There is a law, the "Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996". Do a search anywhere on those terms and you'll find a sizeable list of sites, such as:
You are right though, from what I understand, it should be illegal to use the SSN outside of "tax purposes" but I think there are plenty of current violations or at least obvious bending of the rules.
Yes, that's the general rule of adminstering unix - get someone to help you. That's the problem! Home users don't want to have to call in a child prodigy with a Jolt addiction to get things done.
What people really want is something that DOESN'T BREAK. Once people around me know that I'm a "programmer", whenever they have computer problems, they ask me about it... My parents, my brother, neighbors, coworkers, my landlord... All these people are Windows users, they probably wish they didn't have to ask, but they do.
It isn't a Unix issue; it's about software with lots of complexities, and it's about software that breaks.
Personally, I prefer unix (generally, Linux specifically), because if something goes wrong, I can go in, find out what's wrong and fix it... with Windows, I find it far more difficult to even TELL what is wrong, let alone fix it. But that is just a band-aid after something breaks. What needs to be addressed is making software more robust so that it can handle/diagnose/fix/reconfigure itself so people don't HAVE to worry about the internals.
I thought Netscape gave away the browser, first. I thought the intent of that was to capture market and up-end the game against IE, by changing the rules...
Don't be too sure of that. Forcing people to sign is no guarantee that they will actually READ what they sign... When I bought my car, the sales dude was mildly suprised that I actually read all the things I was being asked to sign. I've also heard that buying a house takes 2 or more TIMES the number of signatures and that most people don't ever read them... Personally, I have read quite a few of the EULAs. I don't read them in detail any more, but I still skim, looking for the differences. I suspect we are the exception, real signature or no.
-- "I'm a hacker, not because I was programming when I was 13, but because I'm human."
This has been discussed above... It would only be illegal AFTER the laws have passed. Creating crimes out of actions after the fact, I think, is unconstitutional.
-- "I'm a hacker, not because I was programming when I was 13, but because I'm human."
The article doesn't even mention one of the scientists doing Real work in EB, Rodney Brooks from MIT. I've seen some very nifty things done with independent robots from him, (ala Ghengis and Attila) as well as some 'more recent' (past 2-3 years, maybe) footage of him interacting with a roughly humanoid bust, two arms, a few eyes... pretty cool, although I haven't gotten a good feel of what is going on behind the scenes and how the robot is driven.
From what I've seen, he talks about his techniques as a "Subsumption Architecture"...
There is an interview with him at: http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/brooks/brooks_p1.h tml The picture there is the humanoid bust I mentioned above. He has quite a few papers out, but I don't have any refs off hand.
When KT was talking about CS being "done", it seemed like he was talking about it's "frontierness". I would imagine it could be compared with mechanical engineering, although I don't know a whole lot about That field. ME is very well established, lots of well know techniques, yeah there are still new materials, new techniques for them, but there is a large body of information on how to do the majority of things you're going to want to do with it...
So, yeah, I can see an end to the frontier of CS, and I can see a lot of things yet to do... but fields like Genetic Engineering or Nanotechnology are still much less developed. (No, I don't do either of those fields either.)
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.fairus.org/03205707.htm or the full text here:
http://www.visalaw.com/docs/IIIRA.html
You are right though, from what I understand, it should be illegal to use the SSN outside of "tax purposes" but I think there are plenty of current violations or at least obvious bending of the rules.
What people really want is something that DOESN'T BREAK. Once people around me know that I'm a "programmer", whenever they have computer problems, they ask me about it... My parents, my brother, neighbors, coworkers, my landlord... All these people are Windows users, they probably wish they didn't have to ask, but they do.
It isn't a Unix issue; it's about software with lots of complexities, and it's about software that breaks.
Personally, I prefer unix (generally, Linux specifically), because if something goes wrong, I can go in, find out what's wrong and fix it... with Windows, I find it far more difficult to even TELL what is wrong, let alone fix it. But that is just a band-aid after something breaks. What needs to be addressed is making software more robust so that it can handle/diagnose/fix/reconfigure itself so people don't HAVE to worry about the internals.
I thought Netscape gave away the browser, first. I thought the intent of that was to capture market and up-end the game against IE, by changing the rules...
Don't be too sure of that. Forcing people to sign is no guarantee that they will actually READ what they sign... When I bought my car, the sales dude was mildly suprised that I actually read all the things I was being asked to sign. I've also heard that buying a house takes 2 or more TIMES the number of signatures and that most people don't ever read them...
Personally, I have read quite a few of the EULAs. I don't read them in detail any more, but I still skim, looking for the differences. I suspect we are the exception, real signature or no.
--
"I'm a hacker, not because I was programming when I was 13, but because I'm human."
This has been discussed above... It would only be illegal AFTER the laws have passed. Creating crimes out of actions after the fact, I think, is unconstitutional.
--
"I'm a hacker, not because I was programming when I was 13, but because I'm human."
Here
Also, it is actually on the Edge site mentioned by another poster....
From what I've seen, he talks about his techniques as a "Subsumption Architecture"...
There is an interview with him at: http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/brooks/brooks_p1.h tml The picture there is the humanoid bust I mentioned above. He has quite a few papers out, but I don't have any refs off hand.
So, yeah, I can see an end to the frontier of CS, and I can see a lot of things yet to do... but fields like Genetic Engineering or Nanotechnology are still much less developed. (No, I don't do either of those fields either.)