Amen to that. And to the guy up above who said "Use it." If you are regularly practicing what you know, you'll retain it--and the rest you can look up. I know that doesn't help you pass the cert tests, but I would say just cram it and don't worry about long-term retention. Some of the most important things to know aren't on the tests, and a lot of what is on them is not common enough to be worth wasting memorization time on anyway. Don't worry about the crap that's in the books--you can always go back and look it up again. It's what is not in the books that you need to remember.
Don't have any patience with interviewers who expect you to be able to regurgitate technical minutae when you're looking for a job, either. They generally don't understand the really important things and aren't much fun to work for. The ones who ask you about the broader applications of the technology are the ones you want to impress, IMHO.
I'm wondering if that means they are actually angling this at business environments. I know that's the first thing I thought of. It doesn't make much sense to plunk down $99 for your home box, but it's a steal if you have a couple hundred corporate boxes sitting around. It seems like a great solution for the ancient dilemma of hating Windows but needing to provide Windows apps in a business environment. $99 for the whole company versus nearly $200 a box for a Windows license, with no requirement for re-training or document conversion, is going to be an easy argument to make to the CFO.
Just a suggestion to add to a lot of other very adequate ideas...
I notice most of them recommend running fiber through some sort of pressurized, protected conduit, with various tamper notification schemes. Great; do all that. But instead of just running your single fiber strand, run a lot of them. If you feel extra devious, rig up something to pump garbage signal through them, signal which will look not unlike the encrypted traffic I assume you'll be using on the real line.
Stuff enough of them in there, and make the bogus signal convincing enough, and it will easily take your attacker longer than your one-month inspection period to breach the conduit, defeat the anti-tamper, and identify the correct strand, let alone get anything useful off it.
1. Only true if there is sufficient money in your account to cover the chargeback. Of course, any of the sleaze who do this regularly are not going to leave money in their accounts so that this can happen.
FWIW, I agree with posters above who pay via mail. The post office has the time, inclination, and legal obligation to help you out if you are defrauded while using their service--Paypal, or any other private payment scheme, does not. You are a liability to them the instant you start demanding employee time to resolve any dispute, and they'll be doing the bare minimum they can to keep you happy.
Here, most of the scans seemed to be from our ISP's netblock, so I'm guessing that how badly you were affected depended mostly on how many infected NT machines your upstream provider served. For instance, I noticed significant degradation from Nimda, although we were not affected; from Code Red, however, I didn't get a single scan. I think that luck played a factor in how badly any of us were hit by these worms--if no instance of it got loose inside the scan range, other hosts never got infected, and service was good. If it did get in, you got slammed, whether you were vulnerable or not.
Jesus, there's nothing I hate more than people who tell you to read their comments who haven't read yours. Where exactly did I say I thought it was okay to build a replica of a car? And why on Earth do you think that's even what we're talking about? This is not whether it's 'okay' or not, it's about the ramifications of the analogy. You still don't seem to be able to grasp the difference between real and intellectual property. The fact is, buying a CD to duplicate software is not a necessity--buying the parts to assemble a copy of a car is. The plans for a car are the IP--the car is not. Duplicating the plans is analogous to duplicating software--duplicating the car is not. They are apples and oranges, which is the whole point--which makes your "...but if you condone one, you must condone both" sound not logical, but silly.
And a 'medium' such as sound waves or electrical impulses is not the same as computer 'media'. I apologize if you didn't understand the distinction being made.
I disagree. The assumption that the software is the media is wrong, or at least vastly over-simplified. For starters, you don't actually need 'media' to transfer software, or any other sort of intellectual property (and that's the heart of the distinction, I suppose--software is IP, cars are Real Property). You need a medium, but it could as easily be RAM, or reading the code aloud, or whatever. So when you're comparing the physical manifestation of the two items, you're missing crucial distinction--the physical manifestation of a car, is the car. The physical manifestation of a piece of software, is NOT the software.
And that argument has nothing to do with whether or not the replication of either item is legal or not. As I said, they are different sorts of property, and different laws apply.
I would guess that you're just trolling, but if not you seem to have missed the point. Even if you assemble a second car identical to the first, you still ended up paying for all the parts again, plus whatever labor went into it. It's nothing like duplicating software--with something tangible, duplication has the cost of materials tied into it. There are no legal problems because you HAVE paid for both 'copies' of the car. Duplicating software has no practical cost to it... which means the manufacturer of the individual bits gets nothing when you copy them.
Actually, there's a pretty good reason to use E-bay to communicate this sort of thing--no trail.
If you send e-mail from account A to account B, and A is tagged as a terrorist, that means B is now known as a terrorist, too--not very cool if you're B. But if A posts the pic on E-bay, and 13,000 people look at it, which one of them was B? It tremendously complicates the chain to communicate publicly. There's no practical way to find the recipient of a publicly distributed message, which makes the cells that much more secure.
Sorry for the delayed answer. I see that several other posters have already explained scoring issue, and I don't have anything further to add, but I didn't want you to think I was ignoring you--it might increase your paranoia!
Man, I hate those kinds of interviews. Those guys weren't really asking you for answers... they were asking you to read their minds. There are so many different ways to do things, and people get so caught up in their own conception of how it should be done that they can't accept that someone else might have a different answer.
No, actually, you're wrong. They are only killing us as a secondary effect--really, what they are trying to do is reduce our freedoms. If (and at this point, regardless of what anyone says, it's still a big if) Bin Laden's organization was behind this, then what they really want is for us to seal up the borders, stop broadcasting over the air waves, and stop infecting the rest of the world with our ideals of freedom and capitalism.
They win when they can prevent us from spreading around silly ideas like allowing women to have an education, allowing men to shave, anyone to drink, work where they want, spend their money how they choose. They win when we abandon the idea that, all things being equal, people should generally be allowed to live how they choose and worship what they want.
They DO NOT win when a few of us die. They can kill millions, but as long as those ideas exist, they have not won.
That may be a little high-minded and theoretical for some readers. But it is, nevertheless, true, and 21st Century cynicism aside, I think it will be sad if we can't rise to the occasion and defend the liberties that allow us to have these debates in open forum.
Heh. Yeah, I'm not sure that intentionally introduced errors in news stories are much worse than the un-intentional ones that are routinely there anyway. I've been personally close to enough stories that make the paper to realize how horrible the quality of most daily reporting truly is in this country (and don't even get me started on the amateur outfits like indymedia).
I have to see something several different places (which are not obviously merely copying one another) before I'll start to seriously give it much consideration as fact--and even then, realize that large parts of the story will be missing or incorrect for other reasons.
One of the best things about last week, though, was that in the middle of all the chaos and speculation, there were a lot of private individuals who just took some time out and posted up pictures they had taken or things they had seen with their own eyes. Put enough of those things together, and you have a far more accurate story than what a single reporter can do in the same amount of time.
I don't disagree with you. Not everyone can function under such stress. But clearly, through history, many people have. Out of a hundred or so on an airliner, I imagine there would be a few... enough. But as I say, I doubt they really knew or truly believed what was about to happen to them anyway.
Apparently some people, fortunately, have a little more brass than you seem to.
The truth is, none of us know until it happens what we can bring ourselves to do in that moment. But it's nice to see that some people at least express the desire to save the lives of others even if it costs their own.
In some ways I hope that was not true. The thought that the passengers were told what was going to happen and that none of them could find it in themselves to try to stop it (and even if only half, or a quarter, made that decision, they could have against men armed with knives and boxcutters) is disturbing. Although, it's possible that is the reason the fourth plane never made it to its target, wherever that was--if so, I salute whatever brave souls sacrificed themselves to save so many others.
Forgive me for speculating. In truth, none of us will ever know the complete story of what happened on board those airliners. But for years, everyone has been trained and told to sit tight, don't resist, and let the negotiators do their work. Before, that has always been good advice. As of this morning, it may be the worst thing you could do.
My heart goes out to the families of all the victims, everywhere.
1. A country the size of the US, no matter how it conducts itself, will always piss someone off enough to engage in acts of terror.
2. Negotiation and appeasment only encourages the use of terror as a tool.
3. There is no sufficient rational (sic) for the calculated murder of non-governmental, non-military personnel on this--or any--scale.
4. How do you propose to open a dialog with civilians (in other words, not other governments) who actively hide from any contact?
I don't think we should ignore them--I think we should take them off the table. And that's not just a visceral reaction to today's horror. I would suggest that most people who still see this event in terms other than 'war' have not yet accepted the magnitude of the event. In all likelihood, four or five times as many people died today as died at Pearl Harbor (and we're all going to be sick of that comparison by tomorrow. Yet it is the only one we really have). This wasn't a natural disaster, or a car bomb of protest--it was an act of war. We need to address it as such, even though the enemy is not a conventional enemy.
Jim McCarthy is a bastard, and while I haven't read his book, I can't imagine wanting to follow his advice on project management. Talk about someone trying to manage without understanding the product! I had one, and only one, conversation with this guy (he wasn't actually my manager, just an advisor to our company who thought he had a lot of weight to throw around), which left me speechless... literally! I could not think of how to answer what he thought were detailed, pertinent questions, which in fact had nothing at all to do with what we were working on.
Fortunately, it was clear to other people who actually were in control that he was talking out of his ass, too, and so I didn't have to deal with him after that. I still shudder that he (and his wife, who is even worse, but in a different way) now make their living teaching project management skills.
I walk on interviews like that. Those people aren't asking you for answers, they are asking you to read their mind. Unless you're psychic, you're never going to make them happy. The job's not worth it.
Depends on where you've been and what you've been doing. Personally, I don't sit around memorizing crap I don't use on a daily basis. If I've had to do something recently, I can probably give you an answer on that subject in detail, but if it's something I did a lot of last year but haven't had to deal with in the interim, that doesn't mean I'm not competent to do it--just need to refresh my memory.
Granted, there are people out there who have all this at their fingertips, and by all means if you can find one, hire them. But I don't think that "I have to look it up" is necessarily a bad answer. Maybe in your particular situation you had to have someone who could do something specific the next day, but frankly, I'd rather hire a generalist who can do other useful things in the future even if it takes him a couple of days to get up to speed on the current project. I look for the ability to pick things up, because the one constant in this business is change, and just because someone has the flavor of the day down, it doesn't mean they're going to be able to adapt to what happens next week.
Excellent! That's a good idea; I always hit them with an un-plugged box, just to see if they know Rule Number One: "CHECK THE PLUGS!" but a bad cable is even better.
I'm a big believer in practical exams like that. Sit the candidate down at a box, ask them to perform some simple tasks or give you some information that should be relatively easy to find. I'd rather have someone that can sit down and work with their hands on a problem than spit up textbook answers all day long. You can read up on esoteric commands and techniques all you like, but if you can't translate it into results on a screen, you're worthless. This is also a good way to see how they perform under pressure, and whether or not their afraid to look for help elsewhere. I'll take the guy who fires up the web browser and finds the answer in thirty seconds off Google a long time before the schmoe who spends ten minutes slogging through machine settings and racking his brain for it.
Just to throw a little spice into the debate (and provide another perspective from the constant, if somewhat justified "Evil corporations are trying to steal our daughters!" tone around here), let's compare this to railroads.
Yep, railroads. Specifically, the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific. During their initial construction of the transcontinental railroad in the 1860s, they were given scandalously good deals by the government--largely in the form of huge land grants that in many parts of the American West exist to this day, but in other ways such as backed bonds, as well. This, of course, caused a great hue and cry at the time, despite a great deal of popular sentiment supporting railroad building in general. By modern standards, it was a staggering giveaway of public resources--you would never see anything on that scale happening today with modern communications and press.
But there was a reason for it--it opened the greater part of the country to settlement and development (whether that is a desirable goal is a topic for a different thread). Both railroads nearly went bankrupt even with such advantages--it was an undertaking that could not have ever been accomplished without the resources of the government behind it; yet it was a private venture, and private investors eventually profited from it. But, less directly, so did the entire country--we became a wealthy, influential nation largely due to the effect of those railroads on commerce. Nor could the government have accomplished it without the drive and freedom of private companies.
I will not argue that Verisign is performing a similar service. But what if the Internet is the American West, and Verisign the Union Pacific? Or, at least, what if that is how our government is looking at the situation? The Internet is the vast, un-exploited frontier, awaiting the chugging engines of commerce to enrich us all... I'm not sure I believe any of that to be the case. But take a few moments at look at it from that angle and comment. Are ridiculous deals for large companies ALWAYS bad? Or may they sometimes be justified in the larger context which we may not always consider?
Slashdot Mirror
Amen to that. And to the guy up above who said "Use it." If you are regularly practicing what you know, you'll retain it--and the rest you can look up. I know that doesn't help you pass the cert tests, but I would say just cram it and don't worry about long-term retention. Some of the most important things to know aren't on the tests, and a lot of what is on them is not common enough to be worth wasting memorization time on anyway. Don't worry about the crap that's in the books--you can always go back and look it up again. It's what is not in the books that you need to remember.
Don't have any patience with interviewers who expect you to be able to regurgitate technical minutae when you're looking for a job, either. They generally don't understand the really important things and aren't much fun to work for. The ones who ask you about the broader applications of the technology are the ones you want to impress, IMHO.
I'm wondering if that means they are actually angling this at business environments. I know that's the first thing I thought of. It doesn't make much sense to plunk down $99 for your home box, but it's a steal if you have a couple hundred corporate boxes sitting around. It seems like a great solution for the ancient dilemma of hating Windows but needing to provide Windows apps in a business environment. $99 for the whole company versus nearly $200 a box for a Windows license, with no requirement for re-training or document conversion, is going to be an easy argument to make to the CFO.
Ooooohhh! Sneaky. I like it!
Just a suggestion to add to a lot of other very adequate ideas...
I notice most of them recommend running fiber through some sort of pressurized, protected conduit, with various tamper notification schemes. Great; do all that. But instead of just running your single fiber strand, run a lot of them. If you feel extra devious, rig up something to pump garbage signal through them, signal which will look not unlike the encrypted traffic I assume you'll be using on the real line.
Stuff enough of them in there, and make the bogus signal convincing enough, and it will easily take your attacker longer than your one-month inspection period to breach the conduit, defeat the anti-tamper, and identify the correct strand, let alone get anything useful off it.
2. True
1. Only true if there is sufficient money in your account to cover the chargeback. Of course, any of the sleaze who do this regularly are not going to leave money in their accounts so that this can happen.
FWIW, I agree with posters above who pay via mail. The post office has the time, inclination, and legal obligation to help you out if you are defrauded while using their service--Paypal, or any other private payment scheme, does not. You are a liability to them the instant you start demanding employee time to resolve any dispute, and they'll be doing the bare minimum they can to keep you happy.
Here, most of the scans seemed to be from our ISP's netblock, so I'm guessing that how badly you were affected depended mostly on how many infected NT machines your upstream provider served. For instance, I noticed significant degradation from Nimda, although we were not affected; from Code Red, however, I didn't get a single scan. I think that luck played a factor in how badly any of us were hit by these worms--if no instance of it got loose inside the scan range, other hosts never got infected, and service was good. If it did get in, you got slammed, whether you were vulnerable or not.
Jesus, there's nothing I hate more than people who tell you to read their comments who haven't read yours. Where exactly did I say I thought it was okay to build a replica of a car? And why on Earth do you think that's even what we're talking about? This is not whether it's 'okay' or not, it's about the ramifications of the analogy. You still don't seem to be able to grasp the difference between real and intellectual property. The fact is, buying a CD to duplicate software is not a necessity--buying the parts to assemble a copy of a car is. The plans for a car are the IP--the car is not. Duplicating the plans is analogous to duplicating software--duplicating the car is not. They are apples and oranges, which is the whole point--which makes your "...but if you condone one, you must condone both" sound not logical, but silly.
And a 'medium' such as sound waves or electrical impulses is not the same as computer 'media'. I apologize if you didn't understand the distinction being made.
I disagree. The assumption that the software is the media is wrong, or at least vastly over-simplified. For starters, you don't actually need 'media' to transfer software, or any other sort of intellectual property (and that's the heart of the distinction, I suppose--software is IP, cars are Real Property). You need a medium, but it could as easily be RAM, or reading the code aloud, or whatever. So when you're comparing the physical manifestation of the two items, you're missing crucial distinction--the physical manifestation of a car, is the car. The physical manifestation of a piece of software, is NOT the software.
And that argument has nothing to do with whether or not the replication of either item is legal or not. As I said, they are different sorts of property, and different laws apply.
I would guess that you're just trolling, but if not you seem to have missed the point. Even if you assemble a second car identical to the first, you still ended up paying for all the parts again, plus whatever labor went into it. It's nothing like duplicating software--with something tangible, duplication has the cost of materials tied into it. There are no legal problems because you HAVE paid for both 'copies' of the car. Duplicating software has no practical cost to it... which means the manufacturer of the individual bits gets nothing when you copy them.
Actually, there's a pretty good reason to use E-bay to communicate this sort of thing--no trail.
If you send e-mail from account A to account B, and A is tagged as a terrorist, that means B is now known as a terrorist, too--not very cool if you're B. But if A posts the pic on E-bay, and 13,000 people look at it, which one of them was B? It tremendously complicates the chain to communicate publicly. There's no practical way to find the recipient of a publicly distributed message, which makes the cells that much more secure.
Sorry for the delayed answer. I see that several other posters have already explained scoring issue, and I don't have anything further to add, but I didn't want you to think I was ignoring you--it might increase your paranoia!
Man, I hate those kinds of interviews. Those guys weren't really asking you for answers... they were asking you to read their minds. There are so many different ways to do things, and people get so caught up in their own conception of how it should be done that they can't accept that someone else might have a different answer.
No, actually, you're wrong. They are only killing us as a secondary effect--really, what they are trying to do is reduce our freedoms. If (and at this point, regardless of what anyone says, it's still a big if) Bin Laden's organization was behind this, then what they really want is for us to seal up the borders, stop broadcasting over the air waves, and stop infecting the rest of the world with our ideals of freedom and capitalism.
They win when they can prevent us from spreading around silly ideas like allowing women to have an education, allowing men to shave, anyone to drink, work where they want, spend their money how they choose. They win when we abandon the idea that, all things being equal, people should generally be allowed to live how they choose and worship what they want.
They DO NOT win when a few of us die. They can kill millions, but as long as those ideas exist, they have not won.
That may be a little high-minded and theoretical for some readers. But it is, nevertheless, true, and 21st Century cynicism aside, I think it will be sad if we can't rise to the occasion and defend the liberties that allow us to have these debates in open forum.
Heh. Yeah, I'm not sure that intentionally introduced errors in news stories are much worse than the un-intentional ones that are routinely there anyway. I've been personally close to enough stories that make the paper to realize how horrible the quality of most daily reporting truly is in this country (and don't even get me started on the amateur outfits like indymedia).
I have to see something several different places (which are not obviously merely copying one another) before I'll start to seriously give it much consideration as fact--and even then, realize that large parts of the story will be missing or incorrect for other reasons.
One of the best things about last week, though, was that in the middle of all the chaos and speculation, there were a lot of private individuals who just took some time out and posted up pictures they had taken or things they had seen with their own eyes. Put enough of those things together, and you have a far more accurate story than what a single reporter can do in the same amount of time.
I don't disagree with you. Not everyone can function under such stress. But clearly, through history, many people have. Out of a hundred or so on an airliner, I imagine there would be a few... enough. But as I say, I doubt they really knew or truly believed what was about to happen to them anyway.
Apparently some people, fortunately, have a little more brass than you seem to.
The truth is, none of us know until it happens what we can bring ourselves to do in that moment. But it's nice to see that some people at least express the desire to save the lives of others even if it costs their own.
In some ways I hope that was not true. The thought that the passengers were told what was going to happen and that none of them could find it in themselves to try to stop it (and even if only half, or a quarter, made that decision, they could have against men armed with knives and boxcutters) is disturbing. Although, it's possible that is the reason the fourth plane never made it to its target, wherever that was--if so, I salute whatever brave souls sacrificed themselves to save so many others.
Forgive me for speculating. In truth, none of us will ever know the complete story of what happened on board those airliners. But for years, everyone has been trained and told to sit tight, don't resist, and let the negotiators do their work. Before, that has always been good advice. As of this morning, it may be the worst thing you could do.
My heart goes out to the families of all the victims, everywhere.
1. A country the size of the US, no matter how it conducts itself, will always piss someone off enough to engage in acts of terror.
2. Negotiation and appeasment only encourages the use of terror as a tool.
3. There is no sufficient rational (sic) for the calculated murder of non-governmental, non-military personnel on this--or any--scale.
4. How do you propose to open a dialog with civilians (in other words, not other governments) who actively hide from any contact?
I don't think we should ignore them--I think we should take them off the table. And that's not just a visceral reaction to today's horror. I would suggest that most people who still see this event in terms other than 'war' have not yet accepted the magnitude of the event. In all likelihood, four or five times as many people died today as died at Pearl Harbor (and we're all going to be sick of that comparison by tomorrow. Yet it is the only one we really have). This wasn't a natural disaster, or a car bomb of protest--it was an act of war. We need to address it as such, even though the enemy is not a conventional enemy.
Jim McCarthy is a bastard, and while I haven't read his book, I can't imagine wanting to follow his advice on project management. Talk about someone trying to manage without understanding the product! I had one, and only one, conversation with this guy (he wasn't actually my manager, just an advisor to our company who thought he had a lot of weight to throw around), which left me speechless... literally! I could not think of how to answer what he thought were detailed, pertinent questions, which in fact had nothing at all to do with what we were working on.
Fortunately, it was clear to other people who actually were in control that he was talking out of his ass, too, and so I didn't have to deal with him after that. I still shudder that he (and his wife, who is even worse, but in a different way) now make their living teaching project management skills.
What's your address? I'll come over and make sure ;-)
Are you kidding? One of the best things we can do for the environment is kill people! Off 'em all, I say! Stop pollution at the source.
I walk on interviews like that. Those people aren't asking you for answers, they are asking you to read their mind. Unless you're psychic, you're never going to make them happy. The job's not worth it.
Depends on where you've been and what you've been doing. Personally, I don't sit around memorizing crap I don't use on a daily basis. If I've had to do something recently, I can probably give you an answer on that subject in detail, but if it's something I did a lot of last year but haven't had to deal with in the interim, that doesn't mean I'm not competent to do it--just need to refresh my memory.
Granted, there are people out there who have all this at their fingertips, and by all means if you can find one, hire them. But I don't think that "I have to look it up" is necessarily a bad answer. Maybe in your particular situation you had to have someone who could do something specific the next day, but frankly, I'd rather hire a generalist who can do other useful things in the future even if it takes him a couple of days to get up to speed on the current project. I look for the ability to pick things up, because the one constant in this business is change, and just because someone has the flavor of the day down, it doesn't mean they're going to be able to adapt to what happens next week.
Excellent! That's a good idea; I always hit them with an un-plugged box, just to see if they know Rule Number One: "CHECK THE PLUGS!" but a bad cable is even better.
I'm a big believer in practical exams like that. Sit the candidate down at a box, ask them to perform some simple tasks or give you some information that should be relatively easy to find. I'd rather have someone that can sit down and work with their hands on a problem than spit up textbook answers all day long. You can read up on esoteric commands and techniques all you like, but if you can't translate it into results on a screen, you're worthless. This is also a good way to see how they perform under pressure, and whether or not their afraid to look for help elsewhere. I'll take the guy who fires up the web browser and finds the answer in thirty seconds off Google a long time before the schmoe who spends ten minutes slogging through machine settings and racking his brain for it.
Just to throw a little spice into the debate (and provide another perspective from the constant, if somewhat justified "Evil corporations are trying to steal our daughters!" tone around here), let's compare this to railroads.
Yep, railroads. Specifically, the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific. During their initial construction of the transcontinental railroad in the 1860s, they were given scandalously good deals by the government--largely in the form of huge land grants that in many parts of the American West exist to this day, but in other ways such as backed bonds, as well. This, of course, caused a great hue and cry at the time, despite a great deal of popular sentiment supporting railroad building in general. By modern standards, it was a staggering giveaway of public resources--you would never see anything on that scale happening today with modern communications and press.
But there was a reason for it--it opened the greater part of the country to settlement and development (whether that is a desirable goal is a topic for a different thread). Both railroads nearly went bankrupt even with such advantages--it was an undertaking that could not have ever been accomplished without the resources of the government behind it; yet it was a private venture, and private investors eventually profited from it. But, less directly, so did the entire country--we became a wealthy, influential nation largely due to the effect of those railroads on commerce. Nor could the government have accomplished it without the drive and freedom of private companies.
I will not argue that Verisign is performing a similar service. But what if the Internet is the American West, and Verisign the Union Pacific? Or, at least, what if that is how our government is looking at the situation? The Internet is the vast, un-exploited frontier, awaiting the chugging engines of commerce to enrich us all... I'm not sure I believe any of that to be the case. But take a few moments at look at it from that angle and comment. Are ridiculous deals for large companies ALWAYS bad? Or may they sometimes be justified in the larger context which we may not always consider?