Then you use a number unique to them in their context, but for the most part, the vast majority of the kinds of customers you'd need to uniquely identify for a US company are US residents and since you can't work without an SSN, people who don't have one aren't generally good customers or will pay in cash.
Well for credit checks for one, which is one of the things they do with it. It can be useful for medical records too. Government benefits. Taxation, criminal records. Knowing who you are(and more importantly who you aren't) is rather important for an awful lot of things. Most of these companies mostly want it to make sure you pay your bill. It doesn't technically need to be the PK, but if it's unique it may as well be.
Your SSN isn't really all that important a number in and of itself. The only reason it's important at all is because it's unique to you, any number you have which associates you with something can be stolen and the percentage of your identity associated with that number can be stolen. That's because no one ever validates that the SSN you give is actually yours, which is sort of where the whole problem comes in. Until a solution is worked out for that identity theft isn't going to go away any time soon.
And what would you suggest as an alternative? The SSN is the only unique number that a US citizen has, and every US citizen has one. Sometimes you need a PK which actually identifies someone, not just one which identifies the record in your database.
The problem with SSN's and identity theft is verifying that an SSN belongs to a person not the SSN itself, if you replace the SSN with someone other number which is sufficiently unique as to identify you as an individual it's sufficiently unique for someone to be able to use it to steal your identity.
I don't know what the solution to identity theft is, but no one knowing your SSN is not likely to be it. I think most likely the solution is penalties for companies and government departments who take inadequate steps to identify people and/or increasing the documentary requirements for certain kinds of identification. There might have to be some sort of central identification system for on-line purchases, who knows.
I second this actually. I was born in Australia, lived 13 years in the states, have dual citizenship and have voted in both countries. In addition to all the above points, things are also a lot easier to change here for whatever reason. The government puts something unpleasant in, they get caned in the next election and the new government takes it out, we get a few years of garbage and then it goes away. We also have a tendency down here to take great joy in taking folks who get to uppity down a peg regardless of their political party.
Stephen Conroy is an ass, and the fact that Rudd hasn't shit canned him is fairly odd. I can only assume that his situation in the senate is causing him to want to appear to be supporting the Christian loons, so he can get legislation through. I don't really think he's all that serious about it though, it doesn't really come up here all that often and the government certainly isn't making it an issue nor do they want to. The right is in disarray at the moment, and the government would like to keep it that way, giving them something unpopular to rally around(and in all reality any actually implemented three strikes law would be very unpopular in any country) would be rather silly. I don't think that anyone in the liberal party has sufficiently strong feelings about this issue not to ride it to the next election if they thought it could win them government.
Even the Christian loons are only really against the porn, not the piracy anyway. We don't really have much of a commercial consumer software market down here, so we don't really care about that. Australian film only exists because the government subsidizes it, aside from every actor/actress with any talent going overseas, Australian film makers love to make movies Australians don't want to watch, so they've got no real power. ARIA(our RIAA) has a little bit more authority but not all that much.
I'm not really convinced that anyone in government other than Stephen Conroy really wants this to pass, and I'm not sure even he cares about piracy. What I am convinced of is that if the government passes and enforces a three strikes law, and it proves to be unpopular(as is inevitable), at the next election they'll be out on the street again and the law will be gone. After 11 years out of power, I don't think that they're likely to risk that, they do need to look like they're doing something for the Christian right though so that they can get a senate vote from the right wing loony who got in there, and maybe the anti-gambling loony as well. To pass this shit they'd need the 5 members of the green party though, and that ain't going to happen.
When you hire an outsourcing company, you're hiring the company, not it's employees. You do due diligence on the company, it's achievements, it's reputation, and you hire the company. You sign a contract with them, with the same sorts of conditions you'd stick in a regular employment contract to try and ensure that you're going to get what you're paying for. The employees of the outsourcing agency are not your employees and there's really nothing you can do about them because your contract isn't with them, it's with the agency.
That doesn't of course mean you just go with "whatever you decide" on non staffing issues, the company works for you the same way an employee would and you take their advice as appropriate, but who they hire is really none of your business, so long as the company meets its contractual obligations to you. Most of the outsourcing problems are caused by companies not realizing that the outsourcing agency is essentially an employee and not writing stringent enough contracts, or hiring the cheapest option without looking at their ability to actually deliver(which is no different than hiring an18 year old to do a job which requires substantial education and experience simply because you can get them on the cheap).
Not all outsourcing is done on the cheap, sometimes it's done because it's more efficient that way. It's always good to have multiple people with your skill set to bounce ideas off of, and to have backup for absences and the like, but most smallish companies can't afford to have 3 or 4 DBA or sysadmins, etc. So they contract out to another company who, because they provide services to a number of companies, can afford to have more extra people to fill key roles. Their economic situation allows that.
There are advantages to outsourcing beyond just being cheaper, but there are disadvantages to. You don't have the same control of the staffing, you don't have the same kinds of relationships with the staff, and the loyalty of the staff is generally to their employer and not to you. That's not always a huge problem, but sometimes it is, and if it is, expect to have to pay for a redundant DBA or sysadmin so you can keep your place going when they go on vacation. There are pluses and minuses to everything, including outsourcing, and sometimes outsourcing isn't done because it's cheaper, and sometimes when it is, it doesn't turn out to be. When you run your business based entirely on trying to reduce costs, generally you eventually go out of business, that applies to pretty much every field, not just IT our outsourcing.
Certainly human corruption is a universal issue, and certainly without proper vigilance said corruption will, in all likelihood occur in anything that can be abused.
However, the idea is not to be vigilant for anything that might possibly be abused and prevent it(we'd basically have to all stay locked in our houses and not move in order to achieve this, but to be vigilant for abuse and to fight it when/if it occurs.
Everything on earth can be abused, that doesn't meant that we shouldn't do anything, it means we should punish the abusers.
When you talk of slap on the wrist fines for big companies. That's not a failure of regulation, that's a failure of regulators. Punishment for crimes should be appropriate.
As for those four things you feel should be enforced, if you change assault and murder to something along the lines of unjustified harm and threats of harm, they cover the intent behind pretty much every law on the face of the planet anyway. Including nearly every corporate regulation on the face of the planet. SOX, however stupid and overblown law it is, is designed to allow the government to prosecute fraud, which is on your list. Insider trading is a combination of fraud and property rights(two or more members of a financial partnership using information about the shared asset unknown to other members to achieve financial gain at the expense of their partners).
I'm not saying that every regulation is good. I'm not saying that everything in the world needs to be regulated. I'm saying that the free market, if it exists(and I don't really believe it does or can) depends fundamentally on the rule of law for it's survival. You can't have a free market without the rule of law. Since the free market depends on the population being subject to the rule of law, and the members of the free market are members of that same population(even if they pretend to be corporations instead) the members of the free market fundamentally must be subject to the rule of law. That means that any laws which should apply to the people should apply equally to corporations. If people cannot commit fraud because it would destroy the free market, then corporations cannot either. If people cannot use threats of harm to coerce people into unfair service, neither should corporations be able to do so. A corporation isn't absolved of all legal and ethical responsibility because it's a corporation, and the free market cannot exist if it was.
Again, that's not to say that there aren't laws both for regular people and corporations which are unfair, cause more harm than good, or which punish the less well off disproportionately(be they small businesses or poor people). That however is an argument against specific pieces of legislation and perhaps against the legislators who drafted or voted for them. It's not a condemnation of all legislation on a fundamental level.
Unless you can change human nature, freedom, of all kinds, relies on the rule of law. The only reason the cops can't grab you off the street, convict you of any crime they feel like without a trial and throw you in jail for life(or just beat you for the fun of it) is that the rule of law protects you, like it protects all of us.
The somewhat unfortunate truth of life is that in addition to laws we like which protect us from others, sometimes there have to be laws we don't like which protect others from us. Sometimes to protect the freedom of others, our own freedom must be curtailed just as the freedom of others must be curtailed to protect our own.
Not all law is good, not all law is right, but some law is necessary, and it's a lot more complicated than thou shalt not steal.
The free market doesn't exist the way you think it does, it can't because the free market is ALWAYS subject to external non free forces. One guy with a gun can set the price of any object to zero. A seller can lie to you about what they're selling, contaminate what you're buying, or any number of other things.
Regulation is just the rule of law applied in a specific circumstance, and if you think that because all of a sudden I'm selling you something or buying something from you that I'm no longer a human with all the general faults that humans have which require all the other laws we have, then you're an idiot.
We need laws to stop people from killing people, and we need laws to stop businesses from killing people. We need laws to stop people from stealing from people, we need laws to stop businesses stealing from people. Businesses are made up of people, and they're just as likely to be dishonest scum sucking weasels as any crack addict you might find in a dark alley. Perhaps even more likely since that crack addict has to kill you with his bare hands, whereas the CEO only has to sign a piece of paper.
Regulation is necessary, it always has been and it always will be. The question up for debate has always really been, which regulations are appropriate and which regulations are inappropriate. There are certainly bad regulations, but there are also good ones.
You also have to remember that when certain actions are taken, like pouring toxic waste into a river, certain costs are incurred. The company doesn't incur those costs, the people living by that river do. As a representative of the people living by that river, the government is quite right in stopping the company from pouring that waste in.
That's a rather simplistic example of course, but the principle is the same. The free market does not make flawed people less flawed. The free market relies fundamentally on the rule of law for it to function(most specifically the legal protection of property). The idea that an individual is subject to the law, but that a group of individuals should not be is a logical fallacy. Therefor law needs to apply to corporations, and that's what regulation is.
The problem is that "winner" has multiple definitions, and not all of them are nice.
Unfettered by any law, the "winner" is usually chosen by the law of the jungle. They're usually the guys with the largest body count, and, generally speaking, they're not nice people. It's not really all that good for society to have them be the "winner", and it's sure as hell not good for the people who are the "loser", which in all reality is the vast majority of us.
This leaves us wanting to change the winner. Now you've really only got two ways to change the winner. Either you remove the current winner from the game and let the game pick another winner, who will basically be the same as the previous winner, OR you change the rules.
Those of us who favor more regulation basically want to change the rules so we can change the winner. Sometimes when people want to do that it's because they want the winner to be themselves, but sometimes it's because they want a situation wherein the winner doesn't make the losers life so terrible.
That's what civilization is really about, trying to control who wins so that the people who lose don't lose as badly. Despite what everyone tends to believe, the average person has far more power today than they have ever had in the entire history of our species. It's not uniform throughout the world, but it's certainly better overall pretty much everywhere.
The reason people think that this is not the case is that, because the average person covers a lot more kinds of people than it used to, they personally have less power. If you are an educated, white, western male, you have less power than you did 50 years ago, because we're sharing that power with a lot more people than you used to have to share it with. That's not necessarily a bad thing.
He did this patch for work, his motivation for submitting it is not having to maintain it in parallel. All he did was add a feature, why would he want to pick up the whole damned thing?
There are plenty of opportunities in IT, like every other industry on earth, for people who have the right kind of skills and personalities to carve out success and a future of their own. There's no guarantee, but there's no guarantee in anything. If you're truly an entrepreneurial type, and you want to work in IT, then more power to you, you've got as much of a chance of success as anywhere else.
If on the other hand what you want is a job where you can make a quick buck and you don't like the job. Those days are over. You can still make money, but you probably won't get it straight out of the gate and you'll have to be able to provide business value like everyone else. This is a good thing, it keeps the crooked "cross my palm with silver" bastards out of the field and leaves it to people who like it and want to earn an honest living.
In my personal experience, unless you're so in demand that you really don't need an interview anyway, the first person who mentions a monetary figure loses, and if it's the potential employee it's usually worse.
The reasons for this is rather simple. If you underbid, you lose out on cash, no employer on earth will offer you more than you asked for. If you overbid, especially if it's by too much, you risk alienating the employer and are likely to end up not getting what you want.
If on the other hand, they overbid, they don't need to know that and you score. If they underbid, you can refuse, without looking like a greedy asshole and blowing a potential later contact, and if they want you enough, they'll up it.
Salary questions are definitely important, but they're not the be all and end all of getting a job. I value a whole bunch of things above straight dollar figures(so long as the dollars are reasonable of course). Even more importantly, unless you're really strapped for time and don't need the job, negotiating them after they've made an offer will put you in a much stronger position.
As to the general question, the questions you should ask an employer are the questions where the wrong answer means you won't take the job. If you need to have weekends off 100% of the time, ask that, if you need to be able to work flexible hours, ask if you can. If all you're looking for is a paycheck so you don't end up on the street, and you don't really care about anything else. Then you can stick to the pointless crap you ask to show you're interested in the company. Check any employment agency web site and they'll give you a list of them, all they're for is to show you're keen.
The basic rule is that, asking for too much can make you look greedy and cause you problems. Asking too little gets you a job that doesn't meet your needs. The most important skill in life is to know what you need, as opposed to what you want and how far you can go down the want pile and get away with it.
Not especially, whatever you may think, a patent is a legal document, not a technical one. Thing is there's a few things in there which indicate something more than just an xml document. For instance there's a number of references to something that sounds like implying the data format from the document itself. Now that could just be xml, or they could be patenting something to do with the self description.
It could also be a patent on a specific format, which might also be alright.
It just seems too strange that even the patent office could grant a patent based on the information provided if it's for what the submitter claims. The whole claim is full of examples of prior art as well as descriptions for why xml is designed for this specific purpose.
, but I did RTFP, and I'm not entirely clear on what they're actually patenting and whether what they're patenting and what the sumbitterclaims they're patenting are actually the same thing.
Patenting what the submitter claims they're patenting, seems too ludicrous even for the USPTO, and there's a lot of things in the patent which don't make much sense if that's actually what's being patented. I would appreciate it if someone with more knowledge of patents could take a look at this thing and confirm what they're actually patenting.
It may not be financial, and it may not actually be with the developer of the software, but there's always an agreement even if the agreement is implicit. I ask for a piece of software(by clicking on a url or whatever) and the distributor agrees to give it to me. I can tell they agreed to give it to me because the file started downloading. Presuming I haven't circumvented any security to access this link, and the distributor knows that the link is there, there is an implicit distribution agreement between myself and the party providing the software. Where that agreement exists, there exists the potential for liability. There's a question of course as to that liability transfers to the developer, but just because you got it for free and didn't sign anything doesn't mean there wasn't an agreement, and it's got nothing at all to do with the GPL. You could definitely make it a provision of a new GPL version that in order to distribute the software, you take liability, and protect the original developer, but I don't think that would work very well.
The reality of the situation is that people who provide software for a purpose are probably liable for ensuring that the software is fit for that purpose. There's almost certainly a lot of work that needs to be done to determine what level of bugs and what level of knowledge is required for liability and whether you can get explicit acceptance of known bugs as part of the distribution of a piece of software(in the case of bugs which are too expensive to fix) and to what degree. There may also need to be explicit protection for software provided gratis, but that would probably need to be an explicit exception to liability. Free as in speech makes no difference at all, only free as in beer.
Well aside from the fact that the answer is probably "yes" anyway, TFA refers to software which is knowingly selling buggy software, which in your metaphor would be giving the homeless guy a sandwich you knew was tainted. If you knowingly gave the homeless guy a tainted sandwich and he died you'd not only be liable in a financial sense, you'd probably also be liable criminally.
A lot of contracts all over the world have clauses which are unenforceable.
Employment contracts contain overly broad non compete agreements, stores claim they won't refund your money under any circumstances, companies deny liability for things they are liable for.
Just because software developers claim they are not liable, doesn't in any way mean that they are actually not liable. They're claiming it and hoping that it either isn't challenged or it stands in court. It might, it might not. Even contracts both parties discuss and sign cannot enforce an illegal provision. If I sign a contract selling myself, or someone else into slavery in a country where slavery is illegal, that contract isn't binding or legal. There are limitations to everything.
The Europeans are behind in clean coal because clean coal is stupid. The only reason anyone invests in it is to protect their existing coal industry. That's why Australia leads the world in clean coal research, because we have a huge coal industry and since coal makes money the right doesn't want to piss off the owners, and since coal miners are generally union, the left doesn't want to piss them off. Investment in clean coal isn't about making the right environmental choice. Clean coal involves somehow magically stuffing all the bad stuff back into the ground and keeping it there forever, and in all likelihood it's not going to work, particularly since unlike nuclear waste, the bad stuff is a gas.
Over here we have European style gas taxes, and substantially higher prices, and we've got more clean coal research than the US. It has nothing to do with the tax system and everything to do with local economic interest.
Pork is when you spend money which doesn't need to be spent and which has no relation to the bill being voted on to benefit your own constituents. Pork is bad.
Trying to get money which is already going to be spent spent in your community is representing your constituents. Representing your constituents is good. That's what congress critters are supposed to do, represent the interests of the people who voted them in.
We've all gotten a little to free with the word pork. Republics are about representation and if your local representative doesn't represent your interests then you may as well just do away with local representatives entirely and vote for a political party.
Folks in congress are supposed to represent their constituents, that's their job, it's why they were elected. They're supposed to have some degree of broader vision so that at least sometimes they give their constituents what they need instead of what they want, but for the most part, their job is to vote on behalf of the people who voted them in. The national interest is supposed to be served by the president, and by the balance of power between the various and sundry more local representatives.
To reiterate. If you are a member of the house, your job is to vote on behalf of the people who voted you in, it's how the system works. If there's a 5 billion dollar project that needs a location you SHOULD be fighting to get that project built in your district.
Pork on the other hand is generally a matter of quid pro quo, something you vote for to get something else in return, and even that isn't really a problem. The problem is when they tie this sort of quid pro quo into unrelated bills. What we need is to restrict a given bill to covering only its own subject matter. So if you're creating an environmental law banning logging or something it needs to cover only banning logging, not building a football stadium. There's a lot of gray areas and judgement in this kind of thing which is why it's so hard to enforce. If you're talking about protecting a particular bit of forest, and the football stadium is on adjacent land, then they might be related, but that should be obvious from the bill.
The kind of people who would want to work in this kind of joint are a relatively specialized field. There aren't research jobs studying highly infectious diseases jut lying about unfilled, and there aren't really all that many places you can work if you want this particular job. Yes most of the people who would have these kind of specialties could probably get jobs in related fields, but there's a certain something that doing this kind of thing has for these kind of people. They'll move to wherever the jobs are because it's what they want to do. You don't take a job like this for the money(it's likely not that high) and you don't take it for the wonderful working conditions(the safety measures for this kind of thing aren't exactly good times), you take it because it's what you want to do.
Yes, s1ashdot.org is a rather pathetic attack. The point is that I can get a perfectly valid cert and all it tells you is that I'm the person who bought that cert(though there are likely dns attacks which could get you around this).
Sometimes when you're dealing with someone who is exceptionally well known(slashdot, microsoft, etc), but that's not always the case. I'm fairly certain that, at least in theory, you could reregister an expired cert from any of these sites if they happened to let it expire.
Fundamentally, the problem is that verisign is not trustworthy, and the obsession with self signed certificates tends to try and obscure this. We really need to come up with a better solution.
It's not actually adequate, for SSH or for the secure web. If you want a secure connection you need to identify not only that your conversation isn't being listened to, but that you're talking to the person you think you are. Identity is an important part of real security.
The problem is that certificates don't ensure identity, and making a big fuss about them really serves no purpose. Verisign requires no proof of identity(beyond a valid credit card) let alone authority to act on behalf of any given entity. I've personally ordered a cert with a company credit card for someone else who wasn't even an employee of the company. The only form of security involved in the process was someone checking the credit card statement.
Making a fuss about security isn't a problem. The problem is making a fuss about a security feature which doesn't actually work. I could go and get a signed certificate for s1ashdot.org tomorrow if someone hasn't already, and if I scam linked someone to it, it would work perfectly well. If I had access to stolen credit card numbers there's nothing that would stop me doing that either. Browsers make a fuss about certificates, but certificates don't accomplish what the browsers claim they do. When people encounter legitimate self signed certs they ignore the warnings, and there's no real reason why they shouldn't.
For the purposes of this post, "web" means anything they access through a browser. Self signed certs are not all that uncommon on internal company web systems, and users don't really know the difference.
Slashdot Mirror
Then you use a number unique to them in their context, but for the most part, the vast majority of the kinds of customers you'd need to uniquely identify for a US company are US residents and since you can't work without an SSN, people who don't have one aren't generally good customers or will pay in cash.
Well for credit checks for one, which is one of the things they do with it. It can be useful for medical records too. Government benefits. Taxation, criminal records. Knowing who you are(and more importantly who you aren't) is rather important for an awful lot of things. Most of these companies mostly want it to make sure you pay your bill. It doesn't technically need to be the PK, but if it's unique it may as well be.
Your SSN isn't really all that important a number in and of itself. The only reason it's important at all is because it's unique to you, any number you have which associates you with something can be stolen and the percentage of your identity associated with that number can be stolen. That's because no one ever validates that the SSN you give is actually yours, which is sort of where the whole problem comes in. Until a solution is worked out for that identity theft isn't going to go away any time soon.
And what would you suggest as an alternative? The SSN is the only unique number that a US citizen has, and every US citizen has one. Sometimes you need a PK which actually identifies someone, not just one which identifies the record in your database.
The problem with SSN's and identity theft is verifying that an SSN belongs to a person not the SSN itself, if you replace the SSN with someone other number which is sufficiently unique as to identify you as an individual it's sufficiently unique for someone to be able to use it to steal your identity.
I don't know what the solution to identity theft is, but no one knowing your SSN is not likely to be it. I think most likely the solution is penalties for companies and government departments who take inadequate steps to identify people and/or increasing the documentary requirements for certain kinds of identification. There might have to be some sort of central identification system for on-line purchases, who knows.
I second this actually. I was born in Australia, lived 13 years in the states, have dual citizenship and have voted in both countries. In addition to all the above points, things are also a lot easier to change here for whatever reason. The government puts something unpleasant in, they get caned in the next election and the new government takes it out, we get a few years of garbage and then it goes away. We also have a tendency down here to take great joy in taking folks who get to uppity down a peg regardless of their political party.
Stephen Conroy is an ass, and the fact that Rudd hasn't shit canned him is fairly odd. I can only assume that his situation in the senate is causing him to want to appear to be supporting the Christian loons, so he can get legislation through. I don't really think he's all that serious about it though, it doesn't really come up here all that often and the government certainly isn't making it an issue nor do they want to. The right is in disarray at the moment, and the government would like to keep it that way, giving them something unpopular to rally around(and in all reality any actually implemented three strikes law would be very unpopular in any country) would be rather silly. I don't think that anyone in the liberal party has sufficiently strong feelings about this issue not to ride it to the next election if they thought it could win them government.
Even the Christian loons are only really against the porn, not the piracy anyway. We don't really have much of a commercial consumer software market down here, so we don't really care about that. Australian film only exists because the government subsidizes it, aside from every actor/actress with any talent going overseas, Australian film makers love to make movies Australians don't want to watch, so they've got no real power. ARIA(our RIAA) has a little bit more authority but not all that much.
I'm not really convinced that anyone in government other than Stephen Conroy really wants this to pass, and I'm not sure even he cares about piracy. What I am convinced of is that if the government passes and enforces a three strikes law, and it proves to be unpopular(as is inevitable), at the next election they'll be out on the street again and the law will be gone. After 11 years out of power, I don't think that they're likely to risk that, they do need to look like they're doing something for the Christian right though so that they can get a senate vote from the right wing loony who got in there, and maybe the anti-gambling loony as well. To pass this shit they'd need the 5 members of the green party though, and that ain't going to happen.
That's how it works.
When you hire an outsourcing company, you're hiring the company, not it's employees. You do due diligence on the company, it's achievements, it's reputation, and you hire the company. You sign a contract with them, with the same sorts of conditions you'd stick in a regular employment contract to try and ensure that you're going to get what you're paying for. The employees of the outsourcing agency are not your employees and there's really nothing you can do about them because your contract isn't with them, it's with the agency.
That doesn't of course mean you just go with "whatever you decide" on non staffing issues, the company works for you the same way an employee would and you take their advice as appropriate, but who they hire is really none of your business, so long as the company meets its contractual obligations to you. Most of the outsourcing problems are caused by companies not realizing that the outsourcing agency is essentially an employee and not writing stringent enough contracts, or hiring the cheapest option without looking at their ability to actually deliver(which is no different than hiring an18 year old to do a job which requires substantial education and experience simply because you can get them on the cheap).
Not all outsourcing is done on the cheap, sometimes it's done because it's more efficient that way. It's always good to have multiple people with your skill set to bounce ideas off of, and to have backup for absences and the like, but most smallish companies can't afford to have 3 or 4 DBA or sysadmins, etc. So they contract out to another company who, because they provide services to a number of companies, can afford to have more extra people to fill key roles. Their economic situation allows that.
There are advantages to outsourcing beyond just being cheaper, but there are disadvantages to. You don't have the same control of the staffing, you don't have the same kinds of relationships with the staff, and the loyalty of the staff is generally to their employer and not to you. That's not always a huge problem, but sometimes it is, and if it is, expect to have to pay for a redundant DBA or sysadmin so you can keep your place going when they go on vacation. There are pluses and minuses to everything, including outsourcing, and sometimes outsourcing isn't done because it's cheaper, and sometimes when it is, it doesn't turn out to be. When you run your business based entirely on trying to reduce costs, generally you eventually go out of business, that applies to pretty much every field, not just IT our outsourcing.
I just get sort of sick of the whole, "nothing can ever change because that change could be abused". FFS this is a tech site, not an AARP meeting.
I'm kind of sick of this attitude.
Certainly human corruption is a universal issue, and certainly without proper vigilance said corruption will, in all likelihood occur in anything that can be abused.
However, the idea is not to be vigilant for anything that might possibly be abused and prevent it(we'd basically have to all stay locked in our houses and not move in order to achieve this, but to be vigilant for abuse and to fight it when/if it occurs.
Everything on earth can be abused, that doesn't meant that we shouldn't do anything, it means we should punish the abusers.
When you talk of slap on the wrist fines for big companies. That's not a failure of regulation, that's a failure of regulators. Punishment for crimes should be appropriate.
As for those four things you feel should be enforced, if you change assault and murder to something along the lines of unjustified harm and threats of harm, they cover the intent behind pretty much every law on the face of the planet anyway. Including nearly every corporate regulation on the face of the planet. SOX, however stupid and overblown law it is, is designed to allow the government to prosecute fraud, which is on your list. Insider trading is a combination of fraud and property rights(two or more members of a financial partnership using information about the shared asset unknown to other members to achieve financial gain at the expense of their partners).
I'm not saying that every regulation is good. I'm not saying that everything in the world needs to be regulated. I'm saying that the free market, if it exists(and I don't really believe it does or can) depends fundamentally on the rule of law for it's survival. You can't have a free market without the rule of law. Since the free market depends on the population being subject to the rule of law, and the members of the free market are members of that same population(even if they pretend to be corporations instead) the members of the free market fundamentally must be subject to the rule of law. That means that any laws which should apply to the people should apply equally to corporations. If people cannot commit fraud because it would destroy the free market, then corporations cannot either. If people cannot use threats of harm to coerce people into unfair service, neither should corporations be able to do so. A corporation isn't absolved of all legal and ethical responsibility because it's a corporation, and the free market cannot exist if it was.
Again, that's not to say that there aren't laws both for regular people and corporations which are unfair, cause more harm than good, or which punish the less well off disproportionately(be they small businesses or poor people). That however is an argument against specific pieces of legislation and perhaps against the legislators who drafted or voted for them. It's not a condemnation of all legislation on a fundamental level.
Unless you can change human nature, freedom, of all kinds, relies on the rule of law. The only reason the cops can't grab you off the street, convict you of any crime they feel like without a trial and throw you in jail for life(or just beat you for the fun of it) is that the rule of law protects you, like it protects all of us.
The somewhat unfortunate truth of life is that in addition to laws we like which protect us from others, sometimes there have to be laws we don't like which protect others from us. Sometimes to protect the freedom of others, our own freedom must be curtailed just as the freedom of others must be curtailed to protect our own.
Not all law is good, not all law is right, but some law is necessary, and it's a lot more complicated than thou shalt not steal.
The free market doesn't exist the way you think it does, it can't because the free market is ALWAYS subject to external non free forces. One guy with a gun can set the price of any object to zero. A seller can lie to you about what they're selling, contaminate what you're buying, or any number of other things.
Regulation is just the rule of law applied in a specific circumstance, and if you think that because all of a sudden I'm selling you something or buying something from you that I'm no longer a human with all the general faults that humans have which require all the other laws we have, then you're an idiot.
We need laws to stop people from killing people, and we need laws to stop businesses from killing people. We need laws to stop people from stealing from people, we need laws to stop businesses stealing from people. Businesses are made up of people, and they're just as likely to be dishonest scum sucking weasels as any crack addict you might find in a dark alley. Perhaps even more likely since that crack addict has to kill you with his bare hands, whereas the CEO only has to sign a piece of paper.
Regulation is necessary, it always has been and it always will be. The question up for debate has always really been, which regulations are appropriate and which regulations are inappropriate. There are certainly bad regulations, but there are also good ones.
You also have to remember that when certain actions are taken, like pouring toxic waste into a river, certain costs are incurred. The company doesn't incur those costs, the people living by that river do. As a representative of the people living by that river, the government is quite right in stopping the company from pouring that waste in.
That's a rather simplistic example of course, but the principle is the same. The free market does not make flawed people less flawed. The free market relies fundamentally on the rule of law for it to function(most specifically the legal protection of property). The idea that an individual is subject to the law, but that a group of individuals should not be is a logical fallacy. Therefor law needs to apply to corporations, and that's what regulation is.
The problem is that "winner" has multiple definitions, and not all of them are nice.
Unfettered by any law, the "winner" is usually chosen by the law of the jungle. They're usually the guys with the largest body count, and, generally speaking, they're not nice people. It's not really all that good for society to have them be the "winner", and it's sure as hell not good for the people who are the "loser", which in all reality is the vast majority of us.
This leaves us wanting to change the winner. Now you've really only got two ways to change the winner. Either you remove the current winner from the game and let the game pick another winner, who will basically be the same as the previous winner, OR you change the rules.
Those of us who favor more regulation basically want to change the rules so we can change the winner. Sometimes when people want to do that it's because they want the winner to be themselves, but sometimes it's because they want a situation wherein the winner doesn't make the losers life so terrible.
That's what civilization is really about, trying to control who wins so that the people who lose don't lose as badly. Despite what everyone tends to believe, the average person has far more power today than they have ever had in the entire history of our species. It's not uniform throughout the world, but it's certainly better overall pretty much everywhere.
The reason people think that this is not the case is that, because the average person covers a lot more kinds of people than it used to, they personally have less power. If you are an educated, white, western male, you have less power than you did 50 years ago, because we're sharing that power with a lot more people than you used to have to share it with. That's not necessarily a bad thing.
Why on earth would he want to do that?
He did this patch for work, his motivation for submitting it is not having to maintain it in parallel. All he did was add a feature, why would he want to pick up the whole damned thing?
There are plenty of opportunities in IT, like every other industry on earth, for people who have the right kind of skills and personalities to carve out success and a future of their own. There's no guarantee, but there's no guarantee in anything. If you're truly an entrepreneurial type, and you want to work in IT, then more power to you, you've got as much of a chance of success as anywhere else.
If on the other hand what you want is a job where you can make a quick buck and you don't like the job. Those days are over. You can still make money, but you probably won't get it straight out of the gate and you'll have to be able to provide business value like everyone else. This is a good thing, it keeps the crooked "cross my palm with silver" bastards out of the field and leaves it to people who like it and want to earn an honest living.
In my personal experience, unless you're so in demand that you really don't need an interview anyway, the first person who mentions a monetary figure loses, and if it's the potential employee it's usually worse.
The reasons for this is rather simple. If you underbid, you lose out on cash, no employer on earth will offer you more than you asked for. If you overbid, especially if it's by too much, you risk alienating the employer and are likely to end up not getting what you want.
If on the other hand, they overbid, they don't need to know that and you score. If they underbid, you can refuse, without looking like a greedy asshole and blowing a potential later contact, and if they want you enough, they'll up it.
Salary questions are definitely important, but they're not the be all and end all of getting a job. I value a whole bunch of things above straight dollar figures(so long as the dollars are reasonable of course). Even more importantly, unless you're really strapped for time and don't need the job, negotiating them after they've made an offer will put you in a much stronger position.
As to the general question, the questions you should ask an employer are the questions where the wrong answer means you won't take the job. If you need to have weekends off 100% of the time, ask that, if you need to be able to work flexible hours, ask if you can. If all you're looking for is a paycheck so you don't end up on the street, and you don't really care about anything else. Then you can stick to the pointless crap you ask to show you're interested in the company. Check any employment agency web site and they'll give you a list of them, all they're for is to show you're keen.
The basic rule is that, asking for too much can make you look greedy and cause you problems. Asking too little gets you a job that doesn't meet your needs. The most important skill in life is to know what you need, as opposed to what you want and how far you can go down the want pile and get away with it.
Not especially, whatever you may think, a patent is a legal document, not a technical one. Thing is there's a few things in there which indicate something more than just an xml document. For instance there's a number of references to something that sounds like implying the data format from the document itself. Now that could just be xml, or they could be patenting something to do with the self description.
It could also be a patent on a specific format, which might also be alright.
It just seems too strange that even the patent office could grant a patent based on the information provided if it's for what the submitter claims. The whole claim is full of examples of prior art as well as descriptions for why xml is designed for this specific purpose.
Patenting what the submitter claims they're patenting, seems too ludicrous even for the USPTO, and there's a lot of things in the patent which don't make much sense if that's actually what's being patented. I would appreciate it if someone with more knowledge of patents could take a look at this thing and confirm what they're actually patenting.
There's always an agreement.
It may not be financial, and it may not actually be with the developer of the software, but there's always an agreement even if the agreement is implicit. I ask for a piece of software(by clicking on a url or whatever) and the distributor agrees to give it to me. I can tell they agreed to give it to me because the file started downloading. Presuming I haven't circumvented any security to access this link, and the distributor knows that the link is there, there is an implicit distribution agreement between myself and the party providing the software. Where that agreement exists, there exists the potential for liability. There's a question of course as to that liability transfers to the developer, but just because you got it for free and didn't sign anything doesn't mean there wasn't an agreement, and it's got nothing at all to do with the GPL. You could definitely make it a provision of a new GPL version that in order to distribute the software, you take liability, and protect the original developer, but I don't think that would work very well.
The reality of the situation is that people who provide software for a purpose are probably liable for ensuring that the software is fit for that purpose. There's almost certainly a lot of work that needs to be done to determine what level of bugs and what level of knowledge is required for liability and whether you can get explicit acceptance of known bugs as part of the distribution of a piece of software(in the case of bugs which are too expensive to fix) and to what degree. There may also need to be explicit protection for software provided gratis, but that would probably need to be an explicit exception to liability. Free as in speech makes no difference at all, only free as in beer.
Well aside from the fact that the answer is probably "yes" anyway, TFA refers to software which is knowingly selling buggy software, which in your metaphor would be giving the homeless guy a sandwich you knew was tainted. If you knowingly gave the homeless guy a tainted sandwich and he died you'd not only be liable in a financial sense, you'd probably also be liable criminally.
A lot of contracts all over the world have clauses which are unenforceable.
Employment contracts contain overly broad non compete agreements, stores claim they won't refund your money under any circumstances, companies deny liability for things they are liable for.
Just because software developers claim they are not liable, doesn't in any way mean that they are actually not liable. They're claiming it and hoping that it either isn't challenged or it stands in court. It might, it might not. Even contracts both parties discuss and sign cannot enforce an illegal provision. If I sign a contract selling myself, or someone else into slavery in a country where slavery is illegal, that contract isn't binding or legal. There are limitations to everything.
The Europeans are behind in clean coal because clean coal is stupid. The only reason anyone invests in it is to protect their existing coal industry. That's why Australia leads the world in clean coal research, because we have a huge coal industry and since coal makes money the right doesn't want to piss off the owners, and since coal miners are generally union, the left doesn't want to piss them off. Investment in clean coal isn't about making the right environmental choice. Clean coal involves somehow magically stuffing all the bad stuff back into the ground and keeping it there forever, and in all likelihood it's not going to work, particularly since unlike nuclear waste, the bad stuff is a gas.
Over here we have European style gas taxes, and substantially higher prices, and we've got more clean coal research than the US. It has nothing to do with the tax system and everything to do with local economic interest.
Pork is when you spend money which doesn't need to be spent and which has no relation to the bill being voted on to benefit your own constituents. Pork is bad.
Trying to get money which is already going to be spent spent in your community is representing your constituents. Representing your constituents is good. That's what congress critters are supposed to do, represent the interests of the people who voted them in.
We've all gotten a little to free with the word pork. Republics are about representation and if your local representative doesn't represent your interests then you may as well just do away with local representatives entirely and vote for a political party.
Folks in congress are supposed to represent their constituents, that's their job, it's why they were elected. They're supposed to have some degree of broader vision so that at least sometimes they give their constituents what they need instead of what they want, but for the most part, their job is to vote on behalf of the people who voted them in. The national interest is supposed to be served by the president, and by the balance of power between the various and sundry more local representatives.
To reiterate. If you are a member of the house, your job is to vote on behalf of the people who voted you in, it's how the system works. If there's a 5 billion dollar project that needs a location you SHOULD be fighting to get that project built in your district.
Pork on the other hand is generally a matter of quid pro quo, something you vote for to get something else in return, and even that isn't really a problem. The problem is when they tie this sort of quid pro quo into unrelated bills. What we need is to restrict a given bill to covering only its own subject matter. So if you're creating an environmental law banning logging or something it needs to cover only banning logging, not building a football stadium. There's a lot of gray areas and judgement in this kind of thing which is why it's so hard to enforce. If you're talking about protecting a particular bit of forest, and the football stadium is on adjacent land, then they might be related, but that should be obvious from the bill.
The big question is, who are you competing with?
The kind of people who would want to work in this kind of joint are a relatively specialized field. There aren't research jobs studying highly infectious diseases jut lying about unfilled, and there aren't really all that many places you can work if you want this particular job. Yes most of the people who would have these kind of specialties could probably get jobs in related fields, but there's a certain something that doing this kind of thing has for these kind of people. They'll move to wherever the jobs are because it's what they want to do. You don't take a job like this for the money(it's likely not that high) and you don't take it for the wonderful working conditions(the safety measures for this kind of thing aren't exactly good times), you take it because it's what you want to do.
Yes, s1ashdot.org is a rather pathetic attack. The point is that I can get a perfectly valid cert and all it tells you is that I'm the person who bought that cert(though there are likely dns attacks which could get you around this).
Sometimes when you're dealing with someone who is exceptionally well known(slashdot, microsoft, etc), but that's not always the case. I'm fairly certain that, at least in theory, you could reregister an expired cert from any of these sites if they happened to let it expire.
Fundamentally, the problem is that verisign is not trustworthy, and the obsession with self signed certificates tends to try and obscure this. We really need to come up with a better solution.
It's not actually adequate, for SSH or for the secure web. If you want a secure connection you need to identify not only that your conversation isn't being listened to, but that you're talking to the person you think you are. Identity is an important part of real security.
The problem is that certificates don't ensure identity, and making a big fuss about them really serves no purpose. Verisign requires no proof of identity(beyond a valid credit card) let alone authority to act on behalf of any given entity. I've personally ordered a cert with a company credit card for someone else who wasn't even an employee of the company. The only form of security involved in the process was someone checking the credit card statement.
Making a fuss about security isn't a problem. The problem is making a fuss about a security feature which doesn't actually work. I could go and get a signed certificate for s1ashdot.org tomorrow if someone hasn't already, and if I scam linked someone to it, it would work perfectly well. If I had access to stolen credit card numbers there's nothing that would stop me doing that either. Browsers make a fuss about certificates, but certificates don't accomplish what the browsers claim they do. When people encounter legitimate self signed certs they ignore the warnings, and there's no real reason why they shouldn't.
For the purposes of this post, "web" means anything they access through a browser. Self signed certs are not all that uncommon on internal company web systems, and users don't really know the difference.
Yes, but that's still more or less useless if you can't verify who that "one person" is.