Now assume you grow up somewhere where the teachers can't read and write proper English. We can call this place "public school in a non-educated community unless you're lucky." This kind of thing could be useful. The only problem is that people would not be smart enough to correct it, but it might still raise the bar.
Given the choice between doing something immoral to follow orders and refusing orders, people follow orders. And given the choice between doing something immoral and losing money, people do the immoral thing. Morals take a back seat, except for really fundamental social norms. (Most people won't rape someone for money, for example.)
Morals take a back seat, whether because of the almighty dollar or because of societal norms or even norms within most environments. There are some exceptions--for example, where the person giving the orders is not respected, such as an insurance company.
The fact is that the goal is to make money/stay employed/be respected by peers/bosses. Moral calculus rarely enters the picture.
This is also true in law. The law does have ethics, a particular set of rules, which have their own problems (in design and enforcement). Legal ethics do not prohibit charging someone with anything you can make even a colorable argument they are guilty of. In elected legislative policymaking, the incentive is for overcriminalization, which has been known for centuries. In addition, the culture of prosecution is such that success is measured by putting people away for long periods of time.
As a result, the system does a great deal of harm. It also does good (limiting the ability of people to offend again and incentivizing people not to offend), but the good is intangible, whereas the harm is readily apparent.
That the Russians has a near unlimited supply of poor untrained peasants to fling at the enemy on mass does not say much for their strategy. If Germany had not made the bone headed move to invade Russia at the onset of one of the coldest winters in decades, the war would have turned out much differently. You also forget the AIR POWER that the Americans brought to bear on Germany's manufacturing cities and supply lines. Without manufacturing, the German war machine collapsed. It was American technological might that saved the world in WWII, not Russian brawn, which only resulted in millions more needless casualties on all sides.
It was a combination. We can theorize left and right about what might have happened without any one of the great powers, or with slightly different deployments of resources. Britain might have been forced into a separate peace due to an inadequate food supply, for example; Russia might have lost soldiers more quickly than it could produce them without advancing sufficiently if the Americans hadn't bombed the hell out of Europe; America might have turned nuclear against Germany in 1946 if Hitler had never been stupid enough to attack Russia; America might never have declared war on Germany if Japan had attacked a year later and Britain had made a separate peace; The Russians might have failed in their advances if they hadn't tied factory production directly to the food supply for incentive purposes.
There is so much anti-american sentiment these days that theories diminishing the importance of any American commitment are inherently suspect, IMHO. On the other hand, there is nationalistic propaganda that is often wrong, on all sides.
Any sensible person pays attention the first time they're on a particular model of plane, and then only listens if they've forgotten. Unless, like the crew, they are responsible for the safety of themselves *and others*.
I am a firm believer in the Open Source philosophy so proprietary software is not on my radar."
I stopped reading right there. Setting up a computer lab is a good question for Ask Slashdot. Setting up a philosophical/religious indoctrination center is not.
1) "Developing Countries" actually includes many different kinds of nations, with varying levels of infrastructure, support, security, and social rules. Certainly there are places with major problems with violence--child soldiers, human trafficking, lack of respect for life. There are also a huge number of wonderful communities, though many of them have a much harder life than most of us.
2) Two thousand years ago in or around Rome, they had what was effectively an automatically rotating spit over a fire. All it would have taken would have been one guy with vision and resources, and the industrial revolution would have happened there. Luck and circumstance happened to favor the more limited gene pool that emigrated from Africa many thousands of years ago. Of course culture contributes to ongoing successes--as does the position gained because of earlier generations' luck and circumstance.
They generally make decisions that are pro-establishment. Part of that is because the establishment has better lawyers (business v. individual cases) or the non-establishment is unsympathetic (criminals) or the establishment has some influence on which cases come up (if it loses in the Circuit Court of Appeals, the SG's office decides whether to appeal based on whether or not they think the case is a good test case--so the first circuit case for whether it's okay to record police officers on Boston Common, for example, doesn't get appealed because it's not a good test case for the government) or the justices have experiences on the prosecutorial side of the system and so tend to favor it.
However, they're also nine people looking at the law and making decisions based on what seems to make sense to them, in situations where the law can be read to favor either side. Kind of like where all of the courts of appeals had said that committing a crime "with a firearm" included even having a firearm in your pocket at the time a crime was committed. The Supreme Court overturned every circuit because it was an idiotic reading of the law.
Here, the law is more ambiguous--the question turned on whether a duplication in a foreign country, where the U.S. Copyright Act did not apply, was a duplication "under" the U.S. Copyright Act. Because duplications under the act are susceptible to the first sale doctrine.
The Court held it was a duplication "Under" the act.
This is great from an intelligence standpoint and horrible from a privacy standpoint, understandably. But the real potential is the grey market. America has a HUGE grey market, in part resulting in an unfair system (i.e. by staying outside the law people save money--both individuals not paying taxes and employers without compliance costs) and in part a result of an insensible system (child support obligations are so prohibitively expensive to many (and don't recognize that two residences cost more than one) that they incentivize larger gray markets, which decreases the tax base significantly).
The more centralized tracking of people's finances, the easier it becomes to detect gray market activity.
Patents and copyrights exist for making sure no one needs to keep trade secrets. The intent of those laws is to let people learn about the technical details behind the technology.
Not quite. Patents exist in part to encourage people to share the details behind their inventions, at least in theory. They grant a monopoly in exchange for that. People would share the details anyway where it's self-evident, so it's like we're giving a free monopoly--except you still encourage innovation by paying for development costs. The problem is the monopoly can be disproportionate to the investment and can retard progress and the development of knowledge. In any event, though patents are fundamentally at odds with trade secrets--where people keep secrets as long as they can, there is no limited life on the monopoly, and anyone who figures it out can do it--patents definitely don't exist to make sure that no one needs to keep trade secrets. It's just two very different choices, with different benefits and consequences to the innovator and the public.
Copyrights exist to limit the ability of duplicate printing presses (e.g. the pirate bay) to run off works without compensating the original author.
The problem is that the near-absolute control copyrights and patents give comes at a monopolistic cost, which sometimes costs more than it benefits society, mostly due to a collective action problem. (We might individually pay $2 for a hit song, but collectively we would pay much less and the remuneration for it would be more in accord with the Lochean earned income theory of labor, i.e. more fair.)
Having laws that restricts the liberty of learning goes against every principle of a civilized society.
I mostly agree, but it depends on the meaning of civilization. Most people are happy lying, keeping others in ignorance, and restricting knowledge. They tend to rationalize it, and they certainly don't think of it that way.
I disagree with regard to a few specialized issues--I don't mind putting restrictions on certain data related to weapon construction, for example.
Human Rights may include the right to freedom of expression. It does not follow that human rights include the freedom to copy someone else's entertainment work.
There would be a much stronger case if we were talking, for example, about protest videos or the like. And a significantly stronger case if we were talking about art making a political statement. But mostly we're talking about people who can't afford to or don't want to pay (high) market rates for entertainment. It is bad that we criminalize it, and insane that we make it a felony, but it's not a human right to get the entertainment of your choice cheaply.
The problem isn't that it's wrong to criminalize copyright theft to a small degree--it's that our criminal systems are designed so badly that small degrees of criminality can have extreme consequences.
More likely they signed the pact because it let them get the sponsorship. US Cycling teams have had horrible problems getting sponsored in recent years because of all the doping they've been involved in.
It would be nice if they did it for more altruistic reasons, and I hope they did; but I rather suspect they didn't.
It's a commentary on the faking of something fluffy for the masses on the one hand--computer-generated entertainment--and the very real deaths and war and land-grabbing on the part of a major world power on the other.
The accomplishment of Olympic athletes--the ones who aren't doping--and the Olympic ideal itself are fantastic and amazing and to be commended. But there is still a very poignant statement about both mankind and the state of our media when we watch the coverage of a computer-generated opening ceremony rather than responding to the deaths of thousands on the other.
Whether it's a hopeful choice, a selfish choice, or an ignorant choice is another question. (Or a contractual or financial choice, in the case of the media.)
Oh, I didn't have to RTFA to figure as much, but there's a little-known principle called "simulation of the limitation of intelligent thought for comedic purposes."
It's quite useful in certain kinds of puns and wry humor, or when you want Schrodinger's cat to do iPhone math. (Except on Mondays--Schrodinger's cat is usually sleeping on Mondays. Well, maybe.)
They rejected a $2.6 billion bid for the company as too low in March.
But it seems that punitive damages is just getting greedy. Even without punitive damages, just charging them for the Iraq war will bankrupt them 220 times over.
Are you insane? Hospital administration, to some degree, yes; but Doctors aren't trying to be opaque about costs, they're just having to deal with the insurance companies.
As to the requirements for surgeons, they're having to go through the training to be surgeons, not doctors. And a lot of them still mess it up. If anything, we need more training for specialists, not less--or at least better training.
My grandfather never let surgical residents close up after his surgeries because they hadn't had enough training--the hospital gave him trouble about it for a long time. One day he left a very experienced and well-known visiting specialist in his field close up after him, and the surgery itself had been fine.
The specialist botched the job and the patient died.
We don't need less training for surgeons. At the least we need better training.
Yes, it's anecdotal. But anecdotes add up, and I've seen some terrible medicine performed in my time. People die when surgeons aren't trained well.
Slashdot Mirror
Depends on the school. Good, small undergrad schools use little or no TA grading.
Now assume you grow up somewhere where the teachers can't read and write proper English. We can call this place "public school in a non-educated community unless you're lucky." This kind of thing could be useful. The only problem is that people would not be smart enough to correct it, but it might still raise the bar.
Given the choice between doing something immoral to follow orders and refusing orders, people follow orders. And given the choice between doing something immoral and losing money, people do the immoral thing. Morals take a back seat, except for really fundamental social norms. (Most people won't rape someone for money, for example.)
Morals take a back seat, whether because of the almighty dollar or because of societal norms or even norms within most environments. There are some exceptions--for example, where the person giving the orders is not respected, such as an insurance company.
The fact is that the goal is to make money/stay employed/be respected by peers/bosses. Moral calculus rarely enters the picture.
This is also true in law. The law does have ethics, a particular set of rules, which have their own problems (in design and enforcement). Legal ethics do not prohibit charging someone with anything you can make even a colorable argument they are guilty of. In elected legislative policymaking, the incentive is for overcriminalization, which has been known for centuries. In addition, the culture of prosecution is such that success is measured by putting people away for long periods of time.
As a result, the system does a great deal of harm. It also does good (limiting the ability of people to offend again and incentivizing people not to offend), but the good is intangible, whereas the harm is readily apparent.
Science types in a poll conducted at a university are going to have harsher views on date rape because they have partied less.
You could kiss the Constitution goodbye, but you'd still have some semblance of federalism, a free market, free-ish speech, etc.
Sounds like the United States.
That the Russians has a near unlimited supply of poor untrained peasants to fling at the enemy on mass does not say much for their strategy. If Germany had not made the bone headed move to invade Russia at the onset of one of the coldest winters in decades, the war would have turned out much differently. You also forget the AIR POWER that the Americans brought to bear on Germany's manufacturing cities and supply lines. Without manufacturing, the German war machine collapsed. It was American technological might that saved the world in WWII, not Russian brawn, which only resulted in millions more needless casualties on all sides.
It was a combination. We can theorize left and right about what might have happened without any one of the great powers, or with slightly different deployments of resources. Britain might have been forced into a separate peace due to an inadequate food supply, for example; Russia might have lost soldiers more quickly than it could produce them without advancing sufficiently if the Americans hadn't bombed the hell out of Europe; America might have turned nuclear against Germany in 1946 if Hitler had never been stupid enough to attack Russia; America might never have declared war on Germany if Japan had attacked a year later and Britain had made a separate peace; The Russians might have failed in their advances if they hadn't tied factory production directly to the food supply for incentive purposes.
There is so much anti-american sentiment these days that theories diminishing the importance of any American commitment are inherently suspect, IMHO. On the other hand, there is nationalistic propaganda that is often wrong, on all sides.
Any sensible person pays attention the first time they're on a particular model of plane, and then only listens if they've forgotten. Unless, like the crew, they are responsible for the safety of themselves *and others*.
I am a firm believer in the Open Source philosophy so proprietary software is not on my radar."
I stopped reading right there. Setting up a computer lab is a good question for Ask Slashdot. Setting up a philosophical/religious indoctrination center is not.
You must be new here.
1) "Developing Countries" actually includes many different kinds of nations, with varying levels of infrastructure, support, security, and social rules. Certainly there are places with major problems with violence--child soldiers, human trafficking, lack of respect for life. There are also a huge number of wonderful communities, though many of them have a much harder life than most of us.
2) Two thousand years ago in or around Rome, they had what was effectively an automatically rotating spit over a fire. All it would have taken would have been one guy with vision and resources, and the industrial revolution would have happened there. Luck and circumstance happened to favor the more limited gene pool that emigrated from Africa many thousands of years ago. Of course culture contributes to ongoing successes--as does the position gained because of earlier generations' luck and circumstance.
3) The United States.
It's like asking "can you win a race against a Toyoda?" where do you even start with that....?
Since Akio Toyoda is 30 years older than me, I'm pretty sure I could beat him in a race.
Boy do you need a new car!
They generally make decisions that are pro-establishment. Part of that is because the establishment has better lawyers (business v. individual cases) or the non-establishment is unsympathetic (criminals) or the establishment has some influence on which cases come up (if it loses in the Circuit Court of Appeals, the SG's office decides whether to appeal based on whether or not they think the case is a good test case--so the first circuit case for whether it's okay to record police officers on Boston Common, for example, doesn't get appealed because it's not a good test case for the government) or the justices have experiences on the prosecutorial side of the system and so tend to favor it.
However, they're also nine people looking at the law and making decisions based on what seems to make sense to them, in situations where the law can be read to favor either side. Kind of like where all of the courts of appeals had said that committing a crime "with a firearm" included even having a firearm in your pocket at the time a crime was committed. The Supreme Court overturned every circuit because it was an idiotic reading of the law.
Here, the law is more ambiguous--the question turned on whether a duplication in a foreign country, where the U.S. Copyright Act did not apply, was a duplication "under" the U.S. Copyright Act. Because duplications under the act are susceptible to the first sale doctrine.
The Court held it was a duplication "Under" the act.
This is great from an intelligence standpoint and horrible from a privacy standpoint, understandably. But the real potential is the grey market. America has a HUGE grey market, in part resulting in an unfair system (i.e. by staying outside the law people save money--both individuals not paying taxes and employers without compliance costs) and in part a result of an insensible system (child support obligations are so prohibitively expensive to many (and don't recognize that two residences cost more than one) that they incentivize larger gray markets, which decreases the tax base significantly).
The more centralized tracking of people's finances, the easier it becomes to detect gray market activity.
Patents and copyrights exist for making sure no one needs to keep trade secrets. The intent of those laws is to let people learn about the technical details behind the technology.
Not quite. Patents exist in part to encourage people to share the details behind their inventions, at least in theory. They grant a monopoly in exchange for that. People would share the details anyway where it's self-evident, so it's like we're giving a free monopoly--except you still encourage innovation by paying for development costs. The problem is the monopoly can be disproportionate to the investment and can retard progress and the development of knowledge. In any event, though patents are fundamentally at odds with trade secrets--where people keep secrets as long as they can, there is no limited life on the monopoly, and anyone who figures it out can do it--patents definitely don't exist to make sure that no one needs to keep trade secrets. It's just two very different choices, with different benefits and consequences to the innovator and the public.
Copyrights exist to limit the ability of duplicate printing presses (e.g. the pirate bay) to run off works without compensating the original author.
The problem is that the near-absolute control copyrights and patents give comes at a monopolistic cost, which sometimes costs more than it benefits society, mostly due to a collective action problem. (We might individually pay $2 for a hit song, but collectively we would pay much less and the remuneration for it would be more in accord with the Lochean earned income theory of labor, i.e. more fair.)
Having laws that restricts the liberty of learning goes against every principle of a civilized society.
I mostly agree, but it depends on the meaning of civilization. Most people are happy lying, keeping others in ignorance, and restricting knowledge. They tend to rationalize it, and they certainly don't think of it that way.
I disagree with regard to a few specialized issues--I don't mind putting restrictions on certain data related to weapon construction, for example.
you shouldn't have any expectations of privacy.
How many unencrypted telephones are there in the world?
Where is the proof that it is necessary to protect copyright, or is this just something we all assume is true?
Asia.
Human Rights may include the right to freedom of expression. It does not follow that human rights include the freedom to copy someone else's entertainment work.
There would be a much stronger case if we were talking, for example, about protest videos or the like. And a significantly stronger case if we were talking about art making a political statement. But mostly we're talking about people who can't afford to or don't want to pay (high) market rates for entertainment. It is bad that we criminalize it, and insane that we make it a felony, but it's not a human right to get the entertainment of your choice cheaply.
The problem isn't that it's wrong to criminalize copyright theft to a small degree--it's that our criminal systems are designed so badly that small degrees of criminality can have extreme consequences.
More likely they signed the pact because it let them get the sponsorship. US Cycling teams have had horrible problems getting sponsored in recent years because of all the doping they've been involved in.
It would be nice if they did it for more altruistic reasons, and I hope they did; but I rather suspect they didn't.
-------> (whoosh) (joke)
o
- | - (you)
|
/ \
----> (Cliffs of Insanity that way)
Oh lameness filter that I know,
please read these words as filter snow.
> thermite a trolly to it's tracks outside Harvard while he was at MIT
Are you sure? I seem to remember that being a Caltech story.
It's a commentary on the faking of something fluffy for the masses on the one hand--computer-generated entertainment--and the very real deaths and war and land-grabbing on the part of a major world power on the other.
The accomplishment of Olympic athletes--the ones who aren't doping--and the Olympic ideal itself are fantastic and amazing and to be commended. But there is still a very poignant statement about both mankind and the state of our media when we watch the coverage of a computer-generated opening ceremony rather than responding to the deaths of thousands on the other.
Whether it's a hopeful choice, a selfish choice, or an ignorant choice is another question. (Or a contractual or financial choice, in the case of the media.)
You may not be my target audience.
Humor can be found in many places.
Oh, I didn't have to RTFA to figure as much, but there's a little-known principle called "simulation of the limitation of intelligent thought for comedic purposes."
It's quite useful in certain kinds of puns and wry humor, or when you want Schrodinger's cat to do iPhone math. (Except on Mondays--Schrodinger's cat is usually sleeping on Mondays. Well, maybe.)
A thousand dollars. He sold it six times, then... five times... six times... wait, $5,600?
Did somebody let Schrodinger's cat play with the iPhone again?
They rejected a $2.6 billion bid for the company as too low in March.
But it seems that punitive damages is just getting greedy. Even without punitive damages, just charging them for the Iraq war will bankrupt them 220 times over.
Are you insane? Hospital administration, to some degree, yes; but Doctors aren't trying to be opaque about costs, they're just having to deal with the insurance companies.
As to the requirements for surgeons, they're having to go through the training to be surgeons, not doctors. And a lot of them still mess it up. If anything, we need more training for specialists, not less--or at least better training.
My grandfather never let surgical residents close up after his surgeries because they hadn't had enough training--the hospital gave him trouble about it for a long time. One day he left a very experienced and well-known visiting specialist in his field close up after him, and the surgery itself had been fine.
The specialist botched the job and the patient died.
We don't need less training for surgeons. At the least we need better training.
Yes, it's anecdotal. But anecdotes add up, and I've seen some terrible medicine performed in my time. People die when surgeons aren't trained well.