Ah, but what most IT people do NOT realize, is that the more you increase security beyond a reasonable point, the MORE likely you are to have a breach, because the only way people can do their work is to go around your security by using USB flash drives and burning CDs.
Things which do not correctly balance opposing forces or opposing goals are much more likely to fail and this is a universal principle, applicable everywhere. Various sages and philosophers from many different cultures have noted this principle and its implications for thousands of years, and probably longer than that. The problem, then, is that people do not understand principles like this and when they specialize, they memorize procedures and inventories of knowledge and methods of problem solving but they do not recognize the general principles that still apply to their specialty. Personally I believe this is because they get so caught up in what they do that everything becomes immediate and they lose the ability to mentally take a step back and maintain their objectivity.
You have to love the implication that IT staff purposefully choose the most arcane implementation for the hell of it
I know for a fact that many programmers and engineers do indeed *purposefully* make things more complex than they need to be.
People like this enjoy a challenge. Writing code thats hard for others to understand (or themselves in a few weeks time) gives them a sense of accomplishment.
People like this enjoy the careful crafting of complexities layered upon complexities.
Myself, I recite 'keep it simple, stupid' to myself over and over. Its my mantra.
Cleaning up after someone elses excessive overcomplification of something that could have been done simply and cleanly is the bane of my existance.
Then I would say that they are not being challenged enough. The ability to produce something that is simple, robust, elegant, and maybe even beautiful and especially the mentality that can appreciate these things is so significant of a challenge that most end up failing a test that they did not know they were taking, so to speak. That quality may never become common-as-dirt because what sort of person you are, which values you possess, and what attitude you have towards life in general has a lot to do with whether you can appreciate the simple or whether you have a need to prove something. That this "trait" be recognized and identified is a good first step towards cultivating it in the workplace.
It really is a win-win even if you must look at it in mundane terms of marketing. The organization benefits when IT runs smoothly and its systems are robust. IT benefits when there is no needless time pressure brought on by excess complexity that is only present to soothe someone's fevered ego. The only things holding back change are institutional inertia and lack of the willingness to perform this sort of introspection. Both are surmountable.
And IT people need to understand that regular employees are not propeller-heads like Slashdot readers, and to begin to implement technology and processes that average people can understand and use.
You have to love the implication that IT staff purposefully choose the most arcane implementation for the hell of it, or that they enjoy the support calls they receive when users have a hard time with a system. Sometimes what you are doing is inherently complex, and some ability to deal with complexity is necessary. The way I see it, there are two broad approaches to the problem of "implement[ing] technology and processes that average people can understand and use." One is to simplify those technologies and processes. The other is to increase the understanding of the users, or for the users to increase their own understanding.
For some reason, most discussions like this seem to have this unstated assumption that the former approach is the only possible one. I'd like to see more of a middle-ground solution. I like Einstein's saying about how things should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler. Once that is done, if the users still find the systems and processes to be too complex, and their job requires the ability to handle same, then I would conclude that this means they are not qualified for their job and need to be replaced by someone with more understanding. Is that really such a scary conclusion that we must perform all sorts of musings and mental gymnastics to avoid it? Because I certainly believe that people can improve if it is expected of them, if there are not infinite excuses for their shortcomings. For that reason, I don't believe that regarding users who can't handle good systems as unqualified would result in tremendous turnover within a company. I think it would result in more savvy users, even if only to avoid being fired. It would certainly help to disabuse people of this mentality that basic competency is only for nerds, hardcore geeks, and experts.
However, I simply cannot deny that if there were a truly effective way to immediately shut down this behavior, there would be much less of it, nor can I deny that this would be a benefit to everyone else.
If you are in the left lane and someone can't get past you, you are impeding traffic. Keep to the right, you have no idea why someone else might be in a hurry and it is the height of arrogance to take it upon yourself to decide.
I won't dramatize by calling it the "height" of anything, but there certainly is a little arrogance in assuming that you know details of the situation which have not been revealed to you. Since you clearly do not have all the facts and are sorely in need of them lest you continue to portray yourself this way, I'll explain a bit about why I feel this way about aggressive drivers.
I am not a slow driver, though not a speed demon either. Typically I am speeding just a little, though of course not during bad conditions. I stay out of the passing lane unless I am actually passing someone. When I am passing someone, I don't hang out beside them, I get moving and I (reasonably) quickly pass them so I can get back in the rightmost lane. I do not tailgate other drivers, nor do I needlessly limit their maneuverability (like the folks who hang out beside you and refuse to either pass you or drop back). I signal. When I see another driver having a hard time getting onto a road, I let him in if doing so is within my power and doesn't post an obstacle for others. In other words, I recognize that driving is an inherently dangerous thing to do even when you follow all of the rules and take great care, and so I try to give it the respect that it rightfully deserves. Also, I try to share the public roads, knowing that I do not own them any more than the other drivers.
In short, I do everything I can do to avoid being part of the problem. Yet, after all of that, if I am still afflicted by a would-be aggressor, you're god damned right that it is unjust and that I am within my rights to refuse to play these silly games. Like I said earlier, most of the time this means getting out of the way because the useless pissing contest is not worth it, though that is not always possible. When that is not possible, I can tell you I will never speed up and might slow down for such a person because I refuse to reward that behavior by giving them what they want. The bottom line is that I am not the aggressor in that situation, and any inconvenience the aggressor should incur is soundly earned. I understand neither the automatic assumption of wrongdoing on my part, nor the assumption of goodwill on the part of the aggressor that some of you seem determined to make.
Re:From the last Slashdot article and FYI:
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Revisiting DIY HERF Guns
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Having a car die in the middle of a crowded freeway is not a zero-risk event.
I agree, which is the main reason why this is a hypothetical idea that I have no intention of ever implementing. Not ever, for any reason. Nor would I advocate that anyone else do so. It's alright to imagine fictional ideas like this because I plan to keep them fictional. If anything, this discussion for me is about human nature and the observation that there are so many who bully and take advantage because there are so few who decide that they will not tolerate it.
I think it's kind of a disproportionate response, don't you?
Not really, not when you consider that the other person is using the threat of a car accident to try to intimidate you into doing what he wants you to do. People who are concerned about their own safety don't do things like this. That it happens all the time doesn't change the nature of it. You could also add up every accident that has ever happened in this country during which one vehicle rear-ended another, add up the total dollar amount of the property damage, add up the total number of people who were injured or killed because someone was following too closely, and then tell me if you still think an effective deterrent is disproportionate. Every last accident of this type was entirely preventable, which only makes them more unjust, for that means that the inconvenience of paying attention was more important to the at-fault party than the safety of others. There are car accidents where you can say "damn, ANYONE in that position wouldn't have been able to see that coming" but this just isn't it.
Besides, let's assume for the sake of argument that this is in fact a disproportionate response. There is plenty of precedent in law for increasing the penalty of a crime in the hopes that it has a deterrent effect on would-be criminals. This is particularly true for crimes where the individual criminal's chance of getting caught is low. Of course with the law you also generally have due process, which is absent here. This then would be more like those states which have enabled conceal-carry gun permits for law-abiding citizens, and as a result have seen violent crime drop significantly.
Gun control advocates have a real hard time admitting this, but the way this works is simplicity itself: criminals want helpless victims, and they think twice when their would-be victim is likely to be able to defend himself. To me, bullies on the road are no different in principle. They are cowards, and as such they put themselves in positions where they can hassle others with little fear of harm to themselves. An EMP device like what I imagine would give them something to think twice about. The result would not be a high number of people whose engines get stopped via EMP. No, the result would be far fewer tailgaters. What reasonable, law-abiding, non-aggressive driver would find that undesirable?
Again, this is entirely hypothetical. I addressed such concerns for the person with the device by noting you'd probably have to shield your own electronics. For the person tailgating, well, that person is attempting to bully you into driving the way he wants you to drive by threatening you with an increased chance of a car accident. This is particularly true when they have an easy way to pass you and/or when you are already speeding.
I have little concern for what becomes of people who decide to be aggressive assholes without provocation, to be honest with you. They invite any misfortune they receive. I think it's a shame that they would be this way, and I wish they would not, but there is such a thing as sleeping in the bed that you have made and I'll not deprive them of it. I would greatly prefer that they choose not to be belligerent out of the kindness of their heart, and not because they fear an immediate and certain retaliation, but those are the two reasonable choices.
Now in reality, I try not to end up in situations where I have to deal with such people. You can usually see it coming, for these are not sophisticated people and such things as subtlety and discretion are all but unknown to them. For the few I do not foresee ahead of time, I am not too proud to pull over and force a tailgater to pass me, for example, rather than engage in a pointless pissing contest or put up with a needless risk of an accident. I don't particularly care if they think that is weakness, for it is actually the self-determination to not to play such stupid no-win games merely because some random jackass wants me to do so. However, I simply cannot deny that if there were a truly effective way to immediately shut down this behavior, there would be much less of it, nor can I deny that this would be a benefit to everyone else.
Re:From the last Slashdot article and FYI:
on
Revisiting DIY HERF Guns
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· Score: 4, Interesting
a HERF gun is "(a device like EMP but directional)... capable of stalling cars at a distance and crashing computers as well."
I have no intention of actually doing this since it sounds like a great way to get in trouble. So, this is entirely hypothetical. I have thought of what it would be like to have a device like this in your trunk, and arranged so that it can transmit through the trunk lid (maybe this would entail replacing a part of the metal lid with something more transmissive) and pointed backwards. Then, some aggressive idiot wants to tailgate you, you tap your brake lights to ask him to back off. If he doesn't, you flip a switch under your dashboard and kill his engine by letting the EMP disrupt the electronics that control the ignition system. Then watch him disappear in your rear-view as he is forced to pull over with what momentum he has left. That would be most satisfying. Of course, you'd probably have to shield your own electronics, but it could be done.
Wrong. You prevent future occurrences by not doing it again.
When I read that, I have to wonder if you are deliberately disregarding the concept of a deterrent. A deterrent is so easy in this situation too, because a bank is a business and a business wants to make profit and avoid needless expense. The more expensive this mistake is for this particular bank, the more incentive this bank and other banks have to make sure such colossal screw-ups don't happen again. Good security practices often mean more expense. More expense is unappealing to a business, unless of course that security expense is less than what another screw-up like this would cost them. It's so simple really: if any organization can screw up in such an obvious and colossal manner, and is never held fully accountable for that screw-up, they have exactly zero incentive to take better care of their customers' data. For some reason you seem to dislike this idea, and I cannot concern myself with that, so instead I ask you what fault you would find with it.
I'm not getting why you think the gmail user should get to keep the bank account data.
You say that as though I were advocating that he have free use of that data. No, that's not what I am saying. Regarding that data, the only correct assumption is that any sensitive information which has been leaked has already been compromised and is never to be trusted again. So the only certain way to assure the security of the bank's customers is to render that compromised data useless/harmless. The way to do that is to cancel every affected account, and reissue each affected account with different account numbers. This will secure the banking data. You then need to worry about the personal data that thieves can use for identity theft, and for that there are numerous services dedicated to identifying, preventing, and dealing with the results of ID theft. The bank should pay for these services for all affected or potentially affected customers, because its customers would not need these services if not for its own error. In fact, it would be the least they could do.
Furthermore it's obvious that this mistake was entirely preventable, and the method of prevention is basic due diligence. That what I mention above would be expensive for the bank means that banks have an incentive to prevent such screw-ups in the future, which is desirable for everyone who has a bank account of any sort, with this institution or any other. In other words, it's amazing how much of a difference some accountability would make.
Don't kid yourself. Massive injustices usually start out very small. If it's now considered okay to make you suffer in any way, however minor or however great, for the actions of a third party over which you have zero control, then this system is already terminal, we just don't know it yet. The entire concept is diametrically opposed to all of our notions of due process, the right to confront your accuser, the presumption of innocence, you name it.
Agreed: it violates many principles of justice. But one thing it doesn't violate is the First Amendment.
It's a good thing, then, that I have not committed myself to talk about the First Amendment exclusively. I was in fact using his treatment of it as an example of a much more general pattern. If you can't see how that kind of thinking applied to weaken the First Amendment cannot also be applied to weaken those very principles of justice, then you have indeed missed my point.
No. The First Amendment does not entitle you to use any particular medium. It only protects the content of your speech, and even then, there's a lot of content that's still regulated (fraud, libel, obscenity, copyright infringement, etc.).
Authoritarian types just love arguments like this. That obvious intended meaning is a pesky thing to them, so to deal with it they created the ingenius device of separating the text into two concepts: the "spirit of the law", which they have made into something they can disregard whenever convenient, and the "letter of the law" which they can carefully examine to find any needed loopholes (incidentally, the same tactic was used when "freedom," a holistic concept, was split into "economic freedom" and "personal freedom"). That argument you are making is like a path, and I will give you a perfect example of one of that path's many destinations: free speech zones. The "logic" behind them is that the 1st Amendment guarantees your right to free speech, but does not specify where you may exercise this right. So, the free speech zones are located where the impact of contrary opinions can be most effectively minimized. Result? "Get with our program, or be censored, except we won't call it that."
Of course, for the free speech zones, they COULD decide that because the Constitution does not specify the specific locations to which the INALIENABLE RIGHTS it enumerates should apply, then obviously any fool can recognize that it's intended to apply throughout every last crumb of American soil. But, that would mean you can't use clever tricks to censor people without having to call it censorship, which is why such a concept is frowned upon by authoritarian types and other would-be tyrants.
Sure they can. They can sign up for another email account, say from Yahoo or Hotmail, or even another Gmail account. They can post on newsgroups and message boards. They can use the telephone, write a letter, or stand on the street corner with a sign and a megaphone. Just because they can't use one particular email account doesn't mean they're unable to speak.
Don't kid yourself. Massive injustices usually start out very small. If it's now considered okay to make you suffer in any way, however minor or however great, for the actions of a third party over which you have zero control, then this system is already terminal, we just don't know it yet. The entire concept is diametrically opposed to all of our notions of due process, the right to confront your accuser, the presumption of innocence, you name it. To fully support this ruling without being a hypocrite you would first have to throw out centuries of American tradition and jurisprudence. I for one am not prepared to do that.
In summary, this is a step in the wrong direction and the fact that a bank might suffer a little inconvenience due to its own damned screw-up is emphatically NOT a worthy reason to support it.
Leaving the gmail account alone with 1300 bank records in it isn't the right answer.
It is the right answer if you're interested in prevention of future occurrences. I'll describe how this should have been handled, with "should" being determined by basic concepts like logic, justice, and equanimity. The bank should be obligated (by the judge or whomever) to close all customer accounts related to those records, reissue new accounts with different numbers, and to pay for any identity theft protection that the bank's customers may need with no questions asked. That would be justice, because that would honor the concept of the party at fault paying any and all damages and expenses related to the colossal mistake it has made. No one but the bank should suffer in any way due to the bank's mistake.
Furthermore, if it happened the way I have described, other banks will see the result and take note of the fact that they are entrusted with some extremely confidential data and WILL be held accountable if they are negligent and/or do not correctly safeguard it. That would be good for everyone. Why wouldn't you desire this result? In what way is it a bad thing if it's much more expensive for a bank to blatantly screw up than it is for that bank to handle sensitive data in a secure manner?
Besides, the way this was handled doesn't really hold water. So the bank got the g-mail account terminated. They still have zero assurance that the owner of that account hasn't already copied this data. That means they have gained nothing by doing so, and anyone who thinks otherwise is participating in security theater. So, the only proper thing to do is to cancel and reissue all of the accounts in question (like I described above) to assure that they will not be used fradulently. If the only proper thing to do is in fact done, then the information sent to that e-mail account will no longer be valid so it cannot be used fradulently and thus, there is still no good reason to shut down an innocent person's e-mail account.
Right now, though, the greatest danger with this company is that they are pursuing control of world food. They already control the majority of all soybeans and corn in the US.
Indeed. I'd rather see a hundred major corporations go bankrupt than see one of them control the food supply and there's nothing "anti-capitalist" about saying so.
OMG, some company wants to make money by making farming more efficient , eco friendly, and create safer foods.
Run for the hills.
You do knwo that is the only complaint against them, right. "They make money, therefore there bad" is a weak ass argument.
More like "they would like to control the food supply, in much the same way that Microsoft now controls the desktop operating system industry". Some of us find that prospect a disturbing one, and a hard look at Monsanto's business tactics and their allergy to full disclosure does not comfort us one bit. Honestly, I don't know where you get this idea from that the only reason why someone would dislike a company is that they are successful at making money. I am sorry but it sounds like a sound bite from a talk radio show host, not a serious attempt at reasoning. How they go about making that money and how their methods might negatively affect others, either directly or by setting undesirable precedents, is the issue here.
If you want a starting point that you can plug into Google while you disabuse yourself of any concept of this company's benevolence, I have three words for you: bovine growth hormone. This would be very much like telling someone to learn about Microsoft and how they do business by studying their interactions with the ISO concerning OOXML, except in Monsanto's case the controversy was not about a standards body but instead, the major media.
If you're more subtle you could also ask yourself why a company with "more efficient, eco friendly, and... safer foods" would not be eager to label them as such and in fact has fought tooth and nail to prevent any sort of product labels that would identify the fruits of their labors. The only conclusion that makes sense is that they know some people don't want GMO foods and the like and believe that their desire for additional sales volume overrides the average person's right to know what they are buying (or to not purchase something they don't want). The problem with that is that once people no longer know what they are buying, all free-market concepts of "what the market wants" go out the window and you can accurately say that at least some of their business is built on deception.If anyone stands up and suggests that maybe this isn't the best way to do things and that maybe we should question the motives of people who do things this way, would you really suggest that the company's profitability is the only possible reason for doing so? Could you do that with a straight face?
Wow, got a bone to pick much? Guess what? Your doctor might give you a diagnosis they find convenient. What are you going to do, sue them for malpractice if they turn out to be wrong? Snicker snort.
Minor gripe: Does my analogy need to be utterly immaculate, impeccable, and beyond reproach in every possible way, or can you not see the point I was making even though my analogy is imperfect? Sure, doctors are human; they can lie. But there is always a degree of trust whenever you hire an expert to perform a task that you do not have the knowledge to perform. Anytime you do that there is the possibility that the person you hire could be taking advantage of your ignorance or otherwise exploiting your trust. That's a given. Because that's a given, and because it will neither make nor break the point that I was making, I didn't find it worth explaining. The implication was that you should not just call someone a liar or otherwise belittle their position for no reason without some evidence to back that up, and that you especially shouldn't do this when the only reason why you even know that this person exists is because you hired them for their expertise.
By the same token, you might think the IT guy has a personal reason for his decisions. You might even be right.
Personally I believe that "innocent until proven guilty" should not be reserved only for the courts. It is a sound and generally applicable principle, and practicing it is much better for everyone than practicing its alternative. Furthermore, agendas are really not difficult to detect, though it can be difficult to want to see them because this will quickly make you aware of the unpleasant fact that most human beings misrepresent (to some degree) their actual motives, often giving reasons for their behaviors that are much more altruistic than the actual reasons (freedoms are not taken away "to advance a statist agenda", they are taken away "for your safety" etc). They're especially easy to detect when you are talking about a system where logic and objectivity applies, such as when you are evaluating whether a particular technical solution is the best fit for your needs. Claims of this nature are falsifiable, making it a rather straightforward matter to discern an ulterior motive. So, assuming a reasonably low level of naivity, this should not be a problem. Assuming a high enough level of naivity that this would be a problem, it should be safe to say that there are bigger concerns.
To agree with your diagnosis, confirm your otherwise unacknowledged brilliance, and write the damn prescription.
Sure, but you can do all of that without believing that the doctor is incompetent, and without trying to make him look like his (presumably sound and well-founded) diagnosis is faulty. That is, you can regard him as someone who provides a useful service. There's no practical reason for hiring someone for their expertise and then belittling that expertise without solid evidence. There are, however, domineering or egotistical reasons for doing it.
As far as unacknowledged brilliance is concerned, our obsession with credentials and the authority that they represent is why there is so much of it.
Because we IT folk are not trustworthy with money. If left to our own devices, we tend to geek out on cool new tech that is untested and has not proven its stability in any meaningful markets. Unless we are kept on a tight leash, we will start many projects in parallel, never finishing any, just because we want to do fun things instead of work.
At least that's the vibes my management gives off.
I am not talking about you personally when I say this. So management hires undisciplined workers and places them in positions of enough authority that they might be able to make spending decisions, and then complains about or acts wary of the "fact" that their IT staff are not to be trusted with money. Aren't self-fulfilling prophecies great? I suppose if they hired professional criminal thieves they would wonder why employee theft has become a problem.
Note, I am not saying that interviewing candidates and getting an accurate idea of what kind of worker they would be is easy, only that it's worth doing well and that the failure to do so is rightly blamed on management.
And since they're the experts on IT equipment (that IS why you hired them, right?), now you have the best equipment for the job and your well-trained, seasoned admins to run it. Why would you want something else?
In other words, don't be an incompetent manager. Incompetent managers hire people whose expertise they distrust so they can waste time and effort second-guessing their motives and use their authority to undermine technical decisions that should instead be made with facts and logic. This behavior is a bit like paying a doctor to diagnose a disease and then calling him a liar when he makes the diagnosis - if you honestly believe you know medicine better than the doctor does, why would you hire him? It should surprise no one that this behavior, especially when it occurs in a top-down environment where calling bullshit could get you fired rather than respected for your honesty, can only alienate your staff. It's also no great leap of logic to conclude that the brightest and most talented workers (IT or any other) don't wish to be alienated and don't want the neurotic load caused by regular reminders that the person who hired them for their expertise does not trust their expertise.
Some of the best managers are delegators who do not micromanage more than what is necessary for business or legal reasons. They hire good people whose decisions can be trusted and then they let those people make good decisions with minimal interference. They're also open to suggestions for how processes and methods can be improved and whether it would be economical to replace existing tools with superior ones, with "superior" being defined by the needs of the business and how well they can be met with a particular solution. The control freaks and the ones who want to deemphasize the contributions of subordinates so they can look good just don't understand these things, to the cost of everyone who has to work under them. In fact, I wish a dollar figure could be calculated that would show how costly this type of manager really is.
It's not that it's legal, it's that you're paying for the content, so you would have a higher expectation of getting a quality product.
People seem to be ignoring that if news gathering becomes a volunteer-only effort, we're going to get crappy, slanted news -- far worse than anything we see today. Anyone with an agenda is going to put "reporters" on the scene who will deliver precisely the message they want you to hear, dressed up as "news".
"Today an eight car pileup on the freeway left four people paralyzed. The four, who were insured through the Federal Government, had to wait an hour for an ambulance. The other four people, who were insured by Gekko, were rapidly whisked away to the hospital where they are recovering. Bob, how's the weather looking today?"
I'd rather have fairly obvious slant that might encourage people to think more critically about what is being presented. To me, that is far better than knowing that shit like this goes on under an appearance of legitimacy. It would be different if there were elements in the media that actively sought out and rooted out this kind of corruption, but there aren't -- those two reporters, as individuals, decided not to be intimidated, bribed, and silenced and that's the only reason why we know about this. It doesn't take much wisdom to know that most people would have caved. The questioning man wonders, for every example like that one that we do learn about, how many go on that we've never heard of, and of course under that assumed credibility that, as you point out, the established media commands? Say what you will of Internet bloggers and their political biases; they are unlikely to deliberately falsify a story in order to avoid losing Monsanto's ad revenue.
not likely, since at the moment people dying of lack of health care is a significantly bigger issue
In all the media coverage of the health care issue, I've yet to hear of a single bonafide case of a person in the USA dying because he/she was refused medical treatment by a hospital due to inability to pay. It just doesn't work that way. All of the big fuckin' deal about health care is because people who don't have insurance would prefer not to go bankrupt in the event of a sudden catastrophic medical expense. There's nothing "dying" right now that universal health care would save, except for a few credit scores. Don't get me wrong, bankruptcy is no fun for anyone, but please stop pretending like people are dying in the streets because the federal government has not yet dominated the health care business. Really, it'd be much easier to take the proponents of government or government-funded health care seriously if they would quit being so melodramatic.
It's not quite pointless. The purpose seems to be the creation of a "sacred" status for copyright law, something that would cause anyone to think twice about creating anything that might have some indirect role in copyright infringement. In other words it's designed to intimidate, which explains why no allowance seems to have been made for the fact that peer-to-peer software can also have legitimate uses, like the distribution of Linux ISOs.
From the summary:
Earlier this year, at the behest of an anti-piracy group consisting of the usual suspects from the recording industry, a Brazilian court ruled that a company named Cadare Information Technology must implement a filter on the P2P software they distributed on their website to weed out copyrighted content. Cadare was unable comply with the order because they didn't develop the software; they merely offered it for download. The case went back to court, and a Brazilian judge has now decided to ban distribution of the software because it can be used to assist copyright infringement.
This is like banning hammers because some murderers have used them to bludgeon people to death, or banning cars because a few criminals have used them as getaway vehicles. It also ignores the infeasibility of successfully filtering all copyrighted content in all digital forms with no false positives or false negatives. Either those judges are morons who have no idea about the glaring flaws that are easily pointed out, or the absurdity of this ruling is a deliberate component of the Machiavellian "make an example of them" style of authoritarian thinking that seems to be universally exhibited by pro-copyright interests. In fact, the same could be said of the DMCA in the USA and the legislators who supported it.
In many ways, Obama is only slightly different than Bush.
Agreed. They all look like marionettes to me.
It's also a damned stupid thing for them to do, because pandering to the fringe here only further hampers their party's electoral chances next year.
It's a sad day when people who learn of a corporation illegally conspiring with the federal government to spy on the citizens and don't believe the corporation should do this with impunity are considered members of "the fringe." Really, that's a damned shame.
There is simply no excuse for going after the worst of these weasels, and expanding the fight overseas when they flee to supposed safe havens. I wish Microsoft good hunting on this one.
Rather than support an international cat-and-mouse style manhunt for multiple unknown individuals and all of the tax dollars that would require... I'd rather just use a more secure OS and let the people who run Windows deal with Windows problems. Simple.
Let's get after them to patch XP's TCP stack also, but at least DO SOMETHING, someone, please?
Beware of politician's logic. Politicians logic goes like this: "we must do SOMETHING!"... "this is something, so it must be done!"
Me? I'm no good at suits.
Nor am I. However, I do have a skill that's useful, and that's careful decision-making. My choices are something like this:
Insist on using a device like a computer while having no understanding of how this device works or how it is correctly used and maintained. Gravitate towards an operating system that is designed to accommodate users who want to use what they don't really understand, and then accept all of the disadvantages and problems that naturally come with this choice, such as malware and other security issues. Accept as a natural matter of cause-and-effect that a user who chooses not to learn more about the device they use is much more susceptible to misleading advertisemens and other social engineering type of attacks that would not fool a more knowledgable user.
Expect that a computer is a complex general-purpose device and that therefore, some degree of understanding is necessary in order to confidently and properly use and maintain it. Gravitate towards an operating system that assumes I want to be actively involved in the administration and security of the system, the functioning of which is as transparent and user-accessible as possible. Accept as a natural matter of cause-and-effect that this choice means I will have to go to some effort to learn and understand (usually this means reading) before I can effectively use this system, but that this means both my system is more secure (and more securable) and I as a user am much less likely to fall for advertisements designed to fool me into installing malware even if they did target my OS/platform of choice.
For me, that second option was the clear choice because I am more than willing to put some effort towards having a better experience. If other users don't consider that a worthwhile trade-off, then they too are making their choices. There is always a certain mindlessness going on whenever people make a choice like this without realizing that they are choosing something. So they just use whatever the computer came with and don't even investigate whether other options are available, don't even evaluate what those other options would entail. Then they often get screwed and typically by malware of some kind. Thus, when users engage in this mindless, rather careless, and haphazard style of decision-making they leave themselves open to these kinds of problems, and all because they have convinced themselves that basic competence is "too hard." Sorry, but I don't see any injustice in this and frankly I don't want to hear them complain when they have to lay in the bed they have made.
Only a person who really wants to be a victim denies their own active involvement in the foreseeable things that happen to them. What sane person wants to complain about a thing and then disown the steps they are capable of taking that would reduce or eliminate that thing? Sure, go after the malware authors if it makes you feel better, but go after them with the understanding that they are symptoms. The reason why so many problems never seem to go away is that we focus entirely on symptoms.
Nobody's made an ODB/Ol' Dirty Bastard joke yet? Someone here's gotta listen to Wu Tang.
This is slashdot, not Digg. If someone here was to make a joke about ODB, it would more likely have something to do with ODBC being originally developed by Microsoft, yet ODB is publishing books with Google and that conundrum is leading to the end of civilization as we know it, or something.
This is Slashdot, explaining how both of you managed to miss this post.
The purpose of the radar device is to help 'avoid crashes by sounding an alarm and flashing red lights when the driver gets too close to another car.
Hell with that. Can they invent a car that pulls over, stops, kills the engine, and locks the wheels/transmission and ignition for 15 minutes when the driver gets too close to another car? Preferably with an alarm that cannot easily be shut off. That'd make me feel safer on the roads. No, really, the whole problem with driving is that the nuisances which endanger others often happen with impunity. If by "too close to another car" they mean "tailgaters" then this would be better than they deserve. If by that phrase they mean people who don't know how to safely perform a lane change, those are worse than tailgaters.
Monopolies should not be allowed to stand. IMHO any person who sends a child to a private school, or even a neighboring government school, should be exempt from the School Tax for that year (with the tuition receipt used as proof). They should be allowed to keep the money they labored to earn for themselves, and direct it to whatever school they choose, rather than have to pay TWO tuitions.
There has been some "grassroots" demand for the implementation of vouchers, which are similar to what you describe. The idea can be summarized by saying that the money follows the student instead of making the student follow the money. The most powerful and successful opponent of vouchers has been the NEA, who are incredibly influential among various politicians. This page describes their arguments against it.
I agree that this is a monopoly and I don't view it as fundamentally different from any other. I believe that no matter what the stated justifications may be, the simple pattern is that organizations won't support a measure that might diminish their interests. Like that nea.org link, they will often present a multitude of reasons for this, of course. Invariably these situations are political in nature, because the controversy involved makes it appear that there are multiple ideal options rather than the reality of conflicting interests.
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Things which do not correctly balance opposing forces or opposing goals are much more likely to fail and this is a universal principle, applicable everywhere. Various sages and philosophers from many different cultures have noted this principle and its implications for thousands of years, and probably longer than that. The problem, then, is that people do not understand principles like this and when they specialize, they memorize procedures and inventories of knowledge and methods of problem solving but they do not recognize the general principles that still apply to their specialty. Personally I believe this is because they get so caught up in what they do that everything becomes immediate and they lose the ability to mentally take a step back and maintain their objectivity.
You have to love the implication that IT staff purposefully choose the most arcane implementation for the hell of it
I know for a fact that many programmers and engineers do indeed *purposefully* make things more complex than they need to be.
People like this enjoy a challenge. Writing code thats hard for others to understand (or themselves in a few weeks time) gives them a sense of accomplishment.
People like this enjoy the careful crafting of complexities layered upon complexities.
Myself, I recite 'keep it simple, stupid' to myself over and over. Its my mantra.
Cleaning up after someone elses excessive overcomplification of something that could have been done simply and cleanly is the bane of my existance.
Then I would say that they are not being challenged enough. The ability to produce something that is simple, robust, elegant, and maybe even beautiful and especially the mentality that can appreciate these things is so significant of a challenge that most end up failing a test that they did not know they were taking, so to speak. That quality may never become common-as-dirt because what sort of person you are, which values you possess, and what attitude you have towards life in general has a lot to do with whether you can appreciate the simple or whether you have a need to prove something. That this "trait" be recognized and identified is a good first step towards cultivating it in the workplace.
It really is a win-win even if you must look at it in mundane terms of marketing. The organization benefits when IT runs smoothly and its systems are robust. IT benefits when there is no needless time pressure brought on by excess complexity that is only present to soothe someone's fevered ego. The only things holding back change are institutional inertia and lack of the willingness to perform this sort of introspection. Both are surmountable.
You have to love the implication that IT staff purposefully choose the most arcane implementation for the hell of it, or that they enjoy the support calls they receive when users have a hard time with a system. Sometimes what you are doing is inherently complex, and some ability to deal with complexity is necessary. The way I see it, there are two broad approaches to the problem of "implement[ing] technology and processes that average people can understand and use." One is to simplify those technologies and processes. The other is to increase the understanding of the users, or for the users to increase their own understanding.
For some reason, most discussions like this seem to have this unstated assumption that the former approach is the only possible one. I'd like to see more of a middle-ground solution. I like Einstein's saying about how things should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler. Once that is done, if the users still find the systems and processes to be too complex, and their job requires the ability to handle same, then I would conclude that this means they are not qualified for their job and need to be replaced by someone with more understanding. Is that really such a scary conclusion that we must perform all sorts of musings and mental gymnastics to avoid it? Because I certainly believe that people can improve if it is expected of them, if there are not infinite excuses for their shortcomings. For that reason, I don't believe that regarding users who can't handle good systems as unqualified would result in tremendous turnover within a company. I think it would result in more savvy users, even if only to avoid being fired. It would certainly help to disabuse people of this mentality that basic competency is only for nerds, hardcore geeks, and experts.
However, I simply cannot deny that if there were a truly effective way to immediately shut down this behavior, there would be much less of it, nor can I deny that this would be a benefit to everyone else.
If you are in the left lane and someone can't get past you, you are impeding traffic. Keep to the right, you have no idea why someone else might be in a hurry and it is the height of arrogance to take it upon yourself to decide.
I won't dramatize by calling it the "height" of anything, but there certainly is a little arrogance in assuming that you know details of the situation which have not been revealed to you. Since you clearly do not have all the facts and are sorely in need of them lest you continue to portray yourself this way, I'll explain a bit about why I feel this way about aggressive drivers.
I am not a slow driver, though not a speed demon either. Typically I am speeding just a little, though of course not during bad conditions. I stay out of the passing lane unless I am actually passing someone. When I am passing someone, I don't hang out beside them, I get moving and I (reasonably) quickly pass them so I can get back in the rightmost lane. I do not tailgate other drivers, nor do I needlessly limit their maneuverability (like the folks who hang out beside you and refuse to either pass you or drop back). I signal. When I see another driver having a hard time getting onto a road, I let him in if doing so is within my power and doesn't post an obstacle for others. In other words, I recognize that driving is an inherently dangerous thing to do even when you follow all of the rules and take great care, and so I try to give it the respect that it rightfully deserves. Also, I try to share the public roads, knowing that I do not own them any more than the other drivers.
In short, I do everything I can do to avoid being part of the problem. Yet, after all of that, if I am still afflicted by a would-be aggressor, you're god damned right that it is unjust and that I am within my rights to refuse to play these silly games. Like I said earlier, most of the time this means getting out of the way because the useless pissing contest is not worth it, though that is not always possible. When that is not possible, I can tell you I will never speed up and might slow down for such a person because I refuse to reward that behavior by giving them what they want. The bottom line is that I am not the aggressor in that situation, and any inconvenience the aggressor should incur is soundly earned. I understand neither the automatic assumption of wrongdoing on my part, nor the assumption of goodwill on the part of the aggressor that some of you seem determined to make.
I agree, which is the main reason why this is a hypothetical idea that I have no intention of ever implementing. Not ever, for any reason. Nor would I advocate that anyone else do so. It's alright to imagine fictional ideas like this because I plan to keep them fictional. If anything, this discussion for me is about human nature and the observation that there are so many who bully and take advantage because there are so few who decide that they will not tolerate it.
Not really, not when you consider that the other person is using the threat of a car accident to try to intimidate you into doing what he wants you to do. People who are concerned about their own safety don't do things like this. That it happens all the time doesn't change the nature of it. You could also add up every accident that has ever happened in this country during which one vehicle rear-ended another, add up the total dollar amount of the property damage, add up the total number of people who were injured or killed because someone was following too closely, and then tell me if you still think an effective deterrent is disproportionate. Every last accident of this type was entirely preventable, which only makes them more unjust, for that means that the inconvenience of paying attention was more important to the at-fault party than the safety of others. There are car accidents where you can say "damn, ANYONE in that position wouldn't have been able to see that coming" but this just isn't it.
Besides, let's assume for the sake of argument that this is in fact a disproportionate response. There is plenty of precedent in law for increasing the penalty of a crime in the hopes that it has a deterrent effect on would-be criminals. This is particularly true for crimes where the individual criminal's chance of getting caught is low. Of course with the law you also generally have due process, which is absent here. This then would be more like those states which have enabled conceal-carry gun permits for law-abiding citizens, and as a result have seen violent crime drop significantly.
Gun control advocates have a real hard time admitting this, but the way this works is simplicity itself: criminals want helpless victims, and they think twice when their would-be victim is likely to be able to defend himself. To me, bullies on the road are no different in principle. They are cowards, and as such they put themselves in positions where they can hassle others with little fear of harm to themselves. An EMP device like what I imagine would give them something to think twice about. The result would not be a high number of people whose engines get stopped via EMP. No, the result would be far fewer tailgaters. What reasonable, law-abiding, non-aggressive driver would find that undesirable?
What could possibly go wrong?
Again, this is entirely hypothetical. I addressed such concerns for the person with the device by noting you'd probably have to shield your own electronics. For the person tailgating, well, that person is attempting to bully you into driving the way he wants you to drive by threatening you with an increased chance of a car accident. This is particularly true when they have an easy way to pass you and/or when you are already speeding.
I have little concern for what becomes of people who decide to be aggressive assholes without provocation, to be honest with you. They invite any misfortune they receive. I think it's a shame that they would be this way, and I wish they would not, but there is such a thing as sleeping in the bed that you have made and I'll not deprive them of it. I would greatly prefer that they choose not to be belligerent out of the kindness of their heart, and not because they fear an immediate and certain retaliation, but those are the two reasonable choices.
Now in reality, I try not to end up in situations where I have to deal with such people. You can usually see it coming, for these are not sophisticated people and such things as subtlety and discretion are all but unknown to them. For the few I do not foresee ahead of time, I am not too proud to pull over and force a tailgater to pass me, for example, rather than engage in a pointless pissing contest or put up with a needless risk of an accident. I don't particularly care if they think that is weakness, for it is actually the self-determination to not to play such stupid no-win games merely because some random jackass wants me to do so. However, I simply cannot deny that if there were a truly effective way to immediately shut down this behavior, there would be much less of it, nor can I deny that this would be a benefit to everyone else.
a HERF gun is "(a device like EMP but directional) ... capable of stalling cars at a distance and crashing computers as well."
I have no intention of actually doing this since it sounds like a great way to get in trouble. So, this is entirely hypothetical. I have thought of what it would be like to have a device like this in your trunk, and arranged so that it can transmit through the trunk lid (maybe this would entail replacing a part of the metal lid with something more transmissive) and pointed backwards. Then, some aggressive idiot wants to tailgate you, you tap your brake lights to ask him to back off. If he doesn't, you flip a switch under your dashboard and kill his engine by letting the EMP disrupt the electronics that control the ignition system. Then watch him disappear in your rear-view as he is forced to pull over with what momentum he has left. That would be most satisfying. Of course, you'd probably have to shield your own electronics, but it could be done.
When I read that, I have to wonder if you are deliberately disregarding the concept of a deterrent. A deterrent is so easy in this situation too, because a bank is a business and a business wants to make profit and avoid needless expense. The more expensive this mistake is for this particular bank, the more incentive this bank and other banks have to make sure such colossal screw-ups don't happen again. Good security practices often mean more expense. More expense is unappealing to a business, unless of course that security expense is less than what another screw-up like this would cost them. It's so simple really: if any organization can screw up in such an obvious and colossal manner, and is never held fully accountable for that screw-up, they have exactly zero incentive to take better care of their customers' data. For some reason you seem to dislike this idea, and I cannot concern myself with that, so instead I ask you what fault you would find with it.
You say that as though I were advocating that he have free use of that data. No, that's not what I am saying. Regarding that data, the only correct assumption is that any sensitive information which has been leaked has already been compromised and is never to be trusted again. So the only certain way to assure the security of the bank's customers is to render that compromised data useless/harmless. The way to do that is to cancel every affected account, and reissue each affected account with different account numbers. This will secure the banking data. You then need to worry about the personal data that thieves can use for identity theft, and for that there are numerous services dedicated to identifying, preventing, and dealing with the results of ID theft. The bank should pay for these services for all affected or potentially affected customers, because its customers would not need these services if not for its own error. In fact, it would be the least they could do.
Furthermore it's obvious that this mistake was entirely preventable, and the method of prevention is basic due diligence. That what I mention above would be expensive for the bank means that banks have an incentive to prevent such screw-ups in the future, which is desirable for everyone who has a bank account of any sort, with this institution or any other. In other words, it's amazing how much of a difference some accountability would make.
Don't kid yourself. Massive injustices usually start out very small. If it's now considered okay to make you suffer in any way, however minor or however great, for the actions of a third party over which you have zero control, then this system is already terminal, we just don't know it yet. The entire concept is diametrically opposed to all of our notions of due process, the right to confront your accuser, the presumption of innocence, you name it.
Agreed: it violates many principles of justice. But one thing it doesn't violate is the First Amendment.
It's a good thing, then, that I have not committed myself to talk about the First Amendment exclusively. I was in fact using his treatment of it as an example of a much more general pattern. If you can't see how that kind of thinking applied to weaken the First Amendment cannot also be applied to weaken those very principles of justice, then you have indeed missed my point.
Authoritarian types just love arguments like this. That obvious intended meaning is a pesky thing to them, so to deal with it they created the ingenius device of separating the text into two concepts: the "spirit of the law", which they have made into something they can disregard whenever convenient, and the "letter of the law" which they can carefully examine to find any needed loopholes (incidentally, the same tactic was used when "freedom," a holistic concept, was split into "economic freedom" and "personal freedom"). That argument you are making is like a path, and I will give you a perfect example of one of that path's many destinations: free speech zones. The "logic" behind them is that the 1st Amendment guarantees your right to free speech, but does not specify where you may exercise this right. So, the free speech zones are located where the impact of contrary opinions can be most effectively minimized. Result? "Get with our program, or be censored, except we won't call it that."
Of course, for the free speech zones, they COULD decide that because the Constitution does not specify the specific locations to which the INALIENABLE RIGHTS it enumerates should apply, then obviously any fool can recognize that it's intended to apply throughout every last crumb of American soil. But, that would mean you can't use clever tricks to censor people without having to call it censorship, which is why such a concept is frowned upon by authoritarian types and other would-be tyrants.
Don't kid yourself. Massive injustices usually start out very small. If it's now considered okay to make you suffer in any way, however minor or however great, for the actions of a third party over which you have zero control, then this system is already terminal, we just don't know it yet. The entire concept is diametrically opposed to all of our notions of due process, the right to confront your accuser, the presumption of innocence, you name it. To fully support this ruling without being a hypocrite you would first have to throw out centuries of American tradition and jurisprudence. I for one am not prepared to do that.
In summary, this is a step in the wrong direction and the fact that a bank might suffer a little inconvenience due to its own damned screw-up is emphatically NOT a worthy reason to support it.
It is the right answer if you're interested in prevention of future occurrences. I'll describe how this should have been handled, with "should" being determined by basic concepts like logic, justice, and equanimity. The bank should be obligated (by the judge or whomever) to close all customer accounts related to those records, reissue new accounts with different numbers, and to pay for any identity theft protection that the bank's customers may need with no questions asked. That would be justice, because that would honor the concept of the party at fault paying any and all damages and expenses related to the colossal mistake it has made. No one but the bank should suffer in any way due to the bank's mistake.
Furthermore, if it happened the way I have described, other banks will see the result and take note of the fact that they are entrusted with some extremely confidential data and WILL be held accountable if they are negligent and/or do not correctly safeguard it. That would be good for everyone. Why wouldn't you desire this result? In what way is it a bad thing if it's much more expensive for a bank to blatantly screw up than it is for that bank to handle sensitive data in a secure manner?
Besides, the way this was handled doesn't really hold water. So the bank got the g-mail account terminated. They still have zero assurance that the owner of that account hasn't already copied this data. That means they have gained nothing by doing so, and anyone who thinks otherwise is participating in security theater. So, the only proper thing to do is to cancel and reissue all of the accounts in question (like I described above) to assure that they will not be used fradulently. If the only proper thing to do is in fact done, then the information sent to that e-mail account will no longer be valid so it cannot be used fradulently and thus, there is still no good reason to shut down an innocent person's e-mail account.
Indeed. I'd rather see a hundred major corporations go bankrupt than see one of them control the food supply and there's nothing "anti-capitalist" about saying so.
OMG, some company wants to make money by making farming more efficient , eco friendly, and create safer foods.
Run for the hills.
You do knwo that is the only complaint against them, right. "They make money, therefore there bad" is a weak ass argument.
More like "they would like to control the food supply, in much the same way that Microsoft now controls the desktop operating system industry". Some of us find that prospect a disturbing one, and a hard look at Monsanto's business tactics and their allergy to full disclosure does not comfort us one bit. Honestly, I don't know where you get this idea from that the only reason why someone would dislike a company is that they are successful at making money. I am sorry but it sounds like a sound bite from a talk radio show host, not a serious attempt at reasoning. How they go about making that money and how their methods might negatively affect others, either directly or by setting undesirable precedents, is the issue here.
... safer foods" would not be eager to label them as such and in fact has fought tooth and nail to prevent any sort of product labels that would identify the fruits of their labors. The only conclusion that makes sense is that they know some people don't want GMO foods and the like and believe that their desire for additional sales volume overrides the average person's right to know what they are buying (or to not purchase something they don't want). The problem with that is that once people no longer know what they are buying, all free-market concepts of "what the market wants" go out the window and you can accurately say that at least some of their business is built on deception.If anyone stands up and suggests that maybe this isn't the best way to do things and that maybe we should question the motives of people who do things this way, would you really suggest that the company's profitability is the only possible reason for doing so? Could you do that with a straight face?
If you want a starting point that you can plug into Google while you disabuse yourself of any concept of this company's benevolence, I have three words for you: bovine growth hormone. This would be very much like telling someone to learn about Microsoft and how they do business by studying their interactions with the ISO concerning OOXML, except in Monsanto's case the controversy was not about a standards body but instead, the major media.
If you're more subtle you could also ask yourself why a company with "more efficient, eco friendly, and
Minor gripe: Does my analogy need to be utterly immaculate, impeccable, and beyond reproach in every possible way, or can you not see the point I was making even though my analogy is imperfect? Sure, doctors are human; they can lie. But there is always a degree of trust whenever you hire an expert to perform a task that you do not have the knowledge to perform. Anytime you do that there is the possibility that the person you hire could be taking advantage of your ignorance or otherwise exploiting your trust. That's a given. Because that's a given, and because it will neither make nor break the point that I was making, I didn't find it worth explaining. The implication was that you should not just call someone a liar or otherwise belittle their position for no reason without some evidence to back that up, and that you especially shouldn't do this when the only reason why you even know that this person exists is because you hired them for their expertise.
Personally I believe that "innocent until proven guilty" should not be reserved only for the courts. It is a sound and generally applicable principle, and practicing it is much better for everyone than practicing its alternative. Furthermore, agendas are really not difficult to detect, though it can be difficult to want to see them because this will quickly make you aware of the unpleasant fact that most human beings misrepresent (to some degree) their actual motives, often giving reasons for their behaviors that are much more altruistic than the actual reasons (freedoms are not taken away "to advance a statist agenda", they are taken away "for your safety" etc). They're especially easy to detect when you are talking about a system where logic and objectivity applies, such as when you are evaluating whether a particular technical solution is the best fit for your needs. Claims of this nature are falsifiable, making it a rather straightforward matter to discern an ulterior motive. So, assuming a reasonably low level of naivity, this should not be a problem. Assuming a high enough level of naivity that this would be a problem, it should be safe to say that there are bigger concerns.
Sure, but you can do all of that without believing that the doctor is incompetent, and without trying to make him look like his (presumably sound and well-founded) diagnosis is faulty. That is, you can regard him as someone who provides a useful service. There's no practical reason for hiring someone for their expertise and then belittling that expertise without solid evidence. There are, however, domineering or egotistical reasons for doing it.
As far as unacknowledged brilliance is concerned, our obsession with credentials and the authority that they represent is why there is so much of it.
I am not talking about you personally when I say this. So management hires undisciplined workers and places them in positions of enough authority that they might be able to make spending decisions, and then complains about or acts wary of the "fact" that their IT staff are not to be trusted with money. Aren't self-fulfilling prophecies great? I suppose if they hired professional criminal thieves they would wonder why employee theft has become a problem.
Note, I am not saying that interviewing candidates and getting an accurate idea of what kind of worker they would be is easy, only that it's worth doing well and that the failure to do so is rightly blamed on management.
In other words, don't be an incompetent manager. Incompetent managers hire people whose expertise they distrust so they can waste time and effort second-guessing their motives and use their authority to undermine technical decisions that should instead be made with facts and logic. This behavior is a bit like paying a doctor to diagnose a disease and then calling him a liar when he makes the diagnosis - if you honestly believe you know medicine better than the doctor does, why would you hire him? It should surprise no one that this behavior, especially when it occurs in a top-down environment where calling bullshit could get you fired rather than respected for your honesty, can only alienate your staff. It's also no great leap of logic to conclude that the brightest and most talented workers (IT or any other) don't wish to be alienated and don't want the neurotic load caused by regular reminders that the person who hired them for their expertise does not trust their expertise.
Some of the best managers are delegators who do not micromanage more than what is necessary for business or legal reasons. They hire good people whose decisions can be trusted and then they let those people make good decisions with minimal interference. They're also open to suggestions for how processes and methods can be improved and whether it would be economical to replace existing tools with superior ones, with "superior" being defined by the needs of the business and how well they can be met with a particular solution. The control freaks and the ones who want to deemphasize the contributions of subordinates so they can look good just don't understand these things, to the cost of everyone who has to work under them. In fact, I wish a dollar figure could be calculated that would show how costly this type of manager really is.
It's not that it's legal, it's that you're paying for the content, so you would have a higher expectation of getting a quality product.
People seem to be ignoring that if news gathering becomes a volunteer-only effort, we're going to get crappy, slanted news -- far worse than anything we see today. Anyone with an agenda is going to put "reporters" on the scene who will deliver precisely the message they want you to hear, dressed up as "news".
"Today an eight car pileup on the freeway left four people paralyzed. The four, who were insured through the Federal Government, had to wait an hour for an ambulance. The other four people, who were insured by Gekko, were rapidly whisked away to the hospital where they are recovering. Bob, how's the weather looking today?"
I'd rather have fairly obvious slant that might encourage people to think more critically about what is being presented. To me, that is far better than knowing that shit like this goes on under an appearance of legitimacy. It would be different if there were elements in the media that actively sought out and rooted out this kind of corruption, but there aren't -- those two reporters, as individuals, decided not to be intimidated, bribed, and silenced and that's the only reason why we know about this. It doesn't take much wisdom to know that most people would have caved. The questioning man wonders, for every example like that one that we do learn about, how many go on that we've never heard of, and of course under that assumed credibility that, as you point out, the established media commands? Say what you will of Internet bloggers and their political biases; they are unlikely to deliberately falsify a story in order to avoid losing Monsanto's ad revenue.
In all the media coverage of the health care issue, I've yet to hear of a single bonafide case of a person in the USA dying because he/she was refused medical treatment by a hospital due to inability to pay. It just doesn't work that way. All of the big fuckin' deal about health care is because people who don't have insurance would prefer not to go bankrupt in the event of a sudden catastrophic medical expense. There's nothing "dying" right now that universal health care would save, except for a few credit scores. Don't get me wrong, bankruptcy is no fun for anyone, but please stop pretending like people are dying in the streets because the federal government has not yet dominated the health care business. Really, it'd be much easier to take the proponents of government or government-funded health care seriously if they would quit being so melodramatic.
It's not quite pointless. The purpose seems to be the creation of a "sacred" status for copyright law, something that would cause anyone to think twice about creating anything that might have some indirect role in copyright infringement. In other words it's designed to intimidate, which explains why no allowance seems to have been made for the fact that peer-to-peer software can also have legitimate uses, like the distribution of Linux ISOs.
From the summary:
This is like banning hammers because some murderers have used them to bludgeon people to death, or banning cars because a few criminals have used them as getaway vehicles. It also ignores the infeasibility of successfully filtering all copyrighted content in all digital forms with no false positives or false negatives. Either those judges are morons who have no idea about the glaring flaws that are easily pointed out, or the absurdity of this ruling is a deliberate component of the Machiavellian "make an example of them" style of authoritarian thinking that seems to be universally exhibited by pro-copyright interests. In fact, the same could be said of the DMCA in the USA and the legislators who supported it.
Agreed. They all look like marionettes to me.
It's a sad day when people who learn of a corporation illegally conspiring with the federal government to spy on the citizens and don't believe the corporation should do this with impunity are considered members of "the fringe." Really, that's a damned shame.
Rather than support an international cat-and-mouse style manhunt for multiple unknown individuals and all of the tax dollars that would require ... I'd rather just use a more secure OS and let the people who run Windows deal with Windows problems. Simple.
Beware of politician's logic. Politicians logic goes like this: "we must do SOMETHING!" ... "this is something, so it must be done!"
Nor am I. However, I do have a skill that's useful, and that's careful decision-making. My choices are something like this:
For me, that second option was the clear choice because I am more than willing to put some effort towards having a better experience. If other users don't consider that a worthwhile trade-off, then they too are making their choices. There is always a certain mindlessness going on whenever people make a choice like this without realizing that they are choosing something. So they just use whatever the computer came with and don't even investigate whether other options are available, don't even evaluate what those other options would entail. Then they often get screwed and typically by malware of some kind. Thus, when users engage in this mindless, rather careless, and haphazard style of decision-making they leave themselves open to these kinds of problems, and all because they have convinced themselves that basic competence is "too hard." Sorry, but I don't see any injustice in this and frankly I don't want to hear them complain when they have to lay in the bed they have made.
Only a person who really wants to be a victim denies their own active involvement in the foreseeable things that happen to them. What sane person wants to complain about a thing and then disown the steps they are capable of taking that would reduce or eliminate that thing? Sure, go after the malware authors if it makes you feel better, but go after them with the understanding that they are symptoms. The reason why so many problems never seem to go away is that we focus entirely on symptoms.
This is slashdot, not Digg. If someone here was to make a joke about ODB, it would more likely have something to do with ODBC being originally developed by Microsoft, yet ODB is publishing books with Google and that conundrum is leading to the end of civilization as we know it, or something.
This is Slashdot, explaining how both of you managed to miss this post.
Hell with that. Can they invent a car that pulls over, stops, kills the engine, and locks the wheels/transmission and ignition for 15 minutes when the driver gets too close to another car? Preferably with an alarm that cannot easily be shut off. That'd make me feel safer on the roads. No, really, the whole problem with driving is that the nuisances which endanger others often happen with impunity. If by "too close to another car" they mean "tailgaters" then this would be better than they deserve. If by that phrase they mean people who don't know how to safely perform a lane change, those are worse than tailgaters.
There has been some "grassroots" demand for the implementation of vouchers, which are similar to what you describe. The idea can be summarized by saying that the money follows the student instead of making the student follow the money. The most powerful and successful opponent of vouchers has been the NEA, who are incredibly influential among various politicians. This page describes their arguments against it.
I agree that this is a monopoly and I don't view it as fundamentally different from any other. I believe that no matter what the stated justifications may be, the simple pattern is that organizations won't support a measure that might diminish their interests. Like that nea.org link, they will often present a multitude of reasons for this, of course. Invariably these situations are political in nature, because the controversy involved makes it appear that there are multiple ideal options rather than the reality of conflicting interests.