Not the AC, but I just wanted to point out that it's simply not possible for people to expect employees to police their managers. Sure, at some level some boss orders a guy to stick his hand in a running machine, this can be dealt with. But above that, how many Enron employees could have been expected to know that their maintenance schedule in power generation plants across California was carefully crafted to make sure too many separate plants were taken offline for maintenance?
At some point, you eventually reach a place where the only way to continue is to use the powers of government to compel evidence. What's needed at this point is to get rid of the "corporate veil" so that the "evil people" are dealt with by the criminal system (rather than the civil tort system), so that the government's involvement isn't wasted on some lawyer a 50% cut of the settlement.
"Hi mom, I'm coming home this weekend, and I'll have a load of laundry. I'll also need some money because I can get P3NNY ST0X GO WILD OVER OTCBB FFFF! and some C1AL1S CHEAP AT HTTP//CHEAPERDR00GZ.MX/ !! Could you just transfer the funds to my account, it's easy to do, just go to 12.51.53.21/htedit/upload/pics/boa_rip/index.htm [bankofamerica.com]!"
figures that wide-area wireless will take off even faster as the telephone and cable companies try to turn the Internet into television.
While I'm sure you and he thinks wlan will save the world, with ATT and bell south in on this, where is your wireless company going to get their bandwidth from if the other major bandwidth/backbone providers join in? Some other ISP that gets it from ATT?
At this point, the only thing that can actually save us will be the rumored googlenet. As much as end-to-end control of the network by one company reeks of (maybe benign, maybe not) monopoly, at least companies can hook up to it without worrying that some petty fiefdom on the other side will be changing the rules and waylaying their packets en route to their customers.
Thats the point of this law. You've covered all your bases, but you haven't covered the bases of everyone who's listening/watching. If they record your stream and show it to their friends, then they're in need of the same licenses as you.
The PERFORM act makes this your fault, and your problem to fix (by using DRM).
You can get small-as-hell DVD players now for about $40 at your local Target (which will probably be cheaper than the Revolution add on.)
Exactly. Why should nintendo pay per-unit DVD licensing fees for something that the vast majority of the users won't need or want? We're no longer in the PS2 generation where having a DVD player built in was so important that I own DVDs that came with a "PS2 Compatible!" sticker on them.
The only answer that comes to my mind is "Crime". And I'm all for a government cutting that down.
Crime, really? Lets say someone "forgets" their tracking tag at home and goes on a killing spree. You, loyal citizen, take your tag to the grocery store to do some shopping and cross paths with the killer.
I'm sure the cops will be spending the rest of the evening talking about how stupid criminals are these days, going around with their tracking tags and killing people.
This is of course ignoring all the other abuses a corrupt government employee could make from this data. Hell, given that it's the government I'd expect the safeguards to be pretty weak. Expect blackmail letters: "Pay up $10000 or else it will be your tag they track to the grassy knoll". Just tweak a few coordinates in a file somewhere and it's all over for you.
I want to always allow it, deny it, or only allow it this one time.
One of the things I hate about my firewall is that those are the only options. What I'd like to do is "only deny it this one time" so I can see if/how it breaks, and can simply restart the app or game and answer ok if it simply must have internet access.
All good programmers start out as incompetent programmers.
Sorry to butt in on your argument, but it's a pretty pointless one. The real issue you two should be arguing isn't one of competency or not, it's one of experience. The original poster whined that there weren't any Swing programmers in his city with 4 years of experience applying to his job. The suggestion was to hire an inexperienced programmer and teach him/her to use Swing. Or to raise the pay to the level necessary to steal a swing programmer from another employer (and I'll add a third option:*shock* *gasp* offer to relocate a programmer to the area). (or at least offer to accept resumes from out of state employees... I can't count the number of jobs I applied to that I called to follow up only to find that they trashed my resume simply because I wasn't "local" even though I was more than willing and able to relocate myself out of this humid pit of a city)
All good programmers start out as inexperienced programmers. Refusing a good programmer because he hasn't got 10 years of experience in C# doesn't help anyone.
No, see, those are different. I buy 2mbps/256kbps DSL. I should get something approximating that speed when possible. Google buys 500mbps/500mbps whatever. They should get something approximating that speed when possible. I paid for my tier, google paid for their tier. What these people want is for google to ALSO pay for my tier, in addition to what I already paid for my tier.
The problem is that the ISPs are wanting to create new barriers to use the bandwidth that we paid for. Google's got plenty of bandwidth from their ISP(s), I've got plenty of bandwidth from my ISP, and the ISPs certainly have plenty of bandwidth between them, but if Google doesn't pay my ISP, then I can only use Google at 1kbps.
Personally, I think its fraud. I'm hoping that Google resists shelling out the cash and that I can measure the difference in some way so that I can sue my ISP for intentionally degrading the performance of the service I'm paying for below the levels they promised to me.
You'd want to be able to make sure that your stuff got through when you needed it to, even if it meant paying an extra five dollars a month.
How many thousands of ISPs are there in the world? You say $5 a month as if thats anywhere near what they're thinking of charging. If all of them decided to charge for access into their network from the outside, google could be paying millions of dollars a month just to make sure that their stuff "got through" to the customers of all those ISPs. Maybe you misunderstand, maybe you think "get my critical document through" is a service you're buying from your ISP, but whats being proposed is that you'd have to buy this service from all the other ISPs your "critical document" might need to go to.
If you want an analogy, it's like you have a company shipping a package to a customer in an apartment. Your company pays FedEx, FedEx ships the package, the package arrives at the apartment's front desk. Now, the apartment manager calls you to tell you it would be a terrible shame if the package didn't make it to the customer, and that just $20 will help protect it from being "lost". Just as in the ISP case, there is no actual reason that the package should not make it to the hands of your customer (and seriously, when was the last time you had trouble getting the google website to load while your internet connection was working? Do you think google paying up will make your internet connection go down less?) and yet here is some thug who insinuates something bad will happen if you don't pay up. You paid fedex to ship it, the customer paid the apartment manager for a mailbox, what does this extra money actually buy?
These days 'good' is often defined as a top quartile CS student who's had 5 years of on the job experience with a top level team.
The hilarious thing is that this is true, and not only that, the vast majority of the companies out there sobbing about how they can't hire a "good" employee go whining to the government when their bottom quartile pay+benefits somehow only manages to attract bottom quartile applicants.
But Bono and Madonna never asked for your loytalty.
So does target's CEO say they don't need customers?
After all, if people bought these musicians' cd's, they wouldn't be able to whine about piracy (because obviously their alienated fans they don't need must be downloading the music from kazaa since they're not buying the CDs!!!1!)
If they just made shitty music and went to their graves quietly, this wouldn't be an issue. But no, they make shitty music, they know they make shitty music (see Bono's comment) then they use their money and influence to convince people that it must be pirates fault that nobody's buying their CDs, and someone has to stand up to this.
if it greatly puts single persons or companies (etc.pp.) to an unfair disadvantage to others.
I tried going to the newspaper to explain that SmithCorp was dumping toxic waste into the school's playground, but they refused to publish it even with my photographs of guys in bunny suits dumping 55 gallon drums off the back of a company truck. Something about putting the company at an unfair disadvantage. Of course, it could have also been that the local paper's owned by SmithCorp.
Thats the problem with evolution, it doesn't produce the best form possible. All it does is guarantee that you'll have at least the worst form that is still capable of reproduction. Anything better than that is just luck.
"recalls being unable to tell the good guys from the bad as both armed soldiers and civilians alike would order his family out of their car to search it"
The funny part is that it seems pretty obvious to me who the bad guys are here, and that'd be "all of them", assuming I'm not trying to drive my family onto an army base.
In the future the glibc/kernel or whatever would be altered so that exec() works for any file
Already there, see binfmt_misc. Give the kernel information on how to identify the file and what command to run to execute it. Works great for java, mono, wine, etc. Sucks for text.
The difference between doing this in a shell and in the kernel is that to do this in kernelspace requires that every single file be marked as executable, which breaks the concept of executableness (not to mention cases of virus.txt, where it's not actually a text file), and screws everything up for the non newbies.
I was thinking of a shell that would 1) attempt to find executable on the path 2) attempt to find executable given relative path (so that "./thingIcompiled" will work) 3) attempt to find a file in the current directory (or relative path, so "./ls" would work) and if it finds one, it attempts to use "file" to identify what kind of file it is, then uses/etc/mailcap to find an application that can operate on that file. (This avoids having a shell that relies on X and 50MB of gnome/kde/whatever libraries, while still doing The Right Thing and not being confused by the wrong file extension (or like README, with none).
And in the meantime inject helpful hints on learning how to use Linux. "cd foo... Permission denied" would become "you do not have access to enter this directory. Directory access permission is indicated by an "x" or a "t" in the xxxx group of permissions. If you own the directory you can use the command "chmod yaddayaddayadda" to give yourself access to that directory.", "readme... file not found" would become "Linux is case sensitive, may I suggest you use README instead?", and "thingIcompiled" would give you instructions on how to use PATH responsibly, and how to run things in the current directory.
Actually, this might be a good idea. Need some answers to flesh out the specs first though.
What if there was a program named README? What if there was a file named ls, and every time you tried to get a directory listing it opened "ls" in vim? If I'm working on my FTP site and I have a ls-lR file in the main directory, what happens if I try to tabcomplete from "ls", should I get the file or the command?
I could see someone writing nsh (the newbie shell) (hm, looks like the network is taken by bsd 'network shell') which could do all this without having to worry about breaking the operation of existing shells. Maybe when the user feels they've graduated, they could type "done" and nsh would explain how to use chsh to switch to a "normal" shell, with some explanation of each option available on the system.
Then if they're still interested, they've got a decent enough foundation for me (ore more likely someone with more patience) to have a crack at enlightening them further.
And if they aren't, they post to slashdot whining about how some asshole just gave them a stack of useless books and manuals then gave them the cold sholder.
The stolen flag seems to be a cheap way out of a hard problem. A better way would have been a proper scale of value. Ever had a garage sale? If you completely cleaned out Joe Peasant's house, you shouldn't be getting more than a pittance. Maybe you'd get more by cleaning out some sultan's castle, but then you've got the guards, magical traps, locks, etc. that all that fortune brings.
As for the "stolen" flag itself, a merchant should be able to recognize his own goods, and then figure out the rest. How many house's worth of stuff do you think you could pawn at a single shop in the real world before the clerk gets suspicious? So, at some point, the merchant should get suspicious of you, and that merchant should react accordingly (and not by using psychic powers to alert all his merchant guild buddies). As for a related criminal flag, if you're not seen, it didn't happen (heck, if you stole a fork, it wouldn't even be missed). Unless what you took was pretty darn valuable, which in the game world would probably be worth hiring a diviner to look into the issue.
I'd want one of these things too. The "portable screen" idea microsoft had was a start (several years ago they briefly marketed a concept that was basically an underpowered tablet running nothing but a glorified VNC client showing the display on your real computer) but I need something standalone. Don't need to store my mp3 collection on it, so 4GB flash (harddrive=movingparts=bad) should be enough to load the OS and basic apps. Wireless, a good screen, USB for an optional keyboard, and I'd be set.
Slashdot Mirror
Not the AC, but I just wanted to point out that it's simply not possible for people to expect employees to police their managers. Sure, at some level some boss orders a guy to stick his hand in a running machine, this can be dealt with. But above that, how many Enron employees could have been expected to know that their maintenance schedule in power generation plants across California was carefully crafted to make sure too many separate plants were taken offline for maintenance?
At some point, you eventually reach a place where the only way to continue is to use the powers of government to compel evidence. What's needed at this point is to get rid of the "corporate veil" so that the "evil people" are dealt with by the criminal system (rather than the civil tort system), so that the government's involvement isn't wasted on some lawyer a 50% cut of the settlement.
"Hi mom, I'm coming home this weekend, and I'll have a load of laundry. I'll also need some money because I can get P3NNY ST0X GO WILD OVER OTCBB FFFF! and some C1AL1S CHEAP AT HTTP //CHEAPERDR00GZ.MX/ !! Could you just transfer the funds to my account, it's easy to do, just go to 12.51.53.21/htedit/upload/pics/boa_rip/index.htm [bankofamerica.com]!"
figures that wide-area wireless will take off even faster as the telephone and cable companies try to turn the Internet into television.
While I'm sure you and he thinks wlan will save the world, with ATT and bell south in on this, where is your wireless company going to get their bandwidth from if the other major bandwidth/backbone providers join in? Some other ISP that gets it from ATT?
At this point, the only thing that can actually save us will be the rumored googlenet. As much as end-to-end control of the network by one company reeks of (maybe benign, maybe not) monopoly, at least companies can hook up to it without worrying that some petty fiefdom on the other side will be changing the rules and waylaying their packets en route to their customers.
Thats the point of this law. You've covered all your bases, but you haven't covered the bases of everyone who's listening/watching. If they record your stream and show it to their friends, then they're in need of the same licenses as you.
The PERFORM act makes this your fault, and your problem to fix (by using DRM).
You can get small-as-hell DVD players now for about $40 at your local Target (which will probably be cheaper than the Revolution add on.)
Exactly. Why should nintendo pay per-unit DVD licensing fees for something that the vast majority of the users won't need or want? We're no longer in the PS2 generation where having a DVD player built in was so important that I own DVDs that came with a "PS2 Compatible!" sticker on them.
Oh, come on, name me one major hollywood movie with more realistic IT in it.
;)
Tron, of course
The only answer that comes to my mind is "Crime". And I'm all for a government cutting that down.
Crime, really? Lets say someone "forgets" their tracking tag at home and goes on a killing spree. You, loyal citizen, take your tag to the grocery store to do some shopping and cross paths with the killer.
I'm sure the cops will be spending the rest of the evening talking about how stupid criminals are these days, going around with their tracking tags and killing people.
This is of course ignoring all the other abuses a corrupt government employee could make from this data. Hell, given that it's the government I'd expect the safeguards to be pretty weak. Expect blackmail letters: "Pay up $10000 or else it will be your tag they track to the grassy knoll". Just tweak a few coordinates in a file somewhere and it's all over for you.
I want to always allow it, deny it, or only allow it this one time.
One of the things I hate about my firewall is that those are the only options. What I'd like to do is "only deny it this one time" so I can see if/how it breaks, and can simply restart the app or game and answer ok if it simply must have internet access.
All good programmers start out as incompetent programmers.
Sorry to butt in on your argument, but it's a pretty pointless one. The real issue you two should be arguing isn't one of competency or not, it's one of experience. The original poster whined that there weren't any Swing programmers in his city with 4 years of experience applying to his job. The suggestion was to hire an inexperienced programmer and teach him/her to use Swing. Or to raise the pay to the level necessary to steal a swing programmer from another employer (and I'll add a third option:*shock* *gasp* offer to relocate a programmer to the area). (or at least offer to accept resumes from out of state employees... I can't count the number of jobs I applied to that I called to follow up only to find that they trashed my resume simply because I wasn't "local" even though I was more than willing and able to relocate myself out of this humid pit of a city)
All good programmers start out as inexperienced programmers. Refusing a good programmer because he hasn't got 10 years of experience in C# doesn't help anyone.
In just about everything else, we have tiers.
No, see, those are different. I buy 2mbps/256kbps DSL. I should get something approximating that speed when possible. Google buys 500mbps/500mbps whatever. They should get something approximating that speed when possible. I paid for my tier, google paid for their tier. What these people want is for google to ALSO pay for my tier, in addition to what I already paid for my tier.
The problem is that the ISPs are wanting to create new barriers to use the bandwidth that we paid for. Google's got plenty of bandwidth from their ISP(s), I've got plenty of bandwidth from my ISP, and the ISPs certainly have plenty of bandwidth between them, but if Google doesn't pay my ISP, then I can only use Google at 1kbps.
Personally, I think its fraud. I'm hoping that Google resists shelling out the cash and that I can measure the difference in some way so that I can sue my ISP for intentionally degrading the performance of the service I'm paying for below the levels they promised to me.
You'd want to be able to make sure that your stuff got through when you needed it to, even if it meant paying an extra five dollars a month.
How many thousands of ISPs are there in the world? You say $5 a month as if thats anywhere near what they're thinking of charging. If all of them decided to charge for access into their network from the outside, google could be paying millions of dollars a month just to make sure that their stuff "got through" to the customers of all those ISPs. Maybe you misunderstand, maybe you think "get my critical document through" is a service you're buying from your ISP, but whats being proposed is that you'd have to buy this service from all the other ISPs your "critical document" might need to go to.
If you want an analogy, it's like you have a company shipping a package to a customer in an apartment. Your company pays FedEx, FedEx ships the package, the package arrives at the apartment's front desk. Now, the apartment manager calls you to tell you it would be a terrible shame if the package didn't make it to the customer, and that just $20 will help protect it from being "lost". Just as in the ISP case, there is no actual reason that the package should not make it to the hands of your customer (and seriously, when was the last time you had trouble getting the google website to load while your internet connection was working? Do you think google paying up will make your internet connection go down less?) and yet here is some thug who insinuates something bad will happen if you don't pay up. You paid fedex to ship it, the customer paid the apartment manager for a mailbox, what does this extra money actually buy?
accept your failures and struggle to move beyond them
Because obviously trying to improve ourselves is doomed to failure, we're all going to remain permanent virgins for the rest of our lives.
These days 'good' is often defined as a top quartile CS student who's had 5 years of on the job experience with a top level team.
The hilarious thing is that this is true, and not only that, the vast majority of the companies out there sobbing about how they can't hire a "good" employee go whining to the government when their bottom quartile pay+benefits somehow only manages to attract bottom quartile applicants.
Somebody's gotta do it, and she absolutely refuses to give it a try?
but they can also sell them for $19.95.
Except that they can't. If they could, they wouldn't be sobbing about piracy and using the government as a club to beat down their customers.
WINE becomes an OS component as soon as one Linux distro vendor bundles WINE
So apache an OS component, because all of the distribution vendors bundle it with linux?
Does that mean AOL is a component of windows, because dell bundles a 6 month trial on most of their machines?
But Bono and Madonna never asked for your loytalty.
So does target's CEO say they don't need customers?
After all, if people bought these musicians' cd's, they wouldn't be able to whine about piracy (because obviously their alienated fans they don't need must be downloading the music from kazaa since they're not buying the CDs!!!1!)
If they just made shitty music and went to their graves quietly, this wouldn't be an issue. But no, they make shitty music, they know they make shitty music (see Bono's comment) then they use their money and influence to convince people that it must be pirates fault that nobody's buying their CDs, and someone has to stand up to this.
if it greatly puts single persons or companies (etc.pp.) to an unfair disadvantage to others.
I tried going to the newspaper to explain that SmithCorp was dumping toxic waste into the school's playground, but they refused to publish it even with my photographs of guys in bunny suits dumping 55 gallon drums off the back of a company truck. Something about putting the company at an unfair disadvantage. Of course, it could have also been that the local paper's owned by SmithCorp.
Hang on, doorbell...
to produce the best form possible.
Thats the problem with evolution, it doesn't produce the best form possible. All it does is guarantee that you'll have at least the worst form that is still capable of reproduction. Anything better than that is just luck.
"recalls being unable to tell the good guys from the bad as both armed soldiers and civilians alike would order his family out of their car to search it"
The funny part is that it seems pretty obvious to me who the bad guys are here, and that'd be "all of them", assuming I'm not trying to drive my family onto an army base.
In the future the glibc/kernel or whatever would be altered so that exec() works for any file
/etc/mailcap to find an application that can operate on that file. (This avoids having a shell that relies on X and 50MB of gnome/kde/whatever libraries, while still doing The Right Thing and not being confused by the wrong file extension (or like README, with none).
... file not found" would become "Linux is case sensitive, may I suggest you use README instead?", and "thingIcompiled" would give you instructions on how to use PATH responsibly, and how to run things in the current directory.
Already there, see binfmt_misc. Give the kernel information on how to identify the file and what command to run to execute it. Works great for java, mono, wine, etc. Sucks for text.
The difference between doing this in a shell and in the kernel is that to do this in kernelspace requires that every single file be marked as executable, which breaks the concept of executableness (not to mention cases of virus.txt, where it's not actually a text file), and screws everything up for the non newbies.
I was thinking of a shell that would
1) attempt to find executable on the path
2) attempt to find executable given relative path (so that "./thingIcompiled" will work)
3) attempt to find a file in the current directory (or relative path, so "./ls" would work) and if it finds one, it attempts to use "file" to identify what kind of file it is, then uses
And in the meantime inject helpful hints on learning how to use Linux. "cd foo... Permission denied" would become "you do not have access to enter this directory. Directory access permission is indicated by an "x" or a "t" in the xxxx group of permissions. If you own the directory you can use the command "chmod yaddayaddayadda" to give yourself access to that directory.", "readme
Actually, this might be a good idea. Need some answers to flesh out the specs first though.
What if there was a program named README?
What if there was a file named ls, and every time you tried to get a directory listing it opened "ls" in vim?
If I'm working on my FTP site and I have a ls-lR file in the main directory, what happens if I try to tabcomplete from "ls", should I get the file or the command?
I could see someone writing nsh (the newbie shell) (hm, looks like the network is taken by bsd 'network shell') which could do all this without having to worry about breaking the operation of existing shells. Maybe when the user feels they've graduated, they could type "done" and nsh would explain how to use chsh to switch to a "normal" shell, with some explanation of each option available on the system.
"give a man a fish, feed him for a day; teach a man to fish, feed him for a lifetime"
I always preferred "give a man a fire and he'll be warm for the night. Set a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life."
Then if they're still interested, they've got a decent enough foundation for me (ore more likely someone with more patience) to have a crack at enlightening them further.
And if they aren't, they post to slashdot whining about how some asshole just gave them a stack of useless books and manuals then gave them the cold sholder.
Seems that it's a Catch-22 both ways.
The stolen flag seems to be a cheap way out of a hard problem. A better way would have been a proper scale of value. Ever had a garage sale? If you completely cleaned out Joe Peasant's house, you shouldn't be getting more than a pittance. Maybe you'd get more by cleaning out some sultan's castle, but then you've got the guards, magical traps, locks, etc. that all that fortune brings.
As for the "stolen" flag itself, a merchant should be able to recognize his own goods, and then figure out the rest. How many house's worth of stuff do you think you could pawn at a single shop in the real world before the clerk gets suspicious? So, at some point, the merchant should get suspicious of you, and that merchant should react accordingly (and not by using psychic powers to alert all his merchant guild buddies). As for a related criminal flag, if you're not seen, it didn't happen (heck, if you stole a fork, it wouldn't even be missed). Unless what you took was pretty darn valuable, which in the game world would probably be worth hiring a diviner to look into the issue.
I'd want one of these things too. The "portable screen" idea microsoft had was a start (several years ago they briefly marketed a concept that was basically an underpowered tablet running nothing but a glorified VNC client showing the display on your real computer) but I need something standalone. Don't need to store my mp3 collection on it, so 4GB flash (harddrive=movingparts=bad) should be enough to load the OS and basic apps. Wireless, a good screen, USB for an optional keyboard, and I'd be set.