Read the Supreme Court decision: basically, states are only allowed to regulate the internal business of political parties (such as how a Party chooses its nominees) up to the point where those parties are "state actors" -- which is a pretty strict test. Parties are private organizations; if the state of Florida decides it wants to hold a Primary election on January 29th, so be it, but it has *absolutely no expectation* that those of us who are Democrats from the rest of the country will honor the results. In fact, we have rules ( http://www.demconvention.com/a/2007/03/delegate_se lect.html ) to the contrary.
It's not unusual at all. Idaho has a Primary on May 27th; because the Idaho Primary is *not* restricted to people who are willing to commit to being Democrats (again, in response to the Jones decision), we have a *binding* caucus which has recently been moved up to Feb. 5th. I believe the Republicans here actually observe the Primary for Presidential delegate selection (that's *their* business), but the only part of it that is binding for Democrats is the election of down-ballot candidates (and the overwhelming majority of those Democratic Primary races are generally uncontested anyway).
There would be a really easy fix for Wikipedia: prohibit "anonymous" accounts. Require anyone with update access to pay some token fee (like $10 or $20/yr.) via credit card, and collect a bunch of real-world information on the authors in the process.... Then, authors of patently obviously inaccurate or misleading information could be held accountable for their actions; a little self-censorship with an eye toward quality control could significantly improve many of their articles, particularly those pertaining to history, politics, and current events.
ok, so McBride claims that "over a million" lines were cribbed? I just ran through all the.c files in the 2.4.18 kernel source -- there are only 2.94 million lines total, including comments (but not including any header files, obviously, so about a wash). McBride is claiming that OVER A THIRD of the kernel has been ripped off from System V, while his company has been distributing Caldera Linux under the GPL for years? Sounds like pretty good fodder for them not taking "reasonable care" of their copyrighted material -- I mean, if over a third of it was ripped off as he claimed, it should have been pretty easy for SCO to spot, yes?
You are falling into the all-too-common fallacy these days (reinforced, unfortunately, by the shareholder lawsuit epidemic) that shareholder value is precisely equal to direct shareholder return. The first thing you learn in Management 101 is that there are two principal objectives to which a board is responsible:
1. Survival -- keeping the company in existence 2. Maximizing shareholder value -- for some definition of "shareholder value"
For example, Thrivent is a Fortune 500 company that is incorporated as a nonprofit: 100% of its proceeds (less allowed carryover) must be spent charitably. To that sort of organization, value maximization is exactly the opposite of what you are suggesting: it is precisely how much you can afford to give away that determines success.
Now, moving back into the Ben and Jerry's realm for a moment, consider that the bulk of Ben and Jerry's shareholders were Vermonters who supported completely the company's philosophy of community involvement because it benefitted them directly, by making Vermont a better place to live -- to them, they were receiving value from the donations in a non-quantitative form. Needless to say, there are certain tax advantages in getting your value that way rather than in dividend form as well!
Unfortunately, a lot of people tend to miss this point (particularly when they compain about taxation) in their personal lives as well; they seem to believe that only by optimizing their own discretionary income can they enhance their quality of life, when quite the contrary is in fact possible. Consider, for example, the net impact of a community filled with Lexus owners, who all agreed that they would drive Toyotas instead of Lexi [plural!?] and invest the difference in community improvements like parks and libraries -- would their quality of life be better or worse?
That said, and circling back to the original point, too much has been made of cash-oriented shareholder value, without empahsizing that a lot of that positive cash emphasis has come at the expense of creating negative shareholder value in other arenas. Consider, for example, the shareholders of the company that opts to use some inferior component as a cost savings -- but then the inferior component fails in ways that cost lives (potentially including some of those same shareholders). Things like quality of workmanship, reduced pollution, and employee satisfaction create types of shareholder value (what Adam Smith referred to as the "invisible hand" when conceiving of modern Capitalism) that the present bottom-line obsession ignores altogether; today's bottom-line-fallacy-based model ceased to be Capitalism before it ever left the barn.
Ah, but (in the US at least) the Constitutional purpose of copyrights is to motivate authors to produce more works -- something that it is relatively unlikely to expect out of someone who has even reached life + 1 day, let alone life + n years. You could conceivably argue that there is some incentive in creating a financial legacy to support your family, at least in the near term, but even that would be handled by a fixed length copyright: if I have a 10 year copyright on something, and I expire tomorrow, my heirs will still have 10 years before it expires; conversely, if I expire nine years from now, leaving my heirs with only a year left on it, then apparently the copyright didn't fulfill its stated purpose of encouraging me to write something between now and then.
You used Courtney Love as an example: do you really think Kurt Cobain would have wanted the kind of fight between her and Dave Grohl over the Nirvana catalog recently, or would he rather that the copyrights expired altogether than to have his former bandmate trying to get his widow declared insane? And taking it to the logical extreme, it is an obscene example of unrepentant greed that the Margaret Mitchell estate continues to reap rewards off of "Gone With the Wind" nearly eighty years after its first publication.
Do I want my loved ones taken care of after I die? Of course I do -- that's why I have life insurance; it to me would be ridiculous to expect that our cultural legacy should be shortchanged in order to line the pockets of my potential great-grandchildren four decades hence.
As the coauthor of a rapidly-becoming-obsolete technology book that's barely more than two years old, I can certainly sympathize regarding royalty checks in the red (I only received one, so far, that actually came with a check attached). Knowing that, how do you feel about significantly reduced copyright terms? Obviously, it would mean your former label would no longer be able to profit off of songs like "At Seventeen", but conversely, having that material in the public domain much more quickly might result in some of the collateral effects on your current material that, as you described in your first article, Baen is doing for authors.
This expiry issue is actually a more critical concern for many in technology, because unlike other, more tangible cultural elements like books or records, a lot of culturally significant digital content (e.g. old video games) has been produced in the technology arena that, by the time its copyrights expire under current law, no one will remember how to (or have the right hardware to) reproduce. Then again, how many people today (a mere decade later, really) still have working phonographs?
It's no secret that Perl 6 is being designed/developed as a radically different (to the point of mutual unintelligibility) language than Perl 4 was a decade ago (and even Perl 5 is today). On top of that, in today's development there are a lot more people a lot more involved in the design (eg. Conway, Sugalski) than there have been historically. So, all that said, has demand from the community caused changes in Perl as a language that you would not have envisioned otherwise or that take it in directions you would rather not have gone in personally?
That the judge found no protected speech content in video games is neither particularly surprising nor disturbing. Why? They are, in effect, a form of commercial speech -- that is, speech whose primary purpose/objective is generating revenue for its creator. Commercial "speech" is held to a much lower protection standard than, say, political speech or intellectual discourse.
His finding here actually helps as a precedent, for example, in court cases hoping to uphold Washington's spam law, or local size/height restrictions on billboards, or state laws restricting telemarketing practices. On the other hand, it still doesn't preclude specific challenges to these sorts of laws being applied to specific games which may, in fact, contain protected speech content; contrast Half-Life with SimEarth in terms of potentially protected content, for example.
Ironically, this may also help the open source gaming community in another way: if you have a body of rulings indicating that source code is speech, and a second body of rulings indicating that video games distributed commercially as object code are not speech, then that is quite a competetive advantage for the openly-distributed-as-source product. If only we could be similarly lucky with operating systems!
Y'all missed the point. What Microsoft is saying is that if you give away a PC that came with a Windows license originally, you have to give away that Windows license along with it; as a practical matter, this means that people won't be giving away PCs with Windows but no license, and trying to keep the license for another PC -- by doing it this way, Microsoft insures that people who DO upgrade have to make a conscious decision to buy a new Windows license, or not to buy one and run another OS instead.
Try it this way: Every machine running an unlicensed copy of Windows is a missed opportunity to have that machine running something else. If the school districts are given the Windows licenses with the machines and choose not to use the licenses (by running something else), even better!
Personally, I've always been of the opinion that from a technology perspective, the porn websites have been out in front of the rest of the industry (mostly out of necessity). So, I would consider it comparable to, if not possibly better than, other industry experience when evaluating a prospect. Plus, how often as a manager to you get the opportunity to look at porn as part of your job? *grin*
But, I'm not everybody. I tend to hire people (and I've hired four in the past year) based on qualifications, and qualifications alone (although being able to communicate clearly does count as a qualification, so to some extent personality is a factor). Other people and/or organizations might have a problem with it; I would expect that a fair number of the companies, managers, and clients I've done work for over the past several years would, in fact. So, evaluate it like you would evaluate any other position. After all, the flip side is that by some people (hippies, for example), working for a DoD vendor like General Dynamics or Raytheon might be considered a black mark as well. Bottom line is, YMMV. The better question to ask yourself is what kinds of companies you'd like to work for in the future; if your answer consists mainly of the buttoned-down, straight and narrow, you probably should pass, but if it's more of the freewheeling, fast and loose sort, you may want to give the site a whirl.
(y'all already know the tune -- think "7th inning")
It's time to buy some Congressmen,
Not just a few but a crowd:
Spare us the iPods and Gamecubes and crap,
We need to know how to stop a bum rap;
Cause it's vote, vote vote down the bad laws,
They'll vote with whoever will pay --
Only one, two, three bribes will do,
In the Congressional game!
They were in the wrong place at the wrong time; naturally, they became heroes.
--Princess Leia, in the prologue of the novelization of Star Wars: A New Hope.
My first sysadmin gig (and my first gig in IT as an industry) came about when, one day about 6 years ago, I went in to pay my ISP bill, and was confronted with
Jeff, you know Unix, right? You're the only one of our customers with a shell account. How'd you like a job? One of our sysadmins quit last week, and the other just gave notice today.
Of course, I had a couple things going for me in IT at that time: a M.S. in math (in fact, I had just interviewed for a JuCo faculty position that morning) and some "related" experience (some volunteering I did in grad school, and helping out the IT department at a JuCo I had worked for previously). But the fact was, I went from zero to sysadmin in a matter of minutes; it was increasing the likelihood of something like that happening that led me to move to Dallas at the time in the first place.
So, short answer: play the percentages. Do things that are likely to get your IT skills noticed, and put yourselves in a position where they are likely to be. Look for small companies that aren't going to have as formal of requirements for technical people, and be willing to settle for less money (at least, initally) than your more-formally-prepared counterparts. And don't be fooled into thinking that your age is an obstacle: a lot of these companies have very young demographics, and would perceive someone "older" as bringing much-needed maturity to the table.
Slackware was the first Linux distro I installed, more than 6 years ago. Since then, I've flirted with the GUI-package-oriented distros (Red Hat and Mandrake in particular), acquired disks of several others (tradeshow giveaways and the like), been exposed to Debian on servers someone else installed, but I've come back to Slack, to stay.
Why? Several reasons really:
Once you've gotten used to installing it, it really is a very straightforward install. In fact, it should look VERY familiar to anyone who has ever installed FreeBSD.
It's rock-stable when it's released. I'm writing this on Slackware 8.0 now, in fact. It actually fulfills the promise of being useful both on servers and workstations with a single distro.
It is far and away the easiest "mainstream" distro to lock down. Want to ditch the RPC Portmapper? Comment out four lines (two of which are if and endif) in one rc file. None of those annoying system maintenance daemons that open up all sorts of vulnerabilities like some of those well-dressed distros from the East Coast, either.
It wasn't built for greed. This is a compelling argument, and you can make it in favor of Debian as well. Contrast this with those companies that have complex venture-backed and/or publicly-traded business models based on selling distributions. In fact, Slackware's very name is derived from Church of the Subgenius materials predicated on the rejection of greed ("Get Slack!").
I think I'll go along with what others have said about this: even if Slackware, by name and/or business, were to go away, there are plenty of people in the Slackware community (myself included) who have the wherewithal, interest, and capability to "roll-our-own" Slack-like distros. I would expect, if it were to happen, to see all sorts of "children of the Slack" proliferate as a result, perhaps none with the singular momentum of the parent, but all with a specific niche to fill.
It's Not Unusual...
on
Globalization
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
...for people to come out and lambaste Katz, but it's unusual for me: I prefer to do my Karma Whoring in more meaningful ways, like occasionally posting useful information.
But not this time! Katz, you have clearly gotten in over your head. The non-sequitor upon which this essay is based is an utter disaster. How can you conclude there is ANY relationship at all between a cosmopolitan world-view and acceptance of free trade? I can think of several respected scholars (former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, for one) who firmly believe that the notion of national identities, particularly in business, are passe, but still support the use of tariff mechanisms by nations to protect their domestic social institutions. Read The Work of Nations sometime for insight into Reich's concept of "Strategic Trade."
I realize that the two columns you do here are only a small component of your journalistic work week, but it would behoove you to contemplate that before undertaking an essay on the interrelationship between societal openness and macroeconomics, when you obviously didn't have the opportunity to thoroughly research the macroeconomics piece. What eludes me is how the views of such prominent a figure as Reich could fly under your radar!?
Who else did what I did, running out at lunch after reading this (yes, buying online counts) and buying a copy of Sennett's book The Corrosion of Character? I found it in about five minutes at my local Borders (probably would have been quicker if I hadn't stopped to verify its location in TitleSleuth), picked it up, started previewing it, and had trouble putting it down to check out and come back to work.
Anyone who is at all interested in what we've traded away (and why) for our upward mobility should read this. I find it fascinating -- especially since I almost felt like I was looking in a mirror reading the example in the first chapter.
Oh, it doesn't bother me that they want to deport foreigners, what makes me uneasy is the fact that the want to be able to do it without any evidence of wrongdoing.
Again, go back to my original analogy. If I'm having a party in my house, and I suspect that one of my guests is going to start smashing my china and defacing my wall art, I'm not going to wait until after he's done it before I throw him out.
That said, the underlying economic incentive to have foreigners in this country spending money and being productive is going to keep it from being injudiciously applied. This is one summary power I really don't have an issue with granting the DOJ; it's really not a power grab at all if you start with the underlying assumption that in granting entry visas, the government reserves the right to cancel them at any time, for any reason, with or without notice.
The Justice Department has drafted legislation allowing the U.S. attorney general to lock up foreigners deemed to be terrorist suspects and order them deported without presenting any evidence.
Why is this a problem? America belongs to those of us who are its Citizens. Spontaneous deportation of foreigners is really no different than if someone visiting my home gets unruly and I throw him out.
Let's try not to confuse the issue here. There is a far cry from treading on the theoretical rights of those to whom none are guaranteed, to treading on the real, established and manifested rights of those from whom power is derived.
Then you need to remember that Ben Franklin lived during a period of history where (compared to what we've had) terrorism was the equivalent of an Amish couple throwing old fruit at people from a moving buggy.
Tell that to Guy Fawkes. Had the Gunpowder Plot succeeded, we might very well be carrying on this discussion in French, if at all. Not that Fawkes was any supporter of the French, but it's hard to picture them NOT capitalizing on the results had he been successful.
From the looks of the link, the openac3 project is based at the University of Victoria. While south of the 49th parallel, the last time I checked the University of Victoria was still in Canada.
That said, what is the validity of software patents under CANADIAN law? Anyone (a Canadian IP lawyer, for example) have the answer to that burning question? If they aren't valid in Canada, it would appear that any claims Dolby has that their patent is being infringed by openac3 are pretty much moot.
Slashdot Mirror
This may be the best snark in history...! :)
It should have been a no-brainer very early on in the process that reproduction is "obvious to a person skilled in the art."
Read the Supreme Court decision: basically, states are only allowed to regulate the internal business of political parties (such as how a Party chooses its nominees) up to the point where those parties are "state actors" -- which is a pretty strict test. Parties are private organizations; if the state of Florida decides it wants to hold a Primary election on January 29th, so be it, but it has *absolutely no expectation* that those of us who are Democrats from the rest of the country will honor the results. In fact, we have rules ( http://www.demconvention.com/a/2007/03/delegate_se lect.html ) to the contrary.
It's not unusual at all. Idaho has a Primary on May 27th; because the Idaho Primary is *not* restricted to people who are willing to commit to being Democrats (again, in response to the Jones decision), we have a *binding* caucus which has recently been moved up to Feb. 5th. I believe the Republicans here actually observe the Primary for Presidential delegate selection (that's *their* business), but the only part of it that is binding for Democrats is the election of down-ballot candidates (and the overwhelming majority of those Democratic Primary races are generally uncontested anyway).
Not to mention the privilege of 80% markups for "concession pricing" over a near-identical Cinnabon(TM) three miles up the road at the mall...!
Eve Andersson?
Mena Trott?
Barbara Broccoli?
J.K. Rowling?
Zoe Lofgren?
This seems like so much of the usual CNet feature-story drivel....
There would be a really easy fix for Wikipedia: prohibit "anonymous" accounts. Require anyone with update access to pay some token fee (like $10 or $20/yr.) via credit card, and collect a bunch of real-world information on the authors in the process.... Then, authors of patently obviously inaccurate or misleading information could be held accountable for their actions; a little self-censorship with an eye toward quality control could significantly improve many of their articles, particularly those pertaining to history, politics, and current events.
ok, so McBride claims that "over a million" lines were cribbed? I just ran through all the .c files in the 2.4.18 kernel source -- there are only 2.94 million lines total, including comments (but not including any header files, obviously, so about a wash). McBride is claiming that OVER A THIRD of the kernel has been ripped off from System V, while his company has been distributing Caldera Linux under the GPL for years? Sounds like pretty good fodder for them not taking "reasonable care" of their copyrighted material -- I mean, if over a third of it was ripped off as he claimed, it should have been pretty easy for SCO to spot, yes?
You are falling into the all-too-common fallacy these days (reinforced, unfortunately, by the shareholder lawsuit epidemic) that shareholder value is precisely equal to direct shareholder return. The first thing you learn in Management 101 is that there are two principal objectives to which a board is responsible:
1. Survival -- keeping the company in existence
2. Maximizing shareholder value -- for some definition of "shareholder value"
For example, Thrivent is a Fortune 500 company that is incorporated as a nonprofit: 100% of its proceeds (less allowed carryover) must be spent charitably. To that sort of organization, value maximization is exactly the opposite of what you are suggesting: it is precisely how much you can afford to give away that determines success.
Now, moving back into the Ben and Jerry's realm for a moment, consider that the bulk of Ben and Jerry's shareholders were Vermonters who supported completely the company's philosophy of community involvement because it benefitted them directly, by making Vermont a better place to live -- to them, they were receiving value from the donations in a non-quantitative form. Needless to say, there are certain tax advantages in getting your value that way rather than in dividend form as well!
Unfortunately, a lot of people tend to miss this point (particularly when they compain about taxation) in their personal lives as well; they seem to believe that only by optimizing their own discretionary income can they enhance their quality of life, when quite the contrary is in fact possible. Consider, for example, the net impact of a community filled with Lexus owners, who all agreed that they would drive Toyotas instead of Lexi [plural!?] and invest the difference in community improvements like parks and libraries -- would their quality of life be better or worse?
That said, and circling back to the original point, too much has been made of cash-oriented shareholder value, without empahsizing that a lot of that positive cash emphasis has come at the expense of creating negative shareholder value in other arenas. Consider, for example, the shareholders of the company that opts to use some inferior component as a cost savings -- but then the inferior component fails in ways that cost lives (potentially including some of those same shareholders). Things like quality of workmanship, reduced pollution, and employee satisfaction create types of shareholder value (what Adam Smith referred to as the "invisible hand" when conceiving of modern Capitalism) that the present bottom-line obsession ignores altogether; today's bottom-line-fallacy-based model ceased to be Capitalism before it ever left the barn.
Ah, but (in the US at least) the Constitutional purpose of copyrights is to motivate authors to produce more works -- something that it is relatively unlikely to expect out of someone who has even reached life + 1 day, let alone life + n years. You could conceivably argue that there is some incentive in creating a financial legacy to support your family, at least in the near term, but even that would be handled by a fixed length copyright: if I have a 10 year copyright on something, and I expire tomorrow, my heirs will still have 10 years before it expires; conversely, if I expire nine years from now, leaving my heirs with only a year left on it, then apparently the copyright didn't fulfill its stated purpose of encouraging me to write something between now and then.
You used Courtney Love as an example: do you really think Kurt Cobain would have wanted the kind of fight between her and Dave Grohl over the Nirvana catalog recently, or would he rather that the copyrights expired altogether than to have his former bandmate trying to get his widow declared insane? And taking it to the logical extreme, it is an obscene example of unrepentant greed that the Margaret Mitchell estate continues to reap rewards off of "Gone With the Wind" nearly eighty years after its first publication.
Do I want my loved ones taken care of after I die? Of course I do -- that's why I have life insurance; it to me would be ridiculous to expect that our cultural legacy should be shortchanged in order to line the pockets of my potential great-grandchildren four decades hence.
As the coauthor of a rapidly-becoming-obsolete technology book that's barely more than two years old, I can certainly sympathize regarding royalty checks in the red (I only received one, so far, that actually came with a check attached). Knowing that, how do you feel about significantly reduced copyright terms? Obviously, it would mean your former label would no longer be able to profit off of songs like "At Seventeen", but conversely, having that material in the public domain much more quickly might result in some of the collateral effects on your current material that, as you described in your first article, Baen is doing for authors.
This expiry issue is actually a more critical concern for many in technology, because unlike other, more tangible cultural elements like books or records, a lot of culturally significant digital content (e.g. old video games) has been produced in the technology arena that, by the time its copyrights expire under current law, no one will remember how to (or have the right hardware to) reproduce. Then again, how many people today (a mere decade later, really) still have working phonographs?
It's no secret that Perl 6 is being designed/developed as a radically different (to the point of mutual unintelligibility) language than Perl 4 was a decade ago (and even Perl 5 is today). On top of that, in today's development there are a lot more people a lot more involved in the design (eg. Conway, Sugalski) than there have been historically. So, all that said, has demand from the community caused changes in Perl as a language that you would not have envisioned otherwise or that take it in directions you would rather not have gone in personally?
That the judge found no protected speech content in video games is neither particularly surprising nor disturbing. Why? They are, in effect, a form of commercial speech -- that is, speech whose primary purpose/objective is generating revenue for its creator. Commercial "speech" is held to a much lower protection standard than, say, political speech or intellectual discourse.
His finding here actually helps as a precedent, for example, in court cases hoping to uphold Washington's spam law, or local size/height restrictions on billboards, or state laws restricting telemarketing practices. On the other hand, it still doesn't preclude specific challenges to these sorts of laws being applied to specific games which may, in fact, contain protected speech content; contrast Half-Life with SimEarth in terms of potentially protected content, for example.
Ironically, this may also help the open source gaming community in another way: if you have a body of rulings indicating that source code is speech, and a second body of rulings indicating that video games distributed commercially as object code are not speech, then that is quite a competetive advantage for the openly-distributed-as-source product. If only we could be similarly lucky with operating systems!
Y'all missed the point. What Microsoft is saying is that if you give away a PC that came with a Windows license originally, you have to give away that Windows license along with it; as a practical matter, this means that people won't be giving away PCs with Windows but no license, and trying to keep the license for another PC -- by doing it this way, Microsoft insures that people who DO upgrade have to make a conscious decision to buy a new Windows license, or not to buy one and run another OS instead.
Try it this way: Every machine running an unlicensed copy of Windows is a missed opportunity to have that machine running something else. If the school districts are given the Windows licenses with the machines and choose not to use the licenses (by running something else), even better!
What else is there to say? Cool... Very Cool... Even Steph was impressed! :)
...eerily remind me of "Skynet" from the Terminator movies?
How long before it becomes self-aware, realizes humans are the single biggest threat to its continued existence, and begins scheming to eradicate us?
Personally, I've always been of the opinion that from a technology perspective, the porn websites have been out in front of the rest of the industry (mostly out of necessity). So, I would consider it comparable to, if not possibly better than, other industry experience when evaluating a prospect. Plus, how often as a manager to you get the opportunity to look at porn as part of your job? *grin*
But, I'm not everybody. I tend to hire people (and I've hired four in the past year) based on qualifications, and qualifications alone (although being able to communicate clearly does count as a qualification, so to some extent personality is a factor). Other people and/or organizations might have a problem with it; I would expect that a fair number of the companies, managers, and clients I've done work for over the past several years would, in fact. So, evaluate it like you would evaluate any other position. After all, the flip side is that by some people (hippies, for example), working for a DoD vendor like General Dynamics or Raytheon might be considered a black mark as well. Bottom line is, YMMV. The better question to ask yourself is what kinds of companies you'd like to work for in the future; if your answer consists mainly of the buttoned-down, straight and narrow, you probably should pass, but if it's more of the freewheeling, fast and loose sort, you may want to give the site a whirl.
(y'all already know the tune -- think "7th inning")
It's time to buy some Congressmen,
Not just a few but a crowd:
Spare us the iPods and Gamecubes and crap,
We need to know how to stop a bum rap;
Cause it's vote, vote vote down the bad laws,
They'll vote with whoever will pay --
Only one, two, three bribes will do,
In the Congressional game!
--Princess Leia, in the prologue of the novelization of Star Wars: A New Hope.
My first sysadmin gig (and my first gig in IT as an industry) came about when, one day about 6 years ago, I went in to pay my ISP bill, and was confronted with
Of course, I had a couple things going for me in IT at that time: a M.S. in math (in fact, I had just interviewed for a JuCo faculty position that morning) and some "related" experience (some volunteering I did in grad school, and helping out the IT department at a JuCo I had worked for previously). But the fact was, I went from zero to sysadmin in a matter of minutes; it was increasing the likelihood of something like that happening that led me to move to Dallas at the time in the first place.
So, short answer: play the percentages. Do things that are likely to get your IT skills noticed, and put yourselves in a position where they are likely to be. Look for small companies that aren't going to have as formal of requirements for technical people, and be willing to settle for less money (at least, initally) than your more-formally-prepared counterparts. And don't be fooled into thinking that your age is an obstacle: a lot of these companies have very young demographics, and would perceive someone "older" as bringing much-needed maturity to the table.
(with apologies to Barry White)
Slackware was the first Linux distro I installed, more than 6 years ago. Since then, I've flirted with the GUI-package-oriented distros (Red Hat and Mandrake in particular), acquired disks of several others (tradeshow giveaways and the like), been exposed to Debian on servers someone else installed, but I've come back to Slack, to stay.
Why? Several reasons really:
I think I'll go along with what others have said about this: even if Slackware, by name and/or business, were to go away, there are plenty of people in the Slackware community (myself included) who have the wherewithal, interest, and capability to "roll-our-own" Slack-like distros. I would expect, if it were to happen, to see all sorts of "children of the Slack" proliferate as a result, perhaps none with the singular momentum of the parent, but all with a specific niche to fill.
...for people to come out and lambaste Katz, but it's unusual for me: I prefer to do my Karma Whoring in more meaningful ways, like occasionally posting useful information.
But not this time! Katz, you have clearly gotten in over your head. The non-sequitor upon which this essay is based is an utter disaster. How can you conclude there is ANY relationship at all between a cosmopolitan world-view and acceptance of free trade? I can think of several respected scholars (former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, for one) who firmly believe that the notion of national identities, particularly in business, are passe, but still support the use of tariff mechanisms by nations to protect their domestic social institutions. Read The Work of Nations sometime for insight into Reich's concept of "Strategic Trade."
I realize that the two columns you do here are only a small component of your journalistic work week, but it would behoove you to contemplate that before undertaking an essay on the interrelationship between societal openness and macroeconomics, when you obviously didn't have the opportunity to thoroughly research the macroeconomics piece. What eludes me is how the views of such prominent a figure as Reich could fly under your radar!?
Who else did what I did, running out at lunch after reading this (yes, buying online counts) and buying a copy of Sennett's book The Corrosion of Character? I found it in about five minutes at my local Borders (probably would have been quicker if I hadn't stopped to verify its location in TitleSleuth), picked it up, started previewing it, and had trouble putting it down to check out and come back to work.
Anyone who is at all interested in what we've traded away (and why) for our upward mobility should read this. I find it fascinating -- especially since I almost felt like I was looking in a mirror reading the example in the first chapter.
Oh, it doesn't bother me that they want to deport foreigners, what makes me uneasy is the fact that the want to be able to do it without any evidence of wrongdoing.
Again, go back to my original analogy. If I'm having a party in my house, and I suspect that one of my guests is going to start smashing my china and defacing my wall art, I'm not going to wait until after he's done it before I throw him out.
That said, the underlying economic incentive to have foreigners in this country spending money and being productive is going to keep it from being injudiciously applied. This is one summary power I really don't have an issue with granting the DOJ; it's really not a power grab at all if you start with the underlying assumption that in granting entry visas, the government reserves the right to cancel them at any time, for any reason, with or without notice.
The Justice Department has drafted legislation allowing the U.S. attorney general to lock up foreigners deemed to be terrorist suspects and order them deported without presenting any evidence.
Why is this a problem? America belongs to those of us who are its Citizens. Spontaneous deportation of foreigners is really no different than if someone visiting my home gets unruly and I throw him out.
Let's try not to confuse the issue here. There is a far cry from treading on the theoretical rights of those to whom none are guaranteed, to treading on the real, established and manifested rights of those from whom power is derived.
Then you need to remember that Ben Franklin lived during a period of history where (compared to what we've had) terrorism was the equivalent of an Amish couple throwing old fruit at people from a moving buggy.
Tell that to Guy Fawkes. Had the Gunpowder Plot succeeded, we might very well be carrying on this discussion in French, if at all. Not that Fawkes was any supporter of the French, but it's hard to picture them NOT capitalizing on the results had he been successful.
From the looks of the link, the openac3 project is based at the University of Victoria. While south of the 49th parallel, the last time I checked the University of Victoria was still in Canada.
That said, what is the validity of software patents under CANADIAN law? Anyone (a Canadian IP lawyer, for example) have the answer to that burning question? If they aren't valid in Canada, it would appear that any claims Dolby has that their patent is being infringed by openac3 are pretty much moot.