And this is why you should be wary of ANY data collection scheme...just like it used to be that any application would eventually evolve to a point where it incluided a webbrowser/IRC client/email reader, data collections like thses evolve until the government wants it.
Just like Charlie...
Charlie the Consequence Calculating Computational Cluster was calculating
consequences slowly.
Like the rest of him, the name of 5C (as he was known to the hospital
administration) was a joke. Charlie was no expensive cluster, but rather a
decrepit old laptop wedged sideways into a server rack. A med student with
bad programming skills had set it up as an entertaining game for the other
junior doctors.
Each time one of them saved or lost a life, Charlie was fed some data from
the patient history. The doctors were awarded points based on the
occupation of their patients; a cured banker deducted a point, while
killing a teacher got you a five point penalty.
The highest score so far belonged to the original programmer. When he saved
another junior doctor from choking he adapted the program code to give him
all the points amassed by his very nearly expired colleague.
*************
Twenty years later 5C was calculating consequences much faster. Now he was
housed in a much larger, and much more expensive computer. If it had been
possible for a program to be happy, he would have been so.
His original programmer was now the hospital chief of staff and had ordered
that Charlie be expanded by a much more competent team. The computer was
automatically fed patient data to calculate the scores for each doctor.
Fairly often he was asked to advise on medical decisions; if two patients couldn't both be saved he could calculate who had the best point outcome.
The highest score was still the original programmer's. He had made a small
alteration so that he was awarded all the points that Charlie 'saved' by
picking the highest value patients to treat.
**************
Another twenty years later and Charlie was no longer a joke. He was now a
real computational cluster at last. He hummed gently at amazing speed in a
stack of machines as high and as wide as a very cuboid man.
His creator was now Minister for Health, maker of medical decisions for the
state, and he had dictated that Charlie would make all decisions about who
to treat. He had direct access to information on everyone, tied directly
into the national identification database. Who you knew was valuable
information when working out how much you were worth, so for tricky cases
like expensive drugs he was even allowed access to the CCTV network.
Scores were still kept for doctors, and in fact every person these days had
their own score based on who they taught, served or helped. Everyone knew
that trying to overtake the minister for health was pointless; his
invention of Charlie had made him the man with the highest social utility
score in the whole country.
**************
Five years later and the Minister was a sick man. His illness had struck
suddenly and he had been whisked off to a special government run hospital
for those with the very highest scores. His attending doctor knew who the
great man was and right away tapped in, on his tablet, the computer command
to release the drugs that were needed.
Charlie denied the request. The Minister didn't have permission for a
bandage, let alone stroke medication.
Within fifteen minutes a team of crack programmers were in Charlie's data
centre trying to find out what was happening. They worked out the problem
rapidly; Charlie had fungus growing on his circuit boards from a bad air
conditioner. An easy problem to solve, they just needed some fungus killer,
and every hospital had the right stuff to use on athlete's foot.
They called back to the Ministry of Health for permission to access the
fungicide. The team at the Ministry who took the call were not used to
making decisio
On powerbooks and macbook pros the wireless card is locked to channel 1-11. This is fine for the US but, unlike other cards, there is no way to unlock it when you go to Europe (where channels up to 13 are used). This can be a major PITA on a customer site... but at least a spare wireless card is cheap, unlike...
Apple are about the only company that ship the very restricted form of DVD drives. Most will let you read the _data_ from an out-of-region disk, meaning that you can use VLC or another libdvdcss2 solution to play the DVD. The drives that ship with Apple laptops (since late revision powerbooks) totally block reads for out-of-region disks so VLC won't work.
This sucks as it means that my legally purchased region 2 DVDs won't work. There is now a RPC1 de-region crack for macbook pro drives but it requires a copy of Windows to install.
So much for it just works. You would have thought their testing would have involved taking one over the pond for a week of business travel.
Popular music may be rubbish, but that doesn't mean there is no demand for it; if there was no demand for it then there would be no huge p2p effort to supply it!
Certainly the perception of value for a large section of the market may not be high enough to justify paying for it at the current price, but that's not the same as saying that no one would buy it if they couldn't get it for free. The real answer is probably somewhere between 0 sales lost per download and 1 sale lost per download. I doubt we will ever really know for sure.
In any event not liking something is about the most stupid reason imaginable for justifying piracy. If you think it's bad then use your time to consume or create something else instead - there are certainly an enormous number of people giving things away who would be delighted if you took the time to look at their work. A lot of it is really high quality too - I have heard some excellent indie stuff, especially some experimental classical/rock stuff, that could never survive in the commercial world.
Frankly, I'm not sure what the article is trying to state.
This is because the closed source hypervisor in your head is preventing you from accessing the appropriate parts of device memory;)
Frankly this is an interesting legal hack. It certainly seems to comply with the letter of the license, and possibly even the spirit. The freedom to modify GPL 3 software is preserved in the proposal.
What it is analogous to is building (say) a hardware DVDCSS decoder that acts as a black box. Data in, video out. Except - now you can build the black box in software and run it on the same system as GPL 3 code with no (legal) conflicts.
This should certainly help satisfy the requirements of the pragmatist elements of the community that 'just want to build devices that work' while not *totally* dismissing the highly principled group who want to make sure the work they placed under the GPL doesn't go non-free.
The mindset of anyone who has had to sit on a plane for 9 hours listening to an inane cellphone call will not be healthy. The only hope of salvation is that by then your cellphone/camera/gps/projector/printer/mp8player/s extoy/flashlight/pda/radio convergence device will have a battery life of 3 seconds, and/or banned from the plane by the government to stop you pirating the in flight movie.
Excellent point... especially when you consider that if you *are* distributing it will pass through your commercial department.
I have been doing commercial work lately on over 100 contracts, each with unique terms and conditions. Even if we had projects running that used every single OSS license out there it wouldn't tax us to an unreasonable level. That is kind of what specialists are for... businesses pay programmers to programme, and the commercial department to read contracts.
The best bit is that unlike technical issues your PHB probably appreciates the importance of contracts! I can't think of a single director (even the engineering directors) where I work who couldn't assimilate the GPL in five minutes or less - and the GPL is one of the more complex licenses. They deal with stuff far more weird than this every day.
All you need is to know how to state the benefits in their language. My humble effort is here - and I would welcome additions.
If you want a current example from the _very same market_ in the UK (TV watchers) then glance your eye over Sky vs Virgin.
The number one non-over-the-air channel, Sky One, is owned by the same people who own the satellite broadcast system. (In the UK TV service to households with reasonable disposable income is, or was, split into cable vs satellite. Over the air is probably more common but not really in the same market. Outside London there are no real alternatives yet.)
Sky have denied the Sky One (and a few other not very interesting channels) license to Virgin. This has resulted in a massive exodus from cable. As a TV watching friend of mine pointed out "it's not worth the grief from the missus - and the kids would yell at me too". My choice would have been emigration without kids or wife, but he chose to switch to Satellite/Sky instead.
What does this have to do with internet TV, which has no presence yet to be missed? Well, the BBC has a tendency to plug new services endlessly on their channels. There is no one in the UK who doesn't hear or see something from the BBC every single week. Computer penetration is also very high, it's a small island so broadband is readily available too (cable and DSL, the latter from a number of ISPs). Even the people who won't see TV adverts listen to Radio 4 (available over the internet for free - give it a go! - especially the comedy) giving them a direct and unique line to highly educated and very powerful people.
So, a large number of people who have already shown that TV is important enough to make them pick up the phone, will get bombarded with adverts for a new service that they can probably access. Until they get home and try to get to it and see:
The BBC can't give you access to the iPlayer because unlike every reputable ISP yours is trying to charge you extra and we said we wouldn't be part of it. Here is a list of ISPs, that you probably can switch to with a single phone call, that are doing the right thing.
Even if the ISP blocks the error page the cost of handling the phone calls to customer support *alone* will probably make the whole thing impossible to maintain for very long.
Now, it won't come to this. A backroom deal will be cut and the whole thing will go away - precisely because the ISPs have no possible way to win.
Unlike copyright the patent concept is easy to defend. The benefit for progress of engineering and technological culture can be logically demonstrated - and unlike copyright the limits on duration are not totally insane.
However there is obviously some need for reform. If I were starting a business today I would be sure to base it in somewhere like China and register my patents in the US in order to minimise my likely exposure while maximising my potential gain. So what could be done?
Almost the scariest aspect of the patent system is not the actual law but the consequences of the threat of the law. If you are perceived to be infringing your case could be hugely expensive and very protracted - and justice delayed is justice denied. Being right isn't going to be much help if I go bankrupt before I win! Unless you are a huge company you are essentially screwed by a lawsuit. With the intent of keeping the system essentially fair it would seem to be wise to:
Assess the patent dispute in a week or so in a semi-formal tribunal of peers. Appeal is permitted, with (capped) costs paid by each side.
Assess the patent in an equivalent of a small claims court over a month or so. Appeal is permitted, with (capped) costs paid by the loser.
Full lawyer enriching bun fight - but whoever lost the last round gets to pick up the whole cost until a winner is declared.
By lowering the cost of patent litigation the risk would be reduced - and we wouldn't have to wait so long or force so many people to pay protection money in the course of business.
You can run Yahoo Java games on Linux PPC using the IBM JRE. I wrote a set of installation instructions for it that cover installation and setting up the Firefox plugin.
The installation isn't Grandma level, but once it is up and running it is no different to Yahoo games on Windows.
Before anyone jumps on the summary for being incorrect - there is no need to notify a developer when you use or distribute GPL software. However if you want to distribute in violation of the license then there are only two ways:
Get the developer to waive the license (hasn't happened according to summary, which was worth mentioning as it means the only option is (2))
Pile a huge stack of cash in a vault to pay off copyright violation damages
The third option, which isn't usually available when you screw up with non-free software, is to apologise really fast and comply with the GPL*. Although there are no guarantees free software developers are usually nice folks who can overlook a mistake.
It is one reason why all the 'viral' fud about the GPL is so annoying (not that it applies to this case, as there is no derivative product, but it usually rears it's ugly head in these threads). All the GPL does is give you an Option Three which isn't usually available - you would be in court for damages instead of sitting across a table from a bunch of altrustic techies seeking a negotiated solution.
*Historically stopping distribution and rewriting the offending module usually is an option too, depending on how antagonistic you were before admitting your mistake.
I'm pretty sure *I* have a free CD somewhere here, and I have never bought a computer with Windows on it. Maybe it came free with my digital watch.
With some irony it isn't even a useful office suite for homework as it can't (or couldn't when I was 17) handle 'industry standard office files' - as required by UK schools.
Your kids are going to have (at least) two people who are a) their history b) documented better than ever before.
Their kids will have an amazing amount of data from 6 people. 10 generations in there will be a huge mass of mundane details for 2046 people just in their own family tree.
Hopefully someone will invent a better search engine because otherwise it's going to be impossible for them to find the interesting things without being overwhelmed by a tidal wave of rubbish blog posts and bad photos posted to flickr. There is one obvious solution of course...
If you don't trust adobe you could always install the open source Flash plugin swfdec. It's come on a lot recently and now plays most things. Hopefully the heavy pace of development will continue - I'm seeing about 5 commits per day adding new stuff on the mailing list.
For most people qualifications only serve to prove a minimum standard of competence. Yes, a degree is both necessary and a good choice - it helps develop your skills, and also makes you eligible for jobs where someone has made a degree a check box requirement - but other than getting past the first round it makes little difference to the prospect of being hired.
So instead of worrying exactly which degree to take, just get the one that you think you will enjoy most. It's going to be your life for years - if you don't enjoy it, it'll kill you. I did engineering, because it was fun, and I got offers from the IT industry when I graduated as well as elsewhere. There were plenty of people with maths and physics degrees heading into IT as well.
Much more important is to get employment in the right field. Even if it's an unpaid weekend job, or summers doing network admin stuff. Steady employment and a track record is much more impressive than anything most of your competitors will have at the start of the mad rush to hire graduates. The closer it is to your field the better, and if you can pick a company that will keep having you back and give you more impressive things to do that's great.
Even if they (or you) don't want to turn things permanent after college, then you will already have a headstart on networking in your field, proof you can work for a week in an office without putting laxative in the coffee and good things to talk about at interviews.
The perception that open source software is not business friendly is a common, but mistaken, one. I have recently been trying to write a five minute, commercial biased presentation in order to help correct that.
I have 12,000 violations on my laptop. I better make out a check to the EFF before the bang the door down... what's the annual licensing fee on GPL software again?
it costs money for companies to reduce emissions and for the government to enforce standards.
It costs money to keep beaches free of sewage, breakfast free of weevils, jobs free of twenty hour days, students in school, Iraq free of terrorists, criminals in jail and hospitals free of credit card readers at the emergency room doors.
The fact that it might cost money, and that some of that money might need to come from taxes, doesn't necessarily make it a bad idea. It doesn't make it a good idea either - consideration is required in all things.
Energy-conservation initiatives are GOOD things, but there's also the reality that only countries with the LUXURY of being able to afford to invest in such initiatives will do so (at best). India, China -- these are becoming some of the world's largest sources of pollution, and unless Superman starts getting up early for work sometime soon here, I don't see their energy production becoming predominately nuclear or water/wind/solar anyt ime soon.
Per capita the US is far, far ahead. And if you aren't measuring per capita then I'm curious as to how you expect to be taken seriously - what gives Americans (or indeed Europeans) the right to pollute more than anyone else?
Slashdot Mirror
And this is why you should be wary of ANY data collection scheme...just like it used to be that any application would eventually evolve to a point where it incluided a webbrowser/IRC client/email reader, data collections like thses evolve until the government wants it.
Just like Charlie...
Charlie the Consequence Calculating Computational Cluster was calculating consequences slowly.
Like the rest of him, the name of 5C (as he was known to the hospital administration) was a joke. Charlie was no expensive cluster, but rather a decrepit old laptop wedged sideways into a server rack. A med student with bad programming skills had set it up as an entertaining game for the other junior doctors.
Each time one of them saved or lost a life, Charlie was fed some data from the patient history. The doctors were awarded points based on the occupation of their patients; a cured banker deducted a point, while killing a teacher got you a five point penalty.
The highest score so far belonged to the original programmer. When he saved another junior doctor from choking he adapted the program code to give him all the points amassed by his very nearly expired colleague.
*************
Twenty years later 5C was calculating consequences much faster. Now he was housed in a much larger, and much more expensive computer. If it had been possible for a program to be happy, he would have been so.
His original programmer was now the hospital chief of staff and had ordered that Charlie be expanded by a much more competent team. The computer was automatically fed patient data to calculate the scores for each doctor. Fairly often he was asked to advise on medical decisions; if two patients couldn't both be saved he could calculate who had the best point outcome.
The highest score was still the original programmer's. He had made a small alteration so that he was awarded all the points that Charlie 'saved' by picking the highest value patients to treat.
**************
Another twenty years later and Charlie was no longer a joke. He was now a real computational cluster at last. He hummed gently at amazing speed in a stack of machines as high and as wide as a very cuboid man.
His creator was now Minister for Health, maker of medical decisions for the state, and he had dictated that Charlie would make all decisions about who to treat. He had direct access to information on everyone, tied directly into the national identification database. Who you knew was valuable information when working out how much you were worth, so for tricky cases like expensive drugs he was even allowed access to the CCTV network.
Scores were still kept for doctors, and in fact every person these days had their own score based on who they taught, served or helped. Everyone knew that trying to overtake the minister for health was pointless; his invention of Charlie had made him the man with the highest social utility score in the whole country.
**************
Five years later and the Minister was a sick man. His illness had struck suddenly and he had been whisked off to a special government run hospital for those with the very highest scores. His attending doctor knew who the great man was and right away tapped in, on his tablet, the computer command to release the drugs that were needed.
Charlie denied the request. The Minister didn't have permission for a bandage, let alone stroke medication.
Within fifteen minutes a team of crack programmers were in Charlie's data centre trying to find out what was happening. They worked out the problem rapidly; Charlie had fungus growing on his circuit boards from a bad air conditioner. An easy problem to solve, they just needed some fungus killer, and every hospital had the right stuff to use on athlete's foot.
They called back to the Ministry of Health for permission to access the fungicide. The team at the Ministry who took the call were not used to making decisio
You could achieve the same effect with a tic tac toe game that gave entry to anyone who could force a draw.
On powerbooks and macbook pros the wireless card is locked to channel 1-11. This is fine for the US but, unlike other cards, there is no way to unlock it when you go to Europe (where channels up to 13 are used). This can be a major PITA on a customer site... but at least a spare wireless card is cheap, unlike...
Apple are about the only company that ship the very restricted form of DVD drives. Most will let you read the _data_ from an out-of-region disk, meaning that you can use VLC or another libdvdcss2 solution to play the DVD. The drives that ship with Apple laptops (since late revision powerbooks) totally block reads for out-of-region disks so VLC won't work.
This sucks as it means that my legally purchased region 2 DVDs won't work. There is now a RPC1 de-region crack for macbook pro drives but it requires a copy of Windows to install.
So much for it just works. You would have thought their testing would have involved taking one over the pond for a week of business travel.
While lights at night may make the sky harder to see the effect will be very pretty for any visiting aliens.
In fact this story has inspired me to go and set up xplanet again to provide an ever-changing desktop background.
Popular music may be rubbish, but that doesn't mean there is no demand for it; if there was no demand for it then there would be no huge p2p effort to supply it!
Certainly the perception of value for a large section of the market may not be high enough to justify paying for it at the current price, but that's not the same as saying that no one would buy it if they couldn't get it for free. The real answer is probably somewhere between 0 sales lost per download and 1 sale lost per download. I doubt we will ever really know for sure.
In any event not liking something is about the most stupid reason imaginable for justifying piracy. If you think it's bad then use your time to consume or create something else instead - there are certainly an enormous number of people giving things away who would be delighted if you took the time to look at their work. A lot of it is really high quality too - I have heard some excellent indie stuff, especially some experimental classical/rock stuff, that could never survive in the commercial world.
Frankly, I'm not sure what the article is trying to state.
;)
This is because the closed source hypervisor in your head is preventing you from accessing the appropriate parts of device memory
Frankly this is an interesting legal hack. It certainly seems to comply with the letter of the license, and possibly even the spirit. The freedom to modify GPL 3 software is preserved in the proposal.
What it is analogous to is building (say) a hardware DVDCSS decoder that acts as a black box. Data in, video out. Except - now you can build the black box in software and run it on the same system as GPL 3 code with no (legal) conflicts.
This should certainly help satisfy the requirements of the pragmatist elements of the community that 'just want to build devices that work' while not *totally* dismissing the highly principled group who want to make sure the work they placed under the GPL doesn't go non-free.
The mindset of anyone who has had to sit on a plane for 9 hours listening to an inane cellphone call will not be healthy. The only hope of salvation is that by then your cellphone/camera/gps/projector/printer/mp8player/s extoy/flashlight/pda/radio convergence device will have a battery life of 3 seconds, and/or banned from the plane by the government to stop you pirating the in flight movie.
Excellent point... especially when you consider that if you *are* distributing it will pass through your commercial department.
I have been doing commercial work lately on over 100 contracts, each with unique terms and conditions. Even if we had projects running that used every single OSS license out there it wouldn't tax us to an unreasonable level. That is kind of what specialists are for... businesses pay programmers to programme, and the commercial department to read contracts.
The best bit is that unlike technical issues your PHB probably appreciates the importance of contracts! I can't think of a single director (even the engineering directors) where I work who couldn't assimilate the GPL in five minutes or less - and the GPL is one of the more complex licenses. They deal with stuff far more weird than this every day.
All you need is to know how to state the benefits in their language. My humble effort is here - and I would welcome additions.
If you want a current example from the _very same market_ in the UK (TV watchers) then glance your eye over Sky vs Virgin.
The number one non-over-the-air channel, Sky One, is owned by the same people who own the satellite broadcast system. (In the UK TV service to households with reasonable disposable income is, or was, split into cable vs satellite. Over the air is probably more common but not really in the same market. Outside London there are no real alternatives yet.)
Sky have denied the Sky One (and a few other not very interesting channels) license to Virgin. This has resulted in a massive exodus from cable. As a TV watching friend of mine pointed out "it's not worth the grief from the missus - and the kids would yell at me too". My choice would have been emigration without kids or wife, but he chose to switch to Satellite/Sky instead.
What does this have to do with internet TV, which has no presence yet to be missed? Well, the BBC has a tendency to plug new services endlessly on their channels. There is no one in the UK who doesn't hear or see something from the BBC every single week. Computer penetration is also very high, it's a small island so broadband is readily available too (cable and DSL, the latter from a number of ISPs). Even the people who won't see TV adverts listen to Radio 4 (available over the internet for free - give it a go! - especially the comedy) giving them a direct and unique line to highly educated and very powerful people.
So, a large number of people who have already shown that TV is important enough to make them pick up the phone, will get bombarded with adverts for a new service that they can probably access. Until they get home and try to get to it and see:
The BBC can't give you access to the iPlayer because unlike every reputable ISP yours is trying to charge you extra and we said we wouldn't be part of it. Here is a list of ISPs, that you probably can switch to with a single phone call, that are doing the right thing.
Even if the ISP blocks the error page the cost of handling the phone calls to customer support *alone* will probably make the whole thing impossible to maintain for very long.
Now, it won't come to this. A backroom deal will be cut and the whole thing will go away - precisely because the ISPs have no possible way to win.
However there is obviously some need for reform. If I were starting a business today I would be sure to base it in somewhere like China and register my patents in the US in order to minimise my likely exposure while maximising my potential gain. So what could be done?
Almost the scariest aspect of the patent system is not the actual law but the consequences of the threat of the law. If you are perceived to be infringing your case could be hugely expensive and very protracted - and justice delayed is justice denied. Being right isn't going to be much help if I go bankrupt before I win! Unless you are a huge company you are essentially screwed by a lawsuit. With the intent of keeping the system essentially fair it would seem to be wise to:
By lowering the cost of patent litigation the risk would be reduced - and we wouldn't have to wait so long or force so many people to pay protection money in the course of business.
You can run Yahoo Java games on Linux PPC using the IBM JRE. I wrote a set of installation instructions for it that cover installation and setting up the Firefox plugin.
The installation isn't Grandma level, but once it is up and running it is no different to Yahoo games on Windows.
The third option, which isn't usually available when you screw up with non-free software, is to apologise really fast and comply with the GPL*. Although there are no guarantees free software developers are usually nice folks who can overlook a mistake.
It is one reason why all the 'viral' fud about the GPL is so annoying (not that it applies to this case, as there is no derivative product, but it usually rears it's ugly head in these threads). All the GPL does is give you an Option Three which isn't usually available - you would be in court for damages instead of sitting across a table from a bunch of altrustic techies seeking a negotiated solution.
*Historically stopping distribution and rewriting the offending module usually is an option too, depending on how antagonistic you were before admitting your mistake.
I'm pretty sure *I* have a free CD somewhere here, and I have never bought a computer with Windows on it. Maybe it came free with my digital watch.
With some irony it isn't even a useful office suite for homework as it can't (or couldn't when I was 17) handle 'industry standard office files' - as required by UK schools.
I am the only Linux user in the UK, and I don't want an Asus. Sorry guys, no hard feelings.
Your kids are going to have (at least) two people who are a) their history b) documented better than ever before.
Their kids will have an amazing amount of data from 6 people. 10 generations in there will be a huge mass of mundane details for 2046 people just in their own family tree.
Hopefully someone will invent a better search engine because otherwise it's going to be impossible for them to find the interesting things without being overwhelmed by a tidal wave of rubbish blog posts and bad photos posted to flickr. There is one obvious solution of course...
Jr whfg rapelcg rirelguvat jvgu Ebg13? Vg orapuznexf snibhenoyl va grezf bs frphevgl jvgu fhpu vaqhfgel fgnaqneqf nf PFF naq JZN, obgu bs juvpu ner oebxra.
That it's office productivity software. You can generate your own road map.
*Version +1. Just like the current version, but with slightly more features and shiny icons!
*As above.
What are they worried about? That the OpenOffice roadmap might include:
*Given up on office suite. This version is a badger tracking application. Enjoy!
If you don't trust adobe you could always install the open source Flash plugin swfdec. It's come on a lot recently and now plays most things. Hopefully the heavy pace of development will continue - I'm seeing about 5 commits per day adding new stuff on the mailing list.
For most people qualifications only serve to prove a minimum standard of competence. Yes, a degree is both necessary and a good choice - it helps develop your skills, and also makes you eligible for jobs where someone has made a degree a check box requirement - but other than getting past the first round it makes little difference to the prospect of being hired.
So instead of worrying exactly which degree to take, just get the one that you think you will enjoy most. It's going to be your life for years - if you don't enjoy it, it'll kill you. I did engineering, because it was fun, and I got offers from the IT industry when I graduated as well as elsewhere. There were plenty of people with maths and physics degrees heading into IT as well.
Much more important is to get employment in the right field. Even if it's an unpaid weekend job, or summers doing network admin stuff. Steady employment and a track record is much more impressive than anything most of your competitors will have at the start of the mad rush to hire graduates. The closer it is to your field the better, and if you can pick a company that will keep having you back and give you more impressive things to do that's great.
Even if they (or you) don't want to turn things permanent after college, then you will already have a headstart on networking in your field, proof you can work for a week in an office without putting laxative in the coffee and good things to talk about at interviews.
The bad news, Mr Jones, is that you are suffering from chronic pain.
The good news is that we are going to stick a six inch needle into your spine.
The perception that open source software is not business friendly is a common, but mistaken, one. I have recently been trying to write a five minute, commercial biased presentation in order to help correct that.
I have 12,000 violations on my laptop. I better make out a check to the EFF before the bang the door down... what's the annual licensing fee on GPL software again?
it costs money for companies to reduce emissions and for the government to enforce standards.
It costs money to keep beaches free of sewage, breakfast free of weevils, jobs free of twenty hour days, students in school, Iraq free of terrorists, criminals in jail and hospitals free of credit card readers at the emergency room doors.
The fact that it might cost money, and that some of that money might need to come from taxes, doesn't necessarily make it a bad idea. It doesn't make it a good idea either - consideration is required in all things.
Energy-conservation initiatives are GOOD things, but there's also the reality that only countries with the LUXURY of being able to afford to invest in such initiatives will do so (at best). India, China -- these are becoming some of the world's largest sources of pollution, and unless Superman starts getting up early for work sometime soon here, I don't see their energy production becoming predominately nuclear or water/wind/solar anyt ime soon.
Per capita the US is far, far ahead. And if you aren't measuring per capita then I'm curious as to how you expect to be taken seriously - what gives Americans (or indeed Europeans) the right to pollute more than anyone else?