This sort of thing is exactly why I have been against televised exit polls and election returns on national elections in the US while the polls are still open.
Exit polls and even preliminary poll results from the east coast are being broadcast while the polls are still open in other states, which influences the voters who have yet to cast their vote.
Off-shoring is never done to improve service for the customer. It is always done on the basis of cost. Why is it less expensive? Because off-shored labor is so much less expensive that it is cheaper to set up the infrastructure and hire offshore workers than it is to hire workers locally. In short, it is less expensive because it allows companies to circumvent minimum wage laws.
Want to offshore labor "ethically" in your global market? Pay offshore workers the same as you would pay local ones. Suddenly off-shoring looks far less attractive.
I once worked for a company whose internal help desk was rated as being in the top 5% in quality and cost in the industry. The following year, it was off-shored, and all the local workers fired, because the company discovered it could save $1/hour per worker, on about 20 workers. Those who had to use the new "helpless desk" told horror stories about it for years - but none of that mattered. The company saved its dollar per hour (on paper), and the CIO got his bonus.
There was a time when managers and companies considered that they had a duty to treat their employees in an ethical fashion - not just the minimum required to satisfy the law. I miss those days.
A company thats work force does not reflect the general population with out any justification is probably already breaking labor laws.
There's a good chance they aren't, actually, at least in the US.
For example: Upper class people tend to pay for educations at the best universities. Doesn't mean they know any more than people in the middle and lower classes, but having such a school on a resume tends to mean that they will get hired more for management jobs than someone coming from a less prestigious school (middle class), or no college at all (much of the lower class). No labor laws are broken, but in most places, "upper class" has a rather uneven distribution as to the general population with regard to race.
With somewhat more justification, a disproportionate number of highly technical jobs go to the middle class, because they usually have the education to get and keep such jobs. Again, the middle class tends to have an uneven racial distribution.
Menial labor is usually the province of the lower class because most do not have the education to do better, do not speak the language well enough to do better, or both. Middle and upper class workers will take menial labor jobs only as a last resort because they believe they can do better. In the US, the lower class has a disproportionate number of racial and ethnic minorities, which results in a large number of people in menial labor jobs being from those groups.
If blacks and hispanics make up 30% of the population, that 90% of the qualified applicants for an engineering job are white males doesn't mean a company is breaking labor laws if it hires almost exclusively while male engineers. Likewise, if 90% of the applicants to a construction company are black or hispanic, the company having mostly black and hispanic workers is also not breaking labor laws.
While I have seen company policies in large companies that mandated the workforce be of the same racial makeup (percentage-wise) as the local population, such policies are almost uniformly bad for the company, as they result in under-qualified or unqualified applicants being hired solely on the basis of their being the best applicant of their racial group to apply. In the worst case of that I've seen, a company with such policies hired a woman who was both unskilled and functionally illiterate to manage an IT help desk, because she happened to be the same gender and a member of the same minority group as the outgoing manager. That she was fired within a few months and replaced with someone less incompetent is of small comfort to the employees there, or to any of the people who could have done the job well, but were passed over because they didn't meet the company's "diversity goals."
...and in the ways that are best for those forced to follow the policy, not best for the company as a whole.
Some years ago, I worked for a large public utility with an internal IT department that used a chargeback model to "defray" the costs of having an internal IT department. They charged, for example, $200/month for an office to have a networked printer (yes, that was the actual number) in addition to the lease cost. Since the individual office managers having to pay for IT services out of their own budgets weren't stupid, they did the predictable thing: they went out to the computer store and bought $100 inkjet printers instead, hung them off individual machines, and shared them out. Sure, at the page counts being pushed through them, the printers only lasted 4-6 months, and the ink cost per page was not at all economical compared to a laser printer - but the cost savings to the individual office's budget was huge even if it cost the company far more money.
Further, since the cost of having IT do anything was so high, most business units developed their own "unofficial" IT staffs - people who in theory held other jobs, but actually spent much of their time doing off-the-books IT work - also bad for the company financially but a huge budget bonus for the business units involved, since the cost of having those extra people was far less than the cost IT would have charged them for the services those people provided.
The inevitable result of being taught to accept everything they are taught without question, rather than being taught the basics and critical thinking, is that students mostly stop asking important questions. Even if they do ask, they depend on someone else to provide "the one true answer" - because they don't have the tools to arrive at a useful answer on their own.
Leaving aside the question of whether illegal music downloading is something that requires legislation at the federal level, or whether the schools should be doing enforcement, there is another, central issue here that most people are ignoring like the elephant in the room:
If the federal government could legally require action by the schools, they would.
They cannot - so they are resorting to extortion. Public schools are legally required to do a large number of things which are expensive, and which the federal government provides funds to offset the cost of. Because the monies provided are not directly tied to the mandates and required to fund only them, the federal government can threaten to withhold its largess as a means of coercing schools into doing things it cannot legally require.
This is not unique to the educational system - the federal government has been doing it at the State level for some time now, as a means of doing an end run around the 10th Amendment: pass unfunded mandates that require action at the State level; provide federal funding not directly tied to the mandates; require that the states do things the federal government cannot legally force the states to do, on pain of losing the federal funding for failure to comply.
While it is not new at the individual level either, the advent of the recent health care legislation brought it home to all Americans - not just select groups.
Until we are ready to stand up and demand that the federal government abide by the Constitution as written (rather than as it would be convenient for the party in power at the time), we will lose a few more freedoms every year.
For those who say the Constitution is a living document, meant to change with the times, I heartily agree. The Founders provided a Constitutional Amendment process for exactly that reason. If you believe the Constitution does not accurately represent the needs of the present day, then by all means, amend it... but do not "reinterpret" it and try to tell me that is what it said all along, just because you know that an amendment to get what you want will never be ratified.
Mainstream media is distrusted with good reason. It isn't just the bias that everyone knows is there.
Its that they've been caught, not once but several times, reporting stories they knew or should have known were false, as fact, because the stories in question supported that bias.
Spin real news according to your bias, and I'll listen and filter accordingly. Lie to me outright, and I'll never trust you again.
If you implicitly trust your boss and your employer to be fair, go to them and explain the situation, that you feel you're being taken advantage of, and ask how you can work together to address that.
If you have any lower level of trust, immediately start looking for work. When you find a new job and give notice, do NOT take an offer to stay on if they match the offer at your new job.
My last job, I was an 'indispensable man' keeping the tech end of a small company together. I did not in any way, shape, or form, trust the management or owners of the company. For various reasons, I decided it was time to move on, found a new job, and gave notice. They immediately offered to match what I would be making at the new job (a 30% raise over what I had been making). I declined politely, worked my two weeks and left. They hired my predecessor back, at the same salary I had left for, and gave another employee a large raise to stay... and then cut both their salaries by a third 6 weeks later.
Had I stayed, the same would have happened to me - I'd have given up what has turned out to be a dream job for me, in exchange for continuing to work for people I didn't trust, for pretty much the same money (once it was too late and the opportunity to move was gone).
The more data you flood people with, the less likely it is that they will look at any of it. At best, they will pick an agency (one that agrees with their prejudices and preconceived notions) to aggregate, collate, and boil down that data into short bites that have little relation to the meaning of the original data.
At worst, they will be overwhelmed to the point where they simply ignore most of it.
Example of the latter: at my job, I receive about 150 work-related emails a day, even on my weekends. I delete all but two or three without even reading them, because the vast majority are informational emails that I don't have to read - and if I read them all, I'd have no time to actually do my job.
At a guess, I'd say he probably didn't read through all of the 250,000 documents either - that would be over a thousand documents a day for the 8 months he mentioned having access. Even if he had gone over them all, no 22 year old specialist is qualified to make judgments on what material is "safe" to be released to the public. He had a Top Secret/SCI clearance, which means he potentially had access to some -very- sensitive information.
Civilians die in wars. Journalists die in wars. The crew of that helicopter weren't targeting civilians. They were targeting enemy combatants who, in this war, don't have the courtesy to wear uniforms that clearly distinguish them from civilians. That some of those people turned out to have actually been civilians doesn't make them war criminals any more than it did the pilots who bombed enemy cities during the second world war, killing civilians while attempting to destroy military targets. It is unfortunate that civilians / journalists died in the Apache attack - but given that the Apache crew was unaware of the presence of the journalists / civilians, releasing the video served only one purpose: to give propaganda ammunition to the enemies of the United States, both foreign and domestic.
What he deserves is to be executed for treason - though failing two witnesses or a confession in court, they may only be able to convict him of espionage. Fortunately, that is also punishable by death.
If he really believed the information needed to be made public, he could have pursued that through the proper channels, in ways that did not violate his oath or put the lives of others at risk.
There is a simpler way to deal with it, though it would require cooperation from the various organizations that run the internet backbone.
1) Get a reputable organization to investigate and generate a list of the IPs from which the actual attacks are occurring. Not the control IPs - the IPs of the zombies.
2) Have said reputable organization contact the ISPs responsible for those IPs, provide the evidence, and require that they disconnect the customers who own them, until those people provide proof to their local ISP that their machine has been cleaned/reloaded. If the ISP fails to respond or act, contact the appropriate groups and have them stop routing any traffic from that ISP's routers, at the next hop. If those groups will not respond or act, go to the next in the chain. Keep going up the chain until someone resolves the issue.
For an individual, being taken offline (even if it is because your machine is a zombie) is annoying.
At an ISP level, the whole ISP being taken offline because they refused to deal with their zombie customers, would be very bad for that company.
At a country level (if it got that far), having your whole country taken offline because an ISP refused to deal with its zombie customers would be catastrophic.
Given the level of pain this would cause at the individual and ISP level, and the potential pain at higher levels, political entities would rapidly find it was in their best interest to find and stop the people creating and controlling the botnets.
"Terrorists, drug kingpins, gang members, and the like will just use fake or stolen ID's or middlemen to purchase their phones."
Wait a minute. You're saying criminals might break the law? But... but... that's illegal!
I'm sure this law will work every bit as well at keeping pre-paid cell phones out of their hands as the laws that make it illegal for them to have guns do at keeping guns out of their hands.
I've yet to see an unbiased point-by-point comparison between the new and old standards. Everyone reporting on the issue seems to have an axe to grind, and most often with the aim of inflaming as many of those who agree with their view as possible. Most of what we've seen reported hasn't even been actual text from the books - but rather paraphrased 'goals' written by those with an agenda, or out-of-context quotes.
Until we see that sort of comparison, I would suggest that most of the hyperbole and histrionics are premature.
In at least some cases, malicious content is handled by making the mods open source (i.e., released as code), many of the others by the mods using a proprietary format that is only read by the game engine.
Neverwinter Nights was released by Bioware in 2002, and still has a lot of active online servers and an active modding community.
A lot of mods, content, and scripts for the Neverwinter Nights and other games are hosted on the Neverwinter Vault here: http://nwvault.ign.com/
I'm a DM and developer for a Neverwinter Nights persistent world known as Narfell. http://www.narfell.us/
The increased costs of goods and services produced by low cost menial labor from vanished illegals (assuming they all suddenly went away) would be at least partially offset by lower costs associated with the services abused by those same illegals.
The court and prison systems would suddenly be under less load, as would police, hospitals, schools, and other social services, resulting in lower taxes. Vehicle insurance rates would also go down.
There was a time, within living memory, when illegal immigration was not an issue in this country, and bricklaying (for example) was a skilled trade. Now, construction sites hire three illegals to lay bricks badly for what it used to cost to hire one American to do it well. An American can't get a job doing that kind of work anymore. Yet when there were no illegals to do the work, somehow, houses, factories and such still got built.
If we found ourselves with a shortage of low cost unskilled labor, immigration policies could always be adjusted in a controlled fashion to allow such labor into the country without overwhelming local social services and bringing with it the problems that illegals invariably carry with them when present in large numbers.
...but to make a controlled immigration adjustment work, the illegals must first be removed.
Forgot one point on #8 - Evidence of this can also be found at any check cashing place or Western Union office - or anywhere else in the US that allows wire transfers of money. You'll find instructions in Spanish on how to wire money out of the country to Mexico
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This sort of thing is exactly why I have been against televised exit polls and election returns on national elections in the US while the polls are still open.
Exit polls and even preliminary poll results from the east coast are being broadcast while the polls are still open in other states, which influences the voters who have yet to cast their vote.
Off-shoring is never done to improve service for the customer. It is always done on the basis of cost. Why is it less expensive? Because off-shored labor is so much less expensive that it is cheaper to set up the infrastructure and hire offshore workers than it is to hire workers locally. In short, it is less expensive because it allows companies to circumvent minimum wage laws.
Want to offshore labor "ethically" in your global market? Pay offshore workers the same as you would pay local ones. Suddenly off-shoring looks far less attractive.
I once worked for a company whose internal help desk was rated as being in the top 5% in quality and cost in the industry. The following year, it was off-shored, and all the local workers fired, because the company discovered it could save $1/hour per worker, on about 20 workers. Those who had to use the new "helpless desk" told horror stories about it for years - but none of that mattered. The company saved its dollar per hour (on paper), and the CIO got his bonus.
There was a time when managers and companies considered that they had a duty to treat their employees in an ethical fashion - not just the minimum required to satisfy the law. I miss those days.
A company thats work force does not reflect the general population with out any justification is probably already breaking labor laws.
There's a good chance they aren't, actually, at least in the US.
For example: Upper class people tend to pay for educations at the best universities. Doesn't mean they know any more than people in the middle and lower classes, but having such a school on a resume tends to mean that they will get hired more for management jobs than someone coming from a less prestigious school (middle class), or no college at all (much of the lower class). No labor laws are broken, but in most places, "upper class" has a rather uneven distribution as to the general population with regard to race.
With somewhat more justification, a disproportionate number of highly technical jobs go to the middle class, because they usually have the education to get and keep such jobs. Again, the middle class tends to have an uneven racial distribution.
Menial labor is usually the province of the lower class because most do not have the education to do better, do not speak the language well enough to do better, or both. Middle and upper class workers will take menial labor jobs only as a last resort because they believe they can do better. In the US, the lower class has a disproportionate number of racial and ethnic minorities, which results in a large number of people in menial labor jobs being from those groups.
If blacks and hispanics make up 30% of the population, that 90% of the qualified applicants for an engineering job are white males doesn't mean a company is breaking labor laws if it hires almost exclusively while male engineers. Likewise, if 90% of the applicants to a construction company are black or hispanic, the company having mostly black and hispanic workers is also not breaking labor laws.
While I have seen company policies in large companies that mandated the workforce be of the same racial makeup (percentage-wise) as the local population, such policies are almost uniformly bad for the company, as they result in under-qualified or unqualified applicants being hired solely on the basis of their being the best applicant of their racial group to apply. In the worst case of that I've seen, a company with such policies hired a woman who was both unskilled and functionally illiterate to manage an IT help desk, because she happened to be the same gender and a member of the same minority group as the outgoing manager. That she was fired within a few months and replaced with someone less incompetent is of small comfort to the employees there, or to any of the people who could have done the job well, but were passed over because they didn't meet the company's "diversity goals."
Unresponsive providers might be more likely to respond if responsive parties who controlled upstream routers were to stop routing traffic from them.
All traffic.
Wow - they invented a V1. What's next? Television?
...and in the ways that are best for those forced to follow the policy, not best for the company as a whole.
Some years ago, I worked for a large public utility with an internal IT department that used a chargeback model to "defray" the costs of having an internal IT department. They charged, for example, $200/month for an office to have a networked printer (yes, that was the actual number) in addition to the lease cost. Since the individual office managers having to pay for IT services out of their own budgets weren't stupid, they did the predictable thing: they went out to the computer store and bought $100 inkjet printers instead, hung them off individual machines, and shared them out. Sure, at the page counts being pushed through them, the printers only lasted 4-6 months, and the ink cost per page was not at all economical compared to a laser printer - but the cost savings to the individual office's budget was huge even if it cost the company far more money.
Further, since the cost of having IT do anything was so high, most business units developed their own "unofficial" IT staffs - people who in theory held other jobs, but actually spent much of their time doing off-the-books IT work - also bad for the company financially but a huge budget bonus for the business units involved, since the cost of having those extra people was far less than the cost IT would have charged them for the services those people provided.
Yes, if you include secular humanism as a religion, which many do.
If the "recovered" amount is just judgments, the actual dollar amount received may be far less, depending on the defendants' ability to pay.
On the other hand, the lawyers will almost certainly get the full amount of their legal fees.
The inevitable result of being taught to accept everything they are taught without question, rather than being taught the basics and critical thinking, is that students mostly stop asking important questions. Even if they do ask, they depend on someone else to provide "the one true answer" - because they don't have the tools to arrive at a useful answer on their own.
Leaving aside the question of whether illegal music downloading is something that requires legislation at the federal level, or whether the schools should be doing enforcement, there is another, central issue here that most people are ignoring like the elephant in the room:
If the federal government could legally require action by the schools, they would.
They cannot - so they are resorting to extortion. Public schools are legally required to do a large number of things which are expensive, and which the federal government provides funds to offset the cost of. Because the monies provided are not directly tied to the mandates and required to fund only them, the federal government can threaten to withhold its largess as a means of coercing schools into doing things it cannot legally require.
This is not unique to the educational system - the federal government has been doing it at the State level for some time now, as a means of doing an end run around the 10th Amendment: pass unfunded mandates that require action at the State level; provide federal funding not directly tied to the mandates; require that the states do things the federal government cannot legally force the states to do, on pain of losing the federal funding for failure to comply.
While it is not new at the individual level either, the advent of the recent health care legislation brought it home to all Americans - not just select groups.
Until we are ready to stand up and demand that the federal government abide by the Constitution as written (rather than as it would be convenient for the party in power at the time), we will lose a few more freedoms every year.
For those who say the Constitution is a living document, meant to change with the times, I heartily agree. The Founders provided a Constitutional Amendment process for exactly that reason. If you believe the Constitution does not accurately represent the needs of the present day, then by all means, amend it... but do not "reinterpret" it and try to tell me that is what it said all along, just because you know that an amendment to get what you want will never be ratified.
Mainstream media is distrusted with good reason. It isn't just the bias that everyone knows is there.
Its that they've been caught, not once but several times, reporting stories they knew or should have known were false, as fact, because the stories in question supported that bias.
Spin real news according to your bias, and I'll listen and filter accordingly. Lie to me outright, and I'll never trust you again.
If you implicitly trust your boss and your employer to be fair, go to them and explain the situation, that you feel you're being taken advantage of, and ask how you can work together to address that.
If you have any lower level of trust, immediately start looking for work. When you find a new job and give notice, do NOT take an offer to stay on if they match the offer at your new job.
My last job, I was an 'indispensable man' keeping the tech end of a small company together. I did not in any way, shape, or form, trust the management or owners of the company. For various reasons, I decided it was time to move on, found a new job, and gave notice. They immediately offered to match what I would be making at the new job (a 30% raise over what I had been making). I declined politely, worked my two weeks and left. They hired my predecessor back, at the same salary I had left for, and gave another employee a large raise to stay... and then cut both their salaries by a third 6 weeks later.
Had I stayed, the same would have happened to me - I'd have given up what has turned out to be a dream job for me, in exchange for continuing to work for people I didn't trust, for pretty much the same money (once it was too late and the opportunity to move was gone).
The more data you flood people with, the less likely it is that they will look at any of it. At best, they will pick an agency (one that agrees with their prejudices and preconceived notions) to aggregate, collate, and boil down that data into short bites that have little relation to the meaning of the original data.
At worst, they will be overwhelmed to the point where they simply ignore most of it.
Example of the latter: at my job, I receive about 150 work-related emails a day, even on my weekends. I delete all but two or three without even reading them, because the vast majority are informational emails that I don't have to read - and if I read them all, I'd have no time to actually do my job.
They don't teach critical thinking in school anymore.
The ideologues in charge of modern education don't want children thinking critically about their indoctrination. That would hamper the programming.
At a guess, I'd say he probably didn't read through all of the 250,000 documents either - that would be over a thousand documents a day for the 8 months he mentioned having access. Even if he had gone over them all, no 22 year old specialist is qualified to make judgments on what material is "safe" to be released to the public. He had a Top Secret/SCI clearance, which means he potentially had access to some -very- sensitive information.
Civilians die in wars. Journalists die in wars. The crew of that helicopter weren't targeting civilians. They were targeting enemy combatants who, in this war, don't have the courtesy to wear uniforms that clearly distinguish them from civilians. That some of those people turned out to have actually been civilians doesn't make them war criminals any more than it did the pilots who bombed enemy cities during the second world war, killing civilians while attempting to destroy military targets. It is unfortunate that civilians / journalists died in the Apache attack - but given that the Apache crew was unaware of the presence of the journalists / civilians, releasing the video served only one purpose: to give propaganda ammunition to the enemies of the United States, both foreign and domestic.
What he deserves is to be executed for treason - though failing two witnesses or a confession in court, they may only be able to convict him of espionage. Fortunately, that is also punishable by death.
If he really believed the information needed to be made public, he could have pursued that through the proper channels, in ways that did not violate his oath or put the lives of others at risk.
Not his call to make.
There is a simpler way to deal with it, though it would require cooperation from the various organizations that run the internet backbone.
1) Get a reputable organization to investigate and generate a list of the IPs from which the actual attacks are occurring. Not the control IPs - the IPs of the zombies.
2) Have said reputable organization contact the ISPs responsible for those IPs, provide the evidence, and require that they disconnect the customers who own them, until those people provide proof to their local ISP that their machine has been cleaned/reloaded. If the ISP fails to respond or act, contact the appropriate groups and have them stop routing any traffic from that ISP's routers, at the next hop. If those groups will not respond or act, go to the next in the chain. Keep going up the chain until someone resolves the issue.
For an individual, being taken offline (even if it is because your machine is a zombie) is annoying.
At an ISP level, the whole ISP being taken offline because they refused to deal with their zombie customers, would be very bad for that company.
At a country level (if it got that far), having your whole country taken offline because an ISP refused to deal with its zombie customers would be catastrophic.
Given the level of pain this would cause at the individual and ISP level, and the potential pain at higher levels, political entities would rapidly find it was in their best interest to find and stop the people creating and controlling the botnets.
"Terrorists, drug kingpins, gang members, and the like will just use fake or stolen ID's or middlemen to purchase their phones."
Wait a minute. You're saying criminals might break the law? But... but... that's illegal!
I'm sure this law will work every bit as well at keeping pre-paid cell phones out of their hands as the laws that make it illegal for them to have guns do at keeping guns out of their hands.
Oh. Wait...
I've yet to see an unbiased point-by-point comparison between the new and old standards. Everyone reporting on the issue seems to have an axe to grind, and most often with the aim of inflaming as many of those who agree with their view as possible. Most of what we've seen reported hasn't even been actual text from the books - but rather paraphrased 'goals' written by those with an agenda, or out-of-context quotes.
Until we see that sort of comparison, I would suggest that most of the hyperbole and histrionics are premature.
In at least some cases, malicious content is handled by making the mods open source (i.e., released as code), many of the others by the mods using a proprietary format that is only read by the game engine.
Neverwinter Nights was released by Bioware in 2002, and still has a lot of active online servers and an active modding community.
A lot of mods, content, and scripts for the Neverwinter Nights and other games are hosted on the Neverwinter Vault here: http://nwvault.ign.com/
I'm a DM and developer for a Neverwinter Nights persistent world known as Narfell. http://www.narfell.us/
I'm amused that LULAC is being lumped in with the "conservative astroturfing" groups.
Also amused that they are being painted as a front for AT&T.
Yes, I can see how that must be rough on people... having to actually pay attention to obeying the laws of the land, lest they be stopped by police.
Last I checked, the concept that "everyone else" is breaking the law makes it no less a violation of the law when you do it.
The increased costs of goods and services produced by low cost menial labor from vanished illegals (assuming they all suddenly went away) would be at least partially offset by lower costs associated with the services abused by those same illegals.
...but to make a controlled immigration adjustment work, the illegals must first be removed.
The court and prison systems would suddenly be under less load, as would police, hospitals, schools, and other social services, resulting in lower taxes. Vehicle insurance rates would also go down.
There was a time, within living memory, when illegal immigration was not an issue in this country, and bricklaying (for example) was a skilled trade. Now, construction sites hire three illegals to lay bricks badly for what it used to cost to hire one American to do it well. An American can't get a job doing that kind of work anymore. Yet when there were no illegals to do the work, somehow, houses, factories and such still got built.
If we found ourselves with a shortage of low cost unskilled labor, immigration policies could always be adjusted in a controlled fashion to allow such labor into the country without overwhelming local social services and bringing with it the problems that illegals invariably carry with them when present in large numbers.
Forgot one point on #8 - Evidence of this can also be found at any check cashing place or Western Union office - or anywhere else in the US that allows wire transfers of money. You'll find instructions in Spanish on how to wire money out of the country to Mexico