There is a simple solution to theft - initialize each device with a unique key, and give a copy of that key to the owner. By all means pre-load it with trust for the vendor key as well so that it can auto-update by default, but the master key goes to the user. The key might be a $2 USB drive in a little envelope that says "keep safe and don't open unless you want to modify the OS software - Vendor may not be able to repair devices without this key."
"Hello, Apple tech Support" "I lost my USB key - and my phone won't unlock." The problem is people will lose the key; how do you handle that without it becoming a logistical nightmare? Apple really doesn't want to get into the business of determining if a phone was stolen or it is a legitimate lost key request .
One challenge is the existing infrastructure. Would ports spend the money to handle mega-Panamax ships and can the rail infrastructure handle the increased freight. The ability to move freight beyond the port can be a big bottleneck.
One word...NIMBYs. Frankly NIMBYs is why america will be fucked in the future, you can't get shit done here without the NIMBYs having a royal fucking shitfit so we either keep the pre-NIMBY shit running or do without, that really is the only choices we have.
My favorite bumper sticker when it comes to energy was one I saw when Switzerland was voting on nuclear power: "Who needs power plants? I get my electricity from a wall outlet." That pretty much summed up the challenge.
...and inform them of the unethical behavior of the new developer, the situation it put you in and how shocked you were to find that they had deprived you of the opportunity to take credit for your work. Somebody at that company hired you and knows what truly happened. Hopefully that person is in a position to put the situation right and give you the credit you are due.
That said, relying on your code being still accessible after you have left it for a while is not a situation you want to be in. Your former clients can take that code down and replace it any time they want, with anything they want. You should have checked to see the status of that code yourself shortly before you tried to present it as an example of your work.
While I agree on contacting them; I'd start by calling whoever you worked for and explaining what happened. You're not looking for a fight; just to be able to take credit for work you did for them. I'd approach it as a "you won't believe what happened to me..." and don't start with adversarial lawyer letters as some have suggested; they may not even realize their new developer put his copyright on the code. I'd also check your contrat to see if you actually still own the code.
Have the phone interact with the car so that it is used to activate the starting mechanism. While the car is running the phone is blocked from use except for handsfree calling. You get in, open an app, start the car, and drive off. Sure, you can have 2 phones or use a passengers but realistically most folks won't.
Once the PC market became a commodity they moved on.
So no, they didn't "move on" when the PC market became a commodity; it took them a very long time to wake up and smell the coffee, and even then it took them a while before they finally sold off that business unit.
I didn't mean to imply they did so immediately; as you pointed out they tried to differentiate themselves, with little success beyond the thinkPads, to be abel to command a premium. Eventually they simply exited the market when it became they could not get premium pricing. But that is my main point - IBM shifted its focus to areas where they can extract a premium; existing the PC market is just one example of how and when they do that.
I don't think IBM should take your insults lying down. IBM knew when to shift. They may not be high-profile in the PC world anymore, but they've certainly spun off their product lines to companies that could handle them. Meanwhile, IBM themselves haven't exactly disappeared.
That is because IBM has always been about being in businesses that are higher margin and where they can use their breadth and depth of talent, IP, etc. to their advantage. Once the PC market became a commodity they moved on. Big iron is much harder to commoditize and they can sell services around it that use the computing power as business tools. Even as they spin off some businesses they buy others, such as Monday (PwC Consulting) that fit within their services model.
MS has always been, first and foremost, a software company. Services always seemed as an afterthought and focused on their software rather than providing business solutions.
It's being done by the tester, not the students, possibly to keep some people (in specific regions) out of the school they want.
It would be interesting to see if the anomalies correspond to cutoff scores for various educational tiers; i.e. if Tier 1 schools require a minimum of say 70 do you see a spike at and after that with a corresponding empty value and or dip just below that. If the anomalies correspond to the cutoff scores for admissions then that would seem to indicate scores were adjusted to help students get in. If you see a spike just before the cutoff and a blank then it may be students were down graded as well.
One puzzle is why health care workers are so bad at it. Among the explanations studies have offered are complaints about dry skin, the pressures of an emergency environment, the tedium of hand washing and resistance to authority (doctors, who have the most authority, tend to be the most resistant, studies have found).
But... hang on a bit... how come 20 years ago this wasn't an issue?
It was. The first thing you should ask anyone getting ready to examine you when in the hospital is "Did you sanitize your hands?"
Sure, downloads happen through iTunes, but it would still behoove Apple to point searches for songs to iTunes in some way, even if through some intermediary that launches iTunes to actually make the download.
Which is probably why Google were surprised that Apple is not already doing so. Not that that has anything at all to do with copyright infringement.
I am not sure Apple would gain anything buy paying to push iTunes. They have a pretty good market already with users predisposed to going there for music so as dollars would add no revenue hike raising costs. Since iTunes is device specific to a large extent the chance that someone who doesn't know about it becoming a customer is also small, so advertising makes no sense to draw in customers. So it is not surprising Apple ignores Google searches.
Except that 80% of German beer that is drunk it good or better beer and 80% of american beer that is drunk is mediocre or worse. You can find very bad beer in Germany and great beer in the US. The big difference in Germany is that most beer that is sold in bars is from the one of the local breweries, which on average is 3 per town (from 1000 pop.). In many cases you have larger beer houses that brew and sell their own beer. On average you get better beer in Germany than the US.
- from a USA/German national
And 100% of Belgium beer is as good or better than German; as is their chocolates relative to the Swiss.
Are we still having this conversation in 2013? You lost. It's over. Our society at large accepts and supports file sharing for non-commercial use. You can't put that toothpaste back in the tube, you can't roll back the cultural clock. You will not stop filesharing. Figure out a way to make money in this new economy or die quietly.
They have. It's called "THE CLOUD;" with the end goal of ending physical distribution of entertainment and software. Once they do that, file sharing will be much more difficult to the point where it becomes an insignificant problem. For that to happen, high speed access needs to be more prevalent, and the content owners need to find a way to either share revenue with the bandwidth providers or develop their own delivery infrastructure, such as Google is doing. Until then, they will fight rear guard actions such as this in an attempt to stay in business long enough to make the transition. Oddly enough, copyright extensions will be in some ways less important because once you control the storage media to the point where, even if a copyright expires, if others cannot obtain re-distributable copies then the original holder can continue to control the work. Of course, for every advance in protection someone else will look to ways to circumvent it.
I'd struggle to see how the owner of the rootkit could disclaim responsibility in a corporate scenario - especially if lives were lost (e.g. a member of staff, not knowingly, installs a rootkit-installing version of Greys Anatomy into a hospital Citrix system). There's quite a cultural and legal difference between consuming media using devices and installing software that intends to change the behaviour of the end user device.
Also, the sheer volume of test-case and conditions could have hard to predict outcomes (e.g. watching a rootkit-installing DVD on a car infotainment system). Whilst I would think that some software organisations would be daft enough to produce software like this on behalf of the large media organisations I can't see how the business case could stack up given the huge amount of risk of doing this given that there is no way on most legal frameworks that responsibility could be disclaimed.
I agree - even if it is intended only for what I would characterize "home use," i.e. a single machine in a non-commerical setting, it would be hard to prevent it from winding up in other settings. Given the potential liability, especially if it winds up outside of the US, it would be incredibly stupid for a company to do this. They might avoid being sued by an end user with no deep pockets; but a major corporation or country's regulators have a bit more resources to pursue such a suit. Even if the law says it's OK doesn't mean you can avoid any consequences, especially if you can prove negligence.
If only children could be as experienced, thoughtful, and wise as adults!
But they can't, so it's up to adults to grow up and get a clue that stuff people do at 14 rarely matters by the time
they're 21.
For that matter, stuff you do in your 20s doesn't often say a whole lot about you in your 40s. In the few cases it does, we can still safely ignore it because you likely provided more than enough red flags in your 30s as well.
While I agree in theory in this case practice is different from theory. In addition, posting things that reflect poorly on someone doesn't stop at 14 - it often extends to college years. Sure, many people behave(d) the same way and didn't post details but it becomes a case of "I saw this" vs a blank slate. We can say it shouldn't matter but unfortunately it does; which is why the original point is "Be careful and selective about what you put out on the internet about yourself because it will never go away." Just because we all did it when younger doesn't mean we will find it acceptable later when we are making decisions or be as forgiving as perhaps we should. Putting the onus on others to "grow and get a clue" doesn't solve the underlying fundamental problem. We can rationalize the behaviors; argue, as other posters have, they are really the types of behaviors they want because they will be better employees; think it will become irrelevant because everyone will be doing it but none of that makes it very smart to put every stupid thing you did out there for people who may hire you, decide whether to admit you to a school, etc. and give them a reason to chose someone else.
is many of them don't realize the long term ramifications of what they are making readily available online. They think that simply because they limit access to a few friends or don't tag the pictures with their names they are keeping things private. Coupled with a belief "people won't or don't care" makes them somewhat oblivious to the privacy issues. Unfortunately, when they don't get / lose a job because of something that was found online they will realize the importance; but it will be too late. Granted, people make mistakes and shouldn't bear the burden of them forever; but if given the choice between candidate A, where you can find those mistakes on line, and B, where you can't, B will generally win.
Completely true. I used to work for a very large company of > 150k employees who decreed that we wouldn't be allowed to touch certain types of Open Source software with a 10-foot pole, completely missing the fact that their entire line of copier products was based on Linux...
There was a complete disconnect between the PHB-side of the business and R,D&E.
Not really - the code running the copier was pretty much useless without the copier; and few companies have the manufacturing ability to build copiers. Releasing the code isn't going to impact them competitively so it makes sense to use GPL'd code if it works and is cheaper than rolling your own. On the other hand, using GPL'd code in a stand alone document management system that runs on someone else's widely available hardware would not make sense; because any competitor could then resell your code without the investment in developing it and potentially undercut your pricing.
> I assure you that not many companies allow you to touch anything GPL even with 10-foot pole. I work for big company [...]
I'm afraid your point-of-view is biased. The "never touch GPL" rule is much more likely to occur with big companies than smaller ones. Big companies are clumsy, and the decision about using GPL'ed software must likely be made by someone who is too disconnected from the differences between use/extend/link to, and the differences between use/distribute internally/distribute externally. Smaller companies are much more likely to just gather the relevant people and make a more informed decision.
Big company decision making can be cumbersome and it's often easier to say no than yes. However, they are likely not looking at the technical aspects but potential liability. They don't want to accidentally get into a situation where some proprietary product potentially becomes subject to he GPL because some coder added a few lines of GLP'd code. It's easier and less risky to simply ban the use of GPL'd code and pay to develop or license code that doesn't expose them to such a risk.
If an anecdote were in fact relevant, I'd say that I work for a small company that has absolutely no problem with using GPL'ed software, and even linking to it since we're mostly doing SAAS and not distributing code.
That is a different model - the code is not what you sell, it's the service. A company can ban GPL'd code in products while using it to run servers or in other applications where the value is not in the code but what it does and how the company provides the service.
If you want an excellent engineer, you need to pay at least reasonable.
True, and if he can't afford a 100K/year for a full time hire it makes it seem that he is trying to get A+ work at at C+ prices and discovering that it is not a sustainable business model.
I do actually expect all work I pay for to be "bug free" I recently had an aftermarket bed liner put in my truck, and it came back with a bug: it was crooked. I took it back and demanded they make it right for free. And you know what happened? They fixed it for free. Everyone makes mistakes, but when the product makes it to the customer it had better be right.
Why are programmers exempt from workmanship standards?
There is a difference from what is a reasonable standard that is generally accepted for a product and perfection. A crooked bed liner is clearly not normal, but if you expected every seam to be within.0000001 of an inch then you would be beyond the bounds or reasonable and customary. Programers aren't exempt, but workmanship standards do not mean 100% bug free code; especially since every situation can not be anticipated and all bugs discovered and fixed.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a simple solution to theft - initialize each device with a unique key, and give a copy of that key to the owner. By all means pre-load it with trust for the vendor key as well so that it can auto-update by default, but the master key goes to the user. The key might be a $2 USB drive in a little envelope that says "keep safe and don't open unless you want to modify the OS software - Vendor may not be able to repair devices without this key."
"Hello, Apple tech Support" "I lost my USB key - and my phone won't unlock." The problem is people will lose the key; how do you handle that without it becoming a logistical nightmare? Apple really doesn't want to get into the business of determining if a phone was stolen or it is a legitimate lost key request .
One challenge is the existing infrastructure. Would ports spend the money to handle mega-Panamax ships and can the rail infrastructure handle the increased freight. The ability to move freight beyond the port can be a big bottleneck.
One word...NIMBYs. Frankly NIMBYs is why america will be fucked in the future, you can't get shit done here without the NIMBYs having a royal fucking shitfit so we either keep the pre-NIMBY shit running or do without, that really is the only choices we have.
My favorite bumper sticker when it comes to energy was one I saw when Switzerland was voting on nuclear power: "Who needs power plants? I get my electricity from a wall outlet." That pretty much summed up the challenge.
...and inform them of the unethical behavior of the new developer, the situation it put you in and how shocked you were to find that they had deprived you of the opportunity to take credit for your work. Somebody at that company hired you and knows what truly happened. Hopefully that person is in a position to put the situation right and give you the credit you are due.
That said, relying on your code being still accessible after you have left it for a while is not a situation you want to be in. Your former clients can take that code down and replace it any time they want, with anything they want. You should have checked to see the status of that code yourself shortly before you tried to present it as an example of your work.
While I agree on contacting them; I'd start by calling whoever you worked for and explaining what happened. You're not looking for a fight; just to be able to take credit for work you did for them. I'd approach it as a "you won't believe what happened to me..." and don't start with adversarial lawyer letters as some have suggested; they may not even realize their new developer put his copyright on the code. I'd also check your contrat to see if you actually still own the code.
Have the phone interact with the car so that it is used to activate the starting mechanism. While the car is running the phone is blocked from use except for handsfree calling. You get in, open an app, start the car, and drive off. Sure, you can have 2 phones or use a passengers but realistically most folks won't.
to ignore callers I don't want to talk to.
Once the PC market became a commodity they moved on.
So no, they didn't "move on" when the PC market became a commodity; it took them a very long time to wake up and smell the coffee, and even then it took them a while before they finally sold off that business unit.
I didn't mean to imply they did so immediately; as you pointed out they tried to differentiate themselves, with little success beyond the thinkPads, to be abel to command a premium. Eventually they simply exited the market when it became they could not get premium pricing. But that is my main point - IBM shifted its focus to areas where they can extract a premium; existing the PC market is just one example of how and when they do that.
I don't think IBM should take your insults lying down. IBM knew when to shift. They may not be high-profile in the PC world anymore, but they've certainly spun off their product lines to companies that could handle them. Meanwhile, IBM themselves haven't exactly disappeared.
That is because IBM has always been about being in businesses that are higher margin and where they can use their breadth and depth of talent, IP, etc. to their advantage. Once the PC market became a commodity they moved on. Big iron is much harder to commoditize and they can sell services around it that use the computing power as business tools. Even as they spin off some businesses they buy others, such as Monday (PwC Consulting) that fit within their services model.
MS has always been, first and foremost, a software company. Services always seemed as an afterthought and focused on their software rather than providing business solutions.
It's being done by the tester, not the students, possibly to keep some people (in specific regions) out of the school they want.
It would be interesting to see if the anomalies correspond to cutoff scores for various educational tiers; i.e. if Tier 1 schools require a minimum of say 70 do you see a spike at and after that with a corresponding empty value and or dip just below that. If the anomalies correspond to the cutoff scores for admissions then that would seem to indicate scores were adjusted to help students get in. If you see a spike just before the cutoff and a blank then it may be students were down graded as well.
Cockroaches can withstand radiation . . . maybe modern gene therapy could help humans to replicate that process in themselves . . . ?
Hopefully, without turning them into cockroaches . . .
Too late. We call them lawyers
If you ain't cheaten, you ain't winnin.
Why? TFA
One puzzle is why health care workers are so bad at it. Among the explanations studies have offered are complaints about dry skin, the pressures of an emergency environment, the tedium of hand washing and resistance to authority (doctors, who have the most authority, tend to be the most resistant, studies have found).
But... hang on a bit... how come 20 years ago this wasn't an issue?
It was. The first thing you should ask anyone getting ready to examine you when in the hospital is "Did you sanitize your hands?"
Sure, downloads happen through iTunes, but it would still behoove Apple to point searches for songs to iTunes in some way, even if through some intermediary that launches iTunes to actually make the download.
Which is probably why Google were surprised that Apple is not already doing so. Not that that has anything at all to do with copyright infringement.
I am not sure Apple would gain anything buy paying to push iTunes. They have a pretty good market already with users predisposed to going there for music so as dollars would add no revenue hike raising costs. Since iTunes is device specific to a large extent the chance that someone who doesn't know about it becoming a customer is also small, so advertising makes no sense to draw in customers. So it is not surprising Apple ignores Google searches.
Except that 80% of German beer that is drunk it good or better beer and 80% of american beer that is drunk is mediocre or worse. You can find very bad beer in Germany and great beer in the US. The big difference in Germany is that most beer that is sold in bars is from the one of the local breweries, which on average is 3 per town (from 1000 pop.). In many cases you have larger beer houses that brew and sell their own beer. On average you get better beer in Germany than the US.
- from a USA/German national
And 100% of Belgium beer is as good or better than German; as is their chocolates relative to the Swiss.
Are we still having this conversation in 2013? You lost. It's over. Our society at large accepts and supports file sharing for non-commercial use. You can't put that toothpaste back in the tube, you can't roll back the cultural clock. You will not stop filesharing. Figure out a way to make money in this new economy or die quietly.
They have. It's called "THE CLOUD;" with the end goal of ending physical distribution of entertainment and software. Once they do that, file sharing will be much more difficult to the point where it becomes an insignificant problem. For that to happen, high speed access needs to be more prevalent, and the content owners need to find a way to either share revenue with the bandwidth providers or develop their own delivery infrastructure, such as Google is doing. Until then, they will fight rear guard actions such as this in an attempt to stay in business long enough to make the transition. Oddly enough, copyright extensions will be in some ways less important because once you control the storage media to the point where, even if a copyright expires, if others cannot obtain re-distributable copies then the original holder can continue to control the work. Of course, for every advance in protection someone else will look to ways to circumvent it.
I'd struggle to see how the owner of the rootkit could disclaim responsibility in a corporate scenario - especially if lives were lost (e.g. a member of staff, not knowingly, installs a rootkit-installing version of Greys Anatomy into a hospital Citrix system). There's quite a cultural and legal difference between consuming media using devices and installing software that intends to change the behaviour of the end user device.
Also, the sheer volume of test-case and conditions could have hard to predict outcomes (e.g. watching a rootkit-installing DVD on a car infotainment system). Whilst I would think that some software organisations would be daft enough to produce software like this on behalf of the large media organisations I can't see how the business case could stack up given the huge amount of risk of doing this given that there is no way on most legal frameworks that responsibility could be disclaimed.
I agree - even if it is intended only for what I would characterize "home use," i.e. a single machine in a non-commerical setting, it would be hard to prevent it from winding up in other settings. Given the potential liability, especially if it winds up outside of the US, it would be incredibly stupid for a company to do this. They might avoid being sued by an end user with no deep pockets; but a major corporation or country's regulators have a bit more resources to pursue such a suit. Even if the law says it's OK doesn't mean you can avoid any consequences, especially if you can prove negligence.
the response the first time a major corporation's computers become the "victim" of a legal root kit.
If only children could be as experienced, thoughtful, and wise as adults!
But they can't, so it's up to adults to grow up and get a clue that stuff people do at 14 rarely matters by the time they're 21.
For that matter, stuff you do in your 20s doesn't often say a whole lot about you in your 40s. In the few cases it does, we can still safely ignore it because you likely provided more than enough red flags in your 30s as well.
While I agree in theory in this case practice is different from theory. In addition, posting things that reflect poorly on someone doesn't stop at 14 - it often extends to college years. Sure, many people behave(d) the same way and didn't post details but it becomes a case of "I saw this" vs a blank slate. We can say it shouldn't matter but unfortunately it does; which is why the original point is "Be careful and selective about what you put out on the internet about yourself because it will never go away." Just because we all did it when younger doesn't mean we will find it acceptable later when we are making decisions or be as forgiving as perhaps we should. Putting the onus on others to "grow and get a clue" doesn't solve the underlying fundamental problem. We can rationalize the behaviors; argue, as other posters have, they are really the types of behaviors they want because they will be better employees; think it will become irrelevant because everyone will be doing it but none of that makes it very smart to put every stupid thing you did out there for people who may hire you, decide whether to admit you to a school, etc. and give them a reason to chose someone else.
is many of them don't realize the long term ramifications of what they are making readily available online. They think that simply because they limit access to a few friends or don't tag the pictures with their names they are keeping things private. Coupled with a belief "people won't or don't care" makes them somewhat oblivious to the privacy issues. Unfortunately, when they don't get / lose a job because of something that was found online they will realize the importance; but it will be too late. Granted, people make mistakes and shouldn't bear the burden of them forever; but if given the choice between candidate A, where you can find those mistakes on line, and B, where you can't, B will generally win.
Completely true. I used to work for a very large company of > 150k employees who decreed that we wouldn't be allowed to touch certain types of Open Source software with a 10-foot pole, completely missing the fact that their entire line of copier products was based on Linux...
There was a complete disconnect between the PHB-side of the business and R,D&E.
Not really - the code running the copier was pretty much useless without the copier; and few companies have the manufacturing ability to build copiers. Releasing the code isn't going to impact them competitively so it makes sense to use GPL'd code if it works and is cheaper than rolling your own. On the other hand, using GPL'd code in a stand alone document management system that runs on someone else's widely available hardware would not make sense; because any competitor could then resell your code without the investment in developing it and potentially undercut your pricing.
> I assure you that not many companies allow you to touch anything GPL even with 10-foot pole. I work for big company [...]
I'm afraid your point-of-view is biased. The "never touch GPL" rule is much more likely to occur with big companies than smaller ones. Big companies are clumsy, and the decision about using GPL'ed software must likely be made by someone who is too disconnected from the differences between use/extend/link to, and the differences between use/distribute internally/distribute externally. Smaller companies are much more likely to just gather the relevant people and make a more informed decision.
Big company decision making can be cumbersome and it's often easier to say no than yes. However, they are likely not looking at the technical aspects but potential liability. They don't want to accidentally get into a situation where some proprietary product potentially becomes subject to he GPL because some coder added a few lines of GLP'd code. It's easier and less risky to simply ban the use of GPL'd code and pay to develop or license code that doesn't expose them to such a risk.
If an anecdote were in fact relevant, I'd say that I work for a small company that has absolutely no problem with using GPL'ed software, and even linking to it since we're mostly doing SAAS and not distributing code.
That is a different model - the code is not what you sell, it's the service. A company can ban GPL'd code in products while using it to run servers or in other applications where the value is not in the code but what it does and how the company provides the service.
and I've tried to keep 555-1212 private for so long...
Your data back.
If you want an excellent engineer, you need to pay at least reasonable.
True, and if he can't afford a 100K/year for a full time hire it makes it seem that he is trying to get A+ work at at C+ prices and discovering that it is not a sustainable business model.
I do actually expect all work I pay for to be "bug free" I recently had an aftermarket bed liner put in my truck, and it came back with a bug: it was crooked. I took it back and demanded they make it right for free. And you know what happened? They fixed it for free. Everyone makes mistakes, but when the product makes it to the customer it had better be right. Why are programmers exempt from workmanship standards?
There is a difference from what is a reasonable standard that is generally accepted for a product and perfection. A crooked bed liner is clearly not normal, but if you expected every seam to be within .0000001 of an inch then you would be beyond the bounds or reasonable and customary. Programers aren't exempt, but workmanship standards do not mean 100% bug free code; especially since every situation can not be anticipated and all bugs discovered and fixed.