This is way off-topic, but given the series of posts you've made, I think it needs to be said here.
Sometimes, a course of study at a school is designed by people who are actually smart, and they weave general knowledge of the field and awareness of the possibilities carefully throughout the various classes on more specific subjects. When you're taking such a course, almost by definition it is unlikely that you have yet gained the skill and experience to appreciate this.
Your attitude implies that you think you know better than your teachers, and that you insist on making your own judgements on the merits of what they teach. While both self-driven learning and healthy scepticism can be good things, you might like to stop occasionally and ask whether you are missing something that someone more experienced is trying to show you. From your posts here, it will be very clear to many of us who do work professionally that you have missed an opportunity to learn several useful things here: not only LaTeX, a widely used tool in its own right in some fields you might work in later, but also the experience that learning a new tool often doesn't take as long as you think, for example, and perhaps a few practical skills for preparing a good formal document. And you have given all this up just because instead of taking the enormous 5–10 minutes required to learn a new tool recommended by your teacher, you have stubbornly insisted on doing something your own way. If that is your mindset, you are pretty much doomed in any future career you might wish to pursue in the computing field.
You do not know everything. Suck it up, learn a bit of humility, and make the most of opportunities to learn about stuff, because you will probably never have the same kind of opportunity again and you will regret it if you don't. And please don't think I'm writing this just to patronise you. I used to be like you, and so probably did a lot of the other posters here, and I bet every one of us would take a different approach if we could do it again.
The ability to collaborate in a very natural fashion is a strength of GDocs (and I assume the other web-based suites) that is going to be very hard for MS Office, OOo, or any other PC based office suite to match.
Why? What magical power do you think web browsers have to transfer your data quickly and accurately from one place to another that other applications cannot implement? Do you think shifting all that data via a third party is going to give you more bandwidth just because that third party is "teh Google" or something?!
People have been using things like IRC and instant messaging on the Internet for decades, and they are a heck of a lot more efficient at transferring data in real time than anything based on HTTP and browsers.
I'm afraid the rest of your post is similarly wishful thinking. Performance is always going to be a problem because, for a start, Internet connections are not free (and bandwidth is only fixed-cost up to certain limits with today's price plans, which in turn have a rather limited life expectancy in a world of streaming video and on-line apps like these). Security is a non-issue? It will be after the first big leak, and even the mighty Google has had a few major problems in the security/identification area lately (captchas cracked, inadvertently leaking all GMail users' names...).
Ultimately, there is nothing you can do with an on-line office suite run by an external service provider that you couldn't also do with a client application with an Internet connection and your own server to host any shared data. Being centralised, the on-line applications have the advantage of ease of administration, which no locally installed software will ever completely match, though whether that really matters with one-click deployment and updating tools available is a different question. On the other hand, no on-line solution can ever offer the same degree of control, security and reliability that a local set-up can, no matter how hard you try.
But if they want to beat it and are going to try and do so on the basis of better-looking documents, it would be nice if they at least did a couple of the obvious things Word doesn't.
And yes, for some types of document LaTeX does a much better job; personally, I use XeLaTeX more these days, so I can use those OpenType fonts. But LaTeX is not without its fundamental flaws: it has an unhealthy obsession with messing up vertical spacing, and its control of floats is limited, to give two obvious ones that will hit most people writing a long document sooner or later.
My point wasn't that collaboration was bad. On the contrary, good collaboration tools are very useful in modern offices, as you point out yourself. But I can already save files, and share documents with others by saving them to a common disk. Doing it using someone else's disk across the web doesn't get me anything I couldn't do already. None of the three alternatives made any comments about review and version tracking features, nor about being designed to make their documents look good on-screen, either.
I'm constantly amazed about how people will post private information in a public place (thus making it public information), and then complain about how they are being robbed of their privacy.
My problem with Facebook wasn't the information I gave them. All I gave them was an e-mail address, my university, and confirmation when a few close friends told them about our friendship.
My friends, however, subsequently gave them numerous additional bits of data about me without my knowledge or consent. Of course, this wasn't done with any ill intent; for the most part, it was probably done without a second thought. However, within a few days of my joining, Facebook not only had the identities of many of my friends (obviously), but also pretty much everything from enough information to work out my home address and car registration to a fairly complete record of my movements for the past few weeks. I cancelled my account very soon after this pattern became apparent, and asked that my friends no longer post anything relating to me on there.
This is the problem with Facebook: its entire modus operandi is to make other people provide information about you. And as anyone who's been a victim of identity theft (or just shafted on-line by a jealous ex) can testify, there's pretty much SFA you can do about that until it's far too late to make a difference.
Oh, and the other problem that they don't know what the word "delete" actually means, as in, "delete my account" not "flag my account as hidden but keep all the personal information about me in your database anyway".
I just visited the home page of each of the three alternatives mentioned, and read their own words about what features their word processors offer. It was hard not to laugh: they actually describe things like being able to save your files and collaborate with others as features. I'm not sure any of them even mentioned a single real word processing feature anywhere on their list. And while some of the on-line features they plug have some merit — though I suspect many of them are really only gimmicks of little real world value — of course being on-line comes with some major downsides in the security and reliability areas.
Then I read TFA. (Yes, really. It's quiet night.;-)) I think this quote is the most telling:
All three of these word processors are capable of tasks such as formatting the typefaces, placing and sizing graphics, arranging paragraphs, and setting up tables. But only ThinkFree offers the really sophisticated features, such as letting you format a hanging indent.
(Emphasis added)
If adding a hanging indent is sophisticated, these things aren't even glorified text editors, never mind word processors. Where's my real-time word count and spelling checking? My document structuring and organisation tools? My cross-references, footnotes and bibliographies? If they're going to pimp my pages, can I at least have a smart H&J algorithm and use my professional grade OpenType fonts? There is more to a word processor than basic text editing and the occasional picture or table!
I think it's safe to say the guys in Redmond don't need to start throwing chairs. The on-line apps aren't even Word from nearly two decades ago, yet.
I would suggest that the problem of software being useless by the end of its copyright term is because the copyright term is too long. The same goes for patents in related fields. If you get a monopoly for the complete useful lifetime of something and then the public domain gets it only after it is useless, it's hardly a bargain that is in the public interest (unless it would be unlikely to be viable for anyone to make and distribute equivalent products at all with a shorter protection period, but I don't believe this is true for almost all software today).
Fortunately, while some EU bureaucrat may propose this extension (what, again?), it is unlikely to fly. The UK, for one, recently considered this among many other issues in the Gowers Review. If you check out the many public submissions, most of them were centred on the same few issues, of which copyright extension was probably the most common one — and the public view was, to put it mildly, not exactly in favour of the extensions. The Review itself and the government response didn't beat about the bush on the subject either.
With regard to software - for any protection under copyright, I believe that the source code for the work should have to be released. Otherwise, copyright makes no sense, as the works have very limited use when they hit the public domain.
I never understand this argument. To anyone but a software developer, the source code has little if any value; it is the executable code they care about. Heck, I am a software developer, but I would usually prefer to download executables than source code, because life is too short to waste time compiling stuff unnecessarily.
Moreover, releasing the source code gives away a lot more than the ability to compile it to make the same executable: there might be trade secrets described therein, for example.
But the kicker is that it's strange to make an argument that the natural state is that you only control something until you give it away and that copyright is something of a necessary evil to encourage this distribution, yet then to argue that people should be compelled to give away something that they normally wouldn't have to just to obtain that copyright on something else.
I vote for an easy-to-understand version labelling system, based on the premise that everything is experimental and what matters is the nature of the code base:
800/101: Big and scary
888: Medium-sized and scary
1000: Small and scary
X: Small, hot and scary
CP: Small and hot
This leads to the self-evident truth that all technology should be improved until it becomes Summer Glau.
I'm afraid you're confusing RFCs with standards. They are not the same. SPF, for example, is covered by RFC 4408, but it's still broken and it's hardly a standard, never mind a good one.
That, and it was on pretty much every magazine cover DVD for months.
And how many people really don't have access to at least an SP2 DVD anyway? If the average lifetime of a PC is, say, somewhere in the 3–5 year range, then almost all PCs in use today would have come with such a disk.
This entire article is (-1, Troll). It's like asking the average time to crack an Ubuntu box if you install it with a direct, unfirewalled connection to the Internet, disable all the security settings, and post the root password in your Slashdot sig.
The only harm that can come from copyright infringement is financial harm, and that harm can be made fully right even after the fact through an appropriate damage award.
Only if the infringer has enough money to pay for the damages. This is highly unlikely in the event of a private individual sharing popular copyright material with half the Internet via a mass distribution service.
The restriction of speech, by contrast, can easily result in harm that can never be repaired.
Restricting freedom of expression is certainly not to be done lightly, but "easily" doing harm that can "never" be repaired? That sounds a lot like scare-mongering to me. We're presumably talking about the default state of affairs pending a preliminary court hearing that court issue an injunction if necessary. It's not unreasonable to aim for such a hearing to be held within 24 hours. What devastating, irreparable damage do you think is going to be caused by a web site not being able to host certain information for less than 24 hours?
I'm not claiming to be some super-genius programmer, though it's probably safe to assume I'm above average. But this doesn't really matter: the point is that I am a professional, and my time that I give up to interview is valuable to me just as the company's resources it commits to an interview are valuable to it. Interviews are one of those things that tend to wind up being led by the company and pretty one-sided, but to any professional who is good at what they do there is no particular reason they should accept this and potentially wind up making a time-consuming mistake taking a job at a poor employer as a result.
You're absolutely right that the recruitment process is not just a single interview, and I have no problem with places that want me to sign to say I won't disclose any of their confidential information I see during the process. If a company does a quick phone screen first, that's fine too, a half-hour phone call is no big commitment for either of us. However, I do ask about this when I'm invited for a first on-site interview, and I decline to attend that interview if the company can't guarantee to provide the samples I require. It is, after all, one of the main things I will use to decide whether to accept any offer they might make me, not some minor detail that can be sorted out as a formality later.
When copyright conflicts with speech, speech has to win.
Copyright always conflicts with freedom of expression for anyone who is not the copyright holder. That is what it is for, so the law currently disagrees with you in most first-world countries.
But this does not make your example any less valid. It seems the moral of the story is that in a world where information can be shared fast and cheaply, but the law provides for limitations on sharing information under certain circumstances, then the legal machinery must be present to make fast decisions on at least a sensible default pending a full court hearing. Otherwise, whatever the default you choose, some good guys are going to be subject to unfair restriction by some bad guys some of the time.
A court order should have been required in order to take anything down.
The problem with that is that it requires a significant amount of time for Joe Average to obtain such an order, and when we're talking about something like copyright infringement that potentially happens on a large scale in very little time on the Internet, such a delay dramatically reduces the effectiveness of the protections the law affords to copyright holders.
I look at it this way. It cannot be right to appoint a distribution service judge, jury and executioner in a dispute. However, if the presumption prior to a proper court decision is that material may be freely distributed, then a lot of damage can potentially be done very quickly, and never undone regardless of the court's decision. If the presumption prior to a proper court decision is that material may not be distributed, then the most that will happen if the court subsequently decides distribution is permissible is that the distribution will be delayed somewhat. The consequences just aren't balanced, and requiring a court order to take anything down is the option that does far more damage if it turns out to be the wrong call.
Courts issue temporary injunctions all the time to maintain as close as possible to status quo pending the outcome of a proper trial, and that's probably as fair a compromise as is possible to achieve in the real world, but to make this work in the case of on-line copyright infringement, you really need a system where such an injunction can be obtained in near real time.
It suffers the same problem as all the others. Some places will outright refuse to answer anything subjective, confirming only facts like dates of employment, because of legal worries. If someone does answer it with a positive comment, you have no way to know whether they really meant it or they are just saying it to make it easier for a substandard guy to leave.
We should also be sure to lose alt.comp.lang.learn.c-c++, a group whose standard has varied over the years, but which much of the time consists of questions asked by young people learning to program and answered by professionals taking the time to help out. It is absolutely essential to protect the interests of children that such volunteers should be put off wherever possible from using modern technology to offer the next generation the same or better opportunities than they enjoyed themselves.
I don't think either of my last two employers even checked references. They considered the cost/benefit unworthwhile: any old company will either do no more than confirming your dates of employment for legal reasons, or say vague nice things about you whether you are good enough to justify those comments or bad enough that the old employer just wants to get rid of you. In any case, short of confirming that you aren't outright lying about past experience on your CV, a reference isn't worth much to a potential employer, and any interviewer worth their salt will soon find out if your CV is completely made up anyway...
My strategy is to write programs under an open source license that do the same thing as the programs I was paid to write under a closed source license. Just a different way to solve a problem, and done a much better way than management wanted it done anyway.
Sure it is reinventing the wheel, but it is 100% legal and does not infringe on anyone's IP.
Such behaviour would be an absolutely clear-cut infringement of the IP of any employer where I have ever worked. I never sign blanket "all your IP are belong to us" type contracts, but I've never worked anywhere that wouldn't claim the rights to something directly connected with my work and written during the period of my employment.
I'm not normally one for "me too" posts, but yes, I agree wholeheartedly with the parent's sentiment. If I demanded that each company I went to an interview with have someone spend several hours completing my custom coding challenge so I could judge the quality of my potential coworkers, would that be considered reasonable? I doubt it; it would cost them a lot of money with no guarantee of any return on their investment. Likewise, I am a professional, and I expect to be paid for my time. If it would be excessive for them, it is also excessive for me.
You'll probably get away with it, but you are in fact violating the contract you signed.
And worse, you have just demonstrated to a potential future employer that you are untrustworthy in this respect. If you were a bank manager, would you hire someone to handle cash when they had a criminal record for fraud or theft?
And why should any skilled professional take your position seriously if you consider him combative just for asking a basic question about your company?
I now require before agreeing to an interview that any potential employer be prepared to show me:
a decent-sized sample of code from a real project
a decent-sized sample of documentation from a real project
a summary of their software development process
Any employer who is unwilling or unable to provide all of the above at my first interview gets ruled out unless they have some truly spectacular compensating appeal.
IMNSHO, this is fair play. Actually, it's more than fair: from my career to date, it is a statistical certainty that the average code and documentation I write is better than the average standard at any employer where I have interviewed. (It doesn't really matter whether anyone else reading this chooses to believe me, though I have no reason to lie here; when I'm considering where to offer my skills on a professional basis, my opinion of the potential employer is the only one that counts anyway.)
The technical lead on the project where I started with my current employer was quite surprised when I told him that I had nearly turned down the job offer because of an interview question where they showed me a sample of some code with the function name blanked out and asked me to work out what it did. It hadn't occurred to them that I would be judging the general standard of their code based on every sample I saw during the interview process, and that since the function in question sucked in several obvious ways this would give a negative impression.
You are, of course, perfectly entitled to decide not to interview someone like me if you have a problem with my attitude. It's your company, and you can hire who you like, give or take a few anti-discrimination laws at least. Any hardline policy at interviews inevitably means that you will lose out on hiring some good people, but sometimes that's good business sense if you still expect to be able to hire other good people and the savings from the policy cut your costs. But this works the other way, too. My choice in this respect may result in my not getting interviews at some good companies where I might enjoy working, but I accept that, because I am confident of my own abilities and have never had trouble finding a decent job quickly whenever I have wanted to move.
Basically, life is too short to voluntarily spend 40 hours a week working for places who judge who to employ on code samples they didn't see written in front of them and answers to cute programming trivia questions (both bad signs for the robustness of their recruitment process and therefore the calibre of your future work colleagues), yet can't or won't show that despite this they are still a worthwhile place to work. I've spent too many years working for companies who seemed great at interview but turned out to be unpleasant because they suffered from institutional incompetence to risk it again.
However, what it does have is [b]reliable delivery status information[/b]. If the email you sent was not delivered, you would *know* about it.
That simply isn't true. After all, if you could reliably transmit an accepted/rejected acknowledgement, you could reliably transmit an e-mail in the first place, couldn't you?
The back-scatter is caused by anti-spam solutions that do not reject the email during the SMTP conversation, instead accepting the email and ending the SMTP transaction, and [i]only then[/i] decide to reject the message by starting a whole new email delivery. If gmail rejected the email during the SMTP transaction, they would not cause any backscatter.
They seem to have worked out a somewhat effective way around this, though: my mail service correctly bounces spam immediately, but lately I keep getting the bounce messages redirected to another randomly generated address at my domain, and it seems the extra content from doing this to a legitimate bounce message is enough to give the messages a significant chance of making it through the spam filters. I haven't worked out exactly what they are doing yet, but the end result is basically back-scatter anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
This is way off-topic, but given the series of posts you've made, I think it needs to be said here.
Sometimes, a course of study at a school is designed by people who are actually smart, and they weave general knowledge of the field and awareness of the possibilities carefully throughout the various classes on more specific subjects. When you're taking such a course, almost by definition it is unlikely that you have yet gained the skill and experience to appreciate this.
Your attitude implies that you think you know better than your teachers, and that you insist on making your own judgements on the merits of what they teach. While both self-driven learning and healthy scepticism can be good things, you might like to stop occasionally and ask whether you are missing something that someone more experienced is trying to show you. From your posts here, it will be very clear to many of us who do work professionally that you have missed an opportunity to learn several useful things here: not only LaTeX, a widely used tool in its own right in some fields you might work in later, but also the experience that learning a new tool often doesn't take as long as you think, for example, and perhaps a few practical skills for preparing a good formal document. And you have given all this up just because instead of taking the enormous 5–10 minutes required to learn a new tool recommended by your teacher, you have stubbornly insisted on doing something your own way. If that is your mindset, you are pretty much doomed in any future career you might wish to pursue in the computing field.
You do not know everything. Suck it up, learn a bit of humility, and make the most of opportunities to learn about stuff, because you will probably never have the same kind of opportunity again and you will regret it if you don't. And please don't think I'm writing this just to patronise you. I used to be like you, and so probably did a lot of the other posters here, and I bet every one of us would take a different approach if we could do it again.
The ability to collaborate in a very natural fashion is a strength of GDocs (and I assume the other web-based suites) that is going to be very hard for MS Office, OOo, or any other PC based office suite to match.
Why? What magical power do you think web browsers have to transfer your data quickly and accurately from one place to another that other applications cannot implement? Do you think shifting all that data via a third party is going to give you more bandwidth just because that third party is "teh Google" or something?!
People have been using things like IRC and instant messaging on the Internet for decades, and they are a heck of a lot more efficient at transferring data in real time than anything based on HTTP and browsers.
I'm afraid the rest of your post is similarly wishful thinking. Performance is always going to be a problem because, for a start, Internet connections are not free (and bandwidth is only fixed-cost up to certain limits with today's price plans, which in turn have a rather limited life expectancy in a world of streaming video and on-line apps like these). Security is a non-issue? It will be after the first big leak, and even the mighty Google has had a few major problems in the security/identification area lately (captchas cracked, inadvertently leaking all GMail users' names...).
Ultimately, there is nothing you can do with an on-line office suite run by an external service provider that you couldn't also do with a client application with an Internet connection and your own server to host any shared data. Being centralised, the on-line applications have the advantage of ease of administration, which no locally installed software will ever completely match, though whether that really matters with one-click deployment and updating tools available is a different question. On the other hand, no on-line solution can ever offer the same degree of control, security and reliability that a local set-up can, no matter how hard you try.
How did that strategy work out the last time someone tried it? ;-)
I never said Word's typography was good. :-)
But if they want to beat it and are going to try and do so on the basis of better-looking documents, it would be nice if they at least did a couple of the obvious things Word doesn't.
And yes, for some types of document LaTeX does a much better job; personally, I use XeLaTeX more these days, so I can use those OpenType fonts. But LaTeX is not without its fundamental flaws: it has an unhealthy obsession with messing up vertical spacing, and its control of floats is limited, to give two obvious ones that will hit most people writing a long document sooner or later.
My point wasn't that collaboration was bad. On the contrary, good collaboration tools are very useful in modern offices, as you point out yourself. But I can already save files, and share documents with others by saving them to a common disk. Doing it using someone else's disk across the web doesn't get me anything I couldn't do already. None of the three alternatives made any comments about review and version tracking features, nor about being designed to make their documents look good on-screen, either.
I'm constantly amazed about how people will post private information in a public place (thus making it public information), and then complain about how they are being robbed of their privacy.
My problem with Facebook wasn't the information I gave them. All I gave them was an e-mail address, my university, and confirmation when a few close friends told them about our friendship.
My friends, however, subsequently gave them numerous additional bits of data about me without my knowledge or consent. Of course, this wasn't done with any ill intent; for the most part, it was probably done without a second thought. However, within a few days of my joining, Facebook not only had the identities of many of my friends (obviously), but also pretty much everything from enough information to work out my home address and car registration to a fairly complete record of my movements for the past few weeks. I cancelled my account very soon after this pattern became apparent, and asked that my friends no longer post anything relating to me on there.
This is the problem with Facebook: its entire modus operandi is to make other people provide information about you. And as anyone who's been a victim of identity theft (or just shafted on-line by a jealous ex) can testify, there's pretty much SFA you can do about that until it's far too late to make a difference.
Oh, and the other problem that they don't know what the word "delete" actually means, as in, "delete my account" not "flag my account as hidden but keep all the personal information about me in your database anyway".
I just visited the home page of each of the three alternatives mentioned, and read their own words about what features their word processors offer. It was hard not to laugh: they actually describe things like being able to save your files and collaborate with others as features. I'm not sure any of them even mentioned a single real word processing feature anywhere on their list. And while some of the on-line features they plug have some merit — though I suspect many of them are really only gimmicks of little real world value — of course being on-line comes with some major downsides in the security and reliability areas.
Then I read TFA. (Yes, really. It's quiet night. ;-)) I think this quote is the most telling:
All three of these word processors are capable of tasks such as formatting the typefaces, placing and sizing graphics, arranging paragraphs, and setting up tables. But only ThinkFree offers the really sophisticated features, such as letting you format a hanging indent.
(Emphasis added)
If adding a hanging indent is sophisticated, these things aren't even glorified text editors, never mind word processors. Where's my real-time word count and spelling checking? My document structuring and organisation tools? My cross-references, footnotes and bibliographies? If they're going to pimp my pages, can I at least have a smart H&J algorithm and use my professional grade OpenType fonts? There is more to a word processor than basic text editing and the occasional picture or table!
I think it's safe to say the guys in Redmond don't need to start throwing chairs. The on-line apps aren't even Word from nearly two decades ago, yet.
I would suggest that the problem of software being useless by the end of its copyright term is because the copyright term is too long. The same goes for patents in related fields. If you get a monopoly for the complete useful lifetime of something and then the public domain gets it only after it is useless, it's hardly a bargain that is in the public interest (unless it would be unlikely to be viable for anyone to make and distribute equivalent products at all with a shorter protection period, but I don't believe this is true for almost all software today).
Fortunately, while some EU bureaucrat may propose this extension (what, again?), it is unlikely to fly. The UK, for one, recently considered this among many other issues in the Gowers Review. If you check out the many public submissions, most of them were centred on the same few issues, of which copyright extension was probably the most common one — and the public view was, to put it mildly, not exactly in favour of the extensions. The Review itself and the government response didn't beat about the bush on the subject either.
With regard to software - for any protection under copyright, I believe that the source code for the work should have to be released. Otherwise, copyright makes no sense, as the works have very limited use when they hit the public domain.
I never understand this argument. To anyone but a software developer, the source code has little if any value; it is the executable code they care about. Heck, I am a software developer, but I would usually prefer to download executables than source code, because life is too short to waste time compiling stuff unnecessarily.
Moreover, releasing the source code gives away a lot more than the ability to compile it to make the same executable: there might be trade secrets described therein, for example.
But the kicker is that it's strange to make an argument that the natural state is that you only control something until you give it away and that copyright is something of a necessary evil to encourage this distribution, yet then to argue that people should be compelled to give away something that they normally wouldn't have to just to obtain that copyright on something else.
I vote for an easy-to-understand version labelling system, based on the premise that everything is experimental and what matters is the nature of the code base:
This leads to the self-evident truth that all technology should be improved until it becomes Summer Glau.
I'm afraid you're confusing RFCs with standards. They are not the same. SPF, for example, is covered by RFC 4408, but it's still broken and it's hardly a standard, never mind a good one.
That, and it was on pretty much every magazine cover DVD for months.
And how many people really don't have access to at least an SP2 DVD anyway? If the average lifetime of a PC is, say, somewhere in the 3–5 year range, then almost all PCs in use today would have come with such a disk.
This entire article is (-1, Troll). It's like asking the average time to crack an Ubuntu box if you install it with a direct, unfirewalled connection to the Internet, disable all the security settings, and post the root password in your Slashdot sig.
The only harm that can come from copyright infringement is financial harm, and that harm can be made fully right even after the fact through an appropriate damage award.
Only if the infringer has enough money to pay for the damages. This is highly unlikely in the event of a private individual sharing popular copyright material with half the Internet via a mass distribution service.
The restriction of speech, by contrast, can easily result in harm that can never be repaired.
Restricting freedom of expression is certainly not to be done lightly, but "easily" doing harm that can "never" be repaired? That sounds a lot like scare-mongering to me. We're presumably talking about the default state of affairs pending a preliminary court hearing that court issue an injunction if necessary. It's not unreasonable to aim for such a hearing to be held within 24 hours. What devastating, irreparable damage do you think is going to be caused by a web site not being able to host certain information for less than 24 hours?
I'm not claiming to be some super-genius programmer, though it's probably safe to assume I'm above average. But this doesn't really matter: the point is that I am a professional, and my time that I give up to interview is valuable to me just as the company's resources it commits to an interview are valuable to it. Interviews are one of those things that tend to wind up being led by the company and pretty one-sided, but to any professional who is good at what they do there is no particular reason they should accept this and potentially wind up making a time-consuming mistake taking a job at a poor employer as a result.
You're absolutely right that the recruitment process is not just a single interview, and I have no problem with places that want me to sign to say I won't disclose any of their confidential information I see during the process. If a company does a quick phone screen first, that's fine too, a half-hour phone call is no big commitment for either of us. However, I do ask about this when I'm invited for a first on-site interview, and I decline to attend that interview if the company can't guarantee to provide the samples I require. It is, after all, one of the main things I will use to decide whether to accept any offer they might make me, not some minor detail that can be sorted out as a formality later.
When copyright conflicts with speech, speech has to win.
Copyright always conflicts with freedom of expression for anyone who is not the copyright holder. That is what it is for, so the law currently disagrees with you in most first-world countries.
But this does not make your example any less valid. It seems the moral of the story is that in a world where information can be shared fast and cheaply, but the law provides for limitations on sharing information under certain circumstances, then the legal machinery must be present to make fast decisions on at least a sensible default pending a full court hearing. Otherwise, whatever the default you choose, some good guys are going to be subject to unfair restriction by some bad guys some of the time.
A court order should have been required in order to take anything down.
The problem with that is that it requires a significant amount of time for Joe Average to obtain such an order, and when we're talking about something like copyright infringement that potentially happens on a large scale in very little time on the Internet, such a delay dramatically reduces the effectiveness of the protections the law affords to copyright holders.
I look at it this way. It cannot be right to appoint a distribution service judge, jury and executioner in a dispute. However, if the presumption prior to a proper court decision is that material may be freely distributed, then a lot of damage can potentially be done very quickly, and never undone regardless of the court's decision. If the presumption prior to a proper court decision is that material may not be distributed, then the most that will happen if the court subsequently decides distribution is permissible is that the distribution will be delayed somewhat. The consequences just aren't balanced, and requiring a court order to take anything down is the option that does far more damage if it turns out to be the wrong call.
Courts issue temporary injunctions all the time to maintain as close as possible to status quo pending the outcome of a proper trial, and that's probably as fair a compromise as is possible to achieve in the real world, but to make this work in the case of on-line copyright infringement, you really need a system where such an injunction can be obtained in near real time.
Unfortunately, I suspect the average politician would consider your comment (+1, Insightful) — or perhaps (+1, Inciteful)? — rather than (+1, Funny).
It suffers the same problem as all the others. Some places will outright refuse to answer anything subjective, confirming only facts like dates of employment, because of legal worries. If someone does answer it with a positive comment, you have no way to know whether they really meant it or they are just saying it to make it easier for a substandard guy to leave.
We should also be sure to lose alt.comp.lang.learn.c-c++, a group whose standard has varied over the years, but which much of the time consists of questions asked by young people learning to program and answered by professionals taking the time to help out. It is absolutely essential to protect the interests of children that such volunteers should be put off wherever possible from using modern technology to offer the next generation the same or better opportunities than they enjoyed themselves.
I don't think either of my last two employers even checked references. They considered the cost/benefit unworthwhile: any old company will either do no more than confirming your dates of employment for legal reasons, or say vague nice things about you whether you are good enough to justify those comments or bad enough that the old employer just wants to get rid of you. In any case, short of confirming that you aren't outright lying about past experience on your CV, a reference isn't worth much to a potential employer, and any interviewer worth their salt will soon find out if your CV is completely made up anyway...
My strategy is to write programs under an open source license that do the same thing as the programs I was paid to write under a closed source license. Just a different way to solve a problem, and done a much better way than management wanted it done anyway.
Sure it is reinventing the wheel, but it is 100% legal and does not infringe on anyone's IP.
Such behaviour would be an absolutely clear-cut infringement of the IP of any employer where I have ever worked. I never sign blanket "all your IP are belong to us" type contracts, but I've never worked anywhere that wouldn't claim the rights to something directly connected with my work and written during the period of my employment.
I'm not normally one for "me too" posts, but yes, I agree wholeheartedly with the parent's sentiment. If I demanded that each company I went to an interview with have someone spend several hours completing my custom coding challenge so I could judge the quality of my potential coworkers, would that be considered reasonable? I doubt it; it would cost them a lot of money with no guarantee of any return on their investment. Likewise, I am a professional, and I expect to be paid for my time. If it would be excessive for them, it is also excessive for me.
You'll probably get away with it, but you are in fact violating the contract you signed.
And worse, you have just demonstrated to a potential future employer that you are untrustworthy in this respect. If you were a bank manager, would you hire someone to handle cash when they had a criminal record for fraud or theft?
And why should any skilled professional take your position seriously if you consider him combative just for asking a basic question about your company?
I now require before agreeing to an interview that any potential employer be prepared to show me:
Any employer who is unwilling or unable to provide all of the above at my first interview gets ruled out unless they have some truly spectacular compensating appeal.
IMNSHO, this is fair play. Actually, it's more than fair: from my career to date, it is a statistical certainty that the average code and documentation I write is better than the average standard at any employer where I have interviewed. (It doesn't really matter whether anyone else reading this chooses to believe me, though I have no reason to lie here; when I'm considering where to offer my skills on a professional basis, my opinion of the potential employer is the only one that counts anyway.)
The technical lead on the project where I started with my current employer was quite surprised when I told him that I had nearly turned down the job offer because of an interview question where they showed me a sample of some code with the function name blanked out and asked me to work out what it did. It hadn't occurred to them that I would be judging the general standard of their code based on every sample I saw during the interview process, and that since the function in question sucked in several obvious ways this would give a negative impression.
You are, of course, perfectly entitled to decide not to interview someone like me if you have a problem with my attitude. It's your company, and you can hire who you like, give or take a few anti-discrimination laws at least. Any hardline policy at interviews inevitably means that you will lose out on hiring some good people, but sometimes that's good business sense if you still expect to be able to hire other good people and the savings from the policy cut your costs. But this works the other way, too. My choice in this respect may result in my not getting interviews at some good companies where I might enjoy working, but I accept that, because I am confident of my own abilities and have never had trouble finding a decent job quickly whenever I have wanted to move.
Basically, life is too short to voluntarily spend 40 hours a week working for places who judge who to employ on code samples they didn't see written in front of them and answers to cute programming trivia questions (both bad signs for the robustness of their recruitment process and therefore the calibre of your future work colleagues), yet can't or won't show that despite this they are still a worthwhile place to work. I've spent too many years working for companies who seemed great at interview but turned out to be unpleasant because they suffered from institutional incompetence to risk it again.
However, what it does have is [b]reliable delivery status information[/b]. If the email you sent was not delivered, you would *know* about it.
That simply isn't true. After all, if you could reliably transmit an accepted/rejected acknowledgement, you could reliably transmit an e-mail in the first place, couldn't you?
The back-scatter is caused by anti-spam solutions that do not reject the email during the SMTP conversation, instead accepting the email and ending the SMTP transaction, and [i]only then[/i] decide to reject the message by starting a whole new email delivery. If gmail rejected the email during the SMTP transaction, they would not cause any backscatter.
They seem to have worked out a somewhat effective way around this, though: my mail service correctly bounces spam immediately, but lately I keep getting the bounce messages redirected to another randomly generated address at my domain, and it seems the extra content from doing this to a legitimate bounce message is enough to give the messages a significant chance of making it through the spam filters. I haven't worked out exactly what they are doing yet, but the end result is basically back-scatter anyway.