While it might be true that Linux and other *nixes have just as mant vulnerabilities, and they simply haven't been looked for, they aren't desinged just to stop an attack, but also to mitigate the damage.
Windows has actually gotten reasonably decent(by average user standards) at preventing a problem from occuring. I'm not saying they are perfect here, but considering what they are facing out there it has gotten pretty good.
But it is piss poor at mitigating damage once its done. With the infamous difficulties of runnign as a limited user in Windows, and no convenient workarounds, I don't even bother recommending most people do so. The workarounds that exist are too much of a pain for most people, they'd either give up and run as admin anyways or hose their system in the attempt. What this means, is once an attack gets through to a Windows user, the entire system is probably hosed.
However, on *nix, this isn't the case. Limited user accounts ACTUALLY LET YOU GET THE JOB DONE WITHOUT JUMPING THROUGH FLAMING HOOPS! More people would actually run as a limited user if they could get everything done that they need done. I very rarely enter root on my Slackware box... So, if someone were to pWn me, I'd lose at most that account, maybe a few apps. The core system would still be fully functional and uncompromised.
Limited user account idiocy in Windows is the biggest security problem in the OS, forcing even people who know better to run as admin just so they can effectively use the thing.
The only places I've seen limited accounts really work in Windows are in corporate installs, where the computer has a fairly restricted set of tasks... general purpose home systems... forget about it.
Realistically, roomates. Preferably several with compatable shift/sleep schedules.
Alternately, you'd be surprised what you can live on. Here in CT minimum wage is 7.55/hr. That works out to 15,704 dollars per year. Absolute crap money pretty much anywhere.
Rents can be found as low as 500/mo if you really look hard, realistically 600-700 is the lower range for a studio or smallish one bedroom(working on moving out ATM, so my info is fairly current for the New Haven area). Get fond of ramen and Goodwill stores, and you can survive on minimum wage. You will have a pretty shitty life, but you wont' be homeless, and you won't die of malnutrition(some malnutrition related illnesses are possible, but not likely to face a lethal problem in the short term).
Granted, NYC is a lot more expensive than the ghettos of CT that I'm referring to here, but 27k is also a lot more money than 15.7k. I'm sure most people can survive on that much in NYC if they are willing to be ruthlessly frugal. Not a life many would want, but it is possible.
This isn't even accounting for various welfare programs which can make living on shit wages much easier, such as Section 8 housing which fixes the max rent you will pay to 1/3rd of your income(run the numbers above, that minimum wage in CT scenario leads to well over half of your income going to housing).
He's not saying its completely good. Just that the positive contributions of military development to the civilian sector should be considered along with the bad effects of military development.
Like it or not, military needs do often accelerate development of new, and generally useful techologies, quite dramatically.
Is it worth the cost? Thats a rather large debate which I won't get into now, except to say that the all of the costs and benefits, including transfer of military tech to the civilian market, must be considered.
They might have had probable cause(without specifics of a given case I can't say, even if I was a lawyer), and that would be enough to get a warrant.
What would justify a warrantless search, wiretap, or whatever would be someting called Exigent Circumstances- basically there has to be an *immediate* threat, that cannot be countered any other way, and the delay in getting a warrant would eliminate any opportunity to deal with it. Even then, such actions are supposed to be subject to judicial review after the fact.
Sharing the source code would make it easier to find bugs. I don't think anyone seriously disputes this.
Thats often the entire point. The hardest part of fixing a bug is often *finding* it. Unless you would prefer to leave it alone and hope for the best, you want your bugs, especially critical security flaws, to be found as quickly as possible so they can be fixed.
Now, if that link was in fact a real link, and you clicked on it thinking it was, say, legal pornography, and only realize the truth after your browser has displayed the pictures- is that pedophilia? In this scenario you have definitely downloaded child porn.
Or you go on a usenet porn group and just download everything. Probably a fair chance that a few of the pics are underage. Again, you've downloaded child porn.
Maybe you donwload a few vids of the next Traci Lords... bingo, child porn.
You may be researching the issue in general, and land yourself in a legal pickle of child porn- this has apparently happened to a few people.
You might be browsing MySpace, and check out some hot girls... hot 16 and 17 year olds. Some of those pictures are very borderline and I could easily see a judge declaring them pornographic, especially in Republimerica. Given the rampant age inflation to avoid being kicked off the site, you may not even know, if the real age is mentioned at all it might be in bright yellow on bright white, or obscured by background images.
While willfully downloading child porn would be pedophilia in almost all cases, there are *many* scenarios where someone downloading it would not be pedophilia.
The F111 also only has two crew members, and they will generally be bailing out at relatively low altitudes, vastly simplifying the problem.
The idea of an escape system was floated, but it would have been too heavy. That said, if the shuttle were built today, advances in mettalurgy and other materials sciences could probably lead to a much lighter orbiter if the plans were followed precisely, only with modern materials. Tweaking it could probably lead to a crew escape mechanism that could have saved the Challenger astronauts if the materials and techniques were available in the late 70s when it was designed.
Which is the way I think they should go to replace it. Take the basic design, which is essentially proven, albeit with some flaws. Take advantage of modern materials and construction techniques, and safety could be dramatically improved at far less cost than designing a completely new system.
Heh. The classic "I understand it so they will" problem.
Tech types need to remember that even *if* their audience is as smart as them, their intelligence may well be targeted at a completely different area, leaving them completely unable to understand what you are saying, or only understand enough to be dangerous.
They would cross reference it with other searches you have made.
"child porn" as a search term would be a bad sign.
But "protecting children" "is my child at risk" and similar searches showing up in a short amount of time before and after the "child porn" search would point towards an innocent intention for your searching.
Of course, this assumes that the people looking at the data are competent *and* care enough to do their jobs properly, and the people who act on the results are similarly competent and caring. Neither of which I'd be too certain of in the current political climate.
My guess is they redid the printing system, and didn't fully check what other windows systems were affected.
Re:This does look like a waste of money
on
RFID Cookware
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· Score: 1
Large operations will benefit. When you've got to feed hundereds of people in one shot, and need it all cooked consistently... every little bit helps.
I'd agree that its not all that useful at home, but large restaurants, cafeterias, military mess halls... could really benefit from the added consistency such devices can give.
The obvious answer is to pressurize the water. This will increase the boiling temperature, letting you run the reactor much hotter.
Alternately, if that is impractical, run multiple cells. Each cell may only be able to put off enough heat to produce a few volts, string enough of them together, and you can put out a lot of power. With proper design, increasing capacity would be relatively simple compared to a single large reactor. On the other hand, maintenance of potentially hundereds of minireactors could be a nightmare.
Apply everywhere you think you might want to work. Whether they are advertising something or not. The hundered or so bucks you'll spend printing up and mailing out several dozen resumes will get back to you when you get a job sooner than a more conservative approach would get you.
Put your resume on *every* jobs website that covers career fields you are trying to get into. Whether you actively monitor a given site or not, have a resume up there. Most of my contacts have come from sites I don't actively monitor, the two sure things(one I had to turn down because I was woefully unqualified, the other I took) were from sites I didn't actively montitor.
HOBBY EXPERIENCE COUNTS. Sure, formalized volunteer experience, or workforce experience, is better... but if you need to cover some time unemployed, a summary of hobby type experience can help. It's much better than simply "unemployed" being listed on your resume. My current job as an on site tech... the interviewer was mostly interested in my IRC Operator status I put on my resume... almost completely informal, definitely a hobby rather than a job or serious volunteer position, but it was a HUGE help in landing a job.
Have resumes focused on each major field you are going for. For a "job of a lifetime" application, focus it as tightly to that position as you can. Also, have a generic resume available in case someone asks for it and you don't have one that is especially fitting- but do follow up with a more targeted resume.
Register with every temp agency that covers your job field targets. Every single one. Even though those jobs aren't guaranteed to be long term, they are experience, and there are times that they do convert to permanent positions. My manager has basically told me that as soon as the red tape clears(beauracratic inertia is more powerful than God Himself) I'll be moved from temp to permanent. Just have to hit the ground running and work your ass off. Even if you don't get a permanent position, if you impress them, they will be solid references.
There was another point raised elsewhere in this thread- even with the potential power output of solar, building the infrastructure to support it would take ridiculous amounts of energy. It isn't a short term solution, though I will concede that it should form a large part of our long term energy plans.
Until then, we need to get through the short term. And with oil likely to run into very tight supply problems in the relatively near future(relative to readiness of solar to take over), things like coal and nuclear plants are going to be needed as a stopgap measure.
Sure, the Sun gives us more energy than anything else we have available.
The difficulty is converting this energy into a form we can use. If something gives 100 joules of energy, and we can only convert that to 10 joules of energy we can make use of, we'd be better off going with something that gives 50 joules that we can convert to 25 joules of useful energy.
Numbers pulled out of my ass to illustrate the point, I don't have the time to look up the actual figures for solar vs everything else. It also doesn't cover the logistics of battery storage or having worldwide interconnected networks so power gets everywhere from whatever side of the planet is currently facing the sun.
There was also a lot of miscommunication and poor training. The disaster would have been limited greatly if more qualified people were supervising the test. Chances are it would have still been worse than TMI(at least equally bad, ie loss of the reactor), but would not have been anywhere near the disaster that did occur. The people on site did their jobs as well as they knew how, it was their superiors that fucked them by not training them properly or shipping in people that knew what they were doing.
But when experts (from Platts) checked some blueprints of the EPR they found a major flaw. Some thingie may get stuck (expert-speak: 'sump strainer clogging') and let the whole reactor blew away.
I'd be interested to know if the problem is in the basic idea behind the design, or an implementation detail.
That has a lot to do with how good the plant that eventually gets built will be. It would have sucked if, say, quicksort was never pursued because the first implementer had inserted an off by one error that was tripped up under some obscure condition. If the underlying concepts are flawed, ditch it. But if its just this particular implementation of it that is flawed, fix the implementation and move on with construction.
That is a large reason why my Thinkpad runs Slackware. Keep things fairly minimal and simple, wring the most performance I can out of the old PII 366 with 284MB ram. On a better system I'd run Mandriva, but no way in hell I'd consider that for this machine.
Runs *very* well. Performance is plenty fast enough, even in KDE. Compiling tarballs, while I'm in KDE, isn't bad. Hell, I was pleasently surprised at how quickly the kernel compiles while under KDE... takes a long time, but not nearly as long as I expected.
And I've found that Slackware isn't nearly as hard to deal with as its made out to be... but then again I started when the "easy" linux distros were harder than Slackware is now, so my perspective might be skewed a bit compared to a complete newbie. Having to hunt down a kernel driver and xserver for your video card... both of which were found in different places... and then edit xf86config by hand... is a wee bit of a pain in the ass.
heh. reminds me of a goof I made on NT4 when I ran it on my PC.
I decided. "Hey, the admin account can really screw things up if I make a mistake(famous last words). Lets deny even admin anything but read and execute to c:\winnt! Yeah, that will protect me!"
Try logging in... nothing. Can't do it. I actually made a windows system *too* secure. Good learning experience, but a pain in the ass, and if it was a system that people acutally depended on... that would have been Bad.
This is why root type accounts should only be used when actually necesary, no matter how much you think you know. Only takes a momentary brain fart to do something like this, or a slip of a finger for "rm -rf/usr/home/account/sources/" to turn into "rm -rf/".
I don't use root on my linux system either. Those times I actually need such access, I can easily and quickly su, get done what needs to get done, and exit back to my login shell. I only actually log in as root when I'm doing major work such as compiling the kernel that requires me to be in root for an extended time. And once thats done... I log out and log back into limited. Even the admins of a box, whether its a shared system such as a server or group workstation, or their PC, should only hop into root when necesary, they shouldn't do it just because they can. *nix has facilities to let them do it.
Things like sudo that give limited accounts a "partial root" level of power should only be used when that persons job actually requires such access. And even then, unless the access is required each and every time they log in, they should have a normal account for general use.
I do use admin on windows because it's a pain in the ass to do otherwise. I do need to read up on that though, either set up something between a typical user and admin, or find a third party su equivalent for win32.
The leaders I've been most loyal to are the ones that first make sure I have everything I need to do my job, and then get out of my way so I can do it. My morale is best under such conditions - I will move mountains for such a leader if I have to.
That said, reasonable office hijinks that don't directly relate to the job can be a lot of fun and take the drudgery out of things. Wouldn't do much at my job, most of us are out in the field most of the day, hell, I'm not acutally in the office more than once a week, occasionally twice. Which goes back to my main point. I'm getting the job done, so they don't force me to check in all the time and be seen. They know that if they put the calls in my box, they will be completed, it's as simple as that. So they stay out of my way and let me get it done.
Basically, it's not something to rely on(don't go down expecting to box sharks away), but if they are coming after you already, its one of the better ways to save your ass.
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While it might be true that Linux and other *nixes have just as mant vulnerabilities, and they simply haven't been looked for, they aren't desinged just to stop an attack, but also to mitigate the damage.
Windows has actually gotten reasonably decent(by average user standards) at preventing a problem from occuring. I'm not saying they are perfect here, but considering what they are facing out there it has gotten pretty good.
But it is piss poor at mitigating damage once its done. With the infamous difficulties of runnign as a limited user in Windows, and no convenient workarounds, I don't even bother recommending most people do so. The workarounds that exist are too much of a pain for most people, they'd either give up and run as admin anyways or hose their system in the attempt. What this means, is once an attack gets through to a Windows user, the entire system is probably hosed.
However, on *nix, this isn't the case. Limited user accounts ACTUALLY LET YOU GET THE JOB DONE WITHOUT JUMPING THROUGH FLAMING HOOPS! More people would actually run as a limited user if they could get everything done that they need done. I very rarely enter root on my Slackware box... So, if someone were to pWn me, I'd lose at most that account, maybe a few apps. The core system would still be fully functional and uncompromised.
Limited user account idiocy in Windows is the biggest security problem in the OS, forcing even people who know better to run as admin just so they can effectively use the thing.
The only places I've seen limited accounts really work in Windows are in corporate installs, where the computer has a fairly restricted set of tasks... general purpose home systems... forget about it.
Craigslist charges for job listings in large cities.
The VAST majority of ads, including housing ads, are all free. Even most job listings are free, if they are outside the large cities.
Realistically, roomates. Preferably several with compatable shift/sleep schedules.
Alternately, you'd be surprised what you can live on. Here in CT minimum wage is 7.55/hr. That works out to 15,704 dollars per year. Absolute crap money pretty much anywhere.
Rents can be found as low as 500/mo if you really look hard, realistically 600-700 is the lower range for a studio or smallish one bedroom(working on moving out ATM, so my info is fairly current for the New Haven area). Get fond of ramen and Goodwill stores, and you can survive on minimum wage. You will have a pretty shitty life, but you wont' be homeless, and you won't die of malnutrition(some malnutrition related illnesses are possible, but not likely to face a lethal problem in the short term).
Granted, NYC is a lot more expensive than the ghettos of CT that I'm referring to here, but 27k is also a lot more money than 15.7k. I'm sure most people can survive on that much in NYC if they are willing to be ruthlessly frugal. Not a life many would want, but it is possible.
This isn't even accounting for various welfare programs which can make living on shit wages much easier, such as Section 8 housing which fixes the max rent you will pay to 1/3rd of your income(run the numbers above, that minimum wage in CT scenario leads to well over half of your income going to housing).
He's not saying its completely good. Just that the positive contributions of military development to the civilian sector should be considered along with the bad effects of military development.
Like it or not, military needs do often accelerate development of new, and generally useful techologies, quite dramatically.
Is it worth the cost? Thats a rather large debate which I won't get into now, except to say that the all of the costs and benefits, including transfer of military tech to the civilian market, must be considered.
Which is far in excess of their design requirements.
They might have had probable cause(without specifics of a given case I can't say, even if I was a lawyer), and that would be enough to get a warrant.
What would justify a warrantless search, wiretap, or whatever would be someting called Exigent Circumstances- basically there has to be an *immediate* threat, that cannot be countered any other way, and the delay in getting a warrant would eliminate any opportunity to deal with it. Even then, such actions are supposed to be subject to judicial review after the fact.
Now was this simply a failure of the filter method used, or did google deliberately create a weak filter to subvert the effort?
Sharing the source code would make it easier to find bugs. I don't think anyone seriously disputes this.
Thats often the entire point. The hardest part of fixing a bug is often *finding* it. Unless you would prefer to leave it alone and hope for the best, you want your bugs, especially critical security flaws, to be found as quickly as possible so they can be fixed.
http://www.misleadinglinktochildporn.com/
Now, if that link was in fact a real link, and you clicked on it thinking it was, say, legal pornography, and only realize the truth after your browser has displayed the pictures- is that pedophilia? In this scenario you have definitely downloaded child porn.
Or you go on a usenet porn group and just download everything. Probably a fair chance that a few of the pics are underage. Again, you've downloaded child porn.
Maybe you donwload a few vids of the next Traci Lords... bingo, child porn.
You may be researching the issue in general, and land yourself in a legal pickle of child porn- this has apparently happened to a few people.
You might be browsing MySpace, and check out some hot girls... hot 16 and 17 year olds. Some of those pictures are very borderline and I could easily see a judge declaring them pornographic, especially in Republimerica. Given the rampant age inflation to avoid being kicked off the site, you may not even know, if the real age is mentioned at all it might be in bright yellow on bright white, or obscured by background images.
While willfully downloading child porn would be pedophilia in almost all cases, there are *many* scenarios where someone downloading it would not be pedophilia.
The F111 also only has two crew members, and they will generally be bailing out at relatively low altitudes, vastly simplifying the problem.
The idea of an escape system was floated, but it would have been too heavy. That said, if the shuttle were built today, advances in mettalurgy and other materials sciences could probably lead to a much lighter orbiter if the plans were followed precisely, only with modern materials. Tweaking it could probably lead to a crew escape mechanism that could have saved the Challenger astronauts if the materials and techniques were available in the late 70s when it was designed.
Which is the way I think they should go to replace it. Take the basic design, which is essentially proven, albeit with some flaws. Take advantage of modern materials and construction techniques, and safety could be dramatically improved at far less cost than designing a completely new system.
Heh. The classic "I understand it so they will" problem.
Tech types need to remember that even *if* their audience is as smart as them, their intelligence may well be targeted at a completely different area, leaving them completely unable to understand what you are saying, or only understand enough to be dangerous.
They would cross reference it with other searches you have made.
"child porn" as a search term would be a bad sign.
But "protecting children" "is my child at risk" and similar searches showing up in a short amount of time before and after the "child porn" search would point towards an innocent intention for your searching.
Of course, this assumes that the people looking at the data are competent *and* care enough to do their jobs properly, and the people who act on the results are similarly competent and caring. Neither of which I'd be too certain of in the current political climate.
My guess is they redid the printing system, and didn't fully check what other windows systems were affected.
Large operations will benefit. When you've got to feed hundereds of people in one shot, and need it all cooked consistently... every little bit helps.
I'd agree that its not all that useful at home, but large restaurants, cafeterias, military mess halls... could really benefit from the added consistency such devices can give.
Couple ways around this.
The obvious answer is to pressurize the water. This will increase the boiling temperature, letting you run the reactor much hotter.
Alternately, if that is impractical, run multiple cells. Each cell may only be able to put off enough heat to produce a few volts, string enough of them together, and you can put out a lot of power. With proper design, increasing capacity would be relatively simple compared to a single large reactor. On the other hand, maintenance of potentially hundereds of minireactors could be a nightmare.
Apply everywhere you think you might want to work. Whether they are advertising something or not. The hundered or so bucks you'll spend printing up and mailing out several dozen resumes will get back to you when you get a job sooner than a more conservative approach would get you.
Put your resume on *every* jobs website that covers career fields you are trying to get into. Whether you actively monitor a given site or not, have a resume up there. Most of my contacts have come from sites I don't actively monitor, the two sure things(one I had to turn down because I was woefully unqualified, the other I took) were from sites I didn't actively montitor.
HOBBY EXPERIENCE COUNTS. Sure, formalized volunteer experience, or workforce experience, is better... but if you need to cover some time unemployed, a summary of hobby type experience can help. It's much better than simply "unemployed" being listed on your resume. My current job as an on site tech... the interviewer was mostly interested in my IRC Operator status I put on my resume... almost completely informal, definitely a hobby rather than a job or serious volunteer position, but it was a HUGE help in landing a job.
Have resumes focused on each major field you are going for. For a "job of a lifetime" application, focus it as tightly to that position as you can. Also, have a generic resume available in case someone asks for it and you don't have one that is especially fitting- but do follow up with a more targeted resume.
Register with every temp agency that covers your job field targets. Every single one. Even though those jobs aren't guaranteed to be long term, they are experience, and there are times that they do convert to permanent positions. My manager has basically told me that as soon as the red tape clears(beauracratic inertia is more powerful than God Himself) I'll be moved from temp to permanent. Just have to hit the ground running and work your ass off. Even if you don't get a permanent position, if you impress them, they will be solid references.
There was another point raised elsewhere in this thread- even with the potential power output of solar, building the infrastructure to support it would take ridiculous amounts of energy. It isn't a short term solution, though I will concede that it should form a large part of our long term energy plans.
Until then, we need to get through the short term. And with oil likely to run into very tight supply problems in the relatively near future(relative to readiness of solar to take over), things like coal and nuclear plants are going to be needed as a stopgap measure.
Sure, the Sun gives us more energy than anything else we have available.
The difficulty is converting this energy into a form we can use. If something gives 100 joules of energy, and we can only convert that to 10 joules of energy we can make use of, we'd be better off going with something that gives 50 joules that we can convert to 25 joules of useful energy.
Numbers pulled out of my ass to illustrate the point, I don't have the time to look up the actual figures for solar vs everything else. It also doesn't cover the logistics of battery storage or having worldwide interconnected networks so power gets everywhere from whatever side of the planet is currently facing the sun.
There was also a lot of miscommunication and poor training. The disaster would have been limited greatly if more qualified people were supervising the test. Chances are it would have still been worse than TMI(at least equally bad, ie loss of the reactor), but would not have been anywhere near the disaster that did occur. The people on site did their jobs as well as they knew how, it was their superiors that fucked them by not training them properly or shipping in people that knew what they were doing.
But when experts (from Platts) checked some blueprints of the EPR they found a major flaw. Some thingie may get stuck (expert-speak: 'sump strainer clogging') and let the whole reactor blew away.
I'd be interested to know if the problem is in the basic idea behind the design, or an implementation detail.
That has a lot to do with how good the plant that eventually gets built will be. It would have sucked if, say, quicksort was never pursued because the first implementer had inserted an off by one error that was tripped up under some obscure condition. If the underlying concepts are flawed, ditch it. But if its just this particular implementation of it that is flawed, fix the implementation and move on with construction.
That is a large reason why my Thinkpad runs Slackware. Keep things fairly minimal and simple, wring the most performance I can out of the old PII 366 with 284MB ram. On a better system I'd run Mandriva, but no way in hell I'd consider that for this machine.
Runs *very* well. Performance is plenty fast enough, even in KDE. Compiling tarballs, while I'm in KDE, isn't bad. Hell, I was pleasently surprised at how quickly the kernel compiles while under KDE... takes a long time, but not nearly as long as I expected.
And I've found that Slackware isn't nearly as hard to deal with as its made out to be... but then again I started when the "easy" linux distros were harder than Slackware is now, so my perspective might be skewed a bit compared to a complete newbie. Having to hunt down a kernel driver and xserver for your video card... both of which were found in different places... and then edit xf86config by hand... is a wee bit of a pain in the ass.
heh. reminds me of a goof I made on NT4 when I ran it on my PC.
/usr/home/account/sources/" to turn into "rm -rf /".
I decided. "Hey, the admin account can really screw things up if I make a mistake(famous last words). Lets deny even admin anything but read and execute to c:\winnt! Yeah, that will protect me!"
Try logging in... nothing. Can't do it. I actually made a windows system *too* secure. Good learning experience, but a pain in the ass, and if it was a system that people acutally depended on... that would have been Bad.
This is why root type accounts should only be used when actually necesary, no matter how much you think you know. Only takes a momentary brain fart to do something like this, or a slip of a finger for "rm -rf
I don't use root on my linux system either. Those times I actually need such access, I can easily and quickly su, get done what needs to get done, and exit back to my login shell. I only actually log in as root when I'm doing major work such as compiling the kernel that requires me to be in root for an extended time. And once thats done... I log out and log back into limited. Even the admins of a box, whether its a shared system such as a server or group workstation, or their PC, should only hop into root when necesary, they shouldn't do it just because they can. *nix has facilities to let them do it.
Things like sudo that give limited accounts a "partial root" level of power should only be used when that persons job actually requires such access. And even then, unless the access is required each and every time they log in, they should have a normal account for general use.
I do use admin on windows because it's a pain in the ass to do otherwise. I do need to read up on that though, either set up something between a typical user and admin, or find a third party su equivalent for win32.
Take care of your people.
They will then take care of you.
The leaders I've been most loyal to are the ones that first make sure I have everything I need to do my job, and then get out of my way so I can do it. My morale is best under such conditions - I will move mountains for such a leader if I have to.
That said, reasonable office hijinks that don't directly relate to the job can be a lot of fun and take the drudgery out of things. Wouldn't do much at my job, most of us are out in the field most of the day, hell, I'm not acutally in the office more than once a week, occasionally twice. Which goes back to my main point. I'm getting the job done, so they don't force me to check in all the time and be seen. They know that if they put the calls in my box, they will be completed, it's as simple as that. So they stay out of my way and let me get it done.
I remember that one.
Basically, it's not something to rely on(don't go down expecting to box sharks away), but if they are coming after you already, its one of the better ways to save your ass.