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Replaced with Xs to protect the innocent. Not only www but also "security". It's brave of them to be the lab rats for their own research-- or something.
The mark of a good troll is that you can't tell if it's really a troll. With that in mind: How do you think a DCC connection is negotiated? By telepathy? A DCC request is a private CTCP, which is encoded as a private message. DCC, by definition, does use the server.
"We didn't deal crack out of your house; we just met here several times a day to arrange our crack deals, and the crack deals wouldn't have gone through unless we met here first-- but we have a right to use your house." Why do people persist in claiming they have the right to use private property (like a DALnet server) to do something the owners don't want?
Trying to get fuckers on IRC to switch networks is like pulling teeth.
...unless you take away the main reason they were using it. Someone not being able to get their daily fix of warez/porn/music might be what makes them finally switch to the IRC network (or other chat network) all their current friends had started using long ago. This decision, right or wrong, could cause lots of non-trading channels on DALnet to switch to other networks as the channel users make decisions on where they want to move their file-swapping. It's not the same as if one of a user's several channels is switching; the question of whether to switch will be relevant to a large percentage of the population at once, so the switchover decision will hit "critical mass" in a lot more channels, especially if people are generally chosing the same 2-4 networks to switch to, instead of just pulling in every direction at once.
The main point is the text file has a checksum. They read off the checksum of that file at the beginning of the key signing; as long as the key owners have the same checksum, they can just say that their fingerprints match the ones on the list, instead of each one having to repeat his individual fingerprint.
First, I wouldn't be quick to judge someone unfavorably by the high number of signatures on a key. Not only does that punish people who really might have that many close acquaintences (which makes them valuable to the Web of Trust), but a key owner has no control over who slaps frivilous signatures on his public key without his consent. I assume that a lot of well-known net-celebrities each has least a couple non-consentual "new best friends" who went out and signed him alleged key because they met him once, and didn't verify his fingerprint because they still don't get the idea. I had a guy offer to sign my key without verifying my identity, and I'm nowhere near famous. (Needless to say, he's marked as a worthless signature in my trust database.)
On the Web of Trust: I've always understood that trusting a person's identity, and trusting their willingness to sign other keys correctly, were different issues. I think the real problem is that, since most PGP implementations (as far as I know) only allow for a public declaration of identity trust, not signing trust, the Web of Trust really only works if you assume that most people would only sign people they trust to treat other keys the same way. Unfortunately, that's not always going to be true. Even if you sign only the keys of people whose behavior you trust, it's a leap of faith to expect that people even 2 hops away will do the same. (Apparently there is a way to specify the "introducer" trust of the key in the OpenPGP spec, but I haven't seen that in use.)
On being an accessory by signing a key: If the government issues an ID card to someome they know is alcoholic, and that person uses the card to prove age, and thus to buy liquor, and then the person does something stupid because they're drunk, is the state responsible? This goes back to the topic of what a person's Web of Trust really is. Are you participating in a private clique (in which case you can at least declare that you expect a certain amount of discretion until the PGP implementations are more robust), or a mass public service? Under the current system, if you don't know, in general terms, who almost all of the people in a trust chain are, you have no reason to trust that the owner at the bottom of the signature chain is who they claim anyway.
The legal and social implications are separate things here.
The judge has no fantasies about his jurisdiction. He's doing what he can, which is to tell the journalists that, if they want courtroom access at all, the information had better not show up on their employers' websites. If some newspaper wants to compile their reports from second-hand rumors just so they can try to show up the court, they can. Then their reputations go down the tubes, and the judge can still ban the media from the courtroom, which is his perogative, instead of being nice like he is now.
This kind of situation is exactly why foreigners have less freedom than citizens. A foreigner can come in, flout the local standards, then easily return to someplace where no relevant jurisdiction can get him. What do you think would happen to Canadian reporters if they pulled stunts like that with King County? Some pushy jerk would probably call INS and wait for the reporters to cross back into Washington state.
Both Canada and the U.S. recognize the need for restrictions to minimize tainting of juries. "Standing up" for your particular interpretation of free press rights is more attractive when you think you won't have to work for it and you'll get an unfair advantage over your rivals too. From what I can see, the Seattle reporters are doing things they wouldn't even bother arguing for on their home turf-- they're doing something that's wrong by their own country's standards and using a minor loophole to one-up their competition for a few days, even though they (should) know that they've probably ruined it for everyone else from now on, including people who might have been able to use that advantage for something important later.
I was using WinPT for a while, until I stumbled on GPGshell. It calls GnuPG to do the work, so you never have to worry about entering your passphrase into a GUI. IMHO, it's a lot nicer than WinPT. When you install it, you get 3 programs, which don't need each other to work:
GPGkeys, a program to do manage all the keys.
GPGtray, which has a lot of the options on the system tray, and magically knows the "right" thing to do with the clipboard if you double-click it. Highlighting a PGP key in a terminal window then double-clicking on an icon makes importing keys really slick.
GPGtools, which lets you drag-and-drop files onto it.
So anyway, here's what you do:
Get GnuPG (1.0.7 or later) from Nullify. It comes with an installer, plus contains those sinful patented algorithms (like IDEA) that PGP was fond of using in various versions.
Get GPGshell, install, and tell it where you put GnuPG.
So far this setup has had no problem dealing with any PGP messages I've encountered, from 2.6.2 to 7.x, but I haven't tested it extensively.
Few industries receive as much specific attention from the law as railroads. Railroads, especially in the United States and Canada, were the only heavy transportation that mattered for decades; as a result, they affected just about every industry, the politics of the entire continent, and society in general; and the laws, even today, reflect how influential the railroads were. Ever looked at the United States Code or the U.S. state's typical statutes? American laws were customized for railroads early and often in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Special railroad laws are still all over the place. U.S.C. Title 45 (out of 50) is nothing but railroads, and that's just some of the railroad law. Among lots of other things (if I recall correctly): they get special treatment when obtaining the right-of-way; the labor laws treat railroad workers differently; and they even have separate federal retirement from Social Security. I'm sure the laws in other countries address railroads extensively also.
Just like.net was restricted to organizations that provided network access.
Actually, I think.net was supposed to be for services on the network; e.g. in-addr.arpa would have been in-addr.net if it had been later. But the Internet providers kind of co-opted it, then the anything-goes mentality soon after that. Those types of things are now placed in.int with the international treaty organizations, I think, but I can't remember the RFC that says so.
Isn't this a law in all kinds of business? The rich do get richer. What can you do about it?
It's happened over and over again in the economy in the U.S. elsewhere. We're already seeing it happen again fairly rapidly in the U.S. (and probably other places) in a lot of service and utility businesses-- although some of that is a result of deregulation. Online business just speeds the process up.
The big benefit of the public Internet isn't the speed at which the rich get richer-- it's the speed at which something else can come along. The (relatively) low cost of having a presence online, and the speed with which one can establish a satisfying niche, is what made the Internet the "equalizer" in the late '90s. And everyone will still have a good shot at creating a niche and possibly overtaking this year's "big guns" on the Internet, unless a few organizations get enough power to control whether one "free" person can comunicate with other "free" people arbitrarily.
Now then, my big beef is that the school has clearly spent too much time or money (or both) on this web site.
Typical Catholic school these days. What kind of organization that's responsible for influencing minors hawks merchandise on their front page? At least someone was smart enough (or dumb enough) to give them a.com instead of a.org.
Peoria Notre Dame (in Illinois) had the same priorities, but several years back, they didn't have the savvy to know what the web was yet. Their trick to getting extra cash was to force the entire student body to walk around downtown Peoria during the middle of the business day once or twice a year. Oh-- and tell all the kids that it was manditory that they get a certain amount of pledges from God-only-knows-who for this "charity event", under the threat of discipline from the school for intentionally refusing a homework assignment. Neat, huh? By the way, the practicing bishop at the time was John J. Myers, who has now been rewarded for that and other "good work" by being appointed archbishop of Newark, New Jersey. Praise Jesus and pass the plate-- and if you don't have time for both, you know which one is important right now...
Yet another reason not to trust your (children's) education to people who have goals "more important" than aiming for objectivity, respect for people regardless of their power, and open, critical thinking.
1, 2, and 3 seem reasonable enough at face value. Things take a sharp turn at #4, though:
4. Turnitin should only be used as a deterrent to plagiarism and not as a tool to catch cheaters (in fact, I believe the latter to be a misuse of our technology).
This statement seems to contradict itself, even if the first part were partially true. First, from the official website:
The information contained in the reports gives users the ability to determine for themselves the extent to which any given work is plagiarized or original.
How can this not be "a tool to catch cheaters"? Plagiarism is, by definition, a form of cheating. To determine that a passage is plagiarised is to catch the alleged author cheating. Is there a difference between catching someone cheating and determining whether you're catching someone cheating?
As for the parenthesized part of #4: What other direct use is the service, than that it "gives users the ability to determine for themselves [...] plagiarized or original"? How can it be a deterrent unless: (a) the teacher is allowed to use the service to catch cheaters (in which case #4 is a lie); or (b) the teacher is not allowed to use the service to catch cheaters (in which case the only deterrent is the possibility that the teacher might be misusing the "service" anyway)? It seems that, logically, either the service is misrepresenting itself to the teacher, or the teacher is cheating by misrepresenting himself to the student.
7. Technology similar to Turnitin has been used in computer science departments (whether you know it or not) for over a decade.
I don't know whether this is considered relevant to Turnitin's business or not; however: #7 only means that, for 10 years, several teachers have been violating the trust of those who paid them more-or-less based on their trustworthiness as teachers. I doubt it seems ethical to most honest students to force them to contribute their work without authorization (or with manditory so-called "authorization") to a sting operation or similar uses without a court order. If the students were happy to submit their papers for comparison, that's one thing. But it seems like this business model depends on a huge number of students being either coerced by circumstances or silently exploited for uses they don't approve of.
Even if it's not Turnitin's job to treat students with respect, it's still the teachers' job, so one might wonder the integrity of any school participating in this without the informed and uncoerced consent of the non-cheating student authors. Just in case the list goes away later, here's a list of the schools participating in Turnitin (from Turnitit's own list on 2002-03-05):
The University of California System - Georgetown University - Cornell University - Duke University - The California Institute of Technology - Colgate University - Rice University - Boston University - Villanova University - The University of Minnesota, Twin Cities - Rochester Institute of Technology - Rutgers University -
US Military Academy, West Point - Tulane University - Trinity College - Swarthmore College - Wesleyan University - The Citadel - The University of Western Ontario - The University of Leeds, UK - Manakau Institute of Technology, New Zealand
My personal opinion, which probably isn't worth anything: If the school you're applying to is on this list, ask them where they keep the consent forms for these submissions. If they tell you that they don't need permission-- well, then at least you know how you'll be treated. Not that Turnitin or any school would ever exploit your work for profit-making non-research purposes without compensating you beyond the education already pledged to you.
A pattern I've noticed the last few months is that I'll go a few hours without getting spam, then 4 or 5 will come in at once (from different IPs and apparent origins), then I'll get nothing for maybe a couple hours. Often there are days when it just kind of comes in one at a time randomly, but then the majority of a day will go by when it's just in groups. The mail server hasn't been down, so it's not from queue scheduling at the last hop. I've started suspecting that there is a small group of spammers who are doing 99% of the "go forth and multiply" orders several times a day on the Internet.
For those of you who are real conspiracy theorists, here's another disquieting thing I've noticed: About a quarter of the time, I seem to get single items or pairs of spam within a minute or two of sending out e-mail-- it doesn't seem to matter who my e-mail is to. I'm still fairly confident that it's just coincidence so far, but...
The legal relationship between American Indians and the United States is somewhat odd. I'm not a legal expert, but the basic idea is this: American Indians were treated as separate nations when treaties were signed with them. The relation between the United States and American Indians is governed by a bizarre patchwork of individual treaties signed during the 18th and 19th centuries. In theory, an American Indian tribe with a treaty doesn't have to answer to anything except the treaty. In practice, these powers were extended and abused by the U.S. government in the 19th century, and the way American Indian affairs are handled is still bizarre compared to the government's relation to almost everything and everyone else.
The right to sign treaties is, of course, reserved to the federal government (U.S. Constitution, Article I, Section 10). In addition, Section 8 gives the federal government the right to "to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes". Therefore, nearly everything involving American Indian tribes is under federal jurisdiction one way or another. Chapter 25 of the U.S. Code is titled simply "Indians". This includes laws about American Indian finances are handled, so that, for example, some kinds of tribal funds have the protection of the federal government. In theory, this is so that random idiots can't run off with the tribe's (or "nation's") money. (Unfortunately, as one can see from this Slashdot article, the Bureau of Indian Affairs is somewhat less than competent.)
So the short story is: Almost all American Indian tribes answer directly to the federal government, by treaty. This is also why native reservations aren't subject to state laws or state taxes.
So, it appears that the public not allowed to see the rules for the.US domain unless it helps spread Adobe software to other computers while Adobe actively attempts to ruin lives. Adobe still has not even bailed Dimitry Sklyarov out after screwing him over. Meanwhile, at least as of October 31, the U.S. Department of Commerce only converted the press release to a normal format, but doesn't have the real information for free in a normal format.
Has anyone converted these nonstandard documents into an standard Internet format (like plain text or HTML) so that free society can see them? If so, please post a URL. Thanks!
P.S. for anyone who cares: At the bottom of that page is contact information for "further assistance".
I know people who get envelopes daily that look handwritten on first glance. Then you notice that the letter "s" always curves the same. Then you notice that all the other letters do too. And they're almost always from people who want donations, too-- non-profits and political groups.
I'll bet congressmen get bombarded with people who are doing their first political mailing and think that trick will work. If I were the congressman, I'd have a special form letter for people that sent machine-printed letters designed to look like handwriting; I'm sure the majority of congressmen don't share my opinion, however. (Not that I don't wish they did.)
This is probably mostly ranting, but: I don't see why the average Slashdot user would choose an Internet company that (1) requires a couple minutes to load their web page on a modem (which is where the future DSL customers are coming from); and (2) forcing users to view, without asking, a full-motion Flash file that has no useful function at all, but makes the computer drag trying to view it anyway.
Maybe they have some web page "developers" to keep paid in a sagging market, or maybe some marketing consultants instead. Anyway, I think that, when you see that sort of thing (95% what looks pretty on their own 1.3GHz Pentiums over Ethernet, and 5% content the customers are looking for), it's often an omen of what kind of attitude to expect from a company once you subscribe.
(For what it's worth: I've worked at places where folks like like that got "cute" web pages put up despite the tech staff having common sense, so this might not reflect on the tech staff-- just the people who control how the company relates to customers. Maybe I'm just bitter.)
I don't know much about the iPaq, but I'd love to see any palm-sized device that can run a real OS and not cost $3000. (I disqualify anything for daily use that requires one to look like one is wired for a space shuttle flight.) If I have to bring up a keyboard on the display and tap keys with a stylus, I still wouldn't complain.
I can think of several ways this could be useful. All the stuff you take for granted when you're in front of your computer, you could do at a resturaunt, and without taking up half the table to do it. Being able to plug into serial or Ethernet lines without to carry something in my hands the rest of the time would be nice, too.
I don't live in the northwest, but I'm involved in the ISP business, and I've heard nothing good about USWest. Qwest, on the other hand, has been pretty good when it comes to bandwidth for ISPs. Hopefully Qwest will force a clue down USWest's throat, instead of absorbing USWest's poison, which is what happened to AT&T when they swallowed TCI.
On other other hand, not everyone at Qwest is a rocket scientist. Starting about a month ago, and still on several pages, is Qwest's "new" phone number: 1-800-RIDE-QWEST. Look really closely at that phone number, then ask yourself: Do you want those people making decisions that affect your dialtone?
Here's a little story for "legitimate" companies that wish to send advertising. This story is about SSC, which is one of the most reputable companies on the Internet. I would recommend them to anyone, despite this story.
SSC publishes Linux Journal, one of the oldest (if not the oldest) and easily one of the highest signal-over-noise Linux mags available. I had a fairly long subscription to LJ (which, again, I would recommend despite this incident). One day I got e-mail telling me it was time to renew. Well, this e-mail didn't appear to come from SSC. It gave a different site as the place for credit card orders, had non-SSC "From" and "Reply-To" lines, and a non-SSC origin IP. So, uncomfortable about how my e-mail address was getting picked up, I decided to wait until I could call SSC and find out if the e-mail was from their agent or just some random magazine house trying to scam a commission. After I got a paper renewal notice later, I still hadn't gotten around to calling, so I kept putting my renewal off.
That was probably a year or 2 ago. I still haven't gotten around to calling. That's my rotten procrastination habit again, I'm sure. But, my point to legitimate companies is this: This whole time I've been procrastinating, SSC has been without my (probably 5-year) subscription. And that's a company I actually like, sending me a notice I actually wanted. You can probably imagine what I think of companies who send me e-mail when I've never even contacted them.
The moral of this true fable is thus: Go out of your way to demonstrate that you're a previous business contact. Identify who you are and why you have the e-mail address, so that the recipient isn't worried about their personal information getting out. Net folks are far more concerned with whether their privacy than whether they buy something. I'll bet SSC probably knew this, but their agent didn't get it.
(That said, I'll probably go call them and subscribe to Linux Journal again sometime soon. Now I get to wonder about Boardwatch, who is owned by a different company, and wants to charge me more for renewal ($72) than normal people pay for a first subscription. Ah well.)
If the FSF truly believed that software should not have owners, then they would not copyright their software. They should make up their minds one way or the other. Either software should not be owned and all of GNU becomes public domain, or that they keep the GPL/copyrights and merely remove that article.
The FSF believes that software should not have owners; however, the law says that software has owners, and allows the software to be restricted. Making a work public domain gives up all rights to a work-- it can become part of lawfully restricted code, which (I'm assuming) strict GNU adherents see as an unacceptable abuse. In the FSF's perfect world, the law would not allow any ownership. Until that happens, however, the only way to insure that software you've written cannot be "owned" is to use your original authorship legal rights to place a covenant on the work, forcing all later authors to adhere to the same openness you created your software under. The GNU Public License is basically a well-designed hack: It uses the law against itself, preventing copyright from being used for anything except preventing copyright. GNU software doesn't morally have an owner; the GPL, drawn up within the realm of copyright law, just makes sure that anyone attempting to fight software freedom with copyright law will find himself holding the wrong end of the weapon.
From a strategic standpoint, the GPL is a stopgap measure until the laws become more "enlightened". That is another beauty of the hack: The only practical law that could take the punch out of the GPL would be one that simultaneously made the GPL unnecessary.
In summary: The GNU philosophy is that software has no owners, and the GPL insures that those who operate otherwise will fall victim to their own ways.
IFAIK, this is standard journalist ethics. All news organizations are supposed to announce if they have a vested interest in the subject of a news story. Of course, some "journalist" organizations, in their giant conglomerate glory, have probably decided that things like disclosures aren't as important as fitting in another 7.5 second commercial or garage sale ad.
Also, not to rag on Hemos (who I trust), but the "117 bytes in body" link reminded me of something else: I can see some organizations in the future shoving their disclosures into some inconvenient section of their production (half-second message at 5% of TV height at the end of the show, or stuffed into small type in the "copyright & legal" section) and then claim they're meeting ethical standards. I'm one of those pushy types that think that disclosures need to be as prominent as the news report.
Come to think of it, Slashdot is also one of the few organizations I see that still posts corrections with the same priority as the original reports. That's another "minor" thing most billion-dollar precooked news companies don't think are important enough to bother with.
Slashdot Mirror
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Replaced with Xs to protect the innocent. Not only www but also "security". It's brave of them to be the lab rats for their own research-- or something.
The mark of a good troll is that you can't tell if it's really a troll. With that in mind: How do you think a DCC connection is negotiated? By telepathy? A DCC request is a private CTCP, which is encoded as a private message. DCC, by definition, does use the server.
"We didn't deal crack out of your house; we just met here several times a day to arrange our crack deals, and the crack deals wouldn't have gone through unless we met here first-- but we have a right to use your house." Why do people persist in claiming they have the right to use private property (like a DALnet server) to do something the owners don't want?
...unless you take away the main reason they were using it. Someone not being able to get their daily fix of warez/porn/music might be what makes them finally switch to the IRC network (or other chat network) all their current friends had started using long ago. This decision, right or wrong, could cause lots of non-trading channels on DALnet to switch to other networks as the channel users make decisions on where they want to move their file-swapping. It's not the same as if one of a user's several channels is switching; the question of whether to switch will be relevant to a large percentage of the population at once, so the switchover decision will hit "critical mass" in a lot more channels, especially if people are generally chosing the same 2-4 networks to switch to, instead of just pulling in every direction at once.
The main point is the text file has a checksum. They read off the checksum of that file at the beginning of the key signing; as long as the key owners have the same checksum, they can just say that their fingerprints match the ones on the list, instead of each one having to repeat his individual fingerprint.
First, I wouldn't be quick to judge someone unfavorably by the high number of signatures on a key. Not only does that punish people who really might have that many close acquaintences (which makes them valuable to the Web of Trust), but a key owner has no control over who slaps frivilous signatures on his public key without his consent. I assume that a lot of well-known net-celebrities each has least a couple non-consentual "new best friends" who went out and signed him alleged key because they met him once, and didn't verify his fingerprint because they still don't get the idea. I had a guy offer to sign my key without verifying my identity, and I'm nowhere near famous. (Needless to say, he's marked as a worthless signature in my trust database.)
On the Web of Trust: I've always understood that trusting a person's identity, and trusting their willingness to sign other keys correctly, were different issues. I think the real problem is that, since most PGP implementations (as far as I know) only allow for a public declaration of identity trust, not signing trust, the Web of Trust really only works if you assume that most people would only sign people they trust to treat other keys the same way. Unfortunately, that's not always going to be true. Even if you sign only the keys of people whose behavior you trust, it's a leap of faith to expect that people even 2 hops away will do the same. (Apparently there is a way to specify the "introducer" trust of the key in the OpenPGP spec, but I haven't seen that in use.)
On being an accessory by signing a key: If the government issues an ID card to someome they know is alcoholic, and that person uses the card to prove age, and thus to buy liquor, and then the person does something stupid because they're drunk, is the state responsible? This goes back to the topic of what a person's Web of Trust really is. Are you participating in a private clique (in which case you can at least declare that you expect a certain amount of discretion until the PGP implementations are more robust), or a mass public service? Under the current system, if you don't know, in general terms, who almost all of the people in a trust chain are, you have no reason to trust that the owner at the bottom of the signature chain is who they claim anyway.
The legal and social implications are separate things here.
If you think that way: Why explore America again, when the Vikings and Spanish already did it?
You're the first!
"Yes, God?"
"Stop playing with yourself."
"It is God!"
(It's been years-- but I'll bet that's more accurate than the quote on IMDb.)
I was using WinPT for a while, until I stumbled on GPGshell. It calls GnuPG to do the work, so you never have to worry about entering your passphrase into a GUI. IMHO, it's a lot nicer than WinPT. When you install it, you get 3 programs, which don't need each other to work:
So anyway, here's what you do:
So far this setup has had no problem dealing with any PGP messages I've encountered, from 2.6.2 to 7.x, but I haven't tested it extensively.
Few industries receive as much specific attention from the law as railroads. Railroads, especially in the United States and Canada, were the only heavy transportation that mattered for decades; as a result, they affected just about every industry, the politics of the entire continent, and society in general; and the laws, even today, reflect how influential the railroads were. Ever looked at the United States Code or the U.S. state's typical statutes? American laws were customized for railroads early and often in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Special railroad laws are still all over the place. U.S.C. Title 45 (out of 50) is nothing but railroads, and that's just some of the railroad law. Among lots of other things (if I recall correctly): they get special treatment when obtaining the right-of-way; the labor laws treat railroad workers differently; and they even have separate federal retirement from Social Security. I'm sure the laws in other countries address railroads extensively also.
Actually, I think .net was supposed to be for services on the network; e.g. in-addr.arpa would have been in-addr.net if it had been later. But the Internet providers kind of co-opted it, then the anything-goes mentality soon after that. Those types of things are now placed in .int with the international treaty organizations, I think, but I can't remember the RFC that says so.
It's happened over and over again in the economy in the U.S. elsewhere. We're already seeing it happen again fairly rapidly in the U.S. (and probably other places) in a lot of service and utility businesses-- although some of that is a result of deregulation. Online business just speeds the process up.
The big benefit of the public Internet isn't the speed at which the rich get richer-- it's the speed at which something else can come along. The (relatively) low cost of having a presence online, and the speed with which one can establish a satisfying niche, is what made the Internet the "equalizer" in the late '90s. And everyone will still have a good shot at creating a niche and possibly overtaking this year's "big guns" on the Internet, unless a few organizations get enough power to control whether one "free" person can comunicate with other "free" people arbitrarily.
Typical Catholic school these days. What kind of organization that's responsible for influencing minors hawks merchandise on their front page? At least someone was smart enough (or dumb enough) to give them a .com instead of a .org.
Peoria Notre Dame (in Illinois) had the same priorities, but several years back, they didn't have the savvy to know what the web was yet. Their trick to getting extra cash was to force the entire student body to walk around downtown Peoria during the middle of the business day once or twice a year. Oh-- and tell all the kids that it was manditory that they get a certain amount of pledges from God-only-knows-who for this "charity event", under the threat of discipline from the school for intentionally refusing a homework assignment. Neat, huh? By the way, the practicing bishop at the time was John J. Myers, who has now been rewarded for that and other "good work" by being appointed archbishop of Newark, New Jersey. Praise Jesus and pass the plate-- and if you don't have time for both, you know which one is important right now...
Yet another reason not to trust your (children's) education to people who have goals "more important" than aiming for objectivity, respect for people regardless of their power, and open, critical thinking.
This statement seems to contradict itself, even if the first part were partially true. First, from the official website:
How can this not be "a tool to catch cheaters"? Plagiarism is, by definition, a form of cheating. To determine that a passage is plagiarised is to catch the alleged author cheating. Is there a difference between catching someone cheating and determining whether you're catching someone cheating?As for the parenthesized part of #4: What other direct use is the service, than that it "gives users the ability to determine for themselves [...] plagiarized or original"? How can it be a deterrent unless: (a) the teacher is allowed to use the service to catch cheaters (in which case #4 is a lie); or (b) the teacher is not allowed to use the service to catch cheaters (in which case the only deterrent is the possibility that the teacher might be misusing the "service" anyway)? It seems that, logically, either the service is misrepresenting itself to the teacher, or the teacher is cheating by misrepresenting himself to the student.
I don't know whether this is considered relevant to Turnitin's business or not; however: #7 only means that, for 10 years, several teachers have been violating the trust of those who paid them more-or-less based on their trustworthiness as teachers. I doubt it seems ethical to most honest students to force them to contribute their work without authorization (or with manditory so-called "authorization") to a sting operation or similar uses without a court order. If the students were happy to submit their papers for comparison, that's one thing. But it seems like this business model depends on a huge number of students being either coerced by circumstances or silently exploited for uses they don't approve of.
Even if it's not Turnitin's job to treat students with respect, it's still the teachers' job, so one might wonder the integrity of any school participating in this without the informed and uncoerced consent of the non-cheating student authors. Just in case the list goes away later, here's a list of the schools participating in Turnitin (from Turnitit's own list on 2002-03-05):
The University of California System - Georgetown University - Cornell University - Duke University - The California Institute of Technology - Colgate University - Rice University - Boston University - Villanova University - The University of Minnesota, Twin Cities - Rochester Institute of Technology - Rutgers University - US Military Academy, West Point - Tulane University - Trinity College - Swarthmore College - Wesleyan University - The Citadel - The University of Western Ontario - The University of Leeds, UK - Manakau Institute of Technology, New Zealand
My personal opinion, which probably isn't worth anything: If the school you're applying to is on this list, ask them where they keep the consent forms for these submissions. If they tell you that they don't need permission-- well, then at least you know how you'll be treated. Not that Turnitin or any school would ever exploit your work for profit-making non-research purposes without compensating you beyond the education already pledged to you.
A pattern I've noticed the last few months is that I'll go a few hours without getting spam, then 4 or 5 will come in at once (from different IPs and apparent origins), then I'll get nothing for maybe a couple hours. Often there are days when it just kind of comes in one at a time randomly, but then the majority of a day will go by when it's just in groups. The mail server hasn't been down, so it's not from queue scheduling at the last hop. I've started suspecting that there is a small group of spammers who are doing 99% of the "go forth and multiply" orders several times a day on the Internet.
For those of you who are real conspiracy theorists, here's another disquieting thing I've noticed: About a quarter of the time, I seem to get single items or pairs of spam within a minute or two of sending out e-mail-- it doesn't seem to matter who my e-mail is to. I'm still fairly confident that it's just coincidence so far, but...
The legal relationship between American Indians and the United States is somewhat odd. I'm not a legal expert, but the basic idea is this: American Indians were treated as separate nations when treaties were signed with them. The relation between the United States and American Indians is governed by a bizarre patchwork of individual treaties signed during the 18th and 19th centuries. In theory, an American Indian tribe with a treaty doesn't have to answer to anything except the treaty. In practice, these powers were extended and abused by the U.S. government in the 19th century, and the way American Indian affairs are handled is still bizarre compared to the government's relation to almost everything and everyone else.
The right to sign treaties is, of course, reserved to the federal government (U.S. Constitution, Article I, Section 10). In addition, Section 8 gives the federal government the right to "to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes". Therefore, nearly everything involving American Indian tribes is under federal jurisdiction one way or another. Chapter 25 of the U.S. Code is titled simply "Indians". This includes laws about American Indian finances are handled, so that, for example, some kinds of tribal funds have the protection of the federal government. In theory, this is so that random idiots can't run off with the tribe's (or "nation's") money. (Unfortunately, as one can see from this Slashdot article, the Bureau of Indian Affairs is somewhat less than competent.)
So the short story is: Almost all American Indian tribes answer directly to the federal government, by treaty. This is also why native reservations aren't subject to state laws or state taxes.
So, it appears that the public not allowed to see the rules for the .US domain unless it helps spread Adobe software to other computers while Adobe actively attempts to ruin lives. Adobe still has not even bailed Dimitry Sklyarov out after screwing him over. Meanwhile, at least as of October 31, the U.S. Department of Commerce only converted the press release to a normal format, but doesn't have the real information for free in a normal format.
Has anyone converted these nonstandard documents into an standard Internet format (like plain text or HTML) so that free society can see them? If so, please post a URL. Thanks!
P.S. for anyone who cares: At the bottom of that page is contact information for "further assistance".
I know people who get envelopes daily that look handwritten on first glance. Then you notice that the letter "s" always curves the same. Then you notice that all the other letters do too. And they're almost always from people who want donations, too-- non-profits and political groups.
I'll bet congressmen get bombarded with people who are doing their first political mailing and think that trick will work. If I were the congressman, I'd have a special form letter for people that sent machine-printed letters designed to look like handwriting; I'm sure the majority of congressmen don't share my opinion, however. (Not that I don't wish they did.)
This is probably mostly ranting, but: I don't see why the average Slashdot user would choose an Internet company that (1) requires a couple minutes to load their web page on a modem (which is where the future DSL customers are coming from); and (2) forcing users to view, without asking, a full-motion Flash file that has no useful function at all, but makes the computer drag trying to view it anyway.
Maybe they have some web page "developers" to keep paid in a sagging market, or maybe some marketing consultants instead. Anyway, I think that, when you see that sort of thing (95% what looks pretty on their own 1.3GHz Pentiums over Ethernet, and 5% content the customers are looking for), it's often an omen of what kind of attitude to expect from a company once you subscribe.
(For what it's worth: I've worked at places where folks like like that got "cute" web pages put up despite the tech staff having common sense, so this might not reflect on the tech staff-- just the people who control how the company relates to customers. Maybe I'm just bitter.)
I don't know much about the iPaq, but I'd love to see any palm-sized device that can run a real OS and not cost $3000. (I disqualify anything for daily use that requires one to look like one is wired for a space shuttle flight.) If I have to bring up a keyboard on the display and tap keys with a stylus, I still wouldn't complain. I can think of several ways this could be useful. All the stuff you take for granted when you're in front of your computer, you could do at a resturaunt, and without taking up half the table to do it. Being able to plug into serial or Ethernet lines without to carry something in my hands the rest of the time would be nice, too.
I don't live in the northwest, but I'm involved in the ISP business, and I've heard nothing good about USWest. Qwest, on the other hand, has been pretty good when it comes to bandwidth for ISPs. Hopefully Qwest will force a clue down USWest's throat, instead of absorbing USWest's poison, which is what happened to AT&T when they swallowed TCI.
On other other hand, not everyone at Qwest is a rocket scientist. Starting about a month ago, and still on several pages, is Qwest's "new" phone number: 1-800-RIDE-QWEST. Look really closely at that phone number, then ask yourself: Do you want those people making decisions that affect your dialtone?
P.S.: No, most phones don't.
Here's a little story for "legitimate" companies that wish to send advertising. This story is about SSC, which is one of the most reputable companies on the Internet. I would recommend them to anyone, despite this story.
SSC publishes Linux Journal , one of the oldest (if not the oldest) and easily one of the highest signal-over-noise Linux mags available. I had a fairly long subscription to LJ (which, again, I would recommend despite this incident). One day I got e-mail telling me it was time to renew. Well, this e-mail didn't appear to come from SSC. It gave a different site as the place for credit card orders, had non-SSC "From" and "Reply-To" lines, and a non-SSC origin IP. So, uncomfortable about how my e-mail address was getting picked up, I decided to wait until I could call SSC and find out if the e-mail was from their agent or just some random magazine house trying to scam a commission. After I got a paper renewal notice later, I still hadn't gotten around to calling, so I kept putting my renewal off.
That was probably a year or 2 ago. I still haven't gotten around to calling. That's my rotten procrastination habit again, I'm sure. But, my point to legitimate companies is this: This whole time I've been procrastinating, SSC has been without my (probably 5-year) subscription. And that's a company I actually like, sending me a notice I actually wanted. You can probably imagine what I think of companies who send me e-mail when I've never even contacted them.
The moral of this true fable is thus: Go out of your way to demonstrate that you're a previous business contact. Identify who you are and why you have the e-mail address, so that the recipient isn't worried about their personal information getting out. Net folks are far more concerned with whether their privacy than whether they buy something. I'll bet SSC probably knew this, but their agent didn't get it.
(That said, I'll probably go call them and subscribe to Linux Journal again sometime soon. Now I get to wonder about Boardwatch , who is owned by a different company, and wants to charge me more for renewal ($72) than normal people pay for a first subscription. Ah well.)
The FSF believes that software should not have owners; however, the law says that software has owners, and allows the software to be restricted. Making a work public domain gives up all rights to a work-- it can become part of lawfully restricted code, which (I'm assuming) strict GNU adherents see as an unacceptable abuse. In the FSF's perfect world, the law would not allow any ownership. Until that happens, however, the only way to insure that software you've written cannot be "owned" is to use your original authorship legal rights to place a covenant on the work, forcing all later authors to adhere to the same openness you created your software under. The GNU Public License is basically a well-designed hack: It uses the law against itself, preventing copyright from being used for anything except preventing copyright. GNU software doesn't morally have an owner; the GPL, drawn up within the realm of copyright law, just makes sure that anyone attempting to fight software freedom with copyright law will find himself holding the wrong end of the weapon.
From a strategic standpoint, the GPL is a stopgap measure until the laws become more "enlightened". That is another beauty of the hack: The only practical law that could take the punch out of the GPL would be one that simultaneously made the GPL unnecessary.
In summary: The GNU philosophy is that software has no owners, and the GPL insures that those who operate otherwise will fall victim to their own ways.
On the other hand, maybe I'm completely wrong...
IFAIK, this is standard journalist ethics. All news organizations are supposed to announce if they have a vested interest in the subject of a news story. Of course, some "journalist" organizations, in their giant conglomerate glory, have probably decided that things like disclosures aren't as important as fitting in another 7.5 second commercial or garage sale ad.
Also, not to rag on Hemos (who I trust), but the "117 bytes in body" link reminded me of something else: I can see some organizations in the future shoving their disclosures into some inconvenient section of their production (half-second message at 5% of TV height at the end of the show, or stuffed into small type in the "copyright & legal" section) and then claim they're meeting ethical standards. I'm one of those pushy types that think that disclosures need to be as prominent as the news report.
Come to think of it, Slashdot is also one of the few organizations I see that still posts corrections with the same priority as the original reports. That's another "minor" thing most billion-dollar precooked news companies don't think are important enough to bother with.