> > In Canada, I can give my CD to a friend to make copies of all I want. I just can't give him a copy. > Not correct. You can give him a copy. You cannot sell him a copy.
The courts have yet to determine whether "putting up to share on your own FTP site, while leaving an area of your own FTP site open for other file sharers to write files into upon your request" constitutes a "sale" ("an exchange of goods for consideration") or not.
Some argue that it's not a sale, after all, no money has changed hands, right?
Others argue that because you are receiving something of value (namely the MP3z you download from other peers) in exchange for providing something of value (namely copies of the MP3s in your upload/share area), that you have indeed received "consideration" for making your files available, and therefore - at least insofar as the law is concerned - you have "sold" a copy.
A hint as to who's going to win this one when it comes to trial: Check to see if the law in question uses the word "money" or the word "consideration", and check with your favorite landshark as to what "consideration" means.
> I'm chalking this one up to the Discordians and Operation Mindfuck. Sometimes it's best to enjoy a moment of WTF? absurdity, smile and move on.
Hail Eris! All Hail Discordia!
The first thing that came to mind when reading the article was that we've at last found Markoff Chaney, or the Mad Fishmonger, and that perhaps they're the same person.
"And, thus, without ever contacting the Legion of Dynamic Discord, the Erisian Liberation Front or even the Justified
Ancients of Mummu, Markoff Chaney began his own crusade against the Illuminati, not even knowing that they
existed.
His first overt act- his Fort Sumter, as it were- began in Dayton the following Saturday. He was in Norton's
Emporium, a glorified 5 & 100 store, when he saw the sign:
NO SALESPERSON MAY LEAVE THE FLOOR WITHOUT
THE AUTHORIZATION OF A SUPERIOR.
THE MGT
What!, he thought, are the poor girls supposed to pee in their panties if they can't find a superior? Years of school
came back to him ("Please, may I leave the room, sir?") and rituals which had appeared nonsensical suddenly made
sense in a sinister way. Mathematics, of course. They were trying to reduce us all to predictable units, robots. Hah!
not for nothing had he spent a semester in Professor "Sheets" Kelly's intensive course on textual analysis of modern
poetry. The following Wednesday, the Midget was back at Norton's and hiding in a coffee urn when the staff left and
locked up. A few moments later, the sign was down and a subtly different one was in its place:
NO SALESPERSON MAY LEAVE THE FLOOR OR GO TO THE
DOOR WITHOUT THE AUTHORIZATION OF A SUPERIOR. THE MGT.
He came back several times in the next few weeks, and the sign remained. It was as he suspected: in a rigid
hierarchy, nobody questions orders that seem to come from above, and those at the very top are so isolated from the
actual work situation that they never see what is going on below. It was the chains of communication, not the means
of production, that determined a social process; Marx had been wrong, lacking cybernetics to enlighten him. Marx
was like the engineers of his time, who thought of electricity in terms of work done, before Marconi thought of it in
terms of information transmitted. Nothing signed "THE MGT." would ever be challenged; the Midget could always
pass himself off as the Management.
At the same tune, he noticed that the workers were more irritable; the shoppers picked this up and became grouchier
themselves; sales, he guessed correctly, were falling off. Poetry was the answer: poetry in reverse. His interpolated
phrase, with its awkward internal rhyme and its pointlessness, bothered everybody, but in a subliminal, preconscious
fashion. Let the market researchers and statisticians try to figure this one out with their computers and averages. "
The Chaney gambit is similar to the social engineering tactics used recently to walk out the door of a crowded Australian airport with a or rackmount storage system. The Slashdot postings there showed numerous anecdotes, all to the effect of "You can do anything and go anywhere as long as you're wearing coveralls".
The difference is that the Toynbee Tile Dude(s? ttes?) is doing it for his own motivations, the likes of which we can never guess.
Living in Spartan fashion, dining often on a tin of sardines and a pint of milk from a machine, traveling always by
Greyhound bus, the Midget crisscrossed the country constantly, placing his improved surrealist signs whenever the
opportunity presented itself. A slowly mounting wave of anarchy followed in his wake. The Illuminati never got a fix
on him: he had little ego to discover, burning all his energies into Drive, like a dictator or a great painter- but, unlike
a dictator or a great painter, he had no desire for recognition. For years, the Illuminati attributed his efforts to the
Discordians, the JAMs or the esoteric E
> Recently, AOL and other large ISPs leaned on my ISP, Cox, to block port 25 inbound and outbound except throught their SMTP. It's an outrageous DoS attack and I'm going to defeat it.
Not so recently - for the past two years - I've gotten over 100 spams a day from fuckwits with infected boxen and open proxies on cox.net, attbi.com, rr.com, and other broadband cable/DSL providers. The residential broadband providers have done nothing to stop this. Abuse reports are ignored by all ISPs, judging from the rate at which the spam continues.
THAT is the outrageous DoS attack. And I've already defeated it - by blocking all traffic from those subnets. Yes, multiple/8s. (With holes poked for a few ISPs' outbound servers.) You see, I don't care whether you can run your mail server responsibly, because the Class Five Shitstorm of Spam from your neighbors means I'm willing to give up the possibility of a real e-mail from you in exchange for being able to use my email.
So you wanna talk to me? Fine, use your ISP's mail server. If you run your own mail server, surely you can tweak sendmail.cf to forward through it just as easily as anyone else can.
Otherwise, talk to the firewall, 'cuz my mail client ain't listening.
> Sbcglobal is doing something very similar. They redirect all http requests (of computers with high traffic on port 135) to a page they have set up that tells how to download and install the correct patch.
Heh. Now if 200.0.0.0/7, 12.0.0.0/8 and 24.0.0.0/8 and the sewers of cable modems in 66.wherever.whatever.whogivesadamn could do the same thing with port 25, email might be useful again.
> Of course, if this one-day-hack is keeping you from doing your real job your boss will likely prefer the 69 bucks to paying you several hundreds of dollars just to not be doing your job.
You miss the point. Being able to do arbitrary one-day hacks, sometimes in cases when there is no $69 tool, is my job.
I consider myself very fortunate that I have a boss that groks this.
> I guess the real issue is not why someone would choose to write it them self. I think we all know why. The complaint is why complain about how much a $69 piece of software costs?
Because if I hack my own solution, I don't have to pay $69 the next time I'm in the same situation at the next branch office, or even my next employer.
For the record, I don't have a beef with someone charging $69 for something that could be hacked together in an afternoon. I do have a beef with short-sighted PHB-types who say "just pay the $69, it's cheaper, so why waste time building it yourself?"
Getting back to the original comment:
> > It blows my mind that hard-core linux types will put 10 hours into figuring out some trivial problem but won't blow 70 dollars on a piece of software...
Because in the long run (and in this case, "long run" means "twice"), it's cheaper to spend 10 hours solving a problem than buying someone else's solution.
Kludge: Pay $69 to a proprietary vendor every time the problem arises. And panic next year when that $69 product isn't on the shelves anymore and you really need it. Or when you find the $69 product doesn't quite do what you need, but you can't fix it because all you have is a CD with some executables on it.
Elegance: Spend 10 hours writing the ugliest mess of awk and bash that's ever oozed out of a keyboard, but neither your current employer, nor any of your future employers, ever have to worry about solving that problem again, plus you understand how the two systems interoperate, meaning that after the 10 hours, you're more useful to your employer than you were before you began - and are therefore more likely to solve the next problem with those systems in far less than 10 hours.
There's a tradeoff here - if we're talking about 100 hours vs $69, that's another story. But a one-day hack? Unless it's extremely time-critical, just do the hack.
> Machiavelli: > > It is good if your subjects love you. > But better if you can make them fear you. > > But you do *NOT* want them to hate you...
I'm a Machiavelli fan, but the Prince and I would part company on that last line about not wanting to be hated.
I believe history sides with Lucius, who was reputedly quoting Caligula when he penned the line "oderint dum metuant". Let them hate, so long as they fear.
> > fuel would be somewhere around 24% methanol / 76% water. One of those single serving vodka bottles would make a better weapon.
> >And a better cocktail, IMHO. That other stuff will make you blind.
Are we talking about methanol vs. ethanol, or are we still talking about things the first poster may or may not be doing with his testicles?
> > While I'm glad I some protection from telemarketers I know I am still going to get calls from the police asking for donations and silently threatening to ticket me if I don't donate. > > Of course, I would be nervous being on their do-not-call list, it might also become a wait-an-hour-before-responding-to-911-call list.;-)
Fear not. That's just a scam.
The way it works is that Scumbucket Telemarketing (but I repeat myself) sets up a fake "charity" in the name of the YourCityHere Police/Fire Department.
YourCityHere's cops get, maybe 5% of the take. Scumbucket Telemarketing gets the other 95%.
The scam is most effective when YourCityHere is a cash-strapped small town - the cops/firemen may be desperate, and 5% of a scammer's take is still better than nothing, and small towns often have a larger proportion of elderly (gullible) people to leech from.
Sadly, even when the FTC investigates/charges these scumbuckets, the fines rarely amount to more than a slap on the wrist, and the scamming continues.
If you really want to make a donation to your local services, the next time you get one of these scams, tell them you don't do business with telemarketers and hang up. Then go down to your local cop shop or fire department, tell them a scammer tried to pull this scam on you, and that you didn't fall for it, but that the scammer reminded you to give a little back to the community -- then ask how to make a donation so that 100% of your money goes to either the cops/firemen themselves, or to a legitimate charity of their choosing.
> One of the hidden assumptions (beyond "your health will be like being 35 for 150 years") is that human psychology will stand up to the beating it will take and people will have the *yearning* to keep living. Is it possible that people of normal financial means will just run out of interesting stuff to do?
> Our phones are getting slammed pretty good with people saying "my computer is shutting down.. something to do with RPC blahblah" (our users aren't very smart, as if that's a revelation).
Hey, at least they're reading the error message instead of just saying "My computer won't work! Fix it! What do you mean 'error message', look, are you going to FIX IT or am I going to have to get your manager?"
> It looks like the worm affects svchost.exe (the Generic Host Process),
"Uh, WTF is SVCHOST.EXE, and why the fuck does it always
bind itself to 445, and how can I make it stop doing that? I don't
know what it's listening for, but I know that for what I'm using this box for, I don't need it, so why can't I disable the offending
process?"
- Me, the first time I played with a W2K box.
"So SVCHOST does too much stuff to just kill it, but how can I at least stop it from binding
to 445? I know I'm not doing anything on that port, and therefore don't want any process listening for data sent to it. Period."
- Me, after 5 minutes of trivial research.
"Crap, it looks like there's no way to stop SVCHOST from listening to 445. Guess I'd better install my favorite cheap-azz third-party software firewall and block it there. Once I've done so, I don't give a damn if SVCHOST still listens to 445, because unless there's a buffer 'sploit in the firewall software itself, SVCHOST won't get any of the traffic anyways."
- Me, after 5 more minutes.
"I knew this was gonna happen."
- Me, when I read about the DCOM hole last month.
Security is a process, not a product. The process is "Everything is forbidden except what is permitted. Run no services other than the bare minimum required to get the box to bring up a GUI. Run no services that listen to any network traffic unless explicitly started by the user."
Insecurity is a product, not a process. The product is "DCOM should be on by default because pointy-haired bosses won't be able to do $NEW_OFFICE_SUITE_FEATURE without it, nobody buys the OS for anything other than running Office and Outleak."
Repeat ad nauseam with IIS on/enabled by default (CodeRed), the ActiveX/scripting settings for MSIE (Drive-by downloads), the out-of-the-box UPnP vulnerability (port 1900), popup "spam" (port 135), etc.
Basically, every time M$ has the choice between security (Built shiny thing. Disable by default and have applications respond with an error message telling users how to turn shiny thing on if and only if the shiny thing is required by some user action), and stupidity (Oooooh, shiny thing! Enable by default and assume there are no bugs in the code anywhere!), Bill and friends have chosen stupidity.
> Unless it was an upper-level manager who fell and struck the wing of the Columbia during takeoff, I think they'll be fine.
If it was an upper-level manager that struck the leading edge of the wing, they'd have launched a rescue shuttle the next morning.
10-pound hunk of ice hitting delicate TPS panel at 500 mph? After all, upper-level managers all agreed, on the basis of old tests with 3" cubes of foam, that it presented no risk despite the report saying that what happened was "significantly outside the test envelope".
Given the density that implies for NASA upper-level managers, I'd think that even a toenail clipping from a NASA upper-level manager dropped from a height of two inches, would be enough to raise alarm bells. It's kinda hard not to notice the entire wing being sheared off and the toenail clipping plunging through to the center of the earth.
Having observed the entire wing being sheared off during launch, a team of Russkian engineers, fueled by nothing more than adrenaline, caffeine, and Vodka, would have spent a weekend cobbling together a Buran wing out of scrap parts, strapped it to the back of something on loan from Dick Rutan's garage, along with a generous supply of duct tape and spare oxygen tanks, crammed the Rutan bird with the last of John Romero's peroxide fuel, and lobbed the resulting contraption into orbit for a rendezvous with the Shuttle, where they'd attach the substitute wing and successfully pilot the Shuttle to a safe landing.
It would have been all over by the time NASA management even decided on which room to hold the working group meeting for beating up the engineers with questions like "well, are we sure the big triangular thing with the white tiles on the top and the black tiles on the bottom that washed up on the Florida beach was really the Shuttle wing that some people with negative attitudes think might have been somewhat affected by a wing-strike of neutronium-dense NASA Management?". And "Need Another Seven Astronauts" would still be (-1, Ancient Tasteless Joke), not (+1, Informative).
Re:Because conservatives are wrong about most thin
on
Politicizing Science
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
> I'm sure that the average "liberal" is more science-supported than the "conservative" who happens to be a Creation Science fundamentalist. However, the average "conservative" is more science-supported than a "liberal" who happens to believe in GAIA theories (or the caller I heard on Larry King one night who said earthquakes are the Earth getting back at humans for environmental damage).
*applause*. I'm reminded of a.sig where someone observed the following:
The political left seems to regard economic policy issues as litmus tests for whether you are a good person, rather than as questions of facts about what works and doesn't work.
There aren't too many people on the left or right) that would argue that. A leftie might phrase it differently - speaking of "heartless Republicans" and "those striving for social justice" - but would likely agree with the point.
The odd part is that if you replace "left" with "right", and "economic" with "social", you still end up with a statement that both sides would take as a compliment.
If you think working a "day job" at an "big dumb stupid corporation" is oppressive...
If you think having to fill out forms to requisition a 256M stick of RAM from the IT Department is oppressive...
If you think having to fill out more forms and get them signed by your manager, the IT manager, and the Purchasing Department's manager, and then wait two days for Purchasing to order the RAM is unproductive and oppressive...
If you think having to fill out even more forms the next week when you find that the fuckup in Purchasing bought two sticks 256M of PC133 SDRAM (or worse, one stick of 512M DDR instead of two sticks of 256M DDR for your dual-channel workstation), because "You wanted memory, and we found that PC133 was cheaper"... is assinine, counterproductive, and oppressive...
...then you, yes, you, have the adventure of a lifetime when it comes to filling out the forms and signing the declarations and attestations associated with applying for a government grant to develop a web browser, e-mail client, spam filter, office suite, regular expression parser, scripting language, or even/bin/true!
NOTICE: As a condition of receiving a grant under the Patriots' Freedom Software Allowance Act, I affirm, under penalty of perjury that Software developed under the Patriots' Freedom License will in no way be used to transfer data by Specially Designated Nationals, nor any data in violation of the PATRIOT Act, nor will it be used by any third party to facilitate violations of the Communications Decency Act. Software will not be made available to Migrant Employees of any Railroad as per the Railroad Workers' Protection Act of 1966, except such Migrant Employees of Railroads covered under the Railroad Pensioners' Guarantee Act of 1968 (amended 1972), and will comply with all other ordinances and conditions of local, state, and Federal law, subject to amendment.
Friday Afternoon Paradox: Free Software is a Public Good, but the instant it becomes a Public Goods, it ceases to be Free Software.
Ahem. A letter demanding that you refrain from making such derogatory comments in the future will be arriving shortly, courtesy of the Utah League of Colostomy Bag Manufacturers.
Slashdot Mirror
> Not correct. You can give him a copy. You cannot sell him a copy.
The courts have yet to determine whether "putting up to share on your own FTP site, while leaving an area of your own FTP site open for other file sharers to write files into upon your request" constitutes a "sale" ("an exchange of goods for consideration") or not.
Some argue that it's not a sale, after all, no money has changed hands, right?
Others argue that because you are receiving something of value (namely the MP3z you download from other peers) in exchange for providing something of value (namely copies of the MP3s in your upload/share area), that you have indeed received "consideration" for making your files available, and therefore - at least insofar as the law is concerned - you have "sold" a copy.
A hint as to who's going to win this one when it comes to trial: Check to see if the law in question uses the word "money" or the word "consideration", and check with your favorite landshark as to what "consideration" means.
Hail Eris! All Hail Discordia!
The first thing that came to mind when reading the article was that we've at last found Markoff Chaney, or the Mad Fishmonger, and that perhaps they're the same person.
The Chaney gambit is similar to the social engineering tactics used recently to walk out the door of a crowded Australian airport with a or rackmount storage system. The Slashdot postings there showed numerous anecdotes, all to the effect of "You can do anything and go anywhere as long as you're wearing coveralls".
The difference is that the Toynbee Tile Dude(s? ttes?) is doing it for his own motivations, the likes of which we can never guess.
If you're referring to Nolan Bushnell, I think he'd kick your ass for that comment. Check up on your Atari history.
What Tramiel did at Commodore - marketing the C-64 - was great. But what he did to Atari, in particular the coin-op division, was IMO unforgivable.
Not so recently - for the past two years - I've gotten over 100 spams a day from fuckwits with infected boxen and open proxies on cox.net, attbi.com, rr.com, and other broadband cable/DSL providers. The residential broadband providers have done nothing to stop this. Abuse reports are ignored by all ISPs, judging from the rate at which the spam continues.
THAT is the outrageous DoS attack. And I've already defeated it - by blocking all traffic from those subnets. Yes, multiple /8s. (With holes poked for a few ISPs' outbound servers.) You see, I don't care whether you can run your mail server responsibly, because the Class Five Shitstorm of Spam from your neighbors means I'm willing to give up the possibility of a real e-mail from you in exchange for being able to use my email.
So you wanna talk to me? Fine, use your ISP's mail server. If you run your own mail server, surely you can tweak sendmail.cf to forward through it just as easily as anyone else can.
Otherwise, talk to the firewall, 'cuz my mail client ain't listening.
I, for one, welcome our new libertarian overlor-HEY!
Heh. Now if 200.0.0.0/7, 12.0.0.0/8 and 24.0.0.0/8 and the sewers of cable modems in 66.wherever.whatever.whogivesadamn could do the same thing with port 25, email might be useful again.
You miss the point. Being able to do arbitrary one-day hacks, sometimes in cases when there is no $69 tool, is my job.
I consider myself very fortunate that I have a boss that groks this.
Because if I hack my own solution, I don't have to pay $69 the next time I'm in the same situation at the next branch office, or even my next employer.
For the record, I don't have a beef with someone charging $69 for something that could be hacked together in an afternoon. I do have a beef with short-sighted PHB-types who say "just pay the $69, it's cheaper, so why waste time building it yourself?"
Getting back to the original comment:
> > It blows my mind that hard-core linux types will put 10 hours into figuring out some trivial problem but won't blow 70 dollars on a piece of software...
Because in the long run (and in this case, "long run" means "twice"), it's cheaper to spend 10 hours solving a problem than buying someone else's solution.
Kludge: Pay $69 to a proprietary vendor every time the problem arises. And panic next year when that $69 product isn't on the shelves anymore and you really need it. Or when you find the $69 product doesn't quite do what you need, but you can't fix it because all you have is a CD with some executables on it.
Elegance: Spend 10 hours writing the ugliest mess of awk and bash that's ever oozed out of a keyboard, but neither your current employer, nor any of your future employers, ever have to worry about solving that problem again, plus you understand how the two systems interoperate, meaning that after the 10 hours, you're more useful to your employer than you were before you began - and are therefore more likely to solve the next problem with those systems in far less than 10 hours.
There's a tradeoff here - if we're talking about 100 hours vs $69, that's another story. But a one-day hack? Unless it's extremely time-critical, just do the hack.
>
> It is good if your subjects love you.
> But better if you can make them fear you.
>
> But you do *NOT* want them to hate you...
I'm a Machiavelli fan, but the Prince and I would part company on that last line about not wanting to be hated.
I believe history sides with Lucius, who was reputedly quoting Caligula when he penned the line "oderint dum metuant". Let them hate, so long as they fear.
>
>First [Martha Stewart] does a topless Christmass special. Now she is a love slave to McBride
Look, could we please just go back to posting goatse.cx links?
>
>And a better cocktail, IMHO. That other stuff will make you blind.
Are we talking about methanol vs. ethanol, or are we still talking about things the first poster may or may not be doing with his testicles?
I hear SWG's up to 275,000 players :)
Hell, even the filthiest crack whore provides a service that someone's willing to pay $10 for, which makes them vastly more useful than telemarketers.
>
> Of course, I would be nervous being on their do-not-call list, it might also become a wait-an-hour-before-responding-to-911-call list.
Fear not. That's just a scam.
The way it works is that Scumbucket Telemarketing (but I repeat myself) sets up a fake "charity" in the name of the YourCityHere Police/Fire Department.
YourCityHere's cops get, maybe 5% of the take. Scumbucket Telemarketing gets the other 95%.
The scam is most effective when YourCityHere is a cash-strapped small town - the cops/firemen may be desperate, and 5% of a scammer's take is still better than nothing, and small towns often have a larger proportion of elderly (gullible) people to leech from.
Sadly, even when the FTC investigates/charges these scumbuckets, the fines rarely amount to more than a slap on the wrist, and the scamming continues.
If you really want to make a donation to your local services, the next time you get one of these scams, tell them you don't do business with telemarketers and hang up. Then go down to your local cop shop or fire department, tell them a scammer tried to pull this scam on you, and that you didn't fall for it, but that the scammer reminded you to give a little back to the community -- then ask how to make a donation so that 100% of your money goes to either the cops/firemen themselves, or to a legitimate charity of their choosing.
Stop right there. Why not just fess up and admit that you own 100 shares of Unicorn and Virgin, Inc, and you want the stock price to go up?
So you're saying "that's not true" - that Darl McBride is fit to sleep with a pig?
I'm like, WTF d00d? Where did you get such a grudge against pigs?
Fool! What do you think MMORPGs are for?
Hey, at least they're reading the error message instead of just saying "My computer won't work! Fix it! What do you mean 'error message', look, are you going to FIX IT or am I going to have to get your manager?"
"Uh, WTF is SVCHOST.EXE, and why the fuck does it always bind itself to 445, and how can I make it stop doing that? I don't know what it's listening for, but I know that for what I'm using this box for, I don't need it, so why can't I disable the offending process?"
- Me, the first time I played with a W2K box.
"So SVCHOST does too much stuff to just kill it, but how can I at least stop it from binding to 445? I know I'm not doing anything on that port, and therefore don't want any process listening for data sent to it. Period."
- Me, after 5 minutes of trivial research.
"Crap, it looks like there's no way to stop SVCHOST from listening to 445. Guess I'd better install my favorite cheap-azz third-party software firewall and block it there. Once I've done so, I don't give a damn if SVCHOST still listens to 445, because unless there's a buffer 'sploit in the firewall software itself, SVCHOST won't get any of the traffic anyways."
- Me, after 5 more minutes.
"I knew this was gonna happen."
- Me, when I read about the DCOM hole last month.
Security is a process, not a product. The process is "Everything is forbidden except what is permitted. Run no services other than the bare minimum required to get the box to bring up a GUI. Run no services that listen to any network traffic unless explicitly started by the user."
Insecurity is a product, not a process. The product is "DCOM should be on by default because pointy-haired bosses won't be able to do $NEW_OFFICE_SUITE_FEATURE without it, nobody buys the OS for anything other than running Office and Outleak."
Repeat ad nauseam with IIS on/enabled by default (CodeRed), the ActiveX/scripting settings for MSIE (Drive-by downloads), the out-of-the-box UPnP vulnerability (port 1900), popup "spam" (port 135), etc.
Basically, every time M$ has the choice between security (Built shiny thing. Disable by default and have applications respond with an error message telling users how to turn shiny thing on if and only if the shiny thing is required by some user action), and stupidity (Oooooh, shiny thing! Enable by default and assume there are no bugs in the code anywhere!), Bill and friends have chosen stupidity.
If it was an upper-level manager that struck the leading edge of the wing, they'd have launched a rescue shuttle the next morning.
10-pound hunk of ice hitting delicate TPS panel at 500 mph? After all, upper-level managers all agreed, on the basis of old tests with 3" cubes of foam, that it presented no risk despite the report saying that what happened was "significantly outside the test envelope".
Given the density that implies for NASA upper-level managers, I'd think that even a toenail clipping from a NASA upper-level manager dropped from a height of two inches, would be enough to raise alarm bells. It's kinda hard not to notice the entire wing being sheared off and the toenail clipping plunging through to the center of the earth.
Having observed the entire wing being sheared off during launch, a team of Russkian engineers, fueled by nothing more than adrenaline, caffeine, and Vodka, would have spent a weekend cobbling together a Buran wing out of scrap parts, strapped it to the back of something on loan from Dick Rutan's garage, along with a generous supply of duct tape and spare oxygen tanks, crammed the Rutan bird with the last of John Romero's peroxide fuel, and lobbed the resulting contraption into orbit for a rendezvous with the Shuttle, where they'd attach the substitute wing and successfully pilot the Shuttle to a safe landing.
It would have been all over by the time NASA management even decided on which room to hold the working group meeting for beating up the engineers with questions like "well, are we sure the big triangular thing with the white tiles on the top and the black tiles on the bottom that washed up on the Florida beach was really the Shuttle wing that some people with negative attitudes think might have been somewhat affected by a wing-strike of neutronium-dense NASA Management?". And "Need Another Seven Astronauts" would still be (-1, Ancient Tasteless Joke), not (+1, Informative).
*applause*. I'm reminded of a .sig where someone observed the following:
There aren't too many people on the left or right) that would argue that. A leftie might phrase it differently - speaking of "heartless Republicans" and "those striving for social justice" - but would likely agree with the point.
The odd part is that if you replace "left" with "right", and "economic" with "social", you still end up with a statement that both sides would take as a compliment.
If you think having to fill out forms to requisition a 256M stick of RAM from the IT Department is oppressive...
If you think having to fill out more forms and get them signed by your manager, the IT manager, and the Purchasing Department's manager, and then wait two days for Purchasing to order the RAM is unproductive and oppressive...
If you think having to fill out even more forms the next week when you find that the fuckup in Purchasing bought two sticks 256M of PC133 SDRAM (or worse, one stick of 512M DDR instead of two sticks of 256M DDR for your dual-channel workstation), because "You wanted memory, and we found that PC133 was cheaper"... is assinine, counterproductive, and oppressive...
NOTICE: As a condition of receiving a grant under the Patriots' Freedom Software Allowance Act, I affirm, under penalty of perjury that Software developed under the Patriots' Freedom License will in no way be used to transfer data by Specially Designated Nationals, nor any data in violation of the PATRIOT Act, nor will it be used by any third party to facilitate violations of the Communications Decency Act. Software will not be made available to Migrant Employees of any Railroad as per the Railroad Workers' Protection Act of 1966, except such Migrant Employees of Railroads covered under the Railroad Pensioners' Guarantee Act of 1968 (amended 1972), and will comply with all other ordinances and conditions of local, state, and Federal law, subject to amendment.
Friday Afternoon Paradox: Free Software is a Public Good, but the instant it becomes a Public Goods, it ceases to be Free Software.
That's okay, so did the rest of us. *rimshot*
Where does this guy work? :)
If that ever happens around here, the extrovert usually goes "Eeeeeew", and I just shrug it off anyway and go back to reading Slashdot.
Ahem. A letter demanding that you refrain from making such derogatory comments in the future will be arriving shortly, courtesy of the Utah League of Colostomy Bag Manufacturers.