But that much damage? 1.5 million bucks total? This is ludicrous. It's insane. There are punishments for real, genuine crimes with real, lasting harm to a person that are less than that. How is he supposed to pay?
It's a deterrent. It's not supposed to be fair recompense for harm to the company. It's like those $1,000 fine for littering signs. Nearly no one ever gets ticketed for littering, so the fine has to be pretty high for anybody to care. If you had a small chance of getting hit with that fine, instead of zero, which it usually is, you'd think twice about throwing garbage on the ground. Same deal here. He's not supposed to pay. He's supposed to not do this.
I think that bankrupting someone for sharing ten films online is completely immoral. It's just wrong.
Yeah, I agree here, too. You can beat the snot out of someone and steal their car and not be fined $1.5 mil. Of course, you do go to jail. Should that be an option?
As others have pointed out, though, his huge error was not showing up. Don't show up, you get the default judgement, which is usually about as bad as is possible under the law.
Sometimes it actually is worth asking whether the cost of asking your question exceeds its value. Is "What pen should I use?" really worth the time of 1,000+ people? I don't think so. I often think the same thing in meetings where large numbers of expensive people are present. Was that discussion really worth the few $1000/hour it cost to have? No? Then don't do it.
And yes, I fully realize the irony of commenting on a story I don't think should have been posted.:-)
+1. It's hard to care about a "faster" computer when faster just means more nodes. Wow, how are we ever going to top that one? Just build one with more nodes. It's become much more a question of money than innovative technology.
Sort of. It's still a grey area, though. Consider people who are growing marijuana in their houses. That's detectable from outside just by looking at the house from the air if you happen to have eyes (cameras) that see infrared. That has apparently been ruled not acceptable. Similarly, if the police hear you committing a crime in your house, you should expect them to bust down the door in short order, but it's probably well out of bounds for the police to start pointing laser mics at everyone's windows just in case.
Generally true. My ex had a service animal for ~8 years. It would ignore other animals pretty well when working, the exception being if a dog acted aggressively towards it. That dog was a bit of a scaredy cat. I suppose I'm endorsing both sides. Yes, working dogs are trained to ignore such things, but just like people, they don't always get it right.
Of course the cloud isn't just a data center. It's the cloud if a data center can go off line and your data is still available.
I'm afraid that's not true. It should be, but in current marketechture it's not. Plenty of people eager to part you with your money will sell you kit to build a "cloud" in your OWN data center. Yes, data center as in singular. Therein lies the peril. People buy "cloud" thinking it means what you think it means, and what I think it SHOULD mean, but what it *really* means is often something else. At it's worst, it simply means "on the internet", even if that's only one virtual server on the internet.
Really, the first question you need to ask people when they start talking cloud is what they mean by it.
This is the age of putting things in the "cloud" and forgetting that cloud is just someone else's data center(s). If you pay for services sufficient to stay online if the entire northeastern US goes offline, you at the very least get to sue your provider and probably win when it doesn't work. If you periodically go into your datacenter, er, "cloud" and flip the breaker and listen to all the fans die and your backup site X thousand miles away seamlessly takes over, you stand a really good chance of actually weathering a storm like this.
The people who are down didn't necessarily do it wrong. They may have made a quite rational decision that the cost of fully redundant geographically dispersed backup infrastructure and live failover testing is greater than the expected cost of downtime when you factor in the probability of it happening. If they didn't think about it, or just assumed their provider wouldn't screw it up and are now running around wetting their pants, then yeah, they did it wrong.
Here's the thing you're missing. Customer A walks into the store, considers buying $PRODUCT, but doesn't want to plunk down $PRICE because they're afraid $PRODUCT isn't as good as they hope. Customer looks at your return policy, which clearly states products may only be returned if defective, sighs, and leaves empty handed.
Someone well above your retail peon pay grade figured out that if they allow customers to return $PRODUCT for any reason within a period of time, a large portion of those whose only reason not to buy is fear the product may be crap will actually buy. As long as you aren't selling actual crap, a lot of people will keep it. Consumers will end up happier, because the few who buy and end up realizing the product is crap (by their standards) get their money back and those who realize they really do like it get to keep it. Your employer is happy because they sell more, and those they don't sell generally get returned to the manufacturer and, all things considered, don't cost the store very much. Certainly less than the profit gained by doing this.
Oh, and by the way, look up "puffery". It's a nice term that basically means advertisers are allowed to lie to you in certain ways. Quite often products don't work as advertised because advertisers are allowed to inflate their claims.
I simply view it as creating the world I want to live in. I don't want to be lied to, so I don't lie. I don't steal because I don't want to be stolen from. Imagine the best possible world and think about how people must behave in order to realize it, then act that way.
It's imperfect in a prisoner's dilemma sort of way. The optimal play is probably to get everyone else to create that perfect world, then rob them blind. Now that I think about it, I think I just described televangelists.
How much time do you spend dreaming or debating the Easter bunny?
As much as I spend looking at money that says "In the Easter bunny we trust", or reciting as a child "One nation, under the Easter bunny", or seeing signs that say "The Easter bunny hates (whoever)", or getting security screened because a small number of people who worship a different Easter bunny who is actually the same Easter bunny with a different color Easter basket wish me harm, or explaining to my kids that the neighbor kids who tell them they'll go to the Land of Eternal No Candy because they go to the Church of the Pink Easter Bunny and we don't, or we go to the Church of the Blue Easter Bunny.
But yeah, so long as your beliefs don't affect me, I don't care what you believe. Truly, I hope your beliefs bring you joy and comfort.
Nah, I don't think so. Putting a camera in everyone's hands all the time is a threat to people who want to abuse their power now. You don't see cameras in phones being banned. You see some people trying to assert that people can't use them, but they're being smacked down. Cases where the police do something wrong, get caught on film doing it, and try to confiscate the cameras make major news.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes finally has an answer. It's all of us. When someone tries to take this right away from you, you'd better stand up and fight for it.
Unlike the other respondents, I think crap like this will necessarily stop. You can assault one teenager with a camera. You can't assault 50 bystanders who are wearing a device that is basically taking and uploading pictures all the time. We'll start seeing mall "cops" fired for abusing patrons. We'll start seeing police fired (but not prosecuted, I fear) for abusing the public.
To be clear, I don't think all security are bad, not by a long shot. I think some are, and provably so. The problem now is that they're generally the ones with the cameras, and sometimes those dash cams or security cameras are mysteriously not working when they do something wrong.
A lot feel like surveillance is bad, but like speech and guns, surveillance is a tool that can be used for good or evil.
The short version is that patent trolls to something that's amoral and harmful to business and consumers....but it's legal. That's the difference. You can't prosecute someone for doing something legal, but morally repugnant. You can refuse to patronize their business, of course, but being patent trolls they don't actually make anything or have any customers. They have only victims.
How is this insightful? There is such a thing as good and bad code. I was once asked to port an app that did rather complex calculations in fortran. Nary a comment in the whole thing, and not a single variable that was named anything other than one or two letters. The notion that all code is equally bad is nonsense, not insight.
It's absolutely the interviewee's business. I ask this question. I'm not a prima donna, but I do want to know if the last guy left because he couldn't handle the 90 hour work weeks,or the people he had to work with are jerks, or if there's some administrative or bureaucratic hurdles that makes getting anything done impossible. On the positive side, I also want to know if the position is vacant because he's doing a great job and you promoted him. Even moreso turnover rates. If your turnover rates deviate significantly from industry norms, there's a reason. It's no different than looking at someone's resume and seeing a new job every year. It doesn't mean instant no-hire, but it does mean ask about it because it might betray some other reason that's an instant no-hire. It also might be totally innocent. The only way to find out is to ask.
It's actually a red flag if you'd act offended or not want to share the information. I want to accept a job at a work place where I'll be happy and productive, not one I'm going to want to leave in 6 months. When you deny me information I need to know if I'm going to be happy and productive, that nudges me to thinking I won't.
This is plausible sounding nonsense. Evolution does not mean we're at the absolute pinnacle of anything, or on some pareto frontier. It's entirely possible, if not likely, if not darned near certain that we're not considering the evolutionary pressures that created us operated largely on us in an environment that doesn't exist anymore. Bear in mind, evolution doesn't care if you're happy, if you live a long time, or if you're a productive member of society. Evolution cares if you produce more copies of yourself. That is the definition of evolutionary success. Millions of years of evolution have figured out millions of ways to balance survival, intelligence, and metabolic conservation that are good enough not to die off yet. They're not optimal, they just work well enough. When they don't, they die out. We are, after all, not evolved, but evolving. I might buy your claim for species like crocodiles that haven't changed in a hundred million years or so, but it's also possible they just occupy a local maximum. They never evolve into anything "better" because all the pathways lead through something "worse".
You're right that humans are fantastically complicated machines, and it's absolutely possible that improving one function may have unintended consequences, including unintended consequences that outweigh the improvement. But is there no way to ever simply improve the machine without any negative effect? I don't buy it. Show me the data. I strongly believe with our current medical knowledge, that's unprovable.
I have to admit, you have a point. If I were Martin and some guy was following me around in a truck, I'm not thinking he has good intentions. Martin trying to take the gun only means he was aware aware he had a gun at some point, not prior to this becoming a physical altercation. At that point it's only common sense that if you're in a fight with someone and they produce a gun, taking it away is a really good idea. Getting away without doing so is virtually impossible, as you're either at pont blank range with your back turned, or at point blank range backing away much slower than a run, in either case an easy to hit target.
I don't know that Martin felt his life was threatened. He might simply have been annoyed at being followed and decided to beat the snot out of Zimmerman to teach him a lesson. That's what Zimmerman claims, anyway.
This is definitely not mutual self defense. There was a time when no one was doing anything wrong. Martin's certainly free to walk around the neighborhood, harming no one. Zimmerman's certainly free to watch him, and even ask him what he's doing, though Martin's free to tell him to f*ck off. At some point, someone escalated to violence first, unless there was something really bizarre like Martin starting to take a swing at the exact moment Zimmerman pulled his gun. Whoever changed this into a violent confrontation has no legit self defense claim.
If Zimmerman outwieghed Martin by 70 pounds, it was obviously not 70 pounds of muscle. So, yeah, it's quite possible the pudgy guy got knocked to the ground. The video you refer to wasn't very good. Other pictures clearly show injuries. One thing everyone wants to ignore is that injuries take time to show. I took a very hard blow to the back that left a tiny scratch. Two days later I had an impressive bruise 15" or more across.
IMO, there's no arguing that Zimmerman shouldn't have confronted Martin. Martin wasn't doing anything wrong. If Martin jumped Zimmerman, this is clear self defense. If not, it's murder. Which was it? I have no idea. Good luck, jury. I hope you get it right.
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It's a deterrent. It's not supposed to be fair recompense for harm to the company. It's like those $1,000 fine for littering signs. Nearly no one ever gets ticketed for littering, so the fine has to be pretty high for anybody to care. If you had a small chance of getting hit with that fine, instead of zero, which it usually is, you'd think twice about throwing garbage on the ground. Same deal here. He's not supposed to pay. He's supposed to not do this.
Yeah, I agree here, too. You can beat the snot out of someone and steal their car and not be fined $1.5 mil. Of course, you do go to jail. Should that be an option?
As others have pointed out, though, his huge error was not showing up. Don't show up, you get the default judgement, which is usually about as bad as is possible under the law.
Nah, the problem in this case is that getting sued and not showing up for the case is really, really dumb.
$16?! Why do I suddenly fear it's a 25 cent pen with the words "US Government" stuck on the side and marked up 6300%?
Sometimes it actually is worth asking whether the cost of asking your question exceeds its value. Is "What pen should I use?" really worth the time of 1,000+ people? I don't think so. I often think the same thing in meetings where large numbers of expensive people are present. Was that discussion really worth the few $1000/hour it cost to have? No? Then don't do it.
And yes, I fully realize the irony of commenting on a story I don't think should have been posted. :-)
+1. It's hard to care about a "faster" computer when faster just means more nodes. Wow, how are we ever going to top that one? Just build one with more nodes. It's become much more a question of money than innovative technology.
Sort of. It's still a grey area, though. Consider people who are growing marijuana in their houses. That's detectable from outside just by looking at the house from the air if you happen to have eyes (cameras) that see infrared. That has apparently been ruled not acceptable. Similarly, if the police hear you committing a crime in your house, you should expect them to bust down the door in short order, but it's probably well out of bounds for the police to start pointing laser mics at everyone's windows just in case.
Generally true. My ex had a service animal for ~8 years. It would ignore other animals pretty well when working, the exception being if a dog acted aggressively towards it. That dog was a bit of a scaredy cat. I suppose I'm endorsing both sides. Yes, working dogs are trained to ignore such things, but just like people, they don't always get it right.
I'm afraid that's not true. It should be, but in current marketechture it's not. Plenty of people eager to part you with your money will sell you kit to build a "cloud" in your OWN data center. Yes, data center as in singular. Therein lies the peril. People buy "cloud" thinking it means what you think it means, and what I think it SHOULD mean, but what it *really* means is often something else. At it's worst, it simply means "on the internet", even if that's only one virtual server on the internet.
Really, the first question you need to ask people when they start talking cloud is what they mean by it.
This is the age of putting things in the "cloud" and forgetting that cloud is just someone else's data center(s). If you pay for services sufficient to stay online if the entire northeastern US goes offline, you at the very least get to sue your provider and probably win when it doesn't work. If you periodically go into your datacenter, er, "cloud" and flip the breaker and listen to all the fans die and your backup site X thousand miles away seamlessly takes over, you stand a really good chance of actually weathering a storm like this.
The people who are down didn't necessarily do it wrong. They may have made a quite rational decision that the cost of fully redundant geographically dispersed backup infrastructure and live failover testing is greater than the expected cost of downtime when you factor in the probability of it happening. If they didn't think about it, or just assumed their provider wouldn't screw it up and are now running around wetting their pants, then yeah, they did it wrong.
Here's the thing you're missing. Customer A walks into the store, considers buying $PRODUCT, but doesn't want to plunk down $PRICE because they're afraid $PRODUCT isn't as good as they hope. Customer looks at your return policy, which clearly states products may only be returned if defective, sighs, and leaves empty handed.
Someone well above your retail peon pay grade figured out that if they allow customers to return $PRODUCT for any reason within a period of time, a large portion of those whose only reason not to buy is fear the product may be crap will actually buy. As long as you aren't selling actual crap, a lot of people will keep it. Consumers will end up happier, because the few who buy and end up realizing the product is crap (by their standards) get their money back and those who realize they really do like it get to keep it. Your employer is happy because they sell more, and those they don't sell generally get returned to the manufacturer and, all things considered, don't cost the store very much. Certainly less than the profit gained by doing this.
Oh, and by the way, look up "puffery". It's a nice term that basically means advertisers are allowed to lie to you in certain ways. Quite often products don't work as advertised because advertisers are allowed to inflate their claims.
I simply view it as creating the world I want to live in. I don't want to be lied to, so I don't lie. I don't steal because I don't want to be stolen from. Imagine the best possible world and think about how people must behave in order to realize it, then act that way.
It's imperfect in a prisoner's dilemma sort of way. The optimal play is probably to get everyone else to create that perfect world, then rob them blind. Now that I think about it, I think I just described televangelists.
As much as I spend looking at money that says "In the Easter bunny we trust", or reciting as a child "One nation, under the Easter bunny", or seeing signs that say "The Easter bunny hates (whoever)", or getting security screened because a small number of people who worship a different Easter bunny who is actually the same Easter bunny with a different color Easter basket wish me harm, or explaining to my kids that the neighbor kids who tell them they'll go to the Land of Eternal No Candy because they go to the Church of the Pink Easter Bunny and we don't, or we go to the Church of the Blue Easter Bunny.
But yeah, so long as your beliefs don't affect me, I don't care what you believe. Truly, I hope your beliefs bring you joy and comfort.
Minor nit: very few people say Jesus' teachings are bad. Some disagree over his parentage.
Awesome Freudian slip.
Nah, I don't think so. Putting a camera in everyone's hands all the time is a threat to people who want to abuse their power now. You don't see cameras in phones being banned. You see some people trying to assert that people can't use them, but they're being smacked down. Cases where the police do something wrong, get caught on film doing it, and try to confiscate the cameras make major news.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes finally has an answer. It's all of us. When someone tries to take this right away from you, you'd better stand up and fight for it.
s/Buy/By/
Buy a bunch of guys who had just overthrown their government.
Unlike the other respondents, I think crap like this will necessarily stop. You can assault one teenager with a camera. You can't assault 50 bystanders who are wearing a device that is basically taking and uploading pictures all the time. We'll start seeing mall "cops" fired for abusing patrons. We'll start seeing police fired (but not prosecuted, I fear) for abusing the public.
To be clear, I don't think all security are bad, not by a long shot. I think some are, and provably so. The problem now is that they're generally the ones with the cameras, and sometimes those dash cams or security cameras are mysteriously not working when they do something wrong.
A lot feel like surveillance is bad, but like speech and guns, surveillance is a tool that can be used for good or evil.
The short version is that patent trolls to something that's amoral and harmful to business and consumers....but it's legal. That's the difference. You can't prosecute someone for doing something legal, but morally repugnant. You can refuse to patronize their business, of course, but being patent trolls they don't actually make anything or have any customers. They have only victims.
How is this insightful? There is such a thing as good and bad code. I was once asked to port an app that did rather complex calculations in fortran. Nary a comment in the whole thing, and not a single variable that was named anything other than one or two letters. The notion that all code is equally bad is nonsense, not insight.
It's absolutely the interviewee's business. I ask this question. I'm not a prima donna, but I do want to know if the last guy left because he couldn't handle the 90 hour work weeks,or the people he had to work with are jerks, or if there's some administrative or bureaucratic hurdles that makes getting anything done impossible. On the positive side, I also want to know if the position is vacant because he's doing a great job and you promoted him. Even moreso turnover rates. If your turnover rates deviate significantly from industry norms, there's a reason. It's no different than looking at someone's resume and seeing a new job every year. It doesn't mean instant no-hire, but it does mean ask about it because it might betray some other reason that's an instant no-hire. It also might be totally innocent. The only way to find out is to ask.
It's actually a red flag if you'd act offended or not want to share the information. I want to accept a job at a work place where I'll be happy and productive, not one I'm going to want to leave in 6 months. When you deny me information I need to know if I'm going to be happy and productive, that nudges me to thinking I won't.
This is plausible sounding nonsense. Evolution does not mean we're at the absolute pinnacle of anything, or on some pareto frontier. It's entirely possible, if not likely, if not darned near certain that we're not considering the evolutionary pressures that created us operated largely on us in an environment that doesn't exist anymore. Bear in mind, evolution doesn't care if you're happy, if you live a long time, or if you're a productive member of society. Evolution cares if you produce more copies of yourself. That is the definition of evolutionary success. Millions of years of evolution have figured out millions of ways to balance survival, intelligence, and metabolic conservation that are good enough not to die off yet. They're not optimal, they just work well enough. When they don't, they die out. We are, after all, not evolved, but evolving. I might buy your claim for species like crocodiles that haven't changed in a hundred million years or so, but it's also possible they just occupy a local maximum. They never evolve into anything "better" because all the pathways lead through something "worse".
You're right that humans are fantastically complicated machines, and it's absolutely possible that improving one function may have unintended consequences, including unintended consequences that outweigh the improvement. But is there no way to ever simply improve the machine without any negative effect? I don't buy it. Show me the data. I strongly believe with our current medical knowledge, that's unprovable.
I have to admit, you have a point. If I were Martin and some guy was following me around in a truck, I'm not thinking he has good intentions. Martin trying to take the gun only means he was aware aware he had a gun at some point, not prior to this becoming a physical altercation. At that point it's only common sense that if you're in a fight with someone and they produce a gun, taking it away is a really good idea. Getting away without doing so is virtually impossible, as you're either at pont blank range with your back turned, or at point blank range backing away much slower than a run, in either case an easy to hit target.
I don't know that Martin felt his life was threatened. He might simply have been annoyed at being followed and decided to beat the snot out of Zimmerman to teach him a lesson. That's what Zimmerman claims, anyway.
This is definitely not mutual self defense. There was a time when no one was doing anything wrong. Martin's certainly free to walk around the neighborhood, harming no one. Zimmerman's certainly free to watch him, and even ask him what he's doing, though Martin's free to tell him to f*ck off. At some point, someone escalated to violence first, unless there was something really bizarre like Martin starting to take a swing at the exact moment Zimmerman pulled his gun. Whoever changed this into a violent confrontation has no legit self defense claim.
If Zimmerman outwieghed Martin by 70 pounds, it was obviously not 70 pounds of muscle. So, yeah, it's quite possible the pudgy guy got knocked to the ground. The video you refer to wasn't very good. Other pictures clearly show injuries. One thing everyone wants to ignore is that injuries take time to show. I took a very hard blow to the back that left a tiny scratch. Two days later I had an impressive bruise 15" or more across.
IMO, there's no arguing that Zimmerman shouldn't have confronted Martin. Martin wasn't doing anything wrong. If Martin jumped Zimmerman, this is clear self defense. If not, it's murder. Which was it? I have no idea. Good luck, jury. I hope you get it right.