I may have gone to highschool with someone who is now a known drug dealer. Now they can look at my profile and stuff if I have it public, they aren't stepping over any boundaries.
There are state compulsory education laws. There's also the fact that you have little or no selection of high schools when you reside in a particular geographical area. Then there's the notion that you did not force that person to become a drug dealer, probably did not even know he was doing that, and in either case are not responsible for his actions. Now they get to examine your life and investigate you, and you don't think boundaries have been crossed?
On the chance that they do look into it - it will be very obvious I have not associated with the person after investigating MY events and other information..
There's no reason to believe anything about you or obtain any information on you, until and unless they have probable cause to believe you have committed a crime. That's not a matter of opinion, taste, or personal preference. It's sound policy for a free country, for law-abiding citizens who don't want to fear their government, and it's exactly why the Fourth Amendment was written.
This kind of data collection is (relative to other digital data gathering, at least) fairly labor-intensive. Nobody from the FBI is going to pretend to be your friend on Facebook unless your name has already come to their attention for some other reason. You're not worth their time otherwise.
That's the way all government investigation should be. Unless they have a good reason to believe you have committed a crime, your name should never come up and data about you should never be gathered. If they do have a good reason to believe you have committed a crime, the reason should be good enough that a judge will grant them a warrant. This is how you deal with crime without the extreme danger to society that unfettered police power represents.
Where this breaks down is when surveillance is so widespread and can be cheaply done on massive scales that the cops can go on fishing expeditions. At that point, it's not so much about whether you have something to hide, it's about what they want to find. This scenario has to take place first before people can easily be targeted and harassed because of their political views, opinions, religion, etc. If you don't want the police to be little more than state-sponsored thugs, then the goal is to prevent them from ever obtaining this capability. The idea that they can have this capability and any regulations about how they use it will be more than temporary speedbumps as we go down the road of the gradual erosion of civil rights is absurd and counter to any good reading of history.
Exactly. People who are stupid enough to fall for it deserve what they get.
This isn't the government going behind your back, putting you under covert surveillance. It's completely in the open. A friend of mine used to work for the MA state police, in the computer forensics unit. He was amazed at the number of gang members who would just openly accept his friend request on Facebook, which would lead to him quietly beavering away to figure out the social network of the gang, where they met, what they got up to. Sneaky? Perhaps, but not illegal.
Really, people are just plain stupid.
With all of the surveillance and wiretap capabilities they possess, the mandatory backdoors built into many telecommunications systems, and the willingness the feds have shown to use these without first obtaining warrants, I am almost surprised they bother doing this. It's old-fashioned policework, of the sort that seems to be going out of style as we keep approaching a surveillance society. It sounds like at least some of them recognize that when real crimes that harm real people are committed, no Orwellian powers are needed to deal with them.
I suppose for those reasons it's like you said: they are going after the dumber criminals. The kind who commit a crime and then brag about it in public because they can't keep their mouths shut are most likely to get nailed by this. I say good riddance to them. Gang members and other violent criminals are exactly what the police should prioritize. If they can do that using publically-available information obtainable at a low cost, so much the better.
I'm also glad that in this case, they are using their finite resources and personnel to go after people who do real harm instead of nonviolent adults who decide to alter their consciousness in unauthorized ways.
Where exactly is the evidence that the HR representative admitted fault or even bothered to apologize? The quote from the alleged apology note is no apology. It is just a statement of official policy. Just like the voice on the telephone insisting that your call is important after you have been on hold for 47 minutes.
The user "centuren", in this post (the one to which I was responding), said the following:
Still, kudos to Ms. Flewers for coming through, even if it's only on a customer service front. If being accommodating is possible, why not formally apologise if someone was upset enough to complain.
I responded to "centuren" for the purpose of explaining why a formal apology would be undesirable in this situation. Your clue was the fact that I quoted his text and then responded to what I quoted. Furthermore, no actual apology needs to have occurred for me to explain why it would be a bad idea.
Please, can you look a little harder before submitting a post? Having to re-explain things like this that you are capable of seeing on your own just lowers the signal-to-noise ratio.
Given a black-and-white, either-or choice, I'd rather live in a world where it's assumed that everything is a slippery slope, and everything is dealt with accordingly.
Too bad only the Sith deal in absolutes.
Too bad for your joke that you conveniently left out the part I went on to explain why either-or thinking is not necessary for this situation.
If you would be so kind as to look back on elementary school US history, everyone here except the Native Americans was a social reject or "terrorist." If said third world immigrants are properly registered as citizens and are paying taxes for the benefits they enjoy, what right do you have to be here over them?
If they are here legally and are paying taxes as responsible members of society, there's no reason not to enjoy their presence. But there is a difference between immigrants who come to the USA because they want to be Americans, who learn our language and follow our laws, and the current Balkanization that is occurring. The former is the Great Melting Pot we have always enjoyed, and makes us stronger as a nation. The latter is a divisive influence that tends to use our kindness and tolerance against us.
To give an example, it would never occur to me to migrate to a foreign country and then try to impose my customs on them and demand that they accommodate my expectations and speak my language. When we do that here in the USA, it's not always appreciated as a kindness; it's often demanded of us. If I migrated to another country, I would expect to learn their language, study their culture, and learn their customs. I would consider anything else to be quite arrogant. If I don't like the way a foreign country does things, my option is to go someplace else. I would not permanently move to France unless I wanted to become a French, nor to Germany unless I wanted to become a German, etc.
I am sure that some of the controversy about this is not legitimate; that it's due to xenophobia or even racism. The GP's comment about skin color is probably an example of this. It's silly because the USA has had such controversies when the immigrants in question were racially white (such as Irish Catholics). It's not really about skin color, it's about culture. It's about who should accommodate whom when someone comes to a sovereign nation and it decides to allow them to stay. The failure to appreciate that is the root cause of the legitimate controversy surrounding this issue.
Not everything is a slippery slope. You never know, the HR person might just have thought it was funny.
Given a black-and-white, either-or choice, I'd rather live in a world where it's assumed that everything is a slippery slope, and everything is dealt with accordingly. I'd prefer that over constantly getting blindsided by things we keep failing to recognize during their early, easily-preventable stages.
Thankfully a black-and-white choice isn't necessary. So I can look at this and say that anything with an overtone of alleged "religious discrimination" is not likely to be an isolated incident, particularly not in a politically correct climate and particularly not when the person involved wants to be above some rules that are actually quite reasonable. Lots of people want special treatment for the real reason of their egos, and the phony reason of their religion, their socioeconomic status, etc. It's not difficult to see how others would be strongly encouraged to do the same if this guy encounters no resistance.
I agree that the HR guy quite likely did laugh at this. It's a situation though where he might have to ignore his personal feelings to comply with company policy or to appease management. So even if he does have a decent sense of humor, anything that even looks like accommodation is going to encourage this behavior.
Well until the next idiot and the next idiot and so on come along and try to pull the same stunt. Sometimes it's best to just nip it in the bud before it blows up and you have tons of assholes trying to make up excuses for why they should be above a rule that everyone else but them has to follow.
Thank you. For a while there, I was reading the comments thinking, "I can't be the only person here who can recognize a precedent when one is being set." As it is, businesses are already too eager to accommodate melodramatic and otherwise unreasonable people in the hopes that such people will spend money. The effect on society is that being unreasonable, childish, and unable to understand viewpoints other than your own is behavior that has been repeatedly validated. When everyone knows this is the case, everyone feels free to be unreasonable. There should be a difference between "treat them with courtesy, respect, and benefit of doubt" and "kiss their ass no matter what," and everyone benefits from higher-quality interaction when there is.
It's also like the nuisance lawsuits that are without merit, but companies often settle them out-of-court because the cost of the settlement is less than the cost to defend themselves in court. If immediate short-term planning is the only kind of which you are capable, this sounds like the best way to cut your losses. If you can think a little more long-term, you can see that the legions of people who knowingly file lawsuits that have little or no merit are doing it because they are counting on the company to settle just to make them go away. They look at previous cases where this happened and are encouraged.
I am not saying that corporations should start caring about their effects on society more than money, because that's unfortunately unrealistic. I am saying that their shallow, short-term selfishness could be replaced with enlightened self-interest. They'd realize that accommodating pathological behavior is not in their interests, that it only creates more of it, and that discouraging it during its early stages before it takes off and becomes a widespread trend is the most cost-effective approach available. They'd ultimately sustain fewer losses this way, and therefore would make more money.
That's the situation you have here. I have no doubt that other members of other, equally questionable "religions" are watching this, and that what they feel they can or cannot get away with is going to be strongly influenced by what happens here. I also don't doubt that there is a non-zero cost to companies to have their HR staff deal with this and that more incidents means more of this cost. Failing to discourage it early on makes it more likely to wind up in a courtroom with all the extra expenses that entails, not to mention the bad PR of a "religious discrimination" lawsuit.
Still, kudos to Ms. Flewers for coming through, even if it's only on a customer service front. If being accommodating is possible, why not formally apologise if someone was upset enough to complain.
Because it admits fault where there is none, sets a precedent, and generally encourages this sort of behavior.
Protection from malware should function like the immune system, with many lines of defense and many avenues of detection and counter attack. Prevention will never be perfect by itself.
You're right, prevention will never be absolutely 100% perfect. For those few cases where it fails, there is always "format and install from known good media".
It sounds like you'd be amazed at what a little discipline does for the security of your machines and networks. It's a shame we often talk about security like user expertise and whether the user has good practices has nothing to do with whether a machine gets compromised. I think that's what leads to all of these (good-sounding but phony) comparisons to biological immune systems.
He pushes the hard work off onto an "external verifier" without making it clear how that would itself remain rootkit free.
If you have a guaranteed-safe external verifier, malware detection and removal isn't rocket science. Oddly, we have the technololgy in place to create a safe verifier: Trusted Coomputing. All we really need to solve the malware problem for good is something like Trusted Computing that we actually trust! An open standard, untainted by DRM, the provides hardware-level cryptographic isolation between the running system and the verifier.
Still haven't read the article, eh? The technique is to swap everything out except the scanner, then write random bits to the entire memory space, then hash the memory. I could explain it all in greater detail, but, you know, there's this article, already there. Please do try to constrain your criticisms to things that actually apply to the article that was written, you know, the one we can all read. Refuting the imaginary article in your head does nothing for the rest of us.
I'm glad you guys have managed to work out what the article says.
I have one glaring problem with this system, and all other systems designed to detect running malware: no focus on prevention. I'm glad we have a new tool to detect malware executing on a machine that's already compromised, but that's what all of the new tools I read about intend to do. I don't see much progress being made in terms of the design decisions and best practices that prevent (Windows) machines from getting compromised in the first place.
As good as this technique may or may not be, it's not security. It's damage control. It has this in common with almost every malware "solution" that is ever posted to Slashdot. Where are the researchers who want to prevent intrusion in the first place instead of having lots of clever techniques for identifying/limiting its damage after it happens?
I think it's more that most 'isms' are based on a sound principle when first devised, but rarely work when followed to their conclusion.
You make a good point, though both Communism and Socialism are rather well-represented in media and politics. Most of the opposition to them is because of people who don't like them, not because of people who don't know the first thing about them. By contrast, most of the strong opposition to libertarian thought I have ever seen was obviously by people who have never studied it and don't appreciate how closely it approaches the views of the Founding Fathers. To hear them talk, you'd think that the first step to implementing libertarianism would be to dispose of the Constitution and replace it with a plutocracy even though this is patently false.
Unfortunately most people don't seem to desire a minimal government, or don't appreciate that "too small to effectively perform its legitimate functions" is less than minimal. What they seem to want is a huge, all-powerful government that implements policies they personally like. There is little understanding of why that doesn't work.
Whatever you believe about corporations, comparing them to dictatorships in their capacity to do evil is vastly disproportionate.
You have just highlighted why I never once said "capacity to do evil" or made any such comparison. Re-read my original post if you doubt me; you won't find those words anywhere. My comment was solely about organizational structure, hierarchy, and what you call it when a very few (or one) make decisions for the many who have little or no input and no ability to defy. It was also about the fact that examples of this model are everywhere, both governmental and non-governmental, and we are exposed to them from a very young age. The benevolence or maliciousness of those examples has absolutely nothing to do with the point I was making.
This site is growing tedious because it's hard to carry on a good conversation with people who feel free to put words in your mouth and refuse to notice that you were very careful not to make such comparisons. In spoken communication you can fail to correctly hear words that may or may not be repeated for you. But it's absurd that this happens so easily in this form of written communication, where posts cannot be edited once submitted, where you can read a post 20 times before responding if that's what it takes for you to have a good handle on what it does and does not say.
At any rate, now that such a comparison is being made (by you), I will respond to it.
Corporations can spread money around and be persuasive, but at the end of the day the real power is with the guys with the guns.
Apparently the corporations realize this. That must be why a great deal of their persuasive power is focused on people who make laws. Those laws, in turn, are enforced by the guys with the guns. Perhaps you believe there is a meaningful distinction between doing something directly and arranging it by proxy, but I don't share that belief. The only real difference is that doing it by proxy makes it easier to distance yourself from it and deny accountability, but I hardly consider that a bonus.
Then welcome aboard. I for one am grateful that you provide a perspective of someone who has experienced Chavez firsthand. I don't know much about Venezuela at all, so I do not feel qualified to comment. I will say, however, that I notice a distinct lack of factual content in the posts that try to contradict you.
Or, some of the right wing crazies had a few mod points. Bashing Obama is today's most popular conservative sport.
So-called conservatives (I don't see them conserving or being thrifty with much of anything) said the same thing when Bush was in power. It's just a reality that if you want to have political power and make decisions that potentially affect millions of people, you will be subject to scrutiny. Some of that might include "bashing". I don't view this reality in terms of political persuasion.
Now, if someone were to make an "insightful" post regarding US politics and censorship, they would have to include a few observations about Bush's Un-patriotic act, and the fact that Bush was all in favor of the ACTA treaty. Unfortunately, Obama also seems to favor that idiotic treaty which will subject governments around the world to corporate dictates.
We haven't had a President who truly represented the interests of the people in quite a long time. Anyone who really loves freedom would have to be honest about the way most of our politicians don't represent them. It would be quite childish to pretend like party affiliation has anything to do with it, particularly when you're talking about the two major parties.
Criticism of a member of one political party does not constitute automatic support for the other political party. Since you recognize what was wrong with Bush, you should know that your insistence that it does is exactly like his "you're either with us or against us" ideology. On that basis you assume that the person criticising Obama, a leftist, must necessarily be a "right wing crazy", and you don't seem to understand what's wrong with that. If the original poster even mentioned a right-wing politician I could maybe understand it, but he didn't.
I'll say it again: criticism of a member of one political party does not constitute automatic support for the other political party. The political debate on this site would be much richer and far less redundant and predictable if we could all accept this self-evident fact.
I think Venezuela could use a healthy dose of libertarianism (little l), but then again, couldn't we all?
You can easily know that libertarianism is a good idea that deserves more influence. How? Because of the instantaneous, poorly thought-out, knee-jerk kind of opposition it sometimes receives, particularly by people who automatically assume that any mention of it must involve an extreme form of anarco-capitalism. Whenever such careless people offer this kind of thoughtless, automatic demonization of something they obviously don't know very much about, it's a good indication that there is something to it, that it's worth investigating.
Every country has to apply its own rules and norms." He's basically pushing for public support of laws that require journalistic integrity. In effect, he's arguing for libel laws that already exist in much of the Western world to be applied to media outlets on the internet.
One question: why is the transmission medium relevant? Libel laws should be equally applicable whether the false defamation is written in a book, newspaper, magazine, or Web site. Where does the special focus on the Internet come from, if not the fear of power-hungry politicians everywhere of a medium that is not easily censored or controlled, that makes it more difficult for them to get away with lying?
One of the biggest and most noticable differences between traditional media and the Internet, even in the USA, is that traditional media will report "government officials explain X" and stop there. In contrast, many online sources will report "government officials explain X" and then proceed to question the validity of that statement. This is usually done openly, in the sense that regular users like you and I can write posts offering dissent. It's not difficult to understand why corrupt politicians want this to go away.
>While Communism encourages this behavior, it does not hold a monopoly on it. Plenty of non-Communists in businesses and governments everywhere are this way. Remember that corporations are essentially dictatorships and that the type of politician who "knows what's good for you" does not ask whether you agree. Even "because I said so" parents and teachers exhibit this behavior (and condition people to accept it from a young age).
True, but a strawman. Corporations rarely hold the broad scope of powers that governments do. Parents ditto. (Consumers can choose to not buy from a corporation they dislike; children can typically run away from abusive parents and seek refuge with neighbours and family. Seekign refuge from government is another matter entirely as history will show you.). Also, both of the aforementioned rarely their their so-called dicatatorial powers to the excesses that governments do, especially government led by politically-religious folks ala Charvez.
How is that a strawman? The point was not the scope or extent of the power. The point was the arbitrary way that it is exercised and the fact that justification of its use is an afterthought if it is provided at all. It's the difference between "because I am in charge and I said so" versus "because I believe it's the most reasonable way to proceed, and here are my factual reasons explaining why I think so; please let me know if new evidence comes to light."
That distinction can be made whether the situation is "do we execute this possible terrorist?" or whether it's "how long should Junior be grounded?" So again, if your disproportionate concern for the scope of power has anything to do with the way authority is justified, or somehow makes my reasoning a strawman, you have not made your case.
Actually, yes, it is. It's blatantly unconstitutional, and the First Amendment isn't going to go anywhere. You don't need to get over an "it can't happen here" mentality, you need to get over your baseless paranoia.
Three words for you: free speech zones. If you're not familiar with the logic behind them, please look it up. In a nutshell, the (bullshit) "logic" is that the FIrst Amendment guarantees free speech, but does not specify where that right may be exercised. Any reasonable person would conclude that the Constitution does not list specific locations because it applies everywhere in the USA, but that doesn't suit the authoritarian mentality. So now they can tell you that you may not practice free speech where any decision-makers are likely to hear you, right here in the USA.
The dangers of that path, of allowing such flimsy and easily-abused exceptions to what are supposed to be inalienable rights, are both extreme and seldom appreciated. It is not the right way; it is not a good path. It also sets a precedent.
So, they already get around that pesky Constitution when it comes to physical protests. The only real surprise will be if they don't find such clever ways to skirt the First Amendment when it comes to the Internet. That's the mentality you're dealing with here. It will because it can, and any excuse will do.
Calling it "baseless paranoia" suggests that it's impossible or extremely unlikely, that nothing like this has ever happened before, that there's no reason not to trust our federal government. It's neither "baseless" nor is it "paranoia" if you actually take a look at the direction in which this country has been heading. Of course, that will require that when you see a spade, you call it a spade. Some people have a much easier time with this than others. Obviously others prefer to bury their heads in the sand and label as "paranoid" anyone who makes that a little less comfortable.
I am sure we will see some type of oppressive censorship in the relatively near future. Anyone that does not believe this probably is not paying attention to who is in control of the various governments within the United States.
That's crap. The US government is the de facto definition of gridlock, ineffectiveness and partisan pettiness. They wouldn't even agree on a bill to give themselves the winning lottery numbers without bickering, squabbling and turning it into a pissing match. And then they'd anonymously block it, filibuster it and shit can it. If there's one thing the lot of them are missing these days is purpose.
There's only one true political division in the United States: the old-money families and the powerful elite they represent (that represents them, actually, as the truly powerful don't like the limelight) and ordinary Americans. All other divisions are artificial creations of the media, by-products of the either-or way in which everything is presented. Left/right and Democrat/Republican are like this. The Democrats and the Republicans are two factions of a single party, the Statist Party.
There's one thing they all agree on: the government's size, power, and involvement in the daily life of citizens should be continuously expanded, with no regard for merit, necessity, or the reduction in quality of life that this will cause. Right now USA citizens enjoy relatively free access to the Internet. To the power-hungry, however, that just means this is a growth area for government. Unfortunately that's purpose enough for them. There is very much of a "because we can" mentality operating here that is not terribly concerned about immediate goals except that they make good excuses which are hard to politically oppose, such as "to stop terrorism" or "to protect the children".
So, there might be "partisan pettiness" concerning the question of what to do with an overwhelming ability to censor the Internet. But there will be no such pettiness when it comes to whether or not our politicians would like to have this ability.
I guess Chavez has decided to follow the same path that every other communist leader has followed? "We cannot allow openness if it means people will disagree with me."
While Communism encourages this behavior, it does not hold a monopoly on it. Plenty of non-Communists in businesses and governments everywhere are this way. Remember that corporations are essentially dictatorships and that the type of politician who "knows what's good for you" does not ask whether you agree. Even "because I said so" parents and teachers exhibit this behavior (and condition people to accept it from a young age).
The inability to handle dissent is just an essential feature of the authoritarian mentality. I think it's caused by both an inability to lead by example (i.e. hypocrisy) and a profound personal insecurity that makes the person feel they need to be "right" no matter what. That's why anyone who offers dissent, however well-founded, is seen as an enemy and must be shut down. Nowhere in this do you find an awareness of the person's fallibility or an ability to feel gratitude towards those who help them shed false ideas. Their overinflated egos won't allow that. That's why it never occurs to these people that truly sound policies and truly good actions have nothing to fear from scrutiny.
It's also more evidence that Frank Herbert was right when he said: "All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible. Such people have a tendency to become drunk on violence, a condition to which they are quickly addicted."
Where do you get the baseline data? How do you control for delivery complexity? How do you determine pay? What do you 'expect' your drivers to handle? How do you handle owner-ops vs. leased trucks? Accidents? Training? Maintenance? What about drivers that perform significantly below the norm -- you're paying them fairly by your own standards, but you're incurring the overhead of maintaining their paperwork. How do you handle long deliveries vs. short deliveries? Hazardous cargo? Insurance? Benefits?
You mention things like pay, performance expectations of drivers, accidents, training, etc. A GPS system would have the same issues to solve. Basline data is easy; the company already has records of previous deliveries that have been made. It would not be hard to use data-mining techniques on that data to come up with reasonable baselines. Many industries use projections that are far more complex than this.
My intention was not to contain the perfect, absolutely objection-proof system that addresses all possible aspects of truck driving in a Slashdot post (believe it or not). Nor was it my intention to provide a one-time, final ultimate solution for problems that really need to be managed as part of the day-to-day operation of the business, like driver training or pay and benefits. My intention was to demonstrate that there are solutions (with their potential downsides) in addition to the solution of using GPS (with its potential downsides).
Remember that the specific problem being discussed was the productivity of truck drivers, both a need to have a minimum level and the dangers of pushing them too hard. GPS tracking was a proposed solution to that specific problem (not all possible business concerns) and I pointed out that it's not the only solution available for that specific problem, full-stop. If you wish to side-track the discussion because you think numerous irrelevant objections make those objections valid, or constitutes useful debate, perhaps someone else is willing to indulge you.
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There are state compulsory education laws. There's also the fact that you have little or no selection of high schools when you reside in a particular geographical area. Then there's the notion that you did not force that person to become a drug dealer, probably did not even know he was doing that, and in either case are not responsible for his actions. Now they get to examine your life and investigate you, and you don't think boundaries have been crossed?
There's no reason to believe anything about you or obtain any information on you, until and unless they have probable cause to believe you have committed a crime. That's not a matter of opinion, taste, or personal preference. It's sound policy for a free country, for law-abiding citizens who don't want to fear their government, and it's exactly why the Fourth Amendment was written.
That's the way all government investigation should be. Unless they have a good reason to believe you have committed a crime, your name should never come up and data about you should never be gathered. If they do have a good reason to believe you have committed a crime, the reason should be good enough that a judge will grant them a warrant. This is how you deal with crime without the extreme danger to society that unfettered police power represents.
Where this breaks down is when surveillance is so widespread and can be cheaply done on massive scales that the cops can go on fishing expeditions. At that point, it's not so much about whether you have something to hide, it's about what they want to find. This scenario has to take place first before people can easily be targeted and harassed because of their political views, opinions, religion, etc. If you don't want the police to be little more than state-sponsored thugs, then the goal is to prevent them from ever obtaining this capability. The idea that they can have this capability and any regulations about how they use it will be more than temporary speedbumps as we go down the road of the gradual erosion of civil rights is absurd and counter to any good reading of history.
Exactly. People who are stupid enough to fall for it deserve what they get.
This isn't the government going behind your back, putting you under covert surveillance. It's completely in the open. A friend of mine used to work for the MA state police, in the computer forensics unit. He was amazed at the number of gang members who would just openly accept his friend request on Facebook, which would lead to him quietly beavering away to figure out the social network of the gang, where they met, what they got up to. Sneaky? Perhaps, but not illegal.
Really, people are just plain stupid.
With all of the surveillance and wiretap capabilities they possess, the mandatory backdoors built into many telecommunications systems, and the willingness the feds have shown to use these without first obtaining warrants, I am almost surprised they bother doing this. It's old-fashioned policework, of the sort that seems to be going out of style as we keep approaching a surveillance society. It sounds like at least some of them recognize that when real crimes that harm real people are committed, no Orwellian powers are needed to deal with them.
I suppose for those reasons it's like you said: they are going after the dumber criminals. The kind who commit a crime and then brag about it in public because they can't keep their mouths shut are most likely to get nailed by this. I say good riddance to them. Gang members and other violent criminals are exactly what the police should prioritize. If they can do that using publically-available information obtainable at a low cost, so much the better.
I'm also glad that in this case, they are using their finite resources and personnel to go after people who do real harm instead of nonviolent adults who decide to alter their consciousness in unauthorized ways.
The user "centuren", in this post (the one to which I was responding), said the following:
I responded to "centuren" for the purpose of explaining why a formal apology would be undesirable in this situation. Your clue was the fact that I quoted his text and then responded to what I quoted. Furthermore, no actual apology needs to have occurred for me to explain why it would be a bad idea.
Please, can you look a little harder before submitting a post? Having to re-explain things like this that you are capable of seeing on your own just lowers the signal-to-noise ratio.
Given a black-and-white, either-or choice, I'd rather live in a world where it's assumed that everything is a slippery slope, and everything is dealt with accordingly.
Too bad only the Sith deal in absolutes.
Too bad for your joke that you conveniently left out the part I went on to explain why either-or thinking is not necessary for this situation.
If you would be so kind as to look back on elementary school US history, everyone here except the Native Americans was a social reject or "terrorist." If said third world immigrants are properly registered as citizens and are paying taxes for the benefits they enjoy, what right do you have to be here over them?
If they are here legally and are paying taxes as responsible members of society, there's no reason not to enjoy their presence. But there is a difference between immigrants who come to the USA because they want to be Americans, who learn our language and follow our laws, and the current Balkanization that is occurring. The former is the Great Melting Pot we have always enjoyed, and makes us stronger as a nation. The latter is a divisive influence that tends to use our kindness and tolerance against us.
To give an example, it would never occur to me to migrate to a foreign country and then try to impose my customs on them and demand that they accommodate my expectations and speak my language. When we do that here in the USA, it's not always appreciated as a kindness; it's often demanded of us. If I migrated to another country, I would expect to learn their language, study their culture, and learn their customs. I would consider anything else to be quite arrogant. If I don't like the way a foreign country does things, my option is to go someplace else. I would not permanently move to France unless I wanted to become a French, nor to Germany unless I wanted to become a German, etc.
I am sure that some of the controversy about this is not legitimate; that it's due to xenophobia or even racism. The GP's comment about skin color is probably an example of this. It's silly because the USA has had such controversies when the immigrants in question were racially white (such as Irish Catholics). It's not really about skin color, it's about culture. It's about who should accommodate whom when someone comes to a sovereign nation and it decides to allow them to stay. The failure to appreciate that is the root cause of the legitimate controversy surrounding this issue.
Not everything is a slippery slope. You never know, the HR person might just have thought it was funny.
Given a black-and-white, either-or choice, I'd rather live in a world where it's assumed that everything is a slippery slope, and everything is dealt with accordingly. I'd prefer that over constantly getting blindsided by things we keep failing to recognize during their early, easily-preventable stages.
Thankfully a black-and-white choice isn't necessary. So I can look at this and say that anything with an overtone of alleged "religious discrimination" is not likely to be an isolated incident, particularly not in a politically correct climate and particularly not when the person involved wants to be above some rules that are actually quite reasonable. Lots of people want special treatment for the real reason of their egos, and the phony reason of their religion, their socioeconomic status, etc. It's not difficult to see how others would be strongly encouraged to do the same if this guy encounters no resistance.
I agree that the HR guy quite likely did laugh at this. It's a situation though where he might have to ignore his personal feelings to comply with company policy or to appease management. So even if he does have a decent sense of humor, anything that even looks like accommodation is going to encourage this behavior.
Well until the next idiot and the next idiot and so on come along and try to pull the same stunt. Sometimes it's best to just nip it in the bud before it blows up and you have tons of assholes trying to make up excuses for why they should be above a rule that everyone else but them has to follow.
Thank you. For a while there, I was reading the comments thinking, "I can't be the only person here who can recognize a precedent when one is being set." As it is, businesses are already too eager to accommodate melodramatic and otherwise unreasonable people in the hopes that such people will spend money. The effect on society is that being unreasonable, childish, and unable to understand viewpoints other than your own is behavior that has been repeatedly validated. When everyone knows this is the case, everyone feels free to be unreasonable. There should be a difference between "treat them with courtesy, respect, and benefit of doubt" and "kiss their ass no matter what," and everyone benefits from higher-quality interaction when there is.
It's also like the nuisance lawsuits that are without merit, but companies often settle them out-of-court because the cost of the settlement is less than the cost to defend themselves in court. If immediate short-term planning is the only kind of which you are capable, this sounds like the best way to cut your losses. If you can think a little more long-term, you can see that the legions of people who knowingly file lawsuits that have little or no merit are doing it because they are counting on the company to settle just to make them go away. They look at previous cases where this happened and are encouraged.
I am not saying that corporations should start caring about their effects on society more than money, because that's unfortunately unrealistic. I am saying that their shallow, short-term selfishness could be replaced with enlightened self-interest. They'd realize that accommodating pathological behavior is not in their interests, that it only creates more of it, and that discouraging it during its early stages before it takes off and becomes a widespread trend is the most cost-effective approach available. They'd ultimately sustain fewer losses this way, and therefore would make more money.
That's the situation you have here. I have no doubt that other members of other, equally questionable "religions" are watching this, and that what they feel they can or cannot get away with is going to be strongly influenced by what happens here. I also don't doubt that there is a non-zero cost to companies to have their HR staff deal with this and that more incidents means more of this cost. Failing to discourage it early on makes it more likely to wind up in a courtroom with all the extra expenses that entails, not to mention the bad PR of a "religious discrimination" lawsuit.
Because it admits fault where there is none, sets a precedent, and generally encourages this sort of behavior.
Protection from malware should function like the immune system, with many lines of defense and many avenues of detection and counter attack. Prevention will never be perfect by itself.
You're right, prevention will never be absolutely 100% perfect. For those few cases where it fails, there is always "format and install from known good media".
It sounds like you'd be amazed at what a little discipline does for the security of your machines and networks. It's a shame we often talk about security like user expertise and whether the user has good practices has nothing to do with whether a machine gets compromised. I think that's what leads to all of these (good-sounding but phony) comparisons to biological immune systems.
He pushes the hard work off onto an "external verifier" without making it clear how that would itself remain rootkit free.
If you have a guaranteed-safe external verifier, malware detection and removal isn't rocket science. Oddly, we have the technololgy in place to create a safe verifier: Trusted Coomputing. All we really need to solve the malware problem for good is something like Trusted Computing that we actually trust! An open standard, untainted by DRM, the provides hardware-level cryptographic isolation between the running system and the verifier.
I'd rather just secure my systems, thanks.
Still haven't read the article, eh? The technique is to swap everything out except the scanner, then write random bits to the entire memory space, then hash the memory. I could explain it all in greater detail, but, you know, there's this article, already there. Please do try to constrain your criticisms to things that actually apply to the article that was written, you know, the one we can all read. Refuting the imaginary article in your head does nothing for the rest of us.
I'm glad you guys have managed to work out what the article says.
I have one glaring problem with this system, and all other systems designed to detect running malware: no focus on prevention. I'm glad we have a new tool to detect malware executing on a machine that's already compromised, but that's what all of the new tools I read about intend to do. I don't see much progress being made in terms of the design decisions and best practices that prevent (Windows) machines from getting compromised in the first place.
As good as this technique may or may not be, it's not security. It's damage control. It has this in common with almost every malware "solution" that is ever posted to Slashdot. Where are the researchers who want to prevent intrusion in the first place instead of having lots of clever techniques for identifying/limiting its damage after it happens?
Like communism? Socialism?
I think it's more that most 'isms' are based on a sound principle when first devised, but rarely work when followed to their conclusion.
You make a good point, though both Communism and Socialism are rather well-represented in media and politics. Most of the opposition to them is because of people who don't like them, not because of people who don't know the first thing about them. By contrast, most of the strong opposition to libertarian thought I have ever seen was obviously by people who have never studied it and don't appreciate how closely it approaches the views of the Founding Fathers. To hear them talk, you'd think that the first step to implementing libertarianism would be to dispose of the Constitution and replace it with a plutocracy even though this is patently false.
Unfortunately most people don't seem to desire a minimal government, or don't appreciate that "too small to effectively perform its legitimate functions" is less than minimal. What they seem to want is a huge, all-powerful government that implements policies they personally like. There is little understanding of why that doesn't work.
You have just highlighted why I never once said "capacity to do evil" or made any such comparison. Re-read my original post if you doubt me; you won't find those words anywhere. My comment was solely about organizational structure, hierarchy, and what you call it when a very few (or one) make decisions for the many who have little or no input and no ability to defy. It was also about the fact that examples of this model are everywhere, both governmental and non-governmental, and we are exposed to them from a very young age. The benevolence or maliciousness of those examples has absolutely nothing to do with the point I was making.
This site is growing tedious because it's hard to carry on a good conversation with people who feel free to put words in your mouth and refuse to notice that you were very careful not to make such comparisons. In spoken communication you can fail to correctly hear words that may or may not be repeated for you. But it's absurd that this happens so easily in this form of written communication, where posts cannot be edited once submitted, where you can read a post 20 times before responding if that's what it takes for you to have a good handle on what it does and does not say.
At any rate, now that such a comparison is being made (by you), I will respond to it.
Apparently the corporations realize this. That must be why a great deal of their persuasive power is focused on people who make laws. Those laws, in turn, are enforced by the guys with the guns. Perhaps you believe there is a meaningful distinction between doing something directly and arranging it by proxy, but I don't share that belief. The only real difference is that doing it by proxy makes it easier to distance yourself from it and deny accountability, but I hardly consider that a bonus.
Ah, thanks. I'm relatively new to slashdot.
Then welcome aboard. I for one am grateful that you provide a perspective of someone who has experienced Chavez firsthand. I don't know much about Venezuela at all, so I do not feel qualified to comment. I will say, however, that I notice a distinct lack of factual content in the posts that try to contradict you.
So-called conservatives (I don't see them conserving or being thrifty with much of anything) said the same thing when Bush was in power. It's just a reality that if you want to have political power and make decisions that potentially affect millions of people, you will be subject to scrutiny. Some of that might include "bashing". I don't view this reality in terms of political persuasion.
We haven't had a President who truly represented the interests of the people in quite a long time. Anyone who really loves freedom would have to be honest about the way most of our politicians don't represent them. It would be quite childish to pretend like party affiliation has anything to do with it, particularly when you're talking about the two major parties.
Criticism of a member of one political party does not constitute automatic support for the other political party. Since you recognize what was wrong with Bush, you should know that your insistence that it does is exactly like his "you're either with us or against us" ideology. On that basis you assume that the person criticising Obama, a leftist, must necessarily be a "right wing crazy", and you don't seem to understand what's wrong with that. If the original poster even mentioned a right-wing politician I could maybe understand it, but he didn't.
I'll say it again: criticism of a member of one political party does not constitute automatic support for the other political party. The political debate on this site would be much richer and far less redundant and predictable if we could all accept this self-evident fact.
You can easily know that libertarianism is a good idea that deserves more influence. How? Because of the instantaneous, poorly thought-out, knee-jerk kind of opposition it sometimes receives, particularly by people who automatically assume that any mention of it must involve an extreme form of anarco-capitalism. Whenever such careless people offer this kind of thoughtless, automatic demonization of something they obviously don't know very much about, it's a good indication that there is something to it, that it's worth investigating.
One question: why is the transmission medium relevant? Libel laws should be equally applicable whether the false defamation is written in a book, newspaper, magazine, or Web site. Where does the special focus on the Internet come from, if not the fear of power-hungry politicians everywhere of a medium that is not easily censored or controlled, that makes it more difficult for them to get away with lying?
One of the biggest and most noticable differences between traditional media and the Internet, even in the USA, is that traditional media will report "government officials explain X" and stop there. In contrast, many online sources will report "government officials explain X" and then proceed to question the validity of that statement. This is usually done openly, in the sense that regular users like you and I can write posts offering dissent. It's not difficult to understand why corrupt politicians want this to go away.
>While Communism encourages this behavior, it does not hold a monopoly on it. Plenty of non-Communists in businesses and governments everywhere are this way. Remember that corporations are essentially dictatorships and that the type of politician who "knows what's good for you" does not ask whether you agree. Even "because I said so" parents and teachers exhibit this behavior (and condition people to accept it from a young age).
True, but a strawman. Corporations rarely hold the broad scope of powers that governments do. Parents ditto. (Consumers can choose to not buy from a corporation they dislike; children can typically run away from abusive parents and seek refuge with neighbours and family. Seekign refuge from government is another matter entirely as history will show you.). Also, both of the aforementioned rarely their their so-called dicatatorial powers to the excesses that governments do, especially government led by politically-religious folks ala Charvez.
How is that a strawman? The point was not the scope or extent of the power. The point was the arbitrary way that it is exercised and the fact that justification of its use is an afterthought if it is provided at all. It's the difference between "because I am in charge and I said so" versus "because I believe it's the most reasonable way to proceed, and here are my factual reasons explaining why I think so; please let me know if new evidence comes to light."
That distinction can be made whether the situation is "do we execute this possible terrorist?" or whether it's "how long should Junior be grounded?" So again, if your disproportionate concern for the scope of power has anything to do with the way authority is justified, or somehow makes my reasoning a strawman, you have not made your case.
Was that "Brainwashed nutjob" directed at me, or at Scrameustache? It's not clear.
You can resolve that by viewing his post and clicking "Parent".
Only because we generally fail to realize that truly sane individuals have no desire to control other people.
"You think outright censorship is very far away?"
Actually, yes, it is. It's blatantly unconstitutional, and the First Amendment isn't going to go anywhere. You don't need to get over an "it can't happen here" mentality, you need to get over your baseless paranoia.
Three words for you: free speech zones. If you're not familiar with the logic behind them, please look it up. In a nutshell, the (bullshit) "logic" is that the FIrst Amendment guarantees free speech, but does not specify where that right may be exercised. Any reasonable person would conclude that the Constitution does not list specific locations because it applies everywhere in the USA, but that doesn't suit the authoritarian mentality. So now they can tell you that you may not practice free speech where any decision-makers are likely to hear you, right here in the USA.
The dangers of that path, of allowing such flimsy and easily-abused exceptions to what are supposed to be inalienable rights, are both extreme and seldom appreciated. It is not the right way; it is not a good path. It also sets a precedent.
So, they already get around that pesky Constitution when it comes to physical protests. The only real surprise will be if they don't find such clever ways to skirt the First Amendment when it comes to the Internet. That's the mentality you're dealing with here. It will because it can, and any excuse will do.
Calling it "baseless paranoia" suggests that it's impossible or extremely unlikely, that nothing like this has ever happened before, that there's no reason not to trust our federal government. It's neither "baseless" nor is it "paranoia" if you actually take a look at the direction in which this country has been heading. Of course, that will require that when you see a spade, you call it a spade. Some people have a much easier time with this than others. Obviously others prefer to bury their heads in the sand and label as "paranoid" anyone who makes that a little less comfortable.
I am sure we will see some type of oppressive censorship in the relatively near future. Anyone that does not believe this probably is not paying attention to who is in control of the various governments within the United States.
That's crap. The US government is the de facto definition of gridlock, ineffectiveness and partisan pettiness. They wouldn't even agree on a bill to give themselves the winning lottery numbers without bickering, squabbling and turning it into a pissing match. And then they'd anonymously block it, filibuster it and shit can it. If there's one thing the lot of them are missing these days is purpose.
There's only one true political division in the United States: the old-money families and the powerful elite they represent (that represents them, actually, as the truly powerful don't like the limelight) and ordinary Americans. All other divisions are artificial creations of the media, by-products of the either-or way in which everything is presented. Left/right and Democrat/Republican are like this. The Democrats and the Republicans are two factions of a single party, the Statist Party.
There's one thing they all agree on: the government's size, power, and involvement in the daily life of citizens should be continuously expanded, with no regard for merit, necessity, or the reduction in quality of life that this will cause. Right now USA citizens enjoy relatively free access to the Internet. To the power-hungry, however, that just means this is a growth area for government. Unfortunately that's purpose enough for them. There is very much of a "because we can" mentality operating here that is not terribly concerned about immediate goals except that they make good excuses which are hard to politically oppose, such as "to stop terrorism" or "to protect the children".
So, there might be "partisan pettiness" concerning the question of what to do with an overwhelming ability to censor the Internet. But there will be no such pettiness when it comes to whether or not our politicians would like to have this ability.
I guess Chavez has decided to follow the same path that every other communist leader has followed? "We cannot allow openness if it means people will disagree with me."
While Communism encourages this behavior, it does not hold a monopoly on it. Plenty of non-Communists in businesses and governments everywhere are this way. Remember that corporations are essentially dictatorships and that the type of politician who "knows what's good for you" does not ask whether you agree. Even "because I said so" parents and teachers exhibit this behavior (and condition people to accept it from a young age).
The inability to handle dissent is just an essential feature of the authoritarian mentality. I think it's caused by both an inability to lead by example (i.e. hypocrisy) and a profound personal insecurity that makes the person feel they need to be "right" no matter what. That's why anyone who offers dissent, however well-founded, is seen as an enemy and must be shut down. Nowhere in this do you find an awareness of the person's fallibility or an ability to feel gratitude towards those who help them shed false ideas. Their overinflated egos won't allow that. That's why it never occurs to these people that truly sound policies and truly good actions have nothing to fear from scrutiny.
It's also more evidence that Frank Herbert was right when he said: "All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible. Such people have a tendency to become drunk on violence, a condition to which they are quickly addicted."
Where do you get the baseline data? How do you control for delivery complexity? How do you determine pay? What do you 'expect' your drivers to handle? How do you handle owner-ops vs. leased trucks? Accidents? Training? Maintenance? What about drivers that perform significantly below the norm -- you're paying them fairly by your own standards, but you're incurring the overhead of maintaining their paperwork. How do you handle long deliveries vs. short deliveries? Hazardous cargo? Insurance? Benefits?
You mention things like pay, performance expectations of drivers, accidents, training, etc. A GPS system would have the same issues to solve. Basline data is easy; the company already has records of previous deliveries that have been made. It would not be hard to use data-mining techniques on that data to come up with reasonable baselines. Many industries use projections that are far more complex than this.
My intention was not to contain the perfect, absolutely objection-proof system that addresses all possible aspects of truck driving in a Slashdot post (believe it or not). Nor was it my intention to provide a one-time, final ultimate solution for problems that really need to be managed as part of the day-to-day operation of the business, like driver training or pay and benefits. My intention was to demonstrate that there are solutions (with their potential downsides) in addition to the solution of using GPS (with its potential downsides).
Remember that the specific problem being discussed was the productivity of truck drivers, both a need to have a minimum level and the dangers of pushing them too hard. GPS tracking was a proposed solution to that specific problem (not all possible business concerns) and I pointed out that it's not the only solution available for that specific problem, full-stop. If you wish to side-track the discussion because you think numerous irrelevant objections make those objections valid, or constitutes useful debate, perhaps someone else is willing to indulge you.