One problem with "personal outsourcing" is that code doesn't just need to work -- it needs to
(a) KEEP working, and (b) be understandable by everybody else,
because code rarely gets written once to be deployed in isolation and then locked away.
If the code breaks, and you introduce a many-hour delay because the only people that understand it are operating on a substantially different schedule from anywhere your company has operations, well, you're causing a hell of a problem. And if you have to have a back-and-forth with them anytime there's an integration or QA issue, ditto.
Heh. Some companies ask for code samples if you're looking for a software development exam; others may give you a test with a time limit that involves actual coding. Both strike me as rather fair if you're aiming for that position.
Programming, outside of certain constraints (such as needing hard real-time guarantees, coding so almost everything is in ROM and very little RAM is used, and so forth), is only the tool. A computer science education is not about teaching people how to program, but instead how to understand the underlying theory.
There's a fundamental difference, 'tho, when the service offered is about communications.
There's only so much that, say, Coca-Cola might have been coerced into doing -- especially when one considers that the most egregious possibilities, like deliberately poisoning goods distributed to a specific region for the purposes of reducing a particular unruly population, would be too blatant. So... McDonalds, theoretically, could have tabulated which regions eat more burgers, or perhaps given jobs to otherwise useless commissars and other Party hacks. Or given preferential treatment to the dude who just drove up in his Zil. Oooh.
That's nothing compared to the more subtle, and to a dictatorship more useful, cooperation possible regarding the monitoring or communications. Forget taking down blogs; that's small-time, unless the blog is ultra-high-profile. What's more interesting might be possibilities like
* monitoring and identifying possible dissidents so their networks can be infiltrated * allowing agents provocateurs into online fora * localized blackouts to shut down communications from a specific region to slow the release of news about some event that needs to be covered up or spun * planting fake news
That sort of thing. If an information / communications company were to cooperate with a totalitarian state, the range of possible evils is rather substantial.
The US would still be competing with China's lower production costs even if it completely severed trade with them. Buying high-priced products and services raises the cost of doing business, making it harder to compete on price when exporting derived goods/services to the rest of the world.
The clandestine Iranian nuclear program precedes the Bush administration.
For that matter, it's Iran that's talked about wiping other nations from the map -- rather explicitly, not the United States. It's the rest of the world that's moderate here.
It's likely a bit harder for Israel this time around, as
(a) Iran is further away than Iraq, (b) Israel would have to violate the airspace of more than just Iran, and (c) Iran, presumably, is fully aware of what Israel did to Osirak and under no illusions that Israel would refrain from attacking given the opportunity -- and therefore can be expected to have paid more attention to hiding and protecting its facilities.
Third point is the real kicker. If you don't know where the targets are, it's hard to hit them. If they're buried to the point you need earth-penetrating nuclear munitions, well, are you really willing to go that far?
If memory serves, the Minolta A2 has focusing and zoom rings, coupled with an EVF that's commonly lauded as being among the best of any mass-market digital camera.
Just about any of the DSLRs with a reasonably fast lens should be very responsive. Mine only slows down to clear the buffer after a 12-shot burst, which is plenty fine for my taste.
Whoever moderated parent upward seems to be oblivious to the fact that pixels are not interpolated from discrete sets of four, and that the separate pixels
(a) do suffice to reproduce real color scenes damn well, and (b) are spatially distinct so they provide spatial resolution.
What you're missing is that the phone calls wouldn't be made, because the people who own the machines aren't aware that they're actually sending spam courtesy of the last Trojan they installed.
If you search for "Korean spam" on USENET, you'll find that you're hardly alone. ROK systems -- notably KORNET -- have a reputation for combining oddles of bandwidth with a disregard for spam complaints, and they're outside the jurisdiction of the FTC or other non-ROK enforcement bodies...
Interesting. My Gmail account (which is forwarded to by my ol' university accounts, which have been public for far too long) rarely gets 419s these days.
About 200 spam per day tends to be find its way there, mostly
- pharma spam (including 'herbals' and genitalia enlargement) - stock pumping - spams I can't read because they're in Korean - spams I can't read because they're in Chinese - w4r3z (HUGE spike lately, of identical spams, pretending to sell 'OEM' software and 'instant downloads') - spams I can't read because they're in Hebrew (waning) - fake diplomas (recent upswing) - online casinos (waning)
I've also gotten the odd spam from an Austrian pr0n site (in German), and a very very occasional French spam from what appears to be a Canadian-based retailer of books and music (!), and the odd Russian bride site. But it's been a while since the last 419.
Intellectual property includes the designs being sent to the manufacturing plants -- be they patented pharmaceuticals or trademarked vehicles.
If there's no IP protection, then what stops somebody from operating a plant somewhere with minimal labor and regulatory cost, and trying to clone your products? Heck, what would stop, say, Pfizer from doing that to Merck?
AOL gets -- * $1B investment. Not gift, but investment. * $300M credit for purchase of keyword ads. * Ability to sell ads across Google's network including third-party sites (!). * Assistance in opening up the 'walled garden' content to Google's crawler. * Collaboration on video search.
Google -- * Minority shareholder rights. * Possibly, more ads sold by AOL's marketing machine. * Possibly, higher CTR if AOL can do better ad sales -- through knowing more about its users, say (inferred). * Greater availability of the old 'walled garden' content. * Collaboration in online video search, which probably includes working with AOL's 'SingingFish' service, and perhaps access to content? * Interoperability to an IM network with a huge base -- slightly larger than MSN + Yahoo!, last I checked.
There's also a defensive factor; a deal with MSN might have required shifting from Google to MSN, and that would mean some 25-30M search queries per day and ~10% of Google's advertising revenue.
As to how Google might lose, well, if AOL were to collapse, the $1B investment might look like a bad idea; or if the changes drove away too many paying users (through ad clicks, not subscribers). Likewise, AOL might be considered to have lost if Microsoft would have been a better partner, or if people flee AIM to Google Talk, or so forth. But it's an interesting deal from both perspectives, I'd say.
Intentionally profiting from assisting an illegal act tends to be frowned upon. If you're offering the infringing content AND the device meant to allow its use, it's hard to argue innocence.
The DMCA would be useful against less careless vendors offering the built-in mod chip with a knowing wink, but who aren't actually doing the infringing themselves -- just taking advantage of the market of people who want to infringe but don't want to do the necessary modding themselves.
Modding in general is not illegal -- much like modding your car is not. Heavily tinting your windows, however, is frequently frowned upon.
Offering modding services specifically to bypass a digital access protection measure for copyrighted material, however, normally is unless you fall under certain exemptions in the law.
As for why they're invoking it, it would be rather curious if they have such a clear-cut violation and do *not* invoke it. It gives them leverage -- one more charge to bargain away -- and removes the ability of defense counsels in less blatant cases to complain about selective prosecution.
I'm feeling too lazy right now to dig up my copy yet again, but -- if memory serves, there are two conditions, either of which suffices.
The first is that the item or service is specifically intended for circumventing a digital access protection measure.
The second is that the item or service is marketed or advertised for circumventing a digital access protection measure.
Thus, "could" is not sufficient, in the general case. That 'could' would have to be strongly indicative that the infringing use is actually by design...
In this case, since the mod chip was presumably included to bypass the access controls and allow the use of infringing material that the accused themselves provided, it should be a slam dunk -- they can't plausibly claim that they were providing the chips only for legal use.
DMCA applies due to the modding chip -- whose presence would probably be much harder to ditch in a hurry than the infringed games.
Might be useful if they want to prosecute for dealings with other customers, any of whom might have wiped their Xboxes clean by now.
Furthermore, it would allow them to go after other vendors openly selling modded Xboxes and games, or to dissuade potential customers, without needing to re-emphasize the finer points of copyright law.
Unless they're being taxed at, say, FDR-esque levels, the taxes they might be avoiding are far less than the money that they're contributing. After all, total personal income tax rates are rarely over 50%...
Slashdot Mirror
One problem with "personal outsourcing" is that code doesn't just need to work -- it needs to
(a) KEEP working, and
(b) be understandable by everybody else,
because code rarely gets written once to be deployed in isolation and then locked away.
If the code breaks, and you introduce a many-hour delay because the only people that understand it are operating on a substantially different schedule from anywhere your company has operations, well, you're causing a hell of a problem. And if you have to have a back-and-forth with them anytime there's an integration or QA issue, ditto.
Heh. Some companies ask for code samples if you're looking for a software development exam; others may give you a test with a time limit that involves actual coding. Both strike me as rather fair if you're aiming for that position.
Programming, outside of certain constraints (such as needing hard real-time guarantees, coding so almost everything is in ROM and very little RAM is used, and so forth), is only the tool. A computer science education is not about teaching people how to program, but instead how to understand the underlying theory.
There's a fundamental difference, 'tho, when the service offered is about communications.
There's only so much that, say, Coca-Cola might have been coerced into doing -- especially when one considers that the most egregious possibilities, like deliberately poisoning goods distributed to a specific region for the purposes of reducing a particular unruly population, would be too blatant. So... McDonalds, theoretically, could have tabulated which regions eat more burgers, or perhaps given jobs to otherwise useless commissars and other Party hacks. Or given preferential treatment to the dude who just drove up in his Zil. Oooh.
That's nothing compared to the more subtle, and to a dictatorship more useful, cooperation possible regarding the monitoring or communications. Forget taking down blogs; that's small-time, unless the blog is ultra-high-profile. What's more interesting might be possibilities like
* monitoring and identifying possible dissidents so their networks can be infiltrated
* allowing agents provocateurs into online fora
* localized blackouts to shut down communications from a specific region to slow the release of news about some event that needs to be covered up or spun
* planting fake news
That sort of thing. If an information / communications company were to cooperate with a totalitarian state, the range of possible evils is rather substantial.
The US would still be competing with China's lower production costs even if it completely severed trade with them. Buying high-priced products and services raises the cost of doing business, making it harder to compete on price when exporting derived goods/services to the rest of the world.
WTO might have something to say about that.
The clandestine Iranian nuclear program precedes the Bush administration.
For that matter, it's Iran that's talked about wiping other nations from the map -- rather explicitly, not the United States. It's the rest of the world that's moderate here.
It's likely a bit harder for Israel this time around, as
(a) Iran is further away than Iraq,
(b) Israel would have to violate the airspace of more than just Iran, and
(c) Iran, presumably, is fully aware of what Israel did to Osirak and under no illusions that Israel would refrain from attacking given the opportunity -- and therefore can be expected to have paid more attention to hiding and protecting its facilities.
Third point is the real kicker. If you don't know where the targets are, it's hard to hit them. If they're buried to the point you need earth-penetrating nuclear munitions, well, are you really willing to go that far?
If memory serves, the Minolta A2 has focusing and zoom rings, coupled with an EVF that's commonly lauded as being among the best of any mass-market digital camera.
Just about any of the DSLRs with a reasonably fast lens should be very responsive. Mine only slows down to clear the buffer after a 12-shot burst, which is plenty fine for my taste.
Whoever moderated parent upward seems to be oblivious to the fact that pixels are not interpolated from discrete sets of four, and that the separate pixels
(a) do suffice to reproduce real color scenes damn well,
and
(b) are spatially distinct so they provide spatial resolution.
Parent is parroting Foveon propaganda.
Try comparing the results of ISO 800 or ISO 1600 scanned film with, say, a Canon 1Ds Mk II at the same setting.
Doesn't scale nearly as well as botnets do, and they'd also have to spoof Caller ID unless they'd like to make it incredibly obvious.
What you're missing is that the phone calls wouldn't be made, because the people who own the machines aren't aware that they're actually sending spam courtesy of the last Trojan they installed.
Yes.
If you search for "Korean spam" on USENET, you'll find that you're hardly alone. ROK systems -- notably KORNET -- have a reputation for combining oddles of bandwidth with a disregard for spam complaints, and they're outside the jurisdiction of the FTC or other non-ROK enforcement bodies...
Interesting. My Gmail account (which is forwarded to by my ol' university accounts, which have been public for far too long) rarely gets 419s these days.
About 200 spam per day tends to be find its way there, mostly
- pharma spam (including 'herbals' and genitalia enlargement)
- stock pumping
- spams I can't read because they're in Korean
- spams I can't read because they're in Chinese
- w4r3z (HUGE spike lately, of identical spams, pretending to sell 'OEM' software and 'instant downloads')
- spams I can't read because they're in Hebrew (waning)
- fake diplomas (recent upswing)
- online casinos (waning)
I've also gotten the odd spam from an Austrian pr0n site (in German), and a very very occasional French spam from what appears to be a Canadian-based retailer of books and music (!), and the odd Russian bride site. But it's been a while since the last 419.
Intellectual property includes the designs being sent to the manufacturing plants -- be they patented pharmaceuticals or trademarked vehicles.
If there's no IP protection, then what stops somebody from operating a plant somewhere with minimal labor and regulatory cost, and trying to clone your products? Heck, what would stop, say, Pfizer from doing that to Merck?
There's no minimum quorum requirement ? I find that... strange, somehow.
Reading
1 +billion+deal+for+AOL/2100-1025_3-6003187.html?tag =nefd.lede
http://news.com.com/Google%2C+Time+Warner+strike+
AOL gets --
* $1B investment. Not gift, but investment.
* $300M credit for purchase of keyword ads.
* Ability to sell ads across Google's network including third-party sites (!).
* Assistance in opening up the 'walled garden' content to Google's crawler.
* Collaboration on video search.
Google --
* Minority shareholder rights.
* Possibly, more ads sold by AOL's marketing machine.
* Possibly, higher CTR if AOL can do better ad sales -- through knowing more about its users, say (inferred).
* Greater availability of the old 'walled garden' content.
* Collaboration in online video search, which probably includes working with AOL's 'SingingFish' service, and perhaps access to content?
* Interoperability to an IM network with a huge base -- slightly larger than MSN + Yahoo!, last I checked.
There's also a defensive factor; a deal with MSN might have required shifting from Google to MSN, and that would mean some 25-30M search queries per day and ~10% of Google's advertising revenue.
As to how Google might lose, well, if AOL were to collapse, the $1B investment might look like a bad idea; or if the changes drove away too many paying users (through ad clicks, not subscribers). Likewise, AOL might be considered to have lost if Microsoft would have been a better partner, or if people flee AIM to Google Talk, or so forth. But it's an interesting deal from both perspectives, I'd say.
The issuing of warrants to authorize searches is a judicial function; when the executive branch bypasses this, it's taking those powers on for itself.
Intentionally profiting from assisting an illegal act tends to be frowned upon. If you're offering the infringing content AND the device meant to allow its use, it's hard to argue innocence.
The DMCA would be useful against less careless vendors offering the built-in mod chip with a knowing wink, but who aren't actually doing the infringing themselves -- just taking advantage of the market of people who want to infringe but don't want to do the necessary modding themselves.
*sigh*
Modding in general is not illegal -- much like modding your car is not. Heavily tinting your windows, however, is frequently frowned upon.
Offering modding services specifically to bypass a digital access protection measure for copyrighted material, however, normally is unless you fall under certain exemptions in the law.
As for why they're invoking it, it would be rather curious if they have such a clear-cut violation and do *not* invoke it. It gives them leverage -- one more charge to bargain away -- and removes the ability of defense counsels in less blatant cases to complain about selective prosecution.
...other than helping to obliterate a major motivation for bothering to produce such content in the first place, of course.
But hey, who cares about consequences?
The law itself specifies.
I'm feeling too lazy right now to dig up my copy yet again, but -- if memory serves, there are two conditions, either of which suffices.
The first is that the item or service is specifically intended for circumventing a digital access protection measure.
The second is that the item or service is marketed or advertised for circumventing a digital access protection measure.
Thus, "could" is not sufficient, in the general case. That 'could' would have to be strongly indicative that the infringing use is actually by design...
In this case, since the mod chip was presumably included to bypass the access controls and allow the use of infringing material that the accused themselves provided, it should be a slam dunk -- they can't plausibly claim that they were providing the chips only for legal use.
DMCA applies due to the modding chip -- whose presence would probably be much harder to ditch in a hurry than the infringed games.
Might be useful if they want to prosecute for dealings with other customers, any of whom might have wiped their Xboxes clean by now.
Furthermore, it would allow them to go after other vendors openly selling modded Xboxes and games, or to dissuade potential customers, without needing to re-emphasize the finer points of copyright law.
"Similar amounts"?
Unless they're being taxed at, say, FDR-esque levels, the taxes they might be avoiding are far less than the money that they're contributing. After all, total personal income tax rates are rarely over 50%...