Not that there's anything wrong with putty per se (AFAIK), but the underlying platform is a concern. Sure, putty will send everything over SSH back to your Linux boxes at home, but there is more than a little malware these days that logs your keystrokes, something against which SSH cannot protect you. I would only log into the home machines from your Linux machine at work, and even then only if root belongs to you. It's unlikely your employer would be using keystroke loggers, but they could; it's not illegal if they tell you, and maybe not even if they don't. The usual boilerplate in network access policies could be interpreted to mean everything from log scanning for anomalous activity to recording everything you do.
Next, set up public/private key login and don't allow password login. I do this even within my internal network, and there are no Windows machines on it. At work, where Mac, BSD, and Linux are the majority of the boxes, of course I do it too. Those boxes may be fairly secure and there aren't a lot of Windows boxes on my part of the network, but not trusting any box you don't control is a good idea.
As far as the connection duration, I'd leave them up all the time unless there is some other operational need not to.
That's certainly a large part of it. When we only had two kids, my wife and I thought we were pretty busy. When we had a third one, we discovered just how much available time there really was in our schedule. The baby needs as much time, it not more, as her two older siblings together.
I also subscribe to the "relative slice" idea, that a year in my forties seems short in part because it is such a small fraction of my life compared to a year in elementary school. Combine that with all the responsibilities that one juggles as a spouse, parent of three young children, and full-time employee and it's no wonder that everything seems to pass by in a blur.
I don't claim to have been to every country, but I've been to quite a few and never encountered cell phone blocking in theaters. Which countries do this, and how to they handle emergency responder cases? Do they really sell tickets to "unblocked" viewing rooms? (/me firmly places skeptic hat on head.)
A lot of people have commented about spam filtering methodologies being defeated, but they must have some different value for "defeat" than I'm used to. I work for a well-known email security company whose name you likely would immediately recognize. We implement some sort of all the methods you enumerated and a bunch of others you didn't. Our efficacy rate on spam is way higher than 90% (I can't be more specific, but I'll say that there isn't a lot of "up" left from where we are) and in any given month our false positive rate is in the three lowest in the industry (usually lowest or second-lowest).
That doesn't sound much like defeat to me.
No one has ever talked about scrapping SMTP and starting over? People talk about that all the time. At least some of them. They just can't get many people to support that idea. What you're talking about is far harder than IPv6, and far less necessary, yet look how few entities are actually implementing/using that, even with IPv4 space truly nearing exhaustion.
I can think of one: certain emergency response personal who are practically always on call. Anything that blocks a cell phone is also going to block a pager.
Concrete example: My wife's OB/GYN. A couple days after he'd delivered our baby by C-section as scheduled, Ie saw him at 3:00 AM in the hall of the hospital. He'd been paged to come in and do a delivery for one of his patients. Now, he probably wasn't at a movie at that time of day, but what if it had been, say, 4:00 PM on a Saturday afternoon and he couldn't be paged because theaters had Faraday cages everywhere?
I know that's an edge case, but the edge cases here are typically surgeons and emergency responders who truly need to be reachable. No argument that we need to get people to stop being assholes with their cellphones, but screwing everyone else because of the conduct of some (OK, many) jerks doesn't seem like the best solution to me.
And one more thing: the account used to send/receive funds to PayPal should be used for no other purpose, and should be emptied at COB daily (if not more often). Only if/when transfers need to be made to someone else should money be placed in the account.
Putting on my linguist's hat here (yes, I do have a degree in it, thanks), languages don't have pathologies. They have grammars, and those grammars have rules. Rules which tend to change over time and often to be inconsistent between dialects (cf., Old English Vs. modern standard British English, and modern standard British English Vs. modern standard US English), but at any given point in time, the grammar rules intrinsically known by native speakers are a very good guide as to what is correct or not correct in a language.
The current English rule is that "he" is the generic personal pronoun. A drift to "they" may be occurring (or it may be a fad; too early to tell) and using "she" has a certain amount of traction in some quarters and the language may change such that whether to use "he" or "she" is at the discretion of the speaker, with either being correct. However, as it currently stands, usages other than "he" in a context that is not exclusively female (one I frequently encounter myself, since all of my children are girls) is formally incorrect.
As others have noted, the use of "he" for a group that is not exclusively female is just as sexist (or not) as the use of "he" is for a group that is not exclusively male. Claiming that the use of "he" as the generic instead of "she" is sexist only reveals your own bias.
Say what you want about emacs but vim is a quite useful editor. Jeany is pretty good, too, if you like GUI editors. I actually don't like IDEs for editing. Sure, they bring a lot of other things to the table that may be compelling enough to hold my nose and use the IDE's editor, but to say that vi or emacs are not useful editors when compared with a modern Windows IDE seems a stunning statement to me. I find that when what needs to be done is to write and edit, a standalone editor is a better tool for that the embedded editor in an IDE. In fact, all of the best programmers I know use either vim or emacs rather than an IDE. I find it very disturbing that most of them use emacs rather than vim, but that's another story:)
I think he explained the "young people" part when he talked about pay. It's at the stipend level, and since they're also a nonprofit, it sounds like the potential to cash in with stock options isn't there, either. In other words, the only sort of person who'd want to work there is someone young enough to be able to say "Screw the money, or lack thereof, both now and down the road; I have a real passion for what this non-profit start-up is doing that's so overriding I'm willing to do it almost for free." Those of us with families and responsibilities, no matter how passionate we might be about their goal, simply could not afford to take a job there.
Actually, the second one (a mega corp, but not one of the ones in TFA) is a pretty nice place to work; I'm still there and still happy. We have good products, good people, and there is a pretty good cultural match-up between my former startup and the mega that bought us. We've even cross-pollinated some of our culture into the greater business unit of which we're now a part. As of others have noted, there are a lot of really smart people at many mega corps. That was true at the one where I previously worked (I didn't like it for several reasons, but the caliber of the people around me wasn't one of them), and I know people at one of the others on that list and they are really sharp, really passionate about what they do. I've met a few people at the third one, and had a couple of colleagues go to work there, and it also seems like a decent place, although I don't think it would be a good cultural fit for me.
You left one out: work at startups and become an employee via acquisition. It's happened to me twice, including at one of the companies listed in TFA (didn't like it there; I work somewhere else now).
Actually, the idea of *not* attacking infrastructure - indeed the whole concept of "collateral damage" as something to avoid - is a pretty recent fad. No one especially cared about collateral damage in Viet Nam. I don't think the term even existed then. In WW II, by contrast, infrastructure was attacked on purpose. By everyone. The Germans tried it against the British with poor success - the V1 and V2 were more effective in producing terror than in producing any militarily valuable results and only served to harden British resolve, in the end - and the United States and Britain both deliberately attacked German infrastructure in Europe. An early and very successful example of that is the "dam buster" bombs developed to destroy hydro-electric dams in the Ruhr to hamper German industrial production. Many German cities were bombed extensively, and Dresden was largely destroyed in a firebombing attack.
In the Pacific, the United States bombed most Japanese cities flat. Much is made of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but if you ever seen pictures of Tokyo taken in late 1945 and 1946, large sections of it don't look all that different. Asakusa was pretty much completely burned over as the result of incendiary attacks, as were many other large sections of Tokyo and other cities.
These attacks on civilians were quite deliberate. Everyone involved knew that lots of civilians would be killed and injured in massive attacks on infrastructure and either didn't care or viewed it as a benefit. The concept that civilians are not targets is a pretty recently evolution of warfare, if you take a long historical view. Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations, in not drawing a line between civilians and soldiers, is not doing anything that Germany, the US, Britain, and Japan did not do in WW II. If you look at the conduct of all of those protagonists, it would not be hard to conclude that they all believed, in practice if not in philosophy, that there was essentially no such thing as a non-combatant.
All of this widespread bombing was aimed at destroying infrastructure as a means of crippling war production. Less emphasis is placed on attacking infrastructure now, largely because we can bring such overwhelming force to the battlefield that there is no standing army in the world that could long withstand it, and because it does no good against insurgencies and would only harm the image of the country bombing the infrastructure while increasing (in most cases) civilian resolve.
You are correct in pointing out, however, that infrastructure attacks could be the bread and butter of terrorist organizations. That we have seen so few of them around the world - and none (yet) in the United States points out that doing this isn't as easy as it sounds. Getting trained operatives into the United States and keeping them below the radar probably isn't terribly difficult, but keeping them secret while they prepare an attack and - especially - getting them the amount of explosives, poison, or whatever that they'd need to attack a significant infrastructure target and cause major loss of life/property/industrial/capacity/money is harder than it looks at first glance. It is also partly because their mindset seems to still favor the big spectacular attack a la 9/11, I'm sure, but in general, if it was really easy, they would have already done it. More than once.
Better still, I'd install a concealed wireless router with a directional antenna pointed at his car and see if he noticed.
Or, turn off my wireless, show it to him and tell him I won't use it anymore and then point said concealed antenna at his house instead.
And don't forget to tell him about signal leakage. Where I used to live, one day I went outside with my laptop and did a wireless survey of signal leakage on my street. I could go 3 houses up or down my street on the same side, or 2 houses on the other side, and still connect to my network. No special gear, just a 2003-vintage WRT54G and the Toshiba Tecra M4 that I had at the time (don't blame me, it was a company laptop). Considering that range, it's not likely he could find many places to park where he's not getting wifi.
The only reason I wouldn't interview the owner of dumbass.com is that he seems to define "dumbass" as "anyone with whom I disagree politically." The number of issues on which I disagree with President Obama is much greater than the number on which I agree with him, but I don't think he's a dumbass. In fact, I think he's a pretty smart guy. A smart guy who has nevertheless come to the wrong conclusions about a number of things, but smart nevertheless. I doubt any of those listed on dumbass.com are actually dumb, although some of them appear to be of dubious honesty and integrity, even by the low standards of politics.
The assumption that someone with whom a person disagrees politically is a dumbass only points out the person make that assumption as, well, a dumbass. Or, at least, a person with little or no ability to think deeply about a problem and come up with a good solution. In short, someone I don't want to bother interviewing.
An AOL email address, OTOH, is like having "computer stupid" tattooed on your forehead. Some small percentage of people with AOL email addresses are probably highly skilled IT professionals, but the number is assuredly tiny and gets tainted by association with the rest.
Not long ago, I had to evict some tenants who left the property in bad condition, stopped paying rent, and (I heard later from the neighbors) used to frequently throw loud parties with their home theater system blasting so loud that people two and three houses away could hear it inside. They sounded good on paper, but I guess I should have known. You guessed it: they had an AOL email address. Good thing there's no law that says I can't refuse someone as a tenant based on their email address. It's now on my reject list:-) Jk. Or maybe not.
If 7 out of 8 were caught (even if 1 made it on a plane and got to Dublin), Bratislava is probably actually not the best choice. I'd be surprised if TSA at most US airports could catch 6 out of 8. TSA testers have gotten whole fake bombs past checkpoints here.
I don't know about the domestic police where you live, but here in the SF Bay area, a BART officer is on trial for murder right now for shooting an unarmed suspect in the back.
If an Interpol officer did the same thing, the toughest thing we could do is deport him.
It is, as James Bond would put it, a license to kill.
You need about a +10 Insightful. I have children in 1st and 2nd grade, and we are fortunate to have a pretty good public school in our area of the smallish (pop. ~50K) California city where we live. And I do mean fortunate, because many of the schools in California just plain suck, despite the fact that the schools have a huge guaranteed slice of the budget. Despite the record budget percentage allocated to schools, many of them are terrible and even the good ones are strapped for cash. Where's the money going? Bureaucrats in Sacramento, largely. Some is wasted on technology, too. Fortunately, our principal is fairly astute at detecting technology BS and doesn't waste money in that area.
My second grader, who just turned 7, has an early 8th grade lexile level. Her "slow" sister, who just turned 6, is a over a year ahead of the expected lexile level for first graders. What role did technology play in this? Tiny: their reading levels were tested on computers. The magic bullet was an old-fashioned one: books. They were encouraged to read from a very young age and my second grader already had basic reading competence when she started kindergarten. Her younger sister could read and write the alphabet and could read some words when she started kindergarten. In both cases, this came not from technology, but from being home-schooled with pencils, paper, and books prior to starting school.
This doesn't mean technology has no place. As others have noted, it can be a wonderful tool for teaching special needs students and should absolutely be used when appropriate, in an appropriate way. But for most kids, technology in the classroom is not a learning aid, but a hindrance and detraction from time that could be spent learning. Want to learn to read? Spend quality time with books? Want to learn to do math? Quality time with a math book, pencil, and paper will help lots. Did I mention my kids are also both ahead of grade level in math? Same reason, same method.
I am totally on board with your idea that each school should be autonomous, and I'll even go a step further: _all_ education should be voucher-funded -even public schools - and you should be able to send your kids to any school you want with that money, and even public schools should be allowed to go out of business if they fail to achieve and thus can't attract students. This kind of competition will pretty quickly breed private-school quality in public schools because the ones that fail to achieve it will simply cease to exist. Self-preservation will see to it that they improve.
And while I'm at it, I'll say that we need to free of the teacher's unions, which are a hindrance to pretty much everything, even good teaching. One of the worst examples of this is tenure, a practice which may make sense in higher education but is ridiculous in primary and secondary education. If teachers kept their jobs the same way most of the rest of us do - through continued quality and value-add - we'd be much better off. So would they.
At our school, our principal recently had to let go a pretty good teacher whom he had been mentoring and training since he hired her because she was coming up to her third year of employment and he had two options: give her tenure or give her the boot. While she had made great progress, was popular with parents and students alike and would doubtless have moved from being a decent teacher to a great one, he had to go with his second option because in his opinion (which I trust a lot; he took charge at this school some years ago when it was failing and in danger of being closed by the school board, and turned it into a California Distinguished School and one of the best schools in our area), she wasn't ready for tenure. The tenure system forced him do to something he didn't want to do, and give her the boot. If he could have kept her on without tenure and continued mentoring her, I'm sure he would have.
Yes, SPF records are part of the mix at many anti-spam vendors.
However, they aren't part of reputation. Reputation, to describe it simply and without giving away any secrets, is determined by the kind of mail a host or network emits. Whether it has SPF records and/or DKIM-signs its mail does not affect reputation; if you emit junk, your reputation will be junk.
SPF and (moreso) DKIM have value in assessing whether a given mail is a forgery or not (think phishing and related scams). They are not weighted overly much, since people do foolish things like put their work email address into their webmail account all the time, and it causes FPs, for some value of false positive. That is, it's not an FP per se, but the mail is technically legit, so dropping it on the floor isn't the desired action.
In short, don't expect having SPF and DKIM to improve your deliverability much, if at all. That's not where the value-add is. The value-add is helping to separate the sheep from the goats among mail that purports to be from your domain. If you want recipients to be able to (theoretically, since most of them don't/won't check) have greater confidence that a mail that claims to have come from your organization really did so, then yes, implement both SPF and DKIM.
If you're an organization whose customers might be phishing targets, definitely do both. Orgs I've seen targeted for phishing include financial institutions of any size (even a single branch!), various government agencies, educational institutions (not just universities, either), BBB, auto clubs, World of Warcraft accounts, Vonage, Craig's List, all the free webmail providers. If it has a login, and anything a phisher could find to be of value (for practically any value of "value"), there will be phishing attempts.
If your company is one of those - or even if it's not, really - I recommend both SPF and DKIM.
BTW, did anyone notice that coffee mugs were listed as one of the things not stereotypically associated with CS? I don't know where the people who conducted that study hang around, but in my nearly 30 years in IT, in every place I've worked, the coffee mug has been more strongly associated with IT/CS than anything. Well, except maybe beer:)
So, to extend on both what you said and on TFA, if women don't enter CS b/c they don't like to work around geeky guys, then who, exactly is being sexist (or something -ist) here? Doesn't sound like it's the guys to me.
A few things I have experienced in the aforementioned nearly 30 years in IT:
-Women tend to not like technology (computer and otherwise) very much. My wife has an IQ 20 - 30 points higher than mine, is a brilliant entrepreneur and a wizard with a spreadsheet. If you ask her what the screen resolution of our TV is, you're likely to get a blank look for a second before she turns to something interesting. If you get an answer at all, it might be "46 inches" rather than something like "HD" or "1080P" or "1920 x 1080." She cares not in the least how the TV, her computer, or our home network functions, merely that it does so. In that regard, she is like most women (and most men).
-If you don't have some love of computers and technology for their own sakes, you're unlikely to do well in this business. It's kind of like trying to succeed as a mathematician without a love of mathematics: ain't gonna happen.
-Some women like technology, they go into it and succeed. In my entire career, I've known 2 female unix admins and a handful of female mainframe operators. The good ones were all at least kind of geeky. Of the two best, I knew one of them well enough to attend an after-party at her residence. At 3:00 AM and well into our cups, several of us (her included) opened up a brand new, never used, SPARCStation 2 she'd inherited from some employer. The thing was immaculately clean inside and we were all deeply impressed at that machine in general and at the amount of Sun hardware she owned. An SS2 was cool and still somewhat usable with Linux at the time; this was about 10 years ago.
So really, there are not too few women in CS/IT, nor too few men. CS/IT tends to attract a certain kind of person. In general, it is the same kind of person who might have gone into hotrodding if they'd gone done another walk in life (and some of us in IT are current or former hotrodders, too; I was, in my youth). You'll notice there aren't many women into hotrodding,either, but the ones who are tend to have nicer than average cars. If the mindset that attracts people to IT is found more often in men than in women, it's not a problem. It just is.
As another poster noted, the vast majority of those working in early childhood and primary education are women, and no amount of re-jiggering the workplace or increasing the pay (which is actually not that bad) is going to change that. The attributes of primary education are more attractive to women, as a class, than they are to men, and the attributes of IT are more attractive to men, as a class, than they are to women. No amount of wishful thinking or anything else is going to change how people are biologically wired.
Trying to do that is like trying to tweak the opposite sex so that gays and lesbians will change their minds and become straight. Ain't gonna happen; if a woman is a lesbian, there's not much you could do short of a full gender reassignment that would make her attracted to a guy, and even then, she might not view the result as a real woman, but as a conversion job, and not be attracted. Ditto for gay men; give a woman a gender reassignment surgery and they might not perceive her as a man, but as a re-plumbed woman. Perhaps even more so, since male->female gender reassignment is generally more successful than the other way around.
Hmm. In jail today, you get cable TV. Playboy, and I would suppose, other skin mags of your choice. Better medical care than many people who aren't in jail get. The contraband of your choice - including even cell phones - isn't that hard to get. Despite all this soft "humaneness," recidivism is as high as ever. Maybe worse.
That has to change. You want humane jails? Let's start with my definition of how a humane jail works, then:
1) It's a lot like military boot camp. What you do, when you do it, how you do it, and how much of it you do, is determined by your drill instructor. He or she cannot make you do it, but can make you wish you had.
1A) Military-style haircut. And your prison uniform shall be kept neat and clean. You will be issued a uniform that fits and you will wear it as instructed. If you don't want to wear it as instructed, see that part in item 1 about your DI making you wish you had.
2) You'll read what you're allowed to read. You'll watch on TV what you're allowed to watch. This will primarily be educational texts. Spiritual texts will be allowed for those who want them. TV will be education channels such as National Geographic or The History Channel, plus news channels. Want to watch a movie? Earn movie credits through achievement.
3) Education in prison shall be compulsory. Those not having a high school diploma or GED will go into a GED program. Those who do will go into a college program aimed at getting them a 2 or 4 year degree. Or, alternatively, a vocational training program. Completion of the program could, and in most cases should, be made part of the sentence. Allowances should be made for demonstrated learning disabilities.
-Or-
If you don't want to do that stuff, you can get your ass out on the chain gang every day and forget about parole or time off for good behavior. You'll serve every day of your sentence at hard labor.
WRT potential for mistakes in the take-em-out-and-shoot-em, I do support having a higher standard of evidence in capital cases. Specifically, the current standard of "beyond a reasonable doubt" is not enough. Something along the lines of "beyond the shadow of a doubt" is more appropriate. Concrete examples include DNA evidence - which has been used to exonerate a number of incarcerated individuals - or being apprehended at the scene of the crime.
Set up that framework, then push capital punishment down the offense stack. Way down the offense stack. Three strikes and you're out = a life sentence? No. Three strikes = the gallows. Rape, with DNA evidence, = the gallows. I think we could add a few crimes to that list, such as the ones that got this thread started.
Many Americans - including myself - believe that crimes such as his warrant capital punishment, and not capital punishment after 10 - 20 years of bogus appeals, but take-him-out-back-of-the-courthouse-and-shoot-him type capital punishment. Thus, when he is sentenced to 4 consecutive 11-year terms in prison, people are left with the feeling that justice has not been served. Granted, at his age and physical condition, 44 years may well constitute a life sentence, but he has the at least theoretical possibility of being paroled, especially since (as far as I can determine) the sentence was not "without possibility of parole." Thus, he could well get out of prison.
If people believe a sentence is inadequate, don't be surprised if they react with something approaching glee at the possibility that a perp might be killed in prison.
In practical terms, he probably won't be. Known child molesters are typically segregated from the rest of the prisoners for their own protection, because if it becomes known that they are molesters, they're in for a rough time. Since he's fairly well known, especially in South Dakota, I rather expect they'll be keeping him away from the general population.
Pity. Jail should be unpleasant and even brutal. Provides added incentive to stay out of it, you see.
-In your residence -In your car -In email to your friends/family -On the phone to your friends/family -In person with your friends/family.
Venting on Facebook is more like going to Times Square and shouting out loud that you want to kill somebody. Don't be surprised when someone calls the police.
Lots has been written about people today failing to comprehend the line between public and private and the consequences thereof, so I don't need to add to it. I'll just say that Facebook is public, not private, and that public actions will have public consequences.
The poster above you said there's a difference between optimizing for your own but not the competitor's and deliberately sabotaging performance. You say there's not. Let's you and him fight:-)
Seriously, though, I don't see this as a problem. For starters, as some people have noted, not many are using Intel's compiler. The two most widely used compilers for x86 chips are Microsoft's and GCC. Secondly, why should they have to optimize their compiler for a competitor's product, really? Rather, it should be assumed by anyone and everyone that a benchmark made using an Intel product is going to do better on Intel chips, and it doesn't even require nefarious behavior on Intel's part to make that leap. Is it not a matter of course that they are going to be able to better optimize a compiler for a chip they made than a chip they didn't? And why doesn't AMD release its own compiler?
Slewing off-topic, when was the last time you met someone who didn't collect stamps who was vehemently and adamantly opposed to others doing so? Concrete example: has anyone ever sued to:
1) Prevent a kid from talking about his stamp collection at school? 2) Prevent a teacher from talking about stamp collecting at school? 3) Prevent a teacher from discussing her stamp collection in school? 4) A government agency (such as the post office, maybe) from displaying information about stamp collecting? 5) I think you get the idea.
Atheism is not technically a religion, since under the normal definition of religion, a belief in some deity is required. However, atheism is certainly a movement, and one that has some very religion-like qualities to it. I know that most atheists (at least in my direct experience) are live-and-let-live people who don't care or mind that others have religion, talk about it, or seek to advance it. You'd never even know they were atheists unless it happened to come up. However, there is a subset of atheists for whom it pretty much is a religion, or perhaps, an anti-religion. For them, there is no tolerance. Religion must be suppressed and removed from public discourse, and those who have a religion other than militant atheism must be drive into the closet.
How does a non-religious atheist behave? I'll take a good friend of mine as an example. His religious upbringing was at least very strongly agnostic, and I'd say atheist. I've heard him say on a number of occasions that he doesn't believe in God or an afterlife, and when you die, that's it. Yet he married a Christian and their kids are baptized. His wife has a free hand to raise the children in her faith. He doesn't usually attend church with her, but does on special occasions like Easter or Christmas, even though he doesn't believe, and he is respectful when he is there, and of her belief at all times so far as I can tell. Contrast that to, say, the behavior of Madeleine Murray O'Hare.
Atheism is clearly a religion, or at least a religion-like movement, for some value of religion and for some subset of atheists, much as Windows or Linux/Windows or Mac OS/PC or Mac hardware bears a strong resemblance to religion for some advocates of those platforms. To deny this is to ignore the facts on the ground, at best, and to practice sophistry or outright falsehood at worst.
How do you steal GPL-licensed code? By using it in a proprietary product and not releasing the source code to your version.
Who is it being stolen from? All the people who would have access to it had you complied with the license.
It is true that copyright infringement is not usually theft (but there is a case for it being theft when the infringer is selling the infringed item), since the usual type of infringer (a P2P downloader) would not have bought the product anyway, and the copyright holder is not deprived of the use of the infringed material (the usual definition of theft does require someone to be deprived of property). However, when someone infringes GPLed code, they are in fact depriving someone of the use of that code. Not the original author, but those who would, if the license were followed, potentially use that code. Thus, unlike copyrighted software, etc., distributed under a proprietary license which forbids redistribution, infringing copyrighted code distributed under the GPL is in fact theft.
I agree with everything you said, but the reason Obama is spending (IMO wasting) time on this now is simple: Hollywood pulled out all the stops in supporting his campaign, and people don't do that for free. He owes them. They know it, and he knows it, and this is the kind of payback Hollywood once.
Once upon a time in the 1970s, it was somewhat common to see stickers in car windows that said "Ass, gas, or grass - nobody rides for free." Politics works the same way.
Slashdot Mirror
Not that there's anything wrong with putty per se (AFAIK), but the underlying platform is a concern. Sure, putty will send everything over SSH back to your Linux boxes at home, but there is more than a little malware these days that logs your keystrokes, something against which SSH cannot protect you. I would only log into the home machines from your Linux machine at work, and even then only if root belongs to you. It's unlikely your employer would be using keystroke loggers, but they could; it's not illegal if they tell you, and maybe not even if they don't. The usual boilerplate in network access policies could be interpreted to mean everything from log scanning for anomalous activity to recording everything you do.
Next, set up public/private key login and don't allow password login. I do this even within my internal network, and there are no Windows machines on it. At work, where Mac, BSD, and Linux are the majority of the boxes, of course I do it too. Those boxes may be fairly secure and there aren't a lot of Windows boxes on my part of the network, but not trusting any box you don't control is a good idea.
As far as the connection duration, I'd leave them up all the time unless there is some other operational need not to.
That's certainly a large part of it. When we only had two kids, my wife and I thought we were pretty busy. When we had a third one, we discovered just how much available time there really was in our schedule. The baby needs as much time, it not more, as her two older siblings together.
I also subscribe to the "relative slice" idea, that a year in my forties seems short in part because it is such a small fraction of my life compared to a year in elementary school. Combine that with all the responsibilities that one juggles as a spouse, parent of three young children, and full-time employee and it's no wonder that everything seems to pass by in a blur.
I don't claim to have been to every country, but I've been to quite a few and never encountered cell phone blocking in theaters. Which countries do this, and how to they handle emergency responder cases? Do they really sell tickets to "unblocked" viewing rooms? (/me firmly places skeptic hat on head.)
A lot of people have commented about spam filtering methodologies being defeated, but they must have some different value for "defeat" than I'm used to. I work for a well-known email security company whose name you likely would immediately recognize. We implement some sort of all the methods you enumerated and a bunch of others you didn't. Our efficacy rate on spam is way higher than 90% (I can't be more specific, but I'll say that there isn't a lot of "up" left from where we are) and in any given month our false positive rate is in the three lowest in the industry (usually lowest or second-lowest).
That doesn't sound much like defeat to me.
No one has ever talked about scrapping SMTP and starting over? People talk about that all the time. At least some of them. They just can't get many people to support that idea. What you're talking about is far harder than IPv6, and far less necessary, yet look how few entities are actually implementing/using that, even with IPv4 space truly nearing exhaustion.
I can think of one: certain emergency response personal who are practically always on call. Anything that blocks a cell phone is also going to block a pager.
Concrete example: My wife's OB/GYN. A couple days after he'd delivered our baby by C-section as scheduled, Ie saw him at 3:00 AM in the hall of the hospital. He'd been paged to come in and do a delivery for one of his patients. Now, he probably wasn't at a movie at that time of day, but what if it had been, say, 4:00 PM on a Saturday afternoon and he couldn't be paged because theaters had Faraday cages everywhere?
I know that's an edge case, but the edge cases here are typically surgeons and emergency responders who truly need to be reachable. No argument that we need to get people to stop being assholes with their cellphones, but screwing everyone else because of the conduct of some (OK, many) jerks doesn't seem like the best solution to me.
And one more thing: the account used to send/receive funds to PayPal should be used for no other purpose, and should be emptied at COB daily (if not more often). Only if/when transfers need to be made to someone else should money be placed in the account.
Putting on my linguist's hat here (yes, I do have a degree in it, thanks), languages don't have pathologies. They have grammars, and those grammars have rules. Rules which tend to change over time and often to be inconsistent between dialects (cf., Old English Vs. modern standard British English, and modern standard British English Vs. modern standard US English), but at any given point in time, the grammar rules intrinsically known by native speakers are a very good guide as to what is correct or not correct in a language.
The current English rule is that "he" is the generic personal pronoun. A drift to "they" may be occurring (or it may be a fad; too early to tell) and using "she" has a certain amount of traction in some quarters and the language may change such that whether to use "he" or "she" is at the discretion of the speaker, with either being correct. However, as it currently stands, usages other than "he" in a context that is not exclusively female (one I frequently encounter myself, since all of my children are girls) is formally incorrect.
As others have noted, the use of "he" for a group that is not exclusively female is just as sexist (or not) as the use of "he" is for a group that is not exclusively male. Claiming that the use of "he" as the generic instead of "she" is sexist only reveals your own bias.
Say what you want about emacs but vim is a quite useful editor. Jeany is pretty good, too, if you like GUI editors. I actually don't like IDEs for editing. Sure, they bring a lot of other things to the table that may be compelling enough to hold my nose and use the IDE's editor, but to say that vi or emacs are not useful editors when compared with a modern Windows IDE seems a stunning statement to me. I find that when what needs to be done is to write and edit, a standalone editor is a better tool for that the embedded editor in an IDE. In fact, all of the best programmers I know use either vim or emacs rather than an IDE. I find it very disturbing that most of them use emacs rather than vim, but that's another story :)
I think he explained the "young people" part when he talked about pay. It's at the stipend level, and since they're also a nonprofit, it sounds like the potential to cash in with stock options isn't there, either. In other words, the only sort of person who'd want to work there is someone young enough to be able to say "Screw the money, or lack thereof, both now and down the road; I have a real passion for what this non-profit start-up is doing that's so overriding I'm willing to do it almost for free." Those of us with families and responsibilities, no matter how passionate we might be about their goal, simply could not afford to take a job there.
Actually, the second one (a mega corp, but not one of the ones in TFA) is a pretty nice place to work; I'm still there and still happy. We have good products, good people, and there is a pretty good cultural match-up between my former startup and the mega that bought us. We've even cross-pollinated some of our culture into the greater business unit of which we're now a part. As of others have noted, there are a lot of really smart people at many mega corps. That was true at the one where I previously worked (I didn't like it for several reasons, but the caliber of the people around me wasn't one of them), and I know people at one of the others on that list and they are really sharp, really passionate about what they do. I've met a few people at the third one, and had a couple of colleagues go to work there, and it also seems like a decent place, although I don't think it would be a good cultural fit for me.
You left one out: work at startups and become an employee via acquisition. It's happened to me twice, including at one of the companies listed in TFA (didn't like it there; I work somewhere else now).
Actually, the idea of *not* attacking infrastructure - indeed the whole concept of "collateral damage" as something to avoid - is a pretty recent fad. No one especially cared about collateral damage in Viet Nam. I don't think the term even existed then. In WW II, by contrast, infrastructure was attacked on purpose. By everyone. The Germans tried it against the British with poor success - the V1 and V2 were more effective in producing terror than in producing any militarily valuable results and only served to harden British resolve, in the end - and the United States and Britain both deliberately attacked German infrastructure in Europe. An early and very successful example of that is the "dam buster" bombs developed to destroy hydro-electric dams in the Ruhr to hamper German industrial production. Many German cities were bombed extensively, and Dresden was largely destroyed in a firebombing attack.
In the Pacific, the United States bombed most Japanese cities flat. Much is made of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but if you ever seen pictures of Tokyo taken in late 1945 and 1946, large sections of it don't look all that different. Asakusa was pretty much completely burned over as the result of incendiary attacks, as were many other large sections of Tokyo and other cities.
These attacks on civilians were quite deliberate. Everyone involved knew that lots of civilians would be killed and injured in massive attacks on infrastructure and either didn't care or viewed it as a benefit. The concept that civilians are not targets is a pretty recently evolution of warfare, if you take a long historical view. Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations, in not drawing a line between civilians and soldiers, is not doing anything that Germany, the US, Britain, and Japan did not do in WW II. If you look at the conduct of all of those protagonists, it would not be hard to conclude that they all believed, in practice if not in philosophy, that there was essentially no such thing as a non-combatant.
All of this widespread bombing was aimed at destroying infrastructure as a means of crippling war production. Less emphasis is placed on attacking infrastructure now, largely because we can bring such overwhelming force to the battlefield that there is no standing army in the world that could long withstand it, and because it does no good against insurgencies and would only harm the image of the country bombing the infrastructure while increasing (in most cases) civilian resolve.
You are correct in pointing out, however, that infrastructure attacks could be the bread and butter of terrorist organizations. That we have seen so few of them around the world - and none (yet) in the United States points out that doing this isn't as easy as it sounds. Getting trained operatives into the United States and keeping them below the radar probably isn't terribly difficult, but keeping them secret while they prepare an attack and - especially - getting them the amount of explosives, poison, or whatever that they'd need to attack a significant infrastructure target and cause major loss of life/property/industrial/capacity/money is harder than it looks at first glance. It is also partly because their mindset seems to still favor the big spectacular attack a la 9/11, I'm sure, but in general, if it was really easy, they would have already done it. More than once.
Better still, I'd install a concealed wireless router with a directional antenna pointed at his car and see if he noticed.
Or, turn off my wireless, show it to him and tell him I won't use it anymore and then point said concealed antenna at his house instead.
And don't forget to tell him about signal leakage. Where I used to live, one day I went outside with my laptop and did a wireless survey of signal leakage on my street. I could go 3 houses up or down my street on the same side, or 2 houses on the other side, and still connect to my network. No special gear, just a 2003-vintage WRT54G and the Toshiba Tecra M4 that I had at the time (don't blame me, it was a company laptop). Considering that range, it's not likely he could find many places to park where he's not getting wifi.
The only reason I wouldn't interview the owner of dumbass.com is that he seems to define "dumbass" as "anyone with whom I disagree politically." The number of issues on which I disagree with President Obama is much greater than the number on which I agree with him, but I don't think he's a dumbass. In fact, I think he's a pretty smart guy. A smart guy who has nevertheless come to the wrong conclusions about a number of things, but smart nevertheless. I doubt any of those listed on dumbass.com are actually dumb, although some of them appear to be of dubious honesty and integrity, even by the low standards of politics.
The assumption that someone with whom a person disagrees politically is a dumbass only points out the person make that assumption as, well, a dumbass. Or, at least, a person with little or no ability to think deeply about a problem and come up with a good solution. In short, someone I don't want to bother interviewing.
An AOL email address, OTOH, is like having "computer stupid" tattooed on your forehead. Some small percentage of people with AOL email addresses are probably highly skilled IT professionals, but the number is assuredly tiny and gets tainted by association with the rest.
Not long ago, I had to evict some tenants who left the property in bad condition, stopped paying rent, and (I heard later from the neighbors) used to frequently throw loud parties with their home theater system blasting so loud that people two and three houses away could hear it inside. They sounded good on paper, but I guess I should have known. You guessed it: they had an AOL email address. Good thing there's no law that says I can't refuse someone as a tenant based on their email address. It's now on my reject list :-) Jk. Or maybe not.
If 7 out of 8 were caught (even if 1 made it on a plane and got to Dublin), Bratislava is probably actually not the best choice. I'd be surprised if TSA at most US airports could catch 6 out of 8. TSA testers have gotten whole fake bombs past checkpoints here.
I don't know about the domestic police where you live, but here in the SF Bay area, a BART officer is on trial for murder right now for shooting an unarmed suspect in the back.
If an Interpol officer did the same thing, the toughest thing we could do is deport him.
It is, as James Bond would put it, a license to kill.
You need about a +10 Insightful. I have children in 1st and 2nd grade, and we are fortunate to have a pretty good public school in our area of the smallish (pop. ~50K) California city where we live. And I do mean fortunate, because many of the schools in California just plain suck, despite the fact that the schools have a huge guaranteed slice of the budget. Despite the record budget percentage allocated to schools, many of them are terrible and even the good ones are strapped for cash. Where's the money going? Bureaucrats in Sacramento, largely. Some is wasted on technology, too. Fortunately, our principal is fairly astute at detecting technology BS and doesn't waste money in that area.
My second grader, who just turned 7, has an early 8th grade lexile level. Her "slow" sister, who just turned 6, is a over a year ahead of the expected lexile level for first graders. What role did technology play in this? Tiny: their reading levels were tested on computers. The magic bullet was an old-fashioned one: books. They were encouraged to read from a very young age and my second grader already had basic reading competence when she started kindergarten. Her younger sister could read and write the alphabet and could read some words when she started kindergarten. In both cases, this came not from technology, but from being home-schooled with pencils, paper, and books prior to starting school.
This doesn't mean technology has no place. As others have noted, it can be a wonderful tool for teaching special needs students and should absolutely be used when appropriate, in an appropriate way. But for most kids, technology in the classroom is not a learning aid, but a hindrance and detraction from time that could be spent learning. Want to learn to read? Spend quality time with books? Want to learn to do math? Quality time with a math book, pencil, and paper will help lots. Did I mention my kids are also both ahead of grade level in math? Same reason, same method.
I am totally on board with your idea that each school should be autonomous, and I'll even go a step further: _all_ education should be voucher-funded -even public schools - and you should be able to send your kids to any school you want with that money, and even public schools should be allowed to go out of business if they fail to achieve and thus can't attract students. This kind of competition will pretty quickly breed private-school quality in public schools because the ones that fail to achieve it will simply cease to exist. Self-preservation will see to it that they improve.
And while I'm at it, I'll say that we need to free of the teacher's unions, which are a hindrance to pretty much everything, even good teaching. One of the worst examples of this is tenure, a practice which may make sense in higher education but is ridiculous in primary and secondary education. If teachers kept their jobs the same way most of the rest of us do - through continued quality and value-add - we'd be much better off. So would they.
At our school, our principal recently had to let go a pretty good teacher whom he had been mentoring and training since he hired her because she was coming up to her third year of employment and he had two options: give her tenure or give her the boot. While she had made great progress, was popular with parents and students alike and would doubtless have moved from being a decent teacher to a great one, he had to go with his second option because in his opinion (which I trust a lot; he took charge at this school some years ago when it was failing and in danger of being closed by the school board, and turned it into a California Distinguished School and one of the best schools in our area), she wasn't ready for tenure. The tenure system forced him do to something he didn't want to do, and give her the boot. If he could have kept her on without tenure and continued mentoring her, I'm sure he would have.
I work for a major anti-spam vendor.
Yes, SPF records are part of the mix at many anti-spam vendors.
However, they aren't part of reputation. Reputation, to describe it simply and without giving away any secrets, is determined by the kind of mail a host or network emits. Whether it has SPF records and/or DKIM-signs its mail does not affect reputation; if you emit junk, your reputation will be junk.
SPF and (moreso) DKIM have value in assessing whether a given mail is a forgery or not (think phishing and related scams). They are not weighted overly much, since people do foolish things like put their work email address into their webmail account all the time, and it causes FPs, for some value of false positive. That is, it's not an FP per se, but the mail is technically legit, so dropping it on the floor isn't the desired action.
In short, don't expect having SPF and DKIM to improve your deliverability much, if at all. That's not where the value-add is. The value-add is helping to separate the sheep from the goats among mail that purports to be from your domain. If you want recipients to be able to (theoretically, since most of them don't/won't check) have greater confidence that a mail that claims to have come from your organization really did so, then yes, implement both SPF and DKIM.
If you're an organization whose customers might be phishing targets, definitely do both. Orgs I've seen targeted for phishing include financial institutions of any size (even a single branch!), various government agencies, educational institutions (not just universities, either), BBB, auto clubs, World of Warcraft accounts, Vonage, Craig's List, all the free webmail providers. If it has a login, and anything a phisher could find to be of value (for practically any value of "value"), there will be phishing attempts.
If your company is one of those - or even if it's not, really - I recommend both SPF and DKIM.
Yeah, what you said. And then some.
BTW, did anyone notice that coffee mugs were listed as one of the things not stereotypically associated with CS? I don't know where the people who conducted that study hang around, but in my nearly 30 years in IT, in every place I've worked, the coffee mug has been more strongly associated with IT/CS than anything. Well, except maybe beer :)
So, to extend on both what you said and on TFA, if women don't enter CS b/c they don't like to work around geeky guys, then who, exactly is being sexist (or something -ist) here? Doesn't sound like it's the guys to me.
A few things I have experienced in the aforementioned nearly 30 years in IT:
-Women tend to not like technology (computer and otherwise) very much. My wife has an IQ 20 - 30 points higher than mine, is a brilliant entrepreneur and a wizard with a spreadsheet. If you ask her what the screen resolution of our TV is, you're likely to get a blank look for a second before she turns to something interesting. If you get an answer at all, it might be "46 inches" rather than something like "HD" or "1080P" or "1920 x 1080." She cares not in the least how the TV, her computer, or our home network functions, merely that it does so. In that regard, she is like most women (and most men).
-If you don't have some love of computers and technology for their own sakes, you're unlikely to do well in this business. It's kind of like trying to succeed as a mathematician without a love of mathematics: ain't gonna happen.
-Some women like technology, they go into it and succeed. In my entire career, I've known 2 female unix admins and a handful of female mainframe operators. The good ones were all at least kind of geeky. Of the two best, I knew one of them well enough to attend an after-party at her residence. At 3:00 AM and well into our cups, several of us (her included) opened up a brand new, never used, SPARCStation 2 she'd inherited from some employer. The thing was immaculately clean inside and we were all deeply impressed at that machine in general and at the amount of Sun hardware she owned. An SS2 was cool and still somewhat usable with Linux at the time; this was about 10 years ago.
So really, there are not too few women in CS/IT, nor too few men. CS/IT tends to attract a certain kind of person. In general, it is the same kind of person who might have gone into hotrodding if they'd gone done another walk in life (and some of us in IT are current or former hotrodders, too; I was, in my youth). You'll notice there aren't many women into hotrodding,either, but the ones who are tend to have nicer than average cars. If the mindset that attracts people to IT is found more often in men than in women, it's not a problem. It just is.
As another poster noted, the vast majority of those working in early childhood and primary education are women, and no amount of re-jiggering the workplace or increasing the pay (which is actually not that bad) is going to change that. The attributes of primary education are more attractive to women, as a class, than they are to men, and the attributes of IT are more attractive to men, as a class, than they are to women. No amount of wishful thinking or anything else is going to change how people are biologically wired.
Trying to do that is like trying to tweak the opposite sex so that gays and lesbians will change their minds and become straight. Ain't gonna happen; if a woman is a lesbian, there's not much you could do short of a full gender reassignment that would make her attracted to a guy, and even then, she might not view the result as a real woman, but as a conversion job, and not be attracted. Ditto for gay men; give a woman a gender reassignment surgery and they might not perceive her as a man, but as a re-plumbed woman. Perhaps even more so, since male->female gender reassignment is generally more successful than the other way around.
Humane jails?
Hmm. In jail today, you get cable TV. Playboy, and I would suppose, other skin mags of your choice. Better medical care than many people who aren't in jail get. The contraband of your choice - including even cell phones - isn't that hard to get. Despite all this soft "humaneness," recidivism is as high as ever. Maybe worse.
That has to change. You want humane jails? Let's start with my definition of how a humane jail works, then:
1) It's a lot like military boot camp. What you do, when you do it, how you do it, and how much of it you do, is determined by your drill instructor. He or she cannot make you do it, but can make you wish you had.
1A) Military-style haircut. And your prison uniform shall be kept neat and clean. You will be issued a uniform that fits and you will wear it as instructed. If you don't want to wear it as instructed, see that part in item 1 about your DI making you wish you had.
2) You'll read what you're allowed to read. You'll watch on TV what you're allowed to watch. This will primarily be educational texts. Spiritual texts will be allowed for those who want them. TV will be education channels such as National Geographic or The History Channel, plus news channels. Want to watch a movie? Earn movie credits through achievement.
3) Education in prison shall be compulsory. Those not having a high school diploma or GED will go into a GED program. Those who do will go into a college program aimed at getting them a 2 or 4 year degree. Or, alternatively, a vocational training program. Completion of the program could, and in most cases should, be made part of the sentence. Allowances should be made for demonstrated learning disabilities.
-Or-
If you don't want to do that stuff, you can get your ass out on the chain gang every day and forget about parole or time off for good behavior. You'll serve every day of your sentence at hard labor.
WRT potential for mistakes in the take-em-out-and-shoot-em, I do support having a higher standard of evidence in capital cases. Specifically, the current standard of "beyond a reasonable doubt" is not enough. Something along the lines of "beyond the shadow of a doubt" is more appropriate. Concrete examples include DNA evidence - which has been used to exonerate a number of incarcerated individuals - or being apprehended at the scene of the crime.
Set up that framework, then push capital punishment down the offense stack. Way down the offense stack. Three strikes and you're out = a life sentence? No. Three strikes = the gallows. Rape, with DNA evidence, = the gallows. I think we could add a few crimes to that list, such as the ones that got this thread started.
I think it works something like this:
Many Americans - including myself - believe that crimes such as his warrant capital punishment, and not capital punishment after 10 - 20 years of bogus appeals, but take-him-out-back-of-the-courthouse-and-shoot-him type capital punishment. Thus, when he is sentenced to 4 consecutive 11-year terms in prison, people are left with the feeling that justice has not been served. Granted, at his age and physical condition, 44 years may well constitute a life sentence, but he has the at least theoretical possibility of being paroled, especially since (as far as I can determine) the sentence was not "without possibility of parole." Thus, he could well get out of prison.
If people believe a sentence is inadequate, don't be surprised if they react with something approaching glee at the possibility that a perp might be killed in prison.
In practical terms, he probably won't be. Known child molesters are typically segregated from the rest of the prisoners for their own protection, because if it becomes known that they are molesters, they're in for a rough time. Since he's fairly well known, especially in South Dakota, I rather expect they'll be keeping him away from the general population.
Pity. Jail should be unpleasant and even brutal. Provides added incentive to stay out of it, you see.
Sure, there are lots of places.
-In your residence
-In your car
-In email to your friends/family
-On the phone to your friends/family
-In person with your friends/family.
Venting on Facebook is more like going to Times Square and shouting out loud that you want to kill somebody. Don't be surprised when someone calls the police.
Lots has been written about people today failing to comprehend the line between public and private and the consequences thereof, so I don't need to add to it. I'll just say that Facebook is public, not private, and that public actions will have public consequences.
The poster above you said there's a difference between optimizing for your own but not the competitor's and deliberately sabotaging performance. You say there's not. Let's you and him fight :-)
Seriously, though, I don't see this as a problem. For starters, as some people have noted, not many are using Intel's compiler. The two most widely used compilers for x86 chips are Microsoft's and GCC. Secondly, why should they have to optimize their compiler for a competitor's product, really? Rather, it should be assumed by anyone and everyone that a benchmark made using an Intel product is going to do better on Intel chips, and it doesn't even require nefarious behavior on Intel's part to make that leap. Is it not a matter of course that they are going to be able to better optimize a compiler for a chip they made than a chip they didn't? And why doesn't AMD release its own compiler?
Slewing off-topic, when was the last time you met someone who didn't collect stamps who was vehemently and adamantly opposed to others doing so? Concrete example: has anyone ever sued to:
1) Prevent a kid from talking about his stamp collection at school?
2) Prevent a teacher from talking about stamp collecting at school?
3) Prevent a teacher from discussing her stamp collection in school?
4) A government agency (such as the post office, maybe) from displaying information about stamp collecting?
5) I think you get the idea.
Atheism is not technically a religion, since under the normal definition of religion, a belief in some deity is required. However, atheism is certainly a movement, and one that has some very religion-like qualities to it. I know that most atheists (at least in my direct experience) are live-and-let-live people who don't care or mind that others have religion, talk about it, or seek to advance it. You'd never even know they were atheists unless it happened to come up. However, there is a subset of atheists for whom it pretty much is a religion, or perhaps, an anti-religion. For them, there is no tolerance. Religion must be suppressed and removed from public discourse, and those who have a religion other than militant atheism must be drive into the closet.
How does a non-religious atheist behave? I'll take a good friend of mine as an example. His religious upbringing was at least very strongly agnostic, and I'd say atheist. I've heard him say on a number of occasions that he doesn't believe in God or an afterlife, and when you die, that's it. Yet he married a Christian and their kids are baptized. His wife has a free hand to raise the children in her faith. He doesn't usually attend church with her, but does on special occasions like Easter or Christmas, even though he doesn't believe, and he is respectful when he is there, and of her belief at all times so far as I can tell. Contrast that to, say, the behavior of Madeleine Murray O'Hare.
Atheism is clearly a religion, or at least a religion-like movement, for some value of religion and for some subset of atheists, much as Windows or Linux/Windows or Mac OS/PC or Mac hardware bears a strong resemblance to religion for some advocates of those platforms. To deny this is to ignore the facts on the ground, at best, and to practice sophistry or outright falsehood at worst.
How do you steal GPL-licensed code? By using it in a proprietary product and not releasing the source code to your version.
Who is it being stolen from? All the people who would have access to it had you complied with the license.
It is true that copyright infringement is not usually theft (but there is a case for it being theft when the infringer is selling the infringed item), since the usual type of infringer (a P2P downloader) would not have bought the product anyway, and the copyright holder is not deprived of the use of the infringed material (the usual definition of theft does require someone to be deprived of property). However, when someone infringes GPLed code, they are in fact depriving someone of the use of that code. Not the original author, but those who would, if the license were followed, potentially use that code. Thus, unlike copyrighted software, etc., distributed under a proprietary license which forbids redistribution, infringing copyrighted code distributed under the GPL is in fact theft.
I agree with everything you said, but the reason Obama is spending (IMO wasting) time on this now is simple: Hollywood pulled out all the stops in supporting his campaign, and people don't do that for free. He owes them. They know it, and he knows it, and this is the kind of payback Hollywood once.
Once upon a time in the 1970s, it was somewhat common to see stickers in car windows that said "Ass, gas, or grass - nobody rides for free." Politics works the same way.