Well, he used to give full-text editions away for free from his web site (stopping only under pressure from bookstores) so my guess would be that he wouldn't mind that at all. His (documented in his own words on his own site) attitude is that it's good marketing.
OSC isn't a recent convert to enlightened copyright policy...he's been on our side for a long time now.
>are there not better things to do than take the language too seriously?
There are definitely better things to do than take the language (or anything else) too seriously...by definition. The question is whether or not insisting on reasonable spelling and grammar constitutes taking the language too seriously, or merely seriously enough.
For most people who care about such things (and I'll admit without shame that I'm one of them, as I also admit that I'm not entirely without faults in the spelling and grammar department myself), they're simply a very useful shorthand...noticeably poor spelling and/or grammar are an instant tip-off that the person whose work you're reading either is an imbecile or hasn't taken the time to do even minimal checking of their own work. In online media especially, this is an important thing, because other tip-offs about the same problems often aren't available.
Perhaps you don't think that's an important enough thing to pay attention to. If so, pardon us for disagreeing with you.
Well, some (deluded, IMHO) people think government solves problems, despite all the evidence of history that the most a government has ever done with a problem is to manage it.
On the other hand, most of the anti-spam solutions I've seen bandied about are ones that do not require any government action.
(I have numerous disputes with the proposed requirement for every mail server to get an SSL certificate, for example, especially if SSL certificates remain at their present market price, but one thing that plan doesn't do is require or indeed utilize any action by government one way or the other.)
Well, I wouldn't know about Usenet these days...the spam problem is so severe that the last time I looked Usenet was essentially useless except in the moderated groups...and I'm willing to wager you won't find child pornography in those.
More to the point, the article (and the government policy it refers to) is about web sites, not Usenet.
How do you think it can be, that legal porn is absolutely everywhere you turn, but virtually every report of widespread child pornography has turned out to be either a hoax or a mistake (depending on whether one feels generous toward the motivation of the person reporting it), if as you and he say, child pornography is just as common as adult pornography on the internet?
(By "legal porn", BTW, I'm referring only to that which depicts persons who are in reality above the age of sexual consent in whatever jurisdiction the material was produced. Other laws might be being broken without affecting my core argument.)
>illegal child pornography, which has become as pervasive on the Internet as legal sexually explicit sites
I have to wonder whether the person who wrote this is wildly exaggerating the amount of child pornography on the internet (or in the UNIVERSE, for that matter) or wildly understating the amount of regular porn.:)
They don't publicize it because then people might get the idea that there's a major privacy implication. And if people get the idea there's a major privacy implication, they might think twice about buying it.
Remember, the major media networks belong to the same group of conglomerates that provide RIAA and MPAA with both the legal budget to use DMCA as a club and the control of the news cycle (which, of course, comes with the ability to blackmail politicians) that got DMCA passed in the first place. Everyone there who understands DRM is whole-hog in favor of it.
They are, to put it bluntly, our enemy in the intellectual property wars. Don't expect them to cover any news story where the public might take our side.
They're going to be $200 each, which tells me they WILL be refillable by the user, because nobody is going to pay $20/hr in fuel cost to use their own laptop. Even inkjet printers can't get away with THAT level of gouging. (On the other hand, it's in the same price ballpark as present laptop batteries, so we aren't talking about massive up-front gouging either.)
They run on methanol (which is cheap, available over the counter in quantity, and already has enough applications to be widely available at least by mail order) and water (which is not only cheap, it's usually the very LAST public utility to fail in an emergency). Procuring the fuel ingredients will not be hard. And if you're going to be on the road a while, you'll be able to bring fuel with you.
I concur that it'd be nice if they could recharge from a plug. But on balance I'll still call this a major win if it's delivered somewhere in the general neighborhood of on-time and working even kinda sorta like the article says.
>You know...real businesses, like those that call real consultants or hire real IT staff for real solutions. The ones that pay the bills of people like me.
Right then. So you won't be buying one. I'm sure every slashdot reader was on the edge of his seat awaiting that particular revelation.
"I would not buy this because it is not suitable for my clients' needs" != "This is worthless".
I agree that a box like this is not suitable for enterprise high-availability failover. Duh. But that doesn't mean there are no applications for which it'd be useful. (Most of the ones I can think of at the moment cluster around the telecommuting sphere, where availability matters enough to think about, but not enough to spend thousands of dollars on. That's certainly how I'd use it if I bought one...and I'm actively thinking about buying something like this.)
Yes. Thank you for being the one person on slashdot who hasn't drank whatever kool-aid convinces people that the internet is (and ought to be) divided into "content producers" and "content consumers". The internet's greatest virtue lies in its facilities for _completely_ interactive communication, where every participant has the same position in the conversation as every other.
Email lists are the quintessential example of this phenomenon.
Putting up web pages may be easy and cheap enough to be an option for everybody, but it doesn't provide the same level of interactivity as a mailing list can. A world in which everyone can be a producer as well as a consumer is not the same thing as a world in which everyone can be an equal participant. The latter is what we have, where the former is what replacing mailing lists with RSS feeds would give us in even the best case.
Mailing lists are delivered to the users' own mailboxes, at which point their data becomes unavailable only when the recipients decide to delete it. Web pages, on the other hand, are stored on central servers and are thus vulnerable not only to network outages but to gratuitous changes made server-side by webmasters, as well as other sorts of problems. For certain types of content (advertising newsletters would be a good example), this is not a meaningful limitation because the content itself is worthless if it's out of date...but that does not describe the sum total of discussion on mailing lists, and it does not make sense to introduce such unnecessary vulnerabilities.
RSS is good for what it's designed for...but please let's not try to throw away a working technology and substitute a kludged one in its place.
Except that, like it or not, it _is_ the case. MS gives most computer users what most computer users want. Of course, it's well worth saying at this point in the logic stream that "what most computer users want" is defined as "what most computer users have been carefully conditioned/brainwashed by MS PR and MS FUD to want"...but the fact that these desires are artificial instead of being born from the users' own needs has no effect on how hard they'll fight to avoid being given something that doesn't meet them.
Most computer users have no experience of a secure OS. They think of periodic virus outbreaks as background noise...just part of the cost of living in a computerized world. Most of them not only have no contrary experience themselves, but have no regular substantive contact with anyone who has contrary experience.
MS won't start to seriously hurt until Windows is running _prominently_ on devices that end users think of as appliances (with the resulting expectation for appliance-level reliability), instead of "computers".
...the way they use the future tense to make sure we know that the Post is publishing this story before the arrest actually happens...you know...just in case the guy who writes viruses happens to get on that crazy internet thing where he might see this announcement and decide it'd be a terrific time to check out the weather in Rio?
For all the bitching we tend to do about managers, having a good one is critical in this sort of situation. Just about the only way to come through such a problem intact is to ensure that your boss guards your time jealously. Being able to say "your request will take me two days, but it'll be two days a month from now unless you can convince $BOSS to downgrade one of my other priorities" is really the key here. If it's a project you agree is important, but just don't have time for, you might suggest some ways that your boss might be convinced to agree. On the other hand, if it seems meaningless, you can probably avoid an argument by listing some specific items on your to-do list that everyone in the company will recognize as being sacred. But either way it's not your job to do the convincing.
Don't, no matter what you do, work 70 hour weeks without extra compensation. I've been caught in that trap, and I can assure you that what feels to you like dedication to quality looks to them like prime evidence that you're a sucker. (In the worst case, if they fire you for not working unpaid overtime, you still get unemployment benefits. But if you burn yourself out to the point where you either quit or become so unproductive during your regular day that they can call you incompetent, you get nothing.)
If/when your own boss comes to you with more work, my suggested response would be along the lines of "I'm afraid I can't do Y right now, because I'm having to spend all my time on X in order to get it done by when you said you needed it...or is Y more important than X?"
But overall, the best thing to do is to remember that an "order" from someone who doesn't personally control whether or not you still have a job is actually only a suggestion. Keeping all the users happy is a good thing, but not at the expense of either your manager's pet projects or your own sanity.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, he used to give full-text editions away for free from his web site (stopping only under pressure from bookstores) so my guess would be that he wouldn't mind that at all. His (documented in his own words on his own site) attitude is that it's good marketing.
OSC isn't a recent convert to enlightened copyright policy...he's been on our side for a long time now.
>are there not better things to do than take the language too seriously?
There are definitely better things to do than take the language (or anything else) too seriously...by definition. The question is whether or not insisting on reasonable spelling and grammar constitutes taking the language too seriously, or merely seriously enough.
For most people who care about such things (and I'll admit without shame that I'm one of them, as I also admit that I'm not entirely without faults in the spelling and grammar department myself), they're simply a very useful shorthand...noticeably poor spelling and/or grammar are an instant tip-off that the person whose work you're reading either is an imbecile or hasn't taken the time to do even minimal checking of their own work. In online media especially, this is an important thing, because other tip-offs about the same problems often aren't available.
Perhaps you don't think that's an important enough thing to pay attention to. If so, pardon us for disagreeing with you.
Well, some (deluded, IMHO) people think government solves problems, despite all the evidence of history that the most a government has ever done with a problem is to manage it.
On the other hand, most of the anti-spam solutions I've seen bandied about are ones that do not require any government action.
(I have numerous disputes with the proposed requirement for every mail server to get an SSL certificate, for example, especially if SSL certificates remain at their present market price, but one thing that plan doesn't do is require or indeed utilize any action by government one way or the other.)
Well, I wouldn't know about Usenet these days...the spam problem is so severe that the last time I looked Usenet was essentially useless except in the moderated groups...and I'm willing to wager you won't find child pornography in those.
More to the point, the article (and the government policy it refers to) is about web sites, not Usenet.
How do you think it can be, that legal porn is absolutely everywhere you turn, but virtually every report of widespread child pornography has turned out to be either a hoax or a mistake (depending on whether one feels generous toward the motivation of the person reporting it), if as you and he say, child pornography is just as common as adult pornography on the internet?
(By "legal porn", BTW, I'm referring only to that which depicts persons who are in reality above the age of sexual consent in whatever jurisdiction the material was produced. Other laws might be being broken without affecting my core argument.)
>illegal child pornography, which has become as pervasive on the Internet as legal sexually explicit sites
:)
I have to wonder whether the person who wrote this is wildly exaggerating the amount of child pornography on the internet (or in the UNIVERSE, for that matter) or wildly understating the amount of regular porn.
They don't publicize it because then people might get the idea that there's a major privacy implication. And if people get the idea there's a major privacy implication, they might think twice about buying it.
Remember, the major media networks belong to the same group of conglomerates that provide RIAA and MPAA with both the legal budget to use DMCA as a club and the control of the news cycle (which, of course, comes with the ability to blackmail politicians) that got DMCA passed in the first place. Everyone there who understands DRM is whole-hog in favor of it.
They are, to put it bluntly, our enemy in the intellectual property wars. Don't expect them to cover any news story where the public might take our side.
They're going to be $200 each, which tells me they WILL be refillable by the user, because nobody is going to pay $20/hr in fuel cost to use their own laptop. Even inkjet printers can't get away with THAT level of gouging. (On the other hand, it's in the same price ballpark as present laptop batteries, so we aren't talking about massive up-front gouging either.)
They run on methanol (which is cheap, available over the counter in quantity, and already has enough applications to be widely available at least by mail order) and water (which is not only cheap, it's usually the very LAST public utility to fail in an emergency). Procuring the fuel ingredients will not be hard. And if you're going to be on the road a while, you'll be able to bring fuel with you.
I concur that it'd be nice if they could recharge from a plug. But on balance I'll still call this a major win if it's delivered somewhere in the general neighborhood of on-time and working even kinda sorta like the article says.
>You know...real businesses, like those that call real consultants or hire real IT staff for real solutions. The ones that pay the bills of people like me.
Right then. So you won't be buying one. I'm sure every slashdot reader was on the edge of his seat awaiting that particular revelation.
"I would not buy this because it is not suitable for my clients' needs" != "This is worthless".
I agree that a box like this is not suitable for enterprise high-availability failover. Duh. But that doesn't mean there are no applications for which it'd be useful. (Most of the ones I can think of at the moment cluster around the telecommuting sphere, where availability matters enough to think about, but not enough to spend thousands of dollars on. That's certainly how I'd use it if I bought one...and I'm actively thinking about buying something like this.)
Yes. Thank you for being the one person on slashdot who hasn't drank whatever kool-aid convinces people that the internet is (and ought to be) divided into "content producers" and "content consumers". The internet's greatest virtue lies in its facilities for _completely_ interactive communication, where every participant has the same position in the conversation as every other.
Email lists are the quintessential example of this phenomenon.
Putting up web pages may be easy and cheap enough to be an option for everybody, but it doesn't provide the same level of interactivity as a mailing list can. A world in which everyone can be a producer as well as a consumer is not the same thing as a world in which everyone can be an equal participant. The latter is what we have, where the former is what replacing mailing lists with RSS feeds would give us in even the best case.
Mailing lists are delivered to the users' own mailboxes, at which point their data becomes unavailable only when the recipients decide to delete it. Web pages, on the other hand, are stored on central servers and are thus vulnerable not only to network outages but to gratuitous changes made server-side by webmasters, as well as other sorts of problems. For certain types of content (advertising newsletters would be a good example), this is not a meaningful limitation because the content itself is worthless if it's out of date...but that does not describe the sum total of discussion on mailing lists, and it does not make sense to introduce such unnecessary vulnerabilities.
RSS is good for what it's designed for...but please let's not try to throw away a working technology and substitute a kludged one in its place.
Except that, like it or not, it _is_ the case. MS gives most computer users what most computer users want. Of course, it's well worth saying at this point in the logic stream that "what most computer users want" is defined as "what most computer users have been carefully conditioned/brainwashed by MS PR and MS FUD to want"...but the fact that these desires are artificial instead of being born from the users' own needs has no effect on how hard they'll fight to avoid being given something that doesn't meet them.
Most computer users have no experience of a secure OS. They think of periodic virus outbreaks as background noise...just part of the cost of living in a computerized world. Most of them not only have no contrary experience themselves, but have no regular substantive contact with anyone who has contrary experience.
MS won't start to seriously hurt until Windows is running _prominently_ on devices that end users think of as appliances (with the resulting expectation for appliance-level reliability), instead of "computers".
...the way they use the future tense to make sure we know that the Post is publishing this story before the arrest actually happens...you know...just in case the guy who writes viruses happens to get on that crazy internet thing where he might see this announcement and decide it'd be a terrific time to check out the weather in Rio?
For all the bitching we tend to do about managers, having a good one is critical in this sort of situation. Just about the only way to come through such a problem intact is to ensure that your boss guards your time jealously. Being able to say "your request will take me two days, but it'll be two days a month from now unless you can convince $BOSS to downgrade one of my other priorities" is really the key here. If it's a project you agree is important, but just don't have time for, you might suggest some ways that your boss might be convinced to agree. On the other hand, if it seems meaningless, you can probably avoid an argument by listing some specific items on your to-do list that everyone in the company will recognize as being sacred. But either way it's not your job to do the convincing.
Don't, no matter what you do, work 70 hour weeks without extra compensation. I've been caught in that trap, and I can assure you that what feels to you like dedication to quality looks to them like prime evidence that you're a sucker. (In the worst case, if they fire you for not working unpaid overtime, you still get unemployment benefits. But if you burn yourself out to the point where you either quit or become so unproductive during your regular day that they can call you incompetent, you get nothing.)
If/when your own boss comes to you with more work, my suggested response would be along the lines of "I'm afraid I can't do Y right now, because I'm having to spend all my time on X in order to get it done by when you said you needed it...or is Y more important than X?"
But overall, the best thing to do is to remember that an "order" from someone who doesn't personally control whether or not you still have a job is actually only a suggestion. Keeping all the users happy is a good thing, but not at the expense of either your manager's pet projects or your own sanity.