For the amount of money it'd take to build and maintain that kind of structure underground, you can build one HELL of a steel and concrete bunker above ground.
What other law today is broken so oftenyet carries such a large penalty for those whom are caught? Copyright infringement is in a class by itself as the singular most unjust law in the Unites States.
I agree that copyright law is wildly unjust, but I cannot overlook:
The War on (some) Drugs, which regularly brings about the ruin of everyone from nonviolent dealers, to kids busted for simple possession, to chemo patients, to innocent bystanders.
Sex crime laws, especially Megan's law and other sex offender registration laws, which brands people for life as sex offenders, often for crimes such as urinating in public, with dire consequences. Other sex crime laws enforce wildly disproportionate prison sentences for nonviolent crimes, vastly exceeding what even murderers and other violent criminals routinely get.
Three Strikes laws, and any other law that limits a judge's ability to pass a lenient sentence based on circumstances. I'd bet most people have unwittingly committed at least three nonviolent felonies in their lives - the few that get caught spend 25 to life in prison, sometimes for crimes as small as shoplifting.
Put it in another light: He signed a contract with the intention to exercise the "return the phone and cancel the contract" clause. Is exercising that clause illegal just because he was 100% sure he wanted to do it instead of only 20% sure?
I agree a court COULD find it fraudulent (I don't think they would, but juries are fickle), but I disagree with the GGP's assertion that this is established case law, because I'm completely unable to find any cases.
It's well established law. If you buy something with the intention of returning it, you're not acting in good faith. It's simple fraud.
Citation needed.
I've just spent some time googling around on this one. The term for this seems to be "Wardrobing". There's a stub article, but nothing about law. Nor did any turn up in any of my searching. If it's well-established law, I'd expect it to be a FAQ answered by many retailers. It's not.
I also fail to see how it is fraud, unless there are complicating circumstances, such as trying to return an item purchased at another store, or keeping the accessories, or other underhandedness... But if there's no deception, and they have a "for any reason" return policy, how could it be fraud?
On a practical note, several times I have returned things to a local chain with a 100% refund policy, and stated directly that I had no intention to keep it unless I was either too lazy to return it, or unexpectedly impressed with the product, and since neither had happened, please take it back... And they always have. They've certainly never suggested that it was illegal, or even against the spirit of the return policy. (I also think it's ethical, given the circumstances. That's certainly debatable, but outside the scope of this post.)
Unfortunately, the word Conservative has been rhetoriced into near uselessness, as has been Liberal. It's not supposed to mean the brand of theocratic authoritarianism that it's come to be associated with in US politics lately.
It used to mean people who wanted a restricted, limited role of government in their lives. The founding fathers of the United States would, on that scale, be extremely conservative - and highly amicable to the goals of the OP.
While I've stayed where I am through thick and thin, I have a Plan B in case things get worse. At some point, I may need to accept that the majority of the population where I am disagrees with my values, and are also willing to stand up for what they believe in.
Why shouldn't I let them have their country the way they want it, and go somewhere more in line with the way I want things to be?
Sure, in a large organization, you can reach 100:1 due to economy of scale. In a 60 person company, that doesn't happen. The one guy has to do a very diverse range of duties.
Have a frank discussion with your manager. Explain what your problems are. If he has a spine at all, he'll set reasonable expectations of you, and stand up to other managers who're complaining, thus isolating you from this BS and letting you do your job.
If you don't have a manager who can do this, you need to talk to the higher-ups about remedying this situation (which should be doable in a company that size), by either moving you under a competent manager, hiring one, and optionally firing the nonmanager who you currently report to. If that problem can't be fixed, you will soon have to choose between your sanity and your job. Protip: Choose sanity.
You also obviously need more people. If there are legitimate projects that are waiting because they're low priority in your deep stack, then it's a pretty easy case to make. I've been a single IT guy in a 60 person software company, and it's simply not sustainable long-term.
You're looking at a field here that reinvents itself every other month. What you knew 2 years ago is outdated and very near worthless today.
Bullshit. Everything I learned about computer security ten years ago is just as applicable today as it ever was. The specific tools and methods and exploits change every month, but the fundamentals are the same as they ever were.
Don't trust user input. Obscurity is not security. Complicated designs have more bugs. Understand the difference between encryption, authentication, and authorization. People will circumvent your security for convenience, so make sure your security procedures won't impose on them. Audit. Use standard, well reviewed crypto algorithms.
Don't CPU and Memory failures tend to make the computer somewhat unstable before completely bringing it down?
Yes, and this is one of the key dividing lines between true HA mainframes, and every software implementation of HA services. The latter are what 99% of people seeking HA want (for cost reasons), but the former has been great business for IBM and Sun.
Seconded. I'm a seasoned sysadmin, and on and off I've spent an unbelievable number of hours trying to get this to work:
Chaintech AV-710 (a cheap, basic Envy24 card with a TOSLink out and good DACs on one pair of channels). I want it to: 1) give me bit-perfect audio at whatever sample rate I request over TOSLink; 2) sample rate convert and mix in software when I start multiple audio streams (there's no hardware mixer), 3) route the front channels through the good DACs.
It is amazingly hard to get ANYTHING out of the TOSLink port. The gui is right out. You have to fiddle with.asoundrc to get anything. As for requirement 2... I've never had it working despite many attempts over the last couple years, with many hours invested each time reading mailing lists and fiddling with settings.
It is truly an embarassment that I've fallen back on just using an old SB-Live. Bit-perfect is impossible, constant sample rate conversion in software is mandatory for decent sound, but at least I'm getting audio until this whole mess gets better.
That said, I think the rest of the things in the article are kind of far-fetched.
8.1 Most distros don't allow you to easily set up a server with e.g. such a configuration: Samba, SMTP/POP3, Apache HTTP Auth and FTP where all users are virtual. LDAP is a major PITA. Authentication against MySQL/any other DB is also a PITA.
THAT is a requirement for desktop users? Seriously?
4. It should be possible to configure everything via GUI which is still not a case for too many situations and operations.
I contend that this is not only not a desktop requirement (as Windows has demonstrated for a long time), but ultimately, IS NOT POSSIBLE. There are some things that remote edge cases will want that are too nuanced to ever put into a comprehensive GUI, so unless you're going to drop the features, some level of CLI will stay. What the requirement SHOULD be is that it's possible for a normal desktop user to do everything they want through the GUI, and Ubuntu and others are already there for most cases.
I have similar objections to most of the rest of the list, but I think I'll just leave it here.
It is not inherently dangerous, nor is it inherently harmful.
Its continued distribution furthers the damage done to the children depicted, by displaying what may be a traumatic incident in their past to people only interested in getting off on it. It may be greatly overblown, but harm is done even when it's distributed for nonprofit purposes and no incentive is made to create more.
The moral implications of kids who grow up and make an adult decision that they're ok with those pictures being distributed is left as an exercise to the reader.
The US Army's goal is to discourage violent alternatives to peaceful cohabitation and negotiation. That often requires the civility of a headshot.
The US Army's goal is to discourage violent alternatives to peaceful cohabitation and negotiation. That often requires the civility of... violent alternatives to peaceful cohabitation and negotiation?
Personally, aside from the money, I find having to buy and keep track of licenses is a hassle. I find it liberating to be able to just reinstall or upgrade my software any time without that hassle.
I also find OpenOffice is superior in file format backward compatibility. MicroSoft has played the file format of the week game enough rounds that even office has trouble opening its old documents. OO's import isn't perfect, but it's track record on old documents is definitely better for me lately. With ODF, it's been flawless.
Here's the whole quote: "I would possibly like to see such a public network run as a wholesale service whereby the service providers buy capacity and resell it with their own packages."
It's ambiguous, but to me it sounds like layer 2. I thought it was worth clarifying that only layer 1 needs to be provided.
I'm not as sure about airwaves being viable competition for fiber. I support doing it because I think it'd drive prices down on the mediocre services that telcos are gouging us for now, and allow for great mobile broadband. However, compared to the capabilities of dedicated fiber, it's peanuts. Wireless will bring us ~10Mb with smallish (reasonable, because it's a shared resource) caps, over relatively short distances. Fiber can do 1Gb to 5km for dirt cheap, and out to 70km with more expensive longwave transceivers. It's only limited by the ISP's backbone, which they'll be competing to provide the best caps or QOS at a given price point.
As has been pointed out in other subthreads, MS is not discontinuing extended support for IE6.
It does raise the question why IE8 is being rolled out as a Critical Update when IE6 is still a viable, patched option for those who're willing to put up with it. MS's idea of Critical seems to allow room to blend marketing and security.
Not that I want to discourage this rollout. The world will be a better place with IE6 marginalized to the farthest corners of the net. I would just rather they'd clarify the semantics of "Critical".
No, by design, IE8 isn't backward compatible with crappy corporate intranet sites that were coded up for IE6's crappy eccentricities. That's a good thing for most people, but bad for companies that don't want to spend millions revamping their internal apps at MicroSoft's whim.
Yes, of course they shouldn't have gotten into that situation in the first place, but once they're there, you at least expect them to make good on their support commitments (which they are; see the other subthread).
Anyway, my complaint is mainly long-held bitterness over their claim that IE was integral to Windows. It was / is monopoly abuse of the most blatant sort.
Agreed, but the tone of the article is that the change is "we're letting all the riff-raff in". Mostly that's hot air, because it's conflating elections where actual humans are allowed to vote only once with unauthenticated web polls.
I think there are two important metrics at play here: #1, what percentage of eligible voters will vote; #2, how well informed they are on the issues, on average.
#1 clearly goes up with internet voting, or any other method that makes it easy for the sick, elderly, remote, lazy, wage-slaves, intimidated, or whatever to vote.
At first blush, you'd expect #2 to be much lower in this crowd. Whether that's a good criteria for excluding their votes is certainly debatable, but misses what's likely a bigger issue: Will the people who would have voted anyway, vote SMARTER if they can consult Wikipedia, Rock the Vote, Vote Smart, their buddies on IM, or whatever source they trust to help form an opinion, and they're not in a rush to get out of the hot polling place and let the next guy in?
My money's on #2 going up.
Unfortunately, it's at the expense of subverting paper trails, guaranteed booth privacy, identity authentication, and a whole host of other problems that, in my opinion, probably aren't worth it.
And that's what I was referring to. If they stopped extended support for IE6 earlier than promised (which I misinterpreted), some big customers would be *pissed*.
Microsoft have put it into extended support, where XP (and therefor IE6) gets security updates for the next 5 years.
I thought they were making IE8 *be* the extended support path. I was mistaken, sorry.
By the time MS stops security patches for XP, they will have supported the platform for 13 years. How much longer do you want a stable platform?
Personally, I have no stake - I'm a late adopter, but not that late.:)
But I've worked with some very slow moving companies that would be unhappy to have their platform yanked early. It's not a matter of how long is reasonable - it's entirely about what they were promised and planned for.
If it was part of the OS, it's not fair to expect people to upgrade their OS early, not that I personally believe that line.
If they really will give it security fixes to the bitter end, my point is moot.
They are SO upset that they lost the election and they're going ape shit. Instead of trying to push their message with resonable thought, they force it on you with words of communism and "fascism."
It's funny, I felt the same way about the Democrats 8 years ago.
How is microsoft abandoning patching IE6 any different than Mozilla abandoning patches for Firefox 2?
Firefox 2 wasn't forced down our throats as a supposedly integral part of the operating system. If IE6 was a critical part of the operating system, shouldn't it get critical updates for the life of the operating system? Shouldn't corporate customers who bought in with the promise that they'd have a stable platform for however many years actually be able to use that platform, with all its knotholes, for that long?
Not that I mind seeing it go, but it kind of acknowledges the emperor's lack of clothes.
Computers have no practical place in elections unless there is a paper trail to verify the count.
To the point: Computers' place in elections should be solely to produce a clean, unambiguously marked, human readable, machine countable paper ballot, and the subsequent counting thereof.
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Money and practicality, closely related.
For the amount of money it'd take to build and maintain that kind of structure underground, you can build one HELL of a steel and concrete bunker above ground.
What other law today is broken so oftenyet carries such a large penalty for those whom are caught? Copyright infringement is in a class by itself as the singular most unjust law in the Unites States.
I agree that copyright law is wildly unjust, but I cannot overlook:
It doesn't even have to be very strong encryption but obviously good encryption is better if your CPU can handle it.
AES is quite fast on 32-bit CPUs. There's no excuse for bad crypto.
Put it in another light: He signed a contract with the intention to exercise the "return the phone and cancel the contract" clause. Is exercising that clause illegal just because he was 100% sure he wanted to do it instead of only 20% sure?
I agree a court COULD find it fraudulent (I don't think they would, but juries are fickle), but I disagree with the GGP's assertion that this is established case law, because I'm completely unable to find any cases.
It's well established law. If you buy something with the intention of returning it, you're not acting in good faith. It's simple fraud.
Citation needed.
I've just spent some time googling around on this one. The term for this seems to be "Wardrobing". There's a stub article, but nothing about law. Nor did any turn up in any of my searching. If it's well-established law, I'd expect it to be a FAQ answered by many retailers. It's not.
I also fail to see how it is fraud, unless there are complicating circumstances, such as trying to return an item purchased at another store, or keeping the accessories, or other underhandedness... But if there's no deception, and they have a "for any reason" return policy, how could it be fraud?
On a practical note, several times I have returned things to a local chain with a 100% refund policy, and stated directly that I had no intention to keep it unless I was either too lazy to return it, or unexpectedly impressed with the product, and since neither had happened, please take it back... And they always have. They've certainly never suggested that it was illegal, or even against the spirit of the return policy. (I also think it's ethical, given the circumstances. That's certainly debatable, but outside the scope of this post.)
Unfortunately, the word Conservative has been rhetoriced into near uselessness, as has been Liberal. It's not supposed to mean the brand of theocratic authoritarianism that it's come to be associated with in US politics lately.
It used to mean people who wanted a restricted, limited role of government in their lives. The founding fathers of the United States would, on that scale, be extremely conservative - and highly amicable to the goals of the OP.
While I've stayed where I am through thick and thin, I have a Plan B in case things get worse. At some point, I may need to accept that the majority of the population where I am disagrees with my values, and are also willing to stand up for what they believe in.
Why shouldn't I let them have their country the way they want it, and go somewhere more in line with the way I want things to be?
Sure, in a large organization, you can reach 100:1 due to economy of scale. In a 60 person company, that doesn't happen. The one guy has to do a very diverse range of duties.
Have a frank discussion with your manager. Explain what your problems are. If he has a spine at all, he'll set reasonable expectations of you, and stand up to other managers who're complaining, thus isolating you from this BS and letting you do your job.
If you don't have a manager who can do this, you need to talk to the higher-ups about remedying this situation (which should be doable in a company that size), by either moving you under a competent manager, hiring one, and optionally firing the nonmanager who you currently report to. If that problem can't be fixed, you will soon have to choose between your sanity and your job. Protip: Choose sanity.
You also obviously need more people. If there are legitimate projects that are waiting because they're low priority in your deep stack, then it's a pretty easy case to make. I've been a single IT guy in a 60 person software company, and it's simply not sustainable long-term.
You're looking at a field here that reinvents itself every other month. What you knew 2 years ago is outdated and very near worthless today.
Bullshit. Everything I learned about computer security ten years ago is just as applicable today as it ever was. The specific tools and methods and exploits change every month, but the fundamentals are the same as they ever were.
Don't trust user input.
Obscurity is not security.
Complicated designs have more bugs.
Understand the difference between encryption, authentication, and authorization.
People will circumvent your security for convenience, so make sure your security procedures won't impose on them.
Audit.
Use standard, well reviewed crypto algorithms.
Etc.
Don't CPU and Memory failures tend to make the computer somewhat unstable before completely bringing it down?
Yes, and this is one of the key dividing lines between true HA mainframes, and every software implementation of HA services. The latter are what 99% of people seeking HA want (for cost reasons), but the former has been great business for IBM and Sun.
Seconded. I'm a seasoned sysadmin, and on and off I've spent an unbelievable number of hours trying to get this to work:
Chaintech AV-710 (a cheap, basic Envy24 card with a TOSLink out and good DACs on one pair of channels). I want it to: 1) give me bit-perfect audio at whatever sample rate I request over TOSLink; 2) sample rate convert and mix in software when I start multiple audio streams (there's no hardware mixer), 3) route the front channels through the good DACs.
It is amazingly hard to get ANYTHING out of the TOSLink port. The gui is right out. You have to fiddle with .asoundrc to get anything. As for requirement 2... I've never had it working despite many attempts over the last couple years, with many hours invested each time reading mailing lists and fiddling with settings.
It is truly an embarassment that I've fallen back on just using an old SB-Live. Bit-perfect is impossible, constant sample rate conversion in software is mandatory for decent sound, but at least I'm getting audio until this whole mess gets better.
That said, I think the rest of the things in the article are kind of far-fetched.
8.1 Most distros don't allow you to easily set up a server with e.g. such a configuration: Samba, SMTP/POP3, Apache HTTP Auth and FTP where all users are virtual. LDAP is a major PITA. Authentication against MySQL/any other DB is also a PITA.
THAT is a requirement for desktop users? Seriously?
4. It should be possible to configure everything via GUI which is still not a case for too many situations and operations.
I contend that this is not only not a desktop requirement (as Windows has demonstrated for a long time), but ultimately, IS NOT POSSIBLE. There are some things that remote edge cases will want that are too nuanced to ever put into a comprehensive GUI, so unless you're going to drop the features, some level of CLI will stay. What the requirement SHOULD be is that it's possible for a normal desktop user to do everything they want through the GUI, and Ubuntu and others are already there for most cases.
I have similar objections to most of the rest of the list, but I think I'll just leave it here.
It is not inherently dangerous, nor is it inherently harmful.
Its continued distribution furthers the damage done to the children depicted, by displaying what may be a traumatic incident in their past to people only interested in getting off on it. It may be greatly overblown, but harm is done even when it's distributed for nonprofit purposes and no incentive is made to create more.
The moral implications of kids who grow up and make an adult decision that they're ok with those pictures being distributed is left as an exercise to the reader.
The US Army's goal is to discourage violent alternatives to peaceful cohabitation and negotiation. That often requires the civility of a headshot.
The US Army's goal is to discourage violent alternatives to peaceful cohabitation and negotiation. That often requires the civility of... violent alternatives to peaceful cohabitation and negotiation?
I think the doublespeak just wrapped around.
Personally, aside from the money, I find having to buy and keep track of licenses is a hassle. I find it liberating to be able to just reinstall or upgrade my software any time without that hassle.
I also find OpenOffice is superior in file format backward compatibility. MicroSoft has played the file format of the week game enough rounds that even office has trouble opening its old documents. OO's import isn't perfect, but it's track record on old documents is definitely better for me lately. With ODF, it's been flawless.
But I am not for the federal government doing it.
I agree. It should be at a city level.
I don't see that in the GGGP
Here's the whole quote: "I would possibly like to see such a public network run as a wholesale service whereby the service providers buy capacity and resell it with their own packages."
It's ambiguous, but to me it sounds like layer 2. I thought it was worth clarifying that only layer 1 needs to be provided.
I'm not as sure about airwaves being viable competition for fiber. I support doing it because I think it'd drive prices down on the mediocre services that telcos are gouging us for now, and allow for great mobile broadband. However, compared to the capabilities of dedicated fiber, it's peanuts. Wireless will bring us ~10Mb with smallish (reasonable, because it's a shared resource) caps, over relatively short distances. Fiber can do 1Gb to 5km for dirt cheap, and out to 70km with more expensive longwave transceivers. It's only limited by the ISP's backbone, which they'll be competing to provide the best caps or QOS at a given price point.
As has been pointed out in other subthreads, MS is not discontinuing extended support for IE6.
It does raise the question why IE8 is being rolled out as a Critical Update when IE6 is still a viable, patched option for those who're willing to put up with it. MS's idea of Critical seems to allow room to blend marketing and security.
Not that I want to discourage this rollout. The world will be a better place with IE6 marginalized to the farthest corners of the net. I would just rather they'd clarify the semantics of "Critical".
That's what IE8 is.
No, by design, IE8 isn't backward compatible with crappy corporate intranet sites that were coded up for IE6's crappy eccentricities. That's a good thing for most people, but bad for companies that don't want to spend millions revamping their internal apps at MicroSoft's whim.
Yes, of course they shouldn't have gotten into that situation in the first place, but once they're there, you at least expect them to make good on their support commitments (which they are; see the other subthread).
Anyway, my complaint is mainly long-held bitterness over their claim that IE was integral to Windows. It was / is monopoly abuse of the most blatant sort.
Agreed, but the tone of the article is that the change is "we're letting all the riff-raff in". Mostly that's hot air, because it's conflating elections where actual humans are allowed to vote only once with unauthenticated web polls.
I think there are two important metrics at play here: #1, what percentage of eligible voters will vote; #2, how well informed they are on the issues, on average.
#1 clearly goes up with internet voting, or any other method that makes it easy for the sick, elderly, remote, lazy, wage-slaves, intimidated, or whatever to vote.
At first blush, you'd expect #2 to be much lower in this crowd. Whether that's a good criteria for excluding their votes is certainly debatable, but misses what's likely a bigger issue: Will the people who would have voted anyway, vote SMARTER if they can consult Wikipedia, Rock the Vote, Vote Smart, their buddies on IM, or whatever source they trust to help form an opinion, and they're not in a rush to get out of the hot polling place and let the next guy in?
My money's on #2 going up.
Unfortunately, it's at the expense of subverting paper trails, guaranteed booth privacy, identity authentication, and a whole host of other problems that, in my opinion, probably aren't worth it.
And that's what I was referring to. If they stopped extended support for IE6 earlier than promised (which I misinterpreted), some big customers would be *pissed*.
Microsoft have put it into extended support, where XP (and therefor IE6) gets security updates for the next 5 years.
I thought they were making IE8 *be* the extended support path. I was mistaken, sorry.
By the time MS stops security patches for XP, they will have supported the platform for 13 years. How much longer do you want a stable platform?
Personally, I have no stake - I'm a late adopter, but not that late. :)
But I've worked with some very slow moving companies that would be unhappy to have their platform yanked early. It's not a matter of how long is reasonable - it's entirely about what they were promised and planned for.
If it was part of the OS, it's not fair to expect people to upgrade their OS early, not that I personally believe that line.
If they really will give it security fixes to the bitter end, my point is moot.
They are SO upset that they lost the election and they're going ape shit. Instead of trying to push their message with resonable thought, they force it on you with words of communism and "fascism."
It's funny, I felt the same way about the Democrats 8 years ago.
PS, I'm not a Republican.
Oh, bullshit. Apple never sold that many machines to gamers.
How is microsoft abandoning patching IE6 any different than Mozilla abandoning patches for Firefox 2?
Firefox 2 wasn't forced down our throats as a supposedly integral part of the operating system. If IE6 was a critical part of the operating system, shouldn't it get critical updates for the life of the operating system? Shouldn't corporate customers who bought in with the promise that they'd have a stable platform for however many years actually be able to use that platform, with all its knotholes, for that long?
Not that I mind seeing it go, but it kind of acknowledges the emperor's lack of clothes.
Computers have no practical place in elections unless there is a paper trail to verify the count.
To the point: Computers' place in elections should be solely to produce a clean, unambiguously marked, human readable, machine countable paper ballot, and the subsequent counting thereof.