Also, my mom's an artist. She's not the one to do "New Age" crap. She hates that stuff. Instead, she paints on canvases up to 5 feet long and 4 feet tall. She enjoys it with all her passion, but she couldnt do that free either.
That's hardly the same thing. Your mom can only give her canvases away once, and at a few thousand dollar a canvas, I can see why she'd be reluctant to. But she could give away reproductions of her work; putting them up on a website would cost next to nothing (ignoring for the moment the difficulty in scanning large paintings). Surprise... many artists already provide content this way, usually for free and with very few strings attached.
I don't know about music... perhaps there is some free sheet music available; I've never looked. But dont think it'll never happen if a quick search won't turn up anything.
Actually they probably argue that if you share one song, 10 people download it and they will all share the song in turn, making it available to 100 other people, and so on. That way, they can easily justify their $150.000 per shared song, and that's why they tend to count the shared songs, not how often they are downloaded.
"Ok, so let me get this straight. You played a game in which someone cheated. And now someone has to pay you for it? No, you go play a different game. This is covered in kindergarten here in the U.S.; I'm not sure how this particular life lesson is passed on in other countries."
This isn't about cheating, it's about hacking. I think there would be very few people who would think to sue someone who killed and robbed them in-game, or someone who used a clever scam to cheat them out of some money or items. Yes, that is part of the game and part of the reason why people play.
Hacking is another matter. Suppose someome hacked into a few systems and wiped all the prepaid call time off your cellphone account, and all your frequent flyer miles with the airline, and so on. You'd want them back, wouldn't you? Perhaps you and your wife/friend were going to take a vacation to Hawaii with those miles.
If you think that in-game items are worthless as opposed to call time and airmiles, think again. Go look on Ebay: these virtual items can be worth quite a bit, and most in-game currencies have a pretty stable exchange rate to dollars. The reason that these items have value is because they are unstealable in-game pretty much. A smart Ultima Online player keeps most of his gold in the bank, and he can be sure that there is no way that another player can take his house from him. If it could be 'legally' stolen from you in-game, people would not pay such large sums for one. But because players are secure in the knowledge that they'll be able to keep that house, they are willing to pay $500 or more for the privilege of owning one. A hacker destroying or taking virtual property goes outside the rules of the game, and people feel rightly cheated out of items that have a real-world value. Perhaps they even paid real money for these items, and you can bet that the hacker who steals items will flog them on Ebay: to him, the virtual items are certainly worth real money.
"People are just way too attached to their own self worth. It wouldn't be hard to throw in some arguments about artifical spirituality and psuedo-relegious behaviors associated with online gaming but I am out of scotch"
Nope, it's just about money. I haven't paid for in-game items but I can see why some people would. And if I would lose my items because of a hacker, I'd be seriously pissed.
Suppose you own a large virtual house in a desirable location on one of the game worlds of Ultima Online. A hacker steals this house from you. Despite the fact that you may have worked many hours to acquire this house, perhaps you'll just shrug and move on. But how pissed would you be if you found out that your house would have fetched $500 on Ebay? In fact, Ebay is probably where your house will end up: hacking, cheating and scamming virtual items and flogging them on Ebay can earn you a decent income.
"Somebody with bad intentions hacks into the server and destroys your virtual items. Later, the hack is revealed. The sysadmin either goes to the backup or resets a few counters. Virtual items are returned to you. Problem is solved."
If the company reverts the game server to the state of yesterday, the people who gained some valuable item today will be stiffed. It's not that simple. If the server is hacked and reverted, anyone can claim they found 'rare object xyz' that day and demand a replacement. For that reason, game companies rarely if ever offer replacements for lost items.
Keeping a detailed audit trail or journal of each and every object in the game will be difficult, and may prove to be too expensive.
"the bottom line is: the labour value of virtual items depend on who you are. this is totally unlike "hard" items (ie, real shears). labour value theory fails us."
The notion that a virtual item has little or no value to the game company is not completely true. For one, game companies may sell in-game items to some extend. Witness Ultima Online, where the game company will buff your character for real-life dollars.
In-game items are almost like currency when it comes to value. Like currency, virtual items have little or no innate value,yet people attach a value to them (measured in other currency, time, or goods). Scarcity of in game items is seemingly not an issue for a game company, just like governments who can 'always print more money'. If the game company decides to 'print more items', their real-world value will drop accordingly. Like central banks, game companies have a responsibility if they want to control in-game inflation, and companies will and have fired employees caught creating valuable items for themselves or for others.
"Open source and free software has decimated any barriers to entry for software professionals. This is having the effect that anybody can write code, which is often of much lower quality. Now that there is no incentive to pay for any software, the software that is available will decrease in quality over time until everyone will have to write all of their own code out of necessity."
What barriers to the field of software engineers existed before the rise of Free Software? Only monetary ones... these days, the field is open to more and more people, which to me is a Good Thing. Of course it isn't good if you prefer a 'closed shop' for software engineering.
The poor quality of some software has more to do with the shortage of software engineers that existsed until quite recently. During this shortage, companies hired anyone with a pulse as a 'programmer', and the quality of software did decline as a result.
The quality of many Free Software products belies your argument that software engineers are only motivated by monetary rewards. Writing software is like any other hobby known to man: people are willing to spend ridiculous amounts of time on it for no reward other than a personal satisfaction.
Your argument may hold true to some extend for commercially written software: if companies are paying peanuts for software engineers, they'll only be able to hire monkeys who can't code worth a damn.
It doesn't. They don't have any authority in the USA either, but their customers (the record labels) can use the information to pursue the matter further. All they can do is threaten.
Besides, threatening with lawsuits is a lot less effective over here in Europe than it is in the US. If someone would sue me for file-sharing, I'd be fined for copyright infringement at worst... any claims for damages would have to be proven by the plaintiff, and the judge would laugh these $150.000 per infringement claims out of court.
In Holland, sharing files it in a legal grey area anyway. Because of the levies on blank CD's and such, it is actually legal for me to borrow a CD from a friend or rent one, make a copy, return the original, and keep the copy for personal use only. In other words, you can legally share files with anyone as long as you own the original media. Yes, perhaps the law wasn't written with file sharing over P2P networks in mind, but until the law is changed to account for P2P, a decent lawyer will propably get file swappers off the hook.
"Copyright exists to provide incentives to push works into the public domain, not to keep them out of it."
Copyrights exist to provide an incentive to push works into the public domain, by providing a means for the publisher to make money off the published work. Sharing files with friends deprives him of that income. I don't see how sharing files with friends is 'clearly not immoral' (though one could argue that it isn't).
True, but maybe he meant 'crime' as opposed to 'misdemeanor'. Swapping songs is wrong, but the punishment should fit the crime. Sharing a few songs does not warrant being served with multi-million dollar lawsuits, being treated worse than a drunk driver, or being bullied into handing over your live savings to the RIAA. It's the RIAA's tactics and the way file swappers are treated, that has people up in arms, not the fact that they're going after the swappers in itself.
The RIAA is clearly trying a scare tactic, by making examples out of a few individuals. It's a bit like the old days, when they would cut off the hands of shoplifters (though not quite as bad). Respectable people like you and me may shrug about that, but just you wait until you are singled out for being made into an example... and you don't have to have committed any actual crime; if the RIAA dislikes what you do, you're a viable target. Look at that student with the search engine.
"Who said property rights was a great American tradition?"
I'll say it. Property rights are important; without property rights, many if not all of your other rights become meaningless.
But property rights are not the same thing as copyright. To me, property rights mean that when I buy a CD, I own it, that I can play in whatever equipment I see fit, and that I can copy/rip it for personal use. If Bainwol will promote these rights for me, more power to him!
Somehow I have my doubts that this is what he meant, though.
You know, all this infringment stuff would not be a problem if the legal system worked a little better.
Company A claims that system X infringes on their IP. They are required to indicate the offending code; the developers get to work and release a new version without the infringing code. Users are informed to upgrade to version XYZ or start paying royalties to A. If company A refuses to disclose the offending code fragments (publicly or to a panel of experts), they should be countersued for libel.
Unfortunately that's not how it goes. Anyone can claim that their code made it into Linux, without taking a single case to court! In fact, MS probably wants to keep this out of court for as long as they can, so that they can continue to point out the threat of litigation hanging over Linux like a sword of Damocles. Microsoft can spread some powerful FUD here, on the cheap.
One of the strengths of OSS is that no-one really owns it, but that's also its weakness in this case. Who is going to take Microsoft and BSO to task and make them retract their claims or provide proof? No one will since no one owns the product. This plays right into Gates' hands: the court battle will likely be fought against a company who uses Linux, not one who owns it. And no company wishes to be first to step into the ring to go 9 rounds against MS, they'll choose a 'safe' product instead.
Perhaps a few anonymous MS employees infiltrated a number of key Open Source and/or Linux development groups, contributing to the code. Then they wilfully inserted MS proprietary code into these projects.
That's how he knows! He could probably quote you the files and line numbers of the infringing code fragments as well.
/joke, but who knows...?
Maybe so, but it's his body, not society's, to do with as he pleases. Make no mistake, the right to be an egoist is a very fundamental one that ties into a lot of the rights we collectively call Freedom.
I, too, really like this idea... the idea that what comes around, goes around, in the organ donation lists. You enter into a limited donor list? Fine, if any other member dies, you've got dibs on any of his organs you need. Perhaps you prefer to enter into the 'general' list? You don't get preferential treatment, but neither does any of the recipients of your organs. Or perhaps you don't want to donate at all? Fine, but don't expect to be placed first in line whem you're the one in need of a kidney.
"Obviously a lot of companies have decided that having an american physically in the office isn't worth a savings of $45 an hour, but once you've decided to hire telecomuters, isn't a $20 an hour American programmer with who management will probably have a lot less communication difficulties a better buy than a $20 an hour programmer from India?"
Don't compare outsourcing to telecommuting. There's more involved than the costs, and each option has different advantages and drawbacks.
Telecommuting saves on office costs, travel expenses, and employees might be willing to work for less. Then again, there's (still) no good substitute for face-to-face meetings, and I generally find that programmers benefit from talking to their co-workers, about work or other things. People perform better in good teams. As an alternative to letting people work from home, some companies work with satellite offices, but this ties employees again to an office, and might end up combining the drawbacks of working in an office and working from home.
Outsourcing has the same savings (office costs and labor costs), but the advantage is that the employees will be working from the same office, and in proper teams. The drawback is having to remotely manage or oversee projects, and the language barrier. I've seen projects being partly outsourced to India, and it was no picknick.
You also have to realise how the PHB thinks:
- "Outsourcing = Good. It'll save money now anbd make my bottom line look good, and everyone is doing it these days so I will not get fired for doing this even if it fails badly" (the old 'no one ever got fired for buying IBM' rule).
- "Telecommuting = Bad. Come on, we all know the resources will just loaf around the house all day in their underpants. When projects start to fail (and one will fail eventually), I'll be the scapegoat for making this decision".
I've tried 'selling' telecommuting for 1-2 days a week, and found that many (but not all) managers on all levels are opposed to this: CEO's, Division managers, and project managers.
Not a bad idea actually. I've gone and obtained patents for:
- Encryption + Image format
- Encryption + EDI Data
- Encryption + Weblogs
- Encryption + Audio files
- Encryption + VCS
I know you're all thinking "prior art", but since when has that ever stopped anyone from getting a patent? Besides, I am using strong encryption, oh yes.
The dongle isn't attached to my computer. This is how it works.
- I visit the bank's website
- I enter my account number on the website, and the website presents me with a challenge number
- I insert my ATM card into the dongle and enter my PIN.
- I type the challenge number into the dongle, which then shows a response code
- I enter the response code into the website.
From that moment on, I am logged in. When I confirm a set of transactions, or when I modify critical settings, the website issues a challenge again. Just in case I forget to log off.
"It's amazing. 99% of people have the sense not to give out their CC # over a payphone in a crowded bus terminal. Online Banking however, why not. Silly."
Banks should know better as well. Over here, banks are liable to some extend when a customer's online account is hacked or accessed illegaly. That is why all banks go to some lengths to prevent simple password sniffers to gain access to online banking services. They all use some sort of challenge-response system with a small device that turns the challenge into the response. The device issued by my bank requires me to insert my ATM card into it and enter the PIN before it will work. Verifying the PIN and the challenge/response mapping is actually done by the chip on the ATM card. So, I don't have any qualms about accessing my bank account from a dodgy web cafe.
90% of security concerns dealing with the human factor. Security and systems engineers are the ones to decide what to secure, how to secure it, and when to allow remote access. The average user cannot be trusted to make this kind of decisions.
While I agree on your comment about Feng-shui and enforced yoga being bad, I don't think Yoga is silly at all.
In many ways, employees may benefit from relaxation and some 'quiet time' away from their normal hectic workplace. Yoga training will help make the most of these relaxinig breaks. Having Yoga training is also a good selling point to upper management (despite the added cost), and will make the introduction of quiet rooms and time away from desks easier. Which pitch will convince the PHB sooner?
"We'll train our resources to maximise their benefit from regular meditative breaks, which will increase their productivity."
or
"We'll allow our people to sit around doing nothing for an hour or so each day, because we, erm, think they'll work better because of it."
Remember, anything even remotely fun or enjoyable should be packaged as 'training', or as an organised activity with clear benefits, or the bosses will not approve of it. Notice how you never just "go out to shoot your co-workers with paintball guns", but instead are sent on a "team-building event". Even if the teambuilding consists of shooting co-workers with a paintball gun.
"We all know it's just playing further on customer fears (maybe). "
I think this is to prevent anyone from making a frivolous, malicious and/or greedy IP infringment claim on any Microsoft software, such as the claim SCO has made against Linux.
What the SCO case shows us is that pretty much anyone can make outlandish claims against both the producers of the software, and it's users. Microsoft has nicely pre-empted anyone who thought of doing so, since the well-filled Microsoft coffers are guaranteed to cover costs for any suit brought against Microsoft or its customers.
In other words, Microsoft is saying: "If you'll claim that Microsoft software contains code that you own, and you come asking us or our clients for a license fee a la SCO, then we'll sue you to kingdom come."
Slashdot Mirror
That's hardly the same thing. Your mom can only give her canvases away once, and at a few thousand dollar a canvas, I can see why she'd be reluctant to. But she could give away reproductions of her work; putting them up on a website would cost next to nothing (ignoring for the moment the difficulty in scanning large paintings). Surprise... many artists already provide content this way, usually for free and with very few strings attached.
I don't know about music... perhaps there is some free sheet music available; I've never looked. But dont think it'll never happen if a quick search won't turn up anything.
"Ok, so let me get this straight. You played a game in which someone cheated. And now someone has to pay you for it? No, you go play a different game. This is covered in kindergarten here in the U.S.; I'm not sure how this particular life lesson is passed on in other countries."
This isn't about cheating, it's about hacking. I think there would be very few people who would think to sue someone who killed and robbed them in-game, or someone who used a clever scam to cheat them out of some money or items. Yes, that is part of the game and part of the reason why people play.
Hacking is another matter. Suppose someome hacked into a few systems and wiped all the prepaid call time off your cellphone account, and all your frequent flyer miles with the airline, and so on. You'd want them back, wouldn't you? Perhaps you and your wife/friend were going to take a vacation to Hawaii with those miles.
If you think that in-game items are worthless as opposed to call time and airmiles, think again. Go look on Ebay: these virtual items can be worth quite a bit, and most in-game currencies have a pretty stable exchange rate to dollars. The reason that these items have value is because they are unstealable in-game pretty much. A smart Ultima Online player keeps most of his gold in the bank, and he can be sure that there is no way that another player can take his house from him. If it could be 'legally' stolen from you in-game, people would not pay such large sums for one. But because players are secure in the knowledge that they'll be able to keep that house, they are willing to pay $500 or more for the privilege of owning one. A hacker destroying or taking virtual property goes outside the rules of the game, and people feel rightly cheated out of items that have a real-world value. Perhaps they even paid real money for these items, and you can bet that the hacker who steals items will flog them on Ebay: to him, the virtual items are certainly worth real money.
"People are just way too attached to their own self worth. It wouldn't be hard to throw in some arguments about artifical spirituality and psuedo-relegious behaviors associated with online gaming but I am out of scotch"
Nope, it's just about money. I haven't paid for in-game items but I can see why some people would. And if I would lose my items because of a hacker, I'd be seriously pissed.
Suppose you own a large virtual house in a desirable location on one of the game worlds of Ultima Online. A hacker steals this house from you. Despite the fact that you may have worked many hours to acquire this house, perhaps you'll just shrug and move on. But how pissed would you be if you found out that your house would have fetched $500 on Ebay? In fact, Ebay is probably where your house will end up: hacking, cheating and scamming virtual items and flogging them on Ebay can earn you a decent income.
"Somebody with bad intentions hacks into the server and destroys your virtual items. Later, the hack is revealed. The sysadmin either goes to the backup or resets a few counters. Virtual items are returned to you. Problem is solved."
If the company reverts the game server to the state of yesterday, the people who gained some valuable item today will be stiffed. It's not that simple. If the server is hacked and reverted, anyone can claim they found 'rare object xyz' that day and demand a replacement. For that reason, game companies rarely if ever offer replacements for lost items.
Keeping a detailed audit trail or journal of each and every object in the game will be difficult, and may prove to be too expensive.
"the bottom line is: the labour value of virtual items depend on who you are. this is totally unlike "hard" items (ie, real shears). labour value theory fails us."
,yet people attach a value to them (measured in other currency, time, or goods). Scarcity of in game items is seemingly not an issue for a game company, just like governments who can 'always print more money'. If the game company decides to 'print more items', their real-world value will drop accordingly. Like central banks, game companies have a responsibility if they want to control in-game inflation, and companies will and have fired employees caught creating valuable items for themselves or for others.
The notion that a virtual item has little or no value to the game company is not completely true. For one, game companies may sell in-game items to some extend. Witness Ultima Online, where the game company will buff your character for real-life dollars.
In-game items are almost like currency when it comes to value. Like currency, virtual items have little or no innate value
"Open source and free software has decimated any barriers to entry for software professionals. This is having the effect that anybody can write code, which is often of much lower quality. Now that there is no incentive to pay for any software, the software that is available will decrease in quality over time until everyone will have to write all of their own code out of necessity."
What barriers to the field of software engineers existed before the rise of Free Software? Only monetary ones... these days, the field is open to more and more people, which to me is a Good Thing. Of course it isn't good if you prefer a 'closed shop' for software engineering. The poor quality of some software has more to do with the shortage of software engineers that existsed until quite recently. During this shortage, companies hired anyone with a pulse as a 'programmer', and the quality of software did decline as a result.
The quality of many Free Software products belies your argument that software engineers are only motivated by monetary rewards. Writing software is like any other hobby known to man: people are willing to spend ridiculous amounts of time on it for no reward other than a personal satisfaction.
Your argument may hold true to some extend for commercially written software: if companies are paying peanuts for software engineers, they'll only be able to hire monkeys who can't code worth a damn.
"JaredOfEuropa, that has to be an Ultima Online player."
Yes it is *grins* One who was too lazy to come up with a cool handle when he signed up for Slashdot.
It doesn't. They don't have any authority in the USA either, but their customers (the record labels) can use the information to pursue the matter further. All they can do is threaten.
Besides, threatening with lawsuits is a lot less effective over here in Europe than it is in the US. If someone would sue me for file-sharing, I'd be fined for copyright infringement at worst... any claims for damages would have to be proven by the plaintiff, and the judge would laugh these $150.000 per infringement claims out of court.
In Holland, sharing files it in a legal grey area anyway. Because of the levies on blank CD's and such, it is actually legal for me to borrow a CD from a friend or rent one, make a copy, return the original, and keep the copy for personal use only. In other words, you can legally share files with anyone as long as you own the original media. Yes, perhaps the law wasn't written with file sharing over P2P networks in mind, but until the law is changed to account for P2P, a decent lawyer will propably get file swappers off the hook.
"Copyright exists to provide incentives to push works into the public domain, not to keep them out of it."
Copyrights exist to provide an incentive to push works into the public domain, by providing a means for the publisher to make money off the published work. Sharing files with friends deprives him of that income. I don't see how sharing files with friends is 'clearly not immoral' (though one could argue that it isn't).
True, but maybe he meant 'crime' as opposed to 'misdemeanor'. Swapping songs is wrong, but the punishment should fit the crime. Sharing a few songs does not warrant being served with multi-million dollar lawsuits, being treated worse than a drunk driver, or being bullied into handing over your live savings to the RIAA. It's the RIAA's tactics and the way file swappers are treated, that has people up in arms, not the fact that they're going after the swappers in itself.
The RIAA is clearly trying a scare tactic, by making examples out of a few individuals. It's a bit like the old days, when they would cut off the hands of shoplifters (though not quite as bad). Respectable people like you and me may shrug about that, but just you wait until you are singled out for being made into an example... and you don't have to have committed any actual crime; if the RIAA dislikes what you do, you're a viable target. Look at that student with the search engine.
"Who said property rights was a great American tradition?"
I'll say it. Property rights are important; without property rights, many if not all of your other rights become meaningless.
But property rights are not the same thing as copyright. To me, property rights mean that when I buy a CD, I own it, that I can play in whatever equipment I see fit, and that I can copy/rip it for personal use. If Bainwol will promote these rights for me, more power to him!
Somehow I have my doubts that this is what he meant, though.
"I guess musicians should prepare to be replaced by the machines."
They've been doing that for years already. Haven't you been listening to any of today's hit songs?
Way hey! I'm well on my way to success then!
We don't mention his name around here...
"1. the data will be wrong. 2. the data will be hacked and good people will be blacklisted and bad people whitelisted. 3. lawsuits will occur."
...
You forgot:
4.
5. Profit! (for the lawyers, that is)
You know, all this infringment stuff would not be a problem if the legal system worked a little better.
Company A claims that system X infringes on their IP. They are required to indicate the offending code; the developers get to work and release a new version without the infringing code. Users are informed to upgrade to version XYZ or start paying royalties to A. If company A refuses to disclose the offending code fragments (publicly or to a panel of experts), they should be countersued for libel.
Unfortunately that's not how it goes. Anyone can claim that their code made it into Linux, without taking a single case to court! In fact, MS probably wants to keep this out of court for as long as they can, so that they can continue to point out the threat of litigation hanging over Linux like a sword of Damocles. Microsoft can spread some powerful FUD here, on the cheap.
One of the strengths of OSS is that no-one really owns it, but that's also its weakness in this case. Who is going to take Microsoft and BSO to task and make them retract their claims or provide proof? No one will since no one owns the product. This plays right into Gates' hands: the court battle will likely be fought against a company who uses Linux, not one who owns it. And no company wishes to be first to step into the ring to go 9 rounds against MS, they'll choose a 'safe' product instead.
Perhaps a few anonymous MS employees infiltrated a number of key Open Source and/or Linux development groups, contributing to the code. Then they wilfully inserted MS proprietary code into these projects.
/joke, but who knows...?
That's how he knows! He could probably quote you the files and line numbers of the infringing code fragments as well.
"-1 asshole"
Maybe so, but it's his body, not society's, to do with as he pleases. Make no mistake, the right to be an egoist is a very fundamental one that ties into a lot of the rights we collectively call Freedom.
I, too, really like this idea... the idea that what comes around, goes around, in the organ donation lists. You enter into a limited donor list? Fine, if any other member dies, you've got dibs on any of his organs you need. Perhaps you prefer to enter into the 'general' list? You don't get preferential treatment, but neither does any of the recipients of your organs. Or perhaps you don't want to donate at all? Fine, but don't expect to be placed first in line whem you're the one in need of a kidney.
"Obviously a lot of companies have decided that having an american physically in the office isn't worth a savings of $45 an hour, but once you've decided to hire telecomuters, isn't a $20 an hour American programmer with who management will probably have a lot less communication difficulties a better buy than a $20 an hour programmer from India?"
Don't compare outsourcing to telecommuting. There's more involved than the costs, and each option has different advantages and drawbacks.
Telecommuting saves on office costs, travel expenses, and employees might be willing to work for less. Then again, there's (still) no good substitute for face-to-face meetings, and I generally find that programmers benefit from talking to their co-workers, about work or other things. People perform better in good teams. As an alternative to letting people work from home, some companies work with satellite offices, but this ties employees again to an office, and might end up combining the drawbacks of working in an office and working from home.
Outsourcing has the same savings (office costs and labor costs), but the advantage is that the employees will be working from the same office, and in proper teams. The drawback is having to remotely manage or oversee projects, and the language barrier. I've seen projects being partly outsourced to India, and it was no picknick.
You also have to realise how the PHB thinks:
- "Outsourcing = Good. It'll save money now anbd make my bottom line look good, and everyone is doing it these days so I will not get fired for doing this even if it fails badly" (the old 'no one ever got fired for buying IBM' rule).
- "Telecommuting = Bad. Come on, we all know the resources will just loaf around the house all day in their underpants. When projects start to fail (and one will fail eventually), I'll be the scapegoat for making this decision".
I've tried 'selling' telecommuting for 1-2 days a week, and found that many (but not all) managers on all levels are opposed to this: CEO's, Division managers, and project managers.
Not a bad idea actually. I've gone and obtained patents for:
- Encryption + Image format
- Encryption + EDI Data
- Encryption + Weblogs
- Encryption + Audio files
- Encryption + VCS
I know you're all thinking "prior art", but since when has that ever stopped anyone from getting a patent? Besides, I am using strong encryption, oh yes.
The dongle isn't attached to my computer. This is how it works.
- I visit the bank's website
- I enter my account number on the website, and the website presents me with a challenge number
- I insert my ATM card into the dongle and enter my PIN.
- I type the challenge number into the dongle, which then shows a response code
- I enter the response code into the website.
From that moment on, I am logged in. When I confirm a set of transactions, or when I modify critical settings, the website issues a challenge again. Just in case I forget to log off.
"It's amazing. 99% of people have the sense not to give out their CC # over a payphone in a crowded bus terminal. Online Banking however, why not. Silly."
Banks should know better as well. Over here, banks are liable to some extend when a customer's online account is hacked or accessed illegaly. That is why all banks go to some lengths to prevent simple password sniffers to gain access to online banking services. They all use some sort of challenge-response system with a small device that turns the challenge into the response. The device issued by my bank requires me to insert my ATM card into it and enter the PIN before it will work. Verifying the PIN and the challenge/response mapping is actually done by the chip on the ATM card. So, I don't have any qualms about accessing my bank account from a dodgy web cafe.
90% of security concerns dealing with the human factor. Security and systems engineers are the ones to decide what to secure, how to secure it, and when to allow remote access. The average user cannot be trusted to make this kind of decisions.
While I agree on your comment about Feng-shui and enforced yoga being bad, I don't think Yoga is silly at all.
In many ways, employees may benefit from relaxation and some 'quiet time' away from their normal hectic workplace. Yoga training will help make the most of these relaxinig breaks. Having Yoga training is also a good selling point to upper management (despite the added cost), and will make the introduction of quiet rooms and time away from desks easier. Which pitch will convince the PHB sooner?
"We'll train our resources to maximise their benefit from regular meditative breaks, which will increase their productivity."
or
"We'll allow our people to sit around doing nothing for an hour or so each day, because we, erm, think they'll work better because of it."
Remember, anything even remotely fun or enjoyable should be packaged as 'training', or as an organised activity with clear benefits, or the bosses will not approve of it. Notice how you never just "go out to shoot your co-workers with paintball guns", but instead are sent on a "team-building event". Even if the teambuilding consists of shooting co-workers with a paintball gun.
"We all know it's just playing further on customer fears (maybe). "
I think this is to prevent anyone from making a frivolous, malicious and/or greedy IP infringment claim on any Microsoft software, such as the claim SCO has made against Linux.
What the SCO case shows us is that pretty much anyone can make outlandish claims against both the producers of the software, and it's users. Microsoft has nicely pre-empted anyone who thought of doing so, since the well-filled Microsoft coffers are guaranteed to cover costs for any suit brought against Microsoft or its customers.
In other words, Microsoft is saying: "If you'll claim that Microsoft software contains code that you own, and you come asking us or our clients for a license fee a la SCO, then we'll sue you to kingdom come."