This allows people to attempt to disprove it until accepted.
FTFY.
So, things that we take as fact "sun is center of our galaxy", "earth is round", is now a proven theory. But in essence, still a theory.
Assuming you mean solar system rather than galaxy as pointed out by another poster, this is still wrong. "Earth is round" is a description of observable facts, not a theory. Any more than its a theory to say "a soccer ball is round." It may not be perfectly spherical, but it is round. Not "it might be round" or "I think its round due to measuring its circumference and diameter and applying pi." Its round because we define round to be that shape.
Similarly the sun is the center of the solar system because well.. that's what center means. It might have still been a theory in the 16th century when they only had the math to work from, but nowadays we have spacecraft and satellites and crap floating around up there which have reduced this from a theory to simple observation.
On the other hand, [i]WHY[/i] the sun is at the center of the solar system, why Kepler's laws are true, why the earth is almost but not quite spherical -- the why's are definitely in the realm of theory, but the actual observations are merely facts.
"Scientists believe" is a perfectly valid phrase in many contexts. Take for example the big bang. The math (mostly) works out to be sure, but we have no actual proof of it, never mind considering what may have come before the big bang.
We're entirely missing one of the key components of science you listed -- repeatable experiments. And the observable evidence is 14 billion years old (and the really interesting parts are almost entirely obscured by the fact that the early universe wasn't transparent to light.) We've still got logical deduction and modeling, but those can never recreate the full story with complete accuracy. There will always be some variables we can't deduce just by looking at the aftermath.
So to say a scientist 'believes' in the big bang isn't really wrong. Its not quite the same kind of faith-based belief that you see in religion, but neither is it a hard and solid fact that they can absolutely guarantee to be true.
There are similar arguments in say, gravity. Obviously everyone believes that a ball will return to the ground if they throw it, but when you get down to the details of gravity, its not so clear. Questions like whether gravity is a field with a force carrier (graviton) or is a true warping of spacetime as in Einsteins original equations is something we've still not entirely worked out. Most scientists want to believe in the former (as the latter pretty much rules out any sort of GUT above the Planck scale.. and we're not going to be able to experiment on that level for many decades, maybe centuries.. if its even possible) but the coin is still in the air.
Various string theories (and competing non-string theories), particular evolutionary paths for damned near anything, the extinction of the dinosaurs, etc. Basically anything that hasn't had (or can't have) all four of your criteria met within our short period of recorded history is subject to some measure of belief purely by necessity.
Which can be a problem at times. There's no shortage of examples in history where so many scientists believed in a theory that it was just assumed to be a fact, even among the scientific community -- until someone ends up proving them wrong. Heliocentricity, the model of the atom, quantum mechanics, etc all went through this to varying degrees. (Of course, not EVERYONE believed the common stories, but those who didn't tended to keep their mouths shut for fear of ridicule or worse until they had a complete and incontrovertible proof ready to go.. but only one such person is really needed.. anyone else who was working towards the same goal tends to get lost to history and we only remember the one breakthrough guy.)
Well "cheap code" isn't really meaningful, but I'll take it to mean "fast" and/or "sloppy".
But that's the great thing about languages like Python or C# or Java over C/C++ (and in turn, C/C++ over assembler) -- a lot of the detailed (and easy to screw up) work has been done for you either in the runtime or the libraries, allowing your programmers to make better code (or alternately, a boatload more sloppy code) in the same amount of time.
And for 99% of the applications in the world, nobody gives a crap that it takes and extra quarter of a second to perform its task, making the performance of the compiler and/or virtual machine a whole heck of a lot less important. Computer time is cheap. Programmer time is expensive.
But yes, you run across that 1% of cases where performance matters and you can't just reduce the problem complexity (in the big-O sense) with any amount of cleverness. And for those cases, they allow hooks into "faster" languages such as C linking to assembler modules (or even embedded assembly in many dialects) or Python linking to C modules.
It happens and the language designers know it happens, so they've given you a way to handle the performance-sensitive parts of your program without having to spend countless extra hours (or months) writing the entire thing in some harder-to-use-but-theoretically-faster language.
Sure but if you save yourself 6 months of coding over the course of a two year project, you've got lots of spare time to figure out those internals. And by the time your next huge project rolls around, you'll just be that much further ahead of the game.
Monoculture is rarely the best option in any large system, including computer systems. It might make things "better" in the short term (by some measure) but if you've used the wrong tool for the job, the cracks will show eventually no matter how theoretically "pure" you can claim your work to be.
Child porn is censored in most of the world. Like it or not, that's the way of things.
The only question is defining exactly what constitutes "child porn." Are you guilty if you didn't know it was a child at the time? Are you guilty if its an adult pretending to be a child? What if they explicitly tell the camera that they're over 18 when they're obviously dressing in a manner than implies younger? Where is the line between child porn and art drawn? For that matter, 18 is only the magic number because its bandied around in movies so much and the whole world is addicted to Hollywood -- but there's absolutely no reason some jurisdictions couldn't impose 25 as the limit for child porn. Or 15.
There's lots of questions to be asked, and various countries around the world have answered them in whatever manner deemed appropriate by the whichever group of religious nutballs happened to grab power for a while. The one thing that is never questioned however is that it should be banned (aka censored.)
And to really screw things up, there's many jurisdictions where the age of consent is not the same as the "age of child porn" (I'm sure there's some technical term for that) so you could legally have sex with your 16 year old girlfriend, but if you take a picture or a video of her, you're suddenly among the worst criminals on the planet. Enjoy.
Hell, it wasn't that long ago that the cops were busting kids for taking pictures -of themselves- under zero duress or coercion from adults -- just horny teenagers being well.. horny teenagers. But you know, they needed to be "saved". By giving them a criminal record.
The real problem is that we're no longer persecuting child porn to protect children, we're persecuting child porn because it looks good for the cops making arrests and the politicians making laws. The only time children actually come up in the child porn debate anymore is when we need to invoke a "think of the children" cry in order to fend off logic and reason.
Sure there is. In Canada we have the awesome Mountie uniforms. Find one of those in Puerto Rico. Well, outside of a Disney show. Since we sold them the trademark. Go us.
Meh, doesn't surprise me one bit. We might be more lax on many things up here (pandering to the copyright cartels for example.. so far..) but child porn isn't one of them.
We completely let go of any concept of logic or reason when CP is mentioned just as fast as anywhere else in the world, including the US (possibly faster now that Harper's ramming his new crime bills down our throats.)
You can use the mouse without reconfiguring it. MS might be taking a pretty risky step with Metro, but they're not insane enough to assume that anywhere near approaching a large number of people have a touch screen monitor or are willing to replace their existing monitors just to use Windows 8.
As for Metro itself.. its going to be a rough ride for a couple of years to be sure. Win8 stands a good chance of being the next Vista, but by the time Win9 rolls around, I imagine that most of the important (ie: most-used) programs will have added Metro support and the only people who care anymore are business support staff who are stuck maintaining legacy apps that the developers no longer support. But as long as those are only annoying (and not actually broken), its not going to matter too much.
Far far more of an issue than Metro being new is the rumors of hardware lockdowns and ipad-like app stores (with all the arbitrary validation issues and whatnot, not to mention a developer tax for listing the apps) and other such anti-competitive practices.
This has little to do with IP (though I'm sure their lobbyists aren't displeased).
This is about Harper being a lunatic who thinks the way to a peaceful society is to just criminalize (and jail!) everyone, regardless of how small or large their crimes are. Hell he's got to build a large number (I think it was like 20+) of new jails to handle all of the extra people he's planning to criminalize.
The "lawful access" crap that we're discussing here was actually part of a much larger omnibus crime bill. Its only through the efforts of OpenMedia.ca and other groups that these laws were pulled from the omnibus bill and set to be judged on their own merits.
Even if "lawful" access doesn't pass, Harper's planning on shoveling a lot of rights-trampling laws down our throats in the non-electronic world.
And of course the omnibus bill has enough legitimately good parts stuffed in there to discourage dissent among the voting politicians. Combined with the "fast-tracking," its essentially designed to piggy back through a bunch of crap laws that shouldn't exist on the back of a few good ones that should, and with little or no time given to discuss, dissect and rewrite the parts that suck.
Requiring all of the tens of millions of FB users to: a) Have the knowledge to run these servers. b) Be able to distribute their IP addresses to dozens or hundreds of "friends". c) Convince enough said "friends" to bother in the first place. Social media has a minimum population requirement. d) Be willing to expose said servers (and potentially all of the computers on their internal networks) to the entire internet.
etc etc. There's a reason FB is popular and hosting your own system is not -- hosting your own system is a pain in the ass.
Spin-offs do not have any effect on the original copyright. If they did, Disney could just make a new Mickey Mouse cartoon every 10 years and they wouldn't have needed to extend copyright terms to the point of silliness.
Trademarks are another story. And no one (that I know of at least) has made any useful claim suggesting that Disney's trademarks on Mickey & co should be revoked.
That is, its not about Disney losing the image of Mickey Mouse, its quite literally about Disney losing the ability to horde the specific film Steamboat Willy.
You know, just in case people on the Enterprise get such mass nostalgia for crappy cartoons from the early 20th century that Disney can make a huge profit on re-release.
(Replace Disney, Mickey Mouse and Steamboat Willy with your favorite examples as needed).
If by a "large portion" you mean 92 games (directly from the Wikipedia page you linked) out of somewhere in the 8000 range (I don't have an exact count but I believe it was a little over 8400 last time I checked..)
Of course that number includes all games released everywhere in the world, including a bunch of fan hacks.. but even if you give a large benefit of the doubt and say only 1000 of those were legitimately released in the US, the Wii store is still only offering a measly 1% of them. Hardly what I'd call a "large portion."
(Though you could probably argue that many of those games don't deserve to be re-released!)
Don't be ridiculous. This is the 21st century. Evidence isn't necessary beyond a vague plausibility when it comes to copyright infringement.
And once the lawsuit is started, it doesn't really matter if you're guilty or not, since you don't have the time or money to fight the legal battle anyway (for a statistically probable definition of "you.")
If apples an oranges were more similar, you might have a point.
Apples: Solo developer, makes a tool for himself. Decides its useful enough that other people might like it and releases it under the GPL, making not a dime for his work. And then a big company with a pocketbook the size of the guy's house decides that they're somehow entitled to use it/for profit/ simply because it exists and get pissy when they're caught at it.
Oranges: Large companies of middlemen charging you 2-3 times what most works are worth and feeding bare peanuts back to the actual producers. And then some kid in his parent's basement decides to enjoy the work by himself and his life is essentially destroyed because he's now a full-fledged criminal in league with murderers under laws purchased (and often even written) by the same large companies.
Yes both are cases of copyright infringement, but its a lot easier to side with the guy who's just trying to get by than the faceless company who's out for blood, regardless of which one has the law on their side (especially when the law itself is unfairly weighted in favor of the large faceless companies and often simultaneously destroying personal freedoms).
Neither the "right" nor the "left" seem to know much of civil liberties anymore either. Or at least they seem to forget really fast once they get into politics.
Perhaps, but its just as easy to make a 6mm something.
Yes you end up with two standards that way for a period but who cares? People can already differentiate between a 1/4" wrench with a 5/16" wrench.. adding a 6mm wrench in there is only one extra step.. and you usually know ahead of time whether you're working in metric or imperial so its rare that you screw up (and even then, it only really matters in excessively precise work -- that 0.35mm isn't terribly noticeable in most areas).
Oh and I'm Canadian. I deal with this all the time. You get used to having an extra system in the same way you get used to having two alphabets (upper- and lower-case), the already multituninous units of measure (inches, feet, miles, football fields, librariest of congress, whatever).
That said, its a slow transistion. We've been legally a metric country since I think early 80s (too lazy to look it up;) A long time anyway).
Anything that goes against peoples' long-held biases like that tend to take 3-4 generations to completely sink in as those who are too old to change their bias get replaced with younger generations that can be taught the new system without running against pre-existing bias.
Depends what its doing.. if its just basic file manipulation then it could probably be tested without any specific data. And even if it required specific data, if he knew the formats well enough to reimplement a basic test set on his own he may not have needed to copy or use company data.
The part that stands out to me is that he claims to have loads of downtime during working hours, and then he goes home and makes up utilities specific to his job that he then wants to sell back to his company in addition to the wasted hours they're already paying him for.
I understand the necessity of "just in case" support people (I am one myself) but they should minimally be given other low-priority tasks that can be worked on whenever they're not required to perform their primary task. And a lot of bosses will just assume that you're filling your spare hours with something at least remotely work-related (and will be kind of annoyed if you aren't).
Voting without understanding the issue seems like a pretty dumb concept to me.
The real problem is politicians who make huge grandiose claims during elections and then are allowed to pull 180s as soon as they win. In my mind not doing what you promised (or worse, doing the opposite of what you promised) without a hell of a good justification should be grounds for impeachment.
But of course there's the age-old problem of who would implement that? When you're in a system where the people who can really make change happen are the same people who stand to lose the most, well.. the changes don't happen, even if the overall benefit to society would be huge.
Because the real problem is in fact employee turnover.
When you're talking about a scale of decades, including economic downturns with hiring freezes and whatnot, employee turnover is a fact of life. No one works in the same place forever, no matter how good the incentives are to stay. Even if you can stop them from changing jobs, they might retire. Even if you manage to make their job so compelling that they don't retire, death will eventually get them. And good luck getting ghosts to work for you in any meaningful way.
Its purely a management problem. Data retention over long periods of time is a real challenge, and one that most people don't care about because well.. out of sight, out of mind. Put a token effort towards data management when someone important is looking (investors, higher management, whatever). And then redirect the money to more immediate problems as soon as the heat is off.
Remember, the quarterly report is king. Trying to predict and prevent problems that may or may not crop up 10 years from now seems less relevant when you have to make not only profits, but record profits year after year or risk your stock price plummeting.
The idea of course is to NOT use the "meet or beat" tactic. The idea is to not have any competition to bother beating. If I'm a pharmacy, I don't really care that much what my incoming costs are -- I just pass them on to my own customers anyways. In fact, a higher cost means a higher net profit (since margins are typically done as percentages). And if Pfizer is going to toss me an extra million to boot, then party on!
There's two ways to limit that mindset: competition or government interference. Pfizer (and any other company of sufficient size in any field you can imagine) will employ lots of lobbyists to defeat the latter, and will employ any tactics they think they can get away with to prevent the former.
Its an almost safe bet that Pfizer HAD quietly prodded their favorite government employee(s) about retroactively extending patent claims before trying these less destructive tactics, and have been told there's an extremely low chance of success (remember, probability of failure * lawyer fees = risk, or some function thereof..).
Lack of knowledge. Lack of options. Lack of caring. Too much trust that their doctors and/or pharmacists (and more particularly, the companies they work for) are there for anything other than profit.
Have you ever shopped around different pharmacies when you need a perscription filled? Maybe if you live in an area with lots of pharmacies near-by but even then I'd give it a maybe at best.
Then again, I live in Canada where our healthcare is a little more human-oriented and less profit-oriented (so far at least..), so maybe the Americans are a little more thrifty when it comes to their pills than I'm used to.
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All that damned evidence keeps getting in the way of self-serving business models and religious dogma who's only "proof" is its popularity!
Uhh no. A few things:
This allows people to attempt to disprove it until accepted.
FTFY.
So, things that we take as fact "sun is center of our galaxy", "earth is round", is now a proven theory. But in essence, still a theory.
Assuming you mean solar system rather than galaxy as pointed out by another poster, this is still wrong. "Earth is round" is a description of observable facts, not a theory. Any more than its a theory to say "a soccer ball is round." It may not be perfectly spherical, but it is round. Not "it might be round" or "I think its round due to measuring its circumference and diameter and applying pi." Its round because we define round to be that shape.
Similarly the sun is the center of the solar system because well.. that's what center means. It might have still been a theory in the 16th century when they only had the math to work from, but nowadays we have spacecraft and satellites and crap floating around up there which have reduced this from a theory to simple observation.
On the other hand, [i]WHY[/i] the sun is at the center of the solar system, why Kepler's laws are true, why the earth is almost but not quite spherical -- the why's are definitely in the realm of theory, but the actual observations are merely facts.
"Scientists believe" is a perfectly valid phrase in many contexts. Take for example the big bang. The math (mostly) works out to be sure, but we have no actual proof of it, never mind considering what may have come before the big bang.
We're entirely missing one of the key components of science you listed -- repeatable experiments. And the observable evidence is 14 billion years old (and the really interesting parts are almost entirely obscured by the fact that the early universe wasn't transparent to light.) We've still got logical deduction and modeling, but those can never recreate the full story with complete accuracy. There will always be some variables we can't deduce just by looking at the aftermath.
So to say a scientist 'believes' in the big bang isn't really wrong. Its not quite the same kind of faith-based belief that you see in religion, but neither is it a hard and solid fact that they can absolutely guarantee to be true.
There are similar arguments in say, gravity. Obviously everyone believes that a ball will return to the ground if they throw it, but when you get down to the details of gravity, its not so clear. Questions like whether gravity is a field with a force carrier (graviton) or is a true warping of spacetime as in Einsteins original equations is something we've still not entirely worked out. Most scientists want to believe in the former (as the latter pretty much rules out any sort of GUT above the Planck scale.. and we're not going to be able to experiment on that level for many decades, maybe centuries.. if its even possible) but the coin is still in the air.
Various string theories (and competing non-string theories), particular evolutionary paths for damned near anything, the extinction of the dinosaurs, etc. Basically anything that hasn't had (or can't have) all four of your criteria met within our short period of recorded history is subject to some measure of belief purely by necessity.
Which can be a problem at times. There's no shortage of examples in history where so many scientists believed in a theory that it was just assumed to be a fact, even among the scientific community -- until someone ends up proving them wrong. Heliocentricity, the model of the atom, quantum mechanics, etc all went through this to varying degrees. (Of course, not EVERYONE believed the common stories, but those who didn't tended to keep their mouths shut for fear of ridicule or worse until they had a complete and incontrovertible proof ready to go.. but only one such person is really needed.. anyone else who was working towards the same goal tends to get lost to history and we only remember the one breakthrough guy.)
Well "cheap code" isn't really meaningful, but I'll take it to mean "fast" and/or "sloppy".
But that's the great thing about languages like Python or C# or Java over C/C++ (and in turn, C/C++ over assembler) -- a lot of the detailed (and easy to screw up) work has been done for you either in the runtime or the libraries, allowing your programmers to make better code (or alternately, a boatload more sloppy code) in the same amount of time.
And for 99% of the applications in the world, nobody gives a crap that it takes and extra quarter of a second to perform its task, making the performance of the compiler and/or virtual machine a whole heck of a lot less important. Computer time is cheap. Programmer time is expensive.
But yes, you run across that 1% of cases where performance matters and you can't just reduce the problem complexity (in the big-O sense) with any amount of cleverness. And for those cases, they allow hooks into "faster" languages such as C linking to assembler modules (or even embedded assembly in many dialects) or Python linking to C modules.
It happens and the language designers know it happens, so they've given you a way to handle the performance-sensitive parts of your program without having to spend countless extra hours (or months) writing the entire thing in some harder-to-use-but-theoretically-faster language.
Sure but if you save yourself 6 months of coding over the course of a two year project, you've got lots of spare time to figure out those internals. And by the time your next huge project rolls around, you'll just be that much further ahead of the game.
Monoculture is rarely the best option in any large system, including computer systems. It might make things "better" in the short term (by some measure) but if you've used the wrong tool for the job, the cracks will show eventually no matter how theoretically "pure" you can claim your work to be.
Child porn is censored in most of the world. Like it or not, that's the way of things.
The only question is defining exactly what constitutes "child porn." Are you guilty if you didn't know it was a child at the time? Are you guilty if its an adult pretending to be a child? What if they explicitly tell the camera that they're over 18 when they're obviously dressing in a manner than implies younger? Where is the line between child porn and art drawn? For that matter, 18 is only the magic number because its bandied around in movies so much and the whole world is addicted to Hollywood -- but there's absolutely no reason some jurisdictions couldn't impose 25 as the limit for child porn. Or 15.
There's lots of questions to be asked, and various countries around the world have answered them in whatever manner deemed appropriate by the whichever group of religious nutballs happened to grab power for a while. The one thing that is never questioned however is that it should be banned (aka censored.)
And to really screw things up, there's many jurisdictions where the age of consent is not the same as the "age of child porn" (I'm sure there's some technical term for that) so you could legally have sex with your 16 year old girlfriend, but if you take a picture or a video of her, you're suddenly among the worst criminals on the planet. Enjoy.
Hell, it wasn't that long ago that the cops were busting kids for taking pictures -of themselves- under zero duress or coercion from adults -- just horny teenagers being well.. horny teenagers. But you know, they needed to be "saved". By giving them a criminal record.
The real problem is that we're no longer persecuting child porn to protect children, we're persecuting child porn because it looks good for the cops making arrests and the politicians making laws. The only time children actually come up in the child porn debate anymore is when we need to invoke a "think of the children" cry in order to fend off logic and reason.
Sure there is. In Canada we have the awesome Mountie uniforms. Find one of those in Puerto Rico. Well, outside of a Disney show. Since we sold them the trademark. Go us.
Meh, doesn't surprise me one bit. We might be more lax on many things up here (pandering to the copyright cartels for example.. so far..) but child porn isn't one of them.
We completely let go of any concept of logic or reason when CP is mentioned just as fast as anywhere else in the world, including the US (possibly faster now that Harper's ramming his new crime bills down our throats.)
You can use the mouse without reconfiguring it. MS might be taking a pretty risky step with Metro, but they're not insane enough to assume that anywhere near approaching a large number of people have a touch screen monitor or are willing to replace their existing monitors just to use Windows 8.
As for Metro itself.. its going to be a rough ride for a couple of years to be sure. Win8 stands a good chance of being the next Vista, but by the time Win9 rolls around, I imagine that most of the important (ie: most-used) programs will have added Metro support and the only people who care anymore are business support staff who are stuck maintaining legacy apps that the developers no longer support. But as long as those are only annoying (and not actually broken), its not going to matter too much.
Far far more of an issue than Metro being new is the rumors of hardware lockdowns and ipad-like app stores (with all the arbitrary validation issues and whatnot, not to mention a developer tax for listing the apps) and other such anti-competitive practices.
This has little to do with IP (though I'm sure their lobbyists aren't displeased).
This is about Harper being a lunatic who thinks the way to a peaceful society is to just criminalize (and jail!) everyone, regardless of how small or large their crimes are. Hell he's got to build a large number (I think it was like 20+) of new jails to handle all of the extra people he's planning to criminalize.
The "lawful access" crap that we're discussing here was actually part of a much larger omnibus crime bill. Its only through the efforts of OpenMedia.ca and other groups that these laws were pulled from the omnibus bill and set to be judged on their own merits.
Even if "lawful" access doesn't pass, Harper's planning on shoveling a lot of rights-trampling laws down our throats in the non-electronic world.
And of course the omnibus bill has enough legitimately good parts stuffed in there to discourage dissent among the voting politicians. Combined with the "fast-tracking," its essentially designed to piggy back through a bunch of crap laws that shouldn't exist on the back of a few good ones that should, and with little or no time given to discuss, dissect and rewrite the parts that suck.
Requiring all of the tens of millions of FB users to:
a) Have the knowledge to run these servers.
b) Be able to distribute their IP addresses to dozens or hundreds of "friends".
c) Convince enough said "friends" to bother in the first place. Social media has a minimum population requirement.
d) Be willing to expose said servers (and potentially all of the computers on their internal networks) to the entire internet.
etc etc. There's a reason FB is popular and hosting your own system is not -- hosting your own system is a pain in the ass.
Spin-offs do not have any effect on the original copyright. If they did, Disney could just make a new Mickey Mouse cartoon every 10 years and they wouldn't have needed to extend copyright terms to the point of silliness.
Trademarks are another story. And no one (that I know of at least) has made any useful claim suggesting that Disney's trademarks on Mickey & co should be revoked.
That is, its not about Disney losing the image of Mickey Mouse, its quite literally about Disney losing the ability to horde the specific film Steamboat Willy.
You know, just in case people on the Enterprise get such mass nostalgia for crappy cartoons from the early 20th century that Disney can make a huge profit on re-release.
(Replace Disney, Mickey Mouse and Steamboat Willy with your favorite examples as needed).
If by a "large portion" you mean 92 games (directly from the Wikipedia page you linked) out of somewhere in the 8000 range (I don't have an exact count but I believe it was a little over 8400 last time I checked..)
Of course that number includes all games released everywhere in the world, including a bunch of fan hacks.. but even if you give a large benefit of the doubt and say only 1000 of those were legitimately released in the US, the Wii store is still only offering a measly 1% of them. Hardly what I'd call a "large portion."
(Though you could probably argue that many of those games don't deserve to be re-released!)
Don't be ridiculous. This is the 21st century. Evidence isn't necessary beyond a vague plausibility when it comes to copyright infringement.
And once the lawsuit is started, it doesn't really matter if you're guilty or not, since you don't have the time or money to fight the legal battle anyway (for a statistically probable definition of "you.")
America: Guilty until innocence is paid for.
If apples an oranges were more similar, you might have a point.
Apples: Solo developer, makes a tool for himself. Decides its useful enough that other people might like it and releases it under the GPL, making not a dime for his work. And then a big company with a pocketbook the size of the guy's house decides that they're somehow entitled to use it /for profit/ simply because it exists and get pissy when they're caught at it.
Oranges: Large companies of middlemen charging you 2-3 times what most works are worth and feeding bare peanuts back to the actual producers. And then some kid in his parent's basement decides to enjoy the work by himself and his life is essentially destroyed because he's now a full-fledged criminal in league with murderers under laws purchased (and often even written) by the same large companies.
Yes both are cases of copyright infringement, but its a lot easier to side with the guy who's just trying to get by than the faceless company who's out for blood, regardless of which one has the law on their side (especially when the law itself is unfairly weighted in favor of the large faceless companies and often simultaneously destroying personal freedoms).
a mummy in Japan now carries geiger counter
Radioactive bandages are such an irritant.
Neither the "right" nor the "left" seem to know much of civil liberties anymore either. Or at least they seem to forget really fast once they get into politics.
Obviously that means you need a security checkpoint before getting to the security checkpoint. We need to think of the children and all!
That's an odd remark since one of the first tasks assigned when teaching programming to new students is usually the classic higher/lower game.
Its terribly rudimentary, but its a game nonetheless.
Perhaps, but its just as easy to make a 6mm something.
Yes you end up with two standards that way for a period but who cares? People can already differentiate between a 1/4" wrench with a 5/16" wrench.. adding a 6mm wrench in there is only one extra step.. and you usually know ahead of time whether you're working in metric or imperial so its rare that you screw up (and even then, it only really matters in excessively precise work -- that 0.35mm isn't terribly noticeable in most areas).
Oh and I'm Canadian. I deal with this all the time. You get used to having an extra system in the same way you get used to having two alphabets (upper- and lower-case), the already multituninous units of measure (inches, feet, miles, football fields, librariest of congress, whatever).
That said, its a slow transistion. We've been legally a metric country since I think early 80s (too lazy to look it up;) A long time anyway).
Anything that goes against peoples' long-held biases like that tend to take 3-4 generations to completely sink in as those who are too old to change their bias get replaced with younger generations that can be taught the new system without running against pre-existing bias.
Depends what its doing.. if its just basic file manipulation then it could probably be tested without any specific data. And even if it required specific data, if he knew the formats well enough to reimplement a basic test set on his own he may not have needed to copy or use company data.
The part that stands out to me is that he claims to have loads of downtime during working hours, and then he goes home and makes up utilities specific to his job that he then wants to sell back to his company in addition to the wasted hours they're already paying him for.
I understand the necessity of "just in case" support people (I am one myself) but they should minimally be given other low-priority tasks that can be worked on whenever they're not required to perform their primary task. And a lot of bosses will just assume that you're filling your spare hours with something at least remotely work-related (and will be kind of annoyed if you aren't).
Voting without understanding the issue seems like a pretty dumb concept to me.
The real problem is politicians who make huge grandiose claims during elections and then are allowed to pull 180s as soon as they win. In my mind not doing what you promised (or worse, doing the opposite of what you promised) without a hell of a good justification should be grounds for impeachment.
But of course there's the age-old problem of who would implement that? When you're in a system where the people who can really make change happen are the same people who stand to lose the most, well.. the changes don't happen, even if the overall benefit to society would be huge.
Because the real problem is in fact employee turnover.
When you're talking about a scale of decades, including economic downturns with hiring freezes and whatnot, employee turnover is a fact of life. No one works in the same place forever, no matter how good the incentives are to stay. Even if you can stop them from changing jobs, they might retire. Even if you manage to make their job so compelling that they don't retire, death will eventually get them. And good luck getting ghosts to work for you in any meaningful way.
Its purely a management problem. Data retention over long periods of time is a real challenge, and one that most people don't care about because well.. out of sight, out of mind. Put a token effort towards data management when someone important is looking (investors, higher management, whatever). And then redirect the money to more immediate problems as soon as the heat is off.
Remember, the quarterly report is king. Trying to predict and prevent problems that may or may not crop up 10 years from now seems less relevant when you have to make not only profits, but record profits year after year or risk your stock price plummeting.
The idea of course is to NOT use the "meet or beat" tactic. The idea is to not have any competition to bother beating. If I'm a pharmacy, I don't really care that much what my incoming costs are -- I just pass them on to my own customers anyways. In fact, a higher cost means a higher net profit (since margins are typically done as percentages). And if Pfizer is going to toss me an extra million to boot, then party on!
There's two ways to limit that mindset: competition or government interference. Pfizer (and any other company of sufficient size in any field you can imagine) will employ lots of lobbyists to defeat the latter, and will employ any tactics they think they can get away with to prevent the former.
Its an almost safe bet that Pfizer HAD quietly prodded their favorite government employee(s) about retroactively extending patent claims before trying these less destructive tactics, and have been told there's an extremely low chance of success (remember, probability of failure * lawyer fees = risk, or some function thereof..).
Lack of knowledge. Lack of options. Lack of caring. Too much trust that their doctors and/or pharmacists (and more particularly, the companies they work for) are there for anything other than profit.
Have you ever shopped around different pharmacies when you need a perscription filled? Maybe if you live in an area with lots of pharmacies near-by but even then I'd give it a maybe at best.
Then again, I live in Canada where our healthcare is a little more human-oriented and less profit-oriented (so far at least..), so maybe the Americans are a little more thrifty when it comes to their pills than I'm used to.