I read that article when it came out, and found it unconvincing. Kamp slams the bazaar model and the entire community for being hackers who patch together endless bandaid solutions which cause more problems which require more bandaids. That strikes me as unfair, and wrong. To suggest there are no talented programmers working open source is ridiculous. Indeed, many of the GNU tools are superior to the original UNIX tools that they cloned. I'll take the GNU tools over the native tools of HP-UX, AIX, or any other proprietary UNIX. Sure there are problems, but would his way (whatever that is exactly) really be any better? At least the problems get fixed. In the proprietary UNIXes, problems linger. These proprietary vendors often claim that their C compiler generates better code than gcc, but I've found their record on that point spotty. How would he avoid having a long term project sink into a chaos of patchwork? Microsoft didn't do any better with Windows. How should software be developed?
The best I can say for Kamp's thinking is that I think he's right about the cruft. Programs have become huge and bloated. Anymore, when you include a library, you aren't getting just one library, you're getting that library plus all the libraries it depends on, and the ones they depend on, and so on. It can get deep. And you find duplication. One program may ultimately use several slightly different libraries that do nearly the same things. It's just faster for the programmers to throw in everything including the kitchen sink, though it does make things less consistent and more complicated. But the solution? What's his solution? I don't recall that he really said.
The ACM seems a bit confused or schizo on matters of copyright, sometimes publishing bad pieces that take copyright as a given and which only explore solutions to the small "problems" of implementing copyright. That's like asking how to stop genius hackers from cracking DRM schemes-- it misses the point that it doesn't take genius to break DRM, because the idea is unsound. More often, the ACM publishes much more enlightened pieces that point out various ways in which copyright and patents also have become too extreme.
If Megaupload did hurt box office sales, then they obviously hosted lots of pirated material.
You get an F in Logic 101 today. It is quite possible for a site to host no pirated content and yet hurt box office sales. For example, movie critic web sites could give low ratings. A site could have only trailers (presumably that would be legal), which could backfire, convincing people to skip the movie. Perhaps the most damaging blow is an entertainment related discussion site ignoring the existence of a particular movie.
You demand a yes or no answer to an unfair question we all know can already be answered with a yes. This is the springboard to an obvious and contrived implication, which is "Megaupload broke the law/is evil".
Have you ever told a lie? Ever? If you've told just one lie in your entire life, then you are a liar! The number of adults who aren't liars under that standard might well be zero. The world is a sink of depravity.
And your black and white view is, as others said, beside the point. The real enabler is technology in the form of the Internet and extremely capacious and fast storage media. Bashing Megaupload is just shooting the messenger.
Way to go, Republicans. Look stupid again. Make Texas and America look bad, again.
The people behind this out of order demand are all Republicans. And the leader, this Ted Poe, is from Texas. I don't want the US to be a one party nation, but the Republicans seem suicidally intent on cornering the market on stupidity. Royal courts used to have fools. Helped the monarchy avoid really stupid moves. Court fools had a good deal of license, but no real power. I would prefer that the Republicans behave like a serious party, and quit making auditions for this vacant post that shouldn't be needed, now that we have dozens of editorial cartoonists, Saturday Night Live's tradition of mocking candidates and debates, and comedy news such as the Daily Show.
But if Republicans continue to be unable to help it, unable to comprehend that such a demand tramples upon the 1st Amendment and that they ought to be ashamed of themselves, it's time for them to be pushed aside. We haven't had a big party shift since the Whigs waffled on slavery and self destructed in the 1850s. The 4 Whig Presidents, ending with Millard Fillmore, are among our lowest rated presidents. The last really good Republican president we had was not Reagan, it was Eisenhower. Time for some fresh blood.
Allow me to amplify "sellout", just in case anyone doesn't fully understand.
If your name, reputation, education, or whatever is seemingly worth anything, they'll want your endorsement. They want to slap your name on some product, report, or even just an idea. It might even be a good thing that you'd want to be associated with, but it is far more likely they are trying to take a shortcut and think that your name will help polish a turd. They may not even bother with the formality of asking for your permission or real opinion before using your credentials. They are likely to feel they already have your permission for such things because you are working for them. Probably slipped it into your contract.
Once your good name has been trashed because it was used on a few stinkers, then they want to get rid of you. Your reputation has been spent, and now you are no longer of any value. You're just an overpriced code monkey. They'll be extra anxious to see your back before you learn that you were slimed and figure out why you no longer get any traction. You might even cause trouble. They may also find it convenient to blame you for the stinkers being so stinky, to try to hang on to their own reputations, and you will be less able to trouble them or defend yourself if you aren't present.
I actually don't mind a few good ads. But if you give them an inch, they take a mile. I don't want my laptop kept awake and my batteries drained by advertising. I don't want most of my bandwidth devoted to downloading video advertising. I don't want to be forced to sit through a 15 or 30 second video when I'm in a hurry to get out the door and just needed a last minute check on something like the gate a flight was assigned.
The advertisers who are inconsiderate and obnoxious that way also tend to be the ones lying the most about the usefulness, quality, value, and other details of their products. They're insulting our intelligence, trying to sell us shit, and the tone of their advertising shows they don't give a damn about our situations. They have the gall to put their advertisement ahead of my need to catch a flight? I have to block that kind of garbage. That's no better than spam email. Worse, actually. It deserves blocking, same as spam deserves filtering. Why any marketing person thought unskippable ads on a purchased movie was a good idea is beyond me.
Websites that depend on ad revenue should insist that advertisers clean up their acts.
I think government sanctions are necessary. We have the power to discipline these companies, but for a great variety of reasons, we seem unable to do it. One reason is the sheer overwhelming amount of corruption. Where do you start? Also, don't want to lynch a company that really wasn't in the wrong. Could lose a valuable service by being careless and mistaken that way.
At the least, a respected authority can serve as a focus. Pick out the very worst, make sure they are deserving of extreme censure, shine a bright light on them and their actions. Move on to the next once justice is done. A righteous conviction from our justice system is a strong blow to any company. Many current Bank of America customers would quickly drop the bank if they were indicted and the penalty was severe enough to cast their future in doubt. And there are other actions. Like, suppose the FDIC announced they would no longer insure BoA's deposits because the company is too reckless with the money? As in, BoA is investing this FDIC insured money in the stock market, which is a big no-no. Just like that, BoA would look like what they are: a bunch of lying, cheating losers you can't trust with your money. People would abandon them in droves.
I know that. The problem is as you said: "If it's easier for them to cheat or steal, they'll do that." Yes, many will. But, there are also many people who won't cheat and steal. Capitalism and democracy have been effective at harnessing selfishness for the good of all. Yet democracy in particular doesn't work if the majority of the people are selfish fools. We must have honest people for it all to work. Plus, education is crucial so that people aren't as foolish.
Think about how disasters like Deepwater Horizon and Fukushima happened. These were not math errors. Not engineering blunders. It'd be one thing if everything was done in good conscience. Then we'd be reviewing our engineering methods. Instead, upon inquiry we found that management tried to cut corners, cheat, and lie. These were cases in which people did know better, and there were many warnings. Management chose to ignore the warnings. They didn't believe the risks or consequences were as large as they were told. They minimized the dangers and treated the engineers who tried to warn them with disdain. Why did they do that? Because they were greedy sociopaths. They ended up killing a few people and costing the rest of us a great deal of money. So much for greed being good. No company can afford having fools like that in charge. If there's a way to screen them out, it will be used.
That's not the worst of it. Those disasters cost us plenty, but we'll live. We can afford a few of these object lessons as long as the harm is not too great. The worst is having those kind of people in control of world devastating power, such as nuclear weapons. That we can't afford. On a grave matter like global warming, these sociopaths will run civilization into the ground if we let them. They've already engaged in much propagandizing to confuse the public about the dangers, telling what they know are lies.
I regard a certain amount of anti-social behavior as a necessary evil. You are a more experienced and motivated freedom fighter after someone has screwed you over. Most especially, don't accept shoddy treatment from employers. I thought I could ignore all that and focus solely on engineering issues. But you can't. The moment someone tries to frame you for their screwup because they figure you for a doormat, you're involved in dirty office politics. Some of those people on the Deepwater Horizon drilling platform paid for their diffidence with their lives. One of the things I regret the most about having worked for sociopathic bosses are the times I took the cowardly way out and decided not to stand up to them and risk my job. In hindsight, I'd rather have been fired. Better than what did happen a few months later, which is that we all lost our jobs anyway when management jettisoned everyone in a desperate attempt to save their own necks by blaming the peons for the lack of progress, and themselves lost their jobs when the customer wasn't fooled and canceled the contract. You don't have to quit, but you mustn't keep quiet. Let them fire you if they will. The mere act of staying around and quietly taking the abuse empowered them.
As it was with me at these jobs, so it is with us as a society. We are much too lenient with psychopathic businesses. For instance, why does anyone still bank at Bank of America and the rest of the big finance companies that crashed the economy? Why do we put up with the outrageous monopolistic behavior of telecoms companies? We don't have to whine for the government to do something, we are quite able to take matters into our own hands. A mass exodus of customers would bring these obnoxious businesses to heel very quickly. We could have destroyed BP simply by not doing business with them, no need for government sanctions. Exxon should be made to regret that they ever funded grossly biased propaganda thinly disguised as research in a transparent effort to discredit global warming. "Doubt is our product" is cause for termination of every high level manager who subscribes to i
Not at all. Normal people can make hard decisions. If what you said is so, we'd never be able to raise children right. They'd all be spoiled rotten.
You show confusion typical of the thinking on this subject. I've taught classes. I wished everyone would do all the work, get it all right, and not cheat. Then I could hand out all A's. It never happened of course. But I felt that not being a fair judge was the greater disservice to the students. Telling them that they did fine when in fact they did not I saw as not doing them any real favor. They learned the material, or they flunked. Some did respond to early bad news with greater effort, and were able to pass. I didn't like seeing anyone fail, but it was no strain for me to hand out the appropriate grade. This is not being sociopathic.
One of the best lines that sums up the confusion is "greed is good". No. By definition, greed cannot be good. If it is good, then it's not greed. If it is greed, then it cannot be good. Negotiating for more pay may or may not be greedy.
The sociopaths are the people who will choose to take $100 more even knowing that will cost 1000 people $10 more in expenses to deal with the problems their act causes. In other words, they don't care that their gain is a net loss to society. They can't see that what hurts society hurts them too. That kind of enlightened thinking is too abstract for them. I'm not talking about the desperate sort of petty thief who will smash a car window worth $100s for less than $1 in loose change, or will tear up $1000s worth of equipment for $2 worth of copper at the scrap metal recycler. They could be driven to that kind of behavior out of desperation, or anger at a society that has sidelined them. I'm taking about the sort of person who does appear to fit in and who doesn't need the extra $100, but takes it anyway.
There's also the famous Stanford prison experiment. That shows that what seem to be decent people can be tempted into becoming monsters. Or in other words, power corrupts.
It's not easy keeping the wrong sorts of people away from power, but we could definitely do better. If testing can help, we ought to do it.
You don't know stupid, if you think that was foolish.
Heard of a dog that got jolted by an electric fence, and took it as a challenge. The dog bit down on the wire and would not let go. Would get zapped every few seconds, growl, and clamp down harder. After many minutes of this, the farmer finally turned off the fence to get that dog away from it.
There will always be opportunists seeking to take advantage. That doesn't make a real problem any less of a problem.
Over the last 4 years, I've had several door to door home remodelers try to persuade me to replace my single pane windows with energy efficient, argon filled, double pane windows. I ran the numbers, and could not justify the expense. The lowest quote they gave me was $6000 for at best a 50% savings on my heating and cooling bills. That part of my energy bill is about $700 per year. Also, I'm sure I'd see far less than a 50% savings. Maybe only 25%? At $175 saved every year, would take about 35 years to earn back the initial investment. I sent them all on their way. If they could get the cost down to $2000, I'd be interested.
You mentioned hybrid cars? That's another play for suckers. A fuel efficient conventional car can equal or even beat a hybrid on fuel economy, and is far cheaper. Having said that, I'm all for experimenting with hybrids and electric cars on large scales. If we could make batteries about 5x better than they are now, the combustion engine would be toast. An electric motor is so much better that it would compensate for 5x better batteries still not being as good as gas tanks. Another area to watch is autopilots for cars. If driverless cars get good enough that we can tailgate in safety, it would be big, big savings. Interestingly, the computer visualization and control necessary to pull that off could about as easily fly a car as drive one. A good flying car would make our highway system instantly obsolete, useful only for cargo that is too heavy to efficiently move by air.
Suggesting most would favor sacrificing colorful clothes is going too far. Color adds very little cost. It is also not purely cosmetic. That's one of those things the anti-greens like to imply that most greens demand, when there are very few who are that extreme and unreasonable.
You also mentioned travel. Yes of course the ability to travel cheaply and quickly is most empowering and enjoyable. But, we've made it too much of a requirement, thanks to such things as suburban sprawl. I like to travel. But commuting is not particularly enjoyable, it's just a part of modern life and one I'd gladly do without if possible.
Fears that we'll have to sacrifice our economy are not just groundless, but wrong. Work always stimulates the economy, and it will take quite a lot of work to convert our civilization to greener sources of energy. You may be sure that many of those stirring up such fears do so for their own purposes, not out of any concern for our well-being.
A global warming skeptic who actually knows something? How refreshing!
Still, you state a number of errors and assumptions.
hold onto your wallet while not panicking
So you think changes are a net cost? Making our energy usage more efficient is more often a net gain. Worth doing regardless of whether there is global warming. Of course you can spend hugely on things such as expensive materials that are lightweight, but there's no need, not when there is so much low hanging fruit we're ignoring. We blow a lot of money on peacock style displays. People buy large vehicles and houses for the sake of appearances. Surely we can find some other way to show off that doesn't risk the climate. There's even better stuff than that. How about smarter traffic lights? Or do you enjoy idling at a red light while no traffic is present on the cross street?
using YOUR favorite cherrypicked interval
Cherry picking is something the deniers do. Responsible scientists don't. If you have evidence that scientists have deliberately misused available data, or analysis that shows they've just plain gotten it wrong, why don't you publish the specifics?
Might as well start in 16000 BCE
No! Now who is the cherry picker? Why do you want to chose that start time? What's your reason? Seems pretty obvious you chose that date because it's the middle of the last glaciation.
or we could look at the entire dataset back to the Ordovician-Silurian transition
If you want to go back that far, you have to take into account a lot of changed variables, starting with the radically different configuration of the continents. You would do better to look at more recent events such as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, about 55 million years ago. Still plenty of variables to juggle. The most recent major geologic change is the formation of a land connection between North and South America about 3 million years ago, breaking a connection between the Atlantic and Pacific, and creating the Gulf Stream. That's the point in time in which the climate settled into the patterns we know today, and from then to the present is the period which perforce gives us the most useful data for figuring out what the climate should be like. Before that, there was the Messinian Salinity Crisis which ended about 5 million years ago, in which the Mediterranean Sea was cut off from the Atlantic. Data from conditions in those periods can't correlate as well, but is still useful.
But this is what research should be! Freely sharing results. Researchers don't get compensation through selling copies or access, they are compensated by being employed at a university or lab that often is supported by the public. Their research is, or should be, freely available to the public. It's already paid for.
And this research would be freely available if not for greedy publishers trying to impose the art world's current business model on research. The public pays for the research, and then some private publisher is permitted to lock it all away and demand huge fees for access. I very much resent being asked to buy again what I've already paid for. To add to the insult, they sell a pig in a poke. I find some research that may bear on a problem I'm looking at, but just to find out if it does, I have to pay. Then more often than not, I find out it isn't relevant after all. And of course I can't get a refund. The robbery doesn't end there-- the researchers never see one penny of any such fees the publishers manage to sucker people into paying. But I don't play that game. Instead, I simply do not look at the research in question. That's not how this was supposed to work.
Artists too once thrived on patronage. European music and art flowered when art was used as another avenue to engage in rivalry. And it was the Renaissance that elevated art into something worth competing over. More recently, we had the Space Race. But in just a few decades, we've sunk to the point that much of the public questions the value of science, we're playing a fool's game with the climate, and we allow financial organizations to prey upon aspiring students with student loans that now have the unique status of being the only kind of debt that cannot be discharged via bankruptcy. Should we fund roads with tolls, or with a gas tax? I think the gas tax model is more efficient, and prefer it for that reason. I would like to see the "gas tax model" used for art and science.
On the contrary, sharing is a public good. One embodiment of sharing is the public library. Our libraries could be so much better than they are now if copyright wasn't holding us back. Think of the the savings of a digital public library over a traditional library. Thousands of towns have a modest library building with something like 80% of the floor space devoted to shelves full of books. All that could be replaced with a fast network connection, freeing up huge amounts of very valuable space, and saving big on the expenses paid for by our tax dollars. The library building could become much smaller, or the space could be used for other purposes. That's just the start. There would no longer be such things as interlibrary loans, all copies checked out, damaged or lost media, due dates, late fines, and the other hassles of physical media. More than that, libraries would be far more searchable. We would have search engines instead of those clunky card catalogs that by necessity list only minimal information such as titles, authors, and the ever debatable subject.
Access to information makes research much, much easier. We've had horrendous duplications of effort because it can be so hard to find out that someone else has already discovered something. Insularity is a big problem in scientific endeavor, as it leads to different groups using totally different terminology for what turns out to be the same things. More communication and correlation would help with that. We may never know what wondrous cures and advances were delayed for decades thanks to copyright, and patents also. What if there are ways to make batteries 10 times better than the best we have now, and we could have figured this out 20 years ago if only research was more accessible? We'd all have electric cars, and global warming would not be as urgent a problem. That's the kind of price we are all paying. It may well be nothing less than our civilization. Knowledge is absolutely vital to our progress. For want of ideas that were locked away, the kingdom may fall. Still, we're slowly making progress in spite of attempts by copyright extremists to turn back the clock.
Copyright should never have been enforced against private citizens. Doing so is not in the public interest. Additionally, we have seen that it is not possible to enforce it. Copy protection or DRM is unworkable-- the very idea is illogical, requiring that a "consumer" be both given access to content, and denied access to that same content. The idea of erecting a massive police state in order to enforce copyright is equally ludicrous. No government has or will ever have enough power to force that to work. Terror campaigns aren't working either. All we've managed to do is crucify a handful of ordinary citizens in showy and totally unconvincing trials. The best the industry has managed is to confuse the public by convincing many that copying is stealing, and playing on our sympathies with the loud crying about the poor, poor, starving artists, but even all that is about played out. Evidently you still buy those, but more and more people, especially younger people, see them for the self serving lies and distortions that they are.
Copyright law has been extended to extremes never envisioned centuries ago. As currently interpreted and understood, copyright tries to take the natural right to share away from the public. Today, copyright law is one of the biggest barriers to our progress. If not for that, we would have our paperless office, and we'd see a lot more of the Age of Information and all the benefits that would bring us.
You misunderstand the issues. This isn't about running artists out of business, this is about the way business works. We're not asking you to work for free. But, neither will we give up the huge public good known as "sharing" and commonly demonized as "piracy" because you won't accept any other way of doing your business, or even acknowledge that other ways could work.
And anyone who doubts the wisdom of the move to systemd on the Arch Linux forums gets roasted by the maintainers. Arch Linux maintainers get hostile, and defensive and unbending very quickly. Not attitudes that inspires confidence.
The switch has not been smooth. Documentation is lacking. The latest thing was that a routine update removed the shutdown option from the GUI menu. I've also noticed that journalctl (the replacement for "less/var/log/messages") is slow when one wants to view more of the recent history than journalctl shows with the -f flag. I'm thinking systemd compresses the logs almost right away, then journalctl must uncompress everything from the beginning each time the admin wants to view the latest logs. If so, it doesn't speak well of the systemd developers' ability, to have designed software to proceed in such an inefficient manner.
Bad enough that your teenager might wreck your classic sports car, get busted for trying to buy alcohol or cigarettes, become a sex offender for sexting, cause a pregnancy, or thousands of other delinquent acts. At least if they commit piracy, you're personally off the hook now. Too bad your family isn't. You could disown the kid, I suppose.
You can't compare physical property, such as bikes, with data. What muddies the picture is the accused ran an operation to produce physical copies. Did he pass off his copies as genuine items, complete with shrink wrapped jewel cases and printed covers that cannot be easily distinguished from genuine items? That's counterfeiting, which ought to be treated differently. The article doesn't say. Even if he did that, 15 years is much too harsh. The industry keeps trying to conflate copying, stealing, and counterfeiting.
There's another issue here: destructive court actions. Others have already pointed out that the sentence is disproportionately high. But what I find very bad about this is the waste of 15 years of someone's life over a petty white collar crime. They got him for selling just 6 items. What's the punishment for shoplifting those same 6 items? No one was physically injured. No one lost anything-- thousands of people did not lose their homes to fraud. This did not cause the economy to tank. Jail time for this is ridiculous. Mozillo didn't get any jail time, why should this guy? (Though, my opinion is that Mozillo should be in jail.) Fine him for a percentage of the profits he made (100%? 120%?), and let him go on his way.
In addition to the entirely inappropriate jail time, the court is likely to order destructive remedies such as the shredding of all the media. 10000 discs is a lot of plastic. What a waste. They sure don't shred confiscated money. But somehow, acts such as ordering Vonage to stop signing up new customers, or ordering RIM to shut down the Blackberry network are given serious consideration. And there is of course the famous case of Steve Jackson Games, in which they were nearly destroyed by overzealous law enforcement inappropriately holding their equipment hostage. Many innocent 3rd parties would have been seriously inconvenienced if RIM had been forced to shut their network down. A confiscated car is auctioned off, not sent to the crusher. Something ought to be done to curb courts' powers to destroy business, wealth and unrelated activity and property.
We who are pro-choice are not pro-abortion! We don't like it, but we recognize that it is better to have this option available, for all our sakes. Some women would risk death with a back alley abortion, or even kill themselves rather than go through with a pregnancy. Sometimes they don't have a choice because their own lives are on the line. Let's not force our women to such extremes. More than that, let's not put women even more at the mercy of abusive men. Women are physically weaker as is, and can have a rough time for that reason alone. The way some men act, it's as if it's no big deal if the wife dies in childbirth because he can always find another woman! Maybe in the 19th century that was a dastardly way of dumping the wife, since divorce was taboo. Keeps her pregnant, by rape if necessary, until the abuse and stress kills her off. Gets to keep the house and inherit that way too. Fobs everyone off with the excuse that it was God's will and life is tough, rather than take proper care of his woman. If that's not the kind of life you want for your daughters, then for God's sake keep abortion legal.
No woman wants to go through with an abortion. The procedure is not fun, easy, and inconsequential. And it is it's own punishment from the sense of failing to have passed on your genes in at least one instance. There doesn't need to be any harsher punishment than that. Afterwards, she's going to be a bit messed up from the hormone whiplash, so to speak. Better to have never become pregnant in the first place. But life is too messy and harsh. You can't know in advance what will be. You can't cover every circumstance. Consider Trig Palin, who has Down's syndrome. Sure would be nice if Down's syndrome never happened, but that's not an option we have, not with current medical technology. However, we can detect Down's syndrome before birth, and many families choose to abort in that circumstance. Maybe the Palins can afford to raise such a boy, but families on the edge might not be able to. It can be a difficult decision. You shouldn't sit in moral judgment on women and families. Trust that those unfortunate enough to have to make such a decision will think about it carefully.
What of the contradiction of being pro-life and anti health care? Do pro-lifers not understand that lack of health care contributes to abortions?
Did they? I still have a netbook I bought in 1999. 133 MHz Pentium, 96M RAM, 3.2G hard drive. Same physical size as an Asus EEE. Came with Windows 98. Can barely run Firefox 3.6.
The PC case really has not changed significantly since the 1980s, since everyone figured out that separate keyboards are better than integrated ones. Most of the differences are fairly trivial, but often just enough to make it more convenient to buy a new case. One thing I find surprising is that the size of the average desktop computer case hasn't changed much. I would have thought they'd all have shrunk to the size of a shoe box or smaller by now. Seems the driving force keeping the size constant is the need for heat dissipation.
We could do better. Still, we've done fairly well. The CD and DVD drives are the same size as the old 5.25" floppy drive. Hard drives also standardized on that size for a while, then moved to another standardized size, 3.5". We still see the AT style power supply space and mounting points. The physical expansion slot of the XT and the Apple ][ is still with us even though the underlying bus has changed dramatically. The old RS-232 serial port is still around in places, and where it has been replaced, it's with another standard, USB.
You can't know a choice is poor if you are kept in the dark. It's not like the department was bragging about their professors' origins or accomplishments. None of us undergrad students knew what had been done to the department. And why should we suspect it? It should go without saying that we students were hardly in a position to judge the technical competence of an entire department! We didn't know enough to make such a judgment. More, it should be safe to assume that a major school is going to do a competent job of running a degree program, so there is no need to ask questions intended to discover if that is in fact the case. Sadly in this case that assumption didn't hold. I asked around for opinions on the professors, and didn't hear much that was worthwhile. Even if the professors weren't flunk happy, many students would not have made it through the program, which skews their opinions to the point of worthlessness. What to them is a "hard" teacher who should be avoided I often found was a good teacher who made you learn. Hard and fair is good.
It's the unfair treatment that makes it rough. We had professors who were pretty bitter about being cast off by their chosen discipline, but still held to the idea that their chosen field was worth learning, while the field they were pushed into teaching was not, and only attracted inferior students. They took this attitude out on us, sort of "proving" their prejudice, but not so blatantly that it was obvious after the first 2 weeks of class. We had another professor who I heard was decent. Was. Unfortunately, he was old and his last years there were marked by gradually increasing senility. He would go into a berserk rage over and flunk any student who he thought was showing him up in the slightest, and it was too easy to set him off without meaning to. He was also very rigid. If he decided you were a B or a C student, that was the highest grade he would give you, no matter how well you actually performed. But the department could not retire him because he had tons of tenure, and they were short of professors as it was. By the time I figured out what the department was like, I had already earned many hours of credit. I would have lost half those credits if I had left before finishing my degree. Schools make transferring very harsh once they have you.
Really. What struck me about the headline was the loud hero worship of the almighty super special individual. No one, no matter how special, can change facts of nature. This hero worship also shows another huge hole in American thinking. We have a terrible tendency to pick out one "key" person for lionizing, when it actually took a large team to accomplish some feat. In the case of a business leader, there's some justification for that. But still, it's praising Jobs while ignoring that Woz ever existed. Actors would be nothing without good writers and directors. Niel Armstrong would never have set foot on the moon if a massive organization hadn't stood behind him.
As to the facts of nature, I see several ways the electric car could play out. If batteries cannot be greatly improved, then the future might not be electric cars. Where is the flying car that was hoped to be just around the corner in the 1940s? 70 years later, it's still years away. What was not appreciated was how hard flying is. Now with driverless cars on the horizon, we will be able to extend that to control of flying machines, and may at last see the flying car.
If not batteries, we may instead come up with cheap way to produce biodiesel. Then the electric car may then never move beyond the experimental. We may also stay with the hybrid. Diesel electric locomotives have existed and worked excellently for decades. There are other directions to explore. Really, our road design while real simple and basic, is terribly primitive. Maglev is much talked about, but there are many other ideas. What if we came up with walkers along the lines of the Star Wars AT-AT, but scaled down for personal transportation? With decent computer control, it could be possible. What kind of road would be best for them, maybe something like the generously spaced apart round stones used for footpaths? Could they jump small streams, so that we wouldn't have to have so many bridges which are the highest maintenance items of our roads?
Fun? Fun?!? Learning is hard work. Maybe business majors can party most of the time. Engineering majors can't.
As if that isn't enough, there are always a few bad professors who discard their professionalism to flunk students they take a dislike to. I had it even worse. The department I was in was used by other departments as a dumping ground for their worst professors. Instead of one bad teacher, the whole department was bad. The rest of the College of Engineering was graduating 20%, that department was graduating only 5%. The dean finally told them to quit flunking all the students, or he'd eliminate the department. Had I known, I would most certainly have attended a different school. As it was, I managed to graduate in spite of them. You put up with a dysfunctional department and see how much fun you have.
These sort of laws are stupid, because they can NOT stop anyone from doing it
That's one argument I use in favor of legalizing copying. It's not sufficient. Anyway, some may be tempted to think it can be stopped. To that, I say that eventually we may have an implanted camera integrated with our eyes. It'll tap in directly to the optic nerve and record whatever the user is seeing.
In fact, I never considered selling my votes until I saw this article, now I'm like, fuck, i should be selling my votes. Capitalism at it's finest!
Why does anyone vote the way they do? They vote for the politicians that offer them the best deal without being too unbelievable. Romney has a credibility problem that way. He refuses to go into details of just how he'd create this magical prosperity he's selling us all, and refuses to entertain skepticism about whether the little he has given out and not flip flopped on would actually work. Would even more trickle down economics work? If we give even more tax breaks to the rich, they will hire more workers? The evidence suggests no. So he'd rather the talk was all on the areas he feels he's stronger, such as issues dear to the hearts of the social conservative. A lot of people aren't buying his attempts to avoid and bluster on the subject of the economy. Which candidate is most likely to lead to stable employment for the individual voter? Would you sell your vote for a steady job? Really, we already do sell our votes, just not quite so directly.
Same is true of Mazda. No Chilton or Haynes manuals for Mazdas after the mid 90s. For instance, 1989-1993 is the newest MPV for which there is an independent manual.
Slashdot Mirror
I read that article when it came out, and found it unconvincing. Kamp slams the bazaar model and the entire community for being hackers who patch together endless bandaid solutions which cause more problems which require more bandaids. That strikes me as unfair, and wrong. To suggest there are no talented programmers working open source is ridiculous. Indeed, many of the GNU tools are superior to the original UNIX tools that they cloned. I'll take the GNU tools over the native tools of HP-UX, AIX, or any other proprietary UNIX. Sure there are problems, but would his way (whatever that is exactly) really be any better? At least the problems get fixed. In the proprietary UNIXes, problems linger. These proprietary vendors often claim that their C compiler generates better code than gcc, but I've found their record on that point spotty. How would he avoid having a long term project sink into a chaos of patchwork? Microsoft didn't do any better with Windows. How should software be developed?
The best I can say for Kamp's thinking is that I think he's right about the cruft. Programs have become huge and bloated. Anymore, when you include a library, you aren't getting just one library, you're getting that library plus all the libraries it depends on, and the ones they depend on, and so on. It can get deep. And you find duplication. One program may ultimately use several slightly different libraries that do nearly the same things. It's just faster for the programmers to throw in everything including the kitchen sink, though it does make things less consistent and more complicated. But the solution? What's his solution? I don't recall that he really said.
The ACM seems a bit confused or schizo on matters of copyright, sometimes publishing bad pieces that take copyright as a given and which only explore solutions to the small "problems" of implementing copyright. That's like asking how to stop genius hackers from cracking DRM schemes-- it misses the point that it doesn't take genius to break DRM, because the idea is unsound. More often, the ACM publishes much more enlightened pieces that point out various ways in which copyright and patents also have become too extreme.
If Megaupload did hurt box office sales, then they obviously hosted lots of pirated material.
You get an F in Logic 101 today. It is quite possible for a site to host no pirated content and yet hurt box office sales. For example, movie critic web sites could give low ratings. A site could have only trailers (presumably that would be legal), which could backfire, convincing people to skip the movie. Perhaps the most damaging blow is an entertainment related discussion site ignoring the existence of a particular movie.
You demand a yes or no answer to an unfair question we all know can already be answered with a yes. This is the springboard to an obvious and contrived implication, which is "Megaupload broke the law/is evil".
Have you ever told a lie? Ever? If you've told just one lie in your entire life, then you are a liar! The number of adults who aren't liars under that standard might well be zero. The world is a sink of depravity.
And your black and white view is, as others said, beside the point. The real enabler is technology in the form of the Internet and extremely capacious and fast storage media. Bashing Megaupload is just shooting the messenger.
Way to go, Republicans. Look stupid again. Make Texas and America look bad, again.
The people behind this out of order demand are all Republicans. And the leader, this Ted Poe, is from Texas. I don't want the US to be a one party nation, but the Republicans seem suicidally intent on cornering the market on stupidity. Royal courts used to have fools. Helped the monarchy avoid really stupid moves. Court fools had a good deal of license, but no real power. I would prefer that the Republicans behave like a serious party, and quit making auditions for this vacant post that shouldn't be needed, now that we have dozens of editorial cartoonists, Saturday Night Live's tradition of mocking candidates and debates, and comedy news such as the Daily Show.
But if Republicans continue to be unable to help it, unable to comprehend that such a demand tramples upon the 1st Amendment and that they ought to be ashamed of themselves, it's time for them to be pushed aside. We haven't had a big party shift since the Whigs waffled on slavery and self destructed in the 1850s. The 4 Whig Presidents, ending with Millard Fillmore, are among our lowest rated presidents. The last really good Republican president we had was not Reagan, it was Eisenhower. Time for some fresh blood.
Allow me to amplify "sellout", just in case anyone doesn't fully understand.
If your name, reputation, education, or whatever is seemingly worth anything, they'll want your endorsement. They want to slap your name on some product, report, or even just an idea. It might even be a good thing that you'd want to be associated with, but it is far more likely they are trying to take a shortcut and think that your name will help polish a turd. They may not even bother with the formality of asking for your permission or real opinion before using your credentials. They are likely to feel they already have your permission for such things because you are working for them. Probably slipped it into your contract.
Once your good name has been trashed because it was used on a few stinkers, then they want to get rid of you. Your reputation has been spent, and now you are no longer of any value. You're just an overpriced code monkey. They'll be extra anxious to see your back before you learn that you were slimed and figure out why you no longer get any traction. You might even cause trouble. They may also find it convenient to blame you for the stinkers being so stinky, to try to hang on to their own reputations, and you will be less able to trouble them or defend yourself if you aren't present.
I actually don't mind a few good ads. But if you give them an inch, they take a mile. I don't want my laptop kept awake and my batteries drained by advertising. I don't want most of my bandwidth devoted to downloading video advertising. I don't want to be forced to sit through a 15 or 30 second video when I'm in a hurry to get out the door and just needed a last minute check on something like the gate a flight was assigned.
The advertisers who are inconsiderate and obnoxious that way also tend to be the ones lying the most about the usefulness, quality, value, and other details of their products. They're insulting our intelligence, trying to sell us shit, and the tone of their advertising shows they don't give a damn about our situations. They have the gall to put their advertisement ahead of my need to catch a flight? I have to block that kind of garbage. That's no better than spam email. Worse, actually. It deserves blocking, same as spam deserves filtering. Why any marketing person thought unskippable ads on a purchased movie was a good idea is beyond me.
Websites that depend on ad revenue should insist that advertisers clean up their acts.
I think government sanctions are necessary. We have the power to discipline these companies, but for a great variety of reasons, we seem unable to do it. One reason is the sheer overwhelming amount of corruption. Where do you start? Also, don't want to lynch a company that really wasn't in the wrong. Could lose a valuable service by being careless and mistaken that way.
At the least, a respected authority can serve as a focus. Pick out the very worst, make sure they are deserving of extreme censure, shine a bright light on them and their actions. Move on to the next once justice is done. A righteous conviction from our justice system is a strong blow to any company. Many current Bank of America customers would quickly drop the bank if they were indicted and the penalty was severe enough to cast their future in doubt. And there are other actions. Like, suppose the FDIC announced they would no longer insure BoA's deposits because the company is too reckless with the money? As in, BoA is investing this FDIC insured money in the stock market, which is a big no-no. Just like that, BoA would look like what they are: a bunch of lying, cheating losers you can't trust with your money. People would abandon them in droves.
I know that. The problem is as you said: "If it's easier for them to cheat or steal, they'll do that." Yes, many will. But, there are also many people who won't cheat and steal. Capitalism and democracy have been effective at harnessing selfishness for the good of all. Yet democracy in particular doesn't work if the majority of the people are selfish fools. We must have honest people for it all to work. Plus, education is crucial so that people aren't as foolish.
Think about how disasters like Deepwater Horizon and Fukushima happened. These were not math errors. Not engineering blunders. It'd be one thing if everything was done in good conscience. Then we'd be reviewing our engineering methods. Instead, upon inquiry we found that management tried to cut corners, cheat, and lie. These were cases in which people did know better, and there were many warnings. Management chose to ignore the warnings. They didn't believe the risks or consequences were as large as they were told. They minimized the dangers and treated the engineers who tried to warn them with disdain. Why did they do that? Because they were greedy sociopaths. They ended up killing a few people and costing the rest of us a great deal of money. So much for greed being good. No company can afford having fools like that in charge. If there's a way to screen them out, it will be used.
That's not the worst of it. Those disasters cost us plenty, but we'll live. We can afford a few of these object lessons as long as the harm is not too great. The worst is having those kind of people in control of world devastating power, such as nuclear weapons. That we can't afford. On a grave matter like global warming, these sociopaths will run civilization into the ground if we let them. They've already engaged in much propagandizing to confuse the public about the dangers, telling what they know are lies.
I regard a certain amount of anti-social behavior as a necessary evil. You are a more experienced and motivated freedom fighter after someone has screwed you over. Most especially, don't accept shoddy treatment from employers. I thought I could ignore all that and focus solely on engineering issues. But you can't. The moment someone tries to frame you for their screwup because they figure you for a doormat, you're involved in dirty office politics. Some of those people on the Deepwater Horizon drilling platform paid for their diffidence with their lives. One of the things I regret the most about having worked for sociopathic bosses are the times I took the cowardly way out and decided not to stand up to them and risk my job. In hindsight, I'd rather have been fired. Better than what did happen a few months later, which is that we all lost our jobs anyway when management jettisoned everyone in a desperate attempt to save their own necks by blaming the peons for the lack of progress, and themselves lost their jobs when the customer wasn't fooled and canceled the contract. You don't have to quit, but you mustn't keep quiet. Let them fire you if they will. The mere act of staying around and quietly taking the abuse empowered them.
As it was with me at these jobs, so it is with us as a society. We are much too lenient with psychopathic businesses. For instance, why does anyone still bank at Bank of America and the rest of the big finance companies that crashed the economy? Why do we put up with the outrageous monopolistic behavior of telecoms companies? We don't have to whine for the government to do something, we are quite able to take matters into our own hands. A mass exodus of customers would bring these obnoxious businesses to heel very quickly. We could have destroyed BP simply by not doing business with them, no need for government sanctions. Exxon should be made to regret that they ever funded grossly biased propaganda thinly disguised as research in a transparent effort to discredit global warming. "Doubt is our product" is cause for termination of every high level manager who subscribes to i
Not at all. Normal people can make hard decisions. If what you said is so, we'd never be able to raise children right. They'd all be spoiled rotten.
You show confusion typical of the thinking on this subject. I've taught classes. I wished everyone would do all the work, get it all right, and not cheat. Then I could hand out all A's. It never happened of course. But I felt that not being a fair judge was the greater disservice to the students. Telling them that they did fine when in fact they did not I saw as not doing them any real favor. They learned the material, or they flunked. Some did respond to early bad news with greater effort, and were able to pass. I didn't like seeing anyone fail, but it was no strain for me to hand out the appropriate grade. This is not being sociopathic.
One of the best lines that sums up the confusion is "greed is good". No. By definition, greed cannot be good. If it is good, then it's not greed. If it is greed, then it cannot be good. Negotiating for more pay may or may not be greedy.
The sociopaths are the people who will choose to take $100 more even knowing that will cost 1000 people $10 more in expenses to deal with the problems their act causes. In other words, they don't care that their gain is a net loss to society. They can't see that what hurts society hurts them too. That kind of enlightened thinking is too abstract for them. I'm not talking about the desperate sort of petty thief who will smash a car window worth $100s for less than $1 in loose change, or will tear up $1000s worth of equipment for $2 worth of copper at the scrap metal recycler. They could be driven to that kind of behavior out of desperation, or anger at a society that has sidelined them. I'm taking about the sort of person who does appear to fit in and who doesn't need the extra $100, but takes it anyway.
There's also the famous Stanford prison experiment. That shows that what seem to be decent people can be tempted into becoming monsters. Or in other words, power corrupts.
It's not easy keeping the wrong sorts of people away from power, but we could definitely do better. If testing can help, we ought to do it.
You don't know stupid, if you think that was foolish.
Heard of a dog that got jolted by an electric fence, and took it as a challenge. The dog bit down on the wire and would not let go. Would get zapped every few seconds, growl, and clamp down harder. After many minutes of this, the farmer finally turned off the fence to get that dog away from it.
There will always be opportunists seeking to take advantage. That doesn't make a real problem any less of a problem.
Over the last 4 years, I've had several door to door home remodelers try to persuade me to replace my single pane windows with energy efficient, argon filled, double pane windows. I ran the numbers, and could not justify the expense. The lowest quote they gave me was $6000 for at best a 50% savings on my heating and cooling bills. That part of my energy bill is about $700 per year. Also, I'm sure I'd see far less than a 50% savings. Maybe only 25%? At $175 saved every year, would take about 35 years to earn back the initial investment. I sent them all on their way. If they could get the cost down to $2000, I'd be interested.
You mentioned hybrid cars? That's another play for suckers. A fuel efficient conventional car can equal or even beat a hybrid on fuel economy, and is far cheaper. Having said that, I'm all for experimenting with hybrids and electric cars on large scales. If we could make batteries about 5x better than they are now, the combustion engine would be toast. An electric motor is so much better that it would compensate for 5x better batteries still not being as good as gas tanks. Another area to watch is autopilots for cars. If driverless cars get good enough that we can tailgate in safety, it would be big, big savings. Interestingly, the computer visualization and control necessary to pull that off could about as easily fly a car as drive one. A good flying car would make our highway system instantly obsolete, useful only for cargo that is too heavy to efficiently move by air.
Suggesting most would favor sacrificing colorful clothes is going too far. Color adds very little cost. It is also not purely cosmetic. That's one of those things the anti-greens like to imply that most greens demand, when there are very few who are that extreme and unreasonable.
You also mentioned travel. Yes of course the ability to travel cheaply and quickly is most empowering and enjoyable. But, we've made it too much of a requirement, thanks to such things as suburban sprawl. I like to travel. But commuting is not particularly enjoyable, it's just a part of modern life and one I'd gladly do without if possible.
Fears that we'll have to sacrifice our economy are not just groundless, but wrong. Work always stimulates the economy, and it will take quite a lot of work to convert our civilization to greener sources of energy. You may be sure that many of those stirring up such fears do so for their own purposes, not out of any concern for our well-being.
A global warming skeptic who actually knows something? How refreshing!
Still, you state a number of errors and assumptions.
hold onto your wallet while not panicking
So you think changes are a net cost? Making our energy usage more efficient is more often a net gain. Worth doing regardless of whether there is global warming. Of course you can spend hugely on things such as expensive materials that are lightweight, but there's no need, not when there is so much low hanging fruit we're ignoring. We blow a lot of money on peacock style displays. People buy large vehicles and houses for the sake of appearances. Surely we can find some other way to show off that doesn't risk the climate. There's even better stuff than that. How about smarter traffic lights? Or do you enjoy idling at a red light while no traffic is present on the cross street?
using YOUR favorite cherrypicked interval
Cherry picking is something the deniers do. Responsible scientists don't. If you have evidence that scientists have deliberately misused available data, or analysis that shows they've just plain gotten it wrong, why don't you publish the specifics?
Might as well start in 16000 BCE
No! Now who is the cherry picker? Why do you want to chose that start time? What's your reason? Seems pretty obvious you chose that date because it's the middle of the last glaciation.
or we could look at the entire dataset back to the Ordovician-Silurian transition
If you want to go back that far, you have to take into account a lot of changed variables, starting with the radically different configuration of the continents. You would do better to look at more recent events such as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, about 55 million years ago. Still plenty of variables to juggle. The most recent major geologic change is the formation of a land connection between North and South America about 3 million years ago, breaking a connection between the Atlantic and Pacific, and creating the Gulf Stream. That's the point in time in which the climate settled into the patterns we know today, and from then to the present is the period which perforce gives us the most useful data for figuring out what the climate should be like. Before that, there was the Messinian Salinity Crisis which ended about 5 million years ago, in which the Mediterranean Sea was cut off from the Atlantic. Data from conditions in those periods can't correlate as well, but is still useful.
But this is what research should be! Freely sharing results. Researchers don't get compensation through selling copies or access, they are compensated by being employed at a university or lab that often is supported by the public. Their research is, or should be, freely available to the public. It's already paid for.
And this research would be freely available if not for greedy publishers trying to impose the art world's current business model on research. The public pays for the research, and then some private publisher is permitted to lock it all away and demand huge fees for access. I very much resent being asked to buy again what I've already paid for. To add to the insult, they sell a pig in a poke. I find some research that may bear on a problem I'm looking at, but just to find out if it does, I have to pay. Then more often than not, I find out it isn't relevant after all. And of course I can't get a refund. The robbery doesn't end there-- the researchers never see one penny of any such fees the publishers manage to sucker people into paying. But I don't play that game. Instead, I simply do not look at the research in question. That's not how this was supposed to work.
Artists too once thrived on patronage. European music and art flowered when art was used as another avenue to engage in rivalry. And it was the Renaissance that elevated art into something worth competing over. More recently, we had the Space Race. But in just a few decades, we've sunk to the point that much of the public questions the value of science, we're playing a fool's game with the climate, and we allow financial organizations to prey upon aspiring students with student loans that now have the unique status of being the only kind of debt that cannot be discharged via bankruptcy. Should we fund roads with tolls, or with a gas tax? I think the gas tax model is more efficient, and prefer it for that reason. I would like to see the "gas tax model" used for art and science.
sharing is not a public good
On the contrary, sharing is a public good. One embodiment of sharing is the public library. Our libraries could be so much better than they are now if copyright wasn't holding us back. Think of the the savings of a digital public library over a traditional library. Thousands of towns have a modest library building with something like 80% of the floor space devoted to shelves full of books. All that could be replaced with a fast network connection, freeing up huge amounts of very valuable space, and saving big on the expenses paid for by our tax dollars. The library building could become much smaller, or the space could be used for other purposes. That's just the start. There would no longer be such things as interlibrary loans, all copies checked out, damaged or lost media, due dates, late fines, and the other hassles of physical media. More than that, libraries would be far more searchable. We would have search engines instead of those clunky card catalogs that by necessity list only minimal information such as titles, authors, and the ever debatable subject.
Access to information makes research much, much easier. We've had horrendous duplications of effort because it can be so hard to find out that someone else has already discovered something. Insularity is a big problem in scientific endeavor, as it leads to different groups using totally different terminology for what turns out to be the same things. More communication and correlation would help with that. We may never know what wondrous cures and advances were delayed for decades thanks to copyright, and patents also. What if there are ways to make batteries 10 times better than the best we have now, and we could have figured this out 20 years ago if only research was more accessible? We'd all have electric cars, and global warming would not be as urgent a problem. That's the kind of price we are all paying. It may well be nothing less than our civilization. Knowledge is absolutely vital to our progress. For want of ideas that were locked away, the kingdom may fall. Still, we're slowly making progress in spite of attempts by copyright extremists to turn back the clock.
Copyright should never have been enforced against private citizens. Doing so is not in the public interest. Additionally, we have seen that it is not possible to enforce it. Copy protection or DRM is unworkable-- the very idea is illogical, requiring that a "consumer" be both given access to content, and denied access to that same content. The idea of erecting a massive police state in order to enforce copyright is equally ludicrous. No government has or will ever have enough power to force that to work. Terror campaigns aren't working either. All we've managed to do is crucify a handful of ordinary citizens in showy and totally unconvincing trials. The best the industry has managed is to confuse the public by convincing many that copying is stealing, and playing on our sympathies with the loud crying about the poor, poor, starving artists, but even all that is about played out. Evidently you still buy those, but more and more people, especially younger people, see them for the self serving lies and distortions that they are.
Copyright law has been extended to extremes never envisioned centuries ago. As currently interpreted and understood, copyright tries to take the natural right to share away from the public. Today, copyright law is one of the biggest barriers to our progress. If not for that, we would have our paperless office, and we'd see a lot more of the Age of Information and all the benefits that would bring us.
You misunderstand the issues. This isn't about running artists out of business, this is about the way business works. We're not asking you to work for free. But, neither will we give up the huge public good known as "sharing" and commonly demonized as "piracy" because you won't accept any other way of doing your business, or even acknowledge that other ways could work.
And anyone who doubts the wisdom of the move to systemd on the Arch Linux forums gets roasted by the maintainers. Arch Linux maintainers get hostile, and defensive and unbending very quickly. Not attitudes that inspires confidence.
The switch has not been smooth. Documentation is lacking. The latest thing was that a routine update removed the shutdown option from the GUI menu. I've also noticed that journalctl (the replacement for "less /var/log/messages") is slow when one wants to view more of the recent history than journalctl shows with the -f flag. I'm thinking systemd compresses the logs almost right away, then journalctl must uncompress everything from the beginning each time the admin wants to view the latest logs. If so, it doesn't speak well of the systemd developers' ability, to have designed software to proceed in such an inefficient manner.
Bad enough that your teenager might wreck your classic sports car, get busted for trying to buy alcohol or cigarettes, become a sex offender for sexting, cause a pregnancy, or thousands of other delinquent acts. At least if they commit piracy, you're personally off the hook now. Too bad your family isn't. You could disown the kid, I suppose.
You can't compare physical property, such as bikes, with data. What muddies the picture is the accused ran an operation to produce physical copies. Did he pass off his copies as genuine items, complete with shrink wrapped jewel cases and printed covers that cannot be easily distinguished from genuine items? That's counterfeiting, which ought to be treated differently. The article doesn't say. Even if he did that, 15 years is much too harsh. The industry keeps trying to conflate copying, stealing, and counterfeiting.
There's another issue here: destructive court actions. Others have already pointed out that the sentence is disproportionately high. But what I find very bad about this is the waste of 15 years of someone's life over a petty white collar crime. They got him for selling just 6 items. What's the punishment for shoplifting those same 6 items? No one was physically injured. No one lost anything-- thousands of people did not lose their homes to fraud. This did not cause the economy to tank. Jail time for this is ridiculous. Mozillo didn't get any jail time, why should this guy? (Though, my opinion is that Mozillo should be in jail.) Fine him for a percentage of the profits he made (100%? 120%?), and let him go on his way.
In addition to the entirely inappropriate jail time, the court is likely to order destructive remedies such as the shredding of all the media. 10000 discs is a lot of plastic. What a waste. They sure don't shred confiscated money. But somehow, acts such as ordering Vonage to stop signing up new customers, or ordering RIM to shut down the Blackberry network are given serious consideration. And there is of course the famous case of Steve Jackson Games, in which they were nearly destroyed by overzealous law enforcement inappropriately holding their equipment hostage. Many innocent 3rd parties would have been seriously inconvenienced if RIM had been forced to shut their network down. A confiscated car is auctioned off, not sent to the crusher. Something ought to be done to curb courts' powers to destroy business, wealth and unrelated activity and property.
We who are pro-choice are not pro-abortion! We don't like it, but we recognize that it is better to have this option available, for all our sakes. Some women would risk death with a back alley abortion, or even kill themselves rather than go through with a pregnancy. Sometimes they don't have a choice because their own lives are on the line. Let's not force our women to such extremes. More than that, let's not put women even more at the mercy of abusive men. Women are physically weaker as is, and can have a rough time for that reason alone. The way some men act, it's as if it's no big deal if the wife dies in childbirth because he can always find another woman! Maybe in the 19th century that was a dastardly way of dumping the wife, since divorce was taboo. Keeps her pregnant, by rape if necessary, until the abuse and stress kills her off. Gets to keep the house and inherit that way too. Fobs everyone off with the excuse that it was God's will and life is tough, rather than take proper care of his woman. If that's not the kind of life you want for your daughters, then for God's sake keep abortion legal.
No woman wants to go through with an abortion. The procedure is not fun, easy, and inconsequential. And it is it's own punishment from the sense of failing to have passed on your genes in at least one instance. There doesn't need to be any harsher punishment than that. Afterwards, she's going to be a bit messed up from the hormone whiplash, so to speak. Better to have never become pregnant in the first place. But life is too messy and harsh. You can't know in advance what will be. You can't cover every circumstance. Consider Trig Palin, who has Down's syndrome. Sure would be nice if Down's syndrome never happened, but that's not an option we have, not with current medical technology. However, we can detect Down's syndrome before birth, and many families choose to abort in that circumstance. Maybe the Palins can afford to raise such a boy, but families on the edge might not be able to. It can be a difficult decision. You shouldn't sit in moral judgment on women and families. Trust that those unfortunate enough to have to make such a decision will think about it carefully.
What of the contradiction of being pro-life and anti health care? Do pro-lifers not understand that lack of health care contributes to abortions?
Er? Tablets existed long before netbooks
Did they? I still have a netbook I bought in 1999. 133 MHz Pentium, 96M RAM, 3.2G hard drive. Same physical size as an Asus EEE. Came with Windows 98. Can barely run Firefox 3.6.
The PC case really has not changed significantly since the 1980s, since everyone figured out that separate keyboards are better than integrated ones. Most of the differences are fairly trivial, but often just enough to make it more convenient to buy a new case. One thing I find surprising is that the size of the average desktop computer case hasn't changed much. I would have thought they'd all have shrunk to the size of a shoe box or smaller by now. Seems the driving force keeping the size constant is the need for heat dissipation.
We could do better. Still, we've done fairly well. The CD and DVD drives are the same size as the old 5.25" floppy drive. Hard drives also standardized on that size for a while, then moved to another standardized size, 3.5". We still see the AT style power supply space and mounting points. The physical expansion slot of the XT and the Apple ][ is still with us even though the underlying bus has changed dramatically. The old RS-232 serial port is still around in places, and where it has been replaced, it's with another standard, USB.
You can't know a choice is poor if you are kept in the dark. It's not like the department was bragging about their professors' origins or accomplishments. None of us undergrad students knew what had been done to the department. And why should we suspect it? It should go without saying that we students were hardly in a position to judge the technical competence of an entire department! We didn't know enough to make such a judgment. More, it should be safe to assume that a major school is going to do a competent job of running a degree program, so there is no need to ask questions intended to discover if that is in fact the case. Sadly in this case that assumption didn't hold. I asked around for opinions on the professors, and didn't hear much that was worthwhile. Even if the professors weren't flunk happy, many students would not have made it through the program, which skews their opinions to the point of worthlessness. What to them is a "hard" teacher who should be avoided I often found was a good teacher who made you learn. Hard and fair is good.
It's the unfair treatment that makes it rough. We had professors who were pretty bitter about being cast off by their chosen discipline, but still held to the idea that their chosen field was worth learning, while the field they were pushed into teaching was not, and only attracted inferior students. They took this attitude out on us, sort of "proving" their prejudice, but not so blatantly that it was obvious after the first 2 weeks of class. We had another professor who I heard was decent. Was. Unfortunately, he was old and his last years there were marked by gradually increasing senility. He would go into a berserk rage over and flunk any student who he thought was showing him up in the slightest, and it was too easy to set him off without meaning to. He was also very rigid. If he decided you were a B or a C student, that was the highest grade he would give you, no matter how well you actually performed. But the department could not retire him because he had tons of tenure, and they were short of professors as it was. By the time I figured out what the department was like, I had already earned many hours of credit. I would have lost half those credits if I had left before finishing my degree. Schools make transferring very harsh once they have you.
Really. What struck me about the headline was the loud hero worship of the almighty super special individual. No one, no matter how special, can change facts of nature. This hero worship also shows another huge hole in American thinking. We have a terrible tendency to pick out one "key" person for lionizing, when it actually took a large team to accomplish some feat. In the case of a business leader, there's some justification for that. But still, it's praising Jobs while ignoring that Woz ever existed. Actors would be nothing without good writers and directors. Niel Armstrong would never have set foot on the moon if a massive organization hadn't stood behind him.
As to the facts of nature, I see several ways the electric car could play out. If batteries cannot be greatly improved, then the future might not be electric cars. Where is the flying car that was hoped to be just around the corner in the 1940s? 70 years later, it's still years away. What was not appreciated was how hard flying is. Now with driverless cars on the horizon, we will be able to extend that to control of flying machines, and may at last see the flying car.
If not batteries, we may instead come up with cheap way to produce biodiesel. Then the electric car may then never move beyond the experimental. We may also stay with the hybrid. Diesel electric locomotives have existed and worked excellently for decades. There are other directions to explore. Really, our road design while real simple and basic, is terribly primitive. Maglev is much talked about, but there are many other ideas. What if we came up with walkers along the lines of the Star Wars AT-AT, but scaled down for personal transportation? With decent computer control, it could be possible. What kind of road would be best for them, maybe something like the generously spaced apart round stones used for footpaths? Could they jump small streams, so that we wouldn't have to have so many bridges which are the highest maintenance items of our roads?
Fun? Fun?!? Learning is hard work. Maybe business majors can party most of the time. Engineering majors can't.
As if that isn't enough, there are always a few bad professors who discard their professionalism to flunk students they take a dislike to. I had it even worse. The department I was in was used by other departments as a dumping ground for their worst professors. Instead of one bad teacher, the whole department was bad. The rest of the College of Engineering was graduating 20%, that department was graduating only 5%. The dean finally told them to quit flunking all the students, or he'd eliminate the department. Had I known, I would most certainly have attended a different school. As it was, I managed to graduate in spite of them. You put up with a dysfunctional department and see how much fun you have.
These sort of laws are stupid, because they can NOT stop anyone from doing it
That's one argument I use in favor of legalizing copying. It's not sufficient. Anyway, some may be tempted to think it can be stopped. To that, I say that eventually we may have an implanted camera integrated with our eyes. It'll tap in directly to the optic nerve and record whatever the user is seeing.
In fact, I never considered selling my votes until I saw this article, now I'm like, fuck, i should be selling my votes. Capitalism at it's finest!
Why does anyone vote the way they do? They vote for the politicians that offer them the best deal without being too unbelievable. Romney has a credibility problem that way. He refuses to go into details of just how he'd create this magical prosperity he's selling us all, and refuses to entertain skepticism about whether the little he has given out and not flip flopped on would actually work. Would even more trickle down economics work? If we give even more tax breaks to the rich, they will hire more workers? The evidence suggests no. So he'd rather the talk was all on the areas he feels he's stronger, such as issues dear to the hearts of the social conservative. A lot of people aren't buying his attempts to avoid and bluster on the subject of the economy. Which candidate is most likely to lead to stable employment for the individual voter? Would you sell your vote for a steady job? Really, we already do sell our votes, just not quite so directly.
Same is true of Mazda. No Chilton or Haynes manuals for Mazdas after the mid 90s. For instance, 1989-1993 is the newest MPV for which there is an independent manual.