My fault I have a higher education than you and am the director of research for a multi-national corporation.
How long did it take you to compose that post in a legible manner? Everything I get at work from big-wigs who smugly assume (even when I'm the one paying for their services, e.g. when I go to the doctor) I'm an illiterate little shit who doesn't deserve the right to spend my hard-earned income on food is usually malformed garbage chock full of incomplete sentences, logical contradictions, and misused punctuation. The net effect over the past 4 years has made me conclude that there's really nothing involved skill-wise in being a CEO or director of sorts. You just need to know the right people in the old boys club. Besides, if you make a poor decision, you can just blame the answering service or get a bailout. No skill involved at all besides hypnotizing the masses that you're somehow better than them and somehow/deserve/ to get money for free.
My co-workers struggle reading emails longer than 2 or 3 sentence (fragments).
I can't even imagine asking them to read 150 pages.
It would be a disaster.
so you have to escape them if you use them for some other purpose?
As I understand it, yes. If you want to write "Dr. Foulmouthjerk cussed out Sue today. Dr. Foulmouthjerk is going to make sure she'll never work in this state again," in LaTeX it's Dr.\ Foulmouthjerk cussed out Sue today. Dr.\ Foulmouthjerk is going to make sure she'll never work in this state again.
My preteen children year old are on firm warning... they can move out of state, but we parents are coming after them and moving into their attics/basements/spare rooms. There is no escape.
If my parents did that, I'd call the cops on them for trespassing just like they did for me. I had to resign a good internship because I wasn't certain where I was living for a few days.
In hindsight, sure, I was stupid to trust them without a written lease. I should have ditched them when I was 16 instead of waiting for them to upset my life with a 0-day move-out notice.
"Air gap" doesn't mean much if you're just using some kind of removable media to transfer information from the insecure world to the secure world, instead of CAT5. If you aren't somehow protecting access to that removable media, your air gap gives you no additional security.
Don't forget to bring human psychology into play. The "air gap" will make people look at the system in question differently. It can be the difference between someone deciding "hey, I can update MyFace on this computer" and "oh, this is technical." That psychology is also viral, e.g. the computer they produce said removable media on will also become "technical."
Kind of an unrelated example, but it made me think. At work last week, we had a client who needed us to go to USPS' website to track orders for people calling in. Some agents refused to do so stating that USPS wasn't an authorized website. Apparently to make it authorized in their view, I had to add a BLUE LINK to it rather than creating a button that launched it with the tracking number they'd typed in. Or maybe that just proves that females are all whiny, lazy drama queens who regularly cause problems and shouldn't be allowed outside of the kitchen.
Agh, I hit the moderate button but I'd already posted some stupid comment that pales in comparison to yours, so I couldn't moderate you +1, Informative. Anyone else want to do the honors?
Ok, here's some people bitching that they have to read crap.
They could be getting paid to be cussed out by callers. Something tells me being cussed out day after day for things you have no control over (and often had no idea about until you figure out why your mother is a whore according to the caller---it takes serious effort sometimes to get a caller to even state what the problem is between hurling insults---often client's won't even state the problem assuming you're too stupid to understand the problem) is probably worse.
But who the hell cares. Only stupid, incompetent people work at call centers, right?
Every time I hear about this my interest is piqued. I've been taking estrogen for almost a decade now, but that was after my skeletal structure was permanently changed by testosterone before I found a doctor who was willing to treat my androgen problem (instead of assuming that more testosterone = GOOD yay testosterone. maybe for some, but not for me.)
Basically, I have a mix of male and female features. On some days guys hit on me because they think I'm cute and like my hair, and on other days females assume I'm a dweeb who just wants sex when I try to be friendly and talk. Funny enough I like the days when guys hit on me better because men are so much more polite than women (even creepy guys are more polite than most women)!
Anyway, I wonder, would this device waste time and money trying to advertise tampons to me? Would it turn me away by showing me attractive women being attracted to a guy who uses a certain deodorant or cologne (probably one I'd find nauseating anyway since I don't like smelling like a guy)?
I suppose it's probably coming to walls near me soon enough, so I guess I get to find out what gender a computer thinks I am. It seems to be a toss-up for you carbon-based lifeforms out there, not that I really mind. Sometimes it's fun trying to guess whether someone will call me ma'am or sir. All in all I guess I don't really care. Sir and ma'am are better than faggot or gaywad. Sometimes I'm in a bad mood, though, so don't be surprised if you call me ma'am and I don't respond because I was sure everyone would be calling me sir that day.
Now if they really had done their homework, it might figure out that I'm not quite male or female and advertise transgender products instead. Maybe if someone wanted to market a line of feminine clothes or something that would fit my body better than something cut for a female. I know, asking their neural net to allow for more than 2 genders in the world? Nonsense! I guess it just proves I'm a self-centered asshole, wanting to be recognized as a valid person who has money to spend and would like to see something advertised with her in mind.
If you had tons of data storage, would you want to be prepared to market to the 1 in 30,000 person like me who walks by your wall? Or would you rather just lose the business by operating off an incomplete assumption. Some more liberal estimates say they may even lose business from 1 in 5,000 by assuming because they look female they have a uterus or by assuming they look male and they won't be interested in girly things.
Mod parent up. I'd do so myself, but I've already posted.
I'd also like to add one other thing that sets red flags off for me personally: the fact that "climatologists" tend to use the strawman/false dichotomy that either a.) you don't believe the earth is getting warmer (thus you're discarding a lot of recorded data that clearly show there is a recent warming trend, which no rational person would do) or b.) you must believe that humans are causing the warming, that it's out of control, and we're going to roast the planet in 50 years if we don't do something NOW!
There seems to be very little recognition of your position that yes, there is warming, but that it's part of a natural ice age cycle this planet has been through time and time again. It's disconcerting how the AGWs just ignore every criticism and alternative theory thrown at them except to attack the most ignorant of the population.
e.g. it's good for boys to get beaten and girls to get molested because there are scumbags out there who would try to do that to them when they're adults.
Oddly, when I was in middle school (early 90s), that applied to boys, e.g. "He stole your lunch and knocks your books out of your hands in the hall. Live with it. It's part of being a boy" was something I was literally told. Of course, if I would have decked him like I wanted to (and should have in hindsight) I would have had a few detentions.
Yet for some reason the same didn't apply to girls. e.g., no one would dare tell an adolescent young woman that some injustice is just part of being a woman.
Then on the other, other hand there was this one teacher who had a question on a test "What makes things stay on the ground?" My little brother answered "gravity" and was promptly graded wrong. Upon inquiry, we discovered that the correct answer was air pressure. C'est la vie.
When the team of "experts" assembled by Fox News demands access to the data, "fuck off" should be a perfectly reasonable response unless that team can present credentials that indicate that they are worthy of even the minimal inconvenience providing that access would entail. If those experts are qualified, then their appraisal of the research should be welcomed.
I hate Fox news as much as anyone else [ought to...] (especially since I'm not one of the lucky 90% who are cisgendered and heterosexual and I resent how they seem to love attacking my inalienable rights, etc.)
However, who decides who's qualified?
Universities regularly graduate people who can't handle 6th grade reading comprehension, so I don't think that purchasing a degree would make one qualified. It might be best to just make the data available, and if you need to write a chunk of code to fudge some data, it would be helpful as well to articulate exactly why a computer program needs to coerce data into a hockey-stick graph.
Maybe I'm not "qualified," but I still haven't heard a reasonable explanation for the data-munging. I'd really like to know if it was a simple misunderstanding by the media. But how can I find out if I can't purchase a degree and become "qualified?"
I'm waiting with open ears, but all I ever read is PR-style cover-up material these days about how there was no wrongdoing. Maybe there wasn't, but I'd really like to know more. The negative PR was fairly specific about the problems with the handling of the data, but this positive PR I read these days is very vague.
I don't think you understand how capitalism works. It's the engineers who are trying to make this happen who are the incompetent dumbshits, and so stupid and uneducated compared to these CEOs. The CEOs are geniuses who are only hampered by how illiterate their engineers are.
Re:denial, even on Slashdot == we're boned
on
Behind Cyberwar FUD
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Rest assured that this stuff is on the Internet, it's buggy as hell, it's misconfigured, and the passwords are as lame as you can imagine. We're already hacked into, at all levels, both government and private.
The sad thing is that 4 years ago I might have thought you were being a fear-monger. However, after working in a call center that handles gobs of information every day just to see management thinking that setting everyone's passwords to "1234" is a good idea because 1.) it's easy and 2.) having to remember passwords is too technical for pregnant teenagers and 20-somethings I completely believe you.
If a baby-mamma is inconvenienced in any way, especially any way involving using her brain, the stars will move.
Fortunatey at least HIPAA was enough to knock some sense into those idiots.
But then again, after dealing with local hospitals, I've learned that when a CEO is on the warpath and wants to crucify someone, fuck HIPAA. HIPAA doesn't apply when you make shit per hour and a CEO wants to blame you for something and ruin you.
But then they went Indian with their support and calling in would start with a market survey and eventually end with a big negatory.
I work in a (USA) call center. If Indian call centers are anything like my employer, I can guarantee that what you're stating was the result of a USA citizen.
I don't mean indirectly, either. They probably specified a braindead script, then called in test calls. If the agents deviated from their brain-dead scripts, I'll guarantee that someone got a death threat.
That's just how call center is. Please your client by inconveniencing the caller, or the business goes elsewhere.
I guess, I just hope that you're not blaming the call center workers. Some C*O had to turn a profit next quarter, but they didn't give a crap how the calls would be handled, so they gave the call center half-assed information about this business.
Of course, if you inconvenience the caller to avoid being cussed out by the client, you'll still get cussed out by the client!
These people have no idea how to use a call center effectively.
But there's a difference between disclosing your IP address to a legitimate machine listed in the DNS, such as a web site, and disclosing your IP address to another residential user. If a contact originating in the DNS turns malicious, you can pull info from Whois when you file the police report. AIM and ICQ, on the other hand, have no reliable counterpart to Whois as far as I know.
I'm not sure which parallel universe you live in, but I'm certain the cops over here aren't going to do jack whether a malicious IP has a DNS entry or not. My company's website got PWNed the other day by an IP in DNS.
Additionally, I'd rather have a system that doesn't expose vulnerabilities whether the system connecting to it has a DNS or not.
Oh! I've got it. You're in the alternate universe where the MAFIA got into the internet a bit earlier than the one I'm living in and managed to successfully turn it from a peer to peer system to a content delivery system. Only content producers have DNS entries, I get it.
And Capitalism is all about removing the People's property to give it to private interests, often killing millions to do it.
The People aren't individually private interests?
I think our system has clearly failed and has instead instated an aristocracy of C*Os, but let's keep the terminology straight. Corporations, if anything, are public interests, at least they were before they were granted personhood. Perhaps revoking corporate personhood and removing the abomination that is an LLC is all that's needed to right things again.
That, and it'd be nice to hold the board individually, personally, and criminally responsible for the acts of the corporation. If a member of the board feels a decision will cause them to be criminally responsible for something they oppose, they can resign. Policies that are systematically unenforced until something bad happens will give them enough wiggle room to escape liability anyway. (Guilt by association is bad [e.g. McCarthy], but I don't think what I'm proposing is guilt by association.)
If what you mean to say is that corporations as they exist today represent a moral hazard (a detachment of responsibility from the ability to act), I agree 100%. The problem isn't private interests, though, it's the very moral hazard itself. If I bankrupt my private DBA or partnership business, then I cry. If I'm an incompetent C*O who's only looking at the next quarter's numbers, and I bankrupt the corporation, then I get a bailout and a golden parachute. That's the very definition of moral hazard.
Except Nintendo isn't trying to lock users out of their systems, they're trying to lock pirates out.
I bought a piece of hardware. That makes me the user. Nintendo should be thankful that I wanted to play Monster Hunter 3 that bad. Too bad the rest of the games for Wii are shit, so I'd like to use my hardware to play some of those old DOS games out there. It's irrelevant that I can do so with Dosbox on my PC. I'm the customer, and it doesn't matter how batshit insane my request is.
So tell me, where you work, if a customer asks for something you don't want to do, do you just label the customer a pirate? I don't know about you, but every place I've worked would rather give customers 50% discounts and sometimes even months of free service (or a free combo meal when I was doing the burger flipping thing) to keep them, because THE CUSTOMER (me) IS ALWAYS RIGHT.
In fact, you know what? Speaking of burger-flipping, my boss back then (she's an amazing person who went on to district manager last I'd heard) once gave this guy 4 free combo meals for his entire family! Does that make him a pirate since he didn't pay?
Were you fired for being gay, or hitting on all the other guys? I say this because most of the people I've known who are openly sexual (ie in preference of one gender or another) have been obnoxious poon/dick hounds, commonly treading on "sexual harassment" terms several times a day.
Replying to undo my troll moderation of your comment. I thought I'd reply instead.
I've been in a homosexual relationship before. I had to call my boyfriend a "roommate" because I was afraid of being perceived that way. Are YOU sure that he didn't just mention that he was going to do something with his "boyfriend" over the weekend and wound up fired?
Perhaps you're not aware of the way people over-react when it comes to this.
Straight woman: "I'm going to see a movie with my boyfriend tonight." This is perfectly acceptable.
Gay man: "I'm going to see a movie with my boyfriend tonight." Now, all of a sudden, the gay man is rubbing everyone's noses in his sex life.
If I had to guess, you're probably just a bigot who sees only what he wants to see despite what's really there, and I probably should have left my troll moderation stand. However, I'm hoping you're just ignorant.
The productive people (those who can afford health insurance)
I'm not sure what definition of productive you're using, but there's something wrong with your post I can't put my finger on. Perhaps the assumption that life is fair and hard work is rewarded.
What if you develop a chronic disease like DIABETES because of YOUR lifestyle choices?
FTFY. I'm gay and I don't have AIDS. Thank you. My lifestyle choice involves going to work every day. Thank you. Don't you think I get sick of hearing about straight people's sex lives (so-and-so's wife or husband. I don't care who you're fucking any more than you care who I'm fucking) On the other hand, I'm going to drop my health insurance next spring because I'm sick of paying for insulin for fat asses. Thank you.
Slashdot Mirror
but if you could organize and get thousands of customers willing to "strike" together
It's called a boycott. Good luck with that. Seems only religious kooks are willing to do boycotts anymore.
My fault I have a higher education than you and am the director of research for a multi-national corporation.
How long did it take you to compose that post in a legible manner? Everything I get at work from big-wigs who smugly assume (even when I'm the one paying for their services, e.g. when I go to the doctor) I'm an illiterate little shit who doesn't deserve the right to spend my hard-earned income on food is usually malformed garbage chock full of incomplete sentences, logical contradictions, and misused punctuation. The net effect over the past 4 years has made me conclude that there's really nothing involved skill-wise in being a CEO or director of sorts. You just need to know the right people in the old boys club. Besides, if you make a poor decision, you can just blame the answering service or get a bailout. No skill involved at all besides hypnotizing the masses that you're somehow better than them and somehow /deserve/ to get money for free.
How is this really harder than a GUI?
You might have answered your own question:
It is about 150 pages total.
My co-workers struggle reading emails longer than 2 or 3 sentence (fragments). I can't even imagine asking them to read 150 pages. It would be a disaster.
so you have to escape them if you use them for some other purpose?
As I understand it, yes. If you want to write "Dr. Foulmouthjerk cussed out Sue today. Dr. Foulmouthjerk is going to make sure she'll never work in this state again," in LaTeX it's Dr.\ Foulmouthjerk cussed out Sue today. Dr.\ Foulmouthjerk is going to make sure she'll never work in this state again.
My preteen children year old are on firm warning... they can move out of state, but we parents are coming after them and moving into their attics/basements/spare rooms. There is no escape.
If my parents did that, I'd call the cops on them for trespassing just like they did for me. I had to resign a good internship because I wasn't certain where I was living for a few days.
In hindsight, sure, I was stupid to trust them without a written lease. I should have ditched them when I was 16 instead of waiting for them to upset my life with a 0-day move-out notice.
"Air gap" doesn't mean much if you're just using some kind of removable media to transfer information from the insecure world to the secure world, instead of CAT5. If you aren't somehow protecting access to that removable media, your air gap gives you no additional security.
Don't forget to bring human psychology into play. The "air gap" will make people look at the system in question differently. It can be the difference between someone deciding "hey, I can update MyFace on this computer" and "oh, this is technical." That psychology is also viral, e.g. the computer they produce said removable media on will also become "technical."
Kind of an unrelated example, but it made me think. At work last week, we had a client who needed us to go to USPS' website to track orders for people calling in. Some agents refused to do so stating that USPS wasn't an authorized website. Apparently to make it authorized in their view, I had to add a BLUE LINK to it rather than creating a button that launched it with the tracking number they'd typed in. Or maybe that just proves that females are all whiny, lazy drama queens who regularly cause problems and shouldn't be allowed outside of the kitchen.
Agh, I hit the moderate button but I'd already posted some stupid comment that pales in comparison to yours, so I couldn't moderate you +1, Informative. Anyone else want to do the honors?
I'm Fred Phelps, you insensitive clod!
And apparently I've worked at a call center so long that I've started to use greengrocers' apostrophes and don't even catch them while proofreading.
Ok, here's some people bitching that they have to read crap.
They could be getting paid to be cussed out by callers. Something tells me being cussed out day after day for things you have no control over (and often had no idea about until you figure out why your mother is a whore according to the caller---it takes serious effort sometimes to get a caller to even state what the problem is between hurling insults---often client's won't even state the problem assuming you're too stupid to understand the problem) is probably worse.
But who the hell cares. Only stupid, incompetent people work at call centers, right?
Every time I hear about this my interest is piqued. I've been taking estrogen for almost a decade now, but that was after my skeletal structure was permanently changed by testosterone before I found a doctor who was willing to treat my androgen problem (instead of assuming that more testosterone = GOOD yay testosterone. maybe for some, but not for me.)
Basically, I have a mix of male and female features. On some days guys hit on me because they think I'm cute and like my hair, and on other days females assume I'm a dweeb who just wants sex when I try to be friendly and talk. Funny enough I like the days when guys hit on me better because men are so much more polite than women (even creepy guys are more polite than most women)!
Anyway, I wonder, would this device waste time and money trying to advertise tampons to me? Would it turn me away by showing me attractive women being attracted to a guy who uses a certain deodorant or cologne (probably one I'd find nauseating anyway since I don't like smelling like a guy)?
I suppose it's probably coming to walls near me soon enough, so I guess I get to find out what gender a computer thinks I am. It seems to be a toss-up for you carbon-based lifeforms out there, not that I really mind. Sometimes it's fun trying to guess whether someone will call me ma'am or sir. All in all I guess I don't really care. Sir and ma'am are better than faggot or gaywad. Sometimes I'm in a bad mood, though, so don't be surprised if you call me ma'am and I don't respond because I was sure everyone would be calling me sir that day.
Now if they really had done their homework, it might figure out that I'm not quite male or female and advertise transgender products instead. Maybe if someone wanted to market a line of feminine clothes or something that would fit my body better than something cut for a female. I know, asking their neural net to allow for more than 2 genders in the world? Nonsense! I guess it just proves I'm a self-centered asshole, wanting to be recognized as a valid person who has money to spend and would like to see something advertised with her in mind.
If you had tons of data storage, would you want to be prepared to market to the 1 in 30,000 person like me who walks by your wall? Or would you rather just lose the business by operating off an incomplete assumption. Some more liberal estimates say they may even lose business from 1 in 5,000 by assuming because they look female they have a uterus or by assuming they look male and they won't be interested in girly things.
Lost business! It adds up!
instead I gave in and did things that were inline with society because I wanted to do them.
You, sir, are a lucky man. Here's 3 cheers for you. Hip, hip, hooray! Hip, hip, hooray! Hip, hip, hooray!
Mod parent up. I'd do so myself, but I've already posted.
I'd also like to add one other thing that sets red flags off for me personally: the fact that "climatologists" tend to use the strawman/false dichotomy that either a.) you don't believe the earth is getting warmer (thus you're discarding a lot of recorded data that clearly show there is a recent warming trend, which no rational person would do) or b.) you must believe that humans are causing the warming, that it's out of control, and we're going to roast the planet in 50 years if we don't do something NOW!
There seems to be very little recognition of your position that yes, there is warming, but that it's part of a natural ice age cycle this planet has been through time and time again. It's disconcerting how the AGWs just ignore every criticism and alternative theory thrown at them except to attack the most ignorant of the population.
e.g. it's good for boys to get beaten and girls to get molested because there are scumbags out there who would try to do that to them when they're adults.
Oddly, when I was in middle school (early 90s), that applied to boys, e.g. "He stole your lunch and knocks your books out of your hands in the hall. Live with it. It's part of being a boy" was something I was literally told. Of course, if I would have decked him like I wanted to (and should have in hindsight) I would have had a few detentions.
Yet for some reason the same didn't apply to girls. e.g., no one would dare tell an adolescent young woman that some injustice is just part of being a woman.
Then on the other, other hand there was this one teacher who had a question on a test "What makes things stay on the ground?" My little brother answered "gravity" and was promptly graded wrong. Upon inquiry, we discovered that the correct answer was air pressure. C'est la vie.
When the team of "experts" assembled by Fox News demands access to the data, "fuck off" should be a perfectly reasonable response unless that team can present credentials that indicate that they are worthy of even the minimal inconvenience providing that access would entail. If those experts are qualified, then their appraisal of the research should be welcomed.
I hate Fox news as much as anyone else [ought to...] (especially since I'm not one of the lucky 90% who are cisgendered and heterosexual and I resent how they seem to love attacking my inalienable rights, etc.)
However, who decides who's qualified?
Universities regularly graduate people who can't handle 6th grade reading comprehension, so I don't think that purchasing a degree would make one qualified. It might be best to just make the data available, and if you need to write a chunk of code to fudge some data, it would be helpful as well to articulate exactly why a computer program needs to coerce data into a hockey-stick graph.
Maybe I'm not "qualified," but I still haven't heard a reasonable explanation for the data-munging. I'd really like to know if it was a simple misunderstanding by the media. But how can I find out if I can't purchase a degree and become "qualified?"
I'm waiting with open ears, but all I ever read is PR-style cover-up material these days about how there was no wrongdoing. Maybe there wasn't, but I'd really like to know more. The negative PR was fairly specific about the problems with the handling of the data, but this positive PR I read these days is very vague.
I don't think you understand how capitalism works. It's the engineers who are trying to make this happen who are the incompetent dumbshits, and so stupid and uneducated compared to these CEOs. The CEOs are geniuses who are only hampered by how illiterate their engineers are.
Rest assured that this stuff is on the Internet, it's buggy as hell, it's misconfigured, and the passwords are as lame as you can imagine. We're already hacked into, at all levels, both government and private.
The sad thing is that 4 years ago I might have thought you were being a fear-monger. However, after working in a call center that handles gobs of information every day just to see management thinking that setting everyone's passwords to "1234" is a good idea because 1.) it's easy and 2.) having to remember passwords is too technical for pregnant teenagers and 20-somethings I completely believe you.
If a baby-mamma is inconvenienced in any way, especially any way involving using her brain, the stars will move.
Fortunatey at least HIPAA was enough to knock some sense into those idiots.
But then again, after dealing with local hospitals, I've learned that when a CEO is on the warpath and wants to crucify someone, fuck HIPAA. HIPAA doesn't apply when you make shit per hour and a CEO wants to blame you for something and ruin you.
What's a "slope"?
Anyone who asks that fails 7th grade math, and should not be allowed to vote.
I don't care if my statement is tantamount to revoking the 19th Amendment. So be it.
But then they went Indian with their support and calling in would start with a market survey and eventually end with a big negatory.
I work in a (USA) call center. If Indian call centers are anything like my employer, I can guarantee that what you're stating was the result of a USA citizen.
I don't mean indirectly, either. They probably specified a braindead script, then called in test calls. If the agents deviated from their brain-dead scripts, I'll guarantee that someone got a death threat.
That's just how call center is. Please your client by inconveniencing the caller, or the business goes elsewhere.
I guess, I just hope that you're not blaming the call center workers. Some C*O had to turn a profit next quarter, but they didn't give a crap how the calls would be handled, so they gave the call center half-assed information about this business.
Of course, if you inconvenience the caller to avoid being cussed out by the client, you'll still get cussed out by the client!
These people have no idea how to use a call center effectively.
But there's a difference between disclosing your IP address to a legitimate machine listed in the DNS, such as a web site, and disclosing your IP address to another residential user. If a contact originating in the DNS turns malicious, you can pull info from Whois when you file the police report. AIM and ICQ, on the other hand, have no reliable counterpart to Whois as far as I know.
I'm not sure which parallel universe you live in, but I'm certain the cops over here aren't going to do jack whether a malicious IP has a DNS entry or not. My company's website got PWNed the other day by an IP in DNS.
Additionally, I'd rather have a system that doesn't expose vulnerabilities whether the system connecting to it has a DNS or not.
Oh! I've got it. You're in the alternate universe where the MAFIA got into the internet a bit earlier than the one I'm living in and managed to successfully turn it from a peer to peer system to a content delivery system. Only content producers have DNS entries, I get it.
Or did I miss it?
And Capitalism is all about removing the People's property to give it to private interests, often killing millions to do it.
The People aren't individually private interests?
I think our system has clearly failed and has instead instated an aristocracy of C*Os, but let's keep the terminology straight. Corporations, if anything, are public interests, at least they were before they were granted personhood. Perhaps revoking corporate personhood and removing the abomination that is an LLC is all that's needed to right things again.
That, and it'd be nice to hold the board individually, personally, and criminally responsible for the acts of the corporation. If a member of the board feels a decision will cause them to be criminally responsible for something they oppose, they can resign. Policies that are systematically unenforced until something bad happens will give them enough wiggle room to escape liability anyway. (Guilt by association is bad [e.g. McCarthy], but I don't think what I'm proposing is guilt by association.)
If what you mean to say is that corporations as they exist today represent a moral hazard (a detachment of responsibility from the ability to act), I agree 100%. The problem isn't private interests, though, it's the very moral hazard itself. If I bankrupt my private DBA or partnership business, then I cry. If I'm an incompetent C*O who's only looking at the next quarter's numbers, and I bankrupt the corporation, then I get a bailout and a golden parachute. That's the very definition of moral hazard.
Except Nintendo isn't trying to lock users out of their systems, they're trying to lock pirates out.
I bought a piece of hardware. That makes me the user. Nintendo should be thankful that I wanted to play Monster Hunter 3 that bad. Too bad the rest of the games for Wii are shit, so I'd like to use my hardware to play some of those old DOS games out there. It's irrelevant that I can do so with Dosbox on my PC. I'm the customer, and it doesn't matter how batshit insane my request is.
So tell me, where you work, if a customer asks for something you don't want to do, do you just label the customer a pirate? I don't know about you, but every place I've worked would rather give customers 50% discounts and sometimes even months of free service (or a free combo meal when I was doing the burger flipping thing) to keep them, because THE CUSTOMER (me) IS ALWAYS RIGHT.
In fact, you know what? Speaking of burger-flipping, my boss back then (she's an amazing person who went on to district manager last I'd heard) once gave this guy 4 free combo meals for his entire family! Does that make him a pirate since he didn't pay?
Were you fired for being gay, or hitting on all the other guys? I say this because most of the people I've known who are openly sexual (ie in preference of one gender or another) have been obnoxious poon/dick hounds, commonly treading on "sexual harassment" terms several times a day.
Replying to undo my troll moderation of your comment. I thought I'd reply instead.
I've been in a homosexual relationship before. I had to call my boyfriend a "roommate" because I was afraid of being perceived that way. Are YOU sure that he didn't just mention that he was going to do something with his "boyfriend" over the weekend and wound up fired?
Perhaps you're not aware of the way people over-react when it comes to this.
Straight woman: "I'm going to see a movie with my boyfriend tonight." This is perfectly acceptable.
Gay man: "I'm going to see a movie with my boyfriend tonight." Now, all of a sudden, the gay man is rubbing everyone's noses in his sex life.
If I had to guess, you're probably just a bigot who sees only what he wants to see despite what's really there, and I probably should have left my troll moderation stand. However, I'm hoping you're just ignorant.
The productive people (those who can afford health insurance)
I'm not sure what definition of productive you're using, but there's something wrong with your post I can't put my finger on. Perhaps the assumption that life is fair and hard work is rewarded.
What if you develop a chronic disease like DIABETES because of YOUR lifestyle choices?
FTFY. I'm gay and I don't have AIDS. Thank you. My lifestyle choice involves going to work every day. Thank you. Don't you think I get sick of hearing about straight people's sex lives (so-and-so's wife or husband. I don't care who you're fucking any more than you care who I'm fucking) On the other hand, I'm going to drop my health insurance next spring because I'm sick of paying for insulin for fat asses. Thank you.