but it's still their responsibility to invest responsibly so that when disaster does strike, it's not across your entire portfolio.
I love this "blame the victim" attitude.
In fact, this wasn't "disaster striking", as in stock market volatility or other kinds of economic factors, it was fraud. The only people responsible for the losses were at Enron.
Furthermore, the magnitude of the crime remains unchanged whether someone defrauds 100m people for $1 or one person for $100m.
Former employees told us constantly throughout the Enron trial that it was a great place to work, and that they felt devoted to him.
I'm sure members of the mafia say the same thing.
The court has determined that this man stole vast sums of money and ruined many lives. The fact that he and his associates did so with a smile and without feeling guilty about it only makes his crimes worse.
Microsoft wouldn't be as big and powerful as it is today without software piracy. Even today, the fact that a lot of copies of Windows and Office are pirated is what makes Microsoft software so ubiquitous; if everybody actually paid the price Microsoft is asking, many people would likely switch to genuinely free alternatives.
And I don't think this point is lost on Microsoft either; they could have easily piracy-proofed their systems long ago, for example, by making hardware dongles part of their PC spec. But Microsoft probably doesn't want to do that; in addition to the benefits that piracy-provided differential pricing gives them, this way, the company also has power they would otherwise not have: power to raid companies and force violators to do their bidding.
Mac zealots are going to ridicule this, but I'd like to know what they think OS X has that Ubuntu doesn't. As far as I can tell, Ubuntu's UI is faster, its Spotlight-equivalent is faster, it looks at least as nice as OS X, and it comes with tons of nice software preinstalled and for free.
And like so much Bill Gates does, he didn't come up with this observation, he probably didn't attribute it to the original source either, and afterwards people like you still attribute it to him.
If you ever bother to reply to the scam mail you receive from time to time in your inbox you you will soon discover that you are wasting your sympathy.
I don't have any generic sympathy for Nigerian scammers. But I also try not to have prejudices. I don't know what the situation of the individual at the other end is; it may be anything from a confused 12 year old to organized crime. And neither do you or anybody else.
The prudent, ethical, and legal thing is to either ignore those scams or refer them to the authorities; trying to play games with these people is unwise and may end up hurting people.
Nigerians have a life expectancy of 47 years, a per capita GDP of $1400, and 60% of the population below the already low Nigerian poverty line. Compare that with a life expectancy of 77 years, a per capita GDP of $42000 in the US, and 12% of the population below the US poverty line--most of even those wealthy by Nigerian standards. 47% of Nigerian exports go to the US, so we are benefitting greatly from their natural resources. The average age in Nigeria is 18, meaning that many young people are going to have a hard time finding reasonable work, even if they have managed to learn how to read and write and use a PC.
In the face of such disparities, it's easy to understand why many Nigerians wouldn't think twice about attempting E-mail scams: their view of us is that we have way too much money and it won't hurt us if the dumbest of us part with some of that money. You're probably spending more on electricity for your PC than these people have to live on.
Get some perspective. If one of your neighbors were pulling a Nigerian scam on you, play your little games with them, but don't screw around with the lives of people that you should be feeling compassion for. The way to stop the flood of Nigerian scams is for the rich nations to stop contributing to poverty in Africa, not to play games with desparate people.
As far as vigilante justice goes, I think this is more like when you shake a friends hand then say "Wow your hand smells like gasoline" and then when he smells his hand you smack it into his nose. The guy getting the tattoo didn't get hurt
Getting a tattoo is certainly not painless. In Nigeria, it's a potentially life-threatening thing to do. In addition, even in the US, tattoos are a valuable commodity, as several people who have sold their skin as advertising space can attest to, and botched tattoos may entitle the recipient to compensation.
As I was saying, in this case, nothing may have happened and the Nigerian may have deserved it, but that does not change the principle: the anti-scammer was acting irresponsibly and unethically.
I'm not for vigilante justice or anything of that sort but come on this is funny.
It's funny, but that doesn't make it right. And if one knew more about the situation of the person at the other end, it might quickly stop being funny. Do you know how little that person earns? Do you know what their history is? You're probably paying more for lattes each month than their regular pay check.
These kinds of scams are easy enough to recognize; just ignore them or notify the authorities. Don't start playing games for your own amusement with people you know nothing about.
You are suggesting, then, that I can be legally bound to submit payment to an individual, even if that individual's request for payment is known to be fraudulent.
Up to the point of the guy getting the tattoo or sending the carvings, all that has happened is that you promised to send money in return for some action by the other person; the other person hasn't committed any fraudulent act yet, and it's only a supposition that their original request is fraudulent (rather than, say, naive or a joke).
Why is having a scammer 'brand' themself -- of their own free will, believing that such actions will enable them to commit an act of fraud -- a "bad" thing?
Because, whether achieved through deception or brute force, it's still a form of vigilante justice. Furthermore, when all is said and done, you have done injury to a person that hasn't actually done any injury to you--the other person might be a naive teenage kid that wouldn't even have gone through with the scam.
These anti-scam efforts violate two basic principles of the way we administer justice: punishment and retribution is up to the justice system, and with few exceptions, we only punish actual crimes and not merely intent.
Your second example has not been demonstrated to have occured.
Good. In fact, those two particular scammers do look like they deserved what they got. That doesn't make the actions of the anti-scammer any less reprehensible, dangerous, or unethical. We have sleazeballs fighting sleazeballs here.
And it's unwise because you may be breaking the law yourself.
To what law do you refer?
The scam baiters are promising payment if the other party does something. A priori, that's a contract. Depending on the circumstances, it may be valid, legally binding, and even enforceable.
The purpose of scam baiting is not to do something "bad" to the criminal. It is to waste the time and resources that would otherwise be used to victimize someone.
Getting people to tattoo themselves, or indirectly causing wood carvers to do work that the scam baiter knows won't be paid for, is doing "something bad", not just to the scammer, but also to third parties.
While this sort of behavior is probably satisfying, it's both unwise and unethical. It's unwise because these people are criminals that may come after you to hurt you. And it's unwise because you may be breaking the law yourself. Finally, just because someone did something bad to you doesn't make it right for you to do the same to them.
ext2 and ext3 are very high performance file systems that have no trouble moving large amounts of data. ext4 appears to be a market-driven extension of ext3, in which what amounts to users pay for the minimum number of changes necessary to get the job done.
ZFS, on the other hand, is a typical Sun design, in which their kernel engineers throw in every feature they can think of and Sun is marketing the hell out of it. But a lot of features also means a lot of features that can be misconfigured, that can have bugs, and that can cause unexpected performance bottlenecks.
Even if the ZFS feature set is the right one, it's far from clear that putting them into the file system layer is the right place to put them.
So, at this point, ZFS may end up being more Edsel than Liebherr T282.
The administration claimed that there was incontrovertible evidence of WMDs in Iraq, yet they didn't find any. So, it's clear that someone in the administration was either deeply incompetent or deliberately lying; either possibility is a liability for the administration.
In any case, the burden of proof is not on the critics of the CIA, it's on the CIA and the administration; they have to prove to the public that they spent public money wisely and justifiably. We all can listen to their case and decide every four years at the ballot box whether to believe them.
The pope claims infallibility, but scientists generally don't. What scientists claim is rational procedures by which false data or hypotheses will eventually be detected and eliminated. And, unlike prayer, hallucination, or talking bushes, the rational procedures scientists use actually do work sooner or later.
This means that poorly designed web sites with unclear purposes will now be considered a terrorist threat and lead to indefinite detention of the designer(s).
Well, I guess that's at least one effect of the anti-terrorist hysteria that I could get behind; all other efforts to force better web design have failed after all.
Open Source web apps? Does such a thing even exist?
Are you living under a rock? Look on Freshmeat! You can already get system administration, mail readers, groupware, word processing, accounting, CRM, database frontends, file sharing, report generation, scientific data analysis, programming environments, document management, jukebox management, photo management, etc.
I think there is no good open source web-based spreadsheet or presentation package yet, but it's coming.
And what would be the point? I wouldn't be able to "fix" bugs or enhance the code myself even if I have the source, because the app is a web app rather than a local app.
Geez, how much clearer than "OPEN SOURCE web/server-side apps" do I need to put it? I am talking about those server-side apps which are open source. And, as I was saying, there are plenty.
And it makes plenty of sense to install those apps on a little home server, in particular financial applications. That way, you get the privacy and control of a locally installed application, with the ability to use it from multiple front-ends around the house or (if you're careful) while traveling. In addition, web apps are generally easier to develop than desktop apps.
There are many other categories of people and activities that are likely as bad or worse as a 30 year old cell phone user. For example:
-- mothers with young children in the car (I was almost killed by one) -- beverages and/or food in the car -- putting on makeup in the car -- drivers over 70 (the only two accidents I have ever been in were caused by seniors not paying attention aiming straight for my car; that was even more frustrating because I saw them coming up ever so slowly, but they had me cornered, crafty bastards)
Come on, let's get creative in identifying categories of drivers that are likely too distracted to drive safely and turn them all into criminals.
Personally, I think a better choice is to do what we can do already: when an accident occurs, then guilt and penalties are determined by what drivers were doing at the time. And a mother that causes an accident because she was arm-wrestling her 7 year old brat should have the book thrown at her just as much as the high powered lawyer that's yakking away on his cell phone and not paying attention to the road.
I have seen and implemented OR mappers several years before this patent was filed, lots of people knew about it at the time, and it's an obvious idea anyway.
The only saving grace to this patent is that OR mappings are probably a bad idea anyway; if these patents stand up in court, maybe that will finally spur some real innovation in the database market.
Open source is rarely first to market. It has taken years for open source to start to displace other vendors in other markets, and it's going to take patience for cell phones as well.
If Palm gets it right, Palm may well change the tide. If not, some other company will.
What is pretty clear already is that the current crop of Linux phones based on some Linux+J2ME or Linux+Qt/Embedded is not going to cut it. Why? Because none of those phones are going to offer compelling advantages for mainstream users, and their use of non-standard GUI solutions means that they also fail to be interesting to most geeks or vertical application developers using open source APIs.
So, "getting it right" means shipping full Linux, with standard libraries, standard command line environments, and X11. Nothing else will really do, and given the power of today's cell phones, there really is no reason not to.
Linux effectively has Gnome and KDE, and the two work together very well. That means at most two toolkits, with an active effort to integrate them.
That makes the situation better than, say, on Mac OS, which has Cocoa, Carbon, some Classic, and a lot of incompatible third party toolkits. And Windows has a baroque mix of 16bit and 32bit applications, various levels of Win32, and soon.NET, Avalon, and Vista.
Apparently, they did not teach you critical reading and thinking as part of your BS: I didn't argue against research funding, I questioned whether "large scale" research funding (i.e., funding for megaprojects--someone else chose the terminology for this discussion) is the right kind of funding, instead of equal amounts of total funding divided up among lots of small projects. And if physics can't deliver good scientific results with many small projects, then that's a problem with physics as a discipline; there are many other scientific displines that not only deliver excellent fundamental scientific results, but also demonstrably better spin-offs.
We have already established that, unlike other disciplines, physicists are unwilling to community the reasons or justifications for experiments like LIGO clearly and accurately to scientists of other disciplines or the general public, instead relying on statements amounting to "trust us, we know why it's important" and "it's too compliated, you wouldn't understand", and the always popular but completely erroneous "this will confirm Einstein's theories". That is perhaps another reason these people shouldn't get funding until they change their tune.
It's not clear to me what you want. You will probably never get a complete set of financial desktop apps you get on the PC; they are an anachronism. You will likely see more and more open source web/server-side applications that you can install locally.
In the past, the development of such apps has been hampered by the predominance of proprietary standards and formats, but that has been changing. The more the industry moves to open formats and XML (and they do, e.g., OFX), the more open source financial apps you're going to see.
Have some patience; open source is not about being first. Historically, it has taken a decade or two after an application became feasible that the open source application actually arrived. Since high quality open source desktops and open financial standards are a recent phenomenon, it may take a while still, but it will happen eventually.
You make NH sound most unattractive; libertarian notions of freedom in many cases boil down to social Darwinism, and that's not even pleasant for the winners.
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but it's still their responsibility to invest responsibly so that when disaster does strike, it's not across your entire portfolio.
I love this "blame the victim" attitude.
In fact, this wasn't "disaster striking", as in stock market volatility or other kinds of economic factors, it was fraud. The only people responsible for the losses were at Enron.
Furthermore, the magnitude of the crime remains unchanged whether someone defrauds 100m people for $1 or one person for $100m.
Former employees told us constantly throughout the Enron trial that it was a great place to work, and that they felt devoted to him.
I'm sure members of the mafia say the same thing.
The court has determined that this man stole vast sums of money and ruined many lives. The fact that he and his associates did so with a smile and without feeling guilty about it only makes his crimes worse.
Microsoft wouldn't be as big and powerful as it is today without software piracy. Even today, the fact that a lot of copies of Windows and Office are pirated is what makes Microsoft software so ubiquitous; if everybody actually paid the price Microsoft is asking, many people would likely switch to genuinely free alternatives.
And I don't think this point is lost on Microsoft either; they could have easily piracy-proofed their systems long ago, for example, by making hardware dongles part of their PC spec. But Microsoft probably doesn't want to do that; in addition to the benefits that piracy-provided differential pricing gives them, this way, the company also has power they would otherwise not have: power to raid companies and force violators to do their bidding.
If a well-known Chinese university did anything like that to UK networks, the UK government would be screaming "cyberattack" and "cyberterrorism".
Mac zealots are going to ridicule this, but I'd like to know what they think OS X has that Ubuntu doesn't. As far as I can tell, Ubuntu's UI is faster, its Spotlight-equivalent is faster, it looks at least as nice as OS X, and it comes with tons of nice software preinstalled and for free.
And like so much Bill Gates does, he didn't come up with this observation, he probably didn't attribute it to the original source either, and afterwards people like you still attribute it to him.
If you ever bother to reply to the scam mail you receive from time to time in your inbox you you will soon discover that you are wasting your sympathy.
I don't have any generic sympathy for Nigerian scammers. But I also try not to have prejudices. I don't know what the situation of the individual at the other end is; it may be anything from a confused 12 year old to organized crime. And neither do you or anybody else.
The prudent, ethical, and legal thing is to either ignore those scams or refer them to the authorities; trying to play games with these people is unwise and may end up hurting people.
Nigerians have a life expectancy of 47 years, a per capita GDP of $1400, and 60% of the population below the already low Nigerian poverty line. Compare that with a life expectancy of 77 years, a per capita GDP of $42000 in the US, and 12% of the population below the US poverty line--most of even those wealthy by Nigerian standards. 47% of Nigerian exports go to the US, so we are benefitting greatly from their natural resources. The average age in Nigeria is 18, meaning that many young people are going to have a hard time finding reasonable work, even if they have managed to learn how to read and write and use a PC.
In the face of such disparities, it's easy to understand why many Nigerians wouldn't think twice about attempting E-mail scams: their view of us is that we have way too much money and it won't hurt us if the dumbest of us part with some of that money. You're probably spending more on electricity for your PC than these people have to live on.
Get some perspective. If one of your neighbors were pulling a Nigerian scam on you, play your little games with them, but don't screw around with the lives of people that you should be feeling compassion for. The way to stop the flood of Nigerian scams is for the rich nations to stop contributing to poverty in Africa, not to play games with desparate people.
As far as vigilante justice goes, I think this is more like when you shake a friends hand then say "Wow your hand smells like gasoline" and then when he smells his hand you smack it into his nose. The guy getting the tattoo didn't get hurt
Getting a tattoo is certainly not painless. In Nigeria, it's a potentially life-threatening thing to do. In addition, even in the US, tattoos are a valuable commodity, as several people who have sold their skin as advertising space can attest to, and botched tattoos may entitle the recipient to compensation.
As I was saying, in this case, nothing may have happened and the Nigerian may have deserved it, but that does not change the principle: the anti-scammer was acting irresponsibly and unethically.
I'm not for vigilante justice or anything of that sort but come on this is funny.
It's funny, but that doesn't make it right. And if one knew more about the situation of the person at the other end, it might quickly stop being funny. Do you know how little that person earns? Do you know what their history is? You're probably paying more for lattes each month than their regular pay check.
These kinds of scams are easy enough to recognize; just ignore them or notify the authorities. Don't start playing games for your own amusement with people you know nothing about.
You are suggesting, then, that I can be legally bound to submit payment to an individual, even if that individual's request for payment is known to be fraudulent.
Up to the point of the guy getting the tattoo or sending the carvings, all that has happened is that you promised to send money in return for some action by the other person; the other person hasn't committed any fraudulent act yet, and it's only a supposition that their original request is fraudulent (rather than, say, naive or a joke).
Why is having a scammer 'brand' themself -- of their own free will, believing that such actions will enable them to commit an act of fraud -- a "bad" thing?
Because, whether achieved through deception or brute force, it's still a form of vigilante justice. Furthermore, when all is said and done, you have done injury to a person that hasn't actually done any injury to you--the other person might be a naive teenage kid that wouldn't even have gone through with the scam.
These anti-scam efforts violate two basic principles of the way we administer justice: punishment and retribution is up to the justice system, and with few exceptions, we only punish actual crimes and not merely intent.
Your second example has not been demonstrated to have occured.
Good. In fact, those two particular scammers do look like they deserved what they got. That doesn't make the actions of the anti-scammer any less reprehensible, dangerous, or unethical. We have sleazeballs fighting sleazeballs here.
And it's unwise because you may be breaking the law yourself.
To what law do you refer?
The scam baiters are promising payment if the other party does something. A priori, that's a contract. Depending on the circumstances, it may be valid, legally binding, and even enforceable.
The purpose of scam baiting is not to do something "bad" to the criminal. It is to waste the time and resources that would otherwise be used to victimize someone.
Getting people to tattoo themselves, or indirectly causing wood carvers to do work that the scam baiter knows won't be paid for, is doing "something bad", not just to the scammer, but also to third parties.
While this sort of behavior is probably satisfying, it's both unwise and unethical. It's unwise because these people are criminals that may come after you to hurt you. And it's unwise because you may be breaking the law yourself. Finally, just because someone did something bad to you doesn't make it right for you to do the same to them.
I'm thrilled that we have a massive nanny-state in Europe where those afraid of personal risk and responsibility can find a peaceful haven.
Your knowledge and understanding of European politics is clearly as limited as your knowledge and understanding of US politics.
I'm not so sure that that's a reasonable analogy.
ext2 and ext3 are very high performance file systems that have no trouble moving large amounts of data. ext4 appears to be a market-driven extension of ext3, in which what amounts to users pay for the minimum number of changes necessary to get the job done.
ZFS, on the other hand, is a typical Sun design, in which their kernel engineers throw in every feature they can think of and Sun is marketing the hell out of it. But a lot of features also means a lot of features that can be misconfigured, that can have bugs, and that can cause unexpected performance bottlenecks.
Even if the ZFS feature set is the right one, it's far from clear that putting them into the file system layer is the right place to put them.
So, at this point, ZFS may end up being more Edsel than Liebherr T282.
The administration claimed that there was incontrovertible evidence of WMDs in Iraq, yet they didn't find any. So, it's clear that someone in the administration was either deeply incompetent or deliberately lying; either possibility is a liability for the administration.
In any case, the burden of proof is not on the critics of the CIA, it's on the CIA and the administration; they have to prove to the public that they spent public money wisely and justifiably. We all can listen to their case and decide every four years at the ballot box whether to believe them.
The pope claims infallibility, but scientists generally don't. What scientists claim is rational procedures by which false data or hypotheses will eventually be detected and eliminated. And, unlike prayer, hallucination, or talking bushes, the rational procedures scientists use actually do work sooner or later.
This means that poorly designed web sites with unclear purposes will now be considered a terrorist threat and lead to indefinite detention of the designer(s).
Well, I guess that's at least one effect of the anti-terrorist hysteria that I could get behind; all other efforts to force better web design have failed after all.
Open Source web apps? Does such a thing even exist?
Are you living under a rock? Look on Freshmeat! You can already get system administration, mail readers, groupware, word processing, accounting, CRM, database frontends, file sharing, report generation, scientific data analysis, programming environments, document management, jukebox management, photo management, etc.
I think there is no good open source web-based spreadsheet or presentation package yet, but it's coming.
And what would be the point? I wouldn't be able to "fix" bugs or enhance the code myself even if I have the source, because the app is a web app rather than a local app.
Geez, how much clearer than "OPEN SOURCE web/server-side apps" do I need to put it? I am talking about those server-side apps which are open source. And, as I was saying, there are plenty.
And it makes plenty of sense to install those apps on a little home server, in particular financial applications. That way, you get the privacy and control of a locally installed application, with the ability to use it from multiple front-ends around the house or (if you're careful) while traveling. In addition, web apps are generally easier to develop than desktop apps.
There are many other categories of people and activities that are likely as bad or worse as a 30 year old cell phone user. For example:
-- mothers with young children in the car (I was almost killed by one)
-- beverages and/or food in the car
-- putting on makeup in the car
-- drivers over 70 (the only two accidents I have ever been in were caused by seniors not paying attention aiming straight for my car; that was even more frustrating because I saw them coming up ever so slowly, but they had me cornered, crafty bastards)
Come on, let's get creative in identifying categories of drivers that are likely too distracted to drive safely and turn them all into criminals.
Personally, I think a better choice is to do what we can do already: when an accident occurs, then guilt and penalties are determined by what drivers were doing at the time. And a mother that causes an accident because she was arm-wrestling her 7 year old brat should have the book thrown at her just as much as the high powered lawyer that's yakking away on his cell phone and not paying attention to the road.
I have seen and implemented OR mappers several years before this patent was filed, lots of people knew about it at the time, and it's an obvious idea anyway.
The only saving grace to this patent is that OR mappings are probably a bad idea anyway; if these patents stand up in court, maybe that will finally spur some real innovation in the database market.
Open source is rarely first to market. It has taken years for open source to start to displace other vendors in other markets, and it's going to take patience for cell phones as well.
If Palm gets it right, Palm may well change the tide. If not, some other company will.
What is pretty clear already is that the current crop of Linux phones based on some Linux+J2ME or Linux+Qt/Embedded is not going to cut it. Why? Because none of those phones are going to offer compelling advantages for mainstream users, and their use of non-standard GUI solutions means that they also fail to be interesting to most geeks or vertical application developers using open source APIs.
So, "getting it right" means shipping full Linux, with standard libraries, standard command line environments, and X11. Nothing else will really do, and given the power of today's cell phones, there really is no reason not to.
Linux effectively has Gnome and KDE, and the two work together very well. That means at most two toolkits, with an active effort to integrate them.
.NET, Avalon, and Vista.
That makes the situation better than, say, on Mac OS, which has Cocoa, Carbon, some Classic, and a lot of incompatible third party toolkits. And Windows has a baroque mix of 16bit and 32bit applications, various levels of Win32, and soon
Apparently, they did not teach you critical reading and thinking as part of your BS: I didn't argue against research funding, I questioned whether "large scale" research funding (i.e., funding for megaprojects--someone else chose the terminology for this discussion) is the right kind of funding, instead of equal amounts of total funding divided up among lots of small projects. And if physics can't deliver good scientific results with many small projects, then that's a problem with physics as a discipline; there are many other scientific displines that not only deliver excellent fundamental scientific results, but also demonstrably better spin-offs.
We have already established that, unlike other disciplines, physicists are unwilling to community the reasons or justifications for experiments like LIGO clearly and accurately to scientists of other disciplines or the general public, instead relying on statements amounting to "trust us, we know why it's important" and "it's too compliated, you wouldn't understand", and the always popular but completely erroneous "this will confirm Einstein's theories". That is perhaps another reason these people shouldn't get funding until they change their tune.
It's not clear to me what you want. You will probably never get a complete set of financial desktop apps you get on the PC; they are an anachronism. You will likely see more and more open source web/server-side applications that you can install locally.
In the past, the development of such apps has been hampered by the predominance of proprietary standards and formats, but that has been changing. The more the industry moves to open formats and XML (and they do, e.g., OFX), the more open source financial apps you're going to see.
Have some patience; open source is not about being first. Historically, it has taken a decade or two after an application became feasible that the open source application actually arrived. Since high quality open source desktops and open financial standards are a recent phenomenon, it may take a while still, but it will happen eventually.
You make NH sound most unattractive; libertarian notions of freedom in many cases boil down to social Darwinism, and that's not even pleasant for the winners.