Pretexting, the main legal question here, should be illegal if it's not.
The term pretexting is really, really ridiculous.
When a pimply faced cracker does the same thing (call up people in order to gain illegal access to a system) it's called social engineering and fuck-as-hell illegal. When BigCorp does the same thing it's called "pretexting" and is considered a grey area.
Somehow this has a rancid stench of the application of newspeak in order to justify double standards.
Fucking hypocrites!
(I don't specifically mean your post, with which I disagree. I just wanted to get this off my system)
I'm not sure about Denmark, but Sweden and Canada definitely levy a much larger income tax than America does.
There are other options. He could try Switzerland. Fairly low taxes (not quite as low as in the US, but the overall infrastructure provided for your tax-Franc is a lot better then in the US) and (arguably) the highest quality of life.
or just start a vicious cycle of "upgrades" and "enhancements" to the format if it can't.
That's the exact reason why this won't fly. Firware upgrade anybody? No firmware upgrade? Well, buddy; don't buy any newly encoded ITS songs (Games, Videos, Movies) then. They will look and sound like pink noise, if that.
Adams and Franklin were refering to resisting an occupation force, the US is combating an externally commanded islamo-fascist terror insurgency.
One could rightfully argue, that the biggest threat to the American values are not "islamo-fascists", but the current adminsitration, which has all marks of a rather paranoid cult, and is extremely busy to render your rights null and void.
Thanks for the background. Actually, I feel sort of misunderstood.:)
The point is not health insurance (or other benefits) per se; the point is respect towards your employees and this involves fair compensation and (label me a socialist) a participation in the success, of which they are part in creating.
Obviously it is possible to thrive on not being a cheap fuck! I speak from the perspective of running a small data management consultancy, which survived quite turbulent times between 1999 and today. I believe that part of this success lies in exceeding your customers expectation and having a network of reliable suppliers, who are worth their price. And in being fair with your employees without losing sight of the actual numbers.
As a matter of fact, I only tried it once and got the following result:
We have performed a system check and detected that you need to download and install the item highlighted in red below to use CONNECT. Please do this now and then enter the site again. [the item highlited is Internet Explorer, of course]
The copyright notice is Sony UK, I'm based in Switzerland.
Since Sony is on my eternal shitlist of companies I will never again do business with, I didn't really bother to research the issue. My opinion is that you will wind up with a lot of expensive data trash in a few years when the service falters.
Maybe it's all stuff I learned from my father, but you save MORE money by shopping at a series of "normal" stores
I'm not sure that the savings are really the point. At least not to me.
As a matter of fact, the local cheese shop may have 50% higher prices and half the selection of a supermarket. But the selection he has is "hand crafted", if you will. The guy knows his shit and works with the same, trusted suppliers for decades. He will also provide me with his honest opinion if a specific cheese is not quite up there and lets me taste if in doubt.
Same goes for the butchery, or the vegetable shop. Or there's the immense pleasure of walking through a grocery market, check out the various vendors and mentally composing dinner with organically grown produce.
Granted, I'm privileged enough to not have to turn every cent. But then again: How many eggs do I actually eat? And I rather pay three times the price for an egg from a happy, free roaming chicken compared to a battery egg. The taste is no comparision.
Apparently those 2-3 percent didn't help them in Germany.
For such a large and apparently savvy company they did everything wrong, according to The Economist. For starters: They instated a country manager, who couldn't speak a word German and insisted that all communication is in English.
While it's true that the corporate language of major companies from the German speaking world (Deutsche Post - DHL, UBS, Zurich Financial Services, etc) is English and for good reasons too, it's a bad idea to cowboy your way in and allienate just about everybody. Especially in retail, which traditionally has a lot of regional idiosyncrcies.
While this may go through in Switzerland, which is more internationally oriented, this is a bad mistake in Germany, and bloody arrogant to boot.
Then again, Walmart was never famous for modesty. Now they payed the price in Germany.
Dollar store is paying their help and giving them benefits like insurance.
Slightly of topic, but reminds me of In'n'Out Burger. They pay decent wages to their employees, health benefits are the rule and what surprised me most: They use neither freezers, nor microwave ovens. The produce is delivered fresh, every day.
Tasting such a burger is an epiphany. When you order it with onions, for example, you bite into a real onion and not into some fuzzy crap, designed by a food lab.
To me this proves that you don't have to fuck your suppliers, employees and ultimately customers left right and center in order to turn a buck. This is somewhat encouraging in a world where greed and cheap seem to turn more and more into religious mantra.
It's also not exactly new when it comes to water processing plants.
The city of Zurich. uses trouts to check for problems with the processed water for (literally) decades. A few hours before the processed water hits the distribution system and the pipes it is piped through a fish tank with said trout. The fish tank is under constant stream and the trout swims against the stream.
If something , er! fishy occurs the dead or knocked out trout passes a sensor and raises alarm.
This of course is not the only means to test water quality, but it's a time tested, reliable alarm system to warn hours in advance if something goes awfully wrong.
As a side remark: Tap water here has Evian quality.
I'd google for the correct *forum* and ask there. Funnily enough there are also Solaris forums which can be more helpful than Sun support.
I can't speak for Suns support, but used (and did) a lot of support by/for enterprise software vendors (the really expensive type of support) and boy - how do I agree.
If I run into a problem I copy the error message 1:1 into a Google browser window and in 9 out of 10 cases I have my solution in less then 15 minutes, including implementation. It doesn't matter if it's Linux, HP/UX or any industry strngth database I use.
This is not to degrade vendor support. Some of those guys are excellent and it usually comes with access to their proprietary knowledge base, which can solve your problem faster then the time to pick up the phone and call your alliance engineer.
But the argument that support without established vendor backing is the fast path to bancruptcy is spurious, at best. This doesn't discount the fact that large companies need SLR agreements from established vendors. This is less a quality of support issue and more a cover your ass thing.
In Scandinavia (for sure in Finland, I think so in Sweden) fines are set according to your income.
Remember that high level Nokia manager who was fined 10s thousands of Euros for speeding? I don't really think that there's a double standard here, but in the case that actual jail terms differ between rich and not so rich there is, of course.
It was the first automated line of Paris Métro. Before being put into commercial service, it was known by its project name, Meteor, an acronym of Métro Est-Ouest Rapide.
On the same line of thought, alas slightly off-topic, I wonder until today why nobody on a director level at Sony BMG actually smells a jail from inside.
If a pimply faced teenager releases such software into the general public he's a computer criminal, while Sony is just a clever company, which exploits system weeknesses to force malware onto your system, regardless if you want it or not.
HPs behavior is so galling that they also just wound up on my eternal shitlist. Not that it makes a difference to their bottomline.
One can also hope that they get screwed front, back and sideways by the press. I can't imagine journalsits glossing over being spyed on. We'll see...
I bought an item at Robinson's May on the second floor, walked downstairs, walked out the door, had the alarms go off -- and no one reacted.
Of course no one reacted. Didn't you read the article? Those systems are more and more interconnected and talk to each other.
The hidden camera took your foto and submited it to the TSA. Just wait until you board your next flight. Two gentlemen will grab you and ship you off to Guantanamo.
Of course you didn't steal, but how should the system know that? We call that colateral damage.
Aside from the fact that Greenpeace is an unreasonable organization to begin with
That's certainly a matter of opinion. Could you point out a specific Greenpeace study, which is based on hyperbole, bent statistics and lies? I thought not.
this study is a measure of how much money the companies on the list put into "green PR"
You quite obviously didn't read through the studys criteria (you can download the criteria as a pdf via a link on the page). Granted, I'm not a scientist, and the fact how important it is to the environment that PVC and BFRs are phased out of the production process better yesterday then today can't be judged by me. But giving Greenpeace' visibility and the fact that a lot of smart people will look at this and disect it mercylessly gives it some credibility; at least in my book.
Just because a random Chinese company decided to slap a page on their English website about how they comply with RoHS and have an "environmental roadmap" and another one has nothing but spec sheets on their homepage says nothing about their environmental impact.
As a matter of fact the study (again, pdf link) contains tons of links to the pr fluff of the companies in question. From my understanding the study is either based on data released, or in the case of rodamps and commitments not released by the companies.
You may hate Greenpeace as an organization, but your arguments to debunk the study sound rather hollow.
an eco-terrorist, if not modded into the realms of hell and then back.
But Lenovos abyssimal behavior regarding their ecological responsibilty renders them a company which just wound up on my eternal shitlist of companies from which I never ever buy anything.
Lenovo, say hi to the likes of Sony and Air France.
Apple's UNIX (who knows what it'll be called by then) will overtake commercial Linux in rate of revenue growth by the end of 2007.
Well duh, Apple OSX (or whatever it's called by then) costs 100$. Ubuntu Linux (for example) is free as in gratis. How many Ubuntu licenses do you have to sell to reach the revenue of one "Apple Unix" license?
By mid-2008, Apple's sales of systems with factory-installed Apple UNIX will exceed the total combined sales of x86 systems factory-shipped with commercial Linux.
That's very well possible, since there are hardly any systems (specifically in the Desktop realm) which come pre-installed with Linx. Usually you flatten the hard disk of a Windows taxed box, or you build from scratch if you want to run Linux.
You sir are either dim, dishonest or just a plain old idiot.
Sure you could have files with all your stored procedures in them
Bingo!
but then you have to have 2 copies of everything.
Stored procedures (like any DDL statements to set up your database schemas) should be handled like any other source code and treated as such. This includes version control
There seems this "but I can pull it out of the database with my super GUI tool, so why should I keep it on file too?" attitude. Well, duh; it's mighty hard to pull anything of a database whoms disk just crashed.
For recoverability reasons database objects (including stored procedures) should be scripted and version controlled. Period.
I wonder what its Arab clients are thinking. SWIFT can probably now close shop.
I'm more wondering what the honchos of UBS and Credit Suisse (who have representatives in the board of SWIFT) where thinking while this little scheme was going along.
You see, breeching customer confidentiality is protected by federal law in Switzerland and violating this penal code may draw jail time.
That doesn't mean that Swiss banks never provide foreign authorities with customer data, but such authorities must show that there's an ongoing investigation about a crime, or a felony. That's what actually pisses off a lot of foreign governments with stringent fiscal policies, since tax evasion is not a felony in Switzerland and is thus protected under the bank secrecy act.
If wholesale supplying of customer data to the US authorities is not a breech of this code, I don't know what is.
Mind you, that has nothing to do with the infamous Swiss number accounts so much beloved by bad authors. There are no anonymous bank accounts anymore in Switzerland and a numbered account only guarantees that your true identity is coded within the bank and only a few very high honchos know the true identity of the account owner.
Of course Credit Suisse (CSFB) as well as UBS are major players in the US' financial markets and they wouldn't want to piss the US authorities off; now would they?
That means all the stores are collecting information on their customers, and sending it to the police station to be kept in a central database
I think you're very badly misinformed here. In the EU and affiliated countries a store (or any other business) may only collect data, which is directly related to the business transaction with the customer and they are prohibited to share such data.
As a matter of fact (depending on the country) not even the various government agencies are permitted to share personal data with anyone. This includes the government
For example: The police is not allowed to tap into the database of the unemployment agency. You seem to have fallen for some bad libertarian propaganda, here.
Personally I find it offensive that the government should be allowed to sell my personal data to any two bit shyster coming along, waving his checkbook.
Also look where this leads: Identity theft seems to be by far less common in European countries.
Slashdot Mirror
The term pretexting is really, really ridiculous.
When a pimply faced cracker does the same thing (call up people in order to gain illegal access to a system) it's called social engineering and fuck-as-hell illegal. When BigCorp does the same thing it's called "pretexting" and is considered a grey area.
Somehow this has a rancid stench of the application of newspeak in order to justify double standards.
Fucking hypocrites!
(I don't specifically mean your post, with which I disagree. I just wanted to get this off my system)
There are other options. He could try Switzerland. Fairly low taxes (not quite as low as in the US, but the overall infrastructure provided for your tax-Franc is a lot better then in the US) and (arguably) the highest quality of life.
We welcome skilled people, too.
That's the exact reason why this won't fly. Firware upgrade anybody? No firmware upgrade? Well, buddy; don't buy any newly encoded ITS songs (Games, Videos, Movies) then. They will look and sound like pink noise, if that.
One could rightfully argue, that the biggest threat to the American values are not "islamo-fascists", but the current adminsitration, which has all marks of a rather paranoid cult, and is extremely busy to render your rights null and void.
One, sorry, two words: Bargaining power!
What amazes me, UbuntuDupe, is that you're modded flamebait. You raise a fair point.
The point is not health insurance (or other benefits) per se; the point is respect towards your employees and this involves fair compensation and (label me a socialist) a participation in the success, of which they are part in creating.
Obviously it is possible to thrive on not being a cheap fuck! I speak from the perspective of running a small data management consultancy, which survived quite turbulent times between 1999 and today. I believe that part of this success lies in exceeding your customers expectation and having a network of reliable suppliers, who are worth their price. And in being fair with your employees without losing sight of the actual numbers.
See, that's exactly my point :)
As a matter of fact, I only tried it once and got the following result:
We have performed a system check and detected that you need to download and install the item highlighted in red below to use CONNECT. Please do this now and then enter the site again. [the item highlited is Internet Explorer, of course]
The copyright notice is Sony UK, I'm based in Switzerland.
Since Sony is on my eternal shitlist of companies I will never again do business with, I didn't really bother to research the issue. My opinion is that you will wind up with a lot of expensive data trash in a few years when the service falters.
I'm not sure that the savings are really the point. At least not to me.
As a matter of fact, the local cheese shop may have 50% higher prices and half the selection of a supermarket. But the selection he has is "hand crafted", if you will. The guy knows his shit and works with the same, trusted suppliers for decades. He will also provide me with his honest opinion if a specific cheese is not quite up there and lets me taste if in doubt.
Same goes for the butchery, or the vegetable shop. Or there's the immense pleasure of walking through a grocery market, check out the various vendors and mentally composing dinner with organically grown produce.
Granted, I'm privileged enough to not have to turn every cent. But then again: How many eggs do I actually eat? And I rather pay three times the price for an egg from a happy, free roaming chicken compared to a battery egg. The taste is no comparision.
For such a large and apparently savvy company they did everything wrong, according to The Economist. For starters: They instated a country manager, who couldn't speak a word German and insisted that all communication is in English.
While it's true that the corporate language of major companies from the German speaking world (Deutsche Post - DHL, UBS, Zurich Financial Services, etc) is English and for good reasons too, it's a bad idea to cowboy your way in and allienate just about everybody. Especially in retail, which traditionally has a lot of regional idiosyncrcies.
While this may go through in Switzerland, which is more internationally oriented, this is a bad mistake in Germany, and bloody arrogant to boot.
Then again, Walmart was never famous for modesty. Now they payed the price in Germany.
It will probably go the way of the Sony Connect store.
You know, this thing that will be studied in business history classes as Sonys dumb business venture #357 in five years.
I'm not quite sure if this is before or after the Sony corporation filed for bankruptcy.
Slightly of topic, but reminds me of In'n'Out Burger. They pay decent wages to their employees, health benefits are the rule and what surprised me most: They use neither freezers, nor microwave ovens. The produce is delivered fresh, every day.
Tasting such a burger is an epiphany. When you order it with onions, for example, you bite into a real onion and not into some fuzzy crap, designed by a food lab.
Now, the surpising thing, acording to Fast Food Nation, The Dark Side of the All-American Meal is the fact that In'n'Out Burger is highly profitable, even though their prices are quite reasonable.
To me this proves that you don't have to fuck your suppliers, employees and ultimately customers left right and center in order to turn a buck. This is somewhat encouraging in a world where greed and cheap seem to turn more and more into religious mantra.
The city of Zurich. uses trouts to check for problems with the processed water for (literally) decades. A few hours before the processed water hits the distribution system and the pipes it is piped through a fish tank with said trout. The fish tank is under constant stream and the trout swims against the stream.
If something , er! fishy occurs the dead or knocked out trout passes a sensor and raises alarm.
This of course is not the only means to test water quality, but it's a time tested, reliable alarm system to warn hours in advance if something goes awfully wrong.
As a side remark: Tap water here has Evian quality.
I can't speak for Suns support, but used (and did) a lot of support by/for enterprise software vendors (the really expensive type of support) and boy - how do I agree.
If I run into a problem I copy the error message 1:1 into a Google browser window and in 9 out of 10 cases I have my solution in less then 15 minutes, including implementation. It doesn't matter if it's Linux, HP/UX or any industry strngth database I use.
This is not to degrade vendor support. Some of those guys are excellent and it usually comes with access to their proprietary knowledge base, which can solve your problem faster then the time to pick up the phone and call your alliance engineer.
But the argument that support without established vendor backing is the fast path to bancruptcy is spurious, at best. This doesn't discount the fact that large companies need SLR agreements from established vendors. This is less a quality of support issue and more a cover your ass thing.
In Scandinavia (for sure in Finland, I think so in Sweden) fines are set according to your income.
Remember that high level Nokia manager who was fined 10s thousands of Euros for speeding? I don't really think that there's a double standard here, but in the case that actual jail terms differ between rich and not so rich there is, of course.
From the article:
It was the first automated line of Paris Métro. Before being put into commercial service, it was known by its project name, Meteor, an acronym of Métro Est-Ouest Rapide.
If a pimply faced teenager releases such software into the general public he's a computer criminal, while Sony is just a clever company, which exploits system weeknesses to force malware onto your system, regardless if you want it or not.
HPs behavior is so galling that they also just wound up on my eternal shitlist. Not that it makes a difference to their bottomline.
One can also hope that they get screwed front, back and sideways by the press. I can't imagine journalsits glossing over being spyed on. We'll see...
Of course no one reacted. Didn't you read the article? Those systems are more and more interconnected and talk to each other.
The hidden camera took your foto and submited it to the TSA. Just wait until you board your next flight. Two gentlemen will grab you and ship you off to Guantanamo.
Of course you didn't steal, but how should the system know that? We call that colateral damage.
Have a nice flight!
That's certainly a matter of opinion. Could you point out a specific Greenpeace study, which is based on hyperbole, bent statistics and lies? I thought not.
this study is a measure of how much money the companies on the list put into "green PR"
You quite obviously didn't read through the studys criteria (you can download the criteria as a pdf via a link on the page). Granted, I'm not a scientist, and the fact how important it is to the environment that PVC and BFRs are phased out of the production process better yesterday then today can't be judged by me. But giving Greenpeace' visibility and the fact that a lot of smart people will look at this and disect it mercylessly gives it some credibility; at least in my book.
Just because a random Chinese company decided to slap a page on their English website about how they comply with RoHS and have an "environmental roadmap" and another one has nothing but spec sheets on their homepage says nothing about their environmental impact.
As a matter of fact the study (again, pdf link) contains tons of links to the pr fluff of the companies in question. From my understanding the study is either based on data released, or in the case of rodamps and commitments not released by the companies.
You may hate Greenpeace as an organization, but your arguments to debunk the study sound rather hollow.
But Lenovos abyssimal behavior regarding their ecological responsibilty renders them a company which just wound up on my eternal shitlist of companies from which I never ever buy anything.
Lenovo, say hi to the likes of Sony and Air France.
Slashdot covered this recently.
Well duh, Apple OSX (or whatever it's called by then) costs 100$. Ubuntu Linux (for example) is free as in gratis. How many Ubuntu licenses do you have to sell to reach the revenue of one "Apple Unix" license?
By mid-2008, Apple's sales of systems with factory-installed Apple UNIX will exceed the total combined sales of x86 systems factory-shipped with commercial Linux.
That's very well possible, since there are hardly any systems (specifically in the Desktop realm) which come pre-installed with Linx. Usually you flatten the hard disk of a Windows taxed box, or you build from scratch if you want to run Linux.
You sir are either dim, dishonest or just a plain old idiot.
Bingo!
but then you have to have 2 copies of everything.
Stored procedures (like any DDL statements to set up your database schemas) should be handled like any other source code and treated as such. This includes version control
There seems this "but I can pull it out of the database with my super GUI tool, so why should I keep it on file too?" attitude. Well, duh; it's mighty hard to pull anything of a database whoms disk just crashed.
For recoverability reasons database objects (including stored procedures) should be scripted and version controlled. Period.
Of the founder of a space opera ufo nut cult, alas Hubbard is written with a double 'b'.
Maybe Walmart just didn't want to get sued..
I'm more wondering what the honchos of UBS and Credit Suisse (who have representatives in the board of SWIFT) where thinking while this little scheme was going along.
You see, breeching customer confidentiality is protected by federal law in Switzerland and violating this penal code may draw jail time.
That doesn't mean that Swiss banks never provide foreign authorities with customer data, but such authorities must show that there's an ongoing investigation about a crime, or a felony. That's what actually pisses off a lot of foreign governments with stringent fiscal policies, since tax evasion is not a felony in Switzerland and is thus protected under the bank secrecy act.
If wholesale supplying of customer data to the US authorities is not a breech of this code, I don't know what is.
Mind you, that has nothing to do with the infamous Swiss number accounts so much beloved by bad authors. There are no anonymous bank accounts anymore in Switzerland and a numbered account only guarantees that your true identity is coded within the bank and only a few very high honchos know the true identity of the account owner.
Of course Credit Suisse (CSFB) as well as UBS are major players in the US' financial markets and they wouldn't want to piss the US authorities off; now would they?
You have to use it together with a CueCat while you simultaneously order stuff from boo.com and watch PointCast news.
Er, well! Nevermind...
I think you're very badly misinformed here. In the EU and affiliated countries a store (or any other business) may only collect data, which is directly related to the business transaction with the customer and they are prohibited to share such data.
As a matter of fact (depending on the country) not even the various government agencies are permitted to share personal data with anyone. This includes the government
For example: The police is not allowed to tap into the database of the unemployment agency. You seem to have fallen for some bad libertarian propaganda, here.
Personally I find it offensive that the government should be allowed to sell my personal data to any two bit shyster coming along, waving his checkbook.
Also look where this leads: Identity theft seems to be by far less common in European countries.