I was so pleased to graduate and get away from all those whiny pretensious NUS types. Especially all the arts students who had 4 lectures a week and then spent the rest of the time socialising in the student bar.
Absolutely damn right. The NUS, incidentally, is the second-largest bulk buyer of alcohol in the entire country. If students spent less time drinking and whining and more time studying and working, the so-called "problem" of student debt would evaporate overnight. I graduated with some debt, but I worked part time while I was studying (as did most of my friends) and I got a degree that actually qualified me for something, so I'd paid it all off within 3-4 years.
There are some real degrees (easily identified by the letters BSc or BEng) but most students are there to party for 3 years on the taxpayer. It's high time the UK university system was brought back under some semblance of control - or privatized. Either way, there's no justification for the taxpayer continuing to fund "Media Studies" and other worthless subjects.
The idea behind SETI is that aliens have been broadcasting long before us, perhaps as a beacon, but not in response to us.
Yes, but the broadcast still has to overlap us. If a civilization was 100 lightyears away (still not far in the grand scheme of things), broadcast for 500 years, giving up 50 years ago in our time, we still wouldn't see them because there was no overlap between our listening and their signal in our part of space. Given the size and age of the universe, the amount of time we have listened for and the distance light can travel in that time, the odds are high that we'd miss even our next-door neighbours altogether!
By far the largest population of people employed in IT do NOT sell software as a product to be sold. Instead, we work for other business entities providing IT services to them as part of their daily business.
Yes but we all rely - to a greater or lesser extend - on packaged software. We have a relationship with packaged software vendors. We give them money (not as much as they'd like) and they give us features (not as much as we'd like). The closed source model is good because it requires people who benefit from software to pay towards to cost of developing and maintaining it. So, the cost can be spread a million ways, or ten million, or a hundred million.
The open source model means you can either wait for a feature you want to be implemented, or you can pay for it - but now, the cost isn't spread millions of ways, but only tens or hundreds, and people are free to contribute nothing and still fully benefit. The only people making money on open source aren't those whose core business is writing it, but those on the periphery - Red Hat selling support, IBM selling hardware, etc etc. Basically, closed source aligns the interests of software users and software makers, open source decouples their interests. And that is why open source will always lag behind closed source when it comes to real end-user capability.
Any business should do what best, subject to the law, makes money for its owners". This is a philosophical/ethical statement,
No it's not. You might as well say that a car shouldn't permit itself to be used in the breaking of any laws. A corporation is a technology - the responsibility for directing it likes not with the corporation itself but with its owners (also known as shareholders).
RMS talks about having quit his job 20 years ago....
That's stretching the truth a little... yes he did quit the MIT AI lab, but he continued (with their permission) to make use of MIT's facilities, equipment, office space, etc. It would be fair to describe him as an honourary tenured academic.
What the heck does he do for money now??
He received a "genius grant" from the MacArthur foundation, which is given to academics or artists of particular note usually to enable them to take a sabbatical and concentrate on doing their stuff unemcumbered.
The combination of these two fortunate events has given RMS a very warped view of economics... ideas of supply and demand, for example, simply pass right over his head.
This is MOST certainly overstating the importance of software's influence on each person's ability to cooperate and experience community.
The problem RMS faces is the problem faced by every revolutionary: the things that appeal to the common man and the things that appeal to the revolutionary are totally different.
Consider Marxism. Karl Marx obviously believed that after a hard day labouring in the factory or the field, the working man couldn't wait to get home and think about dialectical materialism. But, the working man really couldn't care less about it and that is why communist governments have never been elected, they have to seize power in revolutions.
So it is with RMS. He doesn't realize that the average user simply doesn't care. It would be different if there was a history of software vendors flagrantly abusing their power, perhaps, but there simply isn't. There was a story the other day about MS desupporting Win98. Hell, it's not as if they sent bailliffs to repossess every copy - they just said hey, if you want support, you should upgrade to something more modern. Really quite reasonable, expecially considering they gave over a year's notice they were going to. No-one's gone out of business because, in a fit of pique, MS decided not to renew their licenses and suddenly all their computers stopped working.
The problem of closed source largely exists in RMS' mind; I strongly doubt he's ever personally been inconvenienced by it any more than he's inconvenienced by the manufacturer's warning that opening the TV invalidates the warranty.
His "problem" is that he envisions a perfect world where all software is free.
The "problem" with RMS is that for as long as he can remember he's lived on the goodwill of MIT and the MacArthur foundation. He probably honestly believes that that option is available to every programmer and genuinely can't understand why most aren't interested in giving their work away for free and just living on their sponsors. The idea that these things called "corporations" provides "jobs" to programmers, and that closed-source is a way to raise something called "money" that pays "rent" simply hasn't occured to him.
Consider this: Earth has been broadcasting reasonable amounts of obviously-artificial EM into space for around a hundred years, mostly entirely by accident. We have been listening for obviously-artificial alien EM for under 50 years. So the search for life "in the universe" is really the search for "life with 50 lightyears of Earth that is in a comparable stage of technological development".
Given that our galaxy (which is but one of many) is 90,000 lightyears across, 50 lightyears isn't so much in the grand scheme of things. And if there were an intelligent species just 40 lightyears away - if they were pre-industrial, we would have no way of seeing them, and if 50 years ago they had stopped mass EM broadcasts for whatever reason (maybe because broadcasting is incredibly wasteful of a limited EM spectrum) we'd have missed them altogether - their signals would have passed us without us noticing.
Frankly, it is utterly unsurprising that life hasn't beeen found. Given the size of space, if we do come across it by any other means than devoting our entire planet's industrial capacity to searching for it, it will be purely by accident - and probably even then.
I have worked in programming jobs for over 9 years now.. both within US as well as many other nations across the world. Right now I am living in India.
Actually, I make the point (in another post lower down) that the only differences between Indian and American programmers are cultural (i.e. race has nothing to do with it) and that people born in India who have been exposed to Western culture are equivalent to any Westerner.
I don't think I ever said that Indian individuals are "incompetent idiots who can only obey orders and even then do the job badly" but I maintain that Indian culture does not foster innovation to the extent that Western culture does.
Crivens, that's deep. Where did you pinch that quote from?
See my journal for the source of "Culture is fate". I added the other bit myself because I've learnt you have to be very, very explicit when discussing this sort of thing otherwise idiot liberals will jump on you crying "racist!".
Of course, "racist" is what Liberals call anyone who says anything they don't like.
Are we saying programmers in the US are more innovative than Indian, Russian or other off shore programmers?
It is not a nationality thing but a cultural thing. An Indian programmer who has lived and worked in the West for a few years is as good as a programmer born there. An Indian programmer, who has only ever lived in India and worked with Indians is going to have a big cultural gap.
For example, any Western (by birth or just by experience) programmer has a finely-honed instinct for spotting inconsistencies or contradictions in a spec - and has enough attitude to point them out. An Indian - on a whole 'nother continent - is probably just going to go ahead and code it regardless.
Culture - not geography, not language, not race - is fate.
banks or insurance companies or pharmas or telecoms or whatever.
You are joking, right? If you knew anything about IT (hint: there's a lot more to it than the web) you would know that finance, pharma, telco etc are in the driving seat as far as advanced IT goes. Why do you think Sun, IBM, Oracle et al are selling the top-end kit to? Any company that can use technology for competitive advantage will drive (i.e. pay for) innovation to happen. Finance and telco created a whole new industry, data warehousing, which forced the development of mass storage, fast networking, massive parallelism. Pharma created a whole new branch of computer science, bioinformatics.
The innovation that happens in the public eye is trivial compared to what happens in corporate cubicle farms and data centers.
The reason Western software is innovative is because it is driven by the needs of Western companies. The reason India doesn't innovate is because (aside from Western companies outsourcing to it) it doesn't have large or complex enough domestic businesses competing with each other to push IT as competitive advantage.
So his argument isn't good - companies can still keep the design close to home and then outsource the assembly to India or China.
Yes, but in the industry, Accenture is a byword for disaster. Every project they get involved in runs vastly over budget, is late (sometimes years late) and often doesn't even do what it was supposed to in the first place. NIRS2, anyone? Accenture (and the rest of the Big 5, EDS, etc) is a vampire feeding on the clueless... their slick suits sell gargantuan consulting and systems implementation projects to managers who are intimidated by technology. They'd get laughed out of the building if they pitched to the savvy (free tip: if any big consulting firm pitches to you, make it a condition of signing a contract that the people who do the pitch will be working full time on the project. Watch them squirm, because the consultants business model requires that they dump cheap newbies on you to free up the experienced to sell more engagements).
I worked for Andersen Consulting (now Accenture) so I know how those guys do business. I left after two months
Yeah, I used to be a management consultant too, so I know all the tricks:-)
How much longer will it be before a 'copy-protection' scheme that effectively stops you making any sales to iPod (or similiar) owners harms sales more than the increased level of copying that supposedly happens with non-protected CDs?
Given than an iPod costs around GBP300 and a CD player can be had for around GBP9, it will be a long time before the former has the ubiquity of the latter.
Unfortunately, that's not quite true. One of the popular copy protection mechanisms is actually to misformat the CD slightly; a consumer CD player has enough tolerance to still play it, but a high-quality audio CD player, or a player designed for high-speed data is designed to much finer tolerances and can't. If you look carefully at those CD cases, you will see they are missing the usual CD logo, because technically speaking they aren't CDs as they don't conform to the official standard. They are just objects the same dimension as CDs that happen to play in some CD players and not in others - and by coincidence, those others are the ones used in PCs. In other words, it's a hack, or an anti-hack if you prefer.
ts completely pointless.. Only annoys the ppl who bought it
Your purchase of music released on a label affiliated with the RIAA indirectly supports these efforts which most of you agree is capricious, unfair, predatory and illegal.
You must be new around here. On odd days, we all agree that the MPAA and RIAA are evil, obsolete business models, etc etc, and must die. On even days, we salivate over the next in the Matrix or LoTR (or whatever) franchise.
not much innovation there, just source some parts, stick 'em together, bundle it with an OS, and then you've got yourself a PC business!
Au countraire, Dell is highly innovative. You're just looking in the wrong place. It doesn't innovate much technologically, but its supply chain is state of the art. You can count the corporations that know as much about supply chain as Dell on your fingers. Apple does innovate technologically - but its supply chain is relatively ordinary and compared to Dell's (or Walmart's), quite inefficient.
Have you ever heard of the AMA? It's union for doctors but it's called the American Medical Association.
Yes, but it takes more than a first aid kit in your bedroom to join the AMA. And it would take more than a Linux box in your bedroom to join the American Programmer Association. That counts out most of Slashdot right there!
See, it's a Catch-22. Until the APA has real power, no-one is going to bother jumping through the hoops to join. But if no-one is going to jump through the hoops, it has to permit entry to basically unqualified people if it's going to build critical mass, and if it does that it'll never have any power because membership won't actually mean anything.
Another prominent example is the Bar Association which is a union for lawyers.
When I was a student, I joined the Institute of Mechanical Engineers. It was the done thing to do. But I could tell almost straight away, they did near-enough bugger all for engineers - in the UK a qualified engineer makes far, far less than a doctor, lawyer, etc etc, and any schmuck can call themselves an "engineer" if they like. The IMechE exists to serve the interests of its own leaders (i.e. keeping them in cushy jobs, giving professors fancy-sounding titles, etc etc) rather than the working engineer. Call it what you will, a union or an association for programmers would be no different.
And what, exactly, do you think it is that Saddam Hussein's prison guards did? Or Enron's accountants? Or Darl McBride?
The words "smoking" and "crack" come to mind.
Consider Arthur Andersen, the accounting firm that was practically destroyed as a result of its involvement in the Enron affair. It had 75,000 employees. Now, the reputation of Arthur Andersen lies in tatters, but how many of their accountants actually worked on Enron? 50? 100? What about the other 74,900 employees? Would you tar all of them with the same brush? Most of them had probably never even heard of Enron!
Organizations these days are simply too large and too diverse to draw meaningful conclusions from a mention on someone's CV.
Microsoft doesn't use VSS internally but SourceDepot, which isn't (AFAIK) publicly available. Unsubstantiated rumour has it that SourceDepot is a bespoke version of Perforce. VSS was never meant to scale up to vast projects like entire OS distributions (note that even Linux distributions have separate source code control for the kernel, the tools, etc etc). However for medium-sized projects VSS is fine.
Since no one wants to say that they saw her *in person* and were victimized by it, no crime has been committed.
The owner of the bar complained... presumably he risks losing business if damage is done to reputation, like maybe it has a lot of "family" customers.
Some Slashbots are outraged by this, but fact is that not only did she break a law (a silly law, true, but that's a matter for the local population to decide, not anyone else), she abused someone's private property.
Slashdot Mirror
I was so pleased to graduate and get away from all those whiny pretensious NUS types. Especially all the arts students who had 4 lectures a week and then spent the rest of the time socialising in the student bar.
Absolutely damn right. The NUS, incidentally, is the second-largest bulk buyer of alcohol in the entire country. If students spent less time drinking and whining and more time studying and working, the so-called "problem" of student debt would evaporate overnight. I graduated with some debt, but I worked part time while I was studying (as did most of my friends) and I got a degree that actually qualified me for something, so I'd paid it all off within 3-4 years.
There are some real degrees (easily identified by the letters BSc or BEng) but most students are there to party for 3 years on the taxpayer. It's high time the UK university system was brought back under some semblance of control - or privatized. Either way, there's no justification for the taxpayer continuing to fund "Media Studies" and other worthless subjects.
The idea behind SETI is that aliens have been broadcasting long before us, perhaps as a beacon, but not in response to us.
Yes, but the broadcast still has to overlap us. If a civilization was 100 lightyears away (still not far in the grand scheme of things), broadcast for 500 years, giving up 50 years ago in our time, we still wouldn't see them because there was no overlap between our listening and their signal in our part of space. Given the size and age of the universe, the amount of time we have listened for and the distance light can travel in that time, the odds are high that we'd miss even our next-door neighbours altogether!
You seem to have trouble understanding the idea that the owners might have any other motivation than making money.
Not at all. But if that is their motivation, then that's what the corporation should do.
The point is that that you cannot make an ethical judgement about a corporation per se; you can only make a judgement about a shareholder.
By far the largest population of people employed in IT do NOT sell software as a product to be sold. Instead, we work for other business entities providing IT services to them as part of their daily business.
Yes but we all rely - to a greater or lesser extend - on packaged software. We have a relationship with packaged software vendors. We give them money (not as much as they'd like) and they give us features (not as much as we'd like). The closed source model is good because it requires people who benefit from software to pay towards to cost of developing and maintaining it. So, the cost can be spread a million ways, or ten million, or a hundred million.
The open source model means you can either wait for a feature you want to be implemented, or you can pay for it - but now, the cost isn't spread millions of ways, but only tens or hundreds, and people are free to contribute nothing and still fully benefit. The only people making money on open source aren't those whose core business is writing it, but those on the periphery - Red Hat selling support, IBM selling hardware, etc etc. Basically, closed source aligns the interests of software users and software makers, open source decouples their interests. And that is why open source will always lag behind closed source when it comes to real end-user capability.
Any business should do what best, subject to the law, makes money for its owners". This is a philosophical/ethical statement,
No it's not. You might as well say that a car shouldn't permit itself to be used in the breaking of any laws. A corporation is a technology - the responsibility for directing it likes not with the corporation itself but with its owners (also known as shareholders).
RMS talks about having quit his job 20 years ago....
That's stretching the truth a little... yes he did quit the MIT AI lab, but he continued (with their permission) to make use of MIT's facilities, equipment, office space, etc. It would be fair to describe him as an honourary tenured academic.
What the heck does he do for money now??
He received a "genius grant" from the MacArthur foundation, which is given to academics or artists of particular note usually to enable them to take a sabbatical and concentrate on doing their stuff unemcumbered.
The combination of these two fortunate events has given RMS a very warped view of economics... ideas of supply and demand, for example, simply pass right over his head.
If Win98 were open, somebody would be stepping in to support it as Microsoft bowed out.
Just out of curiousity, is there any commercial company that sells support for a 1997-era Linux kernel?
Or would they just tell you to upgrade to a more recent one?
This is MOST certainly overstating the importance of software's influence on each person's ability to cooperate and experience community.
The problem RMS faces is the problem faced by every revolutionary: the things that appeal to the common man and the things that appeal to the revolutionary are totally different.
Consider Marxism. Karl Marx obviously believed that after a hard day labouring in the factory or the field, the working man couldn't wait to get home and think about dialectical materialism. But, the working man really couldn't care less about it and that is why communist governments have never been elected, they have to seize power in revolutions.
So it is with RMS. He doesn't realize that the average user simply doesn't care. It would be different if there was a history of software vendors flagrantly abusing their power, perhaps, but there simply isn't. There was a story the other day about MS desupporting Win98. Hell, it's not as if they sent bailliffs to repossess every copy - they just said hey, if you want support, you should upgrade to something more modern. Really quite reasonable, expecially considering they gave over a year's notice they were going to. No-one's gone out of business because, in a fit of pique, MS decided not to renew their licenses and suddenly all their computers stopped working.
The problem of closed source largely exists in RMS' mind; I strongly doubt he's ever personally been inconvenienced by it any more than he's inconvenienced by the manufacturer's warning that opening the TV invalidates the warranty.
His "problem" is that he envisions a perfect world where all software is free.
The "problem" with RMS is that for as long as he can remember he's lived on the goodwill of MIT and the MacArthur foundation. He probably honestly believes that that option is available to every programmer and genuinely can't understand why most aren't interested in giving their work away for free and just living on their sponsors. The idea that these things called "corporations" provides "jobs" to programmers, and that closed-source is a way to raise something called "money" that pays "rent" simply hasn't occured to him.
What is it exactly that the Swedish use these fighters for?
:-)
If you believe Saab's advertising, the Gripen was the prototype for their new sports car
I am beginning to wonder based on Fermi's paradox
Consider this: Earth has been broadcasting reasonable amounts of obviously-artificial EM into space for around a hundred years, mostly entirely by accident. We have been listening for obviously-artificial alien EM for under 50 years. So the search for life "in the universe" is really the search for "life with 50 lightyears of Earth that is in a comparable stage of technological development".
Given that our galaxy (which is but one of many) is 90,000 lightyears across, 50 lightyears isn't so much in the grand scheme of things. And if there were an intelligent species just 40 lightyears away - if they were pre-industrial, we would have no way of seeing them, and if 50 years ago they had stopped mass EM broadcasts for whatever reason (maybe because broadcasting is incredibly wasteful of a limited EM spectrum) we'd have missed them altogether - their signals would have passed us without us noticing.
Frankly, it is utterly unsurprising that life hasn't beeen found. Given the size of space, if we do come across it by any other means than devoting our entire planet's industrial capacity to searching for it, it will be purely by accident - and probably even then.
I have worked in programming jobs for over 9 years now.. both within US as well as many other nations across the world. Right now I am living in India.
Actually, I make the point (in another post lower down) that the only differences between Indian and American programmers are cultural (i.e. race has nothing to do with it) and that people born in India who have been exposed to Western culture are equivalent to any Westerner.
I don't think I ever said that Indian individuals are "incompetent idiots who can only obey orders and even then do the job badly" but I maintain that Indian culture does not foster innovation to the extent that Western culture does.
Crivens, that's deep. Where did you pinch that quote from?
See my journal for the source of "Culture is fate". I added the other bit myself because I've learnt you have to be very, very explicit when discussing this sort of thing otherwise idiot liberals will jump on you crying "racist!".
Of course, "racist" is what Liberals call anyone who says anything they don't like.
Are we saying programmers in the US are more innovative than Indian, Russian or other off shore programmers?
It is not a nationality thing but a cultural thing. An Indian programmer who has lived and worked in the West for a few years is as good as a programmer born there. An Indian programmer, who has only ever lived in India and worked with Indians is going to have a big cultural gap.
For example, any Western (by birth or just by experience) programmer has a finely-honed instinct for spotting inconsistencies or contradictions in a spec - and has enough attitude to point them out. An Indian - on a whole 'nother continent - is probably just going to go ahead and code it regardless.
Culture - not geography, not language, not race - is fate.
banks or insurance companies or pharmas or telecoms or whatever.
You are joking, right? If you knew anything about IT (hint: there's a lot more to it than the web) you would know that finance, pharma, telco etc are in the driving seat as far as advanced IT goes. Why do you think Sun, IBM, Oracle et al are selling the top-end kit to? Any company that can use technology for competitive advantage will drive (i.e. pay for) innovation to happen. Finance and telco created a whole new industry, data warehousing, which forced the development of mass storage, fast networking, massive parallelism. Pharma created a whole new branch of computer science, bioinformatics.
The innovation that happens in the public eye is trivial compared to what happens in corporate cubicle farms and data centers.
The reason Western software is innovative is because it is driven by the needs of Western companies. The reason India doesn't innovate is because (aside from Western companies outsourcing to it) it doesn't have large or complex enough domestic businesses competing with each other to push IT as competitive advantage.
So his argument isn't good - companies can still keep the design close to home and then outsource the assembly to India or China.
:-)
Yes, but in the industry, Accenture is a byword for disaster. Every project they get involved in runs vastly over budget, is late (sometimes years late) and often doesn't even do what it was supposed to in the first place. NIRS2, anyone? Accenture (and the rest of the Big 5, EDS, etc) is a vampire feeding on the clueless... their slick suits sell gargantuan consulting and systems implementation projects to managers who are intimidated by technology. They'd get laughed out of the building if they pitched to the savvy (free tip: if any big consulting firm pitches to you, make it a condition of signing a contract that the people who do the pitch will be working full time on the project. Watch them squirm, because the consultants business model requires that they dump cheap newbies on you to free up the experienced to sell more engagements).
I worked for Andersen Consulting (now Accenture) so I know how those guys do business. I left after two months
Yeah, I used to be a management consultant too, so I know all the tricks
How much longer will it be before a 'copy-protection' scheme that effectively stops you making any sales to iPod (or similiar) owners harms sales more than the increased level of copying that supposedly happens with non-protected CDs?
Given than an iPod costs around GBP300 and a CD player can be had for around GBP9, it will be a long time before the former has the ubiquity of the latter.
u can run it on computer for sure..
Unfortunately, that's not quite true. One of the popular copy protection mechanisms is actually to misformat the CD slightly; a consumer CD player has enough tolerance to still play it, but a high-quality audio CD player, or a player designed for high-speed data is designed to much finer tolerances and can't. If you look carefully at those CD cases, you will see they are missing the usual CD logo, because technically speaking they aren't CDs as they don't conform to the official standard. They are just objects the same dimension as CDs that happen to play in some CD players and not in others - and by coincidence, those others are the ones used in PCs. In other words, it's a hack, or an anti-hack if you prefer.
ts completely pointless.. Only annoys the ppl who bought it
Now that is true.
Your purchase of music released on a label affiliated with the RIAA indirectly supports these efforts which most of you agree is capricious, unfair, predatory and illegal.
You must be new around here. On odd days, we all agree that the MPAA and RIAA are evil, obsolete business models, etc etc, and must die. On even days, we salivate over the next in the Matrix or LoTR (or whatever) franchise.
Don't worry, you'll get used to it.
Which desktop (windows, kde, gnome, mac) is shown in this image?
Reckon it's Motif. You kids are probably too young to remember it...
not much innovation there, just source some parts, stick 'em together, bundle it with an OS, and then you've got yourself a PC business!
Au countraire, Dell is highly innovative. You're just looking in the wrong place. It doesn't innovate much technologically, but its supply chain is state of the art. You can count the corporations that know as much about supply chain as Dell on your fingers. Apple does innovate technologically - but its supply chain is relatively ordinary and compared to Dell's (or Walmart's), quite inefficient.
Have you ever heard of the AMA? It's union for doctors but it's called the American Medical Association.
Yes, but it takes more than a first aid kit in your bedroom to join the AMA. And it would take more than a Linux box in your bedroom to join the American Programmer Association. That counts out most of Slashdot right there!
See, it's a Catch-22. Until the APA has real power, no-one is going to bother jumping through the hoops to join. But if no-one is going to jump through the hoops, it has to permit entry to basically unqualified people if it's going to build critical mass, and if it does that it'll never have any power because membership won't actually mean anything.
Another prominent example is the Bar Association which is a union for lawyers.
When I was a student, I joined the Institute of Mechanical Engineers. It was the done thing to do. But I could tell almost straight away, they did near-enough bugger all for engineers - in the UK a qualified engineer makes far, far less than a doctor, lawyer, etc etc, and any schmuck can call themselves an "engineer" if they like. The IMechE exists to serve the interests of its own leaders (i.e. keeping them in cushy jobs, giving professors fancy-sounding titles, etc etc) rather than the working engineer. Call it what you will, a union or an association for programmers would be no different.
And what, exactly, do you think it is that Saddam Hussein's prison guards did? Or Enron's accountants? Or Darl McBride?
The words "smoking" and "crack" come to mind.
Consider Arthur Andersen, the accounting firm that was practically destroyed as a result of its involvement in the Enron affair. It had 75,000 employees. Now, the reputation of Arthur Andersen lies in tatters, but how many of their accountants actually worked on Enron? 50? 100? What about the other 74,900 employees? Would you tar all of them with the same brush? Most of them had probably never even heard of Enron!
Organizations these days are simply too large and too diverse to draw meaningful conclusions from a mention on someone's CV.
"From my cold, dead Visual SourceSafe".
Microsoft doesn't use VSS internally but SourceDepot, which isn't (AFAIK) publicly available. Unsubstantiated rumour has it that SourceDepot is a bespoke version of Perforce. VSS was never meant to scale up to vast projects like entire OS distributions (note that even Linux distributions have separate source code control for the kernel, the tools, etc etc). However for medium-sized projects VSS is fine.
Since no one wants to say that they saw her *in person* and were victimized by it, no crime has been committed.
The owner of the bar complained... presumably he risks losing business if damage is done to reputation, like maybe it has a lot of "family" customers.
Some Slashbots are outraged by this, but fact is that not only did she break a law (a silly law, true, but that's a matter for the local population to decide, not anyone else), she abused someone's private property.