I call total bullshit on these statistics. 8% write their own blogs? Twenty million people?!? Impossible. No way, no how. Now maybe, just maybe 8% of some select subclass of internet users (e.g. 8% of people who spend more than 4 hours/day on the internet, have a college education, a median income greater than $####, own at least one foreign-made car, read WIred magazine, etc.) write blogs, but to think that many ordinary Americans are writing their own blogs... nope. I don't buy it.
And if you doubt this for one moment, just try to remember the last time you stood in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles. See how silly it seems thinking 4/5 of them could explain what a blog is? And to think nearly 1/10 writes their own? Nyet.
>>every so often a little head would appear in the top corner that was to signify that a "supervisor" was watching... Fascinating study! I guess the Panopticon would cause people to just freak out. Maybe the pervasive monitoring in some societies (UK, Hong Kong) is both a symptom AND a cause of the very crime it's meant to monitor.
>>What if a majority of students/researchers in China are working on their Internet (yes, their) and the "virtua-cop" fucks up their work? The short answer is: the officials don't care. Truly. Government is about control, not service, and it's certainly not measured by the results it gives. That's a very "western" viewpoint. And this government has a particularly nasty (and long) history of killing its own folks.
Upon reflection, I agree with you. It's not the admin's fault -- once it was in the admin's domain, it was already too late. IMO, This breech happened due to a design shortcoming, not a programming error. Let me explain: Any serious company with an internet presence should be asking "When a loss of an external user account/password occurs, what's the maximum damage that can occur? What can we do to minimize the impact?" Frankly, there is no reason at all that one user account (or even dozens) should be able to download 1.6 MILLION (!!) resumes. That's an incredible number!
I'm shocked to think Monster doesn't have a limit on the # of resumes an account is able to d/l per some time period. (week/month/quarter). I don't know what that number is, but I'm thinking closer to "100" than "1.6 million". And didn't they run some cumulative activity reports once in a while to learn which accounts are the most active? And to what IP's the requests are being served? At the least, you'll know who your biggest customers are (or at least the ones who are taxing your servers) and where the data is going. At best, you'll spot problems like this breech as it is happening at stop it.
So if someone must be sacrificed, line up the data security officers and a project manager or two. It's their job to be asking these questions and ensure they are compliant.
Then again, hindsight is 20/20. Maybe the best thing that occurs from all this is we, on the sidelines, learn from their mistakes.
THey mention keeping a copy of (Integer) Basic on cassette. That got me thinking... I'm a little surprised that people haven't converted these old tapes to MP3s; the fidelity is far more than sufficient and once converted will be far more reliable than the original**. It would certainly make "offsite distributed peer-to-peer backups" easier. And it would be cool to hook up your iPod to your Apple ][ (or Vic20 or C64 or TRS80...) audio input cable and spend a few minutes loading Alkabeth or Visicalc "from tape".
[**One wrinkle in your tape and presto! You've got an audio drop-out and with it, code that fails to compile. Of course, that was part of the masochistic fun "back in the day" when your code had chunks of nonsense operands in the middle of a routine producing a different bug every time it loaded due to a dying tape or a sticky transport mechanism. I think it actually improved your debugging skills.]
Anyway, the tape->MP3 conversion seems like a common sense idea, but a quick search didn't turn up anything.
"Your Honor, we ask for your understanding and leniency in this case. Rest assured my client and I are suing people as fast as we can. I mean, it's not like money grows on trees. We have to wring it out of grandmothers and college students and people who don't even have PCs and hey, those cheap bastards just aren't coughing it up like they used to. Plus, it's getting harder and harder to trick the public into buying the latest Bubblegum Boys album. So even with a crappy contract that guarantees poverty for the musician via advance fees, bills for studio time and 18th century "breakage" clauses, times are tough for us over at the chrome & glass RIAA skyscraper. We need just a little more time to get some cash together. We've got hungry executives to feed, and those Gulfstream jets don't exactly fly themselves, you know... etc. etc. etc."
That's an excellent summary of his (IMO) loony hypothesis!
>>Radiation in comets could keep water in liquid form for millions of years Could. Possibly. Maybe. If everything is exactly right. And if there were several heretofore unknown mechanisms in place. And a few scientific principles were ignored. etc. etc. etc. vs. Sedimentary evidence of a stable environment RIGHT HERE ON EARTH that has kept water in liquid form for, oh, say A FEW BILLION YEARS.
Sheesh. Was the "It's turtles, all the way down..." lady his mom or something?
I'm surprised they haven't added a "paper and/or postage surcharge" for a 50+ page bill. I know it requires extra postage, but can one even mail a 50 page document using a standard envelope?
Considering how much the environmental activists pressured Apple to use "greener" manufacturing and packaging, I'm a little surprised they're not taking Apple & the carrier to task for this remarkable waste of paper. I would think there's as much material in one 50-page bill as the iPhone packaging! One or two bills therefore completely undoes any of the efforts to make the product packaging more efficient. Penny wise, pound foolish, as they say.
Criminal charges in this case are absurd. But not as absurd as an ATM analogy.
If you request $100 from an ATM and it dispenses $120, so long as you count your money (and nearly everyone does) you KNOW FOR A FACT that an error has occurred. You requested X and got Y.
However, who is to say whether a slot machine that seems to pay out more often is 1)a programming error being exploited or 2)a run of good luck. Now, if the slot machine is paying out and you're not getting three-of-a-kind (or whatever it takes to make one of those things pay... I must admit I've never gambled) then it's clear to the operator (you) that the machine is broken and an error has occurred. However, just because it seems to pay out a bit more often than other machines isn't the sort of thing a normal human being is able to detect.
In fact, some casinos purposely adjust the odds of the machines close to the entrances in order to lure people into the casio with the sound of small, frequent payouts. It's by design.
Isn't this de facto evidence that the sandboxing, which was supposed to be a key component of both Java and.Net's security models, has either failed to deliver on their promises, or simply isn't adequately well engineered to provide protection against rogue applications?
As has been said before, we need a way to grant applications permissions to use resources. We have that, to some degree, with firewalls and apps like ZoneAlarm/LittleSnitch which ask you for permission before an application is allowed to "call home", but what about other resources -- for example, being able to access only a particular directory or install a system-level event hook which acts as a keylogger? etc.
Correct, but the lawsuits should end with the company that decided to use it as a weapon (Meeting minutes will be subpoenaed to determine this, I am certain)otherwise, the lawsuits never end. Next up? Microsoft... they distributed the OS. Intel and AMD make the CPUs which executed the ugly code. Then I suppose they'll sue God next for making bits? This is silly. If Sony knew that a rootkit was being distributed, then they are as responsible as the company which made the rootkit -- IMO, more so because they were putting the product to malicious use. If Sony simply bought a black-box "copy protection system" and the supplier made the decision to include the rootkit, then they are mostly responsible. But Sony is responsible to its customers, just as the copy protection provider is responsible to its customers. Why? Because rootkits are legitimate products. It's how they are used which determines liability.
Now, let's talk about rat poison. Rat poison is also a product which has a legitimate, obvious use. However, if a restaurant serves it in my tea, that is a criminal act. The restaurant is responsible if they added it, or had knowledge that it was in the tea (even if they did not prepare the drink). However if the restaurant can prove I'm a rat then they can get away with serving rat poison to me. So it is with the current media companies. They are charging that their customers are actually rats (ahem, "pirates") who must be fed a steady diet of poison to control their numbers (as if the music and mindless movies weren't poison enough, but I digress!) If RIAA/MPAA can prove we're all rats, they can get away with this sort of negligent behaviour. Not on their own in a free market, mind you, because no consumer would choose these crap products, but if the **AA can force legislation and regulation which mandates copy control, or better yet ban free and open standards, the end of "first sale" doctrine, disassemble "fair use" and/or other nefarious restrictions, they have in effect convinced the lawmakers we are rats and must be controlled.
Only one solution: Quit buying their shite and they'll quit buying legislators.
Seriously -- have the crybabies complaining ever priced a new laptop battery? $100+++, and that's just a simple pop-in replacement.
Frankly, I think $87 is CHEAP when you consider this battery replacement requires someone skilled enough to disassemble the iPhone, desolder the old battery, install the new one, button it all back up and dispose of the old battery and ship you your product. And, keep in mind, Apple assumes liability for replacing the hardware if they screw up the process.
Here's a suggestion for the complainers : if you believe $87 is terribly overpriced and fueling a thick profit margin, perhaps you should open a shop and replace these batteries yourself. (I think they'll see the reality of the situation quickly.)
Woah. It looks like somebody's been hanging out with Dr. Gene Ray, Cubic & Wisest Human.
You see, previous failed attempts at perpetual motion often utilized magnets, but this machine has Magnets AND Time. And Time is cool. But be warned, you may not be capable of understanding it:
Academia is an accreditation of real stupidity - deadly to all humanity. Dumb ass teachers fear Time Cube and will eat dung before debating it. Dumb students are educated stupid.
"Wikipedia claim that the Time Cube is non-science constitutes a Grave error by the half-brain bastard who can't think opposite of the lies he was taught. I was born to think Cubic as in a 4 corner family life, therefore I rise above you. "
After a little hacking, I was able to obtain a partial Twitter log. It's not pretty:
29Jun07 - 8:00am - Wake up, shower 29Jun07 - 8:12am - brush my silky, gorgeous hair. Daub on that Dippity Do. 29Jun07 - 8:17am - examine hair in mirror, fixed a few errant strands. Close call. 29Jun07 - 8:27am - breakfast 29Jun07 - 8:36am - Re-check shiny, perfectly coifed hair. All is well. 29Jun07 - 9:00am - begin daily policy briefings. 29Jun07 - 9:30am - too much iced tea. Bathroom break. 29Jun07 - 9:33am - Confirm hair status in bathroom mirror. Lookin' sharp! 29Jun07 - 10:00am - Rough morning. Need powernap 29Jun07 - 10:37am - EMERGENCY! Hair was ruffled during nap. Sending a carbon-spewing jet to pick up my stylist for emergency combing session....
Whoever stuck in that photo could have stuck in a penis, and Microsoft will probably feel the need to go with overkill to prevent that ever happening.
I'm hoping that by saying "could have stuck in a penis" they meant to say "could have included AN IMAGE of a penis on the DVD." I mean, the internet's a pretty strange place but somebody farking a DVD is just plain freaky.
However, this is far too serious an issue to take any chances and MSFT is far too serious a company not to respond appropriately. I imagine Balmer is hard at work typing up an email right now:
Memo to all employees: remove your penis before reporting for work tomorrow or risk termination. That is all. I have spoken.
What scares me here is I think a large percentage of MSFT employees would comply.
What's even better than asking for their number? Asking them questions!
"What are you wearing?" I tell you what, I've gotten rid of more tele-marketers that way. They stop their script dead in their tracks and usually hang up on me without so much as another word. Mission accomplished. However, if they DON'T hang up after that, be very afraid.
I hate to be a paranoid, but I wonder if this could be a call from an internally-hired agency... you know, just calling up key people to see if anyone is disloyal? If the employee volunteers information or acts interested in a new job, they are mysteriously dismissed a few days later.
I had heard of this tactic being used prior to the IT Tech Boom but not recently. [IIRC, it was the brainchild of the VP of a certain large database software company and also occurred at a large company which writes OSes and application software. The idea was to remove anyone who wasn't loyal. The result was a huge number of very qualified people were dismissed and morale was crushed. But I'm sure the VPs got a nice bonus anyway.]
In this case, it might explain why the company attorney isn't too responsive, when they're normally over-eager to fire off letters of reprimand.
>>Eat up their time, pass them back and forth. They are just like telemarketers. If they can't sell, they don't eat.
It might be effective, but why should your employer pay you and your colleagues just to convince a telemarketer to piss off? How much is it costing your company to deal with these jerks? Hundreds a day? Thousands?? At $40 or so per hour, it doesn't take long for the figures to add up! A large employer might not notice, but a small shop would definitely feel the pinch of paying salaries in exchange for no real work product.
The caller is at fault here. They've been told to stop. Bring in a competent lawyer and dash off a letter or two. If that doesn't stop the calls post haste, sue them for damages and recoup the legal expenses and lost productivity.
>>...just ring up your legal department, tell them the problem, and they'll craft a nice Cease and Desist letter
Right, that's precisely why they're there. However, OP said "Our attorney says the calls are perfectly legal" which leads me to believe the company attorney is the one who should be looking for new employment!
As you said, Harassment is illegal, and making many, many telephone calls which interrupt business after being told to stop is the very definition. This headhunting company has been instructed, verbally I presume, to stop contacting your company. It is time to put this in writing and start building an evidence chain so they can sue the pants off of the caller for lost productivity, misuse of resources and harassment. I'm sure a competent attorney can think of other charges to bring. But first OP needs to find one. IMO, the current attorney doesn't sound like he's earning his retainer.
>>Maybe they got it out of their systems after slaughtering Muslims and Jews through out the years... See crusades and pogroms..
You are sorely in need of a history lesson. The Crusades occurred only after Muslims took most of Europe under their control; an effort (successful, I might add) to push the invaders (Muslims) back to their lands in the Middle East. (By the way, according to the Koran, once an area has been under Islamic rule it is FOREVER owned by Islam. That's why they're pushing so hard to capture Europe through immigration, according to their beliefs Europe is theirs are YOU are the invader! They are being successful, I will add. There are large slums in France under Sharia law, and the police are simply afraid to confront the residents. Been to Italy or Spain recently? If so, you'd hardly recognise it, compared to thirty years ago.)
>>Judaism and Islam do not consider Darwinism being taught in public schools as a threat to their religious beliefs. The difference is that Jews do not riot in the streets and murder if someone should wish to choose a different way.
Once you accept Mohammed, there is NO LEAVING ISLAM. The penalty for attempting to leave the faith is death.
You're quite wrong, again. Islam considers ANYTHING other than what is written in the Koran (or interpreted as a fatwa) as a threat to Islam. Do you not remember the riots across Europe and the Middle East, in which many people were murdered, simply due to a few cartoon depictions of Mohammed? If you do not believe that Muslims take threats to their religion seriously, you are not grounded in reality.
The shame/honor dynamic and tribal alliance is the very heart of Arabic, and in a more general sense, Islamic, culture. If you do not know what this is, I suggest you read "The Closed Circle" by David Pryce Jones.
But look, your mind is made up... there's probably no sense in me even writing this, is there?
>>an innocent country Which one would that be? Afghanistan or Iraq? Perhaps you missed the two-dozen UN Resolutions demanding Saddam Hussein's compliance, or the hundreds of times his military fired at UN overflights or his murder of thousands of his own people with banned poison gas? Maybe you missed the buried French Mirage jet fighters buried in the sand and obtained by France trading weapons for oil. I keep the newspapers, because I knew it would be only a short time before you types were denying reality. More likely you're just ignoring the facts because they don't meet your socialist worldview.
>>Why do you focus so much on these moslems? The problem is a bit closer to home than you think mate. Uh. maybe because they're doing most of the destabilizing of the world? Have you never heard of Dafur? I would guess you're either British or Austrialian, so perhaps you need to have a look into the 7/7 bus bombings or Austrailias' "Catmeat Shiek" who preaches violence from your shores. Have a look at what's happening in France right now. Nearly 100 cars burned EVERY DAY by "youth" (PC word for poorly integrated Muslim immigrants). THAT is your future, coward.
Slashdot Mirror
I call total bullshit on these statistics.
8% write their own blogs? Twenty million people?!? Impossible. No way, no how. Now maybe, just maybe 8% of some select subclass of internet users (e.g. 8% of people who spend more than 4 hours/day on the internet, have a college education, a median income greater than $####, own at least one foreign-made car, read WIred magazine, etc.) write blogs, but to think that many ordinary Americans are writing their own blogs... nope. I don't buy it.
And if you doubt this for one moment, just try to remember the last time you stood in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles. See how silly it seems thinking 4/5 of them could explain what a blog is? And to think nearly 1/10 writes their own? Nyet.
>>every so often a little head would appear in the top corner that was to signify that a "supervisor" was watching...
Fascinating study! I guess the Panopticon would cause people to just freak out. Maybe the pervasive monitoring in some societies (UK, Hong Kong) is both a symptom AND a cause of the very crime it's meant to monitor.
>>What if a majority of students/researchers in China are working on their Internet (yes, their) and the "virtua-cop" fucks up their work?
The short answer is: the officials don't care. Truly. Government is about control, not service, and it's certainly not measured by the results it gives. That's a very "western" viewpoint. And this government has a particularly nasty (and long) history of killing its own folks.
Upon reflection, I agree with you. It's not the admin's fault -- once it was in the admin's domain, it was already too late. IMO, This breech happened due to a design shortcoming, not a programming error. Let me explain: Any serious company with an internet presence should be asking "When a loss of an external user account/password occurs, what's the maximum damage that can occur? What can we do to minimize the impact?" Frankly, there is no reason at all that one user account (or even dozens) should be able to download 1.6 MILLION (!!) resumes. That's an incredible number!
I'm shocked to think Monster doesn't have a limit on the # of resumes an account is able to d/l per some time period. (week/month/quarter). I don't know what that number is, but I'm thinking closer to "100" than "1.6 million". And didn't they run some cumulative activity reports once in a while to learn which accounts are the most active? And to what IP's the requests are being served? At the least, you'll know who your biggest customers are (or at least the ones who are taxing your servers) and where the data is going. At best, you'll spot problems like this breech as it is happening at stop it.
So if someone must be sacrificed, line up the data security officers and a project manager or two. It's their job to be asking these questions and ensure they are compliant.
Then again, hindsight is 20/20. Maybe the best thing that occurs from all this is we, on the sidelines, learn from their mistakes.
Wanted:
New sysadmin. Must have experience in data security. Submit resume to adminjob@monster.com
THey mention keeping a copy of (Integer) Basic on cassette. That got me thinking... I'm a little surprised that people haven't converted these old tapes to MP3s; the fidelity is far more than sufficient and once converted will be far more reliable than the original**. It would certainly make "offsite distributed peer-to-peer backups" easier. And it would be cool to hook up your iPod to your Apple ][ (or Vic20 or C64 or TRS80...) audio input cable and spend a few minutes loading Alkabeth or Visicalc "from tape".
[**One wrinkle in your tape and presto! You've got an audio drop-out and with it, code that fails to compile. Of course, that was part of the masochistic fun "back in the day" when your code had chunks of nonsense operands in the middle of a routine producing a different bug every time it loaded due to a dying tape or a sticky transport mechanism. I think it actually improved your debugging skills.]
Anyway, the tape->MP3 conversion seems like a common sense idea, but a quick search didn't turn up anything.
"Your Honor, we ask for your understanding and leniency in this case. Rest assured my client and I are suing people as fast as we can. I mean, it's not like money grows on trees. We have to wring it out of grandmothers and college students and people who don't even have PCs and hey, those cheap bastards just aren't coughing it up like they used to. Plus, it's getting harder and harder to trick the public into buying the latest Bubblegum Boys album. So even with a crappy contract that guarantees poverty for the musician via advance fees, bills for studio time and 18th century "breakage" clauses, times are tough for us over at the chrome & glass RIAA skyscraper. We need just a little more time to get some cash together. We've got hungry executives to feed, and those Gulfstream jets don't exactly fly themselves, you know... etc. etc. etc."
Or something like that.
That's an excellent summary of his (IMO) loony hypothesis!
>>Radiation in comets could keep water in liquid form for millions of years
Could. Possibly. Maybe. If everything is exactly right. And if there were several heretofore unknown mechanisms in place. And a few scientific principles were ignored. etc. etc. etc.
vs.
Sedimentary evidence of a stable environment RIGHT HERE ON EARTH that has kept water in liquid form for, oh, say A FEW BILLION YEARS.
Sheesh. Was the "It's turtles, all the way down..." lady his mom or something?
I'm surprised they haven't added a "paper and/or postage surcharge" for a 50+ page bill. I know it requires extra postage, but can one even mail a 50 page document using a standard envelope?
Considering how much the environmental activists pressured Apple to use "greener" manufacturing and packaging, I'm a little surprised they're not taking Apple & the carrier to task for this remarkable waste of paper. I would think there's as much material in one 50-page bill as the iPhone packaging! One or two bills therefore completely undoes any of the efforts to make the product packaging more efficient. Penny wise, pound foolish, as they say.
Criminal charges in this case are absurd. But not as absurd as an ATM analogy.
If you request $100 from an ATM and it dispenses $120, so long as you count your money (and nearly everyone does) you KNOW FOR A FACT that an error has occurred. You requested X and got Y.
However, who is to say whether a slot machine that seems to pay out more often is 1)a programming error being exploited or 2)a run of good luck. Now, if the slot machine is paying out and you're not getting three-of-a-kind (or whatever it takes to make one of those things pay... I must admit I've never gambled) then it's clear to the operator (you) that the machine is broken and an error has occurred. However, just because it seems to pay out a bit more often than other machines isn't the sort of thing a normal human being is able to detect.
In fact, some casinos purposely adjust the odds of the machines close to the entrances in order to lure people into the casio with the sound of small, frequent payouts. It's by design.
Isn't this de facto evidence that the sandboxing, which was supposed to be a key component of both Java and .Net's security models, has either failed to deliver on their promises, or simply isn't adequately well engineered to provide protection against rogue applications?
As has been said before, we need a way to grant applications permissions to use resources. We have that, to some degree, with firewalls and apps like ZoneAlarm/LittleSnitch which ask you for permission before an application is allowed to "call home", but what about other resources -- for example, being able to access only a particular directory or install a system-level event hook which acts as a keylogger? etc.
Correct, but the lawsuits should end with the company that decided to use it as a weapon (Meeting minutes will be subpoenaed to determine this, I am certain)otherwise, the lawsuits never end. Next up? Microsoft... they distributed the OS. Intel and AMD make the CPUs which executed the ugly code. Then I suppose they'll sue God next for making bits? This is silly. If Sony knew that a rootkit was being distributed, then they are as responsible as the company which made the rootkit -- IMO, more so because they were putting the product to malicious use. If Sony simply bought a black-box "copy protection system" and the supplier made the decision to include the rootkit, then they are mostly responsible. But Sony is responsible to its customers, just as the copy protection provider is responsible to its customers. Why? Because rootkits are legitimate products. It's how they are used which determines liability.
Now, let's talk about rat poison.
Rat poison is also a product which has a legitimate, obvious use. However, if a restaurant serves it in my tea, that is a criminal act. The restaurant is responsible if they added it, or had knowledge that it was in the tea (even if they did not prepare the drink). However if the restaurant can prove I'm a rat then they can get away with serving rat poison to me. So it is with the current media companies. They are charging that their customers are actually rats (ahem, "pirates") who must be fed a steady diet of poison to control their numbers (as if the music and mindless movies weren't poison enough, but I digress!) If RIAA/MPAA can prove we're all rats, they can get away with this sort of negligent behaviour. Not on their own in a free market, mind you, because no consumer would choose these crap products, but if the **AA can force legislation and regulation which mandates copy control, or better yet ban free and open standards, the end of "first sale" doctrine, disassemble "fair use" and/or other nefarious restrictions, they have in effect convinced the lawmakers we are rats and must be controlled.
Only one solution: Quit buying their shite and they'll quit buying legislators.
>>How can you possibly fast track a 325 page document, giving the public only a time amount of time to check it, then expect it to be perfect.
Damned if we know.
Signed,
The US Congress
Seriously -- have the crybabies complaining ever priced a new laptop battery? $100+++, and that's just a simple pop-in replacement.
Frankly, I think $87 is CHEAP when you consider this battery replacement requires someone skilled enough to disassemble the iPhone, desolder the old battery, install the new one, button it all back up and dispose of the old battery and ship you your product.
And, keep in mind, Apple assumes liability for replacing the hardware if they screw up the process.
Here's a suggestion for the complainers : if you believe $87 is terribly overpriced and fueling a thick profit margin, perhaps you should open a shop and replace these batteries yourself. (I think they'll see the reality of the situation quickly.)
You forgot option #3. Kill them and bury the bodies in a shallow grave behind the shed.
But if you do, please shoot a video and post a torrent. That would be entertaining.
You see, previous failed attempts at perpetual motion often utilized magnets, but this machine has Magnets AND Time. And Time is cool.
But be warned, you may not be capable of understanding it:
http://www.timecube.com/
After a little hacking, I was able to obtain a partial Twitter log. It's not pretty:
...
29Jun07 - 8:00am - Wake up, shower
29Jun07 - 8:12am - brush my silky, gorgeous hair. Daub on that Dippity Do.
29Jun07 - 8:17am - examine hair in mirror, fixed a few errant strands. Close call.
29Jun07 - 8:27am - breakfast
29Jun07 - 8:36am - Re-check shiny, perfectly coifed hair. All is well.
29Jun07 - 9:00am - begin daily policy briefings.
29Jun07 - 9:30am - too much iced tea. Bathroom break.
29Jun07 - 9:33am - Confirm hair status in bathroom mirror. Lookin' sharp!
29Jun07 - 10:00am - Rough morning. Need powernap
29Jun07 - 10:37am - EMERGENCY! Hair was ruffled during nap. Sending a carbon-spewing jet to pick up my stylist for emergency combing session.
"It's turtles... all the way down."
However, this is far too serious an issue to take any chances and MSFT is far too serious a company not to respond appropriately. I imagine Balmer is hard at work typing up an email right now:
Memo to all employees: remove your penis before reporting for work tomorrow or risk termination. That is all. I have spoken.
What scares me here is I think a large percentage of MSFT employees would comply.
I tell you what, I've gotten rid of more tele-marketers that way. They stop their script dead in their tracks and usually hang up on me without so much as another word. Mission accomplished.
However, if they DON'T hang up after that, be very afraid.
I hate to be a paranoid, but I wonder if this could be a call from an internally-hired agency... you know, just calling up key people to see if anyone is disloyal? If the employee volunteers information or acts interested in a new job, they are mysteriously dismissed a few days later.
I had heard of this tactic being used prior to the IT Tech Boom but not recently. [IIRC, it was the brainchild of the VP of a certain large database software company and also occurred at a large company which writes OSes and application software. The idea was to remove anyone who wasn't loyal. The result was a huge number of very qualified people were dismissed and morale was crushed. But I'm sure the VPs got a nice bonus anyway.]
In this case, it might explain why the company attorney isn't too responsive, when they're normally over-eager to fire off letters of reprimand.
>>Eat up their time, pass them back and forth. They are just like telemarketers. If they can't sell, they don't eat.
It might be effective, but why should your employer pay you and your colleagues just to convince a telemarketer to piss off? How much is it costing your company to deal with these jerks? Hundreds a day? Thousands?? At $40 or so per hour, it doesn't take long for the figures to add up! A large employer might not notice, but a small shop would definitely feel the pinch of paying salaries in exchange for no real work product.
The caller is at fault here. They've been told to stop. Bring in a competent lawyer and dash off a letter or two. If that doesn't stop the calls post haste, sue them for damages and recoup the legal expenses and lost productivity.
>>...just ring up your legal department, tell them the problem, and they'll craft a nice Cease and Desist letter
Right, that's precisely why they're there. However, OP said "Our attorney says the calls are perfectly legal" which leads me to believe the company attorney is the one who should be looking for new employment!
As you said, Harassment is illegal, and making many, many telephone calls which interrupt business after being told to stop is the very definition. This headhunting company has been instructed, verbally I presume, to stop contacting your company. It is time to put this in writing and start building an evidence chain so they can sue the pants off of the caller for lost productivity, misuse of resources and harassment. I'm sure a competent attorney can think of other charges to bring. But first OP needs to find one. IMO, the current attorney doesn't sound like he's earning his retainer.
>>Maybe they got it out of their systems after slaughtering Muslims and Jews through out the years... See crusades and pogroms..
You are sorely in need of a history lesson. The Crusades occurred only after Muslims took most of Europe under their control; an effort (successful, I might add) to push the invaders (Muslims) back to their lands in the Middle East. (By the way, according to the Koran, once an area has been under Islamic rule it is FOREVER owned by Islam. That's why they're pushing so hard to capture Europe through immigration, according to their beliefs Europe is theirs are YOU are the invader! They are being successful, I will add. There are large slums in France under Sharia law, and the police are simply afraid to confront the residents. Been to Italy or Spain recently? If so, you'd hardly recognise it, compared to thirty years ago.)
>>Judaism and Islam do not consider Darwinism being taught in public schools as a threat to their religious beliefs.
The difference is that Jews do not riot in the streets and murder if someone should wish to choose a different way.
Once you accept Mohammed, there is NO LEAVING ISLAM. The penalty for attempting to leave the faith is death.
You're quite wrong, again. Islam considers ANYTHING other than what is written in the Koran (or interpreted as a fatwa) as a threat to Islam. Do you not remember the riots across Europe and the Middle East, in which many people were murdered, simply due to a few cartoon depictions of Mohammed?
If you do not believe that Muslims take threats to their religion seriously, you are not grounded in reality.
The shame/honor dynamic and tribal alliance is the very heart of Arabic, and in a more general sense, Islamic, culture. If you do not know what this is, I suggest you read "The Closed Circle" by David Pryce Jones.
But look, your mind is made up... there's probably no sense in me even writing this, is there?
You are simply a fool.
>>an innocent country
Which one would that be? Afghanistan or Iraq? Perhaps you missed the two-dozen UN Resolutions demanding Saddam Hussein's compliance, or the hundreds of times his military fired at UN overflights or his murder of thousands of his own people with banned poison gas? Maybe you missed the buried French Mirage jet fighters buried in the sand and obtained by France trading weapons for oil. I keep the newspapers, because I knew it would be only a short time before you types were denying reality. More likely you're just ignoring the facts because they don't meet your socialist worldview.
>>Why do you focus so much on these moslems? The problem is a bit closer to home than you think mate.
Uh. maybe because they're doing most of the destabilizing of the world? Have you never heard of Dafur? I would guess you're either British or Austrialian, so perhaps you need to have a look into the 7/7 bus bombings or Austrailias' "Catmeat Shiek" who preaches violence from your shores. Have a look at what's happening in France right now. Nearly 100 cars burned EVERY DAY by "youth" (PC word for poorly integrated Muslim immigrants). THAT is your future, coward.
Cheerio.