Going to referee.com, they've announced an alliance with Sports Illustrated. Looks like it's time to let SI know that their corporate partner is being a crying spoiled brat on the Internet and generally making bad net.press for themselves, and that maybe they should think twice about being associated with them.
Yeah, let's all do that! Everybody run to Time/Warner/CNN/AOL and have those guys enforce our ideas of good net behavior. That'll work real well!
There is a new peered sharing network, Project ELF, which allows truly anonymous sharing of any file type. The point of this system is actually privacy, rather than speed, but there are some features which will actually make it faster the larger the network gets, including downloading pieces of the same file from multiple sites simultaneously. Pretty cool!
The "cansat" is a pretty cool use of technology and engineering to get a small package of instruments, but what you've got in the end is still just a telemetry package and not a satellite. They only launched to 15,000 feet. Hell, by that definition I'm a satellite every time I go skydiving! Of course, the guy's over at LDRS would probably be happy with a 15k "satellite" designation!
Actually, there is a peered filesharing system that has some interesting design features which should help it scale better than gnutella. It also addresses a lot of the security concerns brought up by Napster and gnutella. ProjectELF is designed to be a completely untraceable and anonymous peered file sharing system. It is just at the beginning stages, but it already works just fine. Most of the remaining issues seem to be those of interface design and efficiency of coding. It is definitely worth checking out.
Another cool thing is the author's use of a system that I have long advocated, namely sell everything at prices so low that piracy is more difficult that legitimate trade. He prices his product at a dollar. I guess he hopes to make it up in volume. That was always my theory. Sell ten million copies at a buck instead of a half million at $20.
I have to conquer on the lame "2001" rip-off of flying through the clouds around V'Ger. I was young enough at the time to buy just about anything, and I was bored to tears. The other Kubrick rip-off was Spock flying his space-suit through the gallery of V'Ger's collected worlds, complete with reflections on the face shield, etc. Way too long and way too boring.
This was my first experience with a movie that had a great trailer but didn't live up to it's own advertizing. The ad used the scene where the klingons get blasted (amazingly cool effect for the time), so you think there's going to be lot's of fighting with Klingons. Yeah! Perfect movie, right? Nah, they were just teasing... you get to watch about a half an hour of clouds flying by, followed by 15 minutes of Spock in a space suit drifting slowly into the bowels of a big space museum.
The strangest part of this entire article is the last paragraph.
In October, 1989, a Russian news agency reported that scientists claimed to have established that a city in the former Soviet Union had been visited briefly by a spaceship crewed by three feet tall humanoids and a robot.
The whole article is about using a telescope and computers to look for aliens on distant worlds, then at the end we learn that they have been hanging out in Russia all this time!
This entire tempest in a teapot boggles the mind. There is clearly no constitutionally protected right to use your employer's equipment for purposes that your employer has prohibited. It is that simple. The Virginia law does not say state employees cannot look at nudie pictures, just that they cannot do it using state owned equipment.
As for those employees who require such access for their job function, there is an out in the law which allows the executive branch to provide exemptions.
In short, your analysis is bad in more ways than I can count. This may be a dumb law, or even a bad law, but it is not even close to violating anyones right to free speach.
As an IT director who hires people for these positions, I can tell you that the degree you have is only a ticket to get you an interview. The same goes for any type of certification. However, if you came to that interview and I was able to discern that the only reason you were a CS major was because you thought it would get you a high paying job, you wouldn't stand a chance.
Why? Because working in the IT field is very rewarding and challenging for those of us who love it. Those who don't love it are usually mediocre at best, even if they are very bright. My staff includes a PhD in Biology, an Immunologist and a Chemist, none of whom have CS or CIS degrees. They are major league geeks though, and they are the stars of my department. They all were spending their free time working on computers all night for the fun of it and decided to try it as a career. They are all very successful because of the fact that they love what they do.
The take-home lesson is this: Do what you love. Work hard every day at something you love and every day will be challenging and fun. Success will follow.
Next point: if you really love computers and want to understand them, you don't want to change to CIS. You should cherish the opportunity you have to explore your interests and learn while in college. The opportunities will be much fewer and much farther between when you move into the workplace. You should not only be taking courses designed to get you a job, but learning about a wide variety of things to expand your mind. Take philosophy, astronomy, physics, music... College is not a vocational training school, it helps you to learn how to think and communicate as much as it teaches a set of facts and specific skills. Don't waste this time! You won't get another chance like this again in your life. Once you become a real grown-up, with a job, family and mortgage, you won't be spending nearly as much time indulging your interests.
Ok, for a group that loves to talk about intellectual property as much as this group, there are far too many who have no understanding of work, the economy and wealth.
Just because you don't weld a fender doesn't mean you don't contribute to productivity. The guy who designs the fender gets paid a lot more than the guy who welds it on because his contribution is worth a lot more to the company. The guy who put together the design team gets paid even more, because he is even more valuable to the company.
Just because I write custom code for a small company instead of digging ditches doesn't mean I am not building wealth. And no, what you are worth as a PERSON is not directly related to how much money you are paid. However, what you are worth to the company is directly related to what you are paid. So yes, a baseball player is worth more than a school teacher in that context, because he generates more revenue for the company than his salary. That's what we call capitalism. And if you still think that socialism/communism is the right way to organize a society, there are a couple of countries left that haven't collapsed under that insane form of government, and I'm sure they'd be happy to have your contributions as a citizen.
It is interesting that in most jurisdictions traffic violations are "Guilty until proven innocent". I had a scenario similar to your example. I was headed down a hill in an area notorious for strict enforcement, so I was doing exactly the posted 25 mph. This old guy in a pickup truck grows impatient and blasts past me and down the hill. Sure enough, there is a motorcycle cop at the bottom of the hill. The cop is having a cigarette and a coke and looking the other way. His radar gun beeps at him, he turns around and sees me. I'm clearly doing the speed limit (hey, 25 mph is visible to the naked eye, and a long way from 42 mph). He didn't see it that way and wrote up the ticket. When we got to court, the only questions I was allowed to ask are "are you certified to use radar", "was your radar gun calibrated" and "was the grade of the hill or the distance from the curve outside the legal limits for radar use". The question of whether he had the dang thing pointed at me at all was ruled out of order. The fact that he was looking in the complete other direction - out of order. There are only three acceptable arguments to a radar ticket, none of them have to do with "the officer made a mistake". I asked later if they would allow a videotape of the entire event as evidence. Nope, not admissible. BTW, this didn't happen in Turkey or Singapore or some other more limited civil rights area. This happened in Atlanta, GA.
I would suppose that BMG has been careful as to the structure of the new joint venture: Although the other music industry giants have been on the same team in fighting MP3's and other technical advances, they are also fierce competitors. Unless the legal firewall to the new service is built properly, BMG could find themselves on the hook for damages for copyright violations committed against their competitors by Napster. That would be some pretty sweet irony!
Dang! He didn't say that it wasn't the same chemical! He said that it must pass through a much more stringent (years long) regulatory process. This costs money.
What he left out was that the price of human drugs must also include a much higher fee for potential liabilities. Remember silicon implants? The evidence is conclusive that they never harmed a single person, yet the lawsuits were enough to bankrupt not one but two giant companies.
I'll do you one better, not only have they not called him to the carpet for a lack of a physical "lock box", they have given him a complete pass on the fact that his "lock box" metaphor is a complete and utter lie. There is absolutely not one scintilla of difference between his "lock box" and the current system of investing payroll taxes in T-Bills. And at the end of the day there will be exactly the same amount of money in the "trust fund" under Gore that there is right now. Exactly zero dollars and zero cents. That's right, there is not one penny in the social security trust fund. Never has been, and until the system is completely changed, there never will be.
How can this be, you ask? Because those T-Bills are simply an IOU from the US government made out to the US Government. It is absolutely farcical. The entire purpose of the trust fund is to pile up some money for a future time when there will be too many retirees and not enough wage earners to fund the retirement benefits from the current tax revenues. So we collect extra payroll taxes now, and invest them in T-bills. So far, it sounds good, right? Well, two small problems: First, what do you think happens to the money that the government borrows in the form of a treasury issue? It gets spent. That's right, every dime that has been taken in over the past ~20 years of trust fund investments has been spent in our deficit budgets. All of it. Second, where do you suppose the money to repay those T-Bills will come from when the Social Security Trust fund cashes the notes in? Why, the same place the money for all T-Bill redemptions comes from--from current tax revenues. But the sole purpose of the trust fund was to set some money aside because we know that there won't be enough wage earners to pay for those benefits out of current tax revenues at that point in time. So we have accomplished exactly NOTHING in the furtherance of eliminating the burden on further generations, we have simply shifted the coming tax increase from the payroll tax to the income tax. Big whup-ti-doo.
And here's the worst part, and it should really hack you off. For those of us who will start collecting social security after the baby boomers, we will be paying that money TWICE! That's right, I'm putting money in the trust fund now, and when they come calling to redeem those T-bills, I'll be paying the income taxes that will pay them back, with interest. So Al Gore's fictional "Lock Box" simply insures that I pay the cost of the boomer's retirement not once, but twice over. Yeah, thanks a lot!
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Yeah, let's all do that! Everybody run to Time/Warner/CNN/AOL and have those guys enforce our ideas of good net behavior. That'll work real well!
There is a new peered sharing network, Project ELF, which allows truly anonymous sharing of any file type. The point of this system is actually privacy, rather than speed, but there are some features which will actually make it faster the larger the network gets, including downloading pieces of the same file from multiple sites simultaneously. Pretty cool!
The "cansat" is a pretty cool use of technology and engineering to get a small package of instruments, but what you've got in the end is still just a telemetry package and not a satellite. They only launched to 15,000 feet. Hell, by that definition I'm a satellite every time I go skydiving! Of course, the guy's over at LDRS would probably be happy with a 15k "satellite" designation!
Actually, there is a peered filesharing system that has some interesting design features which should help it scale better than gnutella. It also addresses a lot of the security concerns brought up by Napster and gnutella. ProjectELF is designed to be a completely untraceable and anonymous peered file sharing system. It is just at the beginning stages, but it already works just fine. Most of the remaining issues seem to be those of interface design and efficiency of coding. It is definitely worth checking out. Another cool thing is the author's use of a system that I have long advocated, namely sell everything at prices so low that piracy is more difficult that legitimate trade. He prices his product at a dollar. I guess he hopes to make it up in volume. That was always my theory. Sell ten million copies at a buck instead of a half million at $20.
I have to conquer on the lame "2001" rip-off of flying through the clouds around V'Ger. I was young enough at the time to buy just about anything, and I was bored to tears. The other Kubrick rip-off was Spock flying his space-suit through the gallery of V'Ger's collected worlds, complete with reflections on the face shield, etc. Way too long and way too boring.
This was my first experience with a movie that had a great trailer but didn't live up to it's own advertizing. The ad used the scene where the klingons get blasted (amazingly cool effect for the time), so you think there's going to be lot's of fighting with Klingons. Yeah! Perfect movie, right? Nah, they were just teasing... you get to watch about a half an hour of clouds flying by, followed by 15 minutes of Spock in a space suit drifting slowly into the bowels of a big space museum.
The strangest part of this entire article is the last paragraph.
In October, 1989, a Russian news agency reported that scientists claimed to have established that a city in the former Soviet Union had been visited briefly by a spaceship crewed by three feet tall humanoids and a robot.
The whole article is about using a telescope and computers to look for aliens on distant worlds, then at the end we learn that they have been hanging out in Russia all this time!
This entire tempest in a teapot boggles the mind. There is clearly no constitutionally protected right to use your employer's equipment for purposes that your employer has prohibited. It is that simple. The Virginia law does not say state employees cannot look at nudie pictures, just that they cannot do it using state owned equipment.
As for those employees who require such access for their job function, there is an out in the law which allows the executive branch to provide exemptions.
In short, your analysis is bad in more ways than I can count. This may be a dumb law, or even a bad law, but it is not even close to violating anyones right to free speach.
As an IT director who hires people for these positions, I can tell you that the degree you have is only a ticket to get you an interview. The same goes for any type of certification. However, if you came to that interview and I was able to discern that the only reason you were a CS major was because you thought it would get you a high paying job, you wouldn't stand a chance.
Why? Because working in the IT field is very rewarding and challenging for those of us who love it. Those who don't love it are usually mediocre at best, even if they are very bright. My staff includes a PhD in Biology, an Immunologist and a Chemist, none of whom have CS or CIS degrees. They are major league geeks though, and they are the stars of my department. They all were spending their free time working on computers all night for the fun of it and decided to try it as a career. They are all very successful because of the fact that they love what they do.
The take-home lesson is this: Do what you love. Work hard every day at something you love and every day will be challenging and fun. Success will follow.
Next point: if you really love computers and want to understand them, you don't want to change to CIS. You should cherish the opportunity you have to explore your interests and learn while in college. The opportunities will be much fewer and much farther between when you move into the workplace. You should not only be taking courses designed to get you a job, but learning about a wide variety of things to expand your mind. Take philosophy, astronomy, physics, music... College is not a vocational training school, it helps you to learn how to think and communicate as much as it teaches a set of facts and specific skills. Don't waste this time! You won't get another chance like this again in your life. Once you become a real grown-up, with a job, family and mortgage, you won't be spending nearly as much time indulging your interests.
This looks like a perfect candidate for F*'d Company. I didn't see this incident posted yet....
Ok, for a group that loves to talk about intellectual property as much as this group, there are far too many who have no understanding of work, the economy and wealth.
Just because you don't weld a fender doesn't mean you don't contribute to productivity. The guy who designs the fender gets paid a lot more than the guy who welds it on because his contribution is worth a lot more to the company. The guy who put together the design team gets paid even more, because he is even more valuable to the company.
Just because I write custom code for a small company instead of digging ditches doesn't mean I am not building wealth. And no, what you are worth as a PERSON is not directly related to how much money you are paid. However, what you are worth to the company is directly related to what you are paid. So yes, a baseball player is worth more than a school teacher in that context, because he generates more revenue for the company than his salary. That's what we call capitalism. And if you still think that socialism/communism is the right way to organize a society, there are a couple of countries left that haven't collapsed under that insane form of government, and I'm sure they'd be happy to have your contributions as a citizen.
It is interesting that in most jurisdictions traffic violations are "Guilty until proven innocent". I had a scenario similar to your example. I was headed down a hill in an area notorious for strict enforcement, so I was doing exactly the posted 25 mph. This old guy in a pickup truck grows impatient and blasts past me and down the hill. Sure enough, there is a motorcycle cop at the bottom of the hill. The cop is having a cigarette and a coke and looking the other way. His radar gun beeps at him, he turns around and sees me. I'm clearly doing the speed limit (hey, 25 mph is visible to the naked eye, and a long way from 42 mph). He didn't see it that way and wrote up the ticket. When we got to court, the only questions I was allowed to ask are "are you certified to use radar", "was your radar gun calibrated" and "was the grade of the hill or the distance from the curve outside the legal limits for radar use". The question of whether he had the dang thing pointed at me at all was ruled out of order. The fact that he was looking in the complete other direction - out of order. There are only three acceptable arguments to a radar ticket, none of them have to do with "the officer made a mistake". I asked later if they would allow a videotape of the entire event as evidence. Nope, not admissible. BTW, this didn't happen in Turkey or Singapore or some other more limited civil rights area. This happened in Atlanta, GA.
I would suppose that BMG has been careful as to the structure of the new joint venture: Although the other music industry giants have been on the same team in fighting MP3's and other technical advances, they are also fierce competitors. Unless the legal firewall to the new service is built properly, BMG could find themselves on the hook for damages for copyright violations committed against their competitors by Napster. That would be some pretty sweet irony!
Dang! He didn't say that it wasn't the same chemical! He said that it must pass through a much more stringent (years long) regulatory process. This costs money.
What he left out was that the price of human drugs must also include a much higher fee for potential liabilities. Remember silicon implants? The evidence is conclusive that they never harmed a single person, yet the lawsuits were enough to bankrupt not one but two giant companies.
I'll do you one better, not only have they not called him to the carpet for a lack of a physical "lock box", they have given him a complete pass on the fact that his "lock box" metaphor is a complete and utter lie. There is absolutely not one scintilla of difference between his "lock box" and the current system of investing payroll taxes in T-Bills. And at the end of the day there will be exactly the same amount of money in the "trust fund" under Gore that there is right now. Exactly zero dollars and zero cents. That's right, there is not one penny in the social security trust fund. Never has been, and until the system is completely changed, there never will be.
How can this be, you ask? Because those T-Bills are simply an IOU from the US government made out to the US Government. It is absolutely farcical. The entire purpose of the trust fund is to pile up some money for a future time when there will be too many retirees and not enough wage earners to fund the retirement benefits from the current tax revenues. So we collect extra payroll taxes now, and invest them in T-bills. So far, it sounds good, right? Well, two small problems: First, what do you think happens to the money that the government borrows in the form of a treasury issue? It gets spent. That's right, every dime that has been taken in over the past ~20 years of trust fund investments has been spent in our deficit budgets. All of it. Second, where do you suppose the money to repay those T-Bills will come from when the Social Security Trust fund cashes the notes in? Why, the same place the money for all T-Bill redemptions comes from--from current tax revenues. But the sole purpose of the trust fund was to set some money aside because we know that there won't be enough wage earners to pay for those benefits out of current tax revenues at that point in time. So we have accomplished exactly NOTHING in the furtherance of eliminating the burden on further generations, we have simply shifted the coming tax increase from the payroll tax to the income tax. Big whup-ti-doo.
And here's the worst part, and it should really hack you off. For those of us who will start collecting social security after the baby boomers, we will be paying that money TWICE! That's right, I'm putting money in the trust fund now, and when they come calling to redeem those T-bills, I'll be paying the income taxes that will pay them back, with interest. So Al Gore's fictional "Lock Box" simply insures that I pay the cost of the boomer's retirement not once, but twice over. Yeah, thanks a lot!