What Ford did was bring cars to the masses. There were a lot of people who had never even seen a car at that time. I remember "America: The Story of Us", and one of the stories they told about the car was that new drivers, when they were learning, would shout "Whoa!" as a way to try to get the car to stop. They may have had a vague idea that something called an "automobile" existed, but for someone who hadn't even had the possibility of owning one until then, they'd have to have explained to them such things as the benefit over the horse and buggy.
For our times, it would be something like if someone began mass-producing jetpacks and had to sell people on the idea of using a jetpack rather than using a bike or a Segway.
Nothing in the real world (except possibly physics) works in the real world like it does in theory. When people talk about a free market, they're not talking about theory. They're talking about a layman's understanding of it: Prices being determined by supply and demand, and people charging what the market will bear for goods and services. We know a pure free market doesn't work because it leads to robber barons, monopolies and such. But certainly, demand for a given teacher is driven by how well the teacher can teach, rather than how long the teacher's been there, or what summer courses they've taken to stay current.
For high school, I went to Catholic school, where the retirement plan for nuns is (presumably) Heaven. I can tell you absolutely that a teacher in their 90's that'd been teaching for 30 years (which was true in one case when I was there) isn't any better at teaching than someone in his/her 30's who actually knows what they're doing.
I should've ended my last sentence with "in a union job". Clearly, there are a lot of jobs where unions don't play a role, and people still earn what they're worth.
With unions, employees are no longer atomic, are they? The whole point of a union is that the employees are bound together, and that if the employer wants to hire someone, they have to negotiate with the group. Unions create a situation where employees and employers can't agree among themselves what the pay structure could be, because they've got a third party involved. Of course, it's different in a situation where you don't have to join the union, but that's not the situation people are in, in the U.S.
The system that Wave was using didn't really seem so ant-spam to me. If you could find someone on Wave, you could spam them. There isn't any "friending" involved. And of course, all you had to do was add "Public" to the wave for anyone looking in public waves to see it.
There were some uses beyond document creation and maintenance. If more people had been able to use it, it could've been useful for things like event planning. And the real-time chat actually was real-time, which is something lacking in current IM systems. Being able to see someone chatting with you in real-time is one of those experiences that I missed when Unix's talk went out of fashion. It made discussions a hell of a lot more interesting and engrossing, IMHO. And it had translation, to boot, so it also brought down language barriers (at least, to some degree). There was a lot of potential there.
Essentially, I think the biggest problem was that Google didn't trust the technology they created. (This was somewhat for good reason, since the system was very slow if more than a few people were on the wave.) With a tool like this, if all of your contacts can't use it (let alone understand it), then you're dead in the water. They should've probably a) worked on the infrastructure to make the system less laggy, b) released it to everyone, like Google Docs or Gmail, and c) hired an advertising agency to promote it. They apparently didn't have anyone involved here who could successfully articulate what Wave was for if you weren't using it for a software project.
Merit pay is GOP concept to fire as many teachers as possible to "shrink the size of government".
Most occupations are merit pay positions. I don't see anything wrong with the suggestion. Do you have an actual argument, or are you just tarring the argument (in your own eyes, at least) by association?
It does seem odd that the biggest proponents of merit pay are NEVER serious advocates of "merit pay" for politicians.
Actually, there are advocates for merit pay among politicians on both sides of the aisle. But that still doesn't address the question: What's wrong with merit pay for teachers? Isn't it better for both the teachers and their students if pay is tied to performance, rather than set by a union mandate?
It's amazing how free market purists suddenly don't trust the free market when it comes to workers' pay.
Your statement is actually an argument against unions. It's unions that protect incompetent teachers. And it's unions that fight against merit pay (which would be a real free market).
First, let me say that I do agree with you that the medium and the content both play a part in the value of a book. I think this is why e-books have so far (although Steve Jobs should rot in Hell for trying to change this) been less expensive than paper books. The thing I was trying to get at is that the content still has value, and that you're getting something of value when you buy an e-book, even if there's no physical transaction, and even if you can't do everything with an e-book that you can do with a paper book (although this does, obviously, contribute to the devaluing of an e-book version). The labor of writing is worth something, and good writers should be compensated well for what they do, because books (speaking broadly about the content, not just the paper version) are a valuable part of culture, and it should remain a meritocracy, with good writers being able to earn comfortable livings.
Having said all that, on to the rest of the issue.
A hardcover volume filled with blank pages is going to sell for substantially less than the same volume with a popular novel inside it, let alone a textbook of the type the original post talks about.
This just isn't true at all. Many popular novels can be had for a penny or so; and there are "blank books" you can spend a hundred dollars on. I'm not saying the content is meaningless, just that it does not determine value, certainly not on its own. You're focused more on what motivates someone to want the book rather than what determines its economic value.
When you talk about a popular novel being sold for a penny or so, are you talking about a new, hardbound novel? I could see if it was a used hardbound or paperback, but not anything new. It's not that I doubt you. It's just that I've never seen that before. How could a publisher hope to make anything selling a book for that price? How could even a used bookstore make any money that way?
and a simple search on amazon will find many popular books that can be had for pennies. You can't infer a rule from a few examples you pick and choose, especially when it's so damn easy to find counter examples that upset such a rule.
I'm not saying you can't find used paperbacks for pennies. Obviously, you can. But that's an apples to oranges comparison, at best. For one thing, a used book has no stakeholders any longer. The publisher and author are only entitled to the first sale profits. That's one of the reasons publishers like DRM: After the first sale, a DRM'd book is useless (unless, of course, it's cracked).
Again, you're right but you're confusing things. The content is what makes you want the book but it is simply not the sole determinant (or even the most significant determinant) of the book's value. To offer an extreme example, this very popular book can be had brand new for four bucks whereas this book which you've probably never heard of will set you back about a thousand dollars, even used.
In the example above, you compare a used mass market paperback of a popular novel with (what looks like) a specialized textbook. Textbooks almost always cost more, because publishers -- once they convince a school to carry a title -- have a captive audience. And to be fair, the knowledge is specialized enough to where not just anyone could write it (which isn't the case with the Twilight novels). With a textbook, you're absolutely paying for the content.
Copyright violation may come into play in both situations but they are very different -- plagiarism aside, this is not a file on bittorrent; it's offered up for sale.
Are they really that different? In both cases, a copyright violation took place, and in both cases, the file was distributed on a mass basis (although Lulu's reach is certainly a lot different from a torrent's reach). I think there's an argument to be made that this case is much worse, because Lulu sells e-books. On BitTorrent, at least the distributor isn't trying to make money off of copyright violation.
Your claim that popular books can be more expensive is nonsense -- they can also be much cheaper, and in fact since publishers often produce so many more of a popular book, they quite often are much cheaper.
Obviously, the same content in a different format has a different price point. I'm not disputing that. Hardcovers are going to cost more than paperbacks, generally, but there's more than one factor that goes into that. The reason a paperback is released of a book is so that they can make every penny they can off of a book. There are people who buy the hardcover version of a book as soon as it comes out because of the content, and there are people who wait until the paperback (or electronic) version of the book comes out, because it's not as important for them to read it right away.
Any used item is going to be cheaper than a new item. But the content is what gives the book value. A hardcover volume filled with blank pages is going to sell for substantially less than the same volume with a popular novel inside it, let alone a textbook of the type the original post talks about. And bestsellers in hardcover are going to sell for more than unpopular books in hardcover. Compare the price of Stephen King novels in a given format to those of other suspense writers in the same format. (A simple search on Amazon will do the trick.)
What I'm fighting against is the insane idea that when you buy a book, you're paying mostly for its format. You're not. You're paying for the content of the book. Without the content, there'd be no reason to buy it. Does the physical makeup of a paper book have value? Yes, it has some. But without the content, all you're buying is a notebook, and that's worth substantially less.
The price of a book has nothing to do with scarcity. It's the value of the ideas in the book that create the value.
Ahh, that explains why books with really good ideas are so much more expensive than books with bad ideas.
Very popular authors often do have books that are more expensive than less popular authors. And even if all books cost the exact same amount, you're still paying mostly for the content, not for the media. It's the content that's the important thing, whether you want to admit it or not.
This is actually both copyright violation (making a copy of a work without permission) and plagiarism (using someone else's ideas and passing them off as your own). Both concepts come into play here. If I take an MP3 from an artist, and claim it's my own music, I'm violating copyright and plagiarizing. That's how you could compare this to the music industry.
Do I think new laws need to be created for it? No. We already have copyright laws. But that's what's going on here: copyright violation. In addition, it's also plagiarism, but copyright violation does come into play.
Ebook piracy shows no such thing. What is shows is that when your trying to sell something in a market where the cost to copy is nil, then your business model is broken.
When you buy an e-book, you're not paying for the cost to copy. You're paying for the value of the content. Intellectual property does have value.
Artificial scarcity on the internet is simply impossible and at best all you can hope for is to get people to pay for convenience.
The price of a book has nothing to do with scarcity. It's the value of the ideas in the book that create the value. The value of the materials, even for a hardcover book, are negligible in the cost.
Obviously writers can't make money through concerts or t-shirts; but there will always be a market for those of us of enjoy real, physical books. There is also a market for public speakers, many of whom are writers. Does this mean that all writers will be able to make a living? No. However it's neither reasonable nor feasible to allow everyone to make a living doing what they enjoy.
I certainly agree that all writers aren't entitled to make a living doing it, if they can't get people to buy their books. But that doesn't justify stealing. By all means, if you don't think someone's work is worth buying, don't buy it, but then don't read it, either. If it's good enough to read, it's good enough to pay for. The idea that, "If I can figure out a way to steal it, you don't deserve to get paid for it" is, frankly, sociopathic.
Well you see the thing is that the reason why they're earning whatever money they get from royalties is because I, as a citizen of the United States of America, have agreed to temporarily relinquish my right to make copies of their work.
You seem to be saying that being subject to a law means you agree with the law. That's certainly not the case. Back in the 1860's we hashed that whole idea out, and it didn't go particularly well for your side of the argument. The only sense in which you've given positive consent to be governed by a law is by not moving out of its jurisdiction.
Further, you don't have a right to copy someone else's work. No one living in the U.S. today has ever had that right, except under exceptions to the copyright laws (e.g., fair use, and when the copyright expires).
Your argument only applies if chapters are being shared. If you share the whole book, that's just one less person who has to buy your book to read it. That's not a sustainable way to do business unless you're hoping that you can get people to buy your next work, that you then have to put DRM on (to keep the same thing from happening).
The Stephen Kings of the world can afford to give away content in the hope that some people will buy their next work, but for someone starting out, every book they sell is important, and piracy really affects that.
How is it a straw man? For years, we heard exactly that argument from people who pirated music. "Get over it. Your business model is dying. Make your money from concerts and t-shirts."
Ebook piracy just shows how absurd that argument is.
I still stand by it being a ridiculous beatup over office politics gone wrong which we would never have seen in an organisation that didn't have cops on the payroll or somebody that wanted to look like a hero in front of the cameras.
I don't understand how you reach that conclusion with the facts at hand. Childs is the one who dragged the mayor into it in the first place. He's the one who was being the drama queen.
"Childs eventually handed over the passwords to San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom" is very different from the claim that he refused to give them to anyone else.
Are you serious? Seriously? What, exactly, do you think the holdup was? Do you think he was waiting on pins and needles for someone to wander by his cell, and Newsom just happened to be the first person he found?
Well, how's this article work for you? (It summarizes Newsom's testimony.) How's this article? It features this passage:
On Monday afternoon, he handed the passwords over to Mayor Newsom, who was "the only person he felt he could trust," according to a declaration filed in court by his attorney, Erin Crane.
Childs isn't a hero. He was a putz who was drunk on power and his own (inflated) sense of self-importance.
Well, since you ask, here's an account of the events, as Child's defense would have you believe them. Here's another article stating that Childs specifically said in court that his supervisor was not "qualified" to have the passwords. Also, every possible source I can find says specifically that Childs would only give the passwords to the mayor.
This whole thing was a big ego trip for him. There's really no way around it.
You are getting it wrong. There is no such a law, that says explicitly that you MUST OBEY your supervisor.
The illegal part wasn't disobeying his supervisor. It was in not handing over the passwords. The fact that not doing so was disobeying his supervisor was incidental.
Again, anyone over the age of 16 knows that they're going to have to work, at some point, for people they consider to be incompetent. In this case, his disobedience led him to break the law by withholding passwords from people who were entitled to them. If the only issue he had was that there were other people in the room, there are about a hundred different ways he could've conveyed the passwords. There's no way an admin would be so stupid as to not have figured that out. He could've written them down on a piece of paper and handed them to his supervisor, if it came to that.
All he was doing was being a smartass. He thought he held all the cards, and that there was nothing his supervisor could do about it. He gambled and lost.
Let me remind you that regarding the law, you are allowed to break the law, if it is impossible for you to follow it, or if your intentions are just. Just as he did.
It's not permissible to break the law just because your intentions are just. We don't let individuals decide which laws they're going to obey. If you disobey the law, you get punished for it, unless there is a specific defense for your actions under the law (e.g., murder is illegal, but murder in self-defense isn't).
In the present case, he has no legitimate defense. Even if his supervisor had asked him for the passwords in front of 1,000,000 witnesses, that's not an excuse to refuse to give him the passwords at all. He was just on a power trip, and enjoyed seeing the people over him squirm.
One of the first lessons you learn in the corporate world is that no one is indispensable in his or her job. He was trying to get around that by withholding the passwords. He failed. His four years in jail will give him ample time to congratulate himself on what a big man he was.
His supervisor asked him for the password. The record shows that the only person he would give the passwords to was the mayor, even though the mayor wasn't the person over Childs who was entitled to the passwords.
People're trying to make this guy out to be some kind of uberadmin because of withholding the passwords, but the way I see it, he was just trying to make himself indispensable for his own job security (which, it turns out, didn't work out so well).
Put another way: Does anyone here really believe that Childs' only alternative was to go to jail, and that he couldn't figure out an alternate way for the proper people in the organization to get the passwords? I don't buy that. I think the guy was on a pure ego trip because he thought holding the passwords made him bulletproof.
Slashdot Mirror
What Ford did was bring cars to the masses. There were a lot of people who had never even seen a car at that time. I remember "America: The Story of Us", and one of the stories they told about the car was that new drivers, when they were learning, would shout "Whoa!" as a way to try to get the car to stop. They may have had a vague idea that something called an "automobile" existed, but for someone who hadn't even had the possibility of owning one until then, they'd have to have explained to them such things as the benefit over the horse and buggy.
For our times, it would be something like if someone began mass-producing jetpacks and had to sell people on the idea of using a jetpack rather than using a bike or a Segway.
How in the hell was someone like that not excluded from the jury?? Was the prosecutor in on the whole thing???
Nothing in the real world (except possibly physics) works in the real world like it does in theory. When people talk about a free market, they're not talking about theory. They're talking about a layman's understanding of it: Prices being determined by supply and demand, and people charging what the market will bear for goods and services. We know a pure free market doesn't work because it leads to robber barons, monopolies and such. But certainly, demand for a given teacher is driven by how well the teacher can teach, rather than how long the teacher's been there, or what summer courses they've taken to stay current.
For high school, I went to Catholic school, where the retirement plan for nuns is (presumably) Heaven. I can tell you absolutely that a teacher in their 90's that'd been teaching for 30 years (which was true in one case when I was there) isn't any better at teaching than someone in his/her 30's who actually knows what they're doing.
The man was obviously corrupt as shit out of a whore's ass. How much would you like to bet that there was jury tampering involved here?
I should've ended my last sentence with "in a union job". Clearly, there are a lot of jobs where unions don't play a role, and people still earn what they're worth.
With unions, employees are no longer atomic, are they? The whole point of a union is that the employees are bound together, and that if the employer wants to hire someone, they have to negotiate with the group. Unions create a situation where employees and employers can't agree among themselves what the pay structure could be, because they've got a third party involved. Of course, it's different in a situation where you don't have to join the union, but that's not the situation people are in, in the U.S.
The system that Wave was using didn't really seem so ant-spam to me. If you could find someone on Wave, you could spam them. There isn't any "friending" involved. And of course, all you had to do was add "Public" to the wave for anyone looking in public waves to see it.
There were some uses beyond document creation and maintenance. If more people had been able to use it, it could've been useful for things like event planning. And the real-time chat actually was real-time, which is something lacking in current IM systems. Being able to see someone chatting with you in real-time is one of those experiences that I missed when Unix's talk went out of fashion. It made discussions a hell of a lot more interesting and engrossing, IMHO. And it had translation, to boot, so it also brought down language barriers (at least, to some degree). There was a lot of potential there.
Essentially, I think the biggest problem was that Google didn't trust the technology they created. (This was somewhat for good reason, since the system was very slow if more than a few people were on the wave.) With a tool like this, if all of your contacts can't use it (let alone understand it), then you're dead in the water. They should've probably a) worked on the infrastructure to make the system less laggy, b) released it to everyone, like Google Docs or Gmail, and c) hired an advertising agency to promote it. They apparently didn't have anyone involved here who could successfully articulate what Wave was for if you weren't using it for a software project.
Merit pay is GOP concept to fire as many teachers as possible to "shrink the size of government".
Most occupations are merit pay positions. I don't see anything wrong with the suggestion. Do you have an actual argument, or are you just tarring the argument (in your own eyes, at least) by association?
It does seem odd that the biggest proponents of merit pay are NEVER serious advocates of "merit pay" for politicians.
Actually, there are advocates for merit pay among politicians on both sides of the aisle. But that still doesn't address the question: What's wrong with merit pay for teachers? Isn't it better for both the teachers and their students if pay is tied to performance, rather than set by a union mandate?
It's amazing how free market purists suddenly don't trust the free market when it comes to workers' pay.
Your statement is actually an argument against unions. It's unions that protect incompetent teachers. And it's unions that fight against merit pay (which would be a real free market).
Having said all that, on to the rest of the issue.
A hardcover volume filled with blank pages is going to sell for substantially less than the same volume with a popular novel inside it, let alone a textbook of the type the original post talks about.
This just isn't true at all. Many popular novels can be had for a penny or so; and there are "blank books" you can spend a hundred dollars on. I'm not saying the content is meaningless, just that it does not determine value, certainly not on its own. You're focused more on what motivates someone to want the book rather than what determines its economic value.
When you talk about a popular novel being sold for a penny or so, are you talking about a new, hardbound novel? I could see if it was a used hardbound or paperback, but not anything new. It's not that I doubt you. It's just that I've never seen that before. How could a publisher hope to make anything selling a book for that price? How could even a used bookstore make any money that way?
and a simple search on amazon will find many popular books that can be had for pennies. You can't infer a rule from a few examples you pick and choose, especially when it's so damn easy to find counter examples that upset such a rule.
I'm not saying you can't find used paperbacks for pennies. Obviously, you can. But that's an apples to oranges comparison, at best. For one thing, a used book has no stakeholders any longer. The publisher and author are only entitled to the first sale profits. That's one of the reasons publishers like DRM: After the first sale, a DRM'd book is useless (unless, of course, it's cracked).
Again, you're right but you're confusing things. The content is what makes you want the book but it is simply not the sole determinant (or even the most significant determinant) of the book's value. To offer an extreme example, this very popular book can be had brand new for four bucks whereas this book which you've probably never heard of will set you back about a thousand dollars, even used.
In the example above, you compare a used mass market paperback of a popular novel with (what looks like) a specialized textbook. Textbooks almost always cost more, because publishers -- once they convince a school to carry a title -- have a captive audience. And to be fair, the knowledge is specialized enough to where not just anyone could write it (which isn't the case with the Twilight novels). With a textbook, you're absolutely paying for the content.
If you take a look at the Twilight saga in
Copyright violation may come into play in both situations but they are very different -- plagiarism aside, this is not a file on bittorrent; it's offered up for sale.
Are they really that different? In both cases, a copyright violation took place, and in both cases, the file was distributed on a mass basis (although Lulu's reach is certainly a lot different from a torrent's reach). I think there's an argument to be made that this case is much worse, because Lulu sells e-books. On BitTorrent, at least the distributor isn't trying to make money off of copyright violation.
Your claim that popular books can be more expensive is nonsense -- they can also be much cheaper, and in fact since publishers often produce so many more of a popular book, they quite often are much cheaper.
Obviously, the same content in a different format has a different price point. I'm not disputing that. Hardcovers are going to cost more than paperbacks, generally, but there's more than one factor that goes into that. The reason a paperback is released of a book is so that they can make every penny they can off of a book. There are people who buy the hardcover version of a book as soon as it comes out because of the content, and there are people who wait until the paperback (or electronic) version of the book comes out, because it's not as important for them to read it right away.
Any used item is going to be cheaper than a new item. But the content is what gives the book value. A hardcover volume filled with blank pages is going to sell for substantially less than the same volume with a popular novel inside it, let alone a textbook of the type the original post talks about. And bestsellers in hardcover are going to sell for more than unpopular books in hardcover. Compare the price of Stephen King novels in a given format to those of other suspense writers in the same format. (A simple search on Amazon will do the trick.)
What I'm fighting against is the insane idea that when you buy a book, you're paying mostly for its format. You're not. You're paying for the content of the book. Without the content, there'd be no reason to buy it. Does the physical makeup of a paper book have value? Yes, it has some. But without the content, all you're buying is a notebook, and that's worth substantially less.
The price of a book has nothing to do with scarcity. It's the value of the ideas in the book that create the value.
Ahh, that explains why books with really good ideas are so much more expensive than books with bad ideas.
Very popular authors often do have books that are more expensive than less popular authors. And even if all books cost the exact same amount, you're still paying mostly for the content, not for the media. It's the content that's the important thing, whether you want to admit it or not.
This is actually both copyright violation (making a copy of a work without permission) and plagiarism (using someone else's ideas and passing them off as your own). Both concepts come into play here. If I take an MP3 from an artist, and claim it's my own music, I'm violating copyright and plagiarizing. That's how you could compare this to the music industry.
Do I think new laws need to be created for it? No. We already have copyright laws. But that's what's going on here: copyright violation. In addition, it's also plagiarism, but copyright violation does come into play.
Ebook piracy shows no such thing. What is shows is that when your trying to sell something in a market where the cost to copy is nil, then your business model is broken.
When you buy an e-book, you're not paying for the cost to copy. You're paying for the value of the content. Intellectual property does have value.
Artificial scarcity on the internet is simply impossible and at best all you can hope for is to get people to pay for convenience.
The price of a book has nothing to do with scarcity. It's the value of the ideas in the book that create the value. The value of the materials, even for a hardcover book, are negligible in the cost.
Obviously writers can't make money through concerts or t-shirts; but there will always be a market for those of us of enjoy real, physical books. There is also a market for public speakers, many of whom are writers. Does this mean that all writers will be able to make a living? No. However it's neither reasonable nor feasible to allow everyone to make a living doing what they enjoy.
I certainly agree that all writers aren't entitled to make a living doing it, if they can't get people to buy their books. But that doesn't justify stealing. By all means, if you don't think someone's work is worth buying, don't buy it, but then don't read it, either. If it's good enough to read, it's good enough to pay for. The idea that, "If I can figure out a way to steal it, you don't deserve to get paid for it" is, frankly, sociopathic.
Well you see the thing is that the reason why they're earning whatever money they get from royalties is because I, as a citizen of the United States of America, have agreed to temporarily relinquish my right to make copies of their work.
You seem to be saying that being subject to a law means you agree with the law. That's certainly not the case. Back in the 1860's we hashed that whole idea out, and it didn't go particularly well for your side of the argument. The only sense in which you've given positive consent to be governed by a law is by not moving out of its jurisdiction.
Further, you don't have a right to copy someone else's work. No one living in the U.S. today has ever had that right, except under exceptions to the copyright laws (e.g., fair use, and when the copyright expires).
How so?
Your argument only applies if chapters are being shared. If you share the whole book, that's just one less person who has to buy your book to read it. That's not a sustainable way to do business unless you're hoping that you can get people to buy your next work, that you then have to put DRM on (to keep the same thing from happening).
The Stephen Kings of the world can afford to give away content in the hope that some people will buy their next work, but for someone starting out, every book they sell is important, and piracy really affects that.
How is it a straw man? For years, we heard exactly that argument from people who pirated music. "Get over it. Your business model is dying. Make your money from concerts and t-shirts."
Ebook piracy just shows how absurd that argument is.
I don't understand how you reach that conclusion with the facts at hand. Childs is the one who dragged the mayor into it in the first place. He's the one who was being the drama queen.
Are you serious? Seriously? What, exactly, do you think the holdup was? Do you think he was waiting on pins and needles for someone to wander by his cell, and Newsom just happened to be the first person he found?
Well, how's this article work for you? (It summarizes Newsom's testimony.) How's this article? It features this passage:
Childs isn't a hero. He was a putz who was drunk on power and his own (inflated) sense of self-importance.
Well, since you ask, here's an account of the events, as Child's defense would have you believe them. Here's another article stating that Childs specifically said in court that his supervisor was not "qualified" to have the passwords. Also, every possible source I can find says specifically that Childs would only give the passwords to the mayor.
This whole thing was a big ego trip for him. There's really no way around it.
You are getting it wrong. There is no such a law, that says explicitly that you MUST OBEY your supervisor.
The illegal part wasn't disobeying his supervisor. It was in not handing over the passwords. The fact that not doing so was disobeying his supervisor was incidental.
Again, anyone over the age of 16 knows that they're going to have to work, at some point, for people they consider to be incompetent. In this case, his disobedience led him to break the law by withholding passwords from people who were entitled to them. If the only issue he had was that there were other people in the room, there are about a hundred different ways he could've conveyed the passwords. There's no way an admin would be so stupid as to not have figured that out. He could've written them down on a piece of paper and handed them to his supervisor, if it came to that.
All he was doing was being a smartass. He thought he held all the cards, and that there was nothing his supervisor could do about it. He gambled and lost.
Let me remind you that regarding the law, you are allowed to break the law, if it is impossible for you to follow it, or if your intentions are just. Just as he did.
It's not permissible to break the law just because your intentions are just. We don't let individuals decide which laws they're going to obey. If you disobey the law, you get punished for it, unless there is a specific defense for your actions under the law (e.g., murder is illegal, but murder in self-defense isn't).
In the present case, he has no legitimate defense. Even if his supervisor had asked him for the passwords in front of 1,000,000 witnesses, that's not an excuse to refuse to give him the passwords at all. He was just on a power trip, and enjoyed seeing the people over him squirm.
One of the first lessons you learn in the corporate world is that no one is indispensable in his or her job. He was trying to get around that by withholding the passwords. He failed. His four years in jail will give him ample time to congratulate himself on what a big man he was.
Again, do you seriously believe that his [i]only[/i] alternative was to tell his supervisor the passwords [i]orally, immediately[/i]?
He either was intentionally trying to be a dick, or he has the problem-solving ability of a 6-year old.
His supervisor asked him for the password. The record shows that the only person he would give the passwords to was the mayor, even though the mayor wasn't the person over Childs who was entitled to the passwords.
People're trying to make this guy out to be some kind of uberadmin because of withholding the passwords, but the way I see it, he was just trying to make himself indispensable for his own job security (which, it turns out, didn't work out so well).
Put another way: Does anyone here really believe that Childs' only alternative was to go to jail, and that he couldn't figure out an alternate way for the proper people in the organization to get the passwords? I don't buy that. I think the guy was on a pure ego trip because he thought holding the passwords made him bulletproof.