Stupid questions deserve stupid answers. Being a newbie in a field is not an excuse to wasting the experts time by asking the same question for the 50th time or making the same mistake for the 100th.

Go to cryptography experts and tell them you've invented a new cypher and it's really great and could they please have a look. If you are lucky, you will get a few flames telling them that you're the 10th person this month and all the others have been idiots. Not just this month, but for the past 10 years.

Some newbie coming into a field that requires expertise and delivering something that is not a total waste of time to everyone is a once-in-a-decade event. It just happened in mathematics, so yes, it does happen. If you think you're that event, chances are stacked against you solidly.

That doesn't mean you're a bad person. It just means you have a lot to learn, including the nature of the field. And all the hostility and flaming and being obnoxious actually serves a purpose: To shut down the crap as quickly and efficiently as possible, in order to minimize the waste of time.

That's the price you pay for an open development model where everyone can come in and talk to the dev people directly with almost no barriers. Other fields have solved the problem by creating barriers. Try to discuss quantum physics with Hawkins. You'll find that you need to prove several times that you really have something worth discussing just to get there.

In Free Software development, we don't have that barrier. But that means the top people have to deal with the Sturgeon's Law stuff themselves, and they need to do it quickly, and that means skipping the niceties and telling things as they are.

Then together, we will reach everyone. Not everyone gets it by getting it nicely pointed out to them. Sometimes, the clue bat is a necessity.

Uh, this one is really simple.

Don't start at the kernel, idiot.
Don't start at a compiler or programming language or other system part, fool.

Start with an application. In fact, if you need to get that explained, you should start with a good book.

The kernel and compiler, etc. people ought to be hostile to newbies. Their goal is not to teach newbies, it's to deliver reliable code. You don't start learning to fly with a Boing 747 full of passengers, you start with a simulator or a Cessna.

Your first contributions shouldn't be in anything that other (applications) rely on. It should be in an application. Something where if it fails only that thing fails and not everything that depends on it. You'll find that the maintainers of these applications are more forgiving, simply because the burden on them is a lot less.

And yes, I say that as someone who has contributed to bunches of projects.

...to the real cyberpunk world. Megacorporations don't rule the world, they let that dirty work be handled by governments. Instead, the have found a way to corrupt our politics in such a way that we are actually subsidising megacorporations and small companies and taxpayers are footing the bill.

I just hope that the time when history looks upon this period and asks whether we were all insane isn't too far off.

I didn't say you have less corruption in general.

You have less corruption of this particular kind.

This kind of corruption is based on overzealous and overly complex rules and regulations. 3rd world countries usually don't have those, what they have is a lack of regulations, leading to the other kind of corruption, where you need to grease palms to get the wheels of the engine in motion at all, for example.

The system is designed to reward false positives, so guess what happens.

I live in the middle of the city. Back when I still had a car, I got roughly half of my parking tickets voided simply by complaining. In the street I live in, the parking rules are confusing and change every 50 or so metres. I once got a ticket voided by asking the person in charge to explain to me what the rules where on the day and the location where I was parked. They couldn't, so they told me to forget about the ticket.

Ironically, you will have less of this kind of corruption in 3rd world countries.

It's a system problem. Money drives government, not the other way around.

Ok, first up: I agree the listed fees are just crazy.

3x ($30) is wrong as well, however. Basically it's a simple game-theory problem. You want the value of (fine x probability of being caught) to be greater than the price of legal acquisition. Otherwise the rational choice is to acquire it illegally.

Wherever the chance to be caught is pretty high, treble damages works. But when the chance to be caught is relatively small, as it is with file-sharing, then the proper value of a fine must be higher.

But a fee of $150,000 means the chance to be caught is on the order of 1:10,000 - which basically means that prosecution is ridiculously ineffective.

At these figures, we're entering a different area, the zone of the black swans. At a 1:10,000 chance, you're not seriously figuring it in anymore. Just like you don't figure in the chance of getting hit by a roof tile upon leaving your home whenever you go outside. The chance is just so small that for all practical purposes, it could be zero.

So if in the mental model, the probability is 0%, then the value of fine simply doesn't matter anymore. Or, mathematically speaking, you can't calculate it anymore, because fine = legal price / probability of being caught - which for probability 0 doesn't compute.

And now I forgot what I was getting at, that's what you get for chasing a thought to its conclusion. Something that more lawyers should do more often.

That word doesn't mean what you think it means. And quite frankly, you are devaluing it and insulting everyone who has fought against slavery throughout history.

It's no more oppression than having to work a job you no longer like, but you've signed a contract and it still runs for a time X. Or having to be in school even though you'd rather play outside. Part of society is that you can't do anything you feel like doing all the time.

Plus in my version of it you could even refuse. You'd lose the right to vote or run for public office or otherwise participate in politics, but you could say no.

That's true on an absolute scale, but not on a relative one.

Bill Gates is only giving away money he doesn't need. He could burn 90% of his fortune today and it wouldn't make a dent to his style of living.

A lot of average citizen are giving away money for good causes that they could very well use themselves, and that does make a difference to them.

While Bill's money is more in absolute terms and has more effect and he can reach places you couldn't, it is very likely that you are making the bigger sacrifice.

I'm still kind of torn on that. Once you dig beneath the surface, a lot of his current activities aren't entirely white, either. His health activities usually focus on one big provider of the pharmaceuticals, usually one he has stocks in, and generally has the tendency to drive everyone else out of the market. That reminds me a lot of the "old" Bill Gates, and it means that for all the good it does, it also makes people dependent on him, this time not with their computers but with their lives.

...business hostilities are often for show. A huge number of big-corp CEOs are well acquainted with each other or friends, even if their companies fight bitter battles.
In a position like that, you learn to make a difference between the personal and the business. When I rose to a position where I was dealing with the C-Levels directly years ago, I quickly found out that behind closed doors you would regularily get statements like "I'd personally like to do that, but (corporate politics or business reason) I can't." - and sometimes the talk would end there and sometimes it would go into finding a way to get it done. I've been to court with business opponents and shared a ride and a nice conversation with them to the courthouse.

Never confuse the personal relations of two people with the business relations of their companies.

If you've ever worked in IT, you know that the clueless secretary isn't your worst enemy. At least she knows the knows nothing.
Your worst enemy is the "power-user". The guy who knows just enough to fuck everything up. This is the same thing. Breeding people who know a little bit about 2 programming languages is breeding a catastrophic collection of idiots who don't know that they know nothing.

Teaching someone the basic principles of programming, that's cool. Let them know a little about how algorithms work and stuff, a little bit of basic understanding of what, exactly, programming is. But please don't teach someone a little bit about a programming language or two.

Why?

There's no reason why civil service can't be a condition of citizenship. Military service is something different, I get that you might not want to kill people. But conscientious objection to sitting at a desk doing administrative work? On what basis? Cruelty to paper?

Ancient Athens had it solved, and the solution is incredibly simple: No career bureaucrats, no career politicians.

Everyone in the athenian administration was basically the equivalent of a conscript. Part of being a citizen was the duty to serve a few months in the administration every few years.

Data doesn't always establish causality.

If product A is sold X times, but your market analysts say it should've sold Y then you don't know if your analysis is wrong or what of many factors contributed to the difference.

I had marketing in university. Even the experts in that field say that half of the marketing budget is pure waste, they could just as well burn the money. The problem is that they don't know (at least beforehand), which half.

Same here. The distributors only have one half of the data set - the data about the people who bought their product. They don't have the data on the people who didn't. If I don't buy movie A, only I know if it is because I plain didn't like it, or I didn't have the money, or there was a better movie that weekend, or the advertisement didn't reach me and I didn't know it was on, or I didn't because I found a torrent.

So no, they do not have all the data. They have data, and plenty of it, but it's still incomplete.

I do agree that most people here on /. have even less data, though.