You don't have the right to ignore laws you don't agree with.
Sorry
Only in a literal sense. You don't "have the right" to ignore a law - that's just by definition of a law. He was talking about what's evil, not what's lawful. In fact, without even taking a stance on whether this particular law is evil or not, I think we could safely say that following an evil law may in itself be evil.
Some will say these copyright laws harm our cultural wellbeing. With or without a 'right' to do so, I can see how some would say the morally correct action is civil disobedience.
In my experience that's far too long. Here's the message as seen by the user:
...permissions and integrity of your filesystem.
[More information] [Retry] [Ignore Error]
The customer would then assume the software has destroyed their filesystem. They'd call and leave a screaming voicemail starting something like 'Someone needs to call me RIGHT NOW.'
Messages need to be ten words or less to have a fighting chance. And I'm talking about simple words. Even then, people will still call in. We recently had a customer call in wondering what to do about this error in our shipping software: "you have to specify a weight greater than 0 pounds."
Here's how to make error messages work: make them simple and actionable for the sake of the literate. For the rest, charge per incident for support and hire a lot of cheap labour.
While your typical
Great, then it'll take them 5 years to upgrade Firefox and notice something is wrong. Hey, that's just around the time they're upgrading their computer anyhow!
The whole thing needs a complete redesign. I think doing something to get rid of the whole HTML thing would be a giant improvement; just display things straight into a window from application code
Right. HTML is a great language for documents, horrible for applications. The solution you are looking for is called Cappuccino and it throws out HTML and CSS in favour of a regular Objective-C Cocoa like paradigm where you just draw in a window or place UI widgets using layout managers.
Trying to write a web application in HTML is like painting with a tennis ball for a brush. It's the wrong tool for the job and you'll spend half the time bending the various components to your will.
Let me put it this way: if you are seriously ill, you go to Germany. Not only are there endless queues in Sweden for any more complicated treatment but the survival rates are among Europe's lowest.
As a Swede I can say this comment is likely to just be rightist bias. I have never felt the need to go to Germany and know of no-one who has. Keep in mind that Swedes in general love to complain and the right wingers love it doubly so to draw attention to their alternative.
Medical care in Sweden is very good and close family members and myself have had excellent treatment available in a timely manner time and time again, for everything from surgery to life long conditions. By contrast, the one time I had a serious problem in the US - appendicitis - I was receiving new bills over a year after my day in the hospital and the numbers which my insurance had to cover were just astronomical. If I read the paperwork right I basically paid several years worth of salary for a three hour routine surgery. That just doesn't happen in Sweden. My last surgery in Sweden is just a memory and a scar - I don't even recall a single bill. Wait time was shorter than in San Jose, California in the US.
As someone else's signature here on Slashdot says: I like paying taxes. With it I buy civilization.
The professors who are afraid of calculators and automatic problem solvers are the same as those who think class attendance matter. A university, if anything in the world, should be a place for learning, not a very expensive kindergarten. In that perspective the activities of the students are irrelevant: if they learn practical abilities through Wolfram Alpha, great. If they don't, that's their problem. Ultimately the student is the paying customer. Professors much too often slide into this illusion of grandeur where they think the student owes them anything or needs to satisfy the professors when it's in fact the other way around.
If you choose to go to and pay for a university education, do it your way. If Wolfram Alpha gives you the insights you need, then that's the right tool for you. If your style of learning is snoozing under a tree, occasionally watching an apple fall, then do that. If you never go to a class in your life but you come out as the next Einstein you have succeeded. If you waste all your time 'cheating' that's your problem. You're the boss, you're the one paying for it.
And before somebody brings it up, grades are arbitrary statistics based on a flawed system. If they are affected by something as simple as the use of Wolfram Alpha that's just another demonstration of how little real world value they have.
If an engineer is working on a bridge and his supervisor orders him to use a dangerously weak cable, the engineer has both a moral and legal duty to refuse. The same principle ought to apply to software developers, especially when life and property are at stake.
But software is not built that way. Chances are this started out as a small project, at a small company, and then only grew later into something where security was an issue. In your analogy it'd perhaps be like an engineer designing a wooden park bridge, not knowing that in the future somebody would try to lay down an 8 lane highway on it. You wouldn't hold the engineer himself responsible for his work being overextended in a future scenario he did not account for.
So the true problem then is with the supervisor who allowed the project to grow out of reasonable bounds without properly revisiting the foundation.
How can you work when the system's so crowded?
