I don't want any ads at all, but you just hit the nail on the head why the US ads are such a useless nuissance. I do not zap elsewhere for 30 seconds (unless I'm watching live coverage and another channel also has the same event on the air), but I'll never ever stick around for several minutes of ads on end. One really wonders why these companies don't get that...
You're joking, but you also hit another "escape nail" on the head.
Assume you're watching live coverage of something on channel A, but want to zap to channel B's coverage of the same thing in order to escape an ad block on channel A. Then you can just switch off your TV (technically they could prevent that, but in real life doing this would not be an option IMHO) and switch it back on "straight on channel B". Bingo!
Who says that only active zapping can get you trapped? Suppose I'm waiting for a program to start on channel A, but that channel is right now just drivelling away. So I decide to watch at the at least somewhat interesting channel B "until time has come". One minute before I intend to switch to channel A, channel B initiates a 5 minute block of ads. Then what?
So just who should, according to you, define the list of sites the lookup of which bypasses the hosts file? What if a new company enters the securityware business? How and when does it get in there? Be realistic! Oh I see, the list of exceptions should be modifiable without Mircosoft being involved... Errmmm....
The only thing that one might potentially accuse Microsoft of is not documenting this. To be honest, I couldn't care less...
They may very well know exactly what they fixed and have tested it to the very best of their ability without any vagueness. But that does not mean that they will also give out all the details. OK, they probably should do the latter in this case, but there is no causal link from being precise in patching and testing to being precise in disclosure.
I'm in software development (17 years of it) and I know that I've done it: testing the hell out of a patch (using near to one hunderd regression tests) for a problem we discovered ourselves, but never telling anyone outside the team what the patch was about. Why? Because of the nature of the software in question, the nature of the problem, the fact that no actual user discovered the problem in over 7 years of use, the fact that 95% of users could not possibly trigger it even if they knew all the details (special access to internal interfaces was required), and finally because of the nature of our users, who do not know all the details.
Now, I wouldn't actually direct an MBA to an RFC, because his eyes would glaze over about the time he got to "this memo has unlimited distribution."
Have you ever considered that there might be MBAs that originally majored in electrical engineering and/or computer science? Coz I know some, and will know several more in the near future...
The fact that you equal management with MBA, and either MBA or manager with "ignorant of what things really are about" says a lot about how little you understand both.
Look at me I'm a newbie. I say we should make a NON GNU linux distro. I am not smart enough to know that the linux kernel and most linux applications like gnome etc, are under the GPL. I am so much a little stupid girl. Look at me look at me. teheheheheh. OMG ponies!
Look at me. I'm a Slashdot troll. I say GNU should assimilate the world. I'm not smart enough to know that not everything licensed under the GPL is GNU software. I'm such a stupid little boy. Look at me look at me. teheheheheh. OMG ponies!
You'd be better of tracking worldwide economic/political news before you decide to flame people. Check out Suez for the most recent example. Ok, so that one doesn't involve the US, but that's irrelevant because it's only one example of many and most of all because it is very much in line with general French policies and attitudes. They are very nationalistic/protectionistic in general and in terms of economy in particular.
You'd rather pull on whatever is lying around and go about your day. That speaks to your attitude. There are things you are going to decide aren't worth your time, and your clothes show it. Subconsionsly, everybody else knows it too.
When I hire someone (I'm a software engineer / team lead), I want him or her to have things that they consider to not be worth their time! I want them to spend their effort on what is worth their (and my) time. I want them to be studied, creative, productive, committed to quality,... much more than I want them to be dressed up for a wedding party every other day.
For clarity: I never wear T-shirts or jeans myself, most of my clothing has a decent brand name, and I even wear an original (albeit a by now badly worn one) Armani leather vest on a daily basis. But I don't care at all what the people I work with wear, as long as they don't show up at a sales meeting in their underwear.
While I agree that these things have a long (design) life (unless it is preemptively shortened by one of their brethren, that is), the Iowa is a bad example. There is no realistic way that she could be recommissioned (nor any other of the class), even though some people still haven't reconciled themslves with that.
Not only would it be way too expensive and would there be a big training problem, there is also no capacity left anywhere in the world to make or reline the main gun barrels for an Iowa. So you'd have to rebuild that capacity from scratch as well, something that nobody did for 50-60 years at least. And then it would just sit around largely unused. Reviving an Iowa would be a step towards economic suicide of the US military budget.
Besides, from a military point of view, she would be useless. The days of the battleship were ended by the Japanese on December 7, 1941. In fact, they were ended before that even at Taranto on November 11, 1940.
Before anyone kindly points out that several Iowa's were active in the late 80s: I know that, I have a picture of BB61 firing her guns as my desktop background. Beautiful ship, that in my dreams I'd like to sail in (I'm a naval reserve officer). But that doesn't mean they were actually useful during those days, let alone economic. Their reactivation was largely the result of Reaganesc nostalgia.
You can delete posts from the google groups archive. I know, because I did at one point in time out of pure boredom: most of my posts are gone, several others can only be retrieved partially as quoted material.
I have to add, though, that I now regret having deleted that stuff. There was nothing sensitive, risky, or dangerous in there anyway. And if someone wants to check me out for the kind of position that I'm currently looking for, I'd rather they see the active poster with multiple interests that I am/was, than the boring lurker that I now appear to have been.
Finally, remember that Google is your memory too. If you really have posted something risky at some point in a distant past, Google also allows you to remember it in time (and thus to be ready to deal with oher people finding it). As I've written in another/. thread a few days ago: USENET has been archived from day 1, so somebody really persistent will be able to dig up the dirt about you anyway.
I'm saying: USENET was used by its users with the expectation that it was an ephemeral medium.
Not in my case, at least. I've been on USENET since 1988 and I never had that expectation. In fact, I have complained a few times to the relevant administrators that they were expiring stuff too quickly, as I wanted to go back in history looking for references.
What's more, that fact that Google can dig up some of my posts dating from at least 1992 also means that it was non-ephemeral. There was no Google back then, remember?
I'm one of those "knowledgeable users that has never been a sysadmin (except at home)" that you show so much disdain for. So I guess I'm entitled to respond.
16 years ago, we faced exactly the same situation as the person asking the question (same sixe of company, even). Then 15 years ago, "We the Users" staged a revolt (actually I did) and started a working group exactly as he describes to sort stuff out. Things were painful in the beginning, but once everybody understood what it was all about, improvement set in. We've been meeting on a monthly basis ever since. Today, I'm the chairman of that working group and the IT people are very unhappy that I have decided to leave the company. Some of them even hinted that I'd be welcomed to become head of IT in case I were to change my mind about leaving. Yet, I still don't know the nitty gritty details of a lot of stuff they do (and they know it), but I do have significant "power" because they trust me to do the right thing when I know what I'm doing and to keep my fingers off it when I don't.
The key thing is that there is also a lot of stuff that I - being the "ignorant user with some knowledge" that I am - know about what my fellow users - as well as the company - need and do that the IT people don't know. Such as priorities. Or future development strategies (Stick to UNIX? Switch to Linux? How fast do we need to migrate? Or does the market force us to do it all on Windows after all?)
The attitude that you display in your post is one of the key reasons why this sort of mess happens irrespective of which side of the "war" applies it. Both the users as well as IT need to understand that they don't know shit about the other side until they set up a constructive dialogue with people on that other side, educating them along the way.
Finally, IT exists to serve the users and the company. It is doesn't bring in any money on its own and payed by the company, So it'd better be willing to at least listen to what the rest of the company has to say.
Agnostic as I am, I do not believe this apocalypse nonsense at all. But it has to be said that there's another logical error here as well: maybe the invention of (for instance) the printing press really was "the beginning of the end". Maybe the whole process just takes 600 years to complete...
This is a common fallacy that equates years of experience with intelligence. While it is true that years of experience can help a person become better at their profession, would you rather have a doctor without a medical degree who has been practicing medicine for 30 years in a small African village or a young doctor who recently graduated from Johns Hopkins Medical? While this is an extreme example, it proves a point. Experience, in and of itself, does not equate to being skillful.
Let me tell you what I'd rather want for my software project: I want it to be architected by an EE guy with no formal SE training whatsoever but with a metric ton of experience and insight into software (hello Eddy!:-). Yep, he's very intelligent too, but that's besides the point: it allowed him to become the developer he is, but I want him on my project for what he's worth, not for the potential he has to be worth something 5 years from now. I do not want my project architected by a super-bright fresh CS graduate that has no experience whatsoever. Sure, I want that guy on the team as well (if and only if he also is a teamplayer, that is!), but I will never axiomatically consider him "equal" or "better". He'll have to *prove* it first.
I'm a CS guy with 17 years of experience myself, by the way, and I'm the formal project leader. But I know when to recognise developers that are better than me, instead of claming that "I'm created equal, since I am (or at least was) a decent software developer too".
I would be, indeed. A collegue of mine has in a previous life seen a case like that. A small linux server had been running just fine for ages and ages and ages. Then they needed to move it to another office location, so they shut it down nicely and cleanly, drove all the way to the new place, and discovered that it wouldn't boot. It turned out that the box had forgotten all of its low level configuration settings because the battery had died ages ago.
What's so difficult to understand about multiplication of survival rates?
1 * 0.995 is close enough to 1 to be undistiguisable from it without taking detailed measurements
1 * (0.995 ^ 35) equals about 0.84
Add to that the fact that more that boys then baby girls are born, so they actually start out at +- 1.05.
The fact that the difference in absolute numbers isn't immediately obvious amongst the younger ages doesn't mean that it isn't there at all. And it means even less that there isn't a force at work that "promotes" such a difference whenever it's given a chance.
Actually males have a higher mortality rate even in the womb.
True. That's partly related to the Y chromosome being a crippled one that is largely disfunctional.
... There are 1.05 males born for every female...
Also true. This again is related to the Y chromosome being a crippled one. Sperm with Y chromosomes is just that tiny bit lighter and therefore swims faster. The same fact explains why, on average, women that have trouble getting pregnant due to certain genetic/environmentl/medical conditions are even more likely to have sons than they are to have daughters if they do manage to get children in the natural way.
..., but by the time we get to be around 30, the ratio starts becoming much more even and of course in the over 65 group females outnumber males by a significant margin.
Also true, but not related to the higher mortality rate in the womb point that you were making.
By the time we get to be around 30, many more males than females have been taken out by stupid testosterone induced accidents, wars, religious fanatism,... And indeed also by illnesses and weaknesses that are either directly or indirectly influenced by that largely disfunctional Y chromosome.
By the time we get to be 65, other bad habbits that once used to be "almost male only" but that nowadays are increasingly more equally spread, such as smoking, have taken their toll. Lung cancer deaths are clearly on the rise in the female population, but it takes decades for an effect like that to fully show through.
What about somebody with a solid 17 year long track record of concerted effort to improve the organization and a whole bunch of achievements in teh area, but who finally geve up as he has no desire to fight the same almost-hopeless kind of fights for another 20 years and actually wants to do something really productive in a sane environment instead? Would you want him? If not why not? Because he took too long to quit?
Let me tell you from experience: There are companies that want to hire such people ASAP. Sometimes even the one that he's just quiting from, because at long last they understand how much they're in trouble if he really leaves (possibly causing some similarly minded souls to do the same thing).
PS: Dear boss: if you're reading this: There's no way in hell that you'll convince me to stay just like that.
Actually, I didn't trow any calculator about, but I did resign, predicting that many of my team would follow within months. When I announced my decision to the team, the genuine reaction definitely was "soapable". Seven weeks later, some of my now former team members (and some outsiders that "got the signal" just as well) are actively looking into following my example, not having decided what to do yet. And today I learned that the first domino has indeed fallen. My boss is now almost starting to beg to make me reconsider, but he doesn't stand any chance.
That is sooo easy to fix! Make the main character not a lowly engineer, but one that has some management responsability. Say someone in a technical leadership position who actually cares about her/his team of engineers and who has to fight the upper brass to be allowed to do decent people management and to keep the shit out of the way. Someone who is aware of a lot of things going wrong, including something illegal if need be, but who is not in a position to do something about them directly and who therefore has to lobby all over the place (and use intrigue) in an attempt to change stuff. Make her/him somebody who wants to stay decent, but who discovers that in order to get the right thing done, (s)he unwillingly has to cross the line to the "other side". Make her/him feel guilty about having to do this...
It's not like all of the above doesn't exist in real life. People who know who I am will recognise the setting, as well as some recent events, when reading the above.
Does the guy have any clue? I work in scientific research (have done so for 17 years now), and while the topic of what we do in terms of science certainly is boring to Jane & Joe Sixpack, let me tell you that there is literally tons of material in this organisation to create a sucessfull soap series with. Compared to Dallas, the only thing that we don't have readily available is execs as rich as the Ewings. But all the rest we have right here. Corruption, love affairs, hate campains, ruthless managers, incompetent managers, political infighting, hostile takeover attempts, people aged 30 that fall victim to cancer and eventually survice, people that are hit by 3 personal tragedies (both work related and in their private lives) within the space of a mere week,... You name it, I've seen it. Besides, there are plenty of soaps that prove that you don't need to locate the action in the world of the super rich to be succesful. Add a bit of hyperbole here and there (if really needed also on the financial front) to the personal life of the main characters, choose your cast and cliffhangers well, and bingo!
If I were a professional soap writer, I could easily fill something like 24 or more episodes with the stuff that I've seen so far. Adding more material later on, if the thing turns out to be a real success, would be trivial as well.
Maybe you really can trust someone that he'll not conciously steal data. But in addition you need to trust him that he'll always have a copy of all important data on a disk that is backed up, coz' that USB stick of his might easily get lost. OK, so you know the guy and trust that he's competent enough to know why that matters. But then, do you also trust the IT staff that they will always acommodate his needs for storage space and will never force him to fall back to (permanent) emergency solutions?
If you think the above cannot happen, try again. I actually know someone that I trust to the extent described above (and beyond). But I also know the bureacracy of our IT staff and know first hand how much money they "charge" for providing 1GB of storage per year. It's ridiculous and it drives even the most competent people to the point where they store vital data on non-backuped disks and hope for the best. Even our the vast majority of our IT staff themselves know that this policy is crazy, but there's nothing they can do, coz' they don't run the shop either. Even their boss, who invented it, knows it. But he doesn't have any direct income from projects and still has to get all the money that he needs to run IT aproved somewhere.
In the end, unless you're a 2 or 3 persons operation where you really know everybody (but even then), you have to (also) base the amount of trust you're willing to give on the assumption that there is always going to be someone somewhere who isn't worthy of more trust, for whatever reason.
After all, there's a good reason why one should never attribute to malice that which can be adequatly explained by stupidity, as they saying goes.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't want any ads at all, but you just hit the nail on the head why the US ads are such a useless nuissance. I do not zap elsewhere for 30 seconds (unless I'm watching live coverage and another channel also has the same event on the air), but I'll never ever stick around for several minutes of ads on end. One really wonders why these companies don't get that...
Assume you're watching live coverage of something on channel A, but want to zap to channel B's coverage of the same thing in order to escape an ad block on channel A. Then you can just switch off your TV (technically they could prevent that, but in real life doing this would not be an option IMHO) and switch it back on "straight on channel B". Bingo!
Who says that only active zapping can get you trapped? Suppose I'm waiting for a program to start on channel A, but that channel is right now just drivelling away. So I decide to watch at the at least somewhat interesting channel B "until time has come". One minute before I intend to switch to channel A, channel B initiates a 5 minute block of ads. Then what?
The only thing that one might potentially accuse Microsoft of is not documenting this. To be honest, I couldn't care less...
They may very well know exactly what they fixed and have tested it to the very best of their ability without any vagueness. But that does not mean that they will also give out all the details. OK, they probably should do the latter in this case, but there is no causal link from being precise in patching and testing to being precise in disclosure.
I'm in software development (17 years of it) and I know that I've done it: testing the hell out of a patch (using near to one hunderd regression tests) for a problem we discovered ourselves, but never telling anyone outside the team what the patch was about. Why? Because of the nature of the software in question, the nature of the problem, the fact that no actual user discovered the problem in over 7 years of use, the fact that 95% of users could not possibly trigger it even if they knew all the details (special access to internal interfaces was required), and finally because of the nature of our users, who do not know all the details.
Have you ever considered that there might be MBAs that originally majored in electrical engineering and/or computer science? Coz I know some, and will know several more in the near future...
The fact that you equal management with MBA, and either MBA or manager with "ignorant of what things really are about" says a lot about how little you understand both.
Look at me. I'm a Slashdot troll. I say GNU should assimilate the world. I'm not smart enough to know that not everything licensed under the GPL is GNU software. I'm such a stupid little boy. Look at me look at me. teheheheheh. OMG ponies!
You'd be better of tracking worldwide economic/political news before you decide to flame people. Check out Suez for the most recent example. Ok, so that one doesn't involve the US, but that's irrelevant because it's only one example of many and most of all because it is very much in line with general French policies and attitudes. They are very nationalistic/protectionistic in general and in terms of economy in particular.
When I hire someone (I'm a software engineer / team lead), I want him or her to have things that they consider to not be worth their time! I want them to spend their effort on what is worth their (and my) time. I want them to be studied, creative, productive, committed to quality, ... much more than I want them to be dressed up for a wedding party every other day.
For clarity: I never wear T-shirts or jeans myself, most of my clothing has a decent brand name, and I even wear an original (albeit a by now badly worn one) Armani leather vest on a daily basis. But I don't care at all what the people I work with wear, as long as they don't show up at a sales meeting in their underwear.
Not only would it be way too expensive and would there be a big training problem, there is also no capacity left anywhere in the world to make or reline the main gun barrels for an Iowa. So you'd have to rebuild that capacity from scratch as well, something that nobody did for 50-60 years at least. And then it would just sit around largely unused. Reviving an Iowa would be a step towards economic suicide of the US military budget.
Besides, from a military point of view, she would be useless. The days of the battleship were ended by the Japanese on December 7, 1941. In fact, they were ended before that even at Taranto on November 11, 1940.
Before anyone kindly points out that several Iowa's were active in the late 80s: I know that, I have a picture of BB61 firing her guns as my desktop background. Beautiful ship, that in my dreams I'd like to sail in (I'm a naval reserve officer). But that doesn't mean they were actually useful during those days, let alone economic. Their reactivation was largely the result of Reaganesc nostalgia.
I have to add, though, that I now regret having deleted that stuff. There was nothing sensitive, risky, or dangerous in there anyway. And if someone wants to check me out for the kind of position that I'm currently looking for, I'd rather they see the active poster with multiple interests that I am/was, than the boring lurker that I now appear to have been.
Finally, remember that Google is your memory too. If you really have posted something risky at some point in a distant past, Google also allows you to remember it in time (and thus to be ready to deal with oher people finding it). As I've written in another /. thread a few days ago: USENET has been archived from day 1, so somebody really persistent will be able to dig up the dirt about you anyway.
Not in my case, at least. I've been on USENET since 1988 and I never had that expectation. In fact, I have complained a few times to the relevant administrators that they were expiring stuff too quickly, as I wanted to go back in history looking for references.
What's more, that fact that Google can dig up some of my posts dating from at least 1992 also means that it was non-ephemeral. There was no Google back then, remember?
16 years ago, we faced exactly the same situation as the person asking the question (same sixe of company, even). Then 15 years ago, "We the Users" staged a revolt (actually I did) and started a working group exactly as he describes to sort stuff out. Things were painful in the beginning, but once everybody understood what it was all about, improvement set in. We've been meeting on a monthly basis ever since. Today, I'm the chairman of that working group and the IT people are very unhappy that I have decided to leave the company. Some of them even hinted that I'd be welcomed to become head of IT in case I were to change my mind about leaving. Yet, I still don't know the nitty gritty details of a lot of stuff they do (and they know it), but I do have significant "power" because they trust me to do the right thing when I know what I'm doing and to keep my fingers off it when I don't.
The key thing is that there is also a lot of stuff that I - being the "ignorant user with some knowledge" that I am - know about what my fellow users - as well as the company - need and do that the IT people don't know. Such as priorities. Or future development strategies (Stick to UNIX? Switch to Linux? How fast do we need to migrate? Or does the market force us to do it all on Windows after all?)
The attitude that you display in your post is one of the key reasons why this sort of mess happens irrespective of which side of the "war" applies it. Both the users as well as IT need to understand that they don't know shit about the other side until they set up a constructive dialogue with people on that other side, educating them along the way.
Finally, IT exists to serve the users and the company. It is doesn't bring in any money on its own and payed by the company, So it'd better be willing to at least listen to what the rest of the company has to say.
Agnostic as I am, I do not believe this apocalypse nonsense at all. But it has to be said that there's another logical error here as well: maybe the invention of (for instance) the printing press really was "the beginning of the end". Maybe the whole process just takes 600 years to complete...
Let me tell you what I'd rather want for my software project: I want it to be architected by an EE guy with no formal SE training whatsoever but with a metric ton of experience and insight into software (hello Eddy! :-). Yep, he's very intelligent too, but that's besides the point: it allowed him to become the developer he is, but I want him on my project for what he's worth, not for the potential he has to be worth something 5 years from now. I do not want my project architected by a super-bright fresh CS graduate that has no experience whatsoever. Sure, I want that guy on the team as well (if and only if he also is a teamplayer, that is!), but I will never axiomatically consider him "equal" or "better". He'll have to *prove* it first.
I'm a CS guy with 17 years of experience myself, by the way, and I'm the formal project leader. But I know when to recognise developers that are better than me, instead of claming that "I'm created equal, since I am (or at least was) a decent software developer too".
I would be, indeed. A collegue of mine has in a previous life seen a case like that. A small linux server had been running just fine for ages and ages and ages. Then they needed to move it to another office location, so they shut it down nicely and cleanly, drove all the way to the new place, and discovered that it wouldn't boot. It turned out that the box had forgotten all of its low level configuration settings because the battery had died ages ago.
(Having said that, my father will turn 78 next month. 4 months ago he still had a wife, but not anymore. She was only 66 when she died.)
The fact that the difference in absolute numbers isn't immediately obvious amongst the younger ages doesn't mean that it isn't there at all. And it means even less that there isn't a force at work that "promotes" such a difference whenever it's given a chance.
True. That's partly related to the Y chromosome being a crippled one that is largely disfunctional.
Also true. This again is related to the Y chromosome being a crippled one. Sperm with Y chromosomes is just that tiny bit lighter and therefore swims faster. The same fact explains why, on average, women that have trouble getting pregnant due to certain genetic/environmentl/medical conditions are even more likely to have sons than they are to have daughters if they do manage to get children in the natural way.
Also true, but not related to the higher mortality rate in the womb point that you were making.
By the time we get to be around 30, many more males than females have been taken out by stupid testosterone induced accidents, wars, religious fanatism, ... And indeed also by illnesses and weaknesses that are either directly or indirectly influenced by that largely disfunctional Y chromosome.
By the time we get to be 65, other bad habbits that once used to be "almost male only" but that nowadays are increasingly more equally spread, such as smoking, have taken their toll. Lung cancer deaths are clearly on the rise in the female population, but it takes decades for an effect like that to fully show through.
Let me tell you from experience: There are companies that want to hire such people ASAP. Sometimes even the one that he's just quiting from, because at long last they understand how much they're in trouble if he really leaves (possibly causing some similarly minded souls to do the same thing).
PS: Dear boss: if you're reading this: There's no way in hell that you'll convince me to stay just like that.
Actually, I didn't trow any calculator about, but I did resign, predicting that many of my team would follow within months. When I announced my decision to the team, the genuine reaction definitely was "soapable". Seven weeks later, some of my now former team members (and some outsiders that "got the signal" just as well) are actively looking into following my example, not having decided what to do yet. And today I learned that the first domino has indeed fallen. My boss is now almost starting to beg to make me reconsider, but he doesn't stand any chance.
It's not like all of the above doesn't exist in real life. People who know who I am will recognise the setting, as well as some recent events, when reading the above.
Does the guy have any clue? I work in scientific research (have done so for 17 years now), and while the topic of what we do in terms of science certainly is boring to Jane & Joe Sixpack, let me tell you that there is literally tons of material in this organisation to create a sucessfull soap series with. Compared to Dallas, the only thing that we don't have readily available is execs as rich as the Ewings. But all the rest we have right here. Corruption, love affairs, hate campains, ruthless managers, incompetent managers, political infighting, hostile takeover attempts, people aged 30 that fall victim to cancer and eventually survice, people that are hit by 3 personal tragedies (both work related and in their private lives) within the space of a mere week,... You name it, I've seen it. Besides, there are plenty of soaps that prove that you don't need to locate the action in the world of the super rich to be succesful. Add a bit of hyperbole here and there (if really needed also on the financial front) to the personal life of the main characters, choose your cast and cliffhangers well, and bingo!
If I were a professional soap writer, I could easily fill something like 24 or more episodes with the stuff that I've seen so far. Adding more material later on, if the thing turns out to be a real success, would be trivial as well.
I just installed the Adobe plugin in a Mozilla 1.7.x tree and get the same effect. Sample SVGs that I find elsewhere on the web work fine, though.
Maybe you really can trust someone that he'll not conciously steal data. But in addition you need to trust him that he'll always have a copy of all important data on a disk that is backed up, coz' that USB stick of his might easily get lost. OK, so you know the guy and trust that he's competent enough to know why that matters. But then, do you also trust the IT staff that they will always acommodate his needs for storage space and will never force him to fall back to (permanent) emergency solutions?
If you think the above cannot happen, try again. I actually know someone that I trust to the extent described above (and beyond). But I also know the bureacracy of our IT staff and know first hand how much money they "charge" for providing 1GB of storage per year. It's ridiculous and it drives even the most competent people to the point where they store vital data on non-backuped disks and hope for the best. Even our the vast majority of our IT staff themselves know that this policy is crazy, but there's nothing they can do, coz' they don't run the shop either. Even their boss, who invented it, knows it. But he doesn't have any direct income from projects and still has to get all the money that he needs to run IT aproved somewhere.
In the end, unless you're a 2 or 3 persons operation where you really know everybody (but even then), you have to (also) base the amount of trust you're willing to give on the assumption that there is always going to be someone somewhere who isn't worthy of more trust, for whatever reason.
After all, there's a good reason why one should never attribute to malice that which can be adequatly explained by stupidity, as they saying goes.