You are weird. Stop working on forensics and work with attorneys for a week. This is a trivially small e-discovery project. Depending on the parameters, and the amount of money you want to spend, I could do this in two days.
Nowhere have I read anyone interviewing, talking to, etc, people who do exactly this kind of thing all day - attorneys. This process is literally what electronic discovery IS.
As an attorney who works on these types of issues, 650k emails is a trivially small corpus. Even if they were all responsive, and no duplicates, I would expect a decently-sized team to take about ten days to go through that number of emails. Of course, realistically, in most cases you are going to filter that down by 90% or more before a human being looks over a single email... depending on the process and work hours, a single person can easily look at 1k emails a day, and that's when you're doing legal analysis on them... if all you're doing is figuring out "Bullshit/not bullshit" and kicking it upstairs for further analysis 2k emails is not unreasonable for a 12 hour shift. Although it wouldn't be fun to be doing...
But still, at 100 emails/hour that's 6500 man hours of work if you want a human being to comb through every single email, or a hundred people working one 65-hour workweek, which even gives Comey the luxury of a full day to set up the process.
So when you read some idiot saying that it's not possible to have looked through that many emails... yes, yes it certainly is. A big document review team will comb through a million documents a week or more, and that includes doing legal analysis on them as well.
Most people in the US are against the government being able to confiscate people's guns like this. You aren't, clearly, but this seems like a good middle ground between your "guns are something the feds allow you to have" and what the constitution says.
You are totally right. Because most of the guns used in America are used to prevent people from being "stabbed by a crazy" or shot by a terrorist.
Oh wait. Yeah, I can live with the 1/10,000 chance because THOSE THINGS NEVER ACTUALLY HAPPEN EXCEPT IN YOUR IMAGINATION. Or do you think the "liberal media" is covering up the hundreds of thousands of people who use guns to prevent themselves from being stabbed in our (incredibly safe) country every day?
(Bears aside - and you're usually not in a quick-draw situation against a bear. Well, maybe YOU are, Rambo, but most of us aren't.)
Because that incredibly small number of theoretical deaths is miniscule compared to the large number of REAL deaths caused by accidental/unauthorized use of guns.
Linking to an article that uses a sentence like this:
"This is just stupidity but it is common of the combination of ideology driven faux-science (see manmade global warming) and gaslighting that the left relies upon to influence public policy."
is probably not going to convince me that POSTOL is the ideological nutcase here.
What the hell was that inserted for? It was an idiotic point made on a site which clearly has a political axe to grind. It wasn't made well. Anyone claiming to engage in a scientific debate with the phrase "by my own observation" deserves to be laughed out of the room.
This is supposed to be Slashdot, not Fox. Why the hell was this included?
I'm not sure where you see me saying "And this is all okay." Or suggesting that they didn't happen. It's obviously NOT okay, and I don't think I was unclear on that. It's a gross violation of equal protection, and it was stupid to boot. But there's a difference between stupidity and a scandal.
You... you know the actual story, right? Not just the fox news version?
This isn't an issue of "politicization". The IRS was finally DOING ITS JOB and reviewing the applications of groups applying for tax-exempt status. They thought it would save time to, rather than investigate, just assume that groups with certain key words in their name - among them "tea party" and "occupy" - were engaged in political activity which should deny them that status. Amazing how Fox never reports on any groups OTHER than their chosen ones having had problems due to this, isn't it? Well, it's much easier to change the facts to match your preconceived notions than to change your notions to match the facts. And yelling about impeaching Obama is just so durned much fun!
In any case, the whole issue is about two things - 1. It's bad to profile people, anyone, anywhere, and 2. There is a strong group in Washington that doesn't want the IRS to be doing ANY kind of job, let alone stopping people from improperly receiving tax breaks for influencing elections. The ability to pretend it's some type of political cover-up is just gravy.
I was about to post this exact same comment when I read yours. I agree 100%, mbone.
I'll tell you why lavabit was shut down.
on
Why Lavabit Shut Down
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· Score: 1, Flamebait
Lavabit shut down because it was founded by a moron who was more interested in living up to his glorious libertarian ideals than actually living in the real world. I understand that in your Galtean paradise the fact that you had some neat tech was enough, but outside of Ayn Rand's masturbatory fantasies, you need to be aware of the rules of the world you live in. Rules like, "Do not give the finger to a judge." Rules like "If you want something to be secure, you need to have a legal team ready to go BEFORE, not AFTER, you are called into court."
Face it - your glorious security was defeated by social engineering, YOU were the weakest link. Goodbye!
If so, you're living 30 years in the past. All RMS has done in that time is valiantly fight the good fight against other people on his side who don't agree with 100% of what he says. (Citation: Slashdot's entire history)
I appreciate what he did, 30 years ago. But for my entire lifetime as a tech geek, that is literally all he has ever done. And in that time, other people have done much, much more - and done it without feeling the need to attack people who generally support their cause.
Right. That's what Mozilla's well thought out, well argued statement was. Them "Sacrificing their morals."
And after all, it's always more important to attack the people on your side who are not living up to YOUR blessed level of total moral purity than... you know... actually accomplishing anything.
Oh wait, did I say "more important"? I meant "easier".
So it has nothing to do with me not wanting to trust one lick of financial data to a device which is repeatedly proven to have massive and fundamental security holes? And nothing to do with the fact that 90% of the population would just as soon leave money in a nicely-ordered pile outside their door rather than give up their wallet in favor of something - anything - mobile.
The wallet isn't "ripe for disruption." That term refers to something which doesn't work, and can be done better with new technology. A digital wallet gives me zero net advantages.
No, but keep telling yourself your business failed because of "entrenched interests". I'm sure that feels better.
I really, really, really hope you're just joking/trolling. Because if not, I think "electricity is just wires" is my next "the internet is a series of tubes".:-)
This has never been my experience. This sounds like the kind of thing a lot of people SAY happens - but I've worked at enough places, in and out of the server room, that I question whether it actually DOES happen. Does IT need to justify its budget? OF COURSE. Everyone does. Every single department, every year. But in most places I've been, IT budgets go in one direction only - up. (And in the federal space, where I've been working recently, they go up hugely, for a terrible product.) And I've never been in a functional company where the people making the budget decisions don't recognize that infrastructure has value.
The best IT shops - the few and far between where things truly "run without issue" (and I've never been in such a place, though I was in one or two which were pretty close) are like that because management DOES recognize the need for the proper investment and support for these mission-critical systems. Frankly, I'd LOVE to see a counterexample. While we love the idea of the bastard systems engineer who keeps his systems running like clockwork despite being hated and despised... that's not the reality. If things are working well, it's because there's support at every level.
Again, your mileage may vary - and if you have been in a shop where this was in fact the case, I'd love to hear the actual story.
Uh, I live in the USA, and I've worked in IT or other fields in three different major metro areas, and a dozen or so smaller areas. I've never - NEVER - seen this happen. I'm not saying it never happens, just that I've never seen it. Major, crippling IT outages happen all the time.
I even live in an area right now with a power provider to my home (Pepco) who is absolutely awful. Never seen an electrical outage take out an office I worked at.
Your second point is a good one, though one that's easily generalizable. EVERYONE should get more appreciation than they do. Janitors work a lot harder than I do, their work is worse and they get paid a fraction of what I get paid. But boy do I bitch if I come into an office that looks filthy. (Although, to be fair, I do go out of my way to say thank you.) So, yes, it's true, IT should be more appreciated. So should everyone else.
And - if we're being honest - then we should ask ourselves if, in general, we deliver a product that's so good that we deserve commendation for it. In my experience, this is rarely the case. In the industry - IE, when talking to other IT people - we know the difference between a good shop and a bad shop. But for someone on the outside, 99% of IT shops provide a bad user experience. We're ALL bad shops. So yes, it might be better to pat the plumber on the head - but honestly, if I'm the CEO, I really just don't have time to salve the feelings of a whiny plumber.
It sounds like you're upset because upper management is treating you like infrastructure, rather than the heroes you are?
You made the point yourself - nobody cheers when the lights come on, they get pissed when they go out. IT SHOULD be boring and dull. To an average person in your company, they shouldn't - EVER - care about how or why their systems work.
Do you think providing electricity isn't a difficult enterprise, requiring a huge number of highly-trained people doing a bunch of things right, 24/7? And I bet, a hundred years ago, people looked at people working in "electricity" the same way people looked at "IT" twenty years ago.
It's not 100 years ago. It's not 20 years ago. And we're not heroes or geniuses. We're plumbers. (Except that we're too dumb to unionize.) If anything, we are incredibly lucky that our uses are satisfied with the - in most cases - poor level of service they receive. Think about it - in all the time you've worked in IT, how many times have you seen the electricity in a building just go out, without explanation? Now, how many times have you seen major server outages, costing more than a million dollars in lost productivity? For me, I have never seen an electrical outage not related to a major disaster that kept everyone out of the building anyway. I have seen at least 5 outages that led to $1m or more in losses - and three of them were for stupid, easily preventible things. (Really? You upgraded both the primary and backup SAN at once, and killed the entire network for six hours when the patch turned out to not run properly?)
Take another look at your question. It's premised on the proposition that IT SHOULDN'T be boring and dull - which I disagree with entirely - and that IT should get more appreciation than it does, which is questionable at best. What's driving you to ask those questions, in that way?
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAhahahaha.... oh wait, you're serious. Jesus christ.
So let's take a look at the things that you're saying that aren't true, first. Switzerland - Every adult MALE is issued an assault rifle, WHEN THEY GO INTO THE MILITIA, at the age of 18 - when they are trained to use them. If they want to keep them, however, they remove the autofire, so it's no longer a "true assault rifle", whatever you meant by that. If they want to actually CARRY the guns, they have to go through an extensive permitting process, where basically everyone who doesn't have a need to carry (people in the security field) get rejected. Oh, also, you know that "murder rate" might be correlated with "gun death rate", they're not the same. Right? You know that? I'm assuming you just used the murder rate because it makes your point much better than the actual GUN DEATH RATE - you know, the number that shows how many people are KILLED WITH GUNS. There, Mexico has about triple the rate of Switzerland. I know it's not as impressive as 30x the rate, but it is - you know - relevant.
Now, let's look at your interesting and - I'm sure - random and totally neutral choice of Mexico as a counterexample. I mean, you chose a failed state in the middle of a civil war with narcoterrorists - something that (one might think) would drive the gun death rate up. And, in fact, it does - Mexico's gun death rate is about 20x what it was in 2001. So it seems what you've proved - and I'm not saying that this isn't a relevant and important point - is that laws are not magic and we don't live in Hogwarts. Mexico passing restrictive gun laws does not magically make guns vanish. I look forward to reading your thesis on this brilliant insight.
I'm going to pick out some TOTALLY RANDOM AND NEUTRAL countries of my own. Israel and Japan. Both countries with INCREDIBLY restrictive gun laws, so based on what we've learned from you, they'll obviously have ridiculously high gun death rates. Hmm... looking at Wikipedia, Israel is about half of the Swiss Gun Utopia, and Japan has about 2% of the gun deaths of Switzerland. Jesus, who would have thought MY unbiased, random and neutral countries would make the exact opposite point of YOUR unbiased, random and neutral countries? Except, you know, relevant. And without the circumstances that make Mexico a terrible example. And handsomer.
So I get that Slashdot has always had a weird subculture of gun nuts - but you can be pro-gun without being a moron. Let go of the ridiculous dogma and look at the ACTUAL FACTS that support your point. I think there's a special place in hell for people who make an argument so badly [you], it actually turns someone who supports the cause that they're espousing against them [that's me.]
Wow, yeah, the Russians have NEVER killed anyone extrajudicially outside of their borders. Those guys are the paragons of international virtue. (oh wait, what is this... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Litvinenko)
Slashdot Mirror
You are weird. Stop working on forensics and work with attorneys for a week. This is a trivially small e-discovery project. Depending on the parameters, and the amount of money you want to spend, I could do this in two days.
Nowhere have I read anyone interviewing, talking to, etc, people who do exactly this kind of thing all day - attorneys. This process is literally what electronic discovery IS.
As an attorney who works on these types of issues, 650k emails is a trivially small corpus. Even if they were all responsive, and no duplicates, I would expect a decently-sized team to take about ten days to go through that number of emails. Of course, realistically, in most cases you are going to filter that down by 90% or more before a human being looks over a single email... depending on the process and work hours, a single person can easily look at 1k emails a day, and that's when you're doing legal analysis on them... if all you're doing is figuring out "Bullshit/not bullshit" and kicking it upstairs for further analysis 2k emails is not unreasonable for a 12 hour shift. Although it wouldn't be fun to be doing...
But still, at 100 emails/hour that's 6500 man hours of work if you want a human being to comb through every single email, or a hundred people working one 65-hour workweek, which even gives Comey the luxury of a full day to set up the process.
So when you read some idiot saying that it's not possible to have looked through that many emails... yes, yes it certainly is. A big document review team will comb through a million documents a week or more, and that includes doing legal analysis on them as well.
And I already know that Assange is full of crap. So why would I read this?
Most people in the US are against the government being able to confiscate people's guns like this. You aren't, clearly, but this seems like a good middle ground between your "guns are something the feds allow you to have" and what the constitution says.
You are totally right. Because most of the guns used in America are used to prevent people from being "stabbed by a crazy" or shot by a terrorist.
Oh wait. Yeah, I can live with the 1/10,000 chance because THOSE THINGS NEVER ACTUALLY HAPPEN EXCEPT IN YOUR IMAGINATION. Or do you think the "liberal media" is covering up the hundreds of thousands of people who use guns to prevent themselves from being stabbed in our (incredibly safe) country every day?
(Bears aside - and you're usually not in a quick-draw situation against a bear. Well, maybe YOU are, Rambo, but most of us aren't.)
Because that incredibly small number of theoretical deaths is miniscule compared to the large number of REAL deaths caused by accidental/unauthorized use of guns.
Linking to an article that uses a sentence like this:
"This is just stupidity but it is common of the combination of ideology driven faux-science (see manmade global warming) and gaslighting that the left relies upon to influence public policy."
is probably not going to convince me that POSTOL is the ideological nutcase here.
What the hell was that inserted for? It was an idiotic point made on a site which clearly has a political axe to grind. It wasn't made well. Anyone claiming to engage in a scientific debate with the phrase "by my own observation" deserves to be laughed out of the room.
This is supposed to be Slashdot, not Fox. Why the hell was this included?
I'm not sure where you see me saying "And this is all okay." Or suggesting that they didn't happen. It's obviously NOT okay, and I don't think I was unclear on that. It's a gross violation of equal protection, and it was stupid to boot. But there's a difference between stupidity and a scandal.
You... you know the actual story, right? Not just the fox news version?
This isn't an issue of "politicization". The IRS was finally DOING ITS JOB and reviewing the applications of groups applying for tax-exempt status. They thought it would save time to, rather than investigate, just assume that groups with certain key words in their name - among them "tea party" and "occupy" - were engaged in political activity which should deny them that status. Amazing how Fox never reports on any groups OTHER than their chosen ones having had problems due to this, isn't it? Well, it's much easier to change the facts to match your preconceived notions than to change your notions to match the facts. And yelling about impeaching Obama is just so durned much fun!
In any case, the whole issue is about two things - 1. It's bad to profile people, anyone, anywhere, and 2. There is a strong group in Washington that doesn't want the IRS to be doing ANY kind of job, let alone stopping people from improperly receiving tax breaks for influencing elections. The ability to pretend it's some type of political cover-up is just gravy.
I was about to post this exact same comment when I read yours. I agree 100%, mbone.
Lavabit shut down because it was founded by a moron who was more interested in living up to his glorious libertarian ideals than actually living in the real world. I understand that in your Galtean paradise the fact that you had some neat tech was enough, but outside of Ayn Rand's masturbatory fantasies, you need to be aware of the rules of the world you live in. Rules like, "Do not give the finger to a judge." Rules like "If you want something to be secure, you need to have a legal team ready to go BEFORE, not AFTER, you are called into court."
Face it - your glorious security was defeated by social engineering, YOU were the weakest link. Goodbye!
If so, you're living 30 years in the past. All RMS has done in that time is valiantly fight the good fight against other people on his side who don't agree with 100% of what he says. (Citation: Slashdot's entire history)
I appreciate what he did, 30 years ago. But for my entire lifetime as a tech geek, that is literally all he has ever done. And in that time, other people have done much, much more - and done it without feeling the need to attack people who generally support their cause.
Right. That's what Mozilla's well thought out, well argued statement was. Them "Sacrificing their morals."
And after all, it's always more important to attack the people on your side who are not living up to YOUR blessed level of total moral purity than... you know... actually accomplishing anything.
Oh wait, did I say "more important"? I meant "easier".
Yawn. RMS? Attacking a much more successful group for not living up to his perceived orthodoxy? Gasp.
Thank god this is no longer a common type of article on /., at least.
That the title of this story could have been written a bit more neutrally? Or more in line with the story? Or even the summary right below it?
Let me guess - he invests heavily in more traditional auto manufacturers.
So it has nothing to do with me not wanting to trust one lick of financial data to a device which is repeatedly proven to have massive and fundamental security holes? And nothing to do with the fact that 90% of the population would just as soon leave money in a nicely-ordered pile outside their door rather than give up their wallet in favor of something - anything - mobile.
The wallet isn't "ripe for disruption." That term refers to something which doesn't work, and can be done better with new technology. A digital wallet gives me zero net advantages.
No, but keep telling yourself your business failed because of "entrenched interests". I'm sure that feels better.
I really, really, really hope you're just joking/trolling. Because if not, I think "electricity is just wires" is my next "the internet is a series of tubes". :-)
But the OP didn't suggest that the money tap was being shut off - just that they weren't getting their RDA of head-pats.
This has never been my experience. This sounds like the kind of thing a lot of people SAY happens - but I've worked at enough places, in and out of the server room, that I question whether it actually DOES happen. Does IT need to justify its budget? OF COURSE. Everyone does. Every single department, every year. But in most places I've been, IT budgets go in one direction only - up. (And in the federal space, where I've been working recently, they go up hugely, for a terrible product.) And I've never been in a functional company where the people making the budget decisions don't recognize that infrastructure has value.
The best IT shops - the few and far between where things truly "run without issue" (and I've never been in such a place, though I was in one or two which were pretty close) are like that because management DOES recognize the need for the proper investment and support for these mission-critical systems. Frankly, I'd LOVE to see a counterexample. While we love the idea of the bastard systems engineer who keeps his systems running like clockwork despite being hated and despised... that's not the reality. If things are working well, it's because there's support at every level.
Again, your mileage may vary - and if you have been in a shop where this was in fact the case, I'd love to hear the actual story.
Uh, I live in the USA, and I've worked in IT or other fields in three different major metro areas, and a dozen or so smaller areas. I've never - NEVER - seen this happen. I'm not saying it never happens, just that I've never seen it. Major, crippling IT outages happen all the time.
I even live in an area right now with a power provider to my home (Pepco) who is absolutely awful. Never seen an electrical outage take out an office I worked at.
Your second point is a good one, though one that's easily generalizable. EVERYONE should get more appreciation than they do. Janitors work a lot harder than I do, their work is worse and they get paid a fraction of what I get paid. But boy do I bitch if I come into an office that looks filthy. (Although, to be fair, I do go out of my way to say thank you.) So, yes, it's true, IT should be more appreciated. So should everyone else.
And - if we're being honest - then we should ask ourselves if, in general, we deliver a product that's so good that we deserve commendation for it. In my experience, this is rarely the case. In the industry - IE, when talking to other IT people - we know the difference between a good shop and a bad shop. But for someone on the outside, 99% of IT shops provide a bad user experience. We're ALL bad shops. So yes, it might be better to pat the plumber on the head - but honestly, if I'm the CEO, I really just don't have time to salve the feelings of a whiny plumber.
It sounds like you're upset because upper management is treating you like infrastructure, rather than the heroes you are?
You made the point yourself - nobody cheers when the lights come on, they get pissed when they go out. IT SHOULD be boring and dull. To an average person in your company, they shouldn't - EVER - care about how or why their systems work.
Do you think providing electricity isn't a difficult enterprise, requiring a huge number of highly-trained people doing a bunch of things right, 24/7? And I bet, a hundred years ago, people looked at people working in "electricity" the same way people looked at "IT" twenty years ago.
It's not 100 years ago. It's not 20 years ago. And we're not heroes or geniuses. We're plumbers. (Except that we're too dumb to unionize.) If anything, we are incredibly lucky that our uses are satisfied with the - in most cases - poor level of service they receive. Think about it - in all the time you've worked in IT, how many times have you seen the electricity in a building just go out, without explanation? Now, how many times have you seen major server outages, costing more than a million dollars in lost productivity? For me, I have never seen an electrical outage not related to a major disaster that kept everyone out of the building anyway. I have seen at least 5 outages that led to $1m or more in losses - and three of them were for stupid, easily preventible things. (Really? You upgraded both the primary and backup SAN at once, and killed the entire network for six hours when the patch turned out to not run properly?)
Take another look at your question. It's premised on the proposition that IT SHOULDN'T be boring and dull - which I disagree with entirely - and that IT should get more appreciation than it does, which is questionable at best. What's driving you to ask those questions, in that way?
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAhahahaha.... oh wait, you're serious. Jesus christ.
So let's take a look at the things that you're saying that aren't true, first. Switzerland - Every adult MALE is issued an assault rifle, WHEN THEY GO INTO THE MILITIA, at the age of 18 - when they are trained to use them. If they want to keep them, however, they remove the autofire, so it's no longer a "true assault rifle", whatever you meant by that. If they want to actually CARRY the guns, they have to go through an extensive permitting process, where basically everyone who doesn't have a need to carry (people in the security field) get rejected. Oh, also, you know that "murder rate" might be correlated with "gun death rate", they're not the same. Right? You know that? I'm assuming you just used the murder rate because it makes your point much better than the actual GUN DEATH RATE - you know, the number that shows how many people are KILLED WITH GUNS. There, Mexico has about triple the rate of Switzerland. I know it's not as impressive as 30x the rate, but it is - you know - relevant.
Now, let's look at your interesting and - I'm sure - random and totally neutral choice of Mexico as a counterexample. I mean, you chose a failed state in the middle of a civil war with narcoterrorists - something that (one might think) would drive the gun death rate up. And, in fact, it does - Mexico's gun death rate is about 20x what it was in 2001. So it seems what you've proved - and I'm not saying that this isn't a relevant and important point - is that laws are not magic and we don't live in Hogwarts. Mexico passing restrictive gun laws does not magically make guns vanish. I look forward to reading your thesis on this brilliant insight.
I'm going to pick out some TOTALLY RANDOM AND NEUTRAL countries of my own. Israel and Japan. Both countries with INCREDIBLY restrictive gun laws, so based on what we've learned from you, they'll obviously have ridiculously high gun death rates. Hmm... looking at Wikipedia, Israel is about half of the Swiss Gun Utopia, and Japan has about 2% of the gun deaths of Switzerland. Jesus, who would have thought MY unbiased, random and neutral countries would make the exact opposite point of YOUR unbiased, random and neutral countries? Except, you know, relevant. And without the circumstances that make Mexico a terrible example. And handsomer.
So I get that Slashdot has always had a weird subculture of gun nuts - but you can be pro-gun without being a moron. Let go of the ridiculous dogma and look at the ACTUAL FACTS that support your point. I think there's a special place in hell for people who make an argument so badly [you], it actually turns someone who supports the cause that they're espousing against them [that's me.]
Wow, yeah, the Russians have NEVER killed anyone extrajudicially outside of their borders. Those guys are the paragons of international virtue. (oh wait, what is this... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Litvinenko)