Smoking is a unique case as far as drug use goes-- your clothes smell bad, your teeth get stained, the walls inside your house darken from the smoke, and you get winded when you run to catch the bus. These are much more practical consequences of drug use thana friday night spent drinking or taking a few hits of a joint. So I can understand how anti-smoking classes may be much more successful on purely aesthetic grounds.
>There are fair-use clauses that say you can use
>excerpts in your own original writing, but if you
>take my entire work and republish it you have
>violated my copyright.
>You might not have a choice of of providers
>of "broadband" Internet service, but pretty much
>anywhere you can use a 56K modem to dial a local
>number to get to the internet.
Broadband is just another "public utility" and consumers are entitled to public utility service that's as good as they have in any other town.
Your post is akin to "You might not have a choice of providers of 'electric' light, but unless you live on the moon, you can buy candles from any company you want."
Well said (as another scientist who has been on and off the public dole from time to time).
Harry Browne just sounds plain _dumb_ in showing his lack of understanding about how scientific research works. He says that scientific research by "the government" "hurts progress" without realizing that what the govenment does is simply sub-contract out research to private researchers who do it themselves. "The government" simply provides a framework for the researchers to police themselves about how the money is spent. It makes me wonder how well informed he is about anything outside his field of investment banking.
Just gives me another example of why I don't trust humanities majors because most of them just don't have a well-rounded education.:)
The entire premise of that article is totally flawed... Did CNET start publishing articles about how USENET was going to die because it is not commercially viable, or how IRC has no future because it's noone makes money on it?
More ancient readers on slashdot were astute to point out the similarity btw. current P2P file sharing and things like Archie.
I find it pathetic how these authors seem to have little sense of history about how certain internet applications became popular.
There's a fine line between what's considered "art" and what actually turns out to be a self-indulgent piece of masterbatory crap on the part of the artist.
A good insight into this culture is David Sedaris's recent book "Me Talk Pretty Some Day" in which he talks about his experience with the North Carolina performance-art crowd.
Movies are a good counter example. I probably couldn't write a good script, or shoot a good movie, and I may not have a PhD in "feelm", but I know what I _don't_ like, and I can most certainly compare "battlefield earth" unfavorably to "casablanca". And I know that throwing a bunch of palm pilots together to create "art" is just a means of taking advantage of the technologically unsophisticated for publicity purposes.:)
The reality is that undecided voters get on TV-- the ones two dumb to make up their minds. Were it not for all the attention given to them, they would otherwise be non-voters.
Katz has frequently mentioned how things like keeping abreast of politics and the news is something that is irrelevant to "kids today" (aw,shucks), and then he goes encouraging people not to vote. Maybe Katz is just feeding bad values down people's throats.
Let's look at some profiles of people that used that didn't/don't vote (for legal reasons):
o blacks
o women
o recent immigrants
And we all know how kind the legal system was/is _to them_. The fact is simply that not voting plunges one into irrelevancy. Which I suppose is ok, since I wouldn't want Jon Katz and his groupies running the country, anyway.
Religious organizations qualify for tax exempt status in the same way that all non-profit organizations qualify. While there is a specific "religious exemption" for tax purposes, they could likely just as easily incorporate themselves as a non-profit organization to acquire the same status.
>we have freedom OF religion, but we in no way
>have freedom FROM religion. I can be
>any faith I want to - but if I am an Atheist I
>LOSE RIGHTS. Period, End of story.
Actually, the theists and atheists are in a similar position. The theist does not have the freedom from other religions, only the freedom to follow his own. The atheist only has to deal with one additional religion that he disagrees with than the theist does.
The problem is that what redhat needed was to delay releasing 7.0 and instead come out with a 6.3 releast that fixed all the bugs and numerous security holes of 6.2.
Installing Redhat 6.2 is a very burdensome process because of the number of fixes required. However, the consequences of RedHat 7 are much more severe because of its incompatible version of gcc.
What was such a big deal about coming out with a 6.3 release, which would have been stable and useable, instead of just quickly pushing RedHat 7 out the door?
Patent law does exactly what 'b0rxus' does-- when you file a patent, you release all of the details of your system to the public, and your plans become a publicly available government document, accessible by anyone.
The trade-off is that the government gives you a 17-year monopoly on the use of this patent, enforceable by law.
On the other hand, if your system is an unpatented trade secret, then reverse engineering is free game-- if you didn't protect your "trade secret" well enough, then you deserve to lose it.
>The counter to this argument is that when I phone
>a company which uses a telephone
>queing system I haven't got a clue how long I
>will be holding before my call is being
>answered.
Aha... But most places that put you on hold (companies) in the USA have 1-800 numbers, which you don't pay for. Also, in the USA, local calls are included on your monthly phone charge, so services account for the fact that you might not know how long you will be on hold. The fact is that we have so much telephone bandwidth available that we can get away with it because it's simpler. I wouldn't be surprised if someday even domestic long distance gets charged at a "flat rate".
MIT (like most universities) refuses to do research that cannot be published in peer-reviewed journals. Carnivore would have forced MIT to keep more of the data undisclosed than they were comfortable with.
Well, of course, if you are apathetic about politics and don't follow them, _obviously_ you are not going to see any differences.
>Can anybody cite a single interesting or
>important idea or argument that's emerged from
>the months of campaigning in the current U.S.
>presidential race?
Yes. The future of the national debt is quite interesting, considering that it is over 5 trillion dollars, and GW Bush has suddenly come up with a proposal that would massively increase funding for the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation which funds scientific research in American universities. Considering that less than 20% of research propsals to these federal institutions receive any funding, this could radically change the way science is done and couple finally mark a major turning point in which entering the sciences actually becomes a worthwhile career.
So, hey, it's interesting me quite a bit, but that's because I read a lot of news stories.
Actually, the internet has allowed people from all over the world to suddenly follow what once were only local political stories. For example, those of us without MSNBC who live outside of the New York area were able to watch the Clinton/Lazio debate online. Likewise, we can look at political races all over America and find so much information that interests us.
I think it's naive to think that politics will fade away. After all, it's only a matter of time before the full force of the legal system comes crashing down on the internet, and those of us in the industry are going to have to think about retaining lobbyists and giving a lot of thought about if a candidate will stand up for what we support.
In a sense, Katz seems to be promoting the glorification of the "booboisie" -- the blissfully ignorant and anti-intellectual, merely masked with the veneer of being "post-politics".
I think much modern evidence indicates that Patent Officers are more or less rubber-stamps unless any outside parties raise any objections. Thus, it has become the obligation of those with an interest in the industry, not the patent officer, to raise patent objections.
On one level, there's nothing wrong with this -- patents exist to serve the interests of the particular industry, so those involved in the industry should be obligated to ensure that all patents are properly challenged and that illegitimate ones that have slipped by the patent officers are brought to light.
Well, if you are in a similar situation, you are engaged in fraud. Signing off on a patent you know is not legitimate is a crime.
Filing overly broad patents is an abuse of the patent system which will ultimately destroy any concept of intellectual property, since people will not stand by while the system is taken advantage of.
So if you support intellectual proerty laws, you will make sure that your patents are specific and won't abuse the system, lest they contribute to the system's destruction.
>The local college teaches PASCAL as a modern
>programming language. Hah!
There's no obligation to get a degree in CS. Get a degree in Physics, or History, or whatever you find particularly interesting. If you feel that the CS curiculum won't do anything for you, then learn something else.
>But typically I need only a few Alpha-Thinkers,
>whereas I need many more Sysadmins, implementers,
>testers, bug-fixers, porters, and >small-feature-implementers.
Exactly! I worked as a tester and a sysadmin, and while it's nice to do for part time money, it's the _last_ thing I'd want to do for the rest of my life. Education is a great escape out of that. If that's what someone wants to do, then they _shouldn't_ go to college, because they'd hate it.
Sounds like you got a pretty good deal out of things, but I'd like to hope that people who go to university to study CS want to do things other than be a sysadmin-- at least I'd like to think that getting a degree in CS doesn't train you to be a sysadmin, because that would be a lot of wasted years when one could be learning other things about CS.
If we are talking about making lots of money, there's really no secret to it-- you make lots of money because you care about making a lot of money. On the other hand, if you want to get a job making a lot of money doing something _you like_, then that's another matter entirely.
I'm in grad school because I like research. I can wire up all the gigabit routers that I want here in the lab, but that's not what I want to do with my life. I'd hope that people in college feel similarly about their goals.
It depends what you want to do with your life. A realized that I have no desire to be a code monkey for the rest of my life, which is why I'm in grad school. My university's CS curriculum taught me very little in the way of "how to program", I just learned a bunch of different things about the CS field, took a bunch of part time jobs, and discovered the fields I found to be interesting. On the other hand, I can imagine that few university CS programs are particularly good, and some might be captives of coporate intests that want to churn out more code monkeys.
If I wanted to spend the rest of my life maintaining networks or fulfilling the latest code specs, then grad school (or college) would not be for me. But since most of my goals are in expanding my knowledge of CS research, then the last thing I would have wanted to do would be bypass college to just start programming.
Finally, once I finished college, I wasn't limited to CS-- I could have decided to go to law school, or go into investment banking, or become a teacher. So I figured out what parts of computer science I found interesting, did a lot of cool research, and was _still_ able to do anything I wanted with my life. Good deal, in my mind.
Actually, one of the guaranteurs of freedom is that we do _not_ have freedom of contract.
You do not have the "freedom" to agree to wages below the minimum wage. You do not have the "freedom" to live in an apartment without heat. You do not have the "freedom" to sell yourself into slavery.
You cannot give up your freedom to sue someone who has wrong you, unless a settlement has been made after the fact.
In the end, we remain "free" because we are prevented from giving up some of our freedoms.
This is a situation where, I think, where if everyone suddenly exercised their "freedom" to enter into such a horrid contract, we would all be much worse off.
Actually, there are 40,000 auto-deaths per year and only 20,000 homocides. You're _much_ more likely to die because of your driving habits living in the suburbs than you are likely to be a murder victim. So the suburbanites are really playing a fool's game... they _think_ they're safer, but they're really putting themselves at even greater risk by driving and living in pedestrian-unfriendly environments.
Slashdot Mirror
Smoking is a unique case as far as drug use goes-- your clothes smell bad, your teeth get stained, the walls inside your house darken from the smoke, and you get winded when you run to catch the bus. These are much more practical consequences of drug use thana friday night spent drinking or taking a few hits of a joint. So I can understand how anti-smoking classes may be much more successful on purely aesthetic grounds.
-Dean
>There are fair-use clauses that say you can use
... word ... of ... this ... sentence ... is ... a ... separately ... copyrighted ... document.
>excerpts in your own original writing, but if you
>take my entire work and republish it you have
>violated my copyright.
HMm... we can have fun with this:
Each
I suppose it would fall under "fair use" if you published a syllable or two of any one of those documents, however.
-Dean
>You might not have a choice of of providers
>of "broadband" Internet service, but pretty much
>anywhere you can use a 56K modem to dial a local
>number to get to the internet.
Broadband is just another "public utility" and consumers are entitled to public utility service that's as good as they have in any other town.
Your post is akin to "You might not have a choice of providers of 'electric' light, but unless you live on the moon, you can buy candles from any company you want."
-Dean
Well said (as another scientist who has been on and off the public dole from time to time).
:)
Harry Browne just sounds plain _dumb_ in showing his lack of understanding about how scientific research works. He says that scientific research by "the government" "hurts progress" without realizing that what the govenment does is simply sub-contract out research to private researchers who do it themselves. "The government" simply provides a framework for the researchers to police themselves about how the money is spent. It makes me wonder how well informed he is about anything outside his field of investment banking.
Just gives me another example of why I don't trust humanities majors because most of them just don't have a well-rounded education.
-Dean
The entire premise of that article is totally flawed... Did CNET start publishing articles about how USENET was going to die because it is not commercially viable, or how IRC has no future because it's noone makes money on it?
More ancient readers on slashdot were astute to point out the similarity btw. current P2P file sharing and things like Archie.
I find it pathetic how these authors seem to have little sense of history about how certain internet applications became popular.
-Dean
There's a fine line between what's considered "art" and what actually turns out to be a self-indulgent piece of masterbatory crap on the part of the artist.
A good insight into this culture is David Sedaris's recent book "Me Talk Pretty Some Day" in which he talks about his experience with the North Carolina performance-art crowd.
-Dean
Movies are a good counter example. I probably couldn't write a good script, or shoot a good movie, and I may not have a PhD in "feelm", but I know what I _don't_ like, and I can most certainly compare "battlefield earth" unfavorably to "casablanca". And I know that throwing a bunch of palm pilots together to create "art" is just a means of taking advantage of the technologically unsophisticated for publicity purposes. :)
-Dean
The reality is that undecided voters get on TV-- the ones two dumb to make up their minds. Were it not for all the attention given to them, they would otherwise be non-voters.
Katz has frequently mentioned how things like keeping abreast of politics and the news is something that is irrelevant to "kids today" (aw,shucks), and then he goes encouraging people not to vote. Maybe Katz is just feeding bad values down people's throats.
Let's look at some profiles of people that used that didn't/don't vote (for legal reasons):
o blacks
o women
o recent immigrants
And we all know how kind the legal system was/is _to them_. The fact is simply that not voting plunges one into irrelevancy. Which I suppose is ok, since I wouldn't want Jon Katz and his groupies running the country, anyway.
-Dean
Religious organizations qualify for tax exempt status in the same way that all non-profit organizations qualify. While there is a specific "religious exemption" for tax purposes, they could likely just as easily incorporate themselves as a non-profit organization to acquire the same status.
-Dean
>we have freedom OF religion, but we in no way
>have freedom FROM religion. I can be
>any faith I want to - but if I am an Atheist I
>LOSE RIGHTS. Period, End of story.
Actually, the theists and atheists are in a similar position. The theist does not have the freedom from other religions, only the freedom to follow his own. The atheist only has to deal with one additional religion that he disagrees with than the theist does.
-Dean
If you're working more than 40 hours a week to be a code monkey or a sysadmin, they owe you overtime.
A person's salary if for 40 hours per week. After that, unless you're a manager, they owe you time and a half. It's the law.
The problem is that what redhat needed was to delay releasing 7.0 and instead come out with a 6.3 releast that fixed all the bugs and numerous security holes of 6.2.
Installing Redhat 6.2 is a very burdensome process because of the number of fixes required. However, the consequences of RedHat 7 are much more severe because of its incompatible version of gcc.
What was such a big deal about coming out with a 6.3 release, which would have been stable and useable, instead of just quickly pushing RedHat 7 out the door?
Patent law does exactly what 'b0rxus' does-- when you file a patent, you release all of the details of your system to the public, and your plans become a publicly available government document, accessible by anyone.
The trade-off is that the government gives you a 17-year monopoly on the use of this patent, enforceable by law.
On the other hand, if your system is an unpatented trade secret, then reverse engineering is free game-- if you didn't protect your "trade secret" well enough, then you deserve to lose it.
-Dean
>The counter to this argument is that when I phone
>a company which uses a telephone
>queing system I haven't got a clue how long I
>will be holding before my call is being
>answered.
Aha... But most places that put you on hold (companies) in the USA have 1-800 numbers, which you don't pay for. Also, in the USA, local calls are included on your monthly phone charge, so services account for the fact that you might not know how long you will be on hold. The fact is that we have so much telephone bandwidth available that we can get away with it because it's simpler. I wouldn't be surprised if someday even domestic long distance gets charged at a "flat rate".
-Dean
>What's wrong with MIT and a hardcore NDA??
MIT (like most universities) refuses to do research that cannot be published in peer-reviewed journals. Carnivore would have forced MIT to keep more of the data undisclosed than they were comfortable with.
-Dean
Well, of course, if you are apathetic about politics and don't follow them, _obviously_ you are not going to see any differences.
>Can anybody cite a single interesting or
>important idea or argument that's emerged from
>the months of campaigning in the current U.S.
>presidential race?
Yes. The future of the national debt is quite interesting, considering that it is over 5 trillion dollars, and GW Bush has suddenly come up with a proposal that would massively increase funding for the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation which funds scientific research in American universities. Considering that less than 20% of research propsals to these federal institutions receive any funding, this could radically change the way science is done and couple finally mark a major turning point in which entering the sciences actually becomes a worthwhile career.
So, hey, it's interesting me quite a bit, but that's because I read a lot of news stories.
-Dean
Actually, the internet has allowed people from all over the world to suddenly follow what once were only local political stories. For example, those of us without MSNBC who live outside of the New York area were able to watch the Clinton/Lazio debate online. Likewise, we can look at political races all over America and find so much information that interests us.
I think it's naive to think that politics will fade away. After all, it's only a matter of time before the full force of the legal system comes crashing down on the internet, and those of us in the industry are going to have to think about retaining lobbyists and giving a lot of thought about if a candidate will stand up for what we support.
In a sense, Katz seems to be promoting the glorification of the "booboisie" -- the blissfully ignorant and anti-intellectual, merely masked with the veneer of being "post-politics".
-Dean
I think much modern evidence indicates that Patent Officers are more or less rubber-stamps unless any outside parties raise any objections. Thus, it has become the obligation of those with an interest in the industry, not the patent officer, to raise patent objections.
On one level, there's nothing wrong with this -- patents exist to serve the interests of the particular industry, so those involved in the industry should be obligated to ensure that all patents are properly challenged and that illegitimate ones that have slipped by the patent officers are brought to light.
-Dean
Well, if you are in a similar situation, you are engaged in fraud. Signing off on a patent you know is not legitimate is a crime.
Filing overly broad patents is an abuse of the patent system which will ultimately destroy any concept of intellectual property, since people will not stand by while the system is taken advantage of.
So if you support intellectual proerty laws, you will make sure that your patents are specific and won't abuse the system, lest they contribute to the system's destruction.
>The local college teaches PASCAL as a modern
>programming language. Hah!
There's no obligation to get a degree in CS. Get a degree in Physics, or History, or whatever you find particularly interesting. If you feel that the CS curiculum won't do anything for you, then learn something else.
-Dean
>But typically I need only a few Alpha-Thinkers,
>whereas I need many more Sysadmins, implementers,
>testers, bug-fixers, porters, and >small-feature-implementers.
Exactly! I worked as a tester and a sysadmin, and while it's nice to do for part time money, it's the _last_ thing I'd want to do for the rest of my life. Education is a great escape out of that. If that's what someone wants to do, then they _shouldn't_ go to college, because they'd hate it.
-Dean
Sounds like you got a pretty good deal out of things, but I'd like to hope that people who go to university to study CS want to do things other than be a sysadmin-- at least I'd like to think that getting a degree in CS doesn't train you to be a sysadmin, because that would be a lot of wasted years when one could be learning other things about CS.
If we are talking about making lots of money, there's really no secret to it-- you make lots of money because you care about making a lot of money. On the other hand, if you want to get a job making a lot of money doing something _you like_, then that's another matter entirely.
I'm in grad school because I like research. I can wire up all the gigabit routers that I want here in the lab, but that's not what I want to do with my life. I'd hope that people in college feel similarly about their goals.
-Dean
It depends what you want to do with your life. A realized that I have no desire to be a code monkey for the rest of my life, which is why I'm in grad school. My university's CS curriculum taught me very little in the way of "how to program", I just learned a bunch of different things about the CS field, took a bunch of part time jobs, and discovered the fields I found to be interesting. On the other hand, I can imagine that few university CS programs are particularly good, and some might be captives of coporate intests that want to churn out more code monkeys.
If I wanted to spend the rest of my life maintaining networks or fulfilling the latest code specs, then grad school (or college) would not be for me. But since most of my goals are in expanding my knowledge of CS research, then the last thing I would have wanted to do would be bypass college to just start programming.
Finally, once I finished college, I wasn't limited to CS-- I could have decided to go to law school, or go into investment banking, or become a teacher. So I figured out what parts of computer science I found interesting, did a lot of cool research, and was _still_ able to do anything I wanted with my life. Good deal, in my mind.
-Dean
Actually, one of the guaranteurs of freedom is that we do _not_ have freedom of contract.
You do not have the "freedom" to agree to wages below the minimum wage. You do not have the "freedom" to live in an apartment without heat. You do not have the "freedom" to sell yourself into slavery.
You cannot give up your freedom to sue someone who has wrong you, unless a settlement has been made after the fact.
In the end, we remain "free" because we are prevented from giving up some of our freedoms.
This is a situation where, I think, where if everyone suddenly exercised their "freedom" to enter into such a horrid contract, we would all be much worse off.
-Dean
Actually, there are 40,000 auto-deaths per year and only 20,000 homocides. You're _much_ more likely to die because of your driving habits living in the suburbs than you are likely to be a murder victim. So the suburbanites are really playing a fool's game... they _think_ they're safer, but they're really putting themselves at even greater risk by driving and living in pedestrian-unfriendly environments.
-Dean