This is one idea that I really don't understand. Why would the security firms want to hire someone who has hacked into computers? Homicide detectives don't hire murderers, the SEC doesn't hire fraudsters, the ATF doesn't hire drunk smokers w/ unregistered firearm violations....
The real life guy on whose life the movie Catch Me If You Can is based was hired by our (the American) government to help stop check fraud. The man was a brilliant defrauder, and mastered the nation's reserve bank and check system to defraud himself into a life of extreme luxury. He was hired by the government to advise them on improving the system, and, I believe, continues to advise to this day.
So yes, we do stuff like that. We let known criminals off if they'll finger somebody worse, then pay for their well being and anonymous protection via the witness protection program. That's my tax money paying to supplement the life of a criminal only because he happened to also be a tattletale.
"CNN is running a story about how a German inventor has found a way to power a car using dead cats. Yes you read that right."
Weird, because if you read the actual story, it's about how the guy is not really using cats, it's just a rumor that he's denied.
What is WRONG with the editors?
If Bill Gates were to say, "I really like dogs. I also like peanut butter sandwiches," we'd have a Slashdot story that says, "According to Reuters, Bill Gates does not "really like dogs" or does he "like peanut butter sandwiches."
And then you would predictably respond with a bunch of anti-Microsoft nonsense.
You have to wonder how much deliberate trolling the editors do.
I think most people agree on that those health care system works better than the one in USA.
Knowing people who live in Europe and deal with their health care system, they only like one thing about it: it's mostly hassle-free. Yeah their taxes are insane but if you need something done you just go to the hospital or whatever, and don't have to deal with insurance claims and what not.
My friends and distant relations in Canada spin another tail. Most of them carry modest insurance to get work done in the US due to the logjam in the Canadian system.
I don't LIKE our health care system, but I enjoy its relative alacrity and flexibility. I enjoy the freedom to make my own decisions, for the most part, about what I get done, and when.
For an extreme comparison look to Cuba which has one of the worlds better health care systems with only governmental involvement.
Yeah, but I don't like the other stuff you have to put up with to get it, like living in utter poverty unless you're involved with the government, or being jailed and/or executed for disagreeing with the wrong people.
I think nationalized medicine can work, but we're kidding ourselves about what it'd cost in America. With as many people as we have hauling around the mass equivilent of entire additional people in their asses, guts, and thighs, I cringe in terror at the thought of what it'd cost us (as in, you and me) to finance a public health care structure that has to deal with these fatties. It's not a matter of "could we do it" it's a matter of "would it be any better than what we have now?" I'm not sure that it would, and I'm even less convinced that our political leadership knows either. It'd just "be nice." Sort of like Bush's prescription drug thing. Nobody really thought seriously, "What is this going to cost us in the long run?" Or even the short run. Pure political philandering.
PS Yes, in this post I state some opinions that I do not back up further, and while this generally is bad I think that they should be clear enough.
So I guess none of us should criticize poor **insert ANY kind of job/skillset here** unless we can do better?
Not at all. If you want to look at the effort done by somebody and offer specific criticisms of it, fine. To issue blanket statements that just blast somebody's work without ACTUALLY CRITICIZING THE WORK ITSELF, and just insulting the person who wrote it, then yeah I'll ask you to put up or stfu.
So it's OK for your car mechanic to do a poor job, because YOU can't do better yourself? We can't criticize the President because we have not been President?
It's not ok for me to say, "God my mechanics is an incompetant douchebag" without providing any evidence of my specific complaint, or demonstrating that would know a competant mechanic from a shitty one. Compare and contrast.
"This is a game interview? How about addressing blah blah or touching on blah blah. When you review games, you ought to blah blah blah and Zonk just blah blah blah."
Versus:
"omg stfu zonk u suq omg lol"
Or, to use your analogy.
"My car mechanic is a total stupid moron who can't fix cars to save his ass." This is just an insult.
"My car mechanic is completely incompetant, I brought my Toyota in for a battery change and he somehow dislodged the air hose and then clearly never drove it because when I got it on the road it wouldn't shift out of 2nd gear."
If it looks like shit, smells like shit, you don't need to be a shit expert to call it what it is: SHIT!
Uhhh, Mr. Gates? Unix? Multics, fer chrissake?
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Bill Gates Speaks Out
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· Score: 5, Insightful
"Software in general, whether it was from Microsoft or somebody else, was not set up for an environment where all the computers were connected together. So it's not like there was capability and our software did not. As we use the Internet to connect everyone up, then the need to essentially have suspicion and only listen to certain other systems, and if flaws come up to have those updated very quickly, that became a new requirement."
Ok, he's right there... if this quote was from like 1962. Before there was teh webbs, before there was teh netz, before there was teh Microsoft, before there was teh UNIX, there was an operating system that was designed from the ground-up to incorporate advanced/enhanced security features (relative to the times), and it was called Multics.
Unix has been established as a legitimate operating system since the 1970's. I guess you could say the "C" version would be the birthday of modern Unix, so we're talking 1973. Was Bill Gates out of grammar school yet at this point?
Native TCP/IP support was built into the kernel in the early 1980's, a few years. http://www.computerhope.com/unix/xenix.htm">Micros oft itself created a Unix port, and it probably doesn't surprise any of us that SCO ended up with it. The similarities between how SCO and MS behave in the industry and market aren't totally coincidence.
So, Bill, you HAD a network-ready and relatively secure operating system 25 goddam years ago. And you're saying that it's just now that anybody cares about networking, communications, or information security? Security has been a concern since the fucking 1960's, and your own friggen company had a Unix build.
Jesus H. I normally don't jump on the bash-Microsoft bandwagon and often grapple with some of YOU Slashdot turds for doing so, but if this isn't a bunch of merry sunshine blown up the collective asses of industry journalism, I don't know what is.
Doctors are already a protected class of citizens, who have enormous power over the average person. They've got sanctioned monopoly powers [lewrockwell.com], have a huge amount of leeway in treatment quality [lewrockwell.com], and generally don't come close to the quality of service that they did a generation ago [lewrockwell.com].
That's an interesting correlation. The more the government has gotten involved in health care and health insurance industries, the worst the quality of the service has gotten.
It is in everyone person's right to criticize bad service, and the threat of libel lawsuits should not be as powerful.
Luckily for We, The People, libel is notoriously difficult to prove. The malicious intent to misrepresent and damage must be demonstrated. This is tough to do when frustrated people are just bitching. Even if what they are saying is WRONG or misleading, if they're saying it honestly, they're mostly in the clear.
When you have a State-sanctioned power [lewrockwell.com] to treat others, it shouldn't stop you from giving your best, especially in life or death situations.
And yet, the greater your actions are governed and sanctioned by the state, the greater your propensity to do a shitty job.
I've been to other doctors and wish I had the time to complain. Dirty exam rooms, gossiping about other patients, staff that works more like DMV workers than health professionals.
An interesting comparison - health care to the various incompetant sectors of public service.
Re:Zonk the game reviewer now?
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Review: Nintendogs
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I find Zonk's abilities lacking and suggest you give up the attempts at reviewing games or go to a game review site and get a job.
Perhaps you could tell us which publication, web site, or whatever you write for, so we could sample your work, and from it, form a more informed evaluation of the merits of you criticism?
Why would you want to discount search results just because they happen to be on blogs? That strikes me as cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Because my company's filewall blocks access to 99% of blogging sites and those links are useless to me for doing exactly the kind of professional research you mention. I know you'll just want to indict me now for choosing to work at so draconian a company, but that's just how it is and I'd love to be able to exclude those sites.
Luckily, sometimes the "cached" version is helpful.
I don't want to be a jerk or anything, but this has been up on every site I read, including/. for the last couple of months. I find it hard to believe that an editor has never heard of this before submitting this. This is like posting a story about the invention of the Roomba. I assure you, we know. We read about it on Fark, Gizmodo, Slashdot, and every other techy blog out there months ago, over and over again.
This is the first I've heard of it. I don't read Fark, I've never even heard of Gizmodo. But I'm not a protogeek either.
The only folks with a worse appreciation of programming languages and application design than sysadms are DBAs.
I can back this up with a sample size of = 1.
We had a project that analyzed some data. It was written in a procedural DB language (I don't even konw which - PL/SQL or something?). It took approximately 38 hours to run, start to finish.
The project was then turned over to me and another programmer to improve. They wanted the time down to under 12 hours, and they wanted us to tweak the PL/SQL to do it. We both looked at this hopeless plate of spaghetti code and shrugged. The other guy said, "I don't know where to even begin. We'd be better off re-building the thing from the ground up."
No. Impossible. The schema is fixed, other applications already depend on it. Ok, fine, then, can we throw out this PL/SQL and re-write it in Perl or C?
No. Impossible. There's no time.
We did it anyway, and got the thing to run in 45 minutes. They were overjoyed at the efficiency improvement. We also included on-the-fly decompression of the data as the C binary slurped it, so that uncompressed versions of these files (calling records from a telecom, on the order of 4-6 GB apiece, and we had one file per month per billing system and the client had a half dozen billing systems) needn't be kept.
The Oracle DBAs were a non-stop obstacle, refusing to let us do ANYTHING with the database except load data into tables and pull it out. We had to kiss their asses just to get index added or removed. One of the efficiencies was to remove indeces, load data, and then re-apply them. This ended up being much faster than inserting data into indexed columns. They wouldn't hear of it. We wrote sanity checks into the C code to ensure unique data and it was STILL faster they STILL didn't like it.
I've been working with Oracle DBAs for about 6 years, and so far, I've yet to figure out what exactly they DO. They never help me with schema design, sniff at query optimization as if such drudgery were beneath their vast expertise, and dart their eyes sideways at me while huffing and puffing when I ask them to fix locked tables as if I'm interrupting some serious work. But unlocking busted tables is basically the ONLY THING I've ever seen them do. Sometimes they bounce the oracle server. But as far as I could tell their job was to know the Oracle dba login password, unlock tables (in TOAD), smoke cigarettes, and treat everybody else like shit.
Maybe it's been the corporate cultures, but I've worked with them in three industries (medical, financial services, telecommunications) at four companies and experienced this monotony of behavior all around.
"What are the "normal" levels of ozone that should exist over Antarctica, and how do we know that those hypothetical levels are "normal""
(informed and extensive discussion follows)
At the same time, we've watched average antarctic ozone levels cut by a third, and minimum ozone levels cut by two thirds. Worldwide, levels were been cut by five percent in two decades, with the rate accelerating as stratospheric CFC concentrations increased.
What more do you need?
An answer to my original question. Ozone levels are cut by "a third" from what? The level in 1900? 1800? 1950? 1925? 1750? The dawn of the last millennium? How do we know what the "normal" level of ozone is? We have proxies for temperature that allow us to model the history of climate in various parts of the world, but what do we use for the ozone hole? How big is it in the absence of human activity? Does it even exist? And what proxies do we use to model its behavior in the absence of direct observation and measurement?
This is my question. The rest of your information is helpful and informative but I already knew that.
What is your obsession with some "hockey stick"
I don't have one. It's the climate change theory that hinges on it. The graph demonstrates fluctuating temperatures over the last thousand years within a reasonable range and then a sudden spike upwards at the down of the 20th century, coinciding with widescale deployment of carbon-emitting technologies like automobiles. This graph is the hinge upon which the correlation between human activity and climate change swings. It was the first, as I recall, work that demonstrated such a correlation. However, the method by which it was obtained is questionable. For example, other scientisists have obtained the same graph using completely random data and some clever cherry-picking of proxy data series.
There have been thousands of studies, and you obsess over a single graph?
Can you direct me to, say, six of these studies, their peer reviews, and sources for their data? Or is this where you say, "Look that up yourself, it's out there. Get on google, noob!"
The physics of global warming are apparent (CO2 *is* a greenhouse gas), its concentration has increased by 20% in the past century
20% over what? It's level prior to when we were measuring it? How do we know what levels were? We didn't even know what carbon dioxide was a few short centuries ago, nonetheless have the capacity to measure how much was in the atmosphere. How do we know how much has been in the air over the last 1,000 years? Because if we really don't, how we can definitevely say that the current upward spike is human-caused and not a cycle or repeated trend that coincidences with our activity? We can't, obviously. So we use temperature proxies to guess at past temperatures.
Therein lay my question - in some cases, temperature proxies for the entire planet for a year, a decade, or sometimes a century, have been modeled by using a sample size of n
Now, this isn't because HUMANS ARE NOT CAUSING GLOBAL WARMING. That's NOT why this happens. It happens because THERE ISN'T ENOUGH DATA. Or, there wasn't at the time.
Sadly, TONS of subsequent scientific effort has been done using the "hockey stick" research as its base, using its data, its findings, its readings, etc. When last I looked, very few new studies that were or are being done actually went out and got readings of their own. Those that did were unable to produce samples, photographs, dates, times, or places where they took the proxy measurements.
And you're wondering why I'm "obsessed" with it? Because it smells fishy to me.
cores [umich.edu] that show an incredible correlation between CO2 concentration (as well as methane, another greenhouse gas) and temperature over the past several hundred tho
Sorry, but no, and while I understand where you've coming from, you also have to acknowledge that when you see a particular source mislead, mislead, and mislead again, and do so in a consistantly insulting way towards real scientists while, with breathtaking arrogance, claiming their mantle, you're not going to take much notice of it. You're certainly not going to take seriously someone quoting from it.
If somebody says something that runs counter to when I think is true, and quotes a source, I go look it up. I review what they quoted and if it shows no evidence of being worthy of consideration and integration into my worldview, I discard it. If it DOES seem worthy of thinking about, I then consider the source and their motivation, and then go do research on whatever it is I just read. 9 times out of 10, somebody has responded to it and refuted it. And I research THAT response, etc, until I find something that nobody has countered yet, or until the arguments are simply circular. I then absorb this whole body of knowledge and argument, and determine which one seems to me to have the least merit, and discard that one.
So, I don't care if somebody quotes "QueersLoveBush.com" or "wtfpwnedpr0n.com", if I'm discussing a controversial issue with somebody and they provide evidence to support their opinion, I'm going to go at least give it a shot. If it's truly as baseless and worthless as its "source" (despite the fact that JunkScience isn't the source for this) would suggest, it should be clear fairly quickly.
At this stage, quoting from JunkScience
JunkScience did do this research. The files containing the research are sitting on machines owned by JunkScience.com. They might have written up the summary and opinion part, but the research they are quoting was carried out by two guys, independently. And frankly, if you'd gone to read it, there's plenty of holes to poke in THEIR work, too. What amazes me is how quickly and easily Slashdotters won't even think about reviewing the material before dismissing it. Yet you're on here day in and day out blasting George Bush (rightfully) for ignoring a bodies of critical scientific effort in forming his policy.
Sorry if that sounds close minded
It does.
but after a while, anyone but the least human of us considers certain sources strong clues as to whether something should be taken seriously.
I disagree but fair enough. Are you going to at least review the work in question (ignoring JunkScience's opinion of it) and refute what it says? I'm quoting it to "PROVE" anything, I'm throwing information out there to be digested. If it's easily debunked, so be it! I'm interested in forming an accurate and informed worldview, not "proving" that "my side" of an issue is right. I'm interested in figuring out which side of an issue is most compelling. I haven't been compelled by the "man is causing global warming" research I've read. People constantly quote "hundreds" and "thousands" of anonymous "scientific studies" that "prove it" but can't ever give me a link to one along with a body of critical peer review. I only see dire predictions quoted by various scientifists that are accepted unquestionably.
Well, I'm sorry, but I'm skeptic.
I'd have laughed at someone for linking to a Greenpeace report too. Link directly to the papers, or neutral group's readings of it (Nature, New Scientist, Scientific American, you name it) if you like, but don't expect to be taken any more seriously if you link to JunkScience than if you'd linked to the Church of Scientology.
All well and good, but it strikes me as a cheap and easy way to not have to consider and rebut an argument. "Well that can't possibly be valid, look who said it!" I guess I'm less cavalier in dismissing information. Luckily, somebody else has since mailed me a number of references of fairly recent work to investigate, which is encouraging. It had seemed to me that the scientific rigour of global warming study had waned.
For the record, not everyone out here on/. is a bafoon and some of us see your valid points without having to resort degrading how you presented them.
Thank you.
I'm not PUSHING one side or the other, I'm only saying that there's some concerns that a skeptical and reasonable person ought to have about the SCIENTIFIC METHOD employed in gathering a history of global climate data. When I point this out, I'm just insulted and attacked and stereotyped and dismissed without ANYBODY BOTHERING TO READ THE MATERIAL IN QUESTION nor provide their own evidence answering my question, which is simply, what is the nature of the evidence we have used to understand this phenomenon. Nobody here seems to know, you just ASSUME I'm anti-global climate change and attack me. How open-minded and scientific of you.
Though just because someone appears on Fox does not discredit them (where he came up with that one I'll never know).
Agreed, I had no idea the guy was on Fox, but where the guy makes appearances doesn't impact my opinion of his scientific work. Further, the "JunkScience" guy DIDN'T EVEN DO the research in question.
The thing about the CO2/ozone issue is legit. ozone seems to be the principle barrier preventing us from being bombarded by solar radiation, whilst CO2 preventing heat from escaping back out into space (the so-called greenhouse effect).
Again, I specifically said that I do NOT think that there's no ozone hole or no global warming.
I just wanted to point out that you make valid points not all of us think you're wrong.
I'm not really trying to make a POINT or push a "side" so much as articulate my concerns about the nature of the evidence we've gathered. I figured somebod would point me towards a CONCLUSIVE study that's passed rigorous peer review that makes the correlation, but apparantly we'd rather take cheap shots at Fox News, make assumptions about what I believe, liken me to a creationist, and what not.
Again, I'm not denying that climate change exists. I flat out, plainly, and directly stated that it DOES exist and IS happening.
For a bunch of people accusing me of being confused on this, you're failing to read what I've written and understand it. You just see somebody not openly embracing the global warming theory and now you're shitting all over me.
Go back and re-read my post if you're serious about understanding what I am saying and debunking it. If you're just interested in childish slander, then.. well you're in the right place, I guess, Slashdot.
Maybe you should consider READING the research I quoted before you dismiss it because you don't like the hosting site. The research wasn't DONE by the JunkScience guy. I thought you people were a bunch of intellectuals who like facts and truth? You won't even read and digest the material in its own merit or lack thereof, rather than dismiss it out of hand because you don't like the domain it's hosted on?
As I said to another poster - that's pretty anti-intellectual.
It's not original work by junk science. It's by somebody else, but since it doesn't support the global warming mania, it's gotten little media coverage.
If it makes you feel more comfortable, I can host the same data on my own web site. The people who've done this research are not funded by anybody.
Maybe you should read the actual research before you just dismiss it because you find the hosting site distasteful. The anti-intellectualism in here amazes me.
I love how anti-climate change folk, just like creationists, love to pretend that there's not a near scientific consensus [sciencemag.org] on the subject (in this case, anthropogenic climate change). They usually make clear their lack of knowlege on the subject by saying things like:
I did not and do not pretend that there is no scientific consensus on the matter. I also did not say I am anti-climate change. In fact, I made it rather clear that there clearly IS climate change going on. The science that documents this is all but irrefutable. My concerns lie in the research that "proves" that the change is anthropogenic.
CO2 does not destroy ozone.
I didn't say that it does. I asked how we know how much ozone there was in Antarctica's atmosphere before the industrial revolution, since the parent poster to MY post had talked about returning ozone levels to "pre-industrial" normals. How do we know what those levels were? If we do, great, but how?
CFCs destroy ozone. They were not developed until 1928, and didn't become widespread until the 1960s. You're confusing ozone studies with temperature and CO2-level studies.
No, I'm not, I'm quite clear on the difference. Perhaps I mixed the two topics inappropriately in my post. If I was unclear, I apologize. I have two separate questions.
1) What are the "normal" levels of ozone that should exist over Antarctica, and how do we know that those hypothetical levels are "normal"?
2) Although I do not doubt that global climate change is going on, I am skeptical of the research done thus far to prove that it is anthropogenic. The famous "hockey stick" graph shows temperature rising in direct correlation to the advent of the automobile (hence, CO2 emissions). However, the same graph can be found in any number of samples of utterly random information with enough red noise. Further, the pioneering and supporing research on the topic has been found to cherry-pick data series to produce the intended results. In fact, the SAME GUYS who came up with the "hockey stick" graph originally found NO correlation, and kept including and excluding series until they got a correlation, and then published THAT. Among the included series were a study of a half dozen tree rings in the Southwestern United States, which were the sole representative series for a long time period. Now, if you want to tell me it's good science to extrapolate the ring widths of a half dozen trees to be representative of a world containing billions of trees of tens of thousands different species, that's your business, but I will disagree that this is good enough science on which to base global climate policy. What's more, the original samples are now mostly unavailable, much of the original data (including WHERE the trees were found and measured, and exactly WHEN and under what circumstances) is missing, lost, or out of the recollection of the scientists involved.
For my money, if we're going to subject ourselves to lifestyle changes amounting to $100 trillion dollars to limit global temperature increase over the next 300 years to 6 degrees instead of 8, I'd like more research to back up that we are unquestionably the cause. It all SOUNDS GOOD and LOOKS good, but I'm skeptical of the original research and much of the supporting research, and I question the motives of the major players involved in the project.
You don't get more government grants by coming back and saying, "There's nothing to worry about here."
I DID NOT SAY and DO NOT THINK that global warming is not happening.
I am undecided on whether or not I think it's anthropogenic in nature. The research I have read does not prove it to me; not conclusively, not convincingly, not even suggestively. The research alone doesn't prove jack shit to me, it's when it holds up and passes a serious, critical peer review that I start to trust it, and I don't get the sense that global climate change has been given its due review. Finding flaws in it is a one-wa
What was the science behind our determination of how much ozone was in Antarctica's atmosphere prior to the industrial revolution? I've always been puzzled on how we know with such certainty what the situation was back then, that it has changed for the worse, and the source of the change is anthropogenic. I don't doubt that there IS a hole, or that there is global climate change, and that we should study it and understand it, but I'm among the few who aren't completely convinced yet the cause is completely or even mostly athropogenic in nature.
Especially when critical studies that form the basis of global warming theoryso poorly documented and have undergone no genuinely critical peer review. Our founding documents and main research on global climate change contain cherry-picked data series to produce the desired results to "prove" that global warming is a result of automobile emissions. Secondary research to confirm the original research was done with similarly cherry-picked series and is even less well-documented data series. When we can't even go back and review the physical evidence used by our researchers because they have misplaced or just "don't remember" where they gathered their data, any intelligent and appropriately skeptical scientific-thinking person ought to call for more and better research before advocating sweeping policies that will cost the world economies an amount of money so large as to be nearly uncountable.
The proposal, which is open for comment until the end of next week before it takes effect, would represent a big boost for open source software such as Open Office, which is created by volunteer programmers and made available free of charge.
This is nice for our bottom line, since all of the money our government pisses away is OUR money. However, I'd be willing to pay EVEN MORE than Microsoft charges to have open formats. And although I am supportive of both commercial and open source software initiatives, and have contributed to the open source community as a programmer, I honestly don't give a crap what our government thinks about it. This is a move in the right direction. I suspect it's motivated by money, however, and not a benevolent government desiring to increase the freedom of information.
I enjoy going to the theatre, I'd much rather do that than sit at home and watch a movie. I almost never, ever watch movies on DVD except for stuff in my own collection that I watch when bored. I haven't actually rented a movie in probably 6 years.
However, since going to the theatre is expensive, and you have to sit through 35 minutes of commercials and previews and "mini-features" that are actually commercials in disguise, plus annoying people in the audience most of whom are unsupervised children between the ages of 13 and 17 (and I mean children, these people act like they are 6 years old), rude ushers, rude box office employees, rude and incompetant boobs at the concession stand, constantly bumping elbows with some doddering middle aged guy with a gaggle of rugrats hanging off his shirt screaming about Sponge Bob, and standing in line fer chrissake for 20 minutes ahead of time to have a shot at getting a decent seat... it's a lot of hassle.
So, I pick and choose my films VERY VERY carefully, and I'm rarely disappointed. This summer I've seen Batman and The 40 Year Old Virgin, and both were top-notch films. I also saw War of the Worlds, mostly because the GF wanted to see it, and it was a complete dog turd of a movie. I kinda knew that going in, though.
You do not have a moral or legal right to see and modify Microsoft's source code. Or anybody else's. They don't have to publish it or make it available. That's my point.
Wrong. Some property is expected to be held in the public will.
Yes, because it was constructed with taxpayer money and intended for public use. That's much different than me spending 3 years of my life to write a piece of software and have one of you jokers come along and say, "I have a moral and ought to have a legal right to the source code of this software." You don't have a legal right to copies of my screenplays, the storyboards for my novels, or even the concept art for my web comic. You have no moral right to it either, I created it, and it belongs to me. There is nothing analogous in here to public property. I said that you do not have a moral or legal right to somebody else's PRIVATE property. Public property is, by definition, NOT private property. Read.
Copyright is only extended in the expectation that it will revert to the public domain after some limited time.
Copyrights protect private intelletual property by giving the owner of the property the exclusive right to do certain things with their property, such as distribute it, sell it, and make copies of it. The issue has become muddled with the introduction of the Fair Use Doctrine, a loose collection of undefined rules that the Supreme Court has said exists and must be interpretted on a case-by-case basis. Thus, although the copyright holder has the exclusive right to make reproductions of their work, individuals may make copies for their own personal use anyway.
Patents operate under a similiar expectation.
Yeah, our patent system is a bit of a mess.
Roads are held by the public. Any public building are technically owned bythe public.
Yes, they Parks are owned by the public. Some things are found to be too useful to let remain in private hands.
Yes, they are. Roads are also mostly paid for with tax money. Public buildings are constructed with public funds. Parks are bought from private owners with public money, or are donated to the public trust. Many things "belong" to the public. These are public properties, and I have made no statement about your moral or legal right to public property. I made a statement about the absence of a moral or legal right to somebody else's private property. Read.
All the above is US centric, but seeing how we are talking about American businesses on an American forum, it just follows.
No, nothing you said had any relevence to my point.
You have no moral or legal right to somebody else's property. Microsoft's source code is their property, and just because you don't believe in intellectual property rights doesn't mean they don't or shouldn't exist. Your house example is flawed. If you buy a house you OWN it. A home is a physical asset. A software asset is not.
I also have serious doubts that you (or most of the other yahoos) who claim that they can't "fix the bugs" in the software they buy would ever actually do so.
Slashdot Mirror
The real life guy on whose life the movie Catch Me If You Can is based was hired by our (the American) government to help stop check fraud. The man was a brilliant defrauder, and mastered the nation's reserve bank and check system to defraud himself into a life of extreme luxury. He was hired by the government to advise them on improving the system, and, I believe, continues to advise to this day.
So yes, we do stuff like that. We let known criminals off if they'll finger somebody worse, then pay for their well being and anonymous protection via the witness protection program. That's my tax money paying to supplement the life of a criminal only because he happened to also be a tattletale.
Weird, because if you read the actual story, it's about how the guy is not really using cats, it's just a rumor that he's denied.
What is WRONG with the editors?
If Bill Gates were to say, "I really like dogs. I also like peanut butter sandwiches," we'd have a Slashdot story that says, "According to Reuters, Bill Gates does not "really like dogs" or does he "like peanut butter sandwiches."
And then you would predictably respond with a bunch of anti-Microsoft nonsense.
You have to wonder how much deliberate trolling the editors do.
Knowing people who live in Europe and deal with their health care system, they only like one thing about it: it's mostly hassle-free. Yeah their taxes are insane but if you need something done you just go to the hospital or whatever, and don't have to deal with insurance claims and what not.
My friends and distant relations in Canada spin another tail. Most of them carry modest insurance to get work done in the US due to the logjam in the Canadian system.
I don't LIKE our health care system, but I enjoy its relative alacrity and flexibility. I enjoy the freedom to make my own decisions, for the most part, about what I get done, and when.
For an extreme comparison look to Cuba which has one of the worlds better health care systems with only governmental involvement.
Yeah, but I don't like the other stuff you have to put up with to get it, like living in utter poverty unless you're involved with the government, or being jailed and/or executed for disagreeing with the wrong people.
I think nationalized medicine can work, but we're kidding ourselves about what it'd cost in America. With as many people as we have hauling around the mass equivilent of entire additional people in their asses, guts, and thighs, I cringe in terror at the thought of what it'd cost us (as in, you and me) to finance a public health care structure that has to deal with these fatties. It's not a matter of "could we do it" it's a matter of "would it be any better than what we have now?" I'm not sure that it would, and I'm even less convinced that our political leadership knows either. It'd just "be nice." Sort of like Bush's prescription drug thing. Nobody really thought seriously, "What is this going to cost us in the long run?" Or even the short run. Pure political philandering. PS Yes, in this post I state some opinions that I do not back up further, and while this generally is bad I think that they should be clear enough.
Not at all. If you want to look at the effort done by somebody and offer specific criticisms of it, fine. To issue blanket statements that just blast somebody's work without ACTUALLY CRITICIZING THE WORK ITSELF, and just insulting the person who wrote it, then yeah I'll ask you to put up or stfu.
So it's OK for your car mechanic to do a poor job, because YOU can't do better yourself? We can't criticize the President because we have not been President?
It's not ok for me to say, "God my mechanics is an incompetant douchebag" without providing any evidence of my specific complaint, or demonstrating that would know a competant mechanic from a shitty one. Compare and contrast.
"This is a game interview? How about addressing blah blah or touching on blah blah. When you review games, you ought to blah blah blah and Zonk just blah blah blah."
Versus:
"omg stfu zonk u suq omg lol"
Or, to use your analogy.
"My car mechanic is a total stupid moron who can't fix cars to save his ass." This is just an insult.
"My car mechanic is completely incompetant, I brought my Toyota in for a battery change and he somehow dislodged the air hose and then clearly never drove it because when I got it on the road it wouldn't shift out of 2nd gear." If it looks like shit, smells like shit, you don't need to be a shit expert to call it what it is: SHIT!
Ok, he's right there ... if this quote was from like 1962. Before there was teh webbs, before there was teh netz, before there was teh Microsoft, before there was teh UNIX, there was an operating system that was designed from the ground-up to incorporate advanced/enhanced security features (relative to the times), and it was called Multics.
Unix has been established as a legitimate operating system since the 1970's. I guess you could say the "C" version would be the birthday of modern Unix, so we're talking 1973. Was Bill Gates out of grammar school yet at this point?
Native TCP/IP support was built into the kernel in the early 1980's, a few years. http://www.computerhope.com/unix/xenix.htm">Micros oft itself created a Unix port, and it probably doesn't surprise any of us that SCO ended up with it. The similarities between how SCO and MS behave in the industry and market aren't totally coincidence.
So, Bill, you HAD a network-ready and relatively secure operating system 25 goddam years ago. And you're saying that it's just now that anybody cares about networking, communications, or information security? Security has been a concern since the fucking 1960's, and your own friggen company had a Unix build.
Jesus H. I normally don't jump on the bash-Microsoft bandwagon and often grapple with some of YOU Slashdot turds for doing so, but if this isn't a bunch of merry sunshine blown up the collective asses of industry journalism, I don't know what is.
That's an interesting correlation. The more the government has gotten involved in health care and health insurance industries, the worst the quality of the service has gotten.
It is in everyone person's right to criticize bad service, and the threat of libel lawsuits should not be as powerful.
Luckily for We, The People, libel is notoriously difficult to prove. The malicious intent to misrepresent and damage must be demonstrated. This is tough to do when frustrated people are just bitching. Even if what they are saying is WRONG or misleading, if they're saying it honestly, they're mostly in the clear.
When you have a State-sanctioned power [lewrockwell.com] to treat others, it shouldn't stop you from giving your best, especially in life or death situations.
And yet, the greater your actions are governed and sanctioned by the state, the greater your propensity to do a shitty job.
I've been to other doctors and wish I had the time to complain. Dirty exam rooms, gossiping about other patients, staff that works more like DMV workers than health professionals.
An interesting comparison - health care to the various incompetant sectors of public service.
Perhaps you could tell us which publication, web site, or whatever you write for, so we could sample your work, and from it, form a more informed evaluation of the merits of you criticism?
Because my company's filewall blocks access to 99% of blogging sites and those links are useless to me for doing exactly the kind of professional research you mention. I know you'll just want to indict me now for choosing to work at so draconian a company, but that's just how it is and I'd love to be able to exclude those sites.
Luckily, sometimes the "cached" version is helpful.
This is the first I've heard of it. I don't read Fark, I've never even heard of Gizmodo. But I'm not a protogeek either.
And yet I have a 500 GB drive sitting on my desk at home right this very minute and that is NOT the Deskstar 7K500. How is that possible?
1 TB
2 TB
And far superior quality. WHAT YOU SAY? They're not "on the market" yet? Yeah, that's true.
This one is 800 GB, and it's available.
WHAT YOU SAY? It's not a "hard drive" but an ethernet disk?
Oh. Well you got me there.
I can back this up with a sample size of = 1.
We had a project that analyzed some data. It was written in a procedural DB language (I don't even konw which - PL/SQL or something?). It took approximately 38 hours to run, start to finish.
The project was then turned over to me and another programmer to improve. They wanted the time down to under 12 hours, and they wanted us to tweak the PL/SQL to do it. We both looked at this hopeless plate of spaghetti code and shrugged. The other guy said, "I don't know where to even begin. We'd be better off re-building the thing from the ground up."
No. Impossible. The schema is fixed, other applications already depend on it. Ok, fine, then, can we throw out this PL/SQL and re-write it in Perl or C?
No. Impossible. There's no time.
We did it anyway, and got the thing to run in 45 minutes. They were overjoyed at the efficiency improvement. We also included on-the-fly decompression of the data as the C binary slurped it, so that uncompressed versions of these files (calling records from a telecom, on the order of 4-6 GB apiece, and we had one file per month per billing system and the client had a half dozen billing systems) needn't be kept.
The Oracle DBAs were a non-stop obstacle, refusing to let us do ANYTHING with the database except load data into tables and pull it out. We had to kiss their asses just to get index added or removed. One of the efficiencies was to remove indeces, load data, and then re-apply them. This ended up being much faster than inserting data into indexed columns. They wouldn't hear of it. We wrote sanity checks into the C code to ensure unique data and it was STILL faster they STILL didn't like it.
I've been working with Oracle DBAs for about 6 years, and so far, I've yet to figure out what exactly they DO. They never help me with schema design, sniff at query optimization as if such drudgery were beneath their vast expertise, and dart their eyes sideways at me while huffing and puffing when I ask them to fix locked tables as if I'm interrupting some serious work. But unlocking busted tables is basically the ONLY THING I've ever seen them do. Sometimes they bounce the oracle server. But as far as I could tell their job was to know the Oracle dba login password, unlock tables (in TOAD), smoke cigarettes, and treat everybody else like shit.
Maybe it's been the corporate cultures, but I've worked with them in three industries (medical, financial services, telecommunications) at four companies and experienced this monotony of behavior all around.
Maybe I'm just a dickhead and I have it coming. :)
(informed and extensive discussion follows)
At the same time, we've watched average antarctic ozone levels cut by a third, and minimum ozone levels cut by two thirds. Worldwide, levels were been cut by five percent in two decades, with the rate accelerating as stratospheric CFC concentrations increased.
What more do you need?
An answer to my original question. Ozone levels are cut by "a third" from what? The level in 1900? 1800? 1950? 1925? 1750? The dawn of the last millennium? How do we know what the "normal" level of ozone is? We have proxies for temperature that allow us to model the history of climate in various parts of the world, but what do we use for the ozone hole? How big is it in the absence of human activity? Does it even exist? And what proxies do we use to model its behavior in the absence of direct observation and measurement?
This is my question. The rest of your information is helpful and informative but I already knew that.
What is your obsession with some "hockey stick"
I don't have one. It's the climate change theory that hinges on it. The graph demonstrates fluctuating temperatures over the last thousand years within a reasonable range and then a sudden spike upwards at the down of the 20th century, coinciding with widescale deployment of carbon-emitting technologies like automobiles. This graph is the hinge upon which the correlation between human activity and climate change swings. It was the first, as I recall, work that demonstrated such a correlation. However, the method by which it was obtained is questionable. For example, other scientisists have obtained the same graph using completely random data and some clever cherry-picking of proxy data series.
There have been thousands of studies, and you obsess over a single graph?
Can you direct me to, say, six of these studies, their peer reviews, and sources for their data? Or is this where you say, "Look that up yourself, it's out there. Get on google, noob!"
The physics of global warming are apparent (CO2 *is* a greenhouse gas), its concentration has increased by 20% in the past century
20% over what? It's level prior to when we were measuring it? How do we know what levels were? We didn't even know what carbon dioxide was a few short centuries ago, nonetheless have the capacity to measure how much was in the atmosphere. How do we know how much has been in the air over the last 1,000 years? Because if we really don't, how we can definitevely say that the current upward spike is human-caused and not a cycle or repeated trend that coincidences with our activity? We can't, obviously. So we use temperature proxies to guess at past temperatures.
Therein lay my question - in some cases, temperature proxies for the entire planet for a year, a decade, or sometimes a century, have been modeled by using a sample size of n Now, this isn't because HUMANS ARE NOT CAUSING GLOBAL WARMING. That's NOT why this happens. It happens because THERE ISN'T ENOUGH DATA. Or, there wasn't at the time.
Sadly, TONS of subsequent scientific effort has been done using the "hockey stick" research as its base, using its data, its findings, its readings, etc. When last I looked, very few new studies that were or are being done actually went out and got readings of their own. Those that did were unable to produce samples, photographs, dates, times, or places where they took the proxy measurements.
And you're wondering why I'm "obsessed" with it? Because it smells fishy to me.
cores [umich.edu] that show an incredible correlation between CO2 concentration (as well as methane, another greenhouse gas) and temperature over the past several hundred tho
If somebody says something that runs counter to when I think is true, and quotes a source, I go look it up. I review what they quoted and if it shows no evidence of being worthy of consideration and integration into my worldview, I discard it. If it DOES seem worthy of thinking about, I then consider the source and their motivation, and then go do research on whatever it is I just read. 9 times out of 10, somebody has responded to it and refuted it. And I research THAT response, etc, until I find something that nobody has countered yet, or until the arguments are simply circular. I then absorb this whole body of knowledge and argument, and determine which one seems to me to have the least merit, and discard that one.
So, I don't care if somebody quotes "QueersLoveBush.com" or "wtfpwnedpr0n.com", if I'm discussing a controversial issue with somebody and they provide evidence to support their opinion, I'm going to go at least give it a shot. If it's truly as baseless and worthless as its "source" (despite the fact that JunkScience isn't the source for this) would suggest, it should be clear fairly quickly.
At this stage, quoting from JunkScience
JunkScience did do this research. The files containing the research are sitting on machines owned by JunkScience.com. They might have written up the summary and opinion part, but the research they are quoting was carried out by two guys, independently. And frankly, if you'd gone to read it, there's plenty of holes to poke in THEIR work, too. What amazes me is how quickly and easily Slashdotters won't even think about reviewing the material before dismissing it. Yet you're on here day in and day out blasting George Bush (rightfully) for ignoring a bodies of critical scientific effort in forming his policy.
Sorry if that sounds close minded
It does.
but after a while, anyone but the least human of us considers certain sources strong clues as to whether something should be taken seriously.
I disagree but fair enough. Are you going to at least review the work in question (ignoring JunkScience's opinion of it) and refute what it says? I'm quoting it to "PROVE" anything, I'm throwing information out there to be digested. If it's easily debunked, so be it! I'm interested in forming an accurate and informed worldview, not "proving" that "my side" of an issue is right. I'm interested in figuring out which side of an issue is most compelling. I haven't been compelled by the "man is causing global warming" research I've read. People constantly quote "hundreds" and "thousands" of anonymous "scientific studies" that "prove it" but can't ever give me a link to one along with a body of critical peer review. I only see dire predictions quoted by various scientifists that are accepted unquestionably.
Well, I'm sorry, but I'm skeptic.
I'd have laughed at someone for linking to a Greenpeace report too. Link directly to the papers, or neutral group's readings of it (Nature, New Scientist, Scientific American, you name it) if you like, but don't expect to be taken any more seriously if you link to JunkScience than if you'd linked to the Church of Scientology.
All well and good, but it strikes me as a cheap and easy way to not have to consider and rebut an argument. "Well that can't possibly be valid, look who said it!" I guess I'm less cavalier in dismissing information. Luckily, somebody else has since mailed me a number of references of fairly recent work to investigate, which is encouraging. It had seemed to me that the scientific rigour of global warming study had waned.
Thank you.
I'm not PUSHING one side or the other, I'm only saying that there's some concerns that a skeptical and reasonable person ought to have about the SCIENTIFIC METHOD employed in gathering a history of global climate data. When I point this out, I'm just insulted and attacked and stereotyped and dismissed without ANYBODY BOTHERING TO READ THE MATERIAL IN QUESTION nor provide their own evidence answering my question, which is simply, what is the nature of the evidence we have used to understand this phenomenon. Nobody here seems to know, you just ASSUME I'm anti-global climate change and attack me. How open-minded and scientific of you.
Though just because someone appears on Fox does not discredit them (where he came up with that one I'll never know).
Agreed, I had no idea the guy was on Fox, but where the guy makes appearances doesn't impact my opinion of his scientific work. Further, the "JunkScience" guy DIDN'T EVEN DO the research in question.
The thing about the CO2/ozone issue is legit. ozone seems to be the principle barrier preventing us from being bombarded by solar radiation, whilst CO2 preventing heat from escaping back out into space (the so-called greenhouse effect).
Again, I specifically said that I do NOT think that there's no ozone hole or no global warming.
I just wanted to point out that you make valid points not all of us think you're wrong.
I'm not really trying to make a POINT or push a "side" so much as articulate my concerns about the nature of the evidence we've gathered. I figured somebod would point me towards a CONCLUSIVE study that's passed rigorous peer review that makes the correlation, but apparantly we'd rather take cheap shots at Fox News, make assumptions about what I believe, liken me to a creationist, and what not.
For a bunch of people accusing me of being confused on this, you're failing to read what I've written and understand it. You just see somebody not openly embracing the global warming theory and now you're shitting all over me.
Go back and re-read my post if you're serious about understanding what I am saying and debunking it. If you're just interested in childish slander, then .. well you're in the right place, I guess, Slashdot.
Maybe you should consider READING the research I quoted before you dismiss it because you don't like the hosting site. The research wasn't DONE by the JunkScience guy. I thought you people were a bunch of intellectuals who like facts and truth? You won't even read and digest the material in its own merit or lack thereof, rather than dismiss it out of hand because you don't like the domain it's hosted on?
As I said to another poster - that's pretty anti-intellectual.
If it makes you feel more comfortable, I can host the same data on my own web site. The people who've done this research are not funded by anybody.
Maybe you should read the actual research before you just dismiss it because you find the hosting site distasteful. The anti-intellectualism in here amazes me.
I did not and do not pretend that there is no scientific consensus on the matter. I also did not say I am anti-climate change. In fact, I made it rather clear that there clearly IS climate change going on. The science that documents this is all but irrefutable. My concerns lie in the research that "proves" that the change is anthropogenic.
CO2 does not destroy ozone.
I didn't say that it does. I asked how we know how much ozone there was in Antarctica's atmosphere before the industrial revolution, since the parent poster to MY post had talked about returning ozone levels to "pre-industrial" normals. How do we know what those levels were? If we do, great, but how?
CFCs destroy ozone. They were not developed until 1928, and didn't become widespread until the 1960s. You're confusing ozone studies with temperature and CO2-level studies.
No, I'm not, I'm quite clear on the difference. Perhaps I mixed the two topics inappropriately in my post. If I was unclear, I apologize. I have two separate questions.
1) What are the "normal" levels of ozone that should exist over Antarctica, and how do we know that those hypothetical levels are "normal"?
2) Although I do not doubt that global climate change is going on, I am skeptical of the research done thus far to prove that it is anthropogenic. The famous "hockey stick" graph shows temperature rising in direct correlation to the advent of the automobile (hence, CO2 emissions). However, the same graph can be found in any number of samples of utterly random information with enough red noise. Further, the pioneering and supporing research on the topic has been found to cherry-pick data series to produce the intended results. In fact, the SAME GUYS who came up with the "hockey stick" graph originally found NO correlation, and kept including and excluding series until they got a correlation, and then published THAT. Among the included series were a study of a half dozen tree rings in the Southwestern United States, which were the sole representative series for a long time period. Now, if you want to tell me it's good science to extrapolate the ring widths of a half dozen trees to be representative of a world containing billions of trees of tens of thousands different species, that's your business, but I will disagree that this is good enough science on which to base global climate policy. What's more, the original samples are now mostly unavailable, much of the original data (including WHERE the trees were found and measured, and exactly WHEN and under what circumstances) is missing, lost, or out of the recollection of the scientists involved.
For my money, if we're going to subject ourselves to lifestyle changes amounting to $100 trillion dollars to limit global temperature increase over the next 300 years to 6 degrees instead of 8, I'd like more research to back up that we are unquestionably the cause. It all SOUNDS GOOD and LOOKS good, but I'm skeptical of the original research and much of the supporting research, and I question the motives of the major players involved in the project.
You don't get more government grants by coming back and saying, "There's nothing to worry about here."
I DID NOT SAY and DO NOT THINK that global warming is not happening.
I am undecided on whether or not I think it's anthropogenic in nature. The research I have read does not prove it to me; not conclusively, not convincingly, not even suggestively. The research alone doesn't prove jack shit to me, it's when it holds up and passes a serious, critical peer review that I start to trust it, and I don't get the sense that global climate change has been given its due review. Finding flaws in it is a one-wa
Especially when critical studies that form the basis of global warming theory so poorly documented and have undergone no genuinely critical peer review. Our founding documents and main research on global climate change contain cherry-picked data series to produce the desired results to "prove" that global warming is a result of automobile emissions. Secondary research to confirm the original research was done with similarly cherry-picked series and is even less well-documented data series. When we can't even go back and review the physical evidence used by our researchers because they have misplaced or just "don't remember" where they gathered their data, any intelligent and appropriately skeptical scientific-thinking person ought to call for more and better research before advocating sweeping policies that will cost the world economies an amount of money so large as to be nearly uncountable.
This is nice for our bottom line, since all of the money our government pisses away is OUR money. However, I'd be willing to pay EVEN MORE than Microsoft charges to have open formats. And although I am supportive of both commercial and open source software initiatives, and have contributed to the open source community as a programmer, I honestly don't give a crap what our government thinks about it. This is a move in the right direction. I suspect it's motivated by money, however, and not a benevolent government desiring to increase the freedom of information.
As opposed to your myriad valuable contributions to the collective creativity of mankind. Shut the fuck up.
I enjoy going to the theatre, I'd much rather do that than sit at home and watch a movie. I almost never, ever watch movies on DVD except for stuff in my own collection that I watch when bored. I haven't actually rented a movie in probably 6 years. However, since going to the theatre is expensive, and you have to sit through 35 minutes of commercials and previews and "mini-features" that are actually commercials in disguise, plus annoying people in the audience most of whom are unsupervised children between the ages of 13 and 17 (and I mean children, these people act like they are 6 years old), rude ushers, rude box office employees, rude and incompetant boobs at the concession stand, constantly bumping elbows with some doddering middle aged guy with a gaggle of rugrats hanging off his shirt screaming about Sponge Bob, and standing in line fer chrissake for 20 minutes ahead of time to have a shot at getting a decent seat ... it's a lot of hassle.
So, I pick and choose my films VERY VERY carefully, and I'm rarely disappointed. This summer I've seen Batman and The 40 Year Old Virgin, and both were top-notch films. I also saw War of the Worlds, mostly because the GF wanted to see it, and it was a complete dog turd of a movie. I kinda knew that going in, though.
You do not have a moral or legal right to see and modify Microsoft's source code. Or anybody else's. They don't have to publish it or make it available. That's my point.
Yes, because it was constructed with taxpayer money and intended for public use. That's much different than me spending 3 years of my life to write a piece of software and have one of you jokers come along and say, "I have a moral and ought to have a legal right to the source code of this software." You don't have a legal right to copies of my screenplays, the storyboards for my novels, or even the concept art for my web comic. You have no moral right to it either, I created it, and it belongs to me. There is nothing analogous in here to public property. I said that you do not have a moral or legal right to somebody else's PRIVATE property. Public property is, by definition, NOT private property. Read.
Copyright is only extended in the expectation that it will revert to the public domain after some limited time.
Copyrights protect private intelletual property by giving the owner of the property the exclusive right to do certain things with their property, such as distribute it, sell it, and make copies of it. The issue has become muddled with the introduction of the Fair Use Doctrine, a loose collection of undefined rules that the Supreme Court has said exists and must be interpretted on a case-by-case basis. Thus, although the copyright holder has the exclusive right to make reproductions of their work, individuals may make copies for their own personal use anyway.
Patents operate under a similiar expectation.
Yeah, our patent system is a bit of a mess.
Roads are held by the public. Any public building are technically owned bythe public. Yes, they Parks are owned by the public. Some things are found to be too useful to let remain in private hands.
Yes, they are. Roads are also mostly paid for with tax money. Public buildings are constructed with public funds. Parks are bought from private owners with public money, or are donated to the public trust. Many things "belong" to the public. These are public properties, and I have made no statement about your moral or legal right to public property. I made a statement about the absence of a moral or legal right to somebody else's private property. Read.
All the above is US centric, but seeing how we are talking about American businesses on an American forum, it just follows.
No, nothing you said had any relevence to my point.
You have no moral or legal right to somebody else's property. Microsoft's source code is their property, and just because you don't believe in intellectual property rights doesn't mean they don't or shouldn't exist. Your house example is flawed. If you buy a house you OWN it. A home is a physical asset. A software asset is not. I also have serious doubts that you (or most of the other yahoos) who claim that they can't "fix the bugs" in the software they buy would ever actually do so.