I should have said that the 55 mph speed limit was mostly accepted at first as a temporary measure. Also, it was enacted before Nixon's resignation, when trust in the government was higher.
But when the oil shock passed, or more like became the new normal, the speed limit was not repealed. That's when the opposition really picked up. Just why they hung onto the 55 mph limit for another decade in the face of that is the question. Of course some opposed it all along, but the earliest large backlash mentioned in that Wikipedia entry is 1981.
I have to agree more with the GP. I have not been in court proper, but I did go to a hearing to contest a red light camera ticket. The judge was not interested in any mitigating circumstances, such as the proof I provided that the yellow light was too short. The video showed the car entering the intersection a fraction of a second into the red, and that was that as far as he was concerned. Based solely on the video clip, he decided the owner (note, not the driver) had to pay the fine before he even heard the evidence about the yellow light. He did listen to my evidence afterwards, just for fun, perhaps. He certainly had time, since the decision was made so quickly. But as far as they are concerned, the equipment is beyond question. Told me I would have to press on to municipal court to raise questions about problems with that.
I knew the whole thing was about the money anyway, and really didn't expect a fair hearing. Disappointing and infuriating, but not surprising. Not smart for the courts to erode public confidence in their fairness for some miserable, petty revenue generation scheme. As for pressing on, I very much doubt the court would find against their host municipality. I doubt their impartiality extends that far. So I didn't try it. Could have tried another venue, maybe. Instead, I just don't go to or shop in that city anymore than necessary. Not worth fighting, and they know that and count on it.
Accidents happen because somebody does something stupid.
That's too harsh a view. No one can foresee everything. There are accidents in which no one did anything stupid. Races have many of those. Was Evel Knievel stupid? Are astronauts and test pilots stupid? Professional racers are all excellent, attentive drivers, yet accidents still happen because they are pushing the limits, taking more risks. They do that with their eyes open. It can be the best way to learn. You can only do so much with crash test dummies and controlled impacts.
Many accidents that do result from stupidity may not be driver stupidity. The stupidity is sometimes on the part of the road designers, or the car designers. We still have a lot of Dead Man's Curves and Corners. There's bad weather, steep mountains, deer strikes, stuck accelerators, tire blowouts, and more.
The 55mph limit was meant to save gas, not lives. It was enacted in the 1970s when OPEC first flexed their muscles and caused an oil crisis. People actually did mostly obey out of a sense of patriotism and a desire to strike back against OPEC. Later, people noticed that highway fatalities had fallen, because apart from all other factors, slower really is safer. Safety proponents embraced the national speed limit, and the primary argument in favor of it changed from economy to safety. Since then of course, cars have become much safer. Handling is better. Also cars are better at muffling road and engine noise. We have decent radial tires that don't fail after only a few miles like the infamous Firestone 500 was apt to do, and we've learned a few things about safer road design. Slower is always safer, but we accept a little more risk for faster speeds.
Tolls of any kind lower road usage. A strictly enforced artificially low speed limit is just a backhanded way of raising tolls, with safety as the excuse. Same deal with red light cameras, especially when they use yellow lights that are too short.
You pile a lot of qualifications on your claim that IT jobs are plentiful. "... in systems and/or app development spaces" but not quite so much in infrastructure, and "if you have the technical know-how", and "age is rarely an issue". Granted that skills are essential, and that there are a lot of talkers out there who can get hired but can't do the job, but I hardly think that is a problem specific to IT. More than that, rarely isn't good enough. Age should never be an issue. If age is an issue, then I should say that the organizations which discriminate on that basis can't really need people all that badly, or they could not afford to so discriminate.
You further admit that "cookie-cutter, copy-n-paste" programmers, who are nevertheless programmers and so are not complete frauds even if poor at programming, have "dim" job prospects, and are "easily replaceable".
You also mention a 50s something colleague who is making a killing as a contractor. Oh really? Well, maybe he is, and certainly some do, but how do you know? If all you know are his rates, you don't know. A big reason consultants have to charge $100/hr kind of rates is in large part because they cannot get steady work. $100/hr is not so good if you can only get 20 hours of work in a month, and have to spend the rest of the month chasing down more work. You might have a great year in which you have more work than you can handle and you can pull in $200k. Might. But you will have bad years when no one needs you right now, and the few pitiful jobs you do land get you a mere $20k. Some professionals didn't choose consulting, they got pushed into it because no one wanted to hire them permanently. It shows in their income, which is usually rather less than they would get with a full time position. Other reasons for charging such rates is you're on your own with health insurance, self employment tax, and things like equipment. It's annoying and distracting to have to deal with all that administrative crap when you know you need to focus on core technological skills. You have to charge more to compensate. $100/hr is NOT equivalent to $200k annual salary even if you do manage to land enough work to stay busy full time. A rule of thumb I've heard is 1.5x, that is, $100/hr on a consulting basis is worth about the same as $67/hr (or $134k/yr) on a steady, full time basis. Pretty good pay, depending on location, but that's only if you can find enough work to stay gainfully busy most of the time. One thing about this is that businesses have successfully pushed off the problem of how to find enough work onto the consultant. They save on having to plan, save on the huge expense of having idle workers, by making the worker into a consultant who doesn't get any work or pay when they can't do their job of balancing work with available workers.
The one that I find weird is the "Windows Technical Support" scam. 3 times now I've had this kind of phone call in which a live person assures me that they've detected that my computer is infected. The 1st time, I strung him along a bit to see where it was leading. They want you to download and run some software from a particular website, which of course really will infect your computer.
The parts that amazed me were the sheer brazenness of the whole thing, and that evidently there's enough money to be made from infecting computers that it's worth paying call centers to have live people make thousands of attempts at this social engineering. They are so clearly, obviously criminal, yet they weren't shut down immediately. What of the much vaunted ability to track down copyright infringement, in order to empower 3 strikes laws? Are these operations really so hard to find and shut down? Must be, or Rachel from Cardholder Services would have been silenced years ago, though the criminality of that one wasn't as immediately obvious. I suppose it's to be expected that those who run call center operations have no scruples.
Is there some endless hole of wealth that is supposed to prop us up?
Yes, actually: sunlight. It's not endless, there isn't an infinite amount of it, but it is a steady supply that has been available and will continue to be available for a very, very long time. All those people who believe TANSTAAFL are wrong. People who don't appreciate that but who bash others for depending on welfare are unconscious hypocrites.
Sunlight has "propped up" life for billions of years. Most life has evolved to capture and harness this free energy, directly like plants do or indirectly like meat and plant eaters. The exceptions, such as life around hydrothermal vents, merely harness a difference source of energy. Not only is "free" energy merely nice, it's absolutely necessary. No life as we understand it can function without consuming energy. Life must have energy that provides more than it costs to harness. Life reduces entropy, and this must be balanced by an increase in entropy elsewhere.
How life should compete for access, and how ugly that competition has to be is another question. The competition would seem at first glance to be extreme, no holds barred, dog eat dog, but this is not so, or symbiotic relationships would never occur. Also, it would seem every life form should strive to expand as far and fast as possible, and it seems that they do, but this also turns out to be not quite right. Life forms that boom inevitably suffer a bust, trashing the environment in the process. Most times, the environment recovers and fairly quickly, because often there were a few niches that the booming life could not reach. But not always. We've seen booms many times, but always it turns out that some limiting factor was missing, usually predators. Boom and bust may be common, but it's far from a good way to harness available resources. When the bust comes, it weakens the dominant form so much that other life forms that were waiting in the wings can then move in and take over. So the booming life form ends up a loser. Because of that I think life has evolved a number of restraints to avoid it most of the time. In some cases, such as possibly elephants, females will actually quit breeding. Now thanks to our intelligence and technology, we are the booming, unrestrained life form, but possibly unlike all previous booming populations, some of us are smart enough to see that it can't last, and that we must come to some sort of terms with the situation.
Yes, I also wonder what they did. They don't say in their article, and I didn't want to spend time just now wading through the source code to find out for sure. But I suspect it's just throwing more CPU cycles at the compression problem so it can look further ahead.
In this pointer compression, greedy often isn't best. Here's an example text to illustrate: "resident prevent president". The greedy approach is to always make a maximum length match. It would compress the example text as follows: "resident p(re)v(ent pre)(sident)", where the bracketed text is represented with pointers plus lengths, that is, the "(re)" would actually be encoded as a pointer to the start of the text with an instruction that 2 letters should be copied from that location. But often, not trying to match to the maximum possible length leads to greater compression. A compressor that looks at more options might come up with this: "resident p(re)v(ent p)(resident)". This is, I believe, what 7-zip, kzip, and all those other decompressor compatible improvements do. If you're willing to have the computer take more time, it can exhaustively try more possibilities to see which way produces the best compression. The decompressor will not know the difference, all it does is follow instructions about how many letters to copy from various locations in text it decompressed earlier. Zopfli is simply pushing this even further than 7-zip, so of course its compression will be a little better. Hardly worth dressing the technique up with a new name, as if it really was a new idea.
The conflict of interest explains why his arguments were so weak. But I already disagreed before I knew that part. Boycotting Elsevier is boycotting your colleagues? Oh really? And, science should be separate from politics. Yeah, sure, Mom and apple pie. But let's not apply that standard selectively.
Good to see that no one else bought it either, but then I expected as much. Researchers ought to be among the toughest people to fool with bad logic. I don't think he missed the point. Instead, I think he's trying to blow that fact off. It's like he thinks research makes people into naive innocents about stuff like that, or hopes they're all too busy scrambling to be first with new research to pay much attention. And it is a distraction for everyone except possibly those doing research into human behavior and maybe game theory.
That's exactly how many motels do their Internet service. There's no getting around the gateway when it is the only one.
I think the only real solution to your ISP doing this to you is political, not technical. Employ the technology to avoid this situation ever arising. But if it comes up anyway, hit back. Too late for TOR after you've been accused. Switch to another provider, if there are any. If not, could take them to court. If you paid for the service by credit card, you could dispute the charges on the grounds that you aren't being provided what you paid for. It might also be possible to sue them for having allowed infringing activity. Prodigy found out that you can't be both net nanny and common carrier, when they lost that kind of suit. Everyone else was able to win on the grounds that they are not responsible for the content.
Also, help campaign to have Internet access recognized as a fundamental right. These copyright goons are taking advantage of the fact that cutting off Internet access is very nearly as crippling as cutting off a person's air supply, and that the law is, as usual, very behind on recognizing how important Internet access has become. If you rely on the Internet to pay your bills, shop, seek for jobs, communicate with friends and relatives, keep up with the news, and look up information and do research, you can't stand to have it abruptly cut off any more than you could stand to have the road leading to your home blocked and torn up.
It's very inefficient welfare. Not much money reaches the workers. Most of it goes to the stockholders and upper management.
You talk like you think a job for a defense contractor is easy and cushy. You could not be more wrong. I've been one, and I know. Defense contractors are by no means exempt from the high pressure of the commercial world. In many ways, it's worse, because the government can be a very suspicious and hostile customer who is always afraid the contractor really is ripping them off. They don't want to face the heat from a hostile public who is suspicious of government, so they bear down on "slimy" contractors all the harder. So in addition to all the other fun of the high stress modern workplace, you have to put up with onerous reporting and tracking requirements, and intrusive requirements about how the work shall be done because they're not just the customer, they're also the government and their need to know your business is more important than any disruption they cause with their sillier requirements. Constant threats to have the contract canceled are another thrill. They also love pitting contractors against each other. Not only is the government constantly wondering whether you've gone lame and they ought to put you down today, your competitors are egging them on to see you so and do it. You feel like one of the dogs in a dog fight.
Further, many of the supervisors are current or former military officers, and this colors their view of management. They treat you like you're a soldier who must take orders without question or complaint, no matter how stupid those orders may be. Many of them think like the stereotypical officer from hell, which is that the best way to motivate people is to hold guns to their heads, screaming that there's nothing worse than a crybaby wimp quitter. The worst are not the government employees, they are the managers at the defense contractor who came from the military. Often there's a reason these guys are no longer in the military, and that's that they are too hard ass even for them which has, despite popular expectations of their culture, realized that being a total hard ass is not productive. The military really has figured out that soldiers are not mere cannon fodder. But lowly civilian employees and contractors who haven't faced combat are second and third class. If they decide the job isn't getting done, no matter in cases where it's not even clear what the job is because they themselves can't clearly articulate what they want, they're likely to view it as a personal failure on the part of the employees rather than take a step back and consider whether their demands or requirements are unreasonable. The employees weren't trying hard enough. Fire them all, and let's be callous about it because they were never soldiers. Soldiers lose their lives! These guys only lose their jobs, they have nothing to snivel about.
Because the reasons why they haven't held any job for least least 3 years is all them, it has nothing whatever to do with capricious managers all too eager to experience the thrill of firing someone to inspire fear in the survivors, or projects being canceled, or gosh, even ending successfully. Software engineering is all about killing your own job as quickly as possible. Employment is far less secure and stable today than it was in the 70s.
But I understand. You, like every other hiring manager, are inundated with job seekers and you have to employ handy shortcuts to cut the quantity down to manageable amounts. At any rate, your knee jerk criteria is at least favorable to older workers who suffer rampant age discrimination.
You must hire only low skill code monkeys and web devs, if that. You seem pretty smug about routinely getting hundreds of resumes for a handful of positions. With leverage like that, your company can push outrageous provisions in the employment contract and anyone who dares stand up to it doesn't get hired. It doesn't sound as if it has occurred to you that your company's employment contract could be too extreme, with unenforceable and illegal clauses. You sure aren't going to get any innovative people with hiring policies like that, and if you do, you'll squelch them. Anyone you hire who does happen to be creative and innovative will have their creative spirit beaten out of them by your organization. The rest of those sort get weeded out as "undesirables", and you actually like it that way!
At least I haven't seen you complain that it's hard to find skilled people.
I am recovering from what may be the flu right now. Or it may be just the common cold, I don't know. But it's really no big deal. Feel lousy for a day or 2, bookended by a few more days of annoying congestion and sneezing, and that's it. On the worst day, my gums were tender, my nose was flowing, and I felt tired and had sore muscles all over as if I'd done too much exercise. Used to get a flu strain every year as a child. Those always seemed to be stomach bugs that made you vomit, which is worse than any flu I've experienced as an adult. We're always hearing about deadly flu strains, and it always strikes me that those kings of drama in the media make more of it than is warranted.
I don't get flu shots myself. Seems there's always a shortage, and presumably the limited supplies should go to the frailer members of society, which is not me.
Zubrin of the Mars Society already addressed this issue. You don't take the fuel with you, you make it on Mars. His plan is to send a "fuel factory" to Mars many months in advance. This machinery would extract fuel from the CO2 atmosphere. I don't recall the exact details, but might be as simple as separating the carbon and oxygen. He suggests powering it with nuclear reactors, but I wonder if solar would be better, if slower.
As to Tito's plans, it's hard to say. There seems ample reason for cynicism. Scam? Sincere but pie in the sky wishful thinking? What reason do we have to take this guy seriously? What is he trying to prove? I wonder if this is as much propaganda as anything, trying to demonstrate that billionaires are the people best suited to advance humanity, that The Man with vision is the source of progress, and scientists need firm guidance to harness their creativity. If that's what this is all about, he won't get far. Mars is much too difficult for some arrogant billionaire to simply buy with a big enough payment. Mars is also something of a will-o-wisp. It's just the sort of flashy thing that a rich publicity hound would go for, when there are so many other, better and more profound if less spectacular things that could be done with the money.
Yes, and one way to do this is to popularize automatic digital notary services. Before artists release work, they would use these services to date stamp everything. Use a one way hash algorithm such as md5 or sha256 on their work which must of course include their names and whatever other information is needed to uniquely identify them, then send the hash to the notary which would add the current date and digitally sign it.) For extra security, ought to do it several times at different notaries. Also, there are several critical precautions to take. Absolutely must do the hash on one's own, uncompromised computers, cannot use an online service for that. Then, really need to wait a short while before public release, perhaps a day, or perhaps just an hour or less, however often the notary services can practically generate new signatures for new dates.
Whit that in place, if we could get the courts to accept these digital signatures from these notaries as proof of who created it and when, and actively ask for digital signatures from recognized digital notary services whenever a claim of plagiarism is made, we'd have it. No more wondering who is lying: the alleged plagiarist, or the accuser.
And we'll likely have version 3.8.6. Should've bumped the version to 4.0. Aside from the cute version/processor name match, dropping support for the 386 seems a major enough change to warrant the change in version numbering.
Ah, I thought you would pull that one. When you say:
an assurance that nobody else is going to take credit for what they did (or do you think that plagiarism would even have any meaning without copyright?)
You confuse 2 separate issues. Plagiarism has meaning independent of copyright, and can be stopped just fine without it. Or do you think teachers use copyright law to detect cheating on essay assignments? Search engines are great at instantly discovering plagiarism, no need for copyright.
Copyright is unnecessary. You forget it is only a means. The goal is "Progress of Science and useful Arts", but since when has copyright been the only way to achieve that? Never. You should ask whether copyright helps at all. With current capabilities, copyright is actually more of a hindrance than a help. The Internet is vastly more capable of handling the work of publication and distribution than antiquated businesses that insist on using far more expensive physical means for those same tasks. I quite agree with the GP. Publishers should do us all a favor and either adapt or die. Preferably die, like the horse and carriage. Let our public libraries go all digital. Publishers like to think they provide value in screening out crap, and editing the good stuff to make it better, but often what they do is more like censorship than editing. Who knows how many awesome stories were buried because publishers, who are notoriously conservative, didn't think it would sell. They've all but ruined music with their attempts to make it cheaper to produce by restricting the permitted range of expression. The community can screen much better than a bunch of crusty old paternalistic editors.
You already mentioned other ways, when you sneered at them all as if it's obvious they are worse or inadequate. Ads have worked for radio and TV for decades. Patrons have supported artists for centuries. Merchandising may be crass, but it also works. We can certainly expand and improve patronage greatly if we want more art.
Don't be silly. Everyone knows what's meant by "climate denial". It's hard to fairly represent their arguments when they keep changing and contradicting themselves. In the early 2000's, conservatives were indeed denying that there was any climate problem at all. They claimed that if we were seeing higher temperatures at all, it was only because we were on the high side of a cyclical variation. So, which is it? The climate is not changing, or it is changing cyclically? Today, some are still clinging to this "position" even though the Republican party has officially admitted that there is global warming.
Of course we put what we know into our models. These denialists are downright insulting with their suggestions of may have been left out. They don't seem to have considered that for such mistakes to be made, scientists would have to be really stupid. Upon pointing out that after accounting for cyclical changes in Earth's orbit and wobble, ongoing factors such as glacial rebound from the last glaciation, variations in solar output, and other natural effects, we are still seeing warmer temperatures than expected, the denialists shift ground. They may grudgingly admit there is some climate change, but then they deny that mankind is the cause.
We can expect a further shift in their position. When they are forced to concede that mankind is indeed causing global warming, they are likely to claim it's not worth the cost of doing anything about it. As if it's a foregone conclusion that it will cost us greatly to take measures, when in fact many measures would reduce our costs, and are worth doing even if there were no global warming. They might even trot out the total cop out that it's all God's will, and this somehow means that we poor puny mortals can't do anything anyway, so why try?
Swartz didn't steal anything. He copied. There is a difference. As long as people like you keep accepting this gross mischacterization, this misperception that ideas can be owned, we will see more of this kind of tragedy. Stealing is such a loaded word that it's easy to advocate harsh punishments once the public is suckered into thinking of some activity as stealing when it isn't. Perhaps it's unfortunate that our language is so possessive. We say "their story" and "their car" to mean 2 very different things, but by using the same wording for both concepts, we make it too easy to confuse and conflate them. Copyright holders do not own stories, do not get to dictate how others shall use it. They own only an unnatural exclusive right to make copies, which is all too easy to transfer. Can't and don't want to stop people from making parodies or reverse engineering. Copyrights aren't supposed to make the owner into a dictator for life.
DRM is 100% nonsense. Such schemes are bait for suckers who persist in thinking that ideas and laws for material goods are applicable to data, the ones that use the term "intellectual property" disingenuously. Of course authors deserve compensation. But being fair to content creators does not mean we should accept costly measures to prop up business models that are clearly broken. Abandon the Internet? Submit to inspections by piracy police paid for by ourselves? Ridiculous! The honesty most lacking is not the people's, it's the proponents of these copy protection schemes.
How much work are you willing to do to watch that movie for free
You're thinking of it wrong. It's not how much work any one person is willing to do, it's how much work we all are willing to do. Amortized over a world population of about 7 billion, the amount of work required to break DRM is trivial. Only takes one crack to break the DRM for everyone.
Is it worth trying different patches made by people of questionable ethics
The people with the more questionable ethics are the ones trying to impose DRM. I'm more worried about what their unpatched software does than the viruses that could be present in cracks. Remember the Sony BMG rootkit fiasco? The Turbotax boot sector mod? Windows Genuine Advantage, particularly the false positives it raised against legitimate installs? Ernie Ball's experience with the BSA? And once again, you're looking at it wrong. How long can a crack with a trojan go undetected? Only takes one person out of those billions to discover the problem. As soon as it's found out, it's game over for that trojan.
Are you willing to solder a chip to your hardware, risk breaking it?
I'm not willing to buy that hardware in the first place.
Yes, employers are being dishonest even with themselves. Office politics most certainly extends into hiring decisions. They want high skills, but they don't want candidates with PhDs. They want someone who is good but not too good. They seem to want an idiot savant who is a genius at technical work but a complete fool with money who will be in a world of hurt if that all important income takes a hit. They say they're afraid the doctors will leave out of boredom. They think a PhD doesn't mean anything good anyway, and sadly, many doctors are arrogant. But if not arrogant, such a candidate might be "academic", too prone to seeing a bigger picture instead of getting work done. If they buckle down, don't ask too many questions, and get work done, then somehow the work often turns out to be unnecessary and useless because some higher up decided to go a different direction, or the project wasn't a good idea to begin with and fails. They might have even been set up. Then they get slanged for failing to anticipate correctly and everyone else has great fun sneering at the "genius", and hopefully persuading management to get rid of that employee. After all, the most competent of one's fellow employees are the greatest threat to one's own job! If instead the genius does anticipate correctly, in spite of being deliberately kept in the dark then this real fear surfaces. So why not head off the "problem" immediately by refusing to hire the candidate? Not like it's hard to make stick some stupid, trite excuse like "not a good fit" or "they will get bored and leave".
But on a totally different other note, most of us really are fools with money. Most Americans are so wasteful, and could indeed get by with far less income. A family of 2 to 4 does not need an expensive McMansion. Employers are right in that sense. If tech people are so smart, why has the price of housing risen so much more in Silicon Valley and other hotbeds of technology? Maybe the longing for an idiot savant isn't so crazily unreasonable after all?
The interest I have in office stories is in why so many workplaces are so dysfunctional, and how to change that. I've suffered through my share of office horror. I'd rather it was solved than mined for what little comedy is to be had from situations that are more mean, ugly, petty, and stupid than funny.
The medieval nobility and monarchy was sidelined for good reason. The "noble" noble was the exception, not the rule. What was more common was to see his lordship totally out of control. No one could tell him no, so he constantly indulged his most perverse and irrational whims. Life for the subjects could be particularly unpleasant if his lordship was someone like the Marquis de Sade or Vlad the Impaler. Women had to hide from him. Second best for women was to be accompanied by close male relatives. If his lordship's pet dogs took to crapping on the highway, or in a barracks or kitchen or some other public facility, he'd let it be someone else's problem, or he might possibly appoint someone to clean up after the beloved pets, rather than train his dogs not to do that there. Mel Brook's portrayal of King Louis, in which he tells the audience "it's good to be the king" after groping a lady and not being admonished in any way, not even a slap, is not an exaggeration. If anything, it's too mild. In reality, if a powerful male noble encountered some unaccompanied lady, he might drag her behind the nearest curtain and rape her right there, and no one would do anything about it. Then he'd continue on his merry way without so much as a finger wagging, while she was vilified for losing her virginity outside of marriage and had to be packed off to a nunnery. If she was married, neither she or her husband had any legitimate grounds for protest, and if lacking in force, had to resort to subversion for redress of their grievance. If she had enough backing to cause trouble, the noble could simply pay off her relatives with money obtained through taxation, and let bygones be bygones. Or perhaps he'd welcome a war, to distract the peasants from some other problem, drive home to them that things could be worse. He also had a tendency to think of himself as a great person with great ideas, and much like the Kims of North Korea, no one dared point out otherwise.
Today, we see this same kind of bullshit in the office. The root of the problem is that power corrupts. Management has an unhealthy amount of authority and power, and many managers lack the character and discipline to refrain from abusing it. The sort of person who most wants such authority, wants it so they can enjoy the perceived perks however abusive and unfair that is to the underlings. Rank hath its privileges. And here is where corporations really blow it. They're terrible at screening out the abusers and making sure they don't receive or keep power. The power structure of pretty much every corporation is feudal. When the person at the top is an irresponsible jackass, the spoiled child, grandchild, great grand nephew or whatever of the founder, the wonder is that the organization doesn't degrade even more than it usually does. These leaders not only fail to spot the bad managers, they may see in them kindred spirits. Just one example was Marge Schott, owner of the Cincinnati Reds, who let her dogs run wild and crap on the baseball field when it was needed for a game.
So, yeah, yet another story about all this is not particularly illuminating or enjoyable. Dilbert and The Office said what needed saying, and said it well. The message bears repeating, yes, until the revolution comes and the feudal organization of corporations is swept away. But not just parroting, need something new.
Forget it. The US Democratic Party is not at all liberal on copyright. They're practically joined at the hip with Hollywood, who we all know believes that copyright should be ridiculously strong. Republicans are no better on this issue, dismissing staffers who question copyright and sponsoring extreme legislation such as SOPA. The media feels too much self interest and most of the time fails to report fairly on the issue. Even PBS can't bring themselves hold an honest debate on copyright.
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I should have said that the 55 mph speed limit was mostly accepted at first as a temporary measure. Also, it was enacted before Nixon's resignation, when trust in the government was higher.
But when the oil shock passed, or more like became the new normal, the speed limit was not repealed. That's when the opposition really picked up. Just why they hung onto the 55 mph limit for another decade in the face of that is the question. Of course some opposed it all along, but the earliest large backlash mentioned in that Wikipedia entry is 1981.
I have to agree more with the GP. I have not been in court proper, but I did go to a hearing to contest a red light camera ticket. The judge was not interested in any mitigating circumstances, such as the proof I provided that the yellow light was too short. The video showed the car entering the intersection a fraction of a second into the red, and that was that as far as he was concerned. Based solely on the video clip, he decided the owner (note, not the driver) had to pay the fine before he even heard the evidence about the yellow light. He did listen to my evidence afterwards, just for fun, perhaps. He certainly had time, since the decision was made so quickly. But as far as they are concerned, the equipment is beyond question. Told me I would have to press on to municipal court to raise questions about problems with that.
I knew the whole thing was about the money anyway, and really didn't expect a fair hearing. Disappointing and infuriating, but not surprising. Not smart for the courts to erode public confidence in their fairness for some miserable, petty revenue generation scheme. As for pressing on, I very much doubt the court would find against their host municipality. I doubt their impartiality extends that far. So I didn't try it. Could have tried another venue, maybe. Instead, I just don't go to or shop in that city anymore than necessary. Not worth fighting, and they know that and count on it.
Accidents happen because somebody does something stupid.
That's too harsh a view. No one can foresee everything. There are accidents in which no one did anything stupid. Races have many of those. Was Evel Knievel stupid? Are astronauts and test pilots stupid? Professional racers are all excellent, attentive drivers, yet accidents still happen because they are pushing the limits, taking more risks. They do that with their eyes open. It can be the best way to learn. You can only do so much with crash test dummies and controlled impacts.
Many accidents that do result from stupidity may not be driver stupidity. The stupidity is sometimes on the part of the road designers, or the car designers. We still have a lot of Dead Man's Curves and Corners. There's bad weather, steep mountains, deer strikes, stuck accelerators, tire blowouts, and more.
What are you expecting, perfection?
The 55mph limit was meant to save gas, not lives. It was enacted in the 1970s when OPEC first flexed their muscles and caused an oil crisis. People actually did mostly obey out of a sense of patriotism and a desire to strike back against OPEC. Later, people noticed that highway fatalities had fallen, because apart from all other factors, slower really is safer. Safety proponents embraced the national speed limit, and the primary argument in favor of it changed from economy to safety. Since then of course, cars have become much safer. Handling is better. Also cars are better at muffling road and engine noise. We have decent radial tires that don't fail after only a few miles like the infamous Firestone 500 was apt to do, and we've learned a few things about safer road design. Slower is always safer, but we accept a little more risk for faster speeds.
Tolls of any kind lower road usage. A strictly enforced artificially low speed limit is just a backhanded way of raising tolls, with safety as the excuse. Same deal with red light cameras, especially when they use yellow lights that are too short.
You pile a lot of qualifications on your claim that IT jobs are plentiful. "... in systems and/or app development spaces" but not quite so much in infrastructure, and "if you have the technical know-how", and "age is rarely an issue". Granted that skills are essential, and that there are a lot of talkers out there who can get hired but can't do the job, but I hardly think that is a problem specific to IT. More than that, rarely isn't good enough. Age should never be an issue. If age is an issue, then I should say that the organizations which discriminate on that basis can't really need people all that badly, or they could not afford to so discriminate.
You further admit that "cookie-cutter, copy-n-paste" programmers, who are nevertheless programmers and so are not complete frauds even if poor at programming, have "dim" job prospects, and are "easily replaceable".
You also mention a 50s something colleague who is making a killing as a contractor. Oh really? Well, maybe he is, and certainly some do, but how do you know? If all you know are his rates, you don't know. A big reason consultants have to charge $100/hr kind of rates is in large part because they cannot get steady work. $100/hr is not so good if you can only get 20 hours of work in a month, and have to spend the rest of the month chasing down more work. You might have a great year in which you have more work than you can handle and you can pull in $200k. Might. But you will have bad years when no one needs you right now, and the few pitiful jobs you do land get you a mere $20k. Some professionals didn't choose consulting, they got pushed into it because no one wanted to hire them permanently. It shows in their income, which is usually rather less than they would get with a full time position. Other reasons for charging such rates is you're on your own with health insurance, self employment tax, and things like equipment. It's annoying and distracting to have to deal with all that administrative crap when you know you need to focus on core technological skills. You have to charge more to compensate. $100/hr is NOT equivalent to $200k annual salary even if you do manage to land enough work to stay busy full time. A rule of thumb I've heard is 1.5x, that is, $100/hr on a consulting basis is worth about the same as $67/hr (or $134k/yr) on a steady, full time basis. Pretty good pay, depending on location, but that's only if you can find enough work to stay gainfully busy most of the time. One thing about this is that businesses have successfully pushed off the problem of how to find enough work onto the consultant. They save on having to plan, save on the huge expense of having idle workers, by making the worker into a consultant who doesn't get any work or pay when they can't do their job of balancing work with available workers.
The one that I find weird is the "Windows Technical Support" scam. 3 times now I've had this kind of phone call in which a live person assures me that they've detected that my computer is infected. The 1st time, I strung him along a bit to see where it was leading. They want you to download and run some software from a particular website, which of course really will infect your computer.
The parts that amazed me were the sheer brazenness of the whole thing, and that evidently there's enough money to be made from infecting computers that it's worth paying call centers to have live people make thousands of attempts at this social engineering. They are so clearly, obviously criminal, yet they weren't shut down immediately. What of the much vaunted ability to track down copyright infringement, in order to empower 3 strikes laws? Are these operations really so hard to find and shut down? Must be, or Rachel from Cardholder Services would have been silenced years ago, though the criminality of that one wasn't as immediately obvious. I suppose it's to be expected that those who run call center operations have no scruples.
Is there some endless hole of wealth that is supposed to prop us up?
Yes, actually: sunlight. It's not endless, there isn't an infinite amount of it, but it is a steady supply that has been available and will continue to be available for a very, very long time. All those people who believe TANSTAAFL are wrong. People who don't appreciate that but who bash others for depending on welfare are unconscious hypocrites.
Sunlight has "propped up" life for billions of years. Most life has evolved to capture and harness this free energy, directly like plants do or indirectly like meat and plant eaters. The exceptions, such as life around hydrothermal vents, merely harness a difference source of energy. Not only is "free" energy merely nice, it's absolutely necessary. No life as we understand it can function without consuming energy. Life must have energy that provides more than it costs to harness. Life reduces entropy, and this must be balanced by an increase in entropy elsewhere.
How life should compete for access, and how ugly that competition has to be is another question. The competition would seem at first glance to be extreme, no holds barred, dog eat dog, but this is not so, or symbiotic relationships would never occur. Also, it would seem every life form should strive to expand as far and fast as possible, and it seems that they do, but this also turns out to be not quite right. Life forms that boom inevitably suffer a bust, trashing the environment in the process. Most times, the environment recovers and fairly quickly, because often there were a few niches that the booming life could not reach. But not always. We've seen booms many times, but always it turns out that some limiting factor was missing, usually predators. Boom and bust may be common, but it's far from a good way to harness available resources. When the bust comes, it weakens the dominant form so much that other life forms that were waiting in the wings can then move in and take over. So the booming life form ends up a loser. Because of that I think life has evolved a number of restraints to avoid it most of the time. In some cases, such as possibly elephants, females will actually quit breeding. Now thanks to our intelligence and technology, we are the booming, unrestrained life form, but possibly unlike all previous booming populations, some of us are smart enough to see that it can't last, and that we must come to some sort of terms with the situation.
Yes, I also wonder what they did. They don't say in their article, and I didn't want to spend time just now wading through the source code to find out for sure. But I suspect it's just throwing more CPU cycles at the compression problem so it can look further ahead.
In this pointer compression, greedy often isn't best. Here's an example text to illustrate: "resident prevent president". The greedy approach is to always make a maximum length match. It would compress the example text as follows: "resident p(re)v(ent pre)(sident)", where the bracketed text is represented with pointers plus lengths, that is, the "(re)" would actually be encoded as a pointer to the start of the text with an instruction that 2 letters should be copied from that location. But often, not trying to match to the maximum possible length leads to greater compression. A compressor that looks at more options might come up with this: "resident p(re)v(ent p)(resident)". This is, I believe, what 7-zip, kzip, and all those other decompressor compatible improvements do. If you're willing to have the computer take more time, it can exhaustively try more possibilities to see which way produces the best compression. The decompressor will not know the difference, all it does is follow instructions about how many letters to copy from various locations in text it decompressed earlier. Zopfli is simply pushing this even further than 7-zip, so of course its compression will be a little better. Hardly worth dressing the technique up with a new name, as if it really was a new idea.
The conflict of interest explains why his arguments were so weak. But I already disagreed before I knew that part. Boycotting Elsevier is boycotting your colleagues? Oh really? And, science should be separate from politics. Yeah, sure, Mom and apple pie. But let's not apply that standard selectively.
Good to see that no one else bought it either, but then I expected as much. Researchers ought to be among the toughest people to fool with bad logic. I don't think he missed the point. Instead, I think he's trying to blow that fact off. It's like he thinks research makes people into naive innocents about stuff like that, or hopes they're all too busy scrambling to be first with new research to pay much attention. And it is a distraction for everyone except possibly those doing research into human behavior and maybe game theory.
That's exactly how many motels do their Internet service. There's no getting around the gateway when it is the only one.
I think the only real solution to your ISP doing this to you is political, not technical. Employ the technology to avoid this situation ever arising. But if it comes up anyway, hit back. Too late for TOR after you've been accused. Switch to another provider, if there are any. If not, could take them to court. If you paid for the service by credit card, you could dispute the charges on the grounds that you aren't being provided what you paid for. It might also be possible to sue them for having allowed infringing activity. Prodigy found out that you can't be both net nanny and common carrier, when they lost that kind of suit. Everyone else was able to win on the grounds that they are not responsible for the content.
Also, help campaign to have Internet access recognized as a fundamental right. These copyright goons are taking advantage of the fact that cutting off Internet access is very nearly as crippling as cutting off a person's air supply, and that the law is, as usual, very behind on recognizing how important Internet access has become. If you rely on the Internet to pay your bills, shop, seek for jobs, communicate with friends and relatives, keep up with the news, and look up information and do research, you can't stand to have it abruptly cut off any more than you could stand to have the road leading to your home blocked and torn up.
It's very inefficient welfare. Not much money reaches the workers. Most of it goes to the stockholders and upper management.
You talk like you think a job for a defense contractor is easy and cushy. You could not be more wrong. I've been one, and I know. Defense contractors are by no means exempt from the high pressure of the commercial world. In many ways, it's worse, because the government can be a very suspicious and hostile customer who is always afraid the contractor really is ripping them off. They don't want to face the heat from a hostile public who is suspicious of government, so they bear down on "slimy" contractors all the harder. So in addition to all the other fun of the high stress modern workplace, you have to put up with onerous reporting and tracking requirements, and intrusive requirements about how the work shall be done because they're not just the customer, they're also the government and their need to know your business is more important than any disruption they cause with their sillier requirements. Constant threats to have the contract canceled are another thrill. They also love pitting contractors against each other. Not only is the government constantly wondering whether you've gone lame and they ought to put you down today, your competitors are egging them on to see you so and do it. You feel like one of the dogs in a dog fight.
Further, many of the supervisors are current or former military officers, and this colors their view of management. They treat you like you're a soldier who must take orders without question or complaint, no matter how stupid those orders may be. Many of them think like the stereotypical officer from hell, which is that the best way to motivate people is to hold guns to their heads, screaming that there's nothing worse than a crybaby wimp quitter. The worst are not the government employees, they are the managers at the defense contractor who came from the military. Often there's a reason these guys are no longer in the military, and that's that they are too hard ass even for them which has, despite popular expectations of their culture, realized that being a total hard ass is not productive. The military really has figured out that soldiers are not mere cannon fodder. But lowly civilian employees and contractors who haven't faced combat are second and third class. If they decide the job isn't getting done, no matter in cases where it's not even clear what the job is because they themselves can't clearly articulate what they want, they're likely to view it as a personal failure on the part of the employees rather than take a step back and consider whether their demands or requirements are unreasonable. The employees weren't trying hard enough. Fire them all, and let's be callous about it because they were never soldiers. Soldiers lose their lives! These guys only lose their jobs, they have nothing to snivel about.
Because the reasons why they haven't held any job for least least 3 years is all them, it has nothing whatever to do with capricious managers all too eager to experience the thrill of firing someone to inspire fear in the survivors, or projects being canceled, or gosh, even ending successfully. Software engineering is all about killing your own job as quickly as possible. Employment is far less secure and stable today than it was in the 70s.
But I understand. You, like every other hiring manager, are inundated with job seekers and you have to employ handy shortcuts to cut the quantity down to manageable amounts. At any rate, your knee jerk criteria is at least favorable to older workers who suffer rampant age discrimination.
You must hire only low skill code monkeys and web devs, if that. You seem pretty smug about routinely getting hundreds of resumes for a handful of positions. With leverage like that, your company can push outrageous provisions in the employment contract and anyone who dares stand up to it doesn't get hired. It doesn't sound as if it has occurred to you that your company's employment contract could be too extreme, with unenforceable and illegal clauses. You sure aren't going to get any innovative people with hiring policies like that, and if you do, you'll squelch them. Anyone you hire who does happen to be creative and innovative will have their creative spirit beaten out of them by your organization. The rest of those sort get weeded out as "undesirables", and you actually like it that way!
At least I haven't seen you complain that it's hard to find skilled people.
I am recovering from what may be the flu right now. Or it may be just the common cold, I don't know. But it's really no big deal. Feel lousy for a day or 2, bookended by a few more days of annoying congestion and sneezing, and that's it. On the worst day, my gums were tender, my nose was flowing, and I felt tired and had sore muscles all over as if I'd done too much exercise. Used to get a flu strain every year as a child. Those always seemed to be stomach bugs that made you vomit, which is worse than any flu I've experienced as an adult. We're always hearing about deadly flu strains, and it always strikes me that those kings of drama in the media make more of it than is warranted.
I don't get flu shots myself. Seems there's always a shortage, and presumably the limited supplies should go to the frailer members of society, which is not me.
Zubrin of the Mars Society already addressed this issue. You don't take the fuel with you, you make it on Mars. His plan is to send a "fuel factory" to Mars many months in advance. This machinery would extract fuel from the CO2 atmosphere. I don't recall the exact details, but might be as simple as separating the carbon and oxygen. He suggests powering it with nuclear reactors, but I wonder if solar would be better, if slower.
As to Tito's plans, it's hard to say. There seems ample reason for cynicism. Scam? Sincere but pie in the sky wishful thinking? What reason do we have to take this guy seriously? What is he trying to prove? I wonder if this is as much propaganda as anything, trying to demonstrate that billionaires are the people best suited to advance humanity, that The Man with vision is the source of progress, and scientists need firm guidance to harness their creativity. If that's what this is all about, he won't get far. Mars is much too difficult for some arrogant billionaire to simply buy with a big enough payment. Mars is also something of a will-o-wisp. It's just the sort of flashy thing that a rich publicity hound would go for, when there are so many other, better and more profound if less spectacular things that could be done with the money.
Yes, and one way to do this is to popularize automatic digital notary services. Before artists release work, they would use these services to date stamp everything. Use a one way hash algorithm such as md5 or sha256 on their work which must of course include their names and whatever other information is needed to uniquely identify them, then send the hash to the notary which would add the current date and digitally sign it.) For extra security, ought to do it several times at different notaries. Also, there are several critical precautions to take. Absolutely must do the hash on one's own, uncompromised computers, cannot use an online service for that. Then, really need to wait a short while before public release, perhaps a day, or perhaps just an hour or less, however often the notary services can practically generate new signatures for new dates.
Whit that in place, if we could get the courts to accept these digital signatures from these notaries as proof of who created it and when, and actively ask for digital signatures from recognized digital notary services whenever a claim of plagiarism is made, we'd have it. No more wondering who is lying: the alleged plagiarist, or the accuser.
And we'll likely have version 3.8.6. Should've bumped the version to 4.0. Aside from the cute version/processor name match, dropping support for the 386 seems a major enough change to warrant the change in version numbering.
Ah, I thought you would pull that one. When you say:
an assurance that nobody else is going to take credit for what they did (or do you think that plagiarism would even have any meaning without copyright?)
You confuse 2 separate issues. Plagiarism has meaning independent of copyright, and can be stopped just fine without it. Or do you think teachers use copyright law to detect cheating on essay assignments? Search engines are great at instantly discovering plagiarism, no need for copyright.
Copyright is unnecessary. You forget it is only a means. The goal is "Progress of Science and useful Arts", but since when has copyright been the only way to achieve that? Never. You should ask whether copyright helps at all. With current capabilities, copyright is actually more of a hindrance than a help. The Internet is vastly more capable of handling the work of publication and distribution than antiquated businesses that insist on using far more expensive physical means for those same tasks. I quite agree with the GP. Publishers should do us all a favor and either adapt or die. Preferably die, like the horse and carriage. Let our public libraries go all digital. Publishers like to think they provide value in screening out crap, and editing the good stuff to make it better, but often what they do is more like censorship than editing. Who knows how many awesome stories were buried because publishers, who are notoriously conservative, didn't think it would sell. They've all but ruined music with their attempts to make it cheaper to produce by restricting the permitted range of expression. The community can screen much better than a bunch of crusty old paternalistic editors.
You already mentioned other ways, when you sneered at them all as if it's obvious they are worse or inadequate. Ads have worked for radio and TV for decades. Patrons have supported artists for centuries. Merchandising may be crass, but it also works. We can certainly expand and improve patronage greatly if we want more art.
Don't be silly. Everyone knows what's meant by "climate denial". It's hard to fairly represent their arguments when they keep changing and contradicting themselves. In the early 2000's, conservatives were indeed denying that there was any climate problem at all. They claimed that if we were seeing higher temperatures at all, it was only because we were on the high side of a cyclical variation. So, which is it? The climate is not changing, or it is changing cyclically? Today, some are still clinging to this "position" even though the Republican party has officially admitted that there is global warming.
Of course we put what we know into our models. These denialists are downright insulting with their suggestions of may have been left out. They don't seem to have considered that for such mistakes to be made, scientists would have to be really stupid. Upon pointing out that after accounting for cyclical changes in Earth's orbit and wobble, ongoing factors such as glacial rebound from the last glaciation, variations in solar output, and other natural effects, we are still seeing warmer temperatures than expected, the denialists shift ground. They may grudgingly admit there is some climate change, but then they deny that mankind is the cause.
We can expect a further shift in their position. When they are forced to concede that mankind is indeed causing global warming, they are likely to claim it's not worth the cost of doing anything about it. As if it's a foregone conclusion that it will cost us greatly to take measures, when in fact many measures would reduce our costs, and are worth doing even if there were no global warming. They might even trot out the total cop out that it's all God's will, and this somehow means that we poor puny mortals can't do anything anyway, so why try?
No, we cannot agree on one point: "stealing".
Swartz didn't steal anything. He copied. There is a difference. As long as people like you keep accepting this gross mischacterization, this misperception that ideas can be owned, we will see more of this kind of tragedy. Stealing is such a loaded word that it's easy to advocate harsh punishments once the public is suckered into thinking of some activity as stealing when it isn't. Perhaps it's unfortunate that our language is so possessive. We say "their story" and "their car" to mean 2 very different things, but by using the same wording for both concepts, we make it too easy to confuse and conflate them. Copyright holders do not own stories, do not get to dictate how others shall use it. They own only an unnatural exclusive right to make copies, which is all too easy to transfer. Can't and don't want to stop people from making parodies or reverse engineering. Copyrights aren't supposed to make the owner into a dictator for life.
DRM is 100% nonsense. Such schemes are bait for suckers who persist in thinking that ideas and laws for material goods are applicable to data, the ones that use the term "intellectual property" disingenuously. Of course authors deserve compensation. But being fair to content creators does not mean we should accept costly measures to prop up business models that are clearly broken. Abandon the Internet? Submit to inspections by piracy police paid for by ourselves? Ridiculous! The honesty most lacking is not the people's, it's the proponents of these copy protection schemes.
How much work are you willing to do to watch that movie for free
You're thinking of it wrong. It's not how much work any one person is willing to do, it's how much work we all are willing to do. Amortized over a world population of about 7 billion, the amount of work required to break DRM is trivial. Only takes one crack to break the DRM for everyone.
Is it worth trying different patches made by people of questionable ethics
The people with the more questionable ethics are the ones trying to impose DRM. I'm more worried about what their unpatched software does than the viruses that could be present in cracks. Remember the Sony BMG rootkit fiasco? The Turbotax boot sector mod? Windows Genuine Advantage, particularly the false positives it raised against legitimate installs? Ernie Ball's experience with the BSA? And once again, you're looking at it wrong. How long can a crack with a trojan go undetected? Only takes one person out of those billions to discover the problem. As soon as it's found out, it's game over for that trojan.
Are you willing to solder a chip to your hardware, risk breaking it?
I'm not willing to buy that hardware in the first place.
Yes, employers are being dishonest even with themselves. Office politics most certainly extends into hiring decisions. They want high skills, but they don't want candidates with PhDs. They want someone who is good but not too good. They seem to want an idiot savant who is a genius at technical work but a complete fool with money who will be in a world of hurt if that all important income takes a hit. They say they're afraid the doctors will leave out of boredom. They think a PhD doesn't mean anything good anyway, and sadly, many doctors are arrogant. But if not arrogant, such a candidate might be "academic", too prone to seeing a bigger picture instead of getting work done. If they buckle down, don't ask too many questions, and get work done, then somehow the work often turns out to be unnecessary and useless because some higher up decided to go a different direction, or the project wasn't a good idea to begin with and fails. They might have even been set up. Then they get slanged for failing to anticipate correctly and everyone else has great fun sneering at the "genius", and hopefully persuading management to get rid of that employee. After all, the most competent of one's fellow employees are the greatest threat to one's own job! If instead the genius does anticipate correctly, in spite of being deliberately kept in the dark then this real fear surfaces. So why not head off the "problem" immediately by refusing to hire the candidate? Not like it's hard to make stick some stupid, trite excuse like "not a good fit" or "they will get bored and leave".
But on a totally different other note, most of us really are fools with money. Most Americans are so wasteful, and could indeed get by with far less income. A family of 2 to 4 does not need an expensive McMansion. Employers are right in that sense. If tech people are so smart, why has the price of housing risen so much more in Silicon Valley and other hotbeds of technology? Maybe the longing for an idiot savant isn't so crazily unreasonable after all?
The interest I have in office stories is in why so many workplaces are so dysfunctional, and how to change that. I've suffered through my share of office horror. I'd rather it was solved than mined for what little comedy is to be had from situations that are more mean, ugly, petty, and stupid than funny.
The medieval nobility and monarchy was sidelined for good reason. The "noble" noble was the exception, not the rule. What was more common was to see his lordship totally out of control. No one could tell him no, so he constantly indulged his most perverse and irrational whims. Life for the subjects could be particularly unpleasant if his lordship was someone like the Marquis de Sade or Vlad the Impaler. Women had to hide from him. Second best for women was to be accompanied by close male relatives. If his lordship's pet dogs took to crapping on the highway, or in a barracks or kitchen or some other public facility, he'd let it be someone else's problem, or he might possibly appoint someone to clean up after the beloved pets, rather than train his dogs not to do that there. Mel Brook's portrayal of King Louis, in which he tells the audience "it's good to be the king" after groping a lady and not being admonished in any way, not even a slap, is not an exaggeration. If anything, it's too mild. In reality, if a powerful male noble encountered some unaccompanied lady, he might drag her behind the nearest curtain and rape her right there, and no one would do anything about it. Then he'd continue on his merry way without so much as a finger wagging, while she was vilified for losing her virginity outside of marriage and had to be packed off to a nunnery. If she was married, neither she or her husband had any legitimate grounds for protest, and if lacking in force, had to resort to subversion for redress of their grievance. If she had enough backing to cause trouble, the noble could simply pay off her relatives with money obtained through taxation, and let bygones be bygones. Or perhaps he'd welcome a war, to distract the peasants from some other problem, drive home to them that things could be worse. He also had a tendency to think of himself as a great person with great ideas, and much like the Kims of North Korea, no one dared point out otherwise.
Today, we see this same kind of bullshit in the office. The root of the problem is that power corrupts. Management has an unhealthy amount of authority and power, and many managers lack the character and discipline to refrain from abusing it. The sort of person who most wants such authority, wants it so they can enjoy the perceived perks however abusive and unfair that is to the underlings. Rank hath its privileges. And here is where corporations really blow it. They're terrible at screening out the abusers and making sure they don't receive or keep power. The power structure of pretty much every corporation is feudal. When the person at the top is an irresponsible jackass, the spoiled child, grandchild, great grand nephew or whatever of the founder, the wonder is that the organization doesn't degrade even more than it usually does. These leaders not only fail to spot the bad managers, they may see in them kindred spirits. Just one example was Marge Schott, owner of the Cincinnati Reds, who let her dogs run wild and crap on the baseball field when it was needed for a game.
So, yeah, yet another story about all this is not particularly illuminating or enjoyable. Dilbert and The Office said what needed saying, and said it well. The message bears repeating, yes, until the revolution comes and the feudal organization of corporations is swept away. But not just parroting, need something new.
Forget it. The US Democratic Party is not at all liberal on copyright. They're practically joined at the hip with Hollywood, who we all know believes that copyright should be ridiculously strong. Republicans are no better on this issue, dismissing staffers who question copyright and sponsoring extreme legislation such as SOPA. The media feels too much self interest and most of the time fails to report fairly on the issue. Even PBS can't bring themselves hold an honest debate on copyright.