No, it's illegal. You can't lay someone off and then replace them. It doesn't fall under the laws you're quoting, but I'm sure of it. Generally companies get around this by shifting the job definition slightly. Has to do with the definition of "Laying Off", it means you have closed the positions. You can fire someone and replace them, but then you have to have cause, and "High Salary" is not a cause--you'll get your ass sued off.
Now it could be a local law, but I don't think so. I don't think it's criminal either--but it is something you can sue over.
The real value is I'm sick of hearing jokes about 42, sparrows and federal "pound me in the ass" prison. Our culture, as programmers, is becoming extremely inbred and weak.
Lately I've been learning more about China and India--and when the people have been full-time members of my team and not consultants, they have been, as programmers, as good anyone else I've worked with. It's just that at lunch I might find out about a giant dam flooding out huge areas of china for power generation, the attitude towards communism of people that were brought up under it as well as people who's families left it.
Then we discuss India and Hinduism, and what it's like to grow up in a place so crowded that living in a "Small" city like Spokane makes you uncomfortable.
Yeah, it's not much, but if it's a choice between two nearly identical candidates, why not expand your horizons a little?
Now I'm back to working with a guy similar to myself. It's nice, I like him a lot, but we certainly don't offer each other a lot of personal growth--instead we talk about The Daily Show that we both watched last night...
Mostly I just think it's something to think about--that and I really hate the anti-integration attitude that comes across now and then. Not a HUGE deal (although to some of the anti-integration people it seems so serious that I fear they may have repressed some racial/sexual animosity instead of eliminating it.)
I guess it's just a personal preference... Perhaps I should start training inner-city youths or head to Mexico and attempt to start a programming school down there because there IS a definite lack diversity amoung job candidates in our field.
I've seen discrimination based on location (Hire local over distance, even with no relocation cost), age (Hmph), salary (laying off a capable person for someone less capable but cheaper, quite illegal), and I've seen any other number of irrelevant points brought up during hiring discussions.
At no point have I seen someone object the same way people object when you bring up the concept of applying a slight counter-balance to the practice of the last--well forever of hiring white men over any other regardless of qualifications.
Where was your indignation when that was going on?
Well you weren't born yet, right? The thing is, you wouldn't have objected a bit--very few people did. Why do they object now and not then? Why wouldn't you have objected to selection based on race when it favored you, but not now when it's the opposite?
(And don't try to say you would have objected just as much--been the only one anywhere that did--it's just way too unlikely)
Oh and un-American? Like pretty much ALL of America was until the 60's and a significant portion still is? You're calling all of 1950's America un-american? I never heard of Ronald Regan objecting to anti-black hiring practices in movies... you're calling him un-American too?
People get an argument like that running around in their head and never challenge it because they like the argument, because it matches something they want to happen.
Maybe you were just born at the wrong time, perhaps if you were around in the 40's, your personal outrage at the extremely racist and sexist hiring practices could have changed the world!
You are right that men and women are very different. I totally agree that women are not choosing certain careers due simply to tastes... However, in response to this:
It is silly that people are constantly trying to treat them as if they are. Certain types of work are going to be more appealing to the different genders.
No matter how different they might be, you MUST treat them as equal. Just because women generally don't choose tech careers, doesn't mean we should in any way discourage individuals from doing so if it appeals to them. Recognizing difference in another race or sex is not prejudice-using that preconceived difference to change how you treat any individual absolutely is.
Going out of your way to promote workplace diversity isn't bad either. I would respect any company that tries to lure a few more women into technical careers, as well as other races you may not see as often in our lines of work. Perhaps even if they aren't the absolute perfect person for the position. We make value judgments about each person we interview--does it hurt to give a little plus to someone who's nationality, race or gender is underrepresented in your group?
Truthfully, I'm just tired of working with a bunch of nerdy white guys like myself.
I wonder if they pay for every copy streamed, or every part thereof.
Or do they "Set Aside" a video for everyone currently viewing, and if you want to view and they run out of videos, you have to wait?
Or did they just not bother to check with the MPAA at all?
I'm hoping the second one. I have a BUNCH of CDs and I'd love to make them available for streaming to a protected player as long as I have "Purchased copies" sitting in reserve. In fact, the concept of a "Music/Movie Co-op" where people donate music or movies in order to stream others isn't far behind.
What did NetFlix do? What do I have to do to be able to stream movies to people willing to pay for the privilege just like NetFlix??
It occurs to me that humans have a problem perceiving changes in the rate of change of their environment.
If you are used to stocks moving within a certain range, you are virtually unable to conceive of a price crash outside that range--therefore people repeatedly walk blindly into stock-market crashes.
I think scientists throw out "Radical" models because those models are so outside their experience. Nobody would think it possible that the water would rise enough to obliterate hundreds of square miles of New York, Florida, Seattle and San Fransisco within our lifetimes, so if someone presented a model that suggested such a scenario, it would never propagate to us.
I'm not suggesting that such a scenario has ever been considered--just that if it is a possible scenario, we'd never hear about it except on the back page of a supermarket rag...
I would need to know for sure that I could place the song on any player now or ever to be created. I would need to know that I could transfer it to any media that will ever be created. I would need to know it would never cause degradation or loss of content. No transfer or change of use should require external access for permission.
If I drive in a friends car, I should be able to bring the song on a USB stick and play it on his player....or a CD, or any other technology his car's player accepts.
I must be able to transfer ownership to someone else.
I'd expect (although it could be argued against) to be able to share the song with my wife and children.
Finally, since they have a record of my ownership in order to enable the DRM rights, I'd absolutely expect replacement/reissue any time I wanted it.
Then DRM will be acceptable.
The problem is, DRM is absolutely incapable of supporting many of these uses.
So no, I don't have anything against DRM itself, but it is absolutely, inherently counter to the needs of the public.
With the kind of money that foundation has, you'd think they might have an alternate focus group that invests in these companies then tries to manipulate the board of directors/stockholder voting away from bad/evil/whatever practices.
This is one of those cases where theory has very little to do with reality.
In theory you are completely right, but in reality people who call themselves skeptics often seem to religiously deny that which can't be proven.
For instance, before it was possible to prove gravity, it was still there. Before it was possible to prove that we could walk on the moon, it was still a possibility.
If we can't currently prove an afterlife or ESP, that has no relation to their existence--yet those who call themselves skeptics will decry them with the veracity of a Christian preacher proclaiming the existence of some God. (Something we CAN disprove because we simply have to disprove the bible--a trivial task for anyone willing to listen)
But you are in general right about the theory of Skepticism--It's a very useful tool, just don't trust people who call themselves "Skeptics".
Actually a larger hard disk can only help with defrag times and won't effect search times (assuming the same amount of data)
But your point on Why Innovate on capacity is a good one--moreover why innovate only on capacity.
How about a hard-drive with built in RAID? Spread writes across all platters so that if one glitches you get the others. Still, this is not optimal because you can't replace a platter--but still, can we work on using that extra space to improve reliability?
As with anything in life, people will grab as much power as you allow them.
If this is explicitly denied by, say, the constitution but nobody does anything about it, why should he stop?
This is where the "Ever Vigilant" stuff comes in. If we are not marching on Washington--if we are not using every peaceful measure available to us, and then every POSSIBLE measure available to us to stop this destruction of our country, it's really our fault--not any individuals (not GWBs in other words).
As long as they manage to keep us comfortable enough to quell any disquiet while they dismantle our civil protections, they will succeed because. It's happened many times before, and there is no reason to assume that something about our government is magically immune to this type of internal overthrow.
I honestly feel we have a one party system too--Corporate money controls Democrats as well as Republicans, so we really are more of a Fascist state ruled by corporate interests than a Democracy already.
Many of our founding fathers believed in the concept of "Fight for it or lose it". I don't see anyone fighting--at least not in any way that is effective.
Not a huge hack, but when I was working on my first network management system (windows 3.1) I went on a trip to see how it was being used by some customers. One of them (The city of Olympia) had required that we have the ability to send each alarm to a serial port--when I got there I found out why.
They had a very old, slow serial dot-matrix line printer hooked up to the management system. Each alarm set it off with a loud Bzzzzzzzz so they could hear it if they were in another portion of the (loud) shop. The hard-record of alarms was secondary.
After that I implemented a system to allow playing of.wav files upon an alarm, but since nobody had speakers back then (windows 3.0/early 3.1 timeframe) I bet they ran that printer until the 2K bug we had in there made them find a new solution.
I think we just have to accept that once we have made information public, it is eventually going to be used and abused in every way possible.
If you don't want that, try to keep your online profile as low as possible--there isn't much else you can do.
This always get to me--like when a guy (it happens every couple years) goes to the DMV and buys the DMV database and puts it online--all of a sudden everyone raises a stink. THE RECORDS ARE THERE--because this guy did something "new" with them is not a bad thing, perhaps making them available in the first place WAS.
There is also the implied fact/perception: people are "Trusting" that because the DMV is selling them for $300 or whatever, only businesses will buy them and therefore it's okay, it's the fact that this guy "Subverted" the business purposes and made them public is somehow worse. This is the stupidest pile of crap I've ever heard (and yeah, you hear that argument every time there is a discussion about this stuff).
Everyone would probably be a "Privacy Nazi" if they were smart enough to figure out what could be done with the information they are making public.
Not that my opinion is truly different from yours, but since you asked..
My ipod's been on the fritz lately. I haven't wanted to break it open (again). In the meantime I was wanting some tiny $40/1gb flash player to fill the gap--but I can't get one because they don't link with iTunes and I really don't feel like re-arranging my entire way of keeping music.
I could probably figure out where they are stored, but I don't think podcasts are stored as mp3s in iTunes so they wouldn't play on most players anyway.
I've noticed that there are certain people (Almost always of the type that read slashdot, intelligent often engineer types) that are triggered by certain topics into discussions that start to remind me of those given by the religious (although these people tend to not be religious and are actually quite logical).
The main subject that really gets them riled is nuclear power. They get extremely upset at the concept of nuclear bans and will tell you, in detail, exactly why no alternative can work.
Another subject (I wonder if it's the same people, or just the same type of people with different trigger subjects) is this "we are changing/aren't changing the atmosphere). They are very passionate about how it's not us changing the world, coming up with a huge volume of reasoning (look around the threads in this discussion for some examples).
A third is free market--how regulation is the cause of all Americas financial woes.
The interesting thing is, in all cases nothing is really lost by being careful and taking some time to make sure we really are right. There is no reason to be so upset by the thought of keeping companies from opening nuclear plants across the US (Well, unless that's what you do for a living), but there are HUGE potential problems if not done correctly, meaning without enough regulation (we've all seen companies cut corners on safety when it effected profits).
Same with the environment. Religious folks aside (that's not the people I'm talking about), why do some people get so insistent that it's not us changing the environment? It might hurt some companies, but just like the nuclear issue, being safe isn't going to effect the vast majority of the people, including the people I've seen make these arguments.
Without getting into the issue at all, can anyone tell me why they feel so strongly for nuclear power, free market, or mans inability to effect his planet.
Now I really don't care about the issues, I know there are sides, I want to know about personal motivations. Do you really think your lights will go out or your bills will be higher without nuclear power? and if so, is that really so important to you to make you evangelic about it?
Same with the subject at hand. Maybe the facts will go one way, maybe the other (Not trying to start a fight, don't care about the facts right now), but what makes your response "Humans didn't cause it!" rather than "Damn, we better do something about it, build a solar shield or something!". (Actually, I'd guess many feel both responses, but always seem to reach for the "Humans didn't cause it" post first.
The only thing I can guess is that these are people of very strong personal morals who, if they felt that they were contributing to such a problem, would have to do something about it, so they convince themselves of a point that lets them do what it is they want to do and not feel guilty. I can see free marketeers doing the same thing--using it as an excuse to not care about others (which they may otherwise have to do) it doesn't apply to the nuclear thing in any way I can see (Honestly, this is the one that truly baffles me)...
Please reply if you have any insight into the issue because it drives me nuts. I'd really like to hear from an x-pro-nuke or x-free marketeer who has done some soul-searching and has some personal insight into why it was so important to them.
There seem to be a lot of posts on how free web hosting will or will not be successful. That's not what I see in this story at all. I see a big huge giant
>They somehow received a $4 million dollar investment package from Bessemer Venture Partners,
This could mean the end of Wikipedia! Seriously. Every time an investment company gets involved, all they seem to do is destroy companies. Wikipedia could have limped on forever, creating a better and better site and making everyone happy. Now in a few years these investors are going to start saying "Yeah, users love you, but why aren't you making a profit?" Everything goes downhill from here. It's not that they are trying to shut it down, but you can't go from living on a shoestring to being funded back to living on a shoestring AND owing all that money to repay the funding--that last step leaves you less than a year from bankruptcy.
You know, if Microsoft really wanted to kill Linux, they should just start loansharking--um I mean "Funding" all the groups that will accept it. After 2 or 3 years of living off the funding, call in the loans. It wouldn't stop all work, of course, but it would sure break up the large groups and confuse everyone about ownership--enough to possibly destroy the movement. Oh crap, I shouldn't have typed that. They already started after Novell!
Your post is quite amusing actually. You did exactly what you are complaining about--in the same breath and with no sense of irony.
See, it's perfectly possible for a creature to have lived X million years ago and still be alive. Our assumption that it was extinct is the only one challenged, not the age of the fossil--finding a creature alive has no effect on the dating of the fossil.
If we were to find a dinosaur alive, it wouldn't invalidate all the dating ever done, it would simply mean that somewhere a group of dinosaurs has gone unobserved for a long time.
To not realize that and to instead jump to the conclusion that it has to do with bad dating is simply an indication of your desire to find fault in dating techniques because of some personal issue you have with them.
Just jump into an interesting Open Source project, something you can use (or already use). Look for areas they are lacking, and start helping.
Don't turn your nose up at documentation or QA either--They are fantastic learning experiences that every programmer should experience at some times.
Don't stick with what you are familiar with. If you like C & C++, maybe go for a ride on the Rails or maybe a VB or Java based web system. If you have only worked with VB, try C#/J#
Learn all the parts of development. Submitting patches, altering build files, dealing with CMS, dealing with various levels of coders and particularly users--deal with user feedback, talk to them, read support boards!
Open Source is a fantastic opportunity for those trying to figure out how "Real World" Coding works--I think colleges should require a year or two on an open source project before you graduate with a CS degree. It's not quite the "Corporate environment", but you get guidelines and existing code to reference and fix, plus mentoring from some very good developers.
Most of the time used for booting up is repetitive. Scanning for changes, loading the appropriate drivers and rebuilding the runtime information needed to make windows load.
If this were all compiled once and written as an image, then windows could boot within seconds of turning on the computer.
It would require a little more interaction--to make bootup as fast as possible you would need to tell it to scan for hardware changes. Also, the install of a new "Startup" program like winzip, Quicktime, the IM clients, all the crap in your lower-right corner, along with every driver change would require a significant "Rebuild".
Every change would require a rebuild of some sort--you'd have to reboot, re-create a new image, store it off to disk in a contiguous block and then probably boot off it to test the new configuration. No more on-the-fly changes.
It would also mean a little more work for manufactures of programs that want to startup with windows because the image will be loaded then control passed. It's not overly difficult, but it is different than just running an "Exe", and every different path is another entry point for defects.
So you really don't think anyone is being harmed by losing a years wages, possibly their health-care rent or utility money? Do you just have no ability to consider anything outside your own life, or are you woefully uninformed?
I thought the story was about the comparison between the Billionaire downloading songs and the poor people he is destroying with legal fees for doing the same thing--and not even pretending that he is "one of them".
Your post was kinda interesting and misguided, so I'll reply just to you.
I don't really give a crap about comparing to Nazis, and I didn't. I think it has been done.
But I am somewhat fascinated by the concept of how a people might come to allow or desire something like that. In other words, Hitler wasn't the story, the people of Germany--and others--are. (There was an article today about the Vatican knowing about the atrocities much earlier than they admitted and ignoring them)
The thing that is really interesting is that we are still the exact same people. We haven't evolved. Our education isn't all that much better (at least in most of America an many third-world countries). The world is really just was charismatic leader away from complete disaster.
Having grown up in the 70's where the cold war was more a joke than a scare, and future war was unimaginable, this concept came as a complete surprise to me.
So when I see people acting with utter disregard for the destruction of other families via the RIAA, lack of healthcare or housing costs with something like "life's not fair"; I can't help but think--worse than Hitler, this is the person who allowed Hitler.
I mean, there are millions (well, at least thousands. Would you believe hundreds?) of people that you could stick in the whitehouse that could screw up as bad as Bush. The crime isn't being one of those people, it's putting one in power.
Slashdot Mirror
works for me.
No, it's illegal. You can't lay someone off and then replace them. It doesn't fall under the laws you're quoting, but I'm sure of it. Generally companies get around this by shifting the job definition slightly. Has to do with the definition of "Laying Off", it means you have closed the positions. You can fire someone and replace them, but then you have to have cause, and "High Salary" is not a cause--you'll get your ass sued off.
Now it could be a local law, but I don't think so. I don't think it's criminal either--but it is something you can sue over.
The real value is I'm sick of hearing jokes about 42, sparrows and federal "pound me in the ass" prison. Our culture, as programmers, is becoming extremely inbred and weak.
Lately I've been learning more about China and India--and when the people have been full-time members of my team and not consultants, they have been, as programmers, as good anyone else I've worked with. It's just that at lunch I might find out about a giant dam flooding out huge areas of china for power generation, the attitude towards communism of people that were brought up under it as well as people who's families left it.
Then we discuss India and Hinduism, and what it's like to grow up in a place so crowded that living in a "Small" city like Spokane makes you uncomfortable.
Yeah, it's not much, but if it's a choice between two nearly identical candidates, why not expand your horizons a little?
Now I'm back to working with a guy similar to myself. It's nice, I like him a lot, but we certainly don't offer each other a lot of personal growth--instead we talk about The Daily Show that we both watched last night...
Mostly I just think it's something to think about--that and I really hate the anti-integration attitude that comes across now and then. Not a HUGE deal (although to some of the anti-integration people it seems so serious that I fear they may have repressed some racial/sexual animosity instead of eliminating it.)
I guess it's just a personal preference... Perhaps I should start training inner-city youths or head to Mexico and attempt to start a programming school down there because there IS a definite lack diversity amoung job candidates in our field.
Get off your high horse.
I've seen discrimination based on location (Hire local over distance, even with no relocation cost), age (Hmph), salary (laying off a capable person for someone less capable but cheaper, quite illegal), and I've seen any other number of irrelevant points brought up during hiring discussions.
At no point have I seen someone object the same way people object when you bring up the concept of applying a slight counter-balance to the practice of the last--well forever of hiring white men over any other regardless of qualifications.
Where was your indignation when that was going on?
Well you weren't born yet, right? The thing is, you wouldn't have objected a bit--very few people did. Why do they object now and not then? Why wouldn't you have objected to selection based on race when it favored you, but not now when it's the opposite?
(And don't try to say you would have objected just as much--been the only one anywhere that did--it's just way too unlikely)
Oh and un-American? Like pretty much ALL of America was until the 60's and a significant portion still is? You're calling all of 1950's America un-american? I never heard of Ronald Regan objecting to anti-black hiring practices in movies... you're calling him un-American too?
People get an argument like that running around in their head and never challenge it because they like the argument, because it matches something they want to happen.
Maybe you were just born at the wrong time, perhaps if you were around in the 40's, your personal outrage at the extremely racist and sexist hiring practices could have changed the world!
I stand corrected.
No matter how different they might be, you MUST treat them as equal. Just because women generally don't choose tech careers, doesn't mean we should in any way discourage individuals from doing so if it appeals to them. Recognizing difference in another race or sex is not prejudice-using that preconceived difference to change how you treat any individual absolutely is.
Going out of your way to promote workplace diversity isn't bad either. I would respect any company that tries to lure a few more women into technical careers, as well as other races you may not see as often in our lines of work. Perhaps even if they aren't the absolute perfect person for the position. We make value judgments about each person we interview--does it hurt to give a little plus to someone who's nationality, race or gender is underrepresented in your group?
Truthfully, I'm just tired of working with a bunch of nerdy white guys like myself.
I wonder if they pay for every copy streamed, or every part thereof.
Or do they "Set Aside" a video for everyone currently viewing, and if you want to view and they run out of videos, you have to wait?
Or did they just not bother to check with the MPAA at all?
I'm hoping the second one. I have a BUNCH of CDs and I'd love to make them available for streaming to a protected player as long as I have "Purchased copies" sitting in reserve. In fact, the concept of a "Music/Movie Co-op" where people donate music or movies in order to stream others isn't far behind.
What did NetFlix do? What do I have to do to be able to stream movies to people willing to pay for the privilege just like NetFlix??
Yeah, I was thinking the same thing--models suck.
It occurs to me that humans have a problem perceiving changes in the rate of change of their environment.
If you are used to stocks moving within a certain range, you are virtually unable to conceive of a price crash outside that range--therefore people repeatedly walk blindly into stock-market crashes.
I think scientists throw out "Radical" models because those models are so outside their experience. Nobody would think it possible that the water would rise enough to obliterate hundreds of square miles of New York, Florida, Seattle and San Fransisco within our lifetimes, so if someone presented a model that suggested such a scenario, it would never propagate to us.
I'm not suggesting that such a scenario has ever been considered--just that if it is a possible scenario, we'd never hear about it except on the back page of a supermarket rag...
I would need to know for sure that I could place the song on any player now or ever to be created.
...or a CD, or any other technology his car's player accepts.
I would need to know that I could transfer it to any media that will ever be created.
I would need to know it would never cause degradation or loss of content.
No transfer or change of use should require external access for permission.
If I drive in a friends car, I should be able to bring the song on a USB stick and play it on his player.
I must be able to transfer ownership to someone else.
I'd expect (although it could be argued against) to be able to share the song with my wife and children.
Finally, since they have a record of my ownership in order to enable the DRM rights, I'd absolutely expect replacement/reissue any time I wanted it.
Then DRM will be acceptable.
The problem is, DRM is absolutely incapable of supporting many of these uses.
So no, I don't have anything against DRM itself, but it is absolutely, inherently counter to the needs of the public.
With the kind of money that foundation has, you'd think they might have an alternate focus group that invests in these companies then tries to manipulate the board of directors/stockholder voting away from bad/evil/whatever practices.
Why is there no price at that link? Like nowhere to be found...
This is one of those cases where theory has very little to do with reality.
In theory you are completely right, but in reality people who call themselves skeptics often seem to religiously deny that which can't be proven.
For instance, before it was possible to prove gravity, it was still there. Before it was possible to prove that we could walk on the moon, it was still a possibility.
If we can't currently prove an afterlife or ESP, that has no relation to their existence--yet those who call themselves skeptics will decry them with the veracity of a Christian preacher proclaiming the existence of some God. (Something we CAN disprove because we simply have to disprove the bible--a trivial task for anyone willing to listen)
But you are in general right about the theory of Skepticism--It's a very useful tool, just don't trust people who call themselves "Skeptics".
Actually a larger hard disk can only help with defrag times and won't effect search times (assuming the same amount of data)
But your point on Why Innovate on capacity is a good one--moreover why innovate only on capacity.
How about a hard-drive with built in RAID? Spread writes across all platters so that if one glitches you get the others. Still, this is not optimal because you can't replace a platter--but still, can we work on using that extra space to improve reliability?
As with anything in life, people will grab as much power as you allow them.
If this is explicitly denied by, say, the constitution but nobody does anything about it, why should he stop?
This is where the "Ever Vigilant" stuff comes in. If we are not marching on Washington--if we are not using every peaceful measure available to us, and then every POSSIBLE measure available to us to stop this destruction of our country, it's really our fault--not any individuals (not GWBs in other words).
As long as they manage to keep us comfortable enough to quell any disquiet while they dismantle our civil protections, they will succeed because. It's happened many times before, and there is no reason to assume that something about our government is magically immune to this type of internal overthrow.
I honestly feel we have a one party system too--Corporate money controls Democrats as well as Republicans, so we really are more of a Fascist state ruled by corporate interests than a Democracy already.
Many of our founding fathers believed in the concept of "Fight for it or lose it". I don't see anyone fighting--at least not in any way that is effective.
I'm no exception--but I'm up for suggestions.
Not a huge hack, but when I was working on my first network management system (windows 3.1) I went on a trip to see how it was being used by some customers. One of them (The city of Olympia) had required that we have the ability to send each alarm to a serial port--when I got there I found out why.
.wav files upon an alarm, but since nobody had speakers back then (windows 3.0/early 3.1 timeframe) I bet they ran that printer until the 2K bug we had in there made them find a new solution.
They had a very old, slow serial dot-matrix line printer hooked up to the management system. Each alarm set it off with a loud Bzzzzzzzz so they could hear it if they were in another portion of the (loud) shop. The hard-record of alarms was secondary.
After that I implemented a system to allow playing of
I think we just have to accept that once we have made information public, it is eventually going to be used and abused in every way possible.
If you don't want that, try to keep your online profile as low as possible--there isn't much else you can do.
This always get to me--like when a guy (it happens every couple years) goes to the DMV and buys the DMV database and puts it online--all of a sudden everyone raises a stink. THE RECORDS ARE THERE--because this guy did something "new" with them is not a bad thing, perhaps making them available in the first place WAS.
There is also the implied fact/perception: people are "Trusting" that because the DMV is selling them for $300 or whatever, only businesses will buy them and therefore it's okay, it's the fact that this guy "Subverted" the business purposes and made them public is somehow worse. This is the stupidest pile of crap I've ever heard (and yeah, you hear that argument every time there is a discussion about this stuff).
Everyone would probably be a "Privacy Nazi" if they were smart enough to figure out what could be done with the information they are making public.
Not that my opinion is truly different from yours, but since you asked..
My ipod's been on the fritz lately. I haven't wanted to break it open (again). In the meantime I was wanting some tiny $40/1gb flash player to fill the gap--but I can't get one because they don't link with iTunes and I really don't feel like re-arranging my entire way of keeping music.
I could probably figure out where they are stored, but I don't think podcasts are stored as mp3s in iTunes so they wouldn't play on most players anyway.
I expected my rant to get an offtopic, but redundant? Hmph. Are the moderators even trying any more?
I've noticed that there are certain people (Almost always of the type that read slashdot, intelligent often engineer types) that are triggered by certain topics into discussions that start to remind me of those given by the religious (although these people tend to not be religious and are actually quite logical).
The main subject that really gets them riled is nuclear power. They get extremely upset at the concept of nuclear bans and will tell you, in detail, exactly why no alternative can work.
Another subject (I wonder if it's the same people, or just the same type of people with different trigger subjects) is this "we are changing/aren't changing the atmosphere). They are very passionate about how it's not us changing the world, coming up with a huge volume of reasoning (look around the threads in this discussion for some examples).
A third is free market--how regulation is the cause of all Americas financial woes.
The interesting thing is, in all cases nothing is really lost by being careful and taking some time to make sure we really are right. There is no reason to be so upset by the thought of keeping companies from opening nuclear plants across the US (Well, unless that's what you do for a living), but there are HUGE potential problems if not done correctly, meaning without enough regulation (we've all seen companies cut corners on safety when it effected profits).
Same with the environment. Religious folks aside (that's not the people I'm talking about), why do some people get so insistent that it's not us changing the environment? It might hurt some companies, but just like the nuclear issue, being safe isn't going to effect the vast majority of the people, including the people I've seen make these arguments.
Without getting into the issue at all, can anyone tell me why they feel so strongly for nuclear power, free market, or mans inability to effect his planet.
Now I really don't care about the issues, I know there are sides, I want to know about personal motivations. Do you really think your lights will go out or your bills will be higher without nuclear power? and if so, is that really so important to you to make you evangelic about it?
Same with the subject at hand. Maybe the facts will go one way, maybe the other (Not trying to start a fight, don't care about the facts right now), but what makes your response "Humans didn't cause it!" rather than "Damn, we better do something about it, build a solar shield or something!". (Actually, I'd guess many feel both responses, but always seem to reach for the "Humans didn't cause it" post first.
The only thing I can guess is that these are people of very strong personal morals who, if they felt that they were contributing to such a problem, would have to do something about it, so they convince themselves of a point that lets them do what it is they want to do and not feel guilty. I can see free marketeers doing the same thing--using it as an excuse to not care about others (which they may otherwise have to do) it doesn't apply to the nuclear thing in any way I can see (Honestly, this is the one that truly baffles me)...
Please reply if you have any insight into the issue because it drives me nuts. I'd really like to hear from an x-pro-nuke or x-free marketeer who has done some soul-searching and has some personal insight into why it was so important to them.
There seem to be a lot of posts on how free web hosting will or will not be successful. That's not what I see in this story at all. I see a big huge giant
>They somehow received a $4 million dollar investment package from Bessemer Venture Partners,
This could mean the end of Wikipedia! Seriously. Every time an investment company gets involved, all they seem to do is destroy companies. Wikipedia could have limped on forever, creating a better and better site and making everyone happy. Now in a few years these investors are going to start saying "Yeah, users love you, but why aren't you making a profit?" Everything goes downhill from here. It's not that they are trying to shut it down, but you can't go from living on a shoestring to being funded back to living on a shoestring AND owing all that money to repay the funding--that last step leaves you less than a year from bankruptcy.
You know, if Microsoft really wanted to kill Linux, they should just start loansharking--um I mean "Funding" all the groups that will accept it. After 2 or 3 years of living off the funding, call in the loans. It wouldn't stop all work, of course, but it would sure break up the large groups and confuse everyone about ownership--enough to possibly destroy the movement. Oh crap, I shouldn't have typed that. They already started after Novell!
Your post is quite amusing actually. You did exactly what you are complaining about--in the same breath and with no sense of irony.
See, it's perfectly possible for a creature to have lived X million years ago and still be alive. Our assumption that it was extinct is the only one challenged, not the age of the fossil--finding a creature alive has no effect on the dating of the fossil.
If we were to find a dinosaur alive, it wouldn't invalidate all the dating ever done, it would simply mean that somewhere a group of dinosaurs has gone unobserved for a long time.
To not realize that and to instead jump to the conclusion that it has to do with bad dating is simply an indication of your desire to find fault in dating techniques because of some personal issue you have with them.
Just jump into an interesting Open Source project, something you can use (or already use). Look for areas they are lacking, and start helping.
Don't turn your nose up at documentation or QA either--They are fantastic learning experiences that every programmer should experience at some times.
Don't stick with what you are familiar with. If you like C & C++, maybe go for a ride on the Rails or maybe a VB or Java based web system. If you have only worked with VB, try C#/J#
Learn all the parts of development. Submitting patches, altering build files, dealing with CMS, dealing with various levels of coders and particularly users--deal with user feedback, talk to them, read support boards!
Open Source is a fantastic opportunity for those trying to figure out how "Real World" Coding works--I think colleges should require a year or two on an open source project before you graduate with a CS degree. It's not quite the "Corporate environment", but you get guidelines and existing code to reference and fix, plus mentoring from some very good developers.
I've often wondered the same thing.
Most of the time used for booting up is repetitive. Scanning for changes, loading the appropriate drivers and rebuilding the runtime information needed to make windows load.
If this were all compiled once and written as an image, then windows could boot within seconds of turning on the computer.
It would require a little more interaction--to make bootup as fast as possible you would need to tell it to scan for hardware changes. Also, the install of a new "Startup" program like winzip, Quicktime, the IM clients, all the crap in your lower-right corner, along with every driver change would require a significant "Rebuild".
Every change would require a rebuild of some sort--you'd have to reboot, re-create a new image, store it off to disk in a contiguous block and then probably boot off it to test the new configuration. No more on-the-fly changes.
It would also mean a little more work for manufactures of programs that want to startup with windows because the image will be loaded then control passed. It's not overly difficult, but it is different than just running an "Exe", and every different path is another entry point for defects.
It'd totally be worth it though.
So you really don't think anyone is being harmed by losing a years wages, possibly their health-care rent or utility money? Do you just have no ability to consider anything outside your own life, or are you woefully uninformed?
I thought the story was about the comparison between the Billionaire downloading songs and the poor people he is destroying with legal fees for doing the same thing--and not even pretending that he is "one of them".
Your post was kinda interesting and misguided, so I'll reply just to you.
I don't really give a crap about comparing to Nazis, and I didn't. I think it has been done.
But I am somewhat fascinated by the concept of how a people might come to allow or desire something like that. In other words, Hitler wasn't the story, the people of Germany--and others--are. (There was an article today about the Vatican knowing about the atrocities much earlier than they admitted and ignoring them)
The thing that is really interesting is that we are still the exact same people. We haven't evolved. Our education isn't all that much better (at least in most of America an many third-world countries). The world is really just was charismatic leader away from complete disaster.
Having grown up in the 70's where the cold war was more a joke than a scare, and future war was unimaginable, this concept came as a complete surprise to me.
So when I see people acting with utter disregard for the destruction of other families via the RIAA, lack of healthcare or housing costs with something like "life's not fair"; I can't help but think--worse than Hitler, this is the person who allowed Hitler.
I mean, there are millions (well, at least thousands. Would you believe hundreds?) of people that you could stick in the whitehouse that could screw up as bad as Bush. The crime isn't being one of those people, it's putting one in power.