nuclear provides solid, reliable baseline power with fewer deaths per kWh than any other scheme in existence
At least 2 mistakes here.
First, nuclear proponents keep making the mistake, deliberately it seems, of measuring safety by numbers of deaths. By that measure, a small passenger airplane crash could be more disastrous than a big, strong hurricane hitting a major population center. You can't ignore the hazards of radioactive contamination of large areas of land. You can brush off Chernobyl as a sloppy operation run by a reckless Communist society, but Fukushima was not that.
And second, they were comparing nuclear power to coal only. You broadened that to "any other scheme in existence". I agree that nuclear power is preferable to coal. But is it preferable to wind, water, and solar? I think not.
Fukushima was a demonstration that corruption and greed can undermine any safety measures, with disastrous consequences. We as a society had decided how much risk we were willing to accept in exchange for the benefits of nuclear power, and then these operators cut corners. Thanks to them, we were taking much greater risks than we knew. They knew, knew, that the plant could not withstand an earthquake, but instead of fixing the problems, they tried to cover it up and hope no earthquake would strike. When disaster did strike, they kept trying to cover, claiming the plant could have handled an 8.0 quake, but this at 9.0 was of unprecedented magnitude. Lies. There was precedent for such large quakes, but they ignored it. It is also standard practice to engineer in safety margins. That excuse of "unprecedented magnitude", even if it were true, is no excuse at all. It should have been able to withstand an even greater magnitude quake. Oil operators have done similar things time and time again. Deepwater Horizon was another example of a corner cutting, rush job that went bad, and confirmation of fears over the dangers of offshore oil drilling. The Exxon Valdez was another on more than one level. It was a single hull tanker. Now tankers are double hull. It had not been properly maintained, and radar intended to detect impending collision was not functional. The crew also was overworked, tired and rushed. Then there was the emergency equipment that was supposed to be on hand to respond to such a disaster. Turned out, much of that equipment existed only on paper.
I don't mind a gamble with eyes open, but I'm not interested in a rigged game with such extreme negative consequences, and that's what nuclear power looks like. Should operators be trusted? No way! Can we even trust that regulators won't be subverted, gamed, or fooled? Sadly, no. To properly asses the real risks of nuclear power, we have to account for these human factors. A dam failure is bad, but relatively short lived. Incompetent and corrupt handling of such a facility is a peril we can live with. The affected land can be cleaned up and put back to use the moment the waters recede. Not so with radioactive contamination, in which we might have to wait centuries before the contaminated land is safe to use again. Even oil spills, which can have effects spanning many years, are not as bad. If we greatly improve our ability to clean up radiation, so that contaminated land can be made safe in a few years, instead of centuries, then, sure, use nuclear power. But until such advances are in hand, no.
I don't see why the people paying to see the artist live should subsidise me by letting me pay nothing to listen to the music at home.
Then is it against your morals to listen to the radio? Or perhaps you consider radio paid because you have to listen to ads. You never surf to another station when an ad break comes, is that right?
Why do you talk as if the only way for artists to make money is live concerts or sales of copies of recordings? There are other ways, and they do work. The industry should have been working more on them in the 20 years since it became obvious that the ability to make copies was very democratic and both impossible and harmful to attempt to keep from the public. Instead, they have opted for this idiotic dead end of trying to deny copying to the public, and they've not been at all scrupulous about it. They've made idiots of themselves, again. This time, they've pushed this lost cause so hard and so long they've also made themselves into public enemies. Recall that they fought cassettes, VCRs, AM radio, and even player pianos. 100 years ago, they were actually opposed to copyright, fearing the cost and administrative overhead of securing rights to use various artists' work. Hollywood was set up on the west coast to get as far away as possible from the rights holders of Broadway, who were abusing their "rights" to make it difficult to employ the then new technology of film. Those rights were meant to ensure that artists receive compensation, not stop progress. Now the RIAA and MPAA are the crotchety, moralizing, hypocritical, senile, negative deniers of reality, sense, and progress. They're so afraid of losing what they never really had that they won't reach out and embrace a far richer world. That's okay. But they're also greedy, trying to prevent us from embracing it, and that's not okay. They want easy copying for themselves, and think they have a natural right to keep easy copying from the rest of us. They've done a good job of confusing the issues and the public, convincing many that if we don't stamp out piracy, the world of music will end. They're dinosaurs trying to pretend that the meteor never struck.
Well, I have a relative who is a Christian faith healer. Doesn't believe in evolution either, of course. But she's actually quite intelligent, except when it comes to critical thinking. Has this fanatic zeal about her that she readily engages to fend off inconvenient facts and logic. As far as I can tell, she really believes in her own nonsense, and isn't a fraud in that way. I don't know if her intervention has lead to anyone else's premature death, but it's a strong possibility. When she herself needs medical care, she fights but eventually caves and sees a real doctor. Nearly killed herself off by not getting help soon enough for acute appendicitis, and went only after it burst. You'd think that when the pain is so bad that you can't walk and have to crawl around, you'd seek help. That however was only partly due to faith in faith healing. She's also a chip off the old block, as her father also did not see a doctor soon enough when he had the same problem, and he was never into religious hooey, he was just stubborn. (It burst but he lived. Took him months to fully recover.) What mental contortions she does to rationalize all that, I couldn't say. But her intelligence only serves to make her more convincing to the suckers. She knows to keep a wary distance from me, however, as I've burst her bubbles on several occasions. Some years ago she related this nutty conspiracy about a mysterious 6 story building (with a 6x6 layout of rooms on each floor, I suppose) in Belgium, in which all the vital statistics such as name, address, number, and a few other details of everyone in the world were being stored for nefarious purposes. She was in shock after I pointed out that a stack of CDs one person could carry around could hold enough data for that, no need for a whole building. Sometimes those conspiracy theories get laughably dated.
As for suffering from incurable or very serious problems, not always. She once related how she had faith healed... a lawn mower! That's right, a lawn mower. I had thought faith healing was reserved for big problems, but if a lawn mower is a fit subject, I guess nothing is too petty for a little divine intervention.
I don't know that anything can be done for her, to straighten out her messed up thinking.
I was on a project like that. They were to migrate an existing application suite, with at least 20 years of cruft, from an ancient version of Informix to MySQL. In 6 weeks. Maybe a crack team of the very best could have made that deadline, but this was a group of mediocre to bad code monkeys. They brought me in when they had reached the 3 month mark and the end was nowhere in sight.
Only one guy, the DBA, was questioning the schedule, trying to tell everyone that a database migration was not a simple little project. But, as usual, the problem was political. The team had been put in a position that if the company didn't win the contract, there would be no work for them and they would be let go. So of course they massively underestimated the work and ignored the contrarian. Better to get 12 more weeks of pay than 0 more weeks. If the company thought these barely capable code monkeys were going to be selfless in a situation like that, they were hallucinating. The company lost a bundle. The customer got one hell of a deal, and was still unhappy, with some justification as they had been basically promised the moon and told that despite their doubts we could deliver because we were the experts and they weren't.
Yes! We don't mean silly little perks like free snacks, we mean fair management. Something superficial like free snacks sours real fast when crony packed bad management chooses and guides projects poorly, falls for the bullshit artists' cons, hires incompetents instead of good job candidates over stupidly discriminatory reasons such as age, demands death marches in a desperate attempt to get back on the insane schedule they created and should have discussed more before committing to it, then successfully blames the mess on the super smart techies they wouldn't heed because, well, those guys are smart and should have known better.
If there was REALLY a serious shortage, they would...
Stop screwing over US college students with bad student loan deals? And actually offer free college education. Scholarships are something, but I think that college should be paid for in the same way high school is. Stop looking at college as some sort of privilege that students ought to pay for, when the truth is that we need all those educated people to run our democracies. Instead, we've seen the forces of anti-intellectualism and greed enjoy too much success at dismantling public spending on college, out of some moral notion that people should pay their way on this matter, and for the sake of balancing budgets that are not in crisis. We don't ask high school students to pay their way, why is college so different? We are amply repaid whenever we invest in education. Asking those who have nothing to pay their way, who can't be reasonably expected to have yet held a job that pays enough to afford college, is just plain greedy, and very unfair to those who come from poor families. I hear tuition has taken quite a jump in recent years.
None of my high paying jobs have been any fun. Seems that enjoying your job is somehow immoral. Many managers think that if you aren't stressed, you must not have enough work to do. A bigger problem is that if you're on a job at a foundering company, it doesn't matter how good your work is. The company is failing, and some will be looking for others to blame.
The only fun job I had was a low paying one. Because it was low pay, I didn't care about being fired. Nor did I have to worry about it. Would have been easy to find a higher paying job, and they were not going to be able to easily replace me, not at that pay rate. Actually did a better job than if I had been under the gun.
The most stressful job I ever had was one in which the project didn't just fail, it never got off the ground because the various factions were too busy fighting each other to agree on what to do. All sides were slamming everyone involved. If I didn't present a plan, I got beat up for that. When I did present a plan, I got beat up on the pretext of it being inadequate, and me being too stupid to understand that it wasn't adequate. The actual reason was that the manager was a fool who felt it was necessary for his job security that the plan be his plan. Didn't address the substance of any of the ideas at all, in large part because he didn't have the competence to do so. All that mattered to him was that his name was on it. He often took others' plans, tweaked them in ways he thought made them more palatable but actually made them less credible, such as by removing time allotted to deal with various difficulties we were trying to anticipate. Naturally, he'd harshly criticize the person responsible for putting in such "negative" things. And every time the other teams tore "his" plan apart. Then it was quickly revealed that it wasn't actually his plan after all, it was someone else's plan even when it wasn't. He would of course return the favor and try to rip their plans apart. In hindsight, I should have just quit that job, it was that bad. In the end, in a desperate attempt by management to save their own necks, the lowly among us were blamed and "quitted". But it didn't work, and shortly after, the company lost the contract and they lost their jobs.
No doubt McJobs have horrible managers, but their power and leverage is more limited. A McJob simply doesn't have the same level of responsibility, and there's not a whole lot they can credibly blame on some poor peon. Nor is the threat of wrecking your career particularly credible. When you have more responsibility, you can be criticized and blamed for more things, be more easily made into a scapegoat, and your career can be ruined. Have you ever heard of anyone going on a murder/suicide frenzy over a McJob? I haven't. Possibly the closest are the "going postal" incidents. Suicides happen with a bit more frequency in jobs with more responsibility.
King John of England is a very ironic figure who ended up doing a lot of good that he did not intend. It is through his oppressive rule and heavy taxation that he drove everyone to form a coalition against him, to spell out more precisely just what powers the king did not have. This was codified in the famous document, the Magna Carta.
I wonder if Myhrvold might help manage the same thing with patents. He doesn't have as much authority as King John, so I hardly think he could do this singlehandedly, but he may contribute to the downfall of the patent system. Myhrvold may be sophisticated enough to realize this. In which case, is it intentional? Is he sly? Or does he think the patent system is unsinkable? Or maybe he doesn't care one way or the other, and is ready to ride patents forever or switch horses should patents founder.
How about it Myhrvold, are you trying to make patents so burdensome that it causes a big enough backlash to spur some badly needed changes, or do you think the patent system isn't going anywhere, or something else?
It goes back to one big reason why we still haven't had the Year of Linux on the Desktop. One of the areas Linux used to flop on was intermittent hardware. If the user forgot to turn the printer on or plug in the network cable, or wanted to use a flash drive, hook up a camera to a USB port, or even use a venerable CD, Linux would miss. Often the system would not detect anything, not respond, and the user would get no feedback. Or it might respond in a stupidly wasteful way. For instance, a common default configuration for CUPS in the event of a problem was to store print jobs until they could be printed. If a user makes repeated tries to print the same document before discovering that the printer wasn't on, then the system might spew out many unwanted copies the instant the printer is turned on. We used to hack around this with various experimental and troublesome daemons. If it was sort of working, a USB drive repeatedly inserted and removed could be assigned a different mount point every time. Desktop environments tried to solve this problem, without much success, and gradually people came to appreciate that we needed something better deeper in.
A few years back, developers rolled out HAL and udev. HAL turned out to be a mess, and has been dropped in favor of udev only. This delayed matters another few years. Once HAL was gone, it seemed we were at last near to resolving all these issues with udev alone. Then the udev maintainer started really screwing it up. systemd enters the picture about this time. The basic idea is good. Make a more robust initialization system that can better keep tabs on daemons, which will allow better control of hardware. But they may be trying for too much. They aren't replacing just init, they're also replacing the logging utilities, network management, and perhaps other things. This is against the core principle of UNIX, which is for a utility to do one tiny thing, and do it well. systemd has lots of interdependencies, and is still pretty new and unproven. It's sort of like busybox in that it's many pieces rolled into one, but without the extensive testing of the individual components. It also doesn't have much documentation. As I read it, the udev maintainer decided to make udev dependent upon systemd, for no real good reason. And suddenly systemd is a monster, a block through which everything must pass. If systemd is broken, then kernel development could stall until it's fixed. Even Torvalds complained. Said it was forcing distros to rush into systemd. Arch is one of the most cutting edge, so it figures that we'd see systemd pop up there first.
If systemd turns out to be a badly done attempt at replacing init that cannot be fixed up, it could set back the Linux desktop by another few years. As for udev, which has gained such a following that now even the kernel depends on it, the maintainer appears to be attempting to abuse his power to gain more control, force kernel maintainers into extra work. This sudden requirement for systemd may be a part of that. But now udev has been forked, so we'll see.
People here seem to love Arch Linux. I liked it and still run Arch, but now I don't like it so much anymore because they moved to systemd. I'm hunting around for another distro.
I have to agree about the abuse on the Arch forums. Most of the time they're civil. But question systemd, and you'll at best be ignored. Probably you will be flamed. I was. I also tried Arch Linux on an ARM device, ran into problems and posted about it on the forum. One of their people took it badly and really unloaded on me. Finally another guy answered the main question. A few days later when I went back to reread it, I found the entire thread had been deleted.
It's the employers who made this so chilling by reaching for the pink slips. People ought to give that aspect more consideration. Send a message to the employers that termination over something like that is too extreme.
If not for the firings, this incident would be no big deal. Reprimand a few people, make sure they understand they acted inappropriately, and move on. Without the firings, the Twitter shaming would be the worst of it, for both sides, since it's nigh impossible to have things forgotten once they're online.
iostream? Teach that piece of garbage? stdio is much better. stdio is faster, and a better known standard. It's used in lots of places outside C/C++. For instance, if you know stdio, you have a leg up on Python. Perl has a printf library function. There's even a printf Unix command line tool.
Are people still using early 90's Borland compilers? When g++ is freely available, why?? They have a nice IDE, but they're very buggy. Try to manipulate more than 64K of data, and you'll quickly run into some of those Borland bugs. Their compilers from Turbo C++ 2.0 up to Borland C++ 4.5 for sure, and I think 5.1, would all screw up the segmentation. In the debugger, you'd see two variables change when only one was supposed to, because the compiler had assigned the same memory location to both. Didn't matter what memory model you picked, Borland C++ couldn't keep segments straight.
One aspect I find troubling about all this is the response of the employers. 2 people were fired. Not just publicly reprimanded, not merely denied a raise, not put on unpaid leave for a week, fired. Guess finding replacements is easy. Must be a lot of skilled people out there who are unemployed. I note also that the employers aren't bothering to explain. They get to fire people without apology or transparency, and no one thinks anything of that. But if a peon makes some sexist crack, it's the firing squad. Sure, we all understand why they were fired, the employers don't have to explain that. What I'd like to hear is why they chose termination rather than some more mild punishment. Or am I out of touch, and being fired is not such a big deal these days? Last I heard, losing your job ranks up there as one of the top traumatic events of life, with the only clearly worse things being the death of a spouse or child, and I think that's still true, though much depends on the circumstances. If it was only some temporary, low paying job, it's not so bad. If it's something more but you didn't mess up, it's bad, but you still have your self-respect. What's horrible is to be judged and found wanting, and to see that they just might have a point or two, because you did screw up badly.
I wonder how significant this black mark is on their records. Will they ever be able to get another job in IT, or will they have to change careers? Ms. Richards is radioactive now. No one is going to want to be within a mile of her, let alone converse with her. Might cost you your job, and we all know how hard it is to get another job. How many men, and perhaps women as well, will feel now that if they see her at some conference, they should be careful not to be anywhere near her, and if she sits near them, they'll get up and move away. Unfair? She deserves some grief, particularly as I understand she even acted a bit smug about having gotten someone else fired. But if she ends up being driven out of IT altogether, then yes, I'd say that's unfair. The extreme reaction of the employers made the stakes way too high, makes being around her too dangerous. What will we have to say for ourselves if the ostracism gets so bad that she exercises the same option Aaron Swartz did?
Pro sports players do worse and get slapped around with a fine, and maybe have to sit out a game or three. Good athletes are valuable. Techies aren't.
DRM is illogical nonsense. The concept simply does not work. You give someone an encrypted copy of some digital content, and you give their machine a key so it can unlock it and they can view it, hoping that the machine will honor the system, can protect the key, and that no other machine can read it. And that consumers will accept the arrangement and not employ cracks, and also not use the "analog hole". None of that is true. There isn't a single copy protection scheme that has not proven almost ludicrously easy to break. They're so pathetic that 16 year old kids with a minimum of consumer grade equipment can break them. Machines cannot protect keys. Keys have to be readable so the machine itself can use them. Someone is always willing to build or program another machine that does not honor the system, and which is of course quite capable of reading the key and running the decryption algorithm. Other ways have no hope of working any better. Put the key in "suicide" ROM? It can still be deduced. If not, can simply tap into the signal after the decryption. Once broken, the unencumbered copy can be put on the Internet, and that's that.
What little success DRM has enjoyed is purely through the inconvenience factor. Where it has worked, for instance by requiring communication with a remote server, consumers end up rejecting the system when they inevitably get screwed out of their expensive collection because the servers were shut down.
Lot of people, including you it seems, just don't fully understand. DRM is nonsense. Standardized nonsense is still nonsense. It makes as much sense as standardizing on the exact sort of Creationism/Intelligent Design that should be taught in school, which is to say it doesn't make any sense at all. Intelligent Design is not science, and shouldn't be in school at all, except perhaps as an object lesson in bad reasoning. They start with a conclusion, and then do their utmost to force the facts to fit. DRM starts with a business model, then tries to force nature to fit. Reality simply does not work that way. Shout, and you create echoes. Broadcast a signal, and millions can receive it. People gather round a receiver, and create many memories. Copying is a fact of nature, just as gravity is.
Let's not junk up standards, however good or bad, with nonsense.
Are you suggesting Nixon wasn't such a bad fellow? He shouldn't have resigned over Watergate, and Congress shouldn't have threatened impeachment?
Actually, I always thought Watergate was a shade too petty to warrant impeachment. Bad, yes. Maybe it was such a breach of trust that it did warrant an impeachment, and maybe not. But I think Watergate was more in the nature of the last straw, and Nixon had done enough other things to deserve the boot. Why else was he known as "Tricky Dick"? This October Surprise, the prolonging of the Vietnam War, is a far worse crime than Watergate. And if LBJ and Humphrey both knew about it, how many others knew? Seems likely many Democrats in Congress would have heard.
Yes, Nixon accomplished some good things. That's no reason to excuse murder and treason. There are plenty of other people who could have accomplished the good without the bad. But so long as he never did anything else bad, never even made noises that he might do such a thing again, seems the rest of the politicians were grudgingly willing to let it slide, not for his sake but for the sake of the country, of not rocking the boat. And then Watergate came along. In hindsight, seems they shouldn't have let Nixon's treason go.
Recently we heard of Reagan's October Surprise, encouraging Iran to extend the hostage crisis. Wasn't long before we learned all about the Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction that weren't. Wag the Dog was obviously about the possibility that someone in Clinton's position of being caught cheating on his wife would start a war to distract everyone, but it seems Hollywood attacked the wrong party. The Republicans had already done something like that, these October Surprises, more than once. Coupled with their assault on science, their lying propaganda, and their love of war, everyone ought to be afraid of letting the Republicans ever have the reins of power again. Who can guess what unnecessary, costly war they will get us into next, if they get the chance.
I have noticed more and more people who, frustrated with how bad the current law is, are supporting abolition just to be done with the whole thing. This is a dangerous side effect of copyright maximalism, IMO.
Why is abolition dangerous? My own preference is that both copyright and patent law be abolished. Keep trademarks, but put in protections to prevent trademarks from being made to function as de facto copyright and patent law. Same with national secrets, keep them but with curbs to prevent them from being abused more than they already are. (Secrecy is of course routinely abused to cover up problems and violations.) I think that in the US, nothing less than a constitutional amendment, a Freedom of Knowledge Amendment, will protect our right to share knowledge, and settle these issues once and for all. The right to knowledge ought to rank up there with 1st Amendment rights to free speech, religion, and assembly. We still very much need those 1st amendment rights even today, as some people constantly scheme against it. Also, it has to be an amendment because the copyright clause is in the US Constitution.
It is indeed the extremism of the pro-copyright forces that have lead me to this position. Maybe slavery wouldn't have been so bad if there weren't abusive slave owners. For many of these owners, slave women were used to populate what amounted to a harem. Trying to patch up the institution of slavery by dribbling out a few more rights, by for instance making it illegal to have sex with slaves, was not going to work. Only abolition of slavery altogether could head off the problems. And we still have attempts at de facto enslavement, still have people seeking that kind of power and control over others. The "company town" quickly comes to mind. We'll never eliminate all such schemes, but at least we have broad agreement that slavery is immoral.
And that's what we need for knowledge: broad agreement that locking away knowledge is immoral, and that sharing is good, desirable, and a fundamental right. It's been too easy to confuse the public, and persuade many people that they don't have rights that they actually do have. We've had craziness such as governments using copyright to monetize access to the law! We have poor children being denied educational material, over fears that might somehow hurt publishers of textbooks. We have scientists being silenced, technically not allowed to hand out copies of their own works that the public paid for, because they were forced to turn over all copyright to a publisher, in order to get published at all. We've had embarrassing cases such as Dmitry Sklyarov. When a person is technically in violation of copyright just for being overheard while humming a copyrighted song, when people doubt that they have the right to discuss certain subjects such as the details of how to reverse engineer a product lest that somehow infringe on someone's copyright, fair use just isn't enough. George Hotz is another embarrassing case for the Land of the Free. I think that like slavery, copyrights and patents have to go. Until they do, we will continue to see these abusive attempts at extreme control of knowledge enjoy too much success.
I can think of just one way in which copyright does work, as a sort of publicly known usage and endorsement. The example I have in mind is the use of a song in a commercial. (I recall a case in which Nike used the Beatle's Revolution in a commercial, without permission. Nike was sued, and lost.) We can know beyond doubt who the authors are, and who is using the songs. Those users are not private individuals privately using knowledge for their own enjoyment, they are commercial entities seeking to sell products and services to the public, and as such must broadcast to the public. But similar to plagiarism, this need not be covered by copyright. We can enshrine a particular right to compensation in this instance to some other much more limited law. Call it "commercial use right", or "
Yes, move. Get off the first floor. If you can, get a room at the end of a wing. Top floor can also help. It's one fewer wall and ceiling with noisy neighbors, as well as just further away from everyone. That's what I had, but I overlooked one thing. The dorm didn't have A/C, which I learned was a good thing. (In the dorms with A/C, you couldn't turn it off. Middle of January, and freezing air is blasting out of the vent.) However they installed a small unit for the study room which happened to be 2 floors below. The A/C was on the roof of the study room, right outside my window.
As for tapestries and rugs, see if you can persuade your immediate neighbors to put a few in their rooms. I learned that sound deadening works a lot better inside a computer case rather than outside it, and I'd imagine it'd be the same for dorm rooms. And it doesn't take much. Just one rug really knocks down the noise level of a room with a hard floor.
Beyond that, cultivate some patience. The first month of the fall semester is the rowdiest, but most of the noisy party animals drop out astonishingly quickly. Just about every day in October, you'll see someone clearing out, loading their possessions in the parking lot, never to be seen on campus again. By November, it will be a lot quieter. The noise level picks up a little bit for the start of the spring semester, but not near as much as for fall.
I still think the 2 majors parties have enough differences to qualify as 2 separate parties. But both parties have moved so far to the right they could look about the same to the real left. Today's Democrats are actually about the same as Eisenhower Republicans, while the Republicans have gone so far to the right they're flirting with Fascism. Not that they see that.
On some important matters however, they are the same. If you want Wall Street properly policed, with jail time for these criminals who tanked the economy in 2008 through massive fraud in housing, persons such as Fuld and Mozilo, who should you vote for? It's why the Republicans lost in 2008, but then the Democrats basically let these sleaze bags woo them with fat campaign contributions and the like, and carefully kept their distance from the Occupy Wall Street movement. It's just nuts that not one of these scoundrels has seen any prison time. Madoff didn't run a crooked mortgage program, he ran a plain old pyramid scheme. So his imprisonment is not much of a deterrent. But the rest merely paid fines without being required to admit any guilt. The fines, while large by most standards, didn't really hurt them. They're still free, technically innocent, and very, very rich. The most trouble they've faced is the damage to their reputations and the public censure, but they're so rich they don't need to care about any of that. They still have far too easy a time finding people who are impressed by huge wads of cash. Some real consequences is all it would take to rein in Wall Street excess, but somehow neither party seems willing to hold them to account.
I would like to see a few more viable political parties. We have Libertarians, Greens, and now even Pirates, to name only a few, but if any of them have ever won an election in the US, I haven't heard about it. The Reform Party that Perot founded actually landed a governorship when Jesse Ventura won in Minnesota, but that proved to be a one time freak.
I'd also like to see big changes in the Republican Party. They've gone stupid crazy. The crazy has been building for a long time, and it finally boiled over and ran the party off the rails under W. They've become nothing more than an unholy alliance to use lies and propaganda to advance two rather different and incompatible agendas: 1) the rich shall get richer, and 2) morals based on religion. How these social conservatives can focus on the pro-life issue and ignore the deadly sin of Greed continuously committed by their Wall Street "allies", I don't understand. When Big Tobacco pioneered "doubt is our product", the social conservatives should have seen that as lies from Satan. They utterly failed to perceive the dishonesty, and instead embraced those techniques to "teach the controversy" over evolution! They've turned anti-science, because science is antithetical to propaganda. Indeed, they don't understand science too well, seeing it as nothing more than just propaganda itself! They resort to trickery and force such as voter caging, to push their agenda, and think they hold the moral high ground.
As for the pro-business wing of the party, they're fools to employ propaganda to advance their narrow interests. It's strange how business is rather admired and at the same time hated for their high handed, callous disregard for everything but the bottom line. I wonder how many Republican voters passionately hate WalMart, for instance. Business complains of a shortage of skilled workers in IT, but they refuse to countenance government funding of higher education. Somehow, educating our children up through high school at no cost to them is our duty, as well as just good sense, but college is something they should pay for themselves because they need to learn to stop mooching off their parents and the state. Never mind the catch-22 problem that without a college degree it's a lot harder to get a decent paying job with which one can afford a college education. I'd like to see them roll clear back to the principles of the Eisenhower days, really roll back, not pretend as if all the good things about the 1950s have not changed. If they can't do it, then I'd just as soon see them implode.
There's more to life than competition through violence. Societies organized to solve various problems, only one of which was the problem of how to improve at meting out violence. Ancient societies created irrigation systems, built cities and monuments, kept records, did exploration and research, appeased the gods, and made decisions.
Possibly the ancient society closest to your thinking was the Assyrian Empire. They subjugated all their neighbors through violence. Consequently, they were despised. When they lost their grip, their subjects destroyed them. Violent oppression just does not work for long.
I've heard pretty much all the greatest classical music. It's good, but I've run out, and have had to look elsewhere for new material. Symphony orchestras aren't the place to look. They seem more interested in telling you that you're a dirty rotten pirate for even thinking of recording the music as they play, even when it's over 100 years old. The Meyerson in Dallas is plastered with signs that say recording devices are not allowed. They really seem to fear that if digital recordings leak out, there won't be anything left for them to play. Lame. No young person will have much sympathy for that attitude. I sure don't feel their phantom pains. Indeed, if they are helping to prop up extreme copyright, I'd as soon see them die. I want to know why they don't seek out new stuff. Is it that they're leaning too hard on copyright? Get out of the rut, quit being so boring. Where's some new material? Who composes orchestral music today?
Soundtracks have some good stuff-- who could not like the theme to Star Wars? Then there are video games. Established music venues were dismissive until fairly recently, but finally they are recognizing that some games actually have good, original music. I think there's a great future in synthesizing everything. The orchestra as it exists presently is obsolete, and an impediment.
You seem to be suggesting that science is really religion, or at the least that religion is a form of science. We do not know why gravity exists, but we "believe" in it anyway, and therefore scientists have faith in things they cannot fully explain, which makes science no different than religion.
No. We observe, and we model. Creating a model necessarily involves defining terms and relationships, which may be wrong or incomplete. We come up with many models. And we test the models to determine which ones best fit what we observe. Being less than 100% correct does not mean we're a bunch of cultists. We do not resort to filling in gaps with gods, we simply recognize that we just don't know yet. We observe that there seems to be an attractive force between masses, we have named this force "gravity", and most crucially, we have left the door open for other and further interpretations. That's the popular view of gravity, as a fundamental, axiomatic force, but another way of looking at it is that it's a warping of the space time continuum. Two masses are not mysteriously attracted to each other, instead they cause a warping of space, and it is this warping, that is, space itself, that causes the two masses to move toward each other.
The gods explanation is not at all scientific, as it invokes supernatural agencies which are not testable and not falsifiable. Religion was not early attempts at explaining for the sake of explanation. Cultists tried to explain everything whether they knew anything or not, in order to make themselves authority figures. Explanation was only a means to power and control, not a desirable thing in itself. So of course once something has been "explained", the last thing they want is to have to spend time revisiting the matter. The Catholic Church in particular once supported a great deal of scientific inquiry, funding many observatories, but it wasn't out of a spirit of inquiry, it was bravado. It was also an attempt to stay ahead of the game, by discovering things first so they could be ready with an explanation when a new discovery became popular knowledge. They were so sure, had to be sure lest the masses doubt them, that this was safe because the only possible result of all this exploration would be a confirmation of the correctness of their religion. When things didn't work out that way, some of them got ugly. Galileo was forced to recant, with the understanding that if he ever dared utter heresy again, he would be burned at the stake. It wasn't just the priests, the entire membership engaged in this "holier than thou", sanctimonious putting down of rival explanations, going further with this than even many of the priests wished. Some priests are of course nothing more than exploitative, greedy, power hungry tyrants who are ready to take up any shtick that will serve this end, and they see religion merely as the most convenient vehicle, and do not care what's right. Some mean well, and sincerely try to use their authority for the greater good, but constantly run into difficulties caused by the authoritarian style of the entire organization, such as the flock's tendency to dependency. And of course, the flock's vicious repudiation of any threat to the rationale for their beliefs and self justifications. Many priests are quietly embarrassed by the excesses of the flock, particularly when those Bible thumpers get out there and make a lot of contrary noise about things we already know, but what can they do? The Papacy can declare that evolution is not contrary to their teachings all they like, but the flock can and often does ignore them.
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nuclear provides solid, reliable baseline power with fewer deaths per kWh than any other scheme in existence
At least 2 mistakes here.
First, nuclear proponents keep making the mistake, deliberately it seems, of measuring safety by numbers of deaths. By that measure, a small passenger airplane crash could be more disastrous than a big, strong hurricane hitting a major population center. You can't ignore the hazards of radioactive contamination of large areas of land. You can brush off Chernobyl as a sloppy operation run by a reckless Communist society, but Fukushima was not that.
And second, they were comparing nuclear power to coal only. You broadened that to "any other scheme in existence". I agree that nuclear power is preferable to coal. But is it preferable to wind, water, and solar? I think not.
Fukushima was a demonstration that corruption and greed can undermine any safety measures, with disastrous consequences. We as a society had decided how much risk we were willing to accept in exchange for the benefits of nuclear power, and then these operators cut corners. Thanks to them, we were taking much greater risks than we knew. They knew, knew, that the plant could not withstand an earthquake, but instead of fixing the problems, they tried to cover it up and hope no earthquake would strike. When disaster did strike, they kept trying to cover, claiming the plant could have handled an 8.0 quake, but this at 9.0 was of unprecedented magnitude. Lies. There was precedent for such large quakes, but they ignored it. It is also standard practice to engineer in safety margins. That excuse of "unprecedented magnitude", even if it were true, is no excuse at all. It should have been able to withstand an even greater magnitude quake. Oil operators have done similar things time and time again. Deepwater Horizon was another example of a corner cutting, rush job that went bad, and confirmation of fears over the dangers of offshore oil drilling. The Exxon Valdez was another on more than one level. It was a single hull tanker. Now tankers are double hull. It had not been properly maintained, and radar intended to detect impending collision was not functional. The crew also was overworked, tired and rushed. Then there was the emergency equipment that was supposed to be on hand to respond to such a disaster. Turned out, much of that equipment existed only on paper.
I don't mind a gamble with eyes open, but I'm not interested in a rigged game with such extreme negative consequences, and that's what nuclear power looks like. Should operators be trusted? No way! Can we even trust that regulators won't be subverted, gamed, or fooled? Sadly, no. To properly asses the real risks of nuclear power, we have to account for these human factors. A dam failure is bad, but relatively short lived. Incompetent and corrupt handling of such a facility is a peril we can live with. The affected land can be cleaned up and put back to use the moment the waters recede. Not so with radioactive contamination, in which we might have to wait centuries before the contaminated land is safe to use again. Even oil spills, which can have effects spanning many years, are not as bad. If we greatly improve our ability to clean up radiation, so that contaminated land can be made safe in a few years, instead of centuries, then, sure, use nuclear power. But until such advances are in hand, no.
I don't see why the people paying to see the artist live should subsidise me by letting me pay nothing to listen to the music at home.
Then is it against your morals to listen to the radio? Or perhaps you consider radio paid because you have to listen to ads. You never surf to another station when an ad break comes, is that right?
Why do you talk as if the only way for artists to make money is live concerts or sales of copies of recordings? There are other ways, and they do work. The industry should have been working more on them in the 20 years since it became obvious that the ability to make copies was very democratic and both impossible and harmful to attempt to keep from the public. Instead, they have opted for this idiotic dead end of trying to deny copying to the public, and they've not been at all scrupulous about it. They've made idiots of themselves, again. This time, they've pushed this lost cause so hard and so long they've also made themselves into public enemies. Recall that they fought cassettes, VCRs, AM radio, and even player pianos. 100 years ago, they were actually opposed to copyright, fearing the cost and administrative overhead of securing rights to use various artists' work. Hollywood was set up on the west coast to get as far away as possible from the rights holders of Broadway, who were abusing their "rights" to make it difficult to employ the then new technology of film. Those rights were meant to ensure that artists receive compensation, not stop progress. Now the RIAA and MPAA are the crotchety, moralizing, hypocritical, senile, negative deniers of reality, sense, and progress. They're so afraid of losing what they never really had that they won't reach out and embrace a far richer world. That's okay. But they're also greedy, trying to prevent us from embracing it, and that's not okay. They want easy copying for themselves, and think they have a natural right to keep easy copying from the rest of us. They've done a good job of confusing the issues and the public, convincing many that if we don't stamp out piracy, the world of music will end. They're dinosaurs trying to pretend that the meteor never struck.
Yes. Internet service costs money.
If you are on some free Internet plan, do tell.
Well, I have a relative who is a Christian faith healer. Doesn't believe in evolution either, of course. But she's actually quite intelligent, except when it comes to critical thinking. Has this fanatic zeal about her that she readily engages to fend off inconvenient facts and logic. As far as I can tell, she really believes in her own nonsense, and isn't a fraud in that way. I don't know if her intervention has lead to anyone else's premature death, but it's a strong possibility. When she herself needs medical care, she fights but eventually caves and sees a real doctor. Nearly killed herself off by not getting help soon enough for acute appendicitis, and went only after it burst. You'd think that when the pain is so bad that you can't walk and have to crawl around, you'd seek help. That however was only partly due to faith in faith healing. She's also a chip off the old block, as her father also did not see a doctor soon enough when he had the same problem, and he was never into religious hooey, he was just stubborn. (It burst but he lived. Took him months to fully recover.) What mental contortions she does to rationalize all that, I couldn't say. But her intelligence only serves to make her more convincing to the suckers. She knows to keep a wary distance from me, however, as I've burst her bubbles on several occasions. Some years ago she related this nutty conspiracy about a mysterious 6 story building (with a 6x6 layout of rooms on each floor, I suppose) in Belgium, in which all the vital statistics such as name, address, number, and a few other details of everyone in the world were being stored for nefarious purposes. She was in shock after I pointed out that a stack of CDs one person could carry around could hold enough data for that, no need for a whole building. Sometimes those conspiracy theories get laughably dated.
As for suffering from incurable or very serious problems, not always. She once related how she had faith healed ... a lawn mower! That's right, a lawn mower. I had thought faith healing was reserved for big problems, but if a lawn mower is a fit subject, I guess nothing is too petty for a little divine intervention.
I don't know that anything can be done for her, to straighten out her messed up thinking.
I was on a project like that. They were to migrate an existing application suite, with at least 20 years of cruft, from an ancient version of Informix to MySQL. In 6 weeks. Maybe a crack team of the very best could have made that deadline, but this was a group of mediocre to bad code monkeys. They brought me in when they had reached the 3 month mark and the end was nowhere in sight.
Only one guy, the DBA, was questioning the schedule, trying to tell everyone that a database migration was not a simple little project. But, as usual, the problem was political. The team had been put in a position that if the company didn't win the contract, there would be no work for them and they would be let go. So of course they massively underestimated the work and ignored the contrarian. Better to get 12 more weeks of pay than 0 more weeks. If the company thought these barely capable code monkeys were going to be selfless in a situation like that, they were hallucinating. The company lost a bundle. The customer got one hell of a deal, and was still unhappy, with some justification as they had been basically promised the moon and told that despite their doubts we could deliver because we were the experts and they weren't.
offer better conditions
Yes! We don't mean silly little perks like free snacks, we mean fair management. Something superficial like free snacks sours real fast when crony packed bad management chooses and guides projects poorly, falls for the bullshit artists' cons, hires incompetents instead of good job candidates over stupidly discriminatory reasons such as age, demands death marches in a desperate attempt to get back on the insane schedule they created and should have discussed more before committing to it, then successfully blames the mess on the super smart techies they wouldn't heed because, well, those guys are smart and should have known better.
If there was REALLY a serious shortage, they would...
Stop screwing over US college students with bad student loan deals? And actually offer free college education. Scholarships are something, but I think that college should be paid for in the same way high school is. Stop looking at college as some sort of privilege that students ought to pay for, when the truth is that we need all those educated people to run our democracies. Instead, we've seen the forces of anti-intellectualism and greed enjoy too much success at dismantling public spending on college, out of some moral notion that people should pay their way on this matter, and for the sake of balancing budgets that are not in crisis. We don't ask high school students to pay their way, why is college so different? We are amply repaid whenever we invest in education. Asking those who have nothing to pay their way, who can't be reasonably expected to have yet held a job that pays enough to afford college, is just plain greedy, and very unfair to those who come from poor families. I hear tuition has taken quite a jump in recent years.
None of my high paying jobs have been any fun. Seems that enjoying your job is somehow immoral. Many managers think that if you aren't stressed, you must not have enough work to do. A bigger problem is that if you're on a job at a foundering company, it doesn't matter how good your work is. The company is failing, and some will be looking for others to blame.
The only fun job I had was a low paying one. Because it was low pay, I didn't care about being fired. Nor did I have to worry about it. Would have been easy to find a higher paying job, and they were not going to be able to easily replace me, not at that pay rate. Actually did a better job than if I had been under the gun.
The most stressful job I ever had was one in which the project didn't just fail, it never got off the ground because the various factions were too busy fighting each other to agree on what to do. All sides were slamming everyone involved. If I didn't present a plan, I got beat up for that. When I did present a plan, I got beat up on the pretext of it being inadequate, and me being too stupid to understand that it wasn't adequate. The actual reason was that the manager was a fool who felt it was necessary for his job security that the plan be his plan. Didn't address the substance of any of the ideas at all, in large part because he didn't have the competence to do so. All that mattered to him was that his name was on it. He often took others' plans, tweaked them in ways he thought made them more palatable but actually made them less credible, such as by removing time allotted to deal with various difficulties we were trying to anticipate. Naturally, he'd harshly criticize the person responsible for putting in such "negative" things. And every time the other teams tore "his" plan apart. Then it was quickly revealed that it wasn't actually his plan after all, it was someone else's plan even when it wasn't. He would of course return the favor and try to rip their plans apart. In hindsight, I should have just quit that job, it was that bad. In the end, in a desperate attempt by management to save their own necks, the lowly among us were blamed and "quitted". But it didn't work, and shortly after, the company lost the contract and they lost their jobs.
No doubt McJobs have horrible managers, but their power and leverage is more limited. A McJob simply doesn't have the same level of responsibility, and there's not a whole lot they can credibly blame on some poor peon. Nor is the threat of wrecking your career particularly credible. When you have more responsibility, you can be criticized and blamed for more things, be more easily made into a scapegoat, and your career can be ruined. Have you ever heard of anyone going on a murder/suicide frenzy over a McJob? I haven't. Possibly the closest are the "going postal" incidents. Suicides happen with a bit more frequency in jobs with more responsibility.
King John of England is a very ironic figure who ended up doing a lot of good that he did not intend. It is through his oppressive rule and heavy taxation that he drove everyone to form a coalition against him, to spell out more precisely just what powers the king did not have. This was codified in the famous document, the Magna Carta.
I wonder if Myhrvold might help manage the same thing with patents. He doesn't have as much authority as King John, so I hardly think he could do this singlehandedly, but he may contribute to the downfall of the patent system. Myhrvold may be sophisticated enough to realize this. In which case, is it intentional? Is he sly? Or does he think the patent system is unsinkable? Or maybe he doesn't care one way or the other, and is ready to ride patents forever or switch horses should patents founder.
How about it Myhrvold, are you trying to make patents so burdensome that it causes a big enough backlash to spur some badly needed changes, or do you think the patent system isn't going anywhere, or something else?
It goes back to one big reason why we still haven't had the Year of Linux on the Desktop. One of the areas Linux used to flop on was intermittent hardware. If the user forgot to turn the printer on or plug in the network cable, or wanted to use a flash drive, hook up a camera to a USB port, or even use a venerable CD, Linux would miss. Often the system would not detect anything, not respond, and the user would get no feedback. Or it might respond in a stupidly wasteful way. For instance, a common default configuration for CUPS in the event of a problem was to store print jobs until they could be printed. If a user makes repeated tries to print the same document before discovering that the printer wasn't on, then the system might spew out many unwanted copies the instant the printer is turned on. We used to hack around this with various experimental and troublesome daemons. If it was sort of working, a USB drive repeatedly inserted and removed could be assigned a different mount point every time. Desktop environments tried to solve this problem, without much success, and gradually people came to appreciate that we needed something better deeper in.
A few years back, developers rolled out HAL and udev. HAL turned out to be a mess, and has been dropped in favor of udev only. This delayed matters another few years. Once HAL was gone, it seemed we were at last near to resolving all these issues with udev alone. Then the udev maintainer started really screwing it up. systemd enters the picture about this time. The basic idea is good. Make a more robust initialization system that can better keep tabs on daemons, which will allow better control of hardware. But they may be trying for too much. They aren't replacing just init, they're also replacing the logging utilities, network management, and perhaps other things. This is against the core principle of UNIX, which is for a utility to do one tiny thing, and do it well. systemd has lots of interdependencies, and is still pretty new and unproven. It's sort of like busybox in that it's many pieces rolled into one, but without the extensive testing of the individual components. It also doesn't have much documentation. As I read it, the udev maintainer decided to make udev dependent upon systemd, for no real good reason. And suddenly systemd is a monster, a block through which everything must pass. If systemd is broken, then kernel development could stall until it's fixed. Even Torvalds complained. Said it was forcing distros to rush into systemd. Arch is one of the most cutting edge, so it figures that we'd see systemd pop up there first.
If systemd turns out to be a badly done attempt at replacing init that cannot be fixed up, it could set back the Linux desktop by another few years. As for udev, which has gained such a following that now even the kernel depends on it, the maintainer appears to be attempting to abuse his power to gain more control, force kernel maintainers into extra work. This sudden requirement for systemd may be a part of that. But now udev has been forked, so we'll see.
People here seem to love Arch Linux. I liked it and still run Arch, but now I don't like it so much anymore because they moved to systemd. I'm hunting around for another distro.
I have to agree about the abuse on the Arch forums. Most of the time they're civil. But question systemd, and you'll at best be ignored. Probably you will be flamed. I was. I also tried Arch Linux on an ARM device, ran into problems and posted about it on the forum. One of their people took it badly and really unloaded on me. Finally another guy answered the main question. A few days later when I went back to reread it, I found the entire thread had been deleted.
It's the employers who made this so chilling by reaching for the pink slips. People ought to give that aspect more consideration. Send a message to the employers that termination over something like that is too extreme.
If not for the firings, this incident would be no big deal. Reprimand a few people, make sure they understand they acted inappropriately, and move on. Without the firings, the Twitter shaming would be the worst of it, for both sides, since it's nigh impossible to have things forgotten once they're online.
iostream? Teach that piece of garbage? stdio is much better. stdio is faster, and a better known standard. It's used in lots of places outside C/C++. For instance, if you know stdio, you have a leg up on Python. Perl has a printf library function. There's even a printf Unix command line tool.
Are people still using early 90's Borland compilers? When g++ is freely available, why?? They have a nice IDE, but they're very buggy. Try to manipulate more than 64K of data, and you'll quickly run into some of those Borland bugs. Their compilers from Turbo C++ 2.0 up to Borland C++ 4.5 for sure, and I think 5.1, would all screw up the segmentation. In the debugger, you'd see two variables change when only one was supposed to, because the compiler had assigned the same memory location to both. Didn't matter what memory model you picked, Borland C++ couldn't keep segments straight.
One aspect I find troubling about all this is the response of the employers. 2 people were fired. Not just publicly reprimanded, not merely denied a raise, not put on unpaid leave for a week, fired. Guess finding replacements is easy. Must be a lot of skilled people out there who are unemployed. I note also that the employers aren't bothering to explain. They get to fire people without apology or transparency, and no one thinks anything of that. But if a peon makes some sexist crack, it's the firing squad. Sure, we all understand why they were fired, the employers don't have to explain that. What I'd like to hear is why they chose termination rather than some more mild punishment. Or am I out of touch, and being fired is not such a big deal these days? Last I heard, losing your job ranks up there as one of the top traumatic events of life, with the only clearly worse things being the death of a spouse or child, and I think that's still true, though much depends on the circumstances. If it was only some temporary, low paying job, it's not so bad. If it's something more but you didn't mess up, it's bad, but you still have your self-respect. What's horrible is to be judged and found wanting, and to see that they just might have a point or two, because you did screw up badly.
I wonder how significant this black mark is on their records. Will they ever be able to get another job in IT, or will they have to change careers? Ms. Richards is radioactive now. No one is going to want to be within a mile of her, let alone converse with her. Might cost you your job, and we all know how hard it is to get another job. How many men, and perhaps women as well, will feel now that if they see her at some conference, they should be careful not to be anywhere near her, and if she sits near them, they'll get up and move away. Unfair? She deserves some grief, particularly as I understand she even acted a bit smug about having gotten someone else fired. But if she ends up being driven out of IT altogether, then yes, I'd say that's unfair. The extreme reaction of the employers made the stakes way too high, makes being around her too dangerous. What will we have to say for ourselves if the ostracism gets so bad that she exercises the same option Aaron Swartz did?
Pro sports players do worse and get slapped around with a fine, and maybe have to sit out a game or three. Good athletes are valuable. Techies aren't.
DRM is illogical nonsense. The concept simply does not work. You give someone an encrypted copy of some digital content, and you give their machine a key so it can unlock it and they can view it, hoping that the machine will honor the system, can protect the key, and that no other machine can read it. And that consumers will accept the arrangement and not employ cracks, and also not use the "analog hole". None of that is true. There isn't a single copy protection scheme that has not proven almost ludicrously easy to break. They're so pathetic that 16 year old kids with a minimum of consumer grade equipment can break them. Machines cannot protect keys. Keys have to be readable so the machine itself can use them. Someone is always willing to build or program another machine that does not honor the system, and which is of course quite capable of reading the key and running the decryption algorithm. Other ways have no hope of working any better. Put the key in "suicide" ROM? It can still be deduced. If not, can simply tap into the signal after the decryption. Once broken, the unencumbered copy can be put on the Internet, and that's that.
What little success DRM has enjoyed is purely through the inconvenience factor. Where it has worked, for instance by requiring communication with a remote server, consumers end up rejecting the system when they inevitably get screwed out of their expensive collection because the servers were shut down.
Lot of people, including you it seems, just don't fully understand. DRM is nonsense. Standardized nonsense is still nonsense. It makes as much sense as standardizing on the exact sort of Creationism/Intelligent Design that should be taught in school, which is to say it doesn't make any sense at all. Intelligent Design is not science, and shouldn't be in school at all, except perhaps as an object lesson in bad reasoning. They start with a conclusion, and then do their utmost to force the facts to fit. DRM starts with a business model, then tries to force nature to fit. Reality simply does not work that way. Shout, and you create echoes. Broadcast a signal, and millions can receive it. People gather round a receiver, and create many memories. Copying is a fact of nature, just as gravity is.
Let's not junk up standards, however good or bad, with nonsense.
You missed a big one: patronage. A pity we don't have much of a patronage system in place.
Meanwhile, there's the Humble Bundle model.
Are you suggesting Nixon wasn't such a bad fellow? He shouldn't have resigned over Watergate, and Congress shouldn't have threatened impeachment?
Actually, I always thought Watergate was a shade too petty to warrant impeachment. Bad, yes. Maybe it was such a breach of trust that it did warrant an impeachment, and maybe not. But I think Watergate was more in the nature of the last straw, and Nixon had done enough other things to deserve the boot. Why else was he known as "Tricky Dick"? This October Surprise, the prolonging of the Vietnam War, is a far worse crime than Watergate. And if LBJ and Humphrey both knew about it, how many others knew? Seems likely many Democrats in Congress would have heard.
Yes, Nixon accomplished some good things. That's no reason to excuse murder and treason. There are plenty of other people who could have accomplished the good without the bad. But so long as he never did anything else bad, never even made noises that he might do such a thing again, seems the rest of the politicians were grudgingly willing to let it slide, not for his sake but for the sake of the country, of not rocking the boat. And then Watergate came along. In hindsight, seems they shouldn't have let Nixon's treason go.
Recently we heard of Reagan's October Surprise, encouraging Iran to extend the hostage crisis. Wasn't long before we learned all about the Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction that weren't. Wag the Dog was obviously about the possibility that someone in Clinton's position of being caught cheating on his wife would start a war to distract everyone, but it seems Hollywood attacked the wrong party. The Republicans had already done something like that, these October Surprises, more than once. Coupled with their assault on science, their lying propaganda, and their love of war, everyone ought to be afraid of letting the Republicans ever have the reins of power again. Who can guess what unnecessary, costly war they will get us into next, if they get the chance.
Let them pay you whatever they think is reasonable
Sounds like the Humble Bundle. And I agree, quit worrying about piracy.
The submitter could try to get the game into a Humble Bundle. May not be good enough for that, but it's a possibility.
I have noticed more and more people who, frustrated with how bad the current law is, are supporting abolition just to be done with the whole thing. This is a dangerous side effect of copyright maximalism, IMO.
Why is abolition dangerous? My own preference is that both copyright and patent law be abolished. Keep trademarks, but put in protections to prevent trademarks from being made to function as de facto copyright and patent law. Same with national secrets, keep them but with curbs to prevent them from being abused more than they already are. (Secrecy is of course routinely abused to cover up problems and violations.) I think that in the US, nothing less than a constitutional amendment, a Freedom of Knowledge Amendment, will protect our right to share knowledge, and settle these issues once and for all. The right to knowledge ought to rank up there with 1st Amendment rights to free speech, religion, and assembly. We still very much need those 1st amendment rights even today, as some people constantly scheme against it. Also, it has to be an amendment because the copyright clause is in the US Constitution.
It is indeed the extremism of the pro-copyright forces that have lead me to this position. Maybe slavery wouldn't have been so bad if there weren't abusive slave owners. For many of these owners, slave women were used to populate what amounted to a harem. Trying to patch up the institution of slavery by dribbling out a few more rights, by for instance making it illegal to have sex with slaves, was not going to work. Only abolition of slavery altogether could head off the problems. And we still have attempts at de facto enslavement, still have people seeking that kind of power and control over others. The "company town" quickly comes to mind. We'll never eliminate all such schemes, but at least we have broad agreement that slavery is immoral.
And that's what we need for knowledge: broad agreement that locking away knowledge is immoral, and that sharing is good, desirable, and a fundamental right. It's been too easy to confuse the public, and persuade many people that they don't have rights that they actually do have. We've had craziness such as governments using copyright to monetize access to the law! We have poor children being denied educational material, over fears that might somehow hurt publishers of textbooks. We have scientists being silenced, technically not allowed to hand out copies of their own works that the public paid for, because they were forced to turn over all copyright to a publisher, in order to get published at all. We've had embarrassing cases such as Dmitry Sklyarov. When a person is technically in violation of copyright just for being overheard while humming a copyrighted song, when people doubt that they have the right to discuss certain subjects such as the details of how to reverse engineer a product lest that somehow infringe on someone's copyright, fair use just isn't enough. George Hotz is another embarrassing case for the Land of the Free. I think that like slavery, copyrights and patents have to go. Until they do, we will continue to see these abusive attempts at extreme control of knowledge enjoy too much success.
I can think of just one way in which copyright does work, as a sort of publicly known usage and endorsement. The example I have in mind is the use of a song in a commercial. (I recall a case in which Nike used the Beatle's Revolution in a commercial, without permission. Nike was sued, and lost.) We can know beyond doubt who the authors are, and who is using the songs. Those users are not private individuals privately using knowledge for their own enjoyment, they are commercial entities seeking to sell products and services to the public, and as such must broadcast to the public. But similar to plagiarism, this need not be covered by copyright. We can enshrine a particular right to compensation in this instance to some other much more limited law. Call it "commercial use right", or "
Yes, move. Get off the first floor. If you can, get a room at the end of a wing. Top floor can also help. It's one fewer wall and ceiling with noisy neighbors, as well as just further away from everyone. That's what I had, but I overlooked one thing. The dorm didn't have A/C, which I learned was a good thing. (In the dorms with A/C, you couldn't turn it off. Middle of January, and freezing air is blasting out of the vent.) However they installed a small unit for the study room which happened to be 2 floors below. The A/C was on the roof of the study room, right outside my window.
As for tapestries and rugs, see if you can persuade your immediate neighbors to put a few in their rooms. I learned that sound deadening works a lot better inside a computer case rather than outside it, and I'd imagine it'd be the same for dorm rooms. And it doesn't take much. Just one rug really knocks down the noise level of a room with a hard floor.
Beyond that, cultivate some patience. The first month of the fall semester is the rowdiest, but most of the noisy party animals drop out astonishingly quickly. Just about every day in October, you'll see someone clearing out, loading their possessions in the parking lot, never to be seen on campus again. By November, it will be a lot quieter. The noise level picks up a little bit for the start of the spring semester, but not near as much as for fall.
I still think the 2 majors parties have enough differences to qualify as 2 separate parties. But both parties have moved so far to the right they could look about the same to the real left. Today's Democrats are actually about the same as Eisenhower Republicans, while the Republicans have gone so far to the right they're flirting with Fascism. Not that they see that.
On some important matters however, they are the same. If you want Wall Street properly policed, with jail time for these criminals who tanked the economy in 2008 through massive fraud in housing, persons such as Fuld and Mozilo, who should you vote for? It's why the Republicans lost in 2008, but then the Democrats basically let these sleaze bags woo them with fat campaign contributions and the like, and carefully kept their distance from the Occupy Wall Street movement. It's just nuts that not one of these scoundrels has seen any prison time. Madoff didn't run a crooked mortgage program, he ran a plain old pyramid scheme. So his imprisonment is not much of a deterrent. But the rest merely paid fines without being required to admit any guilt. The fines, while large by most standards, didn't really hurt them. They're still free, technically innocent, and very, very rich. The most trouble they've faced is the damage to their reputations and the public censure, but they're so rich they don't need to care about any of that. They still have far too easy a time finding people who are impressed by huge wads of cash. Some real consequences is all it would take to rein in Wall Street excess, but somehow neither party seems willing to hold them to account.
I would like to see a few more viable political parties. We have Libertarians, Greens, and now even Pirates, to name only a few, but if any of them have ever won an election in the US, I haven't heard about it. The Reform Party that Perot founded actually landed a governorship when Jesse Ventura won in Minnesota, but that proved to be a one time freak.
I'd also like to see big changes in the Republican Party. They've gone stupid crazy. The crazy has been building for a long time, and it finally boiled over and ran the party off the rails under W. They've become nothing more than an unholy alliance to use lies and propaganda to advance two rather different and incompatible agendas: 1) the rich shall get richer, and 2) morals based on religion. How these social conservatives can focus on the pro-life issue and ignore the deadly sin of Greed continuously committed by their Wall Street "allies", I don't understand. When Big Tobacco pioneered "doubt is our product", the social conservatives should have seen that as lies from Satan. They utterly failed to perceive the dishonesty, and instead embraced those techniques to "teach the controversy" over evolution! They've turned anti-science, because science is antithetical to propaganda. Indeed, they don't understand science too well, seeing it as nothing more than just propaganda itself! They resort to trickery and force such as voter caging, to push their agenda, and think they hold the moral high ground.
As for the pro-business wing of the party, they're fools to employ propaganda to advance their narrow interests. It's strange how business is rather admired and at the same time hated for their high handed, callous disregard for everything but the bottom line. I wonder how many Republican voters passionately hate WalMart, for instance. Business complains of a shortage of skilled workers in IT, but they refuse to countenance government funding of higher education. Somehow, educating our children up through high school at no cost to them is our duty, as well as just good sense, but college is something they should pay for themselves because they need to learn to stop mooching off their parents and the state. Never mind the catch-22 problem that without a college degree it's a lot harder to get a decent paying job with which one can afford a college education. I'd like to see them roll clear back to the principles of the Eisenhower days, really roll back, not pretend as if all the good things about the 1950s have not changed. If they can't do it, then I'd just as soon see them implode.
There's more to life than competition through violence. Societies organized to solve various problems, only one of which was the problem of how to improve at meting out violence. Ancient societies created irrigation systems, built cities and monuments, kept records, did exploration and research, appeased the gods, and made decisions.
Possibly the ancient society closest to your thinking was the Assyrian Empire. They subjugated all their neighbors through violence. Consequently, they were despised. When they lost their grip, their subjects destroyed them. Violent oppression just does not work for long.
I've heard pretty much all the greatest classical music. It's good, but I've run out, and have had to look elsewhere for new material. Symphony orchestras aren't the place to look. They seem more interested in telling you that you're a dirty rotten pirate for even thinking of recording the music as they play, even when it's over 100 years old. The Meyerson in Dallas is plastered with signs that say recording devices are not allowed. They really seem to fear that if digital recordings leak out, there won't be anything left for them to play. Lame. No young person will have much sympathy for that attitude. I sure don't feel their phantom pains. Indeed, if they are helping to prop up extreme copyright, I'd as soon see them die. I want to know why they don't seek out new stuff. Is it that they're leaning too hard on copyright? Get out of the rut, quit being so boring. Where's some new material? Who composes orchestral music today?
Soundtracks have some good stuff-- who could not like the theme to Star Wars? Then there are video games. Established music venues were dismissive until fairly recently, but finally they are recognizing that some games actually have good, original music. I think there's a great future in synthesizing everything. The orchestra as it exists presently is obsolete, and an impediment.
You seem to be suggesting that science is really religion, or at the least that religion is a form of science. We do not know why gravity exists, but we "believe" in it anyway, and therefore scientists have faith in things they cannot fully explain, which makes science no different than religion.
No. We observe, and we model. Creating a model necessarily involves defining terms and relationships, which may be wrong or incomplete. We come up with many models. And we test the models to determine which ones best fit what we observe. Being less than 100% correct does not mean we're a bunch of cultists. We do not resort to filling in gaps with gods, we simply recognize that we just don't know yet. We observe that there seems to be an attractive force between masses, we have named this force "gravity", and most crucially, we have left the door open for other and further interpretations. That's the popular view of gravity, as a fundamental, axiomatic force, but another way of looking at it is that it's a warping of the space time continuum. Two masses are not mysteriously attracted to each other, instead they cause a warping of space, and it is this warping, that is, space itself, that causes the two masses to move toward each other.
The gods explanation is not at all scientific, as it invokes supernatural agencies which are not testable and not falsifiable. Religion was not early attempts at explaining for the sake of explanation. Cultists tried to explain everything whether they knew anything or not, in order to make themselves authority figures. Explanation was only a means to power and control, not a desirable thing in itself. So of course once something has been "explained", the last thing they want is to have to spend time revisiting the matter. The Catholic Church in particular once supported a great deal of scientific inquiry, funding many observatories, but it wasn't out of a spirit of inquiry, it was bravado. It was also an attempt to stay ahead of the game, by discovering things first so they could be ready with an explanation when a new discovery became popular knowledge. They were so sure, had to be sure lest the masses doubt them, that this was safe because the only possible result of all this exploration would be a confirmation of the correctness of their religion. When things didn't work out that way, some of them got ugly. Galileo was forced to recant, with the understanding that if he ever dared utter heresy again, he would be burned at the stake. It wasn't just the priests, the entire membership engaged in this "holier than thou", sanctimonious putting down of rival explanations, going further with this than even many of the priests wished. Some priests are of course nothing more than exploitative, greedy, power hungry tyrants who are ready to take up any shtick that will serve this end, and they see religion merely as the most convenient vehicle, and do not care what's right. Some mean well, and sincerely try to use their authority for the greater good, but constantly run into difficulties caused by the authoritarian style of the entire organization, such as the flock's tendency to dependency. And of course, the flock's vicious repudiation of any threat to the rationale for their beliefs and self justifications. Many priests are quietly embarrassed by the excesses of the flock, particularly when those Bible thumpers get out there and make a lot of contrary noise about things we already know, but what can they do? The Papacy can declare that evolution is not contrary to their teachings all they like, but the flock can and often does ignore them.