He could have refrained from accessing said content. Access to said private content was not an undeniable right (like having access to food.)
I don't know what the content of the papers were
Scientific papers behind a paywall. Nothing that warranted the DOJ's sadistic hard-on on the poor kid.
, so I would ask... Could he have gone somewhere else for the content?
Probably not. But then again, my position in this matter (which I understand many won't agree) is that if the content was only available at that source, and yet he didn't agree to the source's TOS, then the only valid alternative is to refrain from reaching said content.
It's like anything. If I'm wearing sandals, and a restaurant requires patrons to wear dressed shoes, I simply do not go to that restaurant or I change my sandals for the appropriate footwear. Or if I'm carrying a concealed weapon, and a establishment (say, IKEA) does not want me there because of that, I either leave my gun, or I go somewhere else.
If I'm selling lemonade but I estipulate that I only accept bills smaller than $20, I don't have to sell it to you if you disagree with my request.
My need (or in this case desire) to have access to something produced or owned by another entity can only be satisfied as per the owning entity's rules and regulations.
“Among individuals as among nations, the respect to other people's rights is peace” - Benito Juarez.
2) Writing very clean code, and then keeping it clean, does NOT save you time in the long run. While it does reduce bugs and (in theory) makes it faster to add features in the future, the length of time it takes to write the code in the first place exceeds the time saved by fewer bugs, and the future features must also be clean, which *always* requires more refactoring than you would expect.
That is an excellent point. But I would counter that the aim is not reduce time of delivery, but to control risk (and ergo, cost). As a business, I would prefer to know that something will consistently take me, say, 4 weeks, of testing and delivery with fewer bucks, than knowing I could "deliver" in half the time, but with a "hidden", hard-to-quantify, highly variable cost of defects, maintainance or extensions.
With the former case, I can consistently ballpark the cost and ROI. With the later, it's like driving while blind.
Heh, that raises a question. I often complain about other people's code, it's a typical developer hobby. I can name a lot of companies that produce lousy code, but
What companies do you know that produce good, high-quality code? I was depressed to find I couldn't think of many. Maybe Sun before they disappeared, and NeXT, before they disappeared, and SGI.
The small companies I've worked for have aimed to produce good code. The insurance company where I had my first professional programming job, we aimed to produce good code (and we methodically refactored badly written legacy code inherited from a contractor.)
When I worked for Citircorp Latin America Division, I remember every development team aiming to have some quality in their deliverables. With other large companies, I've seen teams producing shitty code, but also teams having outstanding performance.
There are people and teams churning decent work out there. Unfortunately, they get eclipsed by the hordes of code monkeys in which we drown.
As one who has plied this trade for decades, I'll tell you that programmers are human beings, just like everyone else.
We urge for recognition, and we need money.
You just do not tell us to do what you want us to do without recognizing the hard work we have put into debugging the products.
And you will not go anywhere if you do not pay us.
If we need recognition in order to do work of acceptable quality, we have an ethics problem. For people with a sense of professional ethics, recognizition and remuneration are pre-conditions for staying at a company or project. But they are never pre-conditions for doing developing software with a professionally acceptable level of quality. Professionals leave, when the time is right, when they feel unrecognized or underpaid. But they do not deliver shit.
Barring the unavoidable hacks that must happen here and there, software professionals with work ethics do not deliver shit even when unrecognized or underpaid. The greater problem in the software industry is not the lack of recognition (and certainly not the lack of good pay). It is the scarcity of developers with a sense of work ethics.
Just because the prosecutors were wrong does not mean Swartz was right.
This. Thank you. It is unfortunate that Swartz took his life. He was treated unfairly and with the utmost unjustice, ironically by the DOJ. And he was a brilliant individual. But he did commit a wrong. It does not justify what was done to him (which ultimately led him to kill himself.)
What was the wrong he committed? He was allowed access to the documents he downloaded. The only wrong was that instead of sitting there clicking on each one and clicking save as, he had a script access them and save them. But as to the content itself, he was allowed to have access to it and to save it. Instead of JSTOR, you would have thought the RIAA was behind this.
That. Usage of robots was/is prohibited by JSTOR. Whether that makes sense or not is not the issue. If someone doesn't like a service's TOS, the correct thing is not to use that service. It is not a ZOMG-kill-babies, but it is still a wrong.
Obviously, however, the DOJ's javirtistic response was completely unjustified. Considering that all the WS fat cats that almost drove us to the cliff are not in jail, or the people behind unmasking Valerie Plame's cover as a CIA operative (*cough* Karl *cough* Rove *cough*) still remain unpunished, the DOJ's handling of this petty case is an obscene miscarriage of the law beyond description.
Just because the prosecutors were wrong does not mean Swartz was right.
This. Thank you. It is unfortunate that Swartz took his life. He was treated unfairly and with the utmost unjustice, ironically by the DOJ. And he was a brilliant individual. But he did commit a wrong. It does not justify what was done to him (which ultimately led him to kill himself.)
But/. fans need to get this in their thick, stupid, avant-garde-wannabe skulls. He was not on the right, nor what he did - in this specific issue - constituted something positive or promoting of individual rights. This is a criticism of him, rest in peace, on this specific incident. It does not constitute an indictment on Swartz, the person as a whole, nor does it constitute a justification for what the authoritities did to him.
He might have been abused like Valjean, but he was not Valjean. On this issue, he was not.
OTH, the DOJ certainly played the Javert macabre part and relished on it.
It was a bit tougher in the 60's than the picture you paint, for starters MLK was assasinated.
Indeed, for people to suggest civil rights activists would be incarcerated today for doing what they did then is just an example of reaching all the way up their asses to make an argument. That act is even worse because it willfully white-washes the horrors of the time, horrors that are no longer present regardless of how they feel about the current status quo.
what happens when pacifism meets aggressive violent people?
We're not talking about the broader scale of one nation attacking another nation here. We're talking about neighborhoods. At the neighborhood level, safe communities very rarely meet aggressive, violent people. Therefore, people living in safe communities rarely feel the need to own firearms for personal protection.
I disagree with that. I live in a very well-to-do neighborhood (just like the one I live before I moved to where my family and I are now.) The most well-to-do that I can afford. Gated, with alarms and everything. Guess what? I own a gun. Even with electronic gates and being surrounded by also afluent neighborhood, things happen.
A couple of week ago, our community manager had a police officer coming for a home security measure lecture at our community playhouse (one of the perks of living in a well-to-do neighborhood is to have the $$$ to sponsor such events) because of recent break-ins.
The idea that living in a well-to-do neighborhoods insulate you from crime shows a missunderstanding of the nature of crime. Granted, you will be insulated from, say, gang or drug related violence and street robberies. But it does not insulate you from home robberies. Robbers do not go to poor neighborhoods to commit home robberies. They target well-to-do neighborhoods sufficiently away from their home bases (crossing county lines at times.)
Gun ownership for the purpose of home defense is not targetted for the type of violence you see in poor neighborhoods. They are meant for the time of home invasion or robbery that you are statistically at risk of experiencing in your neighborhood (or in any neighborhood.)
You need to educate yourself well on the nature and statistics of crime robbery.
If I were buying a house, I would see high gun ownership in a neighborhood as a very bad sign, because it means that a large percentage of the people live in constant fear for their lives.
Or maybe because they are into sports shooting? If you find generalizations a good way to make sense out of the world, knock yourself out, so long as you recognized that you do not necessarily have a valid opinion, but a superficial, subjective bias.
This is also the same argument that people make about neighborhoods with lots of police presence - it must be a bad neighborhood. They never stop to consider that well-to-do neighborhoods actually run citizen and police watch programs and other programs that typically increase police presence. You cannot take a peek at complex phenomena and derive overly simplistic conclusions off them. Well, you can, but you shouldn't.
Again using myself as an example. I own a gun. I don't feel fear for my life. I shoot it at the range, what, once every other year. It is locked. I never carried it with me outside of my house other than to go to the range (and probably never will.)
I similary have a lot of colleages, both conservative and liberal leaning that own a gun. One of my wive's best friends, her husband goes hunting regularly, and he (and her) are some of the most easy-going, no-worries couples ever.
I've seen an increase in gun purchasing from among my colleages, and I don't see them doing so because of fear that we are descending into a Mad-Max world, but more as a means to ensure they can exercise their right to own a gun (should they ever want to) before it becomes more expensive.
True that there are a lof of wackos who think they are survivalist warriors and humanity's (read right-fringe lunatic America) last chance before shit hits the fan.
But as vociferous as they are, they do not represent the enormous gamut of political and personal opinions represented by a very politically diversed sector of gun owners.
I won't address the other sentences and statements in your post because I believe my post above is sufficient to answer them.
On one hand, companies outsource "our" jobs with absolutely no remorse at all.
On the other hand,... fingers?
On the other hand, many companies wouldn't mind... IF you told them what was going on. I'm guessing the major issue here is the omission of details by the employee.
The serious issue here was that the employee Fedexed his RSA key. It is amazing how many people in this thread have failed to recognize this as a problem significant enough to warrant dismissal (and depending on the type of work you do, legal prosecution.)
Sorry to break it to you but communism didn't work. Your plan would just create a whole load of lazy people.
Well, no shit. It is difficult to succeed if a large part of the world actively tries to destroy you.
... in addition to them trying actively to destroy the other in addition to following mind-numbing, immensenly stupid things like rounding up all your agricultural tools to melt them in backyard clay furnaces to "recycle" metals (despite all warnings by their own engineers) and the complete destruction of their intelligentsia (I'm referring to the Chinese Cultural Revolution.)
There are plenty of economic textbooks written not by us but by then-Soviet economists that outlined the fundamental failures of communism as an economic system.
It didn't help that Lenin thought and said on record that running a business was something so simple anyone could do it - it didn't help any further that he actually attempted to run a fiscal policy based on such an idiotic lunacy. Shit, take a look at Thomas Sowell's book on economics for some interesting and sadly humorous tales of Communist economic idiocies.
The communist economic system, to put it bluntly, cared more about ideology that on objective measures of production. Sounds great on paper, but when the rubber meets the road, that's where the real tests begin.
True that the Cold War costs run them to the ground, but that's because the Communist economic system was and is inherently flawed. The Soviets would have fared much better had they relied on Fascism as an economic doctrine. Not that I'm condoning or promoting Fascism but we can see how well China has been doing when it moved from Communism to Fascism (which is the actual economic system under usage by the Chinese government since Deng Xiaoping started his push for reform in 1977.
Those are the facts than even former Soviets-era rank-n-file officials acknowledge, but don't let that get in the way of revisionism.
I've seen Tomcat on Windows a lot. Remember that most Enterprise environments until relatively recently used Windows for everything.
As far as I can remember (at least since 1998) I've almost never seen a Java/Windows-based web-application enterprise environment. I've only seen that twice, and these were for subsets of web apps that were meant to run on laptops that would temporarily be on the field, disconnected from a network.
And before the advent of Java, most enterprise systems were running on a combination of mainframes and minicomputers (the good but now almost forgotten AS400s and their like), and the old UNIX workstations. Windows (and before that, DOS) was only on the clients, and sometimes not even that because clients were typically nothing more than VT100 green-ugly terminals.
In general, the "enterprise" does not (and has not) run on windows until recently. The client-side delivery of things and stuff like Microsoft Exchange and ActiveDirectory might, but the rest, back-end servers, database servers, content management servers, caching servers, address validation servers, proxies and firewalls, all that stuff runs predominantly on UNIX.
but also bought into Java as the development platform to standardize on. Developers would be required to develop Java under Windows,
Required? Never seen anything like that. Maybe your experience is different from mine, but again, 8 different companies in distinct industries since 1998, and I've never seen anything like that. Granted, you can do your coding in Windows (which I do at times), but you also typically have a dedicated UNIX server for compilation and testing (and more often than not, a development user account on said server(s)).
People doing Java development exclusively in Windows without a developmental stage prior to testing on the intended platform (UNIX/Linux + Java), that's just asking for shit to blow up in pieces.
and the Gods of IT would refuse to countenance a Linux server in their server room even if the developers wanted Windows.
What year are we talking about here? The late 90's?
RHEL's rise has changed things somewhat, but it's still a common combination.
Your work experience is very strange. When I worked for a very large banking organization (Citicorp), it was all UNIX and Linux (and that was 2001 already). Man, I know of large ties-and-suits insurance companies that were adopting Linux (the Slackware distros of old which predated RedHat by internet eons) in their server rooms back in 1997. And I don't necessarily live in a technology-embracing area so to speak.
This is more a comparison between runtimes and servers, and less about language.
But this comparison is still nearly meaningless since it does not count architecture, deployment choices and infrastructure. Barring the case of extremelly poorly written web-facing applications, architecture and infrastructure are king.
The reason this is interesting, is it's a very simple test, and hows the maximum performance.
But that is not much different from a simple CPU-burning test that computes PI to the uberth degree or something. The only difference here is that instead of churning numbers, we are churning web pages. But that is only part of the equation.
The test claims to try to test the runtimes in the context of the web, and yet the web requires a lot more than that.
Requests can never be faster than returning a simple string. CLR + ISS is slower than JVM + Tomcat. Unfortunately, we don't know where exactly the performance difference lies.
Learn to quote. Lead == primary cause, which I believe, does not imply police played no role (the later being something I do not believe). These two positions are not mutually exclusive, and there is no evidence to suggest they are. Furthermore, this is a multi-faceted, extremely complex social problem, and it is absurd to explain it in terms of simple-minded absolutes.
But if you still believe so, knock yourself out and prove that lead was the absolute, one-and-only factor into consideration, to a magnitude that makes/made all other factors negligible.
Your ignorance is showing. NEVER use anything bigger than #4 bird shot in a 12 gauge you use for home defense. That's the largest commercial shot that won't go through two thicknesses of sheetrock, and it'll do plenty of damage to a perpetrator, without putting anyone else in the house at risk.
Dude, #4 bird short has little stopping power (it has kill power, but little stopping power), I might as well not use it at all, and stick with JHP.38 SP or heavier. True that the caliber I'm suggesting will go through sheetrock, but its penetration is not the same as with a hefty caliber round. There is better chance of deadly over penetration with multiple solid (non-hollow-point).38 SP +P rounds than with the buckshot/gauge I suggested.
They may disarm the citizen, but I doubt even obtaining the weapon makes him more dangerous. All these guys come loaded for bear anyway, it's not like one extra gun is going to make them feel better when they already have three.
^^^ This.
Also, statistically, in the mass shootings where an armed citizen fired back, how many rampaging gunmen have disarmed said citizen? Answer: nil.
Now, notice that I'm not arguing about having more people with guns walking around. But the suggestion that an armed citizen will surely be disarmed and give the mass murder an additional edge is a perfect example of people reaching so far up their asses to make some pretty dumbest pro-gun-control argument, it's just sad.
While having an accessible loaded gun around the house does in fact increase one's risk, having an unloaded locked up gun around the house does not. Smart people tend to go with the later option.
Err...that unloaded, locked up hard to access gun isn't going to do you much good in a time of emergency when you need to shoot some fucker that has just broken into your home, and is likely armed with a real, unlocked, loaded and cocked gun.
Bro, you are not Charles Bronson, and we are not living in Death Wish land. To be honest, I call bs on this, conjuring the most Kafkaesque, silence-of-the-f*-lambs-meets-taxi-driver scenarios where Ethan Hunt surreptitiously sneaks inside your home al the way to your bedpost with deadly and silent competency.
For starters, there are safe boxes that are quick to open even in the dark. It's not like you are going to put your gun(s) in a safebox on the other side of the house. Seriously.
Secondly, if you own hot weapons strictly for SD, one would imagine you invested some money on home protection/burglar alarm systems and, if you are worried/intelligent/paranoid enough that you have position furniture in your bedroom for ease of barricading yourself in it. Something that will give you time lock-and-load under realistic home burglary scenarios.
So no, you are not keeping hot weapons around (and dissing the idea of modern, easy-to-open gun boxes) not because you think about safety, but because you are living a fantasy where you want to pop a bad guy. That is all.
I mean seriously, forget safe boxes, how hard is it to slide a clip on a semi, or load a revolver with a speed loader???? What guns are you carrying? Tinie-tiny, hard-to-load Derringers???? I guess if you live alone, having a loaded gun under your pillow is an acceptable risk (I have kids so that is not an option.)
But that is doesn't negate the fact that such a precaution is largely unnecessary in the majority of cases where speed loading or having a quick-opening safe box is absolutely fine for the purposes of S/D.
Better yet is to have an unloaded gun with a clip or speed loader under your pillow, a 10 or 12 gaugue shotgun and two "00" buckshot rounds as a backup next to your bed. Crap, you don't even need to load the shotgun - you just have to rack the shotgun without even loading it, with the widely recognizable sound of it scaring the crap of most robbers.
And again, the whole point is self-defense, and what I described above is sufficient for that.
Hell, I keep a number of loaded and ready to go pistols all over my house so that at any given time, I'm never far away from one if it were needed.
To each its own, but that is still a dumb proposition of the knee-jerking, ill-turn-charles-bronson-in-a-split second kind. Threats have to be dealt in a manner effective and proportional to risk they pose. I dunno, maybe you are a black-ops agent by day, vigilante by night with bad guys springing out at every corner trying to kill you or something, and you need to keep loaded guns all over the place in a Tom Clancy novel fashion.
If you need to make a personal call that you do not want to/cant make from your desk line, go out to your car during lunch and make it.
What do you recommend for people who use public transit instead of driving to work?
Go outside and make the call? I mean, how many people are out there working in submarines, underground silos or a bunker in the middle of the Mojave Desert for whom the simplest, most general case solution is not applicable?
Everything has risks. Nuclear energy has risks. Vaccinations have risks. Building dams that stop the natural flow of water to produce electricity has risks. Even wind power generators have risks. But risks don't constitute reasons to stop. They constitute conditions to be evaluated against the rewards (read "solutions to actual human problems like starvation and sickness.")
but those other people who are against GMOs are holding an untenable position?
When you offer no other alternative to a pressing problem (with a cost in terms of human lives) that requires immediate attention, yes, that is an untenable position.
Purely ideological, right?
When most of what they have to offer is either paralysis by analysis at best and "be one with nature" at worst, all the while without offering any alternative to put into immediate action (which is what we need), yes, that is purely ideological.
Which goes to the following: since you didn't do your due diligence in informing yourself about prop 37, despite the overwhelming wealth of knowledge, formal and informal currently available, and without that deterring you to take a position on the subject, that also falls into the realm of not only the ideological, but also the (borderline inhumane) impractical.
Now that's a different perspective that I didn't hear about in the news or other sources I've reviewed.
That's because you didn't do your due diligence. That shit was obvious to anyone who was willing to do a modicum of research on the subject.
I would like to see the law written in a way that makes it easy to determine what is labeled and where liability can be traced. Maybe there is a better way to do this.
There certainly are, but the anti-GMOs Luddite pandering sentiment gets in the way. As someone that grew up in a agricultural country where people die of hunger, I never understood the full-bellied avant-guard anti-GMO crowd.
I get that there are significant risks with GMOs and genetic engineering in general, but the general anti-GMO feeling has little to with science and almost every to do with ideological positions. Not much difference from the anti-vaccine crowd (another stupid position I'll never understand, perhaps because I've actually seen babies die or what polio and otherwise preventable shit like that do to people IRL.)
It's about as much their business as a list of sex offenders. You can even use the same excuse: 'Think of the children'. It lets the parents know which neighbors have guns in their house, so they can prohibit their children from visiting those houses, in case the guns are poorly secured.
That's not the radix causa of publishing gun owners' address. That's a bullshit argument and you know it. For that matter they should also have registries for drunk drivers, or people changed with a misdemeanor and up. But guess what? Those lists of people who statistically pose a greater risk to the ZOMG children does not exist, so the argument does not hold water.
I own guns, and I for one don't care to be listed, should that event ever occurs. Barring my social and banking info, I really don't care about hiding anything, certainly not weapons. Not because I'm totting my guns in pride. I simply do not concern myself with trivia. People want to know if I have guns and make a value judgement on me. Fine. Want to know what car I drive. Fine. Want to know if I had or have a bad credit score. Fine.
But not caring does not mean giving up calling on the attention whoring bullshit of it all. The motivation behind this is so pathetic and subjective (considering that more important lists have never and probably will never be published), any attempt to dress it as a logical step falls on its face harder than Willie E. Coyote.
Painting gun owners on a similar basis as sex offenders is just pathetic. Not that the NRA crowd isn't guilty of such stupid mentality when hurling sad value judgement on the anti-gun crowd. Both are equally stupid.
If you are a gun-control advocate, and if you are intelligent, I'm sure you can come up with a better argument than "think of the children and empower parents to protect kids from poorly secured weapons." It's a bullshit argument and you know it.
Slashdot Mirror
That's not math, that's known as attrition.
Stop. You are making sense.
Could he have?>
He could have refrained from accessing said content. Access to said private content was not an undeniable right (like having access to food.)
I don't know what the content of the papers were
Scientific papers behind a paywall. Nothing that warranted the DOJ's sadistic hard-on on the poor kid.
, so I would ask... Could he have gone somewhere else for the content?
Probably not. But then again, my position in this matter (which I understand many won't agree) is that if the content was only available at that source, and yet he didn't agree to the source's TOS, then the only valid alternative is to refrain from reaching said content.
It's like anything. If I'm wearing sandals, and a restaurant requires patrons to wear dressed shoes, I simply do not go to that restaurant or I change my sandals for the appropriate footwear. Or if I'm carrying a concealed weapon, and a establishment (say, IKEA) does not want me there because of that, I either leave my gun, or I go somewhere else.
If I'm selling lemonade but I estipulate that I only accept bills smaller than $20, I don't have to sell it to you if you disagree with my request.
My need (or in this case desire) to have access to something produced or owned by another entity can only be satisfied as per the owning entity's rules and regulations.
“Among individuals as among nations, the respect to other people's rights is peace” - Benito Juarez.
2) Writing very clean code, and then keeping it clean, does NOT save you time in the long run. While it does reduce bugs and (in theory) makes it faster to add features in the future, the length of time it takes to write the code in the first place exceeds the time saved by fewer bugs, and the future features must also be clean, which *always* requires more refactoring than you would expect.
That is an excellent point. But I would counter that the aim is not reduce time of delivery, but to control risk (and ergo, cost). As a business, I would prefer to know that something will consistently take me, say, 4 weeks, of testing and delivery with fewer bucks, than knowing I could "deliver" in half the time, but with a "hidden", hard-to-quantify, highly variable cost of defects, maintainance or extensions.
With the former case, I can consistently ballpark the cost and ROI. With the later, it's like driving while blind.
Heh, that raises a question. I often complain about other people's code, it's a typical developer hobby. I can name a lot of companies that produce lousy code, but What companies do you know that produce good, high-quality code? I was depressed to find I couldn't think of many. Maybe Sun before they disappeared, and NeXT, before they disappeared, and SGI.
The small companies I've worked for have aimed to produce good code. The insurance company where I had my first professional programming job, we aimed to produce good code (and we methodically refactored badly written legacy code inherited from a contractor.)
When I worked for Citircorp Latin America Division, I remember every development team aiming to have some quality in their deliverables. With other large companies, I've seen teams producing shitty code, but also teams having outstanding performance.
There are people and teams churning decent work out there. Unfortunately, they get eclipsed by the hordes of code monkeys in which we drown.
As one who has plied this trade for decades, I'll tell you that programmers are human beings, just like everyone else.
We urge for recognition, and we need money.
You just do not tell us to do what you want us to do without recognizing the hard work we have put into debugging the products.
And you will not go anywhere if you do not pay us.
If we need recognition in order to do work of acceptable quality, we have an ethics problem. For people with a sense of professional ethics, recognizition and remuneration are pre-conditions for staying at a company or project. But they are never pre-conditions for doing developing software with a professionally acceptable level of quality. Professionals leave, when the time is right, when they feel unrecognized or underpaid. But they do not deliver shit.
Barring the unavoidable hacks that must happen here and there, software professionals with work ethics do not deliver shit even when unrecognized or underpaid. The greater problem in the software industry is not the lack of recognition (and certainly not the lack of good pay). It is the scarcity of developers with a sense of work ethics.
Tehe, mariadb.org no workie.
Just because the prosecutors were wrong does not mean Swartz was right.
This. Thank you. It is unfortunate that Swartz took his life. He was treated unfairly and with the utmost unjustice, ironically by the DOJ. And he was a brilliant individual. But he did commit a wrong. It does not justify what was done to him (which ultimately led him to kill himself.)
What was the wrong he committed? He was allowed access to the documents he downloaded. The only wrong was that instead of sitting there clicking on each one and clicking save as, he had a script access them and save them. But as to the content itself, he was allowed to have access to it and to save it. Instead of JSTOR, you would have thought the RIAA was behind this.
That. Usage of robots was/is prohibited by JSTOR. Whether that makes sense or not is not the issue. If someone doesn't like a service's TOS, the correct thing is not to use that service. It is not a ZOMG-kill-babies, but it is still a wrong.
Obviously, however, the DOJ's javirtistic response was completely unjustified. Considering that all the WS fat cats that almost drove us to the cliff are not in jail, or the people behind unmasking Valerie Plame's cover as a CIA operative (*cough* Karl *cough* Rove *cough*) still remain unpunished, the DOJ's handling of this petty case is an obscene miscarriage of the law beyond description.
Just because the prosecutors were wrong does not mean Swartz was right.
This. Thank you. It is unfortunate that Swartz took his life. He was treated unfairly and with the utmost unjustice, ironically by the DOJ. And he was a brilliant individual. But he did commit a wrong. It does not justify what was done to him (which ultimately led him to kill himself.)
But /. fans need to get this in their thick, stupid, avant-garde-wannabe skulls. He was not on the right, nor what he did - in this specific issue - constituted something positive or promoting of individual rights. This is a criticism of him, rest in peace, on this specific incident. It does not constitute an indictment on Swartz, the person as a whole, nor does it constitute a justification for what the authoritities did to him.
He might have been abused like Valjean, but he was not Valjean. On this issue, he was not.
OTH, the DOJ certainly played the Javert macabre part and relished on it.
It was a bit tougher in the 60's than the picture you paint, for starters MLK was assasinated.
Indeed, for people to suggest civil rights activists would be incarcerated today for doing what they did then is just an example of reaching all the way up their asses to make an argument. That act is even worse because it willfully white-washes the horrors of the time, horrors that are no longer present regardless of how they feel about the current status quo.
We're not talking about the broader scale of one nation attacking another nation here. We're talking about neighborhoods. At the neighborhood level, safe communities very rarely meet aggressive, violent people. Therefore, people living in safe communities rarely feel the need to own firearms for personal protection.
I disagree with that. I live in a very well-to-do neighborhood (just like the one I live before I moved to where my family and I are now.) The most well-to-do that I can afford. Gated, with alarms and everything. Guess what? I own a gun. Even with electronic gates and being surrounded by also afluent neighborhood, things happen.
A couple of week ago, our community manager had a police officer coming for a home security measure lecture at our community playhouse (one of the perks of living in a well-to-do neighborhood is to have the $$$ to sponsor such events) because of recent break-ins.
The idea that living in a well-to-do neighborhoods insulate you from crime shows a missunderstanding of the nature of crime. Granted, you will be insulated from, say, gang or drug related violence and street robberies. But it does not insulate you from home robberies. Robbers do not go to poor neighborhoods to commit home robberies. They target well-to-do neighborhoods sufficiently away from their home bases (crossing county lines at times.)
Gun ownership for the purpose of home defense is not targetted for the type of violence you see in poor neighborhoods. They are meant for the time of home invasion or robbery that you are statistically at risk of experiencing in your neighborhood (or in any neighborhood.)
You need to educate yourself well on the nature and statistics of crime robbery.
If I were buying a house, I would see high gun ownership in a neighborhood as a very bad sign, because it means that a large percentage of the people live in constant fear for their lives.
Or maybe because they are into sports shooting? If you find generalizations a good way to make sense out of the world, knock yourself out, so long as you recognized that you do not necessarily have a valid opinion, but a superficial, subjective bias.
This is also the same argument that people make about neighborhoods with lots of police presence - it must be a bad neighborhood. They never stop to consider that well-to-do neighborhoods actually run citizen and police watch programs and other programs that typically increase police presence. You cannot take a peek at complex phenomena and derive overly simplistic conclusions off them. Well, you can, but you shouldn't.
Again using myself as an example. I own a gun. I don't feel fear for my life. I shoot it at the range, what, once every other year. It is locked. I never carried it with me outside of my house other than to go to the range (and probably never will.)
I similary have a lot of colleages, both conservative and liberal leaning that own a gun. One of my wive's best friends, her husband goes hunting regularly, and he (and her) are some of the most easy-going, no-worries couples ever.
I've seen an increase in gun purchasing from among my colleages, and I don't see them doing so because of fear that we are descending into a Mad-Max world, but more as a means to ensure they can exercise their right to own a gun (should they ever want to) before it becomes more expensive.
True that there are a lof of wackos who think they are survivalist warriors and humanity's (read right-fringe lunatic America) last chance before shit hits the fan.
But as vociferous as they are, they do not represent the enormous gamut of political and personal opinions represented by a very politically diversed sector of gun owners.
I won't address the other sentences and statements in your post because I believe my post above is sufficient to answer them.
Pacifism doesn't mean not being armed; it means not being aggressive.
Thank you.
I'm a bit torn on TFS.
On one hand, companies outsource "our" jobs with absolutely no remorse at all.
On the other hand, ... fingers?
On the other hand, many companies wouldn't mind... IF you told them what was going on. I'm guessing the major issue here is the omission of details by the employee.
The serious issue here was that the employee Fedexed his RSA key. It is amazing how many people in this thread have failed to recognize this as a problem significant enough to warrant dismissal (and depending on the type of work you do, legal prosecution.)
Well, no shit. It is difficult to succeed if a large part of the world actively tries to destroy you.
... in addition to them trying actively to destroy the other in addition to following mind-numbing, immensenly stupid things like rounding up all your agricultural tools to melt them in backyard clay furnaces to "recycle" metals (despite all warnings by their own engineers) and the complete destruction of their intelligentsia (I'm referring to the Chinese Cultural Revolution.)
There are plenty of economic textbooks written not by us but by then-Soviet economists that outlined the fundamental failures of communism as an economic system.
It didn't help that Lenin thought and said on record that running a business was something so simple anyone could do it - it didn't help any further that he actually attempted to run a fiscal policy based on such an idiotic lunacy. Shit, take a look at Thomas Sowell's book on economics for some interesting and sadly humorous tales of Communist economic idiocies.
The communist economic system, to put it bluntly, cared more about ideology that on objective measures of production. Sounds great on paper, but when the rubber meets the road, that's where the real tests begin.
True that the Cold War costs run them to the ground, but that's because the Communist economic system was and is inherently flawed. The Soviets would have fared much better had they relied on Fascism as an economic doctrine. Not that I'm condoning or promoting Fascism but we can see how well China has been doing when it moved from Communism to Fascism (which is the actual economic system under usage by the Chinese government since Deng Xiaoping started his push for reform in 1977.
Those are the facts than even former Soviets-era rank-n-file officials acknowledge, but don't let that get in the way of revisionism.
I've seen Tomcat on Windows a lot. Remember that most Enterprise environments until relatively recently used Windows for everything.
As far as I can remember (at least since 1998) I've almost never seen a Java/Windows-based web-application enterprise environment. I've only seen that twice, and these were for subsets of web apps that were meant to run on laptops that would temporarily be on the field, disconnected from a network.
And before the advent of Java, most enterprise systems were running on a combination of mainframes and minicomputers (the good but now almost forgotten AS400s and their like), and the old UNIX workstations. Windows (and before that, DOS) was only on the clients, and sometimes not even that because clients were typically nothing more than VT100 green-ugly terminals.
In general, the "enterprise" does not (and has not) run on windows until recently. The client-side delivery of things and stuff like Microsoft Exchange and ActiveDirectory might, but the rest, back-end servers, database servers, content management servers, caching servers, address validation servers, proxies and firewalls, all that stuff runs predominantly on UNIX.
but also bought into Java as the development platform to standardize on. Developers would be required to develop Java under Windows,
Required? Never seen anything like that. Maybe your experience is different from mine, but again, 8 different companies in distinct industries since 1998, and I've never seen anything like that. Granted, you can do your coding in Windows (which I do at times), but you also typically have a dedicated UNIX server for compilation and testing (and more often than not, a development user account on said server(s)).
People doing Java development exclusively in Windows without a developmental stage prior to testing on the intended platform (UNIX/Linux + Java), that's just asking for shit to blow up in pieces.
and the Gods of IT would refuse to countenance a Linux server in their server room even if the developers wanted Windows.
What year are we talking about here? The late 90's?
RHEL's rise has changed things somewhat, but it's still a common combination.
Your work experience is very strange. When I worked for a very large banking organization (Citicorp), it was all UNIX and Linux (and that was 2001 already). Man, I know of large ties-and-suits insurance companies that were adopting Linux (the Slackware distros of old which predated RedHat by internet eons) in their server rooms back in 1997. And I don't necessarily live in a technology-embracing area so to speak.
This is more a comparison between runtimes and servers, and less about language.
But this comparison is still nearly meaningless since it does not count architecture, deployment choices and infrastructure. Barring the case of extremelly poorly written web-facing applications, architecture and infrastructure are king.
The reason this is interesting, is it's a very simple test, and hows the maximum performance.
But that is not much different from a simple CPU-burning test that computes PI to the uberth degree or something. The only difference here is that instead of churning numbers, we are churning web pages. But that is only part of the equation.
The test claims to try to test the runtimes in the context of the web, and yet the web requires a lot more than that. Requests can never be faster than returning a simple string. CLR + ISS is slower than JVM + Tomcat. Unfortunately, we don't know where exactly the performance difference lies.
The police have absolutely nothing to do with the decrease in crime in the 1990s... http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/01/lead-crime-link-gasoline
Learn to quote. Lead == primary cause, which I believe, does not imply police played no role (the later being something I do not believe). These two positions are not mutually exclusive, and there is no evidence to suggest they are. Furthermore, this is a multi-faceted, extremely complex social problem, and it is absurd to explain it in terms of simple-minded absolutes.
But if you still believe so, knock yourself out and prove that lead was the absolute, one-and-only factor into consideration, to a magnitude that makes/made all other factors negligible.
"12 gaugue shotgun and two "00" buckshot rounds"
Your ignorance is showing. NEVER use anything bigger than #4 bird shot in a 12 gauge you use for home defense. That's the largest commercial shot that won't go through two thicknesses of sheetrock, and it'll do plenty of damage to a perpetrator, without putting anyone else in the house at risk.
Dude, #4 bird short has little stopping power (it has kill power, but little stopping power), I might as well not use it at all, and stick with JHP .38 SP or heavier. True that the caliber I'm suggesting will go through sheetrock, but its penetration is not the same as with a hefty caliber round. There is better chance of deadly over penetration with multiple solid (non-hollow-point) .38 SP +P rounds than with the buckshot/gauge I suggested.
They may disarm the citizen, but I doubt even obtaining the weapon makes him more dangerous. All these guys come loaded for bear anyway, it's not like one extra gun is going to make them feel better when they already have three.
^^^ This.
Also, statistically, in the mass shootings where an armed citizen fired back, how many rampaging gunmen have disarmed said citizen? Answer: nil.
Now, notice that I'm not arguing about having more people with guns walking around. But the suggestion that an armed citizen will surely be disarmed and give the mass murder an additional edge is a perfect example of people reaching so far up their asses to make some pretty dumbest pro-gun-control argument, it's just sad.
Err...that unloaded, locked up hard to access gun isn't going to do you much good in a time of emergency when you need to shoot some fucker that has just broken into your home, and is likely armed with a real, unlocked, loaded and cocked gun.
Bro, you are not Charles Bronson, and we are not living in Death Wish land. To be honest, I call bs on this, conjuring the most Kafkaesque, silence-of-the-f*-lambs-meets-taxi-driver scenarios where Ethan Hunt surreptitiously sneaks inside your home al the way to your bedpost with deadly and silent competency.
For starters, there are safe boxes that are quick to open even in the dark. It's not like you are going to put your gun(s) in a safebox on the other side of the house. Seriously.
Secondly, if you own hot weapons strictly for SD, one would imagine you invested some money on home protection/burglar alarm systems and, if you are worried/intelligent/paranoid enough that you have position furniture in your bedroom for ease of barricading yourself in it. Something that will give you time lock-and-load under realistic home burglary scenarios.
So no, you are not keeping hot weapons around (and dissing the idea of modern, easy-to-open gun boxes) not because you think about safety, but because you are living a fantasy where you want to pop a bad guy. That is all.
I mean seriously, forget safe boxes, how hard is it to slide a clip on a semi, or load a revolver with a speed loader???? What guns are you carrying? Tinie-tiny, hard-to-load Derringers???? I guess if you live alone, having a loaded gun under your pillow is an acceptable risk (I have kids so that is not an option.)
But that is doesn't negate the fact that such a precaution is largely unnecessary in the majority of cases where speed loading or having a quick-opening safe box is absolutely fine for the purposes of S/D.
Better yet is to have an unloaded gun with a clip or speed loader under your pillow, a 10 or 12 gaugue shotgun and two "00" buckshot rounds as a backup next to your bed. Crap, you don't even need to load the shotgun - you just have to rack the shotgun without even loading it, with the widely recognizable sound of it scaring the crap of most robbers.
And again, the whole point is self-defense, and what I described above is sufficient for that.
Hell, I keep a number of loaded and ready to go pistols all over my house so that at any given time, I'm never far away from one if it were needed.
To each its own, but that is still a dumb proposition of the knee-jerking, ill-turn-charles-bronson-in-a-split second kind. Threats have to be dealt in a manner effective and proportional to risk they pose. I dunno, maybe you are a black-ops agent by day, vigilante by night with bad guys springing out at every corner trying to kill you or something, and you need to keep loaded guns all over the place in a Tom Clancy novel fashion.
If you need to make a personal call that you do not want to/cant make from your desk line, go out to your car during lunch and make it.
What do you recommend for people who use public transit instead of driving to work?
Go outside and make the call? I mean, how many people are out there working in submarines, underground silos or a bunker in the middle of the Mojave Desert for whom the simplest, most general case solution is not applicable?
I see. So you know there are risks
Everything has risks. Nuclear energy has risks. Vaccinations have risks. Building dams that stop the natural flow of water to produce electricity has risks. Even wind power generators have risks. But risks don't constitute reasons to stop. They constitute conditions to be evaluated against the rewards (read "solutions to actual human problems like starvation and sickness.")
but those other people who are against GMOs are holding an untenable position?
When you offer no other alternative to a pressing problem (with a cost in terms of human lives) that requires immediate attention, yes, that is an untenable position.
Purely ideological, right?
When most of what they have to offer is either paralysis by analysis at best and "be one with nature" at worst, all the while without offering any alternative to put into immediate action (which is what we need), yes, that is purely ideological.
Which goes to the following: since you didn't do your due diligence in informing yourself about prop 37, despite the overwhelming wealth of knowledge, formal and informal currently available, and without that deterring you to take a position on the subject, that also falls into the realm of not only the ideological, but also the (borderline inhumane) impractical.
Nut Job
May I suggest "pervert" as an alternative?
Now that's a different perspective that I didn't hear about in the news or other sources I've reviewed.
That's because you didn't do your due diligence. That shit was obvious to anyone who was willing to do a modicum of research on the subject.
I would like to see the law written in a way that makes it easy to determine what is labeled and where liability can be traced. Maybe there is a better way to do this.
There certainly are, but the anti-GMOs Luddite pandering sentiment gets in the way. As someone that grew up in a agricultural country where people die of hunger, I never understood the full-bellied avant-guard anti-GMO crowd.
I get that there are significant risks with GMOs and genetic engineering in general, but the general anti-GMO feeling has little to with science and almost every to do with ideological positions. Not much difference from the anti-vaccine crowd (another stupid position I'll never understand, perhaps because I've actually seen babies die or what polio and otherwise preventable shit like that do to people IRL.)
Bloomberg: Steve Jobs Behind NYC Crime Wave
This is not what he said, and the title of the story being linked is this:
Crime Is Up and Bloomberg Blames iPhone Thieves
But let's not get these significant semantic differences get in the way of publishing mindless, attention-whoring, National-Inquisitor-like headlines.
It's about as much their business as a list of sex offenders. You can even use the same excuse: 'Think of the children'. It lets the parents know which neighbors have guns in their house, so they can prohibit their children from visiting those houses, in case the guns are poorly secured.
That's not the radix causa of publishing gun owners' address. That's a bullshit argument and you know it. For that matter they should also have registries for drunk drivers, or people changed with a misdemeanor and up. But guess what? Those lists of people who statistically pose a greater risk to the ZOMG children does not exist, so the argument does not hold water.
I own guns, and I for one don't care to be listed, should that event ever occurs. Barring my social and banking info, I really don't care about hiding anything, certainly not weapons. Not because I'm totting my guns in pride. I simply do not concern myself with trivia. People want to know if I have guns and make a value judgement on me. Fine. Want to know what car I drive. Fine. Want to know if I had or have a bad credit score. Fine.
But not caring does not mean giving up calling on the attention whoring bullshit of it all. The motivation behind this is so pathetic and subjective (considering that more important lists have never and probably will never be published), any attempt to dress it as a logical step falls on its face harder than Willie E. Coyote.
Painting gun owners on a similar basis as sex offenders is just pathetic. Not that the NRA crowd isn't guilty of such stupid mentality when hurling sad value judgement on the anti-gun crowd. Both are equally stupid.
If you are a gun-control advocate, and if you are intelligent, I'm sure you can come up with a better argument than "think of the children and empower parents to protect kids from poorly secured weapons." It's a bullshit argument and you know it.