Realize this: The TSA's job is not, never has been and never will be to provide any actual security worth mentioning. It's job is to create an impression of security and a reference for politicians that they've thought of the chiiiildren.
Look to Ben Gurion International Airport if you want to know how to do air traffic security properly.
And this on the first thing in pretty much forever where I honestly think MS is doing the right thing.
Of course, it is mostly because they realize that advertisement is the #1 sector where they can hurt Google, but still, motivation aside, it is absolutely the right thing to do. Everywhere else when it comes to unsolicited advertisement - aka spam - we demand opt-in. Now that opt-in has become possible for the web, quite frankly, if you don't embrace it you are a fool, an idiot, a sell-out or all three.
Here's what I dislike about the pictures that I've seen on the project website:
Most of them would make bugger all sense to an alien species. Heck, some of them are hard to make sense of if you are a human.
I, too, think the Voyager pictures were a better selection. They provide information about scale and location, something that these pictures don't. Many of them require you to have an understanding of humans and/or human culture to make sense. For example, the indoor pictures have no objective indicators of scale. There is absolutely no hint to tell future alien watchers if these are images of something microscopic, macroscopic, inbetween? Whatever this picture is showing, for example, does not even tell the alien if the area shown in the image is 5 mm, 5 cm, 5m, 50m or whatever across. The skeleton in the top-right corner is largely hidden, it only makes sense as a scale measure if you are a human and your brain is trained on filling in the blanks of other humanoid shapes.
Also, I agree that at least from the selection they show on their webpage, way too many of them show natural catastrophies and doom and gloom.
I miss images that would make alien visitors in the not-5-billion-years distant future help make sense of the ruins of our civilization. If you include pictures of cave paintings, why not a city or two? A million years from now, there won't be anything of either left, but a few thousand years from now, ruins of our cities will still be there even if we go away tomorrow.
And why the focus on humans? What about the other 99% of biomass on the planet?
For a project this expensive, it looks way too much like a high school project to me. Amateurish.
Traffic tickets are not a "service". A service implies that you actually get something useful in return.
You assume that the service always has to be towards the subject. It doesn't. The police performs a service when it arrests a burglar, but the service isn't towards the burglar, it is towards the house owner. Traffic tickets are a service to the other participants of traffic, because by punishing undesireable behaviour they limit it.
Yeah, we can talk all night about how reality sometimes differs and how speeding traps are often put not at the spots where speeding is dangerous but where they'll catch the most people, etc. etc. - that's implementation details.
You overestimate yourself and underestimate your enemies.
Sure you can hack some home WiFi. Your enemy is one guy, statistically speaking most likely someone with just enough computer know-how to reinstall windows.
Going up against a national system is a different game. Not just a different league, a different game. If they don't make the MPAA-stupidity-mistake (invent your own crypto and don't let anyone outside test it for weaknesses) or the typical software-company-mistake (do thinks cheap and fast so you have a great time-to-market, facepalm the day before release and say "oh btw, has anyone thought about security?"), or some other obvious ones, this can be very, very solid.
Crack NSA's SELinux to get a feel for what you're up against. Sure it's possible. All you need is either a serious mistake in the policy configuration, or a ring-0 exploit.
Yes, everything can be hacked. Don't expect to be the one doing it, though. If they do this properly, then a hundred other people have thought of your approach before, during the design, development and testing phases. Maybe they've put in an easter egg for you to find, to reward the effort.
I'm sure people at Nokia feel really good about their "cooperation" with Micro-fuck-everyone-over-once-they're-no-longer-useful now.
What I think is going on is that MS thinks the smartphone market will work like the console market did when they entered it - there were two large competitors, and in almost every market there's always room for a third. By throwing tons of money at it, you can from there start to compete with the juggernauts and if they blunder, you're there to take over (almost happened to Sony with the PS3).
It'll be interesting to see if this works out for the smartphone market, because Apple/iOS and Google/Android aren't the same kind of competitors.
I don't need to clone the hardware, if it is just the source of some data. I can simply replay your data on my machine, no matter what the hardware is. You can't prevent that - if you could prevent software manipulation, you could skip the whole hardware step and embed your key in the software.
Hardware as authentication only works if actual calculations are done on the hardware (Smartcards, SecureID, etc.) or you are able to interface with the hardware (RFID chips, keycards, etc.) directly.
You could use the uncloneable hardware data as a secret key, but then I can get at your key the same way I could if you stored it in a file - hacking your machine. I just need to look in a different place.
But for a low-security fingerprint, it's too much hassle - you could just use the serial number, network card MAC address, etc.
So even though this is quite an interesting approach, I don't quite see a practical application.
And while Mono etc. are around, there is considerable lock-in with proprietary extensions if you rely on the entire.NET toolchain on Windows.
Is there any redemption?!
Not really, no. Once you have done certain things, you are fairly well beyond redemption. If you kill your wife's lover in an angry moment, we allow you back into society after some years. But if you get caught after 10 years of systematically murdering women, we don't. In some places we kill you, in some places we lock you up and throw away the key.
Once you have shown that your evil behaviour is not an abnormality, but standard operating procedure, the burden of proof is on you. And when you've claimed "I've changed!" a couple times and then gone on to fuck over the fools who believed you - well, then future fools will be in short demand.
Is it solely because they charge money for their products that makes you so angry? In that case, I presume MySQL and Java are dead to you as well?
I use MySQL extensively. I don't use much Java, mostly for technical reasons. I use a lot of commercial software. Heck, I've paid money for my text editor because it's damn good.
So no, it's not the money part, it's the evil part.
You are locked in to whatever you choose.
True to a point, but missing the argument. When I write code in C or C++ or PHP or whatever strikes your fancy, then I have decided to use a particular language. However, the resulting code will run on any machine (if compiled) or any interpreter (if interpreted), not just a specific one.
Never touch anything coming from Microsoft unless you plan to sell out wholesale.
If you're an MS shop anyways, then do whatever you want. But if you are not, you should've learnt by now that everything they make is lock-in, bait-and-switch or some other trickery.
Name a counterexample. Pick one that has been around for a while, because they do have a long breath and sometimes give you several years to really bet the farm on their technology before springing the trap.
Without a doubt, the guy is wrong on multiple levels.
First, advertisement is not the foundation of the Internet, there are plenty of sites that are ad-free. I run a few. They are either commercial according to a non-ad model, or they are done by people who simply love doing them, or they are supported by donations, or, or, or... there are lots of models and that's one of the beauties of it all. He is diminishing the variety and creativity of the Internet by claiming everything needs ads.
Two, it's Do Not TRACK, it is not Do Not Advertise. People who have DNT enabled can still be shown ads, you just can't treat them like cattle and mark every step they take. You could still run ads on them, just not the ones you so desperately want (because they pay the best).
However, denying service with a message is actually the right step to take. It is much, much better than silently ignoring the DNT flag. I applaud him for having the balls to stand up for his opinion instead of doing the sleazy thing.
I'm really sorry that they took out your brain last time you were at the hospital. Does it hurt much?;-)
megaupload.com was a website. Megaupload the company was a corporate entity, and its employees and owners were engaged in a conspiracy to aid copyright infringement, if you want the full legal terminology. That is a criminal enterprise by the law books of pretty much every western country.
I hope you find someone to explain that to you in simple words, because unfortunately the wikipedia page is not available in simple english.
How do you know this? - If he didn't get caught he wasn't convicted and then it basically didn't happen.
You are confusing things here. Reality and court verdicts. There are plenty of unsolved murder cases in every country - nobody was convicted for them, and for some nobody ever will. That doesn't mean they didn't happen. The victims are dead and buried. Whether or not the criminal was caught and/or convicted has nothing whatsoever to do with whether or not the crime has occured.
What you are saying is that we don't know if they are criminal or not. That's true. We don't have evidence for it. However, we have circumstancial evidence. Kim was a convicted criminal when he left Germany about 10 years ago. Since then he has flipped the finger at law enforcement at multiple opportunities. Now he was caught in a big criminal enterprise that took a few years to set up.
How high are the chances that a convicted criminal goes clean for a while, makes tons of money legally, and then suddenly starts another criminal enterprise? For what reason would he do that if he is already rich? How high are the chances that he never changed his methods and simply used bribes and influence to stay out of trouble?
Ockhams Razor says he's been a criminal all along.
In this matter they twisted the civil matter of alleged aiding in copyright infringement into a major criminal conspiracy just so they could abuse Interpol and the police of a foreign country
I know a little about how these laws work because my last job was as the IT Compliance manager for a large company. When you say "organized crime" or "criminal conspiracy" you think about the Mafia or the Yakuza. But the legal definition of these terms is that several people conspire to commit a crime. In the eyes of the law, if you and I and two other buddies meet over drinks and come up with a plan to rob the gas station across the street, that's a criminal conspiracy.
And that is why, even if your personal understanding of the term doesn't fit, Megaupload was a criminal conspiracy.
First, no, not everything they did is null and void. Some of the evidence they collected will become inadmissable at court. The part they collected illegally. The other evidence will remain.
Two, innocent until proven guilty is a concept of the legal system and I am neither judge nor court, so I can say whatever the fuck I want, and everyone who has half a brain can look at just the evidence presented so far and it is crystal clear that they were criminals. Sure it needs proving in court, which takes time and isn't done yet, but when you have the criminals themselves on record colluding on their criminal activities, the yes/no question becomes boring and the "what do they get?" question becomes primary.
Three, he is a convicted criminal for other crimes. The guy isn't a clean sheet, he's not a freedom fighter caught by evil big brother, he's a career criminal and whether or not this time they can prove it doesn't change the fact that he has multiple convictions on his record already.
Megaupload intentionally and knowingly invited and rewarded copyright infringement. That's a crime. That's the exact kind of crime you do not want if you want to keep making a copy of a love song for your girlfriend legal.
Do I need to spell it out for you? He's already a convicted criminal, multiple times in fact.
Megaupload was a criminal enterprise and while legally he is innocent until proven guilty, if you look at the facts that were collected, it is highly unlikely he will walk free. Some parts of the evidence will become inadmissible because of this blunder, but others will remain.
He did stupid things when he was younger. Real shocker.
Stock manipulation, insider trading and embezzlement aren't "stupid things", and most of his criminal history happened in his 20s and early 30s. He's a con man, a criminal and a wannabe-hacker. He's the kind of asshole we don't want. Here in Germany, I don't know of a single person in the hacking szene with any respect for him whatsoever.
He never settled down, he simply went through several criminal enterprises without getting caught. Why do you think he moved around all the time, changed citizenship and flipped fingers at the FBI at several occasions?
Hope Kim DotCom has the balls to sue the hell out of the New Zealand government,
Whatever you're smoking, I want some.
This would be a first. I haven't yet heard of drug dealers suing the government for busting them and disrupting their business.
Megaupload was a criminal enterprise, and illegal wiretaps or no there is still more than enough evidence of it. It was correct to bust it. It was not correct to do it the way they did it. There's a difference between arresting an innocent and arresting a criminal in an incorrect way.
Sending the people who actually broke the law to jail and paying Kim for lost revenue would be a step in the right direction.
Are you fucking kidding me?
Kim is a criminal, period. Has been for over a decade. I'm more surprised by the fact that it took them so long to take him down than anything else. Heck, when he left Germany, many of us would've taken bets on how many months it'll take for his crimes to catch up to him and land him in jail.
Yes, they broke the law. Doesn't mean he didn't. Can you stop thinking in terms other than good/bad, black/white, 0/1 ? If anything, then this whole story is evidence that in real life, the story often isn't about good vs. evil but about evil vs. other evil.
If Kim Dotcom didn't exist, the FBI, with the help of the MPAA, would have invented him.
Who says they didn't?
Well, not directly, but known crooks like Kim very often stay out of jail - at least for a long time - by having the right connections, greasing the right palms, or by being useful to the right kind of people.
Why are you explaining and asking permission to use a tool? Download git, install it, use it, done. Standard practice, free, so what's the issue? Just do it. The management doesn't want to see how the sausage is made.
In the majority of Fortune 500 companies, that would get you fired with no questions asked.
Sorry geeks, you are not special and no different from the pencil pushers when it comes to downloading and installing software on company property. You need to get clearance from legal/finance (licensing) and security. Sure, for git the licensing issue is a formality because it's free, but you still need a signature.
Software development is still looked down upon because it's largely a free-for-all, do-a-I-please and that's just not how business works. This attitude of "I'll just do whatever I think" is what will - rightfully - get you into trouble.
Convincing your boss is precisely the correct approach. A good boss won't need much convincing, he doesn't even need to understand things, he just needs to see that you have thought about it and really need it and aren't just looking for a toy to play around with because it was mentioned on/. this morning.
it seems unhealthy to me to have software installs done by developers
"unhealthy" is putting it very nicely. It's insane.
The developers should never have to touch the production system. It is very, very important that the guys running the production system know how to install the software on it and get it up and running. That is exactly what they will have to do if everything burns down one Friday night.
Plus having the developers install it is an open invitation for all kinds of hacks and shortcuts instead of a proper deployment process.
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I knew the TSA would come up.
Realize this: The TSA's job is not, never has been and never will be to provide any actual security worth mentioning. It's job is to create an impression of security and a reference for politicians that they've thought of the chiiiildren.
Look to Ben Gurion International Airport if you want to know how to do air traffic security properly.
And this on the first thing in pretty much forever where I honestly think MS is doing the right thing.
Of course, it is mostly because they realize that advertisement is the #1 sector where they can hurt Google, but still, motivation aside, it is absolutely the right thing to do. Everywhere else when it comes to unsolicited advertisement - aka spam - we demand opt-in. Now that opt-in has become possible for the web, quite frankly, if you don't embrace it you are a fool, an idiot, a sell-out or all three.
Here's what I dislike about the pictures that I've seen on the project website:
Most of them would make bugger all sense to an alien species. Heck, some of them are hard to make sense of if you are a human.
I, too, think the Voyager pictures were a better selection. They provide information about scale and location, something that these pictures don't. Many of them require you to have an understanding of humans and/or human culture to make sense. For example, the indoor pictures have no objective indicators of scale. There is absolutely no hint to tell future alien watchers if these are images of something microscopic, macroscopic, inbetween? Whatever this picture is showing, for example, does not even tell the alien if the area shown in the image is 5 mm, 5 cm, 5m, 50m or whatever across. The skeleton in the top-right corner is largely hidden, it only makes sense as a scale measure if you are a human and your brain is trained on filling in the blanks of other humanoid shapes.
Also, I agree that at least from the selection they show on their webpage, way too many of them show natural catastrophies and doom and gloom.
I miss images that would make alien visitors in the not-5-billion-years distant future help make sense of the ruins of our civilization. If you include pictures of cave paintings, why not a city or two? A million years from now, there won't be anything of either left, but a few thousand years from now, ruins of our cities will still be there even if we go away tomorrow.
And why the focus on humans? What about the other 99% of biomass on the planet?
For a project this expensive, it looks way too much like a high school project to me. Amateurish.
Traffic tickets are not a "service". A service implies that you actually get something useful in return.
You assume that the service always has to be towards the subject. It doesn't. The police performs a service when it arrests a burglar, but the service isn't towards the burglar, it is towards the house owner. Traffic tickets are a service to the other participants of traffic, because by punishing undesireable behaviour they limit it.
Yeah, we can talk all night about how reality sometimes differs and how speeding traps are often put not at the spots where speeding is dangerous but where they'll catch the most people, etc. etc. - that's implementation details.
You overestimate yourself and underestimate your enemies.
Sure you can hack some home WiFi. Your enemy is one guy, statistically speaking most likely someone with just enough computer know-how to reinstall windows.
Going up against a national system is a different game. Not just a different league, a different game. If they don't make the MPAA-stupidity-mistake (invent your own crypto and don't let anyone outside test it for weaknesses) or the typical software-company-mistake (do thinks cheap and fast so you have a great time-to-market, facepalm the day before release and say "oh btw, has anyone thought about security?"), or some other obvious ones, this can be very, very solid.
Crack NSA's SELinux to get a feel for what you're up against. Sure it's possible. All you need is either a serious mistake in the policy configuration, or a ring-0 exploit.
Yes, everything can be hacked. Don't expect to be the one doing it, though. If they do this properly, then a hundred other people have thought of your approach before, during the design, development and testing phases. Maybe they've put in an easter egg for you to find, to reward the effort.
I'm sure people at Nokia feel really good about their "cooperation" with Micro-fuck-everyone-over-once-they're-no-longer-useful now.
What I think is going on is that MS thinks the smartphone market will work like the console market did when they entered it - there were two large competitors, and in almost every market there's always room for a third. By throwing tons of money at it, you can from there start to compete with the juggernauts and if they blunder, you're there to take over (almost happened to Sony with the PS3).
It'll be interesting to see if this works out for the smartphone market, because Apple/iOS and Google/Android aren't the same kind of competitors.
I'm interested, but sceptical.
I don't need to clone the hardware, if it is just the source of some data. I can simply replay your data on my machine, no matter what the hardware is. You can't prevent that - if you could prevent software manipulation, you could skip the whole hardware step and embed your key in the software.
Hardware as authentication only works if actual calculations are done on the hardware (Smartcards, SecureID, etc.) or you are able to interface with the hardware (RFID chips, keycards, etc.) directly.
You could use the uncloneable hardware data as a secret key, but then I can get at your key the same way I could if you stored it in a file - hacking your machine. I just need to look in a different place.
But for a low-security fingerprint, it's too much hassle - you could just use the serial number, network card MAC address, etc.
So even though this is quite an interesting approach, I don't quite see a practical application.
The .NET Framework is about 12 years old now.
And while Mono etc. are around, there is considerable lock-in with proprietary extensions if you rely on the entire .NET toolchain on Windows.
Is there any redemption?!
Not really, no. Once you have done certain things, you are fairly well beyond redemption. If you kill your wife's lover in an angry moment, we allow you back into society after some years. But if you get caught after 10 years of systematically murdering women, we don't. In some places we kill you, in some places we lock you up and throw away the key.
Once you have shown that your evil behaviour is not an abnormality, but standard operating procedure, the burden of proof is on you. And when you've claimed "I've changed!" a couple times and then gone on to fuck over the fools who believed you - well, then future fools will be in short demand.
Is it solely because they charge money for their products that makes you so angry? In that case, I presume MySQL and Java are dead to you as well?
I use MySQL extensively. I don't use much Java, mostly for technical reasons. I use a lot of commercial software. Heck, I've paid money for my text editor because it's damn good.
So no, it's not the money part, it's the evil part.
You are locked in to whatever you choose.
True to a point, but missing the argument. When I write code in C or C++ or PHP or whatever strikes your fancy, then I have decided to use a particular language. However, the resulting code will run on any machine (if compiled) or any interpreter (if interpreted), not just a specific one.
Never touch anything coming from Microsoft unless you plan to sell out wholesale.
If you're an MS shop anyways, then do whatever you want. But if you are not, you should've learnt by now that everything they make is lock-in, bait-and-switch or some other trickery.
Name a counterexample. Pick one that has been around for a while, because they do have a long breath and sometimes give you several years to really bet the farm on their technology before springing the trap.
I'm a bit torn on this, actually.
Without a doubt, the guy is wrong on multiple levels.
First, advertisement is not the foundation of the Internet, there are plenty of sites that are ad-free. I run a few. They are either commercial according to a non-ad model, or they are done by people who simply love doing them, or they are supported by donations, or, or, or... there are lots of models and that's one of the beauties of it all. He is diminishing the variety and creativity of the Internet by claiming everything needs ads.
Two, it's Do Not TRACK, it is not Do Not Advertise. People who have DNT enabled can still be shown ads, you just can't treat them like cattle and mark every step they take. You could still run ads on them, just not the ones you so desperately want (because they pay the best).
However, denying service with a message is actually the right step to take. It is much, much better than silently ignoring the DNT flag. I applaud him for having the balls to stand up for his opinion instead of doing the sleazy thing.
providers of new technology should be forced to apply to Congress to prove they don't upset existing business models.
(emphasis mine)
There's your problem. If it were about proving that they don't break existing laws, I would've considered the point worthy of discussion.
Not upsetting existing business models? Please crawl into a corner and die.
I'm really sorry that they took out your brain last time you were at the hospital. Does it hurt much? ;-)
megaupload.com was a website. Megaupload the company was a corporate entity, and its employees and owners were engaged in a conspiracy to aid copyright infringement, if you want the full legal terminology. That is a criminal enterprise by the law books of pretty much every western country.
I hope you find someone to explain that to you in simple words, because unfortunately the wikipedia page is not available in simple english.
How do you know this? - If he didn't get caught he wasn't convicted and then it basically didn't happen.
You are confusing things here. Reality and court verdicts. There are plenty of unsolved murder cases in every country - nobody was convicted for them, and for some nobody ever will. That doesn't mean they didn't happen. The victims are dead and buried. Whether or not the criminal was caught and/or convicted has nothing whatsoever to do with whether or not the crime has occured.
What you are saying is that we don't know if they are criminal or not. That's true. We don't have evidence for it. However, we have circumstancial evidence. Kim was a convicted criminal when he left Germany about 10 years ago. Since then he has flipped the finger at law enforcement at multiple opportunities. Now he was caught in a big criminal enterprise that took a few years to set up.
How high are the chances that a convicted criminal goes clean for a while, makes tons of money legally, and then suddenly starts another criminal enterprise? For what reason would he do that if he is already rich?
How high are the chances that he never changed his methods and simply used bribes and influence to stay out of trouble?
Ockhams Razor says he's been a criminal all along.
In this matter they twisted the civil matter of alleged aiding in copyright infringement into a major criminal conspiracy just so they could abuse Interpol and the police of a foreign country
I know a little about how these laws work because my last job was as the IT Compliance manager for a large company. When you say "organized crime" or "criminal conspiracy" you think about the Mafia or the Yakuza. But the legal definition of these terms is that several people conspire to commit a crime. In the eyes of the law, if you and I and two other buddies meet over drinks and come up with a plan to rob the gas station across the street, that's a criminal conspiracy.
And that is why, even if your personal understanding of the term doesn't fit, Megaupload was a criminal conspiracy.
Get a brain and use it, it would help.
First, no, not everything they did is null and void. Some of the evidence they collected will become inadmissable at court. The part they collected illegally. The other evidence will remain.
Two, innocent until proven guilty is a concept of the legal system and I am neither judge nor court, so I can say whatever the fuck I want, and everyone who has half a brain can look at just the evidence presented so far and it is crystal clear that they were criminals. Sure it needs proving in court, which takes time and isn't done yet, but when you have the criminals themselves on record colluding on their criminal activities, the yes/no question becomes boring and the "what do they get?" question becomes primary.
Three, he is a convicted criminal for other crimes. The guy isn't a clean sheet, he's not a freedom fighter caught by evil big brother, he's a career criminal and whether or not this time they can prove it doesn't change the fact that he has multiple convictions on his record already.
Reading skills would be useful.
Megaupload intentionally and knowingly invited and rewarded copyright infringement. That's a crime. That's the exact kind of crime you do not want if you want to keep making a copy of a love song for your girlfriend legal.
Do I need to spell it out for you? He's already a convicted criminal, multiple times in fact.
Megaupload was a criminal enterprise and while legally he is innocent until proven guilty, if you look at the facts that were collected, it is highly unlikely he will walk free. Some parts of the evidence will become inadmissible because of this blunder, but others will remain.
He did stupid things when he was younger. Real shocker.
Stock manipulation, insider trading and embezzlement aren't "stupid things", and most of his criminal history happened in his 20s and early 30s.
He's a con man, a criminal and a wannabe-hacker. He's the kind of asshole we don't want. Here in Germany, I don't know of a single person in the hacking szene with any respect for him whatsoever.
He never settled down, he simply went through several criminal enterprises without getting caught. Why do you think he moved around all the time, changed citizenship and flipped fingers at the FBI at several occasions?
Hope Kim DotCom has the balls to sue the hell out of the New Zealand government,
Whatever you're smoking, I want some.
This would be a first. I haven't yet heard of drug dealers suing the government for busting them and disrupting their business.
Megaupload was a criminal enterprise, and illegal wiretaps or no there is still more than enough evidence of it. It was correct to bust it. It was not correct to do it the way they did it. There's a difference between arresting an innocent and arresting a criminal in an incorrect way.
Sending the people who actually broke the law to jail and paying Kim for lost revenue would be a step in the right direction.
Are you fucking kidding me?
Kim is a criminal, period. Has been for over a decade. I'm more surprised by the fact that it took them so long to take him down than anything else. Heck, when he left Germany, many of us would've taken bets on how many months it'll take for his crimes to catch up to him and land him in jail.
Yes, they broke the law. Doesn't mean he didn't. Can you stop thinking in terms other than good/bad, black/white, 0/1 ? If anything, then this whole story is evidence that in real life, the story often isn't about good vs. evil but about evil vs. other evil.
If Kim Dotcom didn't exist, the FBI, with the help of the MPAA, would have invented him.
Who says they didn't?
Well, not directly, but known crooks like Kim very often stay out of jail - at least for a long time - by having the right connections, greasing the right palms, or by being useful to the right kind of people.
And your argument is? Are you complaining that religion does not have a monopoly on bullying and atrocities?
Sorry, but the "I know someone else who also..." argument is a strawman.
Why are you explaining and asking permission to use a tool? Download git, install it, use it, done. Standard practice, free, so what's the issue? Just do it. The management doesn't want to see how the sausage is made.
In the majority of Fortune 500 companies, that would get you fired with no questions asked.
Sorry geeks, you are not special and no different from the pencil pushers when it comes to downloading and installing software on company property. You need to get clearance from legal/finance (licensing) and security. Sure, for git the licensing issue is a formality because it's free, but you still need a signature.
Software development is still looked down upon because it's largely a free-for-all, do-a-I-please and that's just not how business works. This attitude of "I'll just do whatever I think" is what will - rightfully - get you into trouble.
Convincing your boss is precisely the correct approach. A good boss won't need much convincing, he doesn't even need to understand things, he just needs to see that you have thought about it and really need it and aren't just looking for a toy to play around with because it was mentioned on /. this morning.
There was a really great article in a german newspaper these days:
http://www.zeit.de/gesellschaft/zeitgeschehen/2012-09/religion-ideologie-respekt
Basically, the author is spot on - religion always demands respect, but doesn't offer any and doesn't deserve half as much as it already gets.
The believers are bullies, and we need to stop allowing them to shove everyone around.
and is 300,000 lightyears across... possibly extending far into other galaxies...
You are vastly underestimating galactic distances. Our closest neighbor, Andromeda, is over 2 million light years away.
it seems unhealthy to me to have software installs done by developers
"unhealthy" is putting it very nicely. It's insane.
The developers should never have to touch the production system. It is very, very important that the guys running the production system know how to install the software on it and get it up and running. That is exactly what they will have to do if everything burns down one Friday night.
Plus having the developers install it is an open invitation for all kinds of hacks and shortcuts instead of a proper deployment process.