First, I agree with almost all of what you said. Never implicate yourself. Ever. Don't lie about it, don't tell the truth about it, don't say anything about it unless compelled to speak by a court (and even then, run every word by your lawyer first). However, before we go all tough-guy with "get a warrant"...


By admitting to copying someone else's code you could be confessing to a real crime that could result in time in prison.

Complete and utter bullshit. Plagiarism does not commit a crime, period. Academic violation, yes. Institutional violation, yes. Intellectual violation, yes. Probably a workplace violation in some cases (though typically only if you create content for your employer intended for public consumption). But criminal violation? No, no, no.

At most, the real author could sue for copyright violation - non-commercial, academic, non-distributed copyright violation. Good luck even finding a lawyer to waste time on that goldmine of a case.

In a way, using the internet to get the answer is the way it works in IT these days. I routinely get my solutions for problems at work by going to the internet â" I don't memorize every command and algorithm. These kids aren't cheating, they're doing it the current/modern way.

In third grade, you don't do your math homework by Googling "what is 153/17", because learning how to do it counts as the entire purpose of the exercise.

The working world cares about results. School doesn't; it cares about the steps you took to get your result.


It is to hard to decide exactly what is research and copying in these cases.

Not really, no - Unless they all copied a stock answer right out of their textbook, programming assignments don't involve "research". They require either implementing the algorithm of the week, or solving a toy "problem" that, if you speak English and have a high school diploma in the US, you need to turn in the latter if you need to look up how to approach the problem.

Just say no - To allowing the SJWs to destroy yet another site. "Once a poster crosses this line, they should lose all credibility". Indeed!


We can start by stating the obvious:

You fucktards have no sense of humor.


Similarly, it is never acceptable to ... post nude pictures

Ahahahaahahaha... 10/10, perfect, friend! I actually took you as serious up to that point. Truly a magnificent FP troll!

And we all wonder why there is a GamerGate scandal ....

Because some people still don't know what Naughty By Nature's lyrics meant, 23 years later?

Sorry, bud, not making the connection...

Power-save -> 0, Performance -> 1

Laptop-safe -> 0, crotch-burn -> 1. :)

But yeah, I see your point, that it wouldn't have any side effects in the output-integrity sense.

I notice TFA has almost no detail beyond what TFS says. Yeah, so they found this bit that apparently has no side effects to anything else but magically boosts performance by 20%? I'll admit I haven't written a graphics card driver since back in the VESA2 days, but I can't even conceive of what function such a bit could have, without having some down side... Something like (and I don't mean this literally) disabling vsync but accepting tearing.

Okay, I take some pride in usually understanding at least the basics behind cool science tricks like this, but I have to admit, this one just blows me away - I still don't "get", it even after reading TFAs.

So can someone explain what really happens here? Does the light keep reflecting between the two surfaces, as though caught between two "perfect" mirrors? Or do the photons (and does this depend on wave behavior, or could we do it for particles as well) just basically stop mid-air, something like an event horizon as seen from the inside? Or something else entirely?

/ Bonus points for a car analogy. XD
// Serious question, though... Thanks!

Sure, but on the other hand nobody but a novelist or a lonely weather station operator would bother uttering the phrase "fine, dry snow blowing in the wind". They'd just say "it's snowing."

Know how I can tell you don't live somewhere that requires you to remove that fine dry blowing drifting pooling pain-in-the-ass snow from your driveway before work the next morning?

/ Though I'll take that over wet, sticky, clumping snow with a crust of ice any day! I might need to clear it three times, but it goes easy each time.

Nevermind the consequences if they limit the meaning -- it will be legal to destroy most kinds of evidence in a criminal investigation. It's all A-OK if it didn't contain financial records right?

This story seems to mix up the traditional concept of destruction-of-evidence with a very specific subset of that crime applicable under SOX.

The prosecutors simply went too far in pushing for that specific crime, and therein lies the abuse - No different than how they try to make every case of plain ol' traditional fraud into a federal "wire fraud" offense when it involves the use of a computer (ie, basically all of it in the modern world), or how any crime involving more than a single person qualifies under RICO, or to pick a golden oldie, nailing Al Capone for tax fraud. Might what the crew did technically count under SOX? Maybe, maybe not - But SOX doesn't exist to serve as a bigger stick in all situations; it exists specifically to prosecute otherwise difficult to prove "white collar" crimes where most non-accountants can't even comprehend who did what to whom.

Prosecutors need to stick with the crime that actually happened here, punish the crew appropriately, and lose the "get creative with charges and see what sticks" bullshit that has become far, far too common in today's legal system. When the law becomes nothing more than a set of technicalities to use to punish dissidence as their whim, do we really wonder why no one actually respects the law anymore?

Ok, that's better. But have you read that law

Have you, other than to find a misleading snippet from a subsection that, as you point out, doesn't apply? You might want to reconsider subsection (d) before going too far out of your way to flog that (a)(1) strawman.


There is no such law. I asked for a citation — please, be exact.

Not here to do your homework for you, dude; but given that I've had a boring morning... Try 18 USC 1028. "No such law"? Well, not until late 1998, perhaps...

Yes, but their "solution" seems to be lobby Congress to preserve their sixty year old business model, not actually innovate.

Not really much congress can do about this one (short of requiring everyone to pay for cable TV or incur a tax penalty).

People will simply no longer put up with ever-increasing prices for enormous bundles of services they don't want. How often do we hear people bemoan the fact that they watch three channels but pay for three hundred? Well, at some point, people realize that they effectively pay $40 a month per channel they watch; for lighter TV viewers, that can easily come out to $40 a month per series they watch. And hey, even ignoring options like Netflix and Hulu, I can outright buy entire boxed sets of most TV series for half that per season (never mind per month), ad-free, and 100% on-demand.

If congress really wants to try to save the cable TV industry, they need to do something that will cause some pain on the short term - Force the cable industry to offer 100% a la carte programming - Which would in turn require forcing upstream content providers to do the same, rather than subsidizing pro sports by forcing anyone who wants Animal Planet to also pay for ESPN (and vice-versa, forcing sports fans to pay for Nickelodeon if they just want ESPN). That might save the cable industry, as long as they don't get stupid with the price per channel (at $5/channel/month, I might even sign back up. At $20/channel/month, I need to ask myself if I religiously watch more than 12 programs per channel, because I could just buy them on DVD instead).

Nope, much of the outrage is coming from the Seattle Times who had their website spoofed.

As the owners of the Seattle Times' tarnished trademark (and depending on the quality of the spoof, quite likely the copyright holders to a significant number of infringements on that front as well to "decorate" the spoofed site), they have more right to outrage here than anyone.

Beyond, of course, the righteous outrage of a population which has granted its government certain limited powers in the interest of maintaining a functional civil society, only to have that government routinely flaunt its willfully overstepping those powers. But then, that whole constitution thing went out of fashion long before we invaded a sovereign Iraq because a group of Saudi nationals blew up one of our buildings.

Please, cite the violated law. Thank you.

Identity theft. "Corporations are people too", remember? Thus spake Mittens, and whether we like it or not, the courts have largely agreed.

Or more practically, try trademark dilution by tarnishment: "Typically, the only relief available for trademark dilution is injunctive relief. However, if the defendant 'willfully' intended to trade on the owner's reputation or to cause dilution of the famous mark, the owner of the mark may also be entitled to other remedies, including the defendant's profits, damages, attorneys' fees, and destruction of the infringing goods."

Wow... I don't personally care for the Walled iGarden, but you don't just get to make up numbers and then damn them for your imagination.

Brown?

Brown???

Sorry, I knew too many Brownies back in my uni days. More likely, they just forgot about "bigger bottom, better borrow" and broke the wave function the old fashioned way. ;)

/ I could also have gone with "paid daddy to break it for them", but took the high ground... this time!