The basic reality is that most information really isn't all that private, and that managing certificates is rather tedious and expensive.
People don't generally whisper when they're talking to their friends in public, or talk in code, or anything much else. They don't care too much who overhears. If something is supposed to be secret they take the appropriate steps.
The same is true for web traffic. Most of it just doesn't need to be all that secure. Sure bank details need to be private, and a few other things, but my google search doesn't really need to be. Google is already storing it, and why would anyone bother to spy on it, or care if they did?
The exception to this of course is e-mail which is more of a systematic failure than https or ftps. Most people would indeed like their e-mails to be private, but while webmail providers are starting to provide https interfaces, real, honest to goodness, e-mail encryption is just too damned hard. Key management becomes impossible past more than a couple of keys and the whole process is just incredibly tedious. The person who comes up with a way to get e-mail encryption in a way that isn't too much hassle and doesn't involve storing all your keys with some "trusted" third party will have a license to print money.
They're capping bandwidth openly because it's a business model which works, whereas in the states they cap bandwidth and block connections secretly because theirs doesn't. Transpacific costs may have been part of it(though you're not including maintainence), but it's mostly that it works.
IIS is definitely more work than Apache, though your specific example is actually related to windows and not to apache itself, since the same thing would apply to an apache site hosted on a windows server. There's certainly differences in different applications within the same sphere. My point was that most of the linux services you were mentioning aren't comparable to the windows services you were saying they were easier to maintain than. Sharepoint is not BIND.
And my point is that just because you don't use it doesn't mean it's bloat, it's just a feature you don't use. If the vast majority of the software's users don't use it, that's bloat.
You are not the sum total of all users of software and just because you find something useless doesn't mean it is.
You're not really comparing apples to apples there. Of course basic services which aren't used directly by end users and which are based on technologies from the stone age don't really require an awful lot to administer. They never do, regardless of their manufacturer. Even IIS doesn't really take all that much looking after once you've got it configured properly and it's probably one of the crappiest web servers around.
Exchange on the other hand is user facing and has a complex feature set. I know a lot of tech's who don't really understand what exchange is all about, lord knows it took me years to work it out, but exchange isn't in any way comparable to an IMAP or POP server, if all you're using it for is e-mail then you're probably using the wrong product.
Then you get sharepoint which is, in addition to being complex and user facing, also based on relatively new technology. I can tell you from having to work with one of their competitors on a regular basis, that there are a lot worse things to administer and manage than sharepoint in that space.
To be honest, Ford is the least incompetent and corrupt US auto manufacturer by a rather long stretch. Of course they're not really entirely a US auto manufacturer anymore either, but that's really beside the point.
Unions have certainly gone too far. Particularly in regards to the ratios of show stewards(I think that's the term) to actual workers. In some places it got as bad as a two to one ratio, so a total of 1/3 of the people who were actually supposed to be doing things were useless, not even counting all the usual dead wood. That said though, management incompetence is still one of the top three reasons companies like this go down.
I don't know if a union is really the answer in IT, or in any professional job for that matter, but that doesn't mean that you have to bend over and take it. IT skills are really something you can learn or something you can't, and to be honest there aren't really all that many of us in the "can" pile and not all of us end up in IT. Just because your job could be filled by some idiot who paid 5 grand for someone to give him a few useless certifications doesn't mean that that idiot can actually do your job. Competent people are actually fairly rare, that's why you end up answering calls at 3 am in the first place. Certainly some degree of out of hours work is part of doing a support job, but if you're working 80 hours a week and getting paid for 40, you're probably making such a low hourly wage that you don't really have anything much to lose, even in this economy.
Unless the features included in software are unused by the vast majority of that software's users, then it is not feature bloat. Just because you personally don't need a feature, and that your personal copy would be faster without it doesn't mean it's bloated, it just means it has a feature that you don't need. Personally I find mail merge to be a completely wasted feature in every office suite I've ever used. People who send a lot of form letters on the other hand, or who need to address the same letter to lots of people, probably disagree. Alternatively, a lot of people find javascript debuggers useless, whereas I install extra ones into my browsers. Some people hate the awesome bar in firefox, I miss it when I'm using another browser.
Generally speaking, if software is still successful, excluding rare instances where there is zero competition(including older versions of the same product), it's not actually suffering from feature bloat. Software with too many unwanted features generally becomes unusable and so people stop using it. If a lot of people are using it, then at worst it's getting there, and if a lot of people are using that feature, then it's not really bloated at all.
It's true that big block V8's are simple, and therefor easy to fix.
That's not however the same thing as powerful or reliable. I wasn't even suggesting diesel in my original comment, just the fact that engine technology has come a long way in 50 years, but the big block V8 for the most part hasn't. Yeah you can probably fix it yourself if you have the parts, but simple isn't always a good thing if you can get better performance, reliability and efficiency out of something more complex.
You're usage pattern is also a bit of a boundary case. People don't generally haul half a tonne up a ridge in a consumer vehicle. It can be done, but it's really sort of an edge case. You're probably just under the weight limit for really needing something designed for that purpose as opposed to just badly designed for it's market and capable of meeting your requirements.
I stand corrected on the Barina. I've started seeing a lot more of them recently and so I presumed that they got a big push in the last couple of years. A handful of models mostly licensed from other companies certainly qualifies as too little, even if I was a little off on the too late.
Holden is actually doing fairly well though, and has separated themselves a bit financially from the parent GM.
When I lived in Wisconsin you could get it, but you couldn't be guaranteed that any given gas station would actually have any. There might be one pump at a place and it might be operating. You could definitely drive one, but there was an inconvenience factor. I was a bit flippant with the diesel because I'm not entirely convinced that diesel is the solution to the problem. A gigantic car running on diesel is a gigantic car, and as you said, the US implementations(like all US cars lately) were crap.
As far as small cars, I mean something along the lines of a Hyundai Getz, not something like a Ford Focus which generally speaking was a "small" American car where I used to live. I can honestly say I never saw one on the road in the entire time I lived there or any of the times I've been back since. Hertz would rent you one, but it cost about as much per day as a mid size sedan cost for a week. This might be different in California, I didn't live there, but when I left aside from a few trendy cars like the Mini Cooper, nothing small really existed, and about the most fuel efficient car you could buy was a Toyota Corolla which had a rather abysmal 28 MPG or so.
Things are certainly starting to change, I left the states way before the fuel prices changed significantly, and the US is a really big place with a lot of areas which are very different than where I used to live.
None of this changes the fact that the obsession with big block V8's is a large part of why most of the US car manufacturers almost went under last year. Ford was probably the least guilty of this particular offense and they didn't take a handout.
Diesel is always a bit of a difficult thing because it requires the infrastructure available to fuel it and the US has never been really big on Diesel. They also only bought SAAB fairly recently I think(and they're closing it now so the brand is gone). They just never seem to have made anything other than big cars. Even their other divisions generally sold exactly the same kinds of cars. Holden has the Barina now, but it was sort of too little too late.
Certainly this thread can show you that for some reason Americans have a love affair with big V8's, even if they aren't really all that powerful or efficient. GM has never made a super car to the best of my knowledge. I think mostly it was just the fact that V8's being fairly simple to make(basically the same design for 50 years) are cheap and Americans up until fairly recently would buy them.
It might be that before fuel prices rose, you just couldn't really have sold a small car in the US, but it always seems to me that where most Asian and European manufacturers had a dozen small car lines to pour into the US when the demand changed, GM was just caught off guard. If they have many fuel efficient designs they just weren't capable of transitioning their factories in the US into making them fast enough. I don't know all of GM's subsidiaries, but I do know that the Barina is the only compact GM car I can personally think of. To the best of my knowledge SAAB never made one, GM has never released on under their own brand. I know they sell some of the Holden's under Voxel in parts of Europe, but I don't think they had anything small either.
The reason GM needed to get bailed out by the government is because they ignored the evidence of every other country on earth and presumed US gas prices would always stay the same. If they'd produced the last of these ten years ago and started making cars which actually have something remotely resembling fuel efficiency, good design, or low carbon emissions, then American cars might not be a global joke, the government might be a couple of billion dollars less in debt, and a whole lot of Americans who used to work in the auto industry would still have their jobs.
It took near bankruptcy to finally get GM to acknowledge that they had to actually innovate(or at least copy everyone else) rather than continuing with a technology which is 50 years old.
To be perfectly honest, murder is probably a lesser crime. You can kill someone in a fit of rage, or by accident. You can be defending yourself. You can't accidentally rape your kids, even foster kids.
These kids were in his care, it was his job to look after them and protect them and instead he raped them. That's pretty much the most despicable thing you can do. He might not have been their father, but he was acting as their father, if you do that sort of thing to kids you're supposed to be caring for 44 years is far too lenient.
Whether you believe in IP or not, it's pretty much the only thing the US still makes that anyone actually wants to buy.
No one wants what few physical goods the US still produces, there's pretty much zero resources export. The US economy is based almost entirely on ideas(IP) and military hardware. Any president, regardless of their political ideology or personal philosophy is going to work very hard to protect that.
No, Facebook privacy works fairly well, when facebook stops being "information wants to be free" dickheads and changing your privacy settings by default.
If I stuck files on an ftp server and locked it down, it would cost me time, it would cost me money, and most of my relatives wouldn't be able to work it, plus I'd have to give them the password over e-mail which isn't secure either.
I don't want my photos to be impossible to find, I just want them hard enough to find. It's like a front door, you can get through most front doors in about 30 seconds with a sledge hammer, but most people don't carry one of those around. I don't need my door to be impenetrable, just hard enough to penetrate.
who is concerned just by the fact that google themselves have all this information?
I know it's trendy not to trust the government, and I don't trust them all that much either, but if they really want information on me they're going to get it one way or another, and the outlet switch for getting rid of people who abuse that information is an election. Here in Australia we even have instant run off voting so I've been able to vote for a third party and still transition my vote to the lesser of two evils when said third party doesn't win. We've got pretty vibrant politics down here most of the time, and we can usually get rid of whichever set of idiots is going too far. This isn't usually the case in the US, but to be honest, trying to deal with problems getting fair election results by complaining about what the people you didn't want to vote for did isn't really the right way to solve the problem.
Google on the other hand is a private enterprise. I can't vote for new management of google, I can't vote for them to change their policies, I can't even find out what those policies are unless they're public, or how often they're actually following them.
The fact that google will roll over for the feds is really not that much of a big deal, everyone rolls over for the feds if they come with a warrant, that's the law. Admitedly some folks roll over without a warrant, and that's a problem, but outside the scope of this.
The big problem with google is that they horde so much information in the first place. The feds can't get what isn't logged. That's my big problem with google these days. They seem to be more and more intent on gathering more and more information about everyone. Search queries, e-mails, written documents, now DNS queries. Who the hell knows what the binary distribution of Chrome actually reports and to whom. Personally I trust the government a lot more than I trust google, I have at least some control over my government, and none at all over Google.
I wish people would stop making the assumption that because someone shares something on facebook they want to share it with the world.
There are levels of privacy and sharing between telling everyone everything and hiding in a secure lead lined bunker somewhere. I might want to share pictures of my kid with my friends and family who live in other states and other countries without wanting to share that photo with the entire rest of the world.
The reason for using a social site is to allow you to exchange information in a controlled way. If I wanted to just share information with the world I'd stick it up on a public facing web page and let google find it. The problem is that Mark Zuckerberg is an idiot and presumes exactly like you do, that because I want to show my mother her grandchild that I want to share that same information with him and everyone else. Guess what I don't.
I know that the social networking evangalists seem to think that everyone should be metaphorically naked for the world to see and we'd all get along better, and the tin foil hat brigade thinks we should never give our real names even to our spouses, but a lot of times, people want somewhere in the middle.
Whether you believe in the war on drugs or not, drug related prisoners are not political prisoners. They aren't being imprisoned because they believe in drugs, they're being imprisoned because they took them or more likely sold them. These same people are also quite often involved in other kinds of crime.
Being a drug dealer is not the same as being a political activist. If people were being jailed for saying that they don't believe drugs should be illegal, those would be political prisoners.
However, proving that something is the truth is harder than you might think. There's a fairly high standard for that sort of proof. "I saw him doing it" is probably not even enough if you're the only witness(since you're not a reliable witness). You really need proof, real proof, take em to court and throw them in jail kind of proof.
There are a number of other defenses against slander(no real harm, no expectation of belief, etc), but losing out on a job is real harm, and an ex supervisor giving a reference is someone an ordinary person would believe.
These protections are, for the most part, a rather good thing, we wouldn't want ex-employers making shit up about us for revenge. You wouldn't want the guy you thought was a good guy and your friend, but who actually hates you because he wants to sleep with your wife, lying about you.
There have to be consequences for telling harmful lies, and a consequence of that is that there has to be a reasonable required level of proof that you weren't lying, and if you can't meet that level, even if what you said was true, you're screwed.
That's not exactly true. There's far more employment rights in the US than you might think. It's a lot harder to prove prejudice, but if you can any number of things beyond race, religion, and sexual orientation are actually protected. Age, and gender are two big ones, and I'm fairly certain that in at least some states there is some protection for prejudice against someone with a criminal record, depending on the type of crime and the type of job.
You can't actually deny employment for ANY reason, you can however deny employment for no reason, which makes it seem like you can deny employment for any reason. It's somewhat hard to prove that you've been unjustly passed over or terminated when "because I felt like it is a valid reason. If however they felt like it because of your race, gender, sexual orientation, health status, or any of the hundred other reasons they aren't legally allowed to discriminate against you, and you can prove it, you can win your lawsuit.
Basically it's illegal to discriminate against people for all sorts of reasons. The only reason the ones you mentioned are the only ones which seem to be protected is they're a little easier to work with. If you can show that you and the person who got the job over you are equal, but you're black and he or she is white, you can probably convince a jury that it was race which caused the problem. Racism is fairly well known, and your race is pretty obvious so you don't have to prove they knew. For a lot of other things you'd have to prove they knew about it first, which is a little harder sometimes. Fire and hire at will don't actually mean what you think they mean. They come close in reality to that since "because I felt like it" is hard to disprove, but if you can prove otherwise you're in good shape.
That said, pretty much any country in the world would allow an employer to refuse to hire someone for an IT job who had been involved in computer related criminal activity in the past. The fact that this bloke commited felony electronic trespass would certainly be applicable to any applications he made for an IT admin, or network security job.
It's illegal in a lot of places, and even where it isn't illegal it can get you and/or your employer sued. Ask your HR department, but generally speaking the answer is to either turn it over to them or to confirm job title and period of employment. Often even if you would otherwise give a glowing recommendation this is all you're actually allowed to do. It's got nothing to do with what you "know" or don't know, it's got to do with whether you're going to get sued for slander. If you're going to say anything bad about someone(presuming bad references aren't actually illegal in your jurisdiction) you better damned well be able to defend yourself against slander(or libel if you write it). In the US that means you have to be able to prove it's true, and even then you'll be out legal costs and your employer will probably sack you for causing them unecessary trouble.
Generally speaking, the only way you'd be even remotely safe saying anything negative about someone is if it was a criminal offense and they'd actually been convicted, and even then if they were later proved innocent you could still probably get sued. It'd also be totally unecessary, since the prospective employer can just do a criminal record search.
When it comes to references, unless you really like lawyers, courtrooms and paying out huge settlements(not getting a job is material harm) then remember what your mother used to tell you. If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all. Confirm employment dates, and job title, and that's it. To be perfectly honest, in these days where you can get sued for damages if you give a good recommendation for someone who turns out terrible, your best off just confirming employment dates and job title even if you worshiped the ground they walked on, believed the sun shined out of their backside, and would have been happy for them to marry your kid.
And realistically that's perfectly fine. When you get two people who are for all intents and purposes equal, the qualification which determines the final result can be any sort of ridiculous thing including the colour of their shirts on the day or any sort of personal feeling, and to be honest, someone with a criminal history is slightly lower on the totem pole than someone who doesn't have one.
The bigger issue is when you don't get the job, even when you are by far the most qualified candidate due to a past which you have matured beyond. I don't know how often this happens, but it's a problem when it does.
The biggest piece of advice I could give is to make sure you actually know why you're not getting the job. I've met a lot of people who think that they're a lot better than they really are and so blame something for them not getting a job that really isn't applicable. From the time scale, the poster is in their late 30's.
Is his or her skillset up to date?
Does he or she interview well otherwise? I've met a lot of folks who got jobs during the early boom days of IT who never really had to interview in a tight economy and have no idea how.
Can he or she write a resume that actually gets attention?
People who are having a hard time in the job market like to blame all sorts of things which don't matter on why they failed to get the job, and 99.999% of the time, it's just that they presented a bad resume or presented badly at the interview.
The thing is that there's a middle area between publishing nothing about yourself and publishing everything about yourself. Beacon sort of pushed a little too close to everything for some people. I use facebook to keep in touch with my friends overseas, it's useful for that purpose, and I will message them or write on their walls or whatever I deem appropriate whatever information I want to share with them. The key here is "I WANT". There are things I'm happy to publish, there are things I don't want to publish. I'm happy to announce to my friends(and pretty much everyone on my facebook is actually a real friend because I don't give a crap about friend counts IRL or on facebook) some of the events in my life I want to share with them. I don't really need them to know exactly what I bought from that on-line retailer or what I've just done in a video game. Aside from it being none of their business, I don't care what other people are doing and so I don't believe they should care what I'm doing.
Just because some idiots share every second of their lives on facebook, or myspace or twitter or their blog or whatever doesn't mean that everyone who uses those services does.
People like you are why everyone ends up with shitty jobs.
First off, the vast majority of those unemployed people aren't skilled IT workers, and they're not going to come steal your job even if you're an entry level monkey, let alone if you're actually someone they like well enough to offer to promote to management.
Secondly, knowledge of the company and it's processes is worth far more than you'd think, it takes years for people to really get up to speed with the way the core business actually operates.
Thirdly, hiring new staff is expensive, what with advertising, interviewing, training, all that malarky.
There are certainly companies which would rather face these costs than give people a raise, but generally speaking unless you're doing totally unskilled labor you're not as replaceable as you think you are.
You really don't have to be a slave, even in the worst economy you have some choices, and at the very least you can start putting your CV together to get out. So long as you let your manager walk all over you, he or she will. So long as you think "I can't do anything about it" you won't. Grow a pair.
Even in the US which has a ridiculously high.08 legal limit, 4 standard drinks in an hour will put an average size man over the limit. In most of the world with a.05 limit, it's closer to two. Add in the fact that in most places beer isn't piss weak like it was back in the states, and being on call essentially means no drinking. Even in the US, you'd have to be fairly careful.
That said there's something somewhat fishy here, I've never known non technical people to get called in in any field I've ever worked in or with. Certainly technical can mean a lot of things, but it's really only the folks who actually do the work who are actually on call. Managers certainly work a lot of overtime, but generally being on call isn't part of that equation, so I'm not sure what is going on here.
Slashdot Mirror
The basic reality is that most information really isn't all that private, and that managing certificates is rather tedious and expensive.
People don't generally whisper when they're talking to their friends in public, or talk in code, or anything much else. They don't care too much who overhears. If something is supposed to be secret they take the appropriate steps.
The same is true for web traffic. Most of it just doesn't need to be all that secure. Sure bank details need to be private, and a few other things, but my google search doesn't really need to be. Google is already storing it, and why would anyone bother to spy on it, or care if they did?
The exception to this of course is e-mail which is more of a systematic failure than https or ftps. Most people would indeed like their e-mails to be private, but while webmail providers are starting to provide https interfaces, real, honest to goodness, e-mail encryption is just too damned hard. Key management becomes impossible past more than a couple of keys and the whole process is just incredibly tedious. The person who comes up with a way to get e-mail encryption in a way that isn't too much hassle and doesn't involve storing all your keys with some "trusted" third party will have a license to print money.
They're capping bandwidth openly because it's a business model which works, whereas in the states they cap bandwidth and block connections secretly because theirs doesn't. Transpacific costs may have been part of it(though you're not including maintainence), but it's mostly that it works.
IIS is definitely more work than Apache, though your specific example is actually related to windows and not to apache itself, since the same thing would apply to an apache site hosted on a windows server. There's certainly differences in different applications within the same sphere. My point was that most of the linux services you were mentioning aren't comparable to the windows services you were saying they were easier to maintain than. Sharepoint is not BIND.
And my point is that just because you don't use it doesn't mean it's bloat, it's just a feature you don't use. If the vast majority of the software's users don't use it, that's bloat.
You are not the sum total of all users of software and just because you find something useless doesn't mean it is.
You're not really comparing apples to apples there. Of course basic services which aren't used directly by end users and which are based on technologies from the stone age don't really require an awful lot to administer. They never do, regardless of their manufacturer. Even IIS doesn't really take all that much looking after once you've got it configured properly and it's probably one of the crappiest web servers around.
Exchange on the other hand is user facing and has a complex feature set. I know a lot of tech's who don't really understand what exchange is all about, lord knows it took me years to work it out, but exchange isn't in any way comparable to an IMAP or POP server, if all you're using it for is e-mail then you're probably using the wrong product.
Then you get sharepoint which is, in addition to being complex and user facing, also based on relatively new technology. I can tell you from having to work with one of their competitors on a regular basis, that there are a lot worse things to administer and manage than sharepoint in that space.
To be honest, Ford is the least incompetent and corrupt US auto manufacturer by a rather long stretch. Of course they're not really entirely a US auto manufacturer anymore either, but that's really beside the point.
Unions have certainly gone too far. Particularly in regards to the ratios of show stewards(I think that's the term) to actual workers. In some places it got as bad as a two to one ratio, so a total of 1/3 of the people who were actually supposed to be doing things were useless, not even counting all the usual dead wood. That said though, management incompetence is still one of the top three reasons companies like this go down.
I don't know if a union is really the answer in IT, or in any professional job for that matter, but that doesn't mean that you have to bend over and take it. IT skills are really something you can learn or something you can't, and to be honest there aren't really all that many of us in the "can" pile and not all of us end up in IT. Just because your job could be filled by some idiot who paid 5 grand for someone to give him a few useless certifications doesn't mean that that idiot can actually do your job. Competent people are actually fairly rare, that's why you end up answering calls at 3 am in the first place. Certainly some degree of out of hours work is part of doing a support job, but if you're working 80 hours a week and getting paid for 40, you're probably making such a low hourly wage that you don't really have anything much to lose, even in this economy.
I always laugh at comments about feature bloat.
Unless the features included in software are unused by the vast majority of that software's users, then it is not feature bloat. Just because you personally don't need a feature, and that your personal copy would be faster without it doesn't mean it's bloated, it just means it has a feature that you don't need. Personally I find mail merge to be a completely wasted feature in every office suite I've ever used. People who send a lot of form letters on the other hand, or who need to address the same letter to lots of people, probably disagree. Alternatively, a lot of people find javascript debuggers useless, whereas I install extra ones into my browsers. Some people hate the awesome bar in firefox, I miss it when I'm using another browser.
Generally speaking, if software is still successful, excluding rare instances where there is zero competition(including older versions of the same product), it's not actually suffering from feature bloat. Software with too many unwanted features generally becomes unusable and so people stop using it. If a lot of people are using it, then at worst it's getting there, and if a lot of people are using that feature, then it's not really bloated at all.
It's true that big block V8's are simple, and therefor easy to fix.
That's not however the same thing as powerful or reliable. I wasn't even suggesting diesel in my original comment, just the fact that engine technology has come a long way in 50 years, but the big block V8 for the most part hasn't. Yeah you can probably fix it yourself if you have the parts, but simple isn't always a good thing if you can get better performance, reliability and efficiency out of something more complex.
You're usage pattern is also a bit of a boundary case. People don't generally haul half a tonne up a ridge in a consumer vehicle. It can be done, but it's really sort of an edge case. You're probably just under the weight limit for really needing something designed for that purpose as opposed to just badly designed for it's market and capable of meeting your requirements.
I stand corrected on the Barina. I've started seeing a lot more of them recently and so I presumed that they got a big push in the last couple of years. A handful of models mostly licensed from other companies certainly qualifies as too little, even if I was a little off on the too late.
Holden is actually doing fairly well though, and has separated themselves a bit financially from the parent GM.
When I lived in Wisconsin you could get it, but you couldn't be guaranteed that any given gas station would actually have any. There might be one pump at a place and it might be operating. You could definitely drive one, but there was an inconvenience factor. I was a bit flippant with the diesel because I'm not entirely convinced that diesel is the solution to the problem. A gigantic car running on diesel is a gigantic car, and as you said, the US implementations(like all US cars lately) were crap.
As far as small cars, I mean something along the lines of a Hyundai Getz, not something like a Ford Focus which generally speaking was a "small" American car where I used to live. I can honestly say I never saw one on the road in the entire time I lived there or any of the times I've been back since. Hertz would rent you one, but it cost about as much per day as a mid size sedan cost for a week. This might be different in California, I didn't live there, but when I left aside from a few trendy cars like the Mini Cooper, nothing small really existed, and about the most fuel efficient car you could buy was a Toyota Corolla which had a rather abysmal 28 MPG or so.
Things are certainly starting to change, I left the states way before the fuel prices changed significantly, and the US is a really big place with a lot of areas which are very different than where I used to live.
None of this changes the fact that the obsession with big block V8's is a large part of why most of the US car manufacturers almost went under last year. Ford was probably the least guilty of this particular offense and they didn't take a handout.
Diesel is always a bit of a difficult thing because it requires the infrastructure available to fuel it and the US has never been really big on Diesel. They also only bought SAAB fairly recently I think(and they're closing it now so the brand is gone). They just never seem to have made anything other than big cars. Even their other divisions generally sold exactly the same kinds of cars. Holden has the Barina now, but it was sort of too little too late.
Certainly this thread can show you that for some reason Americans have a love affair with big V8's, even if they aren't really all that powerful or efficient. GM has never made a super car to the best of my knowledge. I think mostly it was just the fact that V8's being fairly simple to make(basically the same design for 50 years) are cheap and Americans up until fairly recently would buy them.
It might be that before fuel prices rose, you just couldn't really have sold a small car in the US, but it always seems to me that where most Asian and European manufacturers had a dozen small car lines to pour into the US when the demand changed, GM was just caught off guard. If they have many fuel efficient designs they just weren't capable of transitioning their factories in the US into making them fast enough. I don't know all of GM's subsidiaries, but I do know that the Barina is the only compact GM car I can personally think of. To the best of my knowledge SAAB never made one, GM has never released on under their own brand. I know they sell some of the Holden's under Voxel in parts of Europe, but I don't think they had anything small either.
The reason GM needed to get bailed out by the government is because they ignored the evidence of every other country on earth and presumed US gas prices would always stay the same. If they'd produced the last of these ten years ago and started making cars which actually have something remotely resembling fuel efficiency, good design, or low carbon emissions, then American cars might not be a global joke, the government might be a couple of billion dollars less in debt, and a whole lot of Americans who used to work in the auto industry would still have their jobs.
It took near bankruptcy to finally get GM to acknowledge that they had to actually innovate(or at least copy everyone else) rather than continuing with a technology which is 50 years old.
To be perfectly honest, murder is probably a lesser crime. You can kill someone in a fit of rage, or by accident. You can be defending yourself. You can't accidentally rape your kids, even foster kids.
These kids were in his care, it was his job to look after them and protect them and instead he raped them. That's pretty much the most despicable thing you can do. He might not have been their father, but he was acting as their father, if you do that sort of thing to kids you're supposed to be caring for 44 years is far too lenient.
Whether you believe in IP or not, it's pretty much the only thing the US still makes that anyone actually wants to buy.
No one wants what few physical goods the US still produces, there's pretty much zero resources export. The US economy is based almost entirely on ideas(IP) and military hardware. Any president, regardless of their political ideology or personal philosophy is going to work very hard to protect that.
No, Facebook privacy works fairly well, when facebook stops being "information wants to be free" dickheads and changing your privacy settings by default.
If I stuck files on an ftp server and locked it down, it would cost me time, it would cost me money, and most of my relatives wouldn't be able to work it, plus I'd have to give them the password over e-mail which isn't secure either.
I don't want my photos to be impossible to find, I just want them hard enough to find. It's like a front door, you can get through most front doors in about 30 seconds with a sledge hammer, but most people don't carry one of those around. I don't need my door to be impenetrable, just hard enough to penetrate.
I know it's trendy not to trust the government, and I don't trust them all that much either, but if they really want information on me they're going to get it one way or another, and the outlet switch for getting rid of people who abuse that information is an election. Here in Australia we even have instant run off voting so I've been able to vote for a third party and still transition my vote to the lesser of two evils when said third party doesn't win. We've got pretty vibrant politics down here most of the time, and we can usually get rid of whichever set of idiots is going too far. This isn't usually the case in the US, but to be honest, trying to deal with problems getting fair election results by complaining about what the people you didn't want to vote for did isn't really the right way to solve the problem.
Google on the other hand is a private enterprise. I can't vote for new management of google, I can't vote for them to change their policies, I can't even find out what those policies are unless they're public, or how often they're actually following them.
The fact that google will roll over for the feds is really not that much of a big deal, everyone rolls over for the feds if they come with a warrant, that's the law. Admitedly some folks roll over without a warrant, and that's a problem, but outside the scope of this.
The big problem with google is that they horde so much information in the first place. The feds can't get what isn't logged. That's my big problem with google these days. They seem to be more and more intent on gathering more and more information about everyone. Search queries, e-mails, written documents, now DNS queries. Who the hell knows what the binary distribution of Chrome actually reports and to whom. Personally I trust the government a lot more than I trust google, I have at least some control over my government, and none at all over Google.
I wish people would stop making the assumption that because someone shares something on facebook they want to share it with the world.
There are levels of privacy and sharing between telling everyone everything and hiding in a secure lead lined bunker somewhere. I might want to share pictures of my kid with my friends and family who live in other states and other countries without wanting to share that photo with the entire rest of the world.
The reason for using a social site is to allow you to exchange information in a controlled way. If I wanted to just share information with the world I'd stick it up on a public facing web page and let google find it. The problem is that Mark Zuckerberg is an idiot and presumes exactly like you do, that because I want to show my mother her grandchild that I want to share that same information with him and everyone else. Guess what I don't.
I know that the social networking evangalists seem to think that everyone should be metaphorically naked for the world to see and we'd all get along better, and the tin foil hat brigade thinks we should never give our real names even to our spouses, but a lot of times, people want somewhere in the middle.
Get real mate.
Whether you believe in the war on drugs or not, drug related prisoners are not political prisoners. They aren't being imprisoned because they believe in drugs, they're being imprisoned because they took them or more likely sold them. These same people are also quite often involved in other kinds of crime.
Being a drug dealer is not the same as being a political activist. If people were being jailed for saying that they don't believe drugs should be illegal, those would be political prisoners.
You're right, speaking the truth is not illegal.
However, proving that something is the truth is harder than you might think. There's a fairly high standard for that sort of proof. "I saw him doing it" is probably not even enough if you're the only witness(since you're not a reliable witness). You really need proof, real proof, take em to court and throw them in jail kind of proof.
There are a number of other defenses against slander(no real harm, no expectation of belief, etc), but losing out on a job is real harm, and an ex supervisor giving a reference is someone an ordinary person would believe.
These protections are, for the most part, a rather good thing, we wouldn't want ex-employers making shit up about us for revenge. You wouldn't want the guy you thought was a good guy and your friend, but who actually hates you because he wants to sleep with your wife, lying about you.
There have to be consequences for telling harmful lies, and a consequence of that is that there has to be a reasonable required level of proof that you weren't lying, and if you can't meet that level, even if what you said was true, you're screwed.
That's not exactly true. There's far more employment rights in the US than you might think. It's a lot harder to prove prejudice, but if you can any number of things beyond race, religion, and sexual orientation are actually protected. Age, and gender are two big ones, and I'm fairly certain that in at least some states there is some protection for prejudice against someone with a criminal record, depending on the type of crime and the type of job.
You can't actually deny employment for ANY reason, you can however deny employment for no reason, which makes it seem like you can deny employment for any reason. It's somewhat hard to prove that you've been unjustly passed over or terminated when "because I felt like it is a valid reason. If however they felt like it because of your race, gender, sexual orientation, health status, or any of the hundred other reasons they aren't legally allowed to discriminate against you, and you can prove it, you can win your lawsuit.
Basically it's illegal to discriminate against people for all sorts of reasons. The only reason the ones you mentioned are the only ones which seem to be protected is they're a little easier to work with. If you can show that you and the person who got the job over you are equal, but you're black and he or she is white, you can probably convince a jury that it was race which caused the problem. Racism is fairly well known, and your race is pretty obvious so you don't have to prove they knew. For a lot of other things you'd have to prove they knew about it first, which is a little harder sometimes. Fire and hire at will don't actually mean what you think they mean. They come close in reality to that since "because I felt like it" is hard to disprove, but if you can prove otherwise you're in good shape.
That said, pretty much any country in the world would allow an employer to refuse to hire someone for an IT job who had been involved in computer related criminal activity in the past. The fact that this bloke commited felony electronic trespass would certainly be applicable to any applications he made for an IT admin, or network security job.
DO NOT GIVE BAD EMPLOYMENT REFERENCES.
It's illegal in a lot of places, and even where it isn't illegal it can get you and/or your employer sued. Ask your HR department, but generally speaking the answer is to either turn it over to them or to confirm job title and period of employment. Often even if you would otherwise give a glowing recommendation this is all you're actually allowed to do. It's got nothing to do with what you "know" or don't know, it's got to do with whether you're going to get sued for slander. If you're going to say anything bad about someone(presuming bad references aren't actually illegal in your jurisdiction) you better damned well be able to defend yourself against slander(or libel if you write it). In the US that means you have to be able to prove it's true, and even then you'll be out legal costs and your employer will probably sack you for causing them unecessary trouble.
Generally speaking, the only way you'd be even remotely safe saying anything negative about someone is if it was a criminal offense and they'd actually been convicted, and even then if they were later proved innocent you could still probably get sued. It'd also be totally unecessary, since the prospective employer can just do a criminal record search.
When it comes to references, unless you really like lawyers, courtrooms and paying out huge settlements(not getting a job is material harm) then remember what your mother used to tell you. If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all. Confirm employment dates, and job title, and that's it. To be perfectly honest, in these days where you can get sued for damages if you give a good recommendation for someone who turns out terrible, your best off just confirming employment dates and job title even if you worshiped the ground they walked on, believed the sun shined out of their backside, and would have been happy for them to marry your kid.
And realistically that's perfectly fine. When you get two people who are for all intents and purposes equal, the qualification which determines the final result can be any sort of ridiculous thing including the colour of their shirts on the day or any sort of personal feeling, and to be honest, someone with a criminal history is slightly lower on the totem pole than someone who doesn't have one.
The bigger issue is when you don't get the job, even when you are by far the most qualified candidate due to a past which you have matured beyond. I don't know how often this happens, but it's a problem when it does.
The biggest piece of advice I could give is to make sure you actually know why you're not getting the job. I've met a lot of people who think that they're a lot better than they really are and so blame something for them not getting a job that really isn't applicable. From the time scale, the poster is in their late 30's.
People who are having a hard time in the job market like to blame all sorts of things which don't matter on why they failed to get the job, and 99.999% of the time, it's just that they presented a bad resume or presented badly at the interview.
The thing is that there's a middle area between publishing nothing about yourself and publishing everything about yourself. Beacon sort of pushed a little too close to everything for some people. I use facebook to keep in touch with my friends overseas, it's useful for that purpose, and I will message them or write on their walls or whatever I deem appropriate whatever information I want to share with them. The key here is "I WANT". There are things I'm happy to publish, there are things I don't want to publish. I'm happy to announce to my friends(and pretty much everyone on my facebook is actually a real friend because I don't give a crap about friend counts IRL or on facebook) some of the events in my life I want to share with them. I don't really need them to know exactly what I bought from that on-line retailer or what I've just done in a video game. Aside from it being none of their business, I don't care what other people are doing and so I don't believe they should care what I'm doing.
Just because some idiots share every second of their lives on facebook, or myspace or twitter or their blog or whatever doesn't mean that everyone who uses those services does.
People like you are why everyone ends up with shitty jobs.
First off, the vast majority of those unemployed people aren't skilled IT workers, and they're not going to come steal your job even if you're an entry level monkey, let alone if you're actually someone they like well enough to offer to promote to management.
Secondly, knowledge of the company and it's processes is worth far more than you'd think, it takes years for people to really get up to speed with the way the core business actually operates.
Thirdly, hiring new staff is expensive, what with advertising, interviewing, training, all that malarky.
There are certainly companies which would rather face these costs than give people a raise, but generally speaking unless you're doing totally unskilled labor you're not as replaceable as you think you are.
You really don't have to be a slave, even in the worst economy you have some choices, and at the very least you can start putting your CV together to get out. So long as you let your manager walk all over you, he or she will. So long as you think "I can't do anything about it" you won't. Grow a pair.
Even in the US which has a ridiculously high .08 legal limit, 4 standard drinks in an hour will put an average size man over the limit. In most of the world with a .05 limit, it's closer to two. Add in the fact that in most places beer isn't piss weak like it was back in the states, and being on call essentially means no drinking. Even in the US, you'd have to be fairly careful.
That said there's something somewhat fishy here, I've never known non technical people to get called in in any field I've ever worked in or with. Certainly technical can mean a lot of things, but it's really only the folks who actually do the work who are actually on call. Managers certainly work a lot of overtime, but generally being on call isn't part of that equation, so I'm not sure what is going on here.