What's wrong is when it interferes with your ability to pay your mortgage. I'm doing what I can to maintain standards, but you seem somewhat immune to reality.
So it's okay to steal from your boss to pay your mortgage?
I doubt your boss was a party to that mortgage, so why is it somehow right to steal from them to pay it?
I'm not immune to reality - I just don't think that if the butcher ripped me off, that I'm somehow justified in ripping off the baker, because that's what you're arguing. Should I steal from you because I made what is in hind sight a bad decision?
If you feel that your mortgage problems justify you stealing from people who had no connection to it, please remind me to do an inventory after you visit. And to lock up everything that isn't nailed down before you visit, so you won't succumb to your loose morals or low ethics.
Your mortgage is a contract between you and the lender. You always have the option of defaulting under the contract, and letting them foreclose. For many, that's the reality they're looking at, and there's no use crying over spilt milk. Default, save up the money you're not making on the mortgage payments, and when the foreclosure sale goes through, start over. That's certainly far less questionable than stealing. It's only a house, not a home. A home is wherever you make it - a house is just a pile of (contaminated) gypsum board and wood and bricks.
The problem is that too many of them participate in "pay-to-click". You may have seen that sort of thing - "make money surfing the web". Clickstreams from people in that general demographic, and a few others with smilar economic profiles, can't be monetized - they aren't worth even $0.001 (a tenth of a cent).
Sure, they'd be suckers for credit cards at 35% interest, with a front-loaded fee on the first month of $75, etc. Problem is, they wouldn't even qualify for that... and those that would, too many would default, so the advertiser would just find it to be a huge money pit.
Then you have the possibility of mixing those into the general click pool - which only goes to lower the overall quality of your click stream to the advertiser, who then reasonably drops the price they're willing to pay - or if it now becomes marginal, drops that whole stream, because it's too contaminated with crap.
Clicks in and of themselves have no value. It's only because you can safely predict that in a particular batch of clicks, from a particular set of sources, for a particular product, a certain percentage will convert to actions that ultimately generate the desired response - usually involving the exchange of money at some point. There's a floor to how low you can go for any demographic before it becomes unprofitable, and halo effects (such as "increasing brand recognition") have to be discounted. This can all be calculated in real time, then automatically applied to "protect" other ad campaigns against similar conversion-poor sources.
At under a tenth of a cent per click, the associated costs just aren't worth it - better to devote the same resources to handling a market that *has* money. After all, to generate $10 of revenue, with a click-thru ratio of 2%, shared 50/50 with the web site desplaying the ad, at $0.001 per click, you'd need a million impressions. There's bottom-feeding, then there's *bottom-feeding*. A million page views to make $10? "Well, just show more ads per page!" Too many ads lowers your click-thru rate, so at a certain point, you're going backwards - and your page becomes a wall of ads and almost no content, so you end up losing traffic.
This is just a replay of the old "get a free pc" gimmicks from years gone by, where you had to browse the web with a browser that constantly streamed ads. It didn't work, and this won't either. It's also extremely vulnerable to the peer-to-pear web (the real "cloud computing" model) that will render centralized search engines obsolete by the end of the next decade, but that's another story.
Your NDA forbids mentioning where you work? That's absurd.
Giving the name of the place where I work, plus the nature of my work (server code, etc) would be enough to reveal at least some of the information that's under NDA, such as the technology behind how they handle the volume of requests on low-end hardware.
It's the same thing as when I was on jury duty. I was supposed to hand in the notification sheet at the beginning of the murder trial, but I told my employer I would only be handing it in after it was all over, to avoid the possibility of anyone searching for news about it and either accidentally saying something I wasn't supposed to hear about the case, or bugging me about details
You're a grade A moron or a troll. Jury tampering is a felony and your coworkers aren't children.
They're human. They're curious. They asked. So did a few other people. My response was uniform - "I can't discuss it, and if you ask me again, I have a phone number in my pocket that I'm to call, and within minutes you'll be hauled off, spend the night in the pokey, and have a not-so-nice talk with the nice judge before court starts the next day. I hope you have a spare pair of clean underwear with you, because you'll need it. So please, change the topic."
I didn't want to take a chance of overhearing something, even accidentally. Earlier this year two jurors were hauled before a judge in the same court for speculating about whether it was possible to stand on a truck bumper. The rules are very clear - no discussion of the case except among jurors in the deliberation room and only after hearing all the evidence. Backed up with 2 year jail sentences. Also, up here we don't allow jurors to ever discuss the deliberation process, what went on in reaching the verdict, who voted what, etc. Everything that went on in that room during deliberations stays in that room, forever. The only exceptions provided in law are for psychological counseling, and only AFTER the court approves and under the courts' supervision, related to the stress of the trial, or for an inquiry into juror misdeeds.
That's one reason why our courts aren't media-driven circuses.
Here's a story that might help:
3 truck drivers were applying for a job.
They were each asked the same question - "You're on a tricky narrow road on the side of a mountain. How far to the edge can you maneuver the truck?"
Driver #1: "I can get it to within inches of the edge, no problem."
Driver #2 "I can beat that! Since they're dualies (two tires on each side of the axle) I can get the outside tire to hang over the edge in a pinch!"
Driver #3: "As far away as possible. I'd rather scrap the mirror on the other side."
Or, closer to home: 'Work on a live server if necessary, but not necessarily on a live server."
3. What sort of example is that to set for your kids? How will it affect how they can trust your advice, if they know your ethics are so questionable? Won't they justifiably call you a hypocrite if you do the "Do as I say, not as I do" thing?
Do you call the police to report every speeder and marijuana smoker you come across? Or every person who admits to you that they download copyrighted material illegally? If you don't, then you're a hypocrite.
Lets see... do I speed? No, except for emergencies where a life is in danger (it's happened two or three times) or to comply with a court order (once - an interesting case the details of which are sealed by court order). Do I do dope? No, I have never been into "recreational pharmacology". Do I download copyright material illegally? No. Torrenting a linux distro is about the extent of my activities, and that's legal. So don't start calling me a hypocrite.
Have I stolen code? No. Have I logged into a server after leaving a job, except when asked to to help fix a problem? No. Have I caught co-workers using stolen code? Yes, twice. Did I report it? Yes, with the support of my other co-workers, because it endangers everyone's job. Nobody wants to work with a thief. Maybe you're comfortable with that, but that says more about you than me.
I am not the police, and it's not my job to go around hunting out every petty violation by everyone else. I'm also not like Kurt Greenbaum, who thought it was okay to track down an anonymous poster and get them fired. The hypocrite in this discussion is you, for trying to justify actions you know are wrong, and for trying to pin the hypocrite label on me for something that is not my responsibility, and for which you would be outraged if I *did* act as you proposed.
On the job, you owe your employer a certain standard of care and trust. That's part of what they pay you for. Stealing code or misusing passwords is never justifiable, and ignoring someone who does that is also a breach of trust.
The discussion is about ethics in the workplace. If you know about stealing going on and you cover it up when asked about it, you are liable in civil court. You also are liable if you're in a position of trust and you knew about it and didn't report it to your employer - not the police.
The employer then has the option of laying charges with the police - hence the "accessory after the fact."
Case in point from 4 years ago: A local startup bbq chicken franchise hired away a developer from an established competitor to do their POS. The dev took code from his workplace, with the knowledge of the startup. The cops got involved, the established franchise sued in civil court for an injunction (granted) and damages (granted). They didn't want the guy in jail - they wanted the place shut down and $$$. That's why they pursued it in civil court.
I've taken code from a former workplace on one occasion - where it was spelled out in writing, and witnessed, that the code in question was now exclusively mine.
Even then, I would still re-write from scratch rather than use it, because techniques, hardware, knowledge, and the problem domain have changed. Stealing code is just dumb. It says "I not only don't have ethics, I'm stupid." Why would anyone want to use code from someone who's so obviously stupid, never mind the legal time-bomb that comes with it?
This is not about bosses and golden parachutes. This is about you or I, as individuals, deciding whether we are going to allow ourselves to become thieves and crooks.
What's so wrong about living up to a higher ethical standard? If professional engineers can do it, and programmers want to be treated as professionals, why not act like professionals?
Trying to justify stealing because "there's no real ethics" is an insult to everyone who does have ethics, including employers who try, even in difficult times, to make a go of it and be fair.
Sure, as long as it wasn't too difficult to wipe it and install Debian.
Google isn't about to release the signing keys to allow you to digitally sign your distro, so if you did succeed in wiping it, it would fail on boot, notice the checksum is wrong, and re-image itself. They've already said that's how it's going to work "as protection from malware." You won't even be able to install an unsigned printer driver, so you're going to want a new "ChromeOS-compatible" printer with that welfarebook.
GoogleOS fits into it because free-as-in-speech software is much bigger then you.
The google netbook uses cryptographically signed images for its software. In the event that the software fails the check, the device re-images itself from the cloud, so you don't have "free-as-in-speech" software, you have a closed, Tivo-type system; "look but don't touch."
Ya, and some guy will post step-by-step instructions on the web on how to flash a clean ubuntu install onto and I'll remove your adware garbage.
... except that the proposed ChromeOS netbook/welfarebook runs cryptographically signed software, and if any software that fails the checks,it re-images itself off the cloud. Unless they release the signing keys, you won't be able to install anything on it.
In other words, it's just like a Tivo. Open in name only.
And if it gets down to that price, the same manufacturer (not google) is going to offer similar netbooks with other operating systems for a few bucks more, and without the advertising. they already have the economies of scale at that point, so why not milk it for a few extra bucks? Sell it with a real linux distro that doesn't have adware for $10 more. Sell it with Windows for $20 more. Sell it with OSX for... ummm... maybe not OSX...
Also, clicks from people running "welfarebooks" aren't going to be worth anything to a pay-per-click advertiser. Terrible demographics, especially since if you're too poor to even buy a netbook, some of you are paying your ISP bill by engaging in one of those "make money at home clicking on links" pay-to-click frauds, so advertisers will aggressively filter out users of any "free" netbook.
Advertisers don't want clicks from users of what would be "welfarebooks".
If they can't even afford $200 for a netbook, their demographics are horrendous. Advertisers base their CPM on such things as location, time of day, day of the week, referrer, OS (if I'm advertising pc software, I don't want mac user clicks, and vice versa), etc. Clicks from users of "free" computers won't generate revenue because advertisers will avoid them like the plague.
These are the type of people who are the most likely to be engaged in click fraud, such as pay-to-click "make money at home surfing the web" scams. After all, if they can't afford a computer, they've got to pay for their net access somehow, and it's easier to do click fraud than to scrounge around the 'hood for returnable pop bottles.
The other 145 didn't even catch the virus. Their deaths were totally unrelated to flu. In other words, we've known that this is not a "super-flu." Also, we've known from the first weeks that even the reduced figures are suspect because of faulty assumptions throughout the system.
should we be happy? No - what we have is a total failure to logically allocate resources based on risk, a misuse of public funds, and the media scare-mongering for profit by catering to the basest fears of the crowd. Worse, people haven't learned anything from it. Just like they haven't learned from the market meltdown that "too big to fail" is a lie, and that you don't cure a debt problem by adding even more debt.
The next decade is truly going to be the first of 2 lost decades, because it's going to take that long to get the cohort of the population who thinks that way to (to put it vulgarly) just FOAD.
Is it really a troll? Look at how many posters in the thread openly, even gleefully, claim that America IS "dog eat dog" and employment IS "Darwinian." They're even using it as justification for lying and stealing.
Or they can surround themselves with people that don't have that ethos.
I remember at one job, after regular hours, one of the owners said something that sticks with me. The place always had lots of cash on hand, lots of easily-stolen and easily-fenced stock, and there were occasionally some problems with someone being "light-fingered." He said "That's what's good about everyone in your family. We can leave you with thousands in cash sitting out in the open, and an hour later, we don't even have to check it."
Perhaps it's because we grew up poor; when you're a big family and you don't have much, you learn to share rather than "mine mine mine!"
A second-rate person surrounds themselves with third-rate people. A first-rate person surrounds themselves with first-rate people. And if they aren't first-rate, they'll teach them how to become first-rate, by example. That's how to lead, that's how I treat my co-workers, and that's how I expect to be treated in return.
Sometimes, I end up being disappointed (to put it mildly) but at least I can sleep at night.
I realize that the universe is amoral, and that ethics and morals are one of the things we bring to the table. And yet, even dogs recognize right and wrong; they share, they know when one dog gets more than their fair share and when everyone is treated equally. They know the value of loyalty and how it's repaid. They understand friendship and cooperation. When one is sick or weak, they all feel it. When they see a cat run over by a car, they act sad. At some level, they *get it*.
Maybe people would be better if they just treated each other like dogs.
You can learn a lot about people (and our flaws) by watching dogs.
Wouldn't it be better for everyone if more people thought, even once in a while, "This is the real world, where you give what you can, when you can". Because I've yet to see a u-haul behind a hearse. And because what goes around, comes around. Or at least, "leave a little meat on the bones for the next person" rather than trying to wring every last drop of blood from every interaction. GM tried the latter approach with Delphi, and ended up with quite a mess on its' hands, even before the melt-down.
Every job you take is an "entry-level job" for the job above it. I know, it should be obvious, but a lot of people seem to be missing it in this duscussion.
If you go into a used car lot and they say "sure, we can sell you this car and you can afford the payments", that doesn't relieve you of the obligation to do your own calculating. Many of us were warning a couple of years before the bubble burst that it was in fact a bubble - it wasn't the first one, either. There was the bubble in 1990, the bubble in the early '18s, the bubble in the 70's... gee, looks like there's a bubble every decade, followed by a retreat in prices. It's never been true that "housing prices only go up."
Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
Buying a house isn't something you need an expert to "do the math." A neg-am mortgage is an obvious time bomb. So is a mortgage that has a reset, if you have to stretch for even the initial teaser rate. It's greed. You don't need to "understand how the financial markets work" to see that.
And if you lied on that mortgage application, you deserve a criminal record for fraud. It's your fraud, and the frauds of millions like you, that fueled the bubble, so don't come crying to me about "right-wing" crap. Some other countries managed to avoid this scenario, because their culture is a bit more conservative when it comes to "betting the house." If you want an example, just look to your northern border. Canada never got into the 0% down, 40 year amortization, option arm toxic financing because Canadians don't want such financing - it was offered by one bank over a period of about a year, and then withdrawn because nobody wanted it. Nobody. It *did* have the effect of us passing legislation to ban such products in the future, just in case some future "bright spark" got a brain-fart.
Nobody forced people to speculate in housing, or to lie about their incomes. And your "Now you want to blame them for trying to improve their lives???" is elitist crap. Arguing that people who own homes are somehow better than those who don't? Studies show it's the opposite. People who rent are more likely to know their neighbours, and also more likely to be mobile enough to take advantage of job opportunities.
I've owned, and I've rented, and renting is better, long-term, in this industry. This shouldn't even be a surprise... sci-fi writers depicted pretty much this sort of situation a couple of decades ago.
I know people that work for decades in deep fear of getting fired, because no matter what economic climate we're on, they hear everyday their bosses complaining about the miserable profit margins and how there's going to be job cuts.
Please... if they've had a couple of decades warning, do you honestly think they have any reason to complain about "living in fear".
That's like someone being in a bad marriage for decades...
An old couple go to see a divorce lawyer.
Divorce lawyer: Why do you two want a divorce? You're 92, and your wife is 87. I don't understand.
Husband: We figured it's time. We're old, the children are all dead...
Isn't giving your family a sense of ethics and pride and self-worth more important than keeping a house by being a crook?
No. Survival goes before pride. I would never hesitate for a moment to commit grand theft if that was the only way to keep the roof over my children's heads. I truly hope that no one else would, either.
So then you end up in jail and your kids end up in foster homes or juvie. Too proud to ask family or friends for a bit of help, or to double up, or to sell off some of the junk you've accumulated, or take a menial job?
You can't expect loyalty from people if you show none yourself, and you can't act like a psychopath and expect others to not return the favour.
... and you can't complain if an employer doesn't show loyalty to you if you show none yourself.
Or, to put it even simpler: you can't act like a ruffian and expect to be treated like a lady.
... which is one reason I don't act like a ruffian:-)
Wrong - the extra money printed up would have had zero effect if there had been nobody in a greedy frenzy to borrow it to buy their house before it got even more expensive, so they could get into the new new economy rather than work for a living. Money that isn't in circulation doesn't affect the economy. That's why much of the "stimulus" was ineffective - the banks just kept the money to shore up their own toxic balance sheets.
I'm amazed at all the justifications for lax ethics, from people in a thread complaining that their employer isn't treating them right. Pot, meet kettle.
Intentionally looking the other way makes you just as responsible in the eyes of the civil courts. The law is clear that you owe a certain level of fidelity to your employer. Plus, if everyone just looked the other way, you would be out of a job pretty quickly, since your employer wouldn't be able to stay in business. As for the rest of your comment, ask yourself if you'd hire someone who wants to be treated like a professional, but doesn't want either the responsibility or even to have to act like one.
If stealing that data stops your house being foreclosed due to redundancy, you have to do it. Your family is more important than corporate ethics
That's just a rationalization for being a sleaze. Isn't giving your family a sense of ethics and pride and self-worth more important than keeping a house by being a crook? You might be able to get another house - and a home is where you hang your hat, whether it's a house or an apartment or anywhere else; you can't ever restore your childrens pride if you're sitting in jail because you're a thief. Your kids should be more important than money or property, and they should also know by your actions that you believe that there are things more important than money.
So what if you screw over anyone else working there? America is a dog eat dog, 'fuck you got mine' society. If you don't screw over someone else, someone else will screw over you. Bear in mind those others working there kept their job because you lost yours.
I wouldn't be able to trust you or want to work with you with your attitude. Do you think you'll ever be happy?
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So it's okay to steal from your boss to pay your mortgage?
I doubt your boss was a party to that mortgage, so why is it somehow right to steal from them to pay it?
I'm not immune to reality - I just don't think that if the butcher ripped me off, that I'm somehow justified in ripping off the baker, because that's what you're arguing. Should I steal from you because I made what is in hind sight a bad decision?
If you feel that your mortgage problems justify you stealing from people who had no connection to it, please remind me to do an inventory after you visit. And to lock up everything that isn't nailed down before you visit, so you won't succumb to your loose morals or low ethics.
Your mortgage is a contract between you and the lender. You always have the option of defaulting under the contract, and letting them foreclose. For many, that's the reality they're looking at, and there's no use crying over spilt milk. Default, save up the money you're not making on the mortgage payments, and when the foreclosure sale goes through, start over. That's certainly far less questionable than stealing. It's only a house, not a home. A home is wherever you make it - a house is just a pile of (contaminated) gypsum board and wood and bricks.
The problem is that too many of them participate in "pay-to-click". You may have seen that sort of thing - "make money surfing the web". Clickstreams from people in that general demographic, and a few others with smilar economic profiles, can't be monetized - they aren't worth even $0.001 (a tenth of a cent).
Sure, they'd be suckers for credit cards at 35% interest, with a front-loaded fee on the first month of $75, etc. Problem is, they wouldn't even qualify for that ... and those that would, too many would default, so the advertiser would just find it to be a huge money pit.
Then you have the possibility of mixing those into the general click pool - which only goes to lower the overall quality of your click stream to the advertiser, who then reasonably drops the price they're willing to pay - or if it now becomes marginal, drops that whole stream, because it's too contaminated with crap.
Clicks in and of themselves have no value. It's only because you can safely predict that in a particular batch of clicks, from a particular set of sources, for a particular product, a certain percentage will convert to actions that ultimately generate the desired response - usually involving the exchange of money at some point. There's a floor to how low you can go for any demographic before it becomes unprofitable, and halo effects (such as "increasing brand recognition") have to be discounted. This can all be calculated in real time, then automatically applied to "protect" other ad campaigns against similar conversion-poor sources.
At under a tenth of a cent per click, the associated costs just aren't worth it - better to devote the same resources to handling a market that *has* money. After all, to generate $10 of revenue, with a click-thru ratio of 2%, shared 50/50 with the web site desplaying the ad, at $0.001 per click, you'd need a million impressions. There's bottom-feeding, then there's *bottom-feeding*. A million page views to make $10? "Well, just show more ads per page!" Too many ads lowers your click-thru rate, so at a certain point, you're going backwards - and your page becomes a wall of ads and almost no content, so you end up losing traffic.
This is just a replay of the old "get a free pc" gimmicks from years gone by, where you had to browse the web with a browser that constantly streamed ads. It didn't work, and this won't either. It's also extremely vulnerable to the peer-to-pear web (the real "cloud computing" model) that will render centralized search engines obsolete by the end of the next decade, but that's another story.
Giving the name of the place where I work, plus the nature of my work (server code, etc) would be enough to reveal at least some of the information that's under NDA, such as the technology behind how they handle the volume of requests on low-end hardware.
They're human. They're curious. They asked. So did a few other people. My response was uniform - "I can't discuss it, and if you ask me again, I have a phone number in my pocket that I'm to call, and within minutes you'll be hauled off, spend the night in the pokey, and have a not-so-nice talk with the nice judge before court starts the next day. I hope you have a spare pair of clean underwear with you, because you'll need it. So please, change the topic."
I didn't want to take a chance of overhearing something, even accidentally. Earlier this year two jurors were hauled before a judge in the same court for speculating about whether it was possible to stand on a truck bumper. The rules are very clear - no discussion of the case except among jurors in the deliberation room and only after hearing all the evidence. Backed up with 2 year jail sentences. Also, up here we don't allow jurors to ever discuss the deliberation process, what went on in reaching the verdict, who voted what, etc. Everything that went on in that room during deliberations stays in that room, forever. The only exceptions provided in law are for psychological counseling, and only AFTER the court approves and under the courts' supervision, related to the stress of the trial, or for an inquiry into juror misdeeds.
That's one reason why our courts aren't media-driven circuses.
Here's a story that might help:
3 truck drivers were applying for a job.
They were each asked the same question - "You're on a tricky narrow road on the side of a mountain. How far to the edge can you maneuver the truck?"
Driver #1: "I can get it to within inches of the edge, no problem."
Driver #2 "I can beat that! Since they're dualies (two tires on each side of the axle) I can get the outside tire to hang over the edge in a pinch!"
Driver #3: "As far away as possible. I'd rather scrap the mirror on the other side."
Or, closer to home: 'Work on a live server if necessary, but not necessarily on a live server."
Lets see ... do I speed? No, except for emergencies where a life is in danger (it's happened two or three times) or to comply with a court order (once - an interesting case the details of which are sealed by court order). Do I do dope? No, I have never been into "recreational pharmacology". Do I download copyright material illegally? No. Torrenting a linux distro is about the extent of my activities, and that's legal. So don't start calling me a hypocrite.
Have I stolen code? No. Have I logged into a server after leaving a job, except when asked to to help fix a problem? No. Have I caught co-workers using stolen code? Yes, twice. Did I report it? Yes, with the support of my other co-workers, because it endangers everyone's job. Nobody wants to work with a thief. Maybe you're comfortable with that, but that says more about you than me.
I am not the police, and it's not my job to go around hunting out every petty violation by everyone else. I'm also not like Kurt Greenbaum, who thought it was okay to track down an anonymous poster and get them fired. The hypocrite in this discussion is you, for trying to justify actions you know are wrong, and for trying to pin the hypocrite label on me for something that is not my responsibility, and for which you would be outraged if I *did* act as you proposed.
On the job, you owe your employer a certain standard of care and trust. That's part of what they pay you for. Stealing code or misusing passwords is never justifiable, and ignoring someone who does that is also a breach of trust.
The discussion is about ethics in the workplace. If you know about stealing going on and you cover it up when asked about it, you are liable in civil court. You also are liable if you're in a position of trust and you knew about it and didn't report it to your employer - not the police.
The employer then has the option of laying charges with the police - hence the "accessory after the fact."
Case in point from 4 years ago: A local startup bbq chicken franchise hired away a developer from an established competitor to do their POS. The dev took code from his workplace, with the knowledge of the startup. The cops got involved, the established franchise sued in civil court for an injunction (granted) and damages (granted). They didn't want the guy in jail - they wanted the place shut down and $$$. That's why they pursued it in civil court.
I've taken code from a former workplace on one occasion - where it was spelled out in writing, and witnessed, that the code in question was now exclusively mine.
Even then, I would still re-write from scratch rather than use it, because techniques, hardware, knowledge, and the problem domain have changed. Stealing code is just dumb. It says "I not only don't have ethics, I'm stupid." Why would anyone want to use code from someone who's so obviously stupid, never mind the legal time-bomb that comes with it?
This is not about bosses and golden parachutes. This is about you or I, as individuals, deciding whether we are going to allow ourselves to become thieves and crooks.
What's so wrong about living up to a higher ethical standard? If professional engineers can do it, and programmers want to be treated as professionals, why not act like professionals?
Trying to justify stealing because "there's no real ethics" is an insult to everyone who does have ethics, including employers who try, even in difficult times, to make a go of it and be fair.
Google isn't about to release the signing keys to allow you to digitally sign your distro, so if you did succeed in wiping it, it would fail on boot, notice the checksum is wrong, and re-image itself. They've already said that's how it's going to work "as protection from malware." You won't even be able to install an unsigned printer driver, so you're going to want a new "ChromeOS-compatible" printer with that welfarebook.
The google netbook uses cryptographically signed images for its software. In the event that the software fails the check, the device re-images itself from the cloud, so you don't have "free-as-in-speech" software, you have a closed, Tivo-type system; "look but don't touch."
In other words, it's just like a Tivo. Open in name only.
And if it gets down to that price, the same manufacturer (not google) is going to offer similar netbooks with other operating systems for a few bucks more, and without the advertising. they already have the economies of scale at that point, so why not milk it for a few extra bucks? Sell it with a real linux distro that doesn't have adware for $10 more. Sell it with Windows for $20 more. Sell it with OSX for ... ummm ... maybe not OSX ...
Also, clicks from people running "welfarebooks" aren't going to be worth anything to a pay-per-click advertiser. Terrible demographics, especially since if you're too poor to even buy a netbook, some of you are paying your ISP bill by engaging in one of those "make money at home clicking on links" pay-to-click frauds, so advertisers will aggressively filter out users of any "free" netbook.
Advertisers don't want clicks from users of what would be "welfarebooks".
If they can't even afford $200 for a netbook, their demographics are horrendous. Advertisers base their CPM on such things as location, time of day, day of the week, referrer, OS (if I'm advertising pc software, I don't want mac user clicks, and vice versa), etc. Clicks from users of "free" computers won't generate revenue because advertisers will avoid them like the plague.
These are the type of people who are the most likely to be engaged in click fraud, such as pay-to-click "make money at home surfing the web" scams. After all, if they can't afford a computer, they've got to pay for their net access somehow, and it's easier to do click fraud than to scrounge around the 'hood for returnable pop bottles.
The other 145 didn't even catch the virus. Their deaths were totally unrelated to flu. In other words, we've known that this is not a "super-flu." Also, we've known from the first weeks that even the reduced figures are suspect because of faulty assumptions throughout the system.
should we be happy? No - what we have is a total failure to logically allocate resources based on risk, a misuse of public funds, and the media scare-mongering for profit by catering to the basest fears of the crowd. Worse, people haven't learned anything from it. Just like they haven't learned from the market meltdown that "too big to fail" is a lie, and that you don't cure a debt problem by adding even more debt.
The next decade is truly going to be the first of 2 lost decades, because it's going to take that long to get the cohort of the population who thinks that way to (to put it vulgarly) just FOAD.
It's only a false dichotomy in an open system. Society and the economy are both closed systems.
Is it really a troll? Look at how many posters in the thread openly, even gleefully, claim that America IS "dog eat dog" and employment IS "Darwinian." They're even using it as justification for lying and stealing.
Or they can surround themselves with people that don't have that ethos.
I remember at one job, after regular hours, one of the owners said something that sticks with me. The place always had lots of cash on hand, lots of easily-stolen and easily-fenced stock, and there were occasionally some problems with someone being "light-fingered." He said "That's what's good about everyone in your family. We can leave you with thousands in cash sitting out in the open, and an hour later, we don't even have to check it."
Perhaps it's because we grew up poor; when you're a big family and you don't have much, you learn to share rather than "mine mine mine!"
A second-rate person surrounds themselves with third-rate people. A first-rate person surrounds themselves with first-rate people. And if they aren't first-rate, they'll teach them how to become first-rate, by example. That's how to lead, that's how I treat my co-workers, and that's how I expect to be treated in return.
Sometimes, I end up being disappointed (to put it mildly) but at least I can sleep at night.
I realize that the universe is amoral, and that ethics and morals are one of the things we bring to the table. And yet, even dogs recognize right and wrong; they share, they know when one dog gets more than their fair share and when everyone is treated equally. They know the value of loyalty and how it's repaid. They understand friendship and cooperation. When one is sick or weak, they all feel it. When they see a cat run over by a car, they act sad. At some level, they *get it*.
Maybe people would be better if they just treated each other like dogs.
You can learn a lot about people (and our flaws) by watching dogs.
Wouldn't it be better for everyone if more people thought, even once in a while, "This is the real world, where you give what you can, when you can". Because I've yet to see a u-haul behind a hearse. And because what goes around, comes around. Or at least, "leave a little meat on the bones for the next person" rather than trying to wring every last drop of blood from every interaction. GM tried the latter approach with Delphi, and ended up with quite a mess on its' hands, even before the melt-down.
Every job you take is an "entry-level job" for the job above it. I know, it should be obvious, but a lot of people seem to be missing it in this duscussion.
Bullcrap.
If you go into a used car lot and they say "sure, we can sell you this car and you can afford the payments", that doesn't relieve you of the obligation to do your own calculating. Many of us were warning a couple of years before the bubble burst that it was in fact a bubble - it wasn't the first one, either. There was the bubble in 1990, the bubble in the early '18s, the bubble in the 70's ... gee, looks like there's a bubble every decade, followed by a retreat in prices. It's never been true that "housing prices only go up."
Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
Buying a house isn't something you need an expert to "do the math." A neg-am mortgage is an obvious time bomb. So is a mortgage that has a reset, if you have to stretch for even the initial teaser rate. It's greed. You don't need to "understand how the financial markets work" to see that.
And if you lied on that mortgage application, you deserve a criminal record for fraud. It's your fraud, and the frauds of millions like you, that fueled the bubble, so don't come crying to me about "right-wing" crap. Some other countries managed to avoid this scenario, because their culture is a bit more conservative when it comes to "betting the house." If you want an example, just look to your northern border. Canada never got into the 0% down, 40 year amortization, option arm toxic financing because Canadians don't want such financing - it was offered by one bank over a period of about a year, and then withdrawn because nobody wanted it. Nobody. It *did* have the effect of us passing legislation to ban such products in the future, just in case some future "bright spark" got a brain-fart.
Nobody forced people to speculate in housing, or to lie about their incomes. And your "Now you want to blame them for trying to improve their lives???" is elitist crap. Arguing that people who own homes are somehow better than those who don't? Studies show it's the opposite. People who rent are more likely to know their neighbours, and also more likely to be mobile enough to take advantage of job opportunities.
I've owned, and I've rented, and renting is better, long-term, in this industry. This shouldn't even be a surprise ... sci-fi writers depicted pretty much this sort of situation a couple of decades ago.
Please ... if they've had a couple of decades warning, do you honestly think they have any reason to complain about "living in fear".
That's like someone being in a bad marriage for decades ...
An old couple go to see a divorce lawyer. ...
Divorce lawyer: Why do you two want a divorce? You're 92, and your wife is 87. I don't understand.
Husband: We figured it's time. We're old, the children are all dead
So then you end up in jail and your kids end up in foster homes or juvie. Too proud to ask family or friends for a bit of help, or to double up, or to sell off some of the junk you've accumulated, or take a menial job?
Wrong - the extra money printed up would have had zero effect if there had been nobody in a greedy frenzy to borrow it to buy their house before it got even more expensive, so they could get into the new new economy rather than work for a living. Money that isn't in circulation doesn't affect the economy. That's why much of the "stimulus" was ineffective - the banks just kept the money to shore up their own toxic balance sheets.
I'm amazed at all the justifications for lax ethics, from people in a thread complaining that their employer isn't treating them right. Pot, meet kettle.
Intentionally looking the other way makes you just as responsible in the eyes of the civil courts. The law is clear that you owe a certain level of fidelity to your employer. Plus, if everyone just looked the other way, you would be out of a job pretty quickly, since your employer wouldn't be able to stay in business. As for the rest of your comment, ask yourself if you'd hire someone who wants to be treated like a professional, but doesn't want either the responsibility or even to have to act like one.
I don't buy it.
That's just a rationalization for being a sleaze. Isn't giving your family a sense of ethics and pride and self-worth more important than keeping a house by being a crook? You might be able to get another house - and a home is where you hang your hat, whether it's a house or an apartment or anywhere else; you can't ever restore your childrens pride if you're sitting in jail because you're a thief. Your kids should be more important than money or property, and they should also know by your actions that you believe that there are things more important than money.
I wouldn't be able to trust you or want to work with you with your attitude. Do you think you'll ever be happy?
Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Because anyone using Bing cashback at this point is obviously mentally handicapped.
Oh-oh ... incoming chair ... BING!
After all, they've got to do something to raise the money needed to pay Murdoch to remove his newspapers from Google.
Otherwise, they'll have to start laying off Microsoft emp ... oh, wait a minute ... incoming chair ... BING!
(I hat it when that happens)