Copyright infringement is not stealing, by definition. It doesn't deprive the original author of their work (merely makes a copy of it). Stealing, by definition, removes the item from possession of the original possessor.
See the definition of Stealing to clear up any confusion.
As to the cost of exposure, would you feel comfortable losing a thousand dollars, if you had a couple of hundred thousand in the bank, knowing that in a few years, you'd be having ten thousand come back? Would you still be happy losing that thousand dollars, with the same return, if you had 100 dollars to your name?
Life, by nature is shades of grey, but sometimes, things get to one end of the spectrum or another. This deliberate fraud is pretty much in the clear cut end.
No, it's still called copyright infringement. However, most of the P2P infringement that the *IAA go after is not for profit, and often raises visibility of the artist in question, producing more sales in future. In this case the motive was purely profit (as shown by the thousands of dollars worth of sales the artist had been able to track herself, which would be a significant portion of her own income). These are demonstrably 'lost sales' to her, as money was indeed exchanged, so the demand was there. They were also mis-attributed to another author to cover the for-profit infringement.
In the *IAA case, as the 'consumers' are often people without the money to pay at the time, who are influenced in the future to purchase when they can for things they may have encountered on P2P, while still being illegal, the ethical ground is slightly muddy. In the latter case, of deliberately ripping off another artist's work, passing it off as your own, and making money, there is no ethical uncertainty. Read the old/. articles on this subject. I think it's universally accepted here that the commercial pirates are frowned on and disliked. The P2P sharers are on muddy ground.
Whether or not the RIAA manage to drown out the technical side of the argument in legal noise. I'll be keeping my fingers crossed that this is actually the candle in the darkness that the article author believes to be the case (and no, to those that'll accuse me of being a thief of property and a subversive, I don't download music or videos. I just think the **AA are just playing dictator, and now facing their just come uppance).
The thing is, a generation ago, this wasn't the case. Over the last 30 years, both partners have started working. At the beginning of this, the two worker partnerships brought in a very good sum, comparatively. So, it became the thing to do, as everyone wanted to get the 'extras'. And as more money was available within limited segments (read the housing market), the prices rose to the point that the new double incomes would be able to support. Childcare services were now more in demand, which meant the prices were able to inflate commensurately too. So, in effect, what we have now is more or less the same quality of life overall that was available a generation ago, except it now requires two partners to be working to maintain that standard, rather than one. The option to have one partner working has more or less vanished, unless you're really willing to cut corners.
Failing to respond to upping the ante does, however, result in being trampled on. In your example of Governments A & C, Citizens B & D, you end up with the following possibilities.
Government A imposes restrictions on Citizen B. Gvt. C does nothing. Citizen D remains blissfully unaware of the position of his Government, and wonders why they get a less than warm welcome in some places. Gvt. A, then receives the message that it can place all the restrictions it wants, as nobody has yet stood up and done anything. Citizens B get uppity with their own Gvt. and Gvt. A. C is then forced to do something by public pressure. Either stop all movement, or simply implement the same measures as A, so that their citizenry have faith restored (either that, or they get voted out next round).
Secondly, they play tit for tat all the way, and skip the discontent in the middle.
Assuming this carries on, you get a cessation of movement due to red tape (and the ensuing public unrest, change of government on both ends, and a more sensible Gvt. coming in), or both sides wake up, smell the coffee, and realize that all the unmonitored people coming and going didn't bring chaos and anarchy in all the years so far, so they're unlikely to do so in the future, and just go back to being aware of things, but not necessarily so damn uppity, dropping all those intrusive measures, and letting people get on with living their lives, thus skipping the whole civil unrest part.
The point of the GP, I believe, is that it becomes a simple matter of creating a lot of noise that gets responded to, making it very easy to hide a real threat. Keep creating the noise, and people will become lax, at which point you can easily place a real threat. Or, create a large amount of decoys, and hide the real threat in there. Without correct assessment, and fast assessment, you've just proved that you can a) drain funds, and keep a state of terror, and disillusionment with the local authorities (terror and propoganda, anyone?), which achieves the aims just nicely, and will have a lot of the populace behind the insurgents following this route (all harmless pranks!). b) Make simple use of decoys.
I'd say I'd agree with the GP, Boston has just proved that it's a playground for any insurgency attempts. And actually, as a terrorist is by definition someone who creates situations of terror from nothing, I think the authorities fit the role quite well. Odd when you find yourself unwittingly fighting for the other side.. Even stranger when they pat themselves on the back and think they've done well.
Yes, Ubuntu has it's roots in Debian. However, it does for Debian what Mandrake did for Red Hat when it came on the scene. Adds support for far more devices, codecs and has far more up to date releases of the applications. Debian Stable is usually about a year or more "behind the times", though it does what it says on the tin (I use Debian for servers that really need to be stable, but I'm not too fussed about having the latest shiny release number). Ubuntu makes for a far shiner desktop. Although some of the tech affictionados around here may drop the distro and head for pastures new (perhaps back to Debian, Gentoo or some other distro, maybe even Free BSD!), there are a lot of plain ordinary people out there who just want things to work, and be able to play DVD and have the codecs available to play the media they get sent in attachments via email, or on the web. Ubuntu merging with Linspire, and getting access to all this could be a rather big step forward in getting the ordinary, everyday person who knows little to nothing about computers to have a closer look (especially when you can hand them a live CD, and say "Go play with it and see how it works for you"). Debian is a great base, and Ubuntu is all the easier for the hard work put in by the Debian team. It just wants to be less political and 'proper', and just get on with the job of making the framework work better for the average uninitiated person in the street.
From even the text in the summary: It seems the editor of the forums was not present at the time, and somebody actually posted that in a public forum. Once noticed (somebody told him the problem), he pulled the post.
Now, if that list was posted on Slashdot, would they pull that registration? If someone posted it on the BBC site, would they pull that? Hell, it's probably cached in Google and a variety of other search engines. Are they going to pull those too?
I was aware that it wasn't new.. But with the soviets now out of the picture, things had calmed down an awful lot. With China picking up, and the current paranoia in the US government, I can see this getting ugly. Again, it's just a personal perspective, and I'd love to be proved wrong. China seems to be squaring up to fill the hole in the 'cold war' face off that Russia used to occupy..
It's one of those things that politicians never seem to learn from history, and are doomed to repeat it. So it'll be interesting to see where this leads..
The problem is two fold. Initially, it the debris now clogging up the orbit. This will cause damage to other satellites, possibly knocking them out completely (debris is a huge problem in space). Secondly, it opens up an arms race in space, with money thrown into space weapons research, testing, and bigger and heavier weaponry. I do disagree with some of the conclusions drawn in the article (the author was berating a Short sighted Chinese government for development of space weaponry). The US has quite active in the ASAT department for some time. The only reason the politicians didt create some treaty to ban or restrict research was that there was no space arms race. So, rather than sign up a treaty and lead saying We can do it, but we wont, if you wont, they went ahead, and now people are surprised that other sovereign nations are doing exactly the same thing. Yes, another arms race is a bad thing, but it was all avoidable if the politicians on the US side had actually had the foresight to pull up a treaty in the first place, rather than going ahead believing they would remain the only show in town.
Re:VB already gets the respect it deserves...
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Gotcha. Now I get what you were asking for.. Definitely the non-working makefile. At least that way you can get the guy the training he needs to (over time) achieve what he may be capable of some day, and in the meantime, get assigned to the roles he's capable of.
Not everyone's capable of great things to start off with, and certainly junior positions, I don't expect great things from. What I do expect is for them to learn, make mistakes, fix mistakes, and learn from that too. And someday, with the help of the seniors, end up being experienced seniors themselves, and keep the cycle going. But that's getting into the 'apprenticeship' system (which I'm a firm fan of), which is another story entirely.
Nice quote on the Chemistry set! I work in a hospital, and there are one or two people round here that could certainly do with hearing that particular one..
Re:VB already gets the respect it deserves...
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Quite agree with the amateurs calling themselves professional (and IT is one of the few technical places people actually get away with it.. Just think if people could call themselves Doctors, or professional medics after doing a two week crash course on diseases of the hair!).
As to the working program or non-working makefile, I'd expect both to work. If they didn't, I'd query the authors of both to see what the issue was, unless it was documented somewhere. I really hate pointing the finger and assigning blame; my first port of call would be to find out how to make it work reliably, and let the people doing the coding (who know a lot better than I do what they were thinking at the time) work it out for themselves with no loss of face. Which is basically the job I do now.
Administering TUBE refers to a "Totally Unnecessary Breast Exam" too.. Doctors take more liberty with patients than most believe.
Re:VB already gets the respect it deserves...
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However, we're not talking about 3rd grader essays. I'd heartily expect a 3rd grader program to look like a pack of drunken monkeys wrote it. What we're talking about is "professional" coders writing VB code. A more suitable analogy would be that you go into a bookstore, and find the latest novel you purchase is full of typos, grammatical errors, missing pages, parts of the plot that vanish into nowhere, and misses the last three pages of the story. And that is how the publisher recieved the manuscript and published it. Then on talking to the company to complain, you'd discover that the author had never actually studied English at all, and thought it would be good to write a book. In this case, no, you wouldn't blame the language, you wouildn't necessarily blame the author themselves (as they only knew a little of what made language work). You would most likely berate the people who convinced the author that writing a book was in his realms of competency when the end result blatantly proves that it wasn't. But, as long as a select group prevent that author hearing the bad reviews and dark mutterings, he will continue quite oblivious. Such is the way that VB keeps on having it's acceptance. It's a basardized language intended for a prototyping role (which it does well), but is used primarily as a final product language (which it isn't). But not enough people understand the difference to be able to tell the difference, as they're all told by MS, all you have to do is read a simple book, press a few buttons, and you're as good a programmer as all the rest.
Not really. That's why they have such a huge beaurocracy, paper filling, and banks of administrators and accountants. If they didn't have everything auditable, you can bet your behind the IRS would look VERY closely. And nobody wants a tax audit, they're painful and extremely expensive. Basic accounting is very easy. The difficult part is knowing enough about tax law (as of the current moment in time) to make use of various loopholes and sinks to make money disappear in a required amount.
This is a problematic law with very little thought applied to the nature of the medium in which it operates. What is not covered there is the very distinct possibility that you link to a site that does not include any infringing material, and over time, some leaks onto the linked pages. By the act of someone else modifying content outside your control, you become guilty of Copyright Infringement. It would be interesting to see what extent that leads on to. For example, a governmental site links to an external address. The domain owner of this site changes, take the destination of the link and serves a redirect (or hosts) a warez repository at that link. Unless this link is monitored exceptionally well (and none of those governmental sites ever have a stale link do they!), the government would then be guilty of Copyright Infringement, and thus performing illegal activity. Bet I'm not the only one that sees this coming. Having a law that states linking to something is committing copyright infringement is unworkable. If the intent (which needs to be proved) was to provide access to infringing material hosted elsewhere, then this should fall under 'accessory to' legislation. But intent needs be proved that the intent was to infringe copyright, not provide access to legitimate resources that may become contaminated by an external source (in which case, the external source should be identified and dealt with by the correct bodies).
Last time I was in China (admittedly 11 months ago), I could access Slashdot just fine from China (and that was mainland china; Beijing, Shanghai and Xian, as well as Hong Kong)..
If Cuban is successful in getting a judge to rule that takedown is no longer good enough to prevent a site being sued for copyright infringement, how long do you think it'll be before no site allows anything to be uploaded, as they can no longer afford the resources to work out if it's copyright or not, and can't afford the legal fees for even a few infringements?
This would be disastrous for the net. And for everyone in general, apart from those big media conglomerates who only transmit on their own content. This could, in one fell swoop, turn the internet from the mass of information it is now to just another broadcast mechanism for the big distribution channels (*IAA etc).
These days, I'm probably halfway with you on the "nobody's quashing anything" track. Although, after working for a company a while back that produced pharmaceuticals, and seeing how they market them to doctors (I now work in the NHS, so get to see that from the other side too), I'd say there's a fair bit of bias in the channels that doctors get to read about. Certainly 20 years ago, anything herbal was frowned upon, and told it was not worth the time of day. These days, you can be advised to take such things as echinacea, St. John's Wort and a variety of other things by a GP, as once medical science ran controlled tests on them, they showed as having an effect. Which probably means I'm agreeing with you that there are some things to be re-discovered, and yes, I do also agree there's some dangerous crap out there too in the 'old lore'..
At worst, the 'mainstream' herb lore is ineffective. It's been used for generations without ill effect.. Fringe stuff.. That's another matter.. So I'm not so sure I buy into the 'wait until we prove it is safe' argument. What medical science does for that is fine tune the dosage to get the minimum substance for effect, and isolate the active component.
Actually, I don't think that anyone can recall how the herb lore was first arrived at, as it's pre written records (possibly pre writing). Whether it was observation that someone eating a particular plant didn't die of an ailment when others did, or whether it was feeding people random things and finding that certain things kept people alive when others didn't.. It was all hundreds (probably thousands) of years ago.
I'm not a fanatical herbalist, however, I am curious, and I believe there may be merit, until I can disprove it, rather than believing there is no merit until I can conclusively prove it. I don't have a long enough lifespan for the latter.
That aside, I don't think our viewpoints are that different on the matter. After all, a lot of science is only waffling, with no real proof.. Just a set of best guesses made on what information we have available.. I get the funny feeling that what we consider as almost incontrivertible proof today will be laughed at in a century or two.. And mabe some things forgotten until a new view of the 'rules' means that science can catch up to some odd observation made long ago, and take it further.
Don't think it'll start a flame war.. Not with me certainly.. I have a belief in a few things that seem to work for me (acupressure, acupuncture, neti pots, some herbal remedies, but by no means all).. The way I'd go from conjecture to certainty is by scrutinizing it under controlled conditions, to see if there is connection.
What I'm not (and I probably did sound too confident in the original post) is certain.. I have a belief, which can be changed in debate if and when I'm proved wrong.. What I am, is curious about things. Sadly, I lack the biology skills to persue studies in the areas I'd like to as more than a mere armchair layman. What I do find interesting is some of the old treatments (such as maggots for infected tissue) making reappearances in modern medicine that were frowned on, or overlooked for a long time, in preference to more 'modern' medicine.
So, the behaviour observed in animals where they lick wounds, and even in humans, that 'kiss it better' (introduce saliva to the wound), or suck on a sore wound to make it feel better, by instinct, hasn't given the clue that there's something in saliva that helps? There's a whole store of herb and animal lore that's been systematically quashed for decades (well, since the great witch hunts really), and science is only just getting round to looking at it now. There's a lot to be said for 'complimentary' medicine for lesser ailments (although the modern pharmaceutical treatments are definitely magnitudes more effective for front line serious treatment). Rather than just decrying it, perhaps it should be investigated more thoroughly?
That could hide many things. After all, understanding the subject isn't the whole of the mark. Communicating it also carries a non-trivial mark. If the examiner can't correctly work out what the writer is trying to say, then marks will be lost. Presentation also carries a portion of the mark in most subjects, and using txt spk will almost certainly lose that. So, it's basically allowing people to use txt spk, and actually have a non-zero mark (credit given for the understanding of the subject where it's communicated successfully), but in all probability, they won't be garnering the kind of mark they would otherwise be achieving if they used correct English. It's possibly the kind of discrepancy that would make the difference between a fail and an average pass mark (depending on how obfuscated the text was by using txt spk).
Interesting then that Bush didn't actually originally get voted in, he was appointed by a set of Judges. And second time round it wasn't that convincing either, after all the playing around with statistics that got him in again. Actually, it seems that the kinder, gentler policies are quite popular.
I think the key part of your debate falls down with discounting things by predicting theoretical failures before a test is made. Theory always alters to fit the observed facts. And every now and then, something pops out of the hat that changes everything. It may be possible to be an honest crackpot by getting the equations wrong, and have that failure obvious to everyone else.. It's also possible to find something that works despite what the equations say.. That's called advancing science.. Wrong or right though, it'll be interesting to see how it pans out..
Slashdot Mirror
Copyright infringement is not stealing, by definition. It doesn't deprive the original author of their work (merely makes a copy of it). Stealing, by definition, removes the item from possession of the original possessor.
See the definition of Stealing to clear up any confusion.
As to the cost of exposure, would you feel comfortable losing a thousand dollars, if you had a couple of hundred thousand in the bank, knowing that in a few years, you'd be having ten thousand come back? Would you still be happy losing that thousand dollars, with the same return, if you had 100 dollars to your name?
Life, by nature is shades of grey, but sometimes, things get to one end of the spectrum or another. This deliberate fraud is pretty much in the clear cut end.
No, it's still called copyright infringement.
/. articles on this subject. I think it's universally accepted here that the commercial pirates are frowned on and disliked. The P2P sharers are on muddy ground.
However, most of the P2P infringement that the *IAA go after is not for profit, and often raises visibility of the artist in question, producing more sales in future.
In this case the motive was purely profit (as shown by the thousands of dollars worth of sales the artist had been able to track herself, which would be a significant portion of her own income). These are demonstrably 'lost sales' to her, as money was indeed exchanged, so the demand was there. They were also mis-attributed to another author to cover the for-profit infringement.
In the *IAA case, as the 'consumers' are often people without the money to pay at the time, who are influenced in the future to purchase when they can for things they may have encountered on P2P, while still being illegal, the ethical ground is slightly muddy.
In the latter case, of deliberately ripping off another artist's work, passing it off as your own, and making money, there is no ethical uncertainty.
Read the old
Whether or not the RIAA manage to drown out the technical side of the argument in legal noise.
I'll be keeping my fingers crossed that this is actually the candle in the darkness that the article author believes to be the case (and no, to those that'll accuse me of being a thief of property and a subversive, I don't download music or videos. I just think the **AA are just playing dictator, and now facing their just come uppance).
Ahh.. The Ministry of Truth can't be having people believe they're ever not guilty. Oldthinkers unbellyfeel doubleplus goodness of Ministry of truth.
The thing is, a generation ago, this wasn't the case.
Over the last 30 years, both partners have started working. At the beginning of this, the two worker partnerships brought in a very good sum, comparatively.
So, it became the thing to do, as everyone wanted to get the 'extras'. And as more money was available within limited segments (read the housing market), the prices rose to the point that the new double incomes would be able to support.
Childcare services were now more in demand, which meant the prices were able to inflate commensurately too.
So, in effect, what we have now is more or less the same quality of life overall that was available a generation ago, except it now requires two partners to be working to maintain that standard, rather than one.
The option to have one partner working has more or less vanished, unless you're really willing to cut corners.
Failing to respond to upping the ante does, however, result in being trampled on.
In your example of Governments A & C, Citizens B & D, you end up with the following possibilities.
Government A imposes restrictions on Citizen B. Gvt. C does nothing. Citizen D remains blissfully unaware of the position of his Government, and wonders why they get a less than warm welcome in some places. Gvt. A, then receives the message that it can place all the restrictions it wants, as nobody has yet stood up and done anything. Citizens B get uppity with their own Gvt. and Gvt. A.
C is then forced to do something by public pressure. Either stop all movement, or simply implement the same measures as A, so that their citizenry have faith restored (either that, or they get voted out next round).
Secondly, they play tit for tat all the way, and skip the discontent in the middle.
Assuming this carries on, you get a cessation of movement due to red tape (and the ensuing public unrest, change of government on both ends, and a more sensible Gvt. coming in), or both sides wake up, smell the coffee, and realize that all the unmonitored people coming and going didn't bring chaos and anarchy in all the years so far, so they're unlikely to do so in the future, and just go back to being aware of things, but not necessarily so damn uppity, dropping all those intrusive measures, and letting people get on with living their lives, thus skipping the whole civil unrest part.
The point of the GP, I believe, is that it becomes a simple matter of creating a lot of noise that gets responded to, making it very easy to hide a real threat.
Keep creating the noise, and people will become lax, at which point you can easily place a real threat.
Or, create a large amount of decoys, and hide the real threat in there.
Without correct assessment, and fast assessment, you've just proved that you can a) drain funds, and keep a state of terror, and disillusionment with the local authorities (terror and propoganda, anyone?), which achieves the aims just nicely, and will have a lot of the populace behind the insurgents following this route (all harmless pranks!). b) Make simple use of decoys.
I'd say I'd agree with the GP, Boston has just proved that it's a playground for any insurgency attempts.
And actually, as a terrorist is by definition someone who creates situations of terror from nothing, I think the authorities fit the role quite well. Odd when you find yourself unwittingly fighting for the other side.. Even stranger when they pat themselves on the back and think they've done well.
Yes, Ubuntu has it's roots in Debian. However, it does for Debian what Mandrake did for Red Hat when it came on the scene. Adds support for far more devices, codecs and has far more up to date releases of the applications.
Debian Stable is usually about a year or more "behind the times", though it does what it says on the tin (I use Debian for servers that really need to be stable, but I'm not too fussed about having the latest shiny release number).
Ubuntu makes for a far shiner desktop. Although some of the tech affictionados around here may drop the distro and head for pastures new (perhaps back to Debian, Gentoo or some other distro, maybe even Free BSD!), there are a lot of plain ordinary people out there who just want things to work, and be able to play DVD and have the codecs available to play the media they get sent in attachments via email, or on the web.
Ubuntu merging with Linspire, and getting access to all this could be a rather big step forward in getting the ordinary, everyday person who knows little to nothing about computers to have a closer look (especially when you can hand them a live CD, and say "Go play with it and see how it works for you").
Debian is a great base, and Ubuntu is all the easier for the hard work put in by the Debian team. It just wants to be less political and 'proper', and just get on with the job of making the framework work better for the average uninitiated person in the street.
From even the text in the summary: It seems the editor of the forums was not present at the time, and somebody actually posted that in a public forum.
Once noticed (somebody told him the problem), he pulled the post.
Now, if that list was posted on Slashdot, would they pull that registration? If someone posted it on the BBC site, would they pull that?
Hell, it's probably cached in Google and a variety of other search engines. Are they going to pull those too?
I was aware that it wasn't new.. But with the soviets now out of the picture, things had calmed down an awful lot.
With China picking up, and the current paranoia in the US government, I can see this getting ugly. Again, it's just a personal perspective, and I'd love to be proved wrong. China seems to be squaring up to fill the hole in the 'cold war' face off that Russia used to occupy..
It's one of those things that politicians never seem to learn from history, and are doomed to repeat it. So it'll be interesting to see where this leads..
The problem is two fold. Initially, it the debris now clogging up the orbit. This will cause damage to other satellites, possibly knocking them out completely (debris is a huge problem in space).
Secondly, it opens up an arms race in space, with money thrown into space weapons research, testing, and bigger and heavier weaponry.
I do disagree with some of the conclusions drawn in the article (the author was berating a Short sighted Chinese government for development of space weaponry). The US has quite active in the ASAT department for some time. The only reason the politicians didt create some treaty to ban or restrict research was that there was no space arms race. So, rather than sign up a treaty and lead saying We can do it, but we wont, if you wont, they went ahead, and now people are surprised that other sovereign nations are doing exactly the same thing.
Yes, another arms race is a bad thing, but it was all avoidable if the politicians on the US side had actually had the foresight to pull up a treaty in the first place, rather than going ahead believing they would remain the only show in town.
Gotcha. Now I get what you were asking for.. Definitely the non-working makefile. At least that way you can get the guy the training he needs to (over time) achieve what he may be capable of some day, and in the meantime, get assigned to the roles he's capable of.
Not everyone's capable of great things to start off with, and certainly junior positions, I don't expect great things from. What I do expect is for them to learn, make mistakes, fix mistakes, and learn from that too. And someday, with the help of the seniors, end up being experienced seniors themselves, and keep the cycle going.
But that's getting into the 'apprenticeship' system (which I'm a firm fan of), which is another story entirely.
Nice quote on the Chemistry set! I work in a hospital, and there are one or two people round here that could certainly do with hearing that particular one..
Quite agree with the amateurs calling themselves professional (and IT is one of the few technical places people actually get away with it.. Just think if people could call themselves Doctors, or professional medics after doing a two week crash course on diseases of the hair!).
As to the working program or non-working makefile, I'd expect both to work. If they didn't, I'd query the authors of both to see what the issue was, unless it was documented somewhere. I really hate pointing the finger and assigning blame; my first port of call would be to find out how to make it work reliably, and let the people doing the coding (who know a lot better than I do what they were thinking at the time) work it out for themselves with no loss of face. Which is basically the job I do now.
Administering TUBE refers to a "Totally Unnecessary Breast Exam" too.. Doctors take more liberty with patients than most believe.
However, we're not talking about 3rd grader essays. I'd heartily expect a 3rd grader program to look like a pack of drunken monkeys wrote it.
What we're talking about is "professional" coders writing VB code. A more suitable analogy would be that you go into a bookstore, and find the latest novel you purchase is full of typos, grammatical errors, missing pages, parts of the plot that vanish into nowhere, and misses the last three pages of the story. And that is how the publisher recieved the manuscript and published it. Then on talking to the company to complain, you'd discover that the author had never actually studied English at all, and thought it would be good to write a book.
In this case, no, you wouldn't blame the language, you wouildn't necessarily blame the author themselves (as they only knew a little of what made language work). You would most likely berate the people who convinced the author that writing a book was in his realms of competency when the end result blatantly proves that it wasn't.
But, as long as a select group prevent that author hearing the bad reviews and dark mutterings, he will continue quite oblivious. Such is the way that VB keeps on having it's acceptance. It's a basardized language intended for a prototyping role (which it does well), but is used primarily as a final product language (which it isn't). But not enough people understand the difference to be able to tell the difference, as they're all told by MS, all you have to do is read a simple book, press a few buttons, and you're as good a programmer as all the rest.
Not really. That's why they have such a huge beaurocracy, paper filling, and banks of administrators and accountants.
If they didn't have everything auditable, you can bet your behind the IRS would look VERY closely. And nobody wants a tax audit, they're painful and extremely expensive.
Basic accounting is very easy. The difficult part is knowing enough about tax law (as of the current moment in time) to make use of various loopholes and sinks to make money disappear in a required amount.
This is a problematic law with very little thought applied to the nature of the medium in which it operates.
What is not covered there is the very distinct possibility that you link to a site that does not include any infringing material, and over time, some leaks onto the linked pages.
By the act of someone else modifying content outside your control, you become guilty of Copyright Infringement.
It would be interesting to see what extent that leads on to. For example, a governmental site links to an external address. The domain owner of this site changes, take the destination of the link and serves a redirect (or hosts) a warez repository at that link.
Unless this link is monitored exceptionally well (and none of those governmental sites ever have a stale link do they!), the government would then be guilty of Copyright Infringement, and thus performing illegal activity.
Bet I'm not the only one that sees this coming.
Having a law that states linking to something is committing copyright infringement is unworkable. If the intent (which needs to be proved) was to provide access to infringing material hosted elsewhere, then this should fall under 'accessory to' legislation. But intent needs be proved that the intent was to infringe copyright, not provide access to legitimate resources that may become contaminated by an external source (in which case, the external source should be identified and dealt with by the correct bodies).
Last time I was in China (admittedly 11 months ago), I could access Slashdot just fine from China (and that was mainland china; Beijing, Shanghai and Xian, as well as Hong Kong)..
If Cuban is successful in getting a judge to rule that takedown is no longer good enough to prevent a site being sued for copyright infringement, how long do you think it'll be before no site allows anything to be uploaded, as they can no longer afford the resources to work out if it's copyright or not, and can't afford the legal fees for even a few infringements?
This would be disastrous for the net. And for everyone in general, apart from those big media conglomerates who only transmit on their own content. This could, in one fell swoop, turn the internet from the mass of information it is now to just another broadcast mechanism for the big distribution channels (*IAA etc).
These days, I'm probably halfway with you on the "nobody's quashing anything" track. Although, after working for a company a while back that produced pharmaceuticals, and seeing how they market them to doctors (I now work in the NHS, so get to see that from the other side too), I'd say there's a fair bit of bias in the channels that doctors get to read about.
Certainly 20 years ago, anything herbal was frowned upon, and told it was not worth the time of day. These days, you can be advised to take such things as echinacea, St. John's Wort and a variety of other things by a GP, as once medical science ran controlled tests on them, they showed as having an effect.
Which probably means I'm agreeing with you that there are some things to be re-discovered, and yes, I do also agree there's some dangerous crap out there too in the 'old lore'..
At worst, the 'mainstream' herb lore is ineffective. It's been used for generations without ill effect.. Fringe stuff.. That's another matter.. So I'm not so sure I buy into the 'wait until we prove it is safe' argument. What medical science does for that is fine tune the dosage to get the minimum substance for effect, and isolate the active component.
Actually, I don't think that anyone can recall how the herb lore was first arrived at, as it's pre written records (possibly pre writing). Whether it was observation that someone eating a particular plant didn't die of an ailment when others did, or whether it was feeding people random things and finding that certain things kept people alive when others didn't.. It was all hundreds (probably thousands) of years ago.
I'm not a fanatical herbalist, however, I am curious, and I believe there may be merit, until I can disprove it, rather than believing there is no merit until I can conclusively prove it. I don't have a long enough lifespan for the latter.
That aside, I don't think our viewpoints are that different on the matter. After all, a lot of science is only waffling, with no real proof.. Just a set of best guesses made on what information we have available..
I get the funny feeling that what we consider as almost incontrivertible proof today will be laughed at in a century or two.. And mabe some things forgotten until a new view of the 'rules' means that science can catch up to some odd observation made long ago, and take it further.
Don't think it'll start a flame war.. Not with me certainly..
I have a belief in a few things that seem to work for me (acupressure, acupuncture, neti pots, some herbal remedies, but by no means all)..
The way I'd go from conjecture to certainty is by scrutinizing it under controlled conditions, to see if there is connection.
What I'm not (and I probably did sound too confident in the original post) is certain.. I have a belief, which can be changed in debate if and when I'm proved wrong.. What I am, is curious about things.
Sadly, I lack the biology skills to persue studies in the areas I'd like to as more than a mere armchair layman.
What I do find interesting is some of the old treatments (such as maggots for infected tissue) making reappearances in modern medicine that were frowned on, or overlooked for a long time, in preference to more 'modern' medicine.
So, the behaviour observed in animals where they lick wounds, and even in humans, that 'kiss it better' (introduce saliva to the wound), or suck on a sore wound to make it feel better, by instinct, hasn't given the clue that there's something in saliva that helps?
There's a whole store of herb and animal lore that's been systematically quashed for decades (well, since the great witch hunts really), and science is only just getting round to looking at it now.
There's a lot to be said for 'complimentary' medicine for lesser ailments (although the modern pharmaceutical treatments are definitely magnitudes more effective for front line serious treatment). Rather than just decrying it, perhaps it should be investigated more thoroughly?
That could hide many things. After all, understanding the subject isn't the whole of the mark. Communicating it also carries a non-trivial mark.
If the examiner can't correctly work out what the writer is trying to say, then marks will be lost. Presentation also carries a portion of the mark in most subjects, and using txt spk will almost certainly lose that.
So, it's basically allowing people to use txt spk, and actually have a non-zero mark (credit given for the understanding of the subject where it's communicated successfully), but in all probability, they won't be garnering the kind of mark they would otherwise be achieving if they used correct English.
It's possibly the kind of discrepancy that would make the difference between a fail and an average pass mark (depending on how obfuscated the text was by using txt spk).
Interesting then that Bush didn't actually originally get voted in, he was appointed by a set of Judges.
And second time round it wasn't that convincing either, after all the playing around with statistics that got him in again.
Actually, it seems that the kinder, gentler policies are quite popular.
I think the key part of your debate falls down with discounting things by predicting theoretical failures before a test is made.
Theory always alters to fit the observed facts. And every now and then, something pops out of the hat that changes everything.
It may be possible to be an honest crackpot by getting the equations wrong, and have that failure obvious to everyone else.. It's also possible to find something that works despite what the equations say..
That's called advancing science..
Wrong or right though, it'll be interesting to see how it pans out..