For thousands of years, the patronage system solved this problem. You think a company was founded to make Don Giovanni, expecting to use intellectual property rights to recoup their investment? No, someone commisioned it.
The same could happen today with theatre, opera, symphony, and yes, even movies.
Movies might be the hardest, and they might need to be more of a hybrid system like the current music model, where public performance is the main source of income for artists. If movie theatres didn't have to pay the lion's share of their ticket prices for royalties, they could afford to commission works, and recoup their investment by charging for something you can't d/l from kazaa -- the experience of seeing it in a theatre.
...and he doesn't care about safety/privacy concerns
Right.
So you're telling me he's using a computer with no sensitive personal information on it, has a complete trusted offline backup, and he could easily wipe his machine, install from original media and restore his backup?
If he's not concerned about the safety/privacy problems of IE, then he hasn't given it much thought.
In Oberlin, in Loraine County Ohio, voter turnout is exceptional this year. In fact, 117% of eligible voters have registered.
right. because we all know that the underfunded, understaffed registrar of voters never fails to remove everyone from the voting rolls when they die, move away, etc. without telling them about it.
and populations shifts don't happen.
and no political party would ever stoop to coming up with bogus statistics to justify a massive campaign to disenfranchise their opponents.
I see a lot of people blaming stupid people for this. And stupidity, naivete, etc. are definitely part of it.
But the fact is, some of the phishing emails look really good. I got one last week that was identical to a legit Citibank email, except that it went to http://citibankgroup.biz instead of https://citibank.com. Given all the weird URLs and bulk mailing companies banks use (and the fact that a lot of normal users view URLs to be voodoo), it not surprising to me at all that people fall for this stuff.
In the end, this is just a special case of spam. Verifying the sender using SPF or any of the other systems being adopted right now, will solve this problem. And disabling HTML email (among the worst design decisions ever made, IMHO), would also help a lot.
Since such promises are difficult to verify (see the Diebold machines that got updated with uncertified software for example), you can never be sure that the voting software you're told is open source really is.
I'm not so sure it's impossible. It seems like you could use some public-key approach to verifying that the software you are voting on matches the official build.
I'm a little fuzzy on the ins-and-outs of public key crypto, but it seems like there should be some way of verifying that the software is signed by a key, and that the key matches the offical key.
Maybe you'd have to have the voting machine hash a value, and then compare the result to a hash obtained from the official key through a separate channel (e.g., govt website). That's pretty cumbersome, so only the paranoid and auditors would do it. But that would be better than a black box.
1. The official position of the Catholic Church is that all artificial birth control should be illegal.
Is it? The Code of Canon Law makes 4 references to abortion, and all of them talk about actually performing abortions. Have you got a source for official Catholic doctrine on legislating abortion?
A Catholic is someone who believes in what the Catholic Church teaches.
I'm not expert on Catholic theology, but I'm pretty sure there is wiggle room in Catholic orthodoxy for this.
Kerry is anti-abortion (almost all pro-choice people are). That is, he thinks the best world would be abortion-free, and that the government should encourage sex ed, birth control, adoption, counseling, etc. to reduce abortion and its causes. That is a fine Catholic position.
But Kerry also opposes criminalizing abortion, which the Catholic church is silent on (AFAIK).
I don't know why Carter isn't involved in other states (maybe he is.... I didn't find anything in a quick Googling, though). Maybe it's just that Florida was a big deal last time, and shows no signs of fixing any of its problems.
Florida is also a much larger concern in practical terms, since it's very close race for a large number of electoral votes. Kerry's ahead in Illinois by a large enough margin that any voting irregularities will probably not effect the outcome. Oregon only has about a quarter the electoral votes of Florida.
Second - and more to the point - President Carter is a totally partisan observer here, and I discount ANYTHING he says on the subject due to that fact.
I can't believe this crap is modded Insightful.
Are you even vaguely aware of what Carter has done since he was president? That he's a widely-respected elections monitor? And that he recently won the Nobel Peace Prize for this? We're not talking about some partisan hack like James Carville, here.
And the thing about Katherine Harris (and the FL Supreme Court, too, btw), is that the law wasn't particularly clear or helpful. So human decisions had to be made. And those decisions never went against the partisan interests involved. Never. Call me cynical, but that looks dirty to me.
well, it might be a little far afield, but guns, germs and steel is one of the few books i've read that dramatically changed my point-of-view about a lot of things all at once. it basically sets out to figure out why the disparities between different cultures and races exist.
along the way, he draws from several diverse disciplines (botany, genetics, anthropology, archeology, etc), which is probably the most relevant facet of the book to the question -- it does a great job of showing how to use different approaches to solve problems.
Please stop asking this question. The answer is yes. Until I can carry every version of every document/song/movie/computer program ever made in the history of mankind in my pocket, in lossless formats, no amount of storage on any device will ever be too much.
And even then, I want a larger one to come out so the prices will come down.
i can't read the linked story now b/c it's slashdotted...
but, there's an interesting wrinkle in the protection of satires: there was a case in the nineties (an o.j. simpson parody in the form of 'cat in the hat'). the case hinged on the fact that satire only lets you use the work you are parodying. i.e., you can't use one work to parody something else.
now, parodying the mastercard stuff is probably ok, since it's the stupid, touchy-feely nature of the ads that's being parodied. but it's important to know that satire isn't a magic wand that lets you do anything you want.
For the last time, you are NOT entitled to play music purchased from iTMS anywhere or anyhow you want. If you don't like it, don't purchase your music there. But this is a clear violation of iTMS's terms of service and use. So if you use *Apple's* system then *they* get to set the rules. Don't like it? Fine. Buy music elsewhere where you like the rules, but don't go into their store and complain and break their rules!
bullshit.
the doctrine of first sale is pretty clear: once you've bought something, you have the right to use it any way you want.
there are limits to how many copies you can make and what you can do with those copies. there are limits to public performance. but if you're just using your purchased thing, there are no rules whatsoever. just because the media and software companies don't like it doesn't mean the law has suddenly changed.
i agree that, in most cases, a wired connection is better.
but, there are some cases where wires are a pain, especially given the increasing popularity of laptops. say you've got a laptop at home and no deskop machine. you get a wireless dsl router for your internet access. adding a wirless harddrive to this config makes perfect sense.
All the people who are complaining about running a small set of domains and not being able to afford $2000 are missing the point.
This is designed to force all mail to go through the.mail TLD. If you run a small set of domains, you'll need to get mail service (even if it's just forwarding your mail through one of their servers) from someone with a.mail domain. Yes, this makes the net more hierarchical than it is now, but that's the whole idea: a hierarchical system can enforce rules, and we clearly need some rules to break the spammers.
Now, I'm not sure this is the best way to do it. But it certainly seems like it could be effective.
What sort of adjustment should be expected? Is the uni workplace as structured as the corporate world? Pet peeves? What are the politics like? I ask as I attended a commuter-school with little campus life and have little to draw on for perspective
you don't mention what department you're going to work for, and that makes a big difference. working in an academic department is very different from working in IT, which is different from working in a research group, etc. my experience is working for a short time (2 yrs) in a very small company, and then working at the IT department of the library at a public univ.
the biggest difference for me was that the library where i work has hundreds of staff, and dozens of IT staff. so there were a lot more opportunities for promotions -- which i was able to take good advantage of. the other major difference, as many others have pointed out, is that the pace is much slower (and supervision can be nonexistant, even for entry-level people). you can do with this what you want: good off, read slashdot:^), gossip and politick, learn new stuff, run a business on the side, it's up to you.
the politics is probably the biggest drawback, if that sort of thing bothers you. universities don't usually have as much funding as private companies do, and state budget cuts (for publics) and research funding cuts can make things pretty bad. things are pretty bad now (at least in calif), but the worst looks to be over.
though in my experience, if you're not interested in getting a different job, and you're not a manager who has to fight for funding, you don't really have to care about politics. i know several people who either completely ignore the whole business, or actively provoke the higher-ups without many ramifications.
listen, i understand where you're coming from. on the face of it, spam is just another aspect of the lawless net. and the sometimes draconian things people are doing to try to stop spam seem like they are working in exactly the wrong direction -- towards some big corporate power like aol telling you who you can email and what you can say.
but i also remember what the net was like without spam. i routinely got email from strangers (mostly people who'd seen my posts on various newsgroups) and had interesting conversations with them. i had no filtering on my email account and never got messages i didn't want. my isp didn't have to pay half their bandwidth bill to subsidize other people's business ventures.
and then it happened. i started reading through some newsgroups and thought it was really odd that the same off-topic message was in all of them. and who the hell needed a green-card lawyer, anyway? i now routinely get 100x as much spam as real email. i shudder to think how much my isp is spending on filtering, bandwidth, etc. fighting this.
the spammers don't care that they're leeching off my isp. they don't care that i don't want to see their ads. they don't care that their pornographic ads are completely inappropriate for a significant number of net users (or that this makes it a lot harder to give kids decent net access). they are parasites. they've found a business model that works based on a one-in-a-million response rate, and they'll leech, lie, cheat and offend anyone in the process.
fuck 'em. in a just world, we'd take them out back and kick the shit out of them.
HR is far too hung up on what you have already done, not realizing that the data structures and algorithms are what counts, and they are the same in any language.
i think the problem is that it's very hard to tell from someone's resume and an hour or so of interview whether they actually know their stuff, much less whether they can learn new stuff. so most people just rely on job experience to determine whether people can actually be productive using a given tool or language.
i ran into this problem when i got my first job (not in programming, but as a tech writer/illustrator). i didn't have any experience using their drawing program (freehand) because i'd mostly worked with art produced by someone else. luckily, they let me sit down with it and reproduce someone else's work to show that i could learn it very easily. of course i'd told them (and everyone else i'd interviewed with) that i could learn anything, but they didn't believe it until i'd actually done it.
on the other hand, i've been bitten by this once or twice when interviewing candidates. they all say they can learn whatever language you need (wouldn't you?). but sometimes you hire them and they just don't, and they become an enormous drag on your team because you have to work around their lack of skills.
Not everything lends itself to 'spectacle' or live performance.
that's what commissoned works are for.
before copyright, works that couldn't be developed based on performance revenues were commissioned by the local royalty, wealthy families, church, and/or government. if you can't get people to pay to see it, and you can't get someone to commission it, then you need to find something else to do to make money.
copyright, as it now stands, doesn't do a terribly good job of getting money to performers, and it seriously intrudes on my right to copy and exchange sound and video recordings. that's a terrible bargain that we should be getting rid of as soon as we can.
When I create a work, what ever it may be, I should have the right to determine how and by whom it may be used.
and that right should end when you perform that work in public.
that system worked very well for thousands of years, and would still work today if we totally abandoned copyright law. all but a handful of musicians already make all of their profits from live performances. patronage (government or private) can support artists who require more financing (opera and architecture come to mind) than they can get based on expectations of future performance revenues.
i do think there is a role for protecting artists from having their work plagiarized or bastardized (some european countries have laws like these). but copyright as it stands now hurts consumers, and doesn't help artists.
it's been a long time since i've used windows, but the best site at the time was called "windows annoyances". i think this is now www.annoyances.org. there are also books from the same content which i'd recommend as well, if you like the dead-tree format.
but mainly, i'd suggest trying to work within the system to convince them to make an exception for sys/netadmins and developers. i was in a similar situation about four years ago where i was using linux and transferred into a department where everyone was forced to use windows. so i basically made the case that developers and admins are different, can be responsible for their own machines, and can choose their own tech if they take the responsibility for it. i think the first point is key: once they accept that developers and admins should be allowed to play by different rules, a lot of the resistance will fade.
the other approach i'd consider would be just flying below the radar running linux. the reason i was using linux in the other dept was my department sysadmin didn't care. this is probably not an option for you with mandates from management and converting the whole department to xp. still, you might be able to repartition your hd and dual boot without getting noticed.
Slashdot Mirror
For thousands of years, the patronage system solved this problem. You think a company was founded to make Don Giovanni, expecting to use intellectual property rights to recoup their investment? No, someone commisioned it.
The same could happen today with theatre, opera, symphony, and yes, even movies.
Movies might be the hardest, and they might need to be more of a hybrid system like the current music model, where public performance is the main source of income for artists. If movie theatres didn't have to pay the lion's share of their ticket prices for royalties, they could afford to commission works, and recoup their investment by charging for something you can't d/l from kazaa -- the experience of seeing it in a theatre.
-Esme
Right.
So you're telling me he's using a computer with no sensitive personal information on it, has a complete trusted offline backup, and he could easily wipe his machine, install from original media and restore his backup?
If he's not concerned about the safety/privacy problems of IE, then he hasn't given it much thought.
-Esme
right. because we all know that the underfunded, understaffed registrar of voters never fails to remove everyone from the voting rolls when they die, move away, etc. without telling them about it.
and populations shifts don't happen.
and no political party would ever stoop to coming up with bogus statistics to justify a massive campaign to disenfranchise their opponents.
-esme
I see a lot of people blaming stupid people for this. And stupidity, naivete, etc. are definitely part of it.
But the fact is, some of the phishing emails look really good. I got one last week that was identical to a legit Citibank email, except that it went to http://citibankgroup.biz instead of https://citibank.com. Given all the weird URLs and bulk mailing companies banks use (and the fact that a lot of normal users view URLs to be voodoo), it not surprising to me at all that people fall for this stuff.
In the end, this is just a special case of spam. Verifying the sender using SPF or any of the other systems being adopted right now, will solve this problem. And disabling HTML email (among the worst design decisions ever made, IMHO), would also help a lot.
-Esme
I'm not so sure it's impossible. It seems like you could use some public-key approach to verifying that the software you are voting on matches the official build.
I'm a little fuzzy on the ins-and-outs of public key crypto, but it seems like there should be some way of verifying that the software is signed by a key, and that the key matches the offical key.
Maybe you'd have to have the voting machine hash a value, and then compare the result to a hash obtained from the official key through a separate channel (e.g., govt website). That's pretty cumbersome, so only the paranoid and auditors would do it. But that would be better than a black box.
-Esme
Yes. Paragraph 23 seems pretty clear to me. I wonder if there is a similar call to legislators on the subject of the death penalty?
-Esme
Is it? The Code of Canon Law makes 4 references to abortion, and all of them talk about actually performing abortions. Have you got a source for official Catholic doctrine on legislating abortion?
Unlesss you've got a cite, I don't buy it.
-Esme
I'm not expert on Catholic theology, but I'm pretty sure there is wiggle room in Catholic orthodoxy for this.
Kerry is anti-abortion (almost all pro-choice people are). That is, he thinks the best world would be abortion-free, and that the government should encourage sex ed, birth control, adoption, counseling, etc. to reduce abortion and its causes. That is a fine Catholic position.
But Kerry also opposes criminalizing abortion, which the Catholic church is silent on (AFAIK).
-Esme
I don't know why Carter isn't involved in other states (maybe he is.... I didn't find anything in a quick Googling, though). Maybe it's just that Florida was a big deal last time, and shows no signs of fixing any of its problems.
Florida is also a much larger concern in practical terms, since it's very close race for a large number of electoral votes. Kerry's ahead in Illinois by a large enough margin that any voting irregularities will probably not effect the outcome. Oregon only has about a quarter the electoral votes of Florida.
-Esme
I can't believe this crap is modded Insightful.
Are you even vaguely aware of what Carter has done since he was president? That he's a widely-respected elections monitor? And that he recently won the Nobel Peace Prize for this? We're not talking about some partisan hack like James Carville, here.
And the thing about Katherine Harris (and the FL Supreme Court, too, btw), is that the law wasn't particularly clear or helpful. So human decisions had to be made. And those decisions never went against the partisan interests involved. Never. Call me cynical, but that looks dirty to me.
-Esme
Every candidate who is on the ballot provides a slate of electors. So whoever wins sends their people to the electoral college.
-Esme
well, it might be a little far afield, but guns, germs and steel is one of the few books i've read that dramatically changed my point-of-view about a lot of things all at once. it basically sets out to figure out why the disparities between different cultures and races exist.
along the way, he draws from several diverse disciplines (botany, genetics, anthropology, archeology, etc), which is probably the most relevant facet of the book to the question -- it does a great job of showing how to use different approaches to solve problems.
-esme
So what you're saying is that this won't work because it doesn't gracefully handle people who want to receive unsolicited commercial email.
I see.
How about those people work out some other system, and the rest of us use this? Does that work for you?
-Esme
Please stop asking this question. The answer is yes. Until I can carry every version of every document/song/movie/computer program ever made in the history of mankind in my pocket, in lossless formats, no amount of storage on any device will ever be too much.
And even then, I want a larger one to come out so the prices will come down.
-Esme
i can't read the linked story now b/c it's slashdotted...
but, there's an interesting wrinkle in the protection of satires: there was a case in the nineties (an o.j. simpson parody in the form of 'cat in the hat'). the case hinged on the fact that satire only lets you use the work you are parodying. i.e., you can't use one work to parody something else.
now, parodying the mastercard stuff is probably ok, since it's the stupid, touchy-feely nature of the ads that's being parodied. but it's important to know that satire isn't a magic wand that lets you do anything you want.
-esme
bullshit.
the doctrine of first sale is pretty clear: once you've bought something, you have the right to use it any way you want.
there are limits to how many copies you can make and what you can do with those copies. there are limits to public performance. but if you're just using your purchased thing, there are no rules whatsoever. just because the media and software companies don't like it doesn't mean the law has suddenly changed.
-esme
i agree that, in most cases, a wired connection is better.
but, there are some cases where wires are a pain, especially given the increasing popularity of laptops. say you've got a laptop at home and no deskop machine. you get a wireless dsl router for your internet access. adding a wirless harddrive to this config makes perfect sense.
-esme
All the people who are complaining about running a small set of domains and not being able to afford $2000 are missing the point.
This is designed to force all mail to go through the .mail TLD. If you run a small set of domains, you'll need to get mail service (even if it's just forwarding your mail through one of their servers) from someone with a .mail domain. Yes, this makes the net more hierarchical than it is now, but that's the whole idea: a hierarchical system can enforce rules, and we clearly need some rules to break the spammers.
Now, I'm not sure this is the best way to do it. But it certainly seems like it could be effective.
-esme
you don't mention what department you're going to work for, and that makes a big difference. working in an academic department is very different from working in IT, which is different from working in a research group, etc. my experience is working for a short time (2 yrs) in a very small company, and then working at the IT department of the library at a public univ.
the biggest difference for me was that the library where i work has hundreds of staff, and dozens of IT staff. so there were a lot more opportunities for promotions -- which i was able to take good advantage of. the other major difference, as many others have pointed out, is that the pace is much slower (and supervision can be nonexistant, even for entry-level people). you can do with this what you want: good off, read slashdot :^), gossip and politick, learn new stuff, run a business on the side, it's up to you.
the politics is probably the biggest drawback, if that sort of thing bothers you. universities don't usually have as much funding as private companies do, and state budget cuts (for publics) and research funding cuts can make things pretty bad. things are pretty bad now (at least in calif), but the worst looks to be over.
though in my experience, if you're not interested in getting a different job, and you're not a manager who has to fight for funding, you don't really have to care about politics. i know several people who either completely ignore the whole business, or actively provoke the higher-ups without many ramifications.
-esme
listen, i understand where you're coming from. on the face of it, spam is just another aspect of the lawless net. and the sometimes draconian things people are doing to try to stop spam seem like they are working in exactly the wrong direction -- towards some big corporate power like aol telling you who you can email and what you can say.
but i also remember what the net was like without spam. i routinely got email from strangers (mostly people who'd seen my posts on various newsgroups) and had interesting conversations with them. i had no filtering on my email account and never got messages i didn't want. my isp didn't have to pay half their bandwidth bill to subsidize other people's business ventures.
and then it happened. i started reading through some newsgroups and thought it was really odd that the same off-topic message was in all of them. and who the hell needed a green-card lawyer, anyway? i now routinely get 100x as much spam as real email. i shudder to think how much my isp is spending on filtering, bandwidth, etc. fighting this.
the spammers don't care that they're leeching off my isp. they don't care that i don't want to see their ads. they don't care that their pornographic ads are completely inappropriate for a significant number of net users (or that this makes it a lot harder to give kids decent net access). they are parasites. they've found a business model that works based on a one-in-a-million response rate, and they'll leech, lie, cheat and offend anyone in the process.
fuck 'em. in a just world, we'd take them out back and kick the shit out of them.
-esme
i think the problem is that it's very hard to tell from someone's resume and an hour or so of interview whether they actually know their stuff, much less whether they can learn new stuff. so most people just rely on job experience to determine whether people can actually be productive using a given tool or language.
i ran into this problem when i got my first job (not in programming, but as a tech writer/illustrator). i didn't have any experience using their drawing program (freehand) because i'd mostly worked with art produced by someone else. luckily, they let me sit down with it and reproduce someone else's work to show that i could learn it very easily. of course i'd told them (and everyone else i'd interviewed with) that i could learn anything, but they didn't believe it until i'd actually done it.
on the other hand, i've been bitten by this once or twice when interviewing candidates. they all say they can learn whatever language you need (wouldn't you?). but sometimes you hire them and they just don't, and they become an enormous drag on your team because you have to work around their lack of skills.
-esme
that's what commissoned works are for.
before copyright, works that couldn't be developed based on performance revenues were commissioned by the local royalty, wealthy families, church, and/or government. if you can't get people to pay to see it, and you can't get someone to commission it, then you need to find something else to do to make money.
copyright, as it now stands, doesn't do a terribly good job of getting money to performers, and it seriously intrudes on my right to copy and exchange sound and video recordings. that's a terrible bargain that we should be getting rid of as soon as we can.
-esme
April first is coming earlier and earlier every year.
-esme
and that right should end when you perform that work in public.
that system worked very well for thousands of years, and would still work today if we totally abandoned copyright law. all but a handful of musicians already make all of their profits from live performances. patronage (government or private) can support artists who require more financing (opera and architecture come to mind) than they can get based on expectations of future performance revenues.
i do think there is a role for protecting artists from having their work plagiarized or bastardized (some european countries have laws like these). but copyright as it stands now hurts consumers, and doesn't help artists.
-esme
it's been a long time since i've used windows, but the best site at the time was called "windows annoyances". i think this is now www.annoyances.org. there are also books from the same content which i'd recommend as well, if you like the dead-tree format.
but mainly, i'd suggest trying to work within the system to convince them to make an exception for sys/netadmins and developers. i was in a similar situation about four years ago where i was using linux and transferred into a department where everyone was forced to use windows. so i basically made the case that developers and admins are different, can be responsible for their own machines, and can choose their own tech if they take the responsibility for it. i think the first point is key: once they accept that developers and admins should be allowed to play by different rules, a lot of the resistance will fade.
the other approach i'd consider would be just flying below the radar running linux. the reason i was using linux in the other dept was my department sysadmin didn't care. this is probably not an option for you with mandates from management and converting the whole department to xp. still, you might be able to repartition your hd and dual boot without getting noticed.
-esme