In the war against copyright, it's important to find any excuse to dismiss intellectual property. The oft-repeated claim about Hollywood and patents is just another canard in that fight.
It seems like this could be an argument against war in general (regardless of the circumstances). I'm not sure that I could buy into the logic of that phrase, since it suggests that the only right way to fight Nazis in WW2 is through a pacifism campaign.
The only outcome of censorship, logically, is less of whatever it is you are trying to censor.
Less Botulism? Sound good!
So yes, if the objective is more science, and you would hope it would be, then you do not want the government interfering with it.
Ohhhh, you meant less science. Seriously, though, Science isn't the only variable we're concerned about here. You need to think about the idea that one discovery can affect multiple variables in society (not just the one called "science"). It isn't hard to think of ways that stuff can be abused. In general, we've tried to keep other weapon technology under wraps, as well.
Your way of thinking about these issues seems oversimplistic.
They want realistic war games to be more realistic.
No, they want to teach "rules of war" and they think that violent videogames promote real-world violence. It isn't about "being realistic". Game developers leave out a *ton* of stuff from wargames - your character doesn't need to pee, eat regular meals, clean his gun or restock rounds, clean toilets, put up with the bureaucracy of a military establishment, or boredom of nothing happening for days on end. Having consequences for bad behavior is another one of those (many) "not fun" things that gets left out of games because it's not fun.
Yeash. Did you even read the original comment: "The LSE is a very LEFT-leaning institution... which means that they can provide the "straight dope" on piracy, without trying to please rightwing conservatives who constantly scream that "piracy is theft"."
I wasn't the one who brought up the "right versus left" split - it was a pro-piracy poster.
Possibly because the left is generally in bed with Hollywood and if there was political bias involved, it would likely be toward the industry's side, which it is not.
Did you read the original comment: "without trying to please rightwing conservatives who constantly scream that "piracy is theft"."
So, the rightwing conservatives are anti-piracy because "rightwing conservatives who constantly scream that "piracy is theft"." and the left-wing is "generally in bed with Hollywood and if there was political bias involved, it would likely be toward the industry's side, which it is not.".
It just goes to show that pirates will use whatever they can to claim "this side is biased against piracy, therefore any pro-piracy report must be correct!".
I'm unclear on your point. I think we all agree that a criminal is never going to return your car. A police officer commandeering your car isn't (and shouldn't be) planning on keeping your car, isn't going to sell it for money, and isn't going to strip it down for parts to sell.
The LSE is a very LEFT-leaning institution...... which means that they can provide the "straight dope" on piracy,
Why should I trust a "very LEFT-leaning institution"? Personally, I'd write them off as being idiots and anti-establishment. Being anti-establishment is going to give them a bias TOWARDS piracy. Communism is also a "very left-leaning" idea. It's still a stupid idea, even if "they aren't polluted by corporate interests, therefore their pro-communism stance is unbiased" or some nonsense.
In this day and age consumers are EXTREMELY sensitive to pricing. I don't need to remind you that Valve saw over 2000% (yes, 2000%) increase in Steam sales when they lowered the prices of L4D.
Gee, do you think that the massive amount of press and promotion they get from the price drop might be a favor (rather that just the price drop)?
At the end of the day its all bits. Claiming pseudo-ownership over a certain order/representation of them is insane but it is the current system we have, for better, or worse.
So, you're arguing that everything digital should be free, that anybody can sell other people's copyrighted works (like Walmart or Amazon printing up their own copies of books without paying anybody), and plagarism doesn't actually exist (afterall, why should you have to cite the original author when it's just an arrangement of bits?). Good luck with that. Even most of the anti-copyright activists oppose the idea of being able to *sell* other people's copyrighted works.
Conversely, there ARE some countries where downloading isn't a crime, so stop with your rhetoric that piracy == stealing.
Oh, well, if the individual laws of each country are going to be our standard for what's stealing, then I have to ask you whether or not it's possible for a government to steal money from its people. Afterall, if the government makes laws that allows it to confiscate property from it's people -- it "isn't stealing". Therefore, it's impossible for a country to "steal" from it's people (either by seizing property, or taking a cut of AID payments that were designed to go to it's people) so that it can enrich the local dictator, king, or anybody else who has seized power. Dictators and despots everywhere love the philosophical rhetoric you've constructed around "stealing".
The goal is to _understand_ how those in (3) move to the other categories.
No, it goes a lot deeper than that. I know people who changed from #1 (because they didn't know about piracy and didn't know how to pirate) to category #4 (because "why pay for something you can get for free [via piracy]"?) The very existence of easy access to piracy helps shift those people into piracy. If there's any doubt that he would've paid for it if piracy wasn't an option -- he *USED* to spend plenty of money on digital media.
Heroin overdose among experienced users with steady supplies are unheard of. Heroin is quite safe, actually.
The letal dose of heroin is 5x an "effective dose". I suppose some people who know what they're doing can avoid an overdose, but the gap between an effective dose and a lethal dose is a lot closer for heroin than for - well - every other illegal drug on this list: http://www.americanscientist.org/libraries/documents/200645104835_307.pdf
Now that you know all this, you and all other prohibitionists, especially those in Congress, are engaged in willful murder.
That's a pretty serious charge. I think you should reevalutate your definition of "willful murder". There's a real difference between showing up at someone's house and shooting them, versus making a drug illegal, causing a drug-user to seek out less-safe alternatives, resulting in them overdosing. The thing is that if you make a drug legal, it has complex effects on usage. One result might be an increase in drug use and then an increase in death rates (not only from drug overdose, but also indirect increases in crime as users mug/steal from people to get drug money or driving cars while under the influence). Further, there are other things involved in the decision to make a drug illegal than simply "reducing the number of deaths in society" - for example, if legalizing heroin resulted in fewer deaths, but a lot more people destroying their lives with heroin (but still living to a ripe old age), the second alternative might be worse. In the Vice videos about krokodile, they claim that something like 20% of the population of one city in Russia is addicted to heroin. I question those numbers, but one can see how a city with 20% heroin addiction rates might be a worse fate than having a 1% addiction rate + a dozen addicts dying each year. http://www.vice.com/vice-news/siberia-krokodil-tears-part-1
When the "greenhouse gas" you are trying to reduce the emissions of is CO2 than no there is no distance at all between "finding ways to reduce greenhose gas emissions" and "all economic activity is controlled by the government" because ALL economic activity generates CO2 (all human activity generates CO2).
Yeah, as if the cycling of carbon dioxide from plants to animals/humans and back is equivalent to digging up long-buried carbon dioxide and putting it into the atmosphere. Secondly, reducing carbon emissions is still a long way from controlling all activity. If we put a $2 / gallon tax on gasoline, how does this result in "controlling everything you do"? It doesn't. It means you pay a little money to drive anywhere and it incentivizes alternative fuel sources (which I would think that conservatives would appreciate since the world oil-based economy makes Middle Eastern Muslims rich). You're just trying to find a reason to avoid doing anything about our carbon emissions.
It seems to me that conservatives are just ideologically inclined to drag their feet on *anything* environmentally related. The science doesn't seem to matter. At this point, conservatives have devolved into the party of "not-shitting-on-the-environment is a liberal idea, and we have to oppose everything environment-related because we love any excuse to attack anyone on the left". It's retarded and childish and dangerous.
Oh, going straight for the "they're making us into communists!" scare? How about this: "finding ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions" is a long way from "all economic activity is controlled by the government".
(Or maybe the US government already made us into communists with their "reducing cloroflorocarbons + ozone" scare. Remember that? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone_depletion )
Hey AC. I support what you're saying, even if lots of angry Slashdot commenters can't. What's funny is that people will invent all kinds of reasons to disagree with you, and then they'll turn around and attack you for "believing that Kickstarter is riskless". Duh. The fact that Kickstarter is *RISKY* is a legitimate reason not to fund stuff. It's funny how Slashdotters will agree with what you're saying, but pretend that they disagree and find ways to vilify and insult you for holding the same view that they do (i.e. funding a kickstarter project is risky, and not everyone is comfortable with that risk).
I've worried in the past about what will happen if 3d printing (and I mean real 3d printing that can build all kinds of stuff, not just plastic parts). For stuff that's easy to design (like a coffee mug), I would expect that it wouldn't cause many problems. Open-source designers can design the stuff in an hour or so and give it away. No big deal. For stuff that takes a lot more engineering, like a car, I'd be worried about our ability to continue designing into the future. If designers can't get paid for their work (because everybody's downloading the designs off Piratebay or something and not paying anybody for the design work), then it could harm society's progress. Maybe some sort of kickstarter system could pay for the design (but, again, this works best if the design is relatively cheap). Or maybe people will donate. We'll see. Depending on how things shake-out, we could end up driving a bunch of old fuel-efficient, and unsafe cars that were designed in yesteryear rather than being able to take advantage of much-better designed cars that could never be designed because the market for design has dropped out from underneath us (due to rampant piracy). For stuff that's relatively rare (like designing a Spacecraft), then maybe one entity (i.e. a government or company or billionaire) would be willing to pay the entire bill for the design work. Or maybe the government will fund design work for a variety of consumer devices through tax dollars (essentially the Soviet Union model). Or maybe companies will attempt to tightly control their designs so they don't get copied (e.g. if a company creates a self-driving taxi, but never releases any of the design plans to anybody, thereby allowing them to get a return on their design work through their automated taxi service).
It would be sad to see humanity's technological progress hobbled by ubiquitous printing (a cool technology) that undermines the economics of designing new stuff - at least when that economic model relies on "spreading out the costs of designing stuff over a the population of people who use that device" (which has actually been a very good model - probably the best model in the past few centuries - for the design and production of new stuff).
There's a big difference, though. Brewing still requires learning how to brew, buying hardware, time, and work. Plus, big companies can benefit from economies of scale. Further, the recipes aren't necessarily available. If I wanted to brew a Stella or a Guinness, I'm doubtful that I could create anything that could pass as "close enough". 3D printing is different. 3D printing means putting a design in the machine and waiting for it to print. There's a large gap between brewing and 3d printing that makes the comparison not very useful.
So, you're comparing one manned mission versus one robot mission? What if a manned mission costs a hundred times as much money as one robot mission? If that's the case, then we should compare the scientific usefulness not of "one manned mission versus one robot mission" but rather "one manned mission versus one hundred robot missions".
Fine, let's sidestep the whole issue about taxpayers deciding how much money to spend on space exploration. Let's assume that NASA has a fixed budget. If human space exploration costs a lot more than robot space exploration, then we're deciding between one manned mission versus a dozen or more robot missions. From the standpoint of "how much can we learn", the one human mission might be quite a bit less useful than a dozen separate robot missions.
(I kind of get annoyed by all the "tug on emotional heartstrings" arguments about "doing it because it's hard" or "it's like climbing Mt Everest" type arguments that, it seems to me, are a poor way of making decisions about the allocation of limited resources.)
Geez, I hate your logic. I could also say, "It is foolish to assume that the [people] are perfect angels who could never mean you any harm; this has never been true and never will be true."
Ergo: never trust anyone, including all software developers - including open source developers (stop using software) and web developers (why the heck are you on the internet, don't you know that creators of the internet, the people at your ISP, and Slashdot developers aren't "perfect angels")?
Except that I don't recall any of the telephone companies stopping the NSA. And it's been claimed that Qwest lost out on US government contracts because it put up resistance to the US government.
When Qwest refused the NSA’s illegal request that it hand over its customers’ data without a warrant, the NSA wasn’t happy. According to former Qwest CEO Joseph Nacchio, the government hit back for the telecom’s refusal by denying them lucrative contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
Here's the thing: when there is competition, the government can play favorites with whoever does their bidding best. Remember the whole Yahoo-China thing? China could kick Yahoo out of China so Yahoo had to roll-over so that they could keep their marketshare. And Yahoo fought against the NSA in court as well, but they lost. What did Marissa Mayer say about that again?
"Yahoo chief Marissa Mayer said she feared winding up in prison for treason if she refused to comply with U.S. spy demands for data.
Her comments came after being asked what she is doing to protect Yahoo users from "tyrannical government" during an on-stage interview Wednesday afternoon at a TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco."
* Congrats, Cory. You've gotten on Slashdot several times in the past few weeks. Remember: it's important to keep your name in the news so that you can sell more books. Too bad your analysis is overly simplistic.
If you don't know what your bottleneck is going out to buy hardware is a stupid move.
He was upgrading to SSDs, so he did a test before and after the upgrade. He didn't say that he was upgrading specifically to speed up compiles. He also said that everything else worked much faster on his computer, so he was happy with the purchase. (So, your criticism about how "stupid" he is for upgrading kind of misses it's mark.)
Slashdot Mirror
In the war against copyright, it's important to find any excuse to dismiss intellectual property. The oft-repeated claim about Hollywood and patents is just another canard in that fight.
It seems like this could be an argument against war in general (regardless of the circumstances). I'm not sure that I could buy into the logic of that phrase, since it suggests that the only right way to fight Nazis in WW2 is through a pacifism campaign.
When has with holding information 'ever' been the right move?
Ever heard of World War 2?
The only outcome of censorship, logically, is less of whatever it is you are trying to censor.
Less Botulism? Sound good!
So yes, if the objective is more science, and you would hope it would be, then you do not want the government interfering with it.
Ohhhh, you meant less science. Seriously, though, Science isn't the only variable we're concerned about here. You need to think about the idea that one discovery can affect multiple variables in society (not just the one called "science"). It isn't hard to think of ways that stuff can be abused. In general, we've tried to keep other weapon technology under wraps, as well.
Your way of thinking about these issues seems oversimplistic.
That's true. Although, I think it'll cause sales of the Steam Machine console, not necessarily Linux in general.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2053680/valve-amd-based-steam-machines-are-also-en-route.html
They want realistic war games to be more realistic.
No, they want to teach "rules of war" and they think that violent videogames promote real-world violence. It isn't about "being realistic". Game developers leave out a *ton* of stuff from wargames - your character doesn't need to pee, eat regular meals, clean his gun or restock rounds, clean toilets, put up with the bureaucracy of a military establishment, or boredom of nothing happening for days on end. Having consequences for bad behavior is another one of those (many) "not fun" things that gets left out of games because it's not fun.
Yeash. Did you even read the original comment: "The LSE is a very LEFT-leaning institution... which means that they can provide the "straight dope" on piracy, without trying to please rightwing conservatives who constantly scream that "piracy is theft"."
I wasn't the one who brought up the "right versus left" split - it was a pro-piracy poster.
Possibly because the left is generally in bed with Hollywood and if there was political bias involved, it would likely be toward the industry's side, which it is not.
Did you read the original comment: "without trying to please rightwing conservatives who constantly scream that "piracy is theft"."
So, the rightwing conservatives are anti-piracy because "rightwing conservatives who constantly scream that "piracy is theft"." and the left-wing is "generally in bed with Hollywood and if there was political bias involved, it would likely be toward the industry's side, which it is not.".
It just goes to show that pirates will use whatever they can to claim "this side is biased against piracy, therefore any pro-piracy report must be correct!".
I'm unclear on your point. I think we all agree that a criminal is never going to return your car. A police officer commandeering your car isn't (and shouldn't be) planning on keeping your car, isn't going to sell it for money, and isn't going to strip it down for parts to sell.
The LSE is a very LEFT-leaning institution...... which means that they can provide the "straight dope" on piracy,
Why should I trust a "very LEFT-leaning institution"? Personally, I'd write them off as being idiots and anti-establishment. Being anti-establishment is going to give them a bias TOWARDS piracy. Communism is also a "very left-leaning" idea. It's still a stupid idea, even if "they aren't polluted by corporate interests, therefore their pro-communism stance is unbiased" or some nonsense.
In this day and age consumers are EXTREMELY sensitive to pricing. I don't need to remind you that Valve saw over 2000% (yes, 2000%) increase in Steam sales when they lowered the prices of L4D.
Gee, do you think that the massive amount of press and promotion they get from the price drop might be a favor (rather that just the price drop)?
At the end of the day its all bits. Claiming pseudo-ownership over a certain order/representation of them is insane but it is the current system we have, for better, or worse.
So, you're arguing that everything digital should be free, that anybody can sell other people's copyrighted works (like Walmart or Amazon printing up their own copies of books without paying anybody), and plagarism doesn't actually exist (afterall, why should you have to cite the original author when it's just an arrangement of bits?). Good luck with that. Even most of the anti-copyright activists oppose the idea of being able to *sell* other people's copyrighted works.
Conversely, there ARE some countries where downloading isn't a crime, so stop with your rhetoric that piracy == stealing.
Oh, well, if the individual laws of each country are going to be our standard for what's stealing, then I have to ask you whether or not it's possible for a government to steal money from its people. Afterall, if the government makes laws that allows it to confiscate property from it's people -- it "isn't stealing". Therefore, it's impossible for a country to "steal" from it's people (either by seizing property, or taking a cut of AID payments that were designed to go to it's people) so that it can enrich the local dictator, king, or anybody else who has seized power. Dictators and despots everywhere love the philosophical rhetoric you've constructed around "stealing".
The goal is to _understand_ how those in (3) move to the other categories.
No, it goes a lot deeper than that. I know people who changed from #1 (because they didn't know about piracy and didn't know how to pirate) to category #4 (because "why pay for something you can get for free [via piracy]"?) The very existence of easy access to piracy helps shift those people into piracy. If there's any doubt that he would've paid for it if piracy wasn't an option -- he *USED* to spend plenty of money on digital media.
Heroin overdose among experienced users with steady supplies are unheard of. Heroin is quite safe, actually.
The letal dose of heroin is 5x an "effective dose". I suppose some people who know what they're doing can avoid an overdose, but the gap between an effective dose and a lethal dose is a lot closer for heroin than for - well - every other illegal drug on this list: http://www.americanscientist.org/libraries/documents/200645104835_307.pdf
Now that you know all this, you and all other prohibitionists, especially those in Congress, are engaged in willful murder.
That's a pretty serious charge. I think you should reevalutate your definition of "willful murder". There's a real difference between showing up at someone's house and shooting them, versus making a drug illegal, causing a drug-user to seek out less-safe alternatives, resulting in them overdosing. The thing is that if you make a drug legal, it has complex effects on usage. One result might be an increase in drug use and then an increase in death rates (not only from drug overdose, but also indirect increases in crime as users mug/steal from people to get drug money or driving cars while under the influence). Further, there are other things involved in the decision to make a drug illegal than simply "reducing the number of deaths in society" - for example, if legalizing heroin resulted in fewer deaths, but a lot more people destroying their lives with heroin (but still living to a ripe old age), the second alternative might be worse. In the Vice videos about krokodile, they claim that something like 20% of the population of one city in Russia is addicted to heroin. I question those numbers, but one can see how a city with 20% heroin addiction rates might be a worse fate than having a 1% addiction rate + a dozen addicts dying each year.
http://www.vice.com/vice-news/siberia-krokodil-tears-part-1
I only recognize that reference because of a recent "NPR Planet Money". http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/07/19/201430727/what-actually-happens-at-the-end-of-trading-places
When the "greenhouse gas" you are trying to reduce the emissions of is CO2 than no there is no distance at all between "finding ways to reduce greenhose gas emissions" and "all economic activity is controlled by the government" because ALL economic activity generates CO2 (all human activity generates CO2).
Yeah, as if the cycling of carbon dioxide from plants to animals/humans and back is equivalent to digging up long-buried carbon dioxide and putting it into the atmosphere. Secondly, reducing carbon emissions is still a long way from controlling all activity. If we put a $2 / gallon tax on gasoline, how does this result in "controlling everything you do"? It doesn't. It means you pay a little money to drive anywhere and it incentivizes alternative fuel sources (which I would think that conservatives would appreciate since the world oil-based economy makes Middle Eastern Muslims rich). You're just trying to find a reason to avoid doing anything about our carbon emissions.
Speaking of the Ozone layer, looks like Rush Limbaugh was denying a human role in Ozone depletion, too. Are all conservatives this scientifically illiterate?
http://mediamatters.org/research/2005/08/16/limbaugh-falsely-denied-human-causes-of-ozone-d/133658
It seems to me that conservatives are just ideologically inclined to drag their feet on *anything* environmentally related. The science doesn't seem to matter. At this point, conservatives have devolved into the party of "not-shitting-on-the-environment is a liberal idea, and we have to oppose everything environment-related because we love any excuse to attack anyone on the left". It's retarded and childish and dangerous.
Oh, going straight for the "they're making us into communists!" scare? How about this: "finding ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions" is a long way from "all economic activity is controlled by the government".
(Or maybe the US government already made us into communists with their "reducing cloroflorocarbons + ozone" scare. Remember that? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone_depletion )
Hey AC. I support what you're saying, even if lots of angry Slashdot commenters can't. What's funny is that people will invent all kinds of reasons to disagree with you, and then they'll turn around and attack you for "believing that Kickstarter is riskless". Duh. The fact that Kickstarter is *RISKY* is a legitimate reason not to fund stuff. It's funny how Slashdotters will agree with what you're saying, but pretend that they disagree and find ways to vilify and insult you for holding the same view that they do (i.e. funding a kickstarter project is risky, and not everyone is comfortable with that risk).
I've worried in the past about what will happen if 3d printing (and I mean real 3d printing that can build all kinds of stuff, not just plastic parts). For stuff that's easy to design (like a coffee mug), I would expect that it wouldn't cause many problems. Open-source designers can design the stuff in an hour or so and give it away. No big deal. For stuff that takes a lot more engineering, like a car, I'd be worried about our ability to continue designing into the future. If designers can't get paid for their work (because everybody's downloading the designs off Piratebay or something and not paying anybody for the design work), then it could harm society's progress. Maybe some sort of kickstarter system could pay for the design (but, again, this works best if the design is relatively cheap). Or maybe people will donate. We'll see. Depending on how things shake-out, we could end up driving a bunch of old fuel-efficient, and unsafe cars that were designed in yesteryear rather than being able to take advantage of much-better designed cars that could never be designed because the market for design has dropped out from underneath us (due to rampant piracy). For stuff that's relatively rare (like designing a Spacecraft), then maybe one entity (i.e. a government or company or billionaire) would be willing to pay the entire bill for the design work. Or maybe the government will fund design work for a variety of consumer devices through tax dollars (essentially the Soviet Union model). Or maybe companies will attempt to tightly control their designs so they don't get copied (e.g. if a company creates a self-driving taxi, but never releases any of the design plans to anybody, thereby allowing them to get a return on their design work through their automated taxi service).
It would be sad to see humanity's technological progress hobbled by ubiquitous printing (a cool technology) that undermines the economics of designing new stuff - at least when that economic model relies on "spreading out the costs of designing stuff over a the population of people who use that device" (which has actually been a very good model - probably the best model in the past few centuries - for the design and production of new stuff).
There's a big difference, though. Brewing still requires learning how to brew, buying hardware, time, and work. Plus, big companies can benefit from economies of scale. Further, the recipes aren't necessarily available. If I wanted to brew a Stella or a Guinness, I'm doubtful that I could create anything that could pass as "close enough". 3D printing is different. 3D printing means putting a design in the machine and waiting for it to print. There's a large gap between brewing and 3d printing that makes the comparison not very useful.
So, you're comparing one manned mission versus one robot mission? What if a manned mission costs a hundred times as much money as one robot mission? If that's the case, then we should compare the scientific usefulness not of "one manned mission versus one robot mission" but rather "one manned mission versus one hundred robot missions".
Fine, let's sidestep the whole issue about taxpayers deciding how much money to spend on space exploration. Let's assume that NASA has a fixed budget. If human space exploration costs a lot more than robot space exploration, then we're deciding between one manned mission versus a dozen or more robot missions. From the standpoint of "how much can we learn", the one human mission might be quite a bit less useful than a dozen separate robot missions.
(I kind of get annoyed by all the "tug on emotional heartstrings" arguments about "doing it because it's hard" or "it's like climbing Mt Everest" type arguments that, it seems to me, are a poor way of making decisions about the allocation of limited resources.)
Geez, I hate your logic. I could also say, "It is foolish to assume that the [people] are perfect angels who could never mean you any harm; this has never been true and never will be true."
Ergo: never trust anyone, including all software developers - including open source developers (stop using software) and web developers (why the heck are you on the internet, don't you know that creators of the internet, the people at your ISP, and Slashdot developers aren't "perfect angels")?
When Qwest refused the NSA’s illegal request that it hand over its customers’ data without a warrant, the NSA wasn’t happy. According to former Qwest CEO Joseph Nacchio, the government hit back for the telecom’s refusal by denying them lucrative contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2007/10/qwest-ceo-nsa-punished-qwest-refusing-participate-illegal-surveillance-pre-9-11
Here's the thing: when there is competition, the government can play favorites with whoever does their bidding best. Remember the whole Yahoo-China thing? China could kick Yahoo out of China so Yahoo had to roll-over so that they could keep their marketshare. And Yahoo fought against the NSA in court as well, but they lost. What did Marissa Mayer say about that again?
"Yahoo chief Marissa Mayer said she feared winding up in prison for treason if she refused to comply with U.S. spy demands for data. Her comments came after being asked what she is doing to protect Yahoo users from "tyrannical government" during an on-stage interview Wednesday afternoon at a TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco."
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2013/09/12/yahoo-ceo-fears-defying-nsa-could-mean-prison/
* Congrats, Cory. You've gotten on Slashdot several times in the past few weeks. Remember: it's important to keep your name in the news so that you can sell more books. Too bad your analysis is overly simplistic.
If you don't know what your bottleneck is going out to buy hardware is a stupid move.
He was upgrading to SSDs, so he did a test before and after the upgrade. He didn't say that he was upgrading specifically to speed up compiles. He also said that everything else worked much faster on his computer, so he was happy with the purchase. (So, your criticism about how "stupid" he is for upgrading kind of misses it's mark.)