Honestly, I don't see this happening in a more meaningful way than it already does on youtube, right now. Of course people are going to infringe on legitimate copyrights, and it's going to be ignored 95% of the time, until whoever holds the copyright files a DMCA takedown notice.
Is there any legal weight behind this, or is this just gesturing on Apple's part? It certainly seems like Apple shouldn't have any control over what I do with my iPad once I've bought it; no matter if I give it away for free, stick it in a blender, or install my own bootloader. It's certainly their prerogative if they want to say that any of those things void my warranty, but I don't think they can enforce any of their demands on me.
Some of us like the services that the government provides. While I'm generally more in favor of a progressive income, capital gains, or property tax, I'm okay with a sales tax if it means paying for schools, police, and buses.
Neither of those things are recognized as crimes, and neither of those things are the crimes that the student was charged with.
The first case is simply ridiculous; the MCAT isn't an admission exam, it's closer to the SAT, where you take the test and are given a score on a scale up to 45. Medical schools then look at that score, in conjunction with other things, when deciding whether to admit you. Secondly, admission to a school is nothing like intellectual property, other than the fact that neither is a physical object. Thirdly, when applying to a school, you specifically waive the right to sue them over their selection methods (other than those which are federally protected, such as race, age, gender, etc.)
Cheating is almost definitely against the TOS they signed. However, contract violation is not a crime, it's a civil matter, so you can't be arrested for it. Similarly, contract violation is never something as obtuse as "unauthorized access to a computer system."
No one is saying that what they did is okay. No one is saying that they shouldn't be punished within the system that they cheated. However, cheating is not a crime, and it's ridiculous to insist that someone should face criminal punishment for failing to follow a private organization's rules, which have not been given the consideration and due process that actually laws carry.
Lying, in general, is not illegal. Breaking a contractual obligation, as mysidia pointed out above, is illegal, but not criminal.
The question is not whether they did something wrong: they obviously did. The question is not whether they should be allowed to attend medical school: they clearly should not. The question is whether they committed any of the crimes that they're being charged with, and I'm not sure that they did.
You can't make "suspected future intention to cheat on a licensing exam" a crime. The unauthorized use of a computer doesn't even make any sense, as well as using a device to obtain unauthorized access to a service. I'd be interested to see if they can make "theft" stick: the tests usually come with boilerplate preventing you from making unauthorized copies, but seeing as they paid for the test and were given it freely, that probably doesn't apply. The tests do usually come with boilerplate saying you can't make unauthorized copies, but that'd fall under contract violation, which is a civil violation, not criminal.
The thing is, they cheated, but that's not really illegal. It's wrong, but not illegal. They didn't endanger any lives; sure, they might have at some point, but they didn't actually do anything yet. They shouldn't be allowed into medical school, they should never be doctors, but they shouldn't be arrested.
The MCAT is incredibly difficult. If you don't know the answers, there is very little room to use your multiple-choice-guessing skills like you were able to do on the SAT. Someone who - let's be realistic - probably cheated their way through their undergrad has just about zero chance of getting a score good enough to get into any medical school.
I don't know what the moral here is, though. Cheaters never prosper? That can't be right... Cheaters seldom prosper? No...
In this case, it looks like Wolf-Simon published her results, and some peers fired off some immediate critiques of her methods, while others raised questions based off of what is already known of molecular biology. Wolf-Simon is responding to 8 of these criticisms in the latest publication of Science. As far as I can tell, no one has attempted (and succeeded or failed) to reproduce Wolf-Simon's results. There hasn't been a whole lot of time to do the necessary studies.
As far as I can tell, this is science, as she is performed. You publish controversial/novel results, people immediately try to pick your results apart, and you respond to them. In an ideal world, everything would be done with the same level of rigor as these results are being handled, not just the "hard sciences".
I'm sorry that you had such a poor college experience. My own was quite the opposite of yours; I was exposed to a wide breadth of interesting ideas, both within my field of interest and outside of it, by professors who were truly passionate about the topics. When I graduated, I got a decent job, and was able to pay off all of my debt within a year. Had I spent those four years on my own, exclusively developing technical skills, I almost certainly would have more knowledge and practice in marketable skills; however, the knowledge that I gained outside of technical skills, from English, Philosophy, and Sociology classes, has been valuable to me in a qualitatively different way. Spending a semester studying and debating different schools of philosophy gave me tools for interacting with others and understanding my relationship with the world that no amount of SQL-proficiency could replace. Even if there's no monetary value in that, it's still incredibly valuable to me.
Creating more jobs, even "needless" jobs, still produces goods and services that are forcibly injected into the economy. And the money put into the hands of the consumers has a greater effect than simply raising prices; if you gave a thousand homeless guys $5, a thousand hamburgers would be purchased that would not have otherwise been purchased, and they'd be purchased today. The result would not simply be that the price of a hamburger goes up $5. Furthermore, poorer individuals have a higher "demand per dollar earned" than richer individuals. Again, giving a thousand homeless guys $5 immediately creates demand for about $5000 in food, booze, and cigarettes. Giving a millionaire $5000 effectively has no change in the amount of goods and services that he demands. Increasing demand ramps up production, which improves the economy.
Can you elaborate on this at all? I was under the impression that the New Deal pulled us out of the Great Depression, and that employing the poor, even with needless jobs, gave them money which they would immediately pump back into their local economies. I was under the further impression that money in the control of relatively poor individuals has a tendency to cycle through the economy at a much higher rate (is "Money Multiplier" the correct term?), because of their propensity to spend it immediately instead of saving it in a bank. (Contrary to what one might think, while saving money is the responsible thing for an individual to do, it isn't very good for the economy.)
Do you have any evidence to back up your claims that artificial job creation harms the economy? I'm certainly not looking for a complete Economics lesson here, but it would be nice to know if your claims are backed up by any legitimate Economic theories, or if they're more your "gut feelings."
Why? People seem to enjoy the extras more than they enjoyed the old "monolithic" style of games.
I'd love to come up with a more nuanced discussion of game design than "no u," but your post contains noting but sweeping generalizations, without citing any specific examples. What PS1 games were so much better than anything that we've got nowadays? What exactly do you mean by "core content" as opposed to "extras" - can you name any historic or current games that exemplify your point?
From where I'm sitting, I'm having a hard time imagining anything other than you simply being nostalgic for the games that you played as a child. I'm more than willing to believe that this isn't the case; however I'm apparently having a failure of imagination.
The study identified 3 top payment-processors for spam sites. Surely these processors aren't the weak link; their business model is to process payments for spammers. You can't simply ask them not to process spam payments - there is a financial disincentive for them to do so.
We could move one rung up the ladder, and ask Visa and Mastercard not to authorize any paments to these top-3 processors. However, we've just "widened" the narrowest point, plus, these companies have a financial incentive to grin and pass the buck. Maybe less so; I'd be interested in the number of consumers who later try to contest these payments, but I'm willing to bet that dealing with fraction of unhappy customers now is less expensive than the net amount the credit cards pull in while processing these shady payments. Otherwise, Visa would have done something by now.
Well, yeah. However, this isn't a "defend your patent or lose it," case where a patent-holder is forced to defend their trivial feature even though they don't really care to; Apple applied for the "AppStore" trademark exactly for this eventuality. They don't want anyone else to be able to use the phrase "App Store" to refer to a place where you can buy apps.
How can we take what we've learned from video games, and apply it to education? Our education system is failing a distressingly high portion of students; could we make Math and Literature "stick" better by gamifying the subjects in a meaningful way? I know that (most) of us are over gold-stars at this point, but can we take the lesson of "overemphasize success" from Peggle, and give kids a "you're freaking awesome!" anthem whenever they master a new skill? Would we be better served by a Super Mario Bros approach to Math, where we give children a "Math Sandbox" to play in, until they feel confident that they could master the test? Or giving them "lives" in a class, so they can have some sort of risk-free feedback system for discovering how much effort is needed to successfully master skills?
I know a lot of hate goes into how much we "coddle" children nowadays, trying to make each of them feel like a special little snowflake, but this isn't licence for the education system to stagnate. If video games are beating our education system at teaching children skills inside the "magic circle," there's no reason why we shouldn't abuse the same "brain hacks" that motivate people to play Farmville to teach high-schoolers algebra.
To be fair, the prosthetic is kind of crap compared to a normally functioning human hand. Give it twenty years, though, and I'm sure there'll be quite a market for utility limbs.
I know that there used to be a simple way to change Bitcoins into USD via Paycoin, but they've been shut down. The article makes it seem like governments have made it impossible and illegal to transform Bitcoins into money. I certainly don't believe anything the article has to say, but could you back up your claim with a link or two? Burden of proof, and all that.
I think you've got that backwards; deflation means currency at rest is becoming more valuable, but interest means that currency (if put in a shoe box) becomes less valuable over time. (Because you could be loaning it out and reaping the interest). In your example, the real interest rate is something like 1% (I don't recall if they're additive or the relationship is more complicated), which means that the investment rate will plummet because doing nothing with your money is comparatively more attractive than it is in a situation with a healthy level of inflation.
Slashdot is a business. This is how they make money. From Slashdot's point of view, all of the other stories are posted to bring in enough traffic that they can guarantee readers for their Packt advertisements. A "more honest" slashdot would skip the middle man, and just be advertisements.
Slashdot Mirror
Honestly, I don't see this happening in a more meaningful way than it already does on youtube, right now. Of course people are going to infringe on legitimate copyrights, and it's going to be ignored 95% of the time, until whoever holds the copyright files a DMCA takedown notice.
How is this evil?
Is there any legal weight behind this, or is this just gesturing on Apple's part? It certainly seems like Apple shouldn't have any control over what I do with my iPad once I've bought it; no matter if I give it away for free, stick it in a blender, or install my own bootloader. It's certainly their prerogative if they want to say that any of those things void my warranty, but I don't think they can enforce any of their demands on me.
Some of us like the services that the government provides. While I'm generally more in favor of a progressive income, capital gains, or property tax, I'm okay with a sales tax if it means paying for schools, police, and buses.
Neither of those things are recognized as crimes, and neither of those things are the crimes that the student was charged with.
The first case is simply ridiculous; the MCAT isn't an admission exam, it's closer to the SAT, where you take the test and are given a score on a scale up to 45. Medical schools then look at that score, in conjunction with other things, when deciding whether to admit you. Secondly, admission to a school is nothing like intellectual property, other than the fact that neither is a physical object. Thirdly, when applying to a school, you specifically waive the right to sue them over their selection methods (other than those which are federally protected, such as race, age, gender, etc.)
Cheating is almost definitely against the TOS they signed. However, contract violation is not a crime, it's a civil matter, so you can't be arrested for it. Similarly, contract violation is never something as obtuse as "unauthorized access to a computer system."
No one is saying that what they did is okay. No one is saying that they shouldn't be punished within the system that they cheated. However, cheating is not a crime, and it's ridiculous to insist that someone should face criminal punishment for failing to follow a private organization's rules, which have not been given the consideration and due process that actually laws carry.
Lying, in general, is not illegal. Breaking a contractual obligation, as mysidia pointed out above, is illegal, but not criminal.
The question is not whether they did something wrong: they obviously did. The question is not whether they should be allowed to attend medical school: they clearly should not. The question is whether they committed any of the crimes that they're being charged with, and I'm not sure that they did.
You can't make "suspected future intention to cheat on a licensing exam" a crime. The unauthorized use of a computer doesn't even make any sense, as well as using a device to obtain unauthorized access to a service. I'd be interested to see if they can make "theft" stick: the tests usually come with boilerplate preventing you from making unauthorized copies, but seeing as they paid for the test and were given it freely, that probably doesn't apply. The tests do usually come with boilerplate saying you can't make unauthorized copies, but that'd fall under contract violation, which is a civil violation, not criminal.
The thing is, they cheated, but that's not really illegal. It's wrong, but not illegal. They didn't endanger any lives; sure, they might have at some point, but they didn't actually do anything yet. They shouldn't be allowed into medical school, they should never be doctors, but they shouldn't be arrested.
The MCAT is incredibly difficult. If you don't know the answers, there is very little room to use your multiple-choice-guessing skills like you were able to do on the SAT. Someone who - let's be realistic - probably cheated their way through their undergrad has just about zero chance of getting a score good enough to get into any medical school.
I don't know what the moral here is, though. Cheaters never prosper? That can't be right... Cheaters seldom prosper? No...
Ah: When cheaters fail, they do so spectacularly.
In this case, it looks like Wolf-Simon published her results, and some peers fired off some immediate critiques of her methods, while others raised questions based off of what is already known of molecular biology. Wolf-Simon is responding to 8 of these criticisms in the latest publication of Science. As far as I can tell, no one has attempted (and succeeded or failed) to reproduce Wolf-Simon's results. There hasn't been a whole lot of time to do the necessary studies.
As far as I can tell, this is science, as she is performed. You publish controversial/novel results, people immediately try to pick your results apart, and you respond to them. In an ideal world, everything would be done with the same level of rigor as these results are being handled, not just the "hard sciences".
I'm sorry that you had such a poor college experience. My own was quite the opposite of yours; I was exposed to a wide breadth of interesting ideas, both within my field of interest and outside of it, by professors who were truly passionate about the topics. When I graduated, I got a decent job, and was able to pay off all of my debt within a year. Had I spent those four years on my own, exclusively developing technical skills, I almost certainly would have more knowledge and practice in marketable skills; however, the knowledge that I gained outside of technical skills, from English, Philosophy, and Sociology classes, has been valuable to me in a qualitatively different way. Spending a semester studying and debating different schools of philosophy gave me tools for interacting with others and understanding my relationship with the world that no amount of SQL-proficiency could replace. Even if there's no monetary value in that, it's still incredibly valuable to me.
You know, I'd never really thought about it like that before. Thanks for your valuable and insightful contribution to this discussion!
you don't split your sentances across the topic
---
and the message body. It's obnoxious.
Creating more jobs, even "needless" jobs, still produces goods and services that are forcibly injected into the economy. And the money put into the hands of the consumers has a greater effect than simply raising prices; if you gave a thousand homeless guys $5, a thousand hamburgers would be purchased that would not have otherwise been purchased, and they'd be purchased today. The result would not simply be that the price of a hamburger goes up $5. Furthermore, poorer individuals have a higher "demand per dollar earned" than richer individuals. Again, giving a thousand homeless guys $5 immediately creates demand for about $5000 in food, booze, and cigarettes. Giving a millionaire $5000 effectively has no change in the amount of goods and services that he demands. Increasing demand ramps up production, which improves the economy.
Can you elaborate on this at all? I was under the impression that the New Deal pulled us out of the Great Depression, and that employing the poor, even with needless jobs, gave them money which they would immediately pump back into their local economies. I was under the further impression that money in the control of relatively poor individuals has a tendency to cycle through the economy at a much higher rate (is "Money Multiplier" the correct term?), because of their propensity to spend it immediately instead of saving it in a bank. (Contrary to what one might think, while saving money is the responsible thing for an individual to do, it isn't very good for the economy.)
Do you have any evidence to back up your claims that artificial job creation harms the economy? I'm certainly not looking for a complete Economics lesson here, but it would be nice to know if your claims are backed up by any legitimate Economic theories, or if they're more your "gut feelings."
Why? People seem to enjoy the extras more than they enjoyed the old "monolithic" style of games.
I'd love to come up with a more nuanced discussion of game design than "no u," but your post contains noting but sweeping generalizations, without citing any specific examples. What PS1 games were so much better than anything that we've got nowadays? What exactly do you mean by "core content" as opposed to "extras" - can you name any historic or current games that exemplify your point?
From where I'm sitting, I'm having a hard time imagining anything other than you simply being nostalgic for the games that you played as a child. I'm more than willing to believe that this isn't the case; however I'm apparently having a failure of imagination.
Ah. You're absolutely right, I'm not sure what I was thinking; it is trademarks which you have to defend or lose.
Where's the money in that?
The study identified 3 top payment-processors for spam sites. Surely these processors aren't the weak link; their business model is to process payments for spammers. You can't simply ask them not to process spam payments - there is a financial disincentive for them to do so.
We could move one rung up the ladder, and ask Visa and Mastercard not to authorize any paments to these top-3 processors. However, we've just "widened" the narrowest point, plus, these companies have a financial incentive to grin and pass the buck. Maybe less so; I'd be interested in the number of consumers who later try to contest these payments, but I'm willing to bet that dealing with fraction of unhappy customers now is less expensive than the net amount the credit cards pull in while processing these shady payments. Otherwise, Visa would have done something by now.
Well, yeah. However, this isn't a "defend your patent or lose it," case where a patent-holder is forced to defend their trivial feature even though they don't really care to; Apple applied for the "AppStore" trademark exactly for this eventuality. They don't want anyone else to be able to use the phrase "App Store" to refer to a place where you can buy apps.
How can we take what we've learned from video games, and apply it to education? Our education system is failing a distressingly high portion of students; could we make Math and Literature "stick" better by gamifying the subjects in a meaningful way? I know that (most) of us are over gold-stars at this point, but can we take the lesson of "overemphasize success" from Peggle, and give kids a "you're freaking awesome!" anthem whenever they master a new skill? Would we be better served by a Super Mario Bros approach to Math, where we give children a "Math Sandbox" to play in, until they feel confident that they could master the test? Or giving them "lives" in a class, so they can have some sort of risk-free feedback system for discovering how much effort is needed to successfully master skills?
I know a lot of hate goes into how much we "coddle" children nowadays, trying to make each of them feel like a special little snowflake, but this isn't licence for the education system to stagnate. If video games are beating our education system at teaching children skills inside the "magic circle," there's no reason why we shouldn't abuse the same "brain hacks" that motivate people to play Farmville to teach high-schoolers algebra.
Most people, it turns out. Who'da thunk?
(Most people, it turns out.)
To be fair, the prosthetic is kind of crap compared to a normally functioning human hand. Give it twenty years, though, and I'm sure there'll be quite a market for utility limbs.
I know that there used to be a simple way to change Bitcoins into USD via Paycoin, but they've been shut down. The article makes it seem like governments have made it impossible and illegal to transform Bitcoins into money. I certainly don't believe anything the article has to say, but could you back up your claim with a link or two? Burden of proof, and all that.
I think you've got that backwards; deflation means currency at rest is becoming more valuable, but interest means that currency (if put in a shoe box) becomes less valuable over time. (Because you could be loaning it out and reaping the interest). In your example, the real interest rate is something like 1% (I don't recall if they're additive or the relationship is more complicated), which means that the investment rate will plummet because doing nothing with your money is comparatively more attractive than it is in a situation with a healthy level of inflation.
Slashdot is a business. This is how they make money. From Slashdot's point of view, all of the other stories are posted to bring in enough traffic that they can guarantee readers for their Packt advertisements. A "more honest" slashdot would skip the middle man, and just be advertisements.