My surprise was that they would dare say such things. They have a DSL monoply and are refusing to develop it. It makes it obvious that they care more about government protection than they do about providing service, even when they have been given a monopoly. Bessides alienating the public, they have made a firm enemy of Mr. Powell.
You seem to know how to save us and suggest this course of action:
The solution is CUT COSTS. Stop spending millions a year on pressing and distributing CD's and just put everything in an online library. It's just that simple. Then you can offer more because it costs less to produce. Then people will buy...but not until you make the leap.
Let me remind you what will happen to us if and when we become just another web site and why you don't want that to happen. Two armed thugs are on the way to your residence right now to break your legs. When they are finished with you, be a good boy and go buy some sothing music to recover. You will find lots of nice offerings at any mojor music outlet. Don't look at a used CD store, one of those silly indempendent stores that have no-non major label music because we won't let them, or online because we broke all of that just like your legs.
Your friend, Ben StuffedShirt AOL Cheif Competive Research..
I was a sub-sub contractor for a project like this that Sony wanted to do.
I spent days TRYING to talk them out of it.
They were convinced that the whole napster phenonminon proved that users wanted to burn their own CDs... not that it had ANYTHING to do with getting something for free.
The only convienience this gives me is that I don't have to buy a crappy song to get a good one. Yippie!
Sony was right, people do want to burn their own CDs and are willing to pay reasonable amounts for it. Napster was about being able to get anything you wanted, especially rare and discontinued music and other audio files.
Time-Warner is screwed up. It's no co-incident that this overpriced service is being offered within a two months of the big shake up at AOL-Time Warner. The AOL people are out so now, YEARS after the merger, AOL gets the boost it needs. The only problem is that it's being done on Time-Warner Terms. NO ONE is going to pay the price of an AOL subscription plus 19/month to be able to stream sub par music and then write ten dinky Digital Rights Denied songs a month. So it shall flop. Too little too late TW.
I'm not, or at least I don't understand his passion and personal defensiveness. So a few blow hole Windoze rags got all excited? Could it be that those rags got upset because they actually think Microsoft "Security" is improving just like Bill Gates says it is? Why is Tim Mullen acting so offended? He wrote much of the article in the first person, using "I" no less than sixteen times. "Give me a break", he cries, "When banner ad revenue for a media outlet becomes more important than accuracy, it's time to find a new profession. " Is someone putting undue pressure on poor Tim? Like a major spnsor looking for damage control?
Others are pointing out that Tim might have gotten the bit about "administrator" access wrong and that's important. The administrator may have control of tools that conceal his presence in a way that makes it easier to alter the system. Undetected system alteration is more damaging than simply digging up data. It gives the perpetrator access to data present and in the future undetected. That's far worse than stealing a hard disk and a good reason to take the five minutes (typical M$ efficiency!) to boot that way. It also justifies the use of the W2K boot disk over a Linux disk, though it's nice of Tim to portray Linux as the ultimate cracker tool. The only thing worse than no security is security that impeeds and lulls the user but aids the cracker.
You do know that you can get every form [irs.gov] as a PDF at the IRS website don't you?
No, I did not know that, thank you very much, it might save me a trip to the library. So long as they don't use M$ Word as a document generator, I should be able to view and print any of those forms. I have had trouble with PDF forms in the past which Ghost Script was not able to deal with, so the format is not fool or M$ proof. Adobe's client was able to deal with some, but not all of the forms that contained such intentional errors.
Other infinging parties include Kindergardens and all market places. Kindergardens have a thing called, "Show and Tell" where items are displayed and people talk about them. I plan for my kindergardener to telecomute, will she have to pay Amazon for her show and tell?! Market places have these things called displays where items for sale are placed in public view and a moderator, also known as a sales person, stands beside it and guides members of a discusion group, known as shopers. Indeed, many discussion groups have been known to flurish in said market places that talk about nothing related to buying and selling items, a good example being the various groups that hung out in the Agora of Athens. It seems that the City of Athens has been in violation of this patent for some 2500 years. Ammazon can get some fierce interest penalties from them! Way to innovate Ammazon.
Thank you Federal Government, your little office has encouraged so much that is useful and good. Will you next award Yahoo a patent on internet chat? Please! I feel so guilty for using royalty free software.
Remember disk overlay software? That's an example of software that most people did not understand that got a very bad reputation. Even Joe Sixpacks pays atention when something breaks his computer. Woe to the named agent.
Intuit has done something dumb and will pay. It's bad enough on it's own. M$ could use this to wipe Intuit out the same way they rubbed out DR Dos. A bunch of bogus error messages on top of a few real crashes and no one will ever buy another Turbo Tax again. They will use M$ Taxman or something.
I'm never going to use another non free tax package again. Intuit has proved abusive despite having a good program that was worth the money. It's lowered my confidence in comercial software one more notch.
This year their fraction of the market is stable, next year it will fall. Why? Because this year they are going to screw up people's machines and that will ruin their reputation. The word is already out on them and it kept them from selling more. Next year, when people actually have stories to tell of computer rebuilds, Intuit will eat it. It does not matter if Tubo Tax or Gator broke the machine, everyone knows that Turbo Tax did something they did not have to and should not have. It's so bad that it's turned me further off from comercial code from any vendor.
Yep, copy "protection" that eats your computer for the sake of a $20 software package is really dumb.
Because I won't be able to use Turbo Tax, I'm going to have to actually go down to the library to get the suplemental forms I need. It will take a while and reminders are nice.
What makes you think that US facilities are not secure and that those elswhere are? "Terrorists" operate in Iraq and other hell holes. The only difference between here and there is that there no one is free to report the damage. Iraq's military defense is not so swell either. A single Israeli F-16 knocked out most of Sadam's nuclear capability ten years ago. Kuwait was a good example of Iraq's military strategy, discipline and effectiveness. All of Sadam's money has been spent and all of his people's rights have been denied for nothing. Subways that no one uses, nuclear facilities that generate no power, communications without privacy and jail time for ideas are all wastes.
It's always like this. Some Slahdot people would get hired, and then be presented with 1,500 applications for medical devices.
Could the patent office have experts in every field so that they do nothing incompetent in any? Wow, what a concept, competent government run by free men instead of incompetence connived at by slaves.
They are still understanding the comercialization of software that occured in the 1980s. That's not an easy thing for people not involved with creating software to do. After all, most people were able to ignore computers untill 1996 or so and even then, few people took the time to read all the printed garbage that came with their new tools. Non Disclossure Agreements have only recently filtered out into the rest of the world, especially in the Draconian form that Richard Stallman was faced with in 1984. Even more clueful and involved people can get caught. Honest people can't understand, much less predict dishonest people.
Q: It seems strange that social and psychological factors are more important incentives for creating open-source software than money.
A: I worked for Pixar for 12 years. During those 12 years, every piece of software I wrote, except for one, hit its end of life before I left the company -- the projects were canceled or never deployed. Nothing survives. Now, programmers are like artists. They derive gratification from lots of people using their work. Writing software that just gets put away feels like intellectual masturbation. All of the good comes from someone else participating.
I'm glad that you were not refering to the efforts of free software writers. Who'd have ever thought of a bunch of softies as wankers? I'll leave that piece of filth about the de-bugger alone as they might be against the law in Southern California.
Not so bad at all really. A better analogy, and one I can tell my daughter, would be to compare such work with an Egyptian Slave's job. You eat and work on beautiful objects but your work is secret and in the end it gets locked up in a tomb with a dead man and perhaps yourself never to be seen again by anyone you know or care about. Not very satisfying at all, especiall when you cosider that your work is paid for and props up the nasty structure that enslaves everyone you know. Nah, jerk off works better.
"The Raw, the Cooked and the Half Baked" why does that ring a bell?
It's very good for your average journalist. Sure, they play up this hippie BS and they got a few things silly. Let's give them some credit, Jim Kerstetter did a very good job of cutting through the FUD and summarizing a real shift in industry. This is a very difficult thing for someone who has not worked as a programer to do. Let's help him out a little, shall we?
The best thing I can recomend for him is to spend some more time at the Free Software Society's web site, but especially this page. That "promise to give away innovations" is indeed kind of silly. The use of one idea to extract or deny others is the key sin the Free Software Foundation is fighting against. The notion that the free software people have a problem with anyone making money is also misinformed. The FSF site is a cure for the ignorance behind statments like this, which blemish an otherwise fine article:
Open-source software programmers say they're different from Stallman in one major way: They don't have a problem with people making money off their work--or making money themselves.
The free software foundation only has a problem with people screwing others, for any reason money making included. The Free Software Foundation stands against you using your own work and that of others to extract things from people. The kinds of things extracted for the use of software currently includes everything from money to limits on what you will tell others and who you might work for. The most repulsive thing non free software vendors do is attempt to keep others from understanding how to fix their own problems so that they can extract money perpetually for a problem solved by others long ago. Let's have a look at some of the good words on the above mentioned page:
However, certain kinds of rules about the manner of distributing free software are acceptable, when they don't conflict with the central freedoms. For example, copyleft (very simply stated) is the rule that when redistributing the program, you cannot add restrictions to deny other people the central freedoms. This rule does not conflict with the central freedoms; rather it protects them.
Thus, you may have paid money to get copies of free software, or you may have obtained copies at no charge. But regardless of how you got your copies, you always have the freedom to copy and change the software, even to sell copies.``Free software'' does not mean ``non-commercial''. A free program must be available for commercial use, commercial development, and commercial distribution. Commercial development of free software is no longer unusual; such free commercial software is very important.
In short, people are encouraged to work together to solve common problems like free men will. Using free software will no more force a company to give away confidential information than using manila folders requires people to divulge the contents of their files. The only thing you are really encouraged to do is share your impovements to other people's work, much as lawyers, doctors, engineers and all other professionals have always done.
Wow, nothing really radical there is there? Really when you think about it the restrictions created by modern publishers, especially comercial software vendors, represent the really radical departure from social norms. Telling people that they can't share their expertise in a field? That you can't share your books or even sing a song with your friends that was originally dedicated to your cause? It all starts with a non disclosure agreement, an end user license agreement, a 100 year long copyright and that little "submit" button.
Re:The Witches of Yesterday are the hackers of today.
Hmmm, breakdown by OS:
Win9x admin: ostracized dude at the hell desk. Mantra: "have you tried to reboot?" Spells are secondhand and generally ineffective. Worships the devil and is usually cranky due to above mentioned lack of effeciency and understanding. Sometimes seems possesed. Practicioner of Voodoo.
Win Server Admin: Sometimes casts his own spells. Still worships the devil but may see the error of his ways. Less cranky because one or two spells actually work. Knows Voodoo, and some other Black arts
BSD/Unix Admin: A wide specturm of talents and dispositions. Worships nature, makes little noise and is very effective. Effectivly correlates cause and effect but will still make deals tith the devil. Druid/Alchemist
Linux/Unix Admin: Also a wide variety of talents and dispositions. Makes more noise than the BSD/Unix admin. Worships Nature but believes in higher powers and the law. Can be just as effective as BSD/Unix, very powerful but often thwarted by the Devil. Often persecuted by the Devil and his dupes. Martyr/Scientist
I am sick of the hypocrisy Slashdot getting all up in arms about the Patriot Act and then worshipping Kevin Mitnick.
Umm, the article was written by laywers who pointed out that computer crimes were punished more severly than their meat space counterparts. KM himself says that he was wrong and deserved to be punished. No one, however, deserves to be held in jail, sometimes in solitary confinement, without charge for five years. The paper simply points out that the justice system is largely clueless about the threat and cost of such crimes.
The (majority) of the offenses are generally disgruntled employees getting back at the employer or trying to make money."
This is very serious as it might just be the other way around. Ever been under a supervisor that did not like you? It does not last long, generally. If they are clever, they could set you up for an extened stay in jail and get rid of you at the same time. There are always two disgruntled parties whenever someone is fired and you should take what either says with a large grain of salt.
And the hacker should go to jail for it, just as they would go to jail for breaking into my house and checking out all my stuff. I don't care if they steal anything or not, it is an invasion of my life and privacy!
Would jail your bank, grocery store, and comercial software vendors for those same violations? No, they don't tell you they are doing it, they just do it. The backdoors are put their by design and others sometimes use them. Sure, it's wrong, but you should hate all those who abuse you or simply recognize that you don't care.
Bodily harm or death is much more permanent than losing money.
That's true! In fact, most societies would forgive you if you shot and killed someone who was busy carving up their friend with a knife. Do you know of any that would do the same for someone who shot a hacker? So why is it that hackers can be held for five years without being charged as KM was?
Punishment should fit crime, and ordinary rules of presumed innocence need to be applied in cases of suspected computer crime. As things are, any with-it employer could be frighfully abusive if they wanted.
How about buying from your local bookseller and paying cash?
Winston says that he works for Big Brother too. That bastard who gave him "The Book" set him up! If that "local" bookshop is not in another town, you are not paranoid enough.
Indeed, the bookstore records should be considered "papers" and protected, so this whole business of "knocking down stovepipes" between government and private databases is FUCKING UNAMERICAN!
The language of the constitution is so clear and the intentions are so obvious, that it is equally obvious that it has been broken. You have the right to assemble, to say, pray, and publish what you will. You have the right to bear arms. You will not be put upon by the military. The government can't harrass you without real evidence you are a criminal. The court system will not be used to abuse you. You will have a jury if you are sued. Bail will not be used instead of a conviction. You will not be abused in jail. All of these things have been violated recently with perhaps the exception of the 3rd. I'm not aware of any involuntary quartering of troops, unless eminent domain aquisitions for military bases are considered.
Where are these guys getting their stuff, the hardware store down the street? Enough said. Would I even think of going down in one of these boats? No...not ever.
Good parts are nice to have. When you can't afford them, it IS possible to inspect and prove the parts yourself and make them redundant. The lessons you cite are useful to anyone that wants to look. One of those lessons might be that procedures and regulations are no substitute for free enterprise and competition. If that were true, there would have been no Soviet accidents, but it's not and their service was more dangerous than ours.
It bothers me to see Americans with a "no can do" attitude. This country was founded by people who needed little more than an axe and a rifle. Taken to it's extreem, this attitude would lead to stringent requirements for everything that only one or two companies could meet. The result would look more like the former Soviet Union than the USA.
People out there building their own submarines and other stuff for themselves are the people that make this country work. They consider the problem and build experience to solve other problems that come up. We should be ashamed an worried when these nuts quit what they do.
Waddle does not have a red eye. At least not on the TY site and he was discontinued in 98. You must have been paid to make that silly remark, that or very stupid.
It's a room full of computer geeks, of course the penguin means linux! The softies probably stick pins in him or some other voodoo that has about as much chance of making Linux go away as they have of overcoming their marketroid bosses. Freedom works, closed source blows.
_All_ developers are cocky - very cocky. It's not just a Windows thing.
Blanket statements are stupid, but we can make a few observations that show trends. Have you ever seen a pdksh develper argue with Korn that pdksh was "fully compatible" with the ksh? Nah, me either, but an M$ rep did. Ever see a kernel hacker say that all computers should run the Linux kernel? One or two might say that all computers should run free software, but there is nothing egotistical about that.
Of course there are a few things we can say about Windows developers in general too. Code Red, Sir Cam, "I Love you", and all the rest. Humiliation is a Microsoft thing and will be till they fundamentally alter their development model. Marketroid driven closed source software does not work.
You could just cut them all off. Are there any places left that don't call in credit card purchases? Of course, that would leave 2.2 million credit card users high and dry and they would have to issue 2.2 million new cards. It would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and do incalculable PR damage. So what to do?
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for the link, meshing is the way to go.
You seem to know how to save us and suggest this course of action:
The solution is CUT COSTS. Stop spending millions a year on pressing and distributing CD's and just put everything in an online library. It's just that simple. Then you can offer more because it costs less to produce. Then people will buy...but not until you make the leap.
Let me remind you what will happen to us if and when we become just another web site and why you don't want that to happen. Two armed thugs are on the way to your residence right now to break your legs. When they are finished with you, be a good boy and go buy some sothing music to recover. You will find lots of nice offerings at any mojor music outlet. Don't look at a used CD store, one of those silly indempendent stores that have no-non major label music because we won't let them, or online because we broke all of that just like your legs.
Your friend,
Ben StuffedShirt
AOL Cheif Competive Research..
I was a sub-sub contractor for a project like this that Sony wanted to do.
I spent days TRYING to talk them out of it. They were convinced that the whole napster phenonminon proved that users wanted to burn their own CDs... not that it had ANYTHING to do with getting something for free.
The only convienience this gives me is that I don't have to buy a crappy song to get a good one. Yippie!
Sony was right, people do want to burn their own CDs and are willing to pay reasonable amounts for it. Napster was about being able to get anything you wanted, especially rare and discontinued music and other audio files.
Time-Warner is screwed up. It's no co-incident that this overpriced service is being offered within a two months of the big shake up at AOL-Time Warner. The AOL people are out so now, YEARS after the merger, AOL gets the boost it needs. The only problem is that it's being done on Time-Warner Terms. NO ONE is going to pay the price of an AOL subscription plus 19/month to be able to stream sub par music and then write ten dinky Digital Rights Denied songs a month. So it shall flop. Too little too late TW.
I'm not, or at least I don't understand his passion and personal defensiveness. So a few blow hole Windoze rags got all excited? Could it be that those rags got upset because they actually think Microsoft "Security" is improving just like Bill Gates says it is? Why is Tim Mullen acting so offended? He wrote much of the article in the first person, using "I" no less than sixteen times. "Give me a break", he cries, "When banner ad revenue for a media outlet becomes more important than accuracy, it's time to find a new profession. " Is someone putting undue pressure on poor Tim? Like a major spnsor looking for damage control?
Others are pointing out that Tim might have gotten the bit about "administrator" access wrong and that's important. The administrator may have control of tools that conceal his presence in a way that makes it easier to alter the system. Undetected system alteration is more damaging than simply digging up data. It gives the perpetrator access to data present and in the future undetected. That's far worse than stealing a hard disk and a good reason to take the five minutes (typical M$ efficiency!) to boot that way. It also justifies the use of the W2K boot disk over a Linux disk, though it's nice of Tim to portray Linux as the ultimate cracker tool. The only thing worse than no security is security that impeeds and lulls the user but aids the cracker.
"What, me worry?"
No, I did not know that, thank you very much, it might save me a trip to the library. So long as they don't use M$ Word as a document generator, I should be able to view and print any of those forms. I have had trouble with PDF forms in the past which Ghost Script was not able to deal with, so the format is not fool or M$ proof. Adobe's client was able to deal with some, but not all of the forms that contained such intentional errors.
Thank you Federal Government, your little office has encouraged so much that is useful and good. Will you next award Yahoo a patent on internet chat? Please! I feel so guilty for using royalty free software.
Intuit has done something dumb and will pay. It's bad enough on it's own. M$ could use this to wipe Intuit out the same way they rubbed out DR Dos. A bunch of bogus error messages on top of a few real crashes and no one will ever buy another Turbo Tax again. They will use M$ Taxman or something.
I'm never going to use another non free tax package again. Intuit has proved abusive despite having a good program that was worth the money. It's lowered my confidence in comercial software one more notch.
Yep, copy "protection" that eats your computer for the sake of a $20 software package is really dumb.
Because I won't be able to use Turbo Tax, I'm going to have to actually go down to the library to get the suplemental forms I need. It will take a while and reminders are nice.
What makes you think that US facilities are not secure and that those elswhere are? "Terrorists" operate in Iraq and other hell holes. The only difference between here and there is that there no one is free to report the damage. Iraq's military defense is not so swell either. A single Israeli F-16 knocked out most of Sadam's nuclear capability ten years ago. Kuwait was a good example of Iraq's military strategy, discipline and effectiveness. All of Sadam's money has been spent and all of his people's rights have been denied for nothing. Subways that no one uses, nuclear facilities that generate no power, communications without privacy and jail time for ideas are all wastes.
Could the patent office have experts in every field so that they do nothing incompetent in any? Wow, what a concept, competent government run by free men instead of incompetence connived at by slaves.
They are still understanding the comercialization of software that occured in the 1980s. That's not an easy thing for people not involved with creating software to do. After all, most people were able to ignore computers untill 1996 or so and even then, few people took the time to read all the printed garbage that came with their new tools. Non Disclossure Agreements have only recently filtered out into the rest of the world, especially in the Draconian form that Richard Stallman was faced with in 1984. Even more clueful and involved people can get caught. Honest people can't understand, much less predict dishonest people.
Q: It seems strange that social and psychological factors are more important incentives for creating open-source software than money.
A: I worked for Pixar for 12 years. During those 12 years, every piece of software I wrote, except for one, hit its end of life before I left the company -- the projects were canceled or never deployed. Nothing survives. Now, programmers are like artists. They derive gratification from lots of people using their work. Writing software that just gets put away feels like intellectual masturbation. All of the good comes from someone else participating.
I'm glad that you were not refering to the efforts of free software writers. Who'd have ever thought of a bunch of softies as wankers? I'll leave that piece of filth about the de-bugger alone as they might be against the law in Southern California.
Not so bad at all really. A better analogy, and one I can tell my daughter, would be to compare such work with an Egyptian Slave's job. You eat and work on beautiful objects but your work is secret and in the end it gets locked up in a tomb with a dead man and perhaps yourself never to be seen again by anyone you know or care about. Not very satisfying at all, especiall when you cosider that your work is paid for and props up the nasty structure that enslaves everyone you know. Nah, jerk off works better.
"The Raw, the Cooked and the Half Baked" why does that ring a bell?
The best thing I can recomend for him is to spend some more time at the Free Software Society's web site, but especially this page. That "promise to give away innovations" is indeed kind of silly. The use of one idea to extract or deny others is the key sin the Free Software Foundation is fighting against. The notion that the free software people have a problem with anyone making money is also misinformed. The FSF site is a cure for the ignorance behind statments like this, which blemish an otherwise fine article:
Open-source software programmers say they're different from Stallman in one major way: They don't have a problem with people making money off their work--or making money themselves.
The free software foundation only has a problem with people screwing others, for any reason money making included. The Free Software Foundation stands against you using your own work and that of others to extract things from people. The kinds of things extracted for the use of software currently includes everything from money to limits on what you will tell others and who you might work for. The most repulsive thing non free software vendors do is attempt to keep others from understanding how to fix their own problems so that they can extract money perpetually for a problem solved by others long ago. Let's have a look at some of the good words on the above mentioned page:
However, certain kinds of rules about the manner of distributing free software are acceptable, when they don't conflict with the central freedoms. For example, copyleft (very simply stated) is the rule that when redistributing the program, you cannot add restrictions to deny other people the central freedoms. This rule does not conflict with the central freedoms; rather it protects them.
Thus, you may have paid money to get copies of free software, or you may have obtained copies at no charge. But regardless of how you got your copies, you always have the freedom to copy and change the software, even to sell copies. ``Free software'' does not mean ``non-commercial''. A free program must be available for commercial use, commercial development, and commercial distribution. Commercial development of free software is no longer unusual; such free commercial software is very important.
In short, people are encouraged to work together to solve common problems like free men will. Using free software will no more force a company to give away confidential information than using manila folders requires people to divulge the contents of their files. The only thing you are really encouraged to do is share your impovements to other people's work, much as lawyers, doctors, engineers and all other professionals have always done.
Wow, nothing really radical there is there? Really when you think about it the restrictions created by modern publishers, especially comercial software vendors, represent the really radical departure from social norms. Telling people that they can't share their expertise in a field? That you can't share your books or even sing a song with your friends that was originally dedicated to your cause? It all starts with a non disclosure agreement, an end user license agreement, a 100 year long copyright and that little "submit" button.
I tried to replace my lawyers with tiny shell scripts, but they kept changing the law.
Hmmm, breakdown by OS:
Umm, the article was written by laywers who pointed out that computer crimes were punished more severly than their meat space counterparts. KM himself says that he was wrong and deserved to be punished. No one, however, deserves to be held in jail, sometimes in solitary confinement, without charge for five years. The paper simply points out that the justice system is largely clueless about the threat and cost of such crimes.
The (majority) of the offenses are generally disgruntled employees getting back at the employer or trying to make money."
This is very serious as it might just be the other way around. Ever been under a supervisor that did not like you? It does not last long, generally. If they are clever, they could set you up for an extened stay in jail and get rid of you at the same time. There are always two disgruntled parties whenever someone is fired and you should take what either says with a large grain of salt.
And the hacker should go to jail for it, just as they would go to jail for breaking into my house and checking out all my stuff. I don't care if they steal anything or not, it is an invasion of my life and privacy!
Would jail your bank, grocery store, and comercial software vendors for those same violations? No, they don't tell you they are doing it, they just do it. The backdoors are put their by design and others sometimes use them. Sure, it's wrong, but you should hate all those who abuse you or simply recognize that you don't care.
That's true! In fact, most societies would forgive you if you shot and killed someone who was busy carving up their friend with a knife. Do you know of any that would do the same for someone who shot a hacker? So why is it that hackers can be held for five years without being charged as KM was?
Punishment should fit crime, and ordinary rules of presumed innocence need to be applied in cases of suspected computer crime. As things are, any with-it employer could be frighfully abusive if they wanted.
Winston says that he works for Big Brother too. That bastard who gave him "The Book" set him up! If that "local" bookshop is not in another town, you are not paranoid enough.
Why not quote the 4th amendment? It's very clear about what circumstances are required for the government to invade your personal life:
Amendment IV The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Indeed, the bookstore records should be considered "papers" and protected, so this whole business of "knocking down stovepipes" between government and private databases is FUCKING UNAMERICAN!
The language of the constitution is so clear and the intentions are so obvious, that it is equally obvious that it has been broken. You have the right to assemble, to say, pray, and publish what you will. You have the right to bear arms. You will not be put upon by the military. The government can't harrass you without real evidence you are a criminal. The court system will not be used to abuse you. You will have a jury if you are sued. Bail will not be used instead of a conviction. You will not be abused in jail. All of these things have been violated recently with perhaps the exception of the 3rd. I'm not aware of any involuntary quartering of troops, unless eminent domain aquisitions for military bases are considered.
Someone set up an independent NAT, DHCP, firewall box and don't keep logs. Oh, that's what your roomates cracked w2k box is for? Never mind.
Good parts are nice to have. When you can't afford them, it IS possible to inspect and prove the parts yourself and make them redundant. The lessons you cite are useful to anyone that wants to look. One of those lessons might be that procedures and regulations are no substitute for free enterprise and competition. If that were true, there would have been no Soviet accidents, but it's not and their service was more dangerous than ours.
It bothers me to see Americans with a "no can do" attitude. This country was founded by people who needed little more than an axe and a rifle. Taken to it's extreem, this attitude would lead to stringent requirements for everything that only one or two companies could meet. The result would look more like the former Soviet Union than the USA.
People out there building their own submarines and other stuff for themselves are the people that make this country work. They consider the problem and build experience to solve other problems that come up. We should be ashamed an worried when these nuts quit what they do.
Do you drive to work? It might just kill you.
It's a room full of computer geeks, of course the penguin means linux! The softies probably stick pins in him or some other voodoo that has about as much chance of making Linux go away as they have of overcoming their marketroid bosses. Freedom works, closed source blows.
Blanket statements are stupid, but we can make a few observations that show trends. Have you ever seen a pdksh develper argue with Korn that pdksh was "fully compatible" with the ksh? Nah, me either, but an M$ rep did. Ever see a kernel hacker say that all computers should run the Linux kernel? One or two might say that all computers should run free software, but there is nothing egotistical about that.
Of course there are a few things we can say about Windows developers in general too. Code Red, Sir Cam, "I Love you", and all the rest. Humiliation is a Microsoft thing and will be till they fundamentally alter their development model. Marketroid driven closed source software does not work.
You could just cut them all off. Are there any places left that don't call in credit card purchases? Of course, that would leave 2.2 million credit card users high and dry and they would have to issue 2.2 million new cards. It would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and do incalculable PR damage. So what to do?