Matt is not, never has been, indispensible for the FreeBSD project. He drifted into the project primarily because he was a BSD guru back in his UCB days and wanted to get his hands wet again. Apparently he was a bit irritating about "the BSD way" and stuff too, but probably the only real loss is that link back to the "real" BSD, back when it was being written by a bunch of the most brilliant young college students in the world. FreeBSD itself will go on much as it always has, warts and all.
(Sorry, you had to be around 15 years ago to get the joke... back when the typical Amiga developer was outfitted with a full suite of Matt's software, all of whose name started with a "D" for "Dillon", e.g. "DUUCP" or "DCRON" or "DICE").
Back in "the day", Matt never was one for doing much commenting:-).
(Just remembering chewing through some code in his editor once, and whining to Matt about the fact that there was maybe five comments in a 500 line "C" source file, his response was something along the lines of "it's too obvious to need comments"... uhm, okay:-).
Matt can definitely be abrasive in the face of idiocy. That's also why I'd have him on my team in a New York minute. I'm not interested in working with idiots, and I'm not interested in somebody massaging my widdle ego when I'm wrong. If I'm being an idiot, I want to know it. Too bad too many FreeBSD developers would rather have overinflated egos than good software.
Whenever you complain about some idiocy done by some member of the FreeBSD team, and offer a patch to fix it, they jump all over you like you're some kind of pariah. They don't want a patch unless you are willing to worship at their feet and praise their genius or something, I guess. I've submitted a couple of (very small) patches in the past, and felt like I was arguing with a brick wall at times when trying to explain to a particular developer that the way he was doing something was not the way the SCSI specs read and broke much existing Unix software that would be nice to port to FreeBSD. Matt has a similarly low threshhold for idiocy, and it doesn't surprise me that it comes out sometimes. But he was *RIGHT* most of the time. I mean, the man might be arrogant, and he might be opinionated, but he has a *right* to be that way -- all you have to do is look back at his history to see that. At one time virtually every piece of software I used on my Amiga was written by Matt Dillon!
If Matt reads this message, I hope he moves over into Linux Land. We're more tolerant of abrasive, opinionated people there -- as long as they're right.
I've been acquainted with Matt Dillon's work for over 15 years now. We're talking about someone who wrote a "C" compiler and library in a week once "just to prove he could do it", for cryin' out loud! Frankly, one Matt Dillon is worth four or five of the rest of the BSD development team. I don't care how arrogant or opinionated he is, I'd hire him for my team in a second -- I've worked with arrogant, opinionated people before (hmm, I've also looked in the mirror before:-), and I don't have the slightest bit of problem with them as long as they're *RIGHT*. Just give'em the module definition, ask'em to produce documentation on what they're going to do, and then once that's done, turn them loose to do it. It works. Been there, done that.
On the other hand, Matt is not, and never has been, indispensible to the FreeBSD project. His biggest contribution probably has been cultural more than anything else -- he was working at UCB back in the "real" BSD days and knows how "it spozed to be". I suspect that doesn't make him popular with some of the (relative) newbies who want to add lots of features and stuff -- Matt's code has always been stripped down, clean, and fast as hell (if not always the most elegant or user-friendly code in the world). If the FreeBSD folks got tired of him carping about "the BSD Way", their loss... but it's not going to cripple FreeBSD by any means.
You're correct that a Soyuz cannot carry 7 crew members (it can only carry three). You're correct that a Soyuz cannot carry payloads (but that's why big dumb rockets were created, no?). On the other hand, that simplicity is also why it is far more reliable than a Shuttle could ever be.
If we want to do something useful, we should investigate a larger "disposable" rocket with an upsized version of the Apollo capsule. The Shuttle is far too complex and fragile to be reliable. Feinman's estimate of one catastrophe per 100 launches still stands.
For the crime of testifying before Congress that NASA was skimping on safety, she was fired.
Here is what she has to say about the situation (forwarded from Politech):
Two years ago, I was a highly decorated NASA engineer. I was awarded their highest medal, for Exceptional Achievement -- something that is usually reserved for senior managers -- because of my expertise.
I was a safety engineer.
I was removed from my GS-13 position, as an internationally-recognized authority on hypergolic propellants and explosives, and forced off the Kennedy Space Center. At gunpoint.
Their excuse was that I had "abused government equipment." Because I sent a friend an e-mail joke.
The reality was that I wouldn't play their "political ball."
I F-ING WARNED THEM.
I told them that the technicians and engineers were overworked. I told them that there were too many managers and too many meetings and "dog-and-pony" shows. I told them that their senior "face time" play games, while they spent all their time plotting how to give each other pay raises, and left the guys on the floor to struggle day to day with obsolete and overpriced and unqualified equipment, was going to result in another Challenger.
I was there for Challenger.
I saw the same exact conditions happening again. Overpaid, lazy, irresponsible managers concerned solely with their climbing up their ladders.
I told them they were skimping on inspections. I told them that the ground crews were asleep on their feet from exhaustion. I made as much noise as I knew how to make about the top-heavy bureaucracy sitting around in their fancy panelled offices, giving whorish press interviews in their smugness, while they did not have a clue what was going on in the real world where I was working.
They fired me. They fired a GS-13 civil servant, with an Exceptional Service medal and ten dozen commendations. For sending an e-mail joke.
In reality, for objecting to political fat-cats sitting on their fat rear ends and failing to do their jobs.
Like Challenger, those who are most guilty are the ones who will attempt to make the most political capital out of it. But the blame for Columbia lies entirely and totally with the NASA administrators. They should all be investigated for their criminal negligence. They should all serve time in jail.
I warned them. They did their best to destroy me, because I warned them.
It's too bad that innocent astronauts paid with their lives for NASA managers greed and political ass-kissing.
But I am not surprised.
Two years ago, I warned them.
Dian Hardison
Cocoa, FL 32927
Note: Her NASA biography is still online at a NASA site.
First of all: Columbia was the oldest shuttle, but it actually wasn't the one with the most landing stresses on it. It had 17 prior landings, there are other shuttles that have done 20 landings. Secondly, the Columbia was more heavily built than the other Shuttles. Data from the Columbia's construction was used to reduce the weight of the other shuttles. Finally, Columbia had just been refurbished back in '99 or so, and its airframe was extensively inspected at that time, and this was only its second flight after it was refurbished.
While it is possible that there was an airframe failure, it looks rather unlikely given these facts. Airframes are one of the things we know a lot about, and 17 landings, even as violent as Shuttle landings are, just aren't enough to fatigue an airframe in a way that would make the plane break up.
The factories that make DVD's tend to be in less developed countries like Malaysia. It's more than likely that there's been more pressings done "after hour" than are accounted for in the "offical" totals. It wouldn't surprise me if the biggest DVD pirates were the actual disk pressing plants that make the "official" disks during the day. Spread enough money around, and it's easy to corrupt people who are making $5 a day.
Which of course shows the idiocy of going for the lowest wage -- nobody is going to risk a $50,000/yr job to pirate DVD's, but risking a $5 a day job to pirate DVD's when someone is about to pay you $50,000 is a different tale. It's the same reason why Mexican cops are corrupt and American cops (usually) aren't -- Mexican cops aren't paid a living wage, thus most are in the pay of the drug cartels. Low wages will always mean corruption, and the MPAA members, by siting their DVD-pressing facilities in low-wage nations, have insured that they will have a massive piracy problem.
They are legal to own in Arizona, though you better have a good reason for possessing them if a cop finds them on you. The classification of lockpicks as "burglar tools" happens only if the State can prove intent to use them in a burglary, and typically only happens as an additional charge thrown at you if they're discovered on your person if caught during or after the commission of a burglary.
See Arizona Revised Statute 13-1505 A. Possession of burglary tools; classification, which states, in part, "...intending to use or permit the use of such an item in the commission of a burglary."
No use in a burglary = no crime, under the Arizona burglary tools law. Check your own state laws for what's legal or not in your own state.
So under the "burglary tools" theory, we'd have to show that Jon intended to use DeCSS to commit burglary (steal DVD content), or intended to allow others to use DeCSS to commit burglary (steal DVD content). Just as it is legal for you to unlock your own car with lockpicks, under the "lockpick" theory it would be legal for you to unlock your own DVD (but nobody else's) with lockpicks. That is why it is so important that the Norwegian prosecutor forgot to find anybody who'd used DeCSS to steal DVD content. Proving intent was half the case, and the prosecution blew it, though apparently Norway allows an appeal where the prosecution will be able to introduce facts regarding intent.
The results of the Innocence Project show that the American criminal justice system is a travesty. Only a few people wealthy enough to finance their own defense get a fair trial. The rest basically get railroaded into jail. Granted, most of them are scumbags who actually DID do the crime of which they were convicted... but that does not change the fact that "fair trial" is an oxymoron to most who encounter the criminal justice system. According to their statistics, police misconduct occurs in more than half of convictions of innocent people. Another big contributor is bad defense lawyering, which occurs in close to 1/3rd of convictions of innocent people. Furthermore, the Illinois death penalty statistics suggest that at least half of the people convicted of death-penalty-worthy crimes should not have been convicted (more people were exonerated and released than executed).
What this basically suggests is that the United States is not the bastion of freedom that is often held up to the world. If you piss off a policeman, he can drop a baggy in your car and say "Oh look, what's this?" and bust you for drug possession even if you've never done anything stronger than aspirin. The only difference between the United States and, say, Mexico, is that our cops generally do believe they work for the people rather than for, say, drug traffickers, so they tend to use their mojo on scumbags who, in their opinion, need to be in jail. But that doesn't make the system any fairer if a cop just doesn't like the way you look (e.g., you're a black man driving alone in a ritzy white neighborhood and thus guilty of driving while black) and concocts some lie to justify stopping you ("he was weaving in and out of traffic and slowing suspiciously in front of houses as if scoping them out for a robbery").
It is acceptable and legal for advertising claims to be inflated via "puffery". The test used by the FTC and the courts to detirmine whether fraud has occurred is a simple one: Would you have purchased the product if you'd known that the advertising claim was inflated?
So answer the question: Would you have still used Google if you'd known that Google's page ranking was mostly objective, but wasn't ALWAYS objective?
If you answer "Well, yes, because it gives me better results", BINGO! No fraud. Google could tell you "Our results are produced by 5,000 hamsters madly churning their hamster wheels in the basement of the Lawrence Livermore Labs" and if that had no effect upon whether the mythical "reasonable person" would have bought their product or not, there's no fraud involved. Even though, as far as I know, no hamsters were harnessed to wheels for the production of Google:-).
Puffery: advertising claims that are not of material importance. For example, the box of Lever 2000 soap that I have sitting nearby says "perfect for all of your 2000 parts" on it. Does that mean that they literally counted 2,000 body parts and ascertained that it was perfect for each of them? Of course not! This is harmless puffery. The mythical "reasonable buyer" buys the soap because he likes its smell or its shape or whatever, not because of the advertising slogan, and would buy the soap even if he knew that the company had NOT in fact counted exactly 2000 parts of the body that the soap was good for.
Where fraud comes in is when false claims are used to deceive someone into buying a product. For example, if the claim on that soap was "Cures Athlete's Foot" and you have athlete's foot, but it doesn't really cure athlete's foot, you would have been defrauded because you relied on the stated claim as a material part of your purchasing decision. But harmless puffery like "Our results are better because of our patented PageRank(tm) algorithm!" are no more fraud than "perfect for all of your 2000 parts!" on this box of Lever 2000 soap. You use Google because it works better, not because of harmless puffery that makes no material difference in your decision to use it or not.
So when did you sign a contract with Google that promised that you'd get *ONLY* the unbiased results of its secrete PageRank formula? Advertisers have the right to engage in "puffery" -- mild exaggeration of their product that is not of material consequence when it comes to the purchasing decision. The standard used for fraud claims is this: "Would you have purchased the product if you had known beforehand that the claim was inflated?". So tell me -- if you'd known that Google didn't *ALWAYS* rank pages using PageRank, would you have ceased using Google?
If the mythical "reasonable user" would have used and continued using Google even if he had known that an advertising claim was inflated via "puffery", we have over a hundred years of jurisprudence that says that there is no fraud claim here. Fraud is when someone tricks you into buying a product that you would not otherwise have bought. But nobody tricked you into using Google. You use Google because it works better, not because Google engaged in some harmless puffery about how they arrived at their better results.
Enlighten me, please. You're saying that since the opinion of a page's value was arrived at with the help of a mechanical tabulation device, it is somehow less worthy of protection under the 1st Amendment? As far as I know, the 1st Amendment doesn't have any clause that says "Oh, when you use a mechanical tabulation device to devise an opinion, you must accept the opinion produced by said device." Google, as with any other practitioner of free speech, has the right to decide that they don't agree with what their mechanical algorithm produce. They have a right to express any opinion they like, regardless of what the "PageRank" algorithm produces. If they want to say "Our opinion of these SearchKing pages is that they have a ranking of 0, they're worthless", that's their right -- they don't have to accept what the formal "PageRank" algorithm produces. Now, if there was a contractual agreement somewhere that said "All pages will have a ranking solely produced by the PageRank algorithm", you could go after them for breach of contract... but as far as I know nobody has signed such a contract with Google. (An unsigned statement on their web site is *NOT* a contract).
Not to mention the whole issue of property rights. The ranking (and the algorithm for producing it) is property of Google. It seems to me that you are saying that Google can't do with their property whatever they please. Feh. It is true that "your right to throw your fist stops at the tip of my nose", but Google didn't throw any fists -- they just changed some numbers displayed on their own web site, available only if you explicitly asked Google for those numbers. This makes them no different than any other publisher of information.
The problem with luddites is that they did not
have any knowledge of the oil industry. Technologies such as directional drilling and steam injection have allowed us to extract far more oil from existing deposits than was possible with older technologies that relied on us waiting for the oil to seep into a verticle bore where we could grab it.
On the other hand, we have exhausted what can be done with those technologies. We've steamed pretty much all the oil out of the older oilfields we've applied the new techniques to. Those fields are basically exhausted. There is no "magic bullet" that will allow us to extract more oil out of those fields, because the oil just ain't there anymore.
I could go dig up some facts about the total amount of oil extracted from the continental U.S. since the beginning of the oil industry, and how few years that would have lasted at our current oil consumption levels, and how our oil consumption levels continue going up, but this thread is dead by now so...
I have some rationale for my own particular estimates, but freely admit that they're seat-of-pants, based upon my knowledge of oil extraction technologies such as directional drilling and deep sea exploration. I think the dramatic plummeting of U.S. oil production over the past twenty years should be enough information, though. All the technology in the world could not keep those oil fields producing. What that basically says is that an exploited oil field has a life of perhaps 50 years before its output starts declining dramatically. Add in the fact that the pace of new oilfield discovery has slackened considerably over the past 15 years, and you see an alarming trend developing.
I don't think it's accidental that the major automakers are exploring alternative technologies in a major way. They can see the writing on the wall too. Luckily oil fields don't just "stop" producing. They slowly dribble out. This will give time to find alternative sources of energy. There will probably be some disruption of economic life in the meantime though.
BTW, Montana or Northern Idaho are lousy places to wait out the Oil Wars. Someplace rural in the Southeast is probably preferable -- long growing season, plentiful rainfall, does not get inordinantly cold at night. The only downside is all the rednecks. Better rednecks than skinheads tho, in my opinion.
South Korea has at least one CANDU reactor. CANDU reactors can quite readily produce weapons-grade plutonium via irradiation of depleted uranium, just as easily as the graphite-moderated reactors that the North Koreans use. CANDU reactors can have fuel rods inserted and extracted while they are operating, so it would be child's play to do the switch.
Not to mention that South Korea is the world's #1 builder of ships, the #5 builder of automobiles, the #3 builder of computer chips, the... well, you get the gist. They are a modern technological nation. They could build an atomic bomb if they had the desire to do so without any help from anybody at all, just as India did under much the same circumstances (using a CANDU reactor much like the ones that South Korea owns, by the way). But they don't have the incentive to do so, because the United States has a few sacrificial goat troops stationed on South Korean soil -- thus insuring that if North Korea tosses nukes at South Korea, North Korea will get swiftly fried by massive U.S. retaliation.
Google should not have the right to decide what it "doesn't like"
Why not? It's a free country. Google is a private business. They have a right to their opinions, just like anybody else. Or are you saying that for some reason Google doesn't have the same right to call a scumbag a scumbag that I have? What rationale do you have for that statement?
Sounds to me like you don't like freedom of speech and freedom of opinion. That's a dangerous attitude, in my book.
The U-235 light water reactor is by no means the only possible nuclear reactor. For example, Canada is using unenriched uranium ore (primarily U-238 with a trace of U-235) in their CANDU heavy water reactor. Uranium ore is one of the more common substances on Earth -- both North Korea and Iraq have deposits of uranium ore, for example, which is why they both worry us so much (South Korea, BTW, does *NOT* have deposits of uranium ore, which is why we don't worry about Canada selling them CANDU reactors even though CANDU reactors are perfectly suited for producing large quantities of weapons grade Pu-239 in a short time, that was, of course, why the CANDU style heavy water reactor was created in the first place for the Manhattan Project).
Then there's a wide variety of other radioactive substances that can be burned in reactors. For example, breeder reactors can actually breed plutonium from the very common U-238 (U-238 is one of the most common elements in the Earth's crust), creating an almost infinite supply of fuel. Military breeder reactors work fine for producing lots of plutonium for atomic bombs. Research on commercial breeder reactors (basically the military reactors tied to turbines to power electric generators) was stopped by worries about arms proliferation (it is much easier to seperate Pu-239 from U-238 than it is to seperate U-235 from U-235 in raw uranium ore, thus makes it easier to get enough fissile material to crete atomic bombs), but could be re-started pretty swiftly if necessary. Which would not be for 50 or 100 years, as you mention.
Regarding 100 and 400 years of oil, my own best estimates are somewhat lower than that. My estimates are that we will experience shortages within 20 to 25 years, and that within fifty years we will have basically exhausted all economically accessible oil resources (i.e., there will be oil out there, but it will take more energy to extract it than can be obtained by burning it). However, hopefully by that time the current taboo regarding nuclear power will have eased, and we will be able to replace the lost petrochemical resources with synthetic hydrocarbons or other such creations. (Don't laugh, we use petroleum as feedstock for chemical plants because it's cheap, available, and readily "cracked", but there are certainly other feedstocks that could be "cracked" into various petrochemicals if necessary, including coal, for that matter -- after all, both the Nazis and the South Africans did it).
I'll just point out that publically-chartered corporations are collectivist systems, whereby a large number of owners appoint a small number of board members to oversee their interests. It seems that you are engaged in more than a little hypocricy to blast one collectivist system without blasting the other. As Enron shows, the fact that it's called a "corporation" rather than a "labor contractor" or "union" does not render it immune to corruption -- any organization where a few people are selected to defend the interests of the many tends to turn into a system where those few people defend their own interests, and to [bleep] with the many.
I don't get it. What's the difference between a union and a labor contractor? Isn't a union just an employee-owned labor contractor?
Maybe instead of calling it a "union", we should call it an "employee-owned labor contractor" to deal with all that right-wing anti-union propoganda that's been going around for the past 100 years. After all, in the areas where unions are strong (like the construction trades) that's basically what a union is -- an employee-owned labor contractor, where employers drop by the union hall and say "I need 50 bricklayers for a commercial building at 5th and Dunlap" and voila. The workers are trained by the union through an apprenticeship program, and often the worker's pensions and benefits are administered by the union in this kind of setup, making it seem even more like an employee-owned labor contract organization.
So someone correct me if I'm wrong -- can we just call it an "employee-owned labor contractor" and get around that whole "union label" thing ("unions are for blue-collar workers or incompetents") that keeps unions out of the IT industry?
Regarding outsourcing IT to India -- that's already being done, both via the H1B program and directly. Don't believe that refusing to join a union (err, "employee-owned labor contractor") will preserve your job. It won't. Your employer right now, as you read this message, is investigating outsourcing your job to India. You can bank on it, unless you happen to be your own boss.
According to the benefits page: new Permanent and Term employees with no prior Federal service are covered by the Federal Employees' Retirement System (FERS). FERS is a three tiered system which includes:
A Federal pension
The Thrift Savings Plan (TSP) which provides employees with a pre-tax savings plan similar to a 401(K); and
Coverage under the Social Security system.
You're saying that the USGS is lying? Well, not according to the Office of Personnel Management's Retirement page. Granted, the pension component (the Basic Benefit Plan is pretty meagre -- eg., if your salary was $60,000 per year, and you'd worked for the government for 10 years, you'd get $6,000 per year pension -- but hey, that's still better than private enterprise, and you'd still qualify for social security and have the TSP too, so it's better than a $0 per year pension (what you get from private enterprise nowdays).
Slashdot Mirror
Damn, I'm glad I never got into the FreeBSD community!
-E
-E
(Sorry, you had to be around 15 years ago to get the joke... back when the typical Amiga developer was outfitted with a full suite of Matt's software, all of whose name started with a "D" for "Dillon", e.g. "DUUCP" or "DCRON" or "DICE").
(Just remembering chewing through some code in his editor once, and whining to Matt about the fact that there was maybe five comments in a 500 line "C" source file, his response was something along the lines of "it's too obvious to need comments"... uhm, okay :-).
-E
Matt can definitely be abrasive in the face of idiocy. That's also why I'd have him on my team in a New York minute. I'm not interested in working with idiots, and I'm not interested in somebody massaging my widdle ego when I'm wrong. If I'm being an idiot, I want to know it. Too bad too many FreeBSD developers would rather have overinflated egos than good software.
-E
If Matt reads this message, I hope he moves over into Linux Land. We're more tolerant of abrasive, opinionated people there -- as long as they're right.
-E
On the other hand, Matt is not, and never has been, indispensible to the FreeBSD project. His biggest contribution probably has been cultural more than anything else -- he was working at UCB back in the "real" BSD days and knows how "it spozed to be". I suspect that doesn't make him popular with some of the (relative) newbies who want to add lots of features and stuff -- Matt's code has always been stripped down, clean, and fast as hell (if not always the most elegant or user-friendly code in the world). If the FreeBSD folks got tired of him carping about "the BSD Way", their loss... but it's not going to cripple FreeBSD by any means.
-E
If we want to do something useful, we should investigate a larger "disposable" rocket with an upsized version of the Apollo capsule. The Shuttle is far too complex and fragile to be reliable. Feinman's estimate of one catastrophe per 100 launches still stands.
Two years ago, I was a highly decorated NASA engineer. I was awarded their highest medal, for Exceptional Achievement -- something that is usually reserved for senior managers -- because of my expertise.
I was a safety engineer.
I was removed from my GS-13 position, as an internationally-recognized authority on hypergolic propellants and explosives, and forced off the Kennedy Space Center. At gunpoint.
Their excuse was that I had "abused government equipment." Because I sent a friend an e-mail joke.
The reality was that I wouldn't play their "political ball."
I F-ING WARNED THEM.
I told them that the technicians and engineers were overworked. I told them that there were too many managers and too many meetings and "dog-and-pony" shows. I told them that their senior "face time" play games, while they spent all their time plotting how to give each other pay raises, and left the guys on the floor to struggle day to day with obsolete and overpriced and unqualified equipment, was going to result in another Challenger.
I was there for Challenger.
I saw the same exact conditions happening again. Overpaid, lazy, irresponsible managers concerned solely with their climbing up their ladders.
I told them they were skimping on inspections. I told them that the ground crews were asleep on their feet from exhaustion. I made as much noise as I knew how to make about the top-heavy bureaucracy sitting around in their fancy panelled offices, giving whorish press interviews in their smugness, while they did not have a clue what was going on in the real world where I was working.
They fired me. They fired a GS-13 civil servant, with an Exceptional Service medal and ten dozen commendations. For sending an e-mail joke.
In reality, for objecting to political fat-cats sitting on their fat rear ends and failing to do their jobs.
Like Challenger, those who are most guilty are the ones who will attempt to make the most political capital out of it. But the blame for Columbia lies entirely and totally with the NASA administrators. They should all be investigated for their criminal negligence. They should all serve time in jail.
I warned them. They did their best to destroy me, because I warned them.
It's too bad that innocent astronauts paid with their lives for NASA managers greed and political ass-kissing.
But I am not surprised.
Two years ago, I warned them.
Dian Hardison
Cocoa, FL 32927
Note: Her NASA biography is still online at a NASA site.
While it is possible that there was an airframe failure, it looks rather unlikely given these facts. Airframes are one of the things we know a lot about, and 17 landings, even as violent as Shuttle landings are, just aren't enough to fatigue an airframe in a way that would make the plane break up.
Which of course shows the idiocy of going for the lowest wage -- nobody is going to risk a $50,000/yr job to pirate DVD's, but risking a $5 a day job to pirate DVD's when someone is about to pay you $50,000 is a different tale. It's the same reason why Mexican cops are corrupt and American cops (usually) aren't -- Mexican cops aren't paid a living wage, thus most are in the pay of the drug cartels. Low wages will always mean corruption, and the MPAA members, by siting their DVD-pressing facilities in low-wage nations, have insured that they will have a massive piracy problem.
-E
No use in a burglary = no crime, under the Arizona burglary tools law. Check your own state laws for what's legal or not in your own state.
So under the "burglary tools" theory, we'd have to show that Jon intended to use DeCSS to commit burglary (steal DVD content), or intended to allow others to use DeCSS to commit burglary (steal DVD content). Just as it is legal for you to unlock your own car with lockpicks, under the "lockpick" theory it would be legal for you to unlock your own DVD (but nobody else's) with lockpicks. That is why it is so important that the Norwegian prosecutor forgot to find anybody who'd used DeCSS to steal DVD content. Proving intent was half the case, and the prosecution blew it, though apparently Norway allows an appeal where the prosecution will be able to introduce facts regarding intent.
-E
What this basically suggests is that the United States is not the bastion of freedom that is often held up to the world. If you piss off a policeman, he can drop a baggy in your car and say "Oh look, what's this?" and bust you for drug possession even if you've never done anything stronger than aspirin. The only difference between the United States and, say, Mexico, is that our cops generally do believe they work for the people rather than for, say, drug traffickers, so they tend to use their mojo on scumbags who, in their opinion, need to be in jail. But that doesn't make the system any fairer if a cop just doesn't like the way you look (e.g., you're a black man driving alone in a ritzy white neighborhood and thus guilty of driving while black) and concocts some lie to justify stopping you ("he was weaving in and out of traffic and slowing suspiciously in front of houses as if scoping them out for a robbery").
So answer the question: Would you have still used Google if you'd known that Google's page ranking was mostly objective, but wasn't ALWAYS objective?
If you answer "Well, yes, because it gives me better results", BINGO! No fraud. Google could tell you "Our results are produced by 5,000 hamsters madly churning their hamster wheels in the basement of the Lawrence Livermore Labs" and if that had no effect upon whether the mythical "reasonable person" would have bought their product or not, there's no fraud involved. Even though, as far as I know, no hamsters were harnessed to wheels for the production of Google :-).
-E
Where fraud comes in is when false claims are used to deceive someone into buying a product. For example, if the claim on that soap was "Cures Athlete's Foot" and you have athlete's foot, but it doesn't really cure athlete's foot, you would have been defrauded because you relied on the stated claim as a material part of your purchasing decision. But harmless puffery like "Our results are better because of our patented PageRank(tm) algorithm!" are no more fraud than "perfect for all of your 2000 parts!" on this box of Lever 2000 soap. You use Google because it works better, not because of harmless puffery that makes no material difference in your decision to use it or not.
-E
If the mythical "reasonable user" would have used and continued using Google even if he had known that an advertising claim was inflated via "puffery", we have over a hundred years of jurisprudence that says that there is no fraud claim here. Fraud is when someone tricks you into buying a product that you would not otherwise have bought. But nobody tricked you into using Google. You use Google because it works better, not because Google engaged in some harmless puffery about how they arrived at their better results.
-E
Not to mention the whole issue of property rights. The ranking (and the algorithm for producing it) is property of Google. It seems to me that you are saying that Google can't do with their property whatever they please. Feh. It is true that "your right to throw your fist stops at the tip of my nose", but Google didn't throw any fists -- they just changed some numbers displayed on their own web site, available only if you explicitly asked Google for those numbers. This makes them no different than any other publisher of information.
-E
On the other hand, we have exhausted what can be done with those technologies. We've steamed pretty much all the oil out of the older oilfields we've applied the new techniques to. Those fields are basically exhausted. There is no "magic bullet" that will allow us to extract more oil out of those fields, because the oil just ain't there anymore.
I could go dig up some facts about the total amount of oil extracted from the continental U.S. since the beginning of the oil industry, and how few years that would have lasted at our current oil consumption levels, and how our oil consumption levels continue going up, but this thread is dead by now so ...
I don't think it's accidental that the major automakers are exploring alternative technologies in a major way. They can see the writing on the wall too. Luckily oil fields don't just "stop" producing. They slowly dribble out. This will give time to find alternative sources of energy. There will probably be some disruption of economic life in the meantime though.
BTW, Montana or Northern Idaho are lousy places to wait out the Oil Wars. Someplace rural in the Southeast is probably preferable -- long growing season, plentiful rainfall, does not get inordinantly cold at night. The only downside is all the rednecks. Better rednecks than skinheads tho, in my opinion.
-E
Not to mention that South Korea is the world's #1 builder of ships, the #5 builder of automobiles, the #3 builder of computer chips, the ... well, you get the gist. They are a modern technological nation. They could build an atomic bomb if they had the desire to do so without any help from anybody at all, just as India did under much the same circumstances (using a CANDU reactor much like the ones that South Korea owns, by the way). But they don't have the incentive to do so, because the United States has a few sacrificial goat troops stationed on South Korean soil -- thus insuring that if North Korea tosses nukes at South Korea, North Korea will get swiftly fried by massive U.S. retaliation.
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Why not? It's a free country. Google is a private business. They have a right to their opinions, just like anybody else. Or are you saying that for some reason Google doesn't have the same right to call a scumbag a scumbag that I have? What rationale do you have for that statement?
Sounds to me like you don't like freedom of speech and freedom of opinion. That's a dangerous attitude, in my book.
-E
Then there's a wide variety of other radioactive substances that can be burned in reactors. For example, breeder reactors can actually breed plutonium from the very common U-238 (U-238 is one of the most common elements in the Earth's crust), creating an almost infinite supply of fuel. Military breeder reactors work fine for producing lots of plutonium for atomic bombs. Research on commercial breeder reactors (basically the military reactors tied to turbines to power electric generators) was stopped by worries about arms proliferation (it is much easier to seperate Pu-239 from U-238 than it is to seperate U-235 from U-235 in raw uranium ore, thus makes it easier to get enough fissile material to crete atomic bombs), but could be re-started pretty swiftly if necessary. Which would not be for 50 or 100 years, as you mention.
Regarding 100 and 400 years of oil, my own best estimates are somewhat lower than that. My estimates are that we will experience shortages within 20 to 25 years, and that within fifty years we will have basically exhausted all economically accessible oil resources (i.e., there will be oil out there, but it will take more energy to extract it than can be obtained by burning it). However, hopefully by that time the current taboo regarding nuclear power will have eased, and we will be able to replace the lost petrochemical resources with synthetic hydrocarbons or other such creations. (Don't laugh, we use petroleum as feedstock for chemical plants because it's cheap, available, and readily "cracked", but there are certainly other feedstocks that could be "cracked" into various petrochemicals if necessary, including coal, for that matter -- after all, both the Nazis and the South Africans did it).
I'll just point out that publically-chartered corporations are collectivist systems, whereby a large number of owners appoint a small number of board members to oversee their interests. It seems that you are engaged in more than a little hypocricy to blast one collectivist system without blasting the other. As Enron shows, the fact that it's called a "corporation" rather than a "labor contractor" or "union" does not render it immune to corruption -- any organization where a few people are selected to defend the interests of the many tends to turn into a system where those few people defend their own interests, and to [bleep] with the many.
Maybe instead of calling it a "union", we should call it an "employee-owned labor contractor" to deal with all that right-wing anti-union propoganda that's been going around for the past 100 years. After all, in the areas where unions are strong (like the construction trades) that's basically what a union is -- an employee-owned labor contractor, where employers drop by the union hall and say "I need 50 bricklayers for a commercial building at 5th and Dunlap" and voila. The workers are trained by the union through an apprenticeship program, and often the worker's pensions and benefits are administered by the union in this kind of setup, making it seem even more like an employee-owned labor contract organization.
So someone correct me if I'm wrong -- can we just call it an "employee-owned labor contractor" and get around that whole "union label" thing ("unions are for blue-collar workers or incompetents") that keeps unions out of the IT industry?
Regarding outsourcing IT to India -- that's already being done, both via the H1B program and directly. Don't believe that refusing to join a union (err, "employee-owned labor contractor") will preserve your job. It won't. Your employer right now, as you read this message, is investigating outsourcing your job to India. You can bank on it, unless you happen to be your own boss.
- A Federal pension
- The Thrift Savings Plan (TSP) which provides employees with a pre-tax savings plan similar to a 401(K); and
- Coverage under the Social Security system.
You're saying that the USGS is lying? Well, not according to the Office of Personnel Management's Retirement page. Granted, the pension component (the Basic Benefit Plan is pretty meagre -- eg., if your salary was $60,000 per year, and you'd worked for the government for 10 years, you'd get $6,000 per year pension -- but hey, that's still better than private enterprise, and you'd still qualify for social security and have the TSP too, so it's better than a $0 per year pension (what you get from private enterprise nowdays).