I would have expected this to be the #1 argument in favor of flex-time. People have different productivity cycles. Me personally, I've tried a lot of different schedules, and oddly, the one that works best for me does not have a 24 hour period. I work best on a 25-hour cycle of sleep 9 hours, work 8, play 8. Now obviously I can't put in as many hours as the typical 8/8/8 worker, but the fact that my productivity goes up with a 9/8/8 schedule makes up for it.
Also, I am a student. Over the course of a typical week, I sleep for about 55-60 hours, work 12-20, have class and class work 16-24 hours, and play the rest of the time. With this broken up schedule, I simply don't have enough contiguous play time and towards the end of the quarter (i.e. this week and last week) other parts of the schedule start to take the heat. Let it be said that my GPA would be a few points lower if this school didn't offer so many classes at night.
That's me, and everyone's different. Why companies are compelled to have everyone on a fixed schedule... I don't know.
I think the work-for-hire model doesn't hold for grad students for a couple of reasons (btw, ianal).
First, the primary role of the grad student is as a "customer" of the university. A lot of grad students also work for the university they attend, but that is not their primary capacity. A grad student does not go to grad school in order to work for the university, a grad student goes to grad school to purchase an education in pursuit of a graduate degree.
Second, a university is an academic institution. Work-for-hire is a commercial practice. If we are indeed to keep these distinctions from blurring, then the university needs to forego the work-for-hire argument and concede that it is an academic institution rather than a commercial institution, and an academic institution as well as a commercial institution.
The exit polls usually are correct, but when a state is as close as Florida was, I doubt that the accuracy holds up. Also, the fact that the polls were still open in western Florida when the call was made left room for voters to make a "correction" and that can only add to any inaccuracy that exists in the exit polls.
Like I said, when the election was called in Florida for Gore, I think this is what happened:
1. Gore supporters who had not yet voted decided not to (complacency)
2. Bush supporters who had not yet voted decided to get out and do it (getting busy)
Who cares what exit polls said up to that point. The election was called in Florida while the polls were still open in Florida.
No one will say it in so many words, but it's obvious the talking heads think Nader is costing the election for Gore (it's not over til it's over, but damn it's looking like Bush is ahead). Enough about what Nader's done, let's look at what CNN's done.
The polls close at 7:00 in Florida, right? Ok, CNN decided to call the election for Gore in at 7:00 based on their exit polls. This of course ignores the fact that the polls in the western panhandle closed an hour later at 7:00 Central Time. The effect is this: having seen their state called for Gore, Gore supporters in the panhandle get complacent and Bush supporters get busy. Now the race in Florida is tight, but Bush is ahead. I wager that if CNN had held off on the call, Gore would have it for sure. Now that they have called it and then withdrawn, it's too close to call 5 hours after the last polls closed.
It used to be the philosophy of some ancient Athenian Greeks that the truth was anything one could convince someone else of. In many ways that's a fact today as well, regardless of whether people admit it.
Suppose I say Nasty Statement X about CEO Joe Sixpack of Acme, Inc. and his company. I wouldn't have said X if I didn't think X was true. However Mr. Sixpack was rather annoyed that I revealed X for whatever reason and since Acme was involved, he billed the corporate lawyers (not like his own were as cheap as mine, anyway). So here we are in court "discussing" Nasty Statement X and Mr. Sixpack wins for Acme. Because he and his corporate lapdogs proved (read: convinced) a judge or a jury or whoever that X was false, when in fact I said it in truth.
Is this not a possible scenario? Is it unlikely? No and not really. Considering the mass of wealth, influence, and "credibility" that has gilded the upper escelon of the corporate world in particular and the value they place on not having certain facts revealed... It's pretty fucking likely.
Now, finally, is this definition of truth not what certain Athenians believed during the time of the ancient Greek democracy?
I've heard that too, but there's something else going on in the market. Earlier this year Tom's did a test of Athlon systems with the Via KX133 chipset. Paired with the performance data was a rundown on how easy it was to find information about the Athlon boards on the manufacturer's websites. The conclusion was basically that good Athlon boards exist, but they are not marketted in the least bit. In some cases they were even hidden.
Now, that doesn't have anything specifically to do with SMP, but if board manufacturers were under that much pressure not to market their single-CPU Athlon boards, how much pressure must they be under not to produce SMP Athlon boards?
Perhaps Sony is the first major corporate interest to realize that recent court actions, regardless of who's right and who's wrong, are as futile as damming the ocean. When the industry fights, it's like sqeezing a chunk of jello, it doesn't collapse under the pressure like rubber, it comes out from between your fingers on all sides and makes a mess. So this time, instead of fighting it, they offer some hush money to keep the know-how of ripping these games from spreading. Honestly, if this is true, it's much more sinister than legal action. Legal action makes a scene and everyone stops to look. This will just shut people up.
First of all, the prosecution has to prove that the defedant knew otherwise when they stated their "facts". In this case, that means if any MPAA internal documents say something along the lines of... "open source is a way of licensing software so that users are free to do pretty much whatever they please with the product." The problem is discovering that document and getting it to court. Given the roster of companies involved in open source, the resources to discover that document in spite of the MPAA do exist, but organizing those resources will be a bitch. Now I'm in no position to start getting things together, but if someone like, say Bruce Perens would just make a few well placed phone calls to, for instance, the DoJ, IBM's legal department, RedHat, Caldera, FSF, et al. I believe the strings are there to be pulled if someone with the right reputation would start pulling them. The statement by the MPAA is obviously false. Dragging them into court for it and proving that they knew otherwise when that statement was filed would prove perjury, and that would raise a lot of eyebrows. After all, if the MPAA lied in one legal brief, who knows how many other times they've lied;-)
Excuse me, I meant AOL-Time-Warner. And for that matter, would any AOL users out there care to publish the DeCSS code on your free however many megs of web space you get with your account?
I believe step that will finally turn this issue around will be when someone prints the DeCSS code in a full page ad in Time magazine. That way when the MPAA goes after Time magazine, Time-Warner will be a party to both the defense and the prosecution. Or maybe they'll just sue whoever placed the ad, despite that Time agreed to print it.
When I hear the question "Should peer-to-peer file sharing be legal or not on the Internet?" and "Should companies like Google and Yahoo be held legally responsible for the content that they index?" I start to ask all kinds of other questions in my head. I believe they fall into a common category, but I'm sure what to call it. Here are some:
Q: Should telephone calls to Columbia be illegal? A: They're not illegal, and they shouldn't be illegal. A blanket law like this is not justified by the higher percentage of calls related to illegal trade.
Q: Should the phone company be held responsible for listing the phone numbers of drug dealers and hitmen? A: They should not be, and are not. The phone company is only a party to business that takes place between itself and its customers, and not to business that takes place between its customers. Phone listings, like phone service itself, are provided universally without editorial control.
Q: Should the used CD market be closed because it takes away revenue from new CD sales? A: The market is not and should not be closed. After a CD is purchased, its future resale and any revenue from it are not the domain of the record company.
Q: Should the sale of fertilizer and other nitrates be banned in light of the Oklahoma City bombing? A: They have not and should not be banned. Fertilizer and other nitrates have numerous uses other than in explosives.
So, back to the questions at hand.
Q: Should peer-to-peer sharing be banned on the Internet? A: There are lots of peer-to-peer protocols, and so far only Napster is officially under attack. To make all peer-to-peer protocols illegal would seriously harm the users of established protocols like SMB, who may depend on it for business. Therefore a blanket law is unlikely. Here the answer to the question regarding fertilizer becomes pertinent. Such protocols have other uses. In cases like Napster and Gnutella, it's easy for people to ignore the fact that there are other uses because the first widespread use of these protocols was to avoid copyright laws. That is not the fault of the creators of the protocols and they should not be held responsible. One such use of Napster is for unsigned bands to put their music online in a place where lots of people can get it. Another problem with banning Napster in particular is the Napster, Inc does not place any material on the Napster network, nor do any of the shared files traverse their local network infrastructure. What Napster, Inc does is index what other people have shared. They do this without regard to the status of the files people are sharing. See the answer to the question about phone listings.
Q: Should Yahoo and Google be responsible for the material they index? A: They are not and should not. See the answer to the question about phone listings.
Recently I read a comment comparing the DNS to Usenet on the basis of where the renegades end up. It basically said that the creators of Usenet had the foresight to create not only the top level newsgroup for "proper" discussion forums, but also the alt newsgroup where anything goes. To my knowledge no trademark infringement under the alt umbrella has ever been challenged in court, and due to the nature of that part of Usenet, I don't think it ever could be. It is well understood that alt. is no man's land and on that basis, a sufficiently talented attourny could convince a judge that a mark used under the alt newsgroup does not dilute a trademark due to that understanding.
By contrast, the DNS traps everyone into the.com,.net,.org,.edu,.int,.gov,.mil, and ISO country code domains and leaves no place for all those registrants who would more appropriately occupy a.alt domain. If the DNS had started out with a.alt domain that then became a well understood DMZ, we probably wouldn't have had the domain dispute problems that we've had without it. Adding a.alt TLD now may or may not alleviate the problem of excessive litigation, depending on whether net users at large can embrace the new domain's intent. In the beginning it would have been easier to get users to understand something like that.
As for usurping root service from NSI, it really depends on how widespread pirate DNS usage becomes before that first legal challenge. If the pirate DNS can proclaim loud and clear to all its users from the beginning that its subdomains are merely place names, like those found on a map, and can get a large portion of the Internet using its roots, then appropriate backing from organisations like FSF and EFF and such could get the courts to recognize domains as place names therefore nondiluting.
Ok, suppose they do... then what? My bet is that if Intel buys Transmeta, Crusoe will be forgotten. Intel is a case study in NIH, that is, 'Not Invented Here.' ARM has been in the tank for years until just recently, despite the fact that it's a great platform. Why? Intel didn't invent it, therefore they're more than a little leary about marketting it. Things like the Pentium get out because Intel feels good about designing, producing, and marketting it in house. Maybe things are changing, but if the past is any indication (and it usually is) an Intel buyout of Transmeta will mean the death or severe beating of Crusoe.
I'll second that. A nice tree icon (not like that stupid Christmas Cheer pic) would do nicely for a story like this one. The penguin icon means Linux, and this story is definitely non-Linux. OTOH, I agree that there is a place for environmental conscience on News for Nerds / Stuff that Matters. 1) the environment has traditionally been cared for by nerds, with a brief but notable exception that occurred in the late sixties of which vestiges live on, and 2) it definitely matters.
And then there's DePaul, where they keep getting new T1's until the saturation disappears. It's not bandwidth that's the problem here. It's the routing. For whatever reason, DePaul's class B gets dropped from various routing tables around the net from time to time. And it sucks. Hard.
But then that leads to the inevitable cat and mouse game where the gnutella people continuously reinvent the protocol and the blockers continuously add blocking hueristics. Until they start accidentally blocking other traffic that just gets caught up in the tangle of blocking criteria.
The industry associations love to call people theives and pirates whenever things don't go their way. They liken all Napster users to theives in spite of a Supreme Court ruling that says infringement is not theft. Infrigers doesn't strike as much fear in the hearts of the many, I guess.
I'd like to take this opportunity to point out the similarities between the industry associations and the Nazis. They both have the law on their side, mostly because they induced the implementation of the law, as opposed to any real correctness in the law. They both grant special places to certain "blessed" groups of people (Nazis chose Aryans, {MP,RI}AA chooses individuals with strong ignorant consumerish traits). They both seek to destroy anyone else (Nazis by extermination, AAs by making everyone a "good consumer").
Ok, maybe on it's own merits, it's not fair to call the MPAA and the RIAA Nazis. On the other hand, they're calling a lot of people theives who haven't (as defined by law and court ruling) stolen anything.
I tried this for a while, but my printer was a little weird dealing with log files, so I eventually got rid of it. When I did tho, I deleted/dev/lp1 and then remade it with the device numbers for tty9, and left the syslog configuration files alone.
Some time later, someone did try to get in, but they saw a bunch of stuff logging to "/dev/lp1" and left. So even if you don't have a printer, if you can make it look like you do, you'll scare off a few that way.
Slashdot Mirror
I would have expected this to be the #1 argument in favor of flex-time. People have different productivity cycles. Me personally, I've tried a lot of different schedules, and oddly, the one that works best for me does not have a 24 hour period. I work best on a 25-hour cycle of sleep 9 hours, work 8, play 8. Now obviously I can't put in as many hours as the typical 8/8/8 worker, but the fact that my productivity goes up with a 9/8/8 schedule makes up for it.
Also, I am a student. Over the course of a typical week, I sleep for about 55-60 hours, work 12-20, have class and class work 16-24 hours, and play the rest of the time. With this broken up schedule, I simply don't have enough contiguous play time and towards the end of the quarter (i.e. this week and last week) other parts of the schedule start to take the heat. Let it be said that my GPA would be a few points lower if this school didn't offer so many classes at night.
That's me, and everyone's different. Why companies are compelled to have everyone on a fixed schedule... I don't know.
Forgive me, I've been up all night watching the election coverage....
That last sentence should read "and an not academic institution as well as a commercial institution."
I think the work-for-hire model doesn't hold for grad students for a couple of reasons (btw, ianal).
First, the primary role of the grad student is as a "customer" of the university. A lot of grad students also work for the university they attend, but that is not their primary capacity. A grad student does not go to grad school in order to work for the university, a grad student goes to grad school to purchase an education in pursuit of a graduate degree.
Second, a university is an academic institution. Work-for-hire is a commercial practice. If we are indeed to keep these distinctions from blurring, then the university needs to forego the work-for-hire argument and concede that it is an academic institution rather than a commercial institution, and an academic institution as well as a commercial institution.
The exit polls usually are correct, but when a state is as close as Florida was, I doubt that the accuracy holds up. Also, the fact that the polls were still open in western Florida when the call was made left room for voters to make a "correction" and that can only add to any inaccuracy that exists in the exit polls.
Like I said, when the election was called in Florida for Gore, I think this is what happened:
1. Gore supporters who had not yet voted decided not to (complacency)
2. Bush supporters who had not yet voted decided to get out and do it (getting busy)
Who cares what exit polls said up to that point. The election was called in Florida while the polls were still open in Florida.
No one will say it in so many words, but it's obvious the talking heads think Nader is costing the election for Gore (it's not over til it's over, but damn it's looking like Bush is ahead). Enough about what Nader's done, let's look at what CNN's done.
The polls close at 7:00 in Florida, right? Ok, CNN decided to call the election for Gore in at 7:00 based on their exit polls. This of course ignores the fact that the polls in the western panhandle closed an hour later at 7:00 Central Time. The effect is this: having seen their state called for Gore, Gore supporters in the panhandle get complacent and Bush supporters get busy. Now the race in Florida is tight, but Bush is ahead. I wager that if CNN had held off on the call, Gore would have it for sure. Now that they have called it and then withdrawn, it's too close to call 5 hours after the last polls closed.
That's the shittiest thing I've ever seen.
It used to be the philosophy of some ancient Athenian Greeks that the truth was anything one could convince someone else of. In many ways that's a fact today as well, regardless of whether people admit it.
Suppose I say Nasty Statement X about CEO Joe Sixpack of Acme, Inc. and his company. I wouldn't have said X if I didn't think X was true. However Mr. Sixpack was rather annoyed that I revealed X for whatever reason and since Acme was involved, he billed the corporate lawyers (not like his own were as cheap as mine, anyway). So here we are in court "discussing" Nasty Statement X and Mr. Sixpack wins for Acme. Because he and his corporate lapdogs proved (read: convinced) a judge or a jury or whoever that X was false, when in fact I said it in truth.
Is this not a possible scenario? Is it unlikely? No and not really. Considering the mass of wealth, influence, and "credibility" that has gilded the upper escelon of the corporate world in particular and the value they place on not having certain facts revealed... It's pretty fucking likely.
Now, finally, is this definition of truth not what certain Athenians believed during the time of the ancient Greek democracy?
I've heard that too, but there's something else going on in the market. Earlier this year Tom's did a test of Athlon systems with the Via KX133 chipset. Paired with the performance data was a rundown on how easy it was to find information about the Athlon boards on the manufacturer's websites. The conclusion was basically that good Athlon boards exist, but they are not marketted in the least bit. In some cases they were even hidden.
Now, that doesn't have anything specifically to do with SMP, but if board manufacturers were under that much pressure not to market their single-CPU Athlon boards, how much pressure must they be under not to produce SMP Athlon boards?
Perhaps Sony is the first major corporate interest to realize that recent court actions, regardless of who's right and who's wrong, are as futile as damming the ocean. When the industry fights, it's like sqeezing a chunk of jello, it doesn't collapse under the pressure like rubber, it comes out from between your fingers on all sides and makes a mess. So this time, instead of fighting it, they offer some hush money to keep the know-how of ripping these games from spreading. Honestly, if this is true, it's much more sinister than legal action. Legal action makes a scene and everyone stops to look. This will just shut people up.
First of all, the prosecution has to prove that the defedant knew otherwise when they stated their "facts". In this case, that means if any MPAA internal documents say something along the lines of... "open source is a way of licensing software so that users are free to do pretty much whatever they please with the product." The problem is discovering that document and getting it to court. Given the roster of companies involved in open source, the resources to discover that document in spite of the MPAA do exist, but organizing those resources will be a bitch. Now I'm in no position to start getting things together, but if someone like, say Bruce Perens would just make a few well placed phone calls to, for instance, the DoJ, IBM's legal department, RedHat, Caldera, FSF, et al. I believe the strings are there to be pulled if someone with the right reputation would start pulling them. The statement by the MPAA is obviously false. Dragging them into court for it and proving that they knew otherwise when that statement was filed would prove perjury, and that would raise a lot of eyebrows. After all, if the MPAA lied in one legal brief, who knows how many other times they've lied ;-)
Excuse me, I meant AOL-Time-Warner. And for that matter, would any AOL users out there care to publish the DeCSS code on your free however many megs of web space you get with your account?
I believe step that will finally turn this issue around will be when someone prints the DeCSS code in a full page ad in Time magazine. That way when the MPAA goes after Time magazine, Time-Warner will be a party to both the defense and the prosecution. Or maybe they'll just sue whoever placed the ad, despite that Time agreed to print it.
When I hear the question "Should peer-to-peer file sharing be legal or not on the Internet?" and "Should companies like Google and Yahoo be held legally responsible for the content that they index?" I start to ask all kinds of other questions in my head. I believe they fall into a common category, but I'm sure what to call it. Here are some:
Q: Should telephone calls to Columbia be illegal?
A: They're not illegal, and they shouldn't be illegal. A blanket law like this is not justified by the higher percentage of calls related to illegal trade.
Q: Should the phone company be held responsible for listing the phone numbers of drug dealers and hitmen?
A: They should not be, and are not. The phone company is only a party to business that takes place between itself and its customers, and not to business that takes place between its customers. Phone listings, like phone service itself, are provided universally without editorial control.
Q: Should the used CD market be closed because it takes away revenue from new CD sales?
A: The market is not and should not be closed. After a CD is purchased, its future resale and any revenue from it are not the domain of the record company.
Q: Should the sale of fertilizer and other nitrates be banned in light of the Oklahoma City bombing?
A: They have not and should not be banned. Fertilizer and other nitrates have numerous uses other than in explosives.
So, back to the questions at hand.
Q: Should peer-to-peer sharing be banned on the Internet?
A: There are lots of peer-to-peer protocols, and so far only Napster is officially under attack. To make all peer-to-peer protocols illegal would seriously harm the users of established protocols like SMB, who may depend on it for business. Therefore a blanket law is unlikely. Here the answer to the question regarding fertilizer becomes pertinent. Such protocols have other uses. In cases like Napster and Gnutella, it's easy for people to ignore the fact that there are other uses because the first widespread use of these protocols was to avoid copyright laws. That is not the fault of the creators of the protocols and they should not be held responsible. One such use of Napster is for unsigned bands to put their music online in a place where lots of people can get it. Another problem with banning Napster in particular is the Napster, Inc does not place any material on the Napster network, nor do any of the shared files traverse their local network infrastructure. What Napster, Inc does is index what other people have shared. They do this without regard to the status of the files people are sharing. See the answer to the question about phone listings.
Q: Should Yahoo and Google be responsible for the material they index?
A: They are not and should not. See the answer to the question about phone listings.
Your point is moot. It is still possible to register y.z when the email address x@z goes to a valid account.
Not the shortest anymore. If you owned .z, then you could very easily have your email address be x@z.
Recently I read a comment comparing the DNS to Usenet on the basis of where the renegades end up. It basically said that the creators of Usenet had the foresight to create not only the top level newsgroup for "proper" discussion forums, but also the alt newsgroup where anything goes. To my knowledge no trademark infringement under the alt umbrella has ever been challenged in court, and due to the nature of that part of Usenet, I don't think it ever could be. It is well understood that alt. is no man's land and on that basis, a sufficiently talented attourny could convince a judge that a mark used under the alt newsgroup does not dilute a trademark due to that understanding.
.com, .net, .org, .edu, .int, .gov, .mil, and ISO country code domains and leaves no place for all those registrants who would more appropriately occupy a .alt domain. If the DNS had started out with a .alt domain that then became a well understood DMZ, we probably wouldn't have had the domain dispute problems that we've had without it. Adding a .alt TLD now may or may not alleviate the problem of excessive litigation, depending on whether net users at large can embrace the new domain's intent. In the beginning it would have been easier to get users to understand something like that.
By contrast, the DNS traps everyone into the
As for usurping root service from NSI, it really depends on how widespread pirate DNS usage becomes before that first legal challenge. If the pirate DNS can proclaim loud and clear to all its users from the beginning that its subdomains are merely place names, like those found on a map, and can get a large portion of the Internet using its roots, then appropriate backing from organisations like FSF and EFF and such could get the courts to recognize domains as place names therefore nondiluting.
Ok, suppose they do... then what? My bet is that if Intel buys Transmeta, Crusoe will be forgotten. Intel is a case study in NIH, that is, 'Not Invented Here.' ARM has been in the tank for years until just recently, despite the fact that it's a great platform. Why? Intel didn't invent it, therefore they're more than a little leary about marketting it. Things like the Pentium get out because Intel feels good about designing, producing, and marketting it in house. Maybe things are changing, but if the past is any indication (and it usually is) an Intel buyout of Transmeta will mean the death or severe beating of Crusoe.
I'll second that. A nice tree icon (not like that stupid Christmas Cheer pic) would do nicely for a story like this one. The penguin icon means Linux, and this story is definitely non-Linux. OTOH, I agree that there is a place for environmental conscience on News for Nerds / Stuff that Matters. 1) the environment has traditionally been cared for by nerds, with a brief but notable exception that occurred in the late sixties of which vestiges live on, and 2) it definitely matters.
And then there's DePaul, where they keep getting new T1's until the saturation disappears. It's not bandwidth that's the problem here. It's the routing. For whatever reason, DePaul's class B gets dropped from various routing tables around the net from time to time. And it sucks. Hard.
And given that gnutella uses straight HTTP to do the actual file transfer, well, I'm sure the implications are obvious.
But then that leads to the inevitable cat and mouse game where the gnutella people continuously reinvent the protocol and the blockers continuously add blocking hueristics. Until they start accidentally blocking other traffic that just gets caught up in the tangle of blocking criteria.
The industry associations love to call people theives and pirates whenever things don't go their way. They liken all Napster users to theives in spite of a Supreme Court ruling that says infringement is not theft. Infrigers doesn't strike as much fear in the hearts of the many, I guess.
I'd like to take this opportunity to point out the similarities between the industry associations and the Nazis. They both have the law on their side, mostly because they induced the implementation of the law, as opposed to any real correctness in the law. They both grant special places to certain "blessed" groups of people (Nazis chose Aryans, {MP,RI}AA chooses individuals with strong ignorant consumerish traits). They both seek to destroy anyone else (Nazis by extermination, AAs by making everyone a "good consumer").
Ok, maybe on it's own merits, it's not fair to call the MPAA and the RIAA Nazis. On the other hand, they're calling a lot of people theives who haven't (as defined by law and court ruling) stolen anything.
No, this is not a criminal case. The 5th amendment does not apply.
I wouldn't know, I shut it down and wiped the hard disks.
you have to have certain things running, and you have to know what to do, but it is possible
...much like any Unix operating system.
I tried this for a while, but my printer was a little weird dealing with log files, so I eventually got rid of it. When I did tho, I deleted /dev/lp1 and then remade it with the device numbers for tty9, and left the syslog configuration files alone.
Some time later, someone did try to get in, but they saw a bunch of stuff logging to "/dev/lp1" and left. So even if you don't have a printer, if you can make it look like you do, you'll scare off a few that way.