One thing ignored in all the comments I read is that school districts have a significant percentage of their computers in administration, not the classroom. Training all those office staff in staroffice or something would not be a trivial undertaking, necessarily. I suppose they could use Macs, but then they'd still be using Microsoft Office.
Mostly, though, I suspect administrators are simply scared to go down a path no one else is going down. Government administrators would rather walk down the wrong path with everyone else than take the right path alone.
...
It's further interesting to have seen recently on/. that MS has $40 billion in the bank. And the letter from the Peruvian government official championing open source software. With the legal actions against Microsoft continuing, it certainly does have the feel of pressure building to the point of explosion...
Those of you with children, or an interest in education can help too.
The problem is, those of us with children are overworked, undervacationed, and damned tired anyway from playing with the kids. (Plus, I don't relish the idea of suddenly becoming my school's unpaid IT manager in order to support all those linux decisions I convinced them to make.)
I don't know about the rest of you, but I work an awful lot of the time with headphones on, and my head bobs to the beat pretty much nonstop... I hope the system is smart enough not to scroll up, scroll down, scroll up, scroll down, scroll up...
Who remembers "TV Pow," from an independent station in Hartford, CT, possibly channel 64, back in the early 80's?
During an afternoon cartoon commercial break, two kids would call in and play a Galaxian-like game where each time the kid yelled "POW!" into the phone, his ship would shoot. It was comical because in 30 seconds of play, rarely did anyone ever get more than 2 or 3 points.
Best Buy supports CBDTPA
on
Worst Buy
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Because Best Buy owns Musicland, they support the CBDTPA.
Take the Betamax case, "which they [the entertainment industry] lost, then won with the mind-boggling legislation mandating payment of royalties for sales of blank VCRs!"
Assuming he meant blank "VCR tapes," is anyone familiar with this? Someone actually gets royalties for BLANK TAPES?!?! Can anyone shed light on this? Maybe a link to the ruling or law or an article or something?
Or perhaps it's time for a complete shift: News publishers, who already have mass market distribution mechanisms and brands for digital media (e.g., NYT, SJMN, etc.) could easily "publish" local bands and provide a payment mechanism for them. The cross-marketing possibilities and cross-selling of products becomes interesting, and most local metro papers already have people familiar with the local music scenes, so the best artists would float to the top more democratically.
Computer disposal has attracted public attention because of a recent report by environmental groups that 50 to 80 percent of American high-technology trash was exported to developing countries. The report described the hazards experienced by residents of China, India and Pakistan who are exposed to the hazards of electronic recycling.
This is the single most important piece of information, and they nearly swept it under the rug in the article. I saw a program about three months ago on one of those TV "news" magazine shows covering this problem.
The used PCs being "recycled" are essentially shipped to third world countries. Peasants there then melt down the boards to "recycle" them. They essentially grab the parts that have resale value and let the other parts seep into the environment.
The video on this program was disturbing, to say the least. A huge junkpile of cases and monitors, everything covered by the soot of the burning fires melting the boards... and the people doing all this completely unprotected in any way. Not even masks. The ground around the entire site had been poisoned beyond any possible near-term use.
This program interviewed a clean recycler in the SF Bay area that said the costs of recycling locally in accordance with California environmental laws was very expensive but that this particular outfit never shipped anything overseas.
Basically, this has to be paid for somehow. Right now we're paying in environmental capital in third world countries. If we want to recover that, then the payment needs to come from the profit margin of the machines, the consumers' payments, or the government (taxes). Your choice.
Is this Microsoft's first step into opening a line of private schools?
That's a scary thought: Microsoft manages to set the public school system back eighty years, then offers the middle and upper-middle classes an educational alternative that promotes the Microsoft Way...
Boy, I'm glad I'm not paranoid because that would be a very scary future.
hopefully they didn't test this software on the typical soap opera... which was probably written by "plot writer version 1.0" anyway.
I can see it now: "The camera predicts that the person on screen will turn out to be the long lost, transgender half-brother of the amnesiatic ex-stripper, and that he will marry the heiress to the papaya plantation..."
The fact of the matter is, would you really be upset if every spammer on the web was hit with multiple class-action suits?
That's not their concern.
The real concern is that some company such as eBay or Microsoft or Sun or anyone (Disney even!), has a ton of money through legitimate business that never infringed on anyone's privacy. What's to stop a lawyer from filing class-action lawsuits against that company charging vague privacy infringements? The company, having oodles of money, will settle rather than go to court. The lawyers make out like bandits while all the company's customers get $0.09 each.
Don't believe it will happen? Happens all the time with shareholder lawsuits. There are law firms that specialize in watching for sharp stock value drops and filing class-action lawsuits on behalf of the shareholders.
Isn't is possible that Hollings sincerely believes that the internet is not living up to its promise as a vehicle for economic growth, and he somehow has come to believe that he has been chosen to spur that growth? And that by some good fortune he has been blessed with superior sight and insight into how to do that?
The biggest question to you now is whether to mod this post up as funny or down as flamebait...
"never ascribe to malice that which can be written off as incompetence"
The real problem with privacy legislation is that the law needs to define clearly something that is very context-sensitive and subjective.
More amusing and insightful than informative, NPR's David Weinberger a week or so ago ran this commentary about how as a digital society we are losing the subtle art of determining the context of information.
In case the link gets/.ed, the fundamental points are these:
The privacy of pretty much all information is context-sensitive.
We use body language, visual and voice cues to indicate whether people should pursue certain lines of questioning or not, or whether something they overheard should be considered private, whether it was said in a public place or not.
Digital communication eliminates these subtle "real world" variables, so it's much more difficult to define what is private and what is not.
As a result, as a society we are beginning to consider all information as public if it happens to be voiced, photographed, etc. anywhere, any time. (Remember the email from the British girl whose celebrated quote, "yours was yum," became international news fodder?)
How do we handle this as a society? How should I know? I had hoped we had elected people smarter than I to figure it out, but after seeing Enron and now Hollings, I'm beginning to despair of that notion...
Suppose EVERTHING were out-in-the-open. Would certain socially embarassing things become more acceptable?
An interesting thought. I've often thought that if everything were public, there would simply be so much noise that signal would be indistinguishable from the noise, even if you knew what you were looking for and where to look for it.
Unfortunately, I doubt any "difinitive solutions" will come from this conference. I have never known any solutions to come from any conference of this type. Ideas perhaps, new discussions started, new alliances and enmities forged. But not solutions.
Privacy has always been and will always be shaped by three opposing forces: freedom, convenience, and safety. It's the job of the citizenry to ensure that these forces remain in relative balance and that none is given undue weight.
Too much emphasis on freedom, perhaps you are inconvenienced and perhaps your safety is compromised (wild west). Too much emphasis on convenience, and perhaps your safety and freedom are compromised to provide that convenience. Too much emphasis on safety, and certainly your freedom and comfort will be sacrificed somewhat to keep you absolutely safe.
So, are monitoring technologies in the hands of law enforcement going to abolish our freedoms and privacy? Not if we temper their use, as we have done with everything from personal search to wiretapping.
I'm not particularly worried, but I am certainly glad that there are people who are, for they are the ones maintaining that delicate balance that keeps those forces in opposition.
Exactly how does this tread on free speech? It still allows those who want to get there and it simplifies controlling access so little Johnny doesn't see what mom and dad don't want him to see.
Basically, you take some content and label it a certain way. Hate speech, adult, violent, disriminatory, anti-semetic, communist, etc. You make everyone who says those things stand in a certain place and wear a badge with that label. Furthermore, you take away their right to say those things in any place other than the one you've set aside for them.
That is trampling all over freedom of speech.
The alternative, which would also achieve all the stated objectives, would be to have a positive labeling rather than a negative labeling: Provide a label for all those sites that ARE kid-friendly. Instead of filtering out the "bad" we should promote the "good."
It is pretty easy to provide a set of requirements for a Web site to meet in order to get the positive labeling (i.e. certification).
"ownership" of content?
on
Coding Fair Use
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· Score: 5, Insightful
The piece makes mention of the entertainment industry trying to move everything to pay-per-view. Clearly, that would be ideal for them. But lost in that worldview is the idea that once I "buy" a bit of content, it's "mine" to do with as I choose, short of republication.
Example: I buy a book. I can read it zero or more times. I can pull pages out and rearrange them or stick them on my wall. I can make a photocopy of portions and keep those pages in my car. I can give the book to a friend, but I'm not allowed to copy the book and give it to a friend.
This right is, of course, what the fair use clauses are meant to protect.
Copyright law is really (or should be!) about publishing--no one but the owner of the "rights" to a piece of work has the legal right to publish it.
Perhaps it's all semantics (but isn't that what the law and politics are about?), but it seems to me we should stop talking about copy rights and start talking about publish rights. Put the battle into the right geography: It's not about making copies but about distributing copies.
If we managed to change the language to a language of publish rights instead of copy rights, then perhaps terms like "piracy" would simply vanish. And, it seems to me, coding protections for publish rights while also coding protections for fair use rights would be less ambiguous and more achievable.
While I understand some/. posters actually do know how to read, I suspect that the closest they get to a book is the title, which tells them all they need to know in order to hold definitive opinions on the book's author, subject, publisher, and political position.
All kidding aside, the resource my wife regularly uses is google to find pages regarding books she reads for her book groups.
I would love to see an internet book database, though I know of none. In fact, I would be interested in contributing to such a project.
The study covered kids ages 6 to 12. They pretty explicitly stated that.
Though it does point out another problem with saying anything is "for kids": Some people naturally think of "kids" as elementary school age, and others naturally think of "kids" as early-mid teens.
As for clicking on ads: I fully believe that kids in the age group, on average (remember, 55 kids spread across 6 years of age!), were unable to tell the difference between ad links and in-site links. Furthermore, I would wager that the ads often were much more attractive to click on (more animation and colors).
I wouldn't take it all personally if I were you. Unless you were one of the kids in the study...
Sites for kids. That's about as vague as "sites for adults" (as opposed to "adult sites," of course).
There are several problems with categorizing the design of kids' sites too generically, though I do believe they did a reasonable attempt judging from the summary.
Kids' abilities vary tremendously
It's important to note that these were elementary school children. A first grader at 6 years old will still be learning how to sit still in his seat, while a fifth grader will begin thinking about his first date. They only studied 55 children, which is not a huge amount.
Socioeconomic status matters
The only thing we know about those 55 kids is that 2/3 were in the US and 1/3 were in Israel (how about Finland? Brazil? Korea? Why Israel?) Kids in lower socioeconomic strata often can't even read basic words until third grade.
Kids have different motivations
Were the kids told to look for information? Were they asked how "fun" the sites were? Why were they on line in the first place? Doing any design study without clearly identifying motivations basically produces useless results. For information, I recall several years ago being fairly impressed with Encarta's UI, and many of the early electronic "books" on CD-ROM (back in 1993-4, before Microsoft co-opted the term). And for entertainment, I have observed little kids really enjoying the "minesweeping" style of interface.
Can sweeping conclusions be drawn from such a study? Probably. But designers should be very wary if anyone ever asks them to make a product for any age group without a hell of a lot deeper segmentation as well.
There are so many Java programmers and so much Java code being produced...
Produced? Yes... supported? Maybe... I wonder what percentage of the Java code written in the last five years died with the series of dot com failures we've witnessed.
That said, of course you're correct: COBOL is still in use, and Java will last much longer than five years.
But the language of choice may be something else in five years. Java hasn't been around that long, and scads of people were saying it would never overtake C or C++ when it was first released. And really, C hadn't been around that long when Java was first introduced.
Slashdot Mirror
One thing ignored in all the comments I read is that school districts have a significant percentage of their computers in administration, not the classroom. Training all those office staff in staroffice or something would not be a trivial undertaking, necessarily. I suppose they could use Macs, but then they'd still be using Microsoft Office.
Mostly, though, I suspect administrators are simply scared to go down a path no one else is going down. Government administrators would rather walk down the wrong path with everyone else than take the right path alone.
...
It's further interesting to have seen recently on /. that MS has $40 billion in the bank. And the letter from the Peruvian government official championing open source software. With the legal actions against Microsoft continuing, it certainly does have the feel of pressure building to the point of explosion...
The problem is, those of us with children are overworked, undervacationed, and damned tired anyway from playing with the kids. (Plus, I don't relish the idea of suddenly becoming my school's unpaid IT manager in order to support all those linux decisions I convinced them to make.)
you mean you can get paid to do program?
holy smokes!
I don't know about the rest of you, but I work an awful lot of the time with headphones on, and my head bobs to the beat pretty much nonstop... I hope the system is smart enough not to scroll up, scroll down, scroll up, scroll down, scroll up...
Who remembers "TV Pow," from an independent station in Hartford, CT, possibly channel 64, back in the early 80's?
During an afternoon cartoon commercial break, two kids would call in and play a Galaxian-like game where each time the kid yelled "POW!" into the phone, his ship would shoot. It was comical because in 30 seconds of play, rarely did anyone ever get more than 2 or 3 points.
Because Best Buy owns Musicland, they support the CBDTPA.
Another reason to avoid shopping there.
Copying a newspaper would actually cost more than buying another one. Economy of scale plays a role here.
But people do photocopy articles under the fair use rules.
And this from the Salon article:
Assuming he meant blank "VCR tapes," is anyone familiar with this? Someone actually gets royalties for BLANK TAPES?!?! Can anyone shed light on this? Maybe a link to the ruling or law or an article or something?
(I couldn't get the paper... must be slashdotted)
Similar to the "donate $1 to odd todd."
Is it time for a nonprofit recording label?
Or perhaps it's time for a complete shift: News publishers, who already have mass market distribution mechanisms and brands for digital media (e.g., NYT, SJMN, etc.) could easily "publish" local bands and provide a payment mechanism for them. The cross-marketing possibilities and cross-selling of products becomes interesting, and most local metro papers already have people familiar with the local music scenes, so the best artists would float to the top more democratically.
This is the single most important piece of information, and they nearly swept it under the rug in the article. I saw a program about three months ago on one of those TV "news" magazine shows covering this problem.
The used PCs being "recycled" are essentially shipped to third world countries. Peasants there then melt down the boards to "recycle" them. They essentially grab the parts that have resale value and let the other parts seep into the environment.
The video on this program was disturbing, to say the least. A huge junkpile of cases and monitors, everything covered by the soot of the burning fires melting the boards... and the people doing all this completely unprotected in any way. Not even masks. The ground around the entire site had been poisoned beyond any possible near-term use.
This program interviewed a clean recycler in the SF Bay area that said the costs of recycling locally in accordance with California environmental laws was very expensive but that this particular outfit never shipped anything overseas.
Basically, this has to be paid for somehow. Right now we're paying in environmental capital in third world countries. If we want to recover that, then the payment needs to come from the profit margin of the machines, the consumers' payments, or the government (taxes). Your choice.
Is this Microsoft's first step into opening a line of private schools?
That's a scary thought: Microsoft manages to set the public school system back eighty years, then offers the middle and upper-middle classes an educational alternative that promotes the Microsoft Way...
Boy, I'm glad I'm not paranoid because that would be a very scary future.
hopefully they didn't test this software on the typical soap opera... which was probably written by "plot writer version 1.0" anyway.
I can see it now: "The camera predicts that the person on screen will turn out to be the long lost, transgender half-brother of the amnesiatic ex-stripper, and that he will marry the heiress to the papaya plantation..."
has been posted here
That's not their concern.
The real concern is that some company such as eBay or Microsoft or Sun or anyone (Disney even!), has a ton of money through legitimate business that never infringed on anyone's privacy. What's to stop a lawyer from filing class-action lawsuits against that company charging vague privacy infringements? The company, having oodles of money, will settle rather than go to court. The lawyers make out like bandits while all the company's customers get $0.09 each.
Don't believe it will happen? Happens all the time with shareholder lawsuits. There are law firms that specialize in watching for sharp stock value drops and filing class-action lawsuits on behalf of the shareholders.
Isn't is possible that Hollings sincerely believes that the internet is not living up to its promise as a vehicle for economic growth, and he somehow has come to believe that he has been chosen to spur that growth? And that by some good fortune he has been blessed with superior sight and insight into how to do that?
The biggest question to you now is whether to mod this post up as funny or down as flamebait...
"never ascribe to malice that which can be written off as incompetence"
The real problem with privacy legislation is that the law needs to define clearly something that is very context-sensitive and subjective.
More amusing and insightful than informative, NPR's David Weinberger a week or so ago ran this commentary about how as a digital society we are losing the subtle art of determining the context of information.
In case the link gets /.ed, the fundamental points are these:
How do we handle this as a society? How should I know? I had hoped we had elected people smarter than I to figure it out, but after seeing Enron and now Hollings, I'm beginning to despair of that notion...
An interesting thought. I've often thought that if everything were public, there would simply be so much noise that signal would be indistinguishable from the noise, even if you knew what you were looking for and where to look for it.
Unfortunately, I doubt any "difinitive solutions" will come from this conference. I have never known any solutions to come from any conference of this type. Ideas perhaps, new discussions started, new alliances and enmities forged. But not solutions.
Privacy has always been and will always be shaped by three opposing forces: freedom, convenience, and safety. It's the job of the citizenry to ensure that these forces remain in relative balance and that none is given undue weight.
Too much emphasis on freedom, perhaps you are inconvenienced and perhaps your safety is compromised (wild west). Too much emphasis on convenience, and perhaps your safety and freedom are compromised to provide that convenience. Too much emphasis on safety, and certainly your freedom and comfort will be sacrificed somewhat to keep you absolutely safe.
So, are monitoring technologies in the hands of law enforcement going to abolish our freedoms and privacy? Not if we temper their use, as we have done with everything from personal search to wiretapping.
I'm not particularly worried, but I am certainly glad that there are people who are, for they are the ones maintaining that delicate balance that keeps those forces in opposition.
even worse... it lets all your neighbors also stay on line round the clock
Basically, you take some content and label it a certain way. Hate speech, adult, violent, disriminatory, anti-semetic, communist, etc. You make everyone who says those things stand in a certain place and wear a badge with that label. Furthermore, you take away their right to say those things in any place other than the one you've set aside for them.
That is trampling all over freedom of speech.
The alternative, which would also achieve all the stated objectives, would be to have a positive labeling rather than a negative labeling: Provide a label for all those sites that ARE kid-friendly. Instead of filtering out the "bad" we should promote the "good."
It is pretty easy to provide a set of requirements for a Web site to meet in order to get the positive labeling (i.e. certification).
The piece makes mention of the entertainment industry trying to move everything to pay-per-view. Clearly, that would be ideal for them. But lost in that worldview is the idea that once I "buy" a bit of content, it's "mine" to do with as I choose, short of republication.
Example: I buy a book. I can read it zero or more times. I can pull pages out and rearrange them or stick them on my wall. I can make a photocopy of portions and keep those pages in my car. I can give the book to a friend, but I'm not allowed to copy the book and give it to a friend.
This right is, of course, what the fair use clauses are meant to protect.
Copyright law is really (or should be!) about publishing--no one but the owner of the "rights" to a piece of work has the legal right to publish it.
Perhaps it's all semantics (but isn't that what the law and politics are about?), but it seems to me we should stop talking about copy rights and start talking about publish rights. Put the battle into the right geography: It's not about making copies but about distributing copies.
If we managed to change the language to a language of publish rights instead of copy rights, then perhaps terms like "piracy" would simply vanish. And, it seems to me, coding protections for publish rights while also coding protections for fair use rights would be less ambiguous and more achievable.
While I understand some /. posters actually do know how to read, I suspect that the closest they get to a book is the title, which tells them all they need to know in order to hold definitive opinions on the book's author, subject, publisher, and political position.
All kidding aside, the resource my wife regularly uses is google to find pages regarding books she reads for her book groups.
I would love to see an internet book database, though I know of none. In fact, I would be interested in contributing to such a project.
The study covered kids ages 6 to 12. They pretty explicitly stated that.
Though it does point out another problem with saying anything is "for kids": Some people naturally think of "kids" as elementary school age, and others naturally think of "kids" as early-mid teens.
As for clicking on ads: I fully believe that kids in the age group, on average (remember, 55 kids spread across 6 years of age!), were unable to tell the difference between ad links and in-site links. Furthermore, I would wager that the ads often were much more attractive to click on (more animation and colors).
I wouldn't take it all personally if I were you. Unless you were one of the kids in the study...
Sites for kids. That's about as vague as "sites for adults" (as opposed to "adult sites," of course).
There are several problems with categorizing the design of kids' sites too generically, though I do believe they did a reasonable attempt judging from the summary.
It's important to note that these were elementary school children. A first grader at 6 years old will still be learning how to sit still in his seat, while a fifth grader will begin thinking about his first date. They only studied 55 children, which is not a huge amount.
The only thing we know about those 55 kids is that 2/3 were in the US and 1/3 were in Israel (how about Finland? Brazil? Korea? Why Israel?) Kids in lower socioeconomic strata often can't even read basic words until third grade.
Were the kids told to look for information? Were they asked how "fun" the sites were? Why were they on line in the first place? Doing any design study without clearly identifying motivations basically produces useless results. For information, I recall several years ago being fairly impressed with Encarta's UI, and many of the early electronic "books" on CD-ROM (back in 1993-4, before Microsoft co-opted the term). And for entertainment, I have observed little kids really enjoying the "minesweeping" style of interface.
Can sweeping conclusions be drawn from such a study? Probably. But designers should be very wary if anyone ever asks them to make a product for any age group without a hell of a lot deeper segmentation as well.
Produced? Yes... supported? Maybe... I wonder what percentage of the Java code written in the last five years died with the series of dot com failures we've witnessed.
That said, of course you're correct: COBOL is still in use, and Java will last much longer than five years.
But the language of choice may be something else in five years. Java hasn't been around that long, and scads of people were saying it would never overtake C or C++ when it was first released. And really, C hadn't been around that long when Java was first introduced.