You are correct. Ideally laws protect morality. In practice laws are selectively enforced and abused to serve the whims of those who can afford the largest legal team.
----- It's perfectly legal to sit there and write out what someone's saying to you over the phone, but illegal to have a recorder store? That's just dumb. ----- I agree.
----- two party consent laws are stupid ----- Ethically, consent laws period are just stupid. They're tactical loopholes used by people who know they're planning to do something which would otherwise be illegal. Either you have rights or you don't. Ethically you cannot take away someone's rights by cornering them into a position where the choice is implicitly "sign this or get fired".
This is America, though. Disregarding the pomp and dispaly there are no true ethics. The only real law is "might makes right".
If your employer puts something on the table and implicitly says,"Sign this or we'll make your life at work miserable in ways that you'll never be able to prove in court" what are you going to do? They've said it implicitly. They've said it without saying it. You don't have it written down, you don't have it on tape, but if you don't sign that sheet of paper then you're going to get every crap job and your performance review is going to look like hell. You might even be "downsized". No wrongful termination there.
My point is that illegality implies some underlying immorality to the inaction. How does signing a sheet of paper negate the underlying immorality which made the act illegal?
Once again: why not just have slaves sign a piece of paper in which they agree to nothing more than a crude shack, a small plot of sharecropped land, and arbitrary termination at any time at the discretion of the landowner? Opportunism at its finest.
I'm not trolling. You're behind the times. The prevailing philosophy in America is the witch-hunt philosophy. If you're innocent you have nothing to hide. If you feel you're being watched too closely you're paranoid and will be promptly turned over to pharmaceutical companies and counselors for experimental therapy.
You have no privacy. You need no privacy. This is all for your protection. Go to work, pay taxes, stay out of trouble. Do nothing, be nothing. Those in power are there for good reason. You are not in power for good reason.
Okay. I'm not trolling but I am using a unique form to express my disdain for the hypocrisy of today's American political and legal system.
Once again we demonstrate that, in our current society, law is meaningless as long as you sign an agreement. With this type of mindset we never should have fought a Civil War. Just have the slaves sign an employee agreement in which they consent to accepting nothing more than a shack, a plot of land, and arbitrary termination at any time.
When is America going to wake up out of this hypocrisy?
I just saw a banner ad on/. where MS is handing out free security management tools on their website. I have a strong suspicion that, if one could reverse engineer the code, much of it has been translated, probably illegally verbatim, from commonly available open source security management code like Nmap, Satan, ethereal, tcpdump, etc.
I agree but I don't think the rest of the world cares. They just want to label and shelve us as tools to be used and thrown away as convenience and fancy strike them.
It's okay. Once we die it'll all be over. No more pain, no more ostracision, no more oppression, no more being pushed by management through hoops and hurdles and then criticized for being a performer, no more cold, no more boring workdays... just a nice warm sleep.
I should've used -I INPUT 1 to make certain that it's the top of the list.
In order to prevent the propagation of virii spread through reality, this should be accompanied by a corresponding rule in the FORWARD chain also using -I FORWARD 1.
As I see it, REJECTing input from reality only encourages antagonization because it gives, at bare minimum, response and acknowledgement. To be analagous with Hunt for Red October the goal is to make like a hole in the network.
----- you just know this guy could get a job in it someday (despite the fact that he learned all the stuff just for fun) ----- You get no job unless you can afford a PhD or are a real good fast-talker.
Real geeks became the way they are because they couldn't afford to spend time being socially acceptable. They turned their efforts to acquiring hobbies which would occupy their time.
True geeks are doomed due to the social barriers of financial advancement. No PhD? Unless you're a fast talker and a good swindler (ie. not geeks. geeks are socially restricted) then you max out around $60k/yr. That hardly pays taxes anymore.
I've never implied that Windows programmers were retards.
Windows was was not created with the same goals, nor does it have the same intense commitment to excellence, that is definitive of Apple and *NIX. Windows was created as a corporate entity whose first purpose is to deliver a product and maximize earnings. Windows had business competition that Apple never had to worry about because Apple used a closed model where Windows dealt with an architecture that was much more open. Consequently Apple could afford to devote more time to troubleshooting and improvement while Windows had to release a buggy beta Win95 in order to beat OS/2 to market.
My ethics are stringent however. If MS couldn't deliver a good product they should've done what the.coms did in 2000--dump the shares, bankrupt the business, and run off with the money. Delivering a bad product to the open market was the most irresponsible thing they ever could have done. Let the public whine about computers being hard. Other than the horrendous.com boom-bust cycle of the 90s which left most of us bleeding and only a priveleged few with increased wealth what positive effect have computers had on society that results directly from putting Windows in the home of every American who could really give a flying patoot about their OS?
Medical advances? Scientific advances? All of the important advances would have been made without Windows. The only thing the widespread distribution of Windows did was allow a large group of backroom hacks create pretty spreadsheets to wow, amaze, and swindle investors.
The shell is a scripting host. There's always a subsystem that malicious code can get to if it can find an outlet in the application. Mozilla is way too big and crashes way too often for me to trust that web exploits won't start targeting Mozilla to deliver payloads.
----- The whole point of bringing up OS X was as a proof-of-concept that the sort of user-friendliness which Linux is moving towards does not automatically mean weak security ----- I think everyone's ignoring that Apple was able to prevent the unitiated general run-of-the-mill script hacker from exploring the innards of their system for many many years before Windows became mainstream. Sticking with their ultra-super-secret closed model they've bred an OS that's secure not just because of the code it runs but because of the mindset and the historical knowledge and background of their top level programmers and designers.
If we would take the Mach32 kernel and give it to a bunch of MS jockeys and ask them to produce OS X I have no doubt that it would be a security nightmare. Apple's been refining their methods for decades.
It'll only take one vulnerability in Mozilla coupled with an unknown root exploit to make that a vicious reality. Reuse of the same Mozilla exploit farther down the page (or in the next click-link) makes anything possible.
I'll probably notice that my directories look quite different in my shells, but what about the user that doesn't alias dir='ls -la'? What about the user that doesn't eval dircolors? What about the user that doesn't use shells at all?
The OP didn't know it, but they hit it close on the head.
When users begin to install their systems do they:
a) Make XMMS suid b) chmod 0666/dev/dsp c) chown root.audio/dev/dsp && chmod 0660/dev/dsp d) add users to group: audio as needed
I see a prevalence of b) with some unknowledge water-cooler types hooking their colleagues on a). I also forsee Shockwave exploits which manage to use/dev/dsp as a world useable i/o device.
If we make Linux useable the majority of the migrating users won't bother to learn why b) is a bad choice.
----- Annonymous anything is annoying to the military. They need to be able to trust who and what they're dealing with ----- The military has no trust. The only reason why anonymous software bothers the military is because they don't have a clear idea who they're going to attack next.
I question why we should even care about the military. Other than chasing imaginary straw men across the world and disrupting thousands of innocent lives wherever they go, what are they doing for us? Are we really afraid that some nut is going to land an invading force on US soil? The thought alone is almost as ridiculous as anyone trying it. Are we really afraid that someone is going to lob a few nukes onto US soil? If that happens then no amount of submarines and tanks and floating palaces and flying planes is going to stop them.
----- The NSA has had one at Fort Meade for many years. I'm sure there are others ----- Four local established grandmothers and seven cadets plugging wires into breadboards with light-bulb sized vacuum tubes does not a chip factory make.
Real chipmaking technology is held and used by the people that do it best: Intel, AMD, Motorola. All others are think tanks.
I never said it wasn't capitalist. Of course it's capitalist. I don't know of many nations still using barter and trade.
Why am I not out protesting? Who the heck wants to be one of those freaks getting nailed with a rubber bullet? Peaceful protests? My butt. Society doesn't have many circuses left. Modern society has protests for entertainment.
As for this being my government. All I have to say is,"Hardly." Democracy is rigged. You do know that, don't you?
Corporations are not the result of capitalism. Even barter and trade systems had corporations. They existed mainly in shipping and distributing because that's all there really was for business back in that era.
If you're trying to blame the existence of greed on the presence of a trade system which uses capital known as "capitalism", well, you might as well tie the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks on the position of the moon and stars on that particular day.
Greed happens, bub. Don't blame me or say I'm wrong because of it. I'm just trying to find my next meal in this mess.
This probably would've been prevented if they had compiled using -O3 and -march=athlon-xp.
Someone said "always go with package installs" and that person had more seniority.
Unum. 'I'm not sure that more testing would have revealed that. Unfortunately, that's kind of the nature of software... you may never find the problem. I don't think that's unique to control systems or any particular vendor software.'
----- It is my theory that capitalism, or more precisely free markets, lead to monopolies and oligopolies ----- Which may be true _if_ we had anything resembling a free-market system in the US.
I am not an accountant and I don't have the numbers but we can make a few rough guesstimates which illustrate the principle. The average worker loses about 1/3 of their paycheck to taxes before they even get to cash the check. Don't think that money goes into locked coffers marked "social security", "medicare", or "road building". Those coffers are easily plundered and subject to paper shuffling just like any other government coffer. Of what the worker takes home at least 6% of it is going back to the government when the money eventually gets spent. If that money is spent on fuel, tobacco, alcohol, electricity, internet access, water, natural gas, or natural oil then there are going to be additional taxes on those charges. If that money is spent on certifications, training, or registration then part of those fees is returned to the government to maintain accreditation.
From an estimate based upon the worker's viewpoint the government will eventually claim close to 60% of the paycheck. For what? "Road-building, social security, medicare" I'm sure.
If an estimate is formed based upon the government's budget then it becomes apparent that the government is more of a pyramid scheme than a civil service. Year after year that taxpayers continue to fund an entity which does nothing more but increase the size of a loan to a small circle of bankers.
The bottom line is: How can we have a free market when it is the politicians deciding where the majority of the money is spent? Clearly there's a conflict of interest.
----- Imagine a world where the better you get at something the more punished you are ----- That's not what this is about at all.
----- is why in the hell would I even try to get market share in the first place since I now have a strong fiscal insentive NOT to try to ----- This is about responsibility to the society. Ideally as a company gets larger and its product holds a greater amount of market share the price of that product comes down and the quality increases. That's ideal.
In reality the CEOs, VPs, executive board members, and controlling shareowners are a collective group of greed freaks who have no scruples about lecherously milking the company and the consumer base dry. There's no way around it and no law that can prevent it. We can't legislate fair play.
In order for big companies with controlling market share to fulfill their social duty it is necessary to tax them at a higher rate.
On that note, however, it'll never work. The greed driven group at the top will continue to swindle the entire system and the consumer base will end up paying even more for the product to cover for the tax. No CEO, VP, executive board member, or controlling shareowner is going to let their personal profit margin be squeezed by something as insignificant as a tax. It's easy enough to restructure the accouting ledger and pass the bill on to someone else.
Slashdot Mirror
You are correct. Ideally laws protect morality. In practice laws are selectively enforced and abused to serve the whims of those who can afford the largest legal team.
-----
It's perfectly legal to sit there and write out what someone's saying to you over the phone, but illegal to have a recorder store? That's just dumb.
-----
I agree.
-----
two party consent laws are stupid
-----
Ethically, consent laws period are just stupid. They're tactical loopholes used by people who know they're planning to do something which would otherwise be illegal. Either you have rights or you don't. Ethically you cannot take away someone's rights by cornering them into a position where the choice is implicitly "sign this or get fired".
This is America, though. Disregarding the pomp and dispaly there are no true ethics. The only real law is "might makes right".
If your employer puts something on the table and implicitly says,"Sign this or we'll make your life at work miserable in ways that you'll never be able to prove in court" what are you going to do? They've said it implicitly. They've said it without saying it. You don't have it written down, you don't have it on tape, but if you don't sign that sheet of paper then you're going to get every crap job and your performance review is going to look like hell. You might even be "downsized". No wrongful termination there.
It isn't consent if there's no real choice.
I would like seven red ones, four blue ones, and twelve of the lique-gel-caps. :)
My point is that illegality implies some underlying immorality to the inaction. How does signing a sheet of paper negate the underlying immorality which made the act illegal?
Once again: why not just have slaves sign a piece of paper in which they agree to nothing more than a crude shack, a small plot of sharecropped land, and arbitrary termination at any time at the discretion of the landowner? Opportunism at its finest.
I'm not trolling. You're behind the times. The prevailing philosophy in America is the witch-hunt philosophy. If you're innocent you have nothing to hide. If you feel you're being watched too closely you're paranoid and will be promptly turned over to pharmaceutical companies and counselors for experimental therapy.
You have no privacy. You need no privacy. This is all for your protection. Go to work, pay taxes, stay out of trouble. Do nothing, be nothing. Those in power are there for good reason. You are not in power for good reason.
Okay. I'm not trolling but I am using a unique form to express my disdain for the hypocrisy of today's American political and legal system.
Once again we demonstrate that, in our current society, law is meaningless as long as you sign an agreement. With this type of mindset we never should have fought a Civil War. Just have the slaves sign an employee agreement in which they consent to accepting nothing more than a shack, a plot of land, and arbitrary termination at any time.
When is America going to wake up out of this hypocrisy?
I just saw a banner ad on /. where MS is handing out free security management tools on their website. I have a strong suspicion that, if one could reverse engineer the code, much of it has been translated, probably illegally verbatim, from commonly available open source security management code like Nmap, Satan, ethereal, tcpdump, etc.
But who could afford to challenge them about it?
I agree but I don't think the rest of the world cares. They just want to label and shelve us as tools to be used and thrown away as convenience and fancy strike them.
It's okay. Once we die it'll all be over. No more pain, no more ostracision, no more oppression, no more being pushed by management through hoops and hurdles and then criticized for being a performer, no more cold, no more boring workdays... just a nice warm sleep.
At least I hope it's warm.
I should've used -I INPUT 1 to make certain that it's the top of the list.
In order to prevent the propagation of virii spread through reality, this should be accompanied by a corresponding rule in the FORWARD chain also using -I FORWARD 1.
As I see it, REJECTing input from reality only encourages antagonization because it gives, at bare minimum, response and acknowledgement. To be analagous with Hunt for Red October the goal is to make like a hole in the network.
iptables -t filter -A INPUT -i reality0 -j DROP
-----
you just know this guy could get a job in it someday (despite the fact that he learned all the stuff just for fun)
-----
You get no job unless you can afford a PhD or are a real good fast-talker.
Real geeks became the way they are because they couldn't afford to spend time being socially acceptable. They turned their efforts to acquiring hobbies which would occupy their time.
True geeks are doomed due to the social barriers of financial advancement. No PhD? Unless you're a fast talker and a good swindler (ie. not geeks. geeks are socially restricted) then you max out around $60k/yr. That hardly pays taxes anymore.
I've never implied that Windows programmers were retards.
.coms did in 2000--dump the shares, bankrupt the business, and run off with the money. Delivering a bad product to the open market was the most irresponsible thing they ever could have done. Let the public whine about computers being hard. Other than the horrendous .com boom-bust cycle of the 90s which left most of us bleeding and only a priveleged few with increased wealth what positive effect have computers had on society that results directly from putting Windows in the home of every American who could really give a flying patoot about their OS?
Windows was was not created with the same goals, nor does it have the same intense commitment to excellence, that is definitive of Apple and *NIX. Windows was created as a corporate entity whose first purpose is to deliver a product and maximize earnings. Windows had business competition that Apple never had to worry about because Apple used a closed model where Windows dealt with an architecture that was much more open. Consequently Apple could afford to devote more time to troubleshooting and improvement while Windows had to release a buggy beta Win95 in order to beat OS/2 to market.
My ethics are stringent however. If MS couldn't deliver a good product they should've done what the
Medical advances? Scientific advances? All of the important advances would have been made without Windows. The only thing the widespread distribution of Windows did was allow a large group of backroom hacks create pretty spreadsheets to wow, amaze, and swindle investors.
The shell is a scripting host. There's always a subsystem that malicious code can get to if it can find an outlet in the application. Mozilla is way too big and crashes way too often for me to trust that web exploits won't start targeting Mozilla to deliver payloads.
DragonLance references are worth points in my book.
-----
The whole point of bringing up OS X was as a proof-of-concept that the sort of user-friendliness which Linux is moving towards does not automatically mean weak security
-----
I think everyone's ignoring that Apple was able to prevent the unitiated general run-of-the-mill script hacker from exploring the innards of their system for many many years before Windows became mainstream. Sticking with their ultra-super-secret closed model they've bred an OS that's secure not just because of the code it runs but because of the mindset and the historical knowledge and background of their top level programmers and designers.
If we would take the Mach32 kernel and give it to a bunch of MS jockeys and ask them to produce OS X I have no doubt that it would be a security nightmare. Apple's been refining their methods for decades.
-----
Usability && security
-----
Egads! That should the other way around!
There's no way I want my system executing usability before it's had a chance to evaluate the return value of security.
It'll only take one vulnerability in Mozilla coupled with an unknown root exploit to make that a vicious reality. Reuse of the same Mozilla exploit farther down the page (or in the next click-link) makes anything possible.
I'll probably notice that my directories look quite different in my shells, but what about the user that doesn't alias dir='ls -la'? What about the user that doesn't eval dircolors? What about the user that doesn't use shells at all?
*shiver*
The OP didn't know it, but they hit it close on the head.
/dev/dsp /dev/dsp && chmod 0660 /dev/dsp
/dev/dsp as a world useable i/o device.
When users begin to install their systems do they:
a) Make XMMS suid
b) chmod 0666
c) chown root.audio
d) add users to group: audio as needed
I see a prevalence of b) with some unknowledge water-cooler types hooking their colleagues on a). I also forsee Shockwave exploits which manage to use
If we make Linux useable the majority of the migrating users won't bother to learn why b) is a bad choice.
-----
Annonymous anything is annoying to the military. They need to be able to trust who and what they're dealing with
-----
The military has no trust. The only reason why anonymous software bothers the military is because they don't have a clear idea who they're going to attack next.
I question why we should even care about the military. Other than chasing imaginary straw men across the world and disrupting thousands of innocent lives wherever they go, what are they doing for us? Are we really afraid that some nut is going to land an invading force on US soil? The thought alone is almost as ridiculous as anyone trying it. Are we really afraid that someone is going to lob a few nukes onto US soil? If that happens then no amount of submarines and tanks and floating palaces and flying planes is going to stop them.
-----
The NSA has had one at Fort Meade for many years. I'm sure there are others
-----
Four local established grandmothers and seven cadets plugging wires into breadboards with light-bulb sized vacuum tubes does not a chip factory make.
Real chipmaking technology is held and used by the people that do it best: Intel, AMD, Motorola. All others are think tanks.
I never said it wasn't capitalist. Of course it's capitalist. I don't know of many nations still using barter and trade.
Why am I not out protesting? Who the heck wants to be one of those freaks getting nailed with a rubber bullet? Peaceful protests? My butt. Society doesn't have many circuses left. Modern society has protests for entertainment.
As for this being my government. All I have to say is,"Hardly." Democracy is rigged. You do know that, don't you?
Corporations are not the result of capitalism. Even barter and trade systems had corporations. They existed mainly in shipping and distributing because that's all there really was for business back in that era.
If you're trying to blame the existence of greed on the presence of a trade system which uses capital known as "capitalism", well, you might as well tie the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks on the position of the moon and stars on that particular day.
Greed happens, bub. Don't blame me or say I'm wrong because of it. I'm just trying to find my next meal in this mess.
This probably would've been prevented if they had compiled using -O3 and -march=athlon-xp.
Someone said "always go with package installs" and that person had more seniority.
Unum. 'I'm not sure that more testing would have revealed that. Unfortunately, that's kind of the nature of software... you may never find the problem. I don't think that's unique to control systems or any particular vendor software.'
-----
It is my theory that capitalism, or more precisely free markets, lead to monopolies and oligopolies
-----
Which may be true _if_ we had anything resembling a free-market system in the US.
I am not an accountant and I don't have the numbers but we can make a few rough guesstimates which illustrate the principle. The average worker loses about 1/3 of their paycheck to taxes before they even get to cash the check. Don't think that money goes into locked coffers marked "social security", "medicare", or "road building". Those coffers are easily plundered and subject to paper shuffling just like any other government coffer. Of what the worker takes home at least 6% of it is going back to the government when the money eventually gets spent. If that money is spent on fuel, tobacco, alcohol, electricity, internet access, water, natural gas, or natural oil then there are going to be additional taxes on those charges. If that money is spent on certifications, training, or registration then part of those fees is returned to the government to maintain accreditation.
From an estimate based upon the worker's viewpoint the government will eventually claim close to 60% of the paycheck. For what? "Road-building, social security, medicare" I'm sure.
If an estimate is formed based upon the government's budget then it becomes apparent that the government is more of a pyramid scheme than a civil service. Year after year that taxpayers continue to fund an entity which does nothing more but increase the size of a loan to a small circle of bankers.
The bottom line is: How can we have a free market when it is the politicians deciding where the majority of the money is spent? Clearly there's a conflict of interest.
-----
Imagine a world where the better you get at something the more punished you are
-----
That's not what this is about at all.
-----
is why in the hell would I even try to get market share in the first place since I now have a strong fiscal insentive NOT to try to
-----
This is about responsibility to the society. Ideally as a company gets larger and its product holds a greater amount of market share the price of that product comes down and the quality increases. That's ideal.
In reality the CEOs, VPs, executive board members, and controlling shareowners are a collective group of greed freaks who have no scruples about lecherously milking the company and the consumer base dry. There's no way around it and no law that can prevent it. We can't legislate fair play.
In order for big companies with controlling market share to fulfill their social duty it is necessary to tax them at a higher rate.
On that note, however, it'll never work. The greed driven group at the top will continue to swindle the entire system and the consumer base will end up paying even more for the product to cover for the tax. No CEO, VP, executive board member, or controlling shareowner is going to let their personal profit margin be squeezed by something as insignificant as a tax. It's easy enough to restructure the accouting ledger and pass the bill on to someone else.