I was curious about this, so I asked a friend who is natively multilingual in German and English. Here is what he had to say:
We've all had the feeling of being "chewed up and spit out", right? Sorta the same thing here.
Another translation of "angefressen" would be "pitted" or "full of holes." In other words, its meaning in this case is something like, "mostly used up and not much left of it." It also very strongly implies "fed up, just about all done with this," but that's not obvious from any dictionary translation.
I'll grant you that it's a very language-specific term as used in this way.
I'm pretty sure Google has lawyers. Furthermore, I'm pretty sure they were involved in the firing of this guy.
I think it's pretty silly and disingenuous to suggest that anyone, especially a company, should report unethical behavior to the authorities and let them sort it out whether or not it's illegal, especially when it's pretty likely that it's not. Again, we're not talking about someone stealing credit card numbers, which is clearly a crime. (And which, if I'm not mistaken, would require them to report the activity.)
Or put another way, if you gave your diary to a buddy to hold onto and expected him not to read it, and later you found out he did and used some of the information to embarrass you, would you call the cops? Just how far do you think you'd get in prosecuting that case with no damages incurred?
...it should have been referred to the authorities...
Referred for what? As far as I can tell, the guy didn't do anything illegal. Creepy? Oh, hell, yeah, but illegal?
Fact is, I know that when I send and receive e-mail via Google, there are people in the company that has access to that stuff. I run a few web sites myself, and I hope that people understand that with root access to the server, I have access to everything they do, also. I even go so far as to point that out now and then. But I'm a pretty nice guy, and apparently I'm trustworthy enough for them to believe that I won't use their data for evil. (And I diligently try to live up to that reputation.) I haven't read it in detail, but I'd be very surprised if it doesn't explicitly tell you that in the Terms of Service when you sign up for these services.
What we have here is basically a case of a guy who essentially read some people's diary and used the content within to bug them. If he used the information to lure them into having sex, I'd be right there with you in wanting him thrown in jail. That's not the case. The article even specifically mentioned that he did it to one person with their consent while they were actually watching him to show off his level of access to the systems.
I could be wrong, but I don't think that reading someone's diary is illegal, especially when they hand it to you to keep for them. Or at least, if it is, I seriously doubt much would come of it. I strongly suspect that any competent prosecutor would tell you, "I have murderers, rapists, and even worse--music, movie, and software pirates!--to go after; I don't have time for this."
What Google did was altogether appropriate, and frankly, probably far worse than reporting him to the authorities. They took away his paycheck (which in this economy is no small punishment) and arguably worse, they took away his sweet, sweet access. The guy can't brag to his family and friends any more that he works at Google. He sure as hell can't show off how much trust they have in him to allow him unlimited access to their most trusted data.
I see here that there are people who are so desperate to take Google down a few pegs that they want to take everything crummy individuals do as being representative of the company itself. I think that's a shame. Google's history with the good of consumers has an excellent record, MUCH better than most companies, and they have changed literally entire industries for the better. Their informal "do no evil" slogan should be encouraged and lauded, not picked apart at every opportunity, especially over stuff they have little or no control over. They set a very high standard for themselves, and just because they pick a bad apple now and then, far fewer than most companies, doesn't mean that they're not still a reputable, highly regarded company.
Because it's always good to make it easier to break the law and steal movies.
No, because it makes it easier for you to use your content that you paid for with your hard-earned cash the way you want to instead of how some third party who doesn't have your best interest at heart (and who only wants to get their greedy fingers on the aforementioned hard-earned cash, whether they've earned it or not) would like to make you pay for it over and over for making personal copies, displaying on alternate devices, etc.
The ability to infringe copyright is simply a side effect. Yes, some people may use it for that purpose. I won't.
When they invented the car, are you the type that sarcastically would have said, "Because it's always good to make it easier to to get away after robbing a bank. What other law-breaking things can we invent? Maybe someone should add sound to our good ol' silent films so that people can break the law by singing copyrighted songs."
...she was 'quitting and walking away' because she 'wanted to be able to eat properly again and be able to breathe'.
...the woman with the beer and cigarettes in the photograph said.
(Giving her the benefit of a doubt, maybe quitting her job will ease her stress and allow her to quit smoking as well, in which case it would be literally true instead of ironic.)
...but damn if stuff like this doesn't make me want to go out and buy some of their albums, even if I just give them away, to support what they're doing.
Here in the United States, we see stories like this and think (mainly because it's the reaction the media is eliciting), "What a godforsaken narrow-minded place!" when in fact, our own government is doing much worse to us.
My point was twofold. First, people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. Second, to try to help bring a little awareness to the abuses of our own government. It really wasn't mean as a judgment on India or Saudi Arabia, it could have been any country/countries.
Can you believe the unmitigated nerve of those crappy little backwards countries and their oppressive Big Brother-ish monitoring of their citizens!!? Thank god nothing like this could ever happen in the United States, where we actually give a rat's ass about protecting our privacy from the government!
I'm not going to argue with you. If you want to continue writing like a six-year-old (and conveying that level of intelligence to others), then by all means, please do revel in your choice.
...there isn't a reason they can't use the same convention to indicate possession.
How about because it's wrong?
By your logic, do you spell the word "done" as dun, like bun and fun, just to rigorously adhere to convention? Or do you pronounce it as a homonym of "lone" and "phone" (oops, I mean "fone")?
How do you conjugate the verb "to be"? I be, he bes, yesterday I bed (pronounced "beed," of course), etc.? Or do you go against convention like 99.9% of the rest of us and use its common conjugation of I am, he is, yesterday I was?
I'm sorry, but I find your "it goes against convention!" argument completely uncompelling. Using "it's" as a possessive pronoun is just plain incorrect, just as incorrect as the above examples. The good news is that when you do it, most people know what you're talking about, just as if you typed a sentence "I be dun" instead of "I am done." The bad news is that just like typing that first sentence, you kind of look stupid when you do so.
This is starting to sound like another "Free Mitnick" movement, where people support a guy who legitimately deserves legal punishment just to make themselves feel compassionate.
I don't think there's much argument over whether the guy should be punished. The argument is over how severely he should be punished, given that he 1) didn't cause any damage, 2) wasn't acting out of malice, and 3) was at least accomplish what he did in large part due to the incompetence of those who are, in theory, supposed to be competent in protecting themselves from such attacks.
What people are worried about is that he is going to have the book thrown at him not because of the merits of what his actions deserve, but because he caused a national embarrassment and those who prosecuted him want to use him as an example, a deterrence to others.
Plus, there's a legitimate question of jurisdiction. If I commit a crime at point A against someone at point B that is thousands of miles away, who gets to decide what the punishment is? The legal system at point A, where the crime was actually being committed, or the legal system at point B, where the target or victim of the crime is located? When dealing with the U.S., there's a general impression that it's always in the U.S. regardless of who did what where, and to be honest, there's a pretty good foundation for that impression. Cases like this don't help.
In this sense, I do not blame the British people for not wanting American "justice" slamming down on one of their own citizens. If I were British, I'd be fighting tooth and nail against this extradition, too. Not so much because I care for this particular individual, but because I wouldn't want to be extradited because I supposedly committed a crime in some other country from the comfort of the living room of my suburban castle thousands of miles away.
Last 4 digits of your credit card? If the system allows you to retry infinitely, it's a matter of try and error. 10000 attempts, tops. Trivial to do for an automated system. Last name of your teacher/Mother's maiden name? Trivial for anyone who knows you, and if you don't care for the account you want, send the most common names against as many accounts as you can get your hands on.
I find it amusing that people answer these questions honestly. My mother's maiden name was Johnson. A lot of people who know me know this. I think that it's silly that me telling anyone this could be considered a security risk. It's probably easily found out in public records that anyone can access.
That's why when anyone ever asks me, "For security purposes in case you lose your account information, what is your mother's maiden name?" I answer, "Brigadoon." That way if someone who knows me decides to have a good laugh on ol' Skippus and they call up some owner of an account I have and they ask, "Okay, for security purposes, what is your mother's maiden name?" and they answer, "Johnson," they will not be allowed access to whatever it was they were trying to get access to.
I have a list of stock answers to questions such as my mother's maiden name, my high school, my favorite pet's name, my favorite sports team, etc. Most of them are related. My mother's maiden name is Brigadoon. My high school was good ol' BHS. My favorite pet was Brigadot. My favorite team is the Brigands. You get the idea.
Of course, I've also lied about almost everything in this post. My mother's maiden name really isn't Johnson, and the name I give everyone isn't really Brigadoon, but the part about lying on those forms and using meta-passwords is true, and I highly encourage everyone else to do the same. Using actual facts or experiences that aren't so intimately personal that I wouldn't be telling anyone anyway as a security checkpoint is pretty damn stupid.
They pay for the damages you caused in an accident with the money from everybody else paying who did not get into an accident.
Ha! Are you really that naive?
No, that is only what they tell you they are doing. In reality, they are taking everyone's money, keeping billions of it for themselves, and hiring people whose sole jobs are to screw you out of receiving anything for legitimate claims.
I'm not exaggerating, and I'm not kidding. It is a dirty and corrupt industry.
Just for the record, I wasn't really ranting at you, I was ranting at the insurance companies. I didn't mean you any ill will, though it looks like that might have been my intention in my post.
Insurance is a really fucking good idea if you drive and could face effectively unlimited liability if you kill or, worse, injure someone.
Actually, if you do something to be liable for killing or seriously injuring someone, it's pretty damn likely that insurance won't help you.
Get out your policy. Go ahead, I'll wait. Now read it carefully. Somewhere buried in there is the maximum amount of money the insurance company will pay for such a claim. Now go look up how much plaintiffs win when you're held liable for someone dying or getting maimed, and compare it to the first number. If you kill or main someone, you're pretty much going to declare bankruptcy unless you're Bill Gates, pure and simple, and there's not a damn thing having insurance will do for you.
What insurance is good for is one thing and one thing only: To handle things between minor fender benders up to totaling a car and/or covering relatively minor injuries to others or major ones to yourself. Anything past that and you're screwed. Anything less than that, and you're better off simply paying out of your own pocket because of how much higher your premiums will be.
In case you don't know this yet, insurance is a scam. It sounds nice in theory, but it's legalized gambling with a twist--you're betting money on something bad happening instead of something good. Just like in a casino, in which the house always comes out ahead, the insurance companies will always come out ahead, too. There's actually a special word for people who make sure this stays true, they're called actuaries. Add up all of the money you--and your employer, on your behalf--have paid over the years for insurance, and imagine how far that money would have gone had you paid it into, I dunno, a mutual fund or something instead of paying for actuaries and marble-halled buildings. You might actually be able to pay off a large liability claim if you had.
And now, a lot of states have mandatory automobile insurance laws on the books. Do you live in one? I do, and I remember when it went into effect. If you do, have your premiums gone down because so many more people are now paying into the system and because there are so fewer uninsured motorists on the roads now? Yeah, mine haven't either. Funny how that works, isn't it? Again, it sounds nice in theory, but in reality, these laws are just a blatant money grab by insurance companies to use police power to force you to pay them money. Like I said, the industry as a whole is a scam.
No, we aren't at version 4. We're at less-that-three-weeks of a new product that happens to have a 4 in its name. The fact that it bears some resemblance and has many similar features to other products with things like "3Gs" in their name does not mean it's the fourth version of a product.
God, remind me never to drink any milk at your house.
...Which brings us back to the "for now" part of the comment.
If you're a camcorder manufacturer, chances are you're using H.264 (and paying licensing fees to do so) precisely because it's convenient for people to upload to YouTube and otherwise muck with the video without having to transcode it. If that changes because YouTube and other mainstream sites and software support VP8, and you have the ability to offer consumers the option of doing the same thing without paying licensing fees by encoding in VP8, you'll likely do so to increase your profit margin.
Your logic here supports the chicken-and-egg scenario that MPEG is praying for: manufacturers unwilling to support a format not in common use, and a format won't get in common use because manufacturers won't support it. As Google and other companies break the cycle by convincing people that the format will come into common support, manufacturers will be more willing to jump on board, bringing consumers with them.
So is there no room in your universe for both to be wrong? And given the "they made that up" nature of the GP, are you insinuating that people today are making up stuff McCarthy did? 'Cause for the record, in reality, that was one evil dude.
In spite of your post being significantly trollish, I'll actually reply.
It's called a standard. Maybe you've heard of it at some point in your life. If we apply your logic, then hey, if I want to use the Mayan calendar in my correspondence, then that's perfectly valid and okay, right? Come to think of it, why are we so locked into this whole IP addressing thing where some people use four octets and a few zany forward-thinkers use 128-bit addresses? I want my IP addresses to be three base-seven numbers between 4 and 61 (that's 43 in decimal), followed by six base 10 numbers with arbitrary precision, but that must be odd.
Unlike text, where people around the world use different glyphs to represent the sounds they make (some of which are unique to their particular language or dialect), pretty much everyone everywhere except maybe the Bushmen of the Kalahari* uses the exact same calendar and time intervals. Why would all of those people need dozens of ways to express the exact same information? Worse, some ways can be ambiguous, completely dependent on which system you're using. Is 6/2 June second, or is it February 6? Or take a date like 12/4/10. Is it:
December fourth, 2010?
April twelfth, 2010?
April tenth, 2012?
October fourth, 2012?
If you come up with some new system that has only ten month or that divides the day into different time increments, then by all means, come up with whatever standard you want for the semantic representation of it. When throngs of people then proceed to ignore you and use their own methods that all conflict with each other, maybe then you'll understand that that's a pretty stupid way of doing things.
*Really, I'm not sure about the Bushmen. For all I know, they use the same calendar everyone else does, too. They're actually pretty smart and resourceful.
As far as I'm concerned, there is one and only one Correct Way(TM) to write a date or date/time. It is:
2010-06-21 15:37:21 (Which is the exact date and time in UTC that I typed that.)
You go from most general (year) to most specific (seconds). Always write times in 24-hour format, and always include leading zeroes. Why is that the Correct Way(TM)? Because when you ASCII-alphabetize a list of such dates and times, they will sort into the correct chronological order.
I guess the 21/6 rationale is that some people call it "the twenty-first of June." Those people are wrong. It is "June twenty-first," or if you prefer, "June twenty-one." Do those people call the time "the thirty-seventh of three p.m."? I think not.
If you really want to get fancy, you can use alternative separators. 2010.06.21 15:37:21 is fine. Or if you're into saving space (like in a script or program), just 20100621153721 works, too. The Oracle format for that is 'YYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI:SS'. I use the same format for storing dates in MySQL and SQLite. Whenever I write a timestamp to a log file, I use that format so that the GNU sort command works on it. Whenever I name a file with a date in it, I use the format so that sane operating systems that sort files by name will also sort it chronologically. When I put dates/datetimes in something like Excel, I also use the format in case someone ever exports the file to a text file or to a CSV or something.
I really, really do wish that everyone would stop using all other crazy date/datetime formats.
It kind of reminds me of how, I can't remember who it was, but one of the early developers of protocols said that he regretted making hostnames things like mail.google.com. It really should have been com.google.mail. Think about it; it looks weird now, but if that were the way it worked and you had a ginormous list of FQDNs and sorted it, all your top-level domains would collate together, followed by all of your company names collating together. com.google.docs, com.google.mail, com,google.maps, com.google.www would all be together, instead of mail.google.com, mail.yahoo.com, mail.whatever.com all globbing up. It would also really make it hard for phishers who use URL munging to mislead people.
I killed it, too, but mainly because of the rules of the game in which I get first crack at the answer.
Still, I think the point is that it's impressive the number of questions it gets right. I really didn't miss very many. My mental tally had it getting around 70% or so, which is pretty damn good. I got around 80%, but again, I had first crack at the answer, so Watson could have only possibly scored around 20% of the answers at best. If it tallied your score and Watson's score without actually competing head-to-head, that probably would have been a more interesting challenge. Keep in mind that as a computer, if the programmers chose to do so, they could probably have Watson answering everything pretty much simultaneously. Also, Jeopardy! is a lot about timing, hitting that button as soon as the buttons are unlocked, so in that respect, Watson probably really could kick ass in that its reaction time will always be faster than yours.
Just because I won doesn't make the technology not interesting or significant. Frankly, I'm impressed that it's even able to answer 20% of the questions expressed in natural language correctly.
The problem is that sometimes there are gray areas.
Where I used to work, they provided us with BlackBerries. However, they also had a plan where you paid the company $15 per month, and you could use it as your personal phone as well. Unlimited minutes, unlimited data, it seemed like a pretty good deal. Even if they monitored text messages and such, it's not like my messages were racy or too terribly private.
Then they locked out Gmail. Oh, and they blocked MMS messages. And prevented me from installing apps on it.
At that point, I bought an iPhone. Yes, I'm paying a hell of a lot more than $15 per month for it, and I no longer get unlimited minutes. Still, my freedom to do whatever I want with the device and knowing that Big Brother isn't watching me* is worth the extra money.
*Well, at least one less Big Brother. Uncle Steve still wants to keep me safe from myself.:-/
Sorry for the double post, but I did want to say a few more important things.
I don't mean to imply that all IT security people are on power trips. I know a lot of them, and my job has me working with them a lot. Most are fine, upstanding, ethical people. A lot don't like doing what they are mandated to do by their corporate overlords. Most only do so as much as they have to.
But they're a bit like cops, as most cops are fine, upstanding, ethical people. Still, there are a few who really get off on how much access and control they have, and they use it every chance they get. They're the ones who like to brag to me, "Watch how I can access this random Schmo's desktop. See? They don't even know I'm doing it!"
I'm also not pretending like there should be zero interference with the network. I'm painfully aware of the problems that viruses, trojans, worms, phishing scams, etc. pose. The only reason I would ever advocate having a content filter is for that purpose only, blocking sites that are literally dangerous to be accessing, stuff like malware sites. I'm also for virus scanning, as that's a necessary evil as some people still do stupid things and not 100% of security threats can be caught.
What I object to, though, is this philosophy that we have to protect companies from people wasting valuable time or productivity. That's not IT's job, that's management's job. If I want to check my e-mail from work, there's no reason why I shouldn't be able to check my damn e-mail. I also carry a smart phone and an iPad, so you really can't keep from from checking my e-mail anyway. (Or for that matter, goofing off with the many, many games that are available to me. Or for that matter, even--gasp!--browsing porn!)
I'm just sick of companies spending stupid amounts of money to save pennies in productivity and grossly violate people's reasonable expectation of privacy. It's not right, and given the GP's defense of such policies, it sounds like he has already drunk the corporate kool-aid.
You know, I'm SO sick of the total bullshit line of reasoning that people like you keep giving for gross violations of our privacy, not to mention keeping people like me from doing my job.
Okay, so your company has a policy of not allowing me to browse porn on the Internet, woohoo. Why is it that you jump to the conclusion that the only way to make sure this doesn't happen is to monitor every single web site that I browse? Why can't you just have a policy of, hey, if management has some reason to think that KingSkippus might be up to something, then look for something fishy?
Ponder this. I'm pretty sure that my company also wouldn't like me browsing porn magazines at work. They'd probably get quite irate if, in the middle of the day, I pulled a Hustler out and started flipping through those oh-so-sweet pages. So is the only answer now to have security guards posted at every door to pore through all of my possessions as I come and go, making sure that I have no porn in my physical possessions? I also carry a 4 GB USB drive everywhere I go with some basic troubleshooting tools and electronic copies of documents that I like to have on me at all times. Every time I enter the building, should I be strip searched and, when such a thing is found, every file inspected to make sure that I don't have dirty pictures on it?
No, the whole "We must monitor EVERYTHING!" is just a BS policy made because people like you get off on your power trip.
Legally, it's really simple. You create a policy that says that if you're caught browsing porn on the Internet, you get fired. Managers back it up with action by, when people are caught browsing porn, they fire the person who was doing it. There's no need for stupid ass content filters, treating everyone like they're 13 year olds, to ensure this policy, any more than there's a need for strip searches or searches of all physicial possessions. If a company gets sued--and make no mistake, they will get sued no matter what policy they have--they show the judge the policy and their record of upholding it, and that's that.
I defy you to actually cite these throngs of "all sorts of lawsuits from sexual harrassment to violation of ethics laws," especially the ones where the court found a company liable because they didn't have a content filter in place with people like you watching everything everyone is doing instead of enforcing the policy when violations were reasonably found Big Brother-style. As long as we're talking anecdotally, you know who I've heard does the most browsing of porn on the Internet? High-level management. True story: at the company where I work, most of the executives have been given explicit exemption from our content filters. As for the "ethics laws" joke, discover the wonderful world of "situational ethics" and then explain to how you're protecting a company that deliberately puts a clause that says, "From time to time, the firm may waive certain provisions of this Code" in its Code.
The truth of the matter is that my company spends WAY more on content filters and salaries for people to set them up and monitor them, not to mention the cost to the business when they break and the Internet becomes completely unavailable, than it would on bogus lawsuits that would have been brought anyway. The whole "you need content filtering to protect you" is a scam perpetrated by content filtering companies and people like you who would probably lose your job if management figured out the truth and actually cared. (And, more importantly, did their job of dealing with these issues instead of foisting them on the IT group.)
Back in the mid-90s, my boss read an article that explained about how login scripts could be used on Windows 3.11 to do things like delete Solitaire and Minesweeper and replace the desktop background with a forced company standard. The next thing I
Slashdot Mirror
I was curious about this, so I asked a friend who is natively multilingual in German and English. Here is what he had to say:
I'm pretty sure Google has lawyers. Furthermore, I'm pretty sure they were involved in the firing of this guy.
I think it's pretty silly and disingenuous to suggest that anyone, especially a company, should report unethical behavior to the authorities and let them sort it out whether or not it's illegal, especially when it's pretty likely that it's not. Again, we're not talking about someone stealing credit card numbers, which is clearly a crime. (And which, if I'm not mistaken, would require them to report the activity.)
Or put another way, if you gave your diary to a buddy to hold onto and expected him not to read it, and later you found out he did and used some of the information to embarrass you, would you call the cops? Just how far do you think you'd get in prosecuting that case with no damages incurred?
Referred for what? As far as I can tell, the guy didn't do anything illegal. Creepy? Oh, hell, yeah, but illegal?
Fact is, I know that when I send and receive e-mail via Google, there are people in the company that has access to that stuff. I run a few web sites myself, and I hope that people understand that with root access to the server, I have access to everything they do, also. I even go so far as to point that out now and then. But I'm a pretty nice guy, and apparently I'm trustworthy enough for them to believe that I won't use their data for evil. (And I diligently try to live up to that reputation.) I haven't read it in detail, but I'd be very surprised if it doesn't explicitly tell you that in the Terms of Service when you sign up for these services.
What we have here is basically a case of a guy who essentially read some people's diary and used the content within to bug them. If he used the information to lure them into having sex, I'd be right there with you in wanting him thrown in jail. That's not the case. The article even specifically mentioned that he did it to one person with their consent while they were actually watching him to show off his level of access to the systems.
I could be wrong, but I don't think that reading someone's diary is illegal, especially when they hand it to you to keep for them. Or at least, if it is, I seriously doubt much would come of it. I strongly suspect that any competent prosecutor would tell you, "I have murderers, rapists, and even worse--music, movie, and software pirates!--to go after; I don't have time for this."
What Google did was altogether appropriate, and frankly, probably far worse than reporting him to the authorities. They took away his paycheck (which in this economy is no small punishment) and arguably worse, they took away his sweet, sweet access. The guy can't brag to his family and friends any more that he works at Google. He sure as hell can't show off how much trust they have in him to allow him unlimited access to their most trusted data.
I see here that there are people who are so desperate to take Google down a few pegs that they want to take everything crummy individuals do as being representative of the company itself. I think that's a shame. Google's history with the good of consumers has an excellent record, MUCH better than most companies, and they have changed literally entire industries for the better. Their informal "do no evil" slogan should be encouraged and lauded, not picked apart at every opportunity, especially over stuff they have little or no control over. They set a very high standard for themselves, and just because they pick a bad apple now and then, far fewer than most companies, doesn't mean that they're not still a reputable, highly regarded company.
No, because it makes it easier for you to use your content that you paid for with your hard-earned cash the way you want to instead of how some third party who doesn't have your best interest at heart (and who only wants to get their greedy fingers on the aforementioned hard-earned cash, whether they've earned it or not) would like to make you pay for it over and over for making personal copies, displaying on alternate devices, etc.
The ability to infringe copyright is simply a side effect. Yes, some people may use it for that purpose. I won't.
When they invented the car, are you the type that sarcastically would have said, "Because it's always good to make it easier to to get away after robbing a bank. What other law-breaking things can we invent? Maybe someone should add sound to our good ol' silent films so that people can break the law by singing copyrighted songs."
...the woman with the beer and cigarettes in the photograph said.
(Giving her the benefit of a doubt, maybe quitting her job will ease her stress and allow her to quit smoking as well, in which case it would be literally true instead of ironic.)
...but damn if stuff like this doesn't make me want to go out and buy some of their albums, even if I just give them away, to support what they're doing.
I think you misunderstood my point.
Here in the United States, we see stories like this and think (mainly because it's the reaction the media is eliciting), "What a godforsaken narrow-minded place!" when in fact, our own government is doing much worse to us.
My point was twofold. First, people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. Second, to try to help bring a little awareness to the abuses of our own government. It really wasn't mean as a judgment on India or Saudi Arabia, it could have been any country/countries.
Can you believe the unmitigated nerve of those crappy little backwards countries and their oppressive Big Brother-ish monitoring of their citizens!!? Thank god nothing like this could ever happen in the United States, where we actually give a rat's ass about protecting our privacy from the government!
Oh, wait... Well, shit.
I'm not going to argue with you. If you want to continue writing like a six-year-old (and conveying that level of intelligence to others), then by all means, please do revel in your choice.
How about because it's wrong?
By your logic, do you spell the word "done" as dun, like bun and fun, just to rigorously adhere to convention? Or do you pronounce it as a homonym of "lone" and "phone" (oops, I mean "fone")?
How do you conjugate the verb "to be"? I be, he bes, yesterday I bed (pronounced "beed," of course), etc.? Or do you go against convention like 99.9% of the rest of us and use its common conjugation of I am, he is, yesterday I was?
I'm sorry, but I find your "it goes against convention!" argument completely uncompelling. Using "it's" as a possessive pronoun is just plain incorrect, just as incorrect as the above examples. The good news is that when you do it, most people know what you're talking about, just as if you typed a sentence "I be dun" instead of "I am done." The bad news is that just like typing that first sentence, you kind of look stupid when you do so.
I think the precise moment I died inside was when it started airing wrestling.
I don't think there's much argument over whether the guy should be punished. The argument is over how severely he should be punished, given that he 1) didn't cause any damage, 2) wasn't acting out of malice, and 3) was at least accomplish what he did in large part due to the incompetence of those who are, in theory, supposed to be competent in protecting themselves from such attacks.
What people are worried about is that he is going to have the book thrown at him not because of the merits of what his actions deserve, but because he caused a national embarrassment and those who prosecuted him want to use him as an example, a deterrence to others.
Plus, there's a legitimate question of jurisdiction. If I commit a crime at point A against someone at point B that is thousands of miles away, who gets to decide what the punishment is? The legal system at point A, where the crime was actually being committed, or the legal system at point B, where the target or victim of the crime is located? When dealing with the U.S., there's a general impression that it's always in the U.S. regardless of who did what where, and to be honest, there's a pretty good foundation for that impression. Cases like this don't help.
In this sense, I do not blame the British people for not wanting American "justice" slamming down on one of their own citizens. If I were British, I'd be fighting tooth and nail against this extradition, too. Not so much because I care for this particular individual, but because I wouldn't want to be extradited because I supposedly committed a crime in some other country from the comfort of the living room of my suburban castle thousands of miles away.
I find it amusing that people answer these questions honestly. My mother's maiden name was Johnson. A lot of people who know me know this. I think that it's silly that me telling anyone this could be considered a security risk. It's probably easily found out in public records that anyone can access.
That's why when anyone ever asks me, "For security purposes in case you lose your account information, what is your mother's maiden name?" I answer, "Brigadoon." That way if someone who knows me decides to have a good laugh on ol' Skippus and they call up some owner of an account I have and they ask, "Okay, for security purposes, what is your mother's maiden name?" and they answer, "Johnson," they will not be allowed access to whatever it was they were trying to get access to.
I have a list of stock answers to questions such as my mother's maiden name, my high school, my favorite pet's name, my favorite sports team, etc. Most of them are related. My mother's maiden name is Brigadoon. My high school was good ol' BHS. My favorite pet was Brigadot. My favorite team is the Brigands. You get the idea.
Of course, I've also lied about almost everything in this post. My mother's maiden name really isn't Johnson, and the name I give everyone isn't really Brigadoon, but the part about lying on those forms and using meta-passwords is true, and I highly encourage everyone else to do the same. Using actual facts or experiences that aren't so intimately personal that I wouldn't be telling anyone anyway as a security checkpoint is pretty damn stupid.
Ha! Are you really that naive?
No, that is only what they tell you they are doing. In reality, they are taking everyone's money, keeping billions of it for themselves, and hiring people whose sole jobs are to screw you out of receiving anything for legitimate claims.
I'm not exaggerating, and I'm not kidding. It is a dirty and corrupt industry.
Just for the record, I wasn't really ranting at you, I was ranting at the insurance companies. I didn't mean you any ill will, though it looks like that might have been my intention in my post.
Actually, if you do something to be liable for killing or seriously injuring someone, it's pretty damn likely that insurance won't help you.
Get out your policy. Go ahead, I'll wait. Now read it carefully. Somewhere buried in there is the maximum amount of money the insurance company will pay for such a claim. Now go look up how much plaintiffs win when you're held liable for someone dying or getting maimed, and compare it to the first number. If you kill or main someone, you're pretty much going to declare bankruptcy unless you're Bill Gates, pure and simple, and there's not a damn thing having insurance will do for you.
What insurance is good for is one thing and one thing only: To handle things between minor fender benders up to totaling a car and/or covering relatively minor injuries to others or major ones to yourself. Anything past that and you're screwed. Anything less than that, and you're better off simply paying out of your own pocket because of how much higher your premiums will be.
In case you don't know this yet, insurance is a scam. It sounds nice in theory, but it's legalized gambling with a twist--you're betting money on something bad happening instead of something good. Just like in a casino, in which the house always comes out ahead, the insurance companies will always come out ahead, too. There's actually a special word for people who make sure this stays true, they're called actuaries. Add up all of the money you--and your employer, on your behalf--have paid over the years for insurance, and imagine how far that money would have gone had you paid it into, I dunno, a mutual fund or something instead of paying for actuaries and marble-halled buildings. You might actually be able to pay off a large liability claim if you had.
And now, a lot of states have mandatory automobile insurance laws on the books. Do you live in one? I do, and I remember when it went into effect. If you do, have your premiums gone down because so many more people are now paying into the system and because there are so fewer uninsured motorists on the roads now? Yeah, mine haven't either. Funny how that works, isn't it? Again, it sounds nice in theory, but in reality, these laws are just a blatant money grab by insurance companies to use police power to force you to pay them money. Like I said, the industry as a whole is a scam.
God, remind me never to drink any milk at your house.
...Which brings us back to the "for now" part of the comment.
If you're a camcorder manufacturer, chances are you're using H.264 (and paying licensing fees to do so) precisely because it's convenient for people to upload to YouTube and otherwise muck with the video without having to transcode it. If that changes because YouTube and other mainstream sites and software support VP8, and you have the ability to offer consumers the option of doing the same thing without paying licensing fees by encoding in VP8, you'll likely do so to increase your profit margin.
Your logic here supports the chicken-and-egg scenario that MPEG is praying for: manufacturers unwilling to support a format not in common use, and a format won't get in common use because manufacturers won't support it. As Google and other companies break the cycle by convincing people that the format will come into common support, manufacturers will be more willing to jump on board, bringing consumers with them.
So is there no room in your universe for both to be wrong? And given the "they made that up" nature of the GP, are you insinuating that people today are making up stuff McCarthy did? 'Cause for the record, in reality, that was one evil dude.
In spite of your post being significantly trollish, I'll actually reply.
It's called a standard. Maybe you've heard of it at some point in your life. If we apply your logic, then hey, if I want to use the Mayan calendar in my correspondence, then that's perfectly valid and okay, right? Come to think of it, why are we so locked into this whole IP addressing thing where some people use four octets and a few zany forward-thinkers use 128-bit addresses? I want my IP addresses to be three base-seven numbers between 4 and 61 (that's 43 in decimal), followed by six base 10 numbers with arbitrary precision, but that must be odd.
Unlike text, where people around the world use different glyphs to represent the sounds they make (some of which are unique to their particular language or dialect), pretty much everyone everywhere except maybe the Bushmen of the Kalahari* uses the exact same calendar and time intervals. Why would all of those people need dozens of ways to express the exact same information? Worse, some ways can be ambiguous, completely dependent on which system you're using. Is 6/2 June second, or is it February 6? Or take a date like 12/4/10. Is it:
If you come up with some new system that has only ten month or that divides the day into different time increments, then by all means, come up with whatever standard you want for the semantic representation of it. When throngs of people then proceed to ignore you and use their own methods that all conflict with each other, maybe then you'll understand that that's a pretty stupid way of doing things.
*Really, I'm not sure about the Bushmen. For all I know, they use the same calendar everyone else does, too. They're actually pretty smart and resourceful.
As far as I'm concerned, there is one and only one Correct Way(TM) to write a date or date/time. It is:
2010-06-21 15:37:21 (Which is the exact date and time in UTC that I typed that.)
You go from most general (year) to most specific (seconds). Always write times in 24-hour format, and always include leading zeroes. Why is that the Correct Way(TM)? Because when you ASCII-alphabetize a list of such dates and times, they will sort into the correct chronological order.
I guess the 21/6 rationale is that some people call it "the twenty-first of June." Those people are wrong. It is "June twenty-first," or if you prefer, "June twenty-one." Do those people call the time "the thirty-seventh of three p.m."? I think not.
If you really want to get fancy, you can use alternative separators. 2010.06.21 15:37:21 is fine. Or if you're into saving space (like in a script or program), just 20100621153721 works, too. The Oracle format for that is 'YYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI:SS'. I use the same format for storing dates in MySQL and SQLite. Whenever I write a timestamp to a log file, I use that format so that the GNU sort command works on it. Whenever I name a file with a date in it, I use the format so that sane operating systems that sort files by name will also sort it chronologically. When I put dates/datetimes in something like Excel, I also use the format in case someone ever exports the file to a text file or to a CSV or something.
I really, really do wish that everyone would stop using all other crazy date/datetime formats.
It kind of reminds me of how, I can't remember who it was, but one of the early developers of protocols said that he regretted making hostnames things like mail.google.com. It really should have been com.google.mail. Think about it; it looks weird now, but if that were the way it worked and you had a ginormous list of FQDNs and sorted it, all your top-level domains would collate together, followed by all of your company names collating together. com.google.docs, com.google.mail, com,google.maps, com.google.www would all be together, instead of mail.google.com, mail.yahoo.com, mail.whatever.com all globbing up. It would also really make it hard for phishers who use URL munging to mislead people.
I killed it, too, but mainly because of the rules of the game in which I get first crack at the answer.
Still, I think the point is that it's impressive the number of questions it gets right. I really didn't miss very many. My mental tally had it getting around 70% or so, which is pretty damn good. I got around 80%, but again, I had first crack at the answer, so Watson could have only possibly scored around 20% of the answers at best. If it tallied your score and Watson's score without actually competing head-to-head, that probably would have been a more interesting challenge. Keep in mind that as a computer, if the programmers chose to do so, they could probably have Watson answering everything pretty much simultaneously. Also, Jeopardy! is a lot about timing, hitting that button as soon as the buttons are unlocked, so in that respect, Watson probably really could kick ass in that its reaction time will always be faster than yours.
Just because I won doesn't make the technology not interesting or significant. Frankly, I'm impressed that it's even able to answer 20% of the questions expressed in natural language correctly.
The problem is that sometimes there are gray areas.
Where I used to work, they provided us with BlackBerries. However, they also had a plan where you paid the company $15 per month, and you could use it as your personal phone as well. Unlimited minutes, unlimited data, it seemed like a pretty good deal. Even if they monitored text messages and such, it's not like my messages were racy or too terribly private.
Then they locked out Gmail. Oh, and they blocked MMS messages. And prevented me from installing apps on it.
At that point, I bought an iPhone. Yes, I'm paying a hell of a lot more than $15 per month for it, and I no longer get unlimited minutes. Still, my freedom to do whatever I want with the device and knowing that Big Brother isn't watching me* is worth the extra money.
*Well, at least one less Big Brother. Uncle Steve still wants to keep me safe from myself. :-/
Sorry for the double post, but I did want to say a few more important things.
I don't mean to imply that all IT security people are on power trips. I know a lot of them, and my job has me working with them a lot. Most are fine, upstanding, ethical people. A lot don't like doing what they are mandated to do by their corporate overlords. Most only do so as much as they have to.
But they're a bit like cops, as most cops are fine, upstanding, ethical people. Still, there are a few who really get off on how much access and control they have, and they use it every chance they get. They're the ones who like to brag to me, "Watch how I can access this random Schmo's desktop. See? They don't even know I'm doing it!"
I'm also not pretending like there should be zero interference with the network. I'm painfully aware of the problems that viruses, trojans, worms, phishing scams, etc. pose. The only reason I would ever advocate having a content filter is for that purpose only, blocking sites that are literally dangerous to be accessing, stuff like malware sites. I'm also for virus scanning, as that's a necessary evil as some people still do stupid things and not 100% of security threats can be caught.
What I object to, though, is this philosophy that we have to protect companies from people wasting valuable time or productivity. That's not IT's job, that's management's job. If I want to check my e-mail from work, there's no reason why I shouldn't be able to check my damn e-mail. I also carry a smart phone and an iPad, so you really can't keep from from checking my e-mail anyway. (Or for that matter, goofing off with the many, many games that are available to me. Or for that matter, even--gasp!--browsing porn!)
I'm just sick of companies spending stupid amounts of money to save pennies in productivity and grossly violate people's reasonable expectation of privacy. It's not right, and given the GP's defense of such policies, it sounds like he has already drunk the corporate kool-aid.
You know, I'm SO sick of the total bullshit line of reasoning that people like you keep giving for gross violations of our privacy, not to mention keeping people like me from doing my job.
Okay, so your company has a policy of not allowing me to browse porn on the Internet, woohoo. Why is it that you jump to the conclusion that the only way to make sure this doesn't happen is to monitor every single web site that I browse? Why can't you just have a policy of, hey, if management has some reason to think that KingSkippus might be up to something, then look for something fishy?
Ponder this. I'm pretty sure that my company also wouldn't like me browsing porn magazines at work. They'd probably get quite irate if, in the middle of the day, I pulled a Hustler out and started flipping through those oh-so-sweet pages. So is the only answer now to have security guards posted at every door to pore through all of my possessions as I come and go, making sure that I have no porn in my physical possessions? I also carry a 4 GB USB drive everywhere I go with some basic troubleshooting tools and electronic copies of documents that I like to have on me at all times. Every time I enter the building, should I be strip searched and, when such a thing is found, every file inspected to make sure that I don't have dirty pictures on it?
No, the whole "We must monitor EVERYTHING!" is just a BS policy made because people like you get off on your power trip.
Legally, it's really simple. You create a policy that says that if you're caught browsing porn on the Internet, you get fired. Managers back it up with action by, when people are caught browsing porn, they fire the person who was doing it. There's no need for stupid ass content filters, treating everyone like they're 13 year olds, to ensure this policy, any more than there's a need for strip searches or searches of all physicial possessions. If a company gets sued--and make no mistake, they will get sued no matter what policy they have--they show the judge the policy and their record of upholding it, and that's that.
I defy you to actually cite these throngs of "all sorts of lawsuits from sexual harrassment to violation of ethics laws," especially the ones where the court found a company liable because they didn't have a content filter in place with people like you watching everything everyone is doing instead of enforcing the policy when violations were reasonably found Big Brother-style. As long as we're talking anecdotally, you know who I've heard does the most browsing of porn on the Internet? High-level management. True story: at the company where I work, most of the executives have been given explicit exemption from our content filters. As for the "ethics laws" joke, discover the wonderful world of "situational ethics" and then explain to how you're protecting a company that deliberately puts a clause that says, "From time to time, the firm may waive certain provisions of this Code" in its Code.
The truth of the matter is that my company spends WAY more on content filters and salaries for people to set them up and monitor them, not to mention the cost to the business when they break and the Internet becomes completely unavailable, than it would on bogus lawsuits that would have been brought anyway. The whole "you need content filtering to protect you" is a scam perpetrated by content filtering companies and people like you who would probably lose your job if management figured out the truth and actually cared. (And, more importantly, did their job of dealing with these issues instead of foisting them on the IT group.)
Back in the mid-90s, my boss read an article that explained about how login scripts could be used on Windows 3.11 to do things like delete Solitaire and Minesweeper and replace the desktop background with a forced company standard. The next thing I