Let me get this straight- You have a server that ran problem free for about 3 years and your conclusion is it was "Important To Somebody Who Really Liked Novell" Shouldn't that be "Important To Somebody Who Really Likes Servers That Don't Crash Often"?
I'm not commenting - at all - about how stable that OS is/was. In fact, I'm fairly impressed with both that, and the IBM x-Series 330 that was sitting there chugging along all that time. Of course, it's possible that was literally doing nothing until some cosmic ray flipped a bit and made it stupid, but otherwise it may not have had a single disk read/write or a single network I/O in all that time. No way to know with lighting it up and spending some time on it.
So, whoever chose that recipe certainly had their reasons, but they didn't leave much of a trail. And regardless, my point is that the use of the Novell platform didn't survive whatever business software/process evolution the users went going through.
So you see if it makes a problem for someone to fix rather than ask first?
Please actually read all of the words in a comment before jumping to that conclusion. We asked. Everybody. No one knows what role the machine is playing. No one working there has any Novell experience, and can't imagine actually choosing that platform for anything.
And since the machine was crashy, we sure don't want to leave it cooking when it might be corrupting (or losing) data.
Man you are the typical network admin
No, I'm there to clean up after the "typical network admin" who let that machine into the rack, undocumented, with no information about what it does, for whom, if anything. Better to let some dead-end machine, with an unknown security arrangement - possibly including credentials from long-gone employees, hum along on the network, crashing sometimes as it sees fit, just keep doing its mysterious thing? The end users had no idea that the machine was there or might need attention, and they hadn't budgeted for any forensics work along those lines. The consensus among the users of the network was to power the machine down until more became obvious or could be discovered in a round of calls/e-mails to now-absent users.
Nice smear, though! Did I really need to go into all of that just to make a point about creaky old Novell stuff lingering on a network? Have a swell day.
Or at least, article summaries that completely miss the point about true R&D costs get a lot of screen time. When large companies engage in expensive R&D, they cover those costs by (gasp!) charging people for their products. True for new AMD chips, true for super-duper antibiotics, and true (however indirectly, and not obvious to a lot of people) for Google, too.
Does ANYBODY in the US think long term anymore and still have influence in corporate or government circles?
I think the better question is, do many companies still have the balls to explain to their customers why fancy new products cost what they cost? And, does the nitwitted consuming end of the culture, so saturated with the pernicious concept that every company charging them for a product or service is "evil," still have the intellectual honesty to look at the larger picture? Calling it like it is has become so unfashionable that we're just sinking in a swamp of mediocrity (or trying to, it seems) rather than teaching basic economics in grade school, where what's left of critical thinking might still be salvaged. By the time people become consumers and investors, they're so disconnected from causal relationships that they can't connect the dots between investment, innovation, time, risk, and cool new technologies.
It is about time to write to you Congress rep to asking that Congress demand that the Justice Department investigate this abuse of the courts to stiffle competition
Um... I don't think "pressure from investors" is quite the same as "abuse of the courts."
Since we (pretty much) know MS...
Yes, they were also behind the fake moon landings, and are really Halliburton's Seattle office. *sigh*
Just yesterday I was cycling through the KVM on a rack of machines in a server room, and one of the boxes, apparently untouched for over 3 three years, had puked just that morning (on a RAM hiccup, or something similar), and did the old Novell equivalent of a BSD. The funny thing (other than the timing) was that no one with any interest in the infrastructure could come up with the slightest idea what that machine was actually supposed to be doing. Right now the plan is to leave it off until some dev guy screams (or, payroll doesn't go through, or another equally dramatic land-mine type event).
But the point is, that machine would appear to have gone from Important To Somebody Who Really Liked Novell to, well, Complete Obscurity in a pretty short time. Not entirely representative of Novell's current corporate state of affairs, but in retrospect, the whole thing was sort of poetic. Plus, the users in question are now about to pay for an audit of what the hell actually is running in their server room.
Clearly the Spokes will occur in, relate to, or somehow be connected to, the number five.
You should repent now, for His Noodly Will is nigh.
In the meantime, I think we can clearly see that, like global temperatures, the number of Saturnian Spokes is inversely related to the number of pirates. The decline in pirates has obviously caused an increase in the number Noodly Saturnian Spokes.
Maybe because at some point in your life you just might be the '1' in 1 out of 130 people who will go to jail in the "Land of the Free" during their lifetime.
You make it sound like it's random, or that there's nothing you can do to alter your odds. Start looking at those stats through the lens of reality (rather than while trying to score some cheap political points) and you'll see that there is a very large recidivist population that skews the numbers by returning to prison many times during their lives by repeatedly doing things that put them there. Since we can hopefully presume that you don't beat people up, steal things, cheat on your taxes, defraud people, sell stolen pharmaceutical opiates, etc., then we can assume that your odds of going to prison are actually very, very slim (verging on non-existent).
If you are implying that the fact this idiot kid deserves 11 months locked up for this then I suggest you take a much deeper look into the so-called Justice System in this country
Or, you could look at the larger picture and take into account his repeated bomb threats, theft of services by setting up other people with stolen accounts, and breaking into the extremely sensitive LexisNexis system (a gold mine for identity theft).
What ever happened to trying to help the misguided youth instead of simply trying (however fruitlesly) to punish them?
Well, he can get help while also helping others. He can use 11 months to reflect a little bit on breaches of trust and stolen services, and he can serve as a shining example of locked-up malice (none of what he did was accidental) for his cracker acquaintences to ponder while they're still on the outside. People in prison (other than those that spend their time inside causing even more trouble) have the opportunity to study, read, write, etc. Of course, since this guy has demonstrated repeatedly that he finds a net-connected computer to be best used in ripping people off, threatening them, and prowling for large caches of sensitive personal information, he won't be doing much studying that way for the next two years.
Clearly the Flying Spaghetti Monster has put planet-sized representations of His Noodly Appendages into orbit around Saturn to show us his majestic power.
They are clearly negligent if a 16 year old kid can crack their systems and compromise hundreds of thousands of customers' information.
And if somebody uses a sledgehammer to break the window or wooden door on a doctor's office in the middle of the night, and gains access to thousands of sensitive personal medical records? Is the doctor or his practice negligent for not charging their customers enough money to afford bullet-proof windows heavy steel office doors? And, since someone with a cutting torch available at Home Depot could gain access through that, is the doctor negligent for not using better-than-a-bank grade vaults for record keeping?
If your kid took your gun to commit a crime, you'd be in trouble for leaving it laying around and not providing security and supervision for it.
Depends on the jurisdiction. Some laws like that have been shot down (so to speak) because saying the same thing about gallons of gas or kitchen knives wouldn't pass the same test. But what you're arguing for is really for not assigning blame to the parents when it comes to guns, rather than assigning them more blame when it comes their kid's misuse of the household net connection, or car, or croquet mallet.
apparently, according to politicians and CEOs
Well, you're just making stuff up, now. Politicians and CEOs don't say the computers are dangerous. They say that a lot of jackasses and criminals both petty and grand are making lots of uses of computers. Like they used to (and still) do with the US mail, fax machine, telephones, bank transfers, overseas shipping, etc.
And certainly a company can be penalized for not securing the information or property of their own customers.
Can they? By what standard? How secure? If I back up some heavy equipment, knock down a cinderblock wall, and literally take away your server room, are you a criminal for "letting" me do it?
If we keep all the focus on what an evil little snotty shit he is, nobody will turn an eye toward us.
Is this the first time you've heard of this? That T-Mobile got hacked was all over the news, and for a change, not just the techie news. The focus was pretty much entirely on T-Mobile and the associated victims, not on the punk that did the social cracking.
The problem is that the behavioral culture at work is exactly the same as it is everywhere else. People can't stand hardship, complexity, accountability, or even just the discomfort that comes from having to think for a moment. It shows up in how they drive, how they bank, how they prepare for bad weather, how they marry, how they study for exams, and how they surf. And to the extent that the largess of our economy allows for it to keep happening, it just keeps happening.
The crazy thing is that most of the reasons I've seen for stupid-IT-end-users getting the axe (the ultimate behavior modification) have nothing to do with their poor security-related behavior, but rather for the things they've done that might offend someone. You know:
"Well, of course we'll reset your cracked password again. But when you get back to the field office, be sure to tell Bob that he's probably going to lose his job over that whole Carmen Electra desktop wallpaper thing."
The governor of Louisianna declared the emergency on the Friday before the hurricane started.
Declaring a state of emergency has nothing to do with passing off command of Louisiana's guards to the federal government. It's a funding mechanism, and gets the larger federal support wheels turning. That doesn't mean squat in terms of what support you'll see in the form of bottles of water in 24 hours. That's a local issue - always has been, always should be.
What did Bush do? He got into a plane and flew to... San Diego.
So, let me guess... you really think that the president has no way of communicating with the agencies under him, or with the governors of the states involved in the storm, other than by flying to those places, and what... personally opening up MREs and heating them for people? Where do you suppose Bill Clinton was in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Fran in 1996? That storm displaced hundreds of thousands of people, cost many lives, and many tens of billions of dollars. Clinton was not there personally to tell the governors of the Carolinas or Virginia what to do, or when/how to request specific FEMA or military support - but he was there for the see-the-damage photo ops several days into things, like all officials do. Of course, those people of those states don't maintain large swaths of subsidized housing below sea level, either, and generally do a great, well-rehearsed job of evacuating their coastlines when something like Fran comes washing in.
This idea that the feds didn't have permission to go in is an outright lie.
We're not talking about permission. We're talking about who tells the existing, already-there, local first responders what to do. That's the governor's job, until she expressly passes that responsibility off to someone else. Sure, by the time it was clear that levies broke (making a big mess much worse), the governors for the three states covering the 90,000 square miles already clobbered by the storm had done most (but not always all of) everything they were ultimately supposed to do to get the federal ball rolling, and it was.
Bush's appalling incompetent response was so public that he had to take responsibility for his errors, which he did yesterday.
Of course, he had to say something. What was he going to do, give a lecture on federalism and the laws of physics? The media painted a distorted picture of things, and it sure didn't help that the FEMA director (at the time) couldn't concisely explain the scope of the situation or diplomatically explain that his people didn't tell anyone in New Orleans where to go without their food and water in expectation of a ride out on a city bus. Even beginning to talk frankly about Louisiana's failures in this whole mess would have just been one more thing for the Bush bashers to hang their hat on. So, he took responsibility for things that, to the extent they were within his administration's turf, didn't go well. That's not to be confused with apologizing on behalf of Mayor Nagin, who was in totally over his head, or the governor, who really blew the storm prep and the first 24 hours following, setting the stage for the worst of what we saw.
Bush himself negates your whole argument.
No, he didn't. See above.
And given what most Republicans think of Jesus, you don't have a leg to stand on calling it "cruelty and condescension," unless of course you want to argue with Jesus.
Why should I care what "most Republicans" think about Jesus? Giving people fish (rather than fishing lessons) 2000 years ago was just as stupid then as tolerating/encouraging third-generation food stamp families is today. Argue with Jesus? Too bad he's dead, because if I could, I would.
As I mentioned above, the governor already filed the emergency paperwork the Friday before the storm and specifically spoke with Bush the next day for him to send "everything you got".
I'll see your window closing issue, and raise you by a can't-reorder-the-tabs. So close, but so far, on that one. Be interesting to see if MS's tabbed behavior addresses that.
How many millions did Stalin kill? I'd people to think about THAT when our "leaders" talk about us surrendering our freedoms!
But that's exactly the point. People like Saddam (who actually praised Stalin as a visionary), or entities like the Taliban, are exactly what (left unchecked) turn into the next Stalin, or Pol Pot.
Extremists that see a healthy western world as an irritant and an obstacle to the building of a theocratic, medieval style Caliphate across the world (a stated goal) are going to do whatever they can to destabilize the west. Sure, they'd like to see democracy itself go away, but they'll settle, for now, for making it so distasteful for getting involved in the development of the middle east that hopefully we'll just let them fester on their own. It's a contest of wills, and one we can't afford to lose. The future of the vast Muslim populations in the world can't be left to the tiny number of crazies that are willing to slaughter people in the name of recruiting for Allah.
Estimated cost of Afghan and (purportedly related) Iraqi wars if things go _well_:
Where is your estimate of the lives lost if the Taliban had continued to murder its way to power throughout the area? Where is your estimate of the lives that would have been lost if Saddam had, unchecked, been able to invade another Kuwait, or slug it out (to the tune of a million lives) with another Iran?
Where is your estimate of the misery in which people (mostly women) would live if the retro-minded, extremist, medeivalist theocratic thugs striving for a pan-Arab caliphate get their way? You know, like the regular Monday-morning executions in what used to be soccer fields by the "Department of Vice and Virtue"? Not pursuing democracy and open, educated economies in that oil-rich, reason-deprived part of the world is a recipe for long-term mayhem on an enormous scale. All the worse when oil gets more scarce decades from now, and other energy sources are further marginalizing the current power structures in those cultures. You talk about ROI, but you're not looking at the big picture.
Ever had a clearly deranged guy with a large metal pole trying to beat down your back door in the dark at 3:00AM? I have. It took the police a long time (15 minutes - but that feels like an eternity under the circumstances) to show up, despite an immediate emergency call. The only thing that kept that jackass at a distance was brandishing a gun. He immediately knew what that meant. Yelling at him to go away was not working. Telling him we'd called the police was not working. My wife indicates that if she'd been home alone, she'd probably have shot the guy after his 15th pounding on the door, and I don't think a jury in the world would have convicted her. Once the police did show up, it took three of them to manhandle the guy into a car. I'm a 6'-2", 250-pound guy, and I'd have had my hands full, assuming I didn't get my head cracked open. My wife is 5'-4", 115 pounds. She would have had absolutely no chance with a guy like that in the state he was in. Following up with the county police the next day (a detective, actually), we found that the guy was known for a long string of breaking/entering/battery/assault incidents, and that particular night, had just had a big ugly run-in with one of the local latino MS13 gangs in a bad drug deal - he was doped up, highly agitated, trying to get into a house somewhere to hide, and looking for cash, and not at all afraid of being violent under the circumstances. He saw a light on in our living room, and fixated on our place for whatever reason. Guns did good.
Ever spend time in a rural setting? Perhaps, dealing with rabid racoons, varmits in the hen-house, feral dogs attacking livestock? Just try to tell a farmer that guns do no good.
Remember the LA riots in 1992? Remember the many Korean merchants that had their businesses torched and looted? The Koreatown merchants that kept their businesses intact were those that, knowing there was going to be no police support whatsoever immediately coming to their rescue, camped out on top of their stores, armed, and kept thier livelihoods safe long enough for the government to restore order. Guns did good.
Start reading the news out of other coastal towns along the Gulf. Many people defended their homes and belongings from looters with, at the very least, grandpa's good old 12-gauge duck gun. They likewise dealt with flood-displaced snakes, gators, and other things not normally found crawling around the garage.
Makes me wish Clinton was back in office. He would have actually responded on time since he actually worked instead of taking 5 week vacations (in the middle of a damn war).
How stupid do you think people are? Do you really think that when a president (any president, including Clinton spending weeks hanging out with showbiz buddies on Martha's Vinyard, or cruising overseas - doesn't matter) is ever "on vacation?" Every day, 365 days a year, the president is surrounded by briefers, communications people and other staff. He is still involved in intel briefings and "findings" every day, is on conference calls with DoD and cabinet people, and is on the hook to make any number of diplomatic and other decisions. This is just was true of Clinton as it is of Bush.
The main difference between Bush and Clinton, in that regard is that Clinton didn't actually own a house or have anyplace that he would normally have gone to for any longer period of time. Prior to his 8 years in office, he was living in the Arkansas governer's mansion. Other presidents (Carter, Reagan, Roosevelt, etc) had homes they more traditionally visited, and the White House (along with all of its responsibilities) went there with them. Bush is no more "on vacation" when in Crawford than John F. Kennedy was when spending time on the family compound in Hyannis Port. A key difference now, though (as opposed to, say, when Kennedy was in office - or even Carter or Reagan) is that we now have sophisticated enough communications gear that makes where you sit pretty much of a non-issue. The C-in-C can do, and does the job from anywhere on the globe.
As for "responding"... what did you have in mind? The president signed emergency condition paperwork and orders before the hurricane hit. The responsibility for turning the problem over to the feds lies with the governor of Louisiana (who didn't even authorize her own guard troops to do things like use busses for transportation until two and half days into that mess, and on who's orders truckloads of Red Cross food and water were prevented from being delivered to the Superdome because the thinking was that it would slow down evacuation if people didn't have as much incentive to leave). The governors of the states hold (as they should) enormous responsibilities for first response to emergencies that happen on their turf. The feds aren't supposed to muscle in until expressly asked to. If the people that work in the many structures under the White House's influence could push aside the lines that are drawn between state and federal rights/responsibilities just because they think the state's governor is being incompetent, then I suppose all we'd hear from you is how Bush is disregarding the constitution, etc. You can't have it both ways.
Spending money to prevent grinding poverty is bad
No, but keeping people in grinding poverty by simply handing them a meager living, generation after generation, with no expectation that they can or should be self-sufficient is the height of cruelty and condescension, as polished to a fine art by liberals ever since FDR's time.
Spending money to send in the National Guard and Coast Guard is bad - we only want to do that when it's absolutely necessary... say, when black people start looting Wal-Mart for food.
Why do you think that your credibility will be improved by just simply making stuff up? The Guard troops work for the (in this case, Democrat) governor in situations like this, until she expressly turns that authority over to the feds - which she didn't do. The feds, though, were immediately on the scene in the form of the Coast Guard - which was allowed to operate in that coastal area as part of their mandate. Technically, though, flying into the city as they immediately started doing was actually outside of their normal authority. The Red Cross was waiting, with truckloads of supplies, that the state of Louisiana would not let into the Superdome
That's pretty much a ridiculous way to describe things. Saying that it costs X to produce something, but ignoring the actual overhead is completely sophomoric, and an obvious attempt to pander to the corporations=bad and profit=bad crowds (never mind that only a large, profitable entity could possibly produce things like Xeon or AMD-64 chips and keep coming up with and delivering more, better, faster). It's like the people who think that they only cost their employer what they see on their pay stub. There's a little more to it, folks!
Re:hmmm, how should we interpret his statement?
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Bill Gates Speaks Out
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Given the way the "editor" posted the summary, I can certainly see how the punking would have occured. Of course my first thought was the same thing, and being sure that it couldn't be so (Bill's clumsy sometimes, but not insane), a little homework was called for.
It's very un-slashdot of you, though, to acknowledge the lept-to conclusion. What were you thinking, man? You'll have no street cred!
Sorry if I was snarky.
Re:hmmm, how should we interpret his statement?
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Bill Gates Speaks Out
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Mod this down. It's not interesting, and it's actually incorrect. As many previous comments have pointed out, he (Bill) is explicitly not talking about the "no evil" slogan, much as much of the slashdot audience would love to hear him say that, just for the fun of it.
I realize that this may be hurting their business, but if they suck so much that people feel the need to complain, don't they have the right to complain?
The question is, is hurting their business fair, based on what really happened? Even in restaurants, people will spend an hour enjoying a large meal, order dessert, and then ask to see the manager so that they can complain about something to the point where the manager agrees to a free meal. It's a total scam, and a favorite among customers of all sorts of service businesses. It's not at all a stretch (if you'll pardon the pun) to imagine someone getting $10k in elective cosmetic surgery, and then making completely subjective complaints in hopes of getting out of paying for it (or at least, several thousand dollars of it).
It would be nice not to immediately think of people having motives like that, but I've seen it many times. This is why service professionals frequently require a deposit from new customers (as in, "Sure, I'd be happy to show up on a Sunday morning and help you rebuild that RAID array so you can run payroll - but not without at least half the cash up front."). At least with much technical consulting, one can point to whether or not something is actually working. But when it comes to whether or not someone perceives the work of an elective surgeon to meet some spec... well, I'll be there is a LOT of squabbling over invoices. And pitching an online bitch-fest about it is probably one workable way to get some doctors to simply give in, rather than fight over a few thousand dollars.
That being said, there are some lousy practitioners out there - in every profession. Educating your fellow consumers, in a level-headed, rational, non-hysterical, legally sound way is certainly within everyone's rights. But never underestimate the number of people with buyer's remorse, less cash than they wish they had, or with outright theft-of-services in their hearts.
I noticed you conveniently failed to address his point about the device you bought and paid for spying on you. But I suppose that isn't a problem for you because only criminals have something to hide, eh?
I don't consider it spying because I'm telling them to do it! In fact, I'm paying them to do it. I like what they do with the information they collect, and if I didn't I could still use their scheduling and guide service without them collecting any data at all. They have no problem with that - though they point out that some of what they can do for you becomes less useful if your unit doesn't get to leverage their database as well.
Of course, no, I don't have anything to hide anyway. But if I didn't want them to know that our household seems to watch an insufferable and odd mix of geeky tech stuff, geeky scifi stuff, and geeky outdoorsy stuff (yes, there is such a thing), I could prevent them from knowing that. Yes, if they decided to actually lie about what they're doing, they might still find out what I'm watching. But... so what? It's not like I can use TiVo to stalk Jodi Foster or post death threats on Jihaddi web sites. Yes, it might be embarassing to some to be caught only getting all of their news from Oprah, or from O'Reilly, or from Howard Stern - but, what - that's going to be shocking to someone? If you're using TiVo to control your cable box and record racier stuff off of HBO, well - happily the Taliban won't come and cut out your eyes (though someone from PBS may send you a scolding letter, or something).
And the precise data they collect, and how it's used, should be spelled out in the service contract. (I don't have a TiVo, maybe it is.)
Actually, TiVo is extremely specific about the anonymous user info they collect, and go to a lot of trouble to soothe privacy worries. You can even have them stop collecting your anonymous user data if you want. They tell you how.
But since I find that what they do collect is benign (enough), I'm happy to let them slurp it up... because what I get in exchange is a very "smart" display of what's on, and what I might like. That being said, TiVo does pull some strange stuff out of thin air sometimes (for a week there, I was getting a lot of Spanish language stuff pre-recorded - but signaling my dislike for that on a couple of listings before deleting them, it stopped recommending that and went on to more Scifi re-runs it thinks I missed during the regular season - and it's usually right).
Slashdot Mirror
Let me get this straight- You have a server that ran problem free for about 3 years and your conclusion is it was "Important To Somebody Who Really Liked Novell" Shouldn't that be "Important To Somebody Who Really Likes Servers That Don't Crash Often"?
I'm not commenting - at all - about how stable that OS is/was. In fact, I'm fairly impressed with both that, and the IBM x-Series 330 that was sitting there chugging along all that time. Of course, it's possible that was literally doing nothing until some cosmic ray flipped a bit and made it stupid, but otherwise it may not have had a single disk read/write or a single network I/O in all that time. No way to know with lighting it up and spending some time on it.
So, whoever chose that recipe certainly had their reasons, but they didn't leave much of a trail. And regardless, my point is that the use of the Novell platform didn't survive whatever business software/process evolution the users went going through.
So you see if it makes a problem for someone to fix rather than ask first?
Please actually read all of the words in a comment before jumping to that conclusion. We asked. Everybody. No one knows what role the machine is playing. No one working there has any Novell experience, and can't imagine actually choosing that platform for anything.
And since the machine was crashy, we sure don't want to leave it cooking when it might be corrupting (or losing) data. Man you are the typical network admin
No, I'm there to clean up after the "typical network admin" who let that machine into the rack, undocumented, with no information about what it does, for whom, if anything. Better to let some dead-end machine, with an unknown security arrangement - possibly including credentials from long-gone employees, hum along on the network, crashing sometimes as it sees fit, just keep doing its mysterious thing? The end users had no idea that the machine was there or might need attention, and they hadn't budgeted for any forensics work along those lines. The consensus among the users of the network was to power the machine down until more became obvious or could be discovered in a round of calls/e-mails to now-absent users.
Nice smear, though! Did I really need to go into all of that just to make a point about creaky old Novell stuff lingering on a network? Have a swell day.
Or at least, article summaries that completely miss the point about true R&D costs get a lot of screen time. When large companies engage in expensive R&D, they cover those costs by (gasp!) charging people for their products. True for new AMD chips, true for super-duper antibiotics, and true (however indirectly, and not obvious to a lot of people) for Google, too.
Does ANYBODY in the US think long term anymore and still have influence in corporate or government circles?
I think the better question is, do many companies still have the balls to explain to their customers why fancy new products cost what they cost? And, does the nitwitted consuming end of the culture, so saturated with the pernicious concept that every company charging them for a product or service is "evil," still have the intellectual honesty to look at the larger picture? Calling it like it is has become so unfashionable that we're just sinking in a swamp of mediocrity (or trying to, it seems) rather than teaching basic economics in grade school, where what's left of critical thinking might still be salvaged. By the time people become consumers and investors, they're so disconnected from causal relationships that they can't connect the dots between investment, innovation, time, risk, and cool new technologies.
It is about time to write to you Congress rep to asking that Congress demand that the Justice Department investigate this abuse of the courts to stiffle competition
Um... I don't think "pressure from investors" is quite the same as "abuse of the courts."
Since we (pretty much) know MS...
Yes, they were also behind the fake moon landings, and are really Halliburton's Seattle office. *sigh*
Just yesterday I was cycling through the KVM on a rack of machines in a server room, and one of the boxes, apparently untouched for over 3 three years, had puked just that morning (on a RAM hiccup, or something similar), and did the old Novell equivalent of a BSD. The funny thing (other than the timing) was that no one with any interest in the infrastructure could come up with the slightest idea what that machine was actually supposed to be doing. Right now the plan is to leave it off until some dev guy screams (or, payroll doesn't go through, or another equally dramatic land-mine type event).
But the point is, that machine would appear to have gone from Important To Somebody Who Really Liked Novell to, well, Complete Obscurity in a pretty short time. Not entirely representative of Novell's current corporate state of affairs, but in retrospect, the whole thing was sort of poetic. Plus, the users in question are now about to pay for an audit of what the hell actually is running in their server room.
Clearly the Spokes will occur in, relate to, or somehow be connected to, the number five.
You should repent now, for His Noodly Will is nigh.
In the meantime, I think we can clearly see that, like global temperatures, the number of Saturnian Spokes is inversely related to the number of pirates. The decline in pirates has obviously caused an increase in the number Noodly Saturnian Spokes.
Maybe because at some point in your life you just might be the '1' in 1 out of 130 people who will go to jail in the "Land of the Free" during their lifetime.
You make it sound like it's random, or that there's nothing you can do to alter your odds. Start looking at those stats through the lens of reality (rather than while trying to score some cheap political points) and you'll see that there is a very large recidivist population that skews the numbers by returning to prison many times during their lives by repeatedly doing things that put them there. Since we can hopefully presume that you don't beat people up, steal things, cheat on your taxes, defraud people, sell stolen pharmaceutical opiates, etc., then we can assume that your odds of going to prison are actually very, very slim (verging on non-existent).
If you are implying that the fact this idiot kid deserves 11 months locked up for this then I suggest you take a much deeper look into the so-called Justice System in this country
Or, you could look at the larger picture and take into account his repeated bomb threats, theft of services by setting up other people with stolen accounts, and breaking into the extremely sensitive LexisNexis system (a gold mine for identity theft).
What ever happened to trying to help the misguided youth instead of simply trying (however fruitlesly) to punish them?
Well, he can get help while also helping others. He can use 11 months to reflect a little bit on breaches of trust and stolen services, and he can serve as a shining example of locked-up malice (none of what he did was accidental) for his cracker acquaintences to ponder while they're still on the outside. People in prison (other than those that spend their time inside causing even more trouble) have the opportunity to study, read, write, etc. Of course, since this guy has demonstrated repeatedly that he finds a net-connected computer to be best used in ripping people off, threatening them, and prowling for large caches of sensitive personal information, he won't be doing much studying that way for the next two years.
Does it never occur to people that what they read on the internet isn't always true?
No, that is true that they never... don't not... dis-consider.... never mind. People are twits.
Clearly the Flying Spaghetti Monster has put planet-sized representations of His Noodly Appendages into orbit around Saturn to show us his majestic power.
They are clearly negligent if a 16 year old kid can crack their systems and compromise hundreds of thousands of customers' information.
And if somebody uses a sledgehammer to break the window or wooden door on a doctor's office in the middle of the night, and gains access to thousands of sensitive personal medical records? Is the doctor or his practice negligent for not charging their customers enough money to afford bullet-proof windows heavy steel office doors? And, since someone with a cutting torch available at Home Depot could gain access through that, is the doctor negligent for not using better-than-a-bank grade vaults for record keeping?
If your kid took your gun to commit a crime, you'd be in trouble for leaving it laying around and not providing security and supervision for it.
Depends on the jurisdiction. Some laws like that have been shot down (so to speak) because saying the same thing about gallons of gas or kitchen knives wouldn't pass the same test. But what you're arguing for is really for not assigning blame to the parents when it comes to guns, rather than assigning them more blame when it comes their kid's misuse of the household net connection, or car, or croquet mallet.
apparently, according to politicians and CEOs
Well, you're just making stuff up, now. Politicians and CEOs don't say the computers are dangerous. They say that a lot of jackasses and criminals both petty and grand are making lots of uses of computers. Like they used to (and still) do with the US mail, fax machine, telephones, bank transfers, overseas shipping, etc.
And certainly a company can be penalized for not securing the information or property of their own customers.
Can they? By what standard? How secure? If I back up some heavy equipment, knock down a cinderblock wall, and literally take away your server room, are you a criminal for "letting" me do it?
If we keep all the focus on what an evil little snotty shit he is, nobody will turn an eye toward us.
Is this the first time you've heard of this? That T-Mobile got hacked was all over the news, and for a change, not just the techie news. The focus was pretty much entirely on T-Mobile and the associated victims, not on the punk that did the social cracking.
The problem is that the behavioral culture at work is exactly the same as it is everywhere else. People can't stand hardship, complexity, accountability, or even just the discomfort that comes from having to think for a moment. It shows up in how they drive, how they bank, how they prepare for bad weather, how they marry, how they study for exams, and how they surf. And to the extent that the largess of our economy allows for it to keep happening, it just keeps happening.
The crazy thing is that most of the reasons I've seen for stupid-IT-end-users getting the axe (the ultimate behavior modification) have nothing to do with their poor security-related behavior, but rather for the things they've done that might offend someone. You know:
"Well, of course we'll reset your cracked password again. But when you get back to the field office, be sure to tell Bob that he's probably going to lose his job over that whole Carmen Electra desktop wallpaper thing."
The governor of Louisianna declared the emergency on the Friday before the hurricane started.
Declaring a state of emergency has nothing to do with passing off command of Louisiana's guards to the federal government. It's a funding mechanism, and gets the larger federal support wheels turning. That doesn't mean squat in terms of what support you'll see in the form of bottles of water in 24 hours. That's a local issue - always has been, always should be.
What did Bush do? He got into a plane and flew to... San Diego.
So, let me guess... you really think that the president has no way of communicating with the agencies under him, or with the governors of the states involved in the storm, other than by flying to those places, and what... personally opening up MREs and heating them for people? Where do you suppose Bill Clinton was in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Fran in 1996? That storm displaced hundreds of thousands of people, cost many lives, and many tens of billions of dollars. Clinton was not there personally to tell the governors of the Carolinas or Virginia what to do, or when/how to request specific FEMA or military support - but he was there for the see-the-damage photo ops several days into things, like all officials do. Of course, those people of those states don't maintain large swaths of subsidized housing below sea level, either, and generally do a great, well-rehearsed job of evacuating their coastlines when something like Fran comes washing in.
This idea that the feds didn't have permission to go in is an outright lie.
We're not talking about permission. We're talking about who tells the existing, already-there, local first responders what to do. That's the governor's job, until she expressly passes that responsibility off to someone else. Sure, by the time it was clear that levies broke (making a big mess much worse), the governors for the three states covering the 90,000 square miles already clobbered by the storm had done most (but not always all of) everything they were ultimately supposed to do to get the federal ball rolling, and it was.
Bush's appalling incompetent response was so public that he had to take responsibility for his errors, which he did yesterday.
Of course, he had to say something. What was he going to do, give a lecture on federalism and the laws of physics? The media painted a distorted picture of things, and it sure didn't help that the FEMA director (at the time) couldn't concisely explain the scope of the situation or diplomatically explain that his people didn't tell anyone in New Orleans where to go without their food and water in expectation of a ride out on a city bus. Even beginning to talk frankly about Louisiana's failures in this whole mess would have just been one more thing for the Bush bashers to hang their hat on. So, he took responsibility for things that, to the extent they were within his administration's turf, didn't go well. That's not to be confused with apologizing on behalf of Mayor Nagin, who was in totally over his head, or the governor, who really blew the storm prep and the first 24 hours following, setting the stage for the worst of what we saw.
Bush himself negates your whole argument.
No, he didn't. See above.
And given what most Republicans think of Jesus, you don't have a leg to stand on calling it "cruelty and condescension," unless of course you want to argue with Jesus.
Why should I care what "most Republicans" think about Jesus? Giving people fish (rather than fishing lessons) 2000 years ago was just as stupid then as tolerating/encouraging third-generation food stamp families is today. Argue with Jesus? Too bad he's dead, because if I could, I would.
As I mentioned above, the governor already filed the emergency paperwork the Friday before the storm and specifically spoke with Bush the next day for him to send "everything you got".
You'r
I'll see your window closing issue, and raise you by a can't-reorder-the-tabs. So close, but so far, on that one. Be interesting to see if MS's tabbed behavior addresses that.
How many millions did Stalin kill? I'd people to think about THAT when our "leaders" talk about us surrendering our freedoms!
But that's exactly the point. People like Saddam (who actually praised Stalin as a visionary), or entities like the Taliban, are exactly what (left unchecked) turn into the next Stalin, or Pol Pot.
Extremists that see a healthy western world as an irritant and an obstacle to the building of a theocratic, medieval style Caliphate across the world (a stated goal) are going to do whatever they can to destabilize the west. Sure, they'd like to see democracy itself go away, but they'll settle, for now, for making it so distasteful for getting involved in the development of the middle east that hopefully we'll just let them fester on their own. It's a contest of wills, and one we can't afford to lose. The future of the vast Muslim populations in the world can't be left to the tiny number of crazies that are willing to slaughter people in the name of recruiting for Allah.
Estimated cost of Afghan and (purportedly related) Iraqi wars if things go _well_:
Where is your estimate of the lives lost if the Taliban had continued to murder its way to power throughout the area? Where is your estimate of the lives that would have been lost if Saddam had, unchecked, been able to invade another Kuwait, or slug it out (to the tune of a million lives) with another Iran?
Where is your estimate of the misery in which people (mostly women) would live if the retro-minded, extremist, medeivalist theocratic thugs striving for a pan-Arab caliphate get their way? You know, like the regular Monday-morning executions in what used to be soccer fields by the "Department of Vice and Virtue"? Not pursuing democracy and open, educated economies in that oil-rich, reason-deprived part of the world is a recipe for long-term mayhem on an enormous scale. All the worse when oil gets more scarce decades from now, and other energy sources are further marginalizing the current power structures in those cultures. You talk about ROI, but you're not looking at the big picture.
Guns do no good.
Ever had a clearly deranged guy with a large metal pole trying to beat down your back door in the dark at 3:00AM? I have. It took the police a long time (15 minutes - but that feels like an eternity under the circumstances) to show up, despite an immediate emergency call. The only thing that kept that jackass at a distance was brandishing a gun. He immediately knew what that meant. Yelling at him to go away was not working. Telling him we'd called the police was not working. My wife indicates that if she'd been home alone, she'd probably have shot the guy after his 15th pounding on the door, and I don't think a jury in the world would have convicted her. Once the police did show up, it took three of them to manhandle the guy into a car. I'm a 6'-2", 250-pound guy, and I'd have had my hands full, assuming I didn't get my head cracked open. My wife is 5'-4", 115 pounds. She would have had absolutely no chance with a guy like that in the state he was in. Following up with the county police the next day (a detective, actually), we found that the guy was known for a long string of breaking/entering/battery/assault incidents, and that particular night, had just had a big ugly run-in with one of the local latino MS13 gangs in a bad drug deal - he was doped up, highly agitated, trying to get into a house somewhere to hide, and looking for cash, and not at all afraid of being violent under the circumstances. He saw a light on in our living room, and fixated on our place for whatever reason. Guns did good.
Ever spend time in a rural setting? Perhaps, dealing with rabid racoons, varmits in the hen-house, feral dogs attacking livestock? Just try to tell a farmer that guns do no good.
Remember the LA riots in 1992? Remember the many Korean merchants that had their businesses torched and looted? The Koreatown merchants that kept their businesses intact were those that, knowing there was going to be no police support whatsoever immediately coming to their rescue, camped out on top of their stores, armed, and kept thier livelihoods safe long enough for the government to restore order. Guns did good.
Start reading the news out of other coastal towns along the Gulf. Many people defended their homes and belongings from looters with, at the very least, grandpa's good old 12-gauge duck gun. They likewise dealt with flood-displaced snakes, gators, and other things not normally found crawling around the garage.
Makes me wish Clinton was back in office. He would have actually responded on time since he actually worked instead of taking 5 week vacations (in the middle of a damn war).
How stupid do you think people are? Do you really think that when a president (any president, including Clinton spending weeks hanging out with showbiz buddies on Martha's Vinyard, or cruising overseas - doesn't matter) is ever "on vacation?" Every day, 365 days a year, the president is surrounded by briefers, communications people and other staff. He is still involved in intel briefings and "findings" every day, is on conference calls with DoD and cabinet people, and is on the hook to make any number of diplomatic and other decisions. This is just was true of Clinton as it is of Bush.
The main difference between Bush and Clinton, in that regard is that Clinton didn't actually own a house or have anyplace that he would normally have gone to for any longer period of time. Prior to his 8 years in office, he was living in the Arkansas governer's mansion. Other presidents (Carter, Reagan, Roosevelt, etc) had homes they more traditionally visited, and the White House (along with all of its responsibilities) went there with them. Bush is no more "on vacation" when in Crawford than John F. Kennedy was when spending time on the family compound in Hyannis Port. A key difference now, though (as opposed to, say, when Kennedy was in office - or even Carter or Reagan) is that we now have sophisticated enough communications gear that makes where you sit pretty much of a non-issue. The C-in-C can do, and does the job from anywhere on the globe.
As for "responding"... what did you have in mind? The president signed emergency condition paperwork and orders before the hurricane hit. The responsibility for turning the problem over to the feds lies with the governor of Louisiana (who didn't even authorize her own guard troops to do things like use busses for transportation until two and half days into that mess, and on who's orders truckloads of Red Cross food and water were prevented from being delivered to the Superdome because the thinking was that it would slow down evacuation if people didn't have as much incentive to leave). The governors of the states hold (as they should) enormous responsibilities for first response to emergencies that happen on their turf. The feds aren't supposed to muscle in until expressly asked to. If the people that work in the many structures under the White House's influence could push aside the lines that are drawn between state and federal rights/responsibilities just because they think the state's governor is being incompetent, then I suppose all we'd hear from you is how Bush is disregarding the constitution, etc. You can't have it both ways.
Spending money to prevent grinding poverty is bad
No, but keeping people in grinding poverty by simply handing them a meager living, generation after generation, with no expectation that they can or should be self-sufficient is the height of cruelty and condescension, as polished to a fine art by liberals ever since FDR's time.
Spending money to send in the National Guard and Coast Guard is bad - we only want to do that when it's absolutely necessary... say, when black people start looting Wal-Mart for food.
Why do you think that your credibility will be improved by just simply making stuff up? The Guard troops work for the (in this case, Democrat) governor in situations like this, until she expressly turns that authority over to the feds - which she didn't do. The feds, though, were immediately on the scene in the form of the Coast Guard - which was allowed to operate in that coastal area as part of their mandate. Technically, though, flying into the city as they immediately started doing was actually outside of their normal authority. The Red Cross was waiting, with truckloads of supplies, that the state of Louisiana would not let into the Superdome
Since you seem extraordinarily gullible, especially as it relates to cats, I highly recommend a visit to Bonsai Kitten.
...which would take away some of the cool factor. Well, if they lean Castillian, anyway.
That's pretty much a ridiculous way to describe things. Saying that it costs X to produce something, but ignoring the actual overhead is completely sophomoric, and an obvious attempt to pander to the corporations=bad and profit=bad crowds (never mind that only a large, profitable entity could possibly produce things like Xeon or AMD-64 chips and keep coming up with and delivering more, better, faster). It's like the people who think that they only cost their employer what they see on their pay stub. There's a little more to it, folks!
Given the way the "editor" posted the summary, I can certainly see how the punking would have occured. Of course my first thought was the same thing, and being sure that it couldn't be so (Bill's clumsy sometimes, but not insane), a little homework was called for.
It's very un-slashdot of you, though, to acknowledge the lept-to conclusion. What were you thinking, man? You'll have no street cred!
Sorry if I was snarky.
Mod this down. It's not interesting, and it's actually incorrect. As many previous comments have pointed out, he (Bill) is explicitly not talking about the "no evil" slogan, much as much of the slashdot audience would love to hear him say that, just for the fun of it.
I realize that this may be hurting their business, but if they suck so much that people feel the need to complain, don't they have the right to complain?
The question is, is hurting their business fair, based on what really happened? Even in restaurants, people will spend an hour enjoying a large meal, order dessert, and then ask to see the manager so that they can complain about something to the point where the manager agrees to a free meal. It's a total scam, and a favorite among customers of all sorts of service businesses. It's not at all a stretch (if you'll pardon the pun) to imagine someone getting $10k in elective cosmetic surgery, and then making completely subjective complaints in hopes of getting out of paying for it (or at least, several thousand dollars of it).
It would be nice not to immediately think of people having motives like that, but I've seen it many times. This is why service professionals frequently require a deposit from new customers (as in, "Sure, I'd be happy to show up on a Sunday morning and help you rebuild that RAID array so you can run payroll - but not without at least half the cash up front."). At least with much technical consulting, one can point to whether or not something is actually working. But when it comes to whether or not someone perceives the work of an elective surgeon to meet some spec... well, I'll be there is a LOT of squabbling over invoices. And pitching an online bitch-fest about it is probably one workable way to get some doctors to simply give in, rather than fight over a few thousand dollars.
That being said, there are some lousy practitioners out there - in every profession. Educating your fellow consumers, in a level-headed, rational, non-hysterical, legally sound way is certainly within everyone's rights. But never underestimate the number of people with buyer's remorse, less cash than they wish they had, or with outright theft-of-services in their hearts.
I noticed you conveniently failed to address his point about the device you bought and paid for spying on you. But I suppose that isn't a problem for you because only criminals have something to hide, eh?
I didn't address it because it didn't seem necessary (as in, that part seems like a flagrant troll). TiVo is very clear about what they collect, how they collect it, and how to turn that behavior off it you want them to.
I don't consider it spying because I'm telling them to do it! In fact, I'm paying them to do it. I like what they do with the information they collect, and if I didn't I could still use their scheduling and guide service without them collecting any data at all. They have no problem with that - though they point out that some of what they can do for you becomes less useful if your unit doesn't get to leverage their database as well.
Of course, no, I don't have anything to hide anyway. But if I didn't want them to know that our household seems to watch an insufferable and odd mix of geeky tech stuff, geeky scifi stuff, and geeky outdoorsy stuff (yes, there is such a thing), I could prevent them from knowing that. Yes, if they decided to actually lie about what they're doing, they might still find out what I'm watching. But... so what? It's not like I can use TiVo to stalk Jodi Foster or post death threats on Jihaddi web sites. Yes, it might be embarassing to some to be caught only getting all of their news from Oprah, or from O'Reilly, or from Howard Stern - but, what - that's going to be shocking to someone? If you're using TiVo to control your cable box and record racier stuff off of HBO, well - happily the Taliban won't come and cut out your eyes (though someone from PBS may send you a scolding letter, or something).
And the precise data they collect, and how it's used, should be spelled out in the service contract. (I don't have a TiVo, maybe it is.)
Actually, TiVo is extremely specific about the anonymous user info they collect, and go to a lot of trouble to soothe privacy worries. You can even have them stop collecting your anonymous user data if you want. They tell you how.
But since I find that what they do collect is benign (enough), I'm happy to let them slurp it up... because what I get in exchange is a very "smart" display of what's on, and what I might like. That being said, TiVo does pull some strange stuff out of thin air sometimes (for a week there, I was getting a lot of Spanish language stuff pre-recorded - but signaling my dislike for that on a couple of listings before deleting them, it stopped recommending that and went on to more Scifi re-runs it thinks I missed during the regular season - and it's usually right).