"Abandoned" has a specific legal connotation, and NASA is correct to say that the material was not "abandoned."
By way of analogy, "flotsam" and "jetsam" are not the same thing and are legally very different. If I recall the sense correctly, "flotsam" is the floating debris (and debris washed ashore?) after a ship goes down - anyone may acquire legal possession by simply scooping it out of the water.
"Jetsam," in contrast, is floating debris that was deliberately thrown overboard in an attempt to save the ship, and with the intent to retrieve the material after the storm (or other crisis) has passed. Anyone who scoops it out of the water is stealing it from its lawful owner. Even if the ship ultimately sinks, the owner of the ship still has the legal ownership of jetsam.
(As I said, it's been a long time since I looked at the exact definitions and I may have the sense backwards.)
"Jetsam" was temporary left behind, but it was not legally abandoned. "Flotsam" was abandoned. Anything that goes down with the ship was not, and for some period is owned by the owner of the ship (or the insurance company that paid a claim), although courts have (finally!) come to their senses and said that an insurance company can't protest too much after 100+ years have passed with no attempt at recovery.
NASA, quite legitimately, is considering the material left on the moon "jetsam." They left it behind so they could get the crew home, but I'm sure in the best of all possible worlds they would have the complete lunar lander sitting in a display at the Smithsonian.
You forgot the bureaucratic mind. The UN can't declare a site a World Historical Site until the host country does, else you open up a huge can of worms. (As a trivial example, imagine the Arab world attempting to claim the entire city of Jerusalem is a WHS against the wishes of Israel.)
Historically, very few historic sites are in international territory. Off the top of my head, I can only think of two - the north and south poles (historic because of the first teams to reach each). The lunar landing sites are another.
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<i>Bob always thought that the 'paperclip' seemed a little <b>bent</b></i>
A friendly reminder that ratified treaties supercede the constitution. That makes sense when the treaty ends a war and the option is rewriting the entire Constitution; it makes much less sense when it will provide a de facto end run around reasonable limits on domestic law enforcement.
After the US finally started relaxing the crypto export rules glibc 2.1 included support for secure RPC. While this code is pretty standard and shouldn't cause any problems, the Linux keyserver is probably beta, at best, and none of the RPC-based applications have really been tested with secure RPC.
In other words, this is an area where YOU can make a valuable contribution to the community!:-)
The other secure option is GSSAPI RPC (aka Kerberos). It's not available in Linux yet, but it is a RFC and it also provides strong authentication and encryption(?) of NFS volumes.
I think the key issue here is that these contracts are for "perishable" goods, but the contract's apparent cost is artifically deflated by having a term much longer than the duration of the perishable item being sold.
It's strange to think of computers (or computer services!) as "perishable," but think about new car leases. No car, even one sitting on the dealer's lot the entire time, is a "new" car a few years after its model year. So if you're looking for a "new" car (e.g., to project a successful image to clients) you'll want to replace your car every few years no matter how well it's running.
Computers, access technology, and ISP technology are obviously all perishable over a timeframe of 18-36 months. (The exact timeframe depends on your needs - a system used for the home office will probably need to be upgraded much more frequently than a general family system or kid's system.) We should see contracts that last 12-18 months, but that causes sticker shock so they artificially draw out the length of the contract.
Someone else mentioned health club contracts, and I suspect we'll see some of the same abuses that caused so many problems with health clubs. (E.g., some people bought contracts, the club closed within months, but they still had to pay to use a non-existent facility since the contract was with an independent financing agency.) How long until people buy systems where the ISP soon folds but the hapless user still has to pay $30/month to access a non-existent ISP?
1) I live just down the street from a major university. This university has numerous libraries; each contains countless books detailing criminal acts. Some of these libraries include war crime archives - we're not just talking about offing your neighbor here!
2) The library conveniently provides a card catalogue to enable me to quickly identify where to find books detailing poisons, explosives, etc., plus law books that will give me case histories (in the law library) that can help me avoid detection and escape conviction.
3) Since the University benefits from my presence (they charge me to park my car in their lot, depend on citizens like me to defend their cut of the state income tax, etc.), they "vicariously" benefit from any criminal act I perform.
4) The University also knows that Congress wants to criminalize all chemistry textbooks (lest they be used to produce explosives - never mind what that will do to the chemistry, medical and pharmist training), so they must be aware that the information in this library can be used to commit crime - YET THEY DO NOTHING!
5) Therefore, by this reasoning, the University has a duty to burn its card catalogue, remove the dedicated terminals that provide access to the online card catalogue (and, in fact, has superceded it - the last time I was in the library they were using old card catalogue 'cards' as scratch paper), pull the plug on the internet interface to that same online card catalogue, and randomize the location of all books in the library.
Thank God the freshmen just arrived. They always seem to be good at randomizing stuff on campus.:-)
This is mildly off-topic, but I'm reminded of the problems that occur when sites use mandatory account name policies.
A few jobs back the company policy was "first initial, last name." They stuck to that policy even when D. Adcock came on board. Even though I worked with the individual and am fairly laid back, I never got used to that account name. I suspect she rarely used the company email to contact people outside of the company.
At least she had the option at that time. Today, you'll find more work being forced onto web sites. It's not hard to foresee a world where employees are terminated because one bunch of whiny children insists that "We don't have to change our site, you change your account name!" and another bunch of whiny children insists that "We don't have to change our site's account name policy, you change your site!" and the only person actually trying to do something productive is left out in the cold.
There's actually a lot of evidence that the entire oceans were frozen (to a fairly deep depth!) in Earth's geological record. It was the cover story of _Scientific American_ a few months ago.
It hardly seems coincidental that the Cambrian explosion (where you suddenly saw a *lot* of *very* strange critters in the fossil record) occured just after the ice pack melted.
As an aside, anyone who thinks that "40 years is too short to show geological change" should MEMORIZE this article. As I recall, they believe that the global icepack which survived for millions of years melted in 100 years! I've seen other articles suggesting that ice ages have also ended (and begun?) in surprisingly short times - decades, not centuries.
This is very scary because it implies that large climatic changes are closer to transitions between meta-stable phases than a nice smooth transition. (Which makes sense, mathematically, since nonlinear dynamics show "attractors" and abrupt transitions between them (or chaotic periods) instead of the mush you get with linearized dynamics.) This suggests there may be hystersis(sp?), and *that* means that our current global warming may force the climate into a new stable state which can't be easily undone.
(For the record, I'm in the camp that thinks that human factors are significant, but the relative lack of volcanic activity for the last century is probably more important.)
Not every area has both @Home and @Work. My area (Boulder, Colo) just got a few weeks ago, and we only have @Home with "casual, residential use" guarantees. Reading between the line: I can't complain if I can't telecommute because the system is down for hours while they continue rebuilding the system.
As for the telecommuting issue - I read my @Home AUP, and I actually kicked out the US Worst DSL for non-preformance, and I understand that both organizations strongly downplay the telecommuting aspect because they don't want to catch the flak when people can't work. Worse, a particularly clueless drone once suggested that I "just go into the office" those days when the connection is flaky, not comprehending that as an independent consultant my home *is* my office on some projects.
The fastest way to change this attitude, in my experience, is to ask them if they think the sole reason people order this service is so they can download porn faster. (Esp. since the TV ads always show someone downloading images on a web browser, not downloading source tarballs.) This always seems to force them to reevaluate what's left after they make life unbearable for independent workers and telecommuters.
A large print job (due to lack of disk quotas) could fill the partition causing a server crash.
A few years ago, after starting a contract on a nearly pure NT shop (instead of my usual Unix haunts) I needed to test the network driver on a printer so I spooled up a few thousand print jobs as I left for the evening. I needed this many jobs (which did *not* make it onto paper) to track down a rare network hang condition.
The next morning the sysadmins were looking for me. I had crashed the print server for precisely the reason you stated.
However, they couldn't touch me because:
1) My Unix experience is that print servers *always* put the print spools in a separate partition -- it never occured to me that anyone would be dumb enough to put a print spool on their root partition, and
2) The was no justification (other than ignorance) for them to have set up the print servers this way. This was a printer manufacturer and we had to use fairly large test suites for regression testing, stress testing, etc.
The real problem isn't the overhead lights, it's the horrid spectrum put out by standard fluorescents.
The real solution isn't blocking these tubes and using an incandescent bulb on your desk (which masks the "too-blue" light with "too-red" light), it's replacing the overhead tubes with full-spectrum bulbs. These tubes are bit more expensive than the el-cheapo bulbs preferred by facility managers, but I'm sure you can convince the HR department that it is well worth the trouble.;-)
The situation then comes down to one of the following:
1) Your company agrees to replace all standard tubes with full-spectrum tubes.
2) Your company doesn't agree to this, but allows everyone in your area to chip in some money ($10-20 per?) to replace the bulbs at your cost.
3) Your coworkers are cheap and you replace the bulbs closest to you -- and within days the rest of your coworkers will chip in to replace *their* lights.
An additional point when dealing with HR drones: at *every* shop I've worked in (over 15+ years) with sufficient natural lighting, the overhead lights were off. It drove people from other departments up the wall, but it was a universal, unspoken consensus among the developers.
On reflection, I decided it's probably a reaction to the fact that we spend so much of our time staring at computer screens -- and 99+% of all TVs and monitors are "blue" because it makes them look brighter. (If you have a better monitor, check your "color" setting and try the standard or lower "temperature" settings.) This is why a room lit only by a TV looks "bluish" from outside.
It should go without saying that someone staring at a bluish monitor in a room lit by bluish fluorescent tubes is going to be annoyed. But natural lighting and/or full spectrum bulbs will keep the overall spectrum closer to normal.
(Finally, a personal confession. I installed fluourescent fixtures in both kitchen and bathroom... both with full spectrum bulbs, naturally. I *love* them, and I find their light far more natural than incandescent lighting.)
At the implementation level, object-oriented code and flowcharts don't mix well. Most of us find little value in hundreds of flowcharts consisting of (start)->(call super)->(one line of additional code)->(return). Something like Z notation (to describe the object and the various operations on it), on the other hand....
At the detailed design level, almost all problems break down into one of 500-1000 lower-level patterns. E.g., "this is how you recursively descend a directory tree." While you could use flowcharts, I (and many others) find it better to use canonical "null" examples. The work breaks down to verifying the common stuff is the same and our extensions do what we want. (See also earlier OO comment.)
At the design level, "patterns" work best. At that level the focus isn't on *how* the code is put together, it's on *what* each block of code is supposed to do.
So what's left? Flowcharts at the architectural level? I don't think so. (This level should have DTDs, though!)
Plaintiffs don't even respect the law they cite
on
NYT On DeCSS Case
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· Score: 3
One statement stood out as demonstrating the contempt the MPAA lawyers have for the very law they are trying to use as a weapon.
(Paraphrased) The plantiff showed three pictures - of source code, a binary representation of object code, and a tee-shirt with the same source code. The plantiff's lawyers asserted that if the judge found any of these three presentatives non-expressive, he must find all three presentations non-expressive.
The problem, of course, is that programmers rarely work in object code. That work is usually reserved for *very* old systems where source code OR COMPILERS are no longer available.
Emphasis added for a simple reason: OBJECT CODE IS A DERIVED WORK. Nobody (except the MPAA, apparently) claims that a work can only be conderered "expressive" if every possible derived use is equally expressive. Needless to say, I'm sure that they will argue that this rule doesn't apply to their own product. (Visions of various "derived uses" of videotapes and MPAA lawyers running through my head...)
To ask an obvious (to any programmer) rhetorical question, let's assume that the MPAA lawyer is correct. Let's now take the tee-shirt and obscure a single semicolon with pizza drippings. Are we to believe that *poof* the First Amendment Fairies have now touched the shirt and made it expressive since the code no longer compiles into object code - and that the other coders in the room will suddenly turn in shock to the sloppy eater and gasp as they suddenly understand the message?!
*sigh* What's that saying about a little bit of knowledge being a dangerous thing?
SOME NICs will "chirp" when put into promiscuous mode. SOME OSes will exhibit slightly different behavior on their TCP/IP stack when the NIC is running in promiscious mode.
But all of that is irrelevant. Anyone who seriously wants to sniff your network will snip the Tx lines on a special patch cable. Then it doesn't matter what the NIC or OS is doing - nobody will see anything coming out of that NIC. The only(?) way to detect it is by checking line impedence - something a well-stocked site could handle, but not most businesses or schools.
Obviously, this trick will also keep you from actually doing anything useful -- and that itself might be suspicious. (Or might not, if this "dead" system is sitting in a dorm room or otherwise unoccupied office.) But if you have access to a hub (official or not) and a second NIC....
After the lobbyists get to this bill, they'll flip the parity bit and BUSINESSES will have the right to sue CONSUMERS if they provide false information on online registration forms. (See also: electronic signatures; UCITA.)
I really, really wish I could post this as a joke, but I've seen too many bills that looked good initially, and during initial debates, become horrific monsters when someone made a one word change. E.g., a bill that requires landlords to provide minimum standards as a "floor" (e.g., basic habitability like water, sewer, heat, electricity) became a monster when someone changed that word to "ceiling" - making all leases that guaranteed anything nicer than a hovel unenforceable!
(And sadly, Colorado really did need to have a state law that guaranteed apartments would have running water and flush toilets. An "oversight" intended to protect remote mountain cabins was being exploited by some urban slumlords.)
In either case, this will definitely be a bill to watch. Esp. since Congress has already passed several last-second easter-egg amendments during the past few years.
Been there, done that. If you have a reasonably recent MB and an IDE (or SCSI:-) ZIP disk you can install a "minimal" Debian system to a ZIP - and later boot from it.
Instant monster rescue disk!
It's even better than that, because a minimal Debian install is only 25 MB or so, so you can stuff the remaining 75 MB or so with almost anything you can imagine. You don't have enough disk space to rebuild the kernel, X11, or glibc, but you definitely have enough room to have a reasonably complete compiler set that will allow you to build/rebuild any reasonably sized program. That's a lot more than you can say about 1-3 floppy rescue disks!
I haven't played with the 250 MB ZIP drives (the ATAPI ones just came out), but I have put ATAPI ZIP drives into all of my systems (except the laptop) specifically because they have proven themselves so useful when things go horribly wrong. In fact, I've even swapped out the floppy drive for the ZIP drive in most of those systems!
Think about how much it grates to pay money to your competitors! (Unless you sell discs by the many-thousands, it's more cost effective to use CD-R media.) IIRC, the US (today) does not impose a "tax" to compensate for software piracy, but you can imagine how I will feel about paying Microsoft pennies per disc for something *I* give away for free - just because they're worried that I *could* use the same media to produce illicit copies of their bug-ridden bloatware!
Think about the sites that use CD-R as their primary back-up media - that's typically 200 disks/year/backup system. With a $0.50/disc tax, that's $100 pissed away while you're doing nothing that comes remotely close to being illegal.
Actually, the biggest thing I learned from the double-nickles law is that the "law is an ass." Just like first-year law students.:-)
A bit more details: I grew up in Orlando, and Florida was experimenting with metric speed limit signs due to the large number of international tourists. (They've since gone back to stone-age units alone.) So we had plenty of street signs like "30 (50)", but one always stood out as being very odd: "55 (88)". The problem was that the obvious sign, "55 (90)" couldn't be used because it would legally permit a speed of 56.1 mph (or thereabouts) and That Was Not Permitted. I guess we were expected to believe that a cop would pull us over if we were going 56 MPH and ticket us if we had a domestic driver's license, but let us go if we had an int'l license.
But this teaching us that some laws are optional - nah. People, teenagers especially, have considered speed limits optional since the first speed limit signs were posted. Hell, I'm almost 40 and I still think that today (albeit for other reasons - I now focus my wrath on the yuppie neighborhood that got a major street's speed limit dropped from 40 to 25, not the wide open rural street where the speed limit is "only" 75).
Nope, teenagers have always learned that laws are optional from their parents. It's disgusting that people walk into the front door of the porn shop - they should use the back door like all self-respecting citizens! They should crack down on drunkards/druggies/whatever, not social drinkers/potheads like us!
Hell, consider one of the canonical teen movies - "Porky's." A key point is catching the moralizing preacher and mayor watching a porn flick. That was pulled out of real life, and it's why (imho) most people are somewhat cynical about the law and law enforcement.
That is what's known as the "camel's nose under the tent" - there is absolutely no credible way that the FBI will be satisfied with SMTP-only sniffing.
Do you really think any serious narcotics trafficker or terrorist will use their own e-mail account? Esp. when they know it can be easily traced back to them?
Or will they use a combination of things like free and anonymous web-based email. Coded messages in public forums. (The *real* reason for all of the "hot grits" traffic on Slashdot - it's code for heroin!) Coded messages on IRC. Coded reviews on Amazon.
There is simply no way I can believe that the FBI is so mindnumblingly incompetent that they will only scan SMTP traffic, no matter what they tell credulous reporters asking softball questions lest they find their reporters arrested at the next police acti^H^H^H riot. (Think that's extreme? Ask the Colorado Daily reporter facing federal charges because of his attempts to cover a nighttime raid on eco-protesters.) Even if carnivore doesn't scan SMTP, I'm sure it's an "oversight" which will be remedied immediately after the FBI becomes aware of it, say after the current uproar over carnivore dies down because it only monitors SMTP.
Have no doubt - this system, or its immediate successor - will track *all* traffic associated with a suspect.
What about the THIRD Amendment? For some reason, it keeps coming to mind....
Before everyone goes off in search of a copy of the Constitution, the Third Amendment forbids the government from quartering troops in private residences. Most people today seem to assume it's because of the extra expense put onto the homeowner, but I think it's also a pretty damn clear example of implicit guarantees of privacy in the BoR. After all, few things are more intrusive than having an agent of the government living in your own house!!!
ISPs aren't private residences, of course, but the idea that the government can insist on putting a black box in ISPs "just in case" a search warrant is issued worries me. I can understand why the agents are relunctant to have ISP employees install and configure sniffers, but at the same time even the most gung-ho defender of the police has to admit that the police are not always on the side of the angels. In fact, earlier today A&E re-aired an hour-long report on the murderous corruption of the New Orleans police, and every American should remember the McCarthy era witch hunts and Nixon's "enemies list."
So call me silly, but it bothers me to think that a government agent won't be stationed inside of my residence... but *will* be stationed on my front porch where he can casually examine the contents of my mailbox, the books I'm carrying to and from the public library (which traditionally zealously protects patrons' reading material), etc.
Hmm; this is a minor, almost trivial, point... but I wonder if the FBI pays the standard co-lo fees, or if they just waved a magic wand and require the ISPs to provide free co-lo rackspace and bandwidth.
You should see the cover sheets that some law firms use on faxes...:-)
Anyway, something that Law 101 For Programmers should cover is that anything on your disk is "reduced to tangible form." On the one hand, that means that it's covered by copyright law. On the other hand, that means that you have to take more care with it than with, oh, a snippet of conversation overheard in a public bathroom.
Furthermore, there are a *lot* of places where this type of statement makes sense -- so much sense that failure to include it could give the sender a lot of grief. E.g., if I'm negotiating to sell something, someone at the other site lets the details of my offer out, and that information subsequently costs me a far larger sale because my competitor is able to underbid me.
Because of the latter concerns, what you saw was probably attached to *all* outbound mail automatically - at the same point a copy is made for future reference.:-) If you're already doing business with them then *that* contract probably says you'll honor the non-disclosure -- and ignore it could cost you your job (and make it harder to find another one, since you would be fired "for cause.") If it's from someone you don't know, then it should be treated the same way you want *your* misdelivered mail to be treated.
And if it's a Nigerian (or any other) scam, it should be forwarded to the appropriate authorities. That Nigerian scam has been bloody - some people actually traveled to Nigeria where they were kidnapped and/or killed.
(P.S., IANAL, but one of my graduate software engineering classes had a section on legal issues, and a visiting lecture by a local practicing lawyer.)
After the recent NW Airlines fiasco (where a union activitist's *personal* computer was seized and searched), I have to ask...
We are talking about employee's on-site, business provided email accounts, right? This isn't a backdoor that allows companies to demand access to an employee's personal accounts, right?!
The CNet article suggests that, but knowing how many truly braindead laws Congress has passed recently (electronic signatures, anyone?), the question needs to be asked.
For the record, I have publicly defended monitored e-mail on several occasions - and supported harsh actions against employees who insist on encrypting their personal email - because of those damn harassment suits. But that is a problem that applies to all of society.
Cute, but you can make an excellent argument that the MIT position is that of a pure scientist while the Unix approach is that of a solid engineer. (Do you really want to spend a month optimizing some obscure feature of your compiler -- only to discover that *nobody* tickled that code for two years? - it happened, see Programming Pearls.)
I think that even the most hard-core "MIT" proponent would agree that Unix is very much complete, robust, consistent, and everything else good and wholesome in the universe when compared to "the Operating System found on 98% of the World's PCs!". Windows, of course, is an example of an operating system designed by the marketing department.
Rereading my comments, I should clarify that I'm not a lawyer, I am just presenting an "informed layman's" view on why this clause is probably unenforceable. This is a situation where case law is critical, so you'll need a lawyer to figure out what the courts will (probably) say the license really means.
One other item that may be on-point - no contract can force you to give up some rights (e.g., no matter how much you offer me I can't become your slave, be legally gravely or mortally wounded, etc.) I don't know if the rights to create archival backups are inalienable, but they *are* permitted by an specific law amending copyright law. I don't follow IP law closely, but it's certainly possible that this law prohibits any contractual restrictions on archival copies and the lawyers writing the license knew it. This, at least, can probably be checked by looking up the legislation in Thomas (thomas.loc.gov?).
Slashdot Mirror
"Abandoned" has a specific legal connotation, and NASA is correct to say that the material was not "abandoned."
By way of analogy, "flotsam" and "jetsam" are not the same thing and are legally very different. If I recall the sense correctly, "flotsam" is the floating debris (and debris washed ashore?) after a ship goes down - anyone may acquire legal possession by simply scooping it out of the water.
"Jetsam," in contrast, is floating debris that was deliberately thrown overboard in an attempt to save the ship, and with the intent to retrieve the material after the storm (or other crisis) has passed. Anyone who scoops it out of the water is stealing it from its lawful owner. Even if the ship ultimately sinks, the owner of the ship still has the legal ownership of jetsam.
(As I said, it's been a long time since I looked at the exact definitions and I may have the sense backwards.)
"Jetsam" was temporary left behind, but it was not legally abandoned. "Flotsam" was abandoned. Anything that goes down with the ship was not, and for some period is owned by the owner of the ship (or the insurance company that paid a claim), although courts have (finally!) come to their senses and said that an insurance company can't protest too much after 100+ years have passed with no attempt at recovery.
NASA, quite legitimately, is considering the material left on the moon "jetsam." They left it behind so they could get the crew home, but I'm sure in the best of all possible worlds they would have the complete lunar lander sitting in a display at the Smithsonian.
You forgot the bureaucratic mind. The UN can't declare a site a World Historical Site until the host country does, else you open up a huge can of worms. (As a trivial example, imagine the Arab world attempting to claim the entire city of Jerusalem is a WHS against the wishes of Israel.)
Historically, very few historic sites are in international territory. Off the top of my head, I can only think of two - the north and south poles (historic because of the first teams to reach each). The lunar landing sites are another.
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<i>Bob always thought that the 'paperclip' seemed a little <b>bent</b></i>
A friendly reminder that ratified treaties supercede the constitution. That makes sense when the treaty ends a war and the option is rewriting the entire Constitution; it makes much less sense when it will provide a de facto end run around reasonable limits on domestic law enforcement.
After the US finally started relaxing the crypto export rules glibc 2.1 included support for secure RPC. While this code is pretty standard and shouldn't cause any problems, the Linux keyserver is probably beta, at best, and none of the RPC-based applications have really been tested with secure RPC.
:-)
In other words, this is an area where YOU can make a valuable contribution to the community!
The other secure option is GSSAPI RPC (aka Kerberos). It's not available in Linux yet, but it is a RFC and it also provides strong authentication and encryption(?) of NFS volumes.
I think the key issue here is that these contracts are for "perishable" goods, but the contract's apparent cost is artifically deflated by having a term much longer than the duration of the perishable item being sold.
It's strange to think of computers (or computer services!) as "perishable," but think about new car leases. No car, even one sitting on the dealer's lot the entire time, is a "new" car a few years after its model year. So if you're looking for a "new" car (e.g., to project a successful image to clients) you'll want to replace your car every few years no matter how well it's running.
Computers, access technology, and ISP technology are obviously all perishable over a timeframe of 18-36 months. (The exact timeframe depends on your needs - a system used for the home office will probably need to be upgraded much more frequently than a general family system or kid's system.) We should see contracts that last 12-18 months, but that causes sticker shock so they artificially draw out the length of the contract.
Someone else mentioned health club contracts, and I suspect we'll see some of the same abuses that caused so many problems with health clubs. (E.g., some people bought contracts, the club closed within months, but they still had to pay to use a non-existent facility since the contract was with an independent financing agency.) How long until people buy systems where the ISP soon folds but the hapless user still has to pay $30/month to access a non-existent ISP?
Let's see if I understand the "reasoning" here.
:-)
1) I live just down the street from a major university. This university has numerous libraries; each contains countless books detailing criminal acts. Some of these libraries include war crime archives - we're not just talking about offing your neighbor here!
2) The library conveniently provides a card catalogue to enable me to quickly identify where to find books detailing poisons, explosives, etc., plus law books that will give me case histories (in the law library) that can help me avoid detection and escape conviction.
3) Since the University benefits from my presence (they charge me to park my car in their lot, depend on citizens like me to defend their cut of the state income tax, etc.), they "vicariously" benefit from any criminal act I perform.
4) The University also knows that Congress wants to criminalize all chemistry textbooks (lest they be used to produce explosives - never mind what that will do to the chemistry, medical and pharmist training), so they must be aware that the information in this library can be used to commit crime - YET THEY DO NOTHING!
5) Therefore, by this reasoning, the University has a duty to burn its card catalogue, remove the dedicated terminals that provide access to the online card catalogue (and, in fact, has superceded it - the last time I was in the library they were using old card catalogue 'cards' as scratch paper), pull the plug on the internet interface to that same online card catalogue, and randomize the location of all books in the library.
Thank God the freshmen just arrived. They always seem to be good at randomizing stuff on campus.
This is mildly off-topic, but I'm reminded of the problems that occur when sites use mandatory account name policies.
A few jobs back the company policy was "first initial, last name." They stuck to that policy even when D. Adcock came on board. Even though I worked with the individual and am fairly laid back, I never got used to that account name. I suspect she rarely used the company email to contact people outside of the company.
At least she had the option at that time. Today, you'll find more work being forced onto web sites. It's not hard to foresee a world where employees are terminated because one bunch of whiny children insists that "We don't have to change our site, you change your account name!" and another bunch of whiny children insists that "We don't have to change our site's account name policy, you change your site!" and the only person actually trying to do something productive is left out in the cold.
There's actually a lot of evidence that the entire oceans were frozen (to a fairly deep depth!) in Earth's geological record. It was the cover story of _Scientific American_ a few months ago.
It hardly seems coincidental that the Cambrian explosion (where you suddenly saw a *lot* of *very* strange critters in the fossil record) occured just after the ice pack melted.
As an aside, anyone who thinks that "40 years is too short to show geological change" should MEMORIZE this article. As I recall, they believe that the global icepack which survived for millions of years melted in 100 years! I've seen other articles suggesting that ice ages have also ended (and begun?) in surprisingly short times - decades, not centuries.
This is very scary because it implies that large climatic changes are closer to transitions between meta-stable phases than a nice smooth transition. (Which makes sense, mathematically, since nonlinear dynamics show "attractors" and abrupt transitions between them (or chaotic periods) instead of the mush you get with linearized dynamics.) This suggests there may be hystersis(sp?), and *that* means that our current global warming may force the climate into a new stable state which can't be easily undone.
(For the record, I'm in the camp that thinks that human factors are significant, but the relative lack of volcanic activity for the last century is probably more important.)
Not every area has both @Home and @Work. My area (Boulder, Colo) just got a few weeks ago, and we only have @Home with "casual, residential use" guarantees. Reading between the line: I can't complain if I can't telecommute because the system is down for hours while they continue rebuilding the system.
As for the telecommuting issue - I read my @Home AUP, and I actually kicked out the US Worst DSL for non-preformance, and I understand that both organizations strongly downplay the telecommuting aspect because they don't want to catch the flak when people can't work. Worse, a particularly clueless drone once suggested that I "just go into the office" those days when the connection is flaky, not comprehending that as an independent consultant my home *is* my office on some projects.
The fastest way to change this attitude, in my experience, is to ask them if they think the sole reason people order this service is so they can download porn faster. (Esp. since the TV ads always show someone downloading images on a web browser, not downloading source tarballs.) This always seems to force them to reevaluate what's left after they make life unbearable for independent workers and telecommuters.
A large print job (due to lack of disk quotas) could fill the partition causing a server crash.
A few years ago, after starting a contract on a nearly pure NT shop (instead of my usual Unix haunts) I needed to test the network driver on a printer so I spooled up a few thousand print jobs as I left for the evening. I needed this many jobs (which did *not* make it onto paper) to track down a rare network hang condition.
The next morning the sysadmins were looking for me. I had crashed the print server for precisely the reason you stated.
However, they couldn't touch me because:
1) My Unix experience is that print servers *always* put the print spools in a separate partition -- it never occured to me that anyone would be dumb enough to put a print spool on their root partition, and
2) The was no justification (other than ignorance) for them to have set up the print servers this way. This was a printer manufacturer and we had to use fairly large test suites for regression testing, stress testing, etc.
The real problem isn't the overhead lights, it's the horrid spectrum put out by standard fluorescents.
;-)
The real solution isn't blocking these tubes and using an incandescent bulb on your desk (which masks the "too-blue" light with "too-red" light), it's replacing the overhead tubes with full-spectrum bulbs. These tubes are bit more expensive than the el-cheapo bulbs preferred by facility managers, but I'm sure you can convince the HR department that it is well worth the trouble.
The situation then comes down to one of the following:
1) Your company agrees to replace all standard tubes with full-spectrum tubes.
2) Your company doesn't agree to this, but allows everyone in your area to chip in some money ($10-20 per?) to replace the bulbs at your cost.
3) Your coworkers are cheap and you replace the bulbs closest to you -- and within days the rest of your coworkers will chip in to replace *their* lights.
An additional point when dealing with HR drones: at *every* shop I've worked in (over 15+ years) with sufficient natural lighting, the overhead lights were off. It drove people from other departments up the wall, but it was a universal, unspoken consensus among the developers.
On reflection, I decided it's probably a reaction to the fact that we spend so much of our time staring at computer screens -- and 99+% of all TVs and monitors are "blue" because it makes them look brighter. (If you have a better monitor, check your "color" setting and try the standard or lower "temperature" settings.) This is why a room lit only by a TV looks "bluish" from outside.
It should go without saying that someone staring at a bluish monitor in a room lit by bluish fluorescent tubes is going to be annoyed. But natural lighting and/or full spectrum bulbs will keep the overall spectrum closer to normal.
(Finally, a personal confession. I installed fluourescent fixtures in both kitchen and bathroom... both with full spectrum bulbs, naturally. I *love* them, and I find their light far more natural than incandescent lighting.)
I never use flowcharts.
At the implementation level, object-oriented code and flowcharts don't mix well. Most of us find little value in hundreds of flowcharts consisting of (start)->(call super)->(one line of additional code)->(return). Something like Z notation (to describe the object and the various operations on it), on the other hand....
At the detailed design level, almost all problems break down into one of 500-1000 lower-level patterns. E.g., "this is how you recursively descend a directory tree." While you could use flowcharts, I (and many others) find it better to use canonical "null" examples. The work breaks down to verifying the common stuff is the same and our extensions do what we want. (See also earlier OO comment.)
At the design level, "patterns" work best. At that level the focus isn't on *how* the code is put together, it's on *what* each block of code is supposed to do.
So what's left? Flowcharts at the architectural level? I don't think so. (This level should have DTDs, though!)
One statement stood out as demonstrating the contempt the MPAA lawyers have for the very law they are trying to use as a weapon.
(Paraphrased) The plantiff showed three pictures - of source code, a binary representation of object code, and a tee-shirt with the same source code. The plantiff's lawyers asserted that if the judge found any of these three presentatives non-expressive, he must find all three presentations non-expressive.
The problem, of course, is that programmers rarely work in object code. That work is usually reserved for *very* old systems where source code OR COMPILERS are no longer available.
Emphasis added for a simple reason: OBJECT CODE IS A DERIVED WORK. Nobody (except the MPAA, apparently) claims that a work can only be conderered "expressive" if every possible derived use is equally expressive. Needless to say, I'm sure that they will argue that this rule doesn't apply to their own product. (Visions of various "derived uses" of videotapes and MPAA lawyers running through my head...)
To ask an obvious (to any programmer) rhetorical question, let's assume that the MPAA lawyer is correct. Let's now take the tee-shirt and obscure a single semicolon with pizza drippings. Are we to believe that *poof* the First Amendment Fairies have now touched the shirt and made it expressive since the code no longer compiles into object code - and that the other coders in the room will suddenly turn in shock to the sloppy eater and gasp as they suddenly understand the message?!
*sigh* What's that saying about a little bit of knowledge being a dangerous thing?
SOME NICs will "chirp" when put into promiscuous mode. SOME OSes will exhibit slightly different behavior on their TCP/IP stack when the NIC is running in promiscious mode.
But all of that is irrelevant. Anyone who seriously wants to sniff your network will snip the Tx lines on a special patch cable. Then it doesn't matter what the NIC or OS is doing - nobody will see anything coming out of that NIC. The only(?) way to detect it is by checking line impedence - something a well-stocked site could handle, but not most businesses or schools.
Obviously, this trick will also keep you from actually doing anything useful -- and that itself might be suspicious. (Or might not, if this "dead" system is sitting in a dorm room or otherwise unoccupied office.) But if you have access to a hub (official or not) and a second NIC....
After the lobbyists get to this bill, they'll flip the parity bit and BUSINESSES will have the right to sue CONSUMERS if they provide false information on online registration forms. (See also: electronic signatures; UCITA.)
I really, really wish I could post this as a joke, but I've seen too many bills that looked good initially, and during initial debates, become horrific monsters when someone made a one word change. E.g., a bill that requires landlords to provide minimum standards as a "floor" (e.g., basic habitability like water, sewer, heat, electricity) became a monster when someone changed that word to "ceiling" - making all leases that guaranteed anything nicer than a hovel unenforceable!
(And sadly, Colorado really did need to have a state law that guaranteed apartments would have running water and flush toilets. An "oversight" intended to protect remote mountain cabins was being exploited by some urban slumlords.)
In either case, this will definitely be a bill to watch. Esp. since Congress has already passed several last-second easter-egg amendments during the past few years.
Been there, done that. If you have a reasonably recent MB and an IDE (or SCSI :-) ZIP disk you can install a "minimal" Debian system to a ZIP - and later boot from it.
Instant monster rescue disk!
It's even better than that, because a minimal Debian install is only 25 MB or so, so you can stuff the remaining 75 MB or so with almost anything you can imagine. You don't have enough disk space to rebuild the kernel, X11, or glibc, but you definitely have enough room to have a reasonably complete compiler set that will allow you to build/rebuild any reasonably sized program. That's a lot more than you can say about 1-3 floppy rescue disks!
I haven't played with the 250 MB ZIP drives (the ATAPI ones just came out), but I have put ATAPI ZIP drives into all of my systems (except the laptop) specifically because they have proven themselves so useful when things go horribly wrong. In fact, I've even swapped out the floppy drive for the ZIP drive in most of those systems!
A couple copies of Debian or Red Hat?! So what!!
Think about how much it grates to pay money to your competitors! (Unless you sell discs by the many-thousands, it's more cost effective to use CD-R media.) IIRC, the US (today) does not impose a "tax" to compensate for software piracy, but you can imagine how I will feel about paying Microsoft pennies per disc for something *I* give away for free - just because they're worried that I *could* use the same media to produce illicit copies of their bug-ridden bloatware!
Think about the sites that use CD-R as their primary back-up media - that's typically 200 disks/year/backup system. With a $0.50/disc tax, that's $100 pissed away while you're doing nothing that comes remotely close to being illegal.
Actually, the biggest thing I learned from the double-nickles law is that the "law is an ass." Just like first-year law students. :-)
A bit more details: I grew up in Orlando, and Florida was experimenting with metric speed limit signs due to the large number of international tourists. (They've since gone back to stone-age units alone.) So we had plenty of street signs like "30 (50)", but one always stood out as being very odd: "55 (88)". The problem was that the obvious sign, "55 (90)" couldn't be used because it would legally permit a speed of 56.1 mph (or thereabouts) and That Was Not Permitted. I guess we were expected to believe that a cop would pull us over if we were going 56 MPH and ticket us if we had a domestic driver's license, but let us go if we had an int'l license.
But this teaching us that some laws are optional - nah. People, teenagers especially, have considered speed limits optional since the first speed limit signs were posted. Hell, I'm almost 40 and I still think that today (albeit for other reasons - I now focus my wrath on the yuppie neighborhood that got a major street's speed limit dropped from 40 to 25, not the wide open rural street where the speed limit is "only" 75).
Nope, teenagers have always learned that laws are optional from their parents. It's disgusting that people walk into the front door of the porn shop - they should use the back door like all self-respecting citizens! They should crack down on drunkards/druggies/whatever, not social drinkers/potheads like us!
Hell, consider one of the canonical teen movies - "Porky's." A key point is catching the moralizing preacher and mayor watching a porn flick. That was pulled out of real life, and it's why (imho) most people are somewhat cynical about the law and law enforcement.
That is what's known as the "camel's nose under the tent" - there is absolutely no credible way that the FBI will be satisfied with SMTP-only sniffing.
Do you really think any serious narcotics trafficker or terrorist will use their own e-mail account? Esp. when they know it can be easily traced back to them?
Or will they use a combination of things like free and anonymous web-based email. Coded messages in public forums. (The *real* reason for all of the "hot grits" traffic on Slashdot - it's code for heroin!) Coded messages on IRC. Coded reviews on Amazon.
There is simply no way I can believe that the FBI is so mindnumblingly incompetent that they will only scan SMTP traffic, no matter what they tell credulous reporters asking softball questions lest they find their reporters arrested at the next police acti^H^H^H riot. (Think that's extreme? Ask the Colorado Daily reporter facing federal charges because of his attempts to cover a nighttime raid on eco-protesters.) Even if carnivore doesn't scan SMTP, I'm sure it's an "oversight" which will be remedied immediately after the FBI becomes aware of it, say after the current uproar over carnivore dies down because it only monitors SMTP.
Have no doubt - this system, or its immediate successor - will track *all* traffic associated with a suspect.
What about the THIRD Amendment? For some reason, it keeps coming to mind....
Before everyone goes off in search of a copy of the Constitution, the Third Amendment forbids the government from quartering troops in private residences. Most people today seem to assume it's because of the extra expense put onto the homeowner, but I think it's also a pretty damn clear example of implicit guarantees of privacy in the BoR. After all, few things are more intrusive than having an agent of the government living in your own house!!!
ISPs aren't private residences, of course, but the idea that the government can insist on putting a black box in ISPs "just in case" a search warrant is issued worries me. I can understand why the agents are relunctant to have ISP employees install and configure sniffers, but at the same time even the most gung-ho defender of the police has to admit that the police are not always on the side of the angels. In fact, earlier today A&E re-aired an hour-long report on the murderous corruption of the New Orleans police, and every American should remember the McCarthy era witch hunts and Nixon's "enemies list."
So call me silly, but it bothers me to think that a government agent won't be stationed inside of my residence... but *will* be stationed on my front porch where he can casually examine the contents of my mailbox, the books I'm carrying to and from the public library (which traditionally zealously protects patrons' reading material), etc.
Hmm; this is a minor, almost trivial, point... but I wonder if the FBI pays the standard co-lo fees, or if they just waved a magic wand and require the ISPs to provide free co-lo rackspace and bandwidth.
You should see the cover sheets that some law firms use on faxes... :-)
:-) If you're already doing business with them then *that* contract probably says you'll honor the non-disclosure -- and ignore it could cost you your job (and make it harder to find another one, since you would be fired "for cause.") If it's from someone you don't know, then it should be treated the same way you want *your* misdelivered mail to be treated.
Anyway, something that Law 101 For Programmers should cover is that anything on your disk is "reduced to tangible form." On the one hand, that means that it's covered by copyright law. On the other hand, that means that you have to take more care with it than with, oh, a snippet of conversation overheard in a public bathroom.
Furthermore, there are a *lot* of places where this type of statement makes sense -- so much sense that failure to include it could give the sender a lot of grief. E.g., if I'm negotiating to sell something, someone at the other site lets the details of my offer out, and that information subsequently costs me a far larger sale because my competitor is able to underbid me.
Because of the latter concerns, what you saw was probably attached to *all* outbound mail automatically - at the same point a copy is made for future reference.
And if it's a Nigerian (or any other) scam, it should be forwarded to the appropriate authorities. That Nigerian scam has been bloody - some people actually traveled to Nigeria where they were kidnapped and/or killed.
(P.S., IANAL, but one of my graduate software engineering classes had a section on legal issues, and a visiting lecture by a local practicing lawyer.)
After the recent NW Airlines fiasco (where a union activitist's *personal* computer was seized and searched), I have to ask...
We are talking about employee's on-site, business provided email accounts, right? This isn't a backdoor that allows companies to demand access to an employee's personal accounts, right?!
The CNet article suggests that, but knowing how many truly braindead laws Congress has passed recently (electronic signatures, anyone?), the question needs to be asked.
For the record, I have publicly defended monitored e-mail on several occasions - and supported harsh actions against employees who insist on encrypting their personal email - because of those damn harassment suits. But that is a problem that applies to all of society.
Cute, but you can make an excellent argument that the MIT position is that of a pure scientist while the Unix approach is that of a solid engineer. (Do you really want to spend a month optimizing some obscure feature of your compiler -- only to discover that *nobody* tickled that code for two years? - it happened, see Programming Pearls.)
I think that even the most hard-core "MIT" proponent would agree that Unix is very much complete, robust, consistent, and everything else good and wholesome in the universe when compared to "the Operating System found on 98% of the World's PCs!". Windows, of course, is an example of an operating system designed by the marketing department.
Rereading my comments, I should clarify that I'm not a lawyer, I am just presenting an "informed layman's" view on why this clause is probably unenforceable. This is a situation where case law is critical, so you'll need a lawyer to figure out what the courts will (probably) say the license really means.
One other item that may be on-point - no contract can force you to give up some rights (e.g., no matter how much you offer me I can't become your slave, be legally gravely or mortally wounded, etc.) I don't know if the rights to create archival backups are inalienable, but they *are* permitted by an specific law amending copyright law. I don't follow IP law closely, but it's certainly possible that this law prohibits any contractual restrictions on archival copies and the lawyers writing the license knew it. This, at least, can probably be checked by looking up the legislation in Thomas (thomas.loc.gov?).