My workplace is business-casual, but nobody really says anything if we push the limits of that. I'm a software developer who's just a few years out of school, and I hadn't been making much of an effort to look nice, largely because I was still dirt poor and didn't have decent clothes.
Well, before long my financial situation started to improve (paying off debts from school and old medical bills, etc). I made a resolution to start dressing nicer. Over a long weekend, I went out my wife helped me pick out bunch of new clothes. Still business casual, but toward the nicer end of that. Slacks and nice button up shirts and the like.
So, on Monday I come in dressed up significantly nicer than usual. Then, shortly after lunch, my wife calls me. She's feeling lousy and wants me to take her to the hospital. I go tell my boss that I need to leave for the day, and he looks me up and down, realizes that I'm dressed much nicer than usual, and leaving early.
So, obviously, he jumps to the conclusion that I'm off interviewing at another job. Within a week I had a sit down with my boss and his boss, and they're giving me a 10% raise and a promotion, just out of the blue. They said it's because they're really happy with the work I've been doing, and I just deserve it. I hope that's at least partially true, but I'm totally sure the impetus the clothes.
Of course, this is more an argument for keeping your bosses on their toes than for dressing nicely every day, but I still like the story.
"The problem isn't with the cards themselves - cable companies have been mandated to use them in all cable boxes produced since July of last year. These boxes work. So the problem is obviously with the third party devices."
Your logic is screwy here, too. Example: I write a web page and test it in internet explorer. It looks perfect and flawless. I then try to display it in Opera, Firefox, etc. It looks crappy and the layout is all over the place.
According to your logic, the web page must work, because I tested it in IE. So, the problem is obviously with the other browsers.
My point is that you don't take into account the possibility that cable companies are not adhering strictly to the standards. They could easily design a cable card that works in their own proprietary set top boxes, but is total garbage when you try it on a completely standards-compliant third party device.
Oh, come on, man. Do you have any ideas how many lives have been saved from blood transfusions? They are VERY effective. This article is pointing out that they could be MORE effective.
Taking this article to mean that all science is bullshit is a pretty fucking big leap. I guess what I'm saying is, you're an idiot.
"You are faced with the choice of supporting the band, or not supporting the band. Many people need to support the band in order for it to stay afloat.
If you support the band, you have no reason to believe anyone else will support the band, but you are unable to spend the money you spent supporting the band on other things. So the rational decision is to refuse to support the band, and hope that someone else does." ... "Basic game theory shows that the amount that you were willing to pay is irrelevant to your decision to support or not."
Or, perhaps you are just modeling the problem incorrectly.
You're oversimplifying this to a zero-sum game where the only possible reward is the ultimate long-term survival of the band, but you're ignoring the other possible rewards that could be involved. For many, the gratification and self-satisfaction in offering support for a work of art they enjoy is its own reward.
Agreed. I also never wrote a line of code until college. Before that, I was computer literate in the sense that I could navigate Windows and MS Office, but I hadn't touched any other OS, and I was pretty damn far from an expert.
Anyway, I majored in CS, and I'm now a software engineer writing embedded code for medical equipment. I know a lot of people with similar stories. It's not impossible to pick up later in life.
Also, on Slashdot, you always here these "Why Johnny can't code" posts. Computers, in my opinion, are like cars, in that not everybody needs to know how to rebuild a fuel injection system or whatever. Most people will be just fine if they know how to get behind the wheel and drive.
You know, I tend to agree with you. As a general rule, it's good practice to try to resolve these things without a lawsuit. However, wouldn't it be nice to have a legal precedent to point to? Whether it makes sense or not (hint: it doesn't), just thumbing through the comments here, there are a lot of people who see the GPL as being untested, and therefore potentially legally unsound. Having one easy win in a U.S. court could bring more respect to the license, and maybe help deter those who would violate it.
"People think they can buy whatever hardware they want and just have it work. No. You have to be selective."
Of course, you are right, but that's the problem here. Having Linux increase market share on the desktop means reaching the people who don't know jack about hardware (or software, or computers in general outside the realm of word processing and web surfing). Most of these people would have no clue know where to start trying to determine a particular piece of hardware's Linux compatibility. That's just not going to happen. Sorry.
Also, pretend I'm a Windows user thinking about switching to Linux. What's my first step? It's certainly not going to be to run out and buy compliant hardware. I'm going to try it out on the hardware I already own. If it doesn't work right away with minimal effort, I'll probably end up back on Windows, because that's what I know, it it already works.
This attitude of saying "Linux is easy. Anybody can do it." with one side of your mouth, and then with the other side of your mouth proclaiming that everybody should properly research their hardware purchases in order to make Linux work is not going to further the cause.
Someone create a privatized wiki-torrent where people can put up their own torrents. That way you can never be sued cause you're not responsible for the contents.
Ummm, there's really no such thing as "can never be sued because of". In the U.S., anybody can sue anybody for anything. Sure, maybe a case will hold no water and will get thrown right out of court, but you'd still probably have a pretty damn good lawyer on retainer before you try something like this in the States, because somehow I don't see the **AA saying, "Oh, well. The guy's got a Wiki. There's nothing we can do."
You've heard of the Great Potato Famine of Ireland, right? The thing is, there wasn't a true shortage of food, it was just so profitable to export that the poor in the country couldn't compete, and thus couldn't afford to purchase the food their own country produced. People starved.
I'm sure they would have loved to buy cheaper food from other countries as you say, but that food was being exported to the more affluent countries as well.
I agree with you in principle. I just want to pick nits on one aspect of your argument: You say (paraphrasing): If (on average, men are stronger than women), then (a randly chosen man is likely to be stronger than a randomly chosen woman).
That's not necessarily true. Consider the following dataset, where the numbers represent some index of an individual's strength. Men {1, 2, 3, 4, 1000} (Avg = 252.5) Women {10, 10, 10, 10, 10} (Avg = 10)
So, here we have a dataset where, on average, men are FAR stronger than women. However, choosing a random woman from the population, you'll get a woman with a strength index of 10. There's an 80% chance the man you choose will be weaker than that woman.
Of course, this is not a typical distribution. If you can show that the dataset is regularly distributed (as the actual population is likely to be), and outliers are eliminated, and all the other statistical mumbo-jumbo, you can start to make more meaningful assumptions about the odds and implications. You should just know that saying that the one thing does not mathematically or logically prove the other.
Sorry to reply to myself, but I wanted to add another point: life involves taking risks. "Playing it safe" by not going to college because you might someday break a hip, or whatever, and end up not being able to repay your free schooling is totally ridiculous, IMHO. Anyone who makes decisions that way is just making excuses and dodging opportunities because they're afraid to life their life.
Yes, but for someone whose only other path to college requires tons of student loans, which they'll have to repay whether working or not, it's a calculated risk.
Myself, I paid for college with loans, and I don't regret it one bit. It was either that, or not go at all. Sure, there was always the risk of having difficulty finding a job, especially pursuing computer science right after the bubble burst.
I found work, and I'm having no trouble repaying my student loans, but even if I was struggling, I think it would have been worth it to have some control over my life and to be able to learn about something I love.
Of course, I totally agree with you that we need police officers. They totally fill a vital role in our society, and without enforcement of laws, those laws might as well not exist and we might as well live in anarchy.
However, it's precisely this power over us, and the frequent abuse of this power, that tends to give people such a disdain for cops.
The thing is, given the dangerous nature of the work, and the relatively mediocre pay, why would somebody want to be a cop? Two reasons pop into my mind: 1) Strong sense of duty, and respect for the job. 2) The desire for authority, power, and respect. While I'd like to think there's a lot of folks out there in category 1, I tend to think that more of 'em fall in category 2. Power corrupts. Not everyone, of course, but enough to give the people a bad taste in their mouths.
"Maybe we should do away with insurance (averaging) altogether, and just have everyone pay for whatever happens to them."
Anybody who prefers that system can do so right now by canceling their insurance. If you think your medical bills will be less than your insurance premiums, put your money where your mouth is.
So, stealing is not a good word for it, but it's certainly an invasion of privacy, and it's certainly unethical. We're not talking about a mere copyright violation like downloading music or movies. We're talking about people rifling through your files without your permission.
I don't think you're going to hear people on slashdot complaining about damages to the (RI|MP)AA. This is about the individual, whose rights are being trampled upon.
"So, yes, this is nifty stuff, but I don't see it as "intelligence" so much as an optimization problem."
This sort of reminds me of the the Chinese Room Argument. The gist is that a person is isolated in a room with a complex instruction manual, and that person receives cards with Chinese characters. Using the instruction manual, the person translates the characters into English.
The argument is that the person in the room doesn't really understand Chinese. He's executing instructions that lead to a Chinese translation.
This is used as a corollary for computing, where the person is the CPU and the manual is the program/software. Obviously, the person/CPU doesn't understand Chinese, and the book/program/software clearly doesn't understand Chinese either. So, the argument becomes whether you can claim the system (in this case consisting of the person, his program, etc...) understands Chinese, and therefore whether or not it makes sense to attribute intelligence to something other than an individual.
Of course, the argument, IMO, always comes back to the semantics of how you define intelligence in the first place, which is an argument that nobody is likely to win, but I digress.
If there were an "abstain" column, then you could show your interest in politics by participating, but also show your disdain for the available candidates, by choosing neither of them.
Why not vote third party instead? Abstaining might send a message, but trust me, your message of disdain would be heard much louder if it threatens the existing oligarchy.
"To be honest, you only really need a calculator until you leave high school."
Not true. I made heavy use of my graphic calculator in Calc 1 and 2 (both required for B.S. students). It was also a lifesaver for probability and statistics and linear algebra, though not so much for the graphic as for other features. Unless you go into something liberal-artsy or social-sciency, you WILL use a graphing calculator. You're not always going to be sitting in front of a computer with Matlab or Maple on it.
My recommendation is to stick with something in the TI family. I'm sure that there are better options, but teachers are familiar with TI. Generally, if the teacher gives an in-class tutorial for doing something on a graphic calculator, the kids with the HPs/PDAs/whatever are pretty much on their own. If you have the manual with you, it's no big deal, but I always had too many books in my backpack anyway to want to lug that thing everywhere as well.
Yes, but my point was that if you know HTML and CSS, you can create your own site without MySpace. MySpace is supposed to make it easier, and people talk about it like it does, but in reality it requires a similar skillset to that of creating your own page from scratch.
Also, there's a big difference between copying and pasting code that you understand (even if your understanding is somewhat vague), and copying and pasting code that you don't even know how to begin to try to read (and have no interest in trying to read).
"It takes very little experience to develop your own page that does exactly what you want. It's the Google Gadget system for the common user...
It's interesting to hear people pointing out how easy it is to customize MySpace. You make it sound like it's all point and click through some kind of web interface. The reality, though, is that changing your info is easy, but actually personalizing the appearance of your site requires CSS and HTML, which is certainly beyond the skillset of your average high-schooler or even college student.
Most people end up just copying and pasting some code verbatim from some random MySpace customization site, which to them is just cryptic gobbledy-gook. That seems kind of dangerous to me.
If an employer assigns a task that an employee is capable and willing to do, and the employer provides time and resources to make that happen, then the task is "within the scope of his or her employment". That is to say, it's part of this officer's job. So, the question becomes, did he or didn't he do this on his own time, outside the obligations of his worklife?
You are trying to phrase it as if it must be in his employer's main line of business. Many non-software companies have in-house developers writing code for both internal and external use. That doesn't mean they forfeit all rights to that code, by any means.
Ok, that's fine. Obviously our legal system will keep chugging along, because if somebody's predetermined path is to be a violent criminal or whatever, it's still in our best interest to protect ourselves by locking them up, or whatever. That's sort of beside my point.
What I'm asking is, does it absolve the defendant of their wrongdoing if it was not really a choice they made? I'm not talking about in the eyes of the legal system, but at a more personal level than that. How can you believe that Hitler, for example, was an evil man, if none of what he did in his life was really his choice, and was his predetermined path?
And, for yourself, as a believer in determinism over freewill, can you really feel guilt or remorse for your own mistakes and indiscretions when you believe they weren't really choices you made of your own freewill?
I'm not trying to antagonize you, I'm just really curious what makes you tick, you know? If I didn't believe I had some kind of control over my own actions, I don't know what would get me out of bed every day. Or maybe I wouldn't have that choice, right? Who knows?
I'd be really interested to see if there's a correlation between a person's belief in freewill and the rate of dishonest or immoral behavior. It really seems like believing in determinism over freewill has the potential to serve as a very convenient excuse.
If it's not us behind the proverbial wheel, then we shouldn't be the ones to blame when somebody gets hurt, right? We can't help it, it's all physics, or chemicals in our brains, or God, or my upbringing, or whatever.
I try to believe in a mixture of both, personally. Realistically, I know that our actions are subject to the influence of physical and chemical forces on our bodies, as well as the environment we are exposed to, etc... But I think it's irresponsible to not at least try to take some responsibility over your own actions.
I wouldn't mind getting "punished" by receiving a whole shit-ton of money for intellectual property that's not even mine. That's my kind of punishment.
Slashdot Mirror
I've got a good one, too.
My workplace is business-casual, but nobody really says anything if we push the limits of that. I'm a software developer who's just a few years out of school, and I hadn't been making much of an effort to look nice, largely because I was still dirt poor and didn't have decent clothes.
Well, before long my financial situation started to improve (paying off debts from school and old medical bills, etc). I made a resolution to start dressing nicer. Over a long weekend, I went out my wife helped me pick out bunch of new clothes. Still business casual, but toward the nicer end of that. Slacks and nice button up shirts and the like.
So, on Monday I come in dressed up significantly nicer than usual. Then, shortly after lunch, my wife calls me. She's feeling lousy and wants me to take her to the hospital. I go tell my boss that I need to leave for the day, and he looks me up and down, realizes that I'm dressed much nicer than usual, and leaving early.
So, obviously, he jumps to the conclusion that I'm off interviewing at another job. Within a week I had a sit down with my boss and his boss, and they're giving me a 10% raise and a promotion, just out of the blue. They said it's because they're really happy with the work I've been doing, and I just deserve it. I hope that's at least partially true, but I'm totally sure the impetus the clothes.
Of course, this is more an argument for keeping your bosses on their toes than for dressing nicely every day, but I still like the story.
According to your logic, the web page must work, because I tested it in IE. So, the problem is obviously with the other browsers.
My point is that you don't take into account the possibility that cable companies are not adhering strictly to the standards. They could easily design a cable card that works in their own proprietary set top boxes, but is total garbage when you try it on a completely standards-compliant third party device.
Oh, come on, man. Do you have any ideas how many lives have been saved from blood transfusions? They are VERY effective. This article is pointing out that they could be MORE effective.
Taking this article to mean that all science is bullshit is a pretty fucking big leap. I guess what I'm saying is, you're an idiot.
You're oversimplifying this to a zero-sum game where the only possible reward is the ultimate long-term survival of the band, but you're ignoring the other possible rewards that could be involved. For many, the gratification and self-satisfaction in offering support for a work of art they enjoy is its own reward.
Agreed. I also never wrote a line of code until college. Before that, I was computer literate in the sense that I could navigate Windows and MS Office, but I hadn't touched any other OS, and I was pretty damn far from an expert.
Anyway, I majored in CS, and I'm now a software engineer writing embedded code for medical equipment. I know a lot of people with similar stories. It's not impossible to pick up later in life.
Also, on Slashdot, you always here these "Why Johnny can't code" posts. Computers, in my opinion, are like cars, in that not everybody needs to know how to rebuild a fuel injection system or whatever. Most people will be just fine if they know how to get behind the wheel and drive.
You know, I tend to agree with you. As a general rule, it's good practice to try to resolve these things without a lawsuit. However, wouldn't it be nice to have a legal precedent to point to? Whether it makes sense or not (hint: it doesn't), just thumbing through the comments here, there are a lot of people who see the GPL as being untested, and therefore potentially legally unsound. Having one easy win in a U.S. court could bring more respect to the license, and maybe help deter those who would violate it.
God, I hate myself sometimes.
Also, pretend I'm a Windows user thinking about switching to Linux. What's my first step? It's certainly not going to be to run out and buy compliant hardware. I'm going to try it out on the hardware I already own. If it doesn't work right away with minimal effort, I'll probably end up back on Windows, because that's what I know, it it already works.
This attitude of saying "Linux is easy. Anybody can do it." with one side of your mouth, and then with the other side of your mouth proclaiming that everybody should properly research their hardware purchases in order to make Linux work is not going to further the cause.
You've heard of the Great Potato Famine of Ireland, right? The thing is, there wasn't a true shortage of food, it was just so profitable to export that the poor in the country couldn't compete, and thus couldn't afford to purchase the food their own country produced. People starved.
I'm sure they would have loved to buy cheaper food from other countries as you say, but that food was being exported to the more affluent countries as well.
I agree with you in principle. I just want to pick nits on one aspect of your argument:
You say (paraphrasing):
If (on average, men are stronger than women), then (a randly chosen man is likely to be stronger than a randomly chosen woman).
That's not necessarily true. Consider the following dataset, where the numbers represent some index of an individual's strength.
Men {1, 2, 3, 4, 1000} (Avg = 252.5)
Women {10, 10, 10, 10, 10} (Avg = 10)
So, here we have a dataset where, on average, men are FAR stronger than women. However, choosing a random woman from the population, you'll get a woman with a strength index of 10. There's an 80% chance the man you choose will be weaker than that woman.
Of course, this is not a typical distribution. If you can show that the dataset is regularly distributed (as the actual population is likely to be), and outliers are eliminated, and all the other statistical mumbo-jumbo, you can start to make more meaningful assumptions about the odds and implications. You should just know that saying that the one thing does not mathematically or logically prove the other.
Sorry to reply to myself, but I wanted to add another point: life involves taking risks. "Playing it safe" by not going to college because you might someday break a hip, or whatever, and end up not being able to repay your free schooling is totally ridiculous, IMHO. Anyone who makes decisions that way is just making excuses and dodging opportunities because they're afraid to life their life.
Yes, but for someone whose only other path to college requires tons of student loans, which they'll have to repay whether working or not, it's a calculated risk.
Myself, I paid for college with loans, and I don't regret it one bit. It was either that, or not go at all. Sure, there was always the risk of having difficulty finding a job, especially pursuing computer science right after the bubble burst.
I found work, and I'm having no trouble repaying my student loans, but even if I was struggling, I think it would have been worth it to have some control over my life and to be able to learn about something I love.
Of course, I totally agree with you that we need police officers. They totally fill a vital role in our society, and without enforcement of laws, those laws might as well not exist and we might as well live in anarchy.
However, it's precisely this power over us, and the frequent abuse of this power, that tends to give people such a disdain for cops.
The thing is, given the dangerous nature of the work, and the relatively mediocre pay, why would somebody want to be a cop? Two reasons pop into my mind:
1) Strong sense of duty, and respect for the job.
2) The desire for authority, power, and respect.
While I'd like to think there's a lot of folks out there in category 1, I tend to think that more of 'em fall in category 2. Power corrupts. Not everyone, of course, but enough to give the people a bad taste in their mouths.
So, stealing is not a good word for it, but it's certainly an invasion of privacy, and it's certainly unethical. We're not talking about a mere copyright violation like downloading music or movies. We're talking about people rifling through your files without your permission.
I don't think you're going to hear people on slashdot complaining about damages to the (RI|MP)AA. This is about the individual, whose rights are being trampled upon.
The argument is that the person in the room doesn't really understand Chinese. He's executing instructions that lead to a Chinese translation.
This is used as a corollary for computing, where the person is the CPU and the manual is the program/software. Obviously, the person/CPU doesn't understand Chinese, and the book/program/software clearly doesn't understand Chinese either. So, the argument becomes whether you can claim the system (in this case consisting of the person, his program, etc...) understands Chinese, and therefore whether or not it makes sense to attribute intelligence to something other than an individual.
Of course, the argument, IMO, always comes back to the semantics of how you define intelligence in the first place, which is an argument that nobody is likely to win, but I digress.
My recommendation is to stick with something in the TI family. I'm sure that there are better options, but teachers are familiar with TI. Generally, if the teacher gives an in-class tutorial for doing something on a graphic calculator, the kids with the HPs/PDAs/whatever are pretty much on their own. If you have the manual with you, it's no big deal, but I always had too many books in my backpack anyway to want to lug that thing everywhere as well.
Yes, but my point was that if you know HTML and CSS, you can create your own site without MySpace. MySpace is supposed to make it easier, and people talk about it like it does, but in reality it requires a similar skillset to that of creating your own page from scratch.
Also, there's a big difference between copying and pasting code that you understand (even if your understanding is somewhat vague), and copying and pasting code that you don't even know how to begin to try to read (and have no interest in trying to read).
Most people end up just copying and pasting some code verbatim from some random MySpace customization site, which to them is just cryptic gobbledy-gook. That seems kind of dangerous to me.
If an employer assigns a task that an employee is capable and willing to do, and the employer provides time and resources to make that happen, then the task is "within the scope of his or her employment". That is to say, it's part of this officer's job. So, the question becomes, did he or didn't he do this on his own time, outside the obligations of his worklife?
You are trying to phrase it as if it must be in his employer's main line of business. Many non-software companies have in-house developers writing code for both internal and external use. That doesn't mean they forfeit all rights to that code, by any means.
Ok, that's fine. Obviously our legal system will keep chugging along, because if somebody's predetermined path is to be a violent criminal or whatever, it's still in our best interest to protect ourselves by locking them up, or whatever. That's sort of beside my point.
What I'm asking is, does it absolve the defendant of their wrongdoing if it was not really a choice they made? I'm not talking about in the eyes of the legal system, but at a more personal level than that. How can you believe that Hitler, for example, was an evil man, if none of what he did in his life was really his choice, and was his predetermined path?
And, for yourself, as a believer in determinism over freewill, can you really feel guilt or remorse for your own mistakes and indiscretions when you believe they weren't really choices you made of your own freewill?
I'm not trying to antagonize you, I'm just really curious what makes you tick, you know? If I didn't believe I had some kind of control over my own actions, I don't know what would get me out of bed every day. Or maybe I wouldn't have that choice, right? Who knows?
I'd be really interested to see if there's a correlation between a person's belief in freewill and the rate of dishonest or immoral behavior. It really seems like believing in determinism over freewill has the potential to serve as a very convenient excuse.
If it's not us behind the proverbial wheel, then we shouldn't be the ones to blame when somebody gets hurt, right? We can't help it, it's all physics, or chemicals in our brains, or God, or my upbringing, or whatever.
I try to believe in a mixture of both, personally. Realistically, I know that our actions are subject to the influence of physical and chemical forces on our bodies, as well as the environment we are exposed to, etc... But I think it's irresponsible to not at least try to take some responsibility over your own actions.
I wouldn't mind getting "punished" by receiving a whole shit-ton of money for intellectual property that's not even mine. That's my kind of punishment.