Now I agree the fact that someone came up with an idea doesn't necesserily mean they deserve to be compensated (in fact I am unclear what it would even mean for an artist to deserve a payment). However, at times when there wasnt a system to guarantee artists compensation (early years of the US state) it did seem to significantly reduce the amount of new material created. As we don't want this we should make sure there is some compensation for artists. However we should keep in mind that they do not deserve the money or anything like that...the compensation is merely to encourage them to produce works and should be no higher than necessery.
What kind of compensation is relevant would presumably depend from industry to industry. The huge number of bands out there existing without any real money from CD sales (the undiscovered bands) combined with the potential to make money from concerts suggests that music may not actually need any additional compensation mechanism. The benefits of fame (getting ppl to come to your concert) are probably enough to encourage them to perform songs.
Computer games are another matter. Looking at the paucity of open source video games this seems to be a pretty clear area where compensation is necessery to encourage production. Of course a 5 year copyright protection (possibly one which even included the requirement of open sourcing the game at the end) would probably be sufficent.
Books too seem to need some sort of compensation mechanism. However, far more so than with computer games the charge per copy rule with books is damaging. People, especially poorer people, are denied useful information and education without any benifit to anyone else (if they aren't going to buy the book anyway the author would probably prefer them to read it rather than not read it). A possible solution in this case is the UKs library payment plan. Authors are compensated for their books in proportion to the number of times they are checked out. This could possibly be adapted to the internet world where it is proportional to number of unique downloads (if it is free there is no incentive to download from anywhere but the official site).
Of course while this might work well for mass market books it might have problems for technical books. The market for many of these books is so small that they need to charge quite a high price just to make up publishing etc.. etc.. If they were merely compensated proportional to usage these books might not be published. Fortunatly the rist of the internet and e-publishing may fix this problem soon.
Finally about games not existing. Games provide a valuable service...people enjoy them. After all, aside from producing useless junk, isn't providing an enjoyable life the primary goal of civilization?
This is BS...what do you think McCartyism was? If anything I would suggest that the existance of a threat to our national security (be it russian or al queda) probably decresses our freedom. Remember freedom is only a poorly defined word...we don't need to actually have it for our leaders to say that is what we are fighting for (for instance the double talk bush is giving about the forms of freedom not interfering with freedom itself)
I think you've got it backwards. There is WAY more access to restricted material in the age of mega-stores and centralization then there was in the age of small local stores. When the people deciding corprorate policy and directly responsible to the people in the community (which may be quite conservative) the more likely they are to censure. I bet waldenbooks and suck has brought playboy to tons of communities whose traditional bookstores never carried it.
Whether this is a valid metaphor to use for the internet depends on wether ISP competition is local or non-local. If people in say the rural south can only really use companies as ISPs with local presences then I imagine far reaching corporate dominance would be better. On the other hand if say the telecomunications act allows far away ISPS cheap access to these markets decentralized control would probably be better.
Unless they have a waiver from the state department no? If they are working with the cuban government on a purely scientific mission this might be exactly the sort of thing they get a waiver for.
The only reason that you might actually believe god created the world in seven days is because you believe the bible is the factual, non-metaphorical word of god. If you admit that the bible might in fact be metaphorical, or mistaken (for instance the interpratations (possible incorrect) of ancient people of the word of good) you would simply assign the blatant inconsistancy of scientific evidence with biblical passage to that passage being metaphorical or to a mistake of the ancient hebrews.
If on the other hand you do believe it is the factual word of god you must believe that a day in the bible is a real day. This is actually gods words and he knows very well (being omniscient) that a day means the period of time for one rotation of the earth (it has this meaning because this is its generally accepted meaning). If he still chooses to call several billion years a day he is either lying to us or speaking in a metaphor both possibilities are strictly denied by these sorts of believers.
The point being that argument SHOULD never convince anyone because they either explicity reject its premises (and hence the argument has no hold over them) or they have all the necessery beliefs to accept the conclusion of the argument.
Not that I buy the claim but presumably the greeks didn't actually go there but heard it from others who heard it from others etc... In a chain such as that an accurate scale of distance is going to be really hard to keep (when the greeks here really far away they substitute their own phrase for this).
Jesus...KPMG has really won haven't they. With one stupid letter they managed to get more free advertising and even active links than X10 has purchased during its entire lifetime. Given the way modern search enginges work this probably boosts it up to the top of the heap in search results as well.
You know it might have been more convincing if the potential victims of this LACK of cryptography were not private individuals like you and me trying to prevent others from stealing their money.
As someone pointed out before some of these employees were owed wages by the company...and I believe employee wages are the first thing that gets paid out of the comany..in any case they should be. Therefore legally the enlyoees may own taht much worth of the comapany property.
You may see they should sue in court for it,after all it would be illegal to break into someones house to get even for a debt they owed me, but the situation is symetric here, it should be just as much theft for the owners or VCs of the comapany to take the items.
Now it may be that the VCs or Owners get legal judgements in their favor but this may reflect only their prepardness for this sort of action and greater legal acumen rather that the justness of their case (indeed the case is much harder for the employees b/c they need to show the financial manipulations of the owners/VCs which make the comapny look utterly bankrupt are in fact nefarious). In this case they may even be legally entitled to that much money but the imperfect nature of the legal system screwed them over. It is hard to believe in this case they are doing wrong.
Then again those earlier posters could have been BS and you may have just been trolling.
What would be the point? Sure it would cause more chaos but presumably this box is already rooted and there are far easier ways to cause chaos. Your worm for instance could start corrupting files etc.. etc..
Letting in someone else's worm just takes away processing resources from your (presumably superios) worm
It has been denied by a US official that the US is involved. The current speculation is that it is the guerilla enemies of the taliban retaliating for attacks that occured over the weekend. In other words at best weekly connected to the events in the US.
I agree it may be childish and immature to lash out wildly. However it is probably a good strategy over all.
Sure it may bot be the best response this time but unrestrained response will definatly make it less likely to happen again. Terrorism only works when the response is restrained (they hide in some unidentifiable group and hope to slowly wear down the resolve of the other party).
If we show a consistant tatic of responding irrationally even when the results are perhaps not the best for us in the short run we may be better off in the long term.
In other words if this national hubris (which I find somewhat distasteful myself) pushes the US into milatary action that might not be strictly justified on a cost benifit analysis than it may have served a good purpose.
Perhaps the previous poster believes, with some good reason, that a US advantage would translate into positive results. Given the recent aggresive tendancies of china with respect to taiwan and its inappropriate behavior with pakistan and north korea I tend to agree with him. In fact did I not agree with him (if I thought a territorial win by the chinese would be better for the world) I would almost certainly have to believe the chinese had a better form of government and I would go live there.
Besides it seems completly reasonable to prefer you and the people you care about living to the other guys.
Re:How are his wife and kids?
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Ok sure sending $5 isn't enough...but maybe $50 or $100 is enough. My point was merely that people who actualy go out and protest themselves are not inherintly more effective than those who merely give paypal money. One donates their time directly the other donates their time via their job.
Re:How are his wife and kids?
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That just BS money is all it takes. Fuck you can even higher protester to protest for you. Protesters w/o engough cash volounter their labor for the project but I doubt (given the relative power of lobby groups and protesters) that it is any more effective.
I wopuld therefore imagine his presence at the events is worth some amount of cash
Why is this the case? What is the argument for this? It seems that the you tacitly assume the fact that all these teachers are all necessery means they are all equal. This is simply a misunderstanding of the usage. The janitor is just as necessery for running the economy as the research scientist but this does not make them *equal.*
The standard for measuring relative worth in this context is something like rarity of skills...or ease of replacing those skills. This standard agrees with our usage by saying even tho both janitors and research scientists are necessery for the economy to run the rarity of the research scientist and the extensive training required make the research scientist worth more (job wise not as a human being) than the janitor.
Using this standard it is easy to see that a gym teacher is worth less than a science teacher. Any bum off the street can teach gym (just tell them the rules for volleyball or whatever...and don't tell me the 4 years of recreation major in college is necessery for this) meaning that the gym teacher is less rare and easier to replace. Given the paucity of science teachers this seems to be true of them as well.
>All teachers are underpaid, whether they teach calculus, pre-algebra, AP Chemistry, American Lit, or Spanish 1.
WTF does this mean??? What standard is used to determine they are underpaid? Everyone could use extra money...how do you determine if they are underpaid? Do they work disproportionatly hard for the amount of money they make? Certainly not. They do have abreviated days and summer vacations (I don't deny that teaching a class is hard but so are most jobs). Even if this was the case this isn't a good definition of underpaid, under this definition I am underpaid for writing this post (I worked to put it up and never was compensated making me more underpaid than the teachers). Perhaps you would try to ammend this definition by saying the amount of social good teachers do is great compared to the pay they get.
What leads us to believe that the amount of social good teachers do is great? Yes they are *necessery* to educate our children but so is the person who manufactures school desks. Like above necessity is not to be confused with worth.
Perhaps what is meant is that teachers are underpaid because they are giving up greater other benifits to come teach our children. This however ignores the fact that teachers *choose* to do this. They get some benifit (unless you honestly believe teachers are all in this as some sort of great self-sacrifice...and meeting would be teachers I am sure this is not the case) to themselves out of teaching the children (otherwise they would simply have taken the higher paying jobs). Just like the ski instructure who takes less pay for other benifits the fact that teachers are paid less than those with similar credentials doesn't provide proof that they are underpaid.
The claim that the position of teacher should pay more is an entierly differnt claim. One I agree with but not because of some judgemental claim that teachers are underpaid but because a higher salary would bring better teachers (the present teachers may not 'deserve' to get more). Moreover pay hikes certainly need not be even distributed...I am confident that the required level of sports knowledge can be maintained at the current gym teacher salary
if it is sent in a buffer the encryption protects it. Even if the potential hackers know a password is being sent (and they know a passwd is being sent anyway b/c it is the start of a connection) they can't get any information about what the password itself is (to do so would constitute an unknown plantext attack against the ssh encryption (3DES)).
The danger discussed above is that if each keystroke is sent individualy (instead of in a block) an attacker can monitor the times between keystrokes. If (as is probably the case) differnt transitions of keys take differnt amounts of time then some data can be gotten about what you are typing.
Passwords are precisely the wrong place to worry about this kind of attack. They are the text we type *least* likely to have recognizable delay patterns between various keys (yes it is probably the most consistant timed keystrokes we type but each individual holds their hands quite differntly when they type their password so unless we had actually observed them type in their pawword we would have little knowledge about what kind of keys might correspond to the observed pattern of delays in their password). In addition good passwords (if you have a bad password you already have a much bigger security hole anyway) are some of the most entrpoic pieces of text you type (that is it is the most difficult to make guesses about what a 5 letter pawword is if you know 4 letters than it is to guess what a 5 letter word or name is if you know 4 letters).
In short given the already dubious nature of this attack (no doubt some error will be introduced into the packet timings by the network significantly compounding the already difficult task of guessing keys from key timings) it really isn't passwords people shoule be worried about. More likely would be an attack like this would be used to reconstruct an email where the language structure presents lower entropy and keystroke timings are much easier to deal with.
I think what is occuring here is differnt in two important ways from the earlier fragmentation. First of all the current changes in the UNIX world, even if they do create "new OSes" are actually moves towards GREATER compatibility. If software from vendor X runs on vendor Y's machine there is no division and competition, rather than breaking up effort, drives people on to better software. This OpenUnix takes an already existing system (SCO) and allows it to run linux binaries (essentially encouraging development for the standard linux system).
OS X takes MacOS and makes it compatible with FreeBSD.
Finally the fact that so many of the products that make up these systems are open source compatibility is much easier.
This begs an interesting question. What is the governmental motivation to prevent us from copying Xerox's printer driver if in fact it will be duplicated by open source advocates. As the goal of copyright is to encourage innovation by rewarding those who create it seems it is no longer working. For one if open source people are willing to create said driver/OS/whatever without the protection of copyright then it appears the incentive is no longer needed. In addition should the day ever come when open source software is a real competitor to the closed source software then the incentive is gone as well b/c who will purchase a product that costs money when they can buy one that does it for free. In this case copyright is merely forcing us to do duplicate work.
We should realize that copyright/patent laws are not inalienable rights but rather privleges granted to encourage innovation and thereby total utility. The current effect of copyright in the computer world is to force the same type of software to be written over and over rather than merely once and reused. A possible solution to this issue is to require software to be patented ( instead of copyrighted) only for a short term of 3-5 years and as a condition of said patent readable source code to be made availible (just like with normal patents the way the device works must be made availible as a condition of granting the patent). There would still be a significant incentive to create computer products but unnatural monopolies based on standards control would have a harder time flourishing in addition to the clear benifit of more free software around.
In terms of music and britney spears we should ask the same question. Does the utility associated with the incentive to produce music outweigh the clear disutility of not being able to freely trade and listen to music? I think the answer in this case is no. If Britney got no royalty money off CDs being a pop star would still be financially advantageous enough to her and to her backers for her to continue producing music. The money from concerts alone would make a profit.
In fact given the huge number of bands that exist and play without money from CDs and the fact that many very popular bands start this way with little hope (at their inception) of achieving a hit single we should assume that the copyright protection in music is a fairly minor incentive. Given this analysis it is highly reasonable that we should be able to freely take music (although this analysis would probably not apply to books or other non-performed material).
Finaly about the point of "freeing other peoples work without their consent" I would point out again that their is no inherint right to control your intellectual property. Unlike regular property when someone else uses your IP nothing is taken from you. In fact copyright laws take freedoms away from society as a whole in return for the promise of greater productivity. If this promise is not met then we should abolish copyright laws int hat area.
First of all I hardly see the danger of nude 17 year olds from denmark or germans seeing swastikas are serious enough issues for the respective countries for them to subject their citizens to the laws of the most restrictive nation on the internet. Neither the US nor any european country is going to really export citizens to the Taliban for trial.
I really think you overestimate the effect of "everything is permited." First of all their is a general (if not down to the specifics) agreement on what type of information is allowed in the US and western europe. Yes their are minor differences in hate speech/legal age etc... but we are not talking about free liscence for child pornography or any issue that would really provoke other nations to seriously react.
We already deal with these sorts of issues in non-internet related matters (foreign drug patents expire differntly than in the US for instance and yet we still allow the foreign importation of drugs as long as they are coming from countries with "reasonable" patent systems) and they havent caused some sort of international legal system for these crimes.
What does happen in these cases, and is likely to happen on the internet, is that the involved countries sign treaties which make sure the laws are at least mostly in agreement (the WOT for patents and probably some anti-child porn treaty for the internet). Germans will still be able to illegaly view swastikas and US citizens nude 17 year olds from denmark. Countries that our seriously out of line (allow real child porn/no copyright/patenet enforcement) will be dealt with via sanctions and/or removing blocking internet traffic from that country
This was my primary complaint when I started playing with it a year or so ago (maybe a little less). I was intrigued by the idea of a distributed open source IM client but the fact that your address is server dependent disturbed me.
Sure email works this way, but I always thought this was one of the big benifits of IM...when people moved accounts or whatever their IM addresses stayed the same (lets u find their new email addresses as well). I admit it would be hard to develop a distributed system where your address is none server dependent but it certainly would be possible and well worth the benifits.
I can see alot of ISPs trying to restrict their jabber servers (if this ever catches on) to only people who use their service (a server which supports searches could use up alot of resources if it became too big...and these people don't want to be responsible for the eventual spamings that occur). Secondly the fact that searches only work on a single server is just not acceptable...sure maybe there is a web page search but we all know how effective email searches are.
First of all stopping crime is not the only factor to be considered. Criminal enforcement must be balanced against personal liberties, total cost and welfare of the nation as a whole.
Where police targeting people based on some less psychologically important characteristic than race it would probably be a good idea...but the mere fact that race is so close to many peoples identity and has so frequently been inappropriately used before the mere knowledge that race is being used to profile is quite damaging.
Race is also an inherint non-changable property. As such anyone of a "profiled" race is likely to run into a great deal of law enforcement harrasment. An individual (in fact an entire cultural group) routinely harrased (or at least suspected of crimes) by law enforcement is probably going to develop a poor attitude towards law and authority in general and possibly increase their rate of criminal activity.
Secondly, it is an unfortunate fact that people (and I have no doubt police officers are included in this) are extremely poor at manipulating probabilities. People tend to form sterotypes (as in a vision of how things usually are) and rate liklihoods by how reasonable they are instead of how probable they are. For instance most people would (at least until they thought carefully about it) rate the sequence of coin flips HHTHTTH more likely than HHHHHHH because it somehow seems more "reasonable."
This leads one to suspect that racially profiling is not done in a statistically usefull manner. In fact police may be acting inefficently by their racial profiling.
Consider as a police officer your primary contact is with criminals. Suppose for the purpose of argument that black people make up a significantly greater percent of criminals than whites (or at least the criminals these police come into contact with). These police officers then develop an image of a criminal as a young black male. This would lead them to falsely assume that young black males are almost certainly criminals when in fact most of them are innocent.
Finally racial profilling seems to be used primarily in respect to the war on drugs. While this entire war is a gross violation of civil liberties it points out the further inappropriatness of racial profiling. As a matter of fact the difference between white and black drug use in young men is actually not very large but the difference in arrests and prison sentences is huge. In short these drug laws are being used to remove "undesierables" which should be read as minorities.
BTW I really like how you criticize us for being too hung up on individual rights to implement this but yet your "enlightened" european nations are the ones who haven't implemented such a policy.
He does NOT mean that every theorem out there may be riddled with logical gaps. He is not questioning the validity of the proof or the theorem. He is rather pointin gout that there may be many true relations which are unprovable.
Slashdot Mirror
Now I agree the fact that someone came up with an idea doesn't necesserily mean they deserve to be compensated (in fact I am unclear what it would even mean for an artist to deserve a payment). However, at times when there wasnt a system to guarantee artists compensation (early years of the US state) it did seem to significantly reduce the amount of new material created. As we don't want this we should make sure there is some compensation for artists. However we should keep in mind that they do not deserve the money or anything like that...the compensation is merely to encourage them to produce works and should be no higher than necessery.
What kind of compensation is relevant would presumably depend from industry to industry. The huge number of bands out there existing without any real money from CD sales (the undiscovered bands) combined with the potential to make money from concerts suggests that music may not actually need any additional compensation mechanism. The benefits of fame (getting ppl to come to your concert) are probably enough to encourage them to perform songs.
Computer games are another matter. Looking at the paucity of open source video games this seems to be a pretty clear area where compensation is necessery to encourage production. Of course a 5 year copyright protection (possibly one which even included the requirement of open sourcing the game at the end) would probably be sufficent.
Books too seem to need some sort of compensation mechanism. However, far more so than with computer games the charge per copy rule with books is damaging. People, especially poorer people, are denied useful information and education without any benifit to anyone else (if they aren't going to buy the book anyway the author would probably prefer them to read it rather than not read it). A possible solution in this case is the UKs library payment plan. Authors are compensated for their books in proportion to the number of times they are checked out. This could possibly be adapted to the internet world where it is proportional to number of unique downloads (if it is free there is no incentive to download from anywhere but the official site).
Of course while this might work well for mass market books it might have problems for technical books. The market for many of these books is so small that they need to charge quite a high price just to make up publishing etc.. etc.. If they were merely compensated proportional to usage these books might not be published. Fortunatly the rist of the internet and e-publishing may fix this problem soon.
Finally about games not existing. Games provide a valuable service...people enjoy them. After all, aside from producing useless junk, isn't providing an enjoyable life the primary goal of civilization?
This is BS...what do you think McCartyism was? If anything I would suggest that the existance of a threat to our national security (be it russian or al queda) probably decresses our freedom. Remember freedom is only a poorly defined word...we don't need to actually have it for our leaders to say that is what we are fighting for (for instance the double talk bush is giving about the forms of freedom not interfering with freedom itself)
I think you've got it backwards. There is WAY more access to restricted material in the age of mega-stores and centralization then there was in the age of small local stores. When the people deciding corprorate policy and directly responsible to the people in the community (which may be quite conservative) the more likely they are to censure. I bet waldenbooks and suck has brought playboy to tons of communities whose traditional bookstores never carried it.
Whether this is a valid metaphor to use for the internet depends on wether ISP competition is local or non-local. If people in say the rural south can only really use companies as ISPs with local presences then I imagine far reaching corporate dominance would be better. On the other hand if say the telecomunications act allows far away ISPS cheap access to these markets decentralized control would probably be better.
Unless they have a waiver from the state department no? If they are working with the cuban government on a purely scientific mission this might be exactly the sort of thing they get a waiver for.
Alright I shouldn't respond but I will.
The only reason that you might actually believe god created the world in seven days is because you believe the bible is the factual, non-metaphorical word of god. If you admit that the bible might in fact be metaphorical, or mistaken (for instance the interpratations (possible incorrect) of ancient people of the word of good) you would simply assign the blatant inconsistancy of scientific evidence with biblical passage to that passage being metaphorical or to a mistake of the ancient hebrews.
If on the other hand you do believe it is the factual word of god you must believe that a day in the bible is a real day. This is actually gods words and he knows very well (being omniscient) that a day means the period of time for one rotation of the earth (it has this meaning because this is its generally accepted meaning). If he still chooses to call several billion years a day he is either lying to us or speaking in a metaphor both possibilities are strictly denied by these sorts of believers.
The point being that argument SHOULD never convince anyone because they either explicity reject its premises (and hence the argument has no hold over them) or they have all the necessery beliefs to accept the conclusion of the argument.
Not that I buy the claim but presumably the greeks didn't actually go there but heard it from others who heard it from others etc... In a chain such as that an accurate scale of distance is going to be really hard to keep (when the greeks here really far away they substitute their own phrase for this).
Jesus...KPMG has really won haven't they. With one stupid letter they managed to get more free advertising and even active links than X10 has purchased during its entire lifetime. Given the way modern search enginges work this probably boosts it up to the top of the heap in search results as well.
You know it might have been more convincing if the potential victims of this LACK of cryptography were not private individuals like you and me trying to prevent others from stealing their money.
As someone pointed out before some of these employees were owed wages by the company...and I believe employee wages are the first thing that gets paid out of the comany..in any case they should be. Therefore legally the enlyoees may own taht much worth of the comapany property.
,after all it would be illegal to break into someones house to get even for a debt they owed me, but the situation is symetric here, it should be just as much theft for the owners or VCs of the comapany to take the items.
You may see they should sue in court for it
Now it may be that the VCs or Owners get legal judgements in their favor but this may reflect only their prepardness for this sort of action and greater legal acumen rather that the justness of their case (indeed the case is much harder for the employees b/c they need to show the financial manipulations of the owners/VCs which make the comapny look utterly bankrupt are in fact nefarious). In this case they may even be legally entitled to that much money but the imperfect nature of the legal system screwed them over. It is hard to believe in this case they are doing wrong.
Then again those earlier posters could have been BS and you may have just been trolling.
What would be the point? Sure it would cause more chaos but presumably this box is already rooted and there are far easier ways to cause chaos. Your worm for instance could start corrupting files etc.. etc..
Letting in someone else's worm just takes away processing resources from your (presumably superios) worm
Someone has probably already said this (there are 4 pages of comments jesus christ) but has anyone started making plans to rebuild the towers?
It seems symbolically like the right sort of thing to do..especially if we rebuilt them taller than those malasian towers.
It has been denied by a US official that the US is involved. The current speculation is that it is the guerilla enemies of the taliban retaliating for attacks that occured over the weekend. In other words at best weekly connected to the events in the US.
I agree it may be childish and immature to lash out wildly. However it is probably a good strategy over all.
Sure it may bot be the best response this time but unrestrained response will definatly make it less likely to happen again. Terrorism only works when the response is restrained (they hide in some unidentifiable group and hope to slowly wear down the resolve of the other party).
If we show a consistant tatic of responding irrationally even when the results are perhaps not the best for us in the short run we may be better off in the long term.
In other words if this national hubris (which I find somewhat distasteful myself) pushes the US into milatary action that might not be strictly justified on a cost benifit analysis than it may have served a good purpose.
Perhaps the previous poster believes, with some good reason, that a US advantage would translate into positive results. Given the recent aggresive tendancies of china with respect to taiwan and its inappropriate behavior with pakistan and north korea I tend to agree with him. In fact did I not agree with him (if I thought a territorial win by the chinese would be better for the world) I would almost certainly have to believe the chinese had a better form of government and I would go live there.
Besides it seems completly reasonable to prefer you and the people you care about living to the other guys.
Ok sure sending $5 isn't enough...but maybe $50 or $100 is enough. My point was merely that people who actualy go out and protest themselves are not inherintly more effective than those who merely give paypal money. One donates their time directly the other donates their time via their job.
That just BS money is all it takes. Fuck you can even higher protester to protest for you. Protesters w/o engough cash volounter their labor for the project but I doubt (given the relative power of lobby groups and protesters) that it is any more effective.
I wopuld therefore imagine his presence at the events is worth some amount of cash
This is simply a poor confusion of words.
>If...all teachers are equal.
Why is this the case? What is the argument for this? It seems that the you tacitly assume the fact that all these teachers are all necessery means they are all equal. This is simply a misunderstanding of the usage. The janitor is just as necessery for running the economy as the research scientist but this does not make them *equal.*
The standard for measuring relative worth in this context is something like rarity of skills...or ease of replacing those skills. This standard agrees with our usage by saying even tho both janitors and research scientists are necessery for the economy to run the rarity of the research scientist and the extensive training required make the research scientist worth more (job wise not as a human being) than the janitor.
Using this standard it is easy to see that a gym teacher is worth less than a science teacher. Any bum off the street can teach gym (just tell them the rules for volleyball or whatever...and don't tell me the 4 years of recreation major in college is necessery for this) meaning that the gym teacher is less rare and easier to replace. Given the paucity of science teachers this seems to be true of them as well.
>All teachers are underpaid, whether they teach calculus, pre-algebra, AP Chemistry, American Lit, or Spanish 1.
WTF does this mean??? What standard is used to determine they are underpaid? Everyone could use extra money...how do you determine if they are underpaid? Do they work disproportionatly hard for the amount of money they make? Certainly not. They do have abreviated days and summer vacations (I don't deny that teaching a class is hard but so are most jobs). Even if this was the case this isn't a good definition of underpaid, under this definition I am underpaid for writing this post (I worked to put it up and never was compensated making me more underpaid than the teachers). Perhaps you would try to ammend this definition by saying the amount of social good teachers do is great compared to the pay they get.
What leads us to believe that the amount of social good teachers do is great? Yes they are *necessery* to educate our children but so is the person who manufactures school desks. Like above necessity is not to be confused with worth.
Perhaps what is meant is that teachers are underpaid because they are giving up greater other benifits to come teach our children. This however ignores the fact that teachers *choose* to do this. They get some benifit (unless you honestly believe teachers are all in this as some sort of great self-sacrifice...and meeting would be teachers I am sure this is not the case) to themselves out of teaching the children (otherwise they would simply have taken the higher paying jobs). Just like the ski instructure who takes less pay for other benifits the fact that teachers are paid less than those with similar credentials doesn't provide proof that they are underpaid.
The claim that the position of teacher should pay more is an entierly differnt claim. One I agree with but not because of some judgemental claim that teachers are underpaid but because a higher salary would bring better teachers (the present teachers may not 'deserve' to get more). Moreover pay hikes certainly need not be even distributed...I am confident that the required level of sports knowledge can be maintained at the current gym teacher salary
if it is sent in a buffer the encryption protects it. Even if the potential hackers know a password is being sent (and they know a passwd is being sent anyway b/c it is the start of a connection) they can't get any information about what the password itself is (to do so would constitute an unknown plantext attack against the ssh encryption (3DES)).
The danger discussed above is that if each keystroke is sent individualy (instead of in a block) an attacker can monitor the times between keystrokes. If (as is probably the case) differnt transitions of keys take differnt amounts of time then some data can be gotten about what you are typing.
Passwords are precisely the wrong place to worry about this kind of attack. They are the text we type *least* likely to have recognizable delay patterns between various keys (yes it is probably the most consistant timed keystrokes we type but each individual holds their hands quite differntly when they type their password so unless we had actually observed them type in their pawword we would have little knowledge about what kind of keys might correspond to the observed pattern of delays in their password). In addition good passwords (if you have a bad password you already have a much bigger security hole anyway) are some of the most entrpoic pieces of text you type (that is it is the most difficult to make guesses about what a 5 letter pawword is if you know 4 letters than it is to guess what a 5 letter word or name is if you know 4 letters).
In short given the already dubious nature of this attack (no doubt some error will be introduced into the packet timings by the network significantly compounding the already difficult task of guessing keys from key timings) it really isn't passwords people shoule be worried about. More likely would be an attack like this would be used to reconstruct an email where the language structure presents lower entropy and keystroke timings are much easier to deal with.
I think what is occuring here is differnt in two important ways from the earlier fragmentation. First of all the current changes in the UNIX world, even if they do create "new OSes" are actually moves towards GREATER compatibility. If software from vendor X runs on vendor Y's machine there is no division and competition, rather than breaking up effort, drives people on to better software. This OpenUnix takes an already existing system (SCO) and allows it to run linux binaries (essentially encouraging development for the standard linux system).
OS X takes MacOS and makes it compatible with FreeBSD.
Finally the fact that so many of the products that make up these systems are open source compatibility is much easier.
This begs an interesting question. What is the governmental motivation to prevent us from copying Xerox's printer driver if in fact it will be duplicated by open source advocates. As the goal of copyright is to encourage innovation by rewarding those who create it seems it is no longer working. For one if open source people are willing to create said driver/OS/whatever without the protection of copyright then it appears the incentive is no longer needed. In addition should the day ever come when open source software is a real competitor to the closed source software then the incentive is gone as well b/c who will purchase a product that costs money when they can buy one that does it for free. In this case copyright is merely forcing us to do duplicate work.
We should realize that copyright/patent laws are not inalienable rights but rather privleges granted to encourage innovation and thereby total utility. The current effect of copyright in the computer world is to force the same type of software to be written over and over rather than merely once and reused. A possible solution to this issue is to require software to be patented ( instead of copyrighted) only for a short term of 3-5 years and as a condition of said patent readable source code to be made availible (just like with normal patents the way the device works must be made availible as a condition of granting the patent). There would still be a significant incentive to create computer products but unnatural monopolies based on standards control would have a harder time flourishing in addition to the clear benifit of more free software around.
In terms of music and britney spears we should ask the same question. Does the utility associated with the incentive to produce music outweigh the clear disutility of not being able to freely trade and listen to music? I think the answer in this case is no. If Britney got no royalty money off CDs being a pop star would still be financially advantageous enough to her and to her backers for her to continue producing music. The money from concerts alone would make a profit.
In fact given the huge number of bands that exist and play without money from CDs and the fact that many very popular bands start this way with little hope (at their inception) of achieving a hit single we should assume that the copyright protection in music is a fairly minor incentive. Given this analysis it is highly reasonable that we should be able to freely take music (although this analysis would probably not apply to books or other non-performed material).
Finaly about the point of "freeing other peoples work without their consent" I would point out again that their is no inherint right to control your intellectual property. Unlike regular property when someone else uses your IP nothing is taken from you. In fact copyright laws take freedoms away from society as a whole in return for the promise of greater productivity. If this promise is not met then we should abolish copyright laws int hat area.
First of all I hardly see the danger of nude 17 year olds from denmark or germans seeing swastikas are serious enough issues for the respective countries for them to subject their citizens to the laws of the most restrictive nation on the internet. Neither the US nor any european country is going to really export citizens to the Taliban for trial.
I really think you overestimate the effect of "everything is permited." First of all their is a general (if not down to the specifics) agreement on what type of information is allowed in the US and western europe. Yes their are minor differences in hate speech/legal age etc... but we are not talking about free liscence for child pornography or any issue that would really provoke other nations to seriously react.
We already deal with these sorts of issues in non-internet related matters (foreign drug patents expire differntly than in the US for instance and yet we still allow the foreign importation of drugs as long as they are coming from countries with "reasonable" patent systems) and they havent caused some sort of international legal system for these crimes.
What does happen in these cases, and is likely to happen on the internet, is that the involved countries sign treaties which make sure the laws are at least mostly in agreement (the WOT for patents and probably some anti-child porn treaty for the internet). Germans will still be able to illegaly view swastikas and US citizens nude 17 year olds from denmark. Countries that our seriously out of line (allow real child porn/no copyright/patenet enforcement) will be dealt with via sanctions and/or removing blocking internet traffic from that country
This was my primary complaint when I started playing with it a year or so ago (maybe a little less). I was intrigued by the idea of a distributed open source IM client but the fact that your address is server dependent disturbed me.
Sure email works this way, but I always thought this was one of the big benifits of IM...when people moved accounts or whatever their IM addresses stayed the same (lets u find their new email addresses as well). I admit it would be hard to develop a distributed system where your address is none server dependent but it certainly would be possible and well worth the benifits.
I can see alot of ISPs trying to restrict their jabber servers (if this ever catches on) to only people who use their service (a server which supports searches could use up alot of resources if it became too big...and these people don't want to be responsible for the eventual spamings that occur). Secondly the fact that searches only work on a single server is just not acceptable...sure maybe there is a web page search but we all know how effective email searches are.
Maybe alot of drugs are shipped by rail. Airports have alot of security so maybe people avoid them.
Why they don't just drive I dunno...maybe the police have gotten good at picking out drug couriers?
Good argument but it has some problems.
First of all stopping crime is not the only factor to be considered. Criminal enforcement must be balanced against personal liberties, total cost and welfare of the nation as a whole.
Where police targeting people based on some less psychologically important characteristic than race it would probably be a good idea...but the mere fact that race is so close to many peoples identity and has so frequently been inappropriately used before the mere knowledge that race is being used to profile is quite damaging.
Race is also an inherint non-changable property. As such anyone of a "profiled" race is likely to run into a great deal of law enforcement harrasment. An individual (in fact an entire cultural group) routinely harrased (or at least suspected of crimes) by law enforcement is probably going to develop a poor attitude towards law and authority in general and possibly increase their rate of criminal activity.
Secondly, it is an unfortunate fact that people (and I have no doubt police officers are included in this) are extremely poor at manipulating probabilities. People tend to form sterotypes (as in a vision of how things usually are) and rate liklihoods by how reasonable they are instead of how probable they are. For instance most people would (at least until they thought carefully about it) rate the sequence of coin flips HHTHTTH more likely than HHHHHHH because it somehow seems more "reasonable."
This leads one to suspect that racially profiling is not done in a statistically usefull manner. In fact police may be acting inefficently by their racial profiling.
Consider as a police officer your primary contact is with criminals. Suppose for the purpose of argument that black people make up a significantly greater percent of criminals than whites (or at least the criminals these police come into contact with). These police officers then develop an image of a criminal as a young black male. This would lead them to falsely assume that young black males are almost certainly criminals when in fact most of them are innocent.
Finally racial profilling seems to be used primarily in respect to the war on drugs. While this entire war is a gross violation of civil liberties it points out the further inappropriatness of racial profiling. As a matter of fact the difference between white and black drug use in young men is actually not very large but the difference in arrests and prison sentences is huge. In short these drug laws are being used to remove "undesierables" which should be read as minorities.
BTW I really like how you criticize us for being too hung up on individual rights to implement this but yet your "enlightened" european nations are the ones who haven't implemented such a policy.
He does NOT mean that every theorem out there may be riddled with logical gaps. He is not questioning the validity of the proof or the theorem. He is rather pointin gout that there may be many true relations which are unprovable.