The police did ask how we came across the images, because that was the most obvious way the case might have been thrown out.
Your technician came across it by unethically examining your customer's files. End of statement. He had no business doing anything but what the customer contracted you to do.
That's probably why you never heard anything about it again (either that, or they didn't need your testimony because they acquired other evidence.)
No, I'd say it's more like that mechanic finds the briefcase and opens it. Finding a briefcase is no big deal. Finding a folder full of files is no big deal. Opening either one and examining the contents... now that is a big deal. A lot of this has to do with the implicit trust we place in other people. Sometimes that trust is misplaced.
What makes it worse is that the people who installed the drive are being made out to be the bad guys here, it said they looked for files they could use to test the drive, they weren't randomly looking through his pictures, they most likely just searched for any media files so they could try burn them, saw child porn and reported it, like any responsible person would do.
Responsible, my ass. If what those technicians did wasn't criminal, it should be and it was at best unprofessional.
It is possible to be a criminal and a victim simultaneously. Actually, if you knew anything about the American Justice System, you'd know that merely being accused of a crime makes you a victim, because the results of an accusation are punitive, regardless of whether you committed any wrongdoing. You don't want to be in the system, you really don't: it's a surreal alternate universe where the normal rules simply do not apply. I've never been there myself, but I have enough lawyers in my family to have a pretty good idea what goes on. It's terrifying to an ordinary citizen, disruptive and costly.
Regarding TFA, I'll accept that the techs needed to test his burner, that's only what a good technician should do. However, they didn't need to use his personal picture files, didn't have to view them, and could have just used some files from the \Windows folder and verified the burn. There was also no reason to search his drive for anything! Period! End-of-the-goddamn-statement.
Regardless of what criminal acts this man may have performed, the fact is that the techs were unethical and untrustworthy, and I'd sure never take my computer there. I mean, at what point did they become part of law enforcement? Hell, they should have been fired, and be up on charges too (but they won't be, because government likes technical types that snoop around and snitch on people.) Over the years, my job has required access to confidential information from a number of multi-billion-dollar corporations, as well as private citizens. Never once did I go snooping around just to see what I could find, because it's not my goddamn business. Furthermore, if you want people to trust you, you just don't do things like that. What those techs is highly unprofessional, and once word of this gets out I have no doubt that shop will be out of business in a hurry: "Oh, you mean your technicians will search my computer for any sign of illicit activities? Yeah, right." What a bunch of dumb fucks. If there was every a reason for Joe Sixpack to learn how to fix his own machine, this is it.
Plus which, having worked as a service tech, I can tell you this: you're right, they weren't randomly looking through his pictures. They were systematically searching his drive looking for anything entertaining. Just his bad luck that they found kiddie porn, and the only reason it got reported was probably because their supervisor was looking over their shoulder enjoying the show right along with them! Otherwise they'd just have made copies for their own consumption and nobody would have been the wiser.
On the other hand, blurring the distinction between science and religion is one of the basic tools of the anti-science crowd. Of course, that only works on minds that are already blurry. People that have a handle on what science is tend to automatically reject such attempts on grounds of utter ridiculousness. What's interesting about that is there's no great intelligence required: the fundamental principles of science and scientific method are open and easily understandable by anyone. Yet many people can't be bothered. It's the great tragedy of our times (well, one of them anyway.)
Martian scientists believe that their neighboring planet, known as 'Irth' may have had glaciers and polar ice caps in its recent past. These ara believed to have disappeared during the recent geological era known as SUV.
Some Martian scientists disagree. They believe the proper interpretation of the inhabitants own description of their final days to be the symbols "GW". There are two camps, one of which considers this "GW" to represent the phrase "Global Warming", which would tend to agree with the physical evidence. The other group has some indication that these symbols refer to a mythical figure known colloquially as "GW Bush".
Whether this "GW Bush" bears any relationship to "Global Warming" is not yet clear.
Well, I don't know how it is down under, but when someone applies for, say, a bus driver job, or some other position where there's the potential to hurt or otherwise screw over a lot of people... we try to weed out the obvious bad apples. I mean, you wouldn't want a child molester driving a school bus, now would you. Seems to me that if you want to run a major corporation, you should have to prove, beyond any reasonable doubt, that you aren't a complete asshole and/or moron. And you should be required to go up for re-certification every year... fail, and you go back to driving that bus.
More likely they've had standards support all along, and just have a registry entry they could change to enable real standards mode. Kinda like how NT Workstation could be turned into a pretty close approximation of NT Server by flipping a couple of bits.
Hitler tried to be the world's policeman; so why are you complaining about his rule?
This remark is beyond bizarre. Even you America-haters out there should recognize that.
What makes American steerage of events superior to Nazi rule?
Just to make a start, I don't recall America herding millions off in railway cars to be exterminated. Yes, we did intern a good number of Americans who happened to be Japanese during World War II, because of an unspecified threat of sabotage (so it was said). We did not, however, murder them. I also don't recall us ever attempting to build an Empire along classical lines, such as the Romans, Persians, Spanish, British, French and Germans did. If you don't know what an Empire is, go look it up. It probably doesn't mean what you think it means. It also means a lot of death and destruction.
Because we're not quite as blatant in our self-serving evil?
In one swift stroke you eliminated all the good that America has done, and is doing, over the past century or so. You may wish to deny that America has ever done anything worthwhile (if you are an American, your hatred of your own country tells me you should simply go somewhere else, and if you're not, you're just ignorant) but that's an incredible denial of reality. The quantity of foreign aid alone that the U.S. has given away belies your words. Unless you consider all the exploding munitions, torture and death that Hitler "gave away" to be some kind of foreign aid.
I... forget it. The GP has a much better grasp of world history than you do, I'm sorry to say. You may wish to believe that war and international politics work differently today, in some fundamental way. They don't, because people work in exactly the same way they always have. Bigger weapons, bigger assholes, but other than that nothing much has changed since the Romans were top dog
Well, if the percentage of the Australian population that doesn't know what they're doing is anything comparable to the percentage of the U.S. population that doesn't know what they're doing, I'm sure Telstra is very profitable.
Not good enough. Someone else might figure out how to make your paper and undercut you. You need to bribe^H^H^H^H^Hcontribute to the proper Congresspersons so that it is written into law that only your paper may be used: all others need not apply. Even better, make it so that any election where your paper is not used is automatically declared null-and-void.
That's how you guarantee yourself a neverending revenue stream.
Well, I have a cell phone, and I just turn the ringer off most of the time. I do like the convenience of making calls from anywhere, but I don't necessarily like sharing that convenience, if you know what I mean.
Landlinewise, I have AT&T/SBC's Callvantage VoIP service... so far I gotta say I've been happy with it. I connected the D-Link box they provided to my house wiring and it works like a charm. Comcastoff had me up to $86/month (!!!) for phone service (started out at $39.95 a few years ago) and they just kept jacking it up: finally I was sitting there one day paying my bills, when I remembered what a coworker had said about his Callvantage setup. Now I pay about $60 for my broadband connection, and $24.95/month for VoIP, and I haven't looked back.
What I found very useful about my Callvantage service is that a. you can configure whitelists on their Web site: only numbers on that list will ring your phone and b. it can automatically forward calls on that list to another line (my cell phone) and send a text message to the cell with the Caller ID info in it. I never bother to give out my cell phone number anymore. Don't need to.
The only other option I have for local service is SBC, and they're no better than Comcast. Matter of fact, last time I moved they billed me $350 for installation plus the regular setup charges... according to them, the tech spent eight hours wiring my house. As it happens, my place was wired back in 1971: he came in, checked for dialtone, and left. What a crock. Of course, not to be outdone, I once had a Comcast technician wire my lines backwards (reversed both the lines and ring and tip!) and just leave bare wires hanging in midair. Old Ma Bell is long gone, I'm afraid. Dead and buried.
Also, as a software developer I still occasionally have to deal with modem-based stuff, so I couldn't go all cellular even if I were so inclined.
They want to cut Medicare, student loans, social security, and education.
Well, you have to look at the bigger picture. Three of those departments that you mention are absolutely rife with fraud and abuses of various sorts. If they actually cleaned up those acts, they would find that the funds they're spending now are way more than they need, and could be spent elsewhere. I don't know so much about student loans (although do not pay them back, in general I don't consider an educated population a waste of tax dollars) but Medicare, Social Security and Education are three of the top government money-sinks in existence. I guess my point is that you don't necessarily need to cut back service levels, if you can just cut back on the fraud and malfeasance going on. It's incredible, the sheer quantity of public money being diverted and stolen by Medicare suppliers and hospitals alone.
Did it ever occur to you that maybe it's past time that someone or something weaken our government? Historically, the time since World War II has seen an exponential growth in our government's power and control of wealth. The unfortunate fact is, any savior is going to have to have a lessening of Federal power as an Administrative priority.
Any practical applications of that? Well, apparently ad servers, serving banners across a variety of servers, can report back on the time it took to generate the page.
Can we please have a more productive example of a practical application?
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The police did ask how we came across the images, because that was the most obvious way the case might have been thrown out.
Your technician came across it by unethically examining your customer's files. End of statement. He had no business doing anything but what the customer contracted you to do.
That's probably why you never heard anything about it again (either that, or they didn't need your testimony because they acquired other evidence.)
No, I'd say it's more like that mechanic finds the briefcase and opens it. Finding a briefcase is no big deal. Finding a folder full of files is no big deal. Opening either one and examining the contents ... now that is a big deal. A lot of this has to do with the implicit trust we place in other people. Sometimes that trust is misplaced.
What makes it worse is that the people who installed the drive are being made out to be the bad guys here, it said they looked for files they could use to test the drive, they weren't randomly looking through his pictures, they most likely just searched for any media files so they could try burn them, saw child porn and reported it, like any responsible person would do.
Responsible, my ass. If what those technicians did wasn't criminal, it should be and it was at best unprofessional.
It is possible to be a criminal and a victim simultaneously. Actually, if you knew anything about the American Justice System, you'd know that merely being accused of a crime makes you a victim, because the results of an accusation are punitive, regardless of whether you committed any wrongdoing. You don't want to be in the system, you really don't: it's a surreal alternate universe where the normal rules simply do not apply. I've never been there myself, but I have enough lawyers in my family to have a pretty good idea what goes on. It's terrifying to an ordinary citizen, disruptive and costly.
Regarding TFA, I'll accept that the techs needed to test his burner, that's only what a good technician should do. However, they didn't need to use his personal picture files, didn't have to view them, and could have just used some files from the \Windows folder and verified the burn. There was also no reason to search his drive for anything! Period! End-of-the-goddamn-statement.
Regardless of what criminal acts this man may have performed, the fact is that the techs were unethical and untrustworthy, and I'd sure never take my computer there. I mean, at what point did they become part of law enforcement? Hell, they should have been fired, and be up on charges too (but they won't be, because government likes technical types that snoop around and snitch on people.) Over the years, my job has required access to confidential information from a number of multi-billion-dollar corporations, as well as private citizens. Never once did I go snooping around just to see what I could find, because it's not my goddamn business. Furthermore, if you want people to trust you, you just don't do things like that. What those techs is highly unprofessional, and once word of this gets out I have no doubt that shop will be out of business in a hurry: "Oh, you mean your technicians will search my computer for any sign of illicit activities? Yeah, right." What a bunch of dumb fucks. If there was every a reason for Joe Sixpack to learn how to fix his own machine, this is it.
Plus which, having worked as a service tech, I can tell you this: you're right, they weren't randomly looking through his pictures. They were systematically searching his drive looking for anything entertaining. Just his bad luck that they found kiddie porn, and the only reason it got reported was probably because their supervisor was looking over their shoulder enjoying the show right along with them! Otherwise they'd just have made copies for their own consumption and nobody would have been the wiser.
And the pornographic images of children that were on his hard drive will turn out to just be.........
... files that were put there by somebody who doesn't like him that cracked his wireless router's encryption.
...
Just sayin'
Or better yet ... learn how to fix your computer yourself. Or just keep all your important information on an external hard drive.
Just wait 'til we get real cyborgs, ala "The Six Million Dollar Man". There's a "modified" division for you.
On the other hand, blurring the distinction between science and religion is one of the basic tools of the anti-science crowd. Of course, that only works on minds that are already blurry. People that have a handle on what science is tend to automatically reject such attempts on grounds of utter ridiculousness. What's interesting about that is there's no great intelligence required: the fundamental principles of science and scientific method are open and easily understandable by anyone. Yet many people can't be bothered. It's the great tragedy of our times (well, one of them anyway.)
Martian scientists believe that their neighboring planet, known as 'Irth' may have had glaciers and polar ice caps in its recent past. These ara believed to have disappeared during the recent geological era known as SUV.
Some Martian scientists disagree. They believe the proper interpretation of the inhabitants own description of their final days to be the symbols "GW". There are two camps, one of which considers this "GW" to represent the phrase "Global Warming", which would tend to agree with the physical evidence. The other group has some indication that these symbols refer to a mythical figure known colloquially as "GW Bush".
Whether this "GW Bush" bears any relationship to "Global Warming" is not yet clear.
Well ... they say he's psychic.
Well, I don't know how it is down under, but when someone applies for, say, a bus driver job, or some other position where there's the potential to hurt or otherwise screw over a lot of people ... we try to weed out the obvious bad apples. I mean, you wouldn't want a child molester driving a school bus, now would you. Seems to me that if you want to run a major corporation, you should have to prove, beyond any reasonable doubt, that you aren't a complete asshole and/or moron. And you should be required to go up for re-certification every year ... fail, and you go back to driving that bus.
Estimates place the glacier at 10,000 -- 100,000 years old.
They really meant "wild-assed guess", but it sounds more scientific to call it an estimate.
More likely they've had standards support all along, and just have a registry entry they could change to enable real standards mode. Kinda like how NT Workstation could be turned into a pretty close approximation of NT Server by flipping a couple of bits.
My god. Is that excess data column actually saying they'll charge a $150AU per GB if you go over?
There's a point where you're going to have to take your Internet back at gunpoint. These guys are chiselers.
Would you rather Kim Jong Il at the helm? Vladimir Putin? Mahmoud Ahmadinejad?
You forgot Hu Jintao, who is probably the mostly likely candidate, I'd say.
Hitler tried to be the world's policeman; so why are you complaining about his rule?
... forget it. The GP has a much better grasp of world history than you do, I'm sorry to say. You may wish to believe that war and international politics work differently today, in some fundamental way. They don't, because people work in exactly the same way they always have. Bigger weapons, bigger assholes, but other than that nothing much has changed since the Romans were top dog
This remark is beyond bizarre. Even you America-haters out there should recognize that.
What makes American steerage of events superior to Nazi rule?
Just to make a start, I don't recall America herding millions off in railway cars to be exterminated. Yes, we did intern a good number of Americans who happened to be Japanese during World War II, because of an unspecified threat of sabotage (so it was said). We did not, however, murder them. I also don't recall us ever attempting to build an Empire along classical lines, such as the Romans, Persians, Spanish, British, French and Germans did. If you don't know what an Empire is, go look it up. It probably doesn't mean what you think it means. It also means a lot of death and destruction.
Because we're not quite as blatant in our self-serving evil?
In one swift stroke you eliminated all the good that America has done, and is doing, over the past century or so. You may wish to deny that America has ever done anything worthwhile (if you are an American, your hatred of your own country tells me you should simply go somewhere else, and if you're not, you're just ignorant) but that's an incredible denial of reality. The quantity of foreign aid alone that the U.S. has given away belies your words. Unless you consider all the exploding munitions, torture and death that Hitler "gave away" to be some kind of foreign aid.
I
Well, if the percentage of the Australian population that doesn't know what they're doing is anything comparable to the percentage of the U.S. population that doesn't know what they're doing, I'm sure Telstra is very profitable.
Not good enough. Someone else might figure out how to make your paper and undercut you. You need to bribe^H^H^H^H^Hcontribute to the proper Congresspersons so that it is written into law that only your paper may be used: all others need not apply. Even better, make it so that any election where your paper is not used is automatically declared null-and-void.
That's how you guarantee yourself a neverending revenue stream.
A high ratio of educated users to ... what, exactly? Orangutans? Baboons? Politicians?
Why is this a troll? Diebold is owned and operated by dicks.
Well, I have a cell phone, and I just turn the ringer off most of the time. I do like the convenience of making calls from anywhere, but I don't necessarily like sharing that convenience, if you know what I mean.
... so far I gotta say I've been happy with it. I connected the D-Link box they provided to my house wiring and it works like a charm. Comcastoff had me up to $86/month (!!!) for phone service (started out at $39.95 a few years ago) and they just kept jacking it up: finally I was sitting there one day paying my bills, when I remembered what a coworker had said about his Callvantage setup. Now I pay about $60 for my broadband connection, and $24.95/month for VoIP, and I haven't looked back.
... according to them, the tech spent eight hours wiring my house. As it happens, my place was wired back in 1971: he came in, checked for dialtone, and left. What a crock. Of course, not to be outdone, I once had a Comcast technician wire my lines backwards (reversed both the lines and ring and tip!) and just leave bare wires hanging in midair. Old Ma Bell is long gone, I'm afraid. Dead and buried.
Landlinewise, I have AT&T/SBC's Callvantage VoIP service
What I found very useful about my Callvantage service is that a. you can configure whitelists on their Web site: only numbers on that list will ring your phone and b. it can automatically forward calls on that list to another line (my cell phone) and send a text message to the cell with the Caller ID info in it. I never bother to give out my cell phone number anymore. Don't need to.
The only other option I have for local service is SBC, and they're no better than Comcast. Matter of fact, last time I moved they billed me $350 for installation plus the regular setup charges
Also, as a software developer I still occasionally have to deal with modem-based stuff, so I couldn't go all cellular even if I were so inclined.
Oh, okay. That's not so bad then.
They also charge for backhaul, so your 200mb plan (for $29.95 / month for 24 months) includes all traffic in both directions.
Jesus H. Christ! Just 200 megabytes a month? Sounds like you guys would welcome Comcast or Verizon.
They want to cut Medicare, student loans, social security, and education.
Well, you have to look at the bigger picture. Three of those departments that you mention are absolutely rife with fraud and abuses of various sorts. If they actually cleaned up those acts, they would find that the funds they're spending now are way more than they need, and could be spent elsewhere. I don't know so much about student loans (although do not pay them back, in general I don't consider an educated population a waste of tax dollars) but Medicare, Social Security and Education are three of the top government money-sinks in existence. I guess my point is that you don't necessarily need to cut back service levels, if you can just cut back on the fraud and malfeasance going on. It's incredible, the sheer quantity of public money being diverted and stolen by Medicare suppliers and hospitals alone.
Did it ever occur to you that maybe it's past time that someone or something weaken our government? Historically, the time since World War II has seen an exponential growth in our government's power and control of wealth. The unfortunate fact is, any savior is going to have to have a lessening of Federal power as an Administrative priority.
Any practical applications of that? Well, apparently ad servers, serving banners across a variety of servers, can report back on the time it took to generate the page.
Can we please have a more productive example of a practical application?