Can we also get rid of excessively long sigs, embedded graphics, comic sans and outlook stationary too? Or at least made them more difficult to automate.
I'd love to, but corporate policy requires that we include our name, all relevant phone numbers (desk, mobile, fax), company name (in company font and color, naturally), a trite environmental statement, and the 2-paragraph automated legalese BS that gets latched onto each and every outbound (outside the company) email.
If he's been arrested, it can take as long as is reasonably necessary before trial begins - and he's already been charged. If the lawyers spar a bit (discovery, pre-trial motions, change of venue, etc), then it only adds to the time spent in lock-up while waiting.
The whole Casey Anthony thing had her locked up for about as long, and she was found not guilty of the murder charge** - there was nothing mentioned or made of the time served while waiting for trial, IIRC./P
***(IMHO the bitch did it, but legally she was found not guilty. Such is the system...)
I agree that the guy is getting unfairly treated (and charged, etc), but your logic sucks - no matter how flimsy the door, it's still B&E.
The fucked-up part is, physically breaking and entering into the datacenter would likely have gotten him less potential jail time than busting in digitally.
Actually, he had quite a bit of those traits. I neglected to mention where he took credit for pretty much anything positive that happened, including building the entire IT infrastructure (except that it was 80% completed when he was hired).
You are right in that he wasn't a psychopath in the classic sense. OTOH, he had enough of the traits to put him in that portion of the Venn diagram.:)
What issues arise from psychopaths being in these positions of authority?
I watched one completely destroy the IT department I worked at a few jobs ago.
Dude was the passive-aggressive kind of putz. His first act as head of IT was to dig up (and in some cases invent) things to formally write-up everyone that he perceived as a threat to his authority. His next step was to rip out carefully-laid and in-progress projects and start re-wiring them to align with his goals (goals which, curiously enough, we were never really informed of aside from a bunch of acronyms. That said, we were already doing such things as ITIL and PCI compliance, among others... apparently he had other plans). The worst part is, he tried to pretend that he had the same skills... in spite of periodically destroying his laptop (malware aplenty) and once turning an Oracle DB testbed into mush, then blaming the DBA for it (VM snapshots are beautiful things...) I won't even begin to describe how much money this guy blew off into the ether on unneeded and unnecessary consultants, equipment, and worse.
Most of us began quitting in droves as better opportunities arose - myself included. Out of the original crew, only one stayed behind, and I think she only stayed to finish off the tuition reimbursement program that the company once had.
They eventually pushed him out (according to his LinkedIn profile, he's been "exploring opportunities" since earlier this year.) Too late though, I think... the company has been suffering pretty hard due to cost overruns and the increasing amount of bork-ups in its manufacturing automation (guess why...) I'm not really sure if they'll survive due to a market sector that's going to crap plus a rotten economy overall. We're talking about fuck-ups that will likely push 1500 people in the local area to the unemployment line if they collapse.
Long story short? Be damned careful who you pick to sling around the expensive and important parts of your company. A more competent and less ass-hatted IT leader would have kept costs lower, kept an eye on what's truly important, listened to the warnings and rational dissent from his reports, and not driven away the critical staff that built and knew the damned thing in the first place.
I'm afraid you'll have to take that complaint up with Microsoft - they're the ones who lock it into Windows so tightly and refuse to work towards compatibility with other platforms, after all. *shrug*
No effing way. Only a complete and total newbie would even contemplate that, and I'd fire the first admin who tried to put such a thing in place.
Exchange as an MTA sits behind firewalls and a spam filter (be it home-brewed atop a Linux machine, or an automated commercial appliance, e.g. Barracuda). OWA you put in its own DMZ, insulated on all ends by industrial-grade firewall/security devices. Even Microsoft anticipated that one, and allows you to rig it exactly like that (with the MTA and all other bits buried in your internal network).
Back to TFA, I'm curious as to what's stopping the article submitter from sticking in a simple SCCM** box (or at least script something in Powershell that ties into Windows Update) and do his own %}$#@! patching? Relying on anyone other than the OEM to do patches is kinda, well, dumb.
. ** I know, I know - SCCM blows goats. But it's not like it's completely impossible to set up, and besides - that's the price you pay for using so much Windows gear.
1) Way to pimp your own stuff. I'll grant that you did at least disclose (well, offhanded).;)
2) Leahy backed PIPA and SOPA full-throttle, fer hell's sake... so while neither are perfect parallels to TFA, it does prove one thing: His hands are definitely *not* clean when it comes to the whole Intarwebs thing.
It'd be more like a TV show analogy, after the TV series finally quits or gets cancelled... you have individual episodes which (more or less) stand on their own to varying degrees, some shows which are two-parters ("to be continued..."), and there should be an overall story arc that ties the shows together and provides some source of overall continuity (if the producers have any brains, anyway).
Any event, the TV show analogy fits: You can watch just the favorite episodes, watch the whole season in one go, or get the whole series and do a marathon. Just like songs: singles, albums, discographies.
Some single episodes/songs are masterful and epic, while others simply blow goats. Sometimes you want to do the whole series/album, crappy episodes/songs along with the good, just to get the whole arc for that season. Sometimes it only makes sense to do it as a whole series or album (e.g. X-Files for TV, or Queensryche's Operation Mindcrime for audio.) Other times, you can very easily break it up and enjoy the individual bits (e.g. Invader Zim or, well, any album made by AC/DC).
All that said and done, I sincerely doubt that AC/DC ever had an album that was made with an arc or story that ties the individual songs together.
Dunno about AC, but first glance seems to be that it exploits shitty PHP code in order to get itself hosted onto the websites.
According to TFA, it appears to target one specific kernel (Debian-based), and tries to do some hokey-pokey with RAM to get itself executed. If you want a better description go to the original report
The kernel module in question has been compiled for a kernel with the version string 2.6.32-5. The -5 suffix is indicative of a distribution-specific kernel release. Indeed, a quick Google search reveals that the latest Debian squeeze kernel has the version number 2.6.32-5.
The module furthermore exports symbol names for all functions and global variables found in the module, apparently not declaring any private symbol as static in the sources. In consequence, some dead code is left within the module: the linker can't determine whether any other kernel module might want to access any of those dead-but-public functions, and subsequently it can't remove them.
...doesn't say exactly how, but there is one thing that is entirely left out of the equation... if it's a drive-by download, does it definitely require user involvement, or not? According to the original report, the complaints were that they customers were being redirected to a malicious site, but nothing about a trojan being involved.
...pretty smart for the employees who applied, though.
Japan's demographics (older than most other countries as an average) do tend to skew things upward a bit on their own, but think about it - instead of getting laid off or cut off, you get a steady income and go work somewhere else at the same time (and even while searching for another job, it's at least something to subsist from).
Beats the hell out of getting a pink slip and nothing from the deal.
Blowing off mod points here, but damn... I had to agree with you.
I've lost track of how many headhunters call me up, thinking that I'd just drop everything and move to Dallas, Little Rock, Boston, Virginia, Seattle, SanFran, LA, you-name-it. Oh, and I'm supposed to be there in two weeks. For a six month contract. The guy usually has a heavy Indian accent, and always promises that the salary is larger than what I make now.
It tends to crumble when I demand that the agency fly me out on their dime, pay any and all relocation costs, and oh, yeah - get all its fees from the employer. It shuts them up in very short order.
Don't get me wrong, there are good headhunters out there, but I usually stick with the ones who are local, and that I know of personally. Cold-callers have always led to disappointments, and I'm in no hurry to give them a second chance.
The typical users in my office do one thing at once in maximized windows. Look at outlook, now facebook, now type in word, now facebook, now type in word, now facebook, now outlook, now facebook.....
Each time they jump from full screen app to full screen app
Really? Account Payable|Receivable usually has excel, web browser (to various bank accounts), email, and a 10-key calc app open all at once. During tax season, it gets even crazier. HR/payroll is often just as crazy, and don't ask what the engineers do all at the same time.
Here on the sysadmin side, yeah, it's a bit nuts (vSphere, a zillion instances of PuTTY, an RDP app with 10 different sessions on it... and that's just the remote stuff). On the other hand, most other departments also have multiple apps open at once, plus do a lot of cut+paste... and not just facebook and Excel.
In the real world, most organizations aren't blessed to be completely staffed by godlike cyber-warriors who can context-switch platforms without a financially detectable loss of productivity.
Wait, what? Is that how your IT department works? Seriously?
If your IT department is even halfway competent, you get forewarning that there's going to be a change. More importantly, you get time to anticipate and adapt to it. It isn't like the boss stops by one day, plops a MacBook Pro on your desk and says "you get to work with this now".
If you don't want to take that lead time and put it to good use (even if it's done on your off-time due to a rotten schedule), then yeah... you really shouldn't be an admin.
I wouldn't count them out due to one word: Inertia.
Enterprises still use the stuff, and will use it for quite a good amount of time. This gives Microsoft something that few others have: time to correct its screwups.
The debacle of Vista would have killed most other tech companies, but thanks to inertia and near-total monopoly, Microsoft had room to breathe while it fixed its messes. I think the same story will hold true here. This is similar to Intel having a chance to clean up all that NetBurst/RAMBUS bullcrap when the Pentium 4 first came out, as an example.
Now how long and how much breathing room? Hard to say, especially now that the competition has stepped up its game by quite a bit more than they had in 2006, and with mobile consumer devices forming a huge wildcard.
I'd thought the same thing at first, but if that were the case, there would be a graceful transition of a few months at the very least, and he would've waited at least four to six months after release of something big like Windows 8 - if for no other reason than to insure his imprimatur is firmly on it (and on his resume). Instead we got this sudden no-warning bam-I'm-gone departure.
Departures like that are tough on everyone involved (except the guy leaving), and has the potential to disrupt existing and ongoing projects (and is even harder on just-released ones).
At lower levels, meh - one cog leaves, another is dropped in, with minimum disruption. At the higher levels, lots of bad mojo starts occurring when you rip out one guy and try to drop another in. At the Sinofsky/Ballmer levels? It's a delicate procedure that has the potential to get ugly in a hurry if you don't do it right.
Microsoft is certainly raking in big gobs of money, but consider:
* Sinofsky knows the internal figures and projections... we don't. Perhaps he saw that the feces is about to meet the air handler for Microsoft, and didn't want any part of it.
* Sinofsky was widely favored to be next in line after Ballmer left/got-ejected/whatever, and the investing community wants Ballmer's severed head on a platter. Boss gets nervous in a situation like that, yanno?
* The man had full run of the company and could pretty much do whatever he wanted - at one of the world's biggest corporations. Why would anyone give up that kind of corporate godhood with no warning? Can't be because he's forming his own corp - that takes time and planning, and Sinofsky would leave slowly under such a situation to keep valuable corporate friendships going. Can't be due to being caught humping a dog's corpse while mainlining bath salts or suchlike, because that would've shown up on the news pretty damned quickly. Same with embezzlement and crap like that.
So, unless someone can show me where Sinofsky joins a cult or buys a bunker in Kansas, his departure likely bodes ill news for Microsoft...
Well the Soviets did it, which shows it *can* be done, albeit perhaps messily.
But even under the best assumptions, it would not be a happy situation for Texans. They'd be dominated militarily and economically by the United States, bottled up in the northwest corner of the Gulf of Mexico with unfriendly states on either side and a burgeoning Hispanic population internally to keep under control.
...and most of the oil that comes into the southern US, not to mention a clean majority of refineries - and a whole lot of gas pipelines run through and out of it. Enjoy that $15/gal gasoline until an alternate infrastructure could be built, I guess (assuming things didn't fall into anarchy nationally first).
Think of a seceded Texas as having more influence in Washington than OPEC, but with barbecue at the meetings.
The one and only state who could cut itself off would be California... and that would only last until the electricity and water get shut off from the surrounding states.
Why would you want to be effective in doing really disgusting shit on the world stage, though?
Because sometimes, the world is a disgusting, shitty place.
Note that I am not defending the activity of the military per se, but I also refuse to go along with the naive assumption that somehow you can avoid getting your hands dirty if you're a global player.
Some problems with your post (setting aside the Godwin bit). I doubt that you had ever been in the military in any actual capacity, so I'll explain a few things here:
* Unlike the Wehrmacht (to which you refer), the US military UCMJ requires soldiers, sailors, airmen, etc to disobey any unlawful order, and to report the order-giver to his or her superior officers. This means you are not required to perform clearly illegal actions, even if you are ordered to do so.
* Distribution of classified information to the public which (potentially or actually) puts lives at deliberate risk is not legally or morally defensible.
* The typical grunt has no full comprehension of the complexities and politics behind the classification of a given bit of information. Even most low-level officers have no complete picture as to why a given bit of information they have access to is classified. This is by design, and is called 'compartmentalization'.
* There is already a mechanism in place for whistleblowing, usually referred to in most branches as the Inspector General. For whistleblowing actual crimes, you have JAG(Navy), AFOSI(Air Force), and similar. There is no indication I'm aware of that Manning tried to take these or any other in-place routes.
* Manning had a lot of other options open to him if this was such a big, ugly moral dilemma. Some of these options include a formal request for transfer to another unit, discussion of his concerns with his first sergeant, and other similar actions. Given that the data is classified, if he wants out, the military will damned well make sure he gets out, if only to separate him from the classified data and processes. A perfect example? The transfer of USAF personnel away from nuclear weapons duty/work if they have a clearly stated moral objection to working with or around them. No military branch wants an individual around sensitive data and equipment if the guy has problems with being around it.
Long story short, Manning screwed up all by himself, and has no one to blame but himself.
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Can we also get rid of excessively long sigs, embedded graphics, comic sans and outlook stationary too? Or at least made them more difficult to automate.
I'd love to, but corporate policy requires that we include our name, all relevant phone numbers (desk, mobile, fax), company name (in company font and color, naturally), a trite environmental statement, and the 2-paragraph automated legalese BS that gets latched onto each and every outbound (outside the company) email.
If he's been arrested, it can take as long as is reasonably necessary before trial begins - and he's already been charged. If the lawyers spar a bit (discovery, pre-trial motions, change of venue, etc), then it only adds to the time spent in lock-up while waiting.
The whole Casey Anthony thing had her locked up for about as long, and she was found not guilty of the murder charge** - there was nothing mentioned or made of the time served while waiting for trial, IIRC. /P
***(IMHO the bitch did it, but legally she was found not guilty. Such is the system...)
I agree that the guy is getting unfairly treated (and charged, etc), but your logic sucks - no matter how flimsy the door, it's still B&E.
The fucked-up part is, physically breaking and entering into the datacenter would likely have gotten him less potential jail time than busting in digitally.
Actually, he had quite a bit of those traits. I neglected to mention where he took credit for pretty much anything positive that happened, including building the entire IT infrastructure (except that it was 80% completed when he was hired).
You are right in that he wasn't a psychopath in the classic sense. OTOH, he had enough of the traits to put him in that portion of the Venn diagram. :)
You missed the part where the school also required that the parents and student must vocally support the RFID program, even with a crippled badge.
You also missed the part where wearing said badge -crippled or not- implies acceptance of the program to the other students, forcing compliance.
What issues arise from psychopaths being in these positions of authority?
I watched one completely destroy the IT department I worked at a few jobs ago.
Dude was the passive-aggressive kind of putz. His first act as head of IT was to dig up (and in some cases invent) things to formally write-up everyone that he perceived as a threat to his authority. His next step was to rip out carefully-laid and in-progress projects and start re-wiring them to align with his goals (goals which, curiously enough, we were never really informed of aside from a bunch of acronyms. That said, we were already doing such things as ITIL and PCI compliance, among others... apparently he had other plans). The worst part is, he tried to pretend that he had the same skills... in spite of periodically destroying his laptop (malware aplenty) and once turning an Oracle DB testbed into mush, then blaming the DBA for it (VM snapshots are beautiful things...) I won't even begin to describe how much money this guy blew off into the ether on unneeded and unnecessary consultants, equipment, and worse.
Most of us began quitting in droves as better opportunities arose - myself included. Out of the original crew, only one stayed behind, and I think she only stayed to finish off the tuition reimbursement program that the company once had.
They eventually pushed him out (according to his LinkedIn profile, he's been "exploring opportunities" since earlier this year.) Too late though, I think... the company has been suffering pretty hard due to cost overruns and the increasing amount of bork-ups in its manufacturing automation (guess why...) I'm not really sure if they'll survive due to a market sector that's going to crap plus a rotten economy overall. We're talking about fuck-ups that will likely push 1500 people in the local area to the unemployment line if they collapse.
Long story short? Be damned careful who you pick to sling around the expensive and important parts of your company. A more competent and less ass-hatted IT leader would have kept costs lower, kept an eye on what's truly important, listened to the warnings and rational dissent from his reports, and not driven away the critical staff that built and knew the damned thing in the first place.
I'm afraid you'll have to take that complaint up with Microsoft - they're the ones who lock it into Windows so tightly and refuse to work towards compatibility with other platforms, after all. *shrug*
No effing way. Only a complete and total newbie would even contemplate that, and I'd fire the first admin who tried to put such a thing in place.
Exchange as an MTA sits behind firewalls and a spam filter (be it home-brewed atop a Linux machine, or an automated commercial appliance, e.g. Barracuda). OWA you put in its own DMZ, insulated on all ends by industrial-grade firewall/security devices. Even Microsoft anticipated that one, and allows you to rig it exactly like that (with the MTA and all other bits buried in your internal network).
Back to TFA, I'm curious as to what's stopping the article submitter from sticking in a simple SCCM** box (or at least script something in Powershell that ties into Windows Update) and do his own %}$#@! patching? Relying on anyone other than the OEM to do patches is kinda, well, dumb.
.
** I know, I know - SCCM blows goats. But it's not like it's completely impossible to set up, and besides - that's the price you pay for using so much Windows gear.
If you're going to mock a religion, it would help if you didn't show such massive ignorance about it. Here - I'll help you out:
"He also forced everyone, small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on his right hand or on his forehead..."
(emphasis mine)
So unless you can show me a state DMV regulation that requires one to wear a driver's license on one's forehead or right hand...
Direction aside, two things come up here:
1) Way to pimp your own stuff. I'll grant that you did at least disclose (well, offhanded). ;)
2) Leahy backed PIPA and SOPA full-throttle, fer hell's sake... so while neither are perfect parallels to TFA, it does prove one thing: His hands are definitely *not* clean when it comes to the whole Intarwebs thing.
Not really sure the movie analogy holds up.
It'd be more like a TV show analogy, after the TV series finally quits or gets cancelled... you have individual episodes which (more or less) stand on their own to varying degrees, some shows which are two-parters ("to be continued..."), and there should be an overall story arc that ties the shows together and provides some source of overall continuity (if the producers have any brains, anyway).
Any event, the TV show analogy fits: You can watch just the favorite episodes, watch the whole season in one go, or get the whole series and do a marathon. Just like songs: singles, albums, discographies.
Some single episodes/songs are masterful and epic, while others simply blow goats. Sometimes you want to do the whole series/album, crappy episodes/songs along with the good, just to get the whole arc for that season. Sometimes it only makes sense to do it as a whole series or album (e.g. X-Files for TV, or Queensryche's Operation Mindcrime for audio.) Other times, you can very easily break it up and enjoy the individual bits (e.g. Invader Zim or, well, any album made by AC/DC).
All that said and done, I sincerely doubt that AC/DC ever had an album that was made with an arc or story that ties the individual songs together.
He may be a bastard, but he makes the trains run on time.
...try and submit some shit code onto Linus' lap for kernel inclusion... I dare you. ;)
Dunno about AC, but first glance seems to be that it exploits shitty PHP code in order to get itself hosted onto the websites.
According to TFA, it appears to target one specific kernel (Debian-based), and tries to do some hokey-pokey with RAM to get itself executed. If you want a better description go to the original report
TFA gives some details, however:
The kernel module in question has been compiled for a kernel with the version string 2.6.32-5. The -5 suffix is indicative of a distribution-specific kernel release. Indeed, a quick Google search reveals that the latest Debian squeeze kernel has the version number 2.6.32-5.
The module furthermore exports symbol names for all functions and global variables found in the module, apparently not declaring any private symbol as static in the sources. In consequence, some dead code is left within the module: the linker can't determine whether any other kernel module might want to access any of those dead-but-public functions, and subsequently it can't remove them.
...doesn't say exactly how, but there is one thing that is entirely left out of the equation... if it's a drive-by download, does it definitely require user involvement, or not? According to the original report, the complaints were that they customers were being redirected to a malicious site, but nothing about a trojan being involved.
...pretty smart for the employees who applied, though.
Japan's demographics (older than most other countries as an average) do tend to skew things upward a bit on their own, but think about it - instead of getting laid off or cut off, you get a steady income and go work somewhere else at the same time (and even while searching for another job, it's at least something to subsist from).
Beats the hell out of getting a pink slip and nothing from the deal.
Blowing off mod points here, but damn... I had to agree with you.
I've lost track of how many headhunters call me up, thinking that I'd just drop everything and move to Dallas, Little Rock, Boston, Virginia, Seattle, SanFran, LA, you-name-it. Oh, and I'm supposed to be there in two weeks. For a six month contract. The guy usually has a heavy Indian accent, and always promises that the salary is larger than what I make now.
It tends to crumble when I demand that the agency fly me out on their dime, pay any and all relocation costs, and oh, yeah - get all its fees from the employer. It shuts them up in very short order.
Don't get me wrong, there are good headhunters out there, but I usually stick with the ones who are local, and that I know of personally. Cold-callers have always led to disappointments, and I'm in no hurry to give them a second chance.
The typical users in my office do one thing at once in maximized windows. Look at outlook, now facebook, now type in word, now facebook, now type in word, now facebook, now outlook, now facebook .....
Each time they jump from full screen app to full screen app
Really? Account Payable|Receivable usually has excel, web browser (to various bank accounts), email, and a 10-key calc app open all at once. During tax season, it gets even crazier. HR/payroll is often just as crazy, and don't ask what the engineers do all at the same time.
Here on the sysadmin side, yeah, it's a bit nuts (vSphere, a zillion instances of PuTTY, an RDP app with 10 different sessions on it... and that's just the remote stuff). On the other hand, most other departments also have multiple apps open at once, plus do a lot of cut+paste... and not just facebook and Excel.
In the real world, most organizations aren't blessed to be completely staffed by godlike cyber-warriors who can context-switch platforms without a financially detectable loss of productivity.
Wait, what? Is that how your IT department works? Seriously?
If your IT department is even halfway competent, you get forewarning that there's going to be a change. More importantly, you get time to anticipate and adapt to it. It isn't like the boss stops by one day, plops a MacBook Pro on your desk and says "you get to work with this now".
If you don't want to take that lead time and put it to good use (even if it's done on your off-time due to a rotten schedule), then yeah... you really shouldn't be an admin.
I wouldn't count them out due to one word: Inertia.
Enterprises still use the stuff, and will use it for quite a good amount of time. This gives Microsoft something that few others have: time to correct its screwups.
The debacle of Vista would have killed most other tech companies, but thanks to inertia and near-total monopoly, Microsoft had room to breathe while it fixed its messes. I think the same story will hold true here. This is similar to Intel having a chance to clean up all that NetBurst/RAMBUS bullcrap when the Pentium 4 first came out, as an example.
Now how long and how much breathing room? Hard to say, especially now that the competition has stepped up its game by quite a bit more than they had in 2006, and with mobile consumer devices forming a huge wildcard.
He had that a decade ago... ...question is, why now?
I'd thought the same thing at first, but if that were the case, there would be a graceful transition of a few months at the very least, and he would've waited at least four to six months after release of something big like Windows 8 - if for no other reason than to insure his imprimatur is firmly on it (and on his resume). Instead we got this sudden no-warning bam-I'm-gone departure.
Departures like that are tough on everyone involved (except the guy leaving), and has the potential to disrupt existing and ongoing projects (and is even harder on just-released ones).
At lower levels, meh - one cog leaves, another is dropped in, with minimum disruption. At the higher levels, lots of bad mojo starts occurring when you rip out one guy and try to drop another in. At the Sinofsky/Ballmer levels? It's a delicate procedure that has the potential to get ugly in a hurry if you don't do it right.
Microsoft is certainly raking in big gobs of money, but consider:
* Sinofsky knows the internal figures and projections... we don't. Perhaps he saw that the feces is about to meet the air handler for Microsoft, and didn't want any part of it.
* Sinofsky was widely favored to be next in line after Ballmer left/got-ejected/whatever, and the investing community wants Ballmer's severed head on a platter. Boss gets nervous in a situation like that, yanno?
* The man had full run of the company and could pretty much do whatever he wanted - at one of the world's biggest corporations. Why would anyone give up that kind of corporate godhood with no warning? Can't be because he's forming his own corp - that takes time and planning, and Sinofsky would leave slowly under such a situation to keep valuable corporate friendships going. Can't be due to being caught humping a dog's corpse while mainlining bath salts or suchlike, because that would've shown up on the news pretty damned quickly. Same with embezzlement and crap like that.
So, unless someone can show me where Sinofsky joins a cult or buys a bunker in Kansas, his departure likely bodes ill news for Microsoft...
Well the Soviets did it, which shows it *can* be done, albeit perhaps messily.
But even under the best assumptions, it would not be a happy situation for Texans. They'd be dominated militarily and economically by the United States, bottled up in the northwest corner of the Gulf of Mexico with unfriendly states on either side and a burgeoning Hispanic population internally to keep under control.
...and most of the oil that comes into the southern US, not to mention a clean majority of refineries - and a whole lot of gas pipelines run through and out of it. Enjoy that $15/gal gasoline until an alternate infrastructure could be built, I guess (assuming things didn't fall into anarchy nationally first).
Think of a seceded Texas as having more influence in Washington than OPEC, but with barbecue at the meetings.
The one and only state who could cut itself off would be California... and that would only last until the electricity and water get shut off from the surrounding states.
Well, "pwnd" until another supplier shows up to provide the goods, or Apple funds a new one into existence.
After that, Samsung loses the contract once and for all.
There's a difference between doing business, and killing the golden goose out of childish motive.
Why would you want to be effective in doing really disgusting shit on the world stage, though?
Because sometimes, the world is a disgusting, shitty place.
Note that I am not defending the activity of the military per se, but I also refuse to go along with the naive assumption that somehow you can avoid getting your hands dirty if you're a global player.
Some problems with your post (setting aside the Godwin bit). I doubt that you had ever been in the military in any actual capacity, so I'll explain a few things here:
* Unlike the Wehrmacht (to which you refer), the US military UCMJ requires soldiers, sailors, airmen, etc to disobey any unlawful order, and to report the order-giver to his or her superior officers. This means you are not required to perform clearly illegal actions, even if you are ordered to do so.
* Distribution of classified information to the public which (potentially or actually) puts lives at deliberate risk is not legally or morally defensible.
* The typical grunt has no full comprehension of the complexities and politics behind the classification of a given bit of information. Even most low-level officers have no complete picture as to why a given bit of information they have access to is classified. This is by design, and is called 'compartmentalization'.
* There is already a mechanism in place for whistleblowing, usually referred to in most branches as the Inspector General. For whistleblowing actual crimes, you have JAG(Navy), AFOSI(Air Force), and similar. There is no indication I'm aware of that Manning tried to take these or any other in-place routes.
* Manning had a lot of other options open to him if this was such a big, ugly moral dilemma. Some of these options include a formal request for transfer to another unit, discussion of his concerns with his first sergeant, and other similar actions. Given that the data is classified, if he wants out, the military will damned well make sure he gets out, if only to separate him from the classified data and processes. A perfect example? The transfer of USAF personnel away from nuclear weapons duty/work if they have a clearly stated moral objection to working with or around them. No military branch wants an individual around sensitive data and equipment if the guy has problems with being around it.
Long story short, Manning screwed up all by himself, and has no one to blame but himself.