Diary of a Network Geek

Well, it’s about time!

According to this article on FT.com, there is legislation that is waiting George Bush’s signature which bans the outsourcing of federal work to low cost countries. Now, to me, this only seems right, but, of course, officials in India are up in arms about it. They site all sorts of reasons, including the harm to free trade, but what it comes down to is that they’re mad at the loss of revenue. It’s “unfair”, they claim, to keep them from that business. Of course, they think it’s perfectly fine to take the jobs away from American workers. Oh, sure, that’s just fine with them.

Look, I’m all for free trade, in theory, but I think the government is right to put some breaks on how fast those jobs leave the US. At least give American workers the chance to retrain. Don’t flood the market with thousands upon thousands of tech workers all competeing for the same few jobs. It’ll be just like what happened to Flint, Michigan all over again, but on a much larger scale. Okay, sure, we all benefited from over-seas production, eventually, but in the mean time, those poor people in Flint had the stuffing kicked out of them! The same thing happened in Houston during the oil industry bust. I think we should at least try to keep it from happening in the IT industry. For pity’s sake, the United States created the computer industry! The least we can do is protect our tech workers a little bit.
Anyway, it’s interesting to see how the powers that be in India repsond to the tightening market. It’s all our fault, of course. We should stop picking on them and taking revenue away from them. Hmm, that sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

I’m not sure if this is good, or not…

I tend to think it’s not good, but, then again, as someone who would like to make their living at producing copyrighted works, I like the protection it would give me. According to this article on Wired News, a pair of Democrats, Reps. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) and Howard Berman (D-Calif.), have introduced a bill that would land a person in prison for up to five years and impose a fine of up to $250,000 for uploading a single file to a peer-to-peer network.
At first look, this seems a little harsh, but that’s been the penalty for illegally copying software for a really long time. And, while it seems like a nasty penalty for something that so many people seem to be doing, violating copyright is illegal. I guess my problem with it is that there seems to be some issues involved here that haven’t been completely addressed. Things like, when I buy a CD, what do I really own? Is it the right to listen to the music? Or have I bought a license to the music, or the CD? Anyway, it’s a little bothersome, to me, that they don’t seem to have worked out all the details of what is really legal, but they’re already stumping for really big penalties.
This is one to watch, folks.