In point of fact, much of the empirical research on job satisfaction is limited by the hypothesis and the experimental design. As it turns out, I just completed my thesis on this area and discovered a new way of thinking about intrinsic motivation that changes the conception of roles we play in the workplace, and hence the whole notion of job satisfaction.
What this means is that the choice of what you do is less important than the environment in which you do it, relative to overall, and sustainable, job satisfaction. (Note the simplistic "headline" conclusion that emerges from more detailed and intricate findings that are in the work itself.)
Part of the job of the grad student is to look at what has been done, and what the conventional thinking is in a particular discipline (or across multiple disciplines), and find the structural opportunities to create new paths to knowledge, that is, new ways of knowing. The conventional scientific method introduces its own biases that, paradoxically, limit our ability to know and discover.
(If there are any publishers out there who might be interested in a popular market treatment of this topic, let me know, as my work is going on the market by the end of the summer.)
This, according to an evolutionary biologist at the University of Toronto, speaking at the 2005 McLuhan Lectures on Evolution as a Medium.
Basically, his argument is that for any new technology, there are groups that won't or can't adopt it. Among those groups, there may be those who have genetic mutations that will enable similar capabilities to those of the adopters, and thus will be biologically favoured. This has happened in relatively recent history, as in developing lactose tolerance in adult populations, and social cooperation.
Actually, nearly 300 names on the NEXT batch of petitions that are about to be presented in the House WERE collected by, not quite a child, but a 15 year old, namely, my daughter. As part of her high school civics course, she got involved with Digital Copyright Canada and circulated the petition, singly collecting the most signatures of anyone in the campaign.
At a recent conference on copyright at University of Toronto's Faculty of Law, she buttonholed the former chair of the standing committee, Sarmite Bulte, and put the hard questions to her about ISP notice and takedown (now notice and notice), the extra levy to educational institutions, and the threat to innovation.
So the issue is not "please think of the children," but rather, "Please, the children are thinking!"
Back in the mainframe days - which is when I got my start in the biz - OS/360 and OS/370 (up to OS/MVS V7) were open source. The source was distributed on microfiche, and system programmers were encouraged to modify the code to make the whole thing run better. There was a user organization called the Society to Help Avoid Redundant Effort (SHARE) at which system programmers shared their code modifications with each other, and with the IBM developers. Some of the good stuff made its way back into the standard "distro" - although we didn't call it that back then.
Similarly, the hardware diagrams were standard manuals that existed in every datacentre. I remember browsing through them shortly after I finished school (a hundred years ago or so) and thinking, "there really isn't much to these mainframe computers; nothing much more than the final exam in electronics." But based on those diagrams, and other info, our datacentre was the first in the world to put the 9th megabyte on an S 370/168!
And yes, at the time, I did get questioned about how on earth we could have so much work that we needed a 9th megabyte on a 168.
More than just tying the application to the port (email client to port 25) Zone Alarm warns if an excessive amount of email is about to be sent by the previously authorized client. My normal mail goes without a peep; my distributions to a mailing list gets a Zone Alarm confirmation.
With a compromised spam factory, such a volume warning may serve to wake up even the most naive user. OTOH, I wouldn't be surprised at a, "Oh that Zone Alarm thing? Yeah, it does that every night..."
I remember playing Adventure on a TI Silent 700, a "portable" dumb terminal with a phone coupler that printed on thermal paper, that dialled in to a System 370-168 running MVT, away back in 1978. Our resident genius posted his "carried off in victory by little elves" winning solution on the bulletin board after an all-night session.
There was a quaintness about The Colossal Cave that has been lost in the hyper-realism of today's games. It was that quaintness, I think, that allowed us to both be absorbed by the game, but not lost in it - until we got to that blasted maze!
Pegasus Mail is the email client I would recommend (and have recommended) as a freeware alternative to Outlook. Beside the fact that you have to try really, really hard to get Pegasus to allow yourself to be infected with a virus, the conversion learning curve from Outlook is relatively flat and can be traversed quickly.
Granted, it is missing the full PIM for those who allow Outlook to manage their lives. But then again, with the pervasive spread of Outlook-based viruses, the net value of letting Outlook manage your life is dubious at best.
do please tell me where the Word reveal codes command is.
In Word press Shift-F1. The mouse cursor changes to an arrow with a question mark. Then point and click on any character. Both character and paragraph formatting pop up in a monologue box that I find more useful than WP reveal codes (and I was a die-hard WP user since the DOS days until I learned how to really use Word.)
Last year, Nissan incurred hail damage to tens of thousands of new vehicles waiting for transport outside of their plant in (I think) Tennessee. The entire inventory was auctioned off to dealers are rock bottom prices (even for wholesale). I would expect that the dealers fixed up the hail damage and subsequently sold the cars. However, it meant a loss of millions of dollars of revenue to Nissan USA.
This device is a small and worthwhile investment, even if there is only one hailstorm in the next decade.
This study is yet another example of devising an experiment that begs its own hypothesis.
Based on the results of the experiment, we could equally conclude that the person's willingness to reveal private information is a function of the deviation from the person's own self-image/self-conception, rather than the deviation from a social norm. In this case, if the over-weight person admitted to an over-weight self-image (i.e. was not intrinsically embarrassed or guilty about their weight) stepping on the scale in front of friends wouldn't be highly valued. This conclusion is consistent with our understanding of exhibitionism, a test that the HP study does not pass.
But in general, it seems that this study on its face tells us little about privacy in general, and more about body-image psychology specifically, and thus is of little general applicability in the very serious matter of "publicy," or privacy reversal in an online environment.
"Publicy" was coined, by the way, by Mark Federman of the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto.
The facts of the case are that a relatively low-level RCMP (ie. police) official was asked if Canada wanted him back and the RCMP officer said no. Canadian Foreign Affairs (equivalent to State Dept.) was not involved in the decision; nor was there any sort of due process.
To make matters worse, it is technically illegal in the United States to deport a person to a country that practices torture, which is why Mr. Arar ended up in Syria via Jordan. Technically speaking, Arar was deported only to Jordan, with the tacit understanding that the Jordanians were going to pass him to Syria, a subcontractor, if you will of U.S. intelligence. It could have been worse: Other Middle Eastern countries are also used as such subcontractors, and some of them are of the "disappear and never heard from again" variety.
It is also interesting to note that under U.S. law, the potential deportee is to be asked what country he would like to be deported to, and is to be sent to that country unless officials in said country refuse to take him. The lone RCMP officer in question was taken by U.S. officials to be speaking officially on behalf of Canada.
I suppose that Technically Speaking, everything was done according to the letter of the law with respect to Mr. Arar. The U.S. officials were just following orders . Makes one proud to be an American, eh?
What if spam and the spammers software - was actually being used by a third party in a surepticious manner to send/receive messages? Kinda like plaintext stego.
Indeed, this is a more likely case than we may believe. A simpler version of plaintext stego, using full words intermixed in a quasi-meaningful paragraph, was being used by cells apparently linked to Middle East terrorists via many of the alt.sex.* usenet groups, and in particular, the alt.sex.stories.* groups. They appeared to be gibberish, but a word analysis easily broke through the simplistic attempt at stego and revealed sufficient keywords to account for the "chatter" we always hear about before the multi-colored alerts. Gibberish word spam provides much better cover via individual letter stego.
The use of plaintext stego to encode messages being sent out as spam is analogous to broadcast radio or TV. As long as you are within reception range of the broadcast, you can pick up the signal. This means messages can be retrieved from any number of disposable email accounts, so long as the account has been used in a place that is likely to be harvested, say one of the alt.sex.* usenet groups. As well, (as has been noted above) the sender is a spammer, notoriously hard to track down, and impossible to link to the originator of the encrypted message. So you have anonymous blind sender, sending to anonymous blind recipient. Perfect for terrorism, organized crime and all those other bad guys.
Charles: "There still seems to be confusion surrounding the topic. At the Gartner conference last month, some IT attendees said they still say they didn't understand what Carly Fiorina wanted to convey with HP's Adaptive Enterprise."
Real answer: What Carly wanted to convey is that business results are worse than ever, and that she has royally screwed up with the merger. In having everyone emphasize this "Adaptive Enterprise" bullshit, perhaps they will all be sufficiently distracted trying to figure out what the hell it really is, so that she will keep her job for at least one more year. In other words, pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, and pray that consulting revenues pick up.
Bzzzt. No, you're wrong, but thanks for playing. All books do NOT belong to the public once they are published. They still belong to the author, who has licensed limited rights to the publisher in exchange for publishing, distribution, promotion, etc. Copyright laws say that the work will eventually pass into the public domain, but according to, let's say the Berne Convention, that time is author's life plus 50. (Leaving the United States' Incarcerate Mickey Mouse Forever Act out of the discussion for now.)
The author may choose to make his/her works available under certain circumstances earlier. For instance, I am published under copyright by a major publisher, and I self-publish under Creative Commons, which is a GNU GPL-ish flavour of copyright. And I while I would not want to deny people access to my work, I do have the right to maintain control over what people do with my work once they access it. For instance, you do not have the right to take my Creative Commons work and sell it commercially; you may take it, modify it, use it non-commercially, etc. (The CC licenses have a fair amount of flexibility and granularity.)
In the case of Amazon, technically, the Search In a Book could be argued as part of "fair use." The possibility for it to be misused exists, but the permitted uses far exceed the potential for misuse. The argument that says cookbooks and reference books will suffer through this technology may be true, but no truer than today, when someone sits down in a Barnes & Noble, takes a recipe book from the shelf, and copies down a recipe.
Ultimately, however, the choice as to whether to be included or not should be the author's, without coercion from the publisher. Some authors will be sufficiently enlightened to know that they stand a greater chance of being found this way and opt-in; others will choose to opt-out. It can be done with a choice of IN/OUT at the time a book contract is signed.
I'm surprised that Pegasus email client hasn't been mentioned, as one of the best freeware email clients... heck, it's one of the best email clients, period - free or not free.
I've also found an FTP server to be useful on a home LAN, especially if one is trying to network older, only-nominally-compatible OSs. The one I've enjoyed using is Fastream Netfile - also free - and very easy to setup, configure and use (with WSFTP as a client, btw.)
Well, there already has been a test case of cyborg discrimination. Whether you sympathize with the plight of Prof. Steve Mann at the hands of Air Canada, or think otherwise, the fact is that certain regulations have revealed the potential for discrimination on the basis of technological augmentation of the body.
The specifics of Mann v. Air Canada are not as important as the over-arching issues the case raises. Mann's case cannot be argued on its constitutionality, as there are no constitutional protections against discrimination of cyborgs, or those who are technologically enhanced. However, it was obvious to those of us who saw Mann immediately after the Air Canada incident that the removal of his cyborg accoutrements resulted in significant physical distress. He was unable to maintain balance, properly respond to ambient temperature fluctuations, judge distance for grasping objects, among other physical infirmaties. The symptoms lasted for a little over a month, after which, his body slowly reacclimatized to its non-cyborg state.
The argument cannot be made on the evidence that his wearable computers, and their intrinsic biofeedback mechanisms, were merely fashion accessories or affectations. Because his autonomous body functions had adjusted to Mann's cyborg enhancements, they could rightly be considered part of his (cyborg) biology, necessary to maintain his normal health. In legalese, Mann's cyborg enhancements differed from MP3 players and portable computers "in kind," not merely "in degree." Hence, one could legally consider that Air Canada's security checks should have changed to provide adequate screening without being invasive and destructive. The fact that those with cochlear implants or heart pacemakers are not required to turn off and remove those cyborg enhancements, but Mann was, indicates discrimination.
I am supporting neither Mann nor Air Canada in making these observations. I am pointing out that we already have an important case that raises the issue of the regulatory imposition on those who have technological enhancements to their bodies. The examination of the fundamental issues and the questions they raise is most appropriate to be done now.
Deep in the company's website, they state, " With this patent, Interwoven joins the class of top tier software companies that recognize that market leadership is directly related to continued innovation combined with the protection of intellectual property. Patents represent the most effective and powerful way to ensure that a company protects its long-term investment in research, design and innovation."
Unfortunately, the fallacy of the first part of that self-serving statement is that history demonstrates the contrary: Innovation, especially in the area of software innovation, has been most successful in an atmosphere of sharing, openness, mutual support and peer-recognition. This is well-documented by Manuel Castells, Lawrence Lessig and others. Patents impede the advance of innovation by preventing potential competitors from innovating. With patent protection, innovation is limited to those who can afford the overhead of traaversing the patent minefield (as Stallman puts it). Those who choose to share innovation with the restriction that those who benefit also share their follow-on innovations - even when innovations pertain to other than software disciplines, accelerate the innovation process, and thereby support the development of a sustainably expanding economic infrastructure.
I do agree with the company's second statement: Patents are "most effective and powerful way to ensure that a company protects" its stuff. It just does very little for the rest of society, and for the economy in general.
They must be on crack. There are many different places looking at these sorts of things. Seriously...most places that do cultural analysis of science are also looking at the effects of the internet
Indeed! At the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto, this sort of examination is "standard fare" in our graduate courses, and for our post-grad fellows. In fact, Marshall McLuhan was doing this sort of investigation nearly 40 years ago, in looking at the cultural and societal effects of instantaneous, multi-way communications around the world.
In 1969, for example, executives at IBM thought he was crazy when he explained how there would be networked computers in every home, and how we would be able to buy groceries and other household items online!
...this is actually nothing particularly special, since all the technologies are relatively well-known (among the right circles), and mostly invented by Dr. Steve Mann of the University of Toronto. According to Steve, what the patient actually perceives is more akin to contrast resolution, rather than anything that the visually unimpaired would call "sight".
What is perhaps more interesting, and more widely useful is the Eyetap technology itself. Essentially, Eyetap uses the camera and wearble computer to drive a small laser that mediates reality directly into the eye. For people who are not blind, but profoundly visually impaired, this technology may be a godsend.
Beam me up, Geordi LaForge!
Actually Hitachi is a leader in HDD technology
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Having been on the inside at Hitachi Data Systems for more than a decade through the late 80s and into the mid-90s, I had an "up close and personal" view of the relative advances in HDD technology and R&D. At the time, the advanced research being done at Odawara Works (the home of Hitachi hard disk technology) drew from among the best researchers of almost every division of Hitachi, with the possible exception of the Nuclear Power and Locomotive divisions. In addition, the manufacturing technology employed was considerably more advanced than that of IBM at the time. As a result, MTBF numbers for Hitachi drives were many times those of comparable IBM drives.
Naturally, the dynamics of the business changed when EMC was able to achieve performance and overall system reliability levels that were more than acceptable with integral-cache, RAID-like architectures, able to be built and sold at very economical prices.
As early as 1993/4, many observers predicted that IBM would eventually have to get out of the disk business, as their cost to maintain acceptable reliability and performance would make their product non-competitive. The prediction was that it would be sold to Hitachi, and I've heard that prediction repeated several times in the intervening years. It's also not surprising, nor likely coincidental, that a key executive in the senior stratosphere of Hitachi these days used to be the Chief Engineer in Odawara Works.
There are some wonderful observations for educators and those providing government funding for educational infrastructure from the Hole-In-the-Wall experiment.
Perhaps one of the most important observations made by Dr. Mitra was, "The terminology is not as important as the metaphor."
Metaphors, by their nature are transformational. As Marshall McLuhan wrote in Understanding Media, "All media are active metaphors in their power to translate experience into new forms."
(By "medium," McLuhan means anything that we conceive or create - tangible or intangible, everything from tables to televisions to televangelists. The "message" of a medium is the set of effects or changes that the medium will induce in us, our society or culture.)
In this case, the Indian children used metaphors to which they could relate to effect changes in, and transform, the way they experienced common-place life: Indian music, letters, Shiva's drum and so forth. In doing so, they will tend to view the rest of the world through changed eyes, and will undoubtedly "demand" (even tacitly through imagination) these new experiences. They will likely be dissatisfied with the conventional approach to instruction, perhaps preferring more self-guided, exploration and discovery-based education. What effects might this have on the educational system in India? What effects will this have on educators in North America and Europe who will be forced to confront massive investments in seemingly unnecessary "computer literacy" programs. How can approaches to adult education take advantage of child-like curiosity and discovery?
In the graduate-level course I teach, the majority of the course is discovery and exploration. Where we end up at the end of each seminar is largely irrelevant. If we reach a point of being able to ask a profound question as a "conclusion," the seminar is a resounding success. As seen with these Indian children and Dr. Mitra's brilliant experiment, "The teacher's job is very simple. It's to help the children ask the right questions." To which I would add, adult learners, too.
From where we sit in modern times, ancient myths and legends are often considered little more than fairy tales. But given what we know about the effects of natural catastrophes - namely their ability to eradicate all traces of any civilization that once stood in their path - there is probably much that is buried, inundated or otherwise obscured from view.
One interesting question that is perhaps particularly revealing is, why are are so surprised whenever we find this stuff?
The argument that "It's THEIR equipment..." so all your email and download are belong to... nevermind that! So if I receive a personal FedEx shipment while I'm sitting in THEIR office, does it belong to them? When I put my bag with private notes from my bookie/girlfriend/boyfriend/connection in THEIR credenza, does that give them the right to search through it? Not the same, you say? I fail to see the substantive difference, but try this one on: I use my own (i.e. paid for out of my own pocket with my own money) notebook PC, hooked to THEIR network when I'm in the office. So what rights do they now have? Can they intercept my personal email while it's going through their POP server and on their pipe, but once it lands on MY system I'm home free?
I don't disagree with the concept of ensuring that people are productive while at work, and I don't disagree with a company taking appropriate steps to safeguard its own legal liability as a result of its employees' actions. However, I've never been in favour of such intrusive spying, surreptitious scanning of email, web usage and workstation hard drives. Acceptable use policies and goal-oriented management (as opposed to counting lines of code generated, for instance) should be enough for a competent management team. (Fair disclosure: I am a 40+ executive in a tech company.)
Not Captain Hornblower (was Re:Die Star Trek Die)
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According to Roddenberry, ST:TOS was conceived as "Wagon Train to the Stars", that is, the concept of exploration and meeting strange and interesting people... sort of like/., come to think of it:)
Social commentary, breaking new TV ground, dealing with taboos, observations on the human condition, , were all hallmarks of TOS and TNG. (Sorry, I can't fairly comment on DS9 or Voy) TOS a mistake? I think it was the same sort of mistake which have set other TV ground-breaking classics apart from the dross. The fact that it was ahead of its time, both in its fictional setting and for the '60's when it was originally broadcast, was indicative of its inherent nature. TNG carried it forward for its first few seasons, but like most other successful franchises, overstayed its welcome, IMNSHO.
All of this is not to say that there aren't folks who are obsessed with the program. For a look at how bizarre things can get when a TV program takes over your life, view the documentary, Trekkies. Truly frightening!
Slashdot Mirror
In point of fact, much of the empirical research on job satisfaction is limited by the hypothesis and the experimental design. As it turns out, I just completed my thesis on this area and discovered a new way of thinking about intrinsic motivation that changes the conception of roles we play in the workplace, and hence the whole notion of job satisfaction.
What this means is that the choice of what you do is less important than the environment in which you do it, relative to overall, and sustainable, job satisfaction. (Note the simplistic "headline" conclusion that emerges from more detailed and intricate findings that are in the work itself.)
Part of the job of the grad student is to look at what has been done, and what the conventional thinking is in a particular discipline (or across multiple disciplines), and find the structural opportunities to create new paths to knowledge, that is, new ways of knowing. The conventional scientific method introduces its own biases that, paradoxically, limit our ability to know and discover.
(If there are any publishers out there who might be interested in a popular market treatment of this topic, let me know, as my work is going on the market by the end of the summer.)
This, according to an evolutionary biologist at the University of Toronto, speaking at the 2005 McLuhan Lectures on Evolution as a Medium.
Basically, his argument is that for any new technology, there are groups that won't or can't adopt it. Among those groups, there may be those who have genetic mutations that will enable similar capabilities to those of the adopters, and thus will be biologically favoured. This has happened in relatively recent history, as in developing lactose tolerance in adult populations, and social cooperation.
Actually, nearly 300 names on the NEXT batch of petitions that are about to be presented in the House WERE collected by, not quite a child, but a 15 year old, namely, my daughter. As part of her high school civics course, she got involved with Digital Copyright Canada and circulated the petition, singly collecting the most signatures of anyone in the campaign.
At a recent conference on copyright at University of Toronto's Faculty of Law, she buttonholed the former chair of the standing committee, Sarmite Bulte, and put the hard questions to her about ISP notice and takedown (now notice and notice), the extra levy to educational institutions, and the threat to innovation.
So the issue is not "please think of the children," but rather, "Please, the children are thinking!"
Back in the mainframe days - which is when I got my start in the biz - OS/360 and OS/370 (up to OS/MVS V7) were open source. The source was distributed on microfiche, and system programmers were encouraged to modify the code to make the whole thing run better. There was a user organization called the Society to Help Avoid Redundant Effort (SHARE) at which system programmers shared their code modifications with each other, and with the IBM developers. Some of the good stuff made its way back into the standard "distro" - although we didn't call it that back then.
Similarly, the hardware diagrams were standard manuals that existed in every datacentre. I remember browsing through them shortly after I finished school (a hundred years ago or so) and thinking, "there really isn't much to these mainframe computers; nothing much more than the final exam in electronics." But based on those diagrams, and other info, our datacentre was the first in the world to put the 9th megabyte on an S 370/168!
And yes, at the time, I did get questioned about how on earth we could have so much work that we needed a 9th megabyte on a 168.
More than just tying the application to the port (email client to port 25) Zone Alarm warns if an excessive amount of email is about to be sent by the previously authorized client. My normal mail goes without a peep; my distributions to a mailing list gets a Zone Alarm confirmation.
With a compromised spam factory, such a volume warning may serve to wake up even the most naive user. OTOH, I wouldn't be surprised at a, "Oh that Zone Alarm thing? Yeah, it does that every night..."
I remember playing Adventure on a TI Silent 700, a "portable" dumb terminal with a phone coupler that printed on thermal paper, that dialled in to a System 370-168 running MVT, away back in 1978. Our resident genius posted his "carried off in victory by little elves" winning solution on the bulletin board after an all-night session.
There was a quaintness about The Colossal Cave that has been lost in the hyper-realism of today's games. It was that quaintness, I think, that allowed us to both be absorbed by the game, but not lost in it - until we got to that blasted maze!
Pegasus Mail is the email client I would recommend (and have recommended) as a freeware alternative to Outlook. Beside the fact that you have to try really, really hard to get Pegasus to allow yourself to be infected with a virus, the conversion learning curve from Outlook is relatively flat and can be traversed quickly.
Granted, it is missing the full PIM for those who allow Outlook to manage their lives. But then again, with the pervasive spread of Outlook-based viruses, the net value of letting Outlook manage your life is dubious at best.
do please tell me where the Word reveal codes command is.
In Word press Shift-F1. The mouse cursor changes to an arrow with a question mark. Then point and click on any character. Both character and paragraph formatting pop up in a monologue box that I find more useful than WP reveal codes (and I was a die-hard WP user since the DOS days until I learned how to really use Word.)
Last year, Nissan incurred hail damage to tens of thousands of new vehicles waiting for transport outside of their plant in (I think) Tennessee. The entire inventory was auctioned off to dealers are rock bottom prices (even for wholesale). I would expect that the dealers fixed up the hail damage and subsequently sold the cars. However, it meant a loss of millions of dollars of revenue to Nissan USA.
This device is a small and worthwhile investment, even if there is only one hailstorm in the next decade.
This study is yet another example of devising an experiment that begs its own hypothesis.
Based on the results of the experiment, we could equally conclude that the person's willingness to reveal private information is a function of the deviation from the person's own self-image/self-conception, rather than the deviation from a social norm. In this case, if the over-weight person admitted to an over-weight self-image (i.e. was not intrinsically embarrassed or guilty about their weight) stepping on the scale in front of friends wouldn't be highly valued. This conclusion is consistent with our understanding of exhibitionism, a test that the HP study does not pass.
But in general, it seems that this study on its face tells us little about privacy in general, and more about body-image psychology specifically, and thus is of little general applicability in the very serious matter of "publicy," or privacy reversal in an online environment.
"Publicy" was coined, by the way, by Mark Federman of the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto.
The facts of the case are that a relatively low-level RCMP (ie. police) official was asked if Canada wanted him back and the RCMP officer said no. Canadian Foreign Affairs (equivalent to State Dept.) was not involved in the decision; nor was there any sort of due process.
To make matters worse, it is technically illegal in the United States to deport a person to a country that practices torture, which is why Mr. Arar ended up in Syria via Jordan. Technically speaking, Arar was deported only to Jordan, with the tacit understanding that the Jordanians were going to pass him to Syria, a subcontractor, if you will of U.S. intelligence. It could have been worse: Other Middle Eastern countries are also used as such subcontractors, and some of them are of the "disappear and never heard from again" variety.
It is also interesting to note that under U.S. law, the potential deportee is to be asked what country he would like to be deported to, and is to be sent to that country unless officials in said country refuse to take him. The lone RCMP officer in question was taken by U.S. officials to be speaking officially on behalf of Canada.
I suppose that Technically Speaking, everything was done according to the letter of the law with respect to Mr. Arar. The U.S. officials were just following orders . Makes one proud to be an American, eh?
Indeed, this is a more likely case than we may believe. A simpler version of plaintext stego, using full words intermixed in a quasi-meaningful paragraph, was being used by cells apparently linked to Middle East terrorists via many of the alt.sex.* usenet groups, and in particular, the alt.sex.stories.* groups. They appeared to be gibberish, but a word analysis easily broke through the simplistic attempt at stego and revealed sufficient keywords to account for the "chatter" we always hear about before the multi-colored alerts. Gibberish word spam provides much better cover via individual letter stego.
The use of plaintext stego to encode messages being sent out as spam is analogous to broadcast radio or TV. As long as you are within reception range of the broadcast, you can pick up the signal. This means messages can be retrieved from any number of disposable email accounts, so long as the account has been used in a place that is likely to be harvested, say one of the alt.sex.* usenet groups. As well, (as has been noted above) the sender is a spammer, notoriously hard to track down, and impossible to link to the originator of the encrypted message. So you have anonymous blind sender, sending to anonymous blind recipient. Perfect for terrorism, organized crime and all those other bad guys.
Real answer: What Carly wanted to convey is that business results are worse than ever, and that she has royally screwed up with the merger. In having everyone emphasize this "Adaptive Enterprise" bullshit, perhaps they will all be sufficiently distracted trying to figure out what the hell it really is, so that she will keep her job for at least one more year. In other words, pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, and pray that consulting revenues pick up.
Bzzzt. No, you're wrong, but thanks for playing. All books do NOT belong to the public once they are published. They still belong to the author, who has licensed limited rights to the publisher in exchange for publishing, distribution, promotion, etc. Copyright laws say that the work will eventually pass into the public domain, but according to, let's say the Berne Convention, that time is author's life plus 50. (Leaving the United States' Incarcerate Mickey Mouse Forever Act out of the discussion for now.)
The author may choose to make his/her works available under certain circumstances earlier. For instance, I am published under copyright by a major publisher, and I self-publish under Creative Commons, which is a GNU GPL-ish flavour of copyright. And I while I would not want to deny people access to my work, I do have the right to maintain control over what people do with my work once they access it. For instance, you do not have the right to take my Creative Commons work and sell it commercially; you may take it, modify it, use it non-commercially, etc. (The CC licenses have a fair amount of flexibility and granularity.)
In the case of Amazon, technically, the Search In a Book could be argued as part of "fair use." The possibility for it to be misused exists, but the permitted uses far exceed the potential for misuse. The argument that says cookbooks and reference books will suffer through this technology may be true, but no truer than today, when someone sits down in a Barnes & Noble, takes a recipe book from the shelf, and copies down a recipe.
Ultimately, however, the choice as to whether to be included or not should be the author's, without coercion from the publisher. Some authors will be sufficiently enlightened to know that they stand a greater chance of being found this way and opt-in; others will choose to opt-out. It can be done with a choice of IN/OUT at the time a book contract is signed.
I'm surprised that Pegasus email client hasn't been mentioned, as one of the best freeware email clients... heck, it's one of the best email clients, period - free or not free.
I've also found an FTP server to be useful on a home LAN, especially if one is trying to network older, only-nominally-compatible OSs. The one I've enjoyed using is Fastream Netfile - also free - and very easy to setup, configure and use (with WSFTP as a client, btw.)
Well, there already has been a test case of cyborg discrimination. Whether you sympathize with the plight of Prof. Steve Mann at the hands of Air Canada, or think otherwise, the fact is that certain regulations have revealed the potential for discrimination on the basis of technological augmentation of the body.
The specifics of Mann v. Air Canada are not as important as the over-arching issues the case raises. Mann's case cannot be argued on its constitutionality, as there are no constitutional protections against discrimination of cyborgs, or those who are technologically enhanced. However, it was obvious to those of us who saw Mann immediately after the Air Canada incident that the removal of his cyborg accoutrements resulted in significant physical distress. He was unable to maintain balance, properly respond to ambient temperature fluctuations, judge distance for grasping objects, among other physical infirmaties. The symptoms lasted for a little over a month, after which, his body slowly reacclimatized to its non-cyborg state.
The argument cannot be made on the evidence that his wearable computers, and their intrinsic biofeedback mechanisms, were merely fashion accessories or affectations. Because his autonomous body functions had adjusted to Mann's cyborg enhancements, they could rightly be considered part of his (cyborg) biology, necessary to maintain his normal health. In legalese, Mann's cyborg enhancements differed from MP3 players and portable computers "in kind," not merely "in degree." Hence, one could legally consider that Air Canada's security checks should have changed to provide adequate screening without being invasive and destructive. The fact that those with cochlear implants or heart pacemakers are not required to turn off and remove those cyborg enhancements, but Mann was, indicates discrimination.
I am supporting neither Mann nor Air Canada in making these observations. I am pointing out that we already have an important case that raises the issue of the regulatory imposition on those who have technological enhancements to their bodies. The examination of the fundamental issues and the questions they raise is most appropriate to be done now.
Deep in the company's website, they state, " With this patent, Interwoven joins the class of top tier software companies that recognize that market leadership is directly related to continued innovation combined with the protection of intellectual property. Patents represent the most effective and powerful way to ensure that a company protects its long-term investment in research, design and innovation."
Unfortunately, the fallacy of the first part of that self-serving statement is that history demonstrates the contrary: Innovation, especially in the area of software innovation, has been most successful in an atmosphere of sharing, openness, mutual support and peer-recognition. This is well-documented by Manuel Castells, Lawrence Lessig and others. Patents impede the advance of innovation by preventing potential competitors from innovating. With patent protection, innovation is limited to those who can afford the overhead of traaversing the patent minefield (as Stallman puts it). Those who choose to share innovation with the restriction that those who benefit also share their follow-on innovations - even when innovations pertain to other than software disciplines, accelerate the innovation process, and thereby support the development of a sustainably expanding economic infrastructure.
I do agree with the company's second statement: Patents are "most effective and powerful way to ensure that a company protects" its stuff. It just does very little for the rest of society, and for the economy in general.
They must be on crack. There are many different places looking at these sorts of things. Seriously...most places that do cultural analysis of science are also looking at the effects of the internet
Indeed! At the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto, this sort of examination is "standard fare" in our graduate courses, and for our post-grad fellows. In fact, Marshall McLuhan was doing this sort of investigation nearly 40 years ago, in looking at the cultural and societal effects of instantaneous, multi-way communications around the world.
In 1969, for example, executives at IBM thought he was crazy when he explained how there would be networked computers in every home, and how we would be able to buy groceries and other household items online!
Cindy McCaffrey. At least the sweater seems tight!
...this is actually nothing particularly special, since all the technologies are relatively well-known (among the right circles), and mostly invented by Dr. Steve Mann of the University of Toronto. According to Steve, what the patient actually perceives is more akin to contrast resolution, rather than anything that the visually unimpaired would call "sight".
What is perhaps more interesting, and more widely useful is the Eyetap technology itself. Essentially, Eyetap uses the camera and wearble computer to drive a small laser that mediates reality directly into the eye. For people who are not blind, but profoundly visually impaired, this technology may be a godsend.
Beam me up, Geordi LaForge!
Having been on the inside at Hitachi Data Systems for more than a decade through the late 80s and into the mid-90s, I had an "up close and personal" view of the relative advances in HDD technology and R&D. At the time, the advanced research being done at Odawara Works (the home of Hitachi hard disk technology) drew from among the best researchers of almost every division of Hitachi, with the possible exception of the Nuclear Power and Locomotive divisions. In addition, the manufacturing technology employed was considerably more advanced than that of IBM at the time. As a result, MTBF numbers for Hitachi drives were many times those of comparable IBM drives.
Naturally, the dynamics of the business changed when EMC was able to achieve performance and overall system reliability levels that were more than acceptable with integral-cache, RAID-like architectures, able to be built and sold at very economical prices.
As early as 1993/4, many observers predicted that IBM would eventually have to get out of the disk business, as their cost to maintain acceptable reliability and performance would make their product non-competitive. The prediction was that it would be sold to Hitachi, and I've heard that prediction repeated several times in the intervening years. It's also not surprising, nor likely coincidental, that a key executive in the senior stratosphere of Hitachi these days used to be the Chief Engineer in Odawara Works.
Nice move Naruse-san! Omedetou gozaimasu! Ganbatte ne!
There are some wonderful observations for educators and those providing government funding for educational infrastructure from the Hole-In-the-Wall experiment.
Perhaps one of the most important observations made by Dr. Mitra was, "The terminology is not as important as the metaphor."
Metaphors, by their nature are transformational. As Marshall McLuhan wrote in Understanding Media, "All media are active metaphors in their power to translate experience into new forms."
(By "medium," McLuhan means anything that we conceive or create - tangible or intangible, everything from tables to televisions to televangelists. The "message" of a medium is the set of effects or changes that the medium will induce in us, our society or culture.)
In this case, the Indian children used metaphors to which they could relate to effect changes in, and transform, the way they experienced common-place life: Indian music, letters, Shiva's drum and so forth. In doing so, they will tend to view the rest of the world through changed eyes, and will undoubtedly "demand" (even tacitly through imagination) these new experiences. They will likely be dissatisfied with the conventional approach to instruction, perhaps preferring more self-guided, exploration and discovery-based education. What effects might this have on the educational system in India? What effects will this have on educators in North America and Europe who will be forced to confront massive investments in seemingly unnecessary "computer literacy" programs. How can approaches to adult education take advantage of child-like curiosity and discovery?
In the graduate-level course I teach, the majority of the course is discovery and exploration. Where we end up at the end of each seminar is largely irrelevant. If we reach a point of being able to ask a profound question as a "conclusion," the seminar is a resounding success. As seen with these Indian children and Dr. Mitra's brilliant experiment, "The teacher's job is very simple. It's to help the children ask the right questions." To which I would add, adult learners, too.
From where we sit in modern times, ancient myths and legends are often considered little more than fairy tales. But given what we know about the effects of natural catastrophes - namely their ability to eradicate all traces of any civilization that once stood in their path - there is probably much that is buried, inundated or otherwise obscured from view.
One interesting question that is perhaps particularly revealing is, why are are so surprised whenever we find this stuff?
The argument that "It's THEIR equipment..." so all your email and download are belong to... nevermind that! So if I receive a personal FedEx shipment while I'm sitting in THEIR office, does it belong to them? When I put my bag with private notes from my bookie/girlfriend/boyfriend/connection in THEIR credenza, does that give them the right to search through it? Not the same, you say? I fail to see the substantive difference, but try this one on: I use my own (i.e. paid for out of my own pocket with my own money) notebook PC, hooked to THEIR network when I'm in the office. So what rights do they now have? Can they intercept my personal email while it's going through their POP server and on their pipe, but once it lands on MY system I'm home free? I don't disagree with the concept of ensuring that people are productive while at work, and I don't disagree with a company taking appropriate steps to safeguard its own legal liability as a result of its employees' actions. However, I've never been in favour of such intrusive spying, surreptitious scanning of email, web usage and workstation hard drives. Acceptable use policies and goal-oriented management (as opposed to counting lines of code generated, for instance) should be enough for a competent management team. (Fair disclosure: I am a 40+ executive in a tech company.)
According to Roddenberry, ST:TOS was conceived as "Wagon Train to the Stars", that is, the concept of exploration and meeting strange and interesting people... sort of like /., come to think of it :)
Social commentary, breaking new TV ground, dealing with taboos, observations on the human condition, , were all hallmarks of TOS and TNG. (Sorry, I can't fairly comment on DS9 or Voy) TOS a mistake? I think it was the same sort of mistake which have set other TV ground-breaking classics apart from the dross. The fact that it was ahead of its time, both in its fictional setting and for the '60's when it was originally broadcast, was indicative of its inherent nature. TNG carried it forward for its first few seasons, but like most other successful franchises, overstayed its welcome, IMNSHO.
All of this is not to say that there aren't folks who are obsessed with the program. For a look at how bizarre things can get when a TV program takes over your life, view the documentary, Trekkies. Truly frightening!