While I believe that filesharing should not be illegal, I can't help noticing that one could formulate a similar argument about all property.
Not even remotely. Try making a copy of a plot of land..... Not all resources can be copied at near-zero cost.
I wasn't thinking about the marginal cost of copying so much as the fact of the government providing (at public cost, not proportional to the value of the property being protected) the power of the state to enforce property-rights claims. And anyway, real property is far from the only sort of property that's out there. Some forms of property are quite abstract. As one example, consider grazing rights.
Look at what happens as a result of all the security at airports. Businesses that operate within the zone can (and do) charge extortionate prices since they have a captive clientele to prey on. Similarly, airlines require ID mainly to prevent a secondary market in airfares that is not subject to their current highly-evolved system of price discrimination.
Checking ID does nothing for security. But since when has the government cared about the security of anyone but the elite? This is about getting us used to intrusive control. The controlled areas (airports, theme parks, shopping malls, the prison system) will gradually expand, genuine life will be increasingly marginalized, and we will be increasingly administered in the interest of corporations. Asymmetric information is power. Therefore we should deny them information, even if (as is not proven in this case anyway) this increases our personal exposure to risk.
In order to get a true idea of risks, you have to compare the risk of not being tracked (and all its consequences) against the risks of being tracked (and all those consequences).
Let's not forget that copyright property is a state-sponsored temporary monopoly which creates a scarcity which does not correspond to any state in reality. No such scarcity exists or would exist except as created by law.
While I believe that filesharing should not be illegal, I can't help noticing that one could formulate a similar argument about all property. That makes me suspect that your argument is either invalid, or something extremely radical should happen that's not restricted to file trading.
Is it necessarily a foregone conclusion that privacy and security are in opposition to one another? I'll grant that privacy and sloppy security are opposed, but why have sloppy security at all?
It is indeed a false dichotomy. The things that are really opposed are phony security and justice. Here's why: all these security schemes can be thought of as statistical testing protocols (systems that yield 1=Al Qaeda, 0=John Q Public). To make matters worse, the ones proposed by the Bush junta are incompetently designed. They have the properties of bad statistical tests: poor sensitivity and a high false-positive rate. The high false positive rate means that very large numbers of innocent people will be falsely accused. Since this government is opposed on principle to due process, a large proportion of these people will as a consequence be falsely charged, imprisoned, or subjected to other forms of harassment with no recourse. And all this for a system that yields little or no additional security.
The real security is in having a political system that we all have a stake in, and that we're all willing to defend. Since the present system is (at best) only interested in our well-being in the same way that ranchers are interested in the well-being of their livestock, the only "security" solutions we've seen have been imposed from the top down. That makes it look like a lot like the Iraq war: a highly committed faction wants it in order to serve their own agenda, so it is then proposed as a "solution" to any number of problems that, logically, have nothing to do with it. Eventually, to be seen to be "doing something," the idiots in Congress allow it to be implemented, and catastrophe follows.
If they can't measure you, they can't manage you. With the most likely outcome of closer management being more comprehensive exploitation, the best strategy is to strongly resist any attempts to further track or monitor us.
Even if (despite all evidence) the Bush regime has no nefarious plans, putting such a system in place creates an opportunity for future abuse. Experience of politics in the US shows that the main deterrent to such abuse is lack of opportunity, not moral inhibitions or the successful application of the supposed checks and balances of a rotten system.
I'd like to see a further refinement: if it's a contingency case, the law firm pays its opponent's costs if they lose. NOT the plaintiff.
I was in Britain for a long time. Courts regularly heard both unfair dismissal and medical malpractice cases, so whatever chilling effect there was, it certainly wasn't a complete deterrent. And, when the little guy is the defendant, awarding costs limits the exepcted payoff of "tactical" lawsuits designed to force an unjust settlement in knowledge that the defendant can't afford the typically exporbitant legal fees necessary to defend himself. So it doesn't only benefit the powerful.
As things work now, there is no effective deterrent for speculative cases with minimal legal basis, besides the overhead cost to the law firm that's doing the suit. This encourages a "throw it against the wall and hope something will stick" approach to litigation. File forty dodgy suits, win big on one, you're in the money.
Americans are no more protected from abuse by big corporations than Europeans. The opposite is the case. So the argument that the present US system somehow helps the underdog is a self-serving lie promulgated by the law firms who are the true beneficiaries. Remember, they get their snouts deeply into the trough before the plaintiffs see a single penny of those judgements.
Capping legal firms' fees would be another deisrable thing to do.
Sabre-rattling is about it. I work for a firm in California. Two of our employees left, took the client list and relationships with them, and continued similar work with our clients after leaving. Despite the non-compete that they had signed, we didn't sue. The reason was that, even in this very clear case, the outcome was too uncertain. Also, it would have just pissed off our clients, since they liked the guys who left. So we buried the hatchet and kept on working alongside them. Everyone got on with their lives.
I'm concerned that the Governator will eventually get around to attacking protections such as these as a way of making California more "Business-friendly."
For those of you in "at-will" states: fire your state legislators, they're scum who have sold you out. Theirs is the only employment that should be "at will."
I shrugged when I read it. The English looked like it had been fed through Babelfish and had passed through Mongolian, Kurdish and Quechua before being reluctantly returned to English. Unbelievable that someone could deliberately write anything so turgid, or that there was an editor involved in the process. As for the concepts in the book, they reinforce the old Frankfurt School view that political and philosophical opinions arise from personality types. If one were to develop a shallow political philosophy whose sole purpose was to rationalize narcissism, it would be indistinguishable from Objectivism. This is consistent with Rand's biography, which is that of a self-centered ranter with a grievance against the world for not bowing down to her genius.
You are worried that someone abuses the black box but you are abusing the absence of a black box by breaking the law.
No, I think the poster is trying to make sure that the right to be protected against self-incrimination is not eroded by technicalities.
Anyway, it's my belief that the penalties for some of these infractions are greater precisely because they are seldom enforced, and when they are, it's done selectively. If all driving infractions were punished to the full extent of the law, what would the economic impact be? And how many of us would be punished for behavior that is only potentially harmful?
Why would you imply that the goal of this legislation is not precisely to stifle innovation? Congress has been alarmed by the pace of innovation and the prospect of we the people getting away from their death grip. That's why they've unleashed this torrent of draconian legislation and have tolerated the recent Patent Office mission creep. That's why the current legal environment allows lawsuits such as SCO vs IBM. They want to gum up the works through litigation and legislative repression until they're able to take control again.
Stallman stands vindicated. The struggle is about freedom. They want the Web to be an Orange County shopping mall rather than a vibrant, living city. If you're too far from the norm or aren't there to spend money, you'll get ejected. And no political expression allowed.
Isn't the American ideal capitalism? Free competition?
Precisely. It's competition by corporations to buy legislation to eliminate competition in the buyer's marketplace. That's one of the biggest problems with American capitalism: firms compete not only to produce the best products and services, but to shape the playing field to their advantage. As a consequence, we see such grotesqueries as the DMCA or the insanity that is US patent law.
My advice:
I'm not entirely sure what the big rush is to go to college. I recommend living in a foreign country first, preferably one with a different language and a different culture than your own. Find a university or college town or smaller city in this country and plop yourself down for a year to learn the language. Avoid places with huge tourist industries, but if there is a little tourism, that's good.
That's excellent advice, my eldest son's planning to do that in a remote corner of Europe when he finishes high school and I think it's a good way to force yourself to grow. My son's situation is kind of different than the poster though, since he has been unnervingly consistent since early childhood about his career direction, and he doesn't regard himself a boy genius. But even in his case, poor normal person, I think it's a great idea.
Me, I dropped out of college for two years and lived in a squat (hey, it was the late 70's) in a city 1000 miles from home. Even such internal moves can be worthwhile. Poverty and desperation focuses the mind, as does the sight of members of your peer group failing to survive (literally). That puts everything else into a very stark perspective. Sounds harsh, but it definitely got me out of navel-gazing mode and made me more externally focused.
Berlusconi is already deeply loathed for his ass-kissing support for the Iraq invasion. He's such a seething mass of conflict of interest and corruption that he makes Cheney look like a paragon of integrity. The fact that this was his idea, that the penalties are so grotesquely disproportionate, and that it's so evidently in support of his own personal interests, makes it likely that a future Italian government will repeal it, and it will be politically infeasible to revive it for years after that.
Better it didn't happen, but if it has to happen, at least it's happening in a way that will bring the whole idea into the worst possible disrepute.
The false-positive rate should be emphasized far more than it has been. What does it mean? It means that whatever system they have in place, if it's based on statistical indicators rather than someone's hunch, will inevitably identify several innocent people for every terrorist that they find. Depending on the sensitivity of the detection algoritm, the value of "several" could be anywhere from dozens to thousands. And these people are not "borderline" terrorists in any sense. They are no more likely to be real terrorists than anyone else in the population. They're entirely innocent. So the use of such a system is guaranteed to falsely identify, stigmatize and punish large numbers of innocent people. This is not a tradeoff between freedom and security. It's a tradeoff between justice and the false perception of security.
I've had experience of a number of family businesses (I include boyfriend/girlfriend and boyfriend/boyfriend in that category for the sake of this discussion). By far, they have been the most dysfunctional category of businesses I've dealt with.
1. Emotional issues between the partners get in the way of sensible business decisions. This will weaken your business.
2. It is inevitable that one partner will be better than the other, and it may reach the point where the only reason the weaker partner remains is due to nepotism. This will be noticed by both customers and employees, and will damage your credibility.
3. One of the best things about being in a relationship is being able to have a life outside work. By entering a business relationship with your partner, you've given that up. This will lead to burnout and stagnation, and will eliminate what little quality time you might otherwise have spent together.
Dolts! This is the greatest country in the world hands down. That's why more people want to move here than any other place in the world. Why is this country great? Well sure, freedom is the number one reason. A close second is infrastructure. Do you know how nice it is to have indoor plumbing, paved roads to drive on, being able to drive at night without getting car jacked (for most of the country), electricity on 24 hours a day. I know what it's like to live in a country without those things. You think our governement officials are corrupt? You have no idea. A senator in my home country just demolished a $4 million mansion to rebuild a brand new more luxurious one in its place, while half the country starves.
Freedom and infrastructure!
To keep them require two things: a military and taxes.
I agree with the need for infrastructure. I also agree that a military is necessary. But the US spends a much higher percentage of our (very large) GDP on the military than just about anyone else. The reason for this has little to do with self-defense, and much to do with enforcing the will of the US ruling class on people in remote parts of the world. I will fight to defend my country. I will not fight to further enrich Exxon or Halliburton. I also recognize a moral obligation to resist being transformed into a slave who is press-ganged to carry out the murderous orders of those whom, in a more just society, would be incarcerated. Leaving out all the patriotic lies that they use to sugar-coat it, conscription is nothing but involuntary servitude, and is incompatible with a free society. I'm old enough to have been eligible for the last draft, and a lot of the idiots posting here obviously have no idea what it's like to have the government coerce you to go to a far-away country to commit crimes against humanity on their behalf, or why that might bother some of us. Those who are oblivious to this are the real dolts.
I think the only solution to this would be removing officer discretion from the enforcement process. Enforcement officials should be legally required to punish every single infraction of every law, however minor.
In that case, life would become intolerable and nearly everyone in the country would be at risk of being fined and/or incarcerated. Part of the reason we have the set of laws we do is precisely because they're unenforceable. Legislators pass increasingly draconian laws that are, in their effect, largely symbolic. I have friends who once lived in totalitarian regimes, where the government could do as they pleased with you with little pretense of due process. The reason people survived was because the government was incompetent. Also because the real motivation for that massive state power was not to imprison everyone, but to provide leverage against those who were chosen as targets.
Result: the state as shakedown racket. Look at the asset-forfeiture laws in the US as an example of what's to come. If you have something they want, or you're doing something they don't like, you'll be endlessly harassed. Be a good little drone, kiss ass and pay the mordida, they might leave you alone for a while longer.
Interesting how many posters here seem to be quite content with the "kiss ass and pay up" strategy.
The law itself is not valid. The US has a principle of supercedence of law. The higher a levels of law override the lower ones. So A city can't make something legal that is illegal on a federal level, for example. Works the other way too, the right to freedom of speech can't be nulled in a given state, it's at a higher level. Specifically, it's at the HIGHEST level. The constitution overrides all other levels of law.
And one of the provisions of the Constitution is that the Feds can only pass certain categories of laws, and the ability to pass all other laws is reserved to the states or the people. The federal courts and Congress have widely disregarded this principle, using convoluted arguments involving the interstate commerce clause, the equal-protection amendment, etc. But still it is not true that there is necessarily a hierarchy of laws as you assert. That's more the way things are done in, say, France. A large part of the Constitution consists of statements of limits on what Congress can legislate on.
Most of the people I've worked with -- the vast majority, above and below me, including presidents, vice-presidents, general managers, directors, managers, and individual contributors, across 10 or more companies I've worked at -- were ethical. There have been some exceptions, but they number at most a half dozen over my 20+ years in the software business.
Over my 23 years in the business, that has been my experience as well. I have encountered a handful of companies where lying (and its stunted cousin, backstabbing office politics) were prevalent at the top, but they were pathological aberrations. My current client client sponsor is so strait-laced that she has avoided following some of my recommendations because doing so might give the appearance of spin-doctoring, even when there was no deception involved. I've seen individual programmers who were reluctant to break bad news to the boss, but I attribute that to inexperience and an unfounded sense of insecurity. As a consultant, I am expected to tell the truth, no matter how harsh, and if there were any evidence I was sugar-coating it, my ass would be out the door. If anything, I've seen a reluctance on the part of some senior managers to accept good news. Oh, and these aren't mom-and-pop operations, most have been well-known, successful firms.
I'm interested to see if outsourced IT operations can maintain the same levels of candor. There is a cultural element in willingness to tell the boss bad news, and I know from my own work experience in Europe and the Middle East that this is more strongly encouraged in the US than in more traditional, hierarchical societies.
Worst computer job: I worked in the early 80's on a project where we had lots of minicomputers to integrate before deploying them to several sites, therefore we needed lots of floor space. So our customers provided us with a converted blimp hangar. In the winter, the inside temperature was about 48 degrees, and that was in one of the choice seats near a mini. People worked at terminals with their coats and hats on, wearing woollen gloves with the fingers cut off. To make matters even worse, the pubs nearby were crap: Watneys, urgh.
Worst non-computer job: Applying pitch to roofs in southern California in the summer.
I'll leave out the dangerous jobs, that's a whole different category.
That's exactly right. The reason it's risky to raise IT issues with the management is because there's not routine communication, so problems pile up and it becomes a big deal. Also, in situations where there isn't enough communication to start with, management generally perceive IT as unresponsive. If you tell them anything, tell them that you'd like to see them establish a weekly hour to thrash out IT/business problems. Until then, things will be too highly charged and you're putting yourself at risk of being on the receiving end of "shoot the messenger."
Before you consider talking about geek stuff, consider that this is a country that does not allow other religions other than islam to be followed here. I mean, how pathetic is that?
You're making the mistake of confusing the Saudi government with the Saudi people. Remember, they're not elected; they've been kept in power largely by the US. Further isolating the people is just a case of blaming the victim. It suits some people's agendas to hold Middle Easterners down, but the right thing for us to do is to be on the side of meritocracy and open society and against the corrupt status quo.
I lived and worked in Saudi Arabia for several years. Some of the things that other posters observed are true: women suffer many restrictions, and their criminal justice system is a brutal, crooked mess, mostly because the government is too close to the religious right (to a lesser extent, a problem here too). But it's an extremely complex society that has undergone a lot of changes in the past 50 years, and it is far different than the caricature presented in the US media. There are know-nothing religious reactionaries, thoughtful and tolerant believers, creeps who go whoring in Bangkok, honest technocrats, dodgy businessmen. A lot goes on under the surface.
The Saudi programmers and software engineers I worked with were, like those in the US, a mixed bag. The best were as good as the best here. They have the ability bell curve same as everyone else. The only problems I saw were the result of the nepotism-based government, that removed incentives for achievement. Despite this, there are still talented people trying to do right for their people. Sadly, the system makes it an uphill struggle.
I should add that many of the Americans I met there were the scum of the earth-- cheats, arrogant rip-off artists and ass-kissers, who have aligned themselves with the worst elements of Saudi society. One of the reasons people in the Middle East don't like us or trust us is because they have learned from experience. Direct contact between people who aren't just out to make a fast buck would be a positive step in correcting the view that we're all like those lying bastards. Continuing isolation only sustains corrupt interests in both Saudi Arabia and in the US.
Steg programs need two inputs: an encrypted text to hide (the message), and a random stream of data to hide it in (the "medium"). The only way that the output can be identified as possibly containing a steganographic message is if the statistical properties of the hidden message are in some way distinct from those of the medium.
That implies that an effective steg program would do some analysis of the statistical properties of the medium prior to hiding the message, and would adapt the statistical properties of the encrypted message to blend in. For example, they might make a message hidden in audio look like Boltzmann noise (assuming there were no other pseudo-random artifacts created by the recording equipment and audio encoding scheme).
Only snag I see is that, if several parameters are adjustable, the values of those parameters would also need to be known on the receiving end.
Sometimes the government has to spy on innocent people.
No, they don't.
If they're going to do surveillance at all, yes they do. Go back to a basic statistics book and read about false negatives and false positives, and what happens in cases where the event you're trying to detect is unlikely compared to the false-positive rate of your test. For a test sensitive enough to find a handful of terrorists in a large population, the false-positive rate WILL be high. This implies that, not only will they inevitably spy on innocent people, but will falsely accuse a number of them. If their criteria for determining if you're a terrorist give lots of false positives, tens or hundreds of innocents will fall into the net along with each terrorist. This is also why trials on secret evidence are such a great injustice: there are scenarios in which the government could be acting in good faith, using statistically valid techniques, and still lock up far more innocents than bad guys. An independent body needs to review that evidence, since there's no incentive for the government to admit that (say) 95% of the people they accuse are innocent. And based on what I've seen so far, I have little confidence in the good faith of this government-- that only makes the situation even worse.
It's naive to assume that any simple rule (say, spy only on Arab men aged 20-35) is going to significantly improve your rate of success. Too easy to anticipate and circumvent. It's about as misguided as putting massive resources into preventing another 9/11 attack. Successful terrorists are always changing their tactics. Whatever the next one is, you can be assured that it will be different than the last one. They can only succced by hitting us where we're NOT looking, and by forcing us to expend our resources looking for them where they're not.
Note further that the high false positive rate, and the government's refusal to be accountable for it, will lead to a situation where innocent citizens rightly mistrust the government. This will compromise their ability to gather worthwhile information, and will make us all less secure.
These observations do not assume malign intent on the part of the government. Merely the everyday venality of politicians. I, for one, mistrust the Bush administration's motives as well as their methodology. None of this would encourage a rational, well-meaning person to risk their own personal freedom to provide the government with information of unknown quality that might thwart an attack. Odds are it's irrelevant, and even stronger odds say that you'd be putting yourself at risk of continuing harassment and possibly indefinite incarceration by contacting them. Conclusion: police-state tactics can never improve security. They just make life more threatening for innocent people.
We won't get anywhere until we realize that the tradeoff is not freedom versus security, it's justice versus security. And that tradeoff only applies if the government is behaving honestly. Otherwise, both justice and security are lost.
That is why people in the US are important so that they understand what the problem and its requirements are.
A facetious person would say that this sounds a lot like the guy in the movie Office Space who keeps saying "But I've got PEOPLE SKILLS!" when defending his do-nothing job.
But seriously, I do strategic IT consulting and I agree with you: the most communication-intensive part of the process is getting the requirements right. Worse (for the outsourcing cheerleaders), it's a continuing process for any but the most trivial of projects. And this means that those boring but essential disciplines of configuration management and change control have to operate seamlessly, regardless of where the code gets written and checked in, and that you need some hard-assed testers who know the whole system in its operational context. Typically that'll have to be close to where the software's deployed.
Now get analytical for a few minutes and make a connected-node diagram to show communication within your distributed-development organization, and consider how each communication channel can be disrupted. Noise in a channel translates into cost and risk.
My conclusion is that, if your requirements are not entirely standard (as they might be for, say, a payroll system), you'd better keep it in-house. And I agree with the author of the article that you need to understand what part of your internal IT effort is aimed at creating competitive advantage. That part can never be commoditized effectively. Why? Because the rate of requirements change will be significant, and those changes can't be managed effectively without the active participation of the end users and senior business people. And the change process has to be closed-loop due to the need for meaningful testing.
This is not a slam against Indian programmers. My experience is that they're every bit as good as the people I work with in the US. But I think it shows the limits of how much you can outsource, whether the outsourced resource is on- or offshore. It's really a logistical, not a cultural, issue. It's the same reason that corporate headquarters are in one, not several, locations. Another way of putting it is that IT is now so deeply embedded in the business that its control has to be a centralized function of the organization.
I think maybe you should examine your own motives and objectivity. I doubt you'll find much comfort though.
Don't you think that's a bit more ad-hominem than it needs to be?
But I do wonder if his implicit assumption is that capitalism is only possible if nobody gives anything away for free (even if there are some strings attached).
If so, peer-reviewed science is next on the target list.
I found the "predatory pricing" comment especially interesting. I say that you can borrow my car, but only to drive your Granny to the clinic. Instead, you sell the car. Where I come from, that's not called Grand Predatory Pricing Auto.
This idea that theft must include depriving someone of use is interesting. If so, then intellectual property cannot be stolen unless it is being used to generate revenue? This is quite a novel legal theory. Or perhaps this means that software shouldn't be owned at all? Hmmm. Could be some mileage in that idea.
My guess is that God! Awful2 is uncomfortable with the fact that, in some circumstances, GPL'd software is the product of a more efficient mode of production than proprietary, closed-source software development. The proprietary development model is then equated somehow with Good Old Fashioned Capitalism, and the GPL becomes some sinister innovation to destroy the system that has made us all such successful land-grabbers and conquerors (though I've noticed that the quintessentially laissez-faire slave-trading business model has fallen out of fashion lately). GPL looks more like simple reciprocity to me: "don't take any unless you agree to give something back."
And, as for zero pricing: let's hope he doesn't try to shut down libraries and charitable institutions next. I like civil society, and I'm deeply worried by ideologues who think that their System (whatever it may be) won't work unless they try to prevent me from sharing my creative works with my friends and like-minded strangers. Seems kind of totalitarian to me. Is capitalism really that fragile?
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Look at what happens as a result of all the security at airports. Businesses that operate within the zone can (and do) charge extortionate prices since they have a captive clientele to prey on. Similarly, airlines require ID mainly to prevent a secondary market in airfares that is not subject to their current highly-evolved system of price discrimination.
Checking ID does nothing for security. But since when has the government cared about the security of anyone but the elite? This is about getting us used to intrusive control. The controlled areas (airports, theme parks, shopping malls, the prison system) will gradually expand, genuine life will be increasingly marginalized, and we will be increasingly administered in the interest of corporations. Asymmetric information is power. Therefore we should deny them information, even if (as is not proven in this case anyway) this increases our personal exposure to risk.
In order to get a true idea of risks, you have to compare the risk of not being tracked (and all its consequences) against the risks of being tracked (and all those consequences).
The real security is in having a political system that we all have a stake in, and that we're all willing to defend. Since the present system is (at best) only interested in our well-being in the same way that ranchers are interested in the well-being of their livestock, the only "security" solutions we've seen have been imposed from the top down. That makes it look like a lot like the Iraq war: a highly committed faction wants it in order to serve their own agenda, so it is then proposed as a "solution" to any number of problems that, logically, have nothing to do with it. Eventually, to be seen to be "doing something," the idiots in Congress allow it to be implemented, and catastrophe follows.
If they can't measure you, they can't manage you. With the most likely outcome of closer management being more comprehensive exploitation, the best strategy is to strongly resist any attempts to further track or monitor us.
Even if (despite all evidence) the Bush regime has no nefarious plans, putting such a system in place creates an opportunity for future abuse. Experience of politics in the US shows that the main deterrent to such abuse is lack of opportunity, not moral inhibitions or the successful application of the supposed checks and balances of a rotten system.
Re the "chilling effect"--
I'd like to see a further refinement: if it's a contingency case, the law firm pays its opponent's costs if they lose. NOT the plaintiff.
I was in Britain for a long time. Courts regularly heard both unfair dismissal and medical malpractice cases, so whatever chilling effect there was, it certainly wasn't a complete deterrent. And, when the little guy is the defendant, awarding costs limits the exepcted payoff of "tactical" lawsuits designed to force an unjust settlement in knowledge that the defendant can't afford the typically exporbitant legal fees necessary to defend himself. So it doesn't only benefit the powerful.
As things work now, there is no effective deterrent for speculative cases with minimal legal basis, besides the overhead cost to the law firm that's doing the suit. This encourages a "throw it against the wall and hope something will stick" approach to litigation. File forty dodgy suits, win big on one, you're in the money.
Americans are no more protected from abuse by big corporations than Europeans. The opposite is the case. So the argument that the present US system somehow helps the underdog is a self-serving lie promulgated by the law firms who are the true beneficiaries. Remember, they get their snouts deeply into the trough before the plaintiffs see a single penny of those judgements.
Capping legal firms' fees would be another deisrable thing to do.
Sabre-rattling is about it. I work for a firm in California. Two of our employees left, took the client list and relationships with them, and continued similar work with our clients after leaving. Despite the non-compete that they had signed, we didn't sue. The reason was that, even in this very clear case, the outcome was too uncertain. Also, it would have just pissed off our clients, since they liked the guys who left. So we buried the hatchet and kept on working alongside them. Everyone got on with their lives.
I'm concerned that the Governator will eventually get around to attacking protections such as these as a way of making California more "Business-friendly."
For those of you in "at-will" states: fire your state legislators, they're scum who have sold you out. Theirs is the only employment that should be "at will."
I shrugged when I read it. The English looked like it had been fed through Babelfish and had passed through Mongolian, Kurdish and Quechua before being reluctantly returned to English. Unbelievable that someone could deliberately write anything so turgid, or that there was an editor involved in the process. As for the concepts in the book, they reinforce the old Frankfurt School view that political and philosophical opinions arise from personality types. If one were to develop a shallow political philosophy whose sole purpose was to rationalize narcissism, it would be indistinguishable from Objectivism. This is consistent with Rand's biography, which is that of a self-centered ranter with a grievance against the world for not bowing down to her genius.
Anyway, it's my belief that the penalties for some of these infractions are greater precisely because they are seldom enforced, and when they are, it's done selectively. If all driving infractions were punished to the full extent of the law, what would the economic impact be? And how many of us would be punished for behavior that is only potentially harmful?
Why would you imply that the goal of this legislation is not precisely to stifle innovation? Congress has been alarmed by the pace of innovation and the prospect of we the people getting away from their death grip. That's why they've unleashed this torrent of draconian legislation and have tolerated the recent Patent Office mission creep. That's why the current legal environment allows lawsuits such as SCO vs IBM. They want to gum up the works through litigation and legislative repression until they're able to take control again.
Stallman stands vindicated. The struggle is about freedom. They want the Web to be an Orange County shopping mall rather than a vibrant, living city. If you're too far from the norm or aren't there to spend money, you'll get ejected. And no political expression allowed.
Me, I dropped out of college for two years and lived in a squat (hey, it was the late 70's) in a city 1000 miles from home. Even such internal moves can be worthwhile. Poverty and desperation focuses the mind, as does the sight of members of your peer group failing to survive (literally). That puts everything else into a very stark perspective. Sounds harsh, but it definitely got me out of navel-gazing mode and made me more externally focused.
Berlusconi is already deeply loathed for his ass-kissing support for the Iraq invasion. He's such a seething mass of conflict of interest and corruption that he makes Cheney look like a paragon of integrity. The fact that this was his idea, that the penalties are so grotesquely disproportionate, and that it's so evidently in support of his own personal interests, makes it likely that a future Italian government will repeal it, and it will be politically infeasible to revive it for years after that.
Better it didn't happen, but if it has to happen, at least it's happening in a way that will bring the whole idea into the worst possible disrepute.
The false-positive rate should be emphasized far more than it has been. What does it mean? It means that whatever system they have in place, if it's based on statistical indicators rather than someone's hunch, will inevitably identify several innocent people for every terrorist that they find. Depending on the sensitivity of the detection algoritm, the value of "several" could be anywhere from dozens to thousands. And these people are not "borderline" terrorists in any sense. They are no more likely to be real terrorists than anyone else in the population. They're entirely innocent. So the use of such a system is guaranteed to falsely identify, stigmatize and punish large numbers of innocent people. This is not a tradeoff between freedom and security. It's a tradeoff between justice and the false perception of security.
I've had experience of a number of family businesses (I include boyfriend/girlfriend and boyfriend/boyfriend in that category for the sake of this discussion). By far, they have been the most dysfunctional category of businesses I've dealt with.
1. Emotional issues between the partners get in the way of sensible business decisions. This will weaken your business.
2. It is inevitable that one partner will be better than the other, and it may reach the point where the only reason the weaker partner remains is due to nepotism. This will be noticed by both customers and employees, and will damage your credibility.
3. One of the best things about being in a relationship is being able to have a life outside work. By entering a business relationship with your partner, you've given that up. This will lead to burnout and stagnation, and will eliminate what little quality time you might otherwise have spent together.
Interesting how many posters here seem to be quite content with the "kiss ass and pay up" strategy.
And one of the provisions of the Constitution is that the Feds can only pass certain categories of laws, and the ability to pass all other laws is reserved to the states or the people. The federal courts and Congress have widely disregarded this principle, using convoluted arguments involving the interstate commerce clause, the equal-protection amendment, etc. But still it is not true that there is necessarily a hierarchy of laws as you assert. That's more the way things are done in, say, France. A large part of the Constitution consists of statements of limits on what Congress can legislate on.
Over my 23 years in the business, that has been my experience as well. I have encountered a handful of companies where lying (and its stunted cousin, backstabbing office politics) were prevalent at the top, but they were pathological aberrations. My current client client sponsor is so strait-laced that she has avoided following some of my recommendations because doing so might give the appearance of spin-doctoring, even when there was no deception involved. I've seen individual programmers who were reluctant to break bad news to the boss, but I attribute that to inexperience and an unfounded sense of insecurity. As a consultant, I am expected to tell the truth, no matter how harsh, and if there were any evidence I was sugar-coating it, my ass would be out the door. If anything, I've seen a reluctance on the part of some senior managers to accept good news. Oh, and these aren't mom-and-pop operations, most have been well-known, successful firms.
I'm interested to see if outsourced IT operations can maintain the same levels of candor. There is a cultural element in willingness to tell the boss bad news, and I know from my own work experience in Europe and the Middle East that this is more strongly encouraged in the US than in more traditional, hierarchical societies.
Worst computer job: I worked in the early 80's on a project where we had lots of minicomputers to integrate before deploying them to several sites, therefore we needed lots of floor space. So our customers provided us with a converted blimp hangar. In the winter, the inside temperature was about 48 degrees, and that was in one of the choice seats near a mini. People worked at terminals with their coats and hats on, wearing woollen gloves with the fingers cut off. To make matters even worse, the pubs nearby were crap: Watneys, urgh.
Worst non-computer job: Applying pitch to roofs in southern California in the summer.
I'll leave out the dangerous jobs, that's a whole different category.
That's exactly right. The reason it's risky to raise IT issues with the management is because there's not routine communication, so problems pile up and it becomes a big deal. Also, in situations where there isn't enough communication to start with, management generally perceive IT as unresponsive. If you tell them anything, tell them that you'd like to see them establish a weekly hour to thrash out IT/business problems. Until then, things will be too highly charged and you're putting yourself at risk of being on the receiving end of "shoot the messenger."
You're making the mistake of confusing the Saudi government with the Saudi people. Remember, they're not elected; they've been kept in power largely by the US. Further isolating the people is just a case of blaming the victim. It suits some people's agendas to hold Middle Easterners down, but the right thing for us to do is to be on the side of meritocracy and open society and against the corrupt status quo.
I lived and worked in Saudi Arabia for several years. Some of the things that other posters observed are true: women suffer many restrictions, and their criminal justice system is a brutal, crooked mess, mostly because the government is too close to the religious right (to a lesser extent, a problem here too). But it's an extremely complex society that has undergone a lot of changes in the past 50 years, and it is far different than the caricature presented in the US media. There are know-nothing religious reactionaries, thoughtful and tolerant believers, creeps who go whoring in Bangkok, honest technocrats, dodgy businessmen. A lot goes on under the surface.
The Saudi programmers and software engineers I worked with were, like those in the US, a mixed bag. The best were as good as the best here. They have the ability bell curve same as everyone else. The only problems I saw were the result of the nepotism-based government, that removed incentives for achievement. Despite this, there are still talented people trying to do right for their people. Sadly, the system makes it an uphill struggle.
I should add that many of the Americans I met there were the scum of the earth-- cheats, arrogant rip-off artists and ass-kissers, who have aligned themselves with the worst elements of Saudi society. One of the reasons people in the Middle East don't like us or trust us is because they have learned from experience. Direct contact between people who aren't just out to make a fast buck would be a positive step in correcting the view that we're all like those lying bastards. Continuing isolation only sustains corrupt interests in both Saudi Arabia and in the US.
Steg programs need two inputs: an encrypted text to hide (the message), and a random stream of data to hide it in (the "medium"). The only way that the output can be identified as possibly containing a steganographic message is if the statistical properties of the hidden message are in some way distinct from those of the medium.
That implies that an effective steg program would do some analysis of the statistical properties of the medium prior to hiding the message, and would adapt the statistical properties of the encrypted message to blend in. For example, they might make a message hidden in audio look like Boltzmann noise (assuming there were no other pseudo-random artifacts created by the recording equipment and audio encoding scheme).
Only snag I see is that, if several parameters are adjustable, the values of those parameters would also need to be known on the receiving end.
If they're going to do surveillance at all, yes they do. Go back to a basic statistics book and read about false negatives and false positives, and what happens in cases where the event you're trying to detect is unlikely compared to the false-positive rate of your test. For a test sensitive enough to find a handful of terrorists in a large population, the false-positive rate WILL be high. This implies that, not only will they inevitably spy on innocent people, but will falsely accuse a number of them. If their criteria for determining if you're a terrorist give lots of false positives, tens or hundreds of innocents will fall into the net along with each terrorist. This is also why trials on secret evidence are such a great injustice: there are scenarios in which the government could be acting in good faith, using statistically valid techniques, and still lock up far more innocents than bad guys. An independent body needs to review that evidence, since there's no incentive for the government to admit that (say) 95% of the people they accuse are innocent. And based on what I've seen so far, I have little confidence in the good faith of this government-- that only makes the situation even worse.
It's naive to assume that any simple rule (say, spy only on Arab men aged 20-35) is going to significantly improve your rate of success. Too easy to anticipate and circumvent. It's about as misguided as putting massive resources into preventing another 9/11 attack. Successful terrorists are always changing their tactics. Whatever the next one is, you can be assured that it will be different than the last one. They can only succced by hitting us where we're NOT looking, and by forcing us to expend our resources looking for them where they're not.
Note further that the high false positive rate, and the government's refusal to be accountable for it, will lead to a situation where innocent citizens rightly mistrust the government. This will compromise their ability to gather worthwhile information, and will make us all less secure.
These observations do not assume malign intent on the part of the government. Merely the everyday venality of politicians. I, for one, mistrust the Bush administration's motives as well as their methodology. None of this would encourage a rational, well-meaning person to risk their own personal freedom to provide the government with information of unknown quality that might thwart an attack. Odds are it's irrelevant, and even stronger odds say that you'd be putting yourself at risk of continuing harassment and possibly indefinite incarceration by contacting them. Conclusion: police-state tactics can never improve security. They just make life more threatening for innocent people.
We won't get anywhere until we realize that the tradeoff is not freedom versus security, it's justice versus security. And that tradeoff only applies if the government is behaving honestly. Otherwise, both justice and security are lost.
But seriously, I do strategic IT consulting and I agree with you: the most communication-intensive part of the process is getting the requirements right. Worse (for the outsourcing cheerleaders), it's a continuing process for any but the most trivial of projects. And this means that those boring but essential disciplines of configuration management and change control have to operate seamlessly, regardless of where the code gets written and checked in, and that you need some hard-assed testers who know the whole system in its operational context. Typically that'll have to be close to where the software's deployed.
Now get analytical for a few minutes and make a connected-node diagram to show communication within your distributed-development organization, and consider how each communication channel can be disrupted. Noise in a channel translates into cost and risk.
My conclusion is that, if your requirements are not entirely standard (as they might be for, say, a payroll system), you'd better keep it in-house. And I agree with the author of the article that you need to understand what part of your internal IT effort is aimed at creating competitive advantage. That part can never be commoditized effectively. Why? Because the rate of requirements change will be significant, and those changes can't be managed effectively without the active participation of the end users and senior business people. And the change process has to be closed-loop due to the need for meaningful testing.
This is not a slam against Indian programmers. My experience is that they're every bit as good as the people I work with in the US. But I think it shows the limits of how much you can outsource, whether the outsourced resource is on- or offshore. It's really a logistical, not a cultural, issue. It's the same reason that corporate headquarters are in one, not several, locations. Another way of putting it is that IT is now so deeply embedded in the business that its control has to be a centralized function of the organization.
But I do wonder if his implicit assumption is that capitalism is only possible if nobody gives anything away for free (even if there are some strings attached).
If so, peer-reviewed science is next on the target list.
I found the "predatory pricing" comment especially interesting. I say that you can borrow my car, but only to drive your Granny to the clinic. Instead, you sell the car. Where I come from, that's not called Grand Predatory Pricing Auto.
This idea that theft must include depriving someone of use is interesting. If so, then intellectual property cannot be stolen unless it is being used to generate revenue? This is quite a novel legal theory. Or perhaps this means that software shouldn't be owned at all? Hmmm. Could be some mileage in that idea.
My guess is that God! Awful2 is uncomfortable with the fact that, in some circumstances, GPL'd software is the product of a more efficient mode of production than proprietary, closed-source software development. The proprietary development model is then equated somehow with Good Old Fashioned Capitalism, and the GPL becomes some sinister innovation to destroy the system that has made us all such successful land-grabbers and conquerors (though I've noticed that the quintessentially laissez-faire slave-trading business model has fallen out of fashion lately). GPL looks more like simple reciprocity to me: "don't take any unless you agree to give something back."
And, as for zero pricing: let's hope he doesn't try to shut down libraries and charitable institutions next. I like civil society, and I'm deeply worried by ideologues who think that their System (whatever it may be) won't work unless they try to prevent me from sharing my creative works with my friends and like-minded strangers. Seems kind of totalitarian to me. Is capitalism really that fragile?