Many of the laws passed in the US start the same way. That's the point of the article, though it is hardly new enough to constitute news.
How else do you think multi-thousand-page bills are created? Surely, you don't think that our congressmen have the time to draft them. In our system, bills are written by lobbyists just as our regulatory agencies are managed by the industry they regulate.
Though apathy is definitely a large part of our current dilemma, it is not the point made above. Rather, the point is that your average person would be homeless and hungry if they spent all their time fighting the good fight, while on the other side, lobbyists are *paid* to fight against our rights. In no universe is that a balanced equation.
The counterbalance to that proposed by the founding fathers was that our representatives were to be intelligent, selfless, benevolent leaders of men which would fight for the best interests of their constituents. These representatives would have paid, full-time duties towards that end.
We can see in hindsight that this was a naive, idealistic view of things, only made worse by the formation of political parties and the distillation of seats in Congress to an increasingly small ratio of the population.
I'm still waiting for corporate entities to be executed for capital crimes - until then, I won't actually believe they're people. A possible alternative would be to make the CEO of the company directly and personally responsible for everything the company does, as if the CEO had done it him/her self - make 'em earn those golden parachutes by risking life in prison.
Unfortunately, we're long past the point where that could ever be a possibility. We can't even get corporations to pay meaningful fines for breaking the law, let alone something like a corporate-equivalent of capital punishment. In fact, I am not sure of any non-trivial criminal penalty (even as a sizable fine) has ever been levied against a corporation in the last century. We rely entirely upon lawsuits to keep corporations in line, which both stacks the deck heavily in favor of the near infinite legal budget of the corporation and carries a stigma of injustice against the poor, benevolent, victimized corporations.
No, corporate personhood is all about granting nearly all individual rights to a faceless entity and taking away nearly all responsibilities from the entity and those who control it.
Even if you do sign away all rights to your code, there is a small handful of states whose laws override those contract provisions.
For example, I live in Kansas, and Statute 44-130 explicitly states that employment contract provisions about code I write on my own time using only my own resources are null and void. There are a few limitations to that, of course - the coding I do has to be unrelated to my workplace and not derived from work I do at the office, and I have to disclose to my employer what those projects are.
This was covered a little more in-depth in a question on OnStartups, one of the StackExchange sites.
That's the sad reality. I know full well that my decision to complete a computer science degree virtually guarantees that in the long run, I will make less money than guys who dropped out of my CS program because they couldn't hack it to pursue business school.
The deaths and ill-health caused by coal plants is consistent and expected. The deaths and ill-health caused by a nuclear meltdown is unexpected. The unfortunate but inevitable human psychological reaction is to assume that (despite all the statistics proving otherwise) nuclear power plants are less safe. It's no different than our reaction to 9/11 versus heart disease, where we have spent hundreds of billions of dollars reacting to the former while the latter kills several orders of magnitude more people when both are amortized over the last decade.
I don't ever recall a public outcry for the new security scanners or pat-downs. As far as I can tell, this has merely been a long, downhill slope of politician after politician throwing money and rationality out the window to look like they are doing something in the face of 9/11. Now, you have security personnel in the top brass at the DHS and TSA clamoring for more power and money by concocting a constant stream of new and more invasive security procedures to justify and solidify their positions.
I don't fault the American public for starting it all. I fault them for not doing anything to stop it.
...is that every kid who fails a test should have the grade thrown out and immediately get an A, along with some extra credit for effort on the next assignment.
We might have more sympathy if many of the publishers' "rights" weren't purchased at the expense of our own.
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
Life+70 years for an individual or 95 for a corporation is stretching limited pretty thin. Free use and the public domain have largely been shredded. The public at large has lost many of the rights granted by original copyright law because of shady and corrupt kickback practices.
Protocols in general are content-agnostic. Unless you want to argue that sharing any kind of content (even by content producers/owners) is illegal, no protocol is inherently illegal.
There are plenty of legitimate uses for P2P protocols, the most widely-used probably being WoW's patch system.
Problem is, you are the professional software developer, the user isn't. The user is a professional whatever they are. If they are not good at their job, you can call them idiots. If they are not good at stating software requirements, that's your problem.
You must be a user:)
All joking aside, the user is the domain expert. The user may be a professional teacher, or doctor, or architect, or whatever. A developer cannot possibly determine what a good teaching or medical or CAD program should do inside a vacuum. In order for a program to be a success, the users' goals must be extracted somehow and requirements formed from them.
The problem is: getting the user to effectively communicate their goals is hard. Most of the time, users don't even really know what their real goals are, and when they do, they often times express them not as goals, but as ways to achieve that goal.
One of the largest reasons why agile has become so popular is that users only truly know what they don't want.
Sometimes the user gets too specific with the requirements, and ends up slipping in details that make the function less desirable. When discussing the requirements, though, they will absolutely insist they want it exactly the way they described. It isn't until you hand them an app that does it that the user finally realizes they don't like it that way after all. If you're lucky, users will notice it right away and get it changed early in the process. If you're unlucky, they won't notice until full roll-out of your product. If you're especially unlucky, they won't ever fully notice the problem - they will just end up hating your product for reasons they cannot really put their finger on.
Other times, users will come up with what they believe to be a really great idea for something fresh and new they think they want. It will be something they have never had before, but they are convinced it will revolutionize their lives. In some cases, things end up like the overly-detailed feature - it kinda does what the user wants, but maybe not 100% the way they want, or it is something they will use and brings value, but doesn't quite get them all the way to their real goal. Other times, they will take one look at the prototype or finished feature and realize that it was really a dumb idea after all.
In a true antithesis of impossible requirements there are other times when a user will overlook something because they don't even realize what is possible.
You mean if you scan through our records for the last few years, you can extrapolate out when we'll need to buy our supplies? Great! Now we can more effectively plan our budgets. If we scan our billing system's log files, you mean we can find all cases where our transactions from the Foo system have been dropped? You just saved us hundreds of thousands of dollars of lost charges!
It is the business analyst's job to try and direct the users in a way to best gather requirements, sure. Unless you want to require all developers become experts not only in their field, but also in their users' professions, there is still quite a bit of responsibility on the users to figure out what it is they want.
And managers... well, I'll just point out that there are quite a few scientific studies that show that the average manager is not really any better at managing than any average joe picked off the street.
Don't you know? AT&T will end up with more employees than it had. The fact that the net number of employed US citizens at the end of the merger will be negative is just a mundane detail that should be omitted.
The obvious other side of the coin on this one is that no one notices when someone who's rich wastes money. They notice when that welfare case does because it's contrary to common sense.
I can guarantee you the most wasteful people are those who are rich. We merely see it as privilege rather than waste because they have the money to spare on superfluous expenditures.
That's simple. Fear overrides logic and reason, and judging by our political arena of late, we don't exactly have a whole lot of logic and reason to begin with.
If you filter the set down to two people (or more likely, two teams of people) amongst those who specialize in the same field at the same time looking for the solution to the same problem reduces the number ever so slightly from 7 billion people.
Filtering it down that far, there's a decent possibility that in some cases of interference, those two teams may represent every team looking to solve that particular problem at that time.
When dealing with a trusted keeper of secrets, there is a very fine line between "common sense, let them keep secrets" and simply being a dupe to a predatory and potentially crimial entity. Wikileaks wouldn't exist if the various governments of the world gave us even the slightest reason to trust them.
In the US, our elected officials are one step shy of openly taking bribes, and in the last few months, two of the three branches have been mired in what boils down to little more than a dick waving contest. We have spent a decade occupying two countries we invaded without the slightest bit of reliable intel that would give us reason to do so. Our economy was raped by Wall Street parasites that subsequently got written a big check and left without so much as a slap on the wrist.
I have absolutely zero faith that our government has the best interests of its people in mind. While I would not personally go as far as actively work to release classified documents, I find it particularly difficult to chastise anyone who believes they need to do so for the good of the public.
Almost as shy as they would be if they had to worry about their clean-room research resulting in several multi-million dollar lawsuits related to overly-broad, never-marketed, and hard-to-find patents.
Through their "bring the player, not the class" balancing goals, they also marginalized 4 of the 10 classes in the game. In a world where every class capable of playing a DPS role is able to do so just as effectively as any other class capable of doing a DPS role, those classes that can only do DPS become inferior classes.
I personally quit because my main was a Mage. I knew that logically, I needed to level up a hybrid character that could switch roles on the fly to get the most out of the game, but the time I had already put into developing my Mage in terms of achievements/gear/items put a huge psychological wall up against that, so much so that I felt just as much at a loss trying to play my much newer Paladin character full time. In the end, I was left with the feeling that I was cheated out of the character I wanted to play because of the new balance direction.
Slashdot Mirror
Many of the laws passed in the US start the same way. That's the point of the article, though it is hardly new enough to constitute news.
How else do you think multi-thousand-page bills are created? Surely, you don't think that our congressmen have the time to draft them. In our system, bills are written by lobbyists just as our regulatory agencies are managed by the industry they regulate.
Though apathy is definitely a large part of our current dilemma, it is not the point made above. Rather, the point is that your average person would be homeless and hungry if they spent all their time fighting the good fight, while on the other side, lobbyists are *paid* to fight against our rights. In no universe is that a balanced equation.
The counterbalance to that proposed by the founding fathers was that our representatives were to be intelligent, selfless, benevolent leaders of men which would fight for the best interests of their constituents. These representatives would have paid, full-time duties towards that end.
We can see in hindsight that this was a naive, idealistic view of things, only made worse by the formation of political parties and the distillation of seats in Congress to an increasingly small ratio of the population.
I'm still waiting for corporate entities to be executed for capital crimes - until then, I won't actually believe they're people. A possible alternative would be to make the CEO of the company directly and personally responsible for everything the company does, as if the CEO had done it him/her self - make 'em earn those golden parachutes by risking life in prison.
Unfortunately, we're long past the point where that could ever be a possibility. We can't even get corporations to pay meaningful fines for breaking the law, let alone something like a corporate-equivalent of capital punishment. In fact, I am not sure of any non-trivial criminal penalty (even as a sizable fine) has ever been levied against a corporation in the last century. We rely entirely upon lawsuits to keep corporations in line, which both stacks the deck heavily in favor of the near infinite legal budget of the corporation and carries a stigma of injustice against the poor, benevolent, victimized corporations.
No, corporate personhood is all about granting nearly all individual rights to a faceless entity and taking away nearly all responsibilities from the entity and those who control it.
Even if you do sign away all rights to your code, there is a small handful of states whose laws override those contract provisions.
For example, I live in Kansas, and Statute 44-130 explicitly states that employment contract provisions about code I write on my own time using only my own resources are null and void. There are a few limitations to that, of course - the coding I do has to be unrelated to my workplace and not derived from work I do at the office, and I have to disclose to my employer what those projects are.
This was covered a little more in-depth in a question on OnStartups, one of the StackExchange sites.
That's the sad reality. I know full well that my decision to complete a computer science degree virtually guarantees that in the long run, I will make less money than guys who dropped out of my CS program because they couldn't hack it to pursue business school.
The deaths and ill-health caused by coal plants is consistent and expected. The deaths and ill-health caused by a nuclear meltdown is unexpected. The unfortunate but inevitable human psychological reaction is to assume that (despite all the statistics proving otherwise) nuclear power plants are less safe. It's no different than our reaction to 9/11 versus heart disease, where we have spent hundreds of billions of dollars reacting to the former while the latter kills several orders of magnitude more people when both are amortized over the last decade.
A single tear rolled down my cheek as I compared this satire against real, starry-eyed reactions of my company's management with "the cloud".
You know, this mythical beast that solves all scalability and maintenance issues while simultaneously having absolutely zero downsides...
I don't ever recall a public outcry for the new security scanners or pat-downs. As far as I can tell, this has merely been a long, downhill slope of politician after politician throwing money and rationality out the window to look like they are doing something in the face of 9/11. Now, you have security personnel in the top brass at the DHS and TSA clamoring for more power and money by concocting a constant stream of new and more invasive security procedures to justify and solidify their positions.
I don't fault the American public for starting it all. I fault them for not doing anything to stop it.
They sucked his dick when he was alive. Now... they still suck his dick... only more.
It becomes easier with rigor mortis, that's all.
...is that every kid who fails a test should have the grade thrown out and immediately get an A, along with some extra credit for effort on the next assignment.
We might have more sympathy if many of the publishers' "rights" weren't purchased at the expense of our own.
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
Life+70 years for an individual or 95 for a corporation is stretching limited pretty thin. Free use and the public domain have largely been shredded. The public at large has lost many of the rights granted by original copyright law because of shady and corrupt kickback practices.
Protocols in general are content-agnostic. Unless you want to argue that sharing any kind of content (even by content producers/owners) is illegal, no protocol is inherently illegal.
There are plenty of legitimate uses for P2P protocols, the most widely-used probably being WoW's patch system.
So does every private health insurance agency.
That's not entirely true. Rendering CPR to an unconscious victim can and has gotten people sued.
Problem is, you are the professional software developer, the user isn't. The user is a professional whatever they are. If they are not good at their job, you can call them idiots. If they are not good at stating software requirements, that's your problem.
You must be a user :)
All joking aside, the user is the domain expert. The user may be a professional teacher, or doctor, or architect, or whatever. A developer cannot possibly determine what a good teaching or medical or CAD program should do inside a vacuum. In order for a program to be a success, the users' goals must be extracted somehow and requirements formed from them.
The problem is: getting the user to effectively communicate their goals is hard. Most of the time, users don't even really know what their real goals are, and when they do, they often times express them not as goals, but as ways to achieve that goal.
One of the largest reasons why agile has become so popular is that users only truly know what they don't want.
Sometimes the user gets too specific with the requirements, and ends up slipping in details that make the function less desirable. When discussing the requirements, though, they will absolutely insist they want it exactly the way they described. It isn't until you hand them an app that does it that the user finally realizes they don't like it that way after all. If you're lucky, users will notice it right away and get it changed early in the process. If you're unlucky, they won't notice until full roll-out of your product. If you're especially unlucky, they won't ever fully notice the problem - they will just end up hating your product for reasons they cannot really put their finger on.
Other times, users will come up with what they believe to be a really great idea for something fresh and new they think they want. It will be something they have never had before, but they are convinced it will revolutionize their lives. In some cases, things end up like the overly-detailed feature - it kinda does what the user wants, but maybe not 100% the way they want, or it is something they will use and brings value, but doesn't quite get them all the way to their real goal. Other times, they will take one look at the prototype or finished feature and realize that it was really a dumb idea after all.
In a true antithesis of impossible requirements there are other times when a user will overlook something because they don't even realize what is possible.
You mean if you scan through our records for the last few years, you can extrapolate out when we'll need to buy our supplies? Great! Now we can more effectively plan our budgets. If we scan our billing system's log files, you mean we can find all cases where our transactions from the Foo system have been dropped? You just saved us hundreds of thousands of dollars of lost charges!
It is the business analyst's job to try and direct the users in a way to best gather requirements, sure. Unless you want to require all developers become experts not only in their field, but also in their users' professions, there is still quite a bit of responsibility on the users to figure out what it is they want.
When you live in a basement for long enough, you start to discount the possibility that someone could live below you, I suppose.
And managers... well, I'll just point out that there are quite a few scientific studies that show that the average manager is not really any better at managing than any average joe picked off the street.
There's a good reason for that.
Don't you know? AT&T will end up with more employees than it had. The fact that the net number of employed US citizens at the end of the merger will be negative is just a mundane detail that should be omitted.
The obvious other side of the coin on this one is that no one notices when someone who's rich wastes money. They notice when that welfare case does because it's contrary to common sense.
I can guarantee you the most wasteful people are those who are rich. We merely see it as privilege rather than waste because they have the money to spare on superfluous expenditures.
How has it come to this?
That's simple. Fear overrides logic and reason, and judging by our political arena of late, we don't exactly have a whole lot of logic and reason to begin with.
If you filter the set down to two people (or more likely, two teams of people) amongst those who specialize in the same field at the same time looking for the solution to the same problem reduces the number ever so slightly from 7 billion people.
Filtering it down that far, there's a decent possibility that in some cases of interference, those two teams may represent every team looking to solve that particular problem at that time.
When dealing with a trusted keeper of secrets, there is a very fine line between "common sense, let them keep secrets" and simply being a dupe to a predatory and potentially crimial entity. Wikileaks wouldn't exist if the various governments of the world gave us even the slightest reason to trust them.
In the US, our elected officials are one step shy of openly taking bribes, and in the last few months, two of the three branches have been mired in what boils down to little more than a dick waving contest. We have spent a decade occupying two countries we invaded without the slightest bit of reliable intel that would give us reason to do so. Our economy was raped by Wall Street parasites that subsequently got written a big check and left without so much as a slap on the wrist.
I have absolutely zero faith that our government has the best interests of its people in mind. While I would not personally go as far as actively work to release classified documents, I find it particularly difficult to chastise anyone who believes they need to do so for the good of the public.
C'mon now. You can even go with the reverse tea party angle using "British Petroleum" if you refer to the oil as its old-time nickname "Texas tea".
Almost as shy as they would be if they had to worry about their clean-room research resulting in several multi-million dollar lawsuits related to overly-broad, never-marketed, and hard-to-find patents.
Through their "bring the player, not the class" balancing goals, they also marginalized 4 of the 10 classes in the game. In a world where every class capable of playing a DPS role is able to do so just as effectively as any other class capable of doing a DPS role, those classes that can only do DPS become inferior classes.
I personally quit because my main was a Mage. I knew that logically, I needed to level up a hybrid character that could switch roles on the fly to get the most out of the game, but the time I had already put into developing my Mage in terms of achievements/gear/items put a huge psychological wall up against that, so much so that I felt just as much at a loss trying to play my much newer Paladin character full time. In the end, I was left with the feeling that I was cheated out of the character I wanted to play because of the new balance direction.