Before we start out with any such debate, I think we need to come up with a reasonable, logical rationale as to why people are worked up about the outsides of their houses being in pictures.
This is StreetView. Until some day as somebody creates a BurglarView mashup with an "I'm Feeling Lucky" button, we're talking about somebody who has some specific interest in seeing the neighborhoods they're clicking on. Most likely this means they're in the area or planning on being in the area soon, and this can provide them with valuable information.
"We're affluent and have been robbed" is the downside? Sorry, but that's just on the ridiculous side of lame excuses. Nobody's going to come from around the world to rob you; there's plenty of rich people much closer to them that they can rob. And if it's some dude down the street, they could just as easily walk past themselves. Since they've been robbed three times recently, it almost certainly IS from nearby -- and more importantly, this person or group of people clearly already knows you're worth robbing. And all without the help of StreetView.
I absolutely believe in a right to privacy, and I believe it should be strictly enforced -- but complaining that pictures are taken from a public roadway of the outside of your house, which can be just as easily seen by any random Joe walking by, is hardly something I consider private. Google should have a policy regarding taking down or otherwise obfuscating pictures if they've happened to catch something with their cameras that doesn't belong, just to be on the nice side of things. At the same time, if you're screwing your wife in the window or admiring your Rolex collection in the sunlight then you're obviously not overly concerned with the privacy of those activities to begin with.
Unless somebody can provide a good reason that the outside of a house should be considered private and that taking a picture of that crosses some sort of line, social or legal, I'm not inclined to condemn anybody for doing so. There ARE gated communities for those people who are legitimately so concerned that only people they know and who have business there can get anywhere near their house.
Going to reply to your post backward, just to get the simpler half out of the way before the more rambling part.
Otherwise the next logical step is to punish people who have such thoughts whether or not they also committed any other crime. [. ..] the problem is we as a culture are not big fans of taking ideas to their completion, to any and all "next steps" to find out at what point they break down.
I agree to a point. It's definitely worthwhile to follow something to a conclusion. On the other hand, what you're referring to is "slippery slope," and it's a logical error of argumentation. In other words, something running into a bad conclusion is an excellent reason not to follow it to its conclusion -- but not necessarily a good reason not to take a step in its direction. Only if you have something more than "BUT WHAT IF!" to indicate that it WILL go to its conclusion if you take that step is it particularly valid to a given discussion.
In context, hate crimes legislation doesn't mean we're going to start punishing people before they ever commit a crime.
To me, a hate crime is a thought crime because it depends on what the criminal was thinking at the time the crime was committed. It seems to me that if someone commits i.e. murder, we should try them for murder.
I go back and forth in my head about this an awful lot. For starters, let's not argue about murder; murder typically has penalties so severe that a person who commits it will be either executed or never be let out of prison in most cases, at least in the US. There's not a lot worse you can make the punishment for murder even if we agreed it should be worse.
So, let's use assault as an example. On the one hand, assault is assault, and the person committed assault. That would lead us to believe the punishment should be the same in either case.
But on the other hand, prison is about more than just punishment -- it's also about rehabilitation, and protecting society. If somebody goes around beating black people for being black, I DO think society is in more danger from this person than if he goes around beating people who mouth off to him; at least the second guy was somewhat provoked. It's also likely simpler to get the second person to stop: he needs better ways of managing his anger, which we successfully treat every day. The racist may need much more intensive psychological help to stop, if he ever does. Somebody beating blacks (or gays or what have you) simply for being as they are has a pretty serious problem, in my mind.
If nothing else, I think I would support hate crime legislation that allowed us to keep people in jail until we're confident they won't commit another hate crime. Ideally it means they leave prison no longer racist (homophobic, sexist) -- but if they just leave with officials convinced they're not going to fly off the handle for no reason at all while they're busy hating people, so be it. People shouldn't have to worry about being hurt or killed just because of who or what they are. Assault may be assault, but whatever we can do to curb that sort of feeling... we'll never stop it, isn't it worth trying?
(All of this predicated, of course, on reasonable standards that prosecutors must meet--and I have no idea what those are--to prove that it actually WAS a hate crime instead of simply coincidence.)
I don't know specifically what type of RAM is used in a particular Mac model, but I browsed around on Newegg and found what appears to be the same stick of RAM you linked, but in 2GB format -- $25.99. Upgrading a Macbook from 2GB (2x1GB) to 4GB (2x2GB) costs $100. Even if we're being generous and taking the retail prices of two sticks of RAM and not offering any sort of discount for removing the two 1GB sticks, we're talking nearly a 100% markup. $50 may not be a ton of money when you're talking about buying a $1000+ laptop, but when there's very little reason for the price to go up that much I'm not sure what else we should call it other than getting ripped off. What am I paying for here, other than it being placed in an Apple computer?
All of that would depend on people not being stupid. We still live in a world where somebody who specifically signed up for a newsletter/mailing list/what have you from a legitimate company but decided they no longer want it hit the "Mark as spam" button instead of using the unsubscribe link. Not to mention it being ripe for abuse. Sign up for something from a company you don't like, give them cost-free email, revoke privilege for "abuse."
It's also dependent on there being a universal system in use for such a thing, with a universal ability to query the users' whitelists. Companies would go apeshit if they had absolutely no way of knowing if they're going to get drilled for every email their system sends to a user--even if the user specifically requested them and there's an easy way to turn it off--and rightly so. If we're going to undertake that kind of alteration to our email infrastructure, there's a lot of other pressing issues we may as well take care of first (or instead), not the least of which is ending unauthenticated emails and any type of header forging.
What motivation should AT&T have to cut off access without a court order? As an ISP, there shouldn't be a business case for refusing customer money without being required to do so.
You're right to follow the money, but you stopped a little too soon. The business case is that pirates tend to use a disproportionate share of resources compared to people performing only legitimate activities. Slashdotters will tell you they're only using what they paid for and they would not be wrong, but that doesn't mean ISPs particularly like it.
Presumably, just for its own benefit, the RIAA is trying to find the biggest pirates they can at a given time. That also correlates well to the biggest usage. To the ISPs, they're essentially a free investigator while the ISP itself gets to be innocent of any wrongdoing ("those mp3s were from your own band? Talk to the RIAA!") and only spend money to process the RIAA information.
They don't want to disconnect you; indeed AT&T says they won't without a court order. So for essentially free, one of two things happen: 1) You get scared and stop the activity, in which case usage levels probably drop*, the ISP itself wins, and the RIAA wins as well, or 2) You don't give two hoots and continue the activity, in which case they're no worse off than they started and the RIAA either accepts that or goes to court.
Since the cost of these letters is fairly low, it wouldn't take a lot of people caving and stopping the activity to be good for them, and if the summary is any indication they feel it is working well. With high-speed Internet access competition being so low, and the top two players (AT&T and Comcast) both engaging in it, the risks of customer defection over the practice is low as well.
(* I've used phrases like "probably" and "tend to" a lot in this post. My intention is simply to indicate that there are many legitimate, completely legal/non-tortious ways to soak up metric asstons of bandwidth while at the same time acknowledging that pirating things is still a huge use case.)
Anecdote and casual observation accumulated over time equate to empirical evidence.
Maybe so, but weak empirical evidence. Even if you're completely accurate in describing what you see, and that assumption is often a stretch, your conditions are likely not controlled enough to isolate anything in particular--and it may conflict with what somebody ELSE sees, which opens a completely different can of worms.
It sounds like in your line of work, simply knowing that the blueprint you got handed won't work in the real world is enough. That's perfectly fine; everybody is concerned with different particulars depending on their own perspective. What you have is a conclusion: "No, you're an idiot. This is faulty." From your perspective that's important. From a scientist (or engineer's), it's a starting point: "Why is this faulty? What can we learn from it? How can we avoid the same mistake later?" Neither of you are wrong, neither of you are wasting your time, but at the same time if you two swapped positions everything would likely go to hell pretty quick.
Anecdote and casual observation are great things to direct us on what we need to study rigorously; they're not a study in themselves.
Any "scientist" who dismisses empirical evidence is no scientist at all.
True, but that's not what this is. Hao Wu basically said (paraphrasing) "parents have known this for ages, if scientists could get any they would have known too!"
Aside from being a bit of a douchebag, his statement isn't particularly rigorous. Parents have known WHAT for ages? That children don't listen? That little kids have particular trouble listening? That's spectacular, and it's a good jumping-off point for exactly the kind of study that was done -- but it's not particularly meaningful in itself. I noticed the sky looks blue, too; that's meaningless as well. Somebody coming along and telling me about white light and wavelengths and giving me the reason WHY it's blue can be important. It chains a statement like "the sky is blue" into any number of potential discussions ranging from anatomy to physics to meteorology.
Knowing that little kids have trouble listening is interesting, and frankly even people without kids have observed that (making the little pot-shot comment about scientists not having kids distasteful,) but what's more interesting is to know WHY--the study seems to be pushing the idea that it's literally a functional difference in their brain. That's cool. Can we do anything about it? That might be useful. Why does it happen and what changes as they age that makes it stop? That might be useful too, in any number of applications and particularly for people who have any sort of learning disorders that we might find have similar physical causes and might respond to similar treatments. Is this just a lack of life experiences, or are we literally altering the way the brain works as we get older?
What your parent poster said was correct: Science is necessary to validate our observations because so many things we have "known" to be true have turned out to be false. I'm not big on name calling, and wouldn't have taken that tact myself, but saying that science wastes its time by studying things we "know" does seem illogical at best.
For starters, I don't agree with your premise at all; I believe all sides have potentially valid points worth making. But let's assume it's right.
What makes you think that the people most personally involved in a particular outcome are the ones who should be most involved in making it? If we're having a debate on the death penalty, should we put it to a vote of death row inmates? If we're talking about raising certain groups' taxes, should we limit it to people whose taxes would be raised by the proposal?
It reminds me of an episode of West Wing. They were doing debate prep, and asked the president a question: "If your daughter were murdered, would you want to see the perpetrator sentenced to death?" The reply was a bumbling mess, because he was messing with the guy who answered the question. Predictably, the guy lost his cool: "Of course you would want to see him put to death! You would want it to be cruel and unusual, which is why it's probably good that murder victims' families don't have legal rights in that case."
To give you a ridiculously stupid example, if we're debating a law that says everybody has to sacrifice their first born child to avoid god's wrath, the people who stand to lose their children aren't going to be making impartial decisions. If we're talking about exercising a societal interest that's not going to be good for everybody, "well you won't lose anything so you can't debate it!@" is a worthless excuse. The whole POINT of societal interest is that it's not good for everybody, but it's more good for more people than it is bad for the others. If it was universally agreed upon, we wouldn't need such laws or concepts.
If society decides that letting people drawn fictionalized cartoons of child porn is okay--even if it somehow DOES harm your children (I'm not saying it does and frankly can't fathom how it would)--then at best yours should be another voice in the crowd. You don't deserve to be elevated to higher consideration; if anything, the opposite.
So let's just drop the holier-than-thou nonsense and agree that everybody throws their ideas into the ring equally. If you have a point to make about the issue at hand, make it. If you just think you deserve to be treated extra-special because you had the wonderful foresight to have children... well. No. It's utterly irrelevant to whether fictionalized child porn harms children, and whether it should be allowed or banned.
Re:Islamic groups are pushing censorship worldwide
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I think raping 9 year old girls is a good place to draw the line between "thats just their culture" and "what the fuck, someone shoot this asshole."
I think everybody would agree rather wholeheartedly with you on this.
The real question is, is a girl simply being 9 years old the appropriate place to draw the line between consent and rape?
I don't have any love for people who would do such a thing either, and I certainly have no desires to do any such thing myself. But time and again this site will rally to the defense of an 18 year old kid who had consensual sex with his 15 year old girlfriend but ended up screwed (no pun intended) by angry parents who pressed for statutory rape charges, and I would be firmly on their side in this.
It's not clear to me where the line is, much less where it should be. When I struggle to come up with any reasonable criteria for determining these sorts of things, my instinct is to allow cultures to come to their own conclusions. That's particularly true for me when we're talking about something like an "age line," seemingly without concern for how meaningless that number itself is. Hypothetically, would it make a difference if before they had sex there was some drawn-out health lesson about what sex is and what it means and what it leads to and all that nonsense? Is it the age or the ignorance (or both)?
I don't know the specific history, so I'll assume everything you said was true.
It still doesn't really matter. Music videos used to be something you'd catch semi-randomly on TV. It made perfect sense to use for promotional purposes because it really couldn't take the place of buying the actual CD. Music videos were not on demand. The best you could do it is tape it and rewind it to watch over and over, which was inconvenient at best. The vast majority of people (though probably the vast minority of/.'ers, which makes things difficult) had neither the cables nor the knowledge to capture the audio from their tape onto their computer. And even if they could, people spent far less time at their computers in the early days of music videos; many people didn't even have one.
Nowadays computers are ubiquitous, and many people spend inordinate amounts of time there. YouTube is on-demand; you can listen to the song over and over just by pressing the play button over and over. You can create a playlist of many videos that loops over and over. And it's fairly trivial even for non-technical users to download the video and save it in an ipod-compatible format, making it not only free and on-demand, but also easily portable. No special cables required.
In other words, what used to be completely a marketing tool, when placed on the Internet like it is, becomes a possible replacement for your product. If I were trying to sell something that made that kind of transition, I'd be concerned too.
The smart thing would be to change business models. The problem is that the new business models essentially make the people who have to make the change obsolete, and that's why they're struggling so hard to do whatever they can to prevent those changes by legal coercion.
None of that, however, has anything to do with THIS story--THIS story is just idiocy. They're not claiming that Google isn't paying appropriate royalties to their songs, they're complaining that Google decided rather than pay the royalties they need to they'd simply block those videos from UK viewers until they get a lower rate.
Judging by your verbiage ("posting as anonymous"), I assume you mean that you're actually staying logged in but ticking the checkbox that makes it show up anonymously.
If so, that doesn't necessarily mean anything. Obviously, you're logged in and pressing a checkbox essentially saying "erm, ignore that." So yes, they HAVE your login information at the time your post is going through.
What information they ultimately store with the post when they drop it into the database we don't know without looking at the code. They might ignore all of the login information and process the post exactly as if it had come from somebody who wasn't logged in to begin with. It might process it is a logged-in post and flip the "anonymous" bit, then show it anonymously when it's being displayed. Obviously these two choices would result in very different outcomes as far as what they could then provide to subpoena.
To say that viewing pornography everyday, where women are treated like beautiful objects at best, and dogshit at worst, wouldn't have an effect on one's outlook is rubbish.
I know the "correlation/causation" thing is overdone here, but it seems appropriate. It seems to me that we're only watching these things because we're attracted to them to begin with, not that we've watched so much of it for no apparent reason that we've become attracted to it or immune to the negative aspects.
Women being treated as "beautiful objects" is simply the male mind at work; it has nothing to do with how many pornos they've watched. And yes, I do have at least one article off the top of my head to back that assertion up. We want to use beautiful women for our own sexual pleasure. That's the way men are. If you think about it, that makes perfect sense; when there were one or two or just a handful of human beings on the planet, long before we had any idea that rod fits nicely into hole and produces pleasure (and babies, eek!), there had to be something driving exactly that. As the joke goes, I doubt the first case of sexual intercourse happened because somebody tripped.
As far as the kinkier stuff goes, I'm not sure we really know what causes fetishes, sadism/masochism, etc. I would find it pretty hard to believe that the people who get off on animal porn like it because they watched so much of it back when they didn't though.
The difference is that in most cases, the person keeping an eye on all those server and network monitors is actually trained. At the very least, they have enough technical knowledge about the subjects in hand that they can make an educated decision as to whether it's worth waking the grumpy sysadmin to come down to the office or whether the problem can wait until morning.
This is more likely to be read by a bunch of amateurs concerned by any fluctuation in any reading, and then running to their "sysadmin" twice a week to see what's wrong when the answer is that nothing is wrong; sometimes things just fluctuate. Not only is that going to annoy, distract and potentially overwhelm doctors, but it's going to flood their offices with pointless appointments and have a much greater chance of squeezing out somebody who legitimately needs to be there.
It kind of reminds me of Dr. House from the tv show: He hates full body scans, because he says you'll always find a half dozen unrelated things wrong with the patient that now you have to treat and you're likely no closer to figuring out what their actual problem was. All other concerns aside, this is very likely going to be the same thing.
Religions can be dismissed based on the fact that they are flawed, contradictory of each other and themselves, can be shown to take ideas from other religions and long-dead cults and are basically patently ridiculous.
Also because the sun is yellow. That damn sun, man, I'm telling ya. Disproves all religions.
I say this as somebody who doesn't believe in god, but those are all exceptionally lame. The fact that many religions contradict each other can at best tell you that at least one of them is wrong; it doesn't mean they all are. They may all be wrong, but not agreeing with one another is hardly proof of that. Similarly contradictions within themselves are a decent thing to go by, but that's based on a possibly faulty assumption that everything must be completely and fully logically consistent. We're talking about god here; he can be anything at all, including things our own minds can't even understand.
Borrowing ideas from one another and long-dead cults? Again, that doesn't mean any of them are wrong, just increases the likelihood. I agree with the patently ridiculous part, but that's proof of nothing other than you and I having reached similar conclusions.
I don't believe in god because I have no evidence leading me to do so. That's the bottom line. Even if we took the Bible to be absolute truth, it's still not proof for me because it's circular logic. The only thing telling us it's unaltered truth from god is the Bible itself. That's aside from the historical realities that, even if it started out exactly that way, man has shaped everything that went into (and was excluded from) it.
All that said, I think you want to be careful with the use of words like religion or religions--what you almost certainly mean is theistic religions, and very probably Christian religions, but not all religions are the same. To throw one out there, I don't have any particular qualms with Buddhism (though I admit I haven't researched it thoroughly).
while they might open a new field of study into trying to prove the existence of God, that is the ONLY way that a science degree in creationism might be seen as legit
Religion can never be scientific; they're diametrically opposed concepts. Religion is based on faith, which is belief without proof, while science is a method of trying to gather proof to determine truth.
More to the point, as you say, religion has nothing to do with what makes science, science--the scientific method. And it can't, in any meaningful way, because religious claims are not testable or falsifiable, not repeatable, and not predictive. Belief in a supreme power or being itself is not falsifiable; after all, what if such a power does exist but doesn't want you to know or prove it?
That's not to say that religions might have it right, nor to say that some religions or interpretations thereof might not use science as part of a theory of creationism, like intelligent design purports to do. Nor is it to say that advanced degrees in theology aren't themselves worthwhile. It does mean that religion will never be science, and we should not treat them as equals. If they want to offer a Masters of Art degree in Theology--and I'm sure many places do--so be it. I have no objections. But trying to pretend it's science when it's not... urgh. What the hell are these people trying to accomplish? Do they realize why science is powerful and want to nose in for some reflected love? Or are they simply trying to undermine it entirely?
If Microsoft is infringing on their patents what else should they have done? You can't ignore it.
True. But if it really has been a year since they sent the notification, it seems pretty clear that 1) Microsoft doesn't think they're infringing or 2) they simply don't want to pay license fees. #1 doesn't seem likely, because of that quote about looking for a licensing solution, so it has to be #2.
So how do you infringe somebody's patent and not have to pay them to continue using it? You trade. But you can't trade unless they're also infringing one of yours -- so you can file a lawsuit, which essentially forces them to counter-sue. Now you're both in the pot and you both have incentive to deal, and agreeing to a patent license swap is certainly the easiest and most pain-free resolution to the conflict.
Note that nowhere in that scenario does any party have to actually prove the other is infringing, nor does it even have to be reality. It just has to have a prospect of losing scary enough that you don't want to let a judge/jury decide an outcome. It can be fear of losing or simply fear of legal costs in pursuing a win -- and having Microsoft's legal department on the other side of the table should go a long way toward that.
And hey, if Microsoft actually succeeds in getting a patent trade without TomTom actually infringing one of their patents... well, they won handily.
Presumably he's talking about a situation where a site you want to visit (example.com) is hosting annoying advertisements on its own server. It's not impossible, but it's definitely a niche case.
The builder would be willing to build it for $50000. However, the law requires that he charge you $100000. Would that be rational?
Rational, but stupid. Presumably, for some reason, the government wants houses to cost more money in this case. There's nothing irrational about that, but there are all sorts of questions about whether or not it is good policy.
Now, suppose George Gershwin was willing to write "An American In Paris" as long as he had a copyright for 17 years, but the law required that he have the copyright for the rest of his life plus 100 years. Would that be rational?
Essentially the same as the above case; it's perfectly rational for the government to set the term of copyrights in general, even if a specific individual person might have been happy with less. The questions raised are about where the "sweet spot" is that gets the most people willing to contribute while causing the least harm to others who might have been able to make something useful based on that work.
In this case, the analogy fails though, assuming we're holding the rest of the world ceteris paribus. There's nothing stopping an individual from not exercising his copyright protections, or from simply releasing it into the public domain, at any time he chooses. The government saying life + 100 is the LATEST a copyright can expire (until they move the limit again!). It doesn't force anybody to hold onto their copyrights that long if they don't wish to.
But if somebody copies it, have they stolen it from him? Doesn't he still 'have' it.
That's correct, which is why so many of us on Slashdot, myself included, don't particularly enjoy people calling copyright infringement theft.
In the context of whether or not copyrights are rational, however, you're begging the question. His still having what he wrote doesn't necessarily mean that copyright isn't a worthwhile exercise in itself. It also doesn't mean that somebody infringing that copyright might not have cost him all value the work might ever have had for him. It's a debate worth having, but it seems like you're skipping along to your conclusion here.
I thought the original idea of copyright was to give a creator enough incentive to do creative work.
That's certainly a reasonable way of phrasing the intent of copyright. Let me propose another, hopefully equally reasonable way: Copyright ensures that the people who deserve any money and credit from a work are the ones who receive it, which in turn makes them more willing to share that work with the world.
There's little besides copyright stopping a situation where I write a book, take it to a publishing house to help get it out there and to cover the production costs, and them simply ripping me off. Even if we pass some sort of false attribution law, forcing them to at least publish the book under my name, there's nothing to stop them from keeping every penny of profit that my work generates. All copyright does, in and of itself, is grant me the exclusive rights to decide who gets to copy and distribute my book. A lot of the ills of copyright stem from big companies buying those copyrights under unfavorable terms and then pressuring Congress to enforce the copyrights for them with ridiculous penalties. Those are definitely problems so far as I'm concerned, but that don't damn the entire concept of copyright.
Just like $50K might be enough incentive for that builder to build the house. [. ..] How often do you suppose that comes up in the minds of creators?
Again, you're right, but you're conflating disagreements over copyright terms with copyright itself. I happen to completely agree with what you seem to be saying, namely that copyright terms are waaaay too long. That said, there's obviously a ton of money in them and lots of other peopl
There's enough greed to go around, certainly, and I don't support deception--but the consumers love to bitch and moan but they're never willing to accept their own share of the responsibility.
Why is it so important to these companies to push service plans and insurance and batteries, and mark up a cable to $60 and sell you a hot apple pie with that? Because they've slashed their margins on the things you're actually there to buy so low trying to get you in there to buy them. Think about the people you know. If they could choose between Store A which has their product at $300 and Store B that has it at $250 but are going to push as hard as they possibly can to get you to buy their $50 warranty, which are they likely to choose? The majority of people are going to choose Store B and then bitch about the pressure to buy a warranty as if the two things were unrelated.
I don't condone deception or fraud, but it's this prioritization of the lowest price above all else that brings these things about. It's a lot like how people bitch and moan about Wal-Mart strangling out small mom and pop shops that had that friendly atmosphere and great service. They're dead because they weren't willing to pay for that service; they'd rather save a few bucks by going to that Wal-Mart. So be it, it's their right as consumers--but let's not be naive about the choices being made.
maybe he could be inventing the next bittorrent or HTML if we weren't letting him lose his focus by being a jerk.
It doesn't seem likely. In fact it may do more harm than good trying.
In my experience, these jerky genius types rarely go out of their way to be a jerk. Most of the time they're a jerk because people are getting in the way of them accomplishing what they're setting out to accomplish. They're annoyed by somebody constantly coming over to ask what they consider to be a stupid question, or by having to write 100 emails letting 37 managers know what's going on before they can write a line of code. He's not losing his focus by being a jerk; he's being a jerk because he's being forced to lose his focus. For those who are truly more onto the anti-social side, they may be annoyed by or horrendously uncomfortable with just the regular office niceities that most people suck up. (I don't think I'm rude to anybody, but I tend to be uncomfortable with that "small talk" sort of thing too.) They just want to be left alone to do their work.
If you force these people into a team environment, you're very likely to lose everything good you had and gain nothing in return. He's not likely to stop being a jerk; he's just going to now have a constant stream of "inferior" people he has to tolerate daily. You're institutionalizing the very things that make the person act that way. So he's going to be annoyed and even more jerky, getting even less done than he would have if you just tucked him away in his own little corner of the world and let him go about his business. His co-workers are going to be even less productive than they would ordinarily be because they're going to be delayed by teamwork in general, delayed by his jerkiness and thus obstructionism specifically, and probably affected by the constant exposure to somebody they'd likely rather run away screaming from.
The specific instance in the summary is retarded; if somebody really is crapping in the lobby, they have severe mental problems and should probably be locked in a therapists office and on disability for the rest of their lives. These people are not tolerable in a workplace regardless of what they do. Harrassing female employees probably isn't either, if for no other reason than the millions he saves your company in development costs can very easily be siphoned away by a single lawsuit by any of those employees. If we're just talking about somebody not being social, I don't consider that a grave sin.
Now, admittedly, there are some environments where this person simply never works well. Sometimes the things going on are all too collaborative to just let him off on his own to do what he does best, and that's not going to be a company that works for him and thus he's not going to be an employee that works for the company. Absent that, I agree with what somebody else said whole-heartedly: Use a person's strengths. If you have a guy who's a rockstar coder but bad at the social things and documentation, do what you can to keep as much of that as possible off his desk. If somebody works best in teams, put them with teams as much as possible.
Trying to ram a round peg into a square hole is much more likely to be a great way to shatter them both than it is a method of making a circle square.
Of course, this could explain some of the support for Prop. 8---employers who don't want to lose their "perfect" employees?
Please, let's not excuse their attempts at rationalization much less give them new ones. They're trying to codify their homophobia into law; nothing more, nothing less.
I think students are simply putting off growing up, and I am regularly dealing with high-school crap in, for example, sophomore-level science classes (courses in the students' major even!) which I simply never had to deal with before.
I don't think this is representative of a trend in generational maturity; rather, I think it's a trend in students.
It used to be, not long ago, that university really was higher education. A relatively small percentage of people attended, and those who did usually ended up with the highest-paying, most secure and generally best jobs. This is as we expect.
Somewhere along the lines though, college changed from a choice for those truly interested in furthering their education; it became an expectation. Nowadays much higher percentages of students are attending colleges. They don't particularly want to further their education or learn, they want to end up with the highest-paying, most secure and generally best jobs. It's nothing but a means to an end, and the vast majority of these students who wouldn't have been in college at all a decade or so ago are the exact people who are utterly unconcerned with whether or not they deserve it. These are the students who will pass notes and watch YouTube in class and then run crying to the dean when a professor suggests they may have to earn their way in this world with hard work and results. College == $$$, that's all they need to know, and they're damn well going to protect that. So they trog along for 5-6 years in college until they eventually earn some degree in African Dance Studies or some such, and run off into the real world, blindsided by its lack of concern for their expectations.
Colleges don't get off free either. In their rush to accommodate these new students (students == $$$ in their heads), they didn't bother to ask themselves if those students should be there at all. Compare what college courses are today to what your parents and grandparents and teachers told you college would be like as you grew up. College isn't college, it's a continuation of high school, in both curriculum and presentation. All this does, from the student perspective, is to postpone that blindsiding by a few years and tens of thousands of dollars of student loan debt. They emerge from college roughly as smart (or stupid) as they entered. Most won't have a particularly strong grasp even on subject matter within their own majors, but they will have a piece of paper that says they deserve lots of money.
The net result is a lower quality of college graduate. Already we're seeing the value of a college degree slipping; we're essentially at the point where high-school-only graduates are held in essentially the same vein and have the same earning potential today as not-even-high-school graduates did years ago, and college graduates of today taking the place of high school graduates of yesteryear. I recall my barber telling a story a few years ago about his daughter looking for a job as a secretary, and most of these places requiring a college education. Really? To be a secretary? (It's not relevant to the story, but for completeness' sake I think she actually did have a degree--which didn't lessen the shock of such a thing being required.)
Soon--even today--master's degrees will be the differentiator. Colleges and universities will be ecstatic, since it means an ever-increasing revenue stream for them. Students will be even more sure of their own worth and even more determined that they will--need to--jump into the workforce and make all of that money they just spent back. They have a master's degree, dammit! They deserve it! More and more students will pour into even-higher-education, and we'll just repeat the cycle. Higher education was a differentiator because it was a differentiator. If college degrees are commoditized, they lose much of the value they used to hold--particularly when the system itself is bent down to help make that commoditi
If, as most cable companies do, they've contracted to provide "unlimited" service, at "xx Mbps rate", then that's what they need to provide.
Anybody who agreed to provide service "at xx Mbps rate" is incompetent, unless we're talking about high-end, ridiculously expensive lines being sold to high-end business customers with a SLA. A T1 costs hundreds of dollars per month and only guarantees you 1.5Mbps.
What any legal department worth their salt says is "UP TO xx Mbps." You're never guaranteed you're going to hit that rate; in fact, the only guarantee that statement is making is that they won't permit you to use any more than that. If that's the case here, they can easily throttle traffic types and/or during peak hours and be perfectly within the terms of their contracts. If not, somebody needs to be fired and they need to mail out letters with their new terms ASAP, effective as soon as permitted by law.
Slashdot Mirror
Before we start out with any such debate, I think we need to come up with a reasonable, logical rationale as to why people are worked up about the outsides of their houses being in pictures.
This is StreetView. Until some day as somebody creates a BurglarView mashup with an "I'm Feeling Lucky" button, we're talking about somebody who has some specific interest in seeing the neighborhoods they're clicking on. Most likely this means they're in the area or planning on being in the area soon, and this can provide them with valuable information.
"We're affluent and have been robbed" is the downside? Sorry, but that's just on the ridiculous side of lame excuses. Nobody's going to come from around the world to rob you; there's plenty of rich people much closer to them that they can rob. And if it's some dude down the street, they could just as easily walk past themselves. Since they've been robbed three times recently, it almost certainly IS from nearby -- and more importantly, this person or group of people clearly already knows you're worth robbing. And all without the help of StreetView.
I absolutely believe in a right to privacy, and I believe it should be strictly enforced -- but complaining that pictures are taken from a public roadway of the outside of your house, which can be just as easily seen by any random Joe walking by, is hardly something I consider private. Google should have a policy regarding taking down or otherwise obfuscating pictures if they've happened to catch something with their cameras that doesn't belong, just to be on the nice side of things. At the same time, if you're screwing your wife in the window or admiring your Rolex collection in the sunlight then you're obviously not overly concerned with the privacy of those activities to begin with.
Unless somebody can provide a good reason that the outside of a house should be considered private and that taking a picture of that crosses some sort of line, social or legal, I'm not inclined to condemn anybody for doing so. There ARE gated communities for those people who are legitimately so concerned that only people they know and who have business there can get anywhere near their house.
Going to reply to your post backward, just to get the simpler half out of the way before the more rambling part.
I agree to a point. It's definitely worthwhile to follow something to a conclusion. On the other hand, what you're referring to is "slippery slope," and it's a logical error of argumentation. In other words, something running into a bad conclusion is an excellent reason not to follow it to its conclusion -- but not necessarily a good reason not to take a step in its direction. Only if you have something more than "BUT WHAT IF!" to indicate that it WILL go to its conclusion if you take that step is it particularly valid to a given discussion.
In context, hate crimes legislation doesn't mean we're going to start punishing people before they ever commit a crime.
I go back and forth in my head about this an awful lot. For starters, let's not argue about murder; murder typically has penalties so severe that a person who commits it will be either executed or never be let out of prison in most cases, at least in the US. There's not a lot worse you can make the punishment for murder even if we agreed it should be worse.
So, let's use assault as an example. On the one hand, assault is assault, and the person committed assault. That would lead us to believe the punishment should be the same in either case.
But on the other hand, prison is about more than just punishment -- it's also about rehabilitation, and protecting society. If somebody goes around beating black people for being black, I DO think society is in more danger from this person than if he goes around beating people who mouth off to him; at least the second guy was somewhat provoked. It's also likely simpler to get the second person to stop: he needs better ways of managing his anger, which we successfully treat every day. The racist may need much more intensive psychological help to stop, if he ever does. Somebody beating blacks (or gays or what have you) simply for being as they are has a pretty serious problem, in my mind.
If nothing else, I think I would support hate crime legislation that allowed us to keep people in jail until we're confident they won't commit another hate crime. Ideally it means they leave prison no longer racist (homophobic, sexist) -- but if they just leave with officials convinced they're not going to fly off the handle for no reason at all while they're busy hating people, so be it. People shouldn't have to worry about being hurt or killed just because of who or what they are. Assault may be assault, but whatever we can do to curb that sort of feeling... we'll never stop it, isn't it worth trying?
(All of this predicated, of course, on reasonable standards that prosecutors must meet--and I have no idea what those are--to prove that it actually WAS a hate crime instead of simply coincidence.)
I don't know specifically what type of RAM is used in a particular Mac model, but I browsed around on Newegg and found what appears to be the same stick of RAM you linked, but in 2GB format -- $25.99. Upgrading a Macbook from 2GB (2x1GB) to 4GB (2x2GB) costs $100. Even if we're being generous and taking the retail prices of two sticks of RAM and not offering any sort of discount for removing the two 1GB sticks, we're talking nearly a 100% markup. $50 may not be a ton of money when you're talking about buying a $1000+ laptop, but when there's very little reason for the price to go up that much I'm not sure what else we should call it other than getting ripped off. What am I paying for here, other than it being placed in an Apple computer?
All of that would depend on people not being stupid. We still live in a world where somebody who specifically signed up for a newsletter/mailing list/what have you from a legitimate company but decided they no longer want it hit the "Mark as spam" button instead of using the unsubscribe link. Not to mention it being ripe for abuse. Sign up for something from a company you don't like, give them cost-free email, revoke privilege for "abuse."
It's also dependent on there being a universal system in use for such a thing, with a universal ability to query the users' whitelists. Companies would go apeshit if they had absolutely no way of knowing if they're going to get drilled for every email their system sends to a user--even if the user specifically requested them and there's an easy way to turn it off--and rightly so. If we're going to undertake that kind of alteration to our email infrastructure, there's a lot of other pressing issues we may as well take care of first (or instead), not the least of which is ending unauthenticated emails and any type of header forging.
If nothing else, it seems like a pretty good way to get her to stop nagging you to take her to Paris.
You're right to follow the money, but you stopped a little too soon. The business case is that pirates tend to use a disproportionate share of resources compared to people performing only legitimate activities. Slashdotters will tell you they're only using what they paid for and they would not be wrong, but that doesn't mean ISPs particularly like it.
Presumably, just for its own benefit, the RIAA is trying to find the biggest pirates they can at a given time. That also correlates well to the biggest usage. To the ISPs, they're essentially a free investigator while the ISP itself gets to be innocent of any wrongdoing ("those mp3s were from your own band? Talk to the RIAA!") and only spend money to process the RIAA information.
They don't want to disconnect you; indeed AT&T says they won't without a court order. So for essentially free, one of two things happen: 1) You get scared and stop the activity, in which case usage levels probably drop*, the ISP itself wins, and the RIAA wins as well, or 2) You don't give two hoots and continue the activity, in which case they're no worse off than they started and the RIAA either accepts that or goes to court.
Since the cost of these letters is fairly low, it wouldn't take a lot of people caving and stopping the activity to be good for them, and if the summary is any indication they feel it is working well. With high-speed Internet access competition being so low, and the top two players (AT&T and Comcast) both engaging in it, the risks of customer defection over the practice is low as well.
(* I've used phrases like "probably" and "tend to" a lot in this post. My intention is simply to indicate that there are many legitimate, completely legal/non-tortious ways to soak up metric asstons of bandwidth while at the same time acknowledging that pirating things is still a huge use case.)
Maybe so, but weak empirical evidence. Even if you're completely accurate in describing what you see, and that assumption is often a stretch, your conditions are likely not controlled enough to isolate anything in particular--and it may conflict with what somebody ELSE sees, which opens a completely different can of worms.
It sounds like in your line of work, simply knowing that the blueprint you got handed won't work in the real world is enough. That's perfectly fine; everybody is concerned with different particulars depending on their own perspective. What you have is a conclusion: "No, you're an idiot. This is faulty." From your perspective that's important. From a scientist (or engineer's), it's a starting point: "Why is this faulty? What can we learn from it? How can we avoid the same mistake later?" Neither of you are wrong, neither of you are wasting your time, but at the same time if you two swapped positions everything would likely go to hell pretty quick.
Anecdote and casual observation are great things to direct us on what we need to study rigorously; they're not a study in themselves.
True, but that's not what this is. Hao Wu basically said (paraphrasing) "parents have known this for ages, if scientists could get any they would have known too!"
Aside from being a bit of a douchebag, his statement isn't particularly rigorous. Parents have known WHAT for ages? That children don't listen? That little kids have particular trouble listening? That's spectacular, and it's a good jumping-off point for exactly the kind of study that was done -- but it's not particularly meaningful in itself. I noticed the sky looks blue, too; that's meaningless as well. Somebody coming along and telling me about white light and wavelengths and giving me the reason WHY it's blue can be important. It chains a statement like "the sky is blue" into any number of potential discussions ranging from anatomy to physics to meteorology.
Knowing that little kids have trouble listening is interesting, and frankly even people without kids have observed that (making the little pot-shot comment about scientists not having kids distasteful,) but what's more interesting is to know WHY--the study seems to be pushing the idea that it's literally a functional difference in their brain. That's cool. Can we do anything about it? That might be useful. Why does it happen and what changes as they age that makes it stop? That might be useful too, in any number of applications and particularly for people who have any sort of learning disorders that we might find have similar physical causes and might respond to similar treatments. Is this just a lack of life experiences, or are we literally altering the way the brain works as we get older?
What your parent poster said was correct: Science is necessary to validate our observations because so many things we have "known" to be true have turned out to be false. I'm not big on name calling, and wouldn't have taken that tact myself, but saying that science wastes its time by studying things we "know" does seem illogical at best.
For starters, I don't agree with your premise at all; I believe all sides have potentially valid points worth making. But let's assume it's right.
What makes you think that the people most personally involved in a particular outcome are the ones who should be most involved in making it? If we're having a debate on the death penalty, should we put it to a vote of death row inmates? If we're talking about raising certain groups' taxes, should we limit it to people whose taxes would be raised by the proposal?
It reminds me of an episode of West Wing. They were doing debate prep, and asked the president a question: "If your daughter were murdered, would you want to see the perpetrator sentenced to death?" The reply was a bumbling mess, because he was messing with the guy who answered the question. Predictably, the guy lost his cool: "Of course you would want to see him put to death! You would want it to be cruel and unusual, which is why it's probably good that murder victims' families don't have legal rights in that case."
To give you a ridiculously stupid example, if we're debating a law that says everybody has to sacrifice their first born child to avoid god's wrath, the people who stand to lose their children aren't going to be making impartial decisions. If we're talking about exercising a societal interest that's not going to be good for everybody, "well you won't lose anything so you can't debate it!@" is a worthless excuse. The whole POINT of societal interest is that it's not good for everybody, but it's more good for more people than it is bad for the others. If it was universally agreed upon, we wouldn't need such laws or concepts.
If society decides that letting people drawn fictionalized cartoons of child porn is okay--even if it somehow DOES harm your children (I'm not saying it does and frankly can't fathom how it would)--then at best yours should be another voice in the crowd. You don't deserve to be elevated to higher consideration; if anything, the opposite.
So let's just drop the holier-than-thou nonsense and agree that everybody throws their ideas into the ring equally. If you have a point to make about the issue at hand, make it. If you just think you deserve to be treated extra-special because you had the wonderful foresight to have children... well. No. It's utterly irrelevant to whether fictionalized child porn harms children, and whether it should be allowed or banned.
I think everybody would agree rather wholeheartedly with you on this.
The real question is, is a girl simply being 9 years old the appropriate place to draw the line between consent and rape?
I don't have any love for people who would do such a thing either, and I certainly have no desires to do any such thing myself. But time and again this site will rally to the defense of an 18 year old kid who had consensual sex with his 15 year old girlfriend but ended up screwed (no pun intended) by angry parents who pressed for statutory rape charges, and I would be firmly on their side in this.
It's not clear to me where the line is, much less where it should be. When I struggle to come up with any reasonable criteria for determining these sorts of things, my instinct is to allow cultures to come to their own conclusions. That's particularly true for me when we're talking about something like an "age line," seemingly without concern for how meaningless that number itself is. Hypothetically, would it make a difference if before they had sex there was some drawn-out health lesson about what sex is and what it means and what it leads to and all that nonsense? Is it the age or the ignorance (or both)?
I absolutely DO NOT SUPPORT THIS PROPOSAL -- let me get that out there in no uncertain terms in advance. And for those who care, I am an atheist.
That said, perhaps the kind of idiocy you just sputtered is what these people are so tired of that they even bring nonsense like this up to vote?
I don't know the specific history, so I'll assume everything you said was true.
It still doesn't really matter. Music videos used to be something you'd catch semi-randomly on TV. It made perfect sense to use for promotional purposes because it really couldn't take the place of buying the actual CD. Music videos were not on demand. The best you could do it is tape it and rewind it to watch over and over, which was inconvenient at best. The vast majority of people (though probably the vast minority of /.'ers, which makes things difficult) had neither the cables nor the knowledge to capture the audio from their tape onto their computer. And even if they could, people spent far less time at their computers in the early days of music videos; many people didn't even have one.
Nowadays computers are ubiquitous, and many people spend inordinate amounts of time there. YouTube is on-demand; you can listen to the song over and over just by pressing the play button over and over. You can create a playlist of many videos that loops over and over. And it's fairly trivial even for non-technical users to download the video and save it in an ipod-compatible format, making it not only free and on-demand, but also easily portable. No special cables required.
In other words, what used to be completely a marketing tool, when placed on the Internet like it is, becomes a possible replacement for your product. If I were trying to sell something that made that kind of transition, I'd be concerned too.
The smart thing would be to change business models. The problem is that the new business models essentially make the people who have to make the change obsolete, and that's why they're struggling so hard to do whatever they can to prevent those changes by legal coercion.
None of that, however, has anything to do with THIS story--THIS story is just idiocy. They're not claiming that Google isn't paying appropriate royalties to their songs, they're complaining that Google decided rather than pay the royalties they need to they'd simply block those videos from UK viewers until they get a lower rate.
Judging by your verbiage ("posting as anonymous"), I assume you mean that you're actually staying logged in but ticking the checkbox that makes it show up anonymously.
If so, that doesn't necessarily mean anything. Obviously, you're logged in and pressing a checkbox essentially saying "erm, ignore that." So yes, they HAVE your login information at the time your post is going through.
What information they ultimately store with the post when they drop it into the database we don't know without looking at the code. They might ignore all of the login information and process the post exactly as if it had come from somebody who wasn't logged in to begin with. It might process it is a logged-in post and flip the "anonymous" bit, then show it anonymously when it's being displayed. Obviously these two choices would result in very different outcomes as far as what they could then provide to subpoena.
I know the "correlation/causation" thing is overdone here, but it seems appropriate. It seems to me that we're only watching these things because we're attracted to them to begin with, not that we've watched so much of it for no apparent reason that we've become attracted to it or immune to the negative aspects.
Women being treated as "beautiful objects" is simply the male mind at work; it has nothing to do with how many pornos they've watched. And yes, I do have at least one article off the top of my head to back that assertion up. We want to use beautiful women for our own sexual pleasure. That's the way men are. If you think about it, that makes perfect sense; when there were one or two or just a handful of human beings on the planet, long before we had any idea that rod fits nicely into hole and produces pleasure (and babies, eek!), there had to be something driving exactly that. As the joke goes, I doubt the first case of sexual intercourse happened because somebody tripped.
As far as the kinkier stuff goes, I'm not sure we really know what causes fetishes, sadism/masochism, etc. I would find it pretty hard to believe that the people who get off on animal porn like it because they watched so much of it back when they didn't though.
The difference is that in most cases, the person keeping an eye on all those server and network monitors is actually trained. At the very least, they have enough technical knowledge about the subjects in hand that they can make an educated decision as to whether it's worth waking the grumpy sysadmin to come down to the office or whether the problem can wait until morning.
This is more likely to be read by a bunch of amateurs concerned by any fluctuation in any reading, and then running to their "sysadmin" twice a week to see what's wrong when the answer is that nothing is wrong; sometimes things just fluctuate. Not only is that going to annoy, distract and potentially overwhelm doctors, but it's going to flood their offices with pointless appointments and have a much greater chance of squeezing out somebody who legitimately needs to be there.
It kind of reminds me of Dr. House from the tv show: He hates full body scans, because he says you'll always find a half dozen unrelated things wrong with the patient that now you have to treat and you're likely no closer to figuring out what their actual problem was. All other concerns aside, this is very likely going to be the same thing.
Also because the sun is yellow. That damn sun, man, I'm telling ya. Disproves all religions.
I say this as somebody who doesn't believe in god, but those are all exceptionally lame. The fact that many religions contradict each other can at best tell you that at least one of them is wrong; it doesn't mean they all are. They may all be wrong, but not agreeing with one another is hardly proof of that. Similarly contradictions within themselves are a decent thing to go by, but that's based on a possibly faulty assumption that everything must be completely and fully logically consistent. We're talking about god here; he can be anything at all, including things our own minds can't even understand.
Borrowing ideas from one another and long-dead cults? Again, that doesn't mean any of them are wrong, just increases the likelihood. I agree with the patently ridiculous part, but that's proof of nothing other than you and I having reached similar conclusions.
I don't believe in god because I have no evidence leading me to do so. That's the bottom line. Even if we took the Bible to be absolute truth, it's still not proof for me because it's circular logic. The only thing telling us it's unaltered truth from god is the Bible itself. That's aside from the historical realities that, even if it started out exactly that way, man has shaped everything that went into (and was excluded from) it.
All that said, I think you want to be careful with the use of words like religion or religions--what you almost certainly mean is theistic religions, and very probably Christian religions, but not all religions are the same. To throw one out there, I don't have any particular qualms with Buddhism (though I admit I haven't researched it thoroughly).
Religion can never be scientific; they're diametrically opposed concepts. Religion is based on faith, which is belief without proof, while science is a method of trying to gather proof to determine truth.
More to the point, as you say, religion has nothing to do with what makes science, science--the scientific method. And it can't, in any meaningful way, because religious claims are not testable or falsifiable, not repeatable, and not predictive. Belief in a supreme power or being itself is not falsifiable; after all, what if such a power does exist but doesn't want you to know or prove it?
That's not to say that religions might have it right, nor to say that some religions or interpretations thereof might not use science as part of a theory of creationism, like intelligent design purports to do. Nor is it to say that advanced degrees in theology aren't themselves worthwhile. It does mean that religion will never be science, and we should not treat them as equals. If they want to offer a Masters of Art degree in Theology--and I'm sure many places do--so be it. I have no objections. But trying to pretend it's science when it's not... urgh. What the hell are these people trying to accomplish? Do they realize why science is powerful and want to nose in for some reflected love? Or are they simply trying to undermine it entirely?
True. But if it really has been a year since they sent the notification, it seems pretty clear that 1) Microsoft doesn't think they're infringing or 2) they simply don't want to pay license fees. #1 doesn't seem likely, because of that quote about looking for a licensing solution, so it has to be #2.
So how do you infringe somebody's patent and not have to pay them to continue using it? You trade. But you can't trade unless they're also infringing one of yours -- so you can file a lawsuit, which essentially forces them to counter-sue. Now you're both in the pot and you both have incentive to deal, and agreeing to a patent license swap is certainly the easiest and most pain-free resolution to the conflict.
Note that nowhere in that scenario does any party have to actually prove the other is infringing, nor does it even have to be reality. It just has to have a prospect of losing scary enough that you don't want to let a judge/jury decide an outcome. It can be fear of losing or simply fear of legal costs in pursuing a win -- and having Microsoft's legal department on the other side of the table should go a long way toward that.
And hey, if Microsoft actually succeeds in getting a patent trade without TomTom actually infringing one of their patents... well, they won handily.
For real?
Presumably he's talking about a situation where a site you want to visit (example.com) is hosting annoying advertisements on its own server. It's not impossible, but it's definitely a niche case.
Rational, but stupid. Presumably, for some reason, the government wants houses to cost more money in this case. There's nothing irrational about that, but there are all sorts of questions about whether or not it is good policy.
Essentially the same as the above case; it's perfectly rational for the government to set the term of copyrights in general, even if a specific individual person might have been happy with less. The questions raised are about where the "sweet spot" is that gets the most people willing to contribute while causing the least harm to others who might have been able to make something useful based on that work.
In this case, the analogy fails though, assuming we're holding the rest of the world ceteris paribus. There's nothing stopping an individual from not exercising his copyright protections, or from simply releasing it into the public domain, at any time he chooses. The government saying life + 100 is the LATEST a copyright can expire (until they move the limit again!). It doesn't force anybody to hold onto their copyrights that long if they don't wish to.
That's correct, which is why so many of us on Slashdot, myself included, don't particularly enjoy people calling copyright infringement theft.
In the context of whether or not copyrights are rational, however, you're begging the question. His still having what he wrote doesn't necessarily mean that copyright isn't a worthwhile exercise in itself. It also doesn't mean that somebody infringing that copyright might not have cost him all value the work might ever have had for him. It's a debate worth having, but it seems like you're skipping along to your conclusion here.
That's certainly a reasonable way of phrasing the intent of copyright. Let me propose another, hopefully equally reasonable way: Copyright ensures that the people who deserve any money and credit from a work are the ones who receive it, which in turn makes them more willing to share that work with the world.
There's little besides copyright stopping a situation where I write a book, take it to a publishing house to help get it out there and to cover the production costs, and them simply ripping me off. Even if we pass some sort of false attribution law, forcing them to at least publish the book under my name, there's nothing to stop them from keeping every penny of profit that my work generates. All copyright does, in and of itself, is grant me the exclusive rights to decide who gets to copy and distribute my book. A lot of the ills of copyright stem from big companies buying those copyrights under unfavorable terms and then pressuring Congress to enforce the copyrights for them with ridiculous penalties. Those are definitely problems so far as I'm concerned, but that don't damn the entire concept of copyright.
Again, you're right, but you're conflating disagreements over copyright terms with copyright itself. I happen to completely agree with what you seem to be saying, namely that copyright terms are waaaay too long. That said, there's obviously a ton of money in them and lots of other peopl
There's enough greed to go around, certainly, and I don't support deception--but the consumers love to bitch and moan but they're never willing to accept their own share of the responsibility.
Why is it so important to these companies to push service plans and insurance and batteries, and mark up a cable to $60 and sell you a hot apple pie with that? Because they've slashed their margins on the things you're actually there to buy so low trying to get you in there to buy them. Think about the people you know. If they could choose between Store A which has their product at $300 and Store B that has it at $250 but are going to push as hard as they possibly can to get you to buy their $50 warranty, which are they likely to choose? The majority of people are going to choose Store B and then bitch about the pressure to buy a warranty as if the two things were unrelated.
I don't condone deception or fraud, but it's this prioritization of the lowest price above all else that brings these things about. It's a lot like how people bitch and moan about Wal-Mart strangling out small mom and pop shops that had that friendly atmosphere and great service. They're dead because they weren't willing to pay for that service; they'd rather save a few bucks by going to that Wal-Mart. So be it, it's their right as consumers--but let's not be naive about the choices being made.
It doesn't seem likely. In fact it may do more harm than good trying.
In my experience, these jerky genius types rarely go out of their way to be a jerk. Most of the time they're a jerk because people are getting in the way of them accomplishing what they're setting out to accomplish. They're annoyed by somebody constantly coming over to ask what they consider to be a stupid question, or by having to write 100 emails letting 37 managers know what's going on before they can write a line of code. He's not losing his focus by being a jerk; he's being a jerk because he's being forced to lose his focus. For those who are truly more onto the anti-social side, they may be annoyed by or horrendously uncomfortable with just the regular office niceities that most people suck up. (I don't think I'm rude to anybody, but I tend to be uncomfortable with that "small talk" sort of thing too.) They just want to be left alone to do their work.
If you force these people into a team environment, you're very likely to lose everything good you had and gain nothing in return. He's not likely to stop being a jerk; he's just going to now have a constant stream of "inferior" people he has to tolerate daily. You're institutionalizing the very things that make the person act that way. So he's going to be annoyed and even more jerky, getting even less done than he would have if you just tucked him away in his own little corner of the world and let him go about his business. His co-workers are going to be even less productive than they would ordinarily be because they're going to be delayed by teamwork in general, delayed by his jerkiness and thus obstructionism specifically, and probably affected by the constant exposure to somebody they'd likely rather run away screaming from.
The specific instance in the summary is retarded; if somebody really is crapping in the lobby, they have severe mental problems and should probably be locked in a therapists office and on disability for the rest of their lives. These people are not tolerable in a workplace regardless of what they do. Harrassing female employees probably isn't either, if for no other reason than the millions he saves your company in development costs can very easily be siphoned away by a single lawsuit by any of those employees. If we're just talking about somebody not being social, I don't consider that a grave sin.
Now, admittedly, there are some environments where this person simply never works well. Sometimes the things going on are all too collaborative to just let him off on his own to do what he does best, and that's not going to be a company that works for him and thus he's not going to be an employee that works for the company. Absent that, I agree with what somebody else said whole-heartedly: Use a person's strengths. If you have a guy who's a rockstar coder but bad at the social things and documentation, do what you can to keep as much of that as possible off his desk. If somebody works best in teams, put them with teams as much as possible.
Trying to ram a round peg into a square hole is much more likely to be a great way to shatter them both than it is a method of making a circle square.
Please, let's not excuse their attempts at rationalization much less give them new ones. They're trying to codify their homophobia into law; nothing more, nothing less.
I don't think this is representative of a trend in generational maturity; rather, I think it's a trend in students.
It used to be, not long ago, that university really was higher education. A relatively small percentage of people attended, and those who did usually ended up with the highest-paying, most secure and generally best jobs. This is as we expect.
Somewhere along the lines though, college changed from a choice for those truly interested in furthering their education; it became an expectation. Nowadays much higher percentages of students are attending colleges. They don't particularly want to further their education or learn, they want to end up with the highest-paying, most secure and generally best jobs. It's nothing but a means to an end, and the vast majority of these students who wouldn't have been in college at all a decade or so ago are the exact people who are utterly unconcerned with whether or not they deserve it. These are the students who will pass notes and watch YouTube in class and then run crying to the dean when a professor suggests they may have to earn their way in this world with hard work and results. College == $$$, that's all they need to know, and they're damn well going to protect that. So they trog along for 5-6 years in college until they eventually earn some degree in African Dance Studies or some such, and run off into the real world, blindsided by its lack of concern for their expectations.
Colleges don't get off free either. In their rush to accommodate these new students (students == $$$ in their heads), they didn't bother to ask themselves if those students should be there at all. Compare what college courses are today to what your parents and grandparents and teachers told you college would be like as you grew up. College isn't college, it's a continuation of high school, in both curriculum and presentation. All this does, from the student perspective, is to postpone that blindsiding by a few years and tens of thousands of dollars of student loan debt. They emerge from college roughly as smart (or stupid) as they entered. Most won't have a particularly strong grasp even on subject matter within their own majors, but they will have a piece of paper that says they deserve lots of money.
The net result is a lower quality of college graduate. Already we're seeing the value of a college degree slipping; we're essentially at the point where high-school-only graduates are held in essentially the same vein and have the same earning potential today as not-even-high-school graduates did years ago, and college graduates of today taking the place of high school graduates of yesteryear. I recall my barber telling a story a few years ago about his daughter looking for a job as a secretary, and most of these places requiring a college education. Really? To be a secretary? (It's not relevant to the story, but for completeness' sake I think she actually did have a degree--which didn't lessen the shock of such a thing being required.)
Soon--even today--master's degrees will be the differentiator. Colleges and universities will be ecstatic, since it means an ever-increasing revenue stream for them. Students will be even more sure of their own worth and even more determined that they will--need to--jump into the workforce and make all of that money they just spent back. They have a master's degree, dammit! They deserve it! More and more students will pour into even-higher-education, and we'll just repeat the cycle. Higher education was a differentiator because it was a differentiator. If college degrees are commoditized, they lose much of the value they used to hold--particularly when the system itself is bent down to help make that commoditi
Anybody who agreed to provide service "at xx Mbps rate" is incompetent, unless we're talking about high-end, ridiculously expensive lines being sold to high-end business customers with a SLA. A T1 costs hundreds of dollars per month and only guarantees you 1.5Mbps.
What any legal department worth their salt says is "UP TO xx Mbps." You're never guaranteed you're going to hit that rate; in fact, the only guarantee that statement is making is that they won't permit you to use any more than that. If that's the case here, they can easily throttle traffic types and/or during peak hours and be perfectly within the terms of their contracts. If not, somebody needs to be fired and they need to mail out letters with their new terms ASAP, effective as soon as permitted by law.