If think screwing over and locking out third parties is evil, then Apple already became an evil company for what it did to other OSX-compatible hardware vendors. At least with the App Store they just ban some of their competition and take some of the receipts.
And if you don't think screwing over and locking out third parties is evil, then what's with all the skepticism about Apple trying to make even more of their software ecosystem fractionally as locked down as their hardware ecosystem? Answer for me: why shouldn't they?
They know that, even if they do so, you'll still be an apologist for them afterwards.
Answer: you don't know, and you provably can't know. For every program and every set of tests that doesn't exhaust all possible inputs, there exist other programs which pass that suite of tests but which behave completely differently on an input you didn't test.
This is true even if the suite of tests is as thorough as "call a function telling the program to output its own binary and its own source code", and even if the input you didn't test is as untestable as a write-in vote for "Dick Ishbackdoor 0x9A5F".
To get around this problem you have to step outside the system entirely. For paper ballots, that means you have multiple little old lady volunteers at every precinct watching the vote counts. For electronic ballots, that means you have multiple PhDs at every machine disassembling it for electron microscopy.
Legislation could make it a felony to access the information in an unauthorized way or to proliferate it to anyone.
Well, if that's all we need, why not just have everybody email me their votes? Legislation could make it a felony for me to miscount or reveal the votes, and make it a felony for anyone to email me more times than they're allowed to vote.
Laymen won't trust crypto, but they shouldn't trust plans that would make elections easier to subvert.
I hear the same comments about China I heard about Japan in the 70s and early 80s: they just copy, they don't innovate, and have a mediocre directed economy. And then they ate our lunch.
And then lunch got cut short, and they started getting a bit hungry. Don't feel bad about not being up to date with current events, though; even Wikipedia still hasn't updated its title to Lost Decades.
But China and Japan can take their time catching up; we're trying a mediocre directed economy ourselves, now...
We went from "Can the executive branch wiretap US citizens without a warrant?" (regarding which Obama broke his promise and voted for amnesty instead of filibustering it, by the way) to "Can the executive branch assassinate US citizens without a trial?". This is only "scaling down" in the sense that a bullet is smaller than a phone.
So these guys figured out how to second-guess somebody's trading algorithm. How in hell is that a crime?
Because politicians don't understand economics but they feel free to make laws about it anyway? If someone offers to sell A for price B, and someone else agrees to pay B for A, they are not "manipulating" the market, they are defining it. And if one of those someones is making their offers and agreements via a brain-dead algorithm that is making the market unstable while practically giving their money away to more prudent investors, then the way you make the market stable again isn't by hauling the winners into court, it's by not giving the losers their money back.
A bit of mathematics is a good start. There are certainly lots of mathematically-oriented free software projects out there that could use an extra hand.
A bit of programming is a problem. If you're new to templates and inheritance then by trying to do any design work you risk doing as much harm as good. Trying to contribute to Boost without being a C++ expert may not be a good idea.
But a bit of eagerness to contribute is a very good thing. The trouble with open source in general is that people focus on the fun work first and the necessary support work second and then leave the grunt work for third or for never. You should have no trouble finding projects that don't have a big enough test suite (or finding projects that don't have any test suite, for that matter), and unit tests and regression tests are something you can create that will teach you libraries that you can use in your own research apps, expose you to others' good code, give you a chance to practice writing your own good code, but still not leave you responsible for creating tricky designs or performance-critical implementations yourself yet.
If you want to contribute to a mathematical open source C++ project which has helpful people on the mailing lists and on Slashdot, my biased suggestion is libMesh. There are lots of other good suggestions here, though; my unbiased advice would be to think ahead to your possible dissertation research topics and pick something that is likely to be useful for them. Doing intellectually stimulating things for fun is great (otherwise you wouldn't want to be a grad student), but it's also good to keep an eye out for when "fun" and "personally useful" can overlap.
I don't think corporations should have free speech rights.
You want to allow the government to decide which ads to revoke; do you also want them to decide which news stories to revoke? If not then you can just expect to see more biased news, coming from even more concentrated corporate power. If so then you've just written a blank check for incumbents to spend on skewing all political speech in their favor.
Protecting incumbents seems to be the most common unintended consequence of "campaign reform" laws and proposals. It would make me suspicious about the "unintended" part, except that such reforms seem popular even among people who have no ulterior motives, just enough good intentions to pave a road.
If Bill Gates or the RIAA CEO wants to lobby, let them hire the lobbyist from his personal salary, rather than using the corporation's billon-dollar treasury.
That's great for people with a million-dollar personal salary. For people who need to band together just to buy a single commercial, being unable to do so safely is a bigger problem. I assume you don't intend to give more relative political power to the rich, though? So even aside from the moral case for freedom of speech and assembly, perhaps we need more consideration of the practical case against the unintended consequences of political power.
If someone wants to program their computer to sell us four billion dollars worth of their stock for pennies on the dollar, do we need to send them to jail for it? It seems like the problem kind of punishes itself! At least it would if the trades weren't subject to a "rich people who lose all their money get three do-overs" rule.
Trading strategies ought to be opt-in for brokers' clients, and there ought to be server-side sanity-checking in place to make sure someone can't place an order that they can't fulfill, but that's all true regardless of how high-frequency or how automated the strategies are.
If you spend $100 gambling that the existence of aliens won't be announced in the next year, and the betting market odds are 100-to-1 against you losing, and the bookmaker requires you to deposit that $100 in advance (so they can be certain to have the money in case you lose), then a year later even if you win you'll have $101.
If you put $100 into an insured savings account, then even at today's atrocious interest rates you'll have $101.30 or so a year later. So why would you have ever bothered to make the wager?
Reality is much more complicated. E.g. your bookmaker may have looser liquidity requirements which allow you to make a simultaneous investment with your betting dollars, your opportunity cost may be a higher return in something less liquid like a CD or something more risky like a bond or stock. But even in "fake money" idea futures markets like the Foresight Exchange there seems to be this sort of opportunity cost effect. Even if you think a bet is 99% sure to win you don't want to spend 99 cents on the dollar for it, because you can find a better rate of return elsewhere. The market then reflects this: 3-1 odds may reflect an underlying market belief in 25% probability, but 99-1 odds reflect a belief of significantly less than 1% probability.
And "If you sell me this media, I won't violate these 'copyrights'" is just as reasonable a contract to offer or accept as any other NDA.
But the libertarian argument against copyright violations by third parties is shakier. Say I copy data that you bought under contract onto media that I own; I'm supporting your commission of a tort, which might carry some liability... but what about the guy who gets a copy from me? And the guy who gets a copy from him?
Or would you rather electricity was five times the current price?
Hmm... this sounds like "80% of the cost of your electricity is subsidized by the federal government, no matter which of many diverse local utilities you use", which in turn sounds a lot like "I don't know what I'm talking about"; but let's be clear anyway:
Yes, using prices to reflect costs will have better results than distorting those prices and then trying to replace natural incentives with a haphazard artificial patchwork of bookshelves full of laws.
Having purchased a duly licensed physical copy of the software, you require a further license to actually execute the software, because you'd need to copy the software off the medium and into a computer's memory (and probably onto your hard disk too) in order to actually use it. You don't have that right unless the copyright owner specifically grants it -- or so goes the logic behind the EULA.
This logic has never been true. Judicially, the original lawsuits against MP3 player manufacturers established that format shifting a copyrighted work for personal use qualifies as "fair use". Even if that interpretation of old law was incorrect, it would have been superceded by newer law: US Code Title 17, Chapter 1, 117a, which specifically says that the owner of a copy of a computer program is not infringing when they make additional copies as necessary to utilize and/or archive that program. This section of the law is over 30 years old.
If a copyright holder can retroactively take back some of the rights they sold you by springing a one-sided un-agreed-to contract on you after the fact, what's to stop music, video, or book vendors from putting a EULA in their own works? Ironically, that's exactly what Bobbs-Merrill did in the original "first-sale doctrine" court case, and that was actually less unethical since at their books didn't hide the unilateral rules under a layer of shrinkwrap. Too bad for them that judges were smarter back then...
This is the first and last time in history that someone will accurately be referred to as "awesome" based on their habit of frequently reloading Slashdot.
Why don't we just shove all the ash and coke into old coal mines? If it's going to make it's way into our oil and water supplies from there, then it was going to do so naturally anyways.
My best guess: elements disperse less or more readily depending on how they're chemically or physically bound. I have a couple pounds of sodium chloride in a place where I'd never want to keep a pound of sodium or a pound of chlorine. Wrapping it up in a bunch of carbon in a bunch of rock might be a (relatively) safe way to store arsenic, as compared to separating away the carbon and drilling a bunch of groundwater-permeable tunnels through the rock.
Mess with big business and you may start seeing campaign financing conveniently disappear.
Not if you're careful to limit how much you mess with them - enough to let them know you're a threat but not enough to make it worthwhile for them to evacuate the country seems to be "optimal":
Microsoft Corp is the world's top computer software company. It is also one of the biggest campaign contributors in Washington--an astounding fact when you consider that Microsoft is a relatively new player on the political scene. Prior to 1998, the company and its employees gave virtually nothing in terms of political contributions. But when the Justice Department launched an antitrust investigation into the company's marketing of its popular Windows software, things changed. The company opened a Washington lobbying office, founded a political action committee and soon became one of the most generous political givers in the country. The move eventually galvanized an entire industry, as computer and Internet companies quickly moved to emulate Microsoft's political savvy.
without getting into judgement calls and gray areas.
At fertilization you might be killing a cell with less self-awareness than an insect; after 9 months (unless it dies in the meantime, as many do naturally) you might be committing infanticide. Analyzing the morality of that is a task for Ashley Gray, Mayor of Slate City.
Foxconn had 10 successful suicides in 5 months, for a rate of 24 per year. That's the rate the WHO would say to expect if Foxconn had 86,000 employees. News reports say that Foxconn has more like 300,000 to 450,000 employees, in which case working at Foxconn during their news-making "suicide streak" period made you at least 3-5 times less likely than your countrymen to kill yourself.
Once a company buys from that sort of situation or profits from that sort of situation, you are doing business to a degree outside of the ethics and proper treatment of employees that Americans demand.
That's because American demands include "out of sight, out of mind" and "let them eat cake". Seeing someone in the third world work for us under awful conditions makes us feel bad, so we'd prefer to have them lose that opportunity and work under even-more-awful conditions that we don't have to think about.
And IIRC they're usually on the "liberaltarian" side of that category as well. Not everybody who thinks it's nice to keep more control over your own money is a conservative.
Look at some of their Op-Eds from this month: "America, Home of the Free -- Except for Muslims?" and "Mosque Debate is a Red Herring", arguing against the current conservative assault on the First Amendment. "Government Needs to Divorce the Marriage Business", arguing for equal public treatment of homosexual and heterosexual unions. "It's a WikiLeaks World, Get Used to it", arguing for increased official release of even military secrets. "US Spying Spawns a Dystopian Epidemic", arguing against the Bush-expanded state surveillance. If the RNC is paying Cato, they're not getting their money's worth.
Nope, they provided a service for everybody, even people who never ever bought WoW. You can download the client from Blizzard's ftp site - what you need to play on Blizzard's servers is an account.
I see. So the only way for 91degrees' analogy to be completely, 100% accurate would be if Microsoft allowed free downloads of Internet Explorer, but they did make money from search traffic?
Sure, inability to understand basic arithmetic leaves students unprepared for work in science... or engineering... or operating a cash register... or keeping society from crashing and leaving behind a postapocalyptic wasteland. But *in* that postapocalyptic wasteland, the cannibal hordes will find innumerates to be just as delicious as anyone else, so learning math would have been a waste of time anyway!
Slashdot Mirror
If think screwing over and locking out third parties is evil, then Apple already became an evil company for what it did to other OSX-compatible hardware vendors. At least with the App Store they just ban some of their competition and take some of the receipts.
And if you don't think screwing over and locking out third parties is evil, then what's with all the skepticism about Apple trying to make even more of their software ecosystem fractionally as locked down as their hardware ecosystem? Answer for me: why shouldn't they?
They know that, even if they do so, you'll still be an apologist for them afterwards.
Answer: you don't know, and you provably can't know. For every program and every set of tests that doesn't exhaust all possible inputs, there exist other programs which pass that suite of tests but which behave completely differently on an input you didn't test.
This is true even if the suite of tests is as thorough as "call a function telling the program to output its own binary and its own source code", and even if the input you didn't test is as untestable as a write-in vote for "Dick Ishbackdoor 0x9A5F".
To get around this problem you have to step outside the system entirely. For paper ballots, that means you have multiple little old lady volunteers at every precinct watching the vote counts. For electronic ballots, that means you have multiple PhDs at every machine disassembling it for electron microscopy.
Apparently the Internet needs a "Let Me Scroll To The Bottom Of The Page For You" service as well. See the talk page for additional primary sources.
Legislation could make it a felony to access the information in an unauthorized way or to proliferate it to anyone.
Well, if that's all we need, why not just have everybody email me their votes? Legislation could make it a felony for me to miscount or reveal the votes, and make it a felony for anyone to email me more times than they're allowed to vote.
Laymen won't trust crypto, but they shouldn't trust plans that would make elections easier to subvert.
And then lunch got cut short, and they started getting a bit hungry. Don't feel bad about not being up to date with current events, though; even Wikipedia still hasn't updated its title to Lost Decades.
But China and Japan can take their time catching up; we're trying a mediocre directed economy ourselves, now...
Can be found here. Shame about that heckler with the hammer.
they were all scaled down.
We went from "Can the executive branch wiretap US citizens without a warrant?" (regarding which Obama broke his promise and voted for amnesty instead of filibustering it, by the way) to "Can the executive branch assassinate US citizens without a trial?". This is only "scaling down" in the sense that a bullet is smaller than a phone.
So these guys figured out how to second-guess somebody's trading algorithm. How in hell is that a crime?
Because politicians don't understand economics but they feel free to make laws about it anyway? If someone offers to sell A for price B, and someone else agrees to pay B for A, they are not "manipulating" the market, they are defining it. And if one of those someones is making their offers and agreements via a brain-dead algorithm that is making the market unstable while practically giving their money away to more prudent investors, then the way you make the market stable again isn't by hauling the winners into court, it's by not giving the losers their money back.
A bit of mathematics is a good start. There are certainly lots of mathematically-oriented free software projects out there that could use an extra hand.
A bit of programming is a problem. If you're new to templates and inheritance then by trying to do any design work you risk doing as much harm as good. Trying to contribute to Boost without being a C++ expert may not be a good idea.
But a bit of eagerness to contribute is a very good thing. The trouble with open source in general is that people focus on the fun work first and the necessary support work second and then leave the grunt work for third or for never. You should have no trouble finding projects that don't have a big enough test suite (or finding projects that don't have any test suite, for that matter), and unit tests and regression tests are something you can create that will teach you libraries that you can use in your own research apps, expose you to others' good code, give you a chance to practice writing your own good code, but still not leave you responsible for creating tricky designs or performance-critical implementations yourself yet.
If you want to contribute to a mathematical open source C++ project which has helpful people on the mailing lists and on Slashdot, my biased suggestion is libMesh. There are lots of other good suggestions here, though; my unbiased advice would be to think ahead to your possible dissertation research topics and pick something that is likely to be useful for them. Doing intellectually stimulating things for fun is great (otherwise you wouldn't want to be a grad student), but it's also good to keep an eye out for when "fun" and "personally useful" can overlap.
I don't think corporations should have free speech rights.
You want to allow the government to decide which ads to revoke; do you also want them to decide which news stories to revoke? If not then you can just expect to see more biased news, coming from even more concentrated corporate power. If so then you've just written a blank check for incumbents to spend on skewing all political speech in their favor.
Protecting incumbents seems to be the most common unintended consequence of "campaign reform" laws and proposals. It would make me suspicious about the "unintended" part, except that such reforms seem popular even among people who have no ulterior motives, just enough good intentions to pave a road.
If Bill Gates or the RIAA CEO wants to lobby, let them hire the lobbyist from his personal salary, rather than using the corporation's billon-dollar treasury.
That's great for people with a million-dollar personal salary. For people who need to band together just to buy a single commercial, being unable to do so safely is a bigger problem. I assume you don't intend to give more relative political power to the rich, though? So even aside from the moral case for freedom of speech and assembly, perhaps we need more consideration of the practical case against the unintended consequences of political power.
If someone wants to program their computer to sell us four billion dollars worth of their stock for pennies on the dollar, do we need to send them to jail for it? It seems like the problem kind of punishes itself! At least it would if the trades weren't subject to a "rich people who lose all their money get three do-overs" rule.
Trading strategies ought to be opt-in for brokers' clients, and there ought to be server-side sanity-checking in place to make sure someone can't place an order that they can't fulfill, but that's all true regardless of how high-frequency or how automated the strategies are.
If you spend $100 gambling that the existence of aliens won't be announced in the next year, and the betting market odds are 100-to-1 against you losing, and the bookmaker requires you to deposit that $100 in advance (so they can be certain to have the money in case you lose), then a year later even if you win you'll have $101.
If you put $100 into an insured savings account, then even at today's atrocious interest rates you'll have $101.30 or so a year later. So why would you have ever bothered to make the wager?
Reality is much more complicated. E.g. your bookmaker may have looser liquidity requirements which allow you to make a simultaneous investment with your betting dollars, your opportunity cost may be a higher return in something less liquid like a CD or something more risky like a bond or stock. But even in "fake money" idea futures markets like the Foresight Exchange there seems to be this sort of opportunity cost effect. Even if you think a bet is 99% sure to win you don't want to spend 99 cents on the dollar for it, because you can find a better rate of return elsewhere. The market then reflects this: 3-1 odds may reflect an underlying market belief in 25% probability, but 99-1 odds reflect a belief of significantly less than 1% probability.
If people can safely text, great. If not, punish them when they cause problems.
And what's up with punishing people for "attempted" murder? The bullet missed, so you were safe the whole time; quit whining!
And "If you sell me this media, I won't violate these 'copyrights'" is just as reasonable a contract to offer or accept as any other NDA.
But the libertarian argument against copyright violations by third parties is shakier. Say I copy data that you bought under contract onto media that I own; I'm supporting your commission of a tort, which might carry some liability... but what about the guy who gets a copy from me? And the guy who gets a copy from him?
Or would you rather electricity was five times the current price?
Hmm... this sounds like "80% of the cost of your electricity is subsidized by the federal government, no matter which of many diverse local utilities you use", which in turn sounds a lot like "I don't know what I'm talking about"; but let's be clear anyway:
Yes, using prices to reflect costs will have better results than distorting those prices and then trying to replace natural incentives with a haphazard artificial patchwork of bookshelves full of laws.
Having purchased a duly licensed physical copy of the software, you require a further license to actually execute the software, because you'd need to copy the software off the medium and into a computer's memory (and probably onto your hard disk too) in order to actually use it. You don't have that right unless the copyright owner specifically grants it -- or so goes the logic behind the EULA.
This logic has never been true. Judicially, the original lawsuits against MP3 player manufacturers established that format shifting a copyrighted work for personal use qualifies as "fair use". Even if that interpretation of old law was incorrect, it would have been superceded by newer law: US Code Title 17, Chapter 1, 117a, which specifically says that the owner of a copy of a computer program is not infringing when they make additional copies as necessary to utilize and/or archive that program. This section of the law is over 30 years old.
If a copyright holder can retroactively take back some of the rights they sold you by springing a one-sided un-agreed-to contract on you after the fact, what's to stop music, video, or book vendors from putting a EULA in their own works? Ironically, that's exactly what Bobbs-Merrill did in the original "first-sale doctrine" court case, and that was actually less unethical since at their books didn't hide the unilateral rules under a layer of shrinkwrap. Too bad for them that judges were smarter back then...
This is the first and last time in history that someone will accurately be referred to as "awesome" based on their habit of frequently reloading Slashdot.
Why don't we just shove all the ash and coke into old coal mines? If it's going to make it's way into our oil and water supplies from there, then it was going to do so naturally anyways.
My best guess: elements disperse less or more readily depending on how they're chemically or physically bound. I have a couple pounds of sodium chloride in a place where I'd never want to keep a pound of sodium or a pound of chlorine. Wrapping it up in a bunch of carbon in a bunch of rock might be a (relatively) safe way to store arsenic, as compared to separating away the carbon and drilling a bunch of groundwater-permeable tunnels through the rock.
Not if you're careful to limit how much you mess with them - enough to let them know you're a threat but not enough to make it worthwhile for them to evacuate the country seems to be "optimal":
Microsoft Corp is the world's top computer software company. It is also one of the biggest campaign contributors in Washington--an astounding fact when you consider that Microsoft is a relatively new player on the political scene. Prior to 1998, the company and its employees gave virtually nothing in terms of political contributions. But when the Justice Department launched an antitrust investigation into the company's marketing of its popular Windows software, things changed. The company opened a Washington lobbying office, founded a political action committee and soon became one of the most generous political givers in the country. The move eventually galvanized an entire industry, as computer and Internet companies quickly moved to emulate Microsoft's political savvy.
the forming of a unique DNA sequence.
Unless it's twins.
without getting into judgement calls and gray areas.
At fertilization you might be killing a cell with less self-awareness than an insect; after 9 months (unless it dies in the meantime, as many do naturally) you might be committing infanticide. Analyzing the morality of that is a task for Ashley Gray, Mayor of Slate City.
But after fixing it, the logic looks sound again.
Foxconn had 10 successful suicides in 5 months, for a rate of 24 per year. That's the rate the WHO would say to expect if Foxconn had 86,000 employees. News reports say that Foxconn has more like 300,000 to 450,000 employees, in which case working at Foxconn during their news-making "suicide streak" period made you at least 3-5 times less likely than your countrymen to kill yourself.
Once a company buys from that sort of situation or profits from that sort of situation, you are doing business to a degree outside of the ethics and proper treatment of employees that Americans demand.
That's because American demands include "out of sight, out of mind" and "let them eat cake". Seeing someone in the third world work for us under awful conditions makes us feel bad, so we'd prefer to have them lose that opportunity and work under even-more-awful conditions that we don't have to think about.
And IIRC they're usually on the "liberaltarian" side of that category as well. Not everybody who thinks it's nice to keep more control over your own money is a conservative.
Look at some of their Op-Eds from this month: "America, Home of the Free -- Except for Muslims?" and "Mosque Debate is a Red Herring", arguing against the current conservative assault on the First Amendment. "Government Needs to Divorce the Marriage Business", arguing for equal public treatment of homosexual and heterosexual unions. "It's a WikiLeaks World, Get Used to it", arguing for increased official release of even military secrets. "US Spying Spawns a Dystopian Epidemic", arguing against the Bush-expanded state surveillance. If the RNC is paying Cato, they're not getting their money's worth.
Nope, they provided a service for everybody, even people who never ever bought WoW. You can download the client from Blizzard's ftp site - what you need to play on Blizzard's servers is an account.
I see. So the only way for 91degrees' analogy to be completely, 100% accurate would be if Microsoft allowed free downloads of Internet Explorer, but they did make money from search traffic?
Sure, inability to understand basic arithmetic leaves students unprepared for work in science... or engineering... or operating a cash register... or keeping society from crashing and leaving behind a postapocalyptic wasteland. But *in* that postapocalyptic wasteland, the cannibal hordes will find innumerates to be just as delicious as anyone else, so learning math would have been a waste of time anyway!