Clearly, when a patent is being used to kill an industry, the value of the industry is thus zero. Giving nothing to the patent troll sounds like market value compensation to me...
This, like so many other school programs, is an egregious violation of the students' rights. Yet, we allow it under the all to used "think of the children" guise. What it really results in is a bunch of people who are trained from childhood that violating their rights is OK if the right circumstances present themselves.
Your three separate cases are not really separate. They are all instances of data you want to prevent from being released publicly for fear of the repercussions. As you mentioned in previous posts, the onus is completely on the party wanting to keep the data secret (in this case, the person getting computer repair).
If information is really important, how hard is it to keep on a storage medium that does not require connection to your machine for it to operate? Having all that data on an external drive that you unplug before sending the machine to repair would solve your problem. Sufficiently encrypting the data would do the same.
I am hardly arguing the morality of what someone else might do once they get hold of your private/secret data - merely that it is completely up to you to keep it private/secret.
Furthermore, surgeries are scheduled by days of the week - you will have (e.g.) one room on Mondays, two rooms on Tuesdays, and one room on Friday afternoons. Regardless of what night you're on call, that's when you can operate. Since surgeons only make money when they operate, there is an enormous incentive not to miss an operative day. Since the hospital only makes money from ORs that are in use, if you don't use your operative time you'll lose it. Cancelling a day of surgeries has enormous costs - you already have a nurse anesthetist, a scrub tech, a circulating nurse, and housekeeping personnel scheduled to work there. Do you send them home early, effectively docking their pay for something that isn't their fault? Or do you pay them to do nothing?
Put together a system whereby the surgeons can trade on-call nights when they have surgery scheduled.
Sure, it disrupts the nicer, every X days rotation, but malpractice lawsuits cost extreme amounts of money and this would be a relatively easy way to mitigate it.
You're making an assumption that an international student is more likely to have a full scholarship. Most of the international students in my CS graduating class were from rich families who simply paid extra to have their children educated in the US.
Except that the capital gains rate was cut, and the wealthy tend to have a significant portion of their wealth in investments. In many cases, the highest earners pay a fraction (percent-wise) of what normal people pay, because they have shifted most of their income from a traditional paycheck to stock options.
There is a reason the CEO of Google has a $1/year salary.
We aren't talking the difference between a 15 year copyright and a 16 year copyright. We're talking about what started as a 14-year copyright (with extension possible to another 14) which mutated into 75 years or life+25 years. Additionally, free use have been eroded away while more and more draconian protections have been put in place. Let us put away the straw men, shall we?
There is no objective, hard line in the sand for where to stop. That's the hard part.
The same could be asked of going the other way with it. If you start cutting government expenditures to pave the way for lower/eliminated taxes, where does it stop? Do we cut education? Social security? Infrastructure? Emergency services? Defense?
You have to weigh pros and cons as a group and determine what the majority wants, which can also change over time.
For example, with any kind of infrastructure, you pay taxes to have a network of interconnected nodes of varying quality versus a private network which may be excellently maintained but with no guarantee of coverage.
Several of the human-human relationship commandments are basic ethical requirements for a successful civilization, so it makes sense that they would stand the test of time. Is it possible that the commandments were simply a way to codify these requirements and supplement the additional authority of an invisible parent figure?
So, while there is a disadvantage, you can make yourself heard and get the point across if you are willing to do a bit more for it than the other guy - which is still much better than on your average topical forum. Of course, if your point is such that it cannot be readily argued by logic or backed by references, then you have no recourse - but then the problem is with the point, not with Slashdot moderation system.
That is the way one should expect it to work in any kind of environment. The group generally has a prevailing opinion of a subject because they have seen, read, or heard something that has prompted them to come to that conclusion. It is only natural that it would take some convincing to sway that opinion the other way. One should expect that the ability to sway the group is both proportional to the strength of the counter-data and inversely proportional to the strength of the opinion and the original data from which it was formed.
However, if enough people turn what would be a 30-second check into a 3-minute check, they will eventually have to hire more staff to process the normal flow of people. Additionally, I think it would be a good thing to display for all just how absurd our security theater is by showing off people getting patted-down, rather than innocently stepping through a scanner that (for all they know) is little more invasive than the metal detector they have been walking through every time they get on a plane anyways.
I have to say that I like the idea of a car driving itself. In theory it should be able to be better than any human. However, software is what I do for a living and it seems there are always circumstances that can not be predicted if software but would be easy for a human to handle.
The part of me that is a programmer agrees with you. The part of me that is a driver and a road cyclist must concede that the bar has been set ridiculously low for the car AI to drive better than the average human.
If an individual were to follow me around all day tracking my movements, we could call it stalking. If the police do so by attaching a device to my car, it is called justice?
Those are all arguments for why the iPod Touch was innovative. iPhone was just an iPod Touch that could make calls. That's evolution from the original design. Along those lines, the iPad is merely a larger version of the iPod Touch.
That isn't to say that the three devices should not be lauded for their ability to take their respective markets by storm.
Despite the level of corruption, you find that in generally free societies which are all capitalist based economies (they have varying levels of regulation, but a free market is always the basis) there is the least corruption of any system. Central economies tend to be the very worst. After all, when the people doing the watching are the people with control, well there is something of a conflict of interest, isn't there? It's not perfect, but it is the best we've yet come up with. Doesn't mean there isn't room for improvement or that vigilance and regulation aren't needed, but trying to say "Oh capitalism is the problem," shows a good deal of ignorance of history and current events. As power concentrates, corruption tends to go up and in command economies, you have a hell of a concentration of power.
A completely unregulated, free market tends towards consolidation of power into large companies and ultimately monopoly. This maximizes corruption every bit as effectively as a strong, centralized government.
The grocery stores are the content providers (those creating websites). Net neutrality deals with the roads connecting those stores.
It may be really easy to drive to a different grocery store when one charges too much or lacks what you want, but depending upon how the roads are laid out, you may be stuck driving over the same few stretches of road regardless of which store you go to. What's worse is that the existing roads were largely subsidized with public money, and building new roads to compete with the old ones is often times difficult to impossible due to a variety of reasons (e.g. zoning).
Seriously, if that's a question then the answer is a resounding, "yes!" Why would you believe anything a multi-billion dollar company would tell you? The only time you can actually buy what they're saying is when there are some legal repercussions for not telling the truth.
And the cost of being found out multiplied by the risk of being uncovered in the lie is greater than the cost of telling the truth. Given the right conditions, legal repercussions can and will be treated as a simple business expense.
Offering up the full source material used for a story could be cool. To be most accessible to the common reading audience, stories generally have to be condensed to a sound-byte and dumbed-down, but a premium version could offer up everything used to come up with a story from voice recordings/transcripts and referenced documents. In cases where copyright may be an issue, citations could be presented instead.
A certain sub-set of the readership would pay just to get a look at the material, and you could even develop a subscriber base out of people interested in learning about journalism (perhaps with aims to get into the field).
Debt collector who make false claims in a hope that the person named in the claim would take an honest course of action and pay without a challenge.
I think you are confusing honest with stupid.
If some debt collector came to me with a false claim, I would honestly tell him where he could stick the claim. An intelligent person should keep records of their debts and to whom they are owed.
Slashdot Mirror
Clearly, when a patent is being used to kill an industry, the value of the industry is thus zero. Giving nothing to the patent troll sounds like market value compensation to me...
This, like so many other school programs, is an egregious violation of the students' rights. Yet, we allow it under the all to used "think of the children" guise. What it really results in is a bunch of people who are trained from childhood that violating their rights is OK if the right circumstances present themselves.
Your three separate cases are not really separate. They are all instances of data you want to prevent from being released publicly for fear of the repercussions. As you mentioned in previous posts, the onus is completely on the party wanting to keep the data secret (in this case, the person getting computer repair).
If information is really important, how hard is it to keep on a storage medium that does not require connection to your machine for it to operate? Having all that data on an external drive that you unplug before sending the machine to repair would solve your problem. Sufficiently encrypting the data would do the same.
I am hardly arguing the morality of what someone else might do once they get hold of your private/secret data - merely that it is completely up to you to keep it private/secret.
That sounds like a problem that resolves itself, though.
It's always best to go to the original source.
Furthermore, surgeries are scheduled by days of the week - you will have (e.g.) one room on Mondays, two rooms on Tuesdays, and one room on Friday afternoons. Regardless of what night you're on call, that's when you can operate. Since surgeons only make money when they operate, there is an enormous incentive not to miss an operative day. Since the hospital only makes money from ORs that are in use, if you don't use your operative time you'll lose it. Cancelling a day of surgeries has enormous costs - you already have a nurse anesthetist, a scrub tech, a circulating nurse, and housekeeping personnel scheduled to work there. Do you send them home early, effectively docking their pay for something that isn't their fault? Or do you pay them to do nothing?
Put together a system whereby the surgeons can trade on-call nights when they have surgery scheduled.
Sure, it disrupts the nicer, every X days rotation, but malpractice lawsuits cost extreme amounts of money and this would be a relatively easy way to mitigate it.
You're making an assumption that an international student is more likely to have a full scholarship. Most of the international students in my CS graduating class were from rich families who simply paid extra to have their children educated in the US.
Except that the capital gains rate was cut, and the wealthy tend to have a significant portion of their wealth in investments. In many cases, the highest earners pay a fraction (percent-wise) of what normal people pay, because they have shifted most of their income from a traditional paycheck to stock options.
There is a reason the CEO of Google has a $1/year salary.
We aren't talking the difference between a 15 year copyright and a 16 year copyright. We're talking about what started as a 14-year copyright (with extension possible to another 14) which mutated into 75 years or life+25 years. Additionally, free use have been eroded away while more and more draconian protections have been put in place. Let us put away the straw men, shall we?
There is no objective, hard line in the sand for where to stop. That's the hard part.
The same could be asked of going the other way with it. If you start cutting government expenditures to pave the way for lower/eliminated taxes, where does it stop? Do we cut education? Social security? Infrastructure? Emergency services? Defense?
You have to weigh pros and cons as a group and determine what the majority wants, which can also change over time.
For example, with any kind of infrastructure, you pay taxes to have a network of interconnected nodes of varying quality versus a private network which may be excellently maintained but with no guarantee of coverage.
The obvious answer is to avoid purchasing games that are released with DLC content available right away.
Several of the human-human relationship commandments are basic ethical requirements for a successful civilization, so it makes sense that they would stand the test of time. Is it possible that the commandments were simply a way to codify these requirements and supplement the additional authority of an invisible parent figure?
So, while there is a disadvantage, you can make yourself heard and get the point across if you are willing to do a bit more for it than the other guy - which is still much better than on your average topical forum. Of course, if your point is such that it cannot be readily argued by logic or backed by references, then you have no recourse - but then the problem is with the point, not with Slashdot moderation system.
That is the way one should expect it to work in any kind of environment. The group generally has a prevailing opinion of a subject because they have seen, read, or heard something that has prompted them to come to that conclusion. It is only natural that it would take some convincing to sway that opinion the other way. One should expect that the ability to sway the group is both proportional to the strength of the counter-data and inversely proportional to the strength of the opinion and the original data from which it was formed.
Education.
However, if enough people turn what would be a 30-second check into a 3-minute check, they will eventually have to hire more staff to process the normal flow of people. Additionally, I think it would be a good thing to display for all just how absurd our security theater is by showing off people getting patted-down, rather than innocently stepping through a scanner that (for all they know) is little more invasive than the metal detector they have been walking through every time they get on a plane anyways.
I have to say that I like the idea of a car driving itself. In theory it should be able to be better than any human. However, software is what I do for a living and it seems there are always circumstances that can not be predicted if software but would be easy for a human to handle.
The part of me that is a programmer agrees with you. The part of me that is a driver and a road cyclist must concede that the bar has been set ridiculously low for the car AI to drive better than the average human.
If an individual were to follow me around all day tracking my movements, we could call it stalking. If the police do so by attaching a device to my car, it is called justice?
Those are all arguments for why the iPod Touch was innovative. iPhone was just an iPod Touch that could make calls. That's evolution from the original design. Along those lines, the iPad is merely a larger version of the iPod Touch.
That isn't to say that the three devices should not be lauded for their ability to take their respective markets by storm.
Despite the level of corruption, you find that in generally free societies which are all capitalist based economies (they have varying levels of regulation, but a free market is always the basis) there is the least corruption of any system. Central economies tend to be the very worst. After all, when the people doing the watching are the people with control, well there is something of a conflict of interest, isn't there? It's not perfect, but it is the best we've yet come up with. Doesn't mean there isn't room for improvement or that vigilance and regulation aren't needed, but trying to say "Oh capitalism is the problem," shows a good deal of ignorance of history and current events. As power concentrates, corruption tends to go up and in command economies, you have a hell of a concentration of power.
A completely unregulated, free market tends towards consolidation of power into large companies and ultimately monopoly. This maximizes corruption every bit as effectively as a strong, centralized government.
What happens then when the federal "school board" gets staffed with creationists.
The US get mocked by the rest of the world, and the creationist staff gets replaced upon the next election.
Your analogy is flawed.
The grocery stores are the content providers (those creating websites). Net neutrality deals with the roads connecting those stores.
It may be really easy to drive to a different grocery store when one charges too much or lacks what you want, but depending upon how the roads are laid out, you may be stuck driving over the same few stretches of road regardless of which store you go to. What's worse is that the existing roads were largely subsidized with public money, and building new roads to compete with the old ones is often times difficult to impossible due to a variety of reasons (e.g. zoning).
Seriously, if that's a question then the answer is a resounding, "yes!" Why would you believe anything a multi-billion dollar company would tell you? The only time you can actually buy what they're saying is when there are some legal repercussions for not telling the truth.
And the cost of being found out multiplied by the risk of being uncovered in the lie is greater than the cost of telling the truth. Given the right conditions, legal repercussions can and will be treated as a simple business expense.
What premium content do you have in mind?
Offering up the full source material used for a story could be cool. To be most accessible to the common reading audience, stories generally have to be condensed to a sound-byte and dumbed-down, but a premium version could offer up everything used to come up with a story from voice recordings/transcripts and referenced documents. In cases where copyright may be an issue, citations could be presented instead.
A certain sub-set of the readership would pay just to get a look at the material, and you could even develop a subscriber base out of people interested in learning about journalism (perhaps with aims to get into the field).
Debt collector who make false claims in a hope that the person named in the claim would take an honest course of action and pay without a challenge.
I think you are confusing honest with stupid.
If some debt collector came to me with a false claim, I would honestly tell him where he could stick the claim. An intelligent person should keep records of their debts and to whom they are owed.
Marriage and all the legal perks that come with it?