I wonder what would happen if everyone who was using FOSS software like Apache actually supported it? I'm not talking sending your favorite Linux distro the cost of Vista Home Basic, but like $20 spread across your four or 5 favorite projects. I donated to OCAL earlier this year, but I really need to send a Christmas present to the guys at Inkscape. This story's a good reminder.
If you can justify that you got something of value for it, you can deduct it as a business expense, which is as good as a charitable donation, when it comes to its impact on their taxes. I'd guess Yahoo! would classify it as a PR expense, but they might also classify it as R&D. Depends on what their tax lawyers say to classify it as.
A friend of mine (Randy Cassingham of This Is True) is a HAM radio operator and he's helped provide communications for emergency responders during disasters near where he lives in Colorado. When the chips are down, it seems that radio hobbyists are ready, willing, and able to help out. It's nice to see that they're getting some positive press.
Hopefully much of this thread will be kudos for Ham radio operators around the world. A lot of them use their powers for good more often than you might think.
For what it's worth, I recently upgraded from Illustrator 7 to Illustrator CS2. I found the interface to be nearly, if not exactly, identical.
That's because the main differences are things that Adobe has added, like LivePaint and LiveTrace. The main difference between Illustrator 7 and CS2 is that 7's menus are shorter and its dialogues have fewer options.
OTOH, aside from the fact that it handles fewer file formats (open, import, export), I like Inkscape's drawing tools a lot better than Illustrator's, especially some of their path intersection handlers. They're adding cool new stuff almost every month, it seems, but you're sort of taking your life in your hands by trying to do real work with the latest development build, because it can crash on you unexpectedly, like when you're trying to save an hour's worth of work. Still, even 0.45.1 (the most recent stable build) is a great program.
The general opinion of many of the Brits I've known has been: "if France is for it, there's got to be something wrong with it." Maybe the British can still support OOXML, but the French will pronounce the acronym as "oohjemel" while the British will annoy the French by pronouncing it "oxemul".
You know, if tasers had been around for more than about 10 years, I might be inclined to take this argument seriously.
I remember watching the inventor of the TASER (it should be capitalized, because it's an acronym) being interviewed. TASER stands for "Thomas A. Swift's Electric Rifle". I recall this, because I saw it when I was of an age to be reading Tom Swift books, meaning that this was in the late 70s.
So I looked it up... and whaddaya know, the TASER was invented in 1969. I don't know about you but 38 > 10 in most countries I've visited. In all likelihood, the TASER is older than you.
10 years... How do I mod his comment "-1 ignorant"?
"I have the same view of state and local taxes as federal; I'm willing to pay for what I use and benefit from, whether directly by using government maintained
roads, bridges, schools, etc or indirectly by living in a community with (relatively) clean air and
water, safe working conditions, decent labor standards, and living under the umbrella of protection
from our armed forces and local police and fire departments."
Schools provide an indirect benefit, such as making both our nation and your local community more economically competitive. If ANYTHING has more long term impact on maintaining the standard of living of our nation and its economic standing in the international community than its educational system, I don't know what it is.
The biggest priorities for this country are...
A kick-ass primary education system that is the envy of the developed world.
Clean and plentiful domestically produced energy.
Clean and plentiful domestic water and food supply chains.
Just remember that the average height in the Western world has gone up significantly in the last century due to better nutrition. A lot of the really old people who are really short also didn't get the best quality, variety, or quantity of food when they were growing up, which is a contributing factor to their shortness.
I bet you the average height of men 80 or older has gone up at least 3 inches in the last 30-40 years. By the time you'd be 80, who knows where it will be?
Wait. Is your weight measured before or after the chemotherapy caused you to stop eating or your out-of-control diabetes put you into ketosis (the state you try to achieve through the Atkins diet)?
"You're right. The grandparent might be wondering what happened to his brilliant legal career, but I'm not.
"Bottom line -- it doesn't matter why he did it, it only matters what he did. We don't go easier on defendants who murder someone because they were only trying to keep everyone from finding out about their secret extramarital love affair."
Except "murder" is defined by the circumstances surrounding the death. That's why we have first degree murder, second degree murder, manslaughter, etc. That's why you can admit to killing someone, but still plead not guilty by reason of self defense... or insanity.
If you were even in the same city as a "brilliant legal career", you'd know that a the act is modified by both the manner in which it is committed and the intent with which it was committed.
If I walk up to you, hold up my fist, and say "give me all your money or I'll punch you in the head", it's considered a lesser crime than if I walk up to you, hold up a gun, and say "give me all your money or I'll shoot you in the head."
Minoxidil was a heart medication. Growing hair on bald spots was a side effect that the pharmas did the trials on so they could sell it as a baldness cure.
Viagra... blood pressure medication. Boners were a side effect.
A number of the medications you rail against as fluff were actually discovered while trying to fight something more important. They turned out to be better at the fluff than the intended purpose, but fluff makes money too, and gears were switched so they got marketed for the side effect instead of the intended effect..
Actually, Intel doesn't have to deal with artificial rights activists protesting outside their labs to free the poor microchips they're experimenting on, nor do they have to jump through HUGE FDA hoops when they're ready to scale up to live environment testing of their advances. The folks at Intel have the luxury of playing a lot faster and looser than medical researchers, because a failed attempt at increasing clock speed by 5% usually doesn't kill a living being.
"(in theory you could get up to 25 years for commit a homicide, but it is very unlikely to get such a sentence)."
And that's the point many posters are making. The 20 year sentence is just in theory. It's highly unlikely their punishment will be anywhere near that severe.
"A better analogy would be stealing the key to the secretary's office, and then loaning it out for a fee."
So you don't think that the unauthorized access to the secretary's office with a stolen key would be charged as breaking and entering? That the stealing the key for the purpose of loaning it out for a fee wouldn't add additional counts of accessory to burglary, aiding and abetting, etc. They wouldn't tack on conspiracy, vandalism, fraud, and whatever else they thought they could make stick?
And when you tallied up all the maximum sentences for all those crimes, wouldn't they be in the neightborhood of 20 years?
Now, the date on the other blog post was the day before my source, so it might have been that there were many submissions and my summary of the story was judged the best, but ScuttleMonkey judged the other blog the best/earliest example of the story, thus changing my TFA link. Or it might be that ScuttleMonkey changed the link for more nefarious reasons.
TFA and the post author confuse the issue by saying that these guys are getting punished for the end result (changing their grades), rather than the method (hacking an admin account, using that access to hack other accounts, stealing privileged information, AND taking cash to change someone's grades).
Imagine some jerkwad walked into a 7-11, got a Slurpee, tried to walk out without paying for it, then shot the clerk when the clerk confronted him. Then imagine the Slashdot article saying "this guy could get the death penalty just for stealing a Slurpee."
That's an extreme example, but it gets my message across. They're being prosecuted not only for what they did, but how they did it.
Also, if you read the original press release from the DOJ, it states: "The charged counts carry a maximum punishment of 20 years in prison and/or a $250,000 fine. However, the actual sentence will be determined at the discretion of the court after consideration of the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, which take into account a number of variables, and any applicable statutory sentencing factors."
So even the Feds, while stating the maximum possible sentence (probably for the deterrence value), are admitting that the actual sentence depends on a lot of factors and probably won't be the maximum. Although giving these guys double-dimes in the pen would send a message.
The Israeli Prime Minister and the head of the Palestinian delegation were about to sit down to peace talks when the Prime Minister asked if he coule tell a story.
"In the days before the Hebrews were to enter the Holy Land, Moses was camped beside a stream. He asked his attendants to give him some privacy so he might bathe and be clean when he entered the Holy Land. His attendants left, but after a few hours with no word from Moses, they began to worry. When they returned to the stream, they found Moses in the water and his clothes gone from the bank. 'Moses,' they asked, 'where are your clothes?' Moses replied, 'the Palestinians stole them.'"
And with that, the Prime Minister sat down. The Palestinian representative stood up in protest. "That story is untrue! There were no Palestinians in the Holy Land back then!"
"And that," said the Prime Minister, "is my point."
Calling the State of Israel a "foreign occupation" is no less propagandist than saying the only claim the Palestinians can lay to the land is "finders keepers, losers weepers".
Well, the international Red Cross are jerks. They admitted all the Arabic Red Crescent organizations and have let them use their votes to keep Israel's Magen David Adom out of the organization. The U.S. Red Cross actually stopped paying dues to the international organization and the U.S. Senate has passed a resolution condemning the International Red Cross for allowing this to continue.
But what do you expect? There are more resolutions introduced to condemn Israel every year than there are to condemn ongoing genocides, like Darfour. Apparently the Arab states have nothing better to do.
In effect, the union organizations are selling out their rank-and-file (who are the ones who really get hit by the wage depression as a result of all the illegal workers) in order to bring in lots of new members and make themselves more powerful.
Actually, they do this to get more new members paying into pension funds and other benefits accrued by retirees and senior members. I know a union shop that finds it easy to deal with the unions... offer contracts that benefit the retired or nearly retired members. They'll gladly shaft all the new Spanish-speaking members.
Most HR people care about this because holes in your resume, long periods of time with no discernible activity, are worrisome. It's just SOP to put everything in your resume for whatever period you are covering.
This is a piecework RFP he's responding to. I'm not offering him employment, I'm asking him to bid on a contract. A personal CV isn't appropriate here. Just show me you can do this work.
Also you seem to think you will get good people by asking them to give you a free estimate. Perhaps that is normal on the sites you mention but how much time are people supposed to spend giving out free estimates to every person who may be a potential client?
I'm not demanding a free estimate. The way Rent-A-Coder works is that you bid on a project. It cannot be awarded to you until you bid on it. And when you bid on it, you must specify a price... not a range, not an hourly fee, but a price. The more complicated the project and the more work it will be to estimate the time, the more it's going to pay (the greater the risk, the greater the reward). But any sort of marketplace where vendors bid on jobs poses the risk that you'll spend time developing a bid for a job you don't get.
When it's an open bid... you either bid or go f*** yourself. There is no such thing as getting paid for an estimate. Bid the contract, win the contract, and do a good job. Do that, and the next time I have need of talents like yours, I contact you personally and we have a different process where you might get paid for an estimate. But in an open market place, at risk of being repetitive... you either bid or go f*** yourself.
I'm not contacting you and asking you for an estimate. I'm listing the job in marketplace. You want it, you tell me how long it will take you, how much you want, and why I should give it to you instead of someone else bidding the same price or lower. Brochures, CVs, form letter introductions, link lists as long as my arm... waste of time. How much, how long, and why are you the best? That's it. In a marketplace like that, that's how you win contracts.
The company gets criticized for monitoring the blogosphere and responding to complaints in the comment right after its response.
"Why would a legitimate company providing quality service have concerns about the blogosphere great enough to monitor it?"
In fact come to think of it, most of those we have seen who practice this and post comments like this are scam artists slightly worse than used car dealers.
Actually, I've seen "respectable" companies do this. When I posted a rant about the stupid ways people bid on projects (or try to bid without bidding) on Rent-A-Coder, there was a response from Rent-A-Coder on my blog within a day.
Monitoring and responding to complaints is a positive, IMO.
Slashdot Mirror
... welcome our "death-star-like" beam of energy spouting supermassive black hole overlords.
- Greg
I wonder what would happen if everyone who was using FOSS software like Apache actually supported it? I'm not talking sending your favorite Linux distro the cost of Vista Home Basic, but like $20 spread across your four or 5 favorite projects. I donated to OCAL earlier this year, but I really need to send a Christmas present to the guys at Inkscape. This story's a good reminder.
- Greg
If you can justify that you got something of value for it, you can deduct it as a business expense, which is as good as a charitable donation, when it comes to its impact on their taxes. I'd guess Yahoo! would classify it as a PR expense, but they might also classify it as R&D. Depends on what their tax lawyers say to classify it as.
- Greg
A friend of mine (Randy Cassingham of This Is True ) is a HAM radio operator and he's helped provide communications for emergency responders during disasters near where he lives in Colorado. When the chips are down, it seems that radio hobbyists are ready, willing, and able to help out. It's nice to see that they're getting some positive press.
Hopefully much of this thread will be kudos for Ham radio operators around the world. A lot of them use their powers for good more often than you might think.
- Greg
For what it's worth, I recently upgraded from Illustrator 7 to Illustrator CS2. I found the interface to be nearly, if not exactly, identical.
That's because the main differences are things that Adobe has added, like LivePaint and LiveTrace. The main difference between Illustrator 7 and CS2 is that 7's menus are shorter and its dialogues have fewer options.
OTOH, aside from the fact that it handles fewer file formats (open, import, export), I like Inkscape's drawing tools a lot better than Illustrator's, especially some of their path intersection handlers. They're adding cool new stuff almost every month, it seems, but you're sort of taking your life in your hands by trying to do real work with the latest development build, because it can crash on you unexpectedly, like when you're trying to save an hour's worth of work. Still, even 0.45.1 (the most recent stable build) is a great program.
- Greg
The general opinion of many of the Brits I've known has been: "if France is for it, there's got to be something wrong with it." Maybe the British can still support OOXML, but the French will pronounce the acronym as "oohjemel" while the British will annoy the French by pronouncing it "oxemul".
- Greg
You know, if tasers had been around for more than about 10 years, I might be inclined to take this argument seriously.
I remember watching the inventor of the TASER (it should be capitalized, because it's an acronym) being interviewed. TASER stands for "Thomas A. Swift's Electric Rifle". I recall this, because I saw it when I was of an age to be reading Tom Swift books, meaning that this was in the late 70s.
So I looked it up... and whaddaya know, the TASER was invented in 1969. I don't know about you but 38 > 10 in most countries I've visited. In all likelihood, the TASER is older than you.
10 years... How do I mod his comment "-1 ignorant"?
Schools provide an indirect benefit, such as making both our nation and your local community more economically competitive. If ANYTHING has more long term impact on maintaining the standard of living of our nation and its economic standing in the international community than its educational system, I don't know what it is.
The biggest priorities for this country are...
-G
Just remember that the average height in the Western world has gone up significantly in the last century due to better nutrition. A lot of the really old people who are really short also didn't get the best quality, variety, or quantity of food when they were growing up, which is a contributing factor to their shortness.
I bet you the average height of men 80 or older has gone up at least 3 inches in the last 30-40 years. By the time you'd be 80, who knows where it will be?
Wait. Is your weight measured before or after the chemotherapy caused you to stop eating or your out-of-control diabetes put you into ketosis (the state you try to achieve through the Atkins diet)?
I'm not pigging out. I'm defending against Alzheimers and Parkinsons.
Brilliant!
"You're right. The grandparent might be wondering what happened to his brilliant legal career, but I'm not.
"Bottom line -- it doesn't matter why he did it, it only matters what he did. We don't go easier on defendants who murder someone because they were only trying to keep everyone from finding out about their secret extramarital love affair."
Except "murder" is defined by the circumstances surrounding the death. That's why we have first degree murder, second degree murder, manslaughter, etc. That's why you can admit to killing someone, but still plead not guilty by reason of self defense... or insanity.
If you were even in the same city as a "brilliant legal career", you'd know that a the act is modified by both the manner in which it is committed and the intent with which it was committed.
If I walk up to you, hold up my fist, and say "give me all your money or I'll punch you in the head", it's considered a lesser crime than if I walk up to you, hold up a gun, and say "give me all your money or I'll shoot you in the head."
Minoxidil was a heart medication. Growing hair on bald spots was a side effect that the pharmas did the trials on so they could sell it as a baldness cure.
Viagra... blood pressure medication. Boners were a side effect.
A number of the medications you rail against as fluff were actually discovered while trying to fight something more important. They turned out to be better at the fluff than the intended purpose, but fluff makes money too, and gears were switched so they got marketed for the side effect instead of the intended effect..
"replaced all the computer batteries with turnips"
My VAIO laptop might have a longer battery life on a turnip than it does on the Sony battery that came with it.
Actually, Intel doesn't have to deal with artificial rights activists protesting outside their labs to free the poor microchips they're experimenting on, nor do they have to jump through HUGE FDA hoops when they're ready to scale up to live environment testing of their advances. The folks at Intel have the luxury of playing a lot faster and looser than medical researchers, because a failed attempt at increasing clock speed by 5% usually doesn't kill a living being.
- G
"(in theory you could get up to 25 years for commit a homicide, but it is very unlikely to get such a sentence)."
And that's the point many posters are making. The 20 year sentence is just in theory. It's highly unlikely their punishment will be anywhere near that severe.
"A better analogy would be stealing the key to the secretary's office, and then loaning it out for a fee."
So you don't think that the unauthorized access to the secretary's office with a stolen key would be charged as breaking and entering? That the stealing the key for the purpose of loaning it out for a fee wouldn't add additional counts of accessory to burglary, aiding and abetting, etc. They wouldn't tack on conspiracy, vandalism, fraud, and whatever else they thought they could make stick?
And when you tallied up all the maximum sentences for all those crimes, wouldn't they be in the neightborhood of 20 years?
Hmmm?
And it may not even be the blog the original poster submitted. I submitted a story on MySpace getting false positives on sex-offender screening of their users. I linked to the blog where I'd found out about it when I submitted it (The Internet Patrol). When ScuttleMonkey posted the story to the front page, I still got credit for the submission, but some other blog was linked.
Now, the date on the other blog post was the day before my source, so it might have been that there were many submissions and my summary of the story was judged the best, but ScuttleMonkey judged the other blog the best/earliest example of the story, thus changing my TFA link. Or it might be that ScuttleMonkey changed the link for more nefarious reasons.
TFA and the post author confuse the issue by saying that these guys are getting punished for the end result (changing their grades), rather than the method (hacking an admin account, using that access to hack other accounts, stealing privileged information, AND taking cash to change someone's grades).
Imagine some jerkwad walked into a 7-11, got a Slurpee, tried to walk out without paying for it, then shot the clerk when the clerk confronted him. Then imagine the Slashdot article saying "this guy could get the death penalty just for stealing a Slurpee."
That's an extreme example, but it gets my message across. They're being prosecuted not only for what they did, but how they did it.
Also, if you read the original press release from the DOJ, it states: "The charged counts carry a maximum punishment of 20 years in prison and/or a $250,000 fine. However, the actual sentence will be determined at the discretion of the court after consideration of the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, which take into account a number of variables, and any applicable statutory sentencing factors."
So even the Feds, while stating the maximum possible sentence (probably for the deterrence value), are admitting that the actual sentence depends on a lot of factors and probably won't be the maximum. Although giving these guys double-dimes in the pen would send a message.
There's an old joke:
The Israeli Prime Minister and the head of the Palestinian delegation were about to sit down to peace talks when the Prime Minister asked if he coule tell a story.
"In the days before the Hebrews were to enter the Holy Land, Moses was camped beside a stream. He asked his attendants to give him some privacy so he might bathe and be clean when he entered the Holy Land. His attendants left, but after a few hours with no word from Moses, they began to worry. When they returned to the stream, they found Moses in the water and his clothes gone from the bank. 'Moses,' they asked, 'where are your clothes?' Moses replied, 'the Palestinians stole them.'"
And with that, the Prime Minister sat down. The Palestinian representative stood up in protest. "That story is untrue! There were no Palestinians in the Holy Land back then!"
"And that," said the Prime Minister, "is my point."
Calling the State of Israel a "foreign occupation" is no less propagandist than saying the only claim the Palestinians can lay to the land is "finders keepers, losers weepers".
Well, the international Red Cross are jerks. They admitted all the Arabic Red Crescent organizations and have let them use their votes to keep Israel's Magen David Adom out of the organization. The U.S. Red Cross actually stopped paying dues to the international organization and the U.S. Senate has passed a resolution condemning the International Red Cross for allowing this to continue.
But what do you expect? There are more resolutions introduced to condemn Israel every year than there are to condemn ongoing genocides, like Darfour. Apparently the Arab states have nothing better to do.
In effect, the union organizations are selling out their rank-and-file (who are the ones who really get hit by the wage depression as a result of all the illegal workers) in order to bring in lots of new members and make themselves more powerful.
Actually, they do this to get more new members paying into pension funds and other benefits accrued by retirees and senior members. I know a union shop that finds it easy to deal with the unions... offer contracts that benefit the retired or nearly retired members. They'll gladly shaft all the new Spanish-speaking members.
Most HR people care about this because holes in your resume, long periods of time with no discernible activity, are worrisome. It's just SOP to put everything in your resume for whatever period you are covering.
This is a piecework RFP he's responding to. I'm not offering him employment, I'm asking him to bid on a contract. A personal CV isn't appropriate here. Just show me you can do this work.
Also you seem to think you will get good people by asking them to give you a free estimate. Perhaps that is normal on the sites you mention but how much time are people supposed to spend giving out free estimates to every person who may be a potential client?
I'm not demanding a free estimate. The way Rent-A-Coder works is that you bid on a project. It cannot be awarded to you until you bid on it. And when you bid on it, you must specify a price... not a range, not an hourly fee, but a price. The more complicated the project and the more work it will be to estimate the time, the more it's going to pay (the greater the risk, the greater the reward). But any sort of marketplace where vendors bid on jobs poses the risk that you'll spend time developing a bid for a job you don't get.
When it's an open bid... you either bid or go f*** yourself. There is no such thing as getting paid for an estimate. Bid the contract, win the contract, and do a good job. Do that, and the next time I have need of talents like yours, I contact you personally and we have a different process where you might get paid for an estimate. But in an open market place, at risk of being repetitive... you either bid or go f*** yourself.
I'm not contacting you and asking you for an estimate. I'm listing the job in marketplace. You want it, you tell me how long it will take you, how much you want, and why I should give it to you instead of someone else bidding the same price or lower. Brochures, CVs, form letter introductions, link lists as long as my arm... waste of time. How much, how long, and why are you the best? That's it. In a marketplace like that, that's how you win contracts.
The company gets criticized for monitoring the blogosphere and responding to complaints in the comment right after its response.
"Why would a legitimate company providing quality service have concerns about the blogosphere great enough to monitor it?"
In fact come to think of it, most of those we have seen who practice this and post comments like this are scam artists slightly worse than used car dealers.
Actually, I've seen "respectable" companies do this. When I posted a rant about the stupid ways people bid on projects (or try to bid without bidding) on Rent-A-Coder, there was a response from Rent-A-Coder on my blog within a day.
Monitoring and responding to complaints is a positive, IMO.
Number five is alive!