This explains the situation nicely. In exchange for short term gain GM screwed themselves in the future and now they paying for it.
The simple fact that your are the one contributing to your 401k means that you're in control of your money, if you don't like the 401k plan your employer uses then use another one and forgo the matching funds which are few and far between anyways. This way you start investing in your retirement when you 25 and you end up with a mighty decent chunk of change by the time you choose to retire. You can also of course use that money once you retire to further invest in funds if you feel confident to risk your retirement funds while in retirement. With a couple of million dollars in your fund you can probably feel comfortable investing a hundred thousand or so which will give you enough gains if you invest properly or will a loss you can live with.
As for the mortgage meltdown, it was a result of more idiotic thinking, why on earth would they think people could pay their mortgage if the payments went up 50%? Of course they didn't think other pressure would force a need to increase rates but it was easy to spot and they still did it anyway. The bank I use did not participate in this stupid plan and they are doing quite fine. They have seen an increase in loan defaults but they saw it coming and kept money aside accordingly.
Back to the GM specific issue with setting aside funds, we agree they couldn't foresee the increased costs but they saw the costs increasing and didn't react accordingly which left them 20 billion behind in 1995. More than not reacting accordingly all through the 80s they continued increasing pensions instead of increasing salaries. It screwed the chances at profitability.
Of course their CEO got a rather sizable pay raise last year despite 30 billion in losses. How's that for using your money wisely? They are sinking ship.
The vast majority of sets are 720P HDTV which means they won't show you the full 1080p that bd offers. That means people aren't getting the full value of the product which makes it less attractive.
Blueray isn't natural for HDTV owners. It's natural for 1080p HDTV owners which is a far smaller subset. Generally anyone who bought a TV smaller than 42" can only get 720P so they aren't going to experience what bluray legitimately offers.
Of course 1080p is coming to smaller sets now but its pretty late in the game especially when there is greater interest in ondemand movies from their cable or satellite provider which will limit them to 720P once again. Diverting from broadcast quality screws them as it limits the number of people who have any interest in it at all.
Combine all that with more expensive media, players, and especially burners and you have a product which a very limited appeal.
In the data world bluray isn't good enough either. Why the hell would I spend $60 on an 80gig disc when I can spend $70 on an 800gig LTO4 tape? Combined with the crappiness that is bluray libraries and it just makes very little sense unless you're a tiny shop without a lot of data.
You state how I speak from ignorance and then go on to support my statements exactly. GM did not start setting aside money when the employee enrolled in the pension plan. As a result when it came time for people to retire they had to use current profits to support it. As more and more retire it only gets harder for them, Sorry, but idiotic is indeed the way to describe this behavior.
In regards to 401ks being somehow unsafe, short of total collapse of the economy you can always shift your investments from low-risk funds to different low-risk funds if they aren't performing. It may not be 100% safe but its a few orders of magnitude better than a pension. Potentially you get a lot more too since you can start a 401k whenever you want.
I don't think you have thought your clever plan through. If you make it illegal to hire illegal immigrants through better enforcement, what exactly do you think the millions of illegal immigrants already here are going to do? You think they will go back home?
Living in Phoenix Arizona, one of the fastest growing housing markets in the country I can tell you the market is going strong even in its weakened state. The Mexicans I personally know don't send money back to Mexico, they came here with their family or are working to get money to bring their family back to the U.S.
You seem to have an odd view, illegal immigrants aren't the only stresser on ERs as they have become the main source of healthcare for roughly 16% of Americans who are uninsured. That's about 50 million people if you're counting.
If you unionize these workers then they can't be taken advantage of which will make them less attractive to potential employers. Your stance makes no sense.
The real reason it costs so much less is that contributing to a 401k means that the money is removed from the regular revenue stream. The idiots at GM spent all the money that was supposed to be set aside for pensions which is why they are in so much trouble now.
It turns out when it comes to pensions this was not an uncommon practice but obviously it requires continuous growth which isn't really something that a car company can rely on.
401ks are far safer as employees and employers alike I believe have learned the lesson, plus 401ks are transferrable so if you lose your job after 28 years you don't risk your retirement.
VMWare in an ACE environment is just as secure on Windows as it is on any client down to Windows CE or SUSE Enterprise Desktop, that's the beauty of it. Run whatever you want on whatever base OS you want. The security is the same as you still have your AES or blowfish or whatever encryption method of choice protecting the VM image.
All you need after that is two factor authentication and you're pretty damned secure and you dont have to worry about the host OS as much regardless of your platform of choice.
There is also VMWare's ACE which gives you all sorts of options. Additionally there are Virtual desktop scenarios which means that all your work data is done in the VM where everything is encrypted. That leaves the host OS for guests to use. If the laptop is stolen then the user only loses the work that they did between the time they were last plugged into the network, VPN connectivity even counts.
HP and Lenovo both have whole disk encryption options that work at the enterprise level. My primary experience is with HP which allows me to keep a backup key on a couple of USB thumb drives which can be stored in separate locations. Truecrypt as this same ability and both options are transparent to the OS for the most part.
I had the exact same thing about ADP but I imagined that government data can't be stored and managed by a private company. There are all sorts of logistics to worry about.
Honestly though an Oracle RAC solution isn't going to go out of date in 30 years nor are the laws of the land going to change dramatically enough for modern payroll systems to not keep up. In 30 years they won't be looking for java coders to manage their payroll changes because the providers of said software would have done it for them long ago if the laws of the land were changing in that direction that is.
The bottom line is that we agree, there is simply no excuse for this and I also think we further agree that that this task is better served by those that do it on a regular basis already and already at the scale at which California needs them to.
The real ridiculousness comes in the fact that they haven't just replaced the payroll system on an expensive mainframe with a simple Oracle RAC with two or maybe even three data centers all cross-replicating and log shipping back to a central location.
Suddenly your costs are reduced and perhaps more importantly you can use what thousands of other companies are using which will guarantee a pool of competent programmers to make modifications as necessary. Of course using modern payroll applications will result in not needing to reprogram to change a pay rate in any direction.
Should have looked more careful and now I gotta reply to my own post. I have NO objection to people owning guns. As long as they can demonstrate proficiency it's all good. This does not make people polite though.
Where do pro-gun nuts get this idea that an armed society is a polite society? What is this based on? Personally I have objection to owning guns, I'm from Vermont with some of the most liberal gun laws out there. Guns don't make people polite. You only need to look at the old west to see what rule by the gun does.
A sense of community and a well rounded education do far more to make people polite. 100 years ago you could string up a black man for looking at your woman wrong. Society is a lot more polite today than it was then.
Of course that doesn't mean people do things that are annoying like talking on cell phones in a crowded movie theater. Face it, that it not as bad as someone pulling a knife on you just to prove a point.
Home engineering is not nearly as bad as you make it out to be. A professional grade studio costs a hell of a lot less today to make than it used to back in the day. That was one of the reasons studio time cost so much. Of course the engineers themselves also charged an arm and a leg but now you have professional DJs doing this work for you often times even for free although in rare circumstances they actually pay you to come and perform for them so they can mix properly and make a ton of money at their own shows.
The role of a record label is outdated. Now any marketing company or PR firm can do this work for you and for much smaller prices. They also have a direct incentive to make sure you are successful as they can get more money out of you or you can go to another company. Things are much simpler when the content creator is the same as the content owner.
You mean like an anonymous post from another student threatening to sodomize her? Sounds like plausible danger although I don't know why you'd say she has herpes and then go on to talk about sodomizing her, seems to me like the anonymous poster was admitting to already being infected, otherwise he'd be the one in danger!
So you think by utilizing an anonymous web proxy you are spoofing the proxy provider? That's exactly what you are doing by using someone else's line.
The party you are stealing from is responsible for the call regardless of who actually made the call. The police would show up at their door at which time they would produce evidence that no one in the office made the call. The same thing would happen with a residence, the call came from that location so that is where they will show up. There is no false information being presented and so there is no spoofing. Phone lines don't care who is making the call, only that calls are allowed on the line.
A beige box doesn't spoof anything. It is not possible to remotely spoof someone else's phone number anymore. The only avenue of attack to get around this is to dial into a vulnerable PBX and call out using that PBX. It's not spoofing though, once they are on to you they can use that PBX to trace back to the original caller.
Caller ID has two parts, the CNID part which you can modify and the ANI part which is based on the hardware you are connecting removing control from you.
We had our PBX compromised a while back, ended up tracing calls through three others PBXs before it went outside the country. It takes a lot of teamwork from companies who care about long distance, if you run into one that doesn't it gets a lot harder.
The medium requires both, otherwise it wouldn't be successful. If everyone was a leech then the torrent would die as people wouldn't be able to get the content. So people have to be doing both and in the instance of MediaSentry they certainly are doing both although they are unconcerned with details like that as the only evidence they have is that your IP address downloaded content from them, what happens after that is outside of their purview.
I am uncertain if they try to connect to the IP address somehow to see if its distributing but of course that again wouldn't be fair as it's classic entrapment.
I had a similar experience as a juror. It was a kidnapping case where the prosecutor overreached for a charge. Ultimately we all thought the guy was as ass but there simply wasn't enough evidence, the public defender did a fantastic job in pointing out the holes in the prosecution.
You are correct except that someone downloading from MediaSentry has no way to know what license terms there are. They only know that MediaSentry is distributing content on a medium which requires both downloading and uploading to receive which should imply consent for distribution.
What do you mean it died? You can stream XM over the Internet and it even works on Linux with firefox assuming you have the wmp plugin of course.
I'm definitely a fan of XM, I like driving half way across the country without having to fiddle with the radio stations, it just works everywhere I go and no static.
XM has a lot of channels though with something for pretty much everyone. I hate sounding like a commercial for them but they really do blow terrestrial radio out of the water. For me these days it's XM and Pandora for 90% of my music listening time.
Yeah, I imagine he was aware of a lot more than most other people as admins usually are. I know that I have much more information about the company and how it operates along with its goals than I necessarily need to do my job but it's the nature of trust.
You have to be able to trust your admin so you should treat them accordingly. That is the first mistake of most employers these days. They treat everyone like dirt including the people that can burn them really badly because they don't understand how much their company relies on IT. I know the company I work used to come to an abrupt halt when there was an outage. Since then I've removed the single points of failure, the only thing left is me. They forget that redundant systems get kind of complex though and they assume anyone out of college can do it for 30k so they fight me for 70k.
I came into the same philosophy as you a few years ago when I was in the position where I took over a network that was completely undocumented. Now I have Visio diagrams and written explanations of almost everything including a complete inventory of what I have on what network at each site.
I started it with the idea of the bus principle but I've come to rely on it myself as I'm the only admin and so I often have parts of the network I don't touch for a year at a time. This means I forget how things are put together so I refer back to my own documentation. Works every time.
Ya know, I would kill to have another person around with the same skillset that I have but it just ain't gonna happen. Periodically I print out a report of all my passwords and lock them in the safe of the CFO. That way if another admin comes in because I got run over by a bus or more likely in my case, got in a horrid car wreck going well into the triple digits he or she can read my documentation and gain access to the system.
Not the best solution but it works since they refuse to hire me help even though I am way overworked increasing the likelihood I will kill myself traveling to and from work at all hours.
Slashdot Mirror
It didn't post my link. Will try again
This explains the situation nicely. In exchange for short term gain GM screwed themselves in the future and now they paying for it.
The simple fact that your are the one contributing to your 401k means that you're in control of your money, if you don't like the 401k plan your employer uses then use another one and forgo the matching funds which are few and far between anyways. This way you start investing in your retirement when you 25 and you end up with a mighty decent chunk of change by the time you choose to retire. You can also of course use that money once you retire to further invest in funds if you feel confident to risk your retirement funds while in retirement. With a couple of million dollars in your fund you can probably feel comfortable investing a hundred thousand or so which will give you enough gains if you invest properly or will a loss you can live with.
As for the mortgage meltdown, it was a result of more idiotic thinking, why on earth would they think people could pay their mortgage if the payments went up 50%? Of course they didn't think other pressure would force a need to increase rates but it was easy to spot and they still did it anyway. The bank I use did not participate in this stupid plan and they are doing quite fine. They have seen an increase in loan defaults but they saw it coming and kept money aside accordingly.
Back to the GM specific issue with setting aside funds, we agree they couldn't foresee the increased costs but they saw the costs increasing and didn't react accordingly which left them 20 billion behind in 1995. More than not reacting accordingly all through the 80s they continued increasing pensions instead of increasing salaries. It screwed the chances at profitability.
Of course their CEO got a rather sizable pay raise last year despite 30 billion in losses. How's that for using your money wisely? They are sinking ship.
The vast majority of sets are 720P HDTV which means they won't show you the full 1080p that bd offers. That means people aren't getting the full value of the product which makes it less attractive.
Blueray isn't natural for HDTV owners. It's natural for 1080p HDTV owners which is a far smaller subset. Generally anyone who bought a TV smaller than 42" can only get 720P so they aren't going to experience what bluray legitimately offers.
Of course 1080p is coming to smaller sets now but its pretty late in the game especially when there is greater interest in ondemand movies from their cable or satellite provider which will limit them to 720P once again. Diverting from broadcast quality screws them as it limits the number of people who have any interest in it at all.
Combine all that with more expensive media, players, and especially burners and you have a product which a very limited appeal.
In the data world bluray isn't good enough either. Why the hell would I spend $60 on an 80gig disc when I can spend $70 on an 800gig LTO4 tape? Combined with the crappiness that is bluray libraries and it just makes very little sense unless you're a tiny shop without a lot of data.
You state how I speak from ignorance and then go on to support my statements exactly. GM did not start setting aside money when the employee enrolled in the pension plan. As a result when it came time for people to retire they had to use current profits to support it. As more and more retire it only gets harder for them, Sorry, but idiotic is indeed the way to describe this behavior.
In regards to 401ks being somehow unsafe, short of total collapse of the economy you can always shift your investments from low-risk funds to different low-risk funds if they aren't performing. It may not be 100% safe but its a few orders of magnitude better than a pension. Potentially you get a lot more too since you can start a 401k whenever you want.
I don't think you have thought your clever plan through. If you make it illegal to hire illegal immigrants through better enforcement, what exactly do you think the millions of illegal immigrants already here are going to do? You think they will go back home?
Living in Phoenix Arizona, one of the fastest growing housing markets in the country I can tell you the market is going strong even in its weakened state. The Mexicans I personally know don't send money back to Mexico, they came here with their family or are working to get money to bring their family back to the U.S.
You seem to have an odd view, illegal immigrants aren't the only stresser on ERs as they have become the main source of healthcare for roughly 16% of Americans who are uninsured. That's about 50 million people if you're counting.
If you unionize these workers then they can't be taken advantage of which will make them less attractive to potential employers. Your stance makes no sense.
The real reason it costs so much less is that contributing to a 401k means that the money is removed from the regular revenue stream. The idiots at GM spent all the money that was supposed to be set aside for pensions which is why they are in so much trouble now.
It turns out when it comes to pensions this was not an uncommon practice but obviously it requires continuous growth which isn't really something that a car company can rely on.
401ks are far safer as employees and employers alike I believe have learned the lesson, plus 401ks are transferrable so if you lose your job after 28 years you don't risk your retirement.
VMWare in an ACE environment is just as secure on Windows as it is on any client down to Windows CE or SUSE Enterprise Desktop, that's the beauty of it. Run whatever you want on whatever base OS you want. The security is the same as you still have your AES or blowfish or whatever encryption method of choice protecting the VM image.
All you need after that is two factor authentication and you're pretty damned secure and you dont have to worry about the host OS as much regardless of your platform of choice.
There is also VMWare's ACE which gives you all sorts of options. Additionally there are Virtual desktop scenarios which means that all your work data is done in the VM where everything is encrypted. That leaves the host OS for guests to use. If the laptop is stolen then the user only loses the work that they did between the time they were last plugged into the network, VPN connectivity even counts.
HP and Lenovo both have whole disk encryption options that work at the enterprise level. My primary experience is with HP which allows me to keep a backup key on a couple of USB thumb drives which can be stored in separate locations. Truecrypt as this same ability and both options are transparent to the OS for the most part.
I had the exact same thing about ADP but I imagined that government data can't be stored and managed by a private company. There are all sorts of logistics to worry about.
Honestly though an Oracle RAC solution isn't going to go out of date in 30 years nor are the laws of the land going to change dramatically enough for modern payroll systems to not keep up. In 30 years they won't be looking for java coders to manage their payroll changes because the providers of said software would have done it for them long ago if the laws of the land were changing in that direction that is.
The bottom line is that we agree, there is simply no excuse for this and I also think we further agree that that this task is better served by those that do it on a regular basis already and already at the scale at which California needs them to.
The real ridiculousness comes in the fact that they haven't just replaced the payroll system on an expensive mainframe with a simple Oracle RAC with two or maybe even three data centers all cross-replicating and log shipping back to a central location.
Suddenly your costs are reduced and perhaps more importantly you can use what thousands of other companies are using which will guarantee a pool of competent programmers to make modifications as necessary. Of course using modern payroll applications will result in not needing to reprogram to change a pay rate in any direction.
In short, why is it so hard?
Should have looked more careful and now I gotta reply to my own post. I have NO objection to people owning guns. As long as they can demonstrate proficiency it's all good. This does not make people polite though.
Where do pro-gun nuts get this idea that an armed society is a polite society? What is this based on? Personally I have objection to owning guns, I'm from Vermont with some of the most liberal gun laws out there. Guns don't make people polite. You only need to look at the old west to see what rule by the gun does.
A sense of community and a well rounded education do far more to make people polite. 100 years ago you could string up a black man for looking at your woman wrong. Society is a lot more polite today than it was then.
Of course that doesn't mean people do things that are annoying like talking on cell phones in a crowded movie theater. Face it, that it not as bad as someone pulling a knife on you just to prove a point.
Home engineering is not nearly as bad as you make it out to be. A professional grade studio costs a hell of a lot less today to make than it used to back in the day. That was one of the reasons studio time cost so much. Of course the engineers themselves also charged an arm and a leg but now you have professional DJs doing this work for you often times even for free although in rare circumstances they actually pay you to come and perform for them so they can mix properly and make a ton of money at their own shows.
The role of a record label is outdated. Now any marketing company or PR firm can do this work for you and for much smaller prices. They also have a direct incentive to make sure you are successful as they can get more money out of you or you can go to another company. Things are much simpler when the content creator is the same as the content owner.
You mean like an anonymous post from another student threatening to sodomize her? Sounds like plausible danger although I don't know why you'd say she has herpes and then go on to talk about sodomizing her, seems to me like the anonymous poster was admitting to already being infected, otherwise he'd be the one in danger!
So you think by utilizing an anonymous web proxy you are spoofing the proxy provider? That's exactly what you are doing by using someone else's line.
The party you are stealing from is responsible for the call regardless of who actually made the call. The police would show up at their door at which time they would produce evidence that no one in the office made the call. The same thing would happen with a residence, the call came from that location so that is where they will show up. There is no false information being presented and so there is no spoofing. Phone lines don't care who is making the call, only that calls are allowed on the line.
A beige box doesn't spoof anything. It is not possible to remotely spoof someone else's phone number anymore. The only avenue of attack to get around this is to dial into a vulnerable PBX and call out using that PBX. It's not spoofing though, once they are on to you they can use that PBX to trace back to the original caller.
Caller ID has two parts, the CNID part which you can modify and the ANI part which is based on the hardware you are connecting removing control from you.
We had our PBX compromised a while back, ended up tracing calls through three others PBXs before it went outside the country. It takes a lot of teamwork from companies who care about long distance, if you run into one that doesn't it gets a lot harder.
The medium requires both, otherwise it wouldn't be successful. If everyone was a leech then the torrent would die as people wouldn't be able to get the content. So people have to be doing both and in the instance of MediaSentry they certainly are doing both although they are unconcerned with details like that as the only evidence they have is that your IP address downloaded content from them, what happens after that is outside of their purview.
I am uncertain if they try to connect to the IP address somehow to see if its distributing but of course that again wouldn't be fair as it's classic entrapment.
I had a similar experience as a juror. It was a kidnapping case where the prosecutor overreached for a charge. Ultimately we all thought the guy was as ass but there simply wasn't enough evidence, the public defender did a fantastic job in pointing out the holes in the prosecution.
You are correct except that someone downloading from MediaSentry has no way to know what license terms there are. They only know that MediaSentry is distributing content on a medium which requires both downloading and uploading to receive which should imply consent for distribution.
What do you mean it died? You can stream XM over the Internet and it even works on Linux with firefox assuming you have the wmp plugin of course.
I'm definitely a fan of XM, I like driving half way across the country without having to fiddle with the radio stations, it just works everywhere I go and no static.
XM has a lot of channels though with something for pretty much everyone. I hate sounding like a commercial for them but they really do blow terrestrial radio out of the water. For me these days it's XM and Pandora for 90% of my music listening time.
Yeah, I imagine he was aware of a lot more than most other people as admins usually are. I know that I have much more information about the company and how it operates along with its goals than I necessarily need to do my job but it's the nature of trust.
You have to be able to trust your admin so you should treat them accordingly. That is the first mistake of most employers these days. They treat everyone like dirt including the people that can burn them really badly because they don't understand how much their company relies on IT. I know the company I work used to come to an abrupt halt when there was an outage. Since then I've removed the single points of failure, the only thing left is me. They forget that redundant systems get kind of complex though and they assume anyone out of college can do it for 30k so they fight me for 70k.
I came into the same philosophy as you a few years ago when I was in the position where I took over a network that was completely undocumented. Now I have Visio diagrams and written explanations of almost everything including a complete inventory of what I have on what network at each site.
I started it with the idea of the bus principle but I've come to rely on it myself as I'm the only admin and so I often have parts of the network I don't touch for a year at a time. This means I forget how things are put together so I refer back to my own documentation. Works every time.
Ya know, I would kill to have another person around with the same skillset that I have but it just ain't gonna happen. Periodically I print out a report of all my passwords and lock them in the safe of the CFO. That way if another admin comes in because I got run over by a bus or more likely in my case, got in a horrid car wreck going well into the triple digits he or she can read my documentation and gain access to the system.
Not the best solution but it works since they refuse to hire me help even though I am way overworked increasing the likelihood I will kill myself traveling to and from work at all hours.