Obviously you are right: if you are guilty and are trying to get away with it, you'd better hire the best lawyer support you can afford. But I was speaking in more general terms - not having a lawyer means having to do everything yourself and in anything bigger than a small claims lawsuit it will eventually jeopardize your bank account, your job, your family. I would say it is a very risky propositon.
I always found this is one of the strangest features in the US Justice System - that the loser does not automatically gets to pay both sides fees in a civil complaint. After all, if you bring a lawsuit against me and I am proved innocent, you still get to bankrupt me on legal fees (or force me to surrender whatever you wnat without trial because I can't afford it). It is not only unfair, it (probably intentionally) tilts the balance of Justice in favour of corporations and against the consumers or the common person. I wonder why there is no popular movement to review this specific legislation so anyone can defend him/herself against corporate lawsuits without fear of losing everything to the lawyers on the way to reclaim Justice.
"Defending yourself" against a mega-billion dollar corporations backed by teams of lawyers with no expense limit can be a very costly proposition, even if you are innocent as a baby - the number of legal tricks available you have no clue about is so extensive that you end up losing much more than a regular lawyer fee.
A gas oven, a steam iron and an automobile all have a very limited set of possible operations. Even the most versatile of these machines, the automobile, can be operated with a small set of phisical operations and the knowledge of a simple ruleset (the side of the road you're supposed to be on, the meaning of traffic lights, etc). If you were right, misusing any of them would be very rare, obviously not the case with automobiles (the one with most degrees of freedom).
Computers, on the other hand, are almost limitless machines - change the software you completely changed the way the computer works. There are so many possibilities and so many degrees of freedom that most people won't be capable even to contemplate them all, much less control them.
They are usually written by Frontpage trainned monkeys, which by itself almost garantees an IE-only result. They are then lightly edited for code/debug by people who have Microsoft as their sole "standards" provider, making it almost impossible to get any result other than an IE specific site.
Look at the white on green logo at the top of the page. Check the URL. Yes, this is Slashdot.
Fear the day they make a clear announcement about an application or gadget, one you don't actually have to click through the link to decide if you are interested. On this day Stallman will have sold FSF to Gates, Microsoft will have open-sourced all their code and a new company, Hell Inc., will have cornered the ice-cream market for good.
Allright, I am no graphic artist, but I've been using Gimp 2.0.3 to draw icons, image buttons and work on images for many kinds of programs for a long time.
The interface may take a while to get used to, but once you get there it is very professional and very clear. I believe this kind of joke may be historically funny, but eventually everybody who one day worked with Gimp 0.8 will be retired or dead and no one will remember exactly why it is funny. As I said, even today, someone who never used another drawing program would not see anything wrong or strange in Gimp's interface (any large program has a complicated interface - Photoshop's interface isn't exactly easy to learn).
In the richest Western countries, the most important criminals now come from families with centuries of criminal tradition. A long time ago their grand-grand parents started out-sourcing the less savory edges of the business and buying themselves large mansions, country club memberships and table manners lessons. So now, many generations afterwards, if you don't pay attention, what you see looking at them are ordinary run-of-the-mill lawyers, CEOs and MPs/Congresspeople. They necessarily lost much of their past eagerness, they look less greedy and more civilised - the past crimes leading to their fortunes are all but forgotten and hidden in a mist of heroic capitalist legend.
But one shouldn't be fooled by appearences - anytime their position, their money or their ambitions are somehow at stake the old blood speaks louder and the "rough" edges show - albeilt, again, safely out-sourced down the food chain.
I think it is the same in every "developing" country (I write from Brazil). The mandatory "primordial capitalist accumulation" (as Marx would put it, more or less) must be fed with oceans of blood and tears, until we get to the point where the criminals rich enough to re-write History as fairy-tale.
At first I thought it wouldn't be possible do to such a thing but then examples poured into my mind: a) The gym, where I go to customize my mass (it only affects me, hence "small scale", although the wife would object the "small" part) b)Nanobots can customize anything in a very small scale - too bad they don't exist yet
But I don't think small online stores selling personalized itens fit into this category.
Also, you'd be "in civil court suing the hell out of him right now" just to see your case fall apart the minute your CIO is called to testify that, yes, you have 3000 people working in your IT department and yes, none of them read the warnings or installed the patches Microsoft issued weeks early. "'Cos ya know, mein Judge, we don't deserve to be infected just because we're dumb".
He was tried in a country where paranoia and "revenge justice" is quite out of the law books. Also, a country (an continent) where the media companies do not own half of the Legislative body. By the same vein, in China he would have probably get life in jail or death.
Stop it, my co-workers are already asking what is so funny...
Before you go on, if you haven't noticed yet, humans will have evolved into space-robots and I will still fail to dignify your troll with a serious answer
Surrounded by atheist barbarians who want to force their children into gay marriages, perform mandatory abortions on their pregnant daughters and burn all bibles in the libraries. You can never stop watching for those barbarians, else you will wake up to find 24 hours porn programming on all TV stations. With a bare-breasted Janet Jackson doing the weather.
Eric Raymond served the community well when he broke off with Richard Stallman and started what was called the Open Source Movement (slightly in opposition to, but never quite apart from, the Free Software).
His main contribution, I think, was attracting corporate attention to the benefits of Open Source. A secondary contribution was to show, along the years, how well thought and important the GPL was - as many weak, badly written and loophole-ridden open source licenses started to appear and people started getting their fingers burned by corporate greed. The Open Source people eventually generated a couple of good licenses, but the good ones were never much different from GPL.
I think now it should be quite clear to everyone involved that the level of protection from "corporate leechers" GPL offers is one of the fundamental pillars of the innovation we see today in software developement. As another poster put it, GPL is the only thing that stands between your open code and Microsoft (Oracle, Adobe etc).
As I implied somewhere along the way, I even agree. Slashdot is pretty lazy in this respect when a simple two-word explanation "...[Java IDE] Eclipse..." would have been enough.
My point was that the poster was way beyond the call of duty here. And he brought the digits thing up, not me, I just found it funny he started talking about how many digits his account had without even noticing mine...
Care to count how many digits my account has? And mind you, this is my second account, I lost the first one.
Now, please, you're asking for it. While I fully understand the generic need for better Slashdot posts (alas, that's a lost war already - they won't change) asking about Eclipse in the terms you did is just too funny to let it pass. Now go ask in the Apple section what an iPod is and in the Apache section what the heck is this HTTP thing people keep talking about.
Just to make it clear, I mentioned VB just for its ground-breaking (at the time it was quite right to call it revolutionary) approach to GUI building.
As for Java, I have been successfully using Java to develop both server and client apps for years. As Java evolved and got faster, the client-side scene was born again from the AWT ashes. Today we (me, my company) find very little use for anything else (we have been even doing some great Swingless Java2D full-screen experiments). So, as I said in another comment, without a GUI editor the migration from Netbeans/Swing to Eclipse/SWT would be so painfully slow that I would say it would not be economically feasible (mind you, I am not talking about small apps with hundreds of lines, I am talking about multi-thousand to tens of thousands of lines apps).
AWT sucked so badly that people stoped talking about client side Java and run to the headless servers. The first Swing sucked too, but not so badly. In 1.5 Swing is almost grown-up and quite faster. They have also hired some non-color-blind people to revamp the default look and feel, and it now looks nice (there were ways to make it look nice in 1.3 to 1.4.x, but those were mostly undocumented).
My other main problem is having no easy migration path, hence my problem with the lack of a GUI editor - if I am going to migrate my apps and have to redesign all user interfaces around a new toolkit, the least I need is a GUI editor - rewriting everything in code would be painfully close to my early days writing GUIs for Apple II programs...
I couldn't really see the need for a third widget toolkit (AWT, Swing, SWT) specially after Sun got some sense and started using the community process to discuss and enhance Java. It always sounded to me like an IBMish NIH attack.
Another reason I never used it for more than a week was the fact Eclipse failed to supply a decent integrated GUI editor (hell, since VB showed the way back in the 90's, one of the most important points in an IDE is the GUI editor) - you had either to pay for a decent one or use some buggy and poorly integrated hack. Do they have something usable now?
So, I guess I must keep feeding more memory to my Netbeans at each upgrade cycle...
It looks very trollish - I used Netbeans for a while in a PIII 800 with 256MB. Not my best experience but usable (if you don't mind going for a coffee every now and then while the Garbage Collector does its thing). With my current P4/512 NB 4.1 runs just fine under XP.
Slashdot Mirror
Obviously you are right: if you are guilty and are trying to get away with it, you'd better hire the best lawyer support you can afford. But I was speaking in more general terms - not having a lawyer means having to do everything yourself and in anything bigger than a small claims lawsuit it will eventually jeopardize your bank account, your job, your family. I would say it is a very risky propositon.
I always found this is one of the strangest features in the US Justice System - that the loser does not automatically gets to pay both sides fees in a civil complaint. After all, if you bring a lawsuit against me and I am proved innocent, you still get to bankrupt me on legal fees (or force me to surrender whatever you wnat without trial because I can't afford it). It is not only unfair, it (probably intentionally) tilts the balance of Justice in favour of corporations and against the consumers or the common person. I wonder why there is no popular movement to review this specific legislation so anyone can defend him/herself against corporate lawsuits without fear of losing everything to the lawyers on the way to reclaim Justice.
"Defending yourself" against a mega-billion dollar corporations backed by teams of lawyers with no expense limit can be a very costly proposition, even if you are innocent as a baby - the number of legal tricks available you have no clue about is so extensive that you end up losing much more than a regular lawyer fee.
A gas oven, a steam iron and an automobile all have a very limited set of possible operations. Even the most versatile of these machines, the automobile, can be operated with a small set of phisical operations and the knowledge of a simple ruleset (the side of the road you're supposed to be on, the meaning of traffic lights, etc). If you were right, misusing any of them would be very rare, obviously not the case with automobiles (the one with most degrees of freedom).
Computers, on the other hand, are almost limitless machines - change the software you completely changed the way the computer works. There are so many possibilities and so many degrees of freedom that most people won't be capable even to contemplate them all, much less control them.
They are usually written by Frontpage trainned monkeys, which by itself almost garantees an IE-only result. They are then lightly edited for code/debug by people who have Microsoft as their sole "standards" provider, making it almost impossible to get any result other than an IE specific site.
Look at the white on green logo at the top of the page. Check the URL. Yes, this is Slashdot.
Fear the day they make a clear announcement about an application or gadget, one you don't actually have to click through the link to decide if you are interested. On this day Stallman will have sold FSF to Gates, Microsoft will have open-sourced all their code and a new company, Hell Inc., will have cornered the ice-cream market for good.
Allright, I am no graphic artist, but I've been using Gimp 2.0.3 to draw icons, image buttons and work on images for many kinds of programs for a long time.
The interface may take a while to get used to, but once you get there it is very professional and very clear. I believe this kind of joke may be historically funny, but eventually everybody who one day worked with Gimp 0.8 will be retired or dead and no one will remember exactly why it is funny. As I said, even today, someone who never used another drawing program would not see anything wrong or strange in Gimp's interface (any large program has a complicated interface - Photoshop's interface isn't exactly easy to learn).
In the richest Western countries, the most important criminals now come from families with centuries of criminal tradition. A long time ago their grand-grand parents started out-sourcing the less savory edges of the business and buying themselves large mansions, country club memberships and table manners lessons. So now, many generations afterwards, if you don't pay attention, what you see looking at them are ordinary run-of-the-mill lawyers, CEOs and MPs/Congresspeople. They necessarily lost much of their past eagerness, they look less greedy and more civilised - the past crimes leading to their fortunes are all but forgotten and hidden in a mist of heroic capitalist legend.
But one shouldn't be fooled by appearences - anytime their position, their money or their ambitions are somehow at stake the old blood speaks louder and the "rough" edges show - albeilt, again, safely out-sourced down the food chain.
I think it is the same in every "developing" country (I write from Brazil). The mandatory "primordial capitalist accumulation" (as Marx would put it, more or less) must be fed with oceans of blood and tears, until we get to the point where the criminals rich enough to re-write History as fairy-tale.
The drug lords were from the District of Columbia. If you had ever watched C-SPAN you'd know nobody understands those guys.
At first I thought it wouldn't be possible do to such a thing but then examples poured into my mind:
a) The gym, where I go to customize my mass (it only affects me, hence "small scale", although the wife would object the "small" part)
b)Nanobots can customize anything in a very small scale - too bad they don't exist yet
But I don't think small online stores selling personalized itens fit into this category.
Also, you'd be "in civil court suing the hell out of him right now" just to see your case fall apart the minute your CIO is called to testify that, yes, you have 3000 people working in your IT department and yes, none of them read the warnings or installed the patches Microsoft issued weeks early. "'Cos ya know, mein Judge, we don't deserve to be infected just because we're dumb".
He was tried in a country where paranoia and "revenge justice" is quite out of the law books. Also, a country (an continent) where the media companies do not own half of the Legislative body. By the same vein, in China he would have probably get life in jail or death.
A SlashBack just for dupes...
Stop it, my co-workers are already asking what is so funny...
Before you go on, if you haven't noticed yet, humans will have evolved into space-robots and I will still fail to dignify your troll with a serious answer
Surrounded by atheist barbarians who want to force their children into gay marriages, perform mandatory abortions on their pregnant daughters and burn all bibles in the libraries. You can never stop watching for those barbarians, else you will wake up to find 24 hours porn programming on all TV stations. With a bare-breasted Janet Jackson doing the weather.
Very, very funny. We all love sarcastic one-liners subtly mocking the creationist ignorance. Keep the good work.
Eric Raymond served the community well when he broke off with Richard Stallman and started what was called the Open Source Movement (slightly in opposition to, but never quite apart from, the Free Software).
His main contribution, I think, was attracting corporate attention to the benefits of Open Source. A secondary contribution was to show, along the years, how well thought and important the GPL was - as many weak, badly written and loophole-ridden open source licenses started to appear and people started getting their fingers burned by corporate greed. The Open Source people eventually generated a couple of good licenses, but the good ones were never much different from GPL.
I think now it should be quite clear to everyone involved that the level of protection from "corporate leechers" GPL offers is one of the fundamental pillars of the innovation we see today in software developement. As another poster put it, GPL is the only thing that stands between your open code and Microsoft (Oracle, Adobe etc).
As I implied somewhere along the way, I even agree. Slashdot is pretty lazy in this respect when a simple two-word explanation "...[Java IDE] Eclipse..." would have been enough.
My point was that the poster was way beyond the call of duty here. And he brought the digits thing up, not me, I just found it funny he started talking about how many digits his account had without even noticing mine...
Care to count how many digits my account has? And mind you, this is my second account, I lost the first one.
Now, please, you're asking for it. While I fully understand the generic need for better Slashdot posts (alas, that's a lost war already - they won't change) asking about Eclipse in the terms you did is just too funny to let it pass. Now go ask in the Apple section what an iPod is and in the Apache section what the heck is this HTTP thing people keep talking about.
Just to make it clear, I mentioned VB just for its ground-breaking (at the time it was quite right to call it revolutionary) approach to GUI building.
As for Java, I have been successfully using Java to develop both server and client apps for years. As Java evolved and got faster, the client-side scene was born again from the AWT ashes. Today we (me, my company) find very little use for anything else (we have been even doing some great Swingless Java2D full-screen experiments). So, as I said in another comment, without a GUI editor the migration from Netbeans/Swing to Eclipse/SWT would be so painfully slow that I would say it would not be economically feasible (mind you, I am not talking about small apps with hundreds of lines, I am talking about multi-thousand to tens of thousands of lines apps).
AWT sucked so badly that people stoped talking about client side Java and run to the headless servers. The first Swing sucked too, but not so badly. In 1.5 Swing is almost grown-up and quite faster. They have also hired some non-color-blind people to revamp the default look and feel, and it now looks nice (there were ways to make it look nice in 1.3 to 1.4.x, but those were mostly undocumented).
My other main problem is having no easy migration path, hence my problem with the lack of a GUI editor - if I am going to migrate my apps and have to redesign all user interfaces around a new toolkit, the least I need is a GUI editor - rewriting everything in code would be painfully close to my early days writing GUIs for Apple II programs...
I may give it another try, when the servers come back to life in a day or two.
Java 1.5 issues or some other bug in the IDE? Netbeans has the former nailed down pretty neatly.
I couldn't really see the need for a third widget toolkit (AWT, Swing, SWT) specially after Sun got some sense and started using the community process to discuss and enhance Java. It always sounded to me like an IBMish NIH attack.
Another reason I never used it for more than a week was the fact Eclipse failed to supply a decent integrated GUI editor (hell, since VB showed the way back in the 90's, one of the most important points in an IDE is the GUI editor) - you had either to pay for a decent one or use some buggy and poorly integrated hack. Do they have something usable now?
So, I guess I must keep feeding more memory to my Netbeans at each upgrade cycle...
It looks very trollish - I used Netbeans for a while in a PIII 800 with 256MB. Not my best experience but usable (if you don't mind going for a coffee every now and then while the Garbage Collector does its thing). With my current P4/512 NB 4.1 runs just fine under XP.