So wait, the Internet Toughguy act isn't a cool grown-up thing to do?
You'd think a CIA super-spy would have some neat tracking tricks in a guaranteed-to-be-leaked memo, but a visual inspection of the code shows nada, and as for hidden Unicode characters: nope. It'd be interesting to get multiple copies of the memo from different places to compare, but there's nothing suspicious I can see there.
The thing about confidential information is, there's no such thing at all once you go beyond 10 people or so. More like 3-4 can, maybe, sometimes, keep a secret, but that's pushing it. 2 people knowing a thing is great, because if you didn't tell, you know who did, and 1 is the best of all. There's plenty of ways of getting the behavior you want out of people without being so vulgar as to actually tell them things. He's really got no one to blame but himself for both of the leaks. You think company loyalty exists these days? Hah! I'm sure you'd sell Cisco out in a heartbeat if you saw a profit in it, why do you think your employees, many of whom actually know what it's like to struggle, are any different? You'd think a black-ops specialist would know that, but, obviously, nope.
And the real tricky thing about threats is, you absolutely, positively, must carry them through, or your future threats will mean (less than) nothing. In fact, if you don't already have the proverbial gun to someone's head (preferably without them knowing it's there), it's best not to make the threat at all, although that does take some self-control, which I understand can be a rare commodity in upper-management, and maybe best saved for more important occasions. Although a credible threat can be absolutely terrifying, silence from someone who has a reason to hate you is a lot scarier than hollow chest-thumping. You'd think such an intimidating beast would know that, 20 years after working for the CIA. Time will tell, but I'm guessing that once again the answer will be a big fat nope.
Of course, I'm no 007, I learned all this playing a silly internet spaceships game and reading fantasy books. I imagine this spook knows what he's doing, and we're all dancing on the puppetmaster's strings.
The system is only broken if the intention is to always have the winner be the person with the most votes. If that's the case, then yes, it is an incredibly stupid system compared to simply totaling the votes and picking the winner.
But I don't think that's the intention of the system.
Every single game? That's a ridiculous promise, and I doubt they'd be foolish enough to make it. There's two ways that keeping that promise could be possible:
Drop every game that doesn't support Linux. Goodbye to the vast majority of games.
Provide a perfect Windows emulation layer. Although this would make keeping the promise possible, it is, in practice, impossible in itself.
All Valve games? Sure, I could see them saying that. But all games? No, I'm going to have to call [citation needed] on that one. I'll be very surprised if you can come up with one.
So, not only did they get of scot-free and potentially still have a backdoor into her system, but they're free to keep doing this to other people. And, since they were never brought up on charges, it's probably slander/libel to even tell someone to avoid the place! Because you know the type of person who'd spy on someone's webcam would have no hesitation in bringing charges against a victim who tried to spread the word.
Actually, where's this lady live? Does she have a nice car? I guess I can just take it with no possible consequence, so why not, who doesn't like free money?
Absolutely true, expecting individuals to act in the best interest of millions of strangers is just unrealistic. Of course, it doesn't make you any less a part of the problem. But hey, we're all part of a whole lot of problems. The tragedy of the commons isn't caused by "everyone but me", it's caused by everyone. The only real solution is to make it individually unprofitable to be a part of that tragedy, without making the cost of implementing the solution outweigh the savings gained from the solution's effects.
And what we definitely shouldn't do is demonize others for acting the same way we all act.
Management which has as much or more (usually more) to gain or lose from high-profile cases than the beat cop, and so will understandably put their best people on it. It goes all the way up until you finally reach somebody with a position so high that they won't be significantly affected by the outcome, and as long as they're not hearing complaints from the public, they don't care.
Right and wrong are great, but they're a lot more fungible when it's you that it's affecting.
Say you're a low-level investigator, on the edge of losing his house, with a wife and kids. You can spend an hour or two here and there that should have been spent on Joe's Bike Shop on the Facebook case instead to do a really bang-up job where it's going to be noticed, and maybe turn it into a promotion, or at least ensuring that you're not someone picked for the next round of layoffs. Is that such a big deal? One little hour? For your kids?
And let's be honest, that one little hour isn't a big deal, especially if it's you that's taking that one little hour, and we probably wouldn't begrudge that one guy his chance to finally get out from under his debt even if we weren't imagining that we are that guy. But, that story plays out a thousand times, and it adds up, and people try harder on the important cases.
And then, finally, what the fuck are you doing for Joe's Bike Shop? Because whether you know it or not, you're contributing to the attention the Facebook case is getting just by posting in this thread, or even reading it. You're eyes are seeing ads, or if you've got adblock on, by commenting in the story you're at the very least adding content to a site that's selling ads, who gets money from Facebook, who gets money from countless advertisers, who gives that money to people all over, including politicians, wh... you get the idea. You, personally, are adding to the motivation to give Facebook better justice, and are not adding that same motivation to Joe's Bike Shop, and are therefore contributing to the imbalance. The only possible way out of that is to expect people to treat two people who have vastly different potential effects on their future the same, and that's just not rational to expect of an actual person, and not just the abstraction who's not doing his job that you're probably imagining.
Everybody acts in perfectly reasonable, understandable and if not perfectly moral, certainly not what most would call immoral ways, and aggregate effects end up shafting the little guy. That's not to say that sometimes there aren't more sinister activities and motivations, but usually, it's just emergent behavior from a whole lot of people acting the exact same way you would in their situation. High-profile people get more attention. That's not to say that we shouldn't do what we can to ensure that the little guy gets justice, we absolutely should do what we can to even things up. But there's no sense in getting all self-righteous about it. You might as well get mad that electrons orbit protons, it's just the way things are.
If you were a cop, would you put as much effort into a case where it's very unlikely anyone would ever hear about it as you would into a case where it's likely the entire country is watching? Nobody wants to screw up when everyone's eyes are on you, but nobody outside of Littleplace, OH cares about Joe's Bike Shop. Do well, screw up, not a huge difference in rewards. But doing well or screwing up on the Facebook case can set the tone for the rest of your life.
I can understand not being happy that the "nobodies" of the world don't get the same special attention, but the fact is that it's not just the human nature of the people doing their jobs that you're railing against, it's the nature of all the people who hear about big and little stories that lead the people doing their jobs to treat those cases differently. No conspiracy necessary for celebrities to get more attention than you or I. The extra attention is what makes them celebrities.
Everybody tests as gifted. Seriously. Go find someone who came out "normal".
And if you can find me a cokehead that doesn't claim to have turned down an ivy league scholarship (that was actually just a cover for the real offer of a CIA wetwork job), I'll eat my hat.
Before you start squawking about an electrical failure, Nissan says the steering wheel is connected to the rack through an emergency clutch, allowing the driver to retain control if something goes kablooey.
"Ooooooh I'm soooo deep, ohhh the vast emptiness and hard radiation, a bloo bloo bloo look at me I'm the only hope for humanity's long-term survival, I'm soooo important!"
Really? It's a pretty pertinent question, if your average employee lasts a year, you can expect the job you're interviewing to last that long. Knowing that is fairly important if you want to make any sort of mid-term economic plans. And it's not like you don't get turnabout as an employer, in fact it's volunteered, right there on my resume, and it's at least as valid of a metric for who's going to be a good employer. You want to keep it private? That's fine, but I'm going to look on that about the same as you'd look at an applicant who wants to keep their work history private.
Same thing for why the position is vacant. Heck, it's practically the first words out of any interviewer's mouth, "Why are you leaving/did you leave your previous job?" How is this not an equally valid question for a potential employee?
You seem to be confused about something. Applicant is not a synonym for supplicant. I'm not coming begging, I'm coming negotiating a trade, and questions directly related to what I'm going to get in kind for my work shouldn't be off the table. Maybe you can find people who are willing to put up with your attitude, but they're going to be people with no other choice, and there's a reason they don't have a choice. Honestly though, I doubt you've ever hired anyone and are just trolling, but I do want to make sure someone young and naive who isn't in the workforce yet doesn't think stuff like this is normal. It's not. I've asked those exact questions at all but my first job, and never been looked at funny for it.
Whats interesting and what I just thought of is this, You wouldn't ask a single contractor to overhaul your house, do the plumbing, electrical, wood working and etc.... So why would you buy a phone to be a jack of all trades.
Because I don't actually make decisions based on overstretched metaphors.
Listen to their lyrics. It's beat-off material for creepy 50-year-olds whose wives left them at 25 and now spend their time picking up at bars, 16-year-olds who think that's what everyone who has sex acts like, and the 40-year-old moms who didn't leave their manchild husbands.
The music aside, which I personally think is shit but if you like it more power to ya, the (incredibly trite) lyrics are just glorification of terrible, gross behavior. If you've managed to never hear them, count yourself lucky, but they're prevalent enough (still!) that you'd generally have to go out of your way not to hear them at least at some point in your life.
As for "hey check out obscure band X", there's sites for that. I probably hate your bands, just like you'd probably hate mine, that's fine, but it's why recommending music to random people who don't share your musical tastes is usually pointless. The difference is, anyone who is not ear-bitingly-mad can agree that Nickleback is awful, and yet there's still people out there who listen to them.
When I was 21, I looked around, and realized I had everything I wanted when I was 17. When I was 25, I had the things I still dreamed of when I was 21. Now, at 32, I've got what I wanted at 25.
It wasn't obvious to me at the time, although it is now--you tend to get what you want because you try to get it. Even if it's not a desired outcome, making a prediction can put something in your mind, or others' minds, to the point that it happens. Self-fulfilling prophecy at its finest.
Alternative explanation: You're a human being, with the requisite overactive pattern recognition, that never learned about confirmation bias, so you don't notice all the times when patterns don't occur in the randomness.
And now, you've got a fun choice. You can fight the cognitive dissonance, and your reward will be that life gets a little less special. Or, you can continue to go on in a fog of self-deception, and try to ignore the awkward silences when a heap of crazy falls out of your mouth.
You'd be surprised how much of a toll it can take, being in a position where your primary duty is to make hard decisions, i.e., those without definite answers. I remember very clearly, being a network admin at a company that was on the verge of failing for the last 10 year, whose infrastructure was an ad-hoc mess that was built up purely as a response to immediate needs. I had to make so many decisions, none of which had clear right answers due to the constant constraints of time, money, and the need to "sell" absolutely everything, that I would literally get irritated at the thought of deciding what to eat for lunch.
Most people probably spend the majority of their life without even being aware of it, but you can actually feel it, your decision-making reserves emptying. And if you spend a lot of time tapped out, you come to resent the utterly irrelevant decisions that have to be made, like what to eat for lunch. I'd think, "Oh my GOD I don't care, I just need to stop being hungry so I can function."
I never got to the point of resenting the decision about what to wear for the day, but then again I've never really cared about that, and usually didn't start to feel the drain until about 10 AM anyway. But I can easily see how a more demanding situation would lead to it, and I'll never forget that feeling. If you haven't felt it, I can see how it'd be hard to understand, but it's real, and there's no "anxious" feeling about it. You've just got none left. If you'd never run in your life, you might find it hard to understand what it's like to feel like you don't have enough breath. It's just a finite resource that most people never really put pressure on.
Slashdot Mirror
So wait, the Internet Toughguy act isn't a cool grown-up thing to do?
You'd think a CIA super-spy would have some neat tracking tricks in a guaranteed-to-be-leaked memo, but a visual inspection of the code shows nada, and as for hidden Unicode characters: nope. It'd be interesting to get multiple copies of the memo from different places to compare, but there's nothing suspicious I can see there.
The thing about confidential information is, there's no such thing at all once you go beyond 10 people or so. More like 3-4 can, maybe, sometimes, keep a secret, but that's pushing it. 2 people knowing a thing is great, because if you didn't tell, you know who did, and 1 is the best of all. There's plenty of ways of getting the behavior you want out of people without being so vulgar as to actually tell them things. He's really got no one to blame but himself for both of the leaks. You think company loyalty exists these days? Hah! I'm sure you'd sell Cisco out in a heartbeat if you saw a profit in it, why do you think your employees, many of whom actually know what it's like to struggle, are any different? You'd think a black-ops specialist would know that, but, obviously, nope.
And the real tricky thing about threats is, you absolutely, positively, must carry them through, or your future threats will mean (less than) nothing. In fact, if you don't already have the proverbial gun to someone's head (preferably without them knowing it's there), it's best not to make the threat at all, although that does take some self-control, which I understand can be a rare commodity in upper-management, and maybe best saved for more important occasions. Although a credible threat can be absolutely terrifying, silence from someone who has a reason to hate you is a lot scarier than hollow chest-thumping. You'd think such an intimidating beast would know that, 20 years after working for the CIA. Time will tell, but I'm guessing that once again the answer will be a big fat nope.
Of course, I'm no 007, I learned all this playing a silly internet spaceships game and reading fantasy books. I imagine this spook knows what he's doing, and we're all dancing on the puppetmaster's strings.
The system is only broken if the intention is to always have the winner be the person with the most votes. If that's the case, then yes, it is an incredibly stupid system compared to simply totaling the votes and picking the winner.
But I don't think that's the intention of the system.
Every single game? That's a ridiculous promise, and I doubt they'd be foolish enough to make it. There's two ways that keeping that promise could be possible:
All Valve games? Sure, I could see them saying that. But all games? No, I'm going to have to call [citation needed] on that one. I'll be very surprised if you can come up with one.
So, not only did they get of scot-free and potentially still have a backdoor into her system, but they're free to keep doing this to other people. And, since they were never brought up on charges, it's probably slander/libel to even tell someone to avoid the place! Because you know the type of person who'd spy on someone's webcam would have no hesitation in bringing charges against a victim who tried to spread the word.
Actually, where's this lady live? Does she have a nice car? I guess I can just take it with no possible consequence, so why not, who doesn't like free money?
What's the name of the place? Those people were brought up on charges, right?
Or when he's in a plane:
Stall? Man...
It's a sad day when there's two people in the world who don't recognize a Ghostbusters quote :(
Wake me up with Jackie Treehorn finally gets his Advanced Teledildonics project going.
Absolutely true, expecting individuals to act in the best interest of millions of strangers is just unrealistic. Of course, it doesn't make you any less a part of the problem. But hey, we're all part of a whole lot of problems. The tragedy of the commons isn't caused by "everyone but me", it's caused by everyone. The only real solution is to make it individually unprofitable to be a part of that tragedy, without making the cost of implementing the solution outweigh the savings gained from the solution's effects.
And what we definitely shouldn't do is demonize others for acting the same way we all act.
Management which has as much or more (usually more) to gain or lose from high-profile cases than the beat cop, and so will understandably put their best people on it. It goes all the way up until you finally reach somebody with a position so high that they won't be significantly affected by the outcome, and as long as they're not hearing complaints from the public, they don't care.
Right and wrong are great, but they're a lot more fungible when it's you that it's affecting.
Say you're a low-level investigator, on the edge of losing his house, with a wife and kids. You can spend an hour or two here and there that should have been spent on Joe's Bike Shop on the Facebook case instead to do a really bang-up job where it's going to be noticed, and maybe turn it into a promotion, or at least ensuring that you're not someone picked for the next round of layoffs. Is that such a big deal? One little hour? For your kids?
And let's be honest, that one little hour isn't a big deal, especially if it's you that's taking that one little hour, and we probably wouldn't begrudge that one guy his chance to finally get out from under his debt even if we weren't imagining that we are that guy. But, that story plays out a thousand times, and it adds up, and people try harder on the important cases.
And then, finally, what the fuck are you doing for Joe's Bike Shop? Because whether you know it or not, you're contributing to the attention the Facebook case is getting just by posting in this thread, or even reading it. You're eyes are seeing ads, or if you've got adblock on, by commenting in the story you're at the very least adding content to a site that's selling ads, who gets money from Facebook, who gets money from countless advertisers, who gives that money to people all over, including politicians, wh... you get the idea. You, personally, are adding to the motivation to give Facebook better justice, and are not adding that same motivation to Joe's Bike Shop, and are therefore contributing to the imbalance. The only possible way out of that is to expect people to treat two people who have vastly different potential effects on their future the same, and that's just not rational to expect of an actual person, and not just the abstraction who's not doing his job that you're probably imagining.
Everybody acts in perfectly reasonable, understandable and if not perfectly moral, certainly not what most would call immoral ways, and aggregate effects end up shafting the little guy. That's not to say that sometimes there aren't more sinister activities and motivations, but usually, it's just emergent behavior from a whole lot of people acting the exact same way you would in their situation. High-profile people get more attention. That's not to say that we shouldn't do what we can to ensure that the little guy gets justice, we absolutely should do what we can to even things up. But there's no sense in getting all self-righteous about it. You might as well get mad that electrons orbit protons, it's just the way things are.
No, probably not.
If you were a cop, would you put as much effort into a case where it's very unlikely anyone would ever hear about it as you would into a case where it's likely the entire country is watching? Nobody wants to screw up when everyone's eyes are on you, but nobody outside of Littleplace, OH cares about Joe's Bike Shop. Do well, screw up, not a huge difference in rewards. But doing well or screwing up on the Facebook case can set the tone for the rest of your life.
I can understand not being happy that the "nobodies" of the world don't get the same special attention, but the fact is that it's not just the human nature of the people doing their jobs that you're railing against, it's the nature of all the people who hear about big and little stories that lead the people doing their jobs to treat those cases differently. No conspiracy necessary for celebrities to get more attention than you or I. The extra attention is what makes them celebrities.
Everybody tests as gifted. Seriously. Go find someone who came out "normal".
And if you can find me a cokehead that doesn't claim to have turned down an ivy league scholarship (that was actually just a cover for the real offer of a CIA wetwork job), I'll eat my hat.
YARLY
FTA:
Before you start squawking about an electrical failure, Nissan says the steering wheel is connected to the rack through an emergency clutch, allowing the driver to retain control if something goes kablooey.
*runs around in circles with arms out*
"Ooooooh I'm soooo deep, ohhh the vast emptiness and hard radiation, a bloo bloo bloo look at me I'm the only hope for humanity's long-term survival, I'm soooo important!"
Really? It's a pretty pertinent question, if your average employee lasts a year, you can expect the job you're interviewing to last that long. Knowing that is fairly important if you want to make any sort of mid-term economic plans. And it's not like you don't get turnabout as an employer, in fact it's volunteered, right there on my resume, and it's at least as valid of a metric for who's going to be a good employer. You want to keep it private? That's fine, but I'm going to look on that about the same as you'd look at an applicant who wants to keep their work history private.
Same thing for why the position is vacant. Heck, it's practically the first words out of any interviewer's mouth, "Why are you leaving/did you leave your previous job?" How is this not an equally valid question for a potential employee?
You seem to be confused about something. Applicant is not a synonym for supplicant. I'm not coming begging, I'm coming negotiating a trade, and questions directly related to what I'm going to get in kind for my work shouldn't be off the table. Maybe you can find people who are willing to put up with your attitude, but they're going to be people with no other choice, and there's a reason they don't have a choice. Honestly though, I doubt you've ever hired anyone and are just trolling, but I do want to make sure someone young and naive who isn't in the workforce yet doesn't think stuff like this is normal. It's not. I've asked those exact questions at all but my first job, and never been looked at funny for it.
Whoever taught you Eskimo kisses played a mean joke.
Whats interesting and what I just thought of is this, You wouldn't ask a single contractor to overhaul your house, do the plumbing, electrical, wood working and etc.... So why would you buy a phone to be a jack of all trades.
Because I don't actually make decisions based on overstretched metaphors.
Listen to their lyrics. It's beat-off material for creepy 50-year-olds whose wives left them at 25 and now spend their time picking up at bars, 16-year-olds who think that's what everyone who has sex acts like, and the 40-year-old moms who didn't leave their manchild husbands.
The music aside, which I personally think is shit but if you like it more power to ya, the (incredibly trite) lyrics are just glorification of terrible, gross behavior. If you've managed to never hear them, count yourself lucky, but they're prevalent enough (still!) that you'd generally have to go out of your way not to hear them at least at some point in your life.
As for "hey check out obscure band X", there's sites for that. I probably hate your bands, just like you'd probably hate mine, that's fine, but it's why recommending music to random people who don't share your musical tastes is usually pointless. The difference is, anyone who is not ear-bitingly-mad can agree that Nickleback is awful, and yet there's still people out there who listen to them.
Whatever happened to good old-fashioned revenge?
When I was 21, I looked around, and realized I had everything I wanted when I was 17. When I was 25, I had the things I still dreamed of when I was 21. Now, at 32, I've got what I wanted at 25.
It wasn't obvious to me at the time, although it is now--you tend to get what you want because you try to get it. Even if it's not a desired outcome, making a prediction can put something in your mind, or others' minds, to the point that it happens. Self-fulfilling prophecy at its finest.
Alternative explanation: You're a human being, with the requisite overactive pattern recognition, that never learned about confirmation bias, so you don't notice all the times when patterns don't occur in the randomness.
And now, you've got a fun choice. You can fight the cognitive dissonance, and your reward will be that life gets a little less special. Or, you can continue to go on in a fog of self-deception, and try to ignore the awkward silences when a heap of crazy falls out of your mouth.
Or it just slows down the tick rate, and we have literally no idea. I can't think of any reason a simulation would need to run in real time.
You'd be surprised how much of a toll it can take, being in a position where your primary duty is to make hard decisions, i.e., those without definite answers. I remember very clearly, being a network admin at a company that was on the verge of failing for the last 10 year, whose infrastructure was an ad-hoc mess that was built up purely as a response to immediate needs. I had to make so many decisions, none of which had clear right answers due to the constant constraints of time, money, and the need to "sell" absolutely everything, that I would literally get irritated at the thought of deciding what to eat for lunch.
Most people probably spend the majority of their life without even being aware of it, but you can actually feel it, your decision-making reserves emptying. And if you spend a lot of time tapped out, you come to resent the utterly irrelevant decisions that have to be made, like what to eat for lunch. I'd think, "Oh my GOD I don't care, I just need to stop being hungry so I can function."
I never got to the point of resenting the decision about what to wear for the day, but then again I've never really cared about that, and usually didn't start to feel the drain until about 10 AM anyway. But I can easily see how a more demanding situation would lead to it, and I'll never forget that feeling. If you haven't felt it, I can see how it'd be hard to understand, but it's real, and there's no "anxious" feeling about it. You've just got none left. If you'd never run in your life, you might find it hard to understand what it's like to feel like you don't have enough breath. It's just a finite resource that most people never really put pressure on.
The Planck constant just get bigger as you go.
I was crazy once. They locked me up in a padded room. I died there. They buried me with bugs! I hate bugs. They drive me crazy.