> Check out those screenshots of the first browser-editor-wp
> extension. We've hardly moved at all.
Yeah, the last time I logged into battle.net to play Diablo II online, I thought to myself, "this is so much like Lynx!" Here's a good general rule: on networks where the content is the reason you get on the network, more is better. We've moved quite a lot, in fact.
> Um, we still have that knowledge gap. The vast majority
> of people who use AOL work on faith and believe
in magic...
> they don't know much about what's going on inside their machines.
You're right, of course, but the point is that they're using those machines, where ten years ago nobody without a large degree of acumen even went near them. As much as I despise AOL, it does provide the "have-nots" with impetus for getting to know the basics so they can get online.
> Ah, yes, that's the productive way to run a system:
> Force out anyone who spots a flaw, so that the system never need improve.
Not exactly. The system did "improve" (I quote the term since I don't know if going to a paid-by-advertising model is an improvement, but at least it's economically viable) and now this user is lamenting the change. His comment is, "if you don't like how the system has changed to stay operable, leave it." The flaw in this case is the person who says advertising sucks without providing a realistic alternative.
One last note: "Blockquoth" is a great term. I plan to use it on occasion.
> Before the web came along, the internet was the home
> of intelligent discussion, and academic research. It
> was a wonderful means of communication.
Two things: first, the intelligent folk still gather on the Internet, and second, it's still a wonderful means of communication. I'm a member of a Moot that's entirely email-based, and I therefore have opportunities to discuss topics I'd never otherwise know with very smart people I'd never otherwise meet. I can converse for free with my friends who live hundreds of miles from me, and my father and I often share online games.
> Suddenly the WWW appeared. This ended this golden era.
"Golden era"?!? I think I'd have to argue with you there. I ran a BBS for many years, and I thoroughly enjoyed the sense of community that it engendered, but I don't look back on my BBS days with longing to return to the "golden age". Perhaps you're glossing over the fact that there was so much less available on the pre-1991 Internet, or perhaps you have no need for, and therefore no appreciation of, what out there now.
> Everyone wanted the internet. The media got a
hold on the idea
> and it has never been possible to explain to them the difference
> between the web and the internet since. No more research is interesting
> to anyone unless its web based. This network has been reduced to
> another tool for the corporations to force their content onto us.
It's okay that everyone wants the Internet, it's not their fault that the mainstream media confuses WWW and the Internet, and since non-WWW research is (I'm guessing) interesting to you, and it's certainly of interest to me, you can't very well make statements that nobody cares about anything but the Web. And also, you're assuming a lot to say the the only use of the WWW is as a corporate propaganda tool. There's a lot out there that isn't corporate, and saying that the influx of advertising and other content by business has spoiled the Web is very much like saying that roads serve no use other than as a repository for billboards.
> The last hope for a free populace was eliminated, because
> the sheeple just wanted another form of passive
entertainment.
Ah, here's the rub. "How dare those sheeple demand that the Internet give them anything other than what I deem appropriate" is your message. How very elitist of you. How odd that your statement so closely reflects the lamentation of the Women's Temperance League about how bawdy stories and romance novels had ruined libraries as a repository of higher knowledge and drawn the unwashed masses into their doors. You are right to assume that some people want the Web to be just another form of passive entertainment. You are wrong, however, to assume that all users that use and enjoy the Web are sheeple that don't know any better than to be led around by their credit cards.
I've been working with (and on) the Internet since my school days almost twenty years ago, and I don't seem to recall any "golden age" back then. It was usually a big pain in the ass, mostly because of "more learned than you" types like yourself. Get over it, and try the Web for real. You might enjoy what you find.
> I see that you are making the classic fallacy of the excluded
> middle -- claiming that everyone must choose
one position or the other,
> the better to force them to choose yours.
You make a good point, but the point you make doesn't apply here. My argument with the parent is that in one sentence, he claims that real property can be owned if one can lock it up or fence it in, to paraphrase. Farther down, he states, "the land should not be divided for a price", which contradicts his first statement. Since both statements apply only to real property, your contention of an excluded middle is not relevant. Either the parent author believes in real property rights, or he doesn't believe in real property rights. Since intellectual property rights never entered my argument, Mr. Jefferson's arguments are also irrelevant.
> The only property that is worthy of the name is tangible property.
> Anything else, ideas, inventions, formulae,
equations, drawings, pictures,
> music, etc... are up for grab. If you can't chain it or lock it up or put
> a fence around it, it does not belong to you. Like it or lump it.
I've got to ask the obvious question here. How is your definiton of property rights not infriging on my rights? Said another way, why is your lock or fence any less freedom-inhibiting than a government's lock or fence?
By stating that "the land should not be divided for a price", you contradict your statement at the beginning that you can own something that you can fence in. This demonstrates an hypocrisy that completely submarines your argument. Either property exists, in which case you have no right to redefine property as "only physical property", or it doesn't, in which case you have no more right to posess anything (including "real" property) than anyone else. Now go and solve these discrepancies before you present this line of rhetoric again.
All of this talk of quantum computers, and your post is titled, "the next step" instead of "the next leap"?!? I hate it when a perfectly good joke gets blown.
> Einstein's concept of relative time and all
this quantum religion
> are both offensive to anyone who has the guts to think by themselves.
...and...
> fundamentally abhorrent ideas such as quantum mechanical tunneling
> or particle-wave duality do not even deserve to be commented on.
Newtonian mechanics state that barrier tunneling is impossible as a phenomenon, and Maxwell's stuff doesn't touch on it. This idea developed from Einstein's GR theory. Understanding barrier tunneling allowed for the eventual discovery of materials that allow barrier tunneling in predictable ways. When these materials allow the tunneling specifically of electrons, they are labelled semiconductors. These materials can be made into computing machines that allow you to post a message to Slashdot saying that the theory that decribes their behavior is bunk.
There, now, don't you feel dumb?
There is little "common sense" in modern physics, but that's only because the sense you decribe as "common" is based on macroscopic observation, and these rules break down badly as you go to extremes of smallness, or bigness, or fastness, or farness. If you push two big magnet "North" poles together, they push apart, even when they're touching. Push two protons together, however, and after they get within a certain distance, they attract each other. Abhorrent? Perhaps. Impossible? Tell the residents of Hiroshima that it's impossible.
> Of the colleges I've attended I would doubt that ANYTHING
> that administration does isn't directly related
to money.
You're right there, but colleges prosecute plagiarism to defend their academic reputations, which has the side effect of getting more students to apply. Moreover, most colleges will not readmit a student who was expelled for cheating.
> > So why didn't you simply delete the notes
before the test?
> > If you truly learned it, you wouldn't need them, would you?
> True, but then why would I have bothered to enter them in
> the first place if I knew I was just going to delete them anyway? Duh.
There's no "duh" here. By your own words in the original post,
> But by the mere routine of punching in those notes on those
> ridiculously small keypads I found I almost never needed to refer
> to them during the test. Typing them in and checking that I could
> actually understand the typed in version had made me memorize the information.
If your method of learning is to prepare your crib sheet, then your doing so did indeed help you learn. However, that's not justification for using the crib sheet to cheat. So, to answer your question, you'd enter the notes even if you weren't going to use them because that's how you learn the stuff. Duh, right back.
> Perhaps not, but do you know what? Had I not "cheated" I
> would've learned little. The material would have been dry and
> boring and I wouldn't have bothered studying it.
Then you don't deserve the grade. I studied much that was dry and boring, and so did everyone else who went to college. Your bad study habits are still no excuse at all.
> If I actually learned more by cheating than I
would have otherwise
> I think it was justified. Impossible to prove perhaps, but justified.
> School isn't about being more moral than thou. If I cheated but
> learned more than you (if in fact I had remembered any of it)
> then didn't I get more out of the experience?
You didn't take any ethics classes, did you? Let's take it two ways: one from enforcement and one from justification. I ask three questions:
1.) Did you do something to help yourself on the tests when you knew it wasn't allowed?
2.) If you told your professor that you did it, would he rescind your grade?
3.) If you told your dean about it, would you be put to a disciplinary hearing?
The answer to all three of these questions is yes. On the other front, let's translate your example into a different infraction. "If I stole but gained more than you, then didn't I get more out of the experience?" Of course you gained more, but you broke the rules to get there, which is as morally indefensible as stealing a TV so you can say your TV is better than mine. If you and I go up for the same job, and your better grades get you the job at my expense, your cheating stole my job opportunity. How do you defend that?
>...my point was colleges busting students while they're
> supposed to still be learning that. After the
successfully
> complete the class, so be it.. not during. Beyond that,
> I can see if someone blatantly rips off entire paragraphs or
> more. Getting all antsy over a sentance is a bit much. I've
> actually seen professors stoop to that. That to me is an honest
> mistake, I can't see someone intentionally trying to rip off
> a single sentance in the scope of an entire document.
I've been involved in dozens of hearings involving accusations of plagiarism. I've never encountered a single instance where an accidental lift-off wasn't obviously such. The amount of idea stolen was never the issue, because it never had to be. One student was disciplined for stealing a single formula in his paper, but that was because the entire paper was a proof of that single formula, and he passed it off as his own creation when it had been created by a different student several years earlier. Others have lifted entire passages, forgotten the proper footnotes, and had the professor bring them up on charges. We universally dismissed such charges, since, as you say, they were obviously honest mistakes. Later, as an editor, I encountered many mistakes, and many ripoffs, and they were painfully easy to tell apart. I never fired anyone for not properly crediting a source. I have removed writers for stealing stories. To get back to the point, just because there are trigger-happy profs who will accuse everyone of plagiarism does not justify plagiarism when it occurs. That's tantamount to saying that stealing a little is okay because people are falsely accused of stealing every day, because people steal by accident on occasion, and because there are some who steal a whole lot of stuff.
> You missed my point though, well actually, I think you missed all of them.
No, I didn't. You feel that your cheating was justified because you benefitted from it. I got that point, but I daresay I disagree with it. I'm not sure where you molded your moral compass, and I can hardly claim that I've never broken the rules, but if you think I'm being "holier than thou" because you cheated and I'm calling you on it, you need to revisit what honesty means. There are few people who would label your argument legitimate.
> Reminds me of a probability & statistics class I took once.
> I couldn't find a mathematical solution for a
problem on the
> final so I wrote a Pascal program to find a solution. (Our
> school only did Pascal so I used what they were familiar with).
> Despite the fact that I couldn't run it to find the answer (no
> computers in that class) I got credit for it.
As you should have. Although this doesn't really have relevance to the discussion at hand, it demonstrates a good point in that proving that you know how to solve the problem is more important than actually solving the problem, because, as you say later, in the real world you can use a machine to do the mathematical grunt work.
> I always used to program in my math notes before a test.
> ALWAYS. If I was in the real world and had to solve problems
> like that I'd have those resources. No one does that crap from
> memory, and if they do it's because it's relevant to their
> occupation and they've done it a million times.
Since you don't know what's going to be relevant to your profession after you graduate, why would you sell yourself short by doing it by machine?
> But by the mere routine of punching in those notes on those
> ridiculously small keypads I found I almost
never needed to refer
> to them during the test. Typing them in and checking that I could
> actually understand the typed in version had made me memorize the information.
So why didn't you simply delete the notes before the test? If you truly learned it, you wouldn't need them, would you?
> Did I ever get caught? Hell no. I wrote a program that looked
> like the screens you'd see if you reset the
TI-81 which was what
> the school used. I'd show the teach it was reset and off I went.
> Do I feel I cheated? No. I took the time to learn the information
> so that I could understand it and enter it in a compressed form in
> the tiny memory of those calculators. The fact that 95% of the time
> I didn't need to refer to it proved to me that I was "learning",
> and that's the whole point.
The fact that you had to write the program means you weren't supposed to use the notes, so using them was wrong. The fact that you did write the program means that you knew it was wrong, and you still did it. The fact that 5% of the time you got an answer right by checking your notes means you cheated, and that's the whole point. You cannot justify the 5% by saying you learned the 95%. I managed to learn the 95% as well, and yet I didn't cheat.
> How does this relate to this University scandal? "Cheating"
> takes a wide variety of forms.
But none of those forms is right, or morally supportable.
> How many times have people in an English related class been
> busted for not properly quoting something? Ever been accused of
> plaugerism? I know someone that happened to and it's BS. The point
> of the English classes is to teach you to quote things and what not.
> Do it wrong and we'll threaten to throw you out of college. Nice.
No, it's not nice, but what does "nice" have to do with it? The point of the class is to teach you how to quote correctly and such. At the end of the class, it stands to reason that you should know how to do it correctly, and if you don't then it's not unreasonable to assume you did it intentionally, which is a legitimate ground for expulsion. I have known several situations of plagiarism review, and in every case the "BS" accusations (honest mistakes in accrediting sources) were very obvious, and often resulted in simple failure of the paper in question. Also, try plagiarizing something in the real world, as a journalist. What do you think happens there? What happens is that you get fired from your job and your street cred goes in the toilet, and you might as well find another line of work because nobody will trust you again. I've seen that happen, too, so the fact that colleges come down on it hard is just a reflection of the real world. It's not nice, but journalism rarely is.
> Now how about these students that already graduated? College
> need more revenue? Simple, revoke some diplomas already granted and
> make past students come back at their expense. QED.
If you think that colleges come down on plagiarism because they need more money, you really did miss out on the important part of your education. If your good name is worth that little to you, I feel pity for you, and anyone who associates with you.
> We are living with a generation of kids who have had
> everything handed to them their whole lives, and now that
> they are out in the workforce they expect to do something
> "fun" and get paid good jack for it.
Geez, again and again with the "being miserable builds character" discussion? Haven't you all died yet? You seem to be stuck on the concept of "those kids who don't know the real world" and "they're in for a rude awakening" and "in my day you had to work and work hard" and "having fun at work is for layabouts" and...and...and.... You never seem to grow tired of pointing out how hard you work (and have to work) to get ahead. Well, I'd pay good money to see the look on your face when you realize that you've spent your whole life working a job that isn't fun and you didn't have to do it. I wear jeans to work every day. I have hair down past my shoulders (I am male) and my boss doesn't care. What I do now for my bread is what I did as a hobby in my spare time for years. I love doing my job. The reason I get paid good jack is that I add value to the company, which was the reason they hired me and continue to pay me. Notice that I can do that, and still have lots of fun at work. The attitude that working can't be fun, and that fun jobs aren't worth doing, is wrong. It's well past time you let it go. As my grandfather told me when I was young (and he had learned this even back then), "life's too short to work a job that sucks."
Every generation accuses the next of being indolent little punks who wouldn't know good work if they fell over it, and I see no reason why your generation is any more right than your parents'.
> Racist! Open your borders completely or you're a racist!
That would be nationalist, nitwit. You're a little touchy about the racism thing. Isolationism isn't limited to the USA by any means, and the reasons for favoring local workers over imported workers are many and varied, which is why so many countries follow the practice in the first place. Try not to knee-jerk so severely next time.
Despite the fine response put forth by the AC who responded before me, I'd like to add a few things. First of all, you're quite right that cartels can affect the economics of the situation in the commodities market (OPEC springs readily to mind), but that's specificaly because of the market, not in spite of it. Cartels affect the market by affecting supply. The only way the two farmers in your example can affect the price of corn is to produce less than the 100 pounds the market demands, which is exactly what the subsidies aim to do. This is real life economics at work, not board game rules. Supply and demand never takes a hike in the commodities market, which is why it's such a rough market to be in.
As a side note, your mention of unions is interesting but irrelevant to the commodities market. Unions affect labor cost, which is just part of the cost of production for commodities, and the commodities market does not care how much it costs to produce any given commodity, only how much of it there is. Unions only directly affect price in manufacturing industries, like the auto industry, and since automobiles are not commodity items, this point doesn't matter.
> we should be spending our resources relocating
> the children from places where the resources are insufficient
> to support the current population to places where there
> is a surplus of resources.
I agree in theory, but there's a real-world problem with your idea that many people don't consider. For the most part, the people in these disadvantaged areas don't want to move, since where they are is where they consider their home. In the cases where a large portion of the population wants to leave, they reason they don't is usually that the government in power won't let them go (much like the old USSR). That's why most of the effort expended in feeding the world has historically been to get the food to the people. Getting the people to the food turns problematic.
> but it is unconscionable to expend so many resources
> creating a new life, when there are so many dying due to
> a lack of resources, especially when you consider that
> that new life will consume 10 to 20 times the resources
> that an existing life will in say ethiopia.
This is a very unfair assertion, based on the before-mentioned difficulty with reloaction, and with resource allocation based on need instead of availability. To wit, it's unfair for me not to be able to have a child because an Ethiopian family won't or can't relocate to my backyard, and it's unfair to assume that my child would consume more resources than the same child in Ethiopia, given the same availability of said resources. If my child were forced to grow up there, he'd consume the same as that child, and if that child came here, he'd likely consume just as much as my child will. To assume that my child has less right to live because he'd be born into a resource-rich area is just as wrong as thinking he's got more right to live because of the same reason.
> These subsidies in part are used to compensate farmers
> for intentionally underproducing to restrict supply and keep
> commodity prices up so they can better meet their operating
> costs (exactly what the economic sense of this is is beyond me...
> please correct me if I'm wrong).
The reasoning for this has to do with how commodities get priced by the market. Since commodities are by definition homogenous (my corn won't sell for significantly more (or less) than the next guy's corn), the price is tied very tightly to supply. Assume the whole market uses 100 pounds of corn. If there's only 50 pounds available, the price climbs as people outbid each other for the corn. If there's 100 pounds, the price drops. If there's 120 pounds, the price drops further. This is where the "no-grow" break point comes in. If all the farmers grow more than the market demands, then some of the corn goes unsold. If you don't want it to be your corn that goes to waste, you have to lower your price. There's a point at which you have to sell your corn for less than it costs you to grow it, or you can't sell anything. This affects every grower, not just you, since if you lower your price, now the next farmer must lower his lest he get stuck with silos full of unsold corn. The subsidies keep growers in aggregate from growing more than the market wants, so each grower can earn enough to make a profit, and the growers that would have flooded the market make money on the corn they didn't grow, so they have no economic reason to grow it and muck up the market price for everyone else.
BTW, there has always been an argument made for growing that corn (or what have you) and sending it somewhere that it's needed, but those arguments usually neglect to count in the cost of getting the goods to those other places, which is usually considerable, so they tend to be dismissible based on cost.
> I guess you are right in a way, though. There's no
> population problem, just too many humans.
Well, here's a different spin for you. Too many humans for what? If there were really too many humans, we'd start dying off for lack of resources to live.
> Replace some with Siberian Tigers, Giant Pandas, etc
> and so on - and don't forget to replace a few greedy
> Brazilians with some foliage for the Amazon Rainforest
> (where a lot of Earth's oxygen is converted.)
What is it that makes these beings intrinsically better than the humans you'd replace with them? Why tigers as opposed to carrier pigeons or flies or mushrooms? If diversity is your goal, I have to ask why you only chose endangered mammals and forest in a particular area.
> Even the suggestion that Earth can maintain a lot more
> population is an insult to anybody even mildly
interested
> in the state of the environment. Humans are the WORST thing
> to ever happen to this planet and I'm including the asteroid
> that killed the dinosaurs and the effects of the ice age.
Actually, it's only an insult to those even mildly interested in the current state of the environment. As per your statement about humans being the worst thing that ever happened to the Earth, why is it that the state of the environment before humans came around is a "better" state than the state we're in now? If biodiversity is the most important factor in your equation, then by a huge margin the asteroid (some scientists think it was a comet) that wiped out the dinosaurs by fundamentally changing the Earth's environment is the winner, since it eliminated many more different species than the paltry efforts of humans to date. But again, why is the particular state of biodiversity we have today any better or worse than then, or Precambria, or any other time, for that matter?
I have discovered that in large measure those that say that humans beings are "destroying the Earth" are more accurately stating that we're slowly altering the environment toward rendering it unsuitable for higher mammalian life. This isn't destruction of the Earth by a long shot. The Earth will go on in this state, and most life forms will adapt to the new environment, just like what happened to the Earth during every Ice Age. It would truly suck for humans and other higher mammals, but the Earth has been there before and will be there again.
Please don't interpret this to mean that I think that humans should therefore rape the planet until it won't support us any more. As a human myself, I'd really like to see the Earth continue in a state compatible with the continuation of my species. My post is simply to make you think about why you consider any species as intrinsically more important than any other, and to remind you that the Earth won't take personally the damage we do to the environmental state, but we as humans should. Let's make sure we're angry about the right thing here.
Oh, come now, you don't think it's a stretch trolling me because I didn't go to this guy's home page in the hopes of finding out what kind of car he drives? It's not like many people put this kind of info on their home page, he didn't make any mention in his post as to what car he drove, and if I stepped into an inside joke, there wasn't any easy way for me to know.
> So you finally admit that Japanese cars are better?
Sir (or madam), what the hell are you talking about? Sheldon said nothing about Japanese cars. The VW Beetle was built by Volkswagen, a German company, and he didn't specify who made his new car, which could very well be a Ford.
Looks like you're going back to rec.autos.driving after all.
> Where I come from, dotcoms are desperate for programmers
> and would never even consider throwing someone that actually
> has a degree into the tech-support pit.
Maybe the reason why tech support really sucks is because companies consider it "throwing someone into the tech-support pit". It never seems to cross anyone's mind that it's possible to find people who like to do tech support (I've been doing it for seven years, I have no desire to get out of it, and I'm paid more than the programmers because my longevity is valuable). If you take the time to find people who like the environment, then work to make the environment likeable as well (good management and decent pay and such), it's easy to get and keep good tech support reps. The problem stems from companies that seem to go out of their way to make tech support departments suck, and then they wonder why they can't get good help. It's not easy to build a good attitude on your help desk, but it's possible (our company lives and dies by its tech support so it's a big priority here), and the difference it makes in the service level our customers get is phenomenal.
> Maybe you misunderstand the nature of rights. Rights
> are not something that can be granted (as with a law)
> rights are intrinsic to a person.
I muct compare this to your statement further:
> Legitimacy is a legal fiction. It does not
mean they
> have any power other than what we give them, and certanly
> not any inherant powers.
To these I can only say that rights (as you've described them) are also a legal fiction. If you believe that rights are inherent to each person, you're in agreement with the Founding Fathers, but they also realized that without the force of law behind these rights they're meaningless. If you think that's not true, try living for a while in China, or Singapore, or Libya. The Bill of Rights is a codicil to the Constitution, which is at its heart a legal document designed to put the force of law behind what the FF considered basic rights, and also prevent future lawmakers from taking them away again. Therefore, rights, as we're discussing them in a legal sense, can (and are) granted in a legal sense by the Bill of Rights.
> Yes I have the right to own my intelectual property,
> limited by copyright. Which means that for a set period I can
> derive profit from my stuff or assign that profit to another
> entity. However that entity can only excercise
the power I
> choose to give them, they don't have rights.
By definition, if you assign your rights to a corporation, then by law that corporation has your rights by proxy, so your statement is both legally and conceptually incorrect.
>...but I would contend that when this power is used to
> remove a persons real rights it should be curtailed. This
> is an instance of that abuse of granted power to stifle competition
> and limit personal RIGHTS.
Where exactly do you get the idea that you have the rights to someone else's intellectual property just because they chose to assign those rights to a corporate entity? In the RIAA example we're using, your statement is tantamount to saying that because an artist chose to assign his rights to a record company, you now have the right to acquire that music by any means you choose, with or without payment to the record company, because you don't think the record company has rights in and of itself. Even if that were true (and legally it isn't), you're just transferring the theft to a different target. If you were right, you're still in the wrong, since even if the record company doesn't have intrinsic rights, they're exercising the artist's rights by proxy, and by your violation you're stealing from the artist. Sorry, but you still lose.
You're new in town, aren't you? In the U.S., corporations are legal entities, just like people, with some very notable exceptions (like the inability to incarcerate a corporation). This rule of law was established to limit the liability of the owners of corporations, which was seen as a way to stimulate business. Therefore, before the law, companies (as long as they're incorporated) do indeed have rights, just like individuals. They can hold patents, own property (including intellectual property) and enter into contracts just like regular people. As to your request, that part of the Constitution/Bill of Rights that gives you rights also gives a corporation rights. It's the "corporations are entities" part that's to be found elsewhere.
Slashdot Mirror
> Anyone know of a source of tech. news that is run by people
:)
> with some sense of decency and morality?
I thought you'd guess by now. People with a sense of decency and morality don't run tech news web sites.
Virg
> Check out those screenshots of the first browser-editor-wp
> extension. We've hardly moved at all.
Yeah, the last time I logged into battle.net to play Diablo II online, I thought to myself, "this is so much like Lynx!" Here's a good general rule: on networks where the content is the reason you get on the network, more is better. We've moved quite a lot, in fact.
Virg
Damn, you beat me to it. Wish I had a mod point for you.
Virg
> Um, we still have that knowledge gap. The vast majority
> of people who use AOL work on faith and believe in magic...
> they don't know much about what's going on inside their machines.
You're right, of course, but the point is that they're using those machines, where ten years ago nobody without a large degree of acumen even went near them. As much as I despise AOL, it does provide the "have-nots" with impetus for getting to know the basics so they can get online.
> Ah, yes, that's the productive way to run a system:
> Force out anyone who spots a flaw, so that the system never need improve.
Not exactly. The system did "improve" (I quote the term since I don't know if going to a paid-by-advertising model is an improvement, but at least it's economically viable) and now this user is lamenting the change. His comment is, "if you don't like how the system has changed to stay operable, leave it." The flaw in this case is the person who says advertising sucks without providing a realistic alternative.
One last note: "Blockquoth" is a great term. I plan to use it on occasion.
Virg
> Before the web came along, the internet was the home
> of intelligent discussion, and academic research. It
> was a wonderful means of communication.
Two things: first, the intelligent folk still gather on the Internet, and second, it's still a wonderful means of communication. I'm a member of a Moot that's entirely email-based, and I therefore have opportunities to discuss topics I'd never otherwise know with very smart people I'd never otherwise meet. I can converse for free with my friends who live hundreds of miles from me, and my father and I often share online games.
> Suddenly the WWW appeared. This ended this golden era.
"Golden era"?!? I think I'd have to argue with you there. I ran a BBS for many years, and I thoroughly enjoyed the sense of community that it engendered, but I don't look back on my BBS days with longing to return to the "golden age". Perhaps you're glossing over the fact that there was so much less available on the pre-1991 Internet, or perhaps you have no need for, and therefore no appreciation of, what out there now.
> Everyone wanted the internet. The media got a hold on the idea
> and it has never been possible to explain to them the difference
> between the web and the internet since. No more research is interesting
> to anyone unless its web based. This network has been reduced to
> another tool for the corporations to force their content onto us.
It's okay that everyone wants the Internet, it's not their fault that the mainstream media confuses WWW and the Internet, and since non-WWW research is (I'm guessing) interesting to you, and it's certainly of interest to me, you can't very well make statements that nobody cares about anything but the Web. And also, you're assuming a lot to say the the only use of the WWW is as a corporate propaganda tool. There's a lot out there that isn't corporate, and saying that the influx of advertising and other content by business has spoiled the Web is very much like saying that roads serve no use other than as a repository for billboards.
> The last hope for a free populace was eliminated, because
> the sheeple just wanted another form of passive entertainment.
Ah, here's the rub. "How dare those sheeple demand that the Internet give them anything other than what I deem appropriate" is your message. How very elitist of you. How odd that your statement so closely reflects the lamentation of the Women's Temperance League about how bawdy stories and romance novels had ruined libraries as a repository of higher knowledge and drawn the unwashed masses into their doors. You are right to assume that some people want the Web to be just another form of passive entertainment. You are wrong, however, to assume that all users that use and enjoy the Web are sheeple that don't know any better than to be led around by their credit cards.
I've been working with (and on) the Internet since my school days almost twenty years ago, and I don't seem to recall any "golden age" back then. It was usually a big pain in the ass, mostly because of "more learned than you" types like yourself. Get over it, and try the Web for real. You might enjoy what you find.
Virg
Your post was the most cold, heartless, straight-to-the-point slapdown on a dotcom business model I've read in many years.
Keep up the good work.
Virg
> I see that you are making the classic fallacy of the excluded
> middle -- claiming that everyone must choose one position or the other,
> the better to force them to choose yours.
You make a good point, but the point you make doesn't apply here. My argument with the parent is that in one sentence, he claims that real property can be owned if one can lock it up or fence it in, to paraphrase. Farther down, he states, "the land should not be divided for a price", which contradicts his first statement. Since both statements apply only to real property, your contention of an excluded middle is not relevant. Either the parent author believes in real property rights, or he doesn't believe in real property rights. Since intellectual property rights never entered my argument, Mr. Jefferson's arguments are also irrelevant.
Virg
My bad. I was so into my response that I let that by. I hereby accept 5 swats with Schroedinger's Cat.
Virg
> The only property that is worthy of the name is tangible property.
> Anything else, ideas, inventions, formulae, equations, drawings, pictures,
> music, etc... are up for grab. If you can't chain it or lock it up or put
> a fence around it, it does not belong to you. Like it or lump it.
I've got to ask the obvious question here. How is your definiton of property rights not infriging on my rights? Said another way, why is your lock or fence any less freedom-inhibiting than a government's lock or fence?
By stating that "the land should not be divided for a price", you contradict your statement at the beginning that you can own something that you can fence in. This demonstrates an hypocrisy that completely submarines your argument. Either property exists, in which case you have no right to redefine property as "only physical property", or it doesn't, in which case you have no more right to posess anything (including "real" property) than anyone else. Now go and solve these discrepancies before you present this line of rhetoric again.
Virg
All of this talk of quantum computers, and your post is titled, "the next step" instead of "the next leap"?!? I hate it when a perfectly good joke gets blown.
Virg
> Einstein's concept of relative time and all this quantum religion
...and...
> are both offensive to anyone who has the guts to think by themselves.
> fundamentally abhorrent ideas such as quantum mechanical tunneling
> or particle-wave duality do not even deserve to be commented on.
Newtonian mechanics state that barrier tunneling is impossible as a phenomenon, and Maxwell's stuff doesn't touch on it. This idea developed from Einstein's GR theory. Understanding barrier tunneling allowed for the eventual discovery of materials that allow barrier tunneling in predictable ways. When these materials allow the tunneling specifically of electrons, they are labelled semiconductors. These materials can be made into computing machines that allow you to post a message to Slashdot saying that the theory that decribes their behavior is bunk.
There, now, don't you feel dumb?
There is little "common sense" in modern physics, but that's only because the sense you decribe as "common" is based on macroscopic observation, and these rules break down badly as you go to extremes of smallness, or bigness, or fastness, or farness. If you push two big magnet "North" poles together, they push apart, even when they're touching. Push two protons together, however, and after they get within a certain distance, they attract each other. Abhorrent? Perhaps. Impossible? Tell the residents of Hiroshima that it's impossible.
Virg
> Of the colleges I've attended I would doubt that ANYTHING
...my point was colleges busting students while they're
> that administration does isn't directly related to money.
You're right there, but colleges prosecute plagiarism to defend their academic reputations, which has the side effect of getting more students to apply. Moreover, most colleges will not readmit a student who was expelled for cheating.
> > So why didn't you simply delete the notes before the test?
> > If you truly learned it, you wouldn't need them, would you?
> True, but then why would I have bothered to enter them in
> the first place if I knew I was just going to delete them anyway? Duh.
There's no "duh" here. By your own words in the original post,
> But by the mere routine of punching in those notes on those
> ridiculously small keypads I found I almost never needed to refer
> to them during the test. Typing them in and checking that I could
> actually understand the typed in version had made me memorize the information.
If your method of learning is to prepare your crib sheet, then your doing so did indeed help you learn. However, that's not justification for using the crib sheet to cheat. So, to answer your question, you'd enter the notes even if you weren't going to use them because that's how you learn the stuff. Duh, right back.
> Perhaps not, but do you know what? Had I not "cheated" I
> would've learned little. The material would have been dry and
> boring and I wouldn't have bothered studying it.
Then you don't deserve the grade. I studied much that was dry and boring, and so did everyone else who went to college. Your bad study habits are still no excuse at all.
> If I actually learned more by cheating than I would have otherwise
> I think it was justified. Impossible to prove perhaps, but justified.
> School isn't about being more moral than thou. If I cheated but
> learned more than you (if in fact I had remembered any of it)
> then didn't I get more out of the experience?
You didn't take any ethics classes, did you? Let's take it two ways: one from enforcement and one from justification. I ask three questions:
1.) Did you do something to help yourself on the tests when you knew it wasn't allowed?
2.) If you told your professor that you did it, would he rescind your grade?
3.) If you told your dean about it, would you be put to a disciplinary hearing?
The answer to all three of these questions is yes. On the other front, let's translate your example into a different infraction. "If I stole but gained more than you, then didn't I get more out of the experience?" Of course you gained more, but you broke the rules to get there, which is as morally indefensible as stealing a TV so you can say your TV is better than mine. If you and I go up for the same job, and your better grades get you the job at my expense, your cheating stole my job opportunity. How do you defend that?
>
> supposed to still be learning that. After the successfully
> complete the class, so be it.. not during. Beyond that,
> I can see if someone blatantly rips off entire paragraphs or
> more. Getting all antsy over a sentance is a bit much. I've
> actually seen professors stoop to that. That to me is an honest
> mistake, I can't see someone intentionally trying to rip off
> a single sentance in the scope of an entire document.
I've been involved in dozens of hearings involving accusations of plagiarism. I've never encountered a single instance where an accidental lift-off wasn't obviously such. The amount of idea stolen was never the issue, because it never had to be. One student was disciplined for stealing a single formula in his paper, but that was because the entire paper was a proof of that single formula, and he passed it off as his own creation when it had been created by a different student several years earlier. Others have lifted entire passages, forgotten the proper footnotes, and had the professor bring them up on charges. We universally dismissed such charges, since, as you say, they were obviously honest mistakes. Later, as an editor, I encountered many mistakes, and many ripoffs, and they were painfully easy to tell apart. I never fired anyone for not properly crediting a source. I have removed writers for stealing stories. To get back to the point, just because there are trigger-happy profs who will accuse everyone of plagiarism does not justify plagiarism when it occurs. That's tantamount to saying that stealing a little is okay because people are falsely accused of stealing every day, because people steal by accident on occasion, and because there are some who steal a whole lot of stuff.
> You missed my point though, well actually, I think you missed all of them.
No, I didn't. You feel that your cheating was justified because you benefitted from it. I got that point, but I daresay I disagree with it. I'm not sure where you molded your moral compass, and I can hardly claim that I've never broken the rules, but if you think I'm being "holier than thou" because you cheated and I'm calling you on it, you need to revisit what honesty means. There are few people who would label your argument legitimate.
Virg
> Reminds me of a probability & statistics class I took once.
> I couldn't find a mathematical solution for a problem on the
> final so I wrote a Pascal program to find a solution. (Our
> school only did Pascal so I used what they were familiar with).
> Despite the fact that I couldn't run it to find the answer (no
> computers in that class) I got credit for it.
As you should have. Although this doesn't really have relevance to the discussion at hand, it demonstrates a good point in that proving that you know how to solve the problem is more important than actually solving the problem, because, as you say later, in the real world you can use a machine to do the mathematical grunt work.
> I always used to program in my math notes before a test.
> ALWAYS. If I was in the real world and had to solve problems
> like that I'd have those resources. No one does that crap from
> memory, and if they do it's because it's relevant to their
> occupation and they've done it a million times.
Since you don't know what's going to be relevant to your profession after you graduate, why would you sell yourself short by doing it by machine?
> But by the mere routine of punching in those notes on those
> ridiculously small keypads I found I almost never needed to refer
> to them during the test. Typing them in and checking that I could
> actually understand the typed in version had made me memorize the information.
So why didn't you simply delete the notes before the test? If you truly learned it, you wouldn't need them, would you?
> Did I ever get caught? Hell no. I wrote a program that looked
> like the screens you'd see if you reset the TI-81 which was what
> the school used. I'd show the teach it was reset and off I went.
> Do I feel I cheated? No. I took the time to learn the information
> so that I could understand it and enter it in a compressed form in
> the tiny memory of those calculators. The fact that 95% of the time
> I didn't need to refer to it proved to me that I was "learning",
> and that's the whole point.
The fact that you had to write the program means you weren't supposed to use the notes, so using them was wrong. The fact that you did write the program means that you knew it was wrong, and you still did it. The fact that 5% of the time you got an answer right by checking your notes means you cheated, and that's the whole point. You cannot justify the 5% by saying you learned the 95%. I managed to learn the 95% as well, and yet I didn't cheat.
> How does this relate to this University scandal? "Cheating"
> takes a wide variety of forms.
But none of those forms is right, or morally supportable.
> How many times have people in an English related class been
> busted for not properly quoting something? Ever been accused of
> plaugerism? I know someone that happened to and it's BS. The point
> of the English classes is to teach you to quote things and what not.
> Do it wrong and we'll threaten to throw you out of college. Nice.
No, it's not nice, but what does "nice" have to do with it? The point of the class is to teach you how to quote correctly and such. At the end of the class, it stands to reason that you should know how to do it correctly, and if you don't then it's not unreasonable to assume you did it intentionally, which is a legitimate ground for expulsion. I have known several situations of plagiarism review, and in every case the "BS" accusations (honest mistakes in accrediting sources) were very obvious, and often resulted in simple failure of the paper in question. Also, try plagiarizing something in the real world, as a journalist. What do you think happens there? What happens is that you get fired from your job and your street cred goes in the toilet, and you might as well find another line of work because nobody will trust you again. I've seen that happen, too, so the fact that colleges come down on it hard is just a reflection of the real world. It's not nice, but journalism rarely is.
> Now how about these students that already graduated? College
> need more revenue? Simple, revoke some diplomas already granted and
> make past students come back at their expense. QED.
If you think that colleges come down on plagiarism because they need more money, you really did miss out on the important part of your education. If your good name is worth that little to you, I feel pity for you, and anyone who associates with you.
Virg
> We are living with a generation of kids who have had
> everything handed to them their whole lives, and now that
> they are out in the workforce they expect to do something
> "fun" and get paid good jack for it.
Geez, again and again with the "being miserable builds character" discussion? Haven't you all died yet? You seem to be stuck on the concept of "those kids who don't know the real world" and "they're in for a rude awakening" and "in my day you had to work and work hard" and "having fun at work is for layabouts" and...and...and.... You never seem to grow tired of pointing out how hard you work (and have to work) to get ahead. Well, I'd pay good money to see the look on your face when you realize that you've spent your whole life working a job that isn't fun and you didn't have to do it. I wear jeans to work every day. I have hair down past my shoulders (I am male) and my boss doesn't care. What I do now for my bread is what I did as a hobby in my spare time for years. I love doing my job. The reason I get paid good jack is that I add value to the company, which was the reason they hired me and continue to pay me. Notice that I can do that, and still have lots of fun at work. The attitude that working can't be fun, and that fun jobs aren't worth doing, is wrong. It's well past time you let it go. As my grandfather told me when I was young (and he had learned this even back then), "life's too short to work a job that sucks."
Every generation accuses the next of being indolent little punks who wouldn't know good work if they fell over it, and I see no reason why your generation is any more right than your parents'.
Virg
> Racist! Open your borders completely or you're a racist!
That would be nationalist, nitwit. You're a little touchy about the racism thing. Isolationism isn't limited to the USA by any means, and the reasons for favoring local workers over imported workers are many and varied, which is why so many countries follow the practice in the first place. Try not to knee-jerk so severely next time.
Virg
Despite the fine response put forth by the AC who responded before me, I'd like to add a few things. First of all, you're quite right that cartels can affect the economics of the situation in the commodities market (OPEC springs readily to mind), but that's specificaly because of the market, not in spite of it. Cartels affect the market by affecting supply. The only way the two farmers in your example can affect the price of corn is to produce less than the 100 pounds the market demands, which is exactly what the subsidies aim to do. This is real life economics at work, not board game rules. Supply and demand never takes a hike in the commodities market, which is why it's such a rough market to be in.
As a side note, your mention of unions is interesting but irrelevant to the commodities market. Unions affect labor cost, which is just part of the cost of production for commodities, and the commodities market does not care how much it costs to produce any given commodity, only how much of it there is. Unions only directly affect price in manufacturing industries, like the auto industry, and since automobiles are not commodity items, this point doesn't matter.
Virg
> we should be spending our resources relocating
> the children from places where the resources are insufficient
> to support the current population to places where there
> is a surplus of resources.
I agree in theory, but there's a real-world problem with your idea that many people don't consider. For the most part, the people in these disadvantaged areas don't want to move, since where they are is where they consider their home. In the cases where a large portion of the population wants to leave, they reason they don't is usually that the government in power won't let them go (much like the old USSR). That's why most of the effort expended in feeding the world has historically been to get the food to the people. Getting the people to the food turns problematic.
> but it is unconscionable to expend so many resources
> creating a new life, when there are so many dying due to
> a lack of resources, especially when you consider that
> that new life will consume 10 to 20 times the resources
> that an existing life will in say ethiopia.
This is a very unfair assertion, based on the before-mentioned difficulty with reloaction, and with resource allocation based on need instead of availability. To wit, it's unfair for me not to be able to have a child because an Ethiopian family won't or can't relocate to my backyard, and it's unfair to assume that my child would consume more resources than the same child in Ethiopia, given the same availability of said resources. If my child were forced to grow up there, he'd consume the same as that child, and if that child came here, he'd likely consume just as much as my child will. To assume that my child has less right to live because he'd be born into a resource-rich area is just as wrong as thinking he's got more right to live because of the same reason.
Virg
> These subsidies in part are used to compensate farmers
> for intentionally underproducing to restrict supply and keep
> commodity prices up so they can better meet their operating
> costs (exactly what the economic sense of this is is beyond me...
> please correct me if I'm wrong).
The reasoning for this has to do with how commodities get priced by the market. Since commodities are by definition homogenous (my corn won't sell for significantly more (or less) than the next guy's corn), the price is tied very tightly to supply. Assume the whole market uses 100 pounds of corn. If there's only 50 pounds available, the price climbs as people outbid each other for the corn. If there's 100 pounds, the price drops. If there's 120 pounds, the price drops further. This is where the "no-grow" break point comes in. If all the farmers grow more than the market demands, then some of the corn goes unsold. If you don't want it to be your corn that goes to waste, you have to lower your price. There's a point at which you have to sell your corn for less than it costs you to grow it, or you can't sell anything. This affects every grower, not just you, since if you lower your price, now the next farmer must lower his lest he get stuck with silos full of unsold corn. The subsidies keep growers in aggregate from growing more than the market wants, so each grower can earn enough to make a profit, and the growers that would have flooded the market make money on the corn they didn't grow, so they have no economic reason to grow it and muck up the market price for everyone else.
BTW, there has always been an argument made for growing that corn (or what have you) and sending it somewhere that it's needed, but those arguments usually neglect to count in the cost of getting the goods to those other places, which is usually considerable, so they tend to be dismissible based on cost.
Virg
> I guess you are right in a way, though. There's no
> population problem, just too many humans.
Well, here's a different spin for you. Too many humans for what? If there were really too many humans, we'd start dying off for lack of resources to live.
> Replace some with Siberian Tigers, Giant Pandas, etc
> and so on - and don't forget to replace a few greedy
> Brazilians with some foliage for the Amazon Rainforest
> (where a lot of Earth's oxygen is converted.)
What is it that makes these beings intrinsically better than the humans you'd replace with them? Why tigers as opposed to carrier pigeons or flies or mushrooms? If diversity is your goal, I have to ask why you only chose endangered mammals and forest in a particular area.
> Even the suggestion that Earth can maintain a lot more
> population is an insult to anybody even mildly interested
> in the state of the environment. Humans are the WORST thing
> to ever happen to this planet and I'm including the asteroid
> that killed the dinosaurs and the effects of the ice age.
Actually, it's only an insult to those even mildly interested in the current state of the environment. As per your statement about humans being the worst thing that ever happened to the Earth, why is it that the state of the environment before humans came around is a "better" state than the state we're in now? If biodiversity is the most important factor in your equation, then by a huge margin the asteroid (some scientists think it was a comet) that wiped out the dinosaurs by fundamentally changing the Earth's environment is the winner, since it eliminated many more different species than the paltry efforts of humans to date. But again, why is the particular state of biodiversity we have today any better or worse than then, or Precambria, or any other time, for that matter?
I have discovered that in large measure those that say that humans beings are "destroying the Earth" are more accurately stating that we're slowly altering the environment toward rendering it unsuitable for higher mammalian life. This isn't destruction of the Earth by a long shot. The Earth will go on in this state, and most life forms will adapt to the new environment, just like what happened to the Earth during every Ice Age. It would truly suck for humans and other higher mammals, but the Earth has been there before and will be there again.
Please don't interpret this to mean that I think that humans should therefore rape the planet until it won't support us any more. As a human myself, I'd really like to see the Earth continue in a state compatible with the continuation of my species. My post is simply to make you think about why you consider any species as intrinsically more important than any other, and to remind you that the Earth won't take personally the damage we do to the environmental state, but we as humans should. Let's make sure we're angry about the right thing here.
Virg
Oh, come now, you don't think it's a stretch trolling me because I didn't go to this guy's home page in the hopes of finding out what kind of car he drives? It's not like many people put this kind of info on their home page, he didn't make any mention in his post as to what car he drove, and if I stepped into an inside joke, there wasn't any easy way for me to know.
Virg
> So you finally admit that Japanese cars are better?
Sir (or madam), what the hell are you talking about? Sheldon said nothing about Japanese cars. The VW Beetle was built by Volkswagen, a German company, and he didn't specify who made his new car, which could very well be a Ford.
Looks like you're going back to rec.autos.driving after all.
Virg
> Where I come from, dotcoms are desperate for programmers
> and would never even consider throwing someone that actually
> has a degree into the tech-support pit.
Maybe the reason why tech support really sucks is because companies consider it "throwing someone into the tech-support pit". It never seems to cross anyone's mind that it's possible to find people who like to do tech support (I've been doing it for seven years, I have no desire to get out of it, and I'm paid more than the programmers because my longevity is valuable). If you take the time to find people who like the environment, then work to make the environment likeable as well (good management and decent pay and such), it's easy to get and keep good tech support reps. The problem stems from companies that seem to go out of their way to make tech support departments suck, and then they wonder why they can't get good help. It's not easy to build a good attitude on your help desk, but it's possible (our company lives and dies by its tech support so it's a big priority here), and the difference it makes in the service level our customers get is phenomenal.
Virg
> Maybe you misunderstand the nature of rights. Rights
...but I would contend that when this power is used to
> are not something that can be granted (as with a law)
> rights are intrinsic to a person.
I muct compare this to your statement further:
> Legitimacy is a legal fiction. It does not mean they
> have any power other than what we give them, and certanly
> not any inherant powers.
To these I can only say that rights (as you've described them) are also a legal fiction. If you believe that rights are inherent to each person, you're in agreement with the Founding Fathers, but they also realized that without the force of law behind these rights they're meaningless. If you think that's not true, try living for a while in China, or Singapore, or Libya. The Bill of Rights is a codicil to the Constitution, which is at its heart a legal document designed to put the force of law behind what the FF considered basic rights, and also prevent future lawmakers from taking them away again. Therefore, rights, as we're discussing them in a legal sense, can (and are) granted in a legal sense by the Bill of Rights.
> Yes I have the right to own my intelectual property,
> limited by copyright. Which means that for a set period I can
> derive profit from my stuff or assign that profit to another
> entity. However that entity can only excercise the power I
> choose to give them, they don't have rights.
By definition, if you assign your rights to a corporation, then by law that corporation has your rights by proxy, so your statement is both legally and conceptually incorrect.
>
> remove a persons real rights it should be curtailed. This
> is an instance of that abuse of granted power to stifle competition
> and limit personal RIGHTS.
Where exactly do you get the idea that you have the rights to someone else's intellectual property just because they chose to assign those rights to a corporate entity? In the RIAA example we're using, your statement is tantamount to saying that because an artist chose to assign his rights to a record company, you now have the right to acquire that music by any means you choose, with or without payment to the record company, because you don't think the record company has rights in and of itself. Even if that were true (and legally it isn't), you're just transferring the theft to a different target. If you were right, you're still in the wrong, since even if the record company doesn't have intrinsic rights, they're exercising the artist's rights by proxy, and by your violation you're stealing from the artist. Sorry, but you still lose.
Virg
> Companies have no rights - people do!
You're new in town, aren't you? In the U.S., corporations are legal entities, just like people, with some very notable exceptions (like the inability to incarcerate a corporation). This rule of law was established to limit the liability of the owners of corporations, which was seen as a way to stimulate business. Therefore, before the law, companies (as long as they're incorporated) do indeed have rights, just like individuals. They can hold patents, own property (including intellectual property) and enter into contracts just like regular people. As to your request, that part of the Constitution/Bill of Rights that gives you rights also gives a corporation rights. It's the "corporations are entities" part that's to be found elsewhere.
Virg
Um, the parent post is moderated up to +5.
Now get back under your bridge.
Virg