Probably not the smartest thing to put in writing but me and my friends break the law nearly everyday because we find it to be stupid and pointless and arbitrary. I'm talking mainly about underage drinking laws/the fact that smoking/possessing pot is illegal and minor traffic violations and such. I personally am incredibly afraid of the police because in my limited experience, the police play the role of breaking up parties/giving out traffic tickets for safe infractions of the law (well what I consider safe. I realize we need to have a standard because we can't let everyone decide what's safe)/arresting people for smoking/possessing pot (IMHO, more harmless than many "legal" drugs such as alcohol). Thankfully I've never been the target of serious crime and honestly needed the police but it says a lot that I have such a low opinion of them because my experiences w/ them have been them enforcing laws I disagree with/are just a hassle/being enforced because they're laws and what we did violated the wording, not because what we did violated the spirit of the law/is a detriment to society.
I personally hate laws that are designed so that they are unforcable and then don't serve their purpose or end up being overreaching because they need to be objective even when serving a subjective purpose. Drinking age - IMHO, intended to prevent minors from making this decision on their own which they're not capable of making and harming their bodies. They needed an objective point to set the law instead of the subjective, capable of making this decision (same w/ why can't my parents serve me alcohol. I had a glass of champagne at my sister's graduation, was I 21, no. Law is dumb, IMHO.
I saw a band play today (Nine Days) and they mentioned that EPIC had scrapped one of their CDs and since they played a couple songs from it, they flat out said, if you like it, go download it from somewhere, we just want you listening to our music. It was so nice to hear a band that wanted you to listen to its music without any other motives (granted they couldn't sell this CD since it was never released but it was nice to hear them encouraging people to just listen to their music knowing they weren't making any money off of it).
If companies don't outsource the fear is another company from another country will undercut them. There are two ways to compete: better product, cheaper product. American workers CAN'T compete w/ the cheaper product because we have a much higher cost of living. In my opinion, any job that can be outsourced WILL be outsourced eventually, and we should stop trying to pretend it's the govt's/CEOs fault.
And good for the economy means will provide AMERICAN JOBS in the long-run and allow american firms to REMAIN dominant/competitive (hint: paying your workers more than your competition is a BAD idea from a business standpoint unless your workers are more productive/produce a significantly better product), just not these IT jobs that are being outsourced. And the average Joe is a shareholder. Stop whining at CEOs for doing their jobs. The system is designed to let the best/cheapest product win, not the American product. We need to find ways to make American workers more valuable than cheap offshore workers. That's the solution.
The problem is that local IT workers AREN'T enough better than offshore workers to justify the cost difference. While many disagree w/ me I'm sure, I don't consider most IT work white-collar work so it doesn't scare me that it's being outsourced.
Ask yourself this: would you be up in arms about filing clerks being replaced w/ computer database systems that are cheaper/more efficient? Probably not, but it's the same thing. It's a job sector that is no longer guaranteed work because there's a lot more supply that's more then ADEQUATE to do the job. There are plenty of jobs for math/science educated people outside the IT sector that aren't getting outsourced. Just because IT jobs are dissapearing, doesn't mean your skillset/education is now uselesss in the US.
In response to the zealously religious. To those of us who are either atheist/agnostic (on in my case, believe something created this world but whether it was one superior being, a race of superior beings, or we're part of a simulation, i have no idea) he is way TOO religious. I personally would prefer if the President of this country never once invoked the name of God except maybe as slang to swear (oh my god type thing). But I am not the majority, so I lose.
To someone who is religious, Bush is not a zealot by any means but to someone who does not believe in that one God, he is way too religious for our liking. Especially those of us who are strongly pro-choice. Religious is mutually exclusive w/ being pro-choice when your religion states that life begins at conception And for those of us w/ friends who have diseases (parkinson's/diabetes) that have very promising stem-cell research, any sort of laws doing anything to discourage this research bothers us. Hence Bush is too religious for many.
While this is FAR from the majority opinion, I'd prefer to have a President who doesn't just believe what he's told and does not follow ANY organized religion. So to me (and many others) Bush is too religious.
While I agree with you on most counts, in almost no cases do stockholders of a public company actually run the company (they own it/shares of it but I don't know of any public company that doesn't have a board of directors/CEO who actually runs the company). What you have to worry about is the board of directors not caring about being shady, that's what matters.
Furthermore, I recently had someone from google talk in one of my CS classes and one of the reasons he's stuck there is that the people running the company really care about their employees (read: are not money-grubbing freaks). I don't think this means the company is going downhill.
Clarification: Google had reached a size in which they were going to legally have to file paperwork w/ the SEC as if they were public. This means all the beaurecratic paperwork hassle w/out the easy access to capital. Not doing an IPO would have been a very poor business decision. Just because a company is public doesn't mean the people running the company (esp if they're still majority stockholders, which they might be, I haven't read the SEC filing to know what % of stock is being given away) don't have control anymore.
It completely depends on the band's policy. Some bands (Dave Matthews Band for example) downright encourage recording of their concerts. However, in that case, it's still illegal to SELL them. You're encouraged to distribute them for free (in fact all you're allowed to charge for according to their TOS is distribution costs) in a lossless format.
Quick summary of the policy:
"Dave Matthews Band has always encouraged the taping of our performances, but only for personal use, including trading, as outlined in the Taping Policy Statement. The proliferation of commercial resale of recordings of our concerts has become a concern to us. Commercial bootleg's are not only excessively priced and of inferior quality, but primarily, they are an illegal use that threaten the taping privileges of everyone."
Dave matthews let's you (some restrictions) and if you buy special "recording" tickets, they'll put you right by the sound board to get a better recording. The restrictions on DMB stuff are basically so that you can't profit off of it and there's no sound degradation (you're technically not supposed to distribute the music if it's compressed in a lossy format).
Pearl Jam is another band that sells live bootlegs (in an effort to stave off people selling crappy versions, they generally sell a copy of any concert they play at - often hard to find unless you order through them).
Fundamental problem: Pick any two: a system that accomplishes it's goals, a system w/ no unintended side effects, an enforcable/workable system.
MPAA is interested in the not allowing illegal distribution goal and the having a system that works goal. They don't give a shit about the small minority who want to play DVDs on some "weird" system that doesn't have licensed support. Or people who want to build stuff themself. As Valenti said, then the legislation has to somehow deal w/ what's a viable reason to break the encryption and what's not which is very difficult and now (in his head) the system becomes unworkable.
slightly OT, same thing w/ death penalty laws in texas. someone was on death row and in Texas new evidence cannot be submitted more than 40 days after trial (because it could then allow savy attorneys to cause infinite delays and the sentence might never be carried out) and someone was executed because DNA evidence that exonerated them wasn't allowed to be entered (info from a speech by the unibomber's brother on the death penalty - really against the death penalty). The answer to how could you let that happen was: it's more important for the system to work than for the system to make sure that no innocent person gets killed.
THAT'S the fundamental problem. People w/ different views on what the main goal of a system should be. To the MPAA/RIAA work and accomplish our goals most of the time, to the tinkerer it's work and have NO unintended side-affects that don't let me use this product in any fair use way I see fit.
Dead on. If I had mod points I'd give them to you.
The difference between the avg person and/. crowd, the avg person simply wants something that works and is good enough for their uses. To the techy this product might be shoddy and bug-ridden because it's new advanced features are hacked together and cruddy, but the average person doesn't use them so doesn't care. No matter what you want to say about their ethics/morals/questionable business practices, you have to admit M$ is brilliantly savy when it comes to business. There's a lot more to dominating a market then making the best product.
No his point is, what was important to MS was selling the most amount of units. That means, targetting the widest audience, not necessarily the people who'd use it the most/benefit most from a better product. What he's saying is that most customer's needed a decent easy-to-us4e product and that's what microsoft produced. Focusing on quality when it's not what most of your customers care most about would have been a very poor business decision. Just because developers hate M$ doesn't mean they're not a very business savy company, look how profitable/dominant they are. They're clearly doing something right (any and all arguments about abusing their monopoly must realize they had to earn their monopoly before they could abuse it).
Microsoft's method: Design a product usable by the maximum amount of people that has enough functionality to keep most people using it.
Better than: design the perfect feature-laden product which will be impossible for 90% of people to learn.
Remember microsoft gets paid per unit sold, regardless of how much you use the software.
We've all seen the RIAA flounder around trying to protect an outdated business model. Do you really think the countries in the Middle East would just say, "ok, our time is over." I bet there'd be huge amounts of fighting to keep the world relying on oil and it would be a huge mess. Just because something isn't needed anymore, doesn't mean the people selling it are going to just give up w/out a fight, admit they're not needed anymore and just accept that you will switch to the new/better product.
There's a difference between comparing using OOo or using MS Office and compatring the benefits between STICKING w/ MS Office and CONVERTING TO OOo.
In the first case, it's a no-brainer in my head (except for the support issue, but as has been mentioned, odds are there's an IT person doing support NOT Microsoft - so just have your IT person look the stuff up elsewhere or ask different friends).
In the second case, it's not. As I'm sure anyone who's worked in a medium sized or bigger office has seen, many people don't know anything about computers and if the menus aren't organized EXACTlY the same way, they're going to need help. THe question is, is their lessened productivity while adjusting (plus your IT guys time) offset by the lessened cost (esp when a lot of windows computers come w/ MS Office loaded on them already). Or in my dad's law firm where there is no IT person but 1 lawyer who's computer savy and helps out w/ people's issues, is it worth her not working (and thus not billing out at her rate of several hundred dollars per hour) for x hours because she's installing OOo and helping everyone learn how to use their new software?
For most/. geeks, the time it takes to learn a new software program that performs the same/similar function as another one is most likely minimal (assuming it's a well-written program). For many people, the time will be infinite unless someone shows them how to use it and it will still take a while for them to remember where stuff is/how to do stuff. Conversions aren't always justified because they'll be cheaper if the new practice is continued forever (what if 10 years from now, something new and proprietary and better comes out?). Furthermore, the "It's not the same as what I've been using for x years" is a perfectly valid argument for NOT switching.
I'm currently majoring in operations research & financial engineering (deals a lot w/ optimizing stuff) and if my university offered me the opportunity to double major I would also major in CS (by the time I graduate, I will almost definitely satisfy all CS requirements w/ the exception of maybe 1 or 2 courses). I'm graduating from a very respected university. If I wanted to work in IT, why wouldn't I be qualified because I don't have a CS degree? I will have the background for it, I will have a B.S.E (Bachelors of Science in Engineering).
Comments like yours scare me because it makes me think that the world is struggling so much to find objective ways to differentiate between people that having one thing written on your degree is more important than what courses you took or what knowledge/education you have. It's the same line that was brought up to counter a new anti-grade inflation proposal. THe new proposal which sets a quota on the number of As that can be given out (among other things), defines achievement to be determined by the grade you receive as opposed to defining grades to reflect your achievement (which in my head is backwards).
Correct me if I'm wrong and what you mean to say is that you need a degree, but the degree can be from a related field (such as yours from physics). But I understood your comment to mean we wont touc h someone w/out a degree even if their degree is from a related field.
I use randomly generated passwords. And I have a lot of them (I often forget which password goes to which login so it takes 2 or 3 tries to login, no biggie). However, my fingers memorized my passwords, off the top of my head I don't know a lot of them. What I used to do before memorizing them, was type them in a textfile, backwards and rot13's. something as simple as that to me is perfectly secure. i know security through obscurity is a bad idea, but there's no way to crack a simple encryption scheme if you have no idea when you've cracked it (and you wouldn't since my passwords are all random chars/symbols/numbers). Why not allow people to do something like that? Or not have such ridiculous requirements for passwords. I know gov't employees who've managed to fool the password system because there's doesn't check for similarity to last password, only exact match. it goes something like this (password1, password2, password3) and they cycle through all the digits until they can go back to their plain old password (substitute whatever her password is for where I wrote password).
To someone who doesn't know anything about complexity theory/dictionary attacks, they think, if they have a password no one would guess (such as a random concatentation of family member's birthdays/names) why does it have to be any harder for me to remember. If people don't understand/know of the existance of the technology that's used to crack passwords, how can they understand why they need a crazy password?
Lastly, as has been mentioned before, if people aren't explained why there information needs to be secure, they often have no desire to make it so.
In response to your open standards comment. What incentive does a company have to make a product to sell you designed specifically so that others can easily make it and try to outsell them? Why should a company try and make things cheaper for consumers when in doing so, it will increase competition for them and make it more difficult to make a profit?
We live in a capitalist society where money is generally the most important factor. I've taken several optimization courses and when you want to maximize two things (such as profit and cheapness to consumers) one has to take a backseat to the other, it's too difficult to try and optimize both.
One thing I frequently see people complaining about on/. is companies who lock you into their products (software/hardware/document formats/you name it). They do this for a reason. Compatibility allows you to pick from a wider range of products and are thus less likely to pick theirs. Most product-driven companies aren't concerned with selling you the best product, they want to sell you THEIR product. Economic theory states that they will have to make their product the best in order for you to buy it but that only works in perfectly competitive markets (low/no barriers to entry/exit) with perfect information.
The only way companies would agree to create an open parts standard would be if it would somehow be more profitable to them (which I cannot imagine unless none of them made a certain part that they all needed and thus they want to drive the price down for it by increasing competition).
Corporations are not evil, not out to screw you, they're just out to maximize their profit and screwing you is a side-affect. Products aren't priced at the cost of making them (including labor costs/all that jazz), they're priced so as to maximize profit for the company selling them. That's the short answer to why a car that costs as much/less to make as one made 5 years ago can cost thousands of dollars more. Lastly, some products are popular solely because they are super expensive. Dropping the price on these "trendy" products, would possibly decrease demand and thus lower profits even more.
"Another thing, get rid of calculators in school, make kids learn how to do math rather than relying on a calculator."
I hate that comment. I love math but I love abstract math and I had rote computations. I happen to be very good at mental math and absolutely despise when I can't use a calculator to multiply or divide annoying numbers (or calculate annoying integrals) simply because I find the work annoying/not fun to do. There's a WORLD of difference between difficult due to the concept being difficult and difficult because the numbers don't work out nicely.
Being good at math and having been in mostly accelerated courses, my experience is limited, but the problem I see is not people unable to add/subtract/multiply/divide but people not understanding the basic concepts because to them it's not important why something solves a problem only that it does. I think the key is to test children on CONCEPTS. Make sure they understand why something is true, not just that it is, especially when you begin reaching higher level math. And I don't mean memorize how to prove this esoteric theorem type testing, but actually coming up with good questions which test someone's knowledge of the material (not just the methods to solve problems). The problem here is that it's difficult to create these types of questions and much easier to simply say, calculate the value of this definite integral. However, I always learned better by knowing how something works. In my physics class for example, I never memorized the basic mechanics equations everyone else did because I just taught myself how to derive them. It's funny, I hate memorizing stuff and for the life of me could never memorize years/dates when events in history happened yet I can recite Brouwer's fixed point theorem and walk you through the proof of Fermat's last theorem (not the specifics of each part but the general things proved and how put together they prove the theorem) because this stuff makes sense to me.
I do however completely agree w/ you that the problem is that society downright discourages interest in math or science because that and being "cool" seem to be mututally exclusive.
I couldn't agree with you more. My abstract algebra course last semester was phenomenal because my prof was amazing. I'm taking a Game Theory course this semester (it's a math course not an econ course, there's a lot of high-level math in game theory) and I hate it yet I love the material because my prof sucks and doesn't explain things clearly in my opinion (and in the opinion of many other students I have talked to).
Math is one of those subjects that requires background information. For instance, a Field is not a difficult concept, yet it's formal definition (a commutative division ring) requires knowing what a Ring is, what a division ring is, and what makes it commutative. What's a ring, a ring is an abelian group under some operation (call it addition) that also has another operation (multiplication) that obeys some rules (such as multiplication must distribute over addition). Now, what's a group, what makes a group abelian? See the problem?
Perhaps a better approach would be to not use the formal definitions right away, for instance a field can also be defined as an abelian group that if also a group under multiplication if you remove the additive identitity from the group. This no longer requires knowing anything about rings.
Lastly, many students have no desire to learn for learning's sake, they learn so they can get good grades, and be succesful in life. This sort of attitude (which the system encourages by not requiring students to be able to remember anything from a course once it has ended) helps contribute to the why should I learn difficult subjects mentality. For instance, all engineering students here are required to take a basic comp sci/programming course. They have 3 choices that are (hard & well-taught but you really know how to program when you leave) (medium & you don't know what you're doing but at least you've done some programming on your own ) and (easy & you know nothing because you end up getting the TAs to do all your assignments for you). Most people take the easy way out unless they really are interested in CS. Why? It's hard, why should I take a hard class when I don't have to.
As a college student now I'm going to respond to this. One of the "punishments" we had in junior high school was "in school suspension" which meant spending all day in basically detention. A lot of kids enjoyed it more than class, so that's not much of a punishment.
In my opinion, the problem is a) classes are boring for most kids (even me, someone who loves to learn). If you're gonna teach to the middle, the top will be bored out of the minds and the bottom will be confused as hell. I don't know if tracking works better but in elementary school I always LOVED my enrichment class because it was fun and challenging and all my friends in it loved it also. b) academic stuff isn't "cool". It's cool to know every sports statistic about your favorite team and watch every sports game, but it's not cool to know anything about physics/math theories. This is a societal problem, until it's acceptable for someone to be interested in math/science and not be labelled as a nerd/dork/dweeb there wont be much interest in math/science by normal kids. The only people from my high school who were actually openly into learning about math/science were people in my math research class who were also two-sport varsity ATHLETES and could get away w/ it w/out being made fun of and labelled a dork.
I think the biggest problem is a) though. The classes are really confusing for a lot of people and too easy for those who truly understand it. Not to sound like an ass but I spent the first month of my AP physics course beating Super Mario brothers on my calculator. Why? Because it was more interesting than listening to my prof drone on and on explaining something I had understood for over a week. I still managed to get 100 on more than half of the exams so there was no incentive for me to pay attention.
Laslty, (this should probably be c) most people see no need to know physics/abstract algebra/topology because they don't see how it's applied. They don't understand that they're being taught how to think and that that's what's most important. And honestly, it often has no use because (in my inexperienced opinion) we don't live in a world that often requires critical thinking. Many jobs are designed to require the list amount of thinking possible so as to be easily picked up by the largest number of people.
The problem with the estate tax is this situation. I own a business worth say $10mil, I die, my kids inherit my business. They now have to pay estate taxes. They have no cash to pay the taxes with, all they have is an ASSET they might not wish to sell that's being taxed at it's worth were it to be sold. That's how estate taxes affect normal people.
Or if I own a controlling interest in a public company and die, my kids inherit this but have to pay taxes on it, only way to pay them is to sell off this interest (and perhaps losing the controlling interest). That's why estate planning is so important, to make sure things like this don't happen (because the law doesn't differentiate between assets inherited and money inherited and if it did, what about the example with stock I proposed before, that would then become an easy way to get around paying estate taxes).
While I think repealing the estate tax is DUMB, there are ways it helps those who aren't extremely rich. My dad does complex estate planning, I know what I'm talking about for once.
Or another example (in real life, one that my dad dealt with), Ernest Hemmingway dies and the copyrights on his work pass on to his children, but these copyrights have a value (from income that has yet to be received) and so estate tax has to paid on them. However the children don't have the money to pay the taxes, they can either take out a loan on future earnings from it (which requires paying interest they should not have to pay) or sell the copyright to raise the money to pay the taxes. In my head (ignoring your feelings about copyright law currently) this isn't fair at all to be forced to come up w/ money to pay tax on something that has yet to earn you any money.
As has been proven by something called Carnival Booth any system for screening potential threats that does not have a sufficiently random element can be beaten. The system will supposedly screen some people everytime and will screen some people none of the time. This means if I'm a terrorist and me and 9 terrorist friends get on a plane, and one of us doesn't get screened, we send him on 5 more flights, if he never gets screened there's a good chance he never will (assuming nothing changes his risk status). He's then a good candidate to do bad things. Basically, the system provides a way for terrorists to find out who's a good candidate that wont be stopped while trying to get onto the plane.
That's my objection to the system. Furthermore, why is racial profiling considered evil? It's not saying, oh you're arabic, you must be a terrorist, it's saying you're arabic, x% of terrorists we've found are arabic, so if we screen more people who look like you, we might catch more terrorists. Obviously we shouldn't screen based solely on race but why is it bad to single out people who fall into a group that historically has been more likely to be a problem as opposed to senator's w/ metal in their hips or old grandmothers w/ hip replacements?
It's very common for people to oppose anything that they think might set a precedent which could one day lead to the loss of what they want. Let's take two example, 1) gun control. In my experience, the active gun lobby doesn't want any restrictions on gun use/production at all. I don't think this is because they actually see a legal use for fully automatic assault rifles but because 1 anti-gun law can lead to 2 which can lead to more which could possibly eventually lead to the second ammendment becomming nullified/repealed (no idea what the process is but it can be done).
On the same token, I am vehemently pro-choice. I don't think a woman should be forced to carry a child to term FOR ANY REASON (for the record I also don't believe a fetus is a life so I don't view abortion as murder). However, one of my biggest fears about any sort of abortion law being passed (such as abortions only in the case of rape/incest/danger to the mother) is most likely that this will lead to more draconian laws that further restrict a person's ability to choose whether or not she wants to carry a fetus inside her for 9 months.
The ANTI-DRM crowd hates the idea that they cannot do anything they want (that's legal) with a product they purchased. It has nothing to do w/ pragmatic goals, it has everything to do "we don't ever want restrictive DRM because it means we can't run this on our main system". Consequently, they don't want any DRM to become popular so they oppose it. It's not people saying they don't give a crap about copyright laws. It's about people saying my fair use is important to me, I don't EVER want to see any restrictions placed on it.
My point was arguing against the vote w/ your wallet comment in regards to people complaining about M$ Windows being insecure. You just summed up my point, you can't always get what you want. Voting w/ your wallet wont do anything because there are no good alternatives w/out spending a lot of time/money. I'm not saying there's no way to have a secure operating system, but don't tell people to vote with their wallet when there's not really another option (because security isn't the MAIN criterion for most people when picking out an OS).
It's very simple. Some corporations with power want it, so legislators see a reason to introduce it. The few people technologically educated enough to see how ridiculous it is don't have very much power/are not particularly visible to law enforcement. That's why it keeps coming up again, it's something people who donate money want and most citizens don't care/know enough about to really oppose.
Imagine how different things would be if laws regarding niche areas (considering software patents niche is a bit of a stretch but you get the idea) weren't brought up until people in that area (not just large corporations) were actually consulted on it. Basically is every lawmaker who proposed a technological law came and consulted slashdot to get an opinion on it.
But that's not how things are done. Just like how the USPTO only uses other patent applications to determine prior art, politicians don't appear to have any desire to educate themselves as to whether or not a law helps the people, only as to whether or not their constituents want it (requires them to care about it first) or sadly often more importantly whether or not their campaign contributors want it.
I know encryption schemes such as RSA rely on the difficult of integer factorization as opposed to the ease of multiplying two prime numbers together/generating a prime number. And I know we have a provable quantum integer factorization algorithm (that factored 15 into 3 and 5) that works in sqrt(n) time I believe. What about other encryption methods such as ECC (elliptic curve cryptography) which rely on the difficulty of the discrete logarithm problem (or in the case of ECC, the elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem which according to wikipedia "is [belived to be] significantly more difficult than DLP."). Will quantum computers be able to make these problems easy enough to brute-force them faster than exponential time?
Informally, it's impossible to observe say the spin of a photon without pretty much destroying it. So you'd have to reconstruct a photon w/ the same spin. However photons also have other properties which you cannot measure at the same time (Heisenberg's uncertainty principle), so basically the man-in-the-middle attack fails because the man in the middle cannot get all the information required to retransmit the photon exactly as is. There are ways using entanglement to test and make sure the photon is exactly what Alice sent (I don't know specifics off the top of my head).
Basically, no way to recreate the bit you receive in such a way that Bob wont know it was modified.
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Probably not the smartest thing to put in writing but me and my friends break the law nearly everyday because we find it to be stupid and pointless and arbitrary. I'm talking mainly about underage drinking laws/the fact that smoking/possessing pot is illegal and minor traffic violations and such. I personally am incredibly afraid of the police because in my limited experience, the police play the role of breaking up parties/giving out traffic tickets for safe infractions of the law (well what I consider safe. I realize we need to have a standard because we can't let everyone decide what's safe)/arresting people for smoking/possessing pot (IMHO, more harmless than many "legal" drugs such as alcohol). Thankfully I've never been the target of serious crime and honestly needed the police but it says a lot that I have such a low opinion of them because my experiences w/ them have been them enforcing laws I disagree with/are just a hassle/being enforced because they're laws and what we did violated the wording, not because what we did violated the spirit of the law/is a detriment to society.
I personally hate laws that are designed so that they are unforcable and then don't serve their purpose or end up being overreaching because they need to be objective even when serving a subjective purpose. Drinking age - IMHO, intended to prevent minors from making this decision on their own which they're not capable of making and harming their bodies. They needed an objective point to set the law instead of the subjective, capable of making this decision (same w/ why can't my parents serve me alcohol. I had a glass of champagne at my sister's graduation, was I 21, no. Law is dumb, IMHO.
I saw a band play today (Nine Days) and they mentioned that EPIC had scrapped one of their CDs and since they played a couple songs from it, they flat out said, if you like it, go download it from somewhere, we just want you listening to our music. It was so nice to hear a band that wanted you to listen to its music without any other motives (granted they couldn't sell this CD since it was never released but it was nice to hear them encouraging people to just listen to their music knowing they weren't making any money off of it).
Not true.
If companies don't outsource the fear is another company from another country will undercut them. There are two ways to compete: better product, cheaper product. American workers CAN'T compete w/ the cheaper product because we have a much higher cost of living. In my opinion, any job that can be outsourced WILL be outsourced eventually, and we should stop trying to pretend it's the govt's/CEOs fault.
And good for the economy means will provide AMERICAN JOBS in the long-run and allow american firms to REMAIN dominant/competitive (hint: paying your workers more than your competition is a BAD idea from a business standpoint unless your workers are more productive/produce a significantly better product), just not these IT jobs that are being outsourced. And the average Joe is a shareholder. Stop whining at CEOs for doing their jobs. The system is designed to let the best/cheapest product win, not the American product. We need to find ways to make American workers more valuable than cheap offshore workers. That's the solution.
The problem is that local IT workers AREN'T enough better than offshore workers to justify the cost difference. While many disagree w/ me I'm sure, I don't consider most IT work white-collar work so it doesn't scare me that it's being outsourced.
Ask yourself this: would you be up in arms about filing clerks being replaced w/ computer database systems that are cheaper/more efficient? Probably not, but it's the same thing. It's a job sector that is no longer guaranteed work because there's a lot more supply that's more then ADEQUATE to do the job. There are plenty of jobs for math/science educated people outside the IT sector that aren't getting outsourced. Just because IT jobs are dissapearing, doesn't mean your skillset/education is now uselesss in the US.
In response to the zealously religious. To those of us who are either atheist/agnostic (on in my case, believe something created this world but whether it was one superior being, a race of superior beings, or we're part of a simulation, i have no idea) he is way TOO religious. I personally would prefer if the President of this country never once invoked the name of God except maybe as slang to swear (oh my god type thing). But I am not the majority, so I lose.
To someone who is religious, Bush is not a zealot by any means but to someone who does not believe in that one God, he is way too religious for our liking. Especially those of us who are strongly pro-choice. Religious is mutually exclusive w/ being pro-choice when your religion states that life begins at conception And for those of us w/ friends who have diseases (parkinson's/diabetes) that have very promising stem-cell research, any sort of laws doing anything to discourage this research bothers us. Hence Bush is too religious for many.
While this is FAR from the majority opinion, I'd prefer to have a President who doesn't just believe what he's told and does not follow ANY organized religion. So to me (and many others) Bush is too religious.
While I agree with you on most counts, in almost no cases do stockholders of a public company actually run the company (they own it/shares of it but I don't know of any public company that doesn't have a board of directors/CEO who actually runs the company). What you have to worry about is the board of directors not caring about being shady, that's what matters.
Furthermore, I recently had someone from google talk in one of my CS classes and one of the reasons he's stuck there is that the people running the company really care about their employees (read: are not money-grubbing freaks). I don't think this means the company is going downhill.
Clarification: Google had reached a size in which they were going to legally have to file paperwork w/ the SEC as if they were public. This means all the beaurecratic paperwork hassle w/out the easy access to capital. Not doing an IPO would have been a very poor business decision. Just because a company is public doesn't mean the people running the company (esp if they're still majority stockholders, which they might be, I haven't read the SEC filing to know what % of stock is being given away) don't have control anymore.
It completely depends on the band's policy. Some bands (Dave Matthews Band for example) downright encourage recording of their concerts. However, in that case, it's still illegal to SELL them. You're encouraged to distribute them for free (in fact all you're allowed to charge for according to their TOS is distribution costs) in a lossless format.
For those interested, the official DMB taping policy
Quick summary of the policy: "Dave Matthews Band has always encouraged the taping of our performances, but only for personal use, including trading, as outlined in the Taping Policy Statement. The proliferation of commercial resale of recordings of our concerts has become a concern to us. Commercial bootleg's are not only excessively priced and of inferior quality, but primarily, they are an illegal use that threaten the taping privileges of everyone."
Dave matthews let's you (some restrictions) and if you buy special "recording" tickets, they'll put you right by the sound board to get a better recording. The restrictions on DMB stuff are basically so that you can't profit off of it and there's no sound degradation (you're technically not supposed to distribute the music if it's compressed in a lossy format).
Pearl Jam is another band that sells live bootlegs (in an effort to stave off people selling crappy versions, they generally sell a copy of any concert they play at - often hard to find unless you order through them).
Fundamental problem: Pick any two: a system that accomplishes it's goals, a system w/ no unintended side effects, an enforcable/workable system.
MPAA is interested in the not allowing illegal distribution goal and the having a system that works goal. They don't give a shit about the small minority who want to play DVDs on some "weird" system that doesn't have licensed support. Or people who want to build stuff themself. As Valenti said, then the legislation has to somehow deal w/ what's a viable reason to break the encryption and what's not which is very difficult and now (in his head) the system becomes unworkable.
slightly OT, same thing w/ death penalty laws in texas. someone was on death row and in Texas new evidence cannot be submitted more than 40 days after trial (because it could then allow savy attorneys to cause infinite delays and the sentence might never be carried out) and someone was executed because DNA evidence that exonerated them wasn't allowed to be entered (info from a speech by the unibomber's brother on the death penalty - really against the death penalty). The answer to how could you let that happen was: it's more important for the system to work than for the system to make sure that no innocent person gets killed.
THAT'S the fundamental problem. People w/ different views on what the main goal of a system should be. To the MPAA/RIAA work and accomplish our goals most of the time, to the tinkerer it's work and have NO unintended side-affects that don't let me use this product in any fair use way I see fit.
Dead on. If I had mod points I'd give them to you.
/. crowd, the avg person simply wants something that works and is good enough for their uses. To the techy this product might be shoddy and bug-ridden because it's new advanced features are hacked together and cruddy, but the average person doesn't use them so doesn't care. No matter what you want to say about their ethics/morals/questionable business practices, you have to admit M$ is brilliantly savy when it comes to business. There's a lot more to dominating a market then making the best product.
The difference between the avg person and
No his point is, what was important to MS was selling the most amount of units. That means, targetting the widest audience, not necessarily the people who'd use it the most/benefit most from a better product. What he's saying is that most customer's needed a decent easy-to-us4e product and that's what microsoft produced. Focusing on quality when it's not what most of your customers care most about would have been a very poor business decision. Just because developers hate M$ doesn't mean they're not a very business savy company, look how profitable/dominant they are. They're clearly doing something right (any and all arguments about abusing their monopoly must realize they had to earn their monopoly before they could abuse it).
Microsoft's method: Design a product usable by the maximum amount of people that has enough functionality to keep most people using it.
Better than: design the perfect feature-laden product which will be impossible for 90% of people to learn.
Remember microsoft gets paid per unit sold, regardless of how much you use the software.
We've all seen the RIAA flounder around trying to protect an outdated business model. Do you really think the countries in the Middle East would just say, "ok, our time is over." I bet there'd be huge amounts of fighting to keep the world relying on oil and it would be a huge mess. Just because something isn't needed anymore, doesn't mean the people selling it are going to just give up w/out a fight, admit they're not needed anymore and just accept that you will switch to the new/better product.
There's a difference between comparing using OOo or using MS Office and compatring the benefits between STICKING w/ MS Office and CONVERTING TO OOo.
/. geeks, the time it takes to learn a new software program that performs the same/similar function as another one is most likely minimal (assuming it's a well-written program). For many people, the time will be infinite unless someone shows them how to use it and it will still take a while for them to remember where stuff is/how to do stuff. Conversions aren't always justified because they'll be cheaper if the new practice is continued forever (what if 10 years from now, something new and proprietary and better comes out?). Furthermore, the "It's not the same as what I've been using for x years" is a perfectly valid argument for NOT switching.
In the first case, it's a no-brainer in my head (except for the support issue, but as has been mentioned, odds are there's an IT person doing support NOT Microsoft - so just have your IT person look the stuff up elsewhere or ask different friends).
In the second case, it's not. As I'm sure anyone who's worked in a medium sized or bigger office has seen, many people don't know anything about computers and if the menus aren't organized EXACTlY the same way, they're going to need help. THe question is, is their lessened productivity while adjusting (plus your IT guys time) offset by the lessened cost (esp when a lot of windows computers come w/ MS Office loaded on them already). Or in my dad's law firm where there is no IT person but 1 lawyer who's computer savy and helps out w/ people's issues, is it worth her not working (and thus not billing out at her rate of several hundred dollars per hour) for x hours because she's installing OOo and helping everyone learn how to use their new software?
For most
I'm currently majoring in operations research & financial engineering (deals a lot w/ optimizing stuff) and if my university offered me the opportunity to double major I would also major in CS (by the time I graduate, I will almost definitely satisfy all CS requirements w/ the exception of maybe 1 or 2 courses). I'm graduating from a very respected university. If I wanted to work in IT, why wouldn't I be qualified because I don't have a CS degree? I will have the background for it, I will have a B.S.E (Bachelors of Science in Engineering).
Comments like yours scare me because it makes me think that the world is struggling so much to find objective ways to differentiate between people that having one thing written on your degree is more important than what courses you took or what knowledge/education you have. It's the same line that was brought up to counter a new anti-grade inflation proposal. THe new proposal which sets a quota on the number of As that can be given out (among other things), defines achievement to be determined by the grade you receive as opposed to defining grades to reflect your achievement (which in my head is backwards).
Correct me if I'm wrong and what you mean to say is that you need a degree, but the degree can be from a related field (such as yours from physics). But I understood your comment to mean we wont touc h someone w/out a degree even if their degree is from a related field.
I use randomly generated passwords. And I have a lot of them (I often forget which password goes to which login so it takes 2 or 3 tries to login, no biggie). However, my fingers memorized my passwords, off the top of my head I don't know a lot of them. What I used to do before memorizing them, was type them in a textfile, backwards and rot13's. something as simple as that to me is perfectly secure. i know security through obscurity is a bad idea, but there's no way to crack a simple encryption scheme if you have no idea when you've cracked it (and you wouldn't since my passwords are all random chars/symbols/numbers). Why not allow people to do something like that? Or not have such ridiculous requirements for passwords. I know gov't employees who've managed to fool the password system because there's doesn't check for similarity to last password, only exact match. it goes something like this (password1, password2, password3) and they cycle through all the digits until they can go back to their plain old password (substitute whatever her password is for where I wrote password).
To someone who doesn't know anything about complexity theory/dictionary attacks, they think, if they have a password no one would guess (such as a random concatentation of family member's birthdays/names) why does it have to be any harder for me to remember. If people don't understand/know of the existance of the technology that's used to crack passwords, how can they understand why they need a crazy password?
Lastly, as has been mentioned before, if people aren't explained why there information needs to be secure, they often have no desire to make it so.
In response to your open standards comment. What incentive does a company have to make a product to sell you designed specifically so that others can easily make it and try to outsell them? Why should a company try and make things cheaper for consumers when in doing so, it will increase competition for them and make it more difficult to make a profit?
/. is companies who lock you into their products (software/hardware/document formats/you name it). They do this for a reason. Compatibility allows you to pick from a wider range of products and are thus less likely to pick theirs. Most product-driven companies aren't concerned with selling you the best product, they want to sell you THEIR product. Economic theory states that they will have to make their product the best in order for you to buy it but that only works in perfectly competitive markets (low/no barriers to entry/exit) with perfect information.
We live in a capitalist society where money is generally the most important factor. I've taken several optimization courses and when you want to maximize two things (such as profit and cheapness to consumers) one has to take a backseat to the other, it's too difficult to try and optimize both.
One thing I frequently see people complaining about on
The only way companies would agree to create an open parts standard would be if it would somehow be more profitable to them (which I cannot imagine unless none of them made a certain part that they all needed and thus they want to drive the price down for it by increasing competition).
Corporations are not evil, not out to screw you, they're just out to maximize their profit and screwing you is a side-affect. Products aren't priced at the cost of making them (including labor costs/all that jazz), they're priced so as to maximize profit for the company selling them. That's the short answer to why a car that costs as much/less to make as one made 5 years ago can cost thousands of dollars more. Lastly, some products are popular solely because they are super expensive. Dropping the price on these "trendy" products, would possibly decrease demand and thus lower profits even more.
"Another thing, get rid of calculators in school, make kids learn how to do math rather than relying on a calculator."
I hate that comment. I love math but I love abstract math and I had rote computations. I happen to be very good at mental math and absolutely despise when I can't use a calculator to multiply or divide annoying numbers (or calculate annoying integrals) simply because I find the work annoying/not fun to do. There's a WORLD of difference between difficult due to the concept being difficult and difficult because the numbers don't work out nicely.
Being good at math and having been in mostly accelerated courses, my experience is limited, but the problem I see is not people unable to add/subtract/multiply/divide but people not understanding the basic concepts because to them it's not important why something solves a problem only that it does. I think the key is to test children on CONCEPTS. Make sure they understand why something is true, not just that it is, especially when you begin reaching higher level math. And I don't mean memorize how to prove this esoteric theorem type testing, but actually coming up with good questions which test someone's knowledge of the material (not just the methods to solve problems). The problem here is that it's difficult to create these types of questions and much easier to simply say, calculate the value of this definite integral. However, I always learned better by knowing how something works. In my physics class for example, I never memorized the basic mechanics equations everyone else did because I just taught myself how to derive them. It's funny, I hate memorizing stuff and for the life of me could never memorize years/dates when events in history happened yet I can recite Brouwer's fixed point theorem and walk you through the proof of Fermat's last theorem (not the specifics of each part but the general things proved and how put together they prove the theorem) because this stuff makes sense to me.
I do however completely agree w/ you that the problem is that society downright discourages interest in math or science because that and being "cool" seem to be mututally exclusive.
I couldn't agree with you more. My abstract algebra course last semester was phenomenal because my prof was amazing. I'm taking a Game Theory course this semester (it's a math course not an econ course, there's a lot of high-level math in game theory) and I hate it yet I love the material because my prof sucks and doesn't explain things clearly in my opinion (and in the opinion of many other students I have talked to).
Math is one of those subjects that requires background information. For instance, a Field is not a difficult concept, yet it's formal definition (a commutative division ring) requires knowing what a Ring is, what a division ring is, and what makes it commutative. What's a ring, a ring is an abelian group under some operation (call it addition) that also has another operation (multiplication) that obeys some rules (such as multiplication must distribute over addition). Now, what's a group, what makes a group abelian? See the problem?
Perhaps a better approach would be to not use the formal definitions right away, for instance a field can also be defined as an abelian group that if also a group under multiplication if you remove the additive identitity from the group. This no longer requires knowing anything about rings.
Lastly, many students have no desire to learn for learning's sake, they learn so they can get good grades, and be succesful in life. This sort of attitude (which the system encourages by not requiring students to be able to remember anything from a course once it has ended) helps contribute to the why should I learn difficult subjects mentality. For instance, all engineering students here are required to take a basic comp sci/programming course. They have 3 choices that are (hard & well-taught but you really know how to program when you leave) (medium & you don't know what you're doing but at least you've done some programming on your own ) and (easy & you know nothing because you end up getting the TAs to do all your assignments for you). Most people take the easy way out unless they really are interested in CS. Why? It's hard, why should I take a hard class when I don't have to.
As a college student now I'm going to respond to this. One of the "punishments" we had in junior high school was "in school suspension" which meant spending all day in basically detention. A lot of kids enjoyed it more than class, so that's not much of a punishment.
In my opinion, the problem is a) classes are boring for most kids (even me, someone who loves to learn). If you're gonna teach to the middle, the top will be bored out of the minds and the bottom will be confused as hell. I don't know if tracking works better but in elementary school I always LOVED my enrichment class because it was fun and challenging and all my friends in it loved it also. b) academic stuff isn't "cool". It's cool to know every sports statistic about your favorite team and watch every sports game, but it's not cool to know anything about physics/math theories. This is a societal problem, until it's acceptable for someone to be interested in math/science and not be labelled as a nerd/dork/dweeb there wont be much interest in math/science by normal kids. The only people from my high school who were actually openly into learning about math/science were people in my math research class who were also two-sport varsity ATHLETES and could get away w/ it w/out being made fun of and labelled a dork.
I think the biggest problem is a) though. The classes are really confusing for a lot of people and too easy for those who truly understand it. Not to sound like an ass but I spent the first month of my AP physics course beating Super Mario brothers on my calculator. Why? Because it was more interesting than listening to my prof drone on and on explaining something I had understood for over a week. I still managed to get 100 on more than half of the exams so there was no incentive for me to pay attention.
Laslty, (this should probably be c) most people see no need to know physics/abstract algebra/topology because they don't see how it's applied. They don't understand that they're being taught how to think and that that's what's most important. And honestly, it often has no use because (in my inexperienced opinion) we don't live in a world that often requires critical thinking. Many jobs are designed to require the list amount of thinking possible so as to be easily picked up by the largest number of people.
The problem with the estate tax is this situation. I own a business worth say $10mil, I die, my kids inherit my business. They now have to pay estate taxes. They have no cash to pay the taxes with, all they have is an ASSET they might not wish to sell that's being taxed at it's worth were it to be sold. That's how estate taxes affect normal people.
Or if I own a controlling interest in a public company and die, my kids inherit this but have to pay taxes on it, only way to pay them is to sell off this interest (and perhaps losing the controlling interest). That's why estate planning is so important, to make sure things like this don't happen (because the law doesn't differentiate between assets inherited and money inherited and if it did, what about the example with stock I proposed before, that would then become an easy way to get around paying estate taxes).
While I think repealing the estate tax is DUMB, there are ways it helps those who aren't extremely rich. My dad does complex estate planning, I know what I'm talking about for once.
Or another example (in real life, one that my dad dealt with), Ernest Hemmingway dies and the copyrights on his work pass on to his children, but these copyrights have a value (from income that has yet to be received) and so estate tax has to paid on them. However the children don't have the money to pay the taxes, they can either take out a loan on future earnings from it (which requires paying interest they should not have to pay) or sell the copyright to raise the money to pay the taxes. In my head (ignoring your feelings about copyright law currently) this isn't fair at all to be forced to come up w/ money to pay tax on something that has yet to earn you any money.
As has been proven by something called Carnival Booth any system for screening potential threats that does not have a sufficiently random element can be beaten. The system will supposedly screen some people everytime and will screen some people none of the time. This means if I'm a terrorist and me and 9 terrorist friends get on a plane, and one of us doesn't get screened, we send him on 5 more flights, if he never gets screened there's a good chance he never will (assuming nothing changes his risk status). He's then a good candidate to do bad things. Basically, the system provides a way for terrorists to find out who's a good candidate that wont be stopped while trying to get onto the plane.
That's my objection to the system. Furthermore, why is racial profiling considered evil? It's not saying, oh you're arabic, you must be a terrorist, it's saying you're arabic, x% of terrorists we've found are arabic, so if we screen more people who look like you, we might catch more terrorists. Obviously we shouldn't screen based solely on race but why is it bad to single out people who fall into a group that historically has been more likely to be a problem as opposed to senator's w/ metal in their hips or old grandmothers w/ hip replacements?
It's very common for people to oppose anything that they think might set a precedent which could one day lead to the loss of what they want. Let's take two example, 1) gun control. In my experience, the active gun lobby doesn't want any restrictions on gun use/production at all. I don't think this is because they actually see a legal use for fully automatic assault rifles but because 1 anti-gun law can lead to 2 which can lead to more which could possibly eventually lead to the second ammendment becomming nullified/repealed (no idea what the process is but it can be done).
On the same token, I am vehemently pro-choice. I don't think a woman should be forced to carry a child to term FOR ANY REASON (for the record I also don't believe a fetus is a life so I don't view abortion as murder). However, one of my biggest fears about any sort of abortion law being passed (such as abortions only in the case of rape/incest/danger to the mother) is most likely that this will lead to more draconian laws that further restrict a person's ability to choose whether or not she wants to carry a fetus inside her for 9 months.
The ANTI-DRM crowd hates the idea that they cannot do anything they want (that's legal) with a product they purchased. It has nothing to do w/ pragmatic goals, it has everything to do "we don't ever want restrictive DRM because it means we can't run this on our main system". Consequently, they don't want any DRM to become popular so they oppose it. It's not people saying they don't give a crap about copyright laws. It's about people saying my fair use is important to me, I don't EVER want to see any restrictions placed on it.
My point was arguing against the vote w/ your wallet comment in regards to people complaining about M$ Windows being insecure. You just summed up my point, you can't always get what you want. Voting w/ your wallet wont do anything because there are no good alternatives w/out spending a lot of time/money. I'm not saying there's no way to have a secure operating system, but don't tell people to vote with their wallet when there's not really another option (because security isn't the MAIN criterion for most people when picking out an OS).
It's very simple. Some corporations with power want it, so legislators see a reason to introduce it. The few people technologically educated enough to see how ridiculous it is don't have very much power/are not particularly visible to law enforcement. That's why it keeps coming up again, it's something people who donate money want and most citizens don't care/know enough about to really oppose.
Imagine how different things would be if laws regarding niche areas (considering software patents niche is a bit of a stretch but you get the idea) weren't brought up until people in that area (not just large corporations) were actually consulted on it. Basically is every lawmaker who proposed a technological law came and consulted slashdot to get an opinion on it.
But that's not how things are done. Just like how the USPTO only uses other patent applications to determine prior art, politicians don't appear to have any desire to educate themselves as to whether or not a law helps the people, only as to whether or not their constituents want it (requires them to care about it first) or sadly often more importantly whether or not their campaign contributors want it.
I know encryption schemes such as RSA rely on the difficult of integer factorization as opposed to the ease of multiplying two prime numbers together/generating a prime number. And I know we have a provable quantum integer factorization algorithm (that factored 15 into 3 and 5) that works in sqrt(n) time I believe. What about other encryption methods such as ECC (elliptic curve cryptography) which rely on the difficulty of the discrete logarithm problem (or in the case of ECC, the elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem which according to wikipedia "is [belived to be] significantly more difficult than DLP."). Will quantum computers be able to make these problems easy enough to brute-force them faster than exponential time?
Informally, it's impossible to observe say the spin of a photon without pretty much destroying it. So you'd have to reconstruct a photon w/ the same spin. However photons also have other properties which you cannot measure at the same time (Heisenberg's uncertainty principle), so basically the man-in-the-middle attack fails because the man in the middle cannot get all the information required to retransmit the photon exactly as is. There are ways using entanglement to test and make sure the photon is exactly what Alice sent (I don't know specifics off the top of my head).
Basically, no way to recreate the bit you receive in such a way that Bob wont know it was modified.