How does Sweden do it? Government funded infrastructure.
BTW, I could see government funded Internet infrastructure, though I think it would require long, hard, consideration. In the United States, however, we tend toward free market solutions. Free market solutions demand market segmentation. People need choices to make the free market run efficiently. That means both competitive companies (which we are short on) and competing levels of service.
Again, not that I'm opposed to government funds going to laying fiber. Just that I think it is not in our cultural DNA, and I think a free market solution can also work -- if we get off our "unlimited" (which is not really unlimited) hangup.
Rather than have these ridiculous, confiscatory rates for so-called "unlimited" service (which will still be capped under some other excuse)... why don't the ISP's just provide metered service?
Two reasons, which are really sort of one reason, but I haven't had my coffee yet, and I'm being lazy about synthesizing them.:)
1. The ISP has to purchase their guaranteed rate in advance. So they need to estimate how much you are going to use in advance. They can do this pretty effectively with tiered pricing, and get an overage charge from you to pay the overage charge their upstream charges them.
1. Bandwidth consumption is changing so rapidly that they have a very hard time predicting what you will use next month. It's not like electricity where a given house will use the same amount +/- 10% next month as they did last month or in the same month last year.
Tiering (in ISPs and cell phones, for example) is the least expensive way (for the consumer as well as the ISP) for the ISP to get close to the right money from their customers relative to their real costs.
That said, I would prefer metered usage. Particularly with a nice big meter page at your ISP so you could see what you are using. Make people as conscious of bandwidth as they are of KwH, then maybe we'd start looking at bandwidth efficiency of apps too -- sure would be nice to see email clients that pepper unformatted messages with HTML tags die the death they so richly deserve. But I digress.
Total transfer has a cost. Your connection to the Internet, if kept running wide open full time, would be a money loser for the ISP. There are essentially three solutions to this:
1. High transfer users are subsidized by low transfer users. This will fail as everyone becomes a high transfer user. My Mom now sends me YouTube videos occasionally.
2. Deep packet inspection (DPI), with the high transfer user of services the ISP likes being subsidized by the high transfer user of services the ISP does not like. IE: They charge company A or inhibit customer B, while allowing company C to send high volume content to customer D. Some ISPs think this it the right answer because some services are inherently high volume. Others like the idea of being a toll-road and getting to charge monopoly rents. Ultimately this is insidious because it hides the cost and distorts the free market.
3. Tiered pricing based on the numbers of 1's and 0's you consume, but without regard to which 1's and 0's you consume. IE: net neutrality with tiered pricing.
Of those three options, is there really any question that option 3 is the best?
One may argue, "The ISPs are charging too much, their profit is too high, it's an inefficient market and prices are too high because of lack of competition." Fine, maybe that's true. The answer to that problem is increased competition. Asserting that the ISPs should not be allowed to use option 3 to solve a problem which may be real, however, can only lead to either option 1 or option 2 being used instead. Option 1 would imply increasing the price to everyone. Is that really fair? Should I really continue to have my Internet access subsidized by the guy next door who doesn't use high volume media? I mean, I like it and all, but it's not fair, it's not free market, and it makes the ISPs want to find ways to shut me off so they can focus their business on the guy next door.
Option 3, on the other hand, makes me the most important customer to the ISP. It makes them want high volume users. It makes them more money when we use more Internet. Suddenly the ISP's profit incentive is directly in line with making the Internet faster and encouraging high volume services. Seems like a pretty good thing, no?
So choose your poison:
1. Subsidization with the ISP hating high volume users.
2. Deep packet inspection with the ISP choosing which 1's and 0's are "good" and which are "bad".
3. Net neutrality with tiering, and the ISP becomes profit motivated to encourage high bandwidth and high volume services.
Gee, tough question.
Tom, I love ya. I was making banner ads for your site back in 1997, and loved every little review you put out. But you're off your nut on this one.
In the short term the solution for this is for the president to order the IRS to withhold these payouts until congress can close the loophole. If the paper companies sue, they would get laughed at or scolded by the judges as this is an obvious and evil perversion of the intent of the law.
As others have noted, we have statutory law in the U.S., which means the letter is what matters.
But your point is still a good one on the right path. The next question is "What should we do?"
The answer, I think, is to minimize specificity in laws. We cannot have highly specific laws which are also accurate. Or, said differently, our laws can be precise, or they can be accurate, but they cannot be both.
Seeing evidence of this fact in practice, we should use this evidence to further our cultural understanding of the problem of specialized legislation. Specificity breeds abuse. Continue with the thought experiment and develop your own ideas about the solution to unintended consequences. Or build on the above stated concept that specificity is the problem. Remain hopeful, and keep pushing forward. Each of us is just a drop of water, but if all thoughtful people like yourself continue to push forward, we can build stronger societies tomorrow.
But you can't blame the lawyers for defending their client.
I'm not sure if the lawyer ever swears an oath to defend The Constitution, but his client sure has hell did. Lawyers who are aware of an intent to violate the law going forward are obligated to disclose that fact. These lawyers are obligated to make it clear that the government intends to continue infringing our right to petition for redress, and to continue infringing the Fourth Amendment. If they cannot make that clear, they have an obligation -- at least moral if not legal -- to recuse themselves or resign their position.
Dress it up in the beauty of the adversarial legal system all you like, but saying that these lawyers have no obligation to expose the intent to commit treason by their employers is as empty as any tool of a criminal organization claiming he was just doing what he was told.
Will they get convicted for failing to disclose their fore-knowledge of a future crime? Of course not -- they are failing to disclose a future crime that will never be seen as a crime by those who judge crime, because those who judge crime want absolute power just like this President and the one before him (and most of them since the original GW said he didn't want it). But that does not excuse them of their obligation -- it just means that they will not face any punishment for being accessories to treason.
the site's market share in February was up 90% year over year, accounting for about 2.5% of total US Web site visits.
It's amazing what you can do when you put functionality ahead of everything -- design, cashflow, tracking -- everything on Craig's List is second to plain functionality.
No, Geitner actually put forward a plan (starting with financials) that would allow the government to label companies as 'too big to fail' and then take them over at will. Doesn't matter if they took bailout money or not.
Yegads - thanks for the clarification.
Curious - how would you offset the risk? Is there a good answer?
This is the EXACT same power they want to give to the treasury secretary to be able to unilaterally, on a whim, take over companies when some undocumented criteria are met.
Not unilaterally. The company must first choose to be subject to this policy, typically by accepting a bailout agreement.
The options are pretty simple here -- bandwidth capping or deep packet inspection with traffic shaping. The intertubes are not infinite bandwidth, and they cost money.
To me, the free market bandwidth capping sounds like a vastly superior option.
The pricing may not be efficient at the moment, but at least the free market can address that problem pretty efficiently, eventually. The free market is shithouse for dealing with asymmetric information problems (like the ISPs doing traffic shaping, which the typical customer does not, and should not need to, understand).
On a side note; I like giving my ISP money. They provide an incredibly valuable service. As long as they keep their damned noses out of which 1's and 0's I'm sending, I want to give them lots of money so they build bigger and bigger pipes.
And, think about it -- if we start paying differential prices based on differential bandwidth consumption, where's their profit motive? That's right, in increasing the amount of 1's and 0's we consume. So all of a sudden the ISPs go from hating P2P to loving it. Suddenly the ISPs would be the side of information dissemination, instead of on the information hoarder side. That's a pretty frikkin' good thing, no? Not that I want them corrupting congress in either direction, but if I have to accept corruption, I'd rather have them counterbalancing the intellectual monopoly advocates, who are getting a bit too much of their way lately.
Of course, I'd like to see more competition and more efficient pricing. But that is a separate issue.
Keir Thomas berates the fact that the world of Linux almost entirely lacks critics. In fact, he says, Linux people tend to see genuine critical evaluation as a bad thing.
Keir Thomas is a witch! He gave me the evil eye, and now my laptop has dropped three pixels! He'll crash your servers if you let him run free! Burn him!:)
The Guardian claims the old argument that 'search engines and aggregators provide players like guardian.co.uk with traffic in return for the use of our content' doesn't hold water any more, and that it's 'heavily skewed' in Google's favour.
Is The Guardian saying that their robots.txt file is not working? And that they are also not receiving the User-Agent string that allows them to identify GoogleBot?
Frankly, I am skeptical. I think they are not interested in the free-market, opt-in or opt-out as you wish, approach. What they are asking for is economic socialism(*).
* Please don't conflate political socialism with economic socialism. Don't tell me about gulags or suppression of dissent -- that's political socialism (or rather, some examples of it).
That's the date by which every author and publisher in America is supposed to decide whether to "opt in," "opt out," or simply "ignore" a vast compulsory licensing scheme for the benefit of Google. Most, about 88%, are expected to "ignore." That's because they know their online display rights have value, and the last thing they want is to be herded like sheep into a giant contract commitment.
OK, so it's an option - a new market that the author can choose to participate in, as he or she wishes?
For private gain, the Google parties now seek to destroy the health in the system that individual bargaining preserves.
"Seek to destroy"? It's an option - a new market option.
Disputes will be fixed in arbitration with no access to federal courts which have often shown mercy to authors. Arbitrators will be "you sign it you eat it" line-parsing bureaucrats.
This differs from a contract with binding-arbitration between an author and a traditional publisher how?
If she's arguing that authors should choose to ignore, that seems reasonable. But that last bit sounds like she is claiming there is evil in allowing Google to offer the new business model. Is she an author? Maybe she is a PR person for a traditional publisher? Do I just not get it, and there actually is some new impediment inflicted upon the author here? Or is this article fishy?
Assuming the problem with emissions is that it is a consumption of a public good (clean air), why not just tax gasoline instead? You can consume as much clean air as you like, as long as you pay society for what you consume.
(disclaimer, I'm a Californian with a black car, and I like black cars)
Will this be enough to satisfy anti-DRM players...?
The simple answer to this stupid question is another question: Will it work as well as cracked games?
That's all anyone wants. For the solution to be superior (in the customer's eyes) to the problem (in the company's eyes). It's called customer service. Sell a better product, win. Sell a worse product, lose.
Also, two plus two equals four. (I figure if you didn't already know the "sell good product, win" part, you might not know the answer to that age-old mathematics riddle)
Paying an extra $500 for a computer in this environment -- same piece of hardware -- paying $500 more to get a logo on it? I think that's a more challenging proposition for the average person than it used to be.
I must say I agree, Mr. Ballmer. Have you heard of OpenOffice? It costs less (100% less to be precise) than Microsoft Office and does the same thing. Mostly just a difference in logo. And then there's Ubuntu.
what can I do to make myself hireable in a short period of time?
Lie. Learning to create wealth by programming takes a while. Lying is the most effective fast track.
Is it possible to pick up enough of what I'd need within a couple months?
Not really, because programming still has a lot of art to it. There aren't a whole lot of "plug and chug" type problems out there. Most jobs require some feel still.
If so, what and how?
Here I'm going to give you the real answer to your question: Get an iPhone or an Android. Start coding. Become moderately successful. Put this on your resume.
>> You don't have to look farther than the Bush administration to see this.
> Or the Obama Administration also, apparently.
[sigh]
Can we enter a class-action suit for falsely raised expectations? Perhaps under failure to satisfy fitness for a particular use as advertised?
I really wanted to believe. Scratch that. I still want to believe. We can do better than this, and a rising tide really does raise all ships.
Well, except rats, I guess. A rising tide drowns them. Unfortunately, being a rat is a pre-req for winning a national popular election in the age of advertising and PR.
[sigh]
And revolutions suck. They drain so much GDP from the society in which they occur....
OK - no more sighing. We need to grab the bull by the horns (or by the YouTube, Twitter, Blog, and Facebook as the case may be), and fix this shit. Think hard. Write objectively. Forget the party affiliate stuff and go hard-core rational.
I'm working on a big piece with a dozen friends (from MBA to borderline-socialist) right now on tax policy. The nation needs us. All of us should be doing the same.
Just to reiterate what has already been said by a bunch of other people; *nix was designed for remotely managed systems and untrusted users. Set the home partition and/tmp to noexec, don't give the user write perms anywhere else, script rsync over SSH to manage config updates, similar scripts with rsync/SSH for reassigning a machine to a different department, and make your own gold configs.
I think the reason the OP can't find the software package to do it is because there is no software package to do it, it's built in to DNA of the *nix. It is not a single unified application added on top of the OS like Windows, it is everywhere in the OS. Not that there's anything horribly wrong with Windows remote management - they've come a long way in a very short time. But *nix has been doing it since it was born - it is pervasive in the way the OS works.
It does, however, take some getting used to. It's not going to feel like Windows management. It's a pretty steep learning curve too. But it is fun to learn, and when the gestalt whacks you in the head and you suddenly get it you get this involuntary, "Oh Wow" like you've never felt before.
Beware, though - when that moment hits, all hope is lost. You'll be stuck with *nix for the rest of your life. Mac is still acceptable since it's built on *nix, but it just takes all the fun out of Windows. You'll fire up your Windows box to play a video game, and start to notice all the nice little system management tools that you don't have.
But the Innovation Alliance, a group representing patent-holders that oppose the legislation said that it would 'devalue all patents, invite infringement -- including from companies in China, India and other countries -- and generate more litigation that will further strain the courts.'
These guys really need a new PR firm. Vague insinuations about the threat of SEAsia and clogged courts is soooo pre-9/11. It's all about child porn and terrorism now, guys - get with the program.
Consequently, career experts advise job seekers to not post any photos, opinions or information on blogs and social networking websites (like Slashdot) that a potential employer might find remotely off-putting. Instead of cautioning job seekers to censor their activity online, we job seekers and defenders of our civil liberties should tell employers to stop snooping and to stop judging our behavior outside of work, writes CIO.com Senior Online Editor Meridith Levinson.
I'm going to have to go with option three here:
Find an employer who values independent thinkers, and who will find your analysis of economic issues to be a sign of an active, critical mind. That way, you increase your chance of getting a job, and of not working for a boss who is looking for a mindless cog.
And if all your online posting is about boobs, well, guess what, you're probably not the right guy for that boss to hire. Career experts and CIO magazine seem to betray one helluva bias here - that people are juvenile idiots, who should get jobs despite their vapid nature. That is ridiculous.
Microsoft has said that Open Source is communist and Anti-American! How can the business community survive, now that their broken algorithms have been published?
Maybe you haven't been paying attention. For the past four months, all the CEOs of all the banks have been singing the praises of communism. They were so convincing, in fact, that the government handed them $350 billion with no strings attached (which they promptly spent on themselves, bonuses for their lackeys, and on buying distressed companies).
The banks aren't any more anti-communism than Microsoft is. IE: They oppose it when it benefits others or non-executives, and support it when it keeps them and the rest of the American Aristocracy in beach houses and private jets.
And in that, they are no different than anyone else, except the extreme rare few who strive for objectivity and reason. Extremely endangered are they, though - I believe there are three hundred sixty four known examples of such people in the wild, and but few of them have formed breeding pairs.
Slashdot Mirror
Population Density:
United States: 29.77 persons/square mile
Japan: 336.72 persons/square mile
South Korea: 446.49 persons/square mile
Sweden: 21.69 persons/square mile
How does Sweden do it? Government funded infrastructure.
BTW, I could see government funded Internet infrastructure, though I think it would require long, hard, consideration. In the United States, however, we tend toward free market solutions. Free market solutions demand market segmentation. People need choices to make the free market run efficiently. That means both competitive companies (which we are short on) and competing levels of service.
Again, not that I'm opposed to government funds going to laying fiber. Just that I think it is not in our cultural DNA, and I think a free market solution can also work -- if we get off our "unlimited" (which is not really unlimited) hangup.
Rather than have these ridiculous, confiscatory rates for so-called "unlimited" service (which will still be capped under some other excuse)... why don't the ISP's just provide metered service?
Two reasons, which are really sort of one reason, but I haven't had my coffee yet, and I'm being lazy about synthesizing them. :)
1. The ISP has to purchase their guaranteed rate in advance. So they need to estimate how much you are going to use in advance. They can do this pretty effectively with tiered pricing, and get an overage charge from you to pay the overage charge their upstream charges them.
1. Bandwidth consumption is changing so rapidly that they have a very hard time predicting what you will use next month. It's not like electricity where a given house will use the same amount +/- 10% next month as they did last month or in the same month last year.
Tiering (in ISPs and cell phones, for example) is the least expensive way (for the consumer as well as the ISP) for the ISP to get close to the right money from their customers relative to their real costs.
That said, I would prefer metered usage. Particularly with a nice big meter page at your ISP so you could see what you are using. Make people as conscious of bandwidth as they are of KwH, then maybe we'd start looking at bandwidth efficiency of apps too -- sure would be nice to see email clients that pepper unformatted messages with HTML tags die the death they so richly deserve. But I digress.
Total transfer has a cost. Your connection to the Internet, if kept running wide open full time, would be a money loser for the ISP. There are essentially three solutions to this:
1. High transfer users are subsidized by low transfer users. This will fail as everyone becomes a high transfer user. My Mom now sends me YouTube videos occasionally.
2. Deep packet inspection (DPI), with the high transfer user of services the ISP likes being subsidized by the high transfer user of services the ISP does not like. IE: They charge company A or inhibit customer B, while allowing company C to send high volume content to customer D. Some ISPs think this it the right answer because some services are inherently high volume. Others like the idea of being a toll-road and getting to charge monopoly rents. Ultimately this is insidious because it hides the cost and distorts the free market.
3. Tiered pricing based on the numbers of 1's and 0's you consume, but without regard to which 1's and 0's you consume. IE: net neutrality with tiered pricing.
Of those three options, is there really any question that option 3 is the best?
One may argue, "The ISPs are charging too much, their profit is too high, it's an inefficient market and prices are too high because of lack of competition." Fine, maybe that's true. The answer to that problem is increased competition. Asserting that the ISPs should not be allowed to use option 3 to solve a problem which may be real, however, can only lead to either option 1 or option 2 being used instead. Option 1 would imply increasing the price to everyone. Is that really fair? Should I really continue to have my Internet access subsidized by the guy next door who doesn't use high volume media? I mean, I like it and all, but it's not fair, it's not free market, and it makes the ISPs want to find ways to shut me off so they can focus their business on the guy next door.
Option 3, on the other hand, makes me the most important customer to the ISP. It makes them want high volume users. It makes them more money when we use more Internet. Suddenly the ISP's profit incentive is directly in line with making the Internet faster and encouraging high volume services. Seems like a pretty good thing, no?
So choose your poison:
1. Subsidization with the ISP hating high volume users.
2. Deep packet inspection with the ISP choosing which 1's and 0's are "good" and which are "bad".
3. Net neutrality with tiering, and the ISP becomes profit motivated to encourage high bandwidth and high volume services.
Gee, tough question.
Tom, I love ya. I was making banner ads for your site back in 1997, and loved every little review you put out. But you're off your nut on this one.
In the short term the solution for this is for the president to order the IRS to withhold these payouts until congress can close the loophole. If the paper companies sue, they would get laughed at or scolded by the judges as this is an obvious and evil perversion of the intent of the law.
As others have noted, we have statutory law in the U.S., which means the letter is what matters.
But your point is still a good one on the right path. The next question is "What should we do?"
The answer, I think, is to minimize specificity in laws. We cannot have highly specific laws which are also accurate. Or, said differently, our laws can be precise, or they can be accurate, but they cannot be both.
Seeing evidence of this fact in practice, we should use this evidence to further our cultural understanding of the problem of specialized legislation. Specificity breeds abuse. Continue with the thought experiment and develop your own ideas about the solution to unintended consequences. Or build on the above stated concept that specificity is the problem. Remain hopeful, and keep pushing forward. Each of us is just a drop of water, but if all thoughtful people like yourself continue to push forward, we can build stronger societies tomorrow.
But you can't blame the lawyers for defending their client.
I'm not sure if the lawyer ever swears an oath to defend The Constitution, but his client sure has hell did. Lawyers who are aware of an intent to violate the law going forward are obligated to disclose that fact. These lawyers are obligated to make it clear that the government intends to continue infringing our right to petition for redress, and to continue infringing the Fourth Amendment. If they cannot make that clear, they have an obligation -- at least moral if not legal -- to recuse themselves or resign their position.
Dress it up in the beauty of the adversarial legal system all you like, but saying that these lawyers have no obligation to expose the intent to commit treason by their employers is as empty as any tool of a criminal organization claiming he was just doing what he was told.
Will they get convicted for failing to disclose their fore-knowledge of a future crime? Of course not -- they are failing to disclose a future crime that will never be seen as a crime by those who judge crime, because those who judge crime want absolute power just like this President and the one before him (and most of them since the original GW said he didn't want it). But that does not excuse them of their obligation -- it just means that they will not face any punishment for being accessories to treason.
They'll be as innocent as O.J. and Ted Stevens.
the site's market share in February was up 90% year over year, accounting for about 2.5% of total US Web site visits.
It's amazing what you can do when you put functionality ahead of everything -- design, cashflow, tracking -- everything on Craig's List is second to plain functionality.
No, Geitner actually put forward a plan (starting with financials) that would allow the government to label companies as 'too big to fail' and then take them over at will. Doesn't matter if they took bailout money or not.
Yegads - thanks for the clarification.
Curious - how would you offset the risk? Is there a good answer?
This is the EXACT same power they want to give to the treasury secretary to be able to unilaterally, on a whim, take over companies when some undocumented criteria are met.
Not unilaterally. The company must first choose to be subject to this policy, typically by accepting a bailout agreement.
Now I see why so many people become anarchists... ;)
Demanding that our government respect the principles of our nation is not anarchic. It is Constitutional conservatism. It is patriotism.
The options are pretty simple here -- bandwidth capping or deep packet inspection with traffic shaping. The intertubes are not infinite bandwidth, and they cost money.
To me, the free market bandwidth capping sounds like a vastly superior option.
The pricing may not be efficient at the moment, but at least the free market can address that problem pretty efficiently, eventually. The free market is shithouse for dealing with asymmetric information problems (like the ISPs doing traffic shaping, which the typical customer does not, and should not need to, understand).
On a side note; I like giving my ISP money. They provide an incredibly valuable service. As long as they keep their damned noses out of which 1's and 0's I'm sending, I want to give them lots of money so they build bigger and bigger pipes.
And, think about it -- if we start paying differential prices based on differential bandwidth consumption, where's their profit motive? That's right, in increasing the amount of 1's and 0's we consume. So all of a sudden the ISPs go from hating P2P to loving it. Suddenly the ISPs would be the side of information dissemination, instead of on the information hoarder side. That's a pretty frikkin' good thing, no? Not that I want them corrupting congress in either direction, but if I have to accept corruption, I'd rather have them counterbalancing the intellectual monopoly advocates, who are getting a bit too much of their way lately.
Of course, I'd like to see more competition and more efficient pricing. But that is a separate issue.
Keir Thomas berates the fact that the world of Linux almost entirely lacks critics. In fact, he says, Linux people tend to see genuine critical evaluation as a bad thing.
Keir Thomas is a witch! He gave me the evil eye, and now my laptop has dropped three pixels! He'll crash your servers if you let him run free! Burn him! :)
I find your post to be patriotic, rational, and highly relevant to our current context. Thanks! :)
The Guardian claims the old argument that 'search engines and aggregators provide players like guardian.co.uk with traffic in return for the use of our content' doesn't hold water any more, and that it's 'heavily skewed' in Google's favour.
Is The Guardian saying that their robots.txt file is not working? And that they are also not receiving the User-Agent string that allows them to identify GoogleBot?
Frankly, I am skeptical. I think they are not interested in the free-market, opt-in or opt-out as you wish, approach. What they are asking for is economic socialism(*).
* Please don't conflate political socialism with economic socialism. Don't tell me about gulags or suppression of dissent -- that's political socialism (or rather, some examples of it).
That's the date by which every author and publisher in America is supposed to decide whether to "opt in," "opt out," or simply "ignore" a vast compulsory licensing scheme for the benefit of Google. Most, about 88%, are expected to "ignore." That's because they know their online display rights have value, and the last thing they want is to be herded like sheep into a giant contract commitment.
OK, so it's an option - a new market that the author can choose to participate in, as he or she wishes?
For private gain, the Google parties now seek to destroy the health in the system that individual bargaining preserves.
"Seek to destroy"? It's an option - a new market option.
Disputes will be fixed in arbitration with no access to federal courts which have often shown mercy to authors. Arbitrators will be "you sign it you eat it" line-parsing bureaucrats.
This differs from a contract with binding-arbitration between an author and a traditional publisher how?
If she's arguing that authors should choose to ignore, that seems reasonable. But that last bit sounds like she is claiming there is evil in allowing Google to offer the new business model. Is she an author? Maybe she is a PR person for a traditional publisher? Do I just not get it, and there actually is some new impediment inflicted upon the author here? Or is this article fishy?
Assuming the problem with emissions is that it is a consumption of a public good (clean air), why not just tax gasoline instead? You can consume as much clean air as you like, as long as you pay society for what you consume.
(disclaimer, I'm a Californian with a black car, and I like black cars)
Will this be enough to satisfy anti-DRM players...?
The simple answer to this stupid question is another question: Will it work as well as cracked games?
That's all anyone wants. For the solution to be superior (in the customer's eyes) to the problem (in the company's eyes). It's called customer service. Sell a better product, win. Sell a worse product, lose.
Also, two plus two equals four. (I figure if you didn't already know the "sell good product, win" part, you might not know the answer to that age-old mathematics riddle)
Paying an extra $500 for a computer in this environment -- same piece of hardware -- paying $500 more to get a logo on it? I think that's a more challenging proposition for the average person than it used to be.
I must say I agree, Mr. Ballmer. Have you heard of OpenOffice? It costs less (100% less to be precise) than Microsoft Office and does the same thing. Mostly just a difference in logo. And then there's Ubuntu.
Have a nice day, monkeyboy. :)
what can I do to make myself hireable in a short period of time?
Lie. Learning to create wealth by programming takes a while. Lying is the most effective fast track.
Is it possible to pick up enough of what I'd need within a couple months?
Not really, because programming still has a lot of art to it. There aren't a whole lot of "plug and chug" type problems out there. Most jobs require some feel still.
If so, what and how?
Here I'm going to give you the real answer to your question: Get an iPhone or an Android. Start coding. Become moderately successful. Put this on your resume.
>> You don't have to look farther than the Bush administration to see this.
> Or the Obama Administration also, apparently.
[sigh]
Can we enter a class-action suit for falsely raised expectations? Perhaps under failure to satisfy fitness for a particular use as advertised?
I really wanted to believe. Scratch that. I still want to believe. We can do better than this, and a rising tide really does raise all ships.
Well, except rats, I guess. A rising tide drowns them. Unfortunately, being a rat is a pre-req for winning a national popular election in the age of advertising and PR.
[sigh]
And revolutions suck. They drain so much GDP from the society in which they occur. ...
OK - no more sighing. We need to grab the bull by the horns (or by the YouTube, Twitter, Blog, and Facebook as the case may be), and fix this shit. Think hard. Write objectively. Forget the party affiliate stuff and go hard-core rational.
I'm working on a big piece with a dozen friends (from MBA to borderline-socialist) right now on tax policy. The nation needs us. All of us should be doing the same.
Nice - wish I could mod you up - thanks!
They put their mouths where their money is, or something like that (too late in the day to be properly witty). Read it online for free.
http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/against.htm
Just to reiterate what has already been said by a bunch of other people; *nix was designed for remotely managed systems and untrusted users. Set the home partition and /tmp to noexec, don't give the user write perms anywhere else, script rsync over SSH to manage config updates, similar scripts with rsync/SSH for reassigning a machine to a different department, and make your own gold configs.
I think the reason the OP can't find the software package to do it is because there is no software package to do it, it's built in to DNA of the *nix. It is not a single unified application added on top of the OS like Windows, it is everywhere in the OS. Not that there's anything horribly wrong with Windows remote management - they've come a long way in a very short time. But *nix has been doing it since it was born - it is pervasive in the way the OS works.
It does, however, take some getting used to. It's not going to feel like Windows management. It's a pretty steep learning curve too. But it is fun to learn, and when the gestalt whacks you in the head and you suddenly get it you get this involuntary, "Oh Wow" like you've never felt before.
Beware, though - when that moment hits, all hope is lost. You'll be stuck with *nix for the rest of your life. Mac is still acceptable since it's built on *nix, but it just takes all the fun out of Windows. You'll fire up your Windows box to play a video game, and start to notice all the nice little system management tools that you don't have.
But the Innovation Alliance, a group representing patent-holders that oppose the legislation said that it would 'devalue all patents, invite infringement -- including from companies in China, India and other countries -- and generate more litigation that will further strain the courts.'
These guys really need a new PR firm. Vague insinuations about the threat of SEAsia and clogged courts is soooo pre-9/11. It's all about child porn and terrorism now, guys - get with the program.
Consequently, career experts advise job seekers to not post any photos, opinions or information on blogs and social networking websites (like Slashdot) that a potential employer might find remotely off-putting. Instead of cautioning job seekers to censor their activity online, we job seekers and defenders of our civil liberties should tell employers to stop snooping and to stop judging our behavior outside of work, writes CIO.com Senior Online Editor Meridith Levinson.
I'm going to have to go with option three here:
Find an employer who values independent thinkers, and who will find your analysis of economic issues to be a sign of an active, critical mind. That way, you increase your chance of getting a job, and of not working for a boss who is looking for a mindless cog.
And if all your online posting is about boobs, well, guess what, you're probably not the right guy for that boss to hire. Career experts and CIO magazine seem to betray one helluva bias here - that people are juvenile idiots, who should get jobs despite their vapid nature. That is ridiculous.
Microsoft has said that Open Source is communist and Anti-American! How can the business community survive, now that their broken algorithms have been published?
Maybe you haven't been paying attention. For the past four months, all the CEOs of all the banks have been singing the praises of communism. They were so convincing, in fact, that the government handed them $350 billion with no strings attached (which they promptly spent on themselves, bonuses for their lackeys, and on buying distressed companies).
The banks aren't any more anti-communism than Microsoft is. IE: They oppose it when it benefits others or non-executives, and support it when it keeps them and the rest of the American Aristocracy in beach houses and private jets.
And in that, they are no different than anyone else, except the extreme rare few who strive for objectivity and reason. Extremely endangered are they, though - I believe there are three hundred sixty four known examples of such people in the wild, and but few of them have formed breeding pairs.