This is, IMO, not so much a technological problem as it is a police corruption issue.
And where does that corruption come from? It is, after all, power that corrupts. And the more absolute the power that we give law enforcement, the more absolutely certain we may be that they will be corrupt.
--G
"Next time you think you are calling technical support droids, next time you think that you will but put on hold for hours, be careful, you may be placing a call to... the twilight zone."
Yike, I say. Yike. Competent tech support does not exist in this earth. What planet is Cisco on, and to what worthy cause can I donate money to see that humans never send a manned mission there and pollute this fascinating superior alien culture?
--G
The "'Fire' in a crowded theatre" analogy was penned in a decision to imprison a peaceful protester whose only crime was to condemn the draft.
Anyone who talks about limiting your write to yell 'FIRE' is talking about limiting your right to peaceable protest. Remember that. The historical context should always remind us that so long as the pwerful and control-oriented can craft "reasonable limits," they will use them to stifle criticism.
--G
It seems like every week we have some new story about how quantum computers will break every known encryption algorithm, compress random data, slice break quickly and without crumbs, satisfy your SO's sexual needs, play Quake without human intervention, create a just and virtuous society, solve the halting problem, and compose sonatas all while locked in a safe covered over by drywall and abandoned for forty years in a mineshaft.
Delightful.
As any marketer knows, vaporware is the best product, because nobody knows its real limitations, only its theoretical ones. "There's no theoretical reason it can't sort a list in constant time... ergo it must be able to! Stop the presses!"
One of the big reasons that subscription models like this encounter problems is that it's easy for multiple readers to share a single account. But I don't see any info about how they're going to prevent this.
I predict that they're going to fall into the old cypherounks/cypherpunks login hole here.
--G
There seems to be more and more of an attitude in the Capitol to pass laws like the CDA, DMCA, etc. without a thought of their constitutionality -- lawmakers seem to be taking a "let the courts sort it out" approach.
The problem with this, apart from its mockery of "congress shall make no law...", is that it leaves the law in limbo for the months or years that it can take to get a final judicial ruling on the law's constitutionality. We won't have final word on which bits of the DMCA pass constitutional muster, for instance, for quite some time, even though a lot of us have projects or even livelihoods that depend on that outcome.
What can we do to discourage congress from ignoring the Constitutional import of its actions and leaving us in legal limbo waiting for the courts? What sorts of arguments can convince ppolitical parties and elected officials to listen to the Constitution as much as they listen to their donors and constituents?
Well, if/. really, truly needed revenue, then they could call upon the community to support them with monthly microdonations via Paypal. Just consider: 5-10$ a month from however many avid readers/. has would add up pretty quickly.
Of course, I feel that RMS ought to use the term "liberated software" to avoid the whole "free beer/free speech" issue, but that's another story....
That is not such a good idea.
"Liberated" is slang in many areas for "procured by illicit means" (e.g. he "liberated" a pack of cigarretts from the local five and dime). To many "liberated software" has an unsavory implication of "warez."
Perhaps "liberation software?"
That touches on the fact that it is both free and freeing -- it is software that liberates you (if only for a brief, blissful moment) from the world of EULAs, NDAs, and arcane legalism.
--G
I'm living with Verizon DSL. Nobody else serves my area at the moment (some did, but they went out of business pretty fast after Verizon started putting on the hurt.)
What I want is a pipe. Very simple. Give me always-on access that doesn't go down every morning, give me a static IP -- just one! -- and I'll be happy. They could even throw in a nameserver as a "value-added" service; I'd pay for that.
Instead I get a connection that goes down two hours a day ("some customers in Massachusetts may be experiencing difficulties" says the hold message, and tech support says the same thing and doesn't have a clue when I use words like "traceroute"), but (ooh! yippy-skippy!) it's cheap and comes with "web space" and "free web e-mail".
I don't care about Evil Big Corp vs. Mom and Pop. I don't care about Tech Support. I just want a frickin' reliable pipe with a static IP. Not a hard request. I'm willing to pay, but nobody is selling!
I'm a good customer -- simple demands, low support cost, disposable income, and infinitely loyal if you give me what I want because I'm generally too lazy to change. Companies should be jumping over each other to sell what I want. Who broke capitalism?
--G
Most places, for code that is not too awful or too brilliantly good, 80% of the "cost" of a line of code is maintainance. That means that unmaintainable code is much, much, much worse than code that takes a little while to get right.\ but will need half as much maintainance.
It is definitely worth retooling code that is awful if
the code is expected to last a few more years or to outlast another maintainer, and
Tech companies will require unfair, new contracts to be signed by all employees, without any form of negotiation at all!
Well, you know, after the company I was with was acquired and the new company gave us all new employment agreements to sign with all sorts of impossibly constraining terms... a bunch of us didn't sign it.
And they changed it.
If you try standing up to the corporate bullshit, you will frequently get what you want. They're throwing those contracts at you because they think you have valuable skills and information that they don't want others to have. But the other side of that coin is that you have valuable skills and information that they aren't going to want to lose over a dispute over five words in a contract. Get out of this "they can do whatever they want, workers just have to sit back and take it" attitude and you can make a difference.
As for unions, well, maybe they could help with that. But more likely they will take your money, add a whole new "for your protection" bureaucracy, make it harder to communicate with management, spend your dues trying to keep smart folks out of the labor pool (The IEEE is a good model for what a tech union might look like politically, and its position of H1B visas is the reason I won't join. Those child labor laws taht were such a pain to get around when I was a kid? Those laws have a distinct union label on them too).
The best bet is to have a frank, face-to-face dialogue with you managers. A union is a pretty sorry second to that. And if you can't have a frank, face-to-face dialogue with your managers, it's a safe bet that your company is already on the well-paved road to doom.
Me, I'll applaud if techies unionize... because that means born scabs like me can write our own tickets.
--G
Damn but it's nice to see a company that's willing to fight on the technical ground rather than running to its lawyers at the first sign of trouble. That's downright brave and honourable, there.
Say what you may about the real and supposed sins of DirecTV and its crackers, they were fighting the war on its technical merits rather than with hordes of lawyers. That's good stuff. It's nice to see a company with the integrity to defend itself within its market and its product rather than look for protection from above.
--G
unfortunately, slashdot has prevented me posting the perl because of "lameness filter -- junk character post". I feel that way about my perl somethines, too, but really, Rob, what's up with that?
--G
I browse with Junkbuster, and I frequently feel a little bit guilty about this because I'm depriving folks of their ad impressions. I also do my "daily" browsing (comics, etc.) using a perl script that builds me a personal daily "comics page" -- more bad karma there, since it hits the site with lynx (no ad impression) and then I hit only the bit I care about with Netscape, again no ad impression.
Someone ought to build a script that, given a list of URLs, goes through and gives each of them a fake clickthrough on any ads they might have.
Heck, I'll code it up today. No reason to let my browsing convenience get in the way of sites ad revenues.
--G
How does one get into industrial espionage as a career path? It sounds like a fascinating line of work; I wonder how one gets involved. I mean, you never see classified ads for industrial spies.
--G
In a representative democracy, you're supposed to vote for the person to represent you. If neither candidate represents you, then there's little point in voting. You can basically:
1.Pick one at random
2.Pick an irrelevant candidate (any third party, write in, whatever)
3.Not vote
You always have the option to spoil your ballot, or to go into the booth, don't pick anyone, leave the booth. This is recorded as not voting for anyone -- a fairly clear mandate if enough of us were to do so.
They'll know that you care enough to vote and that you reject the system. That's about all you can hope for.
--G
(1) start with a fairly simple solution. Something that covers the "reasonable attempt to block obscene content" hurdle and will go a little way toward staving off lawsuits.
(2) Log (anonymously -- you don't care who's accessing what) every page accessed and every page blocked.
(3) Once a week, review, say 200 each of the blocked and viewed pages. There will probably be relatively few blocked pages, anyway.
(4) If your basic rules failed on one of those pages -- a false positive or false negative -- revise your rules. Then check which of the logged pages would move across the Line Of Truth and keep tweaking the rules until you're happy.
(5) Lather, rinse, repeat.
No static solution will ever match perfectly; a responsible administrator should update the rules to adapt to new trends and to correct lingering bugs. Adapt, adapt, adapt.
--G
Why do you consider the republicrats citizens, when they are engaged in the demonstrably treasonous activity of selling out the government of the country to the highest bidder?
In the US, there is no such thing as treason during peacetime. What they are doing may be fraud, extortion, bribery, and assault, but nobody in the US today is committing treason, period.
Also, legally, current officeholders are largely immune to prosecution to anything other than treason.
In conclusion: Support the only true form of participatory democracy: Assassination.
--G
This discussion is all moot. Do you really think in 10 years, we'll all still be typing www.something.com? All this will continue until technology makes it moot, and I can finally sit down on my couch and in my best scottish accent, say "Computer: find me that cranky brazilian soccer team named after some bible verse I don't remember". I will then promptly be rewarded with entirely too much information about a meaningless subject (the true purpose of the web), and an offer to purchase books about them, directly from each individual author. Unless of course, Microsoft is still around, in which case my computer will execute a small child in Brazil, and start making me coffee.
Actually, it will (still) provide you with a list of 50,000 hits, all of them porn except for two, about half-way through, linking to identical archived newsgroup articles extolling the virtues of llama farming (for meat and wool) as a hot job for the New Economy. --G
Slashdot Mirror
So that brings the score up to CLECs/Broadband co.s 3, RBOCs 3000.
--G
This is, IMO, not so much a technological problem as it is a police corruption issue.
And where does that corruption come from? It is, after all, power that corrupts. And the more absolute the power that we give law enforcement, the more absolutely certain we may be that they will be corrupt.
--G
Spoil your ballot. It's a vote. It shows that you care, but don't care for the choices the political duopoly and its lackeys give you.
A spoiled ballot is still a vote, it's just a different kind of vote.
--G
"Next time you think you are calling technical support droids, next time you think that you will but put on hold for hours, be careful, you may be placing a call to ... the twilight zone."
Yike, I say. Yike. Competent tech support does not exist in this earth. What planet is Cisco on, and to what worthy cause can I donate money to see that humans never send a manned mission there and pollute this fascinating superior alien culture?
--G
The "'Fire' in a crowded theatre" analogy was penned in a decision to imprison a peaceful protester whose only crime was to condemn the draft.
Anyone who talks about limiting your write to yell 'FIRE' is talking about limiting your right to peaceable protest. Remember that. The historical context should always remind us that so long as the pwerful and control-oriented can craft "reasonable limits," they will use them to stifle criticism.
--G
It seems like every week we have some new story about how quantum computers will break every known encryption algorithm, compress random data, slice break quickly and without crumbs, satisfy your SO's sexual needs, play Quake without human intervention, create a just and virtuous society, solve the halting problem, and compose sonatas all while locked in a safe covered over by drywall and abandoned for forty years in a mineshaft.
Delightful.
As any marketer knows, vaporware is the best product, because nobody knows its real limitations, only its theoretical ones. "There's no theoretical reason it can't sort a list in constant time... ergo it must be able to! Stop the presses!"
Call it vapor-state computing.
--G
Just chop off nine fingers and one fingernail.
--G
One of the big reasons that subscription models like this encounter problems is that it's easy for multiple readers to share a single account. But I don't see any info about how they're going to prevent this.
I predict that they're going to fall into the old cypherounks/cypherpunks login hole here.
--G
There seems to be more and more of an attitude in the Capitol to pass laws like the CDA, DMCA, etc. without a thought of their constitutionality -- lawmakers seem to be taking a "let the courts sort it out" approach.
The problem with this, apart from its mockery of "congress shall make no law...", is that it leaves the law in limbo for the months or years that it can take to get a final judicial ruling on the law's constitutionality. We won't have final word on which bits of the DMCA pass constitutional muster, for instance, for quite some time, even though a lot of us have projects or even livelihoods that depend on that outcome.
What can we do to discourage congress from ignoring the Constitutional import of its actions and leaving us in legal limbo waiting for the courts? What sorts of arguments can convince ppolitical parties and elected officials to listen to the Constitution as much as they listen to their donors and constituents?
--G
Well, if /. really, truly needed revenue, then they could call upon the community to support them with monthly microdonations via Paypal. Just consider: 5-10$ a month from however many avid readers /. has would add up pretty quickly.
How about just selling karma -- $15 a point!
--G
Of course, I feel that RMS ought to use the term "liberated software" to avoid the whole "free beer/free speech" issue, but that's another story....
That is not such a good idea.
"Liberated" is slang in many areas for "procured by illicit means" (e.g. he "liberated" a pack of cigarretts from the local five and dime). To many "liberated software" has an unsavory implication of "warez."
Perhaps "liberation software?"
That touches on the fact that it is both free and freeing -- it is software that liberates you (if only for a brief, blissful moment) from the world of EULAs, NDAs, and arcane legalism.
--G
I'm living with Verizon DSL. Nobody else serves my area at the moment (some did, but they went out of business pretty fast after Verizon started putting on the hurt.)
What I want is a pipe. Very simple. Give me always-on access that doesn't go down every morning, give me a static IP -- just one! -- and I'll be happy. They could even throw in a nameserver as a "value-added" service; I'd pay for that.
Instead I get a connection that goes down two hours a day ("some customers in Massachusetts may be experiencing difficulties" says the hold message, and tech support says the same thing and doesn't have a clue when I use words like "traceroute"), but (ooh! yippy-skippy!) it's cheap and comes with "web space" and "free web e-mail".
I don't care about Evil Big Corp vs. Mom and Pop. I don't care about Tech Support. I just want a frickin' reliable pipe with a static IP. Not a hard request. I'm willing to pay, but nobody is selling!
I'm a good customer -- simple demands, low support cost, disposable income, and infinitely loyal if you give me what I want because I'm generally too lazy to change. Companies should be jumping over each other to sell what I want. Who broke capitalism?
--G
It is definitely worth retooling code that is awful if
--G
Tech companies will require unfair, new contracts to be signed by all employees, without any form of negotiation at all!
Well, you know, after the company I was with was acquired and the new company gave us all new employment agreements to sign with all sorts of impossibly constraining terms... a bunch of us didn't sign it.
And they changed it.
If you try standing up to the corporate bullshit, you will frequently get what you want. They're throwing those contracts at you because they think you have valuable skills and information that they don't want others to have. But the other side of that coin is that you have valuable skills and information that they aren't going to want to lose over a dispute over five words in a contract. Get out of this "they can do whatever they want, workers just have to sit back and take it" attitude and you can make a difference.
As for unions, well, maybe they could help with that. But more likely they will take your money, add a whole new "for your protection" bureaucracy, make it harder to communicate with management, spend your dues trying to keep smart folks out of the labor pool (The IEEE is a good model for what a tech union might look like politically, and its position of H1B visas is the reason I won't join. Those child labor laws taht were such a pain to get around when I was a kid? Those laws have a distinct union label on them too).
The best bet is to have a frank, face-to-face dialogue with you managers. A union is a pretty sorry second to that. And if you can't have a frank, face-to-face dialogue with your managers, it's a safe bet that your company is already on the well-paved road to doom.
Me, I'll applaud if techies unionize... because that means born scabs like me can write our own tickets.
--G
Damn but it's nice to see a company that's willing to fight on the technical ground rather than running to its lawyers at the first sign of trouble. That's downright brave and honourable, there.
Say what you may about the real and supposed sins of DirecTV and its crackers, they were fighting the war on its technical merits rather than with hordes of lawyers. That's good stuff. It's nice to see a company with the integrity to defend itself within its market and its product rather than look for protection from above.
--G
And if the poor guy were getting minimum wage for killing people, would you say that we should feel sorry for him?
Sorry, there's no ethical "get out of jail free" card for the poor. Just because someone is willing to pay for a service doesn't make it right.
--G
unfortunately, slashdot has prevented me posting the perl because of "lameness filter -- junk character post". I feel that way about my perl somethines, too, but really, Rob, what's up with that?
--G
I browse with Junkbuster, and I frequently feel a little bit guilty about this because I'm depriving folks of their ad impressions. I also do my "daily" browsing (comics, etc.) using a perl script that builds me a personal daily "comics page" -- more bad karma there, since it hits the site with lynx (no ad impression) and then I hit only the bit I care about with Netscape, again no ad impression.
Someone ought to build a script that, given a list of URLs, goes through and gives each of them a fake clickthrough on any ads they might have.
Heck, I'll code it up today. No reason to let my browsing convenience get in the way of sites ad revenues.
--G
How does one get into industrial espionage as a career path? It sounds like a fascinating line of work; I wonder how one gets involved. I mean, you never see classified ads for industrial spies.
--G
In a representative democracy, you're supposed to vote for the person to represent you. If neither candidate represents you, then there's little point in voting. You can basically:
1.Pick one at random
2.Pick an irrelevant candidate (any third party, write in, whatever)
3.Not vote
You always have the option to spoil your ballot, or to go into the booth, don't pick anyone, leave the booth. This is recorded as not voting for anyone -- a fairly clear mandate if enough of us were to do so.
They'll know that you care enough to vote and that you reject the system. That's about all you can hope for.
--G
Insert obligatory Al-Gore-Invented-the-Internet The-Chinese-are-Buying-our-Government joke here.
--G
Why am I covering the text above?
--G
What I'd do:
(1) start with a fairly simple solution. Something that covers the "reasonable attempt to block obscene content" hurdle and will go a little way toward staving off lawsuits.
(2) Log (anonymously -- you don't care who's accessing what) every page accessed and every page blocked.
(3) Once a week, review, say 200 each of the blocked and viewed pages. There will probably be relatively few blocked pages, anyway.
(4) If your basic rules failed on one of those pages -- a false positive or false negative -- revise your rules. Then check which of the logged pages would move across the Line Of Truth and keep tweaking the rules until you're happy.
(5) Lather, rinse, repeat.
No static solution will ever match perfectly; a responsible administrator should update the rules to adapt to new trends and to correct lingering bugs. Adapt, adapt, adapt.
--G
To pick a nit...
Why do you consider the republicrats citizens, when they are engaged in the demonstrably treasonous activity of selling out the government of the country to the highest bidder?
In the US, there is no such thing as treason during peacetime. What they are doing may be fraud, extortion, bribery, and assault, but nobody in the US today is committing treason, period.
Also, legally, current officeholders are largely immune to prosecution to anything other than treason.
In conclusion: Support the only true form of participatory democracy: Assassination.
--G
This discussion is all moot. Do you really think in 10 years, we'll all still be typing www.something.com? All this will continue until technology makes it moot, and I can finally sit down on my couch and in my best scottish accent, say "Computer: find me that cranky brazilian soccer team named after some bible verse I don't remember". I will then promptly be rewarded with entirely too much information about a meaningless subject (the true purpose of the web), and an offer to purchase books about them, directly from each individual author. Unless of course, Microsoft is still around, in which case my computer will execute a small child in Brazil, and start making me coffee.
Actually, it will (still) provide you with a list of 50,000 hits, all of them porn except for two, about half-way through, linking to identical archived newsgroup articles extolling the virtues of llama farming (for meat and wool) as a hot job for the New Economy.
--G