and at the same time try to get a bit of traditional American IT industry, OS making.
Since Linux is not traditional American IT industry software, there is no technological drain happening here. This decision does however have the potential to shrink the market share of a certain technologically stagnated and sloppy American OS vendor but that is only to be expected when this American OS vendor's product sucks bigtime. Another factor is the simple fact that given the USA's obsession with intelligence gathering nobody trusts this American OS vendor not to cave into the pressure to spike its product with backdoors
While the "credit card" approach to these things is nice, as in
"Well it really does not matter how much of a mess I make now, future generations will be glad to spend a mountain of money and huge amounts of effort on cleaning up after me"
it is really preferable to just design space craft in such a way that they create the minimum mess possible. And that does not just extend to Nuclear Reactors it applies to everything from slips of foil to entire decommissioned satilites floating around up there doing nothing other than endangering space craft. Ther e should be an obligation to build a disposal mechanism into every satilite launched.
Heh, buckyballs! Pah! Just imagine what happens when Microsoft starts playing around with Nanobots! They will screw it up as usual and we will have a runaway Nanobot chrisis and if we do not stop Bill Gates NOW his runaway nanobots will disassemble the entire planet and reassemble it molecule for molecule as a giant windowslogo and passing Alien explorers will rack their brains for generations to come pondering the question "WTF were these idiots thinking!...... Oh damn my aching brain... black helecopters, coming for me... oh... where did I put that tinfoil hat?
Years ago one of my biology teachers decided to crack a joke. After spending a long time explaining multi-cellular organisms and their evolution from single-cell organisms he asked the class:
"Will all the single cell organisms in the room please raise their hands!"
I was amazed to find my self as one of three kids not to do so, the entire rest of the class had a hand in the air. And people wonder why teachers suffer under a constant nagging feeling that they are wasting their time.
they're more or less waiving their moral claim to any damages for piracy since they've already been paid for that.
This law is really just realistic. We may not like it and it may not be 100% fair but it is probably also the only way these Artists are ever going to see a dime for the not inconsiderable amount of revenue they are loosing to piracy so from that point of view the law is not 100% unfair either. The people who whine the loudest about paying taxes like this are usually the ones who have a boxen under their desk who's cheif role it is to suck MP3's , movies and warez off the net by the gigabyte. Which is strange really since you could make the argument that in a sense such a tax would absolve the downloader from any wrongdoing since he has already paid his royalties with the tax on his storage media. It is a rather neat way out, sort of like way tobacco companies are not liable for damages if they place a warning label on their cigarette boxes, caveat emptor. The real danger of this approach is that the once Artists Organizations, like the one in my own country, succeed with storage medias they start trying to institute a similar tax on every concievable kind of computer hardware and everything else they can think of. The latest bright idea is that ISP's pay a levy on every megabyte of data downloaded by their users.
Aint that the truth! One of the most common reasons for UK tourists in the USA getting into embarrasing situations has to be the simple act of going into a shop and asking where they keep the "fags". It is comical how the most innocent word can mean something very different in another language. I was recenty in Denmark, on my way through the city of Odense I passed a sign with a big arrow on it above which was written: "Middlefart". In Danish that is perfectly innocent but in English.....
There's nothing more maddening than listening to someone hum while you're trying to code.
What I hate the most is people with those hands free mobile ear/microphone sets. One of my colleagues whom I unfortunately have to work with alot has this annoying tendency to transition into a phonecall in the middle of a conversation. It annoys the hell out of everybody who has to deal with him since he has his phone switched to silent mode so there is no hint when somebody calls him, (which happens alot) causing him to drift off into a converstion whoever is on the phone and completely loose any interest in whoever he was talking to before. I don't think I have ever finsihed a conversation with that dude.
Perhaps because after you buy their product, they no longer own it?
It is more complicated than that. What he is trying to say is that maybe if manufacturers were responsible for their product after they sell it perhaps they would take more care to be less wasteful about packaging and design their products in a way that makes it less of a headache to dispose of them. Remember that disposal of toxic and other difficult to dispose of waste comes out of your taxes so one would think it is in your interest to keep waste disposal costs low. Making manufacturers partly responsible for the disposal of their products may not be an optimal solution but unfortunately the only thing that seems to motivate the companies to be less wasteful is to make sure that their profits are tied to their compliance to enviromental and efficiency standards.
Will next version include a small explosive to keep you from doing bad things like watching DVDs in Linux?
No, I don't think, explosive behavioural inhibitors will be practical until Congress adds a few radical new ammendments to the constitution and the backroom crew at Microsoft comes up with a new tamper proof version that is permanently inserted into your brain at birth with a pneumatic bolt gun.
...is our privacy restored by removing the ability to track users' cell phones? Of course not.
Location information is generated automatically by the GSM network. Depending on the layout of the GSM net you can determine in which GSM cell the user is and even (roughly) determine his location within the cell. The location info is required for the network to operate properly. All this article has really accomplished is that Al Quaeda is, as this is written, instructing its operatives to ditch their anonymous simms after a certain short period for new ones to make tracking more difficult or to abandon GSM phones alltogether. It would have been nice if more of those terrorist [EXPLETIVE DELETED] had fallen for this before it was advertised by the press. Loose lips sink ships, or burn skyscrapers in this case.
....but we all know how US intelligence brilliantly prevented the 9/11 strikes with its all tech, no human intellignece approach. It seems to me that US intelligence will have to do some rethinking on the subject of doing completely without human intel sources. If 9/11 and the whole Iraqi WMD mess have proven anything it is firstly, that satilites and other spytechnology no matter how advanced will never completely replace the humble human traitor and secondly that no matter how good you are at running high tech spy gear it does not qualify your to run human spies. That is a very special skill and hard to learn. The CIA cold do worse than to take a leaf out of the books of the KGB when it comes to recruiting human spies, it is a skill the CIA has all but lost.
There are many other examples. Read your history...
<rant>
Lets investigate one lesson of history....
If the Roman empire is anything to go by the USA will end up as a country of the jobless and destitute, ruled by the super rich, who hire the dispossessed citizen masses as what amounts to mercenaries in a state army who's cheif role it is secure resources and to make sure the overseas possessions that secure the good life of the super rich do not get taken over by the restless local natives of said overseas territories. But of course we will learn from history won't we?
...known that your work for them is owned by the company and not owned by you
Things are not always that simple. My own employer recently presented me with a new contract. It included among many other things the three following points:
1) A clause about 'any software/hardware/idea/invention... etc' of mine being the property of the company'. It was so loosely worded that they could theoretically have laid claim to things I 'coded/designed/invented' in my spare time even if this had nothing to do with the business the company is in was likely to cause the company loss of revenue. 2) Forbid me to code in my own time for an Open Source project even if the project is in no way related to the business the company and is completely unlikely to cause them loss of revenue. 3) They also tried to insert what they called a "competition protection" clause in the new contract where they reserrve the right to place an injunction on me, forcing me to remain unemployed for a period of upto 6 months, if I should happen to quit working for them and begin working for somebody they feel is a competitor or if I might be using knowledge obtained in my old job at my new place of work.
All but the third clause were shot down after intense negotiations (read: most of the empoyees staged a small scale mutiny). The third point has been kept in the new contracts but nobody expects it to hold up in court, at least not here in Europe. Although the poor bastard who the company decides to honor by testing that clause on is probably going to have to shell out a small fortune in legal fees to prove them wrong and employees will probably think twice beore signing the new contract. Fortunately I was able to avoid swapping my old contract for the new model.
Now, I will agree that a comany owns what I code/design/invent on company time. I also think that a company is no worse off rewarding employees for valuable innovations in some way. But when the company starts trying to dictate whether or not I can innovate in my own spare time in a way that does not undermine the company I work for I think the company has gone too far.
I don't mean to be hard-hearted here but if I was working with chemicals that ate through my gloves I would:
A) Demand to know what chemicals they are. B) Demand to know their possible effects on my health. C) Demand a better quality hazardous enviroment equipment (Including ventilated headgear) that is proof against the stuff. D) Report the company or even quit if all of the above was not fulfilled.
It is easy to talk about people not wanting to lose their jobs but surely keeping their health must be preferable to any period of unemployment, drop in pay or whatever else caused them not to complain.
Yes, so the US generates 60% of the world's spam. However, what fraction of the world's total email traffic does the US generate? I bet it's near 60%.
Without having some idea of what fraction of a country's email traffic is spam, these numbers just tell you which countries have a bigger internet presence, and absolutely nothing more. .... that there is a direct correlation between the amount of spam generated by a nation and the percentage it creates of the total amount of world Email. In other words if a nation generates x% of spam it must also generate x% of the world email traffic. It would thus follow, by your logic, that 280+ million Americans produce 60% of the world E-mail while 200+ million Germans French and English are responsible for only 1.83%+1.50%+1.31%=4.64% of it? That seems a bit far fetched to me. You should rethink this theory, we Europeans may not be quite as advanced as you North Americans but we do not live in the stone age either.
"And then everybody exclaims in surprise, "how could this happen in a civilized nation?!"
This is more or less how it happened in Germany:
When Hitler attacked the Jews I was not a Jew, therefore I was not concerned.
And when Hitler attacked the Catholics, I was not a Catholic, and therefore, I was not concerned.
And when Hitler attacked the unions and the industrialists, I was not a member of the unions and I was not concerned.
Then Hitler attacked me and the Protestant church -- and there was nobody left to be concerned.
- Pastor Martin Niemoller
In short it happens to civilized nations little by little. You keep ignoring evil things because they are being done to minorities who may be unpopular or unworthy of your outrage because you do not belong to them. Then one day you wake up after ignoring a hundred little injustices and realize that they add up to a colossal injustice and that you are living in a police state that commits unspeakable atrocities and where you will be next if somebody hears you making a government critical comment, listning to the wrong radio station or just telling a treasonous joke.
"They've come up with some VERY clever counters to our prevention methods"
Ehhh.... no, the clever ones are the weeners who work for the spammers and all weeners are doing is making money of the stupid (aka. Spammers). It is perhap not very ethical of the weeners to do so but at least it they are not stupid.
They put an awful lot of effort into sending people spam actually thinking that any sane person would buy their products to save his/her life. And just to give you a sample, these have included such fabulous products as: (Probably fake) Viagra, Latex Dildo's, Subscriptions to fisting porn sites, Windows Software... and that is just a small sample of what I have found the public mail inboxes at work (Which these bastards parsed out of our webpage) before we fortified the webpage against autoparsers, changed the addresses and spam filtered them to be able to find our customer's mail who's considerable volume of messages was getting hard to spot in the flood of useless junkmail. On top of that they are responsible for a eating up a huge amount of Bandwidth on our network and cause constant aggrivation in multiple other ways. To put it short imagine somebody coming along to your house every day with a dumptruck full of unsolicited junkmail leaving you to dig through a metric ton of crap mail to find the three perosnal letters you really want to read. Now, you do the math and figure out why I call them STUPID!
Speak for your self, I for one would NOT want to see a Boray* female naked.
AAAAHHHHHH! MY EYES.... I'M BLIND.....
* Borays - Dwarfish pig-like creatures who reside on the planet Sectar. They live in semi-permanent settlements in the hinterlands raiding human settlements from time to time.
I suppose you mean the same greedy industrial/stock analysts who browse internet Job/Employment sites to see if companies are hiring, which has led to companies flooding these same sites with phoney job offers to fool the analysts? I just love answering Job advertisements 60% of whom are practically guaranteed to be turned down because the were just posted by some corporate slimeball for for "PR reasons".
That is true! I feel Alan Turing and some of his colleagues deserved mention for breaking the Nazi's Enigma code. I suppose building a pioneering computer and helping to save the world from Fascism is way less important than the exploits of Kevin Mitnick.
Slashdot Mirror
These 3 countries are out to save a buck ...
Nothing wrong with that.
and at the same time try to get a bit of traditional American IT industry, OS making.
Since Linux is not traditional American IT industry software, there is no technological drain happening here. This decision does however have the potential to shrink the market share of a certain technologically stagnated and sloppy American OS vendor but that is only to be expected when this American OS vendor's product sucks bigtime. Another factor is the simple fact that given the USA's obsession with intelligence gathering nobody trusts this American OS vendor not to cave into the pressure to spike its product with backdoors
While the "credit card" approach to these things is nice, as in
"Well it really does not matter how much of a mess I make now, future generations will be glad to spend a mountain of money and huge amounts of effort on cleaning up after me"
it is really preferable to just design space craft in such a way that they create the minimum mess possible. And that does not just extend to Nuclear Reactors it applies to everything from slips of foil to entire decommissioned satilites floating around up there doing nothing other than endangering space craft. Ther e should be an obligation to build a disposal mechanism into every satilite launched.
Heh, buckyballs! Pah! Just imagine what happens when Microsoft starts playing around with Nanobots! They will screw it up as usual and we will have a runaway Nanobot chrisis and if we do not stop Bill Gates NOW his runaway nanobots will disassemble the entire planet and reassemble it molecule for molecule as a giant windowslogo and passing Alien explorers will rack their brains for generations to come pondering the question "WTF were these idiots thinking!...... Oh damn my aching brain... black helecopters, coming for me... oh... where did I put that tinfoil hat?
Years ago one of my biology teachers decided to crack a joke. After spending a long time explaining multi-cellular organisms and their evolution from single-cell organisms he asked the class:
"Will all the single cell organisms in the room please raise their hands!"
I was amazed to find my self as one of three kids not to do so, the entire rest of the class had a hand in the air. And people wonder why teachers suffer under a constant nagging feeling that they are wasting their time.
they're more or less waiving their moral claim to any damages for piracy since they've already been paid for that.
This law is really just realistic. We may not like it and it may not be 100% fair but it is probably also the only way these Artists are ever going to see a dime for the not inconsiderable amount of revenue they are loosing to piracy so from that point of view the law is not 100% unfair either. The people who whine the loudest about paying taxes like this are usually the ones who have a boxen under their desk who's cheif role it is to suck MP3's , movies and warez off the net by the gigabyte. Which is strange really since you could make the argument that in a sense such a tax would absolve the downloader from any wrongdoing since he has already paid his royalties with the tax on his storage media. It is a rather neat way out, sort of like way tobacco companies are not liable for damages if they place a warning label on their cigarette boxes, caveat emptor. The real danger of this approach is that the once Artists Organizations, like the one in my own country, succeed with storage medias they start trying to institute a similar tax on every concievable kind of computer hardware and everything else they can think of. The latest bright idea is that ISP's pay a levy on every megabyte of data downloaded by their users.
Aint that the truth! One of the most common reasons for UK tourists in the USA getting into embarrasing situations has to be the simple act of going into a shop and asking where they keep the "fags". It is comical how the most innocent word can mean something very different in another language. I was recenty in Denmark, on my way through the city of Odense I passed a sign with a big arrow on it above which was written: "Middlefart". In Danish that is perfectly innocent but in English.....
There's nothing more maddening than listening to someone hum while you're trying to code.
What I hate the most is people with those hands free mobile ear/microphone sets. One of my colleagues whom I unfortunately have to work with alot has this annoying tendency to transition into a phonecall in the middle of a conversation. It annoys the hell out of everybody who has to deal with him since he has his phone switched to silent mode so there is no hint when somebody calls him, (which happens alot) causing him to drift off into a converstion whoever is on the phone and completely loose any interest in whoever he was talking to before. I don't think I have ever finsihed a conversation with that dude.
Perhaps because after you buy their product, they no longer own it?
It is more complicated than that. What he is trying to say is that maybe if manufacturers were responsible for their product after they sell it perhaps they would take more care to be less wasteful about packaging and design their products in a way that makes it less of a headache to dispose of them. Remember that disposal of toxic and other difficult to dispose of waste comes out of your taxes so one would think it is in your interest to keep waste disposal costs low. Making manufacturers partly responsible for the disposal of their products may not be an optimal solution but unfortunately the only thing that seems to motivate the companies to be less wasteful is to make sure that their profits are tied to their compliance to enviromental and efficiency standards.
Will next version include a small explosive to keep you from doing bad things like watching DVDs in Linux?
No, I don't think, explosive behavioural inhibitors will be practical until Congress adds a few radical new ammendments to the constitution and the backroom crew at Microsoft comes up with a new tamper proof version that is permanently inserted into your brain at birth with a pneumatic bolt gun.
...is our privacy restored by removing the ability to track users' cell phones? Of course not.
Location information is generated automatically by the GSM network. Depending on the layout of the GSM net you can determine in which GSM cell the user is and even (roughly) determine his location within the cell. The location info is required for the network to operate properly. All this article has really accomplished is that Al Quaeda is, as this is written, instructing its operatives to ditch their anonymous simms after a certain short period for new ones to make tracking more difficult or to abandon GSM phones alltogether. It would have been nice if more of those terrorist [EXPLETIVE DELETED] had fallen for this before it was advertised by the press. Loose lips sink ships, or burn skyscrapers in this case.
Looks like it is tech that has won.
....but we all know how US intelligence brilliantly prevented the 9/11 strikes with its all tech, no human intellignece approach. It seems to me that US intelligence will have to do some rethinking on the subject of doing completely without human intel sources. If 9/11 and the whole Iraqi WMD mess have proven anything it is firstly, that satilites and other spytechnology no matter how advanced will never completely replace the humble human traitor and secondly that no matter how good you are at running high tech spy gear it does not qualify your to run human spies. That is a very special skill and hard to learn. The CIA cold do worse than to take a leaf out of the books of the KGB when it comes to recruiting human spies, it is a skill the CIA has all but lost.
If the Roman empire is anything to go by the USA will end up as a country of the jobless and destitute, ruled by the super rich, who hire the dispossessed citizen masses as what amounts to mercenaries in a state army who's cheif role it is secure resources and to make sure the overseas possessions that secure the good life of the super rich do not get taken over by the restless local natives of said overseas territories. But of course we will learn from history won't we?
Things are not always that simple. My own employer recently presented me with a new contract. It included among many other things the three following points:
1) A clause about 'any software/hardware/idea/invention... etc' of mine being the property of the company'. It was so loosely worded that they could theoretically have laid claim to things I 'coded/designed/invented' in my spare time even if this had nothing to do with the business the company is in was likely to cause the company loss of revenue.
2) Forbid me to code in my own time for an Open Source project even if the project is in no way related to the business the company and is completely unlikely to cause them loss of revenue.
3) They also tried to insert what they called a "competition protection" clause in the new contract where they reserrve the right to place an injunction on me, forcing me to remain unemployed for a period of upto 6 months, if I should happen to quit working for them and begin working for somebody they feel is a competitor or if I might be using knowledge obtained in my old job at my new place of work.
All but the third clause were shot down after intense negotiations (read: most of the empoyees staged a small scale mutiny). The third point has been kept in the new contracts but nobody expects it to hold up in court, at least not here in Europe. Although the poor bastard who the company decides to honor by testing that clause on is probably going to have to shell out a small fortune in legal fees to prove them wrong and employees will probably think twice beore signing the new contract. Fortunately I was able to avoid swapping my old contract for the new model.
Now, I will agree that a comany owns what I code/design/invent on company time. I also think that a company is no worse off rewarding employees for valuable innovations in some way. But when the company starts trying to dictate whether or not I can innovate in my own spare time in a way that does not undermine the company I work for I think the company has gone too far.
I don't mean to be hard-hearted here but if I was working with chemicals that ate through my gloves I would:
A) Demand to know what chemicals they are.
B) Demand to know their possible effects on my health.
C) Demand a better quality hazardous enviroment equipment (Including ventilated headgear) that is proof against the stuff.
D) Report the company or even quit if all of the above was not fulfilled.
It is easy to talk about people not wanting to lose their jobs but surely keeping their health must be preferable to any period of unemployment, drop in pay or whatever else caused them not to complain.
Yes, so the US generates 60% of the world's spam. However, what fraction of the world's total email traffic does the US generate? I bet it's near 60%.
.... that there is a direct correlation between the amount of spam generated by a nation and the percentage it creates of the total amount of world Email. In other words if a nation generates x% of spam it must also generate x% of the world email traffic. It would thus follow, by your logic, that 280+ million Americans produce 60% of the world E-mail while 200+ million Germans French and English are responsible for only 1.83%+1.50%+1.31%=4.64% of it? That seems a bit far fetched to me. You should rethink this theory, we Europeans may not be quite as advanced as you North Americans but we do not live in the stone age either.
Without having some idea of what fraction of a country's email traffic is spam, these numbers just tell you which countries have a bigger internet presence, and absolutely nothing more.
"And then everybody exclaims in surprise, "how could this happen in a civilized nation?!"
This is more or less how it happened in Germany:
When Hitler attacked the Jews I was not a Jew, therefore I was not concerned.
And when Hitler attacked the Catholics, I was not a Catholic, and therefore, I was not concerned.
And when Hitler attacked the unions and the industrialists, I was not a member of the unions and I was not concerned.
Then Hitler attacked me and the Protestant church -- and there was nobody left to be concerned.
- Pastor Martin Niemoller
In short it happens to civilized nations little by little. You keep ignoring evil things because they are being done to minorities who may be unpopular or unworthy of your outrage because you do not belong to them. Then one day you wake up after ignoring a hundred little injustices and realize that they add up to a colossal injustice and that you are living in a police state that commits unspeakable atrocities and where you will be next if somebody hears you making a government critical comment, listning to the wrong radio station or just telling a treasonous joke.
"They've come up with some VERY clever counters to our prevention methods"
Ehhh.... no, the clever ones are the weeners who work for the spammers and all weeners are doing is making money of the stupid (aka. Spammers). It is perhap not very ethical of the weeners to do so but at least it they are not stupid.
They put an awful lot of effort into sending people spam actually thinking that any sane person would buy their products to save his/her life. And just to give you a sample, these have included such fabulous products as: (Probably fake) Viagra, Latex Dildo's, Subscriptions to fisting porn sites, Windows Software
"... the economic forces that have led to the spam problem ..."
That is an easy one:
Greed+Stupidity=Spammer
" ... Eugenics war ... "
That is the least of our worries!!! PRAY that your grandchildren will NOT have a neat little inscription behind their right ear that reads.
"DNA Encoded by Microsoft (c)."
Speak for your self, I for one would NOT want to see a Boray* female naked.
AAAAHHHHHH! MY EYES.... I'M BLIND.....
* Borays - Dwarfish pig-like creatures who reside on the planet Sectar. They live in semi-permanent settlements in the hinterlands raiding human settlements from time to time.
Wouldn't it just be classic if it turns out that this code was outsourced?
Yeah, to India...
Moon+Mars=distraction till one week before November 04
Then US special forces in Afganistan magically pull Osama Bin Liner out of a cave. That would have to be the ultimate election gimmic...
I suppose you mean the same greedy industrial/stock analysts who browse internet Job/Employment sites to see if companies are hiring, which has led to companies flooding these same sites with phoney job offers to fool the analysts? I just love answering Job advertisements 60% of whom are practically guaranteed to be turned down because the were just posted by some corporate slimeball for for "PR reasons".
The mst deserving will NEVER be on a "list...
That is true! I feel Alan Turing and some of his colleagues deserved mention for breaking the Nazi's Enigma code. I suppose building a pioneering computer and helping to save the world from Fascism is way less important than the exploits of
Kevin Mitnick.