I did a paper for a class on my Mac using Office 2004, and I embedded some images in the document that were made from screen-shots. Mac's native screen-shot format is.tiff. Looked fine on my computer. When opened on the teacher's computer - Windows, she couldn't see the images. She got a popup (at least the message was helpful) about needing a tiff-viewer.
I reformatted the images in jpeg, and sent her a new copy.
But I could totally see Microsoft linking the image format to Media Player.
Obviously, you've never experienced a Northern California winter.
At least this winter, it rained. A fucking lot. When storms come in, it's not like the thunderstorms of the midwest, the rain falls gently, we get some wind, no thunder no lightning, and it just goes on and on for a week at a time, nonstop.
Then you get a week of sunny weather. Then you get about a week of foggy mornings. Then the rain comes back.
Well, in American Capitalism, there's actually a way to make MORE money than the traditional way (invent a better mousetrap), and that way is to STOP other people from making better mousetraps, by buying their companies and driving their products into the ground.
I used to work for one of the companies Symantec bought. I'm happy to say that this company is now getting to experience what they previously made many other companies experience. They bought other companies to pull their products off the market. And now they've been bought by Symantec, and their products are systematically being pulled off the market or marginalized.
Artificial scarcity adds value. It's sick. It's twisted. It's evil. In the information age, when production costs approach zero because the product can be infinitely reproduced with perfect fidelity, it's the only business model these numbnuts seem to be able to follow.
It seems like a statement of fact: The kids at Columbine were bullied, and there's very little difference between bullying committed by students as opposed to faculty/staff.
That's more true than you know.
The fact that the Columbine kids were bullied is one part of what set them off. The other fact is that the school administration not only allowed the bullying, but took active part in it (by choosing to respond to physical confrontations, fights, assaults, with punishment for the victim, but not for the bully - often because the bully is a star athelete - remember, the team quarterback at Columbine was accused of rape by a cheeleader the year prior to the shootings, and the administration offered her early graduation to keep her quiet).
It's not just bullies that cause school shootings and violence. It's when school administrators take an active role in encouraging bullies and bullying through selective enforcement.
This is a very interesting idea, because if the theory that the solar magnetic field changes by interacting with planetary magnetic fields is true, then perturbations in a star's heliopause would be an indicator of extrasolar planets. The question is - are these perturbations measurable? (probably not).
I'm a mac user (at home) too, - and at work, I generally run as Admin on WinXP because Rational ClearCase has been a very tough nut to crack.
Generally; Running as a User is fine - unless you're going to need to access any control panels, or mess with system areas of the file-system.
But this alone is not really enough to provide real security. You've got to also set some restrictions on file-system and registry permissions. An Excellent guide can be obtained as a pdf file from the NSA.gov website: Guide to Securing Microsoft Windows XP - (Report Number: C44-026-02). Pay careful attention to setting up permissions on the TEMP directory. It really helps a lot with locking everything else down very tightly; as long as your apps are well-behaved. You have to know where your apps are writing their temp files, and as a user, you have to know where your files are being saved. One of the other tricky areas is the Desktop - because you're seeing a combination of All Users\desktop and %userprofile%\desktop. You need to lock out write access to one, but not the other, if you tend to save files to your desktop.
If you follow all this advice, and find that one or more of your "needed" applications breaks, then here are your two best friends: Sysinternals Filemon. Sysinternals Regmon.
Other good pals to hang out with a lot are: Eventvwr.exe (with auditing switched on), compmgmt.msc, and sysinternals psexec. Fast User Switching is pretty useful - but I think the MOST useful is to enable Terminal Server Service (Remote Desktop). You log in from a remote system as Administrator, and fire up Filemon or Regmon, then locally log in as your unprivileged user - try to do what you're trying to get to work, but is now broken. Filemon and Regmon will show you exactly what your application was trying to access, and failed at. Then you've got to consider what you need to do to correct that situation: either open up access to those objects, or change how you're using the application. Some apps are just plain stubborn though, and will force you into unpleasant trade-offs.
But for most standard web-browsing and document writing, running as User is no problem. Developers tend to get into more trouble because developer tools often require elevated privileges (which is my problem at work right now with ClearCase). This leads to developers normally unit-testing their code as Administrator - which leads to more applications that only run well as Administrator: ie a viscious circle.
I wouldn't take his advice about deleting any evidence you found the vulnerability.
The problem is; you could have stumbled onto a honeypot. Or, the system could be vulnerable, but they could be logging your IP anyway (they're only half-incompetent).
Deleting evidence is a sure-fire way to get indicted for obstruction of justice, lying to investigators, etc.
I'm not sure what the right answer here is - but it's not "covering your tracks" because you can't always cover ALL of your tracks, and covering some of them just makes you look guilty.
Similarly, I was recently taking a proctored exam. The exam center used a computer-based testing method, running on a Windows PC. The test was a math test, and the computer was pretty much wide open. Only very minimal measures were taken to lock down access and functionality. Yet, they had a pair of goons frisk me on the way in, and took away my cell phone, my watch, and pen.
I demonstrated for the proctor, the fact that ANYONE could use the start menu, run item to open calc.exe, and therefore, access the windows calculator program, and that they really ought to do a better job securing these machines, seeing as how they spent so much money on the hired muscle.
I was immediately accused of cheating on the test.
I had to contact the professor to get the calculator-restriction lifted (the test was not on arithmatic, but rather on polynomial equations - involving nothing that a calculator would help anyone on anyway).
If you stop paying your bill, the music files are still occupying hard drive sectors.
Quick - try playing back all 15,000 of your music files to determine which ones you need to delete now. . . 5000 out of 15,000. Maybe you can do it next Saturday?
The right wingers are too set upon making the Mid East situation resemble the conditions for the Second Coming of Christ to worry about actually attempting a real diplomatic solution. They think Christ will settle it.
That's only true from the perspective of Dominionist tinfoil hattery. Make no mistake - there are indeed very powerful interests on the Right who have this as a goal, and they very strongly support the Republican party, and the Bush junta. With money, propaganda, and votes.
But the Bush junta has these deluded gullible twits completely fooled.
If Bush was truly one of them, if he set his policy based on the religious dominionist agenda, you'd certainly be seeing more than just TALK on the domestic social issues front. Yes, they've made lots of noises on the gay marriage and abortion ban front. But they've made no real actions. Because they know that the Free Market fundamentalists do not want a Theocracy in the US. These are hotbutton wedge issues designed to inflame the left, and bolster the religious vote. They have absolutely no intention of delivering the US to the Pat Robertsons and James Dobsons. Pat Robertson and James Dobson jerk off to that fantasy - but it's nothing more than that. The Bush junta, and the Republican party, will continue to string these idiots along, because they NEED that voting block to defeat the opposition.
The reason we're in the Middle East is oil.
Not to provide security and stability. But to keep prices up, and production down, and to flatten out the Hubbert's peak so that they can suck more profits out on the downside of the curve.
I put my money where my mouth is 3 years ago, when I bought a fuel-efficient car for commuting to work. While everyone else was buying H2's in anticipation of cheap oil being pumped out of Iraq at gunpoint, I knew that the real intention was to create chaos and instability to panic the traders and jack up prices. I'm proud to say that I was right. THough I have to admit, I expected $5/gal or more by now. I expect that they'r pumping out just enough to try to stave off conservation efforts, which is what fucked them in the late 1970's when they got too greedy, because it cut demand, and drove prices into the toilet. Houston was in a depression in the 1980's because of it. They're not going to make the same mistake this time. If your junkie kicks his habit because you cut off the supply or charged too much, you can't keep him hooked.
The only problem is the huge amount of petroleum dependency for their insecurity actions, their hired mercenary muscle. It breaks the first rule of dealing: don't get high on your own supply.
Actually, Iran became disliked by us because the Iranian people overthrew the CIA-installed Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi during the Iranian Revolution. It wasn't the fact the new government was fundamentalist but because (sarcasm) we couldn't swallow the fact that the people of the country had the arrogance to choose their own leader.
. . . never mind that among all the groups that could have taken power in Iran after the revolution, it was the Ayatollahs that got the least interference from the US. With regard to Iran, the US has very much made it's own bed.
That would minimize the likelyhood of the scam being discovered unless US intel started randomly sampling computers and checking them for bugs but it still seems collossally impractical.
For most government contracts I'm aware of that involve supplying the government with computers, particularly for security-sensitive applications, there are several agencies (Mitre.org and Aerospace Corp) who specialize in examining and auditing the output of the contractor in minute detail for security flaws. Having been a witness to this process, I have to say that I would be amazed if anything like this got through.
Now, if there were contracts that were less open to such scrutiny, for instance, if the contractor was bribing a senator or something (ie. the whole Randy Duke Cunningham / Wade Mitchell fiasco - or even the Halliburton/KBR contracts for Iraq) - then maybe there could be some cause for concern.
For a brief period during the first half of 1992, CNN *was* respectable. Then they realized that on Cable, all they had to do was pander to the lowest common denominator to get more Ad dollars. Cable News (and journalism in general) has been in a downhill slide ever since.
As a former employee (Disclaimer: I am embittered) of Veritas, the ONLY product they had worth a damn was Volume Manager. It was their ONLY real, sustainable revenue source, by virtue of being bundled with Windows, and being bundled with Solaris on their e10000 servers.
Every other product was beaten into submission by poor resource allocation, mismanagement, brain-dead marketing, and utter lack of vision by upper-management, who seemed more focussed on making smarmy deals with AOL.com than developing innovative new software for solving problems.
Veritas had a lot of potentially great products, all of which were ruined by political infighting and stupidity. Many of these products were from competitors they purchased, where they said that the reason for the purchase was to gain new technologies - but really the purpose of these acquisitions was to put potential competitors out of business and take technologies out of the marketplace, and out of the hands of potentially larger competitors (like CA and IBM).
The software industry of the late 1990's was a complete clusterfuck of unregulated overconsolidation. I'm waiting for the big dinosaurs to burn themselves out (and their patents to expire) so a new wave of innovation can begin.
Let me point out that it was the market that brought Enron down, not the government.
Let me point out that it was the GOVERNMENT that propped Enron up after the market took it down. Via bankruptcy protection.
If the government can grant bankruptcy protection, then the recipients of this LARGESS can damn well comply with some regulations on how they do business.
How about this?
Companies that don't like SOX, can opt not to follow it. They can also opt-out of federal bankruptcy protection. They can opt-out of being publicly traded. They can opt-out of using public roads. They can opt-out of hiring employees, each educated at public expense for 13 years. They can opt-out of using the Internet. They can opt-out of their Limited Liability Charters. They can opt-out of selling their product to the lucrative American market without tarrifs.
This all reminds me of the cluster of about 20 or so brain tumors that showed up at the Amoco chemical research campus in the early 1990's in Naperville, Il. All of the victims worked in the same floor of the same building.
Everyone *assumed* that they had been exposed to some nasty organic solvent or something, since this is the kind of research they were doing there.
But they went over that place with a fine tooth comb, looked at all the research records, and these folks never even had anything in storage that was related to something that could cause brain tumors. AFAIK, the Naperville tumor cluster remains a mystery.
The second time, the deciding factor was Ohio, where Diebold,....
Don't forget the whole Bob Ney coingate scandal. Bastard STOLE money from the state pension fund to give to Bush, laundered through many associates to get around campaign finance limits. Ohio Republican party is as crooked as they come.
So basically when you look at it, it wasn't just blind stupidity, but a lot of dishonesty and a lot of greed.
In order for dishonesty and greed to work, you need stupidity.
Over on the other thread, we're talking about how SOX may be more trouble than it's worth.
SOX was created, partially as a reaction to the dishonesty and greed of the dotcom bubble (after all, Enron was a dotcom - not necessarily a computer or IT company, but their business was Energy Trading. Via the internet. Their scam was surfing on the dotcom wave, because they had a web site).
So here we are, 6 years into the dotcom crash (still largely in-progress), and the fraudsters are starting to whine about all those nasty regulations they have to put up with just to "do business".
I remember how, back in grade school, all the other kids used to whine about not being allowed to chew gum because some asshole kept sticking it under the desk.
Slashdot Mirror
interesting backstory to this.
.tiff. Looked fine on my computer. When opened on the teacher's computer - Windows, she couldn't see the images. She got a popup (at least the message was helpful) about needing a tiff-viewer.
I did a paper for a class on my Mac using Office 2004, and I embedded some images in the document that were made from screen-shots. Mac's native screen-shot format is
I reformatted the images in jpeg, and sent her a new copy.
But I could totally see Microsoft linking the image format to Media Player.
Obviously, you've never experienced a Northern California winter.
At least this winter, it rained. A fucking lot. When storms come in, it's not like the thunderstorms of the midwest, the rain falls gently, we get some wind, no thunder no lightning, and it just goes on and on for a week at a time, nonstop.
Then you get a week of sunny weather. Then you get about a week of foggy mornings. Then the rain comes back.
Friday is nit-picking day;
The Hotel California, which was the inspiration for the song, is located in Todos Santos, Baja California Sur, in Mexico.
The song Hotel California is not about the American state, and has nothing at all to do with it, except the word California.
Well, in American Capitalism, there's actually a way to make MORE money than the traditional way (invent a better mousetrap), and that way is to STOP other people from making better mousetraps, by buying their companies and driving their products into the ground.
I used to work for one of the companies Symantec bought. I'm happy to say that this company is now getting to experience what they previously made many other companies experience. They bought other companies to pull their products off the market. And now they've been bought by Symantec, and their products are systematically being pulled off the market or marginalized.
Artificial scarcity adds value. It's sick. It's twisted. It's evil. In the information age, when production costs approach zero because the product can be infinitely reproduced with perfect fidelity, it's the only business model these numbnuts seem to be able to follow.
How quickly can Office 97 open a document that was made with Office 2003?
Not very fast I'd wager.
It seems like a statement of fact: The kids at Columbine were bullied, and there's very little difference between bullying committed by students as opposed to faculty/staff.
That's more true than you know.
The fact that the Columbine kids were bullied is one part of what set them off. The other fact is that the school administration not only allowed the bullying, but took active part in it (by choosing to respond to physical confrontations, fights, assaults, with punishment for the victim, but not for the bully - often because the bully is a star athelete - remember, the team quarterback at Columbine was accused of rape by a cheeleader the year prior to the shootings, and the administration offered her early graduation to keep her quiet).
It's not just bullies that cause school shootings and violence. It's when school administrators take an active role in encouraging bullies and bullying through selective enforcement.
This is a very interesting idea, because if the theory that the solar magnetic field changes by interacting with planetary magnetic fields is true, then perturbations in a star's heliopause would be an indicator of extrasolar planets. The question is - are these perturbations measurable? (probably not).
I'm a mac user (at home) too, - and at work, I generally run as Admin on WinXP because Rational ClearCase has been a very tough nut to crack.
Generally;
Running as a User is fine - unless you're going to need to access any control panels, or mess with system areas of the file-system.
But this alone is not really enough to provide real security. You've got to also set some restrictions on file-system and registry permissions. An Excellent guide can be obtained as a pdf file from the NSA.gov website: Guide to Securing Microsoft Windows XP - (Report Number: C44-026-02). Pay careful attention to setting up permissions on the TEMP directory. It really helps a lot with locking everything else down very tightly; as long as your apps are well-behaved. You have to know where your apps are writing their temp files, and as a user, you have to know where your files are being saved.
One of the other tricky areas is the Desktop - because you're seeing a combination of All Users\desktop and %userprofile%\desktop. You need to lock out write access to one, but not the other, if you tend to save files to your desktop.
If you follow all this advice, and find that one or more of your "needed" applications breaks, then here are your two best friends:
Sysinternals Filemon.
Sysinternals Regmon.
Other good pals to hang out with a lot are: Eventvwr.exe (with auditing switched on), compmgmt.msc, and sysinternals psexec.
Fast User Switching is pretty useful - but I think the MOST useful is to enable Terminal Server Service (Remote Desktop). You log in from a remote system as Administrator, and fire up Filemon or Regmon, then locally log in as your unprivileged user - try to do what you're trying to get to work, but is now broken. Filemon and Regmon will show you exactly what your application was trying to access, and failed at. Then you've got to consider what you need to do to correct that situation: either open up access to those objects, or change how you're using the application. Some apps are just plain stubborn though, and will force you into unpleasant trade-offs.
But for most standard web-browsing and document writing, running as User is no problem. Developers tend to get into more trouble because developer tools often require elevated privileges (which is my problem at work right now with ClearCase). This leads to developers normally unit-testing their code as Administrator - which leads to more applications that only run well as Administrator: ie a viscious circle.
I wouldn't take his advice about deleting any evidence you found the vulnerability.
The problem is; you could have stumbled onto a honeypot. Or, the system could be vulnerable, but they could be logging your IP anyway (they're only half-incompetent).
Deleting evidence is a sure-fire way to get indicted for obstruction of justice, lying to investigators, etc.
I'm not sure what the right answer here is - but it's not "covering your tracks" because you can't always cover ALL of your tracks, and covering some of them just makes you look guilty.
Similarly, I was recently taking a proctored exam. The exam center used a computer-based testing method, running on a Windows PC. The test was a math test, and the computer was pretty much wide open. Only very minimal measures were taken to lock down access and functionality. Yet, they had a pair of goons frisk me on the way in, and took away my cell phone, my watch, and pen.
I demonstrated for the proctor, the fact that ANYONE could use the start menu, run item to open calc.exe, and therefore, access the windows calculator program, and that they really ought to do a better job securing these machines, seeing as how they spent so much money on the hired muscle.
I was immediately accused of cheating on the test.
I had to contact the professor to get the calculator-restriction lifted (the test was not on arithmatic, but rather on polynomial equations - involving nothing that a calculator would help anyone on anyway).
Metallica's greed caused them to lose a lot of fans, many have been there from day 1
Really?
For me it was their last 3 albums. . .
You wish.
If you stop paying your bill, the music files are still occupying hard drive sectors.
Quick - try playing back all 15,000 of your music files to determine which ones you need to delete now. . . 5000 out of 15,000. Maybe you can do it next Saturday?
Adaptive Optics.
(like the kind used for countering atmospheric distortion in large telescopes and, er. . . giant lasers)
The right wingers are too set upon making the Mid East situation resemble the conditions for the Second Coming of Christ to worry about actually attempting a real diplomatic solution. They think Christ will settle it.
That's only true from the perspective of Dominionist tinfoil hattery. Make no mistake - there are indeed very powerful interests on the Right who have this as a goal, and they very strongly support the Republican party, and the Bush junta. With money, propaganda, and votes.
But the Bush junta has these deluded gullible twits completely fooled.
If Bush was truly one of them, if he set his policy based on the religious dominionist agenda, you'd certainly be seeing more than just TALK on the domestic social issues front. Yes, they've made lots of noises on the gay marriage and abortion ban front. But they've made no real actions. Because they know that the Free Market fundamentalists do not want a Theocracy in the US. These are hotbutton wedge issues designed to inflame the left, and bolster the religious vote. They have absolutely no intention of delivering the US to the Pat Robertsons and James Dobsons. Pat Robertson and James Dobson jerk off to that fantasy - but it's nothing more than that. The Bush junta, and the Republican party, will continue to string these idiots along, because they NEED that voting block to defeat the opposition.
The reason we're in the Middle East is oil.
Not to provide security and stability. But to keep prices up, and production down, and to flatten out the Hubbert's peak so that they can suck more profits out on the downside of the curve.
I put my money where my mouth is 3 years ago, when I bought a fuel-efficient car for commuting to work. While everyone else was buying H2's in anticipation of cheap oil being pumped out of Iraq at gunpoint, I knew that the real intention was to create chaos and instability to panic the traders and jack up prices. I'm proud to say that I was right. THough I have to admit, I expected $5/gal or more by now. I expect that they'r pumping out just enough to try to stave off conservation efforts, which is what fucked them in the late 1970's when they got too greedy, because it cut demand, and drove prices into the toilet. Houston was in a depression in the 1980's because of it. They're not going to make the same mistake this time. If your junkie kicks his habit because you cut off the supply or charged too much, you can't keep him hooked.
The only problem is the huge amount of petroleum dependency for their insecurity actions, their hired mercenary muscle. It breaks the first rule of dealing: don't get high on your own supply.
Actually, Iran became disliked by us because the Iranian people overthrew the CIA-installed Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi during the Iranian Revolution. It wasn't the fact the new government was fundamentalist but because (sarcasm) we couldn't swallow the fact that the people of the country had the arrogance to choose their own leader.
. . . never mind that among all the groups that could have taken power in Iran after the revolution, it was the Ayatollahs that got the least interference from the US. With regard to Iran, the US has very much made it's own bed.
That would minimize the likelyhood of the scam being discovered unless US intel started randomly sampling computers and checking them for bugs but it still seems collossally impractical.
For most government contracts I'm aware of that involve supplying the government with computers, particularly for security-sensitive applications, there are several agencies (Mitre.org and Aerospace Corp) who specialize in examining and auditing the output of the contractor in minute detail for security flaws. Having been a witness to this process, I have to say that I would be amazed if anything like this got through.
Now, if there were contracts that were less open to such scrutiny, for instance, if the contractor was bribing a senator or something (ie. the whole Randy Duke Cunningham / Wade Mitchell fiasco - or even the Halliburton/KBR contracts for Iraq) - then maybe there could be some cause for concern.
No - the biggest obstacle will be overcoming the death grip that Big Oil has on the energy industry.
Because successful fusion will fuck them worse than EPA milage standards did in the 1980's.
For a brief period during the first half of 1992, CNN *was* respectable. Then they realized that on Cable, all they had to do was pander to the lowest common denominator to get more Ad dollars. Cable News (and journalism in general) has been in a downhill slide ever since.
Bah!
As a former employee (Disclaimer: I am embittered) of Veritas, the ONLY product they had worth a damn was Volume Manager. It was their ONLY real, sustainable revenue source, by virtue of being bundled with Windows, and being bundled with Solaris on their e10000 servers.
Every other product was beaten into submission by poor resource allocation, mismanagement, brain-dead marketing, and utter lack of vision by upper-management, who seemed more focussed on making smarmy deals with AOL.com than developing innovative new software for solving problems.
Veritas had a lot of potentially great products, all of which were ruined by political infighting and stupidity. Many of these products were from competitors they purchased, where they said that the reason for the purchase was to gain new technologies - but really the purpose of these acquisitions was to put potential competitors out of business and take technologies out of the marketplace, and out of the hands of potentially larger competitors (like CA and IBM).
The software industry of the late 1990's was a complete clusterfuck of unregulated overconsolidation. I'm waiting for the big dinosaurs to burn themselves out (and their patents to expire) so a new wave of innovation can begin.
Frankly, I think these programs should be outed, and every signle person involved, all the way up, should be indicted.
and if found guilty, executed for Treason.
Contempt and spite for our Bill of Rights, and conspiring to undermine or ignore them is Treason.
National bankruptcy might kick them out soon.
. . . only the ones that don't speak Mandarin.
Let me point out that it was the market that brought Enron down, not the government.
Let me point out that it was the GOVERNMENT that propped Enron up after the market took it down. Via bankruptcy protection.
If the government can grant bankruptcy protection, then the recipients of this LARGESS can damn well comply with some regulations on how they do business.
How about this?
Companies that don't like SOX, can opt not to follow it.
They can also opt-out of federal bankruptcy protection.
They can opt-out of being publicly traded.
They can opt-out of using public roads.
They can opt-out of hiring employees, each educated at public expense for 13 years.
They can opt-out of using the Internet.
They can opt-out of their Limited Liability Charters.
They can opt-out of selling their product to the lucrative American market without tarrifs.
Sounds like a deal?
This all reminds me of the cluster of about 20 or so brain tumors that showed up at the Amoco chemical research campus in the early 1990's in Naperville, Il. All of the victims worked in the same floor of the same building.
Everyone *assumed* that they had been exposed to some nasty organic solvent or something, since this is the kind of research they were doing there.
But they went over that place with a fine tooth comb, looked at all the research records, and these folks never even had anything in storage that was related to something that could cause brain tumors. AFAIK, the Naperville tumor cluster remains a mystery.
The second time, the deciding factor was Ohio, where Diebold, ....
Don't forget the whole Bob Ney coingate scandal. Bastard STOLE money from the state pension fund to give to Bush, laundered through many associates to get around campaign finance limits. Ohio Republican party is as crooked as they come.
So basically when you look at it, it wasn't just blind stupidity, but a lot of dishonesty and a lot of greed.
In order for dishonesty and greed to work, you need stupidity.
Over on the other thread, we're talking about how SOX may be more trouble than it's worth.
SOX was created, partially as a reaction to the dishonesty and greed of the dotcom bubble (after all, Enron was a dotcom - not necessarily a computer or IT company, but their business was Energy Trading. Via the internet. Their scam was surfing on the dotcom wave, because they had a web site).
So here we are, 6 years into the dotcom crash (still largely in-progress), and the fraudsters are starting to whine about all those nasty regulations they have to put up with just to "do business".
I remember how, back in grade school, all the other kids used to whine about not being allowed to chew gum because some asshole kept sticking it under the desk.