...is how many of the zombie systems are actually deliberatly set up by the owner. Not some accidental "gone to the wrong web site" setup, but some "I'm gonna make some bucks serving spam" and then claiming they didn't know they were infected.
Probably very few. If it is your own system you have to pay for the bandwidth. Or for even less money you can rent time on a botnet that runs on two thousand exploited Windows boxes. There are even Web based interfaces that will walk you through sending your spam. People who want to run their own spam service on legitimately owned and linked machines have been priced out of the market. Both are equally illegal, so no motivation there. Sure there might be a couple run by someone clueless, but the numbers won't compare to the thousands a botnet herder can put together in an automated fashion.
And you don't think the law is wrong in this respect?
No, I don't. These laws exist in pretty much every country in the world because everyone saw what happened before they existed. For example, Microsoft would not exist at all had the federal government not enforced these laws against IBM in the first place, so any complaints from MS are more than a little hypocritical.
Why? Unless they do it through illegal means...
Leveraging their monopoly to take over another market is illegal means.
Neither Dell, nor HP or Gateway were forced to not bundle or install anything else, the only reason they didn't was because they were afraid.
This does not matter. In capitalism it is assumed everyone will act in their own best interest, otherwise capitalism does not work. As a result, the laws have to look at how one company can illegally change what is another companies best interest, not what they are physically forced to do.
But firefox is inferrior in the one place that counts: support.
Firefox has much better support for nearly all Web standards. They are also professionally supported by hundreds of professional support companies. IE fails to support Web standards, is slower, did not have tabs for years after everyone else did, is insecure and almost unusable. MS themselves still recommend you don't use it to click links and always copy all addresses to the URL field and view them there. The fact Firefox it can still manage 10% against a bundled monopoly is pretty good evidence of its superiority.
Furthermore, nothing prevented consumers from getting any other browser by choice, they merely did not choose.
And because they did not choose, the market did not work. That choice is the only reason why capitalism wins out over other economic models, like communism. Communism fails on the large scale because decisions are made for the consumers by representatives supposedly acting in their best interests.As a result consumers don't get what they really want because humans act in their own best interests, not those of others. In regulated capitalism, people acting their own best interests make choices and the market adapts. If you allow monopolies to tie and bundle, people acting in their own best interests can still make the right choice and lose, because the market consolidates and the lose the ability to make granular enough choices. Historically this has destroyed every market it has happened to. Innovation slows to a crawl, prices skyrocket, and consumers are ignored and there is nothing they can do about it. After a hundred years or so of this in a democratic system, we simply made it illegal, just like everyone else did and with good reason.
What prevented Dell HP or Gateway from doing this before? Nothing.
MS's leveraging of their desktop monopoly made sure this was not in Dell or Gateway's best interests. They used their power to take over a new market, despite not innovating the best or cheapest product in that market.
Because someone else comes along to steal your thunder (see Ubuntu, OS X and fire fox)
I'd argue all of those products are better than MS's offerings for many users, and yet they all have tiny market shares and none compete directly against MS in the marketplace. All the products that did, are gone. That is the point. It does not matter if iTunes is 100 times better than WMP. So long as WMP is bundled most people will just still use whatever came with their computer, which means whatever is built into Windows. In this way a less innovative more expensive program can take over a market from a cheaper, better alternative. That is why it is illegal.
Please go do some reading on monopolies and anti-trust law. You should learn this in and econ 101 course. If not for these laws, there would be a handful of giant conglomerates left and consumers would have no choices for virtually any products.
Nope. I read some reports a while back, but have not done any research recently. You could try Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, International Freedom of Expression Exchange and Anti-Slavery International. If they don't have rankings now, most of them have at least within the recent past and the US sure hasn't been moving up the list.
Besides, I don't see why everyone always paint Microsoft as Apple's big competitor. Apple competes with Dell, Adobe, and Creative more than they compete with Microsoft, since Apple doesn't really make money from seeling individual copies of the OS.
Apple does make money selling individual copies of their OS for people who want to upgrade, just not much money. People make the comparison because OS X is probably the most viable competitor if they could enter into the desktop OS market, which they can't do successfully because of the MS monopoly.
Huh? I really didn't see that coming. The only thing you can do on a Dell that you can't do on a Mac is run Windows apps...
Yeah, pretty much.
The complaints about Microsoft aren't simply about bundling. If buying a copy of Windows allowed you to install Office for free, no one would complain.
I would and so would the courts. You're right that the fundamental complaint is not about bundling two products together, it is about bundling one product with another product when one is a monopoly. Go read up on the economic models of monopolies and antitrust laws to see why this is illegal pretty much everywhere.
AHHHH, Torture!!!! Your posts torture me. So much pain AGGGHHHH. You support torture!!!!!!
No you do, since you voluntarily read it, unless of course someone is forcing you, in which case they are.
See, all of a sudden your overly simplistic statement is proven wrong.
Nope.
I bet now, you are gonna say "that's rediculous[sic]"
Nope.
In this case, according to you, I would get to decide. What is "torture" to me, may not be "torture" to you. This is the same arguement[sic] you are using, just twisted enough to make it truly rediculous[sic] to show the fallacy of your whole point.
Not at all. It is not ridiculous, it is the only way to prevent torture.
You support torture!
No. If this is torture and you're still reading, you support torture, not I.
You are arguing with a position I do not hold. You have created a strawman argument and are now beating up on it.
I responded only to direct quotes from your post. If you do not hold the position you said you did, it is your error not mine. You defended taking the lowest common denominator as an appropriate comparison because you claimed "people like you" needed it for a proper perspective.
My opinion is that the proper perspective is looking up at ideals.
Now had I claimed that you think we should not compare ourselves to the worst when you did not write that, and then attacked that, it would be a strawman argument. But you did say, " The reason he has to used honor-killings as a yardstick is because of people like you have who have absolutely no perspective." If that is not defending doing so, then you've badly misrepresented yourself.
Yeah, but you don't do it on the clock at work...... That time you are spending doing that is not your time when you are being paid to work.
But do they get everyone fired from their contracting position who does something non-work related, or was it the particular content that motivated this reaction? My guess is the latter.
Wow, did you think of that strawman up all by yourself?
I thought up this statement all by myself. Please go learn what a "strawman argument" is. Why the term is so horribly misused on this particular forum is beyond me.
I am saying that people are forced to use that argument ("We are better than 90%...") in reponse to equally stupid arguments like "America is terrible in regards to free speech..."
You can't judge the relative quality of human rights until you actual look at how it is applied. The US is nowhere near "better than 90%." We're mediocre. You're the one who defended that it is acceptable to compare us to those worst as justification for wrongdoing.
It doesn't matter. The law doesn't say the government can't fire people for exercising their free speech. It says the government can't do anything to stop people from exercising their free speech. The FBI can't monitor who checks out what at the library because it has a chilling effect on the free speech of authors. I'd say getting someone fired for what they say is even more likely to cause such a chilling effect, how about you?
The biggest problem is that she used her customer's computer system to criticize that very customer! As a contractor to the US government, she should have just known better than to critique foreign policy on a CIA intranet.
Yeah, just because criticizing the government is the single, most highly protected, right in out entire system of laws is no reason she should not have known better than to actually do it. How sad, RIP bill of rights.
The reason he has to used honor-killings as a yardstick is because of people like you have who have absolutely no perspective.
I reject this argument entirely. Looking to the lowest common denominator and striving to be "a little better than they are" is sickening. We should strive to be the best at everything and look to the best at any given thing for our ideals. Anything else results in not reason, but rationalization of wrongdoing. "Someone else is still worse," is no excuse for wrongdoing.
A subcontractor couldn't be let go because of something one of their employee's wrote on an external blog, but they sure could be overlooked when time came to renew that contract. BAE Systems was protecting what they felt was their best interest. Case closed.
Now go reread the part of my post you quoted. "If the government takes any action to get you fired for saying something, they have violated the First amendment in the Bill of rights and broken the law."
It doesn't matter who fired her, what matters is the government took action to get her fired. What BAE did was legal, but what the government did was most probably not.
Is waterboarding torture? Two opinions on this, which one is right, and who gets to decide?
Yes, it obviously is and the person who is going to subjected to it should have the say. Or we could subject you to it and then you could give us an informed opinion.
Why do they get to decide?
No one who hasn't been through it knows and it is better to not do something that might be torture than to torture people while saying, maybe it isn't really torture.
Knowledge you have is not just allowed to be freely shared.
There are some restrictions on the first amendment as it is enacted in current law. For example, yelling fire in a crowded theater (classic example). It must, however, be proved that your exercising your free speech violates the rights of others. For example, government monitoring of library checkouts was deemed unconstitutional because it had a chilling effect upon a person's right to read the free speech of others, thus violating the first amendment. The government interfering to get you fired certainly has at least as much chilling effect, unless they can demonstrate why this particular free speech prevented them from doing their work.
The First Amendment is designed to prevent government abuse. It does not guarantee the right to work for the government regardless of what you say.
The first amendment guarantees a right. Unless the government can demonstrate why this speech made it so the person could not do their job, then they have broken the law.
Following the terms of a legally binding contract -- signed by both parties -- as a condition of employment is breaking the law?
That is not at all what I wrote. I said your contract with your employer(contract company) cannot grant the government the right to break the law and certainly not the constitution which trumps all other laws including the legal basis for contracts in the first place. For that matter, even if you sign a contract with the government themselves agreeing not to speak about certain topics it won't hold up in court because it is illegal for the government to impose that restriction in the contract unless required by the job. For example, a contract that says you will not say anything good about the democratic party or candidate while you are employed at the post office, is blatantly illegal.
This eliminates the following concerns: 1) Somebody spoofs your fingerprints. He still needs your password to do anything, and that cop will totally kick his ass.
If they already have to use a password, why bother with the biometric at all? It adds complication and a false sense of security. A human who sees 1000 false positives from the machine for every real attempt at fraud will soon stop looking for latex on fingers or even severed fingers. Because you need to use your fingerprint, they might be less suspicious of other factors, like you're the wrong gender or you try five different passwords. Further, assuming someone is going to try to overcome this, they just might torture you for your password and chop your finger off. Me I'd rather tell them the password, keep my finger, and hope the guard notices it isn't me because he hasn't been lulled into a false sense of security by the biometric.
Somebody hacks the database. All the have is the hash.
Assuming everyone does everything properly, which will never happen. Those same companies running a crappy unpatched Windows server with a database accessible to the world with absurdly easy to guess passwords is also likely to store your whole biometric. Since it is easy, it will become a common single point authentication at grocery stores, gas stations, etc. Any of them that are malicious or incompetent or compromised can yield your full biometric. Since it will be so common and easy, people might just randomly grab prints from shopping carts and use them in the store. What about when it is the main method at the store, but you know your print is compromised? Do you go to the special, long line?
Biometrics create more problems than they solve, even as an additional measure, most of the time.
All the credible books I've read mention this as a fallacy. Something you are is not a measurable property since it is impossible to make a copy of what a person is, fundamentally. Biometrics are simply something you have that is really hard to change. This is good in that others may have trouble changing their s to be yours, but bad in that once compromised, you're screwed for life.
Biometrics are not a good part of a secure authentication solution. They are convenient for very low security operations. The difficulty of changing them makes them useful as an additional authentication mechanism, under proper human supervision (which will probably never happen). In the way they are being applied and are ever likely to be applied, biometrics are liability and lead to false positives, sloppy authentication, and a false sense of security. Trying to characterize biometrics as a separate category from "something you have" is mostly an attempt to obfuscate what terrible "something you haves" they tend to be and to remove them from the formalized evaluations of "something you have" components. Largely this is because they are whiz-bang and nifty and sales guys can make a fortune selling them.
Oh, it was on a BLOG on an INTRANET...Here we have a contractor who did something the employer didn't like. Employer fires contractor. End of story.
I take it you don't understand the difference between private companies and government actions? A private company can fire you for saying something. If the government takes any action to get you fired for saying something, they have violated the First amendment in the Bill of rights and broken the law.
I can tell you that generally contracts are written...
Who cares. It doesn't matter what the contract you signed says, it does not mean the government can break the law. If you have a contract that says you can be fired for any reason, fine, but if a government agent payed for with my tax dollars went to your workplace and tried to convince your boss to fire you because you are jewish, or black, or for something you said, or because you own a firearm, they have just broken the law.
Less hypocrisy. Right now I see people on just about every tech site that will tear into Microsoft for packaging a browser with Windows, but praise Apple for packaging an OS with every PC, and dozens of applications with every OS.
Please do some research into anti-trust law and monopolies. Bundling something with a monopolized product bypasses the free market forces. Bundling something with something not monopolized, dissuades some buyers and otherwise evens out the difference. For some simple math, if you have product A which is a monopoly and product B which is not and the former sells 100 units and the latter, 50 units in a market where 100 units are sold, bundling the two results in you sell 100 units of each, or 200 units and extracting more money from the market without innovating or doing anything else that benefits the consumer. If another company has a product C which sells 50 units in a market of 100 units and another product D which also sells 50 units in a market of a hundred units, bundling the two together will result in your selling 50 units of each and thus 100 total. Some people don't buy because they can't afford both and some people are not price restricted so they buy the other product as well, even though they normally wouldn't. The point is, buyers for product C can switch to a competitor, so some do. This, by definition, is not the case for a monopoly.
It is not hypocritical for a company to bundle products that are not monopolies to criticize one for bundling products where one is a monopoly. These two actions while similar have completely different effects. It is not hypocritical for a person who loves to shoot their pistol at the target range to criticize someone who shoots an old lady. Both parties are doing the same basic act (pulling a trigger) but one is illegal and results in detrimental results.
In many cases, this is partly the fault of bad distribution, which means alot of mark up by the local (non-Apple) distributors...but also, because Apple still has yet to even try to make offerings at the truly low level of computing...
First, Apple serves higher end markets. They do okay in Europe and well in Japan, but the world in general is not as wealthy as these markets and price sensitivity is a big issue. Second, Apple bundles their OS costs and software development costs into one big package. A large chunk of the world simply pirates all software and will not pay for it. As a result, Macs are twice as expensive as Windows machines with similar software.
And EVERYONE uses MSN messenger, etc... (I just got back from Mexico)
It's called "bundling."
I don't see Apple taking a large chunk of the rest of the world for a long, long time, if ever. Rather, I see Linux on white boxes taking over slowly.
I never understood this. What is wrong with bundling software? Here's a hint for you, if windows didn't come with IE or [Other Bundled Browser] people would find it awfuly hard to go dowload the latest version of firefox.
You're mistaken. The law makes it illegal for Microsoft to bundle a browser with their OS. It is not illegal for Dell or Gateway or HP to bundle Windows and IE or Windows and Firefox or Linux and Opera. End users don't have to download anything.
Taking that choice away from Dell and HP and Gateway or in any way using their monopoly to make sure IE is the one they choose over better alternatives is what is illegal.
Budling software is not wrong, evil or bad.
Assuming one of the bundled products is a monopoly, then yes bundling is bad. It bypasses the free market and the advantages it brings. Have you ever noticed that most people use IE, even though it has long been inferior in many obvious ways to Firefox? This is because IE is bundled. Thus most people never have a chance to vote with their dollars for the best browser. Now if each computer manufacturer had to choose on even footing which one to pre-install, what would happen? Some would choose one browser and some a different browser. Say Gateway decided to bill their machines as "more secure than Dell" because they pre-installed Firefox. At this point consumers buy computers and tell others and eventually the market decides which is better for different parts of that market. And here's the important part. Because consumers are making this decision, both the Firefox team and the IE team are motivated to make a better product to compete. Consumers gain choice and innovation.
When a monopoly bundles something with that monopoly, capitalism breaks. All the economic models show consolidation of sales, rising prices, and falling quality. If you have no competition why lower prices or work to improve? For this reason it is illegal.
Slashdot Mirror
Probably very few. If it is your own system you have to pay for the bandwidth. Or for even less money you can rent time on a botnet that runs on two thousand exploited Windows boxes. There are even Web based interfaces that will walk you through sending your spam. People who want to run their own spam service on legitimately owned and linked machines have been priced out of the market. Both are equally illegal, so no motivation there. Sure there might be a couple run by someone clueless, but the numbers won't compare to the thousands a botnet herder can put together in an automated fashion.
What little I did find supported the "90th percentile" assertion.
Citation please.
And you don't think the law is wrong in this respect?
No, I don't. These laws exist in pretty much every country in the world because everyone saw what happened before they existed. For example, Microsoft would not exist at all had the federal government not enforced these laws against IBM in the first place, so any complaints from MS are more than a little hypocritical.
Why? Unless they do it through illegal means...
Leveraging their monopoly to take over another market is illegal means.
Neither Dell, nor HP or Gateway were forced to not bundle or install anything else, the only reason they didn't was because they were afraid.
This does not matter. In capitalism it is assumed everyone will act in their own best interest, otherwise capitalism does not work. As a result, the laws have to look at how one company can illegally change what is another companies best interest, not what they are physically forced to do.
But firefox is inferrior in the one place that counts: support.
Firefox has much better support for nearly all Web standards. They are also professionally supported by hundreds of professional support companies. IE fails to support Web standards, is slower, did not have tabs for years after everyone else did, is insecure and almost unusable. MS themselves still recommend you don't use it to click links and always copy all addresses to the URL field and view them there. The fact Firefox it can still manage 10% against a bundled monopoly is pretty good evidence of its superiority.
Furthermore, nothing prevented consumers from getting any other browser by choice, they merely did not choose.
And because they did not choose, the market did not work. That choice is the only reason why capitalism wins out over other economic models, like communism. Communism fails on the large scale because decisions are made for the consumers by representatives supposedly acting in their best interests.As a result consumers don't get what they really want because humans act in their own best interests, not those of others. In regulated capitalism, people acting their own best interests make choices and the market adapts. If you allow monopolies to tie and bundle, people acting in their own best interests can still make the right choice and lose, because the market consolidates and the lose the ability to make granular enough choices. Historically this has destroyed every market it has happened to. Innovation slows to a crawl, prices skyrocket, and consumers are ignored and there is nothing they can do about it. After a hundred years or so of this in a democratic system, we simply made it illegal, just like everyone else did and with good reason.
What prevented Dell HP or Gateway from doing this before? Nothing.
MS's leveraging of their desktop monopoly made sure this was not in Dell or Gateway's best interests. They used their power to take over a new market, despite not innovating the best or cheapest product in that market.
Because someone else comes along to steal your thunder (see Ubuntu, OS X and fire fox)
I'd argue all of those products are better than MS's offerings for many users, and yet they all have tiny market shares and none compete directly against MS in the marketplace. All the products that did, are gone. That is the point. It does not matter if iTunes is 100 times better than WMP. So long as WMP is bundled most people will just still use whatever came with their computer, which means whatever is built into Windows. In this way a less innovative more expensive program can take over a market from a cheaper, better alternative. That is why it is illegal.
Please go do some reading on monopolies and anti-trust law. You should learn this in and econ 101 course. If not for these laws, there would be a handful of giant conglomerates left and consumers would have no choices for virtually any products.
Do you even try this
Nope. I read some reports a while back, but have not done any research recently. You could try Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, International Freedom of Expression Exchange and Anti-Slavery International. If they don't have rankings now, most of them have at least within the recent past and the US sure hasn't been moving up the list.
Besides, I don't see why everyone always paint Microsoft as Apple's big competitor. Apple competes with Dell, Adobe, and Creative more than they compete with Microsoft, since Apple doesn't really make money from seeling individual copies of the OS.
Apple does make money selling individual copies of their OS for people who want to upgrade, just not much money. People make the comparison because OS X is probably the most viable competitor if they could enter into the desktop OS market, which they can't do successfully because of the MS monopoly.
Huh? I really didn't see that coming. The only thing you can do on a Dell that you can't do on a Mac is run Windows apps...
Yeah, pretty much.
The complaints about Microsoft aren't simply about bundling. If buying a copy of Windows allowed you to install Office for free, no one would complain.
I would and so would the courts. You're right that the fundamental complaint is not about bundling two products together, it is about bundling one product with another product when one is a monopoly. Go read up on the economic models of monopolies and antitrust laws to see why this is illegal pretty much everywhere.
AHHHH, Torture!!!! Your posts torture me. So much pain AGGGHHHH. You support torture!!!!!!
No you do, since you voluntarily read it, unless of course someone is forcing you, in which case they are.
See, all of a sudden your overly simplistic statement is proven wrong.
Nope.
I bet now, you are gonna say "that's rediculous[sic]"
Nope.
In this case, according to you, I would get to decide. What is "torture" to me, may not be "torture" to you. This is the same arguement[sic] you are using, just twisted enough to make it truly rediculous[sic] to show the fallacy of your whole point.
Not at all. It is not ridiculous, it is the only way to prevent torture.
You support torture!
No. If this is torture and you're still reading, you support torture, not I.
You are arguing with a position I do not hold. You have created a strawman argument and are now beating up on it.
I responded only to direct quotes from your post. If you do not hold the position you said you did, it is your error not mine. You defended taking the lowest common denominator as an appropriate comparison because you claimed "people like you" needed it for a proper perspective.
My opinion is that the proper perspective is looking up at ideals.
Now had I claimed that you think we should not compare ourselves to the worst when you did not write that, and then attacked that, it would be a strawman argument. But you did say, " The reason he has to used honor-killings as a yardstick is because of people like you have who have absolutely no perspective." If that is not defending doing so, then you've badly misrepresented yourself.
Yeah, but you don't do it on the clock at work...... That time you are spending doing that is not your time when you are being paid to work.
But do they get everyone fired from their contracting position who does something non-work related, or was it the particular content that motivated this reaction? My guess is the latter.
I think you'd have a hard time finding any ranking system that puts more than 20 of them above the US.
Really? Try a Google search for "human rights report." The US usually ranks behind most of Western Europe for human rights in general.
They said 12% of the US market, not world market. The previous poster was just making guesses, by the way.
Wow, did you think of that strawman up all by yourself?
I thought up this statement all by myself. Please go learn what a "strawman argument" is. Why the term is so horribly misused on this particular forum is beyond me.
I am saying that people are forced to use that argument ("We are better than 90%...") in reponse to equally stupid arguments like "America is terrible in regards to free speech..."
You can't judge the relative quality of human rights until you actual look at how it is applied. The US is nowhere near "better than 90%." We're mediocre. You're the one who defended that it is acceptable to compare us to those worst as justification for wrongdoing.
So she WASN'T a gov't employee.
It doesn't matter. The law doesn't say the government can't fire people for exercising their free speech. It says the government can't do anything to stop people from exercising their free speech. The FBI can't monitor who checks out what at the library because it has a chilling effect on the free speech of authors. I'd say getting someone fired for what they say is even more likely to cause such a chilling effect, how about you?
The biggest problem is that she used her customer's computer system to criticize that very customer! As a contractor to the US government, she should have just known better than to critique foreign policy on a CIA intranet.
Yeah, just because criticizing the government is the single, most highly protected, right in out entire system of laws is no reason she should not have known better than to actually do it. How sad, RIP bill of rights.
The reason he has to used honor-killings as a yardstick is because of people like you have who have absolutely no perspective.
I reject this argument entirely. Looking to the lowest common denominator and striving to be "a little better than they are" is sickening. We should strive to be the best at everything and look to the best at any given thing for our ideals. Anything else results in not reason, but rationalization of wrongdoing. "Someone else is still worse," is no excuse for wrongdoing.
A subcontractor couldn't be let go because of something one of their employee's wrote on an external blog, but they sure could be overlooked when time came to renew that contract. BAE Systems was protecting what they felt was their best interest. Case closed.
Now go reread the part of my post you quoted. "If the government takes any action to get you fired for saying something, they have violated the First amendment in the Bill of rights and broken the law."
It doesn't matter who fired her, what matters is the government took action to get her fired. What BAE did was legal, but what the government did was most probably not.
Is waterboarding torture? Two opinions on this, which one is right, and who gets to decide?
Yes, it obviously is and the person who is going to subjected to it should have the say. Or we could subject you to it and then you could give us an informed opinion.
Why do they get to decide?
No one who hasn't been through it knows and it is better to not do something that might be torture than to torture people while saying, maybe it isn't really torture.
Not so clear anymore, is it?
Yeah, actually it is.
Bush might have had his shining beacon of democracy in the Muslim world, which is what he was trying to get Iraq to be.
I don't think you're correct. I think he wanted a shiny beacon of capitalism, but capitalism got in the way of itself.
This person would have been fired for posting *anything* on an internal blog...
That remains unclear. Were other contractors who posted anything on the blog immediately let go and their contract company asked to fire them?
Knowledge you have is not just allowed to be freely shared.
There are some restrictions on the first amendment as it is enacted in current law. For example, yelling fire in a crowded theater (classic example). It must, however, be proved that your exercising your free speech violates the rights of others. For example, government monitoring of library checkouts was deemed unconstitutional because it had a chilling effect upon a person's right to read the free speech of others, thus violating the first amendment. The government interfering to get you fired certainly has at least as much chilling effect, unless they can demonstrate why this particular free speech prevented them from doing their work.
The First Amendment is designed to prevent government abuse. It does not guarantee the right to work for the government regardless of what you say.
The first amendment guarantees a right. Unless the government can demonstrate why this speech made it so the person could not do their job, then they have broken the law.
Following the terms of a legally binding contract -- signed by both parties -- as a condition of employment is breaking the law?
That is not at all what I wrote. I said your contract with your employer(contract company) cannot grant the government the right to break the law and certainly not the constitution which trumps all other laws including the legal basis for contracts in the first place. For that matter, even if you sign a contract with the government themselves agreeing not to speak about certain topics it won't hold up in court because it is illegal for the government to impose that restriction in the contract unless required by the job. For example, a contract that says you will not say anything good about the democratic party or candidate while you are employed at the post office, is blatantly illegal.
This eliminates the following concerns: 1) Somebody spoofs your fingerprints. He still needs your password to do anything, and that cop will totally kick his ass.
If they already have to use a password, why bother with the biometric at all? It adds complication and a false sense of security. A human who sees 1000 false positives from the machine for every real attempt at fraud will soon stop looking for latex on fingers or even severed fingers. Because you need to use your fingerprint, they might be less suspicious of other factors, like you're the wrong gender or you try five different passwords. Further, assuming someone is going to try to overcome this, they just might torture you for your password and chop your finger off. Me I'd rather tell them the password, keep my finger, and hope the guard notices it isn't me because he hasn't been lulled into a false sense of security by the biometric.
Somebody hacks the database. All the have is the hash.
Assuming everyone does everything properly, which will never happen. Those same companies running a crappy unpatched Windows server with a database accessible to the world with absurdly easy to guess passwords is also likely to store your whole biometric. Since it is easy, it will become a common single point authentication at grocery stores, gas stations, etc. Any of them that are malicious or incompetent or compromised can yield your full biometric. Since it will be so common and easy, people might just randomly grab prints from shopping carts and use them in the store. What about when it is the main method at the store, but you know your print is compromised? Do you go to the special, long line?
Biometrics create more problems than they solve, even as an additional measure, most of the time.
something you are (fingerprints, irises, etc.)
All the credible books I've read mention this as a fallacy. Something you are is not a measurable property since it is impossible to make a copy of what a person is, fundamentally. Biometrics are simply something you have that is really hard to change. This is good in that others may have trouble changing their s to be yours, but bad in that once compromised, you're screwed for life.
Biometrics are not a good part of a secure authentication solution. They are convenient for very low security operations. The difficulty of changing them makes them useful as an additional authentication mechanism, under proper human supervision (which will probably never happen). In the way they are being applied and are ever likely to be applied, biometrics are liability and lead to false positives, sloppy authentication, and a false sense of security. Trying to characterize biometrics as a separate category from "something you have" is mostly an attempt to obfuscate what terrible "something you haves" they tend to be and to remove them from the formalized evaluations of "something you have" components. Largely this is because they are whiz-bang and nifty and sales guys can make a fortune selling them.
Oh, it was on a BLOG on an INTRANET...Here we have a contractor who did something the employer didn't like. Employer fires contractor. End of story.
I take it you don't understand the difference between private companies and government actions? A private company can fire you for saying something. If the government takes any action to get you fired for saying something, they have violated the First amendment in the Bill of rights and broken the law.
I can tell you that generally contracts are written...
Who cares. It doesn't matter what the contract you signed says, it does not mean the government can break the law. If you have a contract that says you can be fired for any reason, fine, but if a government agent payed for with my tax dollars went to your workplace and tried to convince your boss to fire you because you are jewish, or black, or for something you said, or because you own a firearm, they have just broken the law.
Less hypocrisy. Right now I see people on just about every tech site that will tear into Microsoft for packaging a browser with Windows, but praise Apple for packaging an OS with every PC, and dozens of applications with every OS.
Please do some research into anti-trust law and monopolies. Bundling something with a monopolized product bypasses the free market forces. Bundling something with something not monopolized, dissuades some buyers and otherwise evens out the difference. For some simple math, if you have product A which is a monopoly and product B which is not and the former sells 100 units and the latter, 50 units in a market where 100 units are sold, bundling the two results in you sell 100 units of each, or 200 units and extracting more money from the market without innovating or doing anything else that benefits the consumer. If another company has a product C which sells 50 units in a market of 100 units and another product D which also sells 50 units in a market of a hundred units, bundling the two together will result in your selling 50 units of each and thus 100 total. Some people don't buy because they can't afford both and some people are not price restricted so they buy the other product as well, even though they normally wouldn't. The point is, buyers for product C can switch to a competitor, so some do. This, by definition, is not the case for a monopoly.
It is not hypocritical for a company to bundle products that are not monopolies to criticize one for bundling products where one is a monopoly. These two actions while similar have completely different effects. It is not hypocritical for a person who loves to shoot their pistol at the target range to criticize someone who shoots an old lady. Both parties are doing the same basic act (pulling a trigger) but one is illegal and results in detrimental results.
In many cases, this is partly the fault of bad distribution, which means alot of mark up by the local (non-Apple) distributors ...but also, because Apple still has yet to even try to make offerings at the truly low level of computing...
First, Apple serves higher end markets. They do okay in Europe and well in Japan, but the world in general is not as wealthy as these markets and price sensitivity is a big issue. Second, Apple bundles their OS costs and software development costs into one big package. A large chunk of the world simply pirates all software and will not pay for it. As a result, Macs are twice as expensive as Windows machines with similar software.
And EVERYONE uses MSN messenger, etc... (I just got back from Mexico)
It's called "bundling."
I don't see Apple taking a large chunk of the rest of the world for a long, long time, if ever. Rather, I see Linux on white boxes taking over slowly.
I never understood this. What is wrong with bundling software? Here's a hint for you, if windows didn't come with IE or [Other Bundled Browser] people would find it awfuly hard to go dowload the latest version of firefox.
You're mistaken. The law makes it illegal for Microsoft to bundle a browser with their OS. It is not illegal for Dell or Gateway or HP to bundle Windows and IE or Windows and Firefox or Linux and Opera. End users don't have to download anything.
Taking that choice away from Dell and HP and Gateway or in any way using their monopoly to make sure IE is the one they choose over better alternatives is what is illegal.
Budling software is not wrong, evil or bad.
Assuming one of the bundled products is a monopoly, then yes bundling is bad. It bypasses the free market and the advantages it brings. Have you ever noticed that most people use IE, even though it has long been inferior in many obvious ways to Firefox? This is because IE is bundled. Thus most people never have a chance to vote with their dollars for the best browser. Now if each computer manufacturer had to choose on even footing which one to pre-install, what would happen? Some would choose one browser and some a different browser. Say Gateway decided to bill their machines as "more secure than Dell" because they pre-installed Firefox. At this point consumers buy computers and tell others and eventually the market decides which is better for different parts of that market. And here's the important part. Because consumers are making this decision, both the Firefox team and the IE team are motivated to make a better product to compete. Consumers gain choice and innovation.
When a monopoly bundles something with that monopoly, capitalism breaks. All the economic models show consolidation of sales, rising prices, and falling quality. If you have no competition why lower prices or work to improve? For this reason it is illegal.