.. There is also an assumption that all thefts are registered and are hence available data.
Is it not possible that one would not register a complaint with, say, a small local insurance broker (or just tell him over golf his secretary needs to check signatures better) whereas one might fill in a form for a multinational, since that's the only way you get a result (like cancelling your compromised card)
Data needed would be
-number of thefts
-number of customers
-volume of business
-some kind of 'estimated level of reporting' percentage
Possibly also 'level of problem' - is it a 'bigger' theft to have a cheque for £50 mailed to the wrong address, or to have a credit card opened in your name, or to have a gun purchased using your ID? Do some companies have only say 0.001 of accounts breached - but when security does fail, it fails catastrophically, to the tune of millions of dollars?
If someone ran off with my numbers, I'd be more concerned that they didn't breach my 'good name' than actual money value - since my career relies on being entirely free from crookedness.(Dealing with money lost is what ID theft insurance is for) This however is a different metric - 'how many' is not the same as 'how bad' - which suffers from being non-numeric, and hence hard to statistify.
The reason given for wanting to use animal material last time this came up (probably the start of the consult process) is the chronic shortage of human stem cells. Why is this the case?
Nobody seems to have asked for donated human material, with consent to use the cells in this fashion. I'm sure male cells can't be hard to obtain...
(Hmm - "Wank for research material! Form orderly queue here!")
Why is it that the hairdresser throws away my hair, donating blood is laudable, organ donation saves lives - but donating some of my hundreds of useless eggs (how many kids I am realistically going to have?) is morally outrageous and really quite hard to do - neither my doctor nor the local fertility clinic had any clue on how to do such.
Who do we vote out / mob / de-fund to get some common sense injected to reasearch ethics committees?
Lack of women where?
My programming classes average about 1/3 to 1/2 women (is this influenced by my being a female tutor?), and my roleplay society is half and half. Maybe this is from the same bag of stereotypes that claims all IT grads are either young males, pale and thin, wearing thickrimmed glasses, and having no social skills - or older males, bearded and wearing sandals?
There are precious few women wargamers though - once on of my mates was asked to change her low-cut top in a tournament, so's not to distract her opponent!
Of my university roleplay society, the top 4 degree groups were english (creative writing and drama); biological sciences (aliens! cyborgs!); history (when did they invent muskets?); and information sciences (including everything from electronic engineering through IT to maths)
The shared skillset is great - especially if one is playing in not traditional sword-and-sorcery, but science-fiction or cyberpunk genres.
Do roleplayers make better programmers? Now, there's a research project for someone - "Should IT companies offer RPGs in preference to paintball or squash as 'management training' games"?
Re:Wrong argument - need a better solution
on
RIAA Sues a Child
·
· Score: 1
Ok - this is getting silly. Let's look at this from a sensible marketing perspective (it's not actually an oxymoron, honestly). Which kind of individuals buy the most music? Probably DJs. Like me (occasionally) and some of my housemates.
Total music downloads, between the 8 of us: Around 2000.
Of those 2000, those actually available on printed CD, the kind you pay for - not freebie, bootleg or white label: about 50.
Of those 50, those we own on CD: 87. (why is it that every rock compilation I own has 'Freebird' on it?) If it gets on the house's server, and four of us like it, all four may well buy it, to be able to play it. Which BTW means more club-ites hear it, think 'must get that' and make the RIAA money by buying records
So - did the RIAA make money out of our downloading music off the Web? Hell, yeah! I wouldn't own several CDs if I hadn't heard them first (remember, DJs are the kind of people who will buy a whole album, for one track they want and another they might use)
The only thing the RIAA are doing by prosecuting like this is to make any kind of music downloading more difficult - which, as I have shown here, actually hurts their bottom line. Anybody really want to argue now that 'they're just protecting their interests (before we even get to how much of their cashflow doesn't get to the artists)?'
I used to work in telemarketing when I was a kid. 14 year olds have basically 3 employment options - waiting tables, delivering papers, and telemarketing. Telemarketing is indoors and not on your feet all the time. The company I worked for wanted you to transfer from a hire purchase agreement at 22% to a 'flexible loan account' at 8%.
We only ever contacted existing customers, and the transfer did mean you ended up paying less interest, if you continued paying off at the same rate. Thus I refute the concept that ALL telemarketing is for useless stuff - some may be, but not all. (The way the company made its money, if you tell someone they have a credit limit of £1000, and the £950 they spent on a telly on that account, they will more than likely spend the other £50, and keep spending what they pay back.)
The following 2 summers I did several telecanvassing and telesales jobs. Hey,it paid for all those luxurious extras like school uniform and the optional obligatory field trips
Most of the people I knew who did this job didn't choose it. They were either students using it to pay for college, or the people couldn't get dole for one reason or another, and have to take what there is. Now.
In Britain, there is no national DNC list. There is, and has been for several years, the Data Protection Act; this guarantees you the right to demand any information on you is deleted. It does not solve the problem of calling for the first time, but it will solve the calling-back thing. I don't know how many actual prosecutions there have been (likely most is sorted out-of-court); but enough for the DP Agency to have steadily been hireing lawyers for the last decade.
Having finished college, and got a phone, I am always at least polite to telemarketers - even though 90% of them aren't for me. (we inherited a business number - most calls start with asking for the purchasing department) Most of them don't really want to be there - but when it's 'telemarket or starve' or 'telemarket or give up college' - even/.ers have to have a little sympathy. Even if we don't ever buy anything.
For the record, I've never had a telemarketer be abusive - some are a little insistent, but no-one has ever sworn at me. Possibly the fact I've never sworn at them has something to do with this.
Wanting to learn and being able to learn are not synonymous
Ok, many people have used cars as an analogy. My local driving school offers 12 * 1 hr lessons, plus practical and theory exam, for a bulk deal of £300 all in. Lets assume for the moment that it takes a similar timescale and cost to use a computer.
Now imagine walking in to the bosses office, and telling him that not only can you not do your job for twelve weeks, but its going to cost another week-and-a-half's wages (at minimum wage) to get you to the minimum competency level. Then you can actually start practicing and getting good. Most bosses' response: Mind the door on your way out.
If you don't have a job, of course, you have plenty of time. However, since IT courses cost money somewhere along the line, so you still won't be able to get the training you need, since IT isn't seen as a necessity by jobcentres, and dole sure as sugar won't leave enough to pay for it.
Unless you are lucky enough to have family or friends to help you learn, computers are going to remain a mystery. This is likely to be the norm for about another 20 or so years - until the majority of working people had to do IT at school.
Then we need to persuade schools to stop using BBC micros and other obsolete technologies...
Next problem. Terminologies change fast. How long ago did we only need kilo and mega to describe memory? 5 years? Now my other half wants a terabyte server for Xmas. Therefore every computer user in order to be compliant with new technologies must report for a weeks training every three months....
...except when its printed out, it still often looks like plain text.
companies that have an IT specialist in the HR department accept emailed CVs. Companies who don't, may well be scared of the shiny box and only accept hardcopy. (most colleges and universites fall in the latter box)
Many of us still need something that can be knocked together in an hour or so, is WYSIWYG and prints out clean.
Stupid people - or ill-educated. Or IT-illiterate. Or too broke to live elsewhere than in a part of town where the denizens would quite cheerfully hack off a body part to get enough money for the next fix, and definitely have no qualms about hitting you until you tell them your PIN... (I don't live that way, but a couple of my students do)
As usual, its the little guy who gets it in the shorts. Like, the ATM in our local bank swallowed everyone's cashcards for a week, on the premise that 'you should by now have recieved your new chip n pin card'. The bank got round to sending them out two weeks later.
So several people were left unable to get at their nice (newly all-electronic) dole cheques.
Technology like this is great until you let it loose on real people and real bureaucracy
I have a laptop bag. It has handbag stuff in it. (like wallet and tissues and receipts and last weeks lesson plans and assignment submissions and the minutes of the meeting I have this evening(no, really))
If I sign out a laptop from the college, it travels in my backpack. Cos its heavy. And I get the bus to work.:)
Is it in any way accurate, the security advice you get when you sign out a laptop, that you shouldn't ever use a laptop bag as its an advert 'hi there mr pickpocket, I'm carrying really valuable stuff'?
Though the college laptops do not fall under that category - more like 'worthless hunk o junk'
And being geeks, surely we should all have towels in our kitbags?
Universities, schools, and libraries (in the UK at least) and other places that have shared IPs tend to also have a Terms Of Use - a contract you have to agree to, to use those computers. Breach of such agreements (and getting caught) can lead to an assortment of scenarios depending on the institution
If you download porn on the school computer, you might just get detention.
The library catches you copying CDs, you'll probably just get banned from using that service.
If you breach TOU at Bangor Uni, and are doing a CS degree, you can get booted off your course.
Some places will even call the cops.
Most shared use machines will have some kind of record of who was logged on when.
Wow! you obviously built your own PC.
I can say this with confidence, since many, perhaps most, large consumer electronix retailers don't supply you with any software discs at all. Your PC crashes, you just send the box back (and pay the extortionate maintainance costs)
On that note, do all purchasers who work for government departments have IT qualifications? If not, and they use Local Big Electronics Shop (tm), aren't they going to get MS Office packaged in by default - meaning it 'just creates hassle' to remove it (like you ever can cleanly) and replace with Open Office or similar.
It's not the cost of retraining the IT staff thats the problem, it's the cost of retraining Purchasing!
this TCO thingie comparison only works when you have hundreds of employees;dozens of systems; and server rather than peer to peer networks
But for all of those SMEs with 5 or less people, if one of them knows Linux (and lets face it, it's not like any of the major distribs advertise, so most new users have to come from word of mouth), training time is minimised since at least 1/5 of your workforce is already competent...
So the question is - you could have a Linux based computer for £500 or a Windows box for over a grand and a half. (identical hardware, I've just done this comparison for two businesses)
IF the installer is even a bit savvy, and tweaks the desktop settings right, the other 4 users need barely know they've changed systems.
On the issue of 'who should be training skillset X' (be this mainframe maintainance, a particular OS or language or in fact any specific technology)
Universities and colleges in the UK have three whole years to teach in, right? That should be plenty of time to explore all kinds of technologies, learn a couple of different languages...everything you need.
Except that each year is nine months long - 33 weeks generally.
Each week has a 35 hr max lecture hours, and each lecture can only contain about 45 mins of new material.
Add it up and you get.... just under 4000 hours.
This has to begin with 'This is a computer. You need to log on like this... This is a WP...'
I teach fundamental computing. The curriculum is jam-packed and overstuffed already - all we can do is try to skim over what's needed, and hope you pick up enough learning skills to understand what you find on-the-job.
If people are needed to maintain IBM mainframes, the company that chose to subscribe to that specific technology needs to train people to use it.
Slashdot Mirror
.. There is also an assumption that all thefts are registered and are hence available data.
Is it not possible that one would not register a complaint with, say, a small local insurance broker (or just tell him over golf his secretary needs to check signatures better) whereas one might fill in a form for a multinational, since that's the only way you get a result (like cancelling your compromised card)
Data needed would be
-number of thefts
-number of customers
-volume of business
-some kind of 'estimated level of reporting' percentage
Possibly also 'level of problem' - is it a 'bigger' theft to have a cheque for £50 mailed to the wrong address, or to have a credit card opened in your name, or to have a gun purchased using your ID? Do some companies have only say 0.001 of accounts breached - but when security does fail, it fails catastrophically, to the tune of millions of dollars?
If someone ran off with my numbers, I'd be more concerned that they didn't breach my 'good name' than actual money value - since my career relies on being entirely free from crookedness.(Dealing with money lost is what ID theft insurance is for) This however is a different metric - 'how many' is not the same as 'how bad' - which suffers from being non-numeric, and hence hard to statistify.
Nobody seems to have asked for donated human material, with consent to use the cells in this fashion. I'm sure male cells can't be hard to obtain...
(Hmm - "Wank for research material! Form orderly queue here!")
Why is it that the hairdresser throws away my hair, donating blood is laudable, organ donation saves lives - but donating some of my hundreds of useless eggs (how many kids I am realistically going to have?) is morally outrageous and really quite hard to do - neither my doctor nor the local fertility clinic had any clue on how to do such.
Who do we vote out / mob / de-fund to get some common sense injected to reasearch ethics committees?
Lack of women where?
My programming classes average about 1/3 to 1/2 women (is this influenced by my being a female tutor?), and my roleplay society is half and half. Maybe this is from the same bag of stereotypes that claims all IT grads are either young males, pale and thin, wearing thickrimmed glasses, and having no social skills - or older males, bearded and wearing sandals?
There are precious few women wargamers though - once on of my mates was asked to change her low-cut top in a tournament, so's not to distract her opponent!
Of my university roleplay society, the top 4 degree groups were english (creative writing and drama); biological sciences (aliens! cyborgs!); history (when did they invent muskets?); and information sciences (including everything from electronic engineering through IT to maths)
The shared skillset is great - especially if one is playing in not traditional sword-and-sorcery, but science-fiction or cyberpunk genres.
Do roleplayers make better programmers? Now, there's a research project for someone - "Should IT companies offer RPGs in preference to paintball or squash as 'management training' games"?
Ok - this is getting silly. Let's look at this from a sensible marketing perspective (it's not actually an oxymoron, honestly). Which kind of individuals buy the most music? Probably DJs. Like me (occasionally) and some of my housemates.
Total music downloads, between the 8 of us: Around 2000.
Of those 2000, those actually available on printed CD, the kind you pay for - not freebie, bootleg or white label: about 50.
Of those 50, those we own on CD: 87. (why is it that every rock compilation I own has 'Freebird' on it?) If it gets on the house's server, and four of us like it, all four may well buy it, to be able to play it. Which BTW means more club-ites hear it, think 'must get that' and make the RIAA money by buying records
So - did the RIAA make money out of our downloading music off the Web? Hell, yeah! I wouldn't own several CDs if I hadn't heard them first (remember, DJs are the kind of people who will buy a whole album, for one track they want and another they might use)
The only thing the RIAA are doing by prosecuting like this is to make any kind of music downloading more difficult - which, as I have shown here, actually hurts their bottom line. Anybody really want to argue now that 'they're just protecting their interests (before we even get to how much of their cashflow doesn't get to the artists)?'
I used to work in telemarketing when I was a kid. 14 year olds have basically 3 employment options - waiting tables, delivering papers, and telemarketing. Telemarketing is indoors and not on your feet all the time. The company I worked for wanted you to transfer from a hire purchase agreement at 22% to a 'flexible loan account' at 8%.
/.ers have to have a little sympathy. Even if we don't ever buy anything.
We only ever contacted existing customers, and the transfer did mean you ended up paying less interest, if you continued paying off at the same rate. Thus I refute the concept that ALL telemarketing is for useless stuff - some may be, but not all. (The way the company made its money, if you tell someone they have a credit limit of £1000, and the £950 they spent on a telly on that account, they will more than likely spend the other £50, and keep spending what they pay back.)
The following 2 summers I did several telecanvassing and telesales jobs. Hey,it paid for all those luxurious extras like school uniform and the optional obligatory field trips
Most of the people I knew who did this job didn't choose it. They were either students using it to pay for college, or the people couldn't get dole for one reason or another, and have to take what there is. Now.
In Britain, there is no national DNC list. There is, and has been for several years, the Data Protection Act; this guarantees you the right to demand any information on you is deleted. It does not solve the problem of calling for the first time, but it will solve the calling-back thing. I don't know how many actual prosecutions there have been (likely most is sorted out-of-court); but enough for the DP Agency to have steadily been hireing lawyers for the last decade.
Having finished college, and got a phone, I am always at least polite to telemarketers - even though 90% of them aren't for me. (we inherited a business number - most calls start with asking for the purchasing department) Most of them don't really want to be there - but when it's 'telemarket or starve' or 'telemarket or give up college' - even
For the record, I've never had a telemarketer be abusive - some are a little insistent, but no-one has ever sworn at me. Possibly the fact I've never sworn at them has something to do with this.
Wanting to learn and being able to learn are not synonymous
Ok, many people have used cars as an analogy. My local driving school offers 12 * 1 hr lessons, plus practical and theory exam, for a bulk deal of £300 all in. Lets assume for the moment that it takes a similar timescale and cost to use a computer.
Now imagine walking in to the bosses office, and telling him that not only can you not do your job for twelve weeks, but its going to cost another week-and-a-half's wages (at minimum wage) to get you to the minimum competency level. Then you can actually start practicing and getting good. Most bosses' response: Mind the door on your way out.
If you don't have a job, of course, you have plenty of time. However, since IT courses cost money somewhere along the line, so you still won't be able to get the training you need, since IT isn't seen as a necessity by jobcentres, and dole sure as sugar won't leave enough to pay for it.
Unless you are lucky enough to have family or friends to help you learn, computers are going to remain a mystery. This is likely to be the norm for about another 20 or so years - until the majority of working people had to do IT at school.
Then we need to persuade schools to stop using BBC micros and other obsolete technologies...
Next problem. Terminologies change fast. How long ago did we only need kilo and mega to describe memory? 5 years? Now my other half wants a terabyte server for Xmas. Therefore every computer user in order to be compliant with new technologies must report for a weeks training every three months....
...except when its printed out, it still often looks like plain text.
companies that have an IT specialist in the HR department accept emailed CVs. Companies who don't, may well be scared of the shiny box and only accept hardcopy. (most colleges and universites fall in the latter box)
Many of us still need something that can be knocked together in an hour or so, is WYSIWYG and prints out clean.
Stupid people - or ill-educated. Or IT-illiterate. Or too broke to live elsewhere than in a part of town where the denizens would quite cheerfully hack off a body part to get enough money for the next fix, and definitely have no qualms about hitting you until you tell them your PIN ... (I don't live that way, but a couple of my students do)
As usual, its the little guy who gets it in the shorts. Like, the ATM in our local bank swallowed everyone's cashcards for a week, on the premise that 'you should by now have recieved your new chip n pin card'. The bank got round to sending them out two weeks later.
So several people were left unable to get at their nice (newly all-electronic) dole cheques.
Technology like this is great until you let it loose on real people and real bureaucracy
Thats a handbag, right?
:)
I have a laptop bag. It has handbag stuff in it. (like wallet and tissues and receipts and last weeks lesson plans and assignment submissions and the minutes of the meeting I have this evening(no, really))
If I sign out a laptop from the college, it travels in my backpack. Cos its heavy. And I get the bus to work.
Is it in any way accurate, the security advice you get when you sign out a laptop, that you shouldn't ever use a laptop bag as its an advert 'hi there mr pickpocket, I'm carrying really valuable stuff'?
Though the college laptops do not fall under that category - more like 'worthless hunk o junk'
And being geeks, surely we should all have towels in our kitbags?
Universities, schools, and libraries (in the UK at least) and other places that have shared IPs tend to also have a Terms Of Use - a contract you have to agree to, to use those computers. Breach of such agreements (and getting caught) can lead to an assortment of scenarios depending on the institution
If you download porn on the school computer, you might just get detention.
The library catches you copying CDs, you'll probably just get banned from using that service.
If you breach TOU at Bangor Uni, and are doing a CS degree, you can get booted off your course.
Some places will even call the cops.
Most shared use machines will have some kind of record of who was logged on when.
Wow! you obviously built your own PC.
I can say this with confidence, since many, perhaps most, large consumer electronix retailers don't supply you with any software discs at all. Your PC crashes, you just send the box back (and pay the extortionate maintainance costs)
On that note, do all purchasers who work for government departments have IT qualifications? If not, and they use Local Big Electronics Shop (tm), aren't they going to get MS Office packaged in by default - meaning it 'just creates hassle' to remove it (like you ever can cleanly) and replace with Open Office or similar.
It's not the cost of retraining the IT staff thats the problem, it's the cost of retraining Purchasing!
this TCO thingie comparison only works when you have hundreds of employees;dozens of systems; and server rather than peer to peer networks
But for all of those SMEs with 5 or less people, if one of them knows Linux (and lets face it, it's not like any of the major distribs advertise, so most new users have to come from word of mouth), training time is minimised since at least 1/5 of your workforce is already competent...
So the question is - you could have a Linux based computer for £500 or a Windows box for over a grand and a half. (identical hardware, I've just done this comparison for two businesses)
IF the installer is even a bit savvy, and tweaks the desktop settings right, the other 4 users need barely know they've changed systems.
On the issue of 'who should be training skillset X' (be this mainframe maintainance, a particular OS or language or in fact any specific technology)
Universities and colleges in the UK have three whole years to teach in, right? That should be plenty of time to explore all kinds of technologies, learn a couple of different languages...everything you need. Except that each year is nine months long - 33 weeks generally. Each week has a 35 hr max lecture hours, and each lecture can only contain about 45 mins of new material. Add it up and you get.... just under 4000 hours. This has to begin with 'This is a computer. You need to log on like this... This is a WP...'
I teach fundamental computing. The curriculum is jam-packed and overstuffed already - all we can do is try to skim over what's needed, and hope you pick up enough learning skills to understand what you find on-the-job. If people are needed to maintain IBM mainframes, the company that chose to subscribe to that specific technology needs to train people to use it.