I'm a little concerned that the EFF and other groups like downhillbattle.org are not helping organize opposition to this bill. It's common knowledge that the government is slow and us internet folk are fast. Yet here we are seeing the opposite, the government is being fast, and freedom organizations of the internet are slow to pick up the fight.
Perhaps this suggests groups like EFF, et al need to re-examine how they react to legistlative bills. Not to sound over-dramatic, but I think they need an "army" of concerned citizens ready to start calling/writing their legistlators within 24 hours notice. Sort of like the minute-men of the American revolutionary war. Perhaps we even need a figuritive watch-tower to monitor congress and catch these bills in the very earliest stages.
In the bigger picture I'm an optimist and I hope to see over the next few years that the internet will help people get organized and bring strong pressure to bear on governments. We see how powerful the open-source model is, I'm waiting to see a similar phenomenom with politics. We see beginings of this with the Dean campaign and things like Groklaw but again I'm hoping this is just the begining.
I just wish there were more I could do personally.
I am hoping some experienced people here could answer a couple job searching questions for me. I'm new to the tech job market, finishing a masters in computer science this summer. I'm just now starting to look for a great job. I would be greatly appriciative of any answers to these questions.
Questions:
1. How should I design my resume, do I include a table listing every application and langauge I know? Is it worth mentioning past jobs not related to programming? Anyone know of really good resume examples for fields in computer science?
2. Should I create some kind of portfolio website to show my work?
3. Would joining an open source project help me develop real world experience to help me in getting a job?
4. I still have an option to specialize my masters degree into any branch of CS. Is there anything that's really valuable these days (ie databases, web development, AI, etc) ?
Thanks so much for any advice. (And I know it's hard to give general advice, but right now I'm intersting in working in any challenging computer science field from GIS to games, and I haven't been able to narrow down my job search yet.)
I am always wondering when will the open source/free software community stand up and start making their own hardware. Personal computers are so 1990s, it's great that they're standardized and fairly open, but let's not forget about the computers of the future, cell phones, Tivos and the like. Creating an free OS for the the personal computer will only be a small victory if all of the future computer platforms are closed and subject to the whims of corporations.
How about using 2 mice at once, one in each hand.? I've always wanted to set up a system like this. I wonder how hard that would be in Linux to set up?
Of course there'd be lots of decisions to make like how to handle focus, which mouse has priority, etc. Anyone know of any projects like this?
I'm not sure what the benefit of two mice would be but it would be neat to see 2 mice moving around the screen, 2 windows moving at once, etc.
No one yet mentioned the "Gyration ULTRA GT 30 CORDLESS MOUSE" which lets you move it in 3D...I think that's how it works. I've wanted one of these myself for a while.
My job was to do searches through a dataset of about 2 million records for certain characteristics and then put them in csv format for my coworkers to "analyze". They used the filter functions and pivot tables in Excel to do their analyses.
A database may well work for them but they just wouldn't be willing to learn how to work a database or anything much different than Excel.
Plus some things that spreadsheets are good for on a small scale like visually manipulating data and writing functions in cells sometimes are still useful on a larger scale. (with fast scrolling and such).
Can I please have a spreadsheet program that doesn't limit me to 64,000 rows?
If anyone knows of an easy way to do this please let me know! I've been searching for years. Otherwise please build it into gnumeric, OO, etc, please!
We need a quicken clone that is just as functional and just as easy to use.
When I was searching for a way to pay my bills online a lot of banks offer quicken files as the only way to synch your data. I'd love to use some of that Quicken functionality, but Quicken is yucky, yeach!
Just because something is open to the public does not mean that it can be corrected. The FCRA not only gives consumers the right to access their credit reports but also to have errors investigated and corrected in a timely manner.
I'm sure you would agree that having access to information about you without the ability to correct it is not a very useful propostition.
As this idea applies to google. If someone posts obscene comments to a website using my full name, anyone "googling" me will have those comments come up and may use that information to deny me goods or services. This fact makes search engines ripe for FCRA related coverage. Of course the only legislation I would reccomend is to not allow the denial of goods and services based on non-verifiable information. (Yes, that idea needs a lot more detail and interpretation but I think it is a good starting point nonetheless. We obviously don't want to burden indexing services like search engine with lots of bureacratic overhead.)
And what about Google? I've talked to a few employers who "google" prospective employees before hiring. Perhaps Google should be treated like a credit bureau?
No hypocrisy here, "hacker" means whatever the general population wants it to mean.
I'm young so I missed that original "hacker" term anyway. I personally like the term wizard better for technologically savy people since what we do does seem like magic to ordinary folk. In fact, in my computer science classes I sometimes pretend I'm in that school Harry Potter goes to and each lesson we get is like a new spell, a new way to manipulate the world.
They need to change their name and get on with life. The languages of the world now own "SPAM".
I believe when any trademark or copyright gains a critical amount of popularity, it should immediately enter the public domain. (Sounds ridiculous, right?) But think about this, at some level of popularity, ideas (including words like Spam) simply become part of our culture. And once something becomes part of our culture, I say we own it.
Take that happy birthday song for example. Does anyone honestly believe someone should be able to collect royalties on public performances of happy birthday? Supposedely it is copyrighted. But I say you can't copyright culture.
Listen, all I'm asking is do we want to live in a world where we don't own our own culture? Our culture is a profound part of each one of us and to be told that it's owned by a corporation for 100+ years, I find it deeply troubling.
Where do I sign up? Don't I need legal or accounting advice? I don't know anything about companies except that I want one. Where does one start learning?
I always wished there were a way to shop an idea around before getting a patent just to simply find out if it's worth spending that much on a patent.
I'm an arm-chair inventor myself and I have around 50 ideas I think are probably 'patentable' (would have to do research on prior art, existing patents, etc) but I'm not even willing to spend 1k on a patent for any of them because I have no idea if they're commercially viable or not.
And if you read articles, or advice for individual innventors all you read are gloom and doom about how 99% of innventors fail, 99% of patents fail.. etc.
I'd love to hear some ideas of how to 'bootstrap' my inventions with minimal capital.
A simple thing that an organization like EFF or Downhill battle could do is to look over these voting records and create a simple "IP score" or "Electronic Freedom score" from the voting records.
That way people could look up the issues they care about most and see how the candidates 'score' against each other.
Scores are easy ways to summarize large amounts of information and would allow everyone to see how congress people are doing on important issues. Obviously almost no one is going to pour over years of voting records, but with voting scores created from the records, it would be easy for anyone to quickly access how their representatives are doing on issues.
I see this article/project as a first step in that direction. I think adoption of this concept by large political organizations could popularize it quickly and give it more legitimacy. Wouldn't it be nice if every senator had to worry about his IP score falling?
It seems most posts are saying we don't want apathetic citizens voting anyway. This is a good argument however it may be instructive to consider the economics of voting from an indvidual level.
If a person acts rationally he will not vote. I read that in an economics textbook once. I believe it was because it costs more for a person to vote (time,effort,etc) than she stands to gain from the influence of her vote. So theoretically people don't vote in raw self-interest but rather because they 'believe' in the idea.
All I'm really suggesting is that maybe there are informed potential voters out there who just are not incented to vote. I don't know what a good incentive is though.
I installed it yesterday and I like it, but it also feels kind of 'spooky' to me because everytime I search, it shows me things on my computer I had no idea I had.
Is there any way to make it read Thunderbird emails?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a little concerned that the EFF and other groups like downhillbattle.org are not helping organize opposition to this bill.
It's common knowledge that the government is slow and us internet folk are fast. Yet here we are seeing the opposite, the government is being fast, and freedom organizations of the internet are slow to pick up the fight.
Perhaps this suggests groups like EFF, et al need to re-examine how they react to legistlative bills. Not to sound over-dramatic, but I think they need an "army" of concerned citizens ready to start calling/writing their legistlators within 24 hours notice. Sort of like the minute-men of the American revolutionary war. Perhaps we even need a figuritive watch-tower to monitor congress and catch these bills in the very earliest stages.
In the bigger picture I'm an optimist and I hope to see over the next few years that the internet will help people get organized and bring strong pressure to bear on governments. We see how powerful the open-source model is, I'm waiting to see a similar phenomenom with politics. We see beginings of this with the Dean campaign and things like Groklaw but again I'm hoping this is just the begining.
I just wish there were more I could do personally.
--
Thanks a lot Slashdot! No wonder none of you have jobs. Well I'll return someday and answer these questions for myself.
I am hoping some experienced people here could answer a couple job searching questions for me.
I'm new to the tech job market, finishing a masters in computer science this summer. I'm just now starting to look for a great job. I would be greatly appriciative of any answers to these questions.
Questions:
1. How should I design my resume, do I include a table listing every application and langauge I know? Is it worth mentioning past jobs not related to programming? Anyone know of really good resume examples for fields in computer science?
2. Should I create some kind of portfolio website to show my work?
3. Would joining an open source project help me develop real world experience to help me in getting a job?
4. I still have an option to specialize my masters degree into any branch of CS. Is there anything that's really valuable these days (ie databases, web development, AI, etc) ?
Thanks so much for any advice. (And I know it's hard to give general advice, but right now I'm intersting in working in any challenging computer science field from GIS to games, and I haven't been able to narrow down my job search yet.)
Thanks again.
--
Hi, does anyone know how to find work as a game programmer? I'm willing to work cheap because I love games. Any ideas? Where should I start?
Much Thanks.
I am always wondering when will the open source/free software community stand up and start making their own hardware. Personal computers are so 1990s, it's great that they're standardized and fairly open, but let's not forget about the computers of the future, cell phones, Tivos and the like. Creating an free OS for the the personal computer will only be a small victory if all of the future computer platforms are closed and subject to the whims of corporations.
--
I vote against software patents. (I just wanted to voice one small opinion.)
Warning: Offtopic somewhat
How about using 2 mice at once, one in each hand.? I've always wanted to set up a system like this. I wonder how hard that would be in Linux to set up?
Of course there'd be lots of decisions to make like how to handle focus, which mouse has priority, etc. Anyone know of any projects like this?
I'm not sure what the benefit of two mice would be but it would be neat to see 2 mice moving around the screen, 2 windows moving at once, etc.
Discuss, discuss!
No one yet mentioned the "Gyration ULTRA GT 30 CORDLESS MOUSE" which lets you move it in 3D. ..I think that's how it works. I've wanted one of these myself for a while.
My job was to do searches through a dataset of about 2 million records for certain characteristics and then put them in csv format for my coworkers to "analyze". They used the filter functions and pivot tables in Excel to do their analyses.
A database may well work for them but they just wouldn't be willing to learn how to work a database or anything much different than Excel.
Plus some things that spreadsheets are good for on a small scale like visually manipulating data and writing functions in cells sometimes are still useful on a larger scale. (with fast scrolling and such).
Sir, if Excel is the right tool for 64,000 rows, isn't it possible it's also the right tool for 75,000 rows?
:-(
I'm not saying 10 million rows here, just that all my datasets are in the 100,000 rows range and my co-workers can only use Excel
Can I please have a spreadsheet program that doesn't limit me to 64,000 rows? If anyone knows of an easy way to do this please let me know! I've been searching for years. Otherwise please build it into gnumeric, OO, etc, please!
We need a quicken clone that is just as functional and just as easy to use.
When I was searching for a way to pay my bills online a lot of banks offer quicken files as the only way to synch your data. I'd love to use some of that Quicken functionality, but Quicken is yucky, yeach!
Just because something is open to the public does not mean that it can be corrected. The FCRA not only gives consumers the right to access their credit reports but also to have errors investigated and corrected in a timely manner.
I'm sure you would agree that having access to information about you without the ability to correct it is not a very useful propostition.
As this idea applies to google. If someone posts obscene comments to a website using my full name, anyone "googling" me will have those comments come up and may use that information to deny me goods or services. This fact makes search engines ripe for FCRA related coverage. Of course the only legislation I would reccomend is to not allow the denial of goods and services based on non-verifiable information. (Yes, that idea needs a lot more detail and interpretation but I think it is a good starting point nonetheless. We obviously don't want to burden indexing services like search engine with lots of bureacratic overhead.)
And what about Google? I've talked to a few employers who "google" prospective employees before hiring. Perhaps Google should be treated like a credit bureau?
No hypocrisy here, "hacker" means whatever the general population wants it to mean.
I'm young so I missed that original "hacker" term anyway. I personally like the term wizard better for technologically savy people since what we do does seem like magic to ordinary folk. In fact, in my computer science classes I sometimes pretend I'm in that school Harry Potter goes to and each lesson we get is like a new spell, a new way to manipulate the world.
They need to change their name and get on with life. The languages of the world now own "SPAM".
I believe when any trademark or copyright gains a critical amount of popularity, it should immediately enter the public domain. (Sounds ridiculous, right?) But think about this, at some level of popularity, ideas (including words like Spam) simply become part of our culture. And once something becomes part of our culture, I say we own it.
Take that happy birthday song for example. Does anyone honestly believe someone should be able to collect royalties on public performances of happy birthday? Supposedely it is copyrighted. But I say you can't copyright culture.
Listen, all I'm asking is do we want to live in a world where we don't own our own culture? Our culture is a profound part of each one of us and to be told that it's owned by a corporation for 100+ years, I find it deeply troubling.
So...
Repeat after me:
"You can't copyright culture"
"You can't copyright culture"
Where do I sign up? Don't I need legal or accounting advice? I don't know anything about companies except that I want one. Where does one start learning?
How can I do this for $200 dollars? Can you point me to resources? How can I start a 'cardboard cutout' company?
I always wished there were a way to shop an idea around before getting a patent just to simply find out if it's worth spending that much on a patent.
.. etc.
I'm an arm-chair inventor myself and I have around 50 ideas I think are probably 'patentable' (would have to do research on prior art, existing patents, etc) but I'm not even willing to spend 1k on a patent for any of them because I have no idea if they're commercially viable or not.
And if you read articles, or advice for individual innventors all you read are gloom and doom about how 99% of innventors fail, 99% of patents fail
I'd love to hear some ideas of how to 'bootstrap' my inventions with minimal capital.
Signed,
Surley Inventor in Omaha
A simple thing that an organization like EFF or Downhill battle could do is to look over these voting records and create a simple "IP score" or "Electronic Freedom score" from the voting records.
That way people could look up the issues they care about most and see how the candidates 'score' against each other.
Scores are easy ways to summarize large amounts of information and would allow everyone to see how congress people are doing on important issues. Obviously almost no one is going to pour over years of voting records, but with voting scores created from the records, it would be easy for anyone to quickly access how their representatives are doing on issues.
I see this article/project as a first step in that direction. I think adoption of this concept by large political organizations could popularize it quickly and give it more legitimacy. Wouldn't it be nice if every senator had to worry about his IP score falling?
"I am lying." or "This sentence is a lie."
It's not true or false. ...maybe it would break...
Whoops wrong section, this is politics! Sorry, I revoke my post.
But I don't know who you should vote for.
My real question is this:
Is this 'intellectual property' situation hopeless? YRO is always so depressing to read.
>
If a person acts rationally he will not vote. I read that in an economics textbook once. I believe it was because it costs more for a person to vote (time,effort,etc) than she stands to gain from the influence of her vote. So theoretically people don't vote in raw self-interest but rather because they 'believe' in the idea.
All I'm really suggesting is that maybe there are informed potential voters out there who just are not incented to vote. I don't know what a good incentive is though.
Is there any way to make it read Thunderbird emails?