algorhythms of the meaningless.

Grok Headline matches for algorhythms of the meaningless.

Are IT Certifications Meaningless?

Are IT Certifications Meaningless? 06/18/2004 10:26 PM

Meaningless but semantic

Meaningless but semantic 09/14/2004 09:13 AM
At a session at foo camp, I went through the tentative chapter outlines of the book I'm plotting. My aim was to ruthlessly use the attendees, getting them to tell me where I'm going wrong and what I should be writing about. And it worked: They poked at the ideas and pointed me in many helpful directions. Thanks, y'all! And it just keeps going: I've been getting incredibly generous email with yet more information and ideas. For example, one came today from Angela Hey chockablock with examples. She writes about some initiatives that have struggled over how human-readable metadata should...

Making 'Organic' Meaningless

Making 'Organic' Meaningless 05/22/2004 12:43 PM

SF Chronicle: Organic Food FIght. The changes in the National Organic Program standards, made in April, expand the use of antibiotics and hormones in organic dairy cows, allow more pesticides in the organic arsenal and for the first time let organic livestock eat potentially contaminated fishmeal. Program administrators also reversed themselves and said seafood, pet food and body care products can use "organic" on their labels without meeting any standards at all.

America's factory-style farming industry is feeling some pressure from farmers who are willing to meet stricter standards for what they grow and raise, because some customers are willing to pay a little more for food they believe meets those standards. So what's the response from Big Agriculture, a business that gets billions in subsidies every year from taxpayers (subsidies that mock our claims of favoring free trade)? It's to lean on a wholly owned subsidiary, the Bush administration's Agriculture Department, to make the word "organic" meaningless. Slippery but clever, but terrible for genuine choice in the marketplace, something the Bush people claim to favor. What's Big Agriculture afraid of? Real competition, of course.

"High-Level" Considered Meaningless

"High-Level" Considered Meaningless 04/09/2004 04:10 PM
Once upon a time, the adjective "high-level", applied to a programming language, denoted an increased degree of expressive power, implying not only economy of expression -- terseness -- but an ability to encode new abstractions encapsulating notions not actually envisioned by the language designers themselves. In the decades since the lambda calculus was first elucidated, and embodied to increasing degrees in the LISPs and their successors, language designers have learned to enable many different kinds of abstraction, and have increasingly concentrated on providing the scaffolding needed to manage the complexity that comes with such power.

RIAA Ditches Meaningless Amnesty Program

RIAA Ditches Meaningless Amnesty Program 04/19/2004 09:57 PM
Last fall, before the RIAA actually started suing people for sharing unauthorized music files, they offered their amnesty program, which basically said if you 'fessed up to sharing music and removed those files immediately, they probably wouldn't sue you. Of course, they couldn't guarantee that the actual copyright holders wouldn't sue - and in admitting guilt to the RIAA some felt that people would actually open themselves up to more liability for exactly that reason. In fact, even a US Senator, Norm Coleman, told people not to fall for the program and some people filed a lawsuit against the program, saying that it was deceptive. Well, now the RIAA (as they've been known to do) has asked that the lawsuit be dismissed because they've recently canceled the amnesty program. Of course, that makes you wonder. Is it okay to offer a "deceptive" program for a few months, and then ask that lawsuits against it are dropped once you stop? Doesn't that just encourage more temporary deceptive programs? The article also notes, by the way, that over 1,100 people actually signed up to request such not-really-amnesty. The RIAA promises that they'll continue to not sue those individuals, though, they still can't make the same promise for the actual copyright holders.

Online Privacy Policies Meaningless If
No One Reads Them

Online Privacy Policies Meaningless If
No One Reads Them 06/16/2004 01:21 PM
In a can-of-worms style legal ruling, a judge has dismissed a case against Northwest Airlines concerning how they treated customer info. It's already well known that many web surfers ignore privacy policies or simply assume that, if there's any privacy policy, their info must be safe. However, in this case, the judge ruled that Northwest did not violate its privacy policy in giving out customer info, because there was no evidence anyone actually read the privacy policy! In other words, even if a company has a privacy policy, it doesn't matter, because no one will read it at all. While this (rightfully so) worries many consumer advocates who are now pushing for federal privacy laws, it also opens up other possibilities. Almost no one reads software end user license agreements. In fact, that's one of the reasons why adware is so common - because companies hide the fact that they're installing all sorts of junk on your computer in the EULA. However, if you took this particular ruling and applied it to the EULA, you could conceivably claim that no EULA is valid, because there's no evidence anyone read it either. In the meantime, though, this ruling really just confirms what most people already knew in the first place: most privacy policies are completely meaningless. The only difference is they used to just be meaningless to the company and now they're meaningless under law as well.
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algorhythms of the meaningless.

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