Indeed, you have to prove intent. Sadly, too many companies do not care at all about intent. They just want an excuse to give you the sack.
Here's an anecdote, which is part of the reason why this sort of thing angers me. When I was working at the Italian branch of a famous cola manufacturer, a top exec told me that their IT guys often found traces of porn on company computers. But they didn't fire the offender straight away. They just put it on a secret file. Later, if they decided they wanted to get rid of that employee without all the hassle related to firing, they'd say "oh look what we've just found!" and fire the guy on the basis that he'd violated the contract.
Playing devils advocate:
I think this action is completely justifiable. After all, if he had a company car and failed to keep it registered, insured, and in a safe condition, then killed some kid on a level crossing, he would be considered negligent and charged.
If the laptop was in his control, is he not responsible for operating it in a safe manner?
8)
Ah, Slashdot car analogies.
No. It's more like a guy using their company car on the weekend to have an affair (on his own time, and paying for the petrol, with personal use of the car being an official perk). The boss finds out. "You cheated on your wife in a company car! That's immoral, and in breach of the fine print of your employment contract. You're fired!"
This was a laptop, right? Not a computer sitting in his office. There is no reason to suppose that any of the alleged porn-surfing was done on company time.
How is it misuse then? Looking at sexy pictures doesn't harm the computer or the company at all. Do they also fire people for using their company laptop, at home and on their own time, for browsing Slashdot or eBay?
You don't even need any malware on your machine to end up with erotic images in your temporary files. I have browsed sites looking for cracks for games, and had porn ads appear. Those images will have been cached somewhere.
The problem is not with failing to wipe the drives between users, or failing to use an anti-virus, or failing to use an ad-blocker, or failing to flush out your temporary files. Non-techie users can't be expected to do such things, and they shouldn't be necessary.
The problem is with companies who think that they can (ab)use the fact that the hardware belongs to them, in order to interfere with employees' private lives. If they do this as a pretext to rid themselves of an unwanted employee, then they are evil. If they do this and fire an employee whose work they were happy with, then they are utter morons.
Secondary problems include (a) the mistaken idea that files in the cache prove intent to view certain content; (b) the current hysteria about "kiddie porn".
You seem to mistake me for the person to whom you originally replied.
My point was that the phrase didn't mean anything so spelt, that it is not normal to put "argumentum" before "non sequitur" in English, and the phrase didn't make much sense with a question mark attached to it so haphazardly. "Isn't that a non sequitur?" would have made more sense.
I almost read your verbose nonsense, and then decided I had other things to do, being as busy as you guessed.
A brief skim revealed the following:
You go on about a "religious man", but that cannot possibly be a response to anything said by me, because I am non-religous, an atheist in fact. It could only start to make sense if it were intended purely as an insult, but in that case you'd be a fortiori insulting yourself.
You make a big deal about me saying that jesus-freaks twist words, when in fact I said the opposite: they are normally devoid of the intelligence necessary to do that.
Like a typical sophist, you accuse your interlocutor of building straw men when he builds a reductio ad absurdum.
The sinful chick in the magic garden is most definitely made of spare rib and not straw. She is actually believed in by nutty Christians.
If you want to write some more concise nonsense then I can reply to it.
Oh, I know that you believe in reason. I don't doubt that at all. I'm merely asking you to prove that reason exists, using "external proof," as you put it, so that you can be consistent with your stated principle that only objective things should be believed in.
You shouldn't believe in reason unless there is some external proof for it, right? But, empirical proof does not exist for metaphysical attributes, such as reason and logic; empirical objective proof only exists for entities that inhabit the physical world, and it relies on reason to make it all work. So, what is your evidence for reason as a truth? I can guess that it is internal and subjective evidence, just like the evidence for the existence of God that other people accept as truth.
Wow. That one deserves a Nobel prize for sophistry. I'm really quite impressed. God-lovers are not typically capable of twisting words with such skill.
You've essentially said that because it's difficult to put into words the obviousness of the existence of things like "reason", "the universe", "stuff", etc., people aren't allowed to ask for evidence for the silly crap you invent.
So, you can say "you can't prove that reason exists, so I don't have to prove the Jewish zombie who'll save you from the evil of the rib-woman who chatted to the snake in the magic garden." And I can say "you can't prove that the universe exists, so I don't have to prove that the flying spaghetti monster is about to rape you with his glutinous tentacles and suck out all memory of it afterwards."
By rhetorically demolishing all rational scepticism (on the basis that any such sceptic is a hypocrite), you've just found a way of proving in practical terms any random nonsense you choose to pull out of your arse. I salute you.
In fact, I didn't even know my site was in Texas. I thought that my local Australian hosting company had machines on site.
It's a little worrying. What if something like a crash or a powercut (or, let's be crazy, an explosion) occurred? The people whom I'm paying would have to trust someone on the other side of the world to fix it. No pressure on them could make the problem be fixed faster.
It also raises the question of why I'm letting a middleman grab a chunk of my cash instead of going directly with these nerds in Stetsons.
The invasion was not illegal because Saddam Hussein had abrogated the terms of his cease fire with the United Nations forces. No. The war was over. By your logic, if Iraq developed a long-range weapon in the year 3000, the US could move in and massacre thousands of people on the basis that a 20th-century war was now resuming.
My point was not that there were no WMD in Iraq in 2003, there were not. Good, because that's all that matters.
Saddam gets the bomb, and then nukes Iran and Saudi Arabia and makes himself master of the middle east... There is no reason we should pay attention to your paranoid ravings.
Actually, the Jews didn't surrender as much as they were lied to. In the one case where the Jews were aware of their fate, they actually did fight and die almost to a man before being herded off to concentration camps. Do read about the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, before you make that claim! Indeed, I think the Warsaw ghetto withstood the Nazi assault all by itself for longer than Paris. You completely miss the point. I'm ridiculing the idea of someone claiming the Jews didn't struggle enough.
The UN didn't veto anything and the Nuremberg principals were about waging a war for the purposes of a genocide. The veto to which I refer is the one enjoyed by the five permanent members of the UN Security Council. Chirac used his veto to make it impossible for the invasion to get UN approval. Military action is only permissible under international law if (a) it is approved by the UN; or (b) it is in self-defence to a current or imminent threat (with no time to seek a UN resolution).
The invasion was therefore illegal. Illegal invasion is known as "aggression", and is held to the ultimate warcrime, as it contains within it responsibility for all subsequent crimes during the war.
The Nuremberg Principles are about prohibiting aggression. WWII was waged for lebensraum and German domination.
Saddam Hussein admitted that he would have reconstituted his arms programs as soon as the sanctions were lifting. So, even though he may not have had no WMD, he had them before, and would have gotten them again. Even Bush himself has stopped trying to claim this. He now admits there were no WMDs, and has shifted to blaming "bad intelligence".
I can't believe that got modded Insightful. What sort of illiterate moderators do we have on here?
English words ending in x add es
to make a plural. Do you say "boxs"??
It is a proper noun anyway, so if you need a plural, you should say "distributions of".
I also hope there was no seriousness in the suggestions that plurals in -ces and -ii would be appropriate.
Re:People always complain about UIs
on
Blender 2.46 Released
·
· Score: 2, Informative
is it because you guys are instinctively comparing it to what you are familiar with? Photoshop-GIMP, Maya-Blender, etc.
Nope. I'm not experienced in 3D.
I recently tried Sketchup on Windows. I immediately got creating 3D scenes, very easily.
I have Blender open on Linux right now. I have no idea how to achieve anything at all in it. Even the save dialogue is weird and non-standard. What's wrong with a standard GTK or QT save dialogue? Why am I seeing all the hidden files in my home directory? Do they think I'm likely to want to save the file in ~/.klamav? Why does it assume I want to save in JPEG rather than PNG?
It's putting me off making the effort to learn it.
But they're not misusing it. The very point is that "easy" and "intuitive" are not the same thing. A hammer is indeed intuitive. Its use it totally obvious and anyone can use it. Now, it may take some experience to use it with great precision, but that's not an issue of intuitiveness.
Indeed. Perhaps there should be a meme according to which the Jews are ridiculed for surrendering and letting themselves be herded off to camps, instead of nobly fighting to the death on their doorsteps as they ought to have? No, I didn't think so.
More to the point, all this WWI and WWII talk is just a retrospective justification. The real reason we hear Americans (and only Americans) making these bigoted comments is because Jacques Chirac used the UN veto against an attack on Iraq, thus making the subsequent invasion a war crime under the Nuremberg Principles. The fact that Chirac has now been proven quite right, with WMDs and suchlike now known to be a pack of lies, does not seem to embarrass the bigots at all.
The sort of reactionary and racist anti-Chinese attitudes that are commonplace on Slashdot really sicken me.
A short period of mourning is declared, with very little enforcement, and all you want to do is seize the opportunity to make it look like censorship, in particular censorship of the disaster. It is the exact opposite. Frivolous entertainment is being scaled down a bit for a mere three days, and the TV networks are saturating the public with quake information. Never has the Chinese government been more open. With previous tragedies we saw secrecy and a desire to save face, but this regime is clearly much more modern. The contrast with the terrible Burmese regime is very clear.
I don't actually agree with the declaration of mourning, and I wish that this government could be replaced with one truly chosen by the people, but this doesn't mean that the non-stop stream of slurs and vilification is OK.
In particular, I find the concept of a period of mourning to be much less offensive than Bush's 16 Sept official day of prayer for hurricane Katrina. Separation of church and state, please!
I never learned to drive a car. Does that make me abnormal? It depends on where you are, but here in America, yes, that makes you abnormal. If you're in the wilds of Africa, probably not so abnormal. Whoa there, cowboy! There is something between those two, you know. America may have a pathological dependency on the motor car, but other countries are not quite so bad. Here in Australia, I'm in a distinct minority by not driving, but not abnormal. The same for watching virtually no TV.
The really significant thing about the Windows Solitaire program is that it has probably permanently changed the name of the card game Patience to "Solitaire".
Slashdot Mirror
All you have to do is check the computer again and say you've only just found it.
Indeed, you have to prove intent. Sadly, too many companies do not care at all about intent. They just want an excuse to give you the sack.
Here's an anecdote, which is part of the reason why this sort of thing angers me. When I was working at the Italian branch of a famous cola manufacturer, a top exec told me that their IT guys often found traces of porn on company computers. But they didn't fire the offender straight away. They just put it on a secret file. Later, if they decided they wanted to get rid of that employee without all the hassle related to firing, they'd say "oh look what we've just found!" and fire the guy on the basis that he'd violated the contract.
That sort of dishonesty makes me sick.
The title is incomprehensible.
I can only guess that you meant that the Register and others made these accusations.
Ah, Slashdot car analogies.
No. It's more like a guy using their company car on the weekend to have an affair (on his own time, and paying for the petrol, with personal use of the car being an official perk). The boss finds out. "You cheated on your wife in a company car! That's immoral, and in breach of the fine print of your employment contract. You're fired!"
Hang on.
This was a laptop, right? Not a computer sitting in his office. There is no reason to suppose that any of the alleged porn-surfing was done on company time.
How is it misuse then? Looking at sexy pictures doesn't harm the computer or the company at all. Do they also fire people for using their company laptop, at home and on their own time, for browsing Slashdot or eBay?
You don't even need any malware on your machine to end up with erotic images in your temporary files. I have browsed sites looking for cracks for games, and had porn ads appear. Those images will have been cached somewhere.
The problem is not with failing to wipe the drives between users, or failing to use an anti-virus, or failing to use an ad-blocker, or failing to flush out your temporary files. Non-techie users can't be expected to do such things, and they shouldn't be necessary.
The problem is with companies who think that they can (ab)use the fact that the hardware belongs to them, in order to interfere with employees' private lives. If they do this as a pretext to rid themselves of an unwanted employee, then they are evil. If they do this and fire an employee whose work they were happy with, then they are utter morons.
Secondary problems include (a) the mistaken idea that files in the cache prove intent to view certain content; (b) the current hysteria about "kiddie porn".
You seem to mistake me for the person to whom you originally replied.
My point was that the phrase didn't mean anything so spelt, that it is not normal to put "argumentum" before "non sequitur" in English, and the phrase didn't make much sense with a question mark attached to it so haphazardly. "Isn't that a non sequitur?" would have made more sense.
I almost read your verbose nonsense, and then decided I had other things to do, being as busy as you guessed.
A brief skim revealed the following:
If you want to write some more concise nonsense then I can reply to it.
Oh, I know that you believe in reason. I don't doubt that at all. I'm merely asking you to prove that reason exists, using "external proof," as you put it, so that you can be consistent with your stated principle that only objective things should be believed in.
You shouldn't believe in reason unless there is some external proof for it, right? But, empirical proof does not exist for metaphysical attributes, such as reason and logic; empirical objective proof only exists for entities that inhabit the physical world, and it relies on reason to make it all work. So, what is your evidence for reason as a truth? I can guess that it is internal and subjective evidence, just like the evidence for the existence of God that other people accept as truth.
Wow. That one deserves a Nobel prize for sophistry. I'm really quite impressed. God-lovers are not typically capable of twisting words with such skill.
You've essentially said that because it's difficult to put into words the obviousness of the existence of things like "reason", "the universe", "stuff", etc., people aren't allowed to ask for evidence for the silly crap you invent.
So, you can say "you can't prove that reason exists, so I don't have to prove the Jewish zombie who'll save you from the evil of the rib-woman who chatted to the snake in the magic garden." And I can say "you can't prove that the universe exists, so I don't have to prove that the flying spaghetti monster is about to rape you with his glutinous tentacles and suck out all memory of it afterwards."
By rhetorically demolishing all rational scepticism (on the basis that any such sceptic is a hypocrite), you've just found a way of proving in practical terms any random nonsense you choose to pull out of your arse. I salute you.
Since he was only actually elected once, that reflects quite well on America.
Me too.
In fact, I didn't even know my site was in Texas. I thought that my local Australian hosting company had machines on site.
It's a little worrying. What if something like a crash or a powercut (or, let's be crazy, an explosion) occurred? The people whom I'm paying would have to trust someone on the other side of the world to fix it. No pressure on them could make the problem be fixed faster.
It also raises the question of why I'm letting a middleman grab a chunk of my cash instead of going directly with these nerds in Stetsons.
Ugh.
The US media tendency to omit "and" strikes again. If you really think the word is soooo verrry loonngg, you can use an ampersand.
A comma just doesn't make sense, and the saving you get from not having to put a space in front of it is really not significant.
The fact that "first" wasn't abbreviated to "1st" shows that the comma thing is just a stupid habit, and not actually to save space.
Why only speak of who owns the moon? What about all the space in between? What about the whole universe?
We are a nest of ants under one paving stone, asking which of us owns the other paving stones.
I can't believe that got modded Insightful. What sort of illiterate moderators do we have on here?
English words ending in x add es to make a plural. Do you say "boxs"??
It is a proper noun anyway, so if you need a plural, you should say "distributions of".
I also hope there was no seriousness in the suggestions that plurals in -ces and -ii would be appropriate.
Nope. I'm not experienced in 3D.
I recently tried Sketchup on Windows. I immediately got creating 3D scenes, very easily.
I have Blender open on Linux right now. I have no idea how to achieve anything at all in it. Even the save dialogue is weird and non-standard. What's wrong with a standard GTK or QT save dialogue? Why am I seeing all the hidden files in my home directory? Do they think I'm likely to want to save the file in ~/.klamav? Why does it assume I want to save in JPEG rather than PNG?
It's putting me off making the effort to learn it.
But they're not misusing it. The very point is that "easy" and "intuitive" are not the same thing. A hammer is indeed intuitive. Its use it totally obvious and anyone can use it. Now, it may take some experience to use it with great precision, but that's not an issue of intuitiveness.
Indeed. Perhaps there should be a meme according to which the Jews are ridiculed for surrendering and letting themselves be herded off to camps, instead of nobly fighting to the death on their doorsteps as they ought to have? No, I didn't think so.
More to the point, all this WWI and WWII talk is just a retrospective justification. The real reason we hear Americans (and only Americans) making these bigoted comments is because Jacques Chirac used the UN veto against an attack on Iraq, thus making the subsequent invasion a war crime under the Nuremberg Principles. The fact that Chirac has now been proven quite right, with WMDs and suchlike now known to be a pack of lies, does not seem to embarrass the bigots at all.The sort of reactionary and racist anti-Chinese attitudes that are commonplace on Slashdot really sicken me.
A short period of mourning is declared, with very little enforcement, and all you want to do is seize the opportunity to make it look like censorship, in particular censorship of the disaster. It is the exact opposite. Frivolous entertainment is being scaled down a bit for a mere three days, and the TV networks are saturating the public with quake information. Never has the Chinese government been more open. With previous tragedies we saw secrecy and a desire to save face, but this regime is clearly much more modern. The contrast with the terrible Burmese regime is very clear.
I don't actually agree with the declaration of mourning, and I wish that this government could be replaced with one truly chosen by the people, but this doesn't mean that the non-stop stream of slurs and vilification is OK.
In particular, I find the concept of a period of mourning to be much less offensive than Bush's 16 Sept official day of prayer for hurricane Katrina. Separation of church and state, please!
The really significant thing about the Windows Solitaire program is that it has probably permanently changed the name of the card game Patience to "Solitaire".