Hmmm... what do you do if you either have no kids, they hate you, or don't have money themselves? The Welfare programs you don't want either?
I'll repeat this: prior to Social Security, impoverished elderly people literally starved to death. Private charity didn't save those people, nor is it always and everywhere available.
Yes, ideally, folks should save for their own retirement. However, practically, most people except the most hardcore libertarians are against deciding you should starve to death because you ended up with insufficient cash when it came time to retire. What do you do for folks that lose their money through theft? They get to starve because they were unlucky?
Many of the "problems" with Social Security come when people think of it as a govt. mandated retirement fund. Yes, when looked at in that light, the costs are high and the returns poor (although the requirement to invest only in T-Bills was a stroke of genius; if the trust fund were in private investments I can only imagine the pork-barreled SNAFU that would be.)
However, Social Security was not conceived as a retirement program, it was conceived as an anti-poverty program for the elderly and unable to work. Looked at in that light, it makes a lot more sense: we (the citizens of the U.S.) achieve a jointly decided on societal goal of trying to keep penniless elderly and disabled fellow citizens from literally starving to death due to hunger.
There are real problems with Social Security as it currently exists, but its very existence is not one of them.
This episode serves the Utah Senate right. It was their bright idea to take up his bill, despite the fact that it's chief proponent is a 100% Pure, Unadulterated, Nutcase.
"There seems to be this invisible pressure to create something that is highly 'intuitive' and incorporates the highest level of innovation that we have ever seen. The problem is that the newest ideas put into games are either gimmicky, terrible in execution, or blatantly ripping off another title."
Huh? If they are "incorporating the highest level of innovation we have ever seen", doesn't that kind of exclude "blatantly ripping off another title?"
or another gem...
"There's a critical problem with popular, mainstream video games that isn't as large with other mediums; they are expensive to make and require a lot of time and effort put in to create something masterful."
*sarcasm on* Yeah, big movies take no effort, money, or time to make. *sarcasm off* Did this guy even READ what he wrote before publishing this ranty tripe? And there are LOTS of "masterful" video games (and movies, for that matter) produced on a shoestring budget. World of Goo, a spectacular (and popular) game by almost any measure, was made by a staff of TWO guys.
I find it unlikely that large amounts of money show up in your account without you knowing it. But how many gifts/payments/etc. show up that are orders of magnitude more than you expect? (How many parents/relatives do you have with direct access to your bank account info?) But in the case here, people with $5k accounts showed avail. balances of $1M+.
Yes, if you pull down that $1M and attempt to hide the money, you WILL end up in jail. If you give it back right away; no harm, no foul. But if you skip the country, pull it out in cash and pretend you don't have it, try to stash it in a foreign bank, etc., it will quite rightfully be considered theft. It doesn't matter whose mistake it was; if you should have known the money isn't yours, and you try to sneakily take it, you are going to get in trouble.
There have been several cases of mis-routed checks where this precise thing has occurred. (Confused account holder asks teller about large amount of funds, they get spent, bank comes back later looking for the cash.)
It always ends badly for the account holder. Certainly asking the teller can help reduce the possibility of jail time, but nothing makes that civil liability go away. The account holder will get sued for the cash, and they will lose. Usually they get whatever they purchased seized, and if they were real assholes about it, they get a civil judgment for whatever can't be recovered. If they knew it was a mistake (a known $500 deposit gets recorded as a $500k deposit as opposed to a mis-directed check) then jail time is a real possibility if you tried quickly withdraw and hide the funds, which is a signal you knew the money wasn't yours.
The moral of the story is: if this ever happens to you, ask the bank about it, wait for a while for them to realize any mistake, and then spend a small amount of the cash consulting with a lawyer (neither the bank nor the D.A. are likely to sue your pants off for buying an hour or two of legal fees.)
No, it isn't. He stated that in some unspecified countries, responsibility for the whereabouts for the cash is in the bank's hands as opposed to the receiving account holder, and you even get a prize for returning it.
I'm reading that as no repercussions for the account holder if they choose not to return it...
In the U.S., your "finder's fee" for returning money that isn't yours is not getting charged with theft.
Basically, the U.S. system says that the party that screwed up has to cough up the cash either way (basic civil liability), but that does not rule out attempted recovery (through the criminal system, if necessary) from the person that accidentally received the cash. The person that receives the cash is entitled to $0.
Are you saying that if an extra $M accidentally gets put into your account, you can keep it with no repercussions if you pull it out and bury it in the backyard? Where is this? I would think it would be an open invitation for bank fraud.
If a large amount of money shows up in your bank account, and you have no idea how it got there, spending it WILL land you in jail if you withdraw the money and hide it or blow it.
This is the case even if you ask the teller if the money is yours and he/she says yes. Once they figure out the truth, they WILL hold you responsible for the cash.
I see no difference between that and this case. These folks knew they did not actually have an account worth millions, yet they bought stock based on money they did not have. Gee, what did they think was going to happen; of COURSE the broker is going to get their cash back ASAP.
If I was the broker, I would waive the trading fees for selling your shares, but would hold the account holder responsible for any losses. Maybe, in a goodwill gesture, sign over the gains (if any) also, but that would be the limit of my generosity.
You are completely blowing smoke. A top-end modern mainframe does NOT contain ANY of the following:
1) Commodity Motherboards. In fact, they don't contain anything that even resembles a motherboard. (It would be impossible to make a fault-tolerant machine if it did.) 2) Commodity CPU parts. Okay, they MAY contain a CPU chip that exists in smaller units, but that is about it. However, many mainframes use completely custom processors. Not even the heatsink the CPU attaches to is anything you would recognize. 3) Normal Disk Drives. Very few, if any, top-end mainframes contain more than a small number of disk drives, if they contain any at all. (Many do not.) 4) Commodity software. You have to be joking. No mainfrmae will boot Linux natively. Even if it could, it would be a waste of some extremely expensive hardware. 5) Standard power supplies. Top-end machines use 3-phase industrial power connected to a wire thick enough to run several houses.
The whole setup is then built to be so fault tolerant, you could literally run a bullet through any single component and it would not even hiccup.
If you ever get the chance to go into a large bank's or large government agency's data center, ask if you can peek inside the front and rear covers of the zSeries mainframe they almost all use.
It looks absolutely nothing like a rack of servers. Nothing at all.
You want to target the mass-market, yet your firm consists of only you? You need to think about how you are going to get mass-market retailers to actually sell the thing, how you are going to get press coverage to publicize it, where you are going to get funding for the production runs, etc.
There are certainly ways to go about this for software (i.e. a game developer producing a little gem for XBox Live), but because of manufacturing costs, this is harder to do for hardware.
I think your best hope is to get a crude hardware prototype with your software running on it, and let an actual mass-market company buy it off of you (or hire you.) The alternative would be to somehow get funding, but if you have no experience in the industry, you won't find anybody willing to hand you money.
I'm just trying to picture some CIO saying "Hmmm... I was going to hand $1B to IBM over the next five years so they take over my IT, but since they let mysql be replaced in the market by some other open source database, I'll just have to give my money to somebody else."
Nobody's saying the internet isn't important, just that if mysql goes away, there will be something else to replace it.
If IBM had pulled a MS and started waving patent swords, certainly there would be reason to hold a grudge. But they don't, and never have, despite undoubtedly having the ability to do so.
As a side note, the T60 I am typing this on also has a drain hole that goes between the keyboard and the base of the notebook chassis. (It's essentially a screw standoff for the keyboard with no screw in it.)
IBM is around a $100B company with fingers in nearly every corner of IT. The portion of that market that gives one iota about IBM's success in merging mysql is a rounding error in that $100B.
There are a lot more things for IBM to worry about with the merger than the continued success of mysql.
The paragraph in Wikipedia you got that from was a freaking disaster zone. Incomplete sentences, jumbled meanings, utter crap. (Mark Twain had to establish Canadian residency to have at least one of his works protected there. (That was in the linked article.))
I've (likely badly) fixed that up, using information from the linked article.
Wikinuts could say this shows the strength of the model, since I, Joe Nobody, was able to correct it. I can counter that with the fact that not even a mere copy editor would have let that utter nonsense through.
We have been hearing about fuel cells "just around the corner" for a freakin' decade now. I think you can put them in the same corner as Duke Nukem Forever and that Holographic Storage thing that keeps popping up on Slashdot.
The initial sentence was overturned due to the judge being a bonehead. Yes, his verdict was not, but his prescribed penalties were, due to some foolish public statements about how much he wanted to punish MS.
Microsoft was anti-trust defense for losers. If the original judge was not such a completely bone-headed moron, MS would have lost, and lost badly. Gates made a complete fool of himself on tape, Boises (sp?) walked all over their lawyers, and the judge seemed to enjoy them twisting in the wind. The only thing that saved them was a change in administrations.
IBM, when accused of anti-trust, they built an in-house team larger than most law firms, and then dragged out the case so long, the judge in charge of the proceedings literally died before the case could be concluded.
Wait a minute, are you saying that anti-trust lawyers that might, at some point in the future, end up working for the FTC should refuse to express an opinion of any kind about any company that may or may not be the subject of future regulatory action in a job they do not yet have and may never have? (Yes, that is a long sentence.)
You know, this kind of attitude might be something of a problem when it comes to Supreme Court Justices. Since we kind of expect Justices to have actually written legal papers expressing opinions of various kinds (as lawyers, and maybe judges), written opinions, and represented clients, at some point before they join the Supreme Court.
People are allowed to have, (and express in a public forum), opinions before they are government employees. Certainly those views can be brought up and considered during confirmation hearings, but having and expressing an opinion does not disqualify somebody from appointment to an executive branch position.
Indeed, since they are appointed positions, all but the most extreme people completely unfit for office are supposed to be confirmed, no matter which side of the political spectrum they are on.
I've done this before... what you really need are two separate documents. (Yes, they are a pain to maintain.)
First, you need a "training" document. This is the one with pretty screenshots and terminal logs going over the procedure in excruciating detail, and this document is used to train new folk on your setup. This is mostly utilized as a guide for...
The second one, which is more of a shorthand checklist template. (Few experienced admins will wade through some lengthy "admin for dummies" procedure after he/she has done it a few times.) This document has the information for the change ticket buried inside the checklist, which increases the probability the checklist will actually be used.
Here's a trivial checklist sample of changing directory permissions:
Wrong User: John Dir to be added:/foo/bar Server Hostname: FooServ Permissions to be set: 345 Charge Code: 3456 Change Request Number: 12345
1) Login to server under admin acct. 2) Set appropriate dir permissions. 3) Update accounting database with charging info. 4) Update chg control db with new permissions info. 5) File TPS report of completed change to PHB.
Sign Here:____________
With a checklist like that, the boring crap after the change is done oftentimes gets skipped because the admin just makes the changes to the server, gets distracted while doing housekeeping, and just signs off the ticket.
Right: Initials: ____ 1) Login to Server __FooServ__ under admin acct. ____ 2) Set the permissions in dir __/foo/bar__ to __345__ ____ 3) Update the accounting database using charge code __3456__ ____ 4) Update the change request number __12345__ ____ 5) File TPS report to PHB
Okay, that last one will still get skipped...
Anyway, that 2nd checklist forces the admin to actually make some effort at reading the checklist instead of just using the header info, and possibly skipping steps.
I'm sorry my nine-byte, one-line, hand-typed, sig without so much as a hyperlink or inane quote is so disturbing to you. I'll make sure to fix that right away. And I'll talk to Taco to ensure my decade's worth of posts here are edited to remove this offense to the eyes.
There are mechanisms, outside of civil lawsuits to punish a drug company that did something evil to create a vaccine. The govt. vaccine court does not rule out a civil case filed by the FDA, nor does it preclude a criminal case.
If the government required vaccine makers to shoulder the burden of liability claims, absolutely no drug company would ever bother to manufacture them. They take a very long time to develop, sell for a relatively low price, are generally given to jury-friendly and photogenic children, and are difficult to manufacture.
The powers that be have decided that the public health benefit of vaccines existing far outweighs the risk of the govt. having to pay out liability claims.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmmm... what do you do if you either have no kids, they hate you, or don't have money themselves? The Welfare programs you don't want either?
I'll repeat this: prior to Social Security, impoverished elderly people literally starved to death. Private charity didn't save those people, nor is it always and everywhere available.
SirWired
Yes, ideally, folks should save for their own retirement. However, practically, most people except the most hardcore libertarians are against deciding you should starve to death because you ended up with insufficient cash when it came time to retire. What do you do for folks that lose their money through theft? They get to starve because they were unlucky?
Many of the "problems" with Social Security come when people think of it as a govt. mandated retirement fund. Yes, when looked at in that light, the costs are high and the returns poor (although the requirement to invest only in T-Bills was a stroke of genius; if the trust fund were in private investments I can only imagine the pork-barreled SNAFU that would be.)
However, Social Security was not conceived as a retirement program, it was conceived as an anti-poverty program for the elderly and unable to work. Looked at in that light, it makes a lot more sense: we (the citizens of the U.S.) achieve a jointly decided on societal goal of trying to keep penniless elderly and disabled fellow citizens from literally starving to death due to hunger.
There are real problems with Social Security as it currently exists, but its very existence is not one of them.
SirWired
This episode serves the Utah Senate right. It was their bright idea to take up his bill, despite the fact that it's chief proponent is a 100% Pure, Unadulterated, Nutcase.
SirWired
"There seems to be this invisible pressure to create something that is highly 'intuitive' and incorporates the highest level of innovation that we have ever seen. The problem is that the newest ideas put into games are either gimmicky, terrible in execution, or blatantly ripping off another title."
Huh? If they are "incorporating the highest level of innovation we have ever seen", doesn't that kind of exclude "blatantly ripping off another title?"
or another gem...
"There's a critical problem with popular, mainstream video games that isn't as large with other mediums; they are expensive to make and require a lot of time and effort put in to create something masterful."
*sarcasm on* Yeah, big movies take no effort, money, or time to make. *sarcasm off* Did this guy even READ what he wrote before publishing this ranty tripe? And there are LOTS of "masterful" video games (and movies, for that matter) produced on a shoestring budget. World of Goo, a spectacular (and popular) game by almost any measure, was made by a staff of TWO guys.
What a moron...
SirWired
These same vulnerabilities have been known for more than a decade. Google "Eligible Receiver" for details.
SirWired
I find it unlikely that large amounts of money show up in your account without you knowing it. But how many gifts/payments/etc. show up that are orders of magnitude more than you expect? (How many parents/relatives do you have with direct access to your bank account info?) But in the case here, people with $5k accounts showed avail. balances of $1M+.
Yes, if you pull down that $1M and attempt to hide the money, you WILL end up in jail. If you give it back right away; no harm, no foul. But if you skip the country, pull it out in cash and pretend you don't have it, try to stash it in a foreign bank, etc., it will quite rightfully be considered theft. It doesn't matter whose mistake it was; if you should have known the money isn't yours, and you try to sneakily take it, you are going to get in trouble.
SirWired
There have been several cases of mis-routed checks where this precise thing has occurred. (Confused account holder asks teller about large amount of funds, they get spent, bank comes back later looking for the cash.)
It always ends badly for the account holder. Certainly asking the teller can help reduce the possibility of jail time, but nothing makes that civil liability go away. The account holder will get sued for the cash, and they will lose. Usually they get whatever they purchased seized, and if they were real assholes about it, they get a civil judgment for whatever can't be recovered. If they knew it was a mistake (a known $500 deposit gets recorded as a $500k deposit as opposed to a mis-directed check) then jail time is a real possibility if you tried quickly withdraw and hide the funds, which is a signal you knew the money wasn't yours.
The moral of the story is: if this ever happens to you, ask the bank about it, wait for a while for them to realize any mistake, and then spend a small amount of the cash consulting with a lawyer (neither the bank nor the D.A. are likely to sue your pants off for buying an hour or two of legal fees.)
SirWired
No, it isn't. He stated that in some unspecified countries, responsibility for the whereabouts for the cash is in the bank's hands as opposed to the receiving account holder, and you even get a prize for returning it.
I'm reading that as no repercussions for the account holder if they choose not to return it...
In the U.S., your "finder's fee" for returning money that isn't yours is not getting charged with theft.
Basically, the U.S. system says that the party that screwed up has to cough up the cash either way (basic civil liability), but that does not rule out attempted recovery (through the criminal system, if necessary) from the person that accidentally received the cash. The person that receives the cash is entitled to $0.
SirWired
Are you saying that if an extra $M accidentally gets put into your account, you can keep it with no repercussions if you pull it out and bury it in the backyard? Where is this? I would think it would be an open invitation for bank fraud.
SirWired
If a large amount of money shows up in your bank account, and you have no idea how it got there, spending it WILL land you in jail if you withdraw the money and hide it or blow it.
This is the case even if you ask the teller if the money is yours and he/she says yes. Once they figure out the truth, they WILL hold you responsible for the cash.
I see no difference between that and this case. These folks knew they did not actually have an account worth millions, yet they bought stock based on money they did not have. Gee, what did they think was going to happen; of COURSE the broker is going to get their cash back ASAP.
If I was the broker, I would waive the trading fees for selling your shares, but would hold the account holder responsible for any losses. Maybe, in a goodwill gesture, sign over the gains (if any) also, but that would be the limit of my generosity.
SirWired
You are completely blowing smoke. A top-end modern mainframe does NOT contain ANY of the following:
1) Commodity Motherboards. In fact, they don't contain anything that even resembles a motherboard. (It would be impossible to make a fault-tolerant machine if it did.)
2) Commodity CPU parts. Okay, they MAY contain a CPU chip that exists in smaller units, but that is about it. However, many mainframes use completely custom processors. Not even the heatsink the CPU attaches to is anything you would recognize.
3) Normal Disk Drives. Very few, if any, top-end mainframes contain more than a small number of disk drives, if they contain any at all. (Many do not.)
4) Commodity software. You have to be joking. No mainfrmae will boot Linux natively. Even if it could, it would be a waste of some extremely expensive hardware.
5) Standard power supplies. Top-end machines use 3-phase industrial power connected to a wire thick enough to run several houses.
The whole setup is then built to be so fault tolerant, you could literally run a bullet through any single component and it would not even hiccup.
If you ever get the chance to go into a large bank's or large government agency's data center, ask if you can peek inside the front and rear covers of the zSeries mainframe they almost all use.
It looks absolutely nothing like a rack of servers. Nothing at all.
SirWired
You want to target the mass-market, yet your firm consists of only you? You need to think about how you are going to get mass-market retailers to actually sell the thing, how you are going to get press coverage to publicize it, where you are going to get funding for the production runs, etc.
There are certainly ways to go about this for software (i.e. a game developer producing a little gem for XBox Live), but because of manufacturing costs, this is harder to do for hardware.
I think your best hope is to get a crude hardware prototype with your software running on it, and let an actual mass-market company buy it off of you (or hire you.) The alternative would be to somehow get funding, but if you have no experience in the industry, you won't find anybody willing to hand you money.
SirWired
I'm just trying to picture some CIO saying "Hmmm... I was going to hand $1B to IBM over the next five years so they take over my IT, but since they let mysql be replaced in the market by some other open source database, I'll just have to give my money to somebody else."
Nobody's saying the internet isn't important, just that if mysql goes away, there will be something else to replace it.
If IBM had pulled a MS and started waving patent swords, certainly there would be reason to hold a grudge. But they don't, and never have, despite undoubtedly having the ability to do so.
SirWired
As a side note, the T60 I am typing this on also has a drain hole that goes between the keyboard and the base of the notebook chassis. (It's essentially a screw standoff for the keyboard with no screw in it.)
SirWired
IBM is around a $100B company with fingers in nearly every corner of IT. The portion of that market that gives one iota about IBM's success in merging mysql is a rounding error in that $100B.
There are a lot more things for IBM to worry about with the merger than the continued success of mysql.
SirWired
The paragraph in Wikipedia you got that from was a freaking disaster zone. Incomplete sentences, jumbled meanings, utter crap. (Mark Twain had to establish Canadian residency to have at least one of his works protected there. (That was in the linked article.))
I've (likely badly) fixed that up, using information from the linked article.
Wikinuts could say this shows the strength of the model, since I, Joe Nobody, was able to correct it. I can counter that with the fact that not even a mere copy editor would have let that utter nonsense through.
He didn't sue the mortgage banks, he instead refused to execute eviction notices for renters that were paying rent on time.
SirWired
We have been hearing about fuel cells "just around the corner" for a freakin' decade now. I think you can put them in the same corner as Duke Nukem Forever and that Holographic Storage thing that keeps popping up on Slashdot.
SirWired
The initial sentence was overturned due to the judge being a bonehead. Yes, his verdict was not, but his prescribed penalties were, due to some foolish public statements about how much he wanted to punish MS.
SirWired
Microsoft was anti-trust defense for losers. If the original judge was not such a completely bone-headed moron, MS would have lost, and lost badly. Gates made a complete fool of himself on tape, Boises (sp?) walked all over their lawyers, and the judge seemed to enjoy them twisting in the wind. The only thing that saved them was a change in administrations.
IBM, when accused of anti-trust, they built an in-house team larger than most law firms, and then dragged out the case so long, the judge in charge of the proceedings literally died before the case could be concluded.
SirWired
Wait a minute, are you saying that anti-trust lawyers that might, at some point in the future, end up working for the FTC should refuse to express an opinion of any kind about any company that may or may not be the subject of future regulatory action in a job they do not yet have and may never have? (Yes, that is a long sentence.)
You know, this kind of attitude might be something of a problem when it comes to Supreme Court Justices. Since we kind of expect Justices to have actually written legal papers expressing opinions of various kinds (as lawyers, and maybe judges), written opinions, and represented clients, at some point before they join the Supreme Court.
People are allowed to have, (and express in a public forum), opinions before they are government employees. Certainly those views can be brought up and considered during confirmation hearings, but having and expressing an opinion does not disqualify somebody from appointment to an executive branch position.
Indeed, since they are appointed positions, all but the most extreme people completely unfit for office are supposed to be confirmed, no matter which side of the political spectrum they are on.
SirWired
I've done this before... what you really need are two separate documents. (Yes, they are a pain to maintain.)
First, you need a "training" document. This is the one with pretty screenshots and terminal logs going over the procedure in excruciating detail, and this document is used to train new folk on your setup. This is mostly utilized as a guide for...
The second one, which is more of a shorthand checklist template. (Few experienced admins will wade through some lengthy "admin for dummies" procedure after he/she has done it a few times.) This document has the information for the change ticket buried inside the checklist, which increases the probability the checklist will actually be used.
Here's a trivial checklist sample of changing directory permissions:
Wrong /foo/bar
User: John
Dir to be added:
Server Hostname: FooServ
Permissions to be set: 345
Charge Code: 3456
Change Request Number: 12345
1) Login to server under admin acct.
2) Set appropriate dir permissions.
3) Update accounting database with charging info.
4) Update chg control db with new permissions info.
5) File TPS report of completed change to PHB.
Sign Here:____________
With a checklist like that, the boring crap after the change is done oftentimes gets skipped because the admin just makes the changes to the server, gets distracted while doing housekeeping, and just signs off the ticket.
Right:
Initials:
____ 1) Login to Server __FooServ__ under admin acct.
____ 2) Set the permissions in dir __/foo/bar__ to __345__
____ 3) Update the accounting database using charge code __3456__
____ 4) Update the change request number __12345__
____ 5) File TPS report to PHB
Okay, that last one will still get skipped...
Anyway, that 2nd checklist forces the admin to actually make some effort at reading the checklist instead of just using the header info, and possibly skipping steps.
SirWired
I'm sorry my nine-byte, one-line, hand-typed, sig without so much as a hyperlink or inane quote is so disturbing to you. I'll make sure to fix that right away. And I'll talk to Taco to ensure my decade's worth of posts here are edited to remove this offense to the eyes.
Or maybe I won't.
SirWired
There are mechanisms, outside of civil lawsuits to punish a drug company that did something evil to create a vaccine. The govt. vaccine court does not rule out a civil case filed by the FDA, nor does it preclude a criminal case.
SirWired
If the government required vaccine makers to shoulder the burden of liability claims, absolutely no drug company would ever bother to manufacture them. They take a very long time to develop, sell for a relatively low price, are generally given to jury-friendly and photogenic children, and are difficult to manufacture.
The powers that be have decided that the public health benefit of vaccines existing far outweighs the risk of the govt. having to pay out liability claims.
SirWired