>Communism can be explained by taking our current system and add social ideas like sharing and helping.
The most important aspect of Communism as a political system, though, is that you empower the state to decide what constitutes ideas like "sharing" and "helping" and then the state uses force to make sure those ideas are acted on. Limited forms of communism can work, say among groups where everyone involved has free choice in his participation at any given juncture. But when you have a communist *government*, you still get the same types of people in roles like "police" and "politician" that you get in every other kind of government, which means your ideals are very unlikely to be expressed the way you expect when they come down in the form of authoritarian government.
When I worked in entertainment, I always travelled with tool bags. The first tool to come out of my tool bag was a grenade. It was a real grenade, of course with no explosive material or firing pin. But I didn't consider it a joke. If you put that on your workspace (roadshow sound board), it says "you touch, you die" better than anything I could think of. I carried that damn tool bag on more planes than I could count. Nobody ever said a word about it. Twice I had trouble at security. One time, was when the screener said "I thought I saw a knife". I was like "yeah" and dug out my buck knife and showed it to her, put it back in, and went on the plane. Another time was when I carried on my dartboard case (I always setup a dart lane in the hotel rooms). They couldn't open it, because you needed to take out long screws in order to do that. That time, I was allowed to just check the dart case on without opening it for anyone.
>It is better to err on the side of public safety.
If they'd killed her, it might have opened up a dialogue that would have the eventual effect of diminishing airport security.
It's important that they be *right*, because we won't accept a status quo that involves innocent people getting killed in the name of airport security.
This will probably scare you: It's legal to go into the airport in my city carrying a gun. Openly, in a holster on your hip, if you want, or, concealed if you have the state-issued permit to do that. It's not legal to go into a checkpoint with a firearm under any circumstances (even the law enforcement people have a process for getting a gun into the secure perimeter.)
Flying with a firearm is fairly easy; I've done it many times: In the check-in line when it's your turn, you say "I have a firearm." You open your bag, take out your gun case, open it, take out your gun, open it/ rack the slide, whatever they want to see to show it's unloaded, they watch you lock the case up, and they confirm that ammunition is in a separate box, they hand you your ticket and send you on your way.
I love seeing the look on the faces of the people behind me when the ticket clerk asks me to show them my gun, out comes the gun, and then I get my ticket and "have a nice flight" or whatever.
Maybe you can convince the TSA to make the screener job pay better than the entry-level federal work that it is. Then maybe people with qualifications beyond a GED or jail vocational rehab will apply.
You do realize that the TSA screeners aren't drawn from the best-and-brightest experienced police, or from the top 1% of those graduating with a Masters in Criminal Justice, right?
Most TSA screeners are working their first job out of high school, and the only reason the "total rewards" are better than fast food, are the federal benefits and federal retirement eligibility. Raises and promotions in federal work aren't tied to performance, only time. So all you have to do to get promoted in a federal job is not get fired (which is pretty hard.)
>I gather you mean "legal" when you say "justified"?
No, not "legal."
But if you kill someone in the act of robbing you, you can use the robbery as a defense for the homocide. It's not pretty, and not a pleasant process, and you still have to live with the consequences. But it's justified, and this justification is written into the law.
I know of plenty of cases of justification by self-defense and by supervening cause for robbers of stores, home invasion robberies, and carjacking. The rules are different for personal robbery in a public place. But you're still framing this in terms of the victim, and my point is that if deadly force is justified during the act of some crimes, why can't these same crimes carry the death penalty?
>Would anyone be happy to see a pickpocket who steals $50 receive a harsher punishment than someone who threatens to rape you and cut >your throat to steal $10? What sort of warped values would you need to have to accept that proposition?
In both of those crimes, the victim is justified in taking the perpetrator's life, in self-defense. With that in mind, both these crimes are worthy of the death penalty. Your jurisdiction may vary, check your local statutes before acting in self-defense.
Where I live, it's perfectly justified to kill a pickpocket if you are the victim and you catch him in the act. So why should the punishment at the end of due process be any less than Death?
He could have -- there was a time when some big player could have realized that a consumer Unix could actually get double digit percents of the consumer OS market. It took Linux getting there on its own before anybody understood this. But during that time Microsoft further developed the Windows hegemony, and the Unix vendors remained in their niches for the most part.
I can attest to "ASCII-art" long pre-dating ASCII. I wish I could remember any emoticon-style smiley from the Telex/TWX days. It would surprise me greatly as well if it wasn't found in newsroom chats or even perhaps military networks from the 1940s or so.
I know that I did this in 1976:
Oo \__/
And I represented spaceships in games I wrote with symbols like "O" and "O-["
But I can't say I ever saw a ":-)" smiley before the mid 80s. Other old farts make such claims but can they dig up evidence?
Can you please cite the judicial order or legislative ruling that establishes copyright infringement as equivalent to theft?
And, on topic, what about the big fuzzy gray area where the creator of a work still has free expression to say things like "steal this book" or "my agent is a dick nose and I want out of my contract?"
They do have to strike a balance, because there *is* a breaking point where artist will *stop* signing to their label, and where they give competitors an improved bargaining position... In aggregate, the RIAA and their ilk are a pretty formidable looking entity, but individually, A&R agents really do have to compete, and the margin balance is pretty delicate.
>that he is planning on going independent and distributing music via the NIN website once his contract finishes
Maybe he's trying to accelerate that, by provoking his agents and assigns to unilaterally go into breach.... It would be a much wiser course of action than, say, what the band Boston did. Make the label ditch him, and he gets press out of it, and gets out of the contract.
> You do have to weigh company morale vs security.
Most organizations have several classes of employee, one including those who could easily walk away and be employed at double or more times their salary the same afternoon. There's another class of employee that most organizations have, consisting of those who will put up with a great deal of abuse, disrepect, and follow any unreasonable or quasi-reasonable rule or workplace condition, because the balance of their value of job security falls in favor of the employee.
The problem is, if decisions are made that adversely affect the former group, serious damage to the organization ensues. And there's a fuzzy line between decisions and polices that affect the latter group but don't disturb the former.
This is part of the reason why all the bitching comes from the lower tiers. Those in the lower tiers seem consistently unable to elevate their positions, and unable to seek elevated positions elsewhere. Those in the higher tiers know that lateral opportunities abound. There are probably a lot more ingredients in the equation, but they include: Experience, Education, Financial ability to *buy* a personal stake, and Personality.
India sure is a strange place, with extremes all over the spectrum. On one hand, I notice that many Indians are quick and eager to accept authority. Enormous swaths of the culture of India seem to function with submission to authority as one of the fundamental precepts. On the other hand, much of India is essentially a lawless frontier, where individuals are free to do what they want, sometimes simply by virtue of being lost in the noise or by operating under a fundamentally dysfunctional government.
I consider it another aspect of the same phenomenon that it seems impossible to know if a complicated J2EE program will compile and deploy and run, without trial-and-error.
What's the exact syntax for that annotation? What's the actual JNDI name going to be? I know what this configuration file should contain but WHERE should it go? Will the classloader see this jar in the lib directory of this.ear? No matter how well I think I understand J2EE, I always run into something, and then I try to figure out whether I could have learned it from a book or online. Most recently: I have a MDB that spawns a long-running process in a thread. That process is not allowed to use the EntityManager from the PersistenceContext that's visible to the MDB. The error message that I got was about Transactions. Very frustrating, and I don't find anyplace that could have told me this limitation ahead of time. Okay, maybe I could have read the JBoss source. Sheesh.
>Having worked on DB2 internally, even *I* needed to get help debugging error messages
I worked in a heterogenous IMS/DB2 mainframe shop where we literally had a full time person just to organize the DB2 documentation. One whole shelf was devoted to messages.
Steinberg wants to put the crypto key of Syncrosoft in between me and the means of production of *my* creative work. This is unacceptable to me as an artist. The result has been that I seek (and find) alternatives to their products from their competitors.
In Steinberg's case, this was especially bad. At one point, their branding and marketing had me convinced that they were the only serious choice for certain kinds of audio production. However, their loud and shrill insistence on copy protection was a whip that made me seek out alternatives.
Their very expensive marketing got me to the till, and their requirement of a dongle turned me away. I'm sure that had a cost.
>The pirating cheapskates would hardly ever buy the software anyway
In the past there have been many counterexamples to dispel the perception of who the "pirate" is. There have been cases where the "Zero-day warez" was released as an inside job. There have been countless situations where the cracked version of the software works better, and is being used by the paying customer as a way of working around a limitation.
>Why did it take you 1.5 hours? I've had to go through the whole windows/office activation dozens of times the longest its taken me is 20 >minutes.
I've had MSDN activation take six weeks. It would have been longer, but my organization threatened to sue. That is, they actually went as far as filing the suit in Federal District Court. Only then did someone with decision making authority at Microsoft contact us, and give us license keys that would activate.
I thought it would be fun to sue Microsoft and win:-)
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>Communism can be explained by taking our current system and add social ideas like sharing and helping.
The most important aspect of Communism as a political system, though, is that you empower the state to decide
what constitutes ideas like "sharing" and "helping" and then the state uses force to make sure those ideas are
acted on. Limited forms of communism can work, say among groups where everyone involved has free choice in his
participation at any given juncture. But when you have a communist *government*, you still get the same types
of people in roles like "police" and "politician" that you get in every other kind of government, which means
your ideals are very unlikely to be expressed the way you expect when they come down in the form of authoritarian
government.
When I worked in entertainment, I always travelled with tool bags. The first tool to come out of my tool bag was a grenade. It was a real grenade, of course with no explosive material or firing pin. But I didn't consider it a joke. If you put that on your workspace (roadshow sound board), it says "you touch, you die" better than anything I could think of. I carried that damn tool bag on more planes than I could count. Nobody ever said a word about it. Twice I had trouble at security. One time, was when the screener said "I thought I saw a knife". I was like "yeah" and dug out my buck knife and showed it to her, put it back in, and went on the plane. Another time was when I carried on my dartboard case (I always setup a dart lane in the hotel rooms). They couldn't open it, because you needed to take out long screws in order to do that. That time, I was allowed to just check the dart case on without opening it for anyone.
Of course, all this was (long) pre-9/11.
Just pointing out how things have changed.
>It is better to err on the side of public safety.
If they'd killed her, it might have opened up a dialogue that would have the eventual effect of diminishing airport security.
It's important that they be *right*, because we won't accept a status quo that involves innocent people getting killed in the name of airport security.
This will probably scare you: It's legal to go into the airport in my city carrying a gun. Openly, in a holster on your hip, if you want, or, concealed if you have the state-issued permit to do that. It's not legal to go into a checkpoint with a firearm under any circumstances (even the law enforcement people have a process for getting a gun into the secure perimeter.)
Flying with a firearm is fairly easy; I've done it many times: In the check-in line when it's your turn, you say "I have a firearm." You open your bag,
take out your gun case, open it, take out your gun, open it/ rack the slide, whatever they want to see to show it's unloaded, they watch you lock the case up, and they confirm that ammunition is in a separate box, they hand you your ticket and send you on your way.
I love seeing the look on the faces of the people behind me when the ticket clerk asks me to show them my gun, out comes the gun, and then I get my ticket and "have a nice flight" or whatever.
Maybe you can convince the TSA to make the screener job pay better than the entry-level federal work that it is.
Then maybe people with qualifications beyond a GED or jail vocational rehab will apply.
You do realize that the TSA screeners aren't drawn from the best-and-brightest experienced police, or from the top 1% of those graduating with a Masters in Criminal Justice, right?
Most TSA screeners are working their first job out of high school, and the only reason the "total rewards" are better than fast food, are the federal benefits and federal retirement eligibility. Raises and promotions in federal work aren't tied to performance, only time. So all you have to do to get promoted in a federal job is not get fired (which is pretty hard.)
>I gather you mean "legal" when you say "justified"?
No, not "legal."
But if you kill someone in the act of robbing you, you can use the robbery as a defense for the homocide. It's not pretty, and not a pleasant process, and you still have to live with the consequences. But it's justified, and this justification is written into the law.
I know of plenty of cases of justification by self-defense and by supervening cause for robbers of stores, home invasion robberies, and carjacking. The rules are different for personal robbery in a public place. But you're still framing this in terms of the victim, and my point is that if deadly force is justified during the act of some crimes, why can't these same crimes carry the death penalty?
>Would anyone be happy to see a pickpocket who steals $50 receive a harsher punishment than someone who threatens to rape you and cut
>your throat to steal $10? What sort of warped values would you need to have to accept that proposition?
In both of those crimes, the victim is justified in taking the perpetrator's life, in self-defense. With that in mind, both these crimes are worthy of the death penalty. Your jurisdiction may vary, check your local statutes before acting in self-defense.
Where I live, it's perfectly justified to kill a pickpocket if you are the victim and you catch him in the act. So why should the punishment at the end of due process be any less than Death?
>He wanted to make a zillion bucks.
He could have -- there was a time when some big player could have realized that a consumer Unix could actually get double digit percents of the consumer OS market. It took Linux getting there on its own before anybody understood this. But during that time Microsoft further developed the Windows hegemony, and the Unix vendors remained in their niches for the most part.
I can attest to "ASCII-art" long pre-dating ASCII. I wish I could remember any emoticon-style smiley from the Telex/TWX days. It would surprise me greatly as well if it wasn't found in newsroom chats or even perhaps military networks from the 1940s or so.
I know that I did this in 1976:
Oo
\__/
And I represented spaceships in games I wrote with symbols like "O" and "O-["
But I can't say I ever saw a ":-)" smiley before the mid 80s. Other old farts make such claims but can they dig up evidence?
This guy was in perfect health, had a good diet, etc., before this three-day marathon?
Or might he have died anyway, the games being irrelevant?
Can you please cite the judicial order or legislative ruling that establishes copyright infringement as equivalent to theft?
And, on topic, what about the big fuzzy gray area where the creator of a work still has free expression to say things like "steal this book" or "my agent is a dick nose and I want out of my contract?"
They do have to strike a balance, because there *is* a breaking point where artist will *stop* signing to their label, and where they give competitors an improved bargaining position... In aggregate, the RIAA and their ilk are a pretty formidable looking entity, but individually, A&R agents really do have to compete, and the margin balance is pretty delicate.
>that he is planning on going independent and distributing music via the NIN website once his contract finishes
Maybe he's trying to accelerate that, by provoking his agents and assigns to unilaterally go into breach.... It would be a much
wiser course of action than, say, what the band Boston did. Make the label ditch him, and he gets press out of it, and gets out of the contract.
> You do have to weigh company morale vs security.
Most organizations have several classes of employee, one including those who could easily walk away and be employed at double or more times their salary the same afternoon. There's another class of employee that most organizations have, consisting of those who will put up with a great deal of abuse, disrepect, and follow any unreasonable or quasi-reasonable rule or workplace condition, because the balance of their value of job security falls in favor of the employee.
The problem is, if decisions are made that adversely affect the former group, serious damage to the organization ensues. And there's a fuzzy line between decisions and polices that affect the latter group but don't disturb the former.
This is part of the reason why all the bitching comes from the lower tiers. Those in the lower tiers seem consistently unable to elevate their positions, and unable to seek elevated positions elsewhere. Those in the higher tiers know that lateral opportunities abound. There are probably a lot more ingredients in the equation, but they include: Experience, Education, Financial ability to *buy* a personal stake, and Personality.
>not that I care much, being in India.
India sure is a strange place, with extremes all over the spectrum. On one hand, I notice that many Indians are quick and eager to accept authority. Enormous swaths of the culture of India seem to function with submission to authority as one of the fundamental precepts. On the other hand, much of India is essentially a lawless frontier, where individuals are free to do what they want, sometimes simply by virtue of being lost in the noise or by operating under a fundamentally dysfunctional government.
>Eventually they call that situation "proper protocols".
Please tell me you don't work in any research field, let alone in the health sciences.
I consider it another aspect of the same phenomenon that it seems impossible to know if a complicated J2EE program will compile and deploy and run, without trial-and-error.
.ear? No matter how well I think I understand J2EE, I always run into something, and then I try to figure out whether I could have learned it from a book or online. Most recently: I have a MDB that spawns a long-running process in a thread. That process is not allowed to use the EntityManager from the PersistenceContext that's visible to the MDB. The error message that I got was about Transactions. Very frustrating, and I don't find anyplace that could have told me this limitation ahead of time. Okay, maybe I could have read the JBoss source. Sheesh.
What's the exact syntax for that annotation? What's the actual JNDI name going to be? I know what this configuration file should contain but WHERE should it go? Will the classloader see this jar in the lib directory of this
Don't shop any place where they actively look for reasons to refuse service.
>What are the current laws on downloading a program and using a serial number to unlock it?
In most places this is legal; *distributing* the program is the offense. Copyright is all about distribution.
>Having worked on DB2 internally, even *I* needed to get help debugging error messages
I worked in a heterogenous IMS/DB2 mainframe shop where we literally had a full time person just to organize the DB2 documentation.
One whole shelf was devoted to messages.
Steinberg wants to put the crypto key of Syncrosoft in between me and the means of production of *my* creative work. This is unacceptable to me as an artist. The result has been that I seek (and find) alternatives to their products from their competitors.
In Steinberg's case, this was especially bad. At one point, their branding and marketing had me convinced that they were the only serious choice for certain kinds of audio production. However, their loud and shrill insistence on copy protection was a whip that made me seek out alternatives.
Their very expensive marketing got me to the till, and their requirement of a dongle turned me away. I'm sure that had a cost.
>The pirating cheapskates would hardly ever buy the software anyway
In the past there have been many counterexamples to dispel the perception of who the "pirate" is. There have been cases where the "Zero-day warez" was released as an inside job. There have been countless situations where the cracked version of the software works better, and is being used by the paying customer as a way of working around a limitation.
>Why did it take you 1.5 hours? I've had to go through the whole windows/office activation dozens of times the longest its taken me is 20 >minutes.
:-)
I've had MSDN activation take six weeks. It would have been longer, but my organization threatened to sue. That is, they actually went as far as filing the suit in Federal District Court. Only then did someone with decision making authority at Microsoft contact us, and give us license keys that would activate.
I thought it would be fun to sue Microsoft and win
>Spoken as a person who has apparently never lost a license key.
I still consider a license key, which I am given responsibility to keep track of, to be the only acceptable form of copy protection.
>the companies failed to send me regular, detailed newsletters about the LOTS of piracy they stopped with their particiular brand of DRM.
They didn't itemize the losses and claim them for tax deductions, either. That's what I want to see.