Easy to administer? You obviously don't administer stupid users very much, do you? Feel free to talk to any of my 300+ realtors who are all over 50 and can barely point and click on a Windows machine.
All this proves is that Windows isn't a good choice for these users.
Imagine telling your grandmother to install the latest version of Perl, then make sure she has all the required libs, then she can install ICQ (for example).
Unlike Windows where the end user is expected to mess around with "techie stuff", with Linux (like any proper operating system) the likes of installing software is done by the administrator.
Ever try to find a open source tax preperation program? Doesn't exist.
What taxes do you think a university pays? How did they possibly manage before computers... Even if they do need a special taxation program, that is something for the admin system.
True, you can get lots of programs from the open source world, but the more specialized the programs get, the less likely you will find a free alternative.
Actually academic research could well be a good place to find highly specialised open source programs. Especially if the software is an intergral part of an experiment.
No, be very careful there. Even in your own home, you do not have the legal right to use deadly force except when protecting yourself or another from immediate danger of death or severe injury
Not so simple, it depends exactly where you are. In the case of the US state laws are relevent here.
No one ever totaled up how much money we lost on that piece-of-shit software and in man-hours for manual deployment, but if you add it to the big fat check we wrote in the end to keep Microsoft off our campus, it was a hell of a lot of wasted grant money intended for student use.
You can pontificate for days on replacing Windows with *nix, or killing Office for StarOffice. God knows I went to the shared governance committee more than once trying to get them to see the light.
Did it never cross their minds that dumping Microsoft might have been cheaper... Wonder how often these "audits" get factored into TCO claims.
This could be dangerous. They could offer to send their own people in to do the audit to reduce costs, and allowing that would be dangerous.
In which case maybe you could tell them that they would need to pay for background checks on the people they wanted to send. As well as certification to prove their competance with all the systems used at the university.
By sucking in the legal folks you turn it from an IT problem to a 'university as a whole' problem.
Dosn't messing up an entire network, including machines which may be involved in important research, make this a problem for the entire university anyway? Are there many university departments where IT is not "mission critical"?
Yes, the BSA is going to court to get these subpeonas and search warrants, but said warrants are being issued based on what?
What would happen if prior to that happening the "target" had gone to court for subpeonas and restraing orders against the BSA?
I'm sorry, but in this country that's just not enough to have federal marshalls come knocking on your door.
At a guess the BSA uses federal marshalls because they arn't available to their targets. But even a business without it's own security guards can pick up the phone and call the police.
If they do the audit, and find nothing wrong, they say they will pay for the audit.
The "standards" they appear to apply are such that a "nothing wrong" is unlikely. Let alone the issue of their being supervised in what they do...
But what about all the time and effort your organization put on it ? What about lost of profit becouse of the downtime ? Would it be possible to sue BSA for it ?
To be fair you'd need to send them an invoice and give them 30 days or so to pay it. Problem is that they may have disrupted your business so much, especially if they also enguaged in vandalism, that you may not be in a position to easily sue them.
We are talking public university here, are we not? As in government employees working there. As one of that category myself, my own employer cannot fire me just on a whim or a threat....
And definitly not where this threat came from a third party.
especially it being the employer themselves that would have put the "incriminating" software on the PC in the first place.
Or maybe some third party (including the BSA) did...
Their 'fix' to this little problem is that they go with the police on a raid in the role of 'experts'. So the police do the raid (with the appropiate papers), bring their BSA 'expert' along who will then 'help identify' illegal software.
This is also a "fix" against the very real possibility that the BSA people themselves would wind up as defedants in civil and criminal courts.
what right exactly? they are not a governmental body. they are a private body who specialises in extortion and blackmail.
Not only that they like to trumpet "auditing" of government. Maybe it's past time someone audited them.
there are numerous examples where they have gone and "inspected" a place using scare tactics to get in "we hear they are making bombs there you know, and while you're body cavity searching, mind if we look for pirated software?" and royally fucking up every computer they come across *including those machines that don;t have windows installed* *including machines that are not capable of having windows installed*.
The problem here is that doing this is a criminal matter in many parts of the world. Why are we not hearing about BSA employees being arrested and tried for hacking. Especially when dealing with universities, where it is not unknown for students and faculty to face "kangaroo courts" (as though the university itself thinks it is an independent nation state.)
The Fourth Amendment, like the rest of the US Constitution, is a restriction on the acts of the government. The acts of private persons are completely irrelevant. The Constitution only restricts the state and its agents.
Would this not prevent the BSA being accompnied by Federal agents. Except if they had all the relevent warrents. Of course if they attempted this kind of incursion without backup they would encounter either security guards or police officers (IIRC most US universities campuses have actual police present.)
auditing software *will* be installed on every campus machine
This could be rather difficult if the machine cannot possibly run the software. Anyway it is hacking, recently equated with terrorism. A police officer who shot a terrorist dead would probably get a medal.
failure to produce licenses for all commercial or shareware software will constitute prima facie evidence of illegal possession, with penalties that could range from the confiscation of the machine to the firing of the user;
and this includes computers *personally* owned by faculty."
The first of these penalites could easily be theft, the second potentially leading to lots of expensive litigation.
Attacking the US is like attacking a bear cub. Sure, you might hurt the poor thing a little, but you shouldn't expect to live much longer...
Except that bear cubs are not unkillable. Effectivly you are saying that anyone wanting to attack the US should enguage in a "decapitation strike".
We recently launched a combined-arms retaliatory attack on a landlocked country literally on the other side of the world. And we had victory in about a month. We helped to establish a friendly government in Afghanistan.
The US does not have a good history of installing good governments however... More often they end up backing awful ones.
Of course this situation is considerably more complex 50 years later. A large portion of the population is now ethnic Chinese settlers. While they were imported by the communist government to create 'facts on the ground' to make it harder for Tibet to succeed, many were sent against their will and most are by now second generation descendants.
Hardly a policy unique to Tibet, one only has to look at the news to see another part of the world where the same policy of "settlers" is ongoing.
Tibet would not survive without China. have you seen the conditions there? they have no practically no farmland. no economy at all. they rely on the eastern side of China for food, money, etc.
That is not the same issue as being under Chinese rule. Why should the Tibetans not be entitled to exactly the same principles of freedom and self government which lead to the US existing in the first place?
Ok, so public support for Operation Bomb the Towelheads is declining; what's the government to do? I know! Let's make the American people xenophobic of ANOTHER socioreligious group!
What this all boils down to is a game of hide-the-sasuage that the government is playing with us. The general public is like a herd of buffalo: pretty dumb, hard to get moving, hard to turn, hard to stop when they ARE moving. Apparently support of the US' support of Israel (as Israel plays their own game of Bomb the Towelys) is waning, so the US needs another shiny object with which to distract the herd.
When the "towelheads" turn out to be people in refugee camps the bloodlust can be lost quickly. Maybe the most important question is exactly what is the "herd" being destracted from?
I'd say that a lot of the hatred directed toward america/americans is because it's easy to blame problems on a country you've never been to that's on the other side of the word.
There is a sterotype about Americans not knowing what goes on in the rest of the world. Also, IIRC, the US has one of the lowest rates of passport holdership in the world... Bush's "axis of evil" could also be described as "blame problems on a country you've never been to that's on the other side of the word"...
Sure, my government has done some questionable and bloody stupid things before (vietnam / meddling in other countries business),
There is a very long list, which is getting longer. Also what most people outside the US see is the utter hypocritical standards the US government uses. Israel is "good", Iraq and Serbia "bad". Whilst the US claims to champion democracy agents of the US government have worked hard to undermine democratic government, typically because few democratic governments will bend over backwards to accomodate interests of foreign (typically US) corporations operating in their country.
I think if you thought about that a little more you would relise that the reason most bombs dropped on every second third world country has a "Made in the USA" sticker on it, is because America sell's a hell of a lot of weapons, many to people at special prices because it furthers their own needs.
Note that "sell" can equate to "paid for by US taxpayers". In situations where the US is providing "aid".
USians are insular - which just goes to prove his point; you don't want to live anywhere else because you don't know about anywhere else, and you've brainwashed yourselves into thinking you're the best.
That only applies to regular people though. US corporations and the US government are rather imperialist.
I DON'T SUPPORT MY TAXES. Somebody with a GUN comes to my HOUSE if I don't pay them.
A while back a group of people got fed up with "taxation without representation". So they staged a revolution, setting up a federal republic with a written constitution. Want to guess where this happened?
I'd say installation of the OS and installation of new software are the two places where Windows still has Linux beat.
Which have nothing to do with users in the first place.
But the application installations REALLY need some work. It would be nice if someone released a standardized installer creator, something like Wise for Windows.
Actually its really WIndows which needs some serious work doing on installers. Where is the Windows installer which dosn't need any physicall access to the machine? How about an installer which can copy an application to a shared area, then generate appropriate.BAT and.REG files to be run through a login script? (It is even possible to write Windows applications which don't need anything putting on workstations.)
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The BSA often operates off tips from disgruntled former employees.
I doubt they ever ask the question "could this unlicenced software have been installed by the person who make the tip off".
Easy to administer? You obviously don't administer stupid users very much, do you? Feel free to talk to any of my 300+ realtors who are all over 50 and can barely point and click on a Windows machine.
All this proves is that Windows isn't a good choice for these users.
Imagine telling your grandmother to install the latest version of Perl, then make sure she has all the required libs, then she can install ICQ (for example).
Unlike Windows where the end user is expected to mess around with "techie stuff", with Linux (like any proper operating system) the likes of installing software is done by the administrator.
Ever try to find a open source tax preperation program? Doesn't exist.
What taxes do you think a university pays? How did they possibly manage before computers... Even if they do need a special taxation program, that is something for the admin system.
True, you can get lots of programs from the open source world, but the more specialized the programs get, the less likely you will find a free alternative.
Actually academic research could well be a good place to find highly specialised open source programs. Especially if the software is an intergral part of an experiment.
Plus the main issue of whether or not a EULA forced upon the user during the install process truly is a binding contract. I think it is not.
Who is the EULA binding on when the owner is a corporate anyway?
No, be very careful there. Even in your own home, you do not have the legal right to use deadly force except when protecting yourself or another from immediate danger of death or severe injury
Not so simple, it depends exactly where you are. In the case of the US state laws are relevent here.
No one ever totaled up how much money we lost on that piece-of-shit software and in man-hours for manual deployment, but if you add it to the big fat check we wrote in the end to keep Microsoft off our campus, it was a hell of a lot of wasted grant money intended for student use.
You can pontificate for days on replacing Windows with *nix, or killing Office for StarOffice. God knows I went to the shared governance committee more than once trying to get them to see the light.
Did it never cross their minds that dumping Microsoft might have been cheaper...
Wonder how often these "audits" get factored into TCO claims.
This could be dangerous. They could offer to send their own people in to do the audit to reduce costs, and allowing that would be dangerous.
In which case maybe you could tell them that they would need to pay for background checks on the people they wanted to send. As well as certification to prove their competance with all the systems used at the university.
By sucking in the legal folks you turn it from an IT problem to a 'university as a whole' problem.
Dosn't messing up an entire network, including machines which may be involved in important research, make this a problem for the entire university anyway? Are there many university departments where IT is not "mission critical"?
Yes, the BSA is going to court to get these subpeonas and search warrants, but said warrants are being issued based on what?
What would happen if prior to that happening the "target" had gone to court for subpeonas and restraing orders against the BSA?
I'm sorry, but in this country that's just not enough to have federal marshalls come knocking on your door.
At a guess the BSA uses federal marshalls because they arn't available to their targets. But even a business without it's own security guards can pick up the phone and call the police.
If they do the audit, and find nothing wrong, they say they will pay for the audit.
The "standards" they appear to apply are such that a "nothing wrong" is unlikely. Let alone the issue of their being supervised in what they do...
But what about all the time and effort your organization put on it ? What about lost of profit becouse of the downtime ? Would it be possible to sue BSA for it ?
To be fair you'd need to send them an invoice and give them 30 days or so to pay it. Problem is that they may have disrupted your business so much, especially if they also enguaged in vandalism, that you may not be in a position to easily sue them.
We are talking public university here, are we not? As in government employees working there. As one of that category myself, my own employer cannot fire me just on a whim or a threat....
And definitly not where this threat came from a third party.
especially it being the employer themselves that would have put the "incriminating" software on the PC in the first place.
Or maybe some third party (including the BSA) did...
Firing of the user? Please. By the authority of whom? Unless they are the employer, I don't see that happening.
The same issue applies to "confiscation of the machine", if the BSA does this then it is either theft, robbery or burglary.
Their 'fix' to this little problem is that they go with the police on a raid in the role of 'experts'. So the police do the raid (with the appropiate papers), bring their BSA 'expert' along who will then 'help identify' illegal software.
This is also a "fix" against the very real possibility that the BSA people themselves would wind up as defedants in civil and criminal courts.
what right exactly? they are not a governmental body. they are a private body who specialises in extortion and blackmail.
Not only that they like to trumpet "auditing" of government. Maybe it's past time someone audited them.
there are numerous examples where they have gone and "inspected" a place using scare tactics to get in "we hear they are making bombs there you know, and while you're body cavity searching, mind if we look for pirated software?" and royally fucking up every computer they come across *including those machines that don;t have windows installed* *including machines that are not capable of having windows installed*.
The problem here is that doing this is a criminal matter in many parts of the world. Why are we not hearing about BSA employees being arrested and tried for hacking. Especially when dealing with universities, where it is not unknown for students and faculty to face "kangaroo courts" (as though the university itself thinks it is an independent nation state.)
The Fourth Amendment, like the rest of the US Constitution, is a restriction on the acts of the government. The acts of private persons are completely irrelevant. The Constitution only restricts the state and its agents.
Would this not prevent the BSA being accompnied by Federal agents. Except if they had all the relevent warrents.
Of course if they attempted this kind of incursion without backup they would encounter either security guards or police officers (IIRC most US universities campuses have actual police present.)
auditing software *will* be installed on every campus machine
This could be rather difficult if the machine cannot possibly run the software. Anyway it is hacking, recently equated with terrorism. A police officer who shot a terrorist dead would probably get a medal.
failure to produce licenses for all commercial or shareware software will constitute prima facie evidence of illegal possession, with penalties that could range from the confiscation of the machine to the firing of the user; and this includes computers *personally* owned by faculty."
The first of these penalites could easily be theft, the second potentially leading to lots of expensive litigation.
Attacking the US is like attacking a bear cub. Sure, you might hurt the poor thing a little, but you shouldn't expect to live much longer...
Except that bear cubs are not unkillable. Effectivly you are saying that anyone wanting to attack the US should enguage in a "decapitation strike".
We recently launched a combined-arms retaliatory attack on a landlocked country literally on the other side of the world. And we had victory in about a month. We helped to establish a friendly government in Afghanistan.
The US does not have a good history of installing good governments however...
More often they end up backing awful ones.
Of course this situation is considerably more complex 50 years later. A large portion of the population is now ethnic Chinese settlers. While they were imported by the communist government to create 'facts on the ground' to make it harder for Tibet to succeed, many were sent against their will and most are by now second generation descendants.
Hardly a policy unique to Tibet, one only has to look at the news to see another part of the world where the same policy of "settlers" is ongoing.
Tibet would not survive without China. have you seen the conditions there? they have no practically no farmland. no economy at all. they rely on the eastern side of China for food, money, etc.
That is not the same issue as being under Chinese rule. Why should the Tibetans not be entitled to exactly the same principles of freedom and self government which lead to the US existing in the first place?
Ok, so public support for Operation Bomb the Towelheads is declining; what's the government to do? I know! Let's make the American people xenophobic of ANOTHER socioreligious group!
What this all boils down to is a game of hide-the-sasuage that the government is playing with us. The general public is like a herd of buffalo: pretty dumb, hard to get moving, hard to turn, hard to stop when they ARE moving. Apparently support of the US' support of Israel (as Israel plays their own game of Bomb the Towelys) is waning, so the US needs another shiny object with which to distract the herd.
When the "towelheads" turn out to be people in refugee camps the bloodlust can be lost quickly.
Maybe the most important question is exactly what is the "herd" being destracted from?
Clever using of an information is a weapon, regardless of whether it is true or not.
Hardly an original idea. Ever heard of Sun Tzu? Who ironically here was from China.
I'd say that a lot of the hatred directed toward america/americans is because it's easy to blame problems on a country you've never been to that's on the other side of the word.
There is a sterotype about Americans not knowing what goes on in the rest of the world. Also, IIRC, the US has one of the lowest rates of passport holdership in the world...
Bush's "axis of evil" could also be described as "blame problems on a country you've never been to that's on the other side of the word"...
Sure, my government has done some questionable and bloody stupid things before (vietnam / meddling in other countries business),
There is a very long list, which is getting longer. Also what most people outside the US see is the utter hypocritical standards the US government uses. Israel is "good", Iraq and Serbia "bad". Whilst the US claims to champion democracy agents of the US government have worked hard to undermine democratic government, typically because few democratic governments will bend over backwards to accomodate interests of foreign (typically US) corporations operating in their country.
I think if you thought about that a little more you would relise that the reason most bombs dropped on every second third world country has a "Made in the USA" sticker on it, is because America sell's a hell of a lot of weapons, many to people at special prices because it furthers their own needs.
Note that "sell" can equate to "paid for by US taxpayers". In situations where the US is providing "aid".
USians are insular - which just goes to prove his point; you don't want to live anywhere else because you don't know about anywhere else, and you've brainwashed yourselves into thinking you're the best.
That only applies to regular people though. US corporations and the US government are rather imperialist.
I DON'T SUPPORT MY TAXES. Somebody with a GUN comes to my HOUSE if I don't pay them.
A while back a group of people got fed up with "taxation without representation". So they staged a revolution, setting up a federal republic with a written constitution. Want to guess where this happened?
I'd say installation of the OS and installation of new software are the two places where Windows still has Linux beat.
.BAT and .REG files to be run through a login script? (It is even possible to write Windows applications which don't need anything putting on workstations.)
Which have nothing to do with users in the first place.
But the application installations REALLY need some work. It would be nice if someone released a standardized installer creator, something like Wise for Windows.
Actually its really WIndows which needs some serious work doing on installers. Where is the Windows installer which dosn't need any physicall access to the machine? How about an installer which can copy an application to a shared area, then generate appropriate