Flashy features was never SCO
on
Endgame For SCO
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· Score: 2
SCO was never about flashy features. That's not what killed SCO.
What killed SCO was two things: 1) Pricing, especially for educational institutions (for many years Microsoft practically GAVE NT to educational instutitions), and 2) availability of trained administrators and technicians. But SCO's management never saw these as problems, "SCO Unix is more stable than Microsoft products" was their attitude, and "people will pay more for a more stable product". As we all know, that's not true -- people might pay the SAME for a more stable product, but if they're paying MORE, they want to see flashy features for that money. That's what killed SCO -- they did not understand that stability doesn't sell, flashy features do.
The problem is that NT labor is readily available, while Unix/Linux labor is not. Now, granted, most of the NT labor is incompetent, but too many businesses think "an admin is an admin" and hire the cheapest one. And what's this incompetent admin going to do when the SCO server needs replacing? You betcha, he's going to install the only thing he understands -- NT!
Census workers, by federal law, are given the right to canvas all residences, including those that are officially "posted". Their Census ID badge serves as their warrant for that purpose. This law is authorized by the Constitution, which provides that a census shall be taken of all residences every 10 years. It's one of the few laws passed over the past 200 years which does abide by the Constitution:-}.
However, you are correct that there are some residences where census workers will not go without a police escort. Specifically, those where the resident's reaction to the census worker was to poke the barrel of a gun out the door! Our instructions when such things happened was to get the bleep out of there, and turn it over to a supervisor, who would probably give it to a cop who would go out there and give the guy a nice little talking-to about the inadvisability of brandishing guns at census workers. If we could talk to a neighbor and get the information, great. If not, then the next step was the supervisor and a cop going to the guy's house to politely question him about who was living in his house on Census day.
I had to do a lot of research into IQ as part of a research methods class. I learned some interesting things. Like: IQ tests are "scored" (i.e., questions decided to be added or deleted, and the results evaluated to see what they mean) by administering them to hundreds of children, then surveying teachers and parents to see how smart they view the kid. In other words, it's a "smartness personality test", rather than some kind of scientific genome test. It is specifically constructed to agree with what society views as "smart" behavior, rather than having any scientific validity as a measure of genetic capability. At best, with the best-normed tests, they predict the kid's future school achievement -- which is a complex stew of genetics and environment that is no where as scientific as the perveyors of "IQ tests" like to state. None of which has a thing to do with what the kid could achieve in a "normal" environment, if he's being raised in a deprived environment.
The kid I mentioned above, BTW, had a measured IQ of 105. But you could give him a problem, and he'd find a solution, usually a sneaky one that was oh-so-obvious once he pointed it out to you (but not otherwise). I had some kids in a "honors" class whose measured IQ was above 115, and they weren't anywhere near as sharp. But then, this kid's whole family was acknowledged to be sharp as tacks... they made the Mafia look like dullards. Why, they had a square mile of the 4th Ward locked up tight with the black tar and crack trade... despite there being a lot of folks bigger, meaner, and more terrifying by nature out there. Interesting how some runty little geeks can psych out a whole neighborhood that way into believing that this family was the second coming of evil incarnate:-}. (This is the same kid who, when another kid could not come on a field trip because of misbehavior, begged and begged for that kid to be able to come... I said "Why do you care, you hate that kid's guts anyhow!" and he just looked down at the ground and said "I know what he feels like.").
Actually, obesity has survival value in cultures that have a seasonal food supply. The more fat you can accumulate during feast season, the better you survive famine season.
Most obesity in the United States today is not genetic in nature anyhow... it's a matter of self-indulgence. Too many fatty foods, too little exercise. Or, as the saying goes, "if obesity is genetic, why don't you ever see fat Ethiopians?" [i.e., you can't get fat if you don't eat!].
The problem is that assisted evolution of this sort generally does not increase the robustness, diversity, and long-term survival capability of a species. What you tend to get, rather, are artificial cosmetic "enhancements". Look at the peacock's tail feathers, for example. These have negative survival potential -- the bigger and more brilliant the tail feathers, the more easily the peacock is seen by predators, and the more difficulty the cock has avoiding said predators (because the bigger tail feathers are heavy and cumbersome). Yet sexual selection amongst peacocks favors the males with the biggest tail feathers. The only reason peacocks managed to survive at all was because they faced no significant environmental pressures. Toss in a few dogs, and voila, talk about swiftly approaching extinction!
I suspect artificial genetic selection amongst Americans would favor blue eyes and blond hair. This, however, is also associated with the greatest risk for skin cancer. Blue eyes and blond hair have negative survival coefficient in today's world of Vitamin D supplemented milk, skimpy swim suits, and overall increased UV exposure due to declining ozone layer. Yet I bet you that of the babies who are "genetically enhanced", the majority will end up with blue eyes and blond hair.
The biggest problem with the human condition at the moment is not human genetics. Rather, it is the inhumane conditions under which the majority of this world's children are being raised, conditions which result in a stunting of both intellectual and physical growth for those who manage to survive.
Even in this country, the richest in the world, close to half of all children are being raised in poverty, with the resulting stunting of intellectual and physical growth. If we could solve this problem, we could double our economic production in two decades worth of time. As it is, alas, too many of the results of poverty are too severely damaged to contribute significantly.
I met someone who could have been the next Albert Einstein in my inner-city classroom eight years ago. He was that brilliant. Smartest kid I ever taught, anywhere, including in affluent suburban schools. Last I heard, he'd quit school and was dealing drugs on the street. What a waste.
Yeah, the genome project is good news for those (relatively few) individuals who suffer from genetically-caused illnesses. But let's not overstate the importance of this thing. There's maybe 0.5% of the population who could benefit from the genome project. As vs. good schools and good living conditions for children, which would eventually benefit all of us because of having a smarter, better work force and no longer having so many broken people hanging around dragging us down.
"we'll probably always have genetic diversity in the Third World":
You just put your hands on why it is that white supremist 1950's sci-fi writers were so wrong (Cyril Kornbluth, anybody?). The notion that "rich people are rich because they're genetically superior" is stupid when most of the world has no access to education or to economic resources that we here in the United States take for granted (simple things like, say, reliable banks -- in most 3rd world nations, there is no real monetary system worth the name).
Even in parts of the United States, access to education and economic resources is extremely difficult -- take, for example, Washington D.C., where there are basically no schools, no jobs paying above minimum wage, and no access to the banking system for the majority of the population (i.e., those who actually live there, vs. thus who merely work there sucking up our tax dollars). I daresay that it easily takes as much intelligence to set up a profitable drug dealing business in D.C. today as it takes to build any successful business, the only deal is that one is illegal and thus has less competition from people with better access to the banking system, while the other is legal and thus impossible for someone without banking access to crack.
Note: If you dispute the part about "access to the banking system": if poor people had access to the banking system, do you think that check cashing stores would be the most profitable (legal) businesses in the inner city?
If you believe that the poor get a bunch of handouts or whatever, all I can figure is that you've never been poor, and you've never had long term exposure to poor people. The fact of the matter is that being poor sucks. Been there, done that, don't care to repeat the experience.
Most poor people work like a dog to keep a roof over their head. My biggest problem when I was teaching in an inner-city school in Houston was that I could not get in touch with parents because they were working -- one poor mother was working three jobs, she often left the house at 6am in the morning, and did not get home until 10pm. Yes, I verified this myself -- I'd sent a note home with her kid, it did not come back signed, he told me his momma wasn't home when he went to sleep and was gone by the time he got up, and yeah, it was true. But what was she supposed to do, given that AFDC in Texas at the time was $172 per month (with $10 extra for each additional kid -- wow).
The poor do not, and never have, received a free ride in life. I am saddened by the fact that so many people born with a silver spoon in their suburban mouths are so ignorant about so large a portion of the U.S. population.
The copyright notice prevents you from taking the document and selling it or redistributing it elsewhere. It does not restrict your use of the information. You can still make a commercial Kerberos implementation based upon the information.
The big furor was that this document previously was under a license that said that it was a trade secret, and which prohibited you from using the INFORMATION in it. This license doesn't do that, it merely prohibits you from re-distributing Microsoft's copyrighted document. No big deal, eh?
While I dislike Microsoft's business practices as much as the next guy (see my home page:-), let's not go overboard and read things into their actions that aren't there.
What puzzles me is why Troll Tech even bothered with the latest version of the QPL. If you read it, it pretty much *IS* the GPL, with a few bits of added fluff to make sure that Troll Tech gets their credit (e.g., nobody can sell a modified version of QT and call it QT).
GPL or QPL, either way, it's the same problem -- you can't use it to write commercial software. Not without buying a commercial license from Troll Tech anyhow. Which is not a big deal at the moment, if you're a commercial company...
You can lose the right to enforce a patent against A SPECIFIC VIOLATION if you do not enforce it against that person for [n] years (I believe it's three years) after finding out that they're violating the patent, but you don't lose the patent in the case of all other violations.
That person or entity might, however, need to purchase a license for future use if he makes new use of the infringing technology. I'll let a real patent lawyer tackle that ball of wax.
The problem with a slow key schedule is that it slows down the cipher when you're using it for non-encryption things like, e.g., generating pseudo-random numbers or creating a message digest. The reason Twofish has a fast key schedule is not because it has to be implementable in hardware but, rather, because it has to be re-usable for things like creating message digests and pseudo-random numbers, since smart cards do not have enough memory on them to put lots of different algorithms.
3DES is an excellent choice where speed does not matter. Where speed does matter, however, it's not so great.
Software implementations of 3DES can't keep up with 100mbit Ethernets, for example. So if I want to encrypt high speed networks, either I use a (very expensive) hardware implementation of 3DES, or I use another algorithm (like Blowfish or Twofish).
Hammer. screw. Screwdriver. Nail. Pick the appropriate (tool,problem) pair from the list. There's no such thing as a magic bullet that solves all problems.
OpenBSD chose Blowfish for their password file long before Twofish was invented. Remember, Twofish is only two years old, and only within the past few months could anybody safely say (without lying out of both faces) that it is secure. Only after the best cryptographers in the world have spent two years trying to break it can you really say that it even has a CHANCE of being secure...
The problem with picking a complete cryptoSYSTEM is that often they are seriously broken. Both SSL and IPsec have been compromised multiple times over the years by things as stupid as a poor pseudo-random-number generator.
There are no magic bullets. Whether you pick a complete cryptosystem or build your own system from components, you're still going to have to exercise due dilligence.
A one time pad uses a very large random keypad which must be shared on both ends (i.e. must be transmitted some other way, such as, e.g., by diplomats with attache cases). As such, it is impractical.
A stream cipher could be considered a "pseudo one-time pad", in that a shorter shared key, instead of being the keypad itself, is used to produce a pseudo-random keypad on both ends (which will be identical if the seeds are identical). The key is basically the seed to a cryptographic-quality PRNG in this case. This is a very tricky thing to get right, and most "pseudo one-time pads" are cracked within minutes of being released. Use RC4 or a block cipher feedback mode if you need a stream cipher, don't try to do this yourself at home.
XOR is the basis of stream ciphers. The only real secret is that you must be XOR'ing against a key-generated bit stream. A common way of doing this is to use the key to seed the stream generator (basically a PRNG) on both ends, and the pseudo-random bit stream generated by the stream generator is then XOR'ed with the bits you're transmitting.
Of course, it's easy to do a stream cipher wrong, and you must change your key for each message transmitted in order to prevent known-plaintext attacks. (That is why most stream ciphers require an intitialization vector, which is basically a random part of the key used to ensure that the same key isn't used for two encipherments). You're much better off using something like RC4 where that kind of stuff has already been thought of and taken care of, or using a cipher feedback mode for a block cipher, which basically uses the block cipher as the bitstream generator. See Bruce Schneier's "Applied Cryptography" for more info.
Well, Blowfish is also significantly faster than 3DES. In reality, I would say use 3DES unless speed matters, because 3DES has stood the test of time -- if it has not been cracked in almost 20 years, it probably won't be cracked within the near future. If you're going to do something that needs speed, on the other hand, Twofish and Blowfish are both much faster than 3DES. While neither has the history of 3DES, both have received significant cryptanalysis, and Twofish is faster and has a larger block size than Blowfish (should be more secure for many types of cipher feedback modes).
As for why Twofish is not yet widely used -- it's a new cipher. Only two years old. Most of the programs you cite as using Blowfish pre-date Twofish, and it is only recently that I would trust Twofish (after every reputable cipher designer in the world has had two years of trying to crack Twofish). I can't say the same about Serpent, BTW, various AES commentators have nasty things to say about it (mostly that it needs more rounds to ensure proper bit diffusion, which would erase its speed advantage). About all that's been said bad about Twofish is that it is rather klunky and ugly compared to the more elegant ciphers in the AES contest (but a secure, fast klunky!).
Disclaimer -- I did the Twofish module for Python... probably am biased:-).
Does this guy have a reputation in the industry? Have I heard of him before? Has he released any meaningful Open Source software that would indicate that he has the skills I need? What kinds of things has he posted on USENET? Is the company he currently works for a leader in the industry, a small startup, or some behemoth where most people are marking time until retirement? What reason did he give for leaving that employer? Does that match up with what I know about that employer?
Most of the above merely requires being current in the industry -- NOT having a background check done.
Let's see, I suggest that you also state in the contract that they must maintain a body weight within 25% of the suggested weight of their height (obesity is the leading cause of heart attacks, diabetes, and other things that interfere with work), cannot smoke (ditto), must not engage in any hazardous activities such as hang gliding or sky diving...
Heck, why not make it a requirement for employment that they wear a security bracelet on their leg and have wide-angle cameras in their car and in each room of their house hooked up to your security center! That way, you can immediately know when they're engaged in Non-Work Activity, and make sure to diffuse any attempts of theirs to Have A Life. Because all companies know that Having A Life decreases work productivity (all that excess time and energy that could be used for work!).
Personally, I've never worked for a company that requires background checks. I'd like to think that I have enough reputation that I never will. Last time I was out of work, I had a job waiting for me a week after I walked out the door of my previous employer, and could have started immediately if I could have driven across the country fast enough. If somebody needs to do a background check on me to know that I'm a productive member of the community, I probably don't want to work for him anyhow -- my work is publically available, and speaks for itself.
Does Experian have to answer to customers? *NO*. Customers expect a "reasonably good" result from Experian, not perfect ones.
Does Experian have to worry about its reputation? *NO*. They know they have a bad reputation amongst the general public. They don't care. Their real customers (lenders, apartment complexes, etc.) don't care either, as long as the information is accurate a reasonable amount of the time.
Does Experian have to face the possiblity of negative consequences for errors in their database? *NO*. They got laws passed in Congress exempting them from all negative consequences..
My big beef is not that these big data compendiums exist. My big beef is that they have bought themselves an exemption against long-standing civil code provisions regarding defamation of character and slander.
It does not bother me that Experian has a record of everything I've bought on credit for the past 7 years. It does bother me that if they make a mistake, I cannot sue them for defamation of character and libel if they refuse to remove the mistaken item.
It's odd that Republican pseudo-libertarians are all for civil contract law -- except for those portions of the civil code regarding defamation of character, libel, and other such forms of willful harm, which they're all for having the government suddenly toss out of the civil code.
Federal law now says that a certain % of drivers licenses issued each year must have the SSN # on them or else the state loses funds. I forget the purported rationale for this, something to do with illegal immigrants or some such bull, but we all know the real reason -- the Feds want a national ID number.
Arizona responded by giving people basically a "lifetime" driver's license. My driver's license is good until I'm 65 years old - and does not have a SSN on it. Thus only newbies to Arizona have the SSN on their driver's license.
One way to prove malice is if you dispute the information, provide evidence showing that the information is wrong, and they still refuse to change the information. Assuming that you (or, rather, your lawyer) has laid a proper paper trail, *THEN* you can prove malice.
I'm setting up Telecheck this way at the moment for saying that I have a bad check (I don't), though thanks to the Debt Collector Protection Act (which is actually named something like the "Fair Credit Collection Act") the most punitive damages I can get is $1,000 above actual damages. Sad, but true, debt collectors, collectively the scum of the earth (otherwise they wouldn't survive as debt collectors) bought themselves protection in Congress. Even class actions can only get $500,000 max damages or (get this) 2% of the net worth of the scumbag max.
The real threat to freedom is the fact that government is now a bought-and-paid-for subsidiary of Corporate America.
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What killed SCO was two things: 1) Pricing, especially for educational institutions (for many years Microsoft practically GAVE NT to educational instutitions), and 2) availability of trained administrators and technicians. But SCO's management never saw these as problems, "SCO Unix is more stable than Microsoft products" was their attitude, and "people will pay more for a more stable product". As we all know, that's not true -- people might pay the SAME for a more stable product, but if they're paying MORE, they want to see flashy features for that money. That's what killed SCO -- they did not understand that stability doesn't sell, flashy features do.
-E
-E
Census workers, by federal law, are given the right to canvas all residences, including those that are officially "posted". Their Census ID badge serves as their warrant for that purpose. This law is authorized by the Constitution, which provides that a census shall be taken of all residences every 10 years. It's one of the few laws passed over the past 200 years which does abide by the Constitution :-}.
However, you are correct that there are some residences where census workers will not go without a police escort. Specifically, those where the resident's reaction to the census worker was to poke the barrel of a gun out the door! Our instructions when such things happened was to get the bleep out of there, and turn it over to a supervisor, who would probably give it to a cop who would go out there and give the guy a nice little talking-to about the inadvisability of brandishing guns at census workers. If we could talk to a neighbor and get the information, great. If not, then the next step was the supervisor and a cop going to the guy's house to politely question him about who was living in his house on Census day.
-E
The kid I mentioned above, BTW, had a measured IQ of 105. But you could give him a problem, and he'd find a solution, usually a sneaky one that was oh-so-obvious once he pointed it out to you (but not otherwise). I had some kids in a "honors" class whose measured IQ was above 115, and they weren't anywhere near as sharp. But then, this kid's whole family was acknowledged to be sharp as tacks... they made the Mafia look like dullards. Why, they had a square mile of the 4th Ward locked up tight with the black tar and crack trade... despite there being a lot of folks bigger, meaner, and more terrifying by nature out there. Interesting how some runty little geeks can psych out a whole neighborhood that way into believing that this family was the second coming of evil incarnate :-}. (This is the same kid who, when another kid could not come on a field trip because of misbehavior, begged and begged for that kid to be able to come... I said "Why do you care, you hate that kid's guts anyhow!" and he just looked down at the ground and said "I know what he feels like.").
-E
Most obesity in the United States today is not genetic in nature anyhow... it's a matter of self-indulgence. Too many fatty foods, too little exercise. Or, as the saying goes, "if obesity is genetic, why don't you ever see fat Ethiopians?" [i.e., you can't get fat if you don't eat!].
-E
I suspect artificial genetic selection amongst Americans would favor blue eyes and blond hair. This, however, is also associated with the greatest risk for skin cancer. Blue eyes and blond hair have negative survival coefficient in today's world of Vitamin D supplemented milk, skimpy swim suits, and overall increased UV exposure due to declining ozone layer. Yet I bet you that of the babies who are "genetically enhanced", the majority will end up with blue eyes and blond hair.
-E
Even in this country, the richest in the world, close to half of all children are being raised in poverty, with the resulting stunting of intellectual and physical growth. If we could solve this problem, we could double our economic production in two decades worth of time. As it is, alas, too many of the results of poverty are too severely damaged to contribute significantly.
I met someone who could have been the next Albert Einstein in my inner-city classroom eight years ago. He was that brilliant. Smartest kid I ever taught, anywhere, including in affluent suburban schools. Last I heard, he'd quit school and was dealing drugs on the street. What a waste.
Yeah, the genome project is good news for those (relatively few) individuals who suffer from genetically-caused illnesses. But let's not overstate the importance of this thing. There's maybe 0.5% of the population who could benefit from the genome project. As vs. good schools and good living conditions for children, which would eventually benefit all of us because of having a smarter, better work force and no longer having so many broken people hanging around dragging us down.
-E
You just put your hands on why it is that white supremist 1950's sci-fi writers were so wrong (Cyril Kornbluth, anybody?). The notion that "rich people are rich because they're genetically superior" is stupid when most of the world has no access to education or to economic resources that we here in the United States take for granted (simple things like, say, reliable banks -- in most 3rd world nations, there is no real monetary system worth the name).
Even in parts of the United States, access to education and economic resources is extremely difficult -- take, for example, Washington D.C., where there are basically no schools, no jobs paying above minimum wage, and no access to the banking system for the majority of the population (i.e., those who actually live there, vs. thus who merely work there sucking up our tax dollars). I daresay that it easily takes as much intelligence to set up a profitable drug dealing business in D.C. today as it takes to build any successful business, the only deal is that one is illegal and thus has less competition from people with better access to the banking system, while the other is legal and thus impossible for someone without banking access to crack.
Note: If you dispute the part about "access to the banking system": if poor people had access to the banking system, do you think that check cashing stores would be the most profitable (legal) businesses in the inner city?
-E
Most poor people work like a dog to keep a roof over their head. My biggest problem when I was teaching in an inner-city school in Houston was that I could not get in touch with parents because they were working -- one poor mother was working three jobs, she often left the house at 6am in the morning, and did not get home until 10pm. Yes, I verified this myself -- I'd sent a note home with her kid, it did not come back signed, he told me his momma wasn't home when he went to sleep and was gone by the time he got up, and yeah, it was true. But what was she supposed to do, given that AFDC in Texas at the time was $172 per month (with $10 extra for each additional kid -- wow).
The poor do not, and never have, received a free ride in life. I am saddened by the fact that so many people born with a silver spoon in their suburban mouths are so ignorant about so large a portion of the U.S. population.
-E
The big furor was that this document previously was under a license that said that it was a trade secret, and which prohibited you from using the INFORMATION in it. This license doesn't do that, it merely prohibits you from re-distributing Microsoft's copyrighted document. No big deal, eh?
While I dislike Microsoft's business practices as much as the next guy (see my home page :-), let's not go overboard and read things into their actions that aren't there.
-E
GPL or QPL, either way, it's the same problem -- you can't use it to write commercial software. Not without buying a commercial license from Troll Tech anyhow. Which is not a big deal at the moment, if you're a commercial company...
-E
That person or entity might, however, need to purchase a license for future use if he makes new use of the infringing technology. I'll let a real patent lawyer tackle that ball of wax.
-E
-E
Software implementations of 3DES can't keep up with 100mbit Ethernets, for example. So if I want to encrypt high speed networks, either I use a (very expensive) hardware implementation of 3DES, or I use another algorithm (like Blowfish or Twofish).
Hammer. screw. Screwdriver. Nail. Pick the appropriate (tool,problem) pair from the list. There's no such thing as a magic bullet that solves all problems.
-E
-E
There are no magic bullets. Whether you pick a complete cryptosystem or build your own system from components, you're still going to have to exercise due dilligence.
-E
A stream cipher could be considered a "pseudo one-time pad", in that a shorter shared key, instead of being the keypad itself, is used to produce a pseudo-random keypad on both ends (which will be identical if the seeds are identical). The key is basically the seed to a cryptographic-quality PRNG in this case. This is a very tricky thing to get right, and most "pseudo one-time pads" are cracked within minutes of being released. Use RC4 or a block cipher feedback mode if you need a stream cipher, don't try to do this yourself at home.
-E
Of course, it's easy to do a stream cipher wrong, and you must change your key for each message transmitted in order to prevent known-plaintext attacks. (That is why most stream ciphers require an intitialization vector, which is basically a random part of the key used to ensure that the same key isn't used for two encipherments). You're much better off using something like RC4 where that kind of stuff has already been thought of and taken care of, or using a cipher feedback mode for a block cipher, which basically uses the block cipher as the bitstream generator. See Bruce Schneier's "Applied Cryptography" for more info.
_E
As for why Twofish is not yet widely used -- it's a new cipher. Only two years old. Most of the programs you cite as using Blowfish pre-date Twofish, and it is only recently that I would trust Twofish (after every reputable cipher designer in the world has had two years of trying to crack Twofish). I can't say the same about Serpent, BTW, various AES commentators have nasty things to say about it (mostly that it needs more rounds to ensure proper bit diffusion, which would erase its speed advantage). About all that's been said bad about Twofish is that it is rather klunky and ugly compared to the more elegant ciphers in the AES contest (but a secure, fast klunky!).
Disclaimer -- I did the Twofish module for Python... probably am biased :-).
-E
Does this guy have a reputation in the industry? Have I heard of him before? Has he released any meaningful Open Source software that would indicate that he has the skills I need? What kinds of things has he posted on USENET? Is the company he currently works for a leader in the industry, a small startup, or some behemoth where most people are marking time until retirement? What reason did he give for leaving that employer? Does that match up with what I know about that employer?
Most of the above merely requires being current in the industry -- NOT having a background check done.
-E
Heck, why not make it a requirement for employment that they wear a security bracelet on their leg and have wide-angle cameras in their car and in each room of their house hooked up to your security center! That way, you can immediately know when they're engaged in Non-Work Activity, and make sure to diffuse any attempts of theirs to Have A Life. Because all companies know that Having A Life decreases work productivity (all that excess time and energy that could be used for work!).
Personally, I've never worked for a company that requires background checks. I'd like to think that I have enough reputation that I never will. Last time I was out of work, I had a job waiting for me a week after I walked out the door of my previous employer, and could have started immediately if I could have driven across the country fast enough. If somebody needs to do a background check on me to know that I'm a productive member of the community, I probably don't want to work for him anyhow -- my work is publically available, and speaks for itself.
-E
Does Experian have to answer to customers? *NO*. Customers expect a "reasonably good" result from Experian, not perfect ones.
Does Experian have to worry about its reputation? *NO*. They know they have a bad reputation amongst the general public. They don't care. Their real customers (lenders, apartment complexes, etc.) don't care either, as long as the information is accurate a reasonable amount of the time.
Does Experian have to face the possiblity of negative consequences for errors in their database? *NO*. They got laws passed in Congress exempting them from all negative consequences..
Does Experian care?
Do I need to answer that last question?
-E
It does not bother me that Experian has a record of everything I've bought on credit for the past 7 years. It does bother me that if they make a mistake, I cannot sue them for defamation of character and libel if they refuse to remove the mistaken item.
It's odd that Republican pseudo-libertarians are all for civil contract law -- except for those portions of the civil code regarding defamation of character, libel, and other such forms of willful harm, which they're all for having the government suddenly toss out of the civil code.
-E
Arizona responded by giving people basically a "lifetime" driver's license. My driver's license is good until I'm 65 years old - and does not have a SSN on it. Thus only newbies to Arizona have the SSN on their driver's license.
-E
I'm setting up Telecheck this way at the moment for saying that I have a bad check (I don't), though thanks to the Debt Collector Protection Act (which is actually named something like the "Fair Credit Collection Act") the most punitive damages I can get is $1,000 above actual damages. Sad, but true, debt collectors, collectively the scum of the earth (otherwise they wouldn't survive as debt collectors) bought themselves protection in Congress. Even class actions can only get $500,000 max damages or (get this) 2% of the net worth of the scumbag max.
The real threat to freedom is the fact that government is now a bought-and-paid-for subsidiary of Corporate America.
-E