No, you missed the point. That has nothing to do with this Linux bashing trash. Your point is correct in theory, but if it's irrelevant to the SCOX v. IBM case, who cares?
Furthermore, if that were *really* what the case was about, why the several years worth of bullshit over copyright infringement that didn't exist first? Occam's Razor says SCOX is full of shit, my friend.
Holy shit. Did you read that summary you linked to? That has got to be one of the most awfully written, incoherent reams of technobabble I've ever seen. This guy hasn't a fucking clue.
For example, read the following "gem" of a sentence:
The book is targeted to systems employees who need to understand and counter the management pressures that prevent them from successfully delivering services to users and to middle and upper management people outside systems who need to understand what the service level options and relative costs really are and why systems people often succeed personally by failing professionally.
How the FUCK does *this* guy write columns for magazines? Who on earth would pay for this kind of shit?
Just like their "open" XML file formats for MS Office. Hah. Microsoft knows god-damned well what they could do to make nice with the Open Source community. No company that can successfully ream businesses and consumers out of hundreds of billions of dollars can convince me that they just honestly misunderstood what the word "open" meant.
I'm a capitalist, and not a zealot by any means, but I'd flip Microsoft the big fucking finger on this one.
The question is entirely ethical by it's very nature. It is an arbitrary set of conditions designed to do turn something non-economic into an economy (for good or ill).
I see your point about the necessity of legal structure and norms of behavior to productize software, but I don't see why that means economic arguments are irrelevant. I make the assumption that the economic incentives of copyright and patents were put in place to encourage innovation by granting limited time monopolies, so that products that benefit society get produced that otherwise would not. Don't get me wrong, I think these laws are broken in practice here in the US, and I'm a dues-paying member of the EFF, opponent of the DMCA and Disney-funded copyright extension, etc.
I'm glad to debate Free Software in this framework - the economic effects of allowing intellectual property vs. not. But if we allow for a moment the utilitarian benefit of having some form of intellectual property regime, what is the ethical nature of the argument against? Doesn't it come down to "I want to modify the source code because I want to, and you trying to just sell me the object code violates my god-given rights"? And if the argument against is made on other grounds, how does it stack up against the utilitarian argument for (see my reply to the other response to my OP for some off-the-cuff ethical issues I have with Stallman's utopia)?
Agreed, I never said he was against making money. He's not, strictly speaking. But he does believe it's unethical to productize software and make money from that (since productization requires restricting redistribution). He doesn't have any problem with charging for the service of developing custom software, but under his model, that is effectively the only business model left that allows value to be extracted from software itself (i.e. all other business models built around Free Software will inherently use said software as a loss leader for hardware, services, or other products).
If we want to talk ethics, my ethical problem with this is that it shits on some of the smartest people in society who solve hard, generally applicable problems and want to productize their solutions and/or intellectual contributions and be rewarded financially for them. It destroys the small software company in favor of large services, hardware and tech conglomerate shops. It kills entrepreneurship and innovation in the software industry, which I believe benefits society as a whole by encouraging said smart people to come up with new ideas and produce stuff that otherwise might not get produced.
Of course, I'm glad to debate any of these specifics on economic terms with anybody interested in doing so, including Mr. Stallman, and then come up with an overall ethical evalution of the Stallman utopia, which I will approach with an open mind.
I have no problem with open source code, shared ideas, common formats, or any of the specifics you mention, and I think that they can be very beneficial much of the time. But those are the economic arguments of Open Source, and as economic arguments, they apply on a situation-by-situation basis, and can be outweighed in many practical cases by other economic factors.
You can probably guess from my Slashdot user ID that I've been around the community for a long time. And I'm a longtime supporter of Open Source, for the benefit to society of having certain pieces of software available as Free and Open Source software. I even think the GPL can be a good choice for a software license for certain projects.
I just try not to kid myself about the end result of a Stallmanesque utopia on me and my many friends in the software industry.
I hear him and other representitives talk about economics all the time. I guess I don't see where this accusation comes from? Are you maybe saying that when they do talk about economics they are not saying what you want to hear?
Gee, I guess I was talking about the part where he constantly condescends to those who make these arguments and raves at the very mention of "Open Source". If you can point me to some resources that match your description, I'd be much obliged.
" What is so inherently unethical about separating modification rights from usage rights"
Again I understand the profound difference between right to use and right to modify. It seems like you don't.
Because I don't, a priori, believe it is unethical to separate said rights, I don't understand the difference between them? I think a sixth grader could drive a truck through the hole in your logic. If you want to make an argument, make it, but don't argue by assertion.
"or imposing reasonable restrictions on redistribution in order to ensure compensation for the labor of producing a work?"
There are reasonable restrictions of redistribution with the GPL. With the GPL you can redistribute all you want, you can even modify and redistribute all you want the only compensation asked of you is that if you modify and redistribute you include the totatliy of the source code with the binary. That's the compensation to the programmer. All they want is some code in return for their code.
It seems to me you are stuck on money as being the only possible renumeration, apparently it has never occured to you that a programmer may want in kind renumeration.
Huh? My last paragraph makes this exact point. I never said that cash was the only form of compensation possible.
I agree. You can point to RMS and say "look, if he hadn't been a kooky visionary 10 or 15 years ago, we wouldn't have all this great Free software today", and you'd probably be at least partially correct.
The problem is that though Free Software has become much more mainstream, that mainstreaming has been led by the Open Source banner, because they are open to economic argumentation. That's the *ONLY* reason there is any support for this stuff from industry, which is of course secondary to ethical concerns for people like Stallman.
Furthermore, it strikes me as strange that RMS focuses on the ethical issues to the exclusion of all others, when the very reason for the success/adoption of the GPL is pure economics - it creates a "you scratch my back, i'll scratch yours" community of participants who contribute back improvements in exchange for the right to make use of a large library of infrastruture components avaialable under these common licensing terms. Forgive my oversimplification, but I don't think that's a radical claim I'm making.
Since the GPL itself is all about economics, why is Stallman so loathe to even mention economics? Especially when the moral or ethical case is one that would leave even most philosophy professors scratching their heads. What is so inherently unethical about separating modification rights from usage rights, or imposing reasonable restrictions on redistribution in order to ensure compensation for the labor of producing a work? And why does the effectively zero marginal cost of production of software somehow make software distribution into an ethical, rather than economic, issue in a way that it doesn't for real goods?
Furthermore, I don't see why I should be guaranteed rights to the source code unless I've compensated somebody for those rights - one way of compensating somebody, in fact, is accepting the terms of the GPL and agreeing to contribute back any useful modifications that I make if I redistribute them.
Which was only released a month ago... something tells me they released that in response to Tridge's work which demonstrated the demand for such a tool to them.
I'm not sure I understand how a corporations support, or lack there of, for social political issues is relevant..
Allow me to explain. We measure its relevance using a unit known to some as the US Dollar, to others as the "greenback". Legislation in this country needs to be lobbied for. Politicians don't know shit, and don't have much of an incentive to learn about shit unless there is somebody breathing down their neck, using the carrot-and-stick approach to get them to pay attention to an issue. The people who do this, lobbyists, have to be paid by somebody. Since corporations have a lot of money and a common goal within the organization can be easily set, it's pretty straightforward to see how they might hire lobbyists and give them the tools (payola money) to work their trade.
Now you may think in an ideal democracy this isn't how things would work, but that's not the world we live in. Professional, trade, and random interest groups can certainly wield the same power by swinging some dollars around, and representing some bloc of citizens. But without some sort of organized, funded umbrella organization, it is difficult to get your opinion heard by politicians.
So, perhaps it's a little more clear now why Microsoft throwing their weight behind this cause might be relevant?
We will all look back on this day at some point in the future and say, "Well, if it hadn't happened already, outsourcing really jumped the shark when we heard that goofy fucking story on Slashdot about a bunch of coders in a cruise ship".
Here you go. Yes, it does fall apart fairly quickly. It's not only very unconvincing from the beginning, but also prone to falling into a heuristics loop like it does at the end, which would be amusing if the loop didn't have such boring results.
The problem though is defining a concept like consent without placing overreaching restrictions on software developer's freedoms. I mean, the majority of spyware currently obtains your consent in some way to install itself - buried in term number 11, section 3b of the click-through EULA, it is disclosed that you hereby give consent for Claria to install Gator, for example. Of course, they know nobody has enough hours in the day to read EVERY EULA put in front of them, so of course no real consent is ever formed.
Any third party product that is not functionally necessary for the application a user believes they are installing should be legally required to be a separable item in the installation process that you must opt-in, not opt-out, from. Sure, such a definition can be worked around by a malicious organization by making the spyware linked in like any old software library and claim it is functionally necessary for the advertised features of the software, but since such a connection would constitute an obvious attempt at circumvention, it should be easily thrown out by a judge at his or her discretion. Ultimately, any of these laws will require some of that kind of subjective precendence-setting to establish an enforcement regime.
I would also like to see any modification of already-installed software on your computer require separate, explicit permission-gathering steps from the user (i.e. fucking with DNS a la new.net, or installing components into your browser toolbar). Any modifications those components make to content or user experience should be explicitly and clearly disclosed in that step, as well as any information gathered by said components for transmission back to the author or other third party.
Are you sure? If you buy the CD-Rs labelled "Music CD-R" rather than the ones labelled "Data CD-R", I'm pretty sure you are paying a fee to the RIAA - there is certainly a huge markup and part of that is designated for the RIAA (see here). And if you have a standalone CD recorder, at least from the major manufacturers, I think you have to use the Music CD-Rs.
Of course the majority of people just use the cheaper and perfectly equivalent Data CD-Rs and use a computer CD-R drive, but the point is the fee exists here in the US too.
You can get something they call a "PD" or "Professional Degree", definitely not a PhD however. However, they do offer MS degrees in a couple of subject areas, and you are right that this is picking up in popularity at top schools.
And to Columbia's credit, they have fairly stringent entrance requirements for the CVN (Columbia Video Network) degree programs, high GRE cutoffs (~650 in each section), undergrad GPA requirement (3.3 minimum), and several letters of recommendation. In other words, the same requirements you'd expect to get into the standard MS programs (which are generally competitive, but not super-competitive, unlike PhD program admissions). And they have the same course requirements and same homework/exam requirements as regular MS students, so it sounds pretty legit.
Everyone is talking about suing Best Buy. If this happened to me, I would sue the county for the outrageously reprehensible behavior of their police officer. Seriously. Best Buy didn't arrest the guy, the cop did, on suspicion of using a 2 dollar bill? Fucking moron should be shot.
Okay, Mr. Troll, so truth is an absolute, and the "mouth-foaming raving lunatics" who write Wikipedia submissions have no particular insight into this absolute truth, but for some reason the editors at Encarta do? Or the people who write academic journal articles? Or the people who write books on the shelf at the library?
I mean, if truth is a mysterious absolute and everybody's opinion is just some schmoe's biased opinion, why the fuck are these other sources better windows on the truth than Wikipedia? You seem to propose, in a typically ignorant illiberal fashion (not conservative, but illiberal), that the existance of dissenting opinions itself *IS* the problem, and that by presenting a nice, tidy, consistent, biased opinion that neglects the alternative point of view, you somehow get closer to the truth.
In fact, I have very rarely seen an article on Wikipedia that follows the pattern you suggest, where two sides compromise by writing a complete factual falsehood. Your straw-man simply doesn't exist. Get over it. The entire reason for the NPOV schtick is to get people to present both sides without blatantly saying one opinion is right and the other is wrong, and getting the writers to distinguish between the facts and the interpretations/opinions.
You know, you're the kind of person that would get run over by a bus and nobody would show up at the funeral. Have you ever held down a real job, by any chance?
The fact is this bullshit costs people money, lots of time and resources, and the occasional customer. If you just look at one instance, yeah, it's not usually so bad. Just like the spam these morons purport to fight. Now add up the cost over all the instances and it starts getting huge. Just the spam these morons purport to fight.
I'm all for fighting spam and maybe even using strongarm tactics against refractory ISPs that repeatedly refuse to play ball. But the sheer number of negative experiences that innocent bystanders have with these RBLs indicates there is something terribly wrong with the way they are run in practice.
Oy. And that, kids, is why we don't drink and pontificate.
The really embarrassing part is that I studied physics in college and worked for a summer as an astronomy/astophysics research assistant at Columbia University studying cataclysmic variable binary star systems. I still can't believe I typed that last night.
Hopefully you're just trolling. But as an entrepreneur and businessperson, in addition to being educated as a scientist, I can say without a shadow of a doubt that understanding our universe is one of the highest motivations we can have as a species. So should taxpayers fund cosmology and astrology research? God damn right they should. It's a tiny fucking fraction of a percent of our country's budget, and it goes to benefitting all humanity.
Furthermore, you think that there aren't lots of American companies that manfactured, serviced, and maintained the Hubble and related systems? You don't realize that NASA spending benefits lots of businesses? What is wrong with having government dollars back a mission that we collectively as a people believe is important but that otherwise has no direct free market incentive to pursue it? If that wasn't what taxpayer dollars were *meant* to be spent on, then I must misunderstand the entire purpose of organizing people into social units and governments.
As long as *I* understand? No, the problem isn't when I don't understand since that never happens, it's when *they* don't understand. That's my whole point - if they have somebody who can articulate what they are looking for who has a rapport with the person controlling the purse strings, then there's no problem. Maybe I went overboard when I said "technical background" - they need to be precise _enough_ to understand and listen when you tell them what "requirements" are and "specifications" are, and make sure the guy controlling the purse strings buys into their vision of what they need.
Try to avoid nasty projects before they happen? When you are assessing a project, also make sure to assess the way decisions are made at your client's company, who has check-signing authority, who determines and measures success, and who defines features and serves as the giver-of-requirements. Make sure you know who all those people are, and make sure they are keeping their jobs for the duration of the project!!!!
Anyway, specifically if your problem is a nontechnical person managing the project on their side, make sure you explain every step in advance - tell them what to expect from a requirements document, and what to expect from a specifications document. Make sure they understand that the process is very important and that even though some things may seem odd to them, it's all done this way to make sure no mistakes are made and to keep their costs down in the long run.
If they are completely non-technical and refuse to accept any guidance or advice, and adamantly insist on micromanaging, time-frame shrinking, and requirements ballooning, the project is fucked from the get-go. Get out of it if you can (i.e. you have decision-making authority and it won't cost people their jobs if you drop the project), if not, try to be honest, go over their head if possible (sometimes you have to play politics between the executive sponsors and project managers and so on).
This is the first mistake. Estimates and deadlines should never be based on a requirements document. That document only tells you what problem you're going to solve, not how you're going to solve it. Any estimate at this point in the process is pulled out of one's ass and worth what you would expect. It should never be given to the client.
Obviously. I would never commit to any time frame before having as complete a specification as I can get a client to let me write. However, many projects are set up from the beginning such that the executive sponsors (i.e. Gold Owners) have dictated a timeframe. Then you have to start out trying to scope something around that while at the same time managing their expectations and telling them repeatedly that they won't get everything they hope for if they stick to their dictated time frame. If you follow your tact, simply walk in and say you won't speak with them until they acknowledge that no time frame can be _discussed_ until they pay you to spend weeks working on the 100 page specification they will want, then you are out of a job.
Requirements (and design) documents should always be considered a separate deliverable. That way when some percentage of your clients decide to cancel the project upon really seeing the scope for the first time, you won't have to eat the cost. This happened to me just last year. I got paid for the requirements doc, so it wasn't a complete loss.
Yes, I completely agree on this - requirements and specification are completely separate deliverables. Nonetheless if nobody at your client's firm is both technical enough, interested enough, or motivated enough to bother actually reading the specification when it's presented to them anyway, but will insist on adding lots of things to it after the fact, you can be fucked nonetheless.
Can't do what, tell them the truth? That's compounding the first mistake. Don't lie to your clients in order to milk them for money when you know the project is doomed. That's unethical and your reputation will suffer accordingly.
No, of course you try to tell people the truth. I was of course exaggerating a bit, you never actively want to lie to obtain a contract in the first place, but if you've gotten stuck in a situation where other people's jobs and livelihoods depend on the non-cancellation of an existing contract, or like my situation, my entire payout from selling my old company was dependent on the consulting contract, you _can't_ just say no and walk away, fucking yourself AND your employees out of hundreds of thousands of dollars because your client *fired* their old CIO mid-project and changed all the rules on you. If that's ethical, then fuck ethics, I'll stick with my system.
I'd try to go over the head of the project manager first. If I couldn't do that, I'd look at my contract and consider my options, including termination of the contract. My contracts always have termination clauses that allow for this. I'd rather terminate the relationship and find something else than screw a client and myself by continuing the project under false pretenses.
See above. The project manager was a non-entity, the President of the company essentially took over decision making authority from the CIO about a week into our project, with an agreement on paper that tied my entire compensation for selling my company which I had put years worth of my life into to the consulting contract. It wasn't just another gig that could be easily replaced. Yes, those were special circumstances - in general, if you try to be honest with somebody and they just refuse to listen, you're probably better off walking away. And no, I would never have screwed over a client intentionally, but it's rarely as simple as you make it seem.
In any case, I didn't mean to make it sound like all projects were really like that, but the bads ones can be. I agree with you that in general those bads ones are so bad (probably why they stick out in my mind and the good ones don't) that they aren't worth taking if you have any choice at all about it. Better to pass on a moderately good opportunity then end up stuck in a miserable doomed project if you can help it.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, apparently a lot can happen in 2 years.
No, you missed the point. That has nothing to do with this Linux bashing trash. Your point is correct in theory, but if it's irrelevant to the SCOX v. IBM case, who cares?
Furthermore, if that were *really* what the case was about, why the several years worth of bullshit over copyright infringement that didn't exist first? Occam's Razor says SCOX is full of shit, my friend.
Holy shit. Did you read that summary you linked to? That has got to be one of the most awfully written, incoherent reams of technobabble I've ever seen. This guy hasn't a fucking clue.
For example, read the following "gem" of a sentence:
The book is targeted to systems employees who need to understand and counter the management pressures that prevent them from successfully delivering services to users and to middle and upper management people outside systems who need to understand what the service level options and relative costs really are and why systems people often succeed personally by failing professionally.
How the FUCK does *this* guy write columns for magazines? Who on earth would pay for this kind of shit?
Just like their "open" XML file formats for MS Office. Hah. Microsoft knows god-damned well what they could do to make nice with the Open Source community. No company that can successfully ream businesses and consumers out of hundreds of billions of dollars can convince me that they just honestly misunderstood what the word "open" meant.
I'm a capitalist, and not a zealot by any means, but I'd flip Microsoft the big fucking finger on this one.
The question is entirely ethical by it's very nature. It is an arbitrary set of conditions designed to do turn something non-economic into an economy (for good or ill).
I see your point about the necessity of legal structure and norms of behavior to productize software, but I don't see why that means economic arguments are irrelevant. I make the assumption that the economic incentives of copyright and patents were put in place to encourage innovation by granting limited time monopolies, so that products that benefit society get produced that otherwise would not. Don't get me wrong, I think these laws are broken in practice here in the US, and I'm a dues-paying member of the EFF, opponent of the DMCA and Disney-funded copyright extension, etc.
I'm glad to debate Free Software in this framework - the economic effects of allowing intellectual property vs. not. But if we allow for a moment the utilitarian benefit of having some form of intellectual property regime, what is the ethical nature of the argument against? Doesn't it come down to "I want to modify the source code because I want to, and you trying to just sell me the object code violates my god-given rights"? And if the argument against is made on other grounds, how does it stack up against the utilitarian argument for (see my reply to the other response to my OP for some off-the-cuff ethical issues I have with Stallman's utopia)?
Agreed, I never said he was against making money. He's not, strictly speaking. But he does believe it's unethical to productize software and make money from that (since productization requires restricting redistribution). He doesn't have any problem with charging for the service of developing custom software, but under his model, that is effectively the only business model left that allows value to be extracted from software itself (i.e. all other business models built around Free Software will inherently use said software as a loss leader for hardware, services, or other products).
If we want to talk ethics, my ethical problem with this is that it shits on some of the smartest people in society who solve hard, generally applicable problems and want to productize their solutions and/or intellectual contributions and be rewarded financially for them. It destroys the small software company in favor of large services, hardware and tech conglomerate shops. It kills entrepreneurship and innovation in the software industry, which I believe benefits society as a whole by encouraging said smart people to come up with new ideas and produce stuff that otherwise might not get produced.
Of course, I'm glad to debate any of these specifics on economic terms with anybody interested in doing so, including Mr. Stallman, and then come up with an overall ethical evalution of the Stallman utopia, which I will approach with an open mind.
I have no problem with open source code, shared ideas, common formats, or any of the specifics you mention, and I think that they can be very beneficial much of the time. But those are the economic arguments of Open Source, and as economic arguments, they apply on a situation-by-situation basis, and can be outweighed in many practical cases by other economic factors.
You can probably guess from my Slashdot user ID that I've been around the community for a long time. And I'm a longtime supporter of Open Source, for the benefit to society of having certain pieces of software available as Free and Open Source software. I even think the GPL can be a good choice for a software license for certain projects.
I just try not to kid myself about the end result of a Stallmanesque utopia on me and my many friends in the software industry.
I hear him and other representitives talk about economics all the time. I guess I don't see where this accusation comes from? Are you maybe saying that when they do talk about economics they are not saying what you want to hear?
Gee, I guess I was talking about the part where he constantly condescends to those who make these arguments and raves at the very mention of "Open Source". If you can point me to some resources that match your description, I'd be much obliged.
" What is so inherently unethical about separating modification rights from usage rights"
Again I understand the profound difference between right to use and right to modify. It seems like you don't.
Because I don't, a priori, believe it is unethical to separate said rights, I don't understand the difference between them? I think a sixth grader could drive a truck through the hole in your logic. If you want to make an argument, make it, but don't argue by assertion.
"or imposing reasonable restrictions on redistribution in order to ensure compensation for the labor of producing a work?"
There are reasonable restrictions of redistribution with the GPL. With the GPL you can redistribute all you want, you can even modify and redistribute all you want the only compensation asked of you is that if you modify and redistribute you include the totatliy of the source code with the binary. That's the compensation to the programmer. All they want is some code in return for their code.
It seems to me you are stuck on money as being the only possible renumeration, apparently it has never occured to you that a programmer may want in kind renumeration.
Huh? My last paragraph makes this exact point. I never said that cash was the only form of compensation possible.
Ok now you are getting it.
Gee thanks, I think I was getting it all along.
I agree. You can point to RMS and say "look, if he hadn't been a kooky visionary 10 or 15 years ago, we wouldn't have all this great Free software today", and you'd probably be at least partially correct.
The problem is that though Free Software has become much more mainstream, that mainstreaming has been led by the Open Source banner, because they are open to economic argumentation. That's the *ONLY* reason there is any support for this stuff from industry, which is of course secondary to ethical concerns for people like Stallman.
Furthermore, it strikes me as strange that RMS focuses on the ethical issues to the exclusion of all others, when the very reason for the success/adoption of the GPL is pure economics - it creates a "you scratch my back, i'll scratch yours" community of participants who contribute back improvements in exchange for the right to make use of a large library of infrastruture components avaialable under these common licensing terms. Forgive my oversimplification, but I don't think that's a radical claim I'm making.
Since the GPL itself is all about economics, why is Stallman so loathe to even mention economics? Especially when the moral or ethical case is one that would leave even most philosophy professors scratching their heads. What is so inherently unethical about separating modification rights from usage rights, or imposing reasonable restrictions on redistribution in order to ensure compensation for the labor of producing a work? And why does the effectively zero marginal cost of production of software somehow make software distribution into an ethical, rather than economic, issue in a way that it doesn't for real goods?
Furthermore, I don't see why I should be guaranteed rights to the source code unless I've compensated somebody for those rights - one way of compensating somebody, in fact, is accepting the terms of the GPL and agreeing to contribute back any useful modifications that I make if I redistribute them.
Which was only released a month ago... something tells me they released that in response to Tridge's work which demonstrated the demand for such a tool to them.
GnU hurd it hear first?
I'm not sure I understand how a corporations support, or lack there of, for social political issues is relevant..
Allow me to explain. We measure its relevance using a unit known to some as the US Dollar, to others as the "greenback". Legislation in this country needs to be lobbied for. Politicians don't know shit, and don't have much of an incentive to learn about shit unless there is somebody breathing down their neck, using the carrot-and-stick approach to get them to pay attention to an issue. The people who do this, lobbyists, have to be paid by somebody. Since corporations have a lot of money and a common goal within the organization can be easily set, it's pretty straightforward to see how they might hire lobbyists and give them the tools (payola money) to work their trade.
Now you may think in an ideal democracy this isn't how things would work, but that's not the world we live in. Professional, trade, and random interest groups can certainly wield the same power by swinging some dollars around, and representing some bloc of citizens. But without some sort of organized, funded umbrella organization, it is difficult to get your opinion heard by politicians.
So, perhaps it's a little more clear now why Microsoft throwing their weight behind this cause might be relevant?
We will all look back on this day at some point in the future and say, "Well, if it hadn't happened already, outsourcing really jumped the shark when we heard that goofy fucking story on Slashdot about a bunch of coders in a cruise ship".
Here you go. Yes, it does fall apart fairly quickly. It's not only very unconvincing from the beginning, but also prone to falling into a heuristics loop like it does at the end, which would be amusing if the loop didn't have such boring results.
The problem though is defining a concept like consent without placing overreaching restrictions on software developer's freedoms. I mean, the majority of spyware currently obtains your consent in some way to install itself - buried in term number 11, section 3b of the click-through EULA, it is disclosed that you hereby give consent for Claria to install Gator, for example. Of course, they know nobody has enough hours in the day to read EVERY EULA put in front of them, so of course no real consent is ever formed.
Any third party product that is not functionally necessary for the application a user believes they are installing should be legally required to be a separable item in the installation process that you must opt-in, not opt-out, from. Sure, such a definition can be worked around by a malicious organization by making the spyware linked in like any old software library and claim it is functionally necessary for the advertised features of the software, but since such a connection would constitute an obvious attempt at circumvention, it should be easily thrown out by a judge at his or her discretion. Ultimately, any of these laws will require some of that kind of subjective precendence-setting to establish an enforcement regime.
I would also like to see any modification of already-installed software on your computer require separate, explicit permission-gathering steps from the user (i.e. fucking with DNS a la new.net, or installing components into your browser toolbar). Any modifications those components make to content or user experience should be explicitly and clearly disclosed in that step, as well as any information gathered by said components for transmission back to the author or other third party.
Are you sure? If you buy the CD-Rs labelled "Music CD-R" rather than the ones labelled "Data CD-R", I'm pretty sure you are paying a fee to the RIAA - there is certainly a huge markup and part of that is designated for the RIAA (see here). And if you have a standalone CD recorder, at least from the major manufacturers, I think you have to use the Music CD-Rs.
Of course the majority of people just use the cheaper and perfectly equivalent Data CD-Rs and use a computer CD-R drive, but the point is the fee exists here in the US too.
You can get something they call a "PD" or "Professional Degree", definitely not a PhD however. However, they do offer MS degrees in a couple of subject areas, and you are right that this is picking up in popularity at top schools.
And to Columbia's credit, they have fairly stringent entrance requirements for the CVN (Columbia Video Network) degree programs, high GRE cutoffs (~650 in each section), undergrad GPA requirement (3.3 minimum), and several letters of recommendation. In other words, the same requirements you'd expect to get into the standard MS programs (which are generally competitive, but not super-competitive, unlike PhD program admissions). And they have the same course requirements and same homework/exam requirements as regular MS students, so it sounds pretty legit.
Holy shit, I almost lost my breakfast reading that post. Awesomely funny.
Everyone is talking about suing Best Buy. If this happened to me, I would sue the county for the outrageously reprehensible behavior of their police officer. Seriously. Best Buy didn't arrest the guy, the cop did, on suspicion of using a 2 dollar bill? Fucking moron should be shot.
Okay, Mr. Troll, so truth is an absolute, and the "mouth-foaming raving lunatics" who write Wikipedia submissions have no particular insight into this absolute truth, but for some reason the editors at Encarta do? Or the people who write academic journal articles? Or the people who write books on the shelf at the library?
I mean, if truth is a mysterious absolute and everybody's opinion is just some schmoe's biased opinion, why the fuck are these other sources better windows on the truth than Wikipedia? You seem to propose, in a typically ignorant illiberal fashion (not conservative, but illiberal), that the existance of dissenting opinions itself *IS* the problem, and that by presenting a nice, tidy, consistent, biased opinion that neglects the alternative point of view, you somehow get closer to the truth.
In fact, I have very rarely seen an article on Wikipedia that follows the pattern you suggest, where two sides compromise by writing a complete factual falsehood. Your straw-man simply doesn't exist. Get over it. The entire reason for the NPOV schtick is to get people to present both sides without blatantly saying one opinion is right and the other is wrong, and getting the writers to distinguish between the facts and the interpretations/opinions.
You know, you're the kind of person that would get run over by a bus and nobody would show up at the funeral. Have you ever held down a real job, by any chance?
The fact is this bullshit costs people money, lots of time and resources, and the occasional customer. If you just look at one instance, yeah, it's not usually so bad. Just like the spam these morons purport to fight. Now add up the cost over all the instances and it starts getting huge. Just the spam these morons purport to fight.
I'm all for fighting spam and maybe even using strongarm tactics against refractory ISPs that repeatedly refuse to play ball. But the sheer number of negative experiences that innocent bystanders have with these RBLs indicates there is something terribly wrong with the way they are run in practice.
Oy. And that, kids, is why we don't drink and pontificate.
The really embarrassing part is that I studied physics in college and worked for a summer as an astronomy/astophysics research assistant at Columbia University studying cataclysmic variable binary star systems. I still can't believe I typed that last night.
You now officially have permission to shoot me.
Hopefully you're just trolling. But as an entrepreneur and businessperson, in addition to being educated as a scientist, I can say without a shadow of a doubt that understanding our universe is one of the highest motivations we can have as a species. So should taxpayers fund cosmology and astrology research? God damn right they should. It's a tiny fucking fraction of a percent of our country's budget, and it goes to benefitting all humanity.
Furthermore, you think that there aren't lots of American companies that manfactured, serviced, and maintained the Hubble and related systems? You don't realize that NASA spending benefits lots of businesses? What is wrong with having government dollars back a mission that we collectively as a people believe is important but that otherwise has no direct free market incentive to pursue it? If that wasn't what taxpayer dollars were *meant* to be spent on, then I must misunderstand the entire purpose of organizing people into social units and governments.
Guess I've been thoroughly trolled.
As long as *I* understand? No, the problem isn't when I don't understand since that never happens, it's when *they* don't understand. That's my whole point - if they have somebody who can articulate what they are looking for who has a rapport with the person controlling the purse strings, then there's no problem. Maybe I went overboard when I said "technical background" - they need to be precise _enough_ to understand and listen when you tell them what "requirements" are and "specifications" are, and make sure the guy controlling the purse strings buys into their vision of what they need.
Try to avoid nasty projects before they happen? When you are assessing a project, also make sure to assess the way decisions are made at your client's company, who has check-signing authority, who determines and measures success, and who defines features and serves as the giver-of-requirements. Make sure you know who all those people are, and make sure they are keeping their jobs for the duration of the project!!!!
Anyway, specifically if your problem is a nontechnical person managing the project on their side, make sure you explain every step in advance - tell them what to expect from a requirements document, and what to expect from a specifications document. Make sure they understand that the process is very important and that even though some things may seem odd to them, it's all done this way to make sure no mistakes are made and to keep their costs down in the long run.
If they are completely non-technical and refuse to accept any guidance or advice, and adamantly insist on micromanaging, time-frame shrinking, and requirements ballooning, the project is fucked from the get-go. Get out of it if you can (i.e. you have decision-making authority and it won't cost people their jobs if you drop the project), if not, try to be honest, go over their head if possible (sometimes you have to play politics between the executive sponsors and project managers and so on).
This is the first mistake. Estimates and deadlines should never be based on a requirements document. That document only tells you what problem you're going to solve, not how you're going to solve it. Any estimate at this point in the process is pulled out of one's ass and worth what you would expect. It should never be given to the client.
Obviously. I would never commit to any time frame before having as complete a specification as I can get a client to let me write. However, many projects are set up from the beginning such that the executive sponsors (i.e. Gold Owners) have dictated a timeframe. Then you have to start out trying to scope something around that while at the same time managing their expectations and telling them repeatedly that they won't get everything they hope for if they stick to their dictated time frame. If you follow your tact, simply walk in and say you won't speak with them until they acknowledge that no time frame can be _discussed_ until they pay you to spend weeks working on the 100 page specification they will want, then you are out of a job.
Requirements (and design) documents should always be considered a separate deliverable. That way when some percentage of your clients decide to cancel the project upon really seeing the scope for the first time, you won't have to eat the cost. This happened to me just last year. I got paid for the requirements doc, so it wasn't a complete loss.
Yes, I completely agree on this - requirements and specification are completely separate deliverables. Nonetheless if nobody at your client's firm is both technical enough, interested enough, or motivated enough to bother actually reading the specification when it's presented to them anyway, but will insist on adding lots of things to it after the fact, you can be fucked nonetheless.
Can't do what, tell them the truth? That's compounding the first mistake. Don't lie to your clients in order to milk them for money when you know the project is doomed. That's unethical and your reputation will suffer accordingly.
No, of course you try to tell people the truth. I was of course exaggerating a bit, you never actively want to lie to obtain a contract in the first place, but if you've gotten stuck in a situation where other people's jobs and livelihoods depend on the non-cancellation of an existing contract, or like my situation, my entire payout from selling my old company was dependent on the consulting contract, you _can't_ just say no and walk away, fucking yourself AND your employees out of hundreds of thousands of dollars because your client *fired* their old CIO mid-project and changed all the rules on you. If that's ethical, then fuck ethics, I'll stick with my system.
I'd try to go over the head of the project manager first. If I couldn't do that, I'd look at my contract and consider my options, including termination of the contract. My contracts always have termination clauses that allow for this. I'd rather terminate the relationship and find something else than screw a client and myself by continuing the project under false pretenses.
See above. The project manager was a non-entity, the President of the company essentially took over decision making authority from the CIO about a week into our project, with an agreement on paper that tied my entire compensation for selling my company which I had put years worth of my life into to the consulting contract. It wasn't just another gig that could be easily replaced. Yes, those were special circumstances - in general, if you try to be honest with somebody and they just refuse to listen, you're probably better off walking away. And no, I would never have screwed over a client intentionally, but it's rarely as simple as you make it seem.
In any case, I didn't mean to make it sound like all projects were really like that, but the bads ones can be. I agree with you that in general those bads ones are so bad (probably why they stick out in my mind and the good ones don't) that they aren't worth taking if you have any choice at all about it. Better to pass on a moderately good opportunity then end up stuck in a miserable doomed project if you can help it.