They are not benefitting from society. They are benefitting from a combination of their abilities and their existing capital. In some cases, their benefits derive solely from the latter (especially those coasting on inheirited wealth). They receive a disproportionately small amount of benefit in terms of social services provided by the money they pay in taxes.
Without factoring in any social obligation, from a purely economical standpoint, you want to maximize the total output of the economy, and strong top-heavy taxation is an impediment to that, especially when it comes to investing.
It's time for the record companies to get with
the program. The _smart_ thing to do would be
to just start releasing albums and songs on
their own sites. Let people download whatever
they want, and pay for it if they keep it.
I'd be all over it. Naturally, I'd expect it
to cost less than a CD, but not a ton less.
I hope artists also move to fore -- popular artists (those whose recording contracts permit) should release a song or three (or an album)
in all mp3, and just take payment if you keep
it. Say, 24 hours trial period, if you keep
it longer, you have to pay. Obviously, its all
voluntary, but who would balk at paying $3 to $6 for an ablum from an artist they like? I think the honest users of such a service would vastly outway any thieves.
Although I do enjoy a bit of fun emulation of
yesteryears favorites, I think the difference is that today's games are more fun now than the games of 10 years ago would be now. For example,
Duke Nukem 3d was a fun game, and I played it a
ton, but would I want to play it now instead of
Quake3? No.
Similarly, would anyone really want to go
back to the Gold Box AD&D games? If they ported
them to Linux and win9x/2k, would you recommend
them to a friend, or would you tell them to go
get Baldur's Gate/BG2/IWD/etc? That said,
I had as much fun playing the gold boxes
then as I do now with the BG series, and ditto
for duke nukem. But that doesn't mean if I
went BACK I'd still have as much fun
This is also a practical question for operating
equipment on earth in extreme conditions, such as the Chernobyl cleanup robots that are now piling up in the middle of that meltdown...
I tried buying linux from Dell recently,
when I decided to, for the first time, buy
pre-assembled instead of building myself (for
a personal box). Having used Dell for business,
I went there first -- their scripts errored
out, and their Linux offerings were overpriced,
usually more expensive than the same or better
system running a windows variant.
I also looked at a few other major vendors,
like Compaq, and came away equally unhappy.
VALinux seems to be ignoring the home market
entirely -- despite a generous budget, I
found all their workstations costly. I finally
found what I wanted in Penguin Computing,
and have been happy thusfar with the box
they built me. But Dell's Linux offerings
are definitely second-class citizens in their
lineup.
That said, who cares what the M$ spin machine
has to say?
I recently switched long distance carriers,
because swbell, while I was calling them
about something else, offered and described a
good plan with no monthly fees and no "local
long distance" that would be inflated to a
price high enough for an international call.
Anyhow, when it actually came time to switch, the southwestern bell rep actually had to call an independant number, punch in my phone numbers, and I had to record a message saying that I'd authorized the switch of the service. I'm not sure if they're just being conscientious or if slamming is illegal around here. Incidentally, if they can do anonymous call blocking with caller id, can't we get a solicitation call block?:P
So we could integrate TNEF decoding into mutt.
But the question may be: do we want to? I know one person at work who, every time he gets and attachment in word, rtf, visio, etc, always says:
send it again in a non-proprietary format. (Text,
postscript, pdf) I myself used to force everyone
sending me visio diagrams to send them as jpgs.
I'm not really interested in legitimizing their
changes by making things compatible. (Although
I'm sure some people believe in it)
On a positive note, a couple weeks ago I had
a plane flight with a gentleman using gnome/E
on his laptop, and it turned out he was a CEO/CTO
of a 75-person hardware engineering firm working
on cutting edge stuff for chips. Apparently
all his people were using "xfig" (which is just
what he ran, I've never used it) to diagram
their circuits instead of something like visio.
Keep in mind, those quotes looked like they were from the odd Focus on the Family people. Even compared to a normal fundamentalist believer, they look extreme. These are the same people that spend their days issuing, "Harry Potter is the Devil's work" sort of messages, etc.
Ok, IANAL, and I imagine YANAL either. But, I've come across this issue in a number of places, because I've worked for ISPs/NSPs for a long time.
But the library is essentially acting as a service provider. As such, it is incapable of guaranteeing any content will or will not exist. Once it begins to filter things, then it may MAKE itself liable, because it has filtered some things and failed to filter others, and incurs liability for that failure.
In one case I can think of, one specific major ISP had a no-filtering policy. They'd remove stuff after being notified, but they did nothing proactive. But someone sued them, using the fact that the _issued pro-active usenet cancels for spam_ to try to nail them. So, in fact, WITH a good faith attempt at filtering, the library may MAKE itself liable. By filtering, it is saying it has taken responsibility for content upon itself, and then can be sued when its filtering fails.
If they passed a resolution and bought and
installed filters, how long would it be before
someone (maybe Jamie?) was standing outside
the library with a huge stack of leaflets: "How
to bypass internet filtering at the library."
I wonder if that would be cause for arrest -- contributing to the delinquincy of a minor? But then again, filters obviously block legitimate sites.
And of course, that assumes that any of the kids would actually need a leaflet.
It may be a good way to placate the Prime Evils (RIAA, MPAA, but Baal escaped), but "this media will stop you from copying things that you aren't authorized to copy" won't have a lot of appeal to any user, average or saavy. A good example is definitely the Intel chip ID fiasco. This may be fine for people who don't know better, since they may not care one way or another, but those are the people that the technology would be for anyhow. Let them repulse consumers if they want.
Baldurs Gate was a fun game. I'd say that the original game starts off a little slow - getting the first few levels can be both time consuming and a little redundant. Then you learn two things simultaneously: random sirine encounters pour out xp, and missile weapons rule that game.
That said, I'd get ToSC -- it has the best quests in the game. Durlag's Tower is downright cool, and there are some really tough fights and a cool quest relating to werebeasts on an island in the pack. I enjoyed the expansion pack as much or more than the original game. I'd actually think it would be cool if they published more, like serial novels, or something.
It's funny, I actually had this in the original.
There was a ring of wizardry you could get in the
city of baldurs gate, as well as a ring of wizardry that was just sitting on the ground outside the friendly arm inn in the grass (was pretty tough to find). I think a patch later removed, then possibly another put back, the FAI ring. Anyhow, at the time, the bioware engine didn't support having the little spellboxes scroll off the screen, so you could PICK more than 12, but you didn't SEE them in the spell book screen -- and there was also some weird bug where you would periodically lose all your spells completely for levels where you could cast too many. You'd open your spellbook and have none selected. That bug was in Icewind Dale too (the unpatched version, anyhow).
You can indeed import characters from BG.
If you played just the standard game, you
have the 89,000 xp cap, and if you played
through the expansion pack (which was better
than the rest of the game, imho), you can
import Tales of the Sword Coast pack characters,
which had an xp cap of 161k.
If you haven't played BG1/ToSC, never fear.
You can create a new character(s), which will
start with 89k xp and jump right in.
I've read some impressive reviews which had good things to say about the story line, etc. What's funny, is, I was going to submit this as a story, too, but I didn't think it was "stuff that mattered". heh.
These laws can be as dangerous as they are helpful, however. I'm in the network security business, and I've been running boxes on the net for 4 years now, and in this time I've seen a lot of complaints which go something like:
Dear root, I received the following ping packet at 13:13:13 on Jan 30. Per USC blah blah, unauthorized access to a computer system is a felony....
And it goes like that. In the past, these ignorant people would cite the US law which applies to unauthorized access to government systems. It didn't apply either way, but the point of the stupid email is this: "unauthorized use" and "unauthorized access" do not take into account the implicit permission for connections when you hook a box to the net. Knowing people in ISP/NSP abuse departments, I've seen way too many complaints along the lines of: "Someone connected to my webserver and this isn't a public server!" Could you call it unauthorized? Technically, yes. But shouldn't connecting a machine to the net be implicit authorization if you don't take steps with a tcpd, ipfilter, ipchains, firewall, etc?
Absolutely. Or a password on your web pages. The same goes for pings -- people will get a single ping packet, and complain that they are "being hacked".
This brings me to an even stickier anecdote: someone has a box on the net running an irc server. Someone hacks a box at a government agency, connects to their irc server. The irc server, as many do, autoconnects to the client box on port 1080, maybe port 23, looking for (1) Wingate and (2) stupidity. Not much later, someone (maybe Nasa, maybe the SS) manages to unlink and postmortem the box, seeing the auto connects logged, and goes after THAT person. Thankfully, they were never dragged into court or anything, but the government actually believed that the person had a hand in the hacking of the box, and that even if not the mere autoconnects were a violation of the law.
That said, I think the "uproar" over hacking is causing laws that also may be too harsh. Removing the $1000 cap on the michigan law is irrelevent -- any hacked system can easily generate a $10k tab, just by citing expert recovery time for dozens of hours at >$100/hr. The simplest 1-machine hacks of companies have generated 6+ figure "damages" in the past.
Even as a security professional, and agreeing that cracking a system when not invited should be a crime, cracking should be a reparation case. If someone spends $5k in time and loses $10k in business because of your crack, you should pay that back, do a few hundred hours community service. It's rough, but it is a crime. It should remain a misdemeanor, unless things are done to multiple systems, with malicious intent to cause harm to the system(s), etc. I'm sure there's a lot of room for discussion, but felonizing script kiddies is not, in my opinion, what we need to do.
At least the original bill seems to allow for
_10 year_ sentences for "damages" of >20k. Sending some 18 yr old to jail for 10 years over a hacked box is absolutely insane. As a network security professional, I'm also fully cognizant about how easily most of these boxes ARE compromised, and replacing security precautions on shared machines with draconian laws with absurd sentences is absolutely unacceptable.
Is it possible there's simply a diverse group of people, with many faiths, much like the population at large, and the story here is that there is no story?
I think so. I also have noticed that here on/., in the geek community, as in the public at large, people tend to adopt certain attitudes based on their perspective vis a vis those of other. Atheists decry the terrible influence and backwards political agenda of the religious right; christians cite the unacceptance of their religion, many believers in smaller practices are either the "lurkers" of their religions (practicing, not talking about it), or talkative, enthusiastic, information, and oddly accepted by the same people decrying christianity as backwards. And what I believe is the largely silent majority has little to say on the topic other than: don't use religion to judge people or their views
Personally, I'd probably expand that: don't use labels, religious or otherwise. I've been labelled a number of things myself, from ignorant to "randite", based on the topic at hand, and it certainly doesn't advance us anywhere to label people instead of using arguments that make sense. I've found myself both consistently impressed by the plethora of truly intelligent/. posts which actually have something insightful to offer, and at the same time horrified of the ease at which people toss around harmful labels or sarcastic flames, as though the sarcastic flaming will appeal to anyone other than the people they pander to with it.
Or, in other words, it seems to me no different that the people I encounter every day in normal life (a geeky life though it may be). And that variety truly is the spice of life, and one of the best things the net has going for it. By committing to truly commit for a minute to another viewpoint, we can all gain the ability to either integrate it into ourselves, or reject it and know why, if we truly seek to understand, rather than to attack.
I've put a lot of thought into this. I myself am a dropout of college -- I went 5 quarters (at a quarter-based 4-yr school). I did more poorly
as the time progressed, because I stopped
attending. (One quarter I took astronomy,
and only showed on the first day, the midterm,
and the final -- did pretty well, too.) I've done very well since then. I'm very, very glad that
I quit school when I did, and that things worked out how they have. In that sense, my own experience would be a remarkable endorsement towards this sort of trend. However, caveats abound:
First, a large number of web jobs are merely technician positions. Most sysadmin, IT, network security, network engineer jobs are merely operating equipment. You plug in disks, you run backups, you create user accounts, you add rules to a firewall, you add static routes here and there, etc. They are jobs which can be performed by anyone slightly-above-average. Because this is true, you would economically expect people to shift into these jobs from lower paying jobs if they were capable, and this is happening. Right now, it isn't necessarily happening faster than these jobs are created. Eventually, supply of these worked will overtake demand, and the pay of these positions will equalize. I know a woman working as a sports therapist in the late 80s/early 90s who made over $100k a year. Interestingly, the most popular career choice of the graduating class before mine (I was '93), was that field. Today, she makes just over $30k/yr.
System administration is not worth (imho) $100k+
in todays dollars. The Silicon Valley is an exception to everything, of course, and that may stay near that forever because of demand/cost of living, but in lifestyle terms, you're making the same/less. What this all comes down to is: fundamentally, people will seek out the best pay and the most challenging work. This is not an axiom, but it is a measurable trend. Those jobs which prove most difficult (historical examples being doctor and lawyer) will pay the best. Exceptions include non-commercial work, such as research/professorships.
Second, if you want to work on things which will be truly "new" in the future, a lot of them require some background. I know a ton of sysadmins, network engineers, security ppl, etc, who never schooled. But I know fewer software engineers, and even fewer hardware engineers -- I interact the hardware engineers less, but I still view this as being because these things respectively require more and more education. You can still be self-taught, but you don't see a lot of demand for, "How to lower the voltage on your integrated circuit" type mini-faqs. I think there will be a huge demand for the forseeable future for good software and hardware engineers. I don't expect them to lose the demand like system administration will. You don't see people offering the equivalent of of an MCSE in ASIC design. Because it takes more background. On the high levels, it requires a very good understanding of physics (for hardware design). On the software side, you have to be well versed in the theory side of things. Understanding how a computer executes instructions, how memory operates, etc,
is far beyond 80%+ of all sysadmins and the like that I've run into.
So, concluding, if you can build the more demanded more fundamental skill sets/knowledge base without school, you're fine without it. If you don't have that knowledge, and are opting for one of the less-mentally-taxing jobs which are more administration/operation oriented rather than being true engineering, expect to see salaries eventually level off and decline.
Moreover, speaking from personal experience -- if you found that picking up sysadmin/network admin/security/etc skills was easy for you, you're probably not going to enjoy your job because it won't challenge you. It may also demand an enormous amount of time from you, leaving you less able to spend other time upgrading your knowledge, and you may feel like you've squandered your abilities.
There are exceptions -- there always will be. There are those so smart that this just doesn't apply -- they have a physics background by the time the choose a college that's strong enough fo r the work, or were answering 50 point questions in Art of Computer Programming when they were in Jr. High -- that's not the norm. So my message is a warning that inflated salaries for in-demand professions will draw people to equalize.
On another note -- I read another article not a year ago that stated that the number of people selecting computer-related majors entering college was actually _declining_. I have a feeling that this is largely the result of this skip-college-go-to-work effect, but there clearly
isn't some huge college crop working its way inexorably towards us ready to flood the market with qualified applicants.
On a closing note, it depends on how good you are. For every person who actually understands what the machines are doing in that sort of work, there are 10 (at least) who can go through the motions. They are the network engineers who don't understand a TCP handshake, and the sysadmins who don't know how a buffer overflow works.
Anyhow, either way, good luck to those that take the plunge, I just wanted to offer a word of caution...and a few pages explaining it:P
on a related note: pgp/gpg+mutt possible?
on
GPG vs. PGP?
·
· Score: 1
Anyone have any reference about integrating either one of them with mutt?
Php.net has an excellent docs section, and I learned to code php and set up a fairly major site from scratch just reading their annoted manual. I will say, if you're new to php, try to read through each section even if you don't THINK you'll need it. There's so many goodies built in, you're bound to miss some. Also, the annoted manual is good because the users offer some clever uses of many pieces of code, or good ways to do things like parse form inputs en masse for illegal characters, or whatever.
Astoundingly astute observation. But I'll play futurist too and disagree with one point. I predict that we won't have starving children or homeless people. Eventually, a world-wide government will arise, although probably not as an official entity, but rather as an agreement in the UN or such, which the US will dutifully follow and enact laws to conform with. We (the US) will move further towards a socialist society. Eventually everyone will, due to amazing productivity gains, work a short day (if that), and have food, health care, and housing (and internet access, in whatever form) provided to them if needed for free.
This information, targetted entertainment, and so on, will truly become the opiate of the masses. There will not be a digital divide, but a motivational one -- most people will opt to not tell, and ambition will become the world's most valued commodity.
What's worse, because of the satisfaction of the general populace and a belief in the goodness of the world, there will be an incredible abuse of power by those possessing it. With everyone too satisfied to play watchdog, those with ambition, right or wrong, will be in charge, and will discover that what tyrants have tried throughout history with secret police, torture, murder, conscription, etc, and failed at, they can accomplish with the carrot instead of the stick.
Provide a television and a cozy couch, and who will challenge you?
I'm blanking on who wrote the story of a similar line, where the populace had a choice to either take a totally side-effect-free happy-drug and live their life in bliss, or to stay off it and try to help run the world. In the story, the happy people really WERE the populace, but my vision is a bit more prone to Morlock raids, to borrow from another piece of fiction. Obviously, the lesson is to master technology, not let it be your master, but its a lot more seductive in real life, as the geek-ified slashdot reader should know.
On another point, you're right on about the moderation system -- it is trivial (yes, I'm guilty) to post karma-whoring crap, and it often seems as though anyone who can put a coherent sentence together can end up at a 5 if they post in the first 10 minutes. Meanwhile, I've had some of my most well-document and empassioned (and dangerous) comments moderated down as flamebait because what I expressed was unpopular with the reader. As a moderator, I tend to have to keep myself conscious of the fact that I need to moderate up well written, original, insightful comments, and not comments which merely crystallize my own thinking in an eloquent way.
I try to promote comments which put for unique, well reasoned, or well documented arguments, rather than promoting what I agree with. It's too bad, in that vein, that if you want to rack up karma, the easiest way to do it is to post early when your (obvious) 2 cents is in great agreement with the masses.
Slashdot Mirror
They are not benefitting from society. They are benefitting from a combination of their abilities and their existing capital. In some cases, their benefits derive solely from the latter (especially those coasting on inheirited wealth). They receive a disproportionately small amount of benefit in terms of social services provided by the money they pay in taxes.
Without factoring in any social obligation, from a purely economical standpoint, you want to maximize the total output of the economy, and strong top-heavy taxation is an impediment to that, especially when it comes to investing.
CSS support for browsers is weak enough, I can't imagine how bad it will be for mobile devices.
It's time for the record companies to get with the program. The _smart_ thing to do would be to just start releasing albums and songs on their own sites. Let people download whatever they want, and pay for it if they keep it. I'd be all over it. Naturally, I'd expect it to cost less than a CD, but not a ton less.
I hope artists also move to fore -- popular artists (those whose recording contracts permit) should release a song or three (or an album) in all mp3, and just take payment if you keep it. Say, 24 hours trial period, if you keep it longer, you have to pay. Obviously, its all voluntary, but who would balk at paying $3 to $6 for an ablum from an artist they like? I think the honest users of such a service would vastly outway any thieves.
Although I do enjoy a bit of fun emulation of yesteryears favorites, I think the difference is that today's games are more fun now than the games of 10 years ago would be now. For example, Duke Nukem 3d was a fun game, and I played it a ton, but would I want to play it now instead of Quake3? No.
Similarly, would anyone really want to go back to the Gold Box AD&D games? If they ported them to Linux and win9x/2k, would you recommend them to a friend, or would you tell them to go get Baldur's Gate/BG2/IWD/etc? That said, I had as much fun playing the gold boxes then as I do now with the BG series, and ditto for duke nukem. But that doesn't mean if I went BACK I'd still have as much fun
This is also a practical question for operating equipment on earth in extreme conditions, such as the Chernobyl cleanup robots that are now piling up in the middle of that meltdown...
Here's what your invoice on a web buy would look like:
Subtotal: $100
Tax: $8.25
AT&T Surcharge: $2 (Click here to learn why AT&T charges YOU extra and what you can do about it)
Total: $110.25
In other words, merchants will pass it on, not subtly but blatantly, and their customers will rebel instantly. Welcome to the information age.
I tried buying linux from Dell recently, when I decided to, for the first time, buy pre-assembled instead of building myself (for a personal box). Having used Dell for business, I went there first -- their scripts errored out, and their Linux offerings were overpriced, usually more expensive than the same or better system running a windows variant.
I also looked at a few other major vendors, like Compaq, and came away equally unhappy. VALinux seems to be ignoring the home market entirely -- despite a generous budget, I found all their workstations costly. I finally found what I wanted in Penguin Computing, and have been happy thusfar with the box they built me. But Dell's Linux offerings are definitely second-class citizens in their lineup.
That said, who cares what the M$ spin machine has to say?
That's "anonymous call blocking", which I mentioned. I want one that knows that people are soliciting ;)
I recently switched long distance carriers, because swbell, while I was calling them about something else, offered and described a good plan with no monthly fees and no "local long distance" that would be inflated to a price high enough for an international call.
:P
Anyhow, when it actually came time to switch, the southwestern bell rep actually had to call an independant number, punch in my phone numbers, and I had to record a message saying that I'd authorized the switch of the service. I'm not sure if they're just being conscientious or if slamming is illegal around here. Incidentally, if they can do anonymous call blocking with caller id, can't we get a solicitation call block?
So we could integrate TNEF decoding into mutt. But the question may be: do we want to? I know one person at work who, every time he gets and attachment in word, rtf, visio, etc, always says: send it again in a non-proprietary format. (Text, postscript, pdf) I myself used to force everyone sending me visio diagrams to send them as jpgs. I'm not really interested in legitimizing their changes by making things compatible. (Although I'm sure some people believe in it)
On a positive note, a couple weeks ago I had a plane flight with a gentleman using gnome/E on his laptop, and it turned out he was a CEO/CTO of a 75-person hardware engineering firm working on cutting edge stuff for chips. Apparently all his people were using "xfig" (which is just what he ran, I've never used it) to diagram their circuits instead of something like visio.
I'm sure glad we have a nice fresh version. It's been so long since I've had to patch my BIND, this sure will be exciting.
Keep in mind, those quotes looked like they were from the odd Focus on the Family people. Even compared to a normal fundamentalist believer, they look extreme. These are the same people that spend their days issuing, "Harry Potter is the Devil's work" sort of messages, etc.
Ok, IANAL, and I imagine YANAL either. But, I've come across this issue in a number of places, because I've worked for ISPs/NSPs for a long time. But the library is essentially acting as a service provider. As such, it is incapable of guaranteeing any content will or will not exist. Once it begins to filter things, then it may MAKE itself liable, because it has filtered some things and failed to filter others, and incurs liability for that failure.
In one case I can think of, one specific major ISP had a no-filtering policy. They'd remove stuff after being notified, but they did nothing proactive. But someone sued them, using the fact that the _issued pro-active usenet cancels for spam_ to try to nail them. So, in fact, WITH a good faith attempt at filtering, the library may MAKE itself liable. By filtering, it is saying it has taken responsibility for content upon itself, and then can be sued when its filtering fails.
If they passed a resolution and bought and installed filters, how long would it be before someone (maybe Jamie?) was standing outside the library with a huge stack of leaflets: "How to bypass internet filtering at the library."
I wonder if that would be cause for arrest -- contributing to the delinquincy of a minor? But then again, filters obviously block legitimate sites.
And of course, that assumes that any of the kids would actually need a leaflet.
It may be a good way to placate the Prime Evils (RIAA, MPAA, but Baal escaped), but "this media will stop you from copying things that you aren't authorized to copy" won't have a lot of appeal to any user, average or saavy. A good example is definitely the Intel chip ID fiasco. This may be fine for people who don't know better, since they may not care one way or another, but those are the people that the technology would be for anyhow. Let them repulse consumers if they want.
Baldurs Gate was a fun game. I'd say that the original game starts off a little slow - getting the first few levels can be both time consuming and a little redundant. Then you learn two things simultaneously: random sirine encounters pour out xp, and missile weapons rule that game.
That said, I'd get ToSC -- it has the best quests in the game. Durlag's Tower is downright cool, and there are some really tough fights and a cool quest relating to werebeasts on an island in the pack. I enjoyed the expansion pack as much or more than the original game. I'd actually think it would be cool if they published more, like serial novels, or something.
It's funny, I actually had this in the original. There was a ring of wizardry you could get in the city of baldurs gate, as well as a ring of wizardry that was just sitting on the ground outside the friendly arm inn in the grass (was pretty tough to find). I think a patch later removed, then possibly another put back, the FAI ring. Anyhow, at the time, the bioware engine didn't support having the little spellboxes scroll off the screen, so you could PICK more than 12, but you didn't SEE them in the spell book screen -- and there was also some weird bug where you would periodically lose all your spells completely for levels where you could cast too many. You'd open your spellbook and have none selected. That bug was in Icewind Dale too (the unpatched version, anyhow).
You can indeed import characters from BG. If you played just the standard game, you have the 89,000 xp cap, and if you played through the expansion pack (which was better than the rest of the game, imho), you can import Tales of the Sword Coast pack characters, which had an xp cap of 161k.
If you haven't played BG1/ToSC, never fear. You can create a new character(s), which will start with 89k xp and jump right in.
I've read some impressive reviews which had good things to say about the story line, etc. What's funny, is, I was going to submit this as a story, too, but I didn't think it was "stuff that mattered". heh.
And it goes like that. In the past, these ignorant people would cite the US law which applies to unauthorized access to government systems. It didn't apply either way, but the point of the stupid email is this: "unauthorized use" and "unauthorized access" do not take into account the implicit permission for connections when you hook a box to the net. Knowing people in ISP/NSP abuse departments, I've seen way too many complaints along the lines of: "Someone connected to my webserver and this isn't a public server!" Could you call it unauthorized? Technically, yes. But shouldn't connecting a machine to the net be implicit authorization if you don't take steps with a tcpd, ipfilter, ipchains, firewall, etc? Absolutely. Or a password on your web pages. The same goes for pings -- people will get a single ping packet, and complain that they are "being hacked".
This brings me to an even stickier anecdote: someone has a box on the net running an irc server. Someone hacks a box at a government agency, connects to their irc server. The irc server, as many do, autoconnects to the client box on port 1080, maybe port 23, looking for (1) Wingate and (2) stupidity. Not much later, someone (maybe Nasa, maybe the SS) manages to unlink and postmortem the box, seeing the auto connects logged, and goes after THAT person. Thankfully, they were never dragged into court or anything, but the government actually believed that the person had a hand in the hacking of the box, and that even if not the mere autoconnects were a violation of the law.
That said, I think the "uproar" over hacking is causing laws that also may be too harsh. Removing the $1000 cap on the michigan law is irrelevent -- any hacked system can easily generate a $10k tab, just by citing expert recovery time for dozens of hours at >$100/hr. The simplest 1-machine hacks of companies have generated 6+ figure "damages" in the past.
Even as a security professional, and agreeing that cracking a system when not invited should be a crime, cracking should be a reparation case. If someone spends $5k in time and loses $10k in business because of your crack, you should pay that back, do a few hundred hours community service. It's rough, but it is a crime. It should remain a misdemeanor, unless things are done to multiple systems, with malicious intent to cause harm to the system(s), etc. I'm sure there's a lot of room for discussion, but felonizing script kiddies is not, in my opinion, what we need to do. At least the original bill seems to allow for _10 year_ sentences for "damages" of >20k. Sending some 18 yr old to jail for 10 years over a hacked box is absolutely insane. As a network security professional, I'm also fully cognizant about how easily most of these boxes ARE compromised, and replacing security precautions on shared machines with draconian laws with absurd sentences is absolutely unacceptable.
Is it possible there's simply a diverse group of people, with many faiths, much like the population at large, and the story here is that there is no story?
/., in the geek community, as in the public at large, people tend to adopt certain attitudes based on their perspective vis a vis those of other. Atheists decry the terrible influence and backwards political agenda of the religious right; christians cite the unacceptance of their religion, many believers in smaller practices are either the "lurkers" of their religions (practicing, not talking about it), or talkative, enthusiastic, information, and oddly accepted by the same people decrying christianity as backwards. And what I believe is the largely silent majority has little to say on the topic other than: don't use religion to judge people or their views
/. posts which actually have something insightful to offer, and at the same time horrified of the ease at which people toss around harmful labels or sarcastic flames, as though the sarcastic flaming will appeal to anyone other than the people they pander to with it.
I think so. I also have noticed that here on
Personally, I'd probably expand that: don't use labels, religious or otherwise. I've been labelled a number of things myself, from ignorant to "randite", based on the topic at hand, and it certainly doesn't advance us anywhere to label people instead of using arguments that make sense. I've found myself both consistently impressed by the plethora of truly intelligent
Or, in other words, it seems to me no different that the people I encounter every day in normal life (a geeky life though it may be). And that variety truly is the spice of life, and one of the best things the net has going for it. By committing to truly commit for a minute to another viewpoint, we can all gain the ability to either integrate it into ourselves, or reject it and know why, if we truly seek to understand, rather than to attack.
I've put a lot of thought into this. I myself am a dropout of college -- I went 5 quarters (at a quarter-based 4-yr school). I did more poorly as the time progressed, because I stopped attending. (One quarter I took astronomy, and only showed on the first day, the midterm, and the final -- did pretty well, too.) I've done very well since then. I'm very, very glad that I quit school when I did, and that things worked out how they have. In that sense, my own experience would be a remarkable endorsement towards this sort of trend. However, caveats abound:
:P
First, a large number of web jobs are merely technician positions. Most sysadmin, IT, network security, network engineer jobs are merely operating equipment. You plug in disks, you run backups, you create user accounts, you add rules to a firewall, you add static routes here and there, etc. They are jobs which can be performed by anyone slightly-above-average. Because this is true, you would economically expect people to shift into these jobs from lower paying jobs if they were capable, and this is happening. Right now, it isn't necessarily happening faster than these jobs are created. Eventually, supply of these worked will overtake demand, and the pay of these positions will equalize. I know a woman working as a sports therapist in the late 80s/early 90s who made over $100k a year. Interestingly, the most popular career choice of the graduating class before mine (I was '93), was that field. Today, she makes just over $30k/yr. System administration is not worth (imho) $100k+ in todays dollars. The Silicon Valley is an exception to everything, of course, and that may stay near that forever because of demand/cost of living, but in lifestyle terms, you're making the same/less. What this all comes down to is: fundamentally, people will seek out the best pay and the most challenging work. This is not an axiom, but it is a measurable trend. Those jobs which prove most difficult (historical examples being doctor and lawyer) will pay the best. Exceptions include non-commercial work, such as research/professorships.
Second, if you want to work on things which will be truly "new" in the future, a lot of them require some background. I know a ton of sysadmins, network engineers, security ppl, etc, who never schooled. But I know fewer software engineers, and even fewer hardware engineers -- I interact the hardware engineers less, but I still view this as being because these things respectively require more and more education. You can still be self-taught, but you don't see a lot of demand for, "How to lower the voltage on your integrated circuit" type mini-faqs. I think there will be a huge demand for the forseeable future for good software and hardware engineers. I don't expect them to lose the demand like system administration will. You don't see people offering the equivalent of of an MCSE in ASIC design. Because it takes more background. On the high levels, it requires a very good understanding of physics (for hardware design). On the software side, you have to be well versed in the theory side of things. Understanding how a computer executes instructions, how memory operates, etc, is far beyond 80%+ of all sysadmins and the like that I've run into.
So, concluding, if you can build the more demanded more fundamental skill sets/knowledge base without school, you're fine without it. If you don't have that knowledge, and are opting for one of the less-mentally-taxing jobs which are more administration/operation oriented rather than being true engineering, expect to see salaries eventually level off and decline.
Moreover, speaking from personal experience -- if you found that picking up sysadmin/network admin/security/etc skills was easy for you, you're probably not going to enjoy your job because it won't challenge you. It may also demand an enormous amount of time from you, leaving you less able to spend other time upgrading your knowledge, and you may feel like you've squandered your abilities.
There are exceptions -- there always will be. There are those so smart that this just doesn't apply -- they have a physics background by the time the choose a college that's strong enough fo r the work, or were answering 50 point questions in Art of Computer Programming when they were in Jr. High -- that's not the norm. So my message is a warning that inflated salaries for in-demand professions will draw people to equalize.
On another note -- I read another article not a year ago that stated that the number of people selecting computer-related majors entering college was actually _declining_. I have a feeling that this is largely the result of this skip-college-go-to-work effect, but there clearly isn't some huge college crop working its way inexorably towards us ready to flood the market with qualified applicants.
On a closing note, it depends on how good you are. For every person who actually understands what the machines are doing in that sort of work, there are 10 (at least) who can go through the motions. They are the network engineers who don't understand a TCP handshake, and the sysadmins who don't know how a buffer overflow works.
Anyhow, either way, good luck to those that take the plunge, I just wanted to offer a word of caution...and a few pages explaining it
Anyone have any reference about integrating either one of them with mutt?
Php.net has an excellent docs section, and I learned to code php and set up a fairly major site from scratch just reading their annoted manual. I will say, if you're new to php, try to read through each section even if you don't THINK you'll need it. There's so many goodies built in, you're bound to miss some. Also, the annoted manual is good because the users offer some clever uses of many pieces of code, or good ways to do things like parse form inputs en masse for illegal characters, or whatever.
Astoundingly astute observation. But I'll play futurist too and disagree with one point. I predict that we won't have starving children or homeless people. Eventually, a world-wide government will arise, although probably not as an official entity, but rather as an agreement in the UN or such, which the US will dutifully follow and enact laws to conform with. We (the US) will move further towards a socialist society. Eventually everyone will, due to amazing productivity gains, work a short day (if that), and have food, health care, and housing (and internet access, in whatever form) provided to them if needed for free.
This information, targetted entertainment, and so on, will truly become the opiate of the masses. There will not be a digital divide, but a motivational one -- most people will opt to not tell, and ambition will become the world's most valued commodity.
What's worse, because of the satisfaction of the general populace and a belief in the goodness of the world, there will be an incredible abuse of power by those possessing it. With everyone too satisfied to play watchdog, those with ambition, right or wrong, will be in charge, and will discover that what tyrants have tried throughout history with secret police, torture, murder, conscription, etc, and failed at, they can accomplish with the carrot instead of the stick. Provide a television and a cozy couch, and who will challenge you?
I'm blanking on who wrote the story of a similar line, where the populace had a choice to either take a totally side-effect-free happy-drug and live their life in bliss, or to stay off it and try to help run the world. In the story, the happy people really WERE the populace, but my vision is a bit more prone to Morlock raids, to borrow from another piece of fiction. Obviously, the lesson is to master technology, not let it be your master, but its a lot more seductive in real life, as the geek-ified slashdot reader should know.
On another point, you're right on about the moderation system -- it is trivial (yes, I'm guilty) to post karma-whoring crap, and it often seems as though anyone who can put a coherent sentence together can end up at a 5 if they post in the first 10 minutes. Meanwhile, I've had some of my most well-document and empassioned (and dangerous) comments moderated down as flamebait because what I expressed was unpopular with the reader. As a moderator, I tend to have to keep myself conscious of the fact that I need to moderate up well written, original, insightful comments, and not comments which merely crystallize my own thinking in an eloquent way. I try to promote comments which put for unique, well reasoned, or well documented arguments, rather than promoting what I agree with. It's too bad, in that vein, that if you want to rack up karma, the easiest way to do it is to post early when your (obvious) 2 cents is in great agreement with the masses.
Good post.