So...if I sell Cisco gear, and it turns out that I wind up with counterfeit Cisco gear, they could argue that because I know what real Cisco gear looks like I should be able to identify any counterfeit Cisco gear.
Only with reasonable cause. If a counterfeit and a real cisco gear are identical or near identical by the of visual inspection one would reasonably do when shopping for that gear, then you are not liable.
If you find that you have reasonable cause to believe something is a counterfeit (or if one of your clients reports one to you), then you contact your supplier of the event. Hopefully at this point, you have all your bills, receipts and purchase orders in good order to demonstrate all your purchases have been done in good faith (so that no one can argue you bought your shit down a dark alley at 2AM from this dude showing the merchandise he has in his trunk.)
BTW, those receipts you get from a well-known supplier, those are documents that prove you bought what you thought was legitimate cisco gear. If you buy it from e-bay, you make print shots of the e-bay announcement that says the gear is legitimate, and you cross-reference that to the serial # of the equipment being sold/purchased.
If you are buying them directly from someone, in addition to asking for a receipt from them, you ask your supplier to sign a receipt of your own making where you state that on that date and time and on that location, you gave them X amount of money for Y amount of cisco gear and that the supplier signing therein assures the gear is legitimate.
That last piece is valuable in demonstrating that you completed the transaction to the letter of the law and that you acted in good faith. Having the supplier sign that puts the onus of counterfeit detection on him, not you.
Obviously, this is all excessive if you are buying gear for yourself. However, if you are buying gear with the intention of reselling, that is the minimum you must do, to protect yourself, and to uphold the letter of the law.
Obviously you will keep a log and incident paperwork showing you contacted the supplier regarding the counterfeit merchandise. If nothing comes out of it, then you contact Cisco, which most likely will also ask you to contact the local authorities.
In other words, you act in good faith and to the letter of the law when you discover you have counterfeit gear. As I understand it, that was not the case with the defendants in this case.
Then Cisco can come in and slap me for some unholy sum for "should have known".
See above.
I wonder how much they lose in sales due to cheap counterfit equipment.
Non sequitur.
I mean, arguably, someone buying a cheap counterfit is not likely to pay the full price for a real one, so it is pretty difficult to call all of it lost sales.
Still, non sequitur. Whether it's a $100 or a $1 a piece loss, it's a loss committed by robbery. Aside from that, there is no guarantee that a counterfeit will perform with the same quality as an original one. That on itself can hurt the reputation of cisco products.
So...now there is an active disincentive to protect your goods from counterfit. Instead of worrying about counterfit, they can just go sue the shit out of anyone selling counterfit to people who probably wouldn't have purchased an original anyways.
It does not follow that a person who bought a counterfeit did it on purpose. Does it?
Cisco has every right to sue you if you knowingly or carelessly
sold counterfeit gear, and/or
allowed your facility to cater individuals looking for counterfeit products on purpose.
You make sure you buy and sell legitimate gear (and you keep a paper trail that you do that in good faith as explained above), and when someone suggest to buy/sell counterfeit gear, you turned them away (and call t
What about all tje murders and other crimes that get committed while wearing Louis Vuitton apparel? Hmm? Does this mean we can hold them liable for it? After all, they have an obligation to stop any crimes that are committed using their product....
Dude, you suck at logic. Seriously.
I know what you are trying to argue for. Unfortunately, this particular example of yours failed miserably. Go back and re-read the case in question. If after doing that you still see parallels with that retarded example, then forget everything I just said. You are beyond hope.
Assigning QOS by user explicitly makes little sense. Not all traffic a person can generate should have the same priority.
An NSA military intelligence officer accessing a satellite mat should have greater priority than his commander surfing the net.
Well, no one is saying that QOS is to be assigned explicitly by user identity alone every single time and for all domain cases. I'm not sure exactly what on earth makes you think that's the argument, considering the following fragment in the second to the last paragraph in my previous post:
advanced prioritization (which the more I think about it, the more that it might be based on not only on identity and data type, but permissions)
Even w/o considering permissions, it's a fact that QOS is very likely a function of identity/role and data type.
So let me know what part of my previous posts sounded like an argument of assigning QOS by user identification explicitly as a general rule. Let's go back again to the points of contention:
Except in trivial cases, user identity is not a trivial thing. It's more often than not an architectural issue. In other words "it cannot be a hard problem" is an innacurate statement.
IPv6 QOS is still in the air, not to mention that there might be strategic reasons within a defense domain to create a new infrastructure as opposed to use IPv6.
IPv6 QOS only provides 7 levels of priority whereas the proposed solution will have 32.
For some aspects of a large system, user identity might be a composite value derived from information carried at both transport and application layers - uncommon but not impossible.
Priority might be assigned by user identity/role, data types and permissions (the later could be a function of other attributes such as time.)
Regarding your "NSA officer vs web-surfing commander", that's a bit silly example (assuming both are using the exact same infrastructure). Obviously here, priority is assigned by role AND by resource. A more interesting example is a NSA officer assigned to a case has a higher priority in pushing alerts down the pipeline than fellow NSA agents receiving general status updates.
This assignment can be implemented as a relationship to the case (and thus, indirectly a function of the agent's identity) or purely as a direct function of his identity. One cannot say that one is better than the other without knowing the specific domain, the specific context in which such an implementation takes place.
There are similar priorities in term of access that can also occur in other domains.ie. "primary care physician" relationship between an identifiable entity with a "doctor" role and a patient. This is an explicit priority/access right assigned from one identity to another under a given role.
Perhaps the word you want to use is "exclusively" instead of "explicitly".
Assigning priority by user *cannot* be a hard problem, because anything you'd do to make it more than trivial would make it impossible.
The options are essentially:
User == source address
or:
User is embedded in packets
because if you don't either know who the user is explicitly or provide some sort of mapping from "user" to "something discrete already in the packet" there's no way to determine the user for arbitrary traffic.
And once you've established which user sent a packet assigning the priority is just a table lookup, which is something routers are already pretty good at.
Well, if you paint all user-mapping problems in such a generic way, then obviously that problem *cannot* be that hard.
Determining who the user is when you know a-priori that it is at the network layer (user == address) or at the transport/application layer (user identifiers within the packets) is vacuously easy, ergo irrelevant. In fact, it's not even part of the overall problem.
In certain domains, a user might be a composite of it's source address and additional user information within the packets. Also, a user might have one or more roles (in a RBAC model) and/or relationships (in a ReBAC model) which might also be a function of source address and user info embedded in packets (and perhaps even by destination address.)
Generically speaking, yeah, it's not a *hard* problem. Put that in the context of a specific, non-trivial architecture, and then we are talking about potentially very complex problems.
Even if user identity is not a hard problem, that still does not cover the other problems that this specific project is trying to investigate : advanced prioritization (which the more I think about it, the more that it might be based on not only on identity and data type, but permissions), authentication, authorization, confidentiality, integrity, availability, perhaps even fault-based attributes according to other attributes (fail-safe, fail-deadly and all that stuff).
$11M to reimplement IPv6 QOS. I suppose it's a bit more advanced since it makes QOS determination based on users or groups, but that doesn't seem that difficult.
Consider me unimpressed.
Dude, there might be strategic/tactical decisions for deciding explicitly not to use IPv6. Notice that I'm not saying that those strategic/tactical decisions are necessarily valid for long-term maintenance, extensibility or external compatibility (the later of which might even be undesirable from a strategic/tactical POV.)
The road of technical divergence can either take you to innovation or to a complete technical fiasco. That fork is many times not only dependent on technical merits alone. Besides, iirc, IPv6 QOS is still as of yet to be developed (not a criticism mind you). It supports only 7 priority levels whereas the proposed technology will support 32 levels. A typical military subnet, with stationary and mobile units, all of them plugged and receiving feeds from a bunch of disparate devices might never need more than 7 or 8, but as you start plugging those nets together, you can (and will) easily require a finer priority granularity than that.
Add to that the ability to determine priority by user or groups, and the problem cannot be dismissed as "meh, should not be that difficult." There might be other defense-specific requirements that we might not know (.ie. limiting jumbopackets by priority or origin.)
Besides, this is being researched by DARPA, the harbinger of ARPANET and MQ-Predator, not some 2009 rendition of kozmo.com.
I know that here on/. we like to fling turds at the government's white elephants, but c'mon. There must likely be be good technical/domain-specific reasons (or at least good enough) for an entity like DARPA to perform research on it, reasons beyond the ones that might impress you.
You'll never, ever find a business which factors in the infrastructure items they depend upon because they are assumed to be there to be used, much like mana from heaven.
No. From the small to the large, they never have to factor those infrastructure items explicitly because they are already factored out as local, state and federal taxes in addition to a myriad other taxes that individuals do not have to pay, double taxation and all that. If infrastructure is paid by taxes, and if business pay their taxes, then they have already factor that out.
Consider also that the greatest users of infrastructure are not business, but individuals. For them, the rate of individual infrastructure usage is inversely proportional to the tax bracket they belong to. The larger your gross income, the larger the tax % you have to pay (while at the same time reducing your dependency on infrastructure.) OTH, the poorer you are, the less tax % you have to pay WHILE having to rely more on the infrastructure.
It's funny that people say "wealth owners these, wealth owners that", but fuck, wealth owners are also creators of wealth and employment, and they are the prime contributors in taxation, at a proportion larger than their proportion on total gross income. What else do you people want? Tax them more? (And thus reduce their total net income which is what is used to keep business [and employment] going?)
Equality is not just on wealth but on responsibility as well. This society already has a fair distribution of wealth and taxation. Social illnesses that we see today are of a cultural origin rather than "OMG, wealth owners!!!!"
but what happens when business controls most of the wealth of the society?
Uh, isn't that the general case, that business control most of the wealth in a society?
Who then plans, builds and maintains the infrastructure items necessary for business to function?
That's a government function.
No one.
Wrong. Government, with tax, most of it disproportionally obtained from wealth creators and disproportionally used by those least capable of paying taxes.
Nerdconomics might be cool to talk and post about, but they are fucking wrong by and large.
I still don't get it. Terabyte drives cost as much as my bi-weekly beer budget, and less every day. Computing power is off of Moore's Law, but is still increasing with multicore and multiprocessors. My computer doesn't have to be hooked up to the interweb to work, nor does it require a subscription to some website to keep rolling. If I want access to the web, I can get it, but that's only a few times a day when I need it.
So, what exactly does "cloud computing" bring to the table for me?
Not much as far as I can see, other than a new crop of buzzwords.
US Citizens don't have the right to go on military bases, and top secret facilities and publish pictures and information about what they see and the personnel.
That I agree with, but, the blogger wasn't going onto secret military facilities or compromising classified information. She was following public officials around as they executed their duties.
Let me get this straight. These public officials are members of a drug-related unit, whose work entail some pretty nasty, violent shit to be dealt (like homicide and sex crime units). And you do not think that secrecy of movement for these units is necessary to reduce the risk of loss of life?
Just because a LEO is not under covered and that his info is in the public domain, that does not mean it is common knowledge. What happens if an informant or an undercovered agent get spotted with a LEO whose identity is now all over on a blog? How do you know that the constant surveillance which served no purpose other than satisfy this woman's political point can have nefarious consequences?
And how can you justify that this woman published a man's address, with pictures and all (even if that information is available should you pursue a process of discovery), in light that this is a LEO, and that as such is at risk, always at risk, for enforcing the law?
As the article notes, she was not charged with obstruction of justice or interference with an officer of the law. This implies that the police department did not have enough evidence to charge her under those laws. The fact that they had to rely on such a broadly worded statute to make their case highlights the weakness of their position.
She was not just writing a blog about police activities. She was putting DEA agents at risk by disclosing their operations and locations.
Again, if there was any evidence of that, the police department would have charged with obstruction of justice, not "identifying a police officer with intent to harass".
"Do not take things out of context! What the document says is companies might save some money if they hire foreigners on F-1 or J-1 visas. It is just so foreigners _who_study_in_the_United_States_ can find a job since employers seem to be under the impression that hiring a foreigner is a hassle."
With the way the recession is currently in the US, it makes no sense for the US govt. to not only allow, but, in some cases expedite bringing foreigners in (or letting them in willy nilly across the border illegally) to fill jobs that our own citizens are in desperate need of...
I don't see that a state funded school should be allowed by the taxpayers of that state to promote the hiring of foreign people over US citizens either...that's not what my tax dollars should be going for...
"Do not take things out of context! What the document says is companies might save some money if they hire foreigners on F-1 or J-1 visas. It is just so foreigners _who_study_in_the_United_States_ can find a job since employers seem to be under the impression that hiring a foreigner is a hassle."
With the way the recession is currently in the US, it makes no sense for the US govt. to not only allow, but, in some cases expedite bringing foreigners in (or letting them in willy nilly across the border illegally) to fill jobs that our own citizens are in desperate need of...
I don't see that a state funded school should be allowed by the taxpayers of that state to promote the hiring of foreign people over US citizens either...that's not what my tax dollars should be going for...
If these so called foreigners are US graduates, and are as competent or perhaps even more so that their "native" counterparts, I don't see what the problem is. Almost every foreign student in a US grad school that I've known have come from 1) top notch undergrad schools in their home countries and are 2) among the creme-de-la-creme.
Now more than ever, as we not only have a recession, but also losing economic growth and scientific and industrial edge to other countries, it is this time, now that we need more Ajay Bhatt's and less Brilliant Paula's.
There is a difference between reasonable protectionism, specially on agriculture and certain types of blue collar manufacturing. It is quite another to go "ZOMG! YER TOOK MAH JAHB!" at importing top-notch scientific talent, and, why not, allow employers to reduce cost in new hiring, which allows to increase net profit and mitigate the risk of having to cut down on the employees they already have.
Your tax dollars should be going to promote the increase of talent in this country, be it native or imported. Worried that a company might hire foreign students over you? Then be better than them, scientifically, academically and technologically.
Understand this. It's not the average student that makes it to a grad school in this country. There are freaking tens of thousands competing academically. Only those with potential, more than the one demonstrated by many slashdoters, who get a visa to study here and get a scholarship based on merit. While most "natives" try to find ways to get a master without writing a thesis (if they ever get that far), these foreign students are the ones that write and publish papers.
Look at the top notch engineers in Lockheed Martin, Motorola, GD and the like. Guess what? They were once foreign students, foreigners who have contributed more to this country than the Im-a-taxpayer-yer-took-mah-johb crow. Most likely those same students are going to be the next inventors or professors (which is what this country need the most) as opposed to those that are currently worrying about losing their current jobs to the evil offshore dudes in Bangalore.
If you are an average professional, don't worry too much about competing
Except for the fact that guns are designed to shoot things. Honestly, I believe that disallowing non-violent felons from the right to bear arms or any other constitutional right is wrong, but social networks are simply talking, and honestly, you can't be molested online, despite what some people might think.
You still haven't answered my question: how much time and effort does it take from you to keep your finances in check?
And one popular definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and getting the same results or lack thereof.
It is so popular people mangles it in the process of quoting it:
"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results" - Einstein.
There is also something called prevention. It's called being pro-active. Repetition by itself, even if results remain the same fit those definitions. We do the same thing every day (go to work) and we get the same results (get paid.) You set up the alarm every day before locking the door, etc etc etc.
If you live in a country where personal lines of credit are a fact of life, where credit records have a risk of getting mixed up, and (moreover since we are in/.) there are real risks of identity theft, does checking and fixing (or requesting to fix) your credit records on an ongoing basis, even if you do not expect the root causes of those problems to disappear, does that constitute insanity?
Moreover, if you are in a case where your credit records are mixed up on a regular basis, and if they are so to a magnitude that YOU KNOW can and will severely affect your ability to do commerce or establish a line of credit, will it be insanity to constantly request for corrections, even if you know the root causes of the problem won't disappear, and that this has to be an ongoing process?
Now, this is a personal thing that you and everyone else has to gauge. Does it impact you enough that you have to take constant action? Does it really and truly take a significant fraction of your time? You make a cost/benefit calculation and you proceed from there. Is that insanity?
Sorry if you hadn't seen results when contacting Experian. My experience has been different - the experience of others I've personally know has been different. So I will leave it at that, that our anecdotal experiences have been different, and your anecdotal experience is not evidence that contacting credit bureaus is futile or that being pro-active in keeping an eye on one's credit report fits the definition of insanity. Non sequitur dude.
I'm not adverse to checking on the credit reports from time to time
Hmmm....
I hope you don't have a job or other life responsibilities that take up a significant fraction of your time.
So, you are "not adverse to checking on the credit reports from time to time", like, once a month? Once every three months? Like checking your bill and bank statements everytime they get to your mailbox for discrepancies, which is what sane, competent people with job and other life responsibilities do, and which does not take a significant fraction of your time? Kinda like that not-so-significant fraction of your time?
and, as I've mentioned, I've contacted Experian several times. Nobody's home.
Sorry to hear that's been your experience. Noticed that I've never it's easy or painless. But barring living in a country where personal lines of credit and a high rate of record mix ups and identity theft, that's what one needs to do.
I really don't think I need to escalate to threatening legal or legislative action to get these companies to be minimally functional, but that apparently is what it would take.
Only inasmuch as damage is done to you and the damage is sufficiently great to warrant litigation.
Lacking a major fuck up on their part, I've got better things to do. Like count my mythical pension....
That's sensible. After all, legal litigation is a tool intended for major fuck ups, not for petty things and minor annoyances that can be resolved with pro-active means of communication.
But this is America. And just like personal lines of credit, people take tools for legal litigation and whore them out.
ZOMG! BIG DEAL! Not really, they simply keep an eye on it, regularly check on it, and write to the credit bureaus every time there is a mix up.
Hi, this is reality talking: "I had a friend who had a negative item on his credit report. JD Byrider, used car dealership, had my friend's loan as a "write off". He showed it to me along with a receipt from JD Byrider showing that he paid it off in a lump sum. I figured, okay easy enough. We went to the dealership, showed them the receipt and the credit report. Dealerships says "we can't help you. the dealership is under new ownership and we can't access old records". Now, this is bullshit, because I guarantee they are still collecting on the old loans. So we file a dispute with the credit bureaus, including the receipt. All said and done, JD Byrider, with their system that cannot access old records tells the bureaus that it was a write-off.
Sue the dealership? Put the blame where the blame is (the dealership)?
Bureau sides with the dealership.
It has no choice. In this argument, it will side with the entity that as far as it knows possess an automated record tracking system (even if it's a shitty one), as opposed to the entity (you) for which has no way of knowing if it has a system of record keeping. Ludicrous as it might sound, that's how it is, and that's how YOU will operate if you had to arbitrate between two entities.
Your course of action is to go to court against the dealership.
If is a fucked up system.
That's why you have the legal system. Use it.
The Bureaus are not there to protect you.
What type of out-of-touch, frog-licking Hippie told you they were?
They are here to monitor credit expenditure and to calculate risk to loaners. If you were a loaner, would you indiscriminately loan money away without ascertaining the risk of not getting paid back under the conditions you gave the loan away?
They are there to make a profit from their clients, business.
No shit.
And now, my employer can use this as a disqualification.
Only if you apply to a job that entails some risk of confidentiality, and only if your credit score is in flames as opposed to being just bad.
You write about how you can give all this info to your employer to get yourself in if they require a credit check. The reality is that your employer is going to have a cut-off. 650 or lower, for example, and you are out.
Could you please cite statistics that can back you up? I've worked in different industries, including insurance and medical-related. I've never seen someone being just denied just like that, not with cause and without a chance to explain. Or maybe I'm lucky and I've been working in WonderLand.
You will never find out why. You won't get a chance to defend yourself.
What has been your experience that makes you come to that conclusion?
How much time and effort does it take you to do keep your finances in check? Seriously? 3 hours every 3 months? Jesus Christ, all I do is take half an hour a month to generate my report, go over it, and make notes. Another half hour to fill in a template word doc, print one for Expedia, one for Equifax, and one for TransUnion. How long does it take to fold them, put them in envelops, lick the stamp and drop them in a mailbox on your way to the supermarket on a weekend while you do your weekly grocery shopping? And when you get a reply, weeks later, how long does it really take you to go over them, and repeat the same process?
Are you that disorganized that it has to really take a substantial time from you? If so, I doubt you are in position to lecture others about having a job and other life responsibilities.
I hope you and everyone you care about are killed painfully. You are such a danger to everyone on this planet that this would simply be the best way to warn others to not be so stupid.
You support the destruction of millions of lives simply because you are an asshole. You have no compassion and you support terrorism. You deserve no mercy.
Your 1st grade skills at logical argumentation impress me beyond description.
It is true that it might further push people into a downward spiral, but it also unfair to expect a company to hire a person that carries a great risk of under performing (and potentially be a negative factor in a team).
That's what probation is for. You know, where they can actually see how well the new hire performs, instead of just getting a nebulous "Oh, he may carry some risk of not performing."?
Why would a company spend 3 months of salary just to determine if a person is a good fit or not?
Say I have a contracting agent, and I need to get a new contractor, I have every right to see whether this person "fits" with what I want him to do and for which I will pay him for. I will ask him for his credentials, I will verify his employment, I will wage any past job failures under consideration.
Furthermore, with his permission, and with his understanding that employment with me is contingent to his approval as it is my legal right to stipulate the conditions of employment with me, I will attempt to profile his emotional state of mind, if he does not carry at this particular point in time in his life, a substantial amount of problems that will preclude him to concentrate and do work (for which I'm paying him for), or worse, become a negative factor towards other employees, or bail out when I need him most, or divulge confidential information.
It is certainly not a ludicrous, frivolous or inhumane right for a company (megacorp or indivual S-corp) to have, is it?
You can't ask for a "refund" as you would for an appliance. Barring unlawful discrimination, it is a company's prerogative (be it a megacorp or an individuals S-corp) to determine how and when to hire or not hire. By trying to force a moral imperative on them, you are trampling on their rights as well.
Now, before you respond, think and read this very carefully, if you are interested in responding logically.
Mind you that it is not as if companies in general are making wide-sweeping decisions when reviewing credit reports. When somethings comes up that is a red flag (IF it occurs), you are asked for a chance to explain.
Most companies are law-abiding and will respect your rights. Very, very few, like the ones mentioned in these news do not, but just as a logical individual would frown from generalizing about individuals, so he would, by logic, frown from doing so from organizations, regardless of their size.
Furthermore, it's not a bad credit score that triggers a red flag. You can get a bad credit report due to medical emergencies, or say, you defaulted on the one credit card you possessed a few years ago (while still being clean and with no credit debt anymore). It is a continuous history of financial troubles totally a sum of a certain magnitude that *might* raise a red flag.
Again, it's all about context. You don't need present a credit report to apply for a job at McDonalds, but it is also false that only those people with direct handling of financial matters need to present a credit history that does not trigger a red flag.
It drained on my productivity, I lost almost a decade on my ability to go back to college (and thus lost all my work towards my MS degree), it affected my mood, my emotional well being and for quite a while my capacity to act professional and be productive.
So just because it had some negative effect on you, it must affect everyone else in exactly the same way?
Let's analyze this strawman of yours for a second. Did I claim that my experience will have the exact same effect on others? Nope. If I did, please show me where I said that.
Do you agree that it will most likely have some sort of negative effect to people in general? Yep.
There is enough documented evidence about the effects of emotional stressors (debt, marital problems, etc) on an individual's performance and ability to interact socially in a healthy manner. Are you that blind? Do you wa
You may start with a lower score than a rich person, but your score will only go bad if you do something irresponsible, like buying something on credit which you don't pay back.
Like, for example, a couple of weeks in the hospital?
Outlying case. Barring medical emergencies without coverage, or grave things like cancer, the overwhelming case of poor individuals with bad credit scores is due to poor financial decisions.
Do we need to pull actual statistics to know that is is not the case?
Credit scores are a good indicator of responsible attitudes.
Or they can be complete bullshit.
My Experian report (which has a high score) has me working for Boeing since I was 10 years old. They apparently confused it with my father, but even after several letters pointing out the mathematical improbability of their information being accurate, it's still there.
It's a shame it isn't true. I could have been retired for years.
Credit scores are a good indicator of responsible attitudes.
Or they can be complete bullshit.
My Experian report (which has a high score) has me working for Boeing since I was 10 years old. They apparently confused it with my father, but even after several letters pointing out the mathematical improbability of their information being accurate, it's still there.
It's a shame it isn't true. I could have been retired for years.
That's not a problem with your credit report per say but with a mix up with your last name and social security number. That can be solved (though it has to be done repeatedly) by writing to the credit bureaus. My mother and my sister have the same first name, and due to my father's last name, they get their credit reports mixed up.
ZOMG! BIG DEAL! Not really, they simply keep an eye on it, regularly check on it, and write to the credit bureaus every time there is a mix up.
Annoying? Yes. Horrendously difficult to deal with if you act proactively and responsibly? Not really.
Also, your anecdotal case is not data, and it does not prove that it is bullshit. If they were to get separated, they'll show a correct score for you and your father. Or would it not?
Also, in the case of hiring, if you know you are applying to a job that requires a credit check (or applying for a home loan or whatever), you proactively (see that word again?)
write to them to get things fixed up
you keep a record of every letter you have sent to the credit bureaus since you started having these problems
you keep a record of every correction done by the credit bureaus, each attached to each corresponding letter you wrote in the previous step
you write an explanatory letter to the hiring company that requires a background check explaining of the situation, and making proof (in the form of past credit reports, credit fixes and attached letters requesting corrections) available upon request
Annoying? Yes. But that's human nature. It's full of annoying this. We just deal proactively with them whenever possible and keep going.
In your case, which is extreme but real, it's always going to be there, and I'm sorry that you have to go through that. But you are an extreme case, an outlier that does not prove credit reports are bullshit. In general, they are accurate tools, a capability measure, for the individual and for those that might need to have a financial relation to him.
Even in your case, things can still be handled, should you need to, by keeping careful records of all your financial and credit statements, all your letters requesting corrections and careful cross-matching of entries in the credit reports to statements you and your father own.
For getting a home loan, it might be a bitch, for a company requiring a credit check, it would be a no brainer to see the particulars of your case.
I'll start by saying that the company mentioned in this article is clearly in the wrong. They have a legal and ethical obligation to inform prospective employees of their rights when performing a background check. Having said that...
IMO, unless you work directly with cash or are in a position where fraud would be easy, employers have no right to that information.
Shit happens in peoples lives leaving them in precarious positions and things dont get paid on time. Having employers deny applicants based on their credit could put people in a downward financial spiral.
It is true that it might further push people into a downward spiral, but it also unfair to expect a company to hire a person that carries a great risk of under performing (and potentially be a negative factor in a team). Their existence and their ability to employ people (and giving them a chance to work, earn a salary and put food on the table) are predicated on their ability to do work and produce earnings, not on being Mother Theresa. People already on a downward spiral are already in it. It's not a company's obligation to take them. That's what counselors are for.
I know this risk to a company is true because I was at one point a risk factor due to my poor finances. It drained on my productivity, I lost almost a decade on my ability to go back to college (and thus lost all my work towards my MS degree), it affected my mood, my emotional well being and for quite a while my capacity to act professional and be productive. This is a very private thing that I'm sharing here, but I have no problem doing so to drive the point of the predicament people and companies face due to people's financial and emotional problems.
So it is not just people who work in finance or with cash that can be a risk for having a poor financial state. Anyone is. That why some (not all) employers give otherwise effective employees time off when they have marital, health or financial problems. Better to ask a programmer or financial analyst to take a leave of absence than to let them stare at the monitor 8 hours a day, 5 days a week and get paid for it. It neither benefits him/her nor the company.
It certainly doesn't help the individual, and it does not help the company's finances nor the individual's team mates (whose work my depend on his.) There is nothing worse than count on a resource that it's not there. It drags your project plans and overall morale. A (hopefully temporary) break is better for all parties involved.
After all, companies are not charitable orgs bend on fixing people's problems. And I say this while being extremely lucky in having worked with very humane companies. For example, while working as a contractor without benefits, when I had a family loss, this particular company let me take needed time off, and wrote me a substantial check to help me (since I wasn't officially getting paid for personal time off.).
So taking an objective, rational view, it is completely legitimate (within reason) for a company to minimize risk and loses to the company's and its employees' team playing capacity by weeding out individuals with deep financial troubles.
With companies that work with confidential/copyrighted data (.ie. pharmaceuticals, insurance, R&D) or as defense contractors (.ie. where I currently work), it is also imperative to mitigate risks of espionage. The typical profile of individuals that commit espionage has almost always been people with deep financial problems, gambling, drug abuse or marital problems more than ideological/political views. This is as real as it gets. So these types of companies have further incentives to check applicant's credit histories.
Having said that, it's all within reason. The company must notify an applicant that a credit check is required; it must notify him/her if a credit check has been the cause for declining the hire. Most of all, it needs to be reasonable. Declining to hire someone because he defaulted
The most successful entrepreneurs are those who make it big in doing what they enjoy.
I have no doubt that the people who have created Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Delicious, and all that "enjoyed" doing what they were doing. But that doesn't mean that they made great contributions to IT or technology.
Non sequitur. You don't need to make a great contribution or invention to be a successful enterpreneur. Case in point: I could be a successful enterpreneur in, say, real state or banking without having to invent anything.
I can be run a successful IT consulting operation without inventing a new operating system or come up with teh l33t hax0r encryption algorithm of doom. I can simply deliver the goods in a timely fashion, with an acceptable quality of work, in a manner that is cost effective to a large customer base while keeping my costs at a minimum.
Efficiency (and reaping the financial fruits of it) is not predicated on earth-shaking inventions.
Furthermore, I find it strange that you doubt that Twitter and Facebook have not made contributions to IT and technology. They are both redefining the utilization of IT in social interactions, opening new markets and new ideas on how to exploit IT to create revenue.
That by itself is innovative - not unless you believe technological innovation must not be tied to a economic and social context.
The twitter model of communication is opening opportunities that no one ever thought before. Its relevance in recent political events (Iran) is an IT/technology innovation by itself, independently of its magnitude and expected longevity. It also proved to be an excellent ground in implementing high-performance message queuing architectures, first written in Ruby and later rewritten in Scala.
Being the proving ground of high performance distributed component architectures written in Scala sounds like a technological innovation to me.
As for Facebook, they have one hell of an architectural plumbing, already featured in one architecture book in the "Pragmatic" series. If that's not innovation, then I'm Marilyn Monroe.
Myspace is a fiasco, but Delicious is a prime example of a system using RESTful services. It is a sample case of how to do things. Isn't that innovation.
Or maybe you think of innovation as abstraction, algorithms and what not completely disconnected from a social/economic context. And though they are innovations, they are not the only type.
Welcome to humanity dude.
It is as if "getting as filthy rich as possible" and "working in an industry they enjoy" were somehow mutually exclusive. They are not.
Well, actually they kind of are: there are only so many hours in the day, and every hour you spend pursuing making money is an hour you aren't spending on developing new technology.
Again, non sequitur. Enterpreneurship != innovation.
You make money by building things. What do you think people do when you refer to them as "making money"? Do you think money grows on trees?
You got to create shit, or sell shit, to make money.
For example, I get paid to develop software. I solve someone's problem, most likely in a way that has not been done before, at least for this particular person, for his particular business and for his particular socio-economic context (and sometimes socio-economic and geographic context.)
I combine libraries and language constructs, reuse algorithms or create my own, reuse or define new architectural instances for a specific problem.
Ergo, by creating a new solution for a specific manifestation of a problem, I innovate. I get paid for it. I make money.
Other people make more money than I do by doing the same thing. Others go further and become enterpreneurs.
You can spend your 9-5 developing new technology. And guess what? You make money out of it. You get paid for it.
Surprising, I know.
You are simply building a strawman to beat up and feel good about it.
Plus, your definition of innovation does not compute.
Go back to school and learn the fundamentals of logical reasoning.
Siebel is absolutely right: IT's "glory days" are over. And good riddance, I say: the spectacular growth of IT has attracted all the wrong people and stifled real innovation. And "all the wrong people" includes people like Siebel himself.
If there is less of a get-rich-quick mentality, maybe people can return to focusing on innovation and long term planning again.
Yes, yes and yes.
Now, if we mean "maturity" to imply solid work processes and repeatable methods (as in the physical engineering disciplines), then certainly not. Not just IT, but software development in general is far from being mature.
However, I see Siebel's point in that IT has reached maturity in the sense no one can pull the kind of crazy shit spending we saw a few years ago. An IT shop can no longer afford, for example, to spend half a mil on hardware just for experiment and see if it works, not without a solid plan and understanding of what they want to get in return from that type of acquisition.
And people can no longer treat a college education on software as the geese of golden eggs, expecting to make $80+/year even if they suck at programming. We have too many unqualified people graduating and getting hired and committing terrible design/development decisions that cost millions, if not billions to the industry and the economy at large.
IT industry by and large has been confusing R&D with indiscriminate spending, and people unqualified for doing software development have been cruising along for far too long at industry's expense.
It's taken a while since the Internet Bubble to reign in and establish a sound economic and spending/investment model on IT. But finally (or so I hope), we are getting there.
Exactly - he's only talking about people with "entrepreneurial spirit", i.e. those people who only care about getting as filthy rich as possible, as fast as possible, and not about working in an industry they enjoy. If they all decide to piss off to China then good luck to them.
Your definition of "entrepreneurial spirit" is very, uhmmm, strange to say the least. It is as if "getting as filthy rich as possible" and "working in an industry they enjoy" were somehow mutually exclusive. They are not.
As surprising as it might seem to you, it isn't a black and white thing. The most successful entrepreneurs are those who make it big in doing what they enjoy. And entrepreneurial spirit is not necessarily driven by the desire of (what some ideological tards consider as) obscene financial success. If you are a good entrepreneur and do something that you like well, financial success will almost inevitably follow.
Ah legal jargon to make it sound like it's actually something novel.
You are missing the point. It's not about something being novel or not.
Seriously, any programmer will think of this amazingly ingenious method if he were tasked to do something like this.
Seriously, you think too much of your fellow programmers. Most programmers nowadays can't figure the difference between their heads and asses when it comes to something mildly complex involving network communications and multi threading.
The only reason this got patented was the absurd use of legal jargon to impress people who have no idea what they're doing (the PTO).
It's not about impressing people. You make a detailed claim, and if that detail claim is not necessarily absurd (what you think of absurd might not necessarily be so) and/or not encompassed, included or superseded on a previously granted patent (or something for which there can be no legal claim to a patent) then you will most likely get it.
Stop labeling everything as arbitrary legal jargon. The more you understand the law, the better that you will be at making sound arguments against abusive patterns. That is, the more useful that you will be at fighting these kind of things.
I worked at McDonalds, then Home Depot, and an assortment of gritty, unglamorous places, all the while building my way up, both at work and on community college, then university and then grad school. Bloody arrongant cunt this woman is.
And a 2.7GPA is an embarrassment. Nothing short than a 3.0 is/should be acceptable as a measure of hard scholastic work. I had a GPA close to 4.0 when I was an undergrad, and that went dipping down to 3.3 at the end of my grad school years. This in Computer Science. I'm embarrassed to say that.
And this tard of a woman thinks it's ok to advertise she has a 2.7GPA from a freaking community college? On Business Administration of Information Technology (whatever the hell that is)?
If she were that intelligent, she would apply to Home Depot (where I worked back in 92-94), and work on the cashier register, then work her way up to the returns/customer service desk, or become a cashier lead, or find her way to work in the store's data processing/reporting office. Having a degree in admin (and on IT), assuming that degree mean some valuable crap, coupled with hard work and lead skills, she would quickly climb the management ladder into department/aile supervisor. That's a type of skill she can build a resume with, which she can later transfer to another job should she wished it.
But that kind of positive, constructive mentality can only come from an intelligent, hard-working and diligent person, not a POS woman who thinks she deserves a job (and has a right to sue her college) because her miserable and embarrasing 2.7GPA didn't materialize into a power-broker position among the managerial echelons.
Slashdot Mirror
So...if I sell Cisco gear, and it turns out that I wind up with counterfeit Cisco gear, they could argue that because I know what real Cisco gear looks like I should be able to identify any counterfeit Cisco gear.
Only with reasonable cause. If a counterfeit and a real cisco gear are identical or near identical by the of visual inspection one would reasonably do when shopping for that gear, then you are not liable.
If you find that you have reasonable cause to believe something is a counterfeit (or if one of your clients reports one to you), then you contact your supplier of the event. Hopefully at this point, you have all your bills, receipts and purchase orders in good order to demonstrate all your purchases have been done in good faith (so that no one can argue you bought your shit down a dark alley at 2AM from this dude showing the merchandise he has in his trunk.)
BTW, those receipts you get from a well-known supplier, those are documents that prove you bought what you thought was legitimate cisco gear. If you buy it from e-bay, you make print shots of the e-bay announcement that says the gear is legitimate, and you cross-reference that to the serial # of the equipment being sold/purchased.
If you are buying them directly from someone, in addition to asking for a receipt from them, you ask your supplier to sign a receipt of your own making where you state that on that date and time and on that location, you gave them X amount of money for Y amount of cisco gear and that the supplier signing therein assures the gear is legitimate.
That last piece is valuable in demonstrating that you completed the transaction to the letter of the law and that you acted in good faith. Having the supplier sign that puts the onus of counterfeit detection on him, not you.
Obviously, this is all excessive if you are buying gear for yourself. However, if you are buying gear with the intention of reselling, that is the minimum you must do, to protect yourself, and to uphold the letter of the law. Obviously you will keep a log and incident paperwork showing you contacted the supplier regarding the counterfeit merchandise. If nothing comes out of it, then you contact Cisco, which most likely will also ask you to contact the local authorities.
In other words, you act in good faith and to the letter of the law when you discover you have counterfeit gear. As I understand it, that was not the case with the defendants in this case.
Then Cisco can come in and slap me for some unholy sum for "should have known".
See above.
I wonder how much they lose in sales due to cheap counterfit equipment.
Non sequitur.
I mean, arguably, someone buying a cheap counterfit is not likely to pay the full price for a real one, so it is pretty difficult to call all of it lost sales.
Still, non sequitur. Whether it's a $100 or a $1 a piece loss, it's a loss committed by robbery. Aside from that, there is no guarantee that a counterfeit will perform with the same quality as an original one. That on itself can hurt the reputation of cisco products.
So...now there is an active disincentive to protect your goods from counterfit. Instead of worrying about counterfit, they can just go sue the shit out of anyone selling counterfit to people who probably wouldn't have purchased an original anyways.
It does not follow that a person who bought a counterfeit did it on purpose. Does it?
Cisco has every right to sue you if you knowingly or carelessly
You make sure you buy and sell legitimate gear (and you keep a paper trail that you do that in good faith as explained above), and when someone suggest to buy/sell counterfeit gear, you turned them away (and call t
s/Louis Vuitton apparel/guns/ ?
Or in his case, s/possibly good point/incredibly stupid and retarded analogy/g
What about all tje murders and other crimes that get committed while wearing Louis Vuitton apparel? Hmm? Does this mean we can hold them liable for it? After all, they have an obligation to stop any crimes that are committed using their product....
Dude, you suck at logic. Seriously.
I know what you are trying to argue for. Unfortunately, this particular example of yours failed miserably. Go back and re-read the case in question. If after doing that you still see parallels with that retarded example, then forget everything I just said. You are beyond hope.
Assigning QOS by user explicitly makes little sense. Not all traffic a person can generate should have the same priority.
An NSA military intelligence officer accessing a satellite mat should have greater priority than his commander surfing the net.
Well, no one is saying that QOS is to be assigned explicitly by user identity alone every single time and for all domain cases. I'm not sure exactly what on earth makes you think that's the argument, considering the following fragment in the second to the last paragraph in my previous post:
advanced prioritization (which the more I think about it, the more that it might be based on not only on identity and data type, but permissions)
Even w/o considering permissions, it's a fact that QOS is very likely a function of identity/role and data type.
So let me know what part of my previous posts sounded like an argument of assigning QOS by user identification explicitly as a general rule. Let's go back again to the points of contention:
Regarding your "NSA officer vs web-surfing commander", that's a bit silly example (assuming both are using the exact same infrastructure). Obviously here, priority is assigned by role AND by resource. A more interesting example is a NSA officer assigned to a case has a higher priority in pushing alerts down the pipeline than fellow NSA agents receiving general status updates.
This assignment can be implemented as a relationship to the case (and thus, indirectly a function of the agent's identity) or purely as a direct function of his identity. One cannot say that one is better than the other without knowing the specific domain, the specific context in which such an implementation takes place.
There are similar priorities in term of access that can also occur in other domains .ie. "primary care physician" relationship between an identifiable entity with a "doctor" role and a patient. This is an explicit priority/access right assigned from one identity to another under a given role.
Perhaps the word you want to use is "exclusively" instead of "explicitly".
Assigning priority by user *cannot* be a hard problem, because anything you'd do to make it more than trivial would make it impossible.
The options are essentially: User == source address or: User is embedded in packets because if you don't either know who the user is explicitly or provide some sort of mapping from "user" to "something discrete already in the packet" there's no way to determine the user for arbitrary traffic.
And once you've established which user sent a packet assigning the priority is just a table lookup, which is something routers are already pretty good at.
Well, if you paint all user-mapping problems in such a generic way, then obviously that problem *cannot* be that hard.
Determining who the user is when you know a-priori that it is at the network layer (user == address) or at the transport/application layer (user identifiers within the packets) is vacuously easy, ergo irrelevant. In fact, it's not even part of the overall problem.
In certain domains, a user might be a composite of it's source address and additional user information within the packets. Also, a user might have one or more roles (in a RBAC model) and/or relationships (in a ReBAC model) which might also be a function of source address and user info embedded in packets (and perhaps even by destination address.)
Generically speaking, yeah, it's not a *hard* problem. Put that in the context of a specific, non-trivial architecture, and then we are talking about potentially very complex problems.
Even if user identity is not a hard problem, that still does not cover the other problems that this specific project is trying to investigate : advanced prioritization (which the more I think about it, the more that it might be based on not only on identity and data type, but permissions), authentication, authorization, confidentiality, integrity, availability, perhaps even fault-based attributes according to other attributes (fail-safe, fail-deadly and all that stuff).
Easy problem my ass.
$11M to reimplement IPv6 QOS. I suppose it's a bit more advanced since it makes QOS determination based on users or groups, but that doesn't seem that difficult.
Consider me unimpressed.
Dude, there might be strategic/tactical decisions for deciding explicitly not to use IPv6. Notice that I'm not saying that those strategic/tactical decisions are necessarily valid for long-term maintenance, extensibility or external compatibility (the later of which might even be undesirable from a strategic/tactical POV.)
The road of technical divergence can either take you to innovation or to a complete technical fiasco. That fork is many times not only dependent on technical merits alone. Besides, iirc, IPv6 QOS is still as of yet to be developed (not a criticism mind you). It supports only 7 priority levels whereas the proposed technology will support 32 levels. A typical military subnet, with stationary and mobile units, all of them plugged and receiving feeds from a bunch of disparate devices might never need more than 7 or 8, but as you start plugging those nets together, you can (and will) easily require a finer priority granularity than that.
Add to that the ability to determine priority by user or groups, and the problem cannot be dismissed as "meh, should not be that difficult." There might be other defense-specific requirements that we might not know (.ie. limiting jumbopackets by priority or origin.)
Besides, this is being researched by DARPA, the harbinger of ARPANET and MQ-Predator, not some 2009 rendition of kozmo.com.
I know that here on /. we like to fling turds at the government's white elephants, but c'mon. There must likely be be good technical/domain-specific reasons (or at least good enough) for an entity like DARPA to perform research on it, reasons beyond the ones that might impress you.
You'll never, ever find a business which factors in the infrastructure items they depend upon because they are assumed to be there to be used, much like mana from heaven.
No. From the small to the large, they never have to factor those infrastructure items explicitly because they are already factored out as local, state and federal taxes in addition to a myriad other taxes that individuals do not have to pay, double taxation and all that. If infrastructure is paid by taxes, and if business pay their taxes, then they have already factor that out.
Consider also that the greatest users of infrastructure are not business, but individuals. For them, the rate of individual infrastructure usage is inversely proportional to the tax bracket they belong to. The larger your gross income, the larger the tax % you have to pay (while at the same time reducing your dependency on infrastructure.) OTH, the poorer you are, the less tax % you have to pay WHILE having to rely more on the infrastructure.
It's funny that people say "wealth owners these, wealth owners that", but fuck, wealth owners are also creators of wealth and employment, and they are the prime contributors in taxation, at a proportion larger than their proportion on total gross income. What else do you people want? Tax them more? (And thus reduce their total net income which is what is used to keep business [and employment] going?)
Equality is not just on wealth but on responsibility as well. This society already has a fair distribution of wealth and taxation. Social illnesses that we see today are of a cultural origin rather than "OMG, wealth owners!!!!"
but what happens when business controls most of the wealth of the society?
Uh, isn't that the general case, that business control most of the wealth in a society?
Who then plans, builds and maintains the infrastructure items necessary for business to function?
That's a government function.
No one.
Wrong. Government, with tax, most of it disproportionally obtained from wealth creators and disproportionally used by those least capable of paying taxes.
Nerdconomics might be cool to talk and post about, but they are fucking wrong by and large.
I still don't get it. Terabyte drives cost as much as my bi-weekly beer budget, and less every day. Computing power is off of Moore's Law, but is still increasing with multicore and multiprocessors. My computer doesn't have to be hooked up to the interweb to work, nor does it require a subscription to some website to keep rolling. If I want access to the web, I can get it, but that's only a few times a day when I need it.
So, what exactly does "cloud computing" bring to the table for me?
Not much as far as I can see, other than a new crop of buzzwords.
Have you ever run a data center?
US Citizens don't have the right to go on military bases, and top secret facilities and publish pictures and information about what they see and the personnel.
That I agree with, but, the blogger wasn't going onto secret military facilities or compromising classified information. She was following public officials around as they executed their duties.
Let me get this straight. These public officials are members of a drug-related unit, whose work entail some pretty nasty, violent shit to be dealt (like homicide and sex crime units). And you do not think that secrecy of movement for these units is necessary to reduce the risk of loss of life?
Just because a LEO is not under covered and that his info is in the public domain, that does not mean it is common knowledge. What happens if an informant or an undercovered agent get spotted with a LEO whose identity is now all over on a blog? How do you know that the constant surveillance which served no purpose other than satisfy this woman's political point can have nefarious consequences?
And how can you justify that this woman published a man's address, with pictures and all (even if that information is available should you pursue a process of discovery), in light that this is a LEO, and that as such is at risk, always at risk, for enforcing the law? As the article notes, she was not charged with obstruction of justice or interference with an officer of the law. This implies that the police department did not have enough evidence to charge her under those laws. The fact that they had to rely on such a broadly worded statute to make their case highlights the weakness of their position.
She was not just writing a blog about police activities. She was putting DEA agents at risk by disclosing their operations and locations.
Again, if there was any evidence of that, the police department would have charged with obstruction of justice, not "identifying a police officer with intent to harass".
Please don't call 911 when you need a cop to come your way.
"Do not take things out of context! What the document says is companies might save some money if they hire foreigners on F-1 or J-1 visas. It is just so foreigners _who_study_in_the_United_States_ can find a job since employers seem to be under the impression that hiring a foreigner is a hassle."
With the way the recession is currently in the US, it makes no sense for the US govt. to not only allow, but, in some cases expedite bringing foreigners in (or letting them in willy nilly across the border illegally) to fill jobs that our own citizens are in desperate need of...
I don't see that a state funded school should be allowed by the taxpayers of that state to promote the hiring of foreign people over US citizens either...that's not what my tax dollars should be going for...
"Do not take things out of context! What the document says is companies might save some money if they hire foreigners on F-1 or J-1 visas. It is just so foreigners _who_study_in_the_United_States_ can find a job since employers seem to be under the impression that hiring a foreigner is a hassle."
With the way the recession is currently in the US, it makes no sense for the US govt. to not only allow, but, in some cases expedite bringing foreigners in (or letting them in willy nilly across the border illegally) to fill jobs that our own citizens are in desperate need of...
I don't see that a state funded school should be allowed by the taxpayers of that state to promote the hiring of foreign people over US citizens either...that's not what my tax dollars should be going for...
If these so called foreigners are US graduates, and are as competent or perhaps even more so that their "native" counterparts, I don't see what the problem is. Almost every foreign student in a US grad school that I've known have come from 1) top notch undergrad schools in their home countries and are 2) among the creme-de-la-creme.
Now more than ever, as we not only have a recession, but also losing economic growth and scientific and industrial edge to other countries, it is this time, now that we need more Ajay Bhatt's and less Brilliant Paula's.
There is a difference between reasonable protectionism, specially on agriculture and certain types of blue collar manufacturing. It is quite another to go "ZOMG! YER TOOK MAH JAHB!" at importing top-notch scientific talent, and, why not, allow employers to reduce cost in new hiring, which allows to increase net profit and mitigate the risk of having to cut down on the employees they already have.
Your tax dollars should be going to promote the increase of talent in this country, be it native or imported. Worried that a company might hire foreign students over you? Then be better than them, scientifically, academically and technologically.
Understand this. It's not the average student that makes it to a grad school in this country. There are freaking tens of thousands competing academically. Only those with potential, more than the one demonstrated by many slashdoters, who get a visa to study here and get a scholarship based on merit. While most "natives" try to find ways to get a master without writing a thesis (if they ever get that far), these foreign students are the ones that write and publish papers.
Look at the top notch engineers in Lockheed Martin, Motorola, GD and the like. Guess what? They were once foreign students, foreigners who have contributed more to this country than the Im-a-taxpayer-yer-took-mah-johb crow. Most likely those same students are going to be the next inventors or professors (which is what this country need the most) as opposed to those that are currently worrying about losing their current jobs to the evil offshore dudes in Bangalore.
If you are an average professional, don't worry too much about competing
Except for the fact that guns are designed to shoot things. Honestly, I believe that disallowing non-violent felons from the right to bear arms or any other constitutional right is wrong, but social networks are simply talking, and honestly, you can't be molested online, despite what some people might think.
Bill Kamal.
And one popular definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and getting the same results or lack thereof.
It is so popular people mangles it in the process of quoting it:
"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results" - Einstein. There is also something called prevention. It's called being pro-active. Repetition by itself, even if results remain the same fit those definitions. We do the same thing every day (go to work) and we get the same results (get paid.) You set up the alarm every day before locking the door, etc etc etc.
If you live in a country where personal lines of credit are a fact of life, where credit records have a risk of getting mixed up, and (moreover since we are in /.) there are real risks of identity theft, does checking and fixing (or requesting to fix) your credit records on an ongoing basis, even if you do not expect the root causes of those problems to disappear, does that constitute insanity?
Moreover, if you are in a case where your credit records are mixed up on a regular basis, and if they are so to a magnitude that YOU KNOW can and will severely affect your ability to do commerce or establish a line of credit, will it be insanity to constantly request for corrections, even if you know the root causes of the problem won't disappear, and that this has to be an ongoing process?
Now, this is a personal thing that you and everyone else has to gauge. Does it impact you enough that you have to take constant action? Does it really and truly take a significant fraction of your time? You make a cost/benefit calculation and you proceed from there. Is that insanity?
Sorry if you hadn't seen results when contacting Experian. My experience has been different - the experience of others I've personally know has been different. So I will leave it at that, that our anecdotal experiences have been different, and your anecdotal experience is not evidence that contacting credit bureaus is futile or that being pro-active in keeping an eye on one's credit report fits the definition of insanity. Non sequitur dude.
I'm not adverse to checking on the credit reports from time to time
Hmmm....
I hope you don't have a job or other life responsibilities that take up a significant fraction of your time.
So, you are "not adverse to checking on the credit reports from time to time", like, once a month? Once every three months? Like checking your bill and bank statements everytime they get to your mailbox for discrepancies, which is what sane, competent people with job and other life responsibilities do, and which does not take a significant fraction of your time? Kinda like that not-so-significant fraction of your time?
and, as I've mentioned, I've contacted Experian several times. Nobody's home.
Sorry to hear that's been your experience. Noticed that I've never it's easy or painless. But barring living in a country where personal lines of credit and a high rate of record mix ups and identity theft, that's what one needs to do.
I really don't think I need to escalate to threatening legal or legislative action to get these companies to be minimally functional, but that apparently is what it would take.
Only inasmuch as damage is done to you and the damage is sufficiently great to warrant litigation.
Lacking a major fuck up on their part, I've got better things to do. Like count my mythical pension....
That's sensible. After all, legal litigation is a tool intended for major fuck ups, not for petty things and minor annoyances that can be resolved with pro-active means of communication.
But this is America. And just like personal lines of credit, people take tools for legal litigation and whore them out.
ZOMG! BIG DEAL! Not really, they simply keep an eye on it, regularly check on it, and write to the credit bureaus every time there is a mix up.
Hi, this is reality talking: "I had a friend who had a negative item on his credit report. JD Byrider, used car dealership, had my friend's loan as a "write off". He showed it to me along with a receipt from JD Byrider showing that he paid it off in a lump sum. I figured, okay easy enough. We went to the dealership, showed them the receipt and the credit report. Dealerships says "we can't help you. the dealership is under new ownership and we can't access old records". Now, this is bullshit, because I guarantee they are still collecting on the old loans. So we file a dispute with the credit bureaus, including the receipt. All said and done, JD Byrider, with their system that cannot access old records tells the bureaus that it was a write-off.
Sue the dealership? Put the blame where the blame is (the dealership)?
Bureau sides with the dealership.
It has no choice. In this argument, it will side with the entity that as far as it knows possess an automated record tracking system (even if it's a shitty one), as opposed to the entity (you) for which has no way of knowing if it has a system of record keeping. Ludicrous as it might sound, that's how it is, and that's how YOU will operate if you had to arbitrate between two entities.
Your course of action is to go to court against the dealership.
If is a fucked up system.
That's why you have the legal system. Use it.
The Bureaus are not there to protect you.
What type of out-of-touch, frog-licking Hippie told you they were?
They are here to monitor credit expenditure and to calculate risk to loaners. If you were a loaner, would you indiscriminately loan money away without ascertaining the risk of not getting paid back under the conditions you gave the loan away?
They are there to make a profit from their clients, business.
No shit.
And now, my employer can use this as a disqualification.
Only if you apply to a job that entails some risk of confidentiality, and only if your credit score is in flames as opposed to being just bad.
You write about how you can give all this info to your employer to get yourself in if they require a credit check. The reality is that your employer is going to have a cut-off. 650 or lower, for example, and you are out.
Could you please cite statistics that can back you up? I've worked in different industries, including insurance and medical-related. I've never seen someone being just denied just like that, not with cause and without a chance to explain. Or maybe I'm lucky and I've been working in WonderLand.
You will never find out why. You won't get a chance to defend yourself.
What has been your experience that makes you come to that conclusion?
Are you that disorganized that it has to really take a substantial time from you? If so, I doubt you are in position to lecture others about having a job and other life responsibilities.
I hope you and everyone you care about are killed painfully. You are such a danger to everyone on this planet that this would simply be the best way to warn others to not be so stupid.
You support the destruction of millions of lives simply because you are an asshole. You have no compassion and you support terrorism. You deserve no mercy.
Your 1st grade skills at logical argumentation impress me beyond description.
It is true that it might further push people into a downward spiral, but it also unfair to expect a company to hire a person that carries a great risk of under performing (and potentially be a negative factor in a team).
That's what probation is for. You know, where they can actually see how well the new hire performs, instead of just getting a nebulous "Oh, he may carry some risk of not performing."?
Why would a company spend 3 months of salary just to determine if a person is a good fit or not?
Say I have a contracting agent, and I need to get a new contractor, I have every right to see whether this person "fits" with what I want him to do and for which I will pay him for. I will ask him for his credentials, I will verify his employment, I will wage any past job failures under consideration.
Furthermore, with his permission, and with his understanding that employment with me is contingent to his approval as it is my legal right to stipulate the conditions of employment with me, I will attempt to profile his emotional state of mind, if he does not carry at this particular point in time in his life, a substantial amount of problems that will preclude him to concentrate and do work (for which I'm paying him for), or worse, become a negative factor towards other employees, or bail out when I need him most, or divulge confidential information.
It is certainly not a ludicrous, frivolous or inhumane right for a company (megacorp or indivual S-corp) to have, is it?
You can't ask for a "refund" as you would for an appliance. Barring unlawful discrimination, it is a company's prerogative (be it a megacorp or an individuals S-corp) to determine how and when to hire or not hire. By trying to force a moral imperative on them, you are trampling on their rights as well.
Now, before you respond, think and read this very carefully, if you are interested in responding logically.
Mind you that it is not as if companies in general are making wide-sweeping decisions when reviewing credit reports. When somethings comes up that is a red flag (IF it occurs), you are asked for a chance to explain.
Most companies are law-abiding and will respect your rights. Very, very few, like the ones mentioned in these news do not, but just as a logical individual would frown from generalizing about individuals, so he would, by logic, frown from doing so from organizations, regardless of their size.
Furthermore, it's not a bad credit score that triggers a red flag. You can get a bad credit report due to medical emergencies, or say, you defaulted on the one credit card you possessed a few years ago (while still being clean and with no credit debt anymore). It is a continuous history of financial troubles totally a sum of a certain magnitude that *might* raise a red flag.
Again, it's all about context. You don't need present a credit report to apply for a job at McDonalds, but it is also false that only those people with direct handling of financial matters need to present a credit history that does not trigger a red flag.
It drained on my productivity, I lost almost a decade on my ability to go back to college (and thus lost all my work towards my MS degree), it affected my mood, my emotional well being and for quite a while my capacity to act professional and be productive.
So just because it had some negative effect on you, it must affect everyone else in exactly the same way?
Let's analyze this strawman of yours for a second. Did I claim that my experience will have the exact same effect on others? Nope. If I did, please show me where I said that.
Do you agree that it will most likely have some sort of negative effect to people in general? Yep.
There is enough documented evidence about the effects of emotional stressors (debt, marital problems, etc) on an individual's performance and ability to interact socially in a healthy manner. Are you that blind? Do you wa
You may start with a lower score than a rich person, but your score will only go bad if you do something irresponsible, like buying something on credit which you don't pay back.
Like, for example, a couple of weeks in the hospital?
Outlying case. Barring medical emergencies without coverage, or grave things like cancer, the overwhelming case of poor individuals with bad credit scores is due to poor financial decisions.
Do we need to pull actual statistics to know that is is not the case?
Or they can be complete bullshit. My Experian report (which has a high score) has me working for Boeing since I was 10 years old. They apparently confused it with my father, but even after several letters pointing out the mathematical improbability of their information being accurate, it's still there. It's a shame it isn't true. I could have been retired for years.
Or they can be complete bullshit. My Experian report (which has a high score) has me working for Boeing since I was 10 years old. They apparently confused it with my father, but even after several letters pointing out the mathematical improbability of their information being accurate, it's still there. It's a shame it isn't true. I could have been retired for years.
That's not a problem with your credit report per say but with a mix up with your last name and social security number. That can be solved (though it has to be done repeatedly) by writing to the credit bureaus. My mother and my sister have the same first name, and due to my father's last name, they get their credit reports mixed up.
ZOMG! BIG DEAL! Not really, they simply keep an eye on it, regularly check on it, and write to the credit bureaus every time there is a mix up.
Annoying? Yes. Horrendously difficult to deal with if you act proactively and responsibly? Not really.
Also, your anecdotal case is not data, and it does not prove that it is bullshit. If they were to get separated, they'll show a correct score for you and your father. Or would it not?
Also, in the case of hiring, if you know you are applying to a job that requires a credit check (or applying for a home loan or whatever), you proactively (see that word again?)
Annoying? Yes. But that's human nature. It's full of annoying this. We just deal proactively with them whenever possible and keep going. In your case, which is extreme but real, it's always going to be there, and I'm sorry that you have to go through that. But you are an extreme case, an outlier that does not prove credit reports are bullshit. In general, they are accurate tools, a capability measure, for the individual and for those that might need to have a financial relation to him.
Even in your case, things can still be handled, should you need to, by keeping careful records of all your financial and credit statements, all your letters requesting corrections and careful cross-matching of entries in the credit reports to statements you and your father own.
For getting a home loan, it might be a bitch, for a company requiring a credit check, it would be a no brainer to see the particulars of your case.
IMO, unless you work directly with cash or are in a position where fraud would be easy, employers have no right to that information.
Shit happens in peoples lives leaving them in precarious positions and things dont get paid on time. Having employers deny applicants based on their credit could put people in a downward financial spiral.
It is true that it might further push people into a downward spiral, but it also unfair to expect a company to hire a person that carries a great risk of under performing (and potentially be a negative factor in a team). Their existence and their ability to employ people (and giving them a chance to work, earn a salary and put food on the table) are predicated on their ability to do work and produce earnings, not on being Mother Theresa. People already on a downward spiral are already in it. It's not a company's obligation to take them. That's what counselors are for.
I know this risk to a company is true because I was at one point a risk factor due to my poor finances. It drained on my productivity, I lost almost a decade on my ability to go back to college (and thus lost all my work towards my MS degree), it affected my mood, my emotional well being and for quite a while my capacity to act professional and be productive. This is a very private thing that I'm sharing here, but I have no problem doing so to drive the point of the predicament people and companies face due to people's financial and emotional problems.
So it is not just people who work in finance or with cash that can be a risk for having a poor financial state. Anyone is. That why some (not all) employers give otherwise effective employees time off when they have marital, health or financial problems. Better to ask a programmer or financial analyst to take a leave of absence than to let them stare at the monitor 8 hours a day, 5 days a week and get paid for it. It neither benefits him/her nor the company.
It certainly doesn't help the individual, and it does not help the company's finances nor the individual's team mates (whose work my depend on his.) There is nothing worse than count on a resource that it's not there. It drags your project plans and overall morale. A (hopefully temporary) break is better for all parties involved.
After all, companies are not charitable orgs bend on fixing people's problems. And I say this while being extremely lucky in having worked with very humane companies. For example, while working as a contractor without benefits, when I had a family loss, this particular company let me take needed time off, and wrote me a substantial check to help me (since I wasn't officially getting paid for personal time off.).
So taking an objective, rational view, it is completely legitimate (within reason) for a company to minimize risk and loses to the company's and its employees' team playing capacity by weeding out individuals with deep financial troubles.
With companies that work with confidential/copyrighted data (.ie. pharmaceuticals, insurance, R&D) or as defense contractors (.ie. where I currently work), it is also imperative to mitigate risks of espionage. The typical profile of individuals that commit espionage has almost always been people with deep financial problems, gambling, drug abuse or marital problems more than ideological/political views. This is as real as it gets. So these types of companies have further incentives to check applicant's credit histories.
Having said that, it's all within reason. The company must notify an applicant that a credit check is required; it must notify him/her if a credit check has been the cause for declining the hire. Most of all, it needs to be reasonable. Declining to hire someone because he defaulted
The most successful entrepreneurs are those who make it big in doing what they enjoy.
I have no doubt that the people who have created Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Delicious, and all that "enjoyed" doing what they were doing. But that doesn't mean that they made great contributions to IT or technology.
Non sequitur. You don't need to make a great contribution or invention to be a successful enterpreneur. Case in point: I could be a successful enterpreneur in, say, real state or banking without having to invent anything.
I can be run a successful IT consulting operation without inventing a new operating system or come up with teh l33t hax0r encryption algorithm of doom. I can simply deliver the goods in a timely fashion, with an acceptable quality of work, in a manner that is cost effective to a large customer base while keeping my costs at a minimum.
Efficiency (and reaping the financial fruits of it) is not predicated on earth-shaking inventions.
Furthermore, I find it strange that you doubt that Twitter and Facebook have not made contributions to IT and technology. They are both redefining the utilization of IT in social interactions, opening new markets and new ideas on how to exploit IT to create revenue.
That by itself is innovative - not unless you believe technological innovation must not be tied to a economic and social context.
The twitter model of communication is opening opportunities that no one ever thought before. Its relevance in recent political events (Iran) is an IT/technology innovation by itself, independently of its magnitude and expected longevity. It also proved to be an excellent ground in implementing high-performance message queuing architectures, first written in Ruby and later rewritten in Scala.
Being the proving ground of high performance distributed component architectures written in Scala sounds like a technological innovation to me.
As for Facebook, they have one hell of an architectural plumbing, already featured in one architecture book in the "Pragmatic" series. If that's not innovation, then I'm Marilyn Monroe.
Myspace is a fiasco, but Delicious is a prime example of a system using RESTful services. It is a sample case of how to do things. Isn't that innovation.
Or maybe you think of innovation as abstraction, algorithms and what not completely disconnected from a social/economic context. And though they are innovations, they are not the only type.
Welcome to humanity dude.
It is as if "getting as filthy rich as possible" and "working in an industry they enjoy" were somehow mutually exclusive. They are not.
Well, actually they kind of are: there are only so many hours in the day, and every hour you spend pursuing making money is an hour you aren't spending on developing new technology.
Again, non sequitur. Enterpreneurship != innovation.
You make money by building things. What do you think people do when you refer to them as "making money"? Do you think money grows on trees?
You got to create shit, or sell shit, to make money.
For example, I get paid to develop software. I solve someone's problem, most likely in a way that has not been done before, at least for this particular person, for his particular business and for his particular socio-economic context (and sometimes socio-economic and geographic context.)
I combine libraries and language constructs, reuse algorithms or create my own, reuse or define new architectural instances for a specific problem.
Ergo, by creating a new solution for a specific manifestation of a problem, I innovate. I get paid for it. I make money.
Other people make more money than I do by doing the same thing. Others go further and become enterpreneurs.
You can spend your 9-5 developing new technology. And guess what? You make money out of it. You get paid for it.
Surprising, I know. You are simply building a strawman to beat up and feel good about it.
Plus, your definition of innovation does not compute.
Go back to school and learn the fundamentals of logical reasoning.
Siebel is absolutely right: IT's "glory days" are over. And good riddance, I say: the spectacular growth of IT has attracted all the wrong people and stifled real innovation. And "all the wrong people" includes people like Siebel himself.
If there is less of a get-rich-quick mentality, maybe people can return to focusing on innovation and long term planning again.
Yes, yes and yes.
Now, if we mean "maturity" to imply solid work processes and repeatable methods (as in the physical engineering disciplines), then certainly not. Not just IT, but software development in general is far from being mature.
However, I see Siebel's point in that IT has reached maturity in the sense no one can pull the kind of crazy shit spending we saw a few years ago. An IT shop can no longer afford, for example, to spend half a mil on hardware just for experiment and see if it works, not without a solid plan and understanding of what they want to get in return from that type of acquisition.
And people can no longer treat a college education on software as the geese of golden eggs, expecting to make $80+/year even if they suck at programming. We have too many unqualified people graduating and getting hired and committing terrible design/development decisions that cost millions, if not billions to the industry and the economy at large.
IT industry by and large has been confusing R&D with indiscriminate spending, and people unqualified for doing software development have been cruising along for far too long at industry's expense.
It's taken a while since the Internet Bubble to reign in and establish a sound economic and spending/investment model on IT. But finally (or so I hope), we are getting there.
Exactly - he's only talking about people with "entrepreneurial spirit", i.e. those people who only care about getting as filthy rich as possible, as fast as possible, and not about working in an industry they enjoy. If they all decide to piss off to China then good luck to them.
Your definition of "entrepreneurial spirit" is very, uhmmm, strange to say the least. It is as if "getting as filthy rich as possible" and "working in an industry they enjoy" were somehow mutually exclusive. They are not.
As surprising as it might seem to you, it isn't a black and white thing. The most successful entrepreneurs are those who make it big in doing what they enjoy. And entrepreneurial spirit is not necessarily driven by the desire of (what some ideological tards consider as) obscene financial success. If you are a good entrepreneur and do something that you like well, financial success will almost inevitably follow.
Surprising, I know!
Ah legal jargon to make it sound like it's actually something novel.
You are missing the point. It's not about something being novel or not.
Seriously, any programmer will think of this amazingly ingenious method if he were tasked to do something like this.
Seriously, you think too much of your fellow programmers. Most programmers nowadays can't figure the difference between their heads and asses when it comes to something mildly complex involving network communications and multi threading.
The only reason this got patented was the absurd use of legal jargon to impress people who have no idea what they're doing (the PTO).
It's not about impressing people. You make a detailed claim, and if that detail claim is not necessarily absurd (what you think of absurd might not necessarily be so) and/or not encompassed, included or superseded on a previously granted patent (or something for which there can be no legal claim to a patent) then you will most likely get it.
Stop labeling everything as arbitrary legal jargon. The more you understand the law, the better that you will be at making sound arguments against abusive patterns. That is, the more useful that you will be at fighting these kind of things.
And a 2.7GPA is an embarrassment. Nothing short than a 3.0 is/should be acceptable as a measure of hard scholastic work. I had a GPA close to 4.0 when I was an undergrad, and that went dipping down to 3.3 at the end of my grad school years. This in Computer Science. I'm embarrassed to say that.
And this tard of a woman thinks it's ok to advertise she has a 2.7GPA from a freaking community college? On Business Administration of Information Technology (whatever the hell that is)?
If she were that intelligent, she would apply to Home Depot (where I worked back in 92-94), and work on the cashier register, then work her way up to the returns/customer service desk, or become a cashier lead, or find her way to work in the store's data processing/reporting office. Having a degree in admin (and on IT), assuming that degree mean some valuable crap, coupled with hard work and lead skills, she would quickly climb the management ladder into department/aile supervisor. That's a type of skill she can build a resume with, which she can later transfer to another job should she wished it.
But that kind of positive, constructive mentality can only come from an intelligent, hard-working and diligent person, not a POS woman who thinks she deserves a job (and has a right to sue her college) because her miserable and embarrasing 2.7GPA didn't materialize into a power-broker position among the managerial echelons.