On the other hand, a company should not be able to take a domain away from someone just because it wants it.
I've been running my domain since 1998. It is my online identity. If some company picks it as the name for its new flagship product, should they be able to take it away from me just?
If your argument starts with "but you've been actually using it!", stop right there and think about how easy it would be to install a simple script that runs a simple news aggregator on an otherwise empty site, or shows a dozen random dog pictures or whatever. If you make "no content" the line, then the squatters will simply put some content on it and you're back to square one. If you make "no (insert any adjective) content" the line you are deep in the territory where company can take domains from individuals by either a) paying enough lawyers to convince a judge that your content is worthless, i.e. not (adjective) or b) simply outspending and outlasting you in court/arbitration/whatever.
Quite frankly, I think taking domains should be such a rare exception that a single person at ICANN should be able to handle all the cases. It should be reserved for clear and obvious cases of abuse. If you can't decide the case within 5 minutes of looking at the site, the whois record, and a few other facts, it should be rejected.
And we should fix the shit with domain tasting and domain parking and all the other crap that ICANN introduced that was practically designed for abuse. ICANN needs to be sacked and replaced by something that's not out for a quick buck.
To that extent, the GPL is working well, but the main barrier is "dynamic linking" seems not only unnecessary, but goes against most developer's notions that dynamically linking to a library doesn't form a combined single product (hence the vague twaddle about "common OS components", not least since the GNU project couldn't have got started if that had been imposed by the then UNIX vendors).
Well, they created the LGPL to cover that angle, and the developer can decide if his work should carry the GPL or the LGPL, so I don't see what all the fuss is about. If I write a library and pick the GPL as its license, than I'm making a clear statement that I don't want my lib to be part of any non-GPL distributed code.
If you don't like it, nobody forces you to use my code.:-)
So you're saying that if someone discovers that has used a GPL'ed library to build that neither the FSF nor any of the contributors to that library would sue to enforce the GPL rights?
I don't see how anything I wrote can be misread to say anything even remotely close to that. You're going off on a very remote tangent there, and quite a distance.
You are, however, missing one: The philosophy of the FSF.
These guys are about software freedom, not about having the largest possible market share. They literally don't care if an important part of the license is problematic for large corporations. As a metaphor, I'm sure you can easily adapt your list to the issue of slavery/emancipation. That wasn't a reason to not do it.
I'm with the FSF on that issue. Large corporations can get something worth many thousands EUR/US$ for free if and only if they are willing to accept the responsibilities that come with it. If they don't like it, they can buy or write their own software.
These are not very high barriers. Many corporations, including most of the Fortune 500, do use Free Software extensively. Quite frankly, most of the team it's just legal being conservative (I don't blame them, it's practically part of their job description to be that way) and not wanting to get into all the tricky details of what that means and how it changes the contracts with, say, the contractors that work on it.
I don't think the goal of Free Software should be to move aside and make commercial compatability be a driving force. That's one of the moves that I dislike about the Open Source rebranding. Freedom and capitalism have a tricky relationship, and they are as much enemies as they are friends. The relationship is only positive for the freedom part if you keep a careful distance - not too far away, but not too close, either.
You assume that this entire thing is about some small cultural values that easily adapt.
It isn't.
The ability to forget is easily as important as the ability to remember, for both a society and the sanity of your own mind. Psychology has only started delving into that realm, but so far findings are clear that forgetting is not a bug of the mind, but an important part of keeping your mind working and sane.
Keeping your memories outside, in digital storage, is not the same thing and will not lead to the same negative consequences as not being able to forget, but we know precious little about what it'll do to us, both on the scale of a society and on the scale of an individual.
That doesn't mean we should go back to the stone age, mind you. But when you hit on pretty deep and important stuff like this, you shouldn't just shrug it off with an "adapt or die" attitude. If you think that attitude is ok, talk to your grandparents - they went to war and died in order to prevent a master race ideology from spreading further. The "if you can't handle it, step aside for people who can" attitude is dangerously close to that. As a race, we've kind of decided that we don't want to drive out every minority or every disadvantaged individual, and for good reasons.
so nobody will give a crap about "minor" stuff in 10 years. it's crap overload.
The world will not. But individuals will.
Imagine meeting your dream partner, the perfect girl/guy. And then losing her because of something stupid you did 10 years before, something you yourself had forgotten, but since there's a record of everything, someone who didn't like you dug it up and sent it to her.
(and don't tell me your perfect partner wouldn't judge you based on something so long ago, I intentionally left it open what it could've been.)
There's a reason that even criminal records get cleaned after some time. Both psychologists and neurologists have found how important forgetting is to the human mind. And sociologists know how important it is to a society.
Everything memorized for all times isn't a dream, it's a nightmare. Not because of any small cultural thing that'll just have to change, but because of fundamental human factors that don't change as easily or quickly as technology does.
"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."
Like so many, he is mistaking "anyone" for "everyone".
I have tons of things I don't want everyone to know, though I don't mind of some specific people do.
We all have.
And then there's degrees. I don't mind telling people about some of the mistakes I made. I don't see why I should go into the details. I don't make a secret of who I'm with or who I've been with, but I wouldn't want to have a list published somewhere. I'm sure even Schmidt or Zuckerberg don't want videos of their last night of sex online for the world to see, even though they'll probably have no problem saying that they've had sex that night on public TV. But there are degrees of disclosure and privacy.
Actually, while confirmation dialogs started out this way, it's 2013 and their main purpose has evolved into cover-your-ass for the software designers. Well designed software today does not give you a popup dialog (which by now almost all users have been trained to ignore due to the massive amount of misuse), but an additional step like a checkbox you have to enter, or the need to enter, say, your account username or your passowrd to delete the account instead of just clicking a button.
Yes, there is, and it's well-known in the field of usability, etc.
The very short summary is that humans have various decision circuits. Some are made for snap-second usually-right decisions and some are made for well-thought-out and as often right as you can hope for ones.
Many technical systems are intentionally designed to be just slightly more complicated to use than is strictly necessary, in order to force the user to slow down so the slower, but more reliable, thought processes have a chance to activate.
As I explained in a different answer: The hostility actually serves a purpose. That and most geeks lack social skills.
So basically you can either have these bright people doing stuff for free that you would pay a huge amount of money for if they didn't, and accept that they can be obnoxious and hostile, or you can buy your webserver from a corporate entity that pays people to be friendly.
Sometimes you get bright people who are also very nice to be around. But when it comes to getting a core system coded and maintained, I'll take the obnoxious asshole who knows what the fuck he's doing over the friendly bloke who couldn't code his way out of a paper bag any day.
I mean, if I can get a friendly guy who's also a coding genius, I'll take him. But if not, I'd rather take the genius part than the friendly part.
Simply put: Yes, and the burden of proof is on you (or the submitter). That exactly is the point. Yes, as in every filter, there are false positives and false negatives. Sometimes a potentially great contributor is turned away. You can't judge everything based on one data point, though. You have to take into consideration the many times that the same level of hostility prevented waste of time and then judge the sum of all events, not the one false positive.
Hawking? Hawkins died in 1928. [See, annoying, isn't it.]
Uh, no? Why should I consider it annoying if you rightly point out a mistake?
You might want to cut the kids some slack now and then.
Not if I'm the Linux kernel maintainer, say. Its is not my job to teach the youngsters. It is my job to maintain the code base. Anything that distracts from that is just that - a distraction.
In your example, you went to your professor - someone whose job it is to teach you. But you already noticed that important difference yourself.
Nevertheless, who says that you can't also, like Hawkins, have stages for reaching the top-notch gurus?
Two reasons. One, it is considered not cool. Two, it adds administrative overhead of a kind nobody wants to do on a volunteer basis.
I've run a couple projects. Everyone wants to do the cool stuff, dabble with the code. Very few people want to be the community managers, project managers (unless it gives authority on decisions!), maintain the wiki or such things.
In the case of Hawkins, the layers you have to go through are doing their job that they are being paid for. Never forget that difference. You can do a ton of stuff in commercial projects that you just can't do in volunteer projects.
Stupid questions deserve stupid answers. Being a newbie in a field is not an excuse to wasting the experts time by asking the same question for the 50th time or making the same mistake for the 100th.
Go to cryptography experts and tell them you've invented a new cypher and it's really great and could they please have a look. If you are lucky, you will get a few flames telling them that you're the 10th person this month and all the others have been idiots. Not just this month, but for the past 10 years.
Some newbie coming into a field that requires expertise and delivering something that is not a total waste of time to everyone is a once-in-a-decade event. It just happened in mathematics, so yes, it does happen. If you think you're that event, chances are stacked against you solidly.
That doesn't mean you're a bad person. It just means you have a lot to learn, including the nature of the field. And all the hostility and flaming and being obnoxious actually serves a purpose: To shut down the crap as quickly and efficiently as possible, in order to minimize the waste of time.
That's the price you pay for an open development model where everyone can come in and talk to the dev people directly with almost no barriers. Other fields have solved the problem by creating barriers. Try to discuss quantum physics with Hawkins. You'll find that you need to prove several times that you really have something worth discussing just to get there.
In Free Software development, we don't have that barrier. But that means the top people have to deal with the Sturgeon's Law stuff themselves, and they need to do it quickly, and that means skipping the niceties and telling things as they are.
Don't start at the kernel, idiot. Don't start at a compiler or programming language or other system part, fool.
Start with an application. In fact, if you need to get that explained, you should start with a good book.
The kernel and compiler, etc. people ought to be hostile to newbies. Their goal is not to teach newbies, it's to deliver reliable code. You don't start learning to fly with a Boing 747 full of passengers, you start with a simulator or a Cessna.
Your first contributions shouldn't be in anything that other (applications) rely on. It should be in an application. Something where if it fails only that thing fails and not everything that depends on it. You'll find that the maintainers of these applications are more forgiving, simply because the burden on them is a lot less.
And yes, I say that as someone who has contributed to bunches of projects.
...to the real cyberpunk world. Megacorporations don't rule the world, they let that dirty work be handled by governments. Instead, the have found a way to corrupt our politics in such a way that we are actually subsidising megacorporations and small companies and taxpayers are footing the bill.
I just hope that the time when history looks upon this period and asks whether we were all insane isn't too far off.
This kind of corruption is based on overzealous and overly complex rules and regulations. 3rd world countries usually don't have those, what they have is a lack of regulations, leading to the other kind of corruption, where you need to grease palms to get the wheels of the engine in motion at all, for example.
I don't see any way this can be an honest mistake.
The system is designed to reward false positives, so guess what happens.
I live in the middle of the city. Back when I still had a car, I got roughly half of my parking tickets voided simply by complaining. In the street I live in, the parking rules are confusing and change every 50 or so metres. I once got a ticket voided by asking the person in charge to explain to me what the rules where on the day and the location where I was parked. They couldn't, so they told me to forget about the ticket.
it appears to be open and unchecked corruption on the part of municipal governments. The kind of thing I expect in a banana republic, not America.
Ironically, you will have less of this kind of corruption in 3rd world countries.
It's a system problem. Money drives government, not the other way around.
Ok, first up: I agree the listed fees are just crazy.
3x ($30) is wrong as well, however. Basically it's a simple game-theory problem. You want the value of (fine x probability of being caught) to be greater than the price of legal acquisition. Otherwise the rational choice is to acquire it illegally.
Wherever the chance to be caught is pretty high, treble damages works. But when the chance to be caught is relatively small, as it is with file-sharing, then the proper value of a fine must be higher.
But a fee of $150,000 means the chance to be caught is on the order of 1:10,000 - which basically means that prosecution is ridiculously ineffective.
At these figures, we're entering a different area, the zone of the black swans. At a 1:10,000 chance, you're not seriously figuring it in anymore. Just like you don't figure in the chance of getting hit by a roof tile upon leaving your home whenever you go outside. The chance is just so small that for all practical purposes, it could be zero.
So if in the mental model, the probability is 0%, then the value of fine simply doesn't matter anymore. Or, mathematically speaking, you can't calculate it anymore, because fine = legal price / probability of being caught - which for probability 0 doesn't compute.
And now I forgot what I was getting at, that's what you get for chasing a thought to its conclusion. Something that more lawyers should do more often.
It is slavery. I object to being enslaved against my will, even for mundane tasks.
That word doesn't mean what you think it means. And quite frankly, you are devaluing it and insulting everyone who has fought against slavery throughout history.
It's no more oppression than having to work a job you no longer like, but you've signed a contract and it still runs for a time X. Or having to be in school even though you'd rather play outside. Part of society is that you can't do anything you feel like doing all the time.
Plus in my version of it you could even refuse. You'd lose the right to vote or run for public office or otherwise participate in politics, but you could say no.
and doing a lot more good in the world than an average citizen like me is in a position to.
That's true on an absolute scale, but not on a relative one.
Bill Gates is only giving away money he doesn't need. He could burn 90% of his fortune today and it wouldn't make a dent to his style of living.
A lot of average citizen are giving away money for good causes that they could very well use themselves, and that does make a difference to them.
While Bill's money is more in absolute terms and has more effect and he can reach places you couldn't, it is very likely that you are making the bigger sacrifice.
but as a man -- I've come to have a lot of admiration for what he's doing. He's a great example for the rest of the world's wealthiest in doing something truly constructive and beneficial with their unimaginable wealth.
I'm still kind of torn on that. Once you dig beneath the surface, a lot of his current activities aren't entirely white, either. His health activities usually focus on one big provider of the pharmaceuticals, usually one he has stocks in, and generally has the tendency to drive everyone else out of the market. That reminds me a lot of the "old" Bill Gates, and it means that for all the good it does, it also makes people dependent on him, this time not with their computers but with their lives.
...business hostilities are often for show. A huge number of big-corp CEOs are well acquainted with each other or friends, even if their companies fight bitter battles. In a position like that, you learn to make a difference between the personal and the business. When I rose to a position where I was dealing with the C-Levels directly years ago, I quickly found out that behind closed doors you would regularily get statements like "I'd personally like to do that, but (corporate politics or business reason) I can't." - and sometimes the talk would end there and sometimes it would go into finding a way to get it done. I've been to court with business opponents and shared a ride and a nice conversation with them to the courthouse.
Never confuse the personal relations of two people with the business relations of their companies.
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You really, really should've read the entire comment before following your "press reply" instinct. I addressed that literally in the following line.
On the other hand, a company should not be able to take a domain away from someone just because it wants it.
I've been running my domain since 1998. It is my online identity. If some company picks it as the name for its new flagship product, should they be able to take it away from me just?
If your argument starts with "but you've been actually using it!", stop right there and think about how easy it would be to install a simple script that runs a simple news aggregator on an otherwise empty site, or shows a dozen random dog pictures or whatever. If you make "no content" the line, then the squatters will simply put some content on it and you're back to square one. If you make "no (insert any adjective) content" the line you are deep in the territory where company can take domains from individuals by either a) paying enough lawyers to convince a judge that your content is worthless, i.e. not (adjective) or b) simply outspending and outlasting you in court/arbitration/whatever.
Quite frankly, I think taking domains should be such a rare exception that a single person at ICANN should be able to handle all the cases. It should be reserved for clear and obvious cases of abuse. If you can't decide the case within 5 minutes of looking at the site, the whois record, and a few other facts, it should be rejected.
And we should fix the shit with domain tasting and domain parking and all the other crap that ICANN introduced that was practically designed for abuse. ICANN needs to be sacked and replaced by something that's not out for a quick buck.
I've written a bunch of stuff, but no library, so obviously I'm using "me" and "you" only for dramatic purposes.
To that extent, the GPL is working well, but the main barrier is "dynamic linking" seems not only unnecessary, but goes against most developer's notions that dynamically linking to a library doesn't form a combined single product (hence the vague twaddle about "common OS components", not least since the GNU project couldn't have got started if that had been imposed by the then UNIX vendors).
Well, they created the LGPL to cover that angle, and the developer can decide if his work should carry the GPL or the LGPL, so I don't see what all the fuss is about. If I write a library and pick the GPL as its license, than I'm making a clear statement that I don't want my lib to be part of any non-GPL distributed code.
If you don't like it, nobody forces you to use my code. :-)
So you're saying that if someone discovers that has used a GPL'ed library to build that neither the FSF nor any of the contributors to that library would sue to enforce the GPL rights?
I don't see how anything I wrote can be misread to say anything even remotely close to that. You're going off on a very remote tangent there, and quite a distance.
Please re-read what I wrote.
You are correct in all your points.
You are, however, missing one: The philosophy of the FSF.
These guys are about software freedom, not about having the largest possible market share. They literally don't care if an important part of the license is problematic for large corporations. As a metaphor, I'm sure you can easily adapt your list to the issue of slavery/emancipation. That wasn't a reason to not do it.
I'm with the FSF on that issue. Large corporations can get something worth many thousands EUR/US$ for free if and only if they are willing to accept the responsibilities that come with it. If they don't like it, they can buy or write their own software.
These are not very high barriers. Many corporations, including most of the Fortune 500, do use Free Software extensively. Quite frankly, most of the team it's just legal being conservative (I don't blame them, it's practically part of their job description to be that way) and not wanting to get into all the tricky details of what that means and how it changes the contracts with, say, the contractors that work on it.
I don't think the goal of Free Software should be to move aside and make commercial compatability be a driving force. That's one of the moves that I dislike about the Open Source rebranding. Freedom and capitalism have a tricky relationship, and they are as much enemies as they are friends. The relationship is only positive for the freedom part if you keep a careful distance - not too far away, but not too close, either.
You assume that this entire thing is about some small cultural values that easily adapt.
It isn't.
The ability to forget is easily as important as the ability to remember, for both a society and the sanity of your own mind. Psychology has only started delving into that realm, but so far findings are clear that forgetting is not a bug of the mind, but an important part of keeping your mind working and sane.
Keeping your memories outside, in digital storage, is not the same thing and will not lead to the same negative consequences as not being able to forget, but we know precious little about what it'll do to us, both on the scale of a society and on the scale of an individual.
That doesn't mean we should go back to the stone age, mind you. But when you hit on pretty deep and important stuff like this, you shouldn't just shrug it off with an "adapt or die" attitude. If you think that attitude is ok, talk to your grandparents - they went to war and died in order to prevent a master race ideology from spreading further. The "if you can't handle it, step aside for people who can" attitude is dangerously close to that. As a race, we've kind of decided that we don't want to drive out every minority or every disadvantaged individual, and for good reasons.
so nobody will give a crap about "minor" stuff in 10 years. it's crap overload.
The world will not. But individuals will.
Imagine meeting your dream partner, the perfect girl/guy. And then losing her because of something stupid you did 10 years before, something you yourself had forgotten, but since there's a record of everything, someone who didn't like you dug it up and sent it to her.
(and don't tell me your perfect partner wouldn't judge you based on something so long ago, I intentionally left it open what it could've been.)
There's a reason that even criminal records get cleaned after some time. Both psychologists and neurologists have found how important forgetting is to the human mind. And sociologists know how important it is to a society.
Everything memorized for all times isn't a dream, it's a nightmare. Not because of any small cultural thing that'll just have to change, but because of fundamental human factors that don't change as easily or quickly as technology does.
"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."
Like so many, he is mistaking "anyone" for "everyone".
I have tons of things I don't want everyone to know, though I don't mind of some specific people do.
We all have.
And then there's degrees. I don't mind telling people about some of the mistakes I made. I don't see why I should go into the details. I don't make a secret of who I'm with or who I've been with, but I wouldn't want to have a list published somewhere. I'm sure even Schmidt or Zuckerberg don't want videos of their last night of sex online for the world to see, even though they'll probably have no problem saying that they've had sex that night on public TV. But there are degrees of disclosure and privacy.
Actually, while confirmation dialogs started out this way, it's 2013 and their main purpose has evolved into cover-your-ass for the software designers. Well designed software today does not give you a popup dialog (which by now almost all users have been trained to ignore due to the massive amount of misuse), but an additional step like a checkbox you have to enter, or the need to enter, say, your account username or your passowrd to delete the account instead of just clicking a button.
Yes, there is, and it's well-known in the field of usability, etc.
The very short summary is that humans have various decision circuits. Some are made for snap-second usually-right decisions and some are made for well-thought-out and as often right as you can hope for ones.
Many technical systems are intentionally designed to be just slightly more complicated to use than is strictly necessary, in order to force the user to slow down so the slower, but more reliable, thought processes have a chance to activate.
As I explained in a different answer: The hostility actually serves a purpose. That and most geeks lack social skills.
So basically you can either have these bright people doing stuff for free that you would pay a huge amount of money for if they didn't, and accept that they can be obnoxious and hostile, or you can buy your webserver from a corporate entity that pays people to be friendly.
Sometimes you get bright people who are also very nice to be around. But when it comes to getting a core system coded and maintained, I'll take the obnoxious asshole who knows what the fuck he's doing over the friendly bloke who couldn't code his way out of a paper bag any day.
I mean, if I can get a friendly guy who's also a coding genius, I'll take him. But if not, I'd rather take the genius part than the friendly part.
Your whole argument is based on this assumption.
Simply put: Yes, and the burden of proof is on you (or the submitter). That exactly is the point. Yes, as in every filter, there are false positives and false negatives. Sometimes a potentially great contributor is turned away. You can't judge everything based on one data point, though. You have to take into consideration the many times that the same level of hostility prevented waste of time and then judge the sum of all events, not the one false positive.
Hawking? Hawkins died in 1928. [See, annoying, isn't it.]
Uh, no? Why should I consider it annoying if you rightly point out a mistake?
You might want to cut the kids some slack now and then.
Not if I'm the Linux kernel maintainer, say. Its is not my job to teach the youngsters. It is my job to maintain the code base. Anything that distracts from that is just that - a distraction.
In your example, you went to your professor - someone whose job it is to teach you. But you already noticed that important difference yourself.
Nevertheless, who says that you can't also, like Hawkins, have stages for reaching the top-notch gurus?
Two reasons.
One, it is considered not cool.
Two, it adds administrative overhead of a kind nobody wants to do on a volunteer basis.
I've run a couple projects. Everyone wants to do the cool stuff, dabble with the code. Very few people want to be the community managers, project managers (unless it gives authority on decisions!), maintain the wiki or such things.
In the case of Hawkins, the layers you have to go through are doing their job that they are being paid for. Never forget that difference. You can do a ton of stuff in commercial projects that you just can't do in volunteer projects.
Stupid questions deserve stupid answers. Being a newbie in a field is not an excuse to wasting the experts time by asking the same question for the 50th time or making the same mistake for the 100th.
Go to cryptography experts and tell them you've invented a new cypher and it's really great and could they please have a look. If you are lucky, you will get a few flames telling them that you're the 10th person this month and all the others have been idiots. Not just this month, but for the past 10 years.
Some newbie coming into a field that requires expertise and delivering something that is not a total waste of time to everyone is a once-in-a-decade event. It just happened in mathematics, so yes, it does happen. If you think you're that event, chances are stacked against you solidly.
That doesn't mean you're a bad person. It just means you have a lot to learn, including the nature of the field. And all the hostility and flaming and being obnoxious actually serves a purpose: To shut down the crap as quickly and efficiently as possible, in order to minimize the waste of time.
That's the price you pay for an open development model where everyone can come in and talk to the dev people directly with almost no barriers. Other fields have solved the problem by creating barriers. Try to discuss quantum physics with Hawkins. You'll find that you need to prove several times that you really have something worth discussing just to get there.
In Free Software development, we don't have that barrier. But that means the top people have to deal with the Sturgeon's Law stuff themselves, and they need to do it quickly, and that means skipping the niceties and telling things as they are.
Then together, we will reach everyone. Not everyone gets it by getting it nicely pointed out to them. Sometimes, the clue bat is a necessity.
Uh, this one is really simple.
Don't start at the kernel, idiot.
Don't start at a compiler or programming language or other system part, fool.
Start with an application. In fact, if you need to get that explained, you should start with a good book.
The kernel and compiler, etc. people ought to be hostile to newbies. Their goal is not to teach newbies, it's to deliver reliable code. You don't start learning to fly with a Boing 747 full of passengers, you start with a simulator or a Cessna.
Your first contributions shouldn't be in anything that other (applications) rely on. It should be in an application. Something where if it fails only that thing fails and not everything that depends on it. You'll find that the maintainers of these applications are more forgiving, simply because the burden on them is a lot less.
And yes, I say that as someone who has contributed to bunches of projects.
...to the real cyberpunk world. Megacorporations don't rule the world, they let that dirty work be handled by governments. Instead, the have found a way to corrupt our politics in such a way that we are actually subsidising megacorporations and small companies and taxpayers are footing the bill.
I just hope that the time when history looks upon this period and asks whether we were all insane isn't too far off.
I didn't say you have less corruption in general.
You have less corruption of this particular kind.
This kind of corruption is based on overzealous and overly complex rules and regulations. 3rd world countries usually don't have those, what they have is a lack of regulations, leading to the other kind of corruption, where you need to grease palms to get the wheels of the engine in motion at all, for example.
I don't see any way this can be an honest mistake.
The system is designed to reward false positives, so guess what happens.
I live in the middle of the city. Back when I still had a car, I got roughly half of my parking tickets voided simply by complaining. In the street I live in, the parking rules are confusing and change every 50 or so metres. I once got a ticket voided by asking the person in charge to explain to me what the rules where on the day and the location where I was parked. They couldn't, so they told me to forget about the ticket.
it appears to be open and unchecked corruption on the part of municipal governments. The kind of thing I expect in a banana republic, not America.
Ironically, you will have less of this kind of corruption in 3rd world countries.
It's a system problem. Money drives government, not the other way around.
Ok, first up: I agree the listed fees are just crazy.
3x ($30) is wrong as well, however. Basically it's a simple game-theory problem. You want the value of (fine x probability of being caught) to be greater than the price of legal acquisition. Otherwise the rational choice is to acquire it illegally.
Wherever the chance to be caught is pretty high, treble damages works. But when the chance to be caught is relatively small, as it is with file-sharing, then the proper value of a fine must be higher.
But a fee of $150,000 means the chance to be caught is on the order of 1:10,000 - which basically means that prosecution is ridiculously ineffective.
At these figures, we're entering a different area, the zone of the black swans. At a 1:10,000 chance, you're not seriously figuring it in anymore. Just like you don't figure in the chance of getting hit by a roof tile upon leaving your home whenever you go outside. The chance is just so small that for all practical purposes, it could be zero.
So if in the mental model, the probability is 0%, then the value of fine simply doesn't matter anymore. Or, mathematically speaking, you can't calculate it anymore, because fine = legal price / probability of being caught - which for probability 0 doesn't compute.
And now I forgot what I was getting at, that's what you get for chasing a thought to its conclusion. Something that more lawyers should do more often.
It is slavery. I object to being enslaved against my will, even for mundane tasks.
That word doesn't mean what you think it means. And quite frankly, you are devaluing it and insulting everyone who has fought against slavery throughout history.
It's no more oppression than having to work a job you no longer like, but you've signed a contract and it still runs for a time X. Or having to be in school even though you'd rather play outside. Part of society is that you can't do anything you feel like doing all the time.
Plus in my version of it you could even refuse. You'd lose the right to vote or run for public office or otherwise participate in politics, but you could say no.
and doing a lot more good in the world than an average citizen like me is in a position to.
That's true on an absolute scale, but not on a relative one.
Bill Gates is only giving away money he doesn't need. He could burn 90% of his fortune today and it wouldn't make a dent to his style of living.
A lot of average citizen are giving away money for good causes that they could very well use themselves, and that does make a difference to them.
While Bill's money is more in absolute terms and has more effect and he can reach places you couldn't, it is very likely that you are making the bigger sacrifice.
but as a man -- I've come to have a lot of admiration for what he's doing. He's a great example for the rest of the world's wealthiest in doing something truly constructive and beneficial with their unimaginable wealth.
I'm still kind of torn on that. Once you dig beneath the surface, a lot of his current activities aren't entirely white, either. His health activities usually focus on one big provider of the pharmaceuticals, usually one he has stocks in, and generally has the tendency to drive everyone else out of the market. That reminds me a lot of the "old" Bill Gates, and it means that for all the good it does, it also makes people dependent on him, this time not with their computers but with their lives.
...business hostilities are often for show. A huge number of big-corp CEOs are well acquainted with each other or friends, even if their companies fight bitter battles.
In a position like that, you learn to make a difference between the personal and the business. When I rose to a position where I was dealing with the C-Levels directly years ago, I quickly found out that behind closed doors you would regularily get statements like "I'd personally like to do that, but (corporate politics or business reason) I can't." - and sometimes the talk would end there and sometimes it would go into finding a way to get it done. I've been to court with business opponents and shared a ride and a nice conversation with them to the courthouse.
Never confuse the personal relations of two people with the business relations of their companies.