The problem with taxes is that everybody likes the benefits but nobody wants to pay 'em. To expand: It's very hard to agree on what is a truly fair way of assigning the tax burden. You can start from any number of plausible-sounding positions (everyone gets equal benefits therefore everyone should contribute equally, everyone should pay based on what they earn, everyone should pay based on what they can afford...) and wind up with wildly different conclusions. You can argue that any given demographic is paying too much tax, or not enough. Given that (a) the US is a democracy, (b) you can pretty much rely on individuals to fight their corner to pay less tax, and (c) there are fewer rich people but they have more influence, it's likely that the current broad approach is close to optimal. Won't seem that way to any single person (who'll almost always feel that they're paying too much to make up for some other guys not paying enough), but society as a whole settles on a balance.
I moved from NT to OpenBSD about a year and a half back. (Kind of a radical switch, eh?:) I had previous experience as a sysadmin, which helped a lot, but relatively little working with UNIXes. I found it surprisingly logical and easy to get used to, believe it or not. So I wonder whether the trickiness of moving from Linux to Open is as much to do with unlearning Linux habits as Open's relative starkness.
I want X. I'm going to get X. I'm ENTITLED to X. If your Y needs get in the way, you'd better watch out. If you stand in my way with your Y, I'll take away your Z and anything else I have to, including your W. I'm going to get X. In this case, X="an abortion", Y="Free Speech", Z="money", and W="freedom".
Or, of course, X="abortion-free country", Y="willingness to perform abortions", Z="privacy", W="life". (Well, okay, Y doesn't fit exactly into the sentence, but you get the gist.)
These things pull both ways. Giving everyone absolute rights is great, but produces situations in which different people's rights conflict.
And that's where a lot of environmentalists go wrong. Instead of focusing on the real problem, which is cleaning up messes, they choose to focus on limiting technology, progress and convenience.
Environmentalists should focus on clean production of energy, not reducing the production of energy.
The trouble is, clean production of energy isn't sufficient - heck, it's already possible and the problem's still there. Fossil fuels may be dirty (and in limited supply in the long term) but they're gosh-darned-awful cheap and convenient. As long as consumers - especially in the US - insist on their current lifestyle at its current monetary cost, they will need to burn ever-increasing quantities of fuel.*
What continually staggers me is the mindset. Developing alternative energy sources is an expensive business that takes years and years. Reducing consumption has immediate effect, cutting down on pollution without side effects and _saves_ money to boot. So why on earth is the US's oil use going up year on year? It just doesn't make sense to me.
I guess the summary of what I'm trying to say is: The real problem is not cleaning up messes, though that's important. The _real_ problem is stopping ourselves from making more of them - an ounce of prevention being worth a pound of cure and so on.
Cheers,
Mat.
* I suppose I ought to put in a disclaimer about the possibility of suddenly developing a magical energy source that solves the world's problems. I don't think that's going to happen any time soon - just look how long fusion power has been "only 50 years away", for instance - but you can never exclude the possibility. It's a bad idea to bank on it, though.
Hi. First, a disclaimer: I am not a statistician. However, I am a scientist and I deal with statistics and uncertainties on data on a daily basis. That said:
There's not supposed to be *any* margin of error in the actual vote.
In an ideal world, possibly. But we don't live in an ideal world, and even if we did the actual vote isn't what we really want to know.
Let's take a step back. What is our experiment (the Florida part of the election, ignoring the wider one) trying to determine? Well, we want to know which candidate is supported by most citizens. That's not what we measure, though; we only count votes from people who made it to the polling station and cast their vote successfully. We're losing some of our sample right off the bat - we don't know how they would have voted. We can try and estimate by supposing that they're split the same way as in the people whose votes we did collect but there's an uncertainty there.
(Of course, it's debatable how many of the people who didn't vote were actually abstaining - in which group I include "couldn't be bothered" folks - and how many were genuinely unable to vote because of ill health, lack of transport, being turned away from the polling station or what-have-you. Furthermore, we don't know if those people are uniformly scattered across the population - in which case we've just got a random error - or whether there's a systematic trend at work; systematic errors are very nasty because they grow right along with your sample whereas random errors grow more slowly. You may have two million votes but if there's a systematic error of 2% they won't help you.)
So there's some inherent uncertainty which is (a) unavoidable, and (b) of unknown size. On top of that there *will* be random counting errors. It's difficult to get an exact estimate without knowing how the voting machinery worked and doing calibration studies but as a rough guide the error in counting N tends to be of order SQRT(N). There'll be a prefactor which will be large if the measuring process is inaccurate and small if it's accurate. A perfect infallible voting system would make this zero, but such a beast does not exist (see comp.risks) and even if it did it would have to be operated by fallible humans.
Perhaps a better analogy - or at least a closer one if you think both Bush and Gore are evil - would be:
1. You are to be shot
2. You are to be hanged
3. You are to protest loudly, then get either shot or hanged according to popular whim.
While I'm rambling: there have been some comments on better voting systems for electing presidents - transferable votes and so on. Folks, it won't make any difference unless you have at least three truly viable parties, for the simple reason that you cannot have 5% of a president. (5% of the seats in a chamber, on the other hand...) It's very possible to have a third party (for example, see the Liberal Democrats in the UK) and it doesn't hurt to anticipate that, but right now it doesn't seem to be there.
I whole-heartedly believe that the people who think those who make more should pay a higher percentage of their income are completely mathematically illiterate.
First off, any taxation system is going to be somewhat arbitrary; while most (but definitely not all) people would agree that some pooling of citizens' resources is a good idea, opinions on who should contribute what to those resources and how they should be gathered vary wildly. So any statements about whether a system is fair are going to be highly subjective.
One simplistic example (with exaggerated figures plucked out of the air) which could justify a variable tax rate would go something like:
Fred and Jim are neighbours. Both have basic, unavoidable living expenses of $18,000 per year - food, rent, mortgage repayments and so on. Fred earns $25,000 a year and Jim earns $27,000 - not much more. Yet if both are hit by a tax of 20%, Jim's disposable income ($3,600) is nearly double Fred's ($2000). A fairer method, one could argue, would be to apply a fixed-percentage tax to what's left after basic expenses - perhaps 65% in this toy example. That would correspond to Fred paying taxes equivalent to 18.2% on his total income and Jim paying 21.7%.
Of course, this approach doesn't scale well - Bill, who earns $50,000, would say his living expenses are higher than Fred and Jim's because he has to make payments on his new SUV. Fred and Jim might argue that this is a luxury rather than a basic expense - but what are they going to say to Joe who only earns $15,000 and thinks that having a car at all is a luxury?
In other words, I'm not proposing this as a serious, workable system, just as a thought-experiment illustrating one reason why some people might consider varying tax rates fairer. (People who actually know something about economics may now chew it to pieces.)
I mean, what if the SAME stats proved that Black(or Hispanic, or whatever the politically correct terms are... sorry.) people get in more accidents than white people? Well, obviously, there would be minority groups protesting as far as the eye can see.
Actually...
I remember hearing in the BBC Reith Lectures (from 1998, I think) the speaker describing almost exactly this situation. I tried to find a transcript on the BBC site but failed, I'm afraid.
The speaker was, I believe, the Professor for racial studies at a prominent US university. When she'd moved house, she had applied for a mortgage over the telephone and been quoted a figure for premiums to be paid. The company had sent her a form - already filled in based on what she'd said on the phone - for her to sign as confirmation.
Now, although the Professor was black she had, as she put it, a "white voice" - so the person taking her phone call had ticked the White/Caucasian box in the Ethnic Origin section on her form. The speaker described how she toyed with the idea of just leaving it be, but decided in the end to correct the mistake before returning the form.
The quoted figure for the premiums went up.
What had happened was _not_ that the mortgage-lender had arbitrarily increased them because she was black. Rather, the information about her was fed as statistical data into the company's projections for property values in the neighbourhood - and because there was a statistical correlation between black people moving into an area and value dropping subsequently, the estimated risk of lending to anyone moving there went up - and therefore so did the premiums.
Operationally, that looks pretty much like discrimination to me. So I'm afraid that minority groups do experience the sharp end of amorally-wielded statistics too.
Why do people on slashdot complain about *their* copyrights being violated, yet vehemently defend their right to violate the copyrights of musicians?
To be fair, Slashdot is not a Borg-like collective (even though it does look that way a lot of the time). There are some people out there who believe in copyright and Don't Do Warez, some who think copyright is a good idea but that there are some monopoly abuses, some who despise the very concept and so on.
There will also be some number whose views change according to whose copyright is being discussed and, yes, those are hypocrites. But not _everyone_ who reads Slashdot is like that.
>>If the community deems that these things are offensive, and should have a restricted audience, what's the problem? And if the community deems that blacks are offensive, and should be restricted, what's the problem?
And if the community deems that murder is offensive, and should be restricted, what's the problem?
Yeesh. Let's try and keep this thing in perspective, people.
I mean, if they were going after people who were using Napster to download mp3s of their stuff, that would be more open to question. Some people who already own the CDs may want to do that to for various reasons (perhaps to save the effort of ripping themselves). But this is talking about going after people who were _distributing_ mp3s. That's a whole different kettle of fish. If you're serving non-PD mp3s to anyone who asks via Napster, you're a pirate and should be prepared to deal with the consequences. That's all there is to it.
And what's all this "For the sake of the children!" stuff? Honestly. I'd expect that from a politician looking for cheap publicity, but here? Gah.
Comparing the US statistics only with those from UK, Switzerland and Japan isn't exactly showing the whole picture.
As a general rule, the US is a conglomeration of various cultures, not merely those of the Japanese, Swiss, and British immigrants. How do the statistics of Japan compare to that part of the US population that considers itself Japanese American? How do the statistics look across the demographic plane of the US?
All good questions - I don't know the answers. (I presented those countries' statistics because they're the only ones I had. Sure, this isn't the whole picture, but it's better than none of it. If you want to know the answers to the questions you were posing, a good webcrawl is probably in order.)
The point I was responding to was that Switzerland has lots of guns, but has (from the US's point of view) a low firearm homicide rate - the implication being that that rate is exclusively dependent on cultural factors. Those stats show that both Switzerland and the US actually have quite a high firearm homicide rate compared to the UK (where I am) - the "lowness" of Switzerland's figure is just relative.
What do we conclude from this?
Well, strictly speaking all we can say is that the firearm homicide rate doesn't depend exclusively on availability. I think we can go a bit further and say that it does to some extent - Switzerland's rate is rather high for an otherwise extremely law-abiding country.
(The reason I've not commented on the figure for Japan, in case you're wondering, is that I have basically no real knowledge of Japanese culture and don't feel I can make useful contributions there.)
I too would really like to start using OpenBSD... It just seem like an concept I'm ready for... But aside from installing the MacOS, Windows 95, 98, NT Workstation 4, NT Server 4, OpenLinux and Redhat Linux, I'm just not sure if i've the actual know-how to pull off an OpenBSD install... Can anyone share their experiences with me/us?
I switched my boxes OpenBSD 2.6 a couple of months back; it was surprisingly easy. You may actually have more experience in relevant areas than I had - my background was in NT admin, though I use various flavours of UNIX (as an ordinary user) a lot at work.
I have a couple of suggestions, though: first, read the FAQ on the OpenBSD site thoroughly beforehand. Several times, for preference - it really does help. Second, try an install or two in VMware first if you can - the install routine can be a bit unfriendly the first time, but is efficient once you've got used to it. (Some things're also organised differently from Linux, so it's good to get used to that in advance as well.)
(As to how much work is needed once it's installed - that depends on what you want to do with it. Several bits of server are integrated and ready to go - Apache, OpenSSH and Sendmail, for instance - but if you're looking to use it as a workstation, you'll need to add quite a few apps. That's generally easy if they've been ported, though - the ports and packages system works well, but is a bit limited compared to what's on offer for Linux or FreeBSD.)
The following is quoted from The Labour Party's Evidence to The Cullen Inquiry in May 1996. Full text may be found at http://www.cybersurf.co.uk/ ~johnny/dunblane/labour.html. Population is in millions. Compare especially the US, Switzerland and the UK. Oh, and take them with a pinch of salt because they're only statistics assembled by a political party and are a few years out of date.
First column: Country Second column: Homicides involving firearms Third column: Population (million) Fourth Column: Firearm homicides per million pop.
Homicides involving firearms (a)
Country......Firearm homicides..Pop.....Firearm Homicides / population UK.................137..........58.4.............. .2.3 Switzerland.(b).....96...........6.94............. 13.8 Japan...............38.........125.0.............. .0.3 United States....16315.........260.7..............62.6
Notes: (a) May involve deaths where a firearm has been used as a blunt instrument. (b) Figures for Switzerland are for 1993.
Sources: Japanese Embassy Swiss Embassy Population trends 1996 United Nations Monthly Bulletin of Statistics, Feb. 1996. US Department of Justice http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/ucr95prs.htm
Analogy 1: "I grow a bunch of melons and give them away for free. Someone takes one and uses it to club someone to death. Am I responsible?"
Analogy 2: "You build a bunch of tactical nuclear weapons, bundle them with instructions on how to use them as mailbombs, and give one to each clinically psychotic person in the country. Aren't you responsible for what happens?"
(My own personal opinion, for what it's worth, is that releasing outlines of security problems - with enough information to show they're genuine and let the appropriate folks to develop patches to counter them - is good. Releasing script-kiddie-ready toolkits is bad. Unhappily, we don't live in a black-and-white world so it may not always be possible to do the former without making the latter fairly trivial.)
I don't think the original poster was suggesting " that copyright should be taken outside and shot". I found his points to be quite good.
Well, okay. Maybe I was a bit harsh - I did zoom in on one particular part of his post. But he did seem to be suggesting that copyright is outmoded because copying can be done easily, which kind of caused me to see red.
I also think your analogies could be polished a bit.
S'okay - they weren't meant to be exact. (Neither was the original one, for that matter - fire is fire is fire and I can make it easily with a zippo, but the same can't be said for creative works.)
What I was getting at was that (what appeared to be) the main thrust of that section, i.e. that artists shouldn't have the right to stop others copying their work because it's easy to make copies, is flawed. It's easy to be antisocial or criminal in any number of ways, but that doesn't justify doing so:
Your example of forging an identity misrepresents one of his main points. Forging an identity should be prohibitted for issues that go beyond a question of copyright.
That was more or less my point.:) There are reasons why X should be prohibited even though it's technically feasible. For X substitute pirating, forging identities, DOS attacks, making yet another evil hamsterdance clone site or what-have-you.
What needs to be considered is why do we copyright, how does society benefit, and how can such a rule be implemented and at what cost?
... and, to be fair, I didn't really touch much on specifics here because I hadn't thought much about them. There does need to be a balance between the rights of the creator to get reasonable compensation for their work and the right of society not to have unreasonable demands made of it. ("Thou shalt not reverse engineer" springs to mind.) I suspect we'd all pretty much agree with that, but the devil is in the detail.
I can go out on the street right now and start selling fire. I can make the fire by banging some rocks together near some dry leaves, and I can sell it on sticks. If you've ever actually tried to start a fire by banging rocks together, you know that it's pretty difficult. So it would take a lot of hard work to make that fire. But if someone bought my fire from me, they could just turn around and start spreading it onto other sticks, and giving it away! Shouldn't I have some kind of right to profit from the fire I worked so hard to make? I don't think so. It was just a bad investment. Anyone can make fire cheap, and once fire is made, anyone can spread it cheap. What right do I have to stop them?
"I take care over my posts. I spend a lot of time researching them, making the arguments as clear and as coherent as possible. I believe in what I post about and take it seriously. But some git has forged my identity and keeps posting inflammatory rubbish in my name. Isn't this wrong? I don't think so. I shouldn't expect people to treat my identity as my own, since it's so easy to forge. (Shouldn't even bother with a technical solution to the problem like PGP-signing, because it's only a temporary solution and will be brute-forced in time.)"
"I grow tomatoes in my greenhouse. I like growing them and it gives me a sense of accomplishment to see them bear fruit - not to mention that I'm sure they taste better than the mass-produced stuff you get in supermarkets. But last night, some folks sneaked into my greenhouse and stole them all. Shouldn't I have some kind of right not to have my tomatoes stolen? I don't think so. After all, I've still got the plants, and if I want more I can grow them. And the satisfaction is in growing so it doesn't matter that I can't eat the tomatoes, right? And anyway it's my fault for growing something that needs a greenhouse which can be broken into so easily. I should switch to growing mushrooms in the cellar since that's more secure."
"I did X, which required a lot of work and dedication on my part. But once I've done X, people can trample all over it and generally abuse it easily and there isn't a lot I can do to stop them. Therefore they have the right to do so and I shouldn't complain and, in fact, I probably shouldn't have done X in the first place."
Mat.
ObDisclaimer: No, I'm not a dedicated poster or gardener. And I'm not a musician either. But I do write in an amateurish way from time to time, so the suggestion that copyright should be taken outside and shot does not go down well with me.
#savage snipping# Well, it's a monopoly, so they'll make as many copies as they need to to get the lowest possible price. And they set the selling price based on that. So the consumer ends up paying more for the good than the market indicates the good is worth. Which, pardon the pun, isn't good.
So - if I understand right - the fact that they're able to make more profit than they would in a competitive environment is evidence that they're abusing their monopoly. In other words, companies with monopolies who want to stay legal should keep to the competitive position on the curve, reducing their profits.
_But_. As I understand it, companies (specifically, their directors) have a legal obligation to maximise profits for the shareholders. Does this mean that they're stuck in a legal tragedy situation, where whatever they do they break the law? I seem to recall that you can't be punished for that.
Obdisclaimer: I know nuffin' about Law, so I may well have caught the wrong end of the stick and misunderstood. And I'd imagine someone's already sorted this one ought before. But I'd be interested to know what the solution is.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with taxes is that everybody likes the benefits but nobody wants to pay 'em.
To expand: It's very hard to agree on what is a truly fair way of assigning the tax burden. You can start from any number of plausible-sounding positions (everyone gets equal benefits therefore everyone should contribute equally, everyone should pay based on what they earn, everyone should pay based on what they can afford...) and wind up with wildly different conclusions. You can argue that any given demographic is paying too much tax, or not enough.
Given that (a) the US is a democracy, (b) you can pretty much rely on individuals to fight their corner to pay less tax, and (c) there are fewer rich people but they have more influence, it's likely that the current broad approach is close to optimal. Won't seem that way to any single person (who'll almost always feel that they're paying too much to make up for some other guys not paying enough), but society as a whole settles on a balance.
Cheers,
Mat.
Actually...
:) I had previous experience as a sysadmin, which helped a lot, but relatively little working with UNIXes. I found it surprisingly logical and easy to get used to, believe it or not. So I wonder whether the trickiness of moving from Linux to Open is as much to do with unlearning Linux habits as Open's relative starkness.
I moved from NT to OpenBSD about a year and a half back. (Kind of a radical switch, eh?
Cheers,
Mat.
I want X. I'm going to get X. I'm ENTITLED to X. If your Y needs get in the way, you'd better watch out. If you stand in my way with your Y, I'll take away your Z and anything else I have to, including your W. I'm going to get X. In this case, X="an abortion", Y="Free Speech", Z="money", and W="freedom".
Or, of course, X="abortion-free country", Y="willingness to perform abortions", Z="privacy", W="life". (Well, okay, Y doesn't fit exactly into the sentence, but you get the gist.)
These things pull both ways. Giving everyone absolute rights is great, but produces situations in which different people's rights conflict.
Mat.
And that's where a lot of environmentalists go wrong. Instead of focusing on the real problem, which is cleaning up messes, they choose to focus on limiting technology, progress and convenience.
Environmentalists should focus on clean production of energy, not reducing the production of energy.
The trouble is, clean production of energy isn't sufficient - heck, it's already possible and the problem's still there. Fossil fuels may be dirty (and in limited supply in the long term) but they're gosh-darned-awful cheap and convenient. As long as consumers - especially in the US - insist on their current lifestyle at its current monetary cost, they will need to burn ever-increasing quantities of fuel.*
What continually staggers me is the mindset. Developing alternative energy sources is an expensive business that takes years and years. Reducing consumption has immediate effect, cutting down on pollution without side effects and _saves_ money to boot. So why on earth is the US's oil use going up year on year? It just doesn't make sense to me.
I guess the summary of what I'm trying to say is: The real problem is not cleaning up messes, though that's important. The _real_ problem is stopping ourselves from making more of them - an ounce of prevention being worth a pound of cure and so on.
Cheers,
Mat.
* I suppose I ought to put in a disclaimer about the possibility of suddenly developing a magical energy source that solves the world's problems. I don't think that's going to happen any time soon - just look how long fusion power has been "only 50 years away", for instance - but you can never exclude the possibility. It's a bad idea to bank on it, though.
Hi. First, a disclaimer: I am not a statistician. However, I am a scientist and I deal with statistics and uncertainties on data on a daily basis. That said:
There's not supposed to be *any* margin of error in the actual vote.
In an ideal world, possibly. But we don't live in an ideal world, and even if we did the actual vote isn't what we really want to know.
Let's take a step back. What is our experiment (the Florida part of the election, ignoring the wider one) trying to determine? Well, we want to know which candidate is supported by most citizens. That's not what we measure, though; we only count votes from people who made it to the polling station and cast their vote successfully. We're losing some of our sample right off the bat - we don't know how they would have voted. We can try and estimate by supposing that they're split the same way as in the people whose votes we did collect but there's an uncertainty there.
(Of course, it's debatable how many of the people who didn't vote were actually abstaining - in which group I include "couldn't be bothered" folks - and how many were genuinely unable to vote because of ill health, lack of transport, being turned away from the polling station or what-have-you. Furthermore, we don't know if those people are uniformly scattered across the population - in which case we've just got a random error - or whether there's a systematic trend at work; systematic errors are very nasty because they grow right along with your sample whereas random errors grow more slowly. You may have two million votes but if there's a systematic error of 2% they won't help you.)
So there's some inherent uncertainty which is (a) unavoidable, and (b) of unknown size. On top of that there *will* be random counting errors. It's difficult to get an exact estimate without knowing how the voting machinery worked and doing calibration studies but as a rough guide the error in counting N tends to be of order SQRT(N). There'll be a prefactor which will be large if the measuring process is inaccurate and small if it's accurate. A perfect infallible voting system would make this zero, but such a beast does not exist (see comp.risks) and even if it did it would have to be operated by fallible humans.
Cheers,
Mat.
Perhaps a better analogy - or at least a closer one if you think both Bush and Gore are evil - would be:
1. You are to be shot
2. You are to be hanged
3. You are to protest loudly, then get either shot or hanged according to popular whim.
While I'm rambling: there have been some comments on better voting systems for electing presidents - transferable votes and so on. Folks, it won't make any difference unless you have at least three truly viable parties, for the simple reason that you cannot have 5% of a president. (5% of the seats in a chamber, on the other hand...) It's very possible to have a third party (for example, see the Liberal Democrats in the UK) and it doesn't hurt to anticipate that, but right now it doesn't seem to be there.
Cheers,
Mat.
I whole-heartedly believe that the people who think those who make more should pay a higher percentage of their income are completely mathematically illiterate.
First off, any taxation system is going to be somewhat arbitrary; while most (but definitely not all) people would agree that some pooling of citizens' resources is a good idea, opinions on who should contribute what to those resources and how they should be gathered vary wildly. So any statements about whether a system is fair are going to be highly subjective.
One simplistic example (with exaggerated figures plucked out of the air) which could justify a variable tax rate would go something like:
Fred and Jim are neighbours. Both have basic, unavoidable living expenses of $18,000 per year - food, rent, mortgage repayments and so on. Fred earns $25,000 a year and Jim earns $27,000 - not much more. Yet if both are hit by a tax of 20%, Jim's disposable income ($3,600) is nearly double Fred's ($2000). A fairer method, one could argue, would be to apply a fixed-percentage tax to what's left after basic expenses - perhaps 65% in this toy example. That would correspond to Fred paying taxes equivalent to 18.2% on his total income and Jim paying 21.7%.
Of course, this approach doesn't scale well - Bill, who earns $50,000, would say his living expenses are higher than Fred and Jim's because he has to make payments on his new SUV. Fred and Jim might argue that this is a luxury rather than a basic expense - but what are they going to say to Joe who only earns $15,000 and thinks that having a car at all is a luxury?
In other words, I'm not proposing this as a serious, workable system, just as a thought-experiment illustrating one reason why some people might consider varying tax rates fairer. (People who actually know something about economics may now chew it to pieces.)
Cheers,
Mat.
Actually...
I remember hearing in the BBC Reith Lectures (from 1998, I think) the speaker describing almost exactly this situation. I tried to find a transcript on the BBC site but failed, I'm afraid.
The speaker was, I believe, the Professor for racial studies at a prominent US university. When she'd moved house, she had applied for a mortgage over the telephone and been quoted a figure for premiums to be paid. The company had sent her a form - already filled in based on what she'd said on the phone - for her to sign as confirmation.
Now, although the Professor was black she had, as she put it, a "white voice" - so the person taking her phone call had ticked the White/Caucasian box in the Ethnic Origin section on her form. The speaker described how she toyed with the idea of just leaving it be, but decided in the end to correct the mistake before returning the form.
The quoted figure for the premiums went up.
What had happened was _not_ that the mortgage-lender had arbitrarily increased them because she was black. Rather, the information about her was fed as statistical data into the company's projections for property values in the neighbourhood - and because there was a statistical correlation between black people moving into an area and value dropping subsequently, the estimated risk of lending to anyone moving there went up - and therefore so did the premiums.
Operationally, that looks pretty much like discrimination to me. So I'm afraid that minority groups do experience the sharp end of amorally-wielded statistics too.
Mat.
Why do people on slashdot complain about *their* copyrights being violated, yet vehemently defend their right to violate the copyrights of musicians?
To be fair, Slashdot is not a Borg-like collective (even though it does look that way a lot of the time). There are some people out there who believe in copyright and Don't Do Warez, some who think copyright is a good idea but that there are some monopoly abuses, some who despise the very concept and so on.
There will also be some number whose views change according to whose copyright is being discussed and, yes, those are hypocrites. But not _everyone_ who reads Slashdot is like that.
Cheers,
Mat.
>>If the community deems that these things are offensive, and should have a restricted audience, what's the problem?
And if the community deems that blacks are offensive, and should be restricted, what's the problem?
And if the community deems that murder is offensive, and should be restricted, what's the problem?
Yeesh. Let's try and keep this thing in perspective, people.
Mat.
This one I just didn't get.
I mean, if they were going after people who were using Napster to download mp3s of their stuff, that would be more open to question. Some people who already own the CDs may want to do that to for various reasons (perhaps to save the effort of ripping themselves). But this is talking about going after people who were _distributing_ mp3s. That's a whole different kettle of fish. If you're serving non-PD mp3s to anyone who asks via Napster, you're a pirate and should be prepared to deal with the consequences. That's all there is to it.
And what's all this "For the sake of the children!" stuff? Honestly. I'd expect that from a politician looking for cheap publicity, but here? Gah.
Mat.
Hi.
Comparing the US statistics only with those from UK, Switzerland and Japan isn't exactly showing the whole picture.
As a general rule, the US is a conglomeration of various cultures, not merely those of the Japanese, Swiss, and British immigrants.
How do the statistics of Japan compare to that part of the US population that considers itself Japanese American?
How do the statistics look across the demographic plane of the US?
All good questions - I don't know the answers. (I presented those countries' statistics because they're the only ones I had. Sure, this isn't the whole picture, but it's better than none of it. If you want to know the answers to the questions you were posing, a good webcrawl is probably in order.)
The point I was responding to was that Switzerland has lots of guns, but has (from the US's point of view) a low firearm homicide rate - the implication being that that rate is exclusively dependent on cultural factors. Those stats show that both Switzerland and the US actually have quite a high firearm homicide rate compared to the UK (where I am) - the "lowness" of Switzerland's figure is just relative.
What do we conclude from this?
Well, strictly speaking all we can say is that the firearm homicide rate doesn't depend exclusively on availability. I think we can go a bit further and say that it does to some extent - Switzerland's rate is rather high for an otherwise extremely law-abiding country.
(The reason I've not commented on the figure for Japan, in case you're wondering, is that I have basically no real knowledge of Japanese culture and don't feel I can make useful contributions there.)
Cheers,
Mat.
Hi.
I too would really like to start using OpenBSD... It just seem like an concept I'm ready for... But aside from installing the MacOS, Windows 95, 98, NT Workstation 4, NT Server 4, OpenLinux and Redhat Linux, I'm just not sure if i've the actual know-how to pull off an OpenBSD install... Can anyone share their experiences with me/us?
I switched my boxes OpenBSD 2.6 a couple of months back; it was surprisingly easy. You may actually have more experience in relevant areas than I had - my background was in NT admin, though I use various flavours of UNIX (as an ordinary user) a lot at work.
I have a couple of suggestions, though: first, read the FAQ on the OpenBSD site thoroughly beforehand. Several times, for preference - it really does help. Second, try an install or two in VMware first if you can - the install routine can be a bit unfriendly the first time, but is efficient once you've got used to it. (Some things're also organised differently from Linux, so it's good to get used to that in advance as well.)
(As to how much work is needed once it's installed - that depends on what you want to do with it. Several bits of server are integrated and ready to go - Apache, OpenSSH and Sendmail, for instance - but if you're looking to use it as a workstation, you'll need to add quite a few apps. That's generally easy if they've been ported, though - the ports and packages system works well, but is a bit limited compared to what's on offer for Linux or FreeBSD.)
Cheers,
Mat.
Hi.
The following is quoted from The Labour Party's Evidence to The Cullen Inquiry in May 1996. Full text may be found at http://www.cybersurf.co.uk/ ~johnny/dunblane/labour.html. Population is in millions. Compare especially the US, Switzerland and the UK. Oh, and take them with a pinch of salt because they're only statistics assembled by a political party and are a few years out of date.
First column: Country
Second column: Homicides involving firearms
Third column: Population (million)
Fourth Column: Firearm homicides per million pop.
Analogy 1:
"I grow a bunch of melons and give them away for free. Someone takes one and uses it to club someone to death. Am I responsible?"
Analogy 2:
"You build a bunch of tactical nuclear weapons, bundle them with instructions on how to use them as mailbombs, and give one to each clinically psychotic person in the country. Aren't you responsible for what happens?"
(My own personal opinion, for what it's worth, is that releasing outlines of security problems - with enough information to show they're genuine and let the appropriate folks to develop patches to counter them - is good. Releasing script-kiddie-ready toolkits is bad. Unhappily, we don't live in a black-and-white world so it may not always be possible to do the former without making the latter fairly trivial.)
Mat.
Hi.
:) There are reasons why X should be prohibited even though it's technically feasible. For X substitute pirating, forging identities, DOS attacks, making yet another evil hamsterdance clone site or what-have-you.
I don't think the original poster was suggesting " that copyright should be taken outside and shot". I found his points to be quite good.
Well, okay. Maybe I was a bit harsh - I did zoom in on one particular part of his post. But he did seem to be suggesting that copyright is outmoded because copying can be done easily, which kind of caused me to see red.
I also think your analogies could be polished a bit.
S'okay - they weren't meant to be exact. (Neither was the original one, for that matter - fire is fire is fire and I can make it easily with a zippo, but the same can't be said for creative works.)
What I was getting at was that (what appeared to be) the main thrust of that section, i.e. that artists shouldn't have the right to stop others copying their work because it's easy to make copies, is flawed. It's easy to be antisocial or criminal in any number of ways, but that doesn't justify doing so:
Your example of forging an identity misrepresents one of his main points. Forging an identity should be prohibitted for issues that go beyond a question of copyright.
That was more or less my point.
What needs to be considered is why do we copyright, how does society benefit, and how can such a rule be implemented and at what cost?
... and, to be fair, I didn't really touch much on specifics here because I hadn't thought much about them. There does need to be a balance between the rights of the creator to get reasonable compensation for their work and the right of society not to have unreasonable demands made of it. ("Thou shalt not reverse engineer" springs to mind.) I suspect we'd all pretty much agree with that, but the devil is in the detail.
Mat.
I can go out on the street right now and start selling fire. I can make the fire by banging some rocks together near some dry leaves, and I can sell it on sticks. If you've ever actually tried to start a fire by banging rocks together, you know that it's pretty difficult. So it would take a lot of hard work to make that fire. But if someone bought my fire from me, they could just turn around and start spreading it onto other sticks, and giving it away! Shouldn't I have some kind of right to profit from the fire I worked so hard to make? I don't think so. It was just a bad investment. Anyone can make fire cheap, and once fire is made, anyone can spread it cheap. What right do I have to stop them?
"I take care over my posts. I spend a lot of time researching them, making the arguments as clear and as coherent as possible. I believe in what I post about and take it seriously. But some git has forged my identity and keeps posting inflammatory rubbish in my name. Isn't this wrong? I don't think so. I shouldn't expect people to treat my identity as my own, since it's so easy to forge. (Shouldn't even bother with a technical solution to the problem like PGP-signing, because it's only a temporary solution and will be brute-forced in time.)"
"I grow tomatoes in my greenhouse. I like growing them and it gives me a sense of accomplishment to see them bear fruit - not to mention that I'm sure they taste better than the mass-produced stuff you get in supermarkets. But last night, some folks sneaked into my greenhouse and stole them all. Shouldn't I have some kind of right not to have my tomatoes stolen? I don't think so. After all, I've still got the plants, and if I want more I can grow them. And the satisfaction is in growing so it doesn't matter that I can't eat the tomatoes, right? And anyway it's my fault for growing something that needs a greenhouse which can be broken into so easily. I should switch to growing mushrooms in the cellar since that's more secure."
"I did X, which required a lot of work and dedication on my part. But once I've done X, people can trample all over it and generally abuse it easily and there isn't a lot I can do to stop them. Therefore they have the right to do so and I shouldn't complain and, in fact, I probably shouldn't have done X in the first place."
Mat.
ObDisclaimer: No, I'm not a dedicated poster or gardener. And I'm not a musician either. But I do write in an amateurish way from time to time, so the suggestion that copyright should be taken outside and shot does not go down well with me.
Now this has interesting consequences...
#savage snipping#
Well, it's a monopoly, so they'll make as many copies as they need to to get the lowest possible price. And they set the selling price based on that. So the consumer ends up paying more for the good than the market indicates the good is worth. Which, pardon the pun, isn't good.
So - if I understand right - the fact that they're able to make more profit than they would in a competitive environment is evidence that they're abusing their monopoly. In other words, companies with monopolies who want to stay legal should keep to the competitive position on the curve, reducing their profits.
_But_. As I understand it, companies (specifically, their directors) have a legal obligation to maximise profits for the shareholders. Does this mean that they're stuck in a legal tragedy situation, where whatever they do they break the law? I seem to recall that you can't be punished for that.
Obdisclaimer: I know nuffin' about Law, so I may well have caught the wrong end of the stick and misunderstood. And I'd imagine someone's already sorted this one ought before. But I'd be interested to know what the solution is.
Mat.