Actually, it's more appropriately termed "Didn't read the fucking article."
The mention of "anti-college" sentiment is only one example out of numerous that are given, yet it's the only thing people are focusing on here, as if the author just walked into your church and shouted "There is no god!"
And your business would likely have failed during the time you would have otherwise been in college, based on even the most generous statistics which seem to indicate a 50-60% small business failure rate in their first five years. Then you would have found yourself in soul crushing debt, AND with no college degree.
You're right, but still, the question has to be asked, when I see these pronouncements of opinion with no context, data, or foundation, as if they are indisputable fact.
This is sort of what i was getting at. They get money - basically for shutting up and signing off on the service - and also probably a boost in sales and resulting revenues from new purchases because this new service will make things much more convenient for users.
There's very little possible downside, and their previous tactic, which probably relied on people repurchasing stuff they already owned, has already proven a dud.
If I wanted to play a facebook game, there's always a desktop system. I don't play facebook games anyway really, so I'm not a good test for that use case, and I'm fairly unsympathetic to people who waste time with them, but I can understand thinking "Gee, it would be cool if I could..." if you do actually play them.
However, claiming that nobody can view porn is just foolish: there are numerous sites that do not require flash, and have a remarkably broad array of free porn^Hvideos available. I've heard that sites such as xnxx.com, youporn.com, xvideos.com, spankwire.com don't require flash. Of course, I haven't confirmed this for myself, because I would never watch porn on an iPad... but I've heard that those sites work just fine.
The record labels would love to see you re-purchase all your stuff digitally, but that's simply not happening. Most itunes statistics I've seen indicate that a large fraction of the songs on the average person's iPod/iPoad/iPhone are ripped from cd, not purchased from the store. So I think the labels are pretty much declaring all that previously purchased content a wash, at least as far as pushing people to repurchase it.
Now Apple unveils a service that makes it easy for any device to have access to any new song you purchase through their store, easily and quickly. No sync headaches, no "shit, what device did I purchase that song on," nothing like that. My gut feeling is that this will boost sales through the iTunes store, which means the labels make more money. They also probably get a small cut of the $25 yearly iTunes Match fee, so they're getting SOME money from the old songs in your library, as well.
So, allow apple to roll out a service that will probably boost sales, and give you a small percentage of yearly revenue from a subscription service... worth the risk? I'd probably take the gamble if I were faced with eroding margins and revenue, too. And let's be honest, it's not going to encourage filesharing any more than existing services and software already do.
Here’s how it works: iTunes determines which songs in your collection are available in the iTunes Store. Any music with a match is automatically added to your iCloud library for you to listen to anytime, on any device. Since there are more than 18 million songs in the iTunes Store, most of your music is probably already in iCloud. All you have to upload is what iTunes can’t match. Which is much faster than starting from scratch. And all the music iTunes matches plays back at 256-Kbps iTunes Plus quality — even if your original copy was of lower quality.
Italics/Bold sentence above emphasized by me.
If your music is already in the Itunes store, the match service will let you avoid having to upload it, and you might be able to upgrade the quality. If it's not in the itunes store, you can still upload it to the service, and have your non-mainstream stuff available to you in the same way, but you won't get the upgraded bitrate that a matched song might get you. I know I have a bunch of old, comparatively low-bitrate, mp3's in my collection... an upgrade of even half of them to 256kbps for the cost of a few minutes scanning my library and $25/yr doesn't sound like an unreasonable price when you factor in the time required to re-rip a couple hundred CDs at a higher bitrate.
Which ones? I'm looking at the edit list for the Revere Page, and I'm not finding anybody there who's showing up as having been editing Palin's page as well.
The one discussion that's linked to, the guy is CLEARLY trolling. On his User page at Wikipedia:
I quote reliable sources such as the LA Times, CNN, when they tell me that Sarah Palin said that Paul Revere used bells to warn colonists during his midnight ride. An enquiring mind such as mine wants to find out exactly how this was accomplished.
It looks to me like he's done most of the defense of the edits made (that were reversed), and I don't see any contributions from him to the Palin page either.
My guess is this is some Anonymous-style "for the lulz" raid.
Never heard of a product. Hear that it's named "iSomething".
Realize, due to naming convention, it's probably an Apple product.
React accordingly: the faithful swoon, the haters hate. It's a well-known, stable, and easy-to-apply branding technique. Should McDonald's do away with the golden arches because it's faintly embarrassing and played out?
But but but everybody here on/. knows that lawyers are all, 100%, without fail, corrupt, scumbag sharks. They don't use logic, or ethics, or any of that!
$13,000 of that is room & board. You do not need to live on campus to attend UC, and you (or your family) likely would spend $10-15k per year on living expenses regardless of whether or not you're in college, so that 13k is kind of a wash - it's not like you won't have to pay rent & food & electric if you're not in college.
Unfortunately, pretty much every job requires that you spend X% of your time doing something you don't love.
For many jobs, X > 66.
Unless you really love attending meetings, filling out time sheets, writing up spec documents that will be obsolete before you finish page 3, arguing with coworkers, and drinking stale coffee.
All a mechanical keyboard confirms is "yes, you pressed a key, for sure, didn't you hear that loud CLICK?" It offers no features that would allow you to tell if you've hit "the right key," because they all make the same godawful noise when they're pressed, it's not like the keyboard announces, "HEY, you typed an 'A'!!" every time you press the 'A' key.
Learn to touch type, and spare yourself the racket. Your ears, and the people sharing space with you, will thank you.
I've used a clicky keyboard. The noise pissed me off. I don't mind buying a new keyboard every couple years if it means I don't sound like a tin can full of nickels rolling down a cobblestone street.
The love for mechanical keyboard strikes me as nothing more than nerd fetish porn. I've never understood it, and I've used Model M's, which I'm led to understand are sort of the "Gisele Bundchen does bukkake! MUST SEE!" of keyboards amongst mechanical keyboard fetishists.
For me, if my choice is "deafen yourself with a racket that actively works to make you less productive because it gets even worse as you type faster," or "buy a new, quiet, comfortable keyboard every couple years," I'll choose crass consumerism.
he should not be required to pay costs associated with the incompetence of others.
The judge would not issue the judgement against him if the law didn't allow for imprisonment & monetary fines. This is pretty standard legalese, I'm not sure why you'd think that paying restitutionary damages to the city is somehow unwarranted. If you want to claim that he's not liable, you really need to show how you arrive at that conclusion, considering he's been declared guilty by a jury.
The reason other places can just kick the tires and give things a cursory looking over is that they have more competent management that makes sure more than one single person holds the keys to the kingdom and knows how the network is set up.
Yes... and? Again, I've never said management was perfect, or blameless in allowing this situation to get to the point it did. But the action was entirely Mr. Childs'. He could have handed over the passwords, or offered a compromise solution where he would deliver the passwords to certain people in writing, rather than out loud over a phone in a conference room surrounded by people he didn't feel could be trusted. He tried to hold the network hostage, and he lost - as he should have. If I'm an idiot and leave my door unlocked, that doesn't give you the right to walk in and make yourself at home, or change my locks and lock me out of my apartment - your actions, your liability.
Even if the full audit is necessary and network engineers out there really do make a quarter million a year, they shouldn't need 6 man years.
Network engineers will probably make 100-150k, especially in the SF Bay area. It is typical for salary to constitute about 1/2 of the "total cost" of an employee per year - benefits, hiring, support, hardware, facilities, all of these cost money above and beyond salary. A team of 10 or so people to audit a network of the size and complexity of an entire (very large) city & county government? I don't think 10 or 12 people x 6 months is particularly outrageous. I'm curious what you estimate a full audit would require, in terms of manpower and time?
Let's also not forget the fact that, if they didn't hire new people to do this, *existing projects* would also be delayed and disrupted, which could have easily cost the city extra time and money. As an example of how schedule disruptions cost money: I have a friend working for another division of my company who was telling me that if they don't meet their Sybase decommission deadline, they're going to owe Sybase approximately 7 million dollars to re-up their licenses for next year. That project has half a dozen engineers, 3 DBAs, and another half a dozen QA/OPS people working on it. And it's considered a fairly small project, budget-wise.
And you're welcome to your opinion of how liable management is. Unfortunately, the courts did not agree with you, and Mr. Childs has been held liable - not for his incompetence, not for his abrasive manner, but for his violation of the law.
I notice you completely ignored that the same thing would have had to happen even if they said "you're fired" and he said "well then, here's the admin passwords".
I notice you've assumed that this would have happened if this situation had unfolded differently. In my experience, it wouldn't have. If he had been fired or laid off, he would have likely had his access terminated shortly before (or during) the action, and his replacement would have simply looked over the systems as part of taking charge of the systems. Given the behavior & actions of Mr. Childs after his transfer (not firing - he was being transferred to a new role initially, he was only fired after he refused to turn over access to city systems to city officials), there was plenty of reason to fear that he had other back-doors and time bombs hidden around the network - and thus plenty of reason to conclude that a thorough investigation was necessary, and not just a cursory "look things over, kick the tires, and see if there's any reason to be worried."
He is not the only admin out there who firmly believes the working config should be volatile to make sure a password recovery attempt sets off every alarm on the network. I'm not a fan of that practice, but it's not something only done nefariously.
But he is an admin who refused to turn over access to systems owned and operated by the city, to city officials. He did not offer to give the passwords out, but only in writing, or only to a specific person (or people), he flat-out refused. Then gave incorrect passwords. Then claimed he had forgotten them, and been locked out. Then made it look like he was going to skip town by withdrawing a large amount of money and appearing to have decided to leave town. Given the totality of his behavior, and his repeated stonewalling of city officials asking for access, it's not an unreasonable conclusion that he had set up these systems to provide himself with a stranglehold on the city if he wanted to.
How many man hours did it cost when some dumbbell made all of their VPN passwords a matter of public record and how much was he fined?
Did that person violate a law? The only reference I'm aware of was the introduction of a list of VPN Passwords & usernames found at Mr. Childs' home, which was unredacted, and thus entered into the public record during the Childs case. If that's what you're referring to, I'm sure it cost the city a fair bit of time and effort to change all the usernames & passwords. But that's not what's at issue here. What's at issue is whether or not exposing those passwords was the result of a criminal act - and it doesn't appear it was. What Childs did was - say it with me now - intentional, and - if not completely malicious, certainly against the best interests of the clients he should have been supporting as a professional. If he had legitimately forgotten the passwords, or simply forgot to mention about the fact that he had set up the routers to wipe on reboot... he would probably be a free man without a 1.5 million dollar judgement against him today. But that's not how it happened.
Management certainly did a poor job of managing him; alas, being incompetent at your work is not a crime.
Given that he was creating and emailing around user passwords (to the person who requested his passwords, no less - read the coverage), it's entirely likely that new hires and people moving into new roles were unable to get access to the systems they were supposed to have access to on their hire date. That's not "service down," but it does cause a fair amount of disruption when you look at the number of new hires & role changes that probably happen all the time in a large city government.
He configured switches to basically self-destruct on reboot, wiping their current configuration. Do you want to find that he's done that in half a dozen other systems only after you've rebooted or crashed and wiped the entire configuration? The audit was entirely appropriate. And 10-15 man years? 1.5 million is more like 6 man-years for network engineers. And why would you think that a team of 10-12 people taking 6 months to conduct a full audit & correct issues uncovered is some sort of exorbitantly costly project?
Do you see NO fault in management anywhere in that?
I never said management was blameless in their handling of Mr. Childs - I said they were not criminally or civilly liable for the costs incurred by Mr. Childs' unprofessional behavior. These two concepts are not mutually incompatible. One can be a terrible manager to an incompetent engineer without being liable for the misdeeds of that engineer.
Making this change does little for usability, and does a lot to promote using the "Search" box at the top of the browser -- note that the new "Compact" view still includes a "Search" field to the left of the tabs. When a user wants to enter a URL, where are they going to look? Riiiiight... for a text box. If the only visible textbox is actually the "search" field... well... you do the math.
The new "compact" URL bar behaves like the current "Find" text entry box - it drops down out of the tab bar. But the URL also disappears when you move your mouse away from it.
I don't see this being all that beneficial for users - they get slightly more real estate, in exchange for lowered security: an elevated susceptibility to phishing, since you won't see the URLs displayed in general, and also less attention paid to whether you're on an https or http connection. And in return, when people are looking for a site... that search box will still be there, inviting users in. I'd say Google is definitely the big winner with this change.
Actually, the admin can very much do that by applying a very large, very bold warning to both sides of the envelope: "Critical sensitive information. Use of the information contained in this envelope by someone unfamiliar with the network systems could cause widespread disruption and server outages of mission critical city government services. Open ONLY in case of emergency, and share ONLY with authorized system administrators."
It gets pretty hard to reasonably argue that it's "the sysadmins fault" that a clueless manager read that, opened the document, fucked around with servers, and broke stuff.
but that's not a crime and there's no way it did 1.5 million in damage.
Indeed, it's not a crime to have a lousy personality. That's not what he's being fined for, though.
The 1.5 million is restitution for expenses incurred (probably loss of service to some people who were left twiddling their thumbs because nobody could add an account to the systems), and also for an audit of the city infrastructure to make sure there were no further vulnerabilities left by this "obsessive abrasive control freak." He already demonstrated that he was willing to hold the systems hostage - should they take the chance that he embedded other backdoors and time bombs in the network infrastructure?
With smallpox vaccine, if you're given the vaccine before symptoms manifest, then the vaccine has a preventive function as well.
So, some of the 14 million doses of vaccine would be given to first responders and the population around an outbreak to contain it and prevent it from spreading.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, it's more appropriately termed "Didn't read the fucking article."
The mention of "anti-college" sentiment is only one example out of numerous that are given, yet it's the only thing people are focusing on here, as if the author just walked into your church and shouted "There is no god!"
Two hundred thousand dollars in student loans? Please, explain to me how you arrived at that sum.
And your business would likely have failed during the time you would have otherwise been in college, based on even the most generous statistics which seem to indicate a 50-60% small business failure rate in their first five years. Then you would have found yourself in soul crushing debt, AND with no college degree.
And this seems the better alternative to you?
You're right, but still, the question has to be asked, when I see these pronouncements of opinion with no context, data, or foundation, as if they are indisputable fact.
This is sort of what i was getting at. They get money - basically for shutting up and signing off on the service - and also probably a boost in sales and resulting revenues from new purchases because this new service will make things much more convenient for users.
There's very little possible downside, and their previous tactic, which probably relied on people repurchasing stuff they already owned, has already proven a dud.
If I wanted to play a facebook game, there's always a desktop system. I don't play facebook games anyway really, so I'm not a good test for that use case, and I'm fairly unsympathetic to people who waste time with them, but I can understand thinking "Gee, it would be cool if I could..." if you do actually play them.
However, claiming that nobody can view porn is just foolish: there are numerous sites that do not require flash, and have a remarkably broad array of free porn^Hvideos available. I've heard that sites such as xnxx.com, youporn.com, xvideos.com, spankwire.com don't require flash. Of course, I haven't confirmed this for myself, because I would never watch porn on an iPad... but I've heard that those sites work just fine.
The record labels would love to see you re-purchase all your stuff digitally, but that's simply not happening. Most itunes statistics I've seen indicate that a large fraction of the songs on the average person's iPod/iPoad/iPhone are ripped from cd, not purchased from the store. So I think the labels are pretty much declaring all that previously purchased content a wash, at least as far as pushing people to repurchase it.
Now Apple unveils a service that makes it easy for any device to have access to any new song you purchase through their store, easily and quickly. No sync headaches, no "shit, what device did I purchase that song on," nothing like that. My gut feeling is that this will boost sales through the iTunes store, which means the labels make more money. They also probably get a small cut of the $25 yearly iTunes Match fee, so they're getting SOME money from the old songs in your library, as well.
So, allow apple to roll out a service that will probably boost sales, and give you a small percentage of yearly revenue from a subscription service... worth the risk? I'd probably take the gamble if I were faced with eroding margins and revenue, too. And let's be honest, it's not going to encourage filesharing any more than existing services and software already do.
From the Apple iCloud web page, up shortly after the WWDC keynote finished:
Italics/Bold sentence above emphasized by me.
If your music is already in the Itunes store, the match service will let you avoid having to upload it, and you might be able to upgrade the quality. If it's not in the itunes store, you can still upload it to the service, and have your non-mainstream stuff available to you in the same way, but you won't get the upgraded bitrate that a matched song might get you. I know I have a bunch of old, comparatively low-bitrate, mp3's in my collection... an upgrade of even half of them to 256kbps for the cost of a few minutes scanning my library and $25/yr doesn't sound like an unreasonable price when you factor in the time required to re-rip a couple hundred CDs at a higher bitrate.
Why do you say that? Honest question, I'd really like you to expand on your opinion with some details.
Which ones? I'm looking at the edit list for the Revere Page, and I'm not finding anybody there who's showing up as having been editing Palin's page as well.
The one discussion that's linked to, the guy is CLEARLY trolling. On his User page at Wikipedia:
Accompanied by this graphic.
It looks to me like he's done most of the defense of the edits made (that were reversed), and I don't see any contributions from him to the Palin page either.
My guess is this is some Anonymous-style "for the lulz" raid.
Modern medicine has.
They even have a name for it: Stimulant Induced Psychosis.
Never heard of a product. Hear that it's named "iSomething".
Realize, due to naming convention, it's probably an Apple product.
React accordingly: the faithful swoon, the haters hate. It's a well-known, stable, and easy-to-apply branding technique. Should McDonald's do away with the golden arches because it's faintly embarrassing and played out?
But but but everybody here on /. knows that lawyers are all, 100%, without fail, corrupt, scumbag sharks. They don't use logic, or ethics, or any of that!
http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/admissions/paying-for-uc/cost/index.html
$13,000 of that is room & board. You do not need to live on campus to attend UC, and you (or your family) likely would spend $10-15k per year on living expenses regardless of whether or not you're in college, so that 13k is kind of a wash - it's not like you won't have to pay rent & food & electric if you're not in college.
For many jobs, X > 66.
Unless you really love attending meetings, filling out time sheets, writing up spec documents that will be obsolete before you finish page 3, arguing with coworkers, and drinking stale coffee.
All a mechanical keyboard confirms is "yes, you pressed a key, for sure, didn't you hear that loud CLICK?" It offers no features that would allow you to tell if you've hit "the right key," because they all make the same godawful noise when they're pressed, it's not like the keyboard announces, "HEY, you typed an 'A'!!" every time you press the 'A' key.
Learn to touch type, and spare yourself the racket. Your ears, and the people sharing space with you, will thank you.
I've used a clicky keyboard. The noise pissed me off. I don't mind buying a new keyboard every couple years if it means I don't sound like a tin can full of nickels rolling down a cobblestone street.
The love for mechanical keyboard strikes me as nothing more than nerd fetish porn. I've never understood it, and I've used Model M's, which I'm led to understand are sort of the "Gisele Bundchen does bukkake! MUST SEE!" of keyboards amongst mechanical keyboard fetishists.
For me, if my choice is "deafen yourself with a racket that actively works to make you less productive because it gets even worse as you type faster," or "buy a new, quiet, comfortable keyboard every couple years," I'll choose crass consumerism.
Interestingly, it appears as if there may be some further movement in the Facetime specs coming soon. See the speculation here:
http://www.subfurther.com/blog/2011/05/10/long-past-time-to-open-facetime/
The judge would not issue the judgement against him if the law didn't allow for imprisonment & monetary fines. This is pretty standard legalese, I'm not sure why you'd think that paying restitutionary damages to the city is somehow unwarranted. If you want to claim that he's not liable, you really need to show how you arrive at that conclusion, considering he's been declared guilty by a jury.
Yes... and? Again, I've never said management was perfect, or blameless in allowing this situation to get to the point it did. But the action was entirely Mr. Childs'. He could have handed over the passwords, or offered a compromise solution where he would deliver the passwords to certain people in writing, rather than out loud over a phone in a conference room surrounded by people he didn't feel could be trusted. He tried to hold the network hostage, and he lost - as he should have. If I'm an idiot and leave my door unlocked, that doesn't give you the right to walk in and make yourself at home, or change my locks and lock me out of my apartment - your actions, your liability.
Network engineers will probably make 100-150k, especially in the SF Bay area. It is typical for salary to constitute about 1/2 of the "total cost" of an employee per year - benefits, hiring, support, hardware, facilities, all of these cost money above and beyond salary. A team of 10 or so people to audit a network of the size and complexity of an entire (very large) city & county government? I don't think 10 or 12 people x 6 months is particularly outrageous. I'm curious what you estimate a full audit would require, in terms of manpower and time?
Let's also not forget the fact that, if they didn't hire new people to do this, *existing projects* would also be delayed and disrupted, which could have easily cost the city extra time and money. As an example of how schedule disruptions cost money: I have a friend working for another division of my company who was telling me that if they don't meet their Sybase decommission deadline, they're going to owe Sybase approximately 7 million dollars to re-up their licenses for next year. That project has half a dozen engineers, 3 DBAs, and another half a dozen QA/OPS people working on it. And it's considered a fairly small project, budget-wise.
And you're welcome to your opinion of how liable management is. Unfortunately, the courts did not agree with you, and Mr. Childs has been held liable - not for his incompetence, not for his abrasive manner, but for his violation of the law.
I notice you've assumed that this would have happened if this situation had unfolded differently. In my experience, it wouldn't have. If he had been fired or laid off, he would have likely had his access terminated shortly before (or during) the action, and his replacement would have simply looked over the systems as part of taking charge of the systems. Given the behavior & actions of Mr. Childs after his transfer (not firing - he was being transferred to a new role initially, he was only fired after he refused to turn over access to city systems to city officials), there was plenty of reason to fear that he had other back-doors and time bombs hidden around the network - and thus plenty of reason to conclude that a thorough investigation was necessary, and not just a cursory "look things over, kick the tires, and see if there's any reason to be worried."
But he is an admin who refused to turn over access to systems owned and operated by the city, to city officials. He did not offer to give the passwords out, but only in writing, or only to a specific person (or people), he flat-out refused. Then gave incorrect passwords. Then claimed he had forgotten them, and been locked out. Then made it look like he was going to skip town by withdrawing a large amount of money and appearing to have decided to leave town. Given the totality of his behavior, and his repeated stonewalling of city officials asking for access, it's not an unreasonable conclusion that he had set up these systems to provide himself with a stranglehold on the city if he wanted to.
Did that person violate a law? The only reference I'm aware of was the introduction of a list of VPN Passwords & usernames found at Mr. Childs' home, which was unredacted, and thus entered into the public record during the Childs case. If that's what you're referring to, I'm sure it cost the city a fair bit of time and effort to change all the usernames & passwords. But that's not what's at issue here. What's at issue is whether or not exposing those passwords was the result of a criminal act - and it doesn't appear it was. What Childs did was - say it with me now - intentional, and - if not completely malicious, certainly against the best interests of the clients he should have been supporting as a professional. If he had legitimately forgotten the passwords, or simply forgot to mention about the fact that he had set up the routers to wipe on reboot... he would probably be a free man without a 1.5 million dollar judgement against him today. But that's not how it happened.
Management certainly did a poor job of managing him; alas, being incompetent at your work is not a crime.
Given that he was creating and emailing around user passwords (to the person who requested his passwords, no less - read the coverage), it's entirely likely that new hires and people moving into new roles were unable to get access to the systems they were supposed to have access to on their hire date. That's not "service down," but it does cause a fair amount of disruption when you look at the number of new hires & role changes that probably happen all the time in a large city government.
He configured switches to basically self-destruct on reboot, wiping their current configuration. Do you want to find that he's done that in half a dozen other systems only after you've rebooted or crashed and wiped the entire configuration? The audit was entirely appropriate. And 10-15 man years? 1.5 million is more like 6 man-years for network engineers. And why would you think that a team of 10-12 people taking 6 months to conduct a full audit & correct issues uncovered is some sort of exorbitantly costly project?
I never said management was blameless in their handling of Mr. Childs - I said they were not criminally or civilly liable for the costs incurred by Mr. Childs' unprofessional behavior. These two concepts are not mutually incompatible. One can be a terrible manager to an incompetent engineer without being liable for the misdeeds of that engineer.
Making this change does little for usability, and does a lot to promote using the "Search" box at the top of the browser -- note that the new "Compact" view still includes a "Search" field to the left of the tabs. When a user wants to enter a URL, where are they going to look? Riiiiight... for a text box. If the only visible textbox is actually the "search" field... well... you do the math.
The new "compact" URL bar behaves like the current "Find" text entry box - it drops down out of the tab bar. But the URL also disappears when you move your mouse away from it.
I don't see this being all that beneficial for users - they get slightly more real estate, in exchange for lowered security: an elevated susceptibility to phishing, since you won't see the URLs displayed in general, and also less attention paid to whether you're on an https or http connection. And in return, when people are looking for a site... that search box will still be there, inviting users in. I'd say Google is definitely the big winner with this change.
But he has a whole lot of chairs. He doesn't need to manipulate followers, he can just do it himself.
Actually, the admin can very much do that by applying a very large, very bold warning to both sides of the envelope: "Critical sensitive information. Use of the information contained in this envelope by someone unfamiliar with the network systems could cause widespread disruption and server outages of mission critical city government services. Open ONLY in case of emergency, and share ONLY with authorized system administrators."
It gets pretty hard to reasonably argue that it's "the sysadmins fault" that a clueless manager read that, opened the document, fucked around with servers, and broke stuff.
Indeed, it's not a crime to have a lousy personality. That's not what he's being fined for, though.
The 1.5 million is restitution for expenses incurred (probably loss of service to some people who were left twiddling their thumbs because nobody could add an account to the systems), and also for an audit of the city infrastructure to make sure there were no further vulnerabilities left by this "obsessive abrasive control freak." He already demonstrated that he was willing to hold the systems hostage - should they take the chance that he embedded other backdoors and time bombs in the network infrastructure?
With smallpox vaccine, if you're given the vaccine before symptoms manifest, then the vaccine has a preventive function as well.
So, some of the 14 million doses of vaccine would be given to first responders and the population around an outbreak to contain it and prevent it from spreading.