One thing that nobody seems to have noticed/mentioned is that most airlines also do package shipping as part of their regular service.
To do this, your friend needs to find out what airlines service the local airport. Once you've got that list of airlines, contact them, and see how they would like to handle shipping a small package (that you're willing to have opened/inspected in your presence) to that city. You may have to arrange to have it shipped to the US/EU offices of that airline before they can get it on a plane, but it is doable. Once it arrives there, your friend just needs to go down to the airport and claim the package.
I don't know what the charges would be for something like this - the last time I did it was in 92, and that was just to San Diego. But I know it (generally) can be done.
Actually, how about if I call you a shortsighted, lazy SOB who isn't willing to do the legwork yourself? That's about what your proposals add up to:
They could impose hiring restrictions on who the companies could hire, no more hiring cheap foreign nationals to avoid paying for someone's experience.
So instead of hiring someone who's appropriate to the job, I can only hire someone who your union says I can hire, even if they don't have the right skills/drive/interests for what I'm after?
Or, flip the coin. I'm a big company, and I tend to hire those cheap, foreign IT guys. Why? Because they give me a competitive advantage. What makes your union membership worth the extra $30K salary you want me to pay for union members? It's my money, and I can damn well spend it where I choose.
They could make IT companies hire and/or keep older workers, no more getting turned out to field when you don't know the lastest language (even though you could learn it in a month).
So, if said older worker is too old/lazy to keep up their skills, I'm required to keep them around, even though the hardware/software they're trained on was retired 5 years ago? If they're not willing to do the legwork/brainwork, why am I obligated to keep them? You said it yourself - your example hasn't taken the time to learn the new language, even though they know they need to. Why not?
They could give worker's a decent working day, nothing wrong with the occasional clock wrapper, but 70 hour weeks are insane and exploitive.
Anybody who doesn't adequately factor in the real hours they're working to the pay they receive deserves to get burned. If you're dumb/crazy enough to accept a job that pays $10/hour for a 15 hour day, ($37,500 for a starting salary, for those who can't do the math), then maybe you need to learn how to figure this kind of thing out. _You_ are responsible for _your_ life. If the job/hours/workload suck, then either negotiate them into something reasonable, find a new (better, more reasonable) job, or learn how to deal with it. If your pay doesn't realistically reflect your real workload, then you need to negotiate a better/more realistic deal.
They could use a guild structure to offer an employment path that doesn't go through college, but instead focuses on on the job training, which many geeks prefer to dry textbook learning.
Right, so instead of reasonably intelligent, creative people with technical skills, I can hire one-track minds with no creativity or problem-solving skills? Right now, companies hire those what have the skills they're looking for. If you have a degree, cool. If you don't, well that's ok too. Doubt me? A friend of mine runs international networking for a Pretty Big software development company. He hasn't had the time to get even an AA. Another friend does UI design review for major (telco) projects. He doesn't have a degree either. Two other friends are CS directors for a couple of different companies. One dropped out just before finishing his BA. The other _never bothered_ to go to college, except for a few side classes. But ALL of these people are willing to do the legwork to keep their skills up.
Something to think about, someday you may not want to work a 70 hour week, you may have a family, you may grey hair or be balding, do you want to be replaced by an undercutting youngster or foreigner?
Grow or die, son, grow or die. If you're not willing to take responsibility for managing your career, why am I supposed to do it for you?
You probably think I'm some a**hole IT manager, right? Well, let's see. I run a 2 person consulting shop. My business partner just had her 60th birthday. She's still a cutting-edge tech writer - she brings in scads of money, and is probably going to work until she's too old to pound the keyboard. She's someone who's really made an effort to keep her skills up. On the flip side, I've seen more than a few techies who didn't bother. Had a discussion with one yesterday, who told me that the ONLY way to cluster is via a hardware cluster, even if I can do it over the wire for 1/2 the price, and get a just-as-fast-if-not-faster solution (and much more scalable, to boot). He hasn't kept up with the technology.
What am I saying? That it's _your_ responsibility to keep your skills up - not your employer. If you depend on your employer to provide that, you're placing your fate in someone else's hands - someone you have no particular reason to trust. In that case, aren't you getting what you've signed up for?
As long as the MPAA doesn't try to ban analog recording I have no problem whatsoever with the prevention of digital recording. This is what MPAA is after. There's a lot of people who produce these videos aka "content" that need to get paid. Its business. Without business there would be nothing...
Two problems with this:
First, if I want to record/timeshift in high-quality digital format vs. in low-quality analog, that's my choice, not theirs. What I choose to do with the signal in the privacy of my home is my business, as long as I break no other laws (rebroadcast, copyright infringement) in the process.
Second, this has didly to do with time-shifting. It has everything to do with forcing you into a pay-per-view model. Personally, I intend to go down kicking and screaming.
The article says that time shifting of material for later use is fine... so what is all the fuss about?
The fuss is because, with the encoding required all the way through the system, time-shifting a program becomes voluntary only from one person's perspective - the publisher. If I want to time-shift a program, and someone at the publisher's end doesn't want me to, with this (proposed) rule, I'm SOL. Under current rules, the only person deciding whether I time-shift is me.
If VCR's are just time shifting devices then what is the problem. As long as the data is not "archiveable" then I can't see there being a problem. Currently there is not a problem as there is no way of providing long term archive of digital data at a reasonable rate. CD-R is not a long time archive format as they degrade. Unless people are going to archive their data to DLT tapes then they only use for short term time shifting.
Under current technology, a VCR/Tivo-ish box is a time-shifting device, but it does so via a mini-archive. The Tivo does so on a space-constrained disk. The VCR uses a tape. I can archive the tape by the simple expedient of popping it out of the VCR, and loading another tape. In theory, in the not-so-distant future, I will be able to go to a digital model of the VCR tape - rather than burning analog tape and popping it out, I can burn a digital version of the program. At that point, I can either (a) time-shift the program (the legal action), or (b) I can archive the program for later repetetive playback (the illegal action). The solution (from the RIAA/MPAA viewpoint) is to block all archival options, then selectively allow time-shifting where they choose. Since that invalidates all existing hardware selections, everything that's currently out there becomes junk under this scheme.
One thing to remember, btw. The prefered model for the MPAA/RIAA is a pay-per-use model, where you pay every time you view/use/etc. something. It's the old razors/razor blades trick. I'd much rather rent you a CD at $1/time you listen to it (enforced by my mechanism, of course), than let you purchase it outright for $15.
I do a fair amount of consulting around the valley, and usually get asked to sign an NDA at some point in the process. Because I work with a number of companies in similar industries (including, in some cases, direct competitors), there are a few things I usually do to protect myself.
First, when someone asks to interview you, find out a general version of what they're interested in you for. Since this is a pre-NDA disclosure, general technologies/approaches are being publicly disclosed.
Second, go look over their web site(s) (presuming, of course, that they have one, or have the appropriate info up on one). Any information that you discover there is publicly available - and counts against that NDA.
Third, make sure you know going in what kind of work/position you're interviewing for.
Finally, look over their competitors web sites, so you have an idea of what "industry practice" looks like.
What's the point of all this? _IF_ they disclose information to you under the NDA during an interview, and _IF_ you wind up working for someone else, the only thing that the NDA protects is _their_ company confidential data that doesn't fall under one of two exemptions:
It is, or has been in the public domain (can't retroactively classify it).
It doesn't come under the heading of industry practice (Your app processing XML into an internal data format is an industry practice. How you do it is confidential, and covered by the NDA).
None of this is brain surgery. Most of it is pretty common-sense. That being said, companies that are going to get anal on that kind of thing probably aren't the kind of folks you want to wind up working for. If they're anal there, they're going to be anal elsewhere in the process.
The part of the opinion that really caught my eye was this:
"The fact that Congress elected to leave technologically unsophisticated persons
who wish to make fair use of encrypted copyrighted works without the technical means of doing so
is a matter for Congress"
Which can be read (to me) that technologically sophisticated persons wishing to make fair use are entirely allowed to do so. The implication is that _possession_ of DeCSS strictly for fair use purposes is not illegal under this decision. _Distribution_ is, however.
My concern is on a different interpretation. This seems to state that running a VPN client from home, to securely connect to your work LAN, is now a violation of the @Home TOS.
Am I interpretting this correctly?
If so, this does not sound like it relates to sellings additional IPs, but more to just making a useful broadband connection much less useful to working professionals.:(
I would have to interpret it this way as well, BUT, you are missing a key point of this. That point is that the @Home Network also includes the @Work Network, which is the companion business-oriented cable modem system (actually, it's the same network, but they charge a lot more for the pipe).
If I had to take a stab at what's really going on here, I would say that someone at @Home realized that a lot of people were getting cable modem service, then using VPNs to link back in to work. What @Home wants is to push all of those people over to the @Work side of the shop, letting them charge more for what is essentially the same service. So far, they've done it more-or-less voluntarily. By changing the underlying TOS, they can now force the issue, pushing _anyone_ who VPNs across to @Work.
"China is a bogey man, just like Saddam Hussien, that the government uses to keep you in line. "
Y'know, I really wish someone like you could do me a favor, and go convince the Chinese of that. Because, based on (a) the available evidence, and (b) some simple demographic math, their government just doesn't seem to have gotten the memo. Here, let me run some of the numbers for you.
The available evidence
For some _strange_ reason, the peace-loving Chinese government has been running a major arms buildup over the last 10+ years, mostly aimed at power-projection weaponry.
In addition to buying ~30 Su-27 AS fighters, they are in the middle of signing a deal to co-produce 300 Su-32 fighter-bombers (think F-15E). The initial Su-27 fighters are distributed, in part operating as a pilot conversion/training force. The Su-32s are the follow-on upgrade force.
The recently-cancelled purchase of those IAI Phalon AEW birds. Mounted on 707 airframes, they provide approximately the same capability as an E-3. The _8_ of them that were to be purchased provides China a nice, high-density capability, covering (continuosly in a warfighting scenario) everything off their coast from Japan to Vietnam.
China recently purchased a set of Russian Sovremenyy destroyers. All of the concern is about their SSMs - which is a smoke screen. The real item of concern is that those were among the first ships the Soviets had built designed for extended deep-water operations. They're not coastal-defence ships. They're power-projection.
According to some reasonably-reliable data, the Chinese have managed to reverse-engineer US neutron bomb designs, and have had them in production since 1994. Remember the last Taiwanese crisis, before the election? They pointedly waved those N-weapons as an optional attack method.
The Chinese PLA is being restructured into a more capable, more portable, and (don't miss it) more deployable force. Deployable where, you might want to ask.
Demographic Math or, damn, there's a lot of people here!
Demographically, China has two problems. The first is that, with a population of over 1 billion, they are adding ~60 million people to their population every year, despite the gov'ts best efforts to the contrary. With a finite amount of land, and an inability to make that land house/feed/otherwise support those extra mouths, the gov't is looking at border areas that used to be considered of marginal use as locations to dump the extra mouths. Remember all those Chinese "colonists" being dumped in Tibet? Why are they there in the first place?
The second problem is even uglier. According to their own demographic data, childbirths in China run 54% male, 46% female (vs. a "normal" 49/51 split). That translates into 4.8 million more males than females, every year. Those birth splits, btw, are valid for ~ the last 10 years. So, where are those extra males going to go? Every one of them, you should remember, gets mandatory military training. Given the available historical evidence, the Chinese government has no real compunctions about "burning" those spare people in a war, to achieve another goal.
What kind of goal? How about that old standby - Lebensraum. Works rather nicely, doesn't it? Take the "extra" males, use them to "liberate" your target territory, then colonize it with the survivors (how do you think the city of Rome wound up owning so much of the Mediteranean, so securely? Same pattern).
None of this is new, or made up, btw. Everything I've just said is either (a) documented historical behavior, or (b) published fact, from Chinese gov't sources.
Like I said - if the Chinese are just a bogeyman, I really wish someone would go tell them that.
The USPS isn't a part of the government, it was privatized several years ago IIRC.
Ding! Thank you for playing. The US Postal Service is, in fact, part of the US Federal Gov't. US Postal Inspectors are legally sworn law enforcement officers (you know, like the Secret Service, US Marshall's Service, or the ATF). Hiring on at the USPS requires you to pass a specialized version of the civil service exam.
Now, at the same time, the USPS is required to _operate_ like a private business. It's supposed to run a profit. It isn't supposed to require regular/massive government funding. It's supposed to self-finance it's own initiatives.
Slashdot Mirror
To do this, your friend needs to find out what airlines service the local airport. Once you've got that list of airlines, contact them, and see how they would like to handle shipping a small package (that you're willing to have opened/inspected in your presence) to that city. You may have to arrange to have it shipped to the US/EU offices of that airline before they can get it on a plane, but it is doable. Once it arrives there, your friend just needs to go down to the airport and claim the package.
I don't know what the charges would be for something like this - the last time I did it was in 92, and that was just to San Diego. But I know it (generally) can be done.
They could impose hiring restrictions on who the companies could hire, no more hiring cheap foreign nationals to avoid paying for someone's experience.
So instead of hiring someone who's appropriate to the job, I can only hire someone who your union says I can hire, even if they don't have the right skills/drive/interests for what I'm after?
Or, flip the coin. I'm a big company, and I tend to hire those cheap, foreign IT guys. Why? Because they give me a competitive advantage. What makes your union membership worth the extra $30K salary you want me to pay for union members? It's my money, and I can damn well spend it where I choose.
They could make IT companies hire and/or keep older workers, no more getting turned out to field when you don't know the lastest language (even though you could learn it in a month).
So, if said older worker is too old/lazy to keep up their skills, I'm required to keep them around, even though the hardware/software they're trained on was retired 5 years ago? If they're not willing to do the legwork/brainwork, why am I obligated to keep them? You said it yourself - your example hasn't taken the time to learn the new language, even though they know they need to. Why not?
They could give worker's a decent working day, nothing wrong with the occasional clock wrapper, but 70 hour weeks are insane and exploitive.
Anybody who doesn't adequately factor in the real hours they're working to the pay they receive deserves to get burned. If you're dumb/crazy enough to accept a job that pays $10/hour for a 15 hour day, ($37,500 for a starting salary, for those who can't do the math), then maybe you need to learn how to figure this kind of thing out. _You_ are responsible for _your_ life. If the job/hours/workload suck, then either negotiate them into something reasonable, find a new (better, more reasonable) job, or learn how to deal with it. If your pay doesn't realistically reflect your real workload, then you need to negotiate a better/more realistic deal.
They could use a guild structure to offer an employment path that doesn't go through college, but instead focuses on on the job training, which many geeks prefer to dry textbook learning.
Right, so instead of reasonably intelligent, creative people with technical skills, I can hire one-track minds with no creativity or problem-solving skills? Right now, companies hire those what have the skills they're looking for. If you have a degree, cool. If you don't, well that's ok too. Doubt me? A friend of mine runs international networking for a Pretty Big software development company. He hasn't had the time to get even an AA. Another friend does UI design review for major (telco) projects. He doesn't have a degree either. Two other friends are CS directors for a couple of different companies. One dropped out just before finishing his BA. The other _never bothered_ to go to college, except for a few side classes. But ALL of these people are willing to do the legwork to keep their skills up.
Something to think about, someday you may not want to work a 70 hour week, you may have a family, you may grey hair or be balding, do you want to be replaced by an undercutting youngster or foreigner?
Grow or die, son, grow or die. If you're not willing to take responsibility for managing your career, why am I supposed to do it for you?
You probably think I'm some a**hole IT manager, right? Well, let's see. I run a 2 person consulting shop. My business partner just had her 60th birthday. She's still a cutting-edge tech writer - she brings in scads of money, and is probably going to work until she's too old to pound the keyboard. She's someone who's really made an effort to keep her skills up. On the flip side, I've seen more than a few techies who didn't bother. Had a discussion with one yesterday, who told me that the ONLY way to cluster is via a hardware cluster, even if I can do it over the wire for 1/2 the price, and get a just-as-fast-if-not-faster solution (and much more scalable, to boot). He hasn't kept up with the technology.
What am I saying? That it's _your_ responsibility to keep your skills up - not your employer. If you depend on your employer to provide that, you're placing your fate in someone else's hands - someone you have no particular reason to trust. In that case, aren't you getting what you've signed up for?
Two problems with this:
First, if I want to record/timeshift in high-quality digital format vs. in low-quality analog, that's my choice, not theirs. What I choose to do with the signal in the privacy of my home is my business, as long as I break no other laws (rebroadcast, copyright infringement) in the process.
Second, this has didly to do with time-shifting. It has everything to do with forcing you into a pay-per-view model. Personally, I intend to go down kicking and screaming.
The fuss is because, with the encoding required all the way through the system, time-shifting a program becomes voluntary only from one person's perspective - the publisher. If I want to time-shift a program, and someone at the publisher's end doesn't want me to, with this (proposed) rule, I'm SOL. Under current rules, the only person deciding whether I time-shift is me.
If VCR's are just time shifting devices then what is the problem. As long as the data is not "archiveable" then I can't see there being a problem. Currently there is not a problem as there is no way of providing long term archive of digital data at a reasonable rate. CD-R is not a long time archive format as they degrade. Unless people are going to archive their data to DLT tapes then they only use for short term time shifting.
Under current technology, a VCR/Tivo-ish box is a time-shifting device, but it does so via a mini-archive. The Tivo does so on a space-constrained disk. The VCR uses a tape. I can archive the tape by the simple expedient of popping it out of the VCR, and loading another tape. In theory, in the not-so-distant future, I will be able to go to a digital model of the VCR tape - rather than burning analog tape and popping it out, I can burn a digital version of the program. At that point, I can either (a) time-shift the program (the legal action), or (b) I can archive the program for later repetetive playback (the illegal action). The solution (from the RIAA/MPAA viewpoint) is to block all archival options, then selectively allow time-shifting where they choose. Since that invalidates all existing hardware selections, everything that's currently out there becomes junk under this scheme.
One thing to remember, btw. The prefered model for the MPAA/RIAA is a pay-per-use model, where you pay every time you view/use/etc. something. It's the old razors/razor blades trick. I'd much rather rent you a CD at $1/time you listen to it (enforced by my mechanism, of course), than let you purchase it outright for $15.
- First, when someone asks to interview you, find out a general version of what they're interested in you for. Since this is a pre-NDA disclosure, general technologies/approaches are being publicly disclosed.
- Second, go look over their web site(s) (presuming, of course, that they have one, or have the appropriate info up on one). Any information that you discover there is publicly available - and counts against that NDA.
- Third, make sure you know going in what kind of work/position you're interviewing for.
- Finally, look over their competitors web sites, so you have an idea of what "industry practice" looks like.
What's the point of all this? _IF_ they disclose information to you under the NDA during an interview, and _IF_ you wind up working for someone else, the only thing that the NDA protects is _their_ company confidential data that doesn't fall under one of two exemptions:- It is, or has been in the public domain (can't retroactively classify it).
- It doesn't come under the heading of industry practice (Your app processing XML into an internal data format is an industry practice. How you do it is confidential, and covered by the NDA).
None of this is brain surgery. Most of it is pretty common-sense. That being said, companies that are going to get anal on that kind of thing probably aren't the kind of folks you want to wind up working for. If they're anal there, they're going to be anal elsewhere in the process.Which can be read (to me) that technologically sophisticated persons wishing to make fair use are entirely allowed to do so. The implication is that _possession_ of DeCSS strictly for fair use purposes is not illegal under this decision. _Distribution_ is, however.
Am I interpretting this correctly?
If so, this does not sound like it relates to sellings additional IPs, but more to just making a useful broadband connection much less useful to working professionals. :(
I would have to interpret it this way as well, BUT, you are missing a key point of this. That point is that the @Home Network also includes the @Work Network, which is the companion business-oriented cable modem system (actually, it's the same network, but they charge a lot more for the pipe).
If I had to take a stab at what's really going on here, I would say that someone at @Home realized that a lot of people were getting cable modem service, then using VPNs to link back in to work. What @Home wants is to push all of those people over to the @Work side of the shop, letting them charge more for what is essentially the same service. So far, they've done it more-or-less voluntarily. By changing the underlying TOS, they can now force the issue, pushing _anyone_ who VPNs across to @Work.
Y'know, I really wish someone like you could do me a favor, and go convince the Chinese of that. Because, based on (a) the available evidence, and (b) some simple demographic math, their government just doesn't seem to have gotten the memo. Here, let me run some of the numbers for you.
The available evidence
For some _strange_ reason, the peace-loving Chinese government has been running a major arms buildup over the last 10+ years, mostly aimed at power-projection weaponry.
- In addition to buying ~30 Su-27 AS fighters, they are in the middle of signing a deal to co-produce 300 Su-32 fighter-bombers (think F-15E). The initial Su-27 fighters are distributed, in part operating as a pilot conversion/training force. The Su-32s are the follow-on upgrade force.
- The recently-cancelled purchase of those IAI Phalon AEW birds. Mounted on 707 airframes, they provide approximately the same capability as an E-3. The _8_ of them that were to be purchased provides China a nice, high-density capability, covering (continuosly in a warfighting scenario) everything off their coast from Japan to Vietnam.
- China recently purchased a set of Russian Sovremenyy destroyers. All of the concern is about their SSMs - which is a smoke screen. The real item of concern is that those were among the first ships the Soviets had built designed for extended deep-water operations. They're not coastal-defence ships. They're power-projection.
- According to some reasonably-reliable data, the Chinese have managed to reverse-engineer US neutron bomb designs, and have had them in production since 1994. Remember the last Taiwanese crisis, before the election? They pointedly waved those N-weapons as an optional attack method.
- The Chinese PLA is being restructured into a more capable, more portable, and (don't miss it) more deployable force. Deployable where, you might want to ask.
Demographic Math or, damn, there's a lot of people here!Demographically, China has two problems. The first is that, with a population of over 1 billion, they are adding ~60 million people to their population every year, despite the gov'ts best efforts to the contrary. With a finite amount of land, and an inability to make that land house/feed/otherwise support those extra mouths, the gov't is looking at border areas that used to be considered of marginal use as locations to dump the extra mouths. Remember all those Chinese "colonists" being dumped in Tibet? Why are they there in the first place?
The second problem is even uglier. According to their own demographic data, childbirths in China run 54% male, 46% female (vs. a "normal" 49/51 split). That translates into 4.8 million more males than females, every year. Those birth splits, btw, are valid for ~ the last 10 years. So, where are those extra males going to go? Every one of them, you should remember, gets mandatory military training. Given the available historical evidence, the Chinese government has no real compunctions about "burning" those spare people in a war, to achieve another goal.
What kind of goal? How about that old standby - Lebensraum. Works rather nicely, doesn't it? Take the "extra" males, use them to "liberate" your target territory, then colonize it with the survivors (how do you think the city of Rome wound up owning so much of the Mediteranean, so securely? Same pattern).
None of this is new, or made up, btw. Everything I've just said is either (a) documented historical behavior, or (b) published fact, from Chinese gov't sources.
Like I said - if the Chinese are just a bogeyman, I really wish someone would go tell them that.
Ding! Thank you for playing. The US Postal Service is, in fact, part of the US Federal Gov't. US Postal Inspectors are legally sworn law enforcement officers (you know, like the Secret Service, US Marshall's Service, or the ATF). Hiring on at the USPS requires you to pass a specialized version of the civil service exam.
Now, at the same time, the USPS is required to _operate_ like a private business. It's supposed to run a profit. It isn't supposed to require regular/massive government funding. It's supposed to self-finance it's own initiatives.
But it's still part of the USG.