It certainly seems reasonable for libraries to use filtering to preserve bandwidth and to stay in line with local community standards, but shouldn't that be the decision of the individual library? It sounds like Bush wants to mandate filtering software (and presumably mandate the filtering parameters as well) for every library and public institution, whether they want it or not.
How a lot of particularly gruesome and shocking crimes seem to come from areas that are relatively untouched by internet technologies? One hears a lot about serial killers lurking in small towns or remote areas of the woods, but not so much in technologically advanced, urban areas. This would seem to indicate that internet content is not, in fact, driving people to murder and mayhem. I myself find that I am able to vent my violent instincts through, for example, shooting games, and because of this I have no desire to bump off my fellow human being. I wonder what I would be like if I didn't have those outlets.
Besides, I can just see the scene now:
Kid is sitting at parents' desk in a darkened room. Furtively, he double-clicks the icon to open a PPP connection. Suddenly, over the haunting sounds of the modem handshake:
"gaaaackkkkkh thpphpht rrrrnnnnggg"
Thunk!
The kid's parents discover him in a faint, sprawled over the keyboard, his heart turned to black.
>there's too little fun stuff to do, and there >aren't enough females
As a Valley native, I find that there is plenty to do in the area. I don't know what "fun stuff" constitutes for you, but: The area is packed with excellent restaurants serving a variety of different cuisines. San Francisco (and to a lesser extent, San Jose) has good cultural venues, including museums, symphony, ballet, and opera. The area's two most prestigious universities, Stanford and Berkeley, offer continuing education classes. There are a number of parks sprinkled throughout the area. Visit the beach at Half Moon Bay (quiet and nice drive up) or Santa Cruz (people watching). There are plenty of clubs and parties to go to on the weekends. The weather is nice all year.
If you want to escape, the Monterey aquarium is a must-see, Yosemite National Park is about 5 hours away, and you can make it down to LA in a day's drive.
I'm not sure why you think there aren't enough females. I'd say the general population is about 50/50, and there were more than a few women at the high tech company where I worked, even in engineering/programming positions.
Heh. Interesting idea, but wasn't that kind of the concept behind software like Microsoft Bob? Put a simplified shell on top, and progress to more complex tasks if you want. If I recall, it didn't go over very well. Also, unfortunately, I've found that a lot of newbie users have trouble admitting that they aren't going to be able to understand absolutely everything about their computer system at first use, and a game level type setup would merely drive this home.
Besides, how would you advance over levels? Do a certain number of file copies to slay the boss?
As much as GUIs are supposed to make computers accessible to everyone, I don't think I would be nearly as proficient in the use of computers for any application if I hadn't started out with MS-DOS, configuring driver settings by hand in the autoexec/config files, using a CLI, etc. Why? Because there were a limited number of ways to accomplish a task (say, copying a file), and that made learning the task relatively easy. It also gives you a much closer relationship to what's really happening on the machine.
Now, with the proliferation of GUIs for everything, we have any number of ways to accomplish one task. They might or might not be the same across applications, so users, who don't understand the underlying workings of the task they want to accomplish, get frustrated and confused. The GUI proliferation is supposed to be a boon to newbies, but that different applications can have substantially variable (to the newbie) ways of accomplishing the same thing has caused a lot of frustration. "So, can I just do this here like I did in Word?" "Er, well, no" "Why not?" "Well, because it's different here." "Oh".
Stuff like network troubleshooting, hardware configuration, etc is, I suspect, going to be annoying no matter what, but, having been "close to the machine", I have a fighting chance. A newbie, confronted with a slew of different metaphors for the same thing, may never make much progress.
A very bright and capable friend of mine spent about two years in a college CS program, then dropped out. He says that he is having trouble advancing beyond the level of network administrator type jobs into bigger projects or management positions, because he lacks a degree. Skipping college may look appealing in the near term, but after a few years you may find yourself stuck in lower level tech positions.
I'm sensing a fad here... instead of pulsating plastic mood rings or mood lipstick, we'll have people obsessively displaying and comparing various bodily statistics and metrics, and using the clothes as chameleonesque mood indicators. "Ooh, baby, with a heartrate that low, I bet you'd make a/great/ lover!"
What do you mean no one uses Usenet? At my university, internal newsgroups are an essential part of academic life. I use various groups for help with work, etc etc, and, in general, I don't notice that a lot of groups are particularly depopulated. I don't use web-based mail for anything except junkmail addresses, and more to the point, none of the newbies I know do either. They're all using Outlook:p
I can certainly see your point-- people who gripe about having to pay taxes, but expect to make full use of government-funded public services peeve me in the same manner. However, the problem with the Carnivore concept is that the government and I may not agree on the things from which I require "protection". Bombs and terrorism are easy to agree on as undesirable, but what if the government feels I should be "protected" from drug information, stuff with sexual content, etc? I may have no desire to do anything illegal, but I don't want the government actively listening for what it may find immoral.
Absolutely. I have one of the older ones without the wheel... it's possibly the most useful upgrade I ever bought. It's smooth, responsive, and doesn't aggravate my wrist. I will give up my Trackman Marble when "they" pry it out of my cold dead fingers.
(Not that this is especially relevant to the primary discussion, but...)
>No music by Gay bands/singers etc.
And, why not? Creativity and musical talent are, insofar as we can tell, independent of sexual orientation. Gay, lesbian, and bisexual artists have produced some amazing music; Cole Porter immediately comes to mind. What is to be gained by denying the public the chance to listen? Homophobia tarnishes our civilization.
Far be it from me to argue against the idea that there is nothing wrong with the structure of the music business as it stands. The massive corporate influence on artistic media is certainly disturbing. Further, the music business is being incredibly shortsighted if it does not see how the concepts around Napster could be beneficial to business. However, ranting about how shutting down Napster is a threat to our rights and the health of the Internet community is just silly.
I know a number of dedicated Napster users, and I can guarantee you that none of them were thinking "hey, this program will help me flout corporatization of media while encouraging beneficial freedom of information." I can guarantee you that most of them thought "wow, neat, I can get music and not pay for it". Easy theft-- cool, eh?
One of my housemates is an independent musician who makes a modest living off of her work. I don't think she would have a problem with people trading a few of her songs over Napster-- it would bring her more publicity. I do think she would be unhappy with people trading her entire CDs. After all, they would be stealing her work-- not from a big corporation, but from her, personally.
While VUIs have some interesting and exciting potential uses that have already been mentioned, I can't help but wonder what they will do to the noise level associated with computer use, especially in office situations. Computers are loud already, what with fans, disk drives, etc. The thought of trying to get work done in a cube, surrounded by the ambient noise of a few dozen people yacking away, makes my skin crawl. Blech.
I understand that you want to have a safe vehicle for your family, but what about the safety of other drivers on the road? I drive a 7 series BMW-- a high-performance car built like a tank. I used to feel quite safe in it until SUVs started to really proliferate. Now, I am surrounded by huge trucklike vehicles that could squish me in an accident, and whose performance and handling issues are a danger to both me and the SUV driver. Further, I've encountered a lot of SUV drivers who simply don't drive safely because of the feelings of protection they get from their vehicles.
Please remember, there are other people on the road besides you and your family. What am I supposed to do? Buy a semi? Hey, it's bigger than an SUV, right? Mind you, I'm not advocating that we all drive Civics, but this escallation of car size peeves me.
I'm a bit fan of text user interfaces, but they don't seem to have changed much over the last several years. Does anyone know of any new and interesting work being done with text interfaces, either by themselves or integrated with other UI technologies (gui, speech, etc)?
English may be the dominant language of internet communication now, but I can think of a good reason why it won't stay that way. At my university, I have encountered people who speak, say, up to three languages well, and another couple at a mediocre or beginners level. For example, Dutch/English/Indonesian + Malay/Cantonese. This seems to be particularly prevalent among SE Asians, who often come from regions where there are many languages in a small space. In contrast, Americans feel impressed with themselves if they speak one other language at a mediocre level of fluency.
The point is, as other regions continue to develop their economy and internet presence, they may not choose English as their common language of communication because they simply won't have to. They will choose a language that is best suited to their needs, that may be easier to learn and use, etc.
I haven't used a printed manual for a mainstream application in a long time. This includes operating systems, word processing, IDEs, etc. I find that most applications are easy enough to use that I don't need the manual to learn basic functionality-- when I need help or information, it's usually at a level of depth or obscurity that a basic manual does not cover, so I look for the information online. For all their faults, GUIs do help a lot in providing cues to the user about application functionality. Along the same line, applications with non-standard UIs such as games are often difficult to learn without a manual to explain things.
However, in the context of trying to learn something really new or different, or trying to learn a text-based application, paper manuals are much more important. It is annoying to have to switch between windows all the time when learning, paper text is still much easier to read for a long time period, and it can be marked up and augmented in ways that online documentation cannot. When I was learning vi, my paper "cheat sheet" of common commands was far more useful than any kind of online documentation would have been, because I could mark it and refer to it easily.
I do wish that hardware vendors would publish the complete specs of their products on paper. Having to hunt down specs online is annoying.
Actually, Jeeves doesn't really remind me of Dr. Sbaitso, a program for which I have a certain amount of nostalgia. If I recall, Dr. Sbaitso took a longer time to become useless, because it really didn't try to give an interactive conversation. "You're having problems with your parents? That's very interesting, tell me more about it". This is in line with it being (ostensibly) a shrink program, so it was good at drawing out the user by expanding on conversational cues, without providing a whole lot of actual commentary. As a result, its confusion became aparent after a while, but wasn't nearly as entertaining.
First off I feel obligated to remind Mr. Katz that not all women on the web are disinterested in technology or interested only in warm, fuzzy community building with other "chicks" (and god, how I hate being called a chick). I'm female, and, as an IT student and professional I am naturally interested in the technology aspects of the web and computing in general-- my livelihood depends on it. So don't tell me that women aren't interested in technology.
Anyway-- I think that that web user's interests (to use this example of technology-oriented vs. communication oriented) are broken down so much by gender (although that cannot be discounted as a factor) but by age. At age 19, I spent most of my childhoon in a time when the web was just starting out, and personal computers were far from ubiquitous. Now, I use the internet/web as a tool for finding information (technology related and otherwise), as a utility for school work and job-related stuff, and for keeping in touch with existing friends. I don't really use it as a community-forming tool, and I think because I didn't grow up using it in that context.
My 15 year old younger brother, on the other hand, is spending most of his childhood in a time where PCs are nearly universal and where the web is amazingly more advanced than when I was his age. At his age, he still doesn't know the difference between hard drive space and RAM capacity, but he is quite profficient at using PCs and the web to improve his life. He uses computers/the web to play games and communicate with his friends and in online communities. He doesn't care about the technologies involved, because he doesn't have to, and he doesn't remember a time when web technology issues were very much a concern for the end user. I think we will see more of this phenomenon as younger web users, who are inclined to view the web as simply another appliance for living, keep coming on line.
In last week's issue of the New Yorker, there is an article that discusses a group of hard scientists who exhibit mild forms of what might be OCD (or OCPD) behavior. It was postulated that there might be some relationship between prevalence of OCD behaviors and having a career that requires a lot of fact checking, careful procedures, and attention to detail. I doubt that there is a relationship between OCD and intelligence in and of itself-- I can find examples of very intelligent people with and without OCD (or any other mental illness). But, there may be a higher prevalence of OCD among people who are attracted to detail-oriented, procedural fields, a group that also tends to be more intelligent than average.
I admit a splitup sounds like a satisfying vindication of everyone's Microsoft woes. But, would splitting up Microsoft really do much do keep them in check? Consider the oft-cited example of Ma Bell-- yes, that company was split up, but I, and pretty much everyone else I know, still get my phone service from a Bell. If the bell split up was meant to open up competition to smaller telcos, then it didn't appear to work. I doubt that the situation will be much different with Microsoft.
Here are two reasons why: 1. So, let's say you have the MS Office Co, then MS Operating System Co, and so on. Their products will still be compatible with each other (most likely), and people will still use them. Why? Because...
2. Well, some people actually like MS products. Further, MS has an entrenched presence in many places, from the corporate level to the home user level. To me, this means that people will not be especially inclined to make a massive overhaul of their IT systems, preferring instead to upgrade or augment existing systems. So, at least for a while, MS will still have a stable market for their product.
So, I don't think a splitup will do that much good either way. Baby MSs will still be large companies with plenty of clout. Better to mandate some open sourcing, or elimination of product tie-ins, etc.
As a current first time college student, I know that many of the most important aspects of the college experience are not related to academics and the classroom, but to social networking and experiences. Therefore, I don't think that an online university would be adequate to serve the needs of a student just out of high school who had never been to college before, and didn't have the social network that older adults have.
However, I do think that an online approach to university education could offer a lot of flexibility to older adults who want either to get a college degree for the first time, or want to continue their education. Given the difficulties in sheduling around their primary workday responsibilities, attending classes at a physical university may be very difficult. A high quality online university that was structured around allowing students flexibility in taking classes might do a lot to help such students. Further, because older adults have established social networks through other means, the social elements of the physical college experience might not be as vital.
Certainly, "complete integration" of women is something to which the community should aspire. However, I think that women-centered organizations such as LinuxChix have an important role in the greater community, particularly for nascent female geeks or those who experience little exposure to female techies in their daily lives. While I was very lucky to have received a great deal of encouragement in my technical pursuits, and very rarely had anyone tell me "you can't code because you're a girl" I still find myself to be the lone female, or one of a few, in my CS classes and at work. As a result, I don't have the positive reinforcement of my goals that interacting on a daily basis with other female geeks would provide-- while I believe, theoretically, that it is possible for me, a female, to excel in a technical field, I see very few visible, real-life examples of this actually happening to other women. Women-centered techie organizations provide a chance for other women to share experiences and see practical examples of success.
Usenet may be dying out among some users, but at my university (CMU), newsgroups, both internal and external, are much used and well-loved, by newbies and experienced users alike. Most of us recognize that the newsgroup format is very well suited for the quick dissemination of information, as well as for the ensuing discussion. Occaisionally, someone will try to suplant the newsgroup format with a web-based discussion system, generally with little success. I would venture that newsgroup systems are similarly important to other universities, even those that are less technically oriented than CMU
I agree that the burden of responsibility for telecomuting facilities should fall on the party for whom telecommuting has greater relative convenience-- employer or employee. I.e., if the employer is effectively forcing the employee to telecommute by not providing them with an office space, by not adequately accomodating a working disability, etc, then the employer should be responsible for ensuring that the employee's home office situation is acceptable in terms of safety, comfort, and convenience.
On the other hand, if the employee petitions to telecommute even though the employer has already provided adequate office space, and the employee has no more compelling reason than "I don't like coming in to the office" or "It's more convenient for me this way", then the burden of setting up the home office should fall largely on the employee.
I do think that bringing the OSHA in is a little heavy handed for a situation that relies a lot on personal preferences and individual employer-employee relationships.
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It certainly seems reasonable for libraries to use filtering to preserve bandwidth and to stay in line with local community standards, but shouldn't that be the decision of the individual library? It sounds like Bush wants to mandate filtering software (and presumably mandate the filtering parameters as well) for every library and public institution, whether they want it or not.
Besides, I can just see the scene now: Kid is sitting at parents' desk in a darkened room. Furtively, he double-clicks the icon to open a PPP connection. Suddenly, over the haunting sounds of the modem handshake:
"gaaaackkkkkh thpphpht rrrrnnnnggg"
Thunk!
The kid's parents discover him in a faint, sprawled over the keyboard, his heart turned to black.
>there's too little fun stuff to do, and there >aren't enough females
As a Valley native, I find that there is plenty to do in the area. I don't know what "fun stuff" constitutes for you, but: The area is packed with excellent restaurants serving a variety of different cuisines. San Francisco (and to a lesser extent, San Jose) has good cultural venues, including museums, symphony, ballet, and opera. The area's two most prestigious universities, Stanford and Berkeley, offer continuing education classes. There are a number of parks sprinkled throughout the area. Visit the beach at Half Moon Bay (quiet and nice drive up) or Santa Cruz (people watching). There are plenty of clubs and parties to go to on the weekends. The weather is nice all year.
If you want to escape, the Monterey aquarium is a must-see, Yosemite National Park is about 5 hours away, and you can make it down to LA in a day's drive.
I'm not sure why you think there aren't enough females. I'd say the general population is about 50/50, and there were more than a few women at the high tech company where I worked, even in engineering/programming positions.
Besides, how would you advance over levels? Do a certain number of file copies to slay the boss?
Now, with the proliferation of GUIs for everything, we have any number of ways to accomplish one task. They might or might not be the same across applications, so users, who don't understand the underlying workings of the task they want to accomplish, get frustrated and confused. The GUI proliferation is supposed to be a boon to newbies, but that different applications can have substantially variable (to the newbie) ways of accomplishing the same thing has caused a lot of frustration. "So, can I just do this here like I did in Word?" "Er, well, no" "Why not?" "Well, because it's different here." "Oh".
Stuff like network troubleshooting, hardware configuration, etc is, I suspect, going to be annoying no matter what, but, having been "close to the machine", I have a fighting chance. A newbie, confronted with a slew of different metaphors for the same thing, may never make much progress.
A very bright and capable friend of mine spent about two years in a college CS program, then dropped out. He says that he is having trouble advancing beyond the level of network administrator type jobs into bigger projects or management positions, because he lacks a degree. Skipping college may look appealing in the near term, but after a few years you may find yourself stuck in lower level tech positions.
Or something.
What do you mean no one uses Usenet? At my university, internal newsgroups are an essential part of academic life. I use various groups for help with work, etc etc, and, in general, I don't notice that a lot of groups are particularly depopulated. I don't use web-based mail for anything except junkmail addresses, and more to the point, none of the newbies I know do either. They're all using Outlook :p
I can certainly see your point-- people who gripe about having to pay taxes, but expect to make full use of government-funded public services peeve me in the same manner. However, the problem with the Carnivore concept is that the government and I may not agree on the things from which I require "protection". Bombs and terrorism are easy to agree on as undesirable, but what if the government feels I should be "protected" from drug information, stuff with sexual content, etc? I may have no desire to do anything illegal, but I don't want the government actively listening for what it may find immoral.
Absolutely. I have one of the older ones without the wheel... it's possibly the most useful upgrade I ever bought. It's smooth, responsive, and doesn't aggravate my wrist. I will give up my Trackman Marble when "they" pry it out of my cold dead fingers.
(Not that this is especially relevant to the primary discussion, but...)
>No music by Gay bands/singers etc.
And, why not? Creativity and musical talent are, insofar as we can tell, independent of sexual orientation. Gay, lesbian, and bisexual artists have produced some amazing music; Cole Porter immediately comes to mind. What is to be gained by denying the public the chance to listen? Homophobia tarnishes our civilization.
I know a number of dedicated Napster users, and I can guarantee you that none of them were thinking "hey, this program will help me flout corporatization of media while encouraging beneficial freedom of information." I can guarantee you that most of them thought "wow, neat, I can get music and not pay for it". Easy theft-- cool, eh?
One of my housemates is an independent musician who makes a modest living off of her work. I don't think she would have a problem with people trading a few of her songs over Napster-- it would bring her more publicity. I do think she would be unhappy with people trading her entire CDs. After all, they would be stealing her work-- not from a big corporation, but from her, personally.
Please remember, there are other people on the road besides you and your family. What am I supposed to do? Buy a semi? Hey, it's bigger than an SUV, right? Mind you, I'm not advocating that we all drive Civics, but this escallation of car size peeves me.
The point is, as other regions continue to develop their economy and internet presence, they may not choose English as their common language of communication because they simply won't have to. They will choose a language that is best suited to their needs, that may be easier to learn and use, etc.
However, in the context of trying to learn something really new or different, or trying to learn a text-based application, paper manuals are much more important. It is annoying to have to switch between windows all the time when learning, paper text is still much easier to read for a long time period, and it can be marked up and augmented in ways that online documentation cannot. When I was learning vi, my paper "cheat sheet" of common commands was far more useful than any kind of online documentation would have been, because I could mark it and refer to it easily.
I do wish that hardware vendors would publish the complete specs of their products on paper. Having to hunt down specs online is annoying.
Actually, Jeeves doesn't really remind me of Dr. Sbaitso, a program for which I have a certain amount of nostalgia. If I recall, Dr. Sbaitso took a longer time to become useless, because it really didn't try to give an interactive conversation. "You're having problems with your parents? That's very interesting, tell me more about it". This is in line with it being (ostensibly) a shrink program, so it was good at drawing out the user by expanding on conversational cues, without providing a whole lot of actual commentary. As a result, its confusion became aparent after a while, but wasn't nearly as entertaining.
First off I feel obligated to remind Mr. Katz that not all women on the web are disinterested in technology or interested only in warm, fuzzy community building with other "chicks" (and god, how I hate being called a chick). I'm female, and, as an IT student and professional I am naturally interested in the technology aspects of the web and computing in general-- my livelihood depends on it. So don't tell me that women aren't interested in technology.
Anyway-- I think that that web user's interests (to use this example of technology-oriented vs. communication oriented) are broken down so much by gender (although that cannot be discounted as a factor) but by age. At age 19, I spent most of my childhoon in a time when the web was just starting out, and personal computers were far from ubiquitous. Now, I use the internet/web as a tool for finding information (technology related and otherwise), as a utility for school work and job-related stuff, and for keeping in touch with existing friends. I don't really use it as a community-forming tool, and I think because I didn't grow up using it in that context.
My 15 year old younger brother, on the other hand, is spending most of his childhood in a time where PCs are nearly universal and where the web is amazingly more advanced than when I was his age. At his age, he still doesn't know the difference between hard drive space and RAM capacity, but he is quite profficient at using PCs and the web to improve his life. He uses computers/the web to play games and communicate with his friends and in online communities. He doesn't care about the technologies involved, because he doesn't have to, and he doesn't remember a time when web technology issues were very much a concern for the end user. I think we will see more of this phenomenon as younger web users, who are inclined to view the web as simply another appliance for living, keep coming on line.
In last week's issue of the New Yorker, there is an article that discusses a group of hard scientists who exhibit mild forms of what might be OCD (or OCPD) behavior. It was postulated that there might be some relationship between prevalence of OCD behaviors and having a career that requires a lot of fact checking, careful procedures, and attention to detail. I doubt that there is a relationship between OCD and intelligence in and of itself-- I can find examples of very intelligent people with and without OCD (or any other mental illness). But, there may be a higher prevalence of OCD among people who are attracted to detail-oriented, procedural fields, a group that also tends to be more intelligent than average.
I admit a splitup sounds like a satisfying vindication of everyone's Microsoft woes. But, would splitting up Microsoft really do much do keep them in check? Consider the oft-cited example of Ma Bell-- yes, that company was split up, but I, and pretty much everyone else I know, still get my phone service from a Bell. If the bell split up was meant to open up competition to smaller telcos, then it didn't appear to work. I doubt that the situation will be much different with Microsoft.
Here are two reasons why:
1. So, let's say you have the MS Office Co, then MS Operating System Co, and so on. Their products will still be compatible with each other (most likely), and people will still use them. Why? Because...
2. Well, some people actually like MS products. Further, MS has an entrenched presence in many places, from the corporate level to the home user level. To me, this means that people will not be especially inclined to make a massive overhaul of their IT systems, preferring instead to upgrade or augment existing systems. So, at least for a while, MS will still have a stable market for their product.
So, I don't think a splitup will do that much good either way. Baby MSs will still be large companies with plenty of clout. Better to mandate some open sourcing, or elimination of product tie-ins, etc.
As a current first time college student, I know that many of the most important aspects of the college experience are not related to academics and the classroom, but to social networking and experiences. Therefore, I don't think that an online university would be adequate to serve the needs of a student just out of high school who had never been to college before, and didn't have the social network that older adults have.
However, I do think that an online approach to university education could offer a lot of flexibility to older adults who want either to get a college degree for the first time, or want to continue their education. Given the difficulties in sheduling around their primary workday responsibilities, attending classes at a physical university may be very difficult. A high quality online university that was structured around allowing students flexibility in taking classes might do a lot to help such students. Further, because older adults have established social networks through other means, the social elements of the physical college experience might not be as vital.
Certainly, "complete integration" of women is something to which the community should aspire. However, I think that women-centered organizations such as LinuxChix have an important role in the greater community, particularly for nascent female geeks or those who experience little exposure to female techies in their daily lives. While I was very lucky to have received a great deal of encouragement in my technical pursuits, and very rarely had anyone tell me "you can't code because you're a girl" I still find myself to be the lone female, or one of a few, in my CS classes and at work. As a result, I don't have the positive reinforcement of my goals that interacting on a daily basis with other female geeks would provide-- while I believe, theoretically, that it is possible for me, a female, to excel in a technical field, I see very few visible, real-life examples of this actually happening to other women. Women-centered techie organizations provide a chance for other women to share experiences and see practical examples of success.
Usenet may be dying out among some users, but at my university (CMU), newsgroups, both internal and external, are much used and well-loved, by newbies and experienced users alike. Most of us recognize that the newsgroup format is very well suited for the quick dissemination of information, as well as for the ensuing discussion. Occaisionally, someone will try to suplant the newsgroup format with a web-based discussion system, generally with little success. I would venture that newsgroup systems are similarly important to other universities, even those that are less technically oriented than CMU
I agree that the burden of responsibility for telecomuting facilities should fall on the party for whom telecommuting has greater relative convenience-- employer or employee. I.e., if the employer is effectively forcing the employee to telecommute by not providing them with an office space, by not adequately accomodating a working disability, etc, then the employer should be responsible for ensuring that the employee's home office situation is acceptable in terms of safety, comfort, and convenience.
On the other hand, if the employee petitions to telecommute even though the employer has already provided adequate office space, and the employee has no more compelling reason than "I don't like coming in to the office" or "It's more convenient for me this way", then the burden of setting up the home office should fall largely on the employee.
I do think that bringing the OSHA in is a little heavy handed for a situation that relies a lot on personal preferences and individual employer-employee relationships.