Yes, the old "40 hour work week" was supposed to include breaks. Multiple breaks, not just lunch. The shift to include lunch is just part of a recent shift to change expectations to thinking that it's normal to work 50-60 hour weeks.
The 80s song "9 to 5" wasn't "9 to 6" or "8 to 5", because at the time, working 9am to 5pm was considered a normal 40 hour work-week.
Honestly, I don't know, but this certainly isn't a new idea. I actually had arguments about this idea back in 2004, though I don't know how to look that far back in my post history. The reason I know it was in 2004, though, is because I have a couple of blog posts about it that are still live. It wasn't a new idea back then, either.
I had a job for a while where 12 hour work-days were common, as well as work on weekends, "after hours" work, and on-call work. So yes, I'd say I typically worked 50-80 hours a week, probably averaging close to 65. All I really did was work, eat, and sleep, and I didn't get to take real vacations.
And yes, you're right, humans just aren't built for that. It was exhausting and miserable, and after about a year of it, I complained loudly to my boss. When he ignored me, I quit. As someone who has worked those kinds of hours, I'll tell you that not only do I think it's a miserable way to live, but I also think the work suffers. I was exhausted and frustrated all the time, and I could have done a much better job if they'd gotten me some help so that I could have gotten a little rest.
the rate for tech workers to be similar to that of other white-collar professions
So that's "tech workers", not computer geeks. Even if you accept the idea that "computer geek" is a meaningful classification, it's no longer the case that only computer geeks work with computers. Tech workers have profiles similar to other white-collar professionals because "tech work' are just white collar professions.
Didn't RTFA, but this sounds like the theory of an engineer who's on an ego trip. "Good engineering managers don't exist because I like engineering and I'm a shitty manager. Doing a better job than me is impossible, because I'm brilliant."
Sorry, no. Good managers are a rarity. Just in general, ignoring the "engineering" part of it, management is a difficult skillset to master, and most people in the position don't really understand what it is to be good at their jobs. But let's take another step back. Most jobs have a difficult skillset to master, and most people don't really understand what it is to be good at their jobs. Most engineers suck at their jobs. They just don't have enough understanding to notice that they're bad at their jobs. It's not really unique to a specific kind of job.
For example, some received information expressed as yearly income while others received the same information expressed as a yearly growth rate. The same information in a plot of steadily increasing average personal income over 3 years—$32,400, $33,100, $33,800—can also be expressed as a steadily decreasing rate of growth—3%, 2.3%, 2.1%. That did the trick. Just changing the units of the data was enough to cure voter fickleness. When economic trends were expressed as yearly income rather than rates of change, the subjects made accurate judgments. But if the same information was expressed as a change over time—the bias reappeared.
I'm not sure why they say that it "cured" voter fickleness. First of all, it seems to me that in both cases, voters are going along with the picture being painted by the statistics provided. You say, "income continues to rise," and it sounds good. You say, "income growth is slowing," and it sounds bad. The person responding to these statements isn't showing better judgement when they hear one statistic vs another. In both cases, they're dealing with the information uncritically. Outside of any context, it's not even clear which statistic provides a more accurate picture of the economic landscape.
Second, if the 'bias'-- which I'm not sure why it is a bias-- reappears when you provide different information, then it means that the voters continue to be 'fickle'.
Source code for games aren't very useful - games are some of the worst-programmed pieces of software out there.
None the less, if you were trying to get a Windows 3.1 game to run on Windows 8.1, and it kept crashing, I would bet that having access to the source code would increase your chances of solving that problem.
I propose we limit copyright to a term no greater than that of patent, and require that the source code of any software be provided in the copyright filings so that it cannot be lost.
I feel your second point is terribly important, and often lost in the discussion. When an author writes a book, and it enters the public domain even after 100 years, we don't have problems then reproducing the work 100 years later. If one copy survives, we can reproduce it with a little work. If you have a copy of a piece of software from 100 years ago, who knows what your options will be? The operating system that your software ran on will no longer be in use. The hardware that the operating system ran on will no longer exist. Even if there are emulators, there's the issue of copy protection-- Will keys be made available? Will the authentication/activation server be running?
The only way to hope to make these things available for posterity is to provide source code. Then, even if you have to rewrite it a bit to make it work on current platforms, you'll be able to do that.
Therefore, I believe we should change copyright law for software, to say that for a piece of software to be protected by copyright, a copy of the source code must be provided to the Library of Congress. It can sit in a vault for however long the copyright holds, at which point it's republished under the public domain.
Honestly, I think it's really a mixed bag. Microsoft is of course continuing to make money, and some of their recent products have shown noteworthy improvement. On the other hand, it's been clear that they've been floundering a bit for years. They've had several major blunders and screw-ups that would have buried any company that didn't start out with a monopoly in a lucrative market. That is, if they hadn't had a steady income from Windows/Office/Exchange, from customers who pretty well have to buy those products whether they like it or not, then they wouldn't be able to stay in business selling their other products. And even those products have been mishandled.
But you're right, yes, they continue to make massive amounts of money from those products in spite of the mishandling. But "doing quite well"? I would say that if they were doing quite well, they wouldn't have dropped Ballmer.
That said, others have already pointed out the biggest problem here... $136 for the single biggest name in Open Source (even before RMS, I dare say)??? Just... Wow. I wouldn't bother giving out my contact info to collect such a pittance either.
On the other hand, it's a relatively new kind of transaction provided with a "currency" associated with illegal activity and scam artists. If I got some sort of notification by email informing me that I'd received $136 and I could collect it in bitcoins by signing up to some service-- well, I'd hope that email would be filtered out as spam before I ever saw it.
That doesn't mean it's a completely terrible idea.
I think you're misunderstanding the discussion. If I send an email to a non-existent email on your domain, your email might accept the email transmission and then send a bounce in return, which will notify me, the sender, that the message didn't go through. However, this setup will unfortunately produce backscatter-- i.e. in cases where spammers are spoofing real email addresses, the owner of the spoofed email address will receive non-delivery reports for emails they didn't send. If, on the other hand, your domain has a catch-all account, then your server will accept the message fully, and not send a non-delivery report. This eliminates backscatter, but now I, a legitimate sender, will not receive a notification that their emails didn't go through.
However, if you reject the email during the SMTP transmission, then my mail server, being legitimate, will notify me that the message was not transmitted. However, your mail server will not actively be sending non-delivery reports, so there will be no backscatter. The only downside to this configuration is that it creates a potential for directory harvesting-- i.e. spammers can attempt to email every permutation of email addresses and take note of the email addresses that do not cause the connection to be terminated, thereby determining which email addresses on your domain are valid.
Of course, all the Bob Smiths in the world can't get their own "bobsmith.com" domain, so if people try to follow your advice, we'll end up with a million variations of "bobfsmith.com" and "bob-smith.com" and "bobsmith.org", which means it will be easy to get mixed up. Plus, everyone knows what gmail is. If I tell you my email address is "bobsmith@gmail.com", are you really going to have a particularly hard time remembering that?
I was going to make this basic point. Essentially it wouldn't be possible to really avoid collecting some kind of data on members of congress. If they're monitoring all of the emails and phone calls made by random citizens, and then one of those citizens emails/calls a member of Congress, then they would capture that data. The most that they could do would be do collect a list of phone numbers and email addresses that are known to belong to members of Congress, and then go back and delete communications captured with those endpoints. That still, to some extent, requires collecting and storing some data about members of congress.
But why would they even bother avoiding collecting data on public officials? The whole point seemed to be to create a massive dragnet that would catch everything, and then to be able to sort through what they got after the fact.
Driver issues suck. No USB or Ethernet or WIFI out of the box after downgrading to W7. Instead of using another machine to get the drivers I just popped in a Debian LiveCD and used Firefox on the WIFI to D/L the W7 drivers into the windows partition.
Sometimes the driver issues really suck. It can be a big PITA to downgrade a Windows 8 ultrabook to Windows 7, for example, because there's no CD drive, and Windows 7 won't have the right USB or network drivers, so there's essentially no storage medium that downgraded computer (or even the Windows 7 installer) is likely to recognize. Even if you download the drivers from another machine, you have no way to get the drivers to the ultrabook without a LiveCD that includes the network/USB drivers. If unprepared, you can find yourself in a lovely little catch-22 where you can't get access to the drivers unless you already have access to the drivers.
I don't really understand why every network interface needs a separate driver anyway. Are all the different interfaces really doing such different things? Couldn't there just be a set of standardized network commands that the NIC received and knew how to translate into the appropriate action? But maybe I'm just stupid. I still don't understand why every printer needs its own driver.
And if it's so weak that it "premonitions" can't be distinguished from randomness, then on a pragmatic level, ESP doesn't exist.
To give an analogy, if I hand you a new cancer medication and say, "This medicine works, but it works so weakly that the incidences of the drug working are scientifically indistinguishable from the outcomes of untreated cancer." Well guess, what... that cancer drug doesn't work then.
The question isn't if you can make the exact same system (or as close as possible) for cheaper but whether you can make an equivalent system for cheaper, and the answer to that is almost always yes.
And that claim really just raises the question, what is an "equivalent system"? Someone might look at the Mac Pro and say, "I can build a cheap tower system with a Core i7 processor with a GeForce video card and non-ECC RAM, and it will play games on it just as well as the Mac Pro!" And yes, that's true. For some people, for what they're looking for, it's an "equivalent system".
But then someone else might say, "I need the Xeon processor and ECC RAM. It's much better if I have an extremely compact system that runs quietly." For that person, your cheap gaming rig is not equivalent. For yet other people, they have good reason to run Mac OS on a supported machine, and that means that there is no such thing as an "equivalent system".
In light of that, I think it makes sense that they attempted to build a system that was as identical as possible. The question, ultimately, wasn't whether Apple should be using cheaper alternative parts, but whether the "Apple Tax" is significant, i.e. whether Apple is somehow "ripping you off" with overly-expensive systems.
In fairness, DRM is capable of preventing very casual misuse. The DRM on games keeps a kid from saying to his friend, "Oh, let me just copy that for you." If you could have something akin to DRM on guns, it might prevent little Jimmy from shooting himself accidentally while playing with it, and it might prevent a casual street thug with no expertise from stealing it.
But you're right, it won't stop a determined individual with expertise from gaining access. Even at best, you can't think of it as an absolute control over access. No security is absolute. The problem, to my mind, is not the abstract intention of embedding security to control the use of a product or technology. The problem is using security in digital media to restrict the access of people who have "purchased" that media. Specifically, the problem is that the people designing the DRM aren't able to anticipate (and therefore allow) all the possible legitimate uses. If they've sold me a movie, they don't know all the devices I might want to watch it on. They don't know what kind of conversion I might want to do on it 5 years from now. They can't separate the unlawful distribution from a legitimate fair-use distribution. What's worse, many people suspect that the media companies are actually attempting to use the DRM to restrict fair-use on purpose to force us all to constantly repurchase the same media.
So that's the problem. "DRM" is really just security. Security can be good, but poorly designed security will cause more trouble for authorized users than for unauthorized users. Security can also be designed, maliciously, to allow abuse by the designer. In short, the problem with "DRM" is that it's security for a product that I purchased, designed to benefit someone other than me. Putting a car alarm in my new car might make sense. Designing that car alarm so that the manufacturer can (and will) lock me out of my own car whenever they want... is not such a great idea.
I don't know if there's a better solution, but you could store checksums of each archived file, and then periodically check the file against its checksum. It'd be a bit resource intensive to do, but it should work. I think some advanced filesystems can do automatic checksums (e.g. ZFS, BTRFS), but those may not be an option, and I'm not entirely sure how it works in practice.
I have not done a scientific study, but I am pretty sure that if I eat three Denny's meals per day and do no exercise, I will become obese.
Well maybe you would, but are you saying that *anyone* would? The science (and many of our experiences) would indicate that the answer is "no".
I'll give my anecdotal evidence. When I was 16-20 years old, I would eat an astounding amount of food. I could eat anything. In one meal, I would eat a whole chicken, a side of fries, a big piece of cake for dessert, and drink 48 oz of soda while doing it. It makes me a little ill now just to think about it. And that would be after eating a Big Mac, large fries, and a milkshake for lunch. It didn't even seem like a lot to me then. And you know what? I was really skinny. 6'1" tall, and 140 lbs. I did no exercise.
Then at 20 years old, I put on 50 lbs in something like 8 months. I still wasn't fat, really. I just wasn't super-skinny anymore. And I hadn't changed my exercise or diet. Then I stayed at 190lbs for about 5 years. How much I ate seemed to have no effect on my weight. I could eat like I did when I as 18, and I stayed 190 lbs. I could spend a month eating half as much food, and I would stay 190 lbs. After those 5 years, though, not changing my exercise or diet, I started putting on weight and got up around 206, and I started feeling a little pudgy. I cut *way* back on my caloric intake-- like I ate half as much as I used to-- and I started exercising quite a lot, which brought me down to about 198-200lbs, which is where I am today.
Wanting to get back down to 190, I've tried starving myself and working out a lot. Eating much less and leaving myself hungry made me feel much worse on a daily basis, but I didn't lose any weight. Working out made me feel much better and look better, but again, I didn't lose weight. The only time I've dipped below 200 lbs was during a stint of unemployment for a few months, when I lost 5 lbs. I was eating more calories, not watching my diet at all, and not particularly exercising more. My theory is that it had something to do with the fact that I was relaxed and happy, instead of being miserable at work all the time.
I don't know what the structure of your company is, but many of the larger companies i've worked for has had some kind of 'complaints department', although that was never what it was called. In one company, if you saw something bad happened, you went to the CEO's assistant. In another company, it was the head of HR. I don't think any of this was officially stated, but people generally knew, if you're having a serious problem, this is person is the release valve. It's the person who you go to and say, "I don't want to go over my boss's head, but...," or "I don't know who to talk to about this, but..."
In a big bureaucratic company, they should have some person, or some kind of mechanism, for complaints about your own boss that isn't breaking the chain of command. They might not be able to fix the problem, but they might be able to give you advice on what to do, from the perspective of someone who knows your company.
I understand that schizophrenia is eminently treatable with medication, though the severe side effects often discourage its use.
My understanding, not from being a doctor but by having some very close interaction with schizophrenics and their treatment, is that it is "treatable" with medication, depending on what you mean by "treatable". There are medications that may stop the hallucinations and allow the sufferer to... sort of control their own behavior better. But that still doesn't necessarily mean that they're going to be "normal". It's more like you're bringing someone from "oh my god, what am I going to do with this crazy person?" to "huh, that guy is a bit too crazy to lead a normal life, but I can deal with him," without every really getting to "he's just a normal guy."
I feel like the medications for mental illness often help control the symptoms without really solving the problem, though admittedly I have only anecdotal experience.
There are numerous examples of countercultures throughout our fairly recent history that were investigated by the authorities, and it was bad enough without those people having to particularly worry about involuntary confinement attributed to supposed mental illness.
I think this is the big problem. Lots of people imagine asylums being used to lock up political opponents, but that's not terrifically likely in a way that I would worry about. In short, if one political party has enough power to simply lock up political opponents, then they're going to do that somehow or another. Issues of cost, as well as issues of whether the system would actually benefit the mentally ill, are less of a fundamental concern-- they're both bound up in how well the system is executed rather than in an inherent issue.
I think the bigger problem is, the definition of 'mental illness' is still a bit sketchy. It wasn't so long ago that homosexuality was considered a mental illness. Are people who engage in extensive body modification mentally ill? I kind of think that maybe they are, but I wouldn't feel comfortable labeling them that in a legally binding way.
I know I went through some times in my own life where I was terrifically unhappy. People kept telling me that I was depressed and I needed to be on medication, but nobody seemed to be willing to consider that I had *reason* to be unhappy. Nobody seemed willing to consider that some of the behavior that they didn't like, that those behaviors were just part of my personality, and I didn't want to medicate myself until my personality went away.
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Yes, the old "40 hour work week" was supposed to include breaks. Multiple breaks, not just lunch. The shift to include lunch is just part of a recent shift to change expectations to thinking that it's normal to work 50-60 hour weeks.
The 80s song "9 to 5" wasn't "9 to 6" or "8 to 5", because at the time, working 9am to 5pm was considered a normal 40 hour work-week.
And yet it happened!
Honestly, I don't know, but this certainly isn't a new idea. I actually had arguments about this idea back in 2004, though I don't know how to look that far back in my post history. The reason I know it was in 2004, though, is because I have a couple of blog posts about it that are still live. It wasn't a new idea back then, either.
I had a job for a while where 12 hour work-days were common, as well as work on weekends, "after hours" work, and on-call work. So yes, I'd say I typically worked 50-80 hours a week, probably averaging close to 65. All I really did was work, eat, and sleep, and I didn't get to take real vacations.
And yes, you're right, humans just aren't built for that. It was exhausting and miserable, and after about a year of it, I complained loudly to my boss. When he ignored me, I quit. As someone who has worked those kinds of hours, I'll tell you that not only do I think it's a miserable way to live, but I also think the work suffers. I was exhausted and frustrated all the time, and I could have done a much better job if they'd gotten me some help so that I could have gotten a little rest.
What ever happened to actual 40-hour work-weeks? It would be 8am to 4pm.
the rate for tech workers to be similar to that of other white-collar professions
So that's "tech workers", not computer geeks. Even if you accept the idea that "computer geek" is a meaningful classification, it's no longer the case that only computer geeks work with computers. Tech workers have profiles similar to other white-collar professionals because "tech work' are just white collar professions.
Didn't RTFA, but this sounds like the theory of an engineer who's on an ego trip. "Good engineering managers don't exist because I like engineering and I'm a shitty manager. Doing a better job than me is impossible, because I'm brilliant."
Sorry, no. Good managers are a rarity. Just in general, ignoring the "engineering" part of it, management is a difficult skillset to master, and most people in the position don't really understand what it is to be good at their jobs. But let's take another step back. Most jobs have a difficult skillset to master, and most people don't really understand what it is to be good at their jobs. Most engineers suck at their jobs. They just don't have enough understanding to notice that they're bad at their jobs. It's not really unique to a specific kind of job.
For example, some received information expressed as yearly income while others received the same information expressed as a yearly growth rate. The same information in a plot of steadily increasing average personal income over 3 years—$32,400, $33,100, $33,800—can also be expressed as a steadily decreasing rate of growth—3%, 2.3%, 2.1%. That did the trick. Just changing the units of the data was enough to cure voter fickleness. When economic trends were expressed as yearly income rather than rates of change, the subjects made accurate judgments. But if the same information was expressed as a change over time—the bias reappeared.
I'm not sure why they say that it "cured" voter fickleness. First of all, it seems to me that in both cases, voters are going along with the picture being painted by the statistics provided. You say, "income continues to rise," and it sounds good. You say, "income growth is slowing," and it sounds bad. The person responding to these statements isn't showing better judgement when they hear one statistic vs another. In both cases, they're dealing with the information uncritically. Outside of any context, it's not even clear which statistic provides a more accurate picture of the economic landscape.
Second, if the 'bias'-- which I'm not sure why it is a bias-- reappears when you provide different information, then it means that the voters continue to be 'fickle'.
Source code for games aren't very useful - games are some of the worst-programmed pieces of software out there.
None the less, if you were trying to get a Windows 3.1 game to run on Windows 8.1, and it kept crashing, I would bet that having access to the source code would increase your chances of solving that problem.
I propose we limit copyright to a term no greater than that of patent, and require that the source code of any software be provided in the copyright filings so that it cannot be lost.
I feel your second point is terribly important, and often lost in the discussion. When an author writes a book, and it enters the public domain even after 100 years, we don't have problems then reproducing the work 100 years later. If one copy survives, we can reproduce it with a little work. If you have a copy of a piece of software from 100 years ago, who knows what your options will be? The operating system that your software ran on will no longer be in use. The hardware that the operating system ran on will no longer exist. Even if there are emulators, there's the issue of copy protection-- Will keys be made available? Will the authentication/activation server be running?
The only way to hope to make these things available for posterity is to provide source code. Then, even if you have to rewrite it a bit to make it work on current platforms, you'll be able to do that.
Therefore, I believe we should change copyright law for software, to say that for a piece of software to be protected by copyright, a copy of the source code must be provided to the Library of Congress. It can sit in a vault for however long the copyright holds, at which point it's republished under the public domain.
Honestly, I think it's really a mixed bag. Microsoft is of course continuing to make money, and some of their recent products have shown noteworthy improvement. On the other hand, it's been clear that they've been floundering a bit for years. They've had several major blunders and screw-ups that would have buried any company that didn't start out with a monopoly in a lucrative market. That is, if they hadn't had a steady income from Windows/Office/Exchange, from customers who pretty well have to buy those products whether they like it or not, then they wouldn't be able to stay in business selling their other products. And even those products have been mishandled.
But you're right, yes, they continue to make massive amounts of money from those products in spite of the mishandling. But "doing quite well"? I would say that if they were doing quite well, they wouldn't have dropped Ballmer.
That said, others have already pointed out the biggest problem here... $136 for the single biggest name in Open Source (even before RMS, I dare say)??? Just... Wow. I wouldn't bother giving out my contact info to collect such a pittance either.
On the other hand, it's a relatively new kind of transaction provided with a "currency" associated with illegal activity and scam artists. If I got some sort of notification by email informing me that I'd received $136 and I could collect it in bitcoins by signing up to some service-- well, I'd hope that email would be filtered out as spam before I ever saw it.
That doesn't mean it's a completely terrible idea.
I think you're misunderstanding the discussion. If I send an email to a non-existent email on your domain, your email might accept the email transmission and then send a bounce in return, which will notify me, the sender, that the message didn't go through. However, this setup will unfortunately produce backscatter-- i.e. in cases where spammers are spoofing real email addresses, the owner of the spoofed email address will receive non-delivery reports for emails they didn't send. If, on the other hand, your domain has a catch-all account, then your server will accept the message fully, and not send a non-delivery report. This eliminates backscatter, but now I, a legitimate sender, will not receive a notification that their emails didn't go through.
However, if you reject the email during the SMTP transmission, then my mail server, being legitimate, will notify me that the message was not transmitted. However, your mail server will not actively be sending non-delivery reports, so there will be no backscatter. The only downside to this configuration is that it creates a potential for directory harvesting-- i.e. spammers can attempt to email every permutation of email addresses and take note of the email addresses that do not cause the connection to be terminated, thereby determining which email addresses on your domain are valid.
Of course, all the Bob Smiths in the world can't get their own "bobsmith.com" domain, so if people try to follow your advice, we'll end up with a million variations of "bobfsmith.com" and "bob-smith.com" and "bobsmith.org", which means it will be easy to get mixed up. Plus, everyone knows what gmail is. If I tell you my email address is "bobsmith@gmail.com", are you really going to have a particularly hard time remembering that?
I was going to make this basic point. Essentially it wouldn't be possible to really avoid collecting some kind of data on members of congress. If they're monitoring all of the emails and phone calls made by random citizens, and then one of those citizens emails/calls a member of Congress, then they would capture that data. The most that they could do would be do collect a list of phone numbers and email addresses that are known to belong to members of Congress, and then go back and delete communications captured with those endpoints. That still, to some extent, requires collecting and storing some data about members of congress.
But why would they even bother avoiding collecting data on public officials? The whole point seemed to be to create a massive dragnet that would catch everything, and then to be able to sort through what they got after the fact.
Driver issues suck. No USB or Ethernet or WIFI out of the box after downgrading to W7. Instead of using another machine to get the drivers I just popped in a Debian LiveCD and used Firefox on the WIFI to D/L the W7 drivers into the windows partition.
Sometimes the driver issues really suck. It can be a big PITA to downgrade a Windows 8 ultrabook to Windows 7, for example, because there's no CD drive, and Windows 7 won't have the right USB or network drivers, so there's essentially no storage medium that downgraded computer (or even the Windows 7 installer) is likely to recognize. Even if you download the drivers from another machine, you have no way to get the drivers to the ultrabook without a LiveCD that includes the network/USB drivers. If unprepared, you can find yourself in a lovely little catch-22 where you can't get access to the drivers unless you already have access to the drivers.
I don't really understand why every network interface needs a separate driver anyway. Are all the different interfaces really doing such different things? Couldn't there just be a set of standardized network commands that the NIC received and knew how to translate into the appropriate action? But maybe I'm just stupid. I still don't understand why every printer needs its own driver.
And if it's so weak that it "premonitions" can't be distinguished from randomness, then on a pragmatic level, ESP doesn't exist.
To give an analogy, if I hand you a new cancer medication and say, "This medicine works, but it works so weakly that the incidences of the drug working are scientifically indistinguishable from the outcomes of untreated cancer." Well guess, what... that cancer drug doesn't work then.
Well no, not unless the "cloud" storage provider allows you to restore deleted files, or old versions of files. Dropbox does, for example.
The question isn't if you can make the exact same system (or as close as possible) for cheaper but whether you can make an equivalent system for cheaper, and the answer to that is almost always yes.
And that claim really just raises the question, what is an "equivalent system"? Someone might look at the Mac Pro and say, "I can build a cheap tower system with a Core i7 processor with a GeForce video card and non-ECC RAM, and it will play games on it just as well as the Mac Pro!" And yes, that's true. For some people, for what they're looking for, it's an "equivalent system".
But then someone else might say, "I need the Xeon processor and ECC RAM. It's much better if I have an extremely compact system that runs quietly." For that person, your cheap gaming rig is not equivalent. For yet other people, they have good reason to run Mac OS on a supported machine, and that means that there is no such thing as an "equivalent system".
In light of that, I think it makes sense that they attempted to build a system that was as identical as possible. The question, ultimately, wasn't whether Apple should be using cheaper alternative parts, but whether the "Apple Tax" is significant, i.e. whether Apple is somehow "ripping you off" with overly-expensive systems.
In fairness, DRM is capable of preventing very casual misuse. The DRM on games keeps a kid from saying to his friend, "Oh, let me just copy that for you." If you could have something akin to DRM on guns, it might prevent little Jimmy from shooting himself accidentally while playing with it, and it might prevent a casual street thug with no expertise from stealing it.
But you're right, it won't stop a determined individual with expertise from gaining access. Even at best, you can't think of it as an absolute control over access. No security is absolute. The problem, to my mind, is not the abstract intention of embedding security to control the use of a product or technology. The problem is using security in digital media to restrict the access of people who have "purchased" that media. Specifically, the problem is that the people designing the DRM aren't able to anticipate (and therefore allow) all the possible legitimate uses. If they've sold me a movie, they don't know all the devices I might want to watch it on. They don't know what kind of conversion I might want to do on it 5 years from now. They can't separate the unlawful distribution from a legitimate fair-use distribution. What's worse, many people suspect that the media companies are actually attempting to use the DRM to restrict fair-use on purpose to force us all to constantly repurchase the same media.
So that's the problem. "DRM" is really just security. Security can be good, but poorly designed security will cause more trouble for authorized users than for unauthorized users. Security can also be designed, maliciously, to allow abuse by the designer. In short, the problem with "DRM" is that it's security for a product that I purchased, designed to benefit someone other than me. Putting a car alarm in my new car might make sense. Designing that car alarm so that the manufacturer can (and will) lock me out of my own car whenever they want... is not such a great idea.
I don't know if there's a better solution, but you could store checksums of each archived file, and then periodically check the file against its checksum. It'd be a bit resource intensive to do, but it should work. I think some advanced filesystems can do automatic checksums (e.g. ZFS, BTRFS), but those may not be an option, and I'm not entirely sure how it works in practice.
I have not done a scientific study, but I am pretty sure that if I eat three Denny's meals per day and do no exercise, I will become obese.
Well maybe you would, but are you saying that *anyone* would? The science (and many of our experiences) would indicate that the answer is "no".
I'll give my anecdotal evidence. When I was 16-20 years old, I would eat an astounding amount of food. I could eat anything. In one meal, I would eat a whole chicken, a side of fries, a big piece of cake for dessert, and drink 48 oz of soda while doing it. It makes me a little ill now just to think about it. And that would be after eating a Big Mac, large fries, and a milkshake for lunch. It didn't even seem like a lot to me then. And you know what? I was really skinny. 6'1" tall, and 140 lbs. I did no exercise.
Then at 20 years old, I put on 50 lbs in something like 8 months. I still wasn't fat, really. I just wasn't super-skinny anymore. And I hadn't changed my exercise or diet. Then I stayed at 190lbs for about 5 years. How much I ate seemed to have no effect on my weight. I could eat like I did when I as 18, and I stayed 190 lbs. I could spend a month eating half as much food, and I would stay 190 lbs. After those 5 years, though, not changing my exercise or diet, I started putting on weight and got up around 206, and I started feeling a little pudgy. I cut *way* back on my caloric intake-- like I ate half as much as I used to-- and I started exercising quite a lot, which brought me down to about 198-200lbs, which is where I am today.
Wanting to get back down to 190, I've tried starving myself and working out a lot. Eating much less and leaving myself hungry made me feel much worse on a daily basis, but I didn't lose any weight. Working out made me feel much better and look better, but again, I didn't lose weight. The only time I've dipped below 200 lbs was during a stint of unemployment for a few months, when I lost 5 lbs. I was eating more calories, not watching my diet at all, and not particularly exercising more. My theory is that it had something to do with the fact that I was relaxed and happy, instead of being miserable at work all the time.
It sounds like somebody big at Bank of America has bought a bunch of Bitcoins and wants to sell them for a profit.
I don't know what the structure of your company is, but many of the larger companies i've worked for has had some kind of 'complaints department', although that was never what it was called. In one company, if you saw something bad happened, you went to the CEO's assistant. In another company, it was the head of HR. I don't think any of this was officially stated, but people generally knew, if you're having a serious problem, this is person is the release valve. It's the person who you go to and say, "I don't want to go over my boss's head, but...," or "I don't know who to talk to about this, but..."
In a big bureaucratic company, they should have some person, or some kind of mechanism, for complaints about your own boss that isn't breaking the chain of command. They might not be able to fix the problem, but they might be able to give you advice on what to do, from the perspective of someone who knows your company.
I understand that schizophrenia is eminently treatable with medication, though the severe side effects often discourage its use.
My understanding, not from being a doctor but by having some very close interaction with schizophrenics and their treatment, is that it is "treatable" with medication, depending on what you mean by "treatable". There are medications that may stop the hallucinations and allow the sufferer to... sort of control their own behavior better. But that still doesn't necessarily mean that they're going to be "normal". It's more like you're bringing someone from "oh my god, what am I going to do with this crazy person?" to "huh, that guy is a bit too crazy to lead a normal life, but I can deal with him," without every really getting to "he's just a normal guy."
I feel like the medications for mental illness often help control the symptoms without really solving the problem, though admittedly I have only anecdotal experience.
There are numerous examples of countercultures throughout our fairly recent history that were investigated by the authorities, and it was bad enough without those people having to particularly worry about involuntary confinement attributed to supposed mental illness.
I think this is the big problem. Lots of people imagine asylums being used to lock up political opponents, but that's not terrifically likely in a way that I would worry about. In short, if one political party has enough power to simply lock up political opponents, then they're going to do that somehow or another. Issues of cost, as well as issues of whether the system would actually benefit the mentally ill, are less of a fundamental concern-- they're both bound up in how well the system is executed rather than in an inherent issue.
I think the bigger problem is, the definition of 'mental illness' is still a bit sketchy. It wasn't so long ago that homosexuality was considered a mental illness. Are people who engage in extensive body modification mentally ill? I kind of think that maybe they are, but I wouldn't feel comfortable labeling them that in a legally binding way.
I know I went through some times in my own life where I was terrifically unhappy. People kept telling me that I was depressed and I needed to be on medication, but nobody seemed to be willing to consider that I had *reason* to be unhappy. Nobody seemed willing to consider that some of the behavior that they didn't like, that those behaviors were just part of my personality, and I didn't want to medicate myself until my personality went away.