The UK has had this for some time - its been generally ignored so far, although I guess at some point they are going to start prosecuting people for using mp3s instead of cds to dj (assuming they are allowed close enough to the dj to look)
This is a third bite at the cherry - you pay for the music, then you pay again for the performing rights licence, then now you pay a third time for the right to transfer the music you paid for into a format where you can play it to the public (which you paid for the right to do)
QR codes are barcodes, with some redundancy/error recovery built in so that you can get a partial or "bad" scan and still get the info; closest US equivalent would be the 2d barcodes with the little "target" round symbol in the middle that UPS put on their shipping labels.
The advantage of QR is that you don't have to give everyone a free scanner - you just give them some free software for their existing mobile phone (which is a LOT cheaper)
The difference is borderline; the BBC is a corporation, but one given a government monopoly on broadcast radio and tv, and the ability to impose a (government set) tax (currently a bit over $200/year) for the right to own receiver equipment. This they farm out to a third company, who pursue an guilty-until-proven-innocent approach of billing every household in the country unless they can prove they don't own a set.
In theory, the government has no control over the BBC as it is an independent corporation; that said, they have to go cap in hand to ask for an increase to their tax, and when the BBC published obvious conclusions regarding a government enquiry which explicitly excluded the most obvious culprits from its terms and purview, the senior governers who chose to publish were forced to resign.
you don't even have to go that far - there are limits on how good a computer can be in the real world, at today's level of technology.
nobody has seriously suggested that 256 bit AES is currently breakable by anything, and AES scales - so there is nothing stopping someone implimentating 512 bit or bigger keysizes. at 0.5k per conversation, that 9GB dvd could last you a fairly long time:)
well, one obvious advantage to maintaining at least the illusion of net neutrality is "common carrier status" - this is what stops an isp being sued when its naughty customers use p2p to share the latest britney spears hit.
All that (and the legal shield it provides) goes away if the isp *does* look at what the packets are and asserts control over them.
Why were they relying on an unlock code anyhow? on-the-fly encryption isn't exactly new and isn't exactly hard to do; it *is* damned hard to break into though, without having access to the password somehow (so you can write a trojan to break in, but you can't start with a stick and break the password unless you get really lucky or its an easy password to guess)
Personally, I don't support DRM at all, in the context it is currently used (ie, technologies to restrict usage rights).
What I do support is watermarking schemes, where a given file is permanently but non-intrusively "stained" with a unique licence number, which can then be traced back to its legal owner should copies of the file suddenly appear (for example) on emule.
Having such a scheme in place could revolutionize the industry - give recording artists an outlet which doesn't require the big multimedia companies to take 90% of the purchase price and all of the copyright, and the pay to the artists themselves could easily double even if prices per-track dropped.
I wonder how this will affect the "Digital DJ" licence - where if you play original cds, you don't have to make any additional payment, but if you rip those cds to your laptop to play them from there *even if you have the cds with you for inspection* you must pay the recording industry for the priviledge.
The kind of regulation they want is more like "you're an evil irresponsible hacker and going to jail if you disclose bugs in someone else's product." Yes, it's security by obscurity. But that way Oracle can happily spew bullshit about being secure and unbreakable, and never have to fix any bugs.
Its a big planet, but a small world.
Any regulation Oracle could come up with would apply *only* in those countries it could get to accept it - so if it were based in the US, it would be binding on Oracle (as a US company) and other US companies, plus any OSS projects based in the states - but Full-Disclosure mailing lists based in Norway or India would still be free to post 0-Day or fixed-delay postings, and those would be readable anywhere in the world.
Insisting on (American Sited) regulation can only shoot Oracle in the foot.
One problem there is there is already a solid (and *very* profitable) market for screen readers and so forth for the windoze platform. The companies who make those aren't interested in having to support linux and all its packages as well - its hard enough for them to keep up with windows and office, their main two "must haves" and their two biggest headaches.
There just isn't a bulk market there (the number of computer-using blind people is not a large enough demographic to support a large marketplace) so prices are high, and choice limited; a large percentage of those already have invested in commercial products, don't want to make the transition to linux (a hell of a jump even for the sighted, without throwing in the additional problems the blind face in getting a new os up and running) or simply don't realise there is an option.
It would be more productive to get screenreader companies interested in supporting an odf-compatable package (such as openoffice) than to try and build an entire new structure for xwindows from scratch (note that unix has been blind accessable since before DOS existed; braille based consoles weren't wonderful by any stretch of the imagination, and their single line of braille had to be scrolled up and down the window "buffer" a line at a time - but they were practical and usable.)
Anyway, I do find it rather amusing that Linux users are so keen on stealing music files from a Windows installation. I mean, it's kinda like them using KDE already, anyway, since KDE is a rip-off of the Windows user interface. Go ahead, guys...keep on living in denial.
Hey, whos denying it? the MS windows interface is one of the best things they ever stole (still think Apple should have gone ahead with that lawsuit rather than letting MS get away with the licence, but I suspect they may have needed the money)
Come to think of it - maybe this is a way MS can survive in a Linux world - sell the Genuine Windows (tm) Window Manager for X, and get a real OS to run their gui on for a change....:)
The so-called "defensive patents" are just used to deter attacks through the threat of countersuit. Mutually Assured Litigation?
The problem there is patent farming - once you have a patent, you have two choices - you can either use it as a countersuit, or you can sell it to a patent-farming company who can't be countersued, as they have no product other than the patents themselves. As making an actual product incurs production costs, risks market forces (despite what MS may think, you can't force people to buy your product if they don't need it) and usually requires a distribution chain. by contrast, patent farming requires only an agressive lawyer, and if you *are* an agressive lawyer, can be pretty much a one-man-show with no upfront costs at all.
Speaking as a classical musician, I find the MIDI standard grossly limited in terms of subtle articulation, phrasing, and dynamics. On glaring problem is the miniscule 128 levels of velocity, which is too small for the dynamic range necessary in classical music. (Yes, there are ways to cheat this in MIDI, but they're rather lackluster and cumbersome.)
So what file formats do you prefer? What do you think of (for example) the new MusicXML format, that both Finale and Sibelius are supporting in their new releases?
TBH I don't see what the issue is - the US government routinely sets aside patent claims if they apply to its own use - see for example This case.... or is it only an issue if a non-us government does it?
The second example, me wanting to use a shared picture on my site with Google ads on the side, was showing a use that most people don't intend to restrict, but end up doing far too often merely because the unnecessary non-commercial option exists. If I have to approach the author for a license to use her picture on my web site, which also happens to be shared under a Creative Commons license, then the license has failed. That's the transaction that the license was supposed to make unnecessary, but since I want ads on my web page, the usable portion of the creative commons is shrunk significantly.
Well, I suspect your web page, with googleAd, is a collective work (although IANAL, and I am certainly NAL in your juristiction) and therefore unless you were charging for access to your web page, it wouldn't be an issue.
Shipping a collective work which is on physical media is another matter. The real problem here is the key and repeated term "commercial advantage or private monetary compensation" which is not defined otherwise, and is sufficiently vague as to be stretched (by a creative lawyer) to cover almost anything you got any sort of payment for.
The problem is, there *has* been this sort of abuse of the GPL, so it can hardly be held as a shining example of how to do this. For example, the excellent nessus vulnerability scanner (which I used to test my own "ramparts" as a commercial network admin has now gone subscription-only as commercial "competitors" weren't actually competitors at all - but companies taking the free nessus code and patterns and selling them bundled with their own pretty gui engines.... More and more GPLed projects are now dead (with either no replacement, or code taken back in-house) and its a sad reflection on the world that these free gifts for the many have been withdrawn due to the actions of those who want to make a quick buck from the hard work of others. How this relates to the CC NC seems quite clear though - and is probably why the CC NC takes this route.
If the HR department won't listen to the people looking to hire someone, and filter based on the critera given by said people.. then they're idiots and need to be replaced or straightened out.
Easier said than done. Sadly, most management bring in a techie once the interviews are arranged "to ask a few technical questions". Some even forgo that, and ask a techie to *write down* some technical questions to ask (and the answers of course - adding a whole new level to the game, not only what is the answer, but what is the answer they are expecting which may differ only in trivial wording from what you said, but will be marked as a "fail")
When I'm involved in interviewing, we actually do have them send us a ton of resumes each time, and then go through them to weed out those that don't seem to actually have knowledge/experience that we want. Then we can narrow down other ways (phone screens and/or onsite interviews). That's a very good approach (and one I have encountered before) but sadly the exception rather than the rule; An example would be being rejected as a candidate for a unix admin job because my cv had on it "solaris" and not "sun unix" - the HR manager concerned didn't know what solaris was, so rejected any CVs that didn't have the words "sun" and "unix" in them..... presumably Sun Solaris would have been fine, provided the word unix was mentioned elsewhere.
Like one other poster said too.. you can usually pick out the complete BSers pretty quickly when talking to them, and I find that there're quite a few you can weed out just as quickly looking over the resume. e.g. Someone describes themselves as a "senior enterprise unix admin" who later goes on to describe a job with a total of about 9 unix hosts and maybe 6 months experience, those hosts all installed and configured by someone else... well, you get the idea.
I can only imagine. I couldn't describe myself as a "senior enterprise unix administrator" but maybe I *should* start lying on my CV as that is apparently what is expected of me. certainly, those I get interviews with seem astonished that I have left off from the cv more that I can do, simply because I don't use those skills enough to keep current....
If I had to pick something to rant about it would be a driving licence though.
I don't have a driving licence
I don't particularly WANT a driving licence, but may pick one up someday just so I have one against need
If you WANT someone with a driving licence, put that on the job spec OR READ IN MY CV WHERE IT SAYS I DONT HAVE ONE!.
Given that interview expenses are rare in these days of high IT unemployment, I really don't want to be spending enough to live on for a week on a pair of train tickets just to be told I was the best technical candidate, but unfortunately they went with a driver just in case they had to come in at 2am....
When you tack on the non-commercial restriction, you're making people jump through hoops to make sure they don't make any money with the new work that has been created. Let's look at an example of a blatant commercial use of a work, such as using a song in a television commercial. If a company uses a Creative Commons licensed song with the ShareAlike and Attribution requirements, that means the resulting commercial will be shared as well, allowing other people to make derivative works as well.
So what is the problem? If you are going to make a profit from your use of their work, why is it so terrible to kick some of that back to the guy who did the creative work you are using? If you instead derived your work (an advert, say) from a commercial-only work, you would have exactly one option - approach the copyright holder and ask for permission to use the work (I will leave aside several compulsory-licence schemes some countries have for derivative works)
If you suddenly find you must now approach the copyright holder for a commercial-usage licence, where is the foul? You are not prevented from using your own talent to produce Works, but *are* prevented from using the fruit of the copyright holder's talent (with or without additions of your own) in order to produce works with commercial value to you.
Ok, you *do* have a second option. you could ensure the produced Work is not for gain; in practice, this is *not* going to mean an advert, as the CC defines gain as "commercial advantage or private monetary compensation" and any advert must by definition be for commercial advantage. However, I still can't see the problem here. NC/CC is no licence at all *for the purposes of making money* - you aren't prevented from using the Work, you just don't get a free ride. Just do what you would do with any other commercially-published tune or image you came across - assume it is copyrighted, that you will need some sort of licence (and that the CC isn't going to be a get-out-of-jail-free card) and negotiate royalties with the original author.
Bwah ha ha... what a laugh. As someone that is an admin, and interviews people for positions now and then, I can tell you that I (and everyone else in our group that interviews as well) see(s) certs as useless. Far too many people have gone to those quickie schools like MicroSkills and just learned how to pass a cert test without actually understanding the underlying technology.
Unfortunately - while you know that, and I know that, you will find almost all HR departments think Certifications are worth more than experience - I am jobhunting right now, and I have lost track of how many jobs HR departments had specified MCSEs for.... even for a primarily unix based role. I have about a decade of experience as a mixed-os admin, multiple flavours of unix, linux, windows, novell - but I can't even be considered for a job I have done for that time as I don't have some bit of paper the HR department decided was "ideal" for the role. Add to that the Recruiting Agency firewall, and you find you won't ever (as an interviewer) even *see* CVs that don't have the bits of paper your HR department specified, as the recruiter seems to believe he earns his commission by filtering out all the people with experience but not cookie-cutter certifications....
I am occasionally considered good at supporting systems - crossplatform dba and sysadmin, cisco networking, checkpoint firewalls - but as a support tech, I didn't get anywhere near $100K or even half that - and I was the highest paid support tech there.
Training is another matter, but tbh again, that's a monopoly backlash - you say that people can be expected to know the monopoly package, and to a certain extent that's true - but working for a company with almost entirely an MS monoculture, we got literally dozens of calls that were due to users not having ever been formally trained in ms office (never mind any other apps they might use) - right down to having unmaximised a mdi child window in excel, and claiming thirty minutes downtime because of the helpdesk not recognising that as a possible cause of "my scrollbars are missing"
Personally, I think any company would welcome a chance to train their staff from a clean sheet - nobody convinced they don't have to listen because they already know "all about" microsoft office then having to burn support hours (and if you think onsite is bad, wait until you have to support the road warriors who want nothing better than to blaim missing their targets on poor IT support)
It appears that Rackspace, in a desire to meet the FBI's turnover deadline went ahead and sent the entire drive rather than the specific logfiles. This appears to be a simple effort to meet a deadline, rather than 3v1l kowtowing to teh m4n.
Several minor problems with that theory - the main one being the fact that indymedia don't keep logs, and in fact told everyone concerned that long before the server was seized. They also accidentally "forgot" to ask the UK authorities to sign off on the removal, so are now legally liable for any data transferred outside of the EU - for example, to america, where EU privacy laws don't apply. this can lead to (at worst for rackspace) the arrest and imprisonment of rackspace board members if they ever visit an EU country. They also appear to have lied to everyone concerned (particularly indymedia) that a gag order was in effect as to why they were removing a server, when in fact not only wasn't there a gag order, they were only ordered to produce (non existent) files....
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Licence
This is a third bite at the cherry - you pay for the music, then you pay again for the performing rights licence, then now you pay a third time for the right to transfer the music you paid for into a format where you can play it to the public (which you paid for the right to do)
QR codes are barcodes, with some redundancy/error recovery built in so that you can get a partial or "bad" scan and still get the info; closest US equivalent would be the 2d barcodes with the little "target" round symbol in the middle that UPS put on their shipping labels.
The advantage of QR is that you don't have to give everyone a free scanner - you just give them some free software for their existing mobile phone (which is a LOT cheaper)
In theory, the government has no control over the BBC as it is an independent corporation; that said, they have to go cap in hand to ask for an increase to their tax, and when the BBC published obvious conclusions regarding a government enquiry which explicitly excluded the most obvious culprits from its terms and purview, the senior governers who chose to publish were forced to resign.
Isn't that pretty much the same reason he wrote linux in the first place? :)
you don't even have to go that far - there are limits on how good a computer can be in the real world, at today's level of technology. nobody has seriously suggested that 256 bit AES is currently breakable by anything, and AES scales - so there is nothing stopping someone implimentating 512 bit or bigger keysizes. at 0.5k per conversation, that 9GB dvd could last you a fairly long time :)
All that (and the legal shield it provides) goes away if the isp *does* look at what the packets are and asserts control over them.
Why were they relying on an unlock code anyhow? on-the-fly encryption isn't exactly new and isn't exactly hard to do; it *is* damned hard to break into though, without having access to the password somehow (so you can write a trojan to break in, but you can't start with a stick and break the password unless you get really lucky or its an easy password to guess)
so you can happily shag like bunnies at 16, but one naughty picture taken by or for your lover could get you or them arrested...
Personally, I don't support DRM at all, in the context it is currently used (ie, technologies to restrict usage rights).
What I do support is watermarking schemes, where a given file is permanently but non-intrusively "stained" with a unique licence number, which can then be traced back to its legal owner should copies of the file suddenly appear (for example) on emule.
Having such a scheme in place could revolutionize the industry - give recording artists an outlet which doesn't require the big multimedia companies to take 90% of the purchase price and all of the copyright, and the pay to the artists themselves could easily double even if prices per-track dropped.
My company's MSDN licence doesn't include *any* physical media - we have to download ISO images directly from MS.
I wonder how this will affect the "Digital DJ" licence - where if you play original cds, you don't have to make any additional payment, but if you rip those cds to your laptop to play them from there *even if you have the cds with you for inspection* you must pay the recording industry for the priviledge.
Its a big planet, but a small world.
Any regulation Oracle could come up with would apply *only* in those countries it could get to accept it - so if it were based in the US, it would be binding on Oracle (as a US company) and other US companies, plus any OSS projects based in the states - but Full-Disclosure mailing lists based in Norway or India would still be free to post 0-Day or fixed-delay postings, and those would be readable anywhere in the world.
Insisting on (American Sited) regulation can only shoot Oracle in the foot.
One problem there is there is already a solid (and *very* profitable) market for screen readers and so forth for the windoze platform. The companies who make those aren't interested in having to support linux and all its packages as well - its hard enough for them to keep up with windows and office, their main two "must haves" and their two biggest headaches.
There just isn't a bulk market there (the number of computer-using blind people is not a large enough demographic to support a large marketplace) so prices are high, and choice limited; a large percentage of those already have invested in commercial products, don't want to make the transition to linux (a hell of a jump even for the sighted, without throwing in the additional problems the blind face in getting a new os up and running) or simply don't realise there is an option.
It would be more productive to get screenreader companies interested in supporting an odf-compatable package (such as openoffice) than to try and build an entire new structure for xwindows from scratch (note that unix has been blind accessable since before DOS existed; braille based consoles weren't wonderful by any stretch of the imagination, and their single line of braille had to be scrolled up and down the window "buffer" a line at a time - but they were practical and usable.)
Anyway, I do find it rather amusing that Linux users are so keen on stealing music files from a Windows installation. I mean, it's kinda like them using KDE already, anyway, since KDE is a rip-off of the Windows user interface. Go ahead, guys...keep on living in denial. :)
Hey, whos denying it? the MS windows interface is one of the best things they ever stole (still think Apple should have gone ahead with that lawsuit rather than letting MS get away with the licence, but I suspect they may have needed the money)
Come to think of it - maybe this is a way MS can survive in a Linux world - sell the Genuine Windows (tm) Window Manager for X, and get a real OS to run their gui on for a change....
I have been using Y! messenger, with full SIP support (and a tie-in with the BT fixed-line service in the uk) for over a year now....
The so-called "defensive patents" are just used to deter attacks through the threat of countersuit. Mutually Assured Litigation?
The problem there is patent farming - once you have a patent, you have two choices - you can either use it as a countersuit, or you can sell it to a patent-farming company who can't be countersued, as they have no product other than the patents themselves. As making an actual product incurs production costs, risks market forces (despite what MS may think, you can't force people to buy your product if they don't need it) and usually requires a distribution chain. by contrast, patent farming requires only an agressive lawyer, and if you *are* an agressive lawyer, can be pretty much a one-man-show with no upfront costs at all.
Speaking as a classical musician, I find the MIDI standard grossly limited in terms of subtle articulation, phrasing, and dynamics. On glaring problem is the miniscule 128 levels of velocity, which is too small for the dynamic range necessary in classical music. (Yes, there are ways to cheat this in MIDI, but they're rather lackluster and cumbersome.)
So what file formats do you prefer? What do you think of (for example) the new MusicXML format, that both Finale and Sibelius are supporting in their new releases?
bah - the Link dropped out, sorry...
TBH I don't see what the issue is - the US government routinely sets aside patent claims if they apply to its own use - see for example This case.... or is it only an issue if a non-us government does it?
Well, I suspect your web page, with googleAd, is a collective work (although IANAL, and I am certainly NAL in your juristiction) and therefore unless you were charging for access to your web page, it wouldn't be an issue.
Shipping a collective work which is on physical media is another matter. The real problem here is the key and repeated term "commercial advantage or private monetary compensation" which is not defined otherwise, and is sufficiently vague as to be stretched (by a creative lawyer) to cover almost anything you got any sort of payment for.
The problem is, there *has* been this sort of abuse of the GPL, so it can hardly be held as a shining example of how to do this. For example, the excellent nessus vulnerability scanner (which I used to test my own "ramparts" as a commercial network admin has now gone subscription-only as commercial "competitors" weren't actually competitors at all - but companies taking the free nessus code and patterns and selling them bundled with their own pretty gui engines.... More and more GPLed projects are now dead (with either no replacement, or code taken back in-house) and its a sad reflection on the world that these free gifts for the many have been withdrawn due to the actions of those who want to make a quick buck from the hard work of others. How this relates to the CC NC seems quite clear though - and is probably why the CC NC takes this route.
Easier said than done. Sadly, most management bring in a techie once the interviews are arranged "to ask a few technical questions". Some even forgo that, and ask a techie to *write down* some technical questions to ask (and the answers of course - adding a whole new level to the game, not only what is the answer, but what is the answer they are expecting which may differ only in trivial wording from what you said, but will be marked as a "fail")
When I'm involved in interviewing, we actually do have them send us a ton of resumes each time, and then go through them to weed out those that don't seem to actually have knowledge/experience that we want. Then we can narrow down other ways (phone screens and/or onsite interviews).
That's a very good approach (and one I have encountered before) but sadly the exception rather than the rule; An example would be being rejected as a candidate for a unix admin job because my cv had on it "solaris" and not "sun unix" - the HR manager concerned didn't know what solaris was, so rejected any CVs that didn't have the words "sun" and "unix" in them..... presumably Sun Solaris would have been fine, provided the word unix was mentioned elsewhere.
Like one other poster said too.. you can usually pick out the complete BSers pretty quickly when talking to them, and I find that there're quite a few you can weed out just as quickly looking over the resume. e.g. Someone describes themselves as a "senior enterprise unix admin" who later goes on to describe a job with a total of about 9 unix hosts and maybe 6 months experience, those hosts all installed and configured by someone else... well, you get the idea.
I can only imagine. I couldn't describe myself as a "senior enterprise unix administrator" but maybe I *should* start lying on my CV as that is apparently what is expected of me. certainly, those I get interviews with seem astonished that I have left off from the cv more that I can do, simply because I don't use those skills enough to keep current....
If I had to pick something to rant about it would be a driving licence though.
I don't have a driving licence
I don't particularly WANT a driving licence, but may pick one up someday just so I have one against need
If you WANT someone with a driving licence, put that on the job spec OR READ IN MY CV WHERE IT SAYS I DONT HAVE ONE!.
Given that interview expenses are rare in these days of high IT unemployment, I really don't want to be spending enough to live on for a week on a pair of train tickets just to be told I was the best technical candidate, but unfortunately they went with a driver just in case they had to come in at 2am....
When you tack on the non-commercial restriction, you're making people jump through hoops to make sure they don't make any money with the new work that has been created. Let's look at an example of a blatant commercial use of a work, such as using a song in a television commercial. If a company uses a Creative Commons licensed song with the ShareAlike and Attribution requirements, that means the resulting commercial will be shared as well, allowing other people to make derivative works as well.
So what is the problem? If you are going to make a profit from your use of their work, why is it so terrible to kick some of that back to the guy who did the creative work you are using? If you instead derived your work (an advert, say) from a commercial-only work, you would have exactly one option - approach the copyright holder and ask for permission to use the work (I will leave aside several compulsory-licence schemes some countries have for derivative works)
If you suddenly find you must now approach the copyright holder for a commercial-usage licence, where is the foul? You are not prevented from using your own talent to produce Works, but *are* prevented from using the fruit of the copyright holder's talent (with or without additions of your own) in order to produce works with commercial value to you.
Ok, you *do* have a second option. you could ensure the produced Work is not for gain; in practice, this is *not* going to mean an advert, as the CC defines gain as "commercial advantage or private monetary compensation" and any advert must by definition be for commercial advantage. However, I still can't see the problem here. NC/CC is no licence at all *for the purposes of making money* - you aren't prevented from using the Work, you just don't get a free ride. Just do what you would do with any other commercially-published tune or image you came across - assume it is copyrighted, that you will need some sort of licence (and that the CC isn't going to be a get-out-of-jail-free card) and negotiate royalties with the original author.
Bwah ha ha... what a laugh. As someone that is an admin, and interviews people for positions now and then, I can tell you that I (and everyone else in our group that interviews as well) see(s) certs as useless. Far too many people have gone to those quickie schools like MicroSkills and just learned how to pass a cert test without actually understanding the underlying technology.
Unfortunately - while you know that, and I know that, you will find almost all HR departments think Certifications are worth more than experience - I am jobhunting right now, and I have lost track of how many jobs HR departments had specified MCSEs for.... even for a primarily unix based role. I have about a decade of experience as a mixed-os admin, multiple flavours of unix, linux, windows, novell - but I can't even be considered for a job I have done for that time as I don't have some bit of paper the HR department decided was "ideal" for the role. Add to that the Recruiting Agency firewall, and you find you won't ever (as an interviewer) even *see* CVs that don't have the bits of paper your HR department specified, as the recruiter seems to believe he earns his commission by filtering out all the people with experience but not cookie-cutter certifications....
I am occasionally considered good at supporting systems - crossplatform dba and sysadmin, cisco networking, checkpoint firewalls - but as a support tech, I didn't get anywhere near $100K or even half that - and I was the highest paid support tech there.
Training is another matter, but tbh again, that's a monopoly backlash - you say that people can be expected to know the monopoly package, and to a certain extent that's true - but working for a company with almost entirely an MS monoculture, we got literally dozens of calls that were due to users not having ever been formally trained in ms office (never mind any other apps they might use) - right down to having unmaximised a mdi child window in excel, and claiming thirty minutes downtime because of the helpdesk not recognising that as a possible cause of "my scrollbars are missing"
Personally, I think any company would welcome a chance to train their staff from a clean sheet - nobody convinced they don't have to listen because they already know "all about" microsoft office then having to burn support hours (and if you think onsite is bad, wait until you have to support the road warriors who want nothing better than to blaim missing their targets on poor IT support)
It appears that Rackspace, in a desire to meet the FBI's turnover deadline went ahead and sent the entire drive rather than the specific logfiles. This appears to be a simple effort to meet a deadline, rather than 3v1l kowtowing to teh m4n.
Several minor problems with that theory - the main one being the fact that indymedia don't keep logs, and in fact told everyone concerned that long before the server was seized. They also accidentally "forgot" to ask the UK authorities to sign off on the removal, so are now legally liable for any data transferred outside of the EU - for example, to america, where EU privacy laws don't apply. this can lead to (at worst for rackspace) the arrest and imprisonment of rackspace board members if they ever visit an EU country. They also appear to have lied to everyone concerned (particularly indymedia) that a gag order was in effect as to why they were removing a server, when in fact not only wasn't there a gag order, they were only ordered to produce (non existent) files....