AltaVista was my weapon of choice until Google came along and was so much better that most net users jumped ship.
From my point of view it wasn't that Google got better, but AltaVista, particularly the Advanced Search, got worse due to AltaVista doing the most idiotic things. AltaVista simply doesn't work right anymore. Presumably they let the work experience coders screw around with the algorithms. The Advanced seach, which I would probably still be using if it hadn't changed, no longer gives correct results for boolean expressions. Some of the pages it comes up with have no relevance whatsoever to the boolean search you type in.
IMHO the strength of AltaVista's boolean searching was the strength of AltaVista - with that gone, it was a foregone conclusion that the whole thing would come tumbling down.
I think 99% of the world population can establish a clear distinction between American people and American government.
Of course in a situation where 90% of the American people are supporting the actions of the American government, and are actively suppressing dissent, there is very little difference that is relevant. The 10% have already lost out to what amounts to mob rule.
I'm sorry, but this is bollocks. A good CEO, and a well structured marketing plan backed by a focussed department (no matter how big or small) is VITAL to the success of these companies.
I'm pretty sure the original poster was referring to the value of marketing to the economy, not its value to the company. Marketing has negative value to the economy because those who participate in it produce nothing of value - they merely try to persuade others to choose their employer's thing of value over somebody else's thing of value.
Theories that try to suggest that marketing has positive value to the economy appear to operate based on an assumption that nobody will by any of the things they need without marketing being there to tell them what they need. In other words, they assume people are too stupid to figure out what they need and then go buy it. Such theories are fundamentally unsupportable.
If marketing were not to exist at all, things of value would still be produced, at a lower price (due to the drop in overhead from marketing). What's more, those currently putting their efforts into marketing would be forced to gain employment producing things, so more would be produced, generating more tangible wealth for everybody.
Marketing is one of the known defects of a competitive market - the attempt to alter the supply and demand aspects of a product not by alteration of the price or quality, but by creating a perception of difference, and when one competitor does it, the others are forced to.
So again, in order to break this circle, we should, as a community, dissolve the practice of allowing ignorant, unhealthy messages to be broadcast (in all channels (spam, billboards, bench-ads) to our community....
There's a lot of other things implied by this approach, of course. The problem is you have to do it sustainably. Forced, quick, radical approaches tend to collapse in on themselves and give away the original objective, whether it takes 70 days or 70 years. There's nothing wrong with having ambitious objectives, but you have to put together a workable plan to achieve it that's not going to turn everything into worse crap before it can be achieved.
As to going after the CEO's assets, there are essentially no cases in which you'd have any legal standing to do so, since the corporate veil was created precisely to prevent that.
I'm not sure about the situation in the US, but in Australia, the directors of a company who keep it trading while insolvent become personally liable for all debts incurred from the point of insolvency. The strict definition of insolvency is being unable to pay debts as and when they fall due.
If you tell your boss you are not giving him his computer back and he calls the cops you will go to jail.
Er, possibly not. Larceny (the old common law name for the offence usually referred to as theft) requires the taking of the thing with the intent to deprive the owner of its use in perpetuity. The intent has to accompany the taking, so if you took the thing on loan intending to give it back later, but then change your mind and decide to keep it, there's no larceny.
Of course your jurisdiction may have other criminal laws that apply, or may have overridden the common law definition of larceny, but the more general rule is as I have described.
On the other hand, the keeping is a conversion, but conversion is normally a civil matter rather than a criminal matter (the cops won't get involved). In this case, the employer can either institute a civil action for conversion (which makes the kept thing yours and requires you to pay for it), in which case you can cross claim for your wages to cancel out the amount awarded. Alternatively they file a write of replevin and come and reposess it, followed by an action of detinue (or just take the action in detinue and take the machine back after succeeding). In that case you're worse off to the extent of court costs.
Keeping of that which you legally have in your posession as security for payment is actually a common act that is not necessarily illegal unless specifically made so in your jurisdiction.
Everything I've heard about grassroots it that actually a letter received from an individual has more impact then 1 letter with a thousands signatures.
This is true, but only when the letters are unique. If it's a form letter that just has different names and signatures at the bottom it tends to get ignored.
This approach works best if the organisation coordinating the campaign lists the points that need to be gotten across and tells people to pick any three they feel are most important and write their own letter based on those three points.
Well I wouldn't say EVIL, but it is definitely legalized bribery and very distasteful to everyone but those getting and giving the money.
Bribery isn't the only way to lobby - just the easiest. It's possible to lobby by wits alone (although there are non-bribe related expenses such as travel to $capital, accommodation and meals).
Yes, it's an invasion of privacy, but the question is whether it is an illegal invasion of privacy. If it was a government agency doing it, then yes, they'd need a warrant. For a private company to monitor what its customers are doing with company equipment is another matter altogether, and in many cases may be perfectly legal.
In most situations where the government would have to get a warrant to intercept telecommunications, so would the telecommunications carrier (ISPs are legally telecommunications carriers in Australia). The exemptions for the carrier relate to interception in the normal course of operating the equipment and detecting crimes against the operation of the equipment itself.
Don't worry too much about subsection 2, none of those provisions apply even though it looks like they might. Subsection 1 is the problem, because it defines interception as "listening to or recording". Since the software downloads are not audio content, they're not "listening to" it, and it seems unlikely they're recording it. There's no reason to expect a court to decide that a checksum, CRC or other hash would constitute "recording", since "recording" implies substantially duplicating the content rather than merely identifying the content probabilistically.
It is unlikely that a court would hold that anything other than the reproduction of the content itself would constitute "recording".
Evidently you did not read the article. The author claims that employers are not interviewing the vast majority of their applicants, and that if there really was shortage, they woul dat least be interviewing them.
Experienced hiring managers learn to be able to pick people who can make the grade (or more accurately, a large proportion of those who can't) just by reading the resume. They don't need to pull them in for an interview to find out they won't make it, because they'll know.
I even tested this once by accepting all candidates in a run for an interview, even though my judgement on the resumes was that they wouldn't be up to scratch. They could tick every box, but every resume either had something or lacked something that led me to believe they wouldn't make it.
Not one of them made it.
When I'm being more selective about who I interview, about one in three makes it.
So not being called in for an interview doesn't mean there's no shortage of competent people - it may simply mean the person's resume gives them away out of the gate.
The best revenge for prima donnas is to give them what they want until thep choke.
I'll second this. We had a prima-donna here recently who loved to find the most obscure way possible to implement a feature. If there was a direct way, he'd never use it. His mission was to show how "clever" he was by using obscure C++ features or arcane side-effects of them to achieve his ends. He always thought he had the best ideas on how development should be done and wasn't backwards about saying so.
So, I gave him a senior role. He choked on it and three months later he resigned.
The thing is, people who take this approach may be clever at some things, but designing and implementing workable and maintainable projects isn't one of them. Prima donnas will hang themselves, given enough rope.
Isn't another federal crime already, by definition, illegal?
Yes, but this bill means you can be sentenced for both that crime and the crime in this bill, basically doubling the sentence. In practice this means little since if a court was going to reduce the one sentence to 3 years they'll just reduce each to 1.5 years. Also this bill theoretically allows them to get somebody before they actually commit the primary offence, but in practice, since they have no way of knowing you have the software (let alone have it for illegal purposes) until you commit the offence, that doesn't change much either.
The bill doesn't make any of the things listed in this article illegal on their own - you have to be using them for, or intending to use them for, committing another federal crime. There is no requirement to divulge passwords, just to assist law enforcement in effecting the execution of a warrant. Without this they'll just seize the equipment anyway, so it's actually in the interests of the person owning the equipment to provide this assistance as it allows them to take just the relevant data.
Of course it does sound a lot more interesting to say it bans the posession of tools that are being used for legal purposes, but the bill explicitly mentions that there must be a use for, or an intent to use for, an otherwise illegal activity.
In CompuServe v Cyber Promotions the court stated quite clearly that the spammer's first amendment rights DO NOT trump the recipient's property rights. This was not a novel result, but was consistent with past rulings, including US Supreme Court rulings.
There's really nothing more to this than that - The Senator is wrong. Plainly, unambiguously, and inexcusably wrong. The only thing newsworthy about this is the degree to which the Senator has embarrassed himself.
If port scanning is illegal, so should looking at someone's house, roof, lawn, doors, windows, etc...
No - Trespass to Chattels requires a direct and intentional interference with the chattel, and in the US and New Zealand requires some damage to, impairment of function of, or deprivation of use of the chattel.
"Direct" can mean either "immediate" or "directed at" (but best understood means the latter). Port scanning involves directing packets at somebody else's computer and/or network, and satisfies the directness requirement. It is also fairly certain that somebody engaging in port scanning is doing so intentionally.
It is a defence that you have permission, but that permission might be implied permission. Implied permission is measured by the reasonable prevailing social norms at the time.
The question of whether this makes port scanning illegal is a simple one, although the answer is not so simple. The only question in dispute is "Does society generally recognise an implied permission for port scanning by connecting a computer to the Internet?"
The answer to this is unclear, and in a court case would be likely to depend on how good the lawyers are on both sides.
Anyone know when Babelfish's "Lawyer to English" translation will be available?
The salient point of the article is that when you access somebody else's computer in a way that is outside the scope of the permission implied by connecting it to the Internet, and by doing so cause any impairment to its function, that is a Trespass to Chattels, and you can be sued.
Depending on how egregious the violation of normal standards, you can be sued either for actual damages, or for actual damages plus exemplary damages.
The short version of an analysis of this article is "Yes, he's right".
So at present, the real value to this stuff is that it doesn't have to be backlit (and, I suspect, uses less power as a result), not that you can make paper airplanes out of it, as alumnniac writes.
The article also says that the device retains state without power - that is, it only needs to use power *at all* when the colour of a pixel changes.
I'm an Internet "oldster".. I was surfing the Web as far back as 1996
It should have been moderated up, but as "funny" rather than "Interesting".
Sad thing is, I think the original poster was serious. If you were trying to be funny you'd say I'm an Internet "oldster".. I was surfing the Web as far back as March.
Face it, anybody who didn't access their first Internet email box in character mode is a newbie. And when I say character mode I don't mean email not including HTML, nor do I mean these wimp environments like Elm and Pine. Real Internet oldies read their mail using/usr/bin/mail, or if they were wimps,/usr/ucb/mail.
Real Internet oldies who are true geeks wrote their own mail program using shell script, and they wrote the shell script using/bin/ed, not any of these modern editors like vi and emacs.
Don't be deluded into thinking you know vi because you know vim either. If your first experience in Unix text editing was vim, you're a newbie on the Internet, a veritable infant.
To be a real Internet oldie, you have to have sent email to an email address that involved explicit routing at some time in the past - it doesn't matter if it was a UUCP bang path or a percent hacked path, as long as it involved explicit routing.
Anybody who thinks using the net since '96 makes you an oldie needs a serious dose of reality.
UCS-2, as mentioned by this article, is the same as UTF-16 and is severely limited by it's 16 bit implementation.
Not quite, although you could be forgiven for believing this. UCS-2 is just a truncated UCS-4, which represents exactly 65536 characters (less a little over 2048 now) and was orginally the same as Unicode. UTF-16 is an encoding which extends the range of possible characters to around 1million, and Unicode has been redefined to be the same as UTF-16. Current versions of Windows use UTF-16, not UCS-2
The article's claim that Unicode can only map 65536 characters is fundamentally flawed, since its new definition as being the same as UTF-16 means it can probably map every character ever used, and in fact includes fictional scripts (including Tolkein, and more importantly, Klingon, although I'm not sure of the standardisation status of the latter at this time).
Most of his argument is right - talking about the potential benefits of giving away some privacy. He even appears to acknowledge that to some degree the user must have some control over how much is given away - it is a basic principle of law that no person may be forced to pay for a benefit they didn't ask for, regardless how much the person forcing that benefit and payment thinks the beneficiary should have it. Giving up privacy is a kind of payment.
His case really falls down, however, in his commentary on the industry's performance on privacy. A good track record on this issue is necessary to support his underlying argument, that the government should not intervene, which is a point he tacitly acknowledges by arguing the record of industry:
So far the industry has done a pretty good job of regulating itself. Most companies now post formal privacy policies on their Web sites and allow visitors to have a say in how information about them is used.
Unfortunately, the second sentence does not support the first, at all. It is not enough to have privacy policies. The privacy policies have to do something other than say "You have no privacy, get over it". The corporations also have to adhere to their privacy policies. It does not good to have a privacy policy if the policy is "no privacy", or if it's not followed. On both these critical counts, the corporations have an apalling track record.
The failure on this issue is fatal to McNealy's argument that government intervention is not required.
The common carrier status is something that has to be explicitly granted by the FCC
This is not strictly correct. A common carrier can be declared as such by the courts, however ISPs have already been ruled by the courts as not being common carriers (in CompuServe v Cyber Promotions IIRC) because:
They are neither monopolies nor oligopolies.
Even if they were monopolies or oligopolies in their regions, there are alternate mechanisms (telephone, USPS), so the ISP service cannot be considered an essential service.
Slashdot Mirror
From my point of view it wasn't that Google got better, but AltaVista, particularly the Advanced Search, got worse due to AltaVista doing the most idiotic things. AltaVista simply doesn't work right anymore. Presumably they let the work experience coders screw around with the algorithms. The Advanced seach, which I would probably still be using if it hadn't changed, no longer gives correct results for boolean expressions. Some of the pages it comes up with have no relevance whatsoever to the boolean search you type in.
IMHO the strength of AltaVista's boolean searching was the strength of AltaVista - with that gone, it was a foregone conclusion that the whole thing would come tumbling down.
Of course in a situation where 90% of the American people are supporting the actions of the American government, and are actively suppressing dissent, there is very little difference that is relevant. The 10% have already lost out to what amounts to mob rule.
I'm pretty sure the original poster was referring to the value of marketing to the economy, not its value to the company. Marketing has negative value to the economy because those who participate in it produce nothing of value - they merely try to persuade others to choose their employer's thing of value over somebody else's thing of value.
Theories that try to suggest that marketing has positive value to the economy appear to operate based on an assumption that nobody will by any of the things they need without marketing being there to tell them what they need. In other words, they assume people are too stupid to figure out what they need and then go buy it. Such theories are fundamentally unsupportable.
If marketing were not to exist at all, things of value would still be produced, at a lower price (due to the drop in overhead from marketing). What's more, those currently putting their efforts into marketing would be forced to gain employment producing things, so more would be produced, generating more tangible wealth for everybody.
Marketing is one of the known defects of a competitive market - the attempt to alter the supply and demand aspects of a product not by alteration of the price or quality, but by creating a perception of difference, and when one competitor does it, the others are forced to.
There's a lot of other things implied by this approach, of course. The problem is you have to do it sustainably. Forced, quick, radical approaches tend to collapse in on themselves and give away the original objective, whether it takes 70 days or 70 years. There's nothing wrong with having ambitious objectives, but you have to put together a workable plan to achieve it that's not going to turn everything into worse crap before it can be achieved.
I'm not sure about the situation in the US, but in Australia, the directors of a company who keep it trading while insolvent become personally liable for all debts incurred from the point of insolvency. The strict definition of insolvency is being unable to pay debts as and when they fall due.
Er, possibly not. Larceny (the old common law name for the offence usually referred to as theft) requires the taking of the thing with the intent to deprive the owner of its use in perpetuity. The intent has to accompany the taking, so if you took the thing on loan intending to give it back later, but then change your mind and decide to keep it, there's no larceny.
Of course your jurisdiction may have other criminal laws that apply, or may have overridden the common law definition of larceny, but the more general rule is as I have described.
On the other hand, the keeping is a conversion, but conversion is normally a civil matter rather than a criminal matter (the cops won't get involved). In this case, the employer can either institute a civil action for conversion (which makes the kept thing yours and requires you to pay for it), in which case you can cross claim for your wages to cancel out the amount awarded. Alternatively they file a write of replevin and come and reposess it, followed by an action of detinue (or just take the action in detinue and take the machine back after succeeding). In that case you're worse off to the extent of court costs.
Keeping of that which you legally have in your posession as security for payment is actually a common act that is not necessarily illegal unless specifically made so in your jurisdiction.
IANALY,TINLA
This is true, but only when the letters are unique. If it's a form letter that just has different names and signatures at the bottom it tends to get ignored.
This approach works best if the organisation coordinating the campaign lists the points that need to be gotten across and tells people to pick any three they feel are most important and write their own letter based on those three points.
Bribery isn't the only way to lobby - just the easiest. It's possible to lobby by wits alone (although there are non-bribe related expenses such as travel to $capital, accommodation and meals).
Perhaps he figures Caldera will buy it. After all, they'll buy the rights to any software as long as it has no apparent future.
In Australia it would be a crime - Crimes Act 1914 (Cth) s85T - sending false postal messages, penalty being imprisonment for 1 year.
In most situations where the government would have to get a warrant to intercept telecommunications, so would the telecommunications carrier (ISPs are legally telecommunications carriers in Australia). The exemptions for the carrier relate to interception in the normal course of operating the equipment and detecting crimes against the operation of the equipment itself.
Don't worry too much about subsection 2, none of those provisions apply even though it looks like they might. Subsection 1 is the problem, because it defines interception as "listening to or recording". Since the software downloads are not audio content, they're not "listening to" it, and it seems unlikely they're recording it. There's no reason to expect a court to decide that a checksum, CRC or other hash would constitute "recording", since "recording" implies substantially duplicating the content rather than merely identifying the content probabilistically.
It is unlikely that a court would hold that anything other than the reproduction of the content itself would constitute "recording".
IANALY,TINLA
Experienced hiring managers learn to be able to pick people who can make the grade (or more accurately, a large proportion of those who can't) just by reading the resume. They don't need to pull them in for an interview to find out they won't make it, because they'll know.
I even tested this once by accepting all candidates in a run for an interview, even though my judgement on the resumes was that they wouldn't be up to scratch. They could tick every box, but every resume either had something or lacked something that led me to believe they wouldn't make it.
Not one of them made it.
When I'm being more selective about who I interview, about one in three makes it.
So not being called in for an interview doesn't mean there's no shortage of competent people - it may simply mean the person's resume gives them away out of the gate.
I'll second this. We had a prima-donna here recently who loved to find the most obscure way possible to implement a feature. If there was a direct way, he'd never use it. His mission was to show how "clever" he was by using obscure C++ features or arcane side-effects of them to achieve his ends. He always thought he had the best ideas on how development should be done and wasn't backwards about saying so.
So, I gave him a senior role. He choked on it and three months later he resigned.
The thing is, people who take this approach may be clever at some things, but designing and implementing workable and maintainable projects isn't one of them. Prima donnas will hang themselves, given enough rope.
Yes, but this bill means you can be sentenced for both that crime and the crime in this bill, basically doubling the sentence. In practice this means little since if a court was going to reduce the one sentence to 3 years they'll just reduce each to 1.5 years. Also this bill theoretically allows them to get somebody before they actually commit the primary offence, but in practice, since they have no way of knowing you have the software (let alone have it for illegal purposes) until you commit the offence, that doesn't change much either.
The bill doesn't make any of the things listed in this article illegal on their own - you have to be using them for, or intending to use them for, committing another federal crime. There is no requirement to divulge passwords, just to assist law enforcement in effecting the execution of a warrant. Without this they'll just seize the equipment anyway, so it's actually in the interests of the person owning the equipment to provide this assistance as it allows them to take just the relevant data.
Of course it does sound a lot more interesting to say it bans the posession of tools that are being used for legal purposes, but the bill explicitly mentions that there must be a use for, or an intent to use for, an otherwise illegal activity.
In CompuServe v Cyber Promotions the court stated quite clearly that the spammer's first amendment rights DO NOT trump the recipient's property rights. This was not a novel result, but was consistent with past rulings, including US Supreme Court rulings.
There's really nothing more to this than that - The Senator is wrong. Plainly, unambiguously, and inexcusably wrong. The only thing newsworthy about this is the degree to which the Senator has embarrassed himself.
No - Trespass to Chattels requires a direct and intentional interference with the chattel, and in the US and New Zealand requires some damage to, impairment of function of, or deprivation of use of the chattel.
"Direct" can mean either "immediate" or "directed at" (but best understood means the latter). Port scanning involves directing packets at somebody else's computer and/or network, and satisfies the directness requirement. It is also fairly certain that somebody engaging in port scanning is doing so intentionally.
It is a defence that you have permission, but that permission might be implied permission. Implied permission is measured by the reasonable prevailing social norms at the time.
The question of whether this makes port scanning illegal is a simple one, although the answer is not so simple. The only question in dispute is "Does society generally recognise an implied permission for port scanning by connecting a computer to the Internet?"
The answer to this is unclear, and in a court case would be likely to depend on how good the lawyers are on both sides.
ObDisclaimer: IANALY,TINLA
The salient point of the article is that when you access somebody else's computer in a way that is outside the scope of the permission implied by connecting it to the Internet, and by doing so cause any impairment to its function, that is a Trespass to Chattels, and you can be sued.
Depending on how egregious the violation of normal standards, you can be sued either for actual damages, or for actual damages plus exemplary damages.
The short version of an analysis of this article is "Yes, he's right".
Now that's what I'd call a big-screen TV.
The article also says that the device retains state without power - that is, it only needs to use power *at all* when the colour of a pixel changes.
I'm an Internet "oldster" .. I was surfing the Web as far back as 1996
It should have been moderated up, but as "funny" rather than "Interesting".
Sad thing is, I think the original poster was serious. If you were trying to be funny you'd say I'm an Internet "oldster" .. I was surfing the Web as far back as March.
Face it, anybody who didn't access their first Internet email box in character mode is a newbie. And when I say character mode I don't mean email not including HTML, nor do I mean these wimp environments like Elm and Pine. Real Internet oldies read their mail using /usr/bin/mail, or if they were wimps, /usr/ucb/mail.
Real Internet oldies who are true geeks wrote their own mail program using shell script, and they wrote the shell script using /bin/ed, not any of these modern editors like vi and emacs.
Don't be deluded into thinking you know vi because you know vim either. If your first experience in Unix text editing was vim, you're a newbie on the Internet, a veritable infant.
To be a real Internet oldie, you have to have sent email to an email address that involved explicit routing at some time in the past - it doesn't matter if it was a UUCP bang path or a percent hacked path, as long as it involved explicit routing.
Anybody who thinks using the net since '96 makes you an oldie needs a serious dose of reality.
Not quite, although you could be forgiven for believing this. UCS-2 is just a truncated UCS-4, which represents exactly 65536 characters (less a little over 2048 now) and was orginally the same as Unicode. UTF-16 is an encoding which extends the range of possible characters to around 1million, and Unicode has been redefined to be the same as UTF-16. Current versions of Windows use UTF-16, not UCS-2
A good reference for this is theUTF-8 and Unicode FAQ for Unix/Linux
The article's claim that Unicode can only map 65536 characters is fundamentally flawed, since its new definition as being the same as UTF-16 means it can probably map every character ever used, and in fact includes fictional scripts (including Tolkein, and more importantly, Klingon, although I'm not sure of the standardisation status of the latter at this time).
Most of his argument is right - talking about the potential benefits of giving away some privacy. He even appears to acknowledge that to some degree the user must have some control over how much is given away - it is a basic principle of law that no person may be forced to pay for a benefit they didn't ask for, regardless how much the person forcing that benefit and payment thinks the beneficiary should have it. Giving up privacy is a kind of payment.
His case really falls down, however, in his commentary on the industry's performance on privacy. A good track record on this issue is necessary to support his underlying argument, that the government should not intervene, which is a point he tacitly acknowledges by arguing the record of industry:
So far the industry has done a pretty good job of regulating itself. Most companies now post formal privacy policies on their Web sites and allow visitors to have a say in how information about them is used.
Unfortunately, the second sentence does not support the first, at all. It is not enough to have privacy policies. The privacy policies have to do something other than say "You have no privacy, get over it". The corporations also have to adhere to their privacy policies. It does not good to have a privacy policy if the policy is "no privacy", or if it's not followed. On both these critical counts, the corporations have an apalling track record.
The failure on this issue is fatal to McNealy's argument that government intervention is not required.
This is not strictly correct. A common carrier can be declared as such by the courts, however ISPs have already been ruled by the courts as not being common carriers (in CompuServe v Cyber Promotions IIRC) because: