was discussing this very thing to colleagues yesterday: they had seen the PBS special by Ken Burns - Jazz - and remarked as to how music used to be literally free. A musician wrote a song and played it in a bar and got paid.
Music is never free -- someone has to put time and effort into it. Basically, whgat you're saying is that the musicians were screwed. This certainly explains why the bebopers had such short life spans Charlie parker was on his way out before he was thirty, Billy Holiday died fairly young, as did most of them (Lee Morgan, Booker Little, Eric Dolphy, John Coltrane, Bud Powell,... )... it's easier to count the ones that *didn't* die young
A lot of these guys died because they were basically worn out -- they'd prematurely aged partly through drug abuse, but you can't sort of seperate the drug abuse from the fact that these guys were working ridiculous hours playing live.
You can do away with copyrights and still get great music, and that's just fine if you're happy to screw the artists (which most of the napseter mob are)
There are many incentives for people to create, but I don't think most artists see money as the incentive for creation. It's probably more like a benefit or a bonus.
You could say the same about anything else -- building bridges, writing software, etc. The fact remains that he's ignored the question regarding economic incentives. Why should artists go unpaid for their work, especially if the public are willing to pay to hear it ?
Well written ? It completely fails to address the sticky question regarding how to compensate artists.
One important point that he ignores is that copyrighted works are scarce. It's true that copies of a given work may not be scarce, but the work itself certainly is scarce, and it takes very tangible resources to produce (no money in == no copyrighted works out).
Computers are similar to auto repair in that they are both technical in nature and easily
accessible for the average person to learn/gain experience in if they have the will to
Anyone can learn how to use PHP or ASP, but understanding finite state automata, Turing machines, Markov chains, writing proofs, etc is a
little more difficult. IMO, only very bright people can manage this. It's certainly true that you may find the occasional "goodwill hunting" (did you see that film?) archetype, but they're the exception and not the rule.
The fact is you CAN'T judge everyone on a case-by-case basis. There's no time. You need to filter when hirin
Companies can and do filter -- but they don't do so by ignoring anyone without a CS degree. I can see why CS graduates might wish for this, and might feel that they're entitled to all the best development jobs. Believe me, they're not. A lot of CS students nowadays are the college-algebra type. Anyone who's not up to taking calc in freshman year IMO is just in the wrong intellectual ballpark for anything substantially more advanced than webmonkey work.
Despite your great ideas about how people should hire, companies are smart enough to choose (for example) smart science majors over dumb CS/IS majors. I recently got a letter from a company that were looking specifically for math and physics PhDs to program for them... Why ? Because they're smarter than the get rich quick wannabees that are starting to crowd out CS class rooms.
As I've now said repeatedly in this thread, a CS degree is NOT proof of skill as a software engineer. But lacking other tests, it's the best we've got.
That's a fallacy. The best "proof of skill" we have is experience. Short of experience, a related degree is the next best thing, the more closely related the better.
Someone without specific training will obviously need to acquire the specific training from elsewhere.
However, it's not necessarily true that more specific training helps that much. I've observed people migrate between math/physics/computer science without that much difficulty. As I've stated in other threads, I'm a PhD student in math, and I've had little trouble keeping up with and overtaking those with CS degrees.
Learning how to think is more important than learning what to think (the latter is easy to do on your own, the former is not)
The problem with your argument is when is something speech and when is something an assault. I would argue that wearing a T-shirt in public with pornographic or violent images is no more just "speech" than walking up and punching someone in the nose
Free speech does not invalidate the right not to listen. Wearing such T-shirts comes dangerously close to doing just that.
The way it generally works is that one has the right to view/listen to "distasteful" subject matter but not to force others to view/listen to it.
IMO, this case really is "cut and dried" provided that noone is forced to view kiddie porn (and even then, the blame lies with whoever is doing the forcing)
You're right, there are two completely different issues here. My main objection was the original posters claim that the problem was a lack of specific training (if he didn't mean to claim that, he's welcome to jump in and correct me). I'm not a great fan of specific training, I've seen too many people do well outside their "field of training" to be convinced that we need more of it
In C++, most of the memory management issues "go away" if you're prepared to add a level of indirection. For example, there's no need for pointer-arrays, since you have structures like vectors. There's no need to micro-manage (what should be) simple data types like strings. Of course, you're stuck with pointers when you want to dynamically create objects (with factories or prototypes) but even then, there are a lot of tricks you can do to manage these (gui widgets that manage their children, handle-body tricks).
What java does seem to offer though is a fairly elegant framework for applications where performance is not critical. The "everything-is-a-reference" mentality makes it somewhat cleaner than C++. I wish they'd implement generics though, this is one of the big advantages C++ has over java. Oh, and I wish Sun would hand java over to a standards body also...
Most untrained people in any field (and heck, most people in any field) are not geniuses,
What about someone who's highly trained in one field ? That person could well be a genius. I am finishing a PhD in math, and a lot of the stuff I have covered is similar to what is taught in high level CS courses. I've been able to teach myself the rest by reading books and writing code. I've worked on projects with CS grad students and they are not substantially better programmers than I am, though it's certainly true that I've had to play catch-up by doing a lot of work on my own.
As for your standing offer, if the architect had a respectable degree (for example, mechanical engineering from a good school), I may consider him, even if he didn't have a degree in architecture. In the absence of a degree in architecture, I would look for experience and reputation, and I believe employers in the computing industry also tend to do the same.
By the way, there's a long standing challenge for any of the other "better trained" students at my school to come and work at the same part time job I'm holding. My boss is still searching...
And yet Chemical Engineering and Electrical Engineering can be taught. Amazing, that. I guess there haven't been any advances in those fields, either.
The advances are somewhat slower than those in computing.
If Software Engineering has changed SO much in the last N years, why is "The Mythical Man-Month", written before most/. posters were even born, still considered the best book on Software Engineering ever written?
Some stuff changes, some doesn't. The stuff the potential employers always ask for is the stuff that changes more quickly. Perhaps the employer mindset is part of the problem.
God didn't say "if you do these things" he said thought, word and deed.
So did the thought police in Orwell's 1984. The dangers of punishing people for their alleged thoughts to me greatly outweighs the dangers of allowing free speech.
The reason why religions (all of them, not just Christianity) emphasise thought first is that they have the insight to realise that behind every ill deed lies an ill thought. But the converse is not true. Moreover, it is in practice much easier to abstain from evil deeds than it is for us to abstain from evil thoughts ( indeed, I believe very few people manage the former, and almost no-one manages the latter )
I understand your concern about "morality" in society. However, I don't believe there is as much a "moral decline" as there is an exposure of societies wrongs. As far as the morality of society goes, there is less child prostitution in America today than there was 100 years ago. Injustices such as racism and racial violence are no longer tolerated by those from the mainstream, lynchings are no longer commonplace. Out of wedlock births are stil all too common, but I'd be interested to see some proof that they're actually on the rise (these were also frequent 100 years ago)
You know, "Fire!" in a crowded theater is illegal too. So is libel and slander.
In the first instance, it's not a restriction on your free speech -- you still have the right to shout "Fire!", you just don't have the right to shout it in certain places. Likewise, you don't have the right to display porn in the workplace, though it's OK to display it and distribute it on your own private property.
The second example is not criminal law -- it's civil law. And civil law gives recompense for those who suffer as a result of malicious conduct (such as libel) Civil law is much broader than criminal law in its scope, almost to the point that it says "if I'm hurt and it's your fault, I have some recourse". If the "virtual porn" could be shown to be injurious in some way, the makers could probably also be sued.
Freedom of Speech is really a rather vague concept and I think it is possible and even easy to extrapolate the idea too far in trying to determine how far to protect it.
The other side of the argument is that it's all too tempting to stomp on speech that you find distasteful. People who do this aren't true advocates of free speech, they're advocates of "free speech that I agree with", which puts them in similar territory to the Chinese communists. One doesn't need to look far back in history to see how easily free speech rights can and are stomped on. (For example, the McCarthy era, or even more recently, the controversial Maplethorpe exhibition in Cincinatti OH)
IMO, the dangers of allowing oneself to be tempted in to stomping on free speech outweigh the "harm" that's caused when someone airs views you disagree with. If we allow this to fly, we can also start banning controversial art, and then move on to politics, starting with the universally despised racist groups, then moving up to communists, socialists, leftists, rightists, and then mainstream groups.You might think this could "never happen here", but you'd simply be wrong -- it can and has happened here (and that statement is probably true for most values of "here")
However, I'm just trying to make the point that spam, to the average Joe, is nothing more than a minor annoyance.
Spam is not "a minor annoyance", it's one minor annoyance per recipient, and all those "minor annoyances" add up. I'm not a big fan of public floggings, but a $1- fine per recipient would not be unreasonable IMO
Well, yes, but there's a little-known feature of most e-mail clients. Its called the "delete" function. It sounds crazy, but I hear it actually allows you to delete unwanted e-mail from your inbox. It sounds horribly complicated to use, I know, but perhaps its a skill that's worth learning.
First, deleting spam does nothing to address
the following:
The ISPs bandwidth, which the user pays for is wasted.
It wastes the users time. Sure it's only a few seconds, but it's a few seconds out of the time of thousands of people. Add up the time and money a spammer wastes, and it's no longer as trivial as you make it out to be.
If the user pays for phone calls by the minute, it's also a waste of the users money.
No, you couldn't. You're just being silly now.
no, I am not. You are defending the conduct of those who wrongfully abuse the resources of others, ultimately wasting their time and money, as well as intruding on their personal space.
And your solution is that its the users responsibility to use filters to keep the spammers out. This solution is fine and good -- as long as spammers don't go out of their way to bypass mail filters. However, if a spammer willfully tries to circumvent protection via filters, IMO it is not that much different to breaking and entering -- the spammer is willfully circumventing the users "mailbox guard".For example, a common trick that spammers use is to send several single messages instead of one bcc mail (which evades filters that reject bcc mail) This is intentional and it's not unusual for spammers to use special software to do it.
So in conclusion, I would submit that if it's the users responsibility to use email filters, it's the spammers responsibility to abstain from willfully subverting such filters -- and spammers who willfully do this should go down really hard, like the common criminals that they are.
The way I'd do it is as follows. All advertising sent over the Internet, solicited or not, must have the option attached in some manner to not receive advertisements from that company at any future date. Whether this is via a Web form, replying to an e-mail with specific commands, or whatever does not matter, so long as the option exists.
Such laws are completely ineffective. Firstly, why assume opt-in and force users to opt-out ? I would have thought that most users would prefer opt-out, so it seems to make a more sensible default.
I can also see problems with the opt-in thing though. One problem would be how to decide what is and isn't spam. I often get unsolicited email that is written to me personally (sometimes job offers from publishing companies for example), and I certainly wouldn't want the senders charged. I would propose that for a spammer to be charged, several complaints should be brought against them. (in other words, it really has to be bulk mail for action to be taken)
I propose that for email to be spam, it should satisfy the following:
The same message text should be sent to several recipients (possibly in different messages)
Several complaints (say at least 10) should be brought against the spammer. This is one way to verify the above item.
The messages should (obviously) be unsolicited.
Re:I'm Sure the Chinese Will Love This....
on
Norway Bans Spam
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· Score: 1
This is not about "the government" protecting you from spam, so put down the conspiracy theory already. The system the article talks about allows you to opt in. So for example, people who are willing to receive spam, and don't want "the governmant" controlling their lives are free to put their name on the national spam list. SOunds good to me. BTW, I don't believe that junk fax laws in the US have harmed the pro-democracy movement in China...
In the example you've given with the anonomyzer personal email, it's unlikely to classify as spam under any resonable definition (there's only one recipient), and more importantly, the only recipients of the message are those who want to read it (and laws prosecuting spam would almost certainly use complaints against the spammer as key evidence, especially since 'genuine' spam attracts an enormous volume of complaints)
To sum it up, I don't agree that others have the freedom to pollute my inbox or abuse resources that I pay for. Your freedom to swing your arms around ends where my nose begins.
Re:Freedom is sacrificed a little at a time
on
Norway Bans Spam
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· Score: 1
But I will not concede to any government the right to determine what can and cannot be considered unwanted e-mail.
Here's a good guideline -- if the originating address is forged, that's a pretty good sign that the email is unwanted (and the sender knows it).
I don't think the email you mention above would count as "spam" by any reasonable definition, because it's not advertising anything.
Re:Repling to spam is the only sure fire defence!!
on
Norway Bans Spam
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· Score: 1
Not all 1800 numbers are toll free, so if you want to dial the spammers 1800, you'd better do it from the public phone.
BTW, most spammers email addresses are forged, and
often, they use a disposable reply address. You only hurt the ISP by replying to them.
I simply can't see how you can justify medieval punishments like flogging for a few little emails, which can be blocked, filtered, or deleted quite easily by anyone with a modicum of technical knowledge.
A lot of these idiots do get past my filters, and my filters also screen out legitimate messages. It's not that easy to filter out everything.
And I am a "tech head". BTW, what about the people who are not ? And what about the ISPs whose bandwidth (that the users pay for) is wasted by the spammer ?
In other words, anyone who is enough of a tech-head to care is quite capable of blocking spam.
It's not just the "tech heads" who don't like being spammed.
The marketplace of ideas has come up with multiple solutions, therefore frivolous laws are not needed.
Well, one could argue the same thing with home security and breaking and entering laws.
services like hotmail, yahoo, etc. can institute their own filters as a service to members. Again, the marketplace has provided.
No, it hasn't. No filtering system is perfect.
There is no reason to put an entrepreneur simply trying to promote his e-business in jail with hardened criminals.
Those who abuse the resources of others without conscience are nothing more than common criminals.
I don't see how the first amendment is an issue. It doesn't give you the right to "speak for free and let others pay for it". spam abuses the resources of others (computer owners, and ISPs). Noone's stopping the spammers "saying their thing" (for example, by putting up a website).
That consumers will want everything for free, or failing that for as little as possible, is a pretty basic assumption within capitalism. People aren't expected to WANT to pay for things, they pay the price that's necessary to get what they want.
That consumers are willing to pay for a product that they find valuable is also a basic assumption. Obviously, targetting a market that are not willing to pay for anything is not a good business strategy. People who don't have the common sense to find a target market who are interested in buying their products (as opposed to using them for free) are also out of their depth entering a marketplace.
hould the leeches start buying something else, then there will be greater motivation for hardware companies to start supporting that something else. The same goes for applications.
Whether it's worth depends on whether the leeches will pay anything. As for "network effects", I believe they're propogated from the corporate sector, not from home users.
Slashdot Mirror
Music is never free -- someone has to put time and effort into it. Basically, whgat you're saying is that the musicians were screwed. This certainly explains why the bebopers had such short life spans Charlie parker was on his way out before he was thirty, Billy Holiday died fairly young, as did most of them (Lee Morgan, Booker Little, Eric Dolphy, John Coltrane, Bud Powell, ... ) ... it's easier to count the ones that *didn't* die young
A lot of these guys died because they were basically worn out -- they'd prematurely aged partly through drug abuse, but you can't sort of seperate the drug abuse from the fact that these guys were working ridiculous hours playing live.
You can do away with copyrights and still get great music, and that's just fine if you're happy to screw the artists (which most of the napseter mob are)
You could say the same about anything else -- building bridges, writing software, etc. The fact remains that he's ignored the question regarding economic incentives. Why should artists go unpaid for their work, especially if the public are willing to pay to hear it ?
One important point that he ignores is that copyrighted works are scarce. It's true that copies of a given work may not be scarce, but the work itself certainly is scarce, and it takes very tangible resources to produce (no money in == no copyrighted works out).
Anyone can learn how to use PHP or ASP, but understanding finite state automata, Turing machines, Markov chains, writing proofs, etc is a little more difficult. IMO, only very bright people can manage this. It's certainly true that you may find the occasional "goodwill hunting" (did you see that film?) archetype, but they're the exception and not the rule.
Companies can and do filter -- but they don't do so by ignoring anyone without a CS degree. I can see why CS graduates might wish for this, and might feel that they're entitled to all the best development jobs. Believe me, they're not. A lot of CS students nowadays are the college-algebra type. Anyone who's not up to taking calc in freshman year IMO is just in the wrong intellectual ballpark for anything substantially more advanced than webmonkey work.
Despite your great ideas about how people should hire, companies are smart enough to choose (for example) smart science majors over dumb CS/IS majors. I recently got a letter from a company that were looking specifically for math and physics PhDs to program for them... Why ? Because they're smarter than the get rich quick wannabees that are starting to crowd out CS class rooms.
That's a fallacy. The best "proof of skill" we have is experience. Short of experience, a related degree is the next best thing, the more closely related the better. Someone without specific training will obviously need to acquire the specific training from elsewhere.
However, it's not necessarily true that more specific training helps that much. I've observed people migrate between math/physics/computer science without that much difficulty. As I've stated in other threads, I'm a PhD student in math, and I've had little trouble keeping up with and overtaking those with CS degrees. Learning how to think is more important than learning what to think (the latter is easy to do on your own, the former is not)
Free speech does not invalidate the right not to listen. Wearing such T-shirts comes dangerously close to doing just that.
The way it generally works is that one has the right to view/listen to "distasteful" subject matter but not to force others to view/listen to it.
IMO, this case really is "cut and dried" provided that noone is forced to view kiddie porn (and even then, the blame lies with whoever is doing the forcing)
You're right, there are two completely different issues here. My main objection was the original posters claim that the problem was a lack of specific training (if he didn't mean to claim that, he's welcome to jump in and correct me). I'm not a great fan of specific training, I've seen too many people do well outside their "field of training" to be convinced that we need more of it
What java does seem to offer though is a fairly elegant framework for applications where performance is not critical. The "everything-is-a-reference" mentality makes it somewhat cleaner than C++. I wish they'd implement generics though, this is one of the big advantages C++ has over java. Oh, and I wish Sun would hand java over to a standards body also ...
What about someone who's highly trained in one field ? That person could well be a genius. I am finishing a PhD in math, and a lot of the stuff I have covered is similar to what is taught in high level CS courses. I've been able to teach myself the rest by reading books and writing code. I've worked on projects with CS grad students and they are not substantially better programmers than I am, though it's certainly true that I've had to play catch-up by doing a lot of work on my own.
As for your standing offer, if the architect had a respectable degree (for example, mechanical engineering from a good school), I may consider him, even if he didn't have a degree in architecture. In the absence of a degree in architecture, I would look for experience and reputation, and I believe employers in the computing industry also tend to do the same.
By the way, there's a long standing challenge for any of the other "better trained" students at my school to come and work at the same part time job I'm holding. My boss is still searching ...
The advances are somewhat slower than those in computing.
If Software Engineering has changed SO much in the last N years, why is "The Mythical Man-Month", written before most /. posters were even born, still considered the best book on Software Engineering ever written?
Some stuff changes, some doesn't. The stuff the potential employers always ask for is the stuff that changes more quickly. Perhaps the employer mindset is part of the problem.
So did the thought police in Orwell's 1984. The dangers of punishing people for their alleged thoughts to me greatly outweighs the dangers of allowing free speech.
The reason why religions (all of them, not just Christianity) emphasise thought first is that they have the insight to realise that behind every ill deed lies an ill thought. But the converse is not true. Moreover, it is in practice much easier to abstain from evil deeds than it is for us to abstain from evil thoughts ( indeed, I believe very few people manage the former, and almost no-one manages the latter )
I understand your concern about "morality" in society. However, I don't believe there is as much a "moral decline" as there is an exposure of societies wrongs. As far as the morality of society goes, there is less child prostitution in America today than there was 100 years ago. Injustices such as racism and racial violence are no longer tolerated by those from the mainstream, lynchings are no longer commonplace. Out of wedlock births are stil all too common, but I'd be interested to see some proof that they're actually on the rise (these were also frequent 100 years ago)
In the first instance, it's not a restriction on your free speech -- you still have the right to shout "Fire!", you just don't have the right to shout it in certain places. Likewise, you don't have the right to display porn in the workplace, though it's OK to display it and distribute it on your own private property.
The second example is not criminal law -- it's civil law. And civil law gives recompense for those who suffer as a result of malicious conduct (such as libel) Civil law is much broader than criminal law in its scope, almost to the point that it says "if I'm hurt and it's your fault, I have some recourse". If the "virtual porn" could be shown to be injurious in some way, the makers could probably also be sued.
Freedom of Speech is really a rather vague concept and I think it is possible and even easy to extrapolate the idea too far in trying to determine how far to protect it.
The other side of the argument is that it's all too tempting to stomp on speech that you find distasteful. People who do this aren't true advocates of free speech, they're advocates of "free speech that I agree with", which puts them in similar territory to the Chinese communists. One doesn't need to look far back in history to see how easily free speech rights can and are stomped on. (For example, the McCarthy era, or even more recently, the controversial Maplethorpe exhibition in Cincinatti OH)
IMO, the dangers of allowing oneself to be tempted in to stomping on free speech outweigh the "harm" that's caused when someone airs views you disagree with. If we allow this to fly, we can also start banning controversial art, and then move on to politics, starting with the universally despised racist groups, then moving up to communists, socialists, leftists, rightists, and then mainstream groups.You might think this could "never happen here", but you'd simply be wrong -- it can and has happened here (and that statement is probably true for most values of "here")
Spam is not "a minor annoyance", it's one minor annoyance per recipient, and all those "minor annoyances" add up. I'm not a big fan of public floggings, but a $1- fine per recipient would not be unreasonable IMO
First, deleting spam does nothing to address the following:
No, you couldn't. You're just being silly now.
no, I am not. You are defending the conduct of those who wrongfully abuse the resources of others, ultimately wasting their time and money, as well as intruding on their personal space.
And your solution is that its the users responsibility to use filters to keep the spammers out. This solution is fine and good -- as long as spammers don't go out of their way to bypass mail filters. However, if a spammer willfully tries to circumvent protection via filters, IMO it is not that much different to breaking and entering -- the spammer is willfully circumventing the users "mailbox guard".For example, a common trick that spammers use is to send several single messages instead of one bcc mail (which evades filters that reject bcc mail) This is intentional and it's not unusual for spammers to use special software to do it.
So in conclusion, I would submit that if it's the users responsibility to use email filters, it's the spammers responsibility to abstain from willfully subverting such filters -- and spammers who willfully do this should go down really hard, like the common criminals that they are.
Such laws are completely ineffective. Firstly, why assume opt-in and force users to opt-out ? I would have thought that most users would prefer opt-out, so it seems to make a more sensible default.
I can also see problems with the opt-in thing though. One problem would be how to decide what is and isn't spam. I often get unsolicited email that is written to me personally (sometimes job offers from publishing companies for example), and I certainly wouldn't want the senders charged. I would propose that for a spammer to be charged, several complaints should be brought against them. (in other words, it really has to be bulk mail for action to be taken)
I propose that for email to be spam, it should satisfy the following:
In the example you've given with the anonomyzer personal email, it's unlikely to classify as spam under any resonable definition (there's only one recipient), and more importantly, the only recipients of the message are those who want to read it (and laws prosecuting spam would almost certainly use complaints against the spammer as key evidence, especially since 'genuine' spam attracts an enormous volume of complaints)
To sum it up, I don't agree that others have the freedom to pollute my inbox or abuse resources that I pay for. Your freedom to swing your arms around ends where my nose begins.
Here's a good guideline -- if the originating address is forged, that's a pretty good sign that the email is unwanted (and the sender knows it). I don't think the email you mention above would count as "spam" by any reasonable definition, because it's not advertising anything.
BTW, most spammers email addresses are forged, and often, they use a disposable reply address. You only hurt the ISP by replying to them.
A lot of these idiots do get past my filters, and my filters also screen out legitimate messages. It's not that easy to filter out everything. And I am a "tech head". BTW, what about the people who are not ? And what about the ISPs whose bandwidth (that the users pay for) is wasted by the spammer ?
In other words, anyone who is enough of a tech-head to care is quite capable of blocking spam.
It's not just the "tech heads" who don't like being spammed.
The marketplace of ideas has come up with multiple solutions, therefore frivolous laws are not needed.
Well, one could argue the same thing with home security and breaking and entering laws.
services like hotmail, yahoo, etc. can institute their own filters as a service to members. Again, the marketplace has provided.
No, it hasn't. No filtering system is perfect.
There is no reason to put an entrepreneur simply trying to promote his e-business in jail with hardened criminals.
Those who abuse the resources of others without conscience are nothing more than common criminals.
[ crackpot communit conspiracy rant snipped ]
That consumers are willing to pay for a product that they find valuable is also a basic assumption. Obviously, targetting a market that are not willing to pay for anything is not a good business strategy. People who don't have the common sense to find a target market who are interested in buying their products (as opposed to using them for free) are also out of their depth entering a marketplace.
Whether it's worth depends on whether the leeches will pay anything. As for "network effects", I believe they're propogated from the corporate sector, not from home users.