The utility of a CS degree for getting employment varies greatly by region. In my experience, socially conservative areas like New York and especially Boston put a great deal of importance on academic credentials as screening criteria for job applicants. Conversely, in Silicon Valley no one really gives a fuck what you studied in school - rather, they care about your apparent intelligence and demonstrated ability. If you write (and publish) some Free Software to demonstrate your skill at programming, and can discuss software intelligently in an interview, then your liberal education should be no obstacle to landing a job in the Valley.
But the internet isn't like a sidewalk at all. Jokes aside, it really is more like a series of tubes.
It is more or less impossible to enter the hotel I have described during business hours without encountering the unionists, and being exposed to their message. Yet suppose you wish to protest webstie Foo and to do so you set up website Bar. This is not analogous, because one may visit site Foo without the slightest awareness of Bar's protest.
Honestly I think DDoS is an even less effective protest technique than sitting down on a freeway ramp during rush hour. Both mostly annoy people, without making a clear political point. But both are obviously political speech, and should either be outright permitted, or at most punishable by a $20 fine. And it's my really nice, reasonable, consensus-oriented side that says $20 fine just to appease you fascists.. and we all know what happens when you start appeasing fascists.
Awww dude, put your name to it! There's so much that you said that's just right, and yet so much you said that's just asininely wrong.. but who wants to debate an AC?
I once worked a contract job where we were expected to program for 12+ hours a day 5 days a week, and another 8hrs on Saturday. It was a cool assignment, so the majority of my team were talented people, as talented as I have worked with at any other company. Yet because of the (vigorously enforced) long hours our productivity was shit. We spent the first four hours fixing the bugs we had inserted the previous day. The next four hours were genuinely productive. At that point we were all exhausted, and spent the next four hours writing horribly buggy code to be fixed the next morning.
This arrangement worked out great for the bodyshop employing my team. They got to bill insane hours, and the project dragged on forever. The company hiring the work, however, fared rather less well. While I left after 2 months of that bullshit, I heard from friends the project was cancelled as a failure after a year and a half. FWIW, the bossman of the project was a case study unto himself in repulsively ineffective management techniques.
Again tho, the picketing analogy isn't exactly accurate. There is no public sidewalk, no intermediate state between doing nothing and blocking access to the facility. If we want the Law to be reasonable, to find a consensus between the many strands of mainstream thought, then how are annoyances like this to be handled? I'm inclined to think of it as a minor infraction, much like jaywalking. Yes, Joe Random shouldn't fire the LOIC at websites he hates - and yes, Joe Random shouldn't cross the street mid-block. Roughly the same level of societal transgression in my evaluation.
I never said they were the same thing, only that the effect on me is the same.
Actually you didn't say that either. You just asserted that neither anonymous internet users nor bank robbers cause you work overtime. Congrats on that, I guess.
Oh c'mon, you know that's a totally bogus analogy. More like a bunch of hippies holding each others arms and blocking the door to the bank. Annoying as fuck if you're the bank manager or you need to make a deposit, but not even slightly similar to armed robbery.
People like Gandhi and Nelson Mandella and Martin Luther King who stood up for what they believe.
Mandela certainly and Gandhi afaik didn't intend to get tossed in a dungeon. MLK did plan and participate in some intentional arrests. They were very public arrests, a useful tactic in that time and context for gaining public support. The arrested protesters were rarely given long sentences, and always tried in open court. There is no reason at all to suppose Dr King would have wanted himself or anyone else tossed in the gulag for years.
Anonymous are nothing more than criminals running from the law.
Did you have to work overtime because of a DDoS attack or something?
DDoS and defacing a website are different, not necessarily related acts. DDoS doesn't leave any lasting damage, it just annoys the target and potentially costs them business. Defacing a site is intrusive, and reasonably analogous to vandalism in the physical world.
A hotel down the street is having a protracted dispute with a labor union. Every work day, all day long, there are picketers with a bullhorn standing in front of the hotel. They chant loudly ("don't check in - check out!") and shout personal insults at hotel guests. Yes, they do stay on the public sidewalk, and do not physically block access to the hotel. But there is no doubt they are very annoying to anyone staying/working there, and they certainly cost the hotel business.
Problem is, picketing is an imperfect analogy for DDoS attacks. The internet has no "public sidewalk" for protesters to stand on, making their message heard loudly & clearly, yet without blocking access.
A better analogy is the flashmob. Suppose a few thousand union sympathizers showed up at this hotel, each went inside and politely asked the desk clerk a pointless question, then left. None of them wearing masks or anything silly like that - all just anonymous Random Joes, indistinguishable from a legitimate customer. A thousand people lined up to get in the hotel would effectively prevent it from doing business - and I bet it would be super annoying to the clerk. I don't know what the Law would say about this kind of protest.
Here's what I don't get reading the comments on this story: It seems like a lot of intelligent & otherwise thoughtful people actually trust the bigmedia to report 'facts'. I don't mean trust them to report on the happenings of the day, as filtered thru the experiences, unconscious biases, and overt political agendas of human reporters. Rather, trust them to report some ideal unbiased and perfectly accurate representation of unquestionable Facts.
Seriously dude, didn't yo momma tell you not to believe everything you read / hear / see on teevee?
A more reasonable thing might be to have a document for each animal indicating what it's signal is, that is automatically admitted to court in any dog-signal-centered case.
That is, in fact, a completely reasonable suggestion.
People who steal music shouldn't be allowed around impressionable children.
I don't think there was any suggestion this man robbed a store or burglarized any albums from his neighborhors. You should really stop slandering strangers.
Facebook knows you're a dog. It also knows what breed, how old you are, your preference in bitches (or other dogs as it may be), your favorite brand of dogfood, and how often you play fetch.
these farmers' neighbors bought some Monsanto seed and carelessly contaminated their fields with it.
There is no evidence the contamination resulted from carelessness on the part of the neighboring frankenfarmers. Rather it appears Monsanto is producing a product which can easily, inadvertently release genetic pollution into nearby fields.
2) So? Making laws hard to enforce isn't the solution. Changing the laws are. You can argue that making laws easier to enforce is universally good. Good laws should be universally enforced. Bad laws that the police routinely ignore because they are inconvenient and only enforce when they feel like it (because they have a quota on the number of tickets they need to issue, someone got caught driving while black etc) again is a bad thing because it is a subjective enforcement of laws and not fair. If everyone was pulled over for doing something that shouldn't be illegal in the first place it would quickly become a political issue and the law would be changed.
Problem is, a huge number of unjust, draconian, puritanical, or otherwise shittastic laws are on the books. How about we change those laws first? Once a nation's laws are a paragon of virtue, and shining light on the hill so to speak.. okay, then the request to give unrestrained panopticon surveillance power to the police might not be quite so terrible an idea.
Re:Your right to what?
on
BTJunkie No More?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
for little money
What are you thinking? The average college kid today has cultural data stored on their computer that would cost tens, in some cases hundreds, of thousands of dollars if licensed (you can't really purchase copyrighted data) at current retail prices.
In the age of the Free Internet, a backward nobody in any insignificant town has cultural horizons orders of magnitude broader than than those enjoyed in the Bad Old Days by the most privileged record store geeks in the biggest cities. Do you really want to undo that historically unparalleled cultural advance just so a handful of greedy media execs and has-been ex-popstars can continue to cash fat checks?
Actually that is part of the definition for "Open standards". So it's referring not to internal storage, but to "encoding and transfer of computer data". I think it's pretty reasonable to require that a standard be documented.
Dude, it wasn't even a bad joke - that's just how the Brits talk. When a young Englishman says "I'm going to destroy X", he is colorfully indicating his intention to "party hard at X". It doesn't have the slightest connection to terrorism, it's just slang for getting wasted & having a good time. It took me about 30 seconds of being around drunk, excited British tourists to figure this out - it tends to be pretty obvious from context.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's just make everything a felony! That'll stop crime, for sure.
The utility of a CS degree for getting employment varies greatly by region. In my experience, socially conservative areas like New York and especially Boston put a great deal of importance on academic credentials as screening criteria for job applicants. Conversely, in Silicon Valley no one really gives a fuck what you studied in school - rather, they care about your apparent intelligence and demonstrated ability. If you write (and publish) some Free Software to demonstrate your skill at programming, and can discuss software intelligently in an interview, then your liberal education should be no obstacle to landing a job in the Valley.
But the internet isn't like a sidewalk at all. Jokes aside, it really is more like a series of tubes.
It is more or less impossible to enter the hotel I have described during business hours without encountering the unionists, and being exposed to their message. Yet suppose you wish to protest webstie Foo and to do so you set up website Bar. This is not analogous, because one may visit site Foo without the slightest awareness of Bar's protest.
Honestly I think DDoS is an even less effective protest technique than sitting down on a freeway ramp during rush hour. Both mostly annoy people, without making a clear political point. But both are obviously political speech, and should either be outright permitted, or at most punishable by a $20 fine. And it's my really nice, reasonable, consensus-oriented side that says $20 fine just to appease you fascists.. and we all know what happens when you start appeasing fascists.
Awww dude, put your name to it! There's so much that you said that's just right, and yet so much you said that's just asininely wrong.. but who wants to debate an AC?
I once worked a contract job where we were expected to program for 12+ hours a day 5 days a week, and another 8hrs on Saturday. It was a cool assignment, so the majority of my team were talented people, as talented as I have worked with at any other company. Yet because of the (vigorously enforced) long hours our productivity was shit. We spent the first four hours fixing the bugs we had inserted the previous day. The next four hours were genuinely productive. At that point we were all exhausted, and spent the next four hours writing horribly buggy code to be fixed the next morning.
This arrangement worked out great for the bodyshop employing my team. They got to bill insane hours, and the project dragged on forever. The company hiring the work, however, fared rather less well. While I left after 2 months of that bullshit, I heard from friends the project was cancelled as a failure after a year and a half. FWIW, the bossman of the project was a case study unto himself in repulsively ineffective management techniques.
Again tho, the picketing analogy isn't exactly accurate. There is no public sidewalk, no intermediate state between doing nothing and blocking access to the facility. If we want the Law to be reasonable, to find a consensus between the many strands of mainstream thought, then how are annoyances like this to be handled? I'm inclined to think of it as a minor infraction, much like jaywalking. Yes, Joe Random shouldn't fire the LOIC at websites he hates - and yes, Joe Random shouldn't cross the street mid-block. Roughly the same level of societal transgression in my evaluation.
I never said they were the same thing, only that the effect on me is the same.
Actually you didn't say that either. You just asserted that neither anonymous internet users nor bank robbers cause you work overtime. Congrats on that, I guess.
Oh c'mon, you know that's a totally bogus analogy. More like a bunch of hippies holding each others arms and blocking the door to the bank. Annoying as fuck if you're the bank manager or you need to make a deposit, but not even slightly similar to armed robbery.
There will be people out in the streets about this when things start getting bad.
Yes, but the drones will take care of them.
People like Gandhi and Nelson Mandella and Martin Luther King who stood up for what they believe.
Mandela certainly and Gandhi afaik didn't intend to get tossed in a dungeon. MLK did plan and participate in some intentional arrests. They were very public arrests, a useful tactic in that time and context for gaining public support. The arrested protesters were rarely given long sentences, and always tried in open court. There is no reason at all to suppose Dr King would have wanted himself or anyone else tossed in the gulag for years.
Anonymous are nothing more than criminals running from the law.
Did you have to work overtime because of a DDoS attack or something?
DDoS and defacing a website are different, not necessarily related acts. DDoS doesn't leave any lasting damage, it just annoys the target and potentially costs them business. Defacing a site is intrusive, and reasonably analogous to vandalism in the physical world.
A hotel down the street is having a protracted dispute with a labor union. Every work day, all day long, there are picketers with a bullhorn standing in front of the hotel. They chant loudly ("don't check in - check out!") and shout personal insults at hotel guests. Yes, they do stay on the public sidewalk, and do not physically block access to the hotel. But there is no doubt they are very annoying to anyone staying/working there, and they certainly cost the hotel business.
Problem is, picketing is an imperfect analogy for DDoS attacks. The internet has no "public sidewalk" for protesters to stand on, making their message heard loudly & clearly, yet without blocking access.
A better analogy is the flashmob. Suppose a few thousand union sympathizers showed up at this hotel, each went inside and politely asked the desk clerk a pointless question, then left. None of them wearing masks or anything silly like that - all just anonymous Random Joes, indistinguishable from a legitimate customer. A thousand people lined up to get in the hotel would effectively prevent it from doing business - and I bet it would be super annoying to the clerk. I don't know what the Law would say about this kind of protest.
What kind of brain dead idiot would intend to get tossed in the gulag, and likely tortured?
Here's what I don't get reading the comments on this story: It seems like a lot of intelligent & otherwise thoughtful people actually trust the bigmedia to report 'facts'. I don't mean trust them to report on the happenings of the day, as filtered thru the experiences, unconscious biases, and overt political agendas of human reporters. Rather, trust them to report some ideal unbiased and perfectly accurate representation of unquestionable Facts.
Seriously dude, didn't yo momma tell you not to believe everything you read / hear / see on teevee?
A more reasonable thing might be to have a document for each animal indicating what it's signal is, that is automatically admitted to court in any dog-signal-centered case.
That is, in fact, a completely reasonable suggestion.
People who steal music shouldn't be allowed around impressionable children.
I don't think there was any suggestion this man robbed a store or burglarized any albums from his neighborhors. You should really stop slandering strangers.
"Never attribute to incompetence that which is more plausibly explained by totalitarian sadism."
FTFY
Nonsense! Smoking marijuana is well known to lead to "Satanic music, jazz and swing".
nobody knows you're a dog.
Facebook knows you're a dog. It also knows what breed, how old you are, your preference in bitches (or other dogs as it may be), your favorite brand of dogfood, and how often you play fetch.
these farmers' neighbors bought some Monsanto seed and carelessly contaminated their fields with it.
There is no evidence the contamination resulted from carelessness on the part of the neighboring frankenfarmers. Rather it appears Monsanto is producing a product which can easily, inadvertently release genetic pollution into nearby fields.
All these things require a warrant so their must be probable cause.
Hahahaha... good one!
2) So? Making laws hard to enforce isn't the solution. Changing the laws are. You can argue that making laws easier to enforce is universally good. Good laws should be universally enforced. Bad laws that the police routinely ignore because they are inconvenient and only enforce when they feel like it (because they have a quota on the number of tickets they need to issue, someone got caught driving while black etc) again is a bad thing because it is a subjective enforcement of laws and not fair. If everyone was pulled over for doing something that shouldn't be illegal in the first place it would quickly become a political issue and the law would be changed.
Problem is, a huge number of unjust, draconian, puritanical, or otherwise shittastic laws are on the books. How about we change those laws first? Once a nation's laws are a paragon of virtue, and shining light on the hill so to speak.. okay, then the request to give unrestrained panopticon surveillance power to the police might not be quite so terrible an idea.
for little money
What are you thinking? The average college kid today has cultural data stored on their computer that would cost tens, in some cases hundreds, of thousands of dollars if licensed (you can't really purchase copyrighted data) at current retail prices.
In the age of the Free Internet, a backward nobody in any insignificant town has cultural horizons orders of magnitude broader than than those enjoyed in the Bad Old Days by the most privileged record store geeks in the biggest cities. Do you really want to undo that historically unparalleled cultural advance just so a handful of greedy media execs and has-been ex-popstars can continue to cash fat checks?
Actually that is part of the definition for "Open standards". So it's referring not to internal storage, but to "encoding and transfer of computer data". I think it's pretty reasonable to require that a standard be documented.
Maybe, with legislation like this, it will become "nobody ever got fired for choosing open source".
Dude, it wasn't even a bad joke - that's just how the Brits talk. When a young Englishman says "I'm going to destroy X", he is colorfully indicating his intention to "party hard at X". It doesn't have the slightest connection to terrorism, it's just slang for getting wasted & having a good time. It took me about 30 seconds of being around drunk, excited British tourists to figure this out - it tends to be pretty obvious from context.