I know there's probably some other comment applauding this statement, but I just have to get how awesome this is out of my system
Some believe only business people can do this-- that hackers can implement software, but not design it. That's nonsense. There's nothing about knowing how to program that prevents hackers from understanding users, or about not knowing how to program that magically enables business people to understand them.
I've found you can pretty much tell if someone believes this is true or not if they ever use the phrase, "he's a computer person." To these people, knowing about computers and the rest of the world are mutually exclusive. It's sad what a massive section of the population this includes. I suspect including any of these people in your own startup would be suicide.
I think the idea is that modularity and (extensible) open standards are the solution (read: compromise) to this classic problem. Programs can gracefully degrade to being compatible with older systems with open standards. And users can have maximum flexibility if their software is modular, not forcibly integrated.
I think the OSS idea gets a bad rap because it is rare to see a program do both of these well when it comes to the user experience.
Why is that less of a problem than the THEORY that global warming might have a human influence?! We're over-fishing our oceans. Why is that less of a danger to human quality of life? (My emphasis)
Even through a selfish view of the world, we (humans) need to be concerned for the welfare of more than just our race. We sit on the shoulders of others; we are not independent.
The best class I ever took in college was a law class on search and seizure - the 4th amendment. Of course I was a CS major, NAL. Still, let me try to explain why this was ok, and respond to each of the 4+ posts up till now. I'll probably be flamed/trolled for this, but that's life.
The basic idea is that when you are out on the road, you shouldn't expect not to be seen. You might pull up to a traffic light next to someone you know, you might be photographed by a traffic camera or satellite, or indeed a network of police officers might be able to spot you.
If you are in your home, in the living room, with the windows blinds open, you shouldn't expect privacy, either. If the cops see you from outside your house smoking pot, they can come in and arrest you. However, if you close the blinds, shut the doors, and generally try not to be seen, you can expect privacy. The key clause is whether you have a "reasonable expectation of privacy." It pretty much means you have to make at least some small effort not to be seen. If the cops come on your property and peek through a tiny slit in the blinds and see you smoking pot, the arrest will be thrown out because they have violated your right to privacy.
So the guy on the road could have been spotted by anyone, at any time, and his location would be given away. Now, to clarify on previous points:
"It's not ok to plant something" - This is true, but that's more a question of vandalism, not right to privacy of location. It might be easier to pretend that the police have some satellite imaging system that can spot any particular car from space, then to consider the legal ramifications. I agree they vandalized his car in planting the GPS, but I don't have any special knowledge in that area, and it's not really the issue at hand.
"They probably caught him on a private road" - If he's visible from a public road, he has no reasonable expectation of privacy. There is a similar law for fields - if you grow pot on your farm and it's visible from the road, or even public airspace, you can't expect privacy.
"It wouldn't be legal to put a GPS on a cop car, so why is the reverse ok, without a warrant" - Again this is a vandalism question. You can't attach stuff to cop cars, and like I said I do think there's a strong argument to say the cops vandalized this fellow's car. But you do have the legal right to know where any cop car on the road currently is. The police have no obligation to publish the information, but if you had a network of friends that were willing to sit and watch for cop cars all day, there wouldn't be anything wrong with that.
"You may not be private, but you should be anonymous" - There's a common sense validity to this, but there's no legal foundation. The constitution (in its amended form) specifically allocates a right to privacy, but anonymity is just a coincidental result of the fact that our cities have too many people for everyone to know everyone else. It would be impossible to grant someone a "right" to be anonymous; the US does, however, come as close as you can get, in that you have no legal obligation to share your identity with anyone who you don't want to (save a couple types of convicted criminals)
"Now the police can track everyone" - Thankfully, no, they can't. The law prevents searches or investigations of the general population. Although the police don't have to have a warrant for certain investigations, they do have to have some basic idea of what they are looking for. This is why, for example, they need a good reason to have you open your trunk at a toll booth - they aren't legally allowed to just do it to everyone.
"A citizen tried to do this, but it was illegal" - Although I don't know the details of the case, I would suspect this was a case of stalking or vandalization or something else. I don't know much about the law of stalking, so I won't say much about this, except that this guy clearly was
Call me foolish, but I for one am not lusting after convergence. I'd rather have good Bluetooth support. That way, my cell phone, which is good at GSM communications and picture taking, for example, can talk with my iPod which is good at data storage (where all those pictures go). Or my PDA, with it's nice big screen, can download web pages via my cell phone. Or my cell phone can get the next 24 hours worth of appointment information from my PDA, in case I want to travel light for a little while. The scenarios go on and on...
It just seems a little more elegant than carrying one monolithic brick around with you.
But it'll stifle innovation? Biggest load I've heard. Those who have great ideas and are passionate about them need no reward.
At least here in the US, we were founded on exactly the opposite idea. You are right, many great thinkers did not ask for any reward. But the vast majority know that there's something in it for them to come up with a great idea. The "right", if you will, to be compensated for one's hard work and critical thinking inspires many minds to excel when they would otherwise flounder. Modern business, which churns out impressive innovations at a remarkable rate, would not be viable without a compensation system. Even in academia there are (non-monetary) compensation systems, such as noteriaty, which I suspect is important to a lot of researchers. The desire to be rewarded for hard work is innate and perfectly natural. (Think of the caveman who figures out how to set a trap, so he can catch animals more safely - he's certainly not obliged to walk to the next cave and share his insights.)
Although I agree with you that copyright terms are horrendously long, and that regulations on media empires are laughably flimsy, being able to own an idea is still essential to our economy. Consider the alternative - a world where all you can own are widgets, and your wealth is measured by how much material stuff you have. Doesn't sound like fun to me.
On the contrary, I find my Dewalt power screwdriver very valuable.
Seriously, I do try to own as little as possible. What happens is that the few things I do own become that much more valuable to me. So if someone steals even 1 thing from me, it really throws me off. If someone were to, say, eat my entire 1 box of cereal, I'd have nothing left to eat for breakfast. Whereas if some criminal came into someone else's house and ate 1 box of cereal, when there are 3 jumbo refill boxes sitting next to it, I don't think they'd really care.
Come to think of it, this minimalist thing sucks.
I run a college movie group that sometimes does sneak previews of upcoming films. I was blown away when I heard that for our most recent preview (Gothika, total crap btw) they wanted to bring in night vision goggles. They wound up basically frisking everyone that came in too, and even turned away kids with cameras in their cell phones. The people who got in didn't actually seem to mind the search that much, they kind of understood. Nonetheless, it was the first time we had a major external security force at one of our screenings.
Does anyone else feel like it's time for the users to start taking a little responsibility too? Computers are monstorously complex machines. People spend years of their lives studying mere fractions of how computers work. The fact that we've boiled it all down to a smooth, milky interface is absolutely incredible, in my opinion. Windows 3.1 was not there, and KDE is really close. But computer engineers are so used to hearing about how it's their fault that people can't use computers, when really, it's ok to ask the users to learn a little.
Do most people know how to drive tractors? No. Those that want to need to learn a little. And tractors are a couple orders of magnitude simpler than the average micropressor. It's true that computers are much more widespread, and so a good compromise IMHO is to say that the simple functionality of a computer should be easy to get at, but the more complex stuff (e.g. cross referencing co-workers' schedules to find a common meeting time) will be harder. Doing something like that isn't going to be point-and-click. It's going to be point-and-click-click-click.
I'm a senior graduating with a CS degree this year. I work for the IT dept on my campus doing web development and it seems like every week I have to try to educate one of my three bosses about some fundamental idea in this area. I'm nearly at the breaking point, even though I only have a month left I'm about ready to quit out of desperation. I just cannot get it through to them that contracts with major companies is not the only answer.
Is there anything good for me to look forward to in the outside world?? Are there any bosses out there that don't make me pull 4 times my weight, but actually help me do my job?
I went to LotR at this theatre tonight, and having read the news story this morning, I decided to talk to Jeff. He does have a support group, in that there are people bringing him supplies and whatnot. He's worked out all the logistics (it actually seems marginally organized) about bathroom, shower, etc. He has a 'web team' that's supposedly going to have things live Monday, but that remains to be seen.
Frankly I tried to keep an open mind while talking to him, but he droned on like another misdirected 20+ year old 'artist'. I don't think his intentions are misrepresented... he really believes that what he's doing is art. I can see the merit in breaking a record, but I have to agree that there must be more productive things that he could be doing with his life.
On the other hand, this art may make some people think: why is my life so fast-paced? Why don't I have time to take 5 months off and do something crazy? Why do I care so much what everyone thinks of me? Why haven't I ever been controversial or done something that goes against the grain of society?
Above all Jeff didn't seem like a fool. He had all his security worked out, he's talked to the theatre manager to make sure they're ok with what he's doing, and he has a support network of friends should his convictions ever weary. His friend John wasn't there when I went to talk to him. It seemed like the thing that was depressing him the most about what he's doing is that no one seems to even care to look seriously at what he's doing; the masses dismiss him as a freak who is wasting time. But then, a lot of people who read this news site have probably had society question their hobbies: this guy might be uncomfortably close to some buried personalities out there.
This was also brought up on bugtraq a while back. I paid special attention because I had a text file on a web site that was indexed, but a google search of "link:<my text file>" produced no results.
On some servers, if you make a query for http://<server>/<path>/?M=A or http://<server>/<path>/?S=D you will get a directory listing instead of the default page. This is a result of FancyIndexing in Apache and can be disabled through methods detailed in the Bugtraq discussion.
The originator of the discussion pointed out that his log files had get requests from Google that specifically looked for these directory listings, so it's pretty clear they were (are?) doing it intentionally.
In the ACMs, you get three people, four problems, four hours, and one computer.
I haven't done it yet (I'm a sophomore; its pretty difficult to get very far), but I know I will at least be going to prelims this year.
Maybe this is something profs should recommend for students that have a hard time integrating themselves. Don't force it like torture, but the competition aspect can make it pretty fun, and so non-team-oriented students might find it interesting and challenging.
Slashdot Mirror
Because there is value in being trustworthy.
(Obviously not enough, though.)
I know there's probably some other comment applauding this statement, but I just have to get how awesome this is out of my system
Some believe only business people can do this-- that hackers can implement software, but not design it. That's nonsense. There's nothing about knowing how to program that prevents hackers from understanding users, or about not knowing how to program that magically enables business people to understand them.
I've found you can pretty much tell if someone believes this is true or not if they ever use the phrase, "he's a computer person." To these people, knowing about computers and the rest of the world are mutually exclusive. It's sad what a massive section of the population this includes. I suspect including any of these people in your own startup would be suicide.
I think the idea is that modularity and (extensible) open standards are the solution (read: compromise) to this classic problem. Programs can gracefully degrade to being compatible with older systems with open standards. And users can have maximum flexibility if their software is modular, not forcibly integrated.
I think the OSS idea gets a bad rap because it is rare to see a program do both of these well when it comes to the user experience.
It's not a healthy thing to lock yourself in a room and create your own reality.
A federal judge saying this makes the federally-mandated V-Chip seem kind of ironic, huh?
Why is that less of a problem than the THEORY that global warming might have a human influence?! We're over-fishing our oceans. Why is that less of a danger to human quality of life? (My emphasis)
Even through a selfish view of the world, we (humans) need to be concerned for the welfare of more than just our race. We sit on the shoulders of others; we are not independent.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/07/02/043922 6&tid=152
The best class I ever took in college was a law class on search and seizure - the 4th amendment. Of course I was a CS major, NAL. Still, let me try to explain why this was ok, and respond to each of the 4+ posts up till now. I'll probably be flamed/trolled for this, but that's life.
The basic idea is that when you are out on the road, you shouldn't expect not to be seen. You might pull up to a traffic light next to someone you know, you might be photographed by a traffic camera or satellite, or indeed a network of police officers might be able to spot you.
If you are in your home, in the living room, with the windows blinds open, you shouldn't expect privacy, either. If the cops see you from outside your house smoking pot, they can come in and arrest you. However, if you close the blinds, shut the doors, and generally try not to be seen, you can expect privacy. The key clause is whether you have a "reasonable expectation of privacy." It pretty much means you have to make at least some small effort not to be seen. If the cops come on your property and peek through a tiny slit in the blinds and see you smoking pot, the arrest will be thrown out because they have violated your right to privacy.
So the guy on the road could have been spotted by anyone, at any time, and his location would be given away. Now, to clarify on previous points:
Call me foolish, but I for one am not lusting after convergence. I'd rather have good Bluetooth support. That way, my cell phone, which is good at GSM communications and picture taking, for example, can talk with my iPod which is good at data storage (where all those pictures go). Or my PDA, with it's nice big screen, can download web pages via my cell phone. Or my cell phone can get the next 24 hours worth of appointment information from my PDA, in case I want to travel light for a little while. The scenarios go on and on...
It just seems a little more elegant than carrying one monolithic brick around with you.
But it'll stifle innovation? Biggest load I've heard. Those who have great ideas and are passionate about them need no reward.
At least here in the US, we were founded on exactly the opposite idea. You are right, many great thinkers did not ask for any reward. But the vast majority know that there's something in it for them to come up with a great idea. The "right", if you will, to be compensated for one's hard work and critical thinking inspires many minds to excel when they would otherwise flounder. Modern business, which churns out impressive innovations at a remarkable rate, would not be viable without a compensation system. Even in academia there are (non-monetary) compensation systems, such as noteriaty, which I suspect is important to a lot of researchers. The desire to be rewarded for hard work is innate and perfectly natural. (Think of the caveman who figures out how to set a trap, so he can catch animals more safely - he's certainly not obliged to walk to the next cave and share his insights.)
Although I agree with you that copyright terms are horrendously long, and that regulations on media empires are laughably flimsy, being able to own an idea is still essential to our economy. Consider the alternative - a world where all you can own are widgets, and your wealth is measured by how much material stuff you have. Doesn't sound like fun to me.
Plus, no one would have ever heard of the GPL.
On the contrary, I find my Dewalt power screwdriver very valuable. Seriously, I do try to own as little as possible. What happens is that the few things I do own become that much more valuable to me. So if someone steals even 1 thing from me, it really throws me off. If someone were to, say, eat my entire 1 box of cereal, I'd have nothing left to eat for breakfast. Whereas if some criminal came into someone else's house and ate 1 box of cereal, when there are 3 jumbo refill boxes sitting next to it, I don't think they'd really care. Come to think of it, this minimalist thing sucks.
I run a college movie group that sometimes does sneak previews of upcoming films. I was blown away when I heard that for our most recent preview (Gothika, total crap btw) they wanted to bring in night vision goggles. They wound up basically frisking everyone that came in too, and even turned away kids with cameras in their cell phones. The people who got in didn't actually seem to mind the search that much, they kind of understood. Nonetheless, it was the first time we had a major external security force at one of our screenings.
Does anyone else feel like it's time for the users to start taking a little responsibility too? Computers are monstorously complex machines. People spend years of their lives studying mere fractions of how computers work. The fact that we've boiled it all down to a smooth, milky interface is absolutely incredible, in my opinion. Windows 3.1 was not there, and KDE is really close. But computer engineers are so used to hearing about how it's their fault that people can't use computers, when really, it's ok to ask the users to learn a little.
Do most people know how to drive tractors? No. Those that want to need to learn a little. And tractors are a couple orders of magnitude simpler than the average micropressor. It's true that computers are much more widespread, and so a good compromise IMHO is to say that the simple functionality of a computer should be easy to get at, but the more complex stuff (e.g. cross referencing co-workers' schedules to find a common meeting time) will be harder. Doing something like that isn't going to be point-and-click. It's going to be point-and-click-click-click.
I'm a senior graduating with a CS degree this year. I work for the IT dept on my campus doing web development and it seems like every week I have to try to educate one of my three bosses about some fundamental idea in this area. I'm nearly at the breaking point, even though I only have a month left I'm about ready to quit out of desperation. I just cannot get it through to them that contracts with major companies is not the only answer.
Is there anything good for me to look forward to in the outside world?? Are there any bosses out there that don't make me pull 4 times my weight, but actually help me do my job?
examineer
ha, sounds like they outsourced their HR to Disney
I went to LotR at this theatre tonight, and having read the news story this morning, I decided to talk to Jeff. He does have a support group, in that there are people bringing him supplies and whatnot. He's worked out all the logistics (it actually seems marginally organized) about bathroom, shower, etc. He has a 'web team' that's supposedly going to have things live Monday, but that remains to be seen.
Frankly I tried to keep an open mind while talking to him, but he droned on like another misdirected 20+ year old 'artist'. I don't think his intentions are misrepresented... he really believes that what he's doing is art. I can see the merit in breaking a record, but I have to agree that there must be more productive things that he could be doing with his life.
On the other hand, this art may make some people think: why is my life so fast-paced? Why don't I have time to take 5 months off and do something crazy? Why do I care so much what everyone thinks of me? Why haven't I ever been controversial or done something that goes against the grain of society?
Above all Jeff didn't seem like a fool. He had all his security worked out, he's talked to the theatre manager to make sure they're ok with what he's doing, and he has a support network of friends should his convictions ever weary. His friend John wasn't there when I went to talk to him. It seemed like the thing that was depressing him the most about what he's doing is that no one seems to even care to look seriously at what he's doing; the masses dismiss him as a freak who is wasting time. But then, a lot of people who read this news site have probably had society question their hobbies: this guy might be uncomfortably close to some buried personalities out there.
On some servers, if you make a query for http://<server>/<path>/?M=A or http://<server>/<path>/?S=D you will get a directory listing instead of the default page. This is a result of FancyIndexing in Apache and can be disabled through methods detailed in the Bugtraq discussion.
The originator of the discussion pointed out that his log files had get requests from Google that specifically looked for these directory listings, so it's pretty clear they were (are?) doing it intentionally.
In the ACMs, you get three people, four problems, four hours, and one computer.
I haven't done it yet (I'm a sophomore; its pretty difficult to get very far), but I know I will at least be going to prelims this year.
Maybe this is something profs should recommend for students that have a hard time integrating themselves. Don't force it like torture, but the competition aspect can make it pretty fun, and so non-team-oriented students might find it interesting and challenging.