Yes and of course we all know that none of those people could possibly have been wrong. Oh wait, these are the same founding fathers who believed that black people only counted as 2/3's of a person and were so afraid of actually giving electoral power to the rabble that they created an electoral college which could ignore their wishes. Jefferson in particular was a bit of a nut job and if we're going to follow his wishes we'd better all move onto 40 acre farms and live the isolated rural lifestyle.
As for the 18th Century criminologists, I've read some really fun stuff from 19th Century criminologists, stuff which associates certain physical features with propensity for criminal acts.
I'm not saying that the great majority of what the founding fathers believed wasn't reasonably good, I'm merely saying that not everything they believed was right.
It is also a well known fact that when they ratified the constitution most of its authors believed it would be a temporary document as had been the articles of confederation not something which would last 200 years, and even then they were smart enough to put in the ability to change it.
Guns are a problem, perhaps making them all together illegal is going overboard, I've even known a few people who were responsible enough about firearms that I didn't feel totally uncomfortable with them owing them, but it's not unreasonable to require some sort of training or control before you purchase a gun. No we will probably never stop actual criminals from obtaining guns and using them to muder people, but maybe we can stop idiots from accidentally shooting themselves or others and maybe we can cut down on those random acts of gun violence. Even if I can't know that no one is going to shoot me, I'd like to know that if I accidentally piss somone off they're not going to go temporarily insane and shoot me, we don't need that kind of security.
You ever tried using forward? It doesn't do what you think it does, it's sort of a step forward control which unless you're looking for a very particular scene isn't bloody helpful at all. Rewind takes you all the way back to the beginning. Leastways that's what it does on mine.
This of course is based on the false assumption that the salary of either programmers or musicians is based in any way on the revenue generated by their work. Which in most cases isn't true. That's not to say the pirating software or music is right, but you're not stealing from the creator so much as the distributor.
Depends what you mean by integrity, if you mean selling out more than or as much as anyone else, then that's not true. If you mean the not sleeping with the help kind of integrity, then maybe. IMHO that kind of integrity is overrated, I'd much rather have a president who slept with anything that moved than an idiot.
That's the point though. In my original post I said that the IT industry needs to have a system whereby people can get experience with the administration technology without having the real ability to screw it up in any major way. I know that junior admins now aren't in that position, but that isn't really the point, there should be an entry level apprentice program for admins because they we wouldn't have so many bloody awful admins(well after a while at least, a lot of admins would be trained by bloody awful admins, but still).
As for joining the rest of the wage slaves, welcome to the real world, IT isn't a magical golden money basket, idiot managers threw billions of dollars into it thinking it would be, but it wasn't. IT is necessary for survival, but they aren't going to throw money at it anymore.
I sincerely believe that the tech field is never going to be what it was for employees. In the early years we got paid high wages because there was more demand than their was supply, simple economics very few people knew anything about computers. In the mid 90's, there started being a lot more of us, but people thought that IT would miraculously make them rich, so the demand increased accordingly. Now, demand has seriously decreased, we, like nearly everyone else, are now a tool which will be used where the company deems it will be effective, but that's about it, and there are now more CS people drawn by the lure of money, than there are jobs. That is to say, you are a wage slave now whether you like it or not and the only way to solve that is to do something about the basic structure of the world.
Now maybe, in 10 or 20 years, when no one takes CS because they think it's a golden money opportunity(though for nearly everyone else, 40k right out of college is still damned good), the supply will decrease and we'll get good wages again, but only temporarily.
As for the Missouri wages issue, I was saying that, especially in Silicon Valley(plenty of people survive in New York on a lot less than you get), cost of living will decrease because there aren't a whole bunch of financially irresponsible millionares running around anymore. You can't charge more than people can afford to pay.
I wish that I could still have walked out of college into a $80,000 a year job without even having to look simply because of who I am, but I've been looking at the job market, and it's not that great, there are jobs, but at least in the US they all want you to know every single new technology and have 3 years of experience in it. I've even seen jobs which want more years of experience with.NET, than.NET has existed. Yes you can get around degree(though I wish you couldn't since I have one) and experience requirements, but the only way I can compete with the people who actually have that experience is that I don't think the $40,000 a year they offer me is a pittance.
Well there are some major problems here. First of all, in any field other than engineering and up till just recently tech work, 50,000 is a high salary, it's significantly higher than the national average, this is especially the case if you're one of the older workers who doesn't have a degree.
Secondly, we're not talking about New York City or California, we're talking about everywhere else. Cost of living in most of those places is probably going to go down too since there are very few people who can afford that and companies aren't going to keep paying those kind of salaries anymore.
Thirdly, as the kind of junior admin I was referring to(which is to say as someone who isn't really needed and who will screw up), you are not either skilled or experienced, you are a trainee. No this isn't perfect people who are already married with children, but that's not really the point, the point is to get younger people trained on this stuff.
Well I would agree with the fact that it's the employers fault, but disagree on what it is thay are doing which causes it.
I would of course agree with the frustration tech workers seeking employment right out of college, and workers in general for that matter. It's hard to get experience when everyone wants it to give you a job, but that's not really the problem when it comes to network and sysadmin positions.
It's perfectly sensible to require people who run something as complicated as a mainframe, or even network administration, or a half a dozen other things require strong experience. However if these companies want to have people available to work on these systems in the future they also have to provide opportunities for people to gain this experience without having to rely on them for full administration. That is to say companies should be hiring more PFY's so that they can train the next generation of administrators through real life experience.
Employers don't want to do this of course because it involves having an extra employee, but they would be much better off in the long term if they had people who had real experience.
Of course an additional problem with this sort of thing is unrealistic pay expectations among tech workers in general. No one is going to hire a PFY for 60,000 a year, but there are still many people on slashdot who believe that 50,000 is a ridiculously low salary for a full time job. So while a lot of it is employers being cheap, it's also somewhat us being unrealistic.
This isn't really the case at all. Being able to call the private data members(which you could already do if you were sneaky anyway), isn't going to seriously alter the security of your code. Yes it could theoretically be a problem in cases where the algorithm is known but the constants used in said algorithm(or even some of the variables) are not known. This is more applicable to DRM techniques than anything else, but as we've seen with DeCSS it doesn't take.NET to crack those.
The only case I can think of where you could have any serious assistance as to what the algorithm does is if you knew the programmer who wrote it very well. I know that for school projects I've implemented algorithms right next to someone who was implememnting the same algorithm and in the end our structures were not even remotely similar.
The biggest problem with this is that some idiot is going to think it's a great technique for use in programming and will start writing code which uses private methods. This sort of thing is basically going to throw a good chunk of the value of OOP(not that anyone writes real reusable OOP anyway) out the window at least for that programmer. Private methods exist for a reason and it's not particularly for security purposes but because code may not work properly if they aren't made private.
I think Blockbuster would actually be quite interested in this if it actually works. While much of their income on older releases mat come from late fees, I doubt this is the case on new movies.
Given the demand for good new releases, and their policy of if it's not here you rent it for free next time, Blockbuster is actually much more interested in being able to have that copy available for rent at $4 than in charging you a $1 late fee.
For new releases(most of the extra copies of which they sell afterwards anyway), this might be great, especially if they had some way of reusing the disks or getting some sort of temporary license to create copies of them.
As for how this would appeal to people, that would depend on how they marketed it. If people could be guaranteed to find that new release movie(and not in the "you can have it free next time" way, they'd probably be happy to use this format. Throw in some sort of discount if you eventually return the expired disc(assuming of course they can be reburned).
Of course as is the case with all such things, the success of this format depends primarily on the ability of both the media companies and the distributors to come to a mutually profitable agreement. Of course it wouldn't prevent people who want to pirate the movies from doing so(pretty much nothing can since for every person trying to prevent it there are at least 10 equally qualified people finding a way around), but that's not really the point.
This is of course true, but rather beside the point. While US based spammers will simply use external open relays, and the end effect on spam will probably be minimal, that isn't really the point. The point is that it's a step in the right direction.
If the FTC keeps taking steps in this direction we might eventually see some legislation against spamming, or at least some sort of compensation method whereby spammers had to pay per message as is the case with regular junk mail. We might even get the first well thought useful internet law ever.
Well, when it comes right down to it, the govt doesn't need to actually threaten legal action, that's just the way things work. Any admin with any sense is going to say hmmmm, the FTC has me on a list and is somewhat unhappy with me, while what I am doing may not technically be illegal now, it's quite possible that they're looking into a way to make it so(technically I think the FTC could probably nail them on something anyway). This brings up the question, "do I want to be on the govts sh*t list when it does become illegal?".
Given the way cyber crimes are treated these days(it wouldn't take much given the current legislation to say something like "open relays give terrorists the opportunity for untraceable communication" or something), the penalty for being on this list is probably going to be something which is at least termination of either your isp account or your job(if you're an admin), and possibly actual criminal liability.
Not to mention the fact that it might go through some people's heads that if the govt can't charge them with something for their open relay, they might be tempted to say, investigate their companies tax records/software license/etc which very few companies want happening.
Or, if you wanted to get really techincal, you could edit your hosts file and tell it to redirect you to something harmless when you clicked on said link. Then you could click on the links all you like without ever having to see the horror.
For a second there I was about to question your true geekiness because a true geek wouldn't worry about the fact that the resulting tunnel would be purposeless. Of course then you saved yourself:)
Well excluding the whole hotter than the surface of the sun thing(which seems a tad exaggerated), couldn't you solve this problem by drilling your hole along the axis of rotation?
Admitedly you'd then be travelling from somewhere unpleasantly cold to somewhere else unpleasantly cold, but in theory assuming you could avoid bursting into flames or filling up the whole with magma, that should solve the as you so aptly put it, stone wedgie problem.
Point being, they can still only tax Californians, not anyone else, and Californians get to vote for or against the people who put such bills into place. Let them worry about it, when if comes to your state, worry about it there, you get to vote for a reason.
As a side note, my home state(WI) has been taxing on-line purchases made by Wisconsin residents from Wisconsin based companies for longer than I've been buying things on-line(read approx 5 years), and possibly longer. They also asked me to declare on my state tax form this year how much I had spenton such purchases from out of state companies so they could tax me on that. California is by no means the first to do this, or more.
Wow, I can tell you've been living in some sort of fantasy land for a while(could you please tell me how to get there I want to live there too). First of all most of the time jobs that suck pay less than jobs that don't suck, partially because being paid crap is part of what makes a job suck. Second, on a scale of crappy jobs, Spamming isn't all that high on the list, yes it would make you feel somewhat dirty and people would hate you, but selling your sould is part and parcel of today's economy.
Not to be a troll or anything, but have you actually read much of the bible? Christianity gives itself a bad name even without the televangalists and pedophile priests.
Not only is 52k not lame for a full-time job, not even for CS anymore, but you also have to take into account the limited amount of effort it takes to maintain such a buisness.
He may have been making only 52k a year, but he could quite easily have worked a regular 40hr/week job in addition to that if he really needed more money, and this took virtually no skill on his part, which is the problem.
Even in a much better economy than currently exists, only highly skilled workers are going to be making much more than 40k a year, if you don't have at least a bachelor's degree you can probably kiss even 40k a year good bye. For someone who doesn't have a college degree and is making closer to 30k or less for working their tail off, this sort of money would look damned appealing, especially if they could keep their current job.
Yay, yet another way Bush is selling out my future. I'm going to have to join the effing army just to pay off my loans at this rate, and I don't even graduate till next saturday.
I personally thing that either the government needs to set up tax penalities for doing this sort of thing that are high enough to make it unprofitable or we've got to finish the global economy we started.
Until the cost of living and therefor the pay is equalized in most of the world(at least the technical world), we're all going to be screwed. There's no way I can compete with an Indian programmer regardless of our comparative skills. Said programmer can be reasonably well off at an income which for me would be below the poverty line.
It's not that great on the other end either. I'm supposed to somehow magically come up with five years experience when no one will hire me without five years experience.
Of course the real beauty(aside from everyone having their web technology of the moment) are the people who want you to have more years of experience with.NET than.NET has actually existed.
I don't doubt that this and many other organizations are home to a great deal of computer-related ignorance. However, this ignorance has absolutely nothing to do with the presence of said bureaucracy and probably little to do with the difficulty of getting things changed.
The willingness of any organization to implement any change whatsoever, let alone a major one, is inversely proportional to the size of that organization. This is because the cost and complexity of such a change is directly proportional to the size of the organization. This is especially true of companies which provide a service rather than a product since the necessary down time to change anything not to mention any possible problems which will occur when it's finally implemented can cost them money and worse clients.
For these reasons, most companies will see the cost of moving to Open Source or anything else for that matter, as, at least in the short term, higher than keeping the current system. Regardless of how much Microsoft or sun charges them, it looks better on this years budget to pay it than to change. Since people rarely get rewarded for savings which will eventually work out several years when their current budget is several million dollars in the red, noone really wants to change.
I personally dislike the idea of eBooks to an almost irrational degree.
To begin, I like the feel of an actual paper book. There's something about holding a book in your hands and feeling the paper which makes it more worthwhile. I can't read long works on a computer screen despite my familiarity with said screen and the large amount of time I spend using it in any given day. I also like the ability to guage how far you are in said book by actually physically looking at the book and seeing how much of it you've managed to get through(this is one of the only ways I can sometimes motivate myself through some of my course related readings.
You could argue that this problem could be solved by generating a book of the screens as has been previously stated. However this has several major drawbacks. If you have a book which can display any written work, you have to delve into the issue of copyright control and DRM which are not currently as much of an issue with books as with digital media.
Something like this also brings up the issue of government involvement. The government(at least in the US) already wants to accumulate all the information about you it can, and since about the only feasible way of managing something like this would be through some sort of centralized electronic distribution network, eBooks would make such information gathering much more effective.
True eBooks could also make distributing your own work much easier(assuming they make these things open for everyone), but IMO the costs don't outweight the benefits.
When are the RIAA, MPAA and all the other annoying groups going to realize what is actually going on in the world.
Why won't they acknowledge that slumpy cd sales have more to do with the fact that albums are: a) overpriced b) almost exactly the same as every other album c) of significantly less overall quailty than used to be the case? True some people don't buy albums anymore because they can get them for free, but this isn't the case for the majority of users and I sincerely doubt their losses are anywhere near close to what they claim.
When will they realize that they could destroy the entire internet and it wouldn't make the new Britney Spears sound-alike any more palatable. When you choose artists exclusively based on their physical attractiveness rather than their ability or the content of their songs, formats where that appearance is not part of the package are going to suffer.
When will they realize that if they imprison every single person who has ever pirated music there will be no one left to buy their product?
Why are copyright laws which were designed to protect creators for a limited period of time so that they would have a financial motivation for creating used to provide corporations who for the most part had nothing to do with that creation with huge profits for periods of more than a century?
For that matter, why do multi-billion dollar corparations need to band together to support one another. I think it's about time someone looked at these on the angle of anti-trust issues.
Well there are of couse exceptions to the rule of censoring toons being a bad thing. There were a few made during the Second World War which were just horrible.
I personally will never get the image of bugs bunny in black face hawking war bonds. "Any bonds today, gonna buy your share of freedom?" Explosions may be one thing but watching your childhood memories as government sponsored bigots is almost as bad as that "fan art".
Haven't seen the infamous one where bugs is shooting the Japanese, there are probably only about a dozen copies of that one left in the world, but it's supposedly considerably worse.
It is actually as others have said a very big deal. Dealing with unexpected input is something which every even semi-knowledgable programmer should know about and be able to do, especially in a program which can take mulitple inputs at a given time(web browser). This is an example of either incompetence on behalf of the IE team or incredibly lazy programming.
Regardless of which caused this particular issue it shows the general quality and security of the application. Buffer overrun errors are a fact of life with C, even the most experience programmers can miss one, as can be said of nearly all the aspects which cause serious flaws(short of poor design decisions like integrating something fundamentally insecure like a browser directly into the OS).
If the IE programmers can't catch something like this, how can we expect them to catch the really serious stuff which novice programmers(the only kind who should still be getting these bugs) wouldn't even know about.
Of course it's especially amusing since along with to a lesser extent Netscape, their tolerance of improper html has led to circumstances where this sort of thing can happen with relative frequency.
Slashdot Mirror
As for the 18th Century criminologists, I've read some really fun stuff from 19th Century criminologists, stuff which associates certain physical features with propensity for criminal acts.
I'm not saying that the great majority of what the founding fathers believed wasn't reasonably good, I'm merely saying that not everything they believed was right.
It is also a well known fact that when they ratified the constitution most of its authors believed it would be a temporary document as had been the articles of confederation not something which would last 200 years, and even then they were smart enough to put in the ability to change it.
Guns are a problem, perhaps making them all together illegal is going overboard, I've even known a few people who were responsible enough about firearms that I didn't feel totally uncomfortable with them owing them, but it's not unreasonable to require some sort of training or control before you purchase a gun. No we will probably never stop actual criminals from obtaining guns and using them to muder people, but maybe we can stop idiots from accidentally shooting themselves or others and maybe we can cut down on those random acts of gun violence. Even if I can't know that no one is going to shoot me, I'd like to know that if I accidentally piss somone off they're not going to go temporarily insane and shoot me, we don't need that kind of security.
Therefor this isn't FUD, but a genunie complaint.
This of course is based on the false assumption that the salary of either programmers or musicians is based in any way on the revenue generated by their work. Which in most cases isn't true. That's not to say the pirating software or music is right, but you're not stealing from the creator so much as the distributor.
Depends what you mean by integrity, if you mean selling out more than or as much as anyone else, then that's not true. If you mean the not sleeping with the help kind of integrity, then maybe. IMHO that kind of integrity is overrated, I'd much rather have a president who slept with anything that moved than an idiot.
As for joining the rest of the wage slaves, welcome to the real world, IT isn't a magical golden money basket, idiot managers threw billions of dollars into it thinking it would be, but it wasn't. IT is necessary for survival, but they aren't going to throw money at it anymore.
I sincerely believe that the tech field is never going to be what it was for employees. In the early years we got paid high wages because there was more demand than their was supply, simple economics very few people knew anything about computers. In the mid 90's, there started being a lot more of us, but people thought that IT would miraculously make them rich, so the demand increased accordingly. Now, demand has seriously decreased, we, like nearly everyone else, are now a tool which will be used where the company deems it will be effective, but that's about it, and there are now more CS people drawn by the lure of money, than there are jobs. That is to say, you are a wage slave now whether you like it or not and the only way to solve that is to do something about the basic structure of the world.
Now maybe, in 10 or 20 years, when no one takes CS because they think it's a golden money opportunity(though for nearly everyone else, 40k right out of college is still damned good), the supply will decrease and we'll get good wages again, but only temporarily.
As for the Missouri wages issue, I was saying that, especially in Silicon Valley(plenty of people survive in New York on a lot less than you get), cost of living will decrease because there aren't a whole bunch of financially irresponsible millionares running around anymore. You can't charge more than people can afford to pay.
I wish that I could still have walked out of college into a $80,000 a year job without even having to look simply because of who I am, but I've been looking at the job market, and it's not that great, there are jobs, but at least in the US they all want you to know every single new technology and have 3 years of experience in it. I've even seen jobs which want more years of experience with .NET, than .NET has existed. Yes you can get around degree(though I wish you couldn't since I have one) and experience requirements, but the only way I can compete with the people who actually have that experience is that I don't think the $40,000 a year they offer me is a pittance.
Secondly, we're not talking about New York City or California, we're talking about everywhere else. Cost of living in most of those places is probably going to go down too since there are very few people who can afford that and companies aren't going to keep paying those kind of salaries anymore.
Thirdly, as the kind of junior admin I was referring to(which is to say as someone who isn't really needed and who will screw up), you are not either skilled or experienced, you are a trainee. No this isn't perfect people who are already married with children, but that's not really the point, the point is to get younger people trained on this stuff.
I would of course agree with the frustration tech workers seeking employment right out of college, and workers in general for that matter. It's hard to get experience when everyone wants it to give you a job, but that's not really the problem when it comes to network and sysadmin positions.
It's perfectly sensible to require people who run something as complicated as a mainframe, or even network administration, or a half a dozen other things require strong experience. However if these companies want to have people available to work on these systems in the future they also have to provide opportunities for people to gain this experience without having to rely on them for full administration. That is to say companies should be hiring more PFY's so that they can train the next generation of administrators through real life experience.
Employers don't want to do this of course because it involves having an extra employee, but they would be much better off in the long term if they had people who had real experience.
Of course an additional problem with this sort of thing is unrealistic pay expectations among tech workers in general. No one is going to hire a PFY for 60,000 a year, but there are still many people on slashdot who believe that 50,000 is a ridiculously low salary for a full time job. So while a lot of it is employers being cheap, it's also somewhat us being unrealistic.
The only case I can think of where you could have any serious assistance as to what the algorithm does is if you knew the programmer who wrote it very well. I know that for school projects I've implemented algorithms right next to someone who was implememnting the same algorithm and in the end our structures were not even remotely similar.
The biggest problem with this is that some idiot is going to think it's a great technique for use in programming and will start writing code which uses private methods. This sort of thing is basically going to throw a good chunk of the value of OOP(not that anyone writes real reusable OOP anyway) out the window at least for that programmer. Private methods exist for a reason and it's not particularly for security purposes but because code may not work properly if they aren't made private.
Given the demand for good new releases, and their policy of if it's not here you rent it for free next time, Blockbuster is actually much more interested in being able to have that copy available for rent at $4 than in charging you a $1 late fee.
For new releases(most of the extra copies of which they sell afterwards anyway), this might be great, especially if they had some way of reusing the disks or getting some sort of temporary license to create copies of them.
As for how this would appeal to people, that would depend on how they marketed it. If people could be guaranteed to find that new release movie(and not in the "you can have it free next time" way, they'd probably be happy to use this format. Throw in some sort of discount if you eventually return the expired disc(assuming of course they can be reburned).
Of course as is the case with all such things, the success of this format depends primarily on the ability of both the media companies and the distributors to come to a mutually profitable agreement. Of course it wouldn't prevent people who want to pirate the movies from doing so(pretty much nothing can since for every person trying to prevent it there are at least 10 equally qualified people finding a way around), but that's not really the point.
If the FTC keeps taking steps in this direction we might eventually see some legislation against spamming, or at least some sort of compensation method whereby spammers had to pay per message as is the case with regular junk mail. We might even get the first well thought useful internet law ever.
Given the way cyber crimes are treated these days(it wouldn't take much given the current legislation to say something like "open relays give terrorists the opportunity for untraceable communication" or something), the penalty for being on this list is probably going to be something which is at least termination of either your isp account or your job(if you're an admin), and possibly actual criminal liability.
Not to mention the fact that it might go through some people's heads that if the govt can't charge them with something for their open relay, they might be tempted to say, investigate their companies tax records/software license/etc which very few companies want happening.
Or, if you wanted to get really techincal, you could edit your hosts file and tell it to redirect you to something harmless when you clicked on said link. Then you could click on the links all you like without ever having to see the horror.
For a second there I was about to question your true geekiness because a true geek wouldn't worry about the fact that the resulting tunnel would be purposeless. Of course then you saved yourself :)
Admitedly you'd then be travelling from somewhere unpleasantly cold to somewhere else unpleasantly cold, but in theory assuming you could avoid bursting into flames or filling up the whole with magma, that should solve the as you so aptly put it, stone wedgie problem.
As a side note, my home state(WI) has been taxing on-line purchases made by Wisconsin residents from Wisconsin based companies for longer than I've been buying things on-line(read approx 5 years), and possibly longer. They also asked me to declare on my state tax form this year how much I had spenton such purchases from out of state companies so they could tax me on that. California is by no means the first to do this, or more.
Wow, I can tell you've been living in some sort of fantasy land for a while(could you please tell me how to get there I want to live there too). First of all most of the time jobs that suck pay less than jobs that don't suck, partially because being paid crap is part of what makes a job suck. Second, on a scale of crappy jobs, Spamming isn't all that high on the list, yes it would make you feel somewhat dirty and people would hate you, but selling your sould is part and parcel of today's economy.
Not to be a troll or anything, but have you actually read much of the bible? Christianity gives itself a bad name even without the televangalists and pedophile priests.
He may have been making only 52k a year, but he could quite easily have worked a regular 40hr/week job in addition to that if he really needed more money, and this took virtually no skill on his part, which is the problem.
Even in a much better economy than currently exists, only highly skilled workers are going to be making much more than 40k a year, if you don't have at least a bachelor's degree you can probably kiss even 40k a year good bye. For someone who doesn't have a college degree and is making closer to 30k or less for working their tail off, this sort of money would look damned appealing, especially if they could keep their current job.
I personally thing that either the government needs to set up tax penalities for doing this sort of thing that are high enough to make it unprofitable or we've got to finish the global economy we started.
Until the cost of living and therefor the pay is equalized in most of the world(at least the technical world), we're all going to be screwed. There's no way I can compete with an Indian programmer regardless of our comparative skills. Said programmer can be reasonably well off at an income which for me would be below the poverty line.
Of course the real beauty(aside from everyone having their web technology of the moment) are the people who want you to have more years of experience with .NET than .NET has actually existed.
The willingness of any organization to implement any change whatsoever, let alone a major one, is inversely proportional to the size of that organization. This is because the cost and complexity of such a change is directly proportional to the size of the organization. This is especially true of companies which provide a service rather than a product since the necessary down time to change anything not to mention any possible problems which will occur when it's finally implemented can cost them money and worse clients.
For these reasons, most companies will see the cost of moving to Open Source or anything else for that matter, as, at least in the short term, higher than keeping the current system. Regardless of how much Microsoft or sun charges them, it looks better on this years budget to pay it than to change. Since people rarely get rewarded for savings which will eventually work out several years when their current budget is several million dollars in the red, noone really wants to change.
To begin, I like the feel of an actual paper book. There's something about holding a book in your hands and feeling the paper which makes it more worthwhile. I can't read long works on a computer screen despite my familiarity with said screen and the large amount of time I spend using it in any given day. I also like the ability to guage how far you are in said book by actually physically looking at the book and seeing how much of it you've managed to get through(this is one of the only ways I can sometimes motivate myself through some of my course related readings.
You could argue that this problem could be solved by generating a book of the screens as has been previously stated. However this has several major drawbacks. If you have a book which can display any written work, you have to delve into the issue of copyright control and DRM which are not currently as much of an issue with books as with digital media.
Something like this also brings up the issue of government involvement. The government(at least in the US) already wants to accumulate all the information about you it can, and since about the only feasible way of managing something like this would be through some sort of centralized electronic distribution network, eBooks would make such information gathering much more effective.
True eBooks could also make distributing your own work much easier(assuming they make these things open for everyone), but IMO the costs don't outweight the benefits.
Why won't they acknowledge that slumpy cd sales have more to do with the fact that albums are: a) overpriced b) almost exactly the same as every other album c) of significantly less overall quailty than used to be the case? True some people don't buy albums anymore because they can get them for free, but this isn't the case for the majority of users and I sincerely doubt their losses are anywhere near close to what they claim.
When will they realize that they could destroy the entire internet and it wouldn't make the new Britney Spears sound-alike any more palatable. When you choose artists exclusively based on their physical attractiveness rather than their ability or the content of their songs, formats where that appearance is not part of the package are going to suffer.
When will they realize that if they imprison every single person who has ever pirated music there will be no one left to buy their product?
Why are copyright laws which were designed to protect creators for a limited period of time so that they would have a financial motivation for creating used to provide corporations who for the most part had nothing to do with that creation with huge profits for periods of more than a century?
For that matter, why do multi-billion dollar corparations need to band together to support one another. I think it's about time someone looked at these on the angle of anti-trust issues.
I personally will never get the image of bugs bunny in black face hawking war bonds. "Any bonds today, gonna buy your share of freedom?" Explosions may be one thing but watching your childhood memories as government sponsored bigots is almost as bad as that "fan art".
Haven't seen the infamous one where bugs is shooting the Japanese, there are probably only about a dozen copies of that one left in the world, but it's supposedly considerably worse.
Regardless of which caused this particular issue it shows the general quality and security of the application. Buffer overrun errors are a fact of life with C, even the most experience programmers can miss one, as can be said of nearly all the aspects which cause serious flaws(short of poor design decisions like integrating something fundamentally insecure like a browser directly into the OS).
If the IE programmers can't catch something like this, how can we expect them to catch the really serious stuff which novice programmers(the only kind who should still be getting these bugs) wouldn't even know about.
Of course it's especially amusing since along with to a lesser extent Netscape, their tolerance of improper html has led to circumstances where this sort of thing can happen with relative frequency.