What I don't understand is why anyone would buy ANY of the merchandise, except as gifts for children. And any kid that gets more than a couple of the figures is going to be a spoilt little bastard./manufactured/ memorabilia ISN'T memorobilia... surely? like, costumes worn in the films, the landspeeder models used in the first film, a tuskan raider's Big Pointy Stick, a rug made from genuine Ewok:/these/ would be memorabilia.
I dunno, mebbe I'm getting old.
Re:Becuase of Stupidity of course
on
Web Services
·
· Score: 2
OTOH, HTTP is pervasive. So are HTTP clients. It's the "write once, run anywhere" model that Sun's been pushing with Java for so many years. You run the app in one place (on your server), and it's accessible to anyone with a computer and a modem. It even works on PDAs, phones, etc with a minimum of effort. I'll be the first to agree that HTTP isn't the best way of doing things for most apps, but the industry has never been about "best". It's about "good enough" and market penetration.
You've just described the web as it was (and is, and will be) since 1995 or so. But the web is passe now; even the PHBs have realised that adding an i or e to the start of a brand just doesn't cut it any more. They need new buzzwords! new paradigms! new... bullshit! Fortunately, the world's marketing people have stepped up to the line with a fresh new truckload of ripe, steaming horseshit. Web services? It's client/server. It's nothing new. And the rest of the hype - vague ideas about websites communicating your preferences between themselves - can either be implemented on the client (Mozilla's wallet, form manager etc); is only of use to a Microsoft-like conglomerate that wants to own/everything; and ISN'T GOING TO HAPPEN. Anyone here remember "DNA"? "Digital dashboard?" Remember in 1996, how VRML was going to make the "flat" WWW redundant? And XML, which was going to make all the 30 yeasr old EDI systems obsolete overnight? Pur-lease. Give me a break. Some of us have been working in this industry for more than a couple of years, and you know what? Once you've seen a couple of bullshit marchitecture hype waves come rolling in, then swoosh back down the beach leaving nothing but some rotting seaweed and a couple of old shampoo bottles... it gets real hard to get excited about an amazing new technological breakthrough when there's no new technology (or indeed anything else of substance) there.
Here in the UK the Blair government,in a fit of eStupidity (before the dotcom crash) decided to Make It So any interaction with the gvernment can be done online.Of course, as well as being Dubya's poodle, Blair & Co are still acting like they're terified Daily Mail readers (fascist middle class women, you know the sort) well think they're the same as "Old Labour" -- the socialist party which won elections several times since the war, introduced the NHS, nationalised lots of stuff, raised taxes a lot and generally perceived as "business unfriendly".They try to fend off these suspicions by... being MORE corrupt and "businessmen friendly" than any government in living memory. Surprise surprise,it turns out that UK Online (govt portal and associated services) is closely tied up with Microsoft - to the extent that it was bouncing non IE browsers when first launched (though I believe that's fixed now.) Search the Register for "govt" and you'll see what I mean. I've been half-expecting them to announce some bullshit along these lines for the last few years. To those saying "HGey, but it's only web authentication" -- yes, it's web authentication to things like paying your taxes, contact any govt department, driving license, Court fines, criminal records, health records,... I shudder to think what this is going to look like in a few years' time. And to be honest, I can't think of a better target for (let's call them) "ethical crackers".
Just when you think GW can't do anything more stupid...*sigh*. Anyone in favour of founding an independent state for geeks?
Personally, I'm amazed that anyone still uses IIS - yet Netcraft's survey shows that usage has been steadily increasing - ever since CodeRed and Nimda. Go figure! (When I first noticed this trend emerging in the Netcraft charts, I thought it must just be a blip caused by some major Apache-based hoster going bust... but by the third or fourth month in a row with a declining share, I realised that it's time to surrender all hope for humanity. We're doomed -- and we deserve it.)
No doubt, last week's TEN new IIS security holes, announced by Microsoft all in one go (smart move...take the publicity hit all in one go, rather than dribble the news out AS THE HOLES ARE CONFIRMED (or even "as the patches become available"). Of course, such behaviour is diametrically opposed to the interests of those fools still running IIS; but then, it shouldn't be a surprise by now that PR is a bigger priority than security for Microsoft. "Trustworthy computing", my sweaty arse!
If I ever become a manager, installing IIS or IE will be a sacking offence. I simply cannot understand why the much trumpeted "shareholder value" and "due diligence" and "director's personal liabilities" have not seen IIS dropped like a dead fish from any half-way competently run web site.
My sympathy, by the way, to any unfortunates trapped in a job where you must admin an IIS. I suggest a stealth Apache install, perhaps as a hotfailover system - next time you have to kill IIS for "emergency maintenance", point out to the pointy haired cretins that you won't have any downtime, as you may always rely on Apache being there to pick up the slack.
A company such as Google should not operate in a country where free speech is not lawful.
What do you mean by "a company such as Google"? If you mean "a company which is popular with geeks and Slashdotters" - well, you're right, in that some of the shine may gradually rub off their geek-friendly, free-speech protecting image. OTOH, plenty of large well-known corporations do business with China, say, or in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan,.. ( insert your favourite repressive non-democratic regime...) IBM organised the Holocaust, you know, and Cisco built and support the Great Firewall of China (and who knows who supplies the software tools that pull out Falun Gong-related email from the wire and queue a request for the secret police to pay the poster a visit at 4am?) (actually, it's probably Free software: but that's morally defensible, in that the Free software community are not getting rich supporting repression.)
I've just started looking at XUL, the Mozilla XML User interface Language. All the Mozilla chrome - dialogs, menus, toolbars etc, all of it - is defined in XUL, which looks straightforward XML, driven by Javascript (which/I believe/ is compiled in the binary: yes? no?)
The only thing really holding me back from using this in my current project (front end management console for the build and test scripts used to QA $AntiVirus_app) in XUL is the lack of a nice drag and drop formbuilder. There's a project to build one - XULMaker - but it seems to be making pretty slow progress and be short of people working on it. Anyway, what I was wondering was, where's the Perl bindings? Being able to say:
I submit that Mozilla is the coolest Free software project running today! I've been using it since the first naked Gecko builds were available - almost nothing in the way of chrome, just a raw HTML rendering widget (and not a great one, to start with!) and watched it grow and mature in the last three or four (can it really be FOUR years Well I guess it surely can) years... the satisfaction I feel now that it's about to take over the world and crush the IE like a bug is amplified by remembered all those sad Slashdot flamers... "it's sooo bloaaatttteddd!!" they winged, "oooh, it's not as good as Internet Explorer", "I just want a browwwwwwser" they whined... HA! Well SCREW YOU, chaps, I was right and you were wrong. BAAAAhahahahaaha!
Little-known fact: although it's true that there's an 18Mb monster emacs package and tons of ludicrous plugins (web browsers..?!), there are in fact stripped down minimal binaries (and source packages.) See your friendly local GNU ftp archive mirror.
BTW, just wanted to make the point I'm a Free software supported, this comment posted via Mozilla on Linux. But it annoys me to see supposed free/open advocates knocking the quality of Microsoft code; there are some duff marketing driven design decisions in there (Outlook... need I say more?) , and win9x was a complete crock, but PLEASE - do yourselves a favour - DON'T underestimate the quality of the oppostion, or MS users who dabble with Linux for a bit will say "Hey! Gnome crashed, I thought Unix wasn't supposed to ever do that! Huh, all the Linux hype must be BS" and go back to Redmond-land.
First of all, there is no way Microsoft can enforce conditions upon the implementation of a standard (read: "standard"). Entering into a contract requires, well, that you enter into a contract.
In the UK, at least, a contract is not considered valid unless there it includes a Consideration. That is, money must change hands. A click-though license on a text document is SURELY unenforceable?
But of course, who wants to be the first to find out? Not me... once again, "Posession of Sacks of Money" trumps "Being Right" in the way our society decides who is right, and who is wrong.
(O/T)
Sometimes I think it's time to start a mass civil disobedience campaign around all these IP issues: fair use, the DMCA, CDPTMA(??), software patents, etc. Let's have a damn big rally on a single weekend, let's plan it 9 months in advance (say: summer of 2002), organise properly, make sure it's in as many countries as possible, that there's good PR, that we all chivvy all our geek mates to come along, stick flyposters and stickers and badges and grafitti for it all over the place...
"Hackers for Freedom", anybody? Nah, I'm dreaming aren't I... *sigh*
I think Microsoft may be trying out this strategy in one relatively narrow market (CIFS, Samba, and NAS markets) - granted, Windows file+print is one of those slam-dunk areas where you can drop in a Linux replacement for departmental NT boxes and immediately free yourself from lots of MS shackles... But: presumably, what they're hoping is that when they End-Of-Life everything before XP (or the next generation after XP), and it then turns out that XP and later use an incompatible version of SMB, that everyone using Samba will be forced to revert to the official Microsoft "solution". But by then I bet Redmond Linux, Lindows, Mandrake, and the other hand-holding, plus another few years of positive comments from the ZDNet / C|Net / PCWeek type publications, will have softened up the PHBs to the idea of Linux... and lo, Microsoft's core market jumps en masse to Linux on the desktop, instead. From the PoV of said PHB's, Linux is already roughly up to the standard of NT4 (yes, of course it's much much better, but their standards are based on things like "Does it have a network neighbourhood icon? Where's my `Word'? How do I start Outlook?" - in other words, the extent to which existing OS and app functionality can be replicated, down to similar looking icons. [ Slashback: someone posted to slashdot once saying they calmed their non-tech relative's panic when they first saw a Linux desktop by simply renaming the icons "Outlook", "Internet Explorer" and so on...] )
Anyway the point I was trying to make is that this is the first new anti-Free strategy we've seen from Microsoft since FUD attacks failed so badly over the last few years. The standard Microsoft plays (FUD, buy the competitor, lock out competitor using, bankrupt, embrace-and-extend) just don't work with Free software. If this seems to knock the Free Software movement back a bit, expect to see them trying this strategy in more and more areas. Expect to see them pushing for more vigorous legal enforcement of patents, and more swingeing damages on losers in patent law-suits. Expect them to make an example of either (a) a Free software project, (b) distributors of such Free software - Red Hat, SuSE etc ; or (most likely, cos it's the most frightening to their customer base) of the USERS of such software. For example, suppose.NET server phones home when it detects a non-licensed CIFS client attempting to connect, then Microsoft automatically send out nastygrams to the users. A PHB who gets a legal threat from Microsoft would probably achieve a vertical take-off with the force with which they would shit themselves.
I suggest that geeks get together and pool money to get hundreds if not thousands of broad software patents (which are trivial to come up with but expensive to get) and then deny their use to anyone else. Shut down the software industry and let the rest of the world blow by us software patent-free.
Yeah, that's what I'm suggesting, with the bonus that I'll get rich this way;)
Seriously, I know jack shit about the hows and wherefores of filing patents; apparently all one has to do here (A.N. major, well-known US-based software and services vendor) is write your idea up in a reasonably clear way, the lawyers take care of everything else - I wouldn't know where to start if I were to try this independently.
rsync: a great idea... particularly as at least one very large (60,000 files) dataset gets "mirrored" from one site another using... drumroll please maestro... DOS `COPY'. So they won't have heard or rsync (or wget --mirror, or LWP::Simple or any of the thousand-and-one mirroring utils on sourceforge)... heh. damas, I just mailed you at Yahoo so we can sort out the cash if I get anywhere with this.
My new employer pays a fat bounty (cash!) for any good patentable ideas, and provide company lawyers to help rewrite one's scribblings into a filable form. If it gets used, you get another $10,000. The car park here is full of Porsches, TVRs, Lotus Elises etc. The tempation to think of a silly idea (say, mouse pointers, cross-platform FEs, firewall rulebases kept in a databae... that sort of thing) and get a pointless patent, just for the money, is pretty strong...
Don't get me wrong, I think software patents are Evil and Rude and I would never patent something actually useful. Any suggestions for stupid things to patent so (a) I get the cash and (b) companyt lawyers go mad trying to enforce something unenforceable (or better: something that would be struck down as a patent when it came to court, so that after I have the cas they realise the patent is unenforcable) received with thanks!
(1) there is no machine, gizmo, doodad or computer that can magically and painlessly fix global warming. Y'all are going to have to get used to paying the price for petrol as the rest of us: about $7 per (British) gallon.
(2) Terraforming Mars? *sigh*... why is it that so many apparently smart people seem to be trapped at a mental age of 14? Grow up, folks, it's NOT - GOING - TO - HAPPEN.
(3) if anyone wants to put some money on this, mail me or reply below.
Vim? Does it have a calendar? Eliza? news? web? programming language? inline shell? holidays? more to the point, have they fixed that awful bug where you have to press three or four keys to change it from overtyping to inserting or deleting? How could anyone think that was a good idea?
OK I'm trolling, but goddamit I'm trolling for emacs AND I'M PROUD OF IT!! (Anyway, c'mon, what do you expect with a story like that?? "Vim the only text editor"?? Are you mad? As it happens I'm half-way through an install of Mandrak 8.2 on the machine next to this one - sure looks like there's more than one text editor there... fgs there's two versions of emacs alone (four including -nox)...
Like... what? Does this mean he and a few pals like to take their F16s for a spin at the weekend, mebbe practice some bomb runs, perhaps take out the odd MiG when they feel like it - just for kicks?
I've never understood why academia seem so intent on believing that civilization has only been around for the last 4 or 5 thousand years or so.
It's not that they're intent on proving it; it's just that there's little or no evidence of any large settlements before then. What artifacts we do have are consistent with loosely organised, unsepcialised hunter-gatherer type societies. No big conspiracy, honestly.
And are you American by any chance? If you lived in Europe you'd realise the Romans left a LOT of stuff behind. And of course Roman civilisation goes back a couple of thousand years BC.
This chap (Graham Hancock) is really very interesting. He recently had a series of (IIRC) six shows on TV here in the UK looking at various evidence he'd accumulated to backup his theory. The basic hypothesis as I understand it is that there were complex, advanced, city-building civilisations BEFORE or possibly DURING the last ice-age; but that most of the evidence was lost under water at the end of the last ice age when the sea level rose. (Of course they'd only be in relatively shallow water, not far offshore - continental shelves, down to a couple of hundred feet. The claimed ruins off Cuba are supposed to be several THOUSAND feet down, which sounds highly unlikely to me -- unless Cuba has a hitherto unknown tectonic fracture or something...
The case against seems to be that (a) the earliest settlements accepted by most archeologists go back perhaps 6000 or 7000 years, and these are flimsy houses built of wood, reeds, thatch etc - not monolithic dressed stone covering many thousands of acres. Secondly, if these civilisations existed, they would surely have built in OTHER places than right next to shore lines -- where are their ruins on land? In one of the programs he looked at a stone-age Japanese society (one I hadn't heard of previously) - however these are " only " 5000 years ago, and built using wood.
Of course there are plenty of lunatics, new age freaks and other riff-raff -- the "jesus was a spaceman, UFOs built Atlantis" types -- who should of course deserve nothing more than laughter, pity and contempt. (Try to explain the distinction to my girfriend though... *sigh*... a great way to teach oneself patience and forbearance... =)
Huh? If I bring my CDs into work, I can play them on a boombox loud enough for the whole office to hear. That's called "fair use".
No: that's public performance, not fair use. Your employer needs to buy a mechanical rights license from whatever the US equivalent of the UK's PRS (Performing Rights Society) is. The PRS have a long history of catching out small restautants, cafes, etc etc for playing music to customers - yes, even a transistor radio behind the counter, counts - without paying for a PRS license. You see small oval PRS stickers on shop windows.
Probably not, but... search the last weeks' worth of the NANOG list archives for evidence that even highly trained network engineers with years of experience get sucked into phone tag hell with Qwest "support" services.
Slashdot Mirror
I dunno, mebbe I'm getting old.
You've just described the web as it was (and is, and will be) since 1995 or so. But the web is passe now; even the PHBs have realised that adding an i or e to the start of a brand just doesn't cut it any more. They need new buzzwords! new paradigms! new... bullshit! Fortunately, the world's marketing people have stepped up to the line with a fresh new truckload of ripe, steaming horseshit. Web services? It's client/server. It's nothing new. And the rest of the hype - vague ideas about websites communicating your preferences between themselves - can either be implemented on the client (Mozilla's wallet, form manager etc); is only of use to a Microsoft-like conglomerate that wants to own
Just when you think GW can't do anything more stupid...*sigh*. Anyone in favour of founding an independent state for geeks?
No doubt, last week's TEN new IIS security holes, announced by Microsoft all in one go (smart move...take the publicity hit all in one go, rather than dribble the news out AS THE HOLES ARE CONFIRMED (or even "as the patches become available"). Of course, such behaviour is diametrically opposed to the interests of those fools still running IIS; but then, it shouldn't be a surprise by now that PR is a bigger priority than security for Microsoft. "Trustworthy computing", my sweaty arse!
If I ever become a manager, installing IIS or IE will be a sacking offence. I simply cannot understand why the much trumpeted "shareholder value" and "due diligence" and "director's personal liabilities" have not seen IIS dropped like a dead fish from any half-way competently run web site.
My sympathy, by the way, to any unfortunates trapped in a job where you must admin an IIS. I suggest a stealth Apache install, perhaps as a hotfailover system - next time you have to kill IIS for "emergency maintenance", point out to the pointy haired cretins that you won't have any downtime, as you may always rely on Apache being there to pick up the slack.
What do you mean by "a company such as Google"? If you mean "a company which is popular with geeks and Slashdotters" - well, you're right, in that some of the shine may gradually rub off their geek-friendly, free-speech protecting image. OTOH, plenty of large well-known corporations do business with China, say, or in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan,.. ( insert your favourite repressive non-democratic regime...) IBM organised the Holocaust, you know, and Cisco built and support the Great Firewall of China (and who knows who supplies the software tools that pull out Falun Gong-related email from the wire and queue a request for the secret police to pay the poster a visit at 4am?) (actually, it's probably Free software: but that's morally defensible, in that the Free software community are not getting rich supporting repression.)
The only thing really holding me back from using this in my current project (front end management console for the build and test scripts used to QA $AntiVirus_app) in XUL is the lack of a nice drag and drop formbuilder. There's a project to build one - XULMaker - but it seems to be making pretty slow progress and be short of people working on it. Anyway, what I was wondering was, where's the Perl bindings? Being able to say :
...
;)
my $g = XUL->new();
$g->set_window(
title=> 'Hello world',
geometry => ([500, 200]),
)
...and so on would be verrrrry cool. And then we could ALL build our own window managers, using Perl. And this post would be on-topic
I submit that Mozilla is the coolest Free software project running today! I've been using it since the first naked Gecko builds were available - almost nothing in the way of chrome, just a raw HTML rendering widget (and not a great one, to start with!) and watched it grow and mature in the last three or four (can it really be FOUR years Well I guess it surely can) years... the satisfaction I feel now that it's about to take over the world and crush the IE like a bug is amplified by remembered all those sad Slashdot flamers... "it's sooo bloaaatttteddd!!" they winged, "oooh, it's not as good as Internet Explorer", "I just want a browwwwwwser" they whined... HA! Well SCREW YOU, chaps, I was right and you were wrong. BAAAAhahahahaaha!
(Cally wanders away to find his medication...)
Little-known fact: although it's true that there's an 18Mb monster emacs package and tons of ludicrous plugins (web browsers..?!), there are in fact stripped down minimal binaries (and source packages.) See your friendly local GNU ftp archive mirror.
win98 isn't even supported any more.
BTW, just wanted to make the point I'm a Free software supported, this comment posted via Mozilla on Linux. But it annoys me to see supposed free/open advocates knocking the quality of Microsoft code; there are some duff marketing driven design decisions in there (Outlook... need I say more?) , and win9x was a complete crock, but PLEASE - do yourselves a favour - DON'T underestimate the quality of the oppostion, or MS users who dabble with Linux for a bit will say "Hey! Gnome crashed, I thought Unix wasn't supposed to ever do that! Huh, all the Linux hype must be BS" and go back to Redmond-land.
In the UK, at least, a contract is not considered valid unless there it includes a Consideration. That is, money must change hands. A click-though license on a text document is SURELY unenforceable?
But of course, who wants to be the first to find out? Not me... once again, "Posession of Sacks of Money" trumps "Being Right" in the way our society decides who is right, and who is wrong.
(O/T)
Sometimes I think it's time to start a mass civil disobedience campaign around all these IP issues: fair use, the DMCA, CDPTMA(??), software patents, etc. Let's have a damn big rally on a single weekend, let's plan it 9 months in advance (say: summer of 2002), organise properly, make sure it's in as many countries as possible, that there's good PR, that we all chivvy all our geek mates to come along, stick flyposters and stickers and badges and grafitti for it all over the place...
"Hackers for Freedom", anybody? Nah, I'm dreaming aren't I... *sigh*
Anyway the point I was trying to make is that this is the first new anti-Free strategy we've seen from Microsoft since FUD attacks failed so badly over the last few years. The standard Microsoft plays (FUD, buy the competitor, lock out competitor using, bankrupt, embrace-and-extend) just don't work with Free software. If this seems to knock the Free Software movement back a bit, expect to see them trying this strategy in more and more areas. Expect to see them pushing for more vigorous legal enforcement of patents, and more swingeing damages on losers in patent law-suits. Expect them to make an example of either (a) a Free software project, (b) distributors of such Free software - Red Hat, SuSE etc ; or (most likely, cos it's the most frightening to their customer base) of the USERS of such software. For example, suppose .NET server phones home when it detects a non-licensed CIFS client attempting to connect, then Microsoft automatically send out nastygrams to the users. A PHB who gets a legal threat from Microsoft would probably achieve a vertical take-off with the force with which they would shit themselves.
rsync: a great idea... particularly as at least one very large (60,000 files) dataset gets "mirrored" from one site another using... drumroll please maestro... DOS `COPY'. So they won't have heard or rsync (or wget --mirror, or LWP::Simple or any of the thousand-and-one mirroring utils on sourceforge)... heh. damas, I just mailed you at Yahoo so we can sort out the cash if I get anywhere with this.
Don't get me wrong, I think software patents are Evil and Rude and I would never patent something actually useful. Any suggestions for stupid things to patent so (a) I get the cash and (b) companyt lawyers go mad trying to enforce something unenforceable (or better: something that would be struck down as a patent when it came to court, so that after I have the cas they realise the patent is unenforcable) received with thanks!
Slashdot ran a story on an early Perl/Flash module... mustabeen... at least two years ago. As usual, the answer's Perl: now what's the question? ;)
(1) there is no machine, gizmo, doodad or computer that can magically and painlessly fix global warming. Y'all are going to have to get used to paying the price for petrol as the rest of us: about $7 per (British) gallon.
(2) Terraforming Mars? *sigh*... why is it that so many apparently smart people seem to be trapped at a mental age of 14? Grow up, folks, it's NOT - GOING - TO - HAPPEN.
(3) if anyone wants to put some money on this, mail me or reply below.
Lockups? corruption? (looks puzzled) You must have set your machine up wrongly.
Vim? Does it have a calendar? Eliza? news? web? programming language? inline shell? holidays? more to the point, have they fixed that awful bug where you have to press three or four keys to change it from overtyping to inserting or deleting? How could anyone think that was a good idea?
OK I'm trolling, but goddamit I'm trolling for emacs AND I'M PROUD OF IT!! (Anyway, c'mon, what do you expect with a story like that?? "Vim the only text editor"?? Are you mad? As it happens I'm half-way through an install of Mandrak 8.2 on the machine next to this one - sure looks like there's more than one text editor there... fgs there's two versions of emacs alone (four including -nox)...
Like... what? Does this mean he and a few pals like to take their F16s for a spin at the weekend, mebbe practice some bomb runs, perhaps take out the odd MiG when they feel like it - just for kicks?
Toc, toc, toc...
Wow, really? Do you have a source or URI for that? I'm not saying you're wrong, just that it's news to me and I'd like to read up on it
And if my aunt had wheels, she'd be a bicycle...
It's not that they're intent on proving it; it's just that there's little or no evidence of any large settlements before then. What artifacts we do have are consistent with loosely organised, unsepcialised hunter-gatherer type societies. No big conspiracy, honestly.
And are you American by any chance? If you lived in Europe you'd realise the Romans left a LOT of stuff behind. And of course Roman civilisation goes back a couple of thousand years BC.
The case against seems to be that (a) the earliest settlements accepted by most archeologists go back perhaps 6000 or 7000 years, and these are flimsy houses built of wood, reeds, thatch etc - not monolithic dressed stone covering many thousands of acres. Secondly, if these civilisations existed, they would surely have built in OTHER places than right next to shore lines -- where are their ruins on land? In one of the programs he looked at a stone-age Japanese society (one I hadn't heard of previously) - however these are " only " 5000 years ago, and built using wood.
Of course there are plenty of lunatics, new age freaks and other riff-raff -- the "jesus was a spaceman, UFOs built Atlantis" types -- who should of course deserve nothing more than laughter, pity and contempt. (Try to explain the distinction to my girfriend though... *sigh*... a great way to teach oneself patience and forbearance... =)
No: that's public performance, not fair use. Your employer needs to buy a mechanical rights license from whatever the US equivalent of the UK's PRS (Performing Rights Society) is. The PRS have a long history of catching out small restautants, cafes, etc etc for playing music to customers - yes, even a transistor radio behind the counter, counts - without paying for a PRS license. You see small oval PRS stickers on shop windows.
Probably not, but... search the last weeks' worth of the NANOG list archives for evidence that even highly trained network engineers with years of experience get sucked into phone tag hell with Qwest "support" services.