Wikipedia demonstrates no sense of "moral responsibility" seems to be their complaint.
The argument beneath the complaint (and it's an old one) goes like this:
I believe you have provided something that I want, and I would like you to continue to provide it. Therefore, I place you in a position of authority over me. I hand any responsibiltiy for my well being in this regard (whatever it was I think you supplied) over to you. I will no longer accept any accountability for a failure of my needs to be met. I will call you to account in the public forum (or, in many cases, in front of a judge) when these needs are not met.
In the case of wikipedia, the commodity supplied is knowledge, and the responsibility abdicated is that of critical thought.
Seems to me that the complainant could benefit by beginning to apply personal responsibility in the place of demanding that some authority accept moral responsibility for his well being.
Don't think that attitude is limited to people who are "subjects" rather than "citizens", either. Laziness, entitlement, and whining are freely practiced everywhere.
You're not helping anyone. You make people with a legitimate beef look petty and you present people with no bad intentions at all as anti-semitic (or specifically anti-Jewish, as there are a lot more semitic people than just Jews). Now, go into a closet and say "niggardly" a hundred times.
People have done this for years!!
on
Hard Drive Window
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
The L5 Song Home, home on Lagrange Where the space debris always collects, We possess, so it seems, two of Man's greatest dreams: Solar power and zero-gee sex.
Without "pay as you go" prepaid cell phones, anybody using one will have to set up an account.
Can hardly pay with cash, if you're running a tab. Better to not have this option. Why, people could say anything to one another and they couldn't be held accountable!
There are many activities that require such specialized knowledge that the average person is not qualified to determine whether the activity was performed correctly.
Codes of ethics, standards, practices, minimum competency, etc. specify the limits to what a Client may expect from one of these professionals. Tort, in this case, is not simply a matter of a user complaining "The equipment/software/system failed and that Engineer was the last person to look at it." (Yes, this really happens. A lot.). If the Engineer screwed up, he's liable (or his supervisor, or his company, depending on other things). But the practice of hiring a professional and then abdicating all responsibility for the entire situation does NOT work. Neither should it. A doctor/lawyer/engineer/realtor/... has a specific task that they were hired to perform, and it's typically not "make me healthy/get me out of jail/make my plant run how I want it to/get me the price I want for my house/..."
For professional responsibility to work, everybody involved needs to know WHO is responsible for WHAT. And the assignment of responsibility needs to be done by people who are competent to do so.
This is why professional organizations function as (often legally empowered) regulatory bodies. They maintain standards and practices, codes of ethics, and minimum qualifications for licensure. These bodies are self-policing, and often write the text of statutes that deal with the professions they regulate.
The types of penalties that the article talks about fall under the general concept of "Malpractice". This concept has been applied in our legal system to the activities of experts, and this is how we balance the interests of experts performing a service with the interests of people affected. Everybody knows what to expect.
This is not a new concept: Even if a man builds a house badly, and it falls and kills the owner, the builder is to be slain. If the owner's son was killed, then the builder's son is slain.. Violation of professional standards must occur (...builds a house badly...), qualifying injuries are defined (kills the owner or the owner's son) and retribution is specified for each qualifying injury. The law does not say "If the house falls down, kill the builder." Why did the house fall down? Was it maintained? How old was the house? Did an earthquake occur? Did the owner build a second and third story on top of the original house? Was the owner using the house to train soldiers in urban infiltration? The law holds the builder accountable for "building a house badly". And liability is only assigned when the builder's malpractice causes an injury. Not when "something bad happend in the house".
There is a legal system in place (you may or may not think it sucks, but it IS the social context in which these things take place), to support and balance the interests of all parties concerned in such situations.
There are other questions that should be addressed in this context as well:
* Is licensure required to approve the work?
* To perform the work?
* To sell the work?
* To present the worker as a professional
* How is the licensing authority regulated? Who gets to be on the board? What authority do they have?
Professional licensure, professional liability, and malpractice laws are certainly not a perfect system. However, the system is predictable and manageable by the parties invovled. It is possible for the Client to know what to expect and for the licensed professional to know what standards and practices he must meet.
A knee-jerk "shoot the developer" reaction is never helpful and rarely appropriate.
"a person is guilty of an offence if: he causes a computer to perform any function with intent to secure access to any program or data held in any computer and the access he intends to secure is unauthorised and he knows at the time when he causes the computer to perform the function that that is the case."
This reads to me something like "If anybody tells you can't do something with a computer, and you do it anyway, it's a crime.".
So, in the UK, to attach criminal liability to your violation of any of my own wishes, I just have to somehow involve a computer.
What, by the way, is a computer in the UK? Do embedded devices count? Don't leave through that automatic door; Mickey here hasn't sold his quota of cars this week, and we want a fair chance to convince you to buy. Whoops--you triggered the photoeye, causing the automatic door to open. I guess you can't get more egalitarian than this--every individual has the right to pass criminal laws.
OK, this seems a really silly example. It is. After all, we trust the authorities to selectively enforce overly broad laws--only prosecuting the real bad guys.
Hell, it works on this side of the pond; why not over there?
These are the guys that claim that... DAVID is Windows compatibility middleware, which enables all major Microsoft Windows applications to run on the free and open source Linux OS.
Except, David (what they're promoting above) doesn't exist. Never has. Never will.
OK, fine. Here's your app. It's notepad.exe, and you can find it on your Win95 CD. Extract it from the cabfile and rename it. Throw dat sucker onto a FAT16 formatted floppy.
Stick the floppy in your XP box. a:\notepad.exe. Did it run? Awesome. First criterion settled. an MS-XP compatible application
Now, boot knoppix. Stick the floppy in your (currently) linux box. mount -t vfat/dev/fd0/mnt/floppy. BAM! Second criterion to install settled.
ALT-F2, konsole, (so we can watch), cd/mnt/floppy, ls (yup, it's there; verifying our install), wine notepad.exe. Did it run?
...the current version of Opera for Linux has the same issues...
Ding! We have a winner!
I've been using Opera for several years (since about Opera 3.0). Opera printing in Linux has always lacked. Currently, they're blaming the failure on QT issues. Yeah, I've tried the static version, too. Printing is still spotty.
BTW, what's with the combative tone and name calling? This is slashdot, after all.;)
Seriously, I love everything about opera except printing. I browse using opera, print using firefox, and access MSIE-only sites (just a few that really don't work; most just say they don't) with konqueror.
While I would never claim to understand how you feel (or even if it's a big deal to you) about the subject I brought up, I would like to tell you that it was not my intent to be cruel. In my family, it was emphysema, which my Great Uncle acquired over many years of smoking. It was not a happy thing, and he was made an example to all us kids. Who all tried cigarettes anyhow.
It'd be nice to believe that a real "oh shit" would cause people to change their behaviour. But it never does.
Some people eventually (choose to) realize that what you do does matter; that it is possible to f*ck up so badly that you're not going to get out of the consequences. That's the end of denial, that's acceptance; that's responsibility.
There's still a debate (more like political flamewar) about certain subjects, but the point is that in our daily lives, most of us make decisions with the foresight of 3-year olds. As individuals and as a society.
Consequences suck; and most people would prefer that they don't exist. Those that point them out are generally reviled as deluded doomsayers, blamers of victims (since when is victimhood redemptive?), or cynics with an agenda.
Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour-- That's orbiting at ninety miles a second, so it's reckoned, a sun that is the source of all our power.
The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see are moving at a million miles a day, in an outer spiral arm at forty-thousand miles an hour in a galaxy we call the milky way.
Our galaxy, itself, contains a hundred billion stars; it's a hundred thousand light years side to side. It bulges in the middle sixteen-thousand light years thick, but out by us, it's just three thousand light years wide.
We're thirty-thousand light years from galactic central point; we go 'round every two-hundred million years... And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions in this amazing and expanding universe!
The universe, itself, keeps on expanding and expanding in all of the directions it can whiz. As fast as it can go (the speed of light, y'know), twelve-million miles a minute, and that's the fastest speed there is.
So, remember if you're feeling very small and insecure, how amazingly unlikely is your birth-- And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere out in space, 'Cause there's bugger-all down here on earth!
Lloyds has often insured against events where the risk is negligable (to Lloyds), but the item or event to be insured is large in the public eye. The point is to make a splash in the media and promote the perception that no matter what you want to insure, Lloyds can insure it, and has done so since the beginning.
Some Examples from various websites:
A grain of rice with a portrait of the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh engraved on it was insured at Lloyd's for $20,000.
Cutty Sark Whisky offered a one-million-pound prize for proof of an extra-terrestrial device, insuring against loss at Lloyd's.
Food critic and gourmet Egon Ronay insured his taste buds for 250,000 pounds.
All a patent (or a library of them) buys you is pretext to go to court. I think the term is "standing".
After you get onto the battlefield, you still need to actually defeat your opponent. In civil court in the US, this is accomplished with money and popular appeal.
While it's possible for the free software movement to appeal to the public as David to [whoever]'s Goliath, technical people don't do a good job of selling ourselves. Maybe it's our natural distaste for sophistry and our intellectual arrogance. My point in this paragraph is to dismiss the court of public opinion. Even if David wins here, Goliath has to give a crap about their image in that particular instance. And Goliath will be back.
Which leads to the real issue. Money. David's got a couple dozen patents and a few grand (hell, give him a couple hundred grand). Goliath has hundreds of times the resources in both arenas. So David wins a battle or two. Goliath wins by sheer attrition.
The solution here is for David to bind his interests to the interests of a powerful party. Convince business and government that:
--The continued existance free (as in beer) software,
--drastic changes (back to reasonable limits) to the patent process,
--and the development and business models promoted by the GPL, LGPL, BSD-license, (pick your favorite)
benefit them in a direct, immediate, and measurable manner, and you have a battle you can win.
Co-opt the resources of your opponent. Better still, convince your opponent that you are his friend and he needs you in order to achieve his goals.
Folks, we (the OSS community, developers, testers, users) need to realize we're doing a terrible job of selling ourselves. Take a lesson from our favorite whipping-boy. Get governments, schools, businesses dependent on open source software. Dependent on the fact that it is free and open-source software, not just on a particular app. Hell, convince Microsoft that linux is not competition, but a resource they can benefit from only as long as it's free. Why not?
Slashdot Mirror
Ziggy played guitar!
The argument beneath the complaint (and it's an old one) goes like this:
I believe you have provided something that I want, and I would like you to continue to provide it.
Therefore, I place you in a position of authority over me. I hand any responsibiltiy for my well being in this regard (whatever it was I think you supplied) over to you. I will no longer accept any accountability for a failure of my needs to be met. I will call you to account in the public forum (or, in many cases, in front of a judge) when these needs are not met.
In the case of wikipedia, the commodity supplied is knowledge, and the responsibility abdicated is that of critical thought.
Seems to me that the complainant could benefit by beginning to apply personal responsibility in the place of demanding that some authority accept moral responsibility for his well being.
Don't think that attitude is limited to people who are "subjects" rather than "citizens", either. Laziness, entitlement, and whining are freely practiced everywhere.
Unless it's a Nikon, then it's a Micro.
unscrupulous lawyer 1843, U.S. slang, probably altered from Ger. Scheisser "incompetent worthless person," from Scheisse "shit," from O.H.G. skizzan "to defecate" (see shit).
shyster--'shIs-t Etymology: probably from German Scheisser, literally, defecator
: one who is professionally unscrupulous especially in the practice of law or politics : PETTIFOGGER
You're not helping anyone. You make people with a legitimate beef look petty and you present people with no bad intentions at all as anti-semitic (or specifically anti-Jewish, as there are a lot more semitic people than just Jews).
Now, go into a closet and say "niggardly" a hundred times.
This is news??
Cat got your tongue? (something important seems to be missing from your comment ... like the body or the subject!)
Dang. That'd be a great business model.
Why didn't we think of that?
Oh, wait...
I downloaded the previous version last night. ... ...
over my 21.6k dialup.
I'm stickin' to it.
The L5 Song
Home, home on Lagrange
Where the space debris always collects,
We possess, so it seems, two of Man's greatest dreams:
Solar power and zero-gee sex.
Can hardly pay with cash, if you're running a tab. Better to not have this option. Why, people could say anything to one another and they couldn't be held accountable!
...when right to be kept right; when wrong to be put right.
Codes of ethics, standards, practices, minimum competency, etc. specify the limits to what a Client may expect from one of these professionals. Tort, in this case, is not simply a matter of a user complaining "The equipment/software/system failed and that Engineer was the last person to look at it." (Yes, this really happens. A lot.). If the Engineer screwed up, he's liable (or his supervisor, or his company, depending on other things). But the practice of hiring a professional and then abdicating all responsibility for the entire situation does NOT work. Neither should it. A doctor/lawyer/engineer/realtor/... has a specific task that they were hired to perform, and it's typically not "make me healthy/get me out of jail/make my plant run how I want it to/get me the price I want for my house/..."
For professional responsibility to work, everybody involved needs to know WHO is responsible for WHAT. And the assignment of responsibility needs to be done by people who are competent to do so.
This is why professional organizations function as (often legally empowered) regulatory bodies. They maintain standards and practices, codes of ethics, and minimum qualifications for licensure. These bodies are self-policing, and often write the text of statutes that deal with the professions they regulate.
The types of penalties that the article talks about fall under the general concept of "Malpractice". This concept has been applied in our legal system to the activities of experts, and this is how we balance the interests of experts performing a service with the interests of people affected. Everybody knows what to expect.
In this context, "Malpractice" is understood to be: An act or continuing conduct of a professional which does not meet the standard of professional competence and results in provable damages to his/her client or patient.
This is not a new concept: Even if a man builds a house badly, and it falls and kills the owner, the builder is to be slain. If the owner's son was killed, then the builder's son is slain. . Violation of professional standards must occur (...builds a house badly...), qualifying injuries are defined (kills the owner or the owner's son) and retribution is specified for each qualifying injury. The law does not say "If the house falls down, kill the builder." Why did the house fall down? Was it maintained? How old was the house? Did an earthquake occur? Did the owner build a second and third story on top of the original house? Was the owner using the house to train soldiers in urban infiltration? The law holds the builder accountable for "building a house badly". And liability is only assigned when the builder's malpractice causes an injury. Not when "something bad happend in the house".
There is a legal system in place (you may or may not think it sucks, but it IS the social context in which these things take place), to support and balance the interests of all parties concerned in such situations.
There are other questions that should be addressed in this context as well:
* Is licensure required to approve the work?
* To perform the work?
* To sell the work?
* To present the worker as a professional
* How is the licensing authority regulated? Who gets to be on the board? What authority do they have?
Professional licensure, professional liability, and malpractice laws are certainly not a perfect system. However, the system is predictable and manageable by the parties invovled. It is possible for the Client to know what to expect and for the licensed professional to know what standards and practices he must meet.
A knee-jerk "shoot the developer" reaction is never helpful and rarely appropriate.
This reads to me something like "If anybody tells you can't do something with a computer, and you do it anyway, it's a crime.".
So, in the UK, to attach criminal liability to your violation of any of my own wishes, I just have to somehow involve a computer.
What, by the way, is a computer in the UK? Do embedded devices count? Don't leave through that automatic door; Mickey here hasn't sold his quota of cars this week, and we want a fair chance to convince you to buy. Whoops--you triggered the photoeye, causing the automatic door to open. I guess you can't get more egalitarian than this--every individual has the right to pass criminal laws.
OK, this seems a really silly example. It is. After all, we trust the authorities to selectively enforce overly broad laws--only prosecuting the real bad guys.
Hell, it works on this side of the pond; why not over there?
Crunchy frog?
DAVID is Windows compatibility middleware, which enables all major Microsoft Windows applications to run on the free and open source Linux OS.
Except, David (what they're promoting above) doesn't exist. Never has. Never will.
OK, fine. Here's your app. It's notepad.exe, and you can find it on your Win95 CD. Extract it from the cabfile and rename it. Throw dat sucker onto a FAT16 formatted floppy.
Stick the floppy in your XP box. a:\notepad.exe. Did it run? Awesome. First criterion settled. an MS-XP compatible application
Now, boot knoppix. Stick the floppy in your (currently) linux box. mount -t vfat
ALT-F2, konsole, (so we can watch), cd
Where's my ten grand?
Ding! We have a winner!
I've been using Opera for several years (since about Opera 3.0). Opera printing in Linux has always lacked. Currently, they're blaming the failure on QT issues. Yeah, I've tried the static version, too. Printing is still spotty.
BTW, what's with the combative tone and name calling? This is slashdot, after all.
There are few that actually DON't work with opera.
For example, the Microsoft Outlook Web Access server at my work.
And, yes, Opera typically identifies itself as MSIE. Except when I told to pretend to be SpaceBison.
Oh, and site compatability.
Seriously, I love everything about opera except printing. I browse using opera, print using firefox, and access MSIE-only sites (just a few that really don't work; most just say they don't) with konqueror.
patchwork, patchwork, patchwork.
It'd be nice to believe that a real "oh shit" would cause people to change their behaviour. But it never does.
Some people eventually (choose to) realize that what you do does matter; that it is possible to f*ck up so badly that you're not going to get out of the consequences. That's the end of denial, that's acceptance; that's responsibility.
There's still a debate (more like political flamewar) about certain subjects, but the point is that in our daily lives, most of us make decisions with the foresight of 3-year olds. As individuals and as a society.
Consequences suck; and most people would prefer that they don't exist. Those that point them out are generally reviled as deluded doomsayers, blamers of victims (since when is victimhood redemptive?), or cynics with an agenda.
You're going to die in 6 months, no matter what.
Geaux Tigers!!!
What about those of us who are not vidiots?
Last FPS I played was "The Bilestoad".
A hundred thousand light years, actually.
Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving
And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour--
That's orbiting at ninety miles a second, so it's reckoned,
a sun that is the source of all our power.
The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see are moving at a million miles a day,
in an outer spiral arm at forty-thousand miles an hour in a galaxy we call the milky way.
Our galaxy, itself, contains a hundred billion stars;
it's a hundred thousand light years side to side.
It bulges in the middle sixteen-thousand light years thick,
but out by us, it's just three thousand light years wide.
We're thirty-thousand light years from galactic central point;
we go 'round every two-hundred million years...
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions in this amazing and expanding universe!
The universe, itself, keeps on expanding and expanding
in all of the directions it can whiz.
As fast as it can go (the speed of light, y'know),
twelve-million miles a minute, and that's the fastest speed there is.
So, remember if you're feeling very small and insecure,
how amazingly unlikely is your birth--
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere out in space,
'Cause there's bugger-all down here on earth!
Yes, that was from memory.
Some Examples from various websites:
A grain of rice with a portrait of the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh engraved on it was insured at Lloyd's for $20,000.
Cutty Sark Whisky offered a one-million-pound prize for proof of an extra-terrestrial device, insuring against loss at Lloyd's.
Food critic and gourmet Egon Ronay insured his taste buds for 250,000 pounds.
Fred Astaire's legs were insured for $650,000
Betty Grable's legs were insured for $250,000
Jimmy Durante's nose was insured for $140,000
All a patent (or a library of them) buys you is pretext to go to court. I think the term is "standing".
After you get onto the battlefield, you still need to actually defeat your opponent. In civil court in the US, this is accomplished with money and popular appeal.
While it's possible for the free software movement to appeal to the public as David to [whoever]'s Goliath, technical people don't do a good job of selling ourselves. Maybe it's our natural distaste for sophistry and our intellectual arrogance. My point in this paragraph is to dismiss the court of public opinion. Even if David wins here, Goliath has to give a crap about their image in that particular instance. And Goliath will be back.
Which leads to the real issue. Money. David's got a couple dozen patents and a few grand (hell, give him a couple hundred grand). Goliath has hundreds of times the resources in both arenas. So David wins a battle or two. Goliath wins by sheer attrition.
The solution here is for David to bind his interests to the interests of a powerful party. Convince business and government that:
--The continued existance free (as in beer) software,
--drastic changes (back to reasonable limits) to the patent process,
--and the development and business models promoted by the GPL, LGPL, BSD-license, (pick your favorite)
benefit them in a direct, immediate, and measurable manner, and you have a battle you can win.
Co-opt the resources of your opponent. Better still, convince your opponent that you are his friend and he needs you in order to achieve his goals.
Folks, we (the OSS community, developers, testers, users) need to realize we're doing a terrible job of selling ourselves. Take a lesson from our favorite whipping-boy. Get governments, schools, businesses dependent on open source software. Dependent on the fact that it is free and open-source software, not just on a particular app. Hell, convince Microsoft that linux is not competition, but a resource they can benefit from only as long as it's free. Why not?