Why that is so hard for law firms to understand I'll never know.
Because in the field of Law and Business, when someone says it's so, that makes it so. The judge says he's guilty, so he's guilty. A senior partner says you're wrong, so you're wrong. The highest authority in the room are twelve people who have no idea what's going on, and the highest authority in the land are nine people who can't tell you the price of milk.
People who eat, sleep and breathe in that atmosphere become extremely disconnected from reality. They tend to take it personally when someone tells them, "Just because you say it's so, doesn't make it so."
Look, you're whining about the complexity of network design without understanding WHY there's complexity. We didn't break up layer 2 and layer 3 for the simple fun of it. We did it because we HAD to. There's a long reason and history for each piece of modern networking -- yes, even a kludge as ugly as NAT -- but you're not bothering to even try to wrap your head around any of it. For someone who whines about "world-proofing children" in your sig, you've undertaken precious little of it yourself. You sound just like every AOL refugee I've ever had in my classes whining about "Why can't it all be on one vlan?"
No one in modern networking is happy with the current state of afffairs, which is why if I had to guess I'd say we'll end up "routing to the edge" with IPv6 eventually. But guess what, even when we reach that Promised Land, you're still going to have to worry about MAC addresses. You'll still have to worry about routing loops. Because of some misplaced security fears, you're still going to have to learn about NAT, and yeah, you're still going to have to know how to subnet. Better networking tools aren't going to make my profession obsolete any more than better scalpels will eliminate surgeons.
A 2009 Honda Civic is a lot easier to operate than a Model T Ford.
But the design work was an order of magnitude harder and more complex.
And as bitter and pissed off as you are at paying my invoices because you can't do this yourself, get used to it. My profession isn't going anywhere. In fact, I'm busier than ever. I'm bitching about not getting enough sleep, remember?
Cletus, is that you? How 'bout you, Billy and Zaboomafoo just move on out of the server room before you break something again, OK? I'd really like to sleep a whole eight hours tonight without getting yet another panicked phone call...
in ignorance, but you better not try to design one that way. If your job is vacuum cleaner DESIGN, it would really help if you knew how to wind that motor, and more importantly, WHY that motor was wound that way. But certainly, if you're the janitor, then feel free to push that handle back and forth, serene in the knowledge that someone else has done the heavy lifting for you.
I'm talking about the damage this idea would do to network design when Billy-the-uberl33t-LAN-Party-Badass tries to recable his Daddy's 15-site company without understanding the implications of switchport vlan assignment (true story). You're talking about how great it would be if the average MCSE janitor could know even less than they do now.
Of course, the reason this sets me off is that I spend a lot of my time dealing with critical networks -- 911, fire, police, hospitals, airports, etc -- where people can literally die when the network goes down. In the past 10 years especially, the trend has been to cut not just corners but whole cloth instead. I used to walk into emergencies to find competent staffs bushwacked by unsuspected bugs and subtle network design issues -- honest-to-God problems.
Now I generally walk into emergencies to find out that Cletus the 90-day-Community-College Wonder has teamed up with Zaboomafoo the Typing Lemur to bring the network down out of criminal negligence and idiocy. Where the Hell is the guy I used to work with, you know, the one who would have stopped this long before it was an issue? Oh, they let him go, they say. He was too expensive.
Was he more expensive than the clusterfrack you two idiots have belched forth upon the land?
This idea that we should invent a powertool to allow even greater ignorance in network design will wreak untold havoc and ensure that even MORE of my nights are interrupted at 3 am by yet another jackass who has stuck his head in the honeypot because he, at a fundamental level, did not understand that crockery that makes up the honeypot wouldn't just automagically stretch to fit his head.
I'm arguing we should keep the bears of very little brain away from the honeypots.
You're arguing we should start making rubber honeypots.
I'm trying to warn you you'll end up with a bunch of asphyxiated bears that way.
You're probably thinking that we have several billion bears we can import before we run out of them.
Wizards, scripts, GUIs and "automagic" are awesome tools. I love my OSPF. I love my Spanning Tree. I love my VTP. I love my Auto speed and duplex settings. I love every tool that helps me take care of tedium and drudgery.
But before you hand these tools to a network designer, they absolutely need to understand HOW and WHY those tools do what they do, lest your network ends up looking like it was built by Mickey the Wizard's Apprentice. Powerful tools require MORE skill on the part of the network admin, not less, because when those tools go wrong, they cause instant damage. Screw up a static route, and one subnet will not ping. Screw up OSPF settings, and multiple subnets may not ping. Screw up VTP settings, and your whole network can go away.
Your argument basically amounts to this. My young son doesn't have the strength yet to cut firewood safely with an ax and saw, so obviously I need to hand him a top-of-the-line Stihl chainsaw.
Without getting too far into it, their brilliant plan to to insinuate a layer 2 and a half using "pseudo MAC addresses," using a directory service rather than broadcasts. They're hoping they can use this mess to paper over horrific network design.
Yeah, I'll grant you you might be able to cobble this mess together in an academic setting, and sure, you'll even be able to rig some demos that show miraculous increases in speed.
I can guarantee they'll find funding with their promise you'll even able to hire even LESS skilled network admins, meaning Zaboomafoo the Typing Lemur now has a shot at his CCIE.
But, damn, you ignorant twits. Most corporate networks are already mashed together by the most cut-rate cable monkeys they can find. The last thing we need is some half-assed "protocol" that will guarantee even more network designs that are guaranteed to trip and break their necks over the first packet.
There is an entire engineering specialty devoted to independent infrastructure for data centers, hospitals, command centers and the like. If it's important that the lights stay the hell on, there are entire engineering firms who spend all their time doing nothing but that.
When lives or capital-L Large amounts of money are at stake, no one in their right minds trusts the city grid alone.
But hey, by all means, don't listen to me. I make a very good living sifting through the rubble that this kind of clueless business-school so-completely-brain-dead-only-an-MBA-could-have-thought-of-it thinking creates. I certainly don't want you listening to me for free now when I can bill the hell out of you for listening to me later.
Make sure your CONTRACT specifies what they can and can't do.
I know an ex-financial manager who thought like that. "If there are any consequences of my lazy, negligent technical decisions, I'll know who I can sue."
They found out a couple of things the hard way.
1. Once your authentication server has been compromised, the damage is done and permanent before your ever realize there's a problem. Once the money is gone, it's gone. On most of the planet, US law means exactly squat.
2. The companies with deep enough pockets to make you whole long ago acquired enough legal staff and connections to tie you up in court for decades, making them effectively immune to lawsuits.
3. Even if you could win in court and get a judgement against them, your bosses will be so angry at the situation in general that they'll hang you from the nearest tree for the sheer satisfaction.
This person had been a thorn in my team's side for some time, and we silently cheered the Blackhats on while we went through the motions of doing our jobs. Unknowingly, I'm sure, but the Blackhats were doing God's work that day, punishing the guilty, forging eternal parables in living flesh. On paper, we did everything possible, but let's just say it wasn't exactly a pitched battle, more like "...help......police...we tawt we taw a putty-tat..." We did our jobs, sure, but we weren't the Angry Avenging Angels that day.
The Law is the wrong tool to use to fix poor network security. It's too slow and unwieldy, taking years to remedy situations that can go wrong in literally milliseconds.
Hire competent, experienced network admins and sleep the sleep of the Just at night.
Outsourcing critical business infrastructure is simply insane. It guarantees your most important work will be done by the lowest possible bidder -- whatever YOU paid -- by people who don't give a damn, can't be held to account and are barely competent, if you're lucky.
Offhand, the NDAs forbid me from naming an huge insurance company, two hospitals and large municipal area that burned down to the ground just this past year from doing exactly this. I was on the teams that got called in to sift through the rubble and rebuild. In each case, the disasters could have been avoided by having even one competent seasoned admin on staff with the authority to say "I don't think so" and make it stick.
Personally though, I hope the large outsourcing groups keep right on going. I get to charge mugging rates to desperate men for cleaning up their messes.
Suppose every time you got in a cab, the driver stopped at each Starbucks along the way and tried to sell you a cup of coffee because Starbucks kicked them back a buck on each sale. Suppose the cab driver even offered you a 50 cent discount. Let's suppose the cab driver was even nice enough to scrupulously stop the meter each time he pulled into a Starbucks parking lot.
Yeah, sure, I'll buy that the astract is general and the Devil is in the details.
The problem is your specifications are pretty much the definition of "broadcast" in the telecom world. I'll bet I could even put together an argument that the patent covers a shared line appearance or a hunt group on your phone. Twitter's appeal isn't that it's novel -- it's that it's convenient.
Now, if you'll excuse me , I need to go patent my new invention of designating a person or device by assigning a number to them...
Every rookie teacher spends their first year thinking more discipline and heavier enforcement is the answer. Good teachers grow out of that, and realize that their initial problems stem from a lack of teaching skills.
Any teacher who thinks the answer to their problem is a Faraday cage or a radio jammer needs to drop the chalk and walk away from the blackboard.
There are still people in our communities who are exposed to massive violence on a daily basis... slaughtermen... Do they have a higher than average likelihood to commit violent crimes?
There's at least one family in Texas I would definitely say that's true for...
When labor is that cheap, it's probably more effective to hire additional workers than it is to squeeze every last drop out of the ones you have.
Spoken like a man who's never had a truly crappy job. Squeezing every last drop out of your workers is its own reward. I knew a restaurant manager once who stole tips off the servers' tables "just to remind everyone who the big dog is." I knew a lawyer who refused to pay his staff a living wage or work them less than 60 hours a week "so they won't have time to go find another job." Hell, even John McCain refused to honor our commitment to pay for our soldier's college expenses because, and I'm paraphrasing correctly, if our soldiers knew they could come home and go to college, no one would want to stay in Iraq.
Sometimes treating your employees like crap is more about shoring up your own inferiority complex than it is smart business decision. If you haven't experienced it directly, go reread Thomas More and George Orwell to get the gist of it.
Is that a joke? Once you've been arrested, convicted and been forced to go to appeal, your life is already a smoldering ruins. The attorney fees alone will bankrupt you, and your employment prospects for jobs that don't require a hairnet and a polyester uniform are gone -- even after you've "won." As the court found, the handgun was entirely beside the point, as Irizarry was arrested based on the utility knife alone.
As for the DHS, have you worked with those wonderful people lately? The best thing I can say about those corrupt thugs is that I did manage to get them to back off their bribery solicitation the last time I had to deal with them. Their definitions will inform federal court decisions, and in turn state courts. As they saw in Texas last year, once some cop yells "switchblade," rational thought on the matter is at an end.
And while we're at it, the switchblade laws were passed in an attempt to suppress gang activity after the whole country had a panic attack after watching "West Side Story." How's that been working out? In the meantime, an entire class of incredibly useful tools have been denied me. I became a convert to one-handed knives that open quickly the day that I got tangled to hell and back while dangling off a ledge. Since one hand was busy, you know, hanging on for dear life, I got to open a swiss army knife with my teeth.
You try that 30 feet off the ground, and then come talk to me about how reasonable our knife laws are.
As for your Leatherman, do me a favor. Clip it to your pocket and walk around town with it the next time you're in New York or DC.
I promise, I'll head up the collection for your bail money.
In the recent case of United States v. Irizarry, a man in New York was arrested and charged with a felony weapons violation (under the switchblade laws) for having a Home Depot "Husky" brand folding utility knife clipped to his pocket.
In related news, the Department of Homeland Security has just issued a new ruling defining all knives that can be opened with one hand by way of thumbstud, ridge or hole -- which means most pocket knives made in the past 20 years -- as "switchblades" whether they have a spring or not. The huntin' and fishin' crowd are pretty much up in arms over that fact that most of them just became criminals. If you carry a recent Leatherman, you're committing a felony under the new rules.
And finally, a man last year was arrested for trying to enter a federal building with an old one-inch army surplus can opener attached to his keychain.
You meant your post as a joke and a satire, but it's already reality.
I cried buckets when my old IBM keyboard finally died after having been schlepped all over the world for more than a decade and a half. I've been limping by on Microsoft Natural keyboard ever since. Where did you find an old honest-to-God-non-bubble-wrap keyboard?
Here's a couple of long out-of-fashion words; contemplation and reflection.
There is no "process" -- not change requests, not planning documents, not maintenance windows, not design documents, and for damn sure no flavor-of-the-month buzzword -- that can replace someone with a brain thinking the problem through.
The problem with this is that it exposes the MBAs for the empty suits they are. Our "business team" -- salesmen with glorified titles -- sit through every meeting bloviating while the engineers get it done. The PMP certs are the worst about it. Me and a customer engineer will put our heads together about something, and decide on a course of action. The PMPs will jump all over it and send out emails about "deliverable actions items."
One of the other engineers will mention something, and we'll realize we should take a different approach. While we're getting real work done, the PMPs will barge in demanding to know if that action items has been deliverabled yet, and if not we need to reprioritize our skill sets.
I used to try to explain it to them. We were going to do that, but then we found out this, so were doing something different. I kept getting haughty responses about how they didn't need to know the little tech stuff, they were just managing the project.
One of them went on at huge length about how you didn't have to be a doctor to be a chief of staff at a hospital.
At that point I just began to feel sorry for him. Can you imagine living your life hoping and praying that no one will ever realize that you don't have the first clue about what you're talking about?
No one's "damned already." If you're going to accept the concept of damnation, then you have to accept the concept of redemption and salvation that go with it.
I have children of my own, sons and daughters both. Your son doesn't need this legacy. He doesn't need to be protected at the expense of Justice. He doesn't need to be shielded by corruption. He doesn't need the legacy of fear and compromise you're apparently leaving him, which he'll one day need to rise above, as I did mine.
You want to leave your son a legacy? Walk the path as it should be walked, with the dignity and compassion it deserves, and the realization you can't escape Death, but you can choose the terms on which you meet him.
The resignation and surrender you offer him -- "I'm already damned, it's hopeless, I'll do anything, just keep me safe" -- is a lousy inheritance.
I'm not arguing for campfires, Kumbayah and daisies. You won't find many "Peace, Love and Understanding" Joe Cocker-wannabes on military bases either.
What I want is a sense of Duty and Honor restored to our police force. I want cops who believe "The Honor of the Unit Lies with Each Man." I want cops who believe they should take a bullet for innocent bystanders the way Secret Service agents are eager to take a bullet for the President. I want civilian cops to regrow the balls and pride it takes not to lie on a witness stand. I want cops with the discipline and honor to play by the same rules they enforce.
I've known a few good men in civilian uniform, but you're right, they are vastly outnumbered by the cowardly thugs they serve with. I want to see the ghost of Marine General Butler to get in there and kick ass until those men deserve the shine on their badge again.
Right now, I've got more respect for the discipline I've seen among LA gang kids than most cops I've known.
Actually, this is a 1760s liberal truth. That's an old quote from the Founding Fathers, who were quoting various philosophers before them.
And if you're so afraid of those big mean bad men that you'll throw innocents to the wolves, then maybe your heart, conscience and courage could stand some reflection.
I can't tell you how overjoyed I am to hear that one of our courts has remembered there are limits to police power.
Unfortunately, the men with the uniforms and guns aren't worrying about such trivia. Have you spoken to any police officers lately? If you don't happen to work in municipal systems or security like I do, hop over to the forums at "officer.com" for an eye-opening read.
The current meme running among police officers is "wolves, sheepdogs and sheeple." That is, the "bad guys" are wolves, cops are sheepdogs, and the civilians are sheep. Sheep are worthless, stupid and deserve to get skinned.
The last member of a SWAT team I met told me a joke. He stomped on the ground twice and spit toward his foot. "You know what that is?" he asked. I shook my head "no." He grinned and said "cop cpr." When I asked if that was the procedure for criminals or victims, he called me a liberal fraker.
Another cop was telling me a story, well bragging really, and a footnote to the story was that a teenage girl was injured. When I asked him why that happened, he responded in fairly rough terms that officer safety took priority over all other considerations. I told him that during my time on base, we were always told that armed men in uniform were supposed to put themselves in harm's way to protect the civilians. Again, in rather rude terms, the officer responded that he didn't care how many civilians were killed, but that he was absolutely not going to expose himself or his fellow officers to real danger.
The court decisions are wonderful, but until we fix the broken traditions and discipline within our nation's police departments, it's an academic exercise at best.
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Why that is so hard for law firms to understand I'll never know.
Because in the field of Law and Business, when someone says it's so, that makes it so. The judge says he's guilty, so he's guilty. A senior partner says you're wrong, so you're wrong. The highest authority in the room are twelve people who have no idea what's going on, and the highest authority in the land are nine people who can't tell you the price of milk.
People who eat, sleep and breathe in that atmosphere become extremely disconnected from reality. They tend to take it personally when someone tells them, "Just because you say it's so, doesn't make it so."
Look, you're whining about the complexity of network design without understanding WHY there's complexity. We didn't break up layer 2 and layer 3 for the simple fun of it. We did it because we HAD to. There's a long reason and history for each piece of modern networking -- yes, even a kludge as ugly as NAT -- but you're not bothering to even try to wrap your head around any of it. For someone who whines about "world-proofing children" in your sig, you've undertaken precious little of it yourself. You sound just like every AOL refugee I've ever had in my classes whining about "Why can't it all be on one vlan?"
No one in modern networking is happy with the current state of afffairs, which is why if I had to guess I'd say we'll end up "routing to the edge" with IPv6 eventually. But guess what, even when we reach that Promised Land, you're still going to have to worry about MAC addresses. You'll still have to worry about routing loops. Because of some misplaced security fears, you're still going to have to learn about NAT, and yeah, you're still going to have to know how to subnet. Better networking tools aren't going to make my profession obsolete any more than better scalpels will eliminate surgeons.
A 2009 Honda Civic is a lot easier to operate than a Model T Ford.
But the design work was an order of magnitude harder and more complex.
And as bitter and pissed off as you are at paying my invoices because you can't do this yourself, get used to it. My profession isn't going anywhere. In fact, I'm busier than ever. I'm bitching about not getting enough sleep, remember?
Cletus, is that you? How 'bout you, Billy and Zaboomafoo just move on out of the server room before you break something again, OK? I'd really like to sleep a whole eight hours tonight without getting yet another panicked phone call...
in ignorance, but you better not try to design one that way. If your job is vacuum cleaner DESIGN, it would really help if you knew how to wind that motor, and more importantly, WHY that motor was wound that way. But certainly, if you're the janitor, then feel free to push that handle back and forth, serene in the knowledge that someone else has done the heavy lifting for you.
I'm talking about the damage this idea would do to network design when Billy-the-uberl33t-LAN-Party-Badass tries to recable his Daddy's 15-site company without understanding the implications of switchport vlan assignment (true story). You're talking about how great it would be if the average MCSE janitor could know even less than they do now.
Of course, the reason this sets me off is that I spend a lot of my time dealing with critical networks -- 911, fire, police, hospitals, airports, etc -- where people can literally die when the network goes down. In the past 10 years especially, the trend has been to cut not just corners but whole cloth instead. I used to walk into emergencies to find competent staffs bushwacked by unsuspected bugs and subtle network design issues -- honest-to-God problems.
Now I generally walk into emergencies to find out that Cletus the 90-day-Community-College Wonder has teamed up with Zaboomafoo the Typing Lemur to bring the network down out of criminal negligence and idiocy. Where the Hell is the guy I used to work with, you know, the one who would have stopped this long before it was an issue? Oh, they let him go, they say. He was too expensive.
Was he more expensive than the clusterfrack you two idiots have belched forth upon the land?
This idea that we should invent a powertool to allow even greater ignorance in network design will wreak untold havoc and ensure that even MORE of my nights are interrupted at 3 am by yet another jackass who has stuck his head in the honeypot because he, at a fundamental level, did not understand that crockery that makes up the honeypot wouldn't just automagically stretch to fit his head.
I'm arguing we should keep the bears of very little brain away from the honeypots.
You're arguing we should start making rubber honeypots.
I'm trying to warn you you'll end up with a bunch of asphyxiated bears that way.
You're probably thinking that we have several billion bears we can import before we run out of them.
Wizards, scripts, GUIs and "automagic" are awesome tools. I love my OSPF. I love my Spanning Tree. I love my VTP. I love my Auto speed and duplex settings. I love every tool that helps me take care of tedium and drudgery.
But before you hand these tools to a network designer, they absolutely need to understand HOW and WHY those tools do what they do, lest your network ends up looking like it was built by Mickey the Wizard's Apprentice. Powerful tools require MORE skill on the part of the network admin, not less, because when those tools go wrong, they cause instant damage. Screw up a static route, and one subnet will not ping. Screw up OSPF settings, and multiple subnets may not ping. Screw up VTP settings, and your whole network can go away.
Your argument basically amounts to this. My young son doesn't have the strength yet to cut firewood safely with an ax and saw, so obviously I need to hand him a top-of-the-line Stihl chainsaw.
Without getting too far into it, their brilliant plan to to insinuate a layer 2 and a half using "pseudo MAC addresses," using a directory service rather than broadcasts. They're hoping they can use this mess to paper over horrific network design.
Yeah, I'll grant you you might be able to cobble this mess together in an academic setting, and sure, you'll even be able to rig some demos that show miraculous increases in speed.
I can guarantee they'll find funding with their promise you'll even able to hire even LESS skilled network admins, meaning Zaboomafoo the Typing Lemur now has a shot at his CCIE.
But, damn, you ignorant twits. Most corporate networks are already mashed together by the most cut-rate cable monkeys they can find. The last thing we need is some half-assed "protocol" that will guarantee even more network designs that are guaranteed to trip and break their necks over the first packet.
There is an entire engineering specialty devoted to independent infrastructure for data centers, hospitals, command centers and the like. If it's important that the lights stay the hell on, there are entire engineering firms who spend all their time doing nothing but that.
When lives or capital-L Large amounts of money are at stake, no one in their right minds trusts the city grid alone.
But hey, by all means, don't listen to me. I make a very good living sifting through the rubble that this kind of clueless business-school so-completely-brain-dead-only-an-MBA-could-have-thought-of-it thinking creates. I certainly don't want you listening to me for free now when I can bill the hell out of you for listening to me later.
Make sure your CONTRACT specifies what they can and can't do.
I know an ex-financial manager who thought like that. "If there are any consequences of my lazy, negligent technical decisions, I'll know who I can sue."
They found out a couple of things the hard way.
1. Once your authentication server has been compromised, the damage is done and permanent before your ever realize there's a problem. Once the money is gone, it's gone. On most of the planet, US law means exactly squat.
2. The companies with deep enough pockets to make you whole long ago acquired enough legal staff and connections to tie you up in court for decades, making them effectively immune to lawsuits.
3. Even if you could win in court and get a judgement against them, your bosses will be so angry at the situation in general that they'll hang you from the nearest tree for the sheer satisfaction.
This person had been a thorn in my team's side for some time, and we silently cheered the Blackhats on while we went through the motions of doing our jobs. Unknowingly, I'm sure, but the Blackhats were doing God's work that day, punishing the guilty, forging eternal parables in living flesh. On paper, we did everything possible, but let's just say it wasn't exactly a pitched battle, more like "...help... ...police...we tawt we taw a putty-tat..." We did our jobs, sure, but we weren't the Angry Avenging Angels that day.
The Law is the wrong tool to use to fix poor network security. It's too slow and unwieldy, taking years to remedy situations that can go wrong in literally milliseconds.
Hire competent, experienced network admins and sleep the sleep of the Just at night.
Outsourcing critical business infrastructure is simply insane. It guarantees your most important work will be done by the lowest possible bidder -- whatever YOU paid -- by people who don't give a damn, can't be held to account and are barely competent, if you're lucky.
Offhand, the NDAs forbid me from naming an huge insurance company, two hospitals and large municipal area that burned down to the ground just this past year from doing exactly this. I was on the teams that got called in to sift through the rubble and rebuild. In each case, the disasters could have been avoided by having even one competent seasoned admin on staff with the authority to say "I don't think so" and make it stick.
Personally though, I hope the large outsourcing groups keep right on going. I get to charge mugging rates to desperate men for cleaning up their messes.
and "abuse detection devices." All of them say whatever the huckster wants them to.
This is just a dodge to allow Apple to dodge their warranties.
Rupert Murdoch is well aware that people who watch FOX news will buy anything.
Suppose every time you got in a cab, the driver stopped at each Starbucks along the way and tried to sell you a cup of coffee because Starbucks kicked them back a buck on each sale. Suppose the cab driver even offered you a 50 cent discount. Let's suppose the cab driver was even nice enough to scrupulously stop the meter each time he pulled into a Starbucks parking lot.
Would you be happy about this cab ride?
Yeah, sure, I'll buy that the astract is general and the Devil is in the details.
The problem is your specifications are pretty much the definition of "broadcast" in the telecom world. I'll bet I could even put together an argument that the patent covers a shared line appearance or a hunt group on your phone. Twitter's appeal isn't that it's novel -- it's that it's convenient.
Now, if you'll excuse me , I need to go patent my new invention of designating a person or device by assigning a number to them...
Every rookie teacher spends their first year thinking more discipline and heavier enforcement is the answer. Good teachers grow out of that, and realize that their initial problems stem from a lack of teaching skills.
Any teacher who thinks the answer to their problem is a Faraday cage or a radio jammer needs to drop the chalk and walk away from the blackboard.
There are still people in our communities who are exposed to massive violence on a daily basis ... slaughtermen ... Do they have a higher than average likelihood to commit violent crimes?
There's at least one family in Texas I would definitely say that's true for...
When labor is that cheap, it's probably more effective to hire additional workers than it is to squeeze every last drop out of the ones you have.
Spoken like a man who's never had a truly crappy job. Squeezing every last drop out of your workers is its own reward. I knew a restaurant manager once who stole tips off the servers' tables "just to remind everyone who the big dog is." I knew a lawyer who refused to pay his staff a living wage or work them less than 60 hours a week "so they won't have time to go find another job." Hell, even John McCain refused to honor our commitment to pay for our soldier's college expenses because, and I'm paraphrasing correctly, if our soldiers knew they could come home and go to college, no one would want to stay in Iraq.
Sometimes treating your employees like crap is more about shoring up your own inferiority complex than it is smart business decision. If you haven't experienced it directly, go reread Thomas More and George Orwell to get the gist of it.
Is that a joke? Once you've been arrested, convicted and been forced to go to appeal, your life is already a smoldering ruins. The attorney fees alone will bankrupt you, and your employment prospects for jobs that don't require a hairnet and a polyester uniform are gone -- even after you've "won." As the court found, the handgun was entirely beside the point, as Irizarry was arrested based on the utility knife alone.
As for the DHS, have you worked with those wonderful people lately? The best thing I can say about those corrupt thugs is that I did manage to get them to back off their bribery solicitation the last time I had to deal with them. Their definitions will inform federal court decisions, and in turn state courts. As they saw in Texas last year, once some cop yells "switchblade," rational thought on the matter is at an end.
And while we're at it, the switchblade laws were passed in an attempt to suppress gang activity after the whole country had a panic attack after watching "West Side Story." How's that been working out? In the meantime, an entire class of incredibly useful tools have been denied me. I became a convert to one-handed knives that open quickly the day that I got tangled to hell and back while dangling off a ledge. Since one hand was busy, you know, hanging on for dear life, I got to open a swiss army knife with my teeth.
You try that 30 feet off the ground, and then come talk to me about how reasonable our knife laws are.
As for your Leatherman, do me a favor. Clip it to your pocket and walk around town with it the next time you're in New York or DC.
I promise, I'll head up the collection for your bail money.
In the recent case of United States v. Irizarry, a man in New York was arrested and charged with a felony weapons violation (under the switchblade laws) for having a Home Depot "Husky" brand folding utility knife clipped to his pocket.
In related news, the Department of Homeland Security has just issued a new ruling defining all knives that can be opened with one hand by way of thumbstud, ridge or hole -- which means most pocket knives made in the past 20 years -- as "switchblades" whether they have a spring or not. The huntin' and fishin' crowd are pretty much up in arms over that fact that most of them just became criminals. If you carry a recent Leatherman, you're committing a felony under the new rules.
And finally, a man last year was arrested for trying to enter a federal building with an old one-inch army surplus can opener attached to his keychain.
You meant your post as a joke and a satire, but it's already reality.
Why can't I be brilliant enough to make an awesome living by POSTING STICK FIGURES TO THE INTERNET?!
I cried buckets when my old IBM keyboard finally died after having been schlepped all over the world for more than a decade and a half. I've been limping by on Microsoft Natural keyboard ever since. Where did you find an old honest-to-God-non-bubble-wrap keyboard?
Here's a couple of long out-of-fashion words; contemplation and reflection.
There is no "process" -- not change requests, not planning documents, not maintenance windows, not design documents, and for damn sure no flavor-of-the-month buzzword -- that can replace someone with a brain thinking the problem through.
The problem with this is that it exposes the MBAs for the empty suits they are. Our "business team" -- salesmen with glorified titles -- sit through every meeting bloviating while the engineers get it done. The PMP certs are the worst about it. Me and a customer engineer will put our heads together about something, and decide on a course of action. The PMPs will jump all over it and send out emails about "deliverable actions items."
One of the other engineers will mention something, and we'll realize we should take a different approach. While we're getting real work done, the PMPs will barge in demanding to know if that action items has been deliverabled yet, and if not we need to reprioritize our skill sets.
I used to try to explain it to them. We were going to do that, but then we found out this, so were doing something different. I kept getting haughty responses about how they didn't need to know the little tech stuff, they were just managing the project.
One of them went on at huge length about how you didn't have to be a doctor to be a chief of staff at a hospital.
At that point I just began to feel sorry for him. Can you imagine living your life hoping and praying that no one will ever realize that you don't have the first clue about what you're talking about?
No one's "damned already." If you're going to accept the concept of damnation, then you have to accept the concept of redemption and salvation that go with it.
I have children of my own, sons and daughters both. Your son doesn't need this legacy. He doesn't need to be protected at the expense of Justice. He doesn't need to be shielded by corruption. He doesn't need the legacy of fear and compromise you're apparently leaving him, which he'll one day need to rise above, as I did mine.
You want to leave your son a legacy? Walk the path as it should be walked, with the dignity and compassion it deserves, and the realization you can't escape Death, but you can choose the terms on which you meet him.
The resignation and surrender you offer him -- "I'm already damned, it's hopeless, I'll do anything, just keep me safe" -- is a lousy inheritance.
I'm not arguing for campfires, Kumbayah and daisies. You won't find many "Peace, Love and Understanding" Joe Cocker-wannabes on military bases either.
What I want is a sense of Duty and Honor restored to our police force. I want cops who believe "The Honor of the Unit Lies with Each Man." I want cops who believe they should take a bullet for innocent bystanders the way Secret Service agents are eager to take a bullet for the President. I want civilian cops to regrow the balls and pride it takes not to lie on a witness stand. I want cops with the discipline and honor to play by the same rules they enforce.
I've known a few good men in civilian uniform, but you're right, they are vastly outnumbered by the cowardly thugs they serve with. I want to see the ghost of Marine General Butler to get in there and kick ass until those men deserve the shine on their badge again.
Right now, I've got more respect for the discipline I've seen among LA gang kids than most cops I've known.
Actually, this is a 1760s liberal truth. That's an old quote from the Founding Fathers, who were quoting various philosophers before them.
And if you're so afraid of those big mean bad men that you'll throw innocents to the wolves, then maybe your heart, conscience and courage could stand some reflection.
I can't tell you how overjoyed I am to hear that one of our courts has remembered there are limits to police power.
Unfortunately, the men with the uniforms and guns aren't worrying about such trivia. Have you spoken to any police officers lately? If you don't happen to work in municipal systems or security like I do, hop over to the forums at "officer.com" for an eye-opening read.
The current meme running among police officers is "wolves, sheepdogs and sheeple." That is, the "bad guys" are wolves, cops are sheepdogs, and the civilians are sheep. Sheep are worthless, stupid and deserve to get skinned.
The last member of a SWAT team I met told me a joke. He stomped on the ground twice and spit toward his foot. "You know what that is?" he asked. I shook my head "no." He grinned and said "cop cpr." When I asked if that was the procedure for criminals or victims, he called me a liberal fraker.
Another cop was telling me a story, well bragging really, and a footnote to the story was that a teenage girl was injured. When I asked him why that happened, he responded in fairly rough terms that officer safety took priority over all other considerations. I told him that during my time on base, we were always told that armed men in uniform were supposed to put themselves in harm's way to protect the civilians. Again, in rather rude terms, the officer responded that he didn't care how many civilians were killed, but that he was absolutely not going to expose himself or his fellow officers to real danger.
The court decisions are wonderful, but until we fix the broken traditions and discipline within our nation's police departments, it's an academic exercise at best.