Yes, I would agree with your points that such white collar crimes are more severe and lasting in effect than robbing someone at gunpoint of a scant few material possessions.
Yes, they harm me more personally because they damage my capacity to act intellectually with their lies than the armed robber does.
Yes, I agree that it was an orchestrated scam and most definitely not an act of passion.
Yes, I agree that it justifies a greater sentence.
Sounds justifiable to me, simply on the basis of what they did. Surreptitiously altering records affects everyone, doing it knowingly for personal gain is an affront to everyone alive and everyone who will ever live. You can't trust someone who has demonstrated that they are of so corrupt and self serving a nature to walk among decent people.
I can understand why a child might originally think that upon first look, but with experience you will come to understand that there are a number of edge cases that disprove your rather childlike extreme position. The entire question is really phrased in a fashion that is by it's very nature not capable of being answered properly because it doesn't appreciate the sophistication of the actual problem. Perhaps by the time you graduate high school you'll start to understand what I'm saying.
Suffice it to say, it's not that I don't know the answer, it's just that you've asked a stupid question. Don't feel too bad, even if you never grow out of it, there are a number of very successful people who do it all the time.
I "guess" that also most scientist would say similar things, as you can start with a hypothesis and than by evaluating this generate some data. Once you have enough data you may want to build a theory on this and see whether future experiments support your theory. A theory without data is a bit like a fish without bones, quite slippery...and often dead.
The study of humanity amount to deduction based on observation of dead societies. One human being is incapable of both conducting an experiment on the larger social scale and observing it. Conversely, some of the most important decisions about how our society operates amount to an experiment that will only be interpreted with anything approaching detachment by the great grandchildren of those of us who procreate and continue things along. So, who is the scientist in this field of endeavor, the observer, or the actor? Neither, according to most strict interpretations. This is where science and religion bang into each other, and why the capacity for effective non-scientific thought is important.
Sounds like something a detective in a writer of detective fiction with a flair for the dramatic would say.
Of course, if you were to look for someone with experience being in a position of command, where who doesn't have the leisure to refuse to guess, a professional writer of fiction would probably be the absolute worst choice you could make. A housewife or a traffic cop would be better prepared.
Human beings don't need proof to operate. We are intuitive computers, and are capable of seeing where trends overlap to produce synergistic effects. If we weren't, we would be incapable of making a decision to achieve effects larger than the span of our own lives, and yet we are.
Sometimes, "think about it" is an invitation to test your brain and see if it's broken before they write you off as an idiot who really is.
No doubt about that. But we need to always be looking ahead when we're deciding what our goals should be and how to use the resources we've got. Gratuitous consumption shouldn't be the order of the day.
As an example, the phrase "Space Tourism" always makes me wince, considering that we have no infrastructure to gather energy from space yet and we're running low on non-renewable energy on a global scale. I'd hate to see that sort of attitude govern how we handle using the Moon's resources.
Well, from a practical standpoint, we should be using earthbound energy sources to create space based energy sources, then switch to them entirely, and in the same way, we should be using earthbound resources to gain the capacity to gather off-earth resources, and eventually, harvest material that comes from outside the solar system and switch to them entirely.
You stretch the timeline out long enough and assume success and growth, someday we're going to want to have this solar system as a Galactic Wildlife Park. We want it to be the shining jewel of humanity, not a burnt out old husk that we fled because we had to.
Early 3d fabs for medical use used this method. They would, for example, recreate a broken skull from x-rays and let the doctor practice putting his hands in it before surgery.
I've been thinking of sinking the money into getting parts for a Rep-Rap. These look nice though.
I can see this being advantageous for single system, but for people in general? This just reeks of being impractical.
For one, no one I KNOW walks with their cameras out in front of them, so the cameras would have setup such a way such that there is a single camera dedicated to capture the event. How do you know a camera is going to capture an event in the first place? Seriously, phones are for talking, not being your peeping-tom from afar.
It would be pretty easy to strap a cell phone to your vest, would it not? Imagine 10,000 protesters with camera phones strapped to their vests and some enterprising geeks near by to exploit the situation and rebroadcast the information on to the web. Be pretty hard to get away with covering up police brutality with something like that running, wouldn't it?
It doesn't really matter what you think. They've got a mandate to promote access to creative works. Using foreign owned DRM to control the content is a direct violation of that mandate. Without that mandate, they have no right to exist, no right to anything created, no right to any of the money or the wealth or the power at all.
Would make an interesting defense should they ever choose to go after anyone legally for breaking this DRM and redistributing the content. Of course, the British are a bunch of fascists just like the USA, so it doesn't really matter either way. The laws are flexible when they interfere with the flow of money.
How about option number 3, a portable power source that generates energy by being moved around, clips onto your web harness with a carabiner, but doesn't trap heat or sweat and won't be ruined when you rip your clothing climbing through trees, rubble, barbed wire, razor wire, etc.
As for your example, if this were issued to signalmen as a replacement for batteries and not a replacement for standard issue gear, what happens when the signalman gets shot? Are you going to trade uniforms with them on the battlefield?
Sounds like a big waste of time, money, effort and eventually lives to me.
I think you're way off base with your estimate of how people use their computers. They don't look at things at all after the first few times, they use motor reflexes and muscle memories.
Most computer users can type the keys of long held passwords without remembering what they are by allowing their fingers to do the work. Most can shut down the computer by doing a precisely measured flick of the mouse without looking at the destination. Even if their screen is turned off on them, most can get pretty close.
Good user interface design should be designed around these principles. Lots of labels and instruction for those who have never used it before, because they will be reading everything, and proper placement of GUI elements to allow easy muscle memorization.
The pictures or lack thereof really don't have anything to do with the quality of use, or learning how to efficiently use the interface once you understand it. If a ribbon is going to be easier to locate blind, time and time again, then it's an improvement. If it's going to be harder to locate blind, it's a step backwards.
Having spent some time in the field wearing various uniforms, I have to say, the idea of wearing a bunch of plastic and metal fibers in the field doesn't sound very appealing. It sounds like a recipe for heat exhaustion.
Are other energy sources really so inconvenient that this is justifiable?
Why is 'a small number of linux users' a reason for going with this? What is wrong with using a format that is available everywhere (including portable players!) as a matter of course?
Because Bill came by with a wad of cash. Like Steve says, the market has spoken.
Standing in the street for a few hours waving a sign isn't useful or effective. It's ineffectual bitching and moaning.
If you want a non-violent means of action, try quiting your job, not paying your taxes, not going shopping anymore and volunteering your time helping organize other people to successfully live and do the same. Not for an hour, not for a day, but indefinitely until everything comes crashing down and the old power structures are defunct.
Remember how funny and strange it sounded that in the midst of disaster, George begged everyone to a)keep working and b)go shopping?
Well, that's the answer. Trace the paths by which power flows from the group to the leader, and turn off the supply.
Hiser acknowledged that ODF supporters are angry with the foundation because of its change of heart.
Indeed, Andrew Updegrove, a partner at Boston-based law firm Gesmer Updegrove LLP and a vocal supporter of ODF, criticized the OpenDocument Foundation in an e-mail on Monday.
"It's a shame," he wrote, "that a group that was expressly formed for the purpose of supporting ODF is now actively working against the standard -- especially given the fact that its tax exemption is based upon supporting that same standard."
What I want to know is, why is this not fraudulent? Sounds like someone forming a non-profit-anti-smoking group, accepting donations and not paying taxes, then speaking on behalf of cigarette companies with the funds collected. Will this organization not at the least be forced to dissolve? What happens to their legal status?
That's a possibility. It's another possibility that those companies who are chained to MS fucked up formats are going to bear ever increasing costs trying to deal with vast amounts of complexity that do not generate any return, but are obligatory for legal reasons, while their competitors who are not burdened with this defeat them in the marketplace by virtue of their not having this lead weight around their neck.
I'm inclined to think it's the latter, personally. It just takes a while.
Personally, I would say anyone who relies on unstructured interactions by users to manage their business might save a little money upfront, but when it comes time to grow to something that places greater demands on the organizational framework, their decision will bite them on the ass hard enough to tank their business.
Creating a sea of unstructured data and calling it your IT infrastructure is a good way to end up with a chaotic mess. In my opinion.
Personally, I would say a "Peaceful Protest" just isn't good enough. Stand up and fight or be counted among your countrymen by those foreigners who have been wronged.
The way world politics are going, you Americans might want to start another violent revolution before you find that having millions of otherwise innocent foreign born people locked in FEMA Concentration Camps is not much different from having an army on your soil, and there are a lot of angry and wronged nations that will help them when the whole thing blows sky high.
Analogue recordings leave room for the possibility that general improvements in physical sciences my result in our being able to recover greater nuances in the sound in the future than we can now.
Digital recordings do not allow for this possibility at all
At the very least, original recordings ought to be analogue for this reason.
Oddly enough, buying something you don't like isn't a good reason to attack someone.
Quite the contrary. When corporations own governments, and democracies are shams, your economic spending becomes your only vote that has weight and consequence. When you buy something, you vote for that corporation.
Spending is an act of participatory involvement in which you empower that corporation, regardless of whether you want to think of it that way or not. This is the foundation of soft enforcement in "international law", and the basis of economic sanctions.
Thus, you can attack corporations by attacking their customers, which is the foundation of such efforts as throwing paint on the coats of people who buy fur coats.
Not entirely sure what you mean by co-opting other peoples' code. That's BS.
It's called dual-licensing, and in the case of Qt it's a two-way process. Open source projects get a hell of a lot out of Qt that would take them years to write themselves as well as significant resources, and using Qt gives Trolltech a lot of publicity and testing.
Well, in the examples I gave, there was ProjectMayo, which started off as a dual licensed open source effort to create MP4 compression for the people. Then it got closed before a release, and turned into DivX. People who worked on it were pissed. Thus Xvid was created, with a name that implied opposition to DivX, and the people who set up the scheme made a fortune putting DivX on devices like the DVD player behind me. There were also efforts to incorporate video support into the Ogg project through Theora and have distance from intellectual property difficulties with the MPEG group and Microsoft, but they never really made any ground because DivX got the corporate seal of approval and filled the gap.
Then there's MySQL, which was made a platform on the basis of open source good will, and is now making quiet efforts to cut off enterprise level tools from non-paying customers. Which is a real boon to those who those who all these years thought they were working towards the lofty goal of enterprise quality tools free for all.
That's what I mean by co-opting other peoples code.
Trolltech engages in dual-licensing shenanigans and co-opts ownership of other peoples code to place in closed source devices in the same letter-not-the-law tradition as MySQL and ProjectMayo.
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Yes, I would agree with your points that such white collar crimes are more severe and lasting in effect than robbing someone at gunpoint of a scant few material possessions.
Yes, they harm me more personally because they damage my capacity to act intellectually with their lies than the armed robber does.
Yes, I agree that it was an orchestrated scam and most definitely not an act of passion.
Yes, I agree that it justifies a greater sentence.
Oh, wait. You lost me at the end.
Sounds justifiable to me, simply on the basis of what they did. Surreptitiously altering records affects everyone, doing it knowingly for personal gain is an affront to everyone alive and everyone who will ever live. You can't trust someone who has demonstrated that they are of so corrupt and self serving a nature to walk among decent people.
I can understand why a child might originally think that upon first look, but with experience you will come to understand that there are a number of edge cases that disprove your rather childlike extreme position. The entire question is really phrased in a fashion that is by it's very nature not capable of being answered properly because it doesn't appreciate the sophistication of the actual problem. Perhaps by the time you graduate high school you'll start to understand what I'm saying.
Suffice it to say, it's not that I don't know the answer, it's just that you've asked a stupid question. Don't feel too bad, even if you never grow out of it, there are a number of very successful people who do it all the time.
I "guess" that also most scientist would say similar things, as you can start with a hypothesis and than by evaluating this generate some data. Once you have enough data you may want to build a theory on this and see whether future experiments support your theory. A theory without data is a bit like a fish without bones, quite slippery...and often dead.
The study of humanity amount to deduction based on observation of dead societies. One human being is incapable of both conducting an experiment on the larger social scale and observing it. Conversely, some of the most important decisions about how our society operates amount to an experiment that will only be interpreted with anything approaching detachment by the great grandchildren of those of us who procreate and continue things along. So, who is the scientist in this field of endeavor, the observer, or the actor? Neither, according to most strict interpretations. This is where science and religion bang into each other, and why the capacity for effective non-scientific thought is important.
Think about it.
Sounds like something a detective in a writer of detective fiction with a flair for the dramatic would say.
Of course, if you were to look for someone with experience being in a position of command, where who doesn't have the leisure to refuse to guess, a professional writer of fiction would probably be the absolute worst choice you could make. A housewife or a traffic cop would be better prepared.
It's very eloquent though.
Human beings don't need proof to operate. We are intuitive computers, and are capable of seeing where trends overlap to produce synergistic effects. If we weren't, we would be incapable of making a decision to achieve effects larger than the span of our own lives, and yet we are.
Sometimes, "think about it" is an invitation to test your brain and see if it's broken before they write you off as an idiot who really is.
Obviously.
No doubt about that. But we need to always be looking ahead when we're deciding what our goals should be and how to use the resources we've got. Gratuitous consumption shouldn't be the order of the day.
As an example, the phrase "Space Tourism" always makes me wince, considering that we have no infrastructure to gather energy from space yet and we're running low on non-renewable energy on a global scale. I'd hate to see that sort of attitude govern how we handle using the Moon's resources.
Well, from a practical standpoint, we should be using earthbound energy sources to create space based energy sources, then switch to them entirely, and in the same way, we should be using earthbound resources to gain the capacity to gather off-earth resources, and eventually, harvest material that comes from outside the solar system and switch to them entirely.
You stretch the timeline out long enough and assume success and growth, someday we're going to want to have this solar system as a Galactic Wildlife Park. We want it to be the shining jewel of humanity, not a burnt out old husk that we fled because we had to.
Early 3d fabs for medical use used this method. They would, for example, recreate a broken skull from x-rays and let the doctor practice putting his hands in it before surgery.
I've been thinking of sinking the money into getting parts for a Rep-Rap. These look nice though.
I can see this being advantageous for single system, but for people in general? This just reeks of being impractical.
For one, no one I KNOW walks with their cameras out in front of them, so the cameras would have setup such a way such that there is a single camera dedicated to capture the event. How do you know a camera is going to capture an event in the first place? Seriously, phones are for talking, not being your peeping-tom from afar.
It would be pretty easy to strap a cell phone to your vest, would it not? Imagine 10,000 protesters with camera phones strapped to their vests and some enterprising geeks near by to exploit the situation and rebroadcast the information on to the web. Be pretty hard to get away with covering up police brutality with something like that running, wouldn't it?
Sounds like something that should be mandatory for anyone engaging in civil disobedience.
It doesn't really matter what you think. They've got a mandate to promote access to creative works. Using foreign owned DRM to control the content is a direct violation of that mandate. Without that mandate, they have no right to exist, no right to anything created, no right to any of the money or the wealth or the power at all.
Would make an interesting defense should they ever choose to go after anyone legally for breaking this DRM and redistributing the content. Of course, the British are a bunch of fascists just like the USA, so it doesn't really matter either way. The laws are flexible when they interfere with the flow of money.
How about option number 3, a portable power source that generates energy by being moved around, clips onto your web harness with a carabiner, but doesn't trap heat or sweat and won't be ruined when you rip your clothing climbing through trees, rubble, barbed wire, razor wire, etc.
As for your example, if this were issued to signalmen as a replacement for batteries and not a replacement for standard issue gear, what happens when the signalman gets shot? Are you going to trade uniforms with them on the battlefield?
Sounds like a big waste of time, money, effort and eventually lives to me.
I think you're way off base with your estimate of how people use their computers. They don't look at things at all after the first few times, they use motor reflexes and muscle memories.
Most computer users can type the keys of long held passwords without remembering what they are by allowing their fingers to do the work. Most can shut down the computer by doing a precisely measured flick of the mouse without looking at the destination. Even if their screen is turned off on them, most can get pretty close.
Good user interface design should be designed around these principles. Lots of labels and instruction for those who have never used it before, because they will be reading everything, and proper placement of GUI elements to allow easy muscle memorization.
The pictures or lack thereof really don't have anything to do with the quality of use, or learning how to efficiently use the interface once you understand it. If a ribbon is going to be easier to locate blind, time and time again, then it's an improvement. If it's going to be harder to locate blind, it's a step backwards.
Having spent some time in the field wearing various uniforms, I have to say, the idea of wearing a bunch of plastic and metal fibers in the field doesn't sound very appealing. It sounds like a recipe for heat exhaustion.
Are other energy sources really so inconvenient that this is justifiable?
Why is 'a small number of linux users' a reason for going with this? What is wrong with using a format that is available everywhere (including portable players!) as a matter of course?
Because Bill came by with a wad of cash. Like Steve says, the market has spoken.
The man is clearly a liar.
Standing in the street for a few hours waving a sign isn't useful or effective. It's ineffectual bitching and moaning.
If you want a non-violent means of action, try quiting your job, not paying your taxes, not going shopping anymore and volunteering your time helping organize other people to successfully live and do the same. Not for an hour, not for a day, but indefinitely until everything comes crashing down and the old power structures are defunct.
Remember how funny and strange it sounded that in the midst of disaster, George begged everyone to a)keep working and b)go shopping?
Well, that's the answer. Trace the paths by which power flows from the group to the leader, and turn off the supply.
Hiser acknowledged that ODF supporters are angry with the foundation because of its change of heart.
Indeed, Andrew Updegrove, a partner at Boston-based law firm Gesmer Updegrove LLP and a vocal supporter of ODF, criticized the OpenDocument Foundation in an e-mail on Monday.
"It's a shame," he wrote, "that a group that was expressly formed for the purpose of supporting ODF is now actively working against the standard -- especially given the fact that its tax exemption is based upon supporting that same standard."
What I want to know is, why is this not fraudulent? Sounds like someone forming a non-profit-anti-smoking group, accepting donations and not paying taxes, then speaking on behalf of cigarette companies with the funds collected. Will this organization not at the least be forced to dissolve? What happens to their legal status?
That's a possibility. It's another possibility that those companies who are chained to MS fucked up formats are going to bear ever increasing costs trying to deal with vast amounts of complexity that do not generate any return, but are obligatory for legal reasons, while their competitors who are not burdened with this defeat them in the marketplace by virtue of their not having this lead weight around their neck.
I'm inclined to think it's the latter, personally. It just takes a while.
Personally, I would say anyone who relies on unstructured interactions by users to manage their business might save a little money upfront, but when it comes time to grow to something that places greater demands on the organizational framework, their decision will bite them on the ass hard enough to tank their business.
Creating a sea of unstructured data and calling it your IT infrastructure is a good way to end up with a chaotic mess. In my opinion.
Personally, I would say a "Peaceful Protest" just isn't good enough. Stand up and fight or be counted among your countrymen by those foreigners who have been wronged.
The way world politics are going, you Americans might want to start another violent revolution before you find that having millions of otherwise innocent foreign born people locked in FEMA Concentration Camps is not much different from having an army on your soil, and there are a lot of angry and wronged nations that will help them when the whole thing blows sky high.
Just a thought.
Analogue recordings leave room for the possibility that general improvements in physical sciences my result in our being able to recover greater nuances in the sound in the future than we can now.
Digital recordings do not allow for this possibility at all
At the very least, original recordings ought to be analogue for this reason.
Oddly enough, buying something you don't like isn't a good reason to attack someone.
Quite the contrary. When corporations own governments, and democracies are shams, your economic spending becomes your only vote that has weight and consequence. When you buy something, you vote for that corporation.
Spending is an act of participatory involvement in which you empower that corporation, regardless of whether you want to think of it that way or not. This is the foundation of soft enforcement in "international law", and the basis of economic sanctions.
Thus, you can attack corporations by attacking their customers, which is the foundation of such efforts as throwing paint on the coats of people who buy fur coats.
If you don't like my politics, you can fuck off.
Not entirely sure what you mean by co-opting other peoples' code. That's BS.
It's called dual-licensing, and in the case of Qt it's a two-way process. Open source projects get a hell of a lot out of Qt that would take them years to write themselves as well as significant resources, and using Qt gives Trolltech a lot of publicity and testing.
Well, in the examples I gave, there was ProjectMayo, which started off as a dual licensed open source effort to create MP4 compression for the people. Then it got closed before a release, and turned into DivX. People who worked on it were pissed. Thus Xvid was created, with a name that implied opposition to DivX, and the people who set up the scheme made a fortune putting DivX on devices like the DVD player behind me. There were also efforts to incorporate video support into the Ogg project through Theora and have distance from intellectual property difficulties with the MPEG group and Microsoft, but they never really made any ground because DivX got the corporate seal of approval and filled the gap.
Then there's MySQL, which was made a platform on the basis of open source good will, and is now making quiet efforts to cut off enterprise level tools from non-paying customers. Which is a real boon to those who those who all these years thought they were working towards the lofty goal of enterprise quality tools free for all.
That's what I mean by co-opting other peoples code.
Trolltech engages in dual-licensing shenanigans and co-opts ownership of other peoples code to place in closed source devices in the same letter-not-the-law tradition as MySQL and ProjectMayo.
They can go to hell.