Re:Cyberselfish, anyone?
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Lawsuits Suck
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the difference is that it's actually possible to get big government to be on your side through the democratic/lobbying/activism process, where big business will always only be on the side of profit
No, the difference is that if I don't like a business I just don't buy their product. Regardless of if I like or dislike government I have no choice to buy their product... alot of their product.. so much that nearly half of my income goes to purchase that product.
I don't associate with environmentalists, minority (activist groups), or labor because these people see the government as a big club to beat over the heads of those who do not agree with them. I (and probably most geeks) would like the government to perform just the jobs they are constitutionally bound to do and nothing else (i.e. national defense and protecting constitutional rights).
The right to keep and bear MP3's? Not!
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Lawsuits Suck
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One could say, hypothetically that we have a constitution thats not largely ignored by the government (I know, a stretch!). And one of the consitutional amendments is the right to keep and bear arms. The founding fathers (who now are probably rolling in their graves) felt this right to be _so important_ as to make it second only to the rights to free speech and association.
Even with such constitutional protection the right to keep and bear arms is under heavy assult. Imagine how vulnerable things that aren't contitutionally protected are to bad law or legal decisions.
A labor union is.. an additional boss, only he takes instead of gives you money.
I don't want someone telling me when I should work and when I shouldn't (strike). Telling me how much I should be paid (union-negotiated contracts), and which political party I should donate my money to (union political contributions). It all comes down to having yet another boss.
Thanks to unions in california we've got rules that say I have to work 8 hours a day 5 days a week with very little leeway. Anyone in the tech sector knows that sometimes you are struck with inspiration and work 16 hours in a day, or come in and just feel uninspired and leave after two hours. I would much rather have the ability to tell my employer "okay, I'll work 10 hours four days a week", or "I'll bust my ass the next few weeks to get the new server farm built but then I'm gonna take it easy for awhile" then to have some labor union bought legistation telling me the hours I am allowed to keep.
If you don't like your employer's policies, ask him to change them. If he doesn't go work somewhere else. If you don't have enough balls to take charge of your own life then go be an auto worker or something.
Let me just start by saying, these are my experiences. They may or may not in any way apply to you. Please do not flame me with "I am not like that". These are just some recomendations which you can either use or ignore.
First off, when I'm looking for a junior level admin with just a few years of experience I'm going to pay that admin approprately. So if you go interview having just in the last two years picked up UNIX admin skills do not expect me to pay you for your 15 previous years of COBOL programming. Expect to be paid for the skills you are being hired for, not all the skills you have.
Secondly I've found sometimes older workers are sometimes very set in their ways to the point of arguing with the rest of the group on how something should be done and ignoring directives to do it otherwise. It is fine to let your opionion on a process known, but if the group or the group's manager decides on a course of action that's contrary to how you've done it in the past then suck it up and follow it rather than ignore or fight it.
Third, some people have a hard time accepting that their superiors may be 20-somethings fresh out of school. This is just something you will have to accept and if this is a problem you may have to go to a larger/more established company that's set up like a more traditional institution.
One thing you might ask yourself (and I may just get flamed here) is why are you older and not yet in a senior management role? The usual youth working at startups these days are highly ambitious; entry level sysadmin/programmer outa school, department head by 24, VP by 27, rich VC by 30. If you are 40 and still an entry level programmer, then its not that you're old, its that you lack ambition. Companies seek swimmers not floaters.
One thing that should _not_ be held against older employees is their family commitments. I dislike people thinking that because someone has a family that they cannont live/eat/breathe 'the company'. I'll tell you what, I don't have a family and I could never live/eat/breathe any company. Perhaps thats why I'm a contractor. I value my free time enough that if you want me to work 10 hours extra this week you are going to pay me for every minute.
It's pretty simple why I, a libertarian kinda dude, do not support increasing H1B visas.
The H1B system is nothing more than endentured servitude, a near-slavery system which hopefully is still covered in history classes in public school. H1B employees are forced to work for the company that brought them over or be sent back. The companies who bring them over often give them 'relocation loans' which are due back if the employee leaves. Thus the employer entices over workers for what seems like alot of money but in reality is hardly enough to survive in Silicon Valley. The employee has to work long hours in poor working conditions, and often poor living conditions (because of what they can't afford). H1B's are of course a good way for corporations to get cheap skilled labor that is easily abuseable, instead of hiring and training US citizens. I speak from experience, contracting for several Silicon Valley companies.
Sure, let forigners come here and apply for citizenship; but don't ship them in like product.
If your looking for a warm fuzzy from the slashdot community to 'take action' (i.e. involve lawyers) against this site I doubt you are going to get it.
Lets face it, there is only so many ways you can lay out a website. you can put nav crap on the left side, right side, or top, or have combinations of two or all three. Theres only so many ways a site can be laid out and if one looks like another then either accept that fact or break out the lawyers and join the ranks of the MPAA and RIAA in bullying to get your way.
The only place you would have might have any leeway is on the images, ask them to have made their own if you feel this bit of 'intelectual property' is so important that it needs to be restricted.
Under the 'Legal Information' the only asserted copyright is over articles and reviews, the rest of the site is described as a 'community site', with no stated restrictions on using/copying the website layout and images itself.
If he broke into your servers and stole your (restricted) source code then perhaps action would be justified, but just taking the 'look and feel' while coding/building his own backend does not.
One in ten is not a bad number. One in ten is bad if you are comparing artists to established products. But that is not what we are talking about. You could compare new artists to research and development or startup businesses.
Companies spend alot on R&D, most of which results in dead ends or does not produce immedate benefits but may be useful down the line. Only one in ten new businesses make it to profitability. This number coencides with the RIAA figure.
We all know burning CD's is cheap cheap cheap. However to get to burning that first CD you've got to spend alot of money on studio time, hiring industry experts to do editing/producing/etc, and do a ton of promotion of the new act. And you never know beforehand if anyone will like it, most times they don't.
Record companies more or less equate to high-risk loan companies with correspondingly high interest rates. The successful artists are subsidizing the search for new talent.
It should be noted its easy to have a terrabyte sized database perform decently if each record is several megabites (high-res arial images)!
Its an entirely different matter to make your terabyte database perform if each record were only several kilobytes, which is much closer to what a 'real world' application looks like.
Simple math. Large record-size, less records; small record-size, more records. The size of the database itself is not the big performance issue your paying thousands for a vendor to address; it's the number of records and being able to search millions of records in a very short time.
So, with smoke-and-mirrors microsoft can exclaim 'look at our terabyte database' and con those who were allways their best customers, the non-technical, into buying that load of BS.
Another piece of NSI's plan has fallen into place.
They changed the policy to state that they, not you, own the domain.
Now they have a court decision to back it up.
You will be reciving notice in the mail that a corporate partner has expressed interest in your domain name; you will of course have the option to outbid them. Have a nice day.
When Judge Kaplan took the mantra 'information wants to be free' (as in free-dom) and turned it into 'information should be available without charge' (as in free aol CD's) he took a step that, carried to it's logical conclusion, 'free software movement' would be categorized as the 'without charge software movement'.
The meanings of free (liberty) and freedom are being marginalized all the time by corporate interests. It's a common theme in adds nowadays.. the idea that consumer goods give you 'freedom' (i.e. cars); that you have a 'right to free checking'. I don't like 'the freedom to choose which cola to drink' when it is marginalizing my freedoms to speak my mind, carry a gun, and worship in any or no manner.
This sort of thing is to categorize people looking for free-dom as looking for free-ride, and that translates from someone seeking liberty to someone seeking to steal just by using the word out of context.
It's fast approaching what was described in 1984; 'free' will no longer carry both it's meanings. It'll be free beer and nothing else.
I dislike proposed censorware laws as much as the next guy, but I also believe they have every right to sell their product to people who wish to filter their own PC's (parents). I also find 'stupid filter tricks' as amusing as the next guy, but in this case it's Akamai's problem and not the filtering companies.
I must point out that this is no deliberate desicion by Akamai to stop those 'evil censors'. The truth of the matter is that they never wrote any security into their network to prevent any website from being 'akamized'. I also have it on good authority that it's alot of work to purge content from an akamai server. Thus in reality, akamai's service is the web-equivalent of an open email relay!
This time you all laugh because it's the filtering companies getting the short end of the stick. Next time this bug will affect you. How long do you think it'll take spammers to use this bug to put their 'get rich quick' webpages into akamai and use those links when they send out spam? ISP's right now can eliminate websites near-realtime when they are used to sell products advertised in spam, which discourages spammers from even trying as their page is taken down almost immediately. If the spammers can be relatively sure their pages would be up for days on end (as they could with akamai) then it encourages them to send more spam, that ends up in your inbox.
So what they are really saying when they say 'we will not commit to filtering' is 'we do not see fixing this security hole as enhancing profits and therefore cannot justify commiting programmers to close it'. I'll repeat for emphasis: This is an akamai security hole. This is the web-equivalent of an open email relay.
-- Greg
PS: I've reported this bug in the past, and they claimed it was a non-issue. Does someone have to write a 2600 howto article on getting service from akamai before it's fixed?
The MPAA just spent four million on a single legal case to uphold their monopoly on information. How much airtime do you think four million can buy, especially if you are the one's who own the major networks?
How difficult do you think it would be for these networks to get Joe average american worked up enough to demand action? How hard would the desision be for the government on a cause the average american supports and for those who contribute so much to each of the political parties?
Sealand is of dubious standing as a sovern nation, and has a combined sea/land/air based armed forces of a rifle and a speedboat. It would not be hard to justify the forceful removal of servers by armed invasion. Not too hard to justify if you can convince people they help terrorists and child pornographers.
Unless sealand someday becomes a major NAP, then lets not forget that a few simple court orders to shut down their traffic at the NAPs or their leased-lines where they enter other nations could have the same effect.
If sealand becomes inconvienent to the large corporations or governments of this globe it can and will be silenced.
There is _no way_ the state change of nitrogen could propel a car at any reasonable speed for any reasonable distance. This simple state change could not impart the kind of energy you get from combustion. Add to that somewhere the energy gets spent to compress the nitrogen to liquid, and keep it in cool storage.. both from coal and oil burning power plants. And then there's the billions that would need to be spent to build infrustructure.
You could go electric, but then your propelling a thousand pounds of battery; and you can only go about 90 miles on flat ground if you don't run the AC. Again you've just pushed the polution problem out of your car but back to a coal or oil burning electrical plant.
If you wanna go eco today the best solution is to get a hybrid; I think honda makes one. If you are lucky enough to live in an area with decent public transportation then go bus/train; good public transit is a rarity in north america, they should take a lesson from europe on how to do it.
I sense an ecologic agenda on the part of Timothy; seems to post alot of this tree huggin kinda stuff. Know how much toxic waste was created casting the silicon for that computer you are typing on? har har har.
I have not read the ruling, but I've read some of the trial transcripts and the defense covered the issues you consider important points.
* If DeCSS was made for Linux DVD players, then why was the compiled Windows port made and released?
The reason why you need exactly this, a windows binary to decode DVD for development of a Linux player, was covered extensively by the defense; and in answering the first point, the remaining points are answered.
Linux, at that time, could not read the DVD filesystem format and there were no DVD-drive drivers for Linux.
Developers could use DeCSS to decode a movie using a windows box, then use that decoded data to develop the rest of their DVD player applications. They could write the portions that play the MPEG video and audio to the screen while others worked on the problem of DVD-drive drivers. Once a DVD-drive driver was written for Linux the DeCSS code that did the decoding could be integrated with the Linux DVD player.
As far as DeCSS as a tool for copying DVD's, the defense showed that there were several other DVD rippers out there that were both easier to use and faster.. Thus their emphasis on trying to get the plantifs to answer on if the pirated movies they found on line were ripped using DeCSS or not. Chances are the pirates used one of the easier tools.
The platifs alledge the poliferation of DVD piracy was due to DeCSS; The defense attempted to show (and what I think) that it's not DeCSS, but the availability of cheap broadband access and larger storage capacities that are the reasons DVD's are being traded online.
They (big businesses in general) make money selling hardware like tape recorders and CDROM burners. They also make money selling licensed DVD players. They don't make money if someone is giving a comprable product away for free.
One big problem I see with this and with many of the other injunctions as of late is that the judiciary has taken it apon themselves to be guardians of the booming economy over their responsibility of administering over a fair and just legal system.
Look at the desisions and injunctions handed down over the last few years. They have all come down on the side of whoever stands to make/lose the most money regardless of who's in the right or wrong.
I don't know if the judges fear that they could damage the strong economy by handing down rulings that hurt corporate profits or what; are they fearful of their 401K funds? I don't know.
What would I suggest? If the law is unjust just ignore it. There are enough people on the internet (not to mention enough nations) that any regulation passed down by one nation can all but be completely ignored by the little guys in all nations.
Microsoft usually comes out with these "we'll have an application in this space real soon, check out our vapor" whenever they are afraid a competitor may move into that space and become dominant.. They do this in hopes that people who traditionally have been microsoft customers will wait for the microsoft product to be released later rather than migrate now to a competetor's solution..
The question that begs asking is, what application are they afraid of? Is it StarOffice? Is it applixware? Are they afraid of the GNOME announcement that there will be something competing with their all-encompasing win32 GUI/API? Perhaps this is the case, they want people to write to the win32 API on Linux rather than to the new gtk/gnome API.
If this vaporware ever condenses into something real and if they can trick developers to be lazy and write to a win32 API on top of linux instead of learning GTK... Then developers and users will not see the advantages the Linux platform provides over windows; after all it'll act and run like windows if it's on top of the windows libraries. In the end new users will be disenchanted with the lindows-winux system and go back to regular windows.
Probably an announcement is forthcoming that the win32 API for Linux is 'just around the corner' ('just wait for the new release!').
The politicians have found an issue to devide us like no other, it's an issue that many people hold so dear to their hearts that they would concentrate on it beyond any other and could never be swayed in their view. An issue that could not be imperically solved as a matter of science. That issue is abortion, and it has given the politicians full reign to do whatever they like while keeping the public at large distracted.
It comes down to when you believe a cell or collection of cells is no longer just a collection of cells but a human being. We all agree that killing a human being is wrong, we all agree that killing a collection of cells with no sentience is not wrong; Such as killing bacteria, an infection, or what have you. There are those that believe that human life occurs at conception, others believe that it occurs at birth and others at some time in-between. One side considers the act murder, the other side argues that the fetus is not alive and bringing an unwanted child into the world is wrong.
Lets face it... If abortion were completely outlawed today it would just mean those seeking abortion would go to the black market or to another country to have the procedure done. If abortion (all forms) were completely made legal then those opposed to it would do what they could do interfere with the availability and safety of the procedure.
So while we throttle each other over pro-choice / pro-life and over an issue we'll _never_ all be able to agree on the politicians are out taking away your god given rights outlined in the constitution and making special rules for special (read influencial) people.
I have never seen a greater social engineering en-masse as the issue of abortion has created. They pull this wool over our eyes so they can go on doing things that affect us constantly, things like raising our taxes while doleing out moneys to special interests from corporate welfare to forign aid to sensitivity training (I'll now note that all sides of the spectrum are guilty of taking public moneies to further their private goals).
The surgical operation of abortion is an act a relively small part of the population actually indulges in and usually not repeatedly. But it gets a great deal of political attention while laws and rights lost that affect all of us every day are ignored.
I can't put mickey mouse on my webpage because disney's lobbyists convinced congress to extend copyright nearly indefinately. 50% of what you and I make goes one way or another to the government in taxes to support programs we may not believe in. That affects me around 40 hours of every week. Politicians complain about high oil prices and forign dependence on oil while passing legislation restricting domestic oil exploration. That affects me every time I drive. We are selling missle technologies, selling strong cryptography, and giving favored trading status to mainland China. This is a country we should be shunning given their opposing idealogical views on government and their use of slave and (political) prisoner labor (theres something there for everybody). The government can give cisco routers with full encryption to red china but I'm not allowed to give a friend in australia a copy of PGP? Are you shitting me??
I tried to keep this as neutral as possible, in hopes that it will provide an interesting read to all sides of the political spectrum. I just hope we and the rest of 'joe sixpack' america can look beyond the surface and see what the real issues are.
After recieving the usual letter from their lawyer along the lines of "transfer this domain or we will begin arbitration proceedings", could you then file your own complaint with an arbiter that's less biased to multinationals?
One might be able to argue that the multinational's 'intent to transfer' said name would violate your trademarks and service marks (Para 4.b in the dispute policy), that the multinational would have less legitimate interest in the name and that the multinational is acting in bad faith.
Of course someone will have to be a test-case to see if pre-emptively filing a dispute will be heard by any dispute panel.
It should be noted that the word 'trademark' does not mean 'registered trademark'! The ICANN policy does not require a registered trademark. If you can show you've been using the domain's name for legitimate activity for a period of time and that the domain name is identified with your activities then you can show that name as an unregistered trademark.
-- Greg
IANAL, but I play one on slashdot.
Why does 'Plain Old Text' render as Extrans and vice-versa?
NSI ignored its rules and actively encourgaged people to abuse the TLD conventions.. It's simple, each domain means another $100/mo for NSI. 'registering.com? register.net and.org too', hence making NSI three times the money.
I remember when NSI was handed the TLD registration contracts, back then we were 'naieve' in that we thought the newcomers to the internet would be good neigbours just as everyone up to that point had been. Nobody expected how much of a mess people out for scratch would cause. Hindsight being 20/20 the government and the community should have had more oversight and required NSI to play by the established rules (RFC's).
Now we have a mess where the TLD's are meaningless and we may as well allow registration in the TLD namespace. www.coke or www.intel
I hope this is not the FBI responding to the EPIC FOIA request. The FBI should turn over their unclassified documents on carnivore immediately; not coming up with some scheme to bury this issue for months so the public can get distracted by some other issue..
I would say this tactic works fairly well, nobody's thought about the missing/found nuclear harddrives at los alamos lately. I wonder how the token non-investigation is going.
Ugh, well meaning but ultimately doing more harm than good. Many have already mentioned the toxic nature of the manufacture and disposal of lead-acid batteries. Lets now talk about the solar pannels themselves.
The manufacture of solar panels requires _lots_ of extremely pure silicon. The process to get this silicon requires many 55 gallon drums of things that will melt your flesh off, cause cancer, and/or create further undesireable effects if spilled into the groundwater (drinking supply). All this nasty stuff has to be disposed of, in non-ecologically friendly ways.
It's like those VW busses with bad piston rings leaving an ozone-killing smog-trail in it's wake sporting 'save the earth' bumperstickers.
One thing I never understood, and has bugged me for awhile, is why is it that environmentalists are against nuclear power? It produces no air polution, the waste products, while admittedly nasty, are fairly small and compact and therefore easily stored with minimum fuss, does not require drastic changes to local ecologies (such as the huge resivors which accompany hydroelectric dams), and does not require massive infrustructures to bulk transport fuels (avoiding spills which destroy whole coastlines). It seems to me to be the lesser of all evils.
Your wonderful and visionary liberals are now touting their great 'deeply religious' VP as we speak. I can't even express the joy I am getting ripping on you liberals who for years have equated religion to evil (disclosure: I'm agnostic, and libertarian).
Your wonderful 'Dems' gave us miracles like the clipper chip, longstanding crypto export controls, and carnivore. The least I can say is this, the Republicans want government to take less of your money than more; perhaps that will mean there will be less money around for them to fund projects to circumvent our individual liberties.
'confiscate your computers', is that like confiscating our guns? Oops, the liberals are already busy taking that right away from us, and considering crypto is munitions I guess AlGore will be beating on my door any time now to take my PC from me.
I've breathed the tear gas too; in training for my four years as a soldier in the US Army. I even got to go on one of Slick Willie's ill-conceved police actions to save the people of Haiti from themselves. What a great job we did with his leadership, millions (billions) wasted, thousands of americans away from their families for months on end and the government there is just as bad as when we arrived.
Why don't you go sell commie somewhere else, we're all stocked up here.
This story has nothing tech related. Why was it posted here? Is somebody friends with the webmaster of hackedtobits.com? Is this a scheme to drive traffic to their site and boost their readership out of some kind of favor?
Secondly, this diatribe is poorly written. Congratulations, you went looking to get arrested and you did. What an act of briliance. And the issue you were protesting was _so important_ to you that you neglected even to mention what it was.
Lets see, we have 'canidate X sucks', a re-run of a book review on a book that wasn't good or partial and now this drivel all in the last few days. WTF are you editors doing??
Is this an effort to be reactionary rather than inteligent in an effort to drive more visitors to the site? Are you missing your banner-add impression projections and need to pull some serious traffic to get it back up??
Give us decent news! theres lots of interesting stuff happening in the world, but we keep getting this worthless trash.
-- Greg
Re:not to sound like a militia......
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Hacker Crackdown?
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What form of government would you recommend?
I would prefer a libertarian society, whereas others I know prefer something more socialist.
Alot of people agree that we could use something better, unfortunately nobody really agrees on what 'better' is.
I actually think our existing constitution and the government laid out in it would run great if it were actually the form it was in today. But right now it's my view that the executive branch has expanded its power past that dictated by the checks and balances of the constitution and resultingly set up way too many regulatory agencies. And the federal government has stripped much of the consitutionally granted power from the states. And many of our constitutionally granted rights have been curtailed in the name of protecting us from evildoers (or making the job of the police easier).
It would be nice to return to the simpler form our government had when it actually ran as envisioned in the constitution.
Unfortuantely american society (among others) is leaning in a direction where the individual is no longer accountable for their actions. Liability for individual's actions are being shifted to product manufacturers. This is mostly thanks to lawyers and greedy americans who think they can get the 'big score' by suing large corporations. Additionally large corporations use lawyers and litigation to intimidate individuals out of behavior that while technically legal is contrary to the way corporations believe things should be done.
You aren't responsible when you spill coffee on yourself, McDonalds is.
You aren't responsible when you get a terminal desease for using a product you knew was unsafe for twenty years, Philip Morris is.
You aren't responsbile when you shoot someone while mugging them, Smith and Wesson is.
You aren't responsible when you pirate music, Napster is.
The terrible end result of this strategy is that your individual rights and fredoms are stripped from you by government because you keep proving time and again that you do not want to be responsible to weild these rights. Government turns into a big babysitter.
Thats the big picture; damn sad where we are going. But to focus on what you can do today to protect yourself:
A solution
Anyone who is considering doing something that may draw the wrath of lawyers should consider incorporating. Incorporation provides protection to those who work for corporation so that these people are not fiscally liable for the actions of the corporation. Thus if you write something somebody does not like and you sign all rights to this code over to your corporation (and licensing this code out with GPL or equiv). Then when the lawsuit comes they can only go after whatever assets your corporation holds, rather than your personal assets.
Incorporating is fairly simple, and involves either some research on your part or paying a lawyer to get things moving. I'd say you probably won't be set back more than $1000, and probably around $150/yr to maintain it (could be more depending on which state you incorporate in and how much research and accounting you do yourself).
It's cheap insurance if you anticipate legal threats. One caveat is to ensure you act within your corporation's framework; if you do things that blurs the line between you 'the corporation' and you 'the individual' you could become personally liable again.
-- Greg
IANAL, so go seek one's advice if you'd like to learn more about incorporating and liability.
Slashdot Mirror
the difference is that it's actually possible to get big government to be on your side through the democratic/lobbying/activism process, where big business will always only be on the side of profit
No, the difference is that if I don't like a business I just don't buy their product. Regardless of if I like or dislike government I have no choice to buy their product... alot of their product.. so much that nearly half of my income goes to purchase that product.
I don't associate with environmentalists, minority (activist groups), or labor because these people see the government as a big club to beat over the heads of those who do not agree with them. I (and probably most geeks) would like the government to perform just the jobs they are constitutionally bound to do and nothing else (i.e. national defense and protecting constitutional rights).
One could say, hypothetically that we have a constitution thats not largely ignored by the government (I know, a stretch!). And one of the consitutional amendments is the right to keep and bear arms. The founding fathers (who now are probably rolling in their graves) felt this right to be _so important_ as to make it second only to the rights to free speech and association.
Even with such constitutional protection the right to keep and bear arms is under heavy assult. Imagine how vulnerable things that aren't contitutionally protected are to bad law or legal decisions.
A labor union is.. an additional boss, only he takes instead of gives you money.
I don't want someone telling me when I should work and when I shouldn't (strike). Telling me how much I should be paid (union-negotiated contracts), and which political party I should donate my money to (union political contributions). It all comes down to having yet another boss.
Thanks to unions in california we've got rules that say I have to work 8 hours a day 5 days a week with very little leeway. Anyone in the tech sector knows that sometimes you are struck with inspiration and work 16 hours in a day, or come in and just feel uninspired and leave after two hours. I would much rather have the ability to tell my employer "okay, I'll work 10 hours four days a week", or "I'll bust my ass the next few weeks to get the new server farm built but then I'm gonna take it easy for awhile" then to have some labor union bought legistation telling me the hours I am allowed to keep.
If you don't like your employer's policies, ask him to change them. If he doesn't go work somewhere else. If you don't have enough balls to take charge of your own life then go be an auto worker or something.
-- Greg
Let me just start by saying, these are my experiences. They may or may not in any way apply to you. Please do not flame me with "I am not like that". These are just some recomendations which you can either use or ignore.
First off, when I'm looking for a junior level admin with just a few years of experience I'm going to pay that admin approprately. So if you go interview having just in the last two years picked up UNIX admin skills do not expect me to pay you for your 15 previous years of COBOL programming. Expect to be paid for the skills you are being hired for, not all the skills you have.
Secondly I've found sometimes older workers are sometimes very set in their ways to the point of arguing with the rest of the group on how something should be done and ignoring directives to do it otherwise. It is fine to let your opionion on a process known, but if the group or the group's manager decides on a course of action that's contrary to how you've done it in the past then suck it up and follow it rather than ignore or fight it.
Third, some people have a hard time accepting that their superiors may be 20-somethings fresh out of school. This is just something you will have to accept and if this is a problem you may have to go to a larger/more established company that's set up like a more traditional institution.
One thing you might ask yourself (and I may just get flamed here) is why are you older and not yet in a senior management role? The usual youth working at startups these days are highly ambitious; entry level sysadmin/programmer outa school, department head by 24, VP by 27, rich VC by 30. If you are 40 and still an entry level programmer, then its not that you're old, its that you lack ambition. Companies seek swimmers not floaters.
One thing that should _not_ be held against older employees is their family commitments. I dislike people thinking that because someone has a family that they cannont live/eat/breathe 'the company'. I'll tell you what, I don't have a family and I could never live/eat/breathe any company. Perhaps thats why I'm a contractor. I value my free time enough that if you want me to work 10 hours extra this week you are going to pay me for every minute.
-- Greg
It's pretty simple why I, a libertarian kinda dude, do not support increasing H1B visas.
The H1B system is nothing more than endentured servitude, a near-slavery system which hopefully is still covered in history classes in public school. H1B employees are forced to work for the company that brought them over or be sent back. The companies who bring them over often give them 'relocation loans' which are due back if the employee leaves. Thus the employer entices over workers for what seems like alot of money but in reality is hardly enough to survive in Silicon Valley. The employee has to work long hours in poor working conditions, and often poor living conditions (because of what they can't afford). H1B's are of course a good way for corporations to get cheap skilled labor that is easily abuseable, instead of hiring and training US citizens. I speak from experience, contracting for several Silicon Valley companies.
Sure, let forigners come here and apply for citizenship; but don't ship them in like product.
-- Greg
If your looking for a warm fuzzy from the slashdot community to 'take action' (i.e. involve lawyers) against this site I doubt you are going to get it.
Lets face it, there is only so many ways you can lay out a website. you can put nav crap on the left side, right side, or top, or have combinations of two or all three. Theres only so many ways a site can be laid out and if one looks like another then either accept that fact or break out the lawyers and join the ranks of the MPAA and RIAA in bullying to get your way.
The only place you would have might have any leeway is on the images, ask them to have made their own if you feel this bit of 'intelectual property' is so important that it needs to be restricted.
Under the 'Legal Information' the only asserted copyright is over articles and reviews, the rest of the site is described as a 'community site', with no stated restrictions on using/copying the website layout and images itself.
If he broke into your servers and stole your (restricted) source code then perhaps action would be justified, but just taking the 'look and feel' while coding/building his own backend does not.
-- Greg
One in ten is not a bad number. One in ten is bad if you are comparing artists to established products. But that is not what we are talking about. You could compare new artists to research and development or startup businesses.
Companies spend alot on R&D, most of which results in dead ends or does not produce immedate benefits but may be useful down the line. Only one in ten new businesses make it to profitability. This number coencides with the RIAA figure.
We all know burning CD's is cheap cheap cheap. However to get to burning that first CD you've got to spend alot of money on studio time, hiring industry experts to do editing/producing/etc, and do a ton of promotion of the new act. And you never know beforehand if anyone will like it, most times they don't.
Record companies more or less equate to high-risk loan companies with correspondingly high interest rates. The successful artists are subsidizing the search for new talent.
-- Greg
It should be noted its easy to have a terrabyte sized database perform decently if each record is several megabites (high-res arial images)!
Its an entirely different matter to make your terabyte database perform if each record were only several kilobytes, which is much closer to what a 'real world' application looks like.
Simple math. Large record-size, less records; small record-size, more records. The size of the database itself is not the big performance issue your paying thousands for a vendor to address; it's the number of records and being able to search millions of records in a very short time.
So, with smoke-and-mirrors microsoft can exclaim 'look at our terabyte database' and con those who were allways their best customers, the non-technical, into buying that load of BS.
-- Greg
Another piece of NSI's plan has fallen into place.
They changed the policy to state that they, not you, own the domain.
Now they have a court decision to back it up.
You will be reciving notice in the mail that a corporate partner has expressed interest in your domain name; you will of course have the option to outbid them. Have a nice day.
-- Greg
When Judge Kaplan took the mantra 'information wants to be free' (as in free-dom) and turned it into 'information should be available without charge' (as in free aol CD's) he took a step that, carried to it's logical conclusion, 'free software movement' would be categorized as the 'without charge software movement'.
The meanings of free (liberty) and freedom are being marginalized all the time by corporate interests. It's a common theme in adds nowadays.. the idea that consumer goods give you 'freedom' (i.e. cars); that you have a 'right to free checking'. I don't like 'the freedom to choose which cola to drink' when it is marginalizing my freedoms to speak my mind, carry a gun, and worship in any or no manner.
This sort of thing is to categorize people looking for free-dom as looking for free-ride, and that translates from someone seeking liberty to someone seeking to steal just by using the word out of context.
It's fast approaching what was described in 1984; 'free' will no longer carry both it's meanings. It'll be free beer and nothing else.
-- Greg
I dislike proposed censorware laws as much as the next guy, but I also believe they have every right to sell their product to people who wish to filter their own PC's (parents). I also find 'stupid filter tricks' as amusing as the next guy, but in this case it's Akamai's problem and not the filtering companies.
I must point out that this is no deliberate desicion by Akamai to stop those 'evil censors'. The truth of the matter is that they never wrote any security into their network to prevent any website from being 'akamized'. I also have it on good authority that it's alot of work to purge content from an akamai server. Thus in reality, akamai's service is the web-equivalent of an open email relay!
This time you all laugh because it's the filtering companies getting the short end of the stick. Next time this bug will affect you. How long do you think it'll take spammers to use this bug to put their 'get rich quick' webpages into akamai and use those links when they send out spam? ISP's right now can eliminate websites near-realtime when they are used to sell products advertised in spam, which discourages spammers from even trying as their page is taken down almost immediately. If the spammers can be relatively sure their pages would be up for days on end (as they could with akamai) then it encourages them to send more spam, that ends up in your inbox.
So what they are really saying when they say 'we will not commit to filtering' is 'we do not see fixing this security hole as enhancing profits and therefore cannot justify commiting programmers to close it'. I'll repeat for emphasis: This is an akamai security hole. This is the web-equivalent of an open email relay.
-- Greg
PS: I've reported this bug in the past, and they claimed it was a non-issue. Does someone have to write a 2600 howto article on getting service from akamai before it's fixed?
The MPAA just spent four million on a single legal case to uphold their monopoly on information. How much airtime do you think four million can buy, especially if you are the one's who own the major networks?
How difficult do you think it would be for these networks to get Joe average american worked up enough to demand action? How hard would the desision be for the government on a cause the average american supports and for those who contribute so much to each of the political parties?
Sealand is of dubious standing as a sovern nation, and has a combined sea/land/air based armed forces of a rifle and a speedboat. It would not be hard to justify the forceful removal of servers by armed invasion. Not too hard to justify if you can convince people they help terrorists and child pornographers.
Unless sealand someday becomes a major NAP, then lets not forget that a few simple court orders to shut down their traffic at the NAPs or their leased-lines where they enter other nations could have the same effect.
If sealand becomes inconvienent to the large corporations or governments of this globe it can and will be silenced.
-- Greg
There is _no way_ the state change of nitrogen could propel a car at any reasonable speed for any reasonable distance. This simple state change could not impart the kind of energy you get from combustion. Add to that somewhere the energy gets spent to compress the nitrogen to liquid, and keep it in cool storage.. both from coal and oil burning power plants. And then there's the billions that would need to be spent to build infrustructure.
You could go electric, but then your propelling a thousand pounds of battery; and you can only go about 90 miles on flat ground if you don't run the AC. Again you've just pushed the polution problem out of your car but back to a coal or oil burning electrical plant.
If you wanna go eco today the best solution is to get a hybrid; I think honda makes one. If you are lucky enough to live in an area with decent public transportation then go bus/train; good public transit is a rarity in north america, they should take a lesson from europe on how to do it.
I sense an ecologic agenda on the part of Timothy; seems to post alot of this tree huggin kinda stuff. Know how much toxic waste was created casting the silicon for that computer you are typing on? har har har.
-- Greg
I have not read the ruling, but I've read some of the trial transcripts and the defense covered the issues you consider important points.
* If DeCSS was made for Linux DVD players, then why was the compiled Windows port made and released?
The reason why you need exactly this, a windows binary to decode DVD for development of a Linux player, was covered extensively by the defense; and in answering the first point, the remaining points are answered.
Linux, at that time, could not read the DVD filesystem format and there were no DVD-drive drivers for Linux.
Developers could use DeCSS to decode a movie using a windows box, then use that decoded data to develop the rest of their DVD player applications. They could write the portions that play the MPEG video and audio to the screen while others worked on the problem of DVD-drive drivers. Once a DVD-drive driver was written for Linux the DeCSS code that did the decoding could be integrated with the Linux DVD player.
As far as DeCSS as a tool for copying DVD's, the defense showed that there were several other DVD rippers out there that were both easier to use and faster.. Thus their emphasis on trying to get the plantifs to answer on if the pirated movies they found on line were ripped using DeCSS or not. Chances are the pirates used one of the easier tools.
The platifs alledge the poliferation of DVD piracy was due to DeCSS; The defense attempted to show (and what I think) that it's not DeCSS, but the availability of cheap broadband access and larger storage capacities that are the reasons DVD's are being traded online.
-- Greg
They (big businesses in general) make money selling hardware like tape recorders and CDROM burners. They also make money selling licensed DVD players. They don't make money if someone is giving a comprable product away for free.
One big problem I see with this and with many of the other injunctions as of late is that the judiciary has taken it apon themselves to be guardians of the booming economy over their responsibility of administering over a fair and just legal system.
Look at the desisions and injunctions handed down over the last few years. They have all come down on the side of whoever stands to make/lose the most money regardless of who's in the right or wrong.
I don't know if the judges fear that they could damage the strong economy by handing down rulings that hurt corporate profits or what; are they fearful of their 401K funds? I don't know.
What would I suggest? If the law is unjust just ignore it. There are enough people on the internet (not to mention enough nations) that any regulation passed down by one nation can all but be completely ignored by the little guys in all nations.
-- Greg
Microsoft usually comes out with these "we'll have an application in this space real soon, check out our vapor" whenever they are afraid a competitor may move into that space and become dominant.. They do this in hopes that people who traditionally have been microsoft customers will wait for the microsoft product to be released later rather than migrate now to a competetor's solution..
The question that begs asking is, what application are they afraid of? Is it StarOffice? Is it applixware? Are they afraid of the GNOME announcement that there will be something competing with their all-encompasing win32 GUI/API? Perhaps this is the case, they want people to write to the win32 API on Linux rather than to the new gtk/gnome API.
If this vaporware ever condenses into something real and if they can trick developers to be lazy and write to a win32 API on top of linux instead of learning GTK... Then developers and users will not see the advantages the Linux platform provides over windows; after all it'll act and run like windows if it's on top of the windows libraries. In the end new users will be disenchanted with the lindows-winux system and go back to regular windows.
Probably an announcement is forthcoming that the win32 API for Linux is 'just around the corner' ('just wait for the new release!').
-- Greg
The politicians have found an issue to devide us like no other, it's an issue that many people hold so dear to their hearts that they would concentrate on it beyond any other and could never be swayed in their view. An issue that could not be imperically solved as a matter of science. That issue is abortion, and it has given the politicians full reign to do whatever they like while keeping the public at large distracted.
It comes down to when you believe a cell or collection of cells is no longer just a collection of cells but a human being. We all agree that killing a human being is wrong, we all agree that killing a collection of cells with no sentience is not wrong; Such as killing bacteria, an infection, or what have you. There are those that believe that human life occurs at conception, others believe that it occurs at birth and others at some time in-between. One side considers the act murder, the other side argues that the fetus is not alive and bringing an unwanted child into the world is wrong.
Lets face it... If abortion were completely outlawed today it would just mean those seeking abortion would go to the black market or to another country to have the procedure done. If abortion (all forms) were completely made legal then those opposed to it would do what they could do interfere with the availability and safety of the procedure.
So while we throttle each other over pro-choice / pro-life and over an issue we'll _never_ all be able to agree on the politicians are out taking away your god given rights outlined in the constitution and making special rules for special (read influencial) people.
I have never seen a greater social engineering en-masse as the issue of abortion has created. They pull this wool over our eyes so they can go on doing things that affect us constantly, things like raising our taxes while doleing out moneys to special interests from corporate welfare to forign aid to sensitivity training (I'll now note that all sides of the spectrum are guilty of taking public moneies to further their private goals).
The surgical operation of abortion is an act a relively small part of the population actually indulges in and usually not repeatedly. But it gets a great deal of political attention while laws and rights lost that affect all of us every day are ignored.
I can't put mickey mouse on my webpage because disney's lobbyists convinced congress to extend copyright nearly indefinately. 50% of what you and I make goes one way or another to the government in taxes to support programs we may not believe in. That affects me around 40 hours of every week. Politicians complain about high oil prices and forign dependence on oil while passing legislation restricting domestic oil exploration. That affects me every time I drive. We are selling missle technologies, selling strong cryptography, and giving favored trading status to mainland China. This is a country we should be shunning given their opposing idealogical views on government and their use of slave and (political) prisoner labor (theres something there for everybody). The government can give cisco routers with full encryption to red china but I'm not allowed to give a friend in australia a copy of PGP? Are you shitting me??
I tried to keep this as neutral as possible, in hopes that it will provide an interesting read to all sides of the political spectrum. I just hope we and the rest of 'joe sixpack' america can look beyond the surface and see what the real issues are.
-- Greg
After recieving the usual letter from their lawyer along the lines of "transfer this domain or we will begin arbitration proceedings", could you then file your own complaint with an arbiter that's less biased to multinationals?
One might be able to argue that the multinational's 'intent to transfer' said name would violate your trademarks and service marks (Para 4.b in the dispute policy), that the multinational would have less legitimate interest in the name and that the multinational is acting in bad faith.
Of course someone will have to be a test-case to see if pre-emptively filing a dispute will be heard by any dispute panel.
It should be noted that the word 'trademark' does not mean 'registered trademark'! The ICANN policy does not require a registered trademark. If you can show you've been using the domain's name for legitimate activity for a period of time and that the domain name is identified with your activities then you can show that name as an unregistered trademark.
-- Greg
IANAL, but I play one on slashdot.
Why does 'Plain Old Text' render as Extrans and vice-versa?
NSI ignored its rules and actively encourgaged people to abuse the TLD conventions.. It's simple, each domain means another $100/mo for NSI. 'registering .com? register .net and .org too', hence making NSI three times the money.
I remember when NSI was handed the TLD registration contracts, back then we were 'naieve' in that we thought the newcomers to the internet would be good neigbours just as everyone up to that point had been. Nobody expected how much of a mess people out for scratch would cause. Hindsight being 20/20 the government and the community should have had more oversight and required NSI to play by the established rules (RFC's).
Now we have a mess where the TLD's are meaningless and we may as well allow registration in the TLD namespace. www.coke or www.intel
-- Greg
I hope this is not the FBI responding to the EPIC FOIA request. The FBI should turn over their unclassified documents on carnivore immediately; not coming up with some scheme to bury this issue for months so the public can get distracted by some other issue..
I would say this tactic works fairly well, nobody's thought about the missing/found nuclear harddrives at los alamos lately. I wonder how the token non-investigation is going.
-- Greg
Ugh, well meaning but ultimately doing more harm than good. Many have already mentioned the toxic nature of the manufacture and disposal of lead-acid batteries. Lets now talk about the solar pannels themselves.
The manufacture of solar panels requires _lots_ of extremely pure silicon. The process to get this silicon requires many 55 gallon drums of things that will melt your flesh off, cause cancer, and/or create further undesireable effects if spilled into the groundwater (drinking supply). All this nasty stuff has to be disposed of, in non-ecologically friendly ways.
It's like those VW busses with bad piston rings leaving an ozone-killing smog-trail in it's wake sporting 'save the earth' bumperstickers.
One thing I never understood, and has bugged me for awhile, is why is it that environmentalists are against nuclear power? It produces no air polution, the waste products, while admittedly nasty, are fairly small and compact and therefore easily stored with minimum fuss, does not require drastic changes to local ecologies (such as the huge resivors which accompany hydroelectric dams), and does not require massive infrustructures to bulk transport fuels (avoiding spills which destroy whole coastlines). It seems to me to be the lesser of all evils.
-- Greg
Your wonderful and visionary liberals are now touting their great 'deeply religious' VP as we speak. I can't even express the joy I am getting ripping on you liberals who for years have equated religion to evil (disclosure: I'm agnostic, and libertarian).
Your wonderful 'Dems' gave us miracles like the clipper chip, longstanding crypto export controls, and carnivore. The least I can say is this, the Republicans want government to take less of your money than more; perhaps that will mean there will be less money around for them to fund projects to circumvent our individual liberties.
'confiscate your computers', is that like confiscating our guns? Oops, the liberals are already busy taking that right away from us, and considering crypto is munitions I guess AlGore will be beating on my door any time now to take my PC from me.
I've breathed the tear gas too; in training for my four years as a soldier in the US Army. I even got to go on one of Slick Willie's ill-conceved police actions to save the people of Haiti from themselves. What a great job we did with his leadership, millions (billions) wasted, thousands of americans away from their families for months on end and the government there is just as bad as when we arrived.
Why don't you go sell commie somewhere else, we're all stocked up here.
-- Greg
This story has nothing tech related. Why was it posted here? Is somebody friends with the webmaster of hackedtobits.com? Is this a scheme to drive traffic to their site and boost their readership out of some kind of favor?
Secondly, this diatribe is poorly written. Congratulations, you went looking to get arrested and you did. What an act of briliance. And the issue you were protesting was _so important_ to you that you neglected even to mention what it was.
Lets see, we have 'canidate X sucks', a re-run of a book review on a book that wasn't good or partial and now this drivel all in the last few days. WTF are you editors doing??
Is this an effort to be reactionary rather than inteligent in an effort to drive more visitors to the site? Are you missing your banner-add impression projections and need to pull some serious traffic to get it back up??
Give us decent news! theres lots of interesting stuff happening in the world, but we keep getting this worthless trash.
-- Greg
What form of government would you recommend?
I would prefer a libertarian society, whereas others I know prefer something more socialist.
Alot of people agree that we could use something better, unfortunately nobody really agrees on what 'better' is.
I actually think our existing constitution and the government laid out in it would run great if it were actually the form it was in today. But right now it's my view that the executive branch has expanded its power past that dictated by the checks and balances of the constitution and resultingly set up way too many regulatory agencies. And the federal government has stripped much of the consitutionally granted power from the states. And many of our constitutionally granted rights have been curtailed in the name of protecting us from evildoers (or making the job of the police easier).
It would be nice to return to the simpler form our government had when it actually ran as envisioned in the constitution.
-- Greg
A problem
Unfortuantely american society (among others) is leaning in a direction where the individual is no longer accountable for their actions. Liability for individual's actions are being shifted to product manufacturers. This is mostly thanks to lawyers and greedy americans who think they can get the 'big score' by suing large corporations. Additionally large corporations use lawyers and litigation to intimidate individuals out of behavior that while technically legal is contrary to the way corporations believe things should be done.
You aren't responsible when you spill coffee on yourself, McDonalds is.
You aren't responsible when you get a terminal desease for using a product you knew was unsafe for twenty years, Philip Morris is.
You aren't responsbile when you shoot someone while mugging them, Smith and Wesson is.
You aren't responsible when you pirate music, Napster is.
The terrible end result of this strategy is that your individual rights and fredoms are stripped from you by government because you keep proving time and again that you do not want to be responsible to weild these rights. Government turns into a big babysitter.
Thats the big picture; damn sad where we are going. But to focus on what you can do today to protect yourself:
A solution
Anyone who is considering doing something that may draw the wrath of lawyers should consider incorporating. Incorporation provides protection to those who work for corporation so that these people are not fiscally liable for the actions of the corporation. Thus if you write something somebody does not like and you sign all rights to this code over to your corporation (and licensing this code out with GPL or equiv). Then when the lawsuit comes they can only go after whatever assets your corporation holds, rather than your personal assets.
Incorporating is fairly simple, and involves either some research on your part or paying a lawyer to get things moving. I'd say you probably won't be set back more than $1000, and probably around $150/yr to maintain it (could be more depending on which state you incorporate in and how much research and accounting you do yourself).
It's cheap insurance if you anticipate legal threats. One caveat is to ensure you act within your corporation's framework; if you do things that blurs the line between you 'the corporation' and you 'the individual' you could become personally liable again.
-- Greg
IANAL, so go seek one's advice if you'd like to learn more about incorporating and liability.