Windows ships with loads of third-party software, it's true, but those programs are all associated with a different company. If Dell ships an Ubuntu box, and it comes with OpenOffice, and it later comes out that OpenOffice has ripped off some other program, Dell isn't liable for that. If Dell ships a diagnostics CD, and software or code has been illegally used on it, Dell is liable.
In the same way, if Windows ships with Firefox (unlikely, but good enough for my purposes) and it turns out that Firefox has been ripping off Safari or Opera or whatever, they can't sue Microsoft, they can sue the Mozilla Foundation.
There's a problem with that, from a litigation standpoint. Suppose one of the guys who builds the diagnostics software is a little careless about where he gets some of his code. The company who owns the rights to said code finds out, and decides to sue Dell for using proprietary code or whatever.
Dell would like to avoid that, and the best way is to build all of their code themselves. This takes time and money. Having not spent that money, or at least not having gotten returns on it yet, they will not offer hardware warranties or anything else that requires this diagnostic software.
Consider yourself lucky to have that choice. A friend of mine living somewhat out in the boonies has the choice between satellite internet, or dial-up. The money is saying dial-up.
You know, I hadn't thought about it quite like that, but you're right. Bush has had a ton of chances to be considered one of the great presidents. He still isn't. When things get this blatant, you have to wonder if the Democratic party is bribing him to throw the game, Black Sox style. Hell, that's at least as reasonable as some of the conspiracy theories I've heard thrown around.
It might. Lawyers and judges tend towards conservative thinking. Their bias will necessarily be passed to the jurors. Now, while it may be a doomed-to-fail act to try and work against the NRA, there are plenty of people who will see this as 'sticking it to those damn Commies,' and vote the other way. This isn't totally stupid, unless you assume that the Russian government cares enough to pay.
I agree with most of your thoughts, but disagree on the implementation. I will almost always vote the man, not the issues. I know all about the cobblestones on the road to hell, but we, the public, are not going to know everything. We are generally not going to know enough for certain cases, such as anything with national security implications of any kind. We need a person in office that we can trust to do his best, whatever the issue.
Then, we take the issues that we can know all about down to the public, and ignore the guy in charge. In my state, we recently had a referendum that included a poll style question: Do you support the death penalty in cases where conclusive DNA evidence can identify the suspect? My extremely democratic mother even was willing to agree with the death penalty for this level of confidence. The poll question ended up being 'Yes' for something like 60% of the state. We will, of course, not get the death penalty, based on the personal views of the governor. Things that can be answered by the people should be answered by the people.
Also, philanthropy is not as rare as people think, but those people don't go to politics. They go to places where they get to do things that matter, like medical school and law school and teaching.
Not quite. We have criminalized murder, but we still allow it to be easy to do. Some guy buys a 30.06 for hunting, takes it up to the top of a university building and opens fire. Some guy hides a steak knife in his coat pocket, and stabs the guy who was having an affair with his wife. Some guy with a mental disorder of some sort goes nuts, and takes his SUV through a crowded pedestrian crossing. Each of us encounters thousands of potential weapons each day, and any serious attempt to remove them is going to be incredibly harsh. Slashdot would use the words police state.
Now, we have campaign contributions. Is is illegal for the GOP to collect funds from its members, and use that to fund their candidate on the road to the White House? Is it illegal for me, when my uncle is running for governor (not an actual event) to unleash my powers of webpage design for free to help him? If not, how much does he have to pay me? Say that I'm a writer for a newspaper, and I write a heavily biased article on the candidates. I don't know them personally, I'm just letting my personal opinions show through. Maybe I own my own business, a sole proprietorship. In Wisconsin, I can treat all of the money it has as money that I have. There's no legal divide between me and my business. Can I donate? If not, is it because I am also a business? If so, then I am being punished for following the American Dream instead of being satisfied with being a wage slave.
The divide is very hard to enforce, and any rules that are hard and fast are necessarily going to also be harsh and unconstitutional.
Nope, it's just that different methods are used against different operating systems. Linux can be updated on the fly, so there's no reason not to use something memory-resident. A well designed Linux server will only need to reboot from power or hardware failure. With some of the virtualization stuff I've noticed recently, even that might not be good enough. Windows gets an update, it needs to reboot. Something that's memory-resident would not work as well against Windows. However, it's much easier to 'own' a Windows box than a Linux one due to the differences in how they handle permissions.
My analogy is that it's easier to kill the Secretary of Defense with a.22 pistol than it is to kill a soldier on a battlefield with that same pistol, because the soldier is wearing body armor. But just try to get your pistol to the Secretary of Defense.
*Soldier = Windows, Secretary of Defense = Linux,.22 pistol = memory-resident ownage. This should not be construed as a threat against the Secretary of Defense, any soldier, or any computer. If I suddenly stop posting, we'll know that even the government wastes time on/.
...You haven't actually disagreed with anything I said. If management tells you to snoop, you're still going to snoop, and you're going to fall within that 33%. At some places, the IT department is told to always be snooping, because it's just too difficult to try and catch everyone ahead of time, and they were told that their computer use might be monitored when they signed on to this job. Here, it might be a necessary duty to periodically pull router logs, and see who's going where. At some particularly paranoid shops, you'll end up with all traffic being sniffed, rather than just connections being logged. Now you get to run searches for your lists of suspicious words, and check the context for possible trade secret or confidential information leaking.
Also, my friend the civil engineer wants me to tell you that you need to know what's going to be rolling on your roads when you design them, because a bridge for cars is not a bridge for trains, and a skyscraper in New York is not a skyscraper in San Francisco.
I have every password needed on the system written down. That piece of paper is in a fireproof safe accessible by me and the head honcho. Now, if I should get hit by a bus while crossing the street, the company is not utterly screwed. I also choose strong passwords, 'e=2.71828', 'answer:42' and other things that are easy to remember, but hard to brute-force. Biggest issue for me is remembering what password goes to which log-in, but that's on the paper if they need it.
It said that 33% accessed confidential information while on the job. In some places, it is part of the Admin's job to snoop. No, I don't care about what you want to do to your wife when you get home, or what you want to do to your secret girlfriend while your wife's out of town. I do care that you're spending up to 20% of your time on various porn sites. First and foremost, that is a leading cause of spyware, and that's cause for distress on my network. Then there's the fact that that's not what you're getting paid to do. That bothers me much less than you trying to damage my network, but it will get reported anyway, as it's supposed to.
Employee trust can be breached while maintaining company trust.
Just to be clear, if Loss Prevention tells you to do something, and you do it, that -is- covering your ass. Loss Prevention is strictly concerned with goods leaving the store without money coming in. My best guess would be that they're worried about prices changing. Take a picture of a barcode for some cheap game, turn it into a sticker, slap the sticker on the latest and greatest. Actually, that's the best reason I can come up with. My best guess is that they don't know why someone would be taking pictures of software any more than I do, but it's uncommon enough that it won't alienate a large segment of the population if they say you can't do it.
Also, allow me to be the first to say something about CD images.
Huh, I read that as being 'Even if you completely trash everything, you're only a 30 second restore away from being back to normal.' There's no harm to the OS, the biggest things you could lose are saved passwords, and that's it. It's not a matter of 'This program is so damn robust it can take all the punishment you can serve it,' it's a matter of 'Whoops, I trashed it. Restore.'
Because unlike the rise of our species, capitalism has needed no meteor. Economics has not had an outside force destroy it. That which works, thrives. That which does not, dies. There is a positive trend in almost every scenario, and the others are tied to outside influences. Germany's economy tanked after WWI, due to war payments and damaged infrastructure. Russia's economy tanked when Communism took over, and tried to guide it down paths that did not work. Japan's economy suffered when the US got involved in WWII, and systematically started breaking things, ending with two nuclear attacks. Then we rebuilt it for them, and now they're a very major player in global economics.
It depends on how the filter is set. Specific sites, like goatse and tubgirl? Sure, I can see my way to blocking that. But if you're going to go overboard in the way commonly attributed to schools, don't. Let them investigate what they want. And keep an eye on the logs, so that when they eventually come to you with questions, you're expecting it, and have had the opportunity to do your own research.
I know. But that's hardly a universal phenomenon, as demonstrated by the aforementioned lions, the pet mice my brother had when he was younger, and many other pack species with an alpha male. The alpha male changes, the young die. Even in species which adopt orphans, this phenomenon is not unknown.
Because that is a horrifically bad metaphor. Best one I've got is that the internet is like a city. Teach them about the places that they shouldn't go alone, and the places they can. Explain the difference between facts you get from actual research material, and Crazy Ernie mumbling about tinfoil hats and mind control lasers. I don't have kids, but a friend of mine decided to test his by making a fake MySpace profile, and trying to get them to meet. He must have done a good job teaching them, because not only did they not bite, they came to him and told him about it. If I ever end up a parent, I'm going to him for advice.
As an unmarried non-parent, I'd personally go the other way. Log, don't filter. Filtering is much more intrusive, and demonstrates that you don't trust them. My parents taught me how to drive, and would not allow me to take the driver's test until -they- were satisfied. I passed the first time, and have no traffic violations other than a single speeding ticket.
I learned many things from my parents, caution near the forefront. I knew not to get in a strange car, I knew how to think for myself, I knew that I could count on my parents to be there and be nonjudgmental if I needed them.
Now, I'd like to think I've done fairly well. I have an Associates degree in Computer Electronics, and have gone back for a Bachelor's in Information Security. I don't drink, mostly because I hate having something else affecting my perceptions. Never did drugs, which is as much from observing the people who did do drugs in high school as anything else. I drive fairly quickly, but I don't do anything else while I'm driving.
The big thing is that we can actually see evolution in action. Resistant diseases exist, and they can be grown in petri dishes through slow (generations timeframe) introduction and increase of antibiotics (for things that are not viruses, those don't care about antibiotics one way or another.) There is no similar evidence for divine intervention, unless you're going to say that God wanted to save that petri dish full of disease, and gave them gifts to help them, a la Jonah and the vine.
Ah yes, this is why capitalist America had its economy tank, while Leninism-Marxism helped people to work together and create the leading economic superpower, the USSR.
Or, history demonstrates that you're wrong. That works too.
Also, nature and natural systems are the ones where a male lion who takes over a pride kills all the cubs to bring the lionesses back into heat, so he can impregnate them and spread his genes yet wider. You fail at economics and zoology
Genocide is driven by intolerance. He may not feel that being intolerant of Nazis is valid, but it doesn't mean he thinks it's OK for them to kill Jews.
Yes, I know, Godwin, but it really is the best example. Personally, I side with Jake and Elwood.
I've read "The Great Gatsby". I did not enjoy it. While the language is technically correct, it is all that is good in the story. Plot and character development were major failings. Contemporary applicability is better, but not good.
Give me Shakespeare any day. Romeo and Juliet is still somewhat applicable, as is Much Ado About Nothing. They do not express grand philosophical ideas such as Orwell does, but they are a joy to read, and for the most part are all stories that could be told in modern times. West Side Story was Romeo and Juliet. Much Ado About Nothing is a comedy based on gossip and rumors. There's something to be said for the Merchant of Venice, and the troubles with arresting people as terrorists with little or no evidence or proof.
This is what makes a classic. The stories are as viable now as they were then. Huckleberry Finn is a classic because it is well-written and displays how things were, as well as being somewhat applicable. A kid runs away from an abusive home. He joins up with someone else he knows who is also on the run. They have trials involving con artists, people looking for them, and eventually one of them is captured. There is a feel to the book, that all of it could be real, and it could be real now.
Slashdot Mirror
Windows ships with loads of third-party software, it's true, but those programs are all associated with a different company. If Dell ships an Ubuntu box, and it comes with OpenOffice, and it later comes out that OpenOffice has ripped off some other program, Dell isn't liable for that. If Dell ships a diagnostics CD, and software or code has been illegally used on it, Dell is liable.
In the same way, if Windows ships with Firefox (unlikely, but good enough for my purposes) and it turns out that Firefox has been ripping off Safari or Opera or whatever, they can't sue Microsoft, they can sue the Mozilla Foundation.
There's a problem with that, from a litigation standpoint. Suppose one of the guys who builds the diagnostics software is a little careless about where he gets some of his code. The company who owns the rights to said code finds out, and decides to sue Dell for using proprietary code or whatever.
Dell would like to avoid that, and the best way is to build all of their code themselves. This takes time and money. Having not spent that money, or at least not having gotten returns on it yet, they will not offer hardware warranties or anything else that requires this diagnostic software.
Consider yourself lucky to have that choice. A friend of mine living somewhat out in the boonies has the choice between satellite internet, or dial-up. The money is saying dial-up.
You know, I hadn't thought about it quite like that, but you're right. Bush has had a ton of chances to be considered one of the great presidents. He still isn't. When things get this blatant, you have to wonder if the Democratic party is bribing him to throw the game, Black Sox style. Hell, that's at least as reasonable as some of the conspiracy theories I've heard thrown around.
It might. Lawyers and judges tend towards conservative thinking. Their bias will necessarily be passed to the jurors. Now, while it may be a doomed-to-fail act to try and work against the NRA, there are plenty of people who will see this as 'sticking it to those damn Commies,' and vote the other way. This isn't totally stupid, unless you assume that the Russian government cares enough to pay.
Developers, developers, developers.
I agree with most of your thoughts, but disagree on the implementation. I will almost always vote the man, not the issues. I know all about the cobblestones on the road to hell, but we, the public, are not going to know everything. We are generally not going to know enough for certain cases, such as anything with national security implications of any kind. We need a person in office that we can trust to do his best, whatever the issue.
Then, we take the issues that we can know all about down to the public, and ignore the guy in charge. In my state, we recently had a referendum that included a poll style question: Do you support the death penalty in cases where conclusive DNA evidence can identify the suspect? My extremely democratic mother even was willing to agree with the death penalty for this level of confidence. The poll question ended up being 'Yes' for something like 60% of the state. We will, of course, not get the death penalty, based on the personal views of the governor. Things that can be answered by the people should be answered by the people.
Also, philanthropy is not as rare as people think, but those people don't go to politics. They go to places where they get to do things that matter, like medical school and law school and teaching.
Not quite. We have criminalized murder, but we still allow it to be easy to do. Some guy buys a 30.06 for hunting, takes it up to the top of a university building and opens fire. Some guy hides a steak knife in his coat pocket, and stabs the guy who was having an affair with his wife. Some guy with a mental disorder of some sort goes nuts, and takes his SUV through a crowded pedestrian crossing. Each of us encounters thousands of potential weapons each day, and any serious attempt to remove them is going to be incredibly harsh. Slashdot would use the words police state.
Now, we have campaign contributions. Is is illegal for the GOP to collect funds from its members, and use that to fund their candidate on the road to the White House? Is it illegal for me, when my uncle is running for governor (not an actual event) to unleash my powers of webpage design for free to help him? If not, how much does he have to pay me? Say that I'm a writer for a newspaper, and I write a heavily biased article on the candidates. I don't know them personally, I'm just letting my personal opinions show through. Maybe I own my own business, a sole proprietorship. In Wisconsin, I can treat all of the money it has as money that I have. There's no legal divide between me and my business. Can I donate? If not, is it because I am also a business? If so, then I am being punished for following the American Dream instead of being satisfied with being a wage slave.
The divide is very hard to enforce, and any rules that are hard and fast are necessarily going to also be harsh and unconstitutional.
Nope, it's just that different methods are used against different operating systems. Linux can be updated on the fly, so there's no reason not to use something memory-resident. A well designed Linux server will only need to reboot from power or hardware failure. With some of the virtualization stuff I've noticed recently, even that might not be good enough. Windows gets an update, it needs to reboot. Something that's memory-resident would not work as well against Windows. However, it's much easier to 'own' a Windows box than a Linux one due to the differences in how they handle permissions.
.22 pistol than it is to kill a soldier on a battlefield with that same pistol, because the soldier is wearing body armor. But just try to get your pistol to the Secretary of Defense.
.22 pistol = memory-resident ownage. This should not be construed as a threat against the Secretary of Defense, any soldier, or any computer. If I suddenly stop posting, we'll know that even the government wastes time on /.
My analogy is that it's easier to kill the Secretary of Defense with a
*Soldier = Windows, Secretary of Defense = Linux,
...You haven't actually disagreed with anything I said. If management tells you to snoop, you're still going to snoop, and you're going to fall within that 33%. At some places, the IT department is told to always be snooping, because it's just too difficult to try and catch everyone ahead of time, and they were told that their computer use might be monitored when they signed on to this job. Here, it might be a necessary duty to periodically pull router logs, and see who's going where. At some particularly paranoid shops, you'll end up with all traffic being sniffed, rather than just connections being logged. Now you get to run searches for your lists of suspicious words, and check the context for possible trade secret or confidential information leaking.
Also, my friend the civil engineer wants me to tell you that you need to know what's going to be rolling on your roads when you design them, because a bridge for cars is not a bridge for trains, and a skyscraper in New York is not a skyscraper in San Francisco.
I have every password needed on the system written down. That piece of paper is in a fireproof safe accessible by me and the head honcho. Now, if I should get hit by a bus while crossing the street, the company is not utterly screwed. I also choose strong passwords, 'e=2.71828', 'answer:42' and other things that are easy to remember, but hard to brute-force. Biggest issue for me is remembering what password goes to which log-in, but that's on the paper if they need it.
It said that 33% accessed confidential information while on the job. In some places, it is part of the Admin's job to snoop. No, I don't care about what you want to do to your wife when you get home, or what you want to do to your secret girlfriend while your wife's out of town. I do care that you're spending up to 20% of your time on various porn sites. First and foremost, that is a leading cause of spyware, and that's cause for distress on my network. Then there's the fact that that's not what you're getting paid to do. That bothers me much less than you trying to damage my network, but it will get reported anyway, as it's supposed to.
Employee trust can be breached while maintaining company trust.
You forgot one.
5) Wander around the cubicles stealing the Post-It notes off their desk.
Just to be clear, if Loss Prevention tells you to do something, and you do it, that -is- covering your ass. Loss Prevention is strictly concerned with goods leaving the store without money coming in. My best guess would be that they're worried about prices changing. Take a picture of a barcode for some cheap game, turn it into a sticker, slap the sticker on the latest and greatest. Actually, that's the best reason I can come up with. My best guess is that they don't know why someone would be taking pictures of software any more than I do, but it's uncommon enough that it won't alienate a large segment of the population if they say you can't do it.
Also, allow me to be the first to say something about CD images.
Huh, I read that as being 'Even if you completely trash everything, you're only a 30 second restore away from being back to normal.' There's no harm to the OS, the biggest things you could lose are saved passwords, and that's it. It's not a matter of 'This program is so damn robust it can take all the punishment you can serve it,' it's a matter of 'Whoops, I trashed it. Restore.'
Because unlike the rise of our species, capitalism has needed no meteor. Economics has not had an outside force destroy it. That which works, thrives. That which does not, dies. There is a positive trend in almost every scenario, and the others are tied to outside influences. Germany's economy tanked after WWI, due to war payments and damaged infrastructure. Russia's economy tanked when Communism took over, and tried to guide it down paths that did not work. Japan's economy suffered when the US got involved in WWII, and systematically started breaking things, ending with two nuclear attacks. Then we rebuilt it for them, and now they're a very major player in global economics.
Capitalism has succeeded wildly.
It depends on how the filter is set. Specific sites, like goatse and tubgirl? Sure, I can see my way to blocking that. But if you're going to go overboard in the way commonly attributed to schools, don't. Let them investigate what they want. And keep an eye on the logs, so that when they eventually come to you with questions, you're expecting it, and have had the opportunity to do your own research.
I know. But that's hardly a universal phenomenon, as demonstrated by the aforementioned lions, the pet mice my brother had when he was younger, and many other pack species with an alpha male. The alpha male changes, the young die. Even in species which adopt orphans, this phenomenon is not unknown.
Because that is a horrifically bad metaphor. Best one I've got is that the internet is like a city. Teach them about the places that they shouldn't go alone, and the places they can. Explain the difference between facts you get from actual research material, and Crazy Ernie mumbling about tinfoil hats and mind control lasers. I don't have kids, but a friend of mine decided to test his by making a fake MySpace profile, and trying to get them to meet. He must have done a good job teaching them, because not only did they not bite, they came to him and told him about it. If I ever end up a parent, I'm going to him for advice.
As an unmarried non-parent, I'd personally go the other way. Log, don't filter. Filtering is much more intrusive, and demonstrates that you don't trust them. My parents taught me how to drive, and would not allow me to take the driver's test until -they- were satisfied. I passed the first time, and have no traffic violations other than a single speeding ticket.
I learned many things from my parents, caution near the forefront. I knew not to get in a strange car, I knew how to think for myself, I knew that I could count on my parents to be there and be nonjudgmental if I needed them.
Now, I'd like to think I've done fairly well. I have an Associates degree in Computer Electronics, and have gone back for a Bachelor's in Information Security. I don't drink, mostly because I hate having something else affecting my perceptions. Never did drugs, which is as much from observing the people who did do drugs in high school as anything else. I drive fairly quickly, but I don't do anything else while I'm driving.
Educate, don't legislate.
The big thing is that we can actually see evolution in action. Resistant diseases exist, and they can be grown in petri dishes through slow (generations timeframe) introduction and increase of antibiotics (for things that are not viruses, those don't care about antibiotics one way or another.) There is no similar evidence for divine intervention, unless you're going to say that God wanted to save that petri dish full of disease, and gave them gifts to help them, a la Jonah and the vine.
What a surprise, another woman who would want nothing to do with me. At least this time I found out before wasting money on drinks or dinner.
Ah yes, this is why capitalist America had its economy tank, while Leninism-Marxism helped people to work together and create the leading economic superpower, the USSR.
Or, history demonstrates that you're wrong. That works too.
Also, nature and natural systems are the ones where a male lion who takes over a pride kills all the cubs to bring the lionesses back into heat, so he can impregnate them and spread his genes yet wider. You fail at economics and zoology
Genocide is driven by intolerance. He may not feel that being intolerant of Nazis is valid, but it doesn't mean he thinks it's OK for them to kill Jews.
Yes, I know, Godwin, but it really is the best example. Personally, I side with Jake and Elwood.
Also, yes, he was being sarcastic.
I've read "The Great Gatsby". I did not enjoy it. While the language is technically correct, it is all that is good in the story. Plot and character development were major failings. Contemporary applicability is better, but not good.
Give me Shakespeare any day. Romeo and Juliet is still somewhat applicable, as is Much Ado About Nothing. They do not express grand philosophical ideas such as Orwell does, but they are a joy to read, and for the most part are all stories that could be told in modern times. West Side Story was Romeo and Juliet. Much Ado About Nothing is a comedy based on gossip and rumors. There's something to be said for the Merchant of Venice, and the troubles with arresting people as terrorists with little or no evidence or proof.
This is what makes a classic. The stories are as viable now as they were then. Huckleberry Finn is a classic because it is well-written and displays how things were, as well as being somewhat applicable. A kid runs away from an abusive home. He joins up with someone else he knows who is also on the run. They have trials involving con artists, people looking for them, and eventually one of them is captured. There is a feel to the book, that all of it could be real, and it could be real now.