Last August I, my girlfriend, and two other (male) friends went on holiday to Mexico. We booked it in June, to travel in August.
The flight was from London to Cancun, changing in Houston - with the Houston->Cancun flight leaving 1hr 40 minutes after we landed.
One of the co-travellers has a Malaysian passport, (although he had "indefinite leave to remain" in the UK, and is now a full British Citizen) so he had to apply for a tourist visa to enter the US. As he's a male aged between 16 and 45, aswell as the standard DS-156 visa application form, he also had to fill in the dreaded DS-157 form.
On that form, he had to provide:
His "Tribal" name (WTF??)
EVERY country he had visited in the last ten years
Full name and address of a contact person in the US (he didn't HAVE a contact in the US, we were staying there for less than 2hrs, for god's sake!)
The address and supervisor's name of the last two places he'd worked
The address of every educational establishment he had EVER attended
Every Professional, Social or Charitable organisation he had ever worked with, belonged to, or CONTRIBUTED to
Rank, branch, position and speciality of any military service he'd ever done
Details of any "armed conflict" he'd ever been in, either as participant OR VICTIM
....and all of this to enter a US airport for 1hr, 40 minutes.
He applied for his visa in June, to travel at the end of August. The visa was eventually approved - it arrived in October.
Net result: he lost 2000 UK pounds (that's $3,733 US) on a holiday that never happened, as buried deep within Expedia's small print was a clause that prevented refunds or claims on travel insurance in case of visa problems.
So despite now having a visa which allows him to visit the US any time in the next ten years, he's never going to use it. He never wants to go to the US ever again, and now that the rest of us (British citizens from birth) have to have fingerprints and digital photos taken, neither do we.
"Seeing a news report on 'cold' pollution and 'warm' pollution (particle versus CO2) and tsunamis and freak weather all this winter (el nino, other new patterns) and amazon and virgin galactic investing into new privitised space makes me think some people at the top know something we don't!"
[OT too: you should read "Stark" and "This Other Eden" by Ben Elton. Then you'd REALLY worry...]
If you don't hit them in the sales, they'll NEVER hear your message
...and when they see reduced revenue, will they think:
"Hey, people aren't buying our product - consumers must be reacting against our DRM technology...we'd better drop it completely and alter our entire business model!"
or : "Hey, people aren't buying our product - maybe it's because our conveyor-belt action movies are crap? We'd better make some better movies with real thoughtful things to say about life, love, and the search for meaning in a consumerised vapid society"
or will they think : "Hey, people aren't buying our product - fecking pirates! It's the pirates, I tell you! Quick! Outlaw the internet, and make our DRM tech compulsory on every form of digital media, it's the only way to stop them!!!" and then get straight on the phone to every Senator they know with a big fat hefty campaign contribution?
Disclaimer: I am a Yorkshireman - half of my family do indeed talk like the Python's Four Yorkshiremen sketch every christmas
My first job after Uni (where I studied Physics, not CS or anything like it) was as a back-office systems developer at a large UK industrial company.
I worked on a WYSE-80 green screen, writing a massively complicated invoicing system in Speedbase. This has to be the most god-awful language and environment I have ever experienced.
Officially "a COBOL-based 4GL", it had a bizarre text-windowing system, and it ran on an 8-bit shell on top of UNIX. Yes, 8-bit - as a result, every programme (or "frame" - including all of its storage, data definitions, associated libraries - EVERYTHING) had to fit into 32K. You could split each large app up into "sub-frames", but you had to keep the root frame in memory while running any sub-frame, and the whole lot had to fit into 32K of RAM.
If someone asked, for instance, for today's date to appear on a report, I might have spent 5 minutes adding the date, then two days trying to lose 8 bytes from elsewhere in the program to get the damn thing to fit into 32K again.
Plus a proprietary database system that still gives me a black knot in my stomach 6 years later:
NO SQL support, ISAM and CSAM only
Maximum of 16 indices per table
Maximum of 256 fields (columns) and 256 indices in the whole database
TWO (count em!) characters for a record name
FOUR characters for a field name
If you didn't have an index to retrieve the record you wanted using the information you had, you had to write: MOVE (variable) INTO (column) FETCH FIRST (recordname) BY (index name) (loop round each record, checking to see if its the record you want - with an average record retireval time of about half a second) - and this in a database of around half a gig
And this was the killer: every time you wanted to make any change to the database - add a field, an index, change a fieldname, ANYTHING - you had to close down the system, get everyone out, and rebuild the whole DB from scratch before letting the users back on again. This invariably took a minimum of 2hrs - many MANY late nights...
Oh yeah - and if any user closed down their PC terminal emulator without logging off, you had to get everyone out and hard-reboot the server.
And we didn't have any o'that fancy new-fangled COMPUTE statement in my day...
So try writing a hugely complicated invoicing system (for what at the time was the largest privately owned company in the UK), with those constraints - for a while my claim to fame was that I wrote the largest ever app in Speedbase, and I only know that because the compiler blew up at 10,000 lines - and THEN come back to me and try to tell me that COBOL is easy!
Heh - AND we had to pay t'mill owner for permission to come to work! And the MD would thrash us to sleep wi' broken bottle!
"Argentina get all pissy about the Falkland Islands, which are hardly worth the trouble."
*ahem* "In a study conducted by tow private companies, Geco Prakla of Norway and Spectrum of Britain, it is estimated that the potential oil reserves [of the Falklands] may exceed by more than 50% the reserves of the UK sector of the North Sea"
Of COURSE we had a war.... there was OIL involved!
The scary thing is, that the statement also rings true the other way - "of COURSE there was oil involved - it was a war!"
/me shakes head resignedly, and holds breath waiting for fusion power...
"CAN WE ALL QUIT CALLING THIS TECHNOLOGY "TVIO". TiVo is the brand name! This drives me crazy! The technology is called PVR (personal video recorder)."
AH, at last! You must be a fellow european! About the only brand name here that has become generic is "Hoover", for vacuum cleaner.
Seriously, here in Britain, if you ask for a Kleenex, most people would probably look at you strangely, as that's taken to mean you specifically want a Kleenex tissue and no other brand will do.
SIDENOTE: The other reason they'll look at you strangely is that it also implies that you're an American, because "only Americans would do that". Personally I think it's a sad reflection on your society that corporatisation (with an s!) has gone so far, but then I'm a Brit, so what would I know...
The notion of corporate personhood and a debate of the merits thereof is the predominant theme of this book (and, presumably the movie aswell, but I'm more of a reader myself) and is dealt with in some depth.
It makes some very interesting points:
Corporations are given all the rights and protections that any other citizen has, and yet they have very few of the duties and responsibilities that come with them.
They are the only class of "citizen" which is LEGALLY REQUIRED to be 100% selfish - If they do anything which cannot be construed as maximising shareholder value (i.e. pursuing their own interest to the exclusion of any other) they can be sued by their shareholders. In other words, corporate philanthropy is actually ILLEGAL, unless there's something in it for them.
The FBI's top consultant on psychopaths performs an analysis of corporate "persons", and pretty much every item on his checklist applies to them.
I won't list any more examples here, but it's a very thorough, well-written, in-depth discussion, and far from the radical leftie polemic which you might think it would be. Much harder to poke holes in than Michael Moore, anyway.
You think that "Thou Shalt Not Kill" is a bad guideline because sometimes it doesn't get followed?
Nothing wrong with the guideline at all - I wish more people would follow it! ESPECIALLY those people who claim to be extremely religious (I'm a devout agnostic, by the way!) and will quite happily pick and choose quotes from the bible when it suits them, on issues like homosexuality, yet conveniently forget the other rules it gives them when they don't accord with their own personal crusade.
You know, like thou shalt not kill, and those wacky ones in Leviticus that prescribe a death penalty for wearing clothes made of more than one fabric. Funny how THAT one never gets quoted by fundamentalists....
Isn't it possible that the quality of work after some point is so bad that it actually takes as much or more time to fix it as it did to do it in the first place?
Definitely - I used to work on a massive online application at a large UK ISP, and luckily they recognised this problem. They had a golden rule there - "We don't go live after five". Also, no releases were allowed on a Friday. Under any circumstances.
This turned out to be alternately massively frustrating, and a major arse-saver. You might get a huge critical bug to fix and be working like a man posessed on it all day, but if it wasn't fixed, packaged up, documented, peer-reviewed, signed off in triplicate and given to the sysadmins for release by 3pm, it wouldn't get released until the next day. You'd go home cursing procedures and paperwork and middle-management to the seventh circle of Hell.
Of course, you usually got back in the next morning, took one look at your code and saw another potential bug that you missed in your frenzy to get the inital issue fixed.
A few years ago, I never would thought I'd hear myself say this, but most procedures are there for a reason. (Ick! My skin is crawling!) Some of them are there purely to justify some managements existence, of course, but some of them can save your neck.
You're not at war either - otherwise you'd have to apply those quaint Geneva Conventions to all those prisoners, and we couldn't have THAT, could we?
Can you imagine a battlefield where one army tries to arrest every member of the opposing force - and only uses deadly force after all other options have been exhausted? Absolutely rediculous!
I agree, completely, in a war situation, it's every man for himself, subject to a few universally agreed upon minimum standards - but as I said, you have not declared war.
It's an uninformed perception designed to induce hatred and fear of anyone who happens to believe that
moral values that have served civilization for thousands of years are to be trusted over more recent notions regardless of their popularity.
Moral values that have served civilisation for thousands of years? You mean like Thou Shalt Not Kill, that kind of thing? Yeah, we've really been following THAT one closely.....
A quick glance through history will show you exactly how well civilisation has done.
If Osama were out there and we could kill him, do you expect us to stay our hands because we've not had his trial?
YES! Yes yes yes! That's EXACTLY what we should do, because THAT is what makes us DIFFERENT to them!
(deep breath....another....)OK, sorry, I've calmed down a bit now, but I'm actually making a serious point here - the U.S. administration seems to see everything in black and white: You're either with us, or against us. You're either good or evil. We are good - ipso facto, if you are not 100% with us, you are evil.
Trouble is that over the last four years in particular, any moral justification that the U.S. has had for claiming the moral high ground has been gradually eroded by its actions.
THEY (i.e. the evil folk) abuse civil and human rights er... Guantanamo anybody?
THEY are an oppressive, undemocratic regime, but WE are the Land Of The Free(TM)! er... USAPATRIOT act anyone?
THEY kill civilians! er... lemme see, what was the latest total in Iraq again?
About the only claim to the moral high ground that can still be made is respect for due judicial process. And if you arbitrarily assassinate people because THEY arbitrarily assassinated our people then where does that leave you? And the rest of us in the world who have to either go along with actions we find repugnant, or risk getting added to the Axis Of Evil(TM) ?
"he's examining to see if it's okay for you to have a right that you already possess under Title 17!"
Read it again, calmly this time, and suppress your instinctive knee-jerk reaction:
I am open to examining whether legislative action is necessary to ENSURE that a person who lawfully obtains or receives a transmission of a digital work MAY back up a copy of it for archival purposes or transfer it to a digital media device for the purpose of non public performance or display.
What he actually said is an implicit acceptance of your right to "fair use". If you don't see that, read it again.
Now compare the emphasis of the two:
Bush: "We must vigorously enforce intellectual property protections"
Kerry: (roughly equivalent to) "I'm open to looking at whether we need more legislation to protect your right to fair use."
I almost had to pay $2.00 a gallon for regular unleaded in Texas
Wow, $2 a gallon is absurd? You poor, poor, hard-done-by serf.... in England, we're currently paying just over 80 pence a LITRE - xe.com tells me that's 1.42637 US dollars
lemme see, google says that 1 US gallon = 3.7854118 litres, so that translates to a price of..... drum roll .....
$5.39 a gallon!
...maybe that's one reason why the US are still so hooked on their huge fuel-guzzling SUVs, while in Britain, a 2-litre engine is considered "huge", and I, along with most of my friends, are quite happy pootling around in our 1-litre runabouts.
There are too few "someone elses" out there compare to all the wanna-be critics who chew up the content that exists and spit it out
Nah, there are loads of "someone elses" out there willing to provide content, but the trouble is that there are also loads of lawyers out there willing to sue the arse off anybody who says something their paymasters don't like.
Resoundingly, people across the country told us there was a special need for software to enable neighbor-to-neighbor activity--and that, ideally, it should be freely distributed, easy to use, and free.
Slashdot Mirror
My most recent experience:
Last August I, my girlfriend, and two other (male) friends went on holiday to Mexico. We booked it in June, to travel in August.
The flight was from London to Cancun, changing in Houston - with the Houston->Cancun flight leaving 1hr 40 minutes after we landed.
One of the co-travellers has a Malaysian passport, (although he had "indefinite leave to remain" in the UK, and is now a full British Citizen) so he had to apply for a tourist visa to enter the US. As he's a male aged between 16 and 45, aswell as the standard DS-156 visa application form, he also had to fill in the dreaded DS-157 form.
On that form, he had to provide:
He applied for his visa in June, to travel at the end of August. The visa was eventually approved - it arrived in October.
Net result: he lost 2000 UK pounds (that's $3,733 US) on a holiday that never happened, as buried deep within Expedia's small print was a clause that prevented refunds or claims on travel insurance in case of visa problems.
So despite now having a visa which allows him to visit the US any time in the next ten years, he's never going to use it. He never wants to go to the US ever again, and now that the rest of us (British citizens from birth) have to have fingerprints and digital photos taken, neither do we.
"Seeing a news report on 'cold' pollution and 'warm' pollution (particle versus CO2) and tsunamis and freak weather all this winter (el nino, other new patterns) and amazon and virgin galactic investing into new privitised space makes me think some people at the top know something we don't!"
[OT too: you should read "Stark" and "This Other Eden" by Ben Elton. Then you'd REALLY worry...]
Hint - it ain't 1. Or 2.
Disclaimer: I am a Yorkshireman - half of my family do indeed talk like the Python's Four Yorkshiremen sketch every christmas
My first job after Uni (where I studied Physics, not CS or anything like it) was as a back-office systems developer at a large UK industrial company.
I worked on a WYSE-80 green screen, writing a massively complicated invoicing system in Speedbase. This has to be the most god-awful language and environment I have ever experienced.
Officially "a COBOL-based 4GL", it had a bizarre text-windowing system, and it ran on an 8-bit shell on top of UNIX. Yes, 8-bit - as a result, every programme (or "frame" - including all of its storage, data definitions, associated libraries - EVERYTHING) had to fit into 32K. You could split each large app up into "sub-frames", but you had to keep the root frame in memory while running any sub-frame, and the whole lot had to fit into 32K of RAM.
If someone asked, for instance, for today's date to appear on a report, I might have spent 5 minutes adding the date, then two days trying to lose 8 bytes from elsewhere in the program to get the damn thing to fit into 32K again.
Plus a proprietary database system that still gives me a black knot in my stomach 6 years later:
MOVE (variable) INTO (column)
FETCH FIRST (recordname) BY (index name)
(loop round each record, checking to see if its the record you want - with an average record retireval time of about half a second)
- and this in a database of around half a gig
Oh yeah - and if any user closed down their PC terminal emulator without logging off, you had to get everyone out and hard-reboot the server.
And we didn't have any o'that fancy new-fangled COMPUTE statement in my day...
So try writing a hugely complicated invoicing system (for what at the time was the largest privately owned company in the UK), with those constraints - for a while my claim to fame was that I wrote the largest ever app in Speedbase, and I only know that because the compiler blew up at 10,000 lines - and THEN come back to me and try to tell me that COBOL is easy!
Heh - AND we had to pay t'mill owner for permission to come to work! And the MD would thrash us to sleep wi' broken bottle!
"Argentina get all pissy about the Falkland Islands, which are hardly worth the trouble."
*ahem* "In a study conducted by tow private companies, Geco Prakla of Norway and Spectrum of Britain, it is estimated that the potential oil reserves [of the Falklands] may exceed by more than 50% the reserves of the UK sector of the North Sea"
Of COURSE we had a war.... there was OIL involved!
The scary thing is, that the statement also rings true the other way - "of COURSE there was oil involved - it was a war!"
"We can all put a red marble in a jar for GW and a blue marble for JK. The perfect infallable voting system."
So who says politics is a load of balls?
(wince)
"CAN WE ALL QUIT CALLING THIS TECHNOLOGY "TVIO". TiVo is the brand name! This drives me crazy! The technology is called PVR (personal video recorder)."
AH, at last! You must be a fellow european! About the only brand name here that has become generic is "Hoover", for vacuum cleaner.
Seriously, here in Britain, if you ask for a Kleenex, most people would probably look at you strangely, as that's taken to mean you specifically want a Kleenex tissue and no other brand will do.
SIDENOTE: The other reason they'll look at you strangely is that it also implies that you're an American, because "only Americans would do that". Personally I think it's a sad reflection on your society that corporatisation (with an s!) has gone so far, but then I'm a Brit, so what would I know...
The notion of corporate personhood and a debate of the merits thereof is the predominant theme of this book (and, presumably the movie aswell, but I'm more of a reader myself) and is dealt with in some depth.
It makes some very interesting points:
I won't list any more examples here, but it's a very thorough, well-written, in-depth discussion, and far from the radical leftie polemic which you might think it would be. Much harder to poke holes in than Michael Moore, anyway.
How about "All your codebase are belong to us" ...?
(wince)
Nothing wrong with the guideline at all - I wish more people would follow it! ESPECIALLY those people who claim to be extremely religious (I'm a devout agnostic, by the way!) and will quite happily pick and choose quotes from the bible when it suits them, on issues like homosexuality, yet conveniently forget the other rules it gives them when they don't accord with their own personal crusade.
You know, like thou shalt not kill, and those wacky ones in Leviticus that prescribe a death penalty for wearing clothes made of more than one fabric. Funny how THAT one never gets quoted by fundamentalists....
Definitely - I used to work on a massive online application at a large UK ISP, and luckily they recognised this problem. They had a golden rule there - "We don't go live after five". Also, no releases were allowed on a Friday. Under any circumstances.
This turned out to be alternately massively frustrating, and a major arse-saver. You might get a huge critical bug to fix and be working like a man posessed on it all day, but if it wasn't fixed, packaged up, documented, peer-reviewed, signed off in triplicate and given to the sysadmins for release by 3pm, it wouldn't get released until the next day. You'd go home cursing procedures and paperwork and middle-management to the seventh circle of Hell.
Of course, you usually got back in the next morning, took one look at your code and saw another potential bug that you missed in your frenzy to get the inital issue fixed.
A few years ago, I never would thought I'd hear myself say this, but most procedures are there for a reason. (Ick! My skin is crawling!) Some of them are there purely to justify some managements existence, of course, but some of them can save your neck.
But we are NOT in peace time
You're not at war either - otherwise you'd have to apply those quaint Geneva Conventions to all those prisoners, and we couldn't have THAT, could we?
Can you imagine a battlefield where one army tries to arrest every member of the opposing force - and only uses deadly force after all other options have been exhausted? Absolutely rediculous!
I agree, completely, in a war situation, it's every man for himself, subject to a few universally agreed upon minimum standards - but as I said, you have not declared war.
Moral values that have served civilisation for thousands of years? You mean like Thou Shalt Not Kill, that kind of thing? Yeah, we've really been following THAT one closely.....
A quick glance through history will show you exactly how well civilisation has done.
YES! Yes yes yes! That's EXACTLY what we should do, because THAT is what makes us DIFFERENT to them!
(deep breath....another....)OK, sorry, I've calmed down a bit now, but I'm actually making a serious point here - the U.S. administration seems to see everything in black and white: You're either with us, or against us. You're either good or evil. We are good - ipso facto, if you are not 100% with us, you are evil.
Trouble is that over the last four years in particular, any moral justification that the U.S. has had for claiming the moral high ground has been gradually eroded by its actions.
er... Guantanamo anybody?
er... USAPATRIOT act anyone?
er... lemme see, what was the latest total in Iraq again?
About the only claim to the moral high ground that can still be made is respect for due judicial process. And if you arbitrarily assassinate people because THEY arbitrarily assassinated our people then where does that leave you? And the rest of us in the world who have to either go along with actions we find repugnant, or risk getting added to the Axis Of Evil(TM) ?
Really? Cool! In that case, can we have our civil rights back now please?
I think that phrase is rapidly becoming obsolete.
I also think that in twenty years time, the running joke will have become "In Neo-Con America...."
Now compare the emphasis of the two:
Bush: "We must vigorously enforce intellectual property protections"
Kerry: (roughly equivalent to) "I'm open to looking at whether we need more legislation to protect your right to fair use."
NOW which answer do you think was best?
Wow, $2 a gallon is absurd? You poor, poor, hard-done-by serf.... in England, we're currently paying just over 80 pence a LITRE - xe.com tells me that's 1.42637 US dollars
lemme see, google says that 1 US gallon = 3.7854118 litres, so that translates to a price of .....
drum roll
.....
$5.39 a gallon!
Can I take it from this that the said politicians will be listening to their electorate and vehemently opposing any criticism of P2P software in Congress or the Senate?
Wait, what's that I see outside my window - is that Satan ice-skating to work ? ooh, watch out for that flying pig....!
I guess in Soviet Betelgeuse, messages from advanced alien civilisations read YOU! (wince - sorry, first ever slashism - and hopefully the last)
"What group does the Patriot Act single out and go against?" Anybody and everybody the government feels like - that's the point