The do not call list applies whether they have their own employees making the calls, "independent sales representatives," or they contract out to another shop, even one overseas. If the HQ is here, DNC applies.
Sue the companies whose services are being sold. After all, they are paying someone else to hassle you, and so they are ultimately responsible.
I haven't had a discover card for almost 9 years now, and I don't miss it one bit. Crappy customer service, accepted almost nowhere compared to Visa and BastardCard, and higher interest rates, too.
And documents being indexed electronically doesn't make it as easy as one might think: it's precisely because documents are indexed electronically that is creating the difficulty: the FBI is claiming, essentially, that it can't predict every possibly keyword it should associate with a document for search purposes, and therefore shouldn't be held accountable if it misses documents during a good-faith search.
So, basicaly they are claiming that they can't give Google a call and buy one of those "Google for your company intranet" 1U rackmount servers I see advertised here and there.
Besides, I don't understand why keywords are so all-important; I was writing software for full-text indexing (minus "noise words" like a/an/the/etc.) almost 15 years ago, and on pokey-slow PC's, too. My department at the college was much too cheap to spring for even a 386. Surely the FBI has heard of full-text indexing?
For a nice parallel, let's look at the religious view of giving money to your church. Does God, all-powerful God, really need your money? Since He's all-powerful, if He really needs the money, he can presto some into existence, whisper to one of His faithful servants where a long-lost gold mine is, etc. You get the picture. No, God does not need your money. What He needs is for you to love Him more than you love your money, and that is why He "needs" your money. He needs you to give it, not for Him to receive it.
If my employer truly cared about me and my work, the long hours, the multi-million dollar deal that I salvaged with an all-nighter and resultant fix, my employer would give me either or both of A. something I love, or B. something my employer loves. Money is nice, money buys things I need, like food for my kids, a roof over our heads, etc. I don't "love" money, but I do need it. My employer LOVES money, and will not part with it. That says a lot about what they value, platitudes about "We are a performance culture" and "We are a meritocracy that leads through learning, inclusiveness and change" notwithstanding.
So, maybe Google realizes that by offering big bucks, they are showing their employees that they value good ideas more than immediate cash. Of course, Google will want to use those good ideas to generate more cash, but if I read it correctly, the reward to the genius employee comes well before the company makes that money back (and more) from the idea.
We always talk about how "physical access to the machine defeats whatever password security you have," but an EFS helps in this regard. An EFS secures your data in cases of theft, either by physical removal, or an attempt to boot the system using a live CD or similar back-door access. As the parent mentioned, when the FS is mounted, it's just as accessible to whatever intrusions might occur, including an attacker at the keyboard when you don't log off, but it makes recovery of data impossible by the usual means of booting a floppy.
In a corporate environment, you have to balance protecting data versus putting yourself at the mercy of a disgruntled employee. If hard drives go missing with your financials, your employee data (!!!), or the designs for your latest product, an EFS will help you sleep a lot easier at night. I'd look at some way to set the key for the EFS and prevent it from being changed, if that's even possible. Give each user their own EFS with their own key, and the key recorded in at least two separate and safe places.
alt.tasteless was never the same after AOHell infested the group. All the time some dumbass would be jumping in, asking about scrotum self-repair or the exploding whale. "I heard you guys have pics of [starlet #1] and [starlet #2]! Can someone email them to [tard@aol.com]?" followed by a quick "ME TOO!!!!!11" from [tard_number_2@aol.com]. It got to be a contest to see who could flame them back the best; many a snuff story was written with an AOHeller as the star.
I'd put in an ObTasteless here, but I've been out of the loop for so long on account of the spam that I just don't have the heart for it any more. [wipes a wistful tear from his eye]
For smart gun, the observed actions are how the person squeezes something to produce a unique and measurable pattern. Embedded sensors in the experimental gun then can read and record the size and force of the users' hand during the first second when the trigger is squeezed.
It is a well-known fact that you don't do things the same way when you're in a real, physical, him-or-me confrontation. I shoot on both sides of a local range, the public side, and the "police-only" side. The public side is the relaxed, methodical shooting where people take their sweet time reloading, placing their shots just-so, and all that. On the tactical side, there isn't a bench, just a bunch of dirt, and the targets. You draw from a holster, move, take aim, and make a 10x bigger pattern than on the public side because, assuming your instructor has done it right, you're under stress. There are distractions (fellow students throwing stuff at you, even!), moving targets, and adrenaline. Falling down, fumbling a weapon, having a feed malfunction ("jam") and having to reload in a split-second, I've seen it all, except somebody get accidentally shot, thankfully.
Here's another one for you - a weapon-retention struggle. Suppose he's got his hand on the grip, but you've managed to turn it around to point at him, and can get your finger into the trigger guard? I have done this with training rounds; shooting someone off a weapon is remarkably effective, and easier than it sounds. Or you have your hand on the weapon, but he has his hand on yours: you can't get your proper grip that way, either, but you have a good chance of getting him to let go when you drop to the ground and shoot him in the foot point-blank (that works, too). But Mr. "Smart" Gun won't permit this, because your grip will be a lot different, and to the "smart" gun, that means it isn't you.
I for one will not be buying any of these "smart" guns. How smart can it be when it's still a 1-in-10 failure rate? I won't trust my life to it, and neither should you. What happens when YOU are the 1 in 10, and the bad guy is in YOUR house? Even if they get it 100%, what about the batteries? I'll take an all-mechanical solution any time, thank you.
Notice that the police and military are exempt from having to use these "smart" guns? Do you think they know something you don't?
In general, if Microsoft is more competitive with its products, that will force PeopleSoft to improve theirs, or stop gouging for support contracts, or whatever.
However, based on MS's past behaviours, I think we can look forward to a "good enough" replacement for PeopleSoft to be built into the next version of Windows. MS will forbid OEM's to remove it because they don't want a "confusing user experience." Oh, and it will increase the "Microsoft tax" on your new PC that you were only going to load Linux on.
Don't get me wrong - I like competition, but I like fair competition, based on merits. It reminds me of my high-school football team; the football was some sort of "regulation size and colour," and so the high school chose its school colours such that one of them matched the ball colour perfectly. When we played home games, we got to pick whether we would wear the light or the dark-coloured jerseys, and of course, we chose the ones that matched the ball. It made it very difficult for the other players to tell who had the ball, and made diversionary fakes a lot easier. When we played away, our opponents would choose the dark colour, so that our team wore the light (and very contrasting) colour jerseys. Net result? We won a lot more home games, and by higher margins. Hardly what I'd call "fair."
We're already back to the "old days" in the embedded systems field, if we ever left. When you have to squeeze every bit of life out of a battery, you make sure your code doesn't piss away processor cycles. If the system calls for an 8-bit processor and a certain network daemon, you make the daemon run on the 8-bit processor, even if it was originally written for a 32-bitter. (then you whack the salesweasel upside the head for promising the moon to the customer)
If you crave the challenge of making tight, efficient code, sometimes with very little under you but the bare chip itself, then embedded systems might be the place for you.
cue the grumpy old man voice: "Why back in my day, we didn't have 64-bit multi-core chips with gigabytes of memory to waste, no sir, we had to write in assembly code for 8-bit processors, and WE LOVED IT!"
Charter lost a few emergency motions to quash the subpoenas, and had to turn over the first batch of names in late 2003, so those people are already within the RIAA's grasp.
What is noteworthy here is that Charter is appealing the case (and racking up legal fees) even after it already had to hand over the goods; the battle (not the war, yet) was lost, but Charter is now saying that the court should have stayed the order. If they're fighting on principle, I say good for them. Maybe they just want to set a precedent so that the next request (maybe for 20,000 names) won't go through.
Most of the posts I see right now say that it's great they care about their subscribers' privacy, to which I say bollocks. Charter, like every cable company cares about one thing: money. Think about it: with all the extra digital channels, what do they have? At least 20 channels of pay-per-view and another 10 or so of home-shopping. Most of the rest of the channels are pretty craptastic, too. And no, they won't sell you just the few channels you want to watch; buy a package for an inflated price, or suck eggs.
Anyway, Charter stands to lose money by having to hire people (PLURAL!) full-time to handle all the DMCA subpoenas, and they stand to lose subscribers (money) if they just roll over to the RIAA, as subscribers will opt for DSL in the hopes that the phone company won't roll over so easily.
A few years ago, I saw a movie in the theatre and loved it. Sadly, nobody else did, and it was gone before I could go back and see it again. Yes, I was willing to pay $9.00 TWICE to see the movie. Since it was gone from theatres, and not yet available on DVD, I searched the P2P networks. I found a crappy cam rip, people talking, getting up a few rows ahead of the cam, bad sound, washed out colour, etc. but it was all I could have, so I took it. I bought the DVD on the release day (and paid too much for it at Lackluster Video, but that's a different rant) and tossed the cam rip in the trash.
I think I had a point there. It might have been that I, as a consumer, was prepared to spend good money on this movie (see it twice = $18.00, DVD=$25.00), but Hollywood's obsession with control meant that I could only buy one ticket, and I had to wait around for the DVD. There was a small chance I would have settled for the cam rip, if it had been better quality, and then there's more lost money.
It would be interesting to see the studios release films on DVD right after the theatrical run finishes, but then they would bitch and moan about "nobody watches the movie because they're just waiting for the DVD." They won't be satisfied until they can erase our memory of the movie when the closing credits roll, and charge us for each viewing.
It doesn't matter if you follow basic security practices or not; many services in Windows are vulnerable to remote exploits, but are necessary for the system to even function at all.
Where's the user error?
Not turning the firewall on before connecting to an untrusted network.
Running untrusted code as an Administrator.
Using buggy software like IE.
Point 1 is conceded. Point 2 is forced by the crummy design of the OS. Point 3 suffers from a little problem - you have to run IE to get to WindowsUpdate.
Yes, users commit a hefty number of the mistakes, but let's lay some blame where it rightly belongs, at Microsoft's feet.
We need to be able to show a end-user, "Look, I can do this, and you can't."
How about "save directly to PDF without spending $400 for Adobe Acrobat"? OpenOffice.org is TEH R0X0RZ. I use it at work (a very large corporation that feeds MS unholy amounts of cash every year), and save to natively to sxw/sxc, then send a PDF to coworkers, or save as DOC/XLS onto the fileserver.
Of course the next question is (besides the privacy concerns) is using programs such as AdAware and Spybot S&D to remove said Federal Spyware illegal. My guess would be yes but I also suppose that the people who would be getting these "taps" on their computers won't care much about the legal reprocussions of removing them.
The real target of making it illegal to remove federal spyware would be the makers of spyware removal programs, who have a lot more to lose than someone already under heavy surveillance for illegal activities. The authors will be threatened, a la the DMCA, with "trafficking in circumvention technology" and I'll bet good money that the feds can bring enough charges to make them fold like cheap suits.
Never mind this particular story is happening in Australia; we either have done it or will soon do it here in the USA. Our federal government specializes in "conviction by overwhelming force," where they threaten so many charges that add up to twenty life sentences plug two lethal injections, the target pleads guilty to one chosen charge to avoid the gamble.
I love my country, but I fear my government. Reason magazine put it best a few months before the election: "The good news is that on Nov. 2, one of these men will lose. The bad news is that the other one will win."
My daughter's sunday school teacher is a single mom with teenage boys. She doesn't have a lot of money, but a family member gave her a new computer last Christmas, and the phone company is selling DSL for only a few bucks more than AOHell. Knowing she can't afford to pay anyone to set it up, I agree to help her set it up, no charge.
A few months later, she's having trouble - can't log in to some site to sign up for a credit-card processing account so she can accept CC for her Mary Kay side business, and she asks for help. I go over one night after work, and one of her boys is doing his homework at the kitchen table, PC in the living room.
She shows me the error, and I immediately point out that CyberSitter or some similar censorware is blocking the site. "Yes, I installed that to help keep the porn off the computer." I pull up the logs, and it's FULL of porn sites being blocked at times when she was at work. He tried to blame it on spam and spyware, and I was non-committal, just wanted to get the thing working for her, but I think she had a little talk with him after I left.
Can you say "uncomfortable?"
P.S. Still can't figure out why cybershitter blocks a credit card merchant site, but I just told her to disable the software when she logged in to do CC stuff.
I can't quite understand why all the salesweasels think we'll jump at pay-per-use licensing. Here's a thought: I'd like to BUY my tools and OWN them, not be treated like a criminal by a vendor.
Pay-per-use implies a secure authentication mechanism, which then opens the door for abuse of one sort or another. If you are developing a product which will compete against something Microsoft already does (or plans to do), and MS gets wind of it, will there be "technical problems" in contacting the authorization server the next time you start up VC++? What about the SCO v. IBM debacle? SCO claimed they could terminate IBM's license for AIX, and if pay-per-use had been in place, SCO could have flipped a switch on all IBM's customers. Do you think that would have affected IBM's willingness to settle? Yes, they could have got a court order to turn it back on, but how many customers would have been down for a day or two, and said, "Screw this, I'm buying my unix from the people who OWN it!"
Pay-per-use is NOT the wave of the future so long as I have any say in it. When my boss asks me for tool evaluations, I'll always favour the least-encumbered tool. And yes, that means even if it's sub-optimal. We can always make changes to F/OSS stuff to meet our needs, and the freedom to do so, IMHO, more than makes up for the extra work involved.
they are tired of VPs who got fat bonuses this year telling them "you don't get a raise this year, and you are lucky you even have a job." They are willing to treat their employees like crap because the market will bear it. You can only take that for so long before you start looking.
Been there, done that, and going to do it (I mean, have it done to me) again this year.
In keeping with my Newspeak-inspired login name, I suppose we could say, "oldcorps unbellyfeel doubleplusgood prolework." A good translation to modern English is:
Old-school, large, top-heavy, MBA-filled, "dinosaur" corporations do not fully appreciate the exceptional effort which the "little people" put forward on a daily basis.
That turned out better than I thought. I like it. I just might put in my resignation letter when I find my new gig.
are people that are, for example, at work, and can't turn off Windows Scripting Host and certain ActiveX controls? Not open emails? Surely there should be a solution to this.
You might consider not doing your online banking from work? (Yeah, I'm a hypocrite, browsing/. from work, but it's lunch break right now.)
Another possibility, if you have or can get enough control of the machine, is to install F/OSS alternatives. My corporate standard is Outhouse and Internet Exploiter, but I'm typing this on Firefox, and I'll check my e-mail in Sylpheed-Claws once I'm done. My IT guy knows about it, and doesn't raise a fuss, because I don't ask him to fix things when they (rarely) go wrong.
Couldnt they just find this suckers IP and track him down and get him fined or arrested?
RTFA. These are online gambling sites. Most gambling has a large amount of organized crime involved. I think that getting fined/arrested should be the least of these scumbags' worries. And whatever the mob would do to them, they would deserve it.
Fred Phelps does a great disservice to Christianity in general. I can't find one example in the entire New Testament where Christ uses the word "hate" to refer to His feelings towards someone or some group. In fact, refer to hate the sin, love the sinner.
Just because I try to have a Christ-like love for people who do wrong things (and I'm certainly not perfect myself, far from it), does not mean that I have to call their wrong things right. To paraphrase C. S. Lewis, I will not uproot my rose garden for the sake of someone who prefers the smell of manure.
The $1500 was for an advertisement, not for a letter to the editor, and was not endorsed by any church.
It's important to admit when you're wrong. I made a mistake, and you are correct; it was a paid advertisement that got the guy fined. So "Freedom of Speech" only matters when you express a popular viewpoint? That's not freedom at all.
"The first conviction under the Swedish law" at the bottom. While he said some very unkind things about homosexuals, he still did not cross "the line" into advocating violence. Some people like their religion with a little more fire and brimstone than others. Who are you to judge?
Oh wait, I'm still not coming up with examples in Canada. I think I might not be able to find any. The references I was remembering were in opposition to C-250 which was eventually passed. While it was being debated, people raised their concerns that this law would be used by homosexuals as a weapon against churches. The provisions in the bill to "protect" pastors have all sorts of wiggle-room in them which can allow the crown to threaten pastors all the same.
I could go on, but I'm stopping at the first page of google results for "church hate speech homosexuality."
I don't care whether you are gay or not; leave me alone to live my life, and I'll leave you alone to live yours. Don't flaunt your homosexuality in my face, and I won't tell you to your face that I think it's wrong. But don't ever expect me to actually approve of your choices. I have my standards, and no amount of whining or legislation is going to change my mind.
Yes, I agree with you that limits of free speech (except for the pathological "yelling 'fire' in a crowded theatre" cases) are a bad thing. What I disagree with you about is that this law wil lbe used to protect religious speech. I submit that, based on recent cases in Canada, it most certainly will be used to oppress religious groups who speak out against "politically corrrect" beliefs.
It's one thing to say "homosexuality is wrong, and we should execute the sodomites! Let's all go home, grab our guns, and get to work." What I am claiming, backed by items in the news, is that a church which simply said, "homosexuality is a sin, and we should not pretend that it is simply another 'life choice'," was threatened and/or fined under anti-hate speech laws.
With such regulations apparently coming to the internet (as far as the site or its owner are in canada), things will only get worse. They are creating a nation of thought-criminals through silly laws like this.
Slashdot Mirror
Sue the companies whose services are being sold. After all, they are paying someone else to hassle you, and so they are ultimately responsible.
I haven't had a discover card for almost 9 years now, and I don't miss it one bit. Crappy customer service, accepted almost nowhere compared to Visa and BastardCard, and higher interest rates, too.
-paul
So, basicaly they are claiming that they can't give Google a call and buy one of those "Google for your company intranet" 1U rackmount servers I see advertised here and there.
Besides, I don't understand why keywords are so all-important; I was writing software for full-text indexing (minus "noise words" like a/an/the/etc.) almost 15 years ago, and on pokey-slow PC's, too. My department at the college was much too cheap to spring for even a 386. Surely the FBI has heard of full-text indexing?
-paul
If my employer truly cared about me and my work, the long hours, the multi-million dollar deal that I salvaged with an all-nighter and resultant fix, my employer would give me either or both of A. something I love, or B. something my employer loves. Money is nice, money buys things I need, like food for my kids, a roof over our heads, etc. I don't "love" money, but I do need it. My employer LOVES money, and will not part with it. That says a lot about what they value, platitudes about "We are a performance culture" and "We are a meritocracy that leads through learning, inclusiveness and change" notwithstanding.
So, maybe Google realizes that by offering big bucks, they are showing their employees that they value good ideas more than immediate cash. Of course, Google will want to use those good ideas to generate more cash, but if I read it correctly, the reward to the genius employee comes well before the company makes that money back (and more) from the idea.
[sigh] When I am king ...
-paul
In a corporate environment, you have to balance protecting data versus putting yourself at the mercy of a disgruntled employee. If hard drives go missing with your financials, your employee data (!!!), or the designs for your latest product, an EFS will help you sleep a lot easier at night. I'd look at some way to set the key for the EFS and prevent it from being changed, if that's even possible. Give each user their own EFS with their own key, and the key recorded in at least two separate and safe places.
-paul
-paul
I'd put in an ObTasteless here, but I've been out of the loop for so long on account of the spam that I just don't have the heart for it any more. [wipes a wistful tear from his eye]
-paul
For smart gun, the observed actions are how the person squeezes something to produce a unique and measurable pattern. Embedded sensors in the experimental gun then can read and record the size and force of the users' hand during the first second when the trigger is squeezed.
It is a well-known fact that you don't do things the same way when you're in a real, physical, him-or-me confrontation. I shoot on both sides of a local range, the public side, and the "police-only" side. The public side is the relaxed, methodical shooting where people take their sweet time reloading, placing their shots just-so, and all that. On the tactical side, there isn't a bench, just a bunch of dirt, and the targets. You draw from a holster, move, take aim, and make a 10x bigger pattern than on the public side because, assuming your instructor has done it right, you're under stress. There are distractions (fellow students throwing stuff at you, even!), moving targets, and adrenaline. Falling down, fumbling a weapon, having a feed malfunction ("jam") and having to reload in a split-second, I've seen it all, except somebody get accidentally shot, thankfully.
Here's another one for you - a weapon-retention struggle. Suppose he's got his hand on the grip, but you've managed to turn it around to point at him, and can get your finger into the trigger guard? I have done this with training rounds; shooting someone off a weapon is remarkably effective, and easier than it sounds. Or you have your hand on the weapon, but he has his hand on yours: you can't get your proper grip that way, either, but you have a good chance of getting him to let go when you drop to the ground and shoot him in the foot point-blank (that works, too). But Mr. "Smart" Gun won't permit this, because your grip will be a lot different, and to the "smart" gun, that means it isn't you.
I for one will not be buying any of these "smart" guns. How smart can it be when it's still a 1-in-10 failure rate? I won't trust my life to it, and neither should you. What happens when YOU are the 1 in 10, and the bad guy is in YOUR house? Even if they get it 100%, what about the batteries? I'll take an all-mechanical solution any time, thank you.
Notice that the police and military are exempt from having to use these "smart" guns? Do you think they know something you don't?
-paul
However, based on MS's past behaviours, I think we can look forward to a "good enough" replacement for PeopleSoft to be built into the next version of Windows. MS will forbid OEM's to remove it because they don't want a "confusing user experience." Oh, and it will increase the "Microsoft tax" on your new PC that you were only going to load Linux on.
Don't get me wrong - I like competition, but I like fair competition, based on merits. It reminds me of my high-school football team; the football was some sort of "regulation size and colour," and so the high school chose its school colours such that one of them matched the ball colour perfectly. When we played home games, we got to pick whether we would wear the light or the dark-coloured jerseys, and of course, we chose the ones that matched the ball. It made it very difficult for the other players to tell who had the ball, and made diversionary fakes a lot easier. When we played away, our opponents would choose the dark colour, so that our team wore the light (and very contrasting) colour jerseys. Net result? We won a lot more home games, and by higher margins. Hardly what I'd call "fair."
Mod this -1, Long-winded.
-paul
If you crave the challenge of making tight, efficient code, sometimes with very little under you but the bare chip itself, then embedded systems might be the place for you.
cue the grumpy old man voice: "Why back in my day, we didn't have 64-bit multi-core chips with gigabytes of memory to waste, no sir, we had to write in assembly code for 8-bit processors, and WE LOVED IT!"
-paul
What is noteworthy here is that Charter is appealing the case (and racking up legal fees) even after it already had to hand over the goods; the battle (not the war, yet) was lost, but Charter is now saying that the court should have stayed the order. If they're fighting on principle, I say good for them. Maybe they just want to set a precedent so that the next request (maybe for 20,000 names) won't go through.
Most of the posts I see right now say that it's great they care about their subscribers' privacy, to which I say bollocks. Charter, like every cable company cares about one thing: money. Think about it: with all the extra digital channels, what do they have? At least 20 channels of pay-per-view and another 10 or so of home-shopping. Most of the rest of the channels are pretty craptastic, too. And no, they won't sell you just the few channels you want to watch; buy a package for an inflated price, or suck eggs.
Anyway, Charter stands to lose money by having to hire people (PLURAL!) full-time to handle all the DMCA subpoenas, and they stand to lose subscribers (money) if they just roll over to the RIAA, as subscribers will opt for DSL in the hopes that the phone company won't roll over so easily.
-paul
I think I had a point there. It might have been that I, as a consumer, was prepared to spend good money on this movie (see it twice = $18.00, DVD=$25.00), but Hollywood's obsession with control meant that I could only buy one ticket, and I had to wait around for the DVD. There was a small chance I would have settled for the cam rip, if it had been better quality, and then there's more lost money.
It would be interesting to see the studios release films on DVD right after the theatrical run finishes, but then they would bitch and moan about "nobody watches the movie because they're just waiting for the DVD." They won't be satisfied until they can erase our memory of the movie when the closing credits roll, and charge us for each viewing.
-paul
Point 1 is conceded. Point 2 is forced by the crummy design of the OS. Point 3 suffers from a little problem - you have to run IE to get to WindowsUpdate.
Yes, users commit a hefty number of the mistakes, but let's lay some blame where it rightly belongs, at Microsoft's feet.
-paul
How about "save directly to PDF without spending $400 for Adobe Acrobat"? OpenOffice.org is TEH R0X0RZ. I use it at work (a very large corporation that feeds MS unholy amounts of cash every year), and save to natively to sxw/sxc, then send a PDF to coworkers, or save as DOC/XLS onto the fileserver.
-paul
The real target of making it illegal to remove federal spyware would be the makers of spyware removal programs, who have a lot more to lose than someone already under heavy surveillance for illegal activities. The authors will be threatened, a la the DMCA, with "trafficking in circumvention technology" and I'll bet good money that the feds can bring enough charges to make them fold like cheap suits.
Never mind this particular story is happening in Australia; we either have done it or will soon do it here in the USA. Our federal government specializes in "conviction by overwhelming force," where they threaten so many charges that add up to twenty life sentences plug two lethal injections, the target pleads guilty to one chosen charge to avoid the gamble.
I love my country, but I fear my government. Reason magazine put it best a few months before the election: "The good news is that on Nov. 2, one of these men will lose. The bad news is that the other one will win."
-paul
PLEASE tell me that the SCO experience is needed only to figure out how to best migrate AWAY from it.
-paul
My daughter's sunday school teacher is a single mom with teenage boys. She doesn't have a lot of money, but a family member gave her a new computer last Christmas, and the phone company is selling DSL for only a few bucks more than AOHell. Knowing she can't afford to pay anyone to set it up, I agree to help her set it up, no charge.
A few months later, she's having trouble - can't log in to some site to sign up for a credit-card processing account so she can accept CC for her Mary Kay side business, and she asks for help. I go over one night after work, and one of her boys is doing his homework at the kitchen table, PC in the living room.
She shows me the error, and I immediately point out that CyberSitter or some similar censorware is blocking the site. "Yes, I installed that to help keep the porn off the computer." I pull up the logs, and it's FULL of porn sites being blocked at times when she was at work. He tried to blame it on spam and spyware, and I was non-committal, just wanted to get the thing working for her, but I think she had a little talk with him after I left.
Can you say "uncomfortable?"
P.S. Still can't figure out why cybershitter blocks a credit card merchant site, but I just told her to disable the software when she logged in to do CC stuff.
-paul
Picture the puke scene from Team America: World Police and you've got a good idea of HALF of what I just went through.
You, sir, should be kicked off slashdot, post-haste.
-paul
Pay-per-use implies a secure authentication mechanism, which then opens the door for abuse of one sort or another. If you are developing a product which will compete against something Microsoft already does (or plans to do), and MS gets wind of it, will there be "technical problems" in contacting the authorization server the next time you start up VC++? What about the SCO v. IBM debacle? SCO claimed they could terminate IBM's license for AIX, and if pay-per-use had been in place, SCO could have flipped a switch on all IBM's customers. Do you think that would have affected IBM's willingness to settle? Yes, they could have got a court order to turn it back on, but how many customers would have been down for a day or two, and said, "Screw this, I'm buying my unix from the people who OWN it!"
Pay-per-use is NOT the wave of the future so long as I have any say in it. When my boss asks me for tool evaluations, I'll always favour the least-encumbered tool. And yes, that means even if it's sub-optimal. We can always make changes to F/OSS stuff to meet our needs, and the freedom to do so, IMHO, more than makes up for the extra work involved.
-paul
Been there, done that, and going to do it (I mean, have it done to me) again this year.
In keeping with my Newspeak-inspired login name, I suppose we could say, "oldcorps unbellyfeel doubleplusgood prolework." A good translation to modern English is:
Old-school, large, top-heavy, MBA-filled, "dinosaur" corporations do not fully appreciate the exceptional effort which the "little people" put forward on a daily basis.
That turned out better than I thought. I like it. I just might put in my resignation letter when I find my new gig.
-paul
YOU FORGOT POLAND!
Thank you, I'll be here all week. Remember to tip your waitress.
-paul
You might consider not doing your online banking from work? (Yeah, I'm a hypocrite, browsing /. from work, but it's lunch break right now.)
Another possibility, if you have or can get enough control of the machine, is to install F/OSS alternatives. My corporate standard is Outhouse and Internet Exploiter, but I'm typing this on Firefox, and I'll check my e-mail in Sylpheed-Claws once I'm done. My IT guy knows about it, and doesn't raise a fuss, because I don't ask him to fix things when they (rarely) go wrong.
-paul
RTFA. These are online gambling sites. Most gambling has a large amount of organized crime involved. I think that getting fined/arrested should be the least of these scumbags' worries. And whatever the mob would do to them, they would deserve it.
-paul
Just because I try to have a Christ-like love for people who do wrong things (and I'm certainly not perfect myself, far from it), does not mean that I have to call their wrong things right. To paraphrase C. S. Lewis, I will not uproot my rose garden for the sake of someone who prefers the smell of manure.
-paul
It's important to admit when you're wrong. I made a mistake, and you are correct; it was a paid advertisement that got the guy fined. So "Freedom of Speech" only matters when you express a popular viewpoint? That's not freedom at all.
"A British Anglican bishop, for instance, who suggested that homosexuals seek psychological counseling was the target of a police investigation" Oops, that was England, not Canada. Same thing - "hate speech" used to persecute a religious group. The bishop's quote is in the article. You decide if that's "hate speech." At least they dropped the charges. They still accomplished the point of making people worry about being prosecuted for expressing their religious beliefs.
"The first conviction under the Swedish law" at the bottom. While he said some very unkind things about homosexuals, he still did not cross "the line" into advocating violence. Some people like their religion with a little more fire and brimstone than others. Who are you to judge?
"Swedish Pastor Sued For So-Called Hate Speech". A different pastor, same result.
Oh wait, I'm still not coming up with examples in Canada. I think I might not be able to find any. The references I was remembering were in opposition to C-250 which was eventually passed. While it was being debated, people raised their concerns that this law would be used by homosexuals as a weapon against churches. The provisions in the bill to "protect" pastors have all sorts of wiggle-room in them which can allow the crown to threaten pastors all the same.
I could go on, but I'm stopping at the first page of google results for "church hate speech homosexuality."
I don't care whether you are gay or not; leave me alone to live my life, and I'll leave you alone to live yours. Don't flaunt your homosexuality in my face, and I won't tell you to your face that I think it's wrong. But don't ever expect me to actually approve of your choices. I have my standards, and no amount of whining or legislation is going to change my mind.
-paul
It's one thing to say "homosexuality is wrong, and we should execute the sodomites! Let's all go home, grab our guns, and get to work." What I am claiming, backed by items in the news, is that a church which simply said, "homosexuality is a sin, and we should not pretend that it is simply another 'life choice'," was threatened and/or fined under anti-hate speech laws.
With such regulations apparently coming to the internet (as far as the site or its owner are in canada), things will only get worse. They are creating a nation of thought-criminals through silly laws like this.
-paul