Ok, let's say I really like gold. I'd like to have an ounce of solid gold, but it's only worth $20 to me, not $400. Since no one will sell it to me for $20, I should just get it for free, right?
No, because in order to obtain that gold, you would have to take it from someone else, thus depriving them of it. That's why it's theft. If you copy software, you are not depriving anyone of that same software.
What if you have no intention of buying the CD, only because you know you don't have to? What if you couldn't possibly obtain it any other way than buying it? Would you then consider purchasing it?
Your "what if" is already false in my example. It's why I made a point of saying "had no intention", while you said "have no intention". In my example, the decision not to buy the CD happened before the opportunity to obtain it for free. To take a more drastic example - Adobe Photoshop.
I would like to use Photoshop. It's useful. But its value to me is probably about $20 worth. I cannot buy it for anywhere near that price, so I don't intend to buy it. If it is made available to me for free, I would use it, and wouldn't be harming anyone by doing so. If it isn't made available to me, then I won't use it.
As for your "let's be realistic" and "I would wager" statement, I'm certain that there are people who pirate material which they would purchase if they couldn't pirate it, and yes, that harms the seller. But not all harm is "theft". Copying data isn't "theft" even when it's harmful, just as it isn't murder, isn't double-parking, and isn't arson (insert your "burning" jokes here). There are different words for different crimes, and they mean something. Theft is not the word for this crime. The misuse of the word "theft" or "steal" is inaccurate and inflammatory.
If I flee Supercuts after getting my hair cut, I'm not denying anyone a subsequent haircut from the same person, but I am definitely stealing something.
No, you're denying them a concurrent haircut. You were consuming the time and effort of the barber/hairstylist. This does not parallel to code or music. Try another analogy.
This point comes up a lot, because it's not just semantics and nitpicking; it's the crucial point. If I had no intention of buying a CD, and I copy it, I have not harmed anyone in any way. I haven't deprived anyone of anything. It's copyright violation, which shouldn't be ignored, but it shouldn't be called theft either. It's not theft anymore than ignoring someone is murder.
Did I misread that, or did you just say that you've never met anyone who uses the camera, then state that all your knowledge about it is from the people you have met who use it?
As to the addiction - poll slashdot users (or even normal, healthy, working professionals, for that matter) asking how many think they are addicted to caffeine. I'd wager you get more than 9%. Addiction itself is not that bad. It's what you're addicted to, and the impact is has on your life, that is the problem. In that respect, there are far worse things to be addicted to than video games. Sure, I think these people would be better off if they weren't addicted to an MMORPG, but I wouldn't call it "a serious problem"
As to the "imaginary friends" bit, characters in fictional TV shows, movies, and novels are all imaginary, too. There's a difference between imaginary friends and characters - the guy who likes the character doesn't imagine that it's talking back to him. I think fascination with a fictional character that you shaped isn't any worse than fascination with fictional characters that someone else created. It's a creative outlet, and if they take pride in that, then good for them.
That said, I personally don't enjoy MMORPGs, but I would describe them as "tedious", not "a serious problem"
I am only associated with our network equiptment through modest inquisitiveness, and I even know cisco are only a brand.
If you were more acquainted with networking equipment, you would know that Cisco makes impressive hardware. In a later post, you state that you're unsure of their marketshare. It's huge.
The breakdown goes something like this:
Home users - less than 1% Cisco (assuming you don't count Linksys, only proper Cisco hardware).
Enterprise networks - 60%-70% Cisco, depending on your source.
There's a reason for these numbers and no, it isn't just this sense of "nobody ever got fired for buying Cisco."
Given a product like a 24 port switch, you can get a 95% reliable product from Netgear, D-Link, Linksys, etc... for something like $200 or so. Meanwhile, Cisco will charge you more than $2,000, for a 99.9% reliable switch.
If you're a home user, that's a no-brainer: You buy the $200 switch.
For enterprises that run hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of business transactions through that switch everyday, it's also a no-brainer: you buy the Cisco.
This 3Com announcement is that they're gonna try to compete for those Enterprise level routers, not the home stuff. It's not hard to undercut Cisco's prices, the tricky part will be matching Cisco's reputation for reliability and support (when something does break, you get help and replacements faster than you would from competitors).
Meanwhile, that's also why Cisco bought Linksys: so that they could sell cheap (but less reliable) products to home users. Both Cisco and Linksys do a great job of making products for their target markets, but those markets have such different needs that you can't sell them the same product, even if they do the same thing (24 port, 10/100 ethernet switch)
(Besides which.. The idea of being 'nice' to a business is just ridiculous. It's a friggin' business venture, not a person! They're in it to make money. If they act 'nice' it's because they believe it's a good strategy to make money. I completely fail to see how that should inspire any loyalties from me.)
Yeah, but the reason they choose that as a strategy is that they anticipate customers favoring their company for its niceness. If niceness is actually important, then lots of people will gravitate towards the nice companies. If not, then the ruthless companies will outperform the nice ones.
If you want more companies to do what Rio does, then throw a little more of your business Rio's way. If not, then just go with whatever company you want. This is still market economics, you're just choosing whether or not their behavior is something of value to you.
Until this can be done with non-exotic materials, it will probably be a push as its worthiness.
The important question isn't "Can I do this with cheap materials?"
The important questions is "Is it scalable?"
If you could give me a cold-fusion-machine made out of $10 worth of Radio Shack parts, which lets you put in 1 Watt and get out 2.5 Watts, that's a novelty. If you give me a machine that costs a billion dollars in materials, but lets you put in a Gigawatt and get out 2.5 Gigawatts, that's a world-changing invention.
As for the "until" part, the next step isn't cheapening the process or scaling it. The next step is understanding it.
Your environmental analysis isn't an issue of emotions vs. logic. We could just as easily paint it as: Logic - The benefit I get from this car far outweighs the damage it does. Emotion - Trees happy good! Pollution and smog ugly bad! Save cute furry animals!
But that's just painting a picture, as you do with your "greed vs. logic" dichotomy.
I believe the issue is one of cost/benefit analysis, which is pretty logical. People look at "What will it cost ME to use this car? What benefit do I get from it?" In almost all cases, the benefit far outweighs the cost.
You could argue that this person is selfish, and should be more considerate, but that's not about logic. Most game theory assumes each player selects the outcome which is most directly beneficial to them.
If you want to be analytical, tell me where emotions come from.
My thinking is that your brain is aggregating and analyzing data in quantities too large for your conscious thought (ration/logic/analysis/thought, whatever you want to call it) to keep up with. Take someone throwing a ball at you. To plot coordinates and calculate trajectory with your conscious mind would take far too long for you to catch it in real time. But you've got "lower" brain functions that can handle those calculations fast enough to be useful.
I think of it like ASICs (Application Specifc Integrated Circuits - think graphics cards and network switches) vs. CPUs. Your "higher brain" can think up new stuff and analyze situations that your instincts don't recognize. But your "higher brain" is goddamn slow by comparison. So netiher one is "better" or "more correct", they're just suited for different situations.
As for "If there is a lack of information avaliable, the logical thing to do is to try to FIND information", that doesn't work. For last resorts, go back to DesCartes - you can't prove anything 100%, because you can't even trust your own senses 100%.
If you don't like my extreme example, I'll pick something more moderate. Watch Law and Order. When you look at a real life (yes, I know it's a fictional show, but it's a good model) you get the impression that it's almost impossible to prove something 100%, especially when you're being opposed. "Go get more proof" is not a valid approach, because there is a limit to the amount of information you can actually get. To get anything done, you eventually have to make a decision based on the information you have, and those decisions are often messy.
In addition to those theoretical limits, there's a time factor. To steal a quote from the military mindset: "It's better to make a good decision now than the best decision later." Real life happens in real time, and delays cost you. Emotions analyze available input way faster than logic does, and most things operate on time constraints. So emotions will often serve you better than analysis, especially in situations where time is short and information is limited.
To call emotions "primitive" is, I belive, a primitive characterization of important workings of the human mind.
I don't care how smart you are, if you don't attend the classes, you won't learn the material.
This is actually not true. There are probably more people who think they can get away with this and are wrong than people who actually can. However, as one of the latter, I can tell you that going to class is neither necessary to learn the material, nor a guarantee that you will. If you're smart, you go to class until you've figured out and considered what actual value you get from attending.
Get up, and actually make it to those classes that you or your parents are paying good money for you to attend.
That was another untrue assumption that bothered me. The money paid for college is paying for the entire experience, not just the academics, and going to class isn't even the entire academic experience. You get four unique years to spend. That time is valuable, don't waste it. If going to class isn't helping you learn the material, or if the material in that class (and the grades that come with it) aren't that important to you, then don't let some notion that you're wasting money hold you back.
I'm putting forth this argument, because I don't see it anywhere else in these comments. There seem to be about 15 "5 - Insightful" comments all saying the same thing, and while I mostly agree with them, I don't like one sided arguments that paint things as simpler than they really are.
The prevailing mindset here seems to be:
"Encouraging diversity by lending extra weight to minority candidates is actually discrimination against non-minority candidates, and therefore is bad"
That's not an unreasonable way to look at it, but there's an inteligent other side which isn't saying "discrimination against white males is okay", as the strawman posts here state. The intelligent other side of this argument goes like this:
1. There are prejudiced people out there, people who discriminate against various minorities. If you honestly don't believe this, then you don't get out enough.
2. This prejudice almost always comes from ignorance. By very definition, prejudice means you don't have detailed knowledge of the subject. Most people who interact on a daily basis with multiple people who are [pick a minority] tend to lose their prejudices.
Imagine you have a small firm of some kind, made up entirely of white men who are genuinely prejudiced. They truly believe that black people and women are poor workers. As a result, they are unlikely to ever hire anyone black or female, and are likely to go on believing in their current prejudices. On the other hand, if they were forced to hire black people and women, there's a decent chance (not 100%, but probably more than 20%) that over time the exposure would cause their prejudices to erode, and that they'd begin hiring genuinely qualified members of various minorities of their own volition.
That's basically the thinking behind the affirmative action, quotas, and reverse-discrimination. It's not that "white men are bad and should be punished", or that "we owe minorities for past wrongs, and should make it up to them now". It's that the best way to get rid of existing prejudice is to expose to diverse groups of people, which is something they won't do if left to their own devices.
Personally, I'm not convinced that the good accomplished by this approach is worth the cost, but I at least acknowledge that the other side of the argument means well and has a reasonable point.
And with a typo. In a story about English papers being copied. Oh the irony.
"If you have to do a report on 'Ulysses' it takes a bit more than a few hours just to read the book - let along understand enough to do a reasonable paper on it."
No, it's not. It's about keeping the machine running. If people don't have property rights, the economy breaks down. We can observe that even in places where only the government gets to seize things at will. In general, the more firm a society's right to property, the stronger their economy (all other things being equal). We don't outlaw stealing because "stealing is bad". We outlaw it because if we allow it the machine breaks. If people are allowed to kill each other on a whim, the machine breaks down. If people can put muddy water in a bottle and call it Coca-Cola, the machine breaks down.
The purpose of the law, as the grandparent poster said, is the keep society functioning, not to enforce what the majority thinks is good and bad. That's why the Constitution has so much stuff about "Congress shall make no law..." and why we have a Judiciary that can strike down laws which are unConsitutional. Unfortunately, regardless of its purpose, the law is still created by people, who are in turn accountable to voters, so if enough voters demand a law saying you're not allowed to do [X], that law may get passed anyway.
The comparison between Army recruiting and developers doesn't work.
As a developer, you're hiring for a very small number of positions which you want very good people for, and you can pay more to get better people if necessary. The Army, on the other hand, is trying to recruit a vast number of people from a pool of applicants that never seems large enough, and paying them based on a set grade.
The Army has conditioning and training built in, so it doesn't matter if you go in thinking you're invincible. They just need you to go in. Then they can drum into the many real life hazards. They can't afford to turn down people who enlist simply because those people are reckless. They're better served by convincing as many people as possible that the Army is cool and easy, then training those attitudes out of them once they're signed up.
Nobody is stupid enough to genuinely believe that death is quickly and easily undone, and if anyone does that should be caught out in their psych profile.
The article you linked to says the opposite of what you use it to say!
It says that while people ONCE thought of cancer as a Western disease, developing countries now make up more than 50% of the world's cancer burden.
Yes, it says that the devloping countries' cancer rates are increasing as they adopt tobacco, high-fat diets, and low physical activity levels, but it also states that it's being measured in terms of "the risk of being diagnosed with cancer." None of this is inconsistent with the AC poster's theory that shorter lifespan and less available medical diagnostics lead to a lower rate of cancer diagnosis amongst the population of developing countries.
Add to that the fact that more actual people are getting cancer and dying from it in developing nations, and I think it's unfair to categorize cancer as "a Western disease", and the report you linked to agrees.
That said, I agree with you that vast discovery-related projects should not be forgone in order to prioritize work on more immediate and apparent problems. With cancer research, we know what we would get from a solution, but we don't know how to get it. We could continue dumping billions into the research and get no practicable results. With projects like this linear accelerator, we don't know what we'll get, but we know exactly how to get it.
It's like the next clue in an investigation. You follow the leads you have, BECAUSE you don't know what they'll reveal, not in spite of that. For all we know, the outcome of this research will be even more beneficial than an outright cure for cancer. It's impossible to tell its value until we know what it is. So I say forge on ahead. The cost/benefit ratio when looked at on the scale of humanity it a bargain.
Personally, I think they're pretty ugly, and that the link text is difficult to read. Dark beige on light beige bordered with darker beige and white isn't exactly straight out of readability studies.
Is MS somehow involved? Who am I supposed to hate? Editors?
Normally that would seem the way to go, and lots of people around here even bitch about michael specifically, but damn if this isn't one of the best headlines I've seen on slashdot in weeks.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, since they'd be running it in VMware on top of their Linux cluster, that sounds about right...
Ok, let's say I really like gold. I'd like to have an ounce of solid gold, but it's only worth $20 to me, not $400. Since no one will sell it to me for $20, I should just get it for free, right?
No, because in order to obtain that gold, you would have to take it from someone else, thus depriving them of it. That's why it's theft. If you copy software, you are not depriving anyone of that same software.
What if you have no intention of buying the CD, only because you know you don't have to? What if you couldn't possibly obtain it any other way than buying it? Would you then consider purchasing it?
Your "what if" is already false in my example. It's why I made a point of saying "had no intention", while you said "have no intention". In my example, the decision not to buy the CD happened before the opportunity to obtain it for free. To take a more drastic example - Adobe Photoshop.
I would like to use Photoshop. It's useful. But its value to me is probably about $20 worth. I cannot buy it for anywhere near that price, so I don't intend to buy it. If it is made available to me for free, I would use it, and wouldn't be harming anyone by doing so. If it isn't made available to me, then I won't use it.
As for your "let's be realistic" and "I would wager" statement, I'm certain that there are people who pirate material which they would purchase if they couldn't pirate it, and yes, that harms the seller. But not all harm is "theft". Copying data isn't "theft" even when it's harmful, just as it isn't murder, isn't double-parking, and isn't arson (insert your "burning" jokes here). There are different words for different crimes, and they mean something. Theft is not the word for this crime. The misuse of the word "theft" or "steal" is inaccurate and inflammatory.
Well, at what speed can your PC run OS X right now? This should be able to easily match 80% of that...
If I flee Supercuts after getting my hair cut, I'm not denying anyone a subsequent haircut from the same person, but I am definitely stealing something.
No, you're denying them a concurrent haircut. You were consuming the time and effort of the barber/hairstylist. This does not parallel to code or music. Try another analogy.
This point comes up a lot, because it's not just semantics and nitpicking; it's the crucial point. If I had no intention of buying a CD, and I copy it, I have not harmed anyone in any way. I haven't deprived anyone of anything. It's copyright violation, which shouldn't be ignored, but it shouldn't be called theft either. It's not theft anymore than ignoring someone is murder.
Did I misread that, or did you just say that you've never met anyone who uses the camera, then state that all your knowledge about it is from the people you have met who use it?
As to the addiction - poll slashdot users (or even normal, healthy, working professionals, for that matter) asking how many think they are addicted to caffeine. I'd wager you get more than 9%. Addiction itself is not that bad. It's what you're addicted to, and the impact is has on your life, that is the problem. In that respect, there are far worse things to be addicted to than video games. Sure, I think these people would be better off if they weren't addicted to an MMORPG, but I wouldn't call it "a serious problem"
As to the "imaginary friends" bit, characters in fictional TV shows, movies, and novels are all imaginary, too. There's a difference between imaginary friends and characters - the guy who likes the character doesn't imagine that it's talking back to him. I think fascination with a fictional character that you shaped isn't any worse than fascination with fictional characters that someone else created. It's a creative outlet, and if they take pride in that, then good for them.
That said, I personally don't enjoy MMORPGs, but I would describe them as "tedious", not "a serious problem"
I am only associated with our network equiptment through modest inquisitiveness, and I even know cisco are only a brand.
If you were more acquainted with networking equipment, you would know that Cisco makes impressive hardware. In a later post, you state that you're unsure of their marketshare. It's huge.
The breakdown goes something like this:
Home users - less than 1% Cisco (assuming you don't count Linksys, only proper Cisco hardware).
Enterprise networks - 60%-70% Cisco, depending on your source.
There's a reason for these numbers and no, it isn't just this sense of "nobody ever got fired for buying Cisco."
Given a product like a 24 port switch, you can get a 95% reliable product from Netgear, D-Link, Linksys, etc... for something like $200 or so. Meanwhile, Cisco will charge you more than $2,000, for a 99.9% reliable switch.
If you're a home user, that's a no-brainer: You buy the $200 switch.
For enterprises that run hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of business transactions through that switch everyday, it's also a no-brainer: you buy the Cisco.
This 3Com announcement is that they're gonna try to compete for those Enterprise level routers, not the home stuff. It's not hard to undercut Cisco's prices, the tricky part will be matching Cisco's reputation for reliability and support (when something does break, you get help and replacements faster than you would from competitors).
Meanwhile, that's also why Cisco bought Linksys: so that they could sell cheap (but less reliable) products to home users. Both Cisco and Linksys do a great job of making products for their target markets, but those markets have such different needs that you can't sell them the same product, even if they do the same thing (24 port, 10/100 ethernet switch)
Yes, thank god 3Com open sourced the code for these new routers, so you don't have to worry about anything like that.
They did release the source code, right?
No?
Really?
Oh...
Hmmm. That Cisco router is starting to look a little better...
(Besides which.. The idea of being 'nice' to a business is just ridiculous. It's a friggin' business venture, not a person! They're in it to make money. If they act 'nice' it's because they believe it's a good strategy to make money. I completely fail to see how that should inspire any loyalties from me.)
Yeah, but the reason they choose that as a strategy is that they anticipate customers favoring their company for its niceness. If niceness is actually important, then lots of people will gravitate towards the nice companies. If not, then the ruthless companies will outperform the nice ones.
If you want more companies to do what Rio does, then throw a little more of your business Rio's way. If not, then just go with whatever company you want. This is still market economics, you're just choosing whether or not their behavior is something of value to you.
Until this can be done with non-exotic materials, it will probably be a push as its worthiness.
The important question isn't "Can I do this with cheap materials?"
The important questions is "Is it scalable?"
If you could give me a cold-fusion-machine made out of $10 worth of Radio Shack parts, which lets you put in 1 Watt and get out 2.5 Watts, that's a novelty. If you give me a machine that costs a billion dollars in materials, but lets you put in a Gigawatt and get out 2.5 Gigawatts, that's a world-changing invention.
As for the "until" part, the next step isn't cheapening the process or scaling it. The next step is understanding it.
bringing the number of 3D games that run under Linux from three to four!
Your environmental analysis isn't an issue of emotions vs. logic. We could just as easily paint it as:
Logic - The benefit I get from this car far outweighs the damage it does.
Emotion - Trees happy good! Pollution and smog ugly bad! Save cute furry animals!
But that's just painting a picture, as you do with your "greed vs. logic" dichotomy.
I believe the issue is one of cost/benefit analysis, which is pretty logical. People look at "What will it cost ME to use this car? What benefit do I get from it?" In almost all cases, the benefit far outweighs the cost.
You could argue that this person is selfish, and should be more considerate, but that's not about logic. Most game theory assumes each player selects the outcome which is most directly beneficial to them.
to respond to the latest SETI news with "Open Source it!"
If you want to be analytical, tell me where emotions come from.
My thinking is that your brain is aggregating and analyzing data in quantities too large for your conscious thought (ration/logic/analysis/thought, whatever you want to call it) to keep up with. Take someone throwing a ball at you. To plot coordinates and calculate trajectory with your conscious mind would take far too long for you to catch it in real time. But you've got "lower" brain functions that can handle those calculations fast enough to be useful.
I think of it like ASICs (Application Specifc Integrated Circuits - think graphics cards and network switches) vs. CPUs. Your "higher brain" can think up new stuff and analyze situations that your instincts don't recognize. But your "higher brain" is goddamn slow by comparison. So netiher one is "better" or "more correct", they're just suited for different situations.
As for "If there is a lack of information avaliable, the logical thing to do is to try to FIND information", that doesn't work. For last resorts, go back to DesCartes - you can't prove anything 100%, because you can't even trust your own senses 100%.
If you don't like my extreme example, I'll pick something more moderate. Watch Law and Order. When you look at a real life (yes, I know it's a fictional show, but it's a good model) you get the impression that it's almost impossible to prove something 100%, especially when you're being opposed. "Go get more proof" is not a valid approach, because there is a limit to the amount of information you can actually get. To get anything done, you eventually have to make a decision based on the information you have, and those decisions are often messy.
In addition to those theoretical limits, there's a time factor. To steal a quote from the military mindset: "It's better to make a good decision now than the best decision later." Real life happens in real time, and delays cost you. Emotions analyze available input way faster than logic does, and most things operate on time constraints. So emotions will often serve you better than analysis, especially in situations where time is short and information is limited.
To call emotions "primitive" is, I belive, a primitive characterization of important workings of the human mind.
I don't care how smart you are, if you don't attend the classes, you won't learn the material.
This is actually not true. There are probably more people who think they can get away with this and are wrong than people who actually can. However, as one of the latter, I can tell you that going to class is neither necessary to learn the material, nor a guarantee that you will. If you're smart, you go to class until you've figured out and considered what actual value you get from attending.
Get up, and actually make it to those classes that you or your parents are paying good money for you to attend.
That was another untrue assumption that bothered me. The money paid for college is paying for the entire experience, not just the academics, and going to class isn't even the entire academic experience. You get four unique years to spend. That time is valuable, don't waste it. If going to class isn't helping you learn the material, or if the material in that class (and the grades that come with it) aren't that important to you, then don't let some notion that you're wasting money hold you back.
I'm putting forth this argument, because I don't see it anywhere else in these comments. There seem to be about 15 "5 - Insightful" comments all saying the same thing, and while I mostly agree with them, I don't like one sided arguments that paint things as simpler than they really are.
The prevailing mindset here seems to be: "Encouraging diversity by lending extra weight to minority candidates is actually discrimination against non-minority candidates, and therefore is bad"
That's not an unreasonable way to look at it, but there's an inteligent other side which isn't saying "discrimination against white males is okay", as the strawman posts here state. The intelligent other side of this argument goes like this:
1. There are prejudiced people out there, people who discriminate against various minorities. If you honestly don't believe this, then you don't get out enough.
2. This prejudice almost always comes from ignorance. By very definition, prejudice means you don't have detailed knowledge of the subject. Most people who interact on a daily basis with multiple people who are [pick a minority] tend to lose their prejudices.
Imagine you have a small firm of some kind, made up entirely of white men who are genuinely prejudiced. They truly believe that black people and women are poor workers. As a result, they are unlikely to ever hire anyone black or female, and are likely to go on believing in their current prejudices. On the other hand, if they were forced to hire black people and women, there's a decent chance (not 100%, but probably more than 20%) that over time the exposure would cause their prejudices to erode, and that they'd begin hiring genuinely qualified members of various minorities of their own volition.
That's basically the thinking behind the affirmative action, quotas, and reverse-discrimination. It's not that "white men are bad and should be punished", or that "we owe minorities for past wrongs, and should make it up to them now". It's that the best way to get rid of existing prejudice is to expose to diverse groups of people, which is something they won't do if left to their own devices.
Personally, I'm not convinced that the good accomplished by this approach is worth the cost, but I at least acknowledge that the other side of the argument means well and has a reasonable point.
No, silly. You need the holographic disc to store holographic movies. Truly 3D movies will take 1 TB, easy.
It takes one gigabyte of transfered data (time) to transfer 1 GB data (amount) thus the rate is 1 GB :-)
Wow, that's pretty good. That means they're using a protocol with zero overhead and their system never experiences any errors!
This story was already posted three times.
And with a typo. In a story about English papers being copied. Oh the irony.
"If you have to do a report on 'Ulysses' it takes a bit more than a few hours just to read the book - let along understand enough to do a reasonable paper on it."
This is nonsense. ALL law is ethics defined.
No, it's not. It's about keeping the machine running. If people don't have property rights, the economy breaks down. We can observe that even in places where only the government gets to seize things at will. In general, the more firm a society's right to property, the stronger their economy (all other things being equal). We don't outlaw stealing because "stealing is bad". We outlaw it because if we allow it the machine breaks. If people are allowed to kill each other on a whim, the machine breaks down. If people can put muddy water in a bottle and call it Coca-Cola, the machine breaks down.
The purpose of the law, as the grandparent poster said, is the keep society functioning, not to enforce what the majority thinks is good and bad. That's why the Constitution has so much stuff about "Congress shall make no law..." and why we have a Judiciary that can strike down laws which are unConsitutional. Unfortunately, regardless of its purpose, the law is still created by people, who are in turn accountable to voters, so if enough voters demand a law saying you're not allowed to do [X], that law may get passed anyway.
The comparison between Army recruiting and developers doesn't work.
As a developer, you're hiring for a very small number of positions which you want very good people for, and you can pay more to get better people if necessary. The Army, on the other hand, is trying to recruit a vast number of people from a pool of applicants that never seems large enough, and paying them based on a set grade.
The Army has conditioning and training built in, so it doesn't matter if you go in thinking you're invincible. They just need you to go in. Then they can drum into the many real life hazards. They can't afford to turn down people who enlist simply because those people are reckless. They're better served by convincing as many people as possible that the Army is cool and easy, then training those attitudes out of them once they're signed up.
Nobody is stupid enough to genuinely believe that death is quickly and easily undone, and if anyone does that should be caught out in their psych profile.
The article you linked to says the opposite of what you use it to say!
It says that while people ONCE thought of cancer as a Western disease, developing countries now make up more than 50% of the world's cancer burden.
Yes, it says that the devloping countries' cancer rates are increasing as they adopt tobacco, high-fat diets, and low physical activity levels, but it also states that it's being measured in terms of "the risk of being diagnosed with cancer." None of this is inconsistent with the AC poster's theory that shorter lifespan and less available medical diagnostics lead to a lower rate of cancer diagnosis amongst the population of developing countries.
Add to that the fact that more actual people are getting cancer and dying from it in developing nations, and I think it's unfair to categorize cancer as "a Western disease", and the report you linked to agrees.
That said, I agree with you that vast discovery-related projects should not be forgone in order to prioritize work on more immediate and apparent problems. With cancer research, we know what we would get from a solution, but we don't know how to get it. We could continue dumping billions into the research and get no practicable results. With projects like this linear accelerator, we don't know what we'll get, but we know exactly how to get it.
It's like the next clue in an investigation. You follow the leads you have, BECAUSE you don't know what they'll reveal, not in spite of that. For all we know, the outcome of this research will be even more beneficial than an outright cure for cancer. It's impossible to tell its value until we know what it is. So I say forge on ahead. The cost/benefit ratio when looked at on the scale of humanity it a bargain.
Personally, I think they're pretty ugly, and that the link text is difficult to read. Dark beige on light beige bordered with darker beige and white isn't exactly straight out of readability studies.
PS - nice user ID.
Is MS somehow involved? Who am I supposed to hate? Editors?
Normally that would seem the way to go, and lots of people around here even bitch about michael specifically, but damn if this isn't one of the best headlines I've seen on slashdot in weeks.
Put a big grin on my face.