Walk past the tourist trap part and you'll find a pretty decent park that is well worth seeing of it's own right. Problem is that most people don't go past the tourist trap portion and have a warped view of the riverwalk.
The Riverwalk in San Antonio, an old school public works project that is off limits to cars. How about some of our nations landmarks that have been closed off to traffic? There are countless trails and bike paths in Minnesota with wonderful scenery. Basically find any place that is a famous landmark, assume that can't drive in front of it and that's a place you should visit.
Harassment online should be no different than harassment offline. If I send an email threating to break someone's leg how is that any different than a message over the phone or in person? Why do people make a big deal that otherwise illegal behavior is somehow legal online? Intimidation, coercion and other forms of threatening behavior are all readily accepted as illegal offline, this case has absolutely no defense in the first amendment (and I'm usually the one defending it).
The issue has nothing to do with Microsoft. The issue has to do with a failure by T-Mobile with a vendor (that happens to be Microsoft). How T-Mobile ever approved a contract with the appropriate backup software, hardware, DR plan and testing is the bigger issue. Microsoft likely provided exactly the level of support that T-Mobile paid for, and I'm willing to bet that T-Mobile balked at these proposed charges from Microsoft and went with the cheaper option without the backup expenses. If your a CIO you use this as an example of why you pay for backup and disaster recovery services.
There are many backup and recovery products that work with Microsoft products just as their are for the various flavors of *nix. Best practices can and should be vendor neutral and your post is completely misguided. This should be a lesson learned for those involved in best practices and reckless management decisions. All that being said, Microsoft never should have agreed to a contract without the appropriate backup clauses in place. If microsoft did have those clauses in the contract, than they violated their contract in a very public way and you will be reading about the lawsuit from T-Mobile all too soon.
With the overhead of DRM and other measures that suck cpu cycles on a heavy basis, we'll never get close to the limit. Can we get a new Moore's law, one that includes the DRM tax on our CPU cycles?
I have watched a complete lack of microsoft support for open source software for over a decade now. I've seen how people struggled with reverse engineering microsoft's products and struggling even more to do so in a manner that Microsoft can't come back on them for stealing code. I've watched products like Wine for years as they have learned about many undocumented features and bugs the hard way. I was not defending Microsoft, I never said they had a good record. I said they finally started to do the right thing and people should applaud now that they have extended meaningful cooperation to the world beyond windows. In the eyes of someone like Microsoft it comes across as a slap in the face and is the kind of behavior that justifies their lack of cooperation to begin with.
A trap? MS spent a week of developer time in cooperation with a Linux team for the express purpose of allowing interoperability. This is a level of cooperation that has previously been unheard of in the Linux community, with well publicized lawsuits filed in an attempt to get a hint of cooperation. Microsoft working with the Linux community at this level has previously only been dreamed of.
All this and some idiot has the audacity to think it might be a trap? For goodness sake, be grateful that it was possible at all. When someone finally does the right thing, give them credit and stop coming across as a whiny ungrateful brat.
Rereading your right about TARP, that was done under W right before the end of the administration and I was wrong for the credit given. As for the automakers though I think your figure is a bit high. I've done a bit of googling and I'm having trouble finding amounts that go beyond 30 billion or so at the high end. Add up direct loans to GM and Chrysler as well partmakers and aid for developing hybrid car technology and even aid going to companies like Tesla and I still can't get figures that get that high.
Point being as far as I can tell Obama hasn't accomplished anything noteworthy on the national level, much less international. I simply cannot see any reason (even one I would disagree with) for giving him a Nobel other than anti Bush sentiment. Once upon a time Nobel prizes were given for grand things like Nuclear arms reductions treaties and ending wars and not to make political statements against leaders no longer in office.
Seriously, what on earth has he done to win such a prize? He has brokered no treaties, he has resolved no conflicts, he hasn't even particularly changed foreign policy with Iraq and Afghanistan. Even the crown jewel of his agenda, closing Gitmo. Having gotten into office he's discovered the world is more complicated that a sound bite for a political stage allows.
For all his talk his biggest accomplishment so far is bailing out the banks to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars - if anything that would be economic. I'm no W supporter, but what possible cause is there for this other than anti-W sentiment?
Offer it as a bribe, perhaps if he does well in school or the like. It sounds like you already have made up your mind about the product not meeting your needs. Certainly things like the linux project would be at best pure hack value, and not much for practical use. If you want to do that, find the right ps3 and relish in a vendor that doesn't actively fight alternate os's and lets you install Linux without all the hassle.
Horrible, a piece of technology could be abused if used in a certain way by evil and nefarious bad guys. We'll have to ban this wireless technology just in case they're out to get us. Breakout the crowbars, put on the night vision goggles, prep the bolt cutters for backup and defend yourself with the glass cutter before they break in. Tinfoil hats to the rescue!
They are excellent targets, and getting these companies to cooperate with international anti-fraud efforts would be a huge win. Without doubt they are the favored methods of 419 scammers and many other scammers for their ability to send money internationally. That being said, sending money through one of these services isn't nearly as convenient or automated as sending money through a credit card. Whilst you may see larger transactions through those services, they can't begin to compare to the sheer volume of traffic of the credit card companies.
People need to refocus malware views and start focusing on some of the largest scourges of the issue.
Visa
Mastercard
American Express
People write malware because it is profitable to so. Regardless of how a machine has been owned, it typically boils down to one of two uses, a botnet or hijacking financial data. The easiest way to do this is get people to submit their own credit card details voluntarily through a webform. While the hosted pages are typically fake, the billing is almost always real, and this should be the target.
Enable companies to watch and report on the merchants accounts where malware authors get there money from. Somehow get the big credit card companies to become proactive about shutting them down without a several month investigation. I've done credit fraud in a former career, it's remarkably easy to detect and find. All of this could be fairly easily detected by the credit card companies if they could be bothered.
The biggest problem is that they can't be bothered as the fraud is profitable for them. Even in the event of a chargeback they can still make money and the administrative costs they occur are nothing compared to the profit they receive. Cut off the source of funding for malware authors quickly instead of slowly and the profit motive for writing malware will take a hit.
You can still perform plenty of validation testing irrespective of what platform a person has used. If a given person can't figure out what your trying to do with the tools provided than the software needs work. When I used to do work for a manufacturer we took people off of the assembly line or equivalent, made sure they knew nothing about computers and used them to perform the testing. If they couldn't figure things out on their own, the test was considered a failure. Blaming the platform or the userbase is a sign of a poor developer, it's no different than blaming your tools.
The entire point of such testing is to remove assumptions and find out what happens in the real world with people that don't have the programmers base line knowledge. Developers have a way of assuming a given level of knowledge that users simply don't have. That's why people like Mark Shuttleworth have done so well, they've presented Linux in a way that simply doesn't require that baseline knowledge. The issue is not whether or not a given tool is capable, well written, more efficient or otherwise. The point he is trying to make is that the issue of acceptance and use by the masses comes down to usability by the masses (documentation can and should heavily influence this).
If your making software only intended for highly trained users that will go to school to learn how to use it (SQL, CAD etc.) usability may not matter as much because you can assume the user has a baseline of knowledge. If your not making software that requires specialized schooling to use, than you should be testing software in a manner as suggested.
First, the principals here have needed to be made law for several years now and congratulations on moving society forward.
Society should not be controlled by the pipe, the pipe is a service, we are not the service. The tail should not wag the dog.
The rules call for "legal content" to be unfiltered, thats a hole big enough to drive a semi through.
The rules need to have an enforcement mechanism with teeth or they will become meaningless.
Reasonable management is being opened up for guidance by the very firms that would be managed. Reasonable management will become a hole big enough to pilot a supertanker through without careful vigilance.
Celebrate that the principals of network neutrality are finally getting airtime and understand that now is the time for increased scrutiny lest we give legal reasons to block the very things that they are trying to open.
If a medium is presented that interacts with something it must be patched! The more prevalent the medium, the higher the level of patching required.
Whether that medium is email, your browser, the OS, office or the like should not matter. It doesn't matter if a new killer app comes out, if it interacts with your computers, you need to patch it for security issues on a routine basis.
Really, the OS, vendor, and the rest don't matter, what matters is that routine patching is done. At first people were surprised that they could get malware from disks, than files, than emaal, infected Internet sites and so on. Is it really a surprise to anyone that you applications like Acrobat and Flash are routinely targeted? Every time the media presents this as the 'next big thing', really how did this not story get approved?
I used to work for Polaris (Snowmobiles, ATV's, Motorcycles etc). They actively tracked and helped out with stolen equipment on a routine basis. Working these issues was my responsibility at the time. Worked with law enforcement, took reports from civilians and similar things.
You know how much work this took on my part? Very little - this fell under "other duties" while I worked there, and I was the only person at the time who worked these. The vendors like Amazon are refusing to help seeing only an expense and a loss of sales. This sheer and utter greed on their part with justifiable reason. If they can't do this because it's the right thing, than somebody needs to legislate good companies morals on their part.
This was truly an unfortunate necessity for the best interest of civil liberties. The reasoning that this case was presented would have made criminals of a great many people for things that should not be criminalized. I understand the charges would have essentially criminalized breaking TOS for a web site, something that simply should not be a criminal action. Will used against this evil bitch who does richly deserve prison, it would set a bad legal precedent.
That being said, I would still like to find a way to charge her with something appropriate, such as a lesser murder charge, as well as holding her civilly responsible (such as how oj still got held civilly) responsible for the murders he committed)
That's debatable, if you give a false social security number you could legally be guilty of fraud. That being said, you are not required to give your social security number for most things and can actively refuse to do so. I don't recall the list off the top of my head, but very few entities have a legal right to get your social security number. Best thing to do when asked is to respond with "refused", most reps will simply check with their supervisor and move on.
Off the top I know anything to do with taxes or financial transactions (investments, checking accounts etc) are required to get it. Research the law on this one, and I think a policy of refusal is something you can do fairly well. The other thing you can do for some transactions is get a Federal Tax ID no, it fits the format of a Social Security number, just be aware you can't always subsitute it for your social security number.
As for your social already given out, getting rid of that would be next to impossible, agencies use that to pass on information to credit bureaus and the like. Think of it as being like trying to delete an email that you sent last week, the odds are really against you.
Sure, these can be done fairly easily. One of the most common types of fraud I encountered was where a parent would take credit out in the name of their own child. The parent figures their in the clear, and denies responsibility when it comes time to pay. Meanwhile the child may not find out until they turn 18 years and suffer a bad experience. I had many instances where I would get hold of someone around 18-20 years old and tell them what was going on.
It's a terrible position to be in, your 18 years old, quite possibly still living at home, and discover that your own mother or father took out 10-20 thousand dollars worth of debt in your name. The way the law works is that you are not responsible for fraud ($50 limit can apply in some cases) as long as you file a fraud report. The net result of this is you end up with a kid in the position of having the file a fraud report with the police knowing that their own parents could go to prison. It's a terrible position to put someone in, but without the fraud report and police report there is nothing that can be done.
These things can also apply in situations where someone has "no credit". Typically a person with no credit still has credit, even if they have never taken out a loan. You would have records from getting a checking account, paying your utilities (this is becoming far more common and will soon be standard practice), renting an apartment, cell phone and so on. Even if you had none of the above (you use cash only) you would discover that many creditors will give someone with no credit a $2-300 credit line regardless.
A determined identity thief will even build up your credit on your behalf, paying the small bill over a course of a year or two until they can get your credit improved to the point were you start qualifying for $1000+ credit on credit cards. In essence they pay some of your bills they give you on your behalf until such time as they can walk out on several thousand dollar plus credit accounts. By all means, even someone with no credit should monitor their credit report (even if only the annual credit report you get for free).
Many years back I worked as a skiptracer / fraud researcher for a well known credit card company. The short of the answer is that with a social security number a person can readily learn a persons private financial details by pulling a credit report.
There is no mechanism that prevents companies from doing so, they 'self authenticate' as it were. Unlike a person who must provide details to prove that they really are who they claim they are. All a business has to do either claim you have given your consent or that you owe them money and they gain full access to your private credit report.
With a credit report alone I can tell everything from what kind of car you own (as most people finance) to where you live, where you have lived, what your lifestyle choices are, where you shop and so on. It's a pretty thorough invasion of privacy. Using additional services I can gain other information about you such as property you own, tax records, court records, family records, residence, an unscrupulous person could even find out your health records. In ten to fifteen minutes I have a very telling picture of your life, whether you want someone to have it or not.
The bottom line is that with a social security number there is very little about a person that cannot be readily discerned in a very short period of time. Unethical people will quickly cross the line, checking things that they shouldn't or, even stealing your identity.
You really need to ask yourself if you want a professional or a peon? You write your question as if you want someone you can piss on, that tells me you want a peon. Heck, you'll save money on the peon, you can get one from any local technical college, they might even know what they're doing.
If you want a professional and don't want to pay for one, your outsourcing some part time work. You get a portion of a professionals time, that makes you a part time customer, a small fry for the outsourcing company. They are essentially offering a courtesy to you at all to work on your network in the off chance your company grows as this will leave them in a good position.
The bottom line is that professionals that live in your country need to be trusted, they have to much to lose. Most professionals will undergo a background check one to every two years. No professional is going to destroy their livelihood by leaking something like your customer list. No professional is going to risk going to prison or getting sued for crossing the line as long as they live in the same country as you. They will lose their ability for references. Outsource to India and the like and all bets are off, there's no reputation to maintain.
Really, the question is why would your customers trust your company, and is a professional service really any different?
The biggest problem is that the vendors you are talking to are being honest and setting your expectations and you don't like what your hearing. Your about to discover how every extra service has an additional charge and you'll quickly bury yourself in extra fees in the event your company does grow. If you want to position yourself for growth and don't want to be sunk under a slew of fees you should hire a professional in house and then trust them to do their job.
The 230 figure is designed to account for how most people will drive the vehicle and uses a government standard test methodology. The important thing is that the same test is applied to all equivalent vehicles. Since 90% of people drive 40 or fewer miles in a day, it's not an unreasonable number if recharged as designed.
If you wanted a better figure of how it would last for a day's worth of driving you could take the total driven range and divide that out to get miles per gallon. Perhaps even quote it with a qualifier as something like 100MPG/300kWh to account for the electrical contribution (my figures are made up but you get the idea). This would allow to easily account for the cost of the electricity as well as the extended range from batteries and post battery range once you have drained the initial charge.
Regardless of how you interpret the results the car is impressive even if it is too expensive. Give it a few years and you should be able to get something like this for a lot less money. I've already talked over with my wife and we want to get a vehicle like this and solar panels on the roof in about three years when costs drop. I figure it should drop my monthly expenses a fair bit and be good for the environment.
I do not have "trouble" with any particular posting, instead it is the principal of the thing. When you think about it, wikileaks goes against any IT best practice, and it certainly goes against any geek value. They are getting a free ride and sympathy from a crowd where they don't deserve it. The fact that you may think it's a hoot that your personal bad guy had his secrets exposed today should be irrelevant. If someone is breaking the law and using secrecy to protect themselves, well they too can fall (Nixon very nicely feel well before wikileaks). It's also down to a matter of judgment on who gets to decide what.
Lets say you work for company and your coworker who was denied a promotion decides to leak your companies R&D results for an upcoming product (say your company just invented a way to make plastics that biodegrade more readily). Well your company just put millions into research for a product that is now going to made by a Chinese company that has to pay none of the research cost, and can skip straight to production. It's going to be your job on the line when your company can't compete. While you may consider that information secret and of no business to the world at large, your Chinese competitor would consider such a thing as being ideal for leaking.
The number of examples are endless, it's only a matter of time before R&D is leaked prevalently. When you remove your companies secrets, you remove much of your companies competitive advantage and you now have to compete on cost alone. Now pause and think about your job, and those of your friends and family, how many of those jobs would be gone? What if you were in the military instead and someone decided to leak secrets that protect you and your buddies in a time of war?
Surely he wont mind if we leak his personal information to the site. Since he is a person of note (after all wikileaks is worldwide) he's fair game, right? While were at it we can leak personal detail of Jimmy Wales, after all the world has the right to know anybodies personal and secret details. Who are you to dare attempt to have privacy, to not want your life exposed and open to the world for it's amusement?
Site like wikileaks are the parasites of the technology world, their entire existence is based solely based on publishing private information and breaking trust. These values are otherwise held in contempt by most people in the IT and geek communities, so why on earth does wikileaks get the time of day on a site like slashdot? Just remember that because you may not like whatever evil corp / country has something published today, it could well be an organization or individual you like tomorrow.
I fail to see how the site is any better than any number of carders sites where credit cards are sold wholesale. I really have to ask, where do they draw the line? What is to heinous for wikileaks to publish? How about detailed descriptions of the making and distribution of nerve gas in a military manner? After all that's been government domain information since at least world war one. What would they do if Iran or North Korea in a spate of indignation decided to post their detail nuclear weapon secrets on wikileaks?
Slashdot Mirror
Walk past the tourist trap part and you'll find a pretty decent park that is well worth seeing of it's own right. Problem is that most people don't go past the tourist trap portion and have a warped view of the riverwalk.
The Riverwalk in San Antonio, an old school public works project that is off limits to cars. How about some of our nations landmarks that have been closed off to traffic? There are countless trails and bike paths in Minnesota with wonderful scenery. Basically find any place that is a famous landmark, assume that can't drive in front of it and that's a place you should visit.
Harassment online should be no different than harassment offline. If I send an email threating to break someone's leg how is that any different than a message over the phone or in person? Why do people make a big deal that otherwise illegal behavior is somehow legal online? Intimidation, coercion and other forms of threatening behavior are all readily accepted as illegal offline, this case has absolutely no defense in the first amendment (and I'm usually the one defending it).
The issue has nothing to do with Microsoft. The issue has to do with a failure by T-Mobile with a vendor (that happens to be Microsoft). How T-Mobile ever approved a contract with the appropriate backup software, hardware, DR plan and testing is the bigger issue. Microsoft likely provided exactly the level of support that T-Mobile paid for, and I'm willing to bet that T-Mobile balked at these proposed charges from Microsoft and went with the cheaper option without the backup expenses. If your a CIO you use this as an example of why you pay for backup and disaster recovery services.
There are many backup and recovery products that work with Microsoft products just as their are for the various flavors of *nix. Best practices can and should be vendor neutral and your post is completely misguided. This should be a lesson learned for those involved in best practices and reckless management decisions. All that being said, Microsoft never should have agreed to a contract without the appropriate backup clauses in place. If microsoft did have those clauses in the contract, than they violated their contract in a very public way and you will be reading about the lawsuit from T-Mobile all too soon.
With the overhead of DRM and other measures that suck cpu cycles on a heavy basis, we'll never get close to the limit. Can we get a new Moore's law, one that includes the DRM tax on our CPU cycles?
I have watched a complete lack of microsoft support for open source software for over a decade now. I've seen how people struggled with reverse engineering microsoft's products and struggling even more to do so in a manner that Microsoft can't come back on them for stealing code. I've watched products like Wine for years as they have learned about many undocumented features and bugs the hard way. I was not defending Microsoft, I never said they had a good record. I said they finally started to do the right thing and people should applaud now that they have extended meaningful cooperation to the world beyond windows. In the eyes of someone like Microsoft it comes across as a slap in the face and is the kind of behavior that justifies their lack of cooperation to begin with.
A trap? MS spent a week of developer time in cooperation with a Linux team for the express purpose of allowing interoperability. This is a level of cooperation that has previously been unheard of in the Linux community, with well publicized lawsuits filed in an attempt to get a hint of cooperation. Microsoft working with the Linux community at this level has previously only been dreamed of.
All this and some idiot has the audacity to think it might be a trap? For goodness sake, be grateful that it was possible at all. When someone finally does the right thing, give them credit and stop coming across as a whiny ungrateful brat.
Rereading your right about TARP, that was done under W right before the end of the administration and I was wrong for the credit given. As for the automakers though I think your figure is a bit high. I've done a bit of googling and I'm having trouble finding amounts that go beyond 30 billion or so at the high end. Add up direct loans to GM and Chrysler as well partmakers and aid for developing hybrid car technology and even aid going to companies like Tesla and I still can't get figures that get that high.
Point being as far as I can tell Obama hasn't accomplished anything noteworthy on the national level, much less international. I simply cannot see any reason (even one I would disagree with) for giving him a Nobel other than anti Bush sentiment. Once upon a time Nobel prizes were given for grand things like Nuclear arms reductions treaties and ending wars and not to make political statements against leaders no longer in office.
Seriously, what on earth has he done to win such a prize? He has brokered no treaties, he has resolved no conflicts, he hasn't even particularly changed foreign policy with Iraq and Afghanistan. Even the crown jewel of his agenda, closing Gitmo. Having gotten into office he's discovered the world is more complicated that a sound bite for a political stage allows.
For all his talk his biggest accomplishment so far is bailing out the banks to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars - if anything that would be economic. I'm no W supporter, but what possible cause is there for this other than anti-W sentiment?
Offer it as a bribe, perhaps if he does well in school or the like. It sounds like you already have made up your mind about the product not meeting your needs. Certainly things like the linux project would be at best pure hack value, and not much for practical use. If you want to do that, find the right ps3 and relish in a vendor that doesn't actively fight alternate os's and lets you install Linux without all the hassle.
Horrible, a piece of technology could be abused if used in a certain way by evil and nefarious bad guys. We'll have to ban this wireless technology just in case they're out to get us. Breakout the crowbars, put on the night vision goggles, prep the bolt cutters for backup and defend yourself with the glass cutter before they break in. Tinfoil hats to the rescue!
They are excellent targets, and getting these companies to cooperate with international anti-fraud efforts would be a huge win. Without doubt they are the favored methods of 419 scammers and many other scammers for their ability to send money internationally. That being said, sending money through one of these services isn't nearly as convenient or automated as sending money through a credit card. Whilst you may see larger transactions through those services, they can't begin to compare to the sheer volume of traffic of the credit card companies.
People write malware because it is profitable to so. Regardless of how a machine has been owned, it typically boils down to one of two uses, a botnet or hijacking financial data. The easiest way to do this is get people to submit their own credit card details voluntarily through a webform. While the hosted pages are typically fake, the billing is almost always real, and this should be the target.
Enable companies to watch and report on the merchants accounts where malware authors get there money from. Somehow get the big credit card companies to become proactive about shutting them down without a several month investigation. I've done credit fraud in a former career, it's remarkably easy to detect and find. All of this could be fairly easily detected by the credit card companies if they could be bothered.
The biggest problem is that they can't be bothered as the fraud is profitable for them. Even in the event of a chargeback they can still make money and the administrative costs they occur are nothing compared to the profit they receive. Cut off the source of funding for malware authors quickly instead of slowly and the profit motive for writing malware will take a hit.
You can still perform plenty of validation testing irrespective of what platform a person has used. If a given person can't figure out what your trying to do with the tools provided than the software needs work. When I used to do work for a manufacturer we took people off of the assembly line or equivalent, made sure they knew nothing about computers and used them to perform the testing. If they couldn't figure things out on their own, the test was considered a failure. Blaming the platform or the userbase is a sign of a poor developer, it's no different than blaming your tools.
The entire point of such testing is to remove assumptions and find out what happens in the real world with people that don't have the programmers base line knowledge. Developers have a way of assuming a given level of knowledge that users simply don't have. That's why people like Mark Shuttleworth have done so well, they've presented Linux in a way that simply doesn't require that baseline knowledge. The issue is not whether or not a given tool is capable, well written, more efficient or otherwise. The point he is trying to make is that the issue of acceptance and use by the masses comes down to usability by the masses (documentation can and should heavily influence this).
If your making software only intended for highly trained users that will go to school to learn how to use it (SQL, CAD etc.) usability may not matter as much because you can assume the user has a baseline of knowledge. If your not making software that requires specialized schooling to use, than you should be testing software in a manner as suggested.
Celebrate that the principals of network neutrality are finally getting airtime and understand that now is the time for increased scrutiny lest we give legal reasons to block the very things that they are trying to open.
If a medium is presented that interacts with something it must be patched! The more prevalent the medium, the higher the level of patching required.
Whether that medium is email, your browser, the OS, office or the like should not matter. It doesn't matter if a new killer app comes out, if it interacts with your computers, you need to patch it for security issues on a routine basis.
Really, the OS, vendor, and the rest don't matter, what matters is that routine patching is done. At first people were surprised that they could get malware from disks, than files, than emaal, infected Internet sites and so on. Is it really a surprise to anyone that you applications like Acrobat and Flash are routinely targeted? Every time the media presents this as the 'next big thing', really how did this not story get approved?
You know how much work this took on my part? Very little - this fell under "other duties" while I worked there, and I was the only person at the time who worked these. The vendors like Amazon are refusing to help seeing only an expense and a loss of sales. This sheer and utter greed on their part with justifiable reason. If they can't do this because it's the right thing, than somebody needs to legislate good companies morals on their part.
This was truly an unfortunate necessity for the best interest of civil liberties. The reasoning that this case was presented would have made criminals of a great many people for things that should not be criminalized. I understand the charges would have essentially criminalized breaking TOS for a web site, something that simply should not be a criminal action. Will used against this evil bitch who does richly deserve prison, it would set a bad legal precedent.
That being said, I would still like to find a way to charge her with something appropriate, such as a lesser murder charge, as well as holding her civilly responsible (such as how oj still got held civilly) responsible for the murders he committed)
That's debatable, if you give a false social security number you could legally be guilty of fraud. That being said, you are not required to give your social security number for most things and can actively refuse to do so. I don't recall the list off the top of my head, but very few entities have a legal right to get your social security number. Best thing to do when asked is to respond with "refused", most reps will simply check with their supervisor and move on.
Off the top I know anything to do with taxes or financial transactions (investments, checking accounts etc) are required to get it. Research the law on this one, and I think a policy of refusal is something you can do fairly well. The other thing you can do for some transactions is get a Federal Tax ID no, it fits the format of a Social Security number, just be aware you can't always subsitute it for your social security number.
As for your social already given out, getting rid of that would be next to impossible, agencies use that to pass on information to credit bureaus and the like. Think of it as being like trying to delete an email that you sent last week, the odds are really against you.
Sure, these can be done fairly easily. One of the most common types of fraud I encountered was where a parent would take credit out in the name of their own child. The parent figures their in the clear, and denies responsibility when it comes time to pay. Meanwhile the child may not find out until they turn 18 years and suffer a bad experience. I had many instances where I would get hold of someone around 18-20 years old and tell them what was going on.
It's a terrible position to be in, your 18 years old, quite possibly still living at home, and discover that your own mother or father took out 10-20 thousand dollars worth of debt in your name. The way the law works is that you are not responsible for fraud ($50 limit can apply in some cases) as long as you file a fraud report. The net result of this is you end up with a kid in the position of having the file a fraud report with the police knowing that their own parents could go to prison. It's a terrible position to put someone in, but without the fraud report and police report there is nothing that can be done.
These things can also apply in situations where someone has "no credit". Typically a person with no credit still has credit, even if they have never taken out a loan. You would have records from getting a checking account, paying your utilities (this is becoming far more common and will soon be standard practice), renting an apartment, cell phone and so on. Even if you had none of the above (you use cash only) you would discover that many creditors will give someone with no credit a $2-300 credit line regardless.
A determined identity thief will even build up your credit on your behalf, paying the small bill over a course of a year or two until they can get your credit improved to the point were you start qualifying for $1000+ credit on credit cards. In essence they pay some of your bills they give you on your behalf until such time as they can walk out on several thousand dollar plus credit accounts. By all means, even someone with no credit should monitor their credit report (even if only the annual credit report you get for free).
Many years back I worked as a skiptracer / fraud researcher for a well known credit card company. The short of the answer is that with a social security number a person can readily learn a persons private financial details by pulling a credit report.
There is no mechanism that prevents companies from doing so, they 'self authenticate' as it were. Unlike a person who must provide details to prove that they really are who they claim they are. All a business has to do either claim you have given your consent or that you owe them money and they gain full access to your private credit report.
With a credit report alone I can tell everything from what kind of car you own (as most people finance) to where you live, where you have lived, what your lifestyle choices are, where you shop and so on. It's a pretty thorough invasion of privacy. Using additional services I can gain other information about you such as property you own, tax records, court records, family records, residence, an unscrupulous person could even find out your health records. In ten to fifteen minutes I have a very telling picture of your life, whether you want someone to have it or not.
The bottom line is that with a social security number there is very little about a person that cannot be readily discerned in a very short period of time. Unethical people will quickly cross the line, checking things that they shouldn't or, even stealing your identity.
You really need to ask yourself if you want a professional or a peon? You write your question as if you want someone you can piss on, that tells me you want a peon. Heck, you'll save money on the peon, you can get one from any local technical college, they might even know what they're doing.
If you want a professional and don't want to pay for one, your outsourcing some part time work. You get a portion of a professionals time, that makes you a part time customer, a small fry for the outsourcing company. They are essentially offering a courtesy to you at all to work on your network in the off chance your company grows as this will leave them in a good position.
The bottom line is that professionals that live in your country need to be trusted, they have to much to lose. Most professionals will undergo a background check one to every two years. No professional is going to destroy their livelihood by leaking something like your customer list. No professional is going to risk going to prison or getting sued for crossing the line as long as they live in the same country as you. They will lose their ability for references. Outsource to India and the like and all bets are off, there's no reputation to maintain.
Really, the question is why would your customers trust your company, and is a professional service really any different?
The biggest problem is that the vendors you are talking to are being honest and setting your expectations and you don't like what your hearing. Your about to discover how every extra service has an additional charge and you'll quickly bury yourself in extra fees in the event your company does grow. If you want to position yourself for growth and don't want to be sunk under a slew of fees you should hire a professional in house and then trust them to do their job.
The 230 figure is designed to account for how most people will drive the vehicle and uses a government standard test methodology. The important thing is that the same test is applied to all equivalent vehicles. Since 90% of people drive 40 or fewer miles in a day, it's not an unreasonable number if recharged as designed.
If you wanted a better figure of how it would last for a day's worth of driving you could take the total driven range and divide that out to get miles per gallon. Perhaps even quote it with a qualifier as something like 100MPG/300kWh to account for the electrical contribution (my figures are made up but you get the idea). This would allow to easily account for the cost of the electricity as well as the extended range from batteries and post battery range once you have drained the initial charge.
Regardless of how you interpret the results the car is impressive even if it is too expensive. Give it a few years and you should be able to get something like this for a lot less money. I've already talked over with my wife and we want to get a vehicle like this and solar panels on the roof in about three years when costs drop. I figure it should drop my monthly expenses a fair bit and be good for the environment.
I do not have "trouble" with any particular posting, instead it is the principal of the thing. When you think about it, wikileaks goes against any IT best practice, and it certainly goes against any geek value. They are getting a free ride and sympathy from a crowd where they don't deserve it. The fact that you may think it's a hoot that your personal bad guy had his secrets exposed today should be irrelevant. If someone is breaking the law and using secrecy to protect themselves, well they too can fall (Nixon very nicely feel well before wikileaks). It's also down to a matter of judgment on who gets to decide what.
Lets say you work for company and your coworker who was denied a promotion decides to leak your companies R&D results for an upcoming product (say your company just invented a way to make plastics that biodegrade more readily). Well your company just put millions into research for a product that is now going to made by a Chinese company that has to pay none of the research cost, and can skip straight to production. It's going to be your job on the line when your company can't compete. While you may consider that information secret and of no business to the world at large, your Chinese competitor would consider such a thing as being ideal for leaking.
The number of examples are endless, it's only a matter of time before R&D is leaked prevalently. When you remove your companies secrets, you remove much of your companies competitive advantage and you now have to compete on cost alone. Now pause and think about your job, and those of your friends and family, how many of those jobs would be gone? What if you were in the military instead and someone decided to leak secrets that protect you and your buddies in a time of war?
Surely he wont mind if we leak his personal information to the site. Since he is a person of note (after all wikileaks is worldwide) he's fair game, right? While were at it we can leak personal detail of Jimmy Wales, after all the world has the right to know anybodies personal and secret details. Who are you to dare attempt to have privacy, to not want your life exposed and open to the world for it's amusement?
Site like wikileaks are the parasites of the technology world, their entire existence is based solely based on publishing private information and breaking trust. These values are otherwise held in contempt by most people in the IT and geek communities, so why on earth does wikileaks get the time of day on a site like slashdot? Just remember that because you may not like whatever evil corp / country has something published today, it could well be an organization or individual you like tomorrow.
I fail to see how the site is any better than any number of carders sites where credit cards are sold wholesale. I really have to ask, where do they draw the line? What is to heinous for wikileaks to publish? How about detailed descriptions of the making and distribution of nerve gas in a military manner? After all that's been government domain information since at least world war one. What would they do if Iran or North Korea in a spate of indignation decided to post their detail nuclear weapon secrets on wikileaks?