Academia, believe it or not, is the bastion of free speech...
One might guess that you are not talking about US universities given that many have their own censorship with explicit and implicit codes from the day they review your application for either employment or to study to the day you leave. Can you write about your truly unpopular beliefs in the "Tell us about yourself" essay section and be admitted or employed? Probably not. A recent discussion (Charlie Rose) of law and admission academics over a recent SC decision demonstrated how important they thought it was to make a class that fit well with their world views. That probably does preclude Nazis, Radical Rightists, Extreme Radical Leftists, Pediphiles, etc. Further, even if they do get in, the level of censorship at many universities is higher than even that practised at gov. offices. The ability to use slurs, racial, ethnic, gender-based, whatever is vogue to protect these days, can get you suspended or expelled. Is that free speech? Class projects, papers, works in general, are all judged by academians that can call your subjective opinion wrong if it is not the same as theirs. A chilling effect or not?
And being an employee is even worse, there are morality clauses, conduct clauses, etc. that can be and often are, inserted into contracts. Assuming you even get the interview, read the Rightists like Horowitz on how universities have chilled out conservative opinion by peer review in hiring. If your peers think you have the wrong political slant then you are wrong for the job. I haven't investigated his specific claims but frankly, having grown up around and in university faculty I would say they are not improbable. Academia, in my experience, is not about the pursuit of truth, generally speaking, anymore (if it ever was) and is now more about politics and political agendas. Education is a tool to control the political process.
Finally, for all of you who don't think about these things, let me ask you, who do you think gets published these days? In soft sciences are you more likely to get published by adding to someone else's work or by promoting a new and controversial theory? I say soft sciences because I think the burden of proof is lower but it can apply to either. I think that it is the controversial theory that gets the ink. Which might seem like it is a good argument for free speech but actually only undermines academic credibility because even then there are controversies you can talk about and those you can't. Is there ever going to be a paper on how older men marrying their adopted daughters is a good thing (a la Woody Allen)? Probably not, because even if it were true, it would be politically wrong to admit it. The last article I read in Science mag went to great lengths to distance itself from humans when discussing the viable propigation strategies used in primate rape (species bound in case you were thinking about being perverse). What should have been a science paper had gone through the chilling effect and was now politicized into a moral tale. We were no longer being told what was discovered via science we were also being told what the moral implications were. If the non-science part is now required to get published we can still call it speech but is that free speech? And if academia is all about publish or perish, well, draw your own conclusions but I would say there is less freedom there than in most afternoon talk shows where guests are appealing to the public and not their peers and, such as it is, industry.
Go to DoXFS on sourceforge.net The work has already begun for a PHP Docuement Management frontend using XFS. Beta app is available now. Has a lot of potential.
I read them, write them and delete them all the time using the attr family of commands. 64K limitation on the current value size but that's not so bad, and in the future it will be the (I think) 512K that Irix has. When you begin to think of all the cool things you can do with that, it becomes very interesting...
Maybe we could all chip in a nickle and buy CmdTaco a couple of new sites for policital agendas. I would suggest SlashTheLeft or SlashTheRight and posting could be based on the current mood and the proscribed political stupidity of the moment. Political opinions, as opposed to observations, could be posted at those sites and all the ensuing morass (a word that describes political discussions at many levels) could be seperated from news. That would leave/. doing what it is really better at doing, namely, giving opinions or making observations on geek issues, don't you think? There has to be, or there should be, a better forum for discussing political opinions - esp. in a community that is so predisposed to vocalizing any opinion however well formed.
I agree, the issues are negligence vs. due diligence where 'due diligence' means acting to the best of your ability. The catch is that acting to the best of your ability means that you will be held to a standard percieved as average or higher, depending on your perceived expertize. Note that doesn't mean you need to be perfect, just competent and acting in a non-negligent/due diligence way. If Nike knew about the security problem or can reasonably be expected to know, then they are expected to react on that information to either solve the problem or attempt to solve the problem. Litigation against them needs to prove that they did act in a negligent manner as compared to their peers. This, in spirit, doesn't sound a lot different from proving negligent endangerment.
The best way to protect yourself from successful litigation against you ( I don't think there's anyway to protect from all litigation) is to act in a responsible manner and document it.
Pop philosophy is almost as deadly as pop medicine/religion/etc and is always Lame. It's Ironic that in modern philosophy there are few enough heros that it needs to borrow from the cinema. At best, they might want to use the movie to teach mythology, or maybe even modern Jungian archetypes but that would be psycology. To use it to teach philosophy is grasping at straws for whatever will get students in. Desparate. Another indication of modern ed. being more about entertainment than knowledge and that is Sad. Save the movie analysis for the pub try to teach without props.
Did any one else read the article and notice that there are 330 million records on people in the USA? According to the CIA World Fact book, the USA has a pop. of 272,639,608 (July 1999 est.). So, where did the extra 60 million or so come from? Bad data gathering? And how much are people going to pay for this data? Sounds like another lawsuit to me...
Perhaps Mr. Gore realizes that Microsoft, through the Gates Foundation, controls a large amount of money distributed to some of the more vocal groups in US society. The fact that the Gates Foundation has received a sizeable amount of their wealth in stock already ties them to MS's well-being and makes their self-interest somewhat the same as MS's. Perhaps Mr. Gore knows that if he can broker an agreement with MS, with MS's support may come some or all of the people now attached to the MS teat. Or maybe I've just read too many bad spy novels...
Does anyone know offhand what the algorythm for thier id is? I'm thinking a perl script that changes the id in the cookies file with a new value. Thanks.
For the ones that actually look at the face: veils, masks, makeup and motorcycle helmets with the visor down. For the ones that read dermal heat patterns: masks, makeup that changes heat loss (like mud?), and motorcycle helmets with the visor down. This may even start a few fashion trends that would be kind of interesting and lend new meaning to the terms public and private faces...
Everything that I might have said has already been said, and sometimes not too politely. Given that I am a contractor and that I prefer it that way, you can guess how well I like those snide remarks about contractors being ill bred parasites. However, to give it perspective, look up J. Campbell's analysis of the interaction between the nomads and the agritarians. Compare it to the Contractors and Emps. Funny how things work out that way.
Open Source is already being used in at least one major International Pharm. where FDA audits are a regular and accepted thing. The argument for using it revolves around accepted risk, the same kind of accepted risk you have when using software from a defunct company, or distributed by the gov., or, ultimately, bought from a company whose lawyers have made an airtight escape clause from any and all responsibility. The company in question performed it's own QA on the software, made documentation for it's SOPs and then used it. In other words, it accepted liability for it (though it does help that Samba is used by many other major companies). There was less risk in using Open Source then using in-house because the level of testing and feedback from the Open Source community is so much higher than in-house. And anyway, the precedent is already set in most companies that use any kind of UNIX and use any of the Free Software that comes with it (sendmail, vi, etc). It all comes down to accepted risk (and if the FDA is involved, documentation stating you are aware of the risk, have analyzed it, and accepted it for these many good reasons).
One last note, the FDA does seem to distingish between device/embedded code and other types of code. The critical functionality is probably the reason. Although even a little wordprocessor problem, say one that moves a decimal point, is just as lethal the FDA is less worried about that. An arythmic heart machine vs. misrepresented dosage... I'd hate to have to make those decisions.
Perhaps this is the time to stop thinking about CRTs (which are now over 100 years old having been invented in the last century) and start thinking about VR (immersive - you only see the alternate world) or HUD (Heads Up Display - used to superimpose info onto the real world). Either of these would extend the perceived screen size to 360 horizontal and 360 vertical and allow a huge amount of objects to be available for either simple monitoring or as links to larger applications (to be called up as either 2D or 3D, depending on function). With the growing success of voice recognition, wearable computers, and spacial mice this is just about here. The real last link is the display hardware (still buggy, or expensive, or less resolution than a CRT) and a new metaphor for a 360x360 interface. Think about that. Look up wearable computing for more info.
Not entirely true. If you read the article it is slim on actual cases where the warrant does succeed in finding criminal activity. It also states that the local law enforcement office acts as a proxy for other law enforcement offices around the US. Ask yourself what it takes to get them to do that, a phone call, letter, warrant in the requesting agencies jurisdiction? The article also states that fishing expeditions using John Doe warrants going after people suspected of behavior unfriendly to a lawyered up corporations were honored resulting in loss of livlihood and/or corporate reprogramming sessions.
The buzz (meaning I have memory of it but no documentation) was also that AOL was in the news a few years ago when it gave the FBI files that were allegedly child pornography. The files, however, were encrypted and the FBI couldn't open them. An almost funny story, except when you stop to think about it. The buzz was that there were no warrants and that AOL monitored and gave up copied files based on a FBI request. AOL took some heat for that in some groups, but because all actions were under the ruberic of 'stopping child porn' many people were willing to overlook it. That ruberic has been the magic phrase every since and was the rallying cry for the CDA (Communications Decency Act). AOL, unwittingly or not, sets precidents for how far privacy can be ignored and I wouldn't be surprized if they are cited as examples in internet privacy legal actions in the future.
So maybe this isn't so stupid. AOL honors all warrants, frivilous or not, and sometimes doesn't even need one to give up their customers. AOL is setting the tone and raising government expectations of privacy invasions.
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Academia, believe it or not, is the bastion of free speech...
One might guess that you are not talking about US universities given that many have their own censorship with explicit and implicit codes from the day they review your application for either employment or to study to the day you leave. Can you write about your truly unpopular beliefs in the "Tell us about yourself" essay section and be admitted or employed? Probably not. A recent discussion (Charlie Rose) of law and admission academics over a recent SC decision demonstrated how important they thought it was to make a class that fit well with their world views. That probably does preclude Nazis, Radical Rightists, Extreme Radical Leftists, Pediphiles, etc. Further, even if they do get in, the level of censorship at many universities is higher than even that practised at gov. offices. The ability to use slurs, racial, ethnic, gender-based, whatever is vogue to protect these days, can get you suspended or expelled. Is that free speech? Class projects, papers, works in general, are all judged by academians that can call your subjective opinion wrong if it is not the same as theirs. A chilling effect or not?
And being an employee is even worse, there are morality clauses, conduct clauses, etc. that can be and often are, inserted into contracts. Assuming you even get the interview, read the Rightists like Horowitz on how universities have chilled out conservative opinion by peer review in hiring. If your peers think you have the wrong political slant then you are wrong for the job. I haven't investigated his specific claims but frankly, having grown up around and in university faculty I would say they are not improbable. Academia, in my experience, is not about the pursuit of truth, generally speaking, anymore (if it ever was) and is now more about politics and political agendas. Education is a tool to control the political process.
Finally, for all of you who don't think about these things, let me ask you, who do you think gets published these days? In soft sciences are you more likely to get published by adding to someone else's work or by promoting a new and controversial theory? I say soft sciences because I think the burden of proof is lower but it can apply to either. I think that it is the controversial theory that gets the ink. Which might seem like it is a good argument for free speech but actually only undermines academic credibility because even then there are controversies you can talk about and those you can't. Is there ever going to be a paper on how older men marrying their adopted daughters is a good thing (a la Woody Allen)? Probably not, because even if it were true, it would be politically wrong to admit it. The last article I read in Science mag went to great lengths to distance itself from humans when discussing the viable propigation strategies used in primate rape (species bound in case you were thinking about being perverse). What should have been a science paper had gone through the chilling effect and was now politicized into a moral tale. We were no longer being told what was discovered via science we were also being told what the moral implications were. If the non-science part is now required to get published we can still call it speech but is that free speech? And if academia is all about publish or perish, well, draw your own conclusions but I would say there is less freedom there than in most afternoon talk shows where guests are appealing to the public and not their peers and, such as it is, industry.
Go to DoXFS on sourceforge.net The work has already begun for a PHP Docuement Management frontend using XFS. Beta app is available now. Has a lot of potential.
I read them, write them and delete them all the time using the attr family of commands. 64K limitation on the current value size but that's not so bad, and in the future it will be the (I think) 512K that Irix has. When you begin to think of all the cool things you can do with that, it becomes very interesting...
Maybe we could all chip in a nickle and buy CmdTaco a couple of new sites for policital agendas. I would suggest SlashTheLeft or SlashTheRight and posting could be based on the current mood and the proscribed political stupidity of the moment. Political opinions, as opposed to observations, could be posted at those sites and all the ensuing morass (a word that describes political discussions at many levels) could be seperated from news. That would leave /. doing what it is really better at doing, namely, giving opinions or making observations on geek issues, don't you think? There has to be, or there should be, a better forum for discussing political opinions - esp. in a community that is so predisposed to vocalizing any opinion however well formed.
I agree, the issues are negligence vs. due diligence where 'due diligence' means acting to the best of your ability. The catch is that acting to the best of your ability means that you will be held to a standard percieved as average or higher, depending on your perceived expertize. Note that doesn't mean you need to be perfect, just competent and acting in a non-negligent/due diligence way. If Nike knew about the security problem or can reasonably be expected to know, then they are expected to react on that information to either solve the problem or attempt to solve the problem. Litigation against them needs to prove that they did act in a negligent manner as compared to their peers. This, in spirit, doesn't sound a lot different from proving negligent endangerment.
The best way to protect yourself from successful litigation against you ( I don't think there's anyway to protect from all litigation) is to act in a responsible manner and document it.
Who is John Galt?
Pop philosophy is almost as deadly as pop medicine/religion/etc and is always Lame. It's Ironic that in modern philosophy there are few enough heros that it needs to borrow from the cinema. At best, they might want to use the movie to teach mythology, or maybe even modern Jungian archetypes but that would be psycology. To use it to teach philosophy is grasping at straws for whatever will get students in. Desparate. Another indication of modern ed. being more about entertainment than knowledge and that is Sad. Save the movie analysis for the pub try to teach without props.
Did any one else read the article and notice that there are 330 million records on people in the USA? According to the CIA World Fact book, the USA has a pop. of 272,639,608 (July 1999 est.). So, where did the extra 60 million or so come from? Bad data gathering? And how much are people going to pay for this data? Sounds like another lawsuit to me...
Perhaps Mr. Gore realizes that Microsoft, through the Gates Foundation, controls a large amount of money distributed to some of the more vocal groups in US society. The fact that the Gates Foundation has received a sizeable amount of their wealth in stock already ties them to MS's well-being and makes their self-interest somewhat the same as MS's. Perhaps Mr. Gore knows that if he can broker an agreement with MS, with MS's support may come some or all of the people now attached to the MS teat. Or maybe I've just read too many bad spy novels...
Does anyone know offhand what the algorythm for thier id is? I'm thinking a perl script that changes the id in the cookies file with a new value. Thanks.
there are 285 documents (minimum - I searched using the complementary account) in the Gartner database referring to Linux. Why is that?
For the ones that actually look at the face: veils, masks, makeup and motorcycle helmets with the visor down. For the ones that read dermal heat patterns: masks, makeup that changes heat loss (like mud?), and motorcycle helmets with the visor down. This may even start a few fashion trends that would be kind of interesting and lend new meaning to the terms public and private faces...
Here's an idea, you get what you settle for.
Everything that I might have said has already been said, and sometimes not too politely. Given that I am a contractor and that I prefer it that way, you can guess how well I like those snide remarks about contractors being ill bred parasites. However, to give it perspective, look up J. Campbell's analysis of the interaction between the nomads and the agritarians. Compare it to the Contractors and Emps. Funny how things work out that way.
Open Source is already being used in at least one major International Pharm. where FDA audits are a regular and accepted thing. The argument for using it revolves around accepted risk, the same kind of accepted risk you have when using software from a defunct company, or distributed by the gov., or, ultimately, bought from a company whose lawyers have made an airtight escape clause from any and all responsibility. The company in question performed it's own QA on the software, made documentation for it's SOPs and then used it. In other words, it accepted liability for it (though it does help that Samba is used by many other major companies). There was less risk in using Open Source then using in-house because the level of testing and feedback from the Open Source community is so much higher than in-house. And anyway, the precedent is already set in most companies that use any kind of UNIX and use any of the Free Software that comes with it (sendmail, vi, etc). It all comes down to accepted risk (and if the FDA is involved, documentation stating you are aware of the risk, have analyzed it, and accepted it for these many good reasons).
One last note, the FDA does seem to distingish between device/embedded code and other types of code. The critical functionality is probably the reason. Although even a little wordprocessor problem, say one that moves a decimal point, is just as lethal the FDA is less worried about that. An arythmic heart machine vs. misrepresented dosage... I'd hate to have to make those decisions.
Perhaps this is the time to stop thinking about CRTs (which are now over 100 years old having been invented in the last century) and start thinking about VR (immersive - you only see the alternate world) or HUD (Heads Up Display - used to superimpose info onto the real world). Either of these would extend the perceived screen size to 360 horizontal and 360 vertical and allow a huge amount of objects to be available for either simple monitoring or as links to larger applications (to be called up as either 2D or 3D, depending on function). With the growing success of voice recognition, wearable computers, and spacial mice this is just about here. The real last link is the display hardware (still buggy, or expensive, or less resolution than a CRT) and a new metaphor for a 360x360 interface. Think about that. Look up wearable computing for more info.
Not entirely true. If you read the article it is slim on actual cases where the warrant does succeed in finding criminal activity. It also states that the local law enforcement office acts as a proxy for other law enforcement offices around the US. Ask yourself what it takes to get them to do that, a phone call, letter, warrant in the requesting agencies jurisdiction? The article also states that fishing expeditions using John Doe warrants going after people suspected of behavior unfriendly to a lawyered up corporations were honored resulting in loss of livlihood and/or corporate reprogramming sessions.
The buzz (meaning I have memory of it but no documentation) was also that AOL was in the news a few years ago when it gave the FBI files that were allegedly child pornography. The files, however, were encrypted and the FBI couldn't open them. An almost funny story, except when you stop to think about it. The buzz was that there were no warrants and that AOL monitored and gave up copied files based on a FBI request. AOL took some heat for that in some groups, but because all actions were under the ruberic of 'stopping child porn' many people were willing to overlook it. That ruberic has been the magic phrase every since and was the rallying cry for the CDA (Communications Decency Act). AOL, unwittingly or not, sets precidents for how far privacy can be ignored and I wouldn't be surprized if they are cited as examples in internet privacy legal actions in the future.
So maybe this isn't so stupid. AOL honors all warrants, frivilous or not, and sometimes doesn't even need one to give up their customers. AOL is setting the tone and raising government expectations of privacy invasions.