> They could already see how good I was at technical learning from my degree.
So not true! I have interviewed many people who have a Master's degree in computer science, even, and they barely know anything. One guy didn't even know the basics of big-O notation (Landau notation), and how to analyze the complexity of functions. How can you have a master's degree and not know that? I don't know -- but there are a lot of people out there like that.
In my experience, you can't trust that degrees mean anything. Even from a top U.S. school, having a degree only means that the person learned something really well, but it might not have been the things you want in a programmer. I've worked with guys from MIT and Stanford who don't know what functional programming is, or what design patterns are.
To you, a degree means a lot, because you know what you went through. To a potential employer it means little, when looking for top engineers.
You don't want to deal with upset and angry parents and a slightly drunk porn-watcher at 30,000 feet. Are you fucking kidding me?
You think Internet access is magically going to make people start watching porn on airplanes? People already have laptop computers (which have hard drives) and don't.
Email isn't trivial to fake in such a way that it would stand up to any kind of scrutiny whatsoever. Already there are simple authentication protocols that are becoming widespread enough to secure the average user. If the receiving domain has any kind of proper configuration, it will be able to validate whether a mail was sent properly using one of SPF records, PTR, DomainKeys, or any reputation system.
Try to fake an email that looks like it authentically came from Amazon.com to a Yahoo account -- even from the perspective of a naive user, you can't do it.
To a user smart enough to examine mail headers, no forged email is good enough to stand up to any inspection. It is an incorrect rumor that email is easy to forge. Certainly if the issue came up in court, an expert witness would lay the question of whether it was forged to rest by examining the mail headers. Any decent MTA can do the same automatically.
For a random occasion, I went to buy a cigar from a mini-mart. I'm 22. I don't buy tobacco products generally, so perhaps I looked uncomfortable -- didn't know what I wanted, etc.
The clerk carded me, asked me a bunch of questions (including my age), and then finally called me a liar, said I wasn't old enough.
I get pissed whenever someone calls me a liar. People have a right to ask for ID, and that's not an insult. Taking my valid ID and subsequently calling me a liar is insulting.
I had my US passport in the car, luckily, which I stormed out and retrieve to hand to the formerly-smug clerk.
I asked her, "Do you think I would really forge a passport just to buy a cigar?"
She looked at me in kind of a dumb stupor and accepted my credit card.
If you'd like to start an RfC on the matter, I'd be happy to offer the community my evidence; I have, after all, been declared one of Wikipedia's foremost experts on Catholicism." -- Essjay Talk 04:10, Jun 23, 2005 (UTC)
The quote itself is a link, to another page, where he is described as this foremost expert and quoted as saying:
I've been a Catholic scholar for years, and I couldn't tell you know how many times I've heard this myth, in and outside class. Essjay Talk 05:29, Jun 19, 2005 (UTC)
In this situation, someone mistakenly believes he's a "scholar", declares him an expert, an Essjay does all he can to reinforce the notion by using that as weight in later arguments. Slashdot is not blowing this out of proportion at all. This guy is on the arbitration committee for God's sake
And Jimbo thinks this is OK? Lying about fake credentials to back up your arguments on Wikipedia... and as an admin... now on the arbitration committeee. Not a big deal?
Would you please explain why you don't think this is a big deal? Who's going to know how much policy, information, and any other content this guy has influenced with his lies? I'm revolted.
The other reason people like Imperial units is because they are often highly divisible numbers. 12 can be divided by 12,6,4,3,2,1. For common division operations, you therefore don't have to resort to decimals.
It's no coincidence we use 60 minutes to the hour to measure time -- 60 is also similarly divisible. 60, 30, 15, 12, 10, 5, 3, 2, 1. It's handy to be able to divide a quantity so many ways without decimals!
The thing that orchestras have that most programmers don't is a program design (the score) that they're working with their peers to develop (play) from. The composer knew what he wanted. Most users don't.
True, but a better analogy in this situation is the customers of the orchestra -- ie, the listeners. This might be a concert hall, or the person who commissioned the piece to be played (perhaps more often in older history).
The conductor is still accountable if the piece doesn't sound like what the customer (audience) expects.
IF you do the research (compatibility list, newsgroups etc.) AND it still fails it's not your fault as an end user. PERIOD. You've done all you can.
I have to think that there's still something wrong with the process if the average user of a piece of software is expected to read compatibility lists. The sooner we start treating software seriously the sooner it will stop sucking. Honestly, if you buy a car, should you be expected to know its internals? To check "compatibility lists" for its parts?
And yes, I know that certain zealots will just "well that's too much to expect from volunteers" but what I'm saying is maybe it should be expected anyway. I have the childish hope that one day space ships will be as common as the personal computer:-) if that did happen, would you expect them to be as crappy as the average piece of software? No, because there are standards.
We, as a community, have been lax. It has done good and bad things. This is a bad one ("acceptable incompatibility").
Good. But would they have innovated more with no patents? With 3-year patents? With 60-year patents? That's the question to be asking here, not "they innovate, so everything's OK." Yeah, but you're missing the point. Sure, without patents, all these companies might be doing a lot more research and staying X years ahead. However, they'd also keep their medicines locked up as trade secrets and the general public would never know how they work. The whole point of the patent system is that things can be released to society after they've been invented. That way, other companies can build on the ideas. Without patents, each company might be more advanced than it is now, but they'd each be an island of research unto themselves, not sharing or contributing with each other or the general public.
Universities aren't a place to learn vocational skills. What do you think an MBA is? MCS? Universities are a completely appropriate place.
The Master of Computer Science (MCS) degree is a terminal, professional degree intended for students who will pursue a technical career in the computer industry. The MCS program normally requires three semesters of full-time study. from http://compsci.rice.edu/academics.cfm?doc_id=4432
And before you start criticizing: Rice University is ranked among the top 20 universities in the USA. I think they're well aware of what they're teaching.
The problem is that stupid companies think programmers with a degree are better, even though there are no university level programming degrees.
That's false. Plenty of universities offer professional terminal degrees. Such degrees are primarily focused on software development. I know this because I'm currently pursuing such a degree.
From: http://compsci.rice.edu/academics.cfm?doc_id=4432
The Master of Computer Science (MCS) degree is a terminal, professional degree intended for students who will pursue a technical career in the computer industry. The MCS program normally requires three semesters of full-time study.
You have a strange idea of rights. None of your rights include the ability to break a contract you willingly entered into with someone. Let's say you downloaded music from iTunes. In order to do that, you had to accept their contract, their conditions. Part of their contract said "you agree to use the music we provide in exactly these ways". Some of those ways include copying to your iPod, and forbid other uses.
Those are your rights. Your rights to the music you have are exactly the ones granted to you by your contract and nothing more. You don't have a right to that music. You don't have fair use, because you agreed to give it up in the contract you signed. If you look closely, you will notice you are not buying a copy of the music; you are buying a license. This license does not grant you 'fair use' or any other such things.
I mean, I understand what you're saying -- those terms suck. But it has nothing to do with your "rights" here. Your rights end when you willingly agree to give them up by signing that contract. And remember, no one is forcing you to sign this contract. You're choosing to buy some 'licenses' with their terms.
Don't make the issue about something it's not. DRM is just an enforcement of the legal situation that already exists because of the contract you signed.
You make the mistake of assuming I endorse the copyright system as currently implemented by our government... I don't.
The idea of copyright -- as it was originally envisioned and implemented, was fine. Copyright would expire after some reasonable time. Things have gone downhill from there because corporations in the US are in bed with the government. And that sucks.
But the fact that the system is broken doesn't mean it's bad in the first place. Copyright is not the problem -- lobbying of the US government is the problem.
I would be very happy if copyright lasted 5-10 years.
To answer your question: if copyright went away entirely, I do think that the number of works created would decrease. Simple economics would tell you that. The idea is that, from some neutral state (w/o copyright), adding copyright creates incentive, which means that more works will be created. I don't want copyright to go away entirely, and I don't want it to be anywhere near how it is now. But I definitely think it should exist in some reasonable form.
Shouldn't DRM be uncrackable even with access to source code?
Quite the contrary -- all DRM should be crackable even without access to the source code.
Ultimately, if you have the ability to "play" the content, you can beat the DRM -- because that's what playing the content is, decrypting it. If you (your computer) can decrypt the content, then you can decrypt the content. Simple!
The distinction between which program on your computer can decrypt the content is *solely* one of obscurity and not one of encryption at all. You have the encryption key -- you can decrypt the content -- the only thing that's preventing it is obscurity of the location of the key, and the methods of the encryption algorithm. Both of those are Security Through Obscurity and are a bad thing. It's also why DRM will never actually work until the hardware gets on board.
Because you always have the key, you can always decrypt it.
What effect will the websites have on the law? That's the question I would ask.
Laws like this are clearly unenforceable. More importantly, it is not morally the website's job to police the people who visit it. It's the job of the parents. Legislators don't seem to win their positions based on campaigns of parental responsibility, however. The trend seems to be "blame everyone else for your kid's problems".
Look at the crap going on involving Grand Theft Auto: someone makes a game modification to show a tit, a tit that isn't even available without modifying the game, and tons of legislators go apeshit about how it's inappropriate for children. Clearly these people aren't worried about justice, and instead are worried about winning the votes of emotional parents, the Security Moms.
A reasonable argument can be made that, for example, liquor stores have a duty to prevent children from buying alcohol in them. However, you must also consider that it is extremely easy and reliable to verify the age of store patrons. No analogy exists online -- it is impossible.
Expecting websites to perform such policing is unquestionably unfair, and I suspect that the courts will agree. The law might have effect on some websites in the short term. In the long term, the websites will have the law overturned as unreasonable.
We just have to hope that the justices who hear these cases really have an interest in justice, unlike the legislators who passed these braindead laws in the first place.
America needs to raise its own damn children (and I say this as an American)
It absolutely matters that the law has no value. It is any citizen's duty to attempt to reverse such unreasonable laws.
If, as you admit, there is no reasonable way for a website to enforce minimum-age restrictions, then the law is unjust and should not be upheld. Indeed, it will be a good thing for the company to take the FTC to court and get the law struck down, not only as unconstitutional, but hopefully as stupid also. That might send a message to legislators who cry out "But think of the children!" and pass dumb laws as part of their election campaigns.
We want the system most likely to make America successful, not to appease someone's sense of fairness.
Actually, I think the reason America was created was to create a land of fairness. Perhaps you have heard this before:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
What ideal do you hold as good, if not fairness? What possible justification can you have for making one person's vote be worth less than another's?
Even the recent supreme court ruling tacitly condoned it by only complaining about instances of potential racial gerrymandering.
That's not quite what happened. The Supreme Court ruled that any division of districts is completely arbitrary, and thus there's no effective way to make laws to covern districting. For example, maybe some county reorganizes to favor the Republicans when it didn't previously -- how do you know the old districting wasn't unfair, and the changes actually fix the unbalance to correctly favor Republicans?
Do you expect people to work forever? Remember Bill has a 4 year old and a 10 year old, IIRC.
For some, being a good father during the tougher years might be more important than running a company. I'm sure he'd prefer his fame disappeared before his kids really started noticing it too. It may just be better for his whole family for him to disappear from the public eye (as much as someone like him could) and focus on his own agenda for a while.
Eating dogfood properly doesn't require doing it every day. I'm a Microsoft employee and I've used Live search exactly enough to report all the important bugs I feel exist. The number one thing that bugs me is that Live results don't appear instantly if you hit "back" from a clicked-on page to return to search results; the JavaScript appears to load it again from the server.
Beyond important feedback of that sort, one should always return to the product one prefers for development. My experience at MS is that employees use whatever they prefer: VIM, Emacs, Visual Studio are all in force. We encourage dogfooding to a great extent, but it's obviously never more important than having other teams legitimately get their work done. I work on Visual Studio, and while it disheartens me to hear some people might rather use VIM as their editor, one must be realistic and assume one's product cannot cater to all people. The best we can do is learn from existing software and how our clients (internal and external) want it to work and improve.
I have not heard anything about coolaid. Dogfood is a very different story.
Note: I am a Microsoft summer intern, so my views don't reflect those of MSFT and such. However, I must say it's generally a very positive atmosphere and beyond the dogfood aspect ("Help other teams test their products in real world scenarios") the culture seems supportive of "use whatever tools to get the job done". People are not fanatics nor blind. It has been a thoroughly positive experience so far:)
Ah come now, if a political party called the "Whigs" can be reputable and successful enough for the history books, I think an openly tongue-in-cheek Pirate Party stands a chance:-)
Slashdot Mirror
"Am I being detained?" If given an unclear answer, ask "Am I free to go?". Repeat until getting a clear answer! Example: http://www.thedailytube.com/video/10017/am-i-being-detained
Of course a computer is going to be good at computing. That doesn't mean it's thinking.
Edsger Dijkstra said it quite well:
The question of whether Machines Can Think ... is about as relevant as the question of whether Submarines Can Swim
> They could already see how good I was at technical learning from my degree.
So not true! I have interviewed many people who have a Master's degree in computer science, even, and they barely know anything. One guy didn't even know the basics of big-O notation (Landau notation), and how to analyze the complexity of functions. How can you have a master's degree and not know that? I don't know -- but there are a lot of people out there like that.
In my experience, you can't trust that degrees mean anything. Even from a top U.S. school, having a degree only means that the person learned something really well, but it might not have been the things you want in a programmer. I've worked with guys from MIT and Stanford who don't know what functional programming is, or what design patterns are.
To you, a degree means a lot, because you know what you went through. To a potential employer it means little, when looking for top engineers.
You think Internet access is magically going to make people start watching porn on airplanes? People already have laptop computers (which have hard drives) and don't.
Quit fearmongering.
Email isn't trivial to fake in such a way that it would stand up to any kind of scrutiny whatsoever. Already there are simple authentication protocols that are becoming widespread enough to secure the average user. If the receiving domain has any kind of proper configuration, it will be able to validate whether a mail was sent properly using one of SPF records, PTR, DomainKeys, or any reputation system.
Try to fake an email that looks like it authentically came from Amazon.com to a Yahoo account -- even from the perspective of a naive user, you can't do it.
To a user smart enough to examine mail headers, no forged email is good enough to stand up to any inspection. It is an incorrect rumor that email is easy to forge. Certainly if the issue came up in court, an expert witness would lay the question of whether it was forged to rest by examining the mail headers. Any decent MTA can do the same automatically.
For a random occasion, I went to buy a cigar from a mini-mart. I'm 22. I don't buy tobacco products generally, so perhaps I looked uncomfortable -- didn't know what I wanted, etc.
The clerk carded me, asked me a bunch of questions (including my age), and then finally called me a liar, said I wasn't old enough.
I get pissed whenever someone calls me a liar. People have a right to ask for ID, and that's not an insult. Taking my valid ID and subsequently calling me a liar is insulting.
I had my US passport in the car, luckily, which I stormed out and retrieve to hand to the formerly-smug clerk.
I asked her, "Do you think I would really forge a passport just to buy a cigar?"
She looked at me in kind of a dumb stupor and accepted my credit card.
Sometimes it just is an insulting process.
The quote itself is a link, to another page, where he is described as this foremost expert and quoted as saying:
In this situation, someone mistakenly believes he's a "scholar", declares him an expert, an Essjay does all he can to reinforce the notion by using that as weight in later arguments. Slashdot is not blowing this out of proportion at all. This guy is on the arbitration committee for God's sake
And Jimbo thinks this is OK? Lying about fake credentials to back up your arguments on Wikipedia... and as an admin... now on the arbitration committeee. Not a big deal?
Would you please explain why you don't think this is a big deal? Who's going to know how much policy, information, and any other content this guy has influenced with his lies? I'm revolted.
The other reason people like Imperial units is because they are often highly divisible numbers. 12 can be divided by 12,6,4,3,2,1. For common division operations, you therefore don't have to resort to decimals.
It's no coincidence we use 60 minutes to the hour to measure time -- 60 is also similarly divisible. 60, 30, 15, 12, 10, 5, 3, 2, 1. It's handy to be able to divide a quantity so many ways without decimals!
True, but a better analogy in this situation is the customers of the orchestra -- ie, the listeners. This might be a concert hall, or the person who commissioned the piece to be played (perhaps more often in older history).
The conductor is still accountable if the piece doesn't sound like what the customer (audience) expects.
I have to think that there's still something wrong with the process if the average user of a piece of software is expected to read compatibility lists. The sooner we start treating software seriously the sooner it will stop sucking. Honestly, if you buy a car, should you be expected to know its internals? To check "compatibility lists" for its parts?
And yes, I know that certain zealots will just "well that's too much to expect from volunteers" but what I'm saying is maybe it should be expected anyway. I have the childish hope that one day space ships will be as common as the personal computer
We, as a community, have been lax. It has done good and bad things. This is a bad one ("acceptable incompatibility").
The problem is that stupid companies think programmers with a degree are better, even though there are no university level programming degrees.
That's false. Plenty of universities offer professional terminal degrees. Such degrees are primarily focused on software development. I know this because I'm currently pursuing such a degree.From: http://compsci.rice.edu/academics.cfm?doc_id=4432 The Master of Computer Science (MCS) degree is a terminal, professional degree intended for students who will pursue a technical career in the computer industry. The MCS program normally requires three semesters of full-time study.
You have a strange idea of rights. None of your rights include the ability to break a contract you willingly entered into with someone. Let's say you downloaded music from iTunes. In order to do that, you had to accept their contract, their conditions. Part of their contract said "you agree to use the music we provide in exactly these ways". Some of those ways include copying to your iPod, and forbid other uses.
Those are your rights. Your rights to the music you have are exactly the ones granted to you by your contract and nothing more. You don't have a right to that music. You don't have fair use, because you agreed to give it up in the contract you signed. If you look closely, you will notice you are not buying a copy of the music; you are buying a license. This license does not grant you 'fair use' or any other such things.
I mean, I understand what you're saying -- those terms suck. But it has nothing to do with your "rights" here. Your rights end when you willingly agree to give them up by signing that contract. And remember, no one is forcing you to sign this contract. You're choosing to buy some 'licenses' with their terms.
Don't make the issue about something it's not. DRM is just an enforcement of the legal situation that already exists because of the contract you signed.
You make the mistake of assuming I endorse the copyright system as currently implemented by our government... I don't.
The idea of copyright -- as it was originally envisioned and implemented, was fine. Copyright would expire after some reasonable time. Things have gone downhill from there because corporations in the US are in bed with the government. And that sucks.
But the fact that the system is broken doesn't mean it's bad in the first place. Copyright is not the problem -- lobbying of the US government is the problem.
I would be very happy if copyright lasted 5-10 years.
To answer your question: if copyright went away entirely, I do think that the number of works created would decrease. Simple economics would tell you that. The idea is that, from some neutral state (w/o copyright), adding copyright creates incentive, which means that more works will be created. I don't want copyright to go away entirely, and I don't want it to be anywhere near how it is now. But I definitely think it should exist in some reasonable form.
You're mistaken. Copyright often benefits the distributors of content more than the creators.
In the short term, you are correct; but lawmakers consider both the short- and long-term.
In the long-term, copyright provides an incentive for people to create new things, and that benefits everyone in society.
Arguably, without copyright we would have many fewer interesting works as part of our culture.
Shouldn't DRM be uncrackable even with access to source code?
Quite the contrary -- all DRM should be crackable even without access to the source code.
Ultimately, if you have the ability to "play" the content, you can beat the DRM -- because that's what playing the content is, decrypting it. If you (your computer) can decrypt the content, then you can decrypt the content. Simple!
The distinction between which program on your computer can decrypt the content is *solely* one of obscurity and not one of encryption at all. You have the encryption key -- you can decrypt the content -- the only thing that's preventing it is obscurity of the location of the key, and the methods of the encryption algorithm. Both of those are Security Through Obscurity and are a bad thing. It's also why DRM will never actually work until the hardware gets on board.
Because you always have the key, you can always decrypt it.
What effect will the websites have on the law? That's the question I would ask.
Laws like this are clearly unenforceable. More importantly, it is not morally the website's job to police the people who visit it. It's the job of the parents. Legislators don't seem to win their positions based on campaigns of parental responsibility, however. The trend seems to be "blame everyone else for your kid's problems".
Look at the crap going on involving Grand Theft Auto: someone makes a game modification to show a tit, a tit that isn't even available without modifying the game, and tons of legislators go apeshit about how it's inappropriate for children. Clearly these people aren't worried about justice, and instead are worried about winning the votes of emotional parents, the Security Moms.
A reasonable argument can be made that, for example, liquor stores have a duty to prevent children from buying alcohol in them. However, you must also consider that it is extremely easy and reliable to verify the age of store patrons. No analogy exists online -- it is impossible.
Expecting websites to perform such policing is unquestionably unfair, and I suspect that the courts will agree. The law might have effect on some websites in the short term. In the long term, the websites will have the law overturned as unreasonable.
We just have to hope that the justices who hear these cases really have an interest in justice, unlike the legislators who passed these braindead laws in the first place.
America needs to raise its own damn children (and I say this as an American)
It absolutely matters that the law has no value. It is any citizen's duty to attempt to reverse such unreasonable laws.
If, as you admit, there is no reasonable way for a website to enforce minimum-age restrictions, then the law is unjust and should not be upheld. Indeed, it will be a good thing for the company to take the FTC to court and get the law struck down, not only as unconstitutional, but hopefully as stupid also. That might send a message to legislators who cry out "But think of the children!" and pass dumb laws as part of their election campaigns.
We want the system most likely to make America successful, not to appease someone's sense of fairness.
Actually, I think the reason America was created was to create a land of fairness. Perhaps you have heard this before:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
What ideal do you hold as good, if not fairness? What possible justification can you have for making one person's vote be worth less than another's?
That's all the supreme court said, AFAIK.
Do you expect people to work forever? Remember Bill has a 4 year old and a 10 year old, IIRC.
For some, being a good father during the tougher years might be more important than running a company. I'm sure he'd prefer his fame disappeared before his kids really started noticing it too. It may just be better for his whole family for him to disappear from the public eye (as much as someone like him could) and focus on his own agenda for a while.
Eating dogfood properly doesn't require doing it every day. I'm a Microsoft employee and I've used Live search exactly enough to report all the important bugs I feel exist. The number one thing that bugs me is that Live results don't appear instantly if you hit "back" from a clicked-on page to return to search results; the JavaScript appears to load it again from the server.
:)
Beyond important feedback of that sort, one should always return to the product one prefers for development. My experience at MS is that employees use whatever they prefer: VIM, Emacs, Visual Studio are all in force. We encourage dogfooding to a great extent, but it's obviously never more important than having other teams legitimately get their work done. I work on Visual Studio, and while it disheartens me to hear some people might rather use VIM as their editor, one must be realistic and assume one's product cannot cater to all people. The best we can do is learn from existing software and how our clients (internal and external) want it to work and improve.
I have not heard anything about coolaid. Dogfood is a very different story.
Note: I am a Microsoft summer intern, so my views don't reflect those of MSFT and such. However, I must say it's generally a very positive atmosphere and beyond the dogfood aspect ("Help other teams test their products in real world scenarios") the culture seems supportive of "use whatever tools to get the job done". People are not fanatics nor blind. It has been a thoroughly positive experience so far
Ah come now, if a political party called the "Whigs" can be reputable and successful enough for the history books, I think an openly tongue-in-cheek Pirate Party stands a chance :-)
while the usual pirate NOCD patches exist, the NOCD versions can't be used to play via the Blizard.Net servers.
Yes they can. You just need a legitimate CD key.