Here's an elegant way to put it: in The Winner-Take-All Society, they point out that a smart person with generic talents can make a killing in business, law or finance, or expect to be mistreated and underpaid as an engineer while working just as hard. How can we expect smart people (or anyone) to make a decision contrary to their best interests? I think we take too dim a view of the profit motive here on Slashdot sometimes. Yeah, some diploma mills churned out code monkeys who were just in it for the gold rush. But if someone's very smart and hardworking, they generally expect to be compensated accordingly. If they don't see that happening in a productive year, why is it a surprise that so many of our brightest people are avoiding science?
It's probably futile to try and block the H1-B program entirely, or even if we did, expect that to change anything since wholesale outsourcing is the ultimate goal. One solution proposed in the book was to end subsidies for business, finance and law programs, since too many people are entering them for the benefit they provide to society, and grant lavish subsidies to science and engineering programs, increasing both financial aid and the number of spots. If you knew that you'd have to pay a half million bucks to get JD, but you could get a Ph.D. in EECS with enough grant money that you'd never have to work while going to school or take out a single loan, that Ph.D. would start looking a lot better. Of course, I'm skeptical of this, since the primary problem seems to be that companies don't want to properly compensate anyone regardless of their education.
We must believe that Unix is a part of Linux on faith alone. This is what we refer to as a "religious mystery," ala the Holy Trinity. Thus, to ask how can Unix and Linux be one in the same is equivalent to asking how the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit can be one, yet distinct. I, for one, need no other proof than the Divinely Inspired testimony of McBride, and anticipate the coming day of His own Passion.
At some point in the past, MADD's goal was to increase penalties for drunk driving. They did that. However, in doing it, they had created a vast organization with thousands of employees and volunteers and an extensive funding apparatus. If they just said, "Okay girls, we won, time to go home," the party would be over. This beast has an annual budget of $45 million, a significant portion of which comes directly from the Department of Justice. You think they're gonna throw that cash-cow away?
Instead, they mutated into a prohibitionist organization who seeks, gradually, to outlaw all alcohol. Man, it's just like boiling a frog. From introducing their pseudoscientific method of determining whether they are "under the influence" by blood alcohol content, to the increase in the drinking age, to further lowering the maximum BAC, to pushing laws which violate our right to due process, to fallaciously claiming anyone who disagrees with them wants people to die, it is clear that will not give up an inch of ground they have gained, and will not stop until their organization dies or drinking is, again, completely against the law. Officers should be allowed discretion in determining themselves who is under the influence and who is not, young adults should learn to drink responsibly rather than surreptitiously pursuing "forbidden fruit," and people should not be deprived of liberty or property without due process.
When you understand this, their overreaction to GTA is clear. Like the NRA, they thrive on overreaction to generate irrational, unthinking fury in their membership. And in the absence of a clear goal, they have simply set their sights on alcohol itself, leaving reason by the wayside.
It doesn't have anything to do with depicting fictional illegal acts, not really.
The legislator's counterpoint is that the actual act which took place was not illegal. Thus, we might imagine that if someone made a film fictionally depicting a murder, it could be legal on the grounds that no actual assault occurred and that there's an understanding that it is fiction. On the other hand, if it's a real murder, it's a snuff film. Similarly, at least some "violent" pornography goes to lengths to show that the persons involved consent to and even enjoy the act by showing before/after interviews.
By contrast, I think it should be fairly obvious that the censor's primary objective is not to ban the fictional depiction of illegal acts, but the depiction of anything they find offensive. It's just like the question of whether violence in video games allows people to blow off steam or turns them into killing machines. One side has decided that they're bad and will always see a casual link where there is none, even though watching a spanking vid is not sufficient nor necessary to make me rape someone and playing Doom is not sufficient nor necessary to make me murder.
As an addendum, what I hate the most about censor-happy people is their absurd conviction that kinky sex is somehow new, and that up until a few years ago everyone had pleasureless missionary sex purely for the sake of procreation. In fact, the Kama Sutra talks at great length about erotic slapping. Are they going to ban the Kama Sutra?
Some people are incompatibilists - this means that they believe that they believe free will is incompatible with determinism - that if you weren't morally suspended, as some theologians might say, and completely free to choose either way, it wouldn't be free will. Some then go on to say that this is proof that free will does not exist, and some are then inclined to say that this means we do (but this are hard to frame in terms of science for obvious reasons).
Others, however, have the idea that free will and determinism are totally compatible. As John Milton's God said, "Just because I knew what they'd do doesn't remove their free will." Basically, any time you make a decision, that's free will, and a decision is but the result of the inputs fed into a computer, albeit a vastly complicated, conscious, very buggy computer.
You are absolutely correct. In most areas which are dicey enough that your laptop might be stolen even if you take all necessary precautions, the police and courts are so overworked that they won't bother to act on something that to them sounds like technobabble from 24 or Alias. My boss tried, repeatedly. He had an IP and everything. The police basically blew him off. And honestly, I'm not sure I would've done much different in their position. There's much more important things to do than help some desk jockey get a tablet pc back.
Simply put, your best bet is to make frequent, automatic backups of your information (and preferably store those backups in a place where they're not likely to get stolen along with the laptop), and get an insurance policy on your laptop.
As my father always explained to me, the problem with getting Federal or State grants and funds as a local school is that it always has strings attached. You need to jump through dozens of hoops to get the money, so many that sometimes it renders any financial advantage provided by the grant moot, or at the very least diverts human energy which could be spent dealing with problems on the ground.
That said, for all its problems, more money for local schools would be a very good thing in the majority of cases. They don't have enough money at my fiancee's school, which is in a perfectly middle-class city, to hire back any of the first and second year teachers, and how are they going to meet class size standards (and thus get money) if they don't have enough teachers?
Finally, I think it bears stating at this point that the total cost of Bush's military actions is somewhere between one and three trillion dollars. Maybe it would be a disaster to pull out of Iraq now, maybe that won't happen - but I'd bet that McCain, with his military swagger, tough-on-terrorism platform, economic incompetence and neocon bent would engage in some other kind of military action during his term, costing the American taxpayers another trillion dollars for no real benefit.
Funny, I was under the impression that some of the most popular study drugs, Ritalin and Adderol, were Schedule II Controlled Substances in the United States (along with Meth, Cocaine, Morphine, and OxyContin) meaning if you use these drugs you are, in fact, breaking the law. I know nobody said anybody broke the law, but it's a sound inference from the facts at hand.
An English test, or an Engineering or Science or Underwater basketweaving test for that matter, is competitive. If you get a perfect grade on a test, you will have a better chance at getting into a good graduate or professional school than someone who is not cheating. Since there are a finite number of spots, for every person who gets a spot in a top school, someone else loses that spot. An undergrad is probably not going to cure cancer, but they might cheat someone smarter than them who would eventually go on to cure cancer out of that spot. And that's what it's all about: trying to determine who is the most deserving. Does a dumber, more unscruplous person deserve a fellowship over their smarter, more principled colleague? That's why in academia you hear all these words like "test" and "grade" and "degree." They're trying to see how people measure up. When you cheat, you make the measurement invalid.
When you're a bona fide scientist, it's a whole different ballgame. But since undergraduate grades determine who gets to do the real research, I think cheating in that arena is unquestionably wrong.
Sure, enhancement is awesome. But in the context of competition, we have come to consider some artificial aids to be equivalent to cheating. The purpose of a competition or test is to measure something, and, frequently, to confer rewards based on that measurement. For example, if someone was taking an English test, I would consider the use of a drug which gave them the ability to recall the text perfectly just as unfair as if they were hiding the book in their lap. While ultimately circular, part of my justification for considering this cheating would be the fact that they are breaking the law, and I am reluctant to do so myself. Part of it is that I understand Ritalin acts like meth on most adults, and I have a very low opinion of tweakers. But the bulk of it is that it effectively makes the test a poor representation of a person's baseline ability in the subject.
This is as opposed to saving lives, or inventing medicines, or solving important problems. Despite the quixotic justifications many students use, their biggest reason for cheating is to secure a better future for themselves at the expense of someone else's. I can't really see a net benefit to society there. In fact, it might be argued that by trying to place themselves in "better" programs, they are ultimately doing themselves a disservice, as people poorly matched in ability to their program are likely to drop out.
Now, if we're not talking about a competition, I think it's more acceptable.
What's the difference between me taking the notes and selling them and me writing a book with information I originally learned from the notes and selling that?
I think the thing that bugs me about the idea of enforcing copyright on a lecture is that most of the lectures I have heard, while almost universally insightful and enlightening, have been about fairly non-disputable points of fact or well-established pieces of knowledge that don't belong to them or me. Does my philosophy lecturer own the right's to Hume's Fork or Occam's Razor? Is my programming instructor going to ask me for a nickle every time I write an try-catch block?
Presumably, the lecture itself is a creative work by the professor and falls under the prevue of copyright to some extent. But interpreting the lecture into a series of bullet points, unless some of those were original, novel ideas created by the professor, would seem to annihilate any direct claim the professor had in terms of copyright, the same as if I said:
Orphan boy is abused by foster parents.
Boy finds out he's magical and goes to magic school.
Boy has various adventures involving traps, basilisks, werewolves, dragons, mazes, and bad wizards.
Boy defeats big evil wizard and bones his best friend's little sister.
it would not seem to be under the copyright of JK Rowling, God willing. At least that's my instinct. And I think the heart of the problem is that "intellectual property" itself is a weird, synthetic type of right which has grown beyond its original boundaries like some kind of white-collar carcinoma.
Perhaps there is something to the fact that, by and large, animals who can regenerate profoundly are cold-blooded, and no natural warm-blooded animals I'm aware of can do that. We already expend huge amounts of energy just keeping ourselves warm. Perhaps the regeneration faded with the increased energy expenditure from warm-bloodedness.
Judging by other types of counterfeits coming out of china, there probably are more traditional counterfeits of networking equipment coming out as well. By this, I mean, generic hardware put into a very convincing Cisco shell and stamped with the Cisco logo. For example, there's the iPhone ripoffs everyone's probably familiar with, as well as high-end guitar ripoffs which wouldn't fool a musician in person, but might fool an amateur, especially over the net.
I can't help but suspect that those who are apologizing for these Chinese counterfeiters are subscribing to a number of romantic notions, among them the desire to see the Chinese as well-intentioned but ignorant and a distaste for big companies. There may be some weight to the idea that they don't see plagiarism and counterfeit in the same way Westerners do, but I think, especially today, they know we have a problem with it.
Your argument smacks of something I hear all the time from some of my friends whose lives see more psychiatric intervention. Basically, it goes like this: "You think you've been depressed? That's nothing. If it didn't take medication to cure you, it's not real depression." Substitute any emotional disorder you want in there, in fact.
Now, I find this fundamentally suspect. Unlike cancer, which has an observable, physical cause and often observable symptoms, emotional disorders are purely subjective. All we can go on are descriptions, so we correlate a certain set of descriptions and say they're a disease. Fine. But then, someone, in retrospect, describes a time of their life which sounds like a depressive episode, but says, "But then I got better," because they roused themselves out of it like Baron Munchhausen, because someone else made them feel better, or for no reason. But if you turn around and say that disqualifies it as depression, it would seem, then, that the illness is being defined by what makes it better rather than what it is, which is absurd.
My theory as to why people employ this nonsense argument is that, if someone else can just 'snap out of it' by sheer force of will, then it undermines their need for chemical and clinical intervention. It becomes some type of moral failure on the part of the depressed to stay depressed. And if we entertain the idea that some people are "stronger" at coping than others, then it's kind of a depressing thought, so naturally we would like to avoid it.
For my part, I don't doubt that lives have been saved and vastly improved by chemical intervention, but it doesn't follow from this that anyone who did not receive chemical intervention was not depressed.
I'm familiar with this argument. It's the same one that occurs when you give a toddler a cookie, the toddler eats the cookie, and the toddler cries that it doesn't have a cookie anymore. The artists were compensated just as surely as the toddler was given a cookie, and the cookie went into the toddler's mouth as surely as the artists' compensation went up their noses.
In response to both you and the grandparent, don't forget that people without medical insurance do not get regular checkups or see doctors when they are still cheap to treat, but instead go to the ER when it's green and about to fall off.
The power of the modern media to set the tone of the national debate makes your reasoning circular. People decide what is important in the world based both on their observations and on the news. So, the argument becomes: they're not talking about him because he's not going to win, and he's not going to win because they're not talking about him. I will allow that it's not 100% circular, but there's definitely feedback there.
Besides, even if you ignore the probable fallaciousness, "He's not going to win anyway," is a poor argument. If he's not going to win, why not treat him fairly? What could it possibly do, since he's not going to win?
This argument then falls under the classification of either an irrational explanation or an incomplete one, and thus, of what I have seen so far, Occam's Razor would prefer a massive conspiracy, despite the number of additional questions it raises. And in fact, most Paulites can provide a number of cogent answers to those questions. I'm sure you can find most of them on this page, so I'll leave that out.
Even when you live a modern, active life it is possible to take things one at a time. I've generally found it to be the more successful strategies to try my best to do so.
Take cleaning house. I keep my house clean pretty well, and sometimes a friend of mine bribes me with food to help her clean up. She says, "I just look at the whole mess, and I'm overwhelmed. I don't know where to start." She seems to think of it as seventy tasks she has to do all at once. I tend to think of cleaning as a queue, since, for example, in order to do the dishes, you have to put away the dishes in the drying rack, and in order to do that you have to make room in the cupboard, etc. The only challenge is finding the front of the queue and doing the tasks one at a time, and keeping it up until you're satisfied or tired. I find it rather meditative.
At work (a small company), I have pretty varied responsibilities too, but I just keep a checklist of deadlines and tasks and do them, one at a time, until they are done. I'm so relaxed the Sales VP has joked that I'm on tranquilizers..
On the other hand, maybe I approach things this way out of habit precisely because I'm a bad multitasker. Whatever. I just believe that insane, frazzled multitasking is not a symptom of modern life itself, but rather of people's lack of expertise at coping with it.
The 92 Taurus I inherited is pretty powerful and gets decent mileage for a mid-sized sedan, but it's a pain in the butt to work on because of accessibility problems. I understand from my mechanic friend that this tends to be a problem for a lot of Fords.
I maintain a Facebook profile to keep in touch with old friends, and I don't do anything at parties which could get me put in prison. Heck, if people are smoking up at parties I go to, they're doing it out in a secluded area like good little second-hand-smoke-conscious Californians. I don't bear any resentment towards potheads, and I think it should be legalized, but I do think it's a little weird to do something which society penalizes so harshly no matter how good the high is, much less assume that if you're between the ages of 15 and 35 and you have a moderately active social life that you're some kind of human weatherballoon.
So, yeah, I can understand that if you had a bunch of shit to hide in your personal life why you'd not maintain a Facebook profile, but I don't have a lot to hide. I like my privacy just as much as the next guy, but the worst that could happen if someone saw a picture of me at a party would be mandatory remedial dance lessons.
No matter how specialized you are, some of your superiors just won't understand your value as an employee.
For example, the guy who got me started working with computers, a QA engineer, effectively replaced 3/4 employees in his department with scripts. He was doing fine for a few months - his supervisor understood that he'd saved the company a few hundred thousand dollars per year, at least. Then, a new supervisor gets installed, and after reviewing his underlings, he has the audacity to say, thought my colleague was making too much money. The supervisor didn't have even a basic understanding of unit testing, and thus could not square the corporate-jargon expectations of the position from the company literature with reality. Thankfully, everything got straightened out and he's still got a job:)
This just goes to show you: it's not about bad managers versus good managers, it's about some people attempting to manage in an area they know little or nothing about, meaning the only tools they have to understand their underlings are gimmicks, buzzwords, half-truths and outright delusions. When you're something they can't define using this bizarre, aphasic lexicon, of course they're going to give you the shaft. No doubt you've got it worse because no corporate bureaucrat is going to understand the true value of a generalist, but it's an endemic problem.
That's an impressive figure, but I would be interested to know how many packages deliberately aren't included in MacPorts because some equivalent is available in the OS X base system. Debian is a whole OS, and MacPorts is an addon, so MacPorts is going to have fewer packages just because its scope is narrower.
Surely this cannot explain the entire disparity and Debian indeed has numerous packages which are unavailable on MacPorts, but it's obvious to me that this is just because there's not enough demand for those packages to motivate someone to port them, as the only package I was interested in that I couldn't find on MacPorts was bacula - and I ended up using something else anyhow.
Regardless of how good VMware is getting, most people would rather have native implementations of their favorite apps than run them on a virtual machine. I cannot imagine anyone who uses Adobe's applications professionally with any degree of proficiency - and note that this does not include people who think they need Photoshop to size and crop a wide range of image formats - settling for less performance when full performance is just a boot away.
I think you have a point with Office, though. I can see myself keeping a VM for the few tasks that OpenOffice can't do quite well, or at all. But with Adobe's apps, computer speed often has a direct effect on project completion time. Someone working contract would be daft to effectively choose to make less money, and someone working salaried would have their manager calling them daft for effectively choosing to hurt the company's bottom line.
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Here's an elegant way to put it: in The Winner-Take-All Society, they point out that a smart person with generic talents can make a killing in business, law or finance, or expect to be mistreated and underpaid as an engineer while working just as hard. How can we expect smart people (or anyone) to make a decision contrary to their best interests? I think we take too dim a view of the profit motive here on Slashdot sometimes. Yeah, some diploma mills churned out code monkeys who were just in it for the gold rush. But if someone's very smart and hardworking, they generally expect to be compensated accordingly. If they don't see that happening in a productive year, why is it a surprise that so many of our brightest people are avoiding science?
It's probably futile to try and block the H1-B program entirely, or even if we did, expect that to change anything since wholesale outsourcing is the ultimate goal. One solution proposed in the book was to end subsidies for business, finance and law programs, since too many people are entering them for the benefit they provide to society, and grant lavish subsidies to science and engineering programs, increasing both financial aid and the number of spots. If you knew that you'd have to pay a half million bucks to get JD, but you could get a Ph.D. in EECS with enough grant money that you'd never have to work while going to school or take out a single loan, that Ph.D. would start looking a lot better. Of course, I'm skeptical of this, since the primary problem seems to be that companies don't want to properly compensate anyone regardless of their education.
(666) 666 6666 / the number / of the daughter / of the beast!
We must believe that Unix is a part of Linux on faith alone. This is what we refer to as a "religious mystery," ala the Holy Trinity. Thus, to ask how can Unix and Linux be one in the same is equivalent to asking how the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit can be one, yet distinct. I, for one, need no other proof than the Divinely Inspired testimony of McBride, and anticipate the coming day of His own Passion.
At some point in the past, MADD's goal was to increase penalties for drunk driving. They did that. However, in doing it, they had created a vast organization with thousands of employees and volunteers and an extensive funding apparatus. If they just said, "Okay girls, we won, time to go home," the party would be over. This beast has an annual budget of $45 million, a significant portion of which comes directly from the Department of Justice. You think they're gonna throw that cash-cow away?
Instead, they mutated into a prohibitionist organization who seeks, gradually, to outlaw all alcohol. Man, it's just like boiling a frog. From introducing their pseudoscientific method of determining whether they are "under the influence" by blood alcohol content, to the increase in the drinking age, to further lowering the maximum BAC, to pushing laws which violate our right to due process, to fallaciously claiming anyone who disagrees with them wants people to die, it is clear that will not give up an inch of ground they have gained, and will not stop until their organization dies or drinking is, again, completely against the law. Officers should be allowed discretion in determining themselves who is under the influence and who is not, young adults should learn to drink responsibly rather than surreptitiously pursuing "forbidden fruit," and people should not be deprived of liberty or property without due process.
When you understand this, their overreaction to GTA is clear. Like the NRA, they thrive on overreaction to generate irrational, unthinking fury in their membership. And in the absence of a clear goal, they have simply set their sights on alcohol itself, leaving reason by the wayside.
It doesn't have anything to do with depicting fictional illegal acts, not really.
The legislator's counterpoint is that the actual act which took place was not illegal. Thus, we might imagine that if someone made a film fictionally depicting a murder, it could be legal on the grounds that no actual assault occurred and that there's an understanding that it is fiction. On the other hand, if it's a real murder, it's a snuff film. Similarly, at least some "violent" pornography goes to lengths to show that the persons involved consent to and even enjoy the act by showing before/after interviews.
By contrast, I think it should be fairly obvious that the censor's primary objective is not to ban the fictional depiction of illegal acts, but the depiction of anything they find offensive. It's just like the question of whether violence in video games allows people to blow off steam or turns them into killing machines. One side has decided that they're bad and will always see a casual link where there is none, even though watching a spanking vid is not sufficient nor necessary to make me rape someone and playing Doom is not sufficient nor necessary to make me murder.
As an addendum, what I hate the most about censor-happy people is their absurd conviction that kinky sex is somehow new, and that up until a few years ago everyone had pleasureless missionary sex purely for the sake of procreation. In fact, the Kama Sutra talks at great length about erotic slapping. Are they going to ban the Kama Sutra?
It depends on what you mean by free will.
Some people are incompatibilists - this means that they believe that they believe free will is incompatible with determinism - that if you weren't morally suspended, as some theologians might say, and completely free to choose either way, it wouldn't be free will. Some then go on to say that this is proof that free will does not exist, and some are then inclined to say that this means we do (but this are hard to frame in terms of science for obvious reasons).
Others, however, have the idea that free will and determinism are totally compatible. As John Milton's God said, "Just because I knew what they'd do doesn't remove their free will." Basically, any time you make a decision, that's free will, and a decision is but the result of the inputs fed into a computer, albeit a vastly complicated, conscious, very buggy computer.
You are absolutely correct. In most areas which are dicey enough that your laptop might be stolen even if you take all necessary precautions, the police and courts are so overworked that they won't bother to act on something that to them sounds like technobabble from 24 or Alias. My boss tried, repeatedly. He had an IP and everything. The police basically blew him off. And honestly, I'm not sure I would've done much different in their position. There's much more important things to do than help some desk jockey get a tablet pc back.
Simply put, your best bet is to make frequent, automatic backups of your information (and preferably store those backups in a place where they're not likely to get stolen along with the laptop), and get an insurance policy on your laptop.
As my father always explained to me, the problem with getting Federal or State grants and funds as a local school is that it always has strings attached. You need to jump through dozens of hoops to get the money, so many that sometimes it renders any financial advantage provided by the grant moot, or at the very least diverts human energy which could be spent dealing with problems on the ground.
That said, for all its problems, more money for local schools would be a very good thing in the majority of cases. They don't have enough money at my fiancee's school, which is in a perfectly middle-class city, to hire back any of the first and second year teachers, and how are they going to meet class size standards (and thus get money) if they don't have enough teachers?
Finally, I think it bears stating at this point that the total cost of Bush's military actions is somewhere between one and three trillion dollars. Maybe it would be a disaster to pull out of Iraq now, maybe that won't happen - but I'd bet that McCain, with his military swagger, tough-on-terrorism platform, economic incompetence and neocon bent would engage in some other kind of military action during his term, costing the American taxpayers another trillion dollars for no real benefit.
Funny, I was under the impression that some of the most popular study drugs, Ritalin and Adderol, were Schedule II Controlled Substances in the United States (along with Meth, Cocaine, Morphine, and OxyContin) meaning if you use these drugs you are, in fact, breaking the law. I know nobody said anybody broke the law, but it's a sound inference from the facts at hand.
An English test, or an Engineering or Science or Underwater basketweaving test for that matter, is competitive. If you get a perfect grade on a test, you will have a better chance at getting into a good graduate or professional school than someone who is not cheating. Since there are a finite number of spots, for every person who gets a spot in a top school, someone else loses that spot. An undergrad is probably not going to cure cancer, but they might cheat someone smarter than them who would eventually go on to cure cancer out of that spot. And that's what it's all about: trying to determine who is the most deserving. Does a dumber, more unscruplous person deserve a fellowship over their smarter, more principled colleague? That's why in academia you hear all these words like "test" and "grade" and "degree." They're trying to see how people measure up. When you cheat, you make the measurement invalid.
When you're a bona fide scientist, it's a whole different ballgame. But since undergraduate grades determine who gets to do the real research, I think cheating in that arena is unquestionably wrong.
Sure, enhancement is awesome. But in the context of competition, we have come to consider some artificial aids to be equivalent to cheating. The purpose of a competition or test is to measure something, and, frequently, to confer rewards based on that measurement. For example, if someone was taking an English test, I would consider the use of a drug which gave them the ability to recall the text perfectly just as unfair as if they were hiding the book in their lap. While ultimately circular, part of my justification for considering this cheating would be the fact that they are breaking the law, and I am reluctant to do so myself. Part of it is that I understand Ritalin acts like meth on most adults, and I have a very low opinion of tweakers. But the bulk of it is that it effectively makes the test a poor representation of a person's baseline ability in the subject.
This is as opposed to saving lives, or inventing medicines, or solving important problems. Despite the quixotic justifications many students use, their biggest reason for cheating is to secure a better future for themselves at the expense of someone else's. I can't really see a net benefit to society there. In fact, it might be argued that by trying to place themselves in "better" programs, they are ultimately doing themselves a disservice, as people poorly matched in ability to their program are likely to drop out.
Now, if we're not talking about a competition, I think it's more acceptable.
What's the difference between me taking the notes and selling them and me writing a book with information I originally learned from the notes and selling that?
I think the thing that bugs me about the idea of enforcing copyright on a lecture is that most of the lectures I have heard, while almost universally insightful and enlightening, have been about fairly non-disputable points of fact or well-established pieces of knowledge that don't belong to them or me. Does my philosophy lecturer own the right's to Hume's Fork or Occam's Razor? Is my programming instructor going to ask me for a nickle every time I write an try-catch block?
Presumably, the lecture itself is a creative work by the professor and falls under the prevue of copyright to some extent. But interpreting the lecture into a series of bullet points, unless some of those were original, novel ideas created by the professor, would seem to annihilate any direct claim the professor had in terms of copyright, the same as if I said:
it would not seem to be under the copyright of JK Rowling, God willing. At least that's my instinct. And I think the heart of the problem is that "intellectual property" itself is a weird, synthetic type of right which has grown beyond its original boundaries like some kind of white-collar carcinoma.
Perhaps there is something to the fact that, by and large, animals who can regenerate profoundly are cold-blooded, and no natural warm-blooded animals I'm aware of can do that. We already expend huge amounts of energy just keeping ourselves warm. Perhaps the regeneration faded with the increased energy expenditure from warm-bloodedness.
Judging by other types of counterfeits coming out of china, there probably are more traditional counterfeits of networking equipment coming out as well. By this, I mean, generic hardware put into a very convincing Cisco shell and stamped with the Cisco logo. For example, there's the iPhone ripoffs everyone's probably familiar with, as well as high-end guitar ripoffs which wouldn't fool a musician in person, but might fool an amateur, especially over the net.
I can't help but suspect that those who are apologizing for these Chinese counterfeiters are subscribing to a number of romantic notions, among them the desire to see the Chinese as well-intentioned but ignorant and a distaste for big companies. There may be some weight to the idea that they don't see plagiarism and counterfeit in the same way Westerners do, but I think, especially today, they know we have a problem with it.
Your argument smacks of something I hear all the time from some of my friends whose lives see more psychiatric intervention. Basically, it goes like this: "You think you've been depressed? That's nothing. If it didn't take medication to cure you, it's not real depression." Substitute any emotional disorder you want in there, in fact.
Now, I find this fundamentally suspect. Unlike cancer, which has an observable, physical cause and often observable symptoms, emotional disorders are purely subjective. All we can go on are descriptions, so we correlate a certain set of descriptions and say they're a disease. Fine. But then, someone, in retrospect, describes a time of their life which sounds like a depressive episode, but says, "But then I got better," because they roused themselves out of it like Baron Munchhausen, because someone else made them feel better, or for no reason. But if you turn around and say that disqualifies it as depression, it would seem, then, that the illness is being defined by what makes it better rather than what it is, which is absurd.
My theory as to why people employ this nonsense argument is that, if someone else can just 'snap out of it' by sheer force of will, then it undermines their need for chemical and clinical intervention. It becomes some type of moral failure on the part of the depressed to stay depressed. And if we entertain the idea that some people are "stronger" at coping than others, then it's kind of a depressing thought, so naturally we would like to avoid it.
For my part, I don't doubt that lives have been saved and vastly improved by chemical intervention, but it doesn't follow from this that anyone who did not receive chemical intervention was not depressed.
I'm familiar with this argument. It's the same one that occurs when you give a toddler a cookie, the toddler eats the cookie, and the toddler cries that it doesn't have a cookie anymore. The artists were compensated just as surely as the toddler was given a cookie, and the cookie went into the toddler's mouth as surely as the artists' compensation went up their noses.
Polling data shows that, in any matchup between Republican primary candidates and Democratic Primary Candidates, that Hillary is the least likely to win a general election and that Obama is the most likely to win. this video offers basically the same argument in a more eloquent and authoritative manner. So, if you want a Democratic president next year, vote for Barack Obama. If you want a Republican president, probably the best thing to do is register as a Democrat and vote for Hillary.
In response to both you and the grandparent, don't forget that people without medical insurance do not get regular checkups or see doctors when they are still cheap to treat, but instead go to the ER when it's green and about to fall off.
The power of the modern media to set the tone of the national debate makes your reasoning circular. People decide what is important in the world based both on their observations and on the news. So, the argument becomes: they're not talking about him because he's not going to win, and he's not going to win because they're not talking about him. I will allow that it's not 100% circular, but there's definitely feedback there.
Besides, even if you ignore the probable fallaciousness, "He's not going to win anyway," is a poor argument. If he's not going to win, why not treat him fairly? What could it possibly do, since he's not going to win?
This argument then falls under the classification of either an irrational explanation or an incomplete one, and thus, of what I have seen so far, Occam's Razor would prefer a massive conspiracy, despite the number of additional questions it raises. And in fact, most Paulites can provide a number of cogent answers to those questions. I'm sure you can find most of them on this page, so I'll leave that out.
Even when you live a modern, active life it is possible to take things one at a time. I've generally found it to be the more successful strategies to try my best to do so.
Take cleaning house. I keep my house clean pretty well, and sometimes a friend of mine bribes me with food to help her clean up. She says, "I just look at the whole mess, and I'm overwhelmed. I don't know where to start." She seems to think of it as seventy tasks she has to do all at once. I tend to think of cleaning as a queue, since, for example, in order to do the dishes, you have to put away the dishes in the drying rack, and in order to do that you have to make room in the cupboard, etc. The only challenge is finding the front of the queue and doing the tasks one at a time, and keeping it up until you're satisfied or tired. I find it rather meditative.
At work (a small company), I have pretty varied responsibilities too, but I just keep a checklist of deadlines and tasks and do them, one at a time, until they are done. I'm so relaxed the Sales VP has joked that I'm on tranquilizers..
On the other hand, maybe I approach things this way out of habit precisely because I'm a bad multitasker. Whatever. I just believe that insane, frazzled multitasking is not a symptom of modern life itself, but rather of people's lack of expertise at coping with it.
The 92 Taurus I inherited is pretty powerful and gets decent mileage for a mid-sized sedan, but it's a pain in the butt to work on because of accessibility problems. I understand from my mechanic friend that this tends to be a problem for a lot of Fords.
I maintain a Facebook profile to keep in touch with old friends, and I don't do anything at parties which could get me put in prison. Heck, if people are smoking up at parties I go to, they're doing it out in a secluded area like good little second-hand-smoke-conscious Californians. I don't bear any resentment towards potheads, and I think it should be legalized, but I do think it's a little weird to do something which society penalizes so harshly no matter how good the high is, much less assume that if you're between the ages of 15 and 35 and you have a moderately active social life that you're some kind of human weatherballoon.
So, yeah, I can understand that if you had a bunch of shit to hide in your personal life why you'd not maintain a Facebook profile, but I don't have a lot to hide. I like my privacy just as much as the next guy, but the worst that could happen if someone saw a picture of me at a party would be mandatory remedial dance lessons.
Now I know exactly how to manipulate my resume to look like a good programmer.
No matter how specialized you are, some of your superiors just won't understand your value as an employee.
For example, the guy who got me started working with computers, a QA engineer, effectively replaced 3/4 employees in his department with scripts. He was doing fine for a few months - his supervisor understood that he'd saved the company a few hundred thousand dollars per year, at least. Then, a new supervisor gets installed, and after reviewing his underlings, he has the audacity to say, thought my colleague was making too much money. The supervisor didn't have even a basic understanding of unit testing, and thus could not square the corporate-jargon expectations of the position from the company literature with reality. Thankfully, everything got straightened out and he's still got a job:)
This just goes to show you: it's not about bad managers versus good managers, it's about some people attempting to manage in an area they know little or nothing about, meaning the only tools they have to understand their underlings are gimmicks, buzzwords, half-truths and outright delusions. When you're something they can't define using this bizarre, aphasic lexicon, of course they're going to give you the shaft. No doubt you've got it worse because no corporate bureaucrat is going to understand the true value of a generalist, but it's an endemic problem.
That's an impressive figure, but I would be interested to know how many packages deliberately aren't included in MacPorts because some equivalent is available in the OS X base system. Debian is a whole OS, and MacPorts is an addon, so MacPorts is going to have fewer packages just because its scope is narrower.
Surely this cannot explain the entire disparity and Debian indeed has numerous packages which are unavailable on MacPorts, but it's obvious to me that this is just because there's not enough demand for those packages to motivate someone to port them, as the only package I was interested in that I couldn't find on MacPorts was bacula - and I ended up using something else anyhow.
Regardless of how good VMware is getting, most people would rather have native implementations of their favorite apps than run them on a virtual machine. I cannot imagine anyone who uses Adobe's applications professionally with any degree of proficiency - and note that this does not include people who think they need Photoshop to size and crop a wide range of image formats - settling for less performance when full performance is just a boot away.
I think you have a point with Office, though. I can see myself keeping a VM for the few tasks that OpenOffice can't do quite well, or at all. But with Adobe's apps, computer speed often has a direct effect on project completion time. Someone working contract would be daft to effectively choose to make less money, and someone working salaried would have their manager calling them daft for effectively choosing to hurt the company's bottom line.