I would suggest that all sf involves politics at some level. Heinlein is political as is Asimov. They are not necessarily as obviously political as L. Neil Smith or Orwell, but they definitely say a lot about what is good in government and society and what is bad. None of Tolkein's good guys live in autocracies. Even the Kings of Gondor had to pay attention to their people.
Remember that a lot of people consider the s in sf to stand for speculative, rather than science.
The key thing is to think about which facet of the genre you wish the students to consider.
Whenever I read a story like this one, I get the feeling that the author, in his or her heart of hearts, is completely in tune with the creationist types who consider the standard Genesis story to be literally true. "God gave man dominion over the animals and..." I know that I am smarter (in book learnin') than most people, but I also know that most people know more about some thing than I do. In fact, watching small animals around where I live, I know that plenty of birds and rabbits and squirrels know more about my immediate neighborhood than I do.
So why does every story about an animal figuring out something like this sound like a miracle has occurred? Animals, especially most mammals, learn how to do things to survive. Humans learn better than most other animals, but the animals still learn about a lot of different things. Yes, it's a news story when a bear opens a "bear-proof" canister. No, the engineers aren't stupid. No, the bear isn't a freak of nature. Yes, the bear is smarter than most.
Why can't there be smarter and stupider animals? All humans are equally smart? Yeesh.
Another reason to stay away from a National grid is the effect of linking all the grids together into one system means a single catastrophic failure becomes possible. We have already seen this sort of problem on both coasts. The bigger the sandpile, the bigger the avalanche. We should be pushing into smaller more local stuff. Right now individual solar is still too expensive, but if we say no to more power lines, the power companies might do more in the line of peak pricing, buying back and conservation helps that some utilities are already doing.
This person likes to throw stones at frogs to see them jump. One example that struck me as an indicator:
Here I examine the semiotic form of some common and conventionally accepted notions of "bad play"... I will, of course, not attempt to give âoebadâ any sort of formal definition
So he does a formal semiotic analysis of an undefined category of acts. Hmmm.
Maybe getting an endowed professorship is easier than I thought.
If you find financial math interesting, go for it. The market for good "quants" will be there forever. It will go up and down, but finance firms want to estimate the future as well as they can, and that means plenty of "quant" jobs in the future.
The more important thing about the Ph.D. is finding a subject that will motivate you after everyone you know is completely bored by your topic.
Archie and gopher were so much better than trolling through ftp archive sites just from word of email. I want my archie back!!!!
Oh wait, now google automatically does a waaay better job of doing what archie provided. And those hyperlink thingies make the bulletin board reference to another ftp site automatically download the file for me. Gosh, it's amazing how that automatic sort of thing have ever displaced the amazingly cumbersome, high maintenance archie/gopher/ftp side of things.
I am sitting in a chair, no one is going to TAX me on the fact that I own some chair (personal property).
Unless you live in Virginia or Somerville or Boston, then they do, or at least they try to.
In fact in MA, "Personal property is "tangible" property (that is, physical), and is subject to the personal property tax unless exempted by statute. Tangible personal property ranges from the chairs... of a doctor's waiting room"
Umm, closed source is there because developers think that copyright protection is not enough to protect their proprietary rights in the products they created. Closed souce will exist with or without copyright. Open source exists because enough people think that copyright protection is enough to keep people from stealing their work, calling it their own, and getting away with it.
If there was no copyright there would not be a need for the GPL because there would not be a restriction on copying, modifying and redistributing the source.
Right, because there would be no source around to copy, except for hobbyists and the FSF because anyone hoping to make money in software would hide their source from their competitors.
The article goes into scenarios where Big Bad Megacorp steals your code and distributes DRM protected binaries because there's no copyright. Well, first of all the 'R' in DRM would not be there if there was no copyright.
As long as there are any property rights associated with a product that has a digital incarnation, there will be DRM solutions available to protect it from copying. This has nothing to do with copyright itself. Copy protection for software existed before people thought you could apply copyright to the bits on a disk, or drum, or paper tape, and it will live on afterwards as well. Making customers pay you for your product is an idea that existed before electronic works and still exists. Trade Secrets and embedded code are just two ways that immediately come to mind. True, technical means exist to get around such things, but most people won't do that unless the prices are truly horrendous.
Of course the copyright lobby is scared about *their* income going down and it's no consolation for them that some other businesses would became filthy rich if copyright was abolished, so they fight to protect and extend copyright as much as possible.
You can also replace "copyright" with oil leasing, farm subsidy, transportaion regulation, and many other issues that have been regulated by the government and say the same thing. Should we get rid of the FAA because some firms use its regulations to stifle competition at small airports? Or should we work to find out about and prevent such abuses? Check out Regulatory Capture.
Intellectual property laws were originally developed to protect the little guys from rapacious publishers and industrial robber barons. The fact that publishers and big companies are the folks making best use of them now doesn't mean the laws have a bad intent or were a bad idea. It means they should be changed.
FSF wants all good ideas to be freely shared and built upon. This is a wonderful, utopian vision, and I would love to live in a world where that would work. I would also like to be a true Libertarian, but everyone, myself included, is too short sighted and ignorant of his/her own utility maximization function to make that work either. In some way I think FSF really wants stronger copyrigt protection of software, not less, but the holder of the right would be the world as a whole. I think I remember reading about this in an essay about "The tragedy of the commons."
If you want laws changed, you need to contact the people who can change them: your congressional reps and senators. Or you can support, with time and/or money, the groups that are trying to move the ball forward on the lobbying front. At this point I am pretty sure that FSF is not one of those groups. I thought FSF was a neat idea when I first heard of it in college, but that philosophy and approach will never change the laws of the land (My land is USA, but this applies elsewhere in the world as well). Geting access to source code has never been a big deal for me. Getting the vendor of a program to take responsibilty for its failings has sometimes been a problem though. The fact that software licenses generally come wih an explicit denial of fitness for a task seems to me to be a much bigger problem.
It seems clear that the author of the article didn't realize that, even with Senator Leahy, the combined (alleged) Microsoft proxies are merely a spit in the bucket compared to some other industries. A given campaign contribution may make a difference to a Senator or Representative, but there are a lot of contributors out there and they are not all on the same side of every issue.
Apple, IBM, and Oracle are also members of BSA. So BSA is not just a Microsoft proxy like that foundation that put out pro-M$ white papers during the antitrust hearings.
The biggest problem for OSS on the hill is that there is not a lot of money to pay for people to travel to the hill and take folks to lunch. Forget Abramoff and the like. It still costs something to get to DC and meet people. It costs money and takes time to do research and write something useful for a hill staffer. There are plenty of lobbying excesses, but information is still not a cost free good. Why should we expect it to be free just because it relates to stuff we care about?
Finally, It's nice to see a lot of this stuff pulled together, but it would be even nicer if the writer had gotten more facts straight. Just one example: Leahy is now the ranking minority member, not the chairman of the Judiciary committee.
If he can show that his use is non-infringing and that the Walmart Foundation lawyers should have known that then 17 USC 512(f) (a later part of the section cited in the cease and desist letter) states:
(f) Misrepresentations.-- Any person who knowingly materially misrepresents under this section--
(1) that material or activity is infringing, or
(2) that material or activity was removed or disabled by mistake or misidentification,
shall be liable for any damages, including costs and attorneys' fees, incurred by the alleged infringer, by any copyright owner or copyright owner's authorized licensee, or by a service provider, who is injured by such misrepresentation, as the result of the service provider relying upon such misrepresentation in removing or disabling access to the material or activity claimed to be infringing, or in replacing the removed material or ceasing to disable access to it. [emphasis added]
So he will be able to get his lawyer fees covered by Walmart.
Every week Saturday Night Live uses the exact intro graphics and theme music from other shows that they are paodying. I guess nobody told them that they can't "steal" other peopls' graphics. That's probably because they actually *can* "steal" other peoples' graphics if it's a parody.
Actually I suspect they ask permission. A friend of mine worked as an assstant to the producer many years ago, and one of his tasks was to contact the owners of copyrighted or trademarked materials and ask permission to use them on the show. Most of the time folks were pleased to get the exposure.
Today Microsoft is pleased to announce that we have incorporated into our new version of Windows a handy hook for spyware writers. Tired of having to do all that digging around yourself? Well, here is a new set of OS functions that will take care of that for you! Worried about capturing key clicks? Worry no more!
Microsoft wants all our developers to have the tools they need, when they need them. It used to be that only the big shots got their needs met by the OS. Now even the script kiddies and spammers have new tools to let them get on with their work.
WARNING! All our new software has the same solid security you have come to expect from Microsoft. So only those who can hack a buffer overflow will have access to this data.
Seems to me the article doesn't really say anything. Thus it is too early to have a decent discussion of what Borland is doing. On the other hand it is nice to see an OSS product making headway against a proprietary product. I liked JBuilder, and I think there are some features to Jbuilder that would be nice additions to Eclipse. Also the GUI seemed a little more solid in JBuilder than in Eclipse.
I wish people would stop recommending that "people write their congress rep" eveything an innane law pops up. These people don't care, hell I bet most don't even read their own mail.
On most issues a congressman or senator gets less than a hundred letters, even less than ten. Any issue that gets a lot of letters that are clearly from a) constituents, b) different people, and c) not form letters gets a lot more attention from the office.
At this point a well written original email on a subject will also get some attention and make the office look again at a bill. Remember to put the bill number in the letter, and turn off the flamer. Showing that it was cc'ed to the newspaper is probably not a bad idea though.
(2) EVIDENCE- For purposes of this subsection, evidence of reproduction or distribution of a copyrighted work, by itself, shall not be sufficient to establish willful infringement of a copyright.
S.167 HR
Clearly the law as quoted above is out to get anyone who stores a file in a shared folder by mistake or has it unknowingly on their machine.
*****NOTICE***** This message was written under the influence of irony. ******************
I can see learning by diffusion, but I guess that does not sound as smart as osmosis.
The difference between osmosis and diffusion that makes the saying work is that osmosis makes the water diffuse more readily to the side with the "lower" density of water. So osmosis is directional across the barrier while diffusion goes both ways. (So shoot me. I am oversimplifying.) Thus learning by osmosis is knowledge seeping across your mental membrane from the outside (think more knowledge) to inside (think less knowledge).
I always figure that learning by osmosis is a required part of really understanding a job because the existing people know stuff, but don't even know what the new people need to know so you just have to let it diffuse through those conversations.
It took me two years of reading Byte magazine in the 80's before I could really understand any of this fancy computer stuff. So now when folks talk about seeing 10.4 at FOSE and WWDC for those who aren't into OSX or like XP with SP2... I have some clue what they are saying. But I never asked directly or was told.
People don't seem to realise that voting for a third party is not simply throwing your vote away.
In fact, Perot's performance in the '92 election was a lot better than Nader's last time around. His presence helped push the whole economy and deficit issue to the fore. And those voters were clearly on Clinton's mind going into '96.
I live in DC, so my electoral votes are going to Kerry, no matter who I vote for. But even if I lived in Florida, I would vote for a 3rd party candidate who represented me better than one of the majors, because that's how I can tell the winner of the election how I feel about the issues in a way that really matters to them.
If you don't want to vote for the same lousy two choices time after time, then don't. You won't get results right away, but after a couple or three election cycles, I bet you will see some change. Only after Perot won all those votes, did the Democrats become deficit hawks. The Republicans will learn, to their regret, why that is, soon enough.
Someone will win by getting something like 25% of the vote with other people getting 23% or something.
But with Proportional Representation doesn't exactly the same thing happen? You will get representatives of some pretty wacky groups. Just look at the power of the extreme right in Israel, or look at the mess that Italy's political system has been for most of the past 50 years.
First past the post is not great, but I think the other methods can also generate some pretty unwelcome and unexpected results.
If gun control were pursued the way the INDUCE act goes after copyright violation: Fishing sinkers would be illegal because they *might* be melted down and recast into bullets.
I believe the short but correct response here is "Did you bother to read the Act?"
The appropriate gun law here is the one that says that you can be prosecuted for murder if you tell someone with a gun, "Shooting him would be a good idea."
This act does not change a lot. It might make it illegal to have a link to a page which has illegally copied material on it. Since if anyone follows the link, they automatcially illegally copy the material. But it surely is not the gross violation of civil rights or whatever that it is made out to be.
Re:I can't believe no one has mentioned stillsuits
on
Just Add, Umm, Water
·
· Score: 1
Provided you can keep the system from having adverse effects on body temperature
I suspect that this is the killer issue. You would need to add a chiller into the suit, and that means more weight, and another thing that would need power.
"intentionally induces" means
intentionally aids, abets, induces, counsels, or procures,
and intent may be shown by acts from which a reasonable
person would find intent to induce infringement based
upon all relevant information...
Nothing in this section shall enlarge or diminish the
doctrines of vicarious or contributory liability...
While the title is really bogus, the act itself is only adding "inducement" as an additional illegal act to the copyright laws. It is not changing the rights that the copyright holder already has. Almost the whole discussion here has been offtopic. Does everyone here think that incitement to riot, inducement to prostitution, and other similar acts should not be illegal?
It's not making copiers and VCRs illegal, it says that if you show someone how to copy something and induce them into copying it illegally, then you have done something illegal yourself.
I think the copyright laws need to change to make fair use mean something again, and make it so Mickey is finally public domain, but saying this act is some fascist, Republican plot is absurd.
Thought that quoting the statute might increase the S/N ratio.
This is the section that outlines criminal offenses. You need to have more than $1,000 worth of stuff copied in 6 months. So even if the RIAA/MPAA are not big on fair use, ripping one or even fifty CDs is not going to get the Government on your case.
Sec. 506.-Criminal offenses
(a) Criminal Infringement. -
Any person who infringes a copyright willfully either -
for purposes of commercial
advantage or private financial gain, or
by the reproduction or
distribution, including by electronic means, during any 180-day period, of 1 or
more copies or phonorecords of 1 or more copyrighted works, which have a total
retail value of more than $1,000,
shall be punished as provided under section 2319 of title 18 ,
United States Code. For purposes of this subsection, evidence of reproduction
or distribution of a copyrighted work, by itself, shall not be sufficient to
establish willful infringement.
(b) Forfeiture and Destruction. -
When any person is convicted of any violation of
subsection (a), the court in its judgment of conviction shall, in addition to
the penalty therein prescribed, order the forfeiture and destruction or other
disposition of all infringing copies or phonorecords and all implements,
devices, or equipment used in the manufacture of such infringing copies or
phonorecords.
(c) Fraudulent Copyright Notice. -
Any
person who, with fraudulent intent, places on any article a notice of copyright
or words of the same purport that such person knows to be false, or who, with
fraudulent intent, publicly distributes or imports for public distribution any
article bearing such notice or words that such person knows to be false, shall
be fined not more than $2,500.
My cousin got his phd from UW-Madison a few years ago. The interviewers at Microsoft Reserach liked his reserach group so much they hired his advisor and half of his fellow students.
So maybe a Wisconsin grad isn't at a disadvantage compared to some Ivy Leaguer.
On the other hand my Ivy League diploma has gotten me job ofers before anyone looked at my transcript - not a pretty sight!
As others have mentioned, years in grade doesn't necessarily mean anything, BUT very few real experts have only two years experience. There's a great article about chess that talks about how experts think differently than novices. [Chase, W.G. and Simon, H.A. (1973). Perception in Chess. Cognitive Psychology, 4 , 55-81] Experts think differently about what they do because they are able to "chunk" things differently. So there is definitely a difference that the manager should know about between novices and experts.
On the other hand,...
In research I've been involved with it is clear that the number of years of experience a person has has very little to do with whether or not they are an expert. So the manager may well be right that he can get what he wants from folks with 2 years of experience. Its how you think, not how long you've been thinking that's important. An other article that mentioned that there is a real difference between high and low productivity teams, but I suspect that the reserach was silent on the effect of years of experience.
Idiots need an explanation for everything, intelligent people seek answers and do not believe in what they cannot prove to themselves.
I always try to go back to mathematics and logic when thinking about God and belief. At this point I hear lots of "*huh?* what are you talking about.?" Any consistent logical system needs to start with some basic set of axioms. We can't start with nothing. I think about religious belief as a lot like Euclid's axioms.
So even if you don't want to believe in Mel Gibson's God, if you have anything close to a consistent ethical or moral sense, there must be something you believe without proof.
Slashdot Mirror
I would suggest that all sf involves politics at some level. Heinlein is political as is Asimov. They are not necessarily as obviously political as L. Neil Smith or Orwell, but they definitely say a lot about what is good in government and society and what is bad. None of Tolkein's good guys live in autocracies. Even the Kings of Gondor had to pay attention to their people. Remember that a lot of people consider the s in sf to stand for speculative, rather than science. The key thing is to think about which facet of the genre you wish the students to consider.
So why does every story about an animal figuring out something like this sound like a miracle has occurred? Animals, especially most mammals, learn how to do things to survive. Humans learn better than most other animals, but the animals still learn about a lot of different things. Yes, it's a news story when a bear opens a "bear-proof" canister. No, the engineers aren't stupid. No, the bear isn't a freak of nature. Yes, the bear is smarter than most.
Why can't there be smarter and stupider animals? All humans are equally smart? Yeesh.
Another reason to stay away from a National grid is the effect of linking all the grids together into one system means a single catastrophic failure becomes possible. We have already seen this sort of problem on both coasts. The bigger the sandpile, the bigger the avalanche. We should be pushing into smaller more local stuff. Right now individual solar is still too expensive, but if we say no to more power lines, the power companies might do more in the line of peak pricing, buying back and conservation helps that some utilities are already doing.
So he does a formal semiotic analysis of an undefined category of acts. Hmmm. Maybe getting an endowed professorship is easier than I thought.
If you find financial math interesting, go for it. The market for good "quants" will be there forever. It will go up and down, but finance firms want to estimate the future as well as they can, and that means plenty of "quant" jobs in the future. The more important thing about the Ph.D. is finding a subject that will motivate you after everyone you know is completely bored by your topic.
Archie and gopher were so much better than trolling through ftp archive sites just from word of email. I want my archie back!!!! Oh wait, now google automatically does a waaay better job of doing what archie provided. And those hyperlink thingies make the bulletin board reference to another ftp site automatically download the file for me. Gosh, it's amazing how that automatic sort of thing have ever displaced the amazingly cumbersome, high maintenance archie/gopher/ftp side of things.
Intellectual property laws were originally developed to protect the little guys from rapacious publishers and industrial robber barons. The fact that publishers and big companies are the folks making best use of them now doesn't mean the laws have a bad intent or were a bad idea. It means they should be changed.
FSF wants all good ideas to be freely shared and built upon. This is a wonderful, utopian vision, and I would love to live in a world where that would work. I would also like to be a true Libertarian, but everyone, myself included, is too short sighted and ignorant of his/her own utility maximization function to make that work either. In some way I think FSF really wants stronger copyrigt protection of software, not less, but the holder of the right would be the world as a whole. I think I remember reading about this in an essay about "The tragedy of the commons."
If you want laws changed, you need to contact the people who can change them: your congressional reps and senators. Or you can support, with time and/or money, the groups that are trying to move the ball forward on the lobbying front. At this point I am pretty sure that FSF is not one of those groups. I thought FSF was a neat idea when I first heard of it in college, but that philosophy and approach will never change the laws of the land (My land is USA, but this applies elsewhere in the world as well). Geting access to source code has never been a big deal for me. Getting the vendor of a program to take responsibilty for its failings has sometimes been a problem though. The fact that software licenses generally come wih an explicit denial of fitness for a task seems to me to be a much bigger problem.
Apple, IBM, and Oracle are also members of BSA. So BSA is not just a Microsoft proxy like that foundation that put out pro-M$ white papers during the antitrust hearings.
The biggest problem for OSS on the hill is that there is not a lot of money to pay for people to travel to the hill and take folks to lunch. Forget Abramoff and the like. It still costs something to get to DC and meet people. It costs money and takes time to do research and write something useful for a hill staffer. There are plenty of lobbying excesses, but information is still not a cost free good. Why should we expect it to be free just because it relates to stuff we care about?
Finally, It's nice to see a lot of this stuff pulled together, but it would be even nicer if the writer had gotten more facts straight. Just one example: Leahy is now the ranking minority member, not the chairman of the Judiciary committee.
Microsoft wants all our developers to have the tools they need, when they need them. It used to be that only the big shots got their needs met by the OS. Now even the script kiddies and spammers have new tools to let them get on with their work.
WARNING! All our new software has the same solid security you have come to expect from Microsoft. So only those who can hack a buffer overflow will have access to this data.
Seems to me the article doesn't really say anything. Thus it is too early to have a decent discussion of what Borland is doing. On the other hand it is nice to see an OSS product making headway against a proprietary product. I liked JBuilder, and I think there are some features to Jbuilder that would be nice additions to Eclipse. Also the GUI seemed a little more solid in JBuilder than in Eclipse.
On most issues a congressman or senator gets less than a hundred letters, even less than ten. Any issue that gets a lot of letters that are clearly from a) constituents, b) different people, and c) not form letters gets a lot more attention from the office.
At this point a well written original email on a subject will also get some attention and make the office look again at a bill. Remember to put the bill number in the letter, and turn off the flamer. Showing that it was cc'ed to the newspaper is probably not a bad idea though.
*****NOTICE*****
This message was written under the influence of irony.
******************
I always figure that learning by osmosis is a required part of really understanding a job because the existing people know stuff, but don't even know what the new people need to know so you just have to let it diffuse through those conversations.
It took me two years of reading Byte magazine in the 80's before I could really understand any of this fancy computer stuff. So now when folks talk about seeing 10.4 at FOSE and WWDC for those who aren't into OSX or like XP with SP2 ... I have some clue what they are saying. But I never asked directly or was told.
In fact, Perot's performance in the '92 election was a lot better than Nader's last time around. His presence helped push the whole economy and deficit issue to the fore. And those voters were clearly on Clinton's mind going into '96.
I live in DC, so my electoral votes are going to Kerry, no matter who I vote for. But even if I lived in Florida, I would vote for a 3rd party candidate who represented me better than one of the majors, because that's how I can tell the winner of the election how I feel about the issues in a way that really matters to them.
If you don't want to vote for the same lousy two choices time after time, then don't. You won't get results right away, but after a couple or three election cycles, I bet you will see some change. Only after Perot won all those votes, did the Democrats become deficit hawks. The Republicans will learn, to their regret, why that is, soon enough.
But with Proportional Representation doesn't exactly the same thing happen? You will get representatives of some pretty wacky groups. Just look at the power of the extreme right in Israel, or look at the mess that Italy's political system has been for most of the past 50 years.
First past the post is not great, but I think the other methods can also generate some pretty unwelcome and unexpected results.
I believe the short but correct response here is "Did you bother to read the Act?"
The appropriate gun law here is the one that says that you can be prosecuted for murder if you tell someone with a gun, "Shooting him would be a good idea."
This act does not change a lot. It might make it illegal to have a link to a page which has illegally copied material on it. Since if anyone follows the link, they automatcially illegally copy the material. But it surely is not the gross violation of civil rights or whatever that it is made out to be.
I suspect that this is the killer issue. You would need to add a chiller into the suit, and that means more weight, and another thing that would need power.
Although I suppose solar might be possible...
It's not making copiers and VCRs illegal, it says that if you show someone how to copy something and induce them into copying it illegally, then you have done something illegal yourself.
I think the copyright laws need to change to make fair use mean something again, and make it so Mickey is finally public domain, but saying this act is some fascist, Republican plot is absurd.
So maybe a Wisconsin grad isn't at a disadvantage compared to some Ivy Leaguer.
On the other hand my Ivy League diploma has gotten me job ofers before anyone looked at my transcript - not a pretty sight!
On the other hand, ...
In research I've been involved with it is clear that the number of years of experience a person has has very little to do with whether or not they are an expert. So the manager may well be right that he can get what he wants from folks with 2 years of experience. Its how you think, not how long you've been thinking that's important. An other article that mentioned that there is a real difference between high and low productivity teams, but I suspect that the reserach was silent on the effect of years of experience.
Idiots need an explanation for everything, intelligent people seek answers and do not believe in what they cannot prove to themselves. I always try to go back to mathematics and logic when thinking about God and belief. At this point I hear lots of "*huh?* what are you talking about.?" Any consistent logical system needs to start with some basic set of axioms. We can't start with nothing. I think about religious belief as a lot like Euclid's axioms. So even if you don't want to believe in Mel Gibson's God, if you have anything close to a consistent ethical or moral sense, there must be something you believe without proof.