I've seen this behavior happen to posts I've made and others I tried to clean up. I've also noticed that a number of administrators (such as userj) have been carefully scrubbing any article or remark that is critical of anyone related to the McCain campaign.
My experience in this area was for a computer lab that supported a foreign language department (of a state university). We used Authorware to make drills and quizes. While Director does more, Authorware was easier to use by the non-experts. Neither of them are inexpensive, and the academic versions weren't significantly cheaper than the "grown up" price. The lab that I was in charge of running was completely Macintosh oriented: at that time, Windows had a very hard time supporting non-ascii character sets. But with a $99 language kit for your Mac, that same Mac would easily handle Japanese, Russian and Hebrew character sets (the remainder of the languages taught used roman characters).
For a university, it would be far better to have one or two trained experts making the content rather than to try to train the teachers how to program. Find someone who is good at both asking questions and hearing the answers.
Gateway managed to get away with a license for their Gateway Tenth Anniversary System. Hidden inside the box was a piece of paper that denied your right to sue, and compelled you to use the abritration service of Gateway's choice (without mentioning the $2000 fee for arbitration). This happened in 1996.
Something that had been working for the disabled playing this game, all of a sudden stops working, and you expect the people affected to just keep paying their monthly subscription in the hopes that "someday" it will be "fixed?" When will it be fixed? How will it be fixed? For the folks who spent money customizing the UI to accomodate their handicap, who reimburses them for the now un-usable game?
That's unfortunate, but the alternative is to limit all human activities to those things that quadraplegics can manage.
Bull. We are not talking about football, or flying a plane, we're discussing a computer game.
For many wheelchair bound folks, games like SWG, EQ and WoW are the only way they can escape from being tied by gravity to a chair. In those worlds, you can run, you can fly, you can move the hunk of flesh you are stuck in.
On my EverCrack server, there used to be 2 disabled players. One had spent over $1k getting a custom UI made that became totally unusable after the latest UI update (the one to make things look like WoW). The most kind description of Corpsed that I could find was well, the doctors did what they could to repair his face. Unable to play/socialize anymore, he gave his account information to his family. Fryerbry is wheelchair bound, and EverCrack is the only way he can run, or fly, or be powerful enough to lift things (like his arms).
Both SWG and EQ have had some serious screwups, and about the only way to make the games fun again involves using a time machine.
So your plan is to violate copyright and misappropriate trade secrets, then enter the data as evidence in a legal action?
One of my past employers was defrauding his largest client out of about $50,000 to $100,000 per year. Some of his customers were stealing about $15,000 per year from him. One of his ex-employees embezzled about $100,000 in inventory to open up a competing business. Very snotty, cut-throat business with deceit seen as a major virtue (the more you stole, the bigger your balls). This employer would engage in scorched earth tactics when it suited him (and it suited just fine if you went to work for anyone he could consider a competitor). I made some copies of some documents that would have had him filing bankruptcy (and probably fleeing the country) if he decided to shoot flames my way. Evidence to suit the BSA or FBI, with copies stored somewhere else, so if my home was raided, it would appear that they got the records, but other copies were stored, uh, I'm still not telling.
if your opposition has a lawyer who believes in scorched earth
Lawyers only work if they get paid. If I manage to destroy all your money, your lawyer will bail pretty quickly. I know where your mistress lives. Does your wife? I know where some of your hidden bank accounts are, does your wife's divorce lawyer? Now they do. I wonder how that happened.
Sir, I don't know who you are. You don't know who I am. Perhaps you should think of me as a wandering porcupine. Harmless until youattack. Like Tom, I do know the person I worked for, and he knows me. I don't need to puff up my chest and intimidate you, because I know that if you want to screw me, you're going to wonder where that dry, rusty corncob came from.
April 20th is the birthday of Hitler. It is also the anniversary of the Columbine High School Massacre. April 19th is the anniversary of the Waco Massacre and the McVeigh's Oklahoma City bombing.
At the most recent company I worked for, I also gave 2 weeks notice, but was called on Sunday to "not bother coming in again." I was surprised that my boss also wanted a written explanation of why I was leaving. GOod for me as I got to move my start date at the new company up a week.
Resignation letters should never be more than:
I will be resigning my position at $COMPANY.
My last day of work will be $DATE
(optional) My current mailing address is $ADDRESS
No more need be stated. As a new person was starting the following Monday, it would have been smarter for me to stay those 2 weeks training the new guy. As it was, they get to do it themselves.
It is almost impossible to actually explain fully and honestly why you're leaving without sounding bitter or nasty. Gee, Mr BossMan, I'm getting a 50% pay raise, 75% shorter commute, working with new technology, doing interesting (very not-boring) stuff, and the new place uses source code control too!
At least most places are not as bad as banks: if they overhear you talking about leaving, that will be your last day at work.
The only strain of Ebola that is airborne is Ebola Reston, which was discovered in Reston, VA. That strain is lethal only to monkeys, and not humans. If it were human-lethal, the suburbs of Washington, DC would be rather empty. The human-lethal strains of Ebola are spread by body fluids, and part of the nastiness of that disease is that it dissolves internal organs so that large quantities of blood and goo pour out of mouths and anuses, and when the skin tears, pours out those new holes as well.
The 1918 flu pandemic had many reports of people going home sick on Tuesday, only to be dead Thursday. That flu only had a 25% mortality rate.
As for your analogy, you forget the Slammer worm. That took about a couple of hours to infect almost every SQL Server and MSDE connected to the internet.
I used to work at a South Florida radio repair facility in the late 80s, early 90s. Ford radios from that time were plagued with leaky electrolytic capacitors made by Nichicon. Ford had to use the very short (around 5mm high) caps to fit under the tape deck (and some model radios used 57 of the short capacitors). Delco (now Delphi) had to use the same height ones to fit under the heat sink. Bose used them (regular height) in their amplifiers. The electrolyte in the cans would leak, and sometimes boil out. We showed Ford engineers some Bose amps that were from Chevy Caprices, where the circuit boards are mounted so that the components hang down. The caps (all Nichicon) managed to squirt fluid up about 1/4 inch to spray onto the circuit board. I'm not sure why the fluid was corrosive, perhaps the combination of heat, 90% humidity and dirt managed to form a combination that would eat through the copper traces on the circuit boards.
Nichicon appears to be the only company manufacturing those short (~5mm high) axial capacitors, and our repair facility had to order them directly from Japan, as I wanted the 105 degree C rated caps, in contrast to the 55C rated caps that were installed in the radios. In South Florida, you could easily get in-dash temperatures over 200F: 90F air temperature outside the car, sunny day cooking the inside of the car.
Newspapers have become little more than advertising vehicles. For an example, look at the Wall Street Journal, about half of what passes for "news" in that paper are press releases from companies.
The urge to look corporate-- sleek, commanding, prudent, yet with just a touch of hubris on your well-cut sleeve-- is an unexpected development in a time of business disgrace.
No normal person writes this Proustian Baloney; this is the sort of thing that a PR agency hack writes and a lazy newspaper sticks in as "news." Paul Graham wrote this essay about press releases posing as news stories.
I expect that the people who pay newspapers to run their "stories" will also be paying congress to prevent bloggers from discussing politics. So that the NoiseMachine can continue to deceive America with their agitprop.
The final blow to local papers will be when local goverments stop posting official notices in those papers. That is where a significant source of income for the papers comes from. Unless you are that newspaper in Newark(?) who is getting something like $100,000/year to publish only news approved by the city council and mayor's office.
In the USA, for a public figure to sue for libel/slander, they have to meet all three prongs of the following:
The plaintiff has to prove the statement is false.
The defendant has to know the statement is false.
The defendant made the statement without caring whether the statement is true or false.
That is called the Sullivan Test after this Supreme Court decision. That particular decision was about a public official, and other decisions have expanded that rule to any individual who is a public figure. Being a public figure makes it much harder to win a defamation case in the US, so many plaintiffs will try to sue in British courts. That's why Jack decided to lie and make the claim "This story is completely false and defamatory. Take it down or else." Because he is probably attempting to try to use that as a defence in court at a later date. Ultimately all lawyering revolves around intimidating your opponent. An opponent who refuses to be intimidated will be very expensive for Jack (or any other lawyer) to deal with. He already ruined his reputation, so it is impossible for anyone to defame it further.
Libel is the term used for written defamation of character (I hand you a note, or print in/., saying that your cat is an idiot), and slander is the verbal form (I tell people that your cat is an idiot). Defamation loosely means making false statements about someone that results in their losing reputation. If your cat really is an idiot, then it isn't defamation. Proving whether a statement is true or false is pretty easy. Proving malice, which is needed for public figure plaintiffs, is much harder to do.
According to Gamespot, the infamous fax to the Seattle Police has not been received by the Seattle Police (as of yesterday). My hypothesis as to why the fax was never sent to the police is that it would constitute filing a false police report which is a crime in every state in this country.
I am not a lawyer either, but I did go to a police academy.
Mr Thompson has made himself a public figure, which makes his sueing folks for slander or libel just about impossible. Pretending to be harassed while deliberately harassing others is hypocrisy. A debating technique commonly called Ad Ad Ad Hominem.
According to the current administration, over 400,000 Americans make their living selling stuff on eBay. If there are 400,000 Americans making a living doing that, the states want a part of it: sales tax or occupational tax.
Yes, you could have software that works flawlessly and comes with a guarantee, but you're still going to pay for it.
You already pay for it. Every bug, every virus, every defect that loses your data: you pay for it already. When headlines claim that some new virus/worm/trojan costs the public millions of dollars, that is millions of dollars of externality that Microsoft foisted off onto the public.
Software publishers shouldn't be able to evade any and all liablity for the defects in their products. It isn't in the interest of the public to let cars explode just because. Likewise it should also be against public interest for software products to cause billions of dollars of economic harm to society. When your database program bursts into flames and crashes, destroying millions of dollars worth of data, due to known defects that the vendor refuses to fix, whose fault is it? The blame the victim squad will be quick to say that one should have back ups (if your car is stolen, how many back ups do you have in the driveway), or not to depend upon faulty stuff like SQL Server or Oracle.
Software quality will only get better when software publisher/vendors become liable for their defects. Producing defective software is a cost of business, except the purchaser bears all the cost. Economists call that an externality.
His series of articles are an attempt to sell cryptographic co-processors.
If one were interested in the history of cryptography, one would read The Code Breakers, by David Kahn (very thick book, yet very interesting). Or, if one were interested in how to utilize cryptography into business processes, one would probably have read Secrets and Lies, by Bruce Schneier.
...when you use RSA for encryption, you use it in conjunction with a symmetric encryption algorithm.
One does that only because public-key algorithms are very slow compared to symmetric-key algoritms. Slower by factors like 100 to 1000. PGP uses both: the body of the message is encoded with a symmetric key, randomly generated for that session, and that key is encrypted with the public key of the recipient. If one were to purchase the co-processors his department sells, one could speed up the public-key encryption to where it would be practical for everyday use.
You don't remember the Tobacco lawsuits do you? Where the tobacco lawyers tried to make a big deal out of the non-compete/non-disclosure agreements that were signed by everyone in the tobacco industry. 10-year non-competes were the corporate standard: there was no exception, there was no negotiation. Period.
You have to give them that power, and why would you? Ahh, but that is what Reaganomics was all about: screwing John Q Public so hard that they would be happy to find even a job washing dishes. And that is what the end results of the offshoring frenzy our country is experiencing: to make you grateful for the bone that employers throw you, and there are thousands of other unemployed techies who would jump through hoops for that job.
I can tell you've never been out of work because you're too old to be fashionable. Things will get very different for you when you reach 40.
Six months is still too long for a non-compete. Any company that wishes to enforce its non-compete should be required to pay the salary of the person forced to be idle.
In the '90s, there was a push by large 2 and 3 letter companies to change engineering from a 4 year curricula to a 2 year curricula (in short, replacing engineers with technicians), focusing on the software tools that those companies used (and avoiding things like theory or sticky stuff like ethics or even worse economics). The university system wasn't interested in such a change of their educational system. Hence the outcry of a shortage of technicians (which are mispelled in the media as engineers).
With a career half-life of under 7 years, it is rather hard to pay off a $100,000 education before you are tossed out the door. So by the time you made it to 30, over half of your engineering graduating class would be unemployed, laid off or promoted to Pointy Haired Boss.
At a previous employer, they had a very high turn over of consultants. Since they considered the data on the hard drive to be a corporate asset, they wanted the stuff fragged if the employee quit or was about to be fired. So the company starts this quiet project to build something that would wipe the drive. It was expected that this would be buggy, and go off randomly, so that the consultants wouldn't be surprised when their laptop became a brick (if everyone who's laptop locked up was subsequently fired, or if their laptop locked up when they were fired, it would tell the consultants too much information). The project was cancelled in 2001 when it was discovered that there were a number of commercial products doing this stuff. The SysAdmins rejoiced when the project was cancelled since the network virus checker was constantly complaining that our group was infected with about 30 virii and trojans each.
Here in Denver, CO, I mostly hear Bengali and Gujurati spoken among Indians. I don't think the original poster, nor most Americans, can conceive of a nation where more than one language is spoken (except to mock Quebec). Vizzini: INCONCEIVABLE!
Inigo Montoya: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Slashdot Mirror
I've seen this behavior happen to posts I've made and others I tried to clean up. I've also noticed that a number of administrators (such as userj) have been carefully scrubbing any article or remark that is critical of anyone related to the McCain campaign.
For a university, it would be far better to have one or two trained experts making the content rather than to try to train the teachers how to program. Find someone who is good at both asking questions and hearing the answers.
Gateway managed to get away with a license for their Gateway Tenth Anniversary System. Hidden inside the box was a piece of paper that denied your right to sue, and compelled you to use the abritration service of Gateway's choice (without mentioning the $2000 fee for arbitration). This happened in 1996.
Something that had been working for the disabled playing this game, all of a sudden stops working, and you expect the people affected to just keep paying their monthly subscription in the hopes that "someday" it will be "fixed?" When will it be fixed? How will it be fixed? For the folks who spent money customizing the UI to accomodate their handicap, who reimburses them for the now un-usable game?
For many wheelchair bound folks, games like SWG, EQ and WoW are the only way they can escape from being tied by gravity to a chair. In those worlds, you can run, you can fly, you can move the hunk of flesh you are stuck in.
Both SWG and EQ have had some serious screwups, and about the only way to make the games fun again involves using a time machine.
Sir, I don't know who you are. You don't know who I am. Perhaps you should think of me as a wandering porcupine. Harmless until you attack. Like Tom, I do know the person I worked for, and he knows me. I don't need to puff up my chest and intimidate you, because I know that if you want to screw me, you're going to wonder where that dry, rusty corncob came from.
April 20th is the birthday of Hitler. It is also the anniversary of the Columbine High School Massacre. April 19th is the anniversary of the Waco Massacre and the McVeigh's Oklahoma City bombing.
Resignation letters should never be more than:
No more need be stated. As a new person was starting the following Monday, it would have been smarter for me to stay those 2 weeks training the new guy. As it was, they get to do it themselves.It is almost impossible to actually explain fully and honestly why you're leaving without sounding bitter or nasty. Gee, Mr BossMan, I'm getting a 50% pay raise, 75% shorter commute, working with new technology, doing interesting (very not-boring) stuff, and the new place uses source code control too!
At least most places are not as bad as banks: if they overhear you talking about leaving, that will be your last day at work.
The 1918 flu pandemic had many reports of people going home sick on Tuesday, only to be dead Thursday. That flu only had a 25% mortality rate.
As for your analogy, you forget the Slammer worm. That took about a couple of hours to infect almost every SQL Server and MSDE connected to the internet.
Nichicon appears to be the only company manufacturing those short (~5mm high) axial capacitors, and our repair facility had to order them directly from Japan, as I wanted the 105 degree C rated caps, in contrast to the 55C rated caps that were installed in the radios. In South Florida, you could easily get in-dash temperatures over 200F: 90F air temperature outside the car, sunny day cooking the inside of the car.
No normal person writes this Proustian Baloney; this is the sort of thing that a PR agency hack writes and a lazy newspaper sticks in as "news." Paul Graham wrote this essay about press releases posing as news stories.
I expect that the people who pay newspapers to run their "stories" will also be paying congress to prevent bloggers from discussing politics. So that the NoiseMachine can continue to deceive America with their agitprop.
The final blow to local papers will be when local goverments stop posting official notices in those papers. That is where a significant source of income for the papers comes from. Unless you are that newspaper in Newark(?) who is getting something like $100,000/year to publish only news approved by the city council and mayor's office.
That is called the Sullivan Test after this Supreme Court decision. That particular decision was about a public official, and other decisions have expanded that rule to any individual who is a public figure. Being a public figure makes it much harder to win a defamation case in the US, so many plaintiffs will try to sue in British courts. That's why Jack decided to lie and make the claim "This story is completely false and defamatory. Take it down or else." Because he is probably attempting to try to use that as a defence in court at a later date. Ultimately all lawyering revolves around intimidating your opponent. An opponent who refuses to be intimidated will be very expensive for Jack (or any other lawyer) to deal with. He already ruined his reputation, so it is impossible for anyone to defame it further.
Libel is the term used for written defamation of character (I hand you a note, or print in /., saying that your cat is an idiot), and slander is the verbal form (I tell people that your cat is an idiot). Defamation loosely means making false statements about someone that results in their losing reputation. If your cat really is an idiot, then it isn't defamation. Proving whether a statement is true or false is pretty easy. Proving malice, which is needed for public figure plaintiffs, is much harder to do.
According to Gamespot, the infamous fax to the Seattle Police has not been received by the Seattle Police (as of yesterday). My hypothesis as to why the fax was never sent to the police is that it would constitute filing a false police report which is a crime in every state in this country.
I am not a lawyer either, but I did go to a police academy.
Mr Thompson has made himself a public figure, which makes his sueing folks for slander or libel just about impossible. Pretending to be harassed while deliberately harassing others is hypocrisy. A debating technique commonly called Ad Ad Ad Hominem.
According to the current administration, over 400,000 Americans make their living selling stuff on eBay. If there are 400,000 Americans making a living doing that, the states want a part of it: sales tax or occupational tax.
Software quality will only get better when software publisher/vendors become liable for their defects. Producing defective software is a cost of business, except the purchaser bears all the cost. Economists call that an externality.
If one were interested in the history of cryptography, one would read The Code Breakers, by David Kahn (very thick book, yet very interesting). Or, if one were interested in how to utilize cryptography into business processes, one would probably have read Secrets and Lies, by Bruce Schneier.
One does that only because public-key algorithms are very slow compared to symmetric-key algoritms. Slower by factors like 100 to 1000. PGP uses both: the body of the message is encoded with a symmetric key, randomly generated for that session, and that key is encrypted with the public key of the recipient. If one were to purchase the co-processors his department sells, one could speed up the public-key encryption to where it would be practical for everyday use.You have to give them that power, and why would you? Ahh, but that is what Reaganomics was all about: screwing John Q Public so hard that they would be happy to find even a job washing dishes. And that is what the end results of the offshoring frenzy our country is experiencing: to make you grateful for the bone that employers throw you, and there are thousands of other unemployed techies who would jump through hoops for that job.
I can tell you've never been out of work because you're too old to be fashionable. Things will get very different for you when you reach 40.
Six months is still too long for a non-compete. Any company that wishes to enforce its non-compete should be required to pay the salary of the person forced to be idle.
With a career half-life of under 7 years, it is rather hard to pay off a $100,000 education before you are tossed out the door. So by the time you made it to 30, over half of your engineering graduating class would be unemployed, laid off or promoted to Pointy Haired Boss.
Last time I checked, the cost to make anti-matter was running about $1 per atom. So your fuel cost is going to run about $10^18.
At a previous employer, they had a very high turn over of consultants. Since they considered the data on the hard drive to be a corporate asset, they wanted the stuff fragged if the employee quit or was about to be fired. So the company starts this quiet project to build something that would wipe the drive. It was expected that this would be buggy, and go off randomly, so that the consultants wouldn't be surprised when their laptop became a brick (if everyone who's laptop locked up was subsequently fired, or if their laptop locked up when they were fired, it would tell the consultants too much information). The project was cancelled in 2001 when it was discovered that there were a number of commercial products doing this stuff. The SysAdmins rejoiced when the project was cancelled since the network virus checker was constantly complaining that our group was infected with about 30 virii and trojans each.
Here in Denver, CO, I mostly hear Bengali and Gujurati spoken among Indians. I don't think the original poster, nor most Americans, can conceive of a nation where more than one language is spoken (except to mock Quebec).
Vizzini: INCONCEIVABLE!
Inigo Montoya: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.