I really don't think too many employers will take the time and trouble to regulate friendships outside the office, or even inside in most cases. Most managers want to get stuff done and call it a day, not snoop around area restaurants and bars to keep tabs on employee social lives.
I wouldn't want to be the one testing this theory. Sure, it might work, but there's a good chance that certain judges would think it's bunk and hold the owner of the access point responsible. If nothing else, they could say that if you had reason to believe it wasn't secure and still kept it on that you were negligent.
If drug dealers were using your front porch and you didn't seem to mind, you would be an accessory to the crime. It would be a different story if you were out of town the entire time.
Even if the "open access point" defense does work, the access point owner will go through a lot more trouble than it's worth to prove themselves innocent.
Anonymous sources are certainly useful for exposing corruption cases and other scandals, but they do have a credibility problem. Keeping a source anonymous is always possible: the reporter could talk to someone between payphones or by meeting at a park or some method where a name would never be revealed. Most reporters would probably not want to use a totally anonymous source without having some way of verifying the source's info independently. Any crank can call up a newspaper and claim they have some dirt on an elected official, so the reporter would need some basic info to at least see if the source is credible. This, in my opinion, is the greatest obstacle to using anon. sources.
Corporations simply do what is good for the corporation in any given scenario. They do not necessarily have consistant beliefs. If the GPL benefits them in situation A, they will claim it is a good thing. In situation B, they might claim the same license is bad since it does not benefit them in that exact situation. SCO is far from being the first company to take an inconsistant position on an issue like this. In any case, they're probably counting on nobody to sue them even if they are in fact using GPL software illegally.
I strongly agree that students should be taught from the beginning to comment their code. That being said, when I was in school I noticed that the instructors who were the most anal about comments were the least effective at teching programming. One teacher in particular (not really a professor) would fail an assignment entirely if the comments were not exactly like she wanted them, and the requirements were quite complex. However she didn't have a clue about programming beyond the examples listed in the textbook. Needless to say the only things I learned in that class were what I had taught myself.
Look at Windows XP SP2. It adds a few genuine security enhancements, but most of what it does is make security settings more visible, like the security center on the control panel. Why is that there? To make PBHs feel warm and fuzzy inside. Because Microsoft knows nobody will really probe them for details. An illusion of security tends to be good enough to convince business-types that the product is secure, so this is all that companies think they need to do.
According to a popup ad that I got this morning, the FBI is investigating me right now, unless I pay some guy $29.95 for this program that hides stuff from them. Sounds like a good deal, I better order it!
OK, what makes you think ANY company, regardless of size, will spend a bunch of time and money on R&D if they will not have any way of recovering the cost? Having to immediately compete with generic versions of their product whose makers got the benefit of free R&D will not allow them to make any money on their research.
Would you be willing to fund any sort of expensive development efforts knowing there is no way to keep low cost competitors from using it for free right from the very beginning?
I agree that it should be much harder to get a patent, but getting rid of them altogether would do some serious damage to new development. Who would want to invest a lot of time and money to develop something requiring research only to have competitors strip it down, analyze how it works and build their own product to sell much cheaper? You can say goodbye to new prescription drugs, absolutely nobody would invent a new one with no protection against immediately available cheap generics.
Real inventors must have a way to make back the money they spent on development, but it would be nice if the system were changed to make it a lot harder for patent trolls to put up the equivalent of a tollbooth on a freeway.
There must always be a time limit on a non-compete. Any agreement that states someone cannot EVER work for a competitor or in a certain industry would be thrown out of court in probably every state. Even if a state's laws did not specifically prohibit this practice, no judge is going to find that to be a reasonable contract condition. Considering courts are fairly hostile towards most non-compete agreements anyway, a judge would be looking for an excuse to throw it out and this would be the best possible reason.
In the computer world, dumb terminals are the "wave of the future" that will never materialize and will also never die. It's not hard to think of advantages to thin-client systems, like centralized support and little to no installation, but there are significant hurdles that must be overcome to make dumb terminals desirable. First, internet connections would need to be wireless, extremely fast, cheap, reliable, secure, and basically taken for granted much like breathable air. We are a long way from this point.
At the moment, there will always be at least that one application for everyone that requires local processing and storage so a fully functional computer will be needed. Who would want to be without their applications during a network outage, so they'll keep everything local just because they can. Also, network computing, thin clients, dumb terminals, whatever need to become cost effective. Nobody wants to effectively rent a computer for the same price or more than they would pay to buy it. With processing and storage getting better and cheaper all the time, I don't see how centralized computing will ever catch up from a cost perspective.
In short, network computing has many advantages that are outweighed by many disadvantages and for this reason I don't see it becoming practical or widespread anytime soon, or anytime at all for that matter.
True. As fast as the IT industry changes, you can't afford to specialize too much in one particular subset of the market, because it will someday become obsolete. Ask someone who used to make their living repairing monitor CRTs how much business they have today. I'm guessing little to none. As long as you can give your clients a warm fuzzy feeling that you will take care of their technology problems, regardless of the specific technology, they will keep coming back to you. If you can't do something yourself, subcontract to someone who can without the client being inconvenienced.
Studies don't matter. Cellphones are so important to society now that we will be willing to live with whatever risks are discovered. Consider how many people each year are killed in car accidents. Why don't we get rid of these contraptions, which are clearly dangerous? Because they are too damn useful, just like cellphones have become. Even if it is determined that cellphone usage causes cancer, blindness, deafness, infertility, whatever, people will continue to use them because they are now such an ingrained part of our lives. The only thing studies can change is to give more ammunition to trial lawyers that are salivating at the thought of suing the entire cellphone industry on behalf of "injured" people.
I think most peoples' complaint is that MTV is now pretty much irrelevant to the music scene. I'd be surprised if they play an hour of music in an entire 24 hour period. When we were younger and MTV was playing the pop music of the day, they at least focused on music instead of "reality TV", celebrity wedding crap and the piss poor excuse for a music show called TRL. The biggest problem with MTV is not the music, but lack thereof.
Strictly in the buzzword sense, RSS is becoming the new XML, in that people make it out to be a much bigger deal than it really is. Right around 2000-2001, business people were raving about XML being the "dawn of a new era", where technical people were thinking "it's just a damn text file with some markup". RSS is much the same, non-technical types think it's an entire new technology instead of what it is: a new way of doing essentially the same old stuff.
I'd hate to be the lawyer trying to prosecute a case with no better evidence than a Slashdot post. Anyone can post something on here under any name. Admitting to downloading something at some time wouldn't even be enough to justify a search warrant to retrieve the poster's IP address, much less a search of the suspect's computer to actually find some evidence. Besides, any files this guy has on his computer are probably legal by now. He admitted to spending a couple hundred dollars on the band's merchandise, which I would think should include CDs, making it OK to have the music in digital form.
The short answer to your question is no, he won't get himself in trouble for this, but as always IANAL.
Failure of a VOIP line is generally not a life-threatening event. For a backup, use your cellphone. For a backup to that, use your neighbor's phone. If your VOIP or digital phone fails, along with your cellphone, along with your neighbor's phone, and you have a life-threatening emergency, then you're just screwed, but how often does that happen?
Keep risk management in perspective. In the case of a business, I think it would be a good idea to keep at least one POTS line, to prevent a total outage of phone service. VOIP would be very useful in the business world to keep down the cost of long distance calls, and the quality is good enough.
Considering risks vs. rewards, VOIP is a good idea in most cases, although it is worth remembering that it is not 100% reliable although nothing really is.
I seem to recall that Windows 95 would sometimes make you reboot when you changed certain monitor settings. Must have had something to do with that first version of "plug and play", which didn't exactly work very well.
Industry insiders are largely responsible for research cuts. When companies like HP, AT&T, Bell Labs, and many other former research giants cut back their activities to become just another consumer electronics company, it's no surprise that research in the US will be lacking. Until someone is willing to focus on more than next quarter's profits, this will be an ongoing trend.
Many environmentalists are in favor of sensible energy policy, which can include nuclear power when done correctly. A minority of them, however, are simply opposed to ALL forms of power generation. There isn't a method of generation that is unopposed by anyone. Whatever it is, they'll find a reason to hate it. I think this small percentage of hardcore environmentalists are really just anti-society luddites. What better way to shut down industrialized society than to get rid of electrical generation?
Outlawing payola is much like outlawing the bribing of congressmen, in that it can't really be stopped. Sure, outright cash payments are illegal, but there are many other ways to transfer something of value for the purpose of buying influence or exposure. Record labels can always withhold preferred albums from stations who don't play the junk that they want to be played. The music business is so complex that there is no way anyone can ensure that some sort of favor isn't being done to have a certain song played.
The only way around this problem is for music fans to get their music from other sources (the internet helps greatly) and payola's influence will be a lot less. At the same time, if people voted more, buying off a congressman would have a lot less effect.
In both cases, it's up to the people to truly solve the problem, the government can't do it for them.
Slashdot Mirror
I really don't think too many employers will take the time and trouble to regulate friendships outside the office, or even inside in most cases. Most managers want to get stuff done and call it a day, not snoop around area restaurants and bars to keep tabs on employee social lives.
some guy slammed on the brake and all the others behind rear-ended him
I say we execute morons like this before they kill anyone else.
I wouldn't want to be the one testing this theory. Sure, it might work, but there's a good chance that certain judges would think it's bunk and hold the owner of the access point responsible. If nothing else, they could say that if you had reason to believe it wasn't secure and still kept it on that you were negligent.
If drug dealers were using your front porch and you didn't seem to mind, you would be an accessory to the crime. It would be a different story if you were out of town the entire time.
Even if the "open access point" defense does work, the access point owner will go through a lot more trouble than it's worth to prove themselves innocent.
Anonymous sources are certainly useful for exposing corruption cases and other scandals, but they do have a credibility problem. Keeping a source anonymous is always possible: the reporter could talk to someone between payphones or by meeting at a park or some method where a name would never be revealed. Most reporters would probably not want to use a totally anonymous source without having some way of verifying the source's info independently. Any crank can call up a newspaper and claim they have some dirt on an elected official, so the reporter would need some basic info to at least see if the source is credible. This, in my opinion, is the greatest obstacle to using anon. sources.
Because it's 540 Mbps, dude! That's enough speed to knock you down and cause you to break something!
Corporations simply do what is good for the corporation in any given scenario. They do not necessarily have consistant beliefs. If the GPL benefits them in situation A, they will claim it is a good thing. In situation B, they might claim the same license is bad since it does not benefit them in that exact situation. SCO is far from being the first company to take an inconsistant position on an issue like this. In any case, they're probably counting on nobody to sue them even if they are in fact using GPL software illegally.
I strongly agree that students should be taught from the beginning to comment their code. That being said, when I was in school I noticed that the instructors who were the most anal about comments were the least effective at teching programming. One teacher in particular (not really a professor) would fail an assignment entirely if the comments were not exactly like she wanted them, and the requirements were quite complex. However she didn't have a clue about programming beyond the examples listed in the textbook. Needless to say the only things I learned in that class were what I had taught myself.
Look at Windows XP SP2. It adds a few genuine security enhancements, but most of what it does is make security settings more visible, like the security center on the control panel. Why is that there? To make PBHs feel warm and fuzzy inside. Because Microsoft knows nobody will really probe them for details. An illusion of security tends to be good enough to convince business-types that the product is secure, so this is all that companies think they need to do.
According to a popup ad that I got this morning, the FBI is investigating me right now, unless I pay some guy $29.95 for this program that hides stuff from them. Sounds like a good deal, I better order it!
OK, what makes you think ANY company, regardless of size, will spend a bunch of time and money on R&D if they will not have any way of recovering the cost? Having to immediately compete with generic versions of their product whose makers got the benefit of free R&D will not allow them to make any money on their research. Would you be willing to fund any sort of expensive development efforts knowing there is no way to keep low cost competitors from using it for free right from the very beginning?
I agree that it should be much harder to get a patent, but getting rid of them altogether would do some serious damage to new development. Who would want to invest a lot of time and money to develop something requiring research only to have competitors strip it down, analyze how it works and build their own product to sell much cheaper? You can say goodbye to new prescription drugs, absolutely nobody would invent a new one with no protection against immediately available cheap generics.
Real inventors must have a way to make back the money they spent on development, but it would be nice if the system were changed to make it a lot harder for patent trolls to put up the equivalent of a tollbooth on a freeway.
There must always be a time limit on a non-compete. Any agreement that states someone cannot EVER work for a competitor or in a certain industry would be thrown out of court in probably every state. Even if a state's laws did not specifically prohibit this practice, no judge is going to find that to be a reasonable contract condition. Considering courts are fairly hostile towards most non-compete agreements anyway, a judge would be looking for an excuse to throw it out and this would be the best possible reason.
In the computer world, dumb terminals are the "wave of the future" that will never materialize and will also never die. It's not hard to think of advantages to thin-client systems, like centralized support and little to no installation, but there are significant hurdles that must be overcome to make dumb terminals desirable. First, internet connections would need to be wireless, extremely fast, cheap, reliable, secure, and basically taken for granted much like breathable air. We are a long way from this point.
At the moment, there will always be at least that one application for everyone that requires local processing and storage so a fully functional computer will be needed. Who would want to be without their applications during a network outage, so they'll keep everything local just because they can. Also, network computing, thin clients, dumb terminals, whatever need to become cost effective. Nobody wants to effectively rent a computer for the same price or more than they would pay to buy it. With processing and storage getting better and cheaper all the time, I don't see how centralized computing will ever catch up from a cost perspective.
In short, network computing has many advantages that are outweighed by many disadvantages and for this reason I don't see it becoming practical or widespread anytime soon, or anytime at all for that matter.
True. As fast as the IT industry changes, you can't afford to specialize too much in one particular subset of the market, because it will someday become obsolete. Ask someone who used to make their living repairing monitor CRTs how much business they have today. I'm guessing little to none. As long as you can give your clients a warm fuzzy feeling that you will take care of their technology problems, regardless of the specific technology, they will keep coming back to you. If you can't do something yourself, subcontract to someone who can without the client being inconvenienced.
Studies don't matter. Cellphones are so important to society now that we will be willing to live with whatever risks are discovered. Consider how many people each year are killed in car accidents. Why don't we get rid of these contraptions, which are clearly dangerous? Because they are too damn useful, just like cellphones have become. Even if it is determined that cellphone usage causes cancer, blindness, deafness, infertility, whatever, people will continue to use them because they are now such an ingrained part of our lives. The only thing studies can change is to give more ammunition to trial lawyers that are salivating at the thought of suing the entire cellphone industry on behalf of "injured" people.
I think most peoples' complaint is that MTV is now pretty much irrelevant to the music scene. I'd be surprised if they play an hour of music in an entire 24 hour period. When we were younger and MTV was playing the pop music of the day, they at least focused on music instead of "reality TV", celebrity wedding crap and the piss poor excuse for a music show called TRL. The biggest problem with MTV is not the music, but lack thereof.
Strictly in the buzzword sense, RSS is becoming the new XML, in that people make it out to be a much bigger deal than it really is. Right around 2000-2001, business people were raving about XML being the "dawn of a new era", where technical people were thinking "it's just a damn text file with some markup". RSS is much the same, non-technical types think it's an entire new technology instead of what it is: a new way of doing essentially the same old stuff.
That's essentially what Hillary says every time she opens her mouth. Her greatest talent is her ability to say it in so many different ways.
I'd hate to be the lawyer trying to prosecute a case with no better evidence than a Slashdot post. Anyone can post something on here under any name. Admitting to downloading something at some time wouldn't even be enough to justify a search warrant to retrieve the poster's IP address, much less a search of the suspect's computer to actually find some evidence. Besides, any files this guy has on his computer are probably legal by now. He admitted to spending a couple hundred dollars on the band's merchandise, which I would think should include CDs, making it OK to have the music in digital form. The short answer to your question is no, he won't get himself in trouble for this, but as always IANAL.
Failure of a VOIP line is generally not a life-threatening event. For a backup, use your cellphone. For a backup to that, use your neighbor's phone. If your VOIP or digital phone fails, along with your cellphone, along with your neighbor's phone, and you have a life-threatening emergency, then you're just screwed, but how often does that happen?
Keep risk management in perspective. In the case of a business, I think it would be a good idea to keep at least one POTS line, to prevent a total outage of phone service. VOIP would be very useful in the business world to keep down the cost of long distance calls, and the quality is good enough.
Considering risks vs. rewards, VOIP is a good idea in most cases, although it is worth remembering that it is not 100% reliable although nothing really is.
I seem to recall that Windows 95 would sometimes make you reboot when you changed certain monitor settings. Must have had something to do with that first version of "plug and play", which didn't exactly work very well.
Industry insiders are largely responsible for research cuts. When companies like HP, AT&T, Bell Labs, and many other former research giants cut back their activities to become just another consumer electronics company, it's no surprise that research in the US will be lacking. Until someone is willing to focus on more than next quarter's profits, this will be an ongoing trend.
Many environmentalists are in favor of sensible energy policy, which can include nuclear power when done correctly. A minority of them, however, are simply opposed to ALL forms of power generation. There isn't a method of generation that is unopposed by anyone. Whatever it is, they'll find a reason to hate it. I think this small percentage of hardcore environmentalists are really just anti-society luddites. What better way to shut down industrialized society than to get rid of electrical generation?
The legal penalties are certainly greater for piracy than simple theft. Of course, the chance of getting caught is a lot smaller.
Outlawing payola is much like outlawing the bribing of congressmen, in that it can't really be stopped. Sure, outright cash payments are illegal, but there are many other ways to transfer something of value for the purpose of buying influence or exposure. Record labels can always withhold preferred albums from stations who don't play the junk that they want to be played. The music business is so complex that there is no way anyone can ensure that some sort of favor isn't being done to have a certain song played.
The only way around this problem is for music fans to get their music from other sources (the internet helps greatly) and payola's influence will be a lot less. At the same time, if people voted more, buying off a congressman would have a lot less effect.
In both cases, it's up to the people to truly solve the problem, the government can't do it for them.