Dude, if you were really listening to your users, you would stop churning out products for the next 5 years and start fixing stuff.
Windows is still a hole-riddled operating system. It is not because you have bad programmers, it's because you HAD bad programmers and kept building on it. Kick it out, get a decent (BSD-style?) kernel and give me a true POSIX architecture I can work with (no, I don't want it as an add-on like Unix Services is an attempt).
Also, give us a better Office. 2007 sucks, I deal with it daily, and nobody in your average corporate office can do anything with it, because it's confusing. It might look good if it were a Web 2.0 webpage, but not for software.
Oh, don't forget the rest of your software packages. SharePoint (also 2007) is barely worth a beta status nor worth the label 'intranet' tool as it is. It's missing lots of functionality for internal use and it's missing a lot of stuff out of the box and it's freakin' slow once you start modifying it. Replication of data, cross-site lookups (without coding in.NET), XSLT 2.0 is missing, ANY User Profile lookup without coding in.NET or SQL and instant replication to the User Information List of custom properties is impossible. Make it compatible with your own products too (SharePoint Designer) I could go on, but you'll find it reading hundreds of blogs.
Also make stuff compatible! Please, AD uses plain Kerberos and LDAP but is somehow not compatible with either (or barely, I made it work together with Mac and Linux boxes, but it ain't good).
These complaints have been here and elsewhere on the web, even on your own forums but nobody has ever taken a look at it, it seems. Maybe the PR department, but they don't have a real implication on the product, so your arguments are moot since you are just another PR shill.
I wonder if they are trying to desensitize us to circumstances like the movie "The Island" portrays. Creating clones of humans for the sake of replacement parts. This sheep is now 15% percent human, so we can harvest them.
But when it becomes 50% human, or even 75%, at what point do we call them humans and at what point do we give them rights as humans. I recently raised the same question on another forum and everybody was all up in arms that we couldn't kill clones of ourselves so we can replace our own 'malfunctioning' parts because they are human. Now these...things?... are partly human, at what point can we stop killing them for our own good?
Well, as TFA says, they get more work done with less energy on Linux rather than Windows. And it's the freakin' government, they're not doing any real work. Letting computers idle is thus cheaper on Linux than on Windows and as we all know, Linux is so fast, it does an infinite loop in 5 seconds.
Or make Active Directory, which is basically built up out of Kerberos & LDAP (with SSL) talk like an LDAP implementation and let the Kerberos work like the Kerberos standard outlines.
Microsoft did not invent anything anytime, they just bought up or copied it (badly) from someone else and made it sound like they did it. From the beginning (BASIC & DOS) till now I have not seen a single drop of innovation or invention come from Redmond. I have basically grown up with Microsoft products around me (from Windows 1.0 & GW-BASIC on DOS 3.1 till Vista now) but my mentor (family member) in computer sciences also had the alternative (or back in the day, the mainstream) solutions and I have never liked Microsoft, nor will I ever like it. The only thing they do is buy something, extend or enhance it so it looks better to the one who buys and then sell it again and forget about their customer.
I currently hear a lot about 'information security' and VoIP, however I would say: they're empty bags of wind and self-perpetuating bubbles.
Information security will be hot until the majority of managers finally finds out that the weakest link in a chain equals the strength of it and see that it's their USERS (aka employees) they have to satisfy, no matter how much their security is upgraded, as long as the sales drone can put it on a memory stick or CD so they can work on it, or in the mean time they can give it to their customer (or their next sales gig), it's useless to keep locking it down. The average script kiddie is going to be kept out with the current lines of defense (frequent updates, virus scanners and firewalls) and the real hackers are going to get in anyway.
VoIP is indeed a hot topic and requires a lot of work these days, it is a good technology, but just as when computer networking (Ethernet, Token Ring) replaced mail carriers around the building, once it's in place, not a whole lot of expertise is required to keep it running. Yes, you'll need the local VoIP administrator and if it breaks the VoIP consultant, but you don't need 10 of them to re-implement it. So again, only the best will survive while the rest will move on to the next field.
The same happened to SEO, firewalls, virusscanners, intranets, websites... it all had it's time of implementation, now everyone has it and it only needs maintained. Thus, either do what you like, or follow the IT fashion industry. Both have their pro's and con's.
I would much rather pay triple or even quadruple the average price of low-end European broadband (avg. around $15/mo), to get similar broadband quality in some medium-to-low density areas here in the States. I live in a very populated city now, but on the outskirts (10 miles out the city, still decently populated), with the rich and old (I am not rich nor old but the rent is descent) and I can only get Time-Warner Cable, and they know it: $30/mo for 512k/96k after their 3 months for $15 promotion ends, I paid that ($30) for 5MBps/256k a few YEARS ago in Europe.
ADSL requires a phone line so the price comes close to the same to that of a 'triple advantage' package ($100/mo), which I don't need (don't want CTV nor POTS), and the DSL speeds still suck, but are better than TWC. But finally Verizon said they will introduce FiOS, $45/mo. for 5MBps/1MBps which will be a relieve (I hope). But that is not really an introductory price anymore. I heard from family in Europe that for some packages (similar speeds to what TWC offers me) they pay a little over 10 Euro.
Where do you live? I would also like to pay less than $2/gallon for gas. Really, calculate how much gas (and time) you REALLY use for driving down to Wal-Mart or the mall instead of the slightly-more-expensive shop around the corner or getting it delivered through the web. I'm not talking about necessities here like your monthly food-shopping, but just things you would like to have and just have to drive further/around for that single item. Getting the car started (two or three times depending) and driving 15 miles in city traffic while waiting for the line to the parking lot costs me usually a little over 1 gallon (digital usage meter in my car both forth and back, not one-way, avg. 25-30mpg) thus costing me nearly $3 to go to the mall, walking around, getting annoyed at other customers (or drivers), risking my car into an accident not calculating the wear and tear especially on brakes. And most people get suckered into buying more stuff than they really need, and expensive items (anything over $25) is usually free shipping too.
Really, I rather just order online in the middle of the night when the shops aren't open and wait around in my underwear until UPS/USPS/FedEx delivers the next 2 (or 3) days.
Well, I got all of that in high school (Industrial Electronics). In my last 2 years of high school, I learned programming PIC's, microprocessors in ASM, C and some high-level educational programming language as well as PID regulators (Integral and Differential regulators), logic ports etc. etc. practical applications, I studied and improved a commercial solar panel setup (research version from a local energy company)
I also need maths and algorithms as a developer, but I also learned the real-life lessons of programming and.com business while I was earning money to learn the good way to do it (as programmers do) as well as the quick way to do it (as managers like you to do) and you were paying money to learn how you theoretically could apply that to a real situation.
Thus I have now more than 6 years of experience and making over 60k, not a college degree, but learned enough in High School and learned even more during 2 year 'schooling' as a Support Engineer, managing every single object you can find in a datacenter as well as planning to build a new one. In the mean time, you have some type of degree and merely 2 or 3 years of entry-level experience.
when you try to annoy a University with a bunch of under-grad law students... would make for great real-life examples in class, or as a graduation project: Counter-suing of annoying companies.
I don't see them fining Red Hat, Google, Yahoo, IBM or any other company that is both highly successful and behaves according to the law. Only breakers of those laws and regulations get punished.
And although you claim that Europe ignored the tech industry for decades, they still have a larger broadband penetration rate, they have a superior electricity and telecommunications network and a lot of smart people and ideas come from a part of Europe (ok, a lot of them migrate to the US, including me but that has more to do with the European tax rates, which are killing to high salaried workers and a brain drain from US and Asian companies), look at Linus Torvalds, DVD Jon, The Pirate Bay, a lot of alternative energy 'inventions'...
Simple, I pay $10 to this programmer that will install it to 100 zombies for me. I can then get all information that passes through the zombies.
Eg. you are using a zombie computer, trying to check your balances. I get the data from the 100 zombies and I have your login data for your bank but about 50 other persons' data, I check your account see that 'you Americans' makes 20x as much as I do in a month.
I transfer 50x your paycheck to my 'business' account, I get all the money off the same day, close the 'business' account and disappear for a little bit. Before you even notice you've been robbed (whenever you check your balances), I have repeated this maybe 10, if not 100 times, I become a rich crime lord in my town and bribe the local cops and surround myself with some 'bouncers'.
Plenty of ideas, I personally, would also disappear from my apartment, retrofit my car with some weaponry and roam the country, using people's or hotel's wireless internet to refill my bank accounts. If you don't want to go into crime, I can also sell all e-mail addresses that ever pass over your network for about 10cents/address.
1) Damages to the persons reputation and possible loss of income/opportunities/jobs/...
2) Damages because of loss of income or jobs (because the time she has to be in court, she can't work)
3) A little more difficult for a person, but certainly an argument in 1). The court however can decide to pull the BAR license for the lawyers if it's really obvious that they're suing just because they're a**holes or just want to take the courts time and consideration from other cases.
4) That's what lawyers do, but again as stated in number 3) that's more the court's call and also arguments for 1)
The problem is proving (and calculating) your losses and again, it's a lot of time for the litigation to go through. Just look at how long this case has been going on (2 years?) and she wasn't even remotely connected to any of the pirating cases.
My point is, not that the price really matters, we (as Americans) need something to depend on and we also don't all have the time or skills to do that. If my car is broken for 3 days, it can make it difficult to go to work (okay, you can rent, but that's another cost added and gets even more expensive and during that time I can't work on my car so the time is even more extended) and I can't rely on co-workers to drive me since they don't live that far away. If I'm late or have to take vacation because of those reasons too many times, I won't get paid or worse, get fired. If I don't get paid for 2 days, I lose over $400 after taxes, adding to the cost.
If my car is out for 5 days because I have a major repair or I get stranded in the middle of nowhere, I need to get it fixed and/or rent a car I could lose over $3000 that week and my bosses won't be happy either. I rather buy a new car for $15000-$25000 than have that happen 5 years in a row.
In Europe on the other hand, I park my car by the side of the road, walk to the next bus stop or take a train and call in that I'll be a few minutes late. I'll have a minor nuisance because I need to reschedule (wake up a little earlier) and get my car fixed over the next few weeks but I won't be handicapped.
If you think that conflicts are going to stop or be minimized, you are dead wrong, it's only going to get worse, and the only thing we do is find better ways to kill each other.
If we would actually apply the lessons we learn, we wouldn't have wars anymore by now, we can develop all those techniques in a peaceful setting by scientist that would actually create it with a good cause in mind, not by an oppressive government that is just going to use it to survey, guide, sense, analyze their people and weaponize the policing forces, and allow the more sophisticated ways of torture (what you call 'human' psychology of urban conflict) to be used.
The medieval set of ideas you talk about can also be applied to 'mock democracy' and 'Christianity' as well as 'greed' and 'power' in our culture. Your and my independence wasn't threatened by 9/11 (unless you believe whatever the media feeds you) and if it was, we have a constitution for that. If 'we' as Americans are 'so good', trying to free Iraq from oppressive governments, why didn't we free Cuba yet (it's our back door), there is no Soviets interested in Cuba, I don't think anyone except for some drug- and warlords are interested in Cuba anymore, but then again there is nothing to get there *cough*oil*cough* so why should we bother. If some crazy Cuban terrorist (sounds like a character from Command&Conquer: Red Alert) really wants, he can make a rocket out of a Pringles can and reach hundreds of beach whales, I mean American tourists.
Most people here in the states get rid of the car because a lot of minor repairs start popping up after that and, yes, you're out of a lot of money ($50-80/hour if you're lucky they don't spoof you out of taking extra long) if you can't do it yourself, and we need the reliability of the car for everything (work, groceries). In Europe, you have public transportation which is near non-existant in the US, we need a reliable car or need to be able to work on it ourself.
Young people like me, that have some knowledge about car repair (or collectors of gonna-be classics like my friend that buys rotten (as in under water for 2 years) '50's through '70's and fixes them up), buy those cars for cheap ($200-$2000). I have a car with currently 220,000 miles on it. Runs great and very comfortable (Buick Park Avenue), I bought it 10,000 miles ago for $1200 because the check engine light was on and they already did some major repairs on it and needed something they could rely on.
I repaired the EGR valve and some other things (quoted over $500 in the garage, I was out less than $300 for the parts), the muffler rusted through (another $100 for parts and quoted over $100 for labor, there is no mid piece so the muffler pipe extends all the way across the bottom of the car which means major work for a garage but is actually nothing a grinder and some brackets can't solve in 45 minutes), the emergency brake was rusted through (again, a grinder helps great to cut the rusted-shut connections and then improvise to get it back together, but it's a pain (timewise) to get the cable running through all the holes and then assemble everything that was loose, and currently I have to change the power steering pump and a wheel bearing (quoted at $500 including labor, $200 in parts). So the people would have been out of over $2000 already, while I can do it majorly myself for less than $1000.
I think however they make the cars so that everything is hard-to-reach and you need a lot of time to get to some important parts, so a garage has their work cut out and if you don't have the correct tools and knowledge you'll be out of even more time.
I used to work at a company that did it's own advertising, they had the catalog and all data for the advertising (pictures of models, the full finished running catalog, the full catalog everybody was working on, the financial data to calculate prices for each catalog), was standing in the middle of a department desk, near the entrance, around 12 disks varying from 80G -> 250G (they bought the largest available for each year, so the 80G has been there for 3 years) daisy chained with FireWire to a single PowerMac G4. No backups whatsoever, just copied the data from one disk to another every night, but only for 2 or 3 older disks.
I could buy stock in their competitors, come into their office right before the catalogs have to be printed (1-2 months before the beginning of fashion season), either steal (nobody would notice, they make too much noise for anyone to sit close by) or destroy the disks (they smoke up if you slightly force the power adapter in at a 45 degree angle) and wait for them to go out of business and my stock to rise.
The data on that is worth millions if not billions, almost $500 million per year in sales alone.
Dude, if you or anyone you know works in such situations... get the HELL out of there. If you have any of those skills, you can start anywhere but there. I currently make around 70k and I work from 8-5 and I take 1 hour lunch break and scatter 'plumbing' breaks throughout the day. They know that if they lose me, they lose a lot of money because of all the custom work I am doing. They can't outsource me, because I'm the guy they outsourced to.
If they really know all those protocols, let the company outsource (or threaten to), they will probably end up being the contractor on site doing the job, but then outsourced. I worked direct for a company, got fired because I didn't want to bend to the advertising manager's every whim (very archaic and bureaucratic company, and he was good friends with the CIO), and I got the next week the offer from a company they were forced to outsource to, to go back there and continue the same job, I declined, but you see what happens when managers screw you. Oh yeah, it was a Fortune 500 company and due to this and many other reasons, they are in progress of being taken over by competitors.
Another job I did was sysadmin and I was there 2 years, again the CEO was Dilbert's pointy haired boss and everything had to be done whenever he felt like it. I left as did many others. Their whole helpdesk was replaced within a year after I left (I was the first and showed everyone that you CAN get a job elsewhere these days), their 'custom' programming team (6 persons; programmed a totally custom ERP system tying in to their server park, website and customer database) got together, quit simultaneously and started their own company and now the original company has to source the programming out to them, they do whatever they want on their own pace and get paid big bucks for it.
I constantly get calls and a lot more e-mails with offers because I have the knowledge. Skilled IT workers are in demand, most outsourcing projects failed horribly (what good is an internal IT department that doesn't/barely understand the native language and is located in India) and companies are hiring massively to build up their IT departments again although most of them are on contracts these days. I love being on contract, you get to do a job you like, you do it good and nobody is going to oppose you because you're expensive ($58/hour or more). If you deliver, you can stay longer and you don't have to put up with any of the salaried bullsh*t, because if they call you at night, or ask you to do some extra, you ask, should I put this as overtime (rate x 2.5) or can I come in later tomorrow.
But really, I'm not putting up with the 24/7 crap (unless I get paid big bucks for it and I don't have a partner to live with) or unpaid overtime anymore. They can say you're going to be outsourced, but actually, these days YOU are in demand, those threats are so 2000.
You still have to open it before it works (except if you have an older version of Outlook Express), doesn't matter where it comes from. And Windows machines should have virus scanners anyway (Mac, Linux and other Unices which send things to Windows should have at least an e-mail scanner in a company), so either way it would get blocked.
As for the posters' question: I wouldn't block webmail access, heck I wouldn't block POP3 or IMAP either. People only get pissed off about it and will find a way around, which might compromise your security more than just allowing webmail.
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Dude, if you were really listening to your users, you would stop churning out products for the next 5 years and start fixing stuff.
.NET), XSLT 2.0 is missing, ANY User Profile lookup without coding in .NET or SQL and instant replication to the User Information List of custom properties is impossible. Make it compatible with your own products too (SharePoint Designer) I could go on, but you'll find it reading hundreds of blogs.
Windows is still a hole-riddled operating system. It is not because you have bad programmers, it's because you HAD bad programmers and kept building on it. Kick it out, get a decent (BSD-style?) kernel and give me a true POSIX architecture I can work with (no, I don't want it as an add-on like Unix Services is an attempt).
Also, give us a better Office. 2007 sucks, I deal with it daily, and nobody in your average corporate office can do anything with it, because it's confusing. It might look good if it were a Web 2.0 webpage, but not for software.
Oh, don't forget the rest of your software packages. SharePoint (also 2007) is barely worth a beta status nor worth the label 'intranet' tool as it is. It's missing lots of functionality for internal use and it's missing a lot of stuff out of the box and it's freakin' slow once you start modifying it. Replication of data, cross-site lookups (without coding in
Also make stuff compatible! Please, AD uses plain Kerberos and LDAP but is somehow not compatible with either (or barely, I made it work together with Mac and Linux boxes, but it ain't good).
These complaints have been here and elsewhere on the web, even on your own forums but nobody has ever taken a look at it, it seems. Maybe the PR department, but they don't have a real implication on the product, so your arguments are moot since you are just another PR shill.
Now everyone that receives a $3000 settlement letter from the MAFIAA can just reply and get the case thrown out? WHY DID NOBODY THINK OF THIS EARLIER?
Before:
Client - Oh noes, we received a letter from the RIAA
RIAA - Thank you, come again
After:
RIAA - Oh noes, we received a letter from our client
Client - Mwoehahahaha
I wonder if they are trying to desensitize us to circumstances like the movie "The Island" portrays. Creating clones of humans for the sake of replacement parts. This sheep is now 15% percent human, so we can harvest them.
...things?... are partly human, at what point can we stop killing them for our own good?
But when it becomes 50% human, or even 75%, at what point do we call them humans and at what point do we give them rights as humans. I recently raised the same question on another forum and everybody was all up in arms that we couldn't kill clones of ourselves so we can replace our own 'malfunctioning' parts because they are human. Now these
Well, as TFA says, they get more work done with less energy on Linux rather than Windows. And it's the freakin' government, they're not doing any real work. Letting computers idle is thus cheaper on Linux than on Windows and as we all know, Linux is so fast, it does an infinite loop in 5 seconds.
Or make Active Directory, which is basically built up out of Kerberos & LDAP (with SSL) talk like an LDAP implementation and let the Kerberos work like the Kerberos standard outlines.
Microsoft did not invent anything anytime, they just bought up or copied it (badly) from someone else and made it sound like they did it. From the beginning (BASIC & DOS) till now I have not seen a single drop of innovation or invention come from Redmond. I have basically grown up with Microsoft products around me (from Windows 1.0 & GW-BASIC on DOS 3.1 till Vista now) but my mentor (family member) in computer sciences also had the alternative (or back in the day, the mainstream) solutions and I have never liked Microsoft, nor will I ever like it. The only thing they do is buy something, extend or enhance it so it looks better to the one who buys and then sell it again and forget about their customer.
I currently hear a lot about 'information security' and VoIP, however I would say: they're empty bags of wind and self-perpetuating bubbles.
Information security will be hot until the majority of managers finally finds out that the weakest link in a chain equals the strength of it and see that it's their USERS (aka employees) they have to satisfy, no matter how much their security is upgraded, as long as the sales drone can put it on a memory stick or CD so they can work on it, or in the mean time they can give it to their customer (or their next sales gig), it's useless to keep locking it down. The average script kiddie is going to be kept out with the current lines of defense (frequent updates, virus scanners and firewalls) and the real hackers are going to get in anyway.
VoIP is indeed a hot topic and requires a lot of work these days, it is a good technology, but just as when computer networking (Ethernet, Token Ring) replaced mail carriers around the building, once it's in place, not a whole lot of expertise is required to keep it running. Yes, you'll need the local VoIP administrator and if it breaks the VoIP consultant, but you don't need 10 of them to re-implement it. So again, only the best will survive while the rest will move on to the next field.
The same happened to SEO, firewalls, virusscanners, intranets, websites... it all had it's time of implementation, now everyone has it and it only needs maintained. Thus, either do what you like, or follow the IT fashion industry. Both have their pro's and con's.
I would much rather pay triple or even quadruple the average price of low-end European broadband (avg. around $15/mo), to get similar broadband quality in some medium-to-low density areas here in the States. I live in a very populated city now, but on the outskirts (10 miles out the city, still decently populated), with the rich and old (I am not rich nor old but the rent is descent) and I can only get Time-Warner Cable, and they know it: $30/mo for 512k/96k after their 3 months for $15 promotion ends, I paid that ($30) for 5MBps/256k a few YEARS ago in Europe.
ADSL requires a phone line so the price comes close to the same to that of a 'triple advantage' package ($100/mo), which I don't need (don't want CTV nor POTS), and the DSL speeds still suck, but are better than TWC. But finally Verizon said they will introduce FiOS, $45/mo. for 5MBps/1MBps which will be a relieve (I hope). But that is not really an introductory price anymore. I heard from family in Europe that for some packages (similar speeds to what TWC offers me) they pay a little over 10 Euro.
Where do you live? I would also like to pay less than $2/gallon for gas. Really, calculate how much gas (and time) you REALLY use for driving down to Wal-Mart or the mall instead of the slightly-more-expensive shop around the corner or getting it delivered through the web. I'm not talking about necessities here like your monthly food-shopping, but just things you would like to have and just have to drive further/around for that single item. Getting the car started (two or three times depending) and driving 15 miles in city traffic while waiting for the line to the parking lot costs me usually a little over 1 gallon (digital usage meter in my car both forth and back, not one-way, avg. 25-30mpg) thus costing me nearly $3 to go to the mall, walking around, getting annoyed at other customers (or drivers), risking my car into an accident not calculating the wear and tear especially on brakes. And most people get suckered into buying more stuff than they really need, and expensive items (anything over $25) is usually free shipping too.
Really, I rather just order online in the middle of the night when the shops aren't open and wait around in my underwear until UPS/USPS/FedEx delivers the next 2 (or 3) days.
Well, I got all of that in high school (Industrial Electronics). In my last 2 years of high school, I learned programming PIC's, microprocessors in ASM, C and some high-level educational programming language as well as PID regulators (Integral and Differential regulators), logic ports etc. etc. practical applications, I studied and improved a commercial solar panel setup (research version from a local energy company)
.com business while I was earning money to learn the good way to do it (as programmers do) as well as the quick way to do it (as managers like you to do) and you were paying money to learn how you theoretically could apply that to a real situation.
I also need maths and algorithms as a developer, but I also learned the real-life lessons of programming and
Thus I have now more than 6 years of experience and making over 60k, not a college degree, but learned enough in High School and learned even more during 2 year 'schooling' as a Support Engineer, managing every single object you can find in a datacenter as well as planning to build a new one. In the mean time, you have some type of degree and merely 2 or 3 years of entry-level experience.
when you try to annoy a University with a bunch of under-grad law students... would make for great real-life examples in class, or as a graduation project: Counter-suing of annoying companies.
I don't see them fining Red Hat, Google, Yahoo, IBM or any other company that is both highly successful and behaves according to the law. Only breakers of those laws and regulations get punished.
And although you claim that Europe ignored the tech industry for decades, they still have a larger broadband penetration rate, they have a superior electricity and telecommunications network and a lot of smart people and ideas come from a part of Europe (ok, a lot of them migrate to the US, including me but that has more to do with the European tax rates, which are killing to high salaried workers and a brain drain from US and Asian companies), look at Linus Torvalds, DVD Jon, The Pirate Bay, a lot of alternative energy 'inventions'...
It seems to me, a lot of businesses remember that quote only up till the comma (,)
Simple, I pay $10 to this programmer that will install it to 100 zombies for me. I can then get all information that passes through the zombies.
Eg. you are using a zombie computer, trying to check your balances. I get the data from the 100 zombies and I have your login data for your bank but about 50 other persons' data, I check your account see that 'you Americans' makes 20x as much as I do in a month.
I transfer 50x your paycheck to my 'business' account, I get all the money off the same day, close the 'business' account and disappear for a little bit. Before you even notice you've been robbed (whenever you check your balances), I have repeated this maybe 10, if not 100 times, I become a rich crime lord in my town and bribe the local cops and surround myself with some 'bouncers'.
Plenty of ideas, I personally, would also disappear from my apartment, retrofit my car with some weaponry and roam the country, using people's or hotel's wireless internet to refill my bank accounts. If you don't want to go into crime, I can also sell all e-mail addresses that ever pass over your network for about 10cents/address.
They still do
Sure, but she'll have to sue for:
1) Damages to the persons reputation and possible loss of income/opportunities/jobs/...
2) Damages because of loss of income or jobs (because the time she has to be in court, she can't work)
3) A little more difficult for a person, but certainly an argument in 1). The court however can decide to pull the BAR license for the lawyers if it's really obvious that they're suing just because they're a**holes or just want to take the courts time and consideration from other cases.
4) That's what lawyers do, but again as stated in number 3) that's more the court's call and also arguments for 1)
The problem is proving (and calculating) your losses and again, it's a lot of time for the litigation to go through. Just look at how long this case has been going on (2 years?) and she wasn't even remotely connected to any of the pirating cases.
That's why she's a virgin, not (yet) penetrated, waiting for it to happen and when it happens she won't have the proper protection and get infected.
My point is, not that the price really matters, we (as Americans) need something to depend on and we also don't all have the time or skills to do that. If my car is broken for 3 days, it can make it difficult to go to work (okay, you can rent, but that's another cost added and gets even more expensive and during that time I can't work on my car so the time is even more extended) and I can't rely on co-workers to drive me since they don't live that far away. If I'm late or have to take vacation because of those reasons too many times, I won't get paid or worse, get fired. If I don't get paid for 2 days, I lose over $400 after taxes, adding to the cost.
If my car is out for 5 days because I have a major repair or I get stranded in the middle of nowhere, I need to get it fixed and/or rent a car I could lose over $3000 that week and my bosses won't be happy either. I rather buy a new car for $15000-$25000 than have that happen 5 years in a row.
In Europe on the other hand, I park my car by the side of the road, walk to the next bus stop or take a train and call in that I'll be a few minutes late. I'll have a minor nuisance because I need to reschedule (wake up a little earlier) and get my car fixed over the next few weeks but I won't be handicapped.
If you think that conflicts are going to stop or be minimized, you are dead wrong, it's only going to get worse, and the only thing we do is find better ways to kill each other.
If we would actually apply the lessons we learn, we wouldn't have wars anymore by now, we can develop all those techniques in a peaceful setting by scientist that would actually create it with a good cause in mind, not by an oppressive government that is just going to use it to survey, guide, sense, analyze their people and weaponize the policing forces, and allow the more sophisticated ways of torture (what you call 'human' psychology of urban conflict) to be used.
The medieval set of ideas you talk about can also be applied to 'mock democracy' and 'Christianity' as well as 'greed' and 'power' in our culture. Your and my independence wasn't threatened by 9/11 (unless you believe whatever the media feeds you) and if it was, we have a constitution for that. If 'we' as Americans are 'so good', trying to free Iraq from oppressive governments, why didn't we free Cuba yet (it's our back door), there is no Soviets interested in Cuba, I don't think anyone except for some drug- and warlords are interested in Cuba anymore, but then again there is nothing to get there *cough*oil*cough* so why should we bother. If some crazy Cuban terrorist (sounds like a character from Command&Conquer: Red Alert) really wants, he can make a rocket out of a Pringles can and reach hundreds of beach whales, I mean American tourists.
Most people here in the states get rid of the car because a lot of minor repairs start popping up after that and, yes, you're out of a lot of money ($50-80/hour if you're lucky they don't spoof you out of taking extra long) if you can't do it yourself, and we need the reliability of the car for everything (work, groceries). In Europe, you have public transportation which is near non-existant in the US, we need a reliable car or need to be able to work on it ourself.
Young people like me, that have some knowledge about car repair (or collectors of gonna-be classics like my friend that buys rotten (as in under water for 2 years) '50's through '70's and fixes them up), buy those cars for cheap ($200-$2000). I have a car with currently 220,000 miles on it. Runs great and very comfortable (Buick Park Avenue), I bought it 10,000 miles ago for $1200 because the check engine light was on and they already did some major repairs on it and needed something they could rely on.
I repaired the EGR valve and some other things (quoted over $500 in the garage, I was out less than $300 for the parts), the muffler rusted through (another $100 for parts and quoted over $100 for labor, there is no mid piece so the muffler pipe extends all the way across the bottom of the car which means major work for a garage but is actually nothing a grinder and some brackets can't solve in 45 minutes), the emergency brake was rusted through (again, a grinder helps great to cut the rusted-shut connections and then improvise to get it back together, but it's a pain (timewise) to get the cable running through all the holes and then assemble everything that was loose, and currently I have to change the power steering pump and a wheel bearing (quoted at $500 including labor, $200 in parts). So the people would have been out of over $2000 already, while I can do it majorly myself for less than $1000.
I think however they make the cars so that everything is hard-to-reach and you need a lot of time to get to some important parts, so a garage has their work cut out and if you don't have the correct tools and knowledge you'll be out of even more time.
I used to work at a company that did it's own advertising, they had the catalog and all data for the advertising (pictures of models, the full finished running catalog, the full catalog everybody was working on, the financial data to calculate prices for each catalog), was standing in the middle of a department desk, near the entrance, around 12 disks varying from 80G -> 250G (they bought the largest available for each year, so the 80G has been there for 3 years) daisy chained with FireWire to a single PowerMac G4. No backups whatsoever, just copied the data from one disk to another every night, but only for 2 or 3 older disks.
I could buy stock in their competitors, come into their office right before the catalogs have to be printed (1-2 months before the beginning of fashion season), either steal (nobody would notice, they make too much noise for anyone to sit close by) or destroy the disks (they smoke up if you slightly force the power adapter in at a 45 degree angle) and wait for them to go out of business and my stock to rise.
The data on that is worth millions if not billions, almost $500 million per year in sales alone.
...city slickers that play Postal 2 may be more likely to dress up as hicks and put a cat on their shotgun as a muffler.
The problem with moon dust is that it's very abrasive and erodes anything very quickly, another problem is that it's mainly electrically charged.
which is part of Vogan's program to understand the "unitary dual" (=list of representations) for all (reductive) Lie groups.
You know, only the Vogon's would be attracted to something that produces that much paperwork.
Dude, if you or anyone you know works in such situations... get the HELL out of there. If you have any of those skills, you can start anywhere but there. I currently make around 70k and I work from 8-5 and I take 1 hour lunch break and scatter 'plumbing' breaks throughout the day. They know that if they lose me, they lose a lot of money because of all the custom work I am doing. They can't outsource me, because I'm the guy they outsourced to.
If they really know all those protocols, let the company outsource (or threaten to), they will probably end up being the contractor on site doing the job, but then outsourced. I worked direct for a company, got fired because I didn't want to bend to the advertising manager's every whim (very archaic and bureaucratic company, and he was good friends with the CIO), and I got the next week the offer from a company they were forced to outsource to, to go back there and continue the same job, I declined, but you see what happens when managers screw you. Oh yeah, it was a Fortune 500 company and due to this and many other reasons, they are in progress of being taken over by competitors.
Another job I did was sysadmin and I was there 2 years, again the CEO was Dilbert's pointy haired boss and everything had to be done whenever he felt like it. I left as did many others. Their whole helpdesk was replaced within a year after I left (I was the first and showed everyone that you CAN get a job elsewhere these days), their 'custom' programming team (6 persons; programmed a totally custom ERP system tying in to their server park, website and customer database) got together, quit simultaneously and started their own company and now the original company has to source the programming out to them, they do whatever they want on their own pace and get paid big bucks for it.
I constantly get calls and a lot more e-mails with offers because I have the knowledge. Skilled IT workers are in demand, most outsourcing projects failed horribly (what good is an internal IT department that doesn't/barely understand the native language and is located in India) and companies are hiring massively to build up their IT departments again although most of them are on contracts these days. I love being on contract, you get to do a job you like, you do it good and nobody is going to oppose you because you're expensive ($58/hour or more). If you deliver, you can stay longer and you don't have to put up with any of the salaried bullsh*t, because if they call you at night, or ask you to do some extra, you ask, should I put this as overtime (rate x 2.5) or can I come in later tomorrow.
But really, I'm not putting up with the 24/7 crap (unless I get paid big bucks for it and I don't have a partner to live with) or unpaid overtime anymore. They can say you're going to be outsourced, but actually, these days YOU are in demand, those threats are so 2000.
You still have to open it before it works (except if you have an older version of Outlook Express), doesn't matter where it comes from. And Windows machines should have virus scanners anyway (Mac, Linux and other Unices which send things to Windows should have at least an e-mail scanner in a company), so either way it would get blocked.
As for the posters' question: I wouldn't block webmail access, heck I wouldn't block POP3 or IMAP either. People only get pissed off about it and will find a way around, which might compromise your security more than just allowing webmail.