They aren't the only hospital in town? Even the small area I grew up in had three in the largest city area plus others in some of the nearby towns. You didn't go to the closest because it was closest, you went to the best (if given a choice). And how else would you know it was best unless there was a marketing department to tell you.
An institution's marketing department is the very worst source of unbiased information about that institution. How else would I know? By doing a little research about them and checking them out. I consider that basic due diligence. I check out a car dealership before I consider buying a vehicle there. Why wouldn't I do that with a potentially life-or-death situation like a hospital visit (i.e. ahead of time before you require their services)?
It seems that their biggest concern is with email. Even enforcing SSL for exchange webmail doesn't mean much as the data on the end user's computer is there, with the potential to be archived/cached, unencrypted.
At this office I worked for, Lotus Notes was used for e-mail. It too was a remote application. It ran on the company server and Citrix was used to remotely run it on the laptop, and all communication was tunneled through the encrypted VPN (that used IPSec I believe). Anyone running a packet sniffer on the laptop would see no traffic of any sort except encrypted VPN data, and that applied for all applications, e-mail included.
I have a hard time believing that a hospital could not afford to do the same thing.
If you aren't going to keep relevant variables consistent, then the comparison is meaningless. Saying X is a cheaper place to live than Y, when the standard of living isn't even remotely comparable, is as pointless as saying you're rich because if you went to Zimbabwe you'd be a billionaire.
I'm saying that the place is cheaper to live in because the standard of living is lower. As in, those two tend to go together. To me that was so obvious that it did not bear special mention. I had no idea this would be a point of confusion.
I phrased that the way I did because companies that hire low-wage foreign workers don't care if those workers have a low standard of living. What they care about is that they are low-wage. How and why that came to be the case is not a line item in their accounting statements. It seriously sucks for those workers but is not why jobs are outsourced to them.
Companies outsource jobs that could be done by domestic workers for one reason: they believe it will lower their costs. It's a similar situation when they hire illegal aliens to perform jobs "that Americans don't want to do." It's not so much that Americans are unwilling to perform that kind of work, because if the wage were $1 million/hour you can bet Americans would be lining up for it. It's that Americans expect a higher wage than workers from countries where the cost of living is lower (and subsequently, but irrelevantly to this discussion, the standard of living is also lower).
That was my only point. Like I said, I had no idea this would be such a point of confusion. In fact I don't think it is. I think you're just clutching at straws . Quibbling about this is about as useful as seeing me make a punctuation error and saying this invalidates my argument. I didn't mention standard of living because while that's of great concern to the illegal alien workers themselves, it has little to do with why companies hire them. If they could live in absolute luxury for those lower wages it wouldn't change a thing the American companies are doing.
This. Without an argument for why your personal machine should be on a sensitive network we can't help you.
I'm slightly disturbed that there's a hospital out there that apparently allows employees unfettered access to their network from their personal machines, actually.
Apparently they get used to that and it spoils them. Now that they're spoiled, when you fix the situation by implementing reasonable controls for sensitive data, they get upset at the new restrictions and start Ask Slashdot discussions about their unwillingness to deal with them.
I've personally worked in offices that dealt with sensitive data. What I dealt with was less sensitive than medical records, yet we had IT policies like this one and they were considered basic measures. Employees who needed to work from home or while traveling were issued company laptops. The laptops were configured to establish an encrypted VPN connection back to the company. All software used once the user logged into the VPN was actually running on the server (I think they used Citrix to remotely run applications) so sensitive data was not stored locally on the laptop's hard drive. I don't know whether the drive was also encrypted.
At this place where our data was less sensitive than medical records, most users were not allowed to plug USB devices like thumbdrives into the company computers. No one was allowed to connect a personal computer to the company network. This worked well since again, the company provided their own equipment to anyone who needed it. I don't believe anyone who was issued company laptops actually had Admin access to them. I think they used a "Power User" profile so a user could do most things but could not install software etc.
None of this was a problem for anyone. If people think not allowing personal computers to connect to sensitive networks is some kind of iron-fisted draconian measure, it'd a great and wonderful thing that those same people are not making IT decisions. Anyone who feels that way has no idea what they are dealing with and/or is unable to see that there is a bigger picture than their immediate convenience.
That's ridiculous. He was saying that if the person is white-skinned, the cops won't bother even if it is an illegal alien.
The point was, the cops are going to use this to target Hispanics regardless of residency status. You can bet that they will detain and/or deport as many as they can until it's struck down in the courts.
Bit of an afterthought but I wanted to add this. You do know that "Hispanic" is not a race, right? "Hispanic" just literally means "Spanish-speaking". There are plenty of white Hispanics, particularly from Cuba.
I'm greatly oversimplifying here and leaving out plenty, but I'll give a brief history. What is now Mexico was conquered by the Conquistadores (and others) who militarily occupied the region and interbred with the natives ("Indians") who lived there. Their descendants were called mestizos. When "Mexican" is used to mean a racial/ethnic group (and not just a nationality) it refers to those descendants.
Cuba on the other hand was not only conquered and subjugated. The native population was basically wiped out and the island was repopulated with mostly white European Spaniards. Their descendants are also in modern-day Cuba.
Both groups are correctly called "Hispanic" because Spanish is their native language. Yet in the most technical sense they are different racial/ethnic groups.
Not only is "Hispanic" not a racial/ethnic issue, Arizona's whole illegal immigration problem is not a racial/ethnic issue either. Arizona's problems here have nothing to do with race or color or ethnicity. It's much simpler than that. Arizona's problems here are because they share a border with Mexico. If they shared a border with Canada instead then I'd imagine their illegal immigrants would tend to be non-Hispanics.
That's not true in all cases. It's true for some, like computer systems.
Computer systems were the subject of discussion. Everything *I* said about the worthiness of taking the effort to properly secure them was in the context of computers. Within that (obvious) context, what I said was plainly true.
The post I'm replying to makes it sound like that is the case for everything, and if you're not putting that type of effort into everything, then you're just 'lazy'.
That same post is the one where I said that he just didn't like the sound of what I said yet could not refute it, so what resulted was an irrelevent response. The reason behind issuing such a response to what I said is quite transparent.
Further more, I'm simply supporting your initial point and saying the AC missed the point of your post by going off on an unrelated (yet seemingly similar) tangent.
Yes but he didn't do that because he rolled dice and randomly came up with it. It happened for a reason. The reason was, he didn't like what I said yet was unable to refute it, and for highly emotional reactive people this is a problem they resolve by techniques like marginalization or ridicule or hyperbole. So he took my statement to an illogical extreme and started talking about growing your own food etc. merely because I advocate that people take personal responsibility for their computer equipment. That's what I called "discredit the messenger".
Sorry man but your latest response just seems like you can't follow a conversation. I suppose that's more likely when you respond days later, and is understandable. Still, if you have some new insight I seem to have missed it. Everything you said there can be learned by reading the thread, so far as I can tell.
I ran the command on the test page and the results are
>>dig +short rs.dns-oarc.net txt
rst.x476.rs.dns-oarc.net.
rst.x485.x476.rs.dns-oarc.net.
rst.x490.x485.x476.rs.dns-oarc.net.
"68.87.73.244 DNS reply size limit is at least 490"
"68.87.73.244 lacks EDNS, defaults to 512"
"Tested at 2010-04-30 13:42:26 UTC"
According to the test page this seems to mean that Comcast doesn't support EDSL (at the moment). So the big question is:
What can I do - aside from praying that Comcast will get their shit together by next week?
You can run your own DNS server and use Comcast only as the pipe. Caching DNS servers are particularly easy to run compared to things like mail servers or web servers as they require little or no maintainence once you get them going.
Yes, it would be much better to only have a few select people make the decisions instead of opening it to a public vote. Wonderful idea.
That depends on who those few select people are. Specifically, do they make a decision "just because", or at every step of every decision can they give you good solid reasons to justify why they made that choice?
So you think that removing toys from kids meals will make parents who previously fed their children fast food every day suddenly start cooking healthy meals?
If so, you're as deluded as the morons in California.
Bad parents will still be bad parents.
The real solution to this is to charge parents who have fat young children (i.e. too young to reasonably buy and cook their own food) with child abuse. Then it doesn't matter how their obesity came to be the case
Being better doesn't explain why they're cheaper. Usually one pays a premium for "better". So, I think things like cost of living are bigger factors than what you're mentioning there. Compared to several other places, measured in dollars, the USA can be an expensive place to live.
Like where ? Of the places I've lived or spent significant time - Australia, New Zealand, the UK, Switzerland, France and Germany - all are noticably more expensive than the US to live in (particularly food and housing, both of which are dirt cheap in the US).
Where, with a comparable standard of living to the US, is cheaper to live ?
(emphasis mine)
Once again people seem to assume that the way I word something is a coincidence or product of random chance. It isn't. There's a very good reason why I never said "comparable standard of living" in my post. The only thing like this I mentioned was cost of living. I'm not trying to pick on you because many, many, MANY people here do this, but apparently people just read whatever they want without regard for what I actually did and did not say.
Thanks to globalism, people who live in first-world nations like the USA, Australia, Switzerland, France etc. are not just competing for jobs (in many industries) against other first-worlders. They are also competing against places that have a much lower standard of living and therefore also have a much lower cost of living. When compared to the USA, Mexico is such a place. When compared to the USA, India is such a place. Both are places either to where jobs are outsourced or from where workers who can accept lower wages (than lawful American citizens) are coming to the USA.
It's either mistaken or intellectually dishonest to ignore this. The bottom line is, there are many workers in the world who will do the same job for less than what is considered poverty-level for Americans. As long as those workers are lawful, this is called competition. As soon as those workers violate immigration laws in order to do so, it's abuse.
That's ridiculous. He was saying that if the person is white-skinned, the cops won't bother even if it is an illegal alien.
The point was, the cops are going to use this to target Hispanics regardless of residency status. You can bet that they will detain and/or deport as many as they can until it's struck down in the courts.
The cops are not targeting Hispanics; that's backwards. Hispanics have made themselves a target by becoming the overwhelming majority of illegal aliens. The cops are merely reacting to this fact. If white Germans or white English were the overwhelming majority of our illegal aliens then I would agree that targeting Mexicans is racism. Since that's not the case, it isn't racism; it's realism.
Have you ever witnessed real racism? It's a horror without excuse or justification. You're really cheapening what it means when you apply it to trivial issues like this one. It's a bit like the boy who cried "wolf".
Furthermore, a Hispanic person who is stopped by the cops during a traffic stop has one easy defense against this, according to the same law: carrying a driver's license issued by an American state. According to this law, that's proof enough of citizenship for their purposes. If an Hispanic person (or any other person, for that matter) is stopped by the police while driving and does not have a valid driver's license, at that point he'd be asked for further documentation. I just don't see the problem here. I wish most laws were this reasonable.
I mean no offense but I think you've been victimized by the various political interests (i.e. both major parties) who have an agenda of preventing any sort of effective border control. They want this to look like the most evil law ever created. They have both media presence and political clout, are very vocal, and are very good at demagoguery and propaganda. They can be extremely convincing. In this instance, they also happen to be absolutely wrong. Please, read the law for yourself instead of listening to either them or me.
You can't take jobs from Americans when they're too stupid and expensive to qualify.
Using your straw-man, I've never seen an American-educated manager good with financials nor foresight in planning. Most are just greedy, lazy bastards, and usually run a business into the ground. With the poor state of education where high-school is enough and most are geographically illiterate.. of course the ones from other countries who are hungrier and have tougher schools are better.
Being better doesn't explain why they're cheaper. Usually one pays a premium for "better". So, I think things like cost of living are bigger factors than what you're mentioning there. Compared to several other places, measured in dollars, the USA can be an expensive place to live.
If the problem is statist bastards asking for ID, why shouldn't I blame the statist bastards asking for ID? Big businesses employing illegals aren't the ones stopping me on the street and violating my rights as a U.S. citizen by demanding my papers. The people doing that are the people supporting these kinds of anti-American laws.
You seem unable to see how these things are connected. It's a linear chain of cause-and-effect. I'll make a crude illustration:
Big business [knowingly] employs illegals -> Illegals find plenty of opportunity here -> Other illegals are encouraged by this -> More of them flock to this country -> It continues unchecked until citizens finally get sick of it -> There is a public outcry -> Politicians address it the only way they know how, by making a law.
Each step in that progression takes time. If you don't like laws like this, you should at least understand them. You won't prevent laws like this by assigning blame or ignoring connections or convincing politicians that they should ignore public outcry. You can prevent laws like this by dealing with problems when they start small and not waiting until they become a crisis.
I've heard conservative estimates that there are more than 20 million illegal aliens in the USA. Before there were 20 million, there were 500,000. Then there were 1 million. Then there were five million. At any point the realization can be made that those numbers are moving the wrong way, that we're doing something wrong, and that we can expect it to become a big crisis if we don't address it now. How sharp you actually are determines just how early you see the pattern, but on this particular issue we've had enough warning that any dullard could have foreseen that it will continue to get worse unless changed.
It's like that saying that defines insanity as doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result.
Non-citizens do not have all of the rights that a citizen does. And frankly, I don't see what the big deal here is. In most places in the world... the first world included... visitors are required to have documentation on them of some kind, be it visa papers or a passport.
You seem to have missed the point that not everyone with brown skin in Arizona is an alien, legal or otherwise. Or, to put it another way, if I took my aunt who was born in Germany (but is now an American citizen) to Arizona, they are probably not going to stop her and demand to see her papers to prove that she is here legally.
And if we had a big problem with literally tens of millions of Germans sneaking into this country by illegally crossing its borders, then maybe I'd see your point.
Seems to me that if the federal government wont address this, a state's attempt is going to be futile and passing bad laws will not improve things.
I see this a different way. That's partly because I don't think this is a bad law. It's mostly because that's the entire point of a federal system. It's designed so that there can be different governments as well as different levels of government. This is something the states can take upon themselves if the national government neglects its responsibility. If we did not have such a system and the national government refused to deal with this issue, then no one else would have the authority to step in and pick up their slack.
There are already laws that cover "probable cause" for committing crimes, and if the person is not committing a crime, how do you know theyre illegal? You want to rely on a cop's hunch?
This law is a lot like the seatbelt laws in my state: it cannot be the reason why you were pulled over. If a cop in my state pulls you over for speeding, he can also give you a second ticket for a seatbelt violation if you are not wearing the seatbelt. If you break no other law and he happens to notice you don't have a seatbelt on, he's not allowed to act on that.
That's the way this law is written. The person has to be breaking some other law first. Now that they've been detained or apprehended, at that point the cop can check their citizenship or immigration status. There's no hunch involved here -- either the person has already broken another law or he hasn't. If he hasn't, they are not authorized to require papers.
I'm a US citizen. I'm not required to carry papers.
I imagine your driver's license would do. Chances are that you'd have it with you anyway since by far the average person's interaction with police seems to come from traffic stops. A state DMV would just have to require that proof of citizenship (a natural-born citizen could use his Social Security card for this) or a valid visa be presented in order to obtain a license. That would make a license good enough for this purpose.
For those who don't drive, state DMVs also issue photo ID cards; they are usually used as proof-of-age to purchase alcohol. The only real difference between those and a license is that a license allows you to drive. The documentation standards for obtaining one are the same, at least in my state.
I remember hearing of a movement a while back to give driver's licenses to illegal aliens. This is a bad idea for a variety of reasons. In this case, it would probably mean that a citizen could not use just a driver's license to easily deal with the implications of this law.
No, it's really not. But it appeals to many in a rather sick sort of way because it validates their victim mentality.
There's one and only one thing cops care about: their job performance as measured by number of tickets and number of arrests. That's what their bosses look at when deciding whether they are adequately doing their job, whether they deserve a raise, whether they have earned a promotion, etc. They certainly don't get any reward for giving a warning instead of a ticket, or otherwise doing something other than nailing you with everything they can.
How is this a problem? By Law they are required to carry documentation with them, like a drivers license.
Because it's so easy to demagogue.
Any problem here is with the federal government, as enforcing immigration laws and taking reasonable measures to protect the country's borders is properly their job. As they have utterly failed to do this job, and their utter failure is causing many problems for certain state governments, one of those states is now trying to do something about it rather than ignoring it and continuing to have these problems.
My bet is that the Feds aren't doing jack shit about this because both political parties benefit from the current situation. Republicans are allied with some corporate interests who view the illegal aliens as low-cost workers, while for Democrats, the joke is "they're not illegal aliens, they're unregistered Democrats." Both stand to lose those benefits if states start dealing with this. Both are powerful political and monied interests. That's why this has to be portrayed as negatively as possible with the most highly emotional rhetoric available. Certainly no critical analysis of this rhetoric will be allowed in the news, though it may appear in some editorial programs.
Right now most of the problem of illegal aliens is coming from Mexico; at least in Arizona this is the case. Thus, these laws will mostly be applied to Mexicans who are here illegally or are here legally but failed to produce the paperwork. None of the people enforcing this law caused Mexicans to come here illegally. They are merely recognizing that this is happening and acting accordingly. Yet because Mexicans are a racial/ethnic group, and because the media eats this kind of shit for breakfast, this measure is being called "racist". It's pure bullshit.
If we had many illegal immigrants from England, Spain, Mexico, and Canada, yet the immigration laws were only enforced against the illegal immigrants who are Mexican, that would be an instance of racism or ethnic discrimination. That isn't the case. Right now the problem is coming from Mexico and illegal immigrants from elsewhere are more like statistical error by comparison. Again, some percentage of Mexican citizens are responsible for that, not anyone who wrote or plans to enforce Arizona's new law. You'll practically never see such a common-sense recognition in the media.
Really, people who think this is some horrible extreme law should take a hard look sometime at Mexico's immigration laws, or those of most other countries for that matter. There's an almost 100% chance that none of the highly emotional people screaming bloody murder about this have done so.
Eh what part of my specific mention of "implied powers" are you confused about? What is sometimes called the Commerce Clause is one of them. I mentioned it. It's right there in black-and-white. I happen to disagree with some of its uses and that was the sole subject of my posts in this thread.
I don't understand how you can see me specifically and explicitly mention a thing, and then act like I have never heard of that thing, and then feel you have contributed anything. You don't seem to be deliberately trolling. Therefore, it must take a real (dubious) "talent" to see only what you wish to see to pull that one off.
It's mostly due to the relationship between the IT staff and the regular employees. In some situations, IT can dictate quite a bit and is left to make their own decisions about security, but in most situations they are essentially the servants of the employees - someone to clean malware off of their computers and be whined at. If the employee(s) doesn't/don't want IE6, then it's harder for IT to make a case to management (since they could otherwise claim that the employees also want an upgrade) to justify upgrading, and most just won't bother unless there's lots of user demand. If the users are against it, it takes either a somewhat reckless IT dept. or a tech-savvy manager to realize that this stuff needs to get done.
A hypothetical: if my doctor told me that there was a very good medical reason for me to do something, I would follow his advice. I guess you could say that doing what he tells me I should do makes me a "servant" except that he doesn't have a way to force me to do anything. I can realize on my own that it's in my interests to follow the advice he gives me and that I probably don't have the expertise it would take to seriously dispute him.
Or I could ignore my doctor's hypothetical advice. Since I am paying/hiring him, I can think of him as my "servant" and insist that he never tell me anything I don't want to hear, especially those things that would suggest I should change my lifestyle or otherwise adapt to something new. I can freely ignore any such advice and take the attitude of "what does he care, he got paid." I could do that, but ignoring the sound advice of an expert in his field who is trying to look out for you is generally unwise.
On the one hand, if you expect users to understand and be able to follow basic procedures without making silly errors they tell you things like "but I'm not a computer expert, I just want it to work!" On the other hand, when you present them with a real computer expert they will ignore his advice the second it means they might lose a pretty icon or a shiny button. So they are like my second hypothetical situation. They neither wish to become experts nor listen to existing experts.
Name one other profession or trade or area of expertise where expert advice is so routinely ignored for such trivial reasons. It doesn't happen with doctors, lawyers, plumbers, electricians, auto mechanics or insurance agents. "If the users are against it" their ability to understand the full implications of their decision and their background in IT should be considered first and foremost. If not, why don't we have such "mob rule" in all the other departments of major corporations? I'm sure most users would like a $300k/yr raise too, so does that mean Accounting is obligated to accommodate them?
It's because of familiarity, I'm pretty sure. I've had clients absolutely refuse to use anything else, even IE8, because it "felt" (in other words, looked) different from what they were used to. My solution to this is usually one of the Firefox themes that makes Firefox look like IE. The IE6 one is pretty flawless.
If a client cares about that more than all of the problems with IE6, then they should not have a position in their company that allows them to make IT-related decisions.
Reading comprehension is a very useful skill.
So is common sense.
Do you actually think that half a dozen angry letters/e-mails will make any difference? That is, if they read them in the first place.
In the real world, most people will either pay and put up with the DRM, pirate it, or not play and don't care at all. The company is trying to make a profit and the customers are trying to have fun. That's all there is to it.
You said "except Ubisoft doesn't know whether you illegally download their game or not, so pirating it and not playing it all have the same effect, that is: Ubisoft will assume piracy." You mentioned that as though it were a valid objection that the parent post had not already addressed. He did in fact address this before you said anything about it. You did not critique the way he addressed this objection. No, instead you acted like he never even thought of it.
You can bring up another, separate issue like the effectiveness of refusing to play this game and making sure Ubisoft understands why. If you would like to admit that you have failed to read and understand the initial post, I would at that point be happy to discuss this separate issue with you.
Meanwhile bringing up this separate issue in an effort to save face isn't fooling anyone. All that does is demonstrate that you cannot admit you made a mistake and are therefore not being terribly honest. That means I do not anticipate having a productive conversation with you about the gaming industry, as it's difficult to do that with someone who wants to convince me that I didn't just see what I plainly just saw.
That's exactly the point: to get people used to it. It's no coincidence that they tried this on a sequel of a successful title, that people would want to play regardless of the hassle. After more companies start adopting it and ignoring the complaints, people will just get used.
They might want to implement it more effectively though.
They must have taken a page from the playbook of many politicians. Many bad laws work this way. The politicians know damned well that we almost never repeal laws that don't work well, so once the bill gets passed it will be on the books forever despite any opposition. Eventually, you end up with an entire generation that has grown up knowing nothing else and the intention is that they won't try too hard to imagine any other way.
Having actual principles and sticking to them is the best defense against this.
Slashdot Mirror
They aren't the only hospital in town? Even the small area I grew up in had three in the largest city area plus others in some of the nearby towns. You didn't go to the closest because it was closest, you went to the best (if given a choice). And how else would you know it was best unless there was a marketing department to tell you.
An institution's marketing department is the very worst source of unbiased information about that institution. How else would I know? By doing a little research about them and checking them out. I consider that basic due diligence. I check out a car dealership before I consider buying a vehicle there. Why wouldn't I do that with a potentially life-or-death situation like a hospital visit (i.e. ahead of time before you require their services)?
At this office I worked for, Lotus Notes was used for e-mail. It too was a remote application. It ran on the company server and Citrix was used to remotely run it on the laptop, and all communication was tunneled through the encrypted VPN (that used IPSec I believe). Anyone running a packet sniffer on the laptop would see no traffic of any sort except encrypted VPN data, and that applied for all applications, e-mail included.
I have a hard time believing that a hospital could not afford to do the same thing.
I'm saying that the place is cheaper to live in because the standard of living is lower. As in, those two tend to go together. To me that was so obvious that it did not bear special mention. I had no idea this would be a point of confusion.
I phrased that the way I did because companies that hire low-wage foreign workers don't care if those workers have a low standard of living. What they care about is that they are low-wage. How and why that came to be the case is not a line item in their accounting statements. It seriously sucks for those workers but is not why jobs are outsourced to them.
Companies outsource jobs that could be done by domestic workers for one reason: they believe it will lower their costs. It's a similar situation when they hire illegal aliens to perform jobs "that Americans don't want to do." It's not so much that Americans are unwilling to perform that kind of work, because if the wage were $1 million/hour you can bet Americans would be lining up for it. It's that Americans expect a higher wage than workers from countries where the cost of living is lower (and subsequently, but irrelevantly to this discussion, the standard of living is also lower).
That was my only point. Like I said, I had no idea this would be such a point of confusion. In fact I don't think it is. I think you're just clutching at straws . Quibbling about this is about as useful as seeing me make a punctuation error and saying this invalidates my argument. I didn't mention standard of living because while that's of great concern to the illegal alien workers themselves, it has little to do with why companies hire them. If they could live in absolute luxury for those lower wages it wouldn't change a thing the American companies are doing.
This. Without an argument for why your personal machine should be on a sensitive network we can't help you.
I'm slightly disturbed that there's a hospital out there that apparently allows employees unfettered access to their network from their personal machines, actually.
Apparently they get used to that and it spoils them. Now that they're spoiled, when you fix the situation by implementing reasonable controls for sensitive data, they get upset at the new restrictions and start Ask Slashdot discussions about their unwillingness to deal with them.
I've personally worked in offices that dealt with sensitive data. What I dealt with was less sensitive than medical records, yet we had IT policies like this one and they were considered basic measures. Employees who needed to work from home or while traveling were issued company laptops. The laptops were configured to establish an encrypted VPN connection back to the company. All software used once the user logged into the VPN was actually running on the server (I think they used Citrix to remotely run applications) so sensitive data was not stored locally on the laptop's hard drive. I don't know whether the drive was also encrypted.
At this place where our data was less sensitive than medical records, most users were not allowed to plug USB devices like thumbdrives into the company computers. No one was allowed to connect a personal computer to the company network. This worked well since again, the company provided their own equipment to anyone who needed it. I don't believe anyone who was issued company laptops actually had Admin access to them. I think they used a "Power User" profile so a user could do most things but could not install software etc.
None of this was a problem for anyone. If people think not allowing personal computers to connect to sensitive networks is some kind of iron-fisted draconian measure, it'd a great and wonderful thing that those same people are not making IT decisions. Anyone who feels that way has no idea what they are dealing with and/or is unable to see that there is a bigger picture than their immediate convenience.
YOUR employer must buy you equipment that is required to perform YOUR job.
Correct. That's one big difference between an employee and a contractor.
That's ridiculous. He was saying that if the person is white-skinned, the cops won't bother even if it is an illegal alien.
The point was, the cops are going to use this to target Hispanics regardless of residency status. You can bet that they will detain and/or deport as many as they can until it's struck down in the courts.
Bit of an afterthought but I wanted to add this. You do know that "Hispanic" is not a race, right? "Hispanic" just literally means "Spanish-speaking". There are plenty of white Hispanics, particularly from Cuba.
I'm greatly oversimplifying here and leaving out plenty, but I'll give a brief history. What is now Mexico was conquered by the Conquistadores (and others) who militarily occupied the region and interbred with the natives ("Indians") who lived there. Their descendants were called mestizos. When "Mexican" is used to mean a racial/ethnic group (and not just a nationality) it refers to those descendants.
Cuba on the other hand was not only conquered and subjugated. The native population was basically wiped out and the island was repopulated with mostly white European Spaniards. Their descendants are also in modern-day Cuba.
Both groups are correctly called "Hispanic" because Spanish is their native language. Yet in the most technical sense they are different racial/ethnic groups.
Not only is "Hispanic" not a racial/ethnic issue, Arizona's whole illegal immigration problem is not a racial/ethnic issue either. Arizona's problems here have nothing to do with race or color or ethnicity. It's much simpler than that. Arizona's problems here are because they share a border with Mexico. If they shared a border with Canada instead then I'd imagine their illegal immigrants would tend to be non-Hispanics.
Computer systems were the subject of discussion. Everything *I* said about the worthiness of taking the effort to properly secure them was in the context of computers. Within that (obvious) context, what I said was plainly true.
That same post is the one where I said that he just didn't like the sound of what I said yet could not refute it, so what resulted was an irrelevent response. The reason behind issuing such a response to what I said is quite transparent.
Yes but he didn't do that because he rolled dice and randomly came up with it. It happened for a reason. The reason was, he didn't like what I said yet was unable to refute it, and for highly emotional reactive people this is a problem they resolve by techniques like marginalization or ridicule or hyperbole. So he took my statement to an illogical extreme and started talking about growing your own food etc. merely because I advocate that people take personal responsibility for their computer equipment. That's what I called "discredit the messenger".
Sorry man but your latest response just seems like you can't follow a conversation. I suppose that's more likely when you respond days later, and is understandable. Still, if you have some new insight I seem to have missed it. Everything you said there can be learned by reading the thread, so far as I can tell.
I ran the command on the test page and the results are
>>dig +short rs.dns-oarc.net txt rst.x476.rs.dns-oarc.net. rst.x485.x476.rs.dns-oarc.net. rst.x490.x485.x476.rs.dns-oarc.net. "68.87.73.244 DNS reply size limit is at least 490" "68.87.73.244 lacks EDNS, defaults to 512" "Tested at 2010-04-30 13:42:26 UTC"
According to the test page this seems to mean that Comcast doesn't support EDSL (at the moment). So the big question is: What can I do - aside from praying that Comcast will get their shit together by next week?
You can run your own DNS server and use Comcast only as the pipe. Caching DNS servers are particularly easy to run compared to things like mail servers or web servers as they require little or no maintainence once you get them going.
Yes, it would be much better to only have a few select people make the decisions instead of opening it to a public vote. Wonderful idea.
That depends on who those few select people are. Specifically, do they make a decision "just because", or at every step of every decision can they give you good solid reasons to justify why they made that choice?
So you think that removing toys from kids meals will make parents who previously fed their children fast food every day suddenly start cooking healthy meals?
If so, you're as deluded as the morons in California.
Bad parents will still be bad parents.
The real solution to this is to charge parents who have fat young children (i.e. too young to reasonably buy and cook their own food) with child abuse. Then it doesn't matter how their obesity came to be the case
Being better doesn't explain why they're cheaper. Usually one pays a premium for "better". So, I think things like cost of living are bigger factors than what you're mentioning there. Compared to several other places, measured in dollars, the USA can be an expensive place to live.
Like where ? Of the places I've lived or spent significant time - Australia, New Zealand, the UK, Switzerland, France and Germany - all are noticably more expensive than the US to live in (particularly food and housing, both of which are dirt cheap in the US).
Where, with a comparable standard of living to the US, is cheaper to live ?
(emphasis mine)
Once again people seem to assume that the way I word something is a coincidence or product of random chance. It isn't. There's a very good reason why I never said "comparable standard of living" in my post. The only thing like this I mentioned was cost of living. I'm not trying to pick on you because many, many, MANY people here do this, but apparently people just read whatever they want without regard for what I actually did and did not say.
Thanks to globalism, people who live in first-world nations like the USA, Australia, Switzerland, France etc. are not just competing for jobs (in many industries) against other first-worlders. They are also competing against places that have a much lower standard of living and therefore also have a much lower cost of living. When compared to the USA, Mexico is such a place. When compared to the USA, India is such a place. Both are places either to where jobs are outsourced or from where workers who can accept lower wages (than lawful American citizens) are coming to the USA.
It's either mistaken or intellectually dishonest to ignore this. The bottom line is, there are many workers in the world who will do the same job for less than what is considered poverty-level for Americans. As long as those workers are lawful, this is called competition. As soon as those workers violate immigration laws in order to do so, it's abuse.
That's ridiculous. He was saying that if the person is white-skinned, the cops won't bother even if it is an illegal alien.
The point was, the cops are going to use this to target Hispanics regardless of residency status. You can bet that they will detain and/or deport as many as they can until it's struck down in the courts.
The cops are not targeting Hispanics; that's backwards. Hispanics have made themselves a target by becoming the overwhelming majority of illegal aliens. The cops are merely reacting to this fact. If white Germans or white English were the overwhelming majority of our illegal aliens then I would agree that targeting Mexicans is racism. Since that's not the case, it isn't racism; it's realism.
Have you ever witnessed real racism? It's a horror without excuse or justification. You're really cheapening what it means when you apply it to trivial issues like this one. It's a bit like the boy who cried "wolf".
Furthermore, a Hispanic person who is stopped by the cops during a traffic stop has one easy defense against this, according to the same law: carrying a driver's license issued by an American state. According to this law, that's proof enough of citizenship for their purposes. If an Hispanic person (or any other person, for that matter) is stopped by the police while driving and does not have a valid driver's license, at that point he'd be asked for further documentation. I just don't see the problem here. I wish most laws were this reasonable.
I mean no offense but I think you've been victimized by the various political interests (i.e. both major parties) who have an agenda of preventing any sort of effective border control. They want this to look like the most evil law ever created. They have both media presence and political clout, are very vocal, and are very good at demagoguery and propaganda. They can be extremely convincing. In this instance, they also happen to be absolutely wrong. Please, read the law for yourself instead of listening to either them or me.
You can't take jobs from Americans when they're too stupid and expensive to qualify.
Using your straw-man, I've never seen an American-educated manager good with financials nor foresight in planning. Most are just greedy, lazy bastards, and usually run a business into the ground. With the poor state of education where high-school is enough and most are geographically illiterate.. of course the ones from other countries who are hungrier and have tougher schools are better.
Being better doesn't explain why they're cheaper. Usually one pays a premium for "better". So, I think things like cost of living are bigger factors than what you're mentioning there. Compared to several other places, measured in dollars, the USA can be an expensive place to live.
If the problem is statist bastards asking for ID, why shouldn't I blame the statist bastards asking for ID? Big businesses employing illegals aren't the ones stopping me on the street and violating my rights as a U.S. citizen by demanding my papers. The people doing that are the people supporting these kinds of anti-American laws.
You seem unable to see how these things are connected. It's a linear chain of cause-and-effect. I'll make a crude illustration:
Big business [knowingly] employs illegals -> Illegals find plenty of opportunity here -> Other illegals are encouraged by this -> More of them flock to this country -> It continues unchecked until citizens finally get sick of it -> There is a public outcry -> Politicians address it the only way they know how, by making a law.
Each step in that progression takes time. If you don't like laws like this, you should at least understand them. You won't prevent laws like this by assigning blame or ignoring connections or convincing politicians that they should ignore public outcry. You can prevent laws like this by dealing with problems when they start small and not waiting until they become a crisis.
I've heard conservative estimates that there are more than 20 million illegal aliens in the USA. Before there were 20 million, there were 500,000. Then there were 1 million. Then there were five million. At any point the realization can be made that those numbers are moving the wrong way, that we're doing something wrong, and that we can expect it to become a big crisis if we don't address it now. How sharp you actually are determines just how early you see the pattern, but on this particular issue we've had enough warning that any dullard could have foreseen that it will continue to get worse unless changed.
It's like that saying that defines insanity as doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result.
You seem to have missed the point that not everyone with brown skin in Arizona is an alien, legal or otherwise. Or, to put it another way, if I took my aunt who was born in Germany (but is now an American citizen) to Arizona, they are probably not going to stop her and demand to see her papers to prove that she is here legally.
And if we had a big problem with literally tens of millions of Germans sneaking into this country by illegally crossing its borders, then maybe I'd see your point.
I see this a different way. That's partly because I don't think this is a bad law. It's mostly because that's the entire point of a federal system. It's designed so that there can be different governments as well as different levels of government. This is something the states can take upon themselves if the national government neglects its responsibility. If we did not have such a system and the national government refused to deal with this issue, then no one else would have the authority to step in and pick up their slack.
This law is a lot like the seatbelt laws in my state: it cannot be the reason why you were pulled over. If a cop in my state pulls you over for speeding, he can also give you a second ticket for a seatbelt violation if you are not wearing the seatbelt. If you break no other law and he happens to notice you don't have a seatbelt on, he's not allowed to act on that.
That's the way this law is written. The person has to be breaking some other law first. Now that they've been detained or apprehended, at that point the cop can check their citizenship or immigration status. There's no hunch involved here -- either the person has already broken another law or he hasn't. If he hasn't, they are not authorized to require papers.
I'm a US citizen. I'm not required to carry papers.
I imagine your driver's license would do. Chances are that you'd have it with you anyway since by far the average person's interaction with police seems to come from traffic stops. A state DMV would just have to require that proof of citizenship (a natural-born citizen could use his Social Security card for this) or a valid visa be presented in order to obtain a license. That would make a license good enough for this purpose.
For those who don't drive, state DMVs also issue photo ID cards; they are usually used as proof-of-age to purchase alcohol. The only real difference between those and a license is that a license allows you to drive. The documentation standards for obtaining one are the same, at least in my state.
I remember hearing of a movement a while back to give driver's licenses to illegal aliens. This is a bad idea for a variety of reasons. In this case, it would probably mean that a citizen could not use just a driver's license to easily deal with the implications of this law.
Appearing reasonably white is no protection.
No, it's really not. But it appeals to many in a rather sick sort of way because it validates their victim mentality.
There's one and only one thing cops care about: their job performance as measured by number of tickets and number of arrests. That's what their bosses look at when deciding whether they are adequately doing their job, whether they deserve a raise, whether they have earned a promotion, etc. They certainly don't get any reward for giving a warning instead of a ticket, or otherwise doing something other than nailing you with everything they can.
How is this a problem? By Law they are required to carry documentation with them, like a drivers license.
Because it's so easy to demagogue.
Any problem here is with the federal government, as enforcing immigration laws and taking reasonable measures to protect the country's borders is properly their job. As they have utterly failed to do this job, and their utter failure is causing many problems for certain state governments, one of those states is now trying to do something about it rather than ignoring it and continuing to have these problems.
My bet is that the Feds aren't doing jack shit about this because both political parties benefit from the current situation. Republicans are allied with some corporate interests who view the illegal aliens as low-cost workers, while for Democrats, the joke is "they're not illegal aliens, they're unregistered Democrats." Both stand to lose those benefits if states start dealing with this. Both are powerful political and monied interests. That's why this has to be portrayed as negatively as possible with the most highly emotional rhetoric available. Certainly no critical analysis of this rhetoric will be allowed in the news, though it may appear in some editorial programs.
Right now most of the problem of illegal aliens is coming from Mexico; at least in Arizona this is the case. Thus, these laws will mostly be applied to Mexicans who are here illegally or are here legally but failed to produce the paperwork. None of the people enforcing this law caused Mexicans to come here illegally. They are merely recognizing that this is happening and acting accordingly. Yet because Mexicans are a racial/ethnic group, and because the media eats this kind of shit for breakfast, this measure is being called "racist". It's pure bullshit.
If we had many illegal immigrants from England, Spain, Mexico, and Canada, yet the immigration laws were only enforced against the illegal immigrants who are Mexican, that would be an instance of racism or ethnic discrimination. That isn't the case. Right now the problem is coming from Mexico and illegal immigrants from elsewhere are more like statistical error by comparison. Again, some percentage of Mexican citizens are responsible for that, not anyone who wrote or plans to enforce Arizona's new law. You'll practically never see such a common-sense recognition in the media.
Really, people who think this is some horrible extreme law should take a hard look sometime at Mexico's immigration laws, or those of most other countries for that matter. There's an almost 100% chance that none of the highly emotional people screaming bloody murder about this have done so.
Eh what part of my specific mention of "implied powers" are you confused about? What is sometimes called the Commerce Clause is one of them. I mentioned it. It's right there in black-and-white. I happen to disagree with some of its uses and that was the sole subject of my posts in this thread.
I don't understand how you can see me specifically and explicitly mention a thing, and then act like I have never heard of that thing, and then feel you have contributed anything. You don't seem to be deliberately trolling. Therefore, it must take a real (dubious) "talent" to see only what you wish to see to pull that one off.
It's mostly due to the relationship between the IT staff and the regular employees. In some situations, IT can dictate quite a bit and is left to make their own decisions about security, but in most situations they are essentially the servants of the employees - someone to clean malware off of their computers and be whined at. If the employee(s) doesn't/don't want IE6, then it's harder for IT to make a case to management (since they could otherwise claim that the employees also want an upgrade) to justify upgrading, and most just won't bother unless there's lots of user demand. If the users are against it, it takes either a somewhat reckless IT dept. or a tech-savvy manager to realize that this stuff needs to get done.
A hypothetical: if my doctor told me that there was a very good medical reason for me to do something, I would follow his advice. I guess you could say that doing what he tells me I should do makes me a "servant" except that he doesn't have a way to force me to do anything. I can realize on my own that it's in my interests to follow the advice he gives me and that I probably don't have the expertise it would take to seriously dispute him.
Or I could ignore my doctor's hypothetical advice. Since I am paying/hiring him, I can think of him as my "servant" and insist that he never tell me anything I don't want to hear, especially those things that would suggest I should change my lifestyle or otherwise adapt to something new. I can freely ignore any such advice and take the attitude of "what does he care, he got paid." I could do that, but ignoring the sound advice of an expert in his field who is trying to look out for you is generally unwise.
On the one hand, if you expect users to understand and be able to follow basic procedures without making silly errors they tell you things like "but I'm not a computer expert, I just want it to work!" On the other hand, when you present them with a real computer expert they will ignore his advice the second it means they might lose a pretty icon or a shiny button. So they are like my second hypothetical situation. They neither wish to become experts nor listen to existing experts.
Name one other profession or trade or area of expertise where expert advice is so routinely ignored for such trivial reasons. It doesn't happen with doctors, lawyers, plumbers, electricians, auto mechanics or insurance agents. "If the users are against it" their ability to understand the full implications of their decision and their background in IT should be considered first and foremost. If not, why don't we have such "mob rule" in all the other departments of major corporations? I'm sure most users would like a $300k/yr raise too, so does that mean Accounting is obligated to accommodate them?
It's because of familiarity, I'm pretty sure. I've had clients absolutely refuse to use anything else, even IE8, because it "felt" (in other words, looked) different from what they were used to. My solution to this is usually one of the Firefox themes that makes Firefox look like IE. The IE6 one is pretty flawless.
If a client cares about that more than all of the problems with IE6, then they should not have a position in their company that allows them to make IT-related decisions.
Reading comprehension is a very useful skill. So is common sense. Do you actually think that half a dozen angry letters/e-mails will make any difference? That is, if they read them in the first place. In the real world, most people will either pay and put up with the DRM, pirate it, or not play and don't care at all. The company is trying to make a profit and the customers are trying to have fun. That's all there is to it.
You said "except Ubisoft doesn't know whether you illegally download their game or not, so pirating it and not playing it all have the same effect, that is: Ubisoft will assume piracy." You mentioned that as though it were a valid objection that the parent post had not already addressed. He did in fact address this before you said anything about it. You did not critique the way he addressed this objection. No, instead you acted like he never even thought of it.
You can bring up another, separate issue like the effectiveness of refusing to play this game and making sure Ubisoft understands why. If you would like to admit that you have failed to read and understand the initial post, I would at that point be happy to discuss this separate issue with you.
Meanwhile bringing up this separate issue in an effort to save face isn't fooling anyone. All that does is demonstrate that you cannot admit you made a mistake and are therefore not being terribly honest. That means I do not anticipate having a productive conversation with you about the gaming industry, as it's difficult to do that with someone who wants to convince me that I didn't just see what I plainly just saw.
Actually that's the Declaration of Independence.
That's exactly the point: to get people used to it. It's no coincidence that they tried this on a sequel of a successful title, that people would want to play regardless of the hassle. After more companies start adopting it and ignoring the complaints, people will just get used. They might want to implement it more effectively though.
They must have taken a page from the playbook of many politicians. Many bad laws work this way. The politicians know damned well that we almost never repeal laws that don't work well, so once the bill gets passed it will be on the books forever despite any opposition. Eventually, you end up with an entire generation that has grown up knowing nothing else and the intention is that they won't try too hard to imagine any other way.
Having actual principles and sticking to them is the best defense against this.