Although I am clearly biased on this point, I just dont see any other need for a tech-union, perhaps someone else can enlighten me on this issue.
1. Any group has more power acting cohesively. Imagine how much money we could pull in if we had real bargaining power with all the companies in the industry. Imagine if all the programmers in the US refused to work for less than, say $55,000. Free-loaders wouldn't be justifiable anymore, and anyone who was good enough/hard-working enough would be even better. Look at pilots - they're less bright than coders by a lot, (I speak from USAF experience), but they're highly skilled and unionized - most airline pilots bring in $100,000+ for doing a job that's substantially less challenging than writing complex code. Did I mention they have unions?
The problem is that right now we're settling for less than what we should expect. There are some fabulously profitable companies out there. But all of that money was made by coders, who got a generous amount of money, but in all honesty deserve more.
2. Tech companies haven't been above screwing employees. People get let go a couple weeks before their options come due, often for fabricated reasons. H1-B visas get rammed through Congress to drive down IT salaries. Imagine if the Big Three automakers tried to import tens of thousands of foreign workers and then pay them substandard wages!! It can only happen in IT.
3. Marketing practices of today may become labor practices of tommorrow. If a company is willing to screw consumers with "content protection" do you really trust it not to screw its own employees?
4. A lot of anti-union people scream "I'm too good for a union - unions are for idiot construction workers." But many industry that depend on highly skilled labor are highly - pilots, aviation mechanics, teachers, athletes, actors. It obviously works for other "knowledge industries".
5. Technology unions probably would be different than old-school unions - it would have to be easier to get rid of people, since it's easier to freeload than it is in manufacturing. Contracts would probably be shorter term, grievance procedures would be streamlined/scaled back, working condition issues would be much less important, etc.
I know of *no* industry where unionization has decreased wages or really adversely affected employees.
And in third world countries can the cops beat up working-class people who complain, companies can collude to pay zero-level wages, and the working class gets fucked into the ground. Real intelligent post here.
I'm gonna do the unthinkable and admit my moderated-up post is just wrong. I was looking for some more evidence to substantiate my post so I went to Oyez later and did a little reading. It turns out that Scalia and Thomas are free speech maniacs - I now have a little more respect for them, which means (respect > 0). I think given the 8-1 opinion in Reno v ACLU, the 9-0 in Texas flag-burning, whatever, the DMCA may die painfully at the US Supreme Court.
On the other hand, the Bush Five are big fans of deferring to the authority of Congress, the Constitution gives Congress the authority to regulate copyrights, so you could see them viewing this as an issue of Congress excercises its enumerated copyright protection authority - very strict Constructionist. I guess it comes to down to whether or not code is speech - and if so whether the copyright clause in Article 3 trumps the First Ammendment or vice-versa.
This seems really obvious on face - like throwing out confessions. Then you see things like the framed rapist who they set free in Texas last week - he "confessed" too.
If we didn't have technicalities, the law enforcement industry would have no checks on itself. Imagine if illegally seized evidence could be used at trials. Why wouldn't cops go door-to-door looking for drugs? It's a much more efficient way to for them to pay their salaries.
Maybe your freedom/rights defending ACLU and the ACLU I see attacking freedom/rights aren't the same people.
I personally wish the ACLU would take a strong stance in support of the Second Ammendment - it's just as important as other consitutional rights, especially in light of a recent Supreme Court ruling that police have no obligation to protect people! But I no of absolutely no instance where the ACLU has supported gun control, there homepage makes no mention of gun control one way or another. I think you're just disliking the ACLU because you don't agree with other liberties.
Believe or not, it is possible to belong to the NRA and the ACLU. It's not like the ACLU has actively supported gun control, or the NRA has actively opposed free speech. The NRA picks up the one right the ACLU won't. When it comes to the practices of the law enforcement industry, they're very much on the same page. So just go join both - and don't tell ACLUer's you're an NRA member and vice versa - they get funny looks, trust me.
The CTO, if he/she has the background to at all qualified, frequently will be a management outsider. I have a friend whose company has a very bright CTO who isn't listened when he tries to talk sanely to the rest of the management. "Management" is frequently filled with an excess of sales/marketing/finance idiots who think anything without a liberal arts degree is too narrow-minded to understand anything. In small companies, he/she may be the only person who has a fucking clue about anything besides the actual techies, so Anonymous CTO may be quite right in claimin he's critical to the company.
It's not unique to Japan. Organizational loyalty exists worldwide in military organizations. People come second, the mission comes first. It's radically different than the outside world.
I've seen other people with a military background run into a related problem - they keep the military's cultural norms of loyalty to the organization and support of the leadership after they leave. The idea of screwing the company for her own benefit struck a fellow weekend-warrior friend as inherently wrong...
This is probably a big improvement over how normal tactical units communicate with locals. Right now, hand signals, emphatic yelling, etc. are the tool of choice for dealing with the language barrier between soldiers and civillians/prisoners. Even the ability to generate simple imperative or declarative statements on the spot would be quite helpful, "Go over there" or "You must leave your house. We have requested indirect fire near here."
Assuming this application, the best thing a designer could do would be to add a way to specify that a statement is imperative, since imperative statements would probably be the most common. In English, for example, a simple imperative statement is distinguished from a declarative statement only by context. In romance languages there is generally another verb for imperative uses so the translation is ambigious unless some contextual information by the English user.
I did a little research at Oyez and was suprised at how often the conservative judges on the Supreme Court rule in favor of first ammendment cases. Even after twelve years of Republican appointments, they ruled 9-0 in favor of a constitutional right to burn the flag, found the CDA unconstitutional, upheld the rights of the Klu Klux Klan and the American Nazi party to hold rallies, upheld the right to cable porn, upheld the right for criminals to sell books about their crimes, and so on. It seems likely the Supreme Court will uphold a right to distribute code. Of course, there could be subtle differences here which, since IANAL I wouln't understand.
I disagree. The masses CAN be powerful in stopping such grabs of liberty when they want to. In particular, the Betamax case (1984 was it?) that ruled that it was legal to tape shows and movies off TV... Also, the public resoundingly rejected Divx.
You understand the public had nothing to with Betamax? It's a Supreme Court decision, not a popular vote. Bear in mind that the Supreme Court will probably upheld the DMCA today. Since 1986, Reagan and Bush have added Clarence Thomas, Sandra Day O'Connor, et al to the Court. These people don't have a history of favoring free-speech rights.
Re:Really, what's so "noble" about open-source eth
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And that ethos is far from noble. It's the ethos of leeches
Have you ever met a corporate lawyer? I'm related to a couple. They don't produce anything and contribute nothing to society. Ever seen a marketing or sales department full of good-for-nothings? Same deal - they leech of the creative and physical labor of others. But we support these hoardes of parasites.
Either way, it's non-productive parasites all the way down...
I thought that if I were a *true* geek, I'd be able to tell where the 10.X.X.X IP addresses used in the movie actually corresponded to. (Hint, not a satellite). I can't recall if they're a class-A private subnet or not -- I only use the class-B private subnets.
Think of it like a 555-xxxx phone number in a movie. Don't want people pinging an IP to death.
There are hundreds of choices who would be far worse, but arguably "more qualified". I'd rather have a politician from an international body that has historically stuck up for the little guy. At least they didn't pick:
1. Bill Gates
2. Larry Ellison
3. Another exec from Microsoft, Cisco, Novell, Oracle, etc.
4. John Ashcroft or Paul Wellstone or similar folk on the right or left-wing of US politics
5. A European pol who believes the net is destroying the precious cultural identity of whatever country he happens to come from
6. Etc.
Finally, isn't ICANN a lot like the Balkans? A complete lack of respect for rule of law, individual rights, free speech, and democracy? Maybe he has the right experience for the job
I have a friend who can speak from painful experience. He would very much like to leave his company for greener pastures or go into independent contractor, but his long-term non-compete agreement is screwing him.
To all of you who say non-competes are uneforceable, you may very well be right. Nonetheless, it's awfully hard for a prospective employer/client to take on someone who has that legal battle potentially hanging over their head. Even if the non-compete is total bunk they still have to worry about legal costs to kill it...
The Mongols were better at this. They used redundant security systems long before anyone else. The tomb of Genghis Kahn was built by thousands of slaves, who were then marched back to forest, where the Khan's warriors killed them all. Those warriors were then taken to a village where the Khan's personal guard killed the warriors. Anyone who had firsthand knowledge of the location was dead, and anyone who had second-hand knowledge was dead too. This also logarithmically decreased the number of people who had any contact with the tomb's builders.
Another great turn-off is "developer with x years of Java experience" or even "developer with x years of experience". These things have two problems -
1) With newer technologies they get absurd real fast - How many people actually have 3 years of Java experience?? That makes you look idiotic real fast, and it makes applicants laugh. Some people may take it seriously and not apply, even if they're quite qualified.
2) In any case you're limiting your pool arbitrarily. Very arbitrarily - how do you know some with 2 years of experience won't work out, but someone with 3 years will? How do you know a young whipper-snapper who's eager to learn isn't the best person for the job? Again, if you're lucky, people with less than x years of experience in whatever will be undeterred but some bright people still won't want to deal with that crap...
Surveys have indicated that 85% of police officers think perjury is OK. Additionally, American police enjoy a remarkably tiny amount of oversight - any attempt to monitor their actions or keep them honest is shot down as 'anti-cop'.
The standards for libel/slander againsta a public official are extremely high. No public officer has won a libel suit in a couple decades. This is just plain silly. Even if the website is 'obscene' this is a pretty clear case of selective prosecution.
What about CS with management?
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I'm currently a CS major at a school that offers a minor in "Management for Technology Students". It also offers an MIS degree.(U of MN).
I'm thinking I won't enjoy straight coding as a career and I have some experience with management at the menial level aqnd I enjoyed it very much. But I'm doing quite well in CS and I don't think I'd respect myself as an MIS student. Is it worth my time to spend a couple years turning out code and then move into a non-development field or some management job? Is a management minor worth my time?
Like most national matters, it's quite hard to pin down GW's postition since he tried to avoid voicing one. One indication of his opinion on civil liberties comes from his praise of "strict constructionist" judges, i.e Scalia and Thomas. A quick Lexis search turned up no instances in the pass 3 years where either one of them has been on the pro-civil liberties side of a split decision on these issues. Thomas issued a startlingly harsh dissent in the court's decision last month to overturn drug-search roadbloacks in Indianapolis. Additionally, I think the law-enforcement industry endorsed Bush so he'll need to pay them back. The forfeiture provision is exactly what the industry loves- a chance to accumulate loads of cash. (Sadly, your friendly police officer cares more about staying employed than protecting people.)
So I think it's safe to assume we can't expect Bush to veto this puppy or not exploit it.
This sounds awfully unconstitutional to me, or at least worthy of a contest in court.
You're probably right. Unfortunately, we're gonna have to take it to the glorious Reinqhuist Court. Regardless of how you feel about their election decisions, these guys don't have a reputation for upholding civil liberties. This is the court that gave us pre-trial asset forfeiture, random school drug tests, drunk-driving roadblocks, the "good faith" exception to 4th ammmendment, and a few other outstanding decisions. Not a chance in hell they'll do the right thing. A constitutional challenge will most likely not succeed.
I would have thought that as the army is security paranoid, they would not install an open source OS on truely mission critical devices.
These are hardly mission critical devices. I read once that combat vehicles have approximately one hour of downtime for each hour of uptime. They require absurd maintenance.
I don't think these devices control any critical systems or transmit any critical data. Weapons systems normally have "black box" designed electronics. When the thing fails, you don't attempt to diagnose the problem, you pull the component out and insert the spare. Hopefully someone will eventually fix the orignal, although apparently soldiers discarded millions of dollars of the puppies in the Arabian desert.
Linux Security is good for businesses, but in the army it's different - their enemies have resources and will keep what they develop a secret, before deploying it once.
I think the opposite is true. Closed source software's advantage is security through obscurity. A huge part of obscurity is the idea of not reverse-engineering the closed source software.
In peacetime, the clause in the license against reverse-engineering gets some respect. Microsoft would probably sue me to death if I had a team of 300 engineers reverse-engineering Windows.
But if I "iberate" a Bad Guy Communication System 900 running TopSecret OS the niceties of software licensing do not apply. I can set 300 engineeers on it and reverse-engineer the code and find any flaws quickly. Bear in mind I only need one Bad Guy Comm Sys to do this. What will the enemy do, sue for license violations? Assuming they won, who would enforce their decision?
These posts came up last time the army bought Linux. Here we go again....
1) Licenses are irrelevant in critical times. In wartime, the Bad Guys (whoever they happen to be) will be using any code they please. They'll use one CD to install Windows 2K on all their computers or they'll use one CD to install Linux on all of them. Software piracy or license violations are not war crimes. What would we do, execute the enemy's signal officers for violating a licesnse?? Second, the US military would probably tell software companies to take their licenses and shove 'em in a real crisis. Congress would back us up and rewrite the laws to exempt the military from all licenses. If you think this won't happen, look at the degree the fedl govt controlled the economy in World War II.
2) More advanced weapons help protect the lives of our soldiers. Would you be ethically remiss if you *failed* to write GPL which would have saved some grunts' lives? What if that code could have helped defend us from attack. (I assume you're an American. If not, change "us" to "your".)
3) This "ethical clause" is an awfully slippery slope. What's next? Hate groups can't run Apache servers? Then we ban pornographers from using GPL code, then we ban unpopular religions, pretty soon only upstanding corporate citizens are able to use GPL code.
How would you get everyone to agree on the ethics clause? You want the ethics clause to exclude military uses, I want to exclude use by police, IP law firms, record companies, motion picture studios... I'm sure others would want to exclude gay and lesbian groups, Scientology and/or Mormons and/or the Catholic Church and/or Muslims and/or Jews, the Republican and/or Democratic parties, and so forth.
Your ethics clause would fragment the GPL into thousands of different licences. Anyone can throw in an "ethics clause" and call it their own personal GPL. We need to resist fragmenting the license just because our code might be used for reasons we don't like.
I've occassionally tried to post comments where I suggest that the market system is not absolutely perfect. All these sources were found from a lexis search, you probably can't get the stories from the original provider anymore. Here we go again....
The whole independent contractor system has tremendous potential for abuse. In 1996 the Toronto Star reported on low-tech companies that fire all their employees and re-hire them as independent contractors to avoid paying benefits. We're not talking high-tech firms with mobile, highly skilled work forces here. It's not nearly as easy for them to tell the company to go to hell as some assume.
The NYT reported on 7/20/97 that Pacific Bell laid off all its managers and offered them new jobs as independent contractors but took away all their benefits. All of the Atlanta Olympics technical workers were independent contractors who were required to sign away their right to sue for anything, including discrimination, etc. A quicke quote:
We're heading into a two-tiered economy," said Ms. Horowitz of Working Today, the advocacy group. "The first tier has a New Deal safety net, protected by all the different labor laws. Then there is a second tier that's short term, flexible, many of them independent contractors. That tier doesn't receive benefits or labor law protections.
"The labor law and social protections are completely out of sync with this work force. If the rules of the game are changing and people are going to become independent contractors, then we have to have a new safety net that serves these people, too."
OK, now we pre-refute the "free market is sacred" posts. Free markets work most of the time. They also fail to effectively provide critical goods and services sometimes. Utilities are a good example - people in rural America wouldn't get electricity without government assistance. Market entities don't factor in effects of their actions that don't relate to their profits. Pollution makes sense in a narrow economic sense, but only in that sense. Discrimination doesn't make economic sense, but the harms to an individual company from discrimantory policies are insignificant.
History shows the need for some government intervention in economics. Look at late-19/early-20th century labor conditions. Large monopolies were able to force employees to work absurd hours for minimal pay. Then we get anti-trust laws, labor regulations, etc. and along came the idea of the weekend. You scream at the top of your lungs about the perfection of market distribution, but the evidence indicates otherwise. It takes a truly stubborn person to look away from the evidence in their face.
Finally, many assume that employers and employees bargain from equal positions. Normally employers bargain from a much stronger position. If one company in industry x switches to independent contractors to avoid paying benefits, it puts tremendous competitive pressure on other companies to do likewise. The average person really doesn't have any option chance to reject these practices if they become widespread. Citing one's recent personal experience in the IT industry is worthless as a refutation. IT is experiencing a labor shortage of epic proportions which advantages employees in a way never seen before. It doesn't affect most people, and it probably can't last for ever.
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Although I am clearly biased on this point, I just dont see any other need for a tech-union, perhaps someone else can enlighten me on this issue.
1. Any group has more power acting cohesively. Imagine how much money we could pull in if we had real bargaining power with all the companies in the industry. Imagine if all the programmers in the US refused to work for less than, say $55,000. Free-loaders wouldn't be justifiable anymore, and anyone who was good enough/hard-working enough would be even better. Look at pilots - they're less bright than coders by a lot, (I speak from USAF experience), but they're highly skilled and unionized - most airline pilots bring in $100,000+ for doing a job that's substantially less challenging than writing complex code. Did I mention they have unions?
The problem is that right now we're settling for less than what we should expect. There are some fabulously profitable companies out there. But all of that money was made by coders, who got a generous amount of money, but in all honesty deserve more.
2. Tech companies haven't been above screwing employees. People get let go a couple weeks before their options come due, often for fabricated reasons. H1-B visas get rammed through Congress to drive down IT salaries. Imagine if the Big Three automakers tried to import tens of thousands of foreign workers and then pay them substandard wages!! It can only happen in IT.
3. Marketing practices of today may become labor practices of tommorrow. If a company is willing to screw consumers with "content protection" do you really trust it not to screw its own employees?
4. A lot of anti-union people scream "I'm too good for a union - unions are for idiot construction workers." But many industry that depend on highly skilled labor are highly - pilots, aviation mechanics, teachers, athletes, actors. It obviously works for other "knowledge industries".
5. Technology unions probably would be different than old-school unions - it would have to be easier to get rid of people, since it's easier to freeload than it is in manufacturing. Contracts would probably be shorter term, grievance procedures would be streamlined/scaled back, working condition issues would be much less important, etc.
I know of *no* industry where unionization has decreased wages or really adversely affected employees.
And in third world countries can the cops beat up working-class people who complain, companies can collude to pay zero-level wages, and the working class gets fucked into the ground. Real intelligent post here.
I'm gonna do the unthinkable and admit my moderated-up post is just wrong. I was looking for some more evidence to substantiate my post so I went to Oyez later and did a little reading. It turns out that Scalia and Thomas are free speech maniacs - I now have a little more respect for them, which means (respect > 0). I think given the 8-1 opinion in Reno v ACLU, the 9-0 in Texas flag-burning, whatever, the DMCA may die painfully at the US Supreme Court.
On the other hand, the Bush Five are big fans of deferring to the authority of Congress, the Constitution gives Congress the authority to regulate copyrights, so you could see them viewing this as an issue of Congress excercises its enumerated copyright protection authority - very strict Constructionist. I guess it comes to down to whether or not code is speech - and if so whether the copyright clause in Article 3 trumps the First Ammendment or vice-versa.
This seems really obvious on face - like throwing out confessions. Then you see things like the framed rapist who they set free in Texas last week - he "confessed" too.
If we didn't have technicalities, the law enforcement industry would have no checks on itself. Imagine if illegally seized evidence could be used at trials. Why wouldn't cops go door-to-door looking for drugs? It's a much more efficient way to for them to pay their salaries.
Maybe your freedom/rights defending ACLU and the ACLU I see attacking freedom/rights aren't the same people.
I personally wish the ACLU would take a strong stance in support of the Second Ammendment - it's just as important as other consitutional rights, especially in light of a recent Supreme Court ruling that police have no obligation to protect people! But I no of absolutely no instance where the ACLU has supported gun control, there homepage makes no mention of gun control one way or another. I think you're just disliking the ACLU because you don't agree with other liberties.
Believe or not, it is possible to belong to the NRA and the ACLU. It's not like the ACLU has actively supported gun control, or the NRA has actively opposed free speech. The NRA picks up the one right the ACLU won't. When it comes to the practices of the law enforcement industry, they're very much on the same page. So just go join both - and don't tell ACLUer's you're an NRA member and vice versa - they get funny looks, trust me.
The CTO, if he/she has the background to at all qualified, frequently will be a management outsider. I have a friend whose company has a very bright CTO who isn't listened when he tries to talk sanely to the rest of the management. "Management" is frequently filled with an excess of sales/marketing/finance idiots who think anything without a liberal arts degree is too narrow-minded to understand anything. In small companies, he/she may be the only person who has a fucking clue about anything besides the actual techies, so Anonymous CTO may be quite right in claimin he's critical to the company.
It's not unique to Japan. Organizational loyalty exists worldwide in military organizations. People come second, the mission comes first. It's radically different than the outside world.
I've seen other people with a military background run into a related problem - they keep the military's cultural norms of loyalty to the organization and support of the leadership after they leave. The idea of screwing the company for her own benefit struck a fellow weekend-warrior friend as inherently wrong...
This is probably a big improvement over how normal tactical units communicate with locals. Right now, hand signals, emphatic yelling, etc. are the tool of choice for dealing with the language barrier between soldiers and civillians/prisoners. Even the ability to generate simple imperative or declarative statements on the spot would be quite helpful, "Go over there" or "You must leave your house. We have requested indirect fire near here."
Assuming this application, the best thing a designer could do would be to add a way to specify that a statement is imperative, since imperative statements would probably be the most common. In English, for example, a simple imperative statement is distinguished from a declarative statement only by context. In romance languages there is generally another verb for imperative uses so the translation is ambigious unless some contextual information by the English user.
I did a little research at Oyez and was suprised at how often the conservative judges on the Supreme Court rule in favor of first ammendment cases. Even after twelve years of Republican appointments, they ruled 9-0 in favor of a constitutional right to burn the flag, found the CDA unconstitutional, upheld the rights of the Klu Klux Klan and the American Nazi party to hold rallies, upheld the right to cable porn, upheld the right for criminals to sell books about their crimes, and so on. It seems likely the Supreme Court will uphold a right to distribute code. Of course, there could be subtle differences here which, since IANAL I wouln't understand.
I disagree. The masses CAN be powerful in stopping such grabs of liberty when they want to. In particular, the Betamax case (1984 was it?) that ruled that it was legal to tape shows and movies off TV... Also, the public resoundingly rejected Divx.
You understand the public had nothing to with Betamax? It's a Supreme Court decision, not a popular vote. Bear in mind that the Supreme Court will probably upheld the DMCA today. Since 1986, Reagan and Bush have added Clarence Thomas, Sandra Day O'Connor, et al to the Court. These people don't have a history of favoring free-speech rights.
And that ethos is far from noble. It's the ethos of leeches
Have you ever met a corporate lawyer? I'm related to a couple. They don't produce anything and contribute nothing to society. Ever seen a marketing or sales department full of good-for-nothings? Same deal - they leech of the creative and physical labor of others. But we support these hoardes of parasites.
Either way, it's non-productive parasites all the way down...
I thought that if I were a *true* geek, I'd be able to tell where the 10.X.X.X IP addresses used in the movie actually corresponded to. (Hint, not a satellite). I can't recall if they're a class-A private subnet or not -- I only use the class-B private subnets.
Think of it like a 555-xxxx phone number in a movie. Don't want people pinging an IP to death.
There are hundreds of choices who would be far worse, but arguably "more qualified". I'd rather have a politician from an international body that has historically stuck up for the little guy. At least they didn't pick:
1. Bill Gates
2. Larry Ellison
3. Another exec from Microsoft, Cisco, Novell, Oracle, etc.
4. John Ashcroft or Paul Wellstone or similar folk on the right or left-wing of US politics
5. A European pol who believes the net is destroying the precious cultural identity of whatever country he happens to come from
6. Etc.
Finally, isn't ICANN a lot like the Balkans? A complete lack of respect for rule of law, individual rights, free speech, and democracy? Maybe he has the right experience for the job
I have a friend who can speak from painful experience. He would very much like to leave his company for greener pastures or go into independent contractor, but his long-term non-compete agreement is screwing him.
To all of you who say non-competes are uneforceable, you may very well be right. Nonetheless, it's awfully hard for a prospective employer/client to take on someone who has that legal battle potentially hanging over their head. Even if the non-compete is total bunk they still have to worry about legal costs to kill it...
Do you know anything more about this CA law? I have a friend there who has gotten himself in some real trouble with a non-compete...
The Mongols were better at this. They used redundant security systems long before anyone else. The tomb of Genghis Kahn was built by thousands of slaves, who were then marched back to forest, where the Khan's warriors killed them all. Those warriors were then taken to a village where the Khan's personal guard killed the warriors. Anyone who had firsthand knowledge of the location was dead, and anyone who had second-hand knowledge was dead too. This also logarithmically decreased the number of people who had any contact with the tomb's builders.
Another great turn-off is "developer with x years of Java experience" or even "developer with x years of experience". These things have two problems -
1) With newer technologies they get absurd real fast - How many people actually have 3 years of Java experience?? That makes you look idiotic real fast, and it makes applicants laugh. Some people may take it seriously and not apply, even if they're quite qualified.
2) In any case you're limiting your pool arbitrarily. Very arbitrarily - how do you know some with 2 years of experience won't work out, but someone with 3 years will? How do you know a young whipper-snapper who's eager to learn isn't the best person for the job? Again, if you're lucky, people with less than x years of experience in whatever will be undeterred but some bright people still won't want to deal with that crap...
Surveys have indicated that 85% of police officers think perjury is OK. Additionally, American police enjoy a remarkably tiny amount of oversight - any attempt to monitor their actions or keep them honest is shot down as 'anti-cop'.
The standards for libel/slander againsta a public official are extremely high. No public officer has won a libel suit in a couple decades. This is just plain silly. Even if the website is 'obscene' this is a pretty clear case of selective prosecution.
I'm currently a CS major at a school that offers a minor in "Management for Technology Students". It also offers an MIS degree.(U of MN).
I'm thinking I won't enjoy straight coding as a career and I have some experience with management at the menial level aqnd I enjoyed it very much. But I'm doing quite well in CS and I don't think I'd respect myself as an MIS student. Is it worth my time to spend a couple years turning out code and then move into a non-development field or some management job? Is a management minor worth my time?
Like most national matters, it's quite hard to pin down GW's postition since he tried to avoid voicing one. One indication of his opinion on civil liberties comes from his praise of "strict constructionist" judges, i.e Scalia and Thomas. A quick Lexis search turned up no instances in the pass 3 years where either one of them has been on the pro-civil liberties side of a split decision on these issues. Thomas issued a startlingly harsh dissent in the court's decision last month to overturn drug-search roadbloacks in Indianapolis. Additionally, I think the law-enforcement industry endorsed Bush so he'll need to pay them back. The forfeiture provision is exactly what the industry loves- a chance to accumulate loads of cash. (Sadly, your friendly police officer cares more about staying employed than protecting people.)
So I think it's safe to assume we can't expect Bush to veto this puppy or not exploit it.
This sounds awfully unconstitutional to me, or at least worthy of a contest in court.
You're probably right. Unfortunately, we're gonna have to take it to the glorious Reinqhuist Court. Regardless of how you feel about their election decisions, these guys don't have a reputation for upholding civil liberties. This is the court that gave us pre-trial asset forfeiture, random school drug tests, drunk-driving roadblocks, the "good faith" exception to 4th ammmendment, and a few other outstanding decisions. Not a chance in hell they'll do the right thing. A constitutional challenge will most likely not succeed.
I would have thought that as the army is security paranoid, they would not install an open source OS on truely mission critical devices.
These are hardly mission critical devices. I read once that combat vehicles have approximately one hour of downtime for each hour of uptime. They require absurd maintenance.
I don't think these devices control any critical systems or transmit any critical data. Weapons systems normally have "black box" designed electronics. When the thing fails, you don't attempt to diagnose the problem, you pull the component out and insert the spare. Hopefully someone will eventually fix the orignal, although apparently soldiers discarded millions of dollars of the puppies in the Arabian desert.
Linux Security is good for businesses, but in the army it's different - their enemies have resources and will keep what they develop a secret, before deploying it once.
I think the opposite is true. Closed source software's advantage is security through obscurity. A huge part of obscurity is the idea of not reverse-engineering the closed source software.
In peacetime, the clause in the license against reverse-engineering gets some respect. Microsoft would probably sue me to death if I had a team of 300 engineers reverse-engineering Windows.
But if I "iberate" a Bad Guy Communication System 900 running TopSecret OS the niceties of software licensing do not apply. I can set 300 engineeers on it and reverse-engineer the code and find any flaws quickly. Bear in mind I only need one Bad Guy Comm Sys to do this. What will the enemy do, sue for license violations? Assuming they won, who would enforce their decision?
These posts came up last time the army bought Linux. Here we go again....
1) Licenses are irrelevant in critical times. In wartime, the Bad Guys (whoever they happen to be) will be using any code they please. They'll use one CD to install Windows 2K on all their computers or they'll use one CD to install Linux on all of them. Software piracy or license violations are not war crimes. What would we do, execute the enemy's signal officers for violating a licesnse?? Second, the US military would probably tell software companies to take their licenses and shove 'em in a real crisis. Congress would back us up and rewrite the laws to exempt the military from all licenses. If you think this won't happen, look at the degree the fedl govt controlled the economy in World War II.
2) More advanced weapons help protect the lives of our soldiers. Would you be ethically remiss if you *failed* to write GPL which would have saved some grunts' lives? What if that code could have helped defend us from attack. (I assume you're an American. If not, change "us" to "your".)
3) This "ethical clause" is an awfully slippery slope. What's next? Hate groups can't run Apache servers? Then we ban pornographers from using GPL code, then we ban unpopular religions, pretty soon only upstanding corporate citizens are able to use GPL code.
How would you get everyone to agree on the ethics clause? You want the ethics clause to exclude military uses, I want to exclude use by police, IP law firms, record companies, motion picture studios... I'm sure others would want to exclude gay and lesbian groups, Scientology and/or Mormons and/or the Catholic Church and/or Muslims and/or Jews, the Republican and/or Democratic parties, and so forth.
Your ethics clause would fragment the GPL into thousands of different licences. Anyone can throw in an "ethics clause" and call it their own personal GPL. We need to resist fragmenting the license just because our code might be used for reasons we don't like.
I've occassionally tried to post comments where I suggest that the market system is not absolutely perfect. All these sources were found from a lexis search, you probably can't get the stories from the original provider anymore. Here we go again....
The whole independent contractor system has tremendous potential for abuse. In 1996 the Toronto Star reported on low-tech companies that fire all their employees and re-hire them as independent contractors to avoid paying benefits. We're not talking high-tech firms with mobile, highly skilled work forces here. It's not nearly as easy for them to tell the company to go to hell as some assume.
The NYT reported on 7/20/97 that Pacific Bell laid off all its managers and offered them new jobs as independent contractors but took away all their benefits. All of the Atlanta Olympics technical workers were independent contractors who were required to sign away their right to sue for anything, including discrimination, etc. A quicke quote:
We're heading into a two-tiered economy," said Ms. Horowitz of Working Today, the advocacy group. "The first tier has a New Deal safety net, protected by all the different labor laws. Then there is a second tier that's short term, flexible, many of them independent contractors. That tier doesn't receive benefits or labor law protections.
"The labor law and social protections are completely out of sync with this work force. If the rules of the game are changing and people are going to become independent contractors, then we have to have a new safety net that serves these people, too."
OK, now we pre-refute the "free market is sacred" posts. Free markets work most of the time. They also fail to effectively provide critical goods and services sometimes. Utilities are a good example - people in rural America wouldn't get electricity without government assistance. Market entities don't factor in effects of their actions that don't relate to their profits. Pollution makes sense in a narrow economic sense, but only in that sense. Discrimination doesn't make economic sense, but the harms to an individual company from discrimantory policies are insignificant.
History shows the need for some government intervention in economics. Look at late-19/early-20th century labor conditions. Large monopolies were able to force employees to work absurd hours for minimal pay. Then we get anti-trust laws, labor regulations, etc. and along came the idea of the weekend. You scream at the top of your lungs about the perfection of market distribution, but the evidence indicates otherwise. It takes a truly stubborn person to look away from the evidence in their face.
Finally, many assume that employers and employees bargain from equal positions. Normally employers bargain from a much stronger position. If one company in industry x switches to independent contractors to avoid paying benefits, it puts tremendous competitive pressure on other companies to do likewise. The average person really doesn't have any option chance to reject these practices if they become widespread. Citing one's recent personal experience in the IT industry is worthless as a refutation. IT is experiencing a labor shortage of epic proportions which advantages employees in a way never seen before. It doesn't affect most people, and it probably can't last for ever.