Good points. I think you're right: cloud services have a long way to come in terms of cost, and I'm not sure that'll happen in the near future. And that scalability isn't relevant to most people, anyway. The number of sites that can't be managed by a single commodity server are small, and that can be scaled right down to a virtual host on a machine shared with 30 other similar sites for the low end. Virtual machine software (e.g. Xen) makes it easy to migrate to a host with more capacity as and when it becomes necessary, and I believe this can even be achieved without downtime. So why would most of us need the cloud, when a competent traditional hosting provider ought to be able to do that anyway?
I have. My company lives (or dies) by the !@# SLA.
Our agreements require no less than 99.9% uptime, about 8 hours of downtime per year. We never gotten close to that - our worst year was about 2.5 hours of downtime because of a power failure at our "fully redundant" hosting facility.
Hmm. When my last hosting provider had a power failure at their hosting facility, it took them more like 2.5 days to get all their clients back up and running. Turns out some of the machines hadn't been rebooted for years, and when they tried to reboot them they wouldn't come up again.
SLA said 99.9%. Compensation limited to one month's hosting costs. Always check the limit...
It's 4pm on a Saturday, and your site is getting hit hard. Rally the troops, call a meeting, decide the proper action, call Fedex to ship you more infrastructure, deploy new hardware, profit from your new customers, all the while laughing at the fools who waited 10 minutes for their cloud to auto-scale.
Or, receive an SMS on your phone telling you that capacity is nearly exhausted. Think about it for thirty seconds; call somebody who's likely to be sitting in front of a computer (surely your company's IT staff is geeky enough that at least _one_ of them will be) and ask if it looks like increased demand or a DDoS. Then call your service provider and ask them to take the appropriate action (either add additional resources or limit connection rates, depending on which it is). Probably takes about the same 10 minutes, but is less likely to end up with a bill you can't afford to pay.
Finally, not using autoscaling because you might get DDoS'd is just stupid. You lose business/visitors. Thats worse than paying more to avoid being taken down, because your reputation gets hurt AS WELL AS losing you business.
The solution to a DDoS is not to keep scaling up your hardware and hoping that the next server you add will be able to withstand it. It won't.
The solution to a DDoS is to get on the phone to your ISP and ask them to step up the filtering on your server. They can limit the rate at which IP can initiate new connections, which will only marginally inconvenience your real customers, and will really limit the amount of resources the DDoS absorbs.
Of course, you can only do this if you know you're under attack, and if your infrastructure is set to autoscale, you probably won't know. Until you receive the bill.
Nice thing about LAMP is at least the AMP part is OS portable, so we can rent capacity where ever it's cheap. So far we haven't needed to do that but it's nice to have the ability.
Only if you're very careful. I'm going to assume that by LAMP you mean Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP as that's the most common meaning these days. Some of what I say also applies to PERL and/or Python, which also sometimes end up in the same acronym.
The first thing to be aware of is that you're likely using Apache with the prefork MPM under Linux. This is the way that works best in that environment; unfortunately, its performance totally sucks in Windows, so if you switch you will want to switch to the multithreaded worker MPM. PHP carries a warning in this case: a lot of its standard libraries are not thread safe. They've done a lot of work on improving the situation, and a lot of PHP sites will work flawlessly, but it's not 100% reliable yet.
Secondly, be aware that file naming conventions differ. This may be obvious, but if your scripts assume they can stick a file in/tmp, they're going to be very surprised when you run them on Windows. Fortunately MS have been smart enough to make most of their APIs recognise '/' as a path separator character, but be aware that if you need to pass filenames to an externally exec'd program this may or may not work.
Thirdly, consider file line ending differences. These won't affect most applications, but there are a few that might blow up.
Static pages & CoralCDN would keep a lot of websites from getting hammered off the internet.
Unfortunately, most interesting sites need dynamic pages. If you're producing different page content for each user (based on preferences, past browsing history, geographic location, or anything else you can think of), you can't really do static pages. Unless you generate a lot of them. Coral can't help with this either, because it would result in each user seeing pages that were intended for another user.
He seems to be the media's go-to person for quantum computing. E.g. here.
Notability's not really a spectrum. Either his importance has been established by reliable, secondary sources or not. The only source in that article is some gigantic database site saying that he got a Ph.D. Clearly not sufficient.
Just means the article [is/was] incomplete, not that Aaronson isn't notable. Stubs usually don't manage to convey the importance of their subject. Note that the deletion debate was closed early because there wasn't a snowball's chance in hell that it would be deleted.
I commonly use the concept of MVC with respect to Django and when I do I always reference [GoF]. Using the definitions as described in this book Django easily fits in the MVC design pattern.
Except it doesn't. According to the definition in that book, View is an Observer of the Model. That relationship is not implemented in Django, and is in fact extraordinarily difficult to implement across a web interface (because it requires the model to be able to call back to the view, which is typically a combination of javascript and html residing on the client computer).
The template code and javascript are the controller. [...] What would break his precious pattern definition is putting data-mutating logic in the template, like every php application ever written....? In the MVC pattern, data-mutating logic goes in the controller. You just said that is the template code, but then you say that it shouldn't be in the template code. You're making no sense.
Which I guess is the only real value of MVC - it's a simple rule of thumb to prevent noobs from hurting themselves.
And provides a basic, easy to understand design for a common requirement of GUI applications: having two windows that show different views of the same data, which update synchronously. That's the part that's almost always missed in web applications, which is at least part of the author's point. MVC does have a purpose, but it's almost useless in the web context because you can't actually implement it (as it requires a call back from the model to the view, which would typically be javascript running on the client, and therefore can't accept such a call back).
Have you ever noticed that guys that write subject matter such as this are the ones that could not code themselves out of a paper bag?
mvc bla bla bla views bla bla bla models bla bla bla
I keep hearing this assertion, but I've never seen it demonstrated. Certainly, having written a substantial chunk of a popular web application framework, it doesn't seem to be a complaint that could be levelled at the specific author of this article.
The solution was a combination of JSP tags and XSLT. The attributes on the tags were designed to give the UI developers control over 'stateful' list generation (e.g., generate the first 10 items, generate items 5-10, etc...). The tags themselves generated an XML stream that the UI designer transformed into markup for the target platform (this app targeted desktop browsers, Palm Pilots, and old-fasioned WML-enabled phones). While XSLT does give the UI designer basic conditionals and iteration, there wasn't enough information available in the XML stream to do much harm and most UI designers could only handle basic transforms.
Hmm. That sounds rather like the "when-I-have-time-for-it" idea that's been floating around my head for the last two years...
There's some evidence for that in their naming of the application layers:
Model Template View
Except in most people's definition of MVC, View encompasses both part of the 'View' and all of the 'Template' layers as described there. And, because there's no space left for Controller, the Controller logic ends up being implemented in the View.
Like the original author, I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing -- I've spent the last 10 years as a professional web developer using essentially the same architecture -- but it quite clearly *isn't* MVC. There's no separation between View and Controller, which is basically half the point of MVC.
The view should do ZERO processing. That should settle it. Some templates allow for a minimal amount of if/else statements and some developers are just sloppy and stick in processing anyway when it should be moved to the controller.
Strong disagree.
You don't want to make the model responsible for calculating all the different information that a user might want to view about it. Say your model is a list of numbers (scores for a sports team, perhaps). Some users want to see statistics: average, high, low, median scores. standard deviation. Should the model calculate those for the view? I don't think so. The model should be straightfoward: it should be concerned with only storing the data that is required to be stored and ensuring it remains consistent with the rules that are placed upon it. The model is the most important part of the application to get right (because data loss can occur if it is wrong), so it should be kept as simple as possible.
In this case, I would say that the TeamScores model class should merely implement the basic functions required to access the basic information (e.g., it should probably be able to return an array, collection or iterator of scores). This would then be passed to a ScoreStatistics view class, which would generate the required information and package it in some simple manner (e.g. by storing references to values in a map of some kind, or in less dynamic languages like Java you could store appropriate component-type objects, e.g. JavaBeans, in such a map), and pass this packaged information to the presentation layer (e.g. a templating engine).
The view, IMO, should normally remain separate from both presentation and model.
He critisizes the incorrect use and application of the term MVC and the misconception and the pointless enforcement of a wrong concept of MVC in places where it is often more than pointless to do so. [...] I think you just pretty much quoted the dictionary definition of a pedant, specifically definition 2B. ...
2b. one who is unimaginative or who unduly emphasizes minutiae in the presentation or use of knowledge
I don't think so. I wouldn't say he shows a lack of imagination, and I wouldn't say that pointing out that an entire class of developers are doing something they set out to do in a fundamentally incorrect way is 'minutiae'.
In my country (Croatia), incitement to commit suicide is a felony punishable by up to 3 years in prison.
I don't think there was enough evidence in this case to prove incitement to commit suicide. The only evidence that could be drawn here would be a message that read something like "The world would be better off without you. Have a shitty rest of your life." While the first sentence on its own can be read as such an incitement, in context with the second it doesn't seem like it. It's a flippant and offensive remark, but no more than that. It's also worth noting that Drew claims not to have sent that particular message, but that one of her employees sent it instead.
So, whether or not incitement to commit suicide is an offence in the relevant state (Michigan, IIRC), it seems to be irrelevant to me. There isn't a good case for it, because it's (a) not clear whether it actually happened and (b) even in the event that it did, it is uncertain who did it.
She should not have had criminal charges. However, she should have been sued into oblivion from the civil suit.
There's no cause of action for a civil suit here. You can't sue somebody because they're offensive. OK, she violated MySpace's TOS, which is a contract violation, and theoretically MySpace could sue to recoup any losses they had due to that violation... except there weren't any. Meier's estate can't sue on the basis of the breach of the MySpace contract due to the doctrine of privity of contract.
Fraudulently entering a computer system for the express purpose of harassing someone is IMHO no better than breaking into a computer to steal IP or crash the system. [...] If breaking TOS is a federal offense, then boo for elevating a civil tort to a criminal offense.
RTFA. The jury found her not guilty of inteding to inflict emotion distress (aka harassment). They only found her guilty of violating the TOS. For this, she faces up to 3 years in prison.
ignorance of law leads to the interpretation that the lori drew case has far reaching implications
Right. So the legal analysts for leading thinktanks, law professors and lawyers I've seen commenting on the implications of this ruling are ignorant of the law. That's good to know.
lori drew is an outlier, she sets no precedent
Most of the time, it's outliers who do set precedents. And then those precedents are applied in more normal cases.
this case, in its proper context that anyone with the faintest understanding of law understands, has absolutely nothing to do with your online rights
You want to enlighten me what that context is? Because I just see somebody who has been convicted of a computer hacking offense with a maximum penalty of 1 year per occasion for the heinous crime of not following myspace's terms of service, but still accessing that service.
Note: the jury acquitted her of intent to inflict emotional distress. This conviction has nothing to do with bullying, or a suicide. Only access to computer systems in violation of terms of service. That's the only illegal thing the jury thought happened, despite the fact they were given the opportunity to convict on other, more relevant offenses.
As for serverco retroactively ruling conduct "unauthorized", there's a panoply of affirmative defenses such as invitation, habitual tolerence, failure to notify, discriminatory enforcement. Cyberbullying wouldn't have those available.
The crime Lori Drew was convicted of was "unauthorized access to a computer system to access information". Nothing about cyberbullying. (She was also charged with "intent to inflict emotional distress" but was acquitted by the jury).
The terms of service she broke were the ones that require you to supply correct personal information. Nothing about cyberbullying.
Myspace habitually tolerates incorrect personal information. It does little or nothing to police whether or not the information its users supply is correct, and there is probaby a very high percentage of users who have supplied incorrect information.
Myspace did not notify Drew that she had violated the terms of service, and hence was not authorized to access the system.
This is the only case where such an event has been prosecuted so far, and it has been selected on a basis that has little or nothing to do with the nature of the supposed crime that was committed. Sounds like discriminatory enforcement to me.
If any of those defenses were appropriate, they would all have been used in this case, and Drew wouldn't be looking at up to 3 years in jail for, essentially, being an arsehole.
She had intent to harass, and harassment is illegal, so, all things considered, I think she should be punished for her actions.
She was found not guilty of that (or, rather, of "unauthorized access to a computer system with intent to cause emotional distress" IIRC). There wasn't enough evidence to satisfy the jury that that was her intent.
The crime she was found guilty of was unauthorized access to a computer system to retrieve information.
Piracy would have to be an unethical practice to begin with.
In this case, I would say there are unethical aspects, although they're minor.
The OP is asking the question: should I buy this book second hand or just copy it. If he buys the book second hand, it removes a book from the second hand marketplace which, economics tells us, results in a very slight increase in the value of the books still in the marketplace. The value of the books in the second hand marketplace has a knock-on effect on the value of books in the new book marketplace.
When the value of new books is high, publishers and authors make larger profits by publishing them. Because most major publishers invest a large chunk of their profits into the production of new books, them having more money will (at certain thresholds) result in them publishing more books.
The choice to not buy the second hand book has a minuscule negative effect on this entire system. If everyone behaved that way, there would be serious problems that would likely result in a substantial reduction in the number of books published.
I assert that the publication of more books is in the public interest. Having a larger variety of books available enables us to live fuller lives and achieve better things. It is also a very good thing for the authors of those additional books.
Because it is in the publisher's interest for the book not to be copied, and because the publisher is clearly therefore hoping that it will not be copied when they sell it, it can be seen as taking advantage of the publisher's nature to do it anyway. They are incapable of preventing this, but they would want to if they could. They are doing something (publishing the book) which the copier is benefitting from (by being able to have the book); to then take advantage of that and, essentially, screw them out of future profits because you can, is therefore unethical.
OTOH, all of these losses are very small, even on the scale where everyone who wants an out-of-print book starts doing this. It wouldn't destroy the market for new books, which is mostly independent. Therefore, I conclude that it is only very slightly unethical.
Most people are willing to do slightly unethical things if they gain enough themselves by doing it. I am certainly no exception, and would not hesitate to download the copy.
(In answer to the demographics questions: too young to consider myself GenX, but also too old to consider myself GenY. Not-so-recent graduate. Don't remember a time when there _was_ no Internet, but do remember a time when most people had never heard of it. In case it also seems relevant, I'm a writer who one day hopes to earn a living off book royalties.)
And somebody's already tagged it {{notability}}. *Sigh*
Aaronson is one of the few CS researchers whose name keeps coming up again & again. He's at least as notable as many of the other CSists who have articles. (Yeah, I know. WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS.)
About your claim that articles get worse over time, I haven't seen many real cases of that. Some articles on important topics seem to stay in bad state indefinitely, but that's an other matter.
This happens a lot: initially, a well-written, but not comprehensive or possibly slightly inaccurate article gets written. Additions to it are haphazard and badly written, resulting in a difficult to read but comprehensize and correct article. Nobody bothers fixing the latter.
Slashdot Mirror
Good points. I think you're right: cloud services have a long way to come in terms of cost, and I'm not sure that'll happen in the near future. And that scalability isn't relevant to most people, anyway. The number of sites that can't be managed by a single commodity server are small, and that can be scaled right down to a virtual host on a machine shared with 30 other similar sites for the low end. Virtual machine software (e.g. Xen) makes it easy to migrate to a host with more capacity as and when it becomes necessary, and I believe this can even be achieved without downtime. So why would most of us need the cloud, when a competent traditional hosting provider ought to be able to do that anyway?
I have. My company lives (or dies) by the !@# SLA.
Our agreements require no less than 99.9% uptime, about 8 hours of downtime per year. We never gotten close to that - our worst year was about 2.5 hours of downtime because of a power failure at our "fully redundant" hosting facility.
Hmm. When my last hosting provider had a power failure at their hosting facility, it took them more like 2.5 days to get all their clients back up and running. Turns out some of the machines hadn't been rebooted for years, and when they tried to reboot them they wouldn't come up again.
SLA said 99.9%. Compensation limited to one month's hosting costs. Always check the limit...
Needless to say, I'm on a different provider now.
It's 4pm on a Saturday, and your site is getting hit hard. Rally the troops, call a meeting, decide the proper action, call Fedex to ship you more infrastructure, deploy new hardware, profit from your new customers, all the while laughing at the fools who waited 10 minutes for their cloud to auto-scale.
Or, receive an SMS on your phone telling you that capacity is nearly exhausted. Think about it for thirty seconds; call somebody who's likely to be sitting in front of a computer (surely your company's IT staff is geeky enough that at least _one_ of them will be) and ask if it looks like increased demand or a DDoS. Then call your service provider and ask them to take the appropriate action (either add additional resources or limit connection rates, depending on which it is). Probably takes about the same 10 minutes, but is less likely to end up with a bill you can't afford to pay.
Finally, not using autoscaling because you might get DDoS'd is just stupid. You lose business/visitors. Thats worse than paying more to avoid being taken down, because your reputation gets hurt AS WELL AS losing you business.
The solution to a DDoS is not to keep scaling up your hardware and hoping that the next server you add will be able to withstand it. It won't.
The solution to a DDoS is to get on the phone to your ISP and ask them to step up the filtering on your server. They can limit the rate at which IP can initiate new connections, which will only marginally inconvenience your real customers, and will really limit the amount of resources the DDoS absorbs.
Of course, you can only do this if you know you're under attack, and if your infrastructure is set to autoscale, you probably won't know. Until you receive the bill.
Nice thing about LAMP is at least the AMP part is OS portable, so we can rent capacity where ever it's cheap. So far we haven't needed to do that but it's nice to have the ability.
Only if you're very careful. I'm going to assume that by LAMP you mean Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP as that's the most common meaning these days. Some of what I say also applies to PERL and/or Python, which also sometimes end up in the same acronym.
The first thing to be aware of is that you're likely using Apache with the prefork MPM under Linux. This is the way that works best in that environment; unfortunately, its performance totally sucks in Windows, so if you switch you will want to switch to the multithreaded worker MPM. PHP carries a warning in this case: a lot of its standard libraries are not thread safe. They've done a lot of work on improving the situation, and a lot of PHP sites will work flawlessly, but it's not 100% reliable yet.
Secondly, be aware that file naming conventions differ. This may be obvious, but if your scripts assume they can stick a file in /tmp, they're going to be very surprised when you run them on Windows. Fortunately MS have been smart enough to make most of their APIs recognise '/' as a path separator character, but be aware that if you need to pass filenames to an externally exec'd program this may or may not work.
Thirdly, consider file line ending differences. These won't affect most applications, but there are a few that might blow up.
Static pages & CoralCDN would keep a lot of websites from getting hammered off the internet.
Unfortunately, most interesting sites need dynamic pages. If you're producing different page content for each user (based on preferences, past browsing history, geographic location, or anything else you can think of), you can't really do static pages. Unless you generate a lot of them. Coral can't help with this either, because it would result in each user seeing pages that were intended for another user.
Where?
He seems to be the media's go-to person for quantum computing. E.g. here.
Notability's not really a spectrum. Either his importance has been established by reliable, secondary sources or not. The only source in that article is some gigantic database site saying that he got a Ph.D. Clearly not sufficient.
Just means the article [is/was] incomplete, not that Aaronson isn't notable. Stubs usually don't manage to convey the importance of their subject. Note that the deletion debate was closed early because there wasn't a snowball's chance in hell that it would be deleted.
I commonly use the concept of MVC with respect to Django and when I do I always reference [GoF]. Using the definitions as described in this book Django easily fits in the MVC design pattern.
Except it doesn't. According to the definition in that book, View is an Observer of the Model. That relationship is not implemented in Django, and is in fact extraordinarily difficult to implement across a web interface (because it requires the model to be able to call back to the view, which is typically a combination of javascript and html residing on the client computer).
The template code and javascript are the controller. [...] What would break his precious pattern definition is putting data-mutating logic in the template, like every php application ever written. ...? In the MVC pattern, data-mutating logic goes in the controller. You just said that is the template code, but then you say that it shouldn't be in the template code. You're making no sense.
Which I guess is the only real value of MVC - it's a simple rule of thumb to prevent noobs from hurting themselves.
And provides a basic, easy to understand design for a common requirement of GUI applications: having two windows that show different views of the same data, which update synchronously. That's the part that's almost always missed in web applications, which is at least part of the author's point. MVC does have a purpose, but it's almost useless in the web context because you can't actually implement it (as it requires a call back from the model to the view, which would typically be javascript running on the client, and therefore can't accept such a call back).
Have you ever noticed that guys that write subject matter such as this are the
ones that could not code themselves out of a paper bag?
mvc bla bla bla views bla bla bla models bla bla bla
I keep hearing this assertion, but I've never seen it demonstrated. Certainly, having written a substantial chunk of a popular web application framework, it doesn't seem to be a complaint that could be levelled at the specific author of this article.
The solution was a combination of JSP tags and XSLT. The attributes on the tags were designed to give the UI developers control over 'stateful' list generation (e.g., generate the first 10 items, generate items 5-10, etc...). The tags themselves generated an XML stream that the UI designer transformed into markup for the target platform (this app targeted desktop browsers, Palm Pilots, and old-fasioned WML-enabled phones). While XSLT does give the UI designer basic conditionals and iteration, there wasn't enough information available in the XML stream to do much harm and most UI designers could only handle basic transforms.
Hmm. That sounds rather like the "when-I-have-time-for-it" idea that's been floating around my head for the last two years...
There's some evidence for that in their naming of the application layers:
Model
Template
View
Except in most people's definition of MVC, View encompasses both part of the 'View' and all of the 'Template' layers as described there. And, because there's no space left for Controller, the Controller logic ends up being implemented in the View.
Like the original author, I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing -- I've spent the last 10 years as a professional web developer using essentially the same architecture -- but it quite clearly *isn't* MVC. There's no separation between View and Controller, which is basically half the point of MVC.
The view should do ZERO processing. That should settle it. Some templates allow for a minimal amount of if/else statements and some developers are just sloppy and stick in processing anyway when it should be moved to the controller.
Strong disagree.
You don't want to make the model responsible for calculating all the different information that a user might want to view about it. Say your model is a list of numbers (scores for a sports team, perhaps). Some users want to see statistics: average, high, low, median scores. standard deviation. Should the model calculate those for the view? I don't think so. The model should be straightfoward: it should be concerned with only storing the data that is required to be stored and ensuring it remains consistent with the rules that are placed upon it. The model is the most important part of the application to get right (because data loss can occur if it is wrong), so it should be kept as simple as possible.
In this case, I would say that the TeamScores model class should merely implement the basic functions required to access the basic information (e.g., it should probably be able to return an array, collection or iterator of scores). This would then be passed to a ScoreStatistics view class, which would generate the required information and package it in some simple manner (e.g. by storing references to values in a map of some kind, or in less dynamic languages like Java you could store appropriate component-type objects, e.g. JavaBeans, in such a map), and pass this packaged information to the presentation layer (e.g. a templating engine).
The view, IMO, should normally remain separate from both presentation and model.
He critisizes the incorrect use and application of the term MVC and the misconception and the pointless enforcement of a wrong concept of MVC in places where it is often more than pointless to do so. [...] I think you just pretty much quoted the dictionary definition of a pedant, specifically definition 2B. ...
2b. one who is unimaginative or who unduly emphasizes minutiae in the presentation or use of knowledge
I don't think so. I wouldn't say he shows a lack of imagination, and I wouldn't say that pointing out that an entire class of developers are doing something they set out to do in a fundamentally incorrect way is 'minutiae'.
intentional infliction of emotional distress is already a tort.
That Drew was found not guilty of.
In my country (Croatia), incitement to commit suicide is a felony punishable by up to 3 years in prison.
I don't think there was enough evidence in this case to prove incitement to commit suicide. The only evidence that could be drawn here would be a message that read something like "The world would be better off without you. Have a shitty rest of your life." While the first sentence on its own can be read as such an incitement, in context with the second it doesn't seem like it. It's a flippant and offensive remark, but no more than that. It's also worth noting that Drew claims not to have sent that particular message, but that one of her employees sent it instead.
So, whether or not incitement to commit suicide is an offence in the relevant state (Michigan, IIRC), it seems to be irrelevant to me. There isn't a good case for it, because it's (a) not clear whether it actually happened and (b) even in the event that it did, it is uncertain who did it.
She should not have had criminal charges. However, she should have been sued into oblivion from the civil suit.
There's no cause of action for a civil suit here. You can't sue somebody because they're offensive. OK, she violated MySpace's TOS, which is a contract violation, and theoretically MySpace could sue to recoup any losses they had due to that violation... except there weren't any. Meier's estate can't sue on the basis of the breach of the MySpace contract due to the doctrine of privity of contract.
Fraudulently entering a computer system for the express purpose of harassing someone is IMHO no better than breaking into a computer to steal IP or crash the system. [...] If breaking TOS is a federal offense, then boo for elevating a civil tort to a criminal offense.
RTFA. The jury found her not guilty of inteding to inflict emotion distress (aka harassment). They only found her guilty of violating the TOS. For this, she faces up to 3 years in prison.
ignorance of law leads to the interpretation that the lori drew case has far reaching implications
Right. So the legal analysts for leading thinktanks, law professors and lawyers I've seen commenting on the implications of this ruling are ignorant of the law. That's good to know.
lori drew is an outlier, she sets no precedent
Most of the time, it's outliers who do set precedents. And then those precedents are applied in more normal cases.
this case, in its proper context that anyone with the faintest understanding of law understands, has absolutely nothing to do with your online rights
You want to enlighten me what that context is? Because I just see somebody who has been convicted of a computer hacking offense with a maximum penalty of 1 year per occasion for the heinous crime of not following myspace's terms of service, but still accessing that service.
Note: the jury acquitted her of intent to inflict emotional distress. This conviction has nothing to do with bullying, or a suicide. Only access to computer systems in violation of terms of service. That's the only illegal thing the jury thought happened, despite the fact they were given the opportunity to convict on other, more relevant offenses.
As for serverco retroactively ruling conduct "unauthorized", there's a panoply of affirmative defenses such as invitation, habitual tolerence, failure to notify, discriminatory enforcement. Cyberbullying wouldn't have those available.
The crime Lori Drew was convicted of was "unauthorized access to a computer system to access information". Nothing about cyberbullying. (She was also charged with "intent to inflict emotional distress" but was acquitted by the jury).
The terms of service she broke were the ones that require you to supply correct personal information. Nothing about cyberbullying.
Myspace habitually tolerates incorrect personal information. It does little or nothing to police whether or not the information its users supply is correct, and there is probaby a very high percentage of users who have supplied incorrect information.
Myspace did not notify Drew that she had violated the terms of service, and hence was not authorized to access the system.
This is the only case where such an event has been prosecuted so far, and it has been selected on a basis that has little or nothing to do with the nature of the supposed crime that was committed. Sounds like discriminatory enforcement to me.
If any of those defenses were appropriate, they would all have been used in this case, and Drew wouldn't be looking at up to 3 years in jail for, essentially, being an arsehole.
She had intent to harass, and harassment is illegal, so, all things considered, I think she should be punished for her actions.
She was found not guilty of that (or, rather, of "unauthorized access to a computer system with intent to cause emotional distress" IIRC). There wasn't enough evidence to satisfy the jury that that was her intent.
The crime she was found guilty of was unauthorized access to a computer system to retrieve information.
Piracy would have to be an unethical practice to begin with.
In this case, I would say there are unethical aspects, although they're minor.
The OP is asking the question: should I buy this book second hand or just copy it. If he buys the book second hand, it removes a book from the second hand marketplace which, economics tells us, results in a very slight increase in the value of the books still in the marketplace. The value of the books in the second hand marketplace has a knock-on effect on the value of books in the new book marketplace.
When the value of new books is high, publishers and authors make larger profits by publishing them. Because most major publishers invest a large chunk of their profits into the production of new books, them having more money will (at certain thresholds) result in them publishing more books.
The choice to not buy the second hand book has a minuscule negative effect on this entire system. If everyone behaved that way, there would be serious problems that would likely result in a substantial reduction in the number of books published.
I assert that the publication of more books is in the public interest. Having a larger variety of books available enables us to live fuller lives and achieve better things. It is also a very good thing for the authors of those additional books.
Because it is in the publisher's interest for the book not to be copied, and because the publisher is clearly therefore hoping that it will not be copied when they sell it, it can be seen as taking advantage of the publisher's nature to do it anyway. They are incapable of preventing this, but they would want to if they could. They are doing something (publishing the book) which the copier is benefitting from (by being able to have the book); to then take advantage of that and, essentially, screw them out of future profits because you can, is therefore unethical.
OTOH, all of these losses are very small, even on the scale where everyone who wants an out-of-print book starts doing this. It wouldn't destroy the market for new books, which is mostly independent. Therefore, I conclude that it is only very slightly unethical.
Most people are willing to do slightly unethical things if they gain enough themselves by doing it. I am certainly no exception, and would not hesitate to download the copy.
(In answer to the demographics questions: too young to consider myself GenX, but also too old to consider myself GenY. Not-so-recent graduate. Don't remember a time when there _was_ no Internet, but do remember a time when most people had never heard of it. In case it also seems relevant, I'm a writer who one day hopes to earn a living off book royalties.)
Perhaps because it's a non-issue now.
I doubt it. It'd be decidedly unlike BT to invest the kind of money in infrastructure that'd solve that problem.
And somebody's already tagged it {{notability}}. *Sigh*
Aaronson is one of the few CS researchers whose name keeps coming up again & again. He's at least as notable as many of the other CSists who have articles. (Yeah, I know. WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS.)
About your claim that articles get worse over time, I haven't seen many real cases of that. Some articles on important topics seem to stay in bad state indefinitely, but that's an other matter.
This happens a lot: initially, a well-written, but not comprehensive or possibly slightly inaccurate article gets written. Additions to it are haphazard and badly written, resulting in a difficult to read but comprehensize and correct article. Nobody bothers fixing the latter.