Freedom of Speech means that you can speak with out reprisal. If you are affraid of what you are saying then that is an imposition of the freedom of speech. However, Freedom of Speech/Expression/Association is often used as a knee-jerk reaction when it doesn't apply.
However, Freedom of Speech is not the real issue, as you so well pointed out. We are devling into the 4th Amendment protections of 'Unlawful Search and Siezure,' and the implied freedoms of Privacy that has been recognized by the US Supreme Court. That is the real issue. Stating that the issue is Freedom of Speech is blurring the issues. You could also argue that this issue is related to the Due Process protections -- the assumption that everyone is a potential terrorist/criminal and as such their communications should be available.
More interesting is that the report that was released on Saturday or Sunday stated that their have been 3,501 abuses of the Patriot Act -- and that was what was admitted.
That does pose a potential major risk. While I am a privacy nut, there are also risks to using strong encryption for everyday communications. For example, if you are applying for a job that requires a background check, what are the chances that you'll end up with a negative report because you use encrypted communications? I can see a potential employer passing over someone because a secuirty check reveals encrypted internet communications.
I am at a university, and right now I am begining to think about the implications of online communications -- even to the point of not posting on Slashdot. If online communications like MySpace are being dregged up during the hiring process, I am wondering what sort of implications using strong encryption for email and even using services like JAP will be. They may not come out and say that you weren't hired for it, but if you apply for something National Security related, or law enforcement, it could look really, really bad.
It is almost like we are getting into a modern era of McCarthyism where freedoms once enjoyed are being traded for the fear of terrorism. While terrorism does throw a valid argument, the arguments of McCarthyism and the current issues with terrorism are quite fascinating. Terrorism does need to be addressed, but at what cost? Does the average Joe need to be treated like a criminal or investigated as such? The terms may change, but as time goes by and more and more freedoms are surrendered in the name of terrorism how will we know that they are being used for that purpouse? I really wonder how much of this is being used for political purpouses.
That is a major problem with security -- assuming that you are secure. If and when virus/malware/spyware writers start to target the cell phone platform, then we are going to have some major problems. Just because the API's are limited and the source closed doesn't mean that some elite hacker with too much time on his hands isn't going to sit down and reverse engineer a phone. Also, what about insiders stealing the API's needed to do something bad. The main issue here is that cell phones are going beyond the simple use of making telephone calls and the technologies that they are starting to support is gaining acceptance. If people are not smart about it, you could be loading Norton on your phone just so you can make a simple phone call. That is the real issue here.
Because a problem doesn't exist today doesn't mean that you should not mitigate against a potential problem tomorrow. And with cell phones have more and more power, memory and features, what someone can do with it increases. Frankly the Boy Scout mantra of "always be prepared" applies very well in security. By saying that the API's are not known, or all you can do is use Java is short-sighted. If I were working for a cell phone company I would take this EXTREMELY seriously and start to plan for it. All it would take is one virus to spread and take over something.
What I am wonder is how this will affect people with neurological disorders that affect brain patterns like epilespy? I know an epileptic that has aura's all the time and she gets dizzy. Her EEG's during those dizzy periods are not normal minutes to hours before a siezure. And bipolar disorders? Sure you can think the password, but if your brain isn't stable all the time how can thinking a password match 100% of the time? What if you change medications? Some migraine medicanes are epilespy drugs and they act on receptor sites that can cause cognitive problems. Parkinsons patients have the same issues. Some of the anti-anxiety drugs are vallium derivative. Do those change the brain patterns? Even more interesting is if someone has an injury and is put on narcotics? Does that mean that the person will be locked out of their computer? And how would anti-depresants like SSRI's affect brain patterns? With the high number of people on them it could cause some issues.
With out knowing all the answers, I would argue that medical issues will be the killer. Realiability would be a huge problem. Unlike other biometerics which have a low probability of changing, I think that brain patterns would be far too unpredictable for wide-spread deployment.
What? You don't surf the net on your network's critical Database server? Wow, I guess I am pretty unique then.....maybe that is the real why I keep getting hacked.
I run Linux and on occasion when I want to play with a program, I use VMWare's non-persistant disk feature to sandbox. It is absolutely amazing how well that works. I like getting bad programs to play with them. Although I have had some that have come up saying that they can't be installed in VMWare. That is very interesting. Some of these programs refuse to even install in VMWare, I presume because they don't want to be analyised at all, and using Virtual Machines is one of the safest ways to do it.
I think that illistrates what they were trying to point out: you have to guess which sites are bad. You'll notice that it includes an invite to download SiteAdvisor, which will help you know if the site is good or bad?
This study wasn't impartial -- it is a marketing campaign for a very useful, free tool. Simply put they show you sites and you have to guess and when it is over they prove to you that it is all a guessing game. You don't need to visit every site. The average user, and I would be a good number (excluding those reply to this post since I will get flamed for it) of advanced users don't excerise due diligence in making sure that the site is clean. If we changed the sites to offering free Hex Editors, a Notepad replacement, etc., then it would be inline with the/. crowd. I am just like the next guy on this site -- you couldn't pay me to download and install a screensaver to my computer from internet. But with many other users, desktops, screensavers and other eye candy is important for their user experience.
Quite simply a host file like the one posted reduced exposure to bad sites. When you exposure is limited then your chances of picking up some malware drop significantly. The current internet is like swimming in the ocean and trying to avoid large fishing nets. If you are never in the area where a fishing net is going to be, you're never going to get caught. The host files restrict 'areas' of the internet that you can swim.
What is more interesting is that looking over the host file revels what type of surfing activity will catch you a bug. For example a LOT of porn sites are blocked, I would say that half of the sites were porn related out of an 11,000 line host file. But the net effect of that host file is users will start to change their surfing habits. If they like to search for screensavers, they might quickly learn they can't so they will stop. Negative reinforcement.
So I would argue that a long host file would do two things. 1) It reduces exposure of your computer to the internet and 2) Alters the persons behavior by retraining them in what they can and cannot look at.
Very true. But for some of these illegit shops, they can't use static IP addresses, and have to rely on URLs -- that way they can have the content floating from one ISP to another to another. If your goal is to stay up as long as you can using a URL will enable that. Simply code your pages. When it looks like you are going to get shutdown, then you set up another hosted solution, and repoint everything there. It allows for quick, and relatively easy setup with out the hassle of changing and recoding sites.
I have had several conversations with the IT department at my university over complaints that I have. Recently, they hired me.
But in all the dicussions that I have had, I can see why another-wise competiant IT staff would do it: usability and support. If an IT department spends a lot of time supporting Joe Sixpack who can hardly use a computer, then it would make sense. Also, if the school is not using some form of webmail, then adopting a webmail program would be nice -- then when the idiot of a user needs to use email you just point them the URL.
Another attractive feature is probably that this program would allow the IT staff to do other things. If there isn't the budget for some project because the email servers have to be updated or there isn't room in the budget for another IT guy, off loading the email to another would make life easier. With that the IT department can work on whatever pet project they want to and not have to worry about managing the email servers.
Cost would be another factor. If Microsoft solution cost less than other options and cost less than hosting your own, then why not?
The problem is that sometimes the lines of useability get blurred when you start throwing issues of cost and support into the mix. While I would not be happy with my school for opting for such a solution, I given the constraints that face most schools, I could see it.
Because anyone who has tried to use Firefox, Konquer, etc, with Windows Live KNOWS that it won't work. The only way that I got it to work was by spoofing the user agent string, and then it didn't render right. So, yes, it does not work with other browsers.
How hard would it be for the PCI card to make a screen write that simply put up a dialog screen indicating an event had happened.
More likely though, it would probably write the event over the network to a monitoring server. After all the PCI card is designed for high-availabilty and secure solutions, so it wouldn't suprise me if it required a network connection.
I bought my own domain name and ran that for a while. I started doing that after my Hotmail account was getting a hundred SPAM messages a day. My SPAM dropped to nearly zero until I got on the radars of the SPAM folks. Then it went up gradually for two years until all I could do was to delete an email account for a week and then reinstate it. That would help significantly. But that method would only work for about six months.
Recently I migrated my email from self hosted over to GMail for domains. Nothing gets through except for maybe one or two a week, if that. One account that I have has over 650 SPAM messages recieved in just three weeks. But my inbox is fine.
However, Open Source databases are not nearly as feature rich as Oracle Databases. For example, the PL/SQL language is very attractive and makes Oracle look good just because of what you can do with it. Oracle also has some very useful and powerful functions and procedures that MySQL doesn't have like synnonyms, native Java support, role privelages, dedicated web server, and XML support to name a few.
So the real question is whether or not open source can innovate fast enough and provide people with an incentive to switch. For example, if a shop is relying on PL/SQL scripts are they going to rewrite everything to switch for less functionality when they are using that functionality? Granted MySQL kicks the pants off of Oracle in simple queries, but what about nested correlated subqueries (which, by the way, Oracle is the only DBMS that supports correlated subqueries), or to be fair, a nest subquery that performs several joins? If you need the data, you need the data. Having the data and not being able to get to it, is pretty aggrigavating. Worse is if a solution is chosen that doesn't allow a person to get to it when there is another solution that will.
I am a huge open source fan, but the problem with many of us open source advocates is that we fail to see where open source fails and close source commercial products pick it up. Performance is not everything; don't believe me look to Microsoft. Reliability, scalability, support and accountabilty are important. A large enterprise is going to choose Oracle or SQL Server because if something needs to be fixed FOR THEM they can get it fixed for them quickly and not have to employ someone to fix it or wait for the community to fix it. That is the reason that Redhat is so successful -- they provide the support for open source products.
I would love to see MySQL and PostgreSQL succeed. But the documentation for both sucks pretty bad (generally speaking many open source products have poor documentation). Oracle on the other hand has a ton of documentation. MySQL and PostgreSQL may be just fine for a small and even mid-size shops, but there is a reason why large enterprises don't use them.
I love it when a teacher complains about the quality of a book. I am in my senior year, and I have taken to not buying the book until I know what the teacher thinks of the book before I buy the book. Why pay for something when the teacher won't even use it? I have found that many of my teachers have textbooks because they have to, and if they weren't required to have one or two they wouldn't.
But what is more interesting is that my professors are noticing that students are not reading the textbooks anymore. In fact in a sympossium, the president of the university stated that students use textbooks as reference books and no longer read them. I think that this is precipated in fact by the professors' view points of books in the first place.
I have a professor that has helped write two major books that are part of the Oracle Library and he is writing another one right now. He doesn't care where we get the book because he doesn't get more or less depending on where we get them. But when the authors might get a whopping $2 per book, I don't really think that a professor is going to push new editions that hard.
With that said, the only professors that are real dorks are the ones that write the crappy spiral bound verisons. I have professors that are some sort of demi-author that are pious and want to be taken seriously like a real author. Those professors that I have had that are real authors, that have written real books don't rely on students to make the sales. Besides I question the intentions of a professor that is trying to make money off of a student -- why are they teaching in the first place? Because they want to teach, or because they have a captive audience that has no viable alternative?
That's one of the problems of being a monopoly that excerises illegal influence -- when you get hauled on the table you don't look good. But giving up a little market share won't fix the problem, since AMD can still get damages. If AMD does have proof of what they're allegding then it won't really matter since Intel is going to punished on prior acts not current acts. It would actually be in Intels best interest to 'relent a little' since it would go to show some reform. I've read the AMD complaint and the Intel response, and frankly, it doesn't look good for Intel if AMD can back up even a fourth of what they have said. So all-in-all, it would probably be in the best interest of Intel to be absolte jack @sses about the whole matter. What Intel needs to do is to prove that they are not a monopoly now. But then again, getting sued and AMD proving that they were a monopoly in the past looks pretty bad as well.
The four pillars are disturbing -- suicide, sodomy, cannibalism and abortion. Is sounds more like a guy that just wants to get the attention of wackos and find out how many people he got to kjill themselves.
One thing that I think might be illegal is all those personality tests that those Kiosk make you take. Having a friend that works for Albertsons as a manager, he tells me that in order to be interviewed you have to come out with a Green/Green designation, otherwise you can't be interviewed. The problem I have with such systems is that the pre-employment personality tests don't reveal enough and they don't take into account your thought process, and they rarely related to the job that you're applying for. One peer of mine was applying for a job as a stocker, but she was turned down because her customer service skills weren't enough. The tests eliminate people with out taking into consideration prior experience or skills which may mitigate those short commings. It is one thing for someone to say that you won't fit in, but it is quite another thing when a computer makes some sort of mathmatical calculation to say you don't get a job. Since when do night stockers need customer service skills? Or if you are going to be the janitor, why do you need to score high on 'works well with others' when it is a self-supervised position?
Not a fair chance? By what standards? By the American constructs of justice, they might have been given the short end of the stick. But according to European constructs, they may have been given a fair shake. When Microsoft entered European markets, they accepted the implications of it. When you go over to another country you implicitly accept their constructs of justice and law. That is why the State Department won't step in and save you when screw up in another country. Arguing and asking that Microsoft be given a fair chance by American definitions is just like asking that someone who is in another country recieve an American trial even though the crime is committed in another country.
The real issue here is that American's view other constructs of justice and social laws as being backwards and wrong. Who is to say that guilty until proven innocent is anymore right or wrong than innocent until proven innocent. I don't agree with the European method, but I am an American.
It is extremely myopic to argue that Microsoft, albeit an American company should be allowed to operate in Europe and at the same time only have to use American laws. If Microsoft is Europe and selling in Europe then Microsoft should be subject to the laws of that nation, regardless of whether or not Americans consider those laws to be just. It is not up to Microsoft to change those laws, and trying to use backhanded methods to compell what they want is not right.
If the constructs of justice are so maligent and repugnant, than why don't the Europeans change them? If Microsoft doesn't like the laws, then Microsoft can withdraw. No one is holding Microsoft in Europe; they are choosing to stay in Europe. And when their behavior is not to the liking of the European Union, it is not the place of an American to say that the EU is not treating them fairly, especially when most Americans, including myself, do not understand how Europe handles such issues. The world does not revolve around America, and American's need to respect the laws of another country, even when we percieve them to be unfair by our standards.
Now I realize that everyone is going to flame me about China, Iran and other countries that violate human rights. But this post is not referring to human rights. That is a whole different story. This is just about the social constructs of justice.
Slashdot Mirror
Freedom of Speech means that you can speak with out reprisal. If you are affraid of what you are saying then that is an imposition of the freedom of speech. However, Freedom of Speech/Expression/Association is often used as a knee-jerk reaction when it doesn't apply.
However, Freedom of Speech is not the real issue, as you so well pointed out. We are devling into the 4th Amendment protections of 'Unlawful Search and Siezure,' and the implied freedoms of Privacy that has been recognized by the US Supreme Court. That is the real issue. Stating that the issue is Freedom of Speech is blurring the issues. You could also argue that this issue is related to the Due Process protections -- the assumption that everyone is a potential terrorist/criminal and as such their communications should be available.
More interesting is that the report that was released on Saturday or Sunday stated that their have been 3,501 abuses of the Patriot Act -- and that was what was admitted.
That does pose a potential major risk. While I am a privacy nut, there are also risks to using strong encryption for everyday communications. For example, if you are applying for a job that requires a background check, what are the chances that you'll end up with a negative report because you use encrypted communications? I can see a potential employer passing over someone because a secuirty check reveals encrypted internet communications.
I am at a university, and right now I am begining to think about the implications of online communications -- even to the point of not posting on Slashdot. If online communications like MySpace are being dregged up during the hiring process, I am wondering what sort of implications using strong encryption for email and even using services like JAP will be. They may not come out and say that you weren't hired for it, but if you apply for something National Security related, or law enforcement, it could look really, really bad.
It is almost like we are getting into a modern era of McCarthyism where freedoms once enjoyed are being traded for the fear of terrorism. While terrorism does throw a valid argument, the arguments of McCarthyism and the current issues with terrorism are quite fascinating. Terrorism does need to be addressed, but at what cost? Does the average Joe need to be treated like a criminal or investigated as such? The terms may change, but as time goes by and more and more freedoms are surrendered in the name of terrorism how will we know that they are being used for that purpouse? I really wonder how much of this is being used for political purpouses.
That is a major problem with security -- assuming that you are secure. If and when virus/malware/spyware writers start to target the cell phone platform, then we are going to have some major problems. Just because the API's are limited and the source closed doesn't mean that some elite hacker with too much time on his hands isn't going to sit down and reverse engineer a phone. Also, what about insiders stealing the API's needed to do something bad. The main issue here is that cell phones are going beyond the simple use of making telephone calls and the technologies that they are starting to support is gaining acceptance. If people are not smart about it, you could be loading Norton on your phone just so you can make a simple phone call. That is the real issue here.
Because a problem doesn't exist today doesn't mean that you should not mitigate against a potential problem tomorrow. And with cell phones have more and more power, memory and features, what someone can do with it increases. Frankly the Boy Scout mantra of "always be prepared" applies very well in security. By saying that the API's are not known, or all you can do is use Java is short-sighted. If I were working for a cell phone company I would take this EXTREMELY seriously and start to plan for it. All it would take is one virus to spread and take over something.
Although, depending on how much you use your computer, it may be cheaper than having children.m ?z=1728_00000_1000_nb_01
http://www.webmd.com/content/article/98/104676.ht
What I am wonder is how this will affect people with neurological disorders that affect brain patterns like epilespy? I know an epileptic that has aura's all the time and she gets dizzy. Her EEG's during those dizzy periods are not normal minutes to hours before a siezure. And bipolar disorders? Sure you can think the password, but if your brain isn't stable all the time how can thinking a password match 100% of the time? What if you change medications? Some migraine medicanes are epilespy drugs and they act on receptor sites that can cause cognitive problems. Parkinsons patients have the same issues. Some of the anti-anxiety drugs are vallium derivative. Do those change the brain patterns? Even more interesting is if someone has an injury and is put on narcotics? Does that mean that the person will be locked out of their computer? And how would anti-depresants like SSRI's affect brain patterns? With the high number of people on them it could cause some issues.
With out knowing all the answers, I would argue that medical issues will be the killer. Realiability would be a huge problem. Unlike other biometerics which have a low probability of changing, I think that brain patterns would be far too unpredictable for wide-spread deployment.
What? You don't surf the net on your network's critical Database server? Wow, I guess I am pretty unique then.....maybe that is the real why I keep getting hacked.
I run Linux and on occasion when I want to play with a program, I use VMWare's non-persistant disk feature to sandbox. It is absolutely amazing how well that works. I like getting bad programs to play with them. Although I have had some that have come up saying that they can't be installed in VMWare. That is very interesting. Some of these programs refuse to even install in VMWare, I presume because they don't want to be analyised at all, and using Virtual Machines is one of the safest ways to do it.
That was the whole point. They are trying to get people to use SiteAdvisor, which has already established itself as free, reliable and clean.
I think that illistrates what they were trying to point out: you have to guess which sites are bad. You'll notice that it includes an invite to download SiteAdvisor, which will help you know if the site is good or bad?
/. crowd. I am just like the next guy on this site -- you couldn't pay me to download and install a screensaver to my computer from internet. But with many other users, desktops, screensavers and other eye candy is important for their user experience.
This study wasn't impartial -- it is a marketing campaign for a very useful, free tool. Simply put they show you sites and you have to guess and when it is over they prove to you that it is all a guessing game. You don't need to visit every site. The average user, and I would be a good number (excluding those reply to this post since I will get flamed for it) of advanced users don't excerise due diligence in making sure that the site is clean. If we changed the sites to offering free Hex Editors, a Notepad replacement, etc., then it would be inline with the
As a recap: THIS STUDY WAS TO MARKET SITEADVISOR.
Quite simply a host file like the one posted reduced exposure to bad sites. When you exposure is limited then your chances of picking up some malware drop significantly. The current internet is like swimming in the ocean and trying to avoid large fishing nets. If you are never in the area where a fishing net is going to be, you're never going to get caught. The host files restrict 'areas' of the internet that you can swim.
What is more interesting is that looking over the host file revels what type of surfing activity will catch you a bug. For example a LOT of porn sites are blocked, I would say that half of the sites were porn related out of an 11,000 line host file. But the net effect of that host file is users will start to change their surfing habits. If they like to search for screensavers, they might quickly learn they can't so they will stop. Negative reinforcement.
So I would argue that a long host file would do two things. 1) It reduces exposure of your computer to the internet and 2) Alters the persons behavior by retraining them in what they can and cannot look at.
Very true. But for some of these illegit shops, they can't use static IP addresses, and have to rely on URLs -- that way they can have the content floating from one ISP to another to another. If your goal is to stay up as long as you can using a URL will enable that. Simply code your pages. When it looks like you are going to get shutdown, then you set up another hosted solution, and repoint everything there. It allows for quick, and relatively easy setup with out the hassle of changing and recoding sites.
I have had several conversations with the IT department at my university over complaints that I have. Recently, they hired me.
But in all the dicussions that I have had, I can see why another-wise competiant IT staff would do it: usability and support. If an IT department spends a lot of time supporting Joe Sixpack who can hardly use a computer, then it would make sense. Also, if the school is not using some form of webmail, then adopting a webmail program would be nice -- then when the idiot of a user needs to use email you just point them the URL.
Another attractive feature is probably that this program would allow the IT staff to do other things. If there isn't the budget for some project because the email servers have to be updated or there isn't room in the budget for another IT guy, off loading the email to another would make life easier. With that the IT department can work on whatever pet project they want to and not have to worry about managing the email servers.
Cost would be another factor. If Microsoft solution cost less than other options and cost less than hosting your own, then why not?
The problem is that sometimes the lines of useability get blurred when you start throwing issues of cost and support into the mix. While I would not be happy with my school for opting for such a solution, I given the constraints that face most schools, I could see it.
Because anyone who has tried to use Firefox, Konquer, etc, with Windows Live KNOWS that it won't work. The only way that I got it to work was by spoofing the user agent string, and then it didn't render right. So, yes, it does not work with other browsers.
How hard would it be for the PCI card to make a screen write that simply put up a dialog screen indicating an event had happened.
More likely though, it would probably write the event over the network to a monitoring server. After all the PCI card is designed for high-availabilty and secure solutions, so it wouldn't suprise me if it required a network connection.
Because surfing the internet was probably an excuse for firing him when they couldn't come up with another reason to fire him and have it stick.
I bought my own domain name and ran that for a while. I started doing that after my Hotmail account was getting a hundred SPAM messages a day. My SPAM dropped to nearly zero until I got on the radars of the SPAM folks. Then it went up gradually for two years until all I could do was to delete an email account for a week and then reinstate it. That would help significantly. But that method would only work for about six months.
Recently I migrated my email from self hosted over to GMail for domains. Nothing gets through except for maybe one or two a week, if that. One account that I have has over 650 SPAM messages recieved in just three weeks. But my inbox is fine.
However, Open Source databases are not nearly as feature rich as Oracle Databases. For example, the PL/SQL language is very attractive and makes Oracle look good just because of what you can do with it. Oracle also has some very useful and powerful functions and procedures that MySQL doesn't have like synnonyms, native Java support, role privelages, dedicated web server, and XML support to name a few.
So the real question is whether or not open source can innovate fast enough and provide people with an incentive to switch. For example, if a shop is relying on PL/SQL scripts are they going to rewrite everything to switch for less functionality when they are using that functionality? Granted MySQL kicks the pants off of Oracle in simple queries, but what about nested correlated subqueries (which, by the way, Oracle is the only DBMS that supports correlated subqueries), or to be fair, a nest subquery that performs several joins? If you need the data, you need the data. Having the data and not being able to get to it, is pretty aggrigavating. Worse is if a solution is chosen that doesn't allow a person to get to it when there is another solution that will.
I am a huge open source fan, but the problem with many of us open source advocates is that we fail to see where open source fails and close source commercial products pick it up. Performance is not everything; don't believe me look to Microsoft. Reliability, scalability, support and accountabilty are important. A large enterprise is going to choose Oracle or SQL Server because if something needs to be fixed FOR THEM they can get it fixed for them quickly and not have to employ someone to fix it or wait for the community to fix it. That is the reason that Redhat is so successful -- they provide the support for open source products.
I would love to see MySQL and PostgreSQL succeed. But the documentation for both sucks pretty bad (generally speaking many open source products have poor documentation). Oracle on the other hand has a ton of documentation. MySQL and PostgreSQL may be just fine for a small and even mid-size shops, but there is a reason why large enterprises don't use them.
I love it when a teacher complains about the quality of a book. I am in my senior year, and I have taken to not buying the book until I know what the teacher thinks of the book before I buy the book. Why pay for something when the teacher won't even use it? I have found that many of my teachers have textbooks because they have to, and if they weren't required to have one or two they wouldn't.
But what is more interesting is that my professors are noticing that students are not reading the textbooks anymore. In fact in a sympossium, the president of the university stated that students use textbooks as reference books and no longer read them. I think that this is precipated in fact by the professors' view points of books in the first place.
I have a professor that has helped write two major books that are part of the Oracle Library and he is writing another one right now. He doesn't care where we get the book because he doesn't get more or less depending on where we get them. But when the authors might get a whopping $2 per book, I don't really think that a professor is going to push new editions that hard.
With that said, the only professors that are real dorks are the ones that write the crappy spiral bound verisons. I have professors that are some sort of demi-author that are pious and want to be taken seriously like a real author. Those professors that I have had that are real authors, that have written real books don't rely on students to make the sales. Besides I question the intentions of a professor that is trying to make money off of a student -- why are they teaching in the first place? Because they want to teach, or because they have a captive audience that has no viable alternative?
How about the DC? Try the Betlway.
That's one of the problems of being a monopoly that excerises illegal influence -- when you get hauled on the table you don't look good. But giving up a little market share won't fix the problem, since AMD can still get damages. If AMD does have proof of what they're allegding then it won't really matter since Intel is going to punished on prior acts not current acts. It would actually be in Intels best interest to 'relent a little' since it would go to show some reform. I've read the AMD complaint and the Intel response, and frankly, it doesn't look good for Intel if AMD can back up even a fourth of what they have said. So all-in-all, it would probably be in the best interest of Intel to be absolte jack @sses about the whole matter. What Intel needs to do is to prove that they are not a monopoly now. But then again, getting sued and AMD proving that they were a monopoly in the past looks pretty bad as well.
Yeah, that church is definately not mainstream.
The four pillars are disturbing -- suicide, sodomy, cannibalism and abortion. Is sounds more like a guy that just wants to get the attention of wackos and find out how many people he got to kjill themselves.
One thing that I think might be illegal is all those personality tests that those Kiosk make you take. Having a friend that works for Albertsons as a manager, he tells me that in order to be interviewed you have to come out with a Green/Green designation, otherwise you can't be interviewed. The problem I have with such systems is that the pre-employment personality tests don't reveal enough and they don't take into account your thought process, and they rarely related to the job that you're applying for. One peer of mine was applying for a job as a stocker, but she was turned down because her customer service skills weren't enough. The tests eliminate people with out taking into consideration prior experience or skills which may mitigate those short commings. It is one thing for someone to say that you won't fit in, but it is quite another thing when a computer makes some sort of mathmatical calculation to say you don't get a job. Since when do night stockers need customer service skills? Or if you are going to be the janitor, why do you need to score high on 'works well with others' when it is a self-supervised position?
Even better yet, in the description of the story:
"Today two such stories were submitted so numerous that I had little choice but to post. "
So they were 'forced' to post the critisms? Interesting indeed, interesting...
NOTE: I rarely read Digg. I has trouble rendering correctly on my machine (Linux + Firefox)
Not a fair chance? By what standards? By the American constructs of justice, they might have been given the short end of the stick. But according to European constructs, they may have been given a fair shake. When Microsoft entered European markets, they accepted the implications of it. When you go over to another country you implicitly accept their constructs of justice and law. That is why the State Department won't step in and save you when screw up in another country. Arguing and asking that Microsoft be given a fair chance by American definitions is just like asking that someone who is in another country recieve an American trial even though the crime is committed in another country.
The real issue here is that American's view other constructs of justice and social laws as being backwards and wrong. Who is to say that guilty until proven innocent is anymore right or wrong than innocent until proven innocent. I don't agree with the European method, but I am an American.
It is extremely myopic to argue that Microsoft, albeit an American company should be allowed to operate in Europe and at the same time only have to use American laws. If Microsoft is Europe and selling in Europe then Microsoft should be subject to the laws of that nation, regardless of whether or not Americans consider those laws to be just. It is not up to Microsoft to change those laws, and trying to use backhanded methods to compell what they want is not right.
If the constructs of justice are so maligent and repugnant, than why don't the Europeans change them? If Microsoft doesn't like the laws, then Microsoft can withdraw. No one is holding Microsoft in Europe; they are choosing to stay in Europe. And when their behavior is not to the liking of the European Union, it is not the place of an American to say that the EU is not treating them fairly, especially when most Americans, including myself, do not understand how Europe handles such issues. The world does not revolve around America, and American's need to respect the laws of another country, even when we percieve them to be unfair by our standards.
Now I realize that everyone is going to flame me about China, Iran and other countries that violate human rights. But this post is not referring to human rights. That is a whole different story. This is just about the social constructs of justice.