Boys will do better in school, and girls will develop more skills which help them succeed in a modern workforce.
Are you so certain? I'd say that almost every aspect of modern society rewards conscientiousness over creativity and we're moving ever faster in that direction. Sure, we love the one in 10,000,000 who can exercise their freedom and creativity to create something unusual (although even that era draws to a close as the wild west of the Internet disappears). However, we crush everyone else that claims creativity in anything but the personal domain.
I'd say that it's pretty clear that modern commercial society (i.e. the one that stops us from starving) simply rewards the natural abilities that most women have in the same way that ancient societies rewarded pure physical strength. It seems to me that if that is what modern society needs, then that's what the schools should be training for.
It seems cruel to train children to expect the freedoms that, if exercised, will lead to their financial destruction.
The one difference I have found is that male engineers are much more likely to overestimate their competence than female engineers.
I'll say that was perhaps the biggest change getting used to a mixed office - remembering that the women (in general) underestimated (or perhaps merely underplayed) their technical competence and the men (in general) overestimated theirs. (Not usually catastrophically, I like to think of it as "optimism":-))
Well that and if you didn't make room in a conversation, you weren't going to get the women (who were often technically superior) contributing. Sadly it took weeks for me to realize that the women weren't willing to talk over the men to make their points... Restructuring the meetings from a technically oriented free-for-all solved the problem nicely.
God forbid we should put the work first or anything...
And God forbid that we actually look at the all the options for what makes a successful company or workplace.
Let me put it another way. You'd probably fail an interview for a successful company in China or Japan. Why? Because what constitutes the best employee has radically different qualities from what constitute your strengths here. Not only that, but if you were masked so that they thought you were Chinese or Japanese, your evaluation would be even lower, not because they privileged white people, but because they were judging you entirely on the basis of a cultural paradigm to which you did not belong.
Does that mean you would have nothing to offer a Chinese or Japanese company? Of course not. Your strengths are strengths. But it does mean that they would have to be flexible enough to understand that your strengths differ from the metrics they normally use. And companies that had that flexibility would gain from that.
I suspect the problem is rather more that you would be distinctly uncomfortable *really* putting work first and making the effort to allow the company to take advantage of a wide ranging, non-uniform set of strengths, many of which you'd barely recognize as relevant. Far easier to claim "this is the way that we've always done it - in fact this is the *only* way to do it" and persuade yourself that it's actually in the best interests of the company.
And it didn't occur to you that men enjoy the privilege of competing in a culture designed specifically to showcase the strengths that geek-oriented men have?
As soon as you feel that there is an objective function to rate something on a one dimensional axis, you've already baked in a set of cultural assumptions about how things must be approached. Not only that, but there's a decent chance that you aren't even aware of what you've done.
I'm a pretty hard-core geek, but at least I realize that *my* favorite company culture is massively exclusionary of most of the planet, and more to the point, there are many, many ways to be be just as effective a company that don't incorporate my culture at all.
Do you find VS CPU-bound in any meaningful way? I've always found it was I/O that cost.
As for converting it to 64-bit, I would be *massively* surprised if updating the code didn't involve messing with hundreds, if not thousands of components, many of which haven't been touched in decades. There are amazing amounts of legacy in there that are absolutely essential to some customer somewhere, and *that* is where I figure you could spend man-decades of development, reduce stability and get almost nothing in return except that satisfaction of knowing you no longer need a copy of, say, Watcom C to do a full code recompile.
Maybe VS is all beautifully clean and can be recompiled at will on the latest compiler, but I suspect reality is ugly.
You know, if you're going to castigate, you *need* to read the story to avoid sounding... uncharitable.
The laptop was donated. They have $0 hardware budget and $0 software budget. Their expectation (obviously mistaken) is that like other infrastructure, it should not change radically without direct user intervention or an act of God.
Your insistence that people be knowledgeable about all the tools they use is, let's say, optimistic. And your inability to comprehend that these people might have more important things to do than become computer experts is... well it's interesting. Unless, of course, you *are* an expert is all of the infrastructure that you interact with on a daily basis, in which case you're just too awesome for us mere humans.
Moving to 64-bit will massively reduce stability for years (given the thousands of pieces of 32-bit code they'll need to be working with for generations). Unless going to 64-bit gives me some big feature win that I don't know about, I'll vastly prefer that MS put the resources that it invests into VS into something that will *increase* stability.
I am certain that there are a few folk who would benefit from this so much it would make up for the 32-64 bit hash that VS would turn into for a release or two, but I'm not among them, and I'm not willing to sacrifice my working environment *and* the developments that are foregone so the development can concentrate on 64 bit.
And honestly, I suspect that for many, 64-bit is a checkmark feature, and is translated in their head to "fewer crashes" when in all likelihood the opposite it is true for quite some time.
Of course, if there are some features that 64-bit code would benefit (and I'm running a million lines of code on a 120 project solution with VS not breaking a sweat), I would be genuinely interested to find out what they are.
Perhaps some of the anti-PCers have seen the euphemism treadmill [rationalwiki.org] run long enough that they look at the history of "no, it's handicapped; no, it's disabled; no, it's physically challenged; no, it's differently abled; no, person first, it's person with a disability" and conclude that their "needs are so out there".
That would be my point. Sure, there's somebody somewhere being upset, but I don't remember anybody appointing them spokesperson for the entire handicapped movement. Personally, I consider myself "PC-compatible" in that I don't use well-known derogatory terms and if there's somebody I deal with regularly, I'll use whatever term they happen to prefer. No surprise, I've rarely (never) been chastised.
Again, to me, railing against PC as it's actually practiced in the real world because of the excesses of a few people is basically like railing against common courtesy because some self-appointed expert has decided that courtesy is defined as children *never* addressing an adult as a familiar by using their first name.
But I have read about situations in which being admonished once is enough to get fired.
It is *conceivable* that someone somewhere has gotten themselves fired for a non-PC term. But I'd bet *very* steep odds that *if* the story is true, there's a lot more behind it than that. If you're a public person, then perhaps a racial epithet will do it, but quite frankly, if you're using racial epithets often enough to do so accidentally, you've got bigger problems...
> one from the imagined "offense" someone MIGHT feel when he's told that reality doesn't conform to his (or her, their, hir or whatever fucked up mangled pronoun is now correct to use so I don't "oppress" someone by assuming his, her, its, whatevershit's gender) whims.
Exactly how many times have *you* personally been admonished for using the wrong pronoun or the like. Not searched for it on the Internet, not heard about it over conversation, but been personally confronted by another human being for something as trivial as this.
Because if it's not been dozens of times, I suspect that its someone else whose special snowflake feelings have been hurt by the *suggestion* that someone else might disapprove of their speech patterns and now feels oppressed.:-)
PC is essentially consideration. Sure, there are some people whose needs are so out there that I probably won't afford them the consideration they would like, but you know, I've never met any of them in real life. And if I did, all it proves is that there are people out there who I'm not willing to spend the effort to accommodate (although I would try if I dealt with them on a regular basis).
I really don't get this generation of real men (or women I suppose) who are such delicate flowers that their nose is put out of joint by the idea that someone somewhere disapproves of their language and they post about it on Tumbler... Dear God, the horror!
If you don't want to exercise a level of consideration that is relevant to the people you talk with regularly, well that just makes you a bit of a jerk. However, I'm going to bet that you aren't, and you probably do moderate your language a little so as to not offend the people you actually talk to, even if it costs you a tiny amount of cognitive effort.
Because a small government has no power worth corrupting.
If there are (next to) no rules, then why pay government to go around them?
Personally, I figure *someone* is going to be molding society to its desires, and I'd prefer that it be an entity that (1) is at least nominally responsible to the citizenry and (2) whom we can boot out every four years.
A question, Karmashock. If you *could* test for impaired judgement due to other factors - lack of sleep, ill health (simple things like a headache), depression, anxiety, mental deterioration due to age, emotional difficulties with spouse or children, etc., would you?
I'm not talking practically or legally, I'm talking ethically. Due you believe that because people's lives are in the balance, you owe your workers no shred of personal privacy or dignity? Or are you saying that to some degree, you *do* prize your worker's dignity over the lives and safety of your customer?
Or is your personal experience that the *only* thing to have a significant impact upon performance is illicit drugs?
if so, perhaps we operate in different circles, because the number of people I've known suffering workplace related issues due to illicit substances is a minuscule fraction of total workplace difficulties. Personally, if I was trying to minimize workplace incidents with no respect for human dignity or privacy, my life experience would indicate firing workers with marital difficulties or depression over using drug tests. And to be clear, I would be in the wrong, because the vast majority of employees with such situations are fine.
Most dangerous situations don't come out of the blue. Instead, there is usually a litany of minor difficulties before a larger incident. However, it is difficult and emotionally inconvenient to remove an employee from safety related job for relatively minor infractions, so instead, companies and individuals often choose to use a test with *some* correlation to a problem so they've done *something*, rather than actually attack what works - acting relentlessly on the small incidents that *may* presage a major incident.
And that too is an imperfect correlation. But it's a hell of a lot better than any other indicator that one can find, and relies (no surprise) on how people *actually* are acting in the workplace as opposed to how they *might* act based on non-work conditions. And even better, it has nothing to do with your (or mine) personal approval of their private lifestyle.
Indirect harm isn't morally different, it's simply easier for the harmer to psychologically excuse himself.
After all, he doesn't see the target, it's pretty hard to calculate the actual loss, he makes up narratives about why the owner doesn't deserve it, he ignores the cultural effects, etc.
Psychologically, I consider it pretty much in the same class as tax evasion. The same moral thought process "Paying for something I don't have to is just stupid" applies to both, except the opportunities for working under the table are fewer.
In my opinion, this comes down to the point that most of us will steal at least something when there is essentially no chance of us getting caught and owner is faceless. How *much* we steal depends mostly on whether we feel bad about our theft.
And personally, I find find the psychological defense mechanisms that we employ to justify the harms we cause somewhat annoying, so I'm happy to strip them away. So in the end, no, the harm is not huge, but it is a harm.
I fail to see why we should use 5-year-olds to determine the meaning of words.
I use common parlance, and stealing and theft are are commonly used to mean taking possession of something that isn't yours.
"He stole my idea", "She stole my place in line", etc.
Language is about communication, and in these cases, the word steal or theft is clearly understood by all parties. In fact, it's *so* well understood, that even a 5 year old understands it. There's not a lot of subtlety to what is meant by theft and it covers quite a wide variation of "take", "property" and the like. It also covers a huge variation is seriousness, from looting millions to the aforementioned place in line.
Avoiding the use of the word here is mostly semantic cover so that people who are pirating don't have to feel bad. "Bad people steal. I'm good, so what I'm doing is not stealing."
Quite frankly, I don't care if people pirate or not. I'm certainly not impressed with media companies claiming stealing software is murdering kittens.
But I really hate people trying to diminish moral responsibility for their actions. It's unpleasant when they're children, and it's really quite toxic when they're adults, and the "it's not stealing" paradigm is a big part of that. If you want to pirate, go ahead. But be enough of an adult to acknowledge that it makes you just that much less of a good person.
Can't handle the idea that you are not quite that wonderful? Then behave in a way you think is better. Voluntarily pay for something you could have stolen.
Mostly, once you're a grown up and (with luck) have some money and a stronger moral compass, actually pay people and companies for the stuff that you think is good enough that you use or enjoy it.
(The "you", in case it's not obvious, is general, not specifically the poster or reader.)
Sure, it's theft, in the same way someone brushing past you is assault. You're now so far down the scale of seriousness that it's pretty much not worth the word as it's usually used.
And no doubt you the next time someone tells you that they ran for the bus, you can point out that they weren't running, it was really more a trot.
When everyone understands what's occurring, standing on semantics inevitably means a clear agenda.
And yes, I'd be rolling my eyes at the industry calling piracy "software murder" or the like. Is there anyone who doesn't consider piracy = supporting terrorism ridiculous?
But companies are soulless entities who do not command my respect. From human beings, I expect better. Not to be perfect, or even good. But at least have enough guts to not spend their time justifying their actions. Do the crime? Fine. Just prattle on about how it's not really a crime. (And yes, I am speaking metaphorically, not legally, and quite possibly not about you specifically.)
Look, your at war with pretty much the entire English speaking world here.
"He stole my place in line." "He stole second base." "They stole my idea."
Look, I understand that you're upset that people use "steal" to mean taking what is owned by someone else. But quite frankly, "steal" communicates perfectly well what is happening to both speaker and listener. I know its an affront that people are communicating in a manner you don't approve of, but it's one of those tragedies of life that one has to learn to endure.
And yes, stealing an idea is less bad than stealing a tangible object. Stealing my place in line less worse still. But the word steal is understood no matter how "wrong" the usage.
I'll fully agree with almost everything you're saying, but "he stole my place in line" is perfectly valid usage - everybody knows what is meant, and it's definitely a light wrong, but stealing is the right term.
And yes, the software/media companies are of course intent on making copying akin to murder. But that doesn't mean the reverse is just hunky dory. I expect companies to lack a strong moral compass. I expect better of people.
It's a semantic point meant to obfuscate the crime. We're talking English, not the criminal court system.
I get you are a good person, so what you're doing can't be stealing, because stealing is bad and good people don't do bad things.
But even a 5 year old knows that copying without permission is stealing (try copying her homework and submitting it with your name. "It's not stealing! You still have your homework!")
Anyway what you're taking is the sellers opportunity to economically exploit his or her work. Probably less than list price, still theft of some value.
An entirely reasonable response. However, I strongly suspect that we will not ever see another amendment in our lifetimes. The US political process is wedged enough that even widely supported measures would have no chance of success as long as there's a united opposition to them somewhere.
However, that is tempered with the benefit of not getting the amendment of the moment when some demagogue gets power, so it's not *all* bad.
Which is why I don't think America should automatically hew to 200+ year old principles held by the founding fathers.
That 'automatically' is fairly important.
Those founders obviously had many good ideas and beliefs, but also some pretty bad ones. Rather than treat the principles as religious dogma where we believe that they saw what we mere mortals cannot possibly comprehend, we look at them with the respect due to principles that have done reasonably well over 200+ years (which is quite a bit), but not beyond questioning.
I think there was even something in the bible about that, "let he who is without sin, cast the first stone" or something like that. The point being that you'll never find someone without sin.
Indeed, which is why you should never take *anyone*'s word as an absolute authority, even the founders. God gave us brains to evaluate for ourselves for a good reason.
Given their reputation, I suspect the problem is getting women to accept offers of employment. At least the women I know were far too intelligent to want to be trapped into that lifestyle.
Or are you suggesting that Amazon should change itself so that there's some semblance of work-life balance, because I don't see that happening anytime soon.
Slashdot Mirror
Boys will do better in school, and girls will develop more skills which help them succeed in a modern workforce.
Are you so certain? I'd say that almost every aspect of modern society rewards conscientiousness over creativity and we're moving ever faster in that direction. Sure, we love the one in 10,000,000 who can exercise their freedom and creativity to create something unusual (although even that era draws to a close as the wild west of the Internet disappears). However, we crush everyone else that claims creativity in anything but the personal domain.
I'd say that it's pretty clear that modern commercial society (i.e. the one that stops us from starving) simply rewards the natural abilities that most women have in the same way that ancient societies rewarded pure physical strength. It seems to me that if that is what modern society needs, then that's what the schools should be training for.
It seems cruel to train children to expect the freedoms that, if exercised, will lead to their financial destruction.
The one difference I have found is that male engineers are much more likely to overestimate their competence than female engineers.
I'll say that was perhaps the biggest change getting used to a mixed office - remembering that the women (in general) underestimated (or perhaps merely underplayed) their technical competence and the men (in general) overestimated theirs. (Not usually catastrophically, I like to think of it as "optimism" :-))
Well that and if you didn't make room in a conversation, you weren't going to get the women (who were often technically superior) contributing. Sadly it took weeks for me to realize that the women weren't willing to talk over the men to make their points... Restructuring the meetings from a technically oriented free-for-all solved the problem nicely.
God forbid we should put the work first or anything...
And God forbid that we actually look at the all the options for what makes a successful company or workplace.
Let me put it another way. You'd probably fail an interview for a successful company in China or Japan. Why? Because what constitutes the best employee has radically different qualities from what constitute your strengths here. Not only that, but if you were masked so that they thought you were Chinese or Japanese, your evaluation would be even lower, not because they privileged white people, but because they were judging you entirely on the basis of a cultural paradigm to which you did not belong.
Does that mean you would have nothing to offer a Chinese or Japanese company? Of course not. Your strengths are strengths. But it does mean that they would have to be flexible enough to understand that your strengths differ from the metrics they normally use. And companies that had that flexibility would gain from that.
I suspect the problem is rather more that you would be distinctly uncomfortable *really* putting work first and making the effort to allow the company to take advantage of a wide ranging, non-uniform set of strengths, many of which you'd barely recognize as relevant. Far easier to claim "this is the way that we've always done it - in fact this is the *only* way to do it" and persuade yourself that it's actually in the best interests of the company.
And it didn't occur to you that men enjoy the privilege of competing in a culture designed specifically to showcase the strengths that geek-oriented men have?
As soon as you feel that there is an objective function to rate something on a one dimensional axis, you've already baked in a set of cultural assumptions about how things must be approached. Not only that, but there's a decent chance that you aren't even aware of what you've done.
I'm a pretty hard-core geek, but at least I realize that *my* favorite company culture is massively exclusionary of most of the planet, and more to the point, there are many, many ways to be be just as effective a company that don't incorporate my culture at all.
Massive lack of awareness != uncomfortable truth.
Do you find VS CPU-bound in any meaningful way? I've always found it was I/O that cost.
As for converting it to 64-bit, I would be *massively* surprised if updating the code didn't involve messing with hundreds, if not thousands of components, many of which haven't been touched in decades. There are amazing amounts of legacy in there that are absolutely essential to some customer somewhere, and *that* is where I figure you could spend man-decades of development, reduce stability and get almost nothing in return except that satisfaction of knowing you no longer need a copy of, say, Watcom C to do a full code recompile.
Maybe VS is all beautifully clean and can be recompiled at will on the latest compiler, but I suspect reality is ugly.
You know, if you're going to castigate, you *need* to read the story to avoid sounding... uncharitable.
The laptop was donated. They have $0 hardware budget and $0 software budget. Their expectation (obviously mistaken) is that like other infrastructure, it should not change radically without direct user intervention or an act of God.
Your insistence that people be knowledgeable about all the tools they use is, let's say, optimistic. And your inability to comprehend that these people might have more important things to do than become computer experts is... well it's interesting. Unless, of course, you *are* an expert is all of the infrastructure that you interact with on a daily basis, in which case you're just too awesome for us mere humans.
Moving to 64-bit will massively reduce stability for years (given the thousands of pieces of 32-bit code they'll need to be working with for generations). Unless going to 64-bit gives me some big feature win that I don't know about, I'll vastly prefer that MS put the resources that it invests into VS into something that will *increase* stability.
I am certain that there are a few folk who would benefit from this so much it would make up for the 32-64 bit hash that VS would turn into for a release or two, but I'm not among them, and I'm not willing to sacrifice my working environment *and* the developments that are foregone so the development can concentrate on 64 bit.
And honestly, I suspect that for many, 64-bit is a checkmark feature, and is translated in their head to "fewer crashes" when in all likelihood the opposite it is true for quite some time.
Of course, if there are some features that 64-bit code would benefit (and I'm running a million lines of code on a 120 project solution with VS not breaking a sweat), I would be genuinely interested to find out what they are.
Perhaps some of the anti-PCers have seen the euphemism treadmill [rationalwiki.org] run long enough that they look at the history of "no, it's handicapped; no, it's disabled; no, it's physically challenged; no, it's differently abled; no, person first, it's person with a disability" and conclude that their "needs are so out there".
That would be my point. Sure, there's somebody somewhere being upset, but I don't remember anybody appointing them spokesperson for the entire handicapped movement. Personally, I consider myself "PC-compatible" in that I don't use well-known derogatory terms and if there's somebody I deal with regularly, I'll use whatever term they happen to prefer. No surprise, I've rarely (never) been chastised.
Again, to me, railing against PC as it's actually practiced in the real world because of the excesses of a few people is basically like railing against common courtesy because some self-appointed expert has decided that courtesy is defined as children *never* addressing an adult as a familiar by using their first name.
But I have read about situations in which being admonished once is enough to get fired.
It is *conceivable* that someone somewhere has gotten themselves fired for a non-PC term. But I'd bet *very* steep odds that *if* the story is true, there's a lot more behind it than that. If you're a public person, then perhaps a racial epithet will do it, but quite frankly, if you're using racial epithets often enough to do so accidentally, you've got bigger problems...
> one from the imagined "offense" someone MIGHT feel when he's told that reality doesn't conform to his (or her, their, hir or whatever fucked up mangled pronoun is now correct to use so I don't "oppress" someone by assuming his, her, its, whatevershit's gender) whims.
Exactly how many times have *you* personally been admonished for using the wrong pronoun or the like. Not searched for it on the Internet, not heard about it over conversation, but been personally confronted by another human being for something as trivial as this.
Because if it's not been dozens of times, I suspect that its someone else whose special snowflake feelings have been hurt by the *suggestion* that someone else might disapprove of their speech patterns and now feels oppressed. :-)
PC is essentially consideration. Sure, there are some people whose needs are so out there that I probably won't afford them the consideration they would like, but you know, I've never met any of them in real life. And if I did, all it proves is that there are people out there who I'm not willing to spend the effort to accommodate (although I would try if I dealt with them on a regular basis).
I really don't get this generation of real men (or women I suppose) who are such delicate flowers that their nose is put out of joint by the idea that someone somewhere disapproves of their language and they post about it on Tumbler... Dear God, the horror!
If you don't want to exercise a level of consideration that is relevant to the people you talk with regularly, well that just makes you a bit of a jerk. However, I'm going to bet that you aren't, and you probably do moderate your language a little so as to not offend the people you actually talk to, even if it costs you a tiny amount of cognitive effort.
Dear God, the horror! You've turned PC!
> How is a larger government more corruptable?
Because a small government has no power worth corrupting.
If there are (next to) no rules, then why pay government to go around them?
Personally, I figure *someone* is going to be molding society to its desires, and I'd prefer that it be an entity that (1) is at least nominally responsible to the citizenry and (2) whom we can boot out every four years.
A question, Karmashock. If you *could* test for impaired judgement due to other factors - lack of sleep, ill health (simple things like a headache), depression, anxiety, mental deterioration due to age, emotional difficulties with spouse or children, etc., would you?
I'm not talking practically or legally, I'm talking ethically. Due you believe that because people's lives are in the balance, you owe your workers no shred of personal privacy or dignity? Or are you saying that to some degree, you *do* prize your worker's dignity over the lives and safety of your customer?
Or is your personal experience that the *only* thing to have a significant impact upon performance is illicit drugs?
if so, perhaps we operate in different circles, because the number of people I've known suffering workplace related issues due to illicit substances is a minuscule fraction of total workplace difficulties. Personally, if I was trying to minimize workplace incidents with no respect for human dignity or privacy, my life experience would indicate firing workers with marital difficulties or depression over using drug tests. And to be clear, I would be in the wrong, because the vast majority of employees with such situations are fine.
Most dangerous situations don't come out of the blue. Instead, there is usually a litany of minor difficulties before a larger incident. However, it is difficult and emotionally inconvenient to remove an employee from safety related job for relatively minor infractions, so instead, companies and individuals often choose to use a test with *some* correlation to a problem so they've done *something*, rather than actually attack what works - acting relentlessly on the small incidents that *may* presage a major incident.
And that too is an imperfect correlation. But it's a hell of a lot better than any other indicator that one can find, and relies (no surprise) on how people *actually* are acting in the workplace as opposed to how they *might* act based on non-work conditions. And even better, it has nothing to do with your (or mine) personal approval of their private lifestyle.
And yet you feel the need to post such a rejoinder as Anonymous. Such dignity and self-respect.
I thought he just dropped out.
Indirect harm isn't morally different, it's simply easier for the harmer to psychologically excuse himself.
After all, he doesn't see the target, it's pretty hard to calculate the actual loss, he makes up narratives about why the owner doesn't deserve it, he ignores the cultural effects, etc.
Psychologically, I consider it pretty much in the same class as tax evasion. The same moral thought process "Paying for something I don't have to is just stupid" applies to both, except the opportunities for working under the table are fewer.
In my opinion, this comes down to the point that most of us will steal at least something when there is essentially no chance of us getting caught and owner is faceless. How *much* we steal depends mostly on whether we feel bad about our theft.
And personally, I find find the psychological defense mechanisms that we employ to justify the harms we cause somewhat annoying, so I'm happy to strip them away. So in the end, no, the harm is not huge, but it is a harm.
I fail to see why we should use 5-year-olds to determine the meaning of words.
I use common parlance, and stealing and theft are are commonly used to mean taking possession of something that isn't yours.
"He stole my idea", "She stole my place in line", etc.
Language is about communication, and in these cases, the word steal or theft is clearly understood by all parties. In fact, it's *so* well understood, that even a 5 year old understands it. There's not a lot of subtlety to what is meant by theft and it covers quite a wide variation of "take", "property" and the like. It also covers a huge variation is seriousness, from looting millions to the aforementioned place in line.
Avoiding the use of the word here is mostly semantic cover so that people who are pirating don't have to feel bad. "Bad people steal. I'm good, so what I'm doing is not stealing."
Quite frankly, I don't care if people pirate or not. I'm certainly not impressed with media companies claiming stealing software is murdering kittens.
But I really hate people trying to diminish moral responsibility for their actions. It's unpleasant when they're children, and it's really quite toxic when they're adults, and the "it's not stealing" paradigm is a big part of that. If you want to pirate, go ahead. But be enough of an adult to acknowledge that it makes you just that much less of a good person.
Can't handle the idea that you are not quite that wonderful? Then behave in a way you think is better. Voluntarily pay for something you could have stolen.
Mostly, once you're a grown up and (with luck) have some money and a stronger moral compass, actually pay people and companies for the stuff that you think is good enough that you use or enjoy it.
(The "you", in case it's not obvious, is general, not specifically the poster or reader.)
Sure, it's theft, in the same way someone brushing past you is assault. You're now so far down the scale of seriousness that it's pretty much not worth the word as it's usually used.
And no doubt you the next time someone tells you that they ran for the bus, you can point out that they weren't running, it was really more a trot.
When everyone understands what's occurring, standing on semantics inevitably means a clear agenda.
And yes, I'd be rolling my eyes at the industry calling piracy "software murder" or the like. Is there anyone who doesn't consider piracy = supporting terrorism ridiculous?
But companies are soulless entities who do not command my respect. From human beings, I expect better. Not to be perfect, or even good. But at least have enough guts to not spend their time justifying their actions. Do the crime? Fine. Just prattle on about how it's not really a crime. (And yes, I am speaking metaphorically, not legally, and quite possibly not about you specifically.)
Look, your at war with pretty much the entire English speaking world here.
"He stole my place in line."
"He stole second base."
"They stole my idea."
Look, I understand that you're upset that people use "steal" to mean taking what is owned by someone else. But quite frankly, "steal" communicates perfectly well what is happening to both speaker and listener. I know its an affront that people are communicating in a manner you don't approve of, but it's one of those tragedies of life that one has to learn to endure.
And yes, stealing an idea is less bad than stealing a tangible object. Stealing my place in line less worse still. But the word steal is understood no matter how "wrong" the usage.
I'll fully agree with almost everything you're saying, but "he stole my place in line" is perfectly valid usage - everybody knows what is meant, and it's definitely a light wrong, but stealing is the right term.
And yes, the software/media companies are of course intent on making copying akin to murder. But that doesn't mean the reverse is just hunky dory. I expect companies to lack a strong moral compass. I expect better of people.
It's a subtle but distinct difference
It's a semantic point meant to obfuscate the crime. We're talking English, not the criminal court system.
I get you are a good person, so what you're doing can't be stealing, because stealing is bad and good people don't do bad things.
But even a 5 year old knows that copying without permission is stealing (try copying her homework and submitting it with your name. "It's not stealing! You still have your homework!")
Anyway what you're taking is the sellers opportunity to economically exploit his or her work. Probably less than list price, still theft of some value.
This is bad because the government should be in the business of gold speculation?
Next up: outrage over the government selling the armed forces cavalry horses...
An entirely reasonable response. However, I strongly suspect that we will not ever see another amendment in our lifetimes. The US political process is wedged enough that even widely supported measures would have no chance of success as long as there's a united opposition to them somewhere.
However, that is tempered with the benefit of not getting the amendment of the moment when some demagogue gets power, so it's not *all* bad.
I think the relevant line in my comment is
Which is why I don't think America should automatically hew to 200+ year old principles held by the founding fathers.
That 'automatically' is fairly important.
Those founders obviously had many good ideas and beliefs, but also some pretty bad ones. Rather than treat the principles as religious dogma where we believe that they saw what we mere mortals cannot possibly comprehend, we look at them with the respect due to principles that have done reasonably well over 200+ years (which is quite a bit), but not beyond questioning.
I think there was even something in the bible about that, "let he who is without sin, cast the first stone" or something like that. The point being that you'll never find someone without sin.
Indeed, which is why you should never take *anyone*'s word as an absolute authority, even the founders. God gave us brains to evaluate for ourselves for a good reason.
If anything would horrify our founding fathers, it would be our large standing Army and the general lack of self-reliance.
I don't know, I suspect for many of the founding fathers, it would be that we've allowed women and blacks to vote.
Which is why I don't think America should automatically hew to 200+ year old principles held by the founding fathers.
Given their reputation, I suspect the problem is getting women to accept offers of employment. At least the women I know were far too intelligent to want to be trapped into that lifestyle.
Or are you suggesting that Amazon should change itself so that there's some semblance of work-life balance, because I don't see that happening anytime soon.