Does anyone know if this exploit affects the VNC server that is built in to Mac OS X? I've never been clear on which mainstream software package it's based on (if any, it doesn't make it obvious either, it's just "VNC Access" and a checkbox, but I can't imagine Apple would have rewritten a VNC server from scratch if they didn't have to).
There's no real good way to set up that service with an SSH tunnel -- I think it's intended use is only on local networks when you're behind a firewall, but on the other hand there's nothing that marks it as being screamingly insecure when you go to turn it on, either (IIRC). If you want to tunnel it, or rather, if you want to limit access to connections that are coming in via an SSH tunnel, I think you have to run a regular VNC server and set it up manually.
The test page is down right now so I can't check it one way or the other, but I'd be interested to see if anyone knows what code is actually used for Apple's built-in VNC server, and whether people believe it's vunerable.
I'm not going to get into an economic argument about personal debt, but I think using the dollar as a measure of the strength of the economy is probably wrongheaded, at least over the past few years.
People have been talking for years about how the value of the dollar, relative to other currencies, hurts US exports, encourages imports, and similarly encourages foreign tourism rather than domestic stuff. Devaluing the dollar relative to other currencies was always part of the Bush administration fiscal policy from day 1: I clearly remember people talking about it during his first campaign. I even recall distinctly a bunch of editorial cartoons which proclaimed how the falling dollar was going to "land on" or "flatten" the Euro and other currencies.
The theory was that you could help the economy overall by making exports cheaper and imports more expensive. (However, as he apparently just realized, a lot of what we import is basically inelastic: we're too addicted to oil to cut our demand for it much, even as the price increases, thus the increase in price hurts us.)
Now, we can debate whether his fiscal policy is intelligent or not -- I'm tempted to say that it's probably not been, and that history won't be kind to him on that front -- but the devaluation of the dollar was at least partly intentional/allowed.
Just remember, every one of those spammers was an obnoxious script kiddie at some point. And the difference between "obnoxious" and "destructive" is only one of scale.
I've said the same thing I don't know how many times. I don't know if the lack of a year is some sort of throwback to Slashdot's beginnings (what, didn't they think it would last more than a year?) or what, but it's obnoxious.
I'm used to having to look in the URL bar to figure out what era an article is from. While you'd think it's obvious on a tech news site, for some of the political or misc. / cultural / current-events articles, you can't necessarily tell whether something is from 1999 or today.
Wasn't it recently ruled that caching a page wasn't a copyright violation?
Somebody tried to sue Google, and it didn't work out for them. Granted, I don't know whether wget'ing a page is as easily defensible as a massive, automated, distributed system like the Google Cache, but there are some fair use arguments there.
Are you sure about this? I just disabled Java, Javascript, and Plugin support, and the site still seems to work in Safari.
I'm not enthused about the looks of any of the sites, I find all of them more visually distracting than the old look, but they all seem to function on my machine. (Although one of them does throw up that weird bar in the middle of the page, i mentioned it further up in this discussion.)
Okay... I admit I'm not that familiar with the internals of Windows, and I also understand that (at least here on/.), Windows is widely seen as a product of programmers who were deprived of oxygen during critical stages of fetal development. But in what universe does having icons in your Start menu translate to having more running processes?
That's like the people who think their computer is slow because they have too many icons on the desktop...
I mentioned this elsewhere as well, but I just thought about it and realized that a Netgear router I installed for my parents almost 5 years ago is still running fine, and has been doing so with no downtime except for power outages.
That's about the best track record of any piece of under-$50 networking equipment I can think of, except for maybe hubs and cables.
I've had my share of Linksys gear, and I doubt it'll last anywhere near as long as that: I've had two 54-series routers flake out on me in the last year, the only reason I'm hanging onto one of them is because it's the Linux model and I figure maybe it'll suck less with somebody else's firmware.
Talk about a company that got gutted...I think their purpose in life is to keep the prices on consumer-grade equipment from climbing to the point where its features might start to compete with actual Cisco gear. If Linksys can keep Netgear's and D-Link's margins thin enough through competition, and busy trying to make the cheapest router and selling it on the end-aisle display at Wal-Mart, they'll never have the opportunity to compete with Cisco's "real" products.
This thread in particular is about the Mac Book Pro, but I've heard it happens with some other computers also; no clue why or what, but the solution that most people seem to be using is "buy a new router" of a brand other than Linksys. Contributing to this is the general brain-deadedness of their tech support staff (and to be fair, Apple's as well), who just point fingers.
FWIW, I have a Netgear MR314 running at my parents house that I set up for them when they first got broadband and the thing is a champ; I think it's been running constantly for 4-1/2 years now (if I did my math right) and the only times it hasn't worked is when the power is out. Damn thing is built like a tank, too: sheet metal chassis, none of this blue plastic crap. I've yet to get a Linksys product that's anywhere near as stable, and based on this article I'm not going to run out and get a D-Link.
The best part are the unions that are basically PACs that take a portion of your paycheck and spend it sponsoring political candidates that you may or may not agree with. Say what you want about the NRA, they're not going around and forcing anyone to donate to them. The big unions basically are: if you want to keep your job, you pay the union dues, and they spend them where they want. In California, they even managed to defeat a measure that would have allowed people to "opt out" of this type of forced-contribution. Talk about a conflict of interest...
That's what I find repulsive. If I want to make a political contribution, I'll break out my checkbook and make it, either directly to the candidate, or to an organization that reflects my views. I wouldn't appreciate it if my employer told me that there was a $50/month mandatory donation out of my paycheck to the political party of their choice, yet that's exactly what the unions do.
And as a line employee, I can guarantee you I'd have about as much say in where the union spent my dues money as in how my company spends its annual budget -- which is to say, essentially zero.
Don't get me wrong -- I agree with you completely.
Management would be criminally stupid to get rid of someone who has that amount of accumulated knowledge in a situation like that. Heck, where I work, we keep a few guys on the team who are basically like that. They spend maybe 75% of their time donut-munching their way towards a myocardial infarction, and the other 25% solving problems nobody else can solve. I don't know what they get paid, but I'd say they're worth every penny, just for the times they've helped me out.
However, (and I'm making some assumptions here) they're not being kept on because of some misguided sense of loyalty on the part of management. They're being kept on because someone along the line correctly realized their great value as an asset to everyone else. That's how the system ought to work; nobody's on the payroll for the sake of being on the payroll, they're there because they're doing something useful. (That was a lot of "there"'s -- apologies.)
Now, I'm not saying my company is exactly ideal in every way. (Don't even get me started...I'm trying to stick to the positive.) But at least in this one instance, it's a good demonstration of how things are supposed to work. Nobody gets a "desk by the window" just because they've put in 30 years.
An organization that fails to recognize the value of it's skilled employees is squandering its (in all probability) most valuable resource, and is being as equally stupid as the one who keeps people on for no good reason at all.
This is where I think you get into the false conclusions.
Do you really think that the engineering teams at U.S. automakers are so inept they can't take apart a Toyota and see how it's made? They have whole labs just for doing that. (Coincidentally, so does Toyota, and every other manufacturer.) Trust me, they know exactly how one is built. There's no secrets. Outside of maybe a few computer chips that aren't documented, everything inside cars today -- foreign and domestic -- is well understood by all parties involved.
But most of the big manufacturers don't have the flexibility to build new plants to take advantage of new manufacturing techniques, because they're tied into employment contracts that make retooling plants much tougher. Going from frame-on construction to stamped uni-bodies, or from bolted together parts to robotically spot-welded, isn't something you just decide to do over a weekend. If you can do it without building an entirely new plant, you're lucky.
Plants can't be retooled because employees can't easily be laid off; old plants are expensive to close, and new plants are almost prohibitively expensive to open.
It's naive of anyone to just say "Americans don't know how to make cars." That's stupid; there's no magic that the Germans and the Japanese have and we don't. There's no reason that the Ford engineers would want to make crappy cars (and in all fairness, I don't think they do); every car design is a result of lots of tradeoffs, including what can be manufactured at a certain price point at a particular time.
The U.S. auto industry is a behemoth, always lagging behind the times and wandering ponderously off in wrong directions, because it's almost impossible to steer. While some of that can be attributed to poor leadership, the root cause of the problem is just that there's a whole lot of dead weight that the foreign auto industries (particularly the Asian ones) don't have to deal with. If Kia wants to shutter a plant for six months so it can implement the latest robotic welders, it does; GM can't, although I think the unions are slowly getting with the program, and realizing that when the U.S. auto industry finishes its wounded-dinosaur routine and collapses, they're going to be squarely underneath.
Don't you think it's important for your government to conform to the constitution in all of its dealings, even in international lands?
No. The Constitution governs a relationship between the U.S. Government and the Citizens of the United States of America. The relationship of this Government to citizens of other places is governed by the treaties lawfully made (i.e. made according to the Constitution) by the Government, with the foreign government.
You have a belief system in your constitution that only applies to domestic issues?
Yes. I have beliefs about how a country should be run -- my country, the one that I live in. How other countries are governed is their own citizens' business. I don't think we should be telling other people how to govern themselves, which is basically the result of the attitude I think you are suggesting -- namely that the Constitution should apply extraterritorially everywhere.
We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
It says exactly nothing about "making the world a better place," or "ensuring the rights of all people everywhere are respected."
However, if you can come up with a good argument for why such measures or goals would make life here in America nicer, or be otherwise beneficial to U.S. Citizens, I'd probably support them. (E.g., by fostering democracy and human rights worldwide, you make the world a more stable place, reduce terrorism, increase trade, etc., thus we do it.) But the U.S. Government has no mandate over or responsibility to non-citizens. It never has, it wasn't intended to, and it never should.
Leveled between the employees and the company, not between the employees. Beyond that your post because a bunch of BS that even cursory study of the history of even skilled labor shows to be bullocks.
You'd have a point if most unionized professions didn't also view employees basically as interchangeable units, all deserving of the same compensation for the same hours worked, increasing in value only through "time in grade" based metrics, where as long as you manage to not get fired, every year you get a small raise.
I've yet to see any unionized employment that really rewarded outstanding performance and recognized that some people are just inherently better at some jobs than others. And generally any attempt to do this is opposed, tooth and nail, by the unions.
Unions THRIVE on an antagonistic relationship between "boss" and "worker," and intentionally suppress competition between one worker and the next. If you shut up and slog along with everybody else and put in your time, you can't be fired and you get your raises with your "seniority." After you put in enough years, you get retirement. It's the same track, everyone's on it, and everybody's the same.
That's not a system that rewards creativity or superior ability, or any other types of individual differences. It's a system of artificially-enforced equality that has the effect of bringing everyone down to the same level.
There is no such thing as a permanent job, and you're naive if you believed that.
Employment is an agreement between two parties, the employer and the employee. It only works as long as both people think they're getting a good deal: your employer thinks that your output is worth what they're paying you, and you (the employee) think that your pay is worth your labor.
If one or both parties don't feel that way, it's not going to last.
This myth that people have of "lifetime employment," where somehow an organization owes you something because you've been there for a set period of time, is a load of crap. Your employer doesn't owe you a thing besides your paycheck and whatever other benefits you have in writing.
If you stayed at your job when you didn't feel that the pay was worth your labor, then you were a fool, and I'm sorry to hear you made a mistake. You should have left. Institutions aren't deserving of any feelings of "loyalty," since they have none in return. A corporation feels nothing when it fires the 30-year veteran or the 6-month temp hire.
Any system that tries to mandate less flexibility -- making it harder for workers to join or leave companies, or harder for companies to take on or get rid of employees -- makes the business climate less competitive versus other places where such restrictions don't exist. And as a country, the LAST thing we need to be doing right now is making ourselves less competitive with regards to the rest of the world.
Why would I want the playing field artificially leveled? My playing field greatly favors me because I am better at my job than most people. A collective bargaining agreement would end that advantage. I could only do as well as anyone else.
Well said. I agree; the playing field looks just fine from where I'm sitting, and I damn well don't need anyone jiggering around and propping up the low end of it, thanks very much.
If I had wanted a lowest-common-denominator, unionized job, I would have gone to trade school, become a machinist, and made auto parts for a living. Oh wait -- all those companies, that whole freaking industry is going out of business in this country, because of the way the Unions have driven the cost of production through the roof. I hope they've had a good run, because they've collective-bargained themselves out of a job.
And that's exactly what would happen in the technology sector, except it wouldn't take half a century for the jobs to start to disappear, it would take half a decade -- and that's at the most. We already have a problem getting businesses to not outsource tech jobs to places where the cost-of-living is a lot lower, and now people want to unionize and make that even higher? It's insane.
Joining a union is about as appealing to me as chaining myself to a half a dozen people who can't swim and jumping into a lake.
You're not worth every penney- you're worth the $2.50/hr your job can be done in India for.
Oh yes, and if all of us tech workers in America join a union, I'm sure it'll make those folks in India look that much less attractive! That's what we need in this country -- make us even more expensive to hire.
So once all the good jobs get outsourced, which shift at Wal-Mart do you want to take? I assume you'll have to check with your manager down at Mickey D's first...
1) The parent poster didn't have to qualify his claim: even if you only wiretap international calls without warrants, that's still wiretapping without warrants.
Not true. If both the source and the destination of the call were outside U.S. borders (and for some reason it was just passing through the U.S. telecom network), no warrant would be required, since no Citizens' rights are being infringed.
At that point, you'd just have created a problem with the other countries involved, and any treaties that the U.S. might hold with them.
Yeah it does the same thing in Safari 2.0.3. No idea why though.
Personally, I'm sort of up into the air as to which ones I like, if any of them. I'm not altogether enthused. It's like they're all striving to be "modern" for the sake of being modern, rather than having a form-follows-function approach, putting readability and clarity first, and having the format flow from there.
They've just got too many 'boxes' going on; I find them visually distracting, and I think that after a few hours I'd be reaching for the "Slashdot Classic" option.
Read the bottom of my post. I fundamentally disagree with the assertion that a partial solution is better than none at all, at least in this case.
A partial solution leads to a false sense of security and greater reliance on heavyhanded, top-down "solutions" to problems that should have been solved from the bottom-up.
Perhaps I'm mistaken here, but if everyone started downloading the torrent after you, how would this help your download speeds? Assuming the pieces download sequentially, they would all have pieces that you already have (since you started first) and instead there'd just be more fighting for connections to the few servers/peers that have the few pieces that you still need.
Seems like if you could have gotten a few thousand people to start downloading the torrent, and then started, you'd be in good shape. But I don't see why adding a bunch of new people to a torrent would help someone who's already well along in downloading the file.
Unless BT downloads pieces of a file non-sequentially, in a random order or something.
I really don't see anything that has changed as a result of the acquisition.
Color me stupid, but didn't they switch from KDE to Gnome as a result of the acquisition? Or was that just coincidental in timing?
How is KDE on SuSE now that they've made Gnome the 'official' or primary desktop?
Right now I'm using Ubuntu with the KDE Desktop packages (Kubuntu) and I'm really dissatisfied. Everything works, but it's just really rough around the edges. The GUI config utilities all seem to be broken, Konqueror randomly crashes when I try to do certain things ("Image View" causes SIGSEGV, repeatably)...however, it browses the Internet OK, works with my SCSI card, WL card, and tape drive OK, and as long as I don't try anything weird, is basically stable. So I'm sort of in that grey area where I'm not happy with it, but I'm not ready for the major project that switching to a new distro (and having to get stuff like WL, SCSI, tape working again) would involve.
I think the next distro I switch to will be something that's corporate-backed. I want something with good documentation. Unfortunately I just cannot stand Gnome (no screen-top menu bar). I'd been eyeing SuSE for a while, but I was disappointed when they moved to Gnome and now I'm hesitant to try the KDE version, because I don't want to get in on something that's on its way out. Also I'm sick of feeling like a second-class citizen, like Kubuntu/Ubuntu.
Anyway enough ranting. I was curious though what the deal is with KDE and Gnome on SuSE, I know they say they're continuing to support KDE, but that's what spokesweasels always say about stuff right up until they end-of-life it.
Slashdot Mirror
Does anyone know if this exploit affects the VNC server that is built in to Mac OS X? I've never been clear on which mainstream software package it's based on (if any, it doesn't make it obvious either, it's just "VNC Access" and a checkbox, but I can't imagine Apple would have rewritten a VNC server from scratch if they didn't have to).
There's no real good way to set up that service with an SSH tunnel -- I think it's intended use is only on local networks when you're behind a firewall, but on the other hand there's nothing that marks it as being screamingly insecure when you go to turn it on, either (IIRC). If you want to tunnel it, or rather, if you want to limit access to connections that are coming in via an SSH tunnel, I think you have to run a regular VNC server and set it up manually.
The test page is down right now so I can't check it one way or the other, but I'd be interested to see if anyone knows what code is actually used for Apple's built-in VNC server, and whether people believe it's vunerable.
I'm not going to get into an economic argument about personal debt, but I think using the dollar as a measure of the strength of the economy is probably wrongheaded, at least over the past few years.
People have been talking for years about how the value of the dollar, relative to other currencies, hurts US exports, encourages imports, and similarly encourages foreign tourism rather than domestic stuff. Devaluing the dollar relative to other currencies was always part of the Bush administration fiscal policy from day 1: I clearly remember people talking about it during his first campaign. I even recall distinctly a bunch of editorial cartoons which proclaimed how the falling dollar was going to "land on" or "flatten" the Euro and other currencies.
The theory was that you could help the economy overall by making exports cheaper and imports more expensive. (However, as he apparently just realized, a lot of what we import is basically inelastic: we're too addicted to oil to cut our demand for it much, even as the price increases, thus the increase in price hurts us.)
Now, we can debate whether his fiscal policy is intelligent or not -- I'm tempted to say that it's probably not been, and that history won't be kind to him on that front -- but the devaluation of the dollar was at least partly intentional/allowed.
You'll have six human-sized flotation devices to choose from.
That's only if you bludgeon them fast enough to keep from drowning you in their flailing. And even then, bodies only float for so long.
I'm not really sure how that works into the union analogy. I'm pretty sure it translates into something illegal. Or at least really unethical.
Okay so no baseball bat .... rolled-up phone book?
Just remember, every one of those spammers was an obnoxious script kiddie at some point. And the difference between "obnoxious" and "destructive" is only one of scale.
I've said the same thing I don't know how many times. I don't know if the lack of a year is some sort of throwback to Slashdot's beginnings (what, didn't they think it would last more than a year?) or what, but it's obnoxious.
I'm used to having to look in the URL bar to figure out what era an article is from. While you'd think it's obvious on a tech news site, for some of the political or misc. / cultural / current-events articles, you can't necessarily tell whether something is from 1999 or today.
Wasn't it recently ruled that caching a page wasn't a copyright violation?
Somebody tried to sue Google, and it didn't work out for them. Granted, I don't know whether wget'ing a page is as easily defensible as a massive, automated, distributed system like the Google Cache, but there are some fair use arguments there.
Are you sure about this? I just disabled Java, Javascript, and Plugin support, and the site still seems to work in Safari.
I'm not enthused about the looks of any of the sites, I find all of them more visually distracting than the old look, but they all seem to function on my machine. (Although one of them does throw up that weird bar in the middle of the page, i mentioned it further up in this discussion.)
Okay ... I admit I'm not that familiar with the internals of Windows, and I also understand that (at least here on /.), Windows is widely seen as a product of programmers who were deprived of oxygen during critical stages of fetal development. But in what universe does having icons in your Start menu translate to having more running processes?
That's like the people who think their computer is slow because they have too many icons on the desktop...
I mentioned this elsewhere as well, but I just thought about it and realized that a Netgear router I installed for my parents almost 5 years ago is still running fine, and has been doing so with no downtime except for power outages.
That's about the best track record of any piece of under-$50 networking equipment I can think of, except for maybe hubs and cables.
I've had my share of Linksys gear, and I doubt it'll last anywhere near as long as that: I've had two 54-series routers flake out on me in the last year, the only reason I'm hanging onto one of them is because it's the Linux model and I figure maybe it'll suck less with somebody else's firmware.
Talk about a company that got gutted...I think their purpose in life is to keep the prices on consumer-grade equipment from climbing to the point where its features might start to compete with actual Cisco gear. If Linksys can keep Netgear's and D-Link's margins thin enough through competition, and busy trying to make the cheapest router and selling it on the end-aisle display at Wal-Mart, they'll never have the opportunity to compete with Cisco's "real" products.
You're not the only one.
= 381090&tstart=0
It seems that quite a few people have experienced odd behaviors as a result of interactions between Linksys routers and some Macs.
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID
This thread in particular is about the Mac Book Pro, but I've heard it happens with some other computers also; no clue why or what, but the solution that most people seem to be using is "buy a new router" of a brand other than Linksys. Contributing to this is the general brain-deadedness of their tech support staff (and to be fair, Apple's as well), who just point fingers.
FWIW, I have a Netgear MR314 running at my parents house that I set up for them when they first got broadband and the thing is a champ; I think it's been running constantly for 4-1/2 years now (if I did my math right) and the only times it hasn't worked is when the power is out. Damn thing is built like a tank, too: sheet metal chassis, none of this blue plastic crap. I've yet to get a Linksys product that's anywhere near as stable, and based on this article I'm not going to run out and get a D-Link.
The best part are the unions that are basically PACs that take a portion of your paycheck and spend it sponsoring political candidates that you may or may not agree with. Say what you want about the NRA, they're not going around and forcing anyone to donate to them. The big unions basically are: if you want to keep your job, you pay the union dues, and they spend them where they want. In California, they even managed to defeat a measure that would have allowed people to "opt out" of this type of forced-contribution. Talk about a conflict of interest...
That's what I find repulsive. If I want to make a political contribution, I'll break out my checkbook and make it, either directly to the candidate, or to an organization that reflects my views. I wouldn't appreciate it if my employer told me that there was a $50/month mandatory donation out of my paycheck to the political party of their choice, yet that's exactly what the unions do.
And as a line employee, I can guarantee you I'd have about as much say in where the union spent my dues money as in how my company spends its annual budget -- which is to say, essentially zero.
Don't get me wrong -- I agree with you completely.
Management would be criminally stupid to get rid of someone who has that amount of accumulated knowledge in a situation like that. Heck, where I work, we keep a few guys on the team who are basically like that. They spend maybe 75% of their time donut-munching their way towards a myocardial infarction, and the other 25% solving problems nobody else can solve. I don't know what they get paid, but I'd say they're worth every penny, just for the times they've helped me out.
However, (and I'm making some assumptions here) they're not being kept on because of some misguided sense of loyalty on the part of management. They're being kept on because someone along the line correctly realized their great value as an asset to everyone else. That's how the system ought to work; nobody's on the payroll for the sake of being on the payroll, they're there because they're doing something useful. (That was a lot of "there"'s -- apologies.)
Now, I'm not saying my company is exactly ideal in every way. (Don't even get me started...I'm trying to stick to the positive.) But at least in this one instance, it's a good demonstration of how things are supposed to work. Nobody gets a "desk by the window" just because they've put in 30 years.
An organization that fails to recognize the value of it's skilled employees is squandering its (in all probability) most valuable resource, and is being as equally stupid as the one who keeps people on for no good reason at all.
This is where I think you get into the false conclusions.
Do you really think that the engineering teams at U.S. automakers are so inept they can't take apart a Toyota and see how it's made? They have whole labs just for doing that. (Coincidentally, so does Toyota, and every other manufacturer.) Trust me, they know exactly how one is built. There's no secrets. Outside of maybe a few computer chips that aren't documented, everything inside cars today -- foreign and domestic -- is well understood by all parties involved.
But most of the big manufacturers don't have the flexibility to build new plants to take advantage of new manufacturing techniques, because they're tied into employment contracts that make retooling plants much tougher. Going from frame-on construction to stamped uni-bodies, or from bolted together parts to robotically spot-welded, isn't something you just decide to do over a weekend. If you can do it without building an entirely new plant, you're lucky.
Plants can't be retooled because employees can't easily be laid off; old plants are expensive to close, and new plants are almost prohibitively expensive to open.
It's naive of anyone to just say "Americans don't know how to make cars." That's stupid; there's no magic that the Germans and the Japanese have and we don't. There's no reason that the Ford engineers would want to make crappy cars (and in all fairness, I don't think they do); every car design is a result of lots of tradeoffs, including what can be manufactured at a certain price point at a particular time.
The U.S. auto industry is a behemoth, always lagging behind the times and wandering ponderously off in wrong directions, because it's almost impossible to steer. While some of that can be attributed to poor leadership, the root cause of the problem is just that there's a whole lot of dead weight that the foreign auto industries (particularly the Asian ones) don't have to deal with. If Kia wants to shutter a plant for six months so it can implement the latest robotic welders, it does; GM can't, although I think the unions are slowly getting with the program, and realizing that when the U.S. auto industry finishes its wounded-dinosaur routine and collapses, they're going to be squarely underneath.
No. The Constitution governs a relationship between the U.S. Government and the Citizens of the United States of America. The relationship of this Government to citizens of other places is governed by the treaties lawfully made (i.e. made according to the Constitution) by the Government, with the foreign government.
You have a belief system in your constitution that only applies to domestic issues?
Yes. I have beliefs about how a country should be run -- my country, the one that I live in. How other countries are governed is their own citizens' business. I don't think we should be telling other people how to govern themselves, which is basically the result of the attitude I think you are suggesting -- namely that the Constitution should apply extraterritorially everywhere.
I mean, what do you really stand for otherwise?
I think this quote sums it up rather nicely:It says exactly nothing about "making the world a better place," or "ensuring the rights of all people everywhere are respected."
However, if you can come up with a good argument for why such measures or goals would make life here in America nicer, or be otherwise beneficial to U.S. Citizens, I'd probably support them. (E.g., by fostering democracy and human rights worldwide, you make the world a more stable place, reduce terrorism, increase trade, etc., thus we do it.) But the U.S. Government has no mandate over or responsibility to non-citizens. It never has, it wasn't intended to, and it never should.
Leveled between the employees and the company, not between the employees. Beyond that your post because a bunch of BS that even cursory study of the history of even skilled labor shows to be bullocks.
You'd have a point if most unionized professions didn't also view employees basically as interchangeable units, all deserving of the same compensation for the same hours worked, increasing in value only through "time in grade" based metrics, where as long as you manage to not get fired, every year you get a small raise.
I've yet to see any unionized employment that really rewarded outstanding performance and recognized that some people are just inherently better at some jobs than others. And generally any attempt to do this is opposed, tooth and nail, by the unions.
Unions THRIVE on an antagonistic relationship between "boss" and "worker," and intentionally suppress competition between one worker and the next. If you shut up and slog along with everybody else and put in your time, you can't be fired and you get your raises with your "seniority." After you put in enough years, you get retirement. It's the same track, everyone's on it, and everybody's the same.
That's not a system that rewards creativity or superior ability, or any other types of individual differences. It's a system of artificially-enforced equality that has the effect of bringing everyone down to the same level.
There is no such thing as a permanent job, and you're naive if you believed that.
Employment is an agreement between two parties, the employer and the employee. It only works as long as both people think they're getting a good deal: your employer thinks that your output is worth what they're paying you, and you (the employee) think that your pay is worth your labor.
If one or both parties don't feel that way, it's not going to last.
This myth that people have of "lifetime employment," where somehow an organization owes you something because you've been there for a set period of time, is a load of crap. Your employer doesn't owe you a thing besides your paycheck and whatever other benefits you have in writing.
If you stayed at your job when you didn't feel that the pay was worth your labor, then you were a fool, and I'm sorry to hear you made a mistake. You should have left. Institutions aren't deserving of any feelings of "loyalty," since they have none in return. A corporation feels nothing when it fires the 30-year veteran or the 6-month temp hire.
Any system that tries to mandate less flexibility -- making it harder for workers to join or leave companies, or harder for companies to take on or get rid of employees -- makes the business climate less competitive versus other places where such restrictions don't exist. And as a country, the LAST thing we need to be doing right now is making ourselves less competitive with regards to the rest of the world.
Why would I want the playing field artificially leveled? My playing field greatly favors me because I am better at my job than most people. A collective bargaining agreement would end that advantage. I could only do as well as anyone else.
Well said. I agree; the playing field looks just fine from where I'm sitting, and I damn well don't need anyone jiggering around and propping up the low end of it, thanks very much.
If I had wanted a lowest-common-denominator, unionized job, I would have gone to trade school, become a machinist, and made auto parts for a living. Oh wait -- all those companies, that whole freaking industry is going out of business in this country, because of the way the Unions have driven the cost of production through the roof. I hope they've had a good run, because they've collective-bargained themselves out of a job.
And that's exactly what would happen in the technology sector, except it wouldn't take half a century for the jobs to start to disappear, it would take half a decade -- and that's at the most. We already have a problem getting businesses to not outsource tech jobs to places where the cost-of-living is a lot lower, and now people want to unionize and make that even higher? It's insane.
Joining a union is about as appealing to me as chaining myself to a half a dozen people who can't swim and jumping into a lake.
You're not worth every penney- you're worth the $2.50/hr your job can be done in India for.
Oh yes, and if all of us tech workers in America join a union, I'm sure it'll make those folks in India look that much less attractive! That's what we need in this country -- make us even more expensive to hire.
So once all the good jobs get outsourced, which shift at Wal-Mart do you want to take? I assume you'll have to check with your manager down at Mickey D's first...
I was going to come up with some sort of pithy response ... but I really can't think of anything.
You basically hit the nail on the head.
1) The parent poster didn't have to qualify his claim: even if you only wiretap international calls without warrants, that's still wiretapping without warrants.
Not true. If both the source and the destination of the call were outside U.S. borders (and for some reason it was just passing through the U.S. telecom network), no warrant would be required, since no Citizens' rights are being infringed.
At that point, you'd just have created a problem with the other countries involved, and any treaties that the U.S. might hold with them.
I am from Florida, we never really voted for him to start with!
You morons couldn't figure out how to vote...you get no sympathy....
Yeah it does the same thing in Safari 2.0.3. No idea why though.
Personally, I'm sort of up into the air as to which ones I like, if any of them. I'm not altogether enthused. It's like they're all striving to be "modern" for the sake of being modern, rather than having a form-follows-function approach, putting readability and clarity first, and having the format flow from there.
They've just got too many 'boxes' going on; I find them visually distracting, and I think that after a few hours I'd be reaching for the "Slashdot Classic" option.
Read the bottom of my post. I fundamentally disagree with the assertion that a partial solution is better than none at all, at least in this case.
A partial solution leads to a false sense of security and greater reliance on heavyhanded, top-down "solutions" to problems that should have been solved from the bottom-up.
Perhaps I'm mistaken here, but if everyone started downloading the torrent after you, how would this help your download speeds? Assuming the pieces download sequentially, they would all have pieces that you already have (since you started first) and instead there'd just be more fighting for connections to the few servers/peers that have the few pieces that you still need.
Seems like if you could have gotten a few thousand people to start downloading the torrent, and then started, you'd be in good shape. But I don't see why adding a bunch of new people to a torrent would help someone who's already well along in downloading the file.
Unless BT downloads pieces of a file non-sequentially, in a random order or something.
I really don't see anything that has changed as a result of the acquisition.
Color me stupid, but didn't they switch from KDE to Gnome as a result of the acquisition? Or was that just coincidental in timing?
How is KDE on SuSE now that they've made Gnome the 'official' or primary desktop?
Right now I'm using Ubuntu with the KDE Desktop packages (Kubuntu) and I'm really dissatisfied. Everything works, but it's just really rough around the edges. The GUI config utilities all seem to be broken, Konqueror randomly crashes when I try to do certain things ("Image View" causes SIGSEGV, repeatably)...however, it browses the Internet OK, works with my SCSI card, WL card, and tape drive OK, and as long as I don't try anything weird, is basically stable. So I'm sort of in that grey area where I'm not happy with it, but I'm not ready for the major project that switching to a new distro (and having to get stuff like WL, SCSI, tape working again) would involve.
I think the next distro I switch to will be something that's corporate-backed. I want something with good documentation. Unfortunately I just cannot stand Gnome (no screen-top menu bar). I'd been eyeing SuSE for a while, but I was disappointed when they moved to Gnome and now I'm hesitant to try the KDE version, because I don't want to get in on something that's on its way out. Also I'm sick of feeling like a second-class citizen, like Kubuntu/Ubuntu.
Anyway enough ranting. I was curious though what the deal is with KDE and Gnome on SuSE, I know they say they're continuing to support KDE, but that's what spokesweasels always say about stuff right up until they end-of-life it.