Publishers wish they had that choice. No, the choice is, will they release it, or will they be left behind when someone else releases it, legally or not? The law can't stop piracy. DRM is just fake security, it can't stop piracy either. Nothing can stop piracy.
Nor should we want piracy stopped. Sharing of knowledge is crucial to our advancement. It is these rent seeking parasites who are the real criminals. Their anti-social hostage taking of knowledge that they did not help create could result in us not discovering something crucial in time to act on it. I'm not talking about mere cures for diseases, I'm talking about knowledge that could save civilization. What if, unknown to us, a big asteroid is headed on a collision course with Earth, and we would have learned of it in time if some damned publisher hadn't locked the knowledge away? And that's only one of the most obvious dangers. More subtle dangers abound, anything from climate change to large scale chemical imbalances, atmospheric and magnetic changes that let radiation through.
Bad enough that we have propagandists of the school of Big Tobacco alive and doing well, we should not make life even easier for them. Copyright is too often misused for censorship, with DMCA takedown notices one of their favorite methods.
No, I do not agree with that defeatism. They have not won. In fact, their cause is a losing cause. And they know it. Secrecy and treaties tried as attempts to bypass legislatures are not signs of power, they're signs of weakness. Enforcement is utterly impractical. No organization has the power to force everyone to obey copyright. It only works somewhat because people are willing to obey it, thinking that doing so helps artists.
What can we do? If we do nothing, they lose. The only way copyright cartels can win is if we help them win. Don't help them. That's all you and everyone else has to do. Don't buy DVDs or CDs, or devices that play them. Don't buy devices that enforce DRM. If you want to help, we can do a bit more than that. Use your public library, and not corporate bookstores (*cough* Amazon *cough*). Help crowdfund art projects. Tell your schools to use open, libre textbooks. Tell the library and politicians you want libraries and schools to have digital options for everything, as soon as possible.
Copyright infringement is not stealing! It should never have been criminalized. It should not even be a civil violation, or thought immoral or wrong. Sharing is a public good, and as such should be encouraged. Yes, encouraged. The government should never have tried to regulate sharing. Restricting copying was a terrible way to raise revenue for any purpose, and as for the stated purpose of enabling producers to profit and thereby encouraging more production, it is failing miserably. Instead, copyright and patent law are frequently misused to censor and suppress the very arts and sciences it was supposed to encourage.
The real greedy scum in this show are the RIAA and MPAA members. Many people, and apparently you too, have swallowed their line of reasoning. They are nothing more than slimy monopolists. They squelch most art to keep the rest small enough for them to manage it all themselves. They own it, or they bury it. In doing so, they hold us all back. Who knows what scientific advances we would have now-- cures for cancer, solutions for famines, and so much more, if they had not created this climate of denial of knowledge.
Want to be careful about criminalizing an action. Governments are all too likely to seize upon that as a revenue opportunity. If the rules are themselves bad or counterproductive, breaking them may be to everyone's benefit, and the only way to get the government to see that a particular change is necessary.
Especially in software engineering, which is notorious for being difficult to estimate, customers are always paranoid that they are getting a bad deal, and often compensate by making excessive demands. They will try to put the screws to you, threatening to take their business elsewhere if you resist their extreme demands. You have to finesse that kind of pressure. Not an outright, flat no, but counterproposals that won't break your company. I've seen more than one business fail because they didn't push back hard enough. Sometimes the customer got what they wanted, at far too low a price and then the vendor folds, and sometimes they didn't because the vendor folded before delivery.
This problem is harder to avoid than it might appear. in one case, the company was screwed by their own employees, that, to be fair, they had put in a bad position. The employees were told that if the company didn't win the contract, they would all be laid off. So what happened? The employees did anything they had to, to win the contract. They lowballed their own company. They severely underestimated the effort and work required, coming up with a plan that called for the job to be finished in just 6 weeks, with another 6 weeks margin of error. Even the customer was doubtful that the work could be done that fast, but the deal was so good, from their point of view, that they accepted. Why management approved it, I'm not sure. Desperation maybe? They blew right past the 3 month mark of course. A deathmarch was nowhere near enough to compensate. After 8 months, they managed to deliver one working part, just enough so that the customer grudgingly decided not to sue them. The customer had little appreciation or sympathy for the vendor's plight. The rest of the work was abandoned. The company lost a lot of money on the deal. One bad deal wasn't fatal, but they made several other bad deals, and those were enough to kill them.
To add to the parent, austerity helps the rich and hurts the poor. How? By driving inflation so far into the dirt that we have deflation. Deflation makes debt more burdensome. If you have debt, and your income gets cut thanks to deflation, it's now harder to pay off your debt. Your material assets also go down in value, so selling to pay off your debt isn't as effective. You may be underwater, your house now worth less than the amount you still owe on the mortgage, and it may be impossible to pay off your debt. Meanwhile, piles of money are worth even more. And it becomes a better idea to sit on piles of money, rather than invest it in business ventures. Trickle down economics is completely backwards. Give the rich more money, through tax breaks and austerity, and they won't respond by creating more jobs. Instead they'll hoard. You have to have some inflation to keep the economy moving. Just how much inflation is the question, but 2% is thought to be too low.
What's so crazy is that we really do have a lot of work to do. We have crumbling infrastructure that's been neglected for years thanks to relentless budget slashing. We also have a big problem with Climate Change. The work is not getting done. In times like these, workers are dirt cheap, but even now employers still want wages pushed further down, and refuse to let the government compete for workers. It's nuts. We may have to see some more bridge collapses, like in Minneapolis, to get some attitudes changed. If the elite aren't careful, we will have riots, like what happened in Greece.
Jeez, again? Do you want the list? There's reason for the hate. Big corporations have shown, time and time again, that they are not to be trusted. When a company like Microsoft rolls out "Trusted Computing" and it turns out that it does the opposite of what the product is named, and they try to pass it off as actually enhancing trust in a roundabout way, they show how insulting, stupid, and treacherous they really are. Same story with Windows Genuine Advantage. They keep trying to conflate security for us with security for them against pirates which somehow includes everyone. By their lights, we're all guilty of piracy. Microsoft still sponsors the Business Software Alliance. And that's hardly the only dirty crap they've pulled. What about file format lock in? Bribing and threatening members of standards bodies to ram through their OOXML garbage? The Microsoft Tax? Embrace, extend, extinguish?
Microsoft thinks we are so stupid that all of us swallow that? I don't like the constant demands to prove that I am not a pirate, or the implication that all copying and downloading is probably piracy and is bad and immoral. The whole intellectual property narrative they pitch is warped and wrong, but there's no convincing them of that. We made them one of the richest companies in history, and the founder Bill Gates into the richest person in the world, but that's not good enough for them, no sir! In spite of all the wealth we've paid them, they've worked themselves into a fury, feeling all wronged over the "theft" they believe they constantly suffer from those dirty pirates. Do I need to keep looking over my shoulder, to check if the BSA is coming for me today? Innocent until proven guilty, unless you're a Windows user, then it's the other way around. The only reason many people continue to do business with a company with such a bad attitude is force. Many feel that they still have to use MS Office. But love MS? No.
Any place could be linked to child porn. Poles are often used to hold signs, for rewards for missing dogs, lawn mowing services and that sort of thing. If someone posts some kind of solicitation for child porn on a pole, is the city that owns the pole somehow liable or responsible? Of course not. If the city also puts signs up on the pole, advertising their services, does that change things? No. Why should it be any different for a web site? So it's not useful to drag child porn into the discussion. That's like saying water is wet. And applying a double standard. Person A got wet, and it's no big deal, but person B also got wet, and on the Internet, oooo!
Better is to compare the Pirate Bay to a dating site which runs ads. The site is profiting off of love, showing ads to people who are trying to find a date. Nothing immoral about that. But imagine that the dating site is trying to operate under a very prudish public and government who doubts the morality of their activities, accusing them of enabling prostitution, and constantly threatening not to go after prostitution only, but to shut the whole thing down under the thought that it's all prostitution anyway. Law enforcers are egged on by powerful interests that aren't interested in justice, but rather are interested in eliminating competition any way they can. Dirty pool.
But they are also spreading a political message, saying that they see nothing wrong with prostitution. There's nothing wrong with that either. We do have freedom of speech. If the users of the site turn towards prostitution or are already mostly prostitutes and "Johns", does that somehow change the morality? No! To shut down the site is about the same as tearing out a pole because someone advertised sexual services on it. Ripping out the pole is not going to stop anything, solve any problem, or convince anyone of the error of their ways. There are other poles. They can't all be torn out, and even if they could, people could use walls instead. Also, tearing out poles is damaging. Innocent 3rd parties, perhaps trying to find their lost doggies, will be harmed.
The Pirate Bay should be left alone. They didn't do anything wrong. We know very well that they are being made into scapegoats for what their users do. Why don't authorities go after the users, as they ought since those are the people who are actually guilty of violating the law as it stands currently? They've tried, and managed to torture a few victims, make examples of them, rather like the Inquisition used to do. But they've seen that they simply can't do it. They would have to charge half the world with piracy. If they can't scare people away from copyright infringement, or convince people it's immoral, no force available to the law can stop it. No technical measure can stop it either. They are trying very hard now to save face, refusing to admit that they can't stop it, refusing to talk about it, and still hoping that somehow the public will come around to their viewpoint. It won't happen. They are definitely refusing to admit that they are actually the ones in error. And that the law will have to change. The Inquisition discredited itself centuries ago. It was a stupid idea from the start, trying to frighten and bully people into being better Christians according to their narrow definition of what it meant to be a good Christian, which excluded Protestants. Today, Protestants enjoy the same rights and protections as Catholics, and the Inquisition is properly seen as at best a tragic mistake and at worst a vehicle for sadists and torturers to have a little fun. Now here we are, repeating that mistake but this time with copyright law.
You touch on the perils of our unprecedented increase in our power to control our environment. We do all kinds of things not because they are a good idea, but out of instinctive prejudice. For instance, mowing the grass. One idea I have heard is that we like grass short because poisonous snakes can't hide in it. We couldn't do much to satisfy that prejudice before the advent of powered mowers, just took way too much labor. Now that we can mow quickly, we do so with a vengeance, to the detriment of biodiversity, the environment, and even our own health and well-being. We've even anointed a few species of grass, shrubs and trees as desirable, and call all other plants weeds. In many cities, it's even against the law to let the grass get too high. Crazy.
I thought of fireplaces as primarily entertainment devices, but I like your take on it better. So many people really like to watch the pretty flames. I confess I like it too, but not so much that I'm willing to work for it. Once again, we have gained the power to have far more fire than we need, and have let our love of fire lead us into unthinking wastefulness.
Light is another of our prejudices. We are not nocturnal. Darkness has become associated less with rest and sleep and more with crime and evil, and plain inconvenience. In our eternal drive for more security, we've done all in our power to banish darkness. Who's afraid of the dark? We are. We have streetlights everywhere. Keeps crime down, they say. Maybe we should not drive at night? What if it was the custom to not drive at all in the dark, and cars did not have headlights because they are not needed? Before artificial lighting, people didn't travel much at night. And now? We don't have to quit when the sun sets, we can keep working. We could do that before the incandescent light, with candles, but candles were inconvenient enough that we usually didn't. Now, it's so easy to stay up late. We don't give ourselves enough sleep, and we're finding out what that does to us. It could be one of the factors causing the obesity epidemic. One popular idea for the cause of the fall of the Roman Empire is lead poisoning. Lot of the emperors behaved in just plain crazy ways that could be explained by mental problems caused by lead poisoning. Doubtless most of the elite of Roman society suffered the same affliction. In the future, will America decline and fall because of sleep deprivation empowered by artificial lighting?
Even indoor climate control may not be pure, unadulterated goodness. I've read that it's actually healthier to swing a bit with the seasons. Don't try to force the house to be a constant 75F year round. Let it drop to 70F in the winter, and rise to 80F in the summer, or more.
So many of our modern conveniences have non-obvious dangers. Bisphenol A sure is convenient, but now we are more aware of problems with it. We would be wiser to fear those dangers more, and worry less about other dangers, particularly foolish ones like that gay marriage could somehow be a threat to the family.
That's what I want. These "smart" homes are the wrong kind of smart, when it means stuffing the house full of expensive gadgetry of little practical use. A house like that is designed to extract the maximum money from home buyers, by dazzling them with ostentatious "tech light" junk. It's not actually meant to be more liveable or something.
One luxury house built around 1880 that I looked over was full of hokey gadgetry that makes us all laugh today. A laundry room with a wood burning heater for the irons (sad irons) so the residents could have the wrinkles removed from their clothes the moment they were out of the wash! This house was built with gas lights, and that was later upgraded to incandescent lighting. Curiously, it had some silly centralized control. By the front door was a large panel of switches for turning on and off all the lights in the house. Does that sound sort of familiar, like maybe even "smart"? 19th century style "smart" home? Also in a room near the front door was a large clock that tracked phases of the moon and sunrise and sunset times. Today, there's an app for that, no need to waste valuable floor space on such a clunky apparatus.
As far as low hanging fruit goes, housing in the US is a target rich environment. There are so many stupidities in how homes are currently constructed. Yeah, LED lighting is good, but you know what? A skylight is even better. Also, so many people in the biz, including the buyers, are really stuck on antiquated and exremely inefficient construction methods. Don't have a brick layer work with tiny bricks, at the least use cinder blocks! Even better, just make entire walls off site, truck them in, and erect them. Can have the walls up in hours. That method works great for commercial buildings, why can't the same thing be done for residential? No reason at all, it's just inertia and custom. Also explains why we still have fireplaces everywhere. Ben Franklin complained about their inefficiency and wastefulness all the way back in the 18th century, and here we are today, still shoving those things into new homes! Then there's the roof. Why, why do people just have to have a complicated roofline? More expensive and less durable at the same time.
No, you don't get it. (A child porn comparison? Really? Weak, dude, really weak. Maybe you could try for a more accurate and less loaded analogy?)
The Pirate Bay is helping the world see that copyright does not work. They aren't parasites, copyright is a bad business model. And, artists will not starve without copyright! There are other ways to earn a living from art.
The real parasites are the Big Media companies who stole works from the public domain by extending copyright again and again, despite that flying in the face of the public interest. They helped cause this backlash through their greed. Copyright might have hung on longer otherwise. Don't think for a moment that we have forgotten being forced to pay the Microsoft tax, and in the "no good deed goes unpunished" department, purchasing media like good citizens only to be rewarded by being forced to watch unskippable commercials at the start, and being told we can't format shift or time shift the media we bought, and even fed propaganda against used record stores and libraries! One of the worst offenses was Sony's CD with the rootkit. They're so damned arrogant that they think their precious copyrights are more valuable than their customers' data? Why aren't you complaining about them? Why do you pass over their far worse crimes and thefts in silence, while screaming about the supposed immoralities and thefts committed by perfectly ordinary citizens? Do you love Disney that much?
Most of all, these antiquated laws are harming us all. We should have had a real digital public library by now. Instead, the works availabe online are scattered, fragmentary, and mostly unsearchable. Good work is being overlooked and buried, for the sake of Mickey Mouse.
Kudos to you for doing a solar panel installation. I've been thinking of my own, but feel that it is still too expensive. I think it is still "big dumb engineering", though I understand solar has gotten much better in recent years. A 30 year or longer payback period is just too long for me. There is so much that can happen in 30 years: technological improvements and price drops, and you may move or die, or your house may be destroyed by fire, tornado, earthquake, flood, or termites.
What I mean by big dumb engineering is exemplified by the double pane windows. Save up to 50% on your heating and cooling costs, they say. How much to replace all the windows and glass doors? Why, only $10,000! I spend about $700 per year on heating and cooling, so the windows only save me $350 per year at best, which makes for about a 30 year payback period right there. I very much doubt I'd see a 50% cut in my heating and cooling costs anyway. A better solution is to put curtains on all the windows. Way, way cheaper, and looks nice too.
Anyway, I've read the first use of solar should be for hot water. There too, I've had no luck. One business quoted me an incredible price tag of $17,000 for their solar water heating system. They quickly rolled out discounts and tax rebates and the like, and got it down to $6000. Nope, still too expensive. I replaced the tank water heater with another tank water heater for $350 (it's nearly the lowest quality available, warrantied for only 6 years), hoping to buy more time for solar water heating to come down in price.
I've gone for much more modest improvements. Replaced incandescent lights with CFLs, and now LEDs. The 4 ft fluorescent tube has been improved from 40 watts to 32 watts and the diameter shrunk a little, and I upgraded to 2 of those when an old ballast went bad. There was this 80plus program to improve the efficiency of computer power supplies. My newest computers are small footprint and low energy, using only 30 watts maximum, and I set them up to sleep after 10 to 15 minutes of inactivity. Tube monitors and TVs are all gone, replaced with flat screens. Most of all, I've let the temperature swing more with the seasons, living with 83F in the summer, and 70F in the winter. I'd go even colder, but the rest of the family whines too much. All that has cut energy use by about 50%. Was using around 10,000 kWh per year, and now I'm at 5200 kWh.
To create jobs, it doesn't matter what we do something about, just that we do something. All these cries that doing something about Climate Change will cost jobs and hurt the economy are dead wrong.
I thought I could ignore politics and focus on engineering and science. No professional employee gets to do that. Try it and you will not be employed much longer. You have to CYA. If you don't, at some point, morons will make you the scapegoat for something, no matter how idiotic and harmful it would be. Or maybe they will target you because they view you as competing for a valuable job they'd rather hand to a relative or friend, and you look easy to take down. Even if firing you is the equivalent to the company of cutting off their right hand, they will do it. Being able to say "told you so" if they do it, and end up going out of business, is cold comfort indeed. On this matter of Climate Change, it will be even colder comfort if our civilization collapses because of it, thus proving even to the biggest deniers that we were right all along. They will still come up with reasons why the disaster is not their fault, and those reasons will likely include you.
All of us owe our existence to the big, free handout from the sun. Without that huge source of free, yes, free energy, known as sunlight, we would die. Further, animals, including us, are completely dependent upon life to convert that free energy into more usable forms. Everything we eat was once alive. Plants keep the oxygen in the very air we breathe at levels we can tolerate. We wouldn't last 10 minutes without air. We are totally, completely dependent upon the environment.
The next time you strut around acting all holier than thou than the "lazy people" because you're employed, think on that. We all mooch off the sun and the environment. If you want to beat up on some people, pick on the ones who are pushing us all closer to unsustainability, by having too many children and/or damaging the environment in their greed to have more, more, more.
I would like to see everyone gain greater independence. A hard life though it was, many had that in the early 19th century, before the Industrial Revolution forced many independent farmers to become factory laborers. Are you crowing about employment, about slaving for The Man, as if that's some kind of virtue? Employers have had entirely too much success pushing back some of the hard won standards. What happened to 9 to 5, to the 40 hour work week? Employer greed, helped along by compliant and fearful employees who've been convinced that it is even more virtuous to work overtime for no extra pay because they're in a "superior" salaried position, and who are afraid of losing their jobs if they say "no", that's what.
And I think we could be in a good position to regain a great deal of independence. It's possible to go off-grid, and not have to buy electricity from a central seller. Add an electric car, and you wouldn't need the oil companies either. You can grow your own food too. Would take a lot of work, but with employers trying to hold minimum wage fixed, and constantly scheming to cut pay even more, it could conceivably pay better to quit a low paying job and put your hours towards managing a vegetable garden. Live off the land. And tell The Man to shove his miserable job and pathetic pay. People did that once. For education and news, download from the Internet. Internet access ought to be treated more like the mail. Our government runs the post office because it was thought that communication was too important and valuable to be totally dependent upon private parties who could and would abuse such power. it has to be supervised by The People. These private telecoms companies have not served us well, preferring instead to monopolize the market and gouge us all for inferior service.
We've been asking this question for decades. We have some ideas and some answers, but aren't satisfied. Political Correctness makes it harder to check some ideas out. It's also just a plain hard question.
Yes, there are gender expectations that work against women going into engineering. But there could also be innate differences in our brains which bear some responsibility for the gender gap. It's not PC to suggest that, but not being PC doesn't make the idea untrue. And that's where we run into a lot of trouble. Testing hypotheses about high level thinking is very difficult. We have good progress on understanding small, more deterministic parts of our brains, like our vision system, but it is very hard to answer why people choose or reject an option that has no obvious advantage or disadvantage, an option that isn't clear cut, that isn't a choice between two chess moves, one of which immediately loses the game.
The article suggests that women are put off of CS by the boom and bust nature of employment in the field. There are a lot of parts to that notion. Are women more risk adverse than men on employment prospects? Is software engineering such an uncertain career path? When choosing a subject to study, do people think first and foremost of where the most and "best" jobs are, or do they try to discover what subjects they like on the idea that having passion for a subject makes one better at it, and therefore more employable? Or, employment opportunities being as arbitrary as they are, do people say the heck with trying to figure that out and merely try to find something they love and do that? In any case, often what matters is having a college degree. If it's not in a field that's in high demand, like STEM is supposed to be if the screams from employers are to be believed (take cries for more STEM workers and H1B visas and all with large grains of salt), then the particular field may not much matter. Lot of people end up working in fields that have nothing to do with their degrees.
We do security theater to feel safer, while ignoring simple measures like facing the seats towards the rear of the plane. And let's face it. Much of what the flight attendant says is security theater. The odds of most of those safety measures-- the floating seat cushion, memorizing the route to the nearest exit-- actually saving a life is very, very low. Planes rarely crash. In most of the crashes, those measures made no difference whatsoever. It's total "Duck and Cover". School children should also memorize the the way to the nearest exit from the school building, in case a crazy person with weapons breaks in and goes on a shooting rampage. Or maybe they should quit worrying and stick to their studies.
She might do better to give everyone a lecture on the perils of obesity, and go all Richard Simmons on them, get everyone up out of their seats and doing calisthenics. Might save more lives doing that instead.
Seeming isn't always correct, and espionage is not something I feel tolerant about. But is this really espionage, or is this trumped up military hysteria over well known information?
I know the military. They exaggerate. They would like to make everything, and I do mean everything, into a secret. There is no downside to doing so. If unsure about some information, the default is to stamp it as secret. Covers their asses that way. This includes basic facts of nature that are well known, stuff that is taught in high school science and math classes. They are total suckers for Security Through Obscurity. That this strangles cooperation and collaboration is less important to them because they don't get into as much trouble if a project fails than if a "secret" gets leaked.. At the same time, they demand that their collaborators have no secrets, and go so far as to enforce this by insisting that work be done on a military base, on computers belonging to the military, and that encryption can't be used anywhere on the hardware without lots of permission. That means of course that the contractors have to get security clearances and permission to be on the base. They also want to be in control, and despite not knowing what the heck they are doing, will periodically make off the wall demands to which the contractors can't easily say no. Can really hamstring a project, so much so that it makes the difference between success and failure. It's so bad that many refuse military funding because it comes with all sorts of unreasonable strings attached. Many years ago, OpenBSD spurned military funding, and I'm sure it was because of that sort of thing. I know universities have turned them down, knowing that the money would not make up for their interference.
Did the perps really steal the software, or only copy it?
Not that it matters much. The army loves to go ape on "bad" guys. The army's reputation for paranoid overreaction to any threat involving computers is such that it wouldn't be surprising if the perps end up spending a very long time in Gitmo if the army gets hold of them. They'll be held without trial as, what do they call it, an imminent threat? They'll also be "aggressively interrogated" to find out how they did it. If the army has to hold a trial, they'll be found guilty of stealing, espionage, and of course (cue dramatic music) Hacking.
I'd rather hear about how to get paid to work on open source. The article talks a little about convincing your current employer to donate some of your time to a project. But first, you need an employer.
Then, your job has to have some down time. I've never had a job in IT with any down time at all. There are always bugs to fix, features to implement, fires to put out, and management to report to. Management is always pushing for more, questioning numbers and estimates or just simply cutting time, to the point that a deathmarch becomes a certainty.
We have plenty of standards and examples to define predatory. Detection of violations are never perfect. Nor does equipment always function as intended. There are always mistakes. This kind of theft of utility is predatory. Right or wrong, it forces you to pay to play, and does so immediately no matter how inconvenient or outright damaging. From what the article says, some of these devices can shut the car off while it is in use. Are these idiots looking to repeat GM"s experience with their infamous ignition switches, but this time being far more culpable because it was caused deliberately?
This kill switch is similar to wheel clamps used to coerce payment of parking offenses. What makes it especially bad is abusive enforcement. Some authorities purposely create situations where it is all too easy to violate parking ordinances. For instance, there's the parking meter with the clock that runs a little too fast. From my experiences at the university, there are the too tight parking spaces that are nearly impossible to fit into, and so you get busted because a bumper was over the line, and there is the parking spot that is missing a line on one side because they didn't think it necessary to paint the curb, so on that technicality it doesn't qualify as a valid parking spot and you get busted for parking illegally. There's the old rotating parking trick-- one city I know made it law that on Tuesdays and Thursdays you park on the south or west side, and on the other weekdays on the north or east. Meant you couldn't leave a car on the street for longer than a day, you would have to move it all the time. That might be impossible if a bad storm hits and your car is snowed in. Didn't stop Washington D.C. from trying to profit from the situation and issue parking tickets. Naturally, your car had better be facing the correct direction. Clamps are pretty universally hated. Too many mistakes made with them, too many cases of overzealous enforcement to generate revenue, too many needless tragedies caused.
If you're desperate, you're easier to victimize with a bad deal. You don't have the option to walk away because you can't do any better anywhere else, and doing without is even worse.
This year, I went to the annual auto show in Dallas. What a total waste of money and time. The automakers who bothered to attend sent very junior people who didn't know anything. But they looked young and pretty. And that was their main selling point too: pretty. Pretty girls selling pretty cars. One of the few interesting cars there was a Nissan Leaf.
Don't know why they bothered having the show. If the show was an indication of the state of automobiling, I'd say they are out of ideas, and too gutless to try what few ideas they do have. Dealerships trying to stifle competition through legal technicalities makes them look really weak. Car makers need some serious shaking up, and Tesla may be the spark that sets off the forest fire. I hope batteries improve to the point that gasoline powered cars can no longer compete, and the public begins unloading them, rather like the way they unloaded SUVs in 2008 when the price of gas spiked, but more permanent.
Automobile makers do not get to dictate what their customers do with the cars they built. If the buyer wants to chop the car, make it into a lowrider, put different wheels on, change the paint color, smash it, bury it, or throw it with a trebuchet, there's not a thing the automobile manufacturer can or should be able to do about it. John Lennon's psychedelic Rolls Royce offended some people. Some of these people had nothing to do with the automaker, they were just upset that someone did something they thought inappropriate to a product they admired. Lot of rock stars are great at puncturing sacred cows that people didn't even realize they had.
Some people get all bent out of shape over a flag burning. Others find book burnings offensive. Get over it. Let them throw copies of Huckleberry Finn, Harry Potter, and the Dungeon Master's Guide in the flames all they like. Nothing is lost, even more so if digitization has not been blocked. The best the arsonists can hope for is that nothing comes of it, as it could backfire and raise awareness of those works. On numerous occasions, vandals have tried to destroy works of art. If there are digital copies, destruction is practically impossible. In any case, a great work like the Mona Lisa can last only so long. It will inevitably deteriorate. If idiotic copyright laws and museum policies have prevented us from copying it into a more permanent form, for posterity, we deserve to lose it to the next time some insane person loses his mind and attacks the art. Rarities have been lost because the owner decided to destroy it. If there are good copies everywhere, the owner of an original can't deny a work to the rest of us out of spite, malice, revenge, or whatever, can't demand a big ransom not to destroy it. Can't mutilate it either through reckless bureaucratic policy, as was done to many paintings, including Rembrandt's Night Watch when they cut the painting down to size to fit a space. Then there are always Acts of God. Art has been lost in fires, floods, earthquakes, and other natural disasters.
I don't see why a work of art should be any different from a car. If the artists don't like it, it should be their responsibility to make copies or documents describing how to recreate it, before handing one over to a buyer. It's not like making a copy is so hard any more. Indeed, the biggest barriers can be legal ones.
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Publishers wish they had that choice. No, the choice is, will they release it, or will they be left behind when someone else releases it, legally or not? The law can't stop piracy. DRM is just fake security, it can't stop piracy either. Nothing can stop piracy.
Nor should we want piracy stopped. Sharing of knowledge is crucial to our advancement. It is these rent seeking parasites who are the real criminals. Their anti-social hostage taking of knowledge that they did not help create could result in us not discovering something crucial in time to act on it. I'm not talking about mere cures for diseases, I'm talking about knowledge that could save civilization. What if, unknown to us, a big asteroid is headed on a collision course with Earth, and we would have learned of it in time if some damned publisher hadn't locked the knowledge away? And that's only one of the most obvious dangers. More subtle dangers abound, anything from climate change to large scale chemical imbalances, atmospheric and magnetic changes that let radiation through.
Bad enough that we have propagandists of the school of Big Tobacco alive and doing well, we should not make life even easier for them. Copyright is too often misused for censorship, with DMCA takedown notices one of their favorite methods.
No, I do not agree with that defeatism. They have not won. In fact, their cause is a losing cause. And they know it. Secrecy and treaties tried as attempts to bypass legislatures are not signs of power, they're signs of weakness. Enforcement is utterly impractical. No organization has the power to force everyone to obey copyright. It only works somewhat because people are willing to obey it, thinking that doing so helps artists.
What can we do? If we do nothing, they lose. The only way copyright cartels can win is if we help them win. Don't help them. That's all you and everyone else has to do. Don't buy DVDs or CDs, or devices that play them. Don't buy devices that enforce DRM. If you want to help, we can do a bit more than that. Use your public library, and not corporate bookstores (*cough* Amazon *cough*). Help crowdfund art projects. Tell your schools to use open, libre textbooks. Tell the library and politicians you want libraries and schools to have digital options for everything, as soon as possible.
Copyright infringement is not stealing! It should never have been criminalized. It should not even be a civil violation, or thought immoral or wrong. Sharing is a public good, and as such should be encouraged. Yes, encouraged. The government should never have tried to regulate sharing. Restricting copying was a terrible way to raise revenue for any purpose, and as for the stated purpose of enabling producers to profit and thereby encouraging more production, it is failing miserably. Instead, copyright and patent law are frequently misused to censor and suppress the very arts and sciences it was supposed to encourage.
The real greedy scum in this show are the RIAA and MPAA members. Many people, and apparently you too, have swallowed their line of reasoning. They are nothing more than slimy monopolists. They squelch most art to keep the rest small enough for them to manage it all themselves. They own it, or they bury it. In doing so, they hold us all back. Who knows what scientific advances we would have now-- cures for cancer, solutions for famines, and so much more, if they had not created this climate of denial of knowledge.
Want to be careful about criminalizing an action. Governments are all too likely to seize upon that as a revenue opportunity. If the rules are themselves bad or counterproductive, breaking them may be to everyone's benefit, and the only way to get the government to see that a particular change is necessary.
Especially in software engineering, which is notorious for being difficult to estimate, customers are always paranoid that they are getting a bad deal, and often compensate by making excessive demands. They will try to put the screws to you, threatening to take their business elsewhere if you resist their extreme demands. You have to finesse that kind of pressure. Not an outright, flat no, but counterproposals that won't break your company. I've seen more than one business fail because they didn't push back hard enough. Sometimes the customer got what they wanted, at far too low a price and then the vendor folds, and sometimes they didn't because the vendor folded before delivery.
This problem is harder to avoid than it might appear. in one case, the company was screwed by their own employees, that, to be fair, they had put in a bad position. The employees were told that if the company didn't win the contract, they would all be laid off. So what happened? The employees did anything they had to, to win the contract. They lowballed their own company. They severely underestimated the effort and work required, coming up with a plan that called for the job to be finished in just 6 weeks, with another 6 weeks margin of error. Even the customer was doubtful that the work could be done that fast, but the deal was so good, from their point of view, that they accepted. Why management approved it, I'm not sure. Desperation maybe? They blew right past the 3 month mark of course. A deathmarch was nowhere near enough to compensate. After 8 months, they managed to deliver one working part, just enough so that the customer grudgingly decided not to sue them. The customer had little appreciation or sympathy for the vendor's plight. The rest of the work was abandoned. The company lost a lot of money on the deal. One bad deal wasn't fatal, but they made several other bad deals, and those were enough to kill them.
To add to the parent, austerity helps the rich and hurts the poor. How? By driving inflation so far into the dirt that we have deflation. Deflation makes debt more burdensome. If you have debt, and your income gets cut thanks to deflation, it's now harder to pay off your debt. Your material assets also go down in value, so selling to pay off your debt isn't as effective. You may be underwater, your house now worth less than the amount you still owe on the mortgage, and it may be impossible to pay off your debt. Meanwhile, piles of money are worth even more. And it becomes a better idea to sit on piles of money, rather than invest it in business ventures. Trickle down economics is completely backwards. Give the rich more money, through tax breaks and austerity, and they won't respond by creating more jobs. Instead they'll hoard. You have to have some inflation to keep the economy moving. Just how much inflation is the question, but 2% is thought to be too low.
What's so crazy is that we really do have a lot of work to do. We have crumbling infrastructure that's been neglected for years thanks to relentless budget slashing. We also have a big problem with Climate Change. The work is not getting done. In times like these, workers are dirt cheap, but even now employers still want wages pushed further down, and refuse to let the government compete for workers. It's nuts. We may have to see some more bridge collapses, like in Minneapolis, to get some attitudes changed. If the elite aren't careful, we will have riots, like what happened in Greece.
Jeez, again? Do you want the list? There's reason for the hate. Big corporations have shown, time and time again, that they are not to be trusted. When a company like Microsoft rolls out "Trusted Computing" and it turns out that it does the opposite of what the product is named, and they try to pass it off as actually enhancing trust in a roundabout way, they show how insulting, stupid, and treacherous they really are. Same story with Windows Genuine Advantage. They keep trying to conflate security for us with security for them against pirates which somehow includes everyone. By their lights, we're all guilty of piracy. Microsoft still sponsors the Business Software Alliance. And that's hardly the only dirty crap they've pulled. What about file format lock in? Bribing and threatening members of standards bodies to ram through their OOXML garbage? The Microsoft Tax? Embrace, extend, extinguish?
Microsoft thinks we are so stupid that all of us swallow that? I don't like the constant demands to prove that I am not a pirate, or the implication that all copying and downloading is probably piracy and is bad and immoral. The whole intellectual property narrative they pitch is warped and wrong, but there's no convincing them of that. We made them one of the richest companies in history, and the founder Bill Gates into the richest person in the world, but that's not good enough for them, no sir! In spite of all the wealth we've paid them, they've worked themselves into a fury, feeling all wronged over the "theft" they believe they constantly suffer from those dirty pirates. Do I need to keep looking over my shoulder, to check if the BSA is coming for me today? Innocent until proven guilty, unless you're a Windows user, then it's the other way around. The only reason many people continue to do business with a company with such a bad attitude is force. Many feel that they still have to use MS Office. But love MS? No.
Any place could be linked to child porn. Poles are often used to hold signs, for rewards for missing dogs, lawn mowing services and that sort of thing. If someone posts some kind of solicitation for child porn on a pole, is the city that owns the pole somehow liable or responsible? Of course not. If the city also puts signs up on the pole, advertising their services, does that change things? No. Why should it be any different for a web site? So it's not useful to drag child porn into the discussion. That's like saying water is wet. And applying a double standard. Person A got wet, and it's no big deal, but person B also got wet, and on the Internet, oooo!
Better is to compare the Pirate Bay to a dating site which runs ads. The site is profiting off of love, showing ads to people who are trying to find a date. Nothing immoral about that. But imagine that the dating site is trying to operate under a very prudish public and government who doubts the morality of their activities, accusing them of enabling prostitution, and constantly threatening not to go after prostitution only, but to shut the whole thing down under the thought that it's all prostitution anyway. Law enforcers are egged on by powerful interests that aren't interested in justice, but rather are interested in eliminating competition any way they can. Dirty pool.
But they are also spreading a political message, saying that they see nothing wrong with prostitution. There's nothing wrong with that either. We do have freedom of speech. If the users of the site turn towards prostitution or are already mostly prostitutes and "Johns", does that somehow change the morality? No! To shut down the site is about the same as tearing out a pole because someone advertised sexual services on it. Ripping out the pole is not going to stop anything, solve any problem, or convince anyone of the error of their ways. There are other poles. They can't all be torn out, and even if they could, people could use walls instead. Also, tearing out poles is damaging. Innocent 3rd parties, perhaps trying to find their lost doggies, will be harmed.
The Pirate Bay should be left alone. They didn't do anything wrong. We know very well that they are being made into scapegoats for what their users do. Why don't authorities go after the users, as they ought since those are the people who are actually guilty of violating the law as it stands currently? They've tried, and managed to torture a few victims, make examples of them, rather like the Inquisition used to do. But they've seen that they simply can't do it. They would have to charge half the world with piracy. If they can't scare people away from copyright infringement, or convince people it's immoral, no force available to the law can stop it. No technical measure can stop it either. They are trying very hard now to save face, refusing to admit that they can't stop it, refusing to talk about it, and still hoping that somehow the public will come around to their viewpoint. It won't happen. They are definitely refusing to admit that they are actually the ones in error. And that the law will have to change. The Inquisition discredited itself centuries ago. It was a stupid idea from the start, trying to frighten and bully people into being better Christians according to their narrow definition of what it meant to be a good Christian, which excluded Protestants. Today, Protestants enjoy the same rights and protections as Catholics, and the Inquisition is properly seen as at best a tragic mistake and at worst a vehicle for sadists and torturers to have a little fun. Now here we are, repeating that mistake but this time with copyright law.
You touch on the perils of our unprecedented increase in our power to control our environment. We do all kinds of things not because they are a good idea, but out of instinctive prejudice. For instance, mowing the grass. One idea I have heard is that we like grass short because poisonous snakes can't hide in it. We couldn't do much to satisfy that prejudice before the advent of powered mowers, just took way too much labor. Now that we can mow quickly, we do so with a vengeance, to the detriment of biodiversity, the environment, and even our own health and well-being. We've even anointed a few species of grass, shrubs and trees as desirable, and call all other plants weeds. In many cities, it's even against the law to let the grass get too high. Crazy.
I thought of fireplaces as primarily entertainment devices, but I like your take on it better. So many people really like to watch the pretty flames. I confess I like it too, but not so much that I'm willing to work for it. Once again, we have gained the power to have far more fire than we need, and have let our love of fire lead us into unthinking wastefulness.
Light is another of our prejudices. We are not nocturnal. Darkness has become associated less with rest and sleep and more with crime and evil, and plain inconvenience. In our eternal drive for more security, we've done all in our power to banish darkness. Who's afraid of the dark? We are. We have streetlights everywhere. Keeps crime down, they say. Maybe we should not drive at night? What if it was the custom to not drive at all in the dark, and cars did not have headlights because they are not needed? Before artificial lighting, people didn't travel much at night. And now? We don't have to quit when the sun sets, we can keep working. We could do that before the incandescent light, with candles, but candles were inconvenient enough that we usually didn't. Now, it's so easy to stay up late. We don't give ourselves enough sleep, and we're finding out what that does to us. It could be one of the factors causing the obesity epidemic. One popular idea for the cause of the fall of the Roman Empire is lead poisoning. Lot of the emperors behaved in just plain crazy ways that could be explained by mental problems caused by lead poisoning. Doubtless most of the elite of Roman society suffered the same affliction. In the future, will America decline and fall because of sleep deprivation empowered by artificial lighting?
Even indoor climate control may not be pure, unadulterated goodness. I've read that it's actually healthier to swing a bit with the seasons. Don't try to force the house to be a constant 75F year round. Let it drop to 70F in the winter, and rise to 80F in the summer, or more.
So many of our modern conveniences have non-obvious dangers. Bisphenol A sure is convenient, but now we are more aware of problems with it. We would be wiser to fear those dangers more, and worry less about other dangers, particularly foolish ones like that gay marriage could somehow be a threat to the family.
That's what I want. These "smart" homes are the wrong kind of smart, when it means stuffing the house full of expensive gadgetry of little practical use. A house like that is designed to extract the maximum money from home buyers, by dazzling them with ostentatious "tech light" junk. It's not actually meant to be more liveable or something.
One luxury house built around 1880 that I looked over was full of hokey gadgetry that makes us all laugh today. A laundry room with a wood burning heater for the irons (sad irons) so the residents could have the wrinkles removed from their clothes the moment they were out of the wash! This house was built with gas lights, and that was later upgraded to incandescent lighting. Curiously, it had some silly centralized control. By the front door was a large panel of switches for turning on and off all the lights in the house. Does that sound sort of familiar, like maybe even "smart"? 19th century style "smart" home? Also in a room near the front door was a large clock that tracked phases of the moon and sunrise and sunset times. Today, there's an app for that, no need to waste valuable floor space on such a clunky apparatus.
As far as low hanging fruit goes, housing in the US is a target rich environment. There are so many stupidities in how homes are currently constructed. Yeah, LED lighting is good, but you know what? A skylight is even better. Also, so many people in the biz, including the buyers, are really stuck on antiquated and exremely inefficient construction methods. Don't have a brick layer work with tiny bricks, at the least use cinder blocks! Even better, just make entire walls off site, truck them in, and erect them. Can have the walls up in hours. That method works great for commercial buildings, why can't the same thing be done for residential? No reason at all, it's just inertia and custom. Also explains why we still have fireplaces everywhere. Ben Franklin complained about their inefficiency and wastefulness all the way back in the 18th century, and here we are today, still shoving those things into new homes! Then there's the roof. Why, why do people just have to have a complicated roofline? More expensive and less durable at the same time.
No, you don't get it. (A child porn comparison? Really? Weak, dude, really weak. Maybe you could try for a more accurate and less loaded analogy?)
The Pirate Bay is helping the world see that copyright does not work. They aren't parasites, copyright is a bad business model. And, artists will not starve without copyright! There are other ways to earn a living from art.
The real parasites are the Big Media companies who stole works from the public domain by extending copyright again and again, despite that flying in the face of the public interest. They helped cause this backlash through their greed. Copyright might have hung on longer otherwise. Don't think for a moment that we have forgotten being forced to pay the Microsoft tax, and in the "no good deed goes unpunished" department, purchasing media like good citizens only to be rewarded by being forced to watch unskippable commercials at the start, and being told we can't format shift or time shift the media we bought, and even fed propaganda against used record stores and libraries! One of the worst offenses was Sony's CD with the rootkit. They're so damned arrogant that they think their precious copyrights are more valuable than their customers' data? Why aren't you complaining about them? Why do you pass over their far worse crimes and thefts in silence, while screaming about the supposed immoralities and thefts committed by perfectly ordinary citizens? Do you love Disney that much?
Most of all, these antiquated laws are harming us all. We should have had a real digital public library by now. Instead, the works availabe online are scattered, fragmentary, and mostly unsearchable. Good work is being overlooked and buried, for the sake of Mickey Mouse.
Regurgitated? If they made a superhero movie featuring Captain Copyright, I'd pirate it in a heartbeat!
Or, maybe, I'll watch it for free by checking it out from the library some day, if they have it and I'm that bored.
Kudos to you for doing a solar panel installation. I've been thinking of my own, but feel that it is still too expensive. I think it is still "big dumb engineering", though I understand solar has gotten much better in recent years. A 30 year or longer payback period is just too long for me. There is so much that can happen in 30 years: technological improvements and price drops, and you may move or die, or your house may be destroyed by fire, tornado, earthquake, flood, or termites.
What I mean by big dumb engineering is exemplified by the double pane windows. Save up to 50% on your heating and cooling costs, they say. How much to replace all the windows and glass doors? Why, only $10,000! I spend about $700 per year on heating and cooling, so the windows only save me $350 per year at best, which makes for about a 30 year payback period right there. I very much doubt I'd see a 50% cut in my heating and cooling costs anyway. A better solution is to put curtains on all the windows. Way, way cheaper, and looks nice too.
Anyway, I've read the first use of solar should be for hot water. There too, I've had no luck. One business quoted me an incredible price tag of $17,000 for their solar water heating system. They quickly rolled out discounts and tax rebates and the like, and got it down to $6000. Nope, still too expensive. I replaced the tank water heater with another tank water heater for $350 (it's nearly the lowest quality available, warrantied for only 6 years), hoping to buy more time for solar water heating to come down in price.
I've gone for much more modest improvements. Replaced incandescent lights with CFLs, and now LEDs. The 4 ft fluorescent tube has been improved from 40 watts to 32 watts and the diameter shrunk a little, and I upgraded to 2 of those when an old ballast went bad. There was this 80plus program to improve the efficiency of computer power supplies. My newest computers are small footprint and low energy, using only 30 watts maximum, and I set them up to sleep after 10 to 15 minutes of inactivity. Tube monitors and TVs are all gone, replaced with flat screens. Most of all, I've let the temperature swing more with the seasons, living with 83F in the summer, and 70F in the winter. I'd go even colder, but the rest of the family whines too much. All that has cut energy use by about 50%. Was using around 10,000 kWh per year, and now I'm at 5200 kWh.
Thank you. I want to add a simple statement:
Doing something always helps the economy.
To create jobs, it doesn't matter what we do something about, just that we do something. All these cries that doing something about Climate Change will cost jobs and hurt the economy are dead wrong.
I thought I could ignore politics and focus on engineering and science. No professional employee gets to do that. Try it and you will not be employed much longer. You have to CYA. If you don't, at some point, morons will make you the scapegoat for something, no matter how idiotic and harmful it would be. Or maybe they will target you because they view you as competing for a valuable job they'd rather hand to a relative or friend, and you look easy to take down. Even if firing you is the equivalent to the company of cutting off their right hand, they will do it. Being able to say "told you so" if they do it, and end up going out of business, is cold comfort indeed. On this matter of Climate Change, it will be even colder comfort if our civilization collapses because of it, thus proving even to the biggest deniers that we were right all along. They will still come up with reasons why the disaster is not their fault, and those reasons will likely include you.
Welcome to reality.
All of us owe our existence to the big, free handout from the sun. Without that huge source of free, yes, free energy, known as sunlight, we would die. Further, animals, including us, are completely dependent upon life to convert that free energy into more usable forms. Everything we eat was once alive. Plants keep the oxygen in the very air we breathe at levels we can tolerate. We wouldn't last 10 minutes without air. We are totally, completely dependent upon the environment.
The next time you strut around acting all holier than thou than the "lazy people" because you're employed, think on that. We all mooch off the sun and the environment. If you want to beat up on some people, pick on the ones who are pushing us all closer to unsustainability, by having too many children and/or damaging the environment in their greed to have more, more, more.
I would like to see everyone gain greater independence. A hard life though it was, many had that in the early 19th century, before the Industrial Revolution forced many independent farmers to become factory laborers. Are you crowing about employment, about slaving for The Man, as if that's some kind of virtue? Employers have had entirely too much success pushing back some of the hard won standards. What happened to 9 to 5, to the 40 hour work week? Employer greed, helped along by compliant and fearful employees who've been convinced that it is even more virtuous to work overtime for no extra pay because they're in a "superior" salaried position, and who are afraid of losing their jobs if they say "no", that's what.
And I think we could be in a good position to regain a great deal of independence. It's possible to go off-grid, and not have to buy electricity from a central seller. Add an electric car, and you wouldn't need the oil companies either. You can grow your own food too. Would take a lot of work, but with employers trying to hold minimum wage fixed, and constantly scheming to cut pay even more, it could conceivably pay better to quit a low paying job and put your hours towards managing a vegetable garden. Live off the land. And tell The Man to shove his miserable job and pathetic pay. People did that once. For education and news, download from the Internet. Internet access ought to be treated more like the mail. Our government runs the post office because it was thought that communication was too important and valuable to be totally dependent upon private parties who could and would abuse such power. it has to be supervised by The People. These private telecoms companies have not served us well, preferring instead to monopolize the market and gouge us all for inferior service.
We've been asking this question for decades. We have some ideas and some answers, but aren't satisfied. Political Correctness makes it harder to check some ideas out. It's also just a plain hard question.
Yes, there are gender expectations that work against women going into engineering. But there could also be innate differences in our brains which bear some responsibility for the gender gap. It's not PC to suggest that, but not being PC doesn't make the idea untrue. And that's where we run into a lot of trouble. Testing hypotheses about high level thinking is very difficult. We have good progress on understanding small, more deterministic parts of our brains, like our vision system, but it is very hard to answer why people choose or reject an option that has no obvious advantage or disadvantage, an option that isn't clear cut, that isn't a choice between two chess moves, one of which immediately loses the game.
The article suggests that women are put off of CS by the boom and bust nature of employment in the field. There are a lot of parts to that notion. Are women more risk adverse than men on employment prospects? Is software engineering such an uncertain career path? When choosing a subject to study, do people think first and foremost of where the most and "best" jobs are, or do they try to discover what subjects they like on the idea that having passion for a subject makes one better at it, and therefore more employable? Or, employment opportunities being as arbitrary as they are, do people say the heck with trying to figure that out and merely try to find something they love and do that? In any case, often what matters is having a college degree. If it's not in a field that's in high demand, like STEM is supposed to be if the screams from employers are to be believed (take cries for more STEM workers and H1B visas and all with large grains of salt), then the particular field may not much matter. Lot of people end up working in fields that have nothing to do with their degrees.
This! Mod this up!
We do security theater to feel safer, while ignoring simple measures like facing the seats towards the rear of the plane. And let's face it. Much of what the flight attendant says is security theater. The odds of most of those safety measures-- the floating seat cushion, memorizing the route to the nearest exit-- actually saving a life is very, very low. Planes rarely crash. In most of the crashes, those measures made no difference whatsoever. It's total "Duck and Cover". School children should also memorize the the way to the nearest exit from the school building, in case a crazy person with weapons breaks in and goes on a shooting rampage. Or maybe they should quit worrying and stick to their studies.
She might do better to give everyone a lecture on the perils of obesity, and go all Richard Simmons on them, get everyone up out of their seats and doing calisthenics. Might save more lives doing that instead.
Seeming isn't always correct, and espionage is not something I feel tolerant about. But is this really espionage, or is this trumped up military hysteria over well known information?
I know the military. They exaggerate. They would like to make everything, and I do mean everything, into a secret. There is no downside to doing so. If unsure about some information, the default is to stamp it as secret. Covers their asses that way. This includes basic facts of nature that are well known, stuff that is taught in high school science and math classes. They are total suckers for Security Through Obscurity. That this strangles cooperation and collaboration is less important to them because they don't get into as much trouble if a project fails than if a "secret" gets leaked.. At the same time, they demand that their collaborators have no secrets, and go so far as to enforce this by insisting that work be done on a military base, on computers belonging to the military, and that encryption can't be used anywhere on the hardware without lots of permission. That means of course that the contractors have to get security clearances and permission to be on the base. They also want to be in control, and despite not knowing what the heck they are doing, will periodically make off the wall demands to which the contractors can't easily say no. Can really hamstring a project, so much so that it makes the difference between success and failure. It's so bad that many refuse military funding because it comes with all sorts of unreasonable strings attached. Many years ago, OpenBSD spurned military funding, and I'm sure it was because of that sort of thing. I know universities have turned them down, knowing that the money would not make up for their interference.
Did the perps really steal the software, or only copy it?
Not that it matters much. The army loves to go ape on "bad" guys. The army's reputation for paranoid overreaction to any threat involving computers is such that it wouldn't be surprising if the perps end up spending a very long time in Gitmo if the army gets hold of them. They'll be held without trial as, what do they call it, an imminent threat? They'll also be "aggressively interrogated" to find out how they did it. If the army has to hold a trial, they'll be found guilty of stealing, espionage, and of course (cue dramatic music) Hacking.
I'd rather hear about how to get paid to work on open source. The article talks a little about convincing your current employer to donate some of your time to a project. But first, you need an employer.
Then, your job has to have some down time. I've never had a job in IT with any down time at all. There are always bugs to fix, features to implement, fires to put out, and management to report to. Management is always pushing for more, questioning numbers and estimates or just simply cutting time, to the point that a deathmarch becomes a certainty.
We have plenty of standards and examples to define predatory. Detection of violations are never perfect. Nor does equipment always function as intended. There are always mistakes. This kind of theft of utility is predatory. Right or wrong, it forces you to pay to play, and does so immediately no matter how inconvenient or outright damaging. From what the article says, some of these devices can shut the car off while it is in use. Are these idiots looking to repeat GM"s experience with their infamous ignition switches, but this time being far more culpable because it was caused deliberately?
This kill switch is similar to wheel clamps used to coerce payment of parking offenses. What makes it especially bad is abusive enforcement. Some authorities purposely create situations where it is all too easy to violate parking ordinances. For instance, there's the parking meter with the clock that runs a little too fast. From my experiences at the university, there are the too tight parking spaces that are nearly impossible to fit into, and so you get busted because a bumper was over the line, and there is the parking spot that is missing a line on one side because they didn't think it necessary to paint the curb, so on that technicality it doesn't qualify as a valid parking spot and you get busted for parking illegally. There's the old rotating parking trick-- one city I know made it law that on Tuesdays and Thursdays you park on the south or west side, and on the other weekdays on the north or east. Meant you couldn't leave a car on the street for longer than a day, you would have to move it all the time. That might be impossible if a bad storm hits and your car is snowed in. Didn't stop Washington D.C. from trying to profit from the situation and issue parking tickets. Naturally, your car had better be facing the correct direction. Clamps are pretty universally hated. Too many mistakes made with them, too many cases of overzealous enforcement to generate revenue, too many needless tragedies caused.
If you're desperate, you're easier to victimize with a bad deal. You don't have the option to walk away because you can't do any better anywhere else, and doing without is even worse.
Exactly. Microsoft tried to secure the software against the users, and tried to tell everyone it was more plain security.
I'm glad users didn't swallow it. MS's lame attempt at confusing everyone got the ridicule and hate it so richly deserved.
This year, I went to the annual auto show in Dallas. What a total waste of money and time. The automakers who bothered to attend sent very junior people who didn't know anything. But they looked young and pretty. And that was their main selling point too: pretty. Pretty girls selling pretty cars. One of the few interesting cars there was a Nissan Leaf.
Don't know why they bothered having the show. If the show was an indication of the state of automobiling, I'd say they are out of ideas, and too gutless to try what few ideas they do have. Dealerships trying to stifle competition through legal technicalities makes them look really weak. Car makers need some serious shaking up, and Tesla may be the spark that sets off the forest fire. I hope batteries improve to the point that gasoline powered cars can no longer compete, and the public begins unloading them, rather like the way they unloaded SUVs in 2008 when the price of gas spiked, but more permanent.
Automobile makers do not get to dictate what their customers do with the cars they built. If the buyer wants to chop the car, make it into a lowrider, put different wheels on, change the paint color, smash it, bury it, or throw it with a trebuchet, there's not a thing the automobile manufacturer can or should be able to do about it. John Lennon's psychedelic Rolls Royce offended some people. Some of these people had nothing to do with the automaker, they were just upset that someone did something they thought inappropriate to a product they admired. Lot of rock stars are great at puncturing sacred cows that people didn't even realize they had.
Some people get all bent out of shape over a flag burning. Others find book burnings offensive. Get over it. Let them throw copies of Huckleberry Finn, Harry Potter, and the Dungeon Master's Guide in the flames all they like. Nothing is lost, even more so if digitization has not been blocked. The best the arsonists can hope for is that nothing comes of it, as it could backfire and raise awareness of those works. On numerous occasions, vandals have tried to destroy works of art. If there are digital copies, destruction is practically impossible. In any case, a great work like the Mona Lisa can last only so long. It will inevitably deteriorate. If idiotic copyright laws and museum policies have prevented us from copying it into a more permanent form, for posterity, we deserve to lose it to the next time some insane person loses his mind and attacks the art. Rarities have been lost because the owner decided to destroy it. If there are good copies everywhere, the owner of an original can't deny a work to the rest of us out of spite, malice, revenge, or whatever, can't demand a big ransom not to destroy it. Can't mutilate it either through reckless bureaucratic policy, as was done to many paintings, including Rembrandt's Night Watch when they cut the painting down to size to fit a space. Then there are always Acts of God. Art has been lost in fires, floods, earthquakes, and other natural disasters.
I don't see why a work of art should be any different from a car. If the artists don't like it, it should be their responsibility to make copies or documents describing how to recreate it, before handing one over to a buyer. It's not like making a copy is so hard any more. Indeed, the biggest barriers can be legal ones.