Why would the government hire as a top expert someone who was a top executive from a huge company which just lied its ass off in front of the entire world in court?
Yucca Mountain is not a thoroughly safe site. There is both more water and more seismic activity than was originally thought many years and tens of billions of dollars ago. It's the bureaucracy of the DoE, much like the bureaucracy of its predecessor, the AEC, that causes bad scientific and technological choices to continue until people get sick and die.
Furthermore, the purpose of the rush to vote is so that (a) the process of building Yucca can start - this will take years, given all the lawsuits that will pile up, and (b) the fact that Yucca is being "built" can be used to answer one of the biggest objections to additional nuke power plants - that there is nowhere safe to put their waste.
The truth of the matter is that there will still be nowhere safe to put the waste, especially of new plants. Yucca's capacity will not be enough to handle the existing private and government waste sitting in buildings all over the country. So they will need another site. Tell CmdrTaco to keep his basement available for the next 30 to 50 years.
Another point I've seen here. 10,000 is not even the low end of the required isolation period. The DoE recommendation to Bush used 10,000 years because (a) even 1,000 years is impossible to contemplate from an engineering perspective, and (b) Our President can't count that high. The actual required isolation period for the heavy radionuclides is more like 40,000 to 100,000 years. Heck, I don't even know if they had lawyers 100,000 years ago. Oh wait, they did have lawyers and politicians then. The hookers came later.
I look to MSNBC for technology reporting about as much as I do for their political reporting, which is to say, not at all.
The Conquistadors were agents of globalization
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Defining Globalism
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One could say that what is now called "globalization" has been in the works since the age of exploration. What's different about the contemporary era is the pace of change, and the ease with which certain cultural and economic models can be transported to other cultures and economies.
The problem is that really positive global change involves using the available technology so that everyone can be heard. The corporations that control much (but not all) of this technology are only interested in propagating their brands, their products, and their ideologies. The U.S. Government - and sadly this includes both the GOP and the New Donkeys - want to propagate a social and economic model in which the poor in the developing world should just shaddup about their human rights and the environment and just appreciate their dollar-a-day jobs, dammit.
Yeah, all of this is "globalization." Jon, the big question is what KIND of globalization. One- way globalization is synonymous with what the GOP loves to call "free trade." Two-way globalization is synonymous with what the WTO- and FTAA-opponents call "fair trade."
Jon, this isn't really hard, is it? I mean, for you to understand. You love to bash the anti-FTAA people as simpletons, but I think you've been projecting.
Jon,
You're not alone in mischaracterizing the so-called anti-globalization folks. The media never seem to get it right, and I'd like to think that's just some kind of socio-political dyslexia or something.
The folks attacking "Free Trade" (as it's bandied about by corporatist Republicans and techno-corporatist Democrats) want first-world firms held to standards of conduct of their host countries instead of letting them rape and plunder to the degree that corrupt regimes might allow them to in developing nations.
Paying decent wages, being responsible in environmental matters, honoring basic labor rights all cost money. This should come out of the ample margins made by transnationals in the developing nations.
The opposition to the WTO and the FTAA now under negotiation is based on those institutions explicitly excluding these issues and focusing only on the rights of capital. In Quebec City, there were some intestinal grumblings about holding host nations to ILO standards, but that's both ineffective and insincere. Supposedly, the secret FTAA documents were supposed to have been made available after the Apr 22 meetings, after they were translated from the Spanish. Nothing yet.
Also, the institutions like WTO use tribunals with authority over national governments to adjudicate "trade disputes." This means that if your town passes an ordinance to boycott products from country X because of its human rights abuses, country X could if it chose sue your town government in the WTO for imposing non-tariff barriers to trade. And the WTO court would not take human rights issues into account in its deliberations, and there'd be no appeal even if damages were assessed.
Jon, drop the techno-utopia stuff. There are some much more basic issues at stake here. Of course the "anti-globalization" folks want global exchanges of ideas and of information, but people need the rights and material subsistence to be able to make use of them. If this globalization is just for the elite 10 or 15 percent of the planet, what the fuck good is it?
Dave
The easist way for a government, or let's say the government's Office of Homeland Defense, to stifle legitimate dissent at home is to cause mysterious glitches in certain individuals' electronic lives... credit getting mysteriously screwed up, cash disappearing, technical problems sorry about that.
Granted, one can still be screwed up in real, physical life, but it requires more effort to tamper with thousands of people in the flesh versus running scripts against lists.
Cable networks are usually local monopolies. These monopolies are supposed to be granted in the public interest. It's not in the public interest if DSL providers cannot place legitimate local advertisements in community media.
AOL-TW should either act fairly or lose their cable franchises. It could be fought out at the local level.
The fact remains that Microsoft lied in federal court, big baldfaced lies, albeit incompetently. Their only salvation was that they so pissed off the judge that his anger and frustration came through in the trial.
The current Admnistration is much better disposed to large corporate liars and thieves than the previous Justice Department was. I had/have no love for Clinton but the DoJ did pursue Microsoft and brought a lot of stuff to light.
It's hardly mudslinging to point out that MS will now likely get away scott-free for conduct that in the Sixties could have led to federal prison sentences.
A twelve-month inactivity period with no provision for deletion is bad, especially given how many time MS's systems have been hacked.
If MS tells you they can't remove you from their service and your personal info will sit out there for a full year, contact your state's Attorney General.
-Dave
If you were an individual or a small company with a case against a large medical corporation, would you want put all your faith in an "unbiased" expert witness whose motives may not be completely unbiased?
Even if an "expert's" motives are pure, there are a lot of scientific areas in which prevailing scientific wisdom may be incomplete, incorrect, or channeled within political or bureaucratic imperatives. I'm thinking, for instance, of epidemiology, where certain state agencies set criteria within which the experts pronounce. Meanwhile, plaintiffs in toxic waste-related lawsuits often don't get to challenge the frameworks within which state experts are told to operate.
I was a recent Buffalo City Council meeting regarding the neighborhood of Hickory Woods, which the *city* itself redeveloped on slag- and toxic-waste filled land and then sold to homeowners using subsidies. At the hearing, there were homeowner after homeowner testifying to pets dying, kids getting seriously ill, their own illnesses, including arsenic-induced internal bleeding, cancer, etc. It was enough for the Council to pass yesterday a resolution looking toward full relocation. The mayor is not yet officially convinced, and he is waiting for a report from the Dept of Health. Guess what? To my knowledge, NYS DOH has never started with an evaluation of any site as immediately dangerous: not with Love Canal and not with Forest Glen, both of which became Federal Environmental Emergencies. BTW, Hickory Woods has toxic levels well above Forest Glen's....
The article mentions a record label who had no backup of its web content, audio files, etc.
I can understand counting on one's web host to backup its servers' data, and it's outrageous that a web host would both (a) not do regular backups and (b) not explain that fact to its customers. On the other hand, most people would never trust a third party to maintain the only copies of their data, for precisely these reasons.
Does every person on the planet have to learn the same lesson the hard way?
In the case of the original posting, it seems the former employee's under no strict legal obligation to restrain himself from speaking about his former employer.
His former employer can sue him - or, "better," threaten to sue him - anyway.
The larger the business, there's a legal apparatus in place and thus there is a lower the relative cost to that firm of using legal pressure on individuals such as former employees, small press and web publishers, etc. Will the firm win if something gets to court? It doesn't have to. The costs of responding and defending - in time in money - is often prohibitive to the target. Firms believe they can modify your behavior with implied threats if they don't like what you are doing or saying.
This is the sodden underbelly of the 'free market' that Ayn Randists and right-libertarians like to trumpet. Markets depend on information, but if firms can distort that information by coercion, they can gain leverage that has nothing to do with the quality or price of their product or service, how they treat their employees, etc. Bottom line: we have the rights we're willing to defend, and large corporations are out to grab as much control over their environment - including you and me - as they can, both by legislation and by intimidation. If you doubt this statement, you have been reading a different Slashdot than I have.
If you get intimidated by these folks, speak with the ACLU in your area, and see if they are willing to advise you, or help you. The people who harass others get to hide behind the corporate veil, the legal 'personhood' granted them by a state government somewhere. You can't hide, so you need a weapon of mass destruction, like a civil rights attorney (or a shark, depending on whether you want to fight a defensive or offensive war).
If you don't want to face even the remote possibility of a fight, then follow others' advice on this board and post anonymously or, as someone else suggested, talk with friends and don't post.
I would venture that the best way to solve this would be for Amazon not to offer to buy/resell new books for a period of time (say 3-6 months) after the book comes out. It is my understanding, based on friends who work in bookstores, that anything that is selling decently, sells the majority of its copies during that period. After that, it is usually spur of the moment buys.
I think this is a good idea. It all depends on how Amazon wants to position itself. If one looks at Powells Books in Portland OR, one of my favorite independent stores, their main store mixes new and used books on the shelves, and their web site reflects this (last I looked). I think it's great, because it provides seamless searching for titles. However, Powells doesn't seem to go out of its way to short-circuit new-book sales.
Books have become expensive. Textbooks are typically in the $70-$150 range now, and trade paper fiction is typically over $20/volume, sometimes much more. Given that fact, and given the durability of books, I think it's going to be hard for the book publishers to restrict offerings of used books. It would also be wrong to try to restrict a wonderful way to recycle. On the other hand, there does need to be a strong market for new books, or opportunities for authors to publish in a traditional mode will dry up. So I think the compromise proposed by Eric is a sensible one.
We should take a leaf out of Bill Gates book, and help the truly deprived, and not scratch our own backs here.
I'll go one step further, and say I like some of the things Gates has said lately. Particularly at a conference on using IT in developing countries: Gates pointed out that infrastructure and food supply were primary issues, not desktop PCs. The ITcrats in attendance were probably expecting something more rah-rah-ish.
This is a far cry from the drivel in his book "Business at the Speed of Light," which I forced myself to read a year or so ago but found too painfully obvious and ridiculous. Stuff that would be obvious to anyone who understood business and who wasn't hamstrung by trying to rely on Windows technology. I mean, even Apple is running an ERP system, c'mon, Bill.
As far as whether programmers and technical types can be exploited, yeah they can, just like anyone else, and in many ways. If you've never visited the Netslaves site, take a look and read some of the message traffic.
And as for the observation that employees can leave at any time, theoretically that's true. In practice, there are often costs associated with picking up and leaving a shop sooner than planned or under circumstances which might preclude one getting rehired quickly. Some employers know this and use it.
NY State has mandated (see its Technology Policy 9903) that all state agency web sites must conform to the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. Of course, I don't know of any specific sites that have been brought into conformity yet, and NY State hasn't to my knowledge made any extra resources available to do this, but it remains an important goal despite the bureaucrats who hot-potatoed it.
Is the cable company illegal?
Is the gas company illegal?
Is the electric company illegal?
Is the water company illegal?
Is the US Mail System illegal?
The first four examples are monopolies which are regulated (at least in most states) by a public commission. Their pricing structures must be approved by the commission involved. Cable is being de-regulated, slowly. In my area cable's lack of competition has led to overpricing and inadequate consumer choice.
The last example involves a quasi-public corporation overseen by the U.S. Government. It's really a special case. There are a lot of public/private ventures in the UK, called quangos (any Brits want to comment on these?) but they're not all that common in the States.
Basically, monopolies are allowed - and regulated - in areas where competition would get awkward or nasty, such as supplying water or electricity. (Another factor involves increasing returns to scale, where a small water or electric producer won't be as efficient as a larger one). Of late, some states are "deregulating" electricity supply but NOT delivery; this leads to lots of bookkeeping between suppliers and customers, but there remain but one set of wires running to each household.
In the case of phone service, I believe that dereg has simply hived off long distance from the natural monopoly of local service. My quality and pricing of local service have gotten worse since dereg, at the same time long distance has drastically improved.
Microsoft also is expected to question Judge Jackson's conduct during the trial.
In past filings, company attorneys have argued that Judge Jackson was biased against Microsoft and that he failed to provide them with an adequate arena to present their case. They've also accused Jackson of mishandling the case and applying antitrust laws too broadly. - from ZDNet story
This is incredible chutzpah. They started with a judge (Penfield) who was a political conservative disposed to be sympathetic, and then MS proceded to lie as lamely as possible and really piss him off. MS had plenty of chances to defend itself, but the facts, as found by Penfield, are that MS comported itself as a monopolist, engaged in restraint of trade, and basically has become a criminal under the antitrust laws.
Of course, it doesn't end there. MS then says that it's willing to discuss a satisfactory solution, in that it would simply agree not to be a bad boy for awhile. Its representatives are taken aback and offended at proposals to break MS up. Doh. If for no other reasons, there should be punitive considerations.
I use MSIE on my Mac, I use OE and the Office suite. The San Francisco MS team's Mac products are good. But MS's actions as a corporation have been found to be illegal, and need to be dealt with. Should they pierce the corporate veil, find the individuals who carried out intimidation and other anticompetitive acts, and punish them? I think that's too radical for the judicial system (it would mean nasty polluting CEOs could go to prison, not good for the DemiPubs)... so MS has to pay the piper. Amazingly, MS simply believes it never did any wrong, even as its attorneys were caught up in lies before much of the world press.
This student Griffiths gives me hope. So did the Georgia high schooler suspended a few years ago for wearing a "Pepsi" shirt on a "Coca-Cola Day" at his high school (which had a sweetheart-monopoly deal with Coca-Cola).
These are minor acts of disobedience but they are performed for a purpose and provoke surprisingly harsh response. I think this is great. I see too many of my fellow boomers accept authority if it means being able to afford a certain lifestyle; they not only accept authority but then accept that authority trampling on the rights of others. We need more satire, more protest, more nonviolent disobedience, if it has a valid message. To the next high schooler who wants to get a point across about some stupidity or injustice you confront, go for it. Remind your parents' generation of what they claimed to stand for when they were younger, in case they've forgotten by now.
The traditional media, including the now-traditional network TV, are converging towards newer media. Many of the graphics I see on TV seem to be influenced by web design. Most TV news is entertainment now, not journalism. Given all that, I think Slashdot does a good job and seems to try at least as hard as the big media to be responsible. The fact that the humor is different and people don't take themselves as seriously on here as the coiffed broadcasters do is a plus.
About 8 years ago or so, MacWorld ran a special feature on computers in K-12. It was not a happy scene. The biggest problem they diagnosed was that in many districts administrators were basically dumping the computers into the classrooms. The teachers had no time to play with the technology, to see the degree to which they could use the technology and incorporate its use into their curriculum.
Children are messy. They learn at different rates, they require different kinds of attention. Hard to quantify. That doesn't stop administrations. Spend $X per child, look at pass/fail rates and mean/modal test scores.
Teachers are messy too. Some will warm to the idea of using computers as, say, communications tools, where you may have a social studies segment where kids interact with kids at a faraway school, and develop their skills corresponding with kids living in a very different society. Other teachers take more time to warm to this and some may never do so. Rather than deal with this, administrations often just Buy Stuff and Put it In.
Connectivity is being equated with giving the kids what they need, in some districts. If forced to choose, I'd rather my baby cousins (I've no kids of my own) had creative and bright teachers than fiber-to-the-desktop instant access to nowhere taught by someone who's been burnt out and is basically teaching until s/he can retire.
That being said, I know that way back in high school, I'd have given my right arm for the kind of access that 's prevalent now. I think there needs to be some studies which set age bands, within which technology is deployed for particular purposes, and evaluated for results along those lines.
There are a couple of issues that apply to AOL's pop-ups.
First, some people who use AOL pay for a limited block of time. Pop-ups for these people cost them time they've paid for to use the service.
Secondly, users are supposed to be able to disable pop-ups, to disable phone solicitations from AOL for the shit it sells, etc. But AOL never goes way out of its way to remind people how to turn that stuff off.
His statement is very valid. ISPs run on tight margins and it makes no sense for a business to risk losing several hundreds or thousands of customer simply to satisfy one user.
True, an ISP in an independent business who can service who it likes.
True, an ISP will go out of business if its service is disrupted for too long.
However, the DoS attack is a crime. Simply suspending the user alone facilitates the harassment. There is another solution.
Suspend the user temporarily. Bring in law enforcement to work with the victim - reinstate the victim and see if the attacks resume. Track them and track down the originators of the attacks. Join the victim in a civil suit against the attackers, if they're identified, for costs and punitive damages. Testify in any criminal prosecution.
To abdicate any and all responsibility in this case may be the right of an ISP, but one who does so won't keep my business.
Like the guy said, it really depends upon what position you're going for. Even more, it really depends upon what position the employer really, really wants to fill. And they're sometimes not the same, and you'll never know the difference until after the interview.
Great post, DT. As you say, many firms want people who can be "productive" right away, but often hiring managers lack the understanding about what productive is. They may want a room full of code hamsters, with careful design and QA taking care of itself automagically. And as you illustrated, many don't know the difference between essential knowledge and the stuff that you can pick up on the fly.
This is an intensification of the trend since the 60s. Computing used to be something that big companies actually trained people to do. Banks hired English majors with certain aptitudes and trained them in IBM assembler. Imagine that. Later, you needed experience and aptitude and demonstrated output (as in bring samples of your work to interviews), but no one expected you to know their environment exactly.
Now things are at an extreme. No training, no learning curve. These are the same folks who turn around and claim a shortage of programming talent and call for more H1B Visas.
There are some folks, myself included, who for health reasons can't code 24 hours nonstop on Pepsi and Pizza anymore. But I've found a place where one can produce quality code, be productive, and have some measure of autonomy. Employers are shortchanging themselves if they overlook us over 40 types, and if they are too blatant in their discrimination, they will get busted one day.
The embargo on Cuba is a Cold-War holdover that no longer makes any sense. It should have been lifted long ago.
In my opinion, it makes sense to try to open limited trade with Cuba and to treat China with more caution.
It doesn't look like communism in the Cuban model or any model for that matter will survive Castro. Castro himself is old and not particularly well, although he's survived enough CIA assassination attempts to get into Ripley's.
Cuba poses no threat any longer to the U.S. Where its big export - after sugar - used to be troops in foreign lands (Angola), it's now exporting medical students trained in Cuba from other Latin American countries. The time has come to ease the embargo and ease the transition of Cuba to a post-communist society.
One problem with this is the Cuban American community from the 60s, who have carried the hatred of the island politicos and system all these years and passed it to their kids. It's completely understandable, but Cuba is going to change. Very little good came of the revolution, but two things which did were access to education and medical care, and a less racialist society. It would behoove us to help them preserve those modest gains while their economy restructures.
Compare this with China. It's seen as a big honking market, whose masses of still-impoverished people will somehow afford the high-tech gadgets that US businesses want to sell. Are the MFN proponents urging a year-to-year renewal of status? No, they want to lock it in, giving China little incentive to liberalize.
True, the regime can't sit on all information all the time, and digital media make it even harder to do, but this by itself does not create (for example) the alternative society and replacement for communism that developed in parts of E.Europe prior to the collapse of the Soviet Empire.
In other words, permanent MFN status gives China's current gerontocracy no reason to liberalize, and does not necessarily sustain enough real centers of independent decisionmaking to effect liberalization from the bottom. The best course with China is to consider MFN each year, and to make it necessary to renew under Congressional review.
Why don't the larger corporations want this? Because they're the same type of economic actors as the fellow from Shittybank, who in the early 1980s, said of E.Euro communist leaders, "we don't care what kind of system they have, as long as they pay their bills."
There is no "commercial service" which "propagates" something -- there is a marketplace in the US which some people in Europe think breaks their local laws. So? It's your laws, you enforce them. If France wants to ban the French from accessing Yahoo auctions, let it set up a national firewall that greps for words like 'Nazi' and we'll see how far it will get.
Your point is well taken, but I'll say again that to some people in these other societies, a service such as Yahoo creates a "place" where these transactions occur. I think you're right, and that one day we'll see some attempt at intelligent blocking in the more severe cases (e.g., China).
I for one don't think blocking solves anything, but that doesn't mean that some countries won't try it.
On the domestic front, I'm curious about the "pre-blocking" going on in the domain name wars, such as 2600's dispute with Verizon. Here, a corporation demands that 2600 handover a domain name (verizonreallysucks.com), citing a law against domain-name banker blackmail. Our corporations are starting to make the French look like sweethearts. I mean, the French are upset over symbols of Nazi genocide, while the corporate lawyers are worried that someone might mistake Emmanuel Goldstein for James Earl Jones.
Slashdot Mirror
Why would the government hire as a top expert someone who was a top executive from a huge company which just lied its ass off in front of the entire world in court?
Wait! Let me try to guess first!
Yucca Mountain is not a thoroughly safe site. There is both more water and more seismic activity than was originally thought many years and tens of billions of dollars ago. It's the bureaucracy of the DoE, much like the bureaucracy of its predecessor, the AEC, that causes bad scientific and technological choices to continue until people get sick and die.
Furthermore, the purpose of the rush to vote is so that (a) the process of building Yucca can start - this will take years, given all the lawsuits that will pile up, and (b) the fact that Yucca is being "built" can be used to answer one of the biggest objections to additional nuke power plants - that there is nowhere safe to put their waste.
The truth of the matter is that there will still be nowhere safe to put the waste, especially of new plants. Yucca's capacity will not be enough to handle the existing private and government waste sitting in buildings all over the country. So they will need another site. Tell CmdrTaco to keep his basement available for the next 30 to 50 years.
Another point I've seen here. 10,000 is not even the low end of the required isolation period. The DoE recommendation to Bush used 10,000 years because (a) even 1,000 years is impossible to contemplate from an engineering perspective, and (b) Our President can't count that high. The actual required isolation period for the heavy radionuclides is more like 40,000 to 100,000 years. Heck, I don't even know if they had lawyers 100,000 years ago. Oh wait, they did have lawyers and politicians then. The hookers came later.
I look to MSNBC for technology reporting about as much as I do for their political reporting, which is to say, not at all.
One could say that what is now called "globalization" has been in the works since the age of exploration. What's different about the contemporary era is the pace of change, and the ease with which certain cultural and economic models can be transported to other cultures and economies.
The problem is that really positive global change involves using the available technology so that everyone can be heard. The corporations that control much (but not all) of this technology are only interested in propagating their brands, their products, and their ideologies. The U.S. Government - and sadly this includes both the GOP and the New Donkeys - want to propagate a social and economic model in which the poor in the developing world should just shaddup about their human rights and the environment and just appreciate their dollar-a-day jobs, dammit.
Yeah, all of this is "globalization." Jon, the big question is what KIND of globalization. One- way globalization is synonymous with what the GOP loves to call "free trade." Two-way globalization is synonymous with what the WTO- and FTAA-opponents call "fair trade."
Jon, this isn't really hard, is it? I mean, for you to understand. You love to bash the anti-FTAA people as simpletons, but I think you've been projecting.
Dave
Jon,
You're not alone in mischaracterizing the so-called anti-globalization folks. The media never seem to get it right, and I'd like to think that's just some kind of socio-political dyslexia or something.
The folks attacking "Free Trade" (as it's bandied about by corporatist Republicans and techno-corporatist Democrats) want first-world firms held to standards of conduct of their host countries instead of letting them rape and plunder to the degree that corrupt regimes might allow them to in developing nations.
Paying decent wages, being responsible in environmental matters, honoring basic labor rights all cost money. This should come out of the ample margins made by transnationals in the developing nations.
The opposition to the WTO and the FTAA now under negotiation is based on those institutions explicitly excluding these issues and focusing only on the rights of capital. In Quebec City, there were some intestinal grumblings about holding host nations to ILO standards, but that's both ineffective and insincere. Supposedly, the secret FTAA documents were supposed to have been made available after the Apr 22 meetings, after they were translated from the Spanish. Nothing yet.
Also, the institutions like WTO use tribunals with authority over national governments to adjudicate "trade disputes." This means that if your town passes an ordinance to boycott products from country X because of its human rights abuses, country X could if it chose sue your town government in the WTO for imposing non-tariff barriers to trade. And the WTO court would not take human rights issues into account in its deliberations, and there'd be no appeal even if damages were assessed.
Jon, drop the techno-utopia stuff. There are some much more basic issues at stake here. Of course the "anti-globalization" folks want global exchanges of ideas and of information, but people need the rights and material subsistence to be able to make use of them. If this globalization is just for the elite 10 or 15 percent of the planet, what the fuck good is it?
Dave
... so will a lot of dissent.
The easist way for a government, or let's say the government's Office of Homeland Defense, to stifle legitimate dissent at home is to cause mysterious glitches in certain individuals' electronic lives... credit getting mysteriously screwed up, cash disappearing, technical problems sorry about that.
Granted, one can still be screwed up in real, physical life, but it requires more effort to tamper with thousands of people in the flesh versus running scripts against lists.
-d
Cable networks are usually local monopolies. These monopolies are supposed to be granted in the public interest. It's not in the public interest if DSL providers cannot place legitimate local advertisements in community media.
AOL-TW should either act fairly or lose their cable franchises. It could be fought out at the local level.
The fact remains that Microsoft lied in federal court, big baldfaced lies, albeit incompetently. Their only salvation was that they so pissed off the judge that his anger and frustration came through in the trial.
The current Admnistration is much better disposed to large corporate liars and thieves than the previous Justice Department was. I had/have no love for Clinton but the DoJ did pursue Microsoft and brought a lot of stuff to light.
It's hardly mudslinging to point out that MS will now likely get away scott-free for conduct that in the Sixties could have led to federal prison sentences.
Dave
The GOP: just another faith-based initiative.
A twelve-month inactivity period with no provision for deletion is bad, especially given how many time MS's systems have been hacked. If MS tells you they can't remove you from their service and your personal info will sit out there for a full year, contact your state's Attorney General. -Dave
If you were an individual or a small company with a case against a large medical corporation, would you want put all your faith in an "unbiased" expert witness whose motives may not be completely unbiased?
Even if an "expert's" motives are pure, there are a lot of scientific areas in which prevailing scientific wisdom may be incomplete, incorrect, or channeled within political or bureaucratic imperatives. I'm thinking, for instance, of epidemiology, where certain state agencies set criteria within which the experts pronounce. Meanwhile, plaintiffs in toxic waste-related lawsuits often don't get to challenge the frameworks within which state experts are told to operate.
I was a recent Buffalo City Council meeting regarding the neighborhood of Hickory Woods, which the *city* itself redeveloped on slag- and toxic-waste filled land and then sold to homeowners using subsidies. At the hearing, there were homeowner after homeowner testifying to pets dying, kids getting seriously ill, their own illnesses, including arsenic-induced internal bleeding, cancer, etc. It was enough for the Council to pass yesterday a resolution looking toward full relocation. The mayor is not yet officially convinced, and he is waiting for a report from the Dept of Health. Guess what? To my knowledge, NYS DOH has never started with an evaluation of any site as immediately dangerous: not with Love Canal and not with Forest Glen, both of which became Federal Environmental Emergencies. BTW, Hickory Woods has toxic levels well above Forest Glen's....
Dave
The article mentions a record label who had no backup of its web content, audio files, etc.
I can understand counting on one's web host to backup its servers' data, and it's outrageous that a web host would both (a) not do regular backups and (b) not explain that fact to its customers. On the other hand, most people would never trust a third party to maintain the only copies of their data, for precisely these reasons.
Does every person on the planet have to learn the same lesson the hard way?
Dave
In the case of the original posting, it seems the former employee's under no strict legal obligation to restrain himself from speaking about his former employer.
His former employer can sue him - or, "better," threaten to sue him - anyway.
The larger the business, there's a legal apparatus in place and thus there is a lower the relative cost to that firm of using legal pressure on individuals such as former employees, small press and web publishers, etc. Will the firm win if something gets to court? It doesn't have to. The costs of responding and defending - in time in money - is often prohibitive to the target. Firms believe they can modify your behavior with implied threats if they don't like what you are doing or saying.
This is the sodden underbelly of the 'free market' that Ayn Randists and right-libertarians like to trumpet. Markets depend on information, but if firms can distort that information by coercion, they can gain leverage that has nothing to do with the quality or price of their product or service, how they treat their employees, etc. Bottom line: we have the rights we're willing to defend, and large corporations are out to grab as much control over their environment - including you and me - as they can, both by legislation and by intimidation. If you doubt this statement, you have been reading a different Slashdot than I have.
If you get intimidated by these folks, speak with the ACLU in your area, and see if they are willing to advise you, or help you. The people who harass others get to hide behind the corporate veil, the legal 'personhood' granted them by a state government somewhere. You can't hide, so you need a weapon of mass destruction, like a civil rights attorney (or a shark, depending on whether you want to fight a defensive or offensive war).
If you don't want to face even the remote possibility of a fight, then follow others' advice on this board and post anonymously or, as someone else suggested, talk with friends and don't post.
Dave
I would venture that the best way to solve this would be for Amazon not to offer to buy/resell new books for a period of time (say 3-6 months) after the book comes out. It is my understanding, based on friends who work in bookstores, that anything that is selling decently, sells the majority of its copies during that period. After that, it is usually spur of the moment buys.
I think this is a good idea. It all depends on how Amazon wants to position itself. If one looks at Powells Books in Portland OR, one of my favorite independent stores, their main store mixes new and used books on the shelves, and their web site reflects this (last I looked). I think it's great, because it provides seamless searching for titles. However, Powells doesn't seem to go out of its way to short-circuit new-book sales.
Books have become expensive. Textbooks are typically in the $70-$150 range now, and trade paper fiction is typically over $20/volume, sometimes much more. Given that fact, and given the durability of books, I think it's going to be hard for the book publishers to restrict offerings of used books. It would also be wrong to try to restrict a wonderful way to recycle. On the other hand, there does need to be a strong market for new books, or opportunities for authors to publish in a traditional mode will dry up. So I think the compromise proposed by Eric is a sensible one.
Dave
We should take a leaf out of Bill Gates book, and help the truly deprived, and not scratch our own backs here.
I'll go one step further, and say I like some of the things Gates has said lately. Particularly at a conference on using IT in developing countries: Gates pointed out that infrastructure and food supply were primary issues, not desktop PCs. The ITcrats in attendance were probably expecting something more rah-rah-ish.
This is a far cry from the drivel in his book "Business at the Speed of Light," which I forced myself to read a year or so ago but found too painfully obvious and ridiculous. Stuff that would be obvious to anyone who understood business and who wasn't hamstrung by trying to rely on Windows technology. I mean, even Apple is running an ERP system, c'mon, Bill.
As far as whether programmers and technical types can be exploited, yeah they can, just like anyone else, and in many ways. If you've never visited the Netslaves site, take a look and read some of the message traffic.
And as for the observation that employees can leave at any time, theoretically that's true. In practice, there are often costs associated with picking up and leaving a shop sooner than planned or under circumstances which might preclude one getting rehired quickly. Some employers know this and use it.
Dave
NY State has mandated (see its Technology Policy 9903) that all state agency web sites must conform to the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. Of course, I don't know of any specific sites that have been brought into conformity yet, and NY State hasn't to my knowledge made any extra resources available to do this, but it remains an important goal despite the bureaucrats who hot-potatoed it.
Lots of specifics have been posted by others here. The W3C guidelines are at http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-WEBCONTENT/ and the state policy is listed at http://www.irm.state.ny.us/policy/99-3.htm.
Please post back after you've come up with a plan, lots of us would be interested.
Dave
Is the cable company illegal?
Is the gas company illegal?
Is the electric company illegal?
Is the water company illegal?
Is the US Mail System illegal?
The first four examples are monopolies which are regulated (at least in most states) by a public commission. Their pricing structures must be approved by the commission involved. Cable is being de-regulated, slowly. In my area cable's lack of competition has led to overpricing and inadequate consumer choice.
The last example involves a quasi-public corporation overseen by the U.S. Government. It's really a special case. There are a lot of public/private ventures in the UK, called quangos (any Brits want to comment on these?) but they're not all that common in the States.
Basically, monopolies are allowed - and regulated - in areas where competition would get awkward or nasty, such as supplying water or electricity. (Another factor involves increasing returns to scale, where a small water or electric producer won't be as efficient as a larger one). Of late, some states are "deregulating" electricity supply but NOT delivery; this leads to lots of bookkeeping between suppliers and customers, but there remain but one set of wires running to each household.
In the case of phone service, I believe that dereg has simply hived off long distance from the natural monopoly of local service. My quality and pricing of local service have gotten worse since dereg, at the same time long distance has drastically improved.
Dave
Microsoft also is expected to question Judge Jackson's conduct during the trial.
In past filings, company attorneys have argued that Judge Jackson was biased against Microsoft and that he failed to provide them with an adequate arena to present their case. They've also accused Jackson of mishandling the case and applying antitrust laws too broadly. - from ZDNet story
This is incredible chutzpah. They started with a judge (Penfield) who was a political conservative disposed to be sympathetic, and then MS proceded to lie as lamely as possible and really piss him off. MS had plenty of chances to defend itself, but the facts, as found by Penfield, are that MS comported itself as a monopolist, engaged in restraint of trade, and basically has become a criminal under the antitrust laws.
Of course, it doesn't end there. MS then says that it's willing to discuss a satisfactory solution, in that it would simply agree not to be a bad boy for awhile. Its representatives are taken aback and offended at proposals to break MS up. Doh. If for no other reasons, there should be punitive considerations.
I use MSIE on my Mac, I use OE and the Office suite. The San Francisco MS team's Mac products are good. But MS's actions as a corporation have been found to be illegal, and need to be dealt with. Should they pierce the corporate veil, find the individuals who carried out intimidation and other anticompetitive acts, and punish them? I think that's too radical for the judicial system (it would mean nasty polluting CEOs could go to prison, not good for the DemiPubs)... so MS has to pay the piper. Amazingly, MS simply believes it never did any wrong, even as its attorneys were caught up in lies before much of the world press.
-Dave
This student Griffiths gives me hope. So did the Georgia high schooler suspended a few years ago for wearing a "Pepsi" shirt on a "Coca-Cola Day" at his high school (which had a sweetheart-monopoly deal with Coca-Cola).
These are minor acts of disobedience but they are performed for a purpose and provoke surprisingly harsh response. I think this is great. I see too many of my fellow boomers accept authority if it means being able to afford a certain lifestyle; they not only accept authority but then accept that authority trampling on the rights of others. We need more satire, more protest, more nonviolent disobedience, if it has a valid message. To the next high schooler who wants to get a point across about some stupidity or injustice you confront, go for it. Remind your parents' generation of what they claimed to stand for when they were younger, in case they've forgotten by now.
Dave
The traditional media, including the now-traditional network TV, are converging towards newer media. Many of the graphics I see on TV seem to be influenced by web design. Most TV news is entertainment now, not journalism. Given all that, I think Slashdot does a good job and seems to try at least as hard as the big media to be responsible. The fact that the humor is different and people don't take themselves as seriously on here as the coiffed broadcasters do is a plus.
Dave
Good points.
About 8 years ago or so, MacWorld ran a special feature on computers in K-12. It was not a happy scene. The biggest problem they diagnosed was that in many districts administrators were basically dumping the computers into the classrooms. The teachers had no time to play with the technology, to see the degree to which they could use the technology and incorporate its use into their curriculum.
Children are messy. They learn at different rates, they require different kinds of attention. Hard to quantify. That doesn't stop administrations. Spend $X per child, look at pass/fail rates and mean/modal test scores.
Teachers are messy too. Some will warm to the idea of using computers as, say, communications tools, where you may have a social studies segment where kids interact with kids at a faraway school, and develop their skills corresponding with kids living in a very different society. Other teachers take more time to warm to this and some may never do so. Rather than deal with this, administrations often just Buy Stuff and Put it In.
Connectivity is being equated with giving the kids what they need, in some districts. If forced to choose, I'd rather my baby cousins (I've no kids of my own) had creative and bright teachers than fiber-to-the-desktop instant access to nowhere taught by someone who's been burnt out and is basically teaching until s/he can retire.
That being said, I know that way back in high school, I'd have given my right arm for the kind of access that 's prevalent now. I think there needs to be some studies which set age bands, within which technology is deployed for particular purposes, and evaluated for results along those lines.
Dave
There are a couple of issues that apply to AOL's pop-ups.
First, some people who use AOL pay for a limited block of time. Pop-ups for these people cost them time they've paid for to use the service.
Secondly, users are supposed to be able to disable pop-ups, to disable phone solicitations from AOL for the shit it sells, etc. But AOL never goes way out of its way to remind people how to turn that stuff off.
Dave
His statement is very valid. ISPs run on tight margins and it makes no sense for a business to risk losing several hundreds or thousands of customer simply to satisfy one user.
True, an ISP in an independent business who can service who it likes.
True, an ISP will go out of business if its service is disrupted for too long.
However, the DoS attack is a crime. Simply suspending the user alone facilitates the harassment. There is another solution.
Suspend the user temporarily. Bring in law enforcement to work with the victim - reinstate the victim and see if the attacks resume. Track them and track down the originators of the attacks. Join the victim in a civil suit against the attackers, if they're identified, for costs and punitive damages. Testify in any criminal prosecution.
To abdicate any and all responsibility in this case may be the right of an ISP, but one who does so won't keep my business.
-Dave
Like the guy said, it really depends upon what position you're going for. Even more, it really depends upon what position the employer really, really wants to fill. And they're sometimes not the same, and you'll never know the difference until after the interview.
Great post, DT. As you say, many firms want people who can be "productive" right away, but often hiring managers lack the understanding about what productive is. They may want a room full of code hamsters, with careful design and QA taking care of itself automagically. And as you illustrated, many don't know the difference between essential knowledge and the stuff that you can pick up on the fly.
This is an intensification of the trend since the 60s. Computing used to be something that big companies actually trained people to do. Banks hired English majors with certain aptitudes and trained them in IBM assembler. Imagine that. Later, you needed experience and aptitude and demonstrated output (as in bring samples of your work to interviews), but no one expected you to know their environment exactly.
Now things are at an extreme. No training, no learning curve. These are the same folks who turn around and claim a shortage of programming talent and call for more H1B Visas.
There are some folks, myself included, who for health reasons can't code 24 hours nonstop on Pepsi and Pizza anymore. But I've found a place where one can produce quality code, be productive, and have some measure of autonomy. Employers are shortchanging themselves if they overlook us over 40 types, and if they are too blatant in their discrimination, they will get busted one day.
Dave
The embargo on Cuba is a Cold-War holdover that no longer makes any sense. It should have been lifted long ago.
In my opinion, it makes sense to try to open limited trade with Cuba and to treat China with more caution.
It doesn't look like communism in the Cuban model or any model for that matter will survive Castro. Castro himself is old and not particularly well, although he's survived enough CIA assassination attempts to get into Ripley's.
Cuba poses no threat any longer to the U.S. Where its big export - after sugar - used to be troops in foreign lands (Angola), it's now exporting medical students trained in Cuba from other Latin American countries. The time has come to ease the embargo and ease the transition of Cuba to a post-communist society.
One problem with this is the Cuban American community from the 60s, who have carried the hatred of the island politicos and system all these years and passed it to their kids. It's completely understandable, but Cuba is going to change. Very little good came of the revolution, but two things which did were access to education and medical care, and a less racialist society. It would behoove us to help them preserve those modest gains while their economy restructures.
Compare this with China. It's seen as a big honking market, whose masses of still-impoverished people will somehow afford the high-tech gadgets that US businesses want to sell. Are the MFN proponents urging a year-to-year renewal of status? No, they want to lock it in, giving China little incentive to liberalize.
True, the regime can't sit on all information all the time, and digital media make it even harder to do, but this by itself does not create (for example) the alternative society and replacement for communism that developed in parts of E.Europe prior to the collapse of the Soviet Empire.
In other words, permanent MFN status gives China's current gerontocracy no reason to liberalize, and does not necessarily sustain enough real centers of independent decisionmaking to effect liberalization from the bottom. The best course with China is to consider MFN each year, and to make it necessary to renew under Congressional review.
Why don't the larger corporations want this? Because they're the same type of economic actors as the fellow from Shittybank, who in the early 1980s, said of E.Euro communist leaders, "we don't care what kind of system they have, as long as they pay their bills."
Dave
There is no "commercial service" which "propagates" something -- there is a marketplace in the US which some people in Europe think breaks their local laws. So? It's your laws, you enforce them. If France wants to ban the French from accessing Yahoo auctions, let it set up a national firewall that greps for words like 'Nazi' and we'll see how far it will get.
Your point is well taken, but I'll say again that to some people in these other societies, a service such as Yahoo creates a "place" where these transactions occur. I think you're right, and that one day we'll see some attempt at intelligent blocking in the more severe cases (e.g., China).
I for one don't think blocking solves anything, but that doesn't mean that some countries won't try it.
On the domestic front, I'm curious about the "pre-blocking" going on in the domain name wars, such as 2600's dispute with Verizon. Here, a corporation demands that 2600 handover a domain name (verizonreallysucks.com), citing a law against domain-name banker blackmail. Our corporations are starting to make the French look like sweethearts. I mean, the French are upset over symbols of Nazi genocide, while the corporate lawyers are worried that someone might mistake Emmanuel Goldstein for James Earl Jones.
Dave