I got those questions too from large and smaller sites, first line didn't know what to do. My response to those things:
Dear,
Please contact the owner of the domain for such matters. If you have any problems finding this, the information can be queried through the whois database. We do not comply with any request for take down unless signed by a judge in our LOCAL district court (the exact information for such procedures can be found in our legal notices on our website).
If you have any further questions, please contact your legal counsel or a legal counsel in our district to proceed.
Sincerely,
MyName
Usually I didn't get any further communication on this. We had a few times the police come in to 'take down' the server. We denied access to our datacenters and told them to take a hike. We also had a few times the police (detectives) to get an 'IP address' for a website (they heard you needed that somehow). We just wrote it down on a piece of paper and gave it to them, they must have thought it was like a package or device they were going to get to disable a site because they asked: What is that? An IP address. Is that it? Yes. Is the site down then? No. But we want it down! No, sorry, gotta get a court order AND a search warrant for our premises AND a search warrant for our clients premises (since the server is their premises).
In Europe this is 'standard' since most countries (I know for sure in Belgium and I think it's a European directive) banned giving away free phones with a x-year signup contract on cell phones. So you usually pay full price for your phone (maybe $10-50 rebate) but you can't get the phone for free. You can step in-and-out of a contract at any time though (no early-termination fee, just pay whatever you started that month) although if you stay longer, you'll save up rebates and freebies. The phones (GSM) aren't locked so you can keep your phone in whatever provider you go (provided that the frequencies are all supported, but the newer phones don't have that issue).
I think that's also why Apple went with Cingular/GSM technology. 1) there is only one phone they have to develop for both Europe and US since CDMA is nearly unexistant in Europe, and 2) you can just switch your SIM cards to get another provider, no lock-in possible.
Knowing what we know about CIOs -- that is, that most are smart, hardworking, supremely aware of how the business works and increasingly savvy regarding the workings of external customers' minds -- the failure of more CIOs to become CEO has to be one of the biggest mysteries of our age.
I have never ever seen a CIO with those qualities. If I would become CIO, yes, but not the CIO's I ever worked for. Most of them are just some corporate managers with their heads in their a$$es, believing everything the sales drone for the next best company that presents a nice interface says.
CIO's deciding to move to Vista as fast as possible, CIO's deciding what company-wide software to implement next (even though all the engineers clearly have a lot of work and the new software doesn't add any value). Aargh.
I currently work for a very large company so I don't have contact with the C** anymore but I still sometimes wonder what they're smoking.
A lot of people seem to have a misunderstanding about the concepts of the internet and especially (D)DoS. The fact that you're under attack, doesn't mean you can just rate limit and be over with it. You can't limit the number of requests are being sent and thus the only thing you can do is rate limit the responses to such requests so that you don't clog your upload. Most providers do have synchronous and separated bandwidth thus your down link will be full anyway.
Reactive (automated) things repel me too. I've seen them, evaluated them but the program/computer/system is too 'dumb' to recognize something bad is happening and where exactly to solve it. That's why we Network & System admins are still in business. You could implement a type of AI, but then it's getting too expensive. The other thing is: who decides and how. You can set rules, but then you have to operate within the rules. You can set self-adjusting rules, but then if the attacker's intelligence > systems intelligence, it can still be altered, bent or even misused.
The other thing that would be good if feasible (both cost- and programming wise) and that thing just plain scares me is using a closed-loop AI over a large set of parallel systems. You can't have any influence on the system and the system will start to recognize stuff just as a real system admin. The problem is, that since anyone can't just influence the system, you'll eventually have a problem and the system is going to shut you and everyone else out. If you meddle with it, the system will go reactive and you'll have your favorite sci-fi horror movie realized
We just can't figure out what the shiny blue things mean the ancients left, it's supposed to be some type of information but we can't figure out why the numbers are there or what they mean.
They 1 - hide, very very good, so even if you lasertag the area, you'll have difficulty finding him and 2 - a smart sniper doesn't stay in the same location popping 10-ths of bullets in people's brains. Snipers are supposed to be single-shot accurate and have a mission to kill a certain person, whether that be a commander, a guard or whatever it may be, if you want more people dead, you deploy a force with a little bigger firepower. The problem (these days in the military too) is that people have been watching too much high-suspense movies and they're using resources like snipers the same way as well as making 'solutions' to counter Hollywood-style military personnel. I've got family that is in Iraq (he's actually got sniper training) and he can tell you all about the use of 100's of military personnel to guard a small area while other areas are under-stabilized and the misuse of their skills to reflect more 'American' style high-suspense combat fighting against guerilla and other 'insurgents' that can transform from civilians walking around on the marketplace to fighter-with-automatic-rifle in a few seconds.
It's a Newton on steroids. It has everything the Newton had, except that the launch is in a time period where people actually see the value of PDA-like devices and it has all these additional features the Newton had only with the PCMCIA slots, that is cell phone and wifi.
I currently have 2 cell phones, mp3 player, I would have bought a Palm soon, but I reconsidered for the iPhone. My car/home/pocket is full of devices and chargers and when I take a plane or so, I have to have a fanny pack to carry it all in.
The iPhone isn't going to be a pops-and-mom cell phone that you get for free with your year-long subscription, it's going to be used by people who bought the iPod and/or the Palm, all the Mac-fan zealots, girls (and boys) that would like to make a fashion statement and every geek I know that knows OS X has a 1337 command line and that you can run full-blown cocoa apps on there. I mean, you should be able to just run (Apple/Microsoft) Remote Desktop on it as well as an SSH client or VNC, any Java app ever made, MP3's, WAV's, MOD's (given that you have enough storage for all that stuff), it doesn't have a stylus that you can lose (like the Palm or Newton), it has the finest display known in any portable device.
They should pay for the name or the license to it, then they should make their own network hardware and start a campaign like the PC vs. Apple skits. Haha.
Cisco is to professional network equipment as Bose is to high-end audio setups. It has a level of quality, but is beyond what is expected for the price but because of the name, everybody wants it.
I'm frequently looking for a job (I do a lot on contract) and the standard reply is: We're sorry, but we currently have decided not to extend you an offer. We encourage you to please apply for any future openings...
Be nice and friendly, but keep it short and simple. You don't need to give a reason or maybe you chose somebody else, the job market is fierce. The nicest thing that one company did for me was reimburse me for the gas and hotel.
Whenever I'm close to computers and electronics, everything works smoothly. If I leave for more than a few days, the whole environment starts coming down, and it's not something I programmed, just something that happens.
My first job, I got fired, the next week the whole AD environment went down for hours on end My second job, I quit, the next week, all firewalls went into some type of crash, the network was overloaded by a broadcast-zombie and there was some type of virus I left home, went living somewhere else, the computer of my dad smoked, he had to buy a new one Another job, I was a freelancer, I left, next week I got bunches of nagios alerts Another job, I was a sysadmin, I got laid off, next week, nobody could receive e-mail and some type of update made it that networking got in trouble Last job, I was a sysadmin, I got fired, yesterday somebody told me that the whole network was down (>30000 nodes)
At least for the next few years, until Microsoft gets somebody like Steve Jobs steering the ship. I mean, Vista is implementing extra security, patching stuff making it so heavy while Linux and Mac developers are just redefining the matter, rewriting it, throwing away what doesn't work.
The comment about the Zune: By next years' summer (I think that is summer 2008), Apple's new WideScreen iPod, the iPhone is planned to have about 0,5% of market share. It just feels like Microsoft is just lagging behind.
And I'm not trying to feed the troll here, I actually feel kinda bad for Microsoft (Windows) and they'll either go the Novell Netware way (completely forgotten, integrated into Linux) or the SCO way (totally bare and without funding).
Of course Microsoft has a lot of money, but as Google showed us, it's not all money that counts anymore. If people don't want your product because it's sucks, it's not going to help throwing another $1B at marketing it, I think it's time for them to see what they've got, re-assess it and throw everything out that isn't working and restart (kinda like Apple did with Mac OS 9 -> OS X and PPC -> Intel
The graphics, and UI are stunning. It looks like they revisited the Newton, and we all know how easy and expensive that was (still being sold on eBay for >200$/pop)
I wish they would bring out this limited version of Mac OS X for PPC (G3 & G4) especially since Leopard probably won't run smoothly on the 'older' hardware.
First you have to call them and spend hours on the phone explaining that you want their services cancelled, why, what you think of their service, your bank card, address, etc. etc. then they give you all types of discounts and freebies to make you change your mind when they finally do cancel it by the end of the month, they send you a 3-month free trial which if you don't cancel it, gets automatically activated into a full membership again
Well, I went through the process, and I'm not a Mexican, I came from the mainland on the other side of the ocean. The process takes about a year and you need to spend about $2000, half of which goes to the American government for the filing of paperwork, while your own government gets the rest for your birth records, criminal records and then about $500 for a legalized translation of all your paperwork from your native language (even if the document is in multiple languages including English) to documents with only English by a certified translator, they need legalized in front of a court that can establish the credibility of the translator, they need stamped by your government's ministry (you can't send them, you need to go to your capital) that deals with emmigration and then stamped by the ambassador of the US in your country (again, no mail, another trip to the capital or wherever the embassy is located).
If I would count the gas, train and bus tickets, time off work (because none of them are open beyond business hours, some aren't even open during business hours) it would have easily cost me between $5000 and $10000 and that's in a country where such travel is relatively cheap, I can imagine living in a country like Mexico or any other 3rd world country would have been much more troublesome especially since some of them don't even have a recognized (by the US gov. that is) set of birth-, dental- or criminal records. Oh, you also have to have a US-certified doctor in your own country (there were 3 in my country) for the necessary set of injections, x-rays, clinical and psychological tests and certifications that you're healthy.
It gets even better: after 2 years of being here, you can expect to fork out the same amount of money again, because you have to renew your permanent residence through the same process, but then in the US.
>$14000 a year? Who really can pony that up? I am living in the US and I make a very good living compared to a lot of other people in my area, especially in the world and if I wouldn't have any health insurance, I doubt I could really get that up for myself, let alone if I had a family.
$14k a year is for a lot of Americans over 1/4 of their yearly income before taxes. Imagine living in a poor country where your total income IS $14k or lower, those people can never get their hands on such products.
Roche and other big pharmaceutical companies (Bayer, Janssen) have made health and health insurance a trillion dollar industry and apparently have no regret that they are killing people, not only in third world countries but I can imagine that a lot of people in the US and Europe can't get the medicine they need because of them.
Site been /.-ed but here's the overview:
on
Macworld Rumor Round-Up
·
· Score: 4, Informative
iTV, the $299 TV device showed last time Leopard, the new OS New displays, some rumors about that going around iLife '07, new year, new iLife, new iWorks video iPod, new full video iPod's? Maybe Apple Phone, lots of vibe about that Mac Pro with 8 processors. Intel got the chips, did Apple implement them?
I hate paying for music when the money doesn't get to the artists, I hate IP laws, RIAA, Microsoft, DRM and everything that is around it.
That's why I'm using free software and not ever buying music from record companies again. iTunes is a great choice, because it has the right price for commercial music, but the DRM invoked to keep the RIAA semi-happy is not for me. If it weren't for the RIAA, Steve Jobs would probably not consider putting up with the arbitrary DRM. But anyway, I'm not even paying a dime to Apple for my music.
My solution is the indie movement. Yes there are hundreds if not thousands of artists out there that make their buck selling music, cd's and more straight off their websites, getting known all over the world and even making movies shown on major movie events as we speak with a budget of a few thousand dollars. They get their advertisements through their podcasts and while they might not earn a million dollars each year, they get by making an honest living, either full or part time, spinning tracks for clubs, having shows in their local environment or even being a store clerk or your average sysadmin.
Give those people a chance, listen to their podcasts and buy their stuff if you like them. They get the full benefit of your contribution minus the costs they make off course but they don't have to get by on 4,5c/download while the rest of the industry is making the rest of your dollar. I'm at the moment listening to someone's podcast and it's mighty good, much better than any commercial music I heard in the same genre. Some do indeed have recording agents and some middleman but usually they get a better deal than another 'known' recording studio like Sony, BMG,...
You should know from different sources (has been on Mythbusters too) that drug tests will turn positive even from eating some poppy-seeds found in bagels etc.? Drug tests are way too sensitive but if they weren't they shouldn't detect real substance (ab)use. We all use drugs in one or another way (computers, coffee, pot, cola, alcohol, tobacco, poppy-seeds,...). It's the pathological abuse that would have a serious effect on people's work performance, conditions or the threat to other co-workers around you that should be tested, unfortunately that is not possible. Smoking on the job (even in separate break-rooms) has serious effects on the employee's health but also on persons around them but nobody can be discriminized for that. Heck, a lot of companies offer (free) coffee which does have some minor effects on your brain and although it might give you an energy-boost and doesn't harm your co-workers, it doesn't give you a particular all-day performance boost, some studies even conclude that the all-over performance declines.
Of course truckers shouldn't smoke pot or drink alcohol, and everybody seriously impaired by some drugs shouldn't be working, but if an employer finds out that somebody is seriously in problems with their drug-use, they shouldn't just fire them, the humane thing to do would be to get them help (with or without a salary)
Slashdot Mirror
I got those questions too from large and smaller sites, first line didn't know what to do. My response to those things:
Dear,
Please contact the owner of the domain for such matters. If you have any problems finding this, the information can be queried through the whois database. We do not comply with any request for take down unless signed by a judge in our LOCAL district court (the exact information for such procedures can be found in our legal notices on our website).
If you have any further questions, please contact your legal counsel or a legal counsel in our district to proceed.
Sincerely,
MyName
Usually I didn't get any further communication on this. We had a few times the police come in to 'take down' the server. We denied access to our datacenters and told them to take a hike. We also had a few times the police (detectives) to get an 'IP address' for a website (they heard you needed that somehow). We just wrote it down on a piece of paper and gave it to them, they must have thought it was like a package or device they were going to get to disable a site because they asked: What is that? An IP address. Is that it? Yes. Is the site down then? No. But we want it down! No, sorry, gotta get a court order AND a search warrant for our premises AND a search warrant for our clients premises (since the server is their premises).
In Europe this is 'standard' since most countries (I know for sure in Belgium and I think it's a European directive) banned giving away free phones with a x-year signup contract on cell phones. So you usually pay full price for your phone (maybe $10-50 rebate) but you can't get the phone for free. You can step in-and-out of a contract at any time though (no early-termination fee, just pay whatever you started that month) although if you stay longer, you'll save up rebates and freebies. The phones (GSM) aren't locked so you can keep your phone in whatever provider you go (provided that the frequencies are all supported, but the newer phones don't have that issue).
I think that's also why Apple went with Cingular/GSM technology. 1) there is only one phone they have to develop for both Europe and US since CDMA is nearly unexistant in Europe, and 2) you can just switch your SIM cards to get another provider, no lock-in possible.
Knowing what we know about CIOs -- that is, that most are smart, hardworking, supremely aware of how the business works and increasingly savvy regarding the workings of external customers' minds -- the failure of more CIOs to become CEO has to be one of the biggest mysteries of our age.
I have never ever seen a CIO with those qualities. If I would become CIO, yes, but not the CIO's I ever worked for. Most of them are just some corporate managers with their heads in their a$$es, believing everything the sales drone for the next best company that presents a nice interface says.
CIO's deciding to move to Vista as fast as possible, CIO's deciding what company-wide software to implement next (even though all the engineers clearly have a lot of work and the new software doesn't add any value). Aargh.
I currently work for a very large company so I don't have contact with the C** anymore but I still sometimes wonder what they're smoking.
I'm just waiting until it gets overturned by a judge. I would go to court until the end if somebody invokes it against me.
A lot of people seem to have a misunderstanding about the concepts of the internet and especially (D)DoS. The fact that you're under attack, doesn't mean you can just rate limit and be over with it. You can't limit the number of requests are being sent and thus the only thing you can do is rate limit the responses to such requests so that you don't clog your upload. Most providers do have synchronous and separated bandwidth thus your down link will be full anyway.
Reactive (automated) things repel me too. I've seen them, evaluated them but the program/computer/system is too 'dumb' to recognize something bad is happening and where exactly to solve it. That's why we Network & System admins are still in business. You could implement a type of AI, but then it's getting too expensive. The other thing is: who decides and how. You can set rules, but then you have to operate within the rules. You can set self-adjusting rules, but then if the attacker's intelligence > systems intelligence, it can still be altered, bent or even misused.
The other thing that would be good if feasible (both cost- and programming wise) and that thing just plain scares me is using a closed-loop AI over a large set of parallel systems. You can't have any influence on the system and the system will start to recognize stuff just as a real system admin. The problem is, that since anyone can't just influence the system, you'll eventually have a problem and the system is going to shut you and everyone else out. If you meddle with it, the system will go reactive and you'll have your favorite sci-fi horror movie realized
You're talking about Exchange or IIS SMTP. Get your customer to use a decent MX and we'll talk
We just can't figure out what the shiny blue things mean the ancients left, it's supposed to be some type of information but we can't figure out why the numbers are there or what they mean.
welcome our new asteroid-hopping self-destructive explorer robots. I hope they asplode before they turn against us.
They 1 - hide, very very good, so even if you lasertag the area, you'll have difficulty finding him and 2 - a smart sniper doesn't stay in the same location popping 10-ths of bullets in people's brains. Snipers are supposed to be single-shot accurate and have a mission to kill a certain person, whether that be a commander, a guard or whatever it may be, if you want more people dead, you deploy a force with a little bigger firepower. The problem (these days in the military too) is that people have been watching too much high-suspense movies and they're using resources like snipers the same way as well as making 'solutions' to counter Hollywood-style military personnel. I've got family that is in Iraq (he's actually got sniper training) and he can tell you all about the use of 100's of military personnel to guard a small area while other areas are under-stabilized and the misuse of their skills to reflect more 'American' style high-suspense combat fighting against guerilla and other 'insurgents' that can transform from civilians walking around on the marketplace to fighter-with-automatic-rifle in a few seconds.
28 days... six hours... 42 minutes... 12 seconds. That... is when the world... will end.
Why do you wear that stupid bunny suit?
Why are you wearing that stupid man suit?
but those iHandcuffs with the iPhone are the closest thing a geek gets to getting f*cked
I can second that. The Guinness in the USA (bottled or canned) is a far cry from the Guinness you can get in Europe (or Ireland for that matter)
It's a Newton on steroids. It has everything the Newton had, except that the launch is in a time period where people actually see the value of PDA-like devices and it has all these additional features the Newton had only with the PCMCIA slots, that is cell phone and wifi.
I currently have 2 cell phones, mp3 player, I would have bought a Palm soon, but I reconsidered for the iPhone. My car/home/pocket is full of devices and chargers and when I take a plane or so, I have to have a fanny pack to carry it all in.
The iPhone isn't going to be a pops-and-mom cell phone that you get for free with your year-long subscription, it's going to be used by people who bought the iPod and/or the Palm, all the Mac-fan zealots, girls (and boys) that would like to make a fashion statement and every geek I know that knows OS X has a 1337 command line and that you can run full-blown cocoa apps on there. I mean, you should be able to just run (Apple/Microsoft) Remote Desktop on it as well as an SSH client or VNC, any Java app ever made, MP3's, WAV's, MOD's (given that you have enough storage for all that stuff), it doesn't have a stylus that you can lose (like the Palm or Newton), it has the finest display known in any portable device.
They should pay for the name or the license to it, then they should make their own network hardware and start a campaign like the PC vs. Apple skits. Haha.
Cisco is to professional network equipment as Bose is to high-end audio setups. It has a level of quality, but is beyond what is expected for the price but because of the name, everybody wants it.
I'm frequently looking for a job (I do a lot on contract) and the standard reply is: We're sorry, but we currently have decided not to extend you an offer. We encourage you to please apply for any future openings...
Be nice and friendly, but keep it short and simple. You don't need to give a reason or maybe you chose somebody else, the job market is fierce. The nicest thing that one company did for me was reimburse me for the gas and hotel.
Whenever I'm close to computers and electronics, everything works smoothly. If I leave for more than a few days, the whole environment starts coming down, and it's not something I programmed, just something that happens.
My first job, I got fired, the next week the whole AD environment went down for hours on end
My second job, I quit, the next week, all firewalls went into some type of crash, the network was overloaded by a broadcast-zombie and there was some type of virus
I left home, went living somewhere else, the computer of my dad smoked, he had to buy a new one
Another job, I was a freelancer, I left, next week I got bunches of nagios alerts
Another job, I was a sysadmin, I got laid off, next week, nobody could receive e-mail and some type of update made it that networking got in trouble
Last job, I was a sysadmin, I got fired, yesterday somebody told me that the whole network was down (>30000 nodes)
At least for the next few years, until Microsoft gets somebody like Steve Jobs steering the ship. I mean, Vista is implementing extra security, patching stuff making it so heavy while Linux and Mac developers are just redefining the matter, rewriting it, throwing away what doesn't work.
The comment about the Zune: By next years' summer (I think that is summer 2008), Apple's new WideScreen iPod, the iPhone is planned to have about 0,5% of market share. It just feels like Microsoft is just lagging behind.
And I'm not trying to feed the troll here, I actually feel kinda bad for Microsoft (Windows) and they'll either go the Novell Netware way (completely forgotten, integrated into Linux) or the SCO way (totally bare and without funding).
Of course Microsoft has a lot of money, but as Google showed us, it's not all money that counts anymore. If people don't want your product because it's sucks, it's not going to help throwing another $1B at marketing it, I think it's time for them to see what they've got, re-assess it and throw everything out that isn't working and restart (kinda like Apple did with Mac OS 9 -> OS X and PPC -> Intel
The graphics, and UI are stunning. It looks like they revisited the Newton, and we all know how easy and expensive that was (still being sold on eBay for >200$/pop)
I wish they would bring out this limited version of Mac OS X for PPC (G3 & G4) especially since Leopard probably won't run smoothly on the 'older' hardware.
Oh my god, they killed Kenny. You bastards!
First you have to call them and spend hours on the phone explaining that you want their services cancelled, why, what you think of their service, your bank card, address, etc. etc. then they give you all types of discounts and freebies to make you change your mind when they finally do cancel it by the end of the month, they send you a 3-month free trial which if you don't cancel it, gets automatically activated into a full membership again
Well, I went through the process, and I'm not a Mexican, I came from the mainland on the other side of the ocean. The process takes about a year and you need to spend about $2000, half of which goes to the American government for the filing of paperwork, while your own government gets the rest for your birth records, criminal records and then about $500 for a legalized translation of all your paperwork from your native language (even if the document is in multiple languages including English) to documents with only English by a certified translator, they need legalized in front of a court that can establish the credibility of the translator, they need stamped by your government's ministry (you can't send them, you need to go to your capital) that deals with emmigration and then stamped by the ambassador of the US in your country (again, no mail, another trip to the capital or wherever the embassy is located).
If I would count the gas, train and bus tickets, time off work (because none of them are open beyond business hours, some aren't even open during business hours) it would have easily cost me between $5000 and $10000 and that's in a country where such travel is relatively cheap, I can imagine living in a country like Mexico or any other 3rd world country would have been much more troublesome especially since some of them don't even have a recognized (by the US gov. that is) set of birth-, dental- or criminal records. Oh, you also have to have a US-certified doctor in your own country (there were 3 in my country) for the necessary set of injections, x-rays, clinical and psychological tests and certifications that you're healthy.
It gets even better: after 2 years of being here, you can expect to fork out the same amount of money again, because you have to renew your permanent residence through the same process, but then in the US.
>$14000 a year? Who really can pony that up? I am living in the US and I make a very good living compared to a lot of other people in my area, especially in the world and if I wouldn't have any health insurance, I doubt I could really get that up for myself, let alone if I had a family.
$14k a year is for a lot of Americans over 1/4 of their yearly income before taxes. Imagine living in a poor country where your total income IS $14k or lower, those people can never get their hands on such products.
Roche and other big pharmaceutical companies (Bayer, Janssen) have made health and health insurance a trillion dollar industry and apparently have no regret that they are killing people, not only in third world countries but I can imagine that a lot of people in the US and Europe can't get the medicine they need because of them.
iTV, the $299 TV device showed last time
Leopard, the new OS
New displays, some rumors about that going around
iLife '07, new year, new iLife, new iWorks
video iPod, new full video iPod's? Maybe
Apple Phone, lots of vibe about that
Mac Pro with 8 processors. Intel got the chips, did Apple implement them?
I hate paying for music when the money doesn't get to the artists, I hate IP laws, RIAA, Microsoft, DRM and everything that is around it.
...
That's why I'm using free software and not ever buying music from record companies again. iTunes is a great choice, because it has the right price for commercial music, but the DRM invoked to keep the RIAA semi-happy is not for me. If it weren't for the RIAA, Steve Jobs would probably not consider putting up with the arbitrary DRM. But anyway, I'm not even paying a dime to Apple for my music.
My solution is the indie movement. Yes there are hundreds if not thousands of artists out there that make their buck selling music, cd's and more straight off their websites, getting known all over the world and even making movies shown on major movie events as we speak with a budget of a few thousand dollars. They get their advertisements through their podcasts and while they might not earn a million dollars each year, they get by making an honest living, either full or part time, spinning tracks for clubs, having shows in their local environment or even being a store clerk or your average sysadmin.
Give those people a chance, listen to their podcasts and buy their stuff if you like them. They get the full benefit of your contribution minus the costs they make off course but they don't have to get by on 4,5c/download while the rest of the industry is making the rest of your dollar. I'm at the moment listening to someone's podcast and it's mighty good, much better than any commercial music I heard in the same genre. Some do indeed have recording agents and some middleman but usually they get a better deal than another 'known' recording studio like Sony, BMG,
You should know from different sources (has been on Mythbusters too) that drug tests will turn positive even from eating some poppy-seeds found in bagels etc.? Drug tests are way too sensitive but if they weren't they shouldn't detect real substance (ab)use. We all use drugs in one or another way (computers, coffee, pot, cola, alcohol, tobacco, poppy-seeds, ...). It's the pathological abuse that would have a serious effect on people's work performance, conditions or the threat to other co-workers around you that should be tested, unfortunately that is not possible. Smoking on the job (even in separate break-rooms) has serious effects on the employee's health but also on persons around them but nobody can be discriminized for that. Heck, a lot of companies offer (free) coffee which does have some minor effects on your brain and although it might give you an energy-boost and doesn't harm your co-workers, it doesn't give you a particular all-day performance boost, some studies even conclude that the all-over performance declines.
Of course truckers shouldn't smoke pot or drink alcohol, and everybody seriously impaired by some drugs shouldn't be working, but if an employer finds out that somebody is seriously in problems with their drug-use, they shouldn't just fire them, the humane thing to do would be to get them help (with or without a salary)