Should Owners of Websites Be Anonymous?
27 April '06 - 10:51. Category: default
A reporter in today's Wall Street Journal (Page B1) asks: "Should Owners of Web sites Be Anonymous?" The reporter, William M. Bulkeley, writes an informative piece that raises many interesting arguments by those who would answer no. Even so, although the reporter quotes well known privacy advocates, Marc Rotenberg and Milton Mueller, the article strongly emphasizes a fear that even disaster relief may be adversely affected if the privacy of *website owners* is protected. I think a balanced article would have explored the
privacy issue further.
Consider for example... John Banks is a loan officer in New York. John’s supervisor recently warned John about the potential number of bad loans he may be carrying as part of his portfolio. To dump some of the bad loans he might be carrying, John came up with a scheme. He pointed his web browser to www.whois.org and entered terms denoting disease or poor health such as ‘cancer’ and ‘illness’. This query on the Internet’s WHOIS database reported results of names and addresses of domain name owners who had developed websites devoted to providing information on certain serious illnesses. John compared these names and addresses with those in his portfolio of loans. For the matches, he canceled the loans and required immediate payment-in-full.
Unmistakably, John’s example is an awful potential abuse to personal privacy that arises from unfettered public access to computer databases in Cyberspace. But... (
for the long story click here)
The short story is that the backdrop of this recent privacy debate concerns: the
Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) which is finalizing current reform efforts regarding the privacy interests of Internet users.
Cyberspaces.org
3.5 million IT workers
19 April '06 - 08:32. Category: default
FROM I
NFORMATION WEEK: "More Americans are employed in IT than at any time in the nation's history...according to an InformationWeek analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data." There are more than 3.5 million IT workers in the United States today. If fewer American college students are majoring in IT areas, how will the demand for IT labor in the United States be met? Does the answer trouble you?
Where are most of the IT jobs?
Investment banks are creating more than half of the IT jobs in the financial services industry, research has found.
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Silicon.com
Sidenote: if you survey word use across newspapers, it is apparent that the acronym "IT" has become a word; it is no longer used as an acronym. Could this be the result of all of those IT workers using English as if English was a programming language?
Cyberspaces.Org
www.cyberspaces.org/webzine/
Justice Scalia's Proud moment
13 April '06 - 08:47. Category: default
On the question of judicial
impartiality when taking a hunting vacation with Vice President Cheney while the court was considering the vice president's appeal:
"For Pete's sake, if you can't trust your Supreme Court justice more than that, get a life..." U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia
According to the Washington Post, Justice Scalia on Wednesday called his 2004 decision not to recuse himself from the vice president's case the "proudest thing" he has done on the court.
Cyberspaces.Org
www.cyberspaces.org/webzine/
This is not your Honeymooners' Alice!
12 April '06 - 18:04. Category: default
Although Ralph Cramden consistently offered his wife, Alice, a trip to the moon during their marriage on the Honeymooners, Alice Software will enable programmers to create their own explorations of space through virtual 3-D models and digital animations.
Alice is an open source programming interface that actually makes learning basic programming concepts seem fun. (The name, Alice, is borrowed from the fictional heroine of Lewis Carroll’s classic Through the Looking Glass. has lent her name to a new teaching tool ).
Hobbyists, game programmers, and students may download the software free of charge at www.alice.org, and the teaching materials free of charge at www.aliceprogramming.net.
Alice 3.0 Carnegie Mellon University has entered into a groundbreaking collaboration with Electronic Arts Inc. (EA), that has the potential to revolutionize and reinvigorate computer science education in the US from middle school through senior high and beyond.
EA has agreed to help underwrite the development of Alice 3.0 – a popular, object-oriented, Java-based computer-programming environment created by Carnegie Mellon researchers – and provide essential arts assets from “The Sims™” – the best selling PC video game of all time.
The Sims content is expected to transform the Alice software into a 3-D programming tool into a compelling and user-friendly programming environment. When the transformation is complete, the new programming environment will be in position to become the national standard for teaching software programming. This is a good thing.
Some studies indicate that there are now fewer computer programming classes offered in American high schools than 20 years ago. According to some, colleges are not turning out sufficient numbers of computer science graduates, and too many colleges successfully introduce new students to programming.
Students who use Alice are able to create virtual worlds using drag and drop techniques featuring three-dimensional objects contained in a library that comes with the program. Additionally, Alice is available free of charge to anyone with a Windows operating system by going to www.alice.org. (A Macintosh version, along with one for Unix and Linux, will be available soon.) Students can also give their objects life, making them active in their environment, by dragging and dropping pre-written pieces of code in a proper sequence.
Cyberspaces.org
www.cyberspaces.org/webzine/
Technology and Immigration Policy
11 April '06 - 08:25. Category: default
Not surprisingly, though primarily concerned with illegal or undocumented aliens, the current headlines about U.S. immigration policy include calls for liberalization of H-1B visa programs that cover employers of information technology workers. According to
ComputerWorld, a recent "unprecedented demand shows that U.S. businesses today can't hire enough...IT professionals -- to keep growing, innovating and competing globally." These claims are rarely backed up by empirical evidence that Americans are unavailable (rather than unwanted) for these jobs.