He is not just some rube with money, he is a trained rube with some money.
He's not just a trained rube with some money, Is everyone ignoring the fact that this guy is a former rocket scientist, who actually designed a lot of the equipment up in space, and used to train Astronauts himself? The guy is as qualified to be in space, if not more so, than a lot of people NASA themselves have sent up.
The problem is not a lack of skills, the problem is because he is a civilian, and not military personnel, NASA won't be able to hold his country accountable for any mistakes he might make. They're being total wankers, of course, but what do you expect from guvvies?
In general, most users of "personalized" websites receive an experience no more "personal" than a list of headlines on some topics that they've previously identified as interests. And that's only if they bother to customize the options on that site, which most people don't.
Regardless of how I've configured my Slashboxes, I still have no idea exactly what headlines or what viewpoints are going to show up when I log on to check the news every day, but I know that in general, they will pertain to the industry I work in, the people I associate with, and part of the community I participate in.
How does this really compare with information distribution of days gone by? In the late 18th century, while the United States was in it's infancy, there was no internet to spread customized news to individuals, but does that mean individuals got all the news and all the viewpoints in their Sunday newspaper?
No, much like Slashdot volunteer moderators do today, the editorial staff of the local newspaper (which in most cases only had a distribution to the local community) filtered through the news they received and printed on topics which were relevent to the industries, peoples and communities in their local distribution area. People may not have had an exact forecast of what they were reading, but certainly could expect that the local paper would print news that affected them.
I think that if the rural farmers in South Carolina were able to find some common ground with the Entrepeneurial class in New York on the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, despite the balkanized nature of the press in those days, there is little danger that everyone in a globally interconnected network are going to totally lose touch with one another.
Surely he'd be better off staying within NAI and fighting to ensure that the code remains free from backdoors? It seems as though he's willing to compromise his principles to get out of a difficult situation, and it means that many of us are going to have to switch to other, less secure versions that we at least know are free from holes.
Not necessarily. If he stays on as an employee of NAI, he could continue to fight against the opening of back doors in the software, but if (when) he loses those fights, he would probably be bound by NDAs and non-compete clauses and the like from publicizing them, and the community at large would have no recourse but to assume that since he is an still an employee, that the product remains true to his original vision, which may not be the case.
Phil is smart and seems aware that the public cannot wisely trust a closed-source security program, and he is stating that he does not wish to continue endorsing it by associating himself with the company that publishes it. I congratulate his courage in leaving a (probably) lucrative corporate position on this principle. Instead, by going to work on the OpenPGP standard, and doing consulting services for other companies who wish to integrate open-standards PGP into their products, he is insuring that peer-reviewable privacy software continues to be available to the public at large.
If he was cutting and running at the first hurdle, he'd stay with NAI, and keep his paycheck, despite the fact that they were making the software less free. Instead, he's making a rather large personal sacrifice to ensure that PGP remains a security system we can trust, even if we can't necessarily trust NAI's implementation of it.
My contactlist is kept serverside. (or is this a disadvantage?)
This is a mixed blessing. AOL also keeps contact lists server-side, but only for the AOL-member version of their IM client (AIM stores contact lists client-side). The nice thing about server-side contact lists is the ease with which a user can port their account from one computer to the next. The problem with this is privacy/security issues.
Actually, all of the IM clients have one or two great features, along with some headache causing frustrations. Each one has a different piece of the puzzle. For instance, ICQ has the feature to require a user's authorization for another user to contact them. Unfortunately they botch the delivery of this feature by keeping the authentication client-side (no doubt a load off their servers, but a simple crack to older versions of the client allow malicious users to contact privacy-minded individuals whether they like it or not). Another result of client-side authentication is that users must repeatedly ask authorization to contact a friend every time they install the client on a new system.
Yahoo has better support over http proxies, AIM is almost entirely spam-free (although a few changes to the default configuration keep my ICQ spam to an easily dealt-with minimum).
I'd like to see these features in a universal IM client, should open standards develop in this arena:
* Local storage/management of contact list, but with an easy interface for exporting/importing contacts between clients on multiple computers
* Server-side authorization for contacting new users (possibly with a password feature for automatic authorization, allowing previously-authorized users or personal friends to automatically get authorization but without storing information on who is actually contacting who)
* Offline message delivery
* Multiple user peer-to-peer chat sessions
* File Transfer (possibly with the ability to publicly/privately share file directories and search for available files...users could choose to share certain files with publicly with the world, while keeping others restricted to users on their contact list, or even individual users...)
* Configurable user information, with the ability to offer different profiles to users with different levels of trust
* Standard privacy features such as the ability to make yourself invisible to certain users or groups of users, and the option to turn these off for those times your bored and really want to chat with strangers.
I am looking at an end-of-the-year pay stub for a number in the low six digits...and I am an exceedingly highly taxed individual. I can't believe that the average American pays a lot more.
And you would be right. The average American doesn't pay a lot more than the $36,000+ per annum that you are paying in taxes.
In fact, I would be surprised if the average American earned as gross income how much you are paying in taxes.
For most Americans, half is a pretty realistic figure, after totalling all the hidden taxes and whatnot. You are very fortunate to be in the extreme upper echelons of the economy, and to control the amount of wealth that you do. Try to remember that within 20 miles of you, there are probably at least a thousand people struggling to support themselves on $20,000 a year or less, and are paying out 6-10k of that to the government.
The fact that IBM is big is only half of the story. IBM does not have very strict central management of it's various business divisions. Or rather, they have a very strict Central Management which rather ruthlessly reallocates company resources to the most profitable of it's currently operating business units. Consequently, it's a highly decentralized company, with business units that have to compete with each other for company resources almost as intently as they have to compete with competitors for market share.
Some of IBM's software development teams may be starting to grok the Open Source development model, and that awareness is showing up elsewhere in the company as well, but might not have as strong a foothold. Each business unit must effectively respond to the demands of it's own marketplace for optimum performance.
IBM's personal computer division probably is reluctant to devote a portion of it's budget to throw itself in with the open-source movement when that segment of the market isn't really moving in that direction yet, even though other portions of the company have found it useful to do so in order to maintain a competitive advantage. The need to support BSD and Linux on their laptops hasn't become strong enough yet, or the laptop management team just can't scrounge up the $$ to support it. If they start losing more of the market to other companies, maybe they'll start singing a different tune.
The DMCA specifies certain infringements that copyright holders may sue over. In this case, as the copyright holder, you cannot infringe your own copyright (and you could also grant waivers to other parties). So there is no illegality in your example. The examples that the EFF are after concern fair use of products whose copyright are held by other parties.
You're right that the DMCA does nothing to prevent someone from accessing their daughter's flute solo on a proprietary recording device, if that person is a software engineering guru with the ability to hack the system independent of input from other individuals. For the sad majority of the population, which does not consist of privileged elite technocrats such as ourselves, this is impossible. And for those of us who possess the skills to do this, we are condemned to duplicate effort since the DMCA makes it illegal for us to share our tools or publicize the means by which we accessed material to which we owned the copyright, since that information could then be used to bypass the protection on material for which we didn't own the copyright. Read this way, the DMCA actually makes it illegal to publish or distribute your own work (the means of accessing your material).
As this trend continues, it will become harder and harder to acquire information which can be reused for anything other than the benefit of the "owner" of that information. When it becomes impossible, it will no longer be worth anyone's while to acquire information as it cannot benefit them at all.
I grabbed a pen as I went in, and the woman at the table helpfully explained write-in votes, and that writing in a vote for anyone but President is a waste because it won't be counted, so that was very nice, but it still kind of bugged me that they didn't just have a pen in the booth so it wouldn't have to be a big production.
You should write a letter to your local, state and federal election commissioners, as well as as many newspapers and media sources you can, bringing attention to this event. DEMAND that the local election commissioner who implemented this policy, and the woman who participated in enforcing it, be prosecuted for tampering with a local state and federal election.
In every state I am aware of, it is clearly against the law to campaign at a polling place. This is clearly a violation of the law, and you should bring it to as many people's attention as possible.
If you voted for a third party, you voted for smirk (bush). Have a nice day
I've begun happily informing people that I hope Bush does win because of my 3rd party vote. Maybe if things get bad enough quick enough there will be a real impetus for change in our system.
No accountability? Then what is that whole voting rigamarole we go through every few years?
The federal government is not very accountable to it's voters. In theory, it should work, but in practice...well, just look at it
At any rate, in corporations, upper-management are usually major shareholders, so when they do a bad job, they feel it in their own pockets...Congress can vote themselves a raise regardless of their job performance. In a corporation, minority shareholders have the right to sue management for such excesses...where is our right as taxpayers and voters to sue the guvvies for same?
Actually, you want as few people working for the government as possible. Government management is like corporate management, only without any accountability to shareholders, so they're even MORE inefficient and wasteful.
I agree. If someone hadn't already posted this, I was going to. I read that sentence, and the first thought to immediately enter my head was "Wow, I can't think of a better reason to take those patents away."
But unlike Wertheim, I discount any involvement of Christianity in this evolution. Christianity is based around the sacredness of the teachings of one man. Whatever spirituality arises from the internet, Christians are most likely to see it as a threat and an aberration.
I love the irony here, as the teachings of that one man more or less amounted to "Try to be tolerant of each other, and each other's ideas."
As long as we're bashing the/. crew, it's interesting to note that the Slashdot opinion poll continues to use a plurality voting system in spite of its obvious irrationality for creating consensus as demonstrated in the other article linked to from this post.
"Why do you think you can measure people's intelligence and productivity with thier salary? If that was the case, then Larry Wall was not very productive when he started writing Perl because no one paid him. Linus Torvald is not even 1/100 time as productive as Ricky Martin. Did they whine about taxes? No. Because they are winners. Microsoft cannot buy these people, because they know their self worth cannot be measured with money."
For that matter, even Billy-boy himself lived on a shoestring when Microsoft was in its infancy, and they were trying to peddle BASIC for the Altair
Would it be possible to engineer an "Open-Source" government with todays communications technology, where people could collaborate on social programs, directly vote on budget issues and the like, and participate as individuals? How could the difficulties of the "Digital Divide" and thus, uneven access to government participation, be overcome? Would this indeed lead to the most effective possible government emerging in an evolutionary fashion, as in software?
Slashdot Mirror
He is not just some rube with money, he is a trained rube with some money.
He's not just a trained rube with some money, Is everyone ignoring the fact that this guy is a former rocket scientist, who actually designed a lot of the equipment up in space, and used to train Astronauts himself? The guy is as qualified to be in space, if not more so, than a lot of people NASA themselves have sent up.
The problem is not a lack of skills, the problem is because he is a civilian, and not military personnel, NASA won't be able to hold his country accountable for any mistakes he might make. They're being total wankers, of course, but what do you expect from guvvies?
In general, most users of "personalized" websites receive an experience no more "personal" than a list of headlines on some topics that they've previously identified as interests. And that's only if they bother to customize the options on that site, which most people don't.
Regardless of how I've configured my Slashboxes, I still have no idea exactly what headlines or what viewpoints are going to show up when I log on to check the news every day, but I know that in general, they will pertain to the industry I work in, the people I associate with, and part of the community I participate in.
How does this really compare with information distribution of days gone by? In the late 18th century, while the United States was in it's infancy, there was no internet to spread customized news to individuals, but does that mean individuals got all the news and all the viewpoints in their Sunday newspaper?
No, much like Slashdot volunteer moderators do today, the editorial staff of the local newspaper (which in most cases only had a distribution to the local community) filtered through the news they received and printed on topics which were relevent to the industries, peoples and communities in their local distribution area. People may not have had an exact forecast of what they were reading, but certainly could expect that the local paper would print news that affected them.
I think that if the rural farmers in South Carolina were able to find some common ground with the Entrepeneurial class in New York on the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, despite the balkanized nature of the press in those days, there is little danger that everyone in a globally interconnected network are going to totally lose touch with one another.
Surely he'd be better off staying within NAI and fighting to ensure that the code remains free from backdoors? It seems as though he's willing to compromise his principles to get out of a difficult situation, and it means that many of us are going to have to switch to other, less secure versions that we at least know are free from holes.
Not necessarily. If he stays on as an employee of NAI, he could continue to fight against the opening of back doors in the software, but if (when) he loses those fights, he would probably be bound by NDAs and non-compete clauses and the like from publicizing them, and the community at large would have no recourse but to assume that since he is an still an employee, that the product remains true to his original vision, which may not be the case.
Phil is smart and seems aware that the public cannot wisely trust a closed-source security program, and he is stating that he does not wish to continue endorsing it by associating himself with the company that publishes it. I congratulate his courage in leaving a (probably) lucrative corporate position on this principle. Instead, by going to work on the OpenPGP standard, and doing consulting services for other companies who wish to integrate open-standards PGP into their products, he is insuring that peer-reviewable privacy software continues to be available to the public at large.
If he was cutting and running at the first hurdle, he'd stay with NAI, and keep his paycheck, despite the fact that they were making the software less free. Instead, he's making a rather large personal sacrifice to ensure that PGP remains a security system we can trust, even if we can't necessarily trust NAI's implementation of it.
My contactlist is kept serverside. (or is this a disadvantage?)
This is a mixed blessing. AOL also keeps contact lists server-side, but only for the AOL-member version of their IM client (AIM stores contact lists client-side). The nice thing about server-side contact lists is the ease with which a user can port their account from one computer to the next. The problem with this is privacy/security issues.
Actually, all of the IM clients have one or two great features, along with some headache causing frustrations. Each one has a different piece of the puzzle. For instance, ICQ has the feature to require a user's authorization for another user to contact them. Unfortunately they botch the delivery of this feature by keeping the authentication client-side (no doubt a load off their servers, but a simple crack to older versions of the client allow malicious users to contact privacy-minded individuals whether they like it or not). Another result of client-side authentication is that users must repeatedly ask authorization to contact a friend every time they install the client on a new system.
Yahoo has better support over http proxies, AIM is almost entirely spam-free (although a few changes to the default configuration keep my ICQ spam to an easily dealt-with minimum).
I'd like to see these features in a universal IM client, should open standards develop in this arena:
* Local storage/management of contact list, but with an easy interface for exporting/importing contacts between clients on multiple computers
* Server-side authorization for contacting new users (possibly with a password feature for automatic authorization, allowing previously-authorized users or personal friends to automatically get authorization but without storing information on who is actually contacting who)
* Offline message delivery
* Multiple user peer-to-peer chat sessions
* File Transfer (possibly with the ability to publicly/privately share file directories and search for available files...users could choose to share certain files with publicly with the world, while keeping others restricted to users on their contact list, or even individual users...)
* Configurable user information, with the ability to offer different profiles to users with different levels of trust
* Standard privacy features such as the ability to make yourself invisible to certain users or groups of users, and the option to turn these off for those times your bored and really want to chat with strangers.
I am looking at an end-of-the-year pay stub for a number in the low six digits...and I am an exceedingly highly taxed individual. I can't believe that the average American pays a lot more.
And you would be right. The average American doesn't pay a lot more than the $36,000+ per annum that you are paying in taxes.
In fact, I would be surprised if the average American earned as gross income how much you are paying in taxes.
For most Americans, half is a pretty realistic figure, after totalling all the hidden taxes and whatnot. You are very fortunate to be in the extreme upper echelons of the economy, and to control the amount of wealth that you do. Try to remember that within 20 miles of you, there are probably at least a thousand people struggling to support themselves on $20,000 a year or less, and are paying out 6-10k of that to the government.
The fact that IBM is big is only half of the story. IBM does not have very strict central management of it's various business divisions. Or rather, they have a very strict Central Management which rather ruthlessly reallocates company resources to the most profitable of it's currently operating business units. Consequently, it's a highly decentralized company, with business units that have to compete with each other for company resources almost as intently as they have to compete with competitors for market share.
Some of IBM's software development teams may be starting to grok the Open Source development model, and that awareness is showing up elsewhere in the company as well, but might not have as strong a foothold. Each business unit must effectively respond to the demands of it's own marketplace for optimum performance.
IBM's personal computer division probably is reluctant to devote a portion of it's budget to throw itself in with the open-source movement when that segment of the market isn't really moving in that direction yet, even though other portions of the company have found it useful to do so in order to maintain a competitive advantage. The need to support BSD and Linux on their laptops hasn't become strong enough yet, or the laptop management team just can't scrounge up the $$ to support it. If they start losing more of the market to other companies, maybe they'll start singing a different tune.
The DMCA specifies certain infringements that copyright holders may sue over. In this case, as the copyright holder, you cannot infringe your own copyright (and you could also grant waivers to other parties). So there is no illegality in your example. The examples that the EFF are after concern fair use of products whose copyright are held by other parties.
You're right that the DMCA does nothing to prevent someone from accessing their daughter's flute solo on a proprietary recording device, if that person is a software engineering guru with the ability to hack the system independent of input from other individuals. For the sad majority of the population, which does not consist of privileged elite technocrats such as ourselves, this is impossible. And for those of us who possess the skills to do this, we are condemned to duplicate effort since the DMCA makes it illegal for us to share our tools or publicize the means by which we accessed material to which we owned the copyright, since that information could then be used to bypass the protection on material for which we didn't own the copyright. Read this way, the DMCA actually makes it illegal to publish or distribute your own work (the means of accessing your material).
As this trend continues, it will become harder and harder to acquire information which can be reused for anything other than the benefit of the "owner" of that information. When it becomes impossible, it will no longer be worth anyone's while to acquire information as it cannot benefit them at all.
I grabbed a pen as I went in, and the woman at the table helpfully explained write-in votes, and that writing in a vote for anyone but President is a waste because it won't be counted, so that was very nice, but it still kind of bugged me that they didn't just have a pen in the booth so it wouldn't have to be a big production.
You should write a letter to your local, state and federal election commissioners, as well as as many newspapers and media sources you can, bringing attention to this event. DEMAND that the local election commissioner who implemented this policy, and the woman who participated in enforcing it, be prosecuted for tampering with a local state and federal election.
In every state I am aware of, it is clearly against the law to campaign at a polling place. This is clearly a violation of the law, and you should bring it to as many people's attention as possible.
If you voted for a third party, you voted for smirk (bush). Have a nice day
I've begun happily informing people that I hope Bush does win because of my 3rd party vote. Maybe if things get bad enough quick enough there will be a real impetus for change in our system.
No accountability? Then what is that whole voting rigamarole we go through every few years?
The federal government is not very accountable to it's voters. In theory, it should work, but in practice...well, just look at it
At any rate, in corporations, upper-management are usually major shareholders, so when they do a bad job, they feel it in their own pockets...Congress can vote themselves a raise regardless of their job performance. In a corporation, minority shareholders have the right to sue management for such excesses...where is our right as taxpayers and voters to sue the guvvies for same?
Actually, you want as few people working for the government as possible. Government management is like corporate management, only without any accountability to shareholders, so they're even MORE inefficient and wasteful.
I pay enough taxes already...
I agree. If someone hadn't already posted this, I was going to. I read that sentence, and the first thought to immediately enter my head was "Wow, I can't think of a better reason to take those patents away."
But unlike Wertheim, I discount any involvement of Christianity in this evolution. Christianity is based around the sacredness of the teachings of one man. Whatever spirituality arises from the internet, Christians are most likely to see it as a threat and an aberration.
I love the irony here, as the teachings of that one man more or less amounted to "Try to be tolerant of each other, and each other's ideas."
As long as we're bashing the /. crew, it's interesting to note that the Slashdot opinion poll continues to use a plurality voting system in spite of its obvious irrationality for creating consensus as demonstrated in the other article linked to from this post.
Pine produces about 1/4 as much pulp per acre as Industrial Hemp.
And the blossoms on Industrial Hemp do not contain THC.
"Why do you think you can measure people's intelligence and productivity with thier salary? If that was the case, then Larry Wall was not very productive when he started writing Perl because no one paid him. Linus Torvald is not even 1/100 time as productive as Ricky Martin. Did they whine about taxes? No. Because they are winners. Microsoft cannot buy these people, because they know their self worth cannot be measured with money."
For that matter, even Billy-boy himself lived on a shoestring when Microsoft was in its infancy, and they were trying to peddle BASIC for the Altair
Would it be possible to engineer an "Open-Source" government with todays communications technology, where people could collaborate on social programs, directly vote on budget issues and the like, and participate as individuals? How could the difficulties of the "Digital Divide" and thus, uneven access to government participation, be overcome? Would this indeed lead to the most effective possible government emerging in an evolutionary fashion, as in software?