Which, seems to me, is one of the reasons why rollback is non trivial. I think I might rather give up the delta and take larger files. With issues like 10.5.2 presented, it really seems better to either wait until the late dot releases or have some method of rollback available....
I don't think the parent is talking about standardizing his password across every service he uses. I think he's talking about standardizing what a password can consist of and what constitutes a standard length, and a *tiny* bit of sanity regarding human factors in memory and use.
I understand in practice that might allow people to collapse to a narrow set of passwords. But I think it's also possible that this kind of standardization could allow people's ideas about what constitutes a good password to coalesce around a few basic points, which might let them more readily create a few.
And the parent is absolutely right that rotating random strings of characters every three months presents a use problem. One type of security analyst might say "suck it up, there's a tradeoff between security and use," and if you can get the user to suck it up and that works in the context of the organization, that's great. But if not, this brings us to the point in the "Amateurs study crypto, pros study economics" phrase. If you really want a secure system, solve both problems. Provide the user with some security practice that isn't going to cost him cycles the operation of the organization is going to demand he use somewhere else.
The overarching purpose of my post above was to respond to the basically nihilistic and all-or-nothing philosophy of the parent poster, and their mess of a proposition that since it's impossible to keep any innocent person from dying, ever (and our moral concepts of innocence mean nothing to physics), we shouldn't care whether or not our justice system sometimes executes people. My purpose was *not* to address every potential argument for the death penalty. Indeed, there are some arguments that state should be granted the ability to kill that I find credible.
And there are some good points from your post:
Except that there are cases where the best defense for society is the excise of the individual from the ability to ever harm another person, ever again, no matter how small a chance.
In particular people should observe that this motive for the death penalty is not primarily a disincentive, nor is it punitive, and as such, it's quite possibly the only solidly logical motive.
We do a damn good job, going through an incredible amount of evidentiary checks and appeals before we get to the point of carrying out a capital sentence.
We do a better job than probably most of the world throughout most of history, in large part because there's been a will to try, a fight against the parent's nihilism.
And yet, there's some serious problems, including career motives of the prosecution and police (not to mention the general "proctologist's view" it's easy to acquire of humanity in both professions), the workload on public defenders, and perhaps most of all the fact that in many cases the law is generally conceived not from the practical motivation you mentioned earlier, but often from the more questionable punitive and disincentive approaches.
There's a reason that all the various innocence projects practice multiple forms of statistic misuse not the least of which is observational selection/cherry-picking
The justice system itself and the critics of the innocence projects have pretty much the same problems when it comes to statistical discussion. T
But personally, I don't care so much about who has the statistics right. The innocence project's positive identification of undeserved convictions is really enough for me. If the broad point is that the death penalty shouldn't be indefinitely suspended but that the system should be actively refined so that we can get better, I can agree with that. But I also find the idea that the death penalty might be suspended while we're working some things out credible.
Which is more humane - marooning someone on a deserted island or somewhere else, "with no hope of escape"? Sticking them in a 4x6 cell, no sunlight, sealed door, food passed through a slot, till they die?
This is a good point, and the answer is going to vary for many people. However, not only is it true that some people would choose to live even in these conditions, inhumane prison conditions are hardly a given.
If you find everyone innocent, your "goal" of not having mistaken convictions is achieved - though I guarantee you wouldn't like the lawless results.
Given the range of potential penalties other than execution, it's not particularly accurate to equate abolishing the death penalty with finding everyone innocent.
You'll never be batting 1000 where fallible components (read: people) are involved. So stop wasting your time and that of others.
Of course perfection is usually out of reach, but that's never a worthy argument against improvement.
Especially with *limited* goals, and the parent poster stated one that's perfectly achievable. Having a *justice system* that doesn't execute innocent people is exceptionally easy: don't have executions as part of the justice system.
Nature (think the universe, not a forest) has no compunctions about innocents dying. We're merely a tiny subset of nature
And we care about it, and since, by your argument, we are part of nature, nature apparently does care.
Hell, maybe we're even one way by which nature's trying to solve a given problem.
Attribution of motive to probably motiveless mechanics aside, the truth is that whether by intention or accident, we're here in nature with both some degree of problem-solving skills and values. There's no reason not to apply the problem-solving skills toward those values.
Far from including the kind of technical clarity that would allow me to rationally evaluate your demands and make a well-informed decision on whether or not an exception to the policy was warranted in this case, you instead degenerated steadily into technical inchoherence so that by the end of your post I have no idea what you're talking about anymore. No doubt you--like my own developers--sincerely believe you've been crystal clear in every important detail.
Somebody else said this, but it deserves repetition. If there's any part of that post you don't actually understand completely -- if any portion of it resembles "technobabble" to you -- then you're essentially fleecing your employers by representing yourself as a competent sysadmin.
And you can certainly look forward to continued hostility from programmers who can spot the gaps in your understanding a mile away, no matter how much you might be trying to hide it from yourself and others by imagining that they just can't understand your job.
Nothing to sneeze at, especially in certain states, including Illinois. It's real policy and real politics.
and voting present whenever a controversial bill came up
I can't speak for him, but I can say that on a number of controversial issues, abstaining rather than voting for a half-assed solution is an action I can get behind. Sometimes waiting for the right thing to come along is a better choice than endorsing or rejecting something incomplete.
only being in the senate for 3 years is a laughable experience record.
Being able to run a successful senate *campaign* is no mean feat. And we've had some great people who were only in public office a short time before they proved their worth. Abraham Lincoln? One two-year term in the *House* on a national level before serving with now universally noted distinction in the Presidency.
The experience argument is pretty much a non-starter, whether or not you're willing to admit Obama actually has it.
The proper way to resolve this ugly problem is to update our electoral system to something that works (Range Voting or Condorcet are both good options), but that is a difficult task and it's not going to happen in the near term
It's not difficult logistically. It's difficult politically (politicians part of the system that elected them are generally reluctant to change it) and difficult educationally (even some ostensibly smart americans been so conditioned to think "voting" == "plurality voting" that they have trouble wrapping their heads around anything else).
Well thats the thing. To me Obama feels like a Manchurian candidate. He has no background... He was pretty much out of the blue. Its almost if he could just finish taking the oath for office and then pull off his mask and its Jeb Bush for all we know.
This is simply wrong, and I'm almost to the point where I think anybody caught repeating it ought to be completely stripped of their right to vote for the rest of their lives, if not actually institutionalized for drooling idiocy.
YOU may not know anything about Obama's background, and that's okay, I can forgive that. You may DISLIKE aspects of his recorded experience, rhetoric, and positions, and that's fine as well.
But to repeat the idea that he "has no background" with 10 years of elected office -- not to mention time as a community organizer in Chicago, time living abroad, degree in Political Science from Columbia stint teaching constitutional law at the University of Chicago, among other things -- that's the kind of corrosive disinformation that may pass for conventional wisdom but actually saps the ability of the country to make useful decisions about candidates for elected offices.
There is plenty of meat to Obama for anyone genuinely interested in learning anything about him as a candidate to bite into.
The analogous situation would be if you only got paid for five years' work every time you won a case or performed an operation.
This doesn't make any sense at all to me -- you'll have to explain what you're drawing a parallel to and how they match up.
this is not an analogous situation.
It's highly analogous for those with eyes to see -- the parallel is that it takes time to create the investment (either the education or the art) and it takes more time to get a return that justifies the time creating it. A five year copyright makes sense only if you somehow imagine that some kind of significant return is the rule inside of that time -- or if you want to limit the benefits of copyright to the few with the talent and resources to do it in that short time period.
Just because something you created is not covered by copyright, it doesn't mean the experience you gained creating it goes away.
And that's great, if all you needed from the investment in creating the work was experience.
So? Why would your portfolio need to remain in copyright for you to get work.
What's to stop a law student in our five-year degree lifetime world from simply continually investing in education to make sure his credentials stay current?
Are you saying the only appropriate compensation for a work that isn't done for hire is being able to get more work?
Huh? Since when do people build a portfolio, get a job, and then just use what's in their portfolio?
Rather frequently, as many professionals can tell you. But even if they didn't, drawing creative work to strict parity with wage/salaried labor isn't what productive, intelligent discussion on the issue is about.
It's not "yanking away someone's protection" -- I will not let you characterize it so.
I'm not sure how you can stop this -- if you advocate stripping the protections that currently exist, then you're yanking them away, whether you've got a convincing argument for doing so or not.
Protection it may be, but it takes the form of special privilege, and it is taken from me and every other citizen of the United States
Taken AND given to every citizen in equal measure. You have no more or fewer rights than the most famous songwriters in the U.S.
and I have the right to question the duration of this privilege and the use to which it is put.
Sure. But you're going to have to demonstrate understanding and consideration of both sides of the copyright equation if you want to be taken seriously, and I'm not just talking about by me.
see no reason to believe that a fifteen-year term will spur the act of creation any more effectively than a five-year term.
Imagine law or medical degrees were only good for five years. Would it be worth the significant investment to go to school? Most people wouldn't even have the time to finish school, let alone set up a practice and recoup the costs put into going to school.
It takes a serious investment to build up a portfolio of worthwhile and marketable work and do all the legwork of getting into the hands and consciousness of your potential audience. This stuff isn't instant unless you're exceptionally gifted AND blessed with resources and connections. Cut it short to something like five years and in many if not most cases you'll never get the time to pull an income from your work before the right to copy/redistribute it is open to anyone. By keeping the term longer than it takes to work through the higher education system to get a law degree, you leave the field open to people who may, for whatever reason, either need that time to create good work, or need that time to get the word out.
Fifteen years isn't even that long. That's why the original U.S. copyright act allowed for a 14 year extension if the author was still living.
t's really the right to modify that I'm after.
You basically have the right to modify, at least until the DMCA gets further tech & teeth. You just don't have the right to modify and distribute.;)
You could also gain the right to modify in far more productive ways than putting an extremely short leash on copyright term. For example, you can do this with any song out there *right now* -- you can get a mechanical license for performing any song at what was, last time I checked, a license fee of $.08 per copy. So, you're perfectly welcome to re-write (or simply re-record) "Every Breath You Take" by the Police any time you're willing to put up a small fee. If you wanted more freedom, you could write laws that waived the fee for non-commercial use. Or you could broaden things to generalized mechanical licensing for all audio works if it's samples you're after. That would be a little more problematic, as it would essentially constitute price fixing for recordings, but any of this would be better than having quickly evaporating copyrights.
And changing the law is far, far, far from the only way to create the culture you're looking for. Show people how it's in their interest to do it, and collaboration will follow. The entire open source explosion of the last 10-20 years happened without anyone shortening software copyrights to five years.
Pull the leash short to a chokingly short length isn't the way to get a reasonable term length any more than bidding 2/3 under the starting price will help you at an auction.
Yeah, well -- there isn't a really polite way to put this -- suck it up.
I mean this in the nicest possible way, but well, fuck you too.
Nobody keeps paying ME for the creative work I did a month ago in my job.
Nice to know your think-through of policy issues is limited to your own perspective. And your post doesn't even give much indication you've thought that through clearly.
You and the musician have exactly the same protections under copyright law right now. If he writes something while working for an employer, nobody pays him for the creative work he did a month ago either. And if you write something on your own time, a month from now, you totally have the right to negotiate revenue from its use. And either of you might well be able to negotiate rights to work done on company time with your employer, even if that stuff is typically classified as a work for hire.
In short, current copyright law has nothing to do with the fact that an independent musician has a greater claim on future revenue from their work than a clock puncher -- it's all about when and for whom the work was done.
So if you want some parity between you and said independent musician, rather than yanking away somebody else's protection, feel free to "suck it up," as you say, and get out there and take the risk of doing your best work on your own time.
five years is the compromise position, not the extreme.
Five years is much better than 120, but it's a pretty ridiculous compromise position. The apparent absence of understanding of the public benefit side of the copyright equation in discourse in the current halls of power is no reason to throw out the personal incentive/benefit side of the equation.
I seem to recall that the first act of Congress establishing copyright covered it from 17 years;
14.
that still seems awful long to me
There are people whose works don't become popular enough to bring income within the five year period you proposed, and it doesn't always have anything to do with merit. Aside from the fact that some works take years to realize, there's a certain luck that comes to buzz and word of mouth and promotion, and there's enough worthwhile work that doesn't see it inside of five or ten years that you're essentially giving it away for free by making a copyright period shorter than that. Something around 15 years starts to seem like a pretty good spot once you realize that.
Rare is the case where your employee actually does something as well as you want them to do it because rare is the case that your employee could care less.
You're hiring the wrong people, or you're managing them poorly. There *are* indeed people who care about doing things well when it's not beaten out of them.
They have absolutely no risk -- they have nothing to lose.
I've pointed this out elsewhere, but I'll repeat it: their risks are *different* -- not capital, borrowed or raised, not collateral, but that absolutely doesn't mean they're risking nothing.
The employee doesn't have any skin in the game.
Then give them some, for some diety's sake. Let them invest personal care in the work you want them to do -- even if it might mean having to give them a little more control. Hire for smaller salaries but share a greater portion of the rewards for good performance, if that's what it takes.
But they can also lose my house, and I can't get another one.
I'm sympathetic to the problems of raising capital, but I think it's possible what you have here is a problem with your business legal structure, not an employee management problem.
The point about lawyers flexing laws is pretty much legit, as is the observation that laws have consequences, some of which may expose you to negative impacts in running a business. The question is whether or not the goods they're crafted to bring about are worth it.
I'd agree that requiring employers to make allowances that mean they need to consider a single man and mother equally means there may be calculable drag on employers. That by itself doesn't mean it's not a good idea, it simply means there's no such thing as a free lunch. The question is if that's the best place to pay/way for the problem of mothers who don't have sufficient incomes in their households, and if it's by and large an acceptable tradeoff.
In my case, our development schedules often include days that are religious holidays. I can't lose my employees to "a higher power"
I'd argue that it's also better to have a society that doesn't discriminate based on religion than it is to have businesses at peak efficiency, too, but that's not really relevant to your statement. Because you're not talking about operating a peak efficiency -- any development schedule that can't accommodate up to a dozen holidays a year and a weekly sabbath of some kind (whether spent in piety or revelry or somewhere in between) is already screwed up, likely negatively influenced by fatigue and diminishing returns, and it ought to scare off any developer with good sense, who ought to run hard and fast unless you're offering some unusually good compensation.
Even if, however, the documentation fell the other way, it's possible that the good done by encouraging a society that doesn't discriminate based on religious belief might outweigh the business economic case.
employees have far too many "rights" for the no risk that they offer.
Speaking as someone who's freelanced on their own for years therefore has some first-hand understanding about some of the difficulties of taxes and risks of varying revenue, and has also been amongst the first handful of employees of at least two startups (and therefore worn more than a few traditional business hats), I'd say that for a person who complains the typical employee has no idea about concerns and risks outside of their desk, you've got a pretty narrow point of view yourself. Perhaps if you find employees so troublesome to have to deal with, you're not anywhere near as well suited to be involved in owning and running a business as you seem to think you are.
No risk? This is a complete misunderstanding of the employee-employer agreement. The fact that lots of employees make the same mistake doesn't mitigate the fact. Their risks are simply different. Sure, they don't risk capital, and they end up in a position which is defined narrowly *by the employer* in such a way that they're only concerned with a subset of the issues a business faces. But any employee is absolutely taking a sizable risk in terms of opportunity cost and weighing that against a specific somewhat predictable financial arrangement and potential career development that's entirely hypothetical. I've seen firsthand how far a crazy employment situation can set back a career and *decrease* earning potential rather than help it, and by the same token, how far a good arrangement can really propel both employees and employers.
You don't get to be a part of household decisions because you have no idea what they are.
Past a certain size, of course it's very difficult to keep everyone appraised of all the details relevant to the smooth function of a business. But before that point, it's at least as much a management failure as anything else if the employees don't understand the issues. And after that point, there's still a lot good management can do to.
Adopting a hybrid paternal-mercenary stance is pretty much antithetical to that, but it's very gratifying to a certain psychology, and in some cases, even locally rewarding, so it's not too surprising it's fairly common.
How the fuck can you compare *that* with OpenMoko, a completely Free phone with a Free firmware, Free Operating System, Free applications, and community of Free Software guys prepared to spend $450 each just to debug the hardware for the benefit of humanity, so that for the first time ever, you can buy a phone that does whatever you want
Fuck, to fucking compare the fuck out of that fucking comparison, I fucking could fucking point out that for fucking fuck's sake, that fuck, it's like fucking OS X, sure fucks it's fucking less fucking free than fucking Linux, and fuck yes it's fucking more fuck bucks than fucking commodity fucked intel fucking hardware, but sweet freaky fucks if you're fucking aligned with the fucking basic goals of the fucking platform it fucking gets out of your fucking way and lets you fucking get your fucking work done.
The fuckers who keep fucking *whining* about how the fucking hardware they like to fuck with isn't fucking getting as many fucking marks on its fucking dance card as they'd like can't seem to fucking understand that there are fucking products out there that fucking may not align with *their* fucking particular fucking goals but still fucking-a align with other fucking people. The fucking iPhone fuckign does fucking exactly what some fucking people want it to, even if it doesn't fucking compile motherfucking gentoo.
Different fucking strokes for different fucking folks, mothafucka'. Can you handle it?
And BTW, the fucking folks who are fucking spending fuckloads amound of fucking time on this kind of fucking crazy platform fucking may fucking well be fucking smarter than their fucking open-source critics if the fucking iPhone does in fucking fact become a fucking popular mobile platform, like there's quake-fucking indications it fucking will. Maybe the OpenFuckingMoko will find a fucking place too, but fuck, there are very fucking few fucking consumer spaces where it's fucking best to bet on open fucking source.
River's too hot to adequately cool their equipment, yet they're... blaming reduced river flow as a result of drought. Curious, no?
Man. I get so sick of wingnuts attributing every omission of language or cause that doesn't reaffirm their worldview to media conspiracy that I'm not sure whether to be relieved or nauseated that it's found elsewhere.
So here's a quick question of my own -- do you really care if they care what the answer is, or are you basically trying a rhetorical trick designed to get GOP sympathetic readers in defense mode?
Reminds me an awful lot of Arnold's campaign. Remember during his campaign the rather disquieting and believable allegations of sexual harrasment that would have made Clinton blush? You know what I remember? GOP apologists standing up and saying "these allegations are poltically motivated." No care or attention, of course, about whether they were true -- it was all about whether it hurt or helped his campaign.
The time for letting that kind of bullshit pass is done.
It doesn't matter ONE BIT whether or not having to answer this kind of question will make a GOP leader look bad. If it does, so be it.
It won't be the question which incriminates, anyway. It'll be the answer. And that's the candidate's responsibility, no one else's.
"Why shouldn't I work for the N.S.A.? That's a tough one, but I'll give it a shot. Say I'm working at N.S.A. Somebody puts a code on my desk, something nobody else can break. So I take a shot at it and maybe I break it. And I'm real happy with myself, 'cause I did my job well. But maybe that code was the location of some rebel army in North Africa or the Middle East. Once they have that location, they bomb the village where the rebels were hiding and fifteen hundred people I never had a problem with get killed. Now the politicians are sayin', "Send in the marines to secure the area" 'cause they don't give a shit. It won't be their kid over there, gettin' shot. Just like it wasn't them when their number was called, 'cause they were pullin' a tour in the National Guard. It'll be some guy from Southie takin' shrapnel in the ass. And he comes home to find that the plant he used to work at got exported to the country he just got back from. And the guy who put the shrapnel in his ass got his old job, 'cause he'll work for fifteen cents a day and no bathroom breaks. Meanwhile my buddy from Southie realizes the only reason he was over there was so we could install a government that would sell us oil at a good price. And of course the oil companies used the skirmish to scare up oil prices so they could turn a quick buck. A cute little ancillary benefit for them but it ain't helping my buddy at two-fifty a gallon. And naturally they're takin' their sweet time bringin' the oil back, and maybe even took the liberty of hiring an alcoholic skipper who likes to drink martinis and play slalom with the icebergs, and it ain't too long 'til he hits one, spills the oil and kills all the sea life in the North Atlantic. So my buddy's out of work and he can't afford to drive, so he's got to walk to the job interviews, which sucks 'cause the shrapnel in his ass is givin' him chronic hemorrhoids. And meanwhile he's starvin' 'cause every time he tries to get a bite to eat the only blue plate special they're servin' is North Atlantic scrod with Quaker State. So what do I think? I'm holdin' out for somethin' better. Why not just shoot my buddy, take his job and give it to his sworn enemy, hike up gas prices, bomb a village, club a baby seal, hit the hash pipe and join the National Guard? I could be elected president. "
Well, for those of us who care about REAL morals like, ya know, freedom and human rights and such, instead of "ooh, boobs!"
There are worse things than nudity, obviously. Including twits who've boiled a fairly nuanced area worthy of concern down to a false dichotomy featuring a vague glittering good and a gross oversimplification.
The OP took some care to show that he doesn't expect everyone else to share his particular standards and he's willing to respect the rights of others to produce and publish things he doesn't want to be involved in. His question isn't about whether YOU think porn is good or evil, it isn't about whether YOU think it's more important to write letters for Amnesty International or keep adult vids out of the hands of local kids. His question is about how to handle things when your employer wants you to participate in a project that crosses whatever your ethical boundaries may be. Maybe that's making a porn directory, maybe it's writing marketing copy for Exxon. If you want to contribute to the discussion, stepping up the ladder of abstraction and providing some advice on grappling with the situation would be a better alternative to criticizing the OP's or anyone else's particular moral values.
Exactly. And have said plants managed to convert the earth into "grey goo" yet? They've had quite a while to get really good at being efficient at using energy and matter to make themselves.
Evolution's fantastic and all, but it's hardly an exhaustive search of all the possibilities at an scale. People have been able to invent lots of interesting and efficient things that haven't evolved, from wheeled carts to nuclear weapons. Self-replicating nanomachines will face limitations, but it's no reason to get complacent.
How about "would *shooting* a legislator be a correct response to this?"
Seriously. By the time this actually gets pondered, it's evidence that the members of congress are barely even bothering to keep up the pretense of representing "we the people."
The problem with opening up draconian measures for spam is that it would become the new kiddie porn -- you don't like someone? Plant kiddie porn on their machine, send a tip to the FBI and presto, if they manage to avoid pound-me-in-the-ass prison somehow, they'll be dogged by a ruined reputation for the rest of their lives.
But hey, why stop there if you can whip whole populations into a literally murderous frenzy by getting someone tarred as a spammer?
Slashdot Mirror
They probably downplayed the size to keep getting their grant monies.
Because nothing helps a career like being off by an order of magnitude?
I don't think typing in BASIC games (or pages and pages of hex dumps) from a magazine works for kids today
Well, there's no reason it couldn't, but there's also better stuff out there.
In particular, Scratch (http://scratch.mit.edu ) shows a lot of thought and promise.
And if that's too simple, a kid may as well be doing work in Flash or something nice a media friendly....
Apple does do delta updates.
Which, seems to me, is one of the reasons why rollback is non trivial. I think I might rather give up the delta and take larger files. With issues like 10.5.2 presented, it really seems better to either wait until the late dot releases or have some method of rollback available....
I don't think the parent is talking about standardizing his password across every service he uses. I think he's talking about standardizing what a password can consist of and what constitutes a standard length, and a *tiny* bit of sanity regarding human factors in memory and use.
I understand in practice that might allow people to collapse to a narrow set of passwords. But I think it's also possible that this kind of standardization could allow people's ideas about what constitutes a good password to coalesce around a few basic points, which might let them more readily create a few.
And the parent is absolutely right that rotating random strings of characters every three months presents a use problem. One type of security analyst might say "suck it up, there's a tradeoff between security and use," and if you can get the user to suck it up and that works in the context of the organization, that's great. But if not, this brings us to the point in the "Amateurs study crypto, pros study economics" phrase. If you really want a secure system, solve both problems. Provide the user with some security practice that isn't going to cost him cycles the operation of the organization is going to demand he use somewhere else.
The overarching purpose of my post above was to respond to the basically nihilistic and all-or-nothing philosophy of the parent poster, and their mess of a proposition that since it's impossible to keep any innocent person from dying, ever (and our moral concepts of innocence mean nothing to physics), we shouldn't care whether or not our justice system sometimes executes people. My purpose was *not* to address every potential argument for the death penalty. Indeed, there are some arguments that state should be granted the ability to kill that I find credible.
And there are some good points from your post:
Except that there are cases where the best defense for society is the excise of the individual from the ability to ever harm another person, ever again, no matter how small a chance.
In particular people should observe that this motive for the death penalty is not primarily a disincentive, nor is it punitive, and as such, it's quite possibly the only solidly logical motive.
We do a damn good job, going through an incredible amount of evidentiary checks and appeals before we get to the point of carrying out a capital sentence.
We do a better job than probably most of the world throughout most of history, in large part because there's been a will to try, a fight against the parent's nihilism.
And yet, there's some serious problems, including career motives of the prosecution and police (not to mention the general "proctologist's view" it's easy to acquire of humanity in both professions), the workload on public defenders, and perhaps most of all the fact that in many cases the law is generally conceived not from the practical motivation you mentioned earlier, but often from the more questionable punitive and disincentive approaches.
There's a reason that all the various innocence projects practice multiple forms of statistic misuse not the least of which is observational selection/cherry-picking
The justice system itself and the critics of the innocence projects have pretty much the same problems when it comes to statistical discussion. T
But personally, I don't care so much about who has the statistics right. The innocence project's positive identification of undeserved convictions is really enough for me. If the broad point is that the death penalty shouldn't be indefinitely suspended but that the system should be actively refined so that we can get better, I can agree with that. But I also find the idea that the death penalty might be suspended while we're working some things out credible.
Which is more humane - marooning someone on a deserted island or somewhere else, "with no hope of escape"? Sticking them in a 4x6 cell, no sunlight, sealed door, food passed through a slot, till they die?
This is a good point, and the answer is going to vary for many people. However, not only is it true that some people would choose to live even in these conditions, inhumane prison conditions are hardly a given.
If you find everyone innocent, your "goal" of not having mistaken convictions is achieved - though I guarantee you wouldn't like the lawless results.
Given the range of potential penalties other than execution, it's not particularly accurate to equate abolishing the death penalty with finding everyone innocent.
You'll never be batting 1000 where fallible components (read: people) are involved. So stop wasting your time and that of others.
Of course perfection is usually out of reach, but that's never a worthy argument against improvement.
Especially with *limited* goals, and the parent poster stated one that's perfectly achievable. Having a *justice system* that doesn't execute innocent people is exceptionally easy: don't have executions as part of the justice system.
Nature (think the universe, not a forest) has no compunctions about innocents dying. We're merely a tiny subset of nature
And we care about it, and since, by your argument, we are part of nature, nature apparently does care.
Hell, maybe we're even one way by which nature's trying to solve a given problem.
Attribution of motive to probably motiveless mechanics aside, the truth is that whether by intention or accident, we're here in nature with both some degree of problem-solving skills and values. There's no reason not to apply the problem-solving skills toward those values.
Far from including the kind of technical clarity that would allow me to rationally evaluate your demands and make a well-informed decision on whether or not an exception to the policy was warranted in this case, you instead degenerated steadily into technical inchoherence so that by the end of your post I have no idea what you're talking about anymore. No doubt you--like my own developers--sincerely believe you've been crystal clear in every important detail.
Somebody else said this, but it deserves repetition. If there's any part of that post you don't actually understand completely -- if any portion of it resembles "technobabble" to you -- then you're essentially fleecing your employers by representing yourself as a competent sysadmin.
And you can certainly look forward to continued hostility from programmers who can spot the gaps in your understanding a mile away, no matter how much you might be trying to hide it from yourself and others by imagining that they just can't understand your job.
Being a state senator
Nothing to sneeze at, especially in certain states, including Illinois. It's real policy and real politics.
and voting present whenever a controversial bill came up
I can't speak for him, but I can say that on a number of controversial issues, abstaining rather than voting for a half-assed solution is an action I can get behind. Sometimes waiting for the right thing to come along is a better choice than endorsing or rejecting something incomplete.
only being in the senate for 3 years is a laughable experience record.
Being able to run a successful senate *campaign* is no mean feat. And we've had some great people who were only in public office a short time before they proved their worth. Abraham Lincoln? One two-year term in the *House* on a national level before serving with now universally noted distinction in the Presidency.
The experience argument is pretty much a non-starter, whether or not you're willing to admit Obama actually has it.
The proper way to resolve this ugly problem is to update our electoral system to something that works (Range Voting or Condorcet are both good options), but that is a difficult task and it's not going to happen in the near term
It's not difficult logistically. It's difficult politically (politicians part of the system that elected them are generally reluctant to change it) and difficult educationally (even some ostensibly smart americans been so conditioned to think "voting" == "plurality voting" that they have trouble wrapping their heads around anything else).
Well thats the thing. To me Obama feels like a Manchurian candidate. He has no background... He was pretty much out of the blue. Its almost if he could just finish taking the oath for office and then pull off his mask and its Jeb Bush for all we know.
This is simply wrong, and I'm almost to the point where I think anybody caught repeating it ought to be completely stripped of their right to vote for the rest of their lives, if not actually institutionalized for drooling idiocy.
YOU may not know anything about Obama's background, and that's okay, I can forgive that. You may DISLIKE aspects of his recorded experience, rhetoric, and positions, and that's fine as well.
But to repeat the idea that he "has no background" with 10 years of elected office -- not to mention time as a community organizer in Chicago, time living abroad, degree in Political Science from Columbia stint teaching constitutional law at the University of Chicago, among other things -- that's the kind of corrosive disinformation that may pass for conventional wisdom but actually saps the ability of the country to make useful decisions about candidates for elected offices.
There is plenty of meat to Obama for anyone genuinely interested in learning anything about him as a candidate to bite into.
The analogous situation would be if you only got paid for five years' work every time you won a case or performed an operation.
This doesn't make any sense at all to me -- you'll have to explain what you're drawing a parallel to and how they match up.
this is not an analogous situation.
It's highly analogous for those with eyes to see -- the parallel is that it takes time to create the investment (either the education or the art) and it takes more time to get a return that justifies the time creating it. A five year copyright makes sense only if you somehow imagine that some kind of significant return is the rule inside of that time -- or if you want to limit the benefits of copyright to the few with the talent and resources to do it in that short time period.
Just because something you created is not covered by copyright, it doesn't mean the experience you gained creating it goes away.
And that's great, if all you needed from the investment in creating the work was experience.
So? Why would your portfolio need to remain in copyright for you to get work.
What's to stop a law student in our five-year degree lifetime world from simply continually investing in education to make sure his credentials stay current?
Are you saying the only appropriate compensation for a work that isn't done for hire is being able to get more work?
Huh? Since when do people build a portfolio, get a job, and then just use what's in their portfolio?
Rather frequently, as many professionals can tell you. But even if they didn't, drawing creative work to strict parity with wage/salaried labor isn't what productive, intelligent discussion on the issue is about.
It's not "yanking away someone's protection" -- I will not let you characterize it so.
;)
I'm not sure how you can stop this -- if you advocate stripping the protections that currently exist, then you're yanking them away, whether you've got a convincing argument for doing so or not.
Protection it may be, but it takes the form of special privilege, and it is taken from me and every other citizen of the United States
Taken AND given to every citizen in equal measure. You have no more or fewer rights than the most famous songwriters in the U.S.
and I have the right to question the duration of this privilege and the use to which it is put.
Sure. But you're going to have to demonstrate understanding and consideration of both sides of the copyright equation if you want to be taken seriously, and I'm not just talking about by me.
see no reason to believe that a fifteen-year term will spur the act of creation any more effectively than a five-year term.
Imagine law or medical degrees were only good for five years. Would it be worth the significant investment to go to school? Most people wouldn't even have the time to finish school, let alone set up a practice and recoup the costs put into going to school.
It takes a serious investment to build up a portfolio of worthwhile and marketable work and do all the legwork of getting into the hands and consciousness of your potential audience. This stuff isn't instant unless you're exceptionally gifted AND blessed with resources and connections. Cut it short to something like five years and in many if not most cases you'll never get the time to pull an income from your work before the right to copy/redistribute it is open to anyone. By keeping the term longer than it takes to work through the higher education system to get a law degree, you leave the field open to people who may, for whatever reason, either need that time to create good work, or need that time to get the word out.
Fifteen years isn't even that long. That's why the original U.S. copyright act allowed for a 14 year extension if the author was still living.
t's really the right to modify that I'm after.
You basically have the right to modify, at least until the DMCA gets further tech & teeth. You just don't have the right to modify and distribute.
You could also gain the right to modify in far more productive ways than putting an extremely short leash on copyright term. For example, you can do this with any song out there *right now* -- you can get a mechanical license for performing any song at what was, last time I checked, a license fee of $.08 per copy. So, you're perfectly welcome to re-write (or simply re-record) "Every Breath You Take" by the Police any time you're willing to put up a small fee. If you wanted more freedom, you could write laws that waived the fee for non-commercial use. Or you could broaden things to generalized mechanical licensing for all audio works if it's samples you're after. That would be a little more problematic, as it would essentially constitute price fixing for recordings, but any of this would be better than having quickly evaporating copyrights.
And changing the law is far, far, far from the only way to create the culture you're looking for. Show people how it's in their interest to do it, and collaboration will follow. The entire open source explosion of the last 10-20 years happened without anyone shortening software copyrights to five years.
Pull the leash short to a chokingly short length isn't the way to get a reasonable term length any more than bidding 2/3 under the starting price will help you at an auction.
Yeah, well -- there isn't a really polite way to put this -- suck it up.
I mean this in the nicest possible way, but well, fuck you too.
Nobody keeps paying ME for the creative work I did a month ago in my job.
Nice to know your think-through of policy issues is limited to your own perspective. And your post doesn't even give much indication you've thought that through clearly.
You and the musician have exactly the same protections under copyright law right now. If he writes something while working for an employer, nobody pays him for the creative work he did a month ago either. And if you write something on your own time, a month from now, you totally have the right to negotiate revenue from its use. And either of you might well be able to negotiate rights to work done on company time with your employer, even if that stuff is typically classified as a work for hire.
In short, current copyright law has nothing to do with the fact that an independent musician has a greater claim on future revenue from their work than a clock puncher -- it's all about when and for whom the work was done.
So if you want some parity between you and said independent musician, rather than yanking away somebody else's protection, feel free to "suck it up," as you say, and get out there and take the risk of doing your best work on your own time.
five years is the compromise position, not the extreme.
Five years is much better than 120, but it's a pretty ridiculous compromise position. The apparent absence of understanding of the public benefit side of the copyright equation in discourse in the current halls of power is no reason to throw out the personal incentive/benefit side of the equation.
I seem to recall that the first act of Congress establishing copyright covered it from 17 years;
14.
that still seems awful long to me
There are people whose works don't become popular enough to bring income within the five year period you proposed, and it doesn't always have anything to do with merit. Aside from the fact that some works take years to realize, there's a certain luck that comes to buzz and word of mouth and promotion, and there's enough worthwhile work that doesn't see it inside of five or ten years that you're essentially giving it away for free by making a copyright period shorter than that. Something around 15 years starts to seem like a pretty good spot once you realize that.
Rare is the case where your employee actually does something as well as you want them to do it because rare is the case that your employee could care less.
You're hiring the wrong people, or you're managing them poorly. There *are* indeed people who care about doing things well when it's not beaten out of them.
They have absolutely no risk -- they have nothing to lose.
I've pointed this out elsewhere, but I'll repeat it: their risks are *different* -- not capital, borrowed or raised, not collateral, but that absolutely doesn't mean they're risking nothing.
The employee doesn't have any skin in the game.
Then give them some, for some diety's sake. Let them invest personal care in the work you want them to do -- even if it might mean having to give them a little more control. Hire for smaller salaries but share a greater portion of the rewards for good performance, if that's what it takes.
But they can also lose my house, and I can't get another one.
I'm sympathetic to the problems of raising capital, but I think it's possible what you have here is a problem with your business legal structure, not an employee management problem.
The point about lawyers flexing laws is pretty much legit, as is the observation that laws have consequences, some of which may expose you to negative impacts in running a business. The question is whether or not the goods they're crafted to bring about are worth it.
I'd agree that requiring employers to make allowances that mean they need to consider a single man and mother equally means there may be calculable drag on employers. That by itself doesn't mean it's not a good idea, it simply means there's no such thing as a free lunch. The question is if that's the best place to pay/way for the problem of mothers who don't have sufficient incomes in their households, and if it's by and large an acceptable tradeoff.
In my case, our development schedules often include days that are religious holidays. I can't lose my employees to "a higher power"
I'd argue that it's also better to have a society that doesn't discriminate based on religion than it is to have businesses at peak efficiency, too, but that's not really relevant to your statement. Because you're not talking about operating a peak efficiency -- any development schedule that can't accommodate up to a dozen holidays a year and a weekly sabbath of some kind (whether spent in piety or revelry or somewhere in between) is already screwed up, likely negatively influenced by fatigue and diminishing returns, and it ought to scare off any developer with good sense, who ought to run hard and fast unless you're offering some unusually good compensation.
Even if, however, the documentation fell the other way, it's possible that the good done by encouraging a society that doesn't discriminate based on religious belief might outweigh the business economic case.
employees have far too many "rights" for the no risk that they offer.
Speaking as someone who's freelanced on their own for years therefore has some first-hand understanding about some of the difficulties of taxes and risks of varying revenue, and has also been amongst the first handful of employees of at least two startups (and therefore worn more than a few traditional business hats), I'd say that for a person who complains the typical employee has no idea about concerns and risks outside of their desk, you've got a pretty narrow point of view yourself. Perhaps if you find employees so troublesome to have to deal with, you're not anywhere near as well suited to be involved in owning and running a business as you seem to think you are.
No risk? This is a complete misunderstanding of the employee-employer agreement. The fact that lots of employees make the same mistake doesn't mitigate the fact. Their risks are simply different. Sure, they don't risk capital, and they end up in a position which is defined narrowly *by the employer* in such a way that they're only concerned with a subset of the issues a business faces. But any employee is absolutely taking a sizable risk in terms of opportunity cost and weighing that against a specific somewhat predictable financial arrangement and potential career development that's entirely hypothetical. I've seen firsthand how far a crazy employment situation can set back a career and *decrease* earning potential rather than help it, and by the same token, how far a good arrangement can really propel both employees and employers.
You don't get to be a part of household decisions because you have no idea what they are.
Past a certain size, of course it's very difficult to keep everyone appraised of all the details relevant to the smooth function of a business. But before that point, it's at least as much a management failure as anything else if the employees don't understand the issues. And after that point, there's still a lot good management can do to.
Adopting a hybrid paternal-mercenary stance is pretty much antithetical to that, but it's very gratifying to a certain psychology, and in some cases, even locally rewarding, so it's not too surprising it's fairly common.
How the fuck can you compare *that* with OpenMoko, a completely Free phone with a Free firmware, Free Operating System, Free applications, and community of Free Software guys prepared to spend $450 each just to debug the hardware for the benefit of humanity, so that for the first time ever, you can buy a phone that does whatever you want
Fuck, to fucking compare the fuck out of that fucking comparison, I fucking could fucking point out that for fucking fuck's sake, that fuck, it's like fucking OS X, sure fucks it's fucking less fucking free than fucking Linux, and fuck yes it's fucking more fuck bucks than fucking commodity fucked intel fucking hardware, but sweet freaky fucks if you're fucking aligned with the fucking basic goals of the fucking platform it fucking gets out of your fucking way and lets you fucking get your fucking work done.
The fuckers who keep fucking *whining* about how the fucking hardware they like to fuck with isn't fucking getting as many fucking marks on its fucking dance card as they'd like can't seem to fucking understand that there are fucking products out there that fucking may not align with *their* fucking particular fucking goals but still fucking-a align with other fucking people. The fucking iPhone fuckign does fucking exactly what some fucking people want it to, even if it doesn't fucking compile motherfucking gentoo.
Different fucking strokes for different fucking folks, mothafucka'. Can you handle it?
And BTW, the fucking folks who are fucking spending fuckloads amound of fucking time on this kind of fucking crazy platform fucking may fucking well be fucking smarter than their fucking open-source critics if the fucking iPhone does in fucking fact become a fucking popular mobile platform, like there's quake-fucking indications it fucking will. Maybe the OpenFuckingMoko will find a fucking place too, but fuck, there are very fucking few fucking consumer spaces where it's fucking best to bet on open fucking source.
Fuck with that, fuckers.
So, are there any estimates of market cap or onhand cash of competitors like Verizon, AT&T, or others?
River's too hot to adequately cool their equipment, yet they're...
blaming reduced river flow as a result of drought.
Curious, no?
Man. I get so sick of wingnuts attributing every omission of language or cause that doesn't reaffirm their worldview to media conspiracy that I'm not sure whether to be relieved or nauseated that it's found elsewhere.
So here's a quick question of my own -- do you really care if they care what the answer is, or are you basically trying a rhetorical trick designed to get GOP sympathetic readers in defense mode?
Reminds me an awful lot of Arnold's campaign. Remember during his campaign the rather disquieting and believable allegations of sexual harrasment that would have made Clinton blush? You know what I remember? GOP apologists standing up and saying "these allegations are poltically motivated." No care or attention, of course, about whether they were true -- it was all about whether it hurt or helped his campaign.
The time for letting that kind of bullshit pass is done.
It doesn't matter ONE BIT whether or not having to answer this kind of question will make a GOP leader look bad. If it does, so be it.
It won't be the question which incriminates, anyway. It'll be the answer. And that's the candidate's responsibility, no one else's.
"Why shouldn't I work for the N.S.A.? That's a tough one, but I'll give it a shot. Say I'm working at N.S.A. Somebody puts a code on my desk, something nobody else can break. So I take a shot at it and maybe I break it. And I'm real happy with myself, 'cause I did my job well. But maybe that code was the location of some rebel army in North Africa or the Middle East. Once they have that location, they bomb the village where the rebels were hiding and fifteen hundred people I never had a problem with get killed. Now the politicians are sayin', "Send in the marines to secure the area" 'cause they don't give a shit. It won't be their kid over there, gettin' shot. Just like it wasn't them when their number was called, 'cause they were pullin' a tour in the National Guard. It'll be some guy from Southie takin' shrapnel in the ass. And he comes home to find that the plant he used to work at got exported to the country he just got back from. And the guy who put the shrapnel in his ass got his old job, 'cause he'll work for fifteen cents a day and no bathroom breaks. Meanwhile my buddy from Southie realizes the only reason he was over there was so we could install a government that would sell us oil at a good price. And of course the oil companies used the skirmish to scare up oil prices so they could turn a quick buck. A cute little ancillary benefit for them but it ain't helping my buddy at two-fifty a gallon. And naturally they're takin' their sweet time bringin' the oil back, and maybe even took the liberty of hiring an alcoholic skipper who likes to drink martinis and play slalom with the icebergs, and it ain't too long 'til he hits one, spills the oil and kills all the sea life in the North Atlantic. So my buddy's out of work and he can't afford to drive, so he's got to walk to the job interviews, which sucks 'cause the shrapnel in his ass is givin' him chronic hemorrhoids. And meanwhile he's starvin' 'cause every time he tries to get a bite to eat the only blue plate special they're servin' is North Atlantic scrod with Quaker State. So what do I think? I'm holdin' out for somethin' better. Why not just shoot my buddy, take his job and give it to his sworn enemy, hike up gas prices, bomb a village, club a baby seal, hit the hash pipe and join the National Guard? I could be elected president. "
Well, for those of us who care about REAL morals like, ya know, freedom and human rights and such, instead of "ooh, boobs!"
There are worse things than nudity, obviously. Including twits who've boiled a fairly nuanced area worthy of concern down to a false dichotomy featuring a vague glittering good and a gross oversimplification.
The OP took some care to show that he doesn't expect everyone else to share his particular standards and he's willing to respect the rights of others to produce and publish things he doesn't want to be involved in. His question isn't about whether YOU think porn is good or evil, it isn't about whether YOU think it's more important to write letters for Amnesty International or keep adult vids out of the hands of local kids. His question is about how to handle things when your employer wants you to participate in a project that crosses whatever your ethical boundaries may be. Maybe that's making a porn directory, maybe it's writing marketing copy for Exxon. If you want to contribute to the discussion, stepping up the ladder of abstraction and providing some advice on grappling with the situation would be a better alternative to criticizing the OP's or anyone else's particular moral values.
Exactly. And have said plants managed to convert the earth into "grey goo" yet? They've had quite a while to get really good at being efficient at using energy and matter to make themselves.
Evolution's fantastic and all, but it's hardly an exhaustive search of all the possibilities at an scale. People have been able to invent lots of interesting and efficient things that haven't evolved, from wheeled carts to nuclear weapons. Self-replicating nanomachines will face limitations, but it's no reason to get complacent.
How about "would *shooting* a legislator be a correct response to this?"
Seriously. By the time this actually gets pondered, it's evidence that the members of congress are barely even bothering to keep up the pretense of representing "we the people."
The problem with opening up draconian measures for spam is that it would become the new kiddie porn -- you don't like someone? Plant kiddie porn on their machine, send a tip to the FBI and presto, if they manage to avoid pound-me-in-the-ass prison somehow, they'll be dogged by a ruined reputation for the rest of their lives.
But hey, why stop there if you can whip whole populations into a literally murderous frenzy by getting someone tarred as a spammer?