Not necessarily. They could have succeeded in taking over the controls in time. After that all it takes is to engage the autopilot, and then the airplane will be back on the preset course and altitude.
Since the airplane had plenty of fuel, the passengers would have enough time to contact the ground and decide what to do next. A relatively safe crash-landing would be always an option, onto a foam-covered runway and into the safety net; with most of the fuel used up or dumped they would be all OK.
But even that would not be necessary, they had a pilot among the passengers:
Donald Greene, 52, was a licensed pilot and the vice president and chief executive officer of the Safe Flight Instrument Corp. of White Plains, N.Y. (link).
Quite possibly this guy would have landed the aircraft with no damage at all, maybe with a couple of dry runs and with an advice of a professional Boeing pilot in order to learn how to handle such a large airplane.
So it is very likely that the passengers attacked not because they wanted to die in a different way, but because they wanted to live. This does not make them any less heroes - people in trouble sometimes just fall in pieces; heroes don't. It's just not a requirement for heroes to die in process.
Not every astronaut is a "hero" -- but it does take a lot of guts to do something that you know might kill you and willingly do it anyway
You can say the same about anyone who drives a car. Not a day goes by without a fatal accident. Today, for example, a truck driver didn't notice that the cars in front started slowing down... In other places it may take some real bravery just to be in the street at night.
All in all, we may even declare a typical construction site to be more dangerous than a Shuttle flight.
The people work for free not because they are dumb, but because that was the condition of their employment, and they were not in position to say "no". Most people are like that; your own example is not usual, and you are obviously not a lowly MSCE sysadmin who works weekends to clean some 1,000 Win98 boxes again and again. Sysadmins don't get to travel with their Powerbooks to Thailand; instead they get to travel under people's desks, on their knees, with CAT5 clenched in their teeth.
It is great that you have the skills and the knowledge to dictate your own employment terms. But you should not think that everyone else is equally capable, and that's the people who "clean up the messes" in both physical and virtual worlds.
That's not much different in spirit from what many of us did at his age, playing with tech, poking at it, learning how things work.
It is one thing to buy a sword and try it out in an empty room. It is a different thing to wield the same sword in a crowded store. Anything that you "play" with can get you jailed or killed. That's why it is a bad idea to play with fire or to run with scissors... or to knowingly distribute viruses of any kind.
Its not like the HelpDesk and SysAdmin personel were cleaning up this shit on their own free time. Nooooo - they got paid.
As matter of fact, salaried employees in USA are expected to work overtime when the need arises. Only hourly paid employees are entitled to paid overtime; the rest works for free, in their own time, away from families and friends. Pretty much everyone who is paid a sum above $25K/yr. regardless of how much he produces is such a salaried worker. Anyone who doesn't like the way things are is free to complain to the Congress.
In other words, noone got hired to clean the mess if at least someone in-house was capable. Existing people were forced to work overtime instead, with no extra pay. They didn't like any of it.
They should. However they are free to put out any ridiculous claims, and fools are free to part with their money in any [foolish] way they see fit. If you pay for a lie, you still paid. You can sue the seller afterward; otherwise the seller keeps your money.
Many laptops live in owner's offices, and chances are the owner has a small office all for himself. Nobody can see what is happening there during lunch, for example.
On the other side of the problem, if the laptop is on a bench in a large lab with people, your coworkers are likely to notice a stranger before they even look at what he is doing.
So the main weakness is where you have to leave your laptop in a room all by itself, or where many strangers are present (such as an airport, hotel.) In most cases these people will not pay any attention to a thief working on a cable, as long as he is smart enough to cover his hands (and the tool) with a newspaper... Dremel tool, OTOH, will be quite obvious.
USB Flash disks are cheap nowadays, and you always can get one that is large enough for your work (unless you are editing music or videos on your laptop in a hotel room:-)
Not exactly. For example, imagine that a company sells a program; one copy of this program can send a BMP picture to another copy of the same program over the network. And the pictures, while in transit, are compressed into patented GIFs (let's assume that GIF is still patented), and encrypted too.
To find out that the GIF patent is used in the program without paying royalties one has to either see the source code, or to crack the encryption. In either case it is not trivial, and can not happen accidentally, just because someone was searching on Google, for example. The company can use the patent for free and get away with it.
The OSS has all the code available, and the use of GIF would become obvious and instantly searchable. As big companies amass more and more patents on everything under the sun, OSS will be more and more vulnerable; for sure, all the new things will be locked out of OSS since they will be heavily patented. I am sure MS learned their lesson with SMB, and whatever they are putting into new designs will be both patented and encrypted.
At that point, his actions should have been regulated to gathering evidence for that day when things came crashing down (and they would have eventially) to cover his ass
If the boss is accused of not doing his job, I can't imagine that any of people he managed would be accused of anything. So this IT guy had no reasonable cause to be concerned for himself. And in no way he is supposed to manage his boss's workload.
Even if he can do his job in 1 hour a week, it is unethical to not find other work that needs to be done for the other 49.
That must not be done because it punishes better workers by forcing them to do more while their lazy peers drift through the day.
If anything, a better worker should be promoted and given more difficult work for better salary. But promotions require vacancies, and these are not easily available.
As it is described here, the boss was required to do a fixed amount of work. To give him more work would require more effort from other people - who were not ready to do more for the same money, or just were not fast enough. It would have a ripple effect. And why to do more? Is a doctor supposed to feed you more drugs if you survived the prescribed dosage? There are only so many roads financed for upgrades, and there are only so many drawings to review and mark up.
It seems rather odd that his superiors wouldn't notice if he never did any of these tasks
Excellent point! The only explanation is that he was never asked to work on such documents. Otherwise there would be screenshots of his Outlook with these emails. This also explains why his email responses were just short "I concur" - the boss was obviously not the decision-maker in the discussion and only wanted to sign off on something that was already decided by other.
So his job was simply to manage the department, and that can be done without any computer. I do some management myself, and I tell you, there are days when I can't even come close to my own computer, so busy I am talking to other people. In fact, the only thing a manager is required to do is to enable his people to work most efficiently.
With regard to some comments that suggest that if the boss was given a computer, he should use it. That's ridiculous. A computer is a part of anyone's workplace, as a chair is. And in fact he did receive and send some email now and then.
That would not be very useful. Any big company would immediately spin off a daughter company with zero revenue, and that company would own all the patents. The daughter company can be fully controlled by the parent company (by nature of owning all its stock, for example.)
Say you loved a certain painting (also a creative piece of art) and you just took it without paying. Did you commit a crime? Of course.
The highlighted words are "took it", such as denied other people the access to the painting, robbed them of the pleasure that only you can now have. That is indeed a crime.
However what happens if you only look at the painting without paying a fee?
And what happens if you look at a copy of the painting, or at its photograph? Are you still required to pay?
The problem here is the same old one: the effort of an artist (as anyone's effort) should be rewarded. But currently there is no sane upper limit on collecting. The answer to all the questions above is then "yes", and you should pay for every use, every view, and maybe even for a review of the painting that you wrote and got paid for, since it can be argued that your work is based on the painting.
It is not a problem at all if most of your clients use the same, relatively small (and thus cacheable) set of files. For example, a herd of accounting workstations may need access to some s/w package. A diskless client should not need to run 300 different applications all the time; these are generally a single purpose boxes. The more RAM you throw in, the more universal they become. Besides, the disk I/O is not that frequent these days, once you have your app loaded.
I don't think any specific programmer will be blamed for that, and I don't think the phrase "coding error" really reflects what happened. It's more likely just a popular explanation like "the computer crashed".
Noone [in their right mind] orders a brand new paper publishing system from a single consultant. The software probably was priced in several million dollars. Somewhere between the components something broke. For example, the file format that the publisher produced was rev. 2.1, but the software at the presses side was only aware of rev. 1.7 and below... If the coder only tested his code with the "other" piece of latest revision, he would never see any problem; and it is not his guilt that in real life the real customer uses some obsolete stuff that isn't compatible...
This kind of problem is clearly of administrative nature, of a system design and of checking which pieces work with which other pieces. Clearly, blame should be assigned to non-existent QA procedures, insufficient unit testing and [obviously] inadequate integration of components. The coder is nowhere here, it's all system design and QA stuff, realm of managers.
There is a very long waiting list, and common stock holders will be the last to see any money. Besides, there isn't a coin small enough to be paid to you for those 25 shares.
Slashdot Mirror
Then your Windows password is the least of your worries.
Not necessarily. They could have succeeded in taking over the controls in time. After that all it takes is to engage the autopilot, and then the airplane will be back on the preset course and altitude.
Since the airplane had plenty of fuel, the passengers would have enough time to contact the ground and decide what to do next. A relatively safe crash-landing would be always an option, onto a foam-covered runway and into the safety net; with most of the fuel used up or dumped they would be all OK.
But even that would not be necessary, they had a pilot among the passengers:
Donald Greene, 52, was a licensed pilot and the vice president and chief executive officer of the Safe Flight Instrument Corp. of White Plains, N.Y. (link).
Quite possibly this guy would have landed the aircraft with no damage at all, maybe with a couple of dry runs and with an advice of a professional Boeing pilot in order to learn how to handle such a large airplane.
So it is very likely that the passengers attacked not because they wanted to die in a different way, but because they wanted to live. This does not make them any less heroes - people in trouble sometimes just fall in pieces; heroes don't. It's just not a requirement for heroes to die in process.
You can say the same about anyone who drives a car. Not a day goes by without a fatal accident. Today, for example, a truck driver didn't notice that the cars in front started slowing down... In other places it may take some real bravery just to be in the street at night.
All in all, we may even declare a typical construction site to be more dangerous than a Shuttle flight.
It is great that you have the skills and the knowledge to dictate your own employment terms. But you should not think that everyone else is equally capable, and that's the people who "clean up the messes" in both physical and virtual worlds.
The guy wouldn't be in jail for mere compilation of the virus, or for any changes as such.
Also you will not be guilty of the shooting - you didn't make a hole in his chest, the bullet did. The grandparent mentioned this "point".
It is one thing to buy a sword and try it out in an empty room. It is a different thing to wield the same sword in a crowded store. Anything that you "play" with can get you jailed or killed. That's why it is a bad idea to play with fire or to run with scissors... or to knowingly distribute viruses of any kind.
As matter of fact, salaried employees in USA are expected to work overtime when the need arises. Only hourly paid employees are entitled to paid overtime; the rest works for free, in their own time, away from families and friends. Pretty much everyone who is paid a sum above $25K/yr. regardless of how much he produces is such a salaried worker. Anyone who doesn't like the way things are is free to complain to the Congress.
In other words, noone got hired to clean the mess if at least someone in-house was capable. Existing people were forced to work overtime instead, with no extra pay. They didn't like any of it.
They should. However they are free to put out any ridiculous claims, and fools are free to part with their money in any [foolish] way they see fit. If you pay for a lie, you still paid. You can sue the seller afterward; otherwise the seller keeps your money.
On the other side of the problem, if the laptop is on a bench in a large lab with people, your coworkers are likely to notice a stranger before they even look at what he is doing.
So the main weakness is where you have to leave your laptop in a room all by itself, or where many strangers are present (such as an airport, hotel.) In most cases these people will not pay any attention to a thief working on a cable, as long as he is smart enough to cover his hands (and the tool) with a newspaper... Dremel tool, OTOH, will be quite obvious.
USB Flash disks are cheap nowadays, and you always can get one that is large enough for your work (unless you are editing music or videos on your laptop in a hotel room :-)
They are both.
They buy the software from SuSE exactly as they buy XP from MS.
To find out that the GIF patent is used in the program without paying royalties one has to either see the source code, or to crack the encryption. In either case it is not trivial, and can not happen accidentally, just because someone was searching on Google, for example. The company can use the patent for free and get away with it.
The OSS has all the code available, and the use of GIF would become obvious and instantly searchable. As big companies amass more and more patents on everything under the sun, OSS will be more and more vulnerable; for sure, all the new things will be locked out of OSS since they will be heavily patented. I am sure MS learned their lesson with SMB, and whatever they are putting into new designs will be both patented and encrypted.
If the boss is accused of not doing his job, I can't imagine that any of people he managed would be accused of anything. So this IT guy had no reasonable cause to be concerned for himself. And in no way he is supposed to manage his boss's workload.
That must not be done because it punishes better workers by forcing them to do more while their lazy peers drift through the day.
If anything, a better worker should be promoted and given more difficult work for better salary. But promotions require vacancies, and these are not easily available.
As it is described here, the boss was required to do a fixed amount of work. To give him more work would require more effort from other people - who were not ready to do more for the same money, or just were not fast enough. It would have a ripple effect. And why to do more? Is a doctor supposed to feed you more drugs if you survived the prescribed dosage? There are only so many roads financed for upgrades, and there are only so many drawings to review and mark up.
Excellent point! The only explanation is that he was never asked to work on such documents. Otherwise there would be screenshots of his Outlook with these emails. This also explains why his email responses were just short "I concur" - the boss was obviously not the decision-maker in the discussion and only wanted to sign off on something that was already decided by other.
So his job was simply to manage the department, and that can be done without any computer. I do some management myself, and I tell you, there are days when I can't even come close to my own computer, so busy I am talking to other people. In fact, the only thing a manager is required to do is to enable his people to work most efficiently.
With regard to some comments that suggest that if the boss was given a computer, he should use it. That's ridiculous. A computer is a part of anyone's workplace, as a chair is. And in fact he did receive and send some email now and then.
What's wrong with that? You see the same pixels anyway.
Do you have to have your window border properly shaded depending on the "light" source, or you'd rather prefer to have your job done?
That would not be very useful. Any big company would immediately spin off a daughter company with zero revenue, and that company would own all the patents. The daughter company can be fully controlled by the parent company (by nature of owning all its stock, for example.)
The highlighted words are "took it", such as denied other people the access to the painting, robbed them of the pleasure that only you can now have. That is indeed a crime.
However what happens if you only look at the painting without paying a fee?
And what happens if you look at a copy of the painting, or at its photograph? Are you still required to pay?
The problem here is the same old one: the effort of an artist (as anyone's effort) should be rewarded. But currently there is no sane upper limit on collecting. The answer to all the questions above is then "yes", and you should pay for every use, every view, and maybe even for a review of the painting that you wrote and got paid for, since it can be argued that your work is based on the painting.
But that is not a nice world to live in.
It is not a problem at all if most of your clients use the same, relatively small (and thus cacheable) set of files. For example, a herd of accounting workstations may need access to some s/w package. A diskless client should not need to run 300 different applications all the time; these are generally a single purpose boxes. The more RAM you throw in, the more universal they become. Besides, the disk I/O is not that frequent these days, once you have your app loaded.
Noone [in their right mind] orders a brand new paper publishing system from a single consultant. The software probably was priced in several million dollars. Somewhere between the components something broke. For example, the file format that the publisher produced was rev. 2.1, but the software at the presses side was only aware of rev. 1.7 and below... If the coder only tested his code with the "other" piece of latest revision, he would never see any problem; and it is not his guilt that in real life the real customer uses some obsolete stuff that isn't compatible...
This kind of problem is clearly of administrative nature, of a system design and of checking which pieces work with which other pieces. Clearly, blame should be assigned to non-existent QA procedures, insufficient unit testing and [obviously] inadequate integration of components. The coder is nowhere here, it's all system design and QA stuff, realm of managers.
There is a very long waiting list, and common stock holders will be the last to see any money. Besides, there isn't a coin small enough to be paid to you for those 25 shares.
You also need to mention if you saw any software offered in those malls :-)
Myself, I definitely stopped playing in secret societies at the age of 7 at the latest.