Lets see, who's word should we trust more, a highly respected reporter for a very reputable newspaper or a convicted felon who had to go to jail multiple times before he finally got a clue?
Was Kevin Mitnick a national menace? No way. Was this a good yarn? I think so. I mean, it was an
interesting sort of morality play for the information age we're moving into. Was Kevin Mitnick an
information-age terrorist? No. His motivation is still a mystery to me. But I'll tell you one thing: he was
an adult. He'd been arrested five times before. He had gone to jail three times before. He was
systematically stealing software from dozens if not more computers around the Internet. He was
targeting cellular telephone companies and stealing source code that major U.S. companies had
spent millions of dollars developing. His motivations are not clear. He was tampering with the
telephone network. He was costing Internet service providers tens of thousands of dollars or more
just watching him -- and they were helpless to stop him.
I don't think you have to make the leap to say he was some grave terrorist. This guy was a hardened
computer criminal. He is a guy who's been given many chances to get his act together. A lot has been
made of whether or not he was "cyberspace's most wanted." I made that call when I wrote my first
article in July, 1994, based on the fact that the U.S. Marshal service, the FBI, the California
Department of Motor Vehicles, several local police departments and several telecommunications
companies were all looking for him and couldn't find him. I think that's a good story -- end of case.
I've been sort of pinned with this conspiracy to catch Kevin. I wrote the first story because I was so
intrigued with his ability to avoid these people. That first story had a modern Bonnie-and-Clyde
aspect to it that I thought was revealing. The fact that people went nuts over the story -- that's
something that I didn't expect. I don't fully comprehend the way the media works. But I didn't
advertise him as a menace to the world -- just as a very persistent criminal. The words that I used to
describe him were "Con man" and "grifter." I think that comes close to approximating what he did.
At the Univ of Tenn, I once stood on top of the hill where the Math, Phys Sciences, and Engineering buildings are located. I could see a migrating flock of starlings. The front of the flock disappeared in the sky at the horizon in one direction while the tail end of the flock disappeared at the horizon in the other direction. I walked home a mile or so to the top of another major hill more or less following the same route the birds were (but not under them, fortunately). When I got to the top of the 2nd hill, I still could not see the start or the end of the flock. This is a flock 4 or 5 miles long and 20-25 birds wide! A rough guestimate puts the flock at over 100,000 and perhaps as many as 250,000.
The Great Smokey Mountains used to have a pidgeon population that was estimated to be in the billions. I think that starlings have just taken over the niche that used to be occupied by the passenger pidgeon.
In a democracy what the majority of the public wants is what the public should get.
Err, the majority of Germans wanted the Jews dead when they elected Hitler Chancellor in 1932. I guess it was OK for him to go ahead with that project then.
People who drive 90MPH are putting other people at risk, not just themselves. And even old ladies cranking out songs for the gals in their church choir are stealing.
There are a lot of people in this world who need laws to tell them what is right and wrong. Lord knows they can't seem to figure it out any other way.
An assignment involving software engineering has one of two results: it is maintainable or it is not. That is no different than an English assignment which is well written or it is not. You seem to see only a binary world. The world I inhabit is a bit more complex.
Go back to your post and substitute the words "Software Engineering" for each occurance of English or Economics. If my analogy fails for English or Econ, it fails for Software as well.
Each discipline has developed its own method for assessing its own problems. In any discipline, a Professor must be able to defend the relative grades he gives one student versus another. The only way that can be done is if there is some kind of recognized standard that enables a Professor to compare one student versus another. This is where the philosophy of science stuff comes in. The latest and greatest (well, 10 years ago when I was paying closer attention) seemed to say that each discipline was going to have to develop its own criteria for what is meant by science or truth or whatever it is we are after. And English, like all other academic exercises, has developed its own system for judging the works of students and peers.
Final point, modern economics is really a branch of mathematics these days. The best analogy is to geometry. Start with some simple axioms (people have preferences. They prefer more to less. Preferences are transitive). It is based in set theory that eventually gives rise to better descriptions of more and more human behavior. Once upon a time it was storytelling, but today storytelling is mostly confined to trying to make human sense out of what the math is saying. Most every MBA in finance makes daily use of those results. Because we are unable to predict the macro trends of policy decisions does not mean that economics is useless. And it really is not hard to understand if students have learned what you are trying to teach.
No, I'm trying to show you that English as an academic discipline may well have valid objective methods for measuring the quality of an argument. You got my gander up because your narrow frame of reference (simple, easy to measure systems) has an implicit assumption that something which has a seemingly easy to observe connection between cause and effect can be objectively measured while extremely complex systems can only be subjectively argued about. That viewpoint has been pretty thoroughly debunked by the philosophy of science crowd. The short version is that if the observe->hypothesize->test cycle of science is impossible for complex systems, then it is impossible for simple systems as well.
OK, got my dander up. I taught scientific writing skills to undergraduates for a couple of years when I was in grad school. My graduate degrees are in Economics.:)
Determining whether an argument has been well presented can be measured using objective criteria. At a minimum, an argument has a clear thesis, evidence to support that thesis, and a conclusion that follows naturally from the thesis and presented evidence.
You have, at least on the surface, a reasonable thesis. The problem is that you have supplied no evidence in support of that thesis. Try the following assignment: Explain how you would develop an objective method for measuring the quality of freshman English writing assignments. If you can develop one, then why are you so sure that others have not? If you are unable to, why not (prejudice?, lack of knowledge?, too lazy to try?) and why should that mean that others cannot or have not?
Contrast that with almost everything else, where it's all basically bullshit. Almost any answer can be seen as being correct.
Nonsense. English majors are expected to understand the basics of rhetoric and how to present an argument well (a skill which is in short supply among many of the engineers with whom I have worked). Economics majors had better understand how to derive supply and demand curves. Physics majors need to understand why engineers can get away with chopping off all the terms in an expansion except the first. Nearly every academic discipline has a set of objective criteria that can be used to differentiate between those who have mastered the discipline and those who have not.
Personally, I do not really care about grade inflation. Undergraduates at the junior/senior level are more like junior graduate students. They are there because they like what they are studying and thus ought to be getting As and Bs as a matter of course. If they are not, a kindly prof should pull them aside and suggest they look for something else to do.
I had the same feeling a few years earlier watching the Brits go after Argentina when the military junta took the Falklands. Seemed kinda like a harmless game of capture the flag. Gooooo UK!
And then Argentina scored big against a British destroyer and people died who probably didn't need to, good cause or not.
If you are that gung-ho about another Iraqi war, then get your ass down to a recruiting station right the fuck now. With 8 weeks Basic + 8 weeks 11B training you might just finish in time to see this war up close and personal.
As for me, I've done time in Uncle Sam's Army. I've got friends in theater. Trust me, it ain't no national football game.
Do you believe that a burgler should not be charged if the victim left their house unlocked? Do not blame the victim for the acts of the perpetrator. Mitnick was given a sentence that was equivalent to that of a recidividist burgler.
If you get down to basics of human motivation, real hacking is just another kind of science. Like Indiana Jones style of archeology. Risky, annoying, controversial but ultimately an unavoidable consequence of human curiosity.
Bullshit. What Mitnick did was neither hacking nor science. It was breaking and entering, pure and simple. Cracking into other people's property is a crime and should be treated as such. Would you mind having curiosity seekers wandering through your home whenever they felt like it?
And if this non-violent offender accidentally breaks into a medical computer, nuclear reactor control computer, air traffic control computer, etc? People can die from incompetent script kiddies who break into machines whose purpose they do not understand. A couple of years ago, a group of high school seniors stole a stop sign from a local intersection. Harmless prank, right? Just a $40 sign? Until a mom and kids drove through the intersection into the path of another car. The high school seniors are doing time for manslaughter. Computer breakins can have serious consequences and should net serious penalties.
I agree totally that writing deCSS type software should not be a crime, but that is not the kind of offense that Mitnick committed.
Your examples are all private goods that should paid for with private individual means. NPR and PBS are public goods so it seems quite reasonable to pay for them with public means. Unless, of course, you are advocating a public takeover of the RIAA and p2p networks and the use of a gov't tax on p2p to pay the artists for all of their work which is shared on the publicly owned p2p networks. Or alternatively you are advocating the privatization of NPR and PBS and only letting doners view the signals.
Hacker Icon? Don't Think So
on
Ask Kevin Mitnick
·
· Score: 0, Troll
Linus Torvalds and Alan Cox are hacker icons. Mitnick is just a dumb fool who got caught breaking the law.
I think that NPR and PBS should be paid for with a mild sales tax on radios, stereos, and TVs. It might add $10 (OK, that is a complete guess) to the cost of a TV set, would end the 3 times a year beg-a-thon, and it would be fair since nearly everyone listens to or watches $10 worth of NPR/PBS during the lifetime of the set.
Silly boy, if you think that telling you that you'd obviously never passed an econ course was rude, you need to grow a thicker skin. It was a shorthand way of saying that what you'd written was poorly thought-out nonsense delivered with a pretense of authority (I used to work at the National Opinion Research Center [uchicago.edu], and we were doing some statistical analysis which was related to this topic.</TedBaxterVoice>) that you plainly did not have.
Sad, having access to all of those wonderful profs (I've met many of them, too) and yet you never learned anything about their field. There is a story (can't remember where I heard this or all of the details about who was involved) about two economists on an elevator at a meeting. Both head for the door when it opens, both stop to let the other exit first, both start forward again, repeat until the door closes, at which point one is heard to say that manners are clearly suboptimal.
Don't think you know everything, hot-shot economist. You're sounding like a wanna-be. Listen to yourself talk. You're resorting to sarcasm as a defence mechanism. You're making defensive rationalizations regarding why I marked you on my Foes list. You're quoting Gracie Allen. And you're trying to insinuate that I'm a little boy. As far as I can tell, you're hurt that somebody had the gall to mark you on their Foe's list... It's happened to you once before, and now you've gone
and done something to piss somebody off again.
<sarcasm>Now you're going to make me cry!</sarcasm>
Poor little boy. Can't handle it when someone tells you that what you have written is incoherent babble? Marking the guy who calls you on it as a foe is akin to stuffing cotton in your ears everytime someone has the gall to tell you that you have no understanding of the subject about which you have pretended to speak with some authority. You will soon end up sounding like Gracie Allen:
"You can learn a lot by listening to people talk. Why, everything I know today I learned by listening to myself talk about things that I knew absolutely nothing about."
Grow up. A real scientist knows how to accept criticism even when that criticism is delivered with a little sting.</sarcasm>
I am an economist. It is clear that you never received more than a c- in econ 101. What you call a moat, real economists call a barrier to entry. The recording industry has never had high barriers to entry. There are many, many independent recording studios for creating master tapes. There are enough independent factories for pressing (once upon a time) vinyl and (now) CDs that anyone can put together a new record label with very little cash. If there are barriers, they lie in the marketing and distribution of the product. But even there, your new label is free to pay off the radio stations just like any other label does.
What has kept new upstarts from joining the ranks of the majors is that none of the indie labels are likely to create a Britny Speers (sp?) and sell a million albums. They could, I suppose, but most indie labels print music that is listened to by comparitively small niches. Once in a while, a particular niche explodes on the larger scene (e.g. rap) and the indie sees enough growth that it is either bought out or branches out into other areas by reinvesting the profit from the successful albums.
It isn't the threat of new indies that bothers the big boys in the recording industry. It is the customers that they are terrified of. If the customer can easily get the product for free, how will any recording company make any money?
I have mod points, but this ? is aleady at 5. It is also the most important question to ask. I am not terribly worried about TCPA as long as I can install my own keys into the BIOS and sign my own os and other software. A proprietary DRM system could still refuse to run content based on those keys and I really wouldn't care too much. But if I am prevented from telling the BIOS which keys are legit and must have my OS signed by some outside TCPA key authority in order to have access to the TCPA features of my motherboard, then I am going to be very, very pissed off about TCPA!
Good One! I sliced the bejesus out of my thumb this afternoon while removing the motherboard from an old case. I'm starting to wonder why PCs require blood sacrifices as part of their maintenance cycle.
My dad used to tell me that most people were good at and enjoyed more than one thing. So from the list of things you enjoy, pick the one that pays the most. There is no reason why you can't have a job you enjoy that also pays well.
Certification requirements are often just a way for a profession to regulate the number (and, hence, the pay) of workers in a particular field. A gov't should never be able to mandate that auto mechanics be certified. As a consumer, I want to have the choice of whether to take my car to a mechanic without a certification, but a great reputation. This happens all the time in auto repair. My current mechanic is an ex-cop who isn't certified and does a great job for a fair price. Some jobs he won't touch because he knows his limits -- the check light for my air-bag is broken and he told me to go to the dealer for that problem. Same should hold for every other profession including MDs, beauty salon workers, and computer repair technicians.
So what should certification be used for? Insurance, for one. An insurance company may choose to offer a reduced rate on malpractice insurance for those with certification. Customers may choose to use the certification as a starting point in deciding whether to hire an individual to perform a given service.
But certification should never be mandated. That is too open for abuse since the certification requirements are usually set by those who are already certified. This gives the certification board an incentive to make it harder than it should be to get the required certification. In some professions, you can see the long term results. Medicine is a great example. Doctors must get an MD and jump through hoops in order to get licensed. Result is too few doctors. Society has begun getting around that by letting nurses perform many of the tasks that used to require an MD. That is a hint that gov't should never have mandated that those tasks require an MD to begin with.
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Lets see, who's word should we trust more, a highly respected reporter for a very reputable newspaper or a convicted felon who had to go to jail multiple times before he finally got a clue?
Was Kevin Mitnick a national menace? No way. Was this a good yarn? I think so. I mean, it was an interesting sort of morality play for the information age we're moving into. Was Kevin Mitnick an information-age terrorist? No. His motivation is still a mystery to me. But I'll tell you one thing: he was an adult. He'd been arrested five times before. He had gone to jail three times before. He was systematically stealing software from dozens if not more computers around the Internet. He was targeting cellular telephone companies and stealing source code that major U.S. companies had spent millions of dollars developing. His motivations are not clear. He was tampering with the telephone network. He was costing Internet service providers tens of thousands of dollars or more just watching him -- and they were helpless to stop him.
I don't think you have to make the leap to say he was some grave terrorist. This guy was a hardened computer criminal. He is a guy who's been given many chances to get his act together. A lot has been made of whether or not he was "cyberspace's most wanted." I made that call when I wrote my first article in July, 1994, based on the fact that the U.S. Marshal service, the FBI, the California Department of Motor Vehicles, several local police departments and several telecommunications companies were all looking for him and couldn't find him. I think that's a good story -- end of case.
I've been sort of pinned with this conspiracy to catch Kevin. I wrote the first story because I was so intrigued with his ability to avoid these people. That first story had a modern Bonnie-and-Clyde aspect to it that I thought was revealing. The fact that people went nuts over the story -- that's something that I didn't expect. I don't fully comprehend the way the media works. But I didn't advertise him as a menace to the world -- just as a very persistent criminal. The words that I used to describe him were "Con man" and "grifter." I think that comes close to approximating what he did.
From a Salon interview with John Markoff
OK by me as long as we have an exception handler.
He had to uuencoded it first since usenet cannot handle plain ascii.
At the Univ of Tenn, I once stood on top of the hill where the Math, Phys Sciences, and Engineering buildings are located. I could see a migrating flock of starlings. The front of the flock disappeared in the sky at the horizon in one direction while the tail end of the flock disappeared at the horizon in the other direction. I walked home a mile or so to the top of another major hill more or less following the same route the birds were (but not under them, fortunately). When I got to the top of the 2nd hill, I still could not see the start or the end of the flock. This is a flock 4 or 5 miles long and 20-25 birds wide! A rough guestimate puts the flock at over 100,000 and perhaps as many as 250,000.
The Great Smokey Mountains used to have a pidgeon population that was estimated to be in the billions. I think that starlings have just taken over the niche that used to be occupied by the passenger pidgeon.
In a democracy what the majority of the public wants is what the public should get.
Err, the majority of Germans wanted the Jews dead when they elected Hitler Chancellor in 1932. I guess it was OK for him to go ahead with that project then.
People who drive 90MPH are putting other people at risk, not just themselves. And even old ladies cranking out songs for the gals in their church choir are stealing.
There are a lot of people in this world who need laws to tell them what is right and wrong. Lord knows they can't seem to figure it out any other way.
An assignment involving software engineering has one of two results: it is maintainable or it is not. That is no different than an English assignment which is well written or it is not. You seem to see only a binary world. The world I inhabit is a bit more complex.
Go back to your post and substitute the words "Software Engineering" for each occurance of English or Economics. If my analogy fails for English or Econ, it fails for Software as well.
Each discipline has developed its own method for assessing its own problems. In any discipline, a Professor must be able to defend the relative grades he gives one student versus another. The only way that can be done is if there is some kind of recognized standard that enables a Professor to compare one student versus another. This is where the philosophy of science stuff comes in. The latest and greatest (well, 10 years ago when I was paying closer attention) seemed to say that each discipline was going to have to develop its own criteria for what is meant by science or truth or whatever it is we are after. And English, like all other academic exercises, has developed its own system for judging the works of students and peers.
Final point, modern economics is really a branch of mathematics these days. The best analogy is to geometry. Start with some simple axioms (people have preferences. They prefer more to less. Preferences are transitive). It is based in set theory that eventually gives rise to better descriptions of more and more human behavior. Once upon a time it was storytelling, but today storytelling is mostly confined to trying to make human sense out of what the math is saying. Most every MBA in finance makes daily use of those results. Because we are unable to predict the macro trends of policy decisions does not mean that economics is useless. And it really is not hard to understand if students have learned what you are trying to teach.
No, I'm trying to show you that English as an academic discipline may well have valid objective methods for measuring the quality of an argument. You got my gander up because your narrow frame of reference (simple, easy to measure systems) has an implicit assumption that something which has a seemingly easy to observe connection between cause and effect can be objectively measured while extremely complex systems can only be subjectively argued about. That viewpoint has been pretty thoroughly debunked by the philosophy of science crowd. The short version is that if the observe->hypothesize->test cycle of science is impossible for complex systems, then it is impossible for simple systems as well.
OK, got my dander up. I taught scientific writing skills to undergraduates for a couple of years when I was in grad school. My graduate degrees are in Economics. :)
Determining whether an argument has been well presented can be measured using objective criteria. At a minimum, an argument has a clear thesis, evidence to support that thesis, and a conclusion that follows naturally from the thesis and presented evidence.
You have, at least on the surface, a reasonable thesis. The problem is that you have supplied no evidence in support of that thesis. Try the following assignment: Explain how you would develop an objective method for measuring the quality of freshman English writing assignments. If you can develop one, then why are you so sure that others have not? If you are unable to, why not (prejudice?, lack of knowledge?, too lazy to try?) and why should that mean that others cannot or have not?
This is why grad schools should pay more attention to recommendations than to grades as long as the student has something over a 3.0.
Contrast that with almost everything else, where it's all basically bullshit. Almost any answer can be seen as being correct.
Nonsense. English majors are expected to understand the basics of rhetoric and how to present an argument well (a skill which is in short supply among many of the engineers with whom I have worked). Economics majors had better understand how to derive supply and demand curves. Physics majors need to understand why engineers can get away with chopping off all the terms in an expansion except the first. Nearly every academic discipline has a set of objective criteria that can be used to differentiate between those who have mastered the discipline and those who have not.
Personally, I do not really care about grade inflation. Undergraduates at the junior/senior level are more like junior graduate students. They are there because they like what they are studying and thus ought to be getting As and Bs as a matter of course. If they are not, a kindly prof should pull them aside and suggest they look for something else to do.
I had the same feeling a few years earlier watching the Brits go after Argentina when the military junta took the Falklands. Seemed kinda like a harmless game of capture the flag. Gooooo UK!
And then Argentina scored big against a British destroyer and people died who probably didn't need to, good cause or not.
If you are that gung-ho about another Iraqi war, then get your ass down to a recruiting station right the fuck now. With 8 weeks Basic + 8 weeks 11B training you might just finish in time to see this war up close and personal.
As for me, I've done time in Uncle Sam's Army. I've got friends in theater. Trust me, it ain't no national football game.
Try this.
Do you believe that a burgler should not be charged if the victim left their house unlocked? Do not blame the victim for the acts of the perpetrator. Mitnick was given a sentence that was equivalent to that of a recidividist burgler.
If you get down to basics of human motivation, real hacking is just another kind of science. Like Indiana Jones style of archeology. Risky, annoying, controversial but ultimately an unavoidable consequence of human curiosity.
Bullshit. What Mitnick did was neither hacking nor science. It was breaking and entering, pure and simple. Cracking into other people's property is a crime and should be treated as such. Would you mind having curiosity seekers wandering through your home whenever they felt like it?
And if this non-violent offender accidentally breaks into a medical computer, nuclear reactor control computer, air traffic control computer, etc? People can die from incompetent script kiddies who break into machines whose purpose they do not understand. A couple of years ago, a group of high school seniors stole a stop sign from a local intersection. Harmless prank, right? Just a $40 sign? Until a mom and kids drove through the intersection into the path of another car. The high school seniors are doing time for manslaughter. Computer breakins can have serious consequences and should net serious penalties.
I agree totally that writing deCSS type software should not be a crime, but that is not the kind of offense that Mitnick committed.
Your examples are all private goods that should paid for with private individual means. NPR and PBS are public goods so it seems quite reasonable to pay for them with public means. Unless, of course, you are advocating a public takeover of the RIAA and p2p networks and the use of a gov't tax on p2p to pay the artists for all of their work which is shared on the publicly owned p2p networks. Or alternatively you are advocating the privatization of NPR and PBS and only letting doners view the signals.
Linus Torvalds and Alan Cox are hacker icons. Mitnick is just a dumb fool who got caught breaking the law.
I think that NPR and PBS should be paid for with a mild sales tax on radios, stereos, and TVs. It might add $10 (OK, that is a complete guess) to the cost of a TV set, would end the 3 times a year beg-a-thon, and it would be fair since nearly everyone listens to or watches $10 worth of NPR/PBS during the lifetime of the set.
Silly boy, if you think that telling you that you'd obviously never passed an econ course was rude, you need to grow a thicker skin. It was a shorthand way of saying that what you'd written was poorly thought-out nonsense delivered with a pretense of authority (I used to work at the National Opinion Research Center [uchicago.edu], and we were doing some statistical analysis which was related to this topic.</TedBaxterVoice>) that you plainly did not have.
Sad, having access to all of those wonderful profs (I've met many of them, too) and yet you never learned anything about their field. There is a story (can't remember where I heard this or all of the details about who was involved) about two economists on an elevator at a meeting. Both head for the door when it opens, both stop to let the other exit first, both start forward again, repeat until the door closes, at which point one is heard to say that manners are clearly suboptimal.
Don't think you know everything, hot-shot economist. You're sounding like a wanna-be. Listen to yourself talk. You're resorting to sarcasm as a defence mechanism. You're making defensive rationalizations regarding why I marked you on my Foes list. You're quoting Gracie Allen. And you're trying to insinuate that I'm a little boy. As far as I can tell, you're hurt that somebody had the gall to mark you on their Foe's list... It's happened to you once before, and now you've gone and done something to piss somebody off again.
<sarcasm>Now you're going to make me cry!</sarcasm>
Poor little boy. Can't handle it when someone tells you that what you have written is incoherent babble? Marking the guy who calls you on it as a foe is akin to stuffing cotton in your ears everytime someone has the gall to tell you that you have no understanding of the subject about which you have pretended to speak with some authority. You will soon end up sounding like Gracie Allen:
"You can learn a lot by listening to people talk. Why, everything I know today I learned by listening to myself talk about things that I knew absolutely nothing about."
Grow up. A real scientist knows how to accept criticism even when that criticism is delivered with a little sting.</sarcasm>
I am an economist. It is clear that you never received more than a c- in econ 101. What you call a moat, real economists call a barrier to entry. The recording industry has never had high barriers to entry. There are many, many independent recording studios for creating master tapes. There are enough independent factories for pressing (once upon a time) vinyl and (now) CDs that anyone can put together a new record label with very little cash. If there are barriers, they lie in the marketing and distribution of the product. But even there, your new label is free to pay off the radio stations just like any other label does.
What has kept new upstarts from joining the ranks of the majors is that none of the indie labels are likely to create a Britny Speers (sp?) and sell a million albums. They could, I suppose, but most indie labels print music that is listened to by comparitively small niches. Once in a while, a particular niche explodes on the larger scene (e.g. rap) and the indie sees enough growth that it is either bought out or branches out into other areas by reinvesting the profit from the successful albums.
It isn't the threat of new indies that bothers the big boys in the recording industry. It is the customers that they are terrified of. If the customer can easily get the product for free, how will any recording company make any money?
I have mod points, but this ? is aleady at 5. It is also the most important question to ask. I am not terribly worried about TCPA as long as I can install my own keys into the BIOS and sign my own os and other software. A proprietary DRM system could still refuse to run content based on those keys and I really wouldn't care too much. But if I am prevented from telling the BIOS which keys are legit and must have my OS signed by some outside TCPA key authority in order to have access to the TCPA features of my motherboard, then I am going to be very, very pissed off about TCPA!
Good One! I sliced the bejesus out of my thumb this afternoon while removing the motherboard from an old case. I'm starting to wonder why PCs require blood sacrifices as part of their maintenance cycle.
My dad used to tell me that most people were good at and enjoyed more than one thing. So from the list of things you enjoy, pick the one that pays the most. There is no reason why you can't have a job you enjoy that also pays well.
Certification requirements are often just a way for a profession to regulate the number (and, hence, the pay) of workers in a particular field. A gov't should never be able to mandate that auto mechanics be certified. As a consumer, I want to have the choice of whether to take my car to a mechanic without a certification, but a great reputation. This happens all the time in auto repair. My current mechanic is an ex-cop who isn't certified and does a great job for a fair price. Some jobs he won't touch because he knows his limits -- the check light for my air-bag is broken and he told me to go to the dealer for that problem. Same should hold for every other profession including MDs, beauty salon workers, and computer repair technicians.
So what should certification be used for? Insurance, for one. An insurance company may choose to offer a reduced rate on malpractice insurance for those with certification. Customers may choose to use the certification as a starting point in deciding whether to hire an individual to perform a given service.
But certification should never be mandated. That is too open for abuse since the certification requirements are usually set by those who are already certified. This gives the certification board an incentive to make it harder than it should be to get the required certification. In some professions, you can see the long term results. Medicine is a great example. Doctors must get an MD and jump through hoops in order to get licensed. Result is too few doctors. Society has begun getting around that by letting nurses perform many of the tasks that used to require an MD. That is a hint that gov't should never have mandated that those tasks require an MD to begin with.