To compare "pain and discomfort for several months" with, say, losing a leg, is more than insulting to those who are unfortunate enough to have a true disability and is a bastardization of the law's intended use.
I couldn't agree more. I think a lot of people also don't realise that those of us who are disabled try to find jobs that won't aggravate our conditions or require special treatment.
I've got maybe 40% hearing (deaf in one ear, average in the other) which isn't severe hearing loss but enough to make things difficult. I went through university without a hearing aid because I didn't want to stand out. I avoid crowds now because I can't hear people over the noise, I don't use the phone much at work and I email instead. I didn't get a job as a waitress or at McDonald's while I was studying because I wouldn't be able to hear people's orders too well.
I now work in a library. It's great. not much background noise. I can hear people, most of the time, and almost none of them have to know that I have a problem.
what many science/engineering etc etc students don't realise that just because humanities students don't study units like calculus or physics etc, does not mean that our courses are totally devoid of science.
i was a political science major during my undergraduate studies and had a few lecturers with a penchant for mathematics. hence, most of the assigned readings included mathematical theory to derive the voting behaviour of certain constituents, or to balance the power of lobby groups.
but of course, from a transcript you wouldn't know that the courses were like that.
i would have loved to have taken computing at university but you also had to take x number of maths units and science units and that would have been more than my humanities units, which was not permitted.
let's not also forget that one of the main purposes of a university education is to learn how to communicate and attain a certain level of critical thinking. if these are considered humanities subjects, so be it.
What I want to know however, is how many/. readers actually have to deal with copyright law on a regular daily basis?
as much as i want to be an idealist i have to deal with reality since i work in a broadcasting library.
i believe in paying for radio licenses to broadcast music on air, but not to be double charged to stream that same music online.
i believe in allowing derivative works for art or academic purposes, but not so that someone can copy software.
i believe in making people jump through hoops to ensure that the news and materials they are using is cleared, but not having to write to copyright owners to ask if i can use a quote from paragraph 3.
copyright can be an evil, horrible beast, yet it is an essential thing to have to ensure that we respect the works of others.
English? more like American. I really hate how American spellings like color etc are seeping into foreign culture. Why, when I write HTML, should I have to use ugly US spelling instead of being able to use proper and correct English spelling. coloUr!
I can't imagine a workplace without music. Only thing worse is a workplace with music that you don't like.
I'm a music librarian so it's my job to listen to music at work. we get a kick out of listening to Very Bad Records, we have music theme days, holiday theme days, days where we only listen to sound effects, etc.
and yes, it does make you more productive
well, i hope they didn't throw it all away
on
Adcritic Shuts Down
·
· Score: 1
I hope adcritic has organised to donate their digital archive to the Internet Archive, or a University/Special Library somewhere so that people who need the archives can still use them.
I know quite a few advertising lecturers who would find it an invaluable resource.
Unfortunately, it seems that too often these sorts of projects come and go (Questia, another floundering enterprise) and the information is lost forever.
in comparison to Sydney 2000, every Olympics after will be put to shame. We Aussies gave such a huge response to such a successful games that everything else pales in comparison!
I'm surprised Salt Lake hasn't decided to hire every IT person that worked on the Sydney systems. They ran like a charm. My dad was working during the games, his job was to make sure that the backup of the backup didn't go down. nice!
people should not be complacent about donating to charity. it should be well thought out. charities often take a large slice of donations for advertising, wages, and their own administration. world vision takes like 40%. this is really bad. imagine the person who only donates like $2 a year, and only $1.20 makes it to the people they want to help.
do your research, make your choice, but most of all, volunteer. it doesn't have to be abroad, what about all those community groups in town who need you - community media, aged care facilities, schools, environmenal groups, youth-at-risk centres, etc.
the domain is the least of your worries in radio. as a fellow non-profit radio volunteer, i would have to put numerous legal threats that we get every year well above your domain woes.
keep your insurance up, keep your listeners happy, forget about the rest.
defamation insurance, a godsend to broadcasters everywhere.
B) chooses to ignore it because it's undercutting record company profit (by.0000001%)
there are a vast number of business models that are far superior to the current one. fair tunes is one.
a large part of my work is dealing with music licensing for radio. our station pays a set amount per year, which is divvied up amongst the artists that we tell the licensing company that we play.
radio was once seen as bad because people could hear music for free. radio nowadays is a huge market for getting new music out to the people.
now, people are turning away from radio to the internet to hear weird obscure bands that the commerical stations don't play. this can only be a good thing.
but wait - how are people going to hear the band in the first place? does the RIAA really expect that people will buy an album that they haven't heard just because of marketing spin?
in times to come, i expect that we will see more time-limited/crippled/encrypted audio that gets limited to just the major artists again.
and on it goes, until the next method of distributing smaller, unheard bands is discovered.
why don't you take a sememster off, and spend that time doing unpaid work experience in a few different companies, in a few different roles to see what you like. try out a few tech companies, but also try media companies with small IT departments, banks, educational organisations.
get a mentor to help you work on what you really enjoy.
if all else fails, consider a related field that can still use your computer experience. what about librarianship. don't laugh - a lot of people are finding that the kind of knowledge you require to be a librarian is closely related to computing.
there are lots of positions out there as systems librarians, implementing and developing computer systems that directly help people that you can see instead of working in a computer company where you may never see the people that your product is designed to help.
i got tailgated a few months ago on a saturday morning. he was a workman, rebuilding an office. he was sitting on a lounge in reception, and watched me as i entered the building with my swipe card. he snuck in behind me just as the door was closing.
i was incredibly paranoid about it (i'm a 22 year old female, and very few people were in the building at the time) and was going to call security until about a half hour later when i saw security running around trying to find the guy.
he turned out to be just a builder but it's scary how long the response took.
there are a lot of excellent articles on post september 11 reporting available from poynter http://www.poynter.org
AJR newslink has also posted some great info http://ajr.newslink.org/
it's like this - people will start to complain of a conspiracy to keep information from them if they DON'T find out about every anthrax scare, every building closure, every bomb threat.
this is what has led to the oversaturation of information today - an intense desire for more information, from different points of view.
the journalists are not to blame - this is what people want to hear about, so they are going to hear about it.
people are prone to panic - people have been told that they shouldn't worry of massive anthrax outbreaks and yet they are foolish enough to want testing and vaccination.
as for objectivity in journalism - that is a complete fallacy. no matter what you do, everything is out of context and everything is bias because none of us could be there to watch every evacuation, press conference, or talk to the people on the street.
also - australian media has warned of the bias in reports from afghanistan, because they are only getting info from the military and the northern alliance at the moment.
the media is a complex, complex beast. to understand it is not as simple as saying, 'the media panics people' or 'the media is bias'. the story you see or read has been shaped by hundreds of people, according to hundreds of different filters and criteria.
sony is a pain in the ass when you send something into repair under warranty. 6-9 weeks is the minimum for everything. but i like their philosophy - i sent in a minidisc walkman for repair, it had a hinge problem. they simply took the entire mechanism out, and put in a new one, keeping the old shell.
there looks to be a few things there, you may need to read the whole article. a well written article that is on the whole pro-open source should still list some of the pitfalls.
you should read the more academic journals rather than dr dobbs for this sort of thing. try sloan management review, computing, and business texts.
Re:Don't forget (yuck) process and (yes) giveback
on
Coder or Architect?
·
· Score: 1
150 years ago bridges used to collapse regularly; even 100 years ago bridge collapses were not unusual. But today, we're building bridges that will be around forever. What happened? Just before the American Civil War, Civil Engineers got together and decided to become more professional.
too bad that in very recent years, professors have been very worried about the caliber of students they have been getting in civil engineering. they are very worried that things will fall down in the future. said one, i can't recall which college they were from "there's no way i would trust them to build a bridge"
it would also be interesting to see how many posters here don't work in fields at all related to software design (like me), but come here for the interesting discussion anyway.
being an outsider, it's quite amusing at times to read all the bragging and boasting that goes on across different forums!
MD is now replacing DAT in broadcasting. DAT fails frequently, has terrible problems with sensitive equipment, and is losing popularity all around. MD players are tiny, they can be concealed easily in interviews, and are easier to use.
It is also widely used in public radio for grabs, promos, advertising, in lieu of more expensive computer equipment.
While MD may have only had moderate success in the home market (although at home we have a MD deck and two MD portables), it is taking off big time in broadcasting.
nope. you can only make A (singular) copy, or if you have additional rights, such as if you are a broacaster making a copy for ease of use purposes.
why can't you copy your own stuff? because you could theoretically listen to your original cd plus an mp3 etc at the same time. when you buy something, you have bought the license for the physical recording of an item on that format. you have not bought a personal license for the song itself independent of the format.
if you only own vinyl but you still download, you are breaking the law because the copy did not come from the original vinyl.
when companies release the next format, everyone will be sucked into buying everything again, because they don't have the right to copy old cd's to any new format.
Certainly. Assuming, of course, that your local public library stocks all texts for MIT-grade classes, especially recent printings and obscure classes.
academic textbooks are not the domain of your local public library, you are totally right here. nor should they be.
wouldn't the logical thing be to go to your local university library and read the books there. university libraries are as public as any other. anyone may walk and read books on the shelves.
And as I said above, frequently there are no books.
if the lecturer has written a book, i can bet you that it will be the required textbook for the class.:-)
while some classes may not have a textbook, they will always have reading lists, which i find very useful when searching for a good core reading set for a topic. unfortunately, these lists are often kept close to a lecturer's chest.
I'm currently doing a graduate research degree by distance. I had no choice because I live right across the country from my university, and I work full-time.
I hate it. There is no structure, no communication, no activities with other students, no study support online, nothing. I love just sitting and chatting with other people tossing ideas around for a few hours. That's how I work.
now i'm sure it depends on the discipline, because something that is often self-paced anyway like programming is probably easier to do by distance rather than history.
Schools need to do so much more to make distance learning a truly interactive experience. At the moment it's just, "jeewhiz, look what we can do on these newfangled computers"
Many people that I knew at uni were not there in order to get a job at the end of the degree. Many were there to enjoy learning. It is unfair to design courses which do not take these people into account. They were often mature or retired, and had no use for job seeking skills.
Lots of universities (at least, in Australia) have a lot of support for students who want to learn how to do resumes, prepare for interviews, etc. See your student union/guild/support centre. We don't need to learn this stuff in class.
Ask an employer what they find more valuable. A grad with specialised knowledge that will be obsolete in 5 years, or a grad who has skills in seeking and synthesising information, regardless of the discipline. The latter is why Arts degrees are valued despite the irrelevant nature of some of the subjects.
There is a strong push by librarians worldwide to develop integrated curricula with faculty that will give students in all courses the knowledge to seek and use information effectively both during and after university. The hardest challenge is balancing the time for course content (the nitty gritty) with the holistic approach to seeking information.
What worries me most about record labels introducing non-copyable CDs etc is that they are infringing upon the rights of other users under copyright law.
I'm in Australia, but I can get in trouble for copying an American CD because the reach of the DMCA is not limited to US shores, because I could theoretically be damaging Universal etc.
However, I have rights under Australian copyright law to duplicate CDs for the purpose of broadcasting under the 'ease of use' provisions because I work in radio.
Which law overrides the other? How do I even know what rights I have?
I just find it so annoying that laws which are enacted in one country can have such an impact across the world. Think Universal will make a copyable batch of its CDs for those of us who do have duplication rights? Nope, didn't think so.
Slashdot Mirror
To compare "pain and discomfort for several months" with, say, losing a leg, is more than insulting to those who are unfortunate enough to have a true disability and is a bastardization of the law's intended use.
I couldn't agree more. I think a lot of people also don't realise that those of us who are disabled try to find jobs that won't aggravate our conditions or require special treatment.
I've got maybe 40% hearing (deaf in one ear, average in the other) which isn't severe hearing loss but enough to make things difficult. I went through university without a hearing aid because I didn't want to stand out. I avoid crowds now because I can't hear people over the noise, I don't use the phone much at work and I email instead. I didn't get a job as a waitress or at McDonald's while I was studying because I wouldn't be able to hear people's orders too well.
I now work in a library. It's great. not much background noise. I can hear people, most of the time, and almost none of them have to know that I have a problem.
what many science/engineering etc etc students don't realise that just because humanities students don't study units like calculus or physics etc, does not mean that our courses are totally devoid of science.
i was a political science major during my undergraduate studies and had a few lecturers with a penchant for mathematics. hence, most of the assigned readings included mathematical theory to derive the voting behaviour of certain constituents, or to balance the power of lobby groups.
but of course, from a transcript you wouldn't know that the courses were like that.
i would have loved to have taken computing at university but you also had to take x number of maths units and science units and that would have been more than my humanities units, which was not permitted.
let's not also forget that one of the main purposes of a university education is to learn how to communicate and attain a certain level of critical thinking. if these are considered humanities subjects, so be it.
An excellent article.
/. readers actually have to deal with copyright law on a regular daily basis?
What I want to know however, is how many
as much as i want to be an idealist i have to deal with reality since i work in a broadcasting library.
i believe in paying for radio licenses to broadcast music on air, but not to be double charged to stream that same music online.
i believe in allowing derivative works for art or academic purposes, but not so that someone can copy software.
i believe in making people jump through hoops to ensure that the news and materials they are using is cleared, but not having to write to copyright owners to ask if i can use a quote from paragraph 3.
copyright can be an evil, horrible beast, yet it is an essential thing to have to ensure that we respect the works of others.
English? more like American. I really hate how American spellings like color etc are seeping into foreign culture. Why, when I write HTML, should I have to use ugly US spelling instead of being able to use proper and correct English spelling. coloUr!
I can't imagine a workplace without music. Only thing worse is a workplace with music that you don't like.
I'm a music librarian so it's my job to listen to music at work. we get a kick out of listening to Very Bad Records, we have music theme days, holiday theme days, days where we only listen to sound effects, etc.
and yes, it does make you more productive
I hope adcritic has organised to donate their digital archive to the Internet Archive, or a University/Special Library somewhere so that people who need the archives can still use them.
I know quite a few advertising lecturers who would find it an invaluable resource.
Unfortunately, it seems that too often these sorts of projects come and go (Questia, another floundering enterprise) and the information is lost forever.
in comparison to Sydney 2000, every Olympics after will be put to shame. We Aussies gave such a huge response to such a successful games that everything else pales in comparison!
I'm surprised Salt Lake hasn't decided to hire every IT person that worked on the Sydney systems. They ran like a charm. My dad was working during the games, his job was to make sure that the backup of the backup didn't go down. nice!
people should not be complacent about donating to charity. it should be well thought out. charities often take a large slice of donations for advertising, wages, and their own administration. world vision takes like 40%. this is really bad. imagine the person who only donates like $2 a year, and only $1.20 makes it to the people they want to help.
do your research, make your choice, but most of all, volunteer. it doesn't have to be abroad, what about all those community groups in town who need you - community media, aged care facilities, schools, environmenal groups, youth-at-risk centres, etc.
at your service -
http://www.ala.org/pio/crisis/index.html
http://www.ala.org/washoff/
also read www.libr.org/Juice (library juice) which always has a lot of comment on these matters
i'm really sad that we as a profession have no protection against the will of the government.
We have our freedom to read policies, but they are worthless against this kind of bullying.
Libraries have been under threat from so many different challenges, so that just proves how powerful information is.
Unfortunately, the ALA is not an especially strong lobby group and this situation is unlikely to end soon.
As an Australian, I can only say how glad I am that our government has not resorted to this kind of action.... yet.
the domain is the least of your worries in radio. as a fellow non-profit radio volunteer, i would have to put numerous legal threats that we get every year well above your domain woes.
keep your insurance up, keep your listeners happy, forget about the rest.
defamation insurance, a godsend to broadcasters everywhere.
obviously the Ms Rosen either -
.0000001%)
A) hasn't heard of fair tunes
or
B) chooses to ignore it because it's undercutting record company profit (by
there are a vast number of business models that are far superior to the current one. fair tunes is one.
a large part of my work is dealing with music licensing for radio. our station pays a set amount per year, which is divvied up amongst the artists that we tell the licensing company that we play.
radio was once seen as bad because people could hear music for free. radio nowadays is a huge market for getting new music out to the people.
now, people are turning away from radio to the internet to hear weird obscure bands that the commerical stations don't play. this can only be a good thing.
but wait - how are people going to hear the band in the first place? does the RIAA really expect that people will buy an album that they haven't heard just because of marketing spin?
in times to come, i expect that we will see more time-limited/crippled/encrypted audio that gets limited to just the major artists again.
and on it goes, until the next method of distributing smaller, unheard bands is discovered.
why don't you take a sememster off, and spend that time doing unpaid work experience in a few different companies, in a few different roles to see what you like. try out a few tech companies, but also try media companies with small IT departments, banks, educational organisations.
get a mentor to help you work on what you really enjoy.
if all else fails, consider a related field that can still use your computer experience. what about librarianship. don't laugh - a lot of people are finding that the kind of knowledge you require to be a librarian is closely related to computing.
there are lots of positions out there as systems librarians, implementing and developing computer systems that directly help people that you can see instead of working in a computer company where you may never see the people that your product is designed to help.
www.blisspix.net
i got tailgated a few months ago on a saturday morning. he was a workman, rebuilding an office. he was sitting on a lounge in reception, and watched me as i entered the building with my swipe card. he snuck in behind me just as the door was closing.
i was incredibly paranoid about it (i'm a 22 year old female, and very few people were in the building at the time) and was going to call security until about a half hour later when i saw security running around trying to find the guy.
he turned out to be just a builder but it's scary how long the response took.
there are a lot of excellent articles on post september 11 reporting available from poynter http://www.poynter.org
AJR newslink has also posted some great info http://ajr.newslink.org/
it's like this - people will start to complain of a conspiracy to keep information from them if they DON'T find out about every anthrax scare, every building closure, every bomb threat.
this is what has led to the oversaturation of information today - an intense desire for more information, from different points of view.
the journalists are not to blame - this is what people want to hear about, so they are going to hear about it.
people are prone to panic - people have been told that they shouldn't worry of massive anthrax outbreaks and yet they are foolish enough to want testing and vaccination.
as for objectivity in journalism - that is a complete fallacy. no matter what you do, everything is out of context and everything is bias because none of us could be there to watch every evacuation, press conference, or talk to the people on the street.
also - australian media has warned of the bias in reports from afghanistan, because they are only getting info from the military and the northern alliance at the moment.
the media is a complex, complex beast. to understand it is not as simple as saying, 'the media panics people' or 'the media is bias'. the story you see or read has been shaped by hundreds of people, according to hundreds of different filters and criteria.
sony is a pain in the ass when you send something into repair under warranty. 6-9 weeks is the minimum for everything. but i like their philosophy - i sent in a minidisc walkman for repair, it had a hinge problem. they simply took the entire mechanism out, and put in a new one, keeping the old shell.
voila! all fixed, all good.
now why can't computer companies do that?
go to ingenta.com
search for open source
go to a library.
do some photocopying.
there looks to be a few things there, you may need to read the whole article. a well written article that is on the whole pro-open source should still list some of the pitfalls.
you should read the more academic journals rather than dr dobbs for this sort of thing. try sloan management review, computing, and business texts.
150 years ago bridges used to collapse regularly; even 100 years ago bridge collapses were not unusual. But today, we're building bridges that will be around forever. What happened? Just before the American Civil War, Civil Engineers got together and decided to become more professional.
too bad that in very recent years, professors have been very worried about the caliber of students they have been getting in civil engineering. they are very worried that things will fall down in the future. said one, i can't recall which college they were from "there's no way i would trust them to build a bridge"
it would also be interesting to see how many posters here don't work in fields at all related to software design (like me), but come here for the interesting discussion anyway.
being an outsider, it's quite amusing at times to read all the bragging and boasting that goes on across different forums!
MD is now replacing DAT in broadcasting. DAT fails frequently, has terrible problems with sensitive equipment, and is losing popularity all around. MD players are tiny, they can be concealed easily in interviews, and are easier to use.
It is also widely used in public radio for grabs, promos, advertising, in lieu of more expensive computer equipment.
While MD may have only had moderate success in the home market (although at home we have a MD deck and two MD portables), it is taking off big time in broadcasting.
nope. you can only make A (singular) copy, or if you have additional rights, such as if you are a broacaster making a copy for ease of use purposes.
why can't you copy your own stuff? because you could theoretically listen to your original cd plus an mp3 etc at the same time. when you buy something, you have bought the license for the physical recording of an item on that format. you have not bought a personal license for the song itself independent of the format.
if you only own vinyl but you still download, you are breaking the law because the copy did not come from the original vinyl.
when companies release the next format, everyone will be sucked into buying everything again, because they don't have the right to copy old cd's to any new format.
Certainly. Assuming, of course, that your local public library stocks all texts for MIT-grade classes, especially recent printings and obscure classes.
:-)
academic textbooks are not the domain of your local public library, you are totally right here. nor should they be.
wouldn't the logical thing be to go to your local university library and read the books there. university libraries are as public as any other. anyone may walk and read books on the shelves.
And as I said above, frequently there are no books.
if the lecturer has written a book, i can bet you that it will be the required textbook for the class.
while some classes may not have a textbook, they will always have reading lists, which i find very useful when searching for a good core reading set for a topic. unfortunately, these lists are often kept close to a lecturer's chest.
I'm currently doing a graduate research degree by distance. I had no choice because I live right across the country from my university, and I work full-time.
I hate it. There is no structure, no communication, no activities with other students, no study support online, nothing. I love just sitting and chatting with other people tossing ideas around for a few hours. That's how I work.
now i'm sure it depends on the discipline, because something that is often self-paced anyway like programming is probably easier to do by distance rather than history.
Schools need to do so much more to make distance learning a truly interactive experience. At the moment it's just, "jeewhiz, look what we can do on these newfangled computers"
Many people that I knew at uni were not there in order to get a job at the end of the degree. Many were there to enjoy learning. It is unfair to design courses which do not take these people into account. They were often mature or retired, and had no use for job seeking skills.
Lots of universities (at least, in Australia) have a lot of support for students who want to learn how to do resumes, prepare for interviews, etc. See your student union/guild/support centre. We don't need to learn this stuff in class.
Ask an employer what they find more valuable. A grad with specialised knowledge that will be obsolete in 5 years, or a grad who has skills in seeking and synthesising information, regardless of the discipline. The latter is why Arts degrees are valued despite the irrelevant nature of some of the subjects.
There is a strong push by librarians worldwide to develop integrated curricula with faculty that will give students in all courses the knowledge to seek and use information effectively both during and after university. The hardest challenge is balancing the time for course content (the nitty gritty) with the holistic approach to seeking information.
What worries me most about record labels introducing non-copyable CDs etc is that they are infringing upon the rights of other users under copyright law.
I'm in Australia, but I can get in trouble for copying an American CD because the reach of the DMCA is not limited to US shores, because I could theoretically be damaging Universal etc.
However, I have rights under Australian copyright law to duplicate CDs for the purpose of broadcasting under the 'ease of use' provisions because I work in radio.
Which law overrides the other? How do I even know what rights I have?
I just find it so annoying that laws which are enacted in one country can have such an impact across the world. Think Universal will make a copyable batch of its CDs for those of us who do have duplication rights? Nope, didn't think so.