Are you telling me that if I were to offer to pick up a letter at a residence, and deliver it to another residence for a fee, I would be breaking the law?
What law? (statute and title, please.)
AFAIK, if you wanted to deliver letters, parcels, or postcards, you could start tommorrow, even today, depending on the time at your location.
As it stands now, our privacy is quite well protected in the mail, and the Fourth Amendment has been applied to the mails, preventing government officials from inspecting articles of mail without a warrant. There is no such protection applied to private delivery services.
The privatisation lobby is often misled into thinking that private companies are concerned for our rights, and they disregard the fact that the Intellegence Community often uses private companies to snoop, harass, and other dirty work whenever the constitution gets in the way of thier plans. Remember Iran-Contra? Do alittle googling on the CIA and thier private contractors, you'll be amazed at what you find.
It's not quite so simple as private=good, government=bad.
WTF? is that a troll? I usually don't feed the trolls, but here goes. The usps is the least expensive delivery service in the world. $0.37 to take a letter accross the damn continent? You call that expensive? What kind of republican crack are you smoking? to Hawaii? Alaska? $0.37!
A monopoly? What country are you livin' in? Youve never used FedEx? You've never sent something by UPS? AirbornExpress? Quit shootin' that smack, you little fascist wh*re, and choose your fights more carefully.
Hell, it cost more than twice that in little countries like France and Germany.
Get off your "Privatize Everything" kick and use reason. Even if the cost of first class pstage went up to $0.50 for a standard letter, the USPS would still be less expensive than the competition.
The subsidy was temporary and lasted during the duration of "The Postal Service Reorganisation Act" from 1971 to 1983. The rest of its history, the mail has paid for itself by selling postage, and it still does. See the USPS History page.
And the Federal government has provided plenty of subsidies to telcom and internet infrastructure.
But I do agree with (most of) your argument, just not your examples.
But I think that, if the conduit (wire, wireless,fiber, cable, etc) providers become divorced (separate) from the service providers, real competition will return to the isp market.
The situation that we have now does not create a truly competative market.
Cable companies enjoy monopolies in providing cablemodem service to thier markets, Phone companies (very soon will) enjoy monopolies in providing dsl, and most community based high bandwidth projects have a single service provider.
If these conduits were operated separately from the services they now carry, it would be possible for a consumer to choose phone service, cable programming, and internet access from any provider they chose. The connection providers could charge the ISP's for access to the market
Pricing would become competative (remember the advent of $9.95/month 56k modem access, same thing, but high-band), and competition between the different transmission mediums (assuming the could not be owned by the same company) would keep those prices in check.
It would require a major shift in thinking for the cable/telco industries, so I'm sure it will be a long time before anything like this becomes a reality.
LOGO is not a bad place to start, even if it is a little out of vogue.
It is a subset of LISP, it is easy to learn, and you can write programs that have some amazingly complex behavior (simple AI).
Not everyone is wowed by the "make pretty apps with lots of buttons" school of programming, and LOGO (or LISP) allows you to expiriement with some complex logical systems without having to face a steep learning curve.
Trying to coordinate a departmental walkout can get you and any conspirators screwed, as in blacklisted. If only one person you aproach with the idea dissagrees with you, or has a "lifer" mentality, then this could get you fired in an ugly way.
Also, you might not get unemployment compensation if your employer is willing to pay for the lawyers to fight it and/or the unemployment arbitrators are biased against the employee (depends on the local political environment).
If you've already taken these thoughts into consideration, and you've weighed the risks carefully, then fsck 'em and walk (don't forget to delete all of your saved but unsubmitted work from the system before you leave).
Your best bet might be to discuss with your co-conspirators a plan to either help each other find employment, or to do as another poster suggested and create a consultancy of yourself and your coleagues.
Handwriting requires a different style of thinking, especially when writing in ink. I've become too dependant on the backspace and delete keys when I'm composing something on the computer.
I believe that one of the best examples of how the medium changes what one writes is found in the novels by Kurt Vonnegut Jr..
His earlier works, such as Slaughterhouse Five and Welcome to the Monkey House were written or typed on an old typewriter, are distinguished by an efficiency of words, short chapters, and a unique irreverence for both literary and social convention. Then someone boughjt the man a word proccessor and he wrote Hocus Pocus which is very wordy, has standard length chapters, and seems rather conventional in comparison to his other work.
I think that handwriting still has it's place, although it is a shrinking niche. But it is clear to me that the product of writing by hand and writing by machine are definately not equivalent.
If I understand basic accounting correctly, then releasing 20% fewer new titles should reduce expenses somwhat (admittedly not by quite 20%), so suffering only a 7% drop in sales should look like an increase in profits, unless you are expiriencing losses other than in sales.
I have learned of much of the new music I listen to through CDBaby.com and I'm sure that the RIAA companies are not very happy about losing customers to artists that don't care much for the typicalrecord companycontract.
It seems the companies are once again not being quite honest about thier losses, the causes, and, it seems, thier motives.
Remembering that most lawyers and judges are not all that knowledgable about programming, SCO could use 80 lines of plagerism to claim that there is a much deeper pattern of copying and paraphrasing going on (disregarding the fact that the vast majority of kernel contributers have had no access to propietary kernel code of any type). And the courts are influenced by the political environment of the time.
I've begun to view the underlying issue here as not one of SCO's ownership of particular code, but more an issue of ownership in general. There is a school of thought that believes that ownership is a neccessary aspect of all things and that things (objects, ideas, actions) only have value if they are paid for. This philosophy has been touted by such notables as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Ronald Reagan, George W Bush and his father. For the user base of GNU/Linux to not see this lawsuit as the beginning of yet another battle in the struggle to curtail the free distribution of ideas (source code are ideas) among men and women would be a mistake. If SCO were to convince the court that the 80 lines of code somehow bestowed upon the Linux kernen a taint (trade secrets) that cannot be removed, then the court may be conned into believing that the kernel is in part owned by SCO and that the distribution of the code and/or binaries should be accompanied by the paying of royalty. In addition, there has been an increasing attitude towards Free Software and Open Sourse that these ideas somehow endanger the economy of the United States (ask around, you'll see what I mean).
The difficulties that Free Software and Open Source Software pose to implementation of manditory DRM (censorship )is interpeted as a threat to not only to the distributers of movies and music but also to the political and law enforcement industries that see media as a way to shape the opinions, ideas and beliefs of the American citizenry. For an example we need only to look at the media coverage of the 2000 presidential election results and the lack of criticism over the courts refusal to mandate a meaningful recount and the subsequent appointment of a George W. Bush by 5 Supreme Court Justices.
An other example would be the casting of the DeCSS code as a "piracy tool" by virtually every news source covering the dispute, when in fact, DVDs can and are pirated without the use of the DeCSS code by software that incorporates licensed code provided by the DVD makers (Expert Guides' DVD Copy. There has been little noise from the MPAA over this tool or software like it, and no mention of such software in media coverage of the DeCSS case.
If the courts are affected by a political stance that views Free Software as somehow being "bad" (for the economy, for national security, etc), then this case is not about 80 lines of code, but about Free Software in general. If the case is decided in favor of SCO, the court may decide on a remedy that is not as simple as removing the offending code.
There also seems to be an increasing bias against community support in the tech feild, although I'm not sure why one would trust a company that has motivation to hide the vulnerabilities from the public more than the community of developers, administrators and users who are dependant on system security.
Admittedly, I have only perused the draft, but it does appear to be another attempt to prevent large companies from being "outed" when they choose to release software that is not ready or is poorly designed. Bugtraq, the Internet Storm Center and the Insecure.org Mailing List Archive do a fine job of lighting a fire under the responsible buttocks when necessary.
I have yet to hear of a posting to one of these lists that could be considered responsible for actual "trouble".
I would assume that if someone were planning on taking advantage of a vulnerability, they would look for one that hasn't yet made it to these lists.
I was refering to the sense of entitlement that companies who are dependant on an anticompetative business model. The lowering cost of infrastructure that Open Source and Free Software enables threatens businesses that previously could count on a "locked in" customer base.
OTOH, the portability of cell phone numbers is likely to cause customers to gravitate towards the company that owns the largest network. Perhaps cell phone number portability would create competition only in a market where the towers and network were owned by companies not offering the service to end users, but were charging the service providers for access to a market.
It seems that these businesses are willing to do anything to retain thier customer base except for offer better terms to thier customers. Cingular (T-Mobile, VoiceStream, whatever) is beginning to show a similar attitude to thier customers as they increasingly own a larger portion of the SMS network. When they own 80% or more of the towers in a given market, they can afford to act as a monopoly.
This one statement almost completely sums up most of what is wrong with the mentality of Slashdot.
pot, kettle.
kettle, pot.
The problem exists not only on/., but in every public discourse that I have observed and/or participated in.
that said: In actuality, the zip+4 frequently could resolve to a single house for most addresses in most zip codes. Accepting that most ZIPs in the US are rural or suburban and that there are many that contain fewer than 10,000 addresses, then this is not a difficult assumption. The question should be more one of whether protections (sort by ZIP, but not +4) should be implemented to protect the minority but significant case (those whose homes have thier own +4 suffix in thier ZIP).
Personally, I see no reason that an actual abuse should be neccessary to ask (and expect) such protections. I'm sure that the persons who market demographic data disagree with me. (Their opinion is wrong.)
Slashdot Mirror
ralities insert e
take business a corporation. insert from
So that's what the preview button is for.
--qtp
I think he meant "Ostus Gustobus"
Which roughly translates to "they eat thier young" (or something close).
I really don't want to know the details.
"The Linux business model was bound to change..."
Mr. Mcbride is showing that he just doesn't understand that Linux is not a business model.
Linux is a reality of the market. Deal with it.
Free Software and Open Source are ralities of the market. Deal with that too.
If someone wants to contribute to the industry through Open Source and Free licensing, they can.
No entrance fee required.
For the first time in the history of the industrial revolution, an educated hobbyist can create something that will take business a corporation.
And nothing can be done about it. No legislation required.
And no amount of hair gel will change anything.
Are you telling me that if I were to offer to pick up a letter at a residence, and deliver it to another residence for a fee, I would be breaking the law?
What law? (statute and title, please.)
AFAIK, if you wanted to deliver letters, parcels, or postcards, you could start tommorrow, even today, depending on the time at your location.
As it stands now, our privacy is quite well protected in the mail, and the Fourth Amendment has been applied to the mails, preventing government officials from inspecting articles of mail without a warrant. There is no such protection applied to private delivery services.
The privatisation lobby is often misled into thinking that private companies are concerned for our rights, and they disregard the fact that the Intellegence Community often uses private companies to snoop, harass, and other dirty work whenever the constitution gets in the way of thier plans. Remember Iran-Contra ? Do alittle googling on the CIA and thier private contractors, you'll be amazed at what you find.
It's not quite so simple as private=good, government=bad.
WTF? is that a troll? I usually don't feed the trolls, but here goes. The usps is the least expensive delivery service in the world. $0.37 to take a letter accross the damn continent? You call that expensive? What kind of republican crack are you smoking? to Hawaii? Alaska? $0.37!
A monopoly? What country are you livin' in? Youve never used FedEx? You've never sent something by UPS? AirbornExpress? Quit shootin' that smack, you little fascist wh*re, and choose your fights more carefully.
Hell, it cost more than twice that in little countries like France and Germany.
Get off your "Privatize Everything" kick and use reason. Even if the cost of first class pstage went up to $0.50 for a standard letter, the USPS would still be less expensive than the competition.
Hasn't been since 1983,
The subsidy was temporary and lasted during the duration of "The Postal Service Reorganisation Act" from 1971 to 1983. The rest of its history, the mail has paid for itself by selling postage, and it still does. See the USPS History page.
And the Federal government has provided plenty of subsidies to telcom and internet infrastructure.
But I do agree with (most of) your argument, just not your examples.
Installing the network will always be expensive.
But I think that, if the conduit (wire, wireless,fiber, cable, etc) providers become divorced (separate) from the service providers, real competition will return to the isp market.
The situation that we have now does not create a truly competative market.
Cable companies enjoy monopolies in providing cablemodem service to thier markets, Phone companies (very soon will) enjoy monopolies in providing dsl, and most community based high bandwidth projects have a single service provider.
If these conduits were operated separately from the services they now carry, it would be possible for a consumer to choose phone service, cable programming, and internet access from any provider they chose. The connection providers could charge the ISP's for access to the market
Pricing would become competative (remember the advent of $9.95/month 56k modem access, same thing, but high-band), and competition between the different transmission mediums (assuming the could not be owned by the same company) would keep those prices in check.
It would require a major shift in thinking for the cable/telco industries, so I'm sure it will be a long time before anything like this becomes a reality.
Actually it's 2^16-2=65532 usable addresses or sixteen bits minus one reserved netmask and one reserved broadcast address.
Unless you subnet it further, then you loose an additional netmask and an additional broadcast address for each subnet.
Unless there's another (more efficient) method I haven't learned.
--qtp
LOGO is not a bad place to start, even if it is a little out of vogue.
It is a subset of LISP, it is easy to learn, and you can write programs that have some amazingly complex behavior (simple AI).
Not everyone is wowed by the "make pretty apps with lots of buttons" school of programming, and LOGO (or LISP) allows you to expiriement with some complex logical systems without having to face a steep learning curve.
There are some rescources here.
That depends on who your employer is, what clubs he belongs to, and who he knows.
I've pissed off the wrong person outside of work before and I'm pretty much fucked for life because of it.
But be careful.
Trying to coordinate a departmental walkout can get you and any conspirators screwed, as in blacklisted. If only one person you aproach with the idea dissagrees with you, or has a "lifer" mentality, then this could get you fired in an ugly way.
Also, you might not get unemployment compensation if your employer is willing to pay for the lawyers to fight it and/or the unemployment arbitrators are biased against the employee (depends on the local political environment).
If you've already taken these thoughts into consideration, and you've weighed the risks carefully, then fsck 'em and walk (don't forget to delete all of your saved but unsubmitted work from the system before you leave).
Your best bet might be to discuss with your co-conspirators a plan to either help each other find employment, or to do as another poster suggested and create a consultancy of yourself and your coleagues.
Handwriting requires a different style of thinking, especially when writing in ink. I've become too dependant on the backspace and delete keys when I'm composing something on the computer.
I believe that one of the best examples of how the medium changes what one writes is found in the novels by Kurt Vonnegut Jr..
His earlier works, such as Slaughterhouse Five and Welcome to the Monkey House were written or typed on an old typewriter, are distinguished by an efficiency of words, short chapters, and a unique irreverence for both literary and social convention. Then someone boughjt the man a word proccessor and he wrote Hocus Pocus which is very wordy, has standard length chapters, and seems rather conventional in comparison to his other work.
I think that handwriting still has it's place, although it is a shrinking niche. But it is clear to me that the product of writing by hand and writing by machine are definately not equivalent.
It looks like a 2. It's difficult to write smoothly and always looks out of place on the page.
I found a (pdf document) reference that has all of the letters and some tips on teaching.
I believe it was my own handwriting that led them to call it cursive.
--qtp.
The combined companies that make up the RIAA have released fewer new tiles. See the BusinessWeek article and this article by George Ziemann of MacWizards Music
If I understand basic accounting correctly, then releasing 20% fewer new titles should reduce expenses somwhat (admittedly not by quite 20%), so suffering only a 7% drop in sales should look like an increase in profits, unless you are expiriencing losses other than in sales.
I have learned of much of the new music I listen to through CDBaby.com and I'm sure that the RIAA companies are not very happy about losing customers to artists that don't care much for the typical record company contract.
It seems the companies are once again not being quite honest about thier losses, the causes, and, it seems, thier motives.
Bluetooth is likely to live on in simple appliances.
Such as (here, have a free idea) a wristwatch that adjusts its time when you leave the house, or disembark from a train or airplane.
I'm no expert at Bluetooth (or much else), but it seems usefull for many trivial, low data, short distance networking problems.
--qtp
to the courts.
Remembering that most lawyers and judges are not all that knowledgable about programming, SCO could use 80 lines of plagerism to claim that there is a much deeper pattern of copying and paraphrasing going on (disregarding the fact that the vast majority of kernel contributers have had no access to propietary kernel code of any type). And the courts are influenced by the political environment of the time.
I've begun to view the underlying issue here as not one of SCO's ownership of particular code, but more an issue of ownership in general. There is a school of thought that believes that ownership is a neccessary aspect of all things and that things (objects, ideas, actions) only have value if they are paid for. This philosophy has been touted by such notables as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Ronald Reagan, George W Bush and his father. For the user base of GNU/Linux to not see this lawsuit as the beginning of yet another battle in the struggle to curtail the free distribution of ideas (source code are ideas) among men and women would be a mistake. If SCO were to convince the court that the 80 lines of code somehow bestowed upon the Linux kernen a taint (trade secrets) that cannot be removed, then the court may be conned into believing that the kernel is in part owned by SCO and that the distribution of the code and/or binaries should be accompanied by the paying of royalty. In addition, there has been an increasing attitude towards Free Software and Open Sourse that these ideas somehow endanger the economy of the United States (ask around, you'll see what I mean).
The difficulties that Free Software and Open Source Software pose to implementation of manditory DRM (censorship )is interpeted as a threat to not only to the distributers of movies and music but also to the political and law enforcement industries that see media as a way to shape the opinions, ideas and beliefs of the American citizenry. For an example we need only to look at the media coverage of the 2000 presidential election results and the lack of criticism over the courts refusal to mandate a meaningful recount and the subsequent appointment of a George W. Bush by 5 Supreme Court Justices.
An other example would be the casting of the DeCSS code as a "piracy tool" by virtually every news source covering the dispute, when in fact, DVDs can and are pirated without the use of the DeCSS code by software that incorporates licensed code provided by the DVD makers (Expert Guides' DVD Copy. There has been little noise from the MPAA over this tool or software like it, and no mention of such software in media coverage of the DeCSS case.
If the courts are affected by a political stance that views Free Software as somehow being "bad" (for the economy, for national security, etc), then this case is not about 80 lines of code, but about Free Software in general. If the case is decided in favor of SCO, the court may decide on a remedy that is not as simple as removing the offending code.
--ptw
There also seems to be an increasing bias against community support in the tech feild, although I'm not sure why one would trust a company that has motivation to hide the vulnerabilities from the public more than the community of developers, administrators and users who are dependant on system security.
Admittedly, I have only perused the draft, but it does appear to be another attempt to prevent large companies from being "outed" when they choose to release software that is not ready or is poorly designed. Bugtraq, the Internet Storm Center and the Insecure.org Mailing List Archive do a fine job of lighting a fire under the responsible buttocks when necessary.
I have yet to hear of a posting to one of these lists that could be considered responsible for actual "trouble".
I would assume that if someone were planning on taking advantage of a vulnerability, they would look for one that hasn't yet made it to these lists.
I was refering to the sense of entitlement that companies who are dependant on an anticompetative business model. The lowering cost of infrastructure that Open Source and Free Software enables threatens businesses that previously could count on a "locked in" customer base.
OTOH, the portability of cell phone numbers is likely to cause customers to gravitate towards the company that owns the largest network. Perhaps cell phone number portability would create competition only in a market where the towers and network were owned by companies not offering the service to end users, but were charging the service providers for access to a market.
It seems that these businesses are willing to do anything to retain thier customer base except for offer better terms to thier customers. Cingular (T-Mobile, VoiceStream, whatever) is beginning to show a similar attitude to thier customers as they increasingly own a larger portion of the SMS network. When they own 80% or more of the towers in a given market, they can afford to act as a monopoly.
--qtp
Costs Associated with Implementing Portable Numbers, by percent:
10% Tecnical Implementation
90% Lost Business
In other words, "our business model is threatened by new technology, lets lobby to have our business model mandated by law."
Prior Art:
MPAA
RIAA
Microsoft
"Or maybe we should sue someone."
Prior Art:
SCO
Anyone see a trend in the corporate culture?
I believe you are feeding the trolls.
AFAICT, Seth is a U.S. citizen living in the U.S.
(and rather funny at times)
Actually, it would be like asking an English reading judge to determine plagerism in a Chineese manuscript.
Assuming, of course, that he can't also read in Chineese.
While not the most elegant post I've seen, it is informative and he used a properly formatted footnote.
Unless there's a ZIP code in Wyoming with only one person...I don't see any rights being trampled, here.
I'd bet most people in Wyoming have thier own +4 suffix though.
I don't know that there is a market for data that is sorted that finely (out side of the Intelligence Comunity).
This one statement almost completely sums up most of what is wrong with the mentality of Slashdot.
/., but in every public discourse that I have observed and/or participated in.
pot, kettle.
kettle, pot.
The problem exists not only on
that said:
In actuality, the zip+4 frequently could resolve to a single house for most addresses in most zip codes. Accepting that most ZIPs in the US are rural or suburban and that there are many that contain fewer than 10,000 addresses, then this is not a difficult assumption. The question should be more one of whether protections (sort by ZIP, but not +4) should be implemented to protect the minority but significant case (those whose homes have thier own +4 suffix in thier ZIP).
Personally, I see no reason that an actual abuse should be neccessary to ask (and expect) such protections. I'm sure that the persons who market demographic data disagree with me. (Their opinion is wrong.)