Maybe the Union bosses see the writing on the wall and realize its the best thing for the people the represent.
Sometimes management isn't just trying to screw the little guy. Hostess was a good example. The company must be profitable and have something left over to reinvest or there won't be a company to pay wages in the first place.
Fuel prices remain high, total freight is still down, etc; the industry is not without head winds.
Except it really isn't the problem you think it is. The people of Guinea in your example will be dirt poor no matter what. If there was real value in extracting the iron someone would do it. The fact that its not being extracted means in real terms there are cheaper sources of iron sufficient to meet demand. If someone started extracting the iron, now the price would just fall through the floor. To keep the operation going wages for minors would be even more depressed, and the local would most likely have to also cope with the knock on environmental effects of the mining. Mostly they'd be worse off.
What Dodgy Mining Co. is really trading on the market is potential access to iron ore in the future when the other sources man no longer be available. If the resource is developed in the future it will be in a less competitive market prices will be higher, wages will likely be higher, tax revenues greater. The people of Guinea will get more wealth from it. Financial markets are about futures not about today.
True but IT isn't usually able to evaluate the business requirements of something like an ERP package. You need a team with all the stake holds and they all need to be equal partners.
What you usually happens though is IT gets invited to the meetings, usually isn't allowed to ask to many questions and is told to by some currently political powerful middle manager to just be quiet when the lowest bid contractors proposes some infrastructure build out missing all the really expensive but show stopping parts like SAN switches.
Well imagine harder. The president is such a sack of shit I don't accept anything as true until I can independently verify it. So listing to him before hearing from other more trust worthy sources first is pretty useless. Usually when I hear the president on the television news or radio at this point I just turn the station.
I'll find out what he had to say later with some other information and analysis around it thank you very much.
Hey the trial is not over yet. And that "unarmed" kid DID do bodily injury to Zimmerman. I think I wait for the court and a jury to decide who provoked who and who was retaliating. I was not there, I doubt you were either, and neither of us know all the evidence.
I agree in general but if someone is DOSing you there is not much you can do about it other than 1) get their provider to stop them, 2) get the authorities to stop them, 3) get your provider to drop their traffic, 4) or stop them yourself.
If the first three can't or won't do it in a reasonable time frame, what option do you have. If its a DDOS your only options might be 2) and 4) provided you can determine the command and control source. Which might very likely require you to pwn some number of the bots so you can determine how the control channels work and find the source.
You might be able to defend against lower bandwidth request based DOS attacks, and network layer attacks like syn floods with correctly configured equipment and software but if they are simply packeting you either have to take it, or retaliate.
Why a compromised machine is a compromised machine. Its already not really under the legal owners control anymore, even if it happens to still be doing what they want it to. I think from an ethical standpoint its acceptable collateral damage.
If you accept that phone records are personal effects belonging to either you or the phone company than the fourth amendment applies. The fourth amendment requires a "probably cause" standard, where FISA has been granting warrants on what most courts would consider a reasonable suspicion standard at a best; which is much lower.
So warrant or not what the NSA was doing should be viewed as unconstitutional; as the warrants themselves are not valid! Its treasonous because it undermines people faith in government, thereby providing aide to the enemy "terrorists" looking to radicalize people for recruiting. Forget Snowden, I want to see some executions of current NSA personnel; they are after all the ones supporting terror.
I can't honestly say any of the realistic alternatives were better; by that I mean people who might have survived the GOP primary process.
What I think we can say is that Obama isn't a good man or a good leader. Take everything else away and he is hypocrite at best a strait out liar at worst. I err on the side of the liar. Why? Well all the apologists, including the president himself, are running around saying how you have all these grand ideas like 'transparency' and then you confront the realities of the office. They usually go on to say anyone disagreeing with that is just a pol as all of our Senators and Representatives are supposedly aware of these programs. Well guess what Obama was a Senator when the initial authorizations for these programs were made.
So its pretty impossible to excuse him on that grounds of 'realities of the office', either he knowingly told the public he was going to push for transparency when he never had any intention of doing that and continues to lie about that today or he is a naive boob. Either way the man brings shame to the Presidency.
The fact is transparency is needed. National security is NOT an excuse for secrecy out side of a very very short and narrowly defined list. That might be designs for weapons systems, capabilities and deployments of weapons systems, deployments of troops, personally identifying information about government employees and citizens, and probably nothing else.
The whole point of national security is to protect the nation. Part of the nation is our republican system of government. Well you can't have a representative government that is in any way democratic if people can't use the ballot box to judge the actions of the incumbents. People can't make good judgements when so much of what government actually does is classified and kept secret. Frankly I don't think its unfair or out of line to call what the folks at NSA, CIA, DOJ, 1600 Penn. are doing "un-American activities".
I don't see that as providing much comfort to anyone who is really concerned about the privacy implications. It actually might make them worse. A tiny dot of appropriately tinted ladies nail polish over the indicator lamp and it would be all but impossible to see the lamp unless its aggravatingly bright in the first place and similarly all but impossible to tell the device has been modified without close inspection.
So you'd have a situation where lots of people would have a false sense of security about mandatory record lights. I know others have posted phones are worse as you don't have to look at what you are recording but most of us are at least a little suspicious when we see someone awkwardly holding their phone outside their pocket or purse keeping it in a fixed orientation. When ordinarily worn externally fashion accessories start to have cameras its going to be way more problematic.
The big challenge is the SCOTUS ruled that you could not sue the government for violating your Fourth Amendment rights if you did not know for sure they had been violated. So the secret wiretaps etc were effectively unchallengeable unless you were also being prosecuted for something based on evidence gather that happened in that way.
Here we have the government admitting they are accessing the private call records from Verizon and specifying which calls. This might they have actually kicked the door open to legal action?
Buying a drug and then burying it in favor of something existing would be stupid- you have a chance to reset the patent clock and get ~15 years of high profits as opposed to trying to compete against the generics
If you have a patented drug that treats condition X and the patent still has some years of life in it. It absolutely makes sense to keep drug Y a secret; especially if drug Y treats condition X better(be it in effectiveness, fewer side effects, etc) and you know that everyone will want to switch from X to Y when you make Y available.
This will give remaining life of your patent on X and the full life of the patent on Y years of being able to sell a drug for the condition at high margins, as you won't have competitors.
Of course this runs the risk that you can't keep Y a secret and since you can't file the patent without starting the clock ticking even if you can keep it secret you run this someone else might 'discover' it first.
Don't know about the particular device you mention but just want to remind everyone to "put some thought into things" before just slapping ip->ethernet->rs232 gateways around all over the place. Many of those old RS232 interface had no authentication or access control, the ones that did usually it was a weak password or pin and no rotation or change period enforced. Lots of the remote ip -> serial port solutions I have seen run clear text too, so even if there is a password on the controller it will be easily sniffed if used often. Make sure you have some sorta of access control on the gateway device and make sure it offers some kinda of encrypted channel or that you know exactly what and who has physical access to the networks between the gateway and the client.
I agree its major red flag. Yes there needs to some limit; you don't ever want to take user input of undefined maximum length, but in the case of passwords a sane max is like 255 bytes, which might be a bit shorter than 255 chars if you are running utf8, and is probably still enough if you need to use a two byte character encoding.
When you lengths like 8 or 10 it leads one to assume passwords probably are being stored insecurely; after all if they were hashing passwords like they should be the final storage requirement would not depend on the size of the original password string.
Its like hanging a sign out "Hey pen testers compromise this box, good password list to try on everything else can be found here!"
I am sorry but you'd have to go out of your way to look for a Linux distribution that does not provide a better desktop user experience for ANY class of user than ReactOS.
I don't say that to knock the ReactOS project, lots of hard work has gone into that and I certain can see useful applications for it, someday. The fact is though that Linux only fails on the desktop now because the media cartels and device vendors want it that way. They don't make software and drivers available or if they do they don't make it available a package that is accessible to less apt end users. Then there is still Microsoft Office. XFCE provides a vastly superior desktop to Windows and OSX. KDE is very good too. Unless you need to be able to run your ten years of crufted Excel and Access documents with their 10KLOCs of VBA Open office is probably as good, and for users with simpler needs feature-wise AbiWord and Gnumeric are very easy to use and blazing fast on just about any hardware.
X.org pretty much configures itself now days and can give you a decent 3d accelerated desktop out of box with zero configuration in many cases.
No the reasons GNU/Linux is not on the desktop are 1) inertia 2) DRM 3) political
ReactOS is a long way from prime time. It for the most part can't run anything that won't also run on a Wine / X.org / Linux stack. The exception being drivers and the only real use case for that is if you have some really obscure special purpose hardware you need to run. I see that with lab and test equipment as well as industrial controllers but not much else. I expect ReactOS will be a very good way to keep some of that stuff going in the near future as most of it is also incompatible with Windows 7+ and XP is not getting patches for very much longer.
I am sorry but people like you who have that attitude toward it are absolutely every bit as wrong as the it types who think the answer to everything should be "no".
When some gets a worm on your network and it takes the entire business offline for the better part of a day while everyone chases down and cleans the machines you will still say IT failed to do the job you refused to let them do.
When you customer list is published on wiki leaks, or near perfect copies of your flagship product trade secrets and all start coming off the boat from china you will say it did not do their, which you refused to let then do.
Yes, IT needs to help you be productive but they also need to protect you and the company, which means they can't just let you do *anyhing* any time. It's not that simple, you need to stop looking at IT as your bitch and start thinking of then as trusted advisors just like you do your legal department or your HR people.
Yea well we learned at my organization you have to keep control. You get good engineers that just are not it experts. If you don't have control you pretty soon find then doing things like FTPing schematics home to work on then there. Sure they are smart guys and understand the potential problems with that when you explain it to them, but that is not the sorta thing they spend there time thinking about. Unless you want to waste there time having the it security talk weekly rather than anually, a good electronic fence implemented on equipment it controls is a more efficient way to keep everyone on the strait and narrow
There you go, a ratio of 1:100 is pretty bad for operations staff by today's standards. You should be able to handle, 2500+ clients with that. One support phone guy. Then 1 network engineer, 1 wintel guy, one *nix guy. The latter three all crossed trained engough to moonlight covering for each other and deal with a support escalation as well as handle the interdisciplinary stuff like VM infrastructure. You can do that if you have standards.
Now we just need to punish the people who valuated Facebook so high.
Why? the market did that for you. The people who valued facebook that high at the end of the day are the ones who agreed to pay the $38 dollar IPO price. They now own shares worth ~$23.50. Isn't that punishment enough?
It was mostly big institutional investors too, probably could not happened to a more deserving bunch.
I have mixed feelings on this one. When it comes to the worlds of Java and.Net "knowing" has more to do with having a good concept of what is in the libraries and how the libraries are organized than anything else. There is something to that. Having a largish portion of that committed to memory both improves ones productivity and impacts ones thinking about how to solve a problem at the same time.
Though like you I'd expect someone who is really good with one to be able to start working with the other almost immediately and become proficient very quickly.
I am sure it has. Or would have if they were more invasive than they are. Luckily the public still had enough sense to kill skipjack in the 90's. Now you can't count on attention spans long enough to even hold a 20 second sound bite and politics is purely about finger pointer, where as back then it was only 98% about finger pointing or so. So I think fear is the way to go now.
Enabling non-owner authorized computer access in any form makes machines less secure; and with less secure machines the terrorists win!
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe the Union bosses see the writing on the wall and realize its the best thing for the people the represent.
Sometimes management isn't just trying to screw the little guy. Hostess was a good example. The company must be profitable and have something left over to reinvest or there won't be a company to pay wages in the first place.
Fuel prices remain high, total freight is still down, etc; the industry is not without head winds.
Except it really isn't the problem you think it is. The people of Guinea in your example will be dirt poor no matter what. If there was real value in extracting the iron someone would do it. The fact that its not being extracted means in real terms there are cheaper sources of iron sufficient to meet demand. If someone started extracting the iron, now the price would just fall through the floor. To keep the operation going wages for minors would be even more depressed, and the local would most likely have to also cope with the knock on environmental effects of the mining. Mostly they'd be worse off.
What Dodgy Mining Co. is really trading on the market is potential access to iron ore in the future when the other sources man no longer be available. If the resource is developed in the future it will be in a less competitive market prices will be higher, wages will likely be higher, tax revenues greater. The people of Guinea will get more wealth from it. Financial markets are about futures not about today.
True but IT isn't usually able to evaluate the business requirements of something like an ERP package. You need a team with all the stake holds and they all need to be equal partners.
What you usually happens though is IT gets invited to the meetings, usually isn't allowed to ask to many questions and is told to by some currently political powerful middle manager to just be quiet when the lowest bid contractors proposes some infrastructure build out missing all the really expensive but show stopping parts like SAN switches.
You should have a look at Codeblocks. Its a nice IDE and it does a pretty good job. Runs on Linux
Well imagine harder. The president is such a sack of shit I don't accept anything as true until I can independently verify it. So listing to him before hearing from other more trust worthy sources first is pretty useless. Usually when I hear the president on the television news or radio at this point I just turn the station.
I'll find out what he had to say later with some other information and analysis around it thank you very much.
Hey the trial is not over yet. And that "unarmed" kid DID do bodily injury to Zimmerman. I think I wait for the court and a jury to decide who provoked who and who was retaliating. I was not there, I doubt you were either, and neither of us know all the evidence.
In Texas you actually are under certain circumstances.
I agree in general but if someone is DOSing you there is not much you can do about it other than 1) get their provider to stop them, 2) get the authorities to stop them, 3) get your provider to drop their traffic, 4) or stop them yourself.
If the first three can't or won't do it in a reasonable time frame, what option do you have. If its a DDOS your only options might be 2) and 4) provided you can determine the command and control source. Which might very likely require you to pwn some number of the bots so you can determine how the control channels work and find the source.
You might be able to defend against lower bandwidth request based DOS attacks, and network layer attacks like syn floods with correctly configured equipment and software but if they are simply packeting you either have to take it, or retaliate.
And they would have been right to do it.
Firing back would make you no better than them
Why a compromised machine is a compromised machine. Its already not really under the legal owners control anymore, even if it happens to still be doing what they want it to. I think from an ethical standpoint its acceptable collateral damage.
If you accept that phone records are personal effects belonging to either you or the phone company than the fourth amendment applies. The fourth amendment requires a "probably cause" standard, where FISA has been granting warrants on what most courts would consider a reasonable suspicion standard at a best; which is much lower.
So warrant or not what the NSA was doing should be viewed as unconstitutional; as the warrants themselves are not valid! Its treasonous because it undermines people faith in government, thereby providing aide to the enemy "terrorists" looking to radicalize people for recruiting. Forget Snowden, I want to see some executions of current NSA personnel; they are after all the ones supporting terror.
I can't honestly say any of the realistic alternatives were better; by that I mean people who might have survived the GOP primary process.
What I think we can say is that Obama isn't a good man or a good leader. Take everything else away and he is hypocrite at best a strait out liar at worst. I err on the side of the liar. Why? Well all the apologists, including the president himself, are running around saying how you have all these grand ideas like 'transparency' and then you confront the realities of the office. They usually go on to say anyone disagreeing with that is just a pol as all of our Senators and Representatives are supposedly aware of these programs. Well guess what Obama was a Senator when the initial authorizations for these programs were made.
So its pretty impossible to excuse him on that grounds of 'realities of the office', either he knowingly told the public he was going to push for transparency when he never had any intention of doing that and continues to lie about that today or he is a naive boob. Either way the man brings shame to the Presidency.
The fact is transparency is needed. National security is NOT an excuse for secrecy out side of a very very short and narrowly defined list. That might be designs for weapons systems, capabilities and deployments of weapons systems, deployments of troops, personally identifying information about government employees and citizens, and probably nothing else.
The whole point of national security is to protect the nation. Part of the nation is our republican system of government. Well you can't have a representative government that is in any way democratic if people can't use the ballot box to judge the actions of the incumbents. People can't make good judgements when so much of what government actually does is classified and kept secret. Frankly I don't think its unfair or out of line to call what the folks at NSA, CIA, DOJ, 1600 Penn. are doing "un-American activities".
I don't see that as providing much comfort to anyone who is really concerned about the privacy implications. It actually might make them worse. A tiny dot of appropriately tinted ladies nail polish over the indicator lamp and it would be all but impossible to see the lamp unless its aggravatingly bright in the first place and similarly all but impossible to tell the device has been modified without close inspection.
So you'd have a situation where lots of people would have a false sense of security about mandatory record lights. I know others have posted phones are worse as you don't have to look at what you are recording but most of us are at least a little suspicious when we see someone awkwardly holding their phone outside their pocket or purse keeping it in a fixed orientation. When ordinarily worn externally fashion accessories start to have cameras its going to be way more problematic.
The big challenge is the SCOTUS ruled that you could not sue the government for violating your Fourth Amendment rights if you did not know for sure they had been violated. So the secret wiretaps etc were effectively unchallengeable unless you were also being prosecuted for something based on evidence gather that happened in that way.
Here we have the government admitting they are accessing the private call records from Verizon and specifying which calls. This might they have actually kicked the door open to legal action?
Buying a drug and then burying it in favor of something existing would be stupid- you have a chance to reset the patent clock and get ~15 years of high profits as opposed to trying to compete against the generics
If you have a patented drug that treats condition X and the patent still has some years of life in it. It absolutely makes sense to keep drug Y a secret; especially if drug Y treats condition X better(be it in effectiveness, fewer side effects, etc) and you know that everyone will want to switch from X to Y when you make Y available.
This will give remaining life of your patent on X and the full life of the patent on Y years of being able to sell a drug for the condition at high margins, as you won't have competitors.
Of course this runs the risk that you can't keep Y a secret and since you can't file the patent without starting the clock ticking even if you can keep it secret you run this someone else might 'discover' it first.
To be really technical about it no data is lost, but information is. The structure of an xml document describes relationships between its elements.
Don't know about the particular device you mention but just want to remind everyone to "put some thought into things" before just slapping ip->ethernet->rs232 gateways around all over the place. Many of those old RS232 interface had no authentication or access control, the ones that did usually it was a weak password or pin and no rotation or change period enforced. Lots of the remote ip -> serial port solutions I have seen run clear text too, so even if there is a password on the controller it will be easily sniffed if used often. Make sure you have some sorta of access control on the gateway device and make sure it offers some kinda of encrypted channel or that you know exactly what and who has physical access to the networks between the gateway and the client.
I agree its major red flag. Yes there needs to some limit; you don't ever want to take user input of undefined maximum length, but in the case of passwords a sane max is like 255 bytes, which might be a bit shorter than 255 chars if you are running utf8, and is probably still enough if you need to use a two byte character encoding.
When you lengths like 8 or 10 it leads one to assume passwords probably are being stored insecurely; after all if they were hashing passwords like they should be the final storage requirement would not depend on the size of the original password string.
Its like hanging a sign out "Hey pen testers compromise this box, good password list to try on everything else can be found here!"
I am sorry but you'd have to go out of your way to look for a Linux distribution that does not provide a better desktop user experience for ANY class of user than ReactOS.
I don't say that to knock the ReactOS project, lots of hard work has gone into that and I certain can see useful applications for it, someday. The fact is though that Linux only fails on the desktop now because the media cartels and device vendors want it that way. They don't make software and drivers available or if they do they don't make it available a package that is accessible to less apt end users. Then there is still Microsoft Office. XFCE provides a vastly superior desktop to Windows and OSX. KDE is very good too. Unless you need to be able to run your ten years of crufted Excel and Access documents with their 10KLOCs of VBA Open office is probably as good, and for users with simpler needs feature-wise AbiWord and Gnumeric are very easy to use and blazing fast on just about any hardware.
X.org pretty much configures itself now days and can give you a decent 3d accelerated desktop out of box with zero configuration in many cases.
No the reasons GNU/Linux is not on the desktop are
1) inertia
2) DRM
3) political
ReactOS is a long way from prime time. It for the most part can't run anything that won't also run on a Wine / X.org / Linux stack. The exception being drivers and the only real use case for that is if you have some really obscure special purpose hardware you need to run. I see that with lab and test equipment as well as industrial controllers but not much else. I expect ReactOS will be a very good way to keep some of that stuff going in the near future as most of it is also incompatible with Windows 7+ and XP is not getting patches for very much longer.
I am sorry but people like you who have that attitude toward it are absolutely every bit as wrong as the it types who think the answer to everything should be "no".
When some gets a worm on your network and it takes the entire business offline for the better part of a day while everyone chases down and cleans the machines you will still say IT failed to do the job you refused to let them do.
When you customer list is published on wiki leaks, or near perfect copies of your flagship product trade secrets and all start coming off the boat from china you will say it did not do their, which you refused to let then do.
Yes, IT needs to help you be productive but they also need to protect you and the company, which means they can't just let you do *anyhing* any time. It's not that simple, you need to stop looking at IT as your bitch and start thinking of then as trusted advisors just like you do your legal department or your HR people.
Yea well we learned at my organization you have to keep control. You get good engineers that just are not it experts. If you don't have control you pretty soon find then doing things like FTPing schematics home to work on then there. Sure they are smart guys and understand the potential problems with that when you explain it to them, but that is not the sorta thing they spend there time thinking about. Unless you want to waste there time having the it security talk weekly rather than anually, a good electronic fence implemented on equipment it controls is a more efficient way to keep everyone on the strait and narrow
There you go, a ratio of 1:100 is pretty bad for operations staff by today's standards. You should be able to handle, 2500+ clients with that. One support phone guy. Then 1 network engineer, 1 wintel guy, one *nix guy. The latter three all crossed trained engough to moonlight covering for each other and deal with a support escalation as well as handle the interdisciplinary stuff like VM infrastructure. You can do that if you have standards.
Now we just need to punish the people who valuated Facebook so high.
Why? the market did that for you. The people who valued facebook that high at the end of the day are the ones who agreed to pay the $38 dollar IPO price. They now own shares worth ~$23.50. Isn't that punishment enough?
It was mostly big institutional investors too, probably could not happened to a more deserving bunch.
I have mixed feelings on this one. When it comes to the worlds of Java and .Net "knowing" has more to do with having a good concept of what is in the libraries and how the libraries are organized than anything else. There is something to that. Having a largish portion of that committed to memory both improves ones productivity and impacts ones thinking about how to solve a problem at the same time.
Though like you I'd expect someone who is really good with one to be able to start working with the other almost immediately and become proficient very quickly.
I am sure it has. Or would have if they were more invasive than they are. Luckily the public still had enough sense to kill skipjack in the 90's. Now you can't count on attention spans long enough to even hold a 20 second sound bite and politics is purely about finger pointer, where as back then it was only 98% about finger pointing or so. So I think fear is the way to go now.
Enabling non-owner authorized computer access in any form makes machines less secure; and with less secure machines the terrorists win!