Who _also_ wants to bet that, if your scenario was the case, that the non-PHB & his team members will be the ones blamed for the memory-design problem, and that the marketing idiots who set up the schedule won't receive so much as a slap on the wrist?
Lots of fools think they can produce good code when exhausted and the clean-up job afterwards is a bitch.
One of my previous (decent) managers made a point about making people clean up their own code - he wouldn't let anyone use you for any new projects until the bug reports started tapering off after the release of anything you had been working on.
That was a _very_ instructive work environment - good for teaching yourself discipline:-)
ome respectable caps can be in place (say 10gb a month, or only so much bandwidth per second)
If the app is P2P, then source bandwidth isn't so much of an issue for the publishers - I could see some kind of limit on # of songs downloaded per month though.
But seriously - how do you create a fair competitive market environment for all while treading the line between fascist govt control and private industry monopolization.
Set a fairly low limit on the max power allowed to transmit for any transmitter, plus similar limits on the total coverage of the spectrum that any controlling entity can own. The government's sole role will be to make sure that people don't violate these rules, plus abide by the restrictions of the chunk of spectrum that they have purchased.
As long as no one is allowed to gain control of too large a chunk of the medium, competition will take care of itself.
Your "rights" are spelled out by society as a whole and the law states that you purchase a license to run software and do not own the code.
Ummm...no it doesn't, unless you've signed a contract limiting your own rights to do what you want with something you've purchased, or if you're living in one of the states that has passed laws that make EULAs enforceable. If you're not affected by either of these things, then you can do anything you want with/to your product as long as you don't violate copyright law.
When you buy software, you are buying licenses to use the software.
That's what the software companies want you to think, but unless you're signing a contract (or are in a state where laws have been passed making EULAs enforceable), when you buy software, you are buying a product & can do what the law allows you to do with any product you buy. That includes reverse engineering and/or applying cracks to the product that you have purchased, since you never signed a contract saying that you couldn't.
Of course, without a contract, copyright law prohibits you from giving a copy of the information contained in your product to anyone else, but it doesn't say anything about what else you can do with or to your own product.
Even the GPL (GNU General Public License) refers to granting permission (via the license) for you to modify the software, provided you adhere to certain requirements.
Wrong again. The GPL grants permission for you to _redistribute_ the software, as long as you adhere to the requirements. You can use & modify the software all you want without agreeing to the GPL, but if you don't agree to the GPL's terms, then under normal copyright law, you are not allowed to redistribute the product.
I'm pretty sure that cats "practice" hunting. I don't think they have a "whoops, my appointment calendar says it's time to practice!" viewpoint, so I'm pretty sure they practice because they find it "fun" (even if they can't verbalize the concept of fun).
perhaps the government could increase the sin tax on Hummers, Suburbans etc, and offer price-reduction tax breaks on smaller, fuel-economic cars.
Actually, it would probably help a bit if (in some instances) the government would stop SUBSIDIZING the purchase of those big, gas-guzzling vehicles...
Without them people can't get paid for their work and I for one am not a communist.
I'm not a communist either, but I believe people should be paid only for providing a good or service - not get paid over and over when they only did the work for a single act of creation (especially in the case where they can stop anyone else from performing a similar act of creation).
It must be nice to have the law enforce an artificial business model (and to have a lot of people believe in the righteousness of that business model). If I could somehow brainwash a lot of people into believing that the act of picking my nose required that everyone in the country sent me a $1, life would sure be a lot easier.
You've got that backwards. Religion is not an expression of morality - a code of morality might be an expression of a particular religion, but just because a set of beliefs calls itself a religion doesn't mean that its adherents are automatically "moral".
Although it is hard for _some_ people to comprehend, it _is_ completely possible for someone with a completely-secular viewpoint to have a strong set of morals. The motivation tends to be a little more practical ("how do I get along with the people around me to make my life easier?") though rather than ideological ("behave or go to hell for eternity").
You didn't read my whole description. Part of my system is that the amount winning bid would go to the person who filed the patent application (and the filing fee should be damn small).
I think this would cause LOTS of intelligent people to submit potentially useful ideas to the patent process (hoping for a big payoff), and each application would get automatically vetted for their value by the people bidding on them. The fixed limit on total # of patents would keep bumping lesser-value patents into the public domain (and once something entered the public domain, it would serve as prior art for anything else like it that someone tried to submit).
The only place patent clerks might be involved would be during challenges of prior art or obviousness, and you could probably replace them with arbitration panels of "experts".
So how can a better vetting system be introduced to force patent offices to look harder at each application for obviousness/prior-artiness?
How 'bout a fixed, limited number of patents? Companies/individuals/organizations can bid on filed patents & the top $N grossing patents are granted to the winners, and everything which ends up below the cutoff mark becomes public domain. Obviousness & prior art are still allowed to be factors (which would greatly affect the bidding price, since a patent which would be easily invalidated probably wouldn't be worth much).
Throw in the possibility that whoever filed the patent gets the bulk of the winning bid value, I think you'd have a big incentive for creative individuals & groups to submit their best work into the process.
Allowing only a limited number of patents would also make it easier for people to check the database to see if they are violating anything, and make people in general less worried about violating tiny obscure little patents.
.he has 14 semi-automatic rifles, 6 shotguns, 2 assault rifles, 4 pistols and about 4000 rounds of ammo...
This kind of attitude always makes me laugh. Short of having an agency like the Secret Service protecting you around the clock, all that firepower would be pretty much meaningless if anyone reasonably intelligent wanted you dead & had no scruples about how to accomplish it. You'd never even get a chance to find out who killed you.
So, you advocate taking by force from those who would not give willingly? Why? Why not simply deny them the services?
There are some services, like national defense, where people receive the benefit of the service just by benefit of its existence. As long as they live in a society, there is no way for them to "choose" not to receive those services and there is no way for those services to be denied to them. Also, services that someone might choose not to receive - like the fire department, emergency medical service, anti-pollution enforcement, disease control, sanitation, etc., affect the lives of the people around the non-service-receiving individuals.
If someone chooses to live in a particular society so that they can receive the benefits of living in that society, then they will be required to pay something for the common services being provided by that society. If they refuse to pay for those common services and if they can't be forced to pay for such services, then by your reasoning there is no other option other than to exile such people out of the society (which would probably also end up involving force).
Your individual-rights-trumps-all-without-force viewpoint is complete fantasy for any "real" societal structure (i.e., involving more than one person). Any situation where infinite resources do not exist will end up requiring an enforcement mechanism.
Part 3 provides a definition of evil: Anything which takes time from me without my consent is immoral and unethical.
I don't agree with this definition. There are a lot of people who would refuse to pay any taxes at all if they were given a choice, even after being provided with a list of public services that their taxes pay for. From the viewpoint of the health of the society, it is not "evil" to force these people to pay their fair share of the services that they are being provided.
My own personal definition of an evil person: someone who gets enjoyment by hurting others in a non-consensual relationship (i.e., the victim didn't want to be hurt).
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder if it would become a tradition just to wear a mask all the time?
Who _also_ wants to bet that, if your scenario was the case, that the non-PHB & his team members will be the ones blamed for the memory-design problem, and that the marketing idiots who set up the schedule won't receive so much as a slap on the wrist?
One of my previous (decent) managers made a point about making people clean up their own code - he wouldn't let anyone use you for any new projects until the bug reports started tapering off after the release of anything you had been working on.
That was a _very_ instructive work environment - good for teaching yourself discipline :-)
How 'bout abstinence (and only abstinence) being the most effective thing you can teach to teens to stop them from getting pregnant & picking up STDs?
I'm assuming you're talking about the non-faked videos.
When it gets down to a conflict (religious authority sez: "this is the reality", science says: "BS!"), how do you make up your mind?
Kneejerk reaction to the asshole religious people.
If the app is P2P, then source bandwidth isn't so much of an issue for the publishers - I could see some kind of limit on # of songs downloaded per month though.
Set a fairly low limit on the max power allowed to transmit for any transmitter, plus similar limits on the total coverage of the spectrum that any controlling entity can own. The government's sole role will be to make sure that people don't violate these rules, plus abide by the restrictions of the chunk of spectrum that they have purchased.
As long as no one is allowed to gain control of too large a chunk of the medium, competition will take care of itself.
Ummm...no it doesn't, unless you've signed a contract limiting your own rights to do what you want with something you've purchased, or if you're living in one of the states that has passed laws that make EULAs enforceable. If you're not affected by either of these things, then you can do anything you want with/to your product as long as you don't violate copyright law.
Wow, you got that all almost completely wrong.
That's what the software companies want you to think, but unless you're signing a contract (or are in a state where laws have been passed making EULAs enforceable), when you buy software, you are buying a product & can do what the law allows you to do with any product you buy. That includes reverse engineering and/or applying cracks to the product that you have purchased, since you never signed a contract saying that you couldn't.
Of course, without a contract, copyright law prohibits you from giving a copy of the information contained in your product to anyone else, but it doesn't say anything about what else you can do with or to your own product.
Wrong again. The GPL grants permission for you to _redistribute_ the software, as long as you adhere to the requirements. You can use & modify the software all you want without agreeing to the GPL, but if you don't agree to the GPL's terms, then under normal copyright law, you are not allowed to redistribute the product.
Racers must go through a lot of clutches (although I've heard that a lot of race cars don't have clutches?)...
Frankly, I suspect it might be easier to find people who would do that to the spammer...
Don't these clocks try and account for that, or even use the lag as part of their synchronization (kind of how the NTP daemon does)?
Ghandi's passive-aggressive tactics work only when your enemy likes to consider itself civilized, and can be shamed into doing the right thing.
If your enemy doesn't give a damn about such things, they will cheerfully destroy you and continue on their merry way without a backwards glance.
I'm pretty sure that cats "practice" hunting. I don't think they have a "whoops, my appointment calendar says it's time to practice!" viewpoint, so I'm pretty sure they practice because they find it "fun" (even if they can't verbalize the concept of fun).
Actually, it would probably help a bit if (in some instances) the government would stop SUBSIDIZING the purchase of those big, gas-guzzling vehicles...
I'm not a communist either, but I believe people should be paid only for providing a good or service - not get paid over and over when they only did the work for a single act of creation (especially in the case where they can stop anyone else from performing a similar act of creation).
It must be nice to have the law enforce an artificial business model (and to have a lot of people believe in the righteousness of that business model). If I could somehow brainwash a lot of people into believing that the act of picking my nose required that everyone in the country sent me a $1, life would sure be a lot easier.
I think cracking open the harddisk & putting the magnetic platter in the coals of an active outdoor charcoal grill might be effective as well?
You've got that backwards. Religion is not an expression of morality - a code of morality might be an expression of a particular religion, but just because a set of beliefs calls itself a religion doesn't mean that its adherents are automatically "moral".
Although it is hard for _some_ people to comprehend, it _is_ completely possible for someone with a completely-secular viewpoint to have a strong set of morals. The motivation tends to be a little more practical ("how do I get along with the people around me to make my life easier?") though rather than ideological ("behave or go to hell for eternity").
You didn't read my whole description. Part of my system is that the amount winning bid would go to the person who filed the patent application (and the filing fee should be damn small).
I think this would cause LOTS of intelligent people to submit potentially useful ideas to the patent process (hoping for a big payoff), and each application would get automatically vetted for their value by the people bidding on them. The fixed limit on total # of patents would keep bumping lesser-value patents into the public domain (and once something entered the public domain, it would serve as prior art for anything else like it that someone tried to submit).
The only place patent clerks might be involved would be during challenges of prior art or obviousness, and you could probably replace them with arbitration panels of "experts".
How 'bout a fixed, limited number of patents? Companies/individuals/organizations can bid on filed patents & the top $N grossing patents are granted to the winners, and everything which ends up below the cutoff mark becomes public domain. Obviousness & prior art are still allowed to be factors (which would greatly affect the bidding price, since a patent which would be easily invalidated probably wouldn't be worth much).
Throw in the possibility that whoever filed the patent gets the bulk of the winning bid value, I think you'd have a big incentive for creative individuals & groups to submit their best work into the process.
Allowing only a limited number of patents would also make it easier for people to check the database to see if they are violating anything, and make people in general less worried about violating tiny obscure little patents.
This kind of attitude always makes me laugh. Short of having an agency like the Secret Service protecting you around the clock, all that firepower would be pretty much meaningless if anyone reasonably intelligent wanted you dead & had no scruples about how to accomplish it. You'd never even get a chance to find out who killed you.
There are some services, like national defense, where people receive the benefit of the service just by benefit of its existence. As long as they live in a society, there is no way for them to "choose" not to receive those services and there is no way for those services to be denied to them. Also, services that someone might choose not to receive - like the fire department, emergency medical service, anti-pollution enforcement, disease control, sanitation, etc., affect the lives of the people around the non-service-receiving individuals.
If someone chooses to live in a particular society so that they can receive the benefits of living in that society, then they will be required to pay something for the common services being provided by that society. If they refuse to pay for those common services and if they can't be forced to pay for such services, then by your reasoning there is no other option other than to exile such people out of the society (which would probably also end up involving force).
Your individual-rights-trumps-all-without-force viewpoint is complete fantasy for any "real" societal structure (i.e., involving more than one person). Any situation where infinite resources do not exist will end up requiring an enforcement mechanism.
I don't agree with this definition. There are a lot of people who would refuse to pay any taxes at all if they were given a choice, even after being provided with a list of public services that their taxes pay for. From the viewpoint of the health of the society, it is not "evil" to force these people to pay their fair share of the services that they are being provided.
My own personal definition of an evil person: someone who gets enjoyment by hurting others in a non-consensual relationship (i.e., the victim didn't want to be hurt).