As 2005 draws to a close, foreigners hold about $3 trillion (yes, that's trillion) in US dollars, Treasury bonds, and other government securities such as Fannie Mae mortgages. Two-thirds of this is held by four Asian countries - Japan, China, Taiwan, and Korea.
This might have been moderated "funny", but we should remember just how much money the US Government has borrowed from China. That national debt is financed by someone, remember?
But we can always raise the national debt ceiling...
The third reason why contractors annoy employees is because they get far more respect from management.
What color is the sky on your planet? At the contracting gig I had before this one, the contractors got all the busy/ugly/painful work while the permanent employees got all the credit. The contracting company encouraged us to bend over and take it because they were afraid of losing the contract. Putting someone in grave danger of losing their assignment has a way of keeping them quiet when you dump 3 different job descriptions on them. Same company employed a lot of H1-B employees for similar reasons; if you lose your gig, you go back. The company seemed to think that by keeping their employees paranoid and terrified, they would get more work out of them. Sadly, occasionally it was true, so they could justify it.
why should we spend our moral money on someone who's not going to be here in a month or two?
Because they're likely to be there for a year? Because creating this kind of class difference destroys productivity? Because the only difference between the contractors and the regular employees is where their paychecks are coming from?
There's an easy solution to that particular problem, it's just that most people are too lazy to apply the sanction.
Like this:
*ring ring* *savage beating* *enjoys rest of movie*
And before all the self-important bastards start whining about how they need to be in touch for emergencies, 1) vibrate 2) go outside to answer or immediately after answering. Either that or reimburse everyone in the theater for their ticket costs. If you're that important you can certianly afford it.
Believe it or not, many people do not rate money to happyness. Quality of job and making a difference mean a lot to many people.
The bank doesn't take job satisfaction as payment on your mortgage. Nor can you eat job satisfaction.
For most people, your employer has no interest in your quality of job or in your making a difference. You're there to shut up and take it. The least you can do is get paid well enough to take the sting out of it.
He wants to charge everyone. and his stupidity will kill bellsouth if they try it. Many MANY large providers can kick his arse hard by simply blacklisting bellsouth routers and ip address ranges. Hell some companies that peer with them might decide to stop routing to the greedy idiot out of principal.
More likely IMHO is that the other telcos and ISPs will follow suit and start up this scheme themselves. It's kind of like getting consumers to get used to paying for 18 cable channels they don't want so they can get the 2 that they do; once one cable company gets that precedent set the others will follow suit to be "competitive".
Obviously there are several fabulously wealthy drug dealers; it's just that there are scores of footsoldiers who make very little.
Replace "drug dealers" with "CEOs" and you'll get a very good indication of why people sell (and use) drugs. The opportunities for advancement are better, your enemies identify themselves clearly (by shooting at you) instead of manipulating office politics, and you die if you fail, so there's no messy bankruptcy/reposession process if you're young, or humiliating retirement/destitution if you're old.
I can think of another reason that this is a bad idea. If you create a situation where only you know the password to mission critical systems, it won't keep you from being fired. What it will do, is get you sued after the fact if you refuse to divulge the information.
The evidence of this is Sony/BMG going off half-cocked and implementing DRM without everyone doing it.
Point. But that just makes it a disorganized monopoly, which IMHO will be much harder to prove and/or remedy.
When I talk about choices for the average user, if it's between crap artist A and crap artist B, they'll choose crap artist B if it doesn't have DRM that's been covered by the news.
I disagree. You have more faith in the American sheeple than I have. IMHO even if they've seen the publicity around this Sony episode, that won't stop them from buying what they've been told to buy through various media, because either 1) they won't make the connection, or 2) they take the "oh I don't have anything that anyone would want to steal" approach I've seen towards viruses/spyware. That being said, it is true that this publicity may make other labels more hesitant to use these kinds of tactics, or at least ask their third party developers, "Hey, what's that rootthingy that I heard about? Sony got in trouble for that and it cost them money."
Ultimately that's the only thing that will deter the other labels from doing what Sony did-if it costs them millions of dollars through lost sales, recall/replacement expenses, and class-action settlements. Not because it's illegal or unethical, but if it's bad for business.
What the RIAA and the record companies don't get is that the more CHOICE we have, the less we're likely put up with the bull from anyone.
That's kind of the point. The RIAA's mission statement includes the maintenance of a monopoly over the distribution of recorded music. Anything that seriously threatens this monopoly is to be eliminated by any means necessary. This is what is meant by "they didn't do anything wrong". In the RIAA's eyes, anything that is done to prevent those nasty pirating hacker people from distributing their God-given content is completely justified.
Most people put up with software errors because they don't know they have options.
If you're talking about Windows, most people don't have options; the decision has already been made for them by either their business or the retailers they buy their computers from. If you're talking about recorded music, name one place you can buy music that wasn't distributed by the major labels. If you have to think about it for more than 15 seconds, then it's too much work for Joe Sixpack. (Leaving aside the point that J.S. couldn't even conceive of what you're talking about without hours of explanation, and even then you most likely won't be able to convince him that it's a bad thing.)
They are not willing to put up with music creating software errors, because they can always buy music elsewhere.
Again, name one place. For many in America the only way to feasibly purchase recorded music is Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart won't go to the time and effort to sign hugely anticompetitive deals with any independent labels (nor would any other major retailer), and those labels couldn't produce the quantities they would need anyway. Not to mention that nobody that shops there would buy the stuff. Sure, in theory, they could buy music through iTunes, but how much of America is that technically sophisticated? (It's trivially simple to you and me, but way beyond a lot of people.)
If she has lots of evidence (and, since she's lobbing these accusations and has a website documenting things, one might presume she should have this evidence), then she has nothing to worry about.
There's something lots of people here are not taking into account: The law has nothing to do with the truth. Most of the time they do coincide, but correlation is not the same as causation. In theory, if the case goes to trial, and she can make her case, then you're right, she has nothing to worry about. In reality, the costs involved in putting on a defense most likely mean that there will be no trial, as this woman more than likely cannot afford to mount a defense. There will only be a settlement, and in that case the truth does not matter. The developer has money, she doesn't, therefore the developer wins. Sucks, I know, but that's what we're talking about. (I am basing this comment on my layman's knowledge of civil torts in the USA. If the Canadian system differs greatly, please feel free to correct me.)
The usual argument (as far as I know, IANAL) is that the speech would damage the educational environment if it were allowed.
And that's where things get lopsided. Damage to the "educational environment" is basically whatever the faculty/principal/superintendent/mayor/whatever say it is. That's why the students have been on the short end in a lot of cases; it's hard to argue one way or another about what is and is not damaging to the "educational environment" because what one person considers educational another will consider disruptive (or even blasphemous/un-American/disloyal/pick one).
That's how it's supposed to work, yes. In practice, students stand up for their rights at their own peril; the ones who can't afford a lawyer, or whose case the ACLU won't take up for some reason, get stomped on.
Unfortunate, but that's the world we currently live in.
State institutions (at any level) are not required to allow free speech. This seems contradictory when you consider the First Amendment, and IMHO it is, but students still get punished for speaking their minds.
The most widespread example is student-run newspapers in high schools and colleges. Students are punished for taking positions in their writing that are critical of the institution, especially at the high school level. Students (and I know this from observing the situation myself at my high school) have been suspended for attempting to run editorials or stories that don't toe the party line. You could argue that they're using school funds, so why should the school print something critical of itself? Because being a state institution, the faculty (in theory) should be required to allow any speech, no matter how damaging or critical.
In practice, not so much. Courts have routinely decided in the schools' favor when these cases have gone to trial. The message this sends to the students is very disturbing (to me at least): Your rights end when you walk through the door. The (required by law) act of attending a public school (barring the home-schooled and those who attend charter schools) requires that the students surrender what IMHO is the most important civil right that American citizens enjoy.
Is it any wonder that these students have no respect for authority? Everyone acts so shocked when the students have total contempt for the school and everything it represents; they don't stop to think that they're teaching them one thing (Americans have lots of rights) but practicing another (You have no rights, shut up or you're getting suspended.)
Here's a free clue folks: Treat people with respect, and you'll get respect back. Don't treat them like second-class citizens and then wonder why nobody shows up for the pep rally.
OK, clearly you've missed something. Your ability to buy a high-end machine is largely due to the dollars spent by "average idiot users".
My ability to buy a high-end machine is due to me earning the money to pay for it.
Don't disrespect them too much - they made much of what you enjoy possible.
I'll disrespect them exactly as much as they deserve - they made it possible for me to get 1 real, useful email for every 500 spam messages I get. They made the market for spyware a reality. They make it possible for viruses to spread. Damn right I'll disrespect them. What are they going to do, stupid me to death?
Interestingly, you seem utterly reluctant to blame the computer professionals who have marketed computers as appliances roughly equivalent in complexity to a microwave.
People know not to put metal in a microwave. People should know not to answer spam, click popups, and disable their firewall. Not earth-shattering expectations.
You also totally fail to blame one of the major causes of crap on the Internet - Operating systems, also marketed in an "appliance" fashion that are utter crap when it comes to quality and default configuration.
Do you seriously think that Microsoft doesn't want to market a completely secure OS? Or Apple? Or RedHat? They'd love to put out a completely locked-down-by-default OS, but none of the idiots would buy it, because it's "too hard". So no, I don't blame OS producers. They do what they have to do to make money-which is put out software that "just works". Convenience always comes at the expense of security, and vice versa. The idiots don't give a flying fuck about security, so in order to put out a viable product, security takes a backseat to convenience, because that's what the market wants. And that's what's wrong here. Clearly the market isn't smart enough to realize that if they took the time to fire a synapse or two, and actually READ the instructions and documentation that comes with the shiny boxes they bought at WalMart, we would all be better off. So in order to protect a resource that is becoming more and more impossible to live without, the choice to be stupid has to be taken away from them. Yes, that's what I'm saying, the idiots must be protected from themselves.
Sorry, but I can't fault the "idiot users" too bloody much. They are using what they were sold as represented and configured. Consider moving the blame where it belongs. Squarely on marketing that borders on deceiptful and O/S design that borders on criminally negligent.
Let's extend your metaphor. Take your average automobile tv ad these days. The cars are frequently shown performing stunts and manuvers that would result in death if the buyer actually tried to drive them that way. That's why you see the "professional driver on closed course" disclaimer at the bottom of the screen. Let's change the car into a wireless router, and the "profesional driver" disclaimer into the instructions packaged with the router that say "here's how to set up encryption." People who don't read the car disclaimer and then wrap themselves around a telephone pole are soley responsible for their actions and their consequences (including property damage and any fatalities). People who buy a wireless router, don't read the encryption instructions, then get raided for kiddy porn because of some random asshole camping on their AP, should be held to the same standard - the router manufacturer made a good faith effort to demonstrate how to set up encryption, including an 800 number to call, so therefore why should they be responsible for the consequences? And yet, you're trying to say (if I understand you correctly) that they should be held responsible. Personal responsibility, look it up. Oh, and about the deceitful marketing? I'd like you to provide an example of that, where ther
Calm down. If the guy wants to leave his wireless open for anyone to use, it's not going to hurt you one iota.
Sorry, don't buy it. If someone hops on his open access port and uses it to upload a virus for an unpatched exploit, and that virus hoses my computer, it hurts me. Unlikely != impossible, and the risk can be drastically reduced by securing the access point.
Because being run over is like having someone possibly sending spam from your internet connection how?
Because they're both preventable with simple actions.
God are you whiny! Quite a few of us choose to let anyone use our wireless connections and it has nothing to do with laziness.
Then you're either hopelessly naive, criminally irresponsible, unbelieveably rude, or terminally lazy; possibly all four. Secure your access point. If others want internet access, and you know them, add their MAC to your 'trusted machines' filter. Even if you only turn on MAC filtering it'll discourage misuse by unknown parties.
Using your example... If you do not want your users on your network sending spam, you have to put something in place to prevent it or make it harder. Block port 25 from client machines, force smtp auth so viruses and rogue applications do not have unrestricted access or some other method. The internet provider hoping you lock down your access point, hoping you never get a mass mailer virus, or placing a clause in your TOS is NOT going to work at all and is a useless plan. End users are not computer security people. If you want security, do not rely on them.
There's a fundamental problem there. To go back to my earlier post, The average idiot user wants things to "just work" no matter what those things are. If you start blocking ports to counteract spam/viruses/what have you, it's going to cause problems for users who think they have a right to use the services that use that port. This in turn generates support costs, both by increasing the number of calls/emails/whatever that need to be responded to, and those calls become longer because the support rep will need to explain to Joe Sixpack what an IP number is, what a port is, and why they're blocking that one. It'll also lead to lost customers. So, since the ISPs are in business to make money, and they make money by keeping their costs as low as possible, they leave the floodgates open.
The environment that we're in now is a result of unreasonable expectations not being corrected years ago. The average user shouldn't have to be a security expert, I agree, but there are some reasonable expectations that are nearly impossible to establish now. For example, let's say a customer's IP is spewing spam or viruses or whatever. The (IMHO) reasonable course of action is to cut that user's access until such time as the problem on THEIR END is corrected. The user would call bitching about loss of access, the rep would see tickets with the customer's name on them giving reasons for the block, and direct them to the proper resources to correct the problem (antivirus, antispyware, nuke/pave, whatever). As I understand it, this is the predominant practice in higher education networking environments. If an ISP were to put this into practice, because of the unreasonable expectations, not only would the customers pitch a fit, the ISP would probably be faced with class action lawsuits, regardless of the fact that they were regulating THEIR network in the way they saw fit (to protect the customers whose computers were NOT spewing crap, and to conserve bandwidth.) The larger ISPs have actually done a pretty decent job in filtering most of the garbage at the headend level, but ultimately, why the hell should it be the ISPs responsibility to clean up after your broken PC? This is like calling your electric company and demanding that they come and fix the toaster you just broke.
In such an environment, the problem will never be fixed. What can we do? This legislation is a start. People should be held responsible for what THEIR computer is doing on a network they DON'T own. I can't understand why this is such a radical idea to so many people.
Personally, I know a decent amount about computers, and I still see no reason why not to leave my network wide open.
Then you don't know as much as you think you do. And you, sir, are part of the problem.
Sure, some spammer can park within 30 feet of my house and sent a virus or spam, but the odds of that happening are not high enough that NOT preventing against such could be termed "negligence."
Sure, the odds are that if I step off the curb without looking, I MIGHT not get flattened by a bus, but you know what? I look anyway. Internet security is everyone's problem. We wouldn't have a spam problem now if people knew what the fuck they were doing, and you're currently making it that much easier for the shit to get into my inbox. Knock it the fuck off and take responsibility for your actions.
What needs to happen is routers need to have more security, and have it easier to use, and defaulting to on.
Most commonly available consumer-level wireless routers come with utilities or "wizards" making setting up (reasonably) strong security a matter of clicking a few buttons and possibly entering in a keyword or keyphrase. How much fucking easier do you need? Would you like someone to hold your hand and blow your nose, too?
I don't think anyone should be prosecuted, but if the government's going to point at anyone, they should pressure the makers of the routers (who default all the security to off, discourage WPA, require 24 character af09 passwords if a password at all, etc...
They do that because lazy fucks like you want it to "just work." The state of the great unwashed computer user population out there is such that if Linksys (for example) were to have strong security enabled by default on their access points, they would quickly find their customer support call centers completely inundated with irate customers who didn't know their WEP from their ass. Most of those customers would return the router to where they bought it, because "it doesn't work." Nevermind that it "doesn't work" because they were too stupid/lazy/whatever to read the instructions. Poof, there goes your business. (Granted, Cisco would survive the implosion of Linksys, but you see my point.)
I shouldn't be required to know as much as Linksys should be.
And this legislation doesn't propose that you should, either. It does propose that you take responsibility for your actions. I don't know everything about how these routers work, and yet I managed to get strong encryption and MAC filtering turned on and working in about ten minutes, without even using the setup utility included (I set it up by hand.). It's not that fucking hard. If you can't even be bothered to do that, then wire your house for cat5 and shut up.
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From the Christian Science Monitor: Full article
This might have been moderated "funny", but we should remember just how much money the US Government has borrowed from China. That national debt is financed by someone, remember?
But we can always raise the national debt ceiling...
Said it before, I'll say it again:
What color is the sky on your planet?
Expecting people to think of anyone other than themselves is un-American.
Pick one.
There's an easy solution to that particular problem, it's just that most people are too lazy to apply the sanction.
Like this:
*ring ring*
*savage beating*
*enjoys rest of movie*
And before all the self-important bastards start whining about how they need to be in touch for emergencies, 1) vibrate 2) go outside to answer or immediately after answering. Either that or reimburse everyone in the theater for their ticket costs. If you're that important you can certianly afford it.
For most people, your employer has no interest in your quality of job or in your making a difference. You're there to shut up and take it. The least you can do is get paid well enough to take the sting out of it.
Money may not buy happiness, but poverty sucks.
I was referring to the sarcasm of the AC impersonating a Sony exec.
You might want to kill -HUP your sarcasm detection daemon, it appears to be non-responsive.
http ://all.your.ba.se/are/belong/to/us
Am I a bad person if this was the first thing I thought of? (Space added so teh sl4sh doesn't auto-generate link)
I can think of another reason that this is a bad idea. If you create a situation where only you know the password to mission critical systems, it won't keep you from being fired. What it will do, is get you sued after the fact if you refuse to divulge the information.
Ultimately that's the only thing that will deter the other labels from doing what Sony did-if it costs them millions of dollars through lost sales, recall/replacement expenses, and class-action settlements. Not because it's illegal or unethical, but if it's bad for business.
I drive a VW, own an iPod, but have wire-rimmed glasses and listen to Lamb of God.
Take your stereotype and cram it.
That's how it's supposed to work, yes. In practice, students stand up for their rights at their own peril; the ones who can't afford a lawyer, or whose case the ACLU won't take up for some reason, get stomped on.
Unfortunate, but that's the world we currently live in.
State institutions (at any level) are not required to allow free speech. This seems contradictory when you consider the First Amendment, and IMHO it is, but students still get punished for speaking their minds.
The most widespread example is student-run newspapers in high schools and colleges. Students are punished for taking positions in their writing that are critical of the institution, especially at the high school level. Students (and I know this from observing the situation myself at my high school) have been suspended for attempting to run editorials or stories that don't toe the party line. You could argue that they're using school funds, so why should the school print something critical of itself? Because being a state institution, the faculty (in theory) should be required to allow any speech, no matter how damaging or critical.
In practice, not so much. Courts have routinely decided in the schools' favor when these cases have gone to trial. The message this sends to the students is very disturbing (to me at least): Your rights end when you walk through the door. The (required by law) act of attending a public school (barring the home-schooled and those who attend charter schools) requires that the students surrender what IMHO is the most important civil right that American citizens enjoy.
Is it any wonder that these students have no respect for authority? Everyone acts so shocked when the students have total contempt for the school and everything it represents; they don't stop to think that they're teaching them one thing (Americans have lots of rights) but practicing another (You have no rights, shut up or you're getting suspended.)
Here's a free clue folks: Treat people with respect, and you'll get respect back. Don't treat them like second-class citizens and then wonder why nobody shows up for the pep rally.
As long as they don't take money from the federal government, then "yes", "yes", and "yes".
The only reason some of them don't is that they don't want to get caught doing it and then suffer the consequences.
My ability to buy a high-end machine is due to me earning the money to pay for it.
I'll disrespect them exactly as much as they deserve - they made it possible for me to get 1 real, useful email for every 500 spam messages I get. They made the market for spyware a reality. They make it possible for viruses to spread. Damn right I'll disrespect them. What are they going to do, stupid me to death?
People know not to put metal in a microwave. People should know not to answer spam, click popups, and disable their firewall. Not earth-shattering expectations.
Do you seriously think that Microsoft doesn't want to market a completely secure OS? Or Apple? Or RedHat? They'd love to put out a completely locked-down-by-default OS, but none of the idiots would buy it, because it's "too hard". So no, I don't blame OS producers. They do what they have to do to make money-which is put out software that "just works". Convenience always comes at the expense of security, and vice versa. The idiots don't give a flying fuck about security, so in order to put out a viable product, security takes a backseat to convenience, because that's what the market wants. And that's what's wrong here. Clearly the market isn't smart enough to realize that if they took the time to fire a synapse or two, and actually READ the instructions and documentation that comes with the shiny boxes they bought at WalMart, we would all be better off. So in order to protect a resource that is becoming more and more impossible to live without, the choice to be stupid has to be taken away from them. Yes, that's what I'm saying, the idiots must be protected from themselves.
Let's extend your metaphor. Take your average automobile tv ad these days. The cars are frequently shown performing stunts and manuvers that would result in death if the buyer actually tried to drive them that way. That's why you see the "professional driver on closed course" disclaimer at the bottom of the screen. Let's change the car into a wireless router, and the "profesional driver" disclaimer into the instructions packaged with the router that say "here's how to set up encryption." People who don't read the car disclaimer and then wrap themselves around a telephone pole are soley responsible for their actions and their consequences (including property damage and any fatalities). People who buy a wireless router, don't read the encryption instructions, then get raided for kiddy porn because of some random asshole camping on their AP, should be held to the same standard - the router manufacturer made a good faith effort to demonstrate how to set up encryption, including an 800 number to call, so therefore why should they be responsible for the consequences? And yet, you're trying to say (if I understand you correctly) that they should be held responsible. Personal responsibility, look it up.
Oh, and about the deceitful marketing? I'd like you to provide an example of that, where ther
The environment that we're in now is a result of unreasonable expectations not being corrected years ago. The average user shouldn't have to be a security expert, I agree, but there are some reasonable expectations that are nearly impossible to establish now. For example, let's say a customer's IP is spewing spam or viruses or whatever. The (IMHO) reasonable course of action is to cut that user's access until such time as the problem on THEIR END is corrected. The user would call bitching about loss of access, the rep would see tickets with the customer's name on them giving reasons for the block, and direct them to the proper resources to correct the problem (antivirus, antispyware, nuke/pave, whatever). As I understand it, this is the predominant practice in higher education networking environments. If an ISP were to put this into practice, because of the unreasonable expectations, not only would the customers pitch a fit, the ISP would probably be faced with class action lawsuits, regardless of the fact that they were regulating THEIR network in the way they saw fit (to protect the customers whose computers were NOT spewing crap, and to conserve bandwidth.) The larger ISPs have actually done a pretty decent job in filtering most of the garbage at the headend level, but ultimately, why the hell should it be the ISPs responsibility to clean up after your broken PC? This is like calling your electric company and demanding that they come and fix the toaster you just broke.
In such an environment, the problem will never be fixed. What can we do? This legislation is a start. People should be held responsible for what THEIR computer is doing on a network they DON'T own. I can't understand why this is such a radical idea to so many people.