It really doesn't hurt anyone to offer it, in the grand scheme of things--if they don't have to pay out, they save some cash; if they have to pay out, a major world-spanning crisis has been averted and the money will really seem like peanuts.
My position is that anyone who's able to solve global warming would do so anyway, $25 million reward or not, because the value of solving global warming is so much more than $25 million. It's kind of like if I offer $100 or even $1000 to anyone who writes an open source tax program with e-filing capabilities (which I'd really love someone to write). It might happen, or it might not, but the $1000 isn't going to change that.
In fact, I'm going to do it. I offer $1000 to anyone who writes a free software (by the FSF definition) tax program that passes the federal e-file tests for any typical 1040 long form.
You can't make money by solving global warming because there is no one who will pay you for your technology.
You could easily make $25 million solving global warming. Like I said, there are probably single homes in beachfront locations worth $25 million. There are definitely $25 million hotels that would be destroyed by global warming. Sell the technology to them.
The benefits from reducing CO2 are spread out among everyone on earth and are too diffuse for conventional market rewards.
True. But the benefits from solving global warming are in the billions or even the trillions. $25 million is a drop in the bucket.
Without government intervention I doubt the problem is going to be solved. At least not until it has already caused billions of dollars in damage. Besides, many governments are doing something about it, just not enough.
But along these lines, I offer a $100 bounty to anyone who successfully brings about world peace. Hey, it's a start, right?
C'mon, $25 million is nothing compared to something like global warming. If global warming could really be solved for $25 million someone would have done it by now. Al Gore spent more than $25 million on his presidential campaign. You think maybe he would have gotten more publicity if he instead chose to spend the money solving global warming? The petroleum industry probably spends way more than $25 million a year lobbying against Kyoto. Surely if they could make Kyoto moot by solving the problem of global warming they'd do that instead. There are probably single beachfront homes that are worth $25 million. If the problem could be solved that cheaply, surely one of those homeowners would have made it happen. There are hundreds of billionaires in the United States. $25 million would be a drop in the bucket to solve one of the biggest problems of our lifetime.
C'mon, $25 million for solving a problem that by some estimates is going to cost the world trillions of dollars if it doesn't get solved? Poor dig, slashdot editors. This isn't news, it's a joke.
But yea- I basically am living with the assumption that if I lose my job, it might be two years before I get another one and that I might never make half the pay that I'm making now again.
Fair enough. I don't know your situation, so I'll take your word for that. But still, I didn't mean to suggest that standing up for what you believe in is necessarily the right thing to do. You might have to settle for average or even below average pay, and for some people that's not worth it.
I get zero percent offers all the time (good til 2008 currently). I owe to much on the house to transfer them at this time. And the house is at a low rate so I would be taking risk (lose the job- miss a 0% payment- suddenly at 24% interest for 10 grand).
I have a fairly low tolerance for risk-- unless it's a double diamond.
You could always take the 0% offer and put all the money into a paypal money market account earning 5% interest. So then if you ever missed a payment and the interest rate went up to 24% you can just pay it all off. Then again, if you call the credit card company and apologize for missing the payment 9 times out of 10 they'll reinstate your 0% rate anyway, if you ask. Or by then you've probably gotten a different offer from a different credit card company. I've forgotten to make a payment on time far too many times and only one time have I been rejected when I asked them to remove the late fees and reinstate the interest rate. The time they did that I transferred all the money to a different card and closed the account.
But please don't take any of this as a suggestion. My risk tolerance is extremely high when it comes to money.
Please define rich, and define freedom. My statement was very ambiguous, but I think Maxo-Texas understood what I was getting at. A vagrant in the United States, for instance, does not need to "work" very much at all to survive. Earn enough to buy an old beat up VW bus and you've got shelter and transportation. Get your clothes at the thrift store for a few bucks a month. Buy the cheapest stuff you can find at the grocery store which meets your basic nutritional needs. Or maybe better, hang out at a college where you can probably find people willing to feed you for a while. Sure, you'll have to work once in a while to support this lifestyle. But you won't have to work very hard or very long, and you won't have to commit to any particular location for a very long period of time. I've known people who have done this. They weren't rich, but they were free.
I'm sure the university has a procedure on the books to request a specific, temporary exemption from school policies to conduct bona-fide research. The important factor is oversight: the university still has the authority and responsibility to tell a professor no if the request is not reasonable.
This presumes that Tor is against school policies in the first place, which it isn't nor should it be.
Professors should be using the schools resources primarily for the purpose of performing their job. But requiring them to get approval ahead of time before doing something which doesn't harm anyone else on the network is what is not reasonable. If the professor is using excessive bandwidth that's one situation I could see requiring a request for permission ahead of time. But for just for using Tor? No, I don't buy it.
The point of tor isn't to hide that your using Tor, the point of Tor is to hide what you did WHILE you were using it. Sure they know he used tor, there is no way to stop that [...]
An important lesson which should be made very clear when the professor suggests to his students that Chinese citizens can use Tor. The fact that the use of Tor can't be (easily or perfectly) hidden severely limits its usefulness when dealing with a government like that in China.
Believe me, if he got his ass owned, and it took down backroom servers or another flavor-of-the-week professor's favorite toy, there would be MOBS outside IT's door -- complete with pitchforks and torches.
If breaking into a single professor's computer can take down a backroom server, then the IT staff deserves the pitchforks and torches. By your rationale Tor should be banned completely from every network in existence, because hey, my laptop might get owned and take down all of Verizon.
A university network is not a typical business environment. You can't control every computer that gets connected to the network, and you can't shut off encrypted traffic. So by your rationale, "a lot of firewalling and intrusion detection" is already COMPLETELY useless.
First: please stop using Tor on our network. Not very objectionable, they do own it and can request that sort of thing. Kind of like saying "please don't seed torrents of 20 Linux CD images on our network."
The IT staff doesn't own the network. Bowling Green State University owns the network. Most likely the University is a non-profit organization (if not government run), and most likely its mission is to educate its students. So if the professor's use of Tor helps him educate his students, and he isn't using a lot of bandwidth during peak times, then no, no one has a right to tell him to stop.
Seeding torrents of 20 Linux CD images is somewhat different, as it more likely uses a lot of bandwidth, but still I think the educational benefits outweigh the costs (especially if the bandwidth is kept limited).
Compared to everyone around me, I'm killing myself saving my ass off (40% of my net) and it's going to be at least four more years (ignoring the health issues) before I reach that point.
Huh? How much do you think you need? If you're saving 40% of your net, and you want to save enough to live off of for 3 months while looking for another job, then you only have to work for 7.5 months. Of course, that ignores unemployment, and it assumes you're already living at the bare minimum level.
My only debt is my house.
Maybe that's part of the problem. One way I acquired savings was by taking on low interest debt. It's much safer to have $10,000 in investments and $10,000 in debt than it is to have $0 either way. Of course, $0 either way plus a $10,000 credit limit is almost as safe (problem is you don't get a guaranteed rate that way).
I *want* to be free like you talk about. It's a lot *harder* than you seem to think.
I'm somewhat intrigued by the fact that you think this. For me it was pretty easy, and it wasn't because I was handed money from my parents, nor is it because I've ever had a huge salary. But for me that freedom is of great importance. It's probably the main reason I got out of the software engineering industry. I hated the idea that everything I created was owned by someone else.
I have the freedom to speak my mind- lose my job- and (assuming my house is paid for and i have saved enough for property taxes, utilities, and food) die years earlier without my meds. Or I can keep my trap shut- and get another 10 years of healthy life and another 12-15 years of total life. I'd prefer not to die at 64 like my grandpa when I know I can make it to 80.
You seem to be making the assumption that if you lose your job you couldn't get another one, with benefits, before your COBRA runs out (18 months). If that's your thinking then I guess I see where you're coming from.
Some people are willing to trade life later for certain things now- I'm not.
I guess I'm like that to some extent, but for the most part I guess I'm just fortunate enough to have never needed to make that choice. I've always been relatively healthy and relatively skilled for the job-market. By the way, I guess when you said you were "killing [yourself] saving [your] ass off" you meant it figuratively. But are you sure about that?
Asking the professor not to use Tor on the university-owned network is reasonable.
Asking is reasonable. Forcing him to wouldn't be. The network is there to allow the professor to do research which helps him do his job. The IT staff has no business telling the professor how to do that. So long as the professor isn't using excessive resources, and barring a subpoena or court order, they shouldn't care what protocols the professor uses.
What is it about university IT departments that attracts such incompetent people?
I didn't really see any incompetence on the part of the IT staff in this story. They tried to intimidate the professor into stopping the use of Tor (which makes it impossible for them to spy on him). They failed, but I bet 95% of the time, using the same tactics, they would succeed.
Even executing my "academic freedom" would result in instant unemployment in the private sector. That severely constrains my interest in executing it since my health care bills would be $300 a month easily for blood pressure and cholesterol medicine alone.
That's why the Government should be providing health insurance, and limiting the price of medication, like in every other first-world country.
Sure, because it's the government's job to subsidize those who don't eat right and exercise. (Yes, some people have high blood pressure and high cholesterol naturally, but for many others it's just a matter of laying off the McDonalds fries.)
Even executing my "academic freedom" would result in instant unemployment in the private sector. That severely constrains my interest in executing it since my health care bills would be $300 a month easily for blood pressure and cholesterol medicine alone.
Surely you'd get more than $300/month in unemployment benefits while you looked for another job. That is, if you got truly got canned in the first place.
Of course, banning Tor from the workplace is something that makes sense for any job where the employees have access to trade secrets.
I applaud his efforts. And I chose not to work in academia so it's my responsibility that he has privileges that I do not.
I guess, but such jobs aren't limited to academia. And unless you're really unskilled and making very little it doesn't take that long to save enough money so you have the ability to stand up for what you believe in.
I'm not so sure about that. I think the ideal would be to pay as little welfare as possible; the idea of taxing poor people for gas either directly or indirectly (by raising the cost of shipping, for example) and then giving them cash back seems a little funny to me. Because, of course, if you tax gas, you raise the cost of everything.
I won't quibble over whether or not you raise the cost of everything, but I will point out that you'll raise the cost of something that uses a lot of gas more than you'll raise the cost of something that uses very little gas. Even if you do raise the cost of everything, you don't raise the cost of everything equally.
The ideal would be to not tax the poor and then give them cash back. Absolutely. But that ideal would be pretty much impossible to implement. You want to present ID and/or your latest W2 statements every time you go to the gas station to fill up?
It is also probably inefficient as well, because some of that money is bound to rub off as it passes through the government's hands. Now, obviously, you need some kinds of welfare programs, but the ideal would be to minimize the loopback. Because, otherwise, you're just having the government spend your money for you.
I really don't think a gas tax is going to push many people over the edge from not needing government assistance to needing it. So the vast majority of those people are already dealing with the government for assistance. So instead of making the disabled veteran show ID every time he fills up his gas tank, you just give him a few extra bucks along with his disability check. This means less government involvement, not more...
Per Amjur Searches (S) 16, "In General", the term "Search" under the 4th Amendment occurs only when there is some expectation of privacy that is deemed reasonable society, and it is infringed. (see e.g. Maryland v. Macon, 472 U.S. 463 (1985)). In the absence of such a reasonable expectation of privacy, there is no search (see e.g. Illinois v. Andreas, 463 U.S. 765 (1983)).
Well I don't know about you, but I have an expectation that someone isn't going to track me everywhere I go in my car, and I think that expectation is reasonable.
The whole point is that (a) there is no reasonable expectation of privacy covering your movements in public space, (b) because of this it isn't a search for the police to follow you in public space, and (c) this GPS tracker simply replaces that police officer who is physically tracking you.
Your whole argument rests on the assumption that it's reasonable for someone to stalk you. It isn't.
But can't an officer follow a suspect without a warrant as it is.
I seem to remember a rule that no, they can't follow a suspect for an extended period of time without getting a warrant. If I'm mistaken, there certainly should be such a rule. The word "search" means "To make a thorough examination of; look over carefully in order to find something; explore." When the police follow someone around they're searching for evidence of wrongdoing. The only question is whether or not the search is reasonable.
IMO following someone around town, whether by foot, by car, or by tracking device, is not reasonable.
However, I have a major issue with the police, with no reason to think I might be doing something wrong and no warrant to back it up, putting a GPS receiver on my car just in case I do do something wrong.
Now you're the one leaving out information. In this case the police did have reasonable suspicion that the person in question was doing something wrong. In fact, the judge feels that the police had probable cause.
That said, I don't see why the police shouldn't have been required to get a warrant first.
It would appear that the police tagged the suspect's car, not the suspect's person. Leaving aside the issue that people equate themselves with their car, tracking a publicly registered vehicle on a public street seems less like a violation of privacy. After all, is it that much different (other than cost to the police) from tailing a person in an unmarked police vehicle?
In my opinion the police should get a warrant before following someone in an unmarked police car also, when the circumstances allow enough time for a warrant to be obtained. Obviously if there's not enough time to get a warrant, that's a different story.
Bear in mind that IANAL, but I suspect that the FSF could make life very difficult for Novell if they change the license for all of the many utilities and applications that they control from GPLv2 to GPLv3. Novell would have a lot of work to do if they were suddenly put in a position in which they could no longer distribute the gcc package, GIMP, GNOME, etc. with SuSE or any other Novell-branded Linux distro.
In addition to the possibility of forking the old versions, what if Novell just gave the software to someone else to distribute? They make changes to all the GPLv2 software, the kernel, those packages which didn't get switched to v3, the parts they managed to fork, and then they hand off all of that to a third party who *is* allowed to distribute GPLv3 software.
I really think if the FSF goes ahead with this it's going to hurt free software severely. Copyleft works best when there is only one license, and for a long time that's how it was with the GPLv2. Fragmenting free software into two incompatible licenses (GPLv2 and GPLv3) is going to hurt the free software movement. Just look at all the difficulties the Free Content movement is currently facing, with the GFDL, incompatible with CC-by-SA, incompatible with CC-BY-NC-SA, etc.
Now maybe this won't happen. Maybe there is enough software currently licensed under GPLv2 or later which can be transitioned to GPLv3 or later, and maybe there will be an overwhelming support within the free software community to make the switch. Maybe the FSF should spend all of its efforts during the first few years after the GPLv3 comes out making sure that happens, and worry about slapping down companies like Novell and Microsoft later, when free software is in a less fragile state.
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My position is that anyone who's able to solve global warming would do so anyway, $25 million reward or not, because the value of solving global warming is so much more than $25 million. It's kind of like if I offer $100 or even $1000 to anyone who writes an open source tax program with e-filing capabilities (which I'd really love someone to write). It might happen, or it might not, but the $1000 isn't going to change that.
In fact, I'm going to do it. I offer $1000 to anyone who writes a free software (by the FSF definition) tax program that passes the federal e-file tests for any typical 1040 long form.
You could easily make $25 million solving global warming. Like I said, there are probably single homes in beachfront locations worth $25 million. There are definitely $25 million hotels that would be destroyed by global warming. Sell the technology to them.
True. But the benefits from solving global warming are in the billions or even the trillions. $25 million is a drop in the bucket.
Without government intervention I doubt the problem is going to be solved. At least not until it has already caused billions of dollars in damage. Besides, many governments are doing something about it, just not enough.
But along these lines, I offer a $100 bounty to anyone who successfully brings about world peace. Hey, it's a start, right?
C'mon, $25 million is nothing compared to something like global warming. If global warming could really be solved for $25 million someone would have done it by now. Al Gore spent more than $25 million on his presidential campaign. You think maybe he would have gotten more publicity if he instead chose to spend the money solving global warming? The petroleum industry probably spends way more than $25 million a year lobbying against Kyoto. Surely if they could make Kyoto moot by solving the problem of global warming they'd do that instead. There are probably single beachfront homes that are worth $25 million. If the problem could be solved that cheaply, surely one of those homeowners would have made it happen. There are hundreds of billionaires in the United States. $25 million would be a drop in the bucket to solve one of the biggest problems of our lifetime.
$25 million, to solve global warming, is a joke.
C'mon, $25 million for solving a problem that by some estimates is going to cost the world trillions of dollars if it doesn't get solved? Poor dig, slashdot editors. This isn't news, it's a joke.
Fair enough. I don't know your situation, so I'll take your word for that. But still, I didn't mean to suggest that standing up for what you believe in is necessarily the right thing to do. You might have to settle for average or even below average pay, and for some people that's not worth it.
You could always take the 0% offer and put all the money into a paypal money market account earning 5% interest. So then if you ever missed a payment and the interest rate went up to 24% you can just pay it all off. Then again, if you call the credit card company and apologize for missing the payment 9 times out of 10 they'll reinstate your 0% rate anyway, if you ask. Or by then you've probably gotten a different offer from a different credit card company. I've forgotten to make a payment on time far too many times and only one time have I been rejected when I asked them to remove the late fees and reinstate the interest rate. The time they did that I transferred all the money to a different card and closed the account.
But please don't take any of this as a suggestion. My risk tolerance is extremely high when it comes to money.
Please define rich, and define freedom. My statement was very ambiguous, but I think Maxo-Texas understood what I was getting at. A vagrant in the United States, for instance, does not need to "work" very much at all to survive. Earn enough to buy an old beat up VW bus and you've got shelter and transportation. Get your clothes at the thrift store for a few bucks a month. Buy the cheapest stuff you can find at the grocery store which meets your basic nutritional needs. Or maybe better, hang out at a college where you can probably find people willing to feed you for a while. Sure, you'll have to work once in a while to support this lifestyle. But you won't have to work very hard or very long, and you won't have to commit to any particular location for a very long period of time. I've known people who have done this. They weren't rich, but they were free.
This presumes that Tor is against school policies in the first place, which it isn't nor should it be.
Professors should be using the schools resources primarily for the purpose of performing their job. But requiring them to get approval ahead of time before doing something which doesn't harm anyone else on the network is what is not reasonable. If the professor is using excessive bandwidth that's one situation I could see requiring a request for permission ahead of time. But for just for using Tor? No, I don't buy it.
Yep, I just confirmed this using a proxy server in Germany. Now hopefully my university's IT staff doesn't come after me!
An important lesson which should be made very clear when the professor suggests to his students that Chinese citizens can use Tor. The fact that the use of Tor can't be (easily or perfectly) hidden severely limits its usefulness when dealing with a government like that in China.
If breaking into a single professor's computer can take down a backroom server, then the IT staff deserves the pitchforks and torches. By your rationale Tor should be banned completely from every network in existence, because hey, my laptop might get owned and take down all of Verizon.
A university network is not a typical business environment. You can't control every computer that gets connected to the network, and you can't shut off encrypted traffic. So by your rationale, "a lot of firewalling and intrusion detection" is already COMPLETELY useless.
The IT staff doesn't own the network. Bowling Green State University owns the network. Most likely the University is a non-profit organization (if not government run), and most likely its mission is to educate its students. So if the professor's use of Tor helps him educate his students, and he isn't using a lot of bandwidth during peak times, then no, no one has a right to tell him to stop.
Seeding torrents of 20 Linux CD images is somewhat different, as it more likely uses a lot of bandwidth, but still I think the educational benefits outweigh the costs (especially if the bandwidth is kept limited).
The free market doesn't force freedom upon you, and most people frankly don't want freedom all that much.
But at least with a free market most people have the choice of freedom.
Huh? How much do you think you need? If you're saving 40% of your net, and you want to save enough to live off of for 3 months while looking for another job, then you only have to work for 7.5 months. Of course, that ignores unemployment, and it assumes you're already living at the bare minimum level.
Maybe that's part of the problem. One way I acquired savings was by taking on low interest debt. It's much safer to have $10,000 in investments and $10,000 in debt than it is to have $0 either way. Of course, $0 either way plus a $10,000 credit limit is almost as safe (problem is you don't get a guaranteed rate that way).
I'm somewhat intrigued by the fact that you think this. For me it was pretty easy, and it wasn't because I was handed money from my parents, nor is it because I've ever had a huge salary. But for me that freedom is of great importance. It's probably the main reason I got out of the software engineering industry. I hated the idea that everything I created was owned by someone else.
You seem to be making the assumption that if you lose your job you couldn't get another one, with benefits, before your COBRA runs out (18 months). If that's your thinking then I guess I see where you're coming from.
I guess I'm like that to some extent, but for the most part I guess I'm just fortunate enough to have never needed to make that choice. I've always been relatively healthy and relatively skilled for the job-market. By the way, I guess when you said you were "killing [yourself] saving [your] ass off" you meant it figuratively. But are you sure about that?
Asking is reasonable. Forcing him to wouldn't be. The network is there to allow the professor to do research which helps him do his job. The IT staff has no business telling the professor how to do that. So long as the professor isn't using excessive resources, and barring a subpoena or court order, they shouldn't care what protocols the professor uses.
I didn't really see any incompetence on the part of the IT staff in this story. They tried to intimidate the professor into stopping the use of Tor (which makes it impossible for them to spy on him). They failed, but I bet 95% of the time, using the same tactics, they would succeed.
According to the article, which I believed until I read the last few lines, there are only two people on campus that use Tor, including the professor.
Sure, because it's the government's job to subsidize those who don't eat right and exercise. (Yes, some people have high blood pressure and high cholesterol naturally, but for many others it's just a matter of laying off the McDonalds fries.)
Surely you'd get more than $300/month in unemployment benefits while you looked for another job. That is, if you got truly got canned in the first place.
Of course, banning Tor from the workplace is something that makes sense for any job where the employees have access to trade secrets.
I guess, but such jobs aren't limited to academia. And unless you're really unskilled and making very little it doesn't take that long to save enough money so you have the ability to stand up for what you believe in.
I won't quibble over whether or not you raise the cost of everything, but I will point out that you'll raise the cost of something that uses a lot of gas more than you'll raise the cost of something that uses very little gas. Even if you do raise the cost of everything, you don't raise the cost of everything equally.
The ideal would be to not tax the poor and then give them cash back. Absolutely. But that ideal would be pretty much impossible to implement. You want to present ID and/or your latest W2 statements every time you go to the gas station to fill up?
I really don't think a gas tax is going to push many people over the edge from not needing government assistance to needing it. So the vast majority of those people are already dealing with the government for assistance. So instead of making the disabled veteran show ID every time he fills up his gas tank, you just give him a few extra bucks along with his disability check. This means less government involvement, not more...
Well I don't know about you, but I have an expectation that someone isn't going to track me everywhere I go in my car, and I think that expectation is reasonable.
Your whole argument rests on the assumption that it's reasonable for someone to stalk you. It isn't.
I seem to remember a rule that no, they can't follow a suspect for an extended period of time without getting a warrant. If I'm mistaken, there certainly should be such a rule. The word "search" means "To make a thorough examination of; look over carefully in order to find something; explore." When the police follow someone around they're searching for evidence of wrongdoing. The only question is whether or not the search is reasonable.
IMO following someone around town, whether by foot, by car, or by tracking device, is not reasonable.
Now you're the one leaving out information. In this case the police did have reasonable suspicion that the person in question was doing something wrong. In fact, the judge feels that the police had probable cause.
That said, I don't see why the police shouldn't have been required to get a warrant first.
In my opinion the police should get a warrant before following someone in an unmarked police car also, when the circumstances allow enough time for a warrant to be obtained. Obviously if there's not enough time to get a warrant, that's a different story.
In addition to the possibility of forking the old versions, what if Novell just gave the software to someone else to distribute? They make changes to all the GPLv2 software, the kernel, those packages which didn't get switched to v3, the parts they managed to fork, and then they hand off all of that to a third party who *is* allowed to distribute GPLv3 software.
I really think if the FSF goes ahead with this it's going to hurt free software severely. Copyleft works best when there is only one license, and for a long time that's how it was with the GPLv2. Fragmenting free software into two incompatible licenses (GPLv2 and GPLv3) is going to hurt the free software movement. Just look at all the difficulties the Free Content movement is currently facing, with the GFDL, incompatible with CC-by-SA, incompatible with CC-BY-NC-SA, etc.
Now maybe this won't happen. Maybe there is enough software currently licensed under GPLv2 or later which can be transitioned to GPLv3 or later, and maybe there will be an overwhelming support within the free software community to make the switch. Maybe the FSF should spend all of its efforts during the first few years after the GPLv3 comes out making sure that happens, and worry about slapping down companies like Novell and Microsoft later, when free software is in a less fragile state.