You say "I'm not subtly insinuating anything . .." and I agree that you are communicating openly. You merely want to say that Amazon would be punished in the market, maybe in the courts via a shareholder complaint, for not being this aggressive. I also think this is the case. I thin the chances are low, but the officers of Amazon would have been wrong not to at least think about them.
I just don't want people to feel that there is some shareholder obligation that forces companies to do illegal things if they can get away with them. I aggree that Amazon may have been in a catch 22 in this case -- punished by patent courts on one hand, punished by the stock market and maybe a shareholder's suit on the other. I think our legal system does many contradictory things and it may well punish the officers of Amazon in both cases. You are right to point out the foolishness of insisting that they take the "moral" stand -- the best systems generally work by making it in your own best interest to do the right thing, and suggesting the answer to a broken patent office is to count on everyday people to "do the right thing" and loose money is a recipe for a russian-style collapse.
If people carelessly use the phrase "fiduciary duty" in the place of "monetary incentive" it will be a bad thing. I have to admit your original post is not a misuse of the word; I should not have implied that *your* use was misplaced. I guess the only complaint I can make in with that post is the weak one that you didn't explain enough about the term.
I agree that they had to patent a patentable invention; it's just that if they have an unpatentable invention, but they can get away with patenting it, they are caught in a dilemma. Once they have the patent, it looks really suspicious to the stock holders if they don't attempt to enforce it. Especially in this age, where investors want strong aggressive businesses. Your remark to Kagato (the "AT&T held the patent on the Transitor" guy) about the 1950's being different is on the money. (If you ever read a bio of Sony and how he delt with the transistor patent issue, it's pretty interesting).
As for the duck test, all that can be bought and sold is not property. The government can destroy many types of rights, which are bought and sold, with out compensation; obviously the property which the Bill of Rights protects from unfair taking must be something more special than just that which can be bought and sold.
For example, what about the time limit on the patents ? By setting it at only 21 years, isn't the government "taking" the "property" that is the exclusive right to manufacture web pages which sell books with a single click, for all eternity ?
No, because the 21 year exclusive priviledge is not a property. It's just an incentive handed out by the government, like a farm subsidy. I believe that in the past tobacco farmers have bought and sold the subsidy rights to grow certain numbers of acres of tobacco at a guaranteed price. If the congress cancelled that program, it wouldn't be "taking" anything any more than cancelling a welfare handout would be taking something.
(By the way, I pleasantly surprised when I accidently clicked on your homepage to see that you work for Compaq in my hometown of Tomball -- I'm moving back there sometime soon.)
Excellent clarification of what a fiduciary duty is.
Essentially, the company's managers are making the argument that the shareholders gave them money while trusting they would behave like good businessmen.
However, this argument is suspiciously convenient. Claiming an implied, trusting contract with the voiceless shareholders falls into the same catagory as protecting the children; it is merely a way to distract attention from one's own motives. This is made clear by the typical ease with which executives take actions in their own interest and against the shareholders.
Fiduciary duty is not a bad thing, it is good. It is just a legal label for the duty of an executive to make reasonable efforts instead of just collecting his pay; it is saying that shareholders may trust in a basic level of performance from the people running the company. It is not the concept of fiduciary duty that I attack. I see fiduciary duty as a reasonable and good restriction on the powers of corporations.
But certain exploitations of certain types of opportunities don't fall under fiduciary duty. It seems to me that by bantering the phrase around carelessly, we risk letting ourselves be the tools of a propaganda effort that wants to spread the idea that any potential money-making effort by a company is required, and those executives are excused from normal moral and legal obligations.
A similar effort promoted the phrase "intellectual property", starting this whole thing. We need to kill the idea that there is anything but real property, made of atoms. Patents are just what the law defines them to be -- a restriction on the whole people in order to subsidize the reasearch efforts of a few, in order to encourage the advancement of the useful arts and sciences.
In a similar way governments encourage other economic activities by restricting the activities of everyone. An early example is when the King of England gave monopolies on trade with colonies to certain companies, so that the companies would have incentive to settle and develope those lands. More recently, utilities were granted monopolies because it was presummed developing the massive infrastructures necessary would not be worth it unless you had a very long period of no competition. Our (the US Federal) government has the right to hand out monopolies on products and processes in order to encourage people to think of more of them. By using the phrase "intellectual property", we subtly spread the notion that you can "own" the exclusive right to manufacture something, just as you can "own" land.
And now by careless use of the phrase "fiduciary responsibility" or "fiduciary duty" we are going to subtly insinuate that corporate executives have an obligation to take advantage of any weakness in society (such as the current weak patent office).
Unless we post vigorously and often whenever the creeping mis-application of the phrase appears;-)
Simply because you can make money for your shareholders doesn't give you a duty to do so. If Amazon had the oportunity to steal and get away with it, and the company did not, the shareholders have no claim. If Amazon has the oportunity to abuse the legal system or patent system for profit, that opportunity doesn't translate into a duty to do so.
The fiduciary duty is limited to those reasonable business activities which a normal person would expect to be part of the business.
Perhaps someone can post a link to one of the online legal dictionaries on this term ?
There are other problems with invoking the fiduciary responsibilty argument. One of them is that many companies so obviously ignore their shareholder obligations when convenient -- look at some of the huge bonuses given to CEOs of failing companies, or some of the more famous merger deals. In general, I would say that courts believe that fiduciary responsibility will be protected in most cases by the market -- people will sell the stock. It has to be a greivous case, with secret dealings and maybe a non-publicly traded company, before judges will hand down an award.
Lastly, I'd like to remind everyone of the Archer-Daniels-Midland case -- someone could argue that those executives had a fiduciary duty to conspire with the Japanese to fix prices, but they went to jail for that, not for failing shareholder obligation.
Hopefully, Amazon will get slapped with a court settlement (judges can be vicious if they sense a big corporation is abusing the system to the detriment of the court system's reputation and power -- let's hope Amazon has to pay court costs and punitive damages), or burned by the boycott, and we'll teach those shareholders to ask their directors to avoid these tactics.
The problem with this boycott, is that Amazon is one of these internet dot-coms that don't seem to need any revenue. The way to really hurt them is to convience all your day-trading friends to short them.
I do use junkbuster on a few of my browsing accounts. It is awesome, a very good thing.
But some places over-use cookies, forcing you to turn them on for that site. Not just slashdot and the New York Times -- I am not sure how they could avoid using them. But try to go to mapquest or cars.com and refine a search several times with cookies turned off. cars.com doesn't work at all; it keeps the zip code in a cookie (and also uses java, unfortunately).
Right now I turned off junkbuster filtering for slashdot and nytimes.com. It works ok -- I remove the junkbuster proxie when I have to use mapquest or cars.com. But a more general solution might drive a more societal change, and stop these people from feeling so free about tracking you in the first place.
Ever since that slashdot article on cookies in ad banners (I recommend reading it if you haven't already -- it is here: http://slashdot.org/yro/99/10/22/0249212.shtml) I've been thinking of ways to make it hard to track me via cookies. I'd like to automate something so I wouldn't have to do it by hand. What I do currently is edit ~/.netscape/cookies in emacs while browsing, and randomly change things. I set any dates I see to be right after Y2K, to help them in their testing, and transpose blocks of letters.
(Another post below observed how much of the information mined is wrong -- titles and address wrong, for instance. I always give a mangled address to the Radio Shack people who insist on asking for it when you make a purchase. I know someone who was called for a political poll, and instinctively lied to say he was supporting the underdog, figuring it was in his interest to see the front-runner campaign a little harder. I think it is in our interest to lie as much as possible to these sorts of people. Hey, I just convinced myself to go to the local grocery store and sign up for some fake discount cards.)
But anyway, back to cookie-diddling. What I want to do is write a shell script wrapper that spawns of netscape and a second process, which watches the cookie file and does the following sorts of things:
-- I want it to keep a number (say, fifty) New York Times account passwords and usernames. As I browse the nytimes.com, it should switch them in and out at random from the cookie file. This way, nytimes.com sees a number of users making random deep requests into the site, and cannot track the series of articles I read. It should be able to occasionally abandon a username password and pick up a new one automatically.
-- Play with advertiser banner ad cookies: either scramble them and let the site retrieve them, or better yet, somehow trade ad cookies back and forth with several users, thus mixing our viewing histories. The more people the better. Maybe we can set up some type of server that everyone can use.
-- Retrieve new cookies off the web that don't represent a page view, and allow them to be retrieved by the site later. It could submit a randomly choosen dictionary word to yahoo or alltheweb and crawl those links til it got some nice cookies, and toss them in the cookies file. In fact, writing a continuous low-level background task to do this all the time might be good too.
-- Finally, I want to be able to view some sort of statistics on what sites set the most cookies, how often they retrieve them, etc. Basically, the problem here is that I can't get a good idea of what information they are collecting. I can set netscape to pop the annoying little window everytime someone wants to set a cookie, but I'd like to log when they are retrieved as well. Anyone know how to track that ?
I think my last point is the most useful. While engaging a little guerilla war with data miners might be interesting for a while, what would bring real change is if the major browsers automatically kept track of them keeping track of you and allowed you to view the information in an understandable form. This might upset enough people that things would actually change -- those trusting techno-impaired out there would see this and begin to modify their buying practices.
If anyone out there has already written this sort of thing, could you please share, rather than making me re-write it ?
Why XML/XSL ? Is it purely a matter of not wanting Word due to the binary format, and looking for another format that has idiot-style editors, or can be exported from Word ? Or does this offer something I'm missing ?
Under "presentation", you mention a frontend to serve files from CVS through the web server. Doesn't it make more sense to just have the static web directory, and do a cvs update on a regular basis, say with a cron job ?
I will have to solve a problem similar to this in the near future. I plan to write all of the documents in LaTeX, and write Makefiles in the various directories that will use latex2html to generate a web readable version, or by a different make command, generate pdf or ps. I will have everything under cvs. I intend that access for posting will be through ssh and cvs -- you can set the CVS_RSH environment variable to tell cvs to use ssh to access a remote repository.
On the server I will occasionally do a "cvs up; make html" in the web directory. I could also have a cgi that would do the same; but anyone who can post will have an ssh-reachable account and can do it themselves, so it would be a possibly insecure convienence.
People who use Word will be SOL; there will be helpful links to Mac and Windows versions of LaTeX and emacs. It won't make a difference in the long run; they won't ever write anything in LaTeX, and they'll start using Word and at first email, later other servers, to exchange documents. But I believe that you have to fight the good fight; also, given the amount of stuff I have to write, I think that the only way to keep my sanity and any social life at all is to have a good LaTeX template doc and use it for everything.
Let's review how this would meet your needs:
--ability to post files to a directory structure: if you are thinking of something point-and-clicky like FrontPage, then you can look at some of the front ends or wrappers to cvs. I use pcl-cvs.el. There are some girly java and tcl/tk things also.
--receive notifications of new postings: in cvs you can set a "cvs watch". Or the makefiles can blast a message if something is remade when they run. I don't intend to have any sort of automatic notification, because it seems like spam.
--single-click-to-open rather than download and open: Well, I would browse the document library by checking out a copy from cvs, but I suppose others could look at the web and click on the html versions
The main problem is that cvs doesn't handle binary format files very well, so Word is kind of out. Oh well. I think that the other people on this project will never use LaTeX and eventually they will put the frontpage extensions on the apache web server, but I'll always be able to say I tried to do the right thing from the start.
At my company, I installed linux on a Dell Latitude, so that I could work on code at home and during trips.
In fact, it worked out that the best use of it was to run live demonstrations of our unix software projects when traveling. The only development use I really got out of it was using it to dial in to the network and display xterms from my desktop. But because of the demo usage, other projects here caught on, and I have installed Linux on four other laptops.
As far as all those other issues, we've used it a few times on trips as a router on a small laptop LAN, but that was usually not worth the time it took to set up, in my opinion.
The biggest limitation on the machines usuage was the lack of disk space; our demo requires a large amount of data, and our system is pretty bloated, so it is hard to keep a development copy and the demo scripts and data on the hard drive. The most recent machine to receive Linux here was a Dell Ispirion 7000; that had a 14 GB harddrive (it now comes with a 25) and it is faster than anyone of our Sun stations. The person who has it uses it like a desktop machine, except that it is easier to take on the road.
The biggest linux problem I face is that switching from the LCD to an external projector display sometimes messes up X; the screen shifts about 25 pixels to the right.
This is straying off topic, but the book "The Penguin Book of Lies", editted by Philip Kerr, is one of the best books I have read.
It is a collection of various famous lies from history, ranging from British Propaganda about the Germans during WW1 to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion to biblical stuff. Very good.
It isn't available on Amazon. www.powellsbooks.com doesn't seem to have it either. If I could find a copy on the web for under twenty dollars, I'd buy it, even though I've read it before (my father's copy).
Tools like these can be used to defend the actions you wanted to take anyway.
Similarly, if you are a manager at corporation that wants to fire half its workers, you can hire a high priced consulting firm of some sort or another to send in a few good bull shiters fresh out of school with no experience in your industry to produce the graphs, charts, and statistics you need to prove that you have to do it to save the business.
If I were a principal at a school, this would just be ass-cover. You think I'd only keep one database ? Ha. I'd have several different copies, and I would experiment entering or not entering different information on different students. For each student that I wanted to be able to suspend quickly on little grounds (trouble makers, weirdos, etc), I'd make sure I had a database around that listed him as the most dangerous guy in the world. One for each potential victim; when the next columbine happened, I'd have a ready made excuse to send them home until I worked my panties back out of my crack.
Similarly, just in case it actually happened on my watch, you'd want a database you could whip out showing the guy was only the 30th most dangerous person in school.
I think what has to happen in our society is that there has to be an awareness of how these things can be manipulated. I think there will be abuse of this "profiling databases" until the public views them with the same jaundiced cynicism that they veiw (or should view) statistical studies. When they can't be used as ass-cover, then maybe people will actually put them to real use.
You say: "You know when someone seems a little off to you, or gives you the tingle in the back of your neck/unsettledness in your gut type feeling. It's when we don't pay attention to those instincts that trouble arises."
Nonsense. I know numerous people who have given me that that feeling, and so far none has been a murderer or other criminal (lucky for me). And I think that having teachers, principals, policemen, and other authority figures use "gut type feeling" to make decisions is incredibly stupid.
Think of how many people who would never hurt anyone you would punish by exercising this extremely unpredictive type of crap.
Before anyone spends my tax money to watch, persecute, "help" with mandatory psychiatric visits, or otherwise discriminate someone from among their peers, I would want their test to predict the behavior in question with a false alarm rate of less than %50. Even the simply asking if the person has threatened the action before doesn't meet that standard.
If your "tingling at the back of the neck" were actually used by people who mattered, think of how baddly it would go for any normal black student, who was a little too aggressive socially or had a particularly strong black accent or a fascination with ganster rap or whatever, with a redneck principal, teacher, or coach. Unfortunately, "gut feeling" are exactly what people guide themselves by in many places.
Does anyone know why the X server on one of these machines takes up 120 Mb RAM when it's doing nothing ? X servers on linux usually take up 8 to 16 Mb. If you are running on an Ultra or other solaris machine, do a "top -o size" and check it out. Why does Sun's X take up so much room ? How did they write such a monster ? In general I've been pretty pleased with Solaris as an operating system.
I think that there is a lot to be learned from haters. Often their hatred is born from the experience of a a life time of trying to do the tasks that the software in question is least capable of, and it gives them some insight.
Take "The Unix Haters Handbook". I was securely convinced that Unix was the greatest thing possible until I read that. Then I saw people complaining of many of the same problems that I had trained myself to work around, and further learned how some of them became embedded during unix's evolution. At least I now can immagine something better. I'd like to try out one of those lisp machines one day.
Anyway, I think a rabid Windows Hater or Mac hater might be a great person to teach an intro class. The hatred should be generated by close contact with the operating system and not close contact with it's advocates, of course.
The shelf has a plethora of worthless books on linux and that unmentionable OS. It's great to see my tax dollars being wasted on that crap. What happens is that someone hears about the latest next-greatest computer development, and rushes out and buys whatever has "Unleashed" or "in 21 days" on the title just as a way of calming the anxiety. I'd much rather buy them a few beers and tell them to look it up the web.
Also check out: http://www.dcfl.com/sgi.jpg There are some sun monitors to the left.
Can anyone identify the equipment on the left hand side here, and on the shelf ? Looks like a stack of disks. http://www.dcfl.com/vogon2.jpg Oh wait, if there's a file named vogon2.jgp then maybe . . . let me try hand keying the URL instead of clicking links . . . http://www.dcfl.com/vogon.jpg
oh yeah -- much better view.
(wanna bet there's a machine named vogon on their net ?)
(If you stick a "2" in front of the ".jpg" on a couple of the others, you can get more unlinked pics. Nothing interesting, more of the same -- mac2.jpg has an imac box in it. Or just a poster ? It's definitely an imac keyboard.)
And finally, and ultra 60 -- nice machine, I'm using one now. I don't think that's Sun's default environment, either;) http://www.dcfl.com/sun.jpg
This whole set of pictures kind of makes be nervous though. I feel like I'm shoulder surfing. I hope these guys thought about the fact that anything they put on the web might be viewed by the objects of their investigations -- I've got a yellow sticky note on my monitor right now with the passwords to half a dozen accounts written on it, and I sure wouldn't want some idiot making a company web page to wander in and snap a jpeg of that and post it on the web.
-- you are solving a problem that mostly doesn't exist. The system pretty much works, and you are over-engineering it.
-- "The Problem" is not bad moderators; as you note, there are more good than bad people, so just give out more moderator points. The number of moderator points outstanding should be a function of the number of comments; contentious "i hate stevens" types will generate more moderators with their multiple posts.
-- (as others have said above) Don't kill the ability of good moderators to switch to a "veiw everything" mode to seek out gems to be moderated up. If you want to add on three moderator points to used at random, and leave the other five, that might be ok. How about giving out moderator points on a per-article basis ? Then the contentious articles could receive more moderation, and people would view the main page and see an article marked as moderateable.
-- integration of M2 moderation into the comments list is obviously the way to go.
-- Again: stop worrying. The system mostly works. Some people will always be unhappy. For a system that has humans in the loop,/. works amazingly well.
I think really sensitive information might be stored on a windows machine if that was what they wanted for the job at hand.
The security is more likely to be enforced through no network connection, being in a metal room so that no electormagnetic signals can escape, and simply never allowing any recording media of any sort to leave the room once it has entered. Beepers, cell phones, and other electronic devices will also never enter and especially never leave that room. Really secrete places probably have filters on the power or their own power supply so nohting can escape over that channel either. No modem will be left in a computer connected to a live line (there is probably not a live telephone line in the room) so no trojan process can dial out in the middle of the night and up load stuff.
The secrete data can then be manipulated with whatever software you want. Given such a situation, how would you steal data ? You might slip them a messed up copy of something so they'd loose their data or otherwise sabatoge the effort, but there is no channel for you to receive information on the outside.
I agree that scheme is a better first language than Python. That is not to say it would be the language of choice for many tasks; but it would be the language of choice for teaching.
I recommend the book by Mark Watson, "Programming in Scheme: Learn Scheme Through Artificial Intelligence Programs". (It is not on Amazon right now, but I have seen it in SoftPro and MicroCenter bookstores. You might look at http://www.markwatson.com, but I think that the stuff he used to have there (scheme code from the book) is gone now.) If I were teaching a high school or Junior High level class, I would take this book and the "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" by Harold Ableson, and use a mixture of those two for two to three months.
Then I would switch to another language. I think you can learn enough scheme fast enough to do interesting things before the semester runs out (the Watson book is just awesome at this), and I think the intellectual stimuli from being forced to the same or similar problems in different languages is just too valuable to pass up.
I'm not sure what the second language would be. I might let the kids pick for themselves -- either do a small project in a new language, or a larger one in scheme, for a final project.
Slashdot Mirror
You say "I'm not subtly insinuating anything . . ." and I agree that you are communicating openly. You merely want to say that Amazon would be punished in the market, maybe in the courts via a shareholder complaint, for not being this aggressive. I also think this is the case. I thin the chances are low, but the officers of Amazon would have been wrong not to at least think about them.
I just don't want people to feel that there is some shareholder obligation that forces companies to do illegal things if they can get away with them. I aggree that Amazon may have been in a catch 22 in this case -- punished by patent courts on one hand, punished by the stock market and maybe a shareholder's suit on the other. I think our legal system does many contradictory things and it may well punish the officers of Amazon in both cases. You are right to point out the foolishness of insisting that they take the "moral" stand -- the best systems generally work by making it in your own best interest to do the right thing, and suggesting the answer to a broken patent office is to count on everyday people to "do the right thing" and loose money is a recipe for a russian-style collapse.
If people carelessly use the phrase "fiduciary duty" in the place of "monetary incentive" it will be a bad thing. I have to admit your original post is not a misuse of the word; I should not have implied that *your* use was misplaced. I guess the only complaint I can make in with that post is the weak one that you didn't explain enough about the term.
I agree that they had to patent a patentable invention; it's just that if they have an unpatentable invention, but they can get away with patenting it, they are caught in a dilemma. Once they have the patent, it looks really suspicious to the stock holders if they don't attempt to enforce it. Especially in this age, where investors want strong aggressive businesses. Your remark to Kagato (the "AT&T held the patent on the Transitor" guy) about the 1950's being different is on the money. (If you ever read a bio of Sony and how he delt with the transistor patent issue, it's pretty interesting).
As for the duck test, all that can be bought and sold is not property. The government can destroy many types of rights, which are bought and sold, with out compensation; obviously the property which the Bill of Rights protects from unfair taking must be something more special than just that which can be bought and sold.
For example, what about the time limit on the patents ? By setting it at only 21 years, isn't the government "taking" the "property" that is the exclusive right to manufacture web pages which sell books with a single click, for all eternity ?
No, because the 21 year exclusive priviledge is not a property. It's just an incentive handed out by the government, like a farm subsidy. I believe that in the past tobacco farmers have bought and sold the subsidy rights to grow certain numbers of acres of tobacco at a guaranteed price. If the congress cancelled that program, it wouldn't be "taking" anything any more than cancelling a welfare handout would be taking something.
(By the way, I pleasantly surprised when I accidently clicked on your homepage to see that you work for Compaq in my hometown of Tomball -- I'm moving back there sometime soon.)
Excellent clarification of what a fiduciary duty is.
;-)
Essentially, the company's managers are making the argument that the shareholders gave them money while trusting they would behave like good businessmen.
However, this argument is suspiciously convenient. Claiming an implied, trusting contract with the voiceless shareholders falls into the same catagory as protecting the children; it is merely a way to distract attention from one's own motives. This is made clear by the typical ease with which executives take actions in their own interest and against the shareholders.
Fiduciary duty is not a bad thing, it is good. It is just a legal label for the duty of an executive to make reasonable efforts instead of just collecting his pay; it is saying that shareholders may trust in a basic level of performance from the people running the company. It is not the concept of fiduciary duty that I attack. I see fiduciary duty as a reasonable and good restriction on the powers of corporations.
But certain exploitations of certain types of opportunities don't fall under fiduciary duty. It seems to me that by bantering the phrase around carelessly, we risk letting ourselves be the tools of a propaganda effort that wants to spread the idea that any potential money-making effort by a company is required, and those executives are excused from normal moral and legal obligations.
A similar effort promoted the phrase "intellectual property", starting this whole thing. We need to kill the idea that there is anything but real property, made of atoms. Patents are just what the law defines them to be -- a restriction on the whole people in order to subsidize the reasearch efforts of a few, in order to encourage the advancement of the useful arts and sciences.
In a similar way governments encourage other economic activities by restricting the activities of everyone. An early example is when the King of England gave monopolies on trade with colonies to certain companies, so that the companies would have incentive to settle and develope those lands. More recently, utilities were granted monopolies because it was presummed developing the massive infrastructures necessary would not be worth it unless you had a very long period of no competition. Our (the US Federal) government has the right to hand out monopolies on products and processes in order to encourage people to think of more of them. By using the phrase "intellectual property", we subtly spread the notion that you can "own" the exclusive right to manufacture something, just as you can "own" land.
And now by careless use of the phrase "fiduciary responsibility" or "fiduciary duty" we are going to subtly insinuate that corporate executives have an obligation to take advantage of any weakness in society (such as the current weak patent office).
Unless we post vigorously and often whenever the creeping mis-application of the phrase appears
Simply because you can make money for your shareholders doesn't give you a duty to do so. If Amazon had the oportunity to steal and get away with it, and the company did not, the shareholders have no claim. If Amazon has the oportunity to abuse the legal system or patent system for profit, that opportunity doesn't translate into a duty to do so.
The fiduciary duty is limited to those reasonable business activities which a normal person would expect to be part of the business.
Perhaps someone can post a link to one of the online legal dictionaries on this term ?
There are other problems with invoking the fiduciary responsibilty argument. One of them is that many companies so obviously ignore their shareholder obligations when convenient -- look at some of the huge bonuses given to CEOs of failing companies, or some of the more famous merger deals. In general, I would say that courts believe that fiduciary responsibility will be protected in most cases by the market -- people will sell the stock. It has to be a greivous case, with secret dealings and maybe a non-publicly traded company, before judges will hand down an award.
Lastly, I'd like to remind everyone of the Archer-Daniels-Midland case -- someone could argue that those executives had a fiduciary duty to conspire with the Japanese to fix prices, but they went to jail for that, not for failing shareholder obligation.
Hopefully, Amazon will get slapped with a court settlement (judges can be vicious if they sense a big corporation is abusing the system to the detriment of the court system's reputation and power -- let's hope Amazon has to pay court costs and punitive damages), or burned by the boycott, and we'll teach those shareholders to ask their directors to avoid these tactics.
The problem with this boycott, is that Amazon is one of these internet dot-coms that don't seem to need any revenue. The way to really hurt them is to convience all your day-trading friends to short them.
I do use junkbuster on a few of my browsing accounts. It is awesome, a very good thing.
But some places over-use cookies, forcing you to turn them on for that site. Not just slashdot and the New York Times -- I am not sure how they could avoid using them. But try to go to mapquest or cars.com and refine a search several times with cookies turned off. cars.com doesn't work at all; it keeps the zip code in a cookie (and also uses java, unfortunately).
Right now I turned off junkbuster filtering for slashdot and nytimes.com. It works ok -- I remove the junkbuster proxie when I have to use mapquest or cars.com. But a more general solution might drive a more societal change, and stop these people from feeling so free about tracking you in the first place.
Ever since that slashdot article on cookies in ad banners (I recommend reading it if you haven't already -- it is here: http://slashdot.org/yro/99/10/22/0249212.shtml) I've been thinking of ways to make it hard to track me via cookies. I'd like to automate something so I wouldn't have to do it by hand. What I do currently is edit ~/.netscape/cookies in emacs while browsing, and randomly change things. I set any dates I see to be right after Y2K, to help them in their testing, and transpose blocks of letters.
(Another post below observed how much of the information mined is wrong -- titles and address wrong, for instance. I always give a mangled address to the Radio Shack people who insist on asking for it when you make a purchase. I know someone who was called for a political poll, and instinctively lied to say he was supporting the underdog, figuring it was in his interest to see the front-runner campaign a little harder. I think it is in our interest to lie as much as possible to these sorts of people. Hey, I just convinced myself to go to the local grocery store and sign up for some fake discount cards.)
But anyway, back to cookie-diddling. What I want to do is write a shell script wrapper that spawns of netscape and a second process, which watches the cookie file and does the following sorts of things:
-- I want it to keep a number (say, fifty) New York Times account passwords and usernames. As I browse the nytimes.com, it should switch them in and out at random from the cookie file. This way, nytimes.com sees a number of users making random deep requests into the site, and cannot track the series of articles I read. It should be able to occasionally abandon a username password and pick up a new one automatically.
-- Play with advertiser banner ad cookies: either scramble them and let the site retrieve them, or better yet, somehow trade ad cookies back and forth with several users, thus mixing our viewing histories. The more people the better. Maybe we can set up some type of server that everyone can use.
-- Retrieve new cookies off the web that don't represent a page view, and allow them to be retrieved by the site later. It could submit a randomly choosen dictionary word to yahoo or alltheweb and crawl those links til it got some nice cookies, and toss them in the cookies file. In fact, writing a continuous low-level background task to do this all the time might be good too.
-- Finally, I want to be able to view some sort of statistics on what sites set the most cookies, how often they retrieve them, etc. Basically, the problem here is that I can't get a good idea of what information they are collecting. I can set netscape to pop the annoying little window everytime someone wants to set a cookie, but I'd like to log when they are retrieved as well. Anyone know how to track that ?
I think my last point is the most useful. While engaging a little guerilla war with data miners might be interesting for a while, what would bring real change is if the major browsers automatically kept track of them keeping track of you and allowed you to view the information in an understandable form. This might upset enough people that things would actually change -- those trusting techno-impaired out there would see this and begin to modify their buying practices.
If anyone out there has already written this sort of thing, could you please share, rather than making me re-write it ?
--Rob
Why XML/XSL ? Is it purely a matter of not wanting Word due to the binary format, and looking for another format that has idiot-style editors, or can be exported from Word ? Or does this offer something I'm missing ?
Under "presentation", you mention a frontend to serve files from CVS through the web server. Doesn't it make more sense to just have the static web directory, and do a cvs update on a regular basis, say with a cron job ?
I will have to solve a problem similar to this in the near future. I plan to write all of the documents in LaTeX, and write Makefiles in the various directories that will use latex2html to generate a web readable version, or by a different make command, generate pdf or ps. I will have everything under cvs. I intend that access for posting will be through ssh and cvs -- you can set the CVS_RSH environment variable to tell cvs to use ssh to access a remote repository.
On the server I will occasionally do a "cvs up; make html" in the web directory. I could also have a cgi that would do the same; but anyone who can post will have an ssh-reachable account and can do it themselves, so it would be a possibly insecure convienence.
People who use Word will be SOL; there will be helpful links to Mac and Windows versions of LaTeX and emacs. It won't make a difference in the long run; they won't ever write anything in LaTeX, and they'll start using Word and at first email, later other servers, to exchange documents. But I believe that you have to fight the good fight; also, given the amount of stuff I have to write, I think that the only way to keep my sanity and any social life at all is to have a good LaTeX template doc and use it for everything.
Let's review how this would meet your needs:
--ability to post files to a directory structure: if you are thinking of something point-and-clicky like FrontPage, then you can look at some of the front ends or wrappers to cvs. I use pcl-cvs.el. There are some girly java and tcl/tk things also.
--receive notifications of new postings: in cvs you can set a "cvs watch". Or the makefiles can blast a message if something is remade when they run. I don't intend to have any sort of automatic notification, because it seems like spam.
--single-click-to-open rather than download and open: Well, I would browse the document library by checking out a copy from cvs, but I suppose others could look at the web and click on the html versions
The main problem is that cvs doesn't handle binary format files very well, so Word is kind of out. Oh well. I think that the other people on this project will never use LaTeX and eventually they will put the frontpage extensions on the apache web server, but I'll always be able to say I tried to do the right thing from the start.
At my company, I installed linux on a Dell Latitude, so that I could work on code at home and during trips.
In fact, it worked out that the best use of it was to run live demonstrations of our unix software projects when traveling. The only development use I really got out of it was using it to dial in to the network and display xterms from my desktop. But because of the demo usage, other projects here caught on, and I have installed Linux on four other laptops.
As far as all those other issues, we've used it a few times on trips as a router on a small laptop LAN, but that was usually not worth the time it took to set up, in my opinion.
The biggest limitation on the machines usuage was the lack of disk space; our demo requires a large amount of data, and our system is pretty bloated, so it is hard to keep a development copy and the demo scripts and data on the hard drive. The most recent machine to receive Linux here was a Dell Ispirion 7000; that had a 14 GB harddrive (it now comes with a 25) and it is faster than anyone of our Sun stations. The person who has it uses it like a desktop machine, except that it is easier to take on the road.
The biggest linux problem I face is that switching from the LCD to an external projector display sometimes messes up X; the screen shifts about 25 pixels to the right.
This is straying off topic, but the book "The Penguin Book of Lies", editted by Philip Kerr, is one of the best books I have read.
It is a collection of various famous lies from history, ranging from British Propaganda about the Germans during WW1 to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion to biblical stuff. Very good.
It isn't available on Amazon. www.powellsbooks.com doesn't seem to have it either. If I could find a copy on the web for under twenty dollars, I'd buy it, even though I've read it before (my father's copy).
Tools like these can be used to defend the actions you wanted to take anyway.
Similarly, if you are a manager at corporation that wants to fire half its workers, you can hire a high priced consulting firm of some sort or another to send in a few good bull shiters fresh out of school with no experience in your industry to produce the graphs, charts, and statistics you need to prove that you have to do it to save the business.
If I were a principal at a school, this would just be ass-cover. You think I'd only keep one database ? Ha. I'd have several different copies, and I would experiment entering or not entering different information on different students. For each student that I wanted to be able to suspend quickly on little grounds (trouble makers, weirdos, etc), I'd make sure I had a database around that listed him as the most dangerous guy in the world. One for each potential victim; when the next columbine happened, I'd have a ready made excuse to send them home until I worked my panties back out of my crack.
Similarly, just in case it actually happened on my watch, you'd want a database you could whip out showing the guy was only the 30th most dangerous person in school.
I think what has to happen in our society is that there has to be an awareness of how these things can be manipulated. I think there will be abuse of this "profiling databases" until the public views them with the same jaundiced cynicism that they veiw (or should view) statistical studies. When they can't be used as ass-cover, then maybe people will actually put them to real use.
You say: "You know when someone seems a little off to you, or gives you the tingle in the back of your neck/unsettledness in your gut type feeling. It's when we don't pay attention to those instincts that trouble arises."
Nonsense. I know numerous people who have given me that that feeling, and so far none has been a murderer or other criminal (lucky for me). And I think that having teachers, principals, policemen, and other authority figures use "gut type feeling" to make decisions is incredibly stupid.
Think of how many people who would never hurt anyone you would punish by exercising this extremely unpredictive type of crap.
Before anyone spends my tax money to watch, persecute, "help" with mandatory psychiatric visits, or otherwise discriminate someone from among their peers, I would want their test to predict the behavior in question with a false alarm rate of less than %50. Even the simply asking if the person has threatened the action before doesn't meet that standard.
If your "tingling at the back of the neck" were actually used by people who mattered, think of how baddly it would go for any normal black student, who was a little too aggressive socially or had a particularly strong black accent or a fascination with ganster rap or whatever, with a redneck principal, teacher, or coach. Unfortunately, "gut feeling" are exactly what people guide themselves by in many places.
Does anyone know why the X server on one of these machines takes up 120 Mb RAM when it's doing nothing ? X servers on linux usually take up 8 to 16 Mb. If you are running on an Ultra or other solaris machine, do a "top -o size" and check it out. Why does Sun's X take up so much room ? How did they write such a monster ? In general I've been pretty pleased with Solaris as an operating system.
I think that there is a lot to be learned from haters. Often their hatred is born from the experience of a a life time of trying to do the tasks that the software in question is least capable of, and it gives them some insight.
Take "The Unix Haters Handbook". I was securely convinced that Unix was the greatest thing possible until I read that. Then I saw people complaining of many of the same problems that I had trained myself to work around, and further learned how some of them became embedded during unix's evolution. At least I now can immagine something better. I'd like to try out one of those lisp machines one day.
Anyway, I think a rabid Windows Hater or Mac hater might be a great person to teach an intro class. The hatred should be generated by close contact with the operating system and not close contact with it's advocates, of course.
The picture for linux material is this:
;)
http://www.dcfl.com/mac.jpg
The shelf has a plethora of worthless books on linux and that unmentionable OS. It's great to see my tax dollars being wasted on that crap. What happens is that someone hears about the latest next-greatest computer development, and rushes out and buys whatever has "Unleashed" or "in 21 days" on the title just as a way of calming the anxiety. I'd much rather buy them a few beers and tell them to look it up the web.
Also check out:
http://www.dcfl.com/sgi.jpg
There are some sun monitors to the left.
Can anyone identify the equipment on the left hand side here, and on the shelf ? Looks like a stack of disks.
http://www.dcfl.com/vogon2.jpg
Oh wait, if there's a file named vogon2.jgp then maybe . . . let me try hand keying the URL instead of clicking links . . .
http://www.dcfl.com/vogon.jpg
oh yeah -- much better view.
(wanna bet there's a machine named vogon on their net ?)
(If you stick a "2" in front of the ".jpg" on a couple of the others, you can get more unlinked pics. Nothing interesting, more of the same -- mac2.jpg has an imac box in it. Or just a poster ? It's definitely an imac keyboard.)
And finally, and ultra 60 -- nice machine, I'm using one now. I don't think that's Sun's default environment, either
http://www.dcfl.com/sun.jpg
This whole set of pictures kind of makes be nervous though. I feel like I'm shoulder surfing. I hope these guys thought about the fact that anything they put on the web might be viewed by the objects of their investigations -- I've got a yellow sticky note on my monitor right now with the passwords to half a dozen accounts written on it, and I sure wouldn't want some idiot making a company web page to wander in and snap a jpeg of that and post it on the web.
Hmm. I made myself think. I should hide that.
Here are my thoughts:
/. works amazingly well.
-- you are solving a problem that mostly doesn't exist. The system pretty much works, and you are over-engineering it.
-- "The Problem" is not bad moderators; as you note, there are more good than bad people, so just give out more moderator points. The number of moderator points outstanding should be a function of the number of comments; contentious "i hate stevens" types will generate more moderators with their multiple posts.
-- (as others have said above) Don't kill the ability of good moderators to switch to a "veiw everything" mode to seek out gems to be moderated up. If you want to add on three moderator points to used at random, and leave the other five, that might be ok. How about giving out moderator points on a per-article basis ? Then the contentious articles could receive more moderation, and people would view the main page and see an article marked as moderateable.
-- integration of M2 moderation into the comments list is obviously the way to go.
-- Again: stop worrying. The system mostly works. Some people will always be unhappy. For a system that has humans in the loop,
I think really sensitive information might be stored on a windows machine if that was what they wanted for the job at hand.
The security is more likely to be enforced through no network connection, being in a metal room so that no electormagnetic signals can escape, and simply never allowing any recording media of any sort to leave the room once it has entered. Beepers, cell phones, and other electronic devices will also never enter and especially never leave that room. Really secrete places probably have filters on the power or their own power supply so nohting can escape over that channel either. No modem will be left in a computer connected to a live line (there is probably not a live telephone line in the room) so no trojan process can dial out in the middle of the night and up load stuff.
The secrete data can then be manipulated with whatever software you want. Given such a situation, how would you steal data ? You might slip them a messed up copy of something so they'd loose their data or otherwise sabatoge the effort, but there is no channel for you to receive information on the outside.
I agree that scheme is a better first language than Python. That is not to say it would be the language of choice for many tasks; but it would be the language of choice for teaching.
I recommend the book by Mark Watson, "Programming in Scheme: Learn Scheme Through Artificial Intelligence Programs". (It is not on Amazon right now, but I have seen it in SoftPro and MicroCenter bookstores. You might look at http://www.markwatson.com, but I think that the stuff he used to have there (scheme code from the book) is gone now.) If I were teaching a high school or Junior High level class, I would take this book and the "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" by Harold Ableson, and use a mixture of those two for two to three months.
Then I would switch to another language. I think you can learn enough scheme fast enough to do interesting things before the semester runs out (the Watson book is just awesome at this), and I think the intellectual stimuli from being forced to the same or similar problems in different languages is just too valuable to pass up.
I'm not sure what the second language would be. I might let the kids pick for themselves -- either do a small project in a new language, or a larger one in scheme, for a final project.
I object to the fact that whitespace matters in python.