Well, your kids still need some way to make their nest egg so they can buy their rental properties. What are they going to do to get that starting money? To me, coding seems as good a choice for that as anything.
And, it's all fine and good to tell your children to invest, but I'd recommend diversified investment, not JUST rental property. Also, I'd recommend Real Estate Investment Trust investments over owning a single rental property outright. There's less risk with owning a share in a trust holding many properties, because, if you buy 100% ownership in a single property, that one property you bought may end up declining in property value if you're unlucky, even if the real estate market as a whole goes up.
As far as your policy considerations concerning the owning class, they are certainly real. In my view, the best solution to this is graduated estate taxes topping out at something like 90%. There's no social benefit to making it possible for children of rich people to do nothing other than fuck around their whole lives. Democrats like the estate tax. Republicans want to repeal it. Compromise right now is 40% maximum tax bracket with a $5,000,000+ exemption. I'd like the exemption lower and the tax higher.
Missing return from main, undefined behavior after the printf. What do I win?
More seriously, I think it's an overstatement that "even expert C programmers can't spot this". It jumped out at me right when I looked at it. I do a lot of C++, but not much C. I had to do some research to make sure it really was undefined behavior in C when I noticed it, but it did jump right out at me, and I wouldn't have let someone off for this in a code review, because it's obviously either undefined or bad style.
It has nothing to do with a "strange geek religion of human equality". What it has to do with is that most evolutionary psychology is non-falsifiable. You can't use it to make predictions. Here's an example:
Observation: Women go for geek guys. Reason: Humans evolved intelligence, because intelligence confers many advantages, so displays of intelligence attract mates.
Observation: Women don't go for geek guys. Reason: Geek guys tend to work out less, because they're so obsessed with technology, and physical fitness is a good predictor of health, which is a good predictor of good genes, so women tend to prefer people who work out more. Also, intelligence has only recently become important to human success, so women haven't had enough time to evolve attraction based on intelligence.
Do you get it? Evolutionary psychology "sounds nice", but it's so soft that it very often (perhaps not always, but very often) falls on the "bullshit" side of the science/bullshit line. Many smart people on Slashdot can see that, so we don't buy into it.
It's not all bullshit. I remember reading one study in AP Psychology in high school where they actually did a bona fide scientific experiment related to evolutionary psychology, using it to make a hypothesis that they didn't know the truth of, and then testing it. I don't remember at all what it was, unfortunately, but I remember being impressed.
One other aspect that turns us off about evolutionary psychology is that a lot of (typically amateur ) proponents of it seem to promote the naturalistic fallacy: even if you're a dick because evolution made you that way, it doesn't mean you're not a dick.
I don't think you're right about this. One of the nice things about OSS is that you don't have to go with the majority; even a small minority can maintain a usable fork. Slackware has used an unpopular init system for years: it uses BSD init instead of SYSVINIT. I see no reason it shouldn't be able to keep doing that if it wants to, and I don't think Volkerding is enthusiastic about systemd, to say the least. udev doesn't currently depend on systemd, and anyway someone else in this thread said Gentoo already forked it.
By the way, did you know you can run a Linux system, today, without udev? You just create the device files in/dev like you did back in the 90s, and it'll work. That's not to say this is a good idea. But it will work.
Where have you read that Slackware is going with systemd? If they do, I may switch to Gentoo. My previous experience with Gentoo was less than positive, but, then, I was using SPARC...
Extremely hard questions that don't have to be fully answered to realize that something without a functioning brain isn't sentient.
Sentient life has to have some ability to create thoughts. It has to be self-aware. A dog is more sentient than a fetus is in the first trimester. And we have no problem with killing dogs. We try to do it kindly when we do it. But we do it.
Got a link for that? Linux supports oodles of ridiculously obscure hardware, and support is rarely removed. Yes, they dropped 386 (not 32-bit x86... literal Intel 80386 as opposed to 80486) support some months ago; that was a special case because the weirdness of that architecture was permeating the kernel... but a standard floppy disk drive? I can't imagine they'd be dropping support for that. That support most likely lives in some driver file somewhere and takes approximately zero developer time to keep up to date.
I really don't get Git. I've looked at it a few times, and it seems much less intuitive to me than Subversion was when I learned it. I could see it being good for really, really large projects, like Linux, but non-distributed version control systems seem so much simpler I can't help but think they're better choices than Git for most projects. Maybe someone could specify, for a project with =20 people on it, what's so great about Git?
You know resorting to ad hominem is poor form, right?
The law is not a code of ethics. Sometimes, at some points in history, it has been quite unethical. These days it's not so bad in the US, but copyright does overreach quite a bit, and there are certainly things one could do that would violate copyright but not be unethical. Think abandonware. Someone following the ACM's code of ethics couldn't participate in VetusWare. They certainly violate copyright. Personally, I'm surprised they've been allowed to survive. It makes me have a slightly more positive opinion of Microsoft and others that VetusWare has survived.
I don't personally upload things to VetusWare, and I'm not terribly interested in the stuff there. But, I don't think it would be professionally unethical to do that. If I was uploading my employer's code, sure, that's a professional ethics issue, but, if I dig out an ancient copy of some abandonware I have lying around and upload it on my own time, from a connection that doesn't trace back to my employer's office network, I don't think that's a professional ethics issue. By the way, do you think everyone who's ever downloaded anything from VetusWare should go to prison or be kicked out of the software field?
Back to the ACM's ethics code. You're arguing it's not that bad. And you're right. It's not that bad. It's not bad because it's vague and unenforceable. But putting out a code with "Respect patents and copyrights, always" in it, when software patents rain down terror on true innovators daily and the only way to preserve any semblance of the history of personal computing is to just ignore copyright altogether, tells me that the leaders of the ACM disagree with me on something important. I wouldn't want those people running a licensing body. And despite your protestations, they are the ones who probably would be running the licensing body, because they are the ones running the professional organization right now.
So, there's substantial evidence you're wrong that I'd like everything this hypothetical licensing body does. I think a lot of software engineers wouldn't like it, which is probably part of why we don't have one. We don't agree on everything, thegarbz. Some of us are libertarians. Some of us are socialists. We would have political fights like any other diverse group of people with differing views.
Right now, the ACM isn't so bad. They mainly put on conferences and stuff like that. Nobody cares about their code of ethics. Nobody has to follow it. Even if you're in the ACM you probably don't have to follow it because there's probably extremely little, if any, enforcement of it. But the fact that someone got that language into the ethics code means there is a substantial pressure group in the ACM that would like to see everyone in the ACM forced to endorse the status quo on copyright and patents in relation to software. I'd rather not give those people any power. I don't think I'd have much to gain from that, and I think I would have much to lose. And, from a non-selfish point of view, I think the software field has much to lose, too, and not just because of the copyright/patent thing. I think it's a good thing that you can hire yourself out as a contractor while you're in high school or start Facebook from your dorm room in college. You regulate the field, you destroy that. Freedom is worth a lot.
Finally, I agree with my sibling poster about small organizations and politics. Look at Debian if you doubt our organizations have politics.
Yes, you can vote. Whoopdee-doo. You can also vote in homeowner's assocations, so homeowner's associations are never run by small-minded dictators who make you cut your bushes a certain way or they sell your house to pay the fine. That never happens. Never.
Oh wait, it does. Just because you can vote in an election bestowing power on people doesn't mean the power won't be abused. If there's not a compelling reason to give a small group of people power over a larger group, it probably shouldn't be done, because doing that comes with several disadvantages.
Yes, I could join the ACM, pay my dues, and then lobby to get them to take out the language in their charter saying that software patents are just peachy. Or, since they have no teeth, I can just not join their little club and follow whatever code of ethics I want to follow.
You want to make it so I can't just ignore them, because I would have to join them to do my job, and then I would have to put up with whatever rules I can't get changed. I don't like that idea. My time is valuable, and, ignoring a powerless organization is much less time-consuming than fighting to change a powerful one from within. And, even if I can fight, I won't always win the fight.
So, I'm glad we don't have licensing for programmers, and I will be a single-issue voter on that issue if either political party moves to require such licensing.
I really, really don't think we need PE-style licensing professionalism for most software. Example: Facebook lets anybody commit code that goes straight to the public site. I guess you're probably supposed to test it before you hit commit and it immediately goes live. Is this an issue? Does Facebook crash often? Does it even matter?
In the situations where good software is really, really important -- like, say, airplanes -- we already have regulations in place to deal with the special needs of those particular fields. If a PE does a bad job, a bridge might fall down. If a normal software developer does a bad job, Facebook might be unavailable for 20 minutes. Or maybe even Google... *shudder*.
If it's a case where a Pacemaker might fail, I assert that we've learned from Therac-25 and similar incidents and apply the right quality standards, generally, to safety-critical software like that.
And that's really what the PE system is for. Safety. Most engineers build things that really need to work right, or seriously bad stuff will happen. Most software developers don't. And, because we're not constrained the same way PEs are constrained, we're able to do a lot more work a lot more quickly than software developers operating under PE-style constraints. If you want to see what a world of PE software engineers would be like, look at aircraft code, spaceship code, or (I hope... not sure) medical device code. Yes, it works great and is incredibly clean. There's also very little of it, because making code to that standard costs a lot of time and money and it's just absurd to do it for Facebook, Twitter, or Microsoft Office.
If this actually happened, you would have rules like this:
"You can't write X without including Y DRM because otherwise OMG PIRACY!!111!!!"
Fix the morons who would write that into the code of ethics. Then, maybe we'll talk.
"It's been 3 minutes since you last sucessfully posted a comment."
Yes, it has, and I have "Excellent" karma and have been a member for so many years I can't remember, and I currently have mod points. Maybe give me the benefit of the doubt?
I hope you reported this to somebody after leaving the job. Besides it being the right thing to do, whistleblowers can actually get good money in some cases...
This is unsettled law. The CFAA is very vague, so judges have to interpret it, so it's unsettled. Saying it's the "geek perspecticve" is meaningless; expert opinion certainly matters here.
Until we get a Supreme Court CFAA case, we'll never really know what that stupid law means. Until we know what it means, overzealous prosecutors will be using it to bully people into accepting plea bargins or killing themselves. Aaron's Law appears to be dying in committee. It's a damn shame.
Think of the intent of the actions here. Did he sell these email addresses to spammers on the black market? No, he contacted the press. These are not the actions of someone who should be sent to jail.
First: LibreOffice has essentially perfect Word 97 import/export, and modern Word still supports those formats well.
Second: It's very common for there to be formatting problems with documents exchanged between different institutions. It is slightly annoying to receive misformatted documents, but it is accepted as normal. It would cause some secretary a little angst. That secretary wouldn't be able to influence purchasing decisions, even if she (or he) were petty enough to want to hurt someone's business over the issue.
It definitely is fun to talk about this with subject with intelligent people... even though, at least in my experience, it rarely results in anyone changing his mind.
Looking through the works, rather than just taking Wikipedia at face value, it looks like the following is the kernel of the non-Biblical evidence: 1. Tacitus, approximately a century after the events in the Bible took place, talked about Christians in Rome and their persecution and said that Jesus was crucified by Pilate. He gets Pilate's official rank wrong. We have no idea where he got his information. Still, this is better than I thought the evidence was. Which isn't necessarily saying much. 2. There's a passage by Jewish-to-Roman defector Josephus Flavius talking about Jesus written circa 100 AD. It's at least partly a forgery, though....and that's it. Two references, one at least partly forged, each no earlier than 70 years after the fact.
Tacitus was a good historian. Maybe he looked up Jesus's death in the official Roman records. Maybe those records didn't even exist by the time Tacitus was writing; his death wouldn't have been particularly noteworthy at the time. He doesn't tell us where he got his information -- this isn't unusual for a Roman historian -- so we don't and never will know if he was just parroting Christian mythology on the subject.
Regarding scholarly consensus on the matter... the consensus of people who have devoted their lives to studying a single book that that book isn't totally made up doesn't impress me much:)
Like I said, though, I don't know if he existed. I don't think we ever will know. If I had to guess, I'd say yes. But in my mind it's like maybe a 60% chance.
Perhaps not the best example, since, even if this guy didn't exist, some seriously weird stuff -- from their perspective at least -- started happening to those people during World War 2, but you get the idea.
Re God being just: if you believe in eye-for-eye "justice", I guess he would be just. Like I said, I don't. I think causing pain "because he/she/they deserve it" is immoral and shouldn't be the foundation of a modern society. If you steal, you should have to repay the person you stole from, plus interest and perhaps emotional damages. That's making the person you stole from whole again. Cutting your hand off isn't called for. Neither is putting you in jail except for (1) deterrence and (2) rehabilitation. Pain for pain's sake should never happen. If you disagree, maybe that's why you don't feel the God you're describing is as horrific a being as I perceive him to be.
Don't worry about eloquence. I think we're understanding each other:)
This is actually my first attempt at quoting. Let's see if it works.
The "official" response is that we were created perfect, but Adam & Eve screwed it up, so we are ALL screwed. God, however, threw us a life-line. All you have to do to escape is turn from sin and follow Jesus. God's rules, so he can define sin how he wants. Should being gay be a sin? I would tend to exclude that from the list, but it is not my choice.
Regarding the apple story: putting the apple in the garden when he KNEW they would eat it was supremely assholish. Yeah, he told them not to eat it. Yeah, they did anyway. BUT WHY PUT IT THERE IN THE FIRST PLACE? Oh, they had to have a choice. Well, why? If you're designing a UI, you don't have a big button on the screen saying, "DON'T CLICK ME, BUT, IF YOU DO, MAYBE SOMETHING GOOD WILL HAPPEN!" and then have that button format the hard drive. As a general rule when creating devices or environments people interact with, you try to make it hard or preferably impossible for them to screw things up for themselves, not easy. If you're nice, you try NOT to give them choices they don't need and which can only serve to hurt them. He gave them a choice when he knew they'd make the wrong one. That's worse than stupid: it's mean. It's psychological torture. It's like:
"Yah, things could have been great for you guys but you FLUNKED. HA HA ha. Ha ha. Ha."
As to heaven vs. hell, let's look at things differently. If you do assume heaven and hell exist, then who gets to go where? Would you like to think that Hitler is in hell? How about Stallin? Putin? The guy who cut you off in traffic last week? The guy who sold you the broken used hard drive off of CraigsList and told you it was in great shape? Simply stated, if you just judge people on good/evil, where should the dividing line be? What about the person who is just below this imaginary line? How should they feel? To a perfect being, the ONLY line that makes sense is perfection. Nobody lives up to that, so God had to invent an escape plan.
Personally, I don't think anyone "deserves" to suffer. An eye for an eye just isn't how I think about things like that. It's like, a dog bites someone, so you torture the dog. Why do that? It's a dog. Kill it if you need to; don't make it suffer.
Most of the time, at least in my opinion, people who do assholish things don't really know they're being assholes. They had bad parents who taught them a screwed-up morality system. Or, they fail at logic. Or, they're too self-centered. Or, they fall into blame-the-victim fallacies because of who knows why. But, they're not really evil. They're just wrong. If you can get to them -- really get them to listen to you -- maybe you can make them right. Maybe not. But either way, there's no excuse for being cruel.
Sadists are the people I have the most problem with. People who intentionally cause other people pain just for the sake of doing that -- I mean, I can't empathize with them. At all. They're more alien to me than, well, dogs. Even dogs can show kindness, to their owners and to other dogs. People who can't, well, they're freaks of nature, and they're scary, and they're tragic, and my understanding is they often can't be helped. I look at them as deformed to the point that they can scarcely be called human. And that's sad.
But I don't want to torture them. Lock them up if you have to (assuming they committed a crime). But why would you want to hurt them? What would that accomplish except satisfying your own vindiction? And vindictiveness if a character flaw.
If I were hurt -- badly -- by a sadist, maybe I would like to see them suffer. But that's because I'm not perfect; I am sometimes vindictive. However, it would take a lot -- a lot a lot a lot a lot -- to make me want to torture them for all eternity. If I got to where I would want to cause that much pain, well, the sadist won, in a way, because
I saw this in meta-moderation, and I had to respond. I voted you up, by the way. Well-written post.
Atheist here. I'm not going to argue God isn't real; I can do that, but I won't convince you. I'm going to argue that, if your God is real, he is an asshole of the highest order.
I'm going to assume, based on your post, that you either believe unrepentant homosexuals are to be tortured in a place that has undergone extreme global warming, or you think they will simply cease to exist. I've heard Christians say both. Whichever is the case, don't you think that's a really (pun intentional) dick move? They're not hurting other people. God made them to like doing what they do. They don't think what they're doing is wrong; they were also made not to think what they were doing is wrong. If your God is real, he made a list of rules he knew would be violated by a bunch of people, therefore condemning them, and then set them up for failure. And it's up to him; he's omnipotent. He can make whatever rules he wants. Some of them -- the "don't hurt other people" ones -- make sense in a society where (for some reason) he has to essentially pretend he doesn't exist and so can't perform miracles like just resurrecting murder victims because you have to accept he exists with little to no evidence of that fact because he's such an egotist he actually cares about that. Some of them -- like "don't stick that there, even if he likes it" -- make sense only if you think he is the final arbiter of what's right and what's wrong.
And if he's omnipotent, he is, from a pure power perspective. He has the power to enforce whatever rules he wants, just like Saudi Arabia has the power to oppress women as much as they want. If you think might makes right, then go with God. And I guess you'd better tow the line in that case or you'll get thrown in the Bad Place, too. So maybe you can't even be honest with me. Maybe you're too scared to be honest with yourself.
But think about it. Really think about condemning people -- good people, who help other people, who want to do the right thing as they see it, and who happen to be attracted to their own gender -- to eternal torture or eternal nonexistence (whatever you think is going to happen to them) because they got that rule wrong. They didn't hurt anyone else. They weren't trying to do anything wrong. The rule doesn't make any logical sense; you have to just accept it "on faith", which they didn't have. And this God dude puts them on the eternal shit list for that.
If this guy is real, isn't he pretty despicable? If not -- honest answer -- what the fuck is he doing that for? What is he trying to accomplish? And is damning X people to hell or nothingness for whatever he's trying to accomplish really, REALLY worth it, because what he's doing carries a higher cost than anything any mortal has ever done, ever.
If we start getting modded offtopic or somesuch, point me to a journal if you'd like to keep this discussion up. I'm interested in what answers you might come up with for this. I had one guy -- a close friend -- actually come right out and say that, while he was religious, he was towing the line out of fear and fear alone. I'd be interested in what you think of all this because you seem like a pretty smart guy.
And you think this would be a good thing? You think undermining someone's ability to make a living because of their political beliefs, whatever they may be, is a/GOOD/ thing?
I've enjoyed discussing this issue with you as well.
The statement you quoted continues on to say that difficult questions of patentability should be left to Congress. It's simply saying that Congress can change the law if it wants to, and that the court isn't judging whether patentability of software, were it legal, would be a good or bad thing.
Regarding software as mathematics, and programmer's ability to do math, software is a specialized branch of mathematics, and programmers, even if they do not understand other branches, typically understand the mathematics of algorithms at least to a rudimentary degree. For instance, a good programmer will be able to sketch out a proof that a loop in his program works correctly by intuitively using loop invariants, even if he's never studied loop invariants formally. I would argue programmers probably should study loop invariants formally. I'll note that I have not had a class on proving proving programs correct, but I do think I would benefit from one.
However, even talking about formal correctness is a little bit of a distraction. The point is that a human can sit down and execute a program using his brain and will produce the same result as a computer executing the program with a CPU. A computer with one ISA can emulate another and execute software written for a different type of computer. The fundamental essence of software is abstract, not physical. A machine with gears is a physical machine. A computer is a physical machine as well, and software, when running on it, does correspond to electrons in certain states, but those electrons aren't the essence of what the programmer created. Software is an entity that exists outside of any individual computer or the physical world. It's an abstract entity, and that's the type of thing that's not supposed to be patentable.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, your kids still need some way to make their nest egg so they can buy their rental properties. What are they going to do to get that starting money? To me, coding seems as good a choice for that as anything.
And, it's all fine and good to tell your children to invest, but I'd recommend diversified investment, not JUST rental property. Also, I'd recommend Real Estate Investment Trust investments over owning a single rental property outright. There's less risk with owning a share in a trust holding many properties, because, if you buy 100% ownership in a single property, that one property you bought may end up declining in property value if you're unlucky, even if the real estate market as a whole goes up.
As far as your policy considerations concerning the owning class, they are certainly real. In my view, the best solution to this is graduated estate taxes topping out at something like 90%. There's no social benefit to making it possible for children of rich people to do nothing other than fuck around their whole lives. Democrats like the estate tax. Republicans want to repeal it. Compromise right now is 40% maximum tax bracket with a $5,000,000+ exemption. I'd like the exemption lower and the tax higher.
Also, fuck beta.
---linuxrocks123
main()
{
printf("hello, world");
}
Missing return from main, undefined behavior after the printf. What do I win?
More seriously, I think it's an overstatement that "even expert C programmers can't spot this". It jumped out at me right when I looked at it. I do a lot of C++, but not much C. I had to do some research to make sure it really was undefined behavior in C when I noticed it, but it did jump right out at me, and I wouldn't have let someone off for this in a code review, because it's obviously either undefined or bad style.
It has nothing to do with a "strange geek religion of human equality". What it has to do with is that most evolutionary psychology is non-falsifiable. You can't use it to make predictions. Here's an example:
Observation: Women go for geek guys.
Reason: Humans evolved intelligence, because intelligence confers many advantages, so displays of intelligence attract mates.
Observation: Women don't go for geek guys.
Reason: Geek guys tend to work out less, because they're so obsessed with technology, and physical fitness is a good predictor of health, which is a good predictor of good genes, so women tend to prefer people who work out more. Also, intelligence has only recently become important to human success, so women haven't had enough time to evolve attraction based on intelligence.
Do you get it? Evolutionary psychology "sounds nice", but it's so soft that it very often (perhaps not always, but very often) falls on the "bullshit" side of the science/bullshit line. Many smart people on Slashdot can see that, so we don't buy into it.
It's not all bullshit. I remember reading one study in AP Psychology in high school where they actually did a bona fide scientific experiment related to evolutionary psychology, using it to make a hypothesis that they didn't know the truth of, and then testing it. I don't remember at all what it was, unfortunately, but I remember being impressed.
One other aspect that turns us off about evolutionary psychology is that a lot of (typically amateur ) proponents of it seem to promote the naturalistic fallacy: even if you're a dick because evolution made you that way, it doesn't mean you're not a dick.
Also, fuck beta.
I don't think you're right about this. One of the nice things about OSS is that you don't have to go with the majority; even a small minority can maintain a usable fork. Slackware has used an unpopular init system for years: it uses BSD init instead of SYSVINIT. I see no reason it shouldn't be able to keep doing that if it wants to, and I don't think Volkerding is enthusiastic about systemd, to say the least. udev doesn't currently depend on systemd, and anyway someone else in this thread said Gentoo already forked it.
By the way, did you know you can run a Linux system, today, without udev? You just create the device files in /dev like you did back in the 90s, and it'll work. That's not to say this is a good idea. But it will work.
Where have you read that Slackware is going with systemd? If they do, I may switch to Gentoo. My previous experience with Gentoo was less than positive, but, then, I was using SPARC...
If we found a way to make a computer self-aware -- truly pass the Turing test -- I'd have a problem with killing that computer.
Extremely hard questions that don't have to be fully answered to realize that something without a functioning brain isn't sentient.
Sentient life has to have some ability to create thoughts. It has to be self-aware. A dog is more sentient than a fetus is in the first trimester. And we have no problem with killing dogs. We try to do it kindly when we do it. But we do it.
Got a link for that? Linux supports oodles of ridiculously obscure hardware, and support is rarely removed. Yes, they dropped 386 (not 32-bit x86 ... literal Intel 80386 as opposed to 80486) support some months ago; that was a special case because the weirdness of that architecture was permeating the kernel ... but a standard floppy disk drive? I can't imagine they'd be dropping support for that. That support most likely lives in some driver file somewhere and takes approximately zero developer time to keep up to date.
I really don't get Git. I've looked at it a few times, and it seems much less intuitive to me than Subversion was when I learned it. I could see it being good for really, really large projects, like Linux, but non-distributed version control systems seem so much simpler I can't help but think they're better choices than Git for most projects. Maybe someone could specify, for a project with =20 people on it, what's so great about Git?
How is that not an absurd violation of HIPAA?
The stock market isn't a zero sum game. Stocks pay dividends.
You know resorting to ad hominem is poor form, right?
The law is not a code of ethics. Sometimes, at some points in history, it has been quite unethical. These days it's not so bad in the US, but copyright does overreach quite a bit, and there are certainly things one could do that would violate copyright but not be unethical. Think abandonware. Someone following the ACM's code of ethics couldn't participate in VetusWare. They certainly violate copyright. Personally, I'm surprised they've been allowed to survive. It makes me have a slightly more positive opinion of Microsoft and others that VetusWare has survived.
I don't personally upload things to VetusWare, and I'm not terribly interested in the stuff there. But, I don't think it would be professionally unethical to do that. If I was uploading my employer's code, sure, that's a professional ethics issue, but, if I dig out an ancient copy of some abandonware I have lying around and upload it on my own time, from a connection that doesn't trace back to my employer's office network, I don't think that's a professional ethics issue. By the way, do you think everyone who's ever downloaded anything from VetusWare should go to prison or be kicked out of the software field?
Back to the ACM's ethics code. You're arguing it's not that bad. And you're right. It's not that bad. It's not bad because it's vague and unenforceable. But putting out a code with "Respect patents and copyrights, always" in it, when software patents rain down terror on true innovators daily and the only way to preserve any semblance of the history of personal computing is to just ignore copyright altogether, tells me that the leaders of the ACM disagree with me on something important. I wouldn't want those people running a licensing body. And despite your protestations, they are the ones who probably would be running the licensing body, because they are the ones running the professional organization right now.
So, there's substantial evidence you're wrong that I'd like everything this hypothetical licensing body does. I think a lot of software engineers wouldn't like it, which is probably part of why we don't have one. We don't agree on everything, thegarbz. Some of us are libertarians. Some of us are socialists. We would have political fights like any other diverse group of people with differing views.
Right now, the ACM isn't so bad. They mainly put on conferences and stuff like that. Nobody cares about their code of ethics. Nobody has to follow it. Even if you're in the ACM you probably don't have to follow it because there's probably extremely little, if any, enforcement of it. But the fact that someone got that language into the ethics code means there is a substantial pressure group in the ACM that would like to see everyone in the ACM forced to endorse the status quo on copyright and patents in relation to software. I'd rather not give those people any power. I don't think I'd have much to gain from that, and I think I would have much to lose. And, from a non-selfish point of view, I think the software field has much to lose, too, and not just because of the copyright/patent thing. I think it's a good thing that you can hire yourself out as a contractor while you're in high school or start Facebook from your dorm room in college. You regulate the field, you destroy that. Freedom is worth a lot.
Finally, I agree with my sibling poster about small organizations and politics. Look at Debian if you doubt our organizations have politics.
Yes, you can vote. Whoopdee-doo. You can also vote in homeowner's assocations, so homeowner's associations are never run by small-minded dictators who make you cut your bushes a certain way or they sell your house to pay the fine. That never happens. Never.
Oh wait, it does. Just because you can vote in an election bestowing power on people doesn't mean the power won't be abused. If there's not a compelling reason to give a small group of people power over a larger group, it probably shouldn't be done, because doing that comes with several disadvantages.
Yes, I could join the ACM, pay my dues, and then lobby to get them to take out the language in their charter saying that software patents are just peachy. Or, since they have no teeth, I can just not join their little club and follow whatever code of ethics I want to follow.
You want to make it so I can't just ignore them, because I would have to join them to do my job, and then I would have to put up with whatever rules I can't get changed. I don't like that idea. My time is valuable, and, ignoring a powerless organization is much less time-consuming than fighting to change a powerful one from within. And, even if I can fight, I won't always win the fight.
So, I'm glad we don't have licensing for programmers, and I will be a single-issue voter on that issue if either political party moves to require such licensing.
I commented on this just yesterday.
I really, really don't think we need PE-style licensing professionalism for most software. Example: Facebook lets anybody commit code that goes straight to the public site. I guess you're probably supposed to test it before you hit commit and it immediately goes live. Is this an issue? Does Facebook crash often? Does it even matter?
In the situations where good software is really, really important -- like, say, airplanes -- we already have regulations in place to deal with the special needs of those particular fields. If a PE does a bad job, a bridge might fall down. If a normal software developer does a bad job, Facebook might be unavailable for 20 minutes. Or maybe even Google ... *shudder*.
If it's a case where a Pacemaker might fail, I assert that we've learned from Therac-25 and similar incidents and apply the right quality standards, generally, to safety-critical software like that.
And that's really what the PE system is for. Safety. Most engineers build things that really need to work right, or seriously bad stuff will happen. Most software developers don't. And, because we're not constrained the same way PEs are constrained, we're able to do a lot more work a lot more quickly than software developers operating under PE-style constraints. If you want to see what a world of PE software engineers would be like, look at aircraft code, spaceship code, or (I hope ... not sure) medical device code. Yes, it works great and is incredibly clean. There's also very little of it, because making code to that standard costs a lot of time and money and it's just absurd to do it for Facebook, Twitter, or Microsoft Office.
If this actually happened, you would have rules like this:
"You can't write X without including Y DRM because otherwise OMG PIRACY!!111!!!"
Fix the morons who would write that into the code of ethics. Then, maybe we'll talk.
"It's been 3 minutes since you last sucessfully posted a comment."
Yes, it has, and I have "Excellent" karma and have been a member for so many years I can't remember, and I currently have mod points. Maybe give me the benefit of the doubt?
Just for that:
http://soylentnews.org/
FUCK BETA
I hope you reported this to somebody after leaving the job. Besides it being the right thing to do, whistleblowers can actually get good money in some cases...
This is unsettled law. The CFAA is very vague, so judges have to interpret it, so it's unsettled. Saying it's the "geek perspecticve" is meaningless; expert opinion certainly matters here.
Until we get a Supreme Court CFAA case, we'll never really know what that stupid law means. Until we know what it means, overzealous prosecutors will be using it to bully people into accepting plea bargins or killing themselves. Aaron's Law appears to be dying in committee. It's a damn shame.
Think of the intent of the actions here. Did he sell these email addresses to spammers on the black market? No, he contacted the press. These are not the actions of someone who should be sent to jail.
You're way overstating it.
First: LibreOffice has essentially perfect Word 97 import/export, and modern Word still supports those formats well.
Second: It's very common for there to be formatting problems with documents exchanged between different institutions. It is slightly annoying to receive misformatted documents, but it is accepted as normal. It would cause some secretary a little angst. That secretary wouldn't be able to influence purchasing decisions, even if she (or he) were petty enough to want to hurt someone's business over the issue.
This guy isn't a professional CEO. He's one of the co-founders of Mozilla and the inventor of JavaScript.
Likewise :)
It definitely is fun to talk about this with subject with intelligent people ... even though, at least in my experience, it rarely results in anyone changing his mind.
Looking through the works, rather than just taking Wikipedia at face value, it looks like the following is the kernel of the non-Biblical evidence: ...and that's it. Two references, one at least partly forged, each no earlier than 70 years after the fact.
1. Tacitus, approximately a century after the events in the Bible took place, talked about Christians in Rome and their persecution and said that Jesus was crucified by Pilate. He gets Pilate's official rank wrong. We have no idea where he got his information. Still, this is better than I thought the evidence was. Which isn't necessarily saying much.
2. There's a passage by Jewish-to-Roman defector Josephus Flavius talking about Jesus written circa 100 AD. It's at least partly a forgery, though.
Tacitus was a good historian. Maybe he looked up Jesus's death in the official Roman records. Maybe those records didn't even exist by the time Tacitus was writing; his death wouldn't have been particularly noteworthy at the time. He doesn't tell us where he got his information -- this isn't unusual for a Roman historian -- so we don't and never will know if he was just parroting Christian mythology on the subject.
Regarding scholarly consensus on the matter ... the consensus of people who have devoted their lives to studying a single book that that book isn't totally made up doesn't impress me much :)
Like I said, though, I don't know if he existed. I don't think we ever will know. If I had to guess, I'd say yes. But in my mind it's like maybe a 60% chance.
Re Jesus catching on: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J...
Perhaps not the best example, since, even if this guy didn't exist, some seriously weird stuff -- from their perspective at least -- started happening to those people during World War 2, but you get the idea.
Re God being just: if you believe in eye-for-eye "justice", I guess he would be just. Like I said, I don't. I think causing pain "because he/she/they deserve it" is immoral and shouldn't be the foundation of a modern society. If you steal, you should have to repay the person you stole from, plus interest and perhaps emotional damages. That's making the person you stole from whole again. Cutting your hand off isn't called for. Neither is putting you in jail except for (1) deterrence and (2) rehabilitation. Pain for pain's sake should never happen. If you disagree, maybe that's why you don't feel the God you're describing is as horrific a being as I perceive him to be.
Don't worry about eloquence. I think we're understanding each other :)
Regarding the apple story: putting the apple in the garden when he KNEW they would eat it was supremely assholish. Yeah, he told them not to eat it. Yeah, they did anyway. BUT WHY PUT IT THERE IN THE FIRST PLACE? Oh, they had to have a choice. Well, why? If you're designing a UI, you don't have a big button on the screen saying, "DON'T CLICK ME, BUT, IF YOU DO, MAYBE SOMETHING GOOD WILL HAPPEN!" and then have that button format the hard drive. As a general rule when creating devices or environments people interact with, you try to make it hard or preferably impossible for them to screw things up for themselves, not easy. If you're nice, you try NOT to give them choices they don't need and which can only serve to hurt them. He gave them a choice when he knew they'd make the wrong one. That's worse than stupid: it's mean. It's psychological torture. It's like:
"Yah, things could have been great for you guys but you FLUNKED. HA HA ha. Ha ha. Ha."
Personally, I don't think anyone "deserves" to suffer. An eye for an eye just isn't how I think about things like that. It's like, a dog bites someone, so you torture the dog. Why do that? It's a dog. Kill it if you need to; don't make it suffer.
Most of the time, at least in my opinion, people who do assholish things don't really know they're being assholes. They had bad parents who taught them a screwed-up morality system. Or, they fail at logic. Or, they're too self-centered. Or, they fall into blame-the-victim fallacies because of who knows why. But, they're not really evil. They're just wrong. If you can get to them -- really get them to listen to you -- maybe you can make them right. Maybe not. But either way, there's no excuse for being cruel.
Sadists are the people I have the most problem with. People who intentionally cause other people pain just for the sake of doing that -- I mean, I can't empathize with them. At all. They're more alien to me than, well, dogs. Even dogs can show kindness, to their owners and to other dogs. People who can't, well, they're freaks of nature, and they're scary, and they're tragic, and my understanding is they often can't be helped. I look at them as deformed to the point that they can scarcely be called human. And that's sad.
But I don't want to torture them. Lock them up if you have to (assuming they committed a crime). But why would you want to hurt them? What would that accomplish except satisfying your own vindiction? And vindictiveness if a character flaw.
If I were hurt -- badly -- by a sadist, maybe I would like to see them suffer. But that's because I'm not perfect; I am sometimes vindictive. However, it would take a lot -- a lot a lot a lot a lot -- to make me want to torture them for all eternity. If I got to where I would want to cause that much pain, well, the sadist won, in a way, because
I saw this in meta-moderation, and I had to respond. I voted you up, by the way. Well-written post.
Atheist here. I'm not going to argue God isn't real; I can do that, but I won't convince you. I'm going to argue that, if your God is real, he is an asshole of the highest order.
I'm going to assume, based on your post, that you either believe unrepentant homosexuals are to be tortured in a place that has undergone extreme global warming, or you think they will simply cease to exist. I've heard Christians say both. Whichever is the case, don't you think that's a really (pun intentional) dick move? They're not hurting other people. God made them to like doing what they do. They don't think what they're doing is wrong; they were also made not to think what they were doing is wrong. If your God is real, he made a list of rules he knew would be violated by a bunch of people, therefore condemning them, and then set them up for failure. And it's up to him; he's omnipotent. He can make whatever rules he wants. Some of them -- the "don't hurt other people" ones -- make sense in a society where (for some reason) he has to essentially pretend he doesn't exist and so can't perform miracles like just resurrecting murder victims because you have to accept he exists with little to no evidence of that fact because he's such an egotist he actually cares about that. Some of them -- like "don't stick that there, even if he likes it" -- make sense only if you think he is the final arbiter of what's right and what's wrong.
And if he's omnipotent, he is, from a pure power perspective. He has the power to enforce whatever rules he wants, just like Saudi Arabia has the power to oppress women as much as they want. If you think might makes right, then go with God. And I guess you'd better tow the line in that case or you'll get thrown in the Bad Place, too. So maybe you can't even be honest with me. Maybe you're too scared to be honest with yourself.
But think about it. Really think about condemning people -- good people, who help other people, who want to do the right thing as they see it, and who happen to be attracted to their own gender -- to eternal torture or eternal nonexistence (whatever you think is going to happen to them) because they got that rule wrong. They didn't hurt anyone else. They weren't trying to do anything wrong. The rule doesn't make any logical sense; you have to just accept it "on faith", which they didn't have. And this God dude puts them on the eternal shit list for that.
If this guy is real, isn't he pretty despicable? If not -- honest answer -- what the fuck is he doing that for? What is he trying to accomplish? And is damning X people to hell or nothingness for whatever he's trying to accomplish really, REALLY worth it, because what he's doing carries a higher cost than anything any mortal has ever done, ever.
If we start getting modded offtopic or somesuch, point me to a journal if you'd like to keep this discussion up. I'm interested in what answers you might come up with for this. I had one guy -- a close friend -- actually come right out and say that, while he was religious, he was towing the line out of fear and fear alone. I'd be interested in what you think of all this because you seem like a pretty smart guy.
And you think this would be a good thing? You think undermining someone's ability to make a living because of their political beliefs, whatever they may be, is a /GOOD/ thing?
The 1950s called. They want their red scare back.
I've enjoyed discussing this issue with you as well.
The statement you quoted continues on to say that difficult questions of patentability should be left to Congress. It's simply saying that Congress can change the law if it wants to, and that the court isn't judging whether patentability of software, were it legal, would be a good or bad thing.
Regarding software as mathematics, and programmer's ability to do math, software is a specialized branch of mathematics, and programmers, even if they do not understand other branches, typically understand the mathematics of algorithms at least to a rudimentary degree. For instance, a good programmer will be able to sketch out a proof that a loop in his program works correctly by intuitively using loop invariants, even if he's never studied loop invariants formally. I would argue programmers probably should study loop invariants formally. I'll note that I have not had a class on proving proving programs correct, but I do think I would benefit from one.
However, even talking about formal correctness is a little bit of a distraction. The point is that a human can sit down and execute a program using his brain and will produce the same result as a computer executing the program with a CPU. A computer with one ISA can emulate another and execute software written for a different type of computer. The fundamental essence of software is abstract, not physical. A machine with gears is a physical machine. A computer is a physical machine as well, and software, when running on it, does correspond to electrons in certain states, but those electrons aren't the essence of what the programmer created. Software is an entity that exists outside of any individual computer or the physical world. It's an abstract entity, and that's the type of thing that's not supposed to be patentable.