Some see CentOS as the "gateway drug" that eventually brings more users to RHEL. That's certainly been the case for us, only we had a third-party pusher in the guise of an RDBMS vendor.
We've used CentOS on our app servers for a while now and were going to use it on our DB servers as well until we called $DB_VENDOR asking about CentOS support. They acknowledged that it's functionally identical to RHEL, but that really didn't matter: they'd tested on RHEL, Suse, and Ubuntu, so that's what they support. We have quite a lot invested in CentOS expertise already, so RHEL it had to be. After all, if your production DB is down you can't have tech support hanging up on you when they find out you're on an "unsupported" distro, right?
So even though there are no foreseeable Linux problems we couldn't solve on our own, we'll be running fully supported RHEL 5 on our DB servers. Hell, even with the maxicare RHEL package our support costs are about a tenth what they were for $PROPRIETARY_PLATFORM.
But RHEL will only be on the production DB servers. Everything else will continue to be CentOS.
There are *lots* of places further south in Canada than Cape Breton! A launch from Cape Breton goes over the ocean. A rocket flying east from southern Ontario goes over some very densely populated areas, many of them in a foreign country that seems to have an issue with other countries even having missiles, let alone firing them into their airspace. Should a Canadian space program need America's permission every time they do a launch? Even worse than the problem of America's government is the problem of America's lawyers, who would wet themselves like an overexcited terrier if a hunk of metal fell off a spaceship and landed on a school somewhere.
For a diagnosis of APD, though, there needs to be (snip) For a diagnosis of APD there needs to be an evaluation by a psychiatric professional whose knowledge of the subject goes beyond what a Slashdotter can copy-and-paste from Wikipedia.
Speaking of Wikipedia, look up clinomorphism for a brief introduction to this thread's favorite hobby.
"Failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors" isn't inherently sociopathic, particularly when the unlawfulness surrounds a specific activity or set of activities. A prostitute isn't a sociopath even if you can bust her a dozen times a night for loitering, solicitation, prostitution, trespassing, cruising, and whatever else an irate cop feels like pressing charges for. But if she's abused and abandoned her children, cut johns who refused to pay her after-the-fact upcharges, shoplifted, habitually borrowed money without repaying, smeared dog shit on her tattletale neighbor's front door, that's the pattern of criminal behavior this criterion has in mind.
The second criterion you cite doesn't hold either: A trained and skillful driver who is soberly and attentively pushing his well-maintained sports car through traffic is not demonstrating sociopathic behavior. Tailgating somebody without passing them, or passing them then slamming on brakes, or forcing them off the road, or pulling up next to them and just staring at them for a few miles would be far more indicative of an antisocial personality than squeezing past them in the breakdown lane.
Your third criterion fails because the only person he's trying to deceive is the police officer trying to catch him (his efforts to avoid detection show deliberation and forethought, atypical of the APD personality). Your fourth criterion fails because there is no evidence that he's hurt somebody in a way to show remorse for!
I will say, with the same amount of diagnostic authority you have, that he has demonstrated an unhealthy degree of obsession with his goal of crossing the country by car in thirty-four hours. Just like Steve Fossett showed an unhealthy obsession with circling the globe in a balloon.
Oh, and your firing-a-gun-down-a-crowded-street analogy is bogus: It equates giving somebody reason to think they are being shot at with giving them reason to think they are being overtaken by a fast car.
Hear, hear! I hope they jail the SOB. These people aren't rebels or pioneers, they're dangerous sociopaths. They shouldn't be on the roads.
Since when does driving real fast qualify as sociopathy? And judging from the incredibly lengths he went to to defy authority while doing what he enjoys, yes, I'd say that at least in this domain he's very much a rebel.
I gotta quit reading motorcycle blogs just before reading Slashdot. All I could think was you had a satellite that leaked oil and every time it was in Earth's shadow the electrics would fail. I guess it really was like a 1960s Triumph -- you get it started once and take the hell off, and hope to God it stays running for the whole trip.
A useful eyewitness report over at Daily Kos says basically the guy that was being a serious PITA. It also corrects me on a couple of points on when the police became involved but makes clear that this kid was being a self-centered, disruptive jerk.
A local paper has some updates, including notes from the police about how markedly different the student's behavior was when there was or wasn't a camera pointing at him, also that one of the videos circulating on YouTube was shot with the student's own camera.
Watch the whole video -- not just the one that starts with "are you a member of a secret society?" and ends with an arrest. Watch the one that starts at the beggining. The guy came in, already being followed by police and disrupted the hell out of a meeting. He made a great effort to become the center of attention long before he got to the mic and long after his privilege to do so ran out. Hell, it looks from here like the police were actually nice enough to let him ask his question, which he parleyed into a two-minute rant about nobody cares but him.
He disturbed the peace and resisted arrest. And yes, disturbing the peace is an arrestable offense nearly anywhere. When the officers very calmly and professionally took him by the arm, he began to fling himself about while shouting and continuing to disturb the peace, and was finally dragged down as he continued to wrestle violently.
Here's where it gets a little tough-love: When you arrest someone you put them in handcuffs. When someone's struggling violently while you're putting them in handcuffs, well, you'd be amazed how many people will keep fighting until they break their own wrist or dislocate their shoulder. And if they keep getting their hands free, like this guy, what will they have in their hands next? A knife? A gun? This is a guy struggling violently against arrest, remember. Just because he's wearing a polo shirt instead of a hoodie doesn't make him harmless. So you, the arresting officer try a number of things, like telling them to stop resisting, like immobilizing them with judo-style holds, like letting the sheer weight of a pile of officers hold him face down. And when none of that works, and all of that was tried, you make him stop struggling. The old school of policing is a swift poke to the solar plexus with your truncheon, since somewhat deprecated. Slightly newer school is mace or pepper spray, but with sitting nearby, the chance of by-stander injury is too great. The Taser was the right way to go.
Anyone who wants to pout about that this guy has a right to be heard, well, not exactly. You may have a right to speak, but you have no right to force me to listen by grabbing a microphone and disrupting the orderly proceedings of my meeting. That very same Amendment grants the rest of us the right to assemble peaceably.
The family was not, actually, detained. According to the article 'Joe' only attempted to prevent the particular man from 'leaving the parking lot'. There was no indication the store employees were attempting to prevent the family from leaving; if the man in question had not been in the car, there would not have been an issue, save their personal choice.
Here's a cut 'n' paste from the article:
I was speaking to my father this morning about what unfolded yesterday, and he told me something that I was not aware of until this point. While I was speaking to Joe Atha from the back seat of the car, Santura stood in front of my father's vehicle with his hands out to the side as a way of preventing him from driving forward. My father would not have been able to drive forward because Santura stood in the way, and he would not have been able to drive backwards because the open door would have hit Joe who was leaning into the car. The family was in the car, the car was blocked from leaving, therefore the family was blocked from leaving. You think maybe they should have abandoned the car and fled on foot?
Likewise, the man was not assaulted, because he had no expectation of harm coming to him.
I disagree, but I don't think either of us knows enough to say. I don't think anyone actually put a hand on him until the arrest, though.
Contrary to popular opinion, there has to be substantive or lasting impact for 'emotional damage' to suffice - simply because a dollar amount has to be assigned. The man's own words say, "I regret putting them through a little scare". It's hard to claim that is a substantive damage.
All true, but we could call "little" ironic understatement and we're back to square one.
I could be totally wrong - and I welcome anyone whose taken a crim pro or civ pro class to correct me - but I suspect that he'd have a hard time substantiating any of those claims as having caused him harm.
There's a chance that at least two people who have taken those classes will be hashing this out in front of a third.
All I'm sure of at this point is that Best Buy and the arresting officer were in error. The rest is just a quibble over the particulars. IMO TFA indicates the family was prevented from leaving. Whether or what kind of criminal act this is is beyond my poor little IANAL brain.
[B]ecause the family was never the focus of the investigation, and they were never materially detained except through their own cooperation, they don't have a case. The family were, in fact, detained, though not by the police. According to the father (who was driving the car), one store employee was standing in front of the car, preventing it from moving forward, while another stood between the open door and the frame, preventing it from moving backward. I ain't passed the bar neither, but that sounds like they were detained against their will.
On top of that, TFA reports they were emotionally shaken to the point of tears.
[T]he civil suit against the corporation is tougher, because he has to show that he suffered a material harm. I think it would be considerably easier, actually. He was assaulted, physically detained, verbally abused, and the store employees tried to take his property from him. And they're the ones who unlawfully detained the family.
A merchant may detain a person for a reasonable time for the purpose of conducting an investigation in a reasonable manner whenever the merchant has probable cause...
Ignoring the differences in California and Ohio statutes, probable cause in a shoplifting case requires a good deal more than "he wouldn't show me a receipt." By and large, in order to detain someone on suspicion of shoplifting you need to see them:
take merchandise,
conceal it, and
leave the store without paying for it.
And you have to keep them under continual observation the whole time.
As you mentioned, Mr. Righi's refusal to suck corporate cock is not probable cause.
Having read TFA, it looks to me like the security guard and store manager have unlawfully detained not just Mr. Righi, but his entire family: By blocking the car from moving, the manager and guard trapped his father and father's wife, his brother and two sisters. That's five crimes -- possibly felonies -- committed by the store, on top of whatever crimes they committed against their customer.
If Mr. Righi and his family decide to pursue this, I think the perpetrators and their employers will be begging for the chance to apologize and settle.
How do you measure avoided data leaks that would of cost millions? This is a fundamental estimation problem in risk management. For every type of breach, you calculate the cost of the breach and multiply it by the odds of a breach. An event that would do a million dollars in damage which, in a given year, has a one-in-twenty chance of occurring has an annual risk cost of fifty thousand dollars.
Data leaks are a small (but significant) part of a much larger overall problem: Disk crashes, power glitches and simple errors in data entry are all possible and can result in everything from minor inconvenience to outright destruction.
Determining probabilities and costs is sometimes easy, sometimes a dark art. The odds of a disk failing is pretty easy to learn, and the cost of the failure easy to compute. The odds of someone finding and exploiting a security flaw in your application and how much damage it can result in is trickier but not impossible.
Corporate IT, when done right, is an exercise in keeping bad things that might happen from happening, and bad things that will happen from doing damage.
Re:Let me fix that for you...
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(although Linux has mostly created new markets rather than occupying the space where Unix used to live). Linux's original success was from commoditizing Unix -- and putting it on commodity hardware. That's Linux's early commercial relevance: It nibbled away at Unix from the low end and established itself as the Unix of choice on a hardware platform that was getting faster and more powerful at an astonishing rate. Thanks to easy source-level portability, a Unix shop could see the economic sense in doing their initial development on Linux, then porting to whatever flavor of Unix they supported -- but their customers were suddenly asking for a Linux port themselves.
During the dot-com boom, Linux started doing serious damage to Unix -- instead of a single midrange Unix box, it was cheaper and more flexible to use twenty Linux machines and a load balancer. I suppose this is about when Linux started "creating new markets," but its early success is from replacing Unix in its existing problem domains. Creating new markets was a mostly from extending into domains where Unix was the right technology, but had not been affordable.
As long as we're throwing around generalizations, let me offer one: there is a strong inverse correlation between social skills and inclination towards the immersive technology environment that IT work tends to offer. More simply, people who grow up interacting with computers instead of other people learn an awful lot about computers and very little about people. When they do socialize, they socialize best with people with common interests -- other socially awkward computer experts.
I keep saying "they", but I mean "we", because I'm one of them. We're not very mature. We're socially inept outside of our specialized domain. But that's okay, because we're in the IT shop surrounded by people in our specialized domain, isolated from everybody else, stuck in a positive feedback loop with mostly guys.
My advice to any woman who's going to spend time around IT guys is: treat them like fifteen year old boys. Seriously -- it's tenth grade, and your class is on a field trip and you're stuck in a rented van with seven tenth grade boys. We can go back and forth all day about how they should behave, about how things should be, but that's how it actually is.
You can probably come up with a pretty good coping strategy based on this, but since you're immersing yourself in a foreign culture, knowing a little about the locals and their quaint little folkways is probably your best bet. Here some basic pointers, take 'em or leave 'em:
Don't try to be liked. You'll come across as a doormat. The way to be liked is to know your shit.
If somebody's being a butthead, call him a butthead. Actually say "butthead" out loud, preferably with a little snort.
Don't be insulted if somebody calls you a butthead. In fact, be flattered. Unless a guy is actually starting a fight, he won't talk to you that way unless he actually feels comfortable around you -- sees you as a peer, in other words. The best response to a dig is "Yeah, yeah, fuck you."
If two guys in earshot are talking sexist, or just being loud and disruptive, yell "Hey, stop being assholes" in their direction.
Guys get really really touchy about their abilities and think unsolicited advice is a slam on them personally--and for whatever reason it's even more hurtful coming from a woman. Never offer unsolicited technical advice. Wait for a cue. Preface the advice with "yeah, the same thing happened to me last week. Took me forever to figure out."
Guys hardly ever understand subtle hints or pick up on emotional cues. If something's bugging you, for fuck's sake say it, because they'll never figure it out on their own.
If you want something, say so. This includes things like second monitors, or raises.
You gotta be a little thick-skinned. If you're having a thin-skinned day, use your work as an excuse to socially withdraw. If someone continues to annoy you, "not right now" is usually all you need to say.
A great way to get rid of somebody who's annoying you is to ask them a technical question they're going to have to look up the answer to, or better yet do some sort of experiment.
It's a different culture, yes. Pretend you've moved to France or something. You can complain all day about how fucked up the French are, or you can get the hang of it and really have a lot of fun.
Needless to say, not all shops are like this. Some of them are courteous, enlightened, civilized places to work. If you find one, or currently work in one, congratulations, because by "some" I actually mean "probably three in the whole wide world."
Only Microsoft and McAfee refused to answer. If they refused to answer, I wonder if that means they've received National Security Letters on the matter. After all, the first rule of National Security Letters is you do not talk about National Security Letters. Seriously. If you receive one you go to jail for discussing its contents.
I mean, your Windows computer with McAfee AV talks to Microsoft and McAfee every day, yes? If either company can uniquely identify your computer ( *cough* registration key *cough*), what's to stop them from putting together a special "update" just for you?
Maybe their refusal to answer is simply a refusal to lie.
Pseudonymity does not guarantee anonymity, as you have so clevery demonstrated. I have taken no special measures to disguise my identity beyond basing my username on a nickname I acquired almost twenty years ago. Using a nickname here, rather than my real name, puts me in the same boat as over a million Slashdot users.
"theonetruekeebler" can always be traced back to the same person, at least in principle. "Anonymous Coward", on the other hand, has no such nonrepudiation associated with it.
Well done, and I commend your ability to Google, as well as your willingness to do this not once, but twice. Outing people in a forum where pseudonyms are the norm is particularly ironic when done from the bunker of an anonymous account. Whether it's funny, threatening or merely puerile should remain an exercise for the reader.
The best part, the very best part, is where you quote a piece in my journal called "The Anonymous Coward Reply Pledge," which is about not engaging you in a conversation. A rather cleverly crafted troll, perhaps? Hoping to gloat over my lack of integrity in case I replied? I've replied to ACs before, you know. Usually it's out of forgetfulness, but right now I'm doing because I know the difference between an immutable law of nature and a guideline for distinguishing between someone being anonymous for a legitimate reason, and the run-of-the-mill pigfucker.
Since you see fit to out people, might I inquire as to who you actually are? Assuming of course you're okay with which end of the legitimate vs. pigfucker continuum you'll come out on.
It sounds like the problem is a misallocation of funding, not underfunding.
If you can power X equipment, then why bother to purchase X+Y equipment before you purchase more power capacity first?
TFA says they haven't just exceeded the power capacity of their data center: They're exceeding the power capacity of the grid. The NSA needs to upgrade three entire substations to stay afloat through 2012, and they're considering moving major portions of their center to Tennessee, where, I suspect, they intend to use redundant pairs of entire TVA lakes and their power supply -- and maybe even as their cooling system.
The problem biting the NSA is one that's bit countless companies, mine included: You can pack far more computing power into the same floor space than was ever thought possible.
And they ain't running itty bitty machines, either. One of the NSA's major computational platform is the DEC Alpha. They have thousands of them -- quite a few are probably big-dog GS1280 AlphaServers, stunningly potent number-crunchers that presently max out at 128 processors and 512GB memory. They're quite demanding in terms of power and cooling: My company's five modestly configured AlphaServers consume twenty thousand dollars in power per month and can dump up to 250,000 BTU/hour in heat. We've seriously considered moving to Opteron-based servers, mostly for what we'd save on electricity. We could pull it off because we're just running databases. The NSA, though, has untold petabytes of existing data to migrate, and incredible sums invested in signal processing and cataloging software. They may not have the luxury of a more power-efficient platform.
Imagine what would happen if there was universal, unencumbered network access. The price of CDs would collapse and the TERRORISTS would win. Or would they lose?
I know you're being kinda silly, but:
They'd lose. A black market can only succeed when the the legitimate item is difficult to obtain, typically either costly or illegal. But in this case the black market must also compete with file sharing, where the price of music is effectively zero. So I suspect that in first-world countries where there's thing like the Internet, the black market for CDs only exists in economically depressed areas. Making it impossible to share music online, and the black market for CDs comes into full swing in countries that have lots of disposable income. And organized crime and terrorists have a much better chance of winning because now they're even better funded.
So I'm going to say with a straight face that if you successfully eliminate file sharing, then the terrorists will win. It will be just them and the corporations, with the rest of us in the middle.
Incidentally, saying that black market music bankrolls organized crime is a duplicitous bit of circular reasoning. If you and a few friends start counterfeiting CDs and distributing them for sale through channels, that is inherently organized crime, and you're being "bankrolled" because that's your primary line of business. You don't have to carry guns, sell cocaine and get nicknames like "Vinnie the Schmooze."
Alas, a full description of the study's methodology is beyond my fifteen-years-gone recollections, and seemed rather excessive for a casual aside at the end of a Slashdot posting. For the sake of brevity I oversimplified: The study was conducted by a large university against its own undergraduate student body. Respondents weren'were asked for permission to obtain their grades through the registrar's office. Marijuana was not the only drug asked about. Alcohol was included. Usage breakdowns were done by gender, major, grades, honors placement, and probably other things. Beyond the marijuana-GPA thing, I remember little else of the results -- except that Poli-Sci majors drank a lot, and hard-science majors were rather straightlaced.
One other thing: Looking back more carefully, I truthfully have no idea who funded it. I think my mental image of it has grown over the years. At the time, though, I was floored that all the "The Truth About Marijuana" literature I was being force-fed ignored the other side of the story. I remember an anti-drug class I was forced to take, and its textbook discrediting one report for having too small a sample size, but then crowing to the high heavens about another study (long since discredited, BTW) with fewer than half as many participants. Granted, there are things about standard deviations and confidence levels that I still don't understand, but it was an important lesson to me about trusting numbers from somebody trying to sell you something, especially if they're selling an ideology or political point of view.
You know, there's about half a hundred reasons the War on Some Drugs is lost -- and half a hundred more why it's still being funded. But the biggest reason, it seems, is the "Drugs is drugs" mentality that piles marijuana in with hard drugs like heroin and crack cocaine.
The war against marijuana is a war against a whole lot of people: NIDA says that in 2004, 14.6 million Americans 12 and over had used marijuana in the last month. Those are government numbers, and while I suspect them of lying, I don't know if they're aiming high to make the "problem" seem worse or aiming low to hide the fact that if so many people use pot shouldn't this "epidemic" be damaging the country in ways you'd notice? Aside from the ones about masked men in battle armor executing no-knock warrants on somebody whose vindictive neighbor "thought he smelled something?" At any rate, 14.6 million out of 245 million Americans twelve or over means just under six percent of everybody smokes up at least once a month.
And 83 million have used it at least once -- a third of everybody over twelve. I've heard numbers lower than that from the government and numbers higher than that from pro-marijuana groups. If you also cut out the over-65 crowd, well golly-gee, over half of everybody has smoked dope.
Looks to me like the War on Some Drugs is a war waged on the majority of Americans. And I have a sinking feeling that the most common (and practical) advice any parent gives his kids about drugs anymore is "Stay away from the hard stuff, and don't drive drunk, but if you smoke pot, please don't get caught."
(Just a little aside: One of my favorite suppressed studies -- one that's funded but never officially published because the results conflict with the politically necessary results -- was a two question survey of college students. The first question was "What's your GPA?" The second was "Do you smoke pot?" Turns out that the pot smokers had a higher GPA than the non pot smokers. Now if I could just convince my boss I'd code better with a plate of "special" brownies next to me...)
They're asking you, point blank, to commit a crime on their behalf. Their controller, that is to say, their chief financial administrator, the guy who's supposed to keep the books straight and honest, is asking you to participate in a scam to conceal a debt legally due to one of your vendors. So I want you to keep this question in mind:
What else are they doing that's illegal?
I'm not kidding here. If they're willing, as a company, to do something illegal, then this is either the tip of the iceburg or the top of the slippery slope. If they get caught at this, you'll be the scapegoat. If they get caught at something else, you'll come to work one day to find a a padlocked door and a nice man from the DA/DOJ/FBI/IRS saying you're unemployed now, but he'd sure appreciate hundreds of uncompensated hours of your cooperation, and what's this they're saying in there about you wanting to install illegal software?
Resign. They are unethical and you don't want their stink on your resume.
Document all they've asked you to do, then hand in your resignation. If they give you an ounce of grief, well, in your shoes I'd wish I had the balls to demand four months' paid severance with full benefits, on top of the glowingest of references, all of which (I dream of reminding them) would cost them a lot less than one visit from the SIIA --- or one shot on the six o'clock of their executives news being led from the building in handcuffs.
2007 called -- All the companies that combined to lose millions of hours and billions of dollars since 1998 from ignoring this argument want the intervening years back.
AIX is a stone-reliable Unix that has at least a decade head-start on Linux. It was built (and continues to be maintained) using old-school techniques like rigorous design and review. While Linux was designed with a flexible enough kernel architecture that it can be hacked into running on nigh-anything, AIX and the hardware it runs on were designed for each other. One never surprises the other. And that hardware is some of the best in the world. If you spring for the support contract, IBM will take very, very good care of you.
Sometimes you find yourself with a bit of IT infrastructure that you are betting the company on. It's hardly a crime to invest in robust, reliable solutions where it really counts.
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We've used CentOS on our app servers for a while now and were going to use it on our DB servers as well until we called $DB_VENDOR asking about CentOS support. They acknowledged that it's functionally identical to RHEL, but that really didn't matter: they'd tested on RHEL, Suse, and Ubuntu, so that's what they support. We have quite a lot invested in CentOS expertise already, so RHEL it had to be. After all, if your production DB is down you can't have tech support hanging up on you when they find out you're on an "unsupported" distro, right?
So even though there are no foreseeable Linux problems we couldn't solve on our own, we'll be running fully supported RHEL 5 on our DB servers. Hell, even with the maxicare RHEL package our support costs are about a tenth what they were for $PROPRIETARY_PLATFORM.
But RHEL will only be on the production DB servers. Everything else will continue to be CentOS.
Speaking of Wikipedia, look up clinomorphism for a brief introduction to this thread's favorite hobby.
"Failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors" isn't inherently sociopathic, particularly when the unlawfulness surrounds a specific activity or set of activities. A prostitute isn't a sociopath even if you can bust her a dozen times a night for loitering, solicitation, prostitution, trespassing, cruising, and whatever else an irate cop feels like pressing charges for. But if she's abused and abandoned her children, cut johns who refused to pay her after-the-fact upcharges, shoplifted, habitually borrowed money without repaying, smeared dog shit on her tattletale neighbor's front door, that's the pattern of criminal behavior this criterion has in mind.
The second criterion you cite doesn't hold either: A trained and skillful driver who is soberly and attentively pushing his well-maintained sports car through traffic is not demonstrating sociopathic behavior. Tailgating somebody without passing them, or passing them then slamming on brakes, or forcing them off the road, or pulling up next to them and just staring at them for a few miles would be far more indicative of an antisocial personality than squeezing past them in the breakdown lane.
Your third criterion fails because the only person he's trying to deceive is the police officer trying to catch him (his efforts to avoid detection show deliberation and forethought, atypical of the APD personality). Your fourth criterion fails because there is no evidence that he's hurt somebody in a way to show remorse for!
I will say, with the same amount of diagnostic authority you have, that he has demonstrated an unhealthy degree of obsession with his goal of crossing the country by car in thirty-four hours. Just like Steve Fossett showed an unhealthy obsession with circling the globe in a balloon.
Oh, and your firing-a-gun-down-a-crowded-street analogy is bogus: It equates giving somebody reason to think they are being shot at with giving them reason to think they are being overtaken by a fast car.
Hear, hear! I hope they jail the SOB. These people aren't rebels or pioneers, they're dangerous sociopaths. They shouldn't be on the roads.
Since when does driving real fast qualify as sociopathy? And judging from the incredibly lengths he went to to defy authority while doing what he enjoys, yes, I'd say that at least in this domain he's very much a rebel.I gotta quit reading motorcycle blogs just before reading Slashdot. All I could think was you had a satellite that leaked oil and every time it was in Earth's shadow the electrics would fail. I guess it really was like a 1960s Triumph -- you get it started once and take the hell off, and hope to God it stays running for the whole trip.
A local paper has some updates, including notes from the police about how markedly different the student's behavior was when there was or wasn't a camera pointing at him, also that one of the videos circulating on YouTube was shot with the student's own camera.
He disturbed the peace and resisted arrest. And yes, disturbing the peace is an arrestable offense nearly anywhere. When the officers very calmly and professionally took him by the arm, he began to fling himself about while shouting and continuing to disturb the peace, and was finally dragged down as he continued to wrestle violently.
Here's where it gets a little tough-love: When you arrest someone you put them in handcuffs. When someone's struggling violently while you're putting them in handcuffs, well, you'd be amazed how many people will keep fighting until they break their own wrist or dislocate their shoulder. And if they keep getting their hands free, like this guy, what will they have in their hands next? A knife? A gun? This is a guy struggling violently against arrest, remember. Just because he's wearing a polo shirt instead of a hoodie doesn't make him harmless. So you, the arresting officer try a number of things, like telling them to stop resisting, like immobilizing them with judo-style holds, like letting the sheer weight of a pile of officers hold him face down. And when none of that works, and all of that was tried, you make him stop struggling. The old school of policing is a swift poke to the solar plexus with your truncheon, since somewhat deprecated. Slightly newer school is mace or pepper spray, but with sitting nearby, the chance of by-stander injury is too great. The Taser was the right way to go.
Anyone who wants to pout about that this guy has a right to be heard, well, not exactly. You may have a right to speak, but you have no right to force me to listen by grabbing a microphone and disrupting the orderly proceedings of my meeting. That very same Amendment grants the rest of us the right to assemble peaceably.
The family was not, actually, detained. According to the article 'Joe' only attempted to prevent the particular man from 'leaving the parking lot'. There was no indication the store employees were attempting to prevent the family from leaving; if the man in question had not been in the car, there would not have been an issue, save their personal choice.
Here's a cut 'n' paste from the article: I was speaking to my father this morning about what unfolded yesterday, and he told me something that I was not aware of until this point. While I was speaking to Joe Atha from the back seat of the car, Santura stood in front of my father's vehicle with his hands out to the side as a way of preventing him from driving forward. My father would not have been able to drive forward because Santura stood in the way, and he would not have been able to drive backwards because the open door would have hit Joe who was leaning into the car. The family was in the car, the car was blocked from leaving, therefore the family was blocked from leaving. You think maybe they should have abandoned the car and fled on foot?Likewise, the man was not assaulted, because he had no expectation of harm coming to him.
I disagree, but I don't think either of us knows enough to say. I don't think anyone actually put a hand on him until the arrest, though.Contrary to popular opinion, there has to be substantive or lasting impact for 'emotional damage' to suffice - simply because a dollar amount has to be assigned. The man's own words say, "I regret putting them through a little scare". It's hard to claim that is a substantive damage.
All true, but we could call "little" ironic understatement and we're back to square one.I could be totally wrong - and I welcome anyone whose taken a crim pro or civ pro class to correct me - but I suspect that he'd have a hard time substantiating any of those claims as having caused him harm.
There's a chance that at least two people who have taken those classes will be hashing this out in front of a third.All I'm sure of at this point is that Best Buy and the arresting officer were in error. The rest is just a quibble over the particulars. IMO TFA indicates the family was prevented from leaving. Whether or what kind of criminal act this is is beyond my poor little IANAL brain.
On top of that, TFA reports they were emotionally shaken to the point of tears.
[T]he civil suit against the corporation is tougher, because he has to show that he suffered a material harm. I think it would be considerably easier, actually. He was assaulted, physically detained, verbally abused, and the store employees tried to take his property from him. And they're the ones who unlawfully detained the family.Ignoring the differences in California and Ohio statutes, probable cause in a shoplifting case requires a good deal more than "he wouldn't show me a receipt." By and large, in order to detain someone on suspicion of shoplifting you need to see them:
And you have to keep them under continual observation the whole time.
As you mentioned, Mr. Righi's refusal to suck corporate cock is not probable cause.
Having read TFA, it looks to me like the security guard and store manager have unlawfully detained not just Mr. Righi, but his entire family: By blocking the car from moving, the manager and guard trapped his father and father's wife, his brother and two sisters. That's five crimes -- possibly felonies -- committed by the store, on top of whatever crimes they committed against their customer.
If Mr. Righi and his family decide to pursue this, I think the perpetrators and their employers will be begging for the chance to apologize and settle.
Data leaks are a small (but significant) part of a much larger overall problem: Disk crashes, power glitches and simple errors in data entry are all possible and can result in everything from minor inconvenience to outright destruction.
Determining probabilities and costs is sometimes easy, sometimes a dark art. The odds of a disk failing is pretty easy to learn, and the cost of the failure easy to compute. The odds of someone finding and exploiting a security flaw in your application and how much damage it can result in is trickier but not impossible.
Corporate IT, when done right, is an exercise in keeping bad things that might happen from happening, and bad things that will happen from doing damage.
During the dot-com boom, Linux started doing serious damage to Unix -- instead of a single midrange Unix box, it was cheaper and more flexible to use twenty Linux machines and a load balancer. I suppose this is about when Linux started "creating new markets," but its early success is from replacing Unix in its existing problem domains. Creating new markets was a mostly from extending into domains where Unix was the right technology, but had not been affordable.
I keep saying "they", but I mean "we", because I'm one of them. We're not very mature. We're socially inept outside of our specialized domain. But that's okay, because we're in the IT shop surrounded by people in our specialized domain, isolated from everybody else, stuck in a positive feedback loop with mostly guys.
My advice to any woman who's going to spend time around IT guys is: treat them like fifteen year old boys. Seriously -- it's tenth grade, and your class is on a field trip and you're stuck in a rented van with seven tenth grade boys. We can go back and forth all day about how they should behave, about how things should be, but that's how it actually is.
You can probably come up with a pretty good coping strategy based on this, but since you're immersing yourself in a foreign culture, knowing a little about the locals and their quaint little folkways is probably your best bet. Here some basic pointers, take 'em or leave 'em:
- Don't try to be liked. You'll come across as a doormat. The way to be liked is to know your shit.
- If somebody's being a butthead, call him a butthead. Actually say "butthead" out loud, preferably with a little snort.
- Don't be insulted if somebody calls you a butthead. In fact, be flattered. Unless a guy is actually starting a fight, he won't talk to you that way unless he actually feels comfortable around you -- sees you as a peer, in other words. The best response to a dig is "Yeah, yeah, fuck you."
- If two guys in earshot are talking sexist, or just being loud and disruptive, yell "Hey, stop being assholes" in their direction.
- Guys get really really touchy about their abilities and think unsolicited advice is a slam on them personally--and for whatever reason it's even more hurtful coming from a woman. Never offer unsolicited technical advice. Wait for a cue. Preface the advice with "yeah, the same thing happened to me last week. Took me forever to figure out."
- Guys hardly ever understand subtle hints or pick up on emotional cues. If something's bugging you, for fuck's sake say it, because they'll never figure it out on their own.
- If you want something, say so. This includes things like second monitors, or raises.
- You gotta be a little thick-skinned. If you're having a thin-skinned day, use your work as an excuse to socially withdraw. If someone continues to annoy you, "not right now" is usually all you need to say.
- A great way to get rid of somebody who's annoying you is to ask them a technical question they're going to have to look up the answer to, or better yet do some sort of experiment.
It's a different culture, yes. Pretend you've moved to France or something. You can complain all day about how fucked up the French are, or you can get the hang of it and really have a lot of fun.Needless to say, not all shops are like this. Some of them are courteous, enlightened, civilized places to work. If you find one, or currently work in one, congratulations, because by "some" I actually mean "probably three in the whole wide world."
I mean, your Windows computer with McAfee AV talks to Microsoft and McAfee every day, yes? If either company can uniquely identify your computer ( *cough* registration key *cough*), what's to stop them from putting together a special "update" just for you?
Maybe their refusal to answer is simply a refusal to lie.
"theonetruekeebler" can always be traced back to the same person, at least in principle. "Anonymous Coward", on the other hand, has no such nonrepudiation associated with it.
The best part, the very best part, is where you quote a piece in my journal called "The Anonymous Coward Reply Pledge," which is about not engaging you in a conversation. A rather cleverly crafted troll, perhaps? Hoping to gloat over my lack of integrity in case I replied? I've replied to ACs before, you know. Usually it's out of forgetfulness, but right now I'm doing because I know the difference between an immutable law of nature and a guideline for distinguishing between someone being anonymous for a legitimate reason, and the run-of-the-mill pigfucker.
Since you see fit to out people, might I inquire as to who you actually are? Assuming of course you're okay with which end of the legitimate vs. pigfucker continuum you'll come out on.
If you can power X equipment, then why bother to purchase X+Y equipment before you purchase more power capacity first?
TFA says they haven't just exceeded the power capacity of their data center: They're exceeding the power capacity of the grid. The NSA needs to upgrade three entire substations to stay afloat through 2012, and they're considering moving major portions of their center to Tennessee, where, I suspect, they intend to use redundant pairs of entire TVA lakes and their power supply -- and maybe even as their cooling system.
The problem biting the NSA is one that's bit countless companies, mine included: You can pack far more computing power into the same floor space than was ever thought possible.
And they ain't running itty bitty machines, either. One of the NSA's major computational platform is the DEC Alpha. They have thousands of them -- quite a few are probably big-dog GS1280 AlphaServers, stunningly potent number-crunchers that presently max out at 128 processors and 512GB memory. They're quite demanding in terms of power and cooling: My company's five modestly configured AlphaServers consume twenty thousand dollars in power per month and can dump up to 250,000 BTU/hour in heat. We've seriously considered moving to Opteron-based servers, mostly for what we'd save on electricity. We could pull it off because we're just running databases. The NSA, though, has untold petabytes of existing data to migrate, and incredible sums invested in signal processing and cataloging software. They may not have the luxury of a more power-efficient platform.
I first read that as "liquor lens" and thought somebody had finally made a working pair of beer goggles...
Imagine what would happen if there was universal, unencumbered network access. The price of CDs would collapse and the TERRORISTS would win. Or would they lose?
I know you're being kinda silly, but:They'd lose. A black market can only succeed when the the legitimate item is difficult to obtain, typically either costly or illegal. But in this case the black market must also compete with file sharing, where the price of music is effectively zero. So I suspect that in first-world countries where there's thing like the Internet, the black market for CDs only exists in economically depressed areas. Making it impossible to share music online, and the black market for CDs comes into full swing in countries that have lots of disposable income. And organized crime and terrorists have a much better chance of winning because now they're even better funded.
So I'm going to say with a straight face that if you successfully eliminate file sharing, then the terrorists will win. It will be just them and the corporations, with the rest of us in the middle.
Incidentally, saying that black market music bankrolls organized crime is a duplicitous bit of circular reasoning. If you and a few friends start counterfeiting CDs and distributing them for sale through channels, that is inherently organized crime, and you're being "bankrolled" because that's your primary line of business. You don't have to carry guns, sell cocaine and get nicknames like "Vinnie the Schmooze."
One other thing: Looking back more carefully, I truthfully have no idea who funded it. I think my mental image of it has grown over the years. At the time, though, I was floored that all the "The Truth About Marijuana" literature I was being force-fed ignored the other side of the story. I remember an anti-drug class I was forced to take, and its textbook discrediting one report for having too small a sample size, but then crowing to the high heavens about another study (long since discredited, BTW) with fewer than half as many participants. Granted, there are things about standard deviations and confidence levels that I still don't understand, but it was an important lesson to me about trusting numbers from somebody trying to sell you something, especially if they're selling an ideology or political point of view.
The war against marijuana is a war against a whole lot of people: NIDA says that in 2004, 14.6 million Americans 12 and over had used marijuana in the last month. Those are government numbers, and while I suspect them of lying, I don't know if they're aiming high to make the "problem" seem worse or aiming low to hide the fact that if so many people use pot shouldn't this "epidemic" be damaging the country in ways you'd notice? Aside from the ones about masked men in battle armor executing no-knock warrants on somebody whose vindictive neighbor "thought he smelled something?" At any rate, 14.6 million out of 245 million Americans twelve or over means just under six percent of everybody smokes up at least once a month.
And 83 million have used it at least once -- a third of everybody over twelve. I've heard numbers lower than that from the government and numbers higher than that from pro-marijuana groups. If you also cut out the over-65 crowd, well golly-gee, over half of everybody has smoked dope.
Looks to me like the War on Some Drugs is a war waged on the majority of Americans. And I have a sinking feeling that the most common (and practical) advice any parent gives his kids about drugs anymore is "Stay away from the hard stuff, and don't drive drunk, but if you smoke pot, please don't get caught."
(Just a little aside: One of my favorite suppressed studies -- one that's funded but never officially published because the results conflict with the politically necessary results -- was a two question survey of college students. The first question was "What's your GPA?" The second was "Do you smoke pot?" Turns out that the pot smokers had a higher GPA than the non pot smokers. Now if I could just convince my boss I'd code better with a plate of "special" brownies next to me...)
Oh, wait.
That's here.
Bugger.
What else are they doing that's illegal?
I'm not kidding here. If they're willing, as a company, to do something illegal, then this is either the tip of the iceburg or the top of the slippery slope. If they get caught at this, you'll be the scapegoat. If they get caught at something else, you'll come to work one day to find a a padlocked door and a nice man from the DA/DOJ/FBI/IRS saying you're unemployed now, but he'd sure appreciate hundreds of uncompensated hours of your cooperation, and what's this they're saying in there about you wanting to install illegal software?
Resign. They are unethical and you don't want their stink on your resume.
Document all they've asked you to do, then hand in your resignation. If they give you an ounce of grief, well, in your shoes I'd wish I had the balls to demand four months' paid severance with full benefits, on top of the glowingest of references, all of which (I dream of reminding them) would cost them a lot less than one visit from the SIIA --- or one shot on the six o'clock of their executives news being led from the building in handcuffs.
AIX is a stone-reliable Unix that has at least a decade head-start on Linux. It was built (and continues to be maintained) using old-school techniques like rigorous design and review. While Linux was designed with a flexible enough kernel architecture that it can be hacked into running on nigh-anything, AIX and the hardware it runs on were designed for each other. One never surprises the other. And that hardware is some of the best in the world. If you spring for the support contract, IBM will take very, very good care of you.
Sometimes you find yourself with a bit of IT infrastructure that you are betting the company on. It's hardly a crime to invest in robust, reliable solutions where it really counts.