Random complaints by a few disgruntled users do not automatically make Paypal a "scam". In fact, most of the complaints I have seen are cases where paypal holds money back to prevent possible financial losses. For instance, when Notch started selling Minecraft, paypal temporarily suspended his account because thousands of $10 transactions were suspicious to their heuristics. They didn't keep the money, and soon restored his service.
Then buy a boxed copy of each unit of software and tape the unique license keys to each computer using it. I'm just saying, if you really want to be above reproach, you can do this. Try to pinch pennies and get exactly the bare minimum licenses you need? Well, this is a risk you take.
Yes, but for companies who steal commercial software, how else SHOULD it work?
Companies who have the choice of paid open source, free open source, and commercial software still extremely frequently choose commercial. Must be a reason.
Software is immensely expensive to create. The bigger, real world systems actually in use cost a fortune in real money to create because the bigger and more complex they get, the more people are needed to try to increase productivity by increasingly small percentages.
The money has to come from somewhere. If companies can't pay their programmers, the software stops being made. The open source model is an alternative in SOME cases - but not all.
Software is pathetically easy to steal. Somehow the companies making the software need to get paid. Going after individual thieves is a waste of time, but targeting corporations with deep pockets makes perfect sense.
Sue Joe Smoe for ripping off Microsoft Office, and you won't recover enough to pay your lawyers and the fees to file the lawsuit. Sue Exxon because they paid for 1000 copies of Office but used 10,000, and they will be able to pay any court judgement. You can ask the courts for your legal fees, the cost of the software they stole, and compensation for your trouble.
Not see what is unfair or unjust about this. The "hardball" tactic described here is to find companies that are stealing software, and offer them this "true up" deal. This is just a pre-lawsuit bargain - they pay a lot less than they would pay if there were a court judgement, you get your money now. Sounds fair and reasonable to me.
If companies don't want to face this risk, they can use open source software. Oh, it costs them more to have an in house programmer staff to customize the software for their needs? (since open source stuff tends to be a bit rough around the edges) Then pay the damn commercial license fees, and buy a few more than you need just to be on the safe side.
Basically everyone who has responded to my comment, yourself included, is ignorant of the very concept of investment or finance.
Look, I agree, if the GOVERNMENT - an entity that gets to collect taxes from everyone and thus benefits from efficiency improvements that all it's citizens benefit from - were funding electric car research, they could afford to give it away for free and not be concerned about copycats.
However, national governments have historically been shit for innovation. Their stuff costs far too much, takes too long, and is nowhere near as good as what is possible.
So if a private organization invests money to invent something - which is NOT free. I'm not talking about patenting the bloody spork or the concept of swapping 2 variables, an electric car is a massive project that costs billions and requires many separate complex systems. That money came from people seeking a return.
If they can't get a return - because of lack of legal protection from theft - they will stop investing. If the U.S. government doesn't enforce the laws, tech funding dries up. There would never be any MORE corporate investment in research, and as mentioned, the government sucks.
In such a world, we all lose. Technology is the only thing that differentiates us from squabbling apes.
With that said, I agree the current model is suboptimal. The worse excesses are when private companies get to patent government funded research, getting all the benefits but taking none of the risks. However, in the case of a Chinese firm ripping off a design, the U.S. government doesn't have to let them sell their product and does have the power to punish China as a nation. If the government fails to do so, they are no different than local cops letting someone rob you and then openly selling the stolen goods at a store nearby.
If it took 1 billion dollars to invent and then refine an idea to fruition, and then others can steal the idea for free, the issue is where does that billion come from? If engineering and R&D firms are not paid for their effort, they will cease to invent anything new.
The only problem I see is that certain aspects of the design were probably copied wholesale from Tesla. This is bad when you essentially get to steal aspects of a design that cost a fortune to develop and then deploy a copy for a fraction the cost. As long as they pay Tesla some compensation for their technology, this would be fine. As long as the US government and it's allies level trade sanctions against China if they don't respect American IP at all, this would be fine.
The current situation is only a problem because neither is true. China copies shamelessly and then isn't punished for it. So the cut rate competing product gets sold in America for a cheaper cost, and then the innovators - the firm that developed the tech - go out of business or can't justify future R&D projects.
Anyways, anyone can cram in bigger batteries, bigger motor drivers, and bigger motors. Doesn't make it a good idea - the Tesla performance is already overkill for ordinary driving conditions on real world roads. Future electric cars will probably have less performance.
And "free" is just clickbait. Obviously this car will be leased, which you can already do with every other battery electric vehicle sold today.
Fair enough. That does sound like actual abuse. I read the article but not the direct court opinion.
Yes, in that light, the court decision seems far more reasonable. He might be a mass murderer - I can't even imagine how much of a tragedy killing that many people is - but that still is abusive treatment.
In the USA, of course, the courts would have never reached this ruling - even if the person suing were innocent.
Yes, but not every person is so freely willing to kill. It's one thing to not assume superhuman powers, it's another thing to say, put him on gardening detail and give him some tools. Most murderers only killed one person and it was the result of a big argument or a long series of slights and betrayals. They aren't going to just attack and kill random prisoners or guards because they think they are subhuman.
Obviously, in the USA (and most other countries), they would treat this man far worse. Most places he would have been executed.
With that said, while I'm not in favor of harsh punitive treatment in prisons IF it doesn't help prevent crime, nothing in the article sounds unreasonable. He is a dangerous killer - he killed 77 people. It's not unreasonable for his jailers to try to prevent it from becoming 78. He's so dangerous that making him wear cuffs when moving him between cells and preventing him from coming into proximity with other prisoners seem like reasonable precautions.
Isolation is torture - you might argue he deserves it - but maybe they could let him communicate with other prisoners without physical contact being possible? The lives of the other prisoners and the guards do need to be protected.
And they seem to have given him a treadmill, a video game system, a TV - a lot of stuff to ameliorate the isolation. They'd never do this in the USA - he'd be probably in a tiny cell waiting in silence for his execution.
Maybe, maybe not. Obviously, I'm going to have to say that you and I aren't the arbiter of what copyright law covers or doesn't cover, the courts are. They sided with Oracle in the first round, and clearly there is some reason to think they might side with Oracle this time, or Oracle's attorneys would have settled.
I was addressing whether or not said architecture should even be copyrightable at all. I think it should be, to a point. Sort of how you can't copyright a structural arch but you can copyright the design of an entire building.
Anyways, here's where you might have missed the mark a little bit. Sure, "bool Play(void);" isn't much. And, by itself, I'd agree with you.
But when you write an interface to a program - something I'm in the process of doing now - the interface itself reveals part of your software architecture. And as the architecture changes, as you eliminate countless bad early decisions, so does the interface. If someone just gets to grab your interface for free (if you didn't put a permissive license on it), they are also getting a partial blueprint to the architecture of your software. It's going to be easier and cheaper for them to make a knockoff than it was for you. As you probably know if you are a programmer, the decisions you make on how to subdivide a task and what information is passed where is actually the majority of the solution. Good, isolated and decoupled functions that actually implement a solution are easy, and you'll get them right eventually. It's the overall interface that matters and mistakes here are expensive because to fix them often ends up affecting dozens or hundreds of places.
A 7000 line header file is a whole interface. It's like a paragraph, where that single boolean function prototype is but a single word. In the written world, you can't copyright the word "the" but you can copyright a big enough chunk of text...
The IP of the phone used to make those posts traces to a tracphone that the man is known to have purchased with cash. They know he bought the phone because of the bank withdrawals, the car used, and the walmart video.
So, a twitter acount makes threats. Twitter gives the IP of the computer posting the messages and the phone number of the phone used for the account. Phone number goes to a tracphone. Tracphone bought at walmart, on the same day the man withdrawals the exact amount of cash used to puchase the phones and someone looking like them buys stuff at walmart and drives the same car with the same license plate and has the same phone chargers in his car for a phone he doesn't have any more.
I read the affidavit for a warrant for the guy's arrest.
To summarize : He used PIA, but bought 2 tracfones that he used to make harassing twitter posts. They have surveillance of someone looking like him at the register, his car leaving, bank withdrawals for the exact amount of money used to buy the phones in cash, and 3 separate sets of recordings. Walmart security(who seem to be pretty on the ball, surprisingly) even got a picture of his license plate when he visited a second time.
They also have the phones geolocated when they were used, they checked that he went to the closest walmart to his house, they found 2 chargers in his car for the phones, the username and password for a PIA account listed in his wallet, cell tower locations to his home and work...pretty solid.
I didn't see any of the gaps I normally see when I read about police investigations, it almost sounds like the Feds made sure they had the right man. Really, the only fault I have with the authorities is the hysterical response to bomb threats. Evacuating a building because some random made an anonymous threat? That's no way to run a railroad. Most of the damage he did was because the authorities fucked up.
Apple hacks this specific phone. They then shore up whatever vulnerabilities that were in iOS/their hardware design that made such a hack impossible.
Their design should have made it flat out impossible. An encryption processor has the key to the phone's data in memory. If more than 10 passcode attempts are made, it deletes the key. Boom, data is gone. No takebacks. Firmware on that processor should have been locked and fused.
If this were actually how they implemented it, there would BE a controversy. They'd respond that it's totally impossible, and invite the FBI's tech experts to view the design under NDA to confirm for themselves. They'd explain that they would comply if they could, but it isn't possible.
Odds are very, very low that he'll get kidnapped from Russia. It could happen but probably won't. As long as he stays inside the borders of the Russian Federation, one of the largest countries in the world, he will probably be able to live out the rest of his natural life free.
And we've seen the news articles - his stripper girlfriend comes to visit him and he has a dog. He also gets a horde of messages from young women sending him naked pics, so if he has to, he can just ask one of them to come visit him if his stripper gf leaves him.
How is this in any way comparable to prison? I suspect he sleeps like a baby.
That isn't how wear leveling algorithm work. Yes, once you hit 99%, every write does involve a rewrite somewhere, but those writes are not concentrated in the 1% free area. Instead, the drive controller is reading sections of already written disk and moving them around.
Step 1 : Make antihydrogen Step 2 : fuse to anti-iron or an elemental Type 1 superconductor Step 3 : suspend the chunks of superconducting antimatter inside tanks made of permanent magnets in the walls. This is stable. Keep the wall temperature cold enough (about 3K or so) that the antimatter stays superconducting. Step 4 : grab it with lasers and feed it into your engine Step 5 : engine uses big honking magnets to repel the pions produced as a result of the antimatter reaction. This is about 30% at converting annihilation energy to thrust
You can get a heck of a lot faster doing this. At least 0.5 C. And it's not only not known to be impossible, it's straightforward - you would need many many orders of magnitude more engineering ability and manufacturing ability to do it, but the principles behind it are sound.
The Rasberry Pi is a basically a complete desktop computer. Even running distros without rendering of a graphical desktop, it has all the internal complexity of Linux. Not a good place to start - Linux is immensely complicated and there are many ways to go wrong if you're just starting out. So you get a desktop PC with the muscle behind a decent desktop PC, like a fast processor, a bunch of ram, and a nice set of I/O ports. Not good if you have access to something better.
Arduinos, on the other hand, are basically a bare chip. The arduino IDE is extremely minimalistic. Any instructions you type in, that's what it's gonna do. The arduino libraries are hidden - you don't have to include anything, you can just type a command in C you googled for and it calls the relevant library. You only have to tell it the target chip, and it, for the most part, can run code you wrote on a different type of arduino without you doing anything but changing the target.
See, the part that truly makes you decent about this is you recognize that luck played a roll. Certain uber-rich have been surrounded by bootlickers for so long that they genuinely believe that THEY, individually, got their fortune 100% through their own efforts, with no luck, and thus they don't have to lift a finger to support the society they live in that made this possible.
And by "support society", I don't mean give tens of thousands of bucks to welfare queens so they can make more babies. I think the rich should pay enough taxes so the government doesn't have to borrow money, and can maintain the productive stuff - the roads, etc - in top tier condition. I think certain wealthy people are basically "looting" America, by causing America to rack up a ton of debt and not even maintain its own infrastructure, in return for lower taxes.
Now, of course, as you point out in your own post - and I fully believe you - there's no secret club where the rich people coordinate their looting of America. It's more than each wealthy person, seeking their own interests, tends to support politicians who say what they want to hear - such as "we don't need to raise taxes on the rich, the current progressive tax system already charges them more (it doesn't if you factor other taxes than income), give the rich people more money and it will "trickle down", etc.
The real problem is that such ridiculous lies become official government policy because democracy is kind of flawed and ignorance can rule the day.
I think it also depends on what you mean by a "few bucks", and how you got it.
1. Did you invent some new idea and sell it for millions or tens of millions of dollars, after slaving away on it 16 hours a day for years? Yeah, ok, you deserve it.
2. Did you brown-nose your way to the top of a major corporation, exploiting your gender/racial diversity or good ole boy connections to get promotions you didn't deserve. Then, after taking over, you run a nearly century old company into the ground. You negotiate pay packages worth tens of millions of dollars a year. When they fire you, you collect another 50 mil on the way out.
The problem is that there seems to be an awful lot of #2 going on. There just aren't that many company founders getting rich after making genius inventions, and a whole lot of rich, connected people getting obscenely richer still.
I don't understand why they can't fund the project more lavishly and try to get results from this thing sooner. It seems like the potential rewards would be worth the risk.
Slashdot Mirror
Random complaints by a few disgruntled users do not automatically make Paypal a "scam". In fact, most of the complaints I have seen are cases where paypal holds money back to prevent possible financial losses. For instance, when Notch started selling Minecraft, paypal temporarily suspended his account because thousands of $10 transactions were suspicious to their heuristics. They didn't keep the money, and soon restored his service.
Then buy a boxed copy of each unit of software and tape the unique license keys to each computer using it. I'm just saying, if you really want to be above reproach, you can do this. Try to pinch pennies and get exactly the bare minimum licenses you need? Well, this is a risk you take.
Yes, but for companies who steal commercial software, how else SHOULD it work?
Companies who have the choice of paid open source, free open source, and commercial software still extremely frequently choose commercial. Must be a reason.
Software is immensely expensive to create. The bigger, real world systems actually in use cost a fortune in real money to create because the bigger and more complex they get, the more people are needed to try to increase productivity by increasingly small percentages.
The money has to come from somewhere. If companies can't pay their programmers, the software stops being made. The open source model is an alternative in SOME cases - but not all.
Software is pathetically easy to steal. Somehow the companies making the software need to get paid. Going after individual thieves is a waste of time, but targeting corporations with deep pockets makes perfect sense.
Sue Joe Smoe for ripping off Microsoft Office, and you won't recover enough to pay your lawyers and the fees to file the lawsuit. Sue Exxon because they paid for 1000 copies of Office but used 10,000, and they will be able to pay any court judgement. You can ask the courts for your legal fees, the cost of the software they stole, and compensation for your trouble.
Not see what is unfair or unjust about this. The "hardball" tactic described here is to find companies that are stealing software, and offer them this "true up" deal. This is just a pre-lawsuit bargain - they pay a lot less than they would pay if there were a court judgement, you get your money now. Sounds fair and reasonable to me.
If companies don't want to face this risk, they can use open source software. Oh, it costs them more to have an in house programmer staff to customize the software for their needs? (since open source stuff tends to be a bit rough around the edges) Then pay the damn commercial license fees, and buy a few more than you need just to be on the safe side.
Basically everyone who has responded to my comment, yourself included, is ignorant of the very concept of investment or finance.
Look, I agree, if the GOVERNMENT - an entity that gets to collect taxes from everyone and thus benefits from efficiency improvements that all it's citizens benefit from - were funding electric car research, they could afford to give it away for free and not be concerned about copycats.
However, national governments have historically been shit for innovation. Their stuff costs far too much, takes too long, and is nowhere near as good as what is possible.
So if a private organization invests money to invent something - which is NOT free. I'm not talking about patenting the bloody spork or the concept of swapping 2 variables, an electric car is a massive project that costs billions and requires many separate complex systems. That money came from people seeking a return.
If they can't get a return - because of lack of legal protection from theft - they will stop investing. If the U.S. government doesn't enforce the laws, tech funding dries up. There would never be any MORE corporate investment in research, and as mentioned, the government sucks.
In such a world, we all lose. Technology is the only thing that differentiates us from squabbling apes.
With that said, I agree the current model is suboptimal. The worse excesses are when private companies get to patent government funded research, getting all the benefits but taking none of the risks. However, in the case of a Chinese firm ripping off a design, the U.S. government doesn't have to let them sell their product and does have the power to punish China as a nation. If the government fails to do so, they are no different than local cops letting someone rob you and then openly selling the stolen goods at a store nearby.
If it took 1 billion dollars to invent and then refine an idea to fruition, and then others can steal the idea for free, the issue is where does that billion come from? If engineering and R&D firms are not paid for their effort, they will cease to invent anything new.
The only problem I see is that certain aspects of the design were probably copied wholesale from Tesla. This is bad when you essentially get to steal aspects of a design that cost a fortune to develop and then deploy a copy for a fraction the cost. As long as they pay Tesla some compensation for their technology, this would be fine. As long as the US government and it's allies level trade sanctions against China if they don't respect American IP at all, this would be fine.
The current situation is only a problem because neither is true. China copies shamelessly and then isn't punished for it. So the cut rate competing product gets sold in America for a cheaper cost, and then the innovators - the firm that developed the tech - go out of business or can't justify future R&D projects.
Anyways, anyone can cram in bigger batteries, bigger motor drivers, and bigger motors. Doesn't make it a good idea - the Tesla performance is already overkill for ordinary driving conditions on real world roads. Future electric cars will probably have less performance.
And "free" is just clickbait. Obviously this car will be leased, which you can already do with every other battery electric vehicle sold today.
Fair enough. That does sound like actual abuse. I read the article but not the direct court opinion.
Yes, in that light, the court decision seems far more reasonable. He might be a mass murderer - I can't even imagine how much of a tragedy killing that many people is - but that still is abusive treatment.
In the USA, of course, the courts would have never reached this ruling - even if the person suing were innocent.
Yes, but not every person is so freely willing to kill. It's one thing to not assume superhuman powers, it's another thing to say, put him on gardening detail and give him some tools. Most murderers only killed one person and it was the result of a big argument or a long series of slights and betrayals. They aren't going to just attack and kill random prisoners or guards because they think they are subhuman.
Obviously, in the USA (and most other countries), they would treat this man far worse. Most places he would have been executed.
With that said, while I'm not in favor of harsh punitive treatment in prisons IF it doesn't help prevent crime, nothing in the article sounds unreasonable. He is a dangerous killer - he killed 77 people. It's not unreasonable for his jailers to try to prevent it from becoming 78. He's so dangerous that making him wear cuffs when moving him between cells and preventing him from coming into proximity with other prisoners seem like reasonable precautions.
Isolation is torture - you might argue he deserves it - but maybe they could let him communicate with other prisoners without physical contact being possible? The lives of the other prisoners and the guards do need to be protected.
And they seem to have given him a treadmill, a video game system, a TV - a lot of stuff to ameliorate the isolation. They'd never do this in the USA - he'd be probably in a tiny cell waiting in silence for his execution.
Then this is a slam dunk for google. It shouldn't even go to trial...oh. It is still going to trial?
Maybe, maybe not. Obviously, I'm going to have to say that you and I aren't the arbiter of what copyright law covers or doesn't cover, the courts are. They sided with Oracle in the first round, and clearly there is some reason to think they might side with Oracle this time, or Oracle's attorneys would have settled.
I was addressing whether or not said architecture should even be copyrightable at all. I think it should be, to a point. Sort of how you can't copyright a structural arch but you can copyright the design of an entire building.
Caveat : I'm of mixed feeling myself.
Anyways, here's where you might have missed the mark a little bit. Sure, "bool Play(void);" isn't much. And, by itself, I'd agree with you.
But when you write an interface to a program - something I'm in the process of doing now - the interface itself reveals part of your software architecture. And as the architecture changes, as you eliminate countless bad early decisions, so does the interface. If someone just gets to grab your interface for free (if you didn't put a permissive license on it), they are also getting a partial blueprint to the architecture of your software. It's going to be easier and cheaper for them to make a knockoff than it was for you. As you probably know if you are a programmer, the decisions you make on how to subdivide a task and what information is passed where is actually the majority of the solution. Good, isolated and decoupled functions that actually implement a solution are easy, and you'll get them right eventually. It's the overall interface that matters and mistakes here are expensive because to fix them often ends up affecting dozens or hundreds of places.
A 7000 line header file is a whole interface. It's like a paragraph, where that single boolean function prototype is but a single word. In the written world, you can't copyright the word "the" but you can copyright a big enough chunk of text...
The IP of the phone used to make those posts traces to a tracphone that the man is known to have purchased with cash. They know he bought the phone because of the bank withdrawals, the car used, and the walmart video.
So, a twitter acount makes threats. Twitter gives the IP of the computer posting the messages and the phone number of the phone used for the account. Phone number goes to a tracphone. Tracphone bought at walmart, on the same day the man withdrawals the exact amount of cash used to puchase the phones and someone looking like them buys stuff at walmart and drives the same car with the same license plate and has the same phone chargers in his car for a phone he doesn't have any more.
This is pretty close to "direct" evidence...
I read the affidavit for a warrant for the guy's arrest.
To summarize : He used PIA, but bought 2 tracfones that he used to make harassing twitter posts. They have surveillance of someone looking like him at the register, his car leaving, bank withdrawals for the exact amount of money used to buy the phones in cash, and 3 separate sets of recordings. Walmart security(who seem to be pretty on the ball, surprisingly) even got a picture of his license plate when he visited a second time.
They also have the phones geolocated when they were used, they checked that he went to the closest walmart to his house, they found 2 chargers in his car for the phones, the username and password for a PIA account listed in his wallet, cell tower locations to his home and work...pretty solid.
I didn't see any of the gaps I normally see when I read about police investigations, it almost sounds like the Feds made sure they had the right man. Really, the only fault I have with the authorities is the hysterical response to bomb threats. Evacuating a building because some random made an anonymous threat? That's no way to run a railroad. Most of the damage he did was because the authorities fucked up.
Apple hacks this specific phone. They then shore up whatever vulnerabilities that were in iOS/their hardware design that made such a hack impossible.
Their design should have made it flat out impossible. An encryption processor has the key to the phone's data in memory. If more than 10 passcode attempts are made, it deletes the key. Boom, data is gone. No takebacks. Firmware on that processor should have been locked and fused.
If this were actually how they implemented it, there would BE a controversy. They'd respond that it's totally impossible, and invite the FBI's tech experts to view the design under NDA to confirm for themselves. They'd explain that they would comply if they could, but it isn't possible.
Are you trolling?
Odds are very, very low that he'll get kidnapped from Russia. It could happen but probably won't. As long as he stays inside the borders of the Russian Federation, one of the largest countries in the world, he will probably be able to live out the rest of his natural life free.
And we've seen the news articles - his stripper girlfriend comes to visit him and he has a dog. He also gets a horde of messages from young women sending him naked pics, so if he has to, he can just ask one of them to come visit him if his stripper gf leaves him.
How is this in any way comparable to prison? I suspect he sleeps like a baby.
That isn't how wear leveling algorithm work. Yes, once you hit 99%, every write does involve a rewrite somewhere, but those writes are not concentrated in the 1% free area. Instead, the drive controller is reading sections of already written disk and moving them around.
2.6 cents, eh. That is less than the generators who make the power are getting paid, is it not?
Step 1 : Make antihydrogen
Step 2 : fuse to anti-iron or an elemental Type 1 superconductor
Step 3 : suspend the chunks of superconducting antimatter inside tanks made of permanent magnets in the walls. This is stable. Keep the wall temperature cold enough (about 3K or so) that the antimatter stays superconducting.
Step 4 : grab it with lasers and feed it into your engine
Step 5 : engine uses big honking magnets to repel the pions produced as a result of the antimatter reaction. This is about 30% at converting annihilation energy to thrust
You can get a heck of a lot faster doing this. At least 0.5 C. And it's not only not known to be impossible, it's straightforward - you would need many many orders of magnitude more engineering ability and manufacturing ability to do it, but the principles behind it are sound.
The Rasberry Pi is a basically a complete desktop computer. Even running distros without rendering of a graphical desktop, it has all the internal complexity of Linux. Not a good place to start - Linux is immensely complicated and there are many ways to go wrong if you're just starting out. So you get a desktop PC with the muscle behind a decent desktop PC, like a fast processor, a bunch of ram, and a nice set of I/O ports. Not good if you have access to something better.
Arduinos, on the other hand, are basically a bare chip. The arduino IDE is extremely minimalistic. Any instructions you type in, that's what it's gonna do. The arduino libraries are hidden - you don't have to include anything, you can just type a command in C you googled for and it calls the relevant library. You only have to tell it the target chip, and it, for the most part, can run code you wrote on a different type of arduino without you doing anything but changing the target.
See, the part that truly makes you decent about this is you recognize that luck played a roll. Certain uber-rich have been surrounded by bootlickers for so long that they genuinely believe that THEY, individually, got their fortune 100% through their own efforts, with no luck, and thus they don't have to lift a finger to support the society they live in that made this possible.
And by "support society", I don't mean give tens of thousands of bucks to welfare queens so they can make more babies. I think the rich should pay enough taxes so the government doesn't have to borrow money, and can maintain the productive stuff - the roads, etc - in top tier condition. I think certain wealthy people are basically "looting" America, by causing America to rack up a ton of debt and not even maintain its own infrastructure, in return for lower taxes.
Now, of course, as you point out in your own post - and I fully believe you - there's no secret club where the rich people coordinate their looting of America. It's more than each wealthy person, seeking their own interests, tends to support politicians who say what they want to hear - such as "we don't need to raise taxes on the rich, the current progressive tax system already charges them more (it doesn't if you factor other taxes than income), give the rich people more money and it will "trickle down", etc.
The real problem is that such ridiculous lies become official government policy because democracy is kind of flawed and ignorance can rule the day.
Mandatory minimum sentencing and sentencing "guidelines" that make it clear he "deserves" decades in prison mean otherwise.
Those guidelines don't have anything about "he reported on crimes committed by his employer".
I think it also depends on what you mean by a "few bucks", and how you got it.
1. Did you invent some new idea and sell it for millions or tens of millions of dollars, after slaving away on it 16 hours a day for years? Yeah, ok, you deserve it.
2. Did you brown-nose your way to the top of a major corporation, exploiting your gender/racial diversity or good ole boy connections to get promotions you didn't deserve. Then, after taking over, you run a nearly century old company into the ground. You negotiate pay packages worth tens of millions of dollars a year. When they fire you, you collect another 50 mil on the way out.
The problem is that there seems to be an awful lot of #2 going on. There just aren't that many company founders getting rich after making genius inventions, and a whole lot of rich, connected people getting obscenely richer still.
I don't understand why they can't fund the project more lavishly and try to get results from this thing sooner. It seems like the potential rewards would be worth the risk.