Even sadder is that the school probably could have found on-campus behavior to punish, but instead went after off-campus behavior that was none of their business.
Undoubtedly the kid was going around school telling kids "hey, look at this neat URL!" and getting kids giggling and disruptive. If so, cite him for that on-campus behavior. Don't try to cite him for off-campus behavior, because schools only have authority to regulate speech or behavior that directly disrupts class (courts have ruled that students do NOT leave their 1st Amendment rights at the schoolhouse door, but they cannot disrupt class with their speech), and speech that's off-campus by definition cannot disrupt class.
Frankly, as a former school teacher, I find your attitude to be rather disgusting. The Constitution did not become toilet paper just because a vice principal's feelings were hurt.
If the student's *ON CAMPUS* behavior was disrupting class, if, for example, the kid was going around saying "look at this neat URL!" and kids were giggling and dusrupting class, that's one thing. No student has the right to interfere with the education of another. If documented, this would have sufficed to uphold the suspension. But what the kid does on his spare time is his own business. I did not see it as my job to regulate what the student did on his own time, I had enough work regulating what the kid did on my time. It is a shame that this vice principal was so anal that he did a knee-jerk dumb thing and cited the kid for off-campus behavior, especially when with a little more work he could have probably found on-campus behavior to cite the kid for (I'm sure that the kid was spreading the nasty URL around campus, for example -- and what students do on-campus *IS* the school's business).
Schools should only be worried about what happens at school, not what happens anywhere else. If the kid had been disrupting class by telling everybody, "hey, I have this neat URL!" that's one thing. But the problem is that the school did not document such disruption of class. If they had, they would have won -- not because of the content of the web site, but, rather, because of what the kid did on campus.
To a certain extent schools act 'in loco parentis' -- but only while the student is on campus or attending a school function. The courts have long held that students do not lose their 1st Amendment rights just because they are students. The only time schools are allowed to step in is when the student's ON-CAMPUS speech is disrupting the school. What the student says off-campus is none of the school's business.
And oh -- I've been a teacher. I've also hung out with school attendance officers (the people who conduct disciplinary hearings). I've seen how students disrespect teachers and administrators. But if it happens off campus, it's not the school's business. I had plenty to handle on-campus without going out of my way to look for trouble off-campus.
Now, if they'd suspended him for going around campus and disrupting class by telling everybody about his cool URL, that's a different story. You can't shout 'fire' in a crowded theatre, no matter what the 1st Amendment says. But that has to be documented. You can suspend a student for on-campus speech if it can be documented that the on-campus speech is disrupting class (i.e., with at least one discipline referral from a teacher who says that).
But off-campus speech is another issue altogether. It cannot be argued that off-campus speech is disrupting class, and therefore off-campus speech does not fall under the "cannot shout 'fire' in a crowded theator" exception to the 1st Amendment. The school's mistake was for suspending him for off-campus (protected) speech, rather than for speech he did on-campus.
I, too, have been a school teacher. I daresay that I probably taught students equally as tough as yours, given that I taught in an inner-city school in Houston and in the "worst" school in the Red River School District (that was the one where 1/3rd of my students were there because the judge had ordered them to attend school as part of juvenile probation).
Nevertheless, while disrespect and disruptful behavior cannot be tolerated on the school campus, what happens off the school campus was not my concern. Frankly, I find it ridiculous that, as overworked as teachers and administrators are, they chose to make an issue of something that happened off-campus. That's *LOOKING* for trouble, and surely there's enough trouble *ON* campus for administrators?
Now, if this kid was going around *ON CAMPUS* saying to other kids, "Look at this disrespectful page I made!", and him doing that was disrupting class and the school environment, that's a different story. But you have to make that case, complete with documentation of how his *ON CAMPUS* behavior disrupted the school environment. This is under the old principle of "free speech does not cover shouting 'fire!' in a crowded theater" -- i.e., that disruptive speech on-campus is not protected speech. But the on-caompus speech has to be what's documented as the problem -- *not* the off-campus speech.
Napster has actually encouraged me to buy more CD's. Before Napster, it was impossible to tell which albums by an interesting artist were good, so I tended to only buy stuff that I'd heard on the radio recently. Nowdays, let's see, I'm reading a review where this guy says he was influenced by Nick Drake and Leonard Cohen, let's go do a web search on Nick Drake and Leonard Cohen, hmm, those guys look interesting, what albums did they put out? Hmm, let's listen to a couple of songs off of this "Pink Moon" album. Sounds pretty nifty, think I'll go buy it. Hmm, Patti Smith? Wonder whether she was any good. Naw, don't like that sound. Don't buy it. But they're still $15 ahead of where they would have been before Napster.
Hardly! If so, then Wal-Mart and Microsoft would both be bankrupt (both companies are based on the principle that "good enough" junk is what Americans want). If so, then the American "Big Three" automakers would have gone out of business in the 1960's.
The fact of the matter is that what most Americans want is "good enough" junk -- something of low quality, with known flaws, that is inexpensive and "good enough" to get the job done. This is one reason why American industry advances so much faster than, say, German industry. Whereas a German designer will sit there and fiddle and fiddle until the product is "perfect", the American will whip out something servicable, say "Next!", and move on to creating something else using the lessons learned from creating the first. The result is product which is clunky, kludgy, and is "good enough", but which is definitely not going to be held up as anything exempliary. See, e.g., the Intel x86 architecture, which shouts "Kludge!" from every trace on its silicon die.
I don't know of any country (other than perhaps North Korea and Cuba) where free market capitalism is not the primary producer of wealth. So why are you saying that it's NOT ascendant everywhere?
There are countries where free market capitalism is not very efficient because either they have no effective government (Russia, Somalia), or because their government is corrupt (Kenya) or because their government is incompetent (Peru). Still, the majority of wealth in those countries is created by entrepeneurs practicing free market capitalism -- creating goods and/or services and selling them on a free market. This is difficult in countries that lack a stable money supply (Russia) or government support for private property (China), but it's interesting to note that China has no food shortages because private farmers produce more food than all collectives combined, despite controlling a quite small percentage of the land.
Remember, "capitalism" is not stock markets and such. It is the trading of goods and services in a free market, rather than the forced redistribution of goods and services by a government entity. Wherever there is a village market, there is capitalism.
"Capital" is the goods and services produced by an economy. "money" is something issued by government (usually) that people use as an easy "short-cut" for exchanging goods and services. Money has no inherent value of its own, as can be noted by the experiences of the Weirmer Republic and Yeltsin's Russia, where the mark and the ruble (respectively) became worthless toilet paper due to being overprinted by the government, and thus people moved to other methods of exchange (barter, mostly). Money's only value is in how many goods and services it represents.
All economies have capital. Capital is what we eat, is where we sleep, is what we wear. Even communist societies have capital. They merely assign ownership of that capital to the State. Even socialist societies have capital. They merely use the government to reassign ownership of some of that capital based upon various principles of fairness or equity.
"Capitalism", as you use the term, is a misleading abbreviation of the term "free-market capitalism", which is where ownership of capital is vested in individuals and these individuals vie to increase the amount of capital that each of them owns. This has proven to be very effective at increasing the amount of capital in a society. There are costs to "pure" free market capitalism, though. In the short term, "pure" free market capitalism would have business owners creating unsafe workplaces and polluting the environment, because in the short term those result in more profit, for example. And there are always winners and losers in free market capitalism, and the question of what to do with the losers (those whose skills and abilities do not have value enough to provide them with food and shelter) remains. Thus Carl Marx's criticism of the free market capitalism of his day was quite on target. Thankfully, we do not live in a "pure" free market economy today, but, rather, one which is moderated by government. The extent to which a government should intervene in a free market economy is always an issue, but even the most die-hard free market capitalists admit that the economy would collapse if not for government interventions such as, e.g., chartered limited-liability corporations (a government-enforced invention, otherwise shareholders would be liable for the misdeeds of corporations and would not invest money in corporations), court systems (which allow settling business disputes without guns, well, usually, anyhow), and guarantees of the safety of the money supply.
I would recommend that, if you have been given permission to release something as Open Source, you get it in writing. Then I would suggest releasing early and often, so that if the copyright holder (the entity that commissioned the "work for hire") changes his mind, it's too late, it's already being dessimated across the 'Net. It appears that this guy made two mistakes: a) he did not get the GPL agreement in writing, and b) he did not release the software early and often under the GPL in order to "get the genie out of the bottle" (so to speak).
Nevertheless, the copyright holder (the entity that commissioned the "work for hire") can change the licensing at any time and use the software in any way he wishes. If he wants to use the software in a proprietary application with a proprietary license, that is his right, regardless of any other license that the software has been released under. If the software has not yet been released and the copyright holder wishes to change the license prior to release, that is his right. So it is pretty clear that this dude is out of luck -- he didn't properly practice CYA (rule #1 of CYA: Unless it's in writing, it ain't so. Rule #2: If they want to come after you, make sure it'll be as publically embarrassing for them as possible).
I think you're right with your complaints about the erosion of property rights here in the United States. Once upon a time, if I bought it, it was mine. I could farm it, strip-mine it, burn it, whatever. Now it turns out that I bring home this piece of software that I bought at the store, just like buying a book or album or whatever, and what? There's this little slip of paper in here that says I did *NOT* buy this software? It says I'm merely *leasing* this software? And oh, if I don't do this, this, and this, they can take this legally purchased software *BACK* without refunding me any money?
If the software industry was a car dealer, every major software publisher would be in jail for fraud. Misrepresenting a lease as a sale *IS* fraud in every jurisdiction in the country. It puzzles me how "content owners" can claim that they are protecting "property rights" when it appears to me that they are intent mostly upon removing *MY* property rights. The Constitution provides for copyright law. Copyright law grants "content owners" the right to restrict duplication and redistribution of copies, but does not otherwise infringe upon my property rights. But it appears that these bogus "shrink wrap" licenses (after-the-fact post-sales "click this" deals) are soon to be legally enforcible as the law of the land.
I'm as paranoid as anybody who does encryption. I was chatting with an OS implementation guy at one of the major Unix vendors regarding the PRNG that he is charged with implementing, and I clued him in on several paranoid assumptions he was overlooking.
Still, past a certain point, you must consider practicality. While I'd love to chain Twofish and Rijndael together (Twofish is a Feistel cipher somewhat similar to DES, Rijndael is some other kind of beasty altogether, so it is unlikely that BOTH would be broke), the result would be less than half the speed of Rijndael. While this would be fine for a file encryption program, I wouldn't want to try it for encrypting a gigabit Ethernet network connection -- it'd suck my CPU to the toilet.
Past a certain point, you have to look past paranoia and decide: a) Just how secure the data needs to be (and against whom does it need to be secure), and b) what's practical to do, given current technology. I made the decision, when Rijndael was chosen as the Advanced Encryption Standard, that Rijndael alone provided adequate security for my purposes. Depending upon how sensitive your data is (and what happens if it is compromised), you may make a different decision. I'm sure that Bin Laden triple-encrypts everything, since failure of his encryption means that he dies. If the consequences of failure are death and imprisonment, of COURSE you should double or triple encrypt everything, regardless of the performance penalty. Otherwise, it's a more difficult analysis, and usually double or triple encryption doesn't buy you enough to outweigh the costs.
The AES candidates have been examined by the best and brightest cryptographers world-wide (every cryptographer outside of the NSA, anyhow). The creators of Rijndael are two of the most reputable cipher designers in Europe, who, amongst other things, have designed ciphers currently implemented in most of the "smart cards" in Europe. While I would not trust the NSA further than I could throw a Buick, I trust Bruce Schneir, Paul Crowly, Brian Gladman, and all of the other very, very good and reputable people who have closely examined Rijndael and found no breaks.
Right now I believe that the NSA has given up on cracking ciphers, and is more interested in securing America's commercial transactions to protect them from info warfare. Besides, as one spook divulged somewhere that I don't recall, the NSA doesn't need to crack the encryption to monitor your communications. Most networks and operating systems are so insecure that, if they decide to monitor you, they can intercept your data long before it hits the wire.
Me and Randy Kaelber whipped up a program called 'aescrypt' that is at aescrypt.sourceforge.net. Nothing fancy, but useful for shell scripts. (Reminder: If you post any shell scripts that use aescrypt, you must also submit the URL to the BXA, see Matt Blaze's crypto page at crypto.com for more info). Anywho, this uses Rijndael to implement a stream cipher via CFB-128 cipher feedback mode.
You'll need to devise your own shell scripts to serve as a key manager etc.,this is a raw Unix component similar to 'dd', rather than a swiss-army-knife application like PGP.
Congratulation: you have bought into every myth and lie that right-wing propogandists have ever spread about unions. I see that you read Reader's Digest regularly and believe that each and every article there is the truth, the whole truth, and only the truth.
I would fill you in with facts, such as the fact that most states nowdays have laws prohibiting closed shops and forced strikes, etc., but obviously your mind is already made up. I just wish you'd cite sources for your right-wing propoganda, instead of doing a Rush Limbaugh and just pulling them out of your ass.
It is bizarre that it's okay for investors to get together into a group and form an association called a "company", with all the aggregation of power and money that this implies, but it's not okay for workers to get together and form an association called a "union". It seems to me that freedom of association is one of the more vital rights granted by our Constitution. If you dislike the behavior of some of these associations, well, I dislike the behavior of some of our major corporations too, such as Intel's habit of firing anybody over age 40 because they're "too expensive and too old" (note that age discrimination laws do NOT apply to 40-year-olds, they're violating no laws, but that does not mean it's ethical or right), and Nike's bad habit of contracting with companies that use slave labor or child labor to build shoes.
I had the same experience, except it happened over a year after I was employed. I basically said "I'm not going to sign a contract that gives you control over any Open Source software that I write", gave them modifications that basically said the same (as well as giving them an unlimited license to use any software I'd written beforehand), and the HR department said "We'll get this approved by the lawyers and get back to you." That was the last I heard of it.
Unfortunately, when you're applying for a new job you don't have that leverage. I was critical to the team producing the company's new product. As a new hire, I probably would not have gotten the same consideration -- they'd probably have tossed my application into the shredder as a "difficult" person. Which I am, if you intend to test my piss or steal my Open Source software, but which I'm not as an employee. (Oh, of course I don't do drugs -- I wouldn't be around if I did drugs -- but my thought is that if you don't trust me when I say that, then why should I trust you?).
I work for a company whose main product has a free Open Source competitor. As far as I can tell, they're in no danger of going out of business. There's always going to be people who need more hand-holding and a better user interface than typical Open Source programs provide.
Besides, it isn't the job of the government to resolve this situation. In a free market, the person who provides the best value is supposed to win the competition, not the person who has the best pull of the government. If this means a few programmers end up switching to a different industry, hey, I have sympathy with them -- but then, as when the automobile put buggy-makers out of business, sympathy only goes so far. Should the government have stepped in to protect the buggy-makers? Or should the buggy-makers instead have switched to making automobile? Most of the buggy makers decided to get government protection. Only one buggy maker decided to switch industries, and that buggy maker (Studebaker) was the only one that survived.
Static linking leads to its own problems. For example, a few revisions back Red Hat decided to move/usr/terminfo from the place where it'd been since time eternal to/usr/share/terminfo. No big deal -- except that every program that used curses or readline that was statically linked now failed miserably, because they were linked against the old curses that was looking in/usr/terminfo. Similarly, Red Hat decided to move the timezone files one year. Again, statically linked programs suddenly thought they were in Zulu time or something because the libc they were linked again could not find the timezone. Red Hat in particular has a bad habit of moving critical system files from place to place as they decide that the FHS reads differently than it did when they last visited the issue. And they don't even wait for.0 releases to move files around -- between Red Hat 5.0 and Red Hat 5.1, for example, terminfo decided to migrate.
Don't let anybody tell you that DLL hell is not a problem under Linux. It is. Our development team specifically runs Red Hat 6.2 Linux rather than the "latest and greatest" so that our software will by default run on the most number of systems out there, and we still have nightmares at times. And software installation is even more terrible than DLL hell -- everybody has a different place they stick rc.d, everybody has different runlevels that they start up in, etc., it's enough to give a guy a nervous breakdown. I finally gave up and simply put a note in the installer, "Plunk a reference to script [xyz] into wherever your Linux wants its startup scripts" and tossed up my hands in despair. Coming up with an installer that would put something into the startup sequence on Slackware, Debian, SuSE, Storm, Caldera, Red Hat, and TurboLinux was an AI problem, not a job for a shell script slinger.
Of course, this is how the distribution vendors want it. When it came time to package up RPM's for Red Hat, it was ridiculously simple to fix my little servelet to start up at system boot, just toss the start script into the right place and run the nifty command that Red Hat provides for that purpose. That's how Red Hat wants it, because that way it's tied to their version of Linux.
Not that the proprietary Unixes are any better. I curse Solaris every time I have to touch it (did you know that the only way to get a list of all SCSI tape devices on Solaris 2.8 is to do a 'find' on the/devices directory, but *only* after running "usr/sbin/devfsadm -C" because otherwise you could have some device nodes in there left over from drives that no longer exist?). I can't get Xemacs to install from the package files on IRIX (looks like I'm going to have to compile it from source, oh joy). HP/UX has a broken 'uname' command (how the BLEEP can a vendor break uname?!), though at least I manage to get "HP/UX" out of it. Creating a shared library on AIX is deep voodoo requiring encantations and lamentations and really only works right on the very very latest version of AIX (don't even *try* it for two versions back, it won't work). As pissed as I get about Linux vendors and their habit of breaking the world every six months, at least Linux stuff generally works and is easily fixed when it doesn't.
Note: I speak for myself, not for my employer. My employer specifically disclaims any statements I make about idiocies that OS vendors perpetrate.
Diffie-Hellman requires that the base and modulus be publically shared between the two ends. So the base and modulus would not be secret in any event. A given base and modulus is supposed to generate a prime field. If it does, then the NSA can study it all they want and there will be no problem. If it doesn't, I want to know beforehand, not after the NSA discovers that a "probably prime" modulus and base that were dynamically generated at runtime generates repeating subfields (i.e., drastically reduces the shared key space) rather than a single prime field.
The kind of "probably prime" number generators that can operate in real time are pretty lousy, in my opinion, and I'd much rather trust a known good modulus and base pair.
If you don't like Linux, you have no business reading Slashdot. Slashdot started out as a Linux site, and you can't expect Malda to change his stripes just because you don't like it.
I can just here the conversation in the Oval Office as our amiable puppet president discovers that some people think they don't have to obey American laws because (get this) they aren't Americans and they aren't on American soil! "Well gosh darn it, we're just going to have to fix that, aren't we? Honey, where's the red button? I thought it was here under my pajama tops... oh dear, what do you mean you hid it? Honey? Honey, put away the ruler, I'll be good!"
But the difference between a $300 and a $3000 microphone is no longer night and day. For example, Oktava has some great-sounding small and large-diaphragmn condenser mikes for cheap, as does Marshal Electronics (the mike people, not the soundboard people).
I do agree, though, that the better equipment is more consistent and easier to work with. But it's no longer a night and day contrast. It's more of a 5 minutes before sundown and 3 minutes before sudown contrast, where there is a noticable difference, but only shades, not a complete "this is crap". An Oktava can sound quite good, good enough that without another mike to compare it against, a pro couldn't tell that it was a $300 mike, but put it head-to-head against a $3,000 microphone and you'll be able to hear the difference. But without that direct comparison point, most people can't tell it's a $300 mike.
But yeah, I agree that people who think they're going to record good-sounding stuff with a $50 mike are deluded. The afore-mentioned Oktava is the lowest-cost mike that sounds reasonably good for digital recording. But it's no longer a case where you MUST have a $3,000 mike to sound good. There's now a lot of good mikes in the $200-$500 range that sound quite good, to the point where most people can't tell the difference unless they happen to have a $3,000 mike handy to directly compare against.
So do you have any alternative to mp3.com? IUMA has crashed and burned so that's not an alternative...
The problem with mp3.com is that the "suits" took over. What we need is a site by artists, for artists, without the bullshit. Sort of like Keenspot is for web comics, but with mp3's instead of comics. Yeah, the artists would have to pay a few bucks a month for web hosting services to make such a thing work, but (a) that would keep the claptrap down, and (b) it would keep hucksterism from dictating site policy -- the site would be controlled by the artists, not by venture capitalists or stockholders.
Remember, he who pays the bills controls the content. mp3.com promised a free ride to artists. Well, there ain't no such thing as a free lunch, and whoever pays the bills gets the say. It's called the golden rule -- he who has the gold, rules.
I agree that getting a home recording to sound like what plays on the top 40 is not achievable by most people. On the other hand, not everybody WANTS their music to sound like the overproduced underwhelming crap that plays on the top 40.
People believe that overproduced overhyped drivel sounds good because they've been culturally acclimated into believing so. When the majority of music is once again home produced, as it was prior to the invention of the record, it is unlikely that the overproduced sound will survive. People will once again become accustomed to listening to real music, warts and all, rather than the sterile edifices to perfection that characterise big-studio productions.
Slashdot Mirror
Undoubtedly the kid was going around school telling kids "hey, look at this neat URL!" and getting kids giggling and disruptive. If so, cite him for that on-campus behavior. Don't try to cite him for off-campus behavior, because schools only have authority to regulate speech or behavior that directly disrupts class (courts have ruled that students do NOT leave their 1st Amendment rights at the schoolhouse door, but they cannot disrupt class with their speech), and speech that's off-campus by definition cannot disrupt class.
-E
If the student's *ON CAMPUS* behavior was disrupting class, if, for example, the kid was going around saying "look at this neat URL!" and kids were giggling and dusrupting class, that's one thing. No student has the right to interfere with the education of another. If documented, this would have sufficed to uphold the suspension. But what the kid does on his spare time is his own business. I did not see it as my job to regulate what the student did on his own time, I had enough work regulating what the kid did on my time. It is a shame that this vice principal was so anal that he did a knee-jerk dumb thing and cited the kid for off-campus behavior, especially when with a little more work he could have probably found on-campus behavior to cite the kid for (I'm sure that the kid was spreading the nasty URL around campus, for example -- and what students do on-campus *IS* the school's business).
-E
To a certain extent schools act 'in loco parentis' -- but only while the student is on campus or attending a school function. The courts have long held that students do not lose their 1st Amendment rights just because they are students. The only time schools are allowed to step in is when the student's ON-CAMPUS speech is disrupting the school. What the student says off-campus is none of the school's business.
And oh -- I've been a teacher. I've also hung out with school attendance officers (the people who conduct disciplinary hearings). I've seen how students disrespect teachers and administrators. But if it happens off campus, it's not the school's business. I had plenty to handle on-campus without going out of my way to look for trouble off-campus.
-E
But off-campus speech is another issue altogether. It cannot be argued that off-campus speech is disrupting class, and therefore off-campus speech does not fall under the "cannot shout 'fire' in a crowded theator" exception to the 1st Amendment. The school's mistake was for suspending him for off-campus (protected) speech, rather than for speech he did on-campus.
-E
Nevertheless, while disrespect and disruptful behavior cannot be tolerated on the school campus, what happens off the school campus was not my concern. Frankly, I find it ridiculous that, as overworked as teachers and administrators are, they chose to make an issue of something that happened off-campus. That's *LOOKING* for trouble, and surely there's enough trouble *ON* campus for administrators?
Now, if this kid was going around *ON CAMPUS* saying to other kids, "Look at this disrespectful page I made!", and him doing that was disrupting class and the school environment, that's a different story. But you have to make that case, complete with documentation of how his *ON CAMPUS* behavior disrupted the school environment. This is under the old principle of "free speech does not cover shouting 'fire!' in a crowded theater" -- i.e., that disruptive speech on-campus is not protected speech. But the on-caompus speech has to be what's documented as the problem -- *not* the off-campus speech.
-E
-E
The fact of the matter is that what most Americans want is "good enough" junk -- something of low quality, with known flaws, that is inexpensive and "good enough" to get the job done. This is one reason why American industry advances so much faster than, say, German industry. Whereas a German designer will sit there and fiddle and fiddle until the product is "perfect", the American will whip out something servicable, say "Next!", and move on to creating something else using the lessons learned from creating the first. The result is product which is clunky, kludgy, and is "good enough", but which is definitely not going to be held up as anything exempliary. See, e.g., the Intel x86 architecture, which shouts "Kludge!" from every trace on its silicon die.
-E
There are countries where free market capitalism is not very efficient because either they have no effective government (Russia, Somalia), or because their government is corrupt (Kenya) or because their government is incompetent (Peru). Still, the majority of wealth in those countries is created by entrepeneurs practicing free market capitalism -- creating goods and/or services and selling them on a free market. This is difficult in countries that lack a stable money supply (Russia) or government support for private property (China), but it's interesting to note that China has no food shortages because private farmers produce more food than all collectives combined, despite controlling a quite small percentage of the land.
Remember, "capitalism" is not stock markets and such. It is the trading of goods and services in a free market, rather than the forced redistribution of goods and services by a government entity. Wherever there is a village market, there is capitalism.
-E
All economies have capital. Capital is what we eat, is where we sleep, is what we wear. Even communist societies have capital. They merely assign ownership of that capital to the State. Even socialist societies have capital. They merely use the government to reassign ownership of some of that capital based upon various principles of fairness or equity.
"Capitalism", as you use the term, is a misleading abbreviation of the term "free-market capitalism", which is where ownership of capital is vested in individuals and these individuals vie to increase the amount of capital that each of them owns. This has proven to be very effective at increasing the amount of capital in a society. There are costs to "pure" free market capitalism, though. In the short term, "pure" free market capitalism would have business owners creating unsafe workplaces and polluting the environment, because in the short term those result in more profit, for example. And there are always winners and losers in free market capitalism, and the question of what to do with the losers (those whose skills and abilities do not have value enough to provide them with food and shelter) remains. Thus Carl Marx's criticism of the free market capitalism of his day was quite on target. Thankfully, we do not live in a "pure" free market economy today, but, rather, one which is moderated by government. The extent to which a government should intervene in a free market economy is always an issue, but even the most die-hard free market capitalists admit that the economy would collapse if not for government interventions such as, e.g., chartered limited-liability corporations (a government-enforced invention, otherwise shareholders would be liable for the misdeeds of corporations and would not invest money in corporations), court systems (which allow settling business disputes without guns, well, usually, anyhow), and guarantees of the safety of the money supply.
-E
Nevertheless, the copyright holder (the entity that commissioned the "work for hire") can change the licensing at any time and use the software in any way he wishes. If he wants to use the software in a proprietary application with a proprietary license, that is his right, regardless of any other license that the software has been released under. If the software has not yet been released and the copyright holder wishes to change the license prior to release, that is his right. So it is pretty clear that this dude is out of luck -- he didn't properly practice CYA (rule #1 of CYA: Unless it's in writing, it ain't so. Rule #2: If they want to come after you, make sure it'll be as publically embarrassing for them as possible).
-E
If the software industry was a car dealer, every major software publisher would be in jail for fraud. Misrepresenting a lease as a sale *IS* fraud in every jurisdiction in the country. It puzzles me how "content owners" can claim that they are protecting "property rights" when it appears to me that they are intent mostly upon removing *MY* property rights. The Constitution provides for copyright law. Copyright law grants "content owners" the right to restrict duplication and redistribution of copies, but does not otherwise infringe upon my property rights. But it appears that these bogus "shrink wrap" licenses (after-the-fact post-sales "click this" deals) are soon to be legally enforcible as the law of the land.
-E
Still, past a certain point, you must consider practicality. While I'd love to chain Twofish and Rijndael together (Twofish is a Feistel cipher somewhat similar to DES, Rijndael is some other kind of beasty altogether, so it is unlikely that BOTH would be broke), the result would be less than half the speed of Rijndael. While this would be fine for a file encryption program, I wouldn't want to try it for encrypting a gigabit Ethernet network connection -- it'd suck my CPU to the toilet.
Past a certain point, you have to look past paranoia and decide: a) Just how secure the data needs to be (and against whom does it need to be secure), and b) what's practical to do, given current technology. I made the decision, when Rijndael was chosen as the Advanced Encryption Standard, that Rijndael alone provided adequate security for my purposes. Depending upon how sensitive your data is (and what happens if it is compromised), you may make a different decision. I'm sure that Bin Laden triple-encrypts everything, since failure of his encryption means that he dies. If the consequences of failure are death and imprisonment, of COURSE you should double or triple encrypt everything, regardless of the performance penalty. Otherwise, it's a more difficult analysis, and usually double or triple encryption doesn't buy you enough to outweigh the costs.
-E
Right now I believe that the NSA has given up on cracking ciphers, and is more interested in securing America's commercial transactions to protect them from info warfare. Besides, as one spook divulged somewhere that I don't recall, the NSA doesn't need to crack the encryption to monitor your communications. Most networks and operating systems are so insecure that, if they decide to monitor you, they can intercept your data long before it hits the wire.
-E
You'll need to devise your own shell scripts to serve as a key manager etc.,this is a raw Unix component similar to 'dd', rather than a swiss-army-knife application like PGP.
-E
I would fill you in with facts, such as the fact that most states nowdays have laws prohibiting closed shops and forced strikes, etc., but obviously your mind is already made up. I just wish you'd cite sources for your right-wing propoganda, instead of doing a Rush Limbaugh and just pulling them out of your ass.
It is bizarre that it's okay for investors to get together into a group and form an association called a "company", with all the aggregation of power and money that this implies, but it's not okay for workers to get together and form an association called a "union". It seems to me that freedom of association is one of the more vital rights granted by our Constitution. If you dislike the behavior of some of these associations, well, I dislike the behavior of some of our major corporations too, such as Intel's habit of firing anybody over age 40 because they're "too expensive and too old" (note that age discrimination laws do NOT apply to 40-year-olds, they're violating no laws, but that does not mean it's ethical or right), and Nike's bad habit of contracting with companies that use slave labor or child labor to build shoes.
-Eric
Unfortunately, when you're applying for a new job you don't have that leverage. I was critical to the team producing the company's new product. As a new hire, I probably would not have gotten the same consideration -- they'd probably have tossed my application into the shredder as a "difficult" person. Which I am, if you intend to test my piss or steal my Open Source software, but which I'm not as an employee. (Oh, of course I don't do drugs -- I wouldn't be around if I did drugs -- but my thought is that if you don't trust me when I say that, then why should I trust you?).
-E
Besides, it isn't the job of the government to resolve this situation. In a free market, the person who provides the best value is supposed to win the competition, not the person who has the best pull of the government. If this means a few programmers end up switching to a different industry, hey, I have sympathy with them -- but then, as when the automobile put buggy-makers out of business, sympathy only goes so far. Should the government have stepped in to protect the buggy-makers? Or should the buggy-makers instead have switched to making automobile? Most of the buggy makers decided to get government protection. Only one buggy maker decided to switch industries, and that buggy maker (Studebaker) was the only one that survived.
-E
Don't let anybody tell you that DLL hell is not a problem under Linux. It is. Our development team specifically runs Red Hat 6.2 Linux rather than the "latest and greatest" so that our software will by default run on the most number of systems out there, and we still have nightmares at times. And software installation is even more terrible than DLL hell -- everybody has a different place they stick rc.d, everybody has different runlevels that they start up in, etc., it's enough to give a guy a nervous breakdown. I finally gave up and simply put a note in the installer, "Plunk a reference to script [xyz] into wherever your Linux wants its startup scripts" and tossed up my hands in despair. Coming up with an installer that would put something into the startup sequence on Slackware, Debian, SuSE, Storm, Caldera, Red Hat, and TurboLinux was an AI problem, not a job for a shell script slinger.
Of course, this is how the distribution vendors want it. When it came time to package up RPM's for Red Hat, it was ridiculously simple to fix my little servelet to start up at system boot, just toss the start script into the right place and run the nifty command that Red Hat provides for that purpose. That's how Red Hat wants it, because that way it's tied to their version of Linux.
Not that the proprietary Unixes are any better. I curse Solaris every time I have to touch it (did you know that the only way to get a list of all SCSI tape devices on Solaris 2.8 is to do a 'find' on the /devices directory, but *only* after running "usr/sbin/devfsadm -C" because otherwise you could have some device nodes in there left over from drives that no longer exist?). I can't get Xemacs to install from the package files on IRIX (looks like I'm going to have to compile it from source, oh joy). HP/UX has a broken 'uname' command (how the BLEEP can a vendor break uname?!), though at least I manage to get "HP/UX" out of it. Creating a shared library on AIX is deep voodoo requiring encantations and lamentations and really only works right on the very very latest version of AIX (don't even *try* it for two versions back, it won't work). As pissed as I get about Linux vendors and their habit of breaking the world every six months, at least Linux stuff generally works and is easily fixed when it doesn't.
Note: I speak for myself, not for my employer. My employer specifically disclaims any statements I make about idiocies that OS vendors perpetrate.
-E
The kind of "probably prime" number generators that can operate in real time are pretty lousy, in my opinion, and I'd much rather trust a known good modulus and base pair.
-E
-E
-E
(Those school teachers are mean :-).
I do agree, though, that the better equipment is more consistent and easier to work with. But it's no longer a night and day contrast. It's more of a 5 minutes before sundown and 3 minutes before sudown contrast, where there is a noticable difference, but only shades, not a complete "this is crap". An Oktava can sound quite good, good enough that without another mike to compare it against, a pro couldn't tell that it was a $300 mike, but put it head-to-head against a $3,000 microphone and you'll be able to hear the difference. But without that direct comparison point, most people can't tell it's a $300 mike.
But yeah, I agree that people who think they're going to record good-sounding stuff with a $50 mike are deluded. The afore-mentioned Oktava is the lowest-cost mike that sounds reasonably good for digital recording. But it's no longer a case where you MUST have a $3,000 mike to sound good. There's now a lot of good mikes in the $200-$500 range that sound quite good, to the point where most people can't tell the difference unless they happen to have a $3,000 mike handy to directly compare against.
-E
The problem with mp3.com is that the "suits" took over. What we need is a site by artists, for artists, without the bullshit. Sort of like Keenspot is for web comics, but with mp3's instead of comics. Yeah, the artists would have to pay a few bucks a month for web hosting services to make such a thing work, but (a) that would keep the claptrap down, and (b) it would keep hucksterism from dictating site policy -- the site would be controlled by the artists, not by venture capitalists or stockholders.
Remember, he who pays the bills controls the content. mp3.com promised a free ride to artists. Well, there ain't no such thing as a free lunch, and whoever pays the bills gets the say. It's called the golden rule -- he who has the gold, rules.
-E
People believe that overproduced overhyped drivel sounds good because they've been culturally acclimated into believing so. When the majority of music is once again home produced, as it was prior to the invention of the record, it is unlikely that the overproduced sound will survive. People will once again become accustomed to listening to real music, warts and all, rather than the sterile edifices to perfection that characterise big-studio productions.
-E