No, he will not be serving "whatever the appropriate punishment is." He'll be serving up to four years in a penitentiary with murderers, rapists, child molesters, and the like. Very likely, this guy is more likely to pose a danger to society (as opposed to a danger to corporate profits) than when he went in.
Nobody anywhere in the world should serve a day of jail time for copyright infringement. The fact that he might only shows that society is burdened with some screwed up priorities.
Okay, but exactly which happy-fun-time forms of mortality are we being deprived of by this?
C'mon, name one.
Cancer? No, not fun. Heart disease? Again, not fun. Ebola? Novelty aside, still not fun.
What about that one disease that makes you feel like you're shot full of heroin right before you die? Wait, no such thing.
I don't think people will really be complaining that all the good deaths have been gotten rid of. The biggest effect, I think, will be a sudden onset of safety paranoia. The building codes that once meant buildings were expected to survive anything the next hundred years might throw at them? Better shore them up. Speed limits? Better slow them down. Penalties for murder, drunk driving, and malpractice would all increase by a factor of ten.
I don't think we can legislate or engineer our way to a perfectly safe society, but I imagine that they're going to try.
Personally, I'd be pretty happy if I knew my most probable cause of death was suicide.
Unless an increase in minimum wage forced an increase in inflation sufficient to entirely wipe out the minimum wage increase itself, then the system will stabilize.
The whole "just be thankful for what you have" attitude is charming, in a Pollyana-esque sort of way. But it's precisely the sort of thinking that has gotten us in our current situation. For those who have been living under a rock (or getting their news from Fox News and Sean Hannity, which basically amounts to the same thing), that situation is as follows: in today's business environment, even incompetent CEOs can expect to earn a hundred times the salaries of their rank-and-file employees. The top 1% of people own about a third of all the wealth, and that figure is continuing to climb. Meanwhile, down at the bottom, wages are dangerously low, to the point where it threatens the actual health and survival of wage-earners.
The situation isn't just unfair, it's insane, and the last thing we should be doing is making peace with that insanity. The forces that give Information "The Backbone of the New Economy" Technology workers their non-existent pay increases are the same ones that are driving down the costs of labor across the board: vastly overinflated salaries for upper management, offshoring, and a corporate culture that focuses on "cutting costs" without regard for human consequences. These forces have to be fought while there is still a middle class left, because once that's gone, there will be absolutely no safeguards against abuses by the wealthy.
You're looking at things wrong. A pay increase isn't a "reward" that people earn. Instead, you should see your overall pay as representing your value to your company, which gets adjusted from time to time.
Now, if you're not getting annual cost-of-living raises, it's an indication that (despite the year of experience you've gained at the company) you're actually less valuable to your employer than you were a year ago, because they're paying you in less valuable dollars.
On average, people who remain with an employer should be becoming more valuable, not less, due to the experience they've gained.
Then there is the matter of productivity. Worker productivity varies from field to field, but on average it goes up due to more efficient use of resources, better tools and processes, etc. These improvements should be increasing the amount of wealth being created even by mediocre employees. So if a worker who is 5% more productive than he was last year, simply because of externalities that affected the way he did his job (as opposed to actively taking steps to make himself more productive) then he should be getting some fraction of that additional value he's creating.
In short, on average we workers are more productive each year (Slashdot not withstanding), and therefore we should get paid better each year. So, yes, automatic salary increases should be expected.
I think that, with billions of dollars being spent on the mission, it would be wasteful to avoid placing restrictions on the astronauts that might substantially impact the success of the mission. If that means defining what sort of relationships are acceptable between crewmembers, so be it.
But I think it's right to be skeptical when it sounds like the rules are less a product of the actual study of actual data, than of personal judgments encoding personal biases about sex.
Even then, I can imagine the religious right screaming bloody murder if NASA made "just do it" their official policy regarding sex. I'm imagining something along the lines of "We paid half a trillion dollars for an orbiting brothel? Vote the bums out, and replace them with godfearing prudes like ourselves!"
I'm all for turning a Mars expedition into "The Love Boat." But we need to accept that NASA may be constrained by both psychological and political realities.
I think jealousy is an evolutionary strategy which isn't nearly as applicable today as it was for our hunter-gatherer ancestors. The male doesn't want the female screwing around, because if she does, then she might be carrying somebody else's baby, and any investment of resources made in that baby will therefore be ineffective in promoting the male's genes. Meanwhile the female doesn't want the male screwing around, because he might end up falling for some other woman, and therefore won't stick around to help raise his child, which means it's less likely that the child will survive to reproduce her genes.
That, in a nutshell, is why evolution endowed us with the sense of jealousy: because those who are most likely to reproduce are those who adopt the tactics that maximize effective procreation. It sound terribly dry and unromantic, and from evolution's perspective, it really is. The rush of orgasm, the feeling of bonding with your partner, and the mesmerizing beauty of the opposite sex are all just cunning ploys to keep us behaving in evolutionarily successful ways.
But our goals and evolution's goals aren't the same. Evolution wasn't planning ahead when it stumbled on the idea of giving us big brains, with their powers of introspection and imagination. Evolution will continue telling us to screw like rabbits long after we've created more people than our resources can manage to keep healthy and happy. Evolution is continuing to make us jealously mindful of each others' sexuality even in the age of effective contraception and paternity tests. In short, evolution hasn't prepared us for the world we live in. So as powerful and innate as some of these emotions may be, we need to second-guess what they might tell us to do.
But rather than being introspective about the causes of sexuality, sexual jealousy, and coming up with new strategies to maximize pleasure and minimize pain, most people are happy to simply turn their critical thinking skills over to one religious creed or another. Marital fidelity isn't just a useful strategy for those who choose it; it becomes God's One True Sexual Arrangement, and any deviation from it--even if freely chosen by the deviators and their partners--is Heresy, Sin, Satanic, and possibly even Liberal. I'm perfectly accepting of those who choose "one man, one woman, till death do us part", but I'm against those who not only choose that lifestyle without thinking, but demand that everyone else choose it without thinking as well. Society has codified that system into law already, and they fight tooth and nail against even the most sensible expansions of the definition of marriage (gay marriage, for example).
I say, if a group of nine women and seven men can all share a big house, rotate partners, talk out their jealousies and insecurities, and all climb into one big bed at night without disturbing each other with their snoring, then let them.
I don't know about open source games per se. But I think repositories of open source artwork, 3D models, sound, game engines, etc., might go a long way in lowering the cost of developing games. I'm not sure what license would be appropriate when it comes to sound and artwork.
Are you claiming that people won't switch because their current applications aren't compatable with OO.o? Or that OO.o is "not flexible or extensibly integrable enough for large-scale corporate use?" These are two completely different claims, and you don't even bother to defend the second one.
OO.o can work with databases, and can use Python as a scripting language. These two things alone should make it "flexible and integrable enough for large-scale corporate use," except to people who are already tied down to their current Office macros. So please, explain what specific features--or lack thereof--make OO.o "too inflexible", rather than simply "not compatable."
I see that you've forgotten why GWB senior lost to Clinton. Do you recall the phrase: "read my lips"?
I haven't forgotten. Bush Senior was excoriated by his own party, and eventually lost the election, precisely because the Republicans were so adamantly anti-taxation. Bush had to raise taxes in order to bring the country's deficit under control after Desert Storm and the S&L bailouts. Even then, it took a lot of Democratic arm twisting.
This is a total non-sequitur. Just because Bush Senior was the most prominent Republican at the time doesn't mean that his every act defined the Republican Party platform.
Finally, Bush Senior didn't lose the election because he raised taxes. He wasn't punished for raising taxes, but for raising taxes after saying this:
I'm the one who will not raise taxes. My opponent says he'll raise them as a last resort, or a third resort. But when a politician talks like that, you know that's one resort he'll be checking into. My opponent won't rule out raising taxes. But I will. And The Congress will push me to raise taxes and I'll say no. And they'll push, and I'll say no, and they'll push again, and all I can say to them is "Read my lips: no new taxes."
He shouldn't have made the promise, and raising taxes was probably the most sensible thing to do at the time he reneged on the promise. But when he made the promise, he was simply saying what the vast majority of his party wanted to hear. Hence, my assertion that Republicans are against taxation, even though they don't seem to have any talent for controlling spending.
Ever heard of Dan Rostenkowski?
The name rings a bell. But he was a Chicago politician. It's not like we could expect better from him.
Democrats get us into wars for "humanitarian reasons". Sometimes they're more successful than others (Kosovo vs. Somalia). Republicans get into wars because of WMDs... wait, no... because Saddam is a bad bad man... oh, and spreading Democracy... and because if we don't stay and get more of our soliders killed, we're spitting on those we've already killed.
Democrats commit felonies by lying about their extramarital relations. Republicans commit felonies by leaking national secrets in order to harm political enemies.
I think that Clinton did a far better job of surrounding himself with *competent* and well-meaning cronies.
Republicans are supported by the CEO crowd, which is almost exclusively white, male, pudgy, and middle-aged. Democrats are supported by Gwyneth Paltrow.
Okay, that was six words. The point still stands. This "journalist" has never once had anything not-gratuitously-insulting to say about Wikipedia.
Don't give him any page hits. Just go straight to the twoarticles he's analyzing. The first of the two is the article that the main story probably should have linked to, even though it lacks Orlowski's choice, insulting quotes (and therefore makes it less important, as measured in page hits). The second seems to take Orlowski's "amateurs suck" mentality, but is a good deal more polite about it.
This is absolutely the last thing we need here. FCKeditor, for example, allows for gratuitous font size madness, insertion of images (including a separate button for selecting animated gif smileys), centered text, and the nefarious Comic Sans MS font.
Right now, there isn't much that we can do to mess with the text of our comments, and we should keep it that way. It gives the site a level of unity and cohesiveness. Why in the name of Al Franken would we want to turn Slashdot into another PHPBB?
Now, if you wanted to argue for a Wikipedia style toolbar, which would insert boilerplate html for links, quoting of the parent, etc., then you might be onto something.
I'm conflicted. On one hand, I think we have different ideas about the nature of the Over/Underrated mods. I think that you should be able to look at any post, regardless of score, and say, "Yeah, it doesn't deserve to be at that score. It should be higer/lower." For example, if I'm running around using my karma bonus to give a +2 to useless one-liners (think AOL's "ME TOO!!1" from the days of yore), then it makes sense for people to nerf it.
On the other hand, you could argue that in order to deserve a score lower than two, there has to be something actively wrong with it. Whatever wrongness exists, it ought to be covered under some more specific moderation. "Overrated" doesn't give the poster any actual feedback.
Rather, gamers are the show that he presents to his audience.
Some dysfunctional kid blows up a taco stand, and also happens to be a gamer? Jack Thompson is there, ready to present this kid to the rest of the world as a time bomb built by the Evil Gaming Industry(TM).
Some moderately anti-social kid gets pissed at Jack Thompson for his absurd misrepresentations of kids like him, and fires off a profanity-laced rejoinder? Jack is there, ready to use the kid's outrage to show what an evil, messed up lot gamers really are.
The more we fight the guy, the more ammo he has to twist around and use against us. Whether his own psychopathic rantings are coldly calculated to raise our ire, or they're just simply the way his mind works, either way they have the effect of creating the outrage that his career feeds upon.
He's a judo master who directs an entire community's energy against itself. Unless we become judo masters ourselves, we only make him stronger.
"Great example of more FUD for the fire (no pun intended)."
Are you sure? This sentence seems to just scream, "Pun intended! Pun really really really intended!" I realize that puns are the red-headed stepchildren of the humor world, but if you're going to make them, at least stand up for them afterwards.
I thought that--conceptually at least--uranium-238 refinement processes were public knowledge. In fact, I remember reading it in my high school chemistry book. According to that method, at least, you convert the uranium into uranium hexafluoride (a gas), and then perform some process that separates the gases according to weight, such as fractional liquification or passing it through filters. As the weight difference between the two isotopes is minimal, it has to be performed thousands upon thousands of times. But eventually statistics win out, and you have pure U238.
Note to any FBI/Secret Service types: First, al-Qaeda probably already has someone who knows chemistry better than I do, so it's not like I'm saying anything they don't already know. Second, if you still see fit to arrest me, I'm willing to cut a deal and help you track down all extant copies of my high school chemistry text.
Killing off distros would reduce fragmentation, and maybe having more developers per distro would be helpful (though I think there are lots of contributors who wouldn't be contributing if it weren't for the existence of their particular distro). But I think that a better strategy is to simply have people use tools that allow people from different distros to collaborate on patches, bug-tracking, and so on. Ubuntu's Launchpad is intended to be that sort of tool, and I hope it's successful.
I have to disagree. Academic writing (at least as it's taught here at the University of Utah) seems designed to make academic prose as painfully boring as possible. My girlfriend's mother is a professor at the U, and one day she was so frustrated with the latest crop of term papers with their passive voices, gratuitous jargon, and interminable dryness, she asked her class, "Who taught you all to write like this?" The response? They were trying to follow the so-called "best practices" set out by the Writing Department. This, they said, was how they were told they needed to write when their audience was "the community of higher discourse."
A good academic writing style can serve to make the content clearer and more appealing than the "methodical" manner that gets taught at my school, and it can do so without sacrificing scientific rigor. Science isn't easy, but given some of the papers I've read, much of that pain is self-inflicted.
Unfortunately, no, they can't. Natural language processing is one of those really, really hard things, like artificial intelligence, or trying to understand women. Just being able to parse a sentence into its components (noun phrases, verb phrases, adjectives, etc.) is error-prone. We cannot recognize excellent prose with current technology.
Indeed, they may be complete idiots. Or they might have welded their careers to a small startup which needs this product to be successful, regardless of its actual effectiveness. Or it may be that all the information you're getting about a product is being put out by the marketing drones, who are themselves willfully ignorant of the problems.
Most of the criticisms I've read so far sound basically correct. If you use this product, it will punish you for letting somebody else carry your equipment. It will punish you for carrying it in a bag if you usually carry it in your pocket. It will punish you for running, or being drunk. And yes, when people are required to enter a password to use their own equipment, because the device doesn't believe it's them, then most people feel like it's a punishment.
Finally, throw in the problems with biometrics generally, and this has all the makings of a complete failure.
If the company is as riddled with jerks, then they already consider the codebase their property. From a legal standpoint, they're probably right. Any damage these developers do to the current codebase could be construed as vandalism of a company resource. If they decide to quit, or simply stop working on the project, it's already unlikely that management will find anyone who wants to finish it.
They might be able to get away with it, because management isn't familiar with the app or the code as it sounds right now. But if I were them I would still play it safe.
While it's difficult to start a business, market a product, etc., etc., they might be able to handle that. My bigger concern is that their product is probably way too specialized to be marketable. These sorts of applications are usually one-shot deals, designed to fit into a certain workflow that only exists at their company.
So what they ought to realize is that there is probably only one customer for their application. You could suggest having them demo the product, quit, and then offer to return on a contractual basis to finish it. It's still very risky, but I think it has a better chance of success than your original proposal.
Slashdot Mirror
No, he will not be serving "whatever the appropriate punishment is." He'll be serving up to four years in a penitentiary with murderers, rapists, child molesters, and the like. Very likely, this guy is more likely to pose a danger to society (as opposed to a danger to corporate profits) than when he went in.
Nobody anywhere in the world should serve a day of jail time for copyright infringement. The fact that he might only shows that society is burdened with some screwed up priorities.
Okay, but exactly which happy-fun-time forms of mortality are we being deprived of by this?
C'mon, name one.
Cancer? No, not fun. Heart disease? Again, not fun. Ebola? Novelty aside, still not fun.
What about that one disease that makes you feel like you're shot full of heroin right before you die? Wait, no such thing.
I don't think people will really be complaining that all the good deaths have been gotten rid of. The biggest effect, I think, will be a sudden onset of safety paranoia. The building codes that once meant buildings were expected to survive anything the next hundred years might throw at them? Better shore them up. Speed limits? Better slow them down. Penalties for murder, drunk driving, and malpractice would all increase by a factor of ten.
I don't think we can legislate or engineer our way to a perfectly safe society, but I imagine that they're going to try.
Personally, I'd be pretty happy if I knew my most probable cause of death was suicide.
Unless an increase in minimum wage forced an increase in inflation sufficient to entirely wipe out the minimum wage increase itself, then the system will stabilize.
Next objection.
I'd start with the underpaid unprofessionals, myself. Increase the minimum wage to $9/hr immediately, then anchor it to inflation thereafter.
The whole "just be thankful for what you have" attitude is charming, in a Pollyana-esque sort of way. But it's precisely the sort of thinking that has gotten us in our current situation. For those who have been living under a rock (or getting their news from Fox News and Sean Hannity, which basically amounts to the same thing), that situation is as follows: in today's business environment, even incompetent CEOs can expect to earn a hundred times the salaries of their rank-and-file employees. The top 1% of people own about a third of all the wealth, and that figure is continuing to climb. Meanwhile, down at the bottom, wages are dangerously low, to the point where it threatens the actual health and survival of wage-earners.
The situation isn't just unfair, it's insane, and the last thing we should be doing is making peace with that insanity. The forces that give Information "The Backbone of the New Economy" Technology workers their non-existent pay increases are the same ones that are driving down the costs of labor across the board: vastly overinflated salaries for upper management, offshoring, and a corporate culture that focuses on "cutting costs" without regard for human consequences. These forces have to be fought while there is still a middle class left, because once that's gone, there will be absolutely no safeguards against abuses by the wealthy.
You're looking at things wrong. A pay increase isn't a "reward" that people earn. Instead, you should see your overall pay as representing your value to your company, which gets adjusted from time to time.
Now, if you're not getting annual cost-of-living raises, it's an indication that (despite the year of experience you've gained at the company) you're actually less valuable to your employer than you were a year ago, because they're paying you in less valuable dollars.
On average, people who remain with an employer should be becoming more valuable, not less, due to the experience they've gained.
Then there is the matter of productivity. Worker productivity varies from field to field, but on average it goes up due to more efficient use of resources, better tools and processes, etc. These improvements should be increasing the amount of wealth being created even by mediocre employees. So if a worker who is 5% more productive than he was last year, simply because of externalities that affected the way he did his job (as opposed to actively taking steps to make himself more productive) then he should be getting some fraction of that additional value he's creating.
In short, on average we workers are more productive each year (Slashdot not withstanding), and therefore we should get paid better each year. So, yes, automatic salary increases should be expected.
I think that, with billions of dollars being spent on the mission, it would be wasteful to avoid placing restrictions on the astronauts that might substantially impact the success of the mission. If that means defining what sort of relationships are acceptable between crewmembers, so be it.
But I think it's right to be skeptical when it sounds like the rules are less a product of the actual study of actual data, than of personal judgments encoding personal biases about sex.
Even then, I can imagine the religious right screaming bloody murder if NASA made "just do it" their official policy regarding sex. I'm imagining something along the lines of "We paid half a trillion dollars for an orbiting brothel? Vote the bums out, and replace them with godfearing prudes like ourselves!"
I'm all for turning a Mars expedition into "The Love Boat." But we need to accept that NASA may be constrained by both psychological and political realities.
I think jealousy is an evolutionary strategy which isn't nearly as applicable today as it was for our hunter-gatherer ancestors. The male doesn't want the female screwing around, because if she does, then she might be carrying somebody else's baby, and any investment of resources made in that baby will therefore be ineffective in promoting the male's genes. Meanwhile the female doesn't want the male screwing around, because he might end up falling for some other woman, and therefore won't stick around to help raise his child, which means it's less likely that the child will survive to reproduce her genes.
That, in a nutshell, is why evolution endowed us with the sense of jealousy: because those who are most likely to reproduce are those who adopt the tactics that maximize effective procreation. It sound terribly dry and unromantic, and from evolution's perspective, it really is. The rush of orgasm, the feeling of bonding with your partner, and the mesmerizing beauty of the opposite sex are all just cunning ploys to keep us behaving in evolutionarily successful ways.
But our goals and evolution's goals aren't the same. Evolution wasn't planning ahead when it stumbled on the idea of giving us big brains, with their powers of introspection and imagination. Evolution will continue telling us to screw like rabbits long after we've created more people than our resources can manage to keep healthy and happy. Evolution is continuing to make us jealously mindful of each others' sexuality even in the age of effective contraception and paternity tests. In short, evolution hasn't prepared us for the world we live in. So as powerful and innate as some of these emotions may be, we need to second-guess what they might tell us to do.
But rather than being introspective about the causes of sexuality, sexual jealousy, and coming up with new strategies to maximize pleasure and minimize pain, most people are happy to simply turn their critical thinking skills over to one religious creed or another. Marital fidelity isn't just a useful strategy for those who choose it; it becomes God's One True Sexual Arrangement, and any deviation from it--even if freely chosen by the deviators and their partners--is Heresy, Sin, Satanic, and possibly even Liberal. I'm perfectly accepting of those who choose "one man, one woman, till death do us part", but I'm against those who not only choose that lifestyle without thinking, but demand that everyone else choose it without thinking as well. Society has codified that system into law already, and they fight tooth and nail against even the most sensible expansions of the definition of marriage (gay marriage, for example).
I say, if a group of nine women and seven men can all share a big house, rotate partners, talk out their jealousies and insecurities, and all climb into one big bed at night without disturbing each other with their snoring, then let them.
Oh, yeah: Legalize marijuana!
I don't know about open source games per se. But I think repositories of open source artwork, 3D models, sound, game engines, etc., might go a long way in lowering the cost of developing games. I'm not sure what license would be appropriate when it comes to sound and artwork.
Are you claiming that people won't switch because their current applications aren't compatable with OO.o? Or that OO.o is "not flexible or extensibly integrable enough for large-scale corporate use?" These are two completely different claims, and you don't even bother to defend the second one.
OO.o can work with databases, and can use Python as a scripting language. These two things alone should make it "flexible and integrable enough for large-scale corporate use," except to people who are already tied down to their current Office macros. So please, explain what specific features--or lack thereof--make OO.o "too inflexible", rather than simply "not compatable."
This is a total non-sequitur. Just because Bush Senior was the most prominent Republican at the time doesn't mean that his every act defined the Republican Party platform.
Finally, Bush Senior didn't lose the election because he raised taxes. He wasn't punished for raising taxes, but for raising taxes after saying this:
He shouldn't have made the promise, and raising taxes was probably the most sensible thing to do at the time he reneged on the promise. But when he made the promise, he was simply saying what the vast majority of his party wanted to hear. Hence, my assertion that Republicans are against taxation, even though they don't seem to have any talent for controlling spending.
The name rings a bell. But he was a Chicago politician. It's not like we could expect better from him.
Differences:
Democrats tax and spend. Republicans just spend.
Democrats get us into wars for "humanitarian reasons". Sometimes they're more successful than others (Kosovo vs. Somalia). Republicans get into wars because of WMDs... wait, no... because Saddam is a bad bad man... oh, and spreading Democracy... and because if we don't stay and get more of our soliders killed, we're spitting on those we've already killed.
Democrats commit felonies by lying about their extramarital relations. Republicans commit felonies by leaking national secrets in order to harm political enemies.
I think that Clinton did a far better job of surrounding himself with *competent* and well-meaning cronies.
Republicans are supported by the CEO crowd, which is almost exclusively white, male, pudgy, and middle-aged. Democrats are supported by Gwyneth Paltrow.
*STOP PAYING ATTENTION TO ANDREW ORLOWSKI!*
Okay, that was six words. The point still stands. This "journalist" has never once had anything not-gratuitously-insulting to say about Wikipedia.
Don't give him any page hits. Just go straight to the two articles he's analyzing. The first of the two is the article that the main story probably should have linked to, even though it lacks Orlowski's choice, insulting quotes (and therefore makes it less important, as measured in page hits). The second seems to take Orlowski's "amateurs suck" mentality, but is a good deal more polite about it.
This is absolutely the last thing we need here. FCKeditor, for example, allows for gratuitous font size madness, insertion of images (including a separate button for selecting animated gif smileys), centered text, and the nefarious Comic Sans MS font.
Right now, there isn't much that we can do to mess with the text of our comments, and we should keep it that way. It gives the site a level of unity and cohesiveness. Why in the name of Al Franken would we want to turn Slashdot into another PHPBB?
Now, if you wanted to argue for a Wikipedia style toolbar, which would insert boilerplate html for links, quoting of the parent, etc., then you might be onto something.
I'm conflicted. On one hand, I think we have different ideas about the nature of the Over/Underrated mods. I think that you should be able to look at any post, regardless of score, and say, "Yeah, it doesn't deserve to be at that score. It should be higer/lower." For example, if I'm running around using my karma bonus to give a +2 to useless one-liners (think AOL's "ME TOO!!1" from the days of yore), then it makes sense for people to nerf it.
On the other hand, you could argue that in order to deserve a score lower than two, there has to be something actively wrong with it. Whatever wrongness exists, it ought to be covered under some more specific moderation. "Overrated" doesn't give the poster any actual feedback.
True. Gamers aren't his audience.
Rather, gamers are the show that he presents to his audience.
Some dysfunctional kid blows up a taco stand, and also happens to be a gamer? Jack Thompson is there, ready to present this kid to the rest of the world as a time bomb built by the Evil Gaming Industry(TM).
Some moderately anti-social kid gets pissed at Jack Thompson for his absurd misrepresentations of kids like him, and fires off a profanity-laced rejoinder? Jack is there, ready to use the kid's outrage to show what an evil, messed up lot gamers really are.
The more we fight the guy, the more ammo he has to twist around and use against us. Whether his own psychopathic rantings are coldly calculated to raise our ire, or they're just simply the way his mind works, either way they have the effect of creating the outrage that his career feeds upon.
He's a judo master who directs an entire community's energy against itself. Unless we become judo masters ourselves, we only make him stronger.
I thought that--conceptually at least--uranium-238 refinement processes were public knowledge. In fact, I remember reading it in my high school chemistry book. According to that method, at least, you convert the uranium into uranium hexafluoride (a gas), and then perform some process that separates the gases according to weight, such as fractional liquification or passing it through filters. As the weight difference between the two isotopes is minimal, it has to be performed thousands upon thousands of times. But eventually statistics win out, and you have pure U238.
Note to any FBI/Secret Service types: First, al-Qaeda probably already has someone who knows chemistry better than I do, so it's not like I'm saying anything they don't already know. Second, if you still see fit to arrest me, I'm willing to cut a deal and help you track down all extant copies of my high school chemistry text.
Killing off distros would reduce fragmentation, and maybe having more developers per distro would be helpful (though I think there are lots of contributors who wouldn't be contributing if it weren't for the existence of their particular distro). But I think that a better strategy is to simply have people use tools that allow people from different distros to collaborate on patches, bug-tracking, and so on. Ubuntu's Launchpad is intended to be that sort of tool, and I hope it's successful.
You've just stumbled on the fastest way to end any vi/Emacs flamewar.
I have to disagree. Academic writing (at least as it's taught here at the University of Utah) seems designed to make academic prose as painfully boring as possible. My girlfriend's mother is a professor at the U, and one day she was so frustrated with the latest crop of term papers with their passive voices, gratuitous jargon, and interminable dryness, she asked her class, "Who taught you all to write like this?" The response? They were trying to follow the so-called "best practices" set out by the Writing Department. This, they said, was how they were told they needed to write when their audience was "the community of higher discourse."
A good academic writing style can serve to make the content clearer and more appealing than the "methodical" manner that gets taught at my school, and it can do so without sacrificing scientific rigor. Science isn't easy, but given some of the papers I've read, much of that pain is self-inflicted.
Indeed, they may be complete idiots. Or they might have welded their careers to a small startup which needs this product to be successful, regardless of its actual effectiveness. Or it may be that all the information you're getting about a product is being put out by the marketing drones, who are themselves willfully ignorant of the problems.
Most of the criticisms I've read so far sound basically correct. If you use this product, it will punish you for letting somebody else carry your equipment. It will punish you for carrying it in a bag if you usually carry it in your pocket. It will punish you for running, or being drunk. And yes, when people are required to enter a password to use their own equipment, because the device doesn't believe it's them, then most people feel like it's a punishment.
Finally, throw in the problems with biometrics generally, and this has all the makings of a complete failure.
Let's modify your last few suggestions.
If the company is as riddled with jerks, then they already consider the codebase their property. From a legal standpoint, they're probably right. Any damage these developers do to the current codebase could be construed as vandalism of a company resource. If they decide to quit, or simply stop working on the project, it's already unlikely that management will find anyone who wants to finish it.
They might be able to get away with it, because management isn't familiar with the app or the code as it sounds right now. But if I were them I would still play it safe.
That's not a very likely option.
While it's difficult to start a business, market a product, etc., etc., they might be able to handle that. My bigger concern is that their product is probably way too specialized to be marketable. These sorts of applications are usually one-shot deals, designed to fit into a certain workflow that only exists at their company.
So what they ought to realize is that there is probably only one customer for their application. You could suggest having them demo the product, quit, and then offer to return on a contractual basis to finish it. It's still very risky, but I think it has a better chance of success than your original proposal.