i have a friend who works for a company that has an "encrypt everything" policy. He has a company laptop which is equipped with such encryption software. His wife has an identical laptop. Mr. X's laptop is a dog. Mrs. X's laptop is zippy.
Overhead and speed are the cost of the kind of encryption you're talking about. That's the price you're going to pay for doing what you're talking about. If you really want the encryption, learn to live with it. If you can't live with it, ditch the encrypt-everything policy and find a way to only encrypt what you have to.
"Thailand is ramping up their media wide censorship of anything that remotely offends Thai royalty."
Uh, no. Thailand is ramping up their media wide censorship of anything that remotely offends the kind of obnoxious people who think censorship is a great idea, are looking for something to get offended about, and don't mind using the king's good name as an excuse.
There's a difference.
The actual king says that people should be permitted to criticize him, and I believe he has not expressed that he's in any way offended by any of the stuff people are being jailed for.
One of the things ascribed to the "nice guy" that is presumed to hurt them is that they take responsibility for failures.
A lot of organizations with political problems have a sort of "blame-oriented" culture. When something goes wrong, someone has to be blamed, and that person must be made to suffer. This is, of course, bad, because it focuses on punishing someone rather than solving the problem.
Sometimes in such an organization, you can actually gain power by accepting blame. When a problem is brought up and the group is obviously going on the hunt for a scapegoat, sometimes you can stand up and say "I'll take responsibility for that," define the problem as you see it, and spell out what you intend to do about it. This can be so shocking to the other people that they don't know what to do about it, and thus there's no punishment. This is particularly true if you do this in a context where it's clear that you're not actually to blame for the problem, you're just accepting responsibility for it anyway.
This can have several positive effects: 1) You are seen as someone who isn't afraid to stand up and be responsible, a leader. 2) You are seen as a force for positive action, a bringer of solutions. 3) You get to be in charge of whatever it is, even if you might not normally have been in charge of it. If you want to do so, you can expand your realm of authority in this manner.
Sometimes when you do this, one or more people who are particularly blame focused will notice you said you're "responsible", not "to blame", and start questioning you to determine if you actually caused the problem or someone else did (maybe someone who works for you) so they can try to find someone to blame and harm. When this happens, I say something like "The important thing here is not that we affix blame and punish someone, the important part is that we solve the problem for the organization so we can move on and stop suffering the consequences. If you want someone to blame, blame me. I care more about getting the job done than about my image." If they try to pursue it, it makes them look like a fool in front of everyone else. If they try to go after a member of my staff, I say something to the effect of "I am responsible for my team, so if this problem is their fault, it's my fault. If I feel that any member of my team is failing to perform adequately, I will take care of mentoring them, helping them, or firing them as necessary. It's not your responsibility, and none of your business. I don't tell you how to do your job, please stop interfering with mine." I've never had anyone stupid enough to be willing to push it beyond that.
You can probably get away with all of this, IF: 1) You are willing to be bold about it. Timidity will just get you stepped on. 2) You're high enough placed in the organization that upper management knows you. 3) You've already built some respect with some successes, so upper management knows that when you say you will do something, you mean it. 4) Most importantly, you MUST have a solution to propose IMMEDIATELY when you say you are going to take responsibility. That solution doesn't have to be comprehensive, you can propose to have particular people study the problem to determine what the next step is, but have SOMETHING to propose right away.
I'm sorry, but what you say is naive. Unless the origanization is a technical one for which the chairman of the board and CEO are both technical people, there will always be some level where a technical person is managed by a non-technical person who has a limited at best understanding of what the techies do. If there isn't someone at the technical group who performs the task of ensuring that the non-techie overlords understand what is going on and who is doing a good job, then the non-techies eventually tend to start to think the techies aren't doing anything and hate them.
When the techies are infighting, things are bad. If it happens once, you need to have your finger on the pulse of the organization and know when someone is backstabbing you (This isn't so hard if you have a good relationship with management, usually they'll tell you) and go to management to demonstrate why what they're saying is false and get *them* fired. If it's happening regularly, you're in a dysfunctional organization and you should be looking for a new job.
I have been an IT manager, and I speak from experience when I say that this sort of problem is particularly bad for IT organizations. People tend to hate IT because when things are going right they don't perceive that IT is doing anything (even if IT is working their behinds off to keep things going right) so usually they only notice IT when things go wrong, so of course they blame the problem (whatever it is) on IT, regardless of what caused it. This gives IT the image of being a bunch of lazy do-nothings who aren't doing their job of making everything work. So, IT has to work extra-hard to make it very clear to management on a regular basis that they are working hard and being responsive to company needs and being successful at solving problems.
As annoying as it is, good help desk software or CRM software can go a long way for this, by being able to provide statistics and documentation to show non-techie overlords that IT is working hard and being responsive.
A decent IT manager is a current or former techie with excellent language skills who is able to mediate between business people with needs and technical people who can fulfill needs. They should be able to listen to business people describe business requirements and translate those into technical requirements for technical solutions. They should also be able to direct or monitor technical work performed by technical workers and describe it in business terms to business people so they understand that progress is being made and their needs are being taken seriously. They should also be able to recognize when mediation is needed so they can perform these services to help facilitate interaction between technical and non-technical staff.
A bad IT manager doesn't understand anything about technology and probably thinks that such understanding is not required to manage technical people. They don't understand that IT work is a creative profession which isn't always strictly quantifiable, and believe that the IT staff can be managed entirely based on statistical metrics of performance. If your IT manager's previous experience is in retail, or they use the phrase "I have a degree in management", run screaming. (A decent manager of any type will never find it necessary to mention their MBA, because they know that attempting to intimidate employees is the worst possible way to get them to do anything.)
I've worked in IT, and been an IT manager, in both small and large organizations. My experience is, both types of organizations are abusive to their people, sometimes in different ways. The small organizations tend to overwork their people, paying for inadequate numbers of people but expecting them to provide world-class service as if they're a Fortune 500 corporation. The big organizations tend to turn into Dilbert-land, with pointy-haired bosses torturing everyone with the stupid management paradigm du jour and occasionally firing random people as scapegoats for the boss's failures.
Regardless, I don't think it much matters what size company you work IT in; my experience is that, while the article claims about 25% of IT workers are treated abusively, reality is more like close to 100% of IT workers are treated abusively.
It has to be something about the particular converter, the particular VCR, or the particular combination of the two. There's no reason why the color problem you describe must necessarily be the case.
> Will a perceived lack of trust cripple the effectiveness of the program?"
Yes. Next obvious question?
The program you describe is highly unethical and you should have nothing to do with it. If you were ever to apply to me for a job and you told me about this program, I would treat you like you're radioactive.
The program you describe will succeed only in setting up an adversarial relationship between the students and the school, and teach them that adults are not to be trusted. Further, you're trying to extend the school's ability to censor and monitor into the home, where it doesn't belong. You are planning to MANDATE that students use a CENSORED, SPIED UPON computer IN THEIR HOMES. THE SCHOOL IS A BRANCH OF THE GOVERNMENT. WHEN A GOVERNMENT ORGANIZATION IS SPYING AND CENSORING IN THE HOME, THIS COUNTRY AND EVERYTHING IT WAS FOUNDED ON HAVE GONE TO HELL.
How do you think you're going to teach kids about freedom of speech and the right to privacy when you're carefully violating both?
If I were a parent, I would forbid the computer from entering my home, and if you tried to enforce it, I'd sue the school.
Re:Everything is a lot easier with the degree
on
IT Job Without a Degree?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
The lack of a degree is more of a problem at lower level jobs. For junior employees, employers need something to tell them whether the candidate is any good or not, and for a candidate that doesn't have years of experience, that means a degree.
For a candidate who has a lot of experience and references, it's less of an issue.
I advise that the best thing to do if you don't have a degree is not to list your college level education at all. If you list that you have some higher education but didn't complete it, employers hold it against you. If you don't list your college education at all, they're more likely to either not notice, or assume that you have a degree but didn't list it for some reason, such as that perhaps it's in an unrelated field. (A lot of people who work in computing didn't study computer science.)
One other thing to do if you want to work in IT is get some certifications, in topics that you see mentioned by employers you'd like to work for in their job ads. Certifications absolutely mesmerize many employers. I've been an IT director, and I've had experiences with HR trying to talk me into hiring an unqualified candidate with a bunch of certifications instead of a qualified candidate with a college degree and relevant experience. In fact, in one case HR even pressured me to hire a candidate with a bunch of certifications that <i>weren't even relevant to the position</i> and no relevant experience <i>after</i> I'd already hired my candidate of choice and was satisfied with their work.
A certification will probably cost you a few thousand dollars, but it's a lot cheaper than a college degree, and can get you in the door fast. You'll have to shell out to update your certifications every few years, but if you're working for an employer for whom your certs are relevant, they'll often be willing to pay for the refresher courses and testing.
It's not XML notation: XML is ambiguous in far too many ways, and was never intended for anything but markup. Water can be expressed in pure XML, but is usually written in ConciseXML, as was my example.
And last I heard MUMPS had been renamed to "M". (Somebody should teach it to Judi Dench...) While you discount it, I know that companies that use it are very happy with it, and I'm told by people who work with it that it's very effective for handling data for the health care industry, which is what it's designed for.
Computers are tools for getting stuff done, so I question your focus on whether or not the code is pretty over the fact that the code accomplishes the task in half the effort. (And I could knock off a few more lines if I want to work on it, I think.)
That's what I thought about the Python example. I find Water to be very readable. But seriously, would you rather type a few angles, or write twice as much code? Every language has admirers and people who think it's ugly, the really important part is whether it facilitates programmers to get things done.
It is, however, unfortunate that my line breaks got messed up. It should be slightly more readable than it shows. Also, to be honest, the line breaks and indentation are largely gratuitous, the parser generally ignores them. I could have made this "knight's tour in one line of Water" but it would have been a stupidly long line; I tried to put in logical line breaks to show a realistic scenario to compare to the Python example.
And I forgot to mention, it runs in about two seconds on the interpreter, it should run an order of magnitude faster when compiled but I don't have the compiler installed at the moment.
Yeah yeah. You think it's a good joke... and it is... until the day a user calls you and says that. And I not only have had it happen to me, I know several other people who had it happen to them.
I think the thing that pleases me most is the fact that the Foundation books were largely about the idea that while religion and irrationality tend to mess up a society, science always kinda works. If they manage to convey this idea in the movies, it could be a great message for our culture at this time.
It's also worth noting that the founder of Greenpeace thinks they're a bunch of kooks. See the Penn & Teller's Bulls*** episode on environmentalism.
I believe in protecting the environment, but I'd like to sanely focus on serious problems first, and do so in a logical and dignified manner, instead of just attacking companies just because they're prominent and it generates publicity.
Better: register them, and if possible, use them to send commands to the botnet to shut down. Not sure if these crooks would build such commands in, but if they did, time to use 'em.
My wording error aside, to claim to the patent office that you invented something when you know darn well you didn't because you carefully went about the process of stealing somebody's trade secret, and even filed a patent with the government stating your intent to do so, seems to indicate that your claim of invention is fraudulent. Moreover, while unknowingly filing a patent application for which there is prior art is not illegal, knowingly filing a fraudulent statement (patent application) with a US government office probably is.
This is precisely the kind of thing that I find really offensive: the assumption that the fact that I feel I need a relationship means that there's something wrong with me and/or my self image.
How dare you assume I have poor self image just because I feel I need a relationship? I happen to be a terrific guy with fabulous skills, intelligence, style, manners, and class, who just happens to need a relationship.
The fact that I am single is proof that I am smart enough to look for a *good* relationship rather than settling for any random slob that might want me, and that I have enough self respect to suffer my loneliness until the right man comes along.
If you feel societally pressured to not be single, that's your problem. Don't project your problems onto me.
In my state, you can't have straight-only or gay-only dating services. It's illegal discrimination, and if one of these web sites was headquartered here, you could file a complaint against them for it. And should.
And speaking as a gay man, if a gay bar here in Massachusetts refused to serve you for being straight, I would hope you would march to the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination and file a complaint, and if I saw it happen, I would offer to file a sworn statement to support your complaint and I would stop patronizing the establishment. Minority-focused businesses are not and should not be above the law. I have spoken with gay friends about this situation in the past, and while some felt it's a bit rude for straight people to "invade" a gay bar, everyone agreed that they should be served, politely.
Moreover, their attempt to patent this procedure would seem to indicate that they were knowingly violating prior art, in fact intentionally doing so, which would seem to imply that they could be charged with fraud or something similar.
I'm surprised they filed this patent attempt, and that their lawyers let it happen - it's like saying "I would like explicit government recognition of my plans to violate the law to ensure that when I do so everyone will recognize exactly what I did."
Slashdot Mirror
Just what I need, more competition for the inadequate number of jobs available to me.
Wow. You know, back in the dark ages when I was in high school, they had this newfangled thing called "Detention". I wonder whatever became of it.
i have a friend who works for a company that has an "encrypt everything" policy. He has a company laptop which is equipped with such encryption software. His wife has an identical laptop. Mr. X's laptop is a dog. Mrs. X's laptop is zippy.
Overhead and speed are the cost of the kind of encryption you're talking about. That's the price you're going to pay for doing what you're talking about. If you really want the encryption, learn to live with it. If you can't live with it, ditch the encrypt-everything policy and find a way to only encrypt what you have to.
Wouldn't this violate HIPAA?
If so, I believe that any doctors that participated in disclosing the DNA data to the state would be subject to federal arrest and jailing.
Uh, no. Thailand is ramping up their media wide censorship of anything that remotely offends the kind of obnoxious people who think censorship is a great idea, are looking for something to get offended about, and don't mind using the king's good name as an excuse.
There's a difference.
The actual king says that people should be permitted to criticize him, and I believe he has not expressed that he's in any way offended by any of the stuff people are being jailed for.
I would think this strategy runs the risk of insulting the judge.
nifty! Thanks for telling us about that.
One of the things ascribed to the "nice guy" that is presumed to hurt them is that they take responsibility for failures.
A lot of organizations with political problems have a sort of "blame-oriented" culture. When something goes wrong, someone has to be blamed, and that person must be made to suffer. This is, of course, bad, because it focuses on punishing someone rather than solving the problem.
Sometimes in such an organization, you can actually gain power by accepting blame. When a problem is brought up and the group is obviously going on the hunt for a scapegoat, sometimes you can stand up and say "I'll take responsibility for that," define the problem as you see it, and spell out what you intend to do about it. This can be so shocking to the other people that they don't know what to do about it, and thus there's no punishment. This is particularly true if you do this in a context where it's clear that you're not actually to blame for the problem, you're just accepting responsibility for it anyway.
This can have several positive effects:
1) You are seen as someone who isn't afraid to stand up and be responsible, a leader.
2) You are seen as a force for positive action, a bringer of solutions.
3) You get to be in charge of whatever it is, even if you might not normally have been in charge of it. If you want to do so, you can expand your realm of authority in this manner.
Sometimes when you do this, one or more people who are particularly blame focused will notice you said you're "responsible", not "to blame", and start questioning you to determine if you actually caused the problem or someone else did (maybe someone who works for you) so they can try to find someone to blame and harm. When this happens, I say something like "The important thing here is not that we affix blame and punish someone, the important part is that we solve the problem for the organization so we can move on and stop suffering the consequences. If you want someone to blame, blame me. I care more about getting the job done than about my image." If they try to pursue it, it makes them look like a fool in front of everyone else. If they try to go after a member of my staff, I say something to the effect of "I am responsible for my team, so if this problem is their fault, it's my fault. If I feel that any member of my team is failing to perform adequately, I will take care of mentoring them, helping them, or firing them as necessary. It's not your responsibility, and none of your business. I don't tell you how to do your job, please stop interfering with mine." I've never had anyone stupid enough to be willing to push it beyond that.
You can probably get away with all of this, IF:
1) You are willing to be bold about it. Timidity will just get you stepped on.
2) You're high enough placed in the organization that upper management knows you.
3) You've already built some respect with some successes, so upper management knows that when you say you will do something, you mean it.
4) Most importantly, you MUST have a solution to propose IMMEDIATELY when you say you are going to take responsibility. That solution doesn't have to be comprehensive, you can propose to have particular people study the problem to determine what the next step is, but have SOMETHING to propose right away.
I'm sorry, but what you say is naive. Unless the origanization is a technical one for which the chairman of the board and CEO are both technical people, there will always be some level where a technical person is managed by a non-technical person who has a limited at best understanding of what the techies do. If there isn't someone at the technical group who performs the task of ensuring that the non-techie overlords understand what is going on and who is doing a good job, then the non-techies eventually tend to start to think the techies aren't doing anything and hate them.
When the techies are infighting, things are bad. If it happens once, you need to have your finger on the pulse of the organization and know when someone is backstabbing you (This isn't so hard if you have a good relationship with management, usually they'll tell you) and go to management to demonstrate why what they're saying is false and get *them* fired. If it's happening regularly, you're in a dysfunctional organization and you should be looking for a new job.
I have been an IT manager, and I speak from experience when I say that this sort of problem is particularly bad for IT organizations. People tend to hate IT because when things are going right they don't perceive that IT is doing anything (even if IT is working their behinds off to keep things going right) so usually they only notice IT when things go wrong, so of course they blame the problem (whatever it is) on IT, regardless of what caused it. This gives IT the image of being a bunch of lazy do-nothings who aren't doing their job of making everything work. So, IT has to work extra-hard to make it very clear to management on a regular basis that they are working hard and being responsive to company needs and being successful at solving problems.
As annoying as it is, good help desk software or CRM software can go a long way for this, by being able to provide statistics and documentation to show non-techie overlords that IT is working hard and being responsive.
A decent IT manager is a current or former techie with excellent language skills who is able to mediate between business people with needs and technical people who can fulfill needs. They should be able to listen to business people describe business requirements and translate those into technical requirements for technical solutions. They should also be able to direct or monitor technical work performed by technical workers and describe it in business terms to business people so they understand that progress is being made and their needs are being taken seriously. They should also be able to recognize when mediation is needed so they can perform these services to help facilitate interaction between technical and non-technical staff.
A bad IT manager doesn't understand anything about technology and probably thinks that such understanding is not required to manage technical people. They don't understand that IT work is a creative profession which isn't always strictly quantifiable, and believe that the IT staff can be managed entirely based on statistical metrics of performance. If your IT manager's previous experience is in retail, or they use the phrase "I have a degree in management", run screaming. (A decent manager of any type will never find it necessary to mention their MBA, because they know that attempting to intimidate employees is the worst possible way to get them to do anything.)
If you work with backup tapes enough, you quickly come to believe they're all garbage.
I've worked in IT, and been an IT manager, in both small and large organizations. My experience is, both types of organizations are abusive to their people, sometimes in different ways. The small organizations tend to overwork their people, paying for inadequate numbers of people but expecting them to provide world-class service as if they're a Fortune 500 corporation. The big organizations tend to turn into Dilbert-land, with pointy-haired bosses torturing everyone with the stupid management paradigm du jour and occasionally firing random people as scapegoats for the boss's failures.
Regardless, I don't think it much matters what size company you work IT in; my experience is that, while the article claims about 25% of IT workers are treated abusively, reality is more like close to 100% of IT workers are treated abusively.
It has to be something about the particular converter, the particular VCR, or the particular combination of the two. There's no reason why the color problem you describe must necessarily be the case.
> Will a perceived lack of trust cripple the effectiveness of the program?"
Yes. Next obvious question?
The program you describe is highly unethical and you should have nothing to do with it. If you were ever to apply to me for a job and you told me about this program, I would treat you like you're radioactive.
The program you describe will succeed only in setting up an adversarial relationship between the students and the school, and teach them that adults are not to be trusted. Further, you're trying to extend the school's ability to censor and monitor into the home, where it doesn't belong. You are planning to MANDATE that students use a CENSORED, SPIED UPON computer IN THEIR HOMES. THE SCHOOL IS A BRANCH OF THE GOVERNMENT. WHEN A GOVERNMENT ORGANIZATION IS SPYING AND CENSORING IN THE HOME, THIS COUNTRY AND EVERYTHING IT WAS FOUNDED ON HAVE GONE TO HELL.
How do you think you're going to teach kids about freedom of speech and the right to privacy when you're carefully violating both?
If I were a parent, I would forbid the computer from entering my home, and if you tried to enforce it, I'd sue the school.
The lack of a degree is more of a problem at lower level jobs. For junior employees, employers need something to tell them whether the candidate is any good or not, and for a candidate that doesn't have years of experience, that means a degree.
For a candidate who has a lot of experience and references, it's less of an issue.
I advise that the best thing to do if you don't have a degree is not to list your college level education at all. If you list that you have some higher education but didn't complete it, employers hold it against you. If you don't list your college education at all, they're more likely to either not notice, or assume that you have a degree but didn't list it for some reason, such as that perhaps it's in an unrelated field. (A lot of people who work in computing didn't study computer science.)
One other thing to do if you want to work in IT is get some certifications, in topics that you see mentioned by employers you'd like to work for in their job ads. Certifications absolutely mesmerize many employers. I've been an IT director, and I've had experiences with HR trying to talk me into hiring an unqualified candidate with a bunch of certifications instead of a qualified candidate with a college degree and relevant experience. In fact, in one case HR even pressured me to hire a candidate with a bunch of certifications that <i>weren't even relevant to the position</i> and no relevant experience <i>after</i> I'd already hired my candidate of choice and was satisfied with their work.
A certification will probably cost you a few thousand dollars, but it's a lot cheaper than a college degree, and can get you in the door fast. You'll have to shell out to update your certifications every few years, but if you're working for an employer for whom your certs are relevant, they'll often be willing to pay for the refresher courses and testing.
It's not XML notation: XML is ambiguous in far too many ways, and was never intended for anything but markup. Water can be expressed in pure XML, but is usually written in ConciseXML, as was my example.
And last I heard MUMPS had been renamed to "M". (Somebody should teach it to Judi Dench...) While you discount it, I know that companies that use it are very happy with it, and I'm told by people who work with it that it's very effective for handling data for the health care industry, which is what it's designed for.
Computers are tools for getting stuff done, so I question your focus on whether or not the code is pretty over the fact that the code accomplishes the task in half the effort. (And I could knock off a few more lines if I want to work on it, I think.)
That's what I thought about the Python example. I find Water to be very readable. But seriously, would you rather type a few angles, or write twice as much code? Every language has admirers and people who think it's ugly, the really important part is whether it facilitates programmers to get things done.
It is, however, unfortunate that my line breaks got messed up. It should be slightly more readable than it shows. Also, to be honest, the line breaks and indentation are largely gratuitous, the parser generally ignores them. I could have made this "knight's tour in one line of Water" but it would have been a stupidly long line; I tried to put in logical line breaks to show a realistic scenario to compare to the Python example.
And I forgot to mention, it runs in about two seconds on the interpreter, it should run an order of magnitude faster when compiled but I don't have the compiler installed at the moment.
> Try beating this, fellow coders!
.<set board=.size.<for_each combiner=insert> .size.<for_each combiner=insert> false </for_each> </for_each> /> .<fill/> .board.<has y/> .board.<get y/>.<has x/> .board.<get y/>.<get x/>.<not/> /> .board.<get y/>.<set <do x/>=counter/> .size.<times .size/> /> />.<for_each> /> .<in_range_and_empty x=new_x y=new_y/> .<fill x=new_x y=new_y counter=counter.<plus 1/> /> </if> /> .board.<for_each>
Here it is in 30 lines of Water. Oh, and it outputs in HTML.
<class knights_tour size=8 board=opt >
<method make>
_subject
</method>
<method in_range_and_empty x=req y=req>
<and
</method>
<method fill x=0 y=0 counter=0>
<if>
counter.<is_not
<v <v -2 1/> <v -1 2/> <v 1 2/> <v 2 1/> <v 2 -1/> <v 1 -2/> <v -1 -2/> <v -2 -1/>
<set new_y=y.<plus value.0/> new_x=x.<plus value.1/>
<if>
</for_each>
</if>
</method>
<method htm_inst>
<set a_table=<table border=1/>
<set a_row=<tr/>/>
value.<for_each> a_row.<insert <td value/>/> </for_each>
a_table.<insert a_row/>
</for_each>
a_table
</method>
</class>
<knights_tour/>
(My formatting is getting messed up. Should be 30. It's merging a few lines in the preview, but not in a way that would break anything.)
Yeah yeah. You think it's a good joke... and it is... until the day a user calls you and says that. And I not only have had it happen to me, I know several other people who had it happen to them.
I think the thing that pleases me most is the fact that the Foundation books were largely about the idea that while religion and irrationality tend to mess up a society, science always kinda works. If they manage to convey this idea in the movies, it could be a great message for our culture at this time.
It's also worth noting that the founder of Greenpeace thinks they're a bunch of kooks. See the Penn & Teller's Bulls*** episode on environmentalism.
I believe in protecting the environment, but I'd like to sanely focus on serious problems first, and do so in a logical and dignified manner, instead of just attacking companies just because they're prominent and it generates publicity.
Better: register them, and if possible, use them to send commands to the botnet to shut down. Not sure if these crooks would build such commands in, but if they did, time to use 'em.
Thank you, grammar police.
My wording error aside, to claim to the patent office that you invented something when you know darn well you didn't because you carefully went about the process of stealing somebody's trade secret, and even filed a patent with the government stating your intent to do so, seems to indicate that your claim of invention is fraudulent. Moreover, while unknowingly filing a patent application for which there is prior art is not illegal, knowingly filing a fraudulent statement (patent application) with a US government office probably is.
This is precisely the kind of thing that I find really offensive: the assumption that the fact that I feel I need a relationship means that there's something wrong with me and/or my self image.
How dare you assume I have poor self image just because I feel I need a relationship? I happen to be a terrific guy with fabulous skills, intelligence, style, manners, and class, who just happens to need a relationship.
The fact that I am single is proof that I am smart enough to look for a *good* relationship rather than settling for any random slob that might want me, and that I have enough self respect to suffer my loneliness until the right man comes along.
If you feel societally pressured to not be single, that's your problem. Don't project your problems onto me.
In my state, you can't have straight-only or gay-only dating services. It's illegal discrimination, and if one of these web sites was headquartered here, you could file a complaint against them for it. And should.
And speaking as a gay man, if a gay bar here in Massachusetts refused to serve you for being straight, I would hope you would march to the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination and file a complaint, and if I saw it happen, I would offer to file a sworn statement to support your complaint and I would stop patronizing the establishment. Minority-focused businesses are not and should not be above the law. I have spoken with gay friends about this situation in the past, and while some felt it's a bit rude for straight people to "invade" a gay bar, everyone agreed that they should be served, politely.
Moreover, their attempt to patent this procedure would seem to indicate that they were knowingly violating prior art, in fact intentionally doing so, which would seem to imply that they could be charged with fraud or something similar.
I'm surprised they filed this patent attempt, and that their lawyers let it happen - it's like saying "I would like explicit government recognition of my plans to violate the law to ensure that when I do so everyone will recognize exactly what I did."