I think TFA makes the point that in disadvantaged households, parents are less able to pay attention to their children, and not necessarily because they are bad parents. People with low incomes often wind up working jobs that have unusual hours (i.e. hours that do not sync up well with the hours that a child spends at school), unusual days off (so that weekends may be spent working), etc. Sometimes people are forced to work more than 40 hours, possibly split across more than one job, to make ends meet, and sometimes both parents (assuming that two parents are in the home) wind up working.
Now, as for why computers exacerbate that problem...well, that I am not really clear on.
"What will you do when more people are breaking your law than obeying it?"
The same thing we do with drug prohibition: expand the police force and increase the power that the police have, and then go ahead and incarcerate millions of people.
To whoever modded this post "informative:" it was obviously a joke. Either mod it "funny" or mod it "lame" (yes, I propose that we add "-1 Lame" to the moderation system).
The flip side, though, is that pro-patent people could also use this to their advantage. Imagine this exchange:
Anti-patent person: Software patents are ridiculous! It would be like trying to claim ownership over a sentence!
Pro-patent person: Well, copyrights on sentences have been granted, so there!
I say we need to invert these things: the drinking age should be 16, the driving age 21. People should learn how to drink from their parents, and that includes how to drink at restaurants and bars, and teenagers should not be driving cars.
Or we can go with the simpler answer, exporting a format that will render and print correctly regardless of which browser (or browser version) or operating system is in use. Why waste time getting a stylesheet to work, when you could just render a PDF instead, especially considering the number of PDF authoring tools and libraries that exist?
Not that I disagree with you, but there are plenty of offline applications written in Java, using Swing. Java is not limited to applets and application servers, there is a mature library for standalone/offline application development. As I remember things, the reason we do not see more desktop applications written in Java is the bad reputation Java had in the 90s for taking a long time to loa, and to some degree the fact that Swing does not integrate with the desktop look and feel (or at least it did not the last time I checked, which was admittedly years ago).
Here I was, thinking that reinventing the wheel was a requisite part of developing a web app. Are you really trying to suggest that we leverage an existing and mature codebase for rendering and printing documents or processing data tables?
Can you define that term? I have seen it used to refer to half a dozen vaguely related concepts so far, so it would be nice to know which one you are referring to.
"There's no shoehorn involved when it's the best tool for the job."
The web is not the best tool for every job though, which I think was OP's point.
The depends entirely on your definition of "hacker." Lamo is a "hacker" in the Hollywood sense, sure: he is able to quickly find flaws in security systems. Real hackers, though, refer to such a person as a "cracker," in the sense that they crack security; a "hacker" is someone who is a computer or electronics enthusiast.
Of course, Lamo was demonized just the same. It would not have mattered if his attack actually involved writing code, the mainstream media would have printed exactly the same stories about him.
Considering that he was found guilty once, I don't think Lamo wants to be carrying secrets for other people anymore. If I were him, I would be staying on the straight and narrow for a while.
Any proposal that involves tax dollars being used to pay for media will be labeled as "socialist" and scaremongerers will undoubtedly claim that it will lead to censorship and oppression.
After they owe more than the combined wealth of all resources humanity could ever potentially obtain
Unfortunately that would not actually lead to a recognition that these damage sums are too high; rather, it would simply lead to a conclusion that there is no valid way for Limewire to do its business, and it would be shut down. Now, if we were dealing with an individual being required to pay these ridiculous amounts of money, then we might see some real reform. "Might" is the operative word there...
Do you really think that by virtue of being GPLed, the project is immune? Lawsuits can still be filed against the developers, and worse yet, those developers may contribute code as individuals -- opening themselves up to personal bankruptcy should a judge rule against them. Look at what happened with GPLed DVD playing software.
Re:Employee monitoring is not really new
on
Employee Monitoring
·
· Score: 1
Did I say the manager has to be the most competent user of the equipment? All I said was that the manager should be competent with the equipment -- competent enough to perform an occasional check to see if people are actually doing their jobs. Sure, if someone is going to put effort into hiding their activities, then it would take an expert to detect that, but I was not referring to such cases. Sure, the accounting manager will not be an expert in computer security...but I can make a similar case that the accountants that he manages are also not likely to be experts at computer intrusion or data hiding.
How is it unreasonable to think that someone who manages employees that use computers for their work should have the level of technical proficiency needed to perform a casual check of computer use? It is no different than expecting a manager to have a certain level of knowledge about any other equipment that his particular employees use.
Re:it's a valid part of IT's job
on
Employee Monitoring
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
By analogy, imagine a railroad. Instead of computers, we have locomotives, and instead of IT staff, we have mechanics who maintain those locomotives. Now, whose responsibility should it be to check it on the employees who operate the locomotives to make sure they are doing their job, the mechanics, or the manager?
Passive monitoring is one thing -- if an IT worker sees something strange, like an employee storing many terabytes of porn on company computers, then of course that should be reported to the boss. Active monitoring is another story -- IT staff should not be expected to check in on employee activity on the computers to make sure that people are working. Actively monitoring the employees is a manager's job.
What bothers me about this whole situation is that the IT guys are not managers -- so why are they watching over the employees to any degree? It is one thing if someone happens to stumble across something unusual, such as your example with the excessive disk space, and then reports that to a manager, but it is quite another story when IT guys are being asked to actively monitor other employees. The managers should be the people who watch over the employees and make sure that the equipment (i.e. computers) is being used properly, and they should not try to pass off that responsibility to someone else.
Employee monitoring is not really new
on
Employee Monitoring
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
When it comes to being employed, though, bosses and managers have always watched their employees to some degree -- that is, of course, the purpose of being the boss. A good boss knows what sort of things are worth confronting an employee about -- maybe it is OK for someone to be chatting with their sweetheart, as long as their work is getting done, but maybe it is not OK for someone to be watching their sweetheart stripping in a video chat even if the work is getting done.
TFA raises a slightly different issue: when one employee is asked to monitor the others. Sysadmins should not be asked to take on the responsibility of watching employees; that is a manager's responsibility. If the manager is not technically competent to monitor computer use, then there is a question of why that person is managing people who use computers for their work -- the manager should be competent with the equipment.
Well thankfully, our firewall is not intended to block what services we can use or hosts we can connect to; it only filters inbound traffic. One nice thing that SSH lets me do, though, is use my workstation as a proxy when I am working from home, so that I can access certain restricted resources (such as journal subscriptions that are only available to computers on our campus).
Of course, TCP session information could be used to figure out which website on a particular server was actually visited. A certain pattern of connections resulting from the loading for off-site content (i.e. advertising), for example, might be used in making such a determination.
Slashdot Mirror
I think TFA makes the point that in disadvantaged households, parents are less able to pay attention to their children, and not necessarily because they are bad parents. People with low incomes often wind up working jobs that have unusual hours (i.e. hours that do not sync up well with the hours that a child spends at school), unusual days off (so that weekends may be spent working), etc. Sometimes people are forced to work more than 40 hours, possibly split across more than one job, to make ends meet, and sometimes both parents (assuming that two parents are in the home) wind up working.
Now, as for why computers exacerbate that problem...well, that I am not really clear on.
"What will you do when more people are breaking your law than obeying it?"
The same thing we do with drug prohibition: expand the police force and increase the power that the police have, and then go ahead and incarcerate millions of people.
To whoever modded this post "informative:" it was obviously a joke. Either mod it "funny" or mod it "lame" (yes, I propose that we add "-1 Lame" to the moderation system).
The flip side, though, is that pro-patent people could also use this to their advantage. Imagine this exchange:
Anti-patent person: Software patents are ridiculous! It would be like trying to claim ownership over a sentence!
Pro-patent person: Well, copyrights on sentences have been granted, so there!
I say we need to invert these things: the drinking age should be 16, the driving age 21. People should learn how to drink from their parents, and that includes how to drink at restaurants and bars, and teenagers should not be driving cars.
Or we can go with the simpler answer, exporting a format that will render and print correctly regardless of which browser (or browser version) or operating system is in use. Why waste time getting a stylesheet to work, when you could just render a PDF instead, especially considering the number of PDF authoring tools and libraries that exist?
"I'm not sure what's "offline" about Java"
Not that I disagree with you, but there are plenty of offline applications written in Java, using Swing. Java is not limited to applets and application servers, there is a mature library for standalone/offline application development. As I remember things, the reason we do not see more desktop applications written in Java is the bad reputation Java had in the 90s for taking a long time to loa, and to some degree the fact that Swing does not integrate with the desktop look and feel (or at least it did not the last time I checked, which was admittedly years ago).
Here I was, thinking that reinventing the wheel was a requisite part of developing a web app. Are you really trying to suggest that we leverage an existing and mature codebase for rendering and printing documents or processing data tables?
Now, if only more people thought this way.
"rich internet application"
Can you define that term? I have seen it used to refer to half a dozen vaguely related concepts so far, so it would be nice to know which one you are referring to.
"There's no shoehorn involved when it's the best tool for the job."
The web is not the best tool for every job though, which I think was OP's point.
The wheel is reinvented in computer science every so often.
The depends entirely on your definition of "hacker." Lamo is a "hacker" in the Hollywood sense, sure: he is able to quickly find flaws in security systems. Real hackers, though, refer to such a person as a "cracker," in the sense that they crack security; a "hacker" is someone who is a computer or electronics enthusiast.
Of course, Lamo was demonized just the same. It would not have mattered if his attack actually involved writing code, the mainstream media would have printed exactly the same stories about him.
Considering that he was found guilty once, I don't think Lamo wants to be carrying secrets for other people anymore. If I were him, I would be staying on the straight and narrow for a while.
Ask any company that hosts an open source software project how many outsiders actually commit code
http://www.fedoraproject.org/
Hm...
Any proposal that involves tax dollars being used to pay for media will be labeled as "socialist" and scaremongerers will undoubtedly claim that it will lead to censorship and oppression.
They essentially only want copyright to prohibit making money by copying, etc., the works of others.
That sure sounds reasonable to me.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evoloop
Not exactly Conway's game of life, but similar concept, and it is certainly possible to encode this in Conway's game of life.
After they owe more than the combined wealth of all resources humanity could ever potentially obtain
Unfortunately that would not actually lead to a recognition that these damage sums are too high; rather, it would simply lead to a conclusion that there is no valid way for Limewire to do its business, and it would be shut down. Now, if we were dealing with an individual being required to pay these ridiculous amounts of money, then we might see some real reform. "Might" is the operative word there...
Do you really think that by virtue of being GPLed, the project is immune? Lawsuits can still be filed against the developers, and worse yet, those developers may contribute code as individuals -- opening themselves up to personal bankruptcy should a judge rule against them. Look at what happened with GPLed DVD playing software.
Did I say the manager has to be the most competent user of the equipment? All I said was that the manager should be competent with the equipment -- competent enough to perform an occasional check to see if people are actually doing their jobs. Sure, if someone is going to put effort into hiding their activities, then it would take an expert to detect that, but I was not referring to such cases. Sure, the accounting manager will not be an expert in computer security...but I can make a similar case that the accountants that he manages are also not likely to be experts at computer intrusion or data hiding.
How is it unreasonable to think that someone who manages employees that use computers for their work should have the level of technical proficiency needed to perform a casual check of computer use? It is no different than expecting a manager to have a certain level of knowledge about any other equipment that his particular employees use.
By analogy, imagine a railroad. Instead of computers, we have locomotives, and instead of IT staff, we have mechanics who maintain those locomotives. Now, whose responsibility should it be to check it on the employees who operate the locomotives to make sure they are doing their job, the mechanics, or the manager?
Passive monitoring is one thing -- if an IT worker sees something strange, like an employee storing many terabytes of porn on company computers, then of course that should be reported to the boss. Active monitoring is another story -- IT staff should not be expected to check in on employee activity on the computers to make sure that people are working. Actively monitoring the employees is a manager's job.
What bothers me about this whole situation is that the IT guys are not managers -- so why are they watching over the employees to any degree? It is one thing if someone happens to stumble across something unusual, such as your example with the excessive disk space, and then reports that to a manager, but it is quite another story when IT guys are being asked to actively monitor other employees. The managers should be the people who watch over the employees and make sure that the equipment (i.e. computers) is being used properly, and they should not try to pass off that responsibility to someone else.
When it comes to being employed, though, bosses and managers have always watched their employees to some degree -- that is, of course, the purpose of being the boss. A good boss knows what sort of things are worth confronting an employee about -- maybe it is OK for someone to be chatting with their sweetheart, as long as their work is getting done, but maybe it is not OK for someone to be watching their sweetheart stripping in a video chat even if the work is getting done.
TFA raises a slightly different issue: when one employee is asked to monitor the others. Sysadmins should not be asked to take on the responsibility of watching employees; that is a manager's responsibility. If the manager is not technically competent to monitor computer use, then there is a question of why that person is managing people who use computers for their work -- the manager should be competent with the equipment.
Somehow the term "endless September" comes to mind...
Well thankfully, our firewall is not intended to block what services we can use or hosts we can connect to; it only filters inbound traffic. One nice thing that SSH lets me do, though, is use my workstation as a proxy when I am working from home, so that I can access certain restricted resources (such as journal subscriptions that are only available to computers on our campus).
Of course, TCP session information could be used to figure out which website on a particular server was actually visited. A certain pattern of connections resulting from the loading for off-site content (i.e. advertising), for example, might be used in making such a determination.