I'm curious if perhaps the the reason we saw no energy savings, was because of all the extra time, money, and energy used up by the IT departments to either prepair for, or recover from the DST change? In the end, it was really a net-zero change.;-)
But more seriously, I wonder how much time and money was wasted with patching code and coddling systems, as well as dealing with failed patches? I suspect that's the real waste of energy in this situation.
If students successfully sue TurnItIn, this will likely open the road for other students to sue schools and individual professors for contributory-copyright-infringement. I suspect that schools and universities will want to avoid litigation, and either encourage professors to not require it's use, or TurnItIn will offer opt-out path for those who use their service.
Of course, this is just my feeling on the whole matter.
Maybe we should look more to why people feel compelled to Drive and Text at the same time? I think we'll see a trend that has been building for years in the US. Businesses are asking more and more of individual employees, having them do the job of 3, 4 or 5 people, all in the name of more profits?
If an employee is so important, it's key that they're reachable when their on their way somewhere else, or needs to be instantly accessed 24/7, maybe there needs to be thought about why that's happening. Why there isn't any alternate coverage. People feel compelled to be accessable for their work because the way we live our lives is evolving from where it used to be more personal time, to now more company time.
I suppose the question I should pose is: How do we change that trend, or can it be?
So, I wonder if anyone has told the BSA they would be happy to cooperate with them, as long as they can bill for their time while devoting resources to their audit needs?
"Certainly, our IT Staff can be available to help you, as well as our Accounting Staff. Of course we charge $300 per man-hour, but that's covered in our standard work agreement."
If it is Google, they're still working on it. They haven't gotten to the University of Missouri in Rolla's nuclear reactor yet. Which has, in the not-so-distant-past, been the home of materials that someone realized were probably a little too enriched for a school-based power plant, and were helpfully exchanged for less potent versions that would allow for the same instruction.
First, how will FDE help when government contractors laptops are lost/stolen with sensitive data on them? Which, I thought, I could be wrong, was more often the case than an actual government laptop being lost/stolen.
And second, this will presume there's no need to get data back from a drive if a machine fails, even if it's not lost/stolen, right? The idea of FDE would be that a drive would only work with it's installed machine, right? One would -hope- there would be a way to retrieve useful data on a system where...say the system board goes bad.
Admins having superuser access are, at the very least, a necessary evil. If you don't let them have it, then they likely can't fix it when it breaks.
Now, IMHO, if an Admin has -time- to snoop an Exec's email, then there's something wrong. Most IT people that I know barely have time to have lunch, and it's usually on the go. I can go on about IT Staff becoming Wage Slaves in Corporate America, but that's probably a different topic.
The bottom line is that you need to keep your Admin's happy, and they ought to be busy enough on their own not to have time to go snooping around where they don't need to be anyway. You want to trust your IT.
I suspect that I'm not the only one whose getting tired of hearing about taking this or taking that away because we're concerned about Terrorists. Terrorism is real, it sucks rocks, but we're living in those times where conventional wars apparently are a thing of the past. We have to get over it and get on with life.
How long are we going to let FUD hang over us and control us? If there's a non-terrorism reason, like you've got alot of people using the data to follow the emergency services and get in the way while gawking at what's going on, then yes, change the policy. Don't throw up a nebulous excuse that 'terrorists will use it!' Then we all go duck and cover and hope we don't get blown up.
Too many people have fought and died for our freedoms. Are we so frightened now, that those lives are meaningless, and we should give up our hard-won freedoms for the illusion of safety?
There's been several comments about legal action; perhaps rightly so. But, the question I ask myself is: With a list of people such as he's exposed, what are the chances that someone will skip the courts all together, and go find the author for a 'personal chat,' or perhaps something more grave?
I think my instict for self-preservation is a bit stronger than that.
Second: Consider the logic that may well be applied if you 'win' the point and are not bound by a contract. If you don't have a contract, and therefore contracted rate, for their ISP service, but you agree that you have been using it, then what rate should you have been charged? Obviously you only got the lower rate because they believed you were under a contract for a specific time period. If that's not the case, then they must have mistakenly under-billed you for services rendered. Thus, they may well decide to retro-bill you for the services you used, at the highest rate possible.
Just use care, getting out of a 'dubious' contract might not always be the best of positions to be in.
This would seem, to the layman like me, that the Executive branch has gone back to the Legislative branch, who in turn said, "Here's an Act with no teeth, you do what you want in the name of anti-terrorism, because this Act can't be construed to limit your powers in that reguard."
If this language is boiler-plate, we need new boilers.
One nice line: 'Nothing in this Act shall be construed to limit the constitutional authority of the President to collect intelligence with respect to foreign powers and agents of foreign powers.'
So, um...what's the whole point of this act, if the President can simply decide that this doesn't apply to what he's doing? Are we just paying our Congressmen to generate laws and paperwork that have no meaning or way for enforcement?
Whatever happened to a system of checks and balances? Geez.
Someone -should- go tell the Oil Companies how much they can charge for their damn gas. Europe pays more than we do for gas, but they have HUGE taxes on their fuel. Is it that much more expensive to ship it to the US?
More to the point, if something becomes part of the infrastructure of a nation, it's going to become under a centralized, governmental control. Can you imagine if there wasn't fedral regulation of highways, or automotive safety standards? Oh, hey..what if the government didn't bail out the airline industry?
Telecom is just the next valid target that will likely be more and more regulated, because it's something that the US has come to rely on as a backbone of it's daily life and infrastructure.
It's really all about the name. The product may have had little to no change, and may be as rock-solid as it ever was. However, the consumer wants to buy a Cadillac when they buy an IBM Thinkpad. This goes to show how important branding is in the marketplace.
If you wanted to buy a Cadillac, and the car you drove felt like one, smelled like one, ran like one, but had the Yugo name on it, wouldn't you be a little shy about investing in that product?
Oddly, I think i'd be tempted to pull up in a large truck with large 'Radioactive' symbols on it and get out in my radiation suit and ask where they'd like the working model put, plus copies of their paperwork showing they have certified radiation containment.
The drawings don't say what sort of 'motor' the system uses. If nothing else, it'd be funny to see their reaction.
I'm afraid I've got to agree. While I'm a male breadwinner in the house, and nonetheless, things at home really need to be properly divided. If you're working late, your other half needs to take up their share.
We split duties with shopping, and I always call in before I head home to see if there's something that needs to be picked up. But, I also do the primary cooking.
As far as the company paying for training, I'm very much of he mind they need to invest in you, particularly if you've invested yourself in the company.
There's just not a chance that IT people who are telecommuting are going to get the shaft. If you have your doubts, go read the verbage in the Federal overtime laws. IT is specifically exempted from them.
It's Federally encouraged to keep your IT staff as wage slaves.
But, that's just how I see it. Your mileage may vary.
Yeah, that's a bum deal, alright. I've seen it with WoW before, and it certainly does suck.
But, aside from WoW, the idea of keeping ones virtual identity is very personal. I've been 'Lionman' for 18 years, but even in the worthwhile places we want to go, to take our virtual identity, we have to compromise, and use something different.
I think when we do that, find that someone else has taken our name on a system, what shocks us most, is that the name we've used for years, turns out to be a name someone else has choosen to represent themselves with, and makes us a little less unique. There's someone else out there who could be mistaken for us.
I've had friends ask me if various websites were mine, because they appeared to sport my virtual name. They weren't me, of course.
Most of it comes down to, IMHO, that we find we're not unique, that someone else has the same idea we had, or worse, saw ours and stole it. It's the slings and arrows of wanting to be someone that stands apart in the vast world that is cyberspace today.
It's been my observation, that we're caught in a bit of a cycle. Currently, we're in the part of the cycle that dictates that IT is a cost-center and not a profit-center.
What's most unfortunate about it, is that this is very much a preception driven cycle. "Powers that be" look at numbers, and suddenly realize that most IT services in a company are just costing money, but not showing any direct profit. Therefore, why should I increase my costs by increasing salaries?
The flip side is that you have to consider how much success and profit comes because IT does it's job. When the "powers that be" make the connection, IT is no longer really a cost-center, but rather a department from which the root of various profit-centers draw their ability to make good money.
So, hopefully, as time goes by, the CEO/CFO/CIO take a bump to the head and wake up realizing that IT, while not a direct profit-center, is often the source from which many other departments draw their ability to make profit for the company. (And thus why the company continues to show profit as a whole.)
Slashdot Mirror
I'm curious if perhaps the the reason we saw no energy savings, was because of all the extra time, money, and energy used up by the IT departments to either prepair for, or recover from the DST change? In the end, it was really a net-zero change. ;-)
But more seriously, I wonder how much time and money was wasted with patching code and coddling systems, as well as dealing with failed patches? I suspect that's the real waste of energy in this situation.
If students successfully sue TurnItIn, this will likely open the road for other students to sue schools and individual professors for contributory-copyright-infringement. I suspect that schools and universities will want to avoid litigation, and either encourage professors to not require it's use, or TurnItIn will offer opt-out path for those who use their service.
Of course, this is just my feeling on the whole matter.
Maybe we should look more to why people feel compelled to Drive and Text at the same time? I think we'll see a trend that has been building for years in the US. Businesses are asking more and more of individual employees, having them do the job of 3, 4 or 5 people, all in the name of more profits?
If an employee is so important, it's key that they're reachable when their on their way somewhere else, or needs to be instantly accessed 24/7, maybe there needs to be thought about why that's happening. Why there isn't any alternate coverage. People feel compelled to be accessable for their work because the way we live our lives is evolving from where it used to be more personal time, to now more company time.
I suppose the question I should pose is: How do we change that trend, or can it be?
Hmmm...wow, gee...imagine that. Moving to Dubai.
... *GASP!*... Oh, no! Say it isn't so!
Let's all find our surprised look.
So, I wonder if anyone has told the BSA they would be happy to cooperate with them, as long as they can bill for their time while devoting resources to their audit needs?
"Certainly, our IT Staff can be available to help you, as well as our Accounting Staff. Of course we charge $300 per man-hour, but that's covered in our standard work agreement."
If it is Google, they're still working on it. They haven't gotten to the University of Missouri in Rolla's nuclear reactor yet. Which has, in the not-so-distant-past, been the home of materials that someone realized were probably a little too enriched for a school-based power plant, and were helpfully exchanged for less potent versions that would allow for the same instruction.
"There is no expressed grant of habeas in the Constitution; there's a prohibition against taking it away," Gonzales said.
I think the best think I can say about this: Get Gonzales out. Get him out NOW!
Grr. Insanity.
First, how will FDE help when government contractors laptops are lost/stolen with sensitive data on them? Which, I thought, I could be wrong, was more often the case than an actual government laptop being lost/stolen.
And second, this will presume there's no need to get data back from a drive if a machine fails, even if it's not lost/stolen, right? The idea of FDE would be that a drive would only work with it's installed machine, right? One would -hope- there would be a way to retrieve useful data on a system where...say the system board goes bad.
Just my $0.02 in thought-form.
Now, IMHO, if an Admin has -time- to snoop an Exec's email, then there's something wrong
You know you can put some unpaid overtime in for such tasks:)
Oh, I suppose you could. But occasionally, it's nice to have a life outside of work, isn't it?
Admins having superuser access are, at the very least, a necessary evil. If you don't let them have it, then they likely can't fix it when it breaks.
Now, IMHO, if an Admin has -time- to snoop an Exec's email, then there's something wrong. Most IT people that I know barely have time to have lunch, and it's usually on the go. I can go on about IT Staff becoming Wage Slaves in Corporate America, but that's probably a different topic.
The bottom line is that you need to keep your Admin's happy, and they ought to be busy enough on their own not to have time to go snooping around where they don't need to be anyway. You want to trust your IT.
[rant]
I suspect that I'm not the only one whose getting tired of hearing about taking this or taking that away because we're concerned about Terrorists. Terrorism is real, it sucks rocks, but we're living in those times where conventional wars apparently are a thing of the past. We have to get over it and get on with life.
How long are we going to let FUD hang over us and control us? If there's a non-terrorism reason, like you've got alot of people using the data to follow the emergency services and get in the way while gawking at what's going on, then yes, change the policy. Don't throw up a nebulous excuse that 'terrorists will use it!' Then we all go duck and cover and hope we don't get blown up.
Too many people have fought and died for our freedoms. Are we so frightened now, that those lives are meaningless, and we should give up our hard-won freedoms for the illusion of safety?
[/rant]
Sorry. I'm just getting tired of it.
So, is that 50 full time people surfing gaming and auction sites out of ...1,000...or 10,000...or 100,000 employees?
And how much did this study cost? As well as the cost to enforce strict AUP?
Just curious...
There's been several comments about legal action; perhaps rightly so. But, the question I ask myself is: With a list of people such as he's exposed, what are the chances that someone will skip the courts all together, and go find the author for a 'personal chat,' or perhaps something more grave?
I think my instict for self-preservation is a bit stronger than that.
First: IANAL.
Second: Consider the logic that may well be applied if you 'win' the point and are not bound by a contract. If you don't have a contract, and therefore contracted rate, for their ISP service, but you agree that you have been using it, then what rate should you have been charged? Obviously you only got the lower rate because they believed you were under a contract for a specific time period. If that's not the case, then they must have mistakenly under-billed you for services rendered. Thus, they may well decide to retro-bill you for the services you used, at the highest rate possible.
Just use care, getting out of a 'dubious' contract might not always be the best of positions to be in.
This would seem, to the layman like me, that the Executive branch has gone back to the Legislative branch, who in turn said, "Here's an Act with no teeth, you do what you want in the name of anti-terrorism, because this Act can't be construed to limit your powers in that reguard."
If this language is boiler-plate, we need new boilers.
One nice line: 'Nothing in this Act shall be construed to limit the constitutional authority of the President to collect intelligence with respect to foreign powers and agents of foreign powers.'
So, um...what's the whole point of this act, if the President can simply decide that this doesn't apply to what he's doing? Are we just paying our Congressmen to generate laws and paperwork that have no meaning or way for enforcement?
Whatever happened to a system of checks and balances? Geez.
Someone -should- go tell the Oil Companies how much they can charge for their damn gas. Europe pays more than we do for gas, but they have HUGE taxes on their fuel. Is it that much more expensive to ship it to the US?
More to the point, if something becomes part of the infrastructure of a nation, it's going to become under a centralized, governmental control. Can you imagine if there wasn't fedral regulation of highways, or automotive safety standards? Oh, hey..what if the government didn't bail out the airline industry?
Telecom is just the next valid target that will likely be more and more regulated, because it's something that the US has come to rely on as a backbone of it's daily life and infrastructure.
It's really all about the name. The product may have had little to no change, and may be as rock-solid as it ever was. However, the consumer wants to buy a Cadillac when they buy an IBM Thinkpad. This goes to show how important branding is in the marketplace.
If you wanted to buy a Cadillac, and the car you drove felt like one, smelled like one, ran like one, but had the Yugo name on it, wouldn't you be a little shy about investing in that product?
Oddly, I think i'd be tempted to pull up in a large truck with large 'Radioactive' symbols on it and get out in my radiation suit and ask where they'd like the working model put, plus copies of their paperwork showing they have certified radiation containment.
The drawings don't say what sort of 'motor' the system uses. If nothing else, it'd be funny to see their reaction.
Okay, you have two choices to make as a corporation:
1.) I can sensor some of my product in a country.
2.) I can not have my product in the country.
Tell me, under the guiding idea of "Do No Evil" or rather "Don't Be Evil," which is not evil?
With option 1, I have some ability to do good.
Under option 2, I have no ability to do good.
I'm afraid I've got to agree. While I'm a male breadwinner in the house, and nonetheless, things at home really need to be properly divided. If you're working late, your other half needs to take up their share.
We split duties with shopping, and I always call in before I head home to see if there's something that needs to be picked up. But, I also do the primary cooking.
As far as the company paying for training, I'm very much of he mind they need to invest in you, particularly if you've invested yourself in the company.
There's just not a chance that IT people who are telecommuting are going to get the shaft. If you have your doubts, go read the verbage in the Federal overtime laws. IT is specifically exempted from them.
It's Federally encouraged to keep your IT staff as wage slaves.
But, that's just how I see it. Your mileage may vary.
Yeah, that's a bum deal, alright. I've seen it with WoW before, and it certainly does suck.
But, aside from WoW, the idea of keeping ones virtual identity is very personal. I've been 'Lionman' for 18 years, but even in the worthwhile places we want to go, to take our virtual identity, we have to compromise, and use something different.
I think when we do that, find that someone else has taken our name on a system, what shocks us most, is that the name we've used for years, turns out to be a name someone else has choosen to represent themselves with, and makes us a little less unique. There's someone else out there who could be mistaken for us.
I've had friends ask me if various websites were mine, because they appeared to sport my virtual name. They weren't me, of course.
Most of it comes down to, IMHO, that we find we're not unique, that someone else has the same idea we had, or worse, saw ours and stole it. It's the slings and arrows of wanting to be someone that stands apart in the vast world that is cyberspace today.
Wait a minute, let me find my surprised look...it's around here somewhere...oh, here it is. (insert gasp of shock and horror here)
If these are the ones we've discovered, imagine the number that have gone unnoticed.
It's been my observation, that we're caught in a bit of a cycle. Currently, we're in the part of the cycle that dictates that IT is a cost-center and not a profit-center.
What's most unfortunate about it, is that this is very much a preception driven cycle. "Powers that be" look at numbers, and suddenly realize that most IT services in a company are just costing money, but not showing any direct profit. Therefore, why should I increase my costs by increasing salaries?
The flip side is that you have to consider how much success and profit comes because IT does it's job. When the "powers that be" make the connection, IT is no longer really a cost-center, but rather a department from which the root of various profit-centers draw their ability to make good money.
So, hopefully, as time goes by, the CEO/CFO/CIO take a bump to the head and wake up realizing that IT, while not a direct profit-center, is often the source from which many other departments draw their ability to make profit for the company. (And thus why the company continues to show profit as a whole.)
Just my $0.02 on the whole deal.