that's never bothered me about solaris. while it's nice to have your servers and desktops on pretty much the same OS (and even hardware) for administrative reasons, the two functions are so wildly different i can't see a need for everything to do both.
sun tsu wrote that the sovereign and the general should be different people because the traits that make someone good at one do not make one good at the other --and may even be a hinderance. i look at servers and desktops in much the same way.
of course, for administrative ease, i "suffer" with a slightly lesser desktop OS so I can stay in sync with my servers. when the windows users trying to learn unix come by, though, i tell them they probably don't want to be using the same desktop as i do.
http://www.armfor.uscourts.gov/digest/2001dig/II IA 3.htm
while the threat does have to have what you refer to as "clear and present danger," you have to consider the context and audience reaction. if the audience is likely to take that as a queue to act (which the secret service isn't likely to know), then that has the weight of a threat.
in this case, the secret service probably felt they had to check it out to evaluate how real the threat was. sure, it looks like satire, but the satire also includes some very specific circumstances that are concrete and possible for a human to do (not like "struck by lightning" or "struck by the blade of the angel of death").
i can just picture how the decision to investigate went. the agent in charge probably said something like "yeah, it looks like a joke but go check it out to see whether or not you find something to show otherwise."
i'm going to go out on a limb and say it's because the copyright holders asked them to take the content down. i'd guess broadcast.com doesn't own any of that.
i used to love the audiobooks that aren't there anymore, myself. what probably happened is that the copyright holders put them up for a while as "samples" and then stopped wanting to do that (e.g., they never intended it to be permanent or they weren't seeing the service turn into enough sales to make it worthwhile).
how many instances of "main(argc, argv)" and its variants do you think SCO will claim are theirs? i probably unknowingly infringe their code regularly without even having seen it.
i hope the judge'll look at something more substantive than line-by-line comparisons.
look at the silly monkey
on
SCOoby Snacks
·
· Score: 1
obviously you can't see the brilliant logic they're using. i'll lead you through one of their examples:
PREMISE: costco was running their network on DOS. PREMISE: DOS didn't scale PREMISE: costco found SCO worked better than DOS CONCLUSION: use (SCO) unix instead of linux
my philosophy 101 professor would be so proud of such sound reasoning.
it's almost like that south park episode in which johnny cochraine distracts the jury with random babble about chewbacca and "look at the monkey. look at the silly monkey."
you've solved the unemployment problem in america: ship all the unemployed people out of the country. i'm sure the canadians will love having a bunch of unemployed americans show up demanding business grants.
in all seriousness, things like this exist in america but most people don't know about them. i only know because some guy on late night tv commercials is always babbling on about grants and loans and pueblo, colorado. even so, a business grant/loan is not the same as collecting state unemployment benefits which, as the previous poster noted, you may not collect (in the U.S.) while you have a job.
you could probably start building the business without the unemployment agency noticing, but once you start seeking (and finding) customers, you'd better make sure you're not still drawing that check. it's that gap between when the money stops and when (if!) it starts up again that scares the pants off most people. i know it's got me scared out of starting my own business.
yeah, i don't see the down side for this. the site basically says it's for small (below $200) donations, which isn't going to buy you ANY influence. it just makes it easier for normal people to give candidates money.
people should save their cynicism for corporate/special interest soft money and lobbying (you know, the things that ACTUALLY buy off candidates). really, if candidates got all enough money through small, distributed, contributions then they wouldn't have to sell themselves to bigger contributers who could want favors in return.
you know, since campaign funds translate into votes (funds buying ads and all), this is pretty close to an internet voting system --plus it's got more security to it than any of the real electronic voting systems i've read about.
section 401 "visually perceptible copies" disagrees with you. it clearly outlines the three parts of the copyright notice and states that someone who infringes on a work bearing that notice can't make a claim of innocent infringement. if it were an insulting anachronism then i doubt very much it would be in every book on my shelf published since the birth of copyright law in this country. precidents may or may not be on your side, but i wouldn't know that without going to a law library (which i don't plan to do, not being a lawyer and all).
you're confusing the fact that a self-mailed envelope is weak evidence with it being legally worthless. you could establish a date and ownership in many other, more solid, ways without the aid of the copyright office. just reading through the posts on this article i see great ideas like having your code notarized.
i'm also going to have to disagree with you on the authority of the copyright office. like the patent office, they are merely bureaucrats who handle related paperwork (like processing applications). they do not institute or enforce copyright law, nor do they even have the final say on the copyrights they issue. don't confuse the copyright office with the legislature or the courts.
why would they say they're the final authority when they're not? well, their jobs DO depend on it. i'm not saying they serve no purpose, because the copyrights they issue do bear a great deal of evidenciary strength, but if everyone stopped using the copyright office entirely what do you think would happen to it? you're also reading too much into what they said about bringing suit. what they mean (and they state it explicitly in response to the "why should i register" question) is that you can't sue for MONEY if it's not registered. civil suits do not have to be for money; they can be for specific compliance --in this case "stop pretending my code is yours."
when they say there's no "poor man's copyright" they are not saying that there is no commonlaw copyright. they are saying that mailing yourself a copy does not, itself, copyright the work. what it does is provide evidence (however weak) of when you wrote it. having it notarized is even better since it not only gives you a legally binding date, but helps prove YOU wrote it because the notary will check your identity and the post office won't.
there are about a thousand other posts on this already, but that never stops anyone else so here i go.
you're overlooking "commonlaw copyright" which, in the U.S., basically gives you copyright on any of your work that exists in a viewable format (as i recall "viewable" is flexible enough to include data on a disk; the point is that the material isn't just floating around in your head but that you've put it down somewhere).
the trick is that you need to prove the date, which is what the other posts about mailing it to yourself or getting it notarized are about. that's also why you see the "& copy ; " notices at the bottom of corporate web pages --a notice that the material is copyrighted and when the copyright took effect).
you also need to prove that it's yours.
there are some legal specifics to help with the proof but, as i recall, the copyright notice should have
something to the effect of "copyrighted by"
the date
the copyright holder
and, of course, it needs to be visible.
it's a little difficult, now, for him to establish his code was first by mailing himself a copy or even registering it officially. if it came to court, he'd have to look for other proof that he wrote it before they did. if he doesn't have a heap of that kind of evidence, he's right to hope it'll stay out of court. however unlikely it seems, if he has no proof whatsoever then he could even lose his copyright to the other company entirely (and they could sue HIM for GPL-ing "their" code).
they're not ENDORSING spyware. they're not INSTALLING spyware. i really don't see this as a newsworthy item at all.
dell just doesn't want to be liable for any damage to users' computers that spyware removal software may do (after all, it's not software they're supporting or are necessarily even familar with), nor do they want to be liable for any license problems from telling people to delete or disable things.
let's follow the train of thought, here: user installs stupid crap, stupid crap breaks machine, user calls dell for help with stupid crap that's not dell's.
there's a reason a lot of tech support places wash their hands of unsupported software and configurations: they're not familiar with how to fix problems that come up, and don't want to accept responsibility if they make things worse.
lots of places have this policy. i get this all the time from vendors: "oh, you're running the linux version of our software on freebsd under emulation . . . uh . . . sorry, that's not supported." i don't get personally offended.
dell's advice to customers should probably be (and probably is) to check what they've installed recently and contact those vendors.
i may be remembering incorrectly, but that's not my point (as far as it being a legal impossibility, going 55mph in a 50mph zone is also a legal impossibility). there's nothing to stop republicans from registering as democrats just to get an all-bush counting (or polling station) group. note this is just an example; i could have used gore but since he's not in the white house it'd be a less effective example.
my point wasn't so much about the veracity of the story as the vulnerability of any audit trail. "wuphonsreach" made a good point that paper is much harder to manipulate than bytes, but it's possible if you get the right people involved. fear of legal implications isn't much of a deterrent at all, since the people who manipulate elections tend to be the power types who feel they can get away with anything.
the people doing the recount have to be honest, too. i recall one story during the florida debacle about an all-republican audit committee. did they just throw gore votes away? no one will ever know but them. people collecting/counting receipts could dispose of those that they dislike.
the point is that an audit trail isn't absolutely safe. someone can tamper with that, too.
ok, hindsight is 20/20 and it's easy to say that someone should have done something differently without having to be in that person's shoes, but i don't see your answer as better.
it started off right, with "you should have blown the whistle." i'd agree with that, and i'd suggest anyone in that position right now --and debating what to do-- take that route. there are whistleblower laws, depending on the circumstances, that will protect someone who turns in an employer for illegal activity.
what you did was illegal. you could have been fined and gone to jail for it, and were counting on your employer's fear of your blackmail to insure they would not prosecute you. the fact that you got away with it does not mean you should advise other people to do the same (and if the statute of limitations hasn't run out you probably shouldn't be posting on slashdot about it, either).
you're missing another dimension: you might be sending mail to a subscriber of this service, unwittingly. sure THEY have accepted the reduced privacy, but have you?
from their site:
only authorised Planetwide personnel have access to a client's details and mail items
all Planetwide personnel are bound by strict confidentiality agreements concerning client details and the opening of people's postal items
every quarter, as well as anytime our policies are updated, our personnel are notified and/or reminded about the importance we place on privacy and what they can do to ensure our members' information is protected
gosh, that makes me feel SO safe. the workmen who installed the windows in my apartment were bonded against theft (i'm going to include information theft in that but a court may not agree with me), but these people who are pretty much reading my mail just need quarterly refresher courses on how important privacy is? if those are anything like the safety and information security classes i've been to in my life, all they mean is that four times a year the employees get extra sleep that day.
it's disturbing how little they say about the actual scanning process, like how exposed IS your mail and to how many people?
the/etc start scripts are very unix standard, so you see them all over and cross-platform developers don't have to write special startup modules/programs/scripts/plug-ins/whatever for linux. the "nifty" colors and functions some distros use are bad enough for that, but at least you can still dump in a normal self-contained shell script.
it really doesn't serve linux well to become totally different. before deviating from the norm, the reason has to be a lot better than "i'd like to boot my system 45 seconds faster."
i think the best idea in the article is the last bullet point under "additional considerations," specifically that you just configure the system to let you log in earlier. since this is (as the article points out) mostly useful for desktops (or, more likely, laptops), a user doesn't need to wait for sshd or a web server to start before (s)he logs in.
i'm too used to the serial boot to use parallel booting. even on a desktop, i like to see the boot messages scroll by just in case.
actually, i'd rather see a readable ebook viewer. if this really can look like paper and ink, i could (hypothetically) replace a couple bookshelves full of paperbacks with one reader and a cdrom. it could make more room for my dvds.
sometimes, especially for long blocks of text, i'd really rather look at paper than a computer screen (incidentally, my "PDA" is called a "pen and pad of paper" for this same reason).
i doubt it means much of anything if the student wins, except that the student doesn't have to pay. the flaw isn't so much in the RIAA's methods as with MIT's ability to track a user down based on the information they had.
i suppose that could mean MIT has to face legal trouble for record-keeping negligence, but since some ISPs offer lack of records as a privacy service, i imagine not.
i'm not a lawyer, but don't get your hopes up that a loss here would mean anything big or in any way stop or slow the RIAA.
in a sense, dual purpose and original intent go hand in hand. both campers and soldiers need socks that stay warm, dry, and minty-fresh smelling for weeks on end but the military is willing to pay a lot more for research and development on new socks than campers are. most products, themselves, are neutral and it's just the application that makes them military or non-military, so if a scientist turns to the military for help --even if the first generation product is tailored to military application-- if it has civilian uses and isn't directly killing people then the funding it gets wouldn't be "blood money" to most people i know.
a scientist who says "i think i can make more advanced socks so the world can be a better place" has to understand that his socks may wind up selling in both white and army green someday. with that in mind, he may decide to let the army pay for the development of the socks even though he plans to sell them to everyone. without the military sock money, those new socks may never come to pass.
yeah, darn those scientists who invented fire to cook my food with the dual purpose of burning villages.
wait, i forgot how to make a sarcasm tag. anyway, the point is that many things useful in civilian life can be useful to the military. nanotechnology that keeps your jeans dry can also keep fatigues dry, for example.
depending on what you're developing, just because you're doing it (partly) for the military may not make it blood money to everyone. the nanotech i just mentioned doesn't directly kill anyone, and the missile tracking system the article post mentions, arguably, saves people.
yeah, i saw that and my reaction was the same as yours: "we rely on tricking people into seeing crappy movies." the thing is that whether they blame text messaging teens, chatroom ghosts, or bloggers, the problem is just that the movie stinks. with movie prices hitting two digits, they have to expect people will be more careful before meandering off to the movies on friday night.
it's the same with record companies; if you want my money, give me something worth spending it on. i'm not going to piss cash at big studios just because i love hollywood so much and want to make sure the stars and executives can afford their sushi and rainbow-colored cocktails.
while i'm not a hiring manager, i basically act like one since i do interviews, cull resumes, and recommend hires when the position is close to me.
i'd rather see the time spent on a Ph.D. as job experience instead. Given a candidate with, say, four years in a Ph.D. program or a candidate with four years of job experience, i ain't picking the college boy. there's only so much you can learn in a nice, safe, lab environment ("school") before you have to learn that you're not always going to get to write neat object-oriented code and you may never have complete project goals at the beginning of the project, and all the other things that happen outside a classroom.
don't get me wrong; some schooling gives you the background you need to make the most of your experience and learn faster, but the schooling is not and will never be as practically applicable as experience.
if you want a doctorate for yourself, fine, but if you're doing it for your resume you'd be much better off getting the degree in your spare time while working in the field. note that this will probably make you a better Ph.D. candidate as well, so the only down side is that the degree'd take you longer.
Slashdot Mirror
this from someone using an email account from a company based in california for his account on a web forum hosted in california.
that's never bothered me about solaris. while it's nice to have your servers and desktops on pretty much the same OS (and even hardware) for administrative reasons, the two functions are so wildly different i can't see a need for everything to do both.
sun tsu wrote that the sovereign and the general should be different people because the traits that make someone good at one do not make one good at the other --and may even be a hinderance. i look at servers and desktops in much the same way.
of course, for administrative ease, i "suffer" with a slightly lesser desktop OS so I can stay in sync with my servers. when the windows users trying to learn unix come by, though, i tell them they probably don't want to be using the same desktop as i do.
you're half right
I IA 3.htm
http://www.armfor.uscourts.gov/digest/2001dig/I
while the threat does have to have what you refer to as "clear and present danger," you have to consider the context and audience reaction. if the audience is likely to take that as a queue to act (which the secret service isn't likely to know), then that has the weight of a threat.
in this case, the secret service probably felt they had to check it out to evaluate how real the threat was. sure, it looks like satire, but the satire also includes some very specific circumstances that are concrete and possible for a human to do (not like "struck by lightning" or "struck by the blade of the angel of death").
i can just picture how the decision to investigate went. the agent in charge probably said something like "yeah, it looks like a joke but go check it out to see whether or not you find something to show otherwise."
i'm going to go out on a limb and say it's because the copyright holders asked them to take the content down. i'd guess broadcast.com doesn't own any of that.
i used to love the audiobooks that aren't there anymore, myself. what probably happened is that the copyright holders put them up for a while as "samples" and then stopped wanting to do that (e.g., they never intended it to be permanent or they weren't seeing the service turn into enough sales to make it worthwhile).
how many instances of "main(argc, argv)" and its variants do you think SCO will claim are theirs? i probably unknowingly infringe their code regularly without even having seen it.
i hope the judge'll look at something more substantive than line-by-line comparisons.
obviously you can't see the brilliant logic they're using. i'll lead you through one of their examples:
PREMISE: costco was running their network on DOS.
PREMISE: DOS didn't scale
PREMISE: costco found SCO worked better than DOS
CONCLUSION: use (SCO) unix instead of linux
my philosophy 101 professor would be so proud of such sound reasoning.
it's almost like that south park episode in which johnny cochraine distracts the jury with random babble about chewbacca and "look at the monkey. look at the silly monkey."
you've solved the unemployment problem in america: ship all the unemployed people out of the country. i'm sure the canadians will love having a bunch of unemployed americans show up demanding business grants.
in all seriousness, things like this exist in america but most people don't know about them. i only know because some guy on late night tv commercials is always babbling on about grants and loans and pueblo, colorado. even so, a business grant/loan is not the same as collecting state unemployment benefits which, as the previous poster noted, you may not collect (in the U.S.) while you have a job.
you could probably start building the business without the unemployment agency noticing, but once you start seeking (and finding) customers, you'd better make sure you're not still drawing that check. it's that gap between when the money stops and when (if!) it starts up again that scares the pants off most people. i know it's got me scared out of starting my own business.
yeah, i don't see the down side for this. the site basically says it's for small (below $200) donations, which isn't going to buy you ANY influence. it just makes it easier for normal people to give candidates money.
people should save their cynicism for corporate/special interest soft money and lobbying (you know, the things that ACTUALLY buy off candidates). really, if candidates got all enough money through small, distributed, contributions then they wouldn't have to sell themselves to bigger contributers who could want favors in return.
you know, since campaign funds translate into votes (funds buying ads and all), this is pretty close to an internet voting system --plus it's got more security to it than any of the real electronic voting systems i've read about.
http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap4.html
section 401 "visually perceptible copies" disagrees with you. it clearly outlines the three parts of the copyright notice and states that someone who infringes on a work bearing that notice can't make a claim of innocent infringement. if it were an insulting anachronism then i doubt very much it would be in every book on my shelf published since the birth of copyright law in this country. precidents may or may not be on your side, but i wouldn't know that without going to a law library (which i don't plan to do, not being a lawyer and all).
you're confusing the fact that a self-mailed envelope is weak evidence with it being legally worthless. you could establish a date and ownership in many other, more solid, ways without the aid of the copyright office. just reading through the posts on this article i see great ideas like having your code notarized.
i'm also going to have to disagree with you on the authority of the copyright office. like the patent office, they are merely bureaucrats who handle related paperwork (like processing applications). they do not institute or enforce copyright law, nor do they even have the final say on the copyrights they issue. don't confuse the copyright office with the legislature or the courts.
why would they say they're the final authority when they're not? well, their jobs DO depend on it. i'm not saying they serve no purpose, because the copyrights they issue do bear a great deal of evidenciary strength, but if everyone stopped using the copyright office entirely what do you think would happen to it? you're also reading too much into what they said about bringing suit. what they mean (and they state it explicitly in response to the "why should i register" question) is that you can't sue for MONEY if it's not registered. civil suits do not have to be for money; they can be for specific compliance --in this case "stop pretending my code is yours."
when they say there's no "poor man's copyright" they are not saying that there is no commonlaw copyright. they are saying that mailing yourself a copy does not, itself, copyright the work. what it does is provide evidence (however weak) of when you wrote it. having it notarized is even better since it not only gives you a legally binding date, but helps prove YOU wrote it because the notary will check your identity and the post office won't.
you're overlooking "commonlaw copyright" which, in the U.S., basically gives you copyright on any of your work that exists in a viewable format (as i recall "viewable" is flexible enough to include data on a disk; the point is that the material isn't just floating around in your head but that you've put it down somewhere).
the trick is that you need to prove the date, which is what the other posts about mailing it to yourself or getting it notarized are about. that's also why you see the "& copy ; " notices at the bottom of corporate web pages --a notice that the material is copyrighted and when the copyright took effect).
you also need to prove that it's yours.
there are some legal specifics to help with the proof but, as i recall, the copyright notice should have
and, of course, it needs to be visible.
it's a little difficult, now, for him to establish his code was first by mailing himself a copy or even registering it officially. if it came to court, he'd have to look for other proof that he wrote it before they did. if he doesn't have a heap of that kind of evidence, he's right to hope it'll stay out of court. however unlikely it seems, if he has no proof whatsoever then he could even lose his copyright to the other company entirely (and they could sue HIM for GPL-ing "their" code).
no, i'm not a lawyer but i play one on slashdot.
they're not ENDORSING spyware. they're not INSTALLING spyware. i really don't see this as a newsworthy item at all.
dell just doesn't want to be liable for any damage to users' computers that spyware removal software may do (after all, it's not software they're supporting or are necessarily even familar with), nor do they want to be liable for any license problems from telling people to delete or disable things.
let's follow the train of thought, here: user installs stupid crap, stupid crap breaks machine, user calls dell for help with stupid crap that's not dell's.
there's a reason a lot of tech support places wash their hands of unsupported software and configurations: they're not familiar with how to fix problems that come up, and don't want to accept responsibility if they make things worse.
lots of places have this policy. i get this all the time from vendors: "oh, you're running the linux version of our software on freebsd under emulation . . . uh . . . sorry, that's not supported." i don't get personally offended.
dell's advice to customers should probably be (and probably is) to check what they've installed recently and contact those vendors.
i may be remembering incorrectly, but that's not my point (as far as it being a legal impossibility, going 55mph in a 50mph zone is also a legal impossibility). there's nothing to stop republicans from registering as democrats just to get an all-bush counting (or polling station) group. note this is just an example; i could have used gore but since he's not in the white house it'd be a less effective example.
my point wasn't so much about the veracity of the story as the vulnerability of any audit trail. "wuphonsreach" made a good point that paper is much harder to manipulate than bytes, but it's possible if you get the right people involved. fear of legal implications isn't much of a deterrent at all, since the people who manipulate elections tend to be the power types who feel they can get away with anything.
the people doing the recount have to be honest, too. i recall one story during the florida debacle about an all-republican audit committee. did they just throw gore votes away? no one will ever know but them. people collecting/counting receipts could dispose of those that they dislike.
the point is that an audit trail isn't absolutely safe. someone can tamper with that, too.
ok, hindsight is 20/20 and it's easy to say that someone should have done something differently without having to be in that person's shoes, but i don't see your answer as better.
it started off right, with "you should have blown the whistle." i'd agree with that, and i'd suggest anyone in that position right now --and debating what to do-- take that route. there are whistleblower laws, depending on the circumstances, that will protect someone who turns in an employer for illegal activity.
what you did was illegal. you could have been fined and gone to jail for it, and were counting on your employer's fear of your blackmail to insure they would not prosecute you. the fact that you got away with it does not mean you should advise other people to do the same (and if the statute of limitations hasn't run out you probably shouldn't be posting on slashdot about it, either).
from their site:
gosh, that makes me feel SO safe. the workmen who installed the windows in my apartment were bonded against theft (i'm going to include information theft in that but a court may not agree with me), but these people who are pretty much reading my mail just need quarterly refresher courses on how important privacy is? if those are anything like the safety and information security classes i've been to in my life, all they mean is that four times a year the employees get extra sleep that day.
it's disturbing how little they say about the actual scanning process, like how exposed IS your mail and to how many people?
the /etc start scripts are very unix standard, so you see them all over and cross-platform developers don't have to write special startup modules/programs/scripts/plug-ins/whatever for linux. the "nifty" colors and functions some distros use are bad enough for that, but at least you can still dump in a normal self-contained shell script.
it really doesn't serve linux well to become totally different. before deviating from the norm, the reason has to be a lot better than "i'd like to boot my system 45 seconds faster."
i think the best idea in the article is the last bullet point under "additional considerations," specifically that you just configure the system to let you log in earlier. since this is (as the article points out) mostly useful for desktops (or, more likely, laptops), a user doesn't need to wait for sshd or a web server to start before (s)he logs in.
i'm too used to the serial boot to use parallel booting. even on a desktop, i like to see the boot messages scroll by just in case.
actually, i'd rather see a readable ebook viewer. if this really can look like paper and ink, i could (hypothetically) replace a couple bookshelves full of paperbacks with one reader and a cdrom. it could make more room for my dvds.
sometimes, especially for long blocks of text, i'd really rather look at paper than a computer screen (incidentally, my "PDA" is called a "pen and pad of paper" for this same reason).
but the wallpaper/paint is a good second choice.
i doubt it means much of anything if the student wins, except that the student doesn't have to pay. the flaw isn't so much in the RIAA's methods as with MIT's ability to track a user down based on the information they had.
i suppose that could mean MIT has to face legal trouble for record-keeping negligence, but since some ISPs offer lack of records as a privacy service, i imagine not.
i'm not a lawyer, but don't get your hopes up that a loss here would mean anything big or in any way stop or slow the RIAA.
in a sense, dual purpose and original intent go hand in hand. both campers and soldiers need socks that stay warm, dry, and minty-fresh smelling for weeks on end but the military is willing to pay a lot more for research and development on new socks than campers are. most products, themselves, are neutral and it's just the application that makes them military or non-military, so if a scientist turns to the military for help --even if the first generation product is tailored to military application-- if it has civilian uses and isn't directly killing people then the funding it gets wouldn't be "blood money" to most people i know.
a scientist who says "i think i can make more advanced socks so the world can be a better place" has to understand that his socks may wind up selling in both white and army green someday. with that in mind, he may decide to let the army pay for the development of the socks even though he plans to sell them to everyone. without the military sock money, those new socks may never come to pass.
yeah, darn those scientists who invented fire to cook my food with the dual purpose of burning villages.
wait, i forgot how to make a sarcasm tag. anyway, the point is that many things useful in civilian life can be useful to the military. nanotechnology that keeps your jeans dry can also keep fatigues dry, for example.
depending on what you're developing, just because you're doing it (partly) for the military may not make it blood money to everyone. the nanotech i just mentioned doesn't directly kill anyone, and the missile tracking system the article post mentions, arguably, saves people.
oddly enough, the japanese already thought of that:d =145627 85&trkid=15856
http://www.netflix.com/MovieDisplay?moviei
funny how life imitates art. or whatever.
yeah, i saw that and my reaction was the same as yours: "we rely on tricking people into seeing crappy movies." the thing is that whether they blame text messaging teens, chatroom ghosts, or bloggers, the problem is just that the movie stinks. with movie prices hitting two digits, they have to expect people will be more careful before meandering off to the movies on friday night.
it's the same with record companies; if you want my money, give me something worth spending it on. i'm not going to piss cash at big studios just because i love hollywood so much and want to make sure the stars and executives can afford their sushi and rainbow-colored cocktails.
why would teenagers message their friends that a movie stinks?
maybe, just maybe, it's because the movie stinks.
while i'm not a hiring manager, i basically act like one since i do interviews, cull resumes, and recommend hires when the position is close to me.
i'd rather see the time spent on a Ph.D. as job experience instead. Given a candidate with, say, four years in a Ph.D. program or a candidate with four years of job experience, i ain't picking the college boy. there's only so much you can learn in a nice, safe, lab environment ("school") before you have to learn that you're not always going to get to write neat object-oriented code and you may never have complete project goals at the beginning of the project, and all the other things that happen outside a classroom.
don't get me wrong; some schooling gives you the background you need to make the most of your experience and learn faster, but the schooling is not and will never be as practically applicable as experience.
if you want a doctorate for yourself, fine, but if you're doing it for your resume you'd be much better off getting the degree in your spare time while working in the field. note that this will probably make you a better Ph.D. candidate as well, so the only down side is that the degree'd take you longer.