I believe what the poster was saying was not that a 4.0 GPA necesarilly was the only qualification one needed to be hired, but rather that this institution had a specific rule against hiring anyone who had achieved such success. While I may not hire you because you have a 4.0 GPA, I certainly would not let your 4.0 GPA stop me from hiring you. As to your comment on banks.... I don't think he was talking about a teller or even branch manager type position here. Certainly those do not require great skill or smarts (Well, branch manager might, I really don't know what their responsibilities are). I think he was refering to high skill jobs like broker (You do realise that banks invest your money rather heavilly right? Where do you think that your interest comes from? They make loans and invest in other areas.), or perhaps a tech position (would you really want an idiot running Bank One's national computer network if you kept your money there?)
I should really stop feeding the trolls. Afirmative action is a case of what my 9th grade civics teacher called the marble cake theory of government. The government does not say "You there, private business, I am going to regulate your hiring practices, right down to the percentages". They can and have made antidiscrimination laws, but afirmitive action is not covered by criminal or civil laws, it is economics. The government has lots of money. They often choose to invest some of that money in private enterprize. They also choose to buy things from private enterprize. The basic tenant of afirmative action is: "Follow these rules or we will not give you money. We will not give you grants (Bam! All the universities fall into line.), we will not buy your products (Slam! There goes all the major manufactering companies.), and we not use your services (Wham! there goes everybody else.)". Most businesses, realizing that even if they do not work for the government today they may want to do so in the future, fell into line. Hence the government imposes a "law" that is not really a law. That is also how they get the states to impose laws. Legal drinking age is a state mandanted affair. Here in Louisiana it was 18 until about 4 years ago (long after the rest of the country changed), because the state finally realized that it really needed those federal highway dollars that were being witheld for our lack of compliance with federal standards. Congress never made a law that said "You have to be 21 to drink in this country" they made one that said "States should madate a 21 year old drinking age or forfiet x% of their federal highway funds." My civics book called it the marble cake theory because it basically allows the feds to make rules without making laws (they premete the whole cake, as opposed to the layer cake model which has the feds at the top, and the states (and business) as a lower but distict layer). Hence Constitutional law (which theoretically only governs gov't) seeps into the everyday life of a business through the marvel of economics. Wow, I can't believe i actually remember some of this stuff.
Mostly because AT&T is not provideing service to these merchents. They are providing service to the customers of the merchant. What is AT&T going to do, start sending out unsolicited bills?
100 Visits By AT&T Broadband customers- $100
Merchant- Crumble--- Chuck.
What does AT&T do now? Can't sue them, they never signed a contract. Could block their site, but you block enough merchent sites (especially big ones like Amazon) and suddenly your customers don't want to use you anymore. The plan as presented in these articles doesn't make any sense. Someone must have misunderstood.
I also have Telocity in New Orleans (Bell South country). I love them. They are server friendly, Unix friendly, and give me a static IP. There was a problem with my inital install that they could not figure out (not at my end), but since then, I have had good uptime (better than the ISDN at work). I don't know how their service is (I've only called twice, and both times it was a verifiable network outage, very short though), but you can't beat the static IP. I run a web server and mail server from my house. I pay a touch more than I would have through Bell South, but they would have given me a dynamic addy, and acted offended that I was going to share access (This policy has apparently changed though, I hooked a client up with them and they provided the router/DHCP server). Telocity, on the other hand, advertises that they don't mind servers on their accounts. The modem actually came with UNIX instruction (Not that there was anything to it, but I was suprized to see that). All in all I am a staisfied customer (and my wife, whom I had to brow beat into letting me have it, now swears she will never live anywhere that does not have DSL).
I got a client up and running on BellSouth's DSL, and had no problems. The tech was knowledgeable, and the one foul up in the router documentation was quickly corrected byt their first line tech support (This was a business install of ADSL, a new service they offer that comes with a nonstandard (for them) four port router/DHCP server). As far I can tell they haven't had a single Bell South related problem.
Having read the actual e-mail in a previous post, I have to wonder what kind of TWIT wrote that article. My high school paper held to higher standards of journalism
but if you just encrypt the traffic between servers, you still know the traffic took place.
Actually this is only true to an extent. You know that earthlink.com sent traffic to hotmail.com, but if that traffic is encrypted, you have no real idea of which of Earthlink's millions of users sent mail to which of Hotmail's millions of users. Since Earthlink and Hotmail proabably exchange a million SMTP transactions a day, this inofrmation would be all but useless ("Well, we know that person A has account with X ISP and person has one with Y ISP, so they must be exchanging LOTS of traffic with each other")
I know I'm feeding the trolls, but here goes. In very simple words: People are concerned that the FBI might make the carnivore system do things it is not supposed to do. With an open source system, everybody will be able to look and see exactly what the the system is doing (in real time, because the admins that install the system will be able to look at it), and make usre that it is only doing what it is supposed to, no more, no less. This does not make the system less secure, it makes it doing what it's supposed to in a verifiable way. Theoretically this makes everyone happy. The FBI gets to look at e-mail of suspects as long as it has the proper warrants, everyone else gets to know that the FBI is ONLY looking at the e-mail of the people it has aquired warrants for. No one (other than a few trolls or zealots) has suggested that the FBI has no right to view e-mail in course of a criminal investigation with the proper warrants, people are simply pointing out the twin facts that:
a) The FBI COULD use this black box system to do more than it is supposed to (This is ithe nature of black boxes), and
b) The FBI has demostrated that it is not always a trustworthy entity when it comes to personal privacy.
See, no bad hackers want to make the world safe for pedophiles or terroists, people just want the checks and balances in place to ensure that no one is violating the fourth amendment gaurentee against unreasonable seaches.
Why dont they just do what most Top Secret military facilities do and have seperate "public" and "private" network terminals? No access to the public internet for mission critical systems, but have a few public terminals that can be used for communications both ways
One of the major points of the article is that this is not the case. INS and immigration are overloaded, and good people are waiting the whole six years fro a green card and not getting one. Not because they shouldn't get one, not because they don't want one, not even because the corps they work for aren't trying to get them one. The system is badly broken. Congress basically said "come on an H1B, it has a six year limit, but that is plenty of time to get a green card". People came and INS said "AHHH!! Look at all the people!!" and fell down on the job. Now these immigrants lured here by the promise of a new life (which many of them actually built), now suddenly find that thru no fault of their own they must give it all back. Meanwhile congress says "Whoops.. Maybe we mispoke ourselves.. sorry... don't let the door hit you on the butt as you leave."
It should be pointed out here that the last message posted on the Kuro5hin site before they started the countdown indirectly asked/. to post it when they came back up. Besides, they need to get used to traffic, I think a lot of people (myself included) "discoverd" them due to their problems... I found that I rather like the site (Other than the/. effect of course)
Actually, I think he would take on common carrier status like any ISP. It wouldn't work in the case presented here though (at least not the way I read teh article) since the Michigan law seems to be about any computers in libraries, not just those purchased by the library.
Not that I am supporting the orignial poster here, but your statement lays out the error in this entire "Must protect the children" arguement. As a parent, you cannot always be with your children. This is very true.
To get money, we have to go to a place we call workplace where no kids are allowed and we cannot be with you all the time. That's why we let those nice people at the daycare centre to take care of you during the day. It doesn't mean we don't love you.
It is your responsibility to make sure that your children are properly supervised. Day care center.. Babysitter.. whatever. You put your child in the care of someone you presumably trust (if you don't trust them, why are you leaving your child with them? Find someone you do trust.) It now becomes that person or organization's job to monitor the child's activty. It is not the library's responsibility, it is not the ISP's responsibility, it is yours, or your designee's (who we assume agreed to take on this responsibility). The arguement that "We can't be with our children all the time" doesn't really hold. If you can't be with your child, then someone you trust should be. Now, after a certain point we let children be by themselves... presumably this is because we now trust them to be their own care provider/supervisor. If, at that point you still don't feel that your child is capable of not reading p0rn in the damn library, then the problem is either with the values the child holds (instilled either by you or your trusted alternates), or with the child's lack of maturity (in which case, they obviously still need supervision. I bet a week or two of total supervison would cure most 16 year olds of their inability to control themselves.) In neither case is the problem with the library's lack of filtering software.
What if I just replace the proprietary executeable with a perl script that does whatever the Hell I want it to, then calls the proprietary binary (Which I moved to a differnt directory) and replaces itself with the old binary destroying all the evidence? I could even pack the script with enough data to make it the same size as th original binary. Of course doing a hash would reveal the difference, but that would work with a replaced open source binary too./P.
Apple can spend their advertizing dollars where ever they want, but not spending them at the rumors sites would be stupid. Further, trying to stop the rumor sites is stupid. Consider:
1) People that use Macs are often fanatics (I am not using the word in a bad way, I simply mean that people that buy Macs tend to be "Mac owners" people that buy PC's (with a number of exception) tend to be "people that have computers"). They actually are interested in their platform above and beyond its usefulness as a tool.
2) Because of this they tend to hang around on Mac sites (rumor based or otherwise). They enjoy these sites, they like to learn about their platform.
3) By carrying out this threat Apple is doing three things (Well, more than that, but I choose to list these three): Pissing off the people that own, run and work on the sites, most of whom are Mac fans and users, but may well turn against a company that repeatedly treats them like crap. Pissing off users who will have to either watch their favorite sites cave and become less interesting or stand up and loose money, all because of a company that both the user and the site try to support. Loosing advertiseing eyeballs in a group that is most suseptable to buying their product.
So basically they are choosing a route that decreases the value of their marketing and risks alienating some of their greatest supporters in an effort to control rumors, which as often as not serve as advertising in and of themselves. Do we see a hole in this theory?
What about expert agents located on the local machine? It would not improve "Search Engine" accuracy per se, but it would eliminate some of the privacy issues. The agent would gather the information about the user, but would not display the information to the internet at large. Instead, the user would fire up his agent, and the agent would fire up the search engine. The agent could then filter the search engine results locally (with sufficently high speed access, it could go to each site and make evaluations, otherwise it could get special info blurbs on each site that matches the initial query.) Revenue stream could be a subscription model. I'd be willing to pay twenty bucks a month for a really superior search agent/search engine combo.
If this diamond film could be produced cheaply enough (and the article make no mention of whether that is possible), I believe the intention is to use it as microscopic moving parts, in applications where silicon wears to quickly. Once it became possilbe to create microscopic engines, the "compelling reason" would exist.
People have already
begun doing this and encoding movies into Divex or 3ivex so they can be downloaded faster. Face it, the whole purpose behind DeCSS is
to make piracy a lot easier.
Actually that is simply a side effect. No one, including the MPAA, has successfully proved that copying DVD's was the intended purpose of DeCSS, and no one has proved that it has been done. In fact, the only reason DeCSS is Illegal is that the DMCA made crytographic circumvention, even for fair use purposes, illegal. That is why the constitiutionality (sp?)of the law is being challenged. By your logic, VCR's and photocopy machines should be illegal also, since they make it possible to reproduce copywrited matirial.
Unless you can think of a way
on
Lawsuits Suck
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to keep the real world out, I'd get used to it. I read a lot of Slashdot posts that boil down to "Why don't we just make the Internet back into what it was?" The answer is: We can't. Of the millions (billions?) of people on the internet, only a small fraction really care about anything beyond whether their e-mail and AIM work. Of that small fraction, at least half corporate types who lean towards the views of their company and paycheck. Of the half that are left a good number think that some real world influence on the net is positive (I happen to like being able to buy stuff online.) Since last I checked it is pretty much impossible to throw all of these people off the 'Net, we have to deal with the fact that the real world is now firmly entrenched and not leaving. We have to choices:
1) Absorb the good stuff and fight the bad stuff that is coming in. (Yes, that means we WILL lose some fights against the bad stuff, but life works that way.), or:
2) Stick our heads in the sand and loose everything while we hang out in ever more isolated enclaves that will eventually be destroyed.
People do not forget who and what was originally here, they don't care. We're like the indians being sent further and further west, except we don't even shoot back. (No, I am not talking about literal armed resistance.) Whining about how they are ruining our place isn't going to stop it from being ruined. We can't make things like they were (and I for one would not particuarlly want to) so we need to take a hand in how they will be.
Yes, I expect people to provide content for free...Snip...I expect musicians to provide music, mp3.com. I expect sites like this to provide news.
Excepting academic sites, usually hosted by Universities, which make money off students and the research they produce, how do you see these sites that provide these services paying for themselves? Accepting for the moment that the propietors of the sites don't want to get fantastically weathy off of them (Some or even most probably do, but we'll leave that alone for now), it costs a fortune just to keep a high traffic site running. Anywhere from dozens to hundreds of powerful computers, a high speed access line (probably at least two for redundency), paying people to program and monitor the site (don't tell me about free software here, a site like Slashdot or Google has to be monitored 24/7. I know very few few people who will answer a call at midnight to fix broken code RIGHT NOW! out of altruism.) These are pure web players here, they don't produce anything except "free" content. How do you propose they pay for the service they give you, much less make a profit?
Actually when you are talking about critical servers, the answer to any of your questions is "Call the Onsite SSE, who will be there in five minutes" My mother in law used to be onsight Cray support for a DOD installation. Her job was to sit around and wait for things to break. When they did she fixed them (They had parts on hand to rebuild the computer from the ground up) and then waited again. The government paid SGI who in turn paid her and a team of several others to sit there and hope nothing goes wrong. Not that I disagree with you in theory, but I can assure you that critical DOD servers spend very little time waiting for the vendor.
IMHO, you let the librarian decide. If you don't like it, then maybe you need to be careful picking your librarians.
There is still a disconnect here. I don't make librian hiring decsions. My theoretical Wiccan lady doesn't make librarian hiring descions. These descsions are made by politicians who are going to cave at the first sign that a majority of people support blocking some unpopular topic (like Wicca or homosexuality in the Bible Belt), or even that a vocal minority of people support the blocking. The reason that the first amendment exists is to protect the expression of unpopular minority opinions. I think that when it comes to censorship the old adage of "Give them an inch, they will take a mile." is well proven. I have looked at the banned book lists of several school and library systems, and there is some pretty innocuaous stuff in there. I never made the claim that the first amendment grants the right to free commercial porn in libraries. I, in fact, presented a viable solution to just that problem. One of the nice things about commercial porn sites is that they tend to make their own nature very clear even from a distance. Yes, librarians do already exact quite a bit of control over the collections of most libraries, but this is a passive control. No one is going out and actually blocking anything, they can simply have limited budgets, and make purchases based on their own tastes and interests which they project onto others. What you are talking about is a more active form of control. The information is out there and freely available, and you are preventing someone from reaching it. The one is like a mother telling a child that s/he cannot have a novel because the money would be better spent on a textbook (The parent is making a judgemnt call based on cost ratios and the values s/he holds), the other is like telling a child that they may not have a free copy of Anne Has Two Mothers (Or whatever the name of that oft banned book is) because it would be bad for the child to have it. There are already laws in most states against displaying pornographic materials in a public place. Put the terminals where the librarians can see them, and let them enforce those laws. I stand by my statements that censorware is:
a) To powerful, and to tempting a power for many censors, and
b) To stupid in it's current incarnations to be trusted with the important job of making libraries true store houses of knowledge.
This is all of course IMHO, but I think that many courts would agree with me.
You should put them in the hands of everyone who grants access to the web (I buy my kids a web browser, the local community funds a library, a mosque provides a "safe" browsing environment for those who share their moral outlook).
Sorry. Gotta disagree. There should absolutely not be filters installed in local libraries. The Mosque example is fine, that is a religious establishment and should therefore be under the control of religious authorities. I may disagree with those authorities, but it's their Mosque. If I don't like it I can leave. Libraries are a differnt matter. They are publicly funded and serve one purpose. Research. A filtered net access is contrary to this goal in several ways:
1. Formost is the fact that "Community standards" are pretty broad things. Some parents object to their children being able to access information on Wicca. Should that be blocked? (if answer=="Yes" println "Irate Wiccan: You are blocking information that I and my children use for our religion"; elseif answer=="No" println "Irate right wing Christian: You are exposing my children to cults and Satanism";) While we could probably all agree that besiality sites should be blocked, human nature is such that once blocking begins, it will quickly become standard to add other "Offenesive" topics to the list. "Well we already block porn, and most of the community feel that sex education does not belong on the web either. Let's just add that."
2. Filtering software, as has often been pointed out in this forum, sucks. It is unacceptable, in a place dedicated to reserch, that I might be unable to reach information on breast cancer or AIDs because it contains "bad" words. What may be an acceptable crippling for home use ("Mom, the filter is blocking an article I need for school, can you turn it off?") is unreasonable in a publicly funded store house for knowledge ("Excuse Mr. Overworked Buerocrat, but if it's not to much trouble, and when you are done helping all these other people, could you modify the filtering software to allow the folllowing list of benign sites, which I understand you will have to veiw and check out before making any changes? I'll just sit here and wait a few hours, thank you.")
3. The question of what level of filtering is appropriate is unanswerable. Should we treat the computers like young children will be using them? Like teenagers will be? Obviously some things approriate to teenagers are not appropriate to ten year olds. Who should we cater to? If we cater to teenagers, then you are limiting adults and not really protecting small children. If you cater to small children then you are limiting your web access to a fraction of the sites on the net, and dooming library employees to a Hell of making exceptions to the rules for special cases.
The simple way to monitor library internet access is to simply put the computers where the librarian can see them. If someone does something truely offensive, they can be ejected. Filtering software should not be placed in libraries. They are publicly fund (hence covered by the first amendment) and their primary purpose (the pursuit of knowledge) would be critically hampered by the crap most of these companies are peddling.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe what the poster was saying was not that a 4.0 GPA necesarilly was the only qualification one needed to be hired, but rather that this institution had a specific rule against hiring anyone who had achieved such success. While I may not hire you because you have a 4.0 GPA, I certainly would not let your 4.0 GPA stop me from hiring you. As to your comment on banks.... I don't think he was talking about a teller or even branch manager type position here. Certainly those do not require great skill or smarts (Well, branch manager might, I really don't know what their responsibilities are). I think he was refering to high skill jobs like broker (You do realise that banks invest your money rather heavilly right? Where do you think that your interest comes from? They make loans and invest in other areas.), or perhaps a tech position (would you really want an idiot running Bank One's national computer network if you kept your money there?)
I should really stop feeding the trolls. Afirmative action is a case of what my 9th grade civics teacher called the marble cake theory of government. The government does not say "You there, private business, I am going to regulate your hiring practices, right down to the percentages". They can and have made antidiscrimination laws, but afirmitive action is not covered by criminal or civil laws, it is economics. The government has lots of money. They often choose to invest some of that money in private enterprize. They also choose to buy things from private enterprize. The basic tenant of afirmative action is: "Follow these rules or we will not give you money. We will not give you grants (Bam! All the universities fall into line.), we will not buy your products (Slam! There goes all the major manufactering companies.), and we not use your services (Wham! there goes everybody else.)". Most businesses, realizing that even if they do not work for the government today they may want to do so in the future, fell into line. Hence the government imposes a "law" that is not really a law. That is also how they get the states to impose laws. Legal drinking age is a state mandanted affair. Here in Louisiana it was 18 until about 4 years ago (long after the rest of the country changed), because the state finally realized that it really needed those federal highway dollars that were being witheld for our lack of compliance with federal standards. Congress never made a law that said "You have to be 21 to drink in this country" they made one that said "States should madate a 21 year old drinking age or forfiet x% of their federal highway funds." My civics book called it the marble cake theory because it basically allows the feds to make rules without making laws (they premete the whole cake, as opposed to the layer cake model which has the feds at the top, and the states (and business) as a lower but distict layer). Hence Constitutional law (which theoretically only governs gov't) seeps into the everyday life of a business through the marvel of economics. Wow, I can't believe i actually remember some of this stuff.
Mostly because AT&T is not provideing service to these merchents. They are providing service to the customers of the merchant. What is AT&T going to do, start sending out unsolicited bills?
100 Visits By AT&T Broadband customers- $100
Merchant- Crumble--- Chuck.
What does AT&T do now? Can't sue them, they never signed a contract. Could block their site, but you block enough merchent sites (especially big ones like Amazon) and suddenly your customers don't want to use you anymore. The plan as presented in these articles doesn't make any sense. Someone must have misunderstood.
I also have Telocity in New Orleans (Bell South country). I love them. They are server friendly, Unix friendly, and give me a static IP. There was a problem with my inital install that they could not figure out (not at my end), but since then, I have had good uptime (better than the ISDN at work). I don't know how their service is (I've only called twice, and both times it was a verifiable network outage, very short though), but you can't beat the static IP. I run a web server and mail server from my house. I pay a touch more than I would have through Bell South, but they would have given me a dynamic addy, and acted offended that I was going to share access (This policy has apparently changed though, I hooked a client up with them and they provided the router/DHCP server). Telocity, on the other hand, advertises that they don't mind servers on their accounts. The modem actually came with UNIX instruction (Not that there was anything to it, but I was suprized to see that). All in all I am a staisfied customer (and my wife, whom I had to brow beat into letting me have it, now swears she will never live anywhere that does not have DSL).
I got a client up and running on BellSouth's DSL, and had no problems. The tech was knowledgeable, and the one foul up in the router documentation was quickly corrected byt their first line tech support (This was a business install of ADSL, a new service they offer that comes with a nonstandard (for them) four port router/DHCP server). As far I can tell they haven't had a single Bell South related problem.
Umm .. the fact that a EULA isn't a leagally binding contract? (Except in UTICA states)
Having read the actual e-mail in a previous post, I have to wonder what kind of TWIT wrote that article. My high school paper held to higher standards of journalism
but if you just encrypt the traffic between servers, you still know the traffic took place.
Actually this is only true to an extent. You know that earthlink.com sent traffic to hotmail.com, but if that traffic is encrypted, you have no real idea of which of Earthlink's millions of users sent mail to which of Hotmail's millions of users. Since Earthlink and Hotmail proabably exchange a million SMTP transactions a day, this inofrmation would be all but useless ("Well, we know that person A has account with X ISP and person has one with Y ISP, so they must be exchanging LOTS of traffic with each other")
I know I'm feeding the trolls, but here goes. In very simple words: People are concerned that the FBI might make the carnivore system do things it is not supposed to do. With an open source system, everybody will be able to look and see exactly what the the system is doing (in real time, because the admins that install the system will be able to look at it), and make usre that it is only doing what it is supposed to, no more, no less. This does not make the system less secure, it makes it doing what it's supposed to in a verifiable way. Theoretically this makes everyone happy. The FBI gets to look at e-mail of suspects as long as it has the proper warrants, everyone else gets to know that the FBI is ONLY looking at the e-mail of the people it has aquired warrants for. No one (other than a few trolls or zealots) has suggested that the FBI has no right to view e-mail in course of a criminal investigation with the proper warrants, people are simply pointing out the twin facts that:
a) The FBI COULD use this black box system to do more than it is supposed to (This is ithe nature of black boxes), and
b) The FBI has demostrated that it is not always a trustworthy entity when it comes to personal privacy.
See, no bad hackers want to make the world safe for pedophiles or terroists, people just want the checks and balances in place to ensure that no one is violating the fourth amendment gaurentee against unreasonable seaches.
Why dont they just do what most Top Secret military facilities do and have seperate "public" and "private" network terminals? No access to the public internet for mission critical systems, but have a few public terminals that can be used for communications both ways
One of the major points of the article is that this is not the case. INS and immigration are overloaded, and good people are waiting the whole six years fro a green card and not getting one. Not because they shouldn't get one, not because they don't want one, not even because the corps they work for aren't trying to get them one. The system is badly broken. Congress basically said "come on an H1B, it has a six year limit, but that is plenty of time to get a green card". People came and INS said "AHHH!! Look at all the people!!" and fell down on the job. Now these immigrants lured here by the promise of a new life (which many of them actually built), now suddenly find that thru no fault of their own they must give it all back. Meanwhile congress says "Whoops.. Maybe we mispoke ourselves.. sorry... don't let the door hit you on the butt as you leave."
It should be pointed out here that the last message posted on the Kuro5hin site before they started the countdown indirectly asked /. to post it when they came back up. Besides, they need to get used to traffic, I think a lot of people (myself included) "discoverd" them due to their problems... I found that I rather like the site (Other than the /. effect of course)
Actually, I think he would take on common carrier status like any ISP. It wouldn't work in the case presented here though (at least not the way I read teh article) since the Michigan law seems to be about any computers in libraries, not just those purchased by the library.
Not that I am supporting the orignial poster here, but your statement lays out the error in this entire "Must protect the children" arguement. As a parent, you cannot always be with your children. This is very true.
To get money, we have to go to a place we call workplace where no kids are allowed and we cannot be with you all the time. That's why we let those nice people at the daycare centre to take care of you during the day. It doesn't mean we don't love you.
It is your responsibility to make sure that your children are properly supervised. Day care center.. Babysitter.. whatever. You put your child in the care of someone you presumably trust (if you don't trust them, why are you leaving your child with them? Find someone you do trust.) It now becomes that person or organization's job to monitor the child's activty. It is not the library's responsibility, it is not the ISP's responsibility, it is yours, or your designee's (who we assume agreed to take on this responsibility). The arguement that "We can't be with our children all the time" doesn't really hold. If you can't be with your child, then someone you trust should be. Now, after a certain point we let children be by themselves... presumably this is because we now trust them to be their own care provider/supervisor. If, at that point you still don't feel that your child is capable of not reading p0rn in the damn library, then the problem is either with the values the child holds (instilled either by you or your trusted alternates), or with the child's lack of maturity (in which case, they obviously still need supervision. I bet a week or two of total supervison would cure most 16 year olds of their inability to control themselves.) In neither case is the problem with the library's lack of filtering software.
What if I just replace the proprietary executeable with a perl script that does whatever the Hell I want it to, then calls the proprietary binary (Which I moved to a differnt directory) and replaces itself with the old binary destroying all the evidence? I could even pack the script with enough data to make it the same size as th original binary. Of course doing a hash would reveal the difference, but that would work with a replaced open source binary too./P.
Apple can spend their advertizing dollars where ever they want, but not spending them at the rumors sites would be stupid. Further, trying to stop the rumor sites is stupid. Consider:
1) People that use Macs are often fanatics (I am not using the word in a bad way, I simply mean that people that buy Macs tend to be "Mac owners" people that buy PC's (with a number of exception) tend to be "people that have computers"). They actually are interested in their platform above and beyond its usefulness as a tool.
2) Because of this they tend to hang around on Mac sites (rumor based or otherwise). They enjoy these sites, they like to learn about their platform.
3) By carrying out this threat Apple is doing three things (Well, more than that, but I choose to list these three): Pissing off the people that own, run and work on the sites, most of whom are Mac fans and users, but may well turn against a company that repeatedly treats them like crap. Pissing off users who will have to either watch their favorite sites cave and become less interesting or stand up and loose money, all because of a company that both the user and the site try to support. Loosing advertiseing eyeballs in a group that is most suseptable to buying their product.
So basically they are choosing a route that decreases the value of their marketing and risks alienating some of their greatest supporters in an effort to control rumors, which as often as not serve as advertising in and of themselves. Do we see a hole in this theory?
Ok, I'll bite. How is replacing a program with a trojan on an open source system any easier than doing so on a close sourced system?
What about expert agents located on the local machine? It would not improve "Search Engine" accuracy per se, but it would eliminate some of the privacy issues. The agent would gather the information about the user, but would not display the information to the internet at large. Instead, the user would fire up his agent, and the agent would fire up the search engine. The agent could then filter the search engine results locally (with sufficently high speed access, it could go to each site and make evaluations, otherwise it could get special info blurbs on each site that matches the initial query.) Revenue stream could be a subscription model. I'd be willing to pay twenty bucks a month for a really superior search agent /search engine combo.
If this diamond film could be produced cheaply enough (and the article make no mention of whether that is possible), I believe the intention is to use it as microscopic moving parts, in applications where silicon wears to quickly. Once it became possilbe to create microscopic engines, the "compelling reason" would exist.
People have already begun doing this and encoding movies into Divex or 3ivex so they can be downloaded faster. Face it, the whole purpose behind DeCSS is to make piracy a lot easier.
Actually that is simply a side effect. No one, including the MPAA, has successfully proved that copying DVD's was the intended purpose of DeCSS, and no one has proved that it has been done. In fact, the only reason DeCSS is Illegal is that the DMCA made crytographic circumvention, even for fair use purposes, illegal. That is why the constitiutionality (sp?)of the law is being challenged. By your logic, VCR's and photocopy machines should be illegal also, since they make it possible to reproduce copywrited matirial.
to keep the real world out, I'd get used to it. I read a lot of Slashdot posts that boil down to "Why don't we just make the Internet back into what it was?" The answer is: We can't. Of the millions (billions?) of people on the internet, only a small fraction really care about anything beyond whether their e-mail and AIM work. Of that small fraction, at least half corporate types who lean towards the views of their company and paycheck. Of the half that are left a good number think that some real world influence on the net is positive (I happen to like being able to buy stuff online.) Since last I checked it is pretty much impossible to throw all of these people off the 'Net, we have to deal with the fact that the real world is now firmly entrenched and not leaving. We have to choices:
1) Absorb the good stuff and fight the bad stuff that is coming in. (Yes, that means we WILL lose some fights against the bad stuff, but life works that way.), or:
2) Stick our heads in the sand and loose everything while we hang out in ever more isolated enclaves that will eventually be destroyed.
People do not forget who and what was originally here, they don't care. We're like the indians being sent further and further west, except we don't even shoot back. (No, I am not talking about literal armed resistance.) Whining about how they are ruining our place isn't going to stop it from being ruined. We can't make things like they were (and I for one would not particuarlly want to) so we need to take a hand in how they will be.
Yes, I expect people to provide content for free...Snip...I expect musicians to provide music, mp3.com. I expect sites like this to provide news.
Excepting academic sites, usually hosted by Universities, which make money off students and the research they produce, how do you see these sites that provide these services paying for themselves? Accepting for the moment that the propietors of the sites don't want to get fantastically weathy off of them (Some or even most probably do, but we'll leave that alone for now), it costs a fortune just to keep a high traffic site running. Anywhere from dozens to hundreds of powerful computers, a high speed access line (probably at least two for redundency), paying people to program and monitor the site (don't tell me about free software here, a site like Slashdot or Google has to be monitored 24/7. I know very few few people who will answer a call at midnight to fix broken code RIGHT NOW! out of altruism.) These are pure web players here, they don't produce anything except "free" content. How do you propose they pay for the service they give you, much less make a profit?
Actually when you are talking about critical servers, the answer to any of your questions is "Call the Onsite SSE, who will be there in five minutes" My mother in law used to be onsight Cray support for a DOD installation. Her job was to sit around and wait for things to break. When they did she fixed them (They had parts on hand to rebuild the computer from the ground up) and then waited again. The government paid SGI who in turn paid her and a team of several others to sit there and hope nothing goes wrong. Not that I disagree with you in theory, but I can assure you that critical DOD servers spend very little time waiting for the vendor.
IMHO, you let the librarian decide. If you don't like it, then maybe you need to be careful picking your librarians.
There is still a disconnect here. I don't make librian hiring decsions. My theoretical Wiccan lady doesn't make librarian hiring descions. These descsions are made by politicians who are going to cave at the first sign that a majority of people support blocking some unpopular topic (like Wicca or homosexuality in the Bible Belt), or even that a vocal minority of people support the blocking. The reason that the first amendment exists is to protect the expression of unpopular minority opinions. I think that when it comes to censorship the old adage of "Give them an inch, they will take a mile." is well proven. I have looked at the banned book lists of several school and library systems, and there is some pretty innocuaous stuff in there. I never made the claim that the first amendment grants the right to free commercial porn in libraries. I, in fact, presented a viable solution to just that problem. One of the nice things about commercial porn sites is that they tend to make their own nature very clear even from a distance. Yes, librarians do already exact quite a bit of control over the collections of most libraries, but this is a passive control. No one is going out and actually blocking anything, they can simply have limited budgets, and make purchases based on their own tastes and interests which they project onto others. What you are talking about is a more active form of control. The information is out there and freely available, and you are preventing someone from reaching it. The one is like a mother telling a child that s/he cannot have a novel because the money would be better spent on a textbook (The parent is making a judgemnt call based on cost ratios and the values s/he holds), the other is like telling a child that they may not have a free copy of Anne Has Two Mothers (Or whatever the name of that oft banned book is) because it would be bad for the child to have it. There are already laws in most states against displaying pornographic materials in a public place. Put the terminals where the librarians can see them, and let them enforce those laws. I stand by my statements that censorware is:
a) To powerful, and to tempting a power for many censors, and
b) To stupid in it's current incarnations to be trusted with the important job of making libraries true store houses of knowledge.
This is all of course IMHO, but I think that many courts would agree with me.
You should put them in the hands of everyone who grants access to the web (I buy my kids a web browser, the local community funds a library, a mosque provides a "safe" browsing environment for those who share their moral outlook).
Sorry. Gotta disagree. There should absolutely not be filters installed in local libraries. The Mosque example is fine, that is a religious establishment and should therefore be under the control of religious authorities. I may disagree with those authorities, but it's their Mosque. If I don't like it I can leave. Libraries are a differnt matter. They are publicly funded and serve one purpose. Research. A filtered net access is contrary to this goal in several ways:
1. Formost is the fact that "Community standards" are pretty broad things. Some parents object to their children being able to access information on Wicca. Should that be blocked? (if answer=="Yes" println "Irate Wiccan: You are blocking information that I and my children use for our religion"; elseif answer=="No" println "Irate right wing Christian: You are exposing my children to cults and Satanism";) While we could probably all agree that besiality sites should be blocked, human nature is such that once blocking begins, it will quickly become standard to add other "Offenesive" topics to the list. "Well we already block porn, and most of the community feel that sex education does not belong on the web either. Let's just add that."
2. Filtering software, as has often been pointed out in this forum, sucks. It is unacceptable, in a place dedicated to reserch, that I might be unable to reach information on breast cancer or AIDs because it contains "bad" words. What may be an acceptable crippling for home use ("Mom, the filter is blocking an article I need for school, can you turn it off?") is unreasonable in a publicly funded store house for knowledge ("Excuse Mr. Overworked Buerocrat, but if it's not to much trouble, and when you are done helping all these other people, could you modify the filtering software to allow the folllowing list of benign sites, which I understand you will have to veiw and check out before making any changes? I'll just sit here and wait a few hours, thank you.")
3. The question of what level of filtering is appropriate is unanswerable. Should we treat the computers like young children will be using them? Like teenagers will be? Obviously some things approriate to teenagers are not appropriate to ten year olds. Who should we cater to? If we cater to teenagers, then you are limiting adults and not really protecting small children. If you cater to small children then you are limiting your web access to a fraction of the sites on the net, and dooming library employees to a Hell of making exceptions to the rules for special cases.
The simple way to monitor library internet access is to simply put the computers where the librarian can see them. If someone does something truely offensive, they can be ejected. Filtering software should not be placed in libraries. They are publicly fund (hence covered by the first amendment) and their primary purpose (the pursuit of knowledge) would be critically hampered by the crap most of these companies are peddling.