Isn't this the same bunch of clowns that declared the End Of the World As We Know It because Apple started using tri-wing screws? (Ones for which they just happened to sell overpriced drivers?) Even though at the time you could buy tri-wing drivers from any number of other tool outfits for a buck or two?
Okay, Vista was a steaming pile of $hit, and MS knew it. (It wouldn't be the first time a software product was released before prime-time; it's endemic in the software industry.) But what you are saying is something like this:
1) Spend many years and billions of dollars producing an OS designed from scratch to be a spectacular failure 2) ??? 3) Profit!
I don't think the upgrade business is so lucrative that it'd pay off Vista's development costs.
I'm not seeing the step 2 here. XP was available on new machines until Windows 7 came out, so any users that didn't want it would not exactly have a tough time avoiding it.
Given that their prize-winners get to have their programs run on a real, live, satellite for field tests in space, I'd say the bragging rights and "cool" factor would be enough for a lot of people.
"Requires use of a potentially unsafe HIV variant that could mutate back to a virulent strain. Extreme care would be required to ensure that the modified virus can be contained."
Given that virulent cancer is far more dangerous than even the nastiest strains of HIV, the HIV would be pretty much always preferable. As long as they start with a strain that is easily controlled via existing drugs, I'd say we'll be fine. Heck, maybe they can dig some out of the vault that even AZT can control long-term.
Being afraid of this treatment because it starts with HIV makes little sense. Yes, more precautions need to be taken than working with, say, E.Coli, but frankly a syringe full of HIV isn't any more dangerous than some of the drugs we use as cancer treatments. (Some chemo formulations are downright scary...)
If somebody said: "SirWired, we can cure your otherwise-hopeless terminal cancer, but at the cost of being infected with HIV", I'd take the HIV any day of the week. Treatments for advanced cancer are often considered breakthroughs if they extend life by a few months. HIV, on the other hand, is getting very close to being a chronic long-term condition not much more serious than Type-I diabetes. (As in, if you have the treatments available and use them, you'll live a pretty normal, albeit likely shorter, life.)
I don't know why anybody is outraged that the sales guy's commission is higher than the author's royalties. This is pretty standard in the intellectual-property industry, and not necessarily out of line with any idea of "fairness." (Authors, artists, screenwriters, etc. have always received the smallest cut of revenue in the IP industry.)
A huge textbook publisher like Harcourt might only have two or three series of elementary-school math textbooks which are then sold to the entire country. The textbooks only have to be written once, and then used for many years (maybe subject to minor revisions.) Meanwhile, selling those textbooks is going to require a lot more sales guys than it is textbook authors. Each textbook salesman is going to sell only a small portion of the production run of the book so it make sense that, in order to make a living, they are going to need a bigger cut of the sales than the author.
Lastly, if the author you want is satisfied with the royalties you are offering, why should you pay him/her more? It's not as if there is some acute shortage of people capable of writing down the precepts of basic arithmetic.
Congratulations, you found the Safe Harbor provisions. However, if you want to claim "Service Provider" status, that same section (subsection (h)) also authorizes copyright holders to completely pick apart your "service" via subpoena and allow the xxAA to implement "infringement finding" tools on your "service" upon request.
Oh, and if you forgot to warn all your users that they could be cut off for repeated infringement, you aren't protected at all. That's right, if you failed to get your friends to agree to a TOS, you've waived your protections.
If the "see no evil" defense didn't work for a whole host of file-sharing networks over the years (all of which had teams of well-paid lawyers), it isn't going to work for Joe Random File Sharing Helper either.
In any case, if illegal file sharing is being accomplished through your machine, even in the unlikely event the xxAA doesn't sue you, you can certainly be subpoenaed to cooperate to figure out who the upstream file provider is.
To turn your analogy around, this is akin to you sitting in your car while your passengers rob the bank, getting your license plate scribbled down, and the cops questioning you about who was in the car. Even if you don't actually know what was going on (unlikely), you can bet they'll still be dusting your car for prints.
Yep, only the fool that invited the xxAA to the network can be monitored. Up until the xxAA says "Help us [insert fool's name here], in return for not getting sued."
In addition, is a pottery wheel really a "wheel"? It looks more like a turntable to me; I never would have though to refer to a lazy susan as "wheel", that's for sure.
"...files that are downloaded from strangers always go through a trusted friend."
Doesn't that just make the "friend" instantly liable for contributory infringement? It's going to be hard (impossible)? for the "friend" to qualify for "common carrier" status, which could provide a safe harbor against an infringement suit.
It's true that this setup appears to be resistant to monitoring by outsiders, but keeping the people you don't want as members out of your online network is difficult, to say the least. It's certainly more work than busting up torrenters, but it's not exactly a difficult barrier either.
And, if I'm providing files, I want files downloaded TO strangers to go through one of my trusted friends (of course, that friend is going to have the contributory infringement problems I suggested earlier.) I don't give a *bleep!* about the downloader covering his tracks, (And when has the xxAA gone after downloaders? Don't they always go after uploaders?) I'm more worried about mine.
I have about as much sympathy for the people victimized by this scheme as I do for people that sign up for 419 scams where the come-on letter is clearly asking the recipient to engage in money laundering, theft, and blatant violations of tax and banking laws.
If you install malicious software on your computer on purpose, I have ZERO sympathy for you when it turns out the software includes you in the list of victims.
There is one major flaw in your obvious "carbs are bad" idea. Carbohydrates have been the backbone of human caloric intake since the dawn of agriculture thousands of years ago. The "staple" food in nearly every country in the world is a grain, legume, or starchy root. Rice, Wheat, Potatotes, Plantains, Cassava, Corn, Yams, Soybeans, Lentils, etc. Nearly Every. Single. One. (The exception would be soil-poor areas such as the Arctic; you eat enough whale blubber and caribou jerky, you can avoid scurvy, but it's tough.) Once we shifted away from being hunter-gatherers, it is only in relatively recent times, and even then, only in some countries, that a high-protein, low-carb diet was even POSSIBLE for the average man. Yet the obesity epidemic is far more recent than the ready availability of surplus caloric intake (in the form of starch and sugars) throughout the developed world.
We can't even blame it on white flour and white rice: they've also been available and used for centuries, due to the superior longevity of flours (or rice) with the bran removed.
A McD's quarter pounder value meal (with fries and soda), consumed on a regular basis, along with other high-calorie, low satisfaction food choices, and the sedentary lifestyle of the average American, IS unhealthy for you, and far more so than the same-sized plate of pasta made at home you could eat instead of the McD value meal.
You eat plenty of those plates of pasta, but keep yourself fairly active, eat vegetables, and supplement the diet with some amount of protein, and it won't hurt you at all, in addition to being much cheaper, lower in cholesterol and fat, and better for the environment, than high-protein choices such as dairy or meat. If you try and live off those QuarterPounder meals, you'll learn in short order how much more unhealthy it is than plates of pasta at home.
Several years ago, I was working a support case with a major bank. Their remote storage mirroring between BFE, [Southwest State Here] and BFE, [Flyover Country State here] failed, and they wanted to know why. I obtain SAN switch logs from both fabrics and attempt to troubleshoot the issue. The logs revealed that the network ports dropped offline one by one, about 5-7 seconds apart, and then the problem hit the other switch. They came back online one-by-one about three minutes later. The ports were scattered all over the respective switches.
I inform the customer of my findings and am informed that there happened to be somebody working on the cabling in that exact same rack cabinet, but he swears he didn't touch anything having to do with these cables and that the problem MUST be within our hardware. I inform the customer that hardware or software issues do not spread to random ports within a switch, and then to a switch that has NOTHING in common besides a nearby rack cabinet, and ONLY affect a particular group of ports that are otherwise completely randomly spread throughout the switch. (We are talking good old-fashioned light loss here... not some esoteric failure that could be caused by software.)
The customer replies: "We'll be having a "discussion" with that cabling contractor."
If all it takes to "shock and disgust" "bleeding edge technophiles" is a technical decision to pick a CPU with faster cores instead of more of them, then these "bleeding edge technophiles" must not get out of Mom's basement very often and are in need of some serious therapy.
The "mythbusters" went over how it's impossible to fool a breathalyzer by using mouthwash shortly beforehand. They didn't say mouthwash doesn't contain alcohol (most of them do, except for the ones labeled "alcohol free".) I suspect it doesn't work because the alcohol in the mouthwash doesn't persist very long, therefore arguing that the mouthwash produced a false positive isn't every effective.
FYI, mouthwashes contain alcohol because the essential oils that give them their scent and taste (or, in Listerine's case, it's antiseptic properties) do not dissolve in water, but they do dissolve in Ethanol, and the alcohol/oil solution in turn dissolves in water. Non-alcohol mouthwashes generally use something other than oils to do their job like Cetyl Pyrindium Chloride.
Professors are supposed to be teaching AND researching. If the focus was on teaching (especially undergrads) we wouldn't need professors for that kind of work; any post-doc would do, and do it for cheap.
While turning professors into publication factories would indeed be a BAD idea, four "research outputs" over three years is not exactly a high bar to cross.
We vote in representatives to vote on bills. They are supposed to use their judgement as informed citizens to decide if a bill meets the interests of his/her constituents. They are supposed to be making their best guess, just like we rely on citizen juries to evaluate evidence to make an informed judgement during trials.
The bills need to come from somewhere, and unless we have a congress packed with lawyers, those bills have to come from somewhere other than individual legislators.
Yep, the whole system is rife with holes, bias, and potential for corruption, but I have not yet seen an alternative system that's any better.
(Before I get started, I would like to acknowledge that this bill is indeed a steaming pile of horse$hit. Now, back to my regularly scheduled criticism of knee-jerk Slashdot populism.)
It is not at all uncommon for bills to be written by those with an interest in the matter. What's the alternative?
Let's say Congressman X gets a bug up his butt about righting some wrong... we'll use warrantless wiretapping as an example. He needs to write a bill, and one that will not be as full of holes as Swiss cheese. The best person to write such a bill is a lawyer. Now, Mr. X isn't a lawyer and has not used his staff budget to hire an expensive civil liberties lawyer on retainer. Where does he go?
Well, a logical solution is the EFF or ACLU, but those are a bunch of lobbyists too. Who, exactly, is supposed to write this legislation in a way that it can be fairly certain it'll actually work?
Just because a bill is written by a lobbyist does not mean it's defective by design. Just because a bill is written by a company with a financial interest in the bill does not mean it's inherently defective. The congressman is more than welcome to reject or modify the bill, or pay a (smaller) amount of money to a lawyer to review it. Yes, many congressman are unduly influenced by things like campaign contributions, but that is a separate question from where bills come from.
In addition to either allowing yourself to go into another part of IT (I mentioned management or technical sales), or risk-taking, there is a third option: Be willing to take a pay cut, and it may be a large one. If you are willing to take a pay cut, you can perform a career switch. It's not at all uncommon for people to switch careers entirely, but matching a good IT salary is usually not an option absent serious (read: expensive and time-consuming) training.
In fact, I don't know of too many non-management salaried fields, period, that match what a decently-paid IT "veteran" can earn that do not absolutely a degree in the field. (As in, accountants, lawyers, certain kinds of engineers, and the healthcare profession can make serious coin, but it takes years to make that switch.)
I've spent my entire life doing one thing. I have no marketable skills except doing that one thing. I like doing that one thing, and that alone. I hate my job because it also involves doing something other than that one thing.
I want to stop doing that one thing, or anything related to it, but still make the same safe, secure, decent amount of money doing something else. But I have no idea what that something else is, and I don't want to take any risks finding out.
What do I do?
Answer: You're fucked.
Seriously, open your horizons some (management or technical sales is where many geeks go when they reach this point), or be willing to take risks. But the magical safe, secure, job you are looking for does not exist.
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't this the same bunch of clowns that declared the End Of the World As We Know It because Apple started using tri-wing screws? (Ones for which they just happened to sell overpriced drivers?) Even though at the time you could buy tri-wing drivers from any number of other tool outfits for a buck or two?
Okay, Vista was a steaming pile of $hit, and MS knew it. (It wouldn't be the first time a software product was released before prime-time; it's endemic in the software industry.) But what you are saying is something like this:
1) Spend many years and billions of dollars producing an OS designed from scratch to be a spectacular failure
2) ???
3) Profit!
I don't think the upgrade business is so lucrative that it'd pay off Vista's development costs.
I'm not seeing the step 2 here. XP was available on new machines until Windows 7 came out, so any users that didn't want it would not exactly have a tough time avoiding it.
Given that their prize-winners get to have their programs run on a real, live, satellite for field tests in space, I'd say the bragging rights and "cool" factor would be enough for a lot of people.
"Requires use of a potentially unsafe HIV variant that could mutate back to a virulent strain. Extreme care would be required to ensure that the modified virus can be contained."
Given that virulent cancer is far more dangerous than even the nastiest strains of HIV, the HIV would be pretty much always preferable. As long as they start with a strain that is easily controlled via existing drugs, I'd say we'll be fine. Heck, maybe they can dig some out of the vault that even AZT can control long-term.
Being afraid of this treatment because it starts with HIV makes little sense. Yes, more precautions need to be taken than working with, say, E.Coli, but frankly a syringe full of HIV isn't any more dangerous than some of the drugs we use as cancer treatments. (Some chemo formulations are downright scary...)
If somebody said: "SirWired, we can cure your otherwise-hopeless terminal cancer, but at the cost of being infected with HIV", I'd take the HIV any day of the week. Treatments for advanced cancer are often considered breakthroughs if they extend life by a few months. HIV, on the other hand, is getting very close to being a chronic long-term condition not much more serious than Type-I diabetes. (As in, if you have the treatments available and use them, you'll live a pretty normal, albeit likely shorter, life.)
I don't know why anybody is outraged that the sales guy's commission is higher than the author's royalties. This is pretty standard in the intellectual-property industry, and not necessarily out of line with any idea of "fairness." (Authors, artists, screenwriters, etc. have always received the smallest cut of revenue in the IP industry.)
A huge textbook publisher like Harcourt might only have two or three series of elementary-school math textbooks which are then sold to the entire country. The textbooks only have to be written once, and then used for many years (maybe subject to minor revisions.) Meanwhile, selling those textbooks is going to require a lot more sales guys than it is textbook authors. Each textbook salesman is going to sell only a small portion of the production run of the book so it make sense that, in order to make a living, they are going to need a bigger cut of the sales than the author.
Lastly, if the author you want is satisfied with the royalties you are offering, why should you pay him/her more? It's not as if there is some acute shortage of people capable of writing down the precepts of basic arithmetic.
Congratulations, you found the Safe Harbor provisions. However, if you want to claim "Service Provider" status, that same section (subsection (h)) also authorizes copyright holders to completely pick apart your "service" via subpoena and allow the xxAA to implement "infringement finding" tools on your "service" upon request.
Oh, and if you forgot to warn all your users that they could be cut off for repeated infringement, you aren't protected at all. That's right, if you failed to get your friends to agree to a TOS, you've waived your protections.
If the "see no evil" defense didn't work for a whole host of file-sharing networks over the years (all of which had teams of well-paid lawyers), it isn't going to work for Joe Random File Sharing Helper either.
In any case, if illegal file sharing is being accomplished through your machine, even in the unlikely event the xxAA doesn't sue you, you can certainly be subpoenaed to cooperate to figure out who the upstream file provider is.
To turn your analogy around, this is akin to you sitting in your car while your passengers rob the bank, getting your license plate scribbled down, and the cops questioning you about who was in the car. Even if you don't actually know what was going on (unlikely), you can bet they'll still be dusting your car for prints.
Yep, only the fool that invited the xxAA to the network can be monitored. Up until the xxAA says "Help us [insert fool's name here], in return for not getting sued."
I'm not quite sure what you are getting at, AC. So no, enough isn't said.
Hey $10,000 isn't too bad for the work, at least if you compare it to other things, like the X-Prize.
Citation Needed
In addition, is a pottery wheel really a "wheel"? It looks more like a turntable to me; I never would have though to refer to a lazy susan as "wheel", that's for sure.
"...files that are downloaded from strangers always go through a trusted friend."
Doesn't that just make the "friend" instantly liable for contributory infringement? It's going to be hard (impossible)? for the "friend" to qualify for "common carrier" status, which could provide a safe harbor against an infringement suit.
It's true that this setup appears to be resistant to monitoring by outsiders, but keeping the people you don't want as members out of your online network is difficult, to say the least. It's certainly more work than busting up torrenters, but it's not exactly a difficult barrier either.
And, if I'm providing files, I want files downloaded TO strangers to go through one of my trusted friends (of course, that friend is going to have the contributory infringement problems I suggested earlier.) I don't give a *bleep!* about the downloader covering his tracks, (And when has the xxAA gone after downloaders? Don't they always go after uploaders?) I'm more worried about mine.
I have about as much sympathy for the people victimized by this scheme as I do for people that sign up for 419 scams where the come-on letter is clearly asking the recipient to engage in money laundering, theft, and blatant violations of tax and banking laws.
If you install malicious software on your computer on purpose, I have ZERO sympathy for you when it turns out the software includes you in the list of victims.
There is one major flaw in your obvious "carbs are bad" idea. Carbohydrates have been the backbone of human caloric intake since the dawn of agriculture thousands of years ago. The "staple" food in nearly every country in the world is a grain, legume, or starchy root. Rice, Wheat, Potatotes, Plantains, Cassava, Corn, Yams, Soybeans, Lentils, etc. Nearly Every. Single. One. (The exception would be soil-poor areas such as the Arctic; you eat enough whale blubber and caribou jerky, you can avoid scurvy, but it's tough.) Once we shifted away from being hunter-gatherers, it is only in relatively recent times, and even then, only in some countries, that a high-protein, low-carb diet was even POSSIBLE for the average man. Yet the obesity epidemic is far more recent than the ready availability of surplus caloric intake (in the form of starch and sugars) throughout the developed world.
We can't even blame it on white flour and white rice: they've also been available and used for centuries, due to the superior longevity of flours (or rice) with the bran removed.
A McD's quarter pounder value meal (with fries and soda), consumed on a regular basis, along with other high-calorie, low satisfaction food choices, and the sedentary lifestyle of the average American, IS unhealthy for you, and far more so than the same-sized plate of pasta made at home you could eat instead of the McD value meal.
You eat plenty of those plates of pasta, but keep yourself fairly active, eat vegetables, and supplement the diet with some amount of protein, and it won't hurt you at all, in addition to being much cheaper, lower in cholesterol and fat, and better for the environment, than high-protein choices such as dairy or meat. If you try and live off those QuarterPounder meals, you'll learn in short order how much more unhealthy it is than plates of pasta at home.
Several years ago, I was working a support case with a major bank. Their remote storage mirroring between BFE, [Southwest State Here] and BFE, [Flyover Country State here] failed, and they wanted to know why. I obtain SAN switch logs from both fabrics and attempt to troubleshoot the issue. The logs revealed that the network ports dropped offline one by one, about 5-7 seconds apart, and then the problem hit the other switch. They came back online one-by-one about three minutes later. The ports were scattered all over the respective switches.
I inform the customer of my findings and am informed that there happened to be somebody working on the cabling in that exact same rack cabinet, but he swears he didn't touch anything having to do with these cables and that the problem MUST be within our hardware. I inform the customer that hardware or software issues do not spread to random ports within a switch, and then to a switch that has NOTHING in common besides a nearby rack cabinet, and ONLY affect a particular group of ports that are otherwise completely randomly spread throughout the switch. (We are talking good old-fashioned light loss here... not some esoteric failure that could be caused by software.)
The customer replies: "We'll be having a "discussion" with that cabling contractor."
If all it takes to "shock and disgust" "bleeding edge technophiles" is a technical decision to pick a CPU with faster cores instead of more of them, then these "bleeding edge technophiles" must not get out of Mom's basement very often and are in need of some serious therapy.
The "mythbusters" went over how it's impossible to fool a breathalyzer by using mouthwash shortly beforehand. They didn't say mouthwash doesn't contain alcohol (most of them do, except for the ones labeled "alcohol free".) I suspect it doesn't work because the alcohol in the mouthwash doesn't persist very long, therefore arguing that the mouthwash produced a false positive isn't every effective.
FYI, mouthwashes contain alcohol because the essential oils that give them their scent and taste (or, in Listerine's case, it's antiseptic properties) do not dissolve in water, but they do dissolve in Ethanol, and the alcohol/oil solution in turn dissolves in water. Non-alcohol mouthwashes generally use something other than oils to do their job like Cetyl Pyrindium Chloride.
Professors are supposed to be teaching AND researching. If the focus was on teaching (especially undergrads) we wouldn't need professors for that kind of work; any post-doc would do, and do it for cheap.
While turning professors into publication factories would indeed be a BAD idea, four "research outputs" over three years is not exactly a high bar to cross.
We vote in representatives to vote on bills. They are supposed to use their judgement as informed citizens to decide if a bill meets the interests of his/her constituents. They are supposed to be making their best guess, just like we rely on citizen juries to evaluate evidence to make an informed judgement during trials.
The bills need to come from somewhere, and unless we have a congress packed with lawyers, those bills have to come from somewhere other than individual legislators.
Yep, the whole system is rife with holes, bias, and potential for corruption, but I have not yet seen an alternative system that's any better.
So who exactly is supposed to write the bills?
And where in my post did I say anything about "corporate rights"?
(Before I get started, I would like to acknowledge that this bill is indeed a steaming pile of horse$hit. Now, back to my regularly scheduled criticism of knee-jerk Slashdot populism.)
It is not at all uncommon for bills to be written by those with an interest in the matter. What's the alternative?
Let's say Congressman X gets a bug up his butt about righting some wrong... we'll use warrantless wiretapping as an example. He needs to write a bill, and one that will not be as full of holes as Swiss cheese. The best person to write such a bill is a lawyer. Now, Mr. X isn't a lawyer and has not used his staff budget to hire an expensive civil liberties lawyer on retainer. Where does he go?
Well, a logical solution is the EFF or ACLU, but those are a bunch of lobbyists too. Who, exactly, is supposed to write this legislation in a way that it can be fairly certain it'll actually work?
Just because a bill is written by a lobbyist does not mean it's defective by design. Just because a bill is written by a company with a financial interest in the bill does not mean it's inherently defective. The congressman is more than welcome to reject or modify the bill, or pay a (smaller) amount of money to a lawyer to review it. Yes, many congressman are unduly influenced by things like campaign contributions, but that is a separate question from where bills come from.
In addition to either allowing yourself to go into another part of IT (I mentioned management or technical sales), or risk-taking, there is a third option: Be willing to take a pay cut, and it may be a large one. If you are willing to take a pay cut, you can perform a career switch. It's not at all uncommon for people to switch careers entirely, but matching a good IT salary is usually not an option absent serious (read: expensive and time-consuming) training.
In fact, I don't know of too many non-management salaried fields, period, that match what a decently-paid IT "veteran" can earn that do not absolutely a degree in the field. (As in, accountants, lawyers, certain kinds of engineers, and the healthcare profession can make serious coin, but it takes years to make that switch.)
You missed the part where he doesn't want to risk the mortgage and kid's college fund.
Dear Slashdot,
I've spent my entire life doing one thing. I have no marketable skills except doing that one thing. I like doing that one thing, and that alone. I hate my job because it also involves doing something other than that one thing.
I want to stop doing that one thing, or anything related to it, but still make the same safe, secure, decent amount of money doing something else. But I have no idea what that something else is, and I don't want to take any risks finding out.
What do I do?
Answer:
You're fucked.
Seriously, open your horizons some (management or technical sales is where many geeks go when they reach this point), or be willing to take risks. But the magical safe, secure, job you are looking for does not exist.