I'm not sure that doing a web search is really "snooping" either--after all, what you put on the web is information you put out there. If you didn't want people to know it, you shouldn't have put it out there for everybody in the world to see.
Now, if employers are breaking into your private disk space, that's different...
Maybe I'll post this anonymously, so it can't be used against me...
What really surprises me is that so many people don't realize this. Perhaps it's the fact that my "online community" experience began with BBSs, and pseudonyms there were often de rigeur due to the.... ahem... illicit nature of much of the information being exchanged; but I largely operate online under a half-dozen false names for anything other than the truly mundane. As a result, anyone Googling my pseudonyms is going to get jackass rants, admissions of former and present bad behavior, and no indication of who I really am. Conversely, Googling my real name (actually, my classic unix-style "first initial lastname") will get mostly a lot of boring technical discussions from a classic Volkswagen listserv and a couple Amazon reviews. Kids nowadays! Can't even think to protect their identity.
And what scholarships would that be? When I was a foreign undergrad I got to pay full price for the privilege of attending a U.S. university. No American taxpayer-funded scholarships whatsoever for me.
Shoulda' been Chinese. Most of the Chinese students at the univerity I attended were there on the Chinese government's dime.The university loved them, because they paid full out-of-state tuition rates. Then they graduate and go home.
If not for my friends and family (primarily the former) I'd already be in Canada or Ireland.
I hear this a lot, and I always feel compelled to ask: why do you think Canada would want you? I have no idea how Ireland feels about immigrants from the US, but I know for a fact that Canada does not have a big sign at the border that says "Come on in and take jobs from Canadians".
Do you really think a hard drive would be more susceptible to magnetic interference from a few measly magnets on the screen back than it would be from the exceptionally strong neodymium magnets in its own brushless motor? Hard drives aren't susceptible to magnets the way floppies are. You'd need a serious electromagnet to bugger data on a hard drive.
A pound is statically defined as 0.90718474 kilograms. The precision is there by definition. Precision only comes into play when you're using instruments to measure the mass of a specific object using a specific device. A kilogram is still 2.20462262 pounds even when your scale only has a precision of one decimal place.
My REB 1100 e-book has an LCD screen and it's a pleasure to read on.
Yeah, I have both a REB 1100 and a REB 1200, and I think they're both great. What that clown Bezos fails to note with his smug "flashlight" analogy is that LCD backlights are adjustable. E-ink in bright sunlight is putting more light into your eyes than an LCD with the backlight turned off.
Something seems very wrong with the fact that a whole novel can be sent over a cell network for $0.10, but a text message of under 200 characters cost double that.
At this point, even a novel is an insignificant use of bandwidth. It's not about cost at all. It's about maximizing profit. As long as dodo teenagers continue to run up huge overage charges for exceeding their SMS limit, they'll keep charging like that.
I think you've missed the whole point of PDFs. They are meant to preserve formatting.
I think the OP is saying he hates PDFs as a format for reading electronically. This is completely logical. As you note, PDF is specifically designed to not be like a computer document, but rather to preserve printed media formatting. This makes them totally unsuitable for on-screen reading. Why people continue to distribute documents that will never be printed in PDF format is beyond me. I blame Adobe for pushing the Acrobat Reader software as being something more than the printer-friendly format it is.
What I'm waiting for is a color e-ink reader, with a roughly 8.5x11 screen (or at least the same aspect ratio), and the capacity to natively display PDF documents. I imagine something the size/weight of a laptop screen, with a touch screen and a few nav buttons at the edges.
Should be *banned* for security areas. If you need 'outside' for a valid reason you provide a dedicated machine for that purpose.
Its pretty simple. That company should be fired, not just the fool that caused the leak.
And i don't care what OS it runs, anything less then the above is plain reckless.
THey undoubtedly already do the above. I would lay money that this guy "brought work home" on a USB flash drive and put it on his home computer. I do something similar at work. I have 2 machines side by side, one with network access, one isolated with all my development tools on it. I transfer the applications I write to the "live" side with a flash drive. In my case it doesn't matter, because there's nothing sensitive on our network (our IT dept is just full of dickheads who lock down all the networked machines). In this contractor's case, the employee will probably lose his clearance and be canned. DoD security regulations are there for exactly this reason.
Wouldn't the responsible behavior be to inform the FBI or DoD
According to TFA, they did that first thing. They presumably had permission to do some publicity stunt/press releases with it after the FBI made sure the contractor was shot, his house burned down, his laptop was seized, or whatever it is they do nowadays to people who break security regulations.
Get real. You speak as if federal "data security" is handled by one guy. Nobody was "distracted" by the Blackberry issue. This kind of shit happens all the time, and is caught all the time. This is just one they've decided to publicize.
No doubt! I work at a large school district, and our machines are locked down tighter than the machines we used in Army intelligence (minus the strong crypto and CAC readers). We can't even install Flash for our web browsers because it's seen as a "risk" (which is ridiculous, as we don't even have anything anyone would WANT on any of our machines). How is this bozo installing P2P apps on a work machine... or worse, why is he putting classified info on a personal machine?
You know, I'm usually one to go with Hanlon's Razor (never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity), but with the VH-71 Marine One replacement program getting the stinkeye for it's ridiculous cost overruns, for once the conspiracy thing has me suspicious. It's likely the plans being on P2P part is entirely coincidence, and the publicity of the incident is the conspiracy, but I can see it happening. The question now is, which Marine One plans are they? Are they the plans for the helicopters currently in service, and the conspiracy is trying to save the VH-71 program, or were they the VH-71 plans and the conspiracy is trying to kill the VH-71 program?
Really though, it's probably just unrelated coincidence. Most things like this are completely unplanned. Conspiracies require competence, and you just don't find that in government much.
That's not even the real issue. They should be asking what a contractor is doing putting classified information on his "walking around" laptop. When I was in military intelligence, we had machines with classified information, but they were either dedicated hardened devices (for in the field) or they were fairly standard windows machines kept inside some sort of secure perimeter. The P2P aspect of this is really irrelevant, other than it gives both the "dastardly towelheads of Eastasia*" and the DoD an easy way to spot the information in the wild. This contractor likely already broke the rules enough to lose his job by having the files there in the first place.
it's camera, it's memory, it's lack of custom apps, lack of MMS, lack of 3G, lack of GPS and so on made it a laughably poor device, whilst in the US it was pretty state of the art.
No, it was substandard in the US even when it came out. I was already walking around with an AT&T Tilt/HTC TYTN II (3G, MMS, GPS, etc) when the iPhone was released to its adoring fans.
I think the point is that when you have "extra" it's not a problem to give things away for free. However, if you can't pay your rent or don't have enough to buy food I don't think your priority is going to be working on something for free. Of course anything that detracts from the "Open Source Rulez Supreme" mantra must be shot down.
"Priority"? What are you talking about? "not being able to pay rent or buy groceries" isn't even an activity. Name the activity that arguably takes priority away from FOSS. "Lookig for a job" is no harder work than having a job, so what is taking up the other 8 hours of waking time?
No, but they might say "Gee, I would normally write a patch to fix Xorg's gonkulator, but dammit, I have to go search for a job instead."
That's the same crap argument that always gets thrown out. Searching for a job isn't something you can reasonably do 16 hours a day, 7 days a week. It takes no appreciably greater amount of the day to look for work than it does to go to work. After you've gone to 3 interviews and sent of 20 more resumes, what are you going to do after 6pm, when most offices are closed? Sit at home for 3 hours and obsessively tune your resume? After every day? Un-fucking-likely.
This is utterly ridiculous. It's not like work on an open source project is comparable to giving away money, or hand-built widgets. Nobody is going to say "gee, I would normally contribute this code to that open source project, but I'm unemployed, so I'll sell it to buy groceries instead."
I've dealt with plenty of men and women who don't know much about computers and they don't want to know. They seem to revel in their ignorance and are quite happy to just rely on others to keep things working for them.
I've run into quite a few people like this, who proudly say "I don't use computers", and to me it would be no less horrifying to hear them smugly declare "I don't know how to read". Where did people get the idea that not being able to operate the gateway to modern information exchange is anything but a personal deficit?
I invite all to see Los Angeles traffic (by the looks of it you're already here, though). This is the land of opposites, apparently, because everyone here drives like a NY taxi driver... except the taxi drivers.
I can't believe this megomaniacal prima dona is now somehow the posterboy of the IT people. There were ways for this nutbar to get out of the quandary while still saving his ass. Instead, he holds a network [b]that does not belong to him[/b] for ransom.
Well, it's just like 1st Amendment cases involving pornography, marching down the street in neo-Nazi uniforms or hooded bedsheets, or the like. You have to fight the idiots who would deny basic rights or make a mockery of law unilaterally, even when they go after the dirtbags. Letting them ignore the law when they beat down the unpopular is just giving them a free pass to do the same to you in the future, when it strikes their fancy.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure that doing a web search is really "snooping" either--after all, what you put on the web is information you put out there. If you didn't want people to know it, you shouldn't have put it out there for everybody in the world to see.
Now, if employers are breaking into your private disk space, that's different...
Maybe I'll post this anonymously, so it can't be used against me...
What really surprises me is that so many people don't realize this. Perhaps it's the fact that my "online community" experience began with BBSs, and pseudonyms there were often de rigeur due to the.... ahem... illicit nature of much of the information being exchanged; but I largely operate online under a half-dozen false names for anything other than the truly mundane. As a result, anyone Googling my pseudonyms is going to get jackass rants, admissions of former and present bad behavior, and no indication of who I really am. Conversely, Googling my real name (actually, my classic unix-style "first initial lastname") will get mostly a lot of boring technical discussions from a classic Volkswagen listserv and a couple Amazon reviews. Kids nowadays! Can't even think to protect their identity.
2001? Long anime has been around before that.
Reading comprehension! 2001 was when the OP started watching anime. No one said anything about when anything first came into existence.
And what scholarships would that be? When I was a foreign undergrad I got to pay full price for the privilege of attending a U.S. university. No American taxpayer-funded scholarships whatsoever for me.
Shoulda' been Chinese. Most of the Chinese students at the univerity I attended were there on the Chinese government's dime.The university loved them, because they paid full out-of-state tuition rates. Then they graduate and go home.
If not for my friends and family (primarily the former) I'd already be in Canada or Ireland.
I hear this a lot, and I always feel compelled to ask: why do you think Canada would want you? I have no idea how Ireland feels about immigrants from the US, but I know for a fact that Canada does not have a big sign at the border that says "Come on in and take jobs from Canadians".
...All without a single flame or troll.
I deem your query inexplicably disagreeable, and claim you favor an operating system I arbitrarily find amusingly substandard!
(sorry, couldn't resist)
Do you really think a hard drive would be more susceptible to magnetic interference from a few measly magnets on the screen back than it would be from the exceptionally strong neodymium magnets in its own brushless motor? Hard drives aren't susceptible to magnets the way floppies are. You'd need a serious electromagnet to bugger data on a hard drive.
A pound is statically defined as 0.90718474 kilograms. The precision is there by definition. Precision only comes into play when you're using instruments to measure the mass of a specific object using a specific device. A kilogram is still 2.20462262 pounds even when your scale only has a precision of one decimal place.
My REB 1100 e-book has an LCD screen and it's a pleasure to read on.
Yeah, I have both a REB 1100 and a REB 1200, and I think they're both great. What that clown Bezos fails to note with his smug "flashlight" analogy is that LCD backlights are adjustable. E-ink in bright sunlight is putting more light into your eyes than an LCD with the backlight turned off.
Something seems very wrong with the fact that a whole novel can be sent over a cell network for $0.10, but a text message of under 200 characters cost double that.
At this point, even a novel is an insignificant use of bandwidth. It's not about cost at all. It's about maximizing profit. As long as dodo teenagers continue to run up huge overage charges for exceeding their SMS limit, they'll keep charging like that.
I think you've missed the whole point of PDFs. They are meant to preserve formatting.
I think the OP is saying he hates PDFs as a format for reading electronically. This is completely logical. As you note, PDF is specifically designed to not be like a computer document, but rather to preserve printed media formatting. This makes them totally unsuitable for on-screen reading. Why people continue to distribute documents that will never be printed in PDF format is beyond me. I blame Adobe for pushing the Acrobat Reader software as being something more than the printer-friendly format it is.
What I'm waiting for is a color e-ink reader, with a roughly 8.5x11 screen (or at least the same aspect ratio), and the capacity to natively display PDF documents. I imagine something the size/weight of a laptop screen, with a touch screen and a few nav buttons at the edges.
Heh. Amusing indeed.
Should be *banned* for security areas. If you need 'outside' for a valid reason you provide a dedicated machine for that purpose.
Its pretty simple. That company should be fired, not just the fool that caused the leak.
And i don't care what OS it runs, anything less then the above is plain reckless.
THey undoubtedly already do the above. I would lay money that this guy "brought work home" on a USB flash drive and put it on his home computer. I do something similar at work. I have 2 machines side by side, one with network access, one isolated with all my development tools on it. I transfer the applications I write to the "live" side with a flash drive. In my case it doesn't matter, because there's nothing sensitive on our network (our IT dept is just full of dickheads who lock down all the networked machines). In this contractor's case, the employee will probably lose his clearance and be canned. DoD security regulations are there for exactly this reason.
Wouldn't the responsible behavior be to inform the FBI or DoD
According to TFA, they did that first thing. They presumably had permission to do some publicity stunt/press releases with it after the FBI made sure the contractor was shot, his house burned down, his laptop was seized, or whatever it is they do nowadays to people who break security regulations.
Get real. You speak as if federal "data security" is handled by one guy. Nobody was "distracted" by the Blackberry issue. This kind of shit happens all the time, and is caught all the time. This is just one they've decided to publicize.
No doubt! I work at a large school district, and our machines are locked down tighter than the machines we used in Army intelligence (minus the strong crypto and CAC readers). We can't even install Flash for our web browsers because it's seen as a "risk" (which is ridiculous, as we don't even have anything anyone would WANT on any of our machines). How is this bozo installing P2P apps on a work machine... or worse, why is he putting classified info on a personal machine?
You know, I'm usually one to go with Hanlon's Razor (never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity), but with the VH-71 Marine One replacement program getting the stinkeye for it's ridiculous cost overruns, for once the conspiracy thing has me suspicious. It's likely the plans being on P2P part is entirely coincidence, and the publicity of the incident is the conspiracy, but I can see it happening. The question now is, which Marine One plans are they? Are they the plans for the helicopters currently in service, and the conspiracy is trying to save the VH-71 program, or were they the VH-71 plans and the conspiracy is trying to kill the VH-71 program?
Really though, it's probably just unrelated coincidence. Most things like this are completely unplanned. Conspiracies require competence, and you just don't find that in government much.
That's not even the real issue. They should be asking what a contractor is doing putting classified information on his "walking around" laptop. When I was in military intelligence, we had machines with classified information, but they were either dedicated hardened devices (for in the field) or they were fairly standard windows machines kept inside some sort of secure perimeter. The P2P aspect of this is really irrelevant, other than it gives both the "dastardly towelheads of Eastasia*" and the DoD an easy way to spot the information in the wild. This contractor likely already broke the rules enough to lose his job by having the files there in the first place.
* we've always been at war with Eastasia, right?
it's camera, it's memory, it's lack of custom apps, lack of MMS, lack of 3G, lack of GPS and so on made it a laughably poor device, whilst in the US it was pretty state of the art.
No, it was substandard in the US even when it came out. I was already walking around with an AT&T Tilt/HTC TYTN II (3G, MMS, GPS, etc) when the iPhone was released to its adoring fans.
When you'll have to work from 9 to 21 six days a week as a professional code monkey, you are not going to contribute much to OSS during evenings
Wait, so you're saying higher unemployment is going to make programmers have to work MORE?
I think the point is that when you have "extra" it's not a problem to give things away for free. However, if you can't pay your rent or don't have enough to buy food I don't think your priority is going to be working on something for free. Of course anything that detracts from the "Open Source Rulez Supreme" mantra must be shot down.
"Priority"? What are you talking about? "not being able to pay rent or buy groceries" isn't even an activity. Name the activity that arguably takes priority away from FOSS. "Lookig for a job" is no harder work than having a job, so what is taking up the other 8 hours of waking time?
No, but they might say "Gee, I would normally write a patch to fix Xorg's gonkulator, but dammit, I have to go search for a job instead."
That's the same crap argument that always gets thrown out. Searching for a job isn't something you can reasonably do 16 hours a day, 7 days a week. It takes no appreciably greater amount of the day to look for work than it does to go to work. After you've gone to 3 interviews and sent of 20 more resumes, what are you going to do after 6pm, when most offices are closed? Sit at home for 3 hours and obsessively tune your resume? After every day? Un-fucking-likely.
People need something to live off
This is utterly ridiculous. It's not like work on an open source project is comparable to giving away money, or hand-built widgets. Nobody is going to say "gee, I would normally contribute this code to that open source project, but I'm unemployed, so I'll sell it to buy groceries instead."
I've dealt with plenty of men and women who don't know much about computers and they don't want to know. They seem to revel in their ignorance and are quite happy to just rely on others to keep things working for them.
I've run into quite a few people like this, who proudly say "I don't use computers", and to me it would be no less horrifying to hear them smugly declare "I don't know how to read". Where did people get the idea that not being able to operate the gateway to modern information exchange is anything but a personal deficit?
I invite all to see Los Angeles traffic (by the looks of it you're already here, though). This is the land of opposites, apparently, because everyone here drives like a NY taxi driver... except the taxi drivers.
I can't believe this megomaniacal prima dona is now somehow the posterboy of the IT people. There were ways for this nutbar to get out of the quandary while still saving his ass. Instead, he holds a network [b]that does not belong to him[/b] for ransom.
Well, it's just like 1st Amendment cases involving pornography, marching down the street in neo-Nazi uniforms or hooded bedsheets, or the like. You have to fight the idiots who would deny basic rights or make a mockery of law unilaterally, even when they go after the dirtbags. Letting them ignore the law when they beat down the unpopular is just giving them a free pass to do the same to you in the future, when it strikes their fancy.