but two of the 11 felony counts against these two are for posession of burglary tools. So they got cought cracking and instead of 9 counts on the indictment for just breaking into the system and stealing passwords there are 11 counts, including the two for still having the programs on their computers.
So the headline and synopsis are misleading in that they suggest that someone was run in for just having the l0phtcrack software when in fact they were caught actually breaking into some system and were found to have l0phtcrack in their posession, right?
Then I guess the discussion should be about if this is legitimate to have felony counts for posession of burgulary tools here. If you bust into a store with a lockpick and are caught, you get breaking and entering, theft of goods and posession of burgulary tools as he charges against you. Should this be different? I don't really see how.
If you use a brick to break a window that you climb in, then put the brick back in your pocket, the cops probably don't charge you for posession of a brick. The question in my mind is then is L0phtcrack a lockpick or a brick? Offhand, I would say it is a specialized tool for defeating security, just like a lockpick is. Having it in your posession alone isn't a crime, but having it in your posession after having used it illegaly probably is. Debugger? Can you use a debugger to break into a server?
No, I read it that way too and angrilly followed the link expecting to see a story about some kid minding his own business who got turned in by his ISP and turned out to have l0pht on his drive. Not the case at all. I know that Taco is just posting the synopsis given buy the submitter, but it is very misleading. I think there is a worthwhile discussion about when posession of a software tool is added as a count in an indictment and what legal precedent there is, but that isn't what the initial post looks like this will be about. Pity.
Last time this surfaced on./ the explanation was that Google somehow uses context from other pages that are linked to the result page. I'm not sure I understand how this works, but the expanation was that somehow there are lots of pages out there with 'evil' and 'satan' in the same part of the page with the hyperlink to www.microsoft.com
OT - I've only ever had one submitted story get posted, out of maybe 10 submissions. It was posted the same day I submitted it, was a story on John Carmack's comments on Linux middle of last year.
A couple times I submitted a story and saw a duplicate submission posted the next day so I tend to think that once something gets submitted it will either be posted or discarded within 48 hours (just my guess)
Ah, nothing I like better than an off-topic discussion about sci-fi movie plot flaws and possible fixes!
>(letting the "real you" live when your Matrix persona had died made no sense, and you could always be recycled for food for the rest of your fellow batter-- humans).
Right! Except when Neo was first 'unplugged' from the Matrix by a roving robot/attendant, the Matrix didn't kill him first before flushing him down the toilet. I always assumed that the 'red pill' that caused an interruption in the 'input/output carrier' made the Matrix assume that the battery had gone dead and that's why the robot disconnected him and opened the drain in his pod. This would effectively kill the battery if it weren't already dead and if Morpheus wasn't waiting to scoop him up. Always thought that scene would have been way cooler with a bunch of floating corpses in the water and Neo bobbing around among them waiting for the ship to pick him out.
I have to agree with the prior post, the "your mind _makes_ it real" explanation is crap. Something along the lines of "while you are connected to the Matrix, your respiration and circulation are under the control of the Matrix. If the Matrix thinks you are dead, you _are_ dead."...or something like that. Also, being plugged and unplugged from the Matrix should have been a more violent and traumatic experience... like you go into arrest and someone has to do CPR on you each time you 'come out'.
You keep using the work "mainframe"... I do not think it means what you think it does.
There aren't any number of PC's that can be connected and controlled in a cost effective way to compete with what I consider to be a mainframe, a complex of 3090-class processing engines like we have in our datacenter in Florida. We crank out over a million bill images each day and process over 3 billion call detail records (wireless phones) each month. If you can describe a PC-based solution that can do this volume for under $200 million, I'm all ears!:-)
This is a bit OT, but I have a theory why this happens. I've seen this quite a bit where I'm used to ordering things like cables, connectors and the like online and then I need one in a hurry so I go over to BestBuy or (gag) CompUSA and find that something I need is over $20 when I would expect to pay less than $5.
So, my theory is that they do this to make up on discounts on related hardware. They run a sale on a printer, some schmuck comes in a buys one, the saleman points out that he'll need a printer cable. The customer has no idea a 3' printer cable should be $4 so Best Buy gets back $15 dollars of the sale discount of the printer.
I miss Elek Tek. When I run out of RJ45 connectors or need to replace a bad cable, I hate running out to the store 'cause I know I'm gonna get ripped. Elek Tek always had all this stuff at good prices and had good selection. Go to freaking CompUSA looking for a printer cable and they have 500 boxes of 3' DB25 to centronics and nothing else, all for $25 each. (end of off-topic rant)
That would be "formal" trade barriers that are put in place by governments of member nations that won't play nice, and only benefit those governments politically at the economic expense of other member nations; not business practices by huge multi-national conglomerates who expect the governments of member nations to come lick their boots when they call, right?
Re:Introversion vs. Social Anxiety Disorder
on
LonelyNet
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· Score: 1
>Sorry if I've offended you, this wasn't, and I'm not, a troll.
Hmm, guess I must have sounded offended. I wasn't, really. I'm just constantly bombarded with free advice and opinions from people who don't have a kid with this problem and I kinda go into a defensive rant sometimes.
This is a subject that causes much pain and emotional distress in my life. There isn't an easy answer. Yeah, I'd like to think that my son is just bored or doesn't fit into 'normal' accepted behavior patterns and that's just the school's problem. That doesn't make it any easier for him to go to school every day. He still has the reality that sitting in a classroom for several hours a day is boring and he'll have to cope with that all the way through high school just like I did.
There are things we can do to make it easier for him, and we're open to anything that works. We are working with the school to get him into accelerated studies, but the district we're in doesn't have anything until 3rd grade. We've enrolled him in some weekend gifted student programs outside of the public school. He likes this and it holds his interest but he still has to go to school on Monday thru Friday. We've altered his diet to cut down on sugars and balance his protein intake. This helps some. We've started to plan more family activities and given him the opportunity to pick what he wants to do. Three nights a week he has Mom and Dad at his disposal to play games or whatever he wants.
All this is helping to some degree. But it cannot alter the basic fact that he must trudge into his 1st grade classroom every weekday and sit through mind-numbing activities that makes him eventually crack. It makes me mad too, but I haven't found a solution to it. If I were independently wealthy, I could pick and choose a private school to send him to, I could hire a tutor or whatever. But I'm just Joe-coder who makes an all-right living but I don't have many options at this point outside of the traditional public school system.
I guess the bottom line is my son's happiness. He is less miserable than he was before we started treating him for his "disorder". His self-esteem is much higher because he is able to get through the school day without being sent to the nurses' office to settle down. He comes home with little notes on his work praising his performance. He is happy when he comes home and can show me what he did at school instead of sulking around complaining that he hates school because it is too hard to sit still and he always gets in trouble for getting up from his seat, or talking, or staring out the window and not doing his work. It sucks, I had the same thing in school so I know what he's going through. I wish I could make it go away for him but so far I can't so I'm doing everything in my best judgement as a parent to make it better for him.
Ever used a biofeedback device? I have one of those 'brainmaster' devices that hooks up to your PC and your head and gives you graphical feedback on your brain activity. It's easy to make it go up, just talk or look around. Much harder to make it go down. The idea is similar to TM, I guess. You try to clear your mind of all thoughts and distractions. The better you are able to do this, the quieter it seems whatever readings this thing gets from the sensors on your head. It's very difficult but also very relaxing once you get the hang of it.
Re:Fantasy Brainball League
on
Brainball!
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· Score: 1
>the player with the least brain activity wins.
No, it's a toss up between Al Gore and Dan Quayle!
Re:Introversion vs. Social Anxiety Disorder
on
LonelyNet
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· Score: 1
>It just so happens that the technical name for this disorder points exactly to it's solution.
Bullshit.
Re:Introversion vs. Social Anxiety Disorder
on
LonelyNet
·
· Score: 1
>"Well, if the kid has an attention deficit, don't you think you should give him/her some attention?"
I realize this is probably a troll, but I am bored so I'll respond anyway.
ADHD is a very troublesome problem for many children, my son included. If I could fix it by simply giving him attention every waking hour, I would quit my job and do that. I wish it were that easy, it is not. My understanding is that there are conflicting theories about what causes it exactly, but it does appear to be biological rather than some sociological (sp?) or psychological problem.
My kid is in 1st grade and has been diagnosed ADHD since before he was in Kindergarten. He is a bright, energenic, loving little boy with a huge monkey on his back: he cannot control his impulses or concentrate on anything for very long. We've had him tested and he registers as being profoundly gifted, his IQ is more than four std dev above 'average'. He taught himself to read at 3. He can easily do math problems that are 5th-grade level. We're trying to get him into accelerated classes at school but they are stalling us off on doing this because of his behavior issues. We've looked at moving him to a private school for gifted children but the tuition is prohibitive.
He is being treated with medication, diet and anything else we can try. My wife and I both work and she is even considering quitting her job (she is a coder geek like me) and home-schooling him. We were told early on that he was just hyper-active because he was bored and his diet was crap, we've tried all the alternative treatments, but so far the medication is giving us the best results. I hate the idea of drugging my son every morning before he goes to school, but it is the only thing that seems to help at all. It is not a magic bullet, but it does seem to be effective. This is a real physical disorder that few people who have not experienced it first hand seem to be able to comprehend. That's too bad because there are a lot of children with this problem, many of them are never recognized or treated. Those that are become stigmatized by people who don't have any sensitivity to this real issue.
or you can just do a search on freshmeat for ripping software. Download one, install it and play around with it. It is not that hard.
I suspect that the reason you can only download mp3 files of CD's you own is not a legal one but a technological one. When you insert a CD into your drive, your PC can read the info (CCDB?) on it and use that verify that you own the CD. Can't do the same thing for tapes or LP's.
Well, gee yeah, that was my first thought. If they need a feature that badly, hire some programmers to contribute. If it's a widely needed feature that makes sense to put into the Kernel, submit it. Maybe the think they want isn't kernel-space anyway so then it makes even more sense to hire programmers to do it themselves.
The image of a greedy corportation trying to crack the whip to get the global contingent of kernel hackers to prioritize development for their own specific interests is absurd.
This is what I don't get... why do they bother trying to get live questions from the audience? You get Larry King Live with some famous guest taking calls when Chuck from Portland call in...
"I'd like to know what your views are on Howard Stern, Bobba Booie, Howard Stern, Bobba Booie!!"
Kinda like the "man on the street" interview thing. Major news story breaks, channel 9 has some idiot down on the street to sample random opinions from passersby.
>for all practical purposes nothing happened at all.
Well, I agree that it was funny and I don't condemn him for doing this, he didn't appear to do anything illegal and nobody was harmed in any financial sense. But I think that there are consequences of this:
CNN has lost credibility (deservedly so, it would seem) and will have a hard time getting anybody to participate in any future online chats. If you are someone who thinks this kind of thing is actually useful, you will miss out on that next great online chat with Janet Reno!
The media plays this up as a 'hack' and furthers the hysteria around 'cyberterror'. We're lucky they aren't calling the repeated crashing of the IRC server by the high volume of users a DDoS attack. I think this is only good for media outlets, security consulting firms, antionline and snickering script kiddies. Expect to see a Katz article on this by the end of the week.
On the plus side, someone at CNN knows the truth about what happened and hopefully will get a clue about how to set up and run one of these in the future. If we're really lucky, this will get enough visibility within CNN for some meaningful changes to happen. Probably not, though.
Y'know I'm not sure but it seems like it 'happened' the same day someone managed to post porno images in comments.
That was fun, I'm at work skimming/. and I see some woman slurping down on some guy's giant prick. Not that I wouldn't normally enjoy seeing something like that but I also enjoy being able to pay the mortgage and buy food and stuff and my employer has a habit of firing people who browse porno at work.
Just a guess, but maybe there was some hole in/. that someone found and the quickest way to stop it was to pull the html/text posting thingy.
Well exactly. The shoe is on the other foot now. If AOL were to continue to push for open access, it might result in AOL/TW having to open its network to all comers. Makes sense to me.
What doesn't make any sense is the statement on 1/11 that they would remain committed to open access. Why even make a public statement like that if you're going to turn right around and drop out of the race? Stupidity, arrogance, didn't realize what he was saying, someone told him it would be a good idea before anyone really thought it through? Geez.
"Our goal for the next release of Windows 2000 is to have zero bugs. The only way this happens is if you take it upon yourselves to fix the bugs that should be fixed, and close the bugs that should be closed," -Lucovsky
Good. Place the responsibility squarely on the developers shoulders and change nothing in the way the project is managed. "Fix the bugs, make the rest of this crap go away. Take some initiative, you lazy, loafing bums."
God this is a Dilbert management speak if I've ever seen it. Unrealistic management directives, I've seen it a hundred times. "Work smarter, not harder", or other equally empty, uninspired drivel that gives you no actual useful information or direction.
You work for a big company and you see a comment like this and you realize just how totally clueless your leadership is... it doesn't do anything for you or give you anything realistic to shoot for so you pretty much just go about your work the same as before.
I've seen better success where attainable, realistic goals are set and then incremental, continuous improvement is sought. Not "we suck rocks right now, but guess what... 3 months from now we will go from 65,000 defects to zero." Kinda crap that makes you laugh, delete the memo, then go get a cup of coffee while you think about what life would be like at a real job. No wonder they are so fscked up.
I'm not sure I follow. The relative screwed-up-ness of my govt. vs someone else's wasn't really the issue in my post. I was thinking more about how any form of government (democratically elected or colonial oversight) will abuse its power if given the chance. The Brittish demonstrated that to Colonial Americans in spades. A resonable amount of distrust is healthy. If a Brit says he implicity trusts his law enforcement agency to provide binary-only executables for him to run on his network, something is screwed up as well.
Slashdot Mirror
but two of the 11 felony counts against these two are for posession of burglary tools. So they got cought cracking and instead of 9 counts on the indictment for just breaking into the system and stealing passwords there are 11 counts, including the two for still having the programs on their computers.
So the headline and synopsis are misleading in that they suggest that someone was run in for just having the l0phtcrack software when in fact they were caught actually breaking into some system and were found to have l0phtcrack in their posession, right?
Then I guess the discussion should be about if this is legitimate to have felony counts for posession of burgulary tools here. If you bust into a store with a lockpick and are caught, you get breaking and entering, theft of goods and posession of burgulary tools as he charges against you. Should this be different? I don't really see how.
If you use a brick to break a window that you climb in, then put the brick back in your pocket, the cops probably don't charge you for posession of a brick. The question in my mind is then is L0phtcrack a lockpick or a brick? Offhand, I would say it is a specialized tool for defeating security, just like a lockpick is. Having it in your posession alone isn't a crime, but having it in your posession after having used it illegaly probably is. Debugger? Can you use a debugger to break into a server?
No, I read it that way too and angrilly followed the link expecting to see a story about some kid minding his own business who got turned in by his ISP and turned out to have l0pht on his drive. Not the case at all. I know that Taco is just posting the synopsis given buy the submitter, but it is very misleading. I think there is a worthwhile discussion about when posession of a software tool is added as a count in an indictment and what legal precedent there is, but that isn't what the initial post looks like this will be about. Pity.
Last time this surfaced on ./ the explanation was that Google somehow uses context from other pages that are linked to the result page. I'm not sure I understand how this works, but the expanation was that somehow there are lots of pages out there with 'evil' and 'satan' in the same part of the page with the hyperlink to www.microsoft.com
OT - I've only ever had one submitted story get posted, out of maybe 10 submissions. It was posted the same day I submitted it, was a story on John Carmack's comments on Linux middle of last year.
A couple times I submitted a story and saw a duplicate submission posted the next day so I tend to think that once something gets submitted it will either be posted or discarded within 48 hours (just my guess)
also experimented = experienced? :=)
Ah, nothing I like better than an off-topic discussion about sci-fi movie plot flaws and possible fixes!
...or something like that. Also, being plugged and unplugged from the Matrix should have been a more violent and traumatic experience... like you go into arrest and someone has to do CPR on you each time you 'come out'.
>(letting the "real you" live when your Matrix persona had died made no sense, and you could always be recycled for food for the rest of your fellow batter-- humans).
Right! Except when Neo was first 'unplugged' from the Matrix by a roving robot/attendant, the Matrix didn't kill him first before flushing him down the toilet. I always assumed that the 'red pill' that caused an interruption in the 'input/output carrier' made the Matrix assume that the battery had gone dead and that's why the robot disconnected him and opened the drain in his pod. This would effectively kill the battery if it weren't already dead and if Morpheus wasn't waiting to scoop him up. Always thought that scene would have been way cooler with a bunch of floating corpses in the water and Neo bobbing around among them waiting for the ship to pick him out.
I have to agree with the prior post, the "your mind _makes_ it real" explanation is crap. Something along the lines of "while you are connected to the Matrix, your respiration and circulation are under the control of the Matrix. If the Matrix thinks you are dead, you _are_ dead."
There aren't any number of PC's that can be connected and controlled in a cost effective way to compete with what I consider to be a mainframe, a complex of 3090-class processing engines like we have in our datacenter in Florida. We crank out over a million bill images each day and process over 3 billion call detail records (wireless phones) each month. If you can describe a PC-based solution that can do this volume for under $200 million, I'm all ears! :-)
>The cable at Best Buy was $20 and $4 at Buy.com.
This is a bit OT, but I have a theory why this happens. I've seen this quite a bit where I'm used to ordering things like cables, connectors and the like online and then I need one in a hurry so I go over to BestBuy or (gag) CompUSA and find that something I need is over $20 when I would expect to pay less than $5.
So, my theory is that they do this to make up on discounts on related hardware. They run a sale on a printer, some schmuck comes in a buys one, the saleman points out that he'll need a printer cable. The customer has no idea a 3' printer cable should be $4 so Best Buy gets back $15 dollars of the sale discount of the printer.
I miss Elek Tek. When I run out of RJ45 connectors or need to replace a bad cable, I hate running out to the store 'cause I know I'm gonna get ripped. Elek Tek always had all this stuff at good prices and had good selection. Go to freaking CompUSA looking for a printer cable and they have 500 boxes of 3' DB25 to centronics and nothing else, all for $25 each. (end of off-topic rant)
That would be "formal" trade barriers that are put in place by governments of member nations that won't play nice, and only benefit those governments politically at the economic expense of other member nations; not business practices by huge multi-national conglomerates who expect the governments of member nations to come lick their boots when they call, right?
>Sorry if I've offended you, this wasn't, and I'm not, a troll.
Hmm, guess I must have sounded offended. I wasn't, really. I'm just constantly bombarded with free advice and opinions from people who don't have a kid with this problem and I kinda go into a defensive rant sometimes.
This is a subject that causes much pain and emotional distress in my life. There isn't an easy answer. Yeah, I'd like to think that my son is just bored or doesn't fit into 'normal' accepted behavior patterns and that's just the school's problem. That doesn't make it any easier for him to go to school every day. He still has the reality that sitting in a classroom for several hours a day is boring and he'll have to cope with that all the way through high school just like I did.
There are things we can do to make it easier for him, and we're open to anything that works. We are working with the school to get him into accelerated studies, but the district we're in doesn't have anything until 3rd grade. We've enrolled him in some weekend gifted student programs outside of the public school. He likes this and it holds his interest but he still has to go to school on Monday thru Friday. We've altered his diet to cut down on sugars and balance his protein intake. This helps some. We've started to plan more family activities and given him the opportunity to pick what he wants to do. Three nights a week he has Mom and Dad at his disposal to play games or whatever he wants.
All this is helping to some degree. But it cannot alter the basic fact that he must trudge into his 1st grade classroom every weekday and sit through mind-numbing activities that makes him eventually crack. It makes me mad too, but I haven't found a solution to it. If I were independently wealthy, I could pick and choose a private school to send him to, I could hire a tutor or whatever. But I'm just Joe-coder who makes an all-right living but I don't have many options at this point outside of the traditional public school system.
I guess the bottom line is my son's happiness. He is less miserable than he was before we started treating him for his "disorder". His self-esteem is much higher because he is able to get through the school day without being sent to the nurses' office to settle down. He comes home with little notes on his work praising his performance. He is happy when he comes home and can show me what he did at school instead of sulking around complaining that he hates school because it is too hard to sit still and he always gets in trouble for getting up from his seat, or talking, or staring out the window and not doing his work. It sucks, I had the same thing in school so I know what he's going through. I wish I could make it go away for him but so far I can't so I'm doing everything in my best judgement as a parent to make it better for him.
Ever used a biofeedback device? I have one of those 'brainmaster' devices that hooks up to your PC and your head and gives you graphical feedback on your brain activity. It's easy to make it go up, just talk or look around. Much harder to make it go down. The idea is similar to TM, I guess. You try to clear your mind of all thoughts and distractions. The better you are able to do this, the quieter it seems whatever readings this thing gets from the sensors on your head. It's very difficult but also very relaxing once you get the hang of it.
>the player with the least brain activity wins.
No, it's a toss up between Al Gore and Dan Quayle!
>It just so happens that the technical name for this disorder points exactly to it's solution.
Bullshit.
>"Well, if the kid has an attention deficit, don't you think you should give him/her some attention?"
I realize this is probably a troll, but I am bored so I'll respond anyway.
ADHD is a very troublesome problem for many children, my son included. If I could fix it by simply giving him attention every waking hour, I would quit my job and do that. I wish it were that easy, it is not. My understanding is that there are conflicting theories about what causes it exactly, but it does appear to be biological rather than some sociological (sp?) or psychological problem.
My kid is in 1st grade and has been diagnosed ADHD since before he was in Kindergarten. He is a bright, energenic, loving little boy with a huge monkey on his back: he cannot control his impulses or concentrate on anything for very long. We've had him tested and he registers as being profoundly gifted, his IQ is more than four std dev above 'average'. He taught himself to read at 3. He can easily do math problems that are 5th-grade level. We're trying to get him into accelerated classes at school but they are stalling us off on doing this because of his behavior issues. We've looked at moving him to a private school for gifted children but the tuition is prohibitive.
He is being treated with medication, diet and anything else we can try. My wife and I both work and she is even considering quitting her job (she is a coder geek like me) and home-schooling him. We were told early on that he was just hyper-active because he was bored and his diet was crap, we've tried all the alternative treatments, but so far the medication is giving us the best results. I hate the idea of drugging my son every morning before he goes to school, but it is the only thing that seems to help at all. It is not a magic bullet, but it does seem to be effective. This is a real physical disorder that few people who have not experienced it first hand seem to be able to comprehend. That's too bad because there are a lot of children with this problem, many of them are never recognized or treated. Those that are become stigmatized by people who don't have any sensitivity to this real issue.
grip homepage
or you can just do a search on freshmeat for ripping software. Download one, install it and play around with it. It is not that hard.
I suspect that the reason you can only download mp3 files of CD's you own is not a legal one but a technological one. When you insert a CD into your drive, your PC can read the info (CCDB?) on it and use that verify that you own the CD. Can't do the same thing for tapes or LP's.
Well, gee yeah, that was my first thought. If they need a feature that badly, hire some programmers to contribute. If it's a widely needed feature that makes sense to put into the Kernel, submit it. Maybe the think they want isn't kernel-space anyway so then it makes even more sense to hire programmers to do it themselves.
The image of a greedy corportation trying to crack the whip to get the global contingent of kernel hackers to prioritize development for their own specific interests is absurd.
"I'd like to know what your views are on Howard Stern, Bobba Booie, Howard Stern, Bobba Booie!!"
Kinda like the "man on the street" interview thing. Major news story breaks, channel 9 has some idiot down on the street to sample random opinions from passersby.
Maybe its just me, I don't get the point.
>for all practical purposes nothing happened at all.
Well, I agree that it was funny and I don't condemn him for doing this, he didn't appear to do anything illegal and nobody was harmed in any financial sense. But I think that there are consequences of this:
CNN has lost credibility (deservedly so, it would seem) and will have a hard time getting anybody to participate in any future online chats. If you are someone who thinks this kind of thing is actually useful, you will miss out on that next great online chat with Janet Reno!
The media plays this up as a 'hack' and furthers the hysteria around 'cyberterror'. We're lucky they aren't calling the repeated crashing of the IRC server by the high volume of users a DDoS attack. I think this is only good for media outlets, security consulting firms, antionline and snickering script kiddies. Expect to see a Katz article on this by the end of the week.
On the plus side, someone at CNN knows the truth about what happened and hopefully will get a clue about how to set up and run one of these in the future. If we're really lucky, this will get enough visibility within CNN for some meaningful changes to happen. Probably not, though.
Y'know I'm not sure but it seems like it 'happened' the same day someone managed to post porno images in comments.
/. and I see some woman slurping down on some guy's giant prick. Not that I wouldn't normally enjoy seeing something like that but I also enjoy being able to pay the mortgage and buy food and stuff and my employer has a habit of firing people who browse porno at work.
/. that someone found and the quickest way to stop it was to pull the html/text posting thingy.
That was fun, I'm at work skimming
Just a guess, but maybe there was some hole in
Well exactly. The shoe is on the other foot now. If AOL were to continue to push for open access, it might result in AOL/TW having to open its network to all comers. Makes sense to me.
What doesn't make any sense is the statement on 1/11 that they would remain committed to open access. Why even make a public statement like that if you're going to turn right around and drop out of the race? Stupidity, arrogance, didn't realize what he was saying, someone told him it would be a good idea before anyone really thought it through? Geez.
That would be really funny as a block of C code, too bad I'm too lazy to take a shot...
Good. Place the responsibility squarely on the developers shoulders and change nothing in the way the project is managed. "Fix the bugs, make the rest of this crap go away. Take some initiative, you lazy, loafing bums."
God this is a Dilbert management speak if I've ever seen it. Unrealistic management directives, I've seen it a hundred times. "Work smarter, not harder", or other equally empty, uninspired drivel that gives you no actual useful information or direction.
You work for a big company and you see a comment like this and you realize just how totally clueless your leadership is... it doesn't do anything for you or give you anything realistic to shoot for so you pretty much just go about your work the same as before.
I've seen better success where attainable, realistic goals are set and then incremental, continuous improvement is sought. Not "we suck rocks right now, but guess what... 3 months from now we will go from 65,000 defects to zero." Kinda crap that makes you laugh, delete the memo, then go get a cup of coffee while you think about what life would be like at a real job. No wonder they are so fscked up.
Well, then one ripped off the other because I'm positive I saw drew carey doing that bit word for word on comedy central.
I'm not sure I follow. The relative screwed-up-ness of my govt. vs someone else's wasn't really the issue in my post. I was thinking more about how any form of government (democratically elected or colonial oversight) will abuse its power if given the chance. The Brittish demonstrated that to Colonial Americans in spades. A resonable amount of distrust is healthy. If a Brit says he implicity trusts his law enforcement agency to provide binary-only executables for him to run on his network, something is screwed up as well.
Yep, you're right. My bad
*goes back to work, hanging head in shame*