But why would the shareholders be held responsible for their company's tax evasion unless they themseves did it? The accountents who actually performed the tax evasion and the managers who ordered it (however far up the chain of command it goes) should be personally held responsible. The company did not break the law, people did. Companies cannot break laws, only individuals.
If some $6.16/hr button pusher is ordered to do something that is illegal and could land him in jail then he should not do it. Being ordered do do something illegal by your boss should never be a defense. This isn't the military where refusing a direct order can get you shot (and even then people have been punished for following illegal orders).
So have limited liability for finance issues but not criminal issues. IE, you can shield your personal assets in the event of a corporate failure but you cannot shield yourself from any "legal" issue. Corporations should not be allowed to be punished, the people involved should be directly punished in the event of wrongdoing.
As a "sorta" libertarian, my view on this is that governments getting out of the way of business also means that government will not create fake legal entities called "corporations" to let people hide behind to avoid taking responsibility for their actions. You are right, there wouldn't have been regulation and the company would not have been punished. The actual people responsible would have been and there would be no hiding behind a corporate shield to protect them from justice. It would be treated the same as a regular joe releasing toxic chemicals that killed people.
Screw the free market punishing the guilty party, the guilty party broke the law and infringed on the personal freedoms of others (like the freedom to live). It's a criminal issue with real people in the wrong, not some faceless corporation. The faceless corporation just did that people controlling it made it do.
Notice they're only suing pornographers. As if that's the only annoying spam.
Well, it is the most annoying spam. Especially if you have little kids you would like to get email addresses for.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not a bible thumping anti-porn type of person, but some of the spam stuff is just vile (and some is illegal), and it is pushed to you instead of requested.
Actually, no you don't -- if somebody steals your identity and racks up a bunch of bad debt, your own identity is affected (as a simple before-and-after attempt to secure a loan will demonstrate).
But you still have you identity. Its value may be diluted but you still possess it. You have not "lost" and ceased to have an identity, as it were.
I'm not saying it is not bad, I'm saying "stealing" is not technically an accurate way to describe it.
If it costs you money to find out what personal data a company has on you, then it is not accountability. It doesn't cost them anything to give you that data (again, not a physical good), so why should they be allowed to set a price on what techniclly should belong to you? If they set their price at $10,000 per request is that still accountability?
The other issue here is that they are monopoly (well, technically an oligopoly) and for all practical purposes almost impossible to avoid doing business with them, and you certainly do not have the option of taking your business to another credit bureau. Given their position they should not be able to act with impunity.
The difference is that these products are coming from people volunteering their free time to write them. They are scratching a specific itch, or filling a need by producing software that in some cases is better than commercial counterparts.
Microsoft is spending billions on R&D, hiring the best minds it can, so I would hope they are being held to a higher standard than some geeks who write software for themselves and their friends. Yet we see that even with this diference, Microsoft still just ends up copying everyone else and making (in many cases) poorer quality software than the open source geeks.
It is not hard to get a free PC capable of running a web server comfortably, not to mention with much more disk space than just about any hosting provider will give you. Heck I know people who throw away Pentium 2s because they think they are useless (Windows XP doesn't run very well).
I got a Sun Ultra 1 for $10, and I do not find the monthly power consumption to be even noticable on my bill.
I think you are missing the point. That $50 a year gets him more than you get. 2GB of disk? Heck my smallest machine has a 30GB disk in it. Unlimited email? Try unlimited services. Want to run Secure IMAP? A jabber server? Any server software you want? Your own virtual servers for friends? You can do all of that when you own and control the machine. Paying for a tiny amount of disk space on someone else's server and being limited to the server software they let you run does not appeal to everyone.
Of course, more and more ISPs are blocking ports (like 80) in the aim of protecting users, so they are ceasing to be "internet service" providers and turning into "client gateways", but I digress.
It is no different than the typical thinking of lawmakers today. The DMCA, Verizon's recent bill in PA, these types of laws are written for the expressed purpose of making sure those pesky citizens do not do anything that could threaten the revenue stream of big companies. We need those big companies to provide us jobs and keep the economy going, and any new disruptive technology threatens that.
This should be no surprise, the decisions voters make are based mostly unimportant (in the grand scheme of things) knee jerk issues or worse, the just vote party lines. The elected officials are not beholden to them, they know they will get voted in as long as they have enough money to put out the critical mass of ads (and dig up dirt for attack ads), which is where corporations with campaign finance come in. The REAL constituants. Senator Fritz Hollings was completely owned by Disney to the point where they should have been listing him as a company asset in their tax filings. He fought for laws to help them, laws that in no remote way helped the voters in his district. Ed Rendell voted against the interest of Pennsylvanians because it was in the best interest of Verizon, who is one of Ed's best contributers.
This is how governemnt works today, all it takes for my earlier post to go from +5 (funny) to -1 (already happening) is for the IT industry to get some friends in congress start talking about how things like "open source" and "gpl" hurt existing industry and should be outlawed.
They are already trying in the courts (what do you think SCO is really about?), if that fails, I'm sure congress will be next on their radar.
Microsoft is really helping the computer industry lately. First their initial decision to make outlook express execute any script embedded in email by default kick started the mostly dead antivirus industry into the powerhouse it is today. Now their forward looking decisions regarding the security of ActiveX and Internet explorer has created a whole new industry of spyware detection and removal.
Think of the revenue and jobs created by these decisions.
And Unix (Linux, OS X too), with your anti-economy designs like user accounts that cannot write to system areas, web browsers that do not support a web site's ability to covertly install software behind the scenes, and email clients that do not interpret VPscript, you should be ashamed of yourselves. If popularity of these OSes rises too high, it could seriously damage the antivirus and antispyware industries, causeing a loss of revenue and jobs. Congress should really do something about this.
The way I see it, it is within a private company's right (utilities are private companies too, after all) to collect any information about you and pass it on, if you agreed to it.
I have no problem with that either. I just do not see a problem with telling them they must make said personal information available to that person. I would prefer a system like in europe where all companies that collect personal information on someone must make it available to them. Furthermore, I do not like that personal information about me can be treated as someone else's intellectual property. The rights associated with that information should belong to me and me alone.
And yes, your identity can be stolen, just like your car can be.
Apples and oranges. Cars are physical objects. Actually identity cannot be "stolen" because I still have mine if someone else uses it. Given that we are dealing with abstract concepts and no physical goods the conventional terminology kinda fails.
However, the government does not stipulate that insurance companies give you free theft protection, and neither should it for credit bureaus.
Right, but allowing you to see your own data (that should belong to you anyway) is not the same a providing theft protection. They offer that service as a paid service still.
The reason I am so against it, is not because I care about this issue per se; I really don't. It just bothers me to see the government assume the responsibility to know what is best for us.
In general I agree but I also believe in taking things on a case by case basis and not seeing everthing in black and white. This specific issue is not one people are going to rally around for the cause of reducing government power. Consider all the many better examples of government oversteping its bounds which harm the public good.
This is one of the very few cases where the federal government actually overstepped its bounds in a way that helps the little guy, rather than helping the large, campaign donating corporations screw over the citizens.
I do not believe that anything in business really happens for the pure motive of serving the public good.
Generally no, but sometimes things come out of government with that purpose (even today, although those things can easily be corrupted anyway). I imagine they also have to make the reports available for those without computers or internet connections right? So if you feel like doing this over the phone or mail, you can avoid giving up that data.
Utilities (such as phone lines) can also report to credit bureas.
Not to mention the fact that you can end up getting screwed even if you never have any business relationship with a lender, simply because your identity was stolen.
I am against government influence into business (and vice versa) as much as the next guy, but I do not see a problem with the government telling a company that keeps massive records on people (possibly without their knowledge or consent in the case of identity theft) telling them they have to be transparent. This is no different than telling the FBI their have to make their files on people available through the FOIA, or telling publically held companies they have to report their finances publically.
Out of curiousity, what negative do you see coming from this that you are against it?
Not quite true. You are right that when creditors run a credit check that it goes on your report and multiple checks are generally held against you. However, requesting a copy yourself does not go on the report and therefor cannot hurt you. They are two different classifications of "credit check".
Who "willingly" does business with a credit bureau? Companies you do business may choose to share your information with them, and then use them to make decisions about you, but you never choose to do anything with them.
I'm self-taught yet in college, been doing this stuff since I was 9 on a PC XT & QBasic, throw in some null-modem cables and a Doom2 deathmatch and I think its obvious how I got here.
Boy does THAT ever sound familiar:)
Am I really a sysadmin, or is what I just described an "operator"
I'd say sysadmin, but only because (to me at least) "operator" signifies a mainframe operator. The Unix/Windows world doesn't really seem to have operators (not really needed imho)
The usual pc-ish terminology kinda falls down when talking about mainframes. The operators are generally responsible for managing output (generally printers, maybe a line printer and/or microfiche unit), releasing batch jobs (time sensitive and order sensitive), reacting to hardware or software failures by reporting, swaping out, or restarting. Also handling tapes (mainframe operators are sometimes refered to as tape monkeys) and doing backups usually plays a big role. For me it meant hours sitting in front of a green screen waiting for a highlighted message telling me to restart a job, release a batch process, load a tape, or put more paper in a printer. Most of the time I spent reading computer books or doing homework and screwing around with my ispf panels and trying to learn more about the mainframe itself. Operators at PSU (and I would guess most mainframe shops) are there 24/7/356. Usually 3 during first and second shift, 2 or 1 during third shift (again, at PSU, not sure about anyone else) Let me tell you, working 3rd shift on 12/31/99 absolutely sucked, even with all the y2k planning, things broke.
Systems programmers (what I eventually became) are more what I would consider a "system administrator". They are the ones who manage the OS, install, update, and manage the software, do the performance tuning, capacity planning, etc.
Since you are curious, I no longer do either, I now spend 90% of my time doing work on security middleware type stuff (identity management, directories, authentication, authorization, etc). All of this at Penn State, where I will likely be forever (happily).
sure, z/OS systems "run themselves" most of the time, but let's see you put a 21-year-old Linux geek in charge of a mainframe.
Funny, that was me 5 years ago:) It was nothing like anything I had ever done with computers before, quite the learning experience. I eventually graduated up to systems programmers and loved every minute of it. Working on a OS/390 (then) machine gives you a whole new perspective on IT.
I always notice that the people with mainframe backgrounds seem to have a serious leg up on most other sysadmin (no matter what the system), even if they have less overall experience. I guess if you are willing to learn that convoluted system you can learn anything:)
Slashdot Mirror
There's gonna be a lot of old sex going on.
You really need to be smacked for putting that image in my head.
Finkployd
But why would the shareholders be held responsible for their company's tax evasion unless they themseves did it? The accountents who actually performed the tax evasion and the managers who ordered it (however far up the chain of command it goes) should be personally held responsible. The company did not break the law, people did. Companies cannot break laws, only individuals.
Finkployd
I was being sarcastic. It frightens me that my comment was moderated "insightful".
Finkployd
If some $6.16/hr button pusher is ordered to do something that is illegal and could land him in jail then he should not do it. Being ordered do do something illegal by your boss should never be a defense. This isn't the military where refusing a direct order can get you shot (and even then people have been punished for following illegal orders).
Finkployd
So have limited liability for finance issues but not criminal issues. IE, you can shield your personal assets in the event of a corporate failure but you cannot shield yourself from any "legal" issue. Corporations should not be allowed to be punished, the people involved should be directly punished in the event of wrongdoing.
Finkployd
As a "sorta" libertarian, my view on this is that governments getting out of the way of business also means that government will not create fake legal entities called "corporations" to let people hide behind to avoid taking responsibility for their actions.
You are right, there wouldn't have been regulation and the company would not have been punished. The actual people responsible would have been and there would be no hiding behind a corporate shield to protect them from justice. It would be treated the same as a regular joe releasing toxic chemicals that killed people.
Screw the free market punishing the guilty party, the guilty party broke the law and infringed on the personal freedoms of others (like the freedom to live). It's a criminal issue with real people in the wrong, not some faceless corporation. The faceless corporation just did that people controlling it made it do.
Finkployd
Notice they're only suing pornographers. As if that's the only annoying spam.
Well, it is the most annoying spam. Especially if you have little kids you would like to get email addresses for.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not a bible thumping anti-porn type of person, but some of the spam stuff is just vile (and some is illegal), and it is pushed to you instead of requested.
Finkployd
Actually, no you don't -- if somebody steals your identity and racks up a bunch of bad debt, your own identity is affected (as a simple before-and-after attempt to secure a loan will demonstrate).
But you still have you identity. Its value may be diluted but you still possess it. You have not "lost" and ceased to have an identity, as it were.
I'm not saying it is not bad, I'm saying "stealing" is not technically an accurate way to describe it.
If it costs you money to find out what personal data a company has on you, then it is not accountability. It doesn't cost them anything to give you that data (again, not a physical good), so why should they be allowed to set a price on what techniclly should belong to you? If they set their price at $10,000 per request is that still accountability?
The other issue here is that they are monopoly (well, technically an oligopoly) and for all practical purposes almost impossible to avoid doing business with them, and you certainly do not have the option of taking your business to another credit bureau. Given their position they should not be able to act with impunity.
Some of them are truly interesting and insightful. The rest are of no consequence, and their existence does not bother me.
Just like everything else on the internet.
Just like everything else in the real world.
Finkployd
The difference is that these products are coming from people volunteering their free time to write them. They are scratching a specific itch, or filling a need by producing software that in some cases is better than commercial counterparts.
Microsoft is spending billions on R&D, hiring the best minds it can, so I would hope they are being held to a higher standard than some geeks who write software for themselves and their friends. Yet we see that even with this diference, Microsoft still just ends up copying everyone else and making (in many cases) poorer quality software than the open source geeks.
Finkployd
It is not hard to get a free PC capable of running a web server comfortably, not to mention with much more disk space than just about any hosting provider will give you. Heck I know people who throw away Pentium 2s because they think they are useless (Windows XP doesn't run very well).
I got a Sun Ultra 1 for $10, and I do not find the monthly power consumption to be even noticable on my bill.
I think you are missing the point. That $50 a year gets him more than you get. 2GB of disk? Heck my smallest machine has a 30GB disk in it. Unlimited email? Try unlimited services. Want to run Secure IMAP? A jabber server? Any server software you want? Your own virtual servers for friends? You can do all of that when you own and control the machine. Paying for a tiny amount of disk space on someone else's server and being limited to the server software they let you run does not appeal to everyone.
Of course, more and more ISPs are blocking ports (like 80) in the aim of protecting users, so they are ceasing to be "internet service" providers and turning into "client gateways", but I digress.
Finkployd
It is no different than the typical thinking of lawmakers today. The DMCA, Verizon's recent bill in PA, these types of laws are written for the expressed purpose of making sure those pesky citizens do not do anything that could threaten the revenue stream of big companies. We need those big companies to provide us jobs and keep the economy going, and any new disruptive technology threatens that.
This should be no surprise, the decisions voters make are based mostly unimportant (in the grand scheme of things) knee jerk issues or worse, the just vote party lines. The elected officials are not beholden to them, they know they will get voted in as long as they have enough money to put out the critical mass of ads (and dig up dirt for attack ads), which is where corporations with campaign finance come in. The REAL constituants. Senator Fritz Hollings was completely owned by Disney to the point where they should have been listing him as a company asset in their tax filings. He fought for laws to help them, laws that in no remote way helped the voters in his district. Ed Rendell voted against the interest of Pennsylvanians because it was in the best interest of Verizon, who is one of Ed's best contributers.
This is how governemnt works today, all it takes for my earlier post to go from +5 (funny) to -1 (already happening) is for the IT industry to get some friends in congress start talking about how things like "open source" and "gpl" hurt existing industry and should be outlawed.
They are already trying in the courts (what do you think SCO is really about?), if that fails, I'm sure congress will be next on their radar.
Microsoft is really helping the computer industry lately. First their initial decision to make outlook express execute any script embedded in email by default kick started the mostly dead antivirus industry into the powerhouse it is today. Now their forward looking decisions regarding the security of ActiveX and Internet explorer has created a whole new industry of spyware detection and removal.
Think of the revenue and jobs created by these decisions.
And Unix (Linux, OS X too), with your anti-economy designs like user accounts that cannot write to system areas, web browsers that do not support a web site's ability to covertly install software behind the scenes, and email clients that do not interpret VPscript, you should be ashamed of yourselves. If popularity of these OSes rises too high, it could seriously damage the antivirus and antispyware industries, causeing a loss of revenue and jobs. Congress should really do something about this.
Finkployd
The way I see it, it is within a private company's right (utilities are private companies too, after all) to collect any information about you and pass it on, if you agreed to it.
I have no problem with that either. I just do not see a problem with telling them they must make said personal information available to that person. I would prefer a system like in europe where all companies that collect personal information on someone must make it available to them. Furthermore, I do not like that personal information about me can be treated as someone else's intellectual property. The rights associated with that information should belong to me and me alone.
And yes, your identity can be stolen, just like your car can be.
Apples and oranges. Cars are physical objects. Actually identity cannot be "stolen" because I still have mine if someone else uses it. Given that we are dealing with abstract concepts and no physical goods the conventional terminology kinda fails.
However, the government does not stipulate that insurance companies give you free theft protection, and neither should it for credit bureaus.
Right, but allowing you to see your own data (that should belong to you anyway) is not the same a providing theft protection. They offer that service as a paid service still.
The reason I am so against it, is not because I care about this issue per se; I really don't. It just bothers me to see the government assume the responsibility to know what is best for us.
In general I agree but I also believe in taking things on a case by case basis and not seeing everthing in black and white. This specific issue is not one people are going to rally around for the cause of reducing government power. Consider all the many better examples of government oversteping its bounds which harm the public good.
This is one of the very few cases where the federal government actually overstepped its bounds in a way that helps the little guy, rather than helping the large, campaign donating corporations screw over the citizens.
I do not believe that anything in business really happens for the pure motive of serving the public good.
Generally no, but sometimes things come out of government with that purpose (even today, although those things can easily be corrupted anyway).
I imagine they also have to make the reports available for those without computers or internet connections right? So if you feel like doing this over the phone or mail, you can avoid giving up that data.
Finkployd
Utilities (such as phone lines) can also report to credit bureas.
Not to mention the fact that you can end up getting screwed even if you never have any business relationship with a lender, simply because your identity was stolen.
I am against government influence into business (and vice versa) as much as the next guy, but I do not see a problem with the government telling a company that keeps massive records on people (possibly without their knowledge or consent in the case of identity theft) telling them they have to be transparent. This is no different than telling the FBI their have to make their files on people available through the FOIA, or telling publically held companies they have to report their finances publically.
Out of curiousity, what negative do you see coming from this that you are against it?
Finkployd
While this is unfortunate, that number is not going to help you detect incorrect information or fraud. Which I believe is the point to this law.
Finkployd
Not quite true. You are right that when creditors run a credit check that it goes on your report and multiple checks are generally held against you. However, requesting a copy yourself does not go on the report and therefor cannot hurt you. They are two different classifications of "credit check".
Finkployd
What marketing information are you going to provide the credit bureaus when you make your request that they do not already have?
Finkployd
Who "willingly" does business with a credit bureau? Companies you do business may choose to share your information with them, and then use them to make decisions about you, but you never choose to do anything with them.
Finkployd
I'm self-taught yet in college, been doing this stuff since I was 9 on a PC XT & QBasic, throw in some null-modem cables and a Doom2 deathmatch and I think its obvious how I got here.
:)
Boy does THAT ever sound familiar
Am I really a sysadmin, or is what I just described an "operator"
I'd say sysadmin, but only because (to me at least) "operator" signifies a mainframe operator. The Unix/Windows world doesn't really seem to have operators (not really needed imho)
The usual pc-ish terminology kinda falls down when talking about mainframes. The operators are generally responsible for managing output (generally printers, maybe a line printer and/or microfiche unit), releasing batch jobs (time sensitive and order sensitive), reacting to hardware or software failures by reporting, swaping out, or restarting. Also handling tapes (mainframe operators are sometimes refered to as tape monkeys) and doing backups usually plays a big role.
For me it meant hours sitting in front of a green screen waiting for a highlighted message telling me to restart a job, release a batch process, load a tape, or put more paper in a printer. Most of the time I spent reading computer books or doing homework and screwing around with my ispf panels and trying to learn more about the mainframe itself. Operators at PSU (and I would guess most mainframe shops) are there 24/7/356. Usually 3 during first and second shift, 2 or 1 during third shift (again, at PSU, not sure about anyone else) Let me tell you, working 3rd shift on 12/31/99 absolutely sucked, even with all the y2k planning, things broke.
Systems programmers (what I eventually became) are more what I would consider a "system administrator". They are the ones who manage the OS, install, update, and manage the software, do the performance tuning, capacity planning, etc.
Since you are curious, I no longer do either, I now spend 90% of my time doing work on security middleware type stuff (identity management, directories, authentication, authorization, etc). All of this at Penn State, where I will likely be forever (happily).
Finkployd
sure, z/OS systems "run themselves" most of the time, but let's see you put a 21-year-old Linux geek in charge of a mainframe.
:)
:)
Funny, that was me 5 years ago
It was nothing like anything I had ever done with computers before, quite the learning experience. I eventually graduated up to systems programmers and loved every minute of it. Working on a OS/390 (then) machine gives you a whole new perspective on IT.
I always notice that the people with mainframe backgrounds seem to have a serious leg up on most other sysadmin (no matter what the system), even if they have less overall experience. I guess if you are willing to learn that convoluted system you can learn anything
Finkployd
Sheesh! Pennsylvania (aka Pennsyltucky) is Philly and Pittsburg with Alabama in between.
Hey now, you are forgetting the tiny sliver of sanity in central PA called University Park.
Finkployd