I forgot to mention one other thing that was key for me. I refuse to participate in any 401K. Liquidity to me is far more important than the tax benefit derived. I have made exceptions, such as when my company offered a 50% match on 401K savings, but when I left the company I took the 10% penalty and withdrew the 401K and put it in my brokerage account. This may not be for everyone, and if I wanted to get fancy enough I could have borrowed the money against the 401K and paid it back if I got into an emergency, but for me instant access to my savings is more important than the tax benefits. To have money in a 401K and to have high interest credit card debt to me is ludicrous.
I prefer to put all my savings into an online brokerage account. At all times I take the value of the stocks in the account, divide by 2, add the value of cash in the account, and assume that is the amount I actually have saved. If that number is too low, I move out of stocks and into cash. If that number is sufficiently high, I move out of cash and into stocks, even onto margin if I think the economy is doing well. This way, I can take a 50% hit in the stock market and still not have to panic and get out.
Of course, the first thing I do is eliminate all credit card debt. Anything above 10% I refuse to carry, at 9.9% I will let it go for a short period of time if I feel that the money has a better use elsewhere. I also keep less liquid debt of less than 10% for as long as possible, such as my student loans, mortgage payments, etc. You never know when you're going to get in trouble, and I think it's well worth it to have liquid money in a brokerage account before paying off low-interest debt which can't be readily borrowed if you ever do get in trouble (if you're broke you're not going to be accepted for a mortgage).
Somehow, last week, on mere suspicion, my and three other kids' computers were seized and held for a few days while the network administrator attempted to track down the source of network troubles. He ultimately failed, but in the process noticed that I was using a different IP address and hostname other than the one I had been assigned. The case was sent to the discipline committee under "Theft of IP address" and I am now on probation for eight weeks.
Don't steal IP addresses. That may very well have been the cause of the network troubles. If you had a legitimate educational purpose for additional IP address, I'm sure you could have gotten them. Probably not directly from your network administrator, but through one of your professors, under a research project. Welcome to adulthood. You are now in control of your life, and if you don't like the policies, you have three choices: find another school, follow the rules, or break the rules and potentially face the consequences.
As for them taking your computer without a search warrant, one of two things happened. They broke the law, and you should sue them, or you signed an agreement you shouldn't have. Again, you should consider the agreements you're forced to sign when you come to a school. If this is something that's important to you, don't go there.
From the point of view of contract law, "sign or be fired" is an offer of valuable consideration (continued employment) in exchange for valuable consideration to the other party (non-competition with them).
Bzzzt, sorry. Unless the non-compete guarantees your employment for a specified period of time, there is no consideration. Sign or be fired is not consideration, because you could sign the contract and then still be fired, unless the contract specifically guarantees your employment.
Unfortunately there are certain facts you will have to deal with if you do this. The primary fact being, that there are certain people who are not suited for college, whether that means not intelligent enough, not disciplined enough, or whatever. Instead of encouraging them to learn a trade and get a job and earn a living, here you are encouraging them to go to college if they "want" to.
I'm not saying give them degrees. I'm not saying give them A's. I'm not saying let them disrupt the experience for anyone else. I'm not even saying give them access to the best faculty until they've proven themselves. I'm merely saying, if they want to waste their money, let them.
What will you do when they get all F's? What will you do when they realize they have spent four years on their worthless "Communications" degree and are 80 grand in debt and no better off for the trouble? Why, you will pat yourself on the back for being so "progressive" and "caring" that you can make unthinking naive statements like the one above, of course.
To be completely honest, I think eliminating acceptance standards for college would reduce the number of people who waste their time at college, not increase it. But in any case, their debt is not my problem, it's theirs (and the bank that was dumb enough to loan them the money in the first place).
You aren't doing someone a favor when you send them to a university where they are likely to fail and from which experience they are unlikely to benefit. Indeed, that is one of the reasons for having standardized tests. If an applicant is simply not suited for Berkeley, and is likely to have a bad academic experience there, it is worse (for the applicant) to say "come on in anyway!" than it is to send him to a less challenging, but more easygoing environment where he can learn at his own pace.
I am not advocating sending them anywhere, I am advocating allowing them the opportunity to choose for themselves what college or non-college is best suited for them. I think that willingness to risk your time and money (or the willingness of a lender to loan you that money) are a better indicator of your likelihood of success than any standarized test or grades. Perhaps it will be worse for some applicants, but this is something they need to learn for themselves, not something for some idiot in a suit to tell them.
By the way, are you volunteering to pay for these professors and buildings?
No, tuition will pay for that. In fact, due to economies of scale, more students will actually bring the tuition per student down, not up.
They should accept anyone who wants to go, regarless of SATs, grades, letters of recommendation, or anything else. Hire more professors, build more buildings.
Great argument, but napster can't use that argument, because they didn't even try. The appeals court acknowledged that it is impossible for napster to remove all mispellings and variations. It clearly stated:
Specifically, we reiterate that contributory liability may potentially be imposed only to the extent that Napster: (1) receives reasonable knowledge of specific infringing files with copyrighted musical compositions and sound recordings; (2) knows or should know that such files are available on the Napster system; and (3) fails to act to prevent viral distribution of the works.
All napster has to do is reasonably police its system and reasonably try to remove files. Why they tried to completely ignore gross abuses is beyond me. Napster screwed up, and they will probably go out of business because of it. Doesn't mean P2P file sharing is dead, though. I thought this ruling was very fair and reasonable. It's the copyright law itself which I find to be harmful and unreasonable.
last i checked, it's not illegal for me to go around telling people where to buy drugs.
Tell that to ebay. I guarantee you that if 1) people regularly sold drugs on ebay, 2) ebay knew about it, and 3) ebay did virtually nothing to stop the people, that would be illegal. But hey, if you think it's not, go for it, I'm sure you could make a ton of money.
Yahoo!'s message boards are public, and the guy no longer works for them (and had no contractual obligations to stay silent when he left), so what precedent gives his ex-company the right to audit his opinions?
You answered your own question. "Yahoo's message boards are public." They have every right to read them and use the information in them. And if you go saying bad (true) things about them on public message boards, they have every right both legally and morally to say bad (true) things about you to your current employer.
As long as what you say is completely true, and not protected (trade secret would be the biggest worry), you shouldn't have any legal worries. It's usually a good idea to let bygones be bygones though, unless you yourself have nothing at all to hide.
I love that this book makes it seem like you can treat all programmers equally. Management is a game of psychology, and while programmers tend to follow certain patterns, they are by no means all alike. Some of us value privacy highly, others don't mind people looking over our shoulders. Some of us have a need to be trusted, others don't mind micro-management. Some of us need to be patted on the back frequently, others take pride in doing their best, others want monetary rewards, others want promotions and responsibilities. Each programmer has different personal goals, and those goals are rarely merely "to work as little as possible," although that's usually part of it. The team will only succeed by making those personal goals coincide with the goals of the team.
This is why I love books like Extreme Programming. It creates colossal failures of a company which my team can then come in and get paid gobs of money to fix.
Great for some maybe. I want to read my slashdot in peace. It helps me decompress from the stressfulness of programming. If someone watches me over my shoulder while I code, I'm looking for a new job.
"Despair has also petitioned the court to require defendants to submit a handwritten letter which repeats the phrase ":-( is a registered trademark of Despair, Inc." one-thousand times. A ruling on the petition is expected within a week."
The trademark is real. It is probably even enforable on "Printed matter namely, greeting cards, posters and art prints", and for commercial purposes... The rest of the article is fake.
The biggest "feature" of 3.23, of course, is the fact that it's GPLed. 3.22 is not. As for switching to Postgresql, I need enum, I need mediumint(5) unsigned zerofill. To some extent it's just programmer laziness, but it's nice to have your code not need to do so much data type checking and formatting. User-defined data types and/or stored procedures would be preferrable, then I wouldn't have to use tinytext for urls, for instance, but for now the only two real choices are MySQL and Postgresql.
drugs are bad, drug war is worse
on
"Traffic"
·
· Score: 2
Let's not forget the other half of this movie. The fact is that drugs can and often do become terribly destructive ways of coping with real feelings and issues. While this movie was good at pointing out the problems with the war on drugs, it only briefly touched on actual solutions to it. IMHO, making drugs illegal is equivalent to making suicide illegal - not very useful.
Well, Microsoft didn't let us see the source code to Windows 95. So in practice this only affects the ability to fork and the free-as-in-beer aspects. Both very important, but I think if Microsoft let us see the source to Windows and let us pay once for an OS instead of every time we buy a computer, Linux would die a quick painful death.
Sure, if anyone had tried to claim that ssh/ssl were dead a year ago, RSA would have shut them up in a second. Of course, now that the RSA algorithm is public domain, big business has every incentive to deem it useless... Concentrate on tweaking the implementations, the basis of public key cryptography is rock solid.
This seems to me to be more of an intel serial number type of system. In other words, the hardware enforces a mechanism which *must* be implemented in software (probably at the OS level, for Windows). Personally, I see no problem with this, as long as I am not forced to run an OS or application software which uses it.
dsniff 2.3 allows you to exploit several fundamental flaws in two extremely popular encryption protocols, SSL and SSH. SSL and SSH are used to protect a large amount of network traffic, from financial transactions with online banks and stock trading sites to network administrator access to secured hosts holding extremely sensitive data.
Umm, first of all, this is only possible *if* you can actively steal and replace every packet between the two (man-in-the-middle). Second, SSL is generally used with a key signed by a CA, so no breach there. Third, at least my version of tera-term with ttssh, stores the key the first time you connect, and will warn you if that key ever changes in a future session. So the user would have to have done this exploit every single time that I have connected. Unlikely (though certainly possible, but my data isn't *that* important). Finally, it's perfectly possible to use ssh with different mechanisms to transfer the key. If I *really cared*, I could put the key on my https server (key signed by verisign), and download the key from there, install it into my ssh client, and bingo, secure connection.
Make sure you obey the DMCA Broadcast Rules... "A mix cannot contain more than three tracks from the same album in a three-hour period". Then again, if you're willing to follow the DMCA, just post your mix up on myplay.
Slashdot Mirror
I forgot to mention one other thing that was key for me. I refuse to participate in any 401K. Liquidity to me is far more important than the tax benefit derived. I have made exceptions, such as when my company offered a 50% match on 401K savings, but when I left the company I took the 10% penalty and withdrew the 401K and put it in my brokerage account. This may not be for everyone, and if I wanted to get fancy enough I could have borrowed the money against the 401K and paid it back if I got into an emergency, but for me instant access to my savings is more important than the tax benefits. To have money in a 401K and to have high interest credit card debt to me is ludicrous.
I prefer to put all my savings into an online brokerage account. At all times I take the value of the stocks in the account, divide by 2, add the value of cash in the account, and assume that is the amount I actually have saved. If that number is too low, I move out of stocks and into cash. If that number is sufficiently high, I move out of cash and into stocks, even onto margin if I think the economy is doing well. This way, I can take a 50% hit in the stock market and still not have to panic and get out.
Of course, the first thing I do is eliminate all credit card debt. Anything above 10% I refuse to carry, at 9.9% I will let it go for a short period of time if I feel that the money has a better use elsewhere. I also keep less liquid debt of less than 10% for as long as possible, such as my student loans, mortgage payments, etc. You never know when you're going to get in trouble, and I think it's well worth it to have liquid money in a brokerage account before paying off low-interest debt which can't be readily borrowed if you ever do get in trouble (if you're broke you're not going to be accepted for a mortgage).
Somehow, last week, on mere suspicion, my and three other kids' computers were seized and held for a few days while the network administrator attempted to track down the source of network troubles. He ultimately failed, but in the process noticed that I was using a different IP address and hostname other than the one I had been assigned. The case was sent to the discipline committee under "Theft of IP address" and I am now on probation for eight weeks.
Don't steal IP addresses. That may very well have been the cause of the network troubles. If you had a legitimate educational purpose for additional IP address, I'm sure you could have gotten them. Probably not directly from your network administrator, but through one of your professors, under a research project. Welcome to adulthood. You are now in control of your life, and if you don't like the policies, you have three choices: find another school, follow the rules, or break the rules and potentially face the consequences.
As for them taking your computer without a search warrant, one of two things happened. They broke the law, and you should sue them, or you signed an agreement you shouldn't have. Again, you should consider the agreements you're forced to sign when you come to a school. If this is something that's important to you, don't go there.
From the point of view of contract law, "sign or be fired" is an offer of valuable consideration (continued employment) in exchange for valuable consideration to the other party (non-competition with them).
Bzzzt, sorry. Unless the non-compete guarantees your employment for a specified period of time, there is no consideration. Sign or be fired is not consideration, because you could sign the contract and then still be fired, unless the contract specifically guarantees your employment.
Unfortunately there are certain facts you will have to deal with if you do this. The primary fact being, that there are certain people who are not suited for college, whether that means not intelligent enough, not disciplined enough, or whatever. Instead of encouraging them to learn a trade and get a job and earn a living, here you are encouraging them to go to college if they "want" to.
I'm not saying give them degrees. I'm not saying give them A's. I'm not saying let them disrupt the experience for anyone else. I'm not even saying give them access to the best faculty until they've proven themselves. I'm merely saying, if they want to waste their money, let them.
What will you do when they get all F's? What will you do when they realize they have spent four years on their worthless "Communications" degree and are 80 grand in debt and no better off for the trouble? Why, you will pat yourself on the back for being so "progressive" and "caring" that you can make unthinking naive statements like the one above, of course.
To be completely honest, I think eliminating acceptance standards for college would reduce the number of people who waste their time at college, not increase it. But in any case, their debt is not my problem, it's theirs (and the bank that was dumb enough to loan them the money in the first place).
You aren't doing someone a favor when you send them to a university where they are likely to fail and from which experience they are unlikely to benefit. Indeed, that is one of the reasons for having standardized tests. If an applicant is simply not suited for Berkeley, and is likely to have a bad academic experience there, it is worse (for the applicant) to say "come on in anyway!" than it is to send him to a less challenging, but more easygoing environment where he can learn at his own pace.
I am not advocating sending them anywhere, I am advocating allowing them the opportunity to choose for themselves what college or non-college is best suited for them. I think that willingness to risk your time and money (or the willingness of a lender to loan you that money) are a better indicator of your likelihood of success than any standarized test or grades. Perhaps it will be worse for some applicants, but this is something they need to learn for themselves, not something for some idiot in a suit to tell them.
By the way, are you volunteering to pay for these professors and buildings?
No, tuition will pay for that. In fact, due to economies of scale, more students will actually bring the tuition per student down, not up.
They should accept anyone who wants to go, regarless of SATs, grades, letters of recommendation, or anything else. Hire more professors, build more buildings.
No, but neither is a foot massage.
last i checked, it's not illegal for me to go around telling people where to buy drugs.
Tell that to ebay. I guarantee you that if 1) people regularly sold drugs on ebay, 2) ebay knew about it, and 3) ebay did virtually nothing to stop the people, that would be illegal. But hey, if you think it's not, go for it, I'm sure you could make a ton of money.
Yahoo!'s message boards are public, and the guy no longer works for them (and had no contractual obligations to stay silent when he left), so what precedent gives his ex-company the right to audit his opinions?
You answered your own question. "Yahoo's message boards are public." They have every right to read them and use the information in them. And if you go saying bad (true) things about them on public message boards, they have every right both legally and morally to say bad (true) things about you to your current employer.
As long as what you say is completely true, and not protected (trade secret would be the biggest worry), you shouldn't have any legal worries. It's usually a good idea to let bygones be bygones though, unless you yourself have nothing at all to hide.
I love that this book makes it seem like you can treat all programmers equally. Management is a game of psychology, and while programmers tend to follow certain patterns, they are by no means all alike. Some of us value privacy highly, others don't mind people looking over our shoulders. Some of us have a need to be trusted, others don't mind micro-management. Some of us need to be patted on the back frequently, others take pride in doing their best, others want monetary rewards, others want promotions and responsibilities. Each programmer has different personal goals, and those goals are rarely merely "to work as little as possible," although that's usually part of it. The team will only succeed by making those personal goals coincide with the goals of the team.
This is why I love books like Extreme Programming. It creates colossal failures of a company which my team can then come in and get paid gobs of money to fix.
Great for some maybe. I want to read my slashdot in peace. It helps me decompress from the stressfulness of programming. If someone watches me over my shoulder while I code, I'm looking for a new job.
"Despair has also petitioned the court to require defendants to submit a handwritten letter which repeats the phrase ":-( is a registered trademark of Despair, Inc." one-thousand times. A ruling on the petition is expected within a week."
The trademark is real. It is probably even enforable on "Printed matter namely, greeting cards, posters and art prints", and for commercial purposes... The rest of the article is fake.
it's spelled "their". maybe we should have a slashdot article "Slashdot makes a grammatical error".
The biggest "feature" of 3.23, of course, is the fact that it's GPLed. 3.22 is not. As for switching to Postgresql, I need enum, I need mediumint(5) unsigned zerofill. To some extent it's just programmer laziness, but it's nice to have your code not need to do so much data type checking and formatting. User-defined data types and/or stored procedures would be preferrable, then I wouldn't have to use tinytext for urls, for instance, but for now the only two real choices are MySQL and Postgresql.
Let's not forget the other half of this movie. The fact is that drugs can and often do become terribly destructive ways of coping with real feelings and issues. While this movie was good at pointing out the problems with the war on drugs, it only briefly touched on actual solutions to it. IMHO, making drugs illegal is equivalent to making suicide illegal - not very useful.
On January 24 Datacloud will introduce JANNA. And you'll see why 2001 won't be like '2001'.
Images are just an excuse to upgrade your 1200 bps modem to a 28.8.
Well, Microsoft didn't let us see the source code to Windows 95. So in practice this only affects the ability to fork and the free-as-in-beer aspects. Both very important, but I think if Microsoft let us see the source to Windows and let us pay once for an OS instead of every time we buy a computer, Linux would die a quick painful death.
good point. i didn't actually think it was actually the case, but i thought it was at least a possibility. i guess not...
How do you feel about being described as "a slightly strange, slightly pudgy loner" on an international news site?
Sure, if anyone had tried to claim that ssh/ssl were dead a year ago, RSA would have shut them up in a second. Of course, now that the RSA algorithm is public domain, big business has every incentive to deem it useless... Concentrate on tweaking the implementations, the basis of public key cryptography is rock solid.
This seems to me to be more of an intel serial number type of system. In other words, the hardware enforces a mechanism which *must* be implemented in software (probably at the OS level, for Windows). Personally, I see no problem with this, as long as I am not forced to run an OS or application software which uses it.
dsniff 2.3 allows you to exploit several fundamental flaws in two extremely popular encryption protocols, SSL and SSH. SSL and SSH are used to protect a large amount of network traffic, from financial transactions with online banks and stock trading sites to network administrator access to secured hosts holding extremely sensitive data.
Umm, first of all, this is only possible *if* you can actively steal and replace every packet between the two (man-in-the-middle). Second, SSL is generally used with a key signed by a CA, so no breach there. Third, at least my version of tera-term with ttssh, stores the key the first time you connect, and will warn you if that key ever changes in a future session. So the user would have to have done this exploit every single time that I have connected. Unlikely (though certainly possible, but my data isn't *that* important). Finally, it's perfectly possible to use ssh with different mechanisms to transfer the key. If I *really cared*, I could put the key on my https server (key signed by verisign), and download the key from there, install it into my ssh client, and bingo, secure connection.
Make sure you obey the DMCA Broadcast Rules... "A mix cannot contain more than three tracks from the same album in a three-hour period". Then again, if you're willing to follow the DMCA, just post your mix up on myplay.