Copyright is not property. The books are the property of whoever owns the individual books. The right to copy those books are something entirely different.
Exactly. So if Google wanted to establish a service where it kept a gigantic room that contained a copy of every book in publication, and you could call up Google on the phone and give an operator a snippet of text you wanted to find, and a guy would leaf through every one of those books and mark down where he found the text, then it would be perfectly within its rights to do so.
Copying the contents of all those books into a database for search purposes, on the other hand, is a different matter.
Here are some alternative options:
The publisher could decide to put up its own searchable database of the contents of its products, and offer that service to the public itself.
The publisher could create such a database, make available an API for accessing it, and charge Google money to include it in its services.
The publisher could decide that Yahoo does a better job of searching information, collect a fee from Yahoo (or not), and give Yahoo exclusive rights to create a database of the publisher's information.
The publisher could feel that databases were against the will of Allah and his prophets and determine that no such database will ever be created from its works.
On the other hand, Google seems to be choosing option #5 -- just copy the information into a database and offer it to the public without getting permission. Unfortunatley, under copyright law option #5 doesn't exist.
I agree. I'm not opposed to the technology; not at all. It seems ingeneous and useful. But it seems patently obvious to me that the program should be opt-in, not opt-out. You wouldn't want an arbitrary commercial company -- a publicly-traded corporation, no less -- having access to your health records, or your business records, just because that corporation and some uninvolved, third-party academics said it was "for the public good." Why on earth should a publishing company be forced to turn over all the fruits of its labors -- remember its sole business is publishing -- because Google feels like it?
Fair use, my ass. The only reason Google wants this program to be opt-out is because that makes it better for Google. Google plans to use the fact that it has access to all this material as a way to market Google's products and services. If it only has a partial database, those products and services instantly become less valuable. But I ask again, why should a publishing company be made to market Google's products and services, for no benefit to the publishing company?
Ah -- you say there's a marketing benefit to the publisher. Fine. Then Google should do some market research to figure out what that benefit is, in dollar amount, and charge the publisher for it. Sounds like a great business opportunity for Google to me. But of course, that wouldn't work, because it would give companies the opportunity to opt out by not paying, and Google doesn't want that.
Suppose Google wanted to put my likeness up on its Web site. Should I have to write and ask them to take it down? Isn't it reasonable to assume that Google doesn't have the right to do that without my permission? So why is it any different for my words?
I repeat: Fair use, my ass. "Public commons," my ass! This isn't "public." This isn't "us." This is Google and Google alone. This isn't for the posterity of society. It's for Google's posterity, and longterm financial gain, at the expense of other businesses.
Promoting the good of society is the role of the government. If the world needs an electronic index of books, then let the federal government pass a law mandating it, provide budget for it, and let it be managed as a project of the Library of Congress. If, on the other hand, a commercial company like Google wants to spend its own money to do the same, then more power to them. But since it's not Congress, Google shouldn't be able to force anybody in this country to comply with its business goals -- in fact, you might think it would have the good grace to ask first, if it's really dedicated to "not being evil."
(And re: "not being evil" -- am I to presume Google is hiring philosophy PhDs as well as computer science ones?)
The status quo is that you may not copy creative works and give them to your friends. Every license in the CC suite allows you to do that. Every one.
I am by no means an expert of Creative Commons licenses, but Stallman does not feel that is the case. He cites two that he feels do not give you that freedom.
That is not the status quo.
That's up to interpretation. The way I see it, Creative Commons doesn't give you anything that intellectual property law doesn't give you already. If I published a novel, I could include a license on the front page that lets people copy it. Creative Commons didn't invent that right. It only drafted the language that non-lawyers could safely use to present such a license.
The same is true of the GPL. It absolutely relies on copyright law to give it its power. Without copyright law, it would be meaningless, because there would be no way to enforce any of its terms.
What makes Stallman different, however, is his staunch and intractable stance. He has clearly thought his views through and states them plainly given any opportunity. He has a mission. He does not waver, nor even like to be perceived as wavering.
Creative Commons, by definition, wavers. Its various licenses offer a veritable smorgasbord of compromises. It presents no clear agenda for particpants. Instead it merely offers what I described: tools for navigating the status quo. It provides legal language for contracts that extend freedoms for copyrighted works, aimed at creators who may not themselves understand the finer points of copyright law. That's laudable, but nowhere near as revolutionary as Stallman's goals (again, whether you agree with those goals or not).
Sorry -- when I said "BitTorrent people" what I meant was the BitTorrent company. They should not have trademarked BitTorrent when it has this history of referring to a free product.
What Stallman is saying sounds, as usual, intellectually consistent. Because some licenses that are called Creative Commons licenses include restrictions that Stallman does not support, Stallman will not endorse the Creative Commons brand. In other words, he will not automatically give you a pat on the back just because you use a Creative Commons license; he wants to know what the terms of the license are first.
Sounds fine to me. I've never been a big supporter of Creative Commons for much the same reason. All Creative Commons seems to be, to me, is a collection of license that someone has paid a lawyer to draft up and then donated that work to the public. You can pick and choose between the licenses and their clauses. It's a generous donation and it's very handy.
Then again, I've never seen how Creative Commons amounts to the "social movement" that people make it out to be. Stallman, whether you agree with him or not, seems devoutly intent on shaking up the foundations of the modern concept of intellectual property. By comparison, Creative Commons licenses seem like little more than tools for helping people navigate the status quo.
So... you think you're going to be a DJ into your 50s? Good luck on that. It may seem impossible to you right now, but sooner or later nobody is going to want to listen to your music. You'll be an old fart just like everybody else your age. My advice is to start saving.
If companies started using the term "google" to refer to searches that did not involve the Google.com Web site or products produced by Google the company, you bet your ass Google would sue. Trademark owners are required to vigorously defend their marks or else they risk losing them.
There are various popular examples. Aspirin, for instance. At one time it was a brand name -- I believe owned by the Bayer company. But enough other people started using the word as a generic that the trademark was eventually lost, and you now refer to it as "aspirin" (small A).
So if you distribute a modified version of the Firefox source you have to remove all references to the name "Firefox"? That sounds pretty much like what you're saying. If independent software packagers risk running afoul of the intellectual property lawyers retained by open source projects then what sort of mess have we created?
The right thing for the BitTorrent people to do would probably be to pick a different brand name and stick to that -- say FileStream, for example. If the FileStream-branded BitTorrent client is so much better than everybody else's, then FileStream will become the preferred brand in the public consciousness and they can the protect THAT, rather than muddying up the waters by firing off lawsuits over nomenclature that, until recently, had been free.
I agree. I've usually taken the option of quitting. I don't regret any of those choices -- in most cases they have translated into career advancement, by giving me options that are more likely to pay off for me in the long term. However, speaking as one who actually has a job he wouldn't mind keeping for a while (for once), I can say that I wish my career had become more stable earlier in my life. That would have given me more of an opportunity to start putting money away. Depending on what part of the country you live in, the downpayment on your first home can be a massive thing. I live in San Francisco, and if I wanted to get in on property in this town I should have done it at least five years ago. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to put together the nest egg.
Also, don't underestimate the possiblity of early retirement. My parents retired before sixty and they have never been happier in their whole lives. I know that for young people it seems ideal to have all your fun when you're young. But go figure how much more fun you can have when the fun never actually has to stop, because you've worked it out so that you never have to have a job again.
Haha... I'm with you there dude, I was actually going to make a crack about the gay guy having all the female friends too.
Only then I realized that being gay in high school was never a real good way to avoid getting beat up. Or being gay and walking down the street in a lot of cities in America, for that matter.:-\
Since there is no absolute normal, it sounds like your argument applies to everyone -- to be alive and exist with others means that one will be teased, and probably tease others too.
You got it. Is that not your experience? It sure is mine. Contrary to the poster below, even big meatheads who win the state football championship get made fun of (maybe just not to their faces).
Here's a link to an article about the hair care products. It says the research is not conclusive, but rather suspicious. Apparently about half of all black girls in the United States start developing secondary sex characteristics before age 8 (yikes! didn't know that), while the rate is much lower for black girls in other parts of the world (e.g. Africa).
It isn't uniformly that way. It depends on the nature of the filtering process. A counter example is kids who come into school already reading. Their advantage is gone by grade 4. Why? All kids pass into the next grade so there is no filtering process.
Care to provide a statistic for that? Seems counter-intuitive to me. If a kid comes into grade 1 already knowing how to read, that kid probably likes to read, which seems likely to be a lifelong advantage, education-wise.
There are all sorts of reasons for early puberty in women. One study found that black girls seemed to be hitting puberty earlier at a much more rapid rate than white girls. Investigation revealed that some of the hair care products commonly used to straighten black girls' hair were responsible, believe it or not. The chemicals in those products, when combined with other environmental factors, would create synthetic estrogens in the girls' bloodstreams, causing them to begin to develop breasts and pubic hair at really young ages (like 5). When the use of the products was discontinued, the breast tissue would disappear and the pubic hair fell out.
Interesting anecdote, however it's actually slightly offtopic. If you check TFA it's actually mostly talking about boys. The victimization in this case is not the rape (or date rape) that you assume. It's about teens getting beaten up, or stabbed in knife fights, etc.
Makes sense, if you think about it. Men, particularly young-ish men, perceive similarly-aged men as rivals, especially where women are present. If you believe a rival is younger than you, you might figure "he's just a little punk" and use your apparent seniority to browbeat him into backing down. If you think he's your same age, on the other hand, you might decide that a more drastic form of "correction" is necessary. At the same time, he might also tend to react less predictably -- being young, he feels like he has more to prove. The whole situation escalates much more rapidly than a confrontation between true peers and quickly turns to violence.
According to TFA though, the main factor that helps early puberty boys avoid this phenomenon is having a lot of female friends.
Now, how difficult would it be to replace the multi-ton cargo with say a few tons of explosives, poisons, or whatever nasty stuff a "terrorist" can think of? Zero.
Well... you make an interesting point, but the difference between the two cargos is clear. Any operation like the Mexican tunnel you talk about cannot be the product of one individual, or even a handful of like-minded individuals. It's going to be the result of a concerted effort of something like an organized drug cartel. In theory I guess it's possible that a terrorist group operating on North American soil could be sufficiently organized to pull off an anthrax-smuggling operation like you describe. It's just very unlikely.
Why? Because all those people smuggling drugs are working to enrich themselves (literally) by selling high-margin products (drugs) to one of the most affluent markets in the world. From an Occam's Razor/human nature perspective, doesn't that motivation sound a lot more logical than trying to murder the people who belong to that market, or destroy their economy?
Don't be naive: You can't build a tunnel across the Mexican border without a lot of complicity from a lot of people... including building contractors, local police, Federal police, drug runners, and everybody else involved -- on both sides of the border. If you were a terrorist, you'd have to be freakin' Tony Robbins to be influential and motivational enough to convince American citizens with the degree of affluence and connections necessary to put your plan into motion that blowing up Americans is the right thing to do.
Oh, I'm not talking about risking your job. If pointing out operational inefficiencies means risking his job then he really does need to find a new job, because the people he works for are dangerous lunatics.
Even if he does have to put his job on the line, what I'm saying is that you actually risk your career more if you fall into a rut where you don't ever accomplish anything. The earlier poster was asking why the guy should even care. I'm saying he should care because his future may depend on it.
Well, and if we want to get pedantic, Romero zombies never ate anybody's brains. They mostly went for the guts. It was "Return of the Living Dead," the comedy/horror take-off on the Romero films, that brought in all the brain-eating.
But if the resources required to complete every task (i.e. people) all come from the same pool, then man-hours spent working on a less-critical, long-term-impact project is always time spent not working on a more mission-critical, customer-facing project. So in a sense, yes, everything needs to follow the same process.
If the applications you're talking about really are going to have primarily long-term impact, though, then maybe all is not lost. If the impact is long-term then the fixes don't have to be made right away, because not fixing something is not causing short-term losses, right? It sounds to me like you're going to have to live with what seem to be excessive turnarounds on IT projects. Maybe, then, what you should be concentrating on in the immediate timeframe is not a commitment to act on any particular trouble ticket, but rather developing a regular schedule of upgrades or software releases that you can get IT to commit to.
For example, you could work to set up a timeline where such-and-such server will receive three upgrades over the next 12 months. The IT department might argue you down to two updates. That might not be anywhere near as agile as you want, but it's still better than one update every nine months.
Once you've established these update deliverables, then you go back and establish just what an update means. You tell them: We want this and this for the June update. They counter: No way, it's just not possible. We can do A and B but C will never happen. You say: Never happen? Not even by the November update?
By keeping the actual definitions of upgrades flexible up front, you create a kind of agility for your group. Things won't happen quickly, but again, actual speed doesn't seem to be your problem so much as the administrative overhead of just starting the process of getting something done. If you're a programmer, think of it as the difference in system overhead between starting a thread and forking a whole new process.
And from time to time, IT will probably try to explain that you're asking too much of them, but all you have to do is ask, "Why?" Ask them to make a real business case for why they can't do what you want them to do by such-and-such date. And who knows? They give you good reasons. But if that's the case, then it's time for you to go back up the hall and take that information to the next level of management, get it in front of your executive officer, or whomever needs to know about it in order to get the budget, personnel, or upper-level directives necessary to get it moving. The best way to grease the wheels of progress is to do it without playing the blame game -- just gather the facts and figure out what needs to be done to get things back on track.
It all sounds like a big hassle, I'm sure, and yes office politics will be involved. But you'll learn some strategies of how to navigate your way through the business world, and devoting some time and energy this way would probably be preferable to just sitting there feeling frustrated.
be grateful you have a job. it's obvious there is nothing you can do about it, so why are you sweating it? go with the flow and live a less-stressed existence. it's not worth creating ripples. the only people who judge you for your work aptitude are you and other men; no one else cares.
Well all right! Way to spend your life being a doormat.
Sure -- if I can read between the lines of what you seem to be saying -- the chicks might not care if you're good at your work or not. But some of those mere "other men" you mention might also happen to sign your paychecks.
The guy was complaining that his company is missing significant business opportunities. Translation: The company is missing significant business opportunities that he could have been instrumental in acting upon. But he can't, because of IT bureaucracy.
OK, so it's not his fault -- but do you think that's going to matter next time he goes in for a raise or a promotion? They'll want to see all the forward-thinking plans he's executed on, and he's going to have nothing, because trying to do anything is like wading through mud.
Even worse, what happens when it's time to a round of layoffs? What justification will he have to keep his job then?
Maybe it's easy for you to just sit there and be grateful you have a job. If it is, it's probably because you've only had one or two entry-level jobs. For people who have had a job for a number of years, however, just having a job no longer seems like Goal #1. Those people start to have other ambitions -- like buying a house, for instance, or a new car, or providing for their families. Maybe you've put yourself through college. Have you put anybody else through college lately? Dads sometimes like to do those kinds of things. They're hard to do when you've spent the last five or ten years sitting at the same desk in the basement, just spinning your wheels.
Slashdot Mirror
Copying the contents of all those books into a database for search purposes, on the other hand, is a different matter.
Here are some alternative options:
On the other hand, Google seems to be choosing option #5 -- just copy the information into a database and offer it to the public without getting permission. Unfortunatley, under copyright law option #5 doesn't exist.
I agree. I'm not opposed to the technology; not at all. It seems ingeneous and useful. But it seems patently obvious to me that the program should be opt-in, not opt-out. You wouldn't want an arbitrary commercial company -- a publicly-traded corporation, no less -- having access to your health records, or your business records, just because that corporation and some uninvolved, third-party academics said it was "for the public good." Why on earth should a publishing company be forced to turn over all the fruits of its labors -- remember its sole business is publishing -- because Google feels like it?
Fair use, my ass. The only reason Google wants this program to be opt-out is because that makes it better for Google. Google plans to use the fact that it has access to all this material as a way to market Google's products and services. If it only has a partial database, those products and services instantly become less valuable. But I ask again, why should a publishing company be made to market Google's products and services, for no benefit to the publishing company?
Ah -- you say there's a marketing benefit to the publisher. Fine. Then Google should do some market research to figure out what that benefit is, in dollar amount, and charge the publisher for it. Sounds like a great business opportunity for Google to me. But of course, that wouldn't work, because it would give companies the opportunity to opt out by not paying, and Google doesn't want that.
Suppose Google wanted to put my likeness up on its Web site. Should I have to write and ask them to take it down? Isn't it reasonable to assume that Google doesn't have the right to do that without my permission? So why is it any different for my words?
I repeat: Fair use, my ass. "Public commons," my ass! This isn't "public." This isn't "us." This is Google and Google alone. This isn't for the posterity of society. It's for Google's posterity, and longterm financial gain, at the expense of other businesses.
Promoting the good of society is the role of the government. If the world needs an electronic index of books, then let the federal government pass a law mandating it, provide budget for it, and let it be managed as a project of the Library of Congress. If, on the other hand, a commercial company like Google wants to spend its own money to do the same, then more power to them. But since it's not Congress, Google shouldn't be able to force anybody in this country to comply with its business goals -- in fact, you might think it would have the good grace to ask first, if it's really dedicated to "not being evil."
(And re: "not being evil" -- am I to presume Google is hiring philosophy PhDs as well as computer science ones?)
It will quite nicely. In fact, with a little free help, it will play Ogg Vorbis files also.
The same is true of the GPL. It absolutely relies on copyright law to give it its power. Without copyright law, it would be meaningless, because there would be no way to enforce any of its terms.
What makes Stallman different, however, is his staunch and intractable stance. He has clearly thought his views through and states them plainly given any opportunity. He has a mission. He does not waver, nor even like to be perceived as wavering.
Creative Commons, by definition, wavers. Its various licenses offer a veritable smorgasbord of compromises. It presents no clear agenda for particpants. Instead it merely offers what I described: tools for navigating the status quo. It provides legal language for contracts that extend freedoms for copyrighted works, aimed at creators who may not themselves understand the finer points of copyright law. That's laudable, but nowhere near as revolutionary as Stallman's goals (again, whether you agree with those goals or not).
Sorry -- when I said "BitTorrent people" what I meant was the BitTorrent company. They should not have trademarked BitTorrent when it has this history of referring to a free product.
What Stallman is saying sounds, as usual, intellectually consistent. Because some licenses that are called Creative Commons licenses include restrictions that Stallman does not support, Stallman will not endorse the Creative Commons brand. In other words, he will not automatically give you a pat on the back just because you use a Creative Commons license; he wants to know what the terms of the license are first.
Sounds fine to me. I've never been a big supporter of Creative Commons for much the same reason. All Creative Commons seems to be, to me, is a collection of license that someone has paid a lawyer to draft up and then donated that work to the public. You can pick and choose between the licenses and their clauses. It's a generous donation and it's very handy.
Then again, I've never seen how Creative Commons amounts to the "social movement" that people make it out to be. Stallman, whether you agree with him or not, seems devoutly intent on shaking up the foundations of the modern concept of intellectual property. By comparison, Creative Commons licenses seem like little more than tools for helping people navigate the status quo.
So... you think you're going to be a DJ into your 50s? Good luck on that. It may seem impossible to you right now, but sooner or later nobody is going to want to listen to your music. You'll be an old fart just like everybody else your age. My advice is to start saving.
If companies started using the term "google" to refer to searches that did not involve the Google.com Web site or products produced by Google the company, you bet your ass Google would sue. Trademark owners are required to vigorously defend their marks or else they risk losing them.
There are various popular examples. Aspirin, for instance. At one time it was a brand name -- I believe owned by the Bayer company. But enough other people started using the word as a generic that the trademark was eventually lost, and you now refer to it as "aspirin" (small A).
So if you distribute a modified version of the Firefox source you have to remove all references to the name "Firefox"? That sounds pretty much like what you're saying. If independent software packagers risk running afoul of the intellectual property lawyers retained by open source projects then what sort of mess have we created?
The right thing for the BitTorrent people to do would probably be to pick a different brand name and stick to that -- say FileStream, for example. If the FileStream-branded BitTorrent client is so much better than everybody else's, then FileStream will become the preferred brand in the public consciousness and they can the protect THAT, rather than muddying up the waters by firing off lawsuits over nomenclature that, until recently, had been free.
I agree. I've usually taken the option of quitting. I don't regret any of those choices -- in most cases they have translated into career advancement, by giving me options that are more likely to pay off for me in the long term. However, speaking as one who actually has a job he wouldn't mind keeping for a while (for once), I can say that I wish my career had become more stable earlier in my life. That would have given me more of an opportunity to start putting money away. Depending on what part of the country you live in, the downpayment on your first home can be a massive thing. I live in San Francisco, and if I wanted to get in on property in this town I should have done it at least five years ago. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to put together the nest egg.
Also, don't underestimate the possiblity of early retirement. My parents retired before sixty and they have never been happier in their whole lives. I know that for young people it seems ideal to have all your fun when you're young. But go figure how much more fun you can have when the fun never actually has to stop, because you've worked it out so that you never have to have a job again.
Haha ... I'm with you there dude, I was actually going to make a crack about the gay guy having all the female friends too.
:-\
Only then I realized that being gay in high school was never a real good way to avoid getting beat up. Or being gay and walking down the street in a lot of cities in America, for that matter.
Here's a link to an article about the hair care products. It says the research is not conclusive, but rather suspicious. Apparently about half of all black girls in the United States start developing secondary sex characteristics before age 8 (yikes! didn't know that), while the rate is much lower for black girls in other parts of the world (e.g. Africa).
Care to provide a statistic for that? Seems counter-intuitive to me. If a kid comes into grade 1 already knowing how to read, that kid probably likes to read, which seems likely to be a lifelong advantage, education-wise.
No it wouldn't. Seriously; there's a couple of those "beard-y" guys in every 8th grade class and they get made fun of, too.
Pretty much anything that makes you different will get you made fun of, actually.
There are all sorts of reasons for early puberty in women. One study found that black girls seemed to be hitting puberty earlier at a much more rapid rate than white girls. Investigation revealed that some of the hair care products commonly used to straighten black girls' hair were responsible, believe it or not. The chemicals in those products, when combined with other environmental factors, would create synthetic estrogens in the girls' bloodstreams, causing them to begin to develop breasts and pubic hair at really young ages (like 5). When the use of the products was discontinued, the breast tissue would disappear and the pubic hair fell out.
Interesting anecdote, however it's actually slightly offtopic. If you check TFA it's actually mostly talking about boys. The victimization in this case is not the rape (or date rape) that you assume. It's about teens getting beaten up, or stabbed in knife fights, etc.
Makes sense, if you think about it. Men, particularly young-ish men, perceive similarly-aged men as rivals, especially where women are present. If you believe a rival is younger than you, you might figure "he's just a little punk" and use your apparent seniority to browbeat him into backing down. If you think he's your same age, on the other hand, you might decide that a more drastic form of "correction" is necessary. At the same time, he might also tend to react less predictably -- being young, he feels like he has more to prove. The whole situation escalates much more rapidly than a confrontation between true peers and quickly turns to violence.
According to TFA though, the main factor that helps early puberty boys avoid this phenomenon is having a lot of female friends.
Why? Because all those people smuggling drugs are working to enrich themselves (literally) by selling high-margin products (drugs) to one of the most affluent markets in the world. From an Occam's Razor/human nature perspective, doesn't that motivation sound a lot more logical than trying to murder the people who belong to that market, or destroy their economy?
Don't be naive: You can't build a tunnel across the Mexican border without a lot of complicity from a lot of people ... including building contractors, local police, Federal police, drug runners, and everybody else involved -- on both sides of the border. If you were a terrorist, you'd have to be freakin' Tony Robbins to be influential and motivational enough to convince American citizens with the degree of affluence and connections necessary to put your plan into motion that blowing up Americans is the right thing to do.
I'm not going to click on that link. The article's going to suck anyway.
Oh, I'm not talking about risking your job. If pointing out operational inefficiencies means risking his job then he really does need to find a new job, because the people he works for are dangerous lunatics.
Even if he does have to put his job on the line, what I'm saying is that you actually risk your career more if you fall into a rut where you don't ever accomplish anything. The earlier poster was asking why the guy should even care. I'm saying he should care because his future may depend on it.
Well, and if we want to get pedantic, Romero zombies never ate anybody's brains. They mostly went for the guts. It was "Return of the Living Dead," the comedy/horror take-off on the Romero films, that brought in all the brain-eating.
But if the resources required to complete every task (i.e. people) all come from the same pool, then man-hours spent working on a less-critical, long-term-impact project is always time spent not working on a more mission-critical, customer-facing project. So in a sense, yes, everything needs to follow the same process.
If the applications you're talking about really are going to have primarily long-term impact, though, then maybe all is not lost. If the impact is long-term then the fixes don't have to be made right away, because not fixing something is not causing short-term losses, right? It sounds to me like you're going to have to live with what seem to be excessive turnarounds on IT projects. Maybe, then, what you should be concentrating on in the immediate timeframe is not a commitment to act on any particular trouble ticket, but rather developing a regular schedule of upgrades or software releases that you can get IT to commit to.
For example, you could work to set up a timeline where such-and-such server will receive three upgrades over the next 12 months. The IT department might argue you down to two updates. That might not be anywhere near as agile as you want, but it's still better than one update every nine months.
Once you've established these update deliverables, then you go back and establish just what an update means. You tell them: We want this and this for the June update. They counter: No way, it's just not possible. We can do A and B but C will never happen. You say: Never happen? Not even by the November update?
By keeping the actual definitions of upgrades flexible up front, you create a kind of agility for your group. Things won't happen quickly, but again, actual speed doesn't seem to be your problem so much as the administrative overhead of just starting the process of getting something done. If you're a programmer, think of it as the difference in system overhead between starting a thread and forking a whole new process.
And from time to time, IT will probably try to explain that you're asking too much of them, but all you have to do is ask, "Why?" Ask them to make a real business case for why they can't do what you want them to do by such-and-such date. And who knows? They give you good reasons. But if that's the case, then it's time for you to go back up the hall and take that information to the next level of management, get it in front of your executive officer, or whomever needs to know about it in order to get the budget, personnel, or upper-level directives necessary to get it moving. The best way to grease the wheels of progress is to do it without playing the blame game -- just gather the facts and figure out what needs to be done to get things back on track.
It all sounds like a big hassle, I'm sure, and yes office politics will be involved. But you'll learn some strategies of how to navigate your way through the business world, and devoting some time and energy this way would probably be preferable to just sitting there feeling frustrated.
Get a job, Null.
Sure -- if I can read between the lines of what you seem to be saying -- the chicks might not care if you're good at your work or not. But some of those mere "other men" you mention might also happen to sign your paychecks.
The guy was complaining that his company is missing significant business opportunities. Translation: The company is missing significant business opportunities that he could have been instrumental in acting upon. But he can't, because of IT bureaucracy.
OK, so it's not his fault -- but do you think that's going to matter next time he goes in for a raise or a promotion? They'll want to see all the forward-thinking plans he's executed on, and he's going to have nothing, because trying to do anything is like wading through mud.
Even worse, what happens when it's time to a round of layoffs? What justification will he have to keep his job then?
Maybe it's easy for you to just sit there and be grateful you have a job. If it is, it's probably because you've only had one or two entry-level jobs. For people who have had a job for a number of years, however, just having a job no longer seems like Goal #1. Those people start to have other ambitions -- like buying a house, for instance, or a new car, or providing for their families. Maybe you've put yourself through college. Have you put anybody else through college lately? Dads sometimes like to do those kinds of things. They're hard to do when you've spent the last five or ten years sitting at the same desk in the basement, just spinning your wheels.