Copyright infringement != stealing. In neither case.
Semantics. And so what? Just because one phrase isn't functionally equivalent to another doesn't make it any less wrong, illegal, and/or immoral/amoral.
But, GPL infringement is often for profit, while file sharing isn't.
Ah, now we're into the justification phase. Why talk about file sharing when we started with copyright infringement? Copyright infringement definitely is about profit. You get something for free instead of paying out $15 for it - you profit.
You can be sure that many people that defend file sharing won't agree with making money from it.
Because some things are only slightly wrong. As long as there's something worse that you're not doing, that makes your crime/law breaking kind of trivial and that's easy to morph into "it's really okay", right?
I love the defenses on Slashdot. People seem to have this Robin Hood mentality, in much the same way Anonymous stealing from banks to give to charity does. Either that, or they shrug and say "the artists don't get much profit" and thereby defend ripping them off of what little profit they might see. Unless all pirates/copyright infringers/whatever you want to call yourself to make yourself feel better do the right (?) thing and send some money directly to the artist. As has been suggested/stated on this site many, many times.
(firefox)...for a long time they were extremely competitive
Firefox had gotten to a point of maturity and very high popularity. It's easy to become complacent at that point.
What do you do when you have a mature and stable product? There are a lot of directions you can go, and in a commercial product those directions are usually set by people in the marketing and product owner roles. Marketing/sales give feedback as to what they believe will be important to the customer. The product owner is responsible for deciding what to implement and in what timeline - the product lifecycle.
If you don't have those roles as part of your team, who makes those decisions? It's not impossible, but there is a reason those roles exist (as unpopular as they might be with some - not all - Slashdot readers, who view sales and marketing as fluff).
And I understand the viewpoint of the developer. What motivates someone? For me, I have a job and I enjoy it, but if I was getting constant criticism on my output and very little praise that'd be pretty demotivating. Now, I realize that part of a job is sometimes you have to do things you don't like, and even if you enjoy your job and are good at it there's still going to be feedback that you won't like.
You might be driven by ideology and desire to go on despite criticism. Personally, there's a great motivation for me in recognizing that I need to make a living because I have a family to support and that means I have superiors that I need to make happy. I.e. I can't afford to just drop this job - I have too much to lose.
If you're an unpaid open source free software developer, your motivation is, what? Ideology and grateful feedback. If you've reached a fulfillment point ("the product is mature and popular") and now start getting a whole bunch of negative feedback, that's very demotivating. What happens if you just stop? You've already done a great job, you can get precious time back, and you don't have to care any more about the complaining. For some people, they're constantly driven to move on, push forwards, continue. They're the entrepreneurs, or the high ideologues (like Richard Stallman). But it takes a lot of energy and passion, and sometimes it's easy to decide it's not worth it any more.
Sez you...the cool kids in my neighborhood were programming their Sinclair ZX81 (which apparently was sold in the U.S. as the Timex Sinclair 1000) in Z80 assembly. B registers, C registers, (and pairing them as BC) D, E, F (paired with A as AF if I remember correctly?) H, L, IX, IY, etc.
Then we got the Commodore 64 and I had only three registers to play with (can't remember what their names were). I felt like I'd taken several steps backwards.
1. Can you actually point to any evidence to the contrary, please? I mean, these are the guys who make the rules. I'm lost as to what would convince you. You keep on and on with all these allegations, and yet without a shred of evidence; not even a blog posting.
2. Your other post - the one where you said:
Civil wars? Peanuts compared to the bureaucracy you advocate. I'd rather have been in the war in Angola as a civilian because at least there's no pretense at a civility that isn't there.
I'm out. I am really reluctant to state something this strongly worded on the basis of some anonymous internet postings, but I think you're genuinely detached from reality. I was talking with someone from Angola a couple of years ago and asked her what it's like. She assured me it wasn't nearly as bad as it used to be because she hadn't been shot at while driving down the street for months now.
Being a civilian in the middle of the war doesn't do much good if you're shot or raped or your house is burned down or your nose and ears are cut off or any of the countless other atrocities.
(And, no, I can't renounce UK citizenship. That's not actually allowed. UK citizens are citizens for life. Violation of those rules is classed as High Treason.)
you may give up your citizenship or status if you already have another citizenship or nationality
The two other conditions are you must be over 18 (or have been married if you're under 18) and of sound mind. Even that is not absolute:
but if you are not of sound mind, you may still be allowed to give up your British citizenship or other British nationality if it would be in your best interests
I didn't know any of this, by the way. I went to Yahoo, entered the words "renounce UK citizenship", and the third result gives me the UKBA site. In the middle of the page is the link to how to do it. Next comes the form you need to fill out. Next is the supporting documents required, followed by cost information, where to send your form, and finally what to expect once you've submitted your form.
But I think you'd rather just whine and blame the faceless "government officials" and their rules, instead of taking some action to make things better for yourself.
My suggestion - drop that enormous chip. Where ever you are in life, you can make things better. Don't blame the rules, don't get hung up on technicalities. If it's that dreadful in the U.S., move back to the U.K. Or, if you are serious in your comment that the terrible U.S. is still marginally better than the terrible U.K., move somewhere else. France. Germany. Australia. As a U.K. citizen you have so many more options than the vast majority of people in the world. If you choose to squander them and just devote your energies to being bitter, then you're fulfilling your own downward spiral. How about at least being thankful you weren't born into starvation in Somalia or in the midst of civil war in Angola or Rwanda?
So renounce your UK citizenship. Despite what you've posted elsewhere, the UK Border Agency says you can.
Can I give up my citizenship?
If you are a British citizen, a British overseas territories citizen, a British overseas citizen, a British subject or a British national (overseas), you may give up your citizenship or status if you:
* already have another citizenship or nationality; or * are going to get another citizenship or nationality after you have given up your British citizenship, British overseas territories citizenship, British overseas citizenship, British subject status or British national (overseas) status.
There's something missing - a downmod of "you are factually incorrect". Not "I disagree", but you make a statement that is provably (in a binary fashion) wrong. As in a statement that is the equivalent of "kiwimate invented Linux" which nonetheless sounds so well written that moderators who don't know any better just go ahead and mod it up to +5 informative, despite it being demonstrably wrong. Not "I disagree", but "here's the documented proof from a reliable source that says otherwise".
Yes. It's quite amazing just how many comments get modded up to +4 or +5 very quickly for no apparent reason. The other big problem I have is it sometimes seems anyone can get modded up to +5 insightful or informative if they sound like they know what they're talking about, even if they're flat out wrong. I've seen so many comments that get modded all the way up and they're provably incorrect, sometimes even if I don't know the topic but take five minutes to read the article linked in the summary.
You do make a valid point, but here are my counterpoints.
One - a paper library is hopefully categorized and indexed properly. If you go to an old-fashioned book library, everything is arranged according to its appropriate category, filed according to the Dewey decimal system. It's easy - you look up the number in a card catalog (or the electronic equivalent) and it tells you the number is 378.143. You go to the appropriate section of the library and there it is. Why? Because a librarian took that book when it first came into the library and filed it properly.
A DM system doesn't work that way. Everything starts off as just a bunch of documents in a flat system. The only way to distinguish and categorize them is by metadata.
Which leads to...
Two - you're moving from a structured filing system (almost certainly under the control of a librarian) to an unstructured filing system. Leaving aside the instantaneous confusion, remember it's going to grow in size over the next several years. Not only will the quantity of documents increase, but even if the initial import was well structured and tagged you're now most likely implementing a system where anyone can insert a new document (not a new record, hopefully - that had better still be under the control of a librarian or you're facing compliance nightmares). I really don't want to sound elitist, but librarians know how to categorize and file things in an organized fashion; users often don't, and even if they do there's a good chance Joe is filing documents according to Joe's categorization, and Marsha is filing documents according to Marsha's categorization, and Sandy is...etc. Unless you take the time to very clearly define those categorizations/metadata up front.
Sorry, but I have to disagree. As I pointed out in another post, there are a lot of factors to think about when you do something like this, and if you don't have the experience you'll make mistakes.
It's kind of like saying (my favorite distro) Linux/Windows 7 is so easy to set up these days that anyone can do it. If it's just a matter of clicking Next->Next->Next, then yes. And that might even be sufficient for a home computer (ignoring things like backups). But most people reading this will know there are a lot of things you have to know to do when you set up a server. Otherwise, it'll work, but chances are it's inefficient, insecure, and prone to the first failure that comes along.
Or - a home wireless router. You could just plug it in and be on your way. Or, you could take a few minutes to do it right and set up encryption, turn off SSID broadcasting, perhaps MAC filtering, etc. Both ways will get you up and running, at least initially. One way, however, is at the very least resulting in a risky unsecured configuration.
Yes, exactly. If I'd thought a bit more before writing my reply above, I'd have commented that Google does information retrieval. That's different from document management and VERY different from records management.
People still have to be able to locate those scanned PDFs. Now it's electronic, you need to know where to go to get it. Is it on a network share in a well-organized directory structure? At some point it gets so close to a taxonomy that you get past the simple hierarchical mapping limits.
The traditional way to handle paper records is the method I referred to; you have them stored in a traditional vault and your RM system tracks by building/room/shelf/box. Everything is barcoded to make it quick/efficient to check in/check out.
These are not insurmountable complications. I'm really just pointing out that there's a lot of details to think about, and it has to scale - both in terms of size of company and in terms of longevity of system. It's requirements gathering for a new paradigm in a company's traditional records keeping processes (which includes the workflow, by the way - I didn't even start to get into that). Again, not insurmountable, and the technology is simple. It's the processes that are crucial.
Very different problem space. Google doesn't need to have a high precision score in its results. A DM system, on the other hand, needs to have really good precision because its corpus will contain thousands of very similar documents. Content searching isn't going to work very well there - you need specific metadata (e.g. delimit by date of filing with the federal agency).
* If you want to get technical, your tf.idf score is going to be well nigh useless in this case. It's about precision, not so much recall.
Nothing fancy, just a database of scanned forms in pdf format and the like.
There's the first problem. It's never simple.
First issue - if you're going to put documents in, you're going to want to get them out. How do you search for them? You're going to want to define the metadata, and that's a headache. Got lawyers? They'll want client and matter. But those fields are just about meaningless to anyone else. How do you resolve the incompatibility? Do you use different forms for different groups of users? How will the engineering department find the subpoena papers that the lawyers filed?
What fields are globally useful? Are they so generic that any search will retrieve hundreds of documents? Conversely, are they so specific as to make your metadata field selections horribly long and therefore ambiguous? (Free text metadata? Let's not go there.)
Remember that you've got to fill in that metadata any time you add a document. What's the balance between useful and annoying? Too many fields and nobody will want to fill it in. Too few, and you won't be able to find anything.
That's for new documents. When you first implement a DMS, you have a truckload of documents to be imported. You're not going to do it manually, you're going to use an auto-import. But how do you define the metadata for all those millions of documents you're importing? What if you have client/matter, for instance? Hopefully they're all already sorted, and you can use something like Kofax Capture, a seriously powerful and fast scanner, and separator sheets on which you can do forms recognition to define the metadata fields. But there's a lot of work involved up front to get that import working properly.
Don't forget the OCR. Hopefully all your paper documents are clean and will OCR nicely, so you can do full text indexing.
Security. Better get that set up right. Profile level security? It's more secure, but people will complain that they don't know if a document is there and they just need to request access because profile level security means if you don't have permissions to access a document it won't even show up in your search results. Groups. And by the way, remember to define the permissions on all those millions of documents you're importing.
Version control. How do you control check in and check out? Do you control check in and check out, or just audit it?
I've only just scratched the surface of a document management system. Then there's records management. You'll want to make sure your system is DoD 5015.2 compliant. Setting up the retention schedules...hopefully you've got a records retention policy already, otherwise that's months worth of work to define those policies and ensure you comply with all regulatory requirements while still balancing your need to purge/archive old records.
How does something even become a record? Hopefully you've already got knowledgeable librarians (yes, that's what they're called), and you just need to train them on your new RM system.
Are all your boxes already barcoded? Your RM system should be able to register where a record is - building, shelf, box.
You're probably getting the idea. The technology is easy. The processes are complicated, and they get exponentially more complicated as the size of your client base grows.
So, you want all the rights and privileges of US citizenship, at your convenience (per your earlier post where you said "I granted the US no authority over me until I was 27"), but none of the rights and obligations.
If you claim citizenship of the US, then yes, the US does have a legal right to tell you what to do. In return, you get full protection of their embassy in a foreign country, the right to enter the country at any time, etc., etc.
working for a foreign power as a UK citizen would have been High Treason
What? Absolute nonsense. If you mean "working in a government job which requires you to swear fealty to the U.S. and renounce all foreign ties", etc., then maybe, but not treason. I'm very familiar with the rules because I'm a non-US citizen living and working in the US (from New Zealand, i.e. not an entirely dissimilar situation).
can't renounce UK citizenship
So what? What, precisely, do you think this stops you from doing? Citizenship is a fairly complicated matter, and it's very dependent on where you were born, your citizenship at birth, etc., but most importantly your intentions.
I think you're just looking for excuses. I am not a US citizen, as I said, but I haven't paid for any of my US education so far. No, I didn't get grants - I got a job working for a company that reimburses my tuition. (So far, to the tune of one and a half master's degrees and quite happy to pay for the rest of my second master's degree, and a Ph.D. after that.) Yes, I'm in a fortunate situation, but my point is nobody's denying me any higher education. And I doubt anybody's denying you, either.
No, actually it's very relevant. For everyone making a fuss about the judge's ignorance, idiocy, etc., I'd really like to hear how you'd address the problem. (Yes, it is a problem. It's the same principle as demanding that any kind of license, be it GPL or BSD, be adhered to, or Richard Stallman insisting that people should say GNU/Linux.)
Put a bit more simplistically - we have an age-old problem (fakes, cheapening of a brand, etc.) which is now complicated by technological advances. What's the best solution that all the technological cleverness on Slashdot can devise? Think of it as a geek challenge...
I hope and pray you're being facetiously ironic, but from the spittle-spraying angry tones of your posts I doubt it.
Some people get caught up in the supposed glamor of a scene. Some people have children to feed and will gladly take any job they can find. News flash - this is not an economy in which people are being inundated with amazing job offers that they can all afford to turn down.
And on the off-chance you're being serious, how do you live day to day in such a black and white world? Just because something doesn't meet my approval doesn't make it immoral by default.
To wrench back on topic, what got you so angry at Zynga in the first place? This reminds me of the recent story on Angry Birds and all the vitriol directed at that game. If it's a pleasant and diversionary exercise, what on earth do you care how people choose to spend their free time?
I may differ from many readers in this opinion, but I happen to think it's very easy to argue with "free" and "freedom" if by doggedly sticking with dogmatic principles you end up taking giant leaps backward.
Wave was amazing. And no one uses them because in early beta they are closed down.
Other have said in this story that Google is shaky at best on marketing, and I agree. You can have the most amazing product, but if you can't communicate effectively that product is doomed.
I didn't use Wave because Google never managed to convey clearly exactly what it did or why I should use it. Just that it was amazing and cool.
The first link may not have worked properly, but the report it took me to is from 18 May 2006 and is a general report on torture. Nowhere is Manning's name mentioned (unsurprisingly, given the date).
I watched the YouTube link. Most of it was the lady reading a letter from Manning that described how embarrassing it was to be naked in front of other people, and saying that he was stripped of clothes and found it very cold, and was checked on every five minutes during the day to see if he was all right. Only permitted to one hour of exercise outside his cell every day and sitting alone in his cell most of the rest of the time. Harsh, but her description of it was "degrading and humiliating". Not torture. Oh yes, and the view from inside the U.S. administration that called the treatment "ridiculous". Not torture.
The Amnesty International link describes "harsh treatment".
I certainly don't intend to trivialize these things, but calling it torture is stretching things mightily.
Link please? I kept reading comments back in the original stories here on/. about all the torture, and they all seemed to revolve around the supposed sleep deprivation. Everything I read said quite clearly that he was allowed uninterrupted sleep throughout the night (between the hours of 11:00 pm and 6:00 am, or something like that).
She does seem to have a fair amount of knowledge there, as you'd expect. I read up on the Pirate Party (WIkipedia, their site, etc.) and I can tell what they stand for in terms of copyright, piracy, etc.
So, next question for me is:
How's she going to handle the current economic crisis in Europe? Because that's a much bigger impact and far more urgent.
What about the terrorism crises going on that threaten various countries in the EU? What's her/the Pirate Party's position?
Energy platform? What do they think about the nuclear industry? What about wind/solar, and how that impacts the reliability of the grid?
Carbon emissions?
Corruption?
Actually, anything other than piracy, really. Because, you know, I'd hate to think that she, and the Pirate Party, and everyone who elected her, think that copyright reform is the only thing that matters and everything else in the entire EU (and their relationship with other political entities) is in the category of "yeah, I guess someone should do something about that. Someone else..."
And the contacts you make. Networking is as important as anything else. The old axiom of "it's not what you know, it's who you know" certainly comes in for a lot of abuse and cynicism with people making the connection of "jobs for the lads", but it's more than that.
If you went to school with someone whose family connections got them an interview at a prestigious company, you now have a connection. With so many applications to weed through, and high competition for any kind of position in a poor economy, it can be immensely helpful just to have a foot in the door. And that foot in the door often is someone who already works there who (a) will get a bonus if they refer someone who ends up getting hired for a position, and (b) thinks "hey, Steven would be good for this job, and I know he was a hard worker at school so I may as well recommend him".
Slashdot Mirror
Copyright infringement != stealing. In neither case.
Semantics. And so what? Just because one phrase isn't functionally equivalent to another doesn't make it any less wrong, illegal, and/or immoral/amoral.
But, GPL infringement is often for profit, while file sharing isn't.
Ah, now we're into the justification phase. Why talk about file sharing when we started with copyright infringement? Copyright infringement definitely is about profit. You get something for free instead of paying out $15 for it - you profit.
You can be sure that many people that defend file sharing won't agree with making money from it.
Because some things are only slightly wrong. As long as there's something worse that you're not doing, that makes your crime/law breaking kind of trivial and that's easy to morph into "it's really okay", right?
I love the defenses on Slashdot. People seem to have this Robin Hood mentality, in much the same way Anonymous stealing from banks to give to charity does. Either that, or they shrug and say "the artists don't get much profit" and thereby defend ripping them off of what little profit they might see. Unless all pirates/copyright infringers/whatever you want to call yourself to make yourself feel better do the right (?) thing and send some money directly to the artist. As has been suggested/stated on this site many, many times.
(firefox)...for a long time they were extremely competitive
Firefox had gotten to a point of maturity and very high popularity. It's easy to become complacent at that point.
What do you do when you have a mature and stable product? There are a lot of directions you can go, and in a commercial product those directions are usually set by people in the marketing and product owner roles. Marketing/sales give feedback as to what they believe will be important to the customer. The product owner is responsible for deciding what to implement and in what timeline - the product lifecycle.
If you don't have those roles as part of your team, who makes those decisions? It's not impossible, but there is a reason those roles exist (as unpopular as they might be with some - not all - Slashdot readers, who view sales and marketing as fluff).
And I understand the viewpoint of the developer. What motivates someone? For me, I have a job and I enjoy it, but if I was getting constant criticism on my output and very little praise that'd be pretty demotivating. Now, I realize that part of a job is sometimes you have to do things you don't like, and even if you enjoy your job and are good at it there's still going to be feedback that you won't like.
You might be driven by ideology and desire to go on despite criticism. Personally, there's a great motivation for me in recognizing that I need to make a living because I have a family to support and that means I have superiors that I need to make happy. I.e. I can't afford to just drop this job - I have too much to lose.
If you're an unpaid open source free software developer, your motivation is, what? Ideology and grateful feedback. If you've reached a fulfillment point ("the product is mature and popular") and now start getting a whole bunch of negative feedback, that's very demotivating. What happens if you just stop? You've already done a great job, you can get precious time back, and you don't have to care any more about the complaining. For some people, they're constantly driven to move on, push forwards, continue. They're the entrepreneurs, or the high ideologues (like Richard Stallman). But it takes a lot of energy and passion, and sometimes it's easy to decide it's not worth it any more.
Sez you...the cool kids in my neighborhood were programming their Sinclair ZX81 (which apparently was sold in the U.S. as the Timex Sinclair 1000) in Z80 assembly. B registers, C registers, (and pairing them as BC) D, E, F (paired with A as AF if I remember correctly?) H, L, IX, IY, etc.
Then we got the Commodore 64 and I had only three registers to play with (can't remember what their names were). I felt like I'd taken several steps backwards.
1. Can you actually point to any evidence to the contrary, please? I mean, these are the guys who make the rules. I'm lost as to what would convince you. You keep on and on with all these allegations, and yet without a shred of evidence; not even a blog posting.
2. Your other post - the one where you said:
Civil wars? Peanuts compared to the bureaucracy you advocate. I'd rather have been in the war in Angola as a civilian because at least there's no pretense at a civility that isn't there.
I'm out. I am really reluctant to state something this strongly worded on the basis of some anonymous internet postings, but I think you're genuinely detached from reality. I was talking with someone from Angola a couple of years ago and asked her what it's like. She assured me it wasn't nearly as bad as it used to be because she hadn't been shot at while driving down the street for months now.
Being a civilian in the middle of the war doesn't do much good if you're shot or raped or your house is burned down or your nose and ears are cut off or any of the countless other atrocities.
Seriously, get some damned perspective.
(And, no, I can't renounce UK citizenship. That's not actually allowed. UK citizens are citizens for life. Violation of those rules is classed as High Treason.)
The UK Border Agency disagrees. From what you've posted, you have a simple justification.
you may give up your citizenship or status if you already have another citizenship or nationality
The two other conditions are you must be over 18 (or have been married if you're under 18) and of sound mind. Even that is not absolute:
but if you are not of sound mind, you may still be allowed to give up your British citizenship or other British nationality if it would be in your best interests
I didn't know any of this, by the way. I went to Yahoo, entered the words "renounce UK citizenship", and the third result gives me the UKBA site. In the middle of the page is the link to how to do it. Next comes the form you need to fill out. Next is the supporting documents required, followed by cost information, where to send your form, and finally what to expect once you've submitted your form.
But I think you'd rather just whine and blame the faceless "government officials" and their rules, instead of taking some action to make things better for yourself.
My suggestion - drop that enormous chip. Where ever you are in life, you can make things better. Don't blame the rules, don't get hung up on technicalities. If it's that dreadful in the U.S., move back to the U.K. Or, if you are serious in your comment that the terrible U.S. is still marginally better than the terrible U.K., move somewhere else. France. Germany. Australia. As a U.K. citizen you have so many more options than the vast majority of people in the world. If you choose to squander them and just devote your energies to being bitter, then you're fulfilling your own downward spiral. How about at least being thankful you weren't born into starvation in Somalia or in the midst of civil war in Angola or Rwanda?
So renounce your UK citizenship. Despite what you've posted elsewhere, the UK Border Agency says you can.
Can I give up my citizenship?
If you are a British citizen, a British overseas territories citizen, a British overseas citizen, a British subject or a British national (overseas), you may give up your citizenship or status if you:
* already have another citizenship or nationality; or
* are going to get another citizenship or nationality after you have given up your British citizenship, British overseas territories citizenship, British overseas citizenship, British subject status or British national (overseas) status.
There's something missing - a downmod of "you are factually incorrect". Not "I disagree", but you make a statement that is provably (in a binary fashion) wrong. As in a statement that is the equivalent of "kiwimate invented Linux" which nonetheless sounds so well written that moderators who don't know any better just go ahead and mod it up to +5 informative, despite it being demonstrably wrong. Not "I disagree", but "here's the documented proof from a reliable source that says otherwise".
Yes. It's quite amazing just how many comments get modded up to +4 or +5 very quickly for no apparent reason. The other big problem I have is it sometimes seems anyone can get modded up to +5 insightful or informative if they sound like they know what they're talking about, even if they're flat out wrong. I've seen so many comments that get modded all the way up and they're provably incorrect, sometimes even if I don't know the topic but take five minutes to read the article linked in the summary.
You do make a valid point, but here are my counterpoints.
One - a paper library is hopefully categorized and indexed properly. If you go to an old-fashioned book library, everything is arranged according to its appropriate category, filed according to the Dewey decimal system. It's easy - you look up the number in a card catalog (or the electronic equivalent) and it tells you the number is 378.143. You go to the appropriate section of the library and there it is. Why? Because a librarian took that book when it first came into the library and filed it properly.
A DM system doesn't work that way. Everything starts off as just a bunch of documents in a flat system. The only way to distinguish and categorize them is by metadata.
Which leads to...
Two - you're moving from a structured filing system (almost certainly under the control of a librarian) to an unstructured filing system. Leaving aside the instantaneous confusion, remember it's going to grow in size over the next several years. Not only will the quantity of documents increase, but even if the initial import was well structured and tagged you're now most likely implementing a system where anyone can insert a new document (not a new record, hopefully - that had better still be under the control of a librarian or you're facing compliance nightmares). I really don't want to sound elitist, but librarians know how to categorize and file things in an organized fashion; users often don't, and even if they do there's a good chance Joe is filing documents according to Joe's categorization, and Marsha is filing documents according to Marsha's categorization, and Sandy is...etc. Unless you take the time to very clearly define those categorizations/metadata up front.
Sorry, but I have to disagree. As I pointed out in another post, there are a lot of factors to think about when you do something like this, and if you don't have the experience you'll make mistakes.
It's kind of like saying (my favorite distro) Linux/Windows 7 is so easy to set up these days that anyone can do it. If it's just a matter of clicking Next->Next->Next, then yes. And that might even be sufficient for a home computer (ignoring things like backups). But most people reading this will know there are a lot of things you have to know to do when you set up a server. Otherwise, it'll work, but chances are it's inefficient, insecure, and prone to the first failure that comes along.
Or - a home wireless router. You could just plug it in and be on your way. Or, you could take a few minutes to do it right and set up encryption, turn off SSID broadcasting, perhaps MAC filtering, etc. Both ways will get you up and running, at least initially. One way, however, is at the very least resulting in a risky unsecured configuration.
Yes, exactly. If I'd thought a bit more before writing my reply above, I'd have commented that Google does information retrieval. That's different from document management and VERY different from records management.
People still have to be able to locate those scanned PDFs. Now it's electronic, you need to know where to go to get it. Is it on a network share in a well-organized directory structure? At some point it gets so close to a taxonomy that you get past the simple hierarchical mapping limits.
The traditional way to handle paper records is the method I referred to; you have them stored in a traditional vault and your RM system tracks by building/room/shelf/box. Everything is barcoded to make it quick/efficient to check in/check out.
These are not insurmountable complications. I'm really just pointing out that there's a lot of details to think about, and it has to scale - both in terms of size of company and in terms of longevity of system. It's requirements gathering for a new paradigm in a company's traditional records keeping processes (which includes the workflow, by the way - I didn't even start to get into that). Again, not insurmountable, and the technology is simple. It's the processes that are crucial.
Very different problem space. Google doesn't need to have a high precision score in its results. A DM system, on the other hand, needs to have really good precision because its corpus will contain thousands of very similar documents. Content searching isn't going to work very well there - you need specific metadata (e.g. delimit by date of filing with the federal agency).
* If you want to get technical, your tf.idf score is going to be well nigh useless in this case. It's about precision, not so much recall.
Is there some complication I don't understand?
Yes. More than one.
Nothing fancy, just a database of scanned forms in pdf format and the like.
There's the first problem. It's never simple.
First issue - if you're going to put documents in, you're going to want to get them out. How do you search for them? You're going to want to define the metadata, and that's a headache. Got lawyers? They'll want client and matter. But those fields are just about meaningless to anyone else. How do you resolve the incompatibility? Do you use different forms for different groups of users? How will the engineering department find the subpoena papers that the lawyers filed?
What fields are globally useful? Are they so generic that any search will retrieve hundreds of documents? Conversely, are they so specific as to make your metadata field selections horribly long and therefore ambiguous? (Free text metadata? Let's not go there.)
Remember that you've got to fill in that metadata any time you add a document. What's the balance between useful and annoying? Too many fields and nobody will want to fill it in. Too few, and you won't be able to find anything.
That's for new documents. When you first implement a DMS, you have a truckload of documents to be imported. You're not going to do it manually, you're going to use an auto-import. But how do you define the metadata for all those millions of documents you're importing? What if you have client/matter, for instance? Hopefully they're all already sorted, and you can use something like Kofax Capture, a seriously powerful and fast scanner, and separator sheets on which you can do forms recognition to define the metadata fields. But there's a lot of work involved up front to get that import working properly.
Don't forget the OCR. Hopefully all your paper documents are clean and will OCR nicely, so you can do full text indexing.
Security. Better get that set up right. Profile level security? It's more secure, but people will complain that they don't know if a document is there and they just need to request access because profile level security means if you don't have permissions to access a document it won't even show up in your search results. Groups. And by the way, remember to define the permissions on all those millions of documents you're importing.
Version control. How do you control check in and check out? Do you control check in and check out, or just audit it?
I've only just scratched the surface of a document management system. Then there's records management. You'll want to make sure your system is DoD 5015.2 compliant. Setting up the retention schedules...hopefully you've got a records retention policy already, otherwise that's months worth of work to define those policies and ensure you comply with all regulatory requirements while still balancing your need to purge/archive old records.
How does something even become a record? Hopefully you've already got knowledgeable librarians (yes, that's what they're called), and you just need to train them on your new RM system.
Are all your boxes already barcoded? Your RM system should be able to register where a record is - building, shelf, box.
You're probably getting the idea. The technology is easy. The processes are complicated, and they get exponentially more complicated as the size of your client base grows.
So, you want all the rights and privileges of US citizenship, at your convenience (per your earlier post where you said "I granted the US no authority over me until I was 27"), but none of the rights and obligations.
If you claim citizenship of the US, then yes, the US does have a legal right to tell you what to do. In return, you get full protection of their embassy in a foreign country, the right to enter the country at any time, etc., etc.
working for a foreign power as a UK citizen would have been High Treason
What? Absolute nonsense. If you mean "working in a government job which requires you to swear fealty to the U.S. and renounce all foreign ties", etc., then maybe, but not treason. I'm very familiar with the rules because I'm a non-US citizen living and working in the US (from New Zealand, i.e. not an entirely dissimilar situation).
can't renounce UK citizenship
So what? What, precisely, do you think this stops you from doing? Citizenship is a fairly complicated matter, and it's very dependent on where you were born, your citizenship at birth, etc., but most importantly your intentions.
I think you're just looking for excuses. I am not a US citizen, as I said, but I haven't paid for any of my US education so far. No, I didn't get grants - I got a job working for a company that reimburses my tuition. (So far, to the tune of one and a half master's degrees and quite happy to pay for the rest of my second master's degree, and a Ph.D. after that.) Yes, I'm in a fortunate situation, but my point is nobody's denying me any higher education. And I doubt anybody's denying you, either.
No, actually it's very relevant. For everyone making a fuss about the judge's ignorance, idiocy, etc., I'd really like to hear how you'd address the problem. (Yes, it is a problem. It's the same principle as demanding that any kind of license, be it GPL or BSD, be adhered to, or Richard Stallman insisting that people should say GNU/Linux.)
Put a bit more simplistically - we have an age-old problem (fakes, cheapening of a brand, etc.) which is now complicated by technological advances. What's the best solution that all the technological cleverness on Slashdot can devise? Think of it as a geek challenge...
Article says "They're still researching options, but the tentative plan is for a high-speed fixed wireless connection with a satellite backup."
I hope and pray you're being facetiously ironic, but from the spittle-spraying angry tones of your posts I doubt it.
Some people get caught up in the supposed glamor of a scene. Some people have children to feed and will gladly take any job they can find. News flash - this is not an economy in which people are being inundated with amazing job offers that they can all afford to turn down.
And on the off-chance you're being serious, how do you live day to day in such a black and white world? Just because something doesn't meet my approval doesn't make it immoral by default.
To wrench back on topic, what got you so angry at Zynga in the first place? This reminds me of the recent story on Angry Birds and all the vitriol directed at that game. If it's a pleasant and diversionary exercise, what on earth do you care how people choose to spend their free time?
It's hard to argue with "free" and "freedom"
I may differ from many readers in this opinion, but I happen to think it's very easy to argue with "free" and "freedom" if by doggedly sticking with dogmatic principles you end up taking giant leaps backward.
Wave was amazing.
And no one uses them because in early beta they are closed down.
Other have said in this story that Google is shaky at best on marketing, and I agree. You can have the most amazing product, but if you can't communicate effectively that product is doomed.
I didn't use Wave because Google never managed to convey clearly exactly what it did or why I should use it. Just that it was amazing and cool.
+4 Informative?
The first link may not have worked properly, but the report it took me to is from 18 May 2006 and is a general report on torture. Nowhere is Manning's name mentioned (unsurprisingly, given the date).
I watched the YouTube link. Most of it was the lady reading a letter from Manning that described how embarrassing it was to be naked in front of other people, and saying that he was stripped of clothes and found it very cold, and was checked on every five minutes during the day to see if he was all right. Only permitted to one hour of exercise outside his cell every day and sitting alone in his cell most of the rest of the time. Harsh, but her description of it was "degrading and humiliating". Not torture. Oh yes, and the view from inside the U.S. administration that called the treatment "ridiculous". Not torture.
The Amnesty International link describes "harsh treatment".
I certainly don't intend to trivialize these things, but calling it torture is stretching things mightily.
conditions that are considered torture
Link please? I kept reading comments back in the original stories here on /. about all the torture, and they all seemed to revolve around the supposed sleep deprivation. Everything I read said quite clearly that he was allowed uninterrupted sleep throughout the night (between the hours of 11:00 pm and 6:00 am, or something like that).
She does seem to have a fair amount of knowledge there, as you'd expect. I read up on the Pirate Party (WIkipedia, their site, etc.) and I can tell what they stand for in terms of copyright, piracy, etc.
So, next question for me is:
How's she going to handle the current economic crisis in Europe? Because that's a much bigger impact and far more urgent.
What about the terrorism crises going on that threaten various countries in the EU? What's her/the Pirate Party's position?
Energy platform? What do they think about the nuclear industry? What about wind/solar, and how that impacts the reliability of the grid?
Carbon emissions?
Corruption?
Actually, anything other than piracy, really. Because, you know, I'd hate to think that she, and the Pirate Party, and everyone who elected her, think that copyright reform is the only thing that matters and everything else in the entire EU (and their relationship with other political entities) is in the category of "yeah, I guess someone should do something about that. Someone else..."
And the contacts you make. Networking is as important as anything else. The old axiom of "it's not what you know, it's who you know" certainly comes in for a lot of abuse and cynicism with people making the connection of "jobs for the lads", but it's more than that.
If you went to school with someone whose family connections got them an interview at a prestigious company, you now have a connection. With so many applications to weed through, and high competition for any kind of position in a poor economy, it can be immensely helpful just to have a foot in the door. And that foot in the door often is someone who already works there who (a) will get a bonus if they refer someone who ends up getting hired for a position, and (b) thinks "hey, Steven would be good for this job, and I know he was a hard worker at school so I may as well recommend him".