I have had a Motorola KRZR for about 3 years with an "unlimited data plan" I paid an extra $10.00 a month for. I tehthered and constantly connected my company VPN for Lotus Notes email.
When I switched to my iPhone I have to pay $20.00 a month more for "unlimited data" yet I couldn't tether (until I jailbrooke my iPhone).
If AT&T honestly thinks that me switching from my Motorola to my iPhone increased my usage of their network, they are sadly mistaken. If anything I use it less because the tethering isn't as stable and I mark this up to their 3G network, not the phone.
They need to upgrade their 3G network and I fully intend to max out my 3G connection driving around town during lunch on Friday.
P.S. I love the Verizon map commercials. I wish they would double the number of times they show them every day.
Chewbacca is also different, ergo must also be killed. The Ewoks are especially different and extra attention must be paid to their destruction.
Ahhh... but this comes back to bite the Empire. There are always ONLY TWO Sith Lords. They come in pairs. Ergo, they are different from all but one other. And must be destroyed.
He should therefore use the "Luke and/or Leia defense" which is that they were preventing their father from destroying the universe.
Seriously. If feel you need to play babysitter that badly and have that little trust in the Terms and Conditions and Non-Disclosure Agreement that you required your outsourced administrator to sign (you read the T&Cs and you made them sign and NDA, RIGHT???!!!) and you have account level encryption for your application data, WHY are you outsourcing? Hire an admin that you can put in a cube next to yours. Then you still won't know what he is doing but at least you can see him in a desk every day.
Cheap. Fast. Good. Pick two. If cheap was one of them, they will either be remote or they probably aren't worth what youve gotten them to accept.
If he is any good, he probably isn't going to stay very long with a clueless management type wanting to look over his shoulder.
My.02.
" a contract is not valid in the US if the terms have been changed but not agreed to by both parties. That is a federal statute, state law cannot override it."
Could anyone in the know please post the specific federal statute? A reference to it by article, section, etc? URL pointer would also be very helpful.
Thank you!
Back in 1938, a massive alien invasion took place in Grover's Mills, New Jersey -- during Orson Welles' famous "War of the Worlds" broadcast about Martians. Maybe it wasn't a hoax? Applications were discovered for social security cards from a list of men with no backgrounds -- all named Cox:
Alan Cox
John Big Cox
Dewey Cox
Dixon Cox
Ima Cox
.
May I pass along my congratulations for your great interdimensional breakthrough. I am sure, in the miserable annals of the Earth, you will be duly enshrined.
Laugh-a while you can, monkey-boy.
1) If you have your DD-WRT installed router inside your home network and assigned a private, not pulic IP
and
2) You do not port forward from the internet to your private VLAN the port for the administrative interface
and
3) You only allow administration from your LAN or Wireless LAN
and
4) your Wireless LAN is securely configured to only allow connections from people using the appropriate security
then
My understanding of the vulnerability is that unless someone is on your LAN or wireless LAN, they would have no way to submit the crafted URL to your DD-WRT installed router and this is all a bunch of hoopla.
Look, he needed to provide that he lost all of his money due to bad investments. Anyone with the amount of money in question probably had an accountant, had to have a set of books and should have easily been able to produce them.
Do you need someone to show you the way to the airport or do you have directions? I, for one, would like anyone who doesn't understand that contempt of a judge will land you in jail, and thinks that makes this a bad place to live, should leave. Good bye. Sayonara. Arrive derci. Chow. Hasta La Vista. Good riddance.
The day contempt of court is allowable is the day the court will no longer function.
>He was imprisoned because the just -though- he was lying. No proof, just a judge's whim. You can't see how that affects you?
I wouldn't call it a "judges whim". A judge, in a court of law, ordered a plaintiff to comply with an order, i.e.
"Show me the money or show me the proof you lost the money"
An answer of "No" isn't either A or B. You are in contempt of a direct order from a judge of the court. He could have either produced the proof, even if it was a letter from a business partner saying "We lost all of our money in an investment" and "heres the business bank account showing a 0$ balanace". Done. End of contempt.
If a judge issues an order, in this case, an order that is absolutly in line with the judgement against the plaintiff, that is, you have to pay, and you do not comply, you are in contempt of court.
The definition of "contempt of court":
Behavior in or out of court that violates a court order, or otherwise disrupts or shows disregard for the court. Refusing to answer a proper question, to file court papers on time or to follow local court rules can expose witnesses, lawyers and litigants to contempt findings. Contempt of court is punishable by fine or imprisonment.
In this case, he won't show the money, so a fine is inappropriate. The alternative was improsonment. This makes absolutely perfect legal sense. The fact that the guy chose to stay in jail for 14 years rather than produce the evidence tells me he is a complete and utter imbecile and deserved the time out of the gene pool.
This brings to memory the story my uncle told me about going back into Vietnam as a missionary, smuggling in bibles. The important part of the story was all the people setting up hidden, illegal churches that would set up pie plate sattelite dishes to receive the weekly radio broadcast of some sermon or something.
It also brings to mind the end of the book/movie Johnny Mnemonic where they simul-blast the cure for NAS to the underground world.
We need a phreaking simulcast and a free 1-800 dialup pool. It may not be rocket science but its just about impossible to prevent a modem from making an outbound phone call over a POTS line.
So obviously you believe this to be preferable to Opera actually making a "better", less bloated, fewer attack vector, "enterprise ready" alternative?
BRILLANT!
"'We're going to see something, but I don't know what to expect. I know on the night of the impact, I'll be running on adrenaline.'"
And when the "massive explosion" identifies an undiscovered fault and splits the moon in half, radically changing the gravitational pull, disrupting global tidal patterns and forever altering the global weather pattern, knowing whether there is water on the moon would be deemed inconsequential.:)
Your assumption is that every WAN site in a global/distributed enterprise is firewall isolated. The more accurate assumption would be the protocols that CAN be black holed would be at layer 2/3 (at the WAN routers) rather than firewalled. The problem will be identifying the protocols and praying that they aren't tunneling it all over HTTP/port 80 or HTTPS/port 443.
We have 1 of three possible scenarios:
1) The Green Dam developers have fully reverse engineered Cybersitter to the point they can reuse pre-compiled binaries and snippets of code required to call them.
2) Cybersitter's development network has been thoroughly compromized to the point that the Chinese Green Dam developers have fully plagurized another companies proprietary code.
3) Cybersitter has contributed to the development of the Chinese Green Dam and was therefore paid for their effort.
1 is certainly possible. 2 is truly frightening on a number of levels. 3 is just wrong and may be a violation of federal law. As they are a US company, contributing code to the development of a Chinese firewall product could be subject to the same verbiage as a US firewall, i.e something similar to:
Under U.S. law, the Software may not be downloaded or otherwise exported, reexported, or transferred to restricted countries, restricted end-users, or for restricted end-uses. The U.S. currently has embargo restrictions against Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria. The lists of restricted end-users are maintained on the U.S. Commerce Department's Denied Persons List, the Commerce Department's Entity List, the Commerce Department's List of Unverified Persons, and the U.S. Treasury Department's List of Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons. In addition, the Software may not be downloaded or otherwise exported, reexported, or transferred to an end-user engaged in activities related to weapons of mass destruction.
and/or:
The Software available to download from this Site is commercial computer software as that term is described in 48 C.F.R. 252.227-7014(a)(1). If acquired by or on behalf of a civilian agency, the U.S. Government acquires this commercial computer software and/or commercial computer software documentation subject to the terms of this Agreement as specified in 48 C.F.R. 12.212 (Computer Software) and 12.211 (Technical Data) of the Federal Acquisition Regulations ("FAR") and its successors. If acquired by or on behalf of any agency within the Department of Defense ("DOD"), the U.S. Government acquires this commercial computer software and/or commercial computer software documentation subject to the terms of this Agreement as specified in 48 C.F.R. 227.7202-3 of the DOD FAR Supplement ("DFAR") and its successors.
As long as the market Opera was searching for is the Home user, I guess opening up another 10 attack vectors into a users desktop/laptop isn't necessarily a bad thing but this has all but eliminated Opera from ever being a viable enterprise browser candidate. I don't care what perceived benefit there might be for adding all this crap into a web browser, the impact of adding 1,000+ clients all firing up web servers, file sharing, a chat client and all that other stuff is going to kill the WAN for any significantly sized business.
IMHO, this release is about as stupid as it gets. Someone with true brillance didn't think this through.
The potential for the firing pin on a Hand Grenade to have rusted and the spring becoming capable of initiating detonation with the slightest jar is very real.
1) EVERYTHING MUST BE IN WRITING Your first task when assuming responsability for a helpdesk MUST be to get a troubleticket system in place. It should track date, time and the actual userID of the individual submitting the ticket. It should require a minimum set of fields (user info, phone number, email address, location) which can usually be populated from LDAP or Active directory lookups once they enter their userid. All submissions get an automatic email response. All tickets should have some basic categories for the problem (outage, service request, new project, application issue, information request) and should have the ability to have both a user assigned and help desk assigned priority. Based on 3-4 levels of priority, the task will be assigned an ESTIMATED duration.
2) Report metrics. How many tickets by type. Average duration of a ticket. Number of tickets by priority. Top 10 submitters of tickets. Shine a spotlight on the issues (95% of all tickets submitted are submitted with urgent priority, as an example, or Bob submits 14 tickets a month and 7 were repeats).
3) Make sure you are immediately notified via email, SMS, pager, etc. when urgent tickets are opened. Make sure your boss is at least cc'ed on them. Make sure the text submitted with the ticket is included. Make sure the entire company understands that this happens.
4) Any helpdesk that allows URGENT helpdesk tickets must ALWAYS have a backup. If there is no backup, there can be no URGENT tickets. All tickets will immediately dropped from URGENT to High if you are a 1 man help desk. Make sure the email notification reflects this and the CC to your boss.
5) Give people the ability to check the status of their tickets and see your queue. If you are a one man shop, have 20 tickets in your queue and someone submits a sev 4 informational ticket, they need to understand its last in line and it may take a while to get an answer.
6) Inform the requestor when their ticket is closed and include a valid, clear reason why it was closed. An acceptable reason can be "Requested additional information. No response in 72 hours. Case closed." Unacceptable responses include "No response", "Closed" and "rejected".
7) If you close a ticket for inactivity, you must have the ability to reopen or to copy all the contents from a previous ticket into a new ticket in an easy to understand manner.
8) Log all activity on a ticket to the ticket. The ticket system is your log book. If you try to call, you send an email or you make a visit (or they come see you) log it. It keeps everyone honest.
9) No tickee, no service. No exceptions. Even if it means "Hold on just a second. Let me open a trouble tiket for you".
10) You MUST have a knowledge base. Index and allow searches of your trouble ticket system. Have a "search the knowledge base" box right on the "submit a ticket" web page. Before they are taken to the submission page, ask the question "Have you searched the knowledge base for your issue?" It is amazong how many problems this will solve without tickets.
With all of these in place, you will have a record with tracking on every issue serviced. You will be able to show the strengths and weaknesses of your help desk and your user community and it will highlight the offenders. It will make your boss painfully aware when there are issues and build the business case when you need assistance. It will also show when you are walking on water. Without these in place, your help desk life will be hell.
If GM declares bankruptcy, ALL contracts are null and void. http://abcnews.go.com/Business/Economy/wireStory?id=7225109 GM could close every plant, fire every worker and put a help wanted sign in the window saying "Help Wanted, Inquire Within" and "If you want a job, you are no longer a union employee". Not saying they will, but they could. This is true for every GM contract (or the contract for any other company). It is immediately open for renegotiation, especially if they form a new company and transfer all the assets they want to keep to that new company. The contracts were all with the old company.
If you see GM declare bankruptcy, expect AT LEAST Chrysler and possibly Ford to follow (since they will not be able to compete with a GM that no longer has the burden of UAW contracts). This will ripple across the automotive industry and will have an impact across the globe. Hopefully, it will kill half the remaining auto companies outside the US. When the big three again become price competitive and they begin to truly lobby for trade balance (meaning when we import their cars they have to pay the same amount of taxes/fees that we have to pay to import US vehicles into their countries) they will no longer be price competitive.
I also hope that we require foreign cars sold in the US to be produced in the US just like every other country does to us. I also hope they stop import of all vehicles from Canada and Mexico without making sure that those vehicles were built paying labor at least US Minimum wage and being subject to full import taxes and fees.
If GM declares bankruptcy, the playing field should rapidly level. At the expense of just about every major global industry (steel, aluminum, plastics, leather, petroleum, paper, rubber). Of which the US Automotives are the largest consumer. If the US Automotives does, so will their suppliers and all of the industries which the consume.
"People don't want SUVs. They are tricked into thinking that they do, and then tricked into thinking that they made the right purchase; 50% of all car advertising is designed specifically to make current owners feel good about their purchase. It both builds brand loyalty even when it is utterly undeserved, and helps reduce sales by other automakers."
You sir, are full of shit.
You obviously don't have kids, you don't live in a climate that gets 50+ inches of snow per year and you don't live in an area that has crappy roads.
My wife CRIED when we traded in our Durango for a minivan. BTW, her minivan is all wheel drive so it is still placed in the "SUV" category.
Any family with more than 2 kids who participate in sports, has a family pet, lives in any climate that gets snow, has dirt roads and needs more cargo space than the prius WANTS an SUV/minivan. You have no idea what you are talking about.
Slashdot Mirror
This is no such thing as "business ethics". There is only "ethics".
I have had a Motorola KRZR for about 3 years with an "unlimited data plan" I paid an extra $10.00 a month for. I tehthered and constantly connected my company VPN for Lotus Notes email. When I switched to my iPhone I have to pay $20.00 a month more for "unlimited data" yet I couldn't tether (until I jailbrooke my iPhone). If AT&T honestly thinks that me switching from my Motorola to my iPhone increased my usage of their network, they are sadly mistaken. If anything I use it less because the tethering isn't as stable and I mark this up to their 3G network, not the phone. They need to upgrade their 3G network and I fully intend to max out my 3G connection driving around town during lunch on Friday. P.S. I love the Verizon map commercials. I wish they would double the number of times they show them every day.
I can see the rebuttal now...
Chewbacca is also different, ergo must also be killed. The Ewoks are especially different and extra attention must be paid to their destruction.
Ahhh... but this comes back to bite the Empire. There are always ONLY TWO Sith Lords. They come in pairs. Ergo, they are different from all but one other. And must be destroyed.
He should therefore use the "Luke and/or Leia defense" which is that they were preventing their father from destroying the universe.
Inigo Montoya: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Seriously. If feel you need to play babysitter that badly and have that little trust in the Terms and Conditions and Non-Disclosure Agreement that you required your outsourced administrator to sign (you read the T&Cs and you made them sign and NDA, RIGHT???!!!) and you have account level encryption for your application data, WHY are you outsourcing? Hire an admin that you can put in a cube next to yours. Then you still won't know what he is doing but at least you can see him in a desk every day. Cheap. Fast. Good. Pick two. If cheap was one of them, they will either be remote or they probably aren't worth what youve gotten them to accept. If he is any good, he probably isn't going to stay very long with a clueless management type wanting to look over his shoulder. My .02.
" a contract is not valid in the US if the terms have been changed but not agreed to by both parties. That is a federal statute, state law cannot override it." Could anyone in the know please post the specific federal statute? A reference to it by article, section, etc? URL pointer would also be very helpful. Thank you!
Back in 1938, a massive alien invasion took place in Grover's Mills, New Jersey -- during Orson Welles' famous "War of the Worlds" broadcast about Martians. Maybe it wasn't a hoax? Applications were discovered for social security cards from a list of men with no backgrounds -- all named Cox:
Alan Cox John Big Cox Dewey Cox Dixon Cox Ima Cox
.
May I pass along my congratulations for your great interdimensional breakthrough. I am sure, in the miserable annals of the Earth, you will be duly enshrined. Laugh-a while you can, monkey-boy.
Anyone who liked BattleZone should check out BZFlag, http://bzflag.org/
Maybe Im missing something here but:
1) If you have your DD-WRT installed router inside your home network and assigned a private, not pulic IP
and
2) You do not port forward from the internet to your private VLAN the port for the administrative interface
and
3) You only allow administration from your LAN or Wireless LAN
and
4) your Wireless LAN is securely configured to only allow connections from people using the appropriate security
then
My understanding of the vulnerability is that unless someone is on your LAN or wireless LAN, they would have no way to submit the crafted URL to your DD-WRT installed router and this is all a bunch of hoopla.
Am I misunderstanding something?
No. Actually, the longest of the century: http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/SEsaros/SEsaros136.html
Look, he needed to provide that he lost all of his money due to bad investments. Anyone with the amount of money in question probably had an accountant, had to have a set of books and should have easily been able to produce them.
Do you need someone to show you the way to the airport or do you have directions? I, for one, would like anyone who doesn't understand that contempt of a judge will land you in jail, and thinks that makes this a bad place to live, should leave. Good bye. Sayonara. Arrive derci. Chow. Hasta La Vista. Good riddance. The day contempt of court is allowable is the day the court will no longer function.
>He was imprisoned because the just -though- he was lying. No proof, just a judge's whim. You can't see how that affects you?
.02.
I wouldn't call it a "judges whim". A judge, in a court of law, ordered a plaintiff to comply with an order, i.e.
"Show me the money or show me the proof you lost the money"
An answer of "No" isn't either A or B. You are in contempt of a direct order from a judge of the court. He could have either produced the proof, even if it was a letter from a business partner saying "We lost all of our money in an investment" and "heres the business bank account showing a 0$ balanace". Done. End of contempt.
If a judge issues an order, in this case, an order that is absolutly in line with the judgement against the plaintiff, that is, you have to pay, and you do not comply, you are in contempt of court.
The definition of "contempt of court":
Behavior in or out of court that violates a court order, or otherwise disrupts or shows disregard for the court. Refusing to answer a proper question, to file court papers on time or to follow local court rules can expose witnesses, lawyers and litigants to contempt findings. Contempt of court is punishable by fine or imprisonment.
In this case, he won't show the money, so a fine is inappropriate. The alternative was improsonment. This makes absolutely perfect legal sense. The fact that the guy chose to stay in jail for 14 years rather than produce the evidence tells me he is a complete and utter imbecile and deserved the time out of the gene pool.
My
This brings to memory the story my uncle told me about going back into Vietnam as a missionary, smuggling in bibles. The important part of the story was all the people setting up hidden, illegal churches that would set up pie plate sattelite dishes to receive the weekly radio broadcast of some sermon or something. It also brings to mind the end of the book/movie Johnny Mnemonic where they simul-blast the cure for NAS to the underground world. We need a phreaking simulcast and a free 1-800 dialup pool. It may not be rocket science but its just about impossible to prevent a modem from making an outbound phone call over a POTS line.
So obviously you believe this to be preferable to Opera actually making a "better", less bloated, fewer attack vector, "enterprise ready" alternative? BRILLANT!
I was actually visualizing the death star exploding. It kinda looks like the moon.
"'We're going to see something, but I don't know what to expect. I know on the night of the impact, I'll be running on adrenaline.'"
:)
And when the "massive explosion" identifies an undiscovered fault and splits the moon in half, radically changing the gravitational pull, disrupting global tidal patterns and forever altering the global weather pattern, knowing whether there is water on the moon would be deemed inconsequential.
Your assumption is that every WAN site in a global/distributed enterprise is firewall isolated. The more accurate assumption would be the protocols that CAN be black holed would be at layer 2/3 (at the WAN routers) rather than firewalled. The problem will be identifying the protocols and praying that they aren't tunneling it all over HTTP/port 80 or HTTPS/port 443.
1) The Green Dam developers have fully reverse engineered Cybersitter to the point they can reuse pre-compiled binaries and snippets of code required to call them.
2) Cybersitter's development network has been thoroughly compromized to the point that the Chinese Green Dam developers have fully plagurized another companies proprietary code.
3) Cybersitter has contributed to the development of the Chinese Green Dam and was therefore paid for their effort.
1 is certainly possible. 2 is truly frightening on a number of levels. 3 is just wrong and may be a violation of federal law. As they are a US company, contributing code to the development of a Chinese firewall product could be subject to the same verbiage as a US firewall, i.e something similar to:
Under U.S. law, the Software may not be downloaded or otherwise exported, reexported, or transferred to restricted countries, restricted end-users, or for restricted end-uses. The U.S. currently has embargo restrictions against Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria. The lists of restricted end-users are maintained on the U.S. Commerce Department's Denied Persons List, the Commerce Department's Entity List, the Commerce Department's List of Unverified Persons, and the U.S. Treasury Department's List of Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons. In addition, the Software may not be downloaded or otherwise exported, reexported, or transferred to an end-user engaged in activities related to weapons of mass destruction.
and/or:
The Software available to download from this Site is commercial computer software as that term is described in 48 C.F.R. 252.227-7014(a)(1). If acquired by or on behalf of a civilian agency, the U.S. Government acquires this commercial computer software and/or commercial computer software documentation subject to the terms of this Agreement as specified in 48 C.F.R. 12.212 (Computer Software) and 12.211 (Technical Data) of the Federal Acquisition Regulations ("FAR") and its successors. If acquired by or on behalf of any agency within the Department of Defense ("DOD"), the U.S. Government acquires this commercial computer software and/or commercial computer software documentation subject to the terms of this Agreement as specified in 48 C.F.R. 227.7202-3 of the DOD FAR Supplement ("DFAR") and its successors.
(Completely and totally plagarized from the ZoneAlarm legal page, http://www.zonealarm.com/security/en-us/legal.htm )
As long as the market Opera was searching for is the Home user, I guess opening up another 10 attack vectors into a users desktop/laptop isn't necessarily a bad thing but this has all but eliminated Opera from ever being a viable enterprise browser candidate. I don't care what perceived benefit there might be for adding all this crap into a web browser, the impact of adding 1,000+ clients all firing up web servers, file sharing, a chat client and all that other stuff is going to kill the WAN for any significantly sized business. IMHO, this release is about as stupid as it gets. Someone with true brillance didn't think this through.
The potential for the firing pin on a Hand Grenade to have rusted and the spring becoming capable of initiating detonation with the slightest jar is very real.
1) EVERYTHING MUST BE IN WRITING
Your first task when assuming responsability for a helpdesk MUST be to get a troubleticket system in place. It should track date, time and the actual userID of the individual submitting the ticket. It should require a minimum set of fields (user info, phone number, email address, location) which can usually be populated from LDAP or Active directory lookups once they enter their userid. All submissions get an automatic email response. All tickets should have some basic categories for the problem (outage, service request, new project, application issue, information request) and should have the ability to have both a user assigned and help desk assigned priority. Based on 3-4 levels of priority, the task will be assigned an ESTIMATED duration.
2) Report metrics. How many tickets by type. Average duration of a ticket. Number of tickets by priority. Top 10 submitters of tickets. Shine a spotlight on the issues (95% of all tickets submitted are submitted with urgent priority, as an example, or Bob submits 14 tickets a month and 7 were repeats).
3) Make sure you are immediately notified via email, SMS, pager, etc. when urgent tickets are opened. Make sure your boss is at least cc'ed on them. Make sure the text submitted with the ticket is included. Make sure the entire company understands that this happens.
4) Any helpdesk that allows URGENT helpdesk tickets must ALWAYS have a backup. If there is no backup, there can be no URGENT tickets. All tickets will immediately dropped from URGENT to High if you are a 1 man help desk. Make sure the email notification reflects this and the CC to your boss.
5) Give people the ability to check the status of their tickets and see your queue. If you are a one man shop, have 20 tickets in your queue and someone submits a sev 4 informational ticket, they need to understand its last in line and it may take a while to get an answer.
6) Inform the requestor when their ticket is closed and include a valid, clear reason why it was closed. An acceptable reason can be "Requested additional information. No response in 72 hours. Case closed." Unacceptable responses include "No response", "Closed" and "rejected".
7) If you close a ticket for inactivity, you must have the ability to reopen or to copy all the contents from a previous ticket into a new ticket in an easy to understand manner.
8) Log all activity on a ticket to the ticket. The ticket system is your log book. If you try to call, you send an email or you make a visit (or they come see you) log it. It keeps everyone honest.
9) No tickee, no service. No exceptions. Even if it means "Hold on just a second. Let me open a trouble tiket for you".
10) You MUST have a knowledge base. Index and allow searches of your trouble ticket system. Have a "search the knowledge base" box right on the "submit a ticket" web page. Before they are taken to the submission page, ask the question "Have you searched the knowledge base for your issue?" It is amazong how many problems this will solve without tickets.
With all of these in place, you will have a record with tracking on every issue serviced. You will be able to show the strengths and weaknesses of your help desk and your user community and it will highlight the offenders. It will make your boss painfully aware when there are issues and build the business case when you need assistance. It will also show when you are walking on water. Without these in place, your help desk life will be hell.
Ass opposed to a cunning linguist who would just talk you into believing it never happened.
If GM declares bankruptcy, ALL contracts are null and void.
http://abcnews.go.com/Business/Economy/wireStory?id=7225109
GM could close every plant, fire every worker and put a help wanted sign in the window saying "Help Wanted, Inquire Within" and "If you want a job, you are no longer a union employee".
Not saying they will, but they could. This is true for every GM contract (or the contract for any other company). It is immediately open for renegotiation, especially if they form a new company and transfer all the assets they want to keep to that new company. The contracts were all with the old company.
If you see GM declare bankruptcy, expect AT LEAST Chrysler and possibly Ford to follow (since they will not be able to compete with a GM that no longer has the burden of UAW contracts). This will ripple across the automotive industry and will have an impact across the globe. Hopefully, it will kill half the remaining auto companies outside the US. When the big three again become price competitive and they begin to truly lobby for trade balance (meaning when we import their cars they have to pay the same amount of taxes/fees that we have to pay to import US vehicles into their countries) they will no longer be price competitive.
I also hope that we require foreign cars sold in the US to be produced in the US just like every other country does to us. I also hope they stop import of all vehicles from Canada and Mexico without making sure that those vehicles were built paying labor at least US Minimum wage and being subject to full import taxes and fees.
If GM declares bankruptcy, the playing field should rapidly level. At the expense of just about every major global industry (steel, aluminum, plastics, leather, petroleum, paper, rubber). Of which the US Automotives are the largest consumer. If the US Automotives does, so will their suppliers and all of the industries which the consume.
My .02.
"People don't want SUVs. They are tricked into thinking that they do, and then tricked into thinking that they made the right purchase; 50% of all car advertising is designed specifically to make current owners feel good about their purchase. It both builds brand loyalty even when it is utterly undeserved, and helps reduce sales by other automakers." You sir, are full of shit. You obviously don't have kids, you don't live in a climate that gets 50+ inches of snow per year and you don't live in an area that has crappy roads. My wife CRIED when we traded in our Durango for a minivan. BTW, her minivan is all wheel drive so it is still placed in the "SUV" category. Any family with more than 2 kids who participate in sports, has a family pet, lives in any climate that gets snow, has dirt roads and needs more cargo space than the prius WANTS an SUV/minivan. You have no idea what you are talking about.