I sure as hell know I'd pay a fair amount for the chance to be involved in something that interesting.
"Interesting" jobs like that only stay interesting until you are paid to do them. When you get down to the actual work, there is little difference between designing a spacecraft, an aircraft, a car or an engine component. As the complexity of the overall object rises, the amount of impact any one person makes on the project reduces accordingly. Of course, that doesn't stop it being fun to talk about the time you used to work on project X.
I'm sure that they would be able to make use of the salt, but even if they can't this is one pollutant I wouldn't mind being dumped in the sea. The fresh water from the plant would eventually find its way to the sea via the city sewers, so there would be no nett environmental impact.
The people who want them are too rich, well organized and above all persistent. They'll keep hammering away at the legisatures until they get what they want.
Then we just have to hammer harder. The amended text passed by the European Parliament in its first reading was a staggering success for the anti-software patent lobby: it explicitly ruled out the possiblity of patenting software per se.
If we can convince the parliament to stand firm, the worst that can happen will be that the European Commission drop the directive, the situation will remain confused at the national level, and we will have to rely on the courts correctly interpreting article 52 of the European Patent Convention in any dispute about the legality of such patents; the best that can happen is that the directive gets put into law with an explicit statement that software cannot be patented. If this happens, there is absolutely no chance that the directive would get overturned within the foreseeable future.
Interesting stuff. I haven't come across Metanet before now. One definite problem appears at the end of the page, however. The notion that you should be able to prove your (online) identity is probably incompatible with an anonymous network that is intended to antagonize governments. Here in the UK, the police already have draconian powers to force people to (silently) hand over their encryption keys. I have no doubt at all that even more draconian legislation would be introduced to combat something like Metanet; to succeed it would really need to be impossible for the courts to force someone to incriminate themselves.
Who are you to say that my kinky daughter can't be a phone sex intermediary for the blind!
:-)
I wouldn't want to stop your kinky daughter from doing that if she wants! Maybe the right answer is to require phone sex companies to cater for deaf people directly so that they don't need to go through a relay service. Then your daughter could be a full-time phone sex relayer, if she so desires.
Can a TTY user have phone sex, or is this something the deaf shouldn't be allowed to access?
Actually, I think a pretty good case could be made that the TTY users shouldn't have access to phone sex services. Not only is it pointless (they could just use IM or e-mail instead) but it would be unfair to the person relaying the conversation. Would you want your daughter/mother to be relaying phone sex for people?
There are many implicit assumptions evident in the survey questions.
The question that asks whether or not you think it is legal to re-use code for different employers needs another option: "it depends". For instance, code released under the GPL with a former employer's permission is free to be used elsewhere. However, the survey doesn't ask whether or not the code was supposed to be kept confidential.
Try following the download link... SourceForge has apparently decided to pull the program. All you'll get is a 404 Error from whatever mirror you select.
You can still get it from the Belgian mirror. At least, you could before I posted this...
The problem is that removing spammers' rights impacts on the rights of everyone else.
There are times when it is desirable to lie about your name (although here in Scotland you can change your name as often as you like with no fuss!)
A couple of years ago, I sent a response to the UK government's consultation on software patents. If you type my name into google, this response comes up on the first page. Despite the fact that my (former) employer had an opposing view on this issue, this isn't a problem. However, consider the case where my political views might be in direct conflict with some aspect of my employer's business. It is certainly reasonable to assume that there could be views which I would wish to express to the government but do not wish to have on the first page of results when current or future employers type my name into google.
I could, of course, send a response anonymously - but I would expect everyone to understand that anonymous responses are not given the same consideration as signed responses.
I would therefore be faced with the choice of participating in the democratic process on the same terms as everyone else, but potentially harming my career; or reducing my democratic participation in order to avoid such career limitation. Neither option is satisfactory. In this case, it would be perfectly reasonable for me to use a false, but realistic, name.
It is easy to come up with other examples. Sticking with DNS in particular, suppose that I work for a very large company, but wish to set up a campaign against some activity that the company engages in - forced child labour to produce nuclear landmines, or whatever. It would clearly be damaging to my career if my employer ever found out that I was orchestrating the campaign. The ability to obtain a domain name without revealing your true identity to all-comers is something that we should seek to preserve if we really want to protect a healthy democracy.
Or another example. Consider a woman who has been a victim of domestic abuse and has runaway from her abusive husband. Should she be prevented from buying a domain name for fear that he might be able to obtain her address?
It is legitimate to have secrets. It can sometimes be legitimate to lie about who you are.
The subjects of the French Monarchy were allowed to eat cake, yet somebody had to go and chop the king's head off? What for other than to gain essential liberties that we all now take for granted?
The right to use pseudonyms is as important as the right to anonymity./. is a perfect example. Many people don't like responding to ACs despite the fact that they don't know any more about most of the logged-in users. The difference is that pseudonyms allow a degree of continuity. They allow conversations to take place without everyone having to make their real names public - thus allowing significantly livelier (and often more childish, admittedly) debate than would otherwise be the case.
You seem to think that advertising has no affect on you. Is this true?
I've absolutely no idea what in my post gave you that idea, but it does happen to be very true. I tend not to respond at all to advertising. In those few instances where advertisers manage to get a message through to me against my wishes - I actively boycott them. Simple.
and then honest people like you could be redirected to a page that says "Sorry, we only want you to see this if you see advertising as well"
The inference I draw from your post is that you believe that it is somehow dishonest to block ads. Do you really believe that it is theft to go and make a cup of tea while the adverts are on TV, or have I just misunderstood you?
It is actually fairly rare for engineers and senior management to agree on what is beneficial to the company. Engineers are typically interested in doing a good job and consider the long term interests of the company. Senior management typically are interested only in tomorrows stock price.
Don't forget that scientific journals are very, very expensive. One of the main drivers for "Open Access" is that many university libraries can no longer afford to continue paying the subscription fees for all the journals that their users need access to.
Scientists are not professional writers. Writing papers is an essential part of the job, but that is not what researchers are actually paid for. Scientists are paid to do research - publishing papers is just one of the (most important) ways that the research is judged.
There are many people who could benefit significantly from access to scientific journals. For example, many people working in industry could make great use of knowledge of the latest academic developments. In an ideal world, businesses would pay for access to journals, but in practice, they don't. If some of the taxes taken from business by government were used to make access to academic research freely available, everyone would benefit.
The rules vary between different journals, but many of the papers seen on researchers' web pages are pre-prints. It is often the case that journals allow pre-prints to be distributed, but retain all rights to the post-prints which have been through the editorial process.
I think the open access ideals are well worth pursuing, but there is a serious flaw with the "author pays" model.
I now work in a University and have easy access to all the information I could possibly want. I should have no problem publishing work under an author pays model either, although I haven't tried yet.
However, before I started working here, I worked in industry. Getting access to scientific journals was harder than catching moonbeams. The best data we could get came from google and citeseer. Even harder than getting data, was getting management to allow us to publish what we were doing. There was a lot of resistance to giving away "secrets" to the competition. The chance of getting management to allow publication, and to *pay* for it, is non-existent in industry.
To reduce the amount of industrial research that is published would be very detrimental to science. In general, I tend to find industrial papers to be more focussed than academic equivalents - fewer words but more bang for the buck.
Slashdot Mirror
"Interesting" jobs like that only stay interesting until you are paid to do them. When you get down to the actual work, there is little difference between designing a spacecraft, an aircraft, a car or an engine component. As the complexity of the overall object rises, the amount of impact any one person makes on the project reduces accordingly. Of course, that doesn't stop it being fun to talk about the time you used to work on project X.
I'm sure that they would be able to make use of the salt, but even if they can't this is one pollutant I wouldn't mind being dumped in the sea. The fresh water from the plant would eventually find its way to the sea via the city sewers, so there would be no nett environmental impact.
Then we just have to hammer harder. The amended text passed by the European Parliament in its first reading was a staggering success for the anti-software patent lobby: it explicitly ruled out the possiblity of patenting software per se.
If we can convince the parliament to stand firm, the worst that can happen will be that the European Commission drop the directive, the situation will remain confused at the national level, and we will have to rely on the courts correctly interpreting article 52 of the European Patent Convention in any dispute about the legality of such patents; the best that can happen is that the directive gets put into law with an explicit statement that software cannot be patented. If this happens, there is absolutely no chance that the directive would get overturned within the foreseeable future.
There is still everything to fight for.
Interesting stuff. I haven't come across Metanet before now. One definite problem appears at the end of the page, however. The notion that you should be able to prove your (online) identity is probably incompatible with an anonymous network that is intended to antagonize governments. Here in the UK, the police already have draconian powers to force people to (silently) hand over their encryption keys. I have no doubt at all that even more draconian legislation would be introduced to combat something like Metanet; to succeed it would really need to be impossible for the courts to force someone to incriminate themselves.
I wouldn't want to stop your kinky daughter from doing that if she wants! Maybe the right answer is to require phone sex companies to cater for deaf people directly so that they don't need to go through a relay service. Then your daughter could be a full-time phone sex relayer, if she so desires.
Actually, I think a pretty good case could be made that the TTY users shouldn't have access to phone sex services. Not only is it pointless (they could just use IM or e-mail instead) but it would be unfair to the person relaying the conversation. Would you want your daughter/mother to be relaying phone sex for people?
login: playfairslashdot@yahoo.no
password: apples
$ md5sum playfair-0.2.tar.gz
4645fa4753a3fb50521fa8750e9932a2 playfair-0.2.tar.gz
But they don't always do it well (164 %)
The question that asks whether or not you think it is legal to re-use code for different employers needs another option: "it depends". For instance, code released under the GPL with a former employer's permission is free to be used elsewhere. However, the survey doesn't ask whether or not the code was supposed to be kept confidential.
You can still get it from the Belgian mirror. At least, you could before I posted this ...
A couple of years ago, I sent a response to the UK government's consultation on software patents. If you type my name into google, this response comes up on the first page. Despite the fact that my (former) employer had an opposing view on this issue, this isn't a problem. However, consider the case where my political views might be in direct conflict with some aspect of my employer's business. It is certainly reasonable to assume that there could be views which I would wish to express to the government but do not wish to have on the first page of results when current or future employers type my name into google.
I could, of course, send a response anonymously - but I would expect everyone to understand that anonymous responses are not given the same consideration as signed responses.
I would therefore be faced with the choice of participating in the democratic process on the same terms as everyone else, but potentially harming my career; or reducing my democratic participation in order to avoid such career limitation. Neither option is satisfactory. In this case, it would be perfectly reasonable for me to use a false, but realistic, name.
It is easy to come up with other examples. Sticking with DNS in particular, suppose that I work for a very large company, but wish to set up a campaign against some activity that the company engages in - forced child labour to produce nuclear landmines, or whatever. It would clearly be damaging to my career if my employer ever found out that I was orchestrating the campaign. The ability to obtain a domain name without revealing your true identity to all-comers is something that we should seek to preserve if we really want to protect a healthy democracy.
Or another example. Consider a woman who has been a victim of domestic abuse and has runaway from her abusive husband. Should she be prevented from buying a domain name for fear that he might be able to obtain her address?
It is legitimate to have secrets. It can sometimes be legitimate to lie about who you are.
The subjects of the French Monarchy were allowed to eat cake, yet somebody had to go and chop the king's head off? What for other than to gain essential liberties that we all now take for granted?
The right to use pseudonyms is as important as the right to anonymity. /. is a perfect example. Many people don't like responding to ACs despite the fact that they don't know any more about most of the logged-in users. The difference is that pseudonyms allow a degree of continuity. They allow conversations to take place without everyone having to make their real names public - thus allowing significantly livelier (and often more childish, admittedly) debate than would otherwise be the case.
I've absolutely no idea what in my post gave you that idea, but it does happen to be very true. I tend not to respond at all to advertising. In those few instances where advertisers manage to get a message through to me against my wishes - I actively boycott them. Simple.
are they going to combine this search technology with geographical IP look-up so that we can all find our nearest Natalie Portman look-alikes?
The inference I draw from your post is that you believe that it is somehow dishonest to block ads. Do you really believe that it is theft to go and make a cup of tea while the adverts are on TV, or have I just misunderstood you?
Neither a spell checker nor a grammar checker would have caught that error.
Don't forget that scientific journals are very, very expensive. One of the main drivers for "Open Access" is that many university libraries can no longer afford to continue paying the subscription fees for all the journals that their users need access to.
Scientists are not professional writers. Writing papers is an essential part of the job, but that is not what researchers are actually paid for. Scientists are paid to do research - publishing papers is just one of the (most important) ways that the research is judged.
There are many people who could benefit significantly from access to scientific journals. For example, many people working in industry could make great use of knowledge of the latest academic developments. In an ideal world, businesses would pay for access to journals, but in practice, they don't. If some of the taxes taken from business by government were used to make access to academic research freely available, everyone would benefit.
The rules vary between different journals, but many of the papers seen on researchers' web pages are pre-prints. It is often the case that journals allow pre-prints to be distributed, but retain all rights to the post-prints which have been through the editorial process.
I now work in a University and have easy access to all the information I could possibly want. I should have no problem publishing work under an author pays model either, although I haven't tried yet.
However, before I started working here, I worked in industry. Getting access to scientific journals was harder than catching moonbeams. The best data we could get came from google and citeseer. Even harder than getting data, was getting management to allow us to publish what we were doing. There was a lot of resistance to giving away "secrets" to the competition. The chance of getting management to allow publication, and to *pay* for it, is non-existent in industry.
To reduce the amount of industrial research that is published would be very detrimental to science. In general, I tend to find industrial papers to be more focussed than academic equivalents - fewer words but more bang for the buck.
They don't have to compete with Microsoft Office.
07734, you can type the names of oil companies into your calculator as well: 710.77345, 710.0553
The story seem credible up until that part :o)