-Resurrect Kirk -Time/space distortions caused by {going too close to the sun,alien weapon,wormhole} -The Borg -Hot semi-naked alien chicks -Lots of talking -Guys in rubber monster suits
Then, my recipe for success:
-A wormhole to the Star Wars universe -Picard vs. Vader! -A Terminator is loose on the Enterprise. "I need your boots, your clothes und your spaceship". -Alien vs. Predator vs. The Borg! -The three-boobied chick from Total Recall ("Captain, I can't reach the fire button") -Admiral Scotty -The Borg team up with the Zerg
Heh, nice assumption. Actually I have. And kids at my high school were doing exactly the same crap we did when I was there 15 years ago. Only differences were the clothes, the music, and some of the lingo.
To be honest, I and most of my friends at school preferred to have homemade food than having to eat the revolting slop they dished out in the caf. I didn't see any change there whatsoever.
...for you parents who don't have problems with controlling every aspect of your child's life at school, since those of us without sprogs obviously don't have a clue about parenting.
It's called "taking 5 minutes in the morning to make them a sandwich." School lunch in US schools is utter slop anyway, in most cases.
The sad truth is that the billion$ earned by microserfs are ours.
Yeah, you're right, I sure hate it when someone comes into my house and twists my arm until I agree to buy an Xbox and MSFT stock.
Boy, talk about sour grapes in the comments responding to this article. You may not like Microsoft (I don't particularly), their products may be shit, their marketing and sales tactics may be highly unethical at times, but the individuals who made this cash earned it by working hard under the capitalist input/reward system.
I'm not a rich guy, although I do well enough, but gee, I sure hope that I never become this embittered. For fuck's sake, be happy for them, use them as inspiration (hey, you too have a chance at this sort of wealth! Hooraah!) and accept that not everybody has some sort of deep religious social obligation to save the world with money they make--the posters saying that these kids should have invested their money with "good causes" should remember this the next time they go out to dinner or buy a candy bar or other luxury.
Mod parent up, great point. In fact, this is exactly what I thought when I got to this passage--I just searched for 'all parties' under this story's comments to make sure I avoid a dupe:-)
Honestly, why don't they just take their ball and go home? Most of it's crap anyway. TV is not necessary for life; those that really want to watch a given show will probably be willing to pay for a (restriction-free) opportunity to do so. In fact, one thing I hear quite a bit from fans of various TV fans around the world is "I'd pay to be able to watch it, just give me a good way of doing so!"
That, or go after those damned dog-seducing Elks. The elk menace must be stopped!
Although to be honest, I'd be very curious to see what the dog's flirtation with large antlered fuzzy creatures of the woodlands leads to in terms of offspring...
I think, I disagree. Your own example (with a Minnesota cop) shows, how the current ("less worse") system was abuse-conductive. There is nothing in the new one, that would make that cop's stalking easier.
Once again, read the bit about complete, uncontrolled discretionary power on the part of DHS to implement and use this. Yes, the current "system" is broken. Once again, it's less worse. If law enforcement wants an easier time doing their jobs, let's hear a proposal for an identity system incorporating the controls that you and I both apparently agree on.
You are against RealID because it can be abused. But you have no problem with P2P file-sharing (and other Slashdot's favorite causes) even though they can be (and in fact are) abused every day -- because you see plenty of legitimate (and cool!) uses for them.
I'm against RealID (or any broken) systems if they can be abused by people with the power to really, really screw me if presented with unchecked authority. Personally I don't bother with P2P, but I don't have a problem with it because crooked law enforcement or overly enthusiastic organs of governmental authority cannot use it to really, really screw me. Simple as that.
So you are advocating keeping the current inefficiencies, because they make life harder for the occasional criminals (among the government officials).
No, I'm saying no such thing. I'm saying the current system is less worse than what's being proposed, don't put words in my mouth.
I have no problem with improvement, as long as it comes with (a) a very clear and powerful privacy policy, (b) a very clearly delimited set of uses, (c) no such nonsense as discretion-not-subject-to-review on the part of a single unelected government officer regarding how this is used/implemented/enforced. None of these are elements of RealID.
Maybe my use of "criminal" in regards to government abuse of powers was a poor choice of words. Currently, there are few easily enforcable safeguards on the abuse of government powers, whether with malicious intent or well-meaning. You don't suppose this will improve with RealID?
Frankly, I do not have any clue what you mean with your P2P analogy.
It is not a paranoia, but all the things you do not want are already possible -- just a little harder technically (rather than legally). And nothing, that is not currently possible, is made possible by this new provision.
Yup, but I didn't claim it's currently impossible. I said it's harder, as you do. And harder, in this case, is fine by me. It means it takes a bit of effort and thought to do by {insert duly authorized agent of government}, and by extension makes it easier to show (criminal?) intent when you do find out that someone committed an abuse of authority against you (such as those highway patrolmen in Minnesota who used the DMV database to stalk cute chicks they saw on the road a while back.)
Here is the main question -- is 100% successfull law enforcement a desired ideal, or a grim distopia, where dissent is impossible?
Dingdingding, grand prize winner here.:-)
The answer to your question is: "depends on the law." What a lot of people tend to conveniently forget is that laws are a means to an end. This end, in modern "western" culture, is a stable and peaceful civil society mindful of the individual's rights, which are safeguarded (important, oft-neglected concept here) by governments answerable to The People. I'm wandering into Godwin territory here, so I won't start naming certain governments duly and democratically elected on "law and order" tickets.
For one, it makes it easier. "Easy" in this case is not always good. Second, it sets a precedent of acceptance for identification which is prone to abuse. Currently, a cop cannot require me to show ID on the streets (unless something fundamental has changed since I last checked.) I do not want anyone with a legal power to inflict violence on me to have that authority.
Third, a uniform identity makes identity theft as such (overblown but still a serious problem) easier--if someone steals a passport or a driver's license from me, it's possible for me to compartmentalize the damage done to some degree. This becomes more difficult with the One Big ID.
Next, linkage--the driver's license/arrest warrants thing, in principle I don't like it, but I won't argue it as it falls in sort of a gray area of what's acceptable to me personally. However, what happens when it becomes possible for government (and authorized private!) agencies and organizations with no business doing so to link together information about my financial status, health, personal life, phone bill, etc etc etc at the touch of a button?
And yes, I'll freely admit that much of this is paranoia over what "could happen". Don't forget, though, that stable civil societies do not begin to exhibit totalitarian behavior overnight--it's the boiling frog.
A uniform driver's license is not bad; however, as a previous poster pointed particularly perceptively pointed out, a driver's license is just a license to operate a motor vehicle, not an ID.
We've gone through this with Social Security before; I think that part of the problem is that many people here don't differentiate between being against uniform/standard documents, be they for ID or just for reference (as in licenses) out of principle, and being against certain incarnations of them (like this one) because they have horrid implications for privacy and civil rights.
Very roughly, "rider" additions to bills are a type of amendments which aren't necessarily directly related to the main purpose of the bill.
Essentially what happens is that representatives (bills originate in the House of Representatives, the lower house) can add their own provisions, make edits, whatnot, of draft bills submitted for review. It's basically a way of saying "change this-and-that or I won't vote for it"--if you have a lot of influence, for example through which committees you chair, you can exercise substantial control over things like budgets, membership in committees (and thus peoples' political careers, etc.)
Committees also have varying degrees of influence of new bills as they can "go to committee" for review, editing, whatnot--for example, the senate foreign relations committee, select committee on intelligence, and others have pretty inordinate amounts of power. The chair of these can engage in what is essentially blackmail to get his way, or to help a colleague/ally/whatever.
No, nothing prevents you from attaching pork projects. And yes, it's shit.
Nonono sorry, I was unclear. In the "western world", Interpol, private investigators, the police and hordes of lawyers are the tools of choice for such organizations. When I put together an incident response team for a large bank in Europe, we found that they already had an (albeit very non-technical) investigation team for things like fraud, forgery, theft, whatever--very professional, very dedicated, mainly ex-cops with a lot of connections. These guys were backed by a strong legal & compliance department.
My point is that, in areas of the world where guys like "Ivan" can survive and flourish due to lacking legal protections of commercial property (i.e. getting the Russian cops to cooperate), the sort of countermeasures you describe as "thuggery" will, beyond a certain threshhold, become not only possible but also, maybe, desirable for large companies.
I'm not claiming that a commercial entity would go around hiring hit men to do a wet job on some kiddie in Iowa. Rather, as a last resort to get rid of a serious threat in, say, Uzbekistan or wherever something like Interpol isn't available, if potential losses become high enough, kidnapping, intimidation and even murder might become an option to be pursued. E.g. if you can't surgically destroy a threat via legal means because the legal foundations and resources just aren't there, you might resort to fighting fire with fire.
I just had a very extensive with a colleague about this, regarding the potential to knock off _really_ high revenue sites (not this piddly-squat gambling crap, I'm talking about large banks doing online trading.)
My theory is that gambling sites get hit because (a) the extortion amount-vs-revenue loss ratio is low, (b) the PR exposure is low ("oh gee it's just a gambling site"), and (c) law enforcement is reluctant and/or incapable of getting involved (legal gray area, small amounts.) Now, as mentioned in the article, these guys are usually present in countries where the legal framework is too weak for especially small companies to fight back through "channels".
Now hat happens when a multibillion dollar financial organization is threatened with trading downtime? I will go out on a limb and claim that the reluctance threshhold for, not to put too fine a point on it, having someone whacked by mafiosi-for-hire will be pretty low once you have the combination of incredibly high potential losses and perpetrators who reside in a country with weak legal protections. This works both ways.
So your BAR-1918 example may not be all that far off.
Well, to be perfectly honest, she _did_ get shot. Which is not supposed to happen, but alas, it did. I don't believe there was a conspiracy; I'm pretty convinced by those docs that the whole thing was a sad, avoidable cockup caused by insufficient training, poor communication, and a whole lot of other elements of Murphy's Law in action.
My point about "American troops shouldn't be there" being a pretty useless statement holds, though. By that logic, Italian journalists with an axe to grind shouldn't be there either. Granted, the troops have, in an indirect way, a choice about this--as in "don't join the army if you don't want to go to war." However, Italian journalists with an axe to grind have a pretty direct choice in the matter. War zones are dangerous places.
I agree with one of this discussion's fanatics' statement that the US troops have more choice than the Iraqi civilians, but in this case, although civilians do sadly seem to be catching a lot of casualties, the woman who was shot (not to mention Callipari, the poor bastard) had a choice.
She does have an anti-American viewpoint, but frankly, there is nothing wrong with that, and it's her fundamental right to harbor and express such a viewpoint (even though I think she's a plank based on her previous writings.) I live in Europe (not Italy, admittedly) and I haven't heard a lot of credibility given to her rantings about a conspiracy to shoot her (she's a pretty irrelevant figure on the whole); rather people are upset that the thing happened at all.
She's a communist, she's written extensively for Il Manifesto and has made a lot of statements underlining her political affiliation & beliefs.
That said, there's nothing wrong with being a leftist, and it's irrelevant to this case (except that, of course, she's using her platform & beliefs to put a pretty massive spin on things.) Saying "the communist reporter" is similar to stating "the black assailant."
In this case it's just a horrible, possibly avoidable tragedy and I'm sure everyone involved really really sorry it happened, not that that helps.
As for the idiots saying things like "if soldiers don't want to get blown up, they should stay the f*** out of Iraq", that's about as base, nonsensical, ill-informed and sad an attitude as I can think of, and simply not deserving of a response.
Read Heinlein's The Cat That Walked Through Walls for an interesting take on stateless, commercially run entities like this and what happens in terms of arbitration, legal enforcement, whatnot.
Essentially, it's the Golden Rule: He who has the gold makes the rules. For better or for worse.
Thankfully, large companies here (Switzerland) are comparatively flexible about 'preferred vendor' type deals. Basically it just means that large clients only feel like dealing with 'x' companies, meaning that small, one-man firms often have to run their contracts through pimps (aka "contract agencies".) Some of this is also caused by kickbacks from headhunter outfits to departmental managers, and by collusion between client firms, but hey, what can you do.
I don't like these guys, as I find them generally pretty useless and not particularly ethical, and don't want them getting any cash they don't deserve. Our solution to this has been to form a small company (blatant plug) based solely on trust among some friends in similar lines of technical consulting.
Basically, the company is a vehicle for us to run our contracts through; the only percentage we pay is a small amount to the company accounts for legal/accounting/logistics fees. We don't expand out of principle, unless it's someone we know and trust. Similarly, when we're asked for referrals by clients, we'll send someone whom we're comfortable recommending--we don't get anything from it, aside from a reputation for honesty when that person does a good job.
I've seen way too much collusion, greed and opportunism here from large customers and consulting/contract agencies, but my colleagues and I have managed to survive very well by doing good work and building strong networks with colleagues at our customers'. I've been preaching this as a nice work methodology for a while now, so you're not the only one:)
Slashdot Mirror
Star Trek is not not just about emotionless women in tight clothes
No, it's the short skirts and blue skin that really make it.
First, the standard sure winners:
-Resurrect Kirk
-Time/space distortions caused by {going too close to the sun,alien weapon,wormhole}
-The Borg
-Hot semi-naked alien chicks
-Lots of talking
-Guys in rubber monster suits
Then, my recipe for success:
-A wormhole to the Star Wars universe
-Picard vs. Vader!
-A Terminator is loose on the Enterprise. "I need your boots, your clothes und your spaceship".
-Alien vs. Predator vs. The Borg!
-The three-boobied chick from Total Recall ("Captain, I can't reach the fire button")
-Admiral Scotty
-The Borg team up with the Zerg
It can't fail.
A lot of us Americans outside the USA don't believe that intelligent life exists inside either...
Heh, nice assumption. Actually I have. And kids at my high school were doing exactly the same crap we did when I was there 15 years ago. Only differences were the clothes, the music, and some of the lingo.
To be honest, I and most of my friends at school preferred to have homemade food than having to eat the revolting slop they dished out in the caf. I didn't see any change there whatsoever.
...for you parents who don't have problems with controlling every aspect of your child's life at school, since those of us without sprogs obviously don't have a clue about parenting.
It's called "taking 5 minutes in the morning to make them a sandwich." School lunch in US schools is utter slop anyway, in most cases.
The sad truth is that the billion$ earned by microserfs are ours.
Yeah, you're right, I sure hate it when someone comes into my house and twists my arm until I agree to buy an Xbox and MSFT stock.
Boy, talk about sour grapes in the comments responding to this article. You may not like Microsoft (I don't particularly), their products may be shit, their marketing and sales tactics may be highly unethical at times, but the individuals who made this cash earned it by working hard under the capitalist input/reward system.
I'm not a rich guy, although I do well enough, but gee, I sure hope that I never become this embittered. For fuck's sake, be happy for them, use them as inspiration (hey, you too have a chance at this sort of wealth! Hooraah!) and accept that not everybody has some sort of deep religious social obligation to save the world with money they make--the posters saying that these kids should have invested their money with "good causes" should remember this the next time they go out to dinner or buy a candy bar or other luxury.
Bitter, bitter, bitter.
Mod parent up, great point. In fact, this is exactly what I thought when I got to this passage--I just searched for 'all parties' under this story's comments to make sure I avoid a dupe :-)
Honestly, why don't they just take their ball and go home? Most of it's crap anyway. TV is not necessary for life; those that really want to watch a given show will probably be willing to pay for a (restriction-free) opportunity to do so. In fact, one thing I hear quite a bit from fans of various TV fans around the world is "I'd pay to be able to watch it, just give me a good way of doing so!"
Let the market decide.
...Maybe the PR value of owning one of thesemight offset the emotional cost of temporarily losing a dog to some bastard elk gigolo.
...a leash :)
That, or go after those damned dog-seducing Elks. The elk menace must be stopped!
Although to be honest, I'd be very curious to see what the dog's flirtation with large antlered fuzzy creatures of the woodlands leads to in terms of offspring...
I think, I disagree. Your own example (with a Minnesota cop) shows, how the current ("less worse") system was abuse-conductive. There is nothing in the new one, that would make that cop's stalking easier.
Once again, read the bit about complete, uncontrolled discretionary power on the part of DHS to implement and use this. Yes, the current "system" is broken. Once again, it's less worse. If law enforcement wants an easier time doing their jobs, let's hear a proposal for an identity system incorporating the controls that you and I both apparently agree on.
You are against RealID because it can be abused. But you have no problem with P2P file-sharing (and other Slashdot's favorite causes) even though they can be (and in fact are) abused every day -- because you see plenty of legitimate (and cool!) uses for them.
I'm against RealID (or any broken) systems if they can be abused by people with the power to really, really screw me if presented with unchecked authority. Personally I don't bother with P2P, but I don't have a problem with it because crooked law enforcement or overly enthusiastic organs of governmental authority cannot use it to really, really screw me. Simple as that.
ROT13 twice, for extra security.
So you are advocating keeping the current inefficiencies, because they make life harder for the occasional criminals (among the government officials).
No, I'm saying no such thing. I'm saying the current system is less worse than what's being proposed, don't put words in my mouth.
I have no problem with improvement, as long as it comes with (a) a very clear and powerful privacy policy, (b) a very clearly delimited set of uses, (c) no such nonsense as discretion-not-subject-to-review on the part of a single unelected government officer regarding how this is used/implemented/enforced. None of these are elements of RealID.
Maybe my use of "criminal" in regards to government abuse of powers was a poor choice of words. Currently, there are few easily enforcable safeguards on the abuse of government powers, whether with malicious intent or well-meaning. You don't suppose this will improve with RealID?
Frankly, I do not have any clue what you mean with your P2P analogy.
It is not a paranoia, but all the things you do not want are already possible -- just a little harder technically (rather than legally). And nothing, that is not currently possible, is made possible by this new provision.
:-)
Yup, but I didn't claim it's currently impossible. I said it's harder, as you do. And harder, in this case, is fine by me. It means it takes a bit of effort and thought to do by {insert duly authorized agent of government}, and by extension makes it easier to show (criminal?) intent when you do find out that someone committed an abuse of authority against you (such as those highway patrolmen in Minnesota who used the DMV database to stalk cute chicks they saw on the road a while back.)
Here is the main question -- is 100% successfull law enforcement a desired ideal, or a grim distopia, where dissent is impossible?
Dingdingding, grand prize winner here.
The answer to your question is: "depends on the law." What a lot of people tend to conveniently forget is that laws are a means to an end. This end, in modern "western" culture, is a stable and peaceful civil society mindful of the individual's rights, which are safeguarded (important, oft-neglected concept here) by governments answerable to The People. I'm wandering into Godwin territory here, so I won't start naming certain governments duly and democratically elected on "law and order" tickets.
For one, it makes it easier. "Easy" in this case is not always good. Second, it sets a precedent of acceptance for identification which is prone to abuse. Currently, a cop cannot require me to show ID on the streets (unless something fundamental has changed since I last checked.) I do not want anyone with a legal power to inflict violence on me to have that authority.
Third, a uniform identity makes identity theft as such (overblown but still a serious problem) easier--if someone steals a passport or a driver's license from me, it's possible for me to compartmentalize the damage done to some degree. This becomes more difficult with the One Big ID.
Next, linkage--the driver's license/arrest warrants thing, in principle I don't like it, but I won't argue it as it falls in sort of a gray area of what's acceptable to me personally. However, what happens when it becomes possible for government (and authorized private!) agencies and organizations with no business doing so to link together information about my financial status, health, personal life, phone bill, etc etc etc at the touch of a button?
And yes, I'll freely admit that much of this is paranoia over what "could happen". Don't forget, though, that stable civil societies do not begin to exhibit totalitarian behavior overnight--it's the boiling frog.
A uniform driver's license is not bad; however, as a previous poster pointed particularly perceptively pointed out, a driver's license is just a license to operate a motor vehicle, not an ID.
We've gone through this with Social Security before; I think that part of the problem is that many people here don't differentiate between being against uniform/standard documents, be they for ID or just for reference (as in licenses) out of principle, and being against certain incarnations of them (like this one) because they have horrid implications for privacy and civil rights.
Very roughly, "rider" additions to bills are a type of amendments which aren't necessarily directly related to the main purpose of the bill.
Essentially what happens is that representatives (bills originate in the House of Representatives, the lower house) can add their own provisions, make edits, whatnot, of draft bills submitted for review. It's basically a way of saying "change this-and-that or I won't vote for it"--if you have a lot of influence, for example through which committees you chair, you can exercise substantial control over things like budgets, membership in committees (and thus peoples' political careers, etc.)
Committees also have varying degrees of influence of new bills as they can "go to committee" for review, editing, whatnot--for example, the senate foreign relations committee, select committee on intelligence, and others have pretty inordinate amounts of power. The chair of these can engage in what is essentially blackmail to get his way, or to help a colleague/ally/whatever.
No, nothing prevents you from attaching pork projects. And yes, it's shit.
It was probably intentional. I'm surprised they didn't supply it on floppies or 64MB USB sticks.
now _that_ would have been snide.
Nonono sorry, I was unclear. In the "western world", Interpol, private investigators, the police and hordes of lawyers are the tools of choice for such organizations. When I put together an incident response team for a large bank in Europe, we found that they already had an (albeit very non-technical) investigation team for things like fraud, forgery, theft, whatever--very professional, very dedicated, mainly ex-cops with a lot of connections. These guys were backed by a strong legal & compliance department.
My point is that, in areas of the world where guys like "Ivan" can survive and flourish due to lacking legal protections of commercial property (i.e. getting the Russian cops to cooperate), the sort of countermeasures you describe as "thuggery" will, beyond a certain threshhold, become not only possible but also, maybe, desirable for large companies.
I'm not claiming that a commercial entity would go around hiring hit men to do a wet job on some kiddie in Iowa. Rather, as a last resort to get rid of a serious threat in, say, Uzbekistan or wherever something like Interpol isn't available, if potential losses become high enough, kidnapping, intimidation and even murder might become an option to be pursued. E.g. if you can't surgically destroy a threat via legal means because the legal foundations and resources just aren't there, you might resort to fighting fire with fire.
7.62mm caliber .30 actually, but fair point.
I just had a very extensive with a colleague about this, regarding the potential to knock off _really_ high revenue sites (not this piddly-squat gambling crap, I'm talking about large banks doing online trading.)
My theory is that gambling sites get hit because (a) the extortion amount-vs-revenue loss ratio is low, (b) the PR exposure is low ("oh gee it's just a gambling site"), and (c) law enforcement is reluctant and/or incapable of getting involved (legal gray area, small amounts.) Now, as mentioned in the article, these guys are usually present in countries where the legal framework is too weak for especially small companies to fight back through "channels".
Now hat happens when a multibillion dollar financial organization is threatened with trading downtime? I will go out on a limb and claim that the reluctance threshhold for, not to put too fine a point on it, having someone whacked by mafiosi-for-hire will be pretty low once you have the combination of incredibly high potential losses and perpetrators who reside in a country with weak legal protections. This works both ways.
So your BAR-1918 example may not be all that far off.
Have a look at NetJuke--Nice web-based app that does streaming and makes a good effort at organizing by artist, album name, category, etc.
Well, to be perfectly honest, she _did_ get shot. Which is not supposed to happen, but alas, it did. I don't believe there was a conspiracy; I'm pretty convinced by those docs that the whole thing was a sad, avoidable cockup caused by insufficient training, poor communication, and a whole lot of other elements of Murphy's Law in action.
My point about "American troops shouldn't be there" being a pretty useless statement holds, though. By that logic, Italian journalists with an axe to grind shouldn't be there either. Granted, the troops have, in an indirect way, a choice about this--as in "don't join the army if you don't want to go to war." However, Italian journalists with an axe to grind have a pretty direct choice in the matter. War zones are dangerous places.
I agree with one of this discussion's fanatics' statement that the US troops have more choice than the Iraqi civilians, but in this case, although civilians do sadly seem to be catching a lot of casualties, the woman who was shot (not to mention Callipari, the poor bastard) had a choice.
She does have an anti-American viewpoint, but frankly, there is nothing wrong with that, and it's her fundamental right to harbor and express such a viewpoint (even though I think she's a plank based on her previous writings.) I live in Europe (not Italy, admittedly) and I haven't heard a lot of credibility given to her rantings about a conspiracy to shoot her (she's a pretty irrelevant figure on the whole); rather people are upset that the thing happened at all.
She's a communist, she's written extensively for Il Manifesto and has made a lot of statements underlining her political affiliation & beliefs.
That said, there's nothing wrong with being a leftist, and it's irrelevant to this case (except that, of course, she's using her platform & beliefs to put a pretty massive spin on things.) Saying "the communist reporter" is similar to stating "the black assailant."
In this case it's just a horrible, possibly avoidable tragedy and I'm sure everyone involved really really sorry it happened, not that that helps.
As for the idiots saying things like "if soldiers don't want to get blown up, they should stay the f*** out of Iraq", that's about as base, nonsensical, ill-informed and sad an attitude as I can think of, and simply not deserving of a response.
it is difficult to see how CS can match expected future demand for IT workers
Easy. Managers will just start doing what any self-respecting geek would do when he needs something--order out.
Read Heinlein's The Cat That Walked Through Walls for an interesting take on stateless, commercially run entities like this and what happens in terms of arbitration, legal enforcement, whatnot.
Essentially, it's the Golden Rule: He who has the gold makes the rules. For better or for worse.
I'm right there with you, bud.
:)
Thankfully, large companies here (Switzerland) are comparatively flexible about 'preferred vendor' type deals. Basically it just means that large clients only feel like dealing with 'x' companies, meaning that small, one-man firms often have to run their contracts through pimps (aka "contract agencies".) Some of this is also caused by kickbacks from headhunter outfits to departmental managers, and by collusion between client firms, but hey, what can you do.
I don't like these guys, as I find them generally pretty useless and not particularly ethical, and don't want them getting any cash they don't deserve. Our solution to this has been to form a small company (blatant plug) based solely on trust among some friends in similar lines of technical consulting.
Basically, the company is a vehicle for us to run our contracts through; the only percentage we pay is a small amount to the company accounts for legal/accounting/logistics fees. We don't expand out of principle, unless it's someone we know and trust. Similarly, when we're asked for referrals by clients, we'll send someone whom we're comfortable recommending--we don't get anything from it, aside from a reputation for honesty when that person does a good job.
I've seen way too much collusion, greed and opportunism here from large customers and consulting/contract agencies, but my colleagues and I have managed to survive very well by doing good work and building strong networks with colleagues at our customers'. I've been preaching this as a nice work methodology for a while now, so you're not the only one