The damage done though is that nobody will learn this because Mike Rowe bent over and took it up the ass in exchange for an XBox and an MCSE...And to think we were supporting the little prick.
Yeah, what was that little bastard thinking looking out for himself and accepting an XBox, free MCSE certification (if/when he passes) and other such gifts for his domain name. They even said they'd cover the costs in getting him a new domain name.
He doesn't owe his supporters on slashdot a damned thing, and he sure didn't do them any harm by accepting hundreds of dollars of free stuff to hand over his domain.
I think if I were 17 and I got offered an XBox in return for my domain name i'd be f'ing stoked, but an XBox, MS Certification, Money to cover the costs of changing my domain name, and whatever else they gave him? Shit i'd have folded too.
I think the parent has missed the whole concept of, well, hack-value. If you have a lot of money, you can buy almost anything. But what's that worth compared to actually building the stuff yourself? Kudos to this guy and all the other "hackers" out there.
Too true, Yeah, i've got a custom, stock looking TV and DVD in my truck(Please be gentle with my server, also, the DVD player has been upgraded and moved, that part was cheesy:( ) However, a tv/dvd in a car/truck these days is a nickle a dozen, it's standard equipment almost, true mine's custom and I did it myself, so I am kinda proud, but shit, mine didn't require a fraction of the effort or work or knowledge that this guy put in. My tv doesn't show the temperature in various parts of my car, it doesn't show gas consumption, it doesn't do GPS, have a clock, tell me how many more miles I can go on the amount of gas I have, or have trip-o-meters, it's not customizable to that degree.. I hear the new BMWs have pretty advanced computers, but I doubt they can do this... This is an extremely cool hack, it looks totally custom, and it's more powerful than any computer system you can buy as an option as your car. I agree, Kudos to this guy, shit i'm jealous.
Of course, then the government will enforce log retention policies for everyone operating any sort of servers anywhere for any reason. Just like companies are legally obligated to retain financial, tax, customer and other business records for three or seven years - they will soon be required by law to retain server logs for as many years, most likely.
Man that's opening up a whole 'nother can o' worms... If you're going to REQUIRE retention times for ANY servers for ANY purpose.. how are they going to keep track of who is and who isn't? audits? Are they going to force people to buy an assload of tapes or hard drives? What if, even if they're able to keep all of their logs on 1 tape per year, a tape dies from some bizarre accident, then are you still charged with refusing to provide the information they're asking you for? What about home users who set up a home server for a hobby? I mean, this isn't a troll, but I just don't see how you would enforce your proposal...
In other words, so long as you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear from this? Great, we'll be installing cameras in every room of your home a week from Thursday. After all, as long as you're not doing anything wrong...
I don't think this is a very good analogy.. you don't own his house, what gives you the right to put in cameras? Your analogy would work better (I hate analogies) if you owned his house (The ISP's bandwidth) which he (The ISP's customer) was renting from you, and the videotapes (logs) were being stored, and not necessarily watched, just in case someone said something illegal was going on in house #1313 Mockingbird Ln at 2:30pm on January 10th. Then you could get your tapes out, check them, and see what was going on in that house at that time on that day and turn them over as evidence to your innocence and your renter's guilt.
It's $700. Case closed. Put down the joypad for 1/2 hr and walk around in circles if you must.
I've been reading through the comments so far and it just dawned on me after seeing your comment.. I had a membership at a boxing gym that was 300/yr, I could get a MUCH better workout going to a boxing class 5 days a week for 2 years than I can playing these video games... now I mean, it's kinda hard to find an hour of free time to go these days, but even if you can find the time twice a week it makes an amazing difference.. now all I need is to find 300 in expendable funds that I can use to get back into it;) Those bastards will MAKE you get in shape.
Funny as this may be, has anyone actually tried one of those arcade boxing games, where you have to duck and weave and you hold onto 'gloves' and actually punch? What a workout.
Yeah, that game is great, although it doesn't record your movement fast enough all the time.. and you kinda gotta slow down a bit and match the pace of the game. On that note, though, Ever seen the Eye Toy for PS2? My girlfriend's Aunt showed us that thing, it's effin' great, it's got it's own disc o' games that comes with it, nothing special, boxing, a soccer 'bounce the ball on your head' game, a game where you wash windows, a couple dancing games.. but damn it's fun, and you'll catch a good workout from it after playing a few games. I got one for my parents for Xmas this year and they absolutely love it. That thing will actually give you a little bit of a workout by the time you're done as well.
Now I have to deal with 5-string bass garbage if I ever want to play NFL Street.
Or you could always go to the playlist editor that's become so popular in these games which allow you to select which songs should be played... I mean, I can't say whether or not this game will have it, but damned near every other game out there does these days. Guess they're not forcing you to deal with anything huh?
Personally I dig the XBox games which allow you to play your own music off of the HDD.
Taht was pretty funny, but I don't think anyone can do the voice for Darth Vader, blackest brother in the galaxy, Nubian god, other than James Earl Jones.
...What's a nubian? (heh, jk, but I got the reference) Anyhow, that is VERY true, but if they replaced the dude in the suit I doubt anyone would give a damn.:)
I can only hope that Lucas will at some point realize that special effects cannot save a bad story.
I'm glad to hear someone else say it... Personally, I think CG is good when used in EXTREME moderation.. now that CG is around it gives directors a reason to be lazy... "Oh it doesn't look right? we'll touch it up in post production" f' that, I remember hearing something on a show about Star Trek that they were using painted metal pipes, broomsticks, hairbrushes, all sorts of every day things to create texture and stuff on the enterprise, now they'd just leave that spot blank and put something fancy on it with CG.. The funny part is, it looked more realistic when it was a painted hairbrush than whatever crap they'd put in it's place using CG! Personally, I LIKED how in EPI&II you could see through the black spots in the XWing/Snow Speeders if you looked close enough.. most people didn't even notice it, but they were able to pull it off without any fancy CG work.. It doesn't HAVE to be perfect, those little imperfections give it character, and they usually go totally unnoticed anyways. Did Lucas forget how to be creative? Er, wait, stupid question.
The actor who played Chewbacca in the original Star Wars trilogy, Peter Mayhew, will be in Episode III.
Well I would HOPE SO! If anyone but Peter Mayhew played Chewbacca I just don't think it would pass... I mean, it takes some serious talent to walk around in a big furry costume for a while... And while they're at it they better get the same people for C3P0 and Vader or this movie just won't quite work!
That's most likely the actual story, but the release form was clear that he had to not allow the screener to be reproduced... which means it was his responsiblity to keep the disc or tape under lock and key. No matter how it got to the net, he should have had control of the physical media so that it didn't happen.
I totally agree with you. A lot of people are saying things like "If you don't trust your employees with a key card then you should get new employees" or things along those lines.. the way I see it is, who cares? McDonalds doesn't exactly have the hardest workers in the world, I wouldn't be surprised if they had people clocking them out and whatnot.. Hell, That's where my first job was, McDonalds, and there wasn't a responsible soul in the joint, mostly High School kids, of course they're going to check one another out every now and then. But here's how I see it, I applaud the fact that they added palm scanners for employee checkin/checkout, I mean seriously, is it REALLY that hard to work the shift that you were scheduled to work? Is leaving 15 minutes early really going to make that big of a difference? If it's an emergency, maybe, but in that case i'm sure your manager would understand. Putting in measures to make sure employees do their jobs... those rat bastard SOBs, what next? Cameras pointed at the registers?
That's most likely the actual story, but the release form was clear that he had to not allow the screener to be reproduced... which means it was his responsiblity to keep the disc or tape under lock and key. No matter how it got to the net, he should have had control of the physical media so that it didn't happen.
I totally agree, it should be his responsibility, but as I said in another post, what happens when he throws it away and the celebrity scavengers digging through his trash find it... I'm thinking he should be sent his own security holagram and an RMA so that when he's done watching it he can seal it and ship it back, then the MPAA can be assured that nobody tampered with it in transit, and they can destroy it themselves.
This person either did it himself, or he gave his screener to somebody else... both are against the rules. I'm sure the MPAA has audits of the process to prove that from creation to packaging nobody interfered with the disc, and from there put it in a tamper-evident seal that if it arived at the actor's address broken he should have reported immediately...
Yeah, it's kinda hard to say where the copy escaped.. if it was someone burning them, then it would have been copied even before it was put in the box, so a tamper-proof seal is irrelevent.. ruling that out, though, and pretending that everyone on the MPAA's side of the shipping process is honest, say the disc gets to the intended recipient, and the seal is not broken.. As someone earlier in this thread had mentioned, maybe someone was digging through his trash (weird people like to go through 'celebrity' trash) and stumbled across this.. Are the screener recipients supposed to keep every copy of every movie shipped to them forever, and be forever responsible for taking care of said movie? If the MPAA wants some thing along those lines they should provide an address and postage for returning the Disc/Tape to a trusted source for destruction. That way you wouldn't need to keep it forever, and you wouldn't need to worry about what happens after you throw it away.. you'd just have to worry about whether or not the person you just mailed it back to is trustworthy.. Either way someone can get royally screwed by this just for receiving the disc in the mail, whether they watched it, threw it away, mailed it back, whatever short of shredding it, burning it or feeding it to the dog. These discs just go through too many hands to be failproof and to hold the recipient responsible for them... I do, however, think they're on the right track, and having an identifier on each disc is a brilliant thing.
100% of screeners that wind up on the 'net are leaked by Academy members... they're the only ones who are authorized to have them to begin with.
I've got several screeners, and i'm not a member of the academy. These are perfectly legit too. When I worked at Blockbuster Video all of the higher-ups, the District Managers and Regional Managers got weekly (usually several a week) shipments of this stuff... I was working at a Blockbuster right nextdoor to the Regional Office, they used to bring the screeners over so that the employees of my store would be able to pass them around and we'd all get to watch them then return them to the office. Any one of these people could have duped any one of these tapes and uploaded them if they wanted to. A side note to this, I haven't worked there for several years, and I think they'd stopped doing this shortly after I quit. As to how I aquired so many copies, I had to work at that office one week, they gave me the screeners that came through that week, and I ended up with about 10 of 'em. Fortunately it was a good week for releases.:)
If that's a shot in attempt to say that the dude's a hack, well, it's a very good one, Godfather III sucked, however he was also in Godfather II, which ruled, so I don't know which way my vote would sway.
Looks like he was also in Brewster's Millions, which I personally thought was great:)
that is why you don't take action on detected spam, you simply flag it and let the end user do with it as they please, with a method to have the mail admin team whitelist (actually, lower score is better than flat-out whitelisting) stuff that is getting flagged that the end users don't want flagged.
Eeeeeeeeexactly. I work for a small web hosting company and we hooked spamassassin up to our mail server which services hundreds of websites. The overall customer response was positive. Basically, we have everything tagged wish "possible-spam: " when it hits our threshold, and we have no bounce threshold. We then created a page for our customers that explains to them, with pictures, how to set up outlook, eudora, netscape, moz, (and through the webmail system in order to reject it before it even gets downloaded or viewed in webmail) etc to reject anything with "X-SPAM-FLAG: YES" in the header, or "possible-spam" in the subject line. With our own mail, we bounce anything that hits the threshold. Our email server gives us the option to "Reject With" so we just have it reject with a message stating that their message has been assumed spam by our filtering system, and if it was a legitimate email to go ahead and send it to a specified box, or to call us. We also whitelisted anything from our addresses so nobody ever bounces our stuff:).. Wasn't so hard at all, cut down on our spam, and made our customers extremely happy... we won on every front with that one
1. A false dichotomy. You have other options (leave SCO and work for someone who will hire you, start your own business, change career paths completely, hell, even go on welfare if need be, and this list of alternatives to SCO v. the poor children is hardly exhaustive).
Sure, you give some viable options here, however, anyone who goes on welfare due to a moral disagreement with SCO deserves to have their ass kicked, here in California we've got enough people on welfare as is, anyone trying to catch a check on the basis that they work for SCO and SCO is suing people like it's the new fashion is an asshole.
2. Your justification (putting your children's dinner above the ethics of your employer) can and has been used to justify doing virtually anything for money. It is no coincidence that crime goes through the roof when economic times are bad, and drops precipitiously when they are good, nor that most crime is committed by those in poverty. Desperation causes many to abandon any ethical or moral backbone they might have had. However, that desperation in no way negates what they have done. A crime remains a crime, a reprehensible act remains a reprehensible act, regardless of whether the money is used to feed a child or buy crack cocain.
Ok, a couple other good points, although flawed -- The people who are justifying working for SCO in order to pay rent and feed their kids are not saying they're going to start robbing banks. They're saying they're going to continue being the techs and office managers for a company who is run by a bunch of idiots. I don't see the crime there.. I'd rather be, and have everyone else for that matter, be an SCO phone support tech than someone out there mugging people and stealing their kids' next meals. C'mon, that was an asanine comparison.
The ethics of obtaining well are orthogonal to the ethics of how that wealth is spent, and ill-gotten gains remain ill-gotten regardless of how well the might later be used. The people harmed remained harmed, even if you turn around and choose to help others.
And just how is working in the office at SCO (and probably not even knowing that they're doing all of this stupid shit, it's not like it's in the news all the time) ill-gotten gains? Now maybe if it were Enron you might want to start looking for a new job as soon as you start seeing your company sinking on the news every day.. but this is different, and even in that case you shouldn't be looked down upon for it... I think if I were an employer and someone from Enron were applying with me before the company collapsed i'd understand and not hold that against them.
When you realize that a stupid movie called "Fight Club" was right on several points (you are not what you own, you are not your string-bean couch, you are not what's in y our wallet) and learn to live on LESS (and you'll find you appreciate those things even more), then you don't have to worry about living "paycheck to paycheck"
Difference here... The bachelors in Fight Club didn't have to explain to their kids why they couldn't eat dinner that night. Your family can't live off of your morals. There are cases where you're going to have to just bite your lip and grind it out. That's a pretty serious situation you mention at the end of your post.. and to answer, if I found out my company was doing business selling 12 year old boys and girls into the sex trade, I wouldn't just up and quit my job that day -- I'd start looking for a new one and continue to grind it out until I found a new one. I would not, however, sacrafice the well being of myself and my family for pride. If it were just me and I were a 23 y/o bachelor, sure, why not, I can suck it up and dine on fine top ramen and rice and water until I find a new gig, but sometimes other people depend on you, and it's selfish to push the shitty situation you're willing to live in onto them as well.
And what, exactly, do you think it is that Saddam Hussein's prison guards did? Or Enron's accountants? Or Darl McBride?
Yeah, but how would that apply if i'm SCO's in-house tech, or network admin, or some such job as that. I can see your point, I think Darl better make enough to live comfortably off of this, because i'm sure it'll be damned hard for him to find a job once SCO crumbles under his fist, but the Sysadmin/Netadmin/Techs had nothing to do with Darl's scandelous steering at the helm. So long as you're not Darl, a board member, or someone in the Law dept, you should be fine.
Unethical behavior is unethical, regardless of how the unethically obtained money is spent. A company hires an unethical person at their own risk. Hiring is as much about risk management as it is in finding the most skillful person, and a person with a proven track record of questionable ethics is, for a legitimate enterprise, a liability, and will generally be passed over for one who either has a proven track record of behaving ethically, or at the very least, a record clean of questionable behavior and associations.
Again, here I am, the sysadmin for SCO. I do my day to day operations, and come up with some major time saving/money saving tactics, saving the company a million dollars a year. I'm not in the courtroom, I'm not the devil on Darl's shoulder telling him "Psst, ok, now sue these guys!". I'm a normal guy doing my job and doing it VERY well, saving my company (immoral it may be) a million dollars a year, would you still pass me by for a less qualified applicant who hasn't designed and implimented systems and policies that had saved his employer wheelbarrows of cash because I worked for SCO/Enron/Worldcomm?
SCO employees who left a year ago fall into one category (no reason to suspect their ethics or judgement). Those who remain, knowing full well what their employer is doing (or remaining willfully ignorant), fall into the other (their ethics, judgement, and quite possibly their intelligence are open to question). A competent person hiring for a legitimate company will not chose such a person over another candidate not so tainted.
Ok, so you, as an employer, would not see this person as totally loyal and willing to stick by and make sure your systems are up and running to the best of their ability through thick and thin? Shit if I didn't quit SCO for a 'better job' then you can feel pretty confident i'll NEVER leave your company. Either way, I agree with people earlier in the thread, a job with SCO is better than no job at all, you get to do all sorts of neat things when you're employed, like pay rent, and eat. I'm sure most employers SHOULD understand this.
Does that mean perfectly competent, ethical people who somehow kept their head in the sand these last ten months may get passed over? You bet. But it is the responsibility of those hiring to look out for the best interests of their firms, not to insure that every last, unfortunatel ex-SCO employee get the benefit of a tremendous and well-justified doubt.
Let's go back to my previous comment for this... Why again, would hiring a kickass forward thinking ex-SCO sysadmin who saved his previous company a million a year, was never late, always had the best interest of the company in mind, was loyal like a dog, and really -really- knows his shit, not be in the "best interests of their firms"
I should sue Sony. My laptop bettery died and they want $250 for a new one. What assholes.
Oooooooh, good call! And i've been contemplating buying a new battery for my '99 lombard powerbook... I hadn't even THOUGHT of getting paid to get a new battery through suing!;)
Except Half-Life had a much stronger single player experience from the get-go, where as the campaign in Halo is rather redundant and tedious.
But then I should also point out that Half-Life's multiplayer options weren't very robust at its release.
Good call. I'm not a big gamer, but Half-Life's single player surprised the hell outta me, TFC was cool when it came out, but that was a while after...
I never really got into the XBox and never saw the validity in the hype for Halo until recently. My neighbors have rooms with a shared wall, they put their TVs on the shared wall and connected the XBox, we usually play 4 player team and non-team games of Halo, after a night or two of playing, I was hooked. We play all the time. Recently I was stoked to get to borrow an XBox for a few weeks, plugged in Halo, and I was SORELY disappointed with the single play experience... I was bored after about 15 minutes. Hopefully Halo2 will not have this problem.
I wonder, how much does the book make an issue of the race of the characters? If the character's race isn't relevant to their actions or the plot, then there's no reason for them to be played by a a "white" actor as opposed to someone else. Why not pick an actor who will bring something interesting to the stage? Who the Hell cares about what amount to little more than cosmetic differences in the characters?
I couldn't agree more. Can I back it up? Yeah, I think I can. Wasn't the Kingpin in the Daredevil comics white? Then what's up with Michael Clarke Duncan playing him in the movie? I think it has something to do with the fact that not even Marlon Brando could have pulled off that role as well as Michael did.
As for all of the Anti-Will Smith people, I think he did a fantastic job in Ali and Enemy of the State. But the main intention behind this post was to point out, race doesn't matter in a movie so long as you get the point across and find the best actor for the job.
Slashdot Mirror
The damage done though is that nobody will learn this because Mike Rowe bent over and took it up the ass in exchange for an XBox and an MCSE...And to think we were supporting the little prick.
Yeah, what was that little bastard thinking looking out for himself and accepting an XBox, free MCSE certification (if/when he passes) and other such gifts for his domain name. They even said they'd cover the costs in getting him a new domain name.
He doesn't owe his supporters on slashdot a damned thing, and he sure didn't do them any harm by accepting hundreds of dollars of free stuff to hand over his domain.
I think if I were 17 and I got offered an XBox in return for my domain name i'd be f'ing stoked, but an XBox, MS Certification, Money to cover the costs of changing my domain name, and whatever else they gave him? Shit i'd have folded too.
-matt
I think the parent has missed the whole concept of, well, hack-value. If you have a lot of money, you can buy almost anything. But what's that worth compared to actually building the stuff yourself? Kudos to this guy and all the other "hackers" out there.
:( ) However, a tv/dvd in a car/truck these days is a nickle a dozen, it's standard equipment almost, true mine's custom and I did it myself, so I am kinda proud, but shit, mine didn't require a fraction of the effort or work or knowledge that this guy put in. My tv doesn't show the temperature in various parts of my car, it doesn't show gas consumption, it doesn't do GPS, have a clock, tell me how many more miles I can go on the amount of gas I have, or have trip-o-meters, it's not customizable to that degree.. I hear the new BMWs have pretty advanced computers, but I doubt they can do this... This is an extremely cool hack, it looks totally custom, and it's more powerful than any computer system you can buy as an option as your car. I agree, Kudos to this guy, shit i'm jealous.
Too true, Yeah, i've got a custom, stock looking TV and DVD in my truck(Please be gentle with my server, also, the DVD player has been upgraded and moved, that part was cheesy
-matt
Of course, then the government will enforce log retention policies for everyone operating any sort of servers anywhere for any reason. Just like companies are legally obligated to retain financial, tax, customer and other business records for three or seven years - they will soon be required by law to retain server logs for as many years, most likely.
Man that's opening up a whole 'nother can o' worms... If you're going to REQUIRE retention times for ANY servers for ANY purpose.. how are they going to keep track of who is and who isn't? audits? Are they going to force people to buy an assload of tapes or hard drives? What if, even if they're able to keep all of their logs on 1 tape per year, a tape dies from some bizarre accident, then are you still charged with refusing to provide the information they're asking you for? What about home users who set up a home server for a hobby? I mean, this isn't a troll, but I just don't see how you would enforce your proposal...
-matt
I don't think this is a very good analogy.. you don't own his house, what gives you the right to put in cameras? Your analogy would work better (I hate analogies) if you owned his house (The ISP's bandwidth) which he (The ISP's customer) was renting from you, and the videotapes (logs) were being stored, and not necessarily watched, just in case someone said something illegal was going on in house #1313 Mockingbird Ln at 2:30pm on January 10th. Then you could get your tapes out, check them, and see what was going on in that house at that time on that day and turn them over as evidence to your innocence and your renter's guilt.
-matt
I've been reading through the comments so far and it just dawned on me after seeing your comment.. I had a membership at a boxing gym that was 300/yr, I could get a MUCH better workout going to a boxing class 5 days a week for 2 years than I can playing these video games... now I mean, it's kinda hard to find an hour of free time to go these days, but even if you can find the time twice a week it makes an amazing difference.. now all I need is to find 300 in expendable funds that I can use to get back into it ;) Those bastards will MAKE you get in shape.
-matt
Yeah, that game is great, although it doesn't record your movement fast enough all the time.. and you kinda gotta slow down a bit and match the pace of the game. On that note, though, Ever seen the Eye Toy for PS2? My girlfriend's Aunt showed us that thing, it's effin' great, it's got it's own disc o' games that comes with it, nothing special, boxing, a soccer 'bounce the ball on your head' game, a game where you wash windows, a couple dancing games.. but damn it's fun, and you'll catch a good workout from it after playing a few games. I got one for my parents for Xmas this year and they absolutely love it. That thing will actually give you a little bit of a workout by the time you're done as well.
-matt
Or you could always go to the playlist editor that's become so popular in these games which allow you to select which songs should be played... I mean, I can't say whether or not this game will have it, but damned near every other game out there does these days. Guess they're not forcing you to deal with anything huh?
Personally I dig the XBox games which allow you to play your own music off of the HDD.
-matt
...What's a nubian? (heh, jk, but I got the reference) Anyhow, that is VERY true, but if they replaced the dude in the suit I doubt anyone would give a damn. :)
-matt
you actually said the sequence was:
4,5,6
1,2,3
5,6,6
In the Lucasverse, this could very well be accurate. :)
-matt
I'm glad to hear someone else say it... Personally, I think CG is good when used in EXTREME moderation.. now that CG is around it gives directors a reason to be lazy... "Oh it doesn't look right? we'll touch it up in post production" f' that, I remember hearing something on a show about Star Trek that they were using painted metal pipes, broomsticks, hairbrushes, all sorts of every day things to create texture and stuff on the enterprise, now they'd just leave that spot blank and put something fancy on it with CG.. The funny part is, it looked more realistic when it was a painted hairbrush than whatever crap they'd put in it's place using CG! Personally, I LIKED how in EPI&II you could see through the black spots in the XWing/Snow Speeders if you looked close enough.. most people didn't even notice it, but they were able to pull it off without any fancy CG work.. It doesn't HAVE to be perfect, those little imperfections give it character, and they usually go totally unnoticed anyways. Did Lucas forget how to be creative? Er, wait, stupid question.
-matt
They killed JarJar?
-matt
Well I would HOPE SO! If anyone but Peter Mayhew played Chewbacca I just don't think it would pass... I mean, it takes some serious talent to walk around in a big furry costume for a while... And while they're at it they better get the same people for C3P0 and Vader or this movie just won't quite work!
-matt
I totally agree with you. A lot of people are saying things like "If you don't trust your employees with a key card then you should get new employees" or things along those lines.. the way I see it is, who cares? McDonalds doesn't exactly have the hardest workers in the world, I wouldn't be surprised if they had people clocking them out and whatnot.. Hell, That's where my first job was, McDonalds, and there wasn't a responsible soul in the joint, mostly High School kids, of course they're going to check one another out every now and then. But here's how I see it, I applaud the fact that they added palm scanners for employee checkin/checkout, I mean seriously, is it REALLY that hard to work the shift that you were scheduled to work? Is leaving 15 minutes early really going to make that big of a difference? If it's an emergency, maybe, but in that case i'm sure your manager would understand. Putting in measures to make sure employees do their jobs... those rat bastard SOBs, what next? Cameras pointed at the registers?
-matt
I totally agree, it should be his responsibility, but as I said in another post, what happens when he throws it away and the celebrity scavengers digging through his trash find it... I'm thinking he should be sent his own security holagram and an RMA so that when he's done watching it he can seal it and ship it back, then the MPAA can be assured that nobody tampered with it in transit, and they can destroy it themselves.
-matt
Yeah, it's kinda hard to say where the copy escaped.. if it was someone burning them, then it would have been copied even before it was put in the box, so a tamper-proof seal is irrelevent.. ruling that out, though, and pretending that everyone on the MPAA's side of the shipping process is honest, say the disc gets to the intended recipient, and the seal is not broken.. As someone earlier in this thread had mentioned, maybe someone was digging through his trash (weird people like to go through 'celebrity' trash) and stumbled across this.. Are the screener recipients supposed to keep every copy of every movie shipped to them forever, and be forever responsible for taking care of said movie? If the MPAA wants some thing along those lines they should provide an address and postage for returning the Disc/Tape to a trusted source for destruction. That way you wouldn't need to keep it forever, and you wouldn't need to worry about what happens after you throw it away.. you'd just have to worry about whether or not the person you just mailed it back to is trustworthy.. Either way someone can get royally screwed by this just for receiving the disc in the mail, whether they watched it, threw it away, mailed it back, whatever short of shredding it, burning it or feeding it to the dog. These discs just go through too many hands to be failproof and to hold the recipient responsible for them... I do, however, think they're on the right track, and having an identifier on each disc is a brilliant thing.
-matt
I've got several screeners, and i'm not a member of the academy. These are perfectly legit too. When I worked at Blockbuster Video all of the higher-ups, the District Managers and Regional Managers got weekly (usually several a week) shipments of this stuff... I was working at a Blockbuster right nextdoor to the Regional Office, they used to bring the screeners over so that the employees of my store would be able to pass them around and we'd all get to watch them then return them to the office. Any one of these people could have duped any one of these tapes and uploaded them if they wanted to. A side note to this, I haven't worked there for several years, and I think they'd stopped doing this shortly after I quit. As to how I aquired so many copies, I had to work at that office one week, they gave me the screeners that came through that week, and I ended up with about 10 of 'em. Fortunately it was a good week for releases. :)
-matt
If that's a shot in attempt to say that the dude's a hack, well, it's a very good one, Godfather III sucked, however he was also in Godfather II, which ruled, so I don't know which way my vote would sway.
Looks like he was also in Brewster's Millions, which I personally thought was great :)
-matt
the The Tar tar pits... (translated)
Hah, that just reminded me of Mickey Blue Eyes (yeah, I saw it, what of it?) they were saying he could find someone at "the la trattoria".
Bah hell, It's funny when you see it, I guess :)
-matt
Eeeeeeeeexactly. I work for a small web hosting company and we hooked spamassassin up to our mail server which services hundreds of websites. The overall customer response was positive. Basically, we have everything tagged wish "possible-spam: " when it hits our threshold, and we have no bounce threshold. We then created a page for our customers that explains to them, with pictures, how to set up outlook, eudora, netscape, moz, (and through the webmail system in order to reject it before it even gets downloaded or viewed in webmail) etc to reject anything with "X-SPAM-FLAG: YES" in the header, or "possible-spam" in the subject line. With our own mail, we bounce anything that hits the threshold. Our email server gives us the option to "Reject With" so we just have it reject with a message stating that their message has been assumed spam by our filtering system, and if it was a legitimate email to go ahead and send it to a specified box, or to call us. We also whitelisted anything from our addresses so nobody ever bounces our stuff :) .. Wasn't so hard at all, cut down on our spam, and made our customers extremely happy... we won on every front with that one
-matt
Sure, you give some viable options here, however, anyone who goes on welfare due to a moral disagreement with SCO deserves to have their ass kicked, here in California we've got enough people on welfare as is, anyone trying to catch a check on the basis that they work for SCO and SCO is suing people like it's the new fashion is an asshole.
2. Your justification (putting your children's dinner above the ethics of your employer) can and has been used to justify doing virtually anything for money. It is no coincidence that crime goes through the roof when economic times are bad, and drops precipitiously when they are good, nor that most crime is committed by those in poverty. Desperation causes many to abandon any ethical or moral backbone they might have had. However, that desperation in no way negates what they have done. A crime remains a crime, a reprehensible act remains a reprehensible act, regardless of whether the money is used to feed a child or buy crack cocain.
Ok, a couple other good points, although flawed -- The people who are justifying working for SCO in order to pay rent and feed their kids are not saying they're going to start robbing banks. They're saying they're going to continue being the techs and office managers for a company who is run by a bunch of idiots. I don't see the crime there.. I'd rather be, and have everyone else for that matter, be an SCO phone support tech than someone out there mugging people and stealing their kids' next meals. C'mon, that was an asanine comparison.
The ethics of obtaining well are orthogonal to the ethics of how that wealth is spent, and ill-gotten gains remain ill-gotten regardless of how well the might later be used. The people harmed remained harmed, even if you turn around and choose to help others.
And just how is working in the office at SCO (and probably not even knowing that they're doing all of this stupid shit, it's not like it's in the news all the time) ill-gotten gains? Now maybe if it were Enron you might want to start looking for a new job as soon as you start seeing your company sinking on the news every day.. but this is different, and even in that case you shouldn't be looked down upon for it... I think if I were an employer and someone from Enron were applying with me before the company collapsed i'd understand and not hold that against them.
-matt
Difference here... The bachelors in Fight Club didn't have to explain to their kids why they couldn't eat dinner that night. Your family can't live off of your morals. There are cases where you're going to have to just bite your lip and grind it out. That's a pretty serious situation you mention at the end of your post.. and to answer, if I found out my company was doing business selling 12 year old boys and girls into the sex trade, I wouldn't just up and quit my job that day -- I'd start looking for a new one and continue to grind it out until I found a new one. I would not, however, sacrafice the well being of myself and my family for pride. If it were just me and I were a 23 y/o bachelor, sure, why not, I can suck it up and dine on fine top ramen and rice and water until I find a new gig, but sometimes other people depend on you, and it's selfish to push the shitty situation you're willing to live in onto them as well.
-matt
Yeah, but how would that apply if i'm SCO's in-house tech, or network admin, or some such job as that. I can see your point, I think Darl better make enough to live comfortably off of this, because i'm sure it'll be damned hard for him to find a job once SCO crumbles under his fist, but the Sysadmin/Netadmin/Techs had nothing to do with Darl's scandelous steering at the helm. So long as you're not Darl, a board member, or someone in the Law dept, you should be fine.
Unethical behavior is unethical, regardless of how the unethically obtained money is spent. A company hires an unethical person at their own risk. Hiring is as much about risk management as it is in finding the most skillful person, and a person with a proven track record of questionable ethics is, for a legitimate enterprise, a liability, and will generally be passed over for one who either has a proven track record of behaving ethically, or at the very least, a record clean of questionable behavior and associations.
Again, here I am, the sysadmin for SCO. I do my day to day operations, and come up with some major time saving/money saving tactics, saving the company a million dollars a year. I'm not in the courtroom, I'm not the devil on Darl's shoulder telling him "Psst, ok, now sue these guys!". I'm a normal guy doing my job and doing it VERY well, saving my company (immoral it may be) a million dollars a year, would you still pass me by for a less qualified applicant who hasn't designed and implimented systems and policies that had saved his employer wheelbarrows of cash because I worked for SCO/Enron/Worldcomm?
SCO employees who left a year ago fall into one category (no reason to suspect their ethics or judgement). Those who remain, knowing full well what their employer is doing (or remaining willfully ignorant), fall into the other (their ethics, judgement, and quite possibly their intelligence are open to question). A competent person hiring for a legitimate company will not chose such a person over another candidate not so tainted.
Ok, so you, as an employer, would not see this person as totally loyal and willing to stick by and make sure your systems are up and running to the best of their ability through thick and thin? Shit if I didn't quit SCO for a 'better job' then you can feel pretty confident i'll NEVER leave your company. Either way, I agree with people earlier in the thread, a job with SCO is better than no job at all, you get to do all sorts of neat things when you're employed, like pay rent, and eat. I'm sure most employers SHOULD understand this.
Does that mean perfectly competent, ethical people who somehow kept their head in the sand these last ten months may get passed over? You bet. But it is the responsibility of those hiring to look out for the best interests of their firms, not to insure that every last, unfortunatel ex-SCO employee get the benefit of a tremendous and well-justified doubt.
Let's go back to my previous comment for this... Why again, would hiring a kickass forward thinking ex-SCO sysadmin who saved his previous company a million a year, was never late, always had the best interest of the company in mind, was loyal like a dog, and really -really- knows his shit, not be in the "best interests of their firms"
-matt
Oooooooh, good call! And i've been contemplating buying a new battery for my '99 lombard powerbook... I hadn't even THOUGHT of getting paid to get a new battery through suing! ;)
-matt
But then I should also point out that Half-Life's multiplayer options weren't very robust at its release.
Good call. I'm not a big gamer, but Half-Life's single player surprised the hell outta me, TFC was cool when it came out, but that was a while after...
I never really got into the XBox and never saw the validity in the hype for Halo until recently. My neighbors have rooms with a shared wall, they put their TVs on the shared wall and connected the XBox, we usually play 4 player team and non-team games of Halo, after a night or two of playing, I was hooked. We play all the time. Recently I was stoked to get to borrow an XBox for a few weeks, plugged in Halo, and I was SORELY disappointed with the single play experience... I was bored after about 15 minutes. Hopefully Halo2 will not have this problem.
-matt
I couldn't agree more. Can I back it up? Yeah, I think I can. Wasn't the Kingpin in the Daredevil comics white? Then what's up with Michael Clarke Duncan playing him in the movie? I think it has something to do with the fact that not even Marlon Brando could have pulled off that role as well as Michael did.
As for all of the Anti-Will Smith people, I think he did a fantastic job in Ali and Enemy of the State. But the main intention behind this post was to point out, race doesn't matter in a movie so long as you get the point across and find the best actor for the job.
-matt