Freedom of contract works well in competitive markets. If I don't like the boilerplate contract provided by Hertz, I not only have the option of foregoing renting the car, I have the option of renting a car from Avis. Competitive pressures will effect the contract terms, just as they effect prices, and will result in an efficient market.
A copyright holder, however, is by definition a monopolist, and is relatively free from competitive pressure in negotiating contracts. (I say "relatively" free, because there may be imperfect substitutes. I could read a novel by Clive Barker instead of Stephen King, or choose a word processor from Corel instead of MS.)
This wouldn't be so bad if the copyright holder could negotiate the contract with each purchaser independently. (Like a monopolist who does perfect price discrimination, this still results in an efficient market.) But that's really not practical. The transaction costs of negotiating a contract are high, so we end up with boilerplate contracts with obnoxious terms and an inefficient market.
The solution we arrived at with books and music is a legally mandated contract. (Think of "fair use", "first-sale doctrine", and fixed royalties to songwriters for songs broadcast on the radio.)
I'm not saying that we should hold software copyright holders liable for security problems. I think that's too much to impose on them, and the end result will be less software produced. But that's a more sophisticated analysis than mere appeal to "freedom of contract".
This is a pointlessly divisive debate. What difference does it make if RMS and Bradley Kuhn would support radical change in US copyright laws regarding software?
It's as silly as a heated debate over the future government of Mars.
Radical change in US copyright law regarding software has about as much chance of happening in the next 30 years as legalization of marijuana.
All we can do is fight for what few legal rights we do have (e.g. the right to reverse engineer), and work outside the political and legal system to create a world in which software copyrights don't matter, by writing and supporting Free Software.
Tim O'Reilly, ESR, RMS, and others: please stop the pointless squabbling.
IANATA (I am not a tax attorney), but I don't think the IRS lets software companies write off the "value" of "donated" software. (Any more than I could write off $75 an hour in time "donated" to charity.) That's just too big a loophole.
Furthermore, I'm pretty sure that you can't write off civil damages (or criminal fines, of course), whether or not the case was settled out of court.
Somebody with a law degree correct me if I'm wrong.
Extending the length of the copyright term for newly produced works increases incentive, at least in theoery.
But maybe you'd care to explain how grandfathering in the compositions of George Gershwin does anything other than keep the money flowing to the heirs of Gershwin?
In 1997, I dropped out of PhD program (in philosophy, no less) at the University of Rochester, because my funding ran out, my dissertation was going nowhere, and the job market in academia was bleak.
A friend got me a job at a Mom 'n' Pop ISP in Memphis (Magibox, later bought by U.S. Internet, later bought by OneMain, later bought by Earthlink, which merged with Mindspring) as tech support and HTML jockey. We used Digital Unix, SCO Unix (*shudder*), FreeBSD (2.7.x, I think) on our servers.
I learned enough Unix administration from the brilliant Ken McCleaft to land a Unix admin job at a small company with a mix of Irix, Solaris, and SCO. I added Linux to the mix. (No senior/junior business there: I was it!) I've gone on to two other Unix admin jobs since.
Unfortunately, the Mom 'n' Pop ISPs, which were a great source of on the job training, are no more.
My advice: send your resumes for the positions anyway. The job market ain't what it was a year ago, but I'd bet that the job requirements are still inflated. My first Unix admin job asked for 3 years experience: I had 1.5 years. Job descriptions are of the "ideal candidate," who doesn't exist and whom they couldn't afford to hire even if he did. When you interview, you'll meet the actual admins, who know that if you can handle one flavor of Unix, you can quickly learn another. They'll ask you questions, and they'll be able to tell if you know enough to handle the position. They all run Linux at home, so be prepared to defend your distro of choice.:) And they're the ones that make the call on hiring.
The English teaching experience may turn out to be a big plus. Every company needs someone who can write clear technical documetation.
I read once where someone wrote that all the philosophy students he knew ended up as Unix admins. I wonder why that is.
I'm personally a big admirer of perl's taint-checking feature. When you run perl with the -T flag, it marks data from external sources as "tainted", which will produce a fatal error if that data is used for certain operations deemed insecure, such as shelling out or opening a file for writing. If you want to use external data to open a file for writing, or shell out, you have to first "lauder" the data by matching it against a regular expression you've constructe.
It would be nice if there were more granular control over what operations are deemed insecure. E.g. so you could deem opening a file for reading insecure, or execution of SQL statements in a database.
It amazes me how some people can oversimplify a complex economic issue, such as in this quote by the author:
But cut through the abstraction and the debate really comes down to a philosophical question: What is the best way to solve problems, more government or less?
But I suppose I really shouldn't be surprised when I look at the byline:
Jason Miller is a sophomore at Michigan State University.
Okay, could someone clue me in as to where the
floor() and pow() functions are, so I can compile
this and try it out? According to the man pages
(RedHat 7.0) they're in math.h, but they're not! --
Federal anti-trust laws themselves are not authorized under the constitution, and that's the thin end of the wedge.
Article I, Section 8, clause 3 grants Congress the power "To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes".
That's the constitutional basis for federal anti-trust laws.
The first thing you'll notice is that reports of the diamond operator's death have been greatly exaggerated. Yes, even though the Second Apocalypse foretold its demise, Rule No. 2 has since been applied and the angle brackets live!
I assume this means that Larry has had a change of heart since he wrote Apocalypse 2, but what is this mysterious "Rule No. 2" that has been invoked?
It's a matter of economics. And it doesn't have anything to do with the cost of producing anime.
The distributors of anime, like the distributors of any copyrighted material, are monopolists. And monopolists, you should recall from Microeconomics 101, are price-seekers. Rather than accepting the market price as given, and trying to sell as many as possible at that price (which occurs in a competitive market), the monopolist would rather sell fewer units at a higher price, if this is what will maximize profit.
In the market for a Hollywood blockbuster, there are some who are willing to pay more, say $30, for a DVD, and a bunch who are willing to pay less, say $20. (I'm just making these numbers up.) The seller maximizes profit by setting the price at $20.
In the smaller market for anime, there are some who are willing to pay $30, and some who are willing to pay $20: but not as many as are willing to pay $20 for the Hollywood blockbuster. There aren't as many lost sales by pricing the release at $30, so the seller maximizes profit by selling at $30.
This is why in a non-competitive market, as the market gets larger, the price goes down. Remember how much VHS tapes cost back in the day? When only the video stores (who were willing to pay more) were buying them, the damn things cost $80. Now that VCRs are ubiquitous, they're "priced to sell".
The same reasoning applies to why they don't put more content on anime DVDs. They lose sales by putting only four episodes on a DVD when they could put eight on a DVD; but they don't lose enough sales to make up for what they gain by putting out twice as many to sell to those willing to pay for less material. (Again, I'm making the numbers up, since I don't have a DVD player. I still watch my anime on VHS.)
'Tis the nature of non-competitive markets. Unfortunately, we haven't figured out a better way to give the creators of artistic works incentive to create, other than granting them monopoly privilege over the reproduction of their work. --
An almost universal failing among those of all political stripes: thinking that "most people" agree with oneself. Hence groups like the "Moral Majority", who whether they were moral or not, were certainly not a majority.
I suspect slashdot has a greater percentage of self-described "libertarians" than the population at large, but "for the most part"? I doubt it. For the most part, we're mainstream liberals and conservatives, like the rest of the country, with all the diversity of opinion that this entails. --
So there I am, innocently trying to install Bundle::libnet on a new machine using "perl -M CPAN -e shell", and CPAN.pm has decided that before I install Bundle::libnet, it should first download the new perl distribution in its entirety and upgrade my system to perl 5.6.1.
Which to me seems a bit overzealous on the part of CPAN.pm. Some might even describe it as Microsoftian in its evil.
Is there any way to turn this "feature" of CPAN.pm off? Or am I stuck installing modules by hand until such time as I decide I want to upgrade to latest and greatest? (Not so bad for individual modules, but installing Bundles by hand is a royal PITA.) --
I don't think using the word "propaganda" is exactly fair. A lot of those people truly believe what they say...
Whether they believe it or not, it's still propaganda.
As far as gun rights go, I happen to support them. I don't bear arms myself, but I support the rights of others to do so. What I don't support is (a) treating gun rights as the most important political issue, and (b) the alliance between the gun nuts and the evangelical Christian theocrats. By making such an alliance, the gun nuts are exchanging protection of gun rights for more important ones that the theocrats would love to take away. --
I think you forget why left-wingers are left wing. Left-wingers want maximal freedom, which includes freedom of speech, freedom of a woman to terminate an unwanted pregancy, and freedom of a person to seek employment without having their race, gender, or sexual orientation be considered as part of the hiring decision. Right-wingers tend to want to reduce our freedom in pursuit of a Protestant theocracy.
And it's true that recently the Democratic party has been catering more to the big businesses than to the general public, which is why some of us are defecting to the Green party.
Personally I think conservatism is just an odd, and probably temporary, alliance between the lassez-faire capitalists, the evangelical/fundamentalist Christians, and the gun nuts. All of whom abuse tend to abuse the word "freedom" in their propaganda.
Liberalism has it's strange cliques as well, e.g. the P.C. language police that make academia such an odd and uncomfortable place for some of us, including me. But overall I find liberals to be a more thoughtful lot than conservatives, and with a much smaller, although equally vocal, lunatic fringe. --
...was a Mom 'n' Pop ISP in Memphis, called "Magibox". I had dropped out of philosophy grad school, and got a job there as Macintosh support and HTML jockey.
There were only four employees besides the owner and his wife. Three of us had advanced degrees in the humanities: me with a MA in philosophy, and two guys with MFAs in creative writing. We ran on a mix of Digital Unix and SCO. SCO was gradually replaced with FreeBSD. It gave me a chance to learn systems adminstration and Perl. (Many thanks to Ken McCleaft for the best advice I ever got: "learn vi".)
Eventually it was swallowed up by U.S. Internet, which prompted me to quit, as my position was going to change from technician to sales. I gave up some stock options that turned out to be utterly worthless. But my experience there got me a job as an entry level Unix sysadmin.
U.S. Internet was swallowed up by One Main, who was then swallowed up by Earthlink, who then merged with Mindspring.
Anyway, phone tech support sucked, but we had fun, and I learned a lot. The Mom 'n' Pop ISP was a great place to get started in a computer career, for those of us who studied Liberal Arts in college.
And for those of you wondering: yes, it really was just like "User Friendly". My funniest tech support moment was talking to this elderly woman, setting up Windows 95 dial-up networking. We got to the point in the wizard where you enter the phone number, and I tell her "Enter 555-7000". I hear from the other end "Beep beep beep boop boop boop boop", as she presses the keys on her touch tone phone. I had to put her on hold while I fell into a fit of laughter.
Thanks Louis, June, Ken, Mare, Craig, and Mike. And Neil who got me the job in the first place. --
Putting all ethical judgement aside, this shows that you have a good reason to go out and buy life insurance now, before genetic screening becomes commonplace.
Even if you don't have a family yet: if you think you will have one, buy life insurance now.
Financial advisors generally recommend having 6-8 times your yearly salary. Better make that 6-8 times what you think you'll be making at the peak of your career, instead of 6-8 times what you're making now.
If you're young, in good health, and a non-smoker, term life insurance is pretty cheap. You can get half a million for a few hundred dollars a year.
And employers: you should be offering life insurance as a benefit to your employees. Offering insurance to groups is a good way for insurance companies to mitigate the problem of adverse selection. --
The author is overlooking the primary problem with a "free market" in personal information: information is replicable.
I may well choose, for rational reasons, to sell my name, address, etc. to one party. But due to the nature of information, that party is capable in turn sell it to a third party (and a fourth, and a fifth), without my consent. And if this is the case, I cannot know what I'm selling, short of negotiating a contract. Have I given my address to one party, or many?
This is the problem that Lessig's proposed strong property right in personal information is intended to solve. (In the same way that a strong property right with regard to copying literature, music, and computer code, is intended to solve the problem of the underproduction of creative works. Whether this solution is worth its price is a separate question.)
If I have a strong property right in my personal information, the transaction costs of selling my personal information are lowered: I know that, unless I have *explicitly* permitted someone to do so, they may not transfer my personal information to a third party. --
Which makes me wonder: why don't browsers send timezone information in their headers, so that the servers can do the Right Thing(TM) with regard to displaying times?
E.g. my browser should send a header like this:
TimeZone: America/Chicago
or
TimeZone: CDT/-600
Then the SlashCode could appropriately display the time that the story was updated as "11:18 AM". (Assuming that the "5:18" refers to GMT.
It seems like a fundamental need for web-based applications. Why hasn't this been done? --
strange quote from the linux consultant...
on
Linux Is Going Down
·
· Score: 2
Linux also lacks some key features that you'd want for a data center such as hot swappable CPUs and memory.
Do hot-swappable CPUs and memory even exist on the Intel platform? The only machines I've heard of that support that are Sun's E10000s.
I currently work at a Fortune 400 retailer, an IBM shop, and we don't have anything with hot-swappable CPUs or memory in our data center. --
Look, if you didn't want to look at the MS-bashing jokes, what are you doing reading the comments on this comments on this story? Heck, what are you doing reading Slashdot at all. It's like going to a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert and complaining about the rednecks.
And as far as this power-user is concerned, any OS that doesn't come with a C compiler and Perl is sorely lacking. And virtual desktops! Damn I hate it when I have to use a GUI that doesn't have virtual desktops! Even the loathsome CDE has virtual desktops. Why haven't Microsoft and Apple given their customers virtual desktops?
Slashdot Mirror
Freedom of contract works well in competitive markets. If I don't like the boilerplate contract provided by Hertz, I not only have the option of foregoing renting the car, I have the option of renting a car from Avis. Competitive pressures will effect the contract terms, just as they effect prices, and will result in an efficient market.
A copyright holder, however, is by definition a monopolist, and is relatively free from competitive pressure in negotiating contracts. (I say "relatively" free, because there may be imperfect substitutes. I could read a novel by Clive Barker instead of Stephen King, or choose a word processor from Corel instead of MS.)
This wouldn't be so bad if the copyright holder could negotiate the contract with each purchaser independently. (Like a monopolist who does perfect price discrimination, this still results in an efficient market.) But that's really not practical. The transaction costs of negotiating a contract are high, so we end up with boilerplate contracts with obnoxious terms and an inefficient market.
The solution we arrived at with books and music is a legally mandated contract. (Think of "fair use", "first-sale doctrine", and fixed royalties to songwriters for songs broadcast on the radio.)
I'm not saying that we should hold software copyright holders liable for security problems. I think that's too much to impose on them, and the end result will be less software produced. But that's a more sophisticated analysis than mere appeal to "freedom of contract".
This is a pointlessly divisive debate. What difference does it make if RMS and Bradley Kuhn would support radical change in US copyright laws regarding software?
It's as silly as a heated debate over the future government of Mars.
Radical change in US copyright law regarding software has about as much chance of happening in the next 30 years as legalization of marijuana.
All we can do is fight for what few legal rights we do have (e.g. the right to reverse engineer), and work outside the political and legal system to create a world in which software copyrights don't matter, by writing and supporting Free Software.
Tim O'Reilly, ESR, RMS, and others: please stop the pointless squabbling.
IANATA (I am not a tax attorney), but I don't think the IRS lets software companies write off the "value" of "donated" software. (Any more than I could write off $75 an hour in time "donated" to charity.) That's just too big a loophole.
Furthermore, I'm pretty sure that you can't write off civil damages (or criminal fines, of course), whether or not the case was settled out of court.
Somebody with a law degree correct me if I'm wrong.
Extending the length of the copyright term for newly produced works increases incentive, at least in theoery.
But maybe you'd care to explain how grandfathering in the compositions of George Gershwin does anything other than keep the money flowing to the heirs of Gershwin?
The tool I use (and prefer to GNU stow) to manage the stuff that isn't managed by a package manager is graft.
./configure --prefix=/usr/local/vim-6.0
/usr/local/vim-6.0, and graft creates symlinks in /usr/local/bin, /usr/local/man, etc.
/usr/local/vim-6.0
/usr/bin.
For stuff that uses GNU-style configure scripts to build, it's simply a matter of, e.g.
$
$ make
# make install
# graft -i vim-6.0
The files themselves are stored in
Removing the software simply involves:
# graft -d vim-6.0
# rm -rf
That said, I usually rely on the package manager, and don't really have a problem with 2000 files in
In 1997, I dropped out of PhD program (in philosophy, no less) at the University of Rochester, because my funding ran out, my dissertation was going nowhere, and the job market in academia was bleak.
:) And they're the ones that make the call on hiring.
A friend got me a job at a Mom 'n' Pop ISP in Memphis (Magibox, later bought by U.S. Internet, later bought by OneMain, later bought by Earthlink, which merged with Mindspring) as tech support and HTML jockey. We used Digital Unix, SCO Unix (*shudder*), FreeBSD (2.7.x, I think) on our servers.
I learned enough Unix administration from the brilliant Ken McCleaft to land a Unix admin job at a small company with a mix of Irix, Solaris, and SCO. I added Linux to the mix. (No senior/junior business there: I was it!) I've gone on to two other Unix admin jobs since.
Unfortunately, the Mom 'n' Pop ISPs, which were a great source of on the job training, are no more.
My advice: send your resumes for the positions anyway. The job market ain't what it was a year ago, but I'd bet that the job requirements are still inflated. My first Unix admin job asked for 3 years experience: I had 1.5 years. Job descriptions are of the "ideal candidate," who doesn't exist and whom they couldn't afford to hire even if he did. When you interview, you'll meet the actual admins, who know that if you can handle one flavor of Unix, you can quickly learn another. They'll ask you questions, and they'll be able to tell if you know enough to handle the position. They all run Linux at home, so be prepared to defend your distro of choice.
The English teaching experience may turn out to be a big plus. Every company needs someone who can write clear technical documetation.
I read once where someone wrote that all the philosophy students he knew ended up as Unix admins. I wonder why that is.
Good luck!
I picked up SysAdmin/TPJ at a newsstand a few days ago, and was dissappointed that TPJ was only 28 pages.
I hope this is not indicative of the size of future issues.
I'm personally a big admirer of perl's taint-checking feature. When you run perl with the -T flag, it marks data from external sources as "tainted", which will produce a fatal error if that data is used for certain operations deemed insecure, such as shelling out or opening a file for writing. If you want to use external data to open a file for writing, or shell out, you have to first "lauder" the data by matching it against a regular expression you've constructe.
It would be nice if there were more granular control over what operations are deemed insecure. E.g. so you could deem opening a file for reading insecure, or execution of SQL statements in a database.
It amazes me how some people can oversimplify a complex economic issue, such as in this quote by the author:
But cut through the abstraction and the debate really comes down to a philosophical question: What is the best way to solve problems, more government or less?
But I suppose I really shouldn't be surprised when I look at the byline:
Jason Miller is a sophomore at Michigan State University.
I wasn't linking against libm. *sigh*
--
Okay, could someone clue me in as to where the floor() and pow() functions are, so I can compile this and try it out? According to the man pages (RedHat 7.0) they're in math.h, but they're not!
--
Federal anti-trust laws themselves are not authorized under the constitution, and that's the thin end of the wedge.
Article I, Section 8, clause 3 grants Congress the power "To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes".
That's the constitutional basis for federal anti-trust laws.
--
Damian Conway writes:
The first thing you'll notice is that reports of the diamond operator's death have been greatly exaggerated. Yes, even though the Second Apocalypse foretold its demise, Rule No. 2 has since been applied and the angle brackets live!
I assume this means that Larry has had a change of heart since he wrote Apocalypse 2, but what is this mysterious "Rule No. 2" that has been invoked?
--
It's a matter of economics. And it doesn't have anything to do with the cost of producing anime.
The distributors of anime, like the distributors of any copyrighted material, are monopolists. And monopolists, you should recall from Microeconomics 101, are price-seekers. Rather than accepting the market price as given, and trying to sell as many as possible at that price (which occurs in a competitive market), the monopolist would rather sell fewer units at a higher price, if this is what will maximize profit.
In the market for a Hollywood blockbuster, there are some who are willing to pay more, say $30, for a DVD, and a bunch who are willing to pay less, say $20. (I'm just making these numbers up.) The seller maximizes profit by setting the price at $20.
In the smaller market for anime, there are some who are willing to pay $30, and some who are willing to pay $20: but not as many as are willing to pay $20 for the Hollywood blockbuster. There aren't as many lost sales by pricing the release at $30, so the seller maximizes profit by selling at $30.
This is why in a non-competitive market, as the market gets larger, the price goes down. Remember how much VHS tapes cost back in the day? When only the video stores (who were willing to pay more) were buying them, the damn things cost $80. Now that VCRs are ubiquitous, they're "priced to sell".
The same reasoning applies to why they don't put more content on anime DVDs. They lose sales by putting only four episodes on a DVD when they could put eight on a DVD; but they don't lose enough sales to make up for what they gain by putting out twice as many to sell to those willing to pay for less material. (Again, I'm making the numbers up, since I don't have a DVD player. I still watch my anime on VHS.)
'Tis the nature of non-competitive markets. Unfortunately, we haven't figured out a better way to give the creators of artistic works incentive to create, other than granting them monopoly privilege over the reproduction of their work.
--
An almost universal failing among those of all political stripes: thinking that "most people" agree with oneself. Hence groups like the "Moral Majority", who whether they were moral or not, were certainly not a majority.
I suspect slashdot has a greater percentage of self-described "libertarians" than the population at large, but "for the most part"? I doubt it. For the most part, we're mainstream liberals and conservatives, like the rest of the country, with all the diversity of opinion that this entails.
--
So there I am, innocently trying to install Bundle::libnet on a new machine using "perl -M CPAN -e shell", and CPAN.pm has decided that before I install Bundle::libnet, it should first download the new perl distribution in its entirety and upgrade my system to perl 5.6.1.
Which to me seems a bit overzealous on the part of CPAN.pm. Some might even describe it as Microsoftian in its evil.
Is there any way to turn this "feature" of CPAN.pm off? Or am I stuck installing modules by hand until such time as I decide I want to upgrade to latest and greatest? (Not so bad for individual modules, but installing Bundles by hand is a royal PITA.)
--
I don't think using the word "propaganda" is exactly fair. A lot of those people truly believe what they say...
Whether they believe it or not, it's still propaganda.
As far as gun rights go, I happen to support them. I don't bear arms myself, but I support the rights of others to do so. What I don't support is (a) treating gun rights as the most important political issue, and (b) the alliance between the gun nuts and the evangelical Christian theocrats. By making such an alliance, the gun nuts are exchanging protection of gun rights for more important ones that the theocrats would love to take away.
--
This is an overgeneralization, of course.
And typical conservative propaganda, as well.
A "liberal" might say somthing like this:
I think you forget why left-wingers are left wing. Left-wingers want maximal freedom, which includes freedom of speech, freedom of a woman to terminate an unwanted pregancy, and freedom of a person to seek employment without having their race, gender, or sexual orientation be considered as part of the hiring decision. Right-wingers tend to want to reduce our freedom in pursuit of a Protestant theocracy.
And it's true that recently the Democratic party has been catering more to the big businesses than to the general public, which is why some of us are defecting to the Green party.
Personally I think conservatism is just an odd, and probably temporary, alliance between the lassez-faire capitalists, the evangelical/fundamentalist Christians, and the gun nuts. All of whom abuse tend to abuse the word "freedom" in their propaganda.
Liberalism has it's strange cliques as well, e.g. the P.C. language police that make academia such an odd and uncomfortable place for some of us, including me. But overall I find liberals to be a more thoughtful lot than conservatives, and with a much smaller, although equally vocal, lunatic fringe.
--
...was a Mom 'n' Pop ISP in Memphis, called "Magibox". I had dropped out of philosophy grad school, and got a job there as Macintosh support and HTML jockey.
There were only four employees besides the owner and his wife. Three of us had advanced degrees in the humanities: me with a MA in philosophy, and two guys with MFAs in creative writing. We ran on a mix of Digital Unix and SCO. SCO was gradually replaced with FreeBSD. It gave me a chance to learn systems adminstration and Perl. (Many thanks to Ken McCleaft for the best advice I ever got: "learn vi".)
Eventually it was swallowed up by U.S. Internet, which prompted me to quit, as my position was going to change from technician to sales. I gave up some stock options that turned out to be utterly worthless. But my experience there got me a job as an entry level Unix sysadmin.
U.S. Internet was swallowed up by One Main, who was then swallowed up by Earthlink, who then merged with Mindspring.
Anyway, phone tech support sucked, but we had fun, and I learned a lot. The Mom 'n' Pop ISP was a great place to get started in a computer career, for those of us who studied Liberal Arts in college.
And for those of you wondering: yes, it really was just like "User Friendly". My funniest tech support moment was talking to this elderly woman, setting up Windows 95 dial-up networking. We got to the point in the wizard where you enter the phone number, and I tell her "Enter 555-7000". I hear from the other end "Beep beep beep boop boop boop boop", as she presses the keys on her touch tone phone. I had to put her on hold while I fell into a fit of laughter.
Thanks Louis, June, Ken, Mare, Craig, and Mike. And Neil who got me the job in the first place.
--
Putting all ethical judgement aside, this shows that you have a good reason to go out and buy life insurance now, before genetic screening becomes commonplace.
Even if you don't have a family yet: if you think you will have one, buy life insurance now.
Financial advisors generally recommend having 6-8 times your yearly salary. Better make that 6-8 times what you think you'll be making at the peak of your career, instead of 6-8 times what you're making now.
If you're young, in good health, and a non-smoker, term life insurance is pretty cheap. You can get half a million for a few hundred dollars a year.
And employers: you should be offering life insurance as a benefit to your employees. Offering insurance to groups is a good way for insurance companies to mitigate the problem of adverse selection.
--
The author is overlooking the primary problem with a "free market" in personal information: information is replicable.
I may well choose, for rational reasons, to sell my name, address, etc. to one party. But due to the nature of information, that party is capable in turn sell it to a third party (and a fourth, and a fifth), without my consent. And if this is the case, I cannot know what I'm selling, short of negotiating a contract. Have I given my address to one party, or many?
This is the problem that Lessig's proposed strong property right in personal information is intended to solve. (In the same way that a strong property right with regard to copying literature, music, and computer code, is intended to solve the problem of the underproduction of creative works. Whether this solution is worth its price is a separate question.)
If I have a strong property right in my personal information, the transaction costs of selling my personal information are lowered: I know that, unless I have *explicitly* permitted someone to do so, they may not transfer my personal information to a third party.
--
Which makes me wonder: why don't browsers send timezone information in their headers, so that the servers can do the Right Thing(TM) with regard to displaying times?
E.g. my browser should send a header like this:
TimeZone: America/Chicago
or
TimeZone: CDT/-600
Then the SlashCode could appropriately display the time that the story was updated as "11:18 AM". (Assuming that the "5:18" refers to GMT.
It seems like a fundamental need for web-based applications. Why hasn't this been done?
--
Linux also lacks some key features that you'd want for a data center such as hot swappable CPUs and memory.
Do hot-swappable CPUs and memory even exist on the Intel platform? The only machines I've heard of that support that are Sun's E10000s.
I currently work at a Fortune 400 retailer, an IBM shop, and we don't have anything with hot-swappable CPUs or memory in our data center.
--
I don't mean this as a troll, but it seems that BIND has more security vulnerabilities than any other piece of software.
I'd say that dubious distinction falls to wu-ftpd, but BIND is a close second.
Anyway, BIND 9 is a complete rewrite.
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Yeah, yeah, whatever.
Look, if you didn't want to look at the MS-bashing jokes, what are you doing reading the comments on this comments on this story? Heck, what are you doing reading Slashdot at all. It's like going to a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert and complaining about the rednecks.
And as far as this power-user is concerned, any OS that doesn't come with a C compiler and Perl is sorely lacking. And virtual desktops! Damn I hate it when I have to use a GUI that doesn't have virtual desktops! Even the loathsome CDE has virtual desktops. Why haven't Microsoft and Apple given their customers virtual desktops?
(Okay, IE 5 is pretty nice. I'll admit that.)
[Grumble, grumble]
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