I've often said the punishment for attempted murder should be greater than that of murder. In both, you set out to kill another human being. In both cases, I'd rather the offender not get to play in the real world with the rest of us any more.
IANAL, so I'm taking the philosophical side of the argument, not the legal.
We've lost the meaning of "speech". Speech is saying something. Intending meaning. I think free speech is a valid argument even if the speech is hateful or wrong, but that's not the case here. He's not speaking, he's vandalizing. Free speech gives him all the right in the world to say to anyone who will listen that he disagrees with conservatives, but it doesn't give him the right to suppress their message.
I'd skip it. I already sometimes abort an attempt to read or view online content due to obnoxious ads. If there's a "Skip this ad" button, I click it. Recently I had to choose between watching some stupid ad for 30 seconds (or whatever) or not reading the article I wanted to read. I decided I didn't reallywant to read it that badly after all.
What if, say, there were two people who needed organ transplants. You match both perfectly. If you don't donate, two die. If you do, you die, but they'll live full lives. Assume the organs required are vital, and such a donation would be allowed under prevailing law.
If you decide you'd rather live, can society then intercede for the numerically greater good?
Spock's simple philosophy sounds good, and probably works really well for bees, but in real life, it has...issues.
One thing that's made my point rather nicely is how many of the responses put their own bias on my words and responded to things I did not say, or at the very least, did not intend to. Nope, I just reread my own post. I asked questions. Should we do this sort of thing? Nowhere in there did I dictate to you what you may or may not do.
I am not arguing that you should be prohibited from downloading it. Quite the opposite, what I advocate is people preserving what is important to them, personally. If for you, that happens to be all of Geocities...I want to say "that's fine with me", but to be perfectly honest, I don't think I have a role in that decision, nor should you care if it's fine with me.
I think that the rush to preserve *everything* now that we have the technological means to do so is misguided. It's comical that you think I'd be afraid of freedom. Quite the opposite. If I can be blunt, I'd like to preserve our collective ability to fuck up without ruining our lives. Many years ago I read an essay by a guy who said the best thing you can do after you graduate high school is move away. The author was the mayor of his town, and talked about his accomplishments in life. He went on to say none of that would have happened if he stayed at home, because he wouldn't have been able to escape his misspent youth. He'd always have been the screw up. The kid who did doughnuts in his car on the high school football field the night before graduation. The kid who narrowly escaped jail. I wonder if kids today still have that option. Can we still move away, or does our digital past, once written, never change? If it was up to me, I'd say we all get to be real human beings who screw up now and again. Sure, we bear the cost of those screw ups, but only the reasonable cost. For example:
Is this reasonable? It's not, is it? Had she been pictured doing something criminal, I'd certainly say it's fair to punish her, but this is where things get weirdly grey. We're leaving digital trails everywhere of doing things that we think are moral and legal (and let's assume they are, like a 24 year old drinking a beer), but someone, amusingly enough the kind of someone you describe me being, now and again will hang you for it. Seriously. I drink beer. There are pictures of me drinking beer. Should I have to "take responsibility" for it, and who gets to decide what that means? You? What if I was a drunken college frat boy, but did no harm short of making a fool of myself. What consequence should I bear, and for how long? If you background check me as a prospective hire and find pictures of me passed out on the porch and I just graduated, sure, it's reasonable to make inferences from that. What if it's a few years later? 10? What if I'm a successful mid-career professional you're interviewing and you find those pictures. Do I still need to "take responsibility" for them, or do you think I may have outgrown that irresponsible period in my (fictional) life?
There's been a growing counter sentiment that I think is correct. Not only is it wrong that we must preserve everything, we should probably forget most things.
Keeping a permanent copy of every bad web site made by every bored teen is not actually useful, any more than keeping every grocery list, or to do list, or every piece of homework you ever did as a child. Some things simply don't have future value. The fact that we can keep things forever at near zero cost doesn't mean that we should keep things of near zero value. Let it go.
Human societies have this nice ability to forget. If you say something really horrible to me today, I'll be mad about it for a while, then get over it. Archiving everything means keeping this sort of thing around forever. Should we really? What's the benefit? It's not accountability. I've said stupid things online, at this point almost 20 years ago, that I now recognize to be stupid things. They aren't sentiments held by me today. Reading them today will cause you to think and feel things about me, when they were written by a quite different person. This is going to be all too common in the future when people are online in their childhood, when saying stupid things that will later embarass you is quite common, if not a daily occurrence.
In short, sure, we should remember our digital culture, but we should also throw out our digital garbage.
TFA addresses this. The ideal path for a double still curves quite a bit, going about 14' off the straight line path instead of 18 for the home to home path.
It is amusing to think that the only time you know when you leave the plate that you're running back to home for sure is the same time when it doesn't matter how fast you go.
A normal IT guy would walk through the lab and say "Hey, that server should be in a datacenter!" -- but the auditors make the reverse conclusion. "Hey, this lab is a datacenter".
And they'd both be wrong.
A good IT guy should walk through and ask "Why isn't this server in a data center?" Often people just want to run their own systems, which is a cultural problem. People don't generally insist on waxing their own floors or doing their own wiring, after all. Often there are poor accounting systems that layer unreasonable costs on putting something in a data center, which obviously is an accounting problem. Often the solution (put everything in a datacenter) causes other problems that the IT segment of the company won't deal with. Host your system in your lab and you get everything done when you want it. Host it in the data center and you get it done next month.
I'm not saying we shouldn't have servers in data centers. Quite the opposite. However we seem to start by saying we'll consolidate to save money on hardware, software, and staff, improve efficiency, and deliver better service. Then we keep saving money by delivering worse service than the self service model did to begin with. THEN we wonder why everybody's lab is a data center.
The OP has something specific he'd like to do involving a particular piece of software. Naturally, the right thing to do is ask an entirely DIFFERENT group how to go about doing it.
You'll get a lot farther, and waste a lot fewer people's time, if you just ask the people you want to work with how to go about doing it.
This is rather like the old joke about the guy looking for his lost ring under the streetlamp even though he dropped it across the street because it's easier to look there. This isn't the right place to ask. This is the easy place to ask. Just like looking under the streetlamp, the results you got are probably not what you hoped.
TFA says its 20 million miles away as if that's a lot. Typical meteor closing speeds are in the ballpark of 50,000 mph, so 20 million miles (or km) is nothing. It's 2 weeks. It's not going to hit any time soon, not because it's 20 million miles away, but because it's going to go make a bunch of orbits around the sun, and so are we, and in oh, 80 years or so, our orbits might intersect again after we've both traveled many billions of miles more.
If the rare earth supply dries up, the open market price will rise and mining these domestically will happen because it's economically sensible to do so. There's no reason to subsidize anything, Congress. Just get out of the way and let the market work.
I tend to agree, but your post made me question whether it's software patents as a whole that are the problem, or the fact that so many are so bleeding obvious.
The thing the PTO needs to get their head around is that if the proposed invention is something any competent developer would devise if presented the problem, it shouldn't be patentable. If it's something that takes a competent developer blood, sweat, tears, time, and money to eventually puzzle out a novel solution, hmm, ok, maybe. In other words, if you invent something, I can see a patent. If you simply sit down and engage in what millions of software developers do every day, no.
I use them about half the time because I'm usually faster than the full time person. Yeah, I know, second career in the making.
The problem with 'em is that you can't help but get the occasional idiot who goes up to one of them with something completely unscannable. The best I've seen so far is the nitwit with a bag of twenty goldfish. How he ever thought he could check that out himself is a mystery to me.
What a relief! I was afraid we were going to actually have to discover all of physics and cosmology. You may not realize it, but you've saved us a vast sum of money and the productive lives of scientists who can now skip all that and play facebook games instead.
If you take away money from a business (charge for a previously free service) you are adding ZERO to the overall economy, because the business has to cut back somewhere else.
This isn't necessarily true unless your "somewhere else" includes everything a business can possibly do with money, like, for example, keeping it as retained earnings. Making a software pirating company pay for software doesn't necessarily mean they'll cancel the coffee service.
Your conclusion is dead on, though. Analysis of this type are quite often not worth the electrons they're printed on because they don't take into account most of the relevant facts.
I wish I could +6 you. This is so true. Managers are afraid to promote on merit because it's hard and risks confrontation with the people you have to tell don't make the grade. It's the right thing to do, but they often don't, and are often not rewarded for doing so. As a result, we get corporations who reward measurable things which don't necessarily contribute to the company. Having an MBA by itself should not get you more money or a better title. Consistently applying the information, practices, strategies, etc you SHOULD have learned during your BS, MBA,, PhD, or whatever, yeah, that should get you something. Simply having one is not enough.
Countries with devastating poverty have a lot of people who can't afford broadband internet for the computer they can't afford to own that runs on electricity they don't have in the "house" that we wouldn't consider a house.
Perhaps we should start with something more basic, like access to clean water, absence of marauding militias, a level of education somewhere above shockingly bad, etc.
Agreed. I'm drawing the distinction between fact (Corporations are NOT people) and the legal treatment, which as you point out is that they get a lot of benefits people should, and not all the drawbacks. I suppose we do need something. I was tempted to say we just need competent judges and legislators who recognize this, but if it were that simple, we wouldn't be having this conversation.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Corporations are not people. Giving corporations the right to influence the political process skews the will of the people.
By the same logic, cancel your life insurance because you've never died before.
Cheat on your taxes because you've never been audited before.
Never use contraception before because you've never impregnated anyone before. Oh, sorry, this is Slashdot. Forget that one.
Give up on getting a girlfriend because you've never had one before. There, that's better.
Every single threat that is real and accepted today was at one point just a theoretical vulnerability. I still remember how we used to laugh at people who thought you could get a computer virus through email, then Microsoft brought us automatic execution of stuff in email, and voila, you could. Brute forcing DES was impractical once. Now it's not. Spamming people's fax machines was once never done. Now I get a couple a week.
Sometimes new technology hasn't been exploited not because it's invulnerable, but merely because it's new.
If someone raises this sort of argument, their either being willfully deceptive, or they're woefully naive.
As one of those libertarians, I propose this test:
Go read all the laws that apply to you. If you can't due to sheer volume, there are too many, they are too complex, or both. Proposing law for trivial problems is really not a good thing.
The problem is that when the market is built around "up to", the one provider who starts advertising their median speed will get almost no customers. They might get people like you and me who understand that a median speed of 5 mbps may well be better than "up to" 10 (you really can't compare them at all), but most of the market is not me or you. Most of the market will do "10 is bigger than 5, so I'll buy the 10."
I read an interesting article a couple years back about carpet cleaning. You've seen the ads. Get n rooms cleaned for only $X, where X is low enough that it's a steal. Then they get in and tell you that yeah, they can do that, but you REALLY want $OTHERSERVICE as well, or $ADDON, and $OTHERTHING. Basically, it's a rare customer who actually gets n rooms for $X.
Some ethical business owner tried to buck that trend and tell people up front that to really get what they wanted, they needed to get the carpet cleaned, plus $OTHERSERVICE, $ADDON, and $OTHERTHING for a total price of $aGoodBitMoreThanX. In the ideal world, consumers would realize everyone's offering the same service for the same price. They might even reward the ethical business owner for being up front about it. In the actual world we live in, it didn't work at all and he was forced to abandon the practice and go back to pricing like everyone else.
Slashdot Mirror
Thank you.
I've often said the punishment for attempted murder should be greater than that of murder. In both, you set out to kill another human being. In both cases, I'd rather the offender not get to play in the real world with the rest of us any more.
IANAL, so I'm taking the philosophical side of the argument, not the legal.
We've lost the meaning of "speech". Speech is saying something. Intending meaning. I think free speech is a valid argument even if the speech is hateful or wrong, but that's not the case here. He's not speaking, he's vandalizing. Free speech gives him all the right in the world to say to anyone who will listen that he disagrees with conservatives, but it doesn't give him the right to suppress their message.
I'd skip it. I already sometimes abort an attempt to read or view online content due to obnoxious ads. If there's a "Skip this ad" button, I click it. Recently I had to choose between watching some stupid ad for 30 seconds (or whatever) or not reading the article I wanted to read. I decided I didn't reallywant to read it that badly after all.
What if, say, there were two people who needed organ transplants. You match both perfectly. If you don't donate, two die. If you do, you die, but they'll live full lives. Assume the organs required are vital, and such a donation would be allowed under prevailing law.
If you decide you'd rather live, can society then intercede for the numerically greater good?
Spock's simple philosophy sounds good, and probably works really well for bees, but in real life, it has...issues.
One thing that's made my point rather nicely is how many of the responses put their own bias on my words and responded to things I did not say, or at the very least, did not intend to. Nope, I just reread my own post. I asked questions. Should we do this sort of thing? Nowhere in there did I dictate to you what you may or may not do.
I am not arguing that you should be prohibited from downloading it. Quite the opposite, what I advocate is people preserving what is important to them, personally. If for you, that happens to be all of Geocities...I want to say "that's fine with me", but to be perfectly honest, I don't think I have a role in that decision, nor should you care if it's fine with me.
I think that the rush to preserve *everything* now that we have the technological means to do so is misguided. It's comical that you think I'd be afraid of freedom. Quite the opposite. If I can be blunt, I'd like to preserve our collective ability to fuck up without ruining our lives. Many years ago I read an essay by a guy who said the best thing you can do after you graduate high school is move away. The author was the mayor of his town, and talked about his accomplishments in life. He went on to say none of that would have happened if he stayed at home, because he wouldn't have been able to escape his misspent youth. He'd always have been the screw up. The kid who did doughnuts in his car on the high school football field the night before graduation. The kid who narrowly escaped jail. I wonder if kids today still have that option. Can we still move away, or does our digital past, once written, never change? If it was up to me, I'd say we all get to be real human beings who screw up now and again. Sure, we bear the cost of those screw ups, but only the reasonable cost. For example:
http://www.wsbtv.com/news/21586641/detail.html
Is this reasonable? It's not, is it? Had she been pictured doing something criminal, I'd certainly say it's fair to punish her, but this is where things get weirdly grey. We're leaving digital trails everywhere of doing things that we think are moral and legal (and let's assume they are, like a 24 year old drinking a beer), but someone, amusingly enough the kind of someone you describe me being, now and again will hang you for it. Seriously. I drink beer. There are pictures of me drinking beer. Should I have to "take responsibility" for it, and who gets to decide what that means? You? What if I was a drunken college frat boy, but did no harm short of making a fool of myself. What consequence should I bear, and for how long? If you background check me as a prospective hire and find pictures of me passed out on the porch and I just graduated, sure, it's reasonable to make inferences from that. What if it's a few years later? 10? What if I'm a successful mid-career professional you're interviewing and you find those pictures. Do I still need to "take responsibility" for them, or do you think I may have outgrown that irresponsible period in my (fictional) life?
There's been a growing counter sentiment that I think is correct. Not only is it wrong that we must preserve everything, we should probably forget most things.
Keeping a permanent copy of every bad web site made by every bored teen is not actually useful, any more than keeping every grocery list, or to do list, or every piece of homework you ever did as a child. Some things simply don't have future value. The fact that we can keep things forever at near zero cost doesn't mean that we should keep things of near zero value. Let it go.
Human societies have this nice ability to forget. If you say something really horrible to me today, I'll be mad about it for a while, then get over it. Archiving everything means keeping this sort of thing around forever. Should we really? What's the benefit? It's not accountability. I've said stupid things online, at this point almost 20 years ago, that I now recognize to be stupid things. They aren't sentiments held by me today. Reading them today will cause you to think and feel things about me, when they were written by a quite different person. This is going to be all too common in the future when people are online in their childhood, when saying stupid things that will later embarass you is quite common, if not a daily occurrence.
In short, sure, we should remember our digital culture, but we should also throw out our digital garbage.
TFA addresses this. The ideal path for a double still curves quite a bit, going about 14' off the straight line path instead of 18 for the home to home path.
It is amusing to think that the only time you know when you leave the plate that you're running back to home for sure is the same time when it doesn't matter how fast you go.
Blowing Bubble's WHAT?!?
Really, it makes all the difference between an angry mob and a very, very friendly one.
No, it's not a solution to anything. It's giving in to baseless and irrational fear, which does nothing but promote baseless and irrational fear.
This is why I have a black cat. It keeps stupid people out of my house.
And they'd both be wrong.
A good IT guy should walk through and ask "Why isn't this server in a data center?" Often people just want to run their own systems, which is a cultural problem. People don't generally insist on waxing their own floors or doing their own wiring, after all. Often there are poor accounting systems that layer unreasonable costs on putting something in a data center, which obviously is an accounting problem. Often the solution (put everything in a datacenter) causes other problems that the IT segment of the company won't deal with. Host your system in your lab and you get everything done when you want it. Host it in the data center and you get it done next month.
I'm not saying we shouldn't have servers in data centers. Quite the opposite. However we seem to start by saying we'll consolidate to save money on hardware, software, and staff, improve efficiency, and deliver better service. Then we keep saving money by delivering worse service than the self service model did to begin with. THEN we wonder why everybody's lab is a data center.
The OP has something specific he'd like to do involving a particular piece of software. Naturally, the right thing to do is ask an entirely DIFFERENT group how to go about doing it.
You'll get a lot farther, and waste a lot fewer people's time, if you just ask the people you want to work with how to go about doing it.
This is rather like the old joke about the guy looking for his lost ring under the streetlamp even though he dropped it across the street because it's easier to look there. This isn't the right place to ask. This is the easy place to ask. Just like looking under the streetlamp, the results you got are probably not what you hoped.
TFA says its 20 million miles away as if that's a lot. Typical meteor closing speeds are in the ballpark of 50,000 mph, so 20 million miles (or km) is nothing. It's 2 weeks. It's not going to hit any time soon, not because it's 20 million miles away, but because it's going to go make a bunch of orbits around the sun, and so are we, and in oh, 80 years or so, our orbits might intersect again after we've both traveled many billions of miles more.
If the rare earth supply dries up, the open market price will rise and mining these domestically will happen because it's economically sensible to do so. There's no reason to subsidize anything, Congress. Just get out of the way and let the market work.
I tend to agree, but your post made me question whether it's software patents as a whole that are the problem, or the fact that so many are so bleeding obvious.
The thing the PTO needs to get their head around is that if the proposed invention is something any competent developer would devise if presented the problem, it shouldn't be patentable. If it's something that takes a competent developer blood, sweat, tears, time, and money to eventually puzzle out a novel solution, hmm, ok, maybe. In other words, if you invent something, I can see a patent. If you simply sit down and engage in what millions of software developers do every day, no.
I use them about half the time because I'm usually faster than the full time person. Yeah, I know, second career in the making.
The problem with 'em is that you can't help but get the occasional idiot who goes up to one of them with something completely unscannable. The best I've seen so far is the nitwit with a bag of twenty goldfish. How he ever thought he could check that out himself is a mystery to me.
What a relief! I was afraid we were going to actually have to discover all of physics and cosmology. You may not realize it, but you've saved us a vast sum of money and the productive lives of scientists who can now skip all that and play facebook games instead.
This isn't necessarily true unless your "somewhere else" includes everything a business can possibly do with money, like, for example, keeping it as retained earnings. Making a software pirating company pay for software doesn't necessarily mean they'll cancel the coffee service.
Your conclusion is dead on, though. Analysis of this type are quite often not worth the electrons they're printed on because they don't take into account most of the relevant facts.
I wish I could +6 you. This is so true. Managers are afraid to promote on merit because it's hard and risks confrontation with the people you have to tell don't make the grade. It's the right thing to do, but they often don't, and are often not rewarded for doing so. As a result, we get corporations who reward measurable things which don't necessarily contribute to the company. Having an MBA by itself should not get you more money or a better title. Consistently applying the information, practices, strategies, etc you SHOULD have learned during your BS, MBA,, PhD, or whatever, yeah, that should get you something. Simply having one is not enough.
Thank you, Captain Obvious.
Countries with devastating poverty have a lot of people who can't afford broadband internet for the computer they can't afford to own that runs on electricity they don't have in the "house" that we wouldn't consider a house.
Perhaps we should start with something more basic, like access to clean water, absence of marauding militias, a level of education somewhere above shockingly bad, etc.
Agreed. I'm drawing the distinction between fact (Corporations are NOT people) and the legal treatment, which as you point out is that they get a lot of benefits people should, and not all the drawbacks. I suppose we do need something. I was tempted to say we just need competent judges and legislators who recognize this, but if it were that simple, we wouldn't be having this conversation.
This part:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Corporations are not people. Giving corporations the right to influence the political process skews the will of the people.
By the same logic, cancel your life insurance because you've never died before.
Cheat on your taxes because you've never been audited before.
Never use contraception before because you've never impregnated anyone before. Oh, sorry, this is Slashdot. Forget that one.
Give up on getting a girlfriend because you've never had one before. There, that's better.
Every single threat that is real and accepted today was at one point just a theoretical vulnerability. I still remember how we used to laugh at people who thought you could get a computer virus through email, then Microsoft brought us automatic execution of stuff in email, and voila, you could. Brute forcing DES was impractical once. Now it's not. Spamming people's fax machines was once never done. Now I get a couple a week.
Sometimes new technology hasn't been exploited not because it's invulnerable, but merely because it's new.
If someone raises this sort of argument, their either being willfully deceptive, or they're woefully naive.
As one of those libertarians, I propose this test:
Go read all the laws that apply to you. If you can't due to sheer volume, there are too many, they are too complex, or both. Proposing law for trivial problems is really not a good thing.
The problem is that when the market is built around "up to", the one provider who starts advertising their median speed will get almost no customers. They might get people like you and me who understand that a median speed of 5 mbps may well be better than "up to" 10 (you really can't compare them at all), but most of the market is not me or you. Most of the market will do "10 is bigger than 5, so I'll buy the 10."
I read an interesting article a couple years back about carpet cleaning. You've seen the ads. Get n rooms cleaned for only $X, where X is low enough that it's a steal. Then they get in and tell you that yeah, they can do that, but you REALLY want $OTHERSERVICE as well, or $ADDON, and $OTHERTHING. Basically, it's a rare customer who actually gets n rooms for $X.
Some ethical business owner tried to buck that trend and tell people up front that to really get what they wanted, they needed to get the carpet cleaned, plus $OTHERSERVICE, $ADDON, and $OTHERTHING for a total price of $aGoodBitMoreThanX. In the ideal world, consumers would realize everyone's offering the same service for the same price. They might even reward the ethical business owner for being up front about it. In the actual world we live in, it didn't work at all and he was forced to abandon the practice and go back to pricing like everyone else.
Especially tied to a credit card. After all, it's not like I leave thumbprints everywhere I go. Oh, wait....