The link goes to a slashdotted dot net nuke website. Don't tell me that Google and NASA pooled their resources to produce this. I guess a Google-Homeland Security team-up would use Frontpage 2000, and a cool perl-cgi login page.
In school, you have probably written dozens of apps that already existed, and hundreds of functions that were already available. Now, it's time to learn where the short-cuts are. Of course you can't rely on cut-and-paste programming for everything, but the trick is to learn that, sometimes, there is a cheap or free architecture, API, etc that can save you time and money. It isn't cheating anymore...
As for the emulator, that may be an interesting project, but make sure you are up on the local laws. You will have a strike against you, because some employers will assume it's illegal and not want that risk on his shoulders (having an employee miss work because he is getting sued for copyright infringement is a risk). You may want to cnosider something that can be justified as good for the industry, or educational purposes, like mono(the *Nix implementation of.net), a cisco router emulator, or an OS/400 emulator (if it can legally be done).
Then, if the boss tries to read too much into your interests, you can say that you saw a need, and decided to hone your skills, while "giving back to society".
Wow, usually when someone tries to screw every party in an attempt to line their pockets, they tell the artists that they are trying to make more moeny, so they can give more to the artists, and they tell the consumer that they are trying to lower prices so they can be competitive
Not here, however. Now they are pretty honest about their intentions. They want to give those who produce music the shaft on what they consider to be their biggest money-maker, and they are doing it so they can make more money...No noble intent, no "starving people in Hollywood" scenarios...just greed... I wonder if the brief ever mentioned the RIAA's desire to do a Scrooge McDuck-style swim in a pool full of money...
The recording industry is a bunch of middle-men, plain and simple. They are trying to screw artists and collect taxes on everything related to music, because they know that the only thing they have going for them is that their parent companies own the music stores, which are, also, not doing very well.
Wasn't he the same guy who said that all of the music on Ipods was stolen anyway and that Apple should cough up a percentage or some fixed amount of money per Ipod to "cover" all the "stolen" music?
Maybe if he gives them all a stern talking-to, they will have all learned their lesson
...but what in god's name does the defendant having MS have to do with anything? Granies, children, the infirm...c'mon. Leave the heart-string pulling crap out next time.
Whether you agree or disagree, I think the common theme with these stories is that the RIAA will stop at nothing to enforce their will. The last two stories I remember seeing were 1). about how the RIAA was prosecuting the family of the recently deceased, and 2). About how that the president of either the RIAA or MPAA looked the other way when his daughter was filesharing.
If you remove the ethical issue, neither of those would have been news. One would be "someone with the right to sue, sues", and the other would be "rich kid gets away with stuff you can't". We all knew that.
I was under the impression that they told the webmaster the reason they were delisted, they just didn't tell the webmaster the specific pages that the reason pertained to. Like "Your site has been delisted for hidden links to non-topical sites" instead of "Your site has been delisted for hidden links to non-topical sites on pages index.html, intro.html." etc. To me, that's a webmaster job. Google did their job on their end. What if the site had hundreds of pages of non-topical links? What if Google spiders just stopped at the first one they indexed (as they should). Should google be in charge of going through this guy's site and telling him exactly where the problems are? They are a search engine, not a website security firm. People are getting lazier everyday and everyone expects someone else to do their dirty work for them. People need to take some responsibility and stop whining.
Even if google only knew of one thing that got the talk.origins webmaster removed from the list, they could have easily included it in the email. What if google had made a mistake? Wouldn't it be reasonable for them to explain why they delisted the webmaster in that case?
Also, is it lazy to ask that when someone could have easily included the page in an email? Worst case scendario, we're talking about copying-and-pasting, or (yank-and-put if they use VIM). The most likely scenario is that they could accomplish their goals by modifying a form letter.
It's not like we're asking them to do anything difficult, like answer a phone, or give out trade secrets...
Although the bill could be written to avoid this loophole, well-thought out bills are not common within our government.
This reminds me of the lebrea tarpit application , which assumes unused IP addresses in a network and intentionally responds to an ACK request, but never responds to anything else, causing virus-infected systems and hacker tools such as nessus to tie up their open ports trying to communicate with systems that don't really exist. This software is illegal in the developer's home state of Illinois because state lawyers argue that viruses (or maybe just the underlying TCP/IP packets) are a "service" , and they have a similar law which prohibits spoofing for the purpose of disrupting network services.
Although the purpose of lebrea is to disrupt a malicious attack, and not to gether information, I can't help but feel that if Code Red is a service, then discovering one's IP address may be considered "information gathering".
They've been calling the war a "quagmire" since, what, week 2?
No, I've been calling it that since long before week two. Try week -12. That's about when the Bush administration decided to start promoting the war, and the more liberal individuals who made up 50% of America, and about 70% of the rest of the industrialized world said it was a bad idea then. We predicted what would happen long before the war began.
The problem is that our propaganda is not being broadcast there, and our nationalism isn't shared by our enemies. They have their own propaganda and their own nationalism, and it conflicts with ours. What that means is that when the neocons were saying that we would run in there, guns blazing, flash them a beautiful American smile, and watch as Iraqi men threw us the "mentos" Commerical-style thumbs up and Iraqi Burkas and panties magically dropped to the floor, the plan was already doomed, because it was predicated on the belief that we are always right and the world always thinks we're right.
Wouldn't such a move (assuming that they use raised lettering, or some kind of thread pattern that can make bills easy to distinguish) make it more difficult to counterfit the bills? How much money have we spent on all these "new" bills, just to prevent counterfitting?
Of course the judge didn't say they had to use a raised lettering system. One poster suggested changing the shape of bills, which would accomplish their goals much more cheaply.
What living room does not have two chairs, or a couch, or futon, and how many living rooms do not have a TV with stereo sound. Under their definition my $350 32" TV is a "home theatre".
Also, the part about "Ideally each TV viewer should have his or her own copy of the DVD" is crap. Should we also be paying them subsidies for the DVDs we choose not to purchase? Maybe we owe them for lost profits on the movies that don't sell well. Please tell me that this is a joke. I don't care if it make me look like a rantng idiot. I'm sure it wouldn't be the first time. Just tell me that the world is not being run by such stupid, short-sighted, and greedy SOBs.
No, it's much more likely that Fox will decide to make a documentary about filming the remake of Revenge of the Nerds, the struggle to gain support for the project, and its ultimate defeat. Rated PG-13.
Nah. It's more likely that their next documentary will be entitled "Nerds: The Menace Among Us"
Why? Because if anyone else had tried to get congress to act on Global Warming, there would have never been An Inconvenient Truth. Had Gore been more successful in convincing congress to join the Kyoto treaty or strengthen EPA guidelines, I don't believe there never would have been the movie. Which just means that the public would remain uncommitted/unconvinced, and future administrations would have just reversed what the more convincing version of an Al Gore could have achieved in Congress.
I'm wondering if our current president hadn't enacted an inconvenient environmental policy, then would we be watching this movie. Had he done just a little bit more to pay lip service to the "eco nuts", like maybe passing the "please make cars have better gas mileage proclaimation", along with the "cars must get at least 12 MPG" bill, then we might have gone through this decade thinking we were making progress. It may still happen that way, but this current "binge" may have contributed to the change in opinion.
It sounds like his criticism is that agile methodologies do not do enough to permit flexibility among the developers. The problem is that the waterfall model, or other traditional methodologies are even more rigid. Most of them delay the maintenence phase until either the end of the software life-cycle or until a team can be organized to tackle the issue, and are based on the idea that a small problem be fixed with a well-planned overhaul, as opposed to a minor tweak. Which do you think would be more likely to provide an emergency fix rapidly?
The problem is that he didn't point out anything that suceeds where agile methodologies fail.
Phase 1.
Build a recevier Phase 2.
Listen for a signal Phase 3.
If signal received, build a transmitter.
If no signal received, then experiment will be a failure. Go home.
Flying shits and "nice" landscapes may be kinda fun for a first time but that time ended about 20 years ago.
I'd like to download a "flying shit" screensaver. Maybe it could have Mr Hankey, or maybe it could be a heavily photoshopped version of a "Three Stooges" pie fight.
Or maybe they could encourage the use of a supercomputer screensaver such as SETI@home or united devices cancer research, etc.
You have never been mid-thrust in an awesome sexual encounter when the doorbell rings, and some smarmy ass-hole in Sunday best is at the door telling you about their imaginary man in the sky, and how he can save your soul.
When I'm having sex, I don't answer the door. If the house were on fire, I might let firemen in, so long as they don't take pictures, but this is sex, we're talking about. Like Christmas, it only comes one day a year, and I'm not stopping for anything.
As for the religious thing, don't you think you are taking it too far? If you can't respect the beliefs of others, or their right to argue their point, then how can you expect them to do the same for you?
I remember the aptitude test from grade school. It had lame questions like "Do you like to cook/Do you want to be a fireman/Do you want to be a cop". And there were no software engineering questions because the people who made the test did not have the insight to know that my hobby (which they never asked about) would, in ten years, take the world by storm.
The irony of the whole thing was that it was a computerized test that dismissed anything even related to computers as an employment option. I might as well have said "I wanna be Michael Jordon", as to say "I want to be a computer programmer".
Shouldn't various students of various abilities be judged to their level by what the market needs? Shouldn't education be partially based on what will be required of the student if they were to enter the industry at a certain knowledge level?
Who determines what field the student will enter, at what age, and what they will need? I remember the aptitude test from grade school. It had lame questions like "Do you like to cook/Do you want to be a fireman/Do you want to be a cop". And there were no software engineering questions because the people who made the test did not have the insight to know that my hobby (which they never asked about) would, in ten years, take the world by storm. Another problem with this is that people change careers often in their lives, and this test discourages people from learning anything more than the bare minimum needed to be able to do one's job.
Fo example, some test may say that the student is best suited to be a factory worker doing "unskilled labor". This requires no reading abilities, no math skills, and no knowledge of history. But, the student may need to know math to determine if he or she is getting paid correctly, and he or she may need to know how to read to understand the contract that the boss is asking him or her to sign. Of course politicians would side with their contributors and deny everything said in that last sentence.
Now, I can agree with your point on high-stakes testing, mainly that the "make these kids smarter or you're fired" attitude will result in massive cheating, but I believe that our problem is that there are too many kids in school listening to important subjects and saying "why should I care? I'll never do this for a living". The result is that we're having trouble competing with the rest of the industrialized world in science, reading comprehension, and, when it comes to history or current events, we're lucky if our politicians really understand what's going on.
The headline implies that Windows is claiming their system is immune to virus, while this guy is saying that he can trust his son to use Vista without an antivirus. The second claim may be true, if they can get rid of buffer overflow errors and lock down the environment for non-admin users enough so that they are incapable of affecting their settings and important files and folders such as C:\Windows.
The first statement can never be true, however, because most people are the Admins of their PC, and they will install anything, if a pop-up window asks them to.
Nope, I stand by my initial reply. Have fun, learn stuff, get high, fall down, read a novel, write a poem....
You've seen "Animal House" one too many times. This kid is asking for advice on how to plan for the future, so telling him to "get high and make mistakes" is not exactly the best advice to give. You're also making the assumption that anyone can get drunk for four years, put on a suit, and go to work anywhere he wants (I'm trying so hard to resist a George W. joke right now). Now maybe he can make a few mistakes, get hired by some shifty company where the boss is a complete A-hole, and after a few years, use that as a stepping stone to something better, and maybe by the time he's thirty or thirty five, end up in a decent company in a decent town, but that's not the life I would endorse.
Besides, I'm not telling the kid to join a convent. I'm telling him to take on a twenty hour per week job, while going to school. He will still have weekends, and for some of us, going to college meant that you __had__ to work..
Go to college, take neat classes, be well rounded. Learn to read, learn to think, learn to write (English first, then C++/Python/Java, what-have you). All of that, plus enjoying these next few years of life is way way more important than an internship or being some Google-head's code slave for a summer. Plenty of time for work after you've had some fun. And yes, I'm completely serious about this.
I couldn't disagree with you more. As a recent graduate who had difficulty finding a job, I can tell you that most businesses won't even look at you, unless you have experience. The best form of experience is working in an interneship for an actual business. If you can get something like that, then you're probably going to have no trouble fnding a job, but you need to start looking early. In my area (northeast Tennessee), internships are not to easy to aquire.
Working internships for the school is a good second choice, but be warned: acedmic atmospheres tend to be more laid back than business atmospheres, so your work may be undervalued.
Don't dismiss BestBuy type places, if you can get on with their geek-squad or any other type of technical support. It's a good place to demonstrate people skills as well as problem solving bilities (but still not as good as actual experience).
Open source projects or volunteer work for non-profits can also be a good place to get some experience, but, if you contribute to an open source project, then you need to make sure that there is some way of showing an employer how much you contributed. I've never contributed to one, so I don't know if it's possible to volunteer, do nothing for four years, and then say "I practically built this thing", but you may want to ask how the project is organized, and if there is a way to get either a good reference or to get credit for something you've done within the project.
I certainly doubt that unless someone does all the work for them, hands it to them on a plate and has a potential market share that can force them into it (like the itunes store back in the day) that the major record labels will continue to resist changes until they die out. Even in the early 90s bands were refering to the record companies as 'Dinosaurs on the way to extinction'. The extinction will be a long time coming but the companies are not known for their ability to adapt which will kill them in the end.
I think it would be better to describe it using an evolution analogy. Some new contender (like some podcast, music distribution site, or streaming radio station) will come along and find a way to make big bucks while at the same time producing their own content. Sure, they may not be raking in dough hand-over-fist, the way the music industry does now, when a hit song emerges, but the point is that the musicians who previously would have had no choice but to give 95% of their profits to the record pimps at the RIAA, could go somewhere else and get a better deal.
The end result will be that one or two labels will lose money and be bought out by either this new contender or their RIAA competitors, but the rest of the industry will see what they have to do to compete: change their name (because their old name was associated with idiots who tried to rip people off. The new company will be run by the same idiots, but under a different business model), and then adopt whatever marketing scheme worked for their non-RIAA counterparts. In the end, the RIAA will not look the same, but most of them will adapt.
If the signal is encrypted, and you have to PAY to receive and decrypt the signal, so what if it is filthy language? Who cares where the signal originates?
The important issues as I see them are:
Profanity being available to children -- I was really hoping the V-chip (and similar technologies) would get rid of this crap. It's really just a smokescreen to cover the next item
Profanity being available to adults -- It makes some people nuts to think that, somewhere, someone is doing something they don't approve of. Maybe it's "godlessness" or "immoral", but mostly it's just a religious nut wanting to control everyone else.
Interference -- Sometimes highly powered transmitters bleed over onto other frequencies. My neighbor used to have an illegal CB antenna that would broadcast on every TV channel below five, including channel 3, which made VCRs and video game systems not work as well as they could have. If these transmitters are interfering with wireless networks, cell phones, television signals, or CB signals used by emergency vehicles then people have a right to complain.
President Bush has said recently that terror groups were trying to influence public opinion in the US, describing their efforts as the "war of ideas".
The guy in a cowboy outfit is in a war of ideas. Oh, crap. We are so screwed.
But seriously, this is not like our president. Remember when we had privatized propaganda? Now that the government is producing it, it will be lower quality and more expensive. I suggest a propaganda voucher system. We should give every American a bullshit card. Then, that person can redeem it at their local store, church, or city hall.
Slashdot Mirror
The link goes to a slashdotted dot net nuke website. Don't tell me that Google and NASA pooled their resources to produce this. I guess a Google-Homeland Security team-up would use Frontpage 2000, and a cool perl-cgi login page.
I thought it was because England had fleets of mass destruction. I'm pretty sure I remember Washington telling us we'd be out of here in six months.
In school, you have probably written dozens of apps that already existed, and hundreds of functions that were already available. Now, it's time to learn where the short-cuts are. Of course you can't rely on cut-and-paste programming for everything, but the trick is to learn that, sometimes, there is a cheap or free architecture, API, etc that can save you time and money. It isn't cheating anymore...
As for the emulator, that may be an interesting project, but make sure you are up on the local laws. You will have a strike against you, because some employers will assume it's illegal and not want that risk on his shoulders (having an employee miss work because he is getting sued for copyright infringement is a risk). You may want to cnosider something that can be justified as good for the industry, or educational purposes, like mono(the *Nix implementation of .net), a cisco router emulator, or an OS/400 emulator (if it can legally be done).
Then, if the boss tries to read too much into your interests, you can say that you saw a need, and decided to hone your skills, while "giving back to society".
Wow, usually when someone tries to screw every party in an attempt to line their pockets, they tell the artists that they are trying to make more moeny, so they can give more to the artists, and they tell the consumer that they are trying to lower prices so they can be competitive
Not here, however. Now they are pretty honest about their intentions. They want to give those who produce music the shaft on what they consider to be their biggest money-maker, and they are doing it so they can make more money...No noble intent, no "starving people in Hollywood" scenarios...just greed... I wonder if the brief ever mentioned the RIAA's desire to do a Scrooge McDuck-style swim in a pool full of money...
The recording industry is a bunch of middle-men, plain and simple. They are trying to screw artists and collect taxes on everything related to music, because they know that the only thing they have going for them is that their parent companies own the music stores, which are, also, not doing very well.
Maybe if he gives them all a stern talking-to, they will have all learned their lesson
Whether you agree or disagree, I think the common theme with these stories is that the RIAA will stop at nothing to enforce their will. The last two stories I remember seeing were 1). about how the RIAA was prosecuting the family of the recently deceased, and 2). About how that the president of either the RIAA or MPAA looked the other way when his daughter was filesharing.
If you remove the ethical issue, neither of those would have been news. One would be "someone with the right to sue, sues", and the other would be "rich kid gets away with stuff you can't". We all knew that.
Even if google only knew of one thing that got the talk.origins webmaster removed from the list, they could have easily included it in the email. What if google had made a mistake? Wouldn't it be reasonable for them to explain why they delisted the webmaster in that case?
Also, is it lazy to ask that when someone could have easily included the page in an email? Worst case scendario, we're talking about copying-and-pasting, or (yank-and-put if they use VIM). The most likely scenario is that they could accomplish their goals by modifying a form letter.
It's not like we're asking them to do anything difficult, like answer a phone, or give out trade secrets...
Although the bill could be written to avoid this loophole, well-thought out bills are not common within our government.
This reminds me of the lebrea tarpit application , which assumes unused IP addresses in a network and intentionally responds to an ACK request, but never responds to anything else, causing virus-infected systems and hacker tools such as nessus to tie up their open ports trying to communicate with systems that don't really exist. This software is illegal in the developer's home state of Illinois because state lawyers argue that viruses (or maybe just the underlying TCP/IP packets) are a "service" , and they have a similar law which prohibits spoofing for the purpose of disrupting network services.
Although the purpose of lebrea is to disrupt a malicious attack, and not to gether information, I can't help but feel that if Code Red is a service, then discovering one's IP address may be considered "information gathering".
Any thoughts?
No, I've been calling it that since long before week two. Try week -12. That's about when the Bush administration decided to start promoting the war, and the more liberal individuals who made up 50% of America, and about 70% of the rest of the industrialized world said it was a bad idea then. We predicted what would happen long before the war began.
The problem is that our propaganda is not being broadcast there, and our nationalism isn't shared by our enemies. They have their own propaganda and their own nationalism, and it conflicts with ours. What that means is that when the neocons were saying that we would run in there, guns blazing, flash them a beautiful American smile, and watch as Iraqi men threw us the "mentos" Commerical-style thumbs up and Iraqi Burkas and panties magically dropped to the floor, the plan was already doomed, because it was predicated on the belief that we are always right and the world always thinks we're right.
Wouldn't such a move (assuming that they use raised lettering, or some kind of thread pattern that can make bills easy to distinguish) make it more difficult to counterfit the bills? How much money have we spent on all these "new" bills, just to prevent counterfitting?
Of course the judge didn't say they had to use a raised lettering system. One poster suggested changing the shape of bills, which would accomplish their goals much more cheaply.
It isn't April Fools day, so WTF?
What living room does not have two chairs, or a couch, or futon, and how many living rooms do not have a TV with stereo sound. Under their definition my $350 32" TV is a "home theatre".
Also, the part about "Ideally each TV viewer should have his or her own copy of the DVD" is crap. Should we also be paying them subsidies for the DVDs we choose not to purchase? Maybe we owe them for lost profits on the movies that don't sell well. Please tell me that this is a joke. I don't care if it make me look like a rantng idiot. I'm sure it wouldn't be the first time. Just tell me that the world is not being run by such stupid, short-sighted, and greedy SOBs.
Nah. It's more likely that their next documentary will be entitled "Nerds: The Menace Among Us"
I'm wondering if our current president hadn't enacted an inconvenient environmental policy, then would we be watching this movie. Had he done just a little bit more to pay lip service to the "eco nuts", like maybe passing the "please make cars have better gas mileage proclaimation", along with the "cars must get at least 12 MPG" bill, then we might have gone through this decade thinking we were making progress. It may still happen that way, but this current "binge" may have contributed to the change in opinion.
It sounds like his criticism is that agile methodologies do not do enough to permit flexibility among the developers. The problem is that the waterfall model, or other traditional methodologies are even more rigid. Most of them delay the maintenence phase until either the end of the software life-cycle or until a team can be organized to tackle the issue, and are based on the idea that a small problem be fixed with a well-planned overhaul, as opposed to a minor tweak. Which do you think would be more likely to provide an emergency fix rapidly?
The problem is that he didn't point out anything that suceeds where agile methodologies fail.
Phase 1.
Build a recevier
Phase 2.
Listen for a signal
Phase 3.
If signal received, build a transmitter.
If no signal received, then experiment will be a failure. Go home.
I'd like to download a "flying shit" screensaver. Maybe it could have Mr Hankey, or maybe it could be a heavily photoshopped version of a "Three Stooges" pie fight.
Or maybe they could encourage the use of a supercomputer screensaver such as SETI@home or united devices cancer research, etc.
When I'm having sex, I don't answer the door. If the house were on fire, I might let firemen in, so long as they don't take pictures, but this is sex, we're talking about. Like Christmas, it only comes one day a year, and I'm not stopping for anything.
As for the religious thing, don't you think you are taking it too far? If you can't respect the beliefs of others, or their right to argue their point, then how can you expect them to do the same for you?
The irony of the whole thing was that it was a computerized test that dismissed anything even related to computers as an employment option. I might as well have said "I wanna be Michael Jordon", as to say "I want to be a computer programmer".
Who determines what field the student will enter, at what age, and what they will need? I remember the aptitude test from grade school. It had lame questions like "Do you like to cook/Do you want to be a fireman/Do you want to be a cop". And there were no software engineering questions because the people who made the test did not have the insight to know that my hobby (which they never asked about) would, in ten years, take the world by storm. Another problem with this is that people change careers often in their lives, and this test discourages people from learning anything more than the bare minimum needed to be able to do one's job.
Fo example, some test may say that the student is best suited to be a factory worker doing "unskilled labor". This requires no reading abilities, no math skills, and no knowledge of history. But, the student may need to know math to determine if he or she is getting paid correctly, and he or she may need to know how to read to understand the contract that the boss is asking him or her to sign. Of course politicians would side with their contributors and deny everything said in that last sentence.
Now, I can agree with your point on high-stakes testing, mainly that the "make these kids smarter or you're fired" attitude will result in massive cheating, but I believe that our problem is that there are too many kids in school listening to important subjects and saying "why should I care? I'll never do this for a living". The result is that we're having trouble competing with the rest of the industrialized world in science, reading comprehension, and, when it comes to history or current events, we're lucky if our politicians really understand what's going on.
The headline implies that Windows is claiming their system is immune to virus, while this guy is saying that he can trust his son to use Vista without an antivirus. The second claim may be true, if they can get rid of buffer overflow errors and lock down the environment for non-admin users enough so that they are incapable of affecting their settings and important files and folders such as C:\Windows.
The first statement can never be true, however, because most people are the Admins of their PC, and they will install anything, if a pop-up window asks them to.
You've seen "Animal House" one too many times. This kid is asking for advice on how to plan for the future, so telling him to "get high and make mistakes" is not exactly the best advice to give. You're also making the assumption that anyone can get drunk for four years, put on a suit, and go to work anywhere he wants (I'm trying so hard to resist a George W. joke right now). Now maybe he can make a few mistakes, get hired by some shifty company where the boss is a complete A-hole, and after a few years, use that as a stepping stone to something better, and maybe by the time he's thirty or thirty five, end up in a decent company in a decent town, but that's not the life I would endorse.
Besides, I'm not telling the kid to join a convent. I'm telling him to take on a twenty hour per week job, while going to school. He will still have weekends, and for some of us, going to college meant that you __had__ to work..
I couldn't disagree with you more. As a recent graduate who had difficulty finding a job, I can tell you that most businesses won't even look at you, unless you have experience. The best form of experience is working in an interneship for an actual business. If you can get something like that, then you're probably going to have no trouble fnding a job, but you need to start looking early. In my area (northeast Tennessee), internships are not to easy to aquire.
Working internships for the school is a good second choice, but be warned: acedmic atmospheres tend to be more laid back than business atmospheres, so your work may be undervalued.
Don't dismiss BestBuy type places, if you can get on with their geek-squad or any other type of technical support. It's a good place to demonstrate people skills as well as problem solving bilities (but still not as good as actual experience).
Open source projects or volunteer work for non-profits can also be a good place to get some experience, but, if you contribute to an open source project, then you need to make sure that there is some way of showing an employer how much you contributed. I've never contributed to one, so I don't know if it's possible to volunteer, do nothing for four years, and then say "I practically built this thing", but you may want to ask how the project is organized, and if there is a way to get either a good reference or to get credit for something you've done within the project.
I think it would be better to describe it using an evolution analogy. Some new contender (like some podcast, music distribution site, or streaming radio station) will come along and find a way to make big bucks while at the same time producing their own content. Sure, they may not be raking in dough hand-over-fist, the way the music industry does now, when a hit song emerges, but the point is that the musicians who previously would have had no choice but to give 95% of their profits to the record pimps at the RIAA, could go somewhere else and get a better deal.
The end result will be that one or two labels will lose money and be bought out by either this new contender or their RIAA competitors, but the rest of the industry will see what they have to do to compete: change their name (because their old name was associated with idiots who tried to rip people off. The new company will be run by the same idiots, but under a different business model), and then adopt whatever marketing scheme worked for their non-RIAA counterparts. In the end, the RIAA will not look the same, but most of them will adapt.
The important issues as I see them are:
The guy in a cowboy outfit is in a war of ideas. Oh, crap. We are so screwed.
But seriously, this is not like our president. Remember when we had privatized propaganda? Now that the government is producing it, it will be lower quality and more expensive. I suggest a propaganda voucher system. We should give every American a bullshit card. Then, that person can redeem it at their local store, church, or city hall.