Give your managers a copy of Tom DeMarco's Peopleware.
While you are at it, read the book yourself. You will find that there is nothing in there about being good technically. That has nothing to do with a project manager's job.
I'm not saying you wouldn't be a good project manager. But if you are, it has nothing to do with how technically astute you are.
Most people who are good technically would actually not like being managers, because their awesome technical skills would be completely wasted in that role. How much fun does a day completely filled with playing with MS Project and Powerpoint, and attending meetings, prying resources from other groups, and walking around talking with your staff sound to you? If your interpersonal skills, listening skills, and leadership skills aren't up to snuff, it would be even less fun for you.
Of course, just because your managers aren't technical doesn't mean they are any good at this stuff either.:-)
This can't be emphasised enough. I've put together 3 systems myself, and every one of them was unbelievably unstable. I don't overclock (ever), and I've learned to verify that the cooling is sufficent, but still I get random crashes and BSOD's all over the place when using DirectX programs (and generally afterwards too. I think they slowly corrupt the rest of the system).
I believe the problem is there are so many different options for every PC component that its impossible for every hardware vendor to test their drivers against all of them. If you buy components yourself, the odds of you putting together a combo that exposes device driver bugs is really high. If you try to buy lots of bleeding-edge equipment, you are almost guaranteed to have problems. The temptation to buy all the lastest cool stuff is practically irresistable if you are putting your own system together (at least for me).
That's why I'd prefer to just buy a nice tested system from Dell or Gateway, if I was starting from scratch.
It looks like those policies just prevent Microsoft from being a contractor to the county. They don't prevent some other contractor from using Microsoft's software in their bids, nor do they prevent the county from purchasing Wintel boxes from someone like Gateway.
Thats how far the data goes. Doesnt mean that 1653 was warmer.
Right. In fact is was probably far colder, since the world at the time was in the middle of the Little Ice Age.
In fact, things got much more unusually cold back then than they are unusually warm today. That's why thermometers were invented then.
Re:Days of denial are over.
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Baked Alaska
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· Score: 2
A truly scientific viewpoint is that the earth has warmed about a degree in the last 100 or so years, but that the links between that warming and human activity are insufficient to establish a strong cause-and-effect relationship. Thus one should suspect that anthropogenic CO2 may contribute to warming, but not conclude that it does.
Right. I happen to believe we had something to do with this, but that certianly isn't proven. This level of temperature change isn't even unique to history. Witness the "Little Ice Age" of the early renisance period. Global temperatures were estimated to have dropped by a couple of degrees then, which is at least double what we are going through right now (and in a worse direction). This caused crop failures all over the world, as well as quite a few history changing effects (eg: The climate changes favored the Innuit enough that they ended up wiping out the Norse settlements in North America and Greenland, despite the fact that the Norse had iron, and the Innuit did not, setting back European coloziation of N. America by roughly 400 years). A good page on this is at http://www.vehiclechoice.org/climate/cutler.html Unfoutunately for climatologists, the "human intervention" scapegoat isn't available for pre-industrial climate changes like this. So they have to look at all sorts of other climate-changing mechanisims. But if such mechanisms could do it then, they can just as easily be doing the same thing now.
We just don't know enough about the climate to say anything is proven at this point.
Re:Days of denial are over.
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Baked Alaska
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· Score: 2
Why is it when ever one of these "there is no evidence for global warming" posts pop up there is NEVER any proper debunking? There have been many studies on global warming, pick one and (this is the hard part) using logic, debunk it.
The main problem here isn't that there is no evidence of a warming over the last few years; there's plenty of that. The problem is that earth's climate was not stable before man ever got here. We'd be quite naieve to expect it to suddenly start staying stable now for us. Given that, there's some, but not enough, proof of a causal relationship between anything we are doing and any short-term temperature changes we might be seeing.
Not that I'm saying I don't buy into the theory that we are causing climate changes. I do. But the evidence is just not all in to say its proven.
I'm also not convinced that we have the consensus we need to start trying to do things about it. Perhaps we have been inadvertantly modifying the earth's climate, but I'm not convinced we should go around purposely modifying it to keep it stable. Its possible that right now we are just in the warming interval between a couple of ice ages. Would it be right for us to prevent the next one when it starts back up (by purposely pumping out massive quatities of CO2 or whatever)? Perhaps climate changes are earth's natural way of "spring cleaning" its species.
The Mississippi river is a good example of this principle. We are spending millions in the US each year to keep it in its banks. Left to its own devices, it used to move around quite a bit, and this was healthy for it in many ways. But its been trying to move its mouth west for decades, and we are preventing it because of the inconvienence that would cause us humans. Howver, the more we work to prevent it, the harder it tries to move, and the more effort we have to spend to keep it there.
doesn't mean the government must morally give me or you or the ditch diggers monopolies to guarantee it." How did monopolies work into this?
I see a fair bit of explanation is in order.
Copyright is the grant of a monopoly (that's where the word comes in) on copying of a work to one party. Copyright monopolies were orignally a revenue source for the british crown (they were sold). They were kept in the US constitution as an *option* for congress, as long as they were for a limited time and were used to promote the arts. The idea was that congress could earn some extra money by selling on a case-by-case basis publishing rights for a short period to popular works that wouldn't get printed by anyone otherwise (printing was very expensive back then). They were not intended to imply any kind of "ownership" over the work itself, and the current situation would have absolutely appalled the authors of the constitution.
So Im assuming you'd be fine if I took something you wrote, book , software, music, put my name on it and sold it as my own?
Actually, yes. I'd be more than fine, I'd be quite flattered. Everything I develop is either released under a free license (or public domain, you'd be shocked how tough it is to do that these days...), or is copyrighted by my employer (they might have a problem with your copy, but I don't:-) ).
Public Domain with no copyright is the way things worked for millinia, and we got along just fine that way. I know some classical music fans who would even tell you that there hasn't been a decent piece of music written since copyright began.
The reason that it is "theft" is because when someone copies and SELLS the copy they are infact depriving the person that they are copying from something. Money.
First off, you are assuming that the person who you gave the copy would have paid this third person for it without my intervention, rather than just doing without it. Further it assumes that it isn't more likely that this kind of activity will cause more people to go purchase a legitimite copy. This is entirely unproven reasoning. Recent data with CD's and downloaded mp3's suggests that unauthorised copying is either having no impact on sales, or even a slight increase.
Secondly, it is very indirect reasoning. I could use this same logic to claim that I am "stealing" from Sears when I loan my neighbor a ratchet set to fix a loose bolt in his house. It is certianly not direct theft.
It is of course a violation of law. But its a civil violation, subject to civil courts, not criminal. Traditional theft gets you thrown in prison, not sued.
You make it sound like your stealing bread to help feed thier family.. you not 'helping' them you stealing for them. They would be just fine w/o it to begin with.
That depends on the software. For a game, sure. But I could easily see some productivity software being as needed by a neighbor as a lawnmower. Yet we'd scoff if someone tried to make lending a lawnmower to your next-door neighbor illegal on the grounds that it takes money from lawnmower companies.
Believe it or not there are people who work HARD to make good games, and their are companies who invest alot of money, these ppl deserve the money they make
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As a professional software engineer of 14 years, and sometimes commercial game beta tester, I know exactly how hard these folks work, how much they invest, etc. Do they "deserve" all they money they can get? Perhaps. So do I. So do you. So do ditch diggers. That doesn't mean the government must morally give me or you or the ditch diggers monopolies to guarantee it.
and when you pirate the software that would normally be bought, you stealing. Period.
"Period", huh? I thought I had a good logical argument, but since you say "Period", I guess I must be wrong. Defeated yet again by the old "truth by repeated assertion" approach.:-)
It is theft. You're acting as an unauthorized redistributor of the product.
This is a perfect illustration of how people have just bought into the media industry's propaganda campaign without even thinking about it. Your two sentences don't go together. The first describes criminally taking physical property away from someone, while the second describes a civil violation of someone else's rights. They are two completely different things, but you don't even notice that while you are typing it out.
So why *do* you call it theft?
It isn't theft morally. No one has any less of anything than they did before the copy was made. In fact, one could argue that if the software is good, I have a moral *obligation* to copy it, in order to increse the good in society. Again, I don't make unauthorised copies myself, but its an argument.
It isn't theft leagally. The offence is treated by the law essentially as a violation of a contract. If you get caught, you won't go to jail like convicted thieves do, you'll just get sued for damages in civil court. (There are some criminal laws now, but they generally don't apply in the violations most people commit)
The only reason you say its "theft" is because that's what the media companies have trained you to call it. They want you to feel on a instinctive level that its morally like breaking into people's houses and stealing their stereos. Don't be their trained monkey; think about what you are saying.
Maybe bnetd was invented so people with pirated copies of the game could play it without being hassled by the BattleNet servers?!
You mean people who posses unauthorised copies of the game. "Piracy" has to do with armed theft of tangable goods (often involving murder, rape, and other nasty business). It has nothing whatsoever to do with sharing fun or useful software with your friends.
There is nothing morally wrong with this activity in and of itself, only the economic argument that some unpaid copies might have been paid copies otherwise. The moral argument is on the other side, where I'm forced to refuse to help to a friend or neighbor when asked, just so someone else can make economic gain off of them. I don't say this as a hypocritical lawbreaker, but as someone who actually tries to comply with the law, and is sick of constantly annoying friends and family members to do so.
The reality of the situation doesn't look so cut-and-dried to most people. How many people do you know who've never in their life copied or lent a game, CD, album, book, or video or audio tape to a friend? None for me. So the media companies try to brainwash us into thinking its some horrible criminal act to share media by using words like "theft", "property" and "piracy". Please don't support the media companies attempts to braiwash the public with inappropriate terminology. They have enough money to do it all by themselves without our help.
I can't find a single mention of the electoral college in the Federalist Papers
Apparently I wasn't looking real hard, since there is one devoted to just that. Hamilton doesn't come out and say what he thinks the likelyhood of the House deciding an election is though (he calls it "a contingency". Thinking about it, he wouldn't, as the main point of the FPs was to convince ordinary folks the constitution is a good thing.
However, he did come damn close to saying direct election would be bad because the general public can't be trusted to make a good decision:
It was equally desirable, that the immediate election should be made by men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station, and acting under circumstances favorable to deliberation, and to a judicious combination of all the reasons and inducements which were proper to govern their choice.
I'm curious if you would provide a source for the statement that the Founders expected most presidential elections to end up in the house -- this is certainly not the impression I had, or something I have seen claimed elsewhere.
Well, I've heard this a lot myself. The best reference I can find is Grolier's EC entry, which says this:
The framers of the Constitution regarded the electoral college as part of a procedure for electing the president by the people, at least indirectly. It seemed probable to the framers that the system of electors voting by ballot in the states would ordinarily serve also as a nominating device, with the final election frequently left to the House.
I'm not sure where online one would go to find a definitive source on this. I can't find a single mention of the electoral college in the Federalist Papers, which would otherwise seem the best bet.
this only explains the indirect-election aspect of such an institution. It tells us nothing about why the Founders chose to make representation in such an institution not strictly proportional
It says nothing about that, because it isn't a particularly interesting issue. All they did was give each state the same number of electors as they have congressmen. Anything else would have required redoing the painful compromise worked out for congressional representation. They didn't really care about opening that can of worms, because they thought elections would usually end up in the house (there's an extra stipulation that there will be only 1 vote per state in House elections).
My problem with your posts is that you seem to think the system is working now according to its original design, and thus the conceptions of the designers in this matter are important. This is complete bunk. The electoral college system of today doesn't even remotely resemble what they envisioned. A good discussion of how it has changed over the years is available on the Federal Election Commission's website. This is incidentally a great place to point people who think the wierdities of the last election were somehow unprecidented.
I'm not saying I think its a bad system. I'm just saying that it is significantly different than the one the original constitutional authors thought they were giving us.
And this brings us to the actual reason for the Electoral College, which is very different from what you suggest in your post. The founders were quite rightly worried that a few large states would be able to control federal elections in such a way that smaller states would have no voice at all, so they reached a compromise. The existence of the Electoral College requires that a presidential candidate build a broad base of support accross a range of states, thus ensuring that he better represents the entire nation.
That sounds nice, and things perhaps work out that way now, but that's not what they were shooting for.
The folks who wrote up the constitution were elitists who were deathly afraid (some might say rightly so) of the "mob-rule" mentality that might set in with a straight democracy. The idea behind the electoral colledge system was that states would appoint their "leading citizens" (in a way left up to the state governments, often by fiat) who would gather and jointly pick a president. It was figured that most of the time candidates would be regional (no mass media back in the 18th century), so no one candidate would get the majority, and it would be thrown into the sentate. Electors were not meant to be directly elected by a state's people. It took a constitutional ammendment to change that.
The senate was also not meant to be a directly elected body, and was to be appointed by the states (however they felt like doing it) from among the state's "wisest men".
Also realise that even for states that had direct elections for all this stuff, they usually restricted the vote to adult white males who owned land initially. If you lived in an apartment, you weren't considered responsible enough to get a vote.
The system we have in the US now is the result of slow and contunial evolution, not some divinely inspired document.
In either case, the ideology would come first, and the analysis spun to preserve the phenomena.
Right. That's why quoting articles from such sources is just a waste of time. Perhaps its worthwhile if you are interested in analyzing political spinning techniques, but as a forum for meaningful public discourse, these sources are completely worthless.
When was the last time you voted for your UN Representative??
The last time I voted for president. The UN representative is a presidential apointeee, just like any other ambassador or cabinet member. He answers to the president, the president answers to us. That's how representative democracy works.
If you think this is somehow undemocratic, then you must think the presidency is too. You don't vote directly for him either. He's "appointed" by the electoral college, which you only get to vote on your representatives to. In most places, they don't even have to pick the person they said they would.
Heck, when this republic was founded, the electors weren't directly voted on either. State governments could just pick them capriciously.
How exactly is someone at National Review (William Buckely's right-wing rag) wanting to unilaterally disavow an international treaty "news"? If the treaty doesn't involve freeing our wealthy businesses to more easily exploit some other country's populace, the folks at NR don't want to hear about it.
I suppose the logic he uses to achieve his goal (of calling the treaty bad) can be interesting, in an acedemic sense. Logic of course is just a means to an end to these folks, not an end in and of itself. A little bit of a twist here...divide by 0 there, and presto! Its proven. But I can get my fill of such silly exercises by watching religous "news" programs on TV.
I see a lot of "so what?" comments, here and attached to the orignal article. Given that he claims the problem is that they are "refusing to release binaries", I'd have the same reaction.
However, that is not the problem. The problem is that they are releasing binaries, but they are doing so under a custom proprietary license. This means that people who have a UnitiedLinux CD won't be able to share it or loan it legally without first uninstalling the whole OS from their system. If the BSA comes and audits you, and you have UnitiedLinux on your systems, you are no better off than if you had been running WindowsNT.
Yes, it is also a bit disrepectful to all the people who worked on that software perhaps. It perverts Linux into just another business' proprietary OS, no better than Windows or OS/2 or MacOS. But more importantly its a very dangerous trend.
However, I think its a doomed trend, just like Divx was doomed, boycott or no. Someone (probably just out of B-school) thought up this great business scheme for how they could start to just rake in the dough, without stopping to ask why consumers would be willing to sign up for such a horrible deal. Unless your name is Microsoft, you have to compete for business. When much freer and cheaper options are avilable, you aren't going to do well. Why on earth would anyone drop RedHat, at $60 for their whole site, to pay $60 per seat?
Re: it's watching a bunch of rich, fat, overpaid,
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The Venture Cafe
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· Score: 0, Troll
it's watching a bunch of rich, fat, overpaid, overhyped
Until here I thought you were talking about union workers.
Show a little respect. If it wasn't for unions, we wouldn't have the 40-hour work week, paid sick time, or probably any other benifits.
Oh wait...I'm on Slashdot, talking to a bunch of young single males with no familes or social lives who are either independant contractors or H1B workers....
I just reread your post and noticed your comment on Aonix. While it might be true that they give good support for their newer products, they don't give any support for the Ada83 compiler they bought from Thompson (who bought it from Alsys). Their solution to any of our problems was to suggest we buy their Ada95 compiler.
That compiler is more than 7 years old! What, precisely, do you think Microsoft's response would be if you called up and asked for support on a pre-3.0 version of Visual C++?
Actually, that's one of the better illustrations of why the only true vendor security is to use a compiler to which you have the source code.:-)
Do you have any evidence that Ada increases software reliability? I've used Ada for about 5 years and I haven't seen any significant difference in reliability between Ada applications and those written in other languages such as C++.
Actually Rational (the compiler and process folks) did an exhaustive study on this. Their findings were that they had about 2x the productivity in Ada than they did in C, and 1/4th the bugs. You can read the findings yourself (Note: before you post replies with possible reasons why their results were wrong, read the study. Just about every flaw imagineable was looked into.)
Its very tough to do such studies, so there isn't a lot of other studies around for comparison. I'm aware of a couple of other informal ones with CS students, (which were interesting, but I wouldn't bet my project on) and that's about it. Rational just happened to have the data available and the expertise to study it. But even the infomal studies I've seen give Ada the nod for reliability. The only thing that seems to come close is Java.
This makes sense when you consider that Ada is the only language that was designed from the start for use in "life-critical" applications.
Most of the Ada vendors have gone out of business so I guess Ada would be a great open source project. You aren't going to get any technical support for the compiler so you might as well have the source.
Most compiler vendors in general have gone out of business, so that really doesn't mean much. What is significant is that there are 4 (perhaps more I don't know about) Ada compiler vendors currently supporting Windows, which is more than can be said for C++ and Java.
As for Ada being a great OpenSource project you are right, but not for the reason you think. I guess you didn't realise that the Gnu Ada compiler not only exists, but is now in the official gcc baseline.
However, I've always had great support from my proprietary compiler vendors too. I'd love to see someone try to get the level of vendor support I recieve from GreenHills and Aonix from Microsoft for VC++.
ACT is actually one of the very few Free Software commercial success stories, so you are quite likely to hear about them if you ever attend an RMS talk. I've seen no less than 3 transcripts where he mentioned them or their Gnu Ada compiler in reference to a question about commercial Free Software.
Slashdot Mirror
While you are at it, read the book yourself. You will find that there is nothing in there about being good technically. That has nothing to do with a project manager's job.
I'm not saying you wouldn't be a good project manager. But if you are, it has nothing to do with how technically astute you are.
Most people who are good technically would actually not like being managers, because their awesome technical skills would be completely wasted in that role. How much fun does a day completely filled with playing with MS Project and Powerpoint, and attending meetings, prying resources from other groups, and walking around talking with your staff sound to you? If your interpersonal skills, listening skills, and leadership skills aren't up to snuff, it would be even less fun for you.
Of course, just because your managers aren't technical doesn't mean they are any good at this stuff either.
This can't be emphasised enough. I've put together 3 systems myself, and every one of them was unbelievably unstable. I don't overclock (ever), and I've learned to verify that the cooling is sufficent, but still I get random crashes and BSOD's all over the place when using DirectX programs (and generally afterwards too. I think they slowly corrupt the rest of the system).
I believe the problem is there are so many different options for every PC component that its impossible for every hardware vendor to test their drivers against all of them. If you buy components yourself, the odds of you putting together a combo that exposes device driver bugs is really high. If you try to buy lots of bleeding-edge equipment, you are almost guaranteed to have problems. The temptation to buy all the lastest cool stuff is practically irresistable if you are putting your own system together (at least for me).
That's why I'd prefer to just buy a nice tested system from Dell or Gateway, if I was starting from scratch.
...since he's going to need that new thymus before long.
It looks like those policies just prevent Microsoft from being a contractor to the county. They don't prevent some other contractor from using Microsoft's software in their bids, nor do they prevent the county from purchasing Wintel boxes from someone like Gateway.
Right. In fact is was probably far colder, since the world at the time was in the middle of the Little Ice Age.
In fact, things got much more unusually cold back then than they are unusually warm today. That's why thermometers were invented then.
Right. I happen to believe we had something to do with this, but that certianly isn't proven. This level of temperature change isn't even unique to history. Witness the "Little Ice Age" of the early renisance period. Global temperatures were estimated to have dropped by a couple of degrees then, which is at least double what we are going through right now (and in a worse direction). This caused crop failures all over the world, as well as quite a few history changing effects (eg: The climate changes favored the Innuit enough that they ended up wiping out the Norse settlements in North America and Greenland, despite the fact that the Norse had iron, and the Innuit did not, setting back European coloziation of N. America by roughly 400 years). A good page on this is at http://www.vehiclechoice.org/climate/cutler.html
Unfoutunately for climatologists, the "human intervention" scapegoat isn't available for pre-industrial climate changes like this. So they have to look at all sorts of other climate-changing mechanisims. But if such mechanisms could do it then, they can just as easily be doing the same thing now.
We just don't know enough about the climate to say anything is proven at this point.
The main problem here isn't that there is no evidence of a warming over the last few years; there's plenty of that. The problem is that earth's climate was not stable before man ever got here. We'd be quite naieve to expect it to suddenly start staying stable now for us. Given that, there's some, but not enough, proof of a causal relationship between anything we are doing and any short-term temperature changes we might be seeing.
Not that I'm saying I don't buy into the theory that we are causing climate changes. I do. But the evidence is just not all in to say its proven.
I'm also not convinced that we have the consensus we need to start trying to do things about it. Perhaps we have been inadvertantly modifying the earth's climate, but I'm not convinced we should go around purposely modifying it to keep it stable. Its possible that right now we are just in the warming interval between a couple of ice ages. Would it be right for us to prevent the next one when it starts back up (by purposely pumping out massive quatities of CO2 or whatever)? Perhaps climate changes are earth's natural way of "spring cleaning" its species.
The Mississippi river is a good example of this principle. We are spending millions in the US each year to keep it in its banks. Left to its own devices, it used to move around quite a bit, and this was healthy for it in many ways. But its been trying to move its mouth west for decades, and we are preventing it because of the inconvienence that would cause us humans. Howver, the more we work to prevent it, the harder it tries to move, and the more effort we have to spend to keep it there.
I see a fair bit of explanation is in order.
Copyright is the grant of a monopoly (that's where the word comes in) on copying of a work to one party. Copyright monopolies were orignally a revenue source for the british crown (they were sold). They were kept in the US constitution as an *option* for congress, as long as they were for a limited time and were used to promote the arts. The idea was that congress could earn some extra money by selling on a case-by-case basis publishing rights for a short period to popular works that wouldn't get printed by anyone otherwise (printing was very expensive back then). They were not intended to imply any kind of "ownership" over the work itself, and the current situation would have absolutely appalled the authors of the constitution.
Actually, yes. I'd be more than fine, I'd be quite flattered. Everything I develop is either released under a free license (or public domain, you'd be shocked how tough it is to do that these days...), or is copyrighted by my employer (they might have a problem with your copy, but I don't
Public Domain with no copyright is the way things worked for millinia, and we got along just fine that way. I know some classical music fans who would even tell you that there hasn't been a decent piece of music written since copyright began.
First off, you are assuming that the person who you gave the copy would have paid this third person for it without my intervention, rather than just doing without it. Further it assumes that it isn't more likely that this kind of activity will cause more people to go purchase a legitimite copy. This is entirely unproven reasoning. Recent data with CD's and downloaded mp3's suggests that unauthorised copying is either having no impact on sales, or even a slight increase.
Secondly, it is very indirect reasoning. I could use this same logic to claim that I am "stealing" from Sears when I loan my neighbor a ratchet set to fix a loose bolt in his house. It is certianly not direct theft.
It is of course a violation of law. But its a civil violation, subject to civil courts, not criminal. Traditional theft gets you thrown in prison, not sued.
That depends on the software. For a game, sure. But I could easily see some productivity software being as needed by a neighbor as a lawnmower. Yet we'd scoff if someone tried to make lending a lawnmower to your next-door neighbor illegal on the grounds that it takes money from lawnmower companies.
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As a professional software engineer of 14 years, and sometimes commercial game beta tester, I know exactly how hard these folks work, how much they invest, etc. Do they "deserve" all they money they can get? Perhaps. So do I. So do you. So do ditch diggers. That doesn't mean the government must morally give me or you or the ditch diggers monopolies to guarantee it.
"Period", huh? I thought I had a good logical argument, but since you say "Period", I guess I must be wrong. Defeated yet again by the old "truth by repeated assertion" approach.
This is a perfect illustration of how people have just bought into the media industry's propaganda campaign without even thinking about it. Your two sentences don't go together. The first describes criminally taking physical property away from someone, while the second describes a civil violation of someone else's rights. They are two completely different things, but you don't even notice that while you are typing it out.
So why *do* you call it theft?
It isn't theft morally. No one has any less of anything than they did before the copy was made. In fact, one could argue that if the software is good, I have a moral *obligation* to copy it, in order to increse the good in society. Again, I don't make unauthorised copies myself, but its an argument.
It isn't theft leagally. The offence is treated by the law essentially as a violation of a contract. If you get caught, you won't go to jail like convicted thieves do, you'll just get sued for damages in civil court. (There are some criminal laws now, but they generally don't apply in the violations most people commit)
The only reason you say its "theft" is because that's what the media companies have trained you to call it. They want you to feel on a instinctive level that its morally like breaking into people's houses and stealing their stereos. Don't be their trained monkey; think about what you are saying.
You mean people who posses unauthorised copies of the game. "Piracy" has to do with armed theft of tangable goods (often involving murder, rape, and other nasty business). It has nothing whatsoever to do with sharing fun or useful software with your friends.
There is nothing morally wrong with this activity in and of itself, only the economic argument that some unpaid copies might have been paid copies otherwise. The moral argument is on the other side, where I'm forced to refuse to help to a friend or neighbor when asked, just so someone else can make economic gain off of them. I don't say this as a hypocritical lawbreaker, but as someone who actually tries to comply with the law, and is sick of constantly annoying friends and family members to do so.
The reality of the situation doesn't look so cut-and-dried to most people. How many people do you know who've never in their life copied or lent a game, CD, album, book, or video or audio tape to a friend? None for me. So the media companies try to brainwash us into thinking its some horrible criminal act to share media by using words like "theft", "property" and "piracy". Please don't support the media companies attempts to braiwash the public with inappropriate terminology. They have enough money to do it all by themselves without our help.
Apparently I wasn't looking real hard, since there is one devoted to just that. Hamilton doesn't come out and say what he thinks the likelyhood of the House deciding an election is though (he calls it "a contingency". Thinking about it, he wouldn't, as the main point of the FPs was to convince ordinary folks the constitution is a good thing.
However, he did come damn close to saying direct election would be bad because the general public can't be trusted to make a good decision:
Well, I've heard this a lot myself. The best reference I can find is Grolier's EC entry, which says this:
I'm not sure where online one would go to find a definitive source on this. I can't find a single mention of the electoral college in the Federalist Papers, which would otherwise seem the best bet.
It says nothing about that, because it isn't a particularly interesting issue. All they did was give each state the same number of electors as they have congressmen. Anything else would have required redoing the painful compromise worked out for congressional representation. They didn't really care about opening that can of worms, because they thought elections would usually end up in the house (there's an extra stipulation that there will be only 1 vote per state in House elections).
My problem with your posts is that you seem to think the system is working now according to its original design, and thus the conceptions of the designers in this matter are important. This is complete bunk. The electoral college system of today doesn't even remotely resemble what they envisioned. A good discussion of how it has changed over the years is available on the Federal Election Commission's website. This is incidentally a great place to point people who think the wierdities of the last election were somehow unprecidented.
I'm not saying I think its a bad system. I'm just saying that it is significantly different than the one the original constitutional authors thought they were giving us.
That sounds nice, and things perhaps work out that way now, but that's not what they were shooting for.
The folks who wrote up the constitution were elitists who were deathly afraid (some might say rightly so) of the "mob-rule" mentality that might set in with a straight democracy. The idea behind the electoral colledge system was that states would appoint their "leading citizens" (in a way left up to the state governments, often by fiat) who would gather and jointly pick a president. It was figured that most of the time candidates would be regional (no mass media back in the 18th century), so no one candidate would get the majority, and it would be thrown into the sentate. Electors were not meant to be directly elected by a state's people. It took a constitutional ammendment to change that.
The senate was also not meant to be a directly elected body, and was to be appointed by the states (however they felt like doing it) from among the state's "wisest men".
Also realise that even for states that had direct elections for all this stuff, they usually restricted the vote to adult white males who owned land initially. If you lived in an apartment, you weren't considered responsible enough to get a vote.
The system we have in the US now is the result of slow and contunial evolution, not some divinely inspired document.
Right. That's why quoting articles from such sources is just a waste of time. Perhaps its worthwhile if you are interested in analyzing political spinning techniques, but as a forum for meaningful public discourse, these sources are completely worthless.
The last time I voted for president. The UN representative is a presidential apointeee, just like any other ambassador or cabinet member. He answers to the president, the president answers to us. That's how representative democracy works.
If you think this is somehow undemocratic, then you must think the presidency is too. You don't vote directly for him either. He's "appointed" by the electoral college, which you only get to vote on your representatives to. In most places, they don't even have to pick the person they said they would.
Heck, when this republic was founded, the electors weren't directly voted on either. State governments could just pick them capriciously.
You mean by stealing them from Mexico?
How exactly is someone at National Review (William Buckely's right-wing rag) wanting to unilaterally disavow an international treaty "news"? If the treaty doesn't involve freeing our wealthy businesses to more easily exploit some other country's populace, the folks at NR don't want to hear about it.
I suppose the logic he uses to achieve his goal (of calling the treaty bad) can be interesting, in an acedemic sense. Logic of course is just a means to an end to these folks, not an end in and of itself. A little bit of a twist here...divide by 0 there, and presto! Its proven. But I can get my fill of such silly exercises by watching religous "news" programs on TV.
I see a lot of "so what?" comments, here and attached to the orignal article. Given that he claims the problem is that they are "refusing to release binaries", I'd have the same reaction.
However, that is not the problem. The problem is that they are releasing binaries, but they are doing so under a custom proprietary license. This means that people who have a UnitiedLinux CD won't be able to share it or loan it legally without first uninstalling the whole OS from their system. If the BSA comes and audits you, and you have UnitiedLinux on your systems, you are no better off than if you had been running WindowsNT.
Yes, it is also a bit disrepectful to all the people who worked on that software perhaps. It perverts Linux into just another business' proprietary OS, no better than Windows or OS/2 or MacOS. But more importantly its a very dangerous trend.
However, I think its a doomed trend, just like Divx was doomed, boycott or no. Someone (probably just out of B-school) thought up this great business scheme for how they could start to just rake in the dough, without stopping to ask why consumers would be willing to sign up for such a horrible deal. Unless your name is Microsoft, you have to compete for business. When much freer and cheaper options are avilable, you aren't going to do well. Why on earth would anyone drop RedHat, at $60 for their whole site, to pay $60 per seat?
Show a little respect. If it wasn't for unions, we wouldn't have the 40-hour work week, paid sick time, or probably any other benifits.
Oh wait...I'm on Slashdot, talking to a bunch of young single males with no familes or social lives who are either independant contractors or H1B workers....
Nevermind.
That compiler is more than 7 years old! What, precisely, do you think Microsoft's response would be if you called up and asked for support on a pre-3.0 version of Visual C++?
Actually, that's one of the better illustrations of why the only true vendor security is to use a compiler to which you have the source code.
I visited the site, but it looks like its run by a bunch of lunatics.
Actually Rational (the compiler and process folks) did an exhaustive study on this. Their findings were that they had about 2x the productivity in Ada than they did in C, and 1/4th the bugs. You can read the findings yourself
(Note: before you post replies with possible reasons why their results were wrong, read the study. Just about every flaw imagineable was looked into.)
Its very tough to do such studies, so there isn't a lot of other studies around for comparison. I'm aware of a couple of other informal ones with CS students, (which were interesting, but I wouldn't bet my project on) and that's about it. Rational just happened to have the data available and the expertise to study it. But even the infomal studies I've seen give Ada the nod for reliability. The only thing that seems to come close is Java.
This makes sense when you consider that Ada is the only language that was designed from the start for use in "life-critical" applications.
Most compiler vendors in general have gone out of business, so that really doesn't mean much. What is significant is that there are 4 (perhaps more I don't know about) Ada compiler vendors currently supporting Windows, which is more than can be said for C++ and Java.
As for Ada being a great OpenSource project you are right, but not for the reason you think. I guess you didn't realise that the Gnu Ada compiler not only exists, but is now in the official gcc baseline.
However, I've always had great support from my proprietary compiler vendors too. I'd love to see someone try to get the level of vendor support I recieve from GreenHills and Aonix from Microsoft for VC++.
ACT is actually one of the very few Free Software commercial success stories, so you are quite likely to hear about them if you ever attend an RMS talk. I've seen no less than 3 transcripts where he mentioned them or their Gnu Ada compiler in reference to a question about commercial Free Software.