The HELP DESK?! Dude. I was in a proxy-war between two directors.
Yes, I got what I wanted. Yes, there was a business case. I had to load $100k+ of server software on this danged thing because I was going on about $30k of travel to several cities around the country within a couple weeks and needed to have my project components with me with the assumption of no (or slow) VPN connection.
The guy was just letting my director know that HE was in charge of IT purchases and he didn't approve of a couple previous _major_ purchases that successfully got around his gridiron. So, he gave me the screws over nothing just to make a point not to me, but to my boss.
This had nothing to do with money and everything to do with politics.
Lower rung? If you consider being one rung down from director "lower."
In a simple heirarchy, sure, your place on the totem determines how much crap you have to put up with. In a Byzantine bureaucracy like an academic institution, the whole point of the exercise is that your place on the totem has little to no bearing on how much b.s. you have to endure because the bureaucracy itself encourages sociopathic behavior as people assert the sovereignty of their little kingdoms. Even the executive director would biatch about this crap when he was battling for resources between institutes. Whether you win or lose these battles is inconsequential. The problem is, you have to fight them, no matter how high up the food chain you are.
At a very well-known, well-funded, academic institute, I had to write a formal business case to submit to not one but TWO directors to justify why I needed an extra 512MB in my laptop...despite the fact that it would at worst be about fifty bucks and, regardless, it was a FREE upgrade. A "business case." Honestly. I didn't have to write a !#%ing "business case" for the laptop itself! The amount of time spent biatching over that $0.00 basically could have paid for the whole g.d. machine, gig included.
There's an old one out there about Nelson Rockefeller, whose dyslexia was so bad that papers had to be numbered "Page One, Two, Three" etc. When asked how he filed his tax returns, he laughed and said "son, I have five floors of accountants just for that."...granted, I imagine there's more literal truth to that story than this one.
The term was coined by said social engineers, not their detractors. If the term has since become "ironic and derogatory," well, that's not very ironic, is it?
I have no doubt Mr. Mitnick possesses/\/\@|) $k1//z. He could be a Nobel Laureate in Quantum Physics having successfully developed a working unified field theory and I'd still say that if he called up a secretary claiming to be the IT director asking for her password so he could get access to the company credit card numbers -- he'd be a Nobel Laureate who happened to also be a con artist, not a "social engineer." Con artistry has been around a lot longer than any field of engineering, so it is a bit suspect when a very basic ploy is fobbed off as anything but what it is: a con.
Conning != "Social Engineering"
on
Mitnick on OSS
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· Score: 1, Interesting
Can we please stop calling common conning "social engineering?" The term itself if a con to make a common shyster seem like a legitimate professional. Unless he was involved in, say, eugenics or public education, this term painfully overstates the actions and qualifications of its practitioners.
The way criminal prosecution works is that the widest possible number of charges are filed in order to get the severest compounding of sentences. No matter how repugnant you may find a person or their acts, this practice of trumping up multiple charges for single offenses is dangerous.
I recently encountered a case where a 24yo claimed that she had been raped by a then friend of hers after they both were out getting completely drunk. He was convicted on separate charges for, basically, every place he stuck it. The definitions of each were such that the jury was compelled to convict on the same act multiple times. So, rather than getting twenty years in prison, he got forty--about what you'd get for first degree murder in most of Europe.
Short and simple -- an overbearing government that feels it knows how to raise kids better than parents is using government schools to achieve it's agends with kids.
The bureaucracy of public education is almost entirely local in nature, with the vast majority of the control being at county level or lower. You would be more correct, then, to say that communities have become overbearing in their attempt to raise each others kids. When book banning and arguments like ID come up, it's not some faceless government division a thousand miles away in Washington trying to control your life, it's your nosey neighbors and fellow PTA members doing the deeds.
It's just so much more comfortable to blame it all on "government" than to admit that you and your neighbors ARE the government in question and, ergo, it's not Big Brother's fault, it's yours.
This is one of the reasons Evolution has been rejected by a lot of people. Just as ultra-right wing Christians really turn people off, this kind of statement also turns people off.
So, rather than actually weighing the evidence and coming to a reasoned conclusion, just obstinately insist it is wrong owing to narcissistic injury? That sort of attitude is precisely what generates those statements, not the other way around.
Why would the contents, components or age of anything that exists on this planet or anywhere else in the universe have anything whatsoever to do with the existence of [g|G]od[s] any more than the contents of my ham sandwich have bugger all to do with the existence of leprechauns?
It is always tiresome when those with a great deal of free time and money laud the virtues of not pursuing the very things that made it possible for them to be in the position to muse about such things, blithely casting off as failures of self-actualization those who perform all those dull tasks that make everything in their lives possible, somehow unable to grasp that a great number of people are perfectly satisfied with simple work and simple lives, but not necessarily simple minds.
However, it is safe to say that what patents protect if not actual property, certainly is the product of the use of a great deal of property. What they protect against is the effective theft of those spent resources, without such protection the incentive to expend those resources would be drastically reduced.
At the very least, there is something there to discuss rather than just throwing the entire idea out the window, no matter how "eloquent" you think the description of that act is.
The selective logic here always fascinates me. No one complains that the coercion of the local police to give a beat down to the person who vandalizes, steals and/or uses your property without permission is "evil." Perhaps we should just say "gosh, tough luck, free market forces and all" when someone steals all your property and deprives you of your means to make a living from the resources you've invested years of your life into building... or is it only "evil" when the force of law is used by someone with a lot more property to lose than you?
There must have been one on the same subject to compare to.
Obviously, yes, there are different standards as last I checked the Washington Post does not print a "Boobies" or "Weiners" section, not that there's anything wrong with that...
The comment was preceded by "during EARTHQUAKES AND STORMS." If you lose connection for ten seconds on an average tuesday due to some network issue, your chances of being inconvenienced are pretty slim. If the telephone lines are snapped in an ice storm, that's probably a tad more inconvenient.
None of the problems seen as particular to VOIP (in the sense of Vonage at home etc) actually are and, besides, in the corporate environment, it has been a done deal for years. I haven't seen a large office that wasn't using IP phones in some years.
POTS doesn't run on magic fairy dust, it requires electricity, but it is assumed to be well backed-up, although it still suffers problems of cut lines etc. In "real" emergencies like earthquakes and storms, POTS goes out ALL THE TIME. How about the growing tide of wireless-only people? 911 problems are the same, towers go out, etc. With VOIP, you're running over POTS or cable. If YOU have a backup power system, much as is required on the provider end, there's little if any systemic difference in reliability--and really, most people no longer use telephones that run only on the power of the phone line itself, so while your telephone line may be just dandy, it doesn't do much good when the phone itself is dead.
AMD has been around since the 60's, whereas I've been using their chips for, oh, 25 years. At the time of the K5, they were just scraping up the pieces from a massive legal battle with Intel, which they won, btw. If you think that was "day one," pfft.
AMD is successful because from day one they've been in the business of making better products, not cheaper products. That they happen to be cheaper in some cases is just a sign that they have a successfully diverse product line.
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The HELP DESK?! Dude. I was in a proxy-war between two directors.
Yes, I got what I wanted. Yes, there was a business case. I had to load $100k+ of server software on this danged thing because I was going on about $30k of travel to several cities around the country within a couple weeks and needed to have my project components with me with the assumption of no (or slow) VPN connection.
The guy was just letting my director know that HE was in charge of IT purchases and he didn't approve of a couple previous _major_ purchases that successfully got around his gridiron. So, he gave me the screws over nothing just to make a point not to me, but to my boss.
This had nothing to do with money and everything to do with politics.
Lower rung? If you consider being one rung down from director "lower."
z antine
In a simple heirarchy, sure, your place on the totem determines how much crap you have to put up with. In a Byzantine bureaucracy like an academic institution, the whole point of the exercise is that your place on the totem has little to no bearing on how much b.s. you have to endure because the bureaucracy itself encourages sociopathic behavior as people assert the sovereignty of their little kingdoms. Even the executive director would biatch about this crap when he was battling for resources between institutes. Whether you win or lose these battles is inconsequential. The problem is, you have to fight them, no matter how high up the food chain you are.
See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derogatory_use_of_By
At a very well-known, well-funded, academic institute, I had to write a formal business case to submit to not one but TWO directors to justify why I needed an extra 512MB in my laptop...despite the fact that it would at worst be about fifty bucks and, regardless, it was a FREE upgrade. A "business case." Honestly. I didn't have to write a !#%ing "business case" for the laptop itself! The amount of time spent biatching over that $0.00 basically could have paid for the whole g.d. machine, gig included.
The "Union of South Africa" is never referred to as the "USA" because for the last 45 years, it has been referred to as the "RSA." ...just sayin'...
There's an old one out there about Nelson Rockefeller, whose dyslexia was so bad that papers had to be numbered "Page One, Two, Three" etc. When asked how he filed his tax returns, he laughed and said "son, I have five floors of accountants just for that." ...granted, I imagine there's more literal truth to that story than this one.
Hello? ...and I've been hanging around them from time to time since 1980. Meh.
The term was coined by said social engineers, not their detractors. If the term has since become "ironic and derogatory," well, that's not very ironic, is it?
I have no doubt Mr. Mitnick possesses /\/\@|) $k1//z. He could be a Nobel Laureate in Quantum Physics having successfully developed a working unified field theory and I'd still say that if he called up a secretary claiming to be the IT director asking for her password so he could get access to the company credit card numbers -- he'd be a Nobel Laureate who happened to also be a con artist, not a "social engineer." Con artistry has been around a lot longer than any field of engineering, so it is a bit suspect when a very basic ploy is fobbed off as anything but what it is: a con.
Can we please stop calling common conning "social engineering?" The term itself if a con to make a common shyster seem like a legitimate professional. Unless he was involved in, say, eugenics or public education, this term painfully overstates the actions and qualifications of its practitioners.
The way criminal prosecution works is that the widest possible number of charges are filed in order to get the severest compounding of sentences. No matter how repugnant you may find a person or their acts, this practice of trumping up multiple charges for single offenses is dangerous.
I recently encountered a case where a 24yo claimed that she had been raped by a then friend of hers after they both were out getting completely drunk. He was convicted on separate charges for, basically, every place he stuck it. The definitions of each were such that the jury was compelled to convict on the same act multiple times. So, rather than getting twenty years in prison, he got forty--about what you'd get for first degree murder in most of Europe.
Short and simple -- an overbearing government that feels it knows how to raise kids better than parents is using government schools to achieve it's agends with kids.
The bureaucracy of public education is almost entirely local in nature, with the vast majority of the control being at county level or lower. You would be more correct, then, to say that communities have become overbearing in their attempt to raise each others kids. When book banning and arguments like ID come up, it's not some faceless government division a thousand miles away in Washington trying to control your life, it's your nosey neighbors and fellow PTA members doing the deeds.
It's just so much more comfortable to blame it all on "government" than to admit that you and your neighbors ARE the government in question and, ergo, it's not Big Brother's fault, it's yours.
This is one of the reasons Evolution has been rejected by a lot of people. Just as ultra-right wing Christians really turn people off, this kind of statement also turns people off.
So, rather than actually weighing the evidence and coming to a reasoned conclusion, just obstinately insist it is wrong owing to narcissistic injury? That sort of attitude is precisely what generates those statements, not the other way around.
I think you have him confused with this man.
...and have been at least since they took out The Contract.
Why would the contents, components or age of anything that exists on this planet or anywhere else in the universe have anything whatsoever to do with the existence of [g|G]od[s] any more than the contents of my ham sandwich have bugger all to do with the existence of leprechauns?
You do realize that on a salary of eleventy googillian, billion, trillion dollars the FICA tax would be precisely $5,580 don't you?
I suppose they're really getting a deal on that $1,305 in Medicare tax too.
Duh.
It is always tiresome when those with a great deal of free time and money laud the virtues of not pursuing the very things that made it possible for them to be in the position to muse about such things, blithely casting off as failures of self-actualization those who perform all those dull tasks that make everything in their lives possible, somehow unable to grasp that a great number of people are perfectly satisfied with simple work and simple lives, but not necessarily simple minds.
...any more than a drivers license.
However, it is safe to say that what patents protect if not actual property, certainly is the product of the use of a great deal of property. What they protect against is the effective theft of those spent resources, without such protection the incentive to expend those resources would be drastically reduced.
At the very least, there is something there to discuss rather than just throwing the entire idea out the window, no matter how "eloquent" you think the description of that act is.
The selective logic here always fascinates me. No one complains that the coercion of the local police to give a beat down to the person who vandalizes, steals and/or uses your property without permission is "evil." Perhaps we should just say "gosh, tough luck, free market forces and all" when someone steals all your property and deprives you of your means to make a living from the resources you've invested years of your life into building... or is it only "evil" when the force of law is used by someone with a lot more property to lose than you?
There must have been one on the same subject to compare to.
Obviously, yes, there are different standards as last I checked the Washington Post does not print a "Boobies" or "Weiners" section, not that there's anything wrong with that...
The comment was preceded by "during EARTHQUAKES AND STORMS." If you lose connection for ten seconds on an average tuesday due to some network issue, your chances of being inconvenienced are pretty slim. If the telephone lines are snapped in an ice storm, that's probably a tad more inconvenient.
None of the problems seen as particular to VOIP (in the sense of Vonage at home etc) actually are and, besides, in the corporate environment, it has been a done deal for years. I haven't seen a large office that wasn't using IP phones in some years.
POTS doesn't run on magic fairy dust, it requires electricity, but it is assumed to be well backed-up, although it still suffers problems of cut lines etc. In "real" emergencies like earthquakes and storms, POTS goes out ALL THE TIME. How about the growing tide of wireless-only people? 911 problems are the same, towers go out, etc. With VOIP, you're running over POTS or cable. If YOU have a backup power system, much as is required on the provider end, there's little if any systemic difference in reliability--and really, most people no longer use telephones that run only on the power of the phone line itself, so while your telephone line may be just dandy, it doesn't do much good when the phone itself is dead.
AMD has been around since the 60's, whereas I've been using their chips for, oh, 25 years. At the time of the K5, they were just scraping up the pieces from a massive legal battle with Intel, which they won, btw. If you think that was "day one," pfft.
Are you KIDDING?
AMD is successful because from day one they've been in the business of making better products, not cheaper products. That they happen to be cheaper in some cases is just a sign that they have a successfully diverse product line.
egregious spelling, I'm thinking you're just jealous they passed the civil service exam.