Who are you arguing with? Who is going to backpedal?
Based on your comment it seems that you don't support the idea that the courts act in the best interest of the corporations. That's my stance too. Pretty sure thats the stance of everyone in this thread. I'm not sure who your comments are directed at.
Does a teller at JP Morgan think about the ethical implications of their work?
Does a cashier at WalMart think about the ethical implications of their work?
In both examples a person that is in no way responsible for the overall direction of the company is facilitating the daily operations of the company that will commit unethical acts.
We cant just ask Engineers to sacrifice their careers because some whiny Journalist/Engineer is having a moral crisis. Our entire society is unethical. We buy clothes that were made by people working for less than $100 a month, living in concrete rooms smaller than most jail cells, who were forced into that labor by their parents. We shop at companies who are lobbying to oppress workers rights. We use electronics made by children and people who would rather kill themselves than continue working at Foxconn.
Get off of your fucking high horse and stop acting like an Engineer is any different than a Banker or a CEO or a cashier. We are all players in the same fuckedup game.
Just because they do things you don't agree with doesn't mean they aren't activists. Being an activist, criminal, and "asshat" are not mutually exclusive and depending on your viewpoint a lot of activists are asshats. I'm sure that in the US there were some white southerners who considered MLK Jr. to be an asshat. Lot's of people consider Greenpeace and PETA to be both activists and asshats. Lots of people consider the ACLU to be activists and asshats. Lots of people dont.
This leads to prosecutors and judges overreacting against things they don't understand very well and juries overreacting to punish people due to not really understanding what they did.
I don't assume that the prosecutors and judges are overreacting because they don't understand technology. I think they understand completely that it is in the corporation's best interests to have disproportionate penalties for online activism compared to meatspace activism. They already lost the fight in meatspace, protests get a lot of coverage and it is really bad PR to see police pepper spraying protesters. I think they have the clear goal of establishing that online protests/activism will not be tolerated and the penalties will be much more severe than a meatspace protest.
Imagine if online protests become an accepted form of civil disobedience? It would be much more difficult to control the masses because they could participate anonymously from their couch. Compare that to an old fashioned protest where people have to miss work and travel and stay outside and sometimes tolerate brutal police action. The masses complaints might actually be addressed instead of ignored.
The objective here isn't to punish anyone proportionally to the crimes they committed. The whole point of online activists having the book thrown at them is to deter future activists.
The corporations already feel like meatspace activists have too many rights, so it is imperative to set a precedent that online activism will be dealt with harshly.
Because it isn't clear from TFA: The US was in control of the sub when it was scuttled by Hawaii. It had been captured when Japan surrendered.
This is really cool because it's a piece of history and an engineering accomplishment but the only reason it was 'lost' was because the US sank it and then pretended that they forgot where they sank it so that they didn't have to give it back and have the Soviets study it.
The cause is that society emphasizes success in your career, whether it be academic or professional, over your personal relationships and life. The effect is that test scores are high and the amount of "scoring" is low.
Most people consider Japan's population growth to be an issue compromising their economic future. There is a fear that there will not be enough young workers to pay into the social safety net programs for the old. The growth problems are usually attributed to the pressures of Japanese society. There is a lot of pressure to study, get into a good school, study, get into a good university, study, and then get a good job then work your ass off. Where is there time to develop relationships and social skills? I have heard Japanese people say "There isn't time to have a relationship with someone from the opposite sex, we are working too much."
Lots of studying seems to pay off in terms of excellent test scores. Does it encourage personal happiness? What are the unintended effects of emphasizing academic performance so much?
However, it is a core tenet of the buyer/seller relationship for advertisements to be accurate, and promises to be upheld. Without these expectations in place, it's impossible to conduct good business, for buyers would pay with fool's gold, and sellers would sell snake oil. The word "scam", almost by definition, indicates that these expectations have not been met.
My point is that in the scenarios I listed the Seller is disingenuous and it has become normal for the Seller to be disingenuous. It is common and accepted for a seller to exploit a lack of domain knowledge of a customer to gain a favorable bargaining position. If it is a core tenet of the buyer/seller relationship to be accurate then most of our interactions with companies are in violation of the tenets of the relationship.
I've seen several of these kinds of things where the contractors essentially knew there was no way to deliver the system on-time and on-budget. They just seem to build in the fact that once the client realizes it, the sunk cost is high enough they get to have a gravy train for some time to come.
It's not fraud, per se, but it's carefully managing the terms of your engagement with the knowledge the customer will end having to pay more and not really have much of a choice.
Sadly, it almost seems to be standard practice in the industry.
That's exactly what I'm talking about, I agree completely. I would like more discourse on the troubling fact that disingenuity is prevalent and accepted (and maybe encouraged) in our society and the public, goverment, and other companies are materially victimized by it.
Of course there are always going to be scammers, but when the largest, most profitable, most recognized, and most entrenched players are the ones who exemplify disenguinty and deceit maybe we should ask ourselves what we can do to affect positive change.
I think we as a society are wrestling with this question: If an entity with obvious motivations to make money off of you disingenuously provides services or goods that do not meet the original expectations or are vastly inappropriate, whose fault is it?
Examples:
You go to buy a car and the salesman tricks you into buying the "rust proofing" or some other nonsense addon that really doesn't add any value.
You go to buy a used car and the salesman sells you a car that he knows is a POS, that might be lucky to make it another 10000 miles.
You go to bestbuy and buy a $50 6' HDMI cable.
You go online and buy $500 speaker wire because the website said the electrons flow better
You take your car to the shop and the mechanic tells you it will cost $1000 to "calibrate your zener filter".
You ask your Cisco rep for advice on gear for your new expansion office, he sells you $50,000 of enterprise equipment for an office of 10.
Your PC is slow and you click on and pay for the "Speed up your PC by clicking on this button" scam.
You pay GeekSquad to do anything.
You pay for the extended warranty that doesn't actually cover anything extra and contains language that prevents you from making a claim in 99% of cases.
Comcast tells you that you have to get the 50 Mbps service or else you wont have enough bandwidth to facebook with your friends, they actually provide 50Mbps for a split second then you get maybe 10% of your advertised capacity.
I don't think any of the above examples are legally fraud. And I think in most of those examples we have agreed that no matter how much it pisses us off and we know it is unethical, companies have no obligation to not rip you off: buyer beware. The exception I can think of is signing a contract with a SLA or something, which is really rare on the consumer level and it seems really rare for the government to require.
In my group there is a person with that specific responsibility. They communicate the possibility of not meeting a deadline and make contingency plans to get the best result given the circumstances.
That person should be fired, and IIRC they have already resigned.
Now find senior advisors who weren't responsible for communicating the risks but knew about them anyways. Ask them why they didn't communicate the risks to the President and based on their answer either fire them or reprimand them.
Send the message that there will be accountability. Why is that important? Unfortunately, be it in Government or the private sector, there is a culture of "that wasn't my job". Everyone knows the project will fail, every single fucking person from the junior engineer to the senior project director know. But everyone winks at each other across the table at meetings and agrees that "failure is not an option, it will be done on time". And inside their heads and within their small groups everyone is saying "well it's not my job to sound the alarm". There is no incentive to take that political hit and say "Boss, we might have told you several times that everything is OK but honestly there are some severe risks to launching by the deadline and we need to start planning for a delay or reduction in features". Instead, when shit hits the fan it's like a mexican gunfight, everyone points a finger at someone else and says "well he knew too" or "that wasn't my job to bring up that this would never work."
Engineering is hard, failure happens. It really shouldn't be punished (except where people just failed to do their jobs), instead it should be learned from so that the same mistakes are not made again.
One day, when software engineering management is a real discipline, they will pound it into the heads of MBAs and PMPs that failure is not only an option, its the most common result so make sure the lines of communication are open, that people feel comfortable communicating risks and saying no, and that all the stakeholders know that the engineers cannot travel through time, so if you start a 1 year project 9 months before you want it to launch then you are SOL and have to pick what features are most important.
I hate "you have more than one number one priority" more than "failure is not an option" and I feel people who say one usually say the other.
How is getting an MCSE any more or less useful than taking any other elective in Shop or Band or Home Ec'?
They still have to take the three R's to graduate. You don't get to skip your civics class to take one of these...
It's less useful because you didn't take Shop where you only learned how to use Milwaukee brand tools. You didn't take Cooking and only learn to use KitchenAid products.
Haahha, do you really think that the same corporations who wrote the DMCA would allow language in the law that would allow it to be used against them?
Even if there was a sound civil case against them, the reason the government rarely files charges against big corporations is that it would be a net loss of money even if the government won. Forget about a criminal case, the bar is way too high. Rich C*Os don't go to prison unless you really f up like the guys at Enron. (Jeffrey Skilling went to my high school! whoo were famous!!!)
The most that would come out of this is a settlement where WB denies any wrong doing.
Is there huge public backlash against Citizens United? Are people marching in the streets against corporate "lobbying"? Are people dumping Comcast because they disagree with their business practices? Will people come out in droves to denounce McGinn's opponent for benefiting from sweet corporate cash? Are the corporations who will do _anything_ to make a profit getting the message that the public disagrees with their business practices?
No.
Stories like this make me upset, because its the same as story about one soldier dying in a war where millions of soldiers are killed. This is one tiny example of how business works in America. Every day in every federal, state, county, and city goverment shit like this happens. Lets have a discussion about that.
The IT world article explains that the fake account was an attractive woman. The victims who exposed their organizations to attack were men who were trying to "help" this attractive woman in her new position.
New security measure: male employees are castrated upon hire. They tried the same attack with a male profile and received no hits.
Aside from that interesting bit, we have heard this story over and over again: Large organizations contain at least a few stupid people. Those stupid people, who are mostly well intentioned, work around security measures and run Java applets to see the company Christmas card, a card that is actually an attack.
FaceBook asked the world to raise your hand if you are ok with them using all of your information and habits to get you to click on ads, and every FB account was a hand raised. Even if you only use it to "stay in touch with family and close friends", "I never click ads", "I run AdBlockPlus" ect... You are a number they use to get more money.
If you are hiring a cheap bottom feeder from India, all I can say is "All the best". The low quality work will blow up in your face 1-2 years from now, and no amount of patchwork will fix it.
Then you will go to a bar after your layoff and lament how you only get cheap unskilled monkeys from India. But the fact is you are the retard who went bottom feeding and found only slime.
The people who hire the "cheap bottom feeder from India" won't be laid off, they are the ones doing the layoffs. The people mandating that we use the Indian slave labor are 2 levels below CEO. CEO->CTO->Director. Anyone below that has no choice, besides a mass exodus.
I might be trolling a bit.
I'm also the exact opposite of most people here on Slashdot Conservative, debt-free, military served, pro-gun, pro life, etc etc, lol.
And I've never heard of the McD principle, lol.
China's military capability is growing and we need to be on watch for that.
I seriously can't tell if you're trolling or not, and I'm sorry if you're not but in order for China to even be a minor threat to us they would need to be able to project force beyond their borders, and that requires aircraft carriers, supply ships, and global logistical support. Since their only aircraft carrier is non-operational militarily, and video of their newest fighter jet was stolen from Top Gun, there is nothing to be concerned about. Maybe if I was Taiwan I would be worried, but China is no where near capable of being a threat to the US. Purely militarily speaking of course.
Beyond that, our economies are interdependent. China and the US will not go to war in the foreseeable future for both military and economic reasons.
Besides, the McDonalds principle will prevail: no two nations that have McDonalds have gone to war with each other since the McDonalds was built.
Throw an exec in jail because of this? Absolutely not
I guess I disagree. As a CEO you are responsible for the actions of your company. You sanctioned a plan to use software to recover your property and did not put adequate safeguards or training in place to prevent abuse of that software. As CEO you are responsible.
Slashdot Mirror
Who are you arguing with? Who is going to backpedal?
Based on your comment it seems that you don't support the idea that the courts act in the best interest of the corporations. That's my stance too. Pretty sure thats the stance of everyone in this thread. I'm not sure who your comments are directed at.
Does a teller at JP Morgan think about the ethical implications of their work?
Does a cashier at WalMart think about the ethical implications of their work?
In both examples a person that is in no way responsible for the overall direction of the company is facilitating the daily operations of the company that will commit unethical acts.
We cant just ask Engineers to sacrifice their careers because some whiny Journalist/Engineer is having a moral crisis. Our entire society is unethical. We buy clothes that were made by people working for less than $100 a month, living in concrete rooms smaller than most jail cells, who were forced into that labor by their parents. We shop at companies who are lobbying to oppress workers rights. We use electronics made by children and people who would rather kill themselves than continue working at Foxconn.
Get off of your fucking high horse and stop acting like an Engineer is any different than a Banker or a CEO or a cashier. We are all players in the same fuckedup game.
Just because they do things you don't agree with doesn't mean they aren't activists. Being an activist, criminal, and "asshat" are not mutually exclusive and depending on your viewpoint a lot of activists are asshats. I'm sure that in the US there were some white southerners who considered MLK Jr. to be an asshat. Lot's of people consider Greenpeace and PETA to be both activists and asshats. Lots of people consider the ACLU to be activists and asshats. Lots of people dont.
This leads to prosecutors and judges overreacting against things they don't understand very well and juries overreacting to punish people due to not really understanding what they did.
I don't assume that the prosecutors and judges are overreacting because they don't understand technology. I think they understand completely that it is in the corporation's best interests to have disproportionate penalties for online activism compared to meatspace activism. They already lost the fight in meatspace, protests get a lot of coverage and it is really bad PR to see police pepper spraying protesters. I think they have the clear goal of establishing that online protests/activism will not be tolerated and the penalties will be much more severe than a meatspace protest.
Imagine if online protests become an accepted form of civil disobedience? It would be much more difficult to control the masses because they could participate anonymously from their couch. Compare that to an old fashioned protest where people have to miss work and travel and stay outside and sometimes tolerate brutal police action. The masses complaints might actually be addressed instead of ignored.
The objective here isn't to punish anyone proportionally to the crimes they committed. The whole point of online activists having the book thrown at them is to deter future activists.
The corporations already feel like meatspace activists have too many rights, so it is imperative to set a precedent that online activism will be dealt with harshly.
Because it isn't clear from TFA: The US was in control of the sub when it was scuttled by Hawaii. It had been captured when Japan surrendered.
This is really cool because it's a piece of history and an engineering accomplishment but the only reason it was 'lost' was because the US sank it and then pretended that they forgot where they sank it so that they didn't have to give it back and have the Soviets study it.
The cause is that society emphasizes success in your career, whether it be academic or professional, over your personal relationships and life. The effect is that test scores are high and the amount of "scoring" is low.
Most people consider Japan's population growth to be an issue compromising their economic future. There is a fear that there will not be enough young workers to pay into the social safety net programs for the old. The growth problems are usually attributed to the pressures of Japanese society. There is a lot of pressure to study, get into a good school, study, get into a good university, study, and then get a good job then work your ass off. Where is there time to develop relationships and social skills? I have heard Japanese people say "There isn't time to have a relationship with someone from the opposite sex, we are working too much."
Lots of studying seems to pay off in terms of excellent test scores. Does it encourage personal happiness? What are the unintended effects of emphasizing academic performance so much?
South Korea has the highest suicide rate of any developed nation.
Japan is on track to experience negative population growth.
What do all these wonderfully educated youth have to look forward to besides leaving their native country to go find somewhere they can actually live
However, it is a core tenet of the buyer/seller relationship for advertisements to be accurate, and promises to be upheld. Without these expectations in place, it's impossible to conduct good business, for buyers would pay with fool's gold, and sellers would sell snake oil. The word "scam", almost by definition, indicates that these expectations have not been met.
My point is that in the scenarios I listed the Seller is disingenuous and it has become normal for the Seller to be disingenuous. It is common and accepted for a seller to exploit a lack of domain knowledge of a customer to gain a favorable bargaining position. If it is a core tenet of the buyer/seller relationship to be accurate then most of our interactions with companies are in violation of the tenets of the relationship.
I've seen several of these kinds of things where the contractors essentially knew there was no way to deliver the system on-time and on-budget. They just seem to build in the fact that once the client realizes it, the sunk cost is high enough they get to have a gravy train for some time to come.
It's not fraud, per se, but it's carefully managing the terms of your engagement with the knowledge the customer will end having to pay more and not really have much of a choice.
Sadly, it almost seems to be standard practice in the industry.
That's exactly what I'm talking about, I agree completely. I would like more discourse on the troubling fact that disingenuity is prevalent and accepted (and maybe encouraged) in our society and the public, goverment, and other companies are materially victimized by it.
Of course there are always going to be scammers, but when the largest, most profitable, most recognized, and most entrenched players are the ones who exemplify disenguinty and deceit maybe we should ask ourselves what we can do to affect positive change.
I think we as a society are wrestling with this question: If an entity with obvious motivations to make money off of you disingenuously provides services or goods that do not meet the original expectations or are vastly inappropriate, whose fault is it?
Examples:
You go to buy a car and the salesman tricks you into buying the "rust proofing" or some other nonsense addon that really doesn't add any value.
You go to buy a used car and the salesman sells you a car that he knows is a POS, that might be lucky to make it another 10000 miles.
You go to bestbuy and buy a $50 6' HDMI cable.
You go online and buy $500 speaker wire because the website said the electrons flow better
You take your car to the shop and the mechanic tells you it will cost $1000 to "calibrate your zener filter".
You ask your Cisco rep for advice on gear for your new expansion office, he sells you $50,000 of enterprise equipment for an office of 10.
Your PC is slow and you click on and pay for the "Speed up your PC by clicking on this button" scam.
You pay GeekSquad to do anything.
You pay for the extended warranty that doesn't actually cover anything extra and contains language that prevents you from making a claim in 99% of cases.
Comcast tells you that you have to get the 50 Mbps service or else you wont have enough bandwidth to facebook with your friends, they actually provide 50Mbps for a split second then you get maybe 10% of your advertised capacity.
I don't think any of the above examples are legally fraud. And I think in most of those examples we have agreed that no matter how much it pisses us off and we know it is unethical, companies have no obligation to not rip you off: buyer beware. The exception I can think of is signing a contract with a SLA or something, which is really rare on the consumer level and it seems really rare for the government to require.
You don't have to buy anything!
Don't stress out, don't skip spending time with your family and friends, don't become part of a violent mob.
You don't have to. You aren't defined by your possessions.
In my group there is a person with that specific responsibility. They communicate the possibility of not meeting a deadline and make contingency plans to get the best result given the circumstances.
That person should be fired, and IIRC they have already resigned.
Now find senior advisors who weren't responsible for communicating the risks but knew about them anyways. Ask them why they didn't communicate the risks to the President and based on their answer either fire them or reprimand them.
Send the message that there will be accountability. Why is that important? Unfortunately, be it in Government or the private sector, there is a culture of "that wasn't my job". Everyone knows the project will fail, every single fucking person from the junior engineer to the senior project director know. But everyone winks at each other across the table at meetings and agrees that "failure is not an option, it will be done on time". And inside their heads and within their small groups everyone is saying "well it's not my job to sound the alarm". There is no incentive to take that political hit and say "Boss, we might have told you several times that everything is OK but honestly there are some severe risks to launching by the deadline and we need to start planning for a delay or reduction in features". Instead, when shit hits the fan it's like a mexican gunfight, everyone points a finger at someone else and says "well he knew too" or "that wasn't my job to bring up that this would never work."
Engineering is hard, failure happens. It really shouldn't be punished (except where people just failed to do their jobs), instead it should be learned from so that the same mistakes are not made again.
One day, when software engineering management is a real discipline, they will pound it into the heads of MBAs and PMPs that failure is not only an option, its the most common result so make sure the lines of communication are open, that people feel comfortable communicating risks and saying no, and that all the stakeholders know that the engineers cannot travel through time, so if you start a 1 year project 9 months before you want it to launch then you are SOL and have to pick what features are most important.
I hate "you have more than one number one priority" more than "failure is not an option" and I feel people who say one usually say the other.
As a young person, getting ahead these days requires cunning and deceit. Do not fail to use these methods when necessary.
It just struck me as disappointing that this is a popular attitude.
How is getting an MCSE any more or less useful than taking any other elective in Shop or Band or Home Ec'?
They still have to take the three R's to graduate. You don't get to skip your civics class to take one of these...
It's less useful because you didn't take Shop where you only learned how to use Milwaukee brand tools. You didn't take Cooking and only learn to use KitchenAid products.
Haahha, do you really think that the same corporations who wrote the DMCA would allow language in the law that would allow it to be used against them?
Even if there was a sound civil case against them, the reason the government rarely files charges against big corporations is that it would be a net loss of money even if the government won. Forget about a criminal case, the bar is way too high. Rich C*Os don't go to prison unless you really f up like the guys at Enron. (Jeffrey Skilling went to my high school! whoo were famous!!!)
The most that would come out of this is a settlement where WB denies any wrong doing.
I feel like I have been put on the list just for reading this. But then I realize I'm already on the list for everything else I read on the internet.
I would be expecting the NSA to be cracking Bitcoin / TOR as we speak to prosecute people for material support of terrorism.
Is there huge public backlash against Citizens United? Are people marching in the streets against corporate "lobbying"? Are people dumping Comcast because they disagree with their business practices? Will people come out in droves to denounce McGinn's opponent for benefiting from sweet corporate cash? Are the corporations who will do _anything_ to make a profit getting the message that the public disagrees with their business practices?
No.
Stories like this make me upset, because its the same as story about one soldier dying in a war where millions of soldiers are killed. This is one tiny example of how business works in America. Every day in every federal, state, county, and city goverment shit like this happens. Lets have a discussion about that.
The IT world article explains that the fake account was an attractive woman. The victims who exposed their organizations to attack were men who were trying to "help" this attractive woman in her new position.
New security measure: male employees are castrated upon hire. They tried the same attack with a male profile and received no hits.
Aside from that interesting bit, we have heard this story over and over again: Large organizations contain at least a few stupid people. Those stupid people, who are mostly well intentioned, work around security measures and run Java applets to see the company Christmas card, a card that is actually an attack.
FaceBook asked the world to raise your hand if you are ok with them using all of your information and habits to get you to click on ads, and every FB account was a hand raised. Even if you only use it to "stay in touch with family and close friends", "I never click ads", "I run AdBlockPlus" ect... You are a number they use to get more money.
If you are hiring a cheap bottom feeder from India, all I can say is "All the best". The low quality work will blow up in your face 1-2 years from now, and no amount of patchwork will fix it. Then you will go to a bar after your layoff and lament how you only get cheap unskilled monkeys from India. But the fact is you are the retard who went bottom feeding and found only slime.
The people who hire the "cheap bottom feeder from India" won't be laid off, they are the ones doing the layoffs. The people mandating that we use the Indian slave labor are 2 levels below CEO. CEO->CTO->Director. Anyone below that has no choice, besides a mass exodus.
I might be trolling a bit. I'm also the exact opposite of most people here on Slashdot Conservative, debt-free, military served, pro-gun, pro life, etc etc, lol. And I've never heard of the McD principle, lol.
I guess it's called the Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention but I was joking anways. Im sure that theory doesn't hold true.
China's military capability is growing and we need to be on watch for that.
I seriously can't tell if you're trolling or not, and I'm sorry if you're not but in order for China to even be a minor threat to us they would need to be able to project force beyond their borders, and that requires aircraft carriers, supply ships, and global logistical support. Since their only aircraft carrier is non-operational militarily, and video of their newest fighter jet was stolen from Top Gun, there is nothing to be concerned about. Maybe if I was Taiwan I would be worried, but China is no where near capable of being a threat to the US. Purely militarily speaking of course.
Beyond that, our economies are interdependent. China and the US will not go to war in the foreseeable future for both military and economic reasons.
Besides, the McDonalds principle will prevail: no two nations that have McDonalds have gone to war with each other since the McDonalds was built.
Throw an exec in jail because of this? Absolutely not
I guess I disagree. As a CEO you are responsible for the actions of your company. You sanctioned a plan to use software to recover your property and did not put adequate safeguards or training in place to prevent abuse of that software. As CEO you are responsible.