I had the priviledge to work with an older programmer -- and he was amazing. We had an incredibly productive office, and it was because even though we knew the science of computer programming, this guy knew the art.
He also taught us incredible lessons. In 8 hours a day, 40 a week, he was able to get all his work done. And he did finally hit it big, and 2 years ago bought his dream house on the beach. As a spot of bad luck that beach was in Gulfport MS, so he'll have to rebuild, but that's not really the point.
The best lesson he taught us was "embrace new technology -- because that's what your job really is." As a result he embraced Windows when it came out, Java, Open Source, XP, and was incredibly relevant, even at the the ripe age of 55. Of course he embraced some things that did not become important. He became a Notes developer. He spent a month becoming an expert on XML, and I know it never really became useful for him. What he knew, and taught us -- there is no point in this profession where you can stop learning. For some people, when they realize that, they decide they want to move to management, where learning actualy hinders your career.
The reason you don't see many old developers is because they can't/won't learn new tricks. All you guys out there who won't learn Ruby? You're days are numbered -- not because Ruby IS the next great thing -- but because it MIGHT be. As a technologist, if you want to keep working with technology, you have to embrace the fact that technology changes.
My last comment is thanks Leo! I know you'll see this, and I just wanted to let you know about the debt that we all owe you, and hope that some day I can pass on the lessons you taught to me to other young developers.
Is that you're worried about someone booting your computer in single user mode. Secure it with a bios password and bootloader password. And make sure your screensaver locks up after a VERY short time out. I know it's a pain in the ass, but that's what they're making you do. On the other hand, since it;s obvious you can do your job very well from anywhere, why not from home?
It's easy enough to put in an "I agree to everything" on the installation script.
But why would anyone want flash pre-installed, unless it were to come with Adblock also installed and defaulted flash blocked. I'd be interested if people's experiences are similar my own, but my "primary" browser does not have flash installed on it, and I've been VERY happy with that. I have an "alternate" browser on my windows boxes, so that if I have to see something Flashy, I can hit the KVM, and get there in IE.
I just think that people are divided enough on Flash that a distro with Flash in it is alienating too many of the Mozilla evangelists who are responsible for the rapid spread.
For me the best thing about wikipedia is the concept behind it. A collaboration of people, working to increase the sum of human knowledge, because the sum of accumulated knowledge is something that is greater than its parts. Everyone working together to maintain this knowledge for the betterment of all. Is that an idealistic view? Of course. But what's wrong with idealism and striving for it? Wikipedia is more that just an encyclopedia -- though it's very good at that. It's a hope that we actually can all work together on something -- something that embiggens us all.
Let whoever the heck wants to set up their own name server service. If people want to cooperate and not give out competing names, gravy. If people want to fuck the internet and poison DNS, well good golly miss molly, it's happening already. If any of these countries that feel slighted really had a backbone (pun intended) they'd fire up their own DNS and tell everyone about it. India wants to control the domains for India, let them tell the world about their DNS. It wouldn't take much modification for people/servers to maintain their own authorization tables.
Likewise, if they want to start giving out domain names, let them -- If cuba were to announce that they were hosting their own DNS service and giving out names with the.cuba extension, I'd make sure that my dns lookups went there for those addresses. If you build it, they will come.
If any country were to announce "We're setting up our own official server" the market -- in other words the REST OF THE WORLD could decide whether to patronize that server or not. Why bother with bitching about the "US control" when this is something that the rest of the world could actually DO something about.
The reality here is that some people just like to bitch. Although without a doubt my proposed solution would cause a lot of confict on the web about who is the authoritative server for what address, I'd rather let the viewers decide for themselves than let the authoritative servers be in the hands of some "authority."
get out of industry and into education
on
Pay vs. Happiness
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· Score: 1
I did the rat race, the start up, the large company. The usual hassles -- long hours but good pay. Several years of my brilliance being expected and not truly appreciated. And in the end for naught -- I was laid off, in spite of my hard work and brilliance.
So for my next job, I took as a "king of all things technical" at a small college. I get paid about 3/4ths what I could be making "in the field." I work 4 tens (m-th 8-6), I'm boss of my own shop. I hire my friends as consultants and coworkers. Noone gets tense about about deadlines, and I am by many miles the most technically competant person around. And I'm surrounded by coeds all day long.
Every now and then I think about some of my friends making more than me -- having more...But I'm still making twice as much as my friends who are public school teachers, and still can provide amply for my family. No season tickets in my future, but I can still go to the ball game. So I recommend looking for a job in education. The hours are good, the money's adequate and your bosses aren't all jerks. 8)
Yeah, we got the dogs in Salem too. I LIKE the dogs, because it's a meaningful, non-random search. And it's reasonable. My co-worker is Bolivian, and he gets stopped and searched on over 50% of the flight he takes. He's dark skinned -- and apparently that's enough to skew the statistics. That's non-meaningful, and apparently non-random, and thus, in my book, unreasonable.
The MBTA in Bostonhas instituted a search policy on the commuter rail and subway. They say the station I come into in the morning (North Station) has about 25000 people come in during rush hours in the AM, making it impracticel tosearch everyone. Ithink "random" searches are never random -- people gettargetted.
With the recent supreme court ruling in the Hiibel case it's more important than ever that citzens defend the right that are given to them. I hope other Bostonians will print out a copy of the ACLU's advice page ann keep it with them when they travel on the T. If you are an American and live in a place that has unreasonable searches, contact your local ACLU and see what they advise.
Regretting that you can't do something in the war on terror? Here's your opportunity. Defend civil liberties at home.
Sad end to a Sad story - One developer's view
on
The End of PalmOS?
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· Score: 5, Informative
*disclosure -- I was laid off from Palm in 2002*
It's really too bad. Palm was a great company, with the right group of people -- actually alot of disaffected Apple folks, who had left when Jobs was pushed out. Plus the original brain trust of Jeff Hawkins and Donna Dubinsky. Those 2 recognized that Palm could not really be the nimble company they would need to be to survive if they were tied down to 3Com. They asked permission to take the company solo, and were denied by the 3Com brass -- so they started Handspring.
Then (IMHO) really just to spite Jeff and Donna, 3Com did indeed spin off Palm. The problem was with Jeff and Donna gone, leadership was missing. 3Com installed Carl Yankowski, and man who had run giant companies before, but never a nimble tech company. Carl didn't know how to run a company of 500 employees, but he did not how to run a company of 10000, so his goal was to get to 10000 as quickly as possible.
This meant massive hirings and acquisitions. Palm had had a damn fine IPO (Yankowski knew how to do that too) so they had alot of cash on hand. And they started hiring like crazy. And when I say like crazy, I mean they put no thought at all into who got the positions, merely that they filled them. This was 1999/2000 pre-bubble-burst, when anyone with half a brain in silicon valley was already working. As a result, Palm was "forced" to hire people with only a quarter of a brain. Bythat I mean managers who thought they could function as engineers, and people who knew how to play the company game.
Intense corporate infighting began betweeen divisions. When one division looked like it was gaining "power" other divisions would sabotage them. The "managers" that Palm had been able to hire were only interested in making sure that their group looked better than any other group. As a result, incredibly promising ideas, such as 100% VCal/vcard complaince got killed. Palm was going to host a free public database with vcard/vcal entries, so when you updated your info in your palm, it would spread to everyone else when they synced (I know it's *sortof* been done -- but not well by anyone, and certainly the data is not publicly accessible via soap). Palm's internet strategy was completely sabotaged by "executives" who weren't part of the internet group, and really didn't undertand anything about it.
Then the hardware disaster. One of the new Palm's was scheduled for release, and was in the final round of testing. Handspring released their new device and it was Shiny. The Palm marketing team, without really consulting with engineering announced WHILE THE DEVICE WAS STILL IN TESTING that the new Palm would be out next month. Sales of current Palms stopped cold while everyone waited for the new device. And then a showstopping bug was found. The vibrate alarm in the new device was too powerful, and after x number of alarms it shook loose something in y number of devices. So the new device was delayed. And all that time, very few Palms were being sold, because everyone was waiting for the new device. 3 months with no sales is a bad thing.
In a last ditfch effort to calm the infighting, Palm spun off the software division into Palmsource, but it was too little too late. The heart and back of a great little company had been broken.
I'm glad to see Palm still alive, and I'm actually glad to see this sale, I kept my equity this long, at least now I'm forced to get rid of it.
I believe the company has shrunk back down to a small enough size that they've attritioned off the morons acquired at the turn of the century -- unfortunately they lost alot of really good engineering talent too. Palm was more than a hardware company at one point -- now they are just a hardware company. And I don't believe a hardware company can be globally competetive if it's based in the U.S.
OOOH! Someone please tell me that the OSX port is close behind. I'd been living on a mac for quite a while, but after seeing the how dtrace can help with Ruby dev I'd switched to Solaris for my Ruby optimization (which is up to about 30% of my work now). If I can start doing this on my powerbook, I'll be a super happy camper.
I'm not sure how this benefits Sun, but something as awesome as this, I'm willing to assume it's altruism, and I appreciate it.
...Yahoo's Hong Kong arm helped China link Shi Tao's e-mail account and computer to a message containing the information....
Here's the thing -- the Hong Kong arm of yahoo lives in HONG KONG! They live in a communist country! How could anyone think that threatened with life in prison by a repressive government, a Chinese "Citizen" would possibly choose to not immediately capitulate to ANY request by the police? Just because an employee in China decided to NOT be Patrick Henry doesn't mean Yahoo's in bed with the Reds.
There has to be an understanding that there are going to be game players who cannot access the outside world -- if not because of lack of actual access, because lack of access to the firewall. As the primary admin for my entire family, scattered as they are across the country, I have have them all natted behind a simpleton box -- but none of them has a routable IP address. I'm unlikely to change thos configurations for a game.
A steam model which requires constant updates/verification is just not going to ever be "the sims" or any other "best selling game of all time."
Holy crap! $900/year to back up 1 gig? You'd be better off renting a dedicated server somewhere and running rsync through SSH (and not using root) to push the data out.
If it were only so simple. What is the "truth" about the Kennedy assination? What is the "truth" about FDR and Pearl Harbor? What is the "truth" about Shoeless Joe Jackson. I would say that "truth" is an internal matter. What is the "truth" about when life begins? IMHO the real truth is that the world is only what we perceive it to be, but I don't expect anyone to agree with that.
I'm reminded of the great Punster, who observed two women yelling across an alleyway in NYC from their respective apartments. "They will never agree" said the punster, "for they argue from different premises."
I see what you mean though -- perhaps I should have used the word "facts" instead of truth, because some people interpret truth with a capital T. The way I meant it was that every individual should be allowed to interpret the facts as they see fit. I apologize for any semantic confusion.
You said:...Here's the real story: Clinton DID NOT LIE. PERIOD...I apologize for the caps. I get sick of straightening people out on this -- not that most of them listen, because they prefer to believe that he lied anyway...
But the REALLY sad thing about this is your defense of it, and your rabid attack on others. Partisian politics is killing this country. Clinton lied. He, in his own testimony admits he was trying to circumvent the truth without technically breaking the law, because that would have been *OK*. To me trying to circumvent the truth is just as bad.
I also believe that there was disinformation on Iraq. I believe Karl Rove should be fired and then prosecuted. I believe in punishing the guilty whether they share my political ideology or not. What bothers me the most about American politics today is the republicans and democrats who blindly follow their leaders and then further the lies of their party line by repeating them (as you have done).
So, I would ask you (and everyone) to turn down the rhetoric (...Your failure to understand this is very dangerous. No citizen should be so easily manipulated...) and instead encourage everyone to seek the truth. Every individual should be allowed to interpret the truth as they see fit -- but we should all be zealots for making sure that the truth is actually known.
If there plan was FREE maybe I'd go with it, but charging $20.00 for PLANS to build something is a little too much like those ads in the back of comic books for me.
...obviously a device designed to kill or maim human beings...
Killing human beings in a very few circumstances, is permitted by law -- most notably self-defense. There have been manycases of criminals wearing body armor.
In the courts opinion, it is reasonable to think that a citizen may have a legitimate usage for armor-piercing bullets. If a ammo manufacturer advertized their bullets as being "cop-killers" then they would be more analogous to the people who distribute a p2p system with the advertizing of "find any song, movie, show etc."
You're arguing about gun-control in general, which is actually counter to what you're (I think) advocating. The same defense that keeps guns legal -- there is in certain circumstances a legal reason to have a gun -- is the same arguement that will protect p2p as a whole. There IS a set of circumstances in which p2p can be legally justified, and thus the whole technology cannot and will not be banned. Just as legally, there ARE restrictions on how guns can be used, there are going to be legal restrictions on how p2p can be used.
Do I agree with this p2p ruling? Not really, I don't personally support the current copyright law, but as a member of the Supreme Court, I'll answer your question. We don't value anything more than individual liberty, because life without liberty is an abhorrent concept. We ruled against people promoting breaking the law, and not against p2p. How else COULD we have ruled?
He also taught us incredible lessons. In 8 hours a day, 40 a week, he was able to get all his work done. And he did finally hit it big, and 2 years ago bought his dream house on the beach. As a spot of bad luck that beach was in Gulfport MS, so he'll have to rebuild, but that's not really the point.
The best lesson he taught us was "embrace new technology -- because that's what your job really is." As a result he embraced Windows when it came out, Java, Open Source, XP, and was incredibly relevant, even at the the ripe age of 55. Of course he embraced some things that did not become important. He became a Notes developer. He spent a month becoming an expert on XML, and I know it never really became useful for him. What he knew, and taught us -- there is no point in this profession where you can stop learning. For some people, when they realize that, they decide they want to move to management, where learning actualy hinders your career.
The reason you don't see many old developers is because they can't/won't learn new tricks. All you guys out there who won't learn Ruby? You're days are numbered -- not because Ruby IS the next great thing -- but because it MIGHT be. As a technologist, if you want to keep working with technology, you have to embrace the fact that technology changes.
My last comment is thanks Leo! I know you'll see this, and I just wanted to let you know about the debt that we all owe you, and hope that some day I can pass on the lessons you taught to me to other young developers.
Don't forget the hugely popular Sportsdot. Not that it makes much sense to run a sports site, and then try to lure slashdot readers over there.
Is that you're worried about someone booting your computer in single user mode. Secure it with a bios password and bootloader password. And make sure your screensaver locks up after a VERY short time out. I know it's a pain in the ass, but that's what they're making you do. On the other hand, since it;s obvious you can do your job very well from anywhere, why not from home?
But why would anyone want flash pre-installed, unless it were to come with Adblock also installed and defaulted flash blocked. I'd be interested if people's experiences are similar my own, but my "primary" browser does not have flash installed on it, and I've been VERY happy with that. I have an "alternate" browser on my windows boxes, so that if I have to see something Flashy, I can hit the KVM, and get there in IE.
I just think that people are divided enough on Flash that a distro with Flash in it is alienating too many of the Mozilla evangelists who are responsible for the rapid spread.
For me the best thing about wikipedia is the concept behind it. A collaboration of people, working to increase the sum of human knowledge, because the sum of accumulated knowledge is something that is greater than its parts. Everyone working together to maintain this knowledge for the betterment of all. Is that an idealistic view? Of course. But what's wrong with idealism and striving for it? Wikipedia is more that just an encyclopedia -- though it's very good at that. It's a hope that we actually can all work together on something -- something that embiggens us all.
is to tell people it was cancelled by fox. That means it's good.
Likewise, if they want to start giving out domain names, let them -- If cuba were to announce that they were hosting their own DNS service and giving out names with the .cuba extension, I'd make sure that my dns lookups went there for those addresses. If you build it, they will come.
If any country were to announce "We're setting up our own official server" the market -- in other words the REST OF THE WORLD could decide whether to patronize that server or not. Why bother with bitching about the "US control" when this is something that the rest of the world could actually DO something about.
The reality here is that some people just like to bitch. Although without a doubt my proposed solution would cause a lot of confict on the web about who is the authoritative server for what address, I'd rather let the viewers decide for themselves than let the authoritative servers be in the hands of some "authority."
You were misinformed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arpanet
So for my next job, I took as a "king of all things technical" at a small college. I get paid about 3/4ths what I could be making "in the field." I work 4 tens (m-th 8-6), I'm boss of my own shop. I hire my friends as consultants and coworkers. Noone gets tense about about deadlines, and I am by many miles the most technically competant person around. And I'm surrounded by coeds all day long.
Every now and then I think about some of my friends making more than me -- having more...But I'm still making twice as much as my friends who are public school teachers, and still can provide amply for my family. No season tickets in my future, but I can still go to the ball game. So I recommend looking for a job in education. The hours are good, the money's adequate and your bosses aren't all jerks. 8)
Cute girls searches more often than their proportion of society. Or maybe I should say cute girls get searched BECAUSE of their proportions.
Yeah, we got the dogs in Salem too. I LIKE the dogs, because it's a meaningful, non-random search. And it's reasonable. My co-worker is Bolivian, and he gets stopped and searched on over 50% of the flight he takes. He's dark skinned -- and apparently that's enough to skew the statistics. That's non-meaningful, and apparently non-random, and thus, in my book, unreasonable.
The MBTA in Bostonhas instituted a search policy on the commuter rail and subway. They say the station I come into in the morning (North Station) has about 25000 people come in during rush hours in the AM, making it impracticel tosearch everyone. Ithink "random" searches are never random -- people gettargetted.
The ACLU has a detailed page describing how to deal with a search request. One of the primary differences in the US and UK is clearly illustrated -- I don't mean this as a slam on the UK, merely pointing out a difference. In the US every ctizen is supposed to be immune from unreasonable search. Of course the definition of reasonable is opem to debate. But it's only by people pushing against crazy things like these train searches that we are able to defend indivual freedoms.
With the recent supreme court ruling in the Hiibel case it's more important than ever that citzens defend the right that are given to them. I hope other Bostonians will print out a copy of the ACLU's advice page ann keep it with them when they travel on the T. If you are an American and live in a place that has unreasonable searches, contact your local ACLU and see what they advise.
Regretting that you can't do something in the war on terror? Here's your opportunity. Defend civil liberties at home.
It's really too bad. Palm was a great company, with the right group of people -- actually alot of disaffected Apple folks, who had left when Jobs was pushed out. Plus the original brain trust of Jeff Hawkins and Donna Dubinsky. Those 2 recognized that Palm could not really be the nimble company they would need to be to survive if they were tied down to 3Com. They asked permission to take the company solo, and were denied by the 3Com brass -- so they started Handspring.
Then (IMHO) really just to spite Jeff and Donna, 3Com did indeed spin off Palm. The problem was with Jeff and Donna gone, leadership was missing. 3Com installed Carl Yankowski, and man who had run giant companies before, but never a nimble tech company. Carl didn't know how to run a company of 500 employees, but he did not how to run a company of 10000, so his goal was to get to 10000 as quickly as possible.
This meant massive hirings and acquisitions. Palm had had a damn fine IPO (Yankowski knew how to do that too) so they had alot of cash on hand. And they started hiring like crazy. And when I say like crazy, I mean they put no thought at all into who got the positions, merely that they filled them. This was 1999/2000 pre-bubble-burst, when anyone with half a brain in silicon valley was already working. As a result, Palm was "forced" to hire people with only a quarter of a brain. Bythat I mean managers who thought they could function as engineers, and people who knew how to play the company game.
Intense corporate infighting began betweeen divisions. When one division looked like it was gaining "power" other divisions would sabotage them. The "managers" that Palm had been able to hire were only interested in making sure that their group looked better than any other group. As a result, incredibly promising ideas, such as 100% VCal/vcard complaince got killed. Palm was going to host a free public database with vcard/vcal entries, so when you updated your info in your palm, it would spread to everyone else when they synced (I know it's *sortof* been done -- but not well by anyone, and certainly the data is not publicly accessible via soap). Palm's internet strategy was completely sabotaged by "executives" who weren't part of the internet group, and really didn't undertand anything about it.
Then the hardware disaster. One of the new Palm's was scheduled for release, and was in the final round of testing. Handspring released their new device and it was Shiny. The Palm marketing team, without really consulting with engineering announced WHILE THE DEVICE WAS STILL IN TESTING that the new Palm would be out next month. Sales of current Palms stopped cold while everyone waited for the new device. And then a showstopping bug was found. The vibrate alarm in the new device was too powerful, and after x number of alarms it shook loose something in y number of devices. So the new device was delayed. And all that time, very few Palms were being sold, because everyone was waiting for the new device. 3 months with no sales is a bad thing.
In a last ditfch effort to calm the infighting, Palm spun off the software division into Palmsource, but it was too little too late. The heart and back of a great little company had been broken.
I'm glad to see Palm still alive, and I'm actually glad to see this sale, I kept my equity this long, at least now I'm forced to get rid of it.
I believe the company has shrunk back down to a small enough size that they've attritioned off the morons acquired at the turn of the century -- unfortunately they lost alot of really good engineering talent too. Palm was more than a hardware company at one point -- now they are just a hardware company. And I don't believe a hardware company can be globally competetive if it's based in the U.S.
I'm not sure how this benefits Sun, but something as awesome as this, I'm willing to assume it's altruism, and I appreciate it.
Here's the thing -- the Hong Kong arm of yahoo lives in HONG KONG! They live in a communist country! How could anyone think that threatened with life in prison by a repressive government, a Chinese "Citizen" would possibly choose to not immediately capitulate to ANY request by the police? Just because an employee in China decided to NOT be Patrick Henry doesn't mean Yahoo's in bed with the Reds.
In Boston you would be making around 90K.
There has to be an understanding that there are going to be game players who cannot access the outside world -- if not because of lack of actual access, because lack of access to the firewall. As the primary admin for my entire family, scattered as they are across the country, I have have them all natted behind a simpleton box -- but none of them has a routable IP address. I'm unlikely to change thos configurations for a game. A steam model which requires constant updates/verification is just not going to ever be "the sims" or any other "best selling game of all time."
Where. I'm not saying it ain't true, but 45 seconds of googling didn't turn it up.
Holy crap! $900/year to back up 1 gig? You'd be better off renting a dedicated server somewhere and running rsync through SSH (and not using root) to push the data out.
On TNG to Jordi: "How are you going to get a reputation as a miracle worker if you tell the Captain the actual amount of time it will take?!?!"
I'm reminded of the great Punster, who observed two women yelling across an alleyway in NYC from their respective apartments. "They will never agree" said the punster, "for they argue from different premises."
I see what you mean though -- perhaps I should have used the word "facts" instead of truth, because some people interpret truth with a capital T. The way I meant it was that every individual should be allowed to interpret the facts as they see fit. I apologize for any semantic confusion.
Bill Clinton said: "I tried to walk a fine line between acting lawfully and testifying falsely, but I now recognize that I did not fully accomplish this goal and am certain my responses to questions about Ms. Lewinsky were false,"
But the REALLY sad thing about this is your defense of it, and your rabid attack on others. Partisian politics is killing this country. Clinton lied. He, in his own testimony admits he was trying to circumvent the truth without technically breaking the law, because that would have been *OK*. To me trying to circumvent the truth is just as bad.
I also believe that there was disinformation on Iraq. I believe Karl Rove should be fired and then prosecuted. I believe in punishing the guilty whether they share my political ideology or not. What bothers me the most about American politics today is the republicans and democrats who blindly follow their leaders and then further the lies of their party line by repeating them (as you have done).
So, I would ask you (and everyone) to turn down the rhetoric (...Your failure to understand this is very dangerous. No citizen should be so easily manipulated...) and instead encourage everyone to seek the truth. Every individual should be allowed to interpret the truth as they see fit -- but we should all be zealots for making sure that the truth is actually known.
If there plan was FREE maybe I'd go with it, but charging $20.00 for PLANS to build something is a little too much like those ads in the back of comic books for me.
No, they won't get banned! You'll just be LIABLE if someone uses your self-advertized mother-in-law smothering device to do just that.
Killing human beings in a very few circumstances, is permitted by law -- most notably self-defense. There have been many cases of criminals wearing body armor.
In the courts opinion, it is reasonable to think that a citizen may have a legitimate usage for armor-piercing bullets. If a ammo manufacturer advertized their bullets as being "cop-killers" then they would be more analogous to the people who distribute a p2p system with the advertizing of "find any song, movie, show etc."
You're arguing about gun-control in general, which is actually counter to what you're (I think) advocating. The same defense that keeps guns legal -- there is in certain circumstances a legal reason to have a gun -- is the same arguement that will protect p2p as a whole. There IS a set of circumstances in which p2p can be legally justified, and thus the whole technology cannot and will not be banned. Just as legally, there ARE restrictions on how guns can be used, there are going to be legal restrictions on how p2p can be used.
Do I agree with this p2p ruling? Not really, I don't personally support the current copyright law, but as a member of the Supreme Court, I'll answer your question. We don't value anything more than individual liberty, because life without liberty is an abhorrent concept. We ruled against people promoting breaking the law, and not against p2p. How else COULD we have ruled?