first of all, this is NOT a public venue. This is a discussion being held at a public university, and may possibly have open attendance, but as far as i know, unless the moderator of the discussion or the host of the discussion thinks he is being disorderly and asks the police to step in, they have NO authority. Given it is on a college campus and these are college cops, maybe they technically have the authority to intervene, but how would you feel if this was your college/university? Is the next step to have cops in the classroom to arrest people with dissenting opinions?
um, you are in zero-g space, if you push the pole, you will move backwards, the pole won't move... now if you propelled yourself forward holding the pole, that would be different.
well, you can personally affect your driving record through your own actions. you cannot change your genetic makeup (yet), just like you can't change your parents... Insurance companies don't currently (and might not be legally able to) not insure you based on your family history of disease, although that can be a pretty legitimate way for them to estimate what your cost to them over your lifetime will be.
The answer is really to not have private health care, b/c in reality it will always be in a corporation's interest to provide you the minimum amount of care to keep you healthy, charge you the most amount of money they can, and pay the least amount they can to the care provider. sometimes that means charging the consumer more than they need to pay, sometimes that means paying the doctors less than they charge, the point is that a profit driven health car system is not going to provide people with the best care, it will provide them with the most profitalble care... anyways, thats a little off topic...
you know, patents do release knowledge into the public domain after a certain amount of time, and they also do spur more creativity than you would think (you don't have to try and guess at why the competitor's widget is better, they have patented the reason it is better, and you can license it from them, or develop something similar following the same principles that doesn't infringe on their patent, or wait for it to expire then incorporate it into your widget)
i think the major problem is that patents worked well for more concrete engineering problems, but once they started moving into patentable processes and software, all of a sudden the system is outdated. I do think people should be able to patent software, if it is truly original. I think it can force openness in software development, but i also think that software patents need to have a much smaller time of application, and that there needs to be a higher standard for proving the originality of the idea.
this law doesn't just affect over the air radio stations, but all streaming web casts. this is a bad deal, and it is supposed to be applied retro actively to 2006 (which will basically put all streaming radio stations out of business).
you can write your congressman or representative here.
for more info on how this will affect streaming radio, check out www.SaveOurInternetRadio.com. i found out about this through soma fm's news section (soma fm is an internet radio station i listen to, i am not affiliated with them)
there are a main with the "pay for faster load" schemes is that both the web sites and the clients (you) have already paid for the bandwith. both the provider and the consumer are already paying for the bandwith, and there are tons of agreements between service providers to manage the cost of the traffic distribution for that.
what the telco's are suggesting is an anti-competetive practice where they will guarantee faster delivery for a provider's content (or possibly slow down delivery for anyone who doesn't pay there bonus fee). the thing is, the provider is ALREADY paying for the bandwith for their site, and obviously the larger the company, the more they need to pay to host their site (b/c they have more bandwith). It creates a barrier of entry into the WWW where small business just CANNNOT compete with larger corporations b/c they cannot afford the added tax to make their site load quickly enough for anyone to use.
i really think we should just pass a law that if you purchase an internet connection, that should mean you have unfiltered access to the internet. Let them sell their crapped up services with the 'fast load tax', but don't let them call it or insinuate that its an internet connection. Then, we aren't over-regulating the industry, but we are still protecting the consumer...
i guess it depends on what your idea of 'making a decent living' is... i think the days of the super star musicians are far from over -- we will always have the uber-pop superstar favorite of the week who's albums go platinum the week they are released...
but, being a musician is being an artist, and unfortunatly most artists don't get paid well in the u.s. The internet and non-DRM'ed music isn't to blame for why the recording artists are having trouble making money, its the broken profit model. recording and distribution used to be mega expensive. Now i can buy a computer for 3,000 bucks that will allow me to create studio quality recorded music. i can buy add a video camera for another 2 or 3 thousand, and now can create studio quality video. I'm not really sure why the record companies still spend hundred's of thousands to produce a record, but you just don't have to, and the smaller and newer artists are just starting to figure that out. People aren't spending less money on music, they are just spending it differently.
sorry to be harsh, but maybe we would be better off with musicians who didn't care so much about making a living, and were really just into music
i've normally had windows machines, but over the holidays i added a mac mini to my collection of computers, and i've got to say that the initial set up of the machine was SO much easier than any computer i've ever set up that i was sold from the first minute. i plugged it in, hooked it up to my television, and turned it on, it then proceded to tell me i didn't have any input devices plugged it, and it would look for bluetooth devices. it recognized the bluetooth keyboard and mouse available in its area, and proceded to tell me how to sync the 2 devices. it then recognized my cell phone (which has blue tooth access as well), and synced up to that. It then found all of the wifi networks and asked me if i wanted to set up a connection to any of them. It was the fastest and easiest setup i've ever had with a computer. i'm still getting used to some of the interface differences between OSX and Windows, but i've got to say it is still the easiest computer to use that i've ever had. there is a lot of recognizable consistency in the OSX interface that windows is lacking. It is built for normal people to use and administer, while still allowing more technical users to be do advanced os management (which really helped me get started, b/c i hadn't used a unix box in 5 years, and only have minimal linux/bsd experience). anyways, i've got to say that the ease of use alone was enough for me to decide to use it as my main computer from now on.
you write all this assuming that the business model for all artists is in selling copies of their work. i would argue that is the incorrect business model for musicians, and possibly even for movie makers.
the movie industry is currently set up to make money 3 ways: 1. selling rights to theaters so poeple can watch the movie there, 2. selling rights to TV stations so the subscribers can watch, 3. selling media so people can watch in the convenience of their own home. The reason DVDs/VHS tapes hit the price point they have hit is complicated, but is mostly b/c of costs involved in production and distribution of the media... once the production/distribution costs became minimal, the industry instead of passing the savings onto the consumer, just kept the price point the same to realize more profit. good business decision, but bad for the consumer.
the music industry is set up to make money from 1. concerts, 2. album sales. rather than focusing on having artists tour and selling concerts, they have tended to focus on increasing album sales as a way for them to make money... but thats not what the market wants. it is perfectly possible for a musician to make money mostly off of touring (how do you think most classical musician's make a living?) if it is essientally free to reproduce and distribute the album, then there is really no demand from the consumer to pay $15 for it.
now, if these stupid industries would think a little outside of the box, they could create a demand for buying the media (like say, by packaging it with limited edition stickers, t-shirts, autographed liner notes, including vouchers for free concert/movie tickets in some, creating a rewards point system where you can get other free stuff the more you buy, etc...). If they could actually make the media more valuable than the content, then they could give the content away for free, and some people would still buy the media, probably at a price point higher than what it currently is (but certainly not everyone would buy it).
honestly, i really think both industries have priced themselves out of the market, anyways... they have continually added to the price of media to raise their profits, meanwhile it has become cheaper and cheaper to reproduce the media. if a movie cost 5 bucks to buy the DVD, i would honestly rather buy it than download it, b/c it takes so long to find a good quality download and then so long to download... but at 20+, its too expensive to just throw down for every movie i wanna watch. the same goes for music.
i think that the double-charge is for sure a red-herring. I think what the telcos and the providers are really trying to do is to is set up the law for future technologies that no one is talking about now (think about VIOP, IPTV).
i'm sure the slashdot crowd has heard the ramblings/debates about whether or not certain ISPs were restricting VOIP traffic b/c they had their own competing technology. As more and more communication and connectivity moves to be IP based, this is going to be a big issue.
what i think they are trying to define with these laws is what you are purchasing as a consumer (ignoring all the stuff in the EULA that says you bought nothing) as well as what the ISPs are purchasing. Did you (as a consumer) purchase a connection to the internet that means free/unencumbered/unfiltered access to everything on the WWW, or did you buy a connection portal that allows you to connect to a subsection of the web? Did the ISP pay for the bandwith to allow people to connect to them, or did they pay for the bandwith to send their data (not for someone to connect to them)?
it seems like common sense that as an end user, you expect to connect to the web, and as an ISP, you expect that if you pay for bandwith, that will allow users to connect to you. It makes too much sense, and that is what the Telcos want to change by creating a new law. That way they can charge Vonage more money for the traffic they are connecting to their users, and their VOIP solution can be more profitable and priced more competitively. Cable providers could charge more for Internet TV traffic to make their digital cable solution more competetive.
Obviously, all of the big telco's will band together, and not charge each other for traffic (b/c they can assume the traffic will be similar between them), but then anyone trying to startup their own VOIP or IPTelevision service will be SOL. at least that is what i think they are trying to set up... maybe i need to take my tinfoil hat off for a little bit, though;)
I still think you are missing an important part of the question... It is asking for tools to manage functional requirements, not just to manage changing documents and concurrent edits.
I've had a very similar discussion in my company, and the main problem is change management (i.e. keeping an up to date, relevant, clear and concise repository of functional specs that is 1.) not impossible to manage and 2.) easy to view the definition of the current functionality).
(on a side note, at my company we thought that wiki's looked to be the most promising as developers, but finally decided that it was just too hard to manage the content and change process with the ones we evaluated.)
the problem is that most QA processes focus on testing for user experience issues and functionality issues. At least in my experience, the QA team isn't typically focused on testing for application security issues (like cross site script, sql injection, buffer overflows, etc...). They are basically trying to find errors before the users find them.
What products like Coverity offer are the opportunity to add in security vulnerability testing that is not manual. Have you ever tried to test a web app for cross-site scripting vulnerabilities, or tried to test an app for buffer overflow errors? Not only is it super time consuming, but new exploits are discovered all of the time.
Whats nice about products like this are that they will auto-magically check your application against this ever changing list of vulnerabilities. In my experience, the QA team has enough to do just verifying that new functionality works as designed and that bugs and issues that a developer resolves are actually fixed.
I would love to be able to integrate this into my team's build process, our QA process, our release process, and even our development process. its just another tool that can double check that everyone is doing things correctly, along side of unit tests and use case scripts.
if you really want to do this, why not just use the WebDeveloper extension for mozilla. I haven't used it much for CSS redesign, but i think you can just edit the style sheets in the left side-bar, and you can load user style sheets...
using the phone doesn't use up any company resources or bandwith? i would have to disagree...
also, if your internal network could not handle 10 minutes of non-business web traffic from every employee throughout the day (not all at once), then i would think you may need to check on your network architecture. We're not talking about downloading 100G of pron per person per day...
thanks for that link... i haven't been paying much attention to the national weather service site in a while, but this is great... i can get the weather in 1 minutes from my phone.
actually, i've worked quite a bit with M$ Word's XML format, and apart from some strange behaviors with how Lists are managed, i think it would be quite do-able to create something to convert a Word XML document into any other document format that exists... I'm not saying it would be easy, some of the info in their XML format is so convoluted, i wonder why people think its so hard to get a job at M$... but it is definitly a possibility.
whos is saying they aren't legally responsible right now? IANAL, but i would assume they have the legal responsibility to keep private data private, and any damages a client of theirs incurs b/c of there lack of security seems to me to be their responsibility... why do you think that they are offering free credit reports, etc... for everyone for a year (not to mention the clients whose data was lost were mostly attorneys, which means they will sue if there are damages).
i know, i can't believe that they would do that (i can, but it pisses me off).
It is certainly a review of the book that it was published with a title that was not owned by the author or the publisher. The author and publisher are trying to strong-arm the little guy (look at me, i wrote a book and have a lot of money, i can afford a big expensive attorney).
I surely hope that the katie.com owner sues penguin for damages, and for infringing on her copyright. I know she didn't have "katie.com" trademarked, and IANAL, but i'm not sure that she needed to. She had an established online presence with that name, and penguin (and the author) knew of that (and even researched it) but proceeded anyways... if they sides were reversed, we all know who would win.
Whats amazing to me, if these guys can get a spaceship into space for the same price as flying a 747 across the country, just think what they could do with the commercial aviation industry...
When was the last time you saw any innovation in commercial aviation?
actually, now your're making the tricky statements.
I can guarantee that a baby born into a community of criminals and never introduced to any other examples of social behavior, will commonly become a criminal himself.
you almost had a good point, but then you brought up "criminals".
just because someone is considered a "criminal" by their government or engages in "crminal activity" (whatever that might), does not make someone morally negative.
Slashdot Mirror
that is the important point! finally someone else gets it.
first of all, this is NOT a public venue. This is a discussion being held at a public university, and may possibly have open attendance, but as far as i know, unless the moderator of the discussion or the host of the discussion thinks he is being disorderly and asks the police to step in, they have NO authority. Given it is on a college campus and these are college cops, maybe they technically have the authority to intervene, but how would you feel if this was your college/university? Is the next step to have cops in the classroom to arrest people with dissenting opinions?
um, you are in zero-g space, if you push the pole, you will move backwards, the pole won't move... now if you propelled yourself forward holding the pole, that would be different.
well, you can personally affect your driving record through your own actions. you cannot change your genetic makeup (yet), just like you can't change your parents... Insurance companies don't currently (and might not be legally able to) not insure you based on your family history of disease, although that can be a pretty legitimate way for them to estimate what your cost to them over your lifetime will be.
The answer is really to not have private health care, b/c in reality it will always be in a corporation's interest to provide you the minimum amount of care to keep you healthy, charge you the most amount of money they can, and pay the least amount they can to the care provider. sometimes that means charging the consumer more than they need to pay, sometimes that means paying the doctors less than they charge, the point is that a profit driven health car system is not going to provide people with the best care, it will provide them with the most profitalble care... anyways, thats a little off topic...
you know, patents do release knowledge into the public domain after a certain amount of time, and they also do spur more creativity than you would think (you don't have to try and guess at why the competitor's widget is better, they have patented the reason it is better, and you can license it from them, or develop something similar following the same principles that doesn't infringe on their patent, or wait for it to expire then incorporate it into your widget)
i think the major problem is that patents worked well for more concrete engineering problems, but once they started moving into patentable processes and software, all of a sudden the system is outdated. I do think people should be able to patent software, if it is truly original. I think it can force openness in software development, but i also think that software patents need to have a much smaller time of application, and that there needs to be a higher standard for proving the originality of the idea.
this law doesn't just affect over the air radio stations, but all streaming web casts. this is a bad deal, and it is supposed to be applied retro actively to 2006 (which will basically put all streaming radio stations out of business).
you can write your congressman or representative here.
for more info on how this will affect streaming radio, check out www.SaveOurInternetRadio.com. i found out about this through soma fm's news section (soma fm is an internet radio station i listen to, i am not affiliated with them)
there are a main with the "pay for faster load" schemes is that both the web sites and the clients (you) have already paid for the bandwith. both the provider and the consumer are already paying for the bandwith, and there are tons of agreements between service providers to manage the cost of the traffic distribution for that.
what the telco's are suggesting is an anti-competetive practice where they will guarantee faster delivery for a provider's content (or possibly slow down delivery for anyone who doesn't pay there bonus fee). the thing is, the provider is ALREADY paying for the bandwith for their site, and obviously the larger the company, the more they need to pay to host their site (b/c they have more bandwith). It creates a barrier of entry into the WWW where small business just CANNNOT compete with larger corporations b/c they cannot afford the added tax to make their site load quickly enough for anyone to use.
i really think we should just pass a law that if you purchase an internet connection, that should mean you have unfiltered access to the internet. Let them sell their crapped up services with the 'fast load tax', but don't let them call it or insinuate that its an internet connection. Then, we aren't over-regulating the industry, but we are still protecting the consumer...
i guess it depends on what your idea of 'making a decent living' is... i think the days of the super star musicians are far from over -- we will always have the uber-pop superstar favorite of the week who's albums go platinum the week they are released...
but, being a musician is being an artist, and unfortunatly most artists don't get paid well in the u.s. The internet and non-DRM'ed music isn't to blame for why the recording artists are having trouble making money, its the broken profit model. recording and distribution used to be mega expensive. Now i can buy a computer for 3,000 bucks that will allow me to create studio quality recorded music. i can buy add a video camera for another 2 or 3 thousand, and now can create studio quality video. I'm not really sure why the record companies still spend hundred's of thousands to produce a record, but you just don't have to, and the smaller and newer artists are just starting to figure that out. People aren't spending less money on music, they are just spending it differently.
sorry to be harsh, but maybe we would be better off with musicians who didn't care so much about making a living, and were really just into music
i've normally had windows machines, but over the holidays i added a mac mini to my collection of computers, and i've got to say that the initial set up of the machine was SO much easier than any computer i've ever set up that i was sold from the first minute. i plugged it in, hooked it up to my television, and turned it on, it then proceded to tell me i didn't have any input devices plugged it, and it would look for bluetooth devices. it recognized the bluetooth keyboard and mouse available in its area, and proceded to tell me how to sync the 2 devices. it then recognized my cell phone (which has blue tooth access as well), and synced up to that. It then found all of the wifi networks and asked me if i wanted to set up a connection to any of them. It was the fastest and easiest setup i've ever had with a computer. i'm still getting used to some of the interface differences between OSX and Windows, but i've got to say it is still the easiest computer to use that i've ever had. there is a lot of recognizable consistency in the OSX interface that windows is lacking. It is built for normal people to use and administer, while still allowing more technical users to be do advanced os management (which really helped me get started, b/c i hadn't used a unix box in 5 years, and only have minimal linux/bsd experience). anyways, i've got to say that the ease of use alone was enough for me to decide to use it as my main computer from now on.
you write all this assuming that the business model for all artists is in selling copies of their work. i would argue that is the incorrect business model for musicians, and possibly even for movie makers.
the movie industry is currently set up to make money 3 ways: 1. selling rights to theaters so poeple can watch the movie there, 2. selling rights to TV stations so the subscribers can watch, 3. selling media so people can watch in the convenience of their own home. The reason DVDs/VHS tapes hit the price point they have hit is complicated, but is mostly b/c of costs involved in production and distribution of the media... once the production/distribution costs became minimal, the industry instead of passing the savings onto the consumer, just kept the price point the same to realize more profit. good business decision, but bad for the consumer.
the music industry is set up to make money from 1. concerts, 2. album sales. rather than focusing on having artists tour and selling concerts, they have tended to focus on increasing album sales as a way for them to make money... but thats not what the market wants. it is perfectly possible for a musician to make money mostly off of touring (how do you think most classical musician's make a living?) if it is essientally free to reproduce and distribute the album, then there is really no demand from the consumer to pay $15 for it.
now, if these stupid industries would think a little outside of the box, they could create a demand for buying the media (like say, by packaging it with limited edition stickers, t-shirts, autographed liner notes, including vouchers for free concert/movie tickets in some, creating a rewards point system where you can get other free stuff the more you buy, etc...). If they could actually make the media more valuable than the content, then they could give the content away for free, and some people would still buy the media, probably at a price point higher than what it currently is (but certainly not everyone would buy it).
honestly, i really think both industries have priced themselves out of the market, anyways... they have continually added to the price of media to raise their profits, meanwhile it has become cheaper and cheaper to reproduce the media. if a movie cost 5 bucks to buy the DVD, i would honestly rather buy it than download it, b/c it takes so long to find a good quality download and then so long to download... but at 20+, its too expensive to just throw down for every movie i wanna watch. the same goes for music.
i think that the double-charge is for sure a red-herring. I think what the telcos and the providers are really trying to do is to is set up the law for future technologies that no one is talking about now (think about VIOP, IPTV).
i'm sure the slashdot crowd has heard the ramblings/debates about whether or not certain ISPs were restricting VOIP traffic b/c they had their own competing technology. As more and more communication and connectivity moves to be IP based, this is going to be a big issue.
what i think they are trying to define with these laws is what you are purchasing as a consumer (ignoring all the stuff in the EULA that says you bought nothing) as well as what the ISPs are purchasing. Did you (as a consumer) purchase a connection to the internet that means free/unencumbered/unfiltered access to everything on the WWW, or did you buy a connection portal that allows you to connect to a subsection of the web? Did the ISP pay for the bandwith to allow people to connect to them, or did they pay for the bandwith to send their data (not for someone to connect to them)?
it seems like common sense that as an end user, you expect to connect to the web, and as an ISP, you expect that if you pay for bandwith, that will allow users to connect to you. It makes too much sense, and that is what the Telcos want to change by creating a new law. That way they can charge Vonage more money for the traffic they are connecting to their users, and their VOIP solution can be more profitable and priced more competitively. Cable providers could charge more for Internet TV traffic to make their digital cable solution more competetive.
Obviously, all of the big telco's will band together, and not charge each other for traffic (b/c they can assume the traffic will be similar between them), but then anyone trying to startup their own VOIP or IPTelevision service will be SOL. at least that is what i think they are trying to set up... maybe i need to take my tinfoil hat off for a little bit, though ;)
I still think you are missing an important part of the question... It is asking for tools to manage functional requirements, not just to manage changing documents and concurrent edits.
I've had a very similar discussion in my company, and the main problem is change management (i.e. keeping an up to date, relevant, clear and concise repository of functional specs that is 1.) not impossible to manage and 2.) easy to view the definition of the current functionality).
(on a side note, at my company we thought that wiki's looked to be the most promising as developers, but finally decided that it was just too hard to manage the content and change process with the ones we evaluated.)
mod parent up.
the problem is that most QA processes focus on testing for user experience issues and functionality issues. At least in my experience, the QA team isn't typically focused on testing for application security issues (like cross site script, sql injection, buffer overflows, etc...). They are basically trying to find errors before the users find them.
What products like Coverity offer are the opportunity to add in security vulnerability testing that is not manual. Have you ever tried to test a web app for cross-site scripting vulnerabilities, or tried to test an app for buffer overflow errors? Not only is it super time consuming, but new exploits are discovered all of the time.
Whats nice about products like this are that they will auto-magically check your application against this ever changing list of vulnerabilities. In my experience, the QA team has enough to do just verifying that new functionality works as designed and that bugs and issues that a developer resolves are actually fixed.
I would love to be able to integrate this into my team's build process, our QA process, our release process, and even our development process. its just another tool that can double check that everyone is doing things correctly, along side of unit tests and use case scripts.
if you really want to do this, why not just use the WebDeveloper extension for mozilla. I haven't used it much for CSS redesign, but i think you can just edit the style sheets in the left side-bar, and you can load user style sheets...
using the phone doesn't use up any company resources or bandwith? i would have to disagree...
also, if your internal network could not handle 10 minutes of non-business web traffic from every employee throughout the day (not all at once), then i would think you may need to check on your network architecture. We're not talking about downloading 100G of pron per person per day...
thanks for that link... i haven't been paying much attention to the national weather service site in a while, but this is great... i can get the weather in 1 minutes from my phone.
actually, i've worked quite a bit with M$ Word's XML format, and apart from some strange behaviors with how Lists are managed, i think it would be quite do-able to create something to convert a Word XML document into any other document format that exists... I'm not saying it would be easy, some of the info in their XML format is so convoluted, i wonder why people think its so hard to get a job at M$... but it is definitly a possibility.
whos is saying they aren't legally responsible right now? IANAL, but i would assume they have the legal responsibility to keep private data private, and any damages a client of theirs incurs b/c of there lack of security seems to me to be their responsibility... why do you think that they are offering free credit reports, etc... for everyone for a year (not to mention the clients whose data was lost were mostly attorneys, which means they will sue if there are damages).
*up*
*down*
*up*
*down*
*left*
*right*
*left*
*right*
*b*
*a*
*select*
*start*
now can i make unlimited calls??
you can still get the 'minimize to tray' extension for firefox... http://minimizetotray.mozdev.org/installation.html
i know, i can't believe that they would do that (i can, but it pisses me off).
It is certainly a review of the book that it was published with a title that was not owned by the author or the publisher. The author and publisher are trying to strong-arm the little guy (look at me, i wrote a book and have a lot of money, i can afford a big expensive attorney).
I surely hope that the katie.com owner sues penguin for damages, and for infringing on her copyright. I know she didn't have "katie.com" trademarked, and IANAL, but i'm not sure that she needed to. She had an established online presence with that name, and penguin (and the author) knew of that (and even researched it) but proceeded anyways... if they sides were reversed, we all know who would win.
Whats amazing to me, if these guys can get a spaceship into space for the same price as flying a 747 across the country, just think what they could do with the commercial aviation industry...
When was the last time you saw any innovation in commercial aviation?
you are right.
he probably didn't even need to extort them.
i bet if he talked to them, and explained what he had found, the probably would have hired him as a consultant to help fix the problem.
or he could have gone to one of the bigger web security firms and used this to get a job...
what an idiot.