Thinkpads were good, about ten years ago, but now they're too expensive for the average user - because they include things like fingerprint scanners that most home users don't need (heck, most businesses don't need them either). Thinkpads are still good, you're just paying for the extra durability and quality.
1. It wasn't actually IBM, but a state-owned company. This would likely have reduced the high-level "checking out" given by IBM, as there was another company in-between. I'm sure they were much more concerned about the machines that were leased to openly-Communist Russia than the ones leased to professedly-Democratic Germany.
2. The Nazis weren't idiots, despite what you'd like to believe. They'd be suspicious of any "high-priority update" when they had seen no problems with the machines. They'd get someone knowledgeable to look at it, and when they found something fishy with it, they wouldn't install it.
Seems to do it for me. It's kinda easy to miss the text box at the bottom though. It also appears to allow you to select contacts by typing in part of their away message or their idle time.
How is this Off-topic? Not only is it a direct comment on the topic, but he also apparently read TFA pretty well:
After much discussion, the Gaim developers decided to call the program Pidgin. "We like the name," Egan told me. "It was the second choice we all really liked. We were thinking up linguistic terms, and someone mentioned Pidgin. Another developer commented that 'corrupted language' may not be the best thing to associate yourself with, to which another pointed out something along the lines of 'have you ever SEEN people talk on IM?'" (Emphasis mine)
Either he's commenting on the argument used in the name selection in a clever and humorous way, or I'm vastly over-analyzing this...
From what I can tell, this is either exclusively or almost exclusively the Global Services Division. SysAdmins, Customer Service, etc. There's some software people, but not a large percentage.
Both my parents work in the Software Group, which AFAIK hasn't been hit at all.
1. Most of the country didn't really think that Hitler was doing anything to the Jews until we actually entered the war. You're acting as if they knew what this technology was being used for, when they probably didn't have any clue.
Let's put it this way. You're the head of a high-tech company. You get a large contract from Iraq, still recovering from it's war-torn state, but appears to be a nice, democratic country trying its hardest to improve itself. There's nothing suspicious about the contract, just a large number of personal computers with something similar to Excel on them. It's the kind of order you'd expect from a government trying to get everything organized. Meanwhile, the entire Western World is in the largest depression in centuries, and your company is getting hit hard. What would you do?
You'd probably take the contract. And when it turns out all those computers with Excel are being used to track Kurds held in concentration camps? "Oh shit(ler)!"
And then 60 years later, people are still blaming your company (which you miraculously held together) for "helping commit genocide"? How would you feel?
2. Are you seriously suggesting that IBM should have tried to sneak into Germany and destroy the technology Hitler already had? Wouldn't that be the CIA's job?
The situation you describe is much different than the one in the article. You acted intelligently. The school administrators in the article did not.
In your situation, you had kids that were downloading dangerous software that left vulnerable a large number of systems. You had proof of their wrongdoing. You could have gotten these kids arrested (I'm sure there's some provision for that sort of thing), and it would have been perfectly reasonable to suspend them for three months.
In the article, however, there's no mention of any actual wrongdoing beyond using a proxy. While this may have just been oversight on the part of the writer, suspending someone for three months solely for using a proxy is overkill.
In summary, I'm agreeing that they should have been punished, but I don't think that three months is appropriate for simply using a proxy, without any proof that they were doing anything wrong. I know I've used a proxy a couple of times at school because, for a time, they had blocked everything coming from http://upload.wikimedia.org/, which made many Wikipedia articles almost useless.
That's nothing. When you sign in at the visitor's desk at Google and get a badge, you have the option of signing this. If you don't, your badge has "NDA Declined" on it, in fairly large letters. We weren't even going there to meet anyone from Google, we were just using their meeting room.
The fact that they're paranoid enough to try to make everyone sign this is scary.
Let's ignore the fact that I haven't found a way to torrent ceramics... yet*.
The thing is, most of us would sit up and take notice of the fact that we are hurting artists if it were not for one thing: Only the music and (to a lesser extent) movie industries are complaining. I've seen no mass outcry among book authors about Project Gutenberg. I haven't seen a painter's association start screaming about their paintings being put online. I haven't seen software companies (yes, I consider coding an art) start suing bit torrent users for pirating software.
The music and movie industries could take a page out of the computer software industry's book. Photoshop is one of the most pirated pieces of software (this is only a reasonable guess, not based on any hard facts) yet Adobe isn't serving up lawsuits left and right. They simply put better copy prevention in their next version. Even Microsoft, often held up as an example of corporate evil, doesn't threaten colleges to the point where they attempt to wall off their network. Microsoft stopped, thought things through, and came up with WGA. While you may not like WGA, it's a far better solution than that of the RIAA or MPAA.
In conclusion, if we had a broader range of artists complaining, some people (myself included) might be inclined to stop or at least curtail our file-sharing. On the other hand, with just the music and movie industries complaining... well, let's just say that it becomes a lot easier to apply the label "whining bastards" to the lot of them.
*I wrote this sentence, and all of a sudden, an intriguing idea popped into my head, fully formed:
"Bit torrent + 3D Printer + 3D Scanner. I'll be able to torrent almost anything!"
change the date notation to DMY or YMD, MDY is another continuous irritation. While I don't necessarily agree with your other points, I absolutely agree with this one. MDY makes ABSOLUTELY no sense. YMD would be much better, as it sorts alphabetically better. (Try having your computer sort 07122007.txt, 03142005.txt, and 02242006.txt, and compare it to 20070712.txt, 20050314.txt, and 20060224.txt.)
Slashdot Mirror
C'mon, no one else gets this joke?
I believe the concept you're failing to grasp is that of "relative". Show me where you can get a Wii or PS3 Dev kit for under $99 on the open market.
I'd take FreeSpace Open. It's the most moddable game I know. Having the ability to change almost anything gives me infinite replay value.
1. It wasn't actually IBM, but a state-owned company. This would likely have reduced the high-level "checking out" given by IBM, as there was another company in-between. I'm sure they were much more concerned about the machines that were leased to openly-Communist Russia than the ones leased to professedly-Democratic Germany.
2. The Nazis weren't idiots, despite what you'd like to believe. They'd be suspicious of any "high-priority update" when they had seen no problems with the machines. They'd get someone knowledgeable to look at it, and when they found something fishy with it, they wouldn't install it.
Seems to do it for me. It's kinda easy to miss the text box at the bottom though. It also appears to allow you to select contacts by typing in part of their away message or their idle time.
Maybe this is why there's no voice support...
After much discussion, the Gaim developers decided to call the program Pidgin. "We like the name," Egan told me. "It was the second choice we all really liked. We were thinking up linguistic terms, and someone mentioned Pidgin. Another developer commented that 'corrupted language' may not be the best thing to associate yourself with, to which another pointed out something along the lines of 'have you ever SEEN people talk on IM?'"
(Emphasis mine)
Either he's commenting on the argument used in the name selection in a clever and humorous way, or I'm vastly over-analyzing this...
From what I can tell, this is either exclusively or almost exclusively the Global Services Division. SysAdmins, Customer Service, etc. There's some software people, but not a large percentage. Both my parents work in the Software Group, which AFAIK hasn't been hit at all.
1. Most of the country didn't really think that Hitler was doing anything to the Jews until we actually entered the war. You're acting as if they knew what this technology was being used for, when they probably didn't have any clue.
Let's put it this way. You're the head of a high-tech company. You get a large contract from Iraq, still recovering from it's war-torn state, but appears to be a nice, democratic country trying its hardest to improve itself. There's nothing suspicious about the contract, just a large number of personal computers with something similar to Excel on them. It's the kind of order you'd expect from a government trying to get everything organized. Meanwhile, the entire Western World is in the largest depression in centuries, and your company is getting hit hard. What would you do?
You'd probably take the contract. And when it turns out all those computers with Excel are being used to track Kurds held in concentration camps? "Oh shit(ler)!"
And then 60 years later, people are still blaming your company (which you miraculously held together) for "helping commit genocide"? How would you feel?
2. Are you seriously suggesting that IBM should have tried to sneak into Germany and destroy the technology Hitler already had? Wouldn't that be the CIA's job?
The situation you describe is much different than the one in the article. You acted intelligently. The school administrators in the article did not.
In your situation, you had kids that were downloading dangerous software that left vulnerable a large number of systems. You had proof of their wrongdoing. You could have gotten these kids arrested (I'm sure there's some provision for that sort of thing), and it would have been perfectly reasonable to suspend them for three months.
In the article, however, there's no mention of any actual wrongdoing beyond using a proxy. While this may have just been oversight on the part of the writer, suspending someone for three months solely for using a proxy is overkill.
In summary, I'm agreeing that they should have been punished, but I don't think that three months is appropriate for simply using a proxy, without any proof that they were doing anything wrong. I know I've used a proxy a couple of times at school because, for a time, they had blocked everything coming from http://upload.wikimedia.org/, which made many Wikipedia articles almost useless.
That's nothing. When you sign in at the visitor's desk at Google and get a badge, you have the option of signing this. If you don't, your badge has "NDA Declined" on it, in fairly large letters. We weren't even going there to meet anyone from Google, we were just using their meeting room. The fact that they're paranoid enough to try to make everyone sign this is scary.
Let's ignore the fact that I haven't found a way to torrent ceramics... yet*.
The thing is, most of us would sit up and take notice of the fact that we are hurting artists if it were not for one thing: Only the music and (to a lesser extent) movie industries are complaining. I've seen no mass outcry among book authors about Project Gutenberg. I haven't seen a painter's association start screaming about their paintings being put online. I haven't seen software companies (yes, I consider coding an art) start suing bit torrent users for pirating software.
The music and movie industries could take a page out of the computer software industry's book. Photoshop is one of the most pirated pieces of software (this is only a reasonable guess, not based on any hard facts) yet Adobe isn't serving up lawsuits left and right. They simply put better copy prevention in their next version. Even Microsoft, often held up as an example of corporate evil, doesn't threaten colleges to the point where they attempt to wall off their network. Microsoft stopped, thought things through, and came up with WGA. While you may not like WGA, it's a far better solution than that of the RIAA or MPAA.
In conclusion, if we had a broader range of artists complaining, some people (myself included) might be inclined to stop or at least curtail our file-sharing. On the other hand, with just the music and movie industries complaining... well, let's just say that it becomes a lot easier to apply the label "whining bastards" to the lot of them.
*I wrote this sentence, and all of a sudden, an intriguing idea popped into my head, fully formed: "Bit torrent + 3D Printer + 3D Scanner. I'll be able to torrent almost anything!"
Reuters != Associated Press. Don't complain about the wrong wire service.