Re:"Always trust code from Microsoft"
on
Do You Code Sign?
·
· Score: 1
Well we did have to submit a few ID numbers and whatnot. I think even a D&B number or some such. But these numbers, while not public knowledge, aren't exactly secret either...
Bottom line is, I should have had to do some sort of out of band verification. Which I didn't.
Re:"Always trust code from Microsoft"
on
Do You Code Sign?
·
· Score: 1
There was a well-publicized instance where Verisign issued a code-signing certificate to someone claiming to be from Microsoft but actually wasn't.
I was getting ready to reply to the thread when I saw this. Have you ever tried to get a code signing certificate? There seem to be extremely few checks and balances on it. Basically you just wait a couple days. They say they do checks to verify you are who you say you are and whatnot... but whoever they called at my company never asked me if I was requesting a certificate. So if they did make the call they didn't ask whoever picked up the phone to verify that it was really me asking for it.
Broader point; certificate and PKI work, as long as there is a seperate communication channel. Sure I can publish my public key out there. But unless someone calls me to verbally confirm the hash there's no way to know if that's MY public key, or the guy that wants to pretend be me's public key...
First off, I have quite a few certs - all but one from Microsoft. The other one is some BS Learning Tree "thanks-for-completing-our-course-pass-this-easy-t est-and-we'll-certify-you" certification... which brings me to my first point...
1. Third part certication companies have a vested interest in certifying people (and selling more certifications). Vendors have a vested interest in producting quality knowledge workers.
So yeah, I have MCSD. For both visual studio 6 and.NET. I haven't even been job searching since then. My company needs the certifications to retain Gold Partner status with Microsoft. If I leave they don't automatically lose it but if enough leave they will, which definitely would give them an incentive to keep me around in the case of company-wide-lay-off-x-people-because-thats-what-t he-accountant-says kind of scenarios (any other scenario, I believe I'm valuable enough that I don't have worry about it, certification or no). Plus, as a consultant, I like to think having the relevant certifications makes me a little more saleable. Which brings me to point number two...
2. You don't have to be looking for a job for a certification to have value
Yes its true that a highly trained monkey could probably get that certification (with the right quasi-legal help). Its also true that if a highly trained monkey can get a certification and you have good cause to have the certification, then the only reason to not get it is that you believe the monkey is better than you. Or maybe you can't afford it. Points 3 and 4 coming up
3. By refusing to certify you risk the appearance of being perceived to be less skilled than someone who did certify. We all know really good test takers with about 30 certifications; you don't want to be perceived as less skilled than that guy, do you?
4. Get someone else to foot the bill whenever possible.
Ok how do you do that? If your employer isn't willing to do it directly, look into your training program; maybe you could forsake that conference this year to get certified? Point out that enterprise-wide levels of certifications sometimes get you elligibility into partnership programs with vendors that can lead to reduced licensing costs, as well as increased sales opportunities.
There's your problem right there. How do you differentiate between work normally and not? Viruses aren't doing anything that the HARDWARE of the system wasn't designed to do... they're just subverting the software.
You say: So a worm or virus would begin to make calls out to the various sub-systems to hide itself and open up ports, then the AV would nip it in the bud.
Well first off a program has to go to extra lengths to make itself visible; a hidden task is the default running mode until you start creating UI. And there's tons of legitimate software that create legitimate but hidden processes to help themselves out.
As far as port opening; they have software to regulate that. It's called a software firewall.
Now there is a virus detection method known as heuristics, which basically looks for virus like behaviour. Things like copying your own code en masse, spitting it out to network ports, scanning for certain types of files. It's not easy and it's not perfect but it does work. It also takes a long time to do.
Hmmm, just the sort of bullshit I've come to expect from ZDNet....
Is it wrong that this just makes me wanna sit on the page hitting F5 every quarter second or so? Hoping that there are a few thousand slashdotters around the world doing the exact same thing with me?
In fact, if I were Google, I would be working on Google Browser. Then they could deliver ads whenever someone was browsing the Internet!
Technically speaking, since Google has become synonymous with searching the web... don't they get to deliver ads whenever anyone browses the internet anyways?
Since it seems the lens size is necessarily very small, will the maximum resolutions of the resulting picture be limited in any way? Or is lens size correlated with the maximum resolution of a camera?
lens size and resolution have no direct correlation. However lens size DOES effect the amount of light gathered, and that effects exposure time, and that in turn effects all sorts of things having to do with image quality and size. That is, a high resolution picture requires a longer exposure than a low resolution picture for a given bit-depth (low-resolution pictures can gang imaging elements together, effectively giving each pixel a larger photon collection area) And the longer exposure means it's more sensitive to vibration.
Any sort of mission to Mars would HAVE to be a bit more spacious than today's craft. Which means we need bigger boosters to get it there.
I would just like to point out that more empty space on a craft is just that; empty. Sure you gotta build a bigger hull and you gotta carry up a few extra liters of air. But there's a nice volume to mass ratio going on here; double the mass to quadruple the volume, that sort of thing... and any volume you add this way doesn't have to have any equipment in it!
But you can use nuclear power to charge a battery or crack hydrogen out of water... giving you a nuclear powered car without having to bring a nuclear reactor with you.
What surprises most people when I tell them about our Shared Source program is that 99% of the >70 programs have full redistribution and modification rights.
Technically, you can't have 99% of 70 items fall into a criteria without also have 100% of them fall into that criteria.
Sure rounding... ok but rounding statistics into your favor seems disengenious to me.
I guarantee it would take nearly everyone except genius autistic programmers more time to write large projects if if VS.NET didn't have any intellisense.
As a genius autistic programmer (well autistic at least... though most of my coworkers wouldn't argue the genius part) I have to say that while yes I can keep all that straight in my head... Intellisense is great as a sanity check. Especially when there are multiple overloads of a method with similar arguments.
I tell you what I'll accept your comparison of Eclipse to Visual Studio when:
1. It loads in no more than 200% of the time of Visual Studio 2. It's intellisense on a 2 GHz computer with 1 GB RAM actually kicks in before I finish typing 3. It's able to treat a J2EE web project as a web project, with automatic deployment and debugging
Until then get outta here with your Eclipse speak.
And yes, I know about a lot of the alternatives, they just all suck so bad they aren't worthy of mentioning by name. Eclipse is better than most, but is java, and slow....
Eclipse is a joke of an IDE. It's impossible to use it productively unless you've got a multi-GHz machine with >= 1GB RAM and a nice fast disk. The company I work for has machines which are pretty screaming running Visual Studio. But we more than double the RAM in these machines if someone gets assigned to a project requiring Eclipse... The price of a few GB of laptop RAM more than outweigh the productivity cost of not having it.
One nearterm solution to the problem is constructing tilt-dependent parallax for each viewer. The person with their head tilted to the right needs to see a different pair of images than the person who is sitting up straight or who has tilted their head to the left
Wow what a concept!
Forget the strange tracking apparatus and all that... what about holographic projection?
look at it this way; you put on a pair of polarised glasses. The left eye sees the horizontally polarised light and the right eye the verticle, or some such thing...
but what you really need is as the head tilts, to present slightly different views to the two eyes so that parallax is maintained. Why not develop polarising filters with a narrow band (the type of polarisation currently used is wide band; anything within 45 degrees of horizontal is passed, with a fall off function as you approach verticle)... and show all the left eye head tilts and right eye head tilts, up to 45 degrees, simultaneously? The display would be holographic in that every pixel shows every head tilt simultaneously...
I don't know how well they can bring that sort of 3 dimensionality to a film without requiring strange and uncomfortable glasses (remember Jaws 3D?). The closest I've seen is in plays where the actors and props are all in three dimensions (naturally).
For the home viewer, stereoscopic shutter glasses are relatively light, most users don't experience eyestrain, and can be had for about $30. If you've got an nVidia card you can even shell out a little bit extra and play your videogames in stereo 3D (awesome... except HUDs are usually not positioned properly in the 3D plane.)
For theatre viewing, cheap, ultralight, and comfortable polarized glasses can be had.
Well, that was the idea. Get it, and have her wear it.
Well maybe you should be a little more specific next time. Slashdotters are known for their propensity to take everything literally and with specificity...
unless it helps us to troll a little bit hehehe
Seriously though replica leia outfits can be had for a couple hundred. Or build your own... there are guides out there...
But the impressive part isn't the current. It's the pulse. It's surprisingly easy to get really high currents... as long as you only want them for fractions of a second.
Sure the total current achieved here is impressive... but what about watt hours? I would imagine the number of watt hours here is surprisingly low compared to the current...
The challenge in developing an accessible user interface is that every disability has a different set of needs.
And even more challenging is remembering that as you develop it. And this isn't just the degree to which a person is disabled. It's also the education level of the person, and even where they were educated.
For instance in new england it's common practice to teach a deaf person both American Sign Language and a pidgin language based on it that's used more commonly for everyday speech. (The difference being that ASL doesn't require lipreading. The conversational sign language used in America generally does) However here in the South, finding someone that knows ASL is very rare.
Honestly, the technology just isn't there yet for fully blind users. I mean you've got refreshable braille displays which are slow and expensive. You've got screen readers which are slow and non-ideal (ever actually try to surf the web with one?) And then you've got speech-to-text. Don't get me started on that one.
So how would I design an interface meant to be used by those without vision?
1. Implement a good speech-to-text-to-speech system. 2. Develop a query and control language. This language should:
a) interpret natural language inputs
b) assist users to clarify a request to an allowed syntax in case of syntax error 3. Map the query and control language to an API. Make it rich. Make it easy to implement 4. Create some special purpose dialects. Text-formatting, for instance (as in: "dictate Hello comma line-break I hope this finds you well period " etc...) 5. Rewrite a bunch of critical apps to use the API. At the minimum you're going to want e-mail, calendar, IM, and web browsing. Some apps just don't make sense; for instance a spreadsheet. Way too visual. 6. Create some special purpose apps designed either specifically to meet the needs of vision impaired people, or to take advantage of the interface. 7. Create some games.
Once you've done all that then you will have created the first interface that's truly usable for the vision impaired.
even though the company who owned it literally trashed the project, don't they still own some sort of rights to it?
Well that all depends... do you think that ideas have intrinsic value? Well of course, that's obvious. But in terms of copyright law, not so much. You definitely can't copyright an idea that exists solely in your mind (though you could patent it). You definitely can copyright a finished product based on an idea. In between is a grey area...
Oh and just to add my $0.02 and risk getting modded redundant, if you throw something away it immediately becomes public domain. As long as its not trespassing to retrieve it, you can do so. This includes outside dumpsters, trash cans, and loose bags / items at a designated municipal pickup location. (i.e. curbside)
Now tying this back to the idea of code ownership; if you throw out your only copy of the source code, do you still own it? And if not is it public domain? Or does it belong to the first entrepeneur to rescue it from the dumpster? Of course, in this case, public domain doesn't have quite the same meaning that it does in the coding world; items in dumpsters can be owned by everyone at once, but only until one person claims it.
This really points out the problems with our current property laws; they are all geared towards protecting the rights of individuals who own physical things; bits are free (well except for a trickle of electricity) and can be perfectly copied any number of times. It is this property of cheap and easy duplication that makes some of the assumptions made when writing property laws just absurd when applied to the new medium.
Ever heard possession is nine tenths of the law? Now how the hell does that apply when anyone in the world can possess for free (assuming someone else is offering the bits for free)... Now that's not a legal principle, but rather a simplification of many legal principles, but as IANAL it was the best example I could come up with.
Bottom line: our government needs to stop treating bits like pieces of furniture. And no, pretending a collection of bits is like a book isn't a better solution. Ideas are valuable. There should be laws that protect the ownership of those ideas. Some would argue that this is what patents are for.
Patents are supposed to turn ideas into something that the legal system can treat like physical property. But two things get in the way of that. Firstly, there is a huge barrier of entry. Not only does your idea have to show some intrinsic merit, value, and novelty but the burden of the work of patenting something falls on the "inventor". If I had enough money to patent every halfway decent piece of code that comes out of my brain, well I wouldn't need to because I'd have enough money to hire teams of lawyers to protect my ideas just as well.
The second issue with patents and bits is the ease of duplication. Before software, you could steal a patent but all you'd get is a set of plans to build something. To make a profit off of that you still had to build a factory and make tools and hire people and get raw materials and put finished products in stores and advertise that its available.
Now with software you don't have to do any of that. You can take the implementation of the idea itself and duplicate it for a small investment of time and a little bit of bandwidth. And thanks to viral marketing and micropayment systems, you can do business online without having to setup a huge (and therefore noticeable) presence.
So here we have a system designed to protect ideas, but to enroll in the system can cost a significant portion of the implementation cost, and once enrolled you have to continuously patrol every nook and cranny in the entire world looking for offenders and still KNOW that someone could slip a little business in the cracks where you'd never notice anyways.
As for what type of employment to pursue that really depends on you. How much money do you need? How much freedom do you desire? What type of work schedule do you want? Do you want to buy your own benefits or let an employer buy them for you? Keep in mind that 401k matches and group health insurance are benefits you can only get from an employer... Personally I like a little stability so I went full time. A lot of people go contract.
Also, what kind of position should a person with a Master's in Computer Science be looking for (other than dish washer)? I've been looking at senior software developer positions
Forget the senior software developer positions. A Master's in Comp Sci is nice but it doesn't show an employer that you've got what it takes to develop software; it shows an employer you've got what it takes to memorize facts about computers and demonstrate basic competency in programming labs, all of which are likely completely out of date w.r.t. the real world needs of today's employers, because the people that create the labs have in all likelihood left the real world employment environment long ago (if they were ever there at all)
Focus on getting a job doing what you want to do. Forget this whole "work above your skill level" bullshit. It's Computer Science! The field changes every six months ANYWAYS. You'll always be challenged to learn regardless of what it might say on your business card under your name.
Slashdot Mirror
Well we did have to submit a few ID numbers and whatnot. I think even a D&B number or some such. But these numbers, while not public knowledge, aren't exactly secret either...
Bottom line is, I should have had to do some sort of out of band verification. Which I didn't.
There was a well-publicized instance where Verisign issued a code-signing certificate to someone claiming to be from Microsoft but actually wasn't.
I was getting ready to reply to the thread when I saw this. Have you ever tried to get a code signing certificate? There seem to be extremely few checks and balances on it. Basically you just wait a couple days. They say they do checks to verify you are who you say you are and whatnot... but whoever they called at my company never asked me if I was requesting a certificate. So if they did make the call they didn't ask whoever picked up the phone to verify that it was really me asking for it.
Broader point; certificate and PKI work, as long as there is a seperate communication channel. Sure I can publish my public key out there. But unless someone calls me to verbally confirm the hash there's no way to know if that's MY public key, or the guy that wants to pretend be me's public key...
First off, I have quite a few certs - all but one from Microsoft. The other one is some BS Learning Tree "thanks-for-completing-our-course-pass-this-easy-t est-and-we'll-certify-you" certification... which brings me to my first point...
.NET. I haven't even been job searching since then. My company needs the certifications to retain Gold Partner status with Microsoft. If I leave they don't automatically lose it but if enough leave they will, which definitely would give them an incentive to keep me around in the case of company-wide-lay-off-x-people-because-thats-what-t he-accountant-says kind of scenarios (any other scenario, I believe I'm valuable enough that I don't have worry about it, certification or no). Plus, as a consultant, I like to think having the relevant certifications makes me a little more saleable. Which brings me to point number two...
1. Third part certication companies have a vested interest in certifying people (and selling more certifications). Vendors have a vested interest in producting quality knowledge workers.
So yeah, I have MCSD. For both visual studio 6 and
2. You don't have to be looking for a job for a certification to have value
Yes its true that a highly trained monkey could probably get that certification (with the right quasi-legal help). Its also true that if a highly trained monkey can get a certification and you have good cause to have the certification, then the only reason to not get it is that you believe the monkey is better than you. Or maybe you can't afford it. Points 3 and 4 coming up
3. By refusing to certify you risk the appearance of being perceived to be less skilled than someone who did certify. We all know really good test takers with about 30 certifications; you don't want to be perceived as less skilled than that guy, do you?
4. Get someone else to foot the bill whenever possible.
Ok how do you do that? If your employer isn't willing to do it directly, look into your training program; maybe you could forsake that conference this year to get certified? Point out that enterprise-wide levels of certifications sometimes get you elligibility into partnership programs with vendors that can lead to reduced licensing costs, as well as increased sales opportunities.
I think more importantly than whether or not they can work a remote and podcast, is do they desire to do so?
capability is one thing; capability doesn't drive markets though. Demand drives markets.
and if determind to work normally
There's your problem right there. How do you differentiate between work normally and not? Viruses aren't doing anything that the HARDWARE of the system wasn't designed to do... they're just subverting the software.
You say:
So a worm or virus would begin to make calls out to the various sub-systems to hide itself and open up ports, then the AV would nip it in the bud.
Well first off a program has to go to extra lengths to make itself visible; a hidden task is the default running mode until you start creating UI. And there's tons of legitimate software that create legitimate but hidden processes to help themselves out.
As far as port opening; they have software to regulate that. It's called a software firewall.
Now there is a virus detection method known as heuristics, which basically looks for virus like behaviour. Things like copying your own code en masse, spitting it out to network ports, scanning for certain types of files. It's not easy and it's not perfect but it does work. It also takes a long time to do.
Hmmm, just the sort of bullshit I've come to expect from ZDNet....
Is it wrong that this just makes me wanna sit on the page hitting F5 every quarter second or so? Hoping that there are a few thousand slashdotters around the world doing the exact same thing with me?
In fact, if I were Google, I would be working on Google Browser. Then they could deliver ads whenever someone was browsing the Internet!
Technically speaking, since Google has become synonymous with searching the web... don't they get to deliver ads whenever anyone browses the internet anyways?
Just remember that any MS employee has likely had whatever he's going to say carefully dissected by the Redmond marketing robodroids.
Actually I believe in this case that he *is* the robodroid for the 360.
My take on the article: notice how many questions were asked multiple times? Notice how many questions he actually answers the question directly?
This felt like a fairly low-content interview IMHO...
The human eye can change shape... and zoom?
I've got to figure out how to do that... hell I could fix my nearsightedness!
A name like autopr0n and the first use for built in zoom you can think of is to fix your nearsightedness??
*tsk tsk* what kind of slashdotter are you?
Since it seems the lens size is necessarily very small, will the maximum resolutions of the resulting picture be limited in any way? Or is lens size correlated with the maximum resolution of a camera?
lens size and resolution have no direct correlation. However lens size DOES effect the amount of light gathered, and that effects exposure time, and that in turn effects all sorts of things having to do with image quality and size. That is, a high resolution picture requires a longer exposure than a low resolution picture for a given bit-depth (low-resolution pictures can gang imaging elements together, effectively giving each pixel a larger photon collection area) And the longer exposure means it's more sensitive to vibration.
Any sort of mission to Mars would HAVE to be a bit more spacious than today's craft. Which means we need bigger boosters to get it there.
I would just like to point out that more empty space on a craft is just that; empty. Sure you gotta build a bigger hull and you gotta carry up a few extra liters of air. But there's a nice volume to mass ratio going on here; double the mass to quadruple the volume, that sort of thing... and any volume you add this way doesn't have to have any equipment in it!
But I agree. Orion is the answer.
Car engines can't be nuclear
But you can use nuclear power to charge a battery or crack hydrogen out of water... giving you a nuclear powered car without having to bring a nuclear reactor with you.
What surprises most people when I tell them about our Shared Source program is that 99% of the >70 programs have full redistribution and modification rights.
Technically, you can't have 99% of 70 items fall into a criteria without also have 100% of them fall into that criteria.
Sure rounding... ok but rounding statistics into your favor seems disengenious to me.
Oh, and not for nothing, you can teach science, but you cannot teach creativity.
Hah I thought this was a comment on the other parts of this discussion re: GWB's new plan to teach intelligent design in schools hahaha
I guarantee it would take nearly everyone except genius autistic programmers more time to write large projects if if VS.NET didn't have any intellisense.
As a genius autistic programmer (well autistic at least... though most of my coworkers wouldn't argue the genius part) I have to say that while yes I can keep all that straight in my head... Intellisense is great as a sanity check. Especially when there are multiple overloads of a method with similar arguments.
I tell you what I'll accept your comparison of Eclipse to Visual Studio when:
1. It loads in no more than 200% of the time of Visual Studio
2. It's intellisense on a 2 GHz computer with 1 GB RAM actually kicks in before I finish typing
3. It's able to treat a J2EE web project as a web project, with automatic deployment and debugging
Until then get outta here with your Eclipse speak.
And yes, I know about a lot of the alternatives, they just all suck so bad they aren't worthy of mentioning by name. Eclipse is better than most, but is java, and slow....
Eclipse is a joke of an IDE. It's impossible to use it productively unless you've got a multi-GHz machine with >= 1GB RAM and a nice fast disk. The company I work for has machines which are pretty screaming running Visual Studio. But we more than double the RAM in these machines if someone gets assigned to a project requiring Eclipse... The price of a few GB of laptop RAM more than outweigh the productivity cost of not having it.
One nearterm solution to the problem is constructing tilt-dependent parallax for each viewer. The person with their head tilted to the right needs to see a different pair of images than the person who is sitting up straight or who has tilted their head to the left
Wow what a concept!
Forget the strange tracking apparatus and all that... what about holographic projection?
look at it this way; you put on a pair of polarised glasses. The left eye sees the horizontally polarised light and the right eye the verticle, or some such thing...
but what you really need is as the head tilts, to present slightly different views to the two eyes so that parallax is maintained. Why not develop polarising filters with a narrow band (the type of polarisation currently used is wide band; anything within 45 degrees of horizontal is passed, with a fall off function as you approach verticle)... and show all the left eye head tilts and right eye head tilts, up to 45 degrees, simultaneously? The display would be holographic in that every pixel shows every head tilt simultaneously...
I don't know how well they can bring that sort of 3 dimensionality to a film without requiring strange and uncomfortable glasses (remember Jaws 3D?). The closest I've seen is in plays where the actors and props are all in three dimensions (naturally).
For the home viewer, stereoscopic shutter glasses are relatively light, most users don't experience eyestrain, and can be had for about $30. If you've got an nVidia card you can even shell out a little bit extra and play your videogames in stereo 3D (awesome... except HUDs are usually not positioned properly in the 3D plane.)
For theatre viewing, cheap, ultralight, and comfortable polarized glasses can be had.
You'll still look like a dork though.
Well, that was the idea. Get it, and have her wear it.
Well maybe you should be a little more specific next time. Slashdotters are known for their propensity to take everything literally and with specificity...
unless it helps us to troll a little bit hehehe
Seriously though replica leia outfits can be had for a couple hundred. Or build your own... there are guides out there...
http://www.leiasmetalbikini.com/make.html
I'd rather have the little outfit that Princess Leia wore while being a slave for Jabba the Hut ;-)
;)
I'd much rather that my girlfriend have it.
Of course good luck getting her to put it on. Maybe if I just didn't tell her it was from starwars
Yeah it sure does.
But the impressive part isn't the current. It's the pulse. It's surprisingly easy to get really high currents... as long as you only want them for fractions of a second.
Sure the total current achieved here is impressive... but what about watt hours? I would imagine the number of watt hours here is surprisingly low compared to the current...
The challenge in developing an accessible user interface is that every disability has a different set of needs.
And even more challenging is remembering that as you develop it. And this isn't just the degree to which a person is disabled. It's also the education level of the person, and even where they were educated.
For instance in new england it's common practice to teach a deaf person both American Sign Language and a pidgin language based on it that's used more commonly for everyday speech. (The difference being that ASL doesn't require lipreading. The conversational sign language used in America generally does) However here in the South, finding someone that knows ASL is very rare.
Honestly, the technology just isn't there yet for fully blind users. I mean you've got refreshable braille displays which are slow and expensive. You've got screen readers which are slow and non-ideal (ever actually try to surf the web with one?) And then you've got speech-to-text. Don't get me started on that one.
So how would I design an interface meant to be used by those without vision?
1. Implement a good speech-to-text-to-speech system.
2. Develop a query and control language. This language should:
a) interpret natural language inputs
b) assist users to clarify a request to an allowed syntax in case of syntax error
3. Map the query and control language to an API. Make it rich. Make it easy to implement
4. Create some special purpose dialects. Text-formatting, for instance (as in: "dictate Hello comma line-break I hope this finds you well period " etc...)
5. Rewrite a bunch of critical apps to use the API. At the minimum you're going to want e-mail, calendar, IM, and web browsing. Some apps just don't make sense; for instance a spreadsheet. Way too visual.
6. Create some special purpose apps designed either specifically to meet the needs of vision impaired people, or to take advantage of the interface.
7. Create some games.
Once you've done all that then you will have created the first interface that's truly usable for the vision impaired.
even though the company who owned it literally trashed the project, don't they still own some sort of rights to it?
Well that all depends... do you think that ideas have intrinsic value? Well of course, that's obvious. But in terms of copyright law, not so much. You definitely can't copyright an idea that exists solely in your mind (though you could patent it). You definitely can copyright a finished product based on an idea. In between is a grey area...
Oh and just to add my $0.02 and risk getting modded redundant, if you throw something away it immediately becomes public domain. As long as its not trespassing to retrieve it, you can do so. This includes outside dumpsters, trash cans, and loose bags / items at a designated municipal pickup location. (i.e. curbside)
Now tying this back to the idea of code ownership; if you throw out your only copy of the source code, do you still own it? And if not is it public domain? Or does it belong to the first entrepeneur to rescue it from the dumpster? Of course, in this case, public domain doesn't have quite the same meaning that it does in the coding world; items in dumpsters can be owned by everyone at once, but only until one person claims it.
This really points out the problems with our current property laws; they are all geared towards protecting the rights of individuals who own physical things; bits are free (well except for a trickle of electricity) and can be perfectly copied any number of times. It is this property of cheap and easy duplication that makes some of the assumptions made when writing property laws just absurd when applied to the new medium.
Ever heard possession is nine tenths of the law? Now how the hell does that apply when anyone in the world can possess for free (assuming someone else is offering the bits for free)... Now that's not a legal principle, but rather a simplification of many legal principles, but as IANAL it was the best example I could come up with.
Bottom line: our government needs to stop treating bits like pieces of furniture. And no, pretending a collection of bits is like a book isn't a better solution. Ideas are valuable. There should be laws that protect the ownership of those ideas. Some would argue that this is what patents are for.
Patents are supposed to turn ideas into something that the legal system can treat like physical property. But two things get in the way of that. Firstly, there is a huge barrier of entry. Not only does your idea have to show some intrinsic merit, value, and novelty but the burden of the work of patenting something falls on the "inventor". If I had enough money to patent every halfway decent piece of code that comes out of my brain, well I wouldn't need to because I'd have enough money to hire teams of lawyers to protect my ideas just as well.
The second issue with patents and bits is the ease of duplication. Before software, you could steal a patent but all you'd get is a set of plans to build something. To make a profit off of that you still had to build a factory and make tools and hire people and get raw materials and put finished products in stores and advertise that its available.
Now with software you don't have to do any of that. You can take the implementation of the idea itself and duplicate it for a small investment of time and a little bit of bandwidth. And thanks to viral marketing and micropayment systems, you can do business online without having to setup a huge (and therefore noticeable) presence.
So here we have a system designed to protect ideas, but to enroll in the system can cost a significant portion of the implementation cost, and once enrolled you have to continuously patrol every nook and cranny in the entire world looking for offenders and still KNOW that someone could slip a little business in the cracks where you'd never notice anyways.
There's gotta be a better way.
As for what type of employment to pursue that really depends on you. How much money do you need? How much freedom do you desire? What type of work schedule do you want? Do you want to buy your own benefits or let an employer buy them for you? Keep in mind that 401k matches and group health insurance are benefits you can only get from an employer... Personally I like a little stability so I went full time. A lot of people go contract.
Also, what kind of position should a person with a Master's in Computer Science be looking for (other than dish washer)? I've been looking at senior software developer positions
Forget the senior software developer positions. A Master's in Comp Sci is nice but it doesn't show an employer that you've got what it takes to develop software; it shows an employer you've got what it takes to memorize facts about computers and demonstrate basic competency in programming labs, all of which are likely completely out of date w.r.t. the real world needs of today's employers, because the people that create the labs have in all likelihood left the real world employment environment long ago (if they were ever there at all)
Focus on getting a job doing what you want to do. Forget this whole "work above your skill level" bullshit. It's Computer Science! The field changes every six months ANYWAYS. You'll always be challenged to learn regardless of what it might say on your business card under your name.