The consumer benefits from less annoying ads that have nothing to do with their interests, yes. But no, their primary benefit is two steps down the line in that quote: "Web sites can make more money from online advertising." A lot of sites are supported by advertising dollars. That's the benefit to the consumer.
You should note that in some (all?) cases, this sort of behavior is prohibited by their Terms of Service. I don't even think it would be particularly hard to identify users doing this based on data usage and usage patterns. They may throttle you back to nothing or simply turn your service off altogether, so I wouldn't plan on that with a phone/contract that is important to you. I don't know if they bother yet, but there's no guarantee they won't later.
Not the OP, however: I understand the incredulity, but here's one study I was given in a telecommunications economics class. (The link from my school's website appears to be gone, but based on filename this is the same PDF I saw):
Downloads have an effect on sales which is statistically indistinguishable from zero, despite rather precise estimates. Moreover, these estimates are of moderate economic significance and are inconsistent with claims that file sharing is the primary reason for the recent decline in music sales.
The basic conclusion, if I remember correctly, was: The top 1% of artists in terms of popularity lose sales due to pirated songs, and the rest actually see their sales increase with piracy. Obviously you can fact-check this yourself to see if my recollection is correct.
I also find it interesting that baseball is one of the few games where when something that 'shouldn't happen' takes place (like a ball lost in ivy), the rules explicitly call for the umpires to decide what should have happened and set things as if it did.
I'm not sure if the "ball lost in ivy" thing was a reference to Wrigley Field, but as a life-long Cubs fan I can tell you the umpire has essentially no discretion in that case. If the fielder throws up his hands, indicating that the ball has become lost in the ivy, it's a ground-rule double. The only discretion involved is in the following two scenarios:
1. If there's a baserunner on ahead of the person who got the hit, the umpires get to decide whether or not he would have been able to score on the play based on where he had gotten to at the time of the call. This very seldom means anything, however, because balls that get stuck in the ivy tend to have been quite hard-hit and usually with a single hop--meaning the baserunner is almost never half way around third base if he was standing anywhere other than third to begin with, and if he WAS on third there's nothing to decide.
2. If the fielder attempted to dig the ball out before throwing his hands up, the ball is live. I wouldn't call this discretion so much as a caveat to the rule and a decision on their part.
There ARE areas of umpire discretion, though. For example interfering with the baserunner makes them not only safe at the next base, but possibly more bases depending on what the umpire thinks would have happened had the interference not occurred. I like these things as they add more of a human element to it that I think is engaging and important.
I can also see where it's completely necessary. Baseball is one of few sports where one team isn't really trying to stop the other. Oh, sure, they're trying to "stop" you from getting a hit or run, but the focus is nearly always on the ball. Did the ball beat the runner to the bag? Did the ball tag the runner? Contrast with basketball where you're dribbling with a defender in your face or football where the entire game is built around who stops the opposing team better and you can see where baseball is unique and requires somebody to make these sorts of decisions. It's part of the allure of the game to me.
Is it just me, or is this hideously inefficient, ugly, and Wrong(tm)?
Well, I understand all of your points but I think you're reacting a bit too much.
Is it inefficient? I presume you mean using a smaller pipe (WAN) to move bigger applications than we would have when thin clients were all the rage. It's true. However, there is a clear money value to using free or subscription services rather than rolling your own. Over time you'll exceed the costs that using your own server and buying/making software yourself would cost (assuming you're not really factoring the cost of software upgrades you're getting automatically through a subscription service in and ignoring IT time on your end), but for smaller businesses and any e-business without a brick office, it certainly makes sense to let somebody else worry about those things. So long as your connection and the server's are fast enough to make the software usable to you, the inefficiency doesn't matter that much.
Ugly? Honestly, I think HTML and JS can produce some really sexy-looking things even if they are a bit of a hack, code-wise, to support all the various browser issues. I like, for example, Google Calendar's look at least as much as I like any "real program" calendaring application I've used. Presumably you don't, so it really boils down to a preference thing.
And wrong? Nah. I'm a believer that things are worth what somebody's willing to pay for them, so if somebody finds enough value in services like this to ignore whatever pitfalls they may identify, I'm not going to fault the service. It's obviously providing something for somebody, and I don't think that's wrong at all.
To be fair, regardless of how you feel about the particular rulings themselves, the US is not a part of the World Court and UN General Assembly rulings are not binding on any member state. It's kind of like claiming that Cuba has ruled we have to lift sanctions so we do, even if the UN votes to support that. They simply don't have that authority.
This is not a comment on either the issues you raised or of Cuban sanctions, so please don't take it that way.
That is a popular opinion around this site for some reason, but the reality is that if these people didn't feel they were getting their money's worth for the game they simply wouldn't pay and wouldn't play. Maybe you see WoW as an endless grind--hell, maybe it even IS one--but obviously a lot of people don't have a problem with that. I presume by your comments that you don't play, and I assume that's the main reason--so it does work.
That said, people cheating isn't necessarily a bad game design. Some people really get off on being "the best" even when they're only the best because they cheated their way to it. WoW has a concept called "twinking" which is basically getting the best possible gear for your PvP bracket. Personally I've never understood that; if I'm good at PvP I want it to be because I'm a good player, not because I had somebody with too much gold buy me all sorts of shit to make me unnaturally powerful for my level. However the prevalence of these twinks at ALL brackets in the game proves a surprising number of people don't feel the same. It's kind of akin to cheat codes in an FPS; they're not proof of a bad game, just proof that sometimes players like to be ridiculously overpowered with no effort.
The reality is this is an MMORPG--other players are always going to play a role in your enjoyment of the game. If it got "too bad" (recognizing that that is a relative term for each player) then the game would either die out or do something about it. As you can probably tell, I'm a player and I still feel I'm getting value for my money, even with the bots and twinks and all the rest. If that changes I'll cancel.
I've said it before, but it's worth saying again: Loser pays disproportionately favors deep-pocketed litigants who generally will have a better legal team to begin with.
Let's use the current issue as an example: If the RIAA loses, yeah, it hurts a little extra if they have to pay some random Joe's legal expenses. Now imagine if Random Joe loses. In addition to exhorbitant RIAA bribes, they have to pay multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars to the RIAA for beating them? The RIAA can bring on any number of lawyers to not only help bury this poor guy, but bury him even deeper assuming they win. And it brings up questions about how to hide activity in the event of the loss. Or hell, simply make some up on a win. Since the loser is paying it's not a detriment to the client for the lawyers to lie out their asses about how many paralegals they used on a particular case, so that seems like a very likely scenario to me.
Further, they can even use that concept to intimidate you more than they already are. Remember, right now it's "pay us $5000 or we'll sue you for $100,000" (numbers made up). Then it would be "pay us $5000 or we'll sue you for $100,000 plus we'll be awarded $75,000 in legal fees if we win." Maybe this shouldn't be the case, but the $5000 settlement looks more and more attractive as the cost of potentially losing skyrockets. As it is you'd have to be pretty damn sure you're going to win to defend yourself, and this only makes it that much worse.
Now let's take it to a whole new level. Pick out one of the cases about chemical companies dumping chemicals into water supplies and townsfolk developing cancer, or the massive oil spills that ruin entire industries in that area for years, or any of those sort of "public good" lawsuits. The chances of winning those suits are not necessarily very good, particularly against absolutely stacked legal teams such as those sorts of companies are going to bring to the table. They're truly David and Goliath-type fights. For ease of math, let's say you're suing for $5 million and the other side's legal expenses are $5 million. Anything less than 50% odds says there's absolutely no way in the world you should do this. But is even 75% good enough? Is a 25% chance of having your life ruined--again, after whatever actual harm you've suffered that causes you to bring this lawsuit--worth it to you, especially knowing they're going to do everything they can to stack the deck against you? (Actually to be fair I suppose you stand to win $10MM and lose $5MM, so it's not quite 50-50 breakpoint, but you get the point.)
In short, loser pays' major flaw is in equating not winning your lawsuit with not being right, or not bringing a winnable suit. If your only goal is to cut the number of lawsuits filed, well, I guess loser pays is a decent way to do that. If it's an attempt to raise the quality of suits brought, or to even the playing fields for the little guys versus the giants, it really succeeds in neither.
Everybody gets hung up on "frivolous lawsuits" and suggests things like loser-pays to combat them. Instead, what they should be asking themselves is why judges aren't hitting lawyers with sanctions for bringing such suits more often. Maybe the suits aren't quite as frivolous as they seem at first glance, or maybe judges simply need to be convinced to do it more often. Maybe "frivolous" needs to be defined, or re-defined. Or maybe things are just working the way they're intended to in this system. Not perfectly, by any means, but maybe in a way that was foreseen. (Read conspiracy theories into that if you want.)
I do, however, agree that anybody who drops a case should be forced to pay their opponent's legal fees. Dropping a case is essentially saying either "Oops, wrong person!" or "I just realized I have no chance of winning this," and in either case the other party should be reimbursed for their time and the costs of proving that to you.
I realize this example isn't quite about "Macs," but I ran into Apple trying to gouge people just a day or two ago.
I was looking at the Macbook, and went to the "Buy" link for the 2.4Ghz white one to see what kind of options I'd have; I think the price was $1299, but don't quote me. Anyway, the next screen was customizations and the first option was RAM. The base system had 2GB and they were offering an upgrade to 4:
"4GB 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM - 2x2GB [Add $400]"
Fucking seriously? They're trying to rape me for $400 for an extra 2GB stick of RAM? Does that mean that a third of the cost of the base system is the one stick of RAM they put in there? Tell you what guys, give me to me for 33% off and I'll get my own RAM, mmk?
I noticed the same sort of behavior when I was glancing at the iPod touch pricing. $299, $399, $499 for their three models with---whaaa?? 8, 16 or 32GB of storage. The original iPod is up to 80 (or more?), which makes it fairly clear to me that they're just playing games and offering you super-expensive, shitty-sized storage now so they can go "LOOK, DOUBLE!" six months from now. To screw the early adopters, in other words.
In fact, now that I think about it that smells like what happened with the iPhone as well, where they dropped their prices like $100 a couple weeks after product launch for no apparent reason and pissed off a ton of their customers. I think they offered some Apple Store coupons or something to make it up to them, but it doesn't wash the slime off in my book.
I really don't agree with your central point though; my brother just bought a new computer and paid around the $1300 for that Macbook I was talking about. For that same money he got the same amount of RAM but faster speeds, a fairly high-end graphics card, 2x250 GB SATA hard drives (compare to 1x160), same clock speed on the processor (listed speeds) except four cores instead of two, DVD-DL burner and a whompin' cooling system that lets him fairly seriously overclock that sucker and push the system that much further. Granted he built it himself which saves a bit of money in some cases, but these systems don't seem comparably spec'd to me. Not even close. They WERE comparably priced though.
The bottom line is with Apple, you truly are paying for the brand as much and possibly more than anything else. That in itself is not necessarily good or bad--though I think it helps to create fanbois who then feel the need to justify their having paid more--but I think it causes them to do some fairly shady things.
Well, I think you're giving the site operator a bit too much credit. I took a look at the actual site at that domain. I don't know if it was always this way or become it at some point in the past, but it looks like it exists for no other reason than to post these emails and make fun of the companies involved, seemingly exclusively, all the way back to late 2005 when their current site's archives end. I dug into their "Old Site" archives and it looks like this behavior began on January 30, 2004. The difference in dates isn't as impressive as it sounds; there are only 5 entries between the very first entry ever and the "I'm going to start posting these emails."
At the bottom of his site is some pseudo-legalese trying to say he's going to bill people for the emails and then post them: "Use of the domain donotreply.com is billed at $100 per day or $1 per email minimum - post billed. This domain is not for sale, nor to be used in unauthorized mailings,addresses, or automated systems. Any use of the domain that results in damage to the server may incur additional billing. Please contact chet at poe-news.com for other pricing and the billing mailing address. Unauthorized use of this domain gives me full rights to post any emails involved using the unauthorized address. Don't like it? Don't use it."
He's not a victim. Really, he's just a bit of a douche.
If somebody leaves the door of their store open, I should expect to be able to enter the store.
Your example assumes you have the right to enter unless you're told you can't; after all, most stores serve little purpose if nobody but the owner is let inside.
How about the more apt analogy: What if they leave the door of their home open? Do you feel that's your authorization to come on in?
A law like this doesn't bother me in principle. I don't think assuming you have some right to use a service another person is paying for because they technically have the ability to stop you is right; I don't think exploiting ignorance is right. I do have problems with the specifics of the implementation though. Three years in prison is clearly way too long of a sentence even for repeat offenders, and it's too open for abuse. I think it should be in the range of an increasing fine + charges you caused the equipment owner to incur, if any. I don't see a need for it to go beyond that.
...Comcast will be arguing that the IRS has no power to promulgate regulations regarding taxation.
Do they? It seems to me that tax code is spelled out by Congress and the IRS is basically tasked with processing the returns and collecting the money (and looking for cheaters). I'm not aware of them actually creating tax code. (Maybe I'm just ignorant on this fact.)
The FCC, on the other hand, is an administrative agency; their decisions carry the weight of law so long as Congress has provided them a specific scope and their decision falls within that scope. Comcast is basically claiming that this is outside the scope Congress has provided the FCC. It may be right or wrong; I'm not a lawyer and certainly not that familiar with the laws in question--but it's not an absurd claim. In fact it's a very logical defense to make. If nothing else, it almost ensures they get the FCC decision stayed for a year or more while they contest the issue in court.
I'm not a lawyer, so maybe I'm completely wrong about all of this. But...
It seems to me that if I sign a contract that says "I will steal the next car I see" and do not steal a car, I can't be sued for breech of contract. Put more generally, a contract can't force me not to comply with the law.
In this situation, the state (and thus county) has a legal obligation to ensure the validity of elections and access to voting for anybody who's eligible, arising both from the US Constitution and almost certainly from their state constitution and state laws as well. As such, it seems to me that if they decide they need to open up the machine to perform that legal duty, either because they suspect some sort of tampering or even just because they feel the machines are somehow malfunctioning and depriving some users of their votes (clearly they believe this or we wouldn't be talking right now!), they can do so. Even if the contract says "you can't open up our machines" if that's what they need to do to comply with the law, I don't think that contract term is valid.
Besides, it would basically be a license; if Sequoia wants all of their machines back, I'm sure the county would be happy to accommodate them at this point. Accompanied with a permanent decertification.
I also realize that companies today are benefiting from experiments and research done by the Nazi's in WWII.
So what? Meh, I'll get back to this.
What I see today is global lawmakers seeming to have to set limits on how far they're willing to let their scientists go
Close. You see lawmakers choosing to do so, so that they can campaign on how moral they are and how evil their opponents are because (gasp!) not everybody has an identical set of beliefs or an identical moral code. And they do it for the same reasons you bring out, which are entirely the wrong reasons.
And what if they're successful? While their method might be condemned, their results would certainly be used.
Because there is no such thing as bad knowledge, merely bad people and bad applications. If I find a cure for cancer by disemboweling babies and feeding them to terrorists, I should go to jail--and other scientists should be absolutely jumping on my discoveries to determine what the hell I was doing that ended up working, and if there's a way to duplicate the effect in a more ethical manner. Anybody who suggests waving their hands and going, "no, wait! We can't use that knowledge, it was discovered in a bad way!" is, sorry, an idiot.
I obviously don't condone what the Nazis did, but the idea that we shouldn't use their results is absurd. Even if you want to frame it as a purely ethical argument, why not make the horrible deaths or maimings of these people mean something if their suffering truly did lead to discoveries that are going to help other people?
I also think it's pretty obvious that some contries, such as China, don't share our level of ethics when it comes to human experimentation.
I certainly can't deny it. The fallacy in that argument is the assumption that ours are the correct set of ethics in all cases, or even that there is an "our;" it seems like just in a sample set of you and me that we could sit down and identify a number of significant differences.
The problem with ethics is that people have them because they believe they are the best. If I thought some other ethical concept was superior to my own, I would adopt it as my own. In other words: Most people are entirely unwilling to even acknowledge the idea that somebody else may be as right as they are. Anybody who has studied ethics in a meaningful way understands there are a ridiculous number of theories of how to determine the "right" set of ethics, and that many of those theories either have what most people consider glaring holes (simple utilitarianism may support the Nazi's actions for example) or come to alternate conclusions given the exact same set of input data. Ethics are not a simple thing, nor are they a concrete thing. Simply putting them to a "vote" (choosing the system of the majority, or even allowing elected officials to dictate them down to scientists) is faulty on many levels.
Most religions see life as beginning at conception. So to grow a blastocyst to harvest stem cells is no different than aborting a 6-month embryo and doing so--it not only smacks of playing God, but of another queasy ability to easily kill some humans to benefit others.
I think your true rationale has come out; your religious views contradict some scientific ideas.
So okay, most religions may define the beginning of life to be conception and, as of yet, most people in the US remain in some way religious. What meaningful conclusions does that allow us to draw about whether or not stem-cell research is right or wrong? I can trot out all the same examples of times religions have been horrifically wrong, or done terrible things to people itself--but I suspect you know them anyway, so there's no point there. And contrary to what religious people think of themselves and their religions, they do not own morality and (especially giv
Re:Good old RubyOnRails
on
Advanced Rails
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· Score: 3, Informative
I said "cleaner" by which I'd mean no indirection thru active record and no relying on a framework specific dispatch handler.
Yeah. Those few lines of code that load the actual framework really muddy the waters. The fact that you're talking about "framework specific handlers" as an attempt to criticize a framework is a good indication to me that you've never tried Rails at all and just assume you're right about everything. If you never use any framework in any language, congratulations. On the other hand there are those of us who think a couple hundred K of memory used by persistent processes is worth significantly (by your own admission, perhaps 50%) reduced development time and thus cost.
As far as "indirection" via AR, if you don't want it you're free to not use it. It's one of the truly magnificent things about Rails. On the other hand if there's a particularly cumbersome query you're quite free to write it in raw SQL. There's a performance boost to be had there, yes. To the vast majority of web applications it's negligible, and that means that its benefits again outweigh its drawbacks. Rails isn't the perfect solution for EVERY project, but a handful of exceptions doesn't make it a bad rule.
I said "scale better" which is undeniable for any interpretation of the word "better".
Yet another irrefutable clue you made up your mind without ever bothering to try anything yourself. Or that you're a pompous ass, either way. Comparisons of scalability are ABSOLUTELY MEANINGLESS if you only provide one of the two items to be compared. Thus your statement is absolutely meaningless. Given the rest of your post, and your previous ones, that seems to be par for the course.
Rails handles scaling well. It probably handles less before it NEEDS to scale in MOST cases, particularly when it is (unfairly) compared to languages rather than other frameworks. If you really are on the border where Rails means you need an extra machine and (say) PHP doesn't, then maybe this is one of those areas where Rails isn't your solution. If you're already into the realm of needing to add hardware to handle load, Rails provides a lot of great solutions for doing that. And once again, it's going to be simple to implement.
I'm not simply talking out of my ass. I've worked on some projects for major clients including ESPN that were done in Rails and are humming along beautifully. Worse yet, some of these projects were extremely time-sensitive, by which I mean that most of the day they do very little work but when the work comes it comes in a huge swarm in a short time window. IE, the worst-case scenario as far as loading servers. It's still working fine, and we got to charge ESPN half as much as we would have for development of a PHP solution. They're already sending us more business, so I guess evil, evil Rails didn't destroy their company too badly. There are obviously many similar stories of huge sites working just fine on Rails, such as yellowpages.com.
To sum it up: Yes, a framework has some additional overhead compared to a simple language such as PHP. An interpreted language won't run as fast as a compiled language like Java or.NET (to bytecode). These are facts. What's in dispute is whether this makes a significant difference, and my experience with popular projects for major clients is that a well-coded Rails solution holds up fine.
You're right that development cost is sunk and electricity (and similar) costs are ongoing, but before that matters you have to be talking about MAJOR projects that are very probably billed minimum in the tens of thousands of dollars range and, realistically, probably over the hundred thousand dollar threshhold. At this point, your 100% more development time is a significant cost that is likely to take many years to balance. Even a $5,000 a year difference in marginal cost if you're talking a $25,000 or $50,000 difference in developemnt cost is
Nothing. Convincing somebody to hang-in on a lawsuit they've already filed, or to file one they otherwise might not, has no bearing on justice so long as they actually have a case. For the most part, justice is in the outcome.
This woman has a case, no doubt about it. Even the judge's actions thus far have indicated that. Similarly, the RIAA are a bunch of scumbags who deserve to be slapped around. Convincing her not to settle and to take it all the way to its conclusion has no bearing on justice that I can see, not even in a generalized sense.
In a technical sense you're right, but that entirely ignores the political aspect.
If the DMCA passed with a veto-proof majority--and I seem to recall that it did--vetoing it will serve no practical purpose other than delaying it slightly and getting his name off it. That's nice in a "principles > all" sense, but it also weakens him as president for no gain. That means when even worse legislation comes up, with something much closer to the <66.6% support for his veto to be worthwhile, it will be that much harder to kill that bill. The opposition will rally around "let's kick him while he's down!" and the president's own party will have more trouble getting anybody to stand by or switch their votes for fear they're going to lose anyway.
None of this is to say that Clinton didn't ACTUALLY support the DMCA; he might very well have. It's simply saying that a president not vetoing a bill doesn't automatically mean he supports it. I wouldn't hold a president responsible in a situation like that where his veto does nothing anyway. (Though ironically I'd personally think better of him for doing it in the face of all those reasons not to.)
If you want high school treatment, well they should have stayed there.
I think most students want the university treatment -- so can we stop grading homework and attendance now? Please?
Seriously. Ask your parents or grandparents. Go back and ask your high school teachers. You'll mostly get the same story: "There's a midterm and a final and that's it." That's the expectation I went into college with, and it was pure bullshit. It's high school part deux these days.
Or better yet, ask your professors whose responsibility it is that you learn. Tell them the fact that you're not getting 100% in their classes means they're not a very good teacher. They'll get quite indignant with you and inform you in no uncertain terms that their job is to present information and yours is to learn it. Most of us agree they're right. So where does homework and attendance fit into this process? If I can learn the material (ie, pass the tests) without ever showing up or doing a lick of homework, why should my grade be worse than somebody who can't? Why don't they just scale everybody's final course grades by their IQ and get it over with?
People can blather on about grading effort, but that's just an excuse. You can't talk about raising and lowering peoples' grades based on your perception of the effort they put into something and then tell them what you're doing is preparing them for the real world. Ask your manager if he cares how hard you worked on that proposal you fucked up that cost the company hundreds of thousands of dollars. Ask him if the guy who was able to finish his half of a project in a quarter the time as you (a quarter as much "effort") should be fired because he just didn't try as hard. Try not to be offended at the hysterical laughing in your face.
And worst part is, students are actually paying to be treated like children. I would have loved the university experience, I simply wasn't offered it. Maybe it's my fault for only forking out $10,000/year and not being willing to be buried under $150,000+ in debt when I got out. Then again I would still have expected my money to buy me something. Live and learn I guess.
Facebook are bastards because they denied doing something and you don't believe them, despite having no actual evidence--not even really any conjecture other than a lame-ass "in this so-called 'terror age'"--that they did so?
The government does not rate any of the things you mentioned. There MAY (I'm not sure) be a mandate THAT they be rated, but they are rated by independent groups specifically to avoid Congressional involvement in the process.
The closest they come is, these days, some states are factoring these ratings into their laws. IE, "selling an 'M'-rated game to a minor results in the store being fined."
That is taken by many people to mean that it is unconstitutional to regulate firearms. But the word firearm doesn't appear anywhere in it, nor does a word which logically extends there unambiguously.
Am I reading that correctly by thinking that you're saying that assuming "Arms" refers to "firearms" is not a logical extension? It certainly seems both logical and reasonable to me, just semantically. If you add in some of the history it's relatively obvious that is what they're talking about. Pretty much nobody disputes THAT. Rather, they dispute either who it refers to (a well-regulated militia or an individual?) or what exactly "Arms" means (my musket seems safe, what about a stick of TNT?).
One could easily say that rights from individuals owning muskets to hydrogen bombs and mutated anthrax for duck hunting
That is my position. Not because I'm an anarchist, or a lunatic who thinks that would be a good idea. Not because I think all of those things actually should be protected. Rather, that's my position because of how I interpret the clause based on my understandings of the history, language and construction of the Constitution--and because the Constitution is supposed to be the highest law of the land. Sad as it seems, if the Constitution and common sense conflict our system is supposed to defer to the Constitution.
That said, I would ABSOLUTELY support an amendment that bans those more crazy items and I bet you would have no problem whatsoever blowing well past the amount of support you need to pass it. I can't quite decide whether or not I would even support an amendment that repealed the second amendment entirely and replaced it with "Congress will regulate arms however it damn well pleases, now STFU."
In short, the Constitution says SOMETHING--unfortunately this case is one of the more ambiguous passages you can find--but if we think that common sense contradicts it the correct way to handle that is by using the amendment process we've constructed to change the meaning, not simply ignoring it like it isn't there. For that matter, why not just do this to remove the ambiguity as well? (Well, that's rhetorical; it's a political decision.)
and right to form up a militia to overthrow the federal government are protected there.
Hmm? I think your bias is showing through there. One could argue my right to form up a militia would be protected, sure, but that passage says absolutely nothing about how one can use any of these things. Even with the most liberal interpretation of the second amendment, high treason is not protected behavior any more so than it would be legal for me to shoot somebody in the skull just because I have a right to bear arms.
Almost, if not all, people will find at least one thing in that list which they don't think people should be allowed to own or possess. But those are all things which could be inferred to be protected if one wasn't utilizing enough common sense.
This seems to be the crux of the trip-up. Law and especially constitutionality is not about what people want or what common sense dictates. These things should shape the laws, they shouldn't be applied in lieu of them. If the law says one thing and common sense says another, the law should win until enough people with common sense band up and change it.
When is someone going to get hit with a suit for abusing copyright?
Well, for starters, that isn't what happened. The judge sanctioned the lawyers for ignoring his orders. To what degree his reversing the jury verdict was influenced by that misconduct (rather than, say, a differing interpretation of fact) is up for debate. It really wasn't about the patent itself though.
To actually answer the question... copyright is hard to ACTUALLY abuse. Yes, it lasts entirely too long--but the most recent Supreme Court decision is basically that that is up to Congress to determine, and I don't necessarily think that's an unreasonable position. The RIAA, for example, clearly are abusing the legal process with their John Doe lawsuits and other things, and using it for fearmongering, but in the event they actually had evidence against a person and brought it their actual case would have merit. They should be sanctioned as well, yes, and I think we're not far from that point. It has already happened a little bit. But again, that's about their legal tactics and not copyright itself.
) Establish two legal distinctions: misdemeanor and felony unconstitutionality.
You do realize that understanding the Constitution is not the job of the legislature, right? We created an entire third branch of government whose only enumerated power was to interpret the laws (ie eg, Constitution).
I think the best way to achieve a system where less unconstitutional laws go into effect is to require a judicial review for any piece of legislation that, say, 20% of congressmen vote to have one for. No more ducking tough issues by refusing to hear them. No more "you can't sue about our secret spying program because you don't know we spied on you until you sue!" procedural nonsense. If there's a constitutional concern expressed, it goes to a court for review. This information should then be posted on a website that clearly lays out, for every congressman in government, what bills they voted to approve that were upheld or struck down, as well as what bills they voted to require a judicial review for and the outcome of said review. If the people really do care about the Constitution, then such a system should help the people make informed decisions about whether or not their congressmen are working to uphold those beliefs. And if they don't care, well, we're pretty well screwed no matter how you slice it.
I'm not sure the Supreme Court could handle the increased workload of such an idea on their own, so it would probably have to go to other courts. In any event, it should go to the full court rather than a single judge so that crappy bills don't slip by with the luck of the draw. I'm not sure how it should be determined which court holds hearing on the bills; perhaps that should also be voted on by the people who voted to call the review in the first place. It would have to be different than straight yes-or-no voting so that the process isn't subject to tyranny of the majority. Perhaps ranked preference voting would get the job done. Or perhaps it could simply require something like a 66% or even 75% majority in order to force compromise. No compromise means no required judicial review; no required judicial review kills the bill instantly, so it's in anybody who wants the bill's interest to get it done.
The flaw I see with this process is that it could be used as a stalling tactic by the minority party. Requiring a judicial review could delay signing and enforcement of a bill by months or even years. Then again, part of me doesn't care. I prefer the government work slowly than quickly; we've seen what happens when they work quickly too often.
I'm not sure about your second point. Part of me likes it, part of me worries about the chilling effect of people not doing what they feel is right for fear that they may get sued into oblivion for it. I'm a big proponent of the idea that we get the government we deserve, so I suppose I'm leaning toward the idea that elections should be used to handle crappy politicians and not the justice system (except of course as warranted). Especially combined with some sort of system like the one I described above, it would be quite easy to weed out crappy politicians. If we (the People!) did so consistently, I think we would eventually end up with a crop of politicians who knew they can't get away with so much anymore. Remember, politicians want to stay in power; they will push exactly as far as their constituents permit them to push. The fact that they can be as brazen as they are now is as much a strike against the voters as it is against the politicians.
As somebody else pointed out, your third point is ripe for abuse in a lot of ways.
(And if you are offended, give me one non-racist reason that would say otherwise).
I have plenty of arguments for you. Some conflict slightly (I'm not advancing a personal position here); choose whichever you please.
1. Nobody's life is worth more or less than anybody else's.
2. Nobody should be deciding whose life is worth more or less than somebody else's. If there's a god, that's his domain exclusively.
3. The soldiers are serving their country by joining the military, which is an admirable thing to do.
4. The soldiers are following orders that almost none of them had any say in. They may agree whole-heartedly with the mission being bogus.
5. Regardless of the motives or validity of our invading, the goal now is peace. If nothing else, we want to avoid ANOTHER black eye from withdrawing and the country falling (further) into civil war.
6. Your arguments are based on the assumption that the insurgents are simply countrymen who believe what they're doing is the best thing for their country. Some do; others are almost certainly legitimate terrorists out to kill people, and still others are foreign nationals just there to fight the US. These are no more admirable qualities than a US soldier following orders.
We are making our fine soldiers into monsters, when this is entirely avoidable.
Being a soldier is not being a monster. Killing an enemy is not being a monster. Fighting for your own life and the life of your squad members is not being a monster. It really doesn't matter if the mission should ever have been undertaken. They're there now.
Those who DO do monstrous things--such as the Abu Ghraib scandals--are monsters, and they deserve to be punished severely. They were also almost certainly that sort of bastard to begin with and it came out due to opportunity.
Granted, insurgents certainly doing horrible things when they attack civilians, but truth be told, they are far far behind us in terms of innocent civilians killed.
That's probably true, but if we're trying to speak from a perspective of morality then a line must be drawn between killing your countrymen because doing so throws the country into further chaos and makes the US look worse, and killing citizens because bombs don't discriminate good versus bad when they explode or because you're afraid for your life based on something they do.
Moreover, there are far worse groups doing killing in the world(Darfur and the Congo jump out)
Erm, the insurgents are bad but others are worse? Okay, but so what?
If you're suggesting they're better places to have sent our troops, I agree completely. If you're suggesting that even with 200,000+ troops in Iraq that we should send more there, ehhh... maybe, but that's an even more extreme burden on the military.
Just to mollify shoot-the-messenge moderators, I favor impeaching Scalia for this.
You favor impeaching a Supreme Court justice for doing his job and providing his interpretation of the Constitution?
I don't support the use of torture, but jesus, the consequences of impeaching justices for not interpreting the Constitution the same way you do are far, far worse.
Slashdot Mirror
The consumer benefits from less annoying ads that have nothing to do with their interests, yes. But no, their primary benefit is two steps down the line in that quote: "Web sites can make more money from online advertising." A lot of sites are supported by advertising dollars. That's the benefit to the consumer.
You should note that in some (all?) cases, this sort of behavior is prohibited by their Terms of Service. I don't even think it would be particularly hard to identify users doing this based on data usage and usage patterns. They may throttle you back to nothing or simply turn your service off altogether, so I wouldn't plan on that with a phone/contract that is important to you. I don't know if they bother yet, but there's no guarantee they won't later.
Not the OP, however: I understand the incredulity, but here's one study I was given in a telecommunications economics class. (The link from my school's website appears to be gone, but based on filename this is the same PDF I saw):
http://www.unc.edu/~cigar/papers/FileSharing_March2004.pdf
A quick excerpt from the abstract:
The basic conclusion, if I remember correctly, was: The top 1% of artists in terms of popularity lose sales due to pirated songs, and the rest actually see their sales increase with piracy. Obviously you can fact-check this yourself to see if my recollection is correct.
I'm not sure if the "ball lost in ivy" thing was a reference to Wrigley Field, but as a life-long Cubs fan I can tell you the umpire has essentially no discretion in that case. If the fielder throws up his hands, indicating that the ball has become lost in the ivy, it's a ground-rule double. The only discretion involved is in the following two scenarios:
1. If there's a baserunner on ahead of the person who got the hit, the umpires get to decide whether or not he would have been able to score on the play based on where he had gotten to at the time of the call. This very seldom means anything, however, because balls that get stuck in the ivy tend to have been quite hard-hit and usually with a single hop--meaning the baserunner is almost never half way around third base if he was standing anywhere other than third to begin with, and if he WAS on third there's nothing to decide.
2. If the fielder attempted to dig the ball out before throwing his hands up, the ball is live. I wouldn't call this discretion so much as a caveat to the rule and a decision on their part.
There ARE areas of umpire discretion, though. For example interfering with the baserunner makes them not only safe at the next base, but possibly more bases depending on what the umpire thinks would have happened had the interference not occurred. I like these things as they add more of a human element to it that I think is engaging and important.
I can also see where it's completely necessary. Baseball is one of few sports where one team isn't really trying to stop the other. Oh, sure, they're trying to "stop" you from getting a hit or run, but the focus is nearly always on the ball. Did the ball beat the runner to the bag? Did the ball tag the runner? Contrast with basketball where you're dribbling with a defender in your face or football where the entire game is built around who stops the opposing team better and you can see where baseball is unique and requires somebody to make these sorts of decisions. It's part of the allure of the game to me.
Well, I understand all of your points but I think you're reacting a bit too much.
Is it inefficient? I presume you mean using a smaller pipe (WAN) to move bigger applications than we would have when thin clients were all the rage. It's true. However, there is a clear money value to using free or subscription services rather than rolling your own. Over time you'll exceed the costs that using your own server and buying/making software yourself would cost (assuming you're not really factoring the cost of software upgrades you're getting automatically through a subscription service in and ignoring IT time on your end), but for smaller businesses and any e-business without a brick office, it certainly makes sense to let somebody else worry about those things. So long as your connection and the server's are fast enough to make the software usable to you, the inefficiency doesn't matter that much.
Ugly? Honestly, I think HTML and JS can produce some really sexy-looking things even if they are a bit of a hack, code-wise, to support all the various browser issues. I like, for example, Google Calendar's look at least as much as I like any "real program" calendaring application I've used. Presumably you don't, so it really boils down to a preference thing.
And wrong? Nah. I'm a believer that things are worth what somebody's willing to pay for them, so if somebody finds enough value in services like this to ignore whatever pitfalls they may identify, I'm not going to fault the service. It's obviously providing something for somebody, and I don't think that's wrong at all.
To be fair, regardless of how you feel about the particular rulings themselves, the US is not a part of the World Court and UN General Assembly rulings are not binding on any member state. It's kind of like claiming that Cuba has ruled we have to lift sanctions so we do, even if the UN votes to support that. They simply don't have that authority.
This is not a comment on either the issues you raised or of Cuban sanctions, so please don't take it that way.
That is a popular opinion around this site for some reason, but the reality is that if these people didn't feel they were getting their money's worth for the game they simply wouldn't pay and wouldn't play. Maybe you see WoW as an endless grind--hell, maybe it even IS one--but obviously a lot of people don't have a problem with that. I presume by your comments that you don't play, and I assume that's the main reason--so it does work.
That said, people cheating isn't necessarily a bad game design. Some people really get off on being "the best" even when they're only the best because they cheated their way to it. WoW has a concept called "twinking" which is basically getting the best possible gear for your PvP bracket. Personally I've never understood that; if I'm good at PvP I want it to be because I'm a good player, not because I had somebody with too much gold buy me all sorts of shit to make me unnaturally powerful for my level. However the prevalence of these twinks at ALL brackets in the game proves a surprising number of people don't feel the same. It's kind of akin to cheat codes in an FPS; they're not proof of a bad game, just proof that sometimes players like to be ridiculously overpowered with no effort.
The reality is this is an MMORPG--other players are always going to play a role in your enjoyment of the game. If it got "too bad" (recognizing that that is a relative term for each player) then the game would either die out or do something about it. As you can probably tell, I'm a player and I still feel I'm getting value for my money, even with the bots and twinks and all the rest. If that changes I'll cancel.
I've said it before, but it's worth saying again: Loser pays disproportionately favors deep-pocketed litigants who generally will have a better legal team to begin with.
Let's use the current issue as an example: If the RIAA loses, yeah, it hurts a little extra if they have to pay some random Joe's legal expenses. Now imagine if Random Joe loses. In addition to exhorbitant RIAA bribes, they have to pay multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars to the RIAA for beating them? The RIAA can bring on any number of lawyers to not only help bury this poor guy, but bury him even deeper assuming they win. And it brings up questions about how to hide activity in the event of the loss. Or hell, simply make some up on a win. Since the loser is paying it's not a detriment to the client for the lawyers to lie out their asses about how many paralegals they used on a particular case, so that seems like a very likely scenario to me.
Further, they can even use that concept to intimidate you more than they already are. Remember, right now it's "pay us $5000 or we'll sue you for $100,000" (numbers made up). Then it would be "pay us $5000 or we'll sue you for $100,000 plus we'll be awarded $75,000 in legal fees if we win." Maybe this shouldn't be the case, but the $5000 settlement looks more and more attractive as the cost of potentially losing skyrockets. As it is you'd have to be pretty damn sure you're going to win to defend yourself, and this only makes it that much worse.
Now let's take it to a whole new level. Pick out one of the cases about chemical companies dumping chemicals into water supplies and townsfolk developing cancer, or the massive oil spills that ruin entire industries in that area for years, or any of those sort of "public good" lawsuits. The chances of winning those suits are not necessarily very good, particularly against absolutely stacked legal teams such as those sorts of companies are going to bring to the table. They're truly David and Goliath-type fights. For ease of math, let's say you're suing for $5 million and the other side's legal expenses are $5 million. Anything less than 50% odds says there's absolutely no way in the world you should do this. But is even 75% good enough? Is a 25% chance of having your life ruined--again, after whatever actual harm you've suffered that causes you to bring this lawsuit--worth it to you, especially knowing they're going to do everything they can to stack the deck against you? (Actually to be fair I suppose you stand to win $10MM and lose $5MM, so it's not quite 50-50 breakpoint, but you get the point.)
In short, loser pays' major flaw is in equating not winning your lawsuit with not being right, or not bringing a winnable suit. If your only goal is to cut the number of lawsuits filed, well, I guess loser pays is a decent way to do that. If it's an attempt to raise the quality of suits brought, or to even the playing fields for the little guys versus the giants, it really succeeds in neither.
Everybody gets hung up on "frivolous lawsuits" and suggests things like loser-pays to combat them. Instead, what they should be asking themselves is why judges aren't hitting lawyers with sanctions for bringing such suits more often. Maybe the suits aren't quite as frivolous as they seem at first glance, or maybe judges simply need to be convinced to do it more often. Maybe "frivolous" needs to be defined, or re-defined. Or maybe things are just working the way they're intended to in this system. Not perfectly, by any means, but maybe in a way that was foreseen. (Read conspiracy theories into that if you want.)
I do, however, agree that anybody who drops a case should be forced to pay their opponent's legal fees. Dropping a case is essentially saying either "Oops, wrong person!" or "I just realized I have no chance of winning this," and in either case the other party should be reimbursed for their time and the costs of proving that to you.
I realize this example isn't quite about "Macs," but I ran into Apple trying to gouge people just a day or two ago.
I was looking at the Macbook, and went to the "Buy" link for the 2.4Ghz white one to see what kind of options I'd have; I think the price was $1299, but don't quote me. Anyway, the next screen was customizations and the first option was RAM. The base system had 2GB and they were offering an upgrade to 4:
"4GB 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM - 2x2GB [Add $400]"
Fucking seriously? They're trying to rape me for $400 for an extra 2GB stick of RAM? Does that mean that a third of the cost of the base system is the one stick of RAM they put in there? Tell you what guys, give me to me for 33% off and I'll get my own RAM, mmk?
I noticed the same sort of behavior when I was glancing at the iPod touch pricing. $299, $399, $499 for their three models with---whaaa?? 8, 16 or 32GB of storage. The original iPod is up to 80 (or more?), which makes it fairly clear to me that they're just playing games and offering you super-expensive, shitty-sized storage now so they can go "LOOK, DOUBLE!" six months from now. To screw the early adopters, in other words.
In fact, now that I think about it that smells like what happened with the iPhone as well, where they dropped their prices like $100 a couple weeks after product launch for no apparent reason and pissed off a ton of their customers. I think they offered some Apple Store coupons or something to make it up to them, but it doesn't wash the slime off in my book.
I really don't agree with your central point though; my brother just bought a new computer and paid around the $1300 for that Macbook I was talking about. For that same money he got the same amount of RAM but faster speeds, a fairly high-end graphics card, 2x250 GB SATA hard drives (compare to 1x160), same clock speed on the processor (listed speeds) except four cores instead of two, DVD-DL burner and a whompin' cooling system that lets him fairly seriously overclock that sucker and push the system that much further. Granted he built it himself which saves a bit of money in some cases, but these systems don't seem comparably spec'd to me. Not even close. They WERE comparably priced though.
The bottom line is with Apple, you truly are paying for the brand as much and possibly more than anything else. That in itself is not necessarily good or bad--though I think it helps to create fanbois who then feel the need to justify their having paid more--but I think it causes them to do some fairly shady things.
Well, I think you're giving the site operator a bit too much credit. I took a look at the actual site at that domain. I don't know if it was always this way or become it at some point in the past, but it looks like it exists for no other reason than to post these emails and make fun of the companies involved, seemingly exclusively, all the way back to late 2005 when their current site's archives end. I dug into their "Old Site" archives and it looks like this behavior began on January 30, 2004. The difference in dates isn't as impressive as it sounds; there are only 5 entries between the very first entry ever and the "I'm going to start posting these emails."
At the bottom of his site is some pseudo-legalese trying to say he's going to bill people for the emails and then post them: "Use of the domain donotreply.com is billed at $100 per day or $1 per email minimum - post billed. This domain is not for sale, nor to be used in unauthorized mailings,addresses, or automated systems. Any use of the domain that results in damage to the server may incur additional billing. Please contact chet at poe-news.com for other pricing and the billing mailing address. Unauthorized use of this domain gives me full rights to post any emails involved using the unauthorized address. Don't like it? Don't use it."
He's not a victim. Really, he's just a bit of a douche.
Your example assumes you have the right to enter unless you're told you can't; after all, most stores serve little purpose if nobody but the owner is let inside.
How about the more apt analogy: What if they leave the door of their home open? Do you feel that's your authorization to come on in?
A law like this doesn't bother me in principle. I don't think assuming you have some right to use a service another person is paying for because they technically have the ability to stop you is right; I don't think exploiting ignorance is right. I do have problems with the specifics of the implementation though. Three years in prison is clearly way too long of a sentence even for repeat offenders, and it's too open for abuse. I think it should be in the range of an increasing fine + charges you caused the equipment owner to incur, if any. I don't see a need for it to go beyond that.
Do they? It seems to me that tax code is spelled out by Congress and the IRS is basically tasked with processing the returns and collecting the money (and looking for cheaters). I'm not aware of them actually creating tax code. (Maybe I'm just ignorant on this fact.)
The FCC, on the other hand, is an administrative agency; their decisions carry the weight of law so long as Congress has provided them a specific scope and their decision falls within that scope. Comcast is basically claiming that this is outside the scope Congress has provided the FCC. It may be right or wrong; I'm not a lawyer and certainly not that familiar with the laws in question--but it's not an absurd claim. In fact it's a very logical defense to make. If nothing else, it almost ensures they get the FCC decision stayed for a year or more while they contest the issue in court.
I'm not a lawyer, so maybe I'm completely wrong about all of this. But...
It seems to me that if I sign a contract that says "I will steal the next car I see" and do not steal a car, I can't be sued for breech of contract. Put more generally, a contract can't force me not to comply with the law.
In this situation, the state (and thus county) has a legal obligation to ensure the validity of elections and access to voting for anybody who's eligible, arising both from the US Constitution and almost certainly from their state constitution and state laws as well. As such, it seems to me that if they decide they need to open up the machine to perform that legal duty, either because they suspect some sort of tampering or even just because they feel the machines are somehow malfunctioning and depriving some users of their votes (clearly they believe this or we wouldn't be talking right now!), they can do so. Even if the contract says "you can't open up our machines" if that's what they need to do to comply with the law, I don't think that contract term is valid.
Besides, it would basically be a license; if Sequoia wants all of their machines back, I'm sure the county would be happy to accommodate them at this point. Accompanied with a permanent decertification.
So what? Meh, I'll get back to this.
Close. You see lawmakers choosing to do so, so that they can campaign on how moral they are and how evil their opponents are because (gasp!) not everybody has an identical set of beliefs or an identical moral code. And they do it for the same reasons you bring out, which are entirely the wrong reasons.
Because there is no such thing as bad knowledge, merely bad people and bad applications. If I find a cure for cancer by disemboweling babies and feeding them to terrorists, I should go to jail--and other scientists should be absolutely jumping on my discoveries to determine what the hell I was doing that ended up working, and if there's a way to duplicate the effect in a more ethical manner. Anybody who suggests waving their hands and going, "no, wait! We can't use that knowledge, it was discovered in a bad way!" is, sorry, an idiot.
I obviously don't condone what the Nazis did, but the idea that we shouldn't use their results is absurd. Even if you want to frame it as a purely ethical argument, why not make the horrible deaths or maimings of these people mean something if their suffering truly did lead to discoveries that are going to help other people?
I certainly can't deny it. The fallacy in that argument is the assumption that ours are the correct set of ethics in all cases, or even that there is an "our;" it seems like just in a sample set of you and me that we could sit down and identify a number of significant differences.
The problem with ethics is that people have them because they believe they are the best. If I thought some other ethical concept was superior to my own, I would adopt it as my own. In other words: Most people are entirely unwilling to even acknowledge the idea that somebody else may be as right as they are. Anybody who has studied ethics in a meaningful way understands there are a ridiculous number of theories of how to determine the "right" set of ethics, and that many of those theories either have what most people consider glaring holes (simple utilitarianism may support the Nazi's actions for example) or come to alternate conclusions given the exact same set of input data. Ethics are not a simple thing, nor are they a concrete thing. Simply putting them to a "vote" (choosing the system of the majority, or even allowing elected officials to dictate them down to scientists) is faulty on many levels.
I think your true rationale has come out; your religious views contradict some scientific ideas.
So okay, most religions may define the beginning of life to be conception and, as of yet, most people in the US remain in some way religious. What meaningful conclusions does that allow us to draw about whether or not stem-cell research is right or wrong? I can trot out all the same examples of times religions have been horrifically wrong, or done terrible things to people itself--but I suspect you know them anyway, so there's no point there. And contrary to what religious people think of themselves and their religions, they do not own morality and (especially giv
Yeah. Those few lines of code that load the actual framework really muddy the waters. The fact that you're talking about "framework specific handlers" as an attempt to criticize a framework is a good indication to me that you've never tried Rails at all and just assume you're right about everything. If you never use any framework in any language, congratulations. On the other hand there are those of us who think a couple hundred K of memory used by persistent processes is worth significantly (by your own admission, perhaps 50%) reduced development time and thus cost.
As far as "indirection" via AR, if you don't want it you're free to not use it. It's one of the truly magnificent things about Rails. On the other hand if there's a particularly cumbersome query you're quite free to write it in raw SQL. There's a performance boost to be had there, yes. To the vast majority of web applications it's negligible, and that means that its benefits again outweigh its drawbacks. Rails isn't the perfect solution for EVERY project, but a handful of exceptions doesn't make it a bad rule.
Yet another irrefutable clue you made up your mind without ever bothering to try anything yourself. Or that you're a pompous ass, either way. Comparisons of scalability are ABSOLUTELY MEANINGLESS if you only provide one of the two items to be compared. Thus your statement is absolutely meaningless. Given the rest of your post, and your previous ones, that seems to be par for the course.
Rails handles scaling well. It probably handles less before it NEEDS to scale in MOST cases, particularly when it is (unfairly) compared to languages rather than other frameworks. If you really are on the border where Rails means you need an extra machine and (say) PHP doesn't, then maybe this is one of those areas where Rails isn't your solution. If you're already into the realm of needing to add hardware to handle load, Rails provides a lot of great solutions for doing that. And once again, it's going to be simple to implement.
I'm not simply talking out of my ass. I've worked on some projects for major clients including ESPN that were done in Rails and are humming along beautifully. Worse yet, some of these projects were extremely time-sensitive, by which I mean that most of the day they do very little work but when the work comes it comes in a huge swarm in a short time window. IE, the worst-case scenario as far as loading servers. It's still working fine, and we got to charge ESPN half as much as we would have for development of a PHP solution. They're already sending us more business, so I guess evil, evil Rails didn't destroy their company too badly. There are obviously many similar stories of huge sites working just fine on Rails, such as yellowpages.com.
To sum it up: Yes, a framework has some additional overhead compared to a simple language such as PHP. An interpreted language won't run as fast as a compiled language like Java or .NET (to bytecode). These are facts. What's in dispute is whether this makes a significant difference, and my experience with popular projects for major clients is that a well-coded Rails solution holds up fine.
You're right that development cost is sunk and electricity (and similar) costs are ongoing, but before that matters you have to be talking about MAJOR projects that are very probably billed minimum in the tens of thousands of dollars range and, realistically, probably over the hundred thousand dollar threshhold. At this point, your 100% more development time is a significant cost that is likely to take many years to balance. Even a $5,000 a year difference in marginal cost if you're talking a $25,000 or $50,000 difference in developemnt cost is
Nothing. Convincing somebody to hang-in on a lawsuit they've already filed, or to file one they otherwise might not, has no bearing on justice so long as they actually have a case. For the most part, justice is in the outcome.
This woman has a case, no doubt about it. Even the judge's actions thus far have indicated that. Similarly, the RIAA are a bunch of scumbags who deserve to be slapped around. Convincing her not to settle and to take it all the way to its conclusion has no bearing on justice that I can see, not even in a generalized sense.
In a technical sense you're right, but that entirely ignores the political aspect.
If the DMCA passed with a veto-proof majority--and I seem to recall that it did--vetoing it will serve no practical purpose other than delaying it slightly and getting his name off it. That's nice in a "principles > all" sense, but it also weakens him as president for no gain. That means when even worse legislation comes up, with something much closer to the <66.6% support for his veto to be worthwhile, it will be that much harder to kill that bill. The opposition will rally around "let's kick him while he's down!" and the president's own party will have more trouble getting anybody to stand by or switch their votes for fear they're going to lose anyway.
None of this is to say that Clinton didn't ACTUALLY support the DMCA; he might very well have. It's simply saying that a president not vetoing a bill doesn't automatically mean he supports it. I wouldn't hold a president responsible in a situation like that where his veto does nothing anyway. (Though ironically I'd personally think better of him for doing it in the face of all those reasons not to.)
I think most students want the university treatment -- so can we stop grading homework and attendance now? Please?
Seriously. Ask your parents or grandparents. Go back and ask your high school teachers. You'll mostly get the same story: "There's a midterm and a final and that's it." That's the expectation I went into college with, and it was pure bullshit. It's high school part deux these days.
Or better yet, ask your professors whose responsibility it is that you learn. Tell them the fact that you're not getting 100% in their classes means they're not a very good teacher. They'll get quite indignant with you and inform you in no uncertain terms that their job is to present information and yours is to learn it. Most of us agree they're right. So where does homework and attendance fit into this process? If I can learn the material (ie, pass the tests) without ever showing up or doing a lick of homework, why should my grade be worse than somebody who can't? Why don't they just scale everybody's final course grades by their IQ and get it over with?
People can blather on about grading effort, but that's just an excuse. You can't talk about raising and lowering peoples' grades based on your perception of the effort they put into something and then tell them what you're doing is preparing them for the real world. Ask your manager if he cares how hard you worked on that proposal you fucked up that cost the company hundreds of thousands of dollars. Ask him if the guy who was able to finish his half of a project in a quarter the time as you (a quarter as much "effort") should be fired because he just didn't try as hard. Try not to be offended at the hysterical laughing in your face.
And worst part is, students are actually paying to be treated like children. I would have loved the university experience, I simply wasn't offered it. Maybe it's my fault for only forking out $10,000/year and not being willing to be buried under $150,000+ in debt when I got out. Then again I would still have expected my money to buy me something. Live and learn I guess.
So, for clarity...
Facebook are bastards because they denied doing something and you don't believe them, despite having no actual evidence--not even really any conjecture other than a lame-ass "in this so-called 'terror age'"--that they did so?
Gotcha.
The government does not rate any of the things you mentioned. There MAY (I'm not sure) be a mandate THAT they be rated, but they are rated by independent groups specifically to avoid Congressional involvement in the process.
The closest they come is, these days, some states are factoring these ratings into their laws. IE, "selling an 'M'-rated game to a minor results in the store being fined."
Am I reading that correctly by thinking that you're saying that assuming "Arms" refers to "firearms" is not a logical extension? It certainly seems both logical and reasonable to me, just semantically. If you add in some of the history it's relatively obvious that is what they're talking about. Pretty much nobody disputes THAT. Rather, they dispute either who it refers to (a well-regulated militia or an individual?) or what exactly "Arms" means (my musket seems safe, what about a stick of TNT?).
That is my position. Not because I'm an anarchist, or a lunatic who thinks that would be a good idea. Not because I think all of those things actually should be protected. Rather, that's my position because of how I interpret the clause based on my understandings of the history, language and construction of the Constitution--and because the Constitution is supposed to be the highest law of the land. Sad as it seems, if the Constitution and common sense conflict our system is supposed to defer to the Constitution.
That said, I would ABSOLUTELY support an amendment that bans those more crazy items and I bet you would have no problem whatsoever blowing well past the amount of support you need to pass it. I can't quite decide whether or not I would even support an amendment that repealed the second amendment entirely and replaced it with "Congress will regulate arms however it damn well pleases, now STFU."
In short, the Constitution says SOMETHING--unfortunately this case is one of the more ambiguous passages you can find--but if we think that common sense contradicts it the correct way to handle that is by using the amendment process we've constructed to change the meaning, not simply ignoring it like it isn't there. For that matter, why not just do this to remove the ambiguity as well? (Well, that's rhetorical; it's a political decision.)
Hmm? I think your bias is showing through there. One could argue my right to form up a militia would be protected, sure, but that passage says absolutely nothing about how one can use any of these things. Even with the most liberal interpretation of the second amendment, high treason is not protected behavior any more so than it would be legal for me to shoot somebody in the skull just because I have a right to bear arms.
This seems to be the crux of the trip-up. Law and especially constitutionality is not about what people want or what common sense dictates. These things should shape the laws, they shouldn't be applied in lieu of them. If the law says one thing and common sense says another, the law should win until enough people with common sense band up and change it.
Well, for starters, that isn't what happened. The judge sanctioned the lawyers for ignoring his orders. To what degree his reversing the jury verdict was influenced by that misconduct (rather than, say, a differing interpretation of fact) is up for debate. It really wasn't about the patent itself though.
To actually answer the question... copyright is hard to ACTUALLY abuse. Yes, it lasts entirely too long--but the most recent Supreme Court decision is basically that that is up to Congress to determine, and I don't necessarily think that's an unreasonable position. The RIAA, for example, clearly are abusing the legal process with their John Doe lawsuits and other things, and using it for fearmongering, but in the event they actually had evidence against a person and brought it their actual case would have merit. They should be sanctioned as well, yes, and I think we're not far from that point. It has already happened a little bit. But again, that's about their legal tactics and not copyright itself.
You do realize that understanding the Constitution is not the job of the legislature, right? We created an entire third branch of government whose only enumerated power was to interpret the laws (ie eg, Constitution).
I think the best way to achieve a system where less unconstitutional laws go into effect is to require a judicial review for any piece of legislation that, say, 20% of congressmen vote to have one for. No more ducking tough issues by refusing to hear them. No more "you can't sue about our secret spying program because you don't know we spied on you until you sue!" procedural nonsense. If there's a constitutional concern expressed, it goes to a court for review. This information should then be posted on a website that clearly lays out, for every congressman in government, what bills they voted to approve that were upheld or struck down, as well as what bills they voted to require a judicial review for and the outcome of said review. If the people really do care about the Constitution, then such a system should help the people make informed decisions about whether or not their congressmen are working to uphold those beliefs. And if they don't care, well, we're pretty well screwed no matter how you slice it.
I'm not sure the Supreme Court could handle the increased workload of such an idea on their own, so it would probably have to go to other courts. In any event, it should go to the full court rather than a single judge so that crappy bills don't slip by with the luck of the draw. I'm not sure how it should be determined which court holds hearing on the bills; perhaps that should also be voted on by the people who voted to call the review in the first place. It would have to be different than straight yes-or-no voting so that the process isn't subject to tyranny of the majority. Perhaps ranked preference voting would get the job done. Or perhaps it could simply require something like a 66% or even 75% majority in order to force compromise. No compromise means no required judicial review; no required judicial review kills the bill instantly, so it's in anybody who wants the bill's interest to get it done.
The flaw I see with this process is that it could be used as a stalling tactic by the minority party. Requiring a judicial review could delay signing and enforcement of a bill by months or even years. Then again, part of me doesn't care. I prefer the government work slowly than quickly; we've seen what happens when they work quickly too often.
I'm not sure about your second point. Part of me likes it, part of me worries about the chilling effect of people not doing what they feel is right for fear that they may get sued into oblivion for it. I'm a big proponent of the idea that we get the government we deserve, so I suppose I'm leaning toward the idea that elections should be used to handle crappy politicians and not the justice system (except of course as warranted). Especially combined with some sort of system like the one I described above, it would be quite easy to weed out crappy politicians. If we (the People!) did so consistently, I think we would eventually end up with a crop of politicians who knew they can't get away with so much anymore. Remember, politicians want to stay in power; they will push exactly as far as their constituents permit them to push. The fact that they can be as brazen as they are now is as much a strike against the voters as it is against the politicians.
As somebody else pointed out, your third point is ripe for abuse in a lot of ways.
I have plenty of arguments for you. Some conflict slightly (I'm not advancing a personal position here); choose whichever you please.
1. Nobody's life is worth more or less than anybody else's.
2. Nobody should be deciding whose life is worth more or less than somebody else's. If there's a god, that's his domain exclusively.
3. The soldiers are serving their country by joining the military, which is an admirable thing to do.
4. The soldiers are following orders that almost none of them had any say in. They may agree whole-heartedly with the mission being bogus.
5. Regardless of the motives or validity of our invading, the goal now is peace. If nothing else, we want to avoid ANOTHER black eye from withdrawing and the country falling (further) into civil war.
6. Your arguments are based on the assumption that the insurgents are simply countrymen who believe what they're doing is the best thing for their country. Some do; others are almost certainly legitimate terrorists out to kill people, and still others are foreign nationals just there to fight the US. These are no more admirable qualities than a US soldier following orders.
Being a soldier is not being a monster. Killing an enemy is not being a monster. Fighting for your own life and the life of your squad members is not being a monster. It really doesn't matter if the mission should ever have been undertaken. They're there now.
Those who DO do monstrous things--such as the Abu Ghraib scandals--are monsters, and they deserve to be punished severely. They were also almost certainly that sort of bastard to begin with and it came out due to opportunity.
That's probably true, but if we're trying to speak from a perspective of morality then a line must be drawn between killing your countrymen because doing so throws the country into further chaos and makes the US look worse, and killing citizens because bombs don't discriminate good versus bad when they explode or because you're afraid for your life based on something they do.
Erm, the insurgents are bad but others are worse? Okay, but so what?
If you're suggesting they're better places to have sent our troops, I agree completely. If you're suggesting that even with 200,000+ troops in Iraq that we should send more there, ehhh... maybe, but that's an even more extreme burden on the military.
You favor impeaching a Supreme Court justice for doing his job and providing his interpretation of the Constitution?
I don't support the use of torture, but jesus, the consequences of impeaching justices for not interpreting the Constitution the same way you do are far, far worse.