An associate of mine will sometimes pay for something small that costs maybe $1 or so with a $20 in order to get change. Sometimes they'll ask if he has something smaller. He'll present a $2 bill.
He tells me that invariably they will break the twenty instead of taking the $2!
So... if I go with SBC wifi instead of gov't wifi, I get to pay for both, one through taxes, and the other through subscription fees? How's that a bargain, again?
If right now, it costs $29.95 a month to get 1.5mbps service over DSL, and a municipality will offer that much to anyone for free over Wi-Fi, then for the phone company to get $29.95 they'd have to offer a lot more: like a fixed IP address, possibly 6mbps service, or other things. That means that your government paid for wi-fi forced your commercial provider to offer you more services for the same or less money, and it is conceivably possible that for what it costs your city to offer the service wholesale, it means that you'll get 6mbps service for less than it would have cost you otherwise, and those who couldn't afford any service at all can get some access for free.
I think we should note that in places where the roads aren't publicly subsidized there is little or no commercial development, for example, rural places in Africa. There may be some argument for the government providing some subsidized things because they are generally needed and no commercial provider will offer them in order to allow the marketplace to operate. I think it matters very little where you might have to pay a yearly maintenance fee to the developer to maintain the local roads and having to pay property taxes. I don't know if there's a good answer but I think there is some argument where there is someone who can provide the service but won't at what it currently costs AND uses the power and capacity it has to prevent competitors from offering it while at the same time getting the laws changed to prevent municipalities from offering it.
It's like someone said, how could a toll road compete against a free highway? One possibility is a less crowded road, and another is offering people the legal right (since it's a private road) to drive at 85 mph if they choose to do so.
"Free Wi-Fi is no more wrong than having free public libraries... or more relevantly, free internet at public libraries."
Why not free cars, houses, food, health care, computers, etc?
Because the market supplies these. What we have had is essentially the exact same situation as the existence of local roads. The telephone companies are not providing the service; nobody is. So the local municipalities are doing so. Now the telephone companies want to make it illegal for local municipalities to provide a particular service that they as telephone companies will not provide, and the telcos are using their power as incumbent to deny access to connectivity to make it impossible for competitors to offer it either.
It is, in simple terms, on the order of a large landholder or holder of the exclusive right to build toll roads not building them in some cities, there being no other private company willing to create roads (because the primary toll road builder won't interconnect or will charge huge rates to do so, or will delay and use any method it can to stop them from operating), and using its ownership of the land or its monopoly toll-road privelege to make it impossible for competitors to build additional local roads, then getting a law to make it illegal for municipalities to build them when it has failed to do so.
I note that except for rural towns in Alaska we generally don't have municipal telephone companies because private companies are providing quality telephone service at fairly low rates, and making money at it (and typically hand-over-fist, too!) But when it comes to internet connectivity we are seeing limited service, high prices and unavailability, with no promises to ever provide service, and at the same time demands that local authorities not offer service when the telephone companies are unwilling or unable to offer it and no competitors will do so either.
I know there must be some answer but if providing data service was as lucrative as providing telephone service we should have had it everywhere at really inexpensive rates. So there has to be some reason, and I think it's because the phone companies want to charge more than the market will bear, are using their monopoly position to keep out competitors, and want to stop any other competition that might endanger their monopoly profit levels, even if the service doesn't directly compete against anything they offer. Or because there is a competitive threat and they are doing everything within their power to protect themselves from competition, even if they have no interest in offering the service.
In short, SBC is asking the state of Texas to provide them with a legally-approved monopoly. And the state is doing it.
No, that's what telephone companies have had for the last 100 years. SBC is asking to not have local government installs wireless networks with tax payer dollars (or, in other words, in form new monopolies with our money).
Except for one small thing: Notwithstanding that the phone companies are demanding that local municipalities be prohibited from setting up government owned communications facilities such as wi-fi access or high-speed broadband, they themselves are not offering it (presumably because it's noneconomic for them to do so.)
This is on the order of a private paving company getting a law passed to make it illegal for cities to build their own (free) roads, then at the same time the paving company is not putting in any (toll) roads themselves because there's not enough traffic to justify them. Or only building small two-lane dirt roads despite that there might be potential use for multi-lane highways.
Most telcos are sitting on wires and equipment that have been long-since depreciated down to value zero but would be enormously expensive for a competitor to duplicate. In ordinary circumstances that's what is necessary, except that the incumbents have the laws rigged to protect them from competitors, or can use all sorts of tricks to keep them from being able to offer any kind of service, including various anti-competitive practices which are prohibited but they get away with anyway.
As it is, the incumbent provider can get the laws rigged to make municipal communications services illegal, then at the same time not do anything to provide any services, plus make it non-economic for a competing private provider to operate. If an incumbent provider claims that it intends to offer service, then it should have to post a bond and be required to do so within a certain period or it forfeits the bond. Else it should have no right to prevent others (including a local municipality) to offer a service it is unwilling or unable to provide itself.
This is a fairly complex bill, so it's not easy to understand, (and that's almost certainly the reason, so people won't figure out what's going on), but here's my (non lawyer) take on it:
The incumbent utility can become partially deregulated;
Competitors can't charge more than the incumbent in the absence of a showing of a need to do so;
Municipalities aren't allowed to provide communications service or operate any kind of communications utility;
There is at least one provision that is probably unconstitutional: Sec. 55.203, which requires private publishers of phone books to provide free listings of state agency local and toll-free numbers, the state's website, and those of any local politicians. A state once tried to have newspapers give the same right of rebuttal when they run editorials, that TV stations have to provide when they run editorials, and such requirement was found to be unconstitutional. This is an attempt to make a private party, not operating a regulated business (private directories are not regulated) and being required to carry a state message. While it may be a good idea, I would say it is on its face unconstitutional.
It's not been well proofread; there are places where words are missing and punctuation is sometimes inaccurate or has been left out.
It can take upwards of a week or more for DNS changes to filter through the Internet, so if your business is dependent on Internet connectivity you should just have to close up for a week because MAPS will not unblock your IP range when you are innocent? Who pays for the week your business is down? If it happens again, then what?
I expect that the courts will more than likely treat this as if the school's network is a private library.
Only if it's not a state school; if it's a private school, maybe. If it is a private school and he has not violated his contract with them, their action in banning his access where he has not done anything to deserve being banned and had no way to know that anything he was doing - which was not illegal - would lead to him being banned, becomes an action based on a capricious and unreasonable action by the school, in effect a contract violation on their part.
Cutting off his access when he has not violated the terms of his contract could be compared to a landlord deciding to evict you becaue you subscribe to The Playboy Channel on your satelite dish even though you're not prohibited from having a satellite dish and there's nothing in your lease that says you're prohibited from subscribing to pay-per-view channels.
If it's a public school, then restricting access based on content - when the content itself is not illegal - becomes a pure First Amendment violation and the restriction is on its face illegal.
This essentially means the end of regulation of phone service. Here's how.
Anyone can provide internet connectivity as DSL service or any way they want to do so, and the FCC has ruled it's not subject to local regulation and if you're not the dominant provider you're not subject to FCC regulation either.
Anyone can offer VOIP telephone service without local regulation as the FCC has ruled VOIP is not subject to local regulation and generally VOIP providers are not subject to FCC regulation at all.
So why can't a company simply offer DSL or internet connectivity to people's houses and offer them the option of VOIP if they want it? Done that way, it has absolutely no state regulation and isn't federally regulated. I'm surprised more telephone companies haven't gone that route and thus completely eliminated state or federal regulation of their operations altogether.
and I can tell you that the larger issue is the amount of bandwidth used by students. Universities pay by the bit and budgets are tight.
Any university that is paying for its access on the basis of metered traffic should fire its IT Administration and get some people who know what they are doing.
Any organization - in the U.S. and most countries in Europe - that is buying Internet access is supposed to be paying on the basis of the size of the connection they have, not on the amount of usage. With Internet access as cheap as it is now, there is no excuse for paying "by the bit" or paying usage-metered rates.
Now if, when you say "pay by the bit" you are not talking about paying according to the amount of usage but the size of the pipe, or are in a country like Australia where there isn't unmetered Internet access, then you are correct. Generally institutions pay for the size of the pipe, not how much of it they fill, and any place doing so when they have the capacity not to take it that way is run by incompetents.
It's not like phone service where, if you take restricted bandwidth there is a huge savings (a phone line with no long distance can be as low as $10 a month but with unlimited long distance it can be around $40), there is usually very little difference in price between taking metered service vs. unmetered pipe based on size.
Oh yes, they can. If they have cut off his network access for doing something which is (1) not prohibited by the terms of service of the network (a specific prohibition explicitly banning this type of service) and (2) not constituting an illegal activity (unauthorized transfers of copyrighted material), it doesn't matter what the IT department thinks, his action is not illegal, he can go to court and get an order to reinstate his access if they refuse to do so. The thought of a court deciding his action wasn't illegal - and thus setting a precedent - will almost certainly cause them to back down.
A strong letter from a lawyer explaining to the administration the circumstances, asking for them to reinstate access, and specifically setting a deadline before legal action, including a request for damages if the status quo is not restored, will almost certainly cause them to cave in and restore his access because if they do, they solve the problem but stalling might leave them open to money damages if the court rules against them. Doubtful they would want to risk that sort of crap game.
This is part of a somewhat larger picture. Companies will pay IT people some salary for what they are doing, but they're afraid their people will go elsewhere if they're more valuable, so they won't provide training, won't pay for it and wouldn't pay the person more once they were trained.
This is also part of the same sort of cheap-jack low-balling of costs that companies will only hire people with degrees and none of them will consider hiring people and training them to do the work, figuring - correctly - that once they are trained they will be more valuable.
Well, hell, you're supposed to include that in the cost-benefit calculations for the people that you hire. If you hire 30 people with no programming experience for $7 an hour plus two professionals at $30 an hour, it costs you the equivalent of nine employees but you'll get a hell of a lot more work from thirty-two people than you would from nine. You won't get 32 professionals worth but the value you will get will exceed that of nine professionals. Even if, total, they are only 1/2 as effective, you are getting the performance of 15 people for the cost of nine! And they'll be trained to know how your shop does things. Then the ones that stay are more valuable to you and should be compensated that way. It would probably more cost effective than the way we are doing things now.
Plus, these people will be grateful for the opportunity to learn how to become professionals and be able to work for those kind of salaries after they are trained. Sure, you'll lose a lot of them to other companies as they get good at it (that's the whole point, you're paying them less because they are less valuable but they'll still churn out more value than you pay them), and you'll have to fire some because they just can't cut it, but the difference in cost and the tremendous amount of reduced-cost labor should make it a no-brainer. And the professionals you do have will never have to work any overtime, have assistants to farm out the really boring work (which makes them learn how to actually DO the stuff nobody wants to do, like documentation and creating test suites) and it's conceivable your projects might just actually get done on time and within budget. This could conceivably mean you have people fighting to get into your company instead of people leaving. And you might actually be able to pay slightly less than market wages because of the superior fringe benefits of reduced stress and guaranteed no overtime. But we're not talking about exploiting anyone here, and you actually end up doing good for people long term.
I would say that they overworked this guy, if the company wants answers they can pay him for them. It would cost them money to discover the answers for themselves, so he can charge them something for the learning experience. You won't get free answers from a lawyer or any other professional except in general terms on whether you need to hire them.
Now, most of us aren't that mercenary and maybe he isn't up to it, so he might give some information, but I think after the first one call, maybe two if he wants to be nice, that they be informed its, oh say, $40 an hour (or twice whatever he was being paid as an employee, whichever is higher) with a 10 minute minimum. That way, if the question isn't worth $8 they won't bother you. But if they want answers, they can pay for them as they need them.
If you have a contract (which I doubt) they owe you salary up till the end of the contract and you can't quit before it.
If, as I suspect, your employment is "at will" meaning your employer can fire you without notice and you can quit without notice. You can bet your employer would not be offering to give you 6 weeks extra pay or other benefits if they terminated your employment.
Unless they gave you some tremendous benefit at a time you needed it, or really did something nice for you when they could have squeezed you over it, never under any circumstances charge less. Since I suspect this has never happened, do not give them anything at a discount. No exceptions. In fact, you should charge more because it costs them less.
You do not owe them any discount at all and it was unreasonable for them to ask for it. Doesn't mean they can't ask, but if they can't afford you they have no business running a computer system in the first place. They wouldn't be getting an employee to work at a discount, they shouldn't expect it of a consultant.
If you want to be more than fair, mirror exactly what they offer you. If all you get out of them if you are fired is two weeks severence, then that's all the notice they should get. If they want you to work for them beyond your employment it should be at full pay or above since you're not their employee.
In fact, since you are not their employee they shouldn't be getting a discount you should be charging them at least double to cover your overhead (you have to pay the full 14% Social Security, not just the 7% employee tax, you have to cover your own health care (the fact you may have it from another employer is irrelevant; it's still a cost they would have to pay if you were their employee and they are not paying yours), you have to carry your own disability insurance (again, it's a cost they're not paying that they would otherwise), and you have to pay your own pension plan contributions in addition to what would be company match). Also they aren't paying you for sitting around when you're not working for them, which means there's no overhead cost added, so even at twice your wages your cost to them as a consultant is less than that of an employee.
There is absolutely no excuse for a company to be paying a former employee who is now a consultant less than at least twice his employee wages except an attempt by the company to cheat him by paying him as a non-employee less than he is worth as an employee. Which is ridiculous since even at twice the cost it's still less than the fully burdened cost of an employee, which is at least 2 1/2 times actual salary.
I'd like to say that, with respect to the law in Utah requiring Internet sites to be filtered, that the decision of the Governor to sign this bill, sucks. Unfortunately, that comment is probably considered sexual in nature, and thus would be required to be censored under the bill, thus nobody in Utah could read this message!
The way to solve this whole problem is that whoever's name is on the copyright notice is the one that pays the cost of publication. If the magazine wants to own the copyright, it cannot charge the author; it can only charge if the author retains all rights. This will solve the problem nicely.
It is faster to develop an application in VB than any other language
Is it REALLY? This really needs to be backed up with research. I would argue that building MEANINGFUL applications would be accomplished much more efficiently in a language such as Ruby or Python (my prototyping language of choice) or even Java. You did not build a web-browser in 4 hours, you merely wrapped an existing one in a new interface. You did not build an e-mail client, you patched together some API's. This same magic is perfectly accomplishable in a number of other languages.
That is the point, that one can take existing components and build new things on top of them much faster using VB than you can using any other language, because none of the other language provide support in the compiler / Integrated Development Environment to do this directly. If there is any other language available that provides this capability - except maybe Delphi - please let me know.
One of the things VB's IDE allows is that you can create a window - a form - set controls on it, then you select what events you want to handle, such as typing into a text box or clicking on a checkbox, and VB will hand you the entry point to handle that event with all the parameters set so that all you have to do is whatever special processing you want to do. Do any of these other languages such as Ruby or Python support that level of processing automation built into the IDE used to edit the source code? If they do, that's a different matter. And, with the exception of the 'Ok' button on a form, you can create one with no processing code at all if you don't need it.
Visual Basic provides a tremendous amount of power to anyone who uses it.
VB is a fine tool for what it is designed to do. As a language it leaves quite a bit to be desired. I find the syntax to be rather clumsy and I find that for significantly complex jobs it's simply not the right tool. It's definitely not a be-all-end-all that so many VB zealots like to make it out to be.
I agree on the last sentence, but you can say the exact same thing for [insert your favorite language]. As for the syntax being clumsy I suspect it's no worse than any other 3rd Generation language. And there are some applications where I would not use Basic because it's not the right tool, but I suspect for many applications it will provide an exceptionally good choice as a means to write applications. I believe the Basic language to be no better and no worse than other equivalent high-level languages.
Back in 1996, IBM released a competitor to VB on Windows that they called "Visual Age for Basic." VAB was a fairly good tool and received good reviews. Woe to the hapless developers who bought into it, though, because IBM suddenly dumped it so hard and so quickly a couple of years later that today you can find nary a mention of it on ibm.com and IBM will not even replace media for it.
@on all Change/1996/ to/the 1990s/
@on all change/IBM/ to/Computer Associates/
@on all change/Visual Age for Basic/ or/VAB/ to/CA-Realizer/
and you have the exact same situation. And despite the fact that basically (no pun intended) CA-Realizer has essentially no value, Computer Associates has never offered to release it as open source either.
In general, the primary open source language available has been C and later C++. All other languages generally only had proprietary compilers and/or interpreters or were not available for PCs. And to a degree the tools for languages like Basic and Pascal were generally not there or were somewhat more expensive and were not available for free. And since people got involved with the free tools, and didn't look at the non-free ones, their opinions of the languages implemented with non-free tools was based on old versions of the language from when they knew them rather than the current releases.
Also, since the primary and most popular version of basic was from Microsoft - either the GW Basic interpreter, the QBasic interpreter, and later the Visual Basic compiler, this made people who do not like Microsoft avoid it.
The first language I ever learned was Basic, yet for years when I wrote programs for the PC I was using Turbo Pascal because Microsoft - or anyone else - wasn't making any kind of Basic Compiler and Borland was making a compiler, and one that was accessible to be able to do things.
And the toolchains that were developed for open source languages generally related to handling other open source languages, which is why the GTK toolkit and other X Windows tools first support is for C and C++, and later language bindings were added.
Now that there are other languages such as PHP (which is a dialect of C) and Ruby and Perl and Python, people are starting to be willing to accept other languages as being valid solutions to the problems they want to solve. But languages like Basic and Pascal get short shrift because it's only recently that we've had open source versions that are reasonably good implementations.
Also, there is a problem that there is generally one (open source) C++ compiler people look at as the one to use, the GNU C++ Compiler. On the other hand, both GNU and Free Pascal have released Pascal Compilers, and there is GAMBAS, XBASIC, GPCP, Free Basic, Small Basic, HBasic, WXBasic, Liberty Basic, Bywater Basic, Lemick Basic, and Script Basic, among others located at Sourceforge, and the other point being that all of these - with the exception of XBasic - are themselves written using C and/or C++, which makes them look bad because it implies the language isn't even powerful enough to write its own compiler. And XBasic's IDE - written in the language - has severe performance problems, which also makes the language look bad. With all of these different implementations it has fractured the language into a half dozen or more different camps all of which are using a slightly different dialect. And those who would like to help on these languages generally can't because while if you know Basic, that's one thing, but to be able to do work on the compiler you have to know C and/or C++ to do so.
That is so fubar. Before you even being to add any code, you have *6 lines of code*. Cruft!
If you have a piece of code that cannot fail, like a simple set of calculations that can't overflow, then you do not need error trapping. Comparing a piece of VB code that traps errors to C code that will simply fail or will silently produce an error without indication of the error, is an unfair and unreasonable apples vs. oranges comparison.
And this situation is no different from the 'TRY / FINALLY' block in C++, in which you have to declare code to handle errors there, as well.
Working in VB6 just makes me feel dirty.
I think this is just a comment by a typical language bigot who does not like the language because it's not his particular favorite. Most of the people who criticize other languages do so because they have "taste" issues they don't like, not because of real or substantial issues.
I'll give some examples of where I dislike the C language and derivatives because of what I consider serious issues rather than just taste disagreements.
I dislike C++ because of the number of excessively complicated constructs that make it very easy to have serious errors that are very difficult to understand or use properly.
I dislike the C language because of a number of issues including use of case sensitivity of identifiers. By adding case sensitivity you increase the complexity of the language in an unnecessary fashion, AND you increase the probability of error in writing code. I do happen to like some of the features of C, such as the use of the additive equate operator, so that you can say a += i which is the same as a = a+i in other languages. Also the use of the ++ and -- operators having both prefix and postfix usage was a great idea.
Another thing I find which was a bad decision in C was the use of = as always being an assignment and requiring use of == for comparison, a bad design choice, I believe. While it may be inconsistent to also use = as a test such as in A = B = C to mean if B=C then A=TRUE else A=FALSE we're at least aware of the condition and it's not all that common to do it that way. Having = always be an assignment makes accidental assignment a lot easier to occur where people wanted to do comparisons, this error being so common that compilers are requiring use of parentheses around such comparisons or triggering a warning. (Actually Pascal solved this problem by mandating:= to be the ONLY means to do assignment so you can't accidentally do an assignment or otherwise erroneously make an assignment. But the same language bigotry makes people dislike Pascal as well.)
I have a wireless router which came with my DSL account, I used to use one of my own. Anyway, since I'm using a router with NAT translation (all the computers connected have 192.1.1.xxx addresses so outside traffic does not filter to them) only returning traffic will get through.
I read that there are 4 service ports that get 80% of the zombie traffic in attempts to capture machines, so I decided to put port logging and discard on those 4 ports (195-197 and 443), and see what happened.
Within ONE MINUTE of logging I discovered close to a dozen hits on port 443. It means this has been going on for months and I had no idea. The only thing that saved me was that I have a firewall. It didn't stop me from picking up 3 BHOs - which I did not expect - but I fortunately had no viruses or worms.
Re:The only protection against libel is the truth.
I believe in some jurisdictions - and I think the U.K. is one of them - even truth of the statement doesn't necessarily provide protection against a successful suit for libel.
Indeed, the Washington Post does sell subscriptions in Ontario. Why should media outlets be any different than any other product with respect to liabilities in the place of sale?
Because we generally hold that you should only have to defend yourself to places where you have presence. If you sell subscriptions by mail, you do not have presence there. That's why companies don't have to collect sales tax on sales by mail.
A standing to the contrary would be devastating. No small retailer or manufacturer could afford to ship anything outside their home state or local area because of the possibility of being sued anywhere in the world. They would have to prove they never shipped the product where it was used, not merely that they don't operate there. And it would destroy Open Source because there are some places that do not allow the manufacturer to disclaim all warranties; a maker of Open Source Software could be (successfully) sued for damages from anyone, anywhere in the world who downloaded it in a country or jurisdiction that does not allow transfer on an "as-is" basis, who claimed they were damaged due to bugs in the software program.
While I am not a lawyer, I am aware of the issue of multi-jurisdictional libel suits where the defendant is sued in a court to which they have no presence, and the issue has already been decided.
In Griffis v. Luban, 646 N.W.2d 527 (July 11, 2002), the Minnesota Supreme Court ruled that Katherine Griffis could not enforce a default judgement from Alabama on a libel suit filed against Mariane Luban, a resident of Minnesota, for Luban's allegedly libelous comments about Griffis on Usenet News, because Ms. Luban has no presence in, and does not do business, in Alabama and the mere publication on the Internet did not give the courts in Alabama jurisdiction over her. The U.S. Supreme Court denied certiorari on appeal, so the case represents the law as it stands now in the U.S. From the syllabus (summary) of the case:
A nonresident defendant is not subject to a foreign court's jurisdiction under the effects test from
Calder v. Jones, 465 U.S. 783, 79 L. Ed. 2d 804, 104 S. Ct. 1482 (1984), absent a showing that: (1) the defendant committed an intentional tort; (2) the plaintiff felt the brunt of the harm caused by that tort in the forum such that the forum state was the focal point of the plaintiff's injury; and (3) the defendant expressly aimed the tortious conduct at the forum such that the forum state was the focal point of the tortious activity.
This is further bolstered by other cases, of which someone posted a list, include Barrett v. Catacombs Press, 44 F. Supp.2d 717 (E.D. Pa.1999); English Sports Betting, Inc. v. Tostigan, 2002 WL 461592 (E. D. Pa. March 15, 2002); Young v. New Haven Advocate, 315 F. 3d 256(4th Cir. 2002); Pavlovich v. Superior Court of Santa Clara County, 58 P. 3d 2 (Cal. 2002).
This goes along with the general rule that a person should only be expect to be subject to suit where they maintain some presence. To provide otherwise would be manifest insanity as you couldn't defend yourself from thousands of lawsuits filed in courts all over the country where you have no involvement and no reason to expect to be sued. Now this would, of course, be a big problem if you're in an accident in your home town and the guy who hit you lives 1,000 miles away; you might not be able to afford to sue them for damages if it's minor. But they solved that one. When you operate an automobile, and you are involved in an accident, under the Drivers' License Compact, you agree to allow the administrator of the Department of Motor Vehicles or equivalent agency of the state where the accident occurred to accept service on your behalf if you are not a resident of that state. Thus if you are involved in an accident, you may be sued in the state where you reside or in the state where the accident occurred, but you can't be sued in the state where the plaintiff lives or anyplace else because there is no jurisdiction.
The Washington Post does not do business in the Province of Ontario, has no contacts with it, and its article wasn't targeting Ontario specifically, thus under U.S. Law there is no grounds for them to be sued in Ontario for what they wrote in a newspaper and a website which are published in the District of Columbia. Even if the plaintiff wins, they can't get a judgement enforced here because of lack of jurisdiction, so it's a pyrrihic victory if they can even prove it to be libelous.
It is illegal essentially everywhere I know of - including every state in the U.S. - to commit suicide, but because of the First Amendment it's legal to generally say or provide information on this sort of a subject.
I note how this minister talks about how it won't suppress free speech or be targeted to certain groups that discuss the subject. Then what on earth is such a law needed for? Because there is a type of speech that they do not like and want to suppress it or target a certain group that subject and they need a law to do so. This is not a law to target people handing out razors. This is not a law to target people who are offering to use the razors on others. This is a law to target those who say (print) something theose who want the law do not like. Thus it is, pure and simple, a law of censorship, a targeting of speech based on the content of that speech in an attempt to ban it. That makes it a restriction on free speech no matter how they want to spin it.
Even if it's with the system owner's permission, wouldn't this be considered illegal and prosecutable?
No. While I am not a lawyer, the statute on computer trespass are clear that access without permission and beyond one's authorization are illegal. If the access is within one's authorization or owner grants permission for access, it is not illegal.
Permission can be implied. Anyone who puts up a website gives implied permission to access it (since the whole idea of posting a website is to get people to access it, presumably either to give them information - or get information from them - or to sell them something (or buy something from them).) If that were not the case, every person who accessed a website could be charged with the crime of computer trespass since they were not explicitly given permission to access that computer!
If you go to a car dealer, ask to take a test drive, some will simply photocopy your license and hand you the keys, and it's reasonable you can borrow it for 5 minutes or so to drive around the block. (Some will send a salesperson along for the ride; depends on the dealer and the probability of theft.) But if you walked in, took the keys and did the same thing, they could prosecute you for grand theft auto.
Where the owner has publicly given permission and in fact, has encouraged people to access the system as root, this would constitute explicit permission and thus no crime could occur for hacking their box.
Slashdot Mirror
He tells me that invariably they will break the twenty instead of taking the $2!
I think we should note that in places where the roads aren't publicly subsidized there is little or no commercial development, for example, rural places in Africa. There may be some argument for the government providing some subsidized things because they are generally needed and no commercial provider will offer them in order to allow the marketplace to operate. I think it matters very little where you might have to pay a yearly maintenance fee to the developer to maintain the local roads and having to pay property taxes. I don't know if there's a good answer but I think there is some argument where there is someone who can provide the service but won't at what it currently costs AND uses the power and capacity it has to prevent competitors from offering it while at the same time getting the laws changed to prevent municipalities from offering it.
It's like someone said, how could a toll road compete against a free highway? One possibility is a less crowded road, and another is offering people the legal right (since it's a private road) to drive at 85 mph if they choose to do so.
It is, in simple terms, on the order of a large landholder or holder of the exclusive right to build toll roads not building them in some cities, there being no other private company willing to create roads (because the primary toll road builder won't interconnect or will charge huge rates to do so, or will delay and use any method it can to stop them from operating), and using its ownership of the land or its monopoly toll-road privelege to make it impossible for competitors to build additional local roads, then getting a law to make it illegal for municipalities to build them when it has failed to do so.
I note that except for rural towns in Alaska we generally don't have municipal telephone companies because private companies are providing quality telephone service at fairly low rates, and making money at it (and typically hand-over-fist, too!) But when it comes to internet connectivity we are seeing limited service, high prices and unavailability, with no promises to ever provide service, and at the same time demands that local authorities not offer service when the telephone companies are unwilling or unable to offer it and no competitors will do so either.
I know there must be some answer but if providing data service was as lucrative as providing telephone service we should have had it everywhere at really inexpensive rates. So there has to be some reason, and I think it's because the phone companies want to charge more than the market will bear, are using their monopoly position to keep out competitors, and want to stop any other competition that might endanger their monopoly profit levels, even if the service doesn't directly compete against anything they offer. Or because there is a competitive threat and they are doing everything within their power to protect themselves from competition, even if they have no interest in offering the service.
This is on the order of a private paving company getting a law passed to make it illegal for cities to build their own (free) roads, then at the same time the paving company is not putting in any (toll) roads themselves because there's not enough traffic to justify them. Or only building small two-lane dirt roads despite that there might be potential use for multi-lane highways.
Most telcos are sitting on wires and equipment that have been long-since depreciated down to value zero but would be enormously expensive for a competitor to duplicate. In ordinary circumstances that's what is necessary, except that the incumbents have the laws rigged to protect them from competitors, or can use all sorts of tricks to keep them from being able to offer any kind of service, including various anti-competitive practices which are prohibited but they get away with anyway.
As it is, the incumbent provider can get the laws rigged to make municipal communications services illegal, then at the same time not do anything to provide any services, plus make it non-economic for a competing private provider to operate. If an incumbent provider claims that it intends to offer service, then it should have to post a bond and be required to do so within a certain period or it forfeits the bond. Else it should have no right to prevent others (including a local municipality) to offer a service it is unwilling or unable to provide itself.
It can take upwards of a week or more for DNS changes to filter through the Internet, so if your business is dependent on Internet connectivity you should just have to close up for a week because MAPS will not unblock your IP range when you are innocent? Who pays for the week your business is down? If it happens again, then what?
Cutting off his access when he has not violated the terms of his contract could be compared to a landlord deciding to evict you becaue you subscribe to The Playboy Channel on your satelite dish even though you're not prohibited from having a satellite dish and there's nothing in your lease that says you're prohibited from subscribing to pay-per-view channels.
If it's a public school, then restricting access based on content - when the content itself is not illegal - becomes a pure First Amendment violation and the restriction is on its face illegal.
Anyone can provide internet connectivity as DSL service or any way they want to do so, and the FCC has ruled it's not subject to local regulation and if you're not the dominant provider you're not subject to FCC regulation either.
Anyone can offer VOIP telephone service without local regulation as the FCC has ruled VOIP is not subject to local regulation and generally VOIP providers are not subject to FCC regulation at all.
So why can't a company simply offer DSL or internet connectivity to people's houses and offer them the option of VOIP if they want it? Done that way, it has absolutely no state regulation and isn't federally regulated. I'm surprised more telephone companies haven't gone that route and thus completely eliminated state or federal regulation of their operations altogether.
Any organization - in the U.S. and most countries in Europe - that is buying Internet access is supposed to be paying on the basis of the size of the connection they have, not on the amount of usage. With Internet access as cheap as it is now, there is no excuse for paying "by the bit" or paying usage-metered rates.
Now if, when you say "pay by the bit" you are not talking about paying according to the amount of usage but the size of the pipe, or are in a country like Australia where there isn't unmetered Internet access, then you are correct. Generally institutions pay for the size of the pipe, not how much of it they fill, and any place doing so when they have the capacity not to take it that way is run by incompetents.
It's not like phone service where, if you take restricted bandwidth there is a huge savings (a phone line with no long distance can be as low as $10 a month but with unlimited long distance it can be around $40), there is usually very little difference in price between taking metered service vs. unmetered pipe based on size.
A strong letter from a lawyer explaining to the administration the circumstances, asking for them to reinstate access, and specifically setting a deadline before legal action, including a request for damages if the status quo is not restored, will almost certainly cause them to cave in and restore his access because if they do, they solve the problem but stalling might leave them open to money damages if the court rules against them. Doubtful they would want to risk that sort of crap game.
This is also part of the same sort of cheap-jack low-balling of costs that companies will only hire people with degrees and none of them will consider hiring people and training them to do the work, figuring - correctly - that once they are trained they will be more valuable.
Well, hell, you're supposed to include that in the cost-benefit calculations for the people that you hire. If you hire 30 people with no programming experience for $7 an hour plus two professionals at $30 an hour, it costs you the equivalent of nine employees but you'll get a hell of a lot more work from thirty-two people than you would from nine. You won't get 32 professionals worth but the value you will get will exceed that of nine professionals. Even if, total, they are only 1/2 as effective, you are getting the performance of 15 people for the cost of nine! And they'll be trained to know how your shop does things. Then the ones that stay are more valuable to you and should be compensated that way. It would probably more cost effective than the way we are doing things now.
Plus, these people will be grateful for the opportunity to learn how to become professionals and be able to work for those kind of salaries after they are trained. Sure, you'll lose a lot of them to other companies as they get good at it (that's the whole point, you're paying them less because they are less valuable but they'll still churn out more value than you pay them), and you'll have to fire some because they just can't cut it, but the difference in cost and the tremendous amount of reduced-cost labor should make it a no-brainer. And the professionals you do have will never have to work any overtime, have assistants to farm out the really boring work (which makes them learn how to actually DO the stuff nobody wants to do, like documentation and creating test suites) and it's conceivable your projects might just actually get done on time and within budget. This could conceivably mean you have people fighting to get into your company instead of people leaving. And you might actually be able to pay slightly less than market wages because of the superior fringe benefits of reduced stress and guaranteed no overtime. But we're not talking about exploiting anyone here, and you actually end up doing good for people long term.
I would say that they overworked this guy, if the company wants answers they can pay him for them. It would cost them money to discover the answers for themselves, so he can charge them something for the learning experience. You won't get free answers from a lawyer or any other professional except in general terms on whether you need to hire them.
Now, most of us aren't that mercenary and maybe he isn't up to it, so he might give some information, but I think after the first one call, maybe two if he wants to be nice, that they be informed its, oh say, $40 an hour (or twice whatever he was being paid as an employee, whichever is higher) with a 10 minute minimum. That way, if the question isn't worth $8 they won't bother you. But if they want answers, they can pay for them as they need them.
If, as I suspect, your employment is "at will" meaning your employer can fire you without notice and you can quit without notice. You can bet your employer would not be offering to give you 6 weeks extra pay or other benefits if they terminated your employment.
Unless they gave you some tremendous benefit at a time you needed it, or really did something nice for you when they could have squeezed you over it, never under any circumstances charge less. Since I suspect this has never happened, do not give them anything at a discount. No exceptions. In fact, you should charge more because it costs them less.
You do not owe them any discount at all and it was unreasonable for them to ask for it. Doesn't mean they can't ask, but if they can't afford you they have no business running a computer system in the first place. They wouldn't be getting an employee to work at a discount, they shouldn't expect it of a consultant.
If you want to be more than fair, mirror exactly what they offer you. If all you get out of them if you are fired is two weeks severence, then that's all the notice they should get. If they want you to work for them beyond your employment it should be at full pay or above since you're not their employee.
In fact, since you are not their employee they shouldn't be getting a discount you should be charging them at least double to cover your overhead (you have to pay the full 14% Social Security, not just the 7% employee tax, you have to cover your own health care (the fact you may have it from another employer is irrelevant; it's still a cost they would have to pay if you were their employee and they are not paying yours), you have to carry your own disability insurance (again, it's a cost they're not paying that they would otherwise), and you have to pay your own pension plan contributions in addition to what would be company match). Also they aren't paying you for sitting around when you're not working for them, which means there's no overhead cost added, so even at twice your wages your cost to them as a consultant is less than that of an employee.
There is absolutely no excuse for a company to be paying a former employee who is now a consultant less than at least twice his employee wages except an attempt by the company to cheat him by paying him as a non-employee less than he is worth as an employee. Which is ridiculous since even at twice the cost it's still less than the fully burdened cost of an employee, which is at least 2 1/2 times actual salary.
Paul Robinson
Paul Robinson
The way to solve this whole problem is that whoever's name is on the copyright notice is the one that pays the cost of publication. If the magazine wants to own the copyright, it cannot charge the author; it can only charge if the author retains all rights. This will solve the problem nicely.
One of the things VB's IDE allows is that you can create a window - a form - set controls on it, then you select what events you want to handle, such as typing into a text box or clicking on a checkbox, and VB will hand you the entry point to handle that event with all the parameters set so that all you have to do is whatever special processing you want to do. Do any of these other languages such as Ruby or Python support that level of processing automation built into the IDE used to edit the source code? If they do, that's a different matter. And, with the exception of the 'Ok' button on a form, you can create one with no processing code at all if you don't need it.
Visual Basic provides a tremendous amount of power to anyone who uses it.
I agree on the last sentence, but you can say the exact same thing for [insert your favorite language]. As for the syntax being clumsy I suspect it's no worse than any other 3rd Generation language. And there are some applications where I would not use Basic because it's not the right tool, but I suspect for many applications it will provide an exceptionally good choice as a means to write applications. I believe the Basic language to be no better and no worse than other equivalent high-level languages.Paul Robinson
@on all change
@on all change
and you have the exact same situation. And despite the fact that basically (no pun intended) CA-Realizer has essentially no value, Computer Associates has never offered to release it as open source either.
Also, since the primary and most popular version of basic was from Microsoft - either the GW Basic interpreter, the QBasic interpreter, and later the Visual Basic compiler, this made people who do not like Microsoft avoid it.
The first language I ever learned was Basic, yet for years when I wrote programs for the PC I was using Turbo Pascal because Microsoft - or anyone else - wasn't making any kind of Basic Compiler and Borland was making a compiler, and one that was accessible to be able to do things.
And the toolchains that were developed for open source languages generally related to handling other open source languages, which is why the GTK toolkit and other X Windows tools first support is for C and C++, and later language bindings were added.
Now that there are other languages such as PHP (which is a dialect of C) and Ruby and Perl and Python, people are starting to be willing to accept other languages as being valid solutions to the problems they want to solve. But languages like Basic and Pascal get short shrift because it's only recently that we've had open source versions that are reasonably good implementations.
Also, there is a problem that there is generally one (open source) C++ compiler people look at as the one to use, the GNU C++ Compiler. On the other hand, both GNU and Free Pascal have released Pascal Compilers, and there is GAMBAS, XBASIC, GPCP, Free Basic, Small Basic, HBasic, WXBasic, Liberty Basic, Bywater Basic, Lemick Basic, and Script Basic, among others located at Sourceforge, and the other point being that all of these - with the exception of XBasic - are themselves written using C and/or C++, which makes them look bad because it implies the language isn't even powerful enough to write its own compiler. And XBasic's IDE - written in the language - has severe performance problems, which also makes the language look bad. With all of these different implementations it has fractured the language into a half dozen or more different camps all of which are using a slightly different dialect. And those who would like to help on these languages generally can't because while if you know Basic, that's one thing, but to be able to do work on the compiler you have to know C and/or C++ to do so.
And this situation is no different from the 'TRY / FINALLY' block in C++, in which you have to declare code to handle errors there, as well.
I think this is just a comment by a typical language bigot who does not like the language because it's not his particular favorite. Most of the people who criticize other languages do so because they have "taste" issues they don't like, not because of real or substantial issues.I'll give some examples of where I dislike the C language and derivatives because of what I consider serious issues rather than just taste disagreements.
I dislike C++ because of the number of excessively complicated constructs that make it very easy to have serious errors that are very difficult to understand or use properly.
I dislike the C language because of a number of issues including use of case sensitivity of identifiers. By adding case sensitivity you increase the complexity of the language in an unnecessary fashion, AND you increase the probability of error in writing code. I do happen to like some of the features of C, such as the use of the additive equate operator, so that you can say a += i which is the same as a = a+i in other languages. Also the use of the ++ and -- operators having both prefix and postfix usage was a great idea.
Another thing I find which was a bad decision in C was the use of = as always being an assignment and requiring use of == for comparison, a bad design choice, I believe. While it may be inconsistent to also use = as a test such as in A = B = C to mean if B=C then A=TRUE else A=FALSE we're at least aware of the condition and it's not all that common to do it that way. Having = always be an assignment makes accidental assignment a lot easier to occur where people wanted to do comparisons, this error being so common that compilers are requiring use of parentheses around such comparisons or triggering a warning. (Actually Pascal solved this problem by mandating := to be the ONLY means to do assignment so you can't accidentally do an assignment or otherwise erroneously make an assignment. But the same language bigotry makes people dislike Pascal as well.)
Paul Robinson
I read that there are 4 service ports that get 80% of the zombie traffic in attempts to capture machines, so I decided to put port logging and discard on those 4 ports (195-197 and 443), and see what happened.
Within ONE MINUTE of logging I discovered close to a dozen hits on port 443. It means this has been going on for months and I had no idea. The only thing that saved me was that I have a firewall. It didn't stop me from picking up 3 BHOs - which I did not expect - but I fortunately had no viruses or worms.
I believe in some jurisdictions - and I think the U.K. is one of them - even truth of the statement doesn't necessarily provide protection against a successful suit for libel.
Because we generally hold that you should only have to defend yourself to places where you have presence. If you sell subscriptions by mail, you do not have presence there. That's why companies don't have to collect sales tax on sales by mail.
A standing to the contrary would be devastating. No small retailer or manufacturer could afford to ship anything outside their home state or local area because of the possibility of being sued anywhere in the world. They would have to prove they never shipped the product where it was used, not merely that they don't operate there. And it would destroy Open Source because there are some places that do not allow the manufacturer to disclaim all warranties; a maker of Open Source Software could be (successfully) sued for damages from anyone, anywhere in the world who downloaded it in a country or jurisdiction that does not allow transfer on an "as-is" basis, who claimed they were damaged due to bugs in the software program.
In Griffis v. Luban, 646 N.W.2d 527 (July 11, 2002), the Minnesota Supreme Court ruled that Katherine Griffis could not enforce a default judgement from Alabama on a libel suit filed against Mariane Luban, a resident of Minnesota, for Luban's allegedly libelous comments about Griffis on Usenet News, because Ms. Luban has no presence in, and does not do business, in Alabama and the mere publication on the Internet did not give the courts in Alabama jurisdiction over her. The U.S. Supreme Court denied certiorari on appeal, so the case represents the law as it stands now in the U.S. From the syllabus (summary) of the case:
This is further bolstered by other cases, of which someone posted a list, include Barrett v. Catacombs Press, 44 F. Supp.2d 717 (E.D. Pa.1999); English Sports Betting, Inc. v. Tostigan, 2002 WL 461592 (E. D. Pa. March 15, 2002); Young v. New Haven Advocate, 315 F. 3d 256(4th Cir. 2002); Pavlovich v. Superior Court of Santa Clara County, 58 P. 3d 2 (Cal. 2002).
This goes along with the general rule that a person should only be expect to be subject to suit where they maintain some presence. To provide otherwise would be manifest insanity as you couldn't defend yourself from thousands of lawsuits filed in courts all over the country where you have no involvement and no reason to expect to be sued. Now this would, of course, be a big problem if you're in an accident in your home town and the guy who hit you lives 1,000 miles away; you might not be able to afford to sue them for damages if it's minor. But they solved that one. When you operate an automobile, and you are involved in an accident, under the Drivers' License Compact, you agree to allow the administrator of the Department of Motor Vehicles or equivalent agency of the state where the accident occurred to accept service on your behalf if you are not a resident of that state. Thus if you are involved in an accident, you may be sued in the state where you reside or in the state where the accident occurred, but you can't be sued in the state where the plaintiff lives or anyplace else because there is no jurisdiction.
The Washington Post does not do business in the Province of Ontario, has no contacts with it, and its article wasn't targeting Ontario specifically, thus under U.S. Law there is no grounds for them to be sued in Ontario for what they wrote in a newspaper and a website which are published in the District of Columbia. Even if the plaintiff wins, they can't get a judgement enforced here because of lack of jurisdiction, so it's a pyrrihic victory if they can even prove it to be libelous.
I note how this minister talks about how it won't suppress free speech or be targeted to certain groups that discuss the subject. Then what on earth is such a law needed for? Because there is a type of speech that they do not like and want to suppress it or target a certain group that subject and they need a law to do so. This is not a law to target people handing out razors. This is not a law to target people who are offering to use the razors on others. This is a law to target those who say (print) something theose who want the law do not like. Thus it is, pure and simple, a law of censorship, a targeting of speech based on the content of that speech in an attempt to ban it. That makes it a restriction on free speech no matter how they want to spin it.
Paul Robinson
No. While I am not a lawyer, the statute on computer trespass are clear that access without permission and beyond one's authorization are illegal. If the access is within one's authorization or owner grants permission for access, it is not illegal.
Permission can be implied. Anyone who puts up a website gives implied permission to access it (since the whole idea of posting a website is to get people to access it, presumably either to give them information - or get information from them - or to sell them something (or buy something from them).) If that were not the case, every person who accessed a website could be charged with the crime of computer trespass since they were not explicitly given permission to access that computer!
If you go to a car dealer, ask to take a test drive, some will simply photocopy your license and hand you the keys, and it's reasonable you can borrow it for 5 minutes or so to drive around the block. (Some will send a salesperson along for the ride; depends on the dealer and the probability of theft.) But if you walked in, took the keys and did the same thing, they could prosecute you for grand theft auto.
Where the owner has publicly given permission and in fact, has encouraged people to access the system as root, this would constitute explicit permission and thus no crime could occur for hacking their box.
Paul Robinson