The other method of commuting into NYC from Connecticut is via car on I-95. Do you realize that I-95 is subsidized on the order of _100%_ by the state and federal government? You don't pay tolls, do you? That's why mass transit is also subsidized, since it's a public transportation service just like Metro North. Also, Metro North provides a valuable service by reducing congestion on I-95 by making mass transit a feasible alternative to driving into the city.
Like the original poster said, driving 30 miles each way to work is a lifestyle choice, so I don't have much sympathy for those who complain about traffic, gas prices, etc.
It's a bit more complicated than that. The Romans (ie, Byzantines as they are called in the middle ages) didn't really place a big priority on such sciences. Archimedes was killed in the Roman takeover of Syracuse, and noone except a lone Roman officer (whose name escapes me) realized what a great man they had inadvertently killed... he was the only person that made sure to memorialize him.
It's not so much that Archimedes was considered "unacceptable" but that he just wasn't considered that important.
Please note that "unitedstatesian" could also refer to the "United States of Mexico", the official name of our southern neighbor. Please do not confuse the readers.
No one (read much less people) will enter a field where the prospects of earning a decent living are substantially lower than in other fields.
The threshhold of "a decent living" in America is quite low. In the biological sciences, people go years in low paid graduate student and post-doctoral positions where the prospect of making a lot of money will always be quite low. But yet the market is absolutely flooded with biology grad students. Likewise, there is very little money in acting or music, even today.
However, what will change is the possibility of making gobs and gobs of money. Hardly anyone ever does actually make a lot of money in the arts or writing, but I wonder how many people stay in the industry because they fantasize that one day they may be that successful and whether once that possibility is eliminated the market will dry up.
This is just a normal, legitimate use of Napster. What were we expecting to happen? While Napster allows for easy indexing of files, it also allows for easy indexing of file ownership.
I wouldn't call it scary, just a normal and expected use of the technology.
So true. A couple things, though... There was a shortage of housing under rent control, but it was a shortage of _expensive_ housing. Those poor, suffering highly paid professionals were unable to get into the Cambridge housing market under rent control because the market couldn't support luxury housing. The end of rent control suddenly changed a lot of run down units into high-rent living spaces.
We've also contended with the paradox that "creating jobs" in Cambridge has actually made us suffer. New office buildings and businesses have sprouted up creating hundreds, if not thousands of jobs. However, people seem to have forgotten that people who live in the city might want to work there, as well, and lack of new housing development while we've had lots of new office buildings has wreaked a lot of havoc.
However, generally, things are a bit more affordable here compared to Silicon Valley and San Francisco, unless you want to live alone. You can find living situations with a bunch of roommates in a somewhat dumpy apartment at reasonable prices (eg, $500/per person, per month).
Also, there are many affordable neighboring cities nearby, whereas in Silicon Valley, you can't find anything affordable for a 50 mile radius.
That's what it all gets down to... control. And I don't think that's a good thing. The ultimate in "control" was DIVX... the company dictated when you were allowed to view your DIVX disc and charged you each time you did for those times you were allowed. If you decided to buy an "ultimated livense", you weren't allowed to play it on your friend's machine without getting charged.
What if Metallica said that their desire to "control" entitled them to dictate which CD player could play their CDs and dictated that you couldn't give the CD to anyone else?
I realize that these guys want to control how their music is distributed, but I think that is ultimately more dangerous than preventing them from controlling it.
I feel I must point out that your post is pretty much wrong. The US is usually perfectly happy to adopt standards that are unique to the USA even if they are out-of-line with Europe's, as is the case with cell phones and measuring units. Noone (noone sane, that is) would claim that the US is trying to keep cell phones out of our hands, for example simply because we don't commonly use european standards.
Also, there are no restrictions on forms of encryption developed within the USA itself-- the issue of export is the problem. There are all sorts of strong encryption available here in the USA, until recently better than anything in Europe, and we were all free to use them within the USA but export restrictions prevented them from being marketed abroad.
>Do you think bands make their music for the fans? >Think again; they do it for themselves, not for >you or anyone else.
As a corrollary, you must keep in mind the following:
Do you think I buy music for the band? Think again, I buy music for myself, not for the band or anyone else, because I enjoy the music. Duh.
Of course the band should make music for the fans. I give _them_ money, don't I?:)
What's your problem? Do you think that corporate entities, like music bands, are entitled to create whatever they want and expect people to give them money for it? Not if they expect to get paid. If they sell stuff _to me_, they had better make stuff that _I like_. Otherwise, why on earth would I bother?
This also shows that RMS, because of his philsophy, is not dependent on the whims and wild swings of the stock market. RedHat, VALinux, etc. are companies that have no guarantee of being able to stay in business, while all of RMS's free software is always going to be with us. He has much more "staying power" than many of these flash-in-the-pan Linux companies. Linuxcare and VALinux have noone to blame but themselves for their troubles. There aren't hordes of Linux-geeks refusing to have anything to do with these companies in favor of RMS's philsophies, RMS just accurate prophesied their fate. -Dean
Re:Don't be fooled by philanthropic SCAM !!
on
ArsDigita University
·
· Score: 1
Not true... ArsDigita _already_ has a "recruitment course"... It is a 3-week long "boot camp" that they use to train and recruit prospective employees which covers specifically the sort of work done at ArsDigita.com (and can be taken at home rather than travelling to Cambridge to take the class). Incidently, it is also free.
ArsDigita university only has one section in its curriculum that covers the work that ArsDigita.com does. Mostly ArsDigita University covers the sort of computer science theory you would find in a major university.
Generally, it's always good to remember that concepts of copyright and intellectual property are actually quite recent innovations. I can't imagine Romanian troubadours seeking financial indemnity against Russian storytellers for coming up with different Dracula variations, for example. I have little sympathy for anyone whining about the inviolable integrity of their precious "intellectual property" when it comes to fanfic.
Copyright exists so that authors can become properly compensated for their work within their lifetime and a little bit afterwards. After this, all characters, settings, etc. enter the public domain.
Since fanfic is not for profit and for the entertainment of the fans themselves (who are encouraging interest in the author's original work), it's best to pretty much ignore the "righteous indignation" of IP owners when it comes to fan-based enthusiasm for their work.
As soon as copyright begins to become a burden for most honest people just having fun with pop culture, then we know something is wrong. Take such "intellectual property rights" with a real grain of salt, here.
Jon Katz always has to work in a mention about geeks and "poop culture" and how they just love it, whatever that is, though he never hesitates to explain what aspect of pop culture "geeks" like or why this makes them different from anyone else. And now we here that women online "focus less on pop culture, more on so-called 'traditional' women's interests -- food, fashion, lifestyle."
I don't understand this, and Jon's columns will be helped so much if he actually participated in the forums... I have to ask, isn't "food, fashion, lifestyle" simply other aspects of "pop culture"? Why isn't it the "pop culture" that Katz is constantly promoting?
Actually, what makes the awards _interesting_ for me is that they are awarded precisely by a small "elite" group... there's the Academy Awards, the Golden Globe Awards, and a few others like this, and it is interesting to see what they have to say, rather than simply looking at box office returns.
That's the point of these groups like the Academy and whoever does the golden globes-- give an award based on what they, the "insider elites", think, and take that for what it's worth, if anything.
When "the masses" act in the aggregate, their reactions are pretty predictable, but it is the quirkiness and unusual nature of decisions make by the small groups and individuals that gives me insight into why movies are considered "worthy" of recognition.
There is nothing inviolable about the "intellectual property rights" of the MPAA to control how and when someone may view the property that appears on a medium. Any rights they claim exist only in so far as they can be enforced... their "rights" are effectively mythical and are there only because we collectively "buy in" to this myth.
We "buy in" to the idea that we should not engage in mass duplication of the program and distribute it far and wide. However, no matter what kind of legal claim a company may have to dictate how, precisely, I may use the data for my personal business is something that I have no reason to "believe in." Thus, their rights do not exist and pretty much end at the door to my apartment.
The "property rights" that the MPAA are claiming are rights that amount to breaking into your house and telling you how you may or may not use your DVD. You can argue all you want about how the contract in their license gives them these rights and we only buy a license to use the DVD in a specific way, but their "rights" are a legal fiction that are only followed by those who believe them. And I disbelieve.
If a television station said that it was illegal for you to record their programs, would you claim you were interefering with their intellectual property if you recorded the program on your VCR? Of course not, because you would regard it as an interference in your personal business, and such a claim by the TV station was inherently unenforceable and their right to tell you not to record it was a myth. The same goes for the MPAA in their claim that only "authorized" players are allowed to play DVDs.
Technically, this is correct. However, any claim that a recording company has to their "ownership" of their ability to enforce how I can use the music is entirely mythical. It may well be that we consent to go along with this myth, but for all intents and purposes, the "licensing agreement" in unenforceable, and the value of the "distribution service" that the media companies provide by distributing the media has become essentially worthless.
So you're right that we only have a license to play a CD on a CD player and not to copy the digital data into another format, but the technical realities of the situation reduce such a license to a quaint joke. If you simply choose to "disbelieve" the license in this case, it ceases to exist. So my advice is to decide not to going along with the "myth" of the company's ownership and copy the contents of the CD onto your hard drive.
I know many of us are wondering why this review appeared on slashdot. Yes, it's weird that this movie has been out for weeks, but it does fit into what Jon Katz thinks we want to read... Katz's oft-repeated claim is that "geeks are in love with pop culture."
Scream 3 is one of those movies whose main attraction is its "pop culture" references, so clearly Katz thought it would have wide "geek appeal".
Of course, the movie was vacuous and they never got better than the freshness of the humor and self-deprecation of the first one.
Well, we can both agree on Katz's writing style... and the article itself was probably out of place here on slashdot, but it is interesting because it is finally a statement by someone that doesn't run along the lines of, "we are entering a new era where Old Media is dead and the New will rise up blahblahblah". It is a very common-sense statement from Katz explaining why the New Media becomes a supplement and intergrates itself into Old Media, in the same way that TV did not eliminate radio or newspapers.
This is a welcome statement from those who think they are part of the "Digerati" and probably reflects a maturing of Katz's views on the topic.
Under windows, I can feed the composite output of my DVD player into my ATI All-in-Wonder Pro and MPEG-encode the analog video stream. I can then copy these MPEGs onto CD-Rs.
I don't need deCSS for this, and deCSS does not make my job of pirating DVDs any easier. If I was a professional pirate, I'd do a bit-for-bit copy using a professional DVD duplicator. As an amateur, if I wanted to make pirate copies, I would have innumerable opportunities to do so without deCSS.
The "Ask Jon Katz" idea was awesome, and something that was really needed.
But one thing it pointed out was how Katz is so completely unrepentent when his shortcomings are pointed out, and since we can all agree that he is lacking in so many areas, it is time for us to start demanding results from the areas we've been shortchanged:
1) Concise, insightful slashdot articles from a writer that doesn't have to show off "what a good writer i am by using methaphors"
2) Writing that doesn't insult our intelligence. I'm tired of Katz articles that begin, "for centuries government/religion/adults/BigBusiness has been used to oppress the intellectual elites/geek world." This relates to the next point:
3) true social insight without pandering to what he thinks is the "slashdot audience." The presmise of having a supposed "writer" outside the "geek community" write about technology is a good one. The problem is that Katz is so enamored with the community that he can't step outside of it.He feels that he has to do us a favor by becoming the "literate" advocate of our community.
So, what I want to see is if slashdot can explore other writers and see if some of them come across better than Katz.
When I read the original story about the ways Lucas was supposedly reacting to the racial stereotyping present in TPM, I thought to myself, "oh, no... making up for racial stereotyping by adding... more racial stereotypes!"
I guess I should have appreciated the irony. In retrospect it was obviously a hoax sent to a gullible press and audience (such as myself). However, it seemed so believable because of the sort of stereotype-baiting casting decisions we saw in programs like Star Trek: Voyager.
It just goes to show, the press is just as gullible the rest of us are, sometimes.:)
The point is that Microsoft had no intention of hiring them as "permanent employees." The treated them like permanent employees, worked them like employees, and hired them like employees but placed a label "temp" on them because they didn't want to pay benefits. It's not that the temps could have gotten full time jobs at Microsoft, it's that Microsoft had no intention of taking them on as permanent employees.
They wanted a large number of workers with the label "temp" attached to them so that it would save them money. The lower courts ruled that this sort of scheme is illegal.
Well, it may be well and good for private consumers to purchase filtering software with proprietary filtering lists. However, public libraries should not spend public money on filtering software that doesn't specify what, precisely, it is filtering.
Unless the entire filtering system is controlled at the discretion of the library staff, rather than a filtering company, then the whole filtering idea is just another way to chip away at our freedoms. (for example, we'd all complain if a company told a library which books it could and couldn't stock)
Katz mentions that a law restricting the distribution of pornography to known minors was struck down by a California Court. Now, I don't know what made the law so vague as to be unconstitutional, but does it make sense that if selling pornography to minors is illegal, why wouldn't e-mail pornography over the internet also be allowed to be illegal? It would seem that this is more or less the same thing, only using different means of delivering the porn to others.
So why is the internet held to a different standard?
Actually, if it wasn't for our sense of consumer entitlement, we would be corporate drones beholding to the whims of eccentric control-freaks like Lucas. So unless you want to _become_ one of these slaves to consumerism, I suggest you get with the program.
Slashdot Mirror
The other method of commuting into NYC from Connecticut is via car on I-95. Do you realize that I-95 is subsidized on the order of _100%_ by the state and federal government? You don't pay tolls, do you? That's why mass transit is also subsidized, since it's a public transportation service just like Metro North. Also, Metro North provides a valuable service by reducing congestion on I-95 by making mass transit a feasible alternative to driving into the city.
Like the original poster said, driving 30 miles each way to work is a lifestyle choice, so I don't have much sympathy for those who complain about traffic, gas prices, etc.
-Dean
It's a bit more complicated than that. The Romans (ie, Byzantines as they are called in the middle ages) didn't really place a big priority on such sciences. Archimedes was killed in the Roman takeover of Syracuse, and noone except a lone Roman officer (whose name escapes me) realized what a great man they had inadvertently killed... he was the only person that made sure to memorialize him.
It's not so much that Archimedes was considered "unacceptable" but that he just wasn't considered that important.
-Dean
Please note that "unitedstatesian" could also refer to the "United States of Mexico", the official name of our southern neighbor. Please do not confuse the readers.
:)
-Dean
No one (read much less people) will enter a field where the prospects of earning a decent living are substantially lower than in other fields.
The threshhold of "a decent living" in America is quite low. In the biological sciences, people go years in low paid graduate student and post-doctoral positions where the prospect of making a lot of money will always be quite low. But yet the market is absolutely flooded with biology grad students. Likewise, there is very little money in acting or music, even today.
However, what will change is the possibility of making gobs and gobs of money. Hardly anyone ever does actually make a lot of money in the arts or writing, but I wonder how many people stay in the industry because they fantasize that one day they may be that successful and whether once that possibility is eliminated the market will dry up.
This is just a normal, legitimate use of Napster. What were we expecting to happen? While Napster allows for easy indexing of files, it also allows for easy indexing of file ownership.
I wouldn't call it scary, just a normal and expected use of the technology.
-Dean
So true. A couple things, though... There was a shortage of housing under rent control, but it was a shortage of _expensive_ housing. Those poor, suffering highly paid professionals were unable to get into the Cambridge housing market under rent control because the market couldn't support luxury housing. The end of rent control suddenly changed a lot of run down units into high-rent living spaces.
We've also contended with the paradox that "creating jobs" in Cambridge has actually made us suffer. New office buildings and businesses have sprouted up creating hundreds, if not thousands of jobs. However, people seem to have forgotten that people who live in the city might want to work there, as well, and lack of new housing development while we've had lots of new office buildings has wreaked a lot of havoc.
However, generally, things are a bit more affordable here compared to Silicon Valley and San Francisco, unless you want to live alone. You can find living situations with a bunch of roommates in a somewhat dumpy apartment at reasonable prices (eg, $500/per person, per month).
Also, there are many affordable neighboring cities nearby, whereas in Silicon Valley, you can't find anything affordable for a 50 mile radius.
-Dean
That's what it all gets down to... control. And I don't think that's a good thing. The ultimate in "control" was DIVX... the company dictated when you were allowed to view your DIVX disc and charged you each time you did for those times you were allowed. If you decided to buy an "ultimated livense", you weren't allowed to play it on your friend's machine without getting charged.
What if Metallica said that their desire to "control" entitled them to dictate which CD player could play their CDs and dictated that you couldn't give the CD to anyone else?
I realize that these guys want to control how their music is distributed, but I think that is ultimately more dangerous than preventing them from controlling it.
-Dean
I feel I must point out that your post is pretty much wrong. The US is usually perfectly happy to adopt standards that are unique to the USA even if they are out-of-line with Europe's, as is the case with cell phones and measuring units. Noone (noone sane, that is) would claim that the US is trying to keep cell phones out of our hands, for example simply because we don't commonly use european standards.
Also, there are no restrictions on forms of encryption developed within the USA itself-- the issue of export is the problem. There are all sorts of strong encryption available here in the USA, until recently better than anything in Europe, and we were all free to use them within the USA but export restrictions prevented them from being marketed abroad.
-Dean
>Do you think bands make their music for the fans?
:)
>Think again; they do it for themselves, not for
>you or anyone else.
As a corrollary, you must keep in mind the following:
Do you think I buy music for the band? Think again, I buy music for myself, not for the band or anyone else, because I enjoy the music. Duh.
Of course the band should make music for the fans. I give _them_ money, don't I?
What's your problem? Do you think that corporate entities, like music bands, are entitled to create whatever they want and expect people to give them money for it? Not if they expect to get paid. If they sell stuff _to me_, they had better make stuff that _I like_. Otherwise, why on earth would I bother?
-Dean
This also shows that RMS, because of his philsophy, is not dependent on the whims and wild swings of the stock market. RedHat, VALinux, etc. are companies that have no guarantee of being able to stay in business, while all of RMS's free software is always going to be with us. He has much more "staying power" than many of these flash-in-the-pan Linux companies. Linuxcare and VALinux have noone to blame but themselves for their troubles. There aren't hordes of Linux-geeks refusing to have anything to do with these companies in favor of RMS's philsophies, RMS just accurate prophesied their fate. -Dean
Not true... ArsDigita _already_ has a "recruitment course"... It is a 3-week long "boot camp" that they use to train and recruit prospective employees which covers specifically the sort of work done at ArsDigita.com (and can be taken at home rather than travelling to Cambridge to take the class). Incidently, it is also free.
ArsDigita university only has one section in its curriculum that covers the work that ArsDigita.com does. Mostly ArsDigita University covers the sort of computer science theory you would find in a major university.
-Dean
Generally, it's always good to remember that concepts of copyright and intellectual property are actually quite recent innovations. I can't imagine Romanian troubadours seeking financial indemnity against Russian storytellers for coming up with different Dracula variations, for example. I have little sympathy for anyone whining about the inviolable integrity of their precious "intellectual property" when it comes to fanfic.
Copyright exists so that authors can become properly compensated for their work within their lifetime and a little bit afterwards. After this, all characters, settings, etc. enter the public domain.
Since fanfic is not for profit and for the entertainment of the fans themselves (who are encouraging interest in the author's original work), it's best to pretty much ignore the "righteous indignation" of IP owners when it comes to fan-based enthusiasm for their work.
As soon as copyright begins to become a burden for most honest people just having fun with pop culture, then we know something is wrong. Take such "intellectual property rights" with a real grain of salt, here.
-Dean
Jon Katz always has to work in a mention about geeks and "poop culture" and how they just love it, whatever that is, though he never hesitates to explain what aspect of pop culture "geeks" like or why this makes them different from anyone else. And now we here that women online "focus less on pop culture, more on so-called 'traditional' women's interests -- food, fashion, lifestyle."
I don't understand this, and Jon's columns will be helped so much if he actually participated in the forums... I have to ask, isn't "food, fashion, lifestyle" simply other aspects of "pop culture"? Why isn't it the "pop culture" that Katz is constantly promoting?
-Dean
Actually, what makes the awards _interesting_ for me is that they are awarded precisely by a small "elite" group... there's the Academy Awards, the Golden Globe Awards, and a few others like this, and it is interesting to see what they have to say, rather than simply looking at box office returns.
That's the point of these groups like the Academy and whoever does the golden globes-- give an award based on what they, the "insider elites", think, and take that for what it's worth, if anything.
When "the masses" act in the aggregate, their reactions are pretty predictable, but it is the quirkiness and unusual nature of decisions make by the small groups and individuals that gives me insight into why movies are considered "worthy" of recognition.
-Dean
There is nothing inviolable about the "intellectual property rights" of the MPAA to control how and when someone may view the property that appears on a medium. Any rights they claim exist only in so far as they can be enforced... their "rights" are effectively mythical and are there only because we collectively "buy in" to this myth.
We "buy in" to the idea that we should not engage in mass duplication of the program and distribute it far and wide. However, no matter what kind of legal claim a company may have to dictate how, precisely, I may use the data for my personal business is something that I have no reason to "believe in." Thus, their rights do not exist and pretty much end at the door to my apartment.
The "property rights" that the MPAA are claiming are rights that amount to breaking into your house and telling you how you may or may not use your DVD. You can argue all you want about how the contract in their license gives them these rights and we only buy a license to use the DVD in a specific way, but their "rights" are a legal fiction that are only followed by those who believe them. And I disbelieve.
If a television station said that it was illegal for you to record their programs, would you claim you were interefering with their intellectual property if you recorded the program on your VCR? Of course not, because you would regard it as an interference in your personal business, and such a claim by the TV station was inherently unenforceable and their right to tell you not to record it was a myth. The same goes for the MPAA in their claim that only "authorized" players are allowed to play DVDs.
-Dean
Technically, this is correct. However, any claim that a recording company has to their "ownership" of their ability to enforce how I can use the music is entirely mythical. It may well be that we consent to go along with this myth, but for all intents and purposes, the "licensing agreement" in unenforceable, and the value of the "distribution service" that the media companies provide by distributing the media has become essentially worthless.
So you're right that we only have a license to play a CD on a CD player and not to copy the digital data into another format, but the technical realities of the situation reduce such a license to a quaint joke. If you simply choose to "disbelieve" the license in this case, it ceases to exist. So my advice is to decide not to going along with the "myth" of the company's ownership and copy the contents of the CD onto your hard drive.
-Dean
I know many of us are wondering why this review appeared on slashdot. Yes, it's weird that this movie has been out for weeks, but it does fit into what Jon Katz thinks we want to read... Katz's oft-repeated claim is that "geeks are in love with pop culture."
Scream 3 is one of those movies whose main attraction is its "pop culture" references, so clearly Katz thought it would have wide "geek appeal".
Of course, the movie was vacuous and they never got better than the freshness of the humor and self-deprecation of the first one.
Well, we can both agree on Katz's writing style... and the article itself was probably out of place here on slashdot, but it is interesting because it is finally a statement by someone that doesn't run along the lines of, "we are entering a new era where Old Media is dead and the New will rise up blahblahblah". It is a very common-sense statement from Katz explaining why the New Media becomes a supplement and intergrates itself into Old Media, in the same way that TV did not eliminate radio or newspapers.
This is a welcome statement from those who think they are part of the "Digerati" and probably reflects a maturing of Katz's views on the topic.
-Dean
Under windows, I can feed the composite output of my DVD player into my ATI All-in-Wonder Pro and MPEG-encode the analog video stream. I can then copy these MPEGs onto CD-Rs.
I don't need deCSS for this, and deCSS does not make my job of pirating DVDs any easier. If I was a professional pirate, I'd do a bit-for-bit copy using a professional DVD duplicator. As an amateur, if I wanted to make pirate copies, I would have innumerable opportunities to do so without deCSS.
-Dean
The "Ask Jon Katz" idea was awesome, and something that was really needed.
But one thing it pointed out was how Katz is so completely unrepentent when his shortcomings are pointed out, and since we can all agree that he is lacking in so many areas, it is time for us to start demanding results from the areas we've been shortchanged:
1) Concise, insightful slashdot articles from a writer that doesn't have to show off "what a good writer i am by using methaphors"
2) Writing that doesn't insult our intelligence. I'm tired of Katz articles that begin, "for centuries government/religion/adults/BigBusiness has been used to oppress the intellectual elites/geek world." This relates to the next point:
3) true social insight without pandering to what he thinks is the "slashdot audience." The presmise of having a supposed "writer" outside the "geek community" write about technology is a good one. The problem is that Katz is so enamored with the community that he can't step outside of it.He feels that he has to do us a favor by becoming the "literate" advocate of our community.
So, what I want to see is if slashdot can explore other writers and see if some of them come across better than Katz.
-Dean
When I read the original story about the ways Lucas was supposedly reacting to the racial stereotyping present in TPM, I thought to myself, "oh, no... making up for racial stereotyping by adding... more racial stereotypes!"
:)
I guess I should have appreciated the irony. In retrospect it was obviously a hoax sent to a gullible press and audience (such as myself). However, it seemed so believable because of the sort of stereotype-baiting casting decisions we saw in programs like Star Trek: Voyager.
It just goes to show, the press is just as gullible the rest of us are, sometimes.
-Dean
The point is that Microsoft had no intention of hiring them as "permanent employees." The treated them like permanent employees, worked them like employees, and hired them like employees but placed a label "temp" on them because they didn't want to pay benefits. It's not that the temps could have gotten full time jobs at Microsoft, it's that Microsoft had no intention of taking them on as permanent employees.
They wanted a large number of workers with the label "temp" attached to them so that it would save them money. The lower courts ruled that this sort of scheme is illegal.
-Dean
Well, it may be well and good for private consumers to purchase filtering software with proprietary filtering lists. However, public libraries should not spend public money on filtering software that doesn't specify what, precisely, it is filtering.
Unless the entire filtering system is controlled at the discretion of the library staff, rather than a filtering company, then the whole filtering idea is just another way to chip away at our freedoms.
(for example, we'd all complain if a company told a library which books it could and couldn't stock)
-Dean
Katz mentions that a law restricting the distribution of pornography to known minors was struck down by a California Court. Now, I don't know what made the law so vague as to be unconstitutional, but does it make sense that if selling pornography to minors is illegal, why wouldn't e-mail pornography over the internet also be allowed to be illegal? It would seem that this is more or less the same thing, only using different means of delivering the porn to others.
So why is the internet held to a different standard?
-Dean
Actually, if it wasn't for our sense of consumer entitlement, we would be corporate drones beholding to the whims of eccentric control-freaks like Lucas. So unless you want to _become_ one of these slaves to consumerism, I suggest you get with the program.
-Dean