I don't read German, so unless there's an English translation, I'll have to pass on reading a copy. Are you speaking from knowledge or have you not read it either?
I'm not doing the accusing. Schavan herself admitted "careless mistakes". She's not denying that the dissertation has problems! She's only trying to wiggle out of characterizing those "mistakes" as plagiarism. Most damning is that the university agreed that what she did is indeed plagiarism. Revoking a degree, and not just any degree but the PhD of an important official, is such an unusual and damaging move-- no university wants to admit they messed up and take a reputation hit-- that I'm satisfied they wouldn't do it unless they were certain. Likely the only question they were really debating when voting on the matter is whether it would be less trouble to just ignore the whole thing and let her keep her undeserved degree. But it's not just her-- academia has to constantly watch for and take action against cheating, or they lose their reputation. Undoubtedly some didn't want to do anything, but they felt they had to act on this matter. Since it was done in 1980 as you pointed out, it's likely her entire committee is retired or dead, so the university will not have to confront them which makes it easier to act. There's not as much to do.
One of the scarier things about working on a dissertation is being warned to keep it quiet until the degree has been granted, because if you don't, it's virtually certain it will be stolen. They may patent it, or they may use it as their own dissertation and either get a degree from a diploma mill, or more likely use it to fool a real university. Yes, cheating is that rife. Her lawsuit sounds more like a desperation move to drag things out or bully or tire the opposition into giving up, rather than a serious attempt to exonerate herself by raising good points. Lance Armstrong is only coming clean because he has no plausible denials left. Texas A&M didn't screw up or lie about George Deutsch having a degree in journalism, he took it upon himself to do that. Hwang Woo-suk got away with misconduct for a while because he was a trusted insider.
If her dissertation isn't "full of" plagiarism, the most important part, the new findings, was not her own work. If that wasn't so, it would be easy to fix. Just add a few more citations. Instead, it was plagiarized, and the plagiarism irreparably compromises the integrity of the work. She is a plagiarist.
How does a university not know a dissertation is full of plagiarism? Only by wearing blinders!
Dissertations are supposed to be carefully checked by at least 3 professors. Her major professor and committee was at best rubber stamping her work without bothering to check anything. Or they were so incompetent or lazy that none were aware of whole areas of work in their field? How else to explain a failure to recognize plagiarism? And how could they not notice that a student's ability and knowledge had wide gaps? Shop talk should have exposed her as a fraud long before she got anywhere near graduation. Also, she may have a history of cheating, unless she earned a B.S. and M.S. honestly, and only resorted to cheating for the PhD? I suppose that could happen-- someone who had an easy time in school and never experienced failure might be tempted when facing it for the first time.
So how could this happen? They were deliberately overlooking serious problems because it suited them in some way. If it wasn't outright bribes and implied threats, as in, her family was a large donor who might not wish to donate any more if she didn't receive the degree, it could be that the department or school was too eager to boost their numbers.
This kind of crap is a black mark for everyone who legitimately earned a PhD.
shouldn't be trying to make money gambling in the stock market using federally insured depositors' money
FTFY. If banks lose it all in the market, because they didn't do due diligence on questionable investments like those repackaged bad home mortgages that earned top ratings because the rating agencies were gamed, they grudgingly allow the government to bail them out because it'd be a real shame if all those small time depositors lost their life savings. If they make a killing in the market, they simply keep the profits. The banks privatized the gains and socialized the losses. And politicians allowed this because they're getting a cut.
Having never used a Blu-ray despite having several burners, I had no idea they were that tough. DVDs sure aren't. I've had CDs and DVDs scratched as I was removing them because the powered tray picked that moment to close. The corner of the tray's face was a sharp point that, even though made of plastic, was able to gouge a big scratch into the disc before I could pull it away. I've learned to grab the disc so that I can instantly whisk it out of the way or drop it back into the tray should the OS pick the worst possible moment to activate the tray. I've also filed those sharp corners down.
I don't like optical media, and I really don't like powered trays.
That's what Hollywood Accounting is for. They simply deduct that $250,000 expense from the artists' revenue, without asking if the artists thought that was money well spent. To add to the insult, they likely also reduce their own taxable income by that same amount.
Still, the money they owe artists isn't enough to cover too many such court cases.
Those kinds of ideas don't fundamentally change anything. It's good that many people realize copyright has gotten out of hand, and make proposals like yours. But few take it to the logical conclusion, which is that copyright itself is a flawed idea, and needs radical change. I am disturbed by the number of comments here suggesting that the accused is indeed guilty and deserving of some kind of punishment, and that the fine wasn't very high, and is therefore acceptable.
Not so! Yes, technically, he violated the law. But, he didn't do anything wrong. The law should be changed, and he should not be punished. We have created this fantastic network for distributing all kinds of information all over the world, and we're half convinced that using it in certain ways is immoral, and unfair to artists. Copying is easy, and sharing is good. That's reality, and no amount of legislation can change that.
Sharing made humanity! It's a core part of what we are. No tribe could function without cooperation. There's been a divide between West and East that goes back to the differences between Greeks and Achaemenid Persians 2500 years ago, and even further. The Persians succeeded initially because they were more tolerant about religious freedom. Many factors contributed to the fall of the Persian Empire, but one that may have been paramount was their governing philosophy. In the tradition of so many Eastern cultures such as the Assyrians before them, they were authoritarian and controlling even about ideas, and it made them weak. They had no great scientists or philosophers, no one to match the likes of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Archimedes, and so many others. Their soldiers were not spirited fighters, their people did not much love their nation. Alexander the Great could never have succeeded otherwise. In more recent times, the same problem afflicted the nominally communist but actually authoritarian Soviet Union and their adherents. The people of the Soviet Union knew they were getting a bum rap. Today, these fascist scum in the music industry want to convince us sharing is not a natural right and we should all get permission before doing any. They regularly trot out the contention that artists will not be able to make a living without copyright, but that's a self serving lie. For the sake of these precious "rights", they would have us turn our society into East Germany, with constant surveillance of all Internet activity to detect unauthorized sharing whenever it occurs, and harsh punishment that not coincidentally enriches the "victims". We can compensate artists for their efforts, and at the same time encourage free file sharing of anything and everything. It's not a question of "allowing" copying-- copying can't be stopped, and those who think otherwise are kidding themselves. The question is how best to encourage progress, so that we may bring our best efforts to bear on the challenges we face. And it is becoming increasingly obvious that the answer is NOT intellectual property rights.
Huh, I need more current documentation. I've been using the JavaScript Bible, 7th edition, and it doesn't mention Object.keys anywhere. Checking, I find that Object.keys() was introduced in JavaScript version 1.8.5, which came out in 2010, about the same time that book was released. Oldest version of Firefox that supports that is version 4.
If you think Perl's OOP is bad, look at JavaScript. In JavaScript, an object is really a hash with some window dressing. It doesn't distinguish well between inheritance and containment. Further, JavaScript hashes are quite limited. Unlike Perl, there is no built in way to iterate over all the keys, get their names, or even check how many there are. Admittedly, C++ can't do that either-- heck C++ doesn't even have a native hash data type, have to dig into the STL for that. But C++ has the excuse that it is a compiled language.
Where's ALGOL? The last time it was updated was, what, 1968? Still sort of living as shell script, perhaps? How about Pascal and Modula? PL/1? Where's classic BASIC with line numbering, like GW-BASIC, not this VB bastardization? I'm sure all these are still lurking about on a few legacy systems, but that's not alive. Undead perhaps, but not alive.
No kidding. If the GP knows the meaning of life, I should like to hear it. People and life never were "needed". Like any inanimate object, the Earth would not miss life at all were it absent.
It's up to us to decide how we want to live. In many ways it isn't even up to us. Like all animals, we have instincts that dictate a great deal of our behavior, honed by millions of years of evolution. Malthus worried that unrestrained greed would lead us to populate as much as possible even though it would have to end in a "tragedy of the commons" catastrophic collapse. But actually, life dealt with this problem long before we were around. If resources are scarce, animals don't breed. Quite a few animals, such as kangaroos, even abort pregnancies if times turn hard. Takes a lot of energy to produce and raise offspring, and so animals evolved to save themselves the trouble and not to do it if failure looks highly likely. Since it is the female that bears most of the costs, she has evolved to make the call. Today, in nations where women have a choice, women are having fewer children than ever. Where women don't have a choice, we have overpopulation, ecological trouble and war. The number one reason people go to war is that it may be better than doing nothing and starving. This is a problem with an easy solution, if only we are willing. Of course, unanticipated disasters can still lead to tragedy, but that's life. We may not ever able to predict the future well enough to avoid every famine.
We have an easy answer to that problem, the only question there is whether we're willing. If we are, then we can focus on other matters. Where do we want to go? What kind of life do we want to live? Why shouldn't all of us who want it be able to have a life of fun? Spend our days skiing, rock climbing, white water rafting, partying, and having sex without undesired pregnancies, diseases, and love triangles that turn ugly? When bored of all that, shift to different pleasures, such as hacking and creating art? The very people who seem to object most to that kind of existence, out of some notion that that's the deadly sin known as Sloth with a bit of Lust and Gluttony thrown in, a bunch of immoral hedonism that will lead to divine punishment, are the same who seem unwilling to face one of the big challenges of our generation, that of Climate Change.
Drugs may lead to crimes such as theft, in order to support the habit, and vandalism and battery if the user goes into a psychotic rage, or negligent homicide and property damage in the case of the drunk driver, but drugs alone shouldn't be criminal. Drinking is not a crime, DWI is. It is in any case a terrible approach to what may not be a problem at all, and where it is a problem, it may be better handled as a health issue, not an issue of moral failing. We have figured out that throwing the book at the insane is unproductive. In cases of drug habits that lead to problems, the family needs the help of an addiction center, not a jail cell.
Consider that Prohibition did not work. It was a popular idea, but it was the wrong answer to the wrong problem. The real problem was that changing technology in the late 1800s caused an across the board increase in alcoholic content in popular drinks. People who didn't change their drinking habits were having trouble staying sober, when before there was no problem. The last thing we needed to do about this problem was go all moralistic about it. We painted it up as personal failings, brought out the big stick of the law, and started the beatings. After a few decades of this approach utterly failing to solve the problem-- if anything, people were drinking even more than before, in part to spit on the Man's laws-- we came to our senses and gave up on Prohibition. We have yet to see the light on the War on Drugs.
That's more explanation than I managed to turn up poking around on the Arch website and asking in the forums. Thanks. Yet I don't buy it. Also, that the discussion isn't more prominent shows another problem: documentation. Would've been nice to provide a list of common initscripts way of doing things with systemd equivalents, to ease the transition.
For instance, took a bit of time to realize that/var/log/messages was no longer used to hold logs, then hunt around to find out what systemd does instead, which is "journalctl". journalctl appears to compress the logs, which may or may not be a good idea, depends on what uses are made of them. I know of logrotate and how to configure it to use compression or not, but how is this done in systemd? One bad thing about compressing them is that if you want to see more of the most recent messages than journalctl stores in the clear, you're in for a wait. Try "journalctl", go to the end with 'G', and you'll be waiting a few minutes. I think what must be going on is that journalctl is uncompressing all the logs, but I don't know. Maybe journalctl is better, but I'd like some more information so I can judge for myself. What I've seen so far doesn't look better.
I am not convinced that systemd is following the UNIX principle of lots of small, simple utilities that each do one thing and do it well. Despite their claims of modularity, systemd seems to be making system initialization into a monolithic process. What compelling reason do they have for this approach? None that I've heard. The reason we stick with the Linux kernel is that it's mature, supports a lot of hardware, and contains a lot of good work and good algorithms for the core function of an OS, process and resource management. We don't stick with it because it's monolithic, more like in spite of that, and because there isn't any decent microkernel alternative. So we're stuck with monolithic kernels. Why would we want to throw away modular initialization systems for a monolithic one?
BTW, that thread also shows the nastiness I was talking about. Consider this gem:
My two cents about Arch moving to systemd: Arch devs knows what they're doing, period. Stop whining about KISS/Arch way because many of you obviously don't get it.
LOL. I use Arch Linux, but forcing everyone to switch to systemd has me looking at other distros. Thinking Lubuntu might be the way to go. Read that Ubuntu is going to a rolling release starting in version 14.
The Arch people get pretty nasty if you question their decisions. I asked why they made this move to systemd, and got "you're an ignoramus if you don't understand" kind of responses. Maybe they don't have a good reason? And maybe that's because there isn't a good reason to switch to systemd? The only good thing I've heard about systemd is that it boots faster.
You talk like the code is all locked away, and that the keepers have the power to keep it that way.
Trying to keep widely spread information away from "bad" people is a fool's quest. How many programmers worked on this project? Dozens? How easy would it be to duplicate the ideas, if not the exact code? Pretty easy. The data may be more difficult, thanks to the sheer quantity, but that's also the most perishable part.
Do you realize how easy it is to design nuclear weapons? I suppose you'd like to think it's a big, carefully guarded secret. It's not. Why else would a backward nation like North Korea be able to build them? The hard thing is obtaining the material. Also, the rocket science required for the preferred delivery method is not exactly easy. But as for the bomb itself, if you have enough material, a very weak explosion, or even just slamming two hunks together with a sledgehammer, is enough to set it off. With high precision, less material is needed.
And this is source code we're talking about here, not munitions, WMDs, or assault rifles. Such being the case, why make a big stink about it? Release it, and save everyone the trouble. Let's head off the possibility of people being dragged into court to defend themselves for leaking.
You're so sure Mr. Swartz was not in the right that you preemptively call everyone who disagrees with you stupid, huh?
No, it is publishers who are in the wrong. If you think JSTOR is some kind of saintly, charitable effort, and point to their non-profit status as evidence, I suggest you take a harder look. Research publishing is a huge racket. We, the people, pay for a great deal of research, and then allow these publishers to lock it all up, charge huge fees for access, and bless the whole affair by calling it privatization. That they do it on behalf of a few school rather than for themselves, and that the access fees are in the form of tuition rather than straight up fees, does not make it any less unfair. JSTOR has willingly aided that injustice, providing cover for the schools, until prodded hard.
Ouch. Without knowing any more of the details, and presuming it was all consensual, sounds like your friend didn't do anything wrong. Sleeping with the sheriff's daughter should not be thought a bad choice. One wonders if it's safe to patronize a strip club. Apart from the food, maybe just eating at Hooters is a bad choice.
I've felt for some time now that the "tough on crime" trend has gone way too far. It's become a self perpetuating industry that is more interested in growing their numbers than in justice. The US imprisons more people than any other nation.
Take a photo of the vault from the analogy of course.
He doesn't have to access another student's data, he can access his own data. Also, for further testing, he could get permission from a few other students to access their data. Don't be so sure the access is unauthorized.
There is really no call to be flinging around accusations. We should all realize the real problem is that officialdom is scared, and is overreacting and lashing out. They're like mental patients with big knives and a bad case of paranoia, slashing their friends who are trying to help, and even cutting their own limbs. They're just deluding themselves if they think making an example of Mr. Al-Khabez will make them any safer. Perhaps a bit of fear of other things, such as being fired, would restore a bit of their perspective. Firing one of the faculty members or administrative officials ought to do the job. Taking away the knives would also help.
So in other words, he's a script kiddie? They're going nuts over that?
A lot of malicious scanning is done with this tool
What makes scanning so malicious? What's next, getting into trouble for trying to telnet to random IP addresses? Is it now a crime to point nmap at school IP addresses? Maybe surfing to their website and repeatedly hitting F5 is a reprehensible DoS attack?
Acunetix is commercial software that he probably would have pirated
Even if that's true, which you do not know, so what? I don't see where that has anything to do with the issue at hand.
I can see why they were spooked
Well, I can't. They can fix the flaws, it's not like that's hard. Might even have to hire a few competent programmers! Instead, they reached for the assault weapons. If they pump enough bullets into this messenger, maybe they can erase his message as well as him. We ought to take these legal powers away from these bozos.
I think there's more to it than $ or even control. The entertainment moguls are a bunch of dumb cowardly dinosaurs, trying to turn back the clock, hang on to a lost world or perhaps a world that never was, which they believe they like and think they understand. Never mind whether it makes sense, or is fair. Or that it would lead to stagnation and decline, and threaten our children. That takes more than any amount of money and power can accomplish, but this detail doesn't seem to have dissuaded them from trying to grab all they can to swing the biggest hammer money can buy at this imaginary problem. They have a frightful amount of expertise in working us and our systems in order to pursue this nightmare.
The question is, are we going to heed them? Our survival may depend upon us not following where they lead. Aaron Swartz had the right ideas, and the entrenched powers drove him to suicide. If Climate Change is a serious problem, and we can't freely apply our best solutions thanks to us being too obedient to opposition from entrenched interests in the form of ridiculous extrapolations of property rights to the immaterial, too willing to fall for their dangerously wrong fantasies and siren songs about the way life ought to be, then perhaps we deserve what's coming. We're too stuck in our wasteful, unsustainable lifestyles, and if we won't change our ways, nature will change them for us with no guarantee any of us will survive. We figured out what happened to the dinosaurs, but we haven't done all we could to make sure the same doesn't happen to us. Another killer meteor could be headed our way. Are we smarter than the dinosaurs? Then there's still the specter of nuclear war. And there are other problems. If we are alone in the universe, is it because it really is that difficult to for life to reach our level? Or is it not so hard, and what's hard is yet to come, and other intelligent life blew it and are no more?
Fire Carmen Ortiz, Steve Heymann, and perhaps Scott Garland.
Disbar and bring charges against Ortiz and Heymann for Attorney Misconduct. Also hit them with Involuntary Manslaughter.
Sue JSTOR for violations of FOIA requests. Sue them for theft, and perhaps racketeering. Also sue them under the anti trust laws for price fixing.
Sue MIT as well, for contributory negligence.
Change the terminology. There should be no language anywhere in the laws that equate copying with theft. This crime of "data theft" should be called "data copying".
Change the deals, and the laws. No private publisher should have any legal grounds for locking away research paid for by the public.
If any of this seems over the top, consider how over the top the accusations and threats against Swartz were.
I'm wondering about Senator Cornyn. Could he actually be in support greater intellectual freedom? It seems 99% of politicians and judges are crusty old fools who blindly swallow publisher propaganda, and their knee jerk reaction to any alleged copyright violation is to believe the accusers and join the pack screaming that it's "theft" and howling for the blood of the accused. A demonstration of this is Ortiz's profound words of wisdom: "Stealing is stealing". But perhaps Cornyn, who sponsored PIPA, is having a change of heart?
Perhaps you are talking about fiction and general publishing? Because in research publication, it's not the publishers who do all those things, it's the authors and fellow authors. And it's all gratis. Publishers really are not adding any value whatsoever.
- quality selection / control on articles (some do better on this than others)
Fellow experts in the field do this, because they're the only ones with the expertise to judge a submission, and spot mistakes. Even the editorial/management process of finding and choosing reviewers is done by fellow experts. This practice is so ingrained there's even a name for it: peer review.
editors
Authors are asked to do basic proofing themselves, so as not to waste peer reviewers' time on trivial errors such as typos.
graphic artists to re-draw illustrations
What illustrations? Perhaps biology uses illustrations, but an abstract science such as mathematics does not.
designers to create pleasing layouts
The typical journal spells out those details. They specify what font sizes authors must use, and often fonts as well. The onus is on the authors to follow the specifications to prepare camera ready documents. A typical research journal will have some variation between papers. Unless the journal has specified otherwise, most papers might be in a serif font, with a few in a sans serif font mixed in. There will be slight differences in the spacing of lines and other fine details. Not everyone uses LaTeX. Probably almost no one still uses a typewriter, but there is other software. Usually, there is no color. These are research papers, not glossy magazine articles. But with e-readers able to substitute on the fly whatever font at whatever size the user likes, these issues are quickly fading into irrelevance.
The problem is, despite employer protestations to the contrary, there are still too many job seekers chasing too few jobs. Otherwise, you wouldn't say things like "as you list more accomplishments, it's just more words to glaze over", and moan about the sheer quantity of resumes you have to wade through, you poor thing you. You speak of "right fit", which is an euphemistic way of saying you get a lot of people you think of as overqualified. You won't understand how good employers have it until you are glad you can get anyone at all who is capable of doing the work. How can more experience ever be a bad thing?
So many employers are so incredibly picky, and not out of any genuine difficulty in finding people. The difficulty is in screening out the hundreds of applications for each position. Even if 90% of them aren't qualified, that's still 10 qualified people per position.
The best evidence that this supposed shortage of talent is actually an employer manufactured problem is pay. There are plenty of people who can code. Are you having to pay more to get good people? Not that I've heard. Nor do you have to hunt for people. You're like the beautiful high school girl who needs a prom date. You just mention you don't have one yet, then kick back and enjoy it as boy after boy makes their pitch. Or you complain that none of the boys are worthy, none of them are trying hard enough, and even get a kick out of embarrassing the scrawny, nerdy ones for thinking they had a chance.
This event has "AMD sucks at management" written all over it. Probably treated these vital employees like crap. AMD has shown other signs of poor leadership, stumbling in the x86 CPU market. They may even be in a death spiral. While I like seeing bad management get what they deserve, I don't like where this looks to be going. If AMD/ATI dies, that leaves Nvidia as the only player in the high end consumer graphics market. I'm not much consoled by Intel's presence. If Intel improves, it doesn't help the situation much. Just means Nvidia is joined by another monopolist. AMD's exit would also leave Intel with one less competitor in the x86 CPU market.
I keep hoping to see a decent open source graphics driver with good 3D acceleration. For years, ATI talked of going there, but somehow it never materialized.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't read German, so unless there's an English translation, I'll have to pass on reading a copy. Are you speaking from knowledge or have you not read it either?
I'm not doing the accusing. Schavan herself admitted "careless mistakes". She's not denying that the dissertation has problems! She's only trying to wiggle out of characterizing those "mistakes" as plagiarism. Most damning is that the university agreed that what she did is indeed plagiarism. Revoking a degree, and not just any degree but the PhD of an important official, is such an unusual and damaging move-- no university wants to admit they messed up and take a reputation hit-- that I'm satisfied they wouldn't do it unless they were certain. Likely the only question they were really debating when voting on the matter is whether it would be less trouble to just ignore the whole thing and let her keep her undeserved degree. But it's not just her-- academia has to constantly watch for and take action against cheating, or they lose their reputation. Undoubtedly some didn't want to do anything, but they felt they had to act on this matter. Since it was done in 1980 as you pointed out, it's likely her entire committee is retired or dead, so the university will not have to confront them which makes it easier to act. There's not as much to do.
One of the scarier things about working on a dissertation is being warned to keep it quiet until the degree has been granted, because if you don't, it's virtually certain it will be stolen. They may patent it, or they may use it as their own dissertation and either get a degree from a diploma mill, or more likely use it to fool a real university. Yes, cheating is that rife. Her lawsuit sounds more like a desperation move to drag things out or bully or tire the opposition into giving up, rather than a serious attempt to exonerate herself by raising good points. Lance Armstrong is only coming clean because he has no plausible denials left. Texas A&M didn't screw up or lie about George Deutsch having a degree in journalism, he took it upon himself to do that. Hwang Woo-suk got away with misconduct for a while because he was a trusted insider.
If her dissertation isn't "full of" plagiarism, the most important part, the new findings, was not her own work. If that wasn't so, it would be easy to fix. Just add a few more citations. Instead, it was plagiarized, and the plagiarism irreparably compromises the integrity of the work. She is a plagiarist.
How does a university not know a dissertation is full of plagiarism? Only by wearing blinders!
Dissertations are supposed to be carefully checked by at least 3 professors. Her major professor and committee was at best rubber stamping her work without bothering to check anything. Or they were so incompetent or lazy that none were aware of whole areas of work in their field? How else to explain a failure to recognize plagiarism? And how could they not notice that a student's ability and knowledge had wide gaps? Shop talk should have exposed her as a fraud long before she got anywhere near graduation. Also, she may have a history of cheating, unless she earned a B.S. and M.S. honestly, and only resorted to cheating for the PhD? I suppose that could happen-- someone who had an easy time in school and never experienced failure might be tempted when facing it for the first time.
So how could this happen? They were deliberately overlooking serious problems because it suited them in some way. If it wasn't outright bribes and implied threats, as in, her family was a large donor who might not wish to donate any more if she didn't receive the degree, it could be that the department or school was too eager to boost their numbers.
This kind of crap is a black mark for everyone who legitimately earned a PhD.
shouldn't be trying to make money gambling in the stock market using federally insured depositors' money
FTFY. If banks lose it all in the market, because they didn't do due diligence on questionable investments like those repackaged bad home mortgages that earned top ratings because the rating agencies were gamed, they grudgingly allow the government to bail them out because it'd be a real shame if all those small time depositors lost their life savings. If they make a killing in the market, they simply keep the profits. The banks privatized the gains and socialized the losses. And politicians allowed this because they're getting a cut.
Having never used a Blu-ray despite having several burners, I had no idea they were that tough. DVDs sure aren't. I've had CDs and DVDs scratched as I was removing them because the powered tray picked that moment to close. The corner of the tray's face was a sharp point that, even though made of plastic, was able to gouge a big scratch into the disc before I could pull it away. I've learned to grab the disc so that I can instantly whisk it out of the way or drop it back into the tray should the OS pick the worst possible moment to activate the tray. I've also filed those sharp corners down.
I don't like optical media, and I really don't like powered trays.
That's what Hollywood Accounting is for. They simply deduct that $250,000 expense from the artists' revenue, without asking if the artists thought that was money well spent. To add to the insult, they likely also reduce their own taxable income by that same amount.
Still, the money they owe artists isn't enough to cover too many such court cases.
Those kinds of ideas don't fundamentally change anything. It's good that many people realize copyright has gotten out of hand, and make proposals like yours. But few take it to the logical conclusion, which is that copyright itself is a flawed idea, and needs radical change. I am disturbed by the number of comments here suggesting that the accused is indeed guilty and deserving of some kind of punishment, and that the fine wasn't very high, and is therefore acceptable.
Not so! Yes, technically, he violated the law. But, he didn't do anything wrong. The law should be changed, and he should not be punished. We have created this fantastic network for distributing all kinds of information all over the world, and we're half convinced that using it in certain ways is immoral, and unfair to artists. Copying is easy, and sharing is good. That's reality, and no amount of legislation can change that.
Sharing made humanity! It's a core part of what we are. No tribe could function without cooperation. There's been a divide between West and East that goes back to the differences between Greeks and Achaemenid Persians 2500 years ago, and even further. The Persians succeeded initially because they were more tolerant about religious freedom. Many factors contributed to the fall of the Persian Empire, but one that may have been paramount was their governing philosophy. In the tradition of so many Eastern cultures such as the Assyrians before them, they were authoritarian and controlling even about ideas, and it made them weak. They had no great scientists or philosophers, no one to match the likes of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Archimedes, and so many others. Their soldiers were not spirited fighters, their people did not much love their nation. Alexander the Great could never have succeeded otherwise. In more recent times, the same problem afflicted the nominally communist but actually authoritarian Soviet Union and their adherents. The people of the Soviet Union knew they were getting a bum rap. Today, these fascist scum in the music industry want to convince us sharing is not a natural right and we should all get permission before doing any. They regularly trot out the contention that artists will not be able to make a living without copyright, but that's a self serving lie. For the sake of these precious "rights", they would have us turn our society into East Germany, with constant surveillance of all Internet activity to detect unauthorized sharing whenever it occurs, and harsh punishment that not coincidentally enriches the "victims". We can compensate artists for their efforts, and at the same time encourage free file sharing of anything and everything. It's not a question of "allowing" copying-- copying can't be stopped, and those who think otherwise are kidding themselves. The question is how best to encourage progress, so that we may bring our best efforts to bear on the challenges we face. And it is becoming increasingly obvious that the answer is NOT intellectual property rights.
Huh, I need more current documentation. I've been using the JavaScript Bible, 7th edition, and it doesn't mention Object.keys anywhere. Checking, I find that Object.keys() was introduced in JavaScript version 1.8.5, which came out in 2010, about the same time that book was released. Oldest version of Firefox that supports that is version 4.
If you think Perl's OOP is bad, look at JavaScript. In JavaScript, an object is really a hash with some window dressing. It doesn't distinguish well between inheritance and containment. Further, JavaScript hashes are quite limited. Unlike Perl, there is no built in way to iterate over all the keys, get their names, or even check how many there are. Admittedly, C++ can't do that either-- heck C++ doesn't even have a native hash data type, have to dig into the STL for that. But C++ has the excuse that it is a compiled language.
Languages never die?
Where's ALGOL? The last time it was updated was, what, 1968? Still sort of living as shell script, perhaps? How about Pascal and Modula? PL/1? Where's classic BASIC with line numbering, like GW-BASIC, not this VB bastardization? I'm sure all these are still lurking about on a few legacy systems, but that's not alive. Undead perhaps, but not alive.
No kidding. If the GP knows the meaning of life, I should like to hear it. People and life never were "needed". Like any inanimate object, the Earth would not miss life at all were it absent.
It's up to us to decide how we want to live. In many ways it isn't even up to us. Like all animals, we have instincts that dictate a great deal of our behavior, honed by millions of years of evolution. Malthus worried that unrestrained greed would lead us to populate as much as possible even though it would have to end in a "tragedy of the commons" catastrophic collapse. But actually, life dealt with this problem long before we were around. If resources are scarce, animals don't breed. Quite a few animals, such as kangaroos, even abort pregnancies if times turn hard. Takes a lot of energy to produce and raise offspring, and so animals evolved to save themselves the trouble and not to do it if failure looks highly likely. Since it is the female that bears most of the costs, she has evolved to make the call. Today, in nations where women have a choice, women are having fewer children than ever. Where women don't have a choice, we have overpopulation, ecological trouble and war. The number one reason people go to war is that it may be better than doing nothing and starving. This is a problem with an easy solution, if only we are willing. Of course, unanticipated disasters can still lead to tragedy, but that's life. We may not ever able to predict the future well enough to avoid every famine.
We have an easy answer to that problem, the only question there is whether we're willing. If we are, then we can focus on other matters. Where do we want to go? What kind of life do we want to live? Why shouldn't all of us who want it be able to have a life of fun? Spend our days skiing, rock climbing, white water rafting, partying, and having sex without undesired pregnancies, diseases, and love triangles that turn ugly? When bored of all that, shift to different pleasures, such as hacking and creating art? The very people who seem to object most to that kind of existence, out of some notion that that's the deadly sin known as Sloth with a bit of Lust and Gluttony thrown in, a bunch of immoral hedonism that will lead to divine punishment, are the same who seem unwilling to face one of the big challenges of our generation, that of Climate Change.
Drugs may lead to crimes such as theft, in order to support the habit, and vandalism and battery if the user goes into a psychotic rage, or negligent homicide and property damage in the case of the drunk driver, but drugs alone shouldn't be criminal. Drinking is not a crime, DWI is. It is in any case a terrible approach to what may not be a problem at all, and where it is a problem, it may be better handled as a health issue, not an issue of moral failing. We have figured out that throwing the book at the insane is unproductive. In cases of drug habits that lead to problems, the family needs the help of an addiction center, not a jail cell.
Consider that Prohibition did not work. It was a popular idea, but it was the wrong answer to the wrong problem. The real problem was that changing technology in the late 1800s caused an across the board increase in alcoholic content in popular drinks. People who didn't change their drinking habits were having trouble staying sober, when before there was no problem. The last thing we needed to do about this problem was go all moralistic about it. We painted it up as personal failings, brought out the big stick of the law, and started the beatings. After a few decades of this approach utterly failing to solve the problem-- if anything, people were drinking even more than before, in part to spit on the Man's laws-- we came to our senses and gave up on Prohibition. We have yet to see the light on the War on Drugs.
That's more explanation than I managed to turn up poking around on the Arch website and asking in the forums. Thanks. Yet I don't buy it. Also, that the discussion isn't more prominent shows another problem: documentation. Would've been nice to provide a list of common initscripts way of doing things with systemd equivalents, to ease the transition.
For instance, took a bit of time to realize that /var/log/messages was no longer used to hold logs, then hunt around to find out what systemd does instead, which is "journalctl". journalctl appears to compress the logs, which may or may not be a good idea, depends on what uses are made of them. I know of logrotate and how to configure it to use compression or not, but how is this done in systemd? One bad thing about compressing them is that if you want to see more of the most recent messages than journalctl stores in the clear, you're in for a wait. Try "journalctl", go to the end with 'G', and you'll be waiting a few minutes. I think what must be going on is that journalctl is uncompressing all the logs, but I don't know. Maybe journalctl is better, but I'd like some more information so I can judge for myself. What I've seen so far doesn't look better.
I am not convinced that systemd is following the UNIX principle of lots of small, simple utilities that each do one thing and do it well. Despite their claims of modularity, systemd seems to be making system initialization into a monolithic process. What compelling reason do they have for this approach? None that I've heard. The reason we stick with the Linux kernel is that it's mature, supports a lot of hardware, and contains a lot of good work and good algorithms for the core function of an OS, process and resource management. We don't stick with it because it's monolithic, more like in spite of that, and because there isn't any decent microkernel alternative. So we're stuck with monolithic kernels. Why would we want to throw away modular initialization systems for a monolithic one?
BTW, that thread also shows the nastiness I was talking about. Consider this gem:
My two cents about Arch moving to systemd: Arch devs knows what they're doing, period. Stop whining about KISS/Arch way because many of you obviously don't get it.
Yeah, I like being talked down to like that. Not.
LOL. I use Arch Linux, but forcing everyone to switch to systemd has me looking at other distros. Thinking Lubuntu might be the way to go. Read that Ubuntu is going to a rolling release starting in version 14.
The Arch people get pretty nasty if you question their decisions. I asked why they made this move to systemd, and got "you're an ignoramus if you don't understand" kind of responses. Maybe they don't have a good reason? And maybe that's because there isn't a good reason to switch to systemd? The only good thing I've heard about systemd is that it boots faster.
You talk like the code is all locked away, and that the keepers have the power to keep it that way.
Trying to keep widely spread information away from "bad" people is a fool's quest. How many programmers worked on this project? Dozens? How easy would it be to duplicate the ideas, if not the exact code? Pretty easy. The data may be more difficult, thanks to the sheer quantity, but that's also the most perishable part.
Do you realize how easy it is to design nuclear weapons? I suppose you'd like to think it's a big, carefully guarded secret. It's not. Why else would a backward nation like North Korea be able to build them? The hard thing is obtaining the material. Also, the rocket science required for the preferred delivery method is not exactly easy. But as for the bomb itself, if you have enough material, a very weak explosion, or even just slamming two hunks together with a sledgehammer, is enough to set it off. With high precision, less material is needed.
And this is source code we're talking about here, not munitions, WMDs, or assault rifles. Such being the case, why make a big stink about it? Release it, and save everyone the trouble. Let's head off the possibility of people being dragged into court to defend themselves for leaking.
You're so sure Mr. Swartz was not in the right that you preemptively call everyone who disagrees with you stupid, huh?
No, it is publishers who are in the wrong. If you think JSTOR is some kind of saintly, charitable effort, and point to their non-profit status as evidence, I suggest you take a harder look. Research publishing is a huge racket. We, the people, pay for a great deal of research, and then allow these publishers to lock it all up, charge huge fees for access, and bless the whole affair by calling it privatization. That they do it on behalf of a few school rather than for themselves, and that the access fees are in the form of tuition rather than straight up fees, does not make it any less unfair. JSTOR has willingly aided that injustice, providing cover for the schools, until prodded hard.
Ouch. Without knowing any more of the details, and presuming it was all consensual, sounds like your friend didn't do anything wrong. Sleeping with the sheriff's daughter should not be thought a bad choice. One wonders if it's safe to patronize a strip club. Apart from the food, maybe just eating at Hooters is a bad choice.
I've felt for some time now that the "tough on crime" trend has gone way too far. It's become a self perpetuating industry that is more interested in growing their numbers than in justice. The US imprisons more people than any other nation.
Take a photo of the vault from the analogy of course.
He doesn't have to access another student's data, he can access his own data. Also, for further testing, he could get permission from a few other students to access their data. Don't be so sure the access is unauthorized.
There is really no call to be flinging around accusations. We should all realize the real problem is that officialdom is scared, and is overreacting and lashing out. They're like mental patients with big knives and a bad case of paranoia, slashing their friends who are trying to help, and even cutting their own limbs. They're just deluding themselves if they think making an example of Mr. Al-Khabez will make them any safer. Perhaps a bit of fear of other things, such as being fired, would restore a bit of their perspective. Firing one of the faculty members or administrative officials ought to do the job. Taking away the knives would also help.
Take a photo.
People keep comparing this to stepping through the missing wall of a vault.
I think a better analogy is coming back a week later and shining a flashlight or laser beam on the vault, and discovering that there is still no wall.
he used Acunetix
So in other words, he's a script kiddie? They're going nuts over that?
A lot of malicious scanning is done with this tool
What makes scanning so malicious? What's next, getting into trouble for trying to telnet to random IP addresses? Is it now a crime to point nmap at school IP addresses? Maybe surfing to their website and repeatedly hitting F5 is a reprehensible DoS attack?
Acunetix is commercial software that he probably would have pirated
Even if that's true, which you do not know, so what? I don't see where that has anything to do with the issue at hand.
I can see why they were spooked
Well, I can't. They can fix the flaws, it's not like that's hard. Might even have to hire a few competent programmers! Instead, they reached for the assault weapons. If they pump enough bullets into this messenger, maybe they can erase his message as well as him. We ought to take these legal powers away from these bozos.
I think there's more to it than $ or even control. The entertainment moguls are a bunch of dumb cowardly dinosaurs, trying to turn back the clock, hang on to a lost world or perhaps a world that never was, which they believe they like and think they understand. Never mind whether it makes sense, or is fair. Or that it would lead to stagnation and decline, and threaten our children. That takes more than any amount of money and power can accomplish, but this detail doesn't seem to have dissuaded them from trying to grab all they can to swing the biggest hammer money can buy at this imaginary problem. They have a frightful amount of expertise in working us and our systems in order to pursue this nightmare.
The question is, are we going to heed them? Our survival may depend upon us not following where they lead. Aaron Swartz had the right ideas, and the entrenched powers drove him to suicide. If Climate Change is a serious problem, and we can't freely apply our best solutions thanks to us being too obedient to opposition from entrenched interests in the form of ridiculous extrapolations of property rights to the immaterial, too willing to fall for their dangerously wrong fantasies and siren songs about the way life ought to be, then perhaps we deserve what's coming. We're too stuck in our wasteful, unsustainable lifestyles, and if we won't change our ways, nature will change them for us with no guarantee any of us will survive. We figured out what happened to the dinosaurs, but we haven't done all we could to make sure the same doesn't happen to us. Another killer meteor could be headed our way. Are we smarter than the dinosaurs? Then there's still the specter of nuclear war. And there are other problems. If we are alone in the universe, is it because it really is that difficult to for life to reach our level? Or is it not so hard, and what's hard is yet to come, and other intelligent life blew it and are no more?
What should happen next?
If any of this seems over the top, consider how over the top the accusations and threats against Swartz were.
I'm wondering about Senator Cornyn. Could he actually be in support greater intellectual freedom? It seems 99% of politicians and judges are crusty old fools who blindly swallow publisher propaganda, and their knee jerk reaction to any alleged copyright violation is to believe the accusers and join the pack screaming that it's "theft" and howling for the blood of the accused. A demonstration of this is Ortiz's profound words of wisdom: "Stealing is stealing". But perhaps Cornyn, who sponsored PIPA, is having a change of heart?
Perhaps you are talking about fiction and general publishing? Because in research publication, it's not the publishers who do all those things, it's the authors and fellow authors. And it's all gratis. Publishers really are not adding any value whatsoever.
- quality selection / control on articles (some do better on this than others)
Fellow experts in the field do this, because they're the only ones with the expertise to judge a submission, and spot mistakes. Even the editorial/management process of finding and choosing reviewers is done by fellow experts. This practice is so ingrained there's even a name for it: peer review.
editors
Authors are asked to do basic proofing themselves, so as not to waste peer reviewers' time on trivial errors such as typos.
graphic artists to re-draw illustrations
What illustrations? Perhaps biology uses illustrations, but an abstract science such as mathematics does not.
designers to create pleasing layouts
The typical journal spells out those details. They specify what font sizes authors must use, and often fonts as well. The onus is on the authors to follow the specifications to prepare camera ready documents. A typical research journal will have some variation between papers. Unless the journal has specified otherwise, most papers might be in a serif font, with a few in a sans serif font mixed in. There will be slight differences in the spacing of lines and other fine details. Not everyone uses LaTeX. Probably almost no one still uses a typewriter, but there is other software. Usually, there is no color. These are research papers, not glossy magazine articles. But with e-readers able to substitute on the fly whatever font at whatever size the user likes, these issues are quickly fading into irrelevance.
The problem is, despite employer protestations to the contrary, there are still too many job seekers chasing too few jobs. Otherwise, you wouldn't say things like "as you list more accomplishments, it's just more words to glaze over", and moan about the sheer quantity of resumes you have to wade through, you poor thing you. You speak of "right fit", which is an euphemistic way of saying you get a lot of people you think of as overqualified. You won't understand how good employers have it until you are glad you can get anyone at all who is capable of doing the work. How can more experience ever be a bad thing?
So many employers are so incredibly picky, and not out of any genuine difficulty in finding people. The difficulty is in screening out the hundreds of applications for each position. Even if 90% of them aren't qualified, that's still 10 qualified people per position.
The best evidence that this supposed shortage of talent is actually an employer manufactured problem is pay. There are plenty of people who can code. Are you having to pay more to get good people? Not that I've heard. Nor do you have to hunt for people. You're like the beautiful high school girl who needs a prom date. You just mention you don't have one yet, then kick back and enjoy it as boy after boy makes their pitch. Or you complain that none of the boys are worthy, none of them are trying hard enough, and even get a kick out of embarrassing the scrawny, nerdy ones for thinking they had a chance.
This event has "AMD sucks at management" written all over it. Probably treated these vital employees like crap. AMD has shown other signs of poor leadership, stumbling in the x86 CPU market. They may even be in a death spiral. While I like seeing bad management get what they deserve, I don't like where this looks to be going. If AMD/ATI dies, that leaves Nvidia as the only player in the high end consumer graphics market. I'm not much consoled by Intel's presence. If Intel improves, it doesn't help the situation much. Just means Nvidia is joined by another monopolist. AMD's exit would also leave Intel with one less competitor in the x86 CPU market.
I keep hoping to see a decent open source graphics driver with good 3D acceleration. For years, ATI talked of going there, but somehow it never materialized.