Because it doesn't really help them except for helping them be a good Internet member.
When you set up proper egress filtering on your network, you make it harder for your network to be used to attack other networks -- at the very least, they can't forge their addresses to appear to come from other ISPs anymore. But it doesn't make your network any less vulnerable to attacks.
Yes, everybody should do it. But since there's no real benefit to doing it beyond knowing that you're doing `the right thing', many ISPs don't do it. Also, doing egress filtering can break a few legitimate applications such as dual homing, requiring some further configuration.
I'm not saying this is right or wrong -- just saying why everybody doesn't do it.
The limitations of IPV4 have nothing to do with Zombies.
That's not quite true. Many (most?) zombies and other forms of malware out there that are used to DDoS remote sites take advantage of the limitations of IPv4 (mostly the ease of forging your source IP address) to hide the true sources of the attack.
Binary though our technology may be, the world in which we use it is not. The answers need not be all or nothing.
That's a cute sound-bite, but not much more. Computers may ultimately be based on binary numbers, but this doesn't mean that the end results have to be binary. And while our brains may be analog in nature, we can still act in binary, all or nothing ways.
As for a black list vs. a grey list, most of these lists looked up via a DNS lookup. Generally the results are either there or not, which is certainly binary, but they could return more granularity if they wanted via a few mechanisms.
As for the email itself, you either accept it or not -- that's a binary decision. However, after you accept it, you can mark it as spam, probable spam or not spam if you wish. And you can delete it, keep it, or put it in a folder that's deleted after a few days (because it's probably spam.) There's a lot more than just two things to do with it once you receive it.
Ultimately, putting all your trust about which mails to accept and which to reject in a list administered remotely, especially by people willing to add all of AOL, is dangerous. A better policy is to still use the list, but make it only one of several things that your system looks at in determining if a given email is spam or not. SpamAssassin and other systems work using this general procedure, and it works very well.
But black vs. grey? It's all a matter of how you define things, and how things are set up. You can certainly use a so called black list in a grey manner...
Nothing says "Fix people spamming from your service" like thousands of angry customers...
I do agree, however the flip side of that coin is that nothing says `drop that black list' like not being able to get email from grandma or Aunt Tillie.
By adding AOL to the blacklist, you might persuade AOL to clean up their act, maybe, but you also will find a lot of people dropping your blacklist because _their_ customers got angry...
Fair or not, you really can't add AOL's main mail servers to any sort of mail blacklist without serious repercussions. Mostly bad.
Judges can throw out an unconstitutional law, and jury nullification allows a jury to refuse to convict a defendant if the jury strongly disagrees with the law.
Fair enough.
However, the post I was responding to said think about it, dude as a plea to use common sense. Unfortunately, common sense and US law don't always have that much in common, and a judge and jury don't usually get too many opportunities to use their common sense.
As for a judge declaring a law unconstitutional, he's still bound by what the law says, it's just that the Constitution is a higher law.
As for jury nullification, well, that would be an opportunity to use common sense, but the powers that be in the US seem to be very busy making sure
that it almost never happens.
In your analogy, sharing a screen-capped Futurama ep. should be legal,
No. It's illegal already, and would remain illegal. It just shouldn't be subject to the new enhanced penalties.
since it was released to the public for consumption. A pre-release RIP of that shows DVD would be a violation. It's not that hard once you remove an overly emotional response and think about it, dude.
The jobs of judges and juries is not to think about it, dude -- their job is to enforce the law as written. What matters is exactly how the law is written here, if it does become law. (Which it sounds like it will.)
No, I'm not a lawyer. I haven't read the legislation either. However, there is certainly room for the grandparent post's concern to be valid.
Going back to Futurama. Suppose Fox (or whomever owns it now) decided that they would put Futurama out for download six months after it was shown on TV. (The Sci-Fi network did put Battlestar Galactica's first episode online, after all. It's not a total stretch.) But somebody watched it on TV, and saved it to their computer, and put that on the Internet. If the product is `Futurama for download', then the person just made it available before release. It really depends on exactly how the law is written.
Another possiblity would be if they took Futurama episodes and saved them to their computer, and then made.iso files for burning to DVD, and put those online. If they did this before the DVD was available with those episodes, it's possible they could get nailed with this new law -- again, it depends on exactly how the law is written.
And laws aren't always used to go after the people that the laws were originally written to go after. It would be extremely naive to assume that this law was somehow different.
And to the Mods about to assign this post to the Troll-bin - Karma be damned.
I don't think your post was a troll. A bit shortsighted, perhaps, but not a troll.
I've almost had it with this place.
Have you considered that maybe the problem isn't with this place, but with your expectations of this place? This place attracts a certain sort of people, and often people of a certain type think similarly. I realize that you're trying to be insulting with your `groupthink mode', but in reality the moderation was probably done by a few people who honestly felt that the post was a troll (could just be one person too) rather than people who `shared a brain'.
whereas the black hat Skylarov could break the encryption, did so, and released it (illegally according to US law),
Black hat? No, or at least not for his Advanced eBook Processor software. (I don't know what else he's done.)
The only way one could really consider Skylarov to be a `black hat' for the AEBPR software would be if they considered the DMCA to be a `just' law. I don't know about you, but I don't consider reverse engineering to be morally suspect, even if the DMCA does make it illegal. I guess you're equating `breaking the law' with `black hat', which I don't agree with.
As for morally suspect, the US going after people in other countries for breaking our laws, when the people aren't even in our country? THAT is morally suspect for you.
Once your in a box there is *not* always a way to gain root and the fact that you've been desensitized enough to say that with a straight face scares me. In linux with proper security it is damn near impossible if you use the tools at your disposal properly.
You seem to have not comprehended what I wrote. Let me repeat it again, and you can read it more carefully this time :
Of course, as a general rule of thumb, once you have access to a box, there's almost always a way to `hack root'. This assumes that it's a knowledgable person who's gotten in though -- in most cases, it's either a clueless script kiddie, or even more likely some sort of worm or automated scanner.
I suggest that you pay special attention to phrases like `general rule of thumb', `almost always', `this assumes that...'.
My statement is correct as written, and does not need any further correction and only possibly a little clarification.
It's fine and dandy that you've listed all these ways to secure your system. However, you seem to have forgotten a few things --
Systems have holes. Yes, they're generally getting more and more obscure as the obvious ones are found and fixed, but to pretend that they've suddenly found them all is merely ignoring history. And don't forget -- as bugs are fixed, new ones are occasionally introduced.
Patches are coming out all the time for your favorite Linux distributions (and for whatever other OS you like.) Many, perhaps most (depends on the OS), of the patches are security related.
Yes, SELinux looks pretty slick. However, it's not a panacea. To use it properly requires quite a bit of effort on the admin's part, and even then there's still room for holes in SELinux or the Linux kernel itself. Same goes for other systems where you sign executables, make stacks non-executable and other things that generally improve the security of a system. They're not absolute.
SELinux is a bitch to configure properly. Most admins that actually use it (and that number seems to be small, though it's grown now that some distributions come with it somewhat configured) only secure a few key daemons with it, and not the entire system. And remember, this story was mostly concerned with `Linux on the desktop, used by the end user'. Unless it comes configured with SELinux out of the box, and it actually works (FC3 certainly doesn't fit into this category!) then almost nobody in this category will be using SELinux.
you've listed several ways to secure your system. However, they 1) don't make your system completely secure and 2) generally make certain things more difficult to do on your system. And at some point, if some security system makes normal operations more difficult, it will be removed unless there is something keeping it in place. (Something being strong policies (muck with your system and be fired!) or maybe ignorance about how to remove it.)
The weakest link in the chain is by far the human factor as always.
Sure, but that has nothing to do with my statement that there's generally a way to hack root once you have access. Just because YOU don't know a way, that doesn't mean that the NSA doesn't, or that the cracker community doesn't. And a proper understanding of computer security will keep that in mind.
That statement does have some merit but it definitely isn't always true and even then, I would much rather compromise only my data than have someone gain access to the entire system.
The statement has a lot of merit. But even so, this merit does not make `running as root' as safe as `not running as root', because `running as root' has additional dangers.
Of course, as a general rule of thumb, once you have access to a box, there's almost always a way to `hack root'. This assumes that it's a knowledgable person who's gotten in though -- in most cases, it's either a clueless script kiddie, or even more likely some sort of worm or automated scanner.
Still, only an idiot would claim that `running as root' is as safe as `not running as root' -- at least without adding a long list of qualifiers to that statement.
What world does this guy live in? Is he completely surrounded by idiots? Remind me never to go anywhere near Linspire.
Oh bmw -- don't ever go anywhere near Linspire.
As for what he said, remember who his target audience is -- the target audience for Linspire is idiots. Or at least those not really familiar with computers. Microsoft and AOL go after the same target audience as well.
The NSA operates on a need-to-know basis where people can't access information they don't need even if they pass the classification level. And very few of them have write access to any data besides their specific responsiblity.
There's no reason a company can't do these things too. Yes, it's a lot of work, and therefore expensive, and yes, it reduces productivity. Which is probably why most employers don't go to this much trouble, but it is possible, and probably done.
While the NSA can secure their information from employees, that's a long shot from companies being able to do so.
A determined company can do many of the same things that the NSA does. Sure, they can't really back it up with guys with machine guns, but they can probably have armed security guards. Perhaps even off-duty police. They can do most of the same security checks, and make them sign similar non disclosure agreements.
(And if the company works on military contracts, perhaps they CAN back it up with guys with machine guns. Maybe.)
Yes, it's expensive. Yes, it's not conducive to productivity. But it can be done.
I'm not exactly sure what 'IP' we're talking about here, anyway. Didn't these programmers create the 'IP' in the first place?
Perhaps. Perhaps not. At my work, I have access to the source code for all our products, but the part I've contributed is exceedingly small (I'm in support, not development.) I guess I could steal it, but 1) who would want it? 2) I'd get sued into oblivion if I did, and probably end up in jail. It's not even remotely worth it. But physically, it would be easy.
As for #1, `who would want it?', even our competitors wouldn't want it. They wouldn't touch it with a 10' pole, because if it was ever found out, they'd be sued into oblivion and they know it. No legitimate company wants that sort of exposure.
And even if a single person did write all of this code, if he does it for his employer, on company time, on company computers, it probably belongs to the company, not him. (The specifics would be lined out in his employment contract and other paperwork.) Yes, perhaps he could write it again for somebody else (though often NDAs prohibit that), but few large projects are one-man-shows anymore.
You're guessing. You may be right, and you may not be. I'm sure the/. logs could tell the story of what sort of browsers are used (except for those that pretend to be something else), and one could extrapolate what OSs are used and things could be measured that way, but that still wouldn't tell you if that copy of Windows was pirated or not. Lots of/.ers who use Windows probably also bought the computer with it preinstalled.
The original claim was :
The majority of the people here pirate everything.
and there's two parts to that claim -- majority and everything. Perhaps the majority of people here have pirated something (be it software, music, movies, TV (broadcast, cable, satellite) or a ship at sea) but I seriously doubt that the majority pirates *everything*.
As long as your employees have access to your IP, there is absolutely no way to prevent them from "stealing" it if they are determined to do so. Period.
Why do people like to end a statement with `Period.' as if it were the last word on the issue, when it clearly is not? Wishful thinking?
You definately can prevent your employees from `stealing' things like code and data. It may not be 100% effective, but you can make it very _very_ difficult.
Think NSA. I certainly never worked there, but I imagine they're 1) very picky about who they hire, and 2) take security to the extreme, and 3) it's all backed up by serious legal threats. (I believe treason is still eligible for the death penalty, is it not?)
#2 is probably most interesting to those here. Physical security is extreme, with metal detectors detecting guns and hard drives, and enforced by men with guns. Things like USB drives (and even Furbies or cell phones) aren't allowed in at all, and I imagine there's spot searches for things like this.
Places like that often have two networks, a secure and an unsecure one. If you plug a computer into the wrong network, it never leaves the building again. The secure network has no access to the Internet whatsoever.
I imagine there's a lot more that they do, but I'm sure that there's web pages dedicated to this sort of thing if you want to read more about it.
Of course, even this isn't 100% effective -- but I imagine it's pretty close. Of course, it's also extremely expensive and restrictive, and few companies are probably willing to do this sort of thing to their employees -- but I imagine that a few do, perhaps to some key employees in key positions...
The majority of the people here pirate everything.
Really?
Last I checked, the majority of people here certainly liked free software. But you really can't `pirate' something that's given away from free.
And as for movies and music and other forms of media, you'll find a very wide variety of views on that here, on every side. Probably the only thing that `most' covers is that `most' people here use computers from time to time.
You'll probably have better luck at a site like corporatenazisyndicate.com or something.
That much is probably true. Though I suspect he'll find some answers here too, even though this really isn't the right place, and I'm amazed the question got greenlighted.
Why is it that we cannot have a prime-time TV Sci-Fi series that does not contain one or more pointless romantic subplots?
Because life contains one or more pointless romantic subplots (If you're lucky, anyways.)
Real people love, have sex, break up, etc. And while sci-fi is usually supposed to be out there, they want us to identify with the characters, and showing that they're not too different from us is one way to do that.
If I hadn't read this/. article, I'd never even have noticed it was gone.
Star Trek Enterprise, or your own personal pointless romantic subplots?
As for Enterprise, it's not quite gone yet. They haven't shown the last episodes yet.
That's too bad. I found it to be nicer to use than Gnome or KDE in FC3. (Of course, I usually prefer something a bit more minimal -- and Gnome and KDE are not even remotely close to minimal. (But twm is a bit too minimal.) (Actually, I use fvwm most of the time. But XFCE wasn't bad.))
I thought we already logged everything and kept it for longer than ten years?
I can't speak for the rest of North America, but in the US companies generally don't have to log Internet traffic. In fact, many specifically have policies to delete old logs on a set schedule specifically so that they don't have the data in case Uncle Sam asks for it. And it's legal.
It's not just Internet related data either. Companies shred internal memos and tax records and the like after a predetermined amount of time as well, for the same reasons.
... stock in manufacturers of hard drives like Maxtor, Western Digital and Seagate went up 12% today.
`We see about 20-30% of our total world-wide production of hard drives being sent to Argentina in the immediate future to fullfill the needs of this decree. After all, a slow cable modem at 1 Mbps can download 10 GB of data per day. Multiply this by ten years and by the many many people in Argentina who have broadband access, and it's a lot of disks' --Some guy at Maxtor.
We had a coin counting machine that didn't seem to be accurate. That probably helped force us to recount tills often.
We had a coin counting machine too. It was accurate enough for nickles, dimes and quarters (pennies do not have a standard weight, so it wasn't really good for them. All the other coins do have a standard weight) but we could count them faster by hand with almost zero errors.
Of course, we counted lots of tills in a day -- the store had 14 main registers, 5 in the customer service area, and perhaps 5 more in the deli, cosmetics, etc. So we got good at it.
For counting coins, we'd put them on the table, and pull them off with our fingers two at a time. Very fast...
Apparently at the time McD's had a policy where they were much more worried if you had extra cash since it means you ripped off a customer
I worked in the cash office at the
local grocery store for several years. (Overall, I wasted six years at that place. Leaving was one of the best things I ever did.)
There, we generally treated overages and underages the same -- if you're over $5, you got punished just like you would if you were under $5. (Though for an isolated incident, $5 was no big deal.)
Amounts under $1 were considered OK and not worth any sort of write-up or anything. But even $100 wouldn't mean a lot of extra manager work -- just that we'd double check our counting of the till and that would be that. (The checker, on the other hand, would get in trouble for that much. Not fired, but trouble. They'd have to count their own till (the thing that holds the money) for a while and if their money control didn't improve, they'd get fired eventually.
I tend to believe that we were more picky about who we hired than the local McDonalds -- certainly, we'd interview people and not hire them, and they'd appear at McDonalds. And we generally hired kids as baggers rather than cashiers, so we got a chance to know them before promoting them. So I'm guessing that McDonalds probably did NOT freak out about a till being $0.10 off, even if it happened every day -- otherwise, they'd be freaking out all the time.
Last I heard, 8% of the US population had worked at McDonalds at some point in their life:)
As for $2 bills, they showed up in the cash office on a regular basis, and I'd snag them (replacing them with 2 $1 bills, of course!) I used them for tips and the like, since they were a bit unusual. Hopefully no waitress thought I was giving her fake money:)
Mozilla is at version 1.7.5 and Firefox is at version 1.x. IE is approaching version 7.0.
And Linux is at version 2.6.something, and Windows is at version 2003 and Solaris is at version 10 (having jumped from 2.6 to 7.) Fedora Core is at FC3 (or is that RH12?) Doom is up to Doom 3, and Jake 2.0 was released at 2.0 and never made 2.1. And I think Sid died at version 6.7.
Relevance?
Version numbers don't mean anything. They're arbitrary, and you cannot compare them to the numbers of other products like you appear to be doing, at least not in any meaningful way.
in that a normal user account is not able to take down the entire system without considerable effort on the part of the attacker
To be fair, a good bug in Mozilla can take your X server down, or at least make it so unresponsive that you can't do anything. Or it could kill your window manager, probably logging you out. And if things do get really stuck, you may have to log in from another system (or hit the vulcan nerve pinch keys -- either kill X, get to a VC and maybe C-A-D.)
Not quite as bad as taking the entire system down, but still annoying when it happens.
Slashdot Mirror
When you set up proper egress filtering on your network, you make it harder for your network to be used to attack other networks -- at the very least, they can't forge their addresses to appear to come from other ISPs anymore. But it doesn't make your network any less vulnerable to attacks.
Yes, everybody should do it. But since there's no real benefit to doing it beyond knowing that you're doing `the right thing', many ISPs don't do it. Also, doing egress filtering can break a few legitimate applications such as dual homing, requiring some further configuration.
I'm not saying this is right or wrong -- just saying why everybody doesn't do it.
As for a black list vs. a grey list, most of these lists looked up via a DNS lookup. Generally the results are either there or not, which is certainly binary, but they could return more granularity if they wanted via a few mechanisms.
As for the email itself, you either accept it or not -- that's a binary decision. However, after you accept it, you can mark it as spam, probable spam or not spam if you wish. And you can delete it, keep it, or put it in a folder that's deleted after a few days (because it's probably spam.) There's a lot more than just two things to do with it once you receive it.
Ultimately, putting all your trust about which mails to accept and which to reject in a list administered remotely, especially by people willing to add all of AOL, is dangerous. A better policy is to still use the list, but make it only one of several things that your system looks at in determining if a given email is spam or not. SpamAssassin and other systems work using this general procedure, and it works very well.
But black vs. grey? It's all a matter of how you define things, and how things are set up. You can certainly use a so called black list in a grey manner ...
By adding AOL to the blacklist, you might persuade AOL to clean up their act, maybe, but you also will find a lot of people dropping your blacklist because _their_ customers got angry ...
Fair or not, you really can't add AOL's main mail servers to any sort of mail blacklist without serious repercussions. Mostly bad.
Others have said that, but certainly not Microsoft that I'm aware of ...
However, the post I was responding to said think about it, dude as a plea to use common sense. Unfortunately, common sense and US law don't always have that much in common, and a judge and jury don't usually get too many opportunities to use their common sense.
As for a judge declaring a law unconstitutional, he's still bound by what the law says, it's just that the Constitution is a higher law.
As for jury nullification, well, that would be an opportunity to use common sense, but the powers that be in the US seem to be very busy making sure that it almost never happens.
No, I'm not a lawyer. I haven't read the legislation either. However, there is certainly room for the grandparent post's concern to be valid.
Going back to Futurama. Suppose Fox (or whomever owns it now) decided that they would put Futurama out for download six months after it was shown on TV. (The Sci-Fi network did put Battlestar Galactica's first episode online, after all. It's not a total stretch.) But somebody watched it on TV, and saved it to their computer, and put that on the Internet. If the product is `Futurama for download', then the person just made it available before release. It really depends on exactly how the law is written.
Another possiblity would be if they took Futurama episodes and saved them to their computer, and then made .iso files for burning to DVD, and put those online. If they did this before the DVD was available with those episodes, it's possible they could get nailed with this new law -- again, it depends on exactly how the law is written.
And laws aren't always used to go after the people that the laws were originally written to go after. It would be extremely naive to assume that this law was somehow different.
I don't think your post was a troll. A bit shortsighted, perhaps, but not a troll. Have you considered that maybe the problem isn't with this place, but with your expectations of this place? This place attracts a certain sort of people, and often people of a certain type think similarly. I realize that you're trying to be insulting with your `groupthink mode', but in reality the moderation was probably done by a few people who honestly felt that the post was a troll (could just be one person too) rather than people who `shared a brain'.The only way one could really consider Skylarov to be a `black hat' for the AEBPR software would be if they considered the DMCA to be a `just' law. I don't know about you, but I don't consider reverse engineering to be morally suspect, even if the DMCA does make it illegal. I guess you're equating `breaking the law' with `black hat', which I don't agree with.
As for morally suspect, the US going after people in other countries for breaking our laws, when the people aren't even in our country? THAT is morally suspect for you.
My statement is correct as written, and does not need any further correction and only possibly a little clarification.
It's fine and dandy that you've listed all these ways to secure your system. However, you seem to have forgotten a few things --
Systems have holes. Yes, they're generally getting more and more obscure as the obvious ones are found and fixed, but to pretend that they've suddenly found them all is merely ignoring history. And don't forget -- as bugs are fixed, new ones are occasionally introduced.
Patches are coming out all the time for your favorite Linux distributions (and for whatever other OS you like.) Many, perhaps most (depends on the OS), of the patches are security related.
Yes, SELinux looks pretty slick. However, it's not a panacea. To use it properly requires quite a bit of effort on the admin's part, and even then there's still room for holes in SELinux or the Linux kernel itself. Same goes for other systems where you sign executables, make stacks non-executable and other things that generally improve the security of a system. They're not absolute.
SELinux is a bitch to configure properly. Most admins that actually use it (and that number seems to be small, though it's grown now that some distributions come with it somewhat configured) only secure a few key daemons with it, and not the entire system. And remember, this story was mostly concerned with `Linux on the desktop, used by the end user'. Unless it comes configured with SELinux out of the box, and it actually works (FC3 certainly doesn't fit into this category!) then almost nobody in this category will be using SELinux.
you've listed several ways to secure your system. However, they 1) don't make your system completely secure and 2) generally make certain things more difficult to do on your system. And at some point, if some security system makes normal operations more difficult, it will be removed unless there is something keeping it in place. (Something being strong policies (muck with your system and be fired!) or maybe ignorance about how to remove it.)
Sure, but that has nothing to do with my statement that there's generally a way to hack root once you have access. Just because YOU don't know a way, that doesn't mean that the NSA doesn't, or that the cracker community doesn't. And a proper understanding of computer security will keep that in mind.Of course, as a general rule of thumb, once you have access to a box, there's almost always a way to `hack root'. This assumes that it's a knowledgable person who's gotten in though -- in most cases, it's either a clueless script kiddie, or even more likely some sort of worm or automated scanner.
Still, only an idiot would claim that `running as root' is as safe as `not running as root' -- at least without adding a long list of qualifiers to that statement.
Oh bmw -- don't ever go anywhere near Linspire.As for what he said, remember who his target audience is -- the target audience for Linspire is idiots. Or at least those not really familiar with computers. Microsoft and AOL go after the same target audience as well.
Rhino Squad? I guess it's official -- there must be no good names for squads left now.
(And if the company works on military contracts, perhaps they CAN back it up with guys with machine guns. Maybe.)
Yes, it's expensive. Yes, it's not conducive to productivity. But it can be done.
Perhaps. Perhaps not. At my work, I have access to the source code for all our products, but the part I've contributed is exceedingly small (I'm in support, not development.) I guess I could steal it, but 1) who would want it? 2) I'd get sued into oblivion if I did, and probably end up in jail. It's not even remotely worth it. But physically, it would be easy.As for #1, `who would want it?', even our competitors wouldn't want it. They wouldn't touch it with a 10' pole, because if it was ever found out, they'd be sued into oblivion and they know it. No legitimate company wants that sort of exposure.
And even if a single person did write all of this code, if he does it for his employer, on company time, on company computers, it probably belongs to the company, not him. (The specifics would be lined out in his employment contract and other paperwork.) Yes, perhaps he could write it again for somebody else (though often NDAs prohibit that), but few large projects are one-man-shows anymore.
The original claim was :
and there's two parts to that claim -- majority and everything. Perhaps the majority of people here have pirated something (be it software, music, movies, TV (broadcast, cable, satellite) or a ship at sea) but I seriously doubt that the majority pirates *everything*.You definately can prevent your employees from `stealing' things like code and data. It may not be 100% effective, but you can make it very _very_ difficult.
Think NSA. I certainly never worked there, but I imagine they're 1) very picky about who they hire, and 2) take security to the extreme, and 3) it's all backed up by serious legal threats. (I believe treason is still eligible for the death penalty, is it not?)
#2 is probably most interesting to those here. Physical security is extreme, with metal detectors detecting guns and hard drives, and enforced by men with guns. Things like USB drives (and even Furbies or cell phones) aren't allowed in at all, and I imagine there's spot searches for things like this.
Places like that often have two networks, a secure and an unsecure one. If you plug a computer into the wrong network, it never leaves the building again. The secure network has no access to the Internet whatsoever.
I imagine there's a lot more that they do, but I'm sure that there's web pages dedicated to this sort of thing if you want to read more about it.
Of course, even this isn't 100% effective -- but I imagine it's pretty close. Of course, it's also extremely expensive and restrictive, and few companies are probably willing to do this sort of thing to their employees -- but I imagine that a few do, perhaps to some key employees in key positions ...
Last I checked, the majority of people here certainly liked free software. But you really can't `pirate' something that's given away from free.
And as for movies and music and other forms of media, you'll find a very wide variety of views on that here, on every side. Probably the only thing that `most' covers is that `most' people here use computers from time to time.
That much is probably true. Though I suspect he'll find some answers here too, even though this really isn't the right place, and I'm amazed the question got greenlighted.Real people love, have sex, break up, etc. And while sci-fi is usually supposed to be out there, they want us to identify with the characters, and showing that they're not too different from us is one way to do that.
Star Trek Enterprise, or your own personal pointless romantic subplots?As for Enterprise, it's not quite gone yet. They haven't shown the last episodes yet.
It's not just Internet related data either. Companies shred internal memos and tax records and the like after a predetermined amount of time as well, for the same reasons.
`We see about 20-30% of our total world-wide production of hard drives being sent to Argentina in the immediate future to fullfill the needs of this decree. After all, a slow cable modem at 1 Mbps can download 10 GB of data per day. Multiply this by ten years and by the many many people in Argentina who have broadband access, and it's a lot of disks' --Some guy at Maxtor.
Of course, we counted lots of tills in a day -- the store had 14 main registers, 5 in the customer service area, and perhaps 5 more in the deli, cosmetics, etc. So we got good at it.
For counting coins, we'd put them on the table, and pull them off with our fingers two at a time. Very fast ...
As for $0.03, that's just silly ...
They're also shaped exactly like the penny, nickle and dime -- they're round!
I think what you were trying to say is that the dollar coins are almost exactly the same size as a quarter, and that's correct.
There, we generally treated overages and underages the same -- if you're over $5, you got punished just like you would if you were under $5. (Though for an isolated incident, $5 was no big deal.)
Amounts under $1 were considered OK and not worth any sort of write-up or anything. But even $100 wouldn't mean a lot of extra manager work -- just that we'd double check our counting of the till and that would be that. (The checker, on the other hand, would get in trouble for that much. Not fired, but trouble. They'd have to count their own till (the thing that holds the money) for a while and if their money control didn't improve, they'd get fired eventually.
I tend to believe that we were more picky about who we hired than the local McDonalds -- certainly, we'd interview people and not hire them, and they'd appear at McDonalds. And we generally hired kids as baggers rather than cashiers, so we got a chance to know them before promoting them. So I'm guessing that McDonalds probably did NOT freak out about a till being $0.10 off, even if it happened every day -- otherwise, they'd be freaking out all the time.
Last I heard, 8% of the US population had worked at McDonalds at some point in their life :)
As for $2 bills, they showed up in the cash office on a regular basis, and I'd snag them (replacing them with 2 $1 bills, of course!) I used them for tips and the like, since they were a bit unusual. Hopefully no waitress thought I was giving her fake money :)
Version numbers don't mean anything. They're arbitrary, and you cannot compare them to the numbers of other products like you appear to be doing, at least not in any meaningful way.
Not quite as bad as taking the entire system down, but still annoying when it happens.