There are plenty of for profit "student life" sites out there (I can't remember URLs offhand, and I really don't feel like plowing through the crappy web interface for the miserable excuse for an electronic bulletin board system that my home college uses to find them) that are geared toward students at colleges and universities, sometimes without the official sanction of the college (as far as I can tell, they get students at the school to gather information for them).
I don't know whether I think that this is right, wrong, or indifferent (I'm leaning heavily toward "indifferent", if such a thing is possible) but I can see how universities could have issues with people making money with their names, and I'm quite sick of getting spammed by these sites' student employees. "Visit ____.com for everything you could possibly want to know!" Grr.
Language doesn't control our thoughts, but it does strongly affect how we express them (for obvious reasons.) To steal an example from Pinker, 1994: The fact that you can be unable to find the right words to express "what you meant to say" is, among other possible illustrations, a demonstration that lingustic determinism just doesn't totally make sense.
Creating a new model doesn't necessarily allow new thoughts to form -- but it gives a different way of looking at a situation, and lets the creator of that model express his thoughts more clearly to himself and to others, which can lead to better-developed theories and better communication of thoughts.
You can't not have a concept just because you don't have a word for it. It's just that you can't talk about it without the words.
You are confusing verbs and vowels in your example. There exist no languages without vowels, as far as I know. The language with the least known number of different sounds ("phonemes") has 11 phonemes, two of them being vowels, if I remember correctly.
I could be way off the map here, in which case I apologise, but I thought that Hebrew had no explicit vowels?
At any rate, I'm not sure if you can speak without vowel sounds: isn't it the air in the vowel production that makes the consonant sounds distinct?
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, or at least the strong version thereof, has been disproved in many ways. A lot of Whorf's supporting material, like the mythical "Eskimos have more than two hundred words for snow", just wasn't true. There are weaker versions of it that may hold: that rather than determining thought, language influences thought. This has been supported by experiments such as the color sorting experiments with a Native American group whose language does not distinguish between the colors of "white" and "pink", but there are still alternate possible explanations. Psycholinguistics is cool.
Thinking about AI (and this is totally out of my own head) it may be that we have trouble describing it, not because of a lack of words or lack of ability to adjust our language to define it, but because the basic nature of consciousness and intelligence are so obvious to us that we don't know where to begin to describe it, only how to know when we aren't doing so. It's like you can explain how vision works, but you can't explain the feeling of seeing: you can explain how food is processed by the body, but you can't explain exactly what a hot fudge sundae tastes like.
I found my father's 1978 thesis there, too. (the one that was apparently stolen from the institution's library.) Makes me wonder whether they're really paying royalties, and whether they have any particular criteria for what they'll include. I'd suspect that there have to be at least a couple people out there interested in synthesizing lysergic acid.
Yes, it sounds like it was a hell of a day on the Hill... a lot more interesting than the last hearings I watched. From my interpretation of the article, it sounds like it several things could happen from here...
1) The RIAA stays where they are, keeps on suing, and those anti-trust threats become reality... which in turn has its own set of possibilities, and so forth.
2) Congress starts a push (with the funding and the personpower) to redefine, clarify, and maybe even educate about copyright, fair use, and intellectual property. Depending on who's involved with it, this could be something I'd actually *like* to see my tax dollars going toward.
3) The RIAA gets the hint and goes more "digital" and record companies start offering those for-money downloads of songs (I'd guess more like singles than by the full album) and deals with it. Maybe they add a few extra things that you can only get by paying -- like you put in your name and credit card number and you get entered into a drawing for CDs or concert tickets or Britney Spears autographs or something.
4) Other heads prevail, nothing really changes, and all those Napster-using freebooters wind up getting nailed.
The reality of the situation is that most people do some company work on their own time, and spend some company time taking care of personal business. It's hard to believe a reasonable employer wouldn't recognize this.
Most do. There are limits, however. Most parents spend a few minutes on the phone to check in with their kids when they come home from school -- they don't get into hour-long conversations with them. Or people will make a few quick phone calls to set up medical appointments, or confirm a reservation, or whatever. And all of these are within acceptable bounds.
There are employees, however, who push the bounds of acceptability. If you're spending long periods of time doing personal stuff, or if you're doing something on company time that could be damaging to the company, there is no reason for the company to willingly sit back and say "Sure, whatever."
If you spend an hour or two a day at work on personal phone calls, doing some non-job-related reading, or any sort of personal activity, you're using your employer's time and resources for non-work-related activity. In this respect, why should personal e-mail and web browsing be different? I've sat down and watched employees at my current place of employment download megs of porn. It's clearly against company policy, and it's not like they're invisible. While you're at work, you've sold that time to your employer -- whether you go by the hour, or you're selling 40 hours out of your week. It's not yours.
If you, as an employee, don't *know* that your employer is capable of doing this, I pity you. Corporations should have clear enforcement policies, yes, and they should stick to them. And when a policy says "We won't monitor this" and they do, it's dishonest. If a monitoring policy is changed, the change should be made public. Warning employees before taking action against them would be a nice touch.
Blocking sites, monitoring user action... yes. If there's a user on my corporate network who's downloading or distributing naked pictures of fourteen-year-olds or selling internal secrets to the Kazakhs or some other such thing, I'd sure as hell like to know about it before the FBI or Barbara Walters does... and keep them from finding out.
Yes, employees should know what kind of things their employers should see. But they should also think like someone could be looking over their shoulder at any time. When you're at home, on a personal connection, it's a different story. When you're using someone else's stuff, you play by their rules.
Even wealthier districts suffer to some extent from this problem. My town's high school is faced with the "need" for their second building campaign in four years, because they don't have enough instructional space -- at the same time, there are five "computer classrooms" that are almost always locked and dark. When they're used, they're basically used for word processing, the two programming classes that are offered, and once in a very small while by a statistics class.
On top of that, the biology, chemistry, physics, and "environmental science" rooms have computers for data collection: the economics and history teachers have a computer station in their rooms (as I recall, my econ class used the computer solely for checking stock reports through AOL), and there are two labs in the "media center" along with a full complement of electronic encyclopedias.
They could easily chuck everything but the encyclopedias, with little or no loss to anyone. Teachers are trying to incorporate computers into their classes... but they wind up with projects like the aforementioned "Find stock quotes on AOL!" or "Find a website related to 20th century history and write up a series of questions about it." (My fourteen-year-old brother wrote his first website for that assignment instead. He wanted to learn something. The teacher was amazed. This frightened me.)
The elementary school lab, while I was there in the 80s, had Commodore 64's which were distributed among the classrooms in 1986 and replaced by Apple ][s. The major computer-class activities were Number Munchers, typing lessons, and making turtles and Lego do stuff... our friend Logo. Fifteen years later, they've upgraded and now, as far as I can tell, spend more time on making pictures and nice-looking documents in Microsoft Word (my junior high classes centered on Word, AOL, and HyperCard. Yiiikes.)
There's no effort made to explain to kids how a computer works, on any level: some basic vocabulary, and then "how-to" lessons. And keeping the technology up-to-date, whether they actually need it for what they're doing or not.
It's the taxpayers who are affected by this, as well as the children. Voters tend to fall into two categories -- those who tend to green-light any spending on computers because computers are technology and technology is good, and those who don't see why the district has to shell out all of this money for stuff that they don't really need, and don't use incredibly effectively anyway. This second group winds up voting against entire school budgets, which forces budget cuts -- but they don't cut the computers, because of the first group.
Oh, and by the way, this district uses mostly students for technicians and admins: they know more than the staff, usually. Talk about a terrifying thought...
In short, given that everyone from Microsoft down to Joe Schmoe has the option to disclaim all warranty under the proposed legislation (and I don't think this is necessarilly a bad thing), what is the point of passing the provision at all?
Perhaps the people involved with it didn't receive enough attention as children?
In any discussion of legal issues, a few things are apparent... 1) Most laypersons seem to operate on hearsay and whatever pseudo-logical deductions they make from what they hear. 2) Most lawmakers don't seem to have the time or the resources to research what they're legislating: they listen to what they hear from whoever sounds informed. 3) There are still a very large group of people who believe that the legal system, as opposed to common sense or simply taking a different approach, is the best solution to any problem. 4) Paranoia abounds, warranted and unwarranted.
So... laws get made, laws get broken, laws get misunderstood, and maybe two hundred years from now a major argument will start over "Well, what did they really *mean* by this UCITA?"
Sure. Require a warranty. But limit liability to some function of the price paid for the software/license.
Interesting idea. Unfortunately most copies of Windows (and many of Office, etc.) come bundled with computers at no additional cost to the purchaser.
No additional cost, or no additional visible cost? I can't imagine either Microsoft or Gateway, Dell, whoever not passing the charge on to the buyer somewhere... and unless things have changed drastically from the last time I looked at "pre-packaged computer systems" or whatever they call them, you had one price for Windows 95 pre-loaded, one for Win98, one for Office Professional, etc...
At any rate, you *can* buy Windows, Office, etc. off the shelf, so getting a retail price for the purposes of such a plan is hardly impossible.
The difference is that I don't pay by the hour to watch cable -- and that I can change the channel to find a network that's not showing commercials at that moment. Yeah, I can play a few cards in FreeCell while I'm waiting for an ad to load in AOL -- but I can't use a web browser, telnet, IRC, check my mail, FTP a few files, or do much of anything else.
I believe that this isn't in reference to pop-up ads that one sees while "web-surfing", but to ads that come up when an AOL user logs on, after "6. Connecting to America OnLine. 7. Verifying Password" and before the AOL windows that let users check mail, go to different "channels", access AOL's browser, et cetera appear. Basically, while these ads are on the screen, you can't do anything except either follow them or click "No, thanks." It's not quite as simple as disabling Javascript in Netscape or MSIE. (Although I doubt a lot of AOL users could handle that easily... ah, well.)
There is *no* obvious, or even semi-obvious, way to turn off the pop-up ads -- most people I know who use AOL just endure and ignore. Granted, each release of AOL gets less and less intuitive to use (2.5 was fairly straight-forward, 3.0 slightly less so, 4.0 I never did figure out how to find the things I used (basics like FTP), and now that 5.0's appeared I've lost any semblance of hope at getting anything done *that* way on my mother's computer.)
However, I have around 200 AOL cds in the back of my car, in display boxes. This makes me happy.
A trip through the Microsoft site wasn't particularly enlightening on where they hope to go with this... besides the typical goal of world domination. However, it seems to me that this isn't aimed at you, or me, or most of the people I know.
The impression I get is that this is going to be at least in part focused at the sorts of people who get very, very nervous at the thought of installing and updating applications -- the kind of people who call tech support or their local helpdesk when they get a box with a button that says "OK", just to make sure that everything's OK. People who don't understand the concept of backing things up, and then get very upset when they get their company computer re-imaged and lose a four-month project. But people who have lots and lots of little electronic "toys" that they can't imagine life without.
When Ballmer says that they've "already got the fundamental building blocks in place" he's not blowing smoke, either... while the hardware end of it is probably not more than a few sketches somewhere at this point, they *do* have the two most important parts -- an interface that everyone knows and can find their way around (after using Word, you can sit down at Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Project, Publisher, FrontPage, et cetera ad nauseum) and a name that is pretty well burned into the brain of anyone with any awareness of computers.
And with the name, the market share, and whatever the heck concept they come up with, they can put together something that a fairly massive number of people will use.
See, it doesn't have to be good. It just has to be easy, and it has to be there.
However, kimchee removal (kimcheeectomy) can usually be performed as an outpatient procedure. It is now covered by many HMOs in the United States, in reflection of the modern trend toward acknowledging and supporting cultural and racial diversity.
has anyone noticed that the specific abuses that the article goes into that the chinise gvmt is getting into have been present in the US for a long time?
The United States hasn't been on the sunny side of human rights for quite a while. I'm not just talking about historical treatment of Native Americans, Japanese-Americans during WWII, slavery, and whatever else our illustrious President has been apologizing for lately. The death penalty, police brutality cases, the prison system, the School of the Americas... there's a pretty sizable list.
How*ever*, it's much easier to put human rights attention on China. I mean, they're across the world, they're Communist, they look different from GenericWaspAmerican in Anytown, USA, and there are always new things to call attention to.
At the same time, there's a largely untapped market of 1.2 billion people over there, who should be drinking more Coke, eating more McDonalds fries, and keeping track of their lives using Microsoft products. The logical conclusion to draw from all of this, of course, is that by allowing the Chinese to have access to the flower of our democratic, capitalist society, they'll acquire a Western mindset along with the aspartame and start allowing political dissidence free reign.
Or at least it makes a good story for public consumption.
How things really work out in the end, of course, is irrelevant.
Lari
Advocate global taxation! Piss off the U.S. Congress!
It's just rather interesting...
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Napster Wars
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The entire Napster/MP3/copyright issue is being moved from a "cool, music for free!" situation into a "youth-vs-the-establishment" issue, isn't it?
It's already been pretty well established that the proverbial genie isn't going back in the bottle at this point, and the the official voices in the music industry start to appear to be growing steadily more and more out of touch with their alleged core audience.
I just start to wonder how much it matters... and this is me speaking from my "pretentious brat" "I-don't-really-listen-to-mainstream-music" standpoint. Historically, the "entertainment companies" haven't been making money off of music for all that long -- maybe a century. There was music before them, and there will be music after them. I'd like to see the musicians who are really deprived of their livelihood by MP3 -- not Metallica, but the independent artist who can't make ends meet since this took off.
But hey, it's the results of capitalism. Markets change.
The MIT hacks are creative, and mostly non-destructive as well, like putting a police car on the roof, or making a building look like R2D2. ...The MIT hacks also inspire some of us at the other end of the G&W bus route... to do what, we're still not entirely sure, but we've got some thoughts and a building that's screaming for some re-modeling. The benefit of more subtle pranking, however, is that being less obvious it'll stay there for extended periods of time and confuse campus tour guides. And anytime anyone's, say, blocked off the entrances to several of the physics faculty offices with a large quantity of balloons, leaving only a tunnel, it's been taken down after a few days. I believe strongly in continuing a tradition of "artistic terrorism." Throwing things down stairwells requires no creativity or planning beyond "when isn't there anyone in the stairwell?" and is basically just idiotic.
However, couldn't the way that colleges are banning Napster be considered a breach of contract? Maybe I'm mistaken, but if I sign a contract to pay for services offered by the colleges, services including internet access, doesn't that mean that I am entitled to those services? Mid-semester, why can one party of the contract change "internet access" to "internet access, except for stuff that uses a lot of bandwidth, which we reserve the right to block whenever we want"?
Does your college have an acceptable-use policy or something similar? Mine does: it says that any use that limits other members of the college community's access to computing services is in violation. The way that Napster was being used was judged to be far in violation of it. And the problem isn't the students who know what they're doing -- it's the ones who have no clue that they're serving MP3s or that Napster doesn't close when they x it out. We had two students at a time basically rendering our dual-T1 connection useless for the rest of campus for a while: we've now arranged for a fractional T3 and basically tripled our available bandwidth, but we also imposed a temporary ban on Napster because it was the only way to get these users' attention. No one's made any move to ban MP3's -- it's just the excessive use of community resources.
Of course, the bigger problem is the asserific FirstClass system that they put our e-mail on this year... and the resulting nine months (so far) of hassle and problem upon problem. Lari
You must remove yourself from the piece of music. For instance, Pomp and Circumstance may be used in the US as a graduation march, however the music can be used for it regardless of whether it is known for that purpose or not.
Interestingly, the Pomp and Circumstance scene was one that was intended to be a part of the original Fantasia, and got moved to the planning boards to be added as a later installment. The original Disney plan was to have "every Disney character with a name" come through. When F2K was in development, this idea resurfaced, and Roy, etc. were very enthusiastic about it until they realized just how many Disney characters had names. At which point the idea got significantly revamped. Obviously.
Another interesting point -- F2K is out in IMAX, supposedly to take advantage of the sound quality in an IMAX theater. Seems to be a bit parallel to the ill-fated Fantasound that was developed for the original, but using existing technology.
I strongly agree with leaving the Sorcerer's Apprentice untouched, by the way -- this sounds very squishy, but Fantasia was more of a dream than a commercial product. And I think that F2K is as close to a dream as Disney can get these days. But keeping the continuity to the original, and subtly saying "We're building on what was done, not changing it" was, I felt, an important part of the piece.
I could have very well done without the celebrity cameos at the transitions, however. It was very distracting and made me lose the entire be-zonedness that I tended to get into during the segments. They were just intrusive... for that matter, the entire "set" was.
And isn't 70 minutes or so about the typical length for any IMAX film?
The article was just another statement of something that everyone knows and not many people are exceptionally concerned with. Her aims are noble. Possibly confused, but her heart's in the right place, wherever her brain happens to be. She doesn't do much at all to prove her points -- she makes generalizations without support, and hopes that feminist sentiment in the readership will carry a case that she can't make about a situation that exists. In fact, she kind of *reinforces* the stereotype that women can't be logical... Yeah, girls play house and boys build stuff. Or whatever. Yeah, maybe women look at things differently. That doesn't make women incapable of programming -- but it implies a difference in learning style, and in the way that different genders solve problems.
Probably some of the most openly misogynist men I've encountered (outside of slashdot!) have been former/current CS majors. Some of the least have been, too. And I know that in my elementary school, the boys were *much* more pushy about computer time -- and girls didn't really fight it. It didn't seem worth it... because the boys were a lot more annoying when they weren't in control. My parents spent a lot of my adolescence requesting that I get off of the computer and do something "social," "with other people." Most of the boys I knew had the same behavior smilingly tolerated, if not encouraged. My brother's HS CS class is entirely male, and most of the people I see in the computer labs when I wander over there now are boys. I can tell you first-hand that even when there's an interested female student, any encouragement she receives is hollow-sounding, and she's subtly denied entry into the "inner sanctum". Bluntly, plenty of women get frustrated early by insecure boys who can't deal with them, share resources, or acknowledge that they might possibly be competent. (Going into psychology, instead, teaches you to write them off as fundamentally unstable, antisocial, or otherwise disordered. Among other things.)
My college CS classes are entirely female: they're TA'd by women: half, or slightly over half, of the department is female. My college IS department is mostly female: the ratio is probably something like four to one. I'd venture to say, although I have no proof, that the proportion of men in food services here is higher than it is in IS. While the number of CS majors is relatively small (around 25 declared of 2300 students), there are a quite sizable number of minors, or people in related majors or interdisciplinary majors (like me.) Department events tend to be packed, and even speakers tend to get surprisingly good turnout for this school.
Immediately after, Time Warner went up 39% (from $64.75 to $90.06): AOL went down $1.75 to $72. I think that in the next two days AOL went down something like 20% on expectations that their growth would slow.
I believe they make more profit from their Office App Division...That is what actually made their OS #1..They put out a good Office Package that would only work on their crappy OS...and they become powers supreme. Maybe Office put MS into the position of being a "power supreme," but it wasn't what made MS operating systems #1 -- what put MS into a position to be able to dominate the market to this extent was basically a combination of luck and good choices, if you look at it -- MS handed IBM an operating system for their PCs (however they got it...). IBM, and then their clones, took over the market and the rest was pretty much a foregone conclusion, at least up to the present day.
Yeah, by building off of that with Office and making MS products "essential" and standard (and uncooperative) they consolidated that position and made themselves into this kind of unshakeable monolith. And yeah, what they've done to keep themselves there wasn't necessarily nice, or ethical, or fair.
But all of the DoJ actions in the world aren't going to do much to change that if there isn't an alternative waiting in the wings. What is it going to take for something else to be able to really fill that space? If you don't have a pretty good idea off the top of your head, come down out of your tower. If it doesn't make sense right off the bat, it's not going to fly. Yeah, Win95/98/whatever crashes, it's slower than it should be, and everything else. But my grandmother can sit down at it and write a letter to her kids without having to think about it. And that's what matters right now.
"In short: I'm not getting up my hopes that this will seriously threaten MS's dominant position on the global market." This seems to be the underlying theme of most of the posts. I don't care what they do, as long as they cut MS off at the knees. Shouldn't the idea be to allow everybody to compete equally. What some of you are advocating is almost reverse discrimination.
Well, think about it. I mean, through silence and a lack of attention/advocacy from anyone except for a few fringe groups, non-MS OS's and apps have been relegated to a position far, far out of the mainstream. This kind of discrimination has been going on for so long that the only way to combat it is through prescribed action -- so make sure that businesses, public schools, the government, et cetera have a certain percentage of non-Windows machines to balance it out.
I mean, come on. Maybe it starts out as tokenism, but this kind of affirmation of other systems will eventually lead to an integrated workplace where Windows, MacOS, Linux, BSD, and whatever the heck else you can dream up will work together in harmony.
Slashdot Mirror
There are plenty of for profit "student life" sites out there (I can't remember URLs offhand, and I really don't feel like plowing through the crappy web interface for the miserable excuse for an electronic bulletin board system that my home college uses to find them) that are geared toward students at colleges and universities, sometimes without the official sanction of the college (as far as I can tell, they get students at the school to gather information for them).
I don't know whether I think that this is right, wrong, or indifferent (I'm leaning heavily toward "indifferent", if such a thing is possible) but I can see how universities could have issues with people making money with their names, and I'm quite sick of getting spammed by these sites' student employees. "Visit ____.com for everything you could possibly want to know!" Grr.
Language doesn't control our thoughts, but it does strongly affect how we express them (for obvious reasons.) To steal an example from Pinker, 1994: The fact that you can be unable to find the right words to express "what you meant to say" is, among other possible illustrations, a demonstration that lingustic determinism just doesn't totally make sense.
Creating a new model doesn't necessarily allow new thoughts to form -- but it gives a different way of looking at a situation, and lets the creator of that model express his thoughts more clearly to himself and to others, which can lead to better-developed theories and better communication of thoughts.
You can't not have a concept just because you don't have a word for it. It's just that you can't talk about it without the words.
I could be way off the map here, in which case I apologise, but I thought that Hebrew had no explicit vowels?
At any rate, I'm not sure if you can speak without vowel sounds: isn't it the air in the vowel production that makes the consonant sounds distinct?
Type without vowels, sure. But...
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, or at least the strong version thereof, has been disproved in many ways. A lot of Whorf's supporting material, like the mythical "Eskimos have more than two hundred words for snow", just wasn't true. There are weaker versions of it that may hold: that rather than determining thought, language influences thought. This has been supported by experiments such as the color sorting experiments with a Native American group whose language does not distinguish between the colors of "white" and "pink", but there are still alternate possible explanations. Psycholinguistics is cool.
Thinking about AI (and this is totally out of my own head) it may be that we have trouble describing it, not because of a lack of words or lack of ability to adjust our language to define it, but because the basic nature of consciousness and intelligence are so obvious to us that we don't know where to begin to describe it, only how to know when we aren't doing so. It's like you can explain how vision works, but you can't explain the feeling of seeing: you can explain how food is processed by the body, but you can't explain exactly what a hot fudge sundae tastes like.
Consciousness is cool.
I found my father's 1978 thesis there, too. (the one that was apparently stolen from the institution's library.) Makes me wonder whether they're really paying royalties, and whether they have any particular criteria for what they'll include. I'd suspect that there have to be at least a couple people out there interested in synthesizing lysergic acid.
Just use PayPal.
Unless you live outside the United States.
Yes, it sounds like it was a hell of a day on the Hill... a lot more interesting than the last hearings I watched. From my interpretation of the article, it sounds like it several things could happen from here...
1) The RIAA stays where they are, keeps on suing, and those anti-trust threats become reality... which in turn has its own set of possibilities, and so forth.
2) Congress starts a push (with the funding and the personpower) to redefine, clarify, and maybe even educate about copyright, fair use, and intellectual property. Depending on who's involved with it, this could be something I'd actually *like* to see my tax dollars going toward.
3) The RIAA gets the hint and goes more "digital" and record companies start offering those for-money downloads of songs (I'd guess more like singles than by the full album) and deals with it. Maybe they add a few extra things that you can only get by paying -- like you put in your name and credit card number and you get entered into a drawing for CDs or concert tickets or Britney Spears autographs or something.
4) Other heads prevail, nothing really changes, and all those Napster-using freebooters wind up getting nailed.
5) Something I haven't thought of yet.
It's hard to believe a reasonable employer wouldn't recognize this.
Most do. There are limits, however. Most parents spend a few minutes on the phone to check in with their kids when they come home from school -- they don't get into hour-long conversations with them. Or people will make a few quick phone calls to set up medical appointments, or confirm a reservation, or whatever. And all of these are within acceptable bounds.
There are employees, however, who push the bounds of acceptability. If you're spending long periods of time doing personal stuff, or if you're doing something on company time that could be damaging to the company, there is no reason for the company to willingly sit back and say "Sure, whatever."
If you spend an hour or two a day at work on personal phone calls, doing some non-job-related reading, or any sort of personal activity, you're using your employer's time and resources for non-work-related activity. In this respect, why should personal e-mail and web browsing be different? I've sat down and watched employees at my current place of employment download megs of porn. It's clearly against company policy, and it's not like they're invisible. While you're at work, you've sold that time to your employer -- whether you go by the hour, or you're selling 40 hours out of your week. It's not yours.
If you, as an employee, don't *know* that your employer is capable of doing this, I pity you. Corporations should have clear enforcement policies, yes, and they should stick to them. And when a policy says "We won't monitor this" and they do, it's dishonest. If a monitoring policy is changed, the change should be made public. Warning employees before taking action against them would be a nice touch.
Blocking sites, monitoring user action... yes. If there's a user on my corporate network who's downloading or distributing naked pictures of fourteen-year-olds or selling internal secrets to the Kazakhs or some other such thing, I'd sure as hell like to know about it before the FBI or Barbara Walters does... and keep them from finding out.
Yes, employees should know what kind of things their employers should see. But they should also think like someone could be looking over their shoulder at any time. When you're at home, on a personal connection, it's a different story. When you're using someone else's stuff, you play by their rules.
Even wealthier districts suffer to some extent from this problem. My town's high school is faced with the "need" for their second building campaign in four years, because they don't have enough instructional space -- at the same time, there are five "computer classrooms" that are almost always locked and dark. When they're used, they're basically used for word processing, the two programming classes that are offered, and once in a very small while by a statistics class.
On top of that, the biology, chemistry, physics, and "environmental science" rooms have computers for data collection: the economics and history teachers have a computer station in their rooms (as I recall, my econ class used the computer solely for checking stock reports through AOL), and there are two labs in the "media center" along with a full complement of electronic encyclopedias.
They could easily chuck everything but the encyclopedias, with little or no loss to anyone. Teachers are trying to incorporate computers into their classes... but they wind up with projects like the aforementioned "Find stock quotes on AOL!" or "Find a website related to 20th century history and write up a series of questions about it." (My fourteen-year-old brother wrote his first website for that assignment instead. He wanted to learn something. The teacher was amazed. This frightened me.)
The elementary school lab, while I was there in the 80s, had Commodore 64's which were distributed among the classrooms in 1986 and replaced by Apple ][s. The major computer-class activities were Number Munchers, typing lessons, and making turtles and Lego do stuff... our friend Logo. Fifteen years later, they've upgraded and now, as far as I can tell, spend more time on making pictures and nice-looking documents in Microsoft Word (my junior high classes centered on Word, AOL, and HyperCard. Yiiikes.)
There's no effort made to explain to kids how a computer works, on any level: some basic vocabulary, and then "how-to" lessons. And keeping the technology up-to-date, whether they actually need it for what they're doing or not.
It's the taxpayers who are affected by this, as well as the children. Voters tend to fall into two categories -- those who tend to green-light any spending on computers because computers are technology and technology is good, and those who don't see why the district has to shell out all of this money for stuff that they don't really need, and don't use incredibly effectively anyway. This second group winds up voting against entire school budgets, which forces budget cuts -- but they don't cut the computers, because of the first group.
Oh, and by the way, this district uses mostly students for technicians and admins: they know more than the staff, usually. Talk about a terrifying thought...
In short, given that everyone from Microsoft down to Joe Schmoe has the option to disclaim all warranty under the proposed legislation (and I don't think this is necessarilly a bad thing), what is the point of passing the provision at all?
Perhaps the people involved with it didn't receive enough attention as children?
In any discussion of legal issues, a few things are apparent... 1) Most laypersons seem to operate on hearsay and whatever pseudo-logical deductions they make from what they hear. 2) Most lawmakers don't seem to have the time or the resources to research what they're legislating: they listen to what they hear from whoever sounds informed. 3) There are still a very large group of people who believe that the legal system, as opposed to common sense or simply taking a different approach, is the best solution to any problem. 4) Paranoia abounds, warranted and unwarranted.
So... laws get made, laws get broken, laws get misunderstood, and maybe two hundred years from now a major argument will start over "Well, what did they really *mean* by this UCITA?"
Sure. Require a warranty. But limit liability to some function of the price paid for the software/license.
Interesting idea. Unfortunately most copies of Windows (and many of Office, etc.) come bundled with computers at no additional cost to the purchaser.
No additional cost, or no additional visible cost? I can't imagine either Microsoft or Gateway, Dell, whoever not passing the charge on to the buyer somewhere... and unless things have changed drastically from the last time I looked at "pre-packaged computer systems" or whatever they call them, you had one price for Windows 95 pre-loaded, one for Win98, one for Office Professional, etc...
At any rate, you *can* buy Windows, Office, etc. off the shelf, so getting a retail price for the purposes of such a plan is hardly impossible.
The difference is that I don't pay by the hour to watch cable -- and that I can change the channel to find a network that's not showing commercials at that moment. Yeah, I can play a few cards in FreeCell while I'm waiting for an ad to load in AOL -- but I can't use a web browser, telnet, IRC, check my mail, FTP a few files, or do much of anything else.
I believe that this isn't in reference to pop-up ads that one sees while "web-surfing", but to ads that come up when an AOL user logs on, after "6. Connecting to America OnLine. 7. Verifying Password" and before the AOL windows that let users check mail, go to different "channels", access AOL's browser, et cetera appear. Basically, while these ads are on the screen, you can't do anything except either follow them or click "No, thanks." It's not quite as simple as disabling Javascript in Netscape or MSIE. (Although I doubt a lot of AOL users could handle that easily... ah, well.)
There is *no* obvious, or even semi-obvious, way to turn off the pop-up ads -- most people I know who use AOL just endure and ignore. Granted, each release of AOL gets less and less intuitive to use (2.5 was fairly straight-forward, 3.0 slightly less so, 4.0 I never did figure out how to find the things I used (basics like FTP), and now that 5.0's appeared I've lost any semblance of hope at getting anything done *that* way on my mother's computer.)
However, I have around 200 AOL cds in the back of my car, in display boxes. This makes me happy.
A trip through the Microsoft site wasn't particularly enlightening on where they hope to go with this... besides the typical goal of world domination. However, it seems to me that this isn't aimed at you, or me, or most of the people I know.
The impression I get is that this is going to be at least in part focused at the sorts of people who get very, very nervous at the thought of installing and updating applications -- the kind of people who call tech support or their local helpdesk when they get a box with a button that says "OK", just to make sure that everything's OK. People who don't understand the concept of backing things up, and then get very upset when they get their company computer re-imaged and lose a four-month project. But people who have lots and lots of little electronic "toys" that they can't imagine life without.
When Ballmer says that they've "already got the fundamental building blocks in place" he's not blowing smoke, either... while the hardware end of it is probably not more than a few sketches somewhere at this point, they *do* have the two most important parts -- an interface that everyone knows and can find their way around (after using Word, you can sit down at Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Project, Publisher, FrontPage, et cetera ad nauseum) and a name that is pretty well burned into the brain of anyone with any awareness of computers.
And with the name, the market share, and whatever the heck concept they come up with, they can put together something that a fairly massive number of people will use.
See, it doesn't have to be good. It just has to be easy, and it has to be there.
No one ever went broke underestimating...
However, kimchee removal (kimcheeectomy) can usually be performed as an outpatient procedure. It is now covered by many HMOs in the United States, in reflection of the modern trend toward acknowledging and supporting cultural and racial diversity.
has anyone noticed that the specific abuses that the article goes into that the chinise gvmt is getting into have been present in the US for a long time?
The United States hasn't been on the sunny side of human rights for quite a while. I'm not just talking about historical treatment of Native Americans, Japanese-Americans during WWII, slavery, and whatever else our illustrious President has been apologizing for lately. The death penalty, police brutality cases, the prison system, the School of the Americas... there's a pretty sizable list.
How*ever*, it's much easier to put human rights attention on China. I mean, they're across the world, they're Communist, they look different from GenericWaspAmerican in Anytown, USA, and there are always new things to call attention to.
At the same time, there's a largely untapped market of 1.2 billion people over there, who should be drinking more Coke, eating more McDonalds fries, and keeping track of their lives using Microsoft products. The logical conclusion to draw from all of this, of course, is that by allowing the Chinese to have access to the flower of our democratic, capitalist society, they'll acquire a Western mindset along with the aspartame and start allowing political dissidence free reign.
Or at least it makes a good story for public consumption.
How things really work out in the end, of course, is irrelevant.
Lari
Advocate global taxation! Piss off the U.S. Congress!
The entire Napster/MP3/copyright issue is being moved from a "cool, music for free!" situation into a "youth-vs-the-establishment" issue, isn't it?
It's already been pretty well established that the proverbial genie isn't going back in the bottle at this point, and the the official voices in the music industry start to appear to be growing steadily more and more out of touch with their alleged core audience.
I just start to wonder how much it matters... and this is me speaking from my "pretentious brat" "I-don't-really-listen-to-mainstream-music" standpoint. Historically, the "entertainment companies" haven't been making money off of music for all that long -- maybe a century. There was music before them, and there will be music after them. I'd like to see the musicians who are really deprived of their livelihood by MP3 -- not Metallica, but the independent artist who can't make ends meet since this took off.
But hey, it's the results of capitalism. Markets change.
The MIT hacks are creative, and mostly non-destructive as well, like putting a police car on the roof, or making a building look like R2D2.
...The MIT hacks also inspire some of us at the other end of the G&W bus route... to do what, we're still not entirely sure, but we've got some thoughts and a building that's screaming for some re-modeling. The benefit of more subtle pranking, however, is that being less obvious it'll stay there for extended periods of time and confuse campus tour guides. And anytime anyone's, say, blocked off the entrances to several of the physics faculty offices with a large quantity of balloons, leaving only a tunnel, it's been taken down after a few days.
I believe strongly in continuing a tradition of "artistic terrorism." Throwing things down stairwells requires no creativity or planning beyond "when isn't there anyone in the stairwell?" and is basically just idiotic.
However, couldn't the way that colleges are banning Napster be considered a breach of contract? Maybe I'm mistaken, but if I sign a contract to pay for services offered by the colleges, services including internet access, doesn't that mean that I am entitled to those services? Mid-semester, why can one party of the contract change "internet access" to "internet access, except for stuff that uses a lot of bandwidth, which we reserve the right to block whenever we want"?
Does your college have an acceptable-use policy or something similar? Mine does: it says that any use that limits other members of the college community's access to computing services is in violation. The way that Napster was being used was judged to be far in violation of it. And the problem isn't the students who know what they're doing -- it's the ones who have no clue that they're serving MP3s or that Napster doesn't close when they x it out.
We had two students at a time basically rendering our dual-T1 connection useless for the rest of campus for a while: we've now arranged for a fractional T3 and basically tripled our available bandwidth, but we also imposed a temporary ban on Napster because it was the only way to get these users' attention. No one's made any move to ban MP3's -- it's just the excessive use of community resources.
Of course, the bigger problem is the asserific FirstClass system that they put our e-mail on this year... and the resulting nine months (so far) of hassle and problem upon problem.
Lari
You must remove yourself from the piece of music. For instance, Pomp and Circumstance may be used in the US as a graduation march, however the music can be used for it regardless of whether it is known for that purpose or not.
Interestingly, the Pomp and Circumstance scene was one that was intended to be a part of the original Fantasia, and got moved to the planning boards to be added as a later installment. The original Disney plan was to have "every Disney character with a name" come through. When F2K was in development, this idea resurfaced, and Roy, etc. were very enthusiastic about it until they realized just how many Disney characters had names. At which point the idea got significantly revamped. Obviously.
Another interesting point -- F2K is out in IMAX, supposedly to take advantage of the sound quality in an IMAX theater. Seems to be a bit parallel to the ill-fated Fantasound that was developed for the original, but using existing technology.
I strongly agree with leaving the Sorcerer's Apprentice untouched, by the way -- this sounds very squishy, but Fantasia was more of a dream than a commercial product. And I think that F2K is as close to a dream as Disney can get these days. But keeping the continuity to the original, and subtly saying "We're building on what was done, not changing it" was, I felt, an important part of the piece.
I could have very well done without the celebrity cameos at the transitions, however. It was very distracting and made me lose the entire be-zonedness that I tended to get into during the segments. They were just intrusive... for that matter, the entire "set" was.
And isn't 70 minutes or so about the typical length for any IMAX film?
Lari
The article was just another statement of something that everyone knows and not many people are exceptionally concerned with. Her aims are noble. Possibly confused, but her heart's in the right place, wherever her brain happens to be. She doesn't do much at all to prove her points -- she makes generalizations without support, and hopes that feminist sentiment in the readership will carry a case that she can't make about a situation that exists. In fact, she kind of *reinforces* the stereotype that women can't be logical... Yeah, girls play house and boys build stuff. Or whatever. Yeah, maybe women look at things differently. That doesn't make women incapable of programming -- but it implies a difference in learning style, and in the way that different genders solve problems.
Probably some of the most openly misogynist men I've encountered (outside of slashdot!) have been former/current CS majors. Some of the least have been, too. And I know that in my elementary school, the boys were *much* more pushy about computer time -- and girls didn't really fight it. It didn't seem worth it... because the boys were a lot more annoying when they weren't in control. My parents spent a lot of my adolescence requesting that I get off of the computer and do something "social," "with other people." Most of the boys I knew had the same behavior smilingly tolerated, if not encouraged. My brother's HS CS class is entirely male, and most of the people I see in the computer labs when I wander over there now are boys. I can tell you first-hand that even when there's an interested female student, any encouragement she receives is hollow-sounding, and she's subtly denied entry into the "inner sanctum". Bluntly, plenty of women get frustrated early by insecure boys who can't deal with them, share resources, or acknowledge that they might possibly be competent. (Going into psychology, instead, teaches you to write them off as fundamentally unstable, antisocial, or otherwise disordered. Among other things.)
My college CS classes are entirely female: they're TA'd by women: half, or slightly over half, of the department is female. My college IS department is mostly female: the ratio is probably something like four to one. I'd venture to say, although I have no proof, that the proportion of men in food services here is higher than it is in IS. While the number of CS majors is relatively small (around 25 declared of 2300 students), there are a quite sizable number of minors, or people in related majors or interdisciplinary majors (like me.) Department events tend to be packed, and even speakers tend to get surprisingly good turnout for this school.
I go to a women's college.
Does it show?
lari
Immediately after, Time Warner went up 39% (from $64.75 to $90.06): AOL went down $1.75 to $72. I think that in the next two days AOL went down something like 20% on expectations that their growth would slow.
I believe they make more profit from their Office App Division...That is what actually made their OS #1..They put out a good Office Package that would only work on their crappy OS...and they become powers supreme. Maybe Office put MS into the position of being a "power supreme," but it wasn't what made MS operating systems #1 -- what put MS into a position to be able to dominate the market to this extent was basically a combination of luck and good choices, if you look at it -- MS handed IBM an operating system for their PCs (however they got it...). IBM, and then their clones, took over the market and the rest was pretty much a foregone conclusion, at least up to the present day.
Yeah, by building off of that with Office and making MS products "essential" and standard (and uncooperative) they consolidated that position and made themselves into this kind of unshakeable monolith. And yeah, what they've done to keep themselves there wasn't necessarily nice, or ethical, or fair.
But all of the DoJ actions in the world aren't going to do much to change that if there isn't an alternative waiting in the wings. What is it going to take for something else to be able to really fill that space? If you don't have a pretty good idea off the top of your head, come down out of your tower. If it doesn't make sense right off the bat, it's not going to fly. Yeah, Win95/98/whatever crashes, it's slower than it should be, and everything else. But my grandmother can sit down at it and write a letter to her kids without having to think about it. And that's what matters right now.
"In short: I'm not getting up my hopes that this will seriously threaten MS's dominant position on the global market." This seems to be the underlying theme of most of the posts. I don't care what they do, as long as they cut MS off at the knees. Shouldn't the idea be to allow everybody to compete equally. What some of you are advocating is almost reverse discrimination.
Well, think about it. I mean, through silence and a lack of attention/advocacy from anyone except for a few fringe groups, non-MS OS's and apps have been relegated to a position far, far out of the mainstream. This kind of discrimination has been going on for so long that the only way to combat it is through prescribed action -- so make sure that businesses, public schools, the government, et cetera have a certain percentage of non-Windows machines to balance it out.
I mean, come on. Maybe it starts out as tokenism, but this kind of affirmation of other systems will eventually lead to an integrated workplace where Windows, MacOS, Linux, BSD, and whatever the heck else you can dream up will work together in harmony.
How could it *not* work?