That's true. I think there's an interesting question whether the gap in interest is the result of something else, though. Are young girls with a potential interest in, say, computer programming, discouraged from trying it out as a hobby at a greater rate than similarly aged boys with similar interests? If so, that might be worth changing, and doesn't require imposing interests on people who don't have them.
In most fields with a gender disparity in either direction, the minority sex is generally, under any reasonable attempt to measure inherent "ability", just as able to do it. The real gaps seem to be in interest: fewer men than women wish to enter psychology as a field, and fewer women than men wish to enter mathematics as a field, to take two examples. Why is that? It's not entirely clear, but it starts pretty early. For example, boys are much more likely than girls to play ad-hoc games that involve numbers and math, even at ages where girls tend to do better in school. Boys are also much more likely to build electronics or program computers as a hobby. Probably much of this is cultural, but that's where the real disparity lies, and you're never going to get parity unless you figure out how to change interest.
On the other hand, changing interest is always tricky, because you run the risk of trying to tell people they ought to be interested in something they really don't seem to be interested in.
Interesting, if that's the case. I wasn't aware that any Private Investigator statutes actually included an explicit provision that evidence obtained in violation of the statute must be excluded from all proceedings, as opposed to merely criminal or civil liability for the violator themselves.
But if the statutes did contain an explicit provision of that sort, wouldn't the brief here argue that? The brief seems to acknowledge that exclusion is discretionary rather than required as a matter of law.
To qualify, the very end of the brief does seem to coyly hint at a possible Constitutional issue, citing an 1886 US Supreme Court case that applied an exclusionary rule in a civil case because its damages were such that it could be considered quasi-criminal. The brief helpfully suggests that the Court could avoid that mess of an issue by simply using its discretionary power to exclude the evidence, without having to consider the Constitutional issue.
That's not really an automatic rule, and it's not clear how the judge will rule here. Except where a statute specifically says that evidence must or cannot be excluded, courts generally decide whether to exclude evidence by balancing: 1) the undesirability of excluding evidence that is truthful (even if illegally obtained) and does actually relate to the case at hand (the infamous "letting someone off on a technicality"); with 2) the desire to provide a disincentive to law-breaking by prohibiting the law-breaker the benefit of their illegally obtained evidence.
In criminal cases, the Supreme Court has done that balancing once and for all in some cases, and issued exclusionary rules that all lower courts must follow, designed to protect certain fundamental Constitutional rights. But when the illegally collected evidence is merely in violation of a statute (rather than Constitutional rights), or in a civil case (as here), the courts have more discretion in determining what remedy is in the public interest and the interest of justice. The courts have been somewhat split on when, if ever, illegally obtained evidence can be admitted, or what other remedies the court could impose.
That's one reason, I think, why the motion here isn't phrased as a demand---that the law requires the evidence to be excluded---but as a request for the court to use its discretionary power to exclude evidence as a remedy in this case: "We respectfully request that this Court remedy this violation by suppressing all MediaSentry evidence in this case." The brief goes on about that at greater length in section II., arguing that the court has the authority to exclude the evidence, and in this case should choose to do so, especially because the brief alleges plaintiffs' counsel supervised the illegal collection of evidence, which is a worse ethical violation than counsel entering into evidence illegally obtained evidence where they had nothing to do with obtaining it (pages 15-17 as numbered; pp. 20-22 of the PDF).
Which universities were you trying to visit? Most University of California campuses allow anyone to just walk in to the libraries and use them, and the ones I've visited have limited-time "guest" logins to both the computers and wireless internet.
I guess it depends on the level of undrinkable. If it just wasn't very good coffee, I'd shrug, not worry much about the wasted $0.99, and not go to that coffee shop again. I don't see why games should be that much different. If I don't like Bogost's $0.99 game, I won't buy his other games; if I do, I might look to see what else he's selling. Unless it was actively some sort of fraud, like he sold me a broken binary for $0.99 (analogous to a seriously unacceptable cup of coffee), I wouldn't ask for my money back.
If your incentives are aligned wrongly, policing will only go so far: it's like trying to destroy black markets by hiring more cops.
Most people don't go into science because they want to fabricate data. Sure, people want to be famous, but most of this data being fabricated isn't even anything that would make you famous (only a handful of high-profile examples are). You need a culture that neither encourages nor rewards attempts to meta-game the academic system, and a system that does not encourage gaming it, by for example judging scientists on some quantitative measure of their publication count multiplied by impact factor and citation count.
It's hard enough to answer difficult questions when everyone in question is acting in good faith, self-examining their own work before publishing it, and generally trying their best to do a good job. It's impossible if you're making some number of people feel they have no choice but to grit their teeth and publish papers they know are somewhat spun or not as good as they could've been. Let the scientists do their damn job, and stop the ranking/numbers game.
Of course, you can't just give everyone a big salary and free reign to spend the next 20 years doing whatever they want. But I would argue that you really need an evaluation of the quality of a scientist, not the quality of their output. Is this person insightful, knowledgeable, committed to doing good research, plugged in to what the real questions in their field are, has a plausible approach to answering them, etc.? If so, leave them the hell alone and let them decide how to best communicate their results, whether that be a flurry of 10 papers a year or one every 2 years.
In short, academic publishing is supposed to be about communication: you legitimately have something you think other people would want to read. Adding incentives based on the amount and type of that communication leads to people basically forcing themselves to communicate when they wouldn't have chosen to otherwise, because they need the lines on their CV; this does not improve the quality of the academic literature.
KDE did already do the 2nd (what you list as correct), and most developers assumed that this was sufficient to keep the files in a consistent state, due to rename() being atomic. The problem is the sync issue you mention afterwards: the failure mode being encountered was that the rename() executed instantly to clobber the old file, while the new file still contained no data on disk. If the machine crashed in the window between the rename() and the sync, you have neither the old nor the new file.
The main thing being discussed with KDE (and others) is how to fix this. Adding a sync() after every config update totally destroys performance, if you might update hundreds of small config files semi-frequently. See, for example, this discussion among Python folks for pros/cons of various options.
It doesn't require much of a conspiracy theory to explain why an article on a tech-related website about a judge would focus on her tech-related decisions.
The 2007 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly somewhat raised the bar for allowing privately-brought anti-trust suits to proceed, but its standard seems to be met here if they do actually implement pay walls, so a suit could at least go to trial. In Twombly, a suit against the Bells was thrown out because it only alleged parallel behavior (not itself illegal) and a claim of conspiracy to carry it out not backed up by any allegations specifying why the plaintiff had any reason to believe it actually was coordinated. Here you can state a sufficient pleading easily: if they simultaneously introduce pay walls, you have parallel behavior, and you additionally allege that they had a meeting at which they discussed carrying out said parallel behavior in concert. Not sure that alone would allow a plaintiff to actually prevail at trial, but it should at least allow a suit to go forward investigating it if this happens (assuming the newspapers don't get a Congressional exemption).
That definition still includes a good proportion of American Christians, since one of the larger (and certainly fastest-growing) sects of Christianity in the US is Pentecostalism, run by pop-star-like, very wealthy and often TV-show-having leaders of megachurches.
If there were significant competition, there wouldn't be large profits to begin with, because competition drives prices towards cost plus a moderate level of profit (the minimum needed for the least greedy player to be willing to participate in the market).
If taxes were on revenue, and prices followed the idealistic supply/demand curve model, that would be true, because taxes would in effect be costs.
However, corporate taxes are generally on profits, i.e. on instances where the idealized model fails to hold, because the market price set by demand is significantly above the cost of production, but for one reason or another this has failed to stimulate an increase in supply to offset it, as classical theory would predict it should. In such markets, you already have a significant deviation from classical price theory, which assumes prices in a competitive market should approach the cost of production. Instead, prices are primarily being set from the demand side without much impact from the cost side. In those cases, which are the only ones in which profit taxes apply, a tax is unlikely to significantly change prices.
Why would you assume a 50/50 split? In high-margin businesses, the presence of large profits (i.e. large gaps between market price and cost) indicates that costs are not a significant factor in setting price, which is primarily set by demand. In high-profit markets, which are of course the ones where a tax on profits most applies, it's much more likely that the market price will be little changed, and the corporations will simply pocket even more profits.
Even so, from Switzerland's perspective that's an even better reason to squeeze Microsoft by having an open bidding process that drives the price down. Why pay them $15m when you could force them to discount?
Red Hat isn't arguing that Switzerland must put any specific set of requirements on the bidding process, only that there must actually be a bidding process with openly stated requirements. If "make it work with Active Directory" is one of the requirements, then it's up to Red Hat to include that in their bid. With contracts in the range of $10m+, there is plenty that Red Hat could custom-produce if it were needed to meet the bid's requirements.
I don't think there's some moral right to business models. Newspaper classifieds were exceedingly shitty, to the point where even in early days I'd often find it easier to sell or buy stuff on local mailing lists and Usenet groups than through classifieds. They also made the most of their gatekeeper status and local monopolies or near-monopolies to charge exhorbitant fees, imposing high transaction costs on person-to-person sales, while not even being friendly to use or search.
Craigslist did classifieds right, so the revenue model of overcharging for classifieds done badly dried up.
Craigslist is doing pretty well for itself. Fortuneestimated that its 2005 profit was over $15 million (revenues of $20 million and expenses of under $5 million), and it's probably considerably higher now.
There's a reason Craigslist, for example, has never gone public or sold a controlling stake to a major media company: because Craig Newmark knows exactly what would happen to the site if he did. He could get more money, sure, but he's very wealthy as it is, so he doesn't need more money. Not enough to sell out the site he spent so many years building, anyway.
Remember, folks, free-market capitalism is about your right to control your own business, taking responsibility for it and running it as you see fit. If you sell out to some large, bureaucratic entity, greedy bastards with no vision will run your life's work right into the ground. Is the payout worth it? Maybe it is, but at least make sure you realize what you're doing: you cannot both sell out to CBS and retain your integrity. The freedom to choose not to sell something is as important as free access to markets is.
Depends on which government you're paying taxes to. Local and state governments are easy to opt out of: just move elsewhere. They're about as coercive in that respect as homeowners' associations, a private-sector entity with government-like characteristics. I agree that the larger and harder to opt-out of entities become, the greater evil they are. But this applies to some very large corporations, also; try finding a way to connect to the internet without going through either: 1) government; or 2) one of the large telecomm firms.
The fact that the government is the lesser evil doesn't mean that it's an evil I actually want to encourage, either, certainly not through some international-violence-projecting arm of government. I simply agree with Thomas Jefferson that, unfortunately, some government regulation of very large corporations is the lesser evil, until we can figure out how to keep large corporations from forming in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
That's true. I think there's an interesting question whether the gap in interest is the result of something else, though. Are young girls with a potential interest in, say, computer programming, discouraged from trying it out as a hobby at a greater rate than similarly aged boys with similar interests? If so, that might be worth changing, and doesn't require imposing interests on people who don't have them.
In most fields with a gender disparity in either direction, the minority sex is generally, under any reasonable attempt to measure inherent "ability", just as able to do it. The real gaps seem to be in interest: fewer men than women wish to enter psychology as a field, and fewer women than men wish to enter mathematics as a field, to take two examples. Why is that? It's not entirely clear, but it starts pretty early. For example, boys are much more likely than girls to play ad-hoc games that involve numbers and math, even at ages where girls tend to do better in school. Boys are also much more likely to build electronics or program computers as a hobby. Probably much of this is cultural, but that's where the real disparity lies, and you're never going to get parity unless you figure out how to change interest.
On the other hand, changing interest is always tricky, because you run the risk of trying to tell people they ought to be interested in something they really don't seem to be interested in.
Interesting, if that's the case. I wasn't aware that any Private Investigator statutes actually included an explicit provision that evidence obtained in violation of the statute must be excluded from all proceedings, as opposed to merely criminal or civil liability for the violator themselves.
But if the statutes did contain an explicit provision of that sort, wouldn't the brief here argue that? The brief seems to acknowledge that exclusion is discretionary rather than required as a matter of law.
To qualify, the very end of the brief does seem to coyly hint at a possible Constitutional issue, citing an 1886 US Supreme Court case that applied an exclusionary rule in a civil case because its damages were such that it could be considered quasi-criminal. The brief helpfully suggests that the Court could avoid that mess of an issue by simply using its discretionary power to exclude the evidence, without having to consider the Constitutional issue.
That's not really an automatic rule, and it's not clear how the judge will rule here. Except where a statute specifically says that evidence must or cannot be excluded, courts generally decide whether to exclude evidence by balancing: 1) the undesirability of excluding evidence that is truthful (even if illegally obtained) and does actually relate to the case at hand (the infamous "letting someone off on a technicality"); with 2) the desire to provide a disincentive to law-breaking by prohibiting the law-breaker the benefit of their illegally obtained evidence.
In criminal cases, the Supreme Court has done that balancing once and for all in some cases, and issued exclusionary rules that all lower courts must follow, designed to protect certain fundamental Constitutional rights. But when the illegally collected evidence is merely in violation of a statute (rather than Constitutional rights), or in a civil case (as here), the courts have more discretion in determining what remedy is in the public interest and the interest of justice. The courts have been somewhat split on when, if ever, illegally obtained evidence can be admitted, or what other remedies the court could impose.
That's one reason, I think, why the motion here isn't phrased as a demand---that the law requires the evidence to be excluded---but as a request for the court to use its discretionary power to exclude evidence as a remedy in this case: "We respectfully request that this Court remedy this violation by suppressing all MediaSentry evidence in this case." The brief goes on about that at greater length in section II., arguing that the court has the authority to exclude the evidence, and in this case should choose to do so, especially because the brief alleges plaintiffs' counsel supervised the illegal collection of evidence, which is a worse ethical violation than counsel entering into evidence illegally obtained evidence where they had nothing to do with obtaining it (pages 15-17 as numbered; pp. 20-22 of the PDF).
Which universities were you trying to visit? Most University of California campuses allow anyone to just walk in to the libraries and use them, and the ones I've visited have limited-time "guest" logins to both the computers and wireless internet.
I guess it depends on the level of undrinkable. If it just wasn't very good coffee, I'd shrug, not worry much about the wasted $0.99, and not go to that coffee shop again. I don't see why games should be that much different. If I don't like Bogost's $0.99 game, I won't buy his other games; if I do, I might look to see what else he's selling. Unless it was actively some sort of fraud, like he sold me a broken binary for $0.99 (analogous to a seriously unacceptable cup of coffee), I wouldn't ask for my money back.
If your incentives are aligned wrongly, policing will only go so far: it's like trying to destroy black markets by hiring more cops.
Most people don't go into science because they want to fabricate data. Sure, people want to be famous, but most of this data being fabricated isn't even anything that would make you famous (only a handful of high-profile examples are). You need a culture that neither encourages nor rewards attempts to meta-game the academic system, and a system that does not encourage gaming it, by for example judging scientists on some quantitative measure of their publication count multiplied by impact factor and citation count.
It's hard enough to answer difficult questions when everyone in question is acting in good faith, self-examining their own work before publishing it, and generally trying their best to do a good job. It's impossible if you're making some number of people feel they have no choice but to grit their teeth and publish papers they know are somewhat spun or not as good as they could've been. Let the scientists do their damn job, and stop the ranking/numbers game.
Of course, you can't just give everyone a big salary and free reign to spend the next 20 years doing whatever they want. But I would argue that you really need an evaluation of the quality of a scientist, not the quality of their output. Is this person insightful, knowledgeable, committed to doing good research, plugged in to what the real questions in their field are, has a plausible approach to answering them, etc.? If so, leave them the hell alone and let them decide how to best communicate their results, whether that be a flurry of 10 papers a year or one every 2 years.
In short, academic publishing is supposed to be about communication: you legitimately have something you think other people would want to read. Adding incentives based on the amount and type of that communication leads to people basically forcing themselves to communicate when they wouldn't have chosen to otherwise, because they need the lines on their CV; this does not improve the quality of the academic literature.
KDE did already do the 2nd (what you list as correct), and most developers assumed that this was sufficient to keep the files in a consistent state, due to rename() being atomic. The problem is the sync issue you mention afterwards: the failure mode being encountered was that the rename() executed instantly to clobber the old file, while the new file still contained no data on disk. If the machine crashed in the window between the rename() and the sync, you have neither the old nor the new file.
The main thing being discussed with KDE (and others) is how to fix this. Adding a sync() after every config update totally destroys performance, if you might update hundreds of small config files semi-frequently. See, for example, this discussion among Python folks for pros/cons of various options.
It doesn't require much of a conspiracy theory to explain why an article on a tech-related website about a judge would focus on her tech-related decisions.
The 2007 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly somewhat raised the bar for allowing privately-brought anti-trust suits to proceed, but its standard seems to be met here if they do actually implement pay walls, so a suit could at least go to trial. In Twombly, a suit against the Bells was thrown out because it only alleged parallel behavior (not itself illegal) and a claim of conspiracy to carry it out not backed up by any allegations specifying why the plaintiff had any reason to believe it actually was coordinated. Here you can state a sufficient pleading easily: if they simultaneously introduce pay walls, you have parallel behavior, and you additionally allege that they had a meeting at which they discussed carrying out said parallel behavior in concert. Not sure that alone would allow a plaintiff to actually prevail at trial, but it should at least allow a suit to go forward investigating it if this happens (assuming the newspapers don't get a Congressional exemption).
That definition still includes a good proportion of American Christians, since one of the larger (and certainly fastest-growing) sects of Christianity in the US is Pentecostalism, run by pop-star-like, very wealthy and often TV-show-having leaders of megachurches.
If there were significant competition, there wouldn't be large profits to begin with, because competition drives prices towards cost plus a moderate level of profit (the minimum needed for the least greedy player to be willing to participate in the market).
If taxes were on revenue, and prices followed the idealistic supply/demand curve model, that would be true, because taxes would in effect be costs.
However, corporate taxes are generally on profits, i.e. on instances where the idealized model fails to hold, because the market price set by demand is significantly above the cost of production, but for one reason or another this has failed to stimulate an increase in supply to offset it, as classical theory would predict it should. In such markets, you already have a significant deviation from classical price theory, which assumes prices in a competitive market should approach the cost of production. Instead, prices are primarily being set from the demand side without much impact from the cost side. In those cases, which are the only ones in which profit taxes apply, a tax is unlikely to significantly change prices.
Why would you assume a 50/50 split? In high-margin businesses, the presence of large profits (i.e. large gaps between market price and cost) indicates that costs are not a significant factor in setting price, which is primarily set by demand. In high-profit markets, which are of course the ones where a tax on profits most applies, it's much more likely that the market price will be little changed, and the corporations will simply pocket even more profits.
I'm not sure the Catholic Church for much of the medieval period was that dissimilar from a large corporation, either.
There's no reason to preferentially import oil over sugar cane, though, which is what current policy promotes.
Even so, from Switzerland's perspective that's an even better reason to squeeze Microsoft by having an open bidding process that drives the price down. Why pay them $15m when you could force them to discount?
Red Hat isn't arguing that Switzerland must put any specific set of requirements on the bidding process, only that there must actually be a bidding process with openly stated requirements. If "make it work with Active Directory" is one of the requirements, then it's up to Red Hat to include that in their bid. With contracts in the range of $10m+, there is plenty that Red Hat could custom-produce if it were needed to meet the bid's requirements.
We already import oil, though, without import tariffs. Why not at least import sugar-cane ethanol on equal terms? Either tax both, or tax neither.
I don't think there's some moral right to business models. Newspaper classifieds were exceedingly shitty, to the point where even in early days I'd often find it easier to sell or buy stuff on local mailing lists and Usenet groups than through classifieds. They also made the most of their gatekeeper status and local monopolies or near-monopolies to charge exhorbitant fees, imposing high transaction costs on person-to-person sales, while not even being friendly to use or search.
Craigslist did classifieds right, so the revenue model of overcharging for classifieds done badly dried up.
Craigslist is doing pretty well for itself. Fortune estimated that its 2005 profit was over $15 million (revenues of $20 million and expenses of under $5 million), and it's probably considerably higher now.
There's a reason Craigslist, for example, has never gone public or sold a controlling stake to a major media company: because Craig Newmark knows exactly what would happen to the site if he did. He could get more money, sure, but he's very wealthy as it is, so he doesn't need more money. Not enough to sell out the site he spent so many years building, anyway.
Remember, folks, free-market capitalism is about your right to control your own business, taking responsibility for it and running it as you see fit. If you sell out to some large, bureaucratic entity, greedy bastards with no vision will run your life's work right into the ground. Is the payout worth it? Maybe it is, but at least make sure you realize what you're doing: you cannot both sell out to CBS and retain your integrity. The freedom to choose not to sell something is as important as free access to markets is.
Depends on which government you're paying taxes to. Local and state governments are easy to opt out of: just move elsewhere. They're about as coercive in that respect as homeowners' associations, a private-sector entity with government-like characteristics. I agree that the larger and harder to opt-out of entities become, the greater evil they are. But this applies to some very large corporations, also; try finding a way to connect to the internet without going through either: 1) government; or 2) one of the large telecomm firms.
The fact that the government is the lesser evil doesn't mean that it's an evil I actually want to encourage, either, certainly not through some international-violence-projecting arm of government. I simply agree with Thomas Jefferson that, unfortunately, some government regulation of very large corporations is the lesser evil, until we can figure out how to keep large corporations from forming in the first place.