In the comments here yesterday about this guy escaping from the can, I expressed surprise at the thuggish, almost murderous look the guy had in his recent mug shot.
The guy's a spammer, I thought, but he looks like a serial killer.
Now I feel really creepy about what's he's done to his family. I don't care about what happens to him; he should suffer for all eternity for killing his wife and child.
I just don't understand the brain activity that would make him do this for 21 months in the can. He's white collar; he may have received parole after a few months for good behavior.
Maybe it's misfiring synapses, but I just don't get it.
I was particularly astonished by the photo of this guy that they included in the story. Good heavens, he's guilty of sending out too many unwanted e-mails...yes, yes, I know, penny stock scams, yada-yada...
But based on that mug shot, I would think was guilty of making Spam (the meat) out of his victims.
Is this what I have to look forward to in my IT career? To end up looking like Jeffrey Dahmer?
I doubt the local store management thought this one up. They tend to act as the home office directs, and are often inflexible on changing policy. Example:
Some years ago, we suffered a lightning strike at my house, and I needed to replace my DirecTV dish (the LNBs were dead). I visited my local Best Buy and found they had just what I needed, with a deal. They had an "open box" DirecTV dish on the sales floor for $25, about $50 less than the regular cost. I bought it and was placing it into the trunk of my car when a little voice inside me said "check the contents of the box."
Sure enough, everything was there...except the LNB. I went back into the store and got into a long discussion with the manager about fixing the problem. They sold LNBs separately, and I asked if they could just toss one in so I could use the dish. But, she explained that their policy on open-box items was a refund: no exchanges, no replacements, no substitutions.
My argument, having worked in retail for some years, was that making a customer happy with a small gesture would go a long way to increasing business. Had they been willing to drop that LNB on the shelf into the box for me, I would have been very happy and would have praised them to my friends for the great service. That would bring them more business.
It's a simple management concept called "making the customer happy," right? I learned it when I worked in retail.
Of course, she explained that she couldn't go against corporate policy, and if I wanted to comment to the company on the policy, I could fill out one of these customer comment cards, blah, blah, blah...
Big box stores may be convenient, but they are frequently intractable. And try getting support for that new copy of Ubuntu you just bought. Especially from the Geek Squad team.
Forgive me for being critical, but unless you indisputably know that your employer's morals are questionable, I think it 's a little presumptuous of you to judge him over this issue. Without reading the majority of posts that have replied to you, I'm guessing that a lot of the responders agree with you.
That's one of the major problems I have with a lot of people here when it comes to these issues. Owning a business is not immoral. Wanting to make a profit, no matter how obscene one might believe it is, is not immoral. How high does your moral soapbox go when your company doubles it's profit and you get a nice raise or bonus?
Murder, rape, child abuse, theft: those things are immoral. Wanting to blast out a pile of advertising using current technologies isn't immoral. Looking for a way to edge out the competition, no matter how stupid the method, isn't immoral. You sound like a smart fellow. As the expert, it's up to you to explain the stupidity of his idea to him. While it may be easy to call the barrage of advertising in other media "immoral," if it wasn't there, accessing that media would be far more costly for us.
That being said, perhaps your employer doesn't quite understand the technical aspects, pitfalls and ethics of what he wants to do. I remind you: you're the expert; explain this to him. Place him in the position of the recipient of that unsolicited email (which he probably already is, if he has an e-mail account), and remind him of the fact that, even if the blast makes it to any of its targets (which it likely won't), his company may wind up blacklisted for spamming, and most of the targets who do get it will be angry enough to refuse to do further business with him.
He may not be the tech savvy person you are, so your job is to explain it to him in terms he understands: how it affects his bottom line. Once he understand that this will more likely affect him negatively, he'll probably back off on the idea. Perhaps advising him on some alternative methods, like setting up actual mailing lists which customers can sign up for via the website.
If he insists on doing this, and you've explained the downside, and you find what he wants to be professionally and personally reprehensible, quit. No one will ever criticize you for taking a stand on an issue like this.
But before you attack his morality, make sure he sees the big picture. Stop looking at the business community as some flaming pit of abhorrent behavior. Without "business," most of the people reading this would be out of work and complaining about the other "immorality": why don't I get some kind of government handout so I can eat and pay my rent?
Sure the pain in your back went away. That's because your arms and shoulders are in so much pain from the dead lifts, you don't even notice your back anymore.
Last January, I decided to treat myself to a new laptop from HP. I called them and asked if they sold a model without an installed operating system (which I knew they didn't...I just wanted to be certain).
I ordered a DV6000 with the smallest available drive (80GB I believe) and looked up the specs on the drive on their web site. At the same time I ordered the system, I ordered a larger-capacity version of the same drive from an online vendor.
When the laptop arrived, I didn't fire it up immediately. I carefully removed the original drive, bagged it and installed my new blank drive. I then installed Kubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy), which was still in pre-RC beta status at the time.
The HP and Kubuntu worked perfectly together out of the box, and I never looked back. (The hardware in this model was all Intel, I should mention, including video and wireless). I've since tried other distros on the multiple partitions I originally set up, and there isn't a byte of Windows code on the machine. Anywhere.
Some might see the expense of an additional drive as silly, but there was a purpose to my madness. I knew going in that if I had any operational, warranty-covered issues with this laptop, the folks at support hell would ask me, before anything else, to boot the unit into Windows to do some useless diagnostic checks. It would be far easier for me to remove the Linux drive, pop the Windows drive back in, and go through those machinations, rather then have them tell me they couldn't help because I wasn't running Windows.
The second drive cost me $80. When the time comes to sell or give this laptop away, I'll pull my Linux drive and pass it along with a brand new, unused Windows drive (XP, not Vista) and all the restore stuff ready to go.
The only time I ever ran an AV application on a Linux box was when I set up a server for a mail gateway at a previous job. I ran SpamAssassin on that box, and filtered everything through some kind of AV tool (it might have been Clam) before the mail message wen through the firewall and was dropped on the Exchange server.
That was some time ago (maybe 2000/2001). Since then, I've run Linux on literally hundreds of systems at various jobs, in addition to my own person systems.
Never saw a virus. Ever.
Yes, there have been intentionally-created viruses for Linux made with the intent of studying how much damage, if any, could be done. But, there's never been a threat in the wild the way there have been on Windows boxes.
And most system "takeovers" of Linus boxes don't occur because if viruses. They happen because someone found an existing vulnerability on an unpatched system that allowed them to get in. That can happen on any system, no matter what the OS happens to be.
There are Linux-based codecs and viewing applications that will play WMP files just fine under Linux. Unless these conference calls are in some secret, closed-source format.
Adobe Reader - Using open source PDF reader "Evince Document Viewer" instead. Result? Software does not annoy.
I got sick of installing Acrobat reader on Linux boxes, and just used kpdf on my KDE systems. Recently switched to XFCE on Xubuntu, and it uses evince as a document reader.
One problem:
I manage the web site for my church. Every Monday, they mail me a PDF file of the following weekend's bulletin. I post it on the site. The original document has a "cover" page with information for the printing company, who also gets a copy.
I could open the file in kpdf, print only pages 2-6 to a new PDF file, and all was well...the new file came out to be between 400K and 600K.
Last week, under Xubuntu, I did the same thing with evince. That print-to-file function somehow managed to turn a 1.4MB, 6-page document into a 2.6MB 5-page file.
Luckily, you can run pretty much any desktop app on any desktop in Linux. So it was back to kpdf, which wound up making that same file only 500K.
As for pre-installed software bundles in Linux, you can painlessly uninstall most of them, or use a distro that asks you what you want to install, even within the "packages" of multiple apps. Slackware, Fedora, OpenSUSE all provide this option. There might even be a way to do it in the Ubuntu family.
What's really interesting about this entire discussion is the assumption that some criminal act has been committed here. Whether or not you support this administration, this whole thing seems more like a fishing expedition by a bunch of people with some kind a agenda.
Trust me, having spent the last 18 years working in IT as a federal employee and a contractor, I don't find this whole "lost emails" and "destroyed hard disks" situation surprising, nor sinister. In spite of the superior levels of technology available, IT changes come to federal agencies (yes, even the White House) very, very slowly. The rules and regulations regarding security, certification of systems and classification of documents (both hard copy and electronic) are frequently a confusing mess of legal-speak and idiocy, where one instruction will occasionally contradict another.
I was the IT director for eight years in a small Navy command. I had the responsibility of overseeing things like file backup and recovery and hard disk destruction. These tasks were often time-consuming, confusing (to follow some instructions), and wrought with opportunities to wipe out the wrong disk. I was fortunate, because I was careful and anal about record-keeping. Once, I removed a Secret classified drive from a machine for use in a new box, because I needed to copy data from it. I stored it in a marked package in a three-drawer safe, with notes on it saying not to remove it from the safe. A week later, I found it in a stack of Secret drives being transported out for destruction, drives that were stored in a completely different cabinet. Luckily, I had to verify the inventory of what we were sending out and caught the "good" drive.
Turns out this was my fault...I didn't add the stored drive to the proper inventory document, and someone else assumed it was going out for destruction (we didn't have the tools or the authority to destroy classified disks, so they were sent to another military facility).
The data on that drive was pretty important -- not to the national security -- but vital for certain people's jobs.
So, if I can nearly screw up on making sure one lousy drive doesn't get blown up, in my little organization, on my little network, I can see how it might happen in someplace like the White House.
Plus, it's not like this is the first administration that lost something. Aren't they still looking for those FBI files that were left laying about when Clinton was living there? And, has Mrs. Clinton found her tax returns yet?
Though I pity your absorption into the Comcast world (which I wouldn't wish on anyone), you'll have a lot more options with DirecTV. What's so "god-awful" about it? There's very little on cable than you can't get from them, the big thing probably being some kind of on-demand thing, and their new HD receivers will have that soon.
With satellite, you at least have a choice of packages to generally get what you want. In fact, if they don't have what you want, you might want to call them and ask about specific offerings. They used to have special packages that they didn't generally advertise.
The big issue here (AFAIK) isn't the lack of a la carte offerings by the cable companies, but the cost of offering them. This is the part that most people don't seem to want to understand. If you think cable is expensive now, watch what happens when the Congress forces them to offer channel-by-channel packages (which, when it happens, will once again demonstrate the Law of Unintended Consequences).
Current cable distribution technology doesn't allow for users to pick a few channels and pay that way. The cablecos (and satellite companies, to some extent) have to pay per-subscriber fees to carry many of those channels. These fees are charged differently for different tiers of programming (basic, basic extended, etc), which is why some so-called "premium" channels are only available with certain packages (Note: this is the big issue involved in the dispute the NFL has with cable carries regarding NFL Network).
In order to provide a la carte, the cable companies are going to have to build new user equipment that will provide such a service, or alternately, build new transmission equipment that allows them to select channels for each destination at the source. Now, we both know there is technology available to do this now. But to mass produce it, deliver it, test it, then figure out a way to make sure the customer billing matches their channel choices is going to cost a LOT of money if they're forced to do this. I'm certain that as time progresses, they will come up with ways to do it that they can roll out on a gradual basis.
In the meantime, since you're getting satellite, just cutomize your receiver to display only the channels you want. It's easy to do, allows you to password-block specific channels from your kids, and makes your on-screen guide easier to maneuver. On my receiver, I remove all the shopping, foreign and religious channels (except EWTN, in case I skip mass on Sunday), along with specialty and sports channels I rarely watch. You can bring them all back up with one keypress on the remote, unless you block them, which requires a password.
I know this doesn't make thing cheaper. But a la carte will NOT make cable and satellite bills go down. In fact, I guarantee they'll go way up...and everyone will be screaming at John Dingle to do something. At which point, he'll probably ask who the idiot was who pushed a la carte on everyone was.
I began working as an IT contractor in 2006, and have lived in Key West, Florida and now the Washington, DC area. I live in northeast Florida, so I fly a lot. The airlines I use most frequently are Southwest and US Airways.
Southwest uses a method for boarding that's based on when you check in. It used to be pretty simple. The earlier you check in, the greater a chance you had to get on the A line (of A, B and C). The problem was that even with an A pass, you had to get to the airport early and camp out on your letter's line to get on early.
Southwest recently changed their boarding methods. I guess they got sick of people camping out on the floor of their gate areas or fighting over who was on line first, or whether sitting in the seats next to the line meant you were actually in the line. They began adding group numbers to the boarding pass letter. You would then line up, one letter at a time, in the group that included your number (usually in five-digit increments). This caused general havoc at the gate because people are stupid and don't listen to the detailed instructions provided by the gate attendant.
Hell, I was made a member of the Southwest "A Team" for all the flying I did...yet my boarding group number was never higher than 15.
US Airways does their boarding in a way that was mentioned in the original post: they load the plane by "zones" with the window seats first, then the middle seats, then the aisles. Of course, on their jumbos, first class gets on first, and people who need "assistance" also get priority.
The loading bottleneck is simple...it's because everyone loads through the same frickin' hatch through the same jetway.
In the now-thousands of miles I have flown in the last two years, I have been unable to find anyone who can explain why the airlines (or more likely, the aircraft manufacturers) don't have MULTIPLE DOORS ON THE AIRCRAFT.
Think of it...you can still have your Jetway for the first class and handicapped/child/assistance crowd...they're nearly always going to sit near the front of the plane anyway. But why not roll a couple of old-fashioned access ladders up to the center (aft of the wings) and rear of the plane, add a couple of doors, and have people load based on the section of the aircraft where their seat is located. Hell, Southwest can still do their open seating thing...find a ladder, get on, grab a seat.
They could also cut loading time by more than half by doing one other simple thing: just eliminate the overheads. Make it a rule: if you cannot fit it under the seat, you MUST check it. I have one of these. I can carry three days worth of clothing, my laptop and sundry other stuff, and it fits nicely (and tightly) under the seat. Most clowns carry the bigger roll-around bags that take up a ton of space and often barely fit in the overhead.
Think about the one thing that holds every other passenger up when exiting an aircraft. Right: the moron who jammed a rhino-sized roll-around into the overhead, and now needs the entire crew to help him unwedge it. While everyone else behind him has to stand there and wait.
I guess this was more of a sore subject than I thought...
My wife gifted me with a 4 GB Sansa m200 this Christmas. It has both modes (MTP and whatever the other one is called), video, radio, recording, etc. Up to 8 GB storage. I have no interest in video (bad eyes), radio or anything other than it's music capabilities. And whether or not it worked with Linux.
As expected, it's mounted as a storage drive when plugged into the USB port. I'm not so anal that I have to sync stuff (I have too much music and am rarely home these days), so I just drag and drop whatever I want to hear onto the player. My only gripe with it up to this point was no open formats (ogg, flac).
However, Rockbox has made firmware available for this model and it's incredible. (Warning: this will not work with the m200R Rhapsody models). Not only does the unit sound better, it now supports all open formats and adds a ton of configuration features not available with the stock firmware.
The other great thing is that you can dual boot between Rockbox and Sansa firmware, and update the Rockbox firmware but just plugging in to a computer and copying the open downloaded firmware archive to the device. Deleting and going back to Sansa control is very easy as well.
I work for a federal agency as a contractor doing web application development. I worked for the Navy as a federal employee for 21 years before that, 13 in IT, eight at my last job as an IT officer. In my current environment, I see a dramatic difference in security, mostly because of the higher level of classification we have here. Some differences to what you state:
CAC cards are used, but terminal servers and websites for teleworking still allow username/password.
We use CAC cards for the unclass systems (on the NIPRNET). 95% of the work people do on computers here is on the SIPRNET, which requires no CAC card, but may in the future. No telework here. Hell, we can't even access our unclassified e-mail accounts using Outlook Web access anymore. For me, this is mostly a good thing.
Blackberries get CAC card readers for encrypted email, while flash drives and external hard drives are thrown into purses and bags.
Blackberries? Hell, I know of exactly three people in this organizations that have them, and they're at the highest levels. They require them for very specific operational purposes. Here's what the rest of us have in regard to Blackberries, phones, flash drives and thumbdrives: NADA. No one is even permitted to bring any of the aforementioned items into the building. Ever. Doing so is a major security violation and could get a contractor like me canned in about an hour. This list also includes mp3 players, walkman-type devices, laptops, PDAs, radios, televisions, CDs/DVDs (audio, video and data), diskettes of any type, basically any item or device that can record, save, store or transmit any kind of electronic signal. A few months ago, someone in hardware support installed a new PC in the building where I work, and the PC had an active wireless adapter installed and transmitting. Security went nuts for an afternoon trying to track down the source of the signal, which was detected during a routine sweep. No one thought to look at this new PC stowed under someone's desk. This place is anal.
Remote computers co-located at contractor facilities STILL store LM hashes and don't have the physical security of a DoD office.
If our folks don't install it, it doesn't get used. This includes anything remote.
EVERYONE writes down passwords because they have a dozen passwords to keep track of and each one is kept very similar to the next. Most users would not think twice about freely giving their password in a social engineering attack because IT here has gotten everyone in the habit of handing out their password to IT to "make things easier."
I've seen far less of this here, and they don't kid around with passwords. With the CAC, all you have to remember is a PIN which you put on the card, and it never expires (unless the card is updated). On the high side, we have to use long passwords (12-char minimum) with at least one upper case letter and one number and a change every 90 days. No reuse of a password until you've changed it 25 times. Although I'm sure some people do it, writing a password down is severely frowned upon. The support folks never ask for passwords...they don't have to. The sysadmins and customer service folks have good control and implementation of passwords and permissions, so any tech using a system will either have you log in (if an issue is with your account) or will log in with their own higher-access account.
Everyone is a local administrator, so google toolbars and instant messaging programs pop up here and there. The creative users block group policy.
Heh, I wish. We can do NOTHING on any workstation. App installations have to be requested through customer service and are frequently pushed from servers. The lockdown of these machines is are more anal than anything I ever did at my last job, even on the NIPR/unclass side. The only way to get around some of these restrictions is to make friends with one of the guys in the Windows branch, and even then, he or she
Well, since you brought it up, and since some Aussie down below go so offended he questioned my veracity about what happened, let me clarify.
I don't know if I had any bars or not. All I know is that when I punched in the number and hit the button to dial, I got nothing. For the sake of my friend down below, I'll make it clearer:
I couldn't make a cell phone call. I don't know why. I don't know if the signal was jammed or the amps were shut off or if T-Mobile just has lousy signal service in that stadium. I couldn't make a call.
Frankly, the reason why I couldn't make a call never really occurred to me until I saw the original story entry, which reminded me of the event. Jeez, it was well over two years ago.
What's interesting (and unrelated to Mr. Bush) is that a fellow season-ticket holder once told me he couldn't make a call on his cell during football games at this facility. The odd thing was that his cell provider was Alltel, which had its name on the stadium (until now, anyway...their naming deal with the Jaguars is over). He claimed it was done intentionally, but he never could explain why.
Maybe the NFL didn't want Alltel customers using their cell phones to blow up the visitor's bench or something.
My wife is a school administrator. When she began teaching some years ago, getting fingerprinted was part of the hiring process. Unfortunately, we live in a world with some pretty sick people and weeding them out from contact with children is one of the protections I expect governments to undertake. The chances of my wife being a child molester are pretty slim, since most of those clowns tend to be male. However, consider the number of female teachers arrested recently for having sexual relations with teenage boys. I'm not sure most of the communities in America want someone with that in the background working in their schools. They also look for records of other anti-social behavior: alcohol or drug-related crimes, theft, assault, etc.
I'm a programmer on a federal project and worked for the DOD for 21 years before that. I have a TS/SCI clearance. What do you think she'd have to submit to if a TS or secret clearance was a requirement of the job? Fingerprints are the least of it -- you have to agree to potential random drug screening, your financial background is closely scrutinized, your friends and neighbors are often interviewed. Hell, at the site I'm working at now, I have to report any out-of-the-ordinary legal or financial event to the security folks...even a speeding ticket. Anything that could be construed as "suspicious" or could possibly cause me to be induced into being bribed for information is supposed to be reported.
Luckily, I'm a pretty boring guy.
Stop being so paranoid. You're sister has it pretty easy. You can complain about it to someone...and she'll wind up losing the job.
Maybe even something a little more...errr...honest:
Australian Security Bans Cell Phones For Bush Visit
I also have to question why this is even worthy of space on this site, especially since the linked story reminds us that this has been done before:
The technology was first used by the US president when Bush attended the APEC summit in Pusan, South Korea, in 2005.
Someone search the/. archives and see if there was a story about this back then.
By the way, this is probably a lot more routine than people realize. In October 2004, the President was making campaign stops around Florida in the days leading up to the election. He made an appearance at Alltel Stadium in Jacksonville on a Saturday afternoon. At one point, Air Force One overflew the stadium on the way to Jacksonville International Airport. A few moments later, Secret Service and other security people began to appear on the field and near the tunnels. At one point, I took out my phone and tried to make a call, but had no signal.
This was in an open-air NFL stadium, surrounded by cell towers, on the edge of the downtown of a fairly large city. I also know that my service is always available, since I have Jaguars season tickets and have been in that building over 110 times since 1995. And my cell phone always worked, especially when the folks at my job called in the middle of a game to complain about server or internet outages.
I hate to drag religion into this relevant discussion of Mark Shuttleworth, Richard Stallman and famous Communists and Marxists...
...but there never was an Apostle named Michael. The Twelve were commonly believed to be Simon Peter, Andrew, James the Greater, his brother John, Judas Iscariot, Phillip, Bartholomew, Thomas Didymus (Doubting Thomas), James the Lesser, Matthew (the tax collector), Simon the Zealot, and Thaddeus (sometimes referred to as another named Judas). The names varied through the ages, but this was generally considered the correct list of names. Even in alterations, there never appeard the name Michael.
Now, perhaps the original poster is referring to Michael the Archangel, who reportedly appeared to both Daniel in the Old Testament and in the Book of Revelation at the end of the New Testament. Michael is depicted as the leader of the Army of God in Heaven, and is, in many places, the patron saint of police officers and military personnel.
So, with this correction, perhaps the original poster wanted to depict Stallman as some kind of warrior angel who would come down from on High to smite those who would force proprietary and closed-source software on the people of this world.
I'm sorry, but trying to picture Stallman equipped with great wings, wearing flowing robes and brandishing a might sword just made Diet Coke come out my nose.
Oh. My. God. Let's not talk about what the Bush administration has done (NSA wiretapping, and who needs habeus corpus?). No, let's smear the Democrats that they might do something if they get back in power. Oh, yeah, that's right, I forgot. Bush spies on everyone. Habeas corpus is now non-existent, right? How long are we going to beat that dead horse? Do you know anyone who's been legally denied their habeas corpus rights in this country? Can you name one? Can you point to anyone who's been victimized by any NSA wire-tapping program? (Which, by the way, is a totally invalid term...the NSA program didn't "wiretap" anything).
Let me set you and a lot of other people straight about something: I work in an environment in which secrecy and surveillance is a day-to-day part of people's jobs. Trust me when I tell you this, this nation has far bigger fish to fry and barely has the resources to do what needs to be done in this area. (Forgive me for not going into this in more detail, but I can't. I'm sure your smart enough to figure out why). There are far more dangerous things going on that require solid intelligence resources, things that directly affect the general welfare of this country. Besides, do you even realize what it would take in time, equipment and manpower for the United States Government to attempt to "spy" on American phone calls?
But, that's for a different discussion...
That aside, my comments were not on what Media Matters does on the surface...hell, I'm a regular reader of Media Research Center's site, and there's no secret that their goal is to focus on anti-conservative bias in the media. As for Media Matters, I've been to their site and, you're right, I don't agree with a lot of their positions...but that's not my problem.
My problem is with the wording of the story. Perhaps it's because of my age, but I find it a bit disconcerting when someone is monitoring something like the Imus show (or any radio show for that matter...I'll bet they have a whole Truth Squad tuning in to Limbaugh or Hannity). You know, like in the old Iron Curtain days (remember real Communism, kids?). The folks who ran those governments also had citizens "monitoring" people. The Nazis were pretty adept at this, too. In Cuba, they send police squads out to confiscate unauthorized satellite dishes discovered through monitoring, to prevent information from the outside.
Now, before anyone gets their panties in a bunch, I'm not comparing Media Matters with Commies, Nazis and the Cuban cops. As we all do, they have every right to listen to anything they wish and comment on it in any way they want, and I would defend to the death their right to do that, whether I agreed with their politics or not.
But that word...monitoring...a bit too Orwellian for my old bones.
When conservatives raised hell in 2004 regarding Ted Rall's racist depiction of Condoleezza Rice in one of his cartoons, the reaction was curious. The issue was largely ignored by most of the media, and the conservative commentators, websites and blogs that did rail against it were pretty much told to just shut up. Rall's cartoons are still carried by his syndicate and many newspapers.
Someone posted comments earlier about the alleged irony that a "liberal watchdog group" pulled the trigger on the Imus fiasco. But the real scary thing is the working of one sentence in the story:
A 26-year-old researcher in Washington, D.C., for liberal watchdog organization Media Matters for America, he was assigned to monitor Mr. Imus's program.
Wow. "...assigned to monitor Mr. Imus..."
Now, since my liberal friends and foes are always screaming about the alleged erosion of their constitutional rights, and some believe it's necessary to make specious claims, such as comparing George Bush and Hitler, doesn't it concern anyone that this "liberal media group" is "assigning" their staff to "monitor" radio personalities? Do you not have a picture of a room full of people, hunched over their desks with headsets on, pen in hand, jotting down any comments they perceive to be offensive to someone? Then reporting to some self-proclaimed arbiter of political and social correctness for action?
I have to wonder what else they plan to "monitor" if their like-minded compatriots ever regain full political power.
Show him the cost of setting up a Samba server on a commodity hardware (or for that matter, existing surplus hardware that still works) versus the cost of hardware, licensing, maintenance and installation of Windows Server 2003 to do the same job.
Especially after you add in the licensing.
That will shut him up.
I find it fascinating that anyone would care what a college student from the Netherlands would have to say about this subject. Not like we're talking about some high-and-mighty figure from the IT world proclaiming (again) the death of Linux on the desktop. The holiday season means slow news days, so this becomes "news" around here.
I use Linux all the time. My laptop, desktop and home server all run various versions. I rarely boot Windows on the laptop (I have a nice free Linux VMWare Server installation for that), and it's nowhere to be found on the other machines. At my job, like everyone else, I have to use Windows (even though I'm developing for Solaris and Linux platforms), but that's they way my organization does things.
This idea that Linux was supposed to provide some kind of "challenge" to Windows on the desktop is a figment of a lot of people's imaginations. If you have a use for it, use it. You have a ton of choices in Linux desktops, from the stripped down and fast, to the bloated and slow. Linux is an equal opportunity system that you can use in any way you see fit. I don't see that kind of choice with Windows. Yet, billions use it. They've made their choice as well.
And as long as we "Linux fanboys" find utility and power in this system, we're continue to use it, and people will continue to develop for it, no matter what kind of FUD continues to be spread about it.
Believe me, coming from someone who first used Linux at kernel version 0.12: nothing has changed.
Slashdot Mirror
In the comments here yesterday about this guy escaping from the can, I expressed surprise at the thuggish, almost murderous look the guy had in his recent mug shot.
The guy's a spammer, I thought, but he looks like a serial killer.
Now I feel really creepy about what's he's done to his family. I don't care about what happens to him; he should suffer for all eternity for killing his wife and child.
I just don't understand the brain activity that would make him do this for 21 months in the can. He's white collar; he may have received parole after a few months for good behavior.
Maybe it's misfiring synapses, but I just don't get it.
I was particularly astonished by the photo of this guy that they included in the story. Good heavens, he's guilty of sending out too many unwanted e-mails...yes, yes, I know, penny stock scams, yada-yada...
But based on that mug shot, I would think was guilty of making Spam (the meat) out of his victims.
Is this what I have to look forward to in my IT career? To end up looking like Jeffrey Dahmer?
I doubt the local store management thought this one up. They tend to act as the home office directs, and are often inflexible on changing policy. Example:
Some years ago, we suffered a lightning strike at my house, and I needed to replace my DirecTV dish (the LNBs were dead). I visited my local Best Buy and found they had just what I needed, with a deal. They had an "open box" DirecTV dish on the sales floor for $25, about $50 less than the regular cost. I bought it and was placing it into the trunk of my car when a little voice inside me said "check the contents of the box."
Sure enough, everything was there...except the LNB. I went back into the store and got into a long discussion with the manager about fixing the problem. They sold LNBs separately, and I asked if they could just toss one in so I could use the dish. But, she explained that their policy on open-box items was a refund: no exchanges, no replacements, no substitutions.
My argument, having worked in retail for some years, was that making a customer happy with a small gesture would go a long way to increasing business. Had they been willing to drop that LNB on the shelf into the box for me, I would have been very happy and would have praised them to my friends for the great service. That would bring them more business.
It's a simple management concept called "making the customer happy," right? I learned it when I worked in retail.
Of course, she explained that she couldn't go against corporate policy, and if I wanted to comment to the company on the policy, I could fill out one of these customer comment cards, blah, blah, blah...
Big box stores may be convenient, but they are frequently intractable. And try getting support for that new copy of Ubuntu you just bought. Especially from the Geek Squad team.
Here it is. Oddly, it's not under "operating systems." Idiots.
Forgive me for being critical, but unless you indisputably know that your employer's morals are questionable, I think it 's a little presumptuous of you to judge him over this issue. Without reading the majority of posts that have replied to you, I'm guessing that a lot of the responders agree with you.
That's one of the major problems I have with a lot of people here when it comes to these issues. Owning a business is not immoral. Wanting to make a profit, no matter how obscene one might believe it is, is not immoral. How high does your moral soapbox go when your company doubles it's profit and you get a nice raise or bonus?
Murder, rape, child abuse, theft: those things are immoral. Wanting to blast out a pile of advertising using current technologies isn't immoral. Looking for a way to edge out the competition, no matter how stupid the method, isn't immoral. You sound like a smart fellow. As the expert, it's up to you to explain the stupidity of his idea to him. While it may be easy to call the barrage of advertising in other media "immoral," if it wasn't there, accessing that media would be far more costly for us.
That being said, perhaps your employer doesn't quite understand the technical aspects, pitfalls and ethics of what he wants to do. I remind you: you're the expert; explain this to him. Place him in the position of the recipient of that unsolicited email (which he probably already is, if he has an e-mail account), and remind him of the fact that, even if the blast makes it to any of its targets (which it likely won't), his company may wind up blacklisted for spamming, and most of the targets who do get it will be angry enough to refuse to do further business with him.
He may not be the tech savvy person you are, so your job is to explain it to him in terms he understands: how it affects his bottom line. Once he understand that this will more likely affect him negatively, he'll probably back off on the idea. Perhaps advising him on some alternative methods, like setting up actual mailing lists which customers can sign up for via the website.
If he insists on doing this, and you've explained the downside, and you find what he wants to be professionally and personally reprehensible, quit. No one will ever criticize you for taking a stand on an issue like this.
But before you attack his morality, make sure he sees the big picture. Stop looking at the business community as some flaming pit of abhorrent behavior. Without "business," most of the people reading this would be out of work and complaining about the other "immorality": why don't I get some kind of government handout so I can eat and pay my rent?
Sure the pain in your back went away. That's because your arms and shoulders are in so much pain from the dead lifts, you don't even notice your back anymore.
Last January, I decided to treat myself to a new laptop from HP. I called them and asked if they sold a model without an installed operating system (which I knew they didn't...I just wanted to be certain).
I ordered a DV6000 with the smallest available drive (80GB I believe) and looked up the specs on the drive on their web site. At the same time I ordered the system, I ordered a larger-capacity version of the same drive from an online vendor.
When the laptop arrived, I didn't fire it up immediately. I carefully removed the original drive, bagged it and installed my new blank drive. I then installed Kubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy), which was still in pre-RC beta status at the time.
The HP and Kubuntu worked perfectly together out of the box, and I never looked back. (The hardware in this model was all Intel, I should mention, including video and wireless). I've since tried other distros on the multiple partitions I originally set up, and there isn't a byte of Windows code on the machine. Anywhere.
Some might see the expense of an additional drive as silly, but there was a purpose to my madness. I knew going in that if I had any operational, warranty-covered issues with this laptop, the folks at support hell would ask me, before anything else, to boot the unit into Windows to do some useless diagnostic checks. It would be far easier for me to remove the Linux drive, pop the Windows drive back in, and go through those machinations, rather then have them tell me they couldn't help because I wasn't running Windows.
The second drive cost me $80. When the time comes to sell or give this laptop away, I'll pull my Linux drive and pass it along with a brand new, unused Windows drive (XP, not Vista) and all the restore stuff ready to go.
AioKits is referring to this famous comedy line:
Welcome to All Things Scottish. if it's not Scottish, it's crap!
Google it.
The only time I ever ran an AV application on a Linux box was when I set up a server for a mail gateway at a previous job. I ran SpamAssassin on that box, and filtered everything through some kind of AV tool (it might have been Clam) before the mail message wen through the firewall and was dropped on the Exchange server.
That was some time ago (maybe 2000/2001). Since then, I've run Linux on literally hundreds of systems at various jobs, in addition to my own person systems.
Never saw a virus. Ever.
Yes, there have been intentionally-created viruses for Linux made with the intent of studying how much damage, if any, could be done. But, there's never been a threat in the wild the way there have been on Windows boxes.
And most system "takeovers" of Linus boxes don't occur because if viruses. They happen because someone found an existing vulnerability on an unpatched system that allowed them to get in. That can happen on any system, no matter what the OS happens to be.
There are Linux-based codecs and viewing applications that will play WMP files just fine under Linux. Unless these conference calls are in some secret, closed-source format.
Adobe Reader - Using open source PDF reader "Evince Document Viewer" instead. Result? Software does not annoy.
I got sick of installing Acrobat reader on Linux boxes, and just used kpdf on my KDE systems. Recently switched to XFCE on Xubuntu, and it uses evince as a document reader.
One problem:
I manage the web site for my church. Every Monday, they mail me a PDF file of the following weekend's bulletin. I post it on the site. The original document has a "cover" page with information for the printing company, who also gets a copy.
I could open the file in kpdf, print only pages 2-6 to a new PDF file, and all was well...the new file came out to be between 400K and 600K.
Last week, under Xubuntu, I did the same thing with evince. That print-to-file function somehow managed to turn a 1.4MB, 6-page document into a 2.6MB 5-page file.
Luckily, you can run pretty much any desktop app on any desktop in Linux. So it was back to kpdf, which wound up making that same file only 500K.
As for pre-installed software bundles in Linux, you can painlessly uninstall most of them, or use a distro that asks you what you want to install, even within the "packages" of multiple apps. Slackware, Fedora, OpenSUSE all provide this option. There might even be a way to do it in the Ubuntu family.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosemary_Woods
What's really interesting about this entire discussion is the assumption that some criminal act has been committed here. Whether or not you support this administration, this whole thing seems more like a fishing expedition by a bunch of people with some kind a agenda.
Trust me, having spent the last 18 years working in IT as a federal employee and a contractor, I don't find this whole "lost emails" and "destroyed hard disks" situation surprising, nor sinister. In spite of the superior levels of technology available, IT changes come to federal agencies (yes, even the White House) very, very slowly. The rules and regulations regarding security, certification of systems and classification of documents (both hard copy and electronic) are frequently a confusing mess of legal-speak and idiocy, where one instruction will occasionally contradict another.
I was the IT director for eight years in a small Navy command. I had the responsibility of overseeing things like file backup and recovery and hard disk destruction. These tasks were often time-consuming, confusing (to follow some instructions), and wrought with opportunities to wipe out the wrong disk. I was fortunate, because I was careful and anal about record-keeping. Once, I removed a Secret classified drive from a machine for use in a new box, because I needed to copy data from it. I stored it in a marked package in a three-drawer safe, with notes on it saying not to remove it from the safe. A week later, I found it in a stack of Secret drives being transported out for destruction, drives that were stored in a completely different cabinet. Luckily, I had to verify the inventory of what we were sending out and caught the "good" drive.
Turns out this was my fault...I didn't add the stored drive to the proper inventory document, and someone else assumed it was going out for destruction (we didn't have the tools or the authority to destroy classified disks, so they were sent to another military facility).
The data on that drive was pretty important -- not to the national security -- but vital for certain people's jobs.
So, if I can nearly screw up on making sure one lousy drive doesn't get blown up, in my little organization, on my little network, I can see how it might happen in someplace like the White House.
Plus, it's not like this is the first administration that lost something. Aren't they still looking for those FBI files that were left laying about when Clinton was living there? And, has Mrs. Clinton found her tax returns yet?
Though I pity your absorption into the Comcast world (which I wouldn't wish on anyone), you'll have a lot more options with DirecTV. What's so "god-awful" about it? There's very little on cable than you can't get from them, the big thing probably being some kind of on-demand thing, and their new HD receivers will have that soon.
With satellite, you at least have a choice of packages to generally get what you want. In fact, if they don't have what you want, you might want to call them and ask about specific offerings. They used to have special packages that they didn't generally advertise.
The big issue here (AFAIK) isn't the lack of a la carte offerings by the cable companies, but the cost of offering them. This is the part that most people don't seem to want to understand. If you think cable is expensive now, watch what happens when the Congress forces them to offer channel-by-channel packages (which, when it happens, will once again demonstrate the Law of Unintended Consequences).
Current cable distribution technology doesn't allow for users to pick a few channels and pay that way. The cablecos (and satellite companies, to some extent) have to pay per-subscriber fees to carry many of those channels. These fees are charged differently for different tiers of programming (basic, basic extended, etc), which is why some so-called "premium" channels are only available with certain packages (Note: this is the big issue involved in the dispute the NFL has with cable carries regarding NFL Network).
In order to provide a la carte, the cable companies are going to have to build new user equipment that will provide such a service, or alternately, build new transmission equipment that allows them to select channels for each destination at the source. Now, we both know there is technology available to do this now. But to mass produce it, deliver it, test it, then figure out a way to make sure the customer billing matches their channel choices is going to cost a LOT of money if they're forced to do this. I'm certain that as time progresses, they will come up with ways to do it that they can roll out on a gradual basis.
In the meantime, since you're getting satellite, just cutomize your receiver to display only the channels you want. It's easy to do, allows you to password-block specific channels from your kids, and makes your on-screen guide easier to maneuver. On my receiver, I remove all the shopping, foreign and religious channels (except EWTN, in case I skip mass on Sunday), along with specialty and sports channels I rarely watch. You can bring them all back up with one keypress on the remote, unless you block them, which requires a password.
I know this doesn't make thing cheaper. But a la carte will NOT make cable and satellite bills go down. In fact, I guarantee they'll go way up...and everyone will be screaming at John Dingle to do something. At which point, he'll probably ask who the idiot was who pushed a la carte on everyone was.
I began working as an IT contractor in 2006, and have lived in Key West, Florida and now the Washington, DC area. I live in northeast Florida, so I fly a lot. The airlines I use most frequently are Southwest and US Airways.
Southwest uses a method for boarding that's based on when you check in. It used to be pretty simple. The earlier you check in, the greater a chance you had to get on the A line (of A, B and C). The problem was that even with an A pass, you had to get to the airport early and camp out on your letter's line to get on early.
Southwest recently changed their boarding methods. I guess they got sick of people camping out on the floor of their gate areas or fighting over who was on line first, or whether sitting in the seats next to the line meant you were actually in the line. They began adding group numbers to the boarding pass letter. You would then line up, one letter at a time, in the group that included your number (usually in five-digit increments). This caused general havoc at the gate because people are stupid and don't listen to the detailed instructions provided by the gate attendant.
Hell, I was made a member of the Southwest "A Team" for all the flying I did...yet my boarding group number was never higher than 15.
US Airways does their boarding in a way that was mentioned in the original post: they load the plane by "zones" with the window seats first, then the middle seats, then the aisles. Of course, on their jumbos, first class gets on first, and people who need "assistance" also get priority.
The loading bottleneck is simple...it's because everyone loads through the same frickin' hatch through the same jetway.
In the now-thousands of miles I have flown in the last two years, I have been unable to find anyone who can explain why the airlines (or more likely, the aircraft manufacturers) don't have MULTIPLE DOORS ON THE AIRCRAFT.
Think of it...you can still have your Jetway for the first class and handicapped/child/assistance crowd...they're nearly always going to sit near the front of the plane anyway. But why not roll a couple of old-fashioned access ladders up to the center (aft of the wings) and rear of the plane, add a couple of doors, and have people load based on the section of the aircraft where their seat is located. Hell, Southwest can still do their open seating thing...find a ladder, get on, grab a seat.
They could also cut loading time by more than half by doing one other simple thing: just eliminate the overheads. Make it a rule: if you cannot fit it under the seat, you MUST check it. I have one of these. I can carry three days worth of clothing, my laptop and sundry other stuff, and it fits nicely (and tightly) under the seat. Most clowns carry the bigger roll-around bags that take up a ton of space and often barely fit in the overhead.
Think about the one thing that holds every other passenger up when exiting an aircraft. Right: the moron who jammed a rhino-sized roll-around into the overhead, and now needs the entire crew to help him unwedge it. While everyone else behind him has to stand there and wait.
I guess this was more of a sore subject than I thought...
My wife gifted me with a 4 GB Sansa m200 this Christmas. It has both modes (MTP and whatever the other one is called), video, radio, recording, etc. Up to 8 GB storage. I have no interest in video (bad eyes), radio or anything other than it's music capabilities. And whether or not it worked with Linux.
As expected, it's mounted as a storage drive when plugged into the USB port. I'm not so anal that I have to sync stuff (I have too much music and am rarely home these days), so I just drag and drop whatever I want to hear onto the player. My only gripe with it up to this point was no open formats (ogg, flac).
However, Rockbox has made firmware available for this model and it's incredible. (Warning: this will not work with the m200R Rhapsody models). Not only does the unit sound better, it now supports all open formats and adds a ton of configuration features not available with the stock firmware.
The other great thing is that you can dual boot between Rockbox and Sansa firmware, and update the Rockbox firmware but just plugging in to a computer and copying the open downloaded firmware archive to the device. Deleting and going back to Sansa control is very easy as well.
Great devices, those Sansas.
I work for a federal agency as a contractor doing web application development. I worked for the Navy as a federal employee for 21 years before that, 13 in IT, eight at my last job as an IT officer. In my current environment, I see a dramatic difference in security, mostly because of the higher level of classification we have here. Some differences to what you state:
CAC cards are used, but terminal servers and websites for teleworking still allow username/password.
We use CAC cards for the unclass systems (on the NIPRNET). 95% of the work people do on computers here is on the SIPRNET, which requires no CAC card, but may in the future. No telework here. Hell, we can't even access our unclassified e-mail accounts using Outlook Web access anymore. For me, this is mostly a good thing.
Blackberries get CAC card readers for encrypted email, while flash drives and external hard drives are thrown into purses and bags.
Blackberries? Hell, I know of exactly three people in this organizations that have them, and they're at the highest levels. They require them for very specific operational purposes. Here's what the rest of us have in regard to Blackberries, phones, flash drives and thumbdrives: NADA. No one is even permitted to bring any of the aforementioned items into the building. Ever. Doing so is a major security violation and could get a contractor like me canned in about an hour. This list also includes mp3 players, walkman-type devices, laptops, PDAs, radios, televisions, CDs/DVDs (audio, video and data), diskettes of any type, basically any item or device that can record, save, store or transmit any kind of electronic signal. A few months ago, someone in hardware support installed a new PC in the building where I work, and the PC had an active wireless adapter installed and transmitting. Security went nuts for an afternoon trying to track down the source of the signal, which was detected during a routine sweep. No one thought to look at this new PC stowed under someone's desk. This place is anal.
Remote computers co-located at contractor facilities STILL store LM hashes and don't have the physical security of a DoD office.
If our folks don't install it, it doesn't get used. This includes anything remote.
EVERYONE writes down passwords because they have a dozen passwords to keep track of and each one is kept very similar to the next. Most users would not think twice about freely giving their password in a social engineering attack because IT here has gotten everyone in the habit of handing out their password to IT to "make things easier."
I've seen far less of this here, and they don't kid around with passwords. With the CAC, all you have to remember is a PIN which you put on the card, and it never expires (unless the card is updated). On the high side, we have to use long passwords (12-char minimum) with at least one upper case letter and one number and a change every 90 days. No reuse of a password until you've changed it 25 times. Although I'm sure some people do it, writing a password down is severely frowned upon. The support folks never ask for passwords...they don't have to. The sysadmins and customer service folks have good control and implementation of passwords and permissions, so any tech using a system will either have you log in (if an issue is with your account) or will log in with their own higher-access account.
Everyone is a local administrator, so google toolbars and instant messaging programs pop up here and there. The creative users block group policy.
Heh, I wish. We can do NOTHING on any workstation. App installations have to be requested through customer service and are frequently pushed from servers. The lockdown of these machines is are more anal than anything I ever did at my last job, even on the NIPR/unclass side. The only way to get around some of these restrictions is to make friends with one of the guys in the Windows branch, and even then, he or she
Well, since you brought it up, and since some Aussie down below go so offended he questioned my veracity about what happened, let me clarify.
I don't know if I had any bars or not. All I know is that when I punched in the number and hit the button to dial, I got nothing. For the sake of my friend down below, I'll make it clearer:
I couldn't make a cell phone call. I don't know why. I don't know if the signal was jammed or the amps were shut off or if T-Mobile just has lousy signal service in that stadium. I couldn't make a call.
Frankly, the reason why I couldn't make a call never really occurred to me until I saw the original story entry, which reminded me of the event. Jeez, it was well over two years ago.
What's interesting (and unrelated to Mr. Bush) is that a fellow season-ticket holder once told me he couldn't make a call on his cell during football games at this facility. The odd thing was that his cell provider was Alltel, which had its name on the stadium (until now, anyway...their naming deal with the Jaguars is over). He claimed it was done intentionally, but he never could explain why.
Maybe the NFL didn't want Alltel customers using their cell phones to blow up the visitor's bench or something.
My wife is a school administrator. When she began teaching some years ago, getting fingerprinted was part of the hiring process. Unfortunately, we live in a world with some pretty sick people and weeding them out from contact with children is one of the protections I expect governments to undertake. The chances of my wife being a child molester are pretty slim, since most of those clowns tend to be male. However, consider the number of female teachers arrested recently for having sexual relations with teenage boys. I'm not sure most of the communities in America want someone with that in the background working in their schools. They also look for records of other anti-social behavior: alcohol or drug-related crimes, theft, assault, etc.
I'm a programmer on a federal project and worked for the DOD for 21 years before that. I have a TS/SCI clearance. What do you think she'd have to submit to if a TS or secret clearance was a requirement of the job? Fingerprints are the least of it -- you have to agree to potential random drug screening, your financial background is closely scrutinized, your friends and neighbors are often interviewed. Hell, at the site I'm working at now, I have to report any out-of-the-ordinary legal or financial event to the security folks...even a speeding ticket. Anything that could be construed as "suspicious" or could possibly cause me to be induced into being bribed for information is supposed to be reported.
Luckily, I'm a pretty boring guy.
Stop being so paranoid. You're sister has it pretty easy. You can complain about it to someone...and she'll wind up losing the job.
Maybe even something a little more...errr...honest:
/. archives and see if there was a story about this back then.
Australian Security Bans Cell Phones For Bush Visit
I also have to question why this is even worthy of space on this site, especially since the linked story reminds us that this has been done before:
The technology was first used by the US president when Bush attended the APEC summit in Pusan, South Korea, in 2005.
Someone search the
By the way, this is probably a lot more routine than people realize. In October 2004, the President was making campaign stops around Florida in the days leading up to the election. He made an appearance at Alltel Stadium in Jacksonville on a Saturday afternoon. At one point, Air Force One overflew the stadium on the way to Jacksonville International Airport. A few moments later, Secret Service and other security people began to appear on the field and near the tunnels. At one point, I took out my phone and tried to make a call, but had no signal.
This was in an open-air NFL stadium, surrounded by cell towers, on the edge of the downtown of a fairly large city. I also know that my service is always available, since I have Jaguars season tickets and have been in that building over 110 times since 1995. And my cell phone always worked, especially when the folks at my job called in the middle of a game to complain about server or internet outages.
Time to let this go, lefties.
I hate to drag religion into this relevant discussion of Mark Shuttleworth, Richard Stallman and famous Communists and Marxists...
...but there never was an Apostle named Michael. The Twelve were commonly believed to be Simon Peter, Andrew, James the Greater, his brother John, Judas Iscariot, Phillip, Bartholomew, Thomas Didymus (Doubting Thomas), James the Lesser, Matthew (the tax collector), Simon the Zealot, and Thaddeus (sometimes referred to as another named Judas). The names varied through the ages, but this was generally considered the correct list of names. Even in alterations, there never appeard the name Michael.
Now, perhaps the original poster is referring to Michael the Archangel, who reportedly appeared to both Daniel in the Old Testament and in the Book of Revelation at the end of the New Testament. Michael is depicted as the leader of the Army of God in Heaven, and is, in many places, the patron saint of police officers and military personnel.
So, with this correction, perhaps the original poster wanted to depict Stallman as some kind of warrior angel who would come down from on High to smite those who would force proprietary and closed-source software on the people of this world.
I'm sorry, but trying to picture Stallman equipped with great wings, wearing flowing robes and brandishing a might sword just made Diet Coke come out my nose.
Let me set you and a lot of other people straight about something: I work in an environment in which secrecy and surveillance is a day-to-day part of people's jobs. Trust me when I tell you this, this nation has far bigger fish to fry and barely has the resources to do what needs to be done in this area. (Forgive me for not going into this in more detail, but I can't. I'm sure your smart enough to figure out why). There are far more dangerous things going on that require solid intelligence resources, things that directly affect the general welfare of this country. Besides, do you even realize what it would take in time, equipment and manpower for the United States Government to attempt to "spy" on American phone calls?
But, that's for a different discussion...
That aside, my comments were not on what Media Matters does on the surface...hell, I'm a regular reader of Media Research Center's site, and there's no secret that their goal is to focus on anti-conservative bias in the media. As for Media Matters, I've been to their site and, you're right, I don't agree with a lot of their positions...but that's not my problem.
My problem is with the wording of the story. Perhaps it's because of my age, but I find it a bit disconcerting when someone is monitoring something like the Imus show (or any radio show for that matter...I'll bet they have a whole Truth Squad tuning in to Limbaugh or Hannity). You know, like in the old Iron Curtain days (remember real Communism, kids?). The folks who ran those governments also had citizens "monitoring" people. The Nazis were pretty adept at this, too. In Cuba, they send police squads out to confiscate unauthorized satellite dishes discovered through monitoring, to prevent information from the outside.
Now, before anyone gets their panties in a bunch, I'm not comparing Media Matters with Commies, Nazis and the Cuban cops. As we all do, they have every right to listen to anything they wish and comment on it in any way they want, and I would defend to the death their right to do that, whether I agreed with their politics or not.
But that word...monitoring...a bit too Orwellian for my old bones.
When conservatives raised hell in 2004 regarding Ted Rall's racist depiction of Condoleezza Rice in one of his cartoons, the reaction was curious. The issue was largely ignored by most of the media, and the conservative commentators, websites and blogs that did rail against it were pretty much told to just shut up. Rall's cartoons are still carried by his syndicate and many newspapers.
Someone posted comments earlier about the alleged irony that a "liberal watchdog group" pulled the trigger on the Imus fiasco. But the real scary thing is the working of one sentence in the story:
A 26-year-old researcher in Washington, D.C., for liberal watchdog organization Media Matters for America, he was assigned to monitor Mr. Imus's program.
Wow. "...assigned to monitor Mr. Imus..."
Now, since my liberal friends and foes are always screaming about the alleged erosion of their constitutional rights, and some believe it's necessary to make specious claims, such as comparing George Bush and Hitler, doesn't it concern anyone that this "liberal media group" is "assigning" their staff to "monitor" radio personalities? Do you not have a picture of a room full of people, hunched over their desks with headsets on, pen in hand, jotting down any comments they perceive to be offensive to someone? Then reporting to some self-proclaimed arbiter of political and social correctness for action?
I have to wonder what else they plan to "monitor" if their like-minded compatriots ever regain full political power.
...those cool flying we were supposed to have, like the ones on The Jetsons?
Who's hiding the anti-gravity stuff? I know someone out there knows about it.
You know they don't want us to have it so we can continue buying oil. The bastards.
Show him the cost of setting up a Samba server on a commodity hardware (or for that matter, existing surplus hardware that still works) versus the cost of hardware, licensing, maintenance and installation of Windows Server 2003 to do the same job. Especially after you add in the licensing. That will shut him up.
I find it fascinating that anyone would care what a college student from the Netherlands would have to say about this subject. Not like we're talking about some high-and-mighty figure from the IT world proclaiming (again) the death of Linux on the desktop. The holiday season means slow news days, so this becomes "news" around here.
I use Linux all the time. My laptop, desktop and home server all run various versions. I rarely boot Windows on the laptop (I have a nice free Linux VMWare Server installation for that), and it's nowhere to be found on the other machines. At my job, like everyone else, I have to use Windows (even though I'm developing for Solaris and Linux platforms), but that's they way my organization does things.
This idea that Linux was supposed to provide some kind of "challenge" to Windows on the desktop is a figment of a lot of people's imaginations. If you have a use for it, use it. You have a ton of choices in Linux desktops, from the stripped down and fast, to the bloated and slow. Linux is an equal opportunity system that you can use in any way you see fit. I don't see that kind of choice with Windows. Yet, billions use it. They've made their choice as well.
And as long as we "Linux fanboys" find utility and power in this system, we're continue to use it, and people will continue to develop for it, no matter what kind of FUD continues to be spread about it.
Believe me, coming from someone who first used Linux at kernel version 0.12: nothing has changed.