Any form of certificate based authentication is a serious problem for freedom of speech and reliability. Anytime you can use a certificate to turn off a spammer, you can use it to turn off anyone's ability to speak/communicate.
Reliability also becomes critically impaired because there is now an additional requirement for every single piece of mail transfer to check the validity of its certificate with a given certificate authority.
If a certificate authority is unable to handle the load, what happens to e-mail? Is it delayed? Is it let through (opportunity for spammer)?
Who pays for the infrastructure to handle all of these requests?
Additional questions to consider is what happens if you have a rogue certificate authority who hands out certificates to spamming entities and will not revoke them?
Who controls turning off certificates? Is there any oversight on their actions?
Can a certificate authority be influenced by a government or large corporate entity to revoke a certificate?
if this plan is adopted, how can one maintain competition in the certificate market unlike what happened in the Web server certificate market with VeriSign?
my bias is from the sender pays world. A certificate controlled environment is more receiver pays then it is today. The receiver will pay for all of the changes in hardware, bandwidth, network reliability at the ISP and certificate authority. It will not be cheap. On the other hand, sender pays systems such as camram (http://www.camram.org) are decentralized, highly cost-effective and shift costs to the sender.
the Ph.D., unless you're going to do research, is a waste of time. Virtually all Ph.D.'s I know are not working in their field of their Ph.D.. Most of them are also not doing well financially because they're working in low-paying contracting (if technical) or working as a teacher for hire at local colleges with no security.
Also, don't forget that your career will start to shut down at about age 35 to 40. If you are not in management by then, you are will be stuck with grunt work positions until your hands die.
Stick with a master's degree, make as much money as you can, save as much money as you can, and start studying for a second career in something not technology related.
I just don't see it happening to fix something that can be handled pretty well through filtering. The fact is, e-mail filtering software is making great headway these days. Baysian filters, collective filters like Cloudmark's SpamNet, and so forth.
you're quite right on the standardization effort. That's what the IETF is for. But before you get there, you really should have a working prototype to demonstrate how the system can behave in the real world. That's what I'm doing with the camram project (http://www.camram.org). I have a mostly working payment based e-mail filter. The last deployment showed me some interesting human factors problems that I'm working on fixing.
As for filters, they really don't work well. The required to much user interaction, they still force you to read spam (i.e. look for false positives). They increase the burden on the receiver in terms of CPU cycles for filtering and people time for correcting the filter which means they have to pay even more for spam than with a did before. Filters do nothing to seriously deter spammers.
filters are useful in one place however. In the camram project, I'm using a filter to create a 3 level discriminator. The thresholds between the levels are set so that almost certainly spam is thrown into an oubliette, almost certainly not spam is allowed through and mail the filter is unable to determine whether it is spam or not is held and a postage due notice is sent.
I hope I will be able to release the Next Generation camram filter in the next week or two. I believe that this'll be the first one usable in the real world for real e-mail.
unfortunately, the IBM ViaVoice package for Linux is a nonfunctional toy compared to the functionality of NaturallySpeaking or even ViaVoice under Windows. As I complained on the ViaVoice mailing list,
My experience with ViaVoice for Linux has been extremely disappointing. It is not a real product and it is most definitely not ready for anything
close to primetime. My major complaints:
1) extremely poor handling of sound systems
There are no tools, utilities or guidance to help you diagnose sound problems. Part of this is due to the immaturity of Linux sound systems but
part of this is clearly a problem with IBM's package. It would be wonderful if they would come out with a single standardized version that
was guaranteed to work with USB audio! I wouldn't care if I have to go purchase a specific USB audio pod (as long as I can use my microphone;-)
note: this is could also be part of Red hat's value add. for speech recognition purposes, you do not need to get all soundcards working because
most soundcards are crap on audio input. Simply getting USB audio to work mixed with standard soundcards output would solve the 90 percent
case. Requiring both directions of audio (input and output) to be USB would solve the 80 percent case.
2) totally ineffective support.
There is a mailing list and the people there do try to be helpful but it's quite clear that their hands are tied and they are not able to help as much as is needed by the customer. personally, I have spent thousands on speech recognition software and hundreds on speech recognition related hardware. I would gladly spend more on a Linux solution that worked right and only required a small number of hours of setup effort.
3) dependence on a specific Java release
While I have no problems with Java as a language, I must admit I get rather tired of having to load up a half a dozen different versions of Java
virtual machines to work with different Java based applications. Note: this is true whether you run on Windows or Linux. Java is truly write once, debug everywhere.
3a) not keeping up with advances in Linux releases.
this is clearly a damned if you do and damned if you don't situation. On one hand, building for an old release is one way to make the product usable by the widest population but on the other hand, if it only works with an old release then the user population can't take advantage of improvements in performance, stability, and driver availability.
In my situation, I cannot run any Red Hat release except 7.1 on my (speech recognition driven) laptop because the video, PCMCIA, networking and sound system software didn't work right(er) until Red Hat 7.1. Therefore any product that counts on Red Hat 6.2 is not a product I can use.
4) dependence on user downloaded packages
If I buy a commercial piece of software, I expect to get *EVERYTHING* I need to run a package. I should not have to go scurrying across the net to download a Java run-time environment or fonts just to run the silly thing.
5) not fixing known bugs
Actually, this is a complaint about all software. We are all guilty of rewarding software manufacturers for creating crappy products by buying their products. Then we reward them for fixing what should not have been broken in the first place by purchasing updates. We would not accept this kind of quality in cars, food, or other products. Why do we accept it in
software?
While my language may be harsh, it's mostly out of frustration caused by being so totally dependent on speech recognition for computer use. I do
recognize the efforts folks have made here to try and produce workable speech recognition under Linux but when it comes right down to it, it just
isn't there yet.
Or it shows how much the competition really sucks. Read what the man said: He has a bunch of devices that DON'T WORK. Did MS send out a goon squad to threaten OSS programmers? Did they send out the black helicopters to take ESR's house?
not exactly. It's more like the manufacturers of these devices won't talk to open source programmers. If you can't get the specs, you can't write the device driver.
The only thing you can do when a vendor is providing a defective product is not purchase it. So, stop purchasing CDs, DVDs or other copy protected material. Encourage everyone you know to stop purchasing the same.
Otherwise, all you are doing is encouraging them to produce defective products.
I highly recommend instead looking at refactoring employment arrangement. Strip off all "benefits" such as health insurance, life insurance, etc. and make an independent of employment status. Personally, I would take it as far as for forbidding employers from providing health insurance etc. to employees.
The relationship between employer and employee should strictly be a cash for service basis.
The same time, the tax code should reward people for doing the right thing such as purchasing health insurance, creating unemployment savings etc. by making those expenses tax deductions.
as for termination notices, companies should notify people with as much leadtime as possible but there is an issue of motivation of the folks knowing that their employment is coming to an end.
but refactoring is nothing new. It was one of the fundamental techniques I learned back in 1979.
personally, I think the lack of quality and the lack of progress are directly related to the industry's lack of historical memory and continuity. This lack of awareness about history keeps us reinventing the same dammed thing over and over again.
there are a group of us try to define and implement a proof of work postage stamp that is reasonably resistant to attacks by dedicated hardware. The basic cryptographic concepts are explained at:
in a nutshell, a hashcash coin is a nonreusable cryptographic expression of work. The message sender would generate the hashcash coin by spending approximately 10 to 15 seconds of CPU time solving a known mathematical problem. A message recipient would be able to verify the coin very quickly and decide how to handle the message based on the presence or absence of a valid coin.
obviously, there would be a need for a white list filter for mailing lists and people one frequently communicates with as well as methods for handling folks without hashcash capability but we have solved most of these problems and are moving forward.
Hashcash is not intended as a perfect solution to the spam problem but it is a very good way of raising the cost of spam for the spammer.
contact me directly if you want to contribute by generating working code for the first generation implementation of hashcash.
Anybody have figures on the total cost of advertising per viewer per half-hour of programming in the US or UK?
a few years ago, an article in wired claimed it was in the ballpark of 25 cents per viewer per half-hour program. With inflation, 50 cents per viewer per half-hour would not be all that far off.
hmmm, at that rate I'm wasting about $15 per week. Time to go back to books.
When all your old VHS tapes wear out, what analog programming will you have to feed your analog TV set?
If things keep going the way they are, nothing. I don't purchase much from the media empires. little music, video, or print. When I buy, I buy mostly used media and when that goes away, I'm not sure what I'll do. Probably check out completely from the media money trap.
its games like these that keep me from ever purchasing a DVD disc or player. I refuse to purchase any content, players or software with intrusive content rights management built-in.
I wish that more people would vote with their wallets and not purchase DVDs, digital TV or any of the other overbearing copyright enforcement devices.
Re:We're not exactly treated like migrant workers.
on
IT Unions?
·
· Score: 1
But we're hardly losing fingers in the process of working on dangerous machinery and then getting fired because we need a day off to wait for the bleeding to stop.
Not exactly true. yes, I can still counted 10 but I've lost significant use in both arms, can no longer write code, and must use speech recognition to write text such as this message. This came about because of eighteen years worth of hours at the keyboard using what ever furniture was available.
I was fired from my job, tried to work with workers compensation Hell to get basic medical treatment for my condition. My regular doctor could not treat me even when I had pain so bad I could not hold a spoon and feed myself because the condition was work-related. Workers compensation requires many lawyer hours to get permission to schedule a single appointment.
Eventually, I gave up, paid for my own medical, and built my own business so that no employer could ever hurt me that way again.
unfortunately, competition is not practical in the last mile scenario. Last mile is a natural monopoly. A rule of thumb as to whether or not an economic situation is a natural monopoly is seeing if the per customer average cost increases every time a competitor enters a market. In the case of last mile, you'll find that this is true. It does not matter what technology you use because all providers in a market go after the same customer base and all customers purchase service from one provider.
Part of the problems with the telecommunication landscape is that people are trying to legislate competition where it is not economically possible for competition to exist. It's the economic equivalent of legislating pi to be equal to 3.0.
The only way out of this mess is to split the Baby Bells into wholesale and retail organizations. The wholesale organization would manage the last mile physical plant and the retail would purchase services from the wholesale organization on an equal footing with any other competitor.
Re:A more advanced scheme
on
Hash Cash
·
· Score: 1
it turns out this technique has been reasonably discredited not because of any cryptographic flaws about because of the amount of power, air-conditioning, floorspace, etc. it would take to create a viable mint. Don't forget all so that you would need to replace your hardware on an ongoing basis to keep up with advances in semiconductor speeds.
here's the reality about speech recognition: it will not work with most soundcards because most soundcards are crap (on the audio input side)
you need to really clean audio for speech recognition to work right. I've spent years with speech recognition after burning up my hands from too many hours programming. I've now learned what combination of microphone, sound system (USB in my case) and software works reliably.
I'm really glad to see IBM start integrating with anybody because it means that the day I can drop kick windows is getting closer!
has a rather nice analysis on death by firearms. For example, in 1997 it was claimed that 4223 children were killed by firearms. Closer examination shows that only 700 of those children were under 17. In the same year, the author claims that "about 700 other kids were slaughtered with knives, blunt objects or bare hands, while more than 2,000 children under 15 died in car crashes and nearly 1,000 drowned."
always remember there are lies, damned lies, and statistics
I would be interested to find out what are gnome project's plans for handicapped accessibility. As it currently stands, Gnome is only usable by people with fully functioning eyes and hands. It would be nice to hear how Gnome will address handicapped accessibility for:
check with your insurance agent about state laws regarding coverage of self-employed people. In Massachusetts, if you have been continually insured, you can purchase coverage at group rates without worrying about pre-existing conditions or cancellations because you're a small business.
We are currently using united healthcare PPO plan and spending something like $500-$600 per month for family coverage. This includes $15 co-pays on office visits and $10 co-pay on drugs.
we have had some small hassles with them but usually, if you're a persistent pain in the butt, they pay.
Disability insurance is a whole different story. Individual rates are extremely high and if you have anything even vaguely wrong, forget about coverage. I'm living with an RSI based disability and I can't get coverage even excluding my RSI.
So, I self-insure. Save as much money as possible and don't forget the corporate shield (you did incorporate as an S-corp?).
good luck, and start bribing your Congress critter to eliminate health insurance as a tax deduction for corporations!
there aren't a whole lot of handicapped programmers out there. There are a whole lot of handicapped ex-programmers out there. Remember, for most developers, RSI is a career ending injury.
The best estimates I've seen say that approximately 50,000 developers are injured per year. Think about how many people make comments about how their wrists hurt and what kind of adaptations that made. These kinds of adaptations are a very simple form of handicapped accessibility so I take gentle issue with your assertion that handicapped accessibility would be something that they (OSS developers) would never use.;-)
I'm currently working on a project with some people in the national research council of Canada. It is aimed specifically at alternative tools for programming. We are aiming at the speech recognition user first and everyone else second because that's our bias. For some rather crufty slides on the user interface and philosophy, take a look at:
http://www.connact.com/~esj/voice_coding
it was a presentation I gave over a year ago but the concepts are still valid.
Are there any programs out there for people that cannot speak? For instance while the person is typing...it will read it out? Just wondering:) NaTaS
yes there are but try and think outside of the box about the solution. How could you build it using the Unix component philosophy? Obviously, you would need a text-to-speech component. You would obviously need some sort of keyboard reader. But what about in the middle? How about some word prediction software? What kind of editing facilities what a person like this need? Do they have other handicaps that also need accommodating like a mobility problem?
It's not a simple point solution. It's a systemwide solution!
Real software usability goes deeper than just interactions with GUI dialogs and so on. For experts, Linux is much more usable than the consumer OS's because it is much more stable, more transparent (less things are hidden under the candy shell of the GUI), and has a broader collection of powerful tools. The challenge is going to be preserving this kind of usability while also making Linux more accessible to non-expert users.
I like this summary but you left out one important community of users and that is handicapped users. For many handicapped users, graphical user interfaces are the kiss of death. My particular handicapped keeps me from using keyboards and mice. I instead use speech recognition and a tablet. Blind users I know require text-to-speech for their user interface. Even a minor handicap like color blindness can render a graphical user interface unusable.
I submitted a rant on this about a month ago to the/.features queue and either the queue is really large or it's a hint that I need to rewrite my rant:-) . If you want a preview take a look at: http://www.connact.com/~esj/ha.html
Slashdot Mirror
Any form of certificate based authentication is a serious problem for freedom of speech and reliability. Anytime you can use a certificate to turn off a spammer, you can use it to turn off anyone's ability to speak/communicate.
Reliability also becomes critically impaired because there is now an additional requirement for every single piece of mail transfer to check the validity of its certificate with a given certificate authority.
If a certificate authority is unable to handle the load, what happens to e-mail? Is it delayed? Is it let through (opportunity for spammer)?
Who pays for the infrastructure to handle all of these requests?
Additional questions to consider is what happens if you have a rogue certificate authority who hands out certificates to spamming entities and will not revoke them?
Who controls turning off certificates? Is there any oversight on their actions?
Can a certificate authority be influenced by a government or large corporate entity to revoke a certificate?
if this plan is adopted, how can one maintain competition in the certificate market unlike what happened in the Web server certificate market with VeriSign?
my bias is from the sender pays world. A certificate controlled environment is more receiver pays then it is today. The receiver will pay for all of the changes in hardware, bandwidth, network reliability at the ISP and certificate authority. It will not be cheap. On the other hand, sender pays systems such as camram (http://www.camram.org) are decentralized, highly cost-effective and shift costs to the sender.
the Ph.D., unless you're going to do research, is a waste of time. Virtually all Ph.D.'s I know are not working in their field of their Ph.D.. Most of them are also not doing well financially because they're working in low-paying contracting (if technical) or working as a teacher for hire at local colleges with no security.
Also, don't forget that your career will start to shut down at about age 35 to 40. If you are not in management by then, you are will be stuck with grunt work positions until your hands die.
Stick with a master's degree, make as much money as you can, save as much money as you can, and start studying for a second career in something not technology related.
http://www.chaum.com/articles/Security_Wthout_Iden tification.htm
security without identification is quite an interesting article and should be considered before heading into any ID scheme.
I just don't see it happening to fix something that can be handled pretty well through filtering. The fact is, e-mail filtering software is making great headway these days. Baysian filters, collective filters like Cloudmark's SpamNet, and so forth.
you're quite right on the standardization effort. That's what the IETF is for. But before you get there, you really should have a working prototype to demonstrate how the system can behave in the real world. That's what I'm doing with the camram project (http://www.camram.org). I have a mostly working payment based e-mail filter. The last deployment showed me some interesting human factors problems that I'm working on fixing.
As for filters, they really don't work well. The required to much user interaction, they still force you to read spam (i.e. look for false positives). They increase the burden on the receiver in terms of CPU cycles for filtering and people time for correcting the filter which means they have to pay even more for spam than with a did before. Filters do nothing to seriously deter spammers.
filters are useful in one place however. In the camram project, I'm using a filter to create a 3 level discriminator. The thresholds between the levels are set so that almost certainly spam is thrown into an oubliette, almost certainly not spam is allowed through and mail the filter is unable to determine whether it is spam or not is held and a postage due notice is sent.
I hope I will be able to release the Next Generation camram filter in the next week or two. I believe that this'll be the first one usable in the real world for real e-mail.
unfortunately, the IBM ViaVoice package for Linux is a nonfunctional toy compared to the functionality of NaturallySpeaking or even ViaVoice under Windows. As I complained on the ViaVoice mailing list,
;-)
My experience with ViaVoice for Linux has been extremely disappointing. It is not a real product and it is most definitely not ready for anything
close to primetime. My major complaints:
1) extremely poor handling of sound systems
There are no tools, utilities or guidance to help you diagnose sound problems. Part of this is due to the immaturity of Linux sound systems but
part of this is clearly a problem with IBM's package. It would be wonderful if they would come out with a single standardized version that
was guaranteed to work with USB audio! I wouldn't care if I have to go purchase a specific USB audio pod (as long as I can use my microphone
note: this is could also be part of Red hat's value add. for speech recognition purposes, you do not need to get all soundcards working because
most soundcards are crap on audio input. Simply getting USB audio to work mixed with standard soundcards output would solve the 90 percent
case. Requiring both directions of audio (input and output) to be USB would solve the 80 percent case.
2) totally ineffective support.
There is a mailing list and the people there do try to be helpful but it's quite clear that their hands are tied and they are not able to help as much as is needed by the customer. personally, I have spent thousands on speech recognition software and hundreds on speech recognition related hardware. I would gladly spend more on a Linux solution that worked right and only required a small number of hours of setup effort.
3) dependence on a specific Java release
While I have no problems with Java as a language, I must admit I get rather tired of having to load up a half a dozen different versions of Java
virtual machines to work with different Java based applications. Note: this is true whether you run on Windows or Linux. Java is truly write once, debug everywhere.
3a) not keeping up with advances in Linux releases.
this is clearly a damned if you do and damned if you don't situation. On one hand, building for an old release is one way to make the product usable by the widest population but on the other hand, if it only works with an old release then the user population can't take advantage of improvements in performance, stability, and driver availability.
In my situation, I cannot run any Red Hat release except 7.1 on my (speech recognition driven) laptop because the video, PCMCIA, networking and sound system software didn't work right(er) until Red Hat 7.1. Therefore any product that counts on Red Hat 6.2 is not a product I can use.
4) dependence on user downloaded packages
If I buy a commercial piece of software, I expect to get *EVERYTHING* I need to run a package. I should not have to go scurrying across the net to download a Java run-time environment or fonts just to run the silly thing.
5) not fixing known bugs
Actually, this is a complaint about all software. We are all guilty of rewarding software manufacturers for creating crappy products by buying their products. Then we reward them for fixing what should not have been broken in the first place by purchasing updates. We would not accept this kind of quality in cars, food, or other products. Why do we accept it in
software?
While my language may be harsh, it's mostly out of frustration caused by being so totally dependent on speech recognition for computer use. I do
recognize the efforts folks have made here to try and produce workable speech recognition under Linux but when it comes right down to it, it just
isn't there yet.
Or it shows how much the competition really sucks. Read what the man said: He has a bunch of devices that DON'T WORK. Did MS send out a goon squad to threaten OSS programmers? Did they send out the black helicopters to take ESR's house?
not exactly. It's more like the manufacturers of these devices won't talk to open source programmers. If you can't get the specs, you can't write the device driver.
The only thing you can do when a vendor is providing a defective product is not purchase it. So, stop purchasing CDs, DVDs or other copy protected material. Encourage everyone you know to stop purchasing the same.
Otherwise, all you are doing is encouraging them to produce defective products.
I highly recommend instead looking at refactoring employment arrangement. Strip off all "benefits" such as health insurance, life insurance, etc. and make an independent of employment status. Personally, I would take it as far as for forbidding employers from providing health insurance etc. to employees.
The relationship between employer and employee should strictly be a cash for service basis.
The same time, the tax code should reward people for doing the right thing such as purchasing health insurance, creating unemployment savings etc. by making those expenses tax deductions.
as for termination notices, companies should notify people with as much leadtime as possible but there is an issue of motivation of the folks knowing that their employment is coming to an end.
but refactoring is nothing new. It was one of the fundamental techniques I learned back in 1979.
personally, I think the lack of quality and the lack of progress are directly related to the industry's lack of historical memory and continuity. This lack of awareness about history keeps us reinventing the same dammed thing over and over again.
there are a group of us try to define and implement a proof of work postage stamp that is reasonably resistant to attacks by dedicated hardware. The basic cryptographic concepts are explained at:
http://www.cypherspace.org/hashcash/
in a nutshell, a hashcash coin is a nonreusable cryptographic expression of work. The message sender would generate the hashcash coin by spending approximately 10 to 15 seconds of CPU time solving a known mathematical problem. A message recipient would be able to verify the coin very quickly and decide how to handle the message based on the presence or absence of a valid coin.
obviously, there would be a need for a white list filter for mailing lists and people one frequently communicates with as well as methods for handling folks without hashcash capability but we have solved most of these problems and are moving forward.
Hashcash is not intended as a perfect solution to the spam problem but it is a very good way of raising the cost of spam for the spammer.
contact me directly if you want to contribute by generating working code for the first generation implementation of hashcash.
Anybody have figures on the total cost of advertising per viewer per half-hour of programming in the US or UK?
a few years ago, an article in wired claimed it was in the ballpark of 25 cents per viewer per half-hour program. With inflation, 50 cents per viewer per half-hour would not be all that far off.
hmmm, at that rate I'm wasting about $15 per week. Time to go back to books.
When all your old VHS tapes wear out, what analog programming will you have to feed your analog TV set?
If things keep going the way they are, nothing. I don't purchase much from the media empires. little music, video, or print. When I buy, I buy mostly used media and when that goes away, I'm not sure what I'll do. Probably check out completely from the media money trap.
its games like these that keep me from ever purchasing a DVD disc or player. I refuse to purchase any content, players or software with intrusive content rights management built-in.
I wish that more people would vote with their wallets and not purchase DVDs, digital TV or any of the other overbearing copyright enforcement devices.
Not exactly true. yes, I can still counted 10 but I've lost significant use in both arms, can no longer write code, and must use speech recognition to write text such as this message. This came about because of eighteen years worth of hours at the keyboard using what ever furniture was available. I was fired from my job, tried to work with workers compensation Hell to get basic medical treatment for my condition. My regular doctor could not treat me even when I had pain so bad I could not hold a spoon and feed myself because the condition was work-related. Workers compensation requires many lawyer hours to get permission to schedule a single appointment.
Eventually, I gave up, paid for my own medical, and built my own business so that no employer could ever hurt me that way again.
unfortunately, competition is not practical in the last mile scenario. Last mile is a natural monopoly. A rule of thumb as to whether or not an economic situation is a natural monopoly is seeing if the per customer average cost increases every time a competitor enters a market. In the case of last mile, you'll find that this is true. It does not matter what technology you use because all providers in a market go after the same customer base and all customers purchase service from one provider.
Part of the problems with the telecommunication landscape is that people are trying to legislate competition where it is not economically possible for competition to exist. It's the economic equivalent of legislating pi to be equal to 3.0.
The only way out of this mess is to split the Baby Bells into wholesale and retail organizations. The wholesale organization would manage the last mile physical plant and the retail would purchase services from the wholesale organization on an equal footing with any other competitor.
it turns out this technique has been reasonably discredited not because of any cryptographic flaws about because of the amount of power, air-conditioning, floorspace, etc. it would take to create a viable mint. Don't forget all so that you would need to replace your hardware on an ongoing basis to keep up with advances in semiconductor speeds.
---eric
here's the reality about speech recognition: it will not work with most soundcards because most soundcards are crap (on the audio input side)
you need to really clean audio for speech recognition to work right. I've spent years with speech recognition after burning up my hands from too many hours programming. I've now learned what combination of microphone, sound system (USB in my case) and software works reliably.
I'm really glad to see IBM start integrating with anybody because it means that the day I can drop kick windows is getting closer!
---eric
There's a mass killing every week or so when some madman starts playing real-life Quake at work!
/ index.html
workplace shootings like the one in Wakefield MA happen once every year or two. not wonderful but not as bad as every week.
Where else in the world do kids shoot other kids in school?
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2000/03/13/guns
has a rather nice analysis on death by firearms. For example, in 1997 it was claimed that 4223 children were killed by firearms. Closer examination shows that only 700 of those children were under 17. In the same year, the author claims that "about 700 other kids were slaughtered with knives, blunt objects or bare hands, while more than 2,000 children under 15 died in car crashes and nearly 1,000 drowned."
always remember there are lies, damned lies, and statistics
--- eric
visual impairments
mobility impairments
hearing impairments
thanks
--- eric
check with your insurance agent about state laws regarding coverage of self-employed people. In Massachusetts, if you have been continually insured, you can purchase coverage at group rates without worrying about pre-existing conditions or cancellations because you're a small business.
We are currently using united healthcare PPO plan and spending something like $500-$600 per month for family coverage. This includes $15 co-pays on office visits and $10 co-pay on drugs.
we have had some small hassles with them but usually, if you're a persistent pain in the butt, they pay.
Disability insurance is a whole different story. Individual rates are extremely high and if you have anything even vaguely wrong, forget about coverage. I'm living with an RSI based disability and I can't get coverage even excluding my RSI.
So, I self-insure. Save as much money as possible and don't forget the corporate shield (you did incorporate as an S-corp?).
good luck, and start bribing your Congress critter to eliminate health insurance as a tax deduction for corporations!
there aren't a whole lot of handicapped programmers out there. There are a whole lot of handicapped ex-programmers out there. Remember, for most developers, RSI is a career ending injury.
;-)
The best estimates I've seen say that approximately 50,000 developers are injured per year. Think about how many people make comments about how their wrists hurt and what kind of adaptations that made. These kinds of adaptations are a very simple form of handicapped accessibility so I take gentle issue with your assertion that handicapped accessibility would be something that they (OSS developers) would never use.
I'm currently working on a project with some people in the national research council of Canada. It is aimed specifically at alternative tools for programming. We are aiming at the speech recognition user first and everyone else second because that's our bias. For some rather crufty slides on the user interface and philosophy, take a look at:
http://www.connact.com/~esj/voice_coding
it was a presentation I gave over a year ago but the concepts are still valid.
--- eric
Are there any programs out there for people that cannot speak? For instance while the person is typing...it will read it out? Just wondering :)
NaTaS
yes there are but try and think outside of the box about the solution. How could you build it using the Unix component philosophy? Obviously, you would need a text-to-speech component. You would obviously need some sort of keyboard reader. But what about in the middle? How about some word prediction software? What kind of editing facilities what a person like this need? Do they have other handicaps that also need accommodating like a mobility problem?
It's not a simple point solution. It's a systemwide solution!
Real software usability goes deeper than just interactions with GUI dialogs and so on. For experts, Linux is much more usable than the consumer OS's because it is much more stable, more transparent (less things are hidden under the candy shell of the GUI), and has a broader collection of powerful tools. The challenge is going to be preserving this kind of usability while also making Linux more accessible to non-expert users.
:-) . If you want a preview take a look at:
I like this summary but you left out one important community of users and that is handicapped users. For many handicapped users, graphical user interfaces are the kiss of death. My particular handicapped keeps me from using keyboards and mice. I instead use speech recognition and a tablet. Blind users I know require text-to-speech for their user interface. Even a minor handicap like color blindness can render a graphical user interface unusable.
I submitted a rant on this about a month ago to the/.features queue and either the queue is really large or it's a hint that I need to rewrite my rant
http://www.connact.com/~esj/ha.html