I have no problem with people paying more if they are lazy.
I'm also pragmatic - most people are probably too lazy to truly review the the information sent to them anyway.
Do you double-check your W2's against your pay stubs? Most people don't.
It might end up being more fair, if the government does it, they might end up being responsible for ensuring you don't get totally screwed. Right now, you're the only one responsible for that.
The web is necessary for success in today's world. Saying that legislating accessibility is like banning sugar in foods is ridiculous. They'd only be remotely comparable if your job, life, taxes, social connections, economic viability and pretty much everything else was influenced by whether or not you could have a sugary food.
What I've yet to comprehend is the hostility that the general population seem to show disabled people. Yeah, it's scary to imagine living life differently than you do now, but that doesn't mean you have to be hostile in your exclusion of people with disabilities.
The problem is that there is a single list that someone has to manage and that someone has to get paid for it.
Competition may be at work here, but not in the way you want. The competition is apparently in bidding for the contract. But then, that is only competition if ICANN makes the bidding competitive.
These guys are researchers, why do you think their goal is to make a separate, competing browser? Generally, that only happens if the market is dumb enough to miss potential, if indeed it has some.
If they show the security advantages can be achieved without hurting other aspects of browser performance, something like Firefox or IE could implement their strategy and claim a big win for security over their competitors. This idea is at least a couple of years old. It would surprise me if it isn't simmering on the back burner of the IE team or someone influential at Mozilla.
As for everyone saying silly things about how programmers should just code better...go take an OS class. Browsers are becoming more like operating systems. Imagine if every program on your computer was essentially working with the same address space except for a few hard-coded rules. Even Windows long ago (like in DOS times) realized that's a broken approach.
How about nearly boiling hot coffee to an 81 year old?
Maybe I'm not being fair to older people, and maybe I don't fully appreciate the difference between 190F and 212F. Is it really that different?
I'm a somewhat frequent Slashdot contributor. I got a new laptop and it came with Vista, and I like it. Before trying it out, I took the time to set it up to dual-boot into XP. I haven't used XP once...everything I need to work in Vista works. No problem. Granted, it's a powerful machine and I disabled a lot of the annoying stuff. Some things, I really like, like the ability to type in what program I'm looking for from the Start menu - that's pretty handy.
Anyway, Vista could be better, but I think it's pretty ok, and *gasp* better than XP in a lot of important ways.
I'm a distance runner. I love to run and I'm pretty fast. I also like to compete. The problem comes when you start having to decide what "fair" means. Is it fair for this guy not to be able to compete? Is it fair to give him an advantage in one aspect of biomechanics since he's at a disadvantage in others?
Sports in many ways are doomed. Nothing's fair - environmental and genetic factors outside of one's control determine so much. For me, I run because it makes me feel good. I compete as a means to beating my own previous best. It's a romantic thought that sports are somehow fair and that winning comes solely from dedication and drive, but it's far from reality.
I have no idea if this guy should be allowed to compete. It doesn't sound like he's fast enough to change the final placings. In the end, the most important aspect of him trying to race is that his case will help decide the fate of a number of other runners with different, but similar, stories. I, for one, just hope he keeps competing for himself and doesn't let this rejection sour him on running altogether. In the end, everyone gets slow...I like to think I'll enjoy competing in some sort of sports for the rest of my life.
Citing Kim's first-time offender status, Babcock sentenced him to the minimum 30 months called for in the more punitive range.
I hate spam, I HATE spam. But, 2.5 years in jail? Seems silly. Here's a guy that could obviously be productive in society if he pursued something worthwhile. So why not levee a large fine, give him some supervision and help him contribute positively. Seems way better than paying $45k a year to keep him.
Many academic conferences now charge for their articles, and as a poor grad student, I would rather deal with some ads than pay for a subscription. Sure, my school usually pays for me through their library, but I'll often come across journals that my school doesn't subscribe to. I'd happily deal with an ad to gain the convenience of accessing them online. At least, I'd like to have that option.
Ethics rarely say anything clearly. They certainly don't here. I think you'd be hard-pressed to find someone who would seriously argue that anyone has an ethical obligation to reference whoever first taught them the for loop each time they use one. But most of us would agree that we do have a responsibility not to copy without permission code that someone has explicitly copyrighted or even just written for commercial purposes. The topic here lies somewhere in the middle. If I write a question to a forum and receive a response, I have no ethical obligation to ask the responder if he'd like payment for his response. But ethics are individual. It may be against your ethics, it's not against mine.
Copyright law suggests a practical tilt. The practical reality is that there is almost a zero chance that anyone will ever find out that the OP used that code, almost zero chance that the original creator of that code will care even if he found out, and almost zero chance that any sensible court would award anything but minor damages for infringing what is no doubt a relatively trivial piece of code implemented many times before by other people (otherwise, you might presume the poster wouldn't be so freely releasing it onto the web). The copyright argument is moot.
Come to your own ethical decision, the OP's boss apparently has.
Doesn't sound like this happened in the OP's example. Sounds like whoever wrote the code was trying to get a piece of a larger project to work and he got it to work. I regularly consult the web for programming advice and a lot of times that advice comes in the form of examples. If you don't want your code used, don't post it on a forum or on your web page.
This article has made headlines by avoiding the real issue of influence.
People want influence and voting is a very round-a-bout way of getting it. A million dollars on the other hand isn't that much money, but it has far greater utility than my vote. As mentioned in the article, some people will sell their vote for an iPod. A million dollars buys many iPods, so in a way it's stupid not to sell your voting rights for a million dollars and the ability to buy many more votes.
It's also a "prisoner's dilemma" problem. It really doesn't matter if I sell my vote. When I start running into trouble is when all my friends (people who have similar views as me) also sell their votes. Then the collective effect matters.
Personally, I'll hold on to my vote (or at least my price is really high), but that trait is influenced by my beliefs, and not based on an assessment of what's really best.
Two things:
1. How do you know it's not happening the other way around?
2. News articles have a history of horribly inflating costs. They probably counted the fraction of the rent of the building used for the party that NASA already owns, the potential for lost working time for the attendees (even though it probably happened after normal working hours), the lost productivity of NASA employees who talked about the party while at work (even though they'd otherwise just be surfing Slashdot), etc. Most companies do this, what's wrong here? I was at Google for a summer and they spent a whole lot of money hosting a party for the people that spend their time primarily trying to scam Google, er, I mean enable their customers to make the most of out Google indexing. Relations with people in the business are important...let's just hope NASA is smart enough to capitalize on those relationships.
I'm a grad student at a well-known school. International students account for maybe 20-30% of my class. I would argue that it should be more. The U.S. has some of the best schools, yet great people exist everywhere.
All homeopaths don't believe anything. If you had read my response, you would have saw that I said that it is only appropriate if it's not dangerous. Some chiropractors think they can cure diseases. A few decades ago there was a lawsuit against a chiropractor in the U.S. that advised a girl with cancer to avoid seeing medical doctors. She died and he was sued and maybe criminally charged (I don't quite remember). Obviously that was pretty insane advise. But, should chiropractic care be denied to someone with moderate back pain who finds it helpful? Probably not when the alternative is pain that would cause them to get surgery - a medical doctor's main treatment behind drugs.
Many homeopaths aren't crazy. I've never gone to one myself (I'm young and don't go to a medical doctor much either), but I know a few people who practice it. It's mostly bunk, but a side effect of what they advise is living well and in harmony with nature and advocating a healthy lifestyle. Not a bad idea at all when what causes many health problems is the tendency of the public to eat garbage, not exercise and take handfuls of drugs at the slightest symptom. And for many chronic illnesses but not life-threatening illnesses, such "treatment" can actually improve peoples' lives.
Even prayer can be beneficial for the mental health of many people. Personally, I'm an atheist, but I recognize its value. Homeopathy is not religion any more than science is a religion. Oh, wait, maybe they're not that different.
If they can be shown not to be dangerous and if they don't cost way too much and if some people find benefit, then it should be considered. Shamans invoke ideas of religion, which we should be careful about awarding government funding to. Some alternative medicine tell people who are dying that they don't need medical attention, also bad. But alternative medicine can be part of an overall strategy of healing body and mind.
No reason to discount them completely just because you think they're quacks.
Re:All UK ciizens should be angry about this!
on
Science vs. Homeopathy
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
Why? It's probably a lot cheaper than the other hospitals. Not to mention that at the very least it gives people a placebo effect and probably teaches them some reasonable lessons about respecting their body and respecting nature, which are valuable lessons.
I'd be more concerned about the excessive amounts of drugs advocated by the traditional hospitals, which have their place, but also serve to mask symptoms And they, along with overly expensive and often unnecessary operations, are part of the reason hospitals are underfunded.
It's still a debate. Business is about likelihood not absolute truth and definitely not the idealized world that cryptographers make up. Sure, if someone tells you about a bug in your software you risk your software being responsible for damages to your customers. That's a potential cost. If you fix it, that's also a cost. Perhaps you simply disagree with the company's assessment of the relative costs. Keep in mind, from the company's viewpoint, for the bugs to have a true effect, someone has to do something illegal. That gives them additional incentive not to fix it. Something goes wrong, it was the hacker, not them, that is responsible (so goes their spin). Not to mention, for every bug that's out there known by someone legitimate, there are potentially many more known by people that aren't. One more reason why it could be considered not cost effective to drop everything to fix the latest bug someone pointed out.
I run a lot (~70 miles per week) and I eat healthy food. I never go to the doctor, but I pay the same as everyone else. Of course, some people just like me have dropped dead of a freak heart attack. The point is that I consciously make decisions that make it less likely that I will need healthcare services. Someone that does not exercise, smokes and eats at McDonalds every day, is probably, statistically more likely to need healthcare.
It's simply unfair that I have to pay the same into the community bucket. I'm paying with my good habits. I pay with the time it takes to run (although I enjoy it). I pay with the additional money it takes to eat good food (although I think it makes me feel better). Why should I have to pay the same into the bucket as someone more likely to take out of the bucket? As a practical matter of fairness, I believe I should not pay more to people that are more likely to take out of the bucket because of their genetics. Some things I believe to be personal decisions, but it's difficult to completely untangle personal choice from genetics.
Slashdot Mirror
I have no problem with people paying more if they are lazy.
I'm also pragmatic - most people are probably too lazy to truly review the the information sent to them anyway.
Do you double-check your W2's against your pay stubs? Most people don't.
It might end up being more fair, if the government does it, they might end up being responsible for ensuring you don't get totally screwed. Right now, you're the only one responsible for that.
The web is necessary for success in today's world. Saying that legislating accessibility is like banning sugar in foods is ridiculous. They'd only be remotely comparable if your job, life, taxes, social connections, economic viability and pretty much everything else was influenced by whether or not you could have a sugary food.
What I've yet to comprehend is the hostility that the general population seem to show disabled people. Yeah, it's scary to imagine living life differently than you do now, but that doesn't mean you have to be hostile in your exclusion of people with disabilities.
The problem is that there is a single list that someone has to manage and that someone has to get paid for it.
Competition may be at work here, but not in the way you want. The competition is apparently in bidding for the contract. But then, that is only competition if ICANN makes the bidding competitive.
These guys are researchers, why do you think their goal is to make a separate, competing browser? Generally, that only happens if the market is dumb enough to miss potential, if indeed it has some.
If they show the security advantages can be achieved without hurting other aspects of browser performance, something like Firefox or IE could implement their strategy and claim a big win for security over their competitors. This idea is at least a couple of years old. It would surprise me if it isn't simmering on the back burner of the IE team or someone influential at Mozilla.
As for everyone saying silly things about how programmers should just code better...go take an OS class. Browsers are becoming more like operating systems. Imagine if every program on your computer was essentially working with the same address space except for a few hard-coded rules. Even Windows long ago (like in DOS times) realized that's a broken approach.
How about nearly boiling hot coffee to an 81 year old?
Maybe I'm not being fair to older people, and maybe I don't fully appreciate the difference between 190F and 212F. Is it really that different?
I'm a somewhat frequent Slashdot contributor. I got a new laptop and it came with Vista, and I like it. Before trying it out, I took the time to set it up to dual-boot into XP. I haven't used XP once...everything I need to work in Vista works. No problem. Granted, it's a powerful machine and I disabled a lot of the annoying stuff. Some things, I really like, like the ability to type in what program I'm looking for from the Start menu - that's pretty handy.
Anyway, Vista could be better, but I think it's pretty ok, and *gasp* better than XP in a lot of important ways.
I'm a distance runner. I love to run and I'm pretty fast. I also like to compete. The problem comes when you start having to decide what "fair" means. Is it fair for this guy not to be able to compete? Is it fair to give him an advantage in one aspect of biomechanics since he's at a disadvantage in others?
Sports in many ways are doomed. Nothing's fair - environmental and genetic factors outside of one's control determine so much. For me, I run because it makes me feel good. I compete as a means to beating my own previous best. It's a romantic thought that sports are somehow fair and that winning comes solely from dedication and drive, but it's far from reality.
I have no idea if this guy should be allowed to compete. It doesn't sound like he's fast enough to change the final placings. In the end, the most important aspect of him trying to race is that his case will help decide the fate of a number of other runners with different, but similar, stories. I, for one, just hope he keeps competing for himself and doesn't let this rejection sour him on running altogether. In the end, everyone gets slow...I like to think I'll enjoy competing in some sort of sports for the rest of my life.
Do you really pay by the minute or by the byte?
If so, I'd be more upset by the Flash advertisements, popups and general web bloat than I would be about the spam.
I hate spam, I HATE spam. But, 2.5 years in jail? Seems silly. Here's a guy that could obviously be productive in society if he pursued something worthwhile. So why not levee a large fine, give him some supervision and help him contribute positively. Seems way better than paying $45k a year to keep him.
PDFs are a medium, web pages are a medium.
Many academic conferences now charge for their articles, and as a poor grad student, I would rather deal with some ads than pay for a subscription. Sure, my school usually pays for me through their library, but I'll often come across journals that my school doesn't subscribe to. I'd happily deal with an ad to gain the convenience of accessing them online. At least, I'd like to have that option.
Ethics rarely say anything clearly. They certainly don't here. I think you'd be hard-pressed to find someone who would seriously argue that anyone has an ethical obligation to reference whoever first taught them the for loop each time they use one. But most of us would agree that we do have a responsibility not to copy without permission code that someone has explicitly copyrighted or even just written for commercial purposes. The topic here lies somewhere in the middle. If I write a question to a forum and receive a response, I have no ethical obligation to ask the responder if he'd like payment for his response. But ethics are individual. It may be against your ethics, it's not against mine. Copyright law suggests a practical tilt. The practical reality is that there is almost a zero chance that anyone will ever find out that the OP used that code, almost zero chance that the original creator of that code will care even if he found out, and almost zero chance that any sensible court would award anything but minor damages for infringing what is no doubt a relatively trivial piece of code implemented many times before by other people (otherwise, you might presume the poster wouldn't be so freely releasing it onto the web). The copyright argument is moot. Come to your own ethical decision, the OP's boss apparently has.
Doesn't sound like this happened in the OP's example. Sounds like whoever wrote the code was trying to get a piece of a larger project to work and he got it to work. I regularly consult the web for programming advice and a lot of times that advice comes in the form of examples. If you don't want your code used, don't post it on a forum or on your web page.
This article has made headlines by avoiding the real issue of influence.
People want influence and voting is a very round-a-bout way of getting it. A million dollars on the other hand isn't that much money, but it has far greater utility than my vote. As mentioned in the article, some people will sell their vote for an iPod. A million dollars buys many iPods, so in a way it's stupid not to sell your voting rights for a million dollars and the ability to buy many more votes.
It's also a "prisoner's dilemma" problem. It really doesn't matter if I sell my vote. When I start running into trouble is when all my friends (people who have similar views as me) also sell their votes. Then the collective effect matters.
Personally, I'll hold on to my vote (or at least my price is really high), but that trait is influenced by my beliefs, and not based on an assessment of what's really best.
Yeah, an engine, sure: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:BetaStirlingTG4web.jpg
Two things:
1. How do you know it's not happening the other way around?
2. News articles have a history of horribly inflating costs. They probably counted the fraction of the rent of the building used for the party that NASA already owns, the potential for lost working time for the attendees (even though it probably happened after normal working hours), the lost productivity of NASA employees who talked about the party while at work (even though they'd otherwise just be surfing Slashdot), etc. Most companies do this, what's wrong here? I was at Google for a summer and they spent a whole lot of money hosting a party for the people that spend their time primarily trying to scam Google, er, I mean enable their customers to make the most of out Google indexing. Relations with people in the business are important...let's just hope NASA is smart enough to capitalize on those relationships.
I'm a grad student at a well-known school. International students account for maybe 20-30% of my class. I would argue that it should be more. The U.S. has some of the best schools, yet great people exist everywhere.
All homeopaths don't believe anything. If you had read my response, you would have saw that I said that it is only appropriate if it's not dangerous. Some chiropractors think they can cure diseases. A few decades ago there was a lawsuit against a chiropractor in the U.S. that advised a girl with cancer to avoid seeing medical doctors. She died and he was sued and maybe criminally charged (I don't quite remember). Obviously that was pretty insane advise. But, should chiropractic care be denied to someone with moderate back pain who finds it helpful? Probably not when the alternative is pain that would cause them to get surgery - a medical doctor's main treatment behind drugs.
Many homeopaths aren't crazy. I've never gone to one myself (I'm young and don't go to a medical doctor much either), but I know a few people who practice it. It's mostly bunk, but a side effect of what they advise is living well and in harmony with nature and advocating a healthy lifestyle. Not a bad idea at all when what causes many health problems is the tendency of the public to eat garbage, not exercise and take handfuls of drugs at the slightest symptom. And for many chronic illnesses but not life-threatening illnesses, such "treatment" can actually improve peoples' lives.
Even prayer can be beneficial for the mental health of many people. Personally, I'm an atheist, but I recognize its value. Homeopathy is not religion any more than science is a religion. Oh, wait, maybe they're not that different.
If they can be shown not to be dangerous and if they don't cost way too much and if some people find benefit, then it should be considered. Shamans invoke ideas of religion, which we should be careful about awarding government funding to. Some alternative medicine tell people who are dying that they don't need medical attention, also bad. But alternative medicine can be part of an overall strategy of healing body and mind.
No reason to discount them completely just because you think they're quacks.
Why? It's probably a lot cheaper than the other hospitals. Not to mention that at the very least it gives people a placebo effect and probably teaches them some reasonable lessons about respecting their body and respecting nature, which are valuable lessons.
I'd be more concerned about the excessive amounts of drugs advocated by the traditional hospitals, which have their place, but also serve to mask symptoms And they, along with overly expensive and often unnecessary operations, are part of the reason hospitals are underfunded.
Nothing is as clear as you think.
if(5 am - 9 pm)
Oh crap, there goes the IP holding the company together...report Traffic Jam
else
report slightly less terrible Traffic Jam
Did the grandparent mention anything about a Biblical interpretation? Nope.
It's still a debate. Business is about likelihood not absolute truth and definitely not the idealized world that cryptographers make up. Sure, if someone tells you about a bug in your software you risk your software being responsible for damages to your customers. That's a potential cost. If you fix it, that's also a cost. Perhaps you simply disagree with the company's assessment of the relative costs. Keep in mind, from the company's viewpoint, for the bugs to have a true effect, someone has to do something illegal. That gives them additional incentive not to fix it. Something goes wrong, it was the hacker, not them, that is responsible (so goes their spin). Not to mention, for every bug that's out there known by someone legitimate, there are potentially many more known by people that aren't. One more reason why it could be considered not cost effective to drop everything to fix the latest bug someone pointed out.
Static jpegs are so 5 years ago.
Diamagnetic Frog on YouTube
I run a lot (~70 miles per week) and I eat healthy food. I never go to the doctor, but I pay the same as everyone else. Of course, some people just like me have dropped dead of a freak heart attack. The point is that I consciously make decisions that make it less likely that I will need healthcare services. Someone that does not exercise, smokes and eats at McDonalds every day, is probably, statistically more likely to need healthcare.
It's simply unfair that I have to pay the same into the community bucket. I'm paying with my good habits. I pay with the time it takes to run (although I enjoy it). I pay with the additional money it takes to eat good food (although I think it makes me feel better). Why should I have to pay the same into the bucket as someone more likely to take out of the bucket? As a practical matter of fairness, I believe I should not pay more to people that are more likely to take out of the bucket because of their genetics. Some things I believe to be personal decisions, but it's difficult to completely untangle personal choice from genetics.