For those who don't know, I'd like to point out that the Jammie Thomas case is quite atypical.
1) The whole case is about her making the downloaded files available through some sort of file sharing software. While this actually is typical, it's important to consider in relation to my following points.
2) In all of her trials, she came across as very unsympathetic. Keep in mind that probably nobody on the jury has an IT background. She came across as someone who knew what she was doing and felt like she was above the law. This is a big reason for the massive judgements against her.
3) She basically denied the charges against her on the stand as her only defense and the prosecutors were easily able to show that the PC sharing the files belonged to her.
4) She is arrogant beyond belief and maybe, just maybe, a bit deranged. It never for even a minute seemed to occur to her that any outcome other than a victory for her was ever possible. This is just not rational.
5) Her legal help for all trials has been bottom of the barrel. In one of her trials, she got a bunch of law school students to defend her for free and one of them told the press prior to the trial that the case would be a slam dunk (or similar words) to win. Her student lawyers learned that practicing law for real is quite a bit harder than it seems on TV and in class.
All I can say is that if you were going to pick someone to stand up to the RIAA for the little guy, she would be your last choice to be that person.
Two young men in steubenville rape a young women and get 1 - 2 years in jail. A man writes a script to get email address from a website and gets 3.5 years in jail. Something's not right.
You have a point in that "computer crimes" are often subject to penalties that are far overkill because the legal system has few people, both lawyers and judges, who understand technology well. However, the rape case got the verdict it did for a variety of reasons.
1) The young woman wasn't actually "raped" in terms of nobody put his penis inside her, but some idiot young men fingered her and photographed it.
2) She was so drunk that she had no idea what happened. It was the photos that made this even go to trial and provided evidence of a crime.
3) The witnesses disagreed on whether or not she was able to give consent to being fingered and photographed and it became a "Who's story do you believe?" kind of issue.
4) Those convicted were both juveniles and this played some role in the time of the sentence.
I really don't see how anybody can honestly believe "Company X accidentally gave me super secret information that they don't want me to have so it's OK if I send to other people who they don't want to have it because I did nothing in terms of hacking to get it". To met this isn't all that different from you seeing an overturned money truck and grabbing as much money as you can from the spill and expecting to be able to keep it. If those guys really were so naive that they thought they could email the passwords to others, well, maybe their sentences will serve as a warning to others.
This is one part of US law that I will always fail to understand. Their action caused harm and CISCO should be able to claim for those damages. I have counter sued twice in the UK when I had to go to court over things that should not have gone to court.
I'm American and my best friend is too and he is a lawyer. I have asked him about this sort of thing, so I can comment on it and offer a sort of American legal perspective, although again, I am not a lawyer myself.
Basically in US law it is possible for a sued party to go after the people who sued them if they win, but it's very difficult to prevail. See, judges and lawyers like our very broken system just fine as it is because it provides employment for them. Judges very rarely will award damages to a sued party after they win in court because doing so could discourage other lawsuits. No joke. The legal system argues that "innocent" parties will be afraid to sue if they can be held liable for costs if they lose anyway (which is your tactic admission by those in the legal system that verdicts are not always correct or fair) and that would discourage truly wronged people from trying to go to court in the first place. So in America, big companies like Cisco just write it off as part of the expense of doing business that some patent troll will take them to court.
Regulations designed to protect the incumbent status quo, rather than serving the needs of real users, is the kind of thing that has kept France out of the picture for innovation. France must import their innovation.
As someone who was a US based IT employee of a French company at one time, I totally agree with this. While in general my French colleagues were good people and I still have fond memories of them, the word "arrogance" doesn't begin to describe how they feel about everything. Honestly, you'd have thought they invented every computer technology there was from the way they acted in our company. And while they've got a plausible cover story about why they want to regulate Skype, I strongly suspect that in reality France Telecom complained about how Skype is sending calls "for free over our domestic network and costing us money" and this is the real reason for the sudden regulatory interest. The relationship between certain very large French businesses and the government is under the table and quite probably in violation of various EU laws, but that relationship exists nonetheless. This is just more evidence of it.
I wonder if the Troll knows they will probably have to pay all the defendents costs if they lose?
You don't live in the USA. Am I right?
That's how law works in the UK. My best friend is a lawyer (we're both Americans) and he's taught me a lot about how the law really works. One of the things he taught me is that it's incredibly difficult in the USA to get costs paid, even when the lawsuit is frivolous. The problem is that courts in general really don't like to award this kind of thing because all judges and lawyers feel that the system works pretty well, darn near close to perfect, as it is right now and anything that punishes people for bringing lawsuits and losing would "hurt the little man" who will be too afraid to pursue his justified lawsuit against some true injustice because he might lose and have to pay the other guy's court costs. So almost certainly this will not be a factor, although if the defendants are attorneys they might push for it anyway as they know the system well enough that it might give them a slightly better chance of getting it than would normally happen.
Who is voting for this guy? It must be a corner of WA where stupid is a virtue.
I think it's actually a combination of things.
1) I know a lot of people who are now Republican variations of what used to be called "yellow dog Democrats". What it means is that they hate the other party so much that they'll vote for anyone who is a candidate of the party they support, regardless of any other consideration.
2) Most Americans simply vote for the incumbent for Congress unless the guy commits a crime or engaged in some really egregious conduct.
3) I don't like to give a lot of personal details here, but my Congressional representative may possibly be the dumbest one in the entire House. However, the person who held the job before the current one was orders of magnitude worse, but for reasons other than stupidity. I live in a place where the only opponents seem to be Tea Party numbskulls, so as dumb as my Rep is, I see the alternatives as being much worse. My Rep is fairly benign and doesn't cause a lot of problems and that looks pretty good compared to the predecessor.
You're probably right about how much "good" it will do now that it has to get an official response. Khanna is hoping that 100,000 signatures will be enough to make someone say "You know, it is pretty stupid that this is now illegal". In reality, I suspect that the government will simply say "You can buy unlocked if you want unlocked. The fact that you don't like the price attached to it is not our concern because it is possible for you to buy unlocked. You might have a point if the law outlawed selling unlocked phones, but it doesn't and therefore you don't have a point."
the American and British pilots are reduced to one-way communication, from the Brits to the Yanks.
That's okay; if the grammar and vocabularly of today's 20 and 30 year old Americans are any indication, our boys need to just shut the fuck up and listen.:p
It's become clear to me from what I see on various internet forums, including Slashdot, that almost nobody under the age of 30 in any English speaking nation has an education worth having. So I wouldn't hold my breath that the Brits would be any better than Americans.
My previous job was working in a US office of a company owned by France Telecom. I had quite a bit of experience working with French colleagues both in the US and in France itself and I can tell you that our French workers were smart and conscientious. There are downsides to the French. They don't make friends easily with non-French people, they can't be fired, and there's a general aura of "We're better than everybody who's not French". If that guy buys a French factory, he'll never be able to get rid of anyone. But they weren't lazy. That's for sure. The French are better than Americans in general in not getting completely and utterly obsessed with work and some Americans resent that.
I remember a few years ago here on Slashdot the subject of "Just sue them for discrimination" came up and a real lawyer (yes, we have some) weighed in on the subject. He basically said that employment discrimination cases are almost impossible to win and he will almost never take them because of that. They basically get into a "he said, she said" kind of thing and that rarely results in an outcome favorable to the plaintiff. He said that when clients came to him wanting to sue their employer his advice was that they would be better off to just accept the job loss and find another job.
Your post seems to be a bunch of complaining on how your company seems completely and utterly powerless to do anything about stupid behavior by its employees. Just have your mail admins deny attachments on email. For example, if it comes from external sources, don't let attachments of any kind get through or only allow certain ones. This is rather trivial to fix. I have to wonder just how smart your "large tech company" is since they seem to have no clue on how to stop this sort of thing.
I think you made a really good post, but I disagree on a couple of items. We live in a "must... have... it... now!" society. I've learned that to some people, saving money or getting better is completely irrelevant if they can get it now over waiting a few days for it come by UPS, Fed Ex, etc. These people aren't going to buy online anyway and they're more numerous than you may think.
The other problem I have is with your taxes comment. Lots of Americans seem to equate paying taxes with flushing money in the toilet - paying for military equipment for wars they don't support, paying some government employee's salary to do nothing every day at work, and so on. Believe me, if you were to live in some kind of Libertarian utopia where you never paid taxes you'd wish the current system was back. Know those roads you drive in that hopefully don't have giant potholes in them? Your taxes paid for that. Know those police and fireman who come quickly when you call instead of making you give a credit card number first before they'll come to your house? Your taxes paid for that. Got kids? Well, if you use public schools, your money went to help educate your kids and your neighbor's kids.
Oddly, I have had experience in previous jobs with Profs, Notes and Citrix. My first job after college was working as a civilian employee of the US Department of Defense at a US military base as a computer programmer. We had Profs there, but its use was restricted to upper level military (maybe Lt. Col. and above) and high grade civilian employees. Yes, I'm sure it worked great - on the mainframe - but it was rather infamous for not being able to talk well at all to non-IBM mainframes. We kept it around because the general who ran our base loved it and refused to use any other mail program, so we kept it around merely to placate him. I kid you not - as soon as he retired, our Profs system was shut down permanently as his successor had no interest in using it. The upper military and civilian employees had to maintain two email accounts while that general who loved Profs was there - one just for Profs in case he sent them email or they needed to email him and one email account on our Unix mail server where everybody who wasn't the general preferred to send email.
My previous employer used Notes. Almost everybody in IT hated it when we switched to it. I will simply say what I said at the time - we picked Notes because non-technical managers could use it, not because it was any good.
The same previous employer also tangled with Citrix. I'll skip a long story that made us look bad with regard to Citrix and simply say that yes, it sucks. I've always felt that it was bought and used mostly by PHB types who don't know any other way to do things except the Windows way.
I can speak Russian rather well (not really good at Ukrainian though) and I've spent a decent amount of time in Ukraine and I have a few friends who live there. I can tell you that justice goes to the highest bidder there at the local level. If the US government wants to bribe a judge, they can get whatever verdict they want. Or if they can convince President Yanukovich that he'll get something back in exchange for sending an "evil pirate" to jail, then his office will just tell the judge what to do. However, if the US just expects the local justice system to act like it would in a western country and they don't bribe or tell the Pres what to do, then anyone facing charges can just bribe the judge himself and get off. It will be interesting to see the outcome, but whatever the verdict is, I have no doubts that it will be completely dishonest and someone will have bribed or cajoled their way into it.
It's just "Ukraine" not "the Ukraine." (Perhaps you're thinking of "the U.K.")
The rule is that when it was part of the Soviet Union and a specific region, it was OK to call it "The Ukraine" but since independence the country has been quite clear in its official documents, embassy names, etc. that in the English language it is now simply known as Ukraine. Rules for other languages such as French may be different.
I got into an argument once via email with a Ukrainian woman in Kiev who insisted that because some English grammar book written in the 1980s (she actually quoted me the page and relevant section) said that it was "The Ukraine" that apparently this meant that until the end of time the country is to be called The Ukraine in the English speaking world. I thought it was a really odd argument to make as most Ukrainians will insist on not using the "The" when referring to their country if they can speak English, but it just goes to show you how old habits die hard.
Here's the deal. They do have a "legitimate right" to launch satellites. However, all their "satellite" launches under the previous Kim's government were fairly transparent attempts to test ICBMs. UN sanctions do not give them the right to test ICBMs. So what they do is insist that they are launching satellites and use that as an ICBM test. They may have actually gotten a satellite into orbit on the most recent launch, a first for the country, but everybody knows that the real purpose is to test more powerful missiles.
In the late 1990s I had a job where I was a Unix system admin and our group needed to hire a replacement for the guy who left. The job required some marginal Unix/Linux user knowledge but most of the work would be repairing and building out PCs for our test group. Our PCs weren't the best and needed constant maintenance. The previous 2 guys who held the job were nuts. Guy number 1 was bipolar and told us on his first day of work that he was bipolar and that he saw no need to take medicine for it. It ended up being 6 months of hell where we basically had a guy who alternated between being a crybaby and Captain Angry All The Time. He left us to become some other company's problem, but we foolishly brought in his replacement before he left and had him train the new guy. Much to our surprise, he became BFFs with guy number 2 and he poisoned guy number 2 against our group. Guy number 2 basically had a permanent hostile attitude towards our group until he left us for another company. So we let guy number 2 leave before we ever started to look for his replacement because we were not going to repeat the previous mistake of letting a departing employee have a negative influence on his replacement.
We interviewed several people and we actually flew a guy in from another state who seemed promising for an interview. I don't remember exactly what it was, but we had some ongoing problem related to our PCs that neither of the 2 previous crazy guys could ever solve. So after we interviewed the guy, my manager brought him into his office and asked him about the problem. He got it fixed on the spot for us within 5 minutes. He was hired that day. His ability to fix that ongoing problem on the spot clinched it for him. He was a fantastic employee for us. So while I'm sure that maybe some sleazebag companies are just trying to get free help, trust me, you don't want to work for them anyway. Some companies may just be using it to test your abilities and if you can solve their problem, you'll get the job. I've seen it firsthand.
You've had some good answers. However, I want to point out that for the most part programming these days is all object oriented. This is a huge change from the procedural based programming you learned years ago. To give you an analogy, it's kind of like studying Russian 20 years ago and now being asked to study Mandarin. They're pretty different from each other. Basically nothing you did in the past will help you to learn OO programming. You will either get the concept or you won't. If you don't, you won't likely find any programming jobs unless you get really lucky and are able to do something that doesn't require OO. I've worked for two companies that have hired senior programmers around your age (including my current employer) and both companies were pleased with the hires. Basically if you can do the job, they'll hire you and being willing to work cheaper than others may actually be an advantage. But on the downside, a lot of programming has impossible deadlines. The programmers where I work now who sit somewhat close to me are really tired because they are working on a fairly new product we are selling and it's got aggressive deadlines. As an older guy, you may find the constant demand for 50-60 hours a week of work to be too much. One programmer told me somewhat recently that he has to work every Saturday too and he feels lucky if he gets a Sunday off - sometimes he doesn't.
Current? Here's the constitutional amendment Rand proposed: "Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of production and trade. .."
That means no safety regulations, no minimum wage, no antitrust legislation, no public roads, and no regulations on the financial markets. It means that if I sell you a product that is poisonous and it debilitates you for the rest of your life, you can sue me in civil court and that's the solution to keep things like lead paint off of products (and, of course, if you're too poor to sue me in civil court you're a worthless fuck who deserves lead poisoning; i.e., all low income housing would be painted with lead paint).
So true. My first exposure to libertarianism was back in the mid-1990s when I had a friend at work who was a developer and a hard core libertarian. I used to ask him questions and this is basically what he believed.
1) The government would have a military that it would use only to defend the US from foreign attack. But just about everything else in the government would be gone. Whatever was left of government, it would likely be maybe 10% or even less of its current size.
2) Since the government will be weak and basically doing very little other than making sure the military stayed functional, everything had to be settled in the courts. If someone sells you ice cream and it's poison and you die, you file a lawsuit. To him, this seemed perfectly reasonable and a logical way to handle things because the "bad" people under libertarianism will go out of business due to the negative publicity of the lawsuits and stop killing people that way. So libertarians are not telling you that their system requires a massive expansion of courts and lawyers. Does that seem rational? To me it doesn't, but it sure did to him.
3) I quickly realized something that all libertarians seem to fail to get - all it takes is one guy to not play by the rules and game the system and everything comes crashing down like a house of cards. It's exactly like RazorSharp said - it's a utopian paradise and it fails when one guy breaks the rules. I've told people that communism makes a lot more sense than libertarianism does. That is because to 99% of "libertarian" Americans, libertarianism means essentially "I don't have to pay any more taxes and Uncle Sam can't tell me what to do". There's no deeper thought than that about the political philosophy they espouse and how it would work in reality.
Introducing the new Microsoft LiveBook. Boots right in to Microsoft's cloud-based OS. Skydrive, Skype, Office365, Bing search, Hotmail. Coming your way in 2015 or sooner.
The problem is that this cannibalizes Windows to an extent that I don't Redmond is prepared to accept. They could just simply offer a cheapish tablet with features like this without it necessarily being a direct threat to Windows.
Somewhere along the line, it must be technically possible to identify that the number isn't coming from where it claims to be.
I second this. Interestingly, I got a robocall today on my cell phone. Every month or two, I keep getting a call during the daytime offering me a fantastic deal on some sort of cruise they claim I have won. I have looked into it and the callers are rather infamous but what they do is they change their number every time they call. So it does no good to file a report (I have actually done this before) as the number you report is something they'll never use again and probably never really had to begin with. I began to see the problems with this in the 1990s when some free PBX software package for Linux started getting popular and one of its features was it enabled you to use any number you wanted as your identifying phone number.
1) I understand your argument, but I sure wouldn't want to be the one rolling the dice in a US court to see if a court would find it legal or not. Lots of developed countries have the idea that their laws apply everywhere in the world.
2) I have an unlocked phone (I bought it unlocked some years ago) but the fact is that most Americans.... JUST... DON'T... CARE. Most Americans don't travel outside of North America, so there's just not a lot of interest in unlocked phones. Some Americans do care a lot, but most don't. In fact, my unlocked phone is powered off and in storage. My main mobile phone (or "cell phone" as we Americans say) is an iPhone and my work requires it to be unjailbroken, so I can't unlock it. They pay the bills for it, so I have to live by their rules. The next time I travel overseas, I'll just take my unlocked phone with me. I doubt that putting unlocking businesses right across the border would be very lucrative. I'm not sure about this, but I'm under the impression that the Canadian market is pretty much just like the American one and subsidized locked phones are the way everybody goes.
Why is colinneagle so important that Adobe was willing to dig up 17 year old software for him to help out on something that is impractical and only has a "Gee whiz" factor going for it? I'm hardly an Adobe expert, but my limited experience is that like any normal software vendor they are trying to get people on the latest and greatest, not make stuff from 17 years ago still work. I guess it's fantastic for him that this works, but given how hard it would be for John Q. Public to find Windows 3.1 and probably also to find an ancient copy of Photoshop, this is starting to sound like a bit of a taunt on how he was able to do something that almost nobody else will be able to do.
Slashdot Mirror
For those who don't know, I'd like to point out that the Jammie Thomas case is quite atypical.
1) The whole case is about her making the downloaded files available through some sort of file sharing software. While this actually is typical, it's important to consider in relation to my following points.
2) In all of her trials, she came across as very unsympathetic. Keep in mind that probably nobody on the jury has an IT background. She came across as someone who knew what she was doing and felt like she was above the law. This is a big reason for the massive judgements against her.
3) She basically denied the charges against her on the stand as her only defense and the prosecutors were easily able to show that the PC sharing the files belonged to her.
4) She is arrogant beyond belief and maybe, just maybe, a bit deranged. It never for even a minute seemed to occur to her that any outcome other than a victory for her was ever possible. This is just not rational.
5) Her legal help for all trials has been bottom of the barrel. In one of her trials, she got a bunch of law school students to defend her for free and one of them told the press prior to the trial that the case would be a slam dunk (or similar words) to win. Her student lawyers learned that practicing law for real is quite a bit harder than it seems on TV and in class.
All I can say is that if you were going to pick someone to stand up to the RIAA for the little guy, she would be your last choice to be that person.
Two young men in steubenville rape a young women and get 1 - 2 years in jail. A man writes a script to get email address from a website and gets 3.5 years in jail. Something's not right.
You have a point in that "computer crimes" are often subject to penalties that are far overkill because the legal system has few people, both lawyers and judges, who understand technology well. However, the rape case got the verdict it did for a variety of reasons.
1) The young woman wasn't actually "raped" in terms of nobody put his penis inside her, but some idiot young men fingered her and photographed it.
2) She was so drunk that she had no idea what happened. It was the photos that made this even go to trial and provided evidence of a crime.
3) The witnesses disagreed on whether or not she was able to give consent to being fingered and photographed and it became a "Who's story do you believe?" kind of issue.
4) Those convicted were both juveniles and this played some role in the time of the sentence.
I really don't see how anybody can honestly believe "Company X accidentally gave me super secret information that they don't want me to have so it's OK if I send to other people who they don't want to have it because I did nothing in terms of hacking to get it". To met this isn't all that different from you seeing an overturned money truck and grabbing as much money as you can from the spill and expecting to be able to keep it. If those guys really were so naive that they thought they could email the passwords to others, well, maybe their sentences will serve as a warning to others.
This is one part of US law that I will always fail to understand. Their action caused harm and CISCO should be able to claim for those damages. I have counter sued twice in the UK when I had to go to court over things that should not have gone to court.
I'm American and my best friend is too and he is a lawyer. I have asked him about this sort of thing, so I can comment on it and offer a sort of American legal perspective, although again, I am not a lawyer myself.
Basically in US law it is possible for a sued party to go after the people who sued them if they win, but it's very difficult to prevail. See, judges and lawyers like our very broken system just fine as it is because it provides employment for them. Judges very rarely will award damages to a sued party after they win in court because doing so could discourage other lawsuits. No joke. The legal system argues that "innocent" parties will be afraid to sue if they can be held liable for costs if they lose anyway (which is your tactic admission by those in the legal system that verdicts are not always correct or fair) and that would discourage truly wronged people from trying to go to court in the first place. So in America, big companies like Cisco just write it off as part of the expense of doing business that some patent troll will take them to court.
Ridiculous headline title.
And a great example of Betteridge's law of headlines.
While there is some truth to this, I think it's actually more an issue of article submitters lacking reading comprehension.
Regulations designed to protect the incumbent status quo, rather than serving the needs of real users, is the kind of thing that has kept France out of the picture for innovation. France must import their innovation.
As someone who was a US based IT employee of a French company at one time, I totally agree with this. While in general my French colleagues were good people and I still have fond memories of them, the word "arrogance" doesn't begin to describe how they feel about everything. Honestly, you'd have thought they invented every computer technology there was from the way they acted in our company. And while they've got a plausible cover story about why they want to regulate Skype, I strongly suspect that in reality France Telecom complained about how Skype is sending calls "for free over our domestic network and costing us money" and this is the real reason for the sudden regulatory interest. The relationship between certain very large French businesses and the government is under the table and quite probably in violation of various EU laws, but that relationship exists nonetheless. This is just more evidence of it.
I wonder if the Troll knows they will probably have to pay all the defendents costs if they lose?
You don't live in the USA. Am I right?
That's how law works in the UK. My best friend is a lawyer (we're both Americans) and he's taught me a lot about how the law really works. One of the things he taught me is that it's incredibly difficult in the USA to get costs paid, even when the lawsuit is frivolous. The problem is that courts in general really don't like to award this kind of thing because all judges and lawyers feel that the system works pretty well, darn near close to perfect, as it is right now and anything that punishes people for bringing lawsuits and losing would "hurt the little man" who will be too afraid to pursue his justified lawsuit against some true injustice because he might lose and have to pay the other guy's court costs. So almost certainly this will not be a factor, although if the defendants are attorneys they might push for it anyway as they know the system well enough that it might give them a slightly better chance of getting it than would normally happen.
Who is voting for this guy? It must be a corner of WA where stupid is a virtue.
I think it's actually a combination of things.
1) I know a lot of people who are now Republican variations of what used to be called "yellow dog Democrats". What it means is that they hate the other party so much that they'll vote for anyone who is a candidate of the party they support, regardless of any other consideration.
2) Most Americans simply vote for the incumbent for Congress unless the guy commits a crime or engaged in some really egregious conduct.
3) I don't like to give a lot of personal details here, but my Congressional representative may possibly be the dumbest one in the entire House. However, the person who held the job before the current one was orders of magnitude worse, but for reasons other than stupidity. I live in a place where the only opponents seem to be Tea Party numbskulls, so as dumb as my Rep is, I see the alternatives as being much worse. My Rep is fairly benign and doesn't cause a lot of problems and that looks pretty good compared to the predecessor.
You're probably right about how much "good" it will do now that it has to get an official response. Khanna is hoping that 100,000 signatures will be enough to make someone say "You know, it is pretty stupid that this is now illegal". In reality, I suspect that the government will simply say "You can buy unlocked if you want unlocked. The fact that you don't like the price attached to it is not our concern because it is possible for you to buy unlocked. You might have a point if the law outlawed selling unlocked phones, but it doesn't and therefore you don't have a point."
the American and British pilots are reduced to one-way communication, from the Brits to the Yanks.
That's okay; if the grammar and vocabularly of today's 20 and 30 year old Americans are any indication, our boys need to just shut the fuck up and listen. :p
It's become clear to me from what I see on various internet forums, including Slashdot, that almost nobody under the age of 30 in any English speaking nation has an education worth having. So I wouldn't hold my breath that the Brits would be any better than Americans.
My previous job was working in a US office of a company owned by France Telecom. I had quite a bit of experience working with French colleagues both in the US and in France itself and I can tell you that our French workers were smart and conscientious. There are downsides to the French. They don't make friends easily with non-French people, they can't be fired, and there's a general aura of "We're better than everybody who's not French". If that guy buys a French factory, he'll never be able to get rid of anyone. But they weren't lazy. That's for sure. The French are better than Americans in general in not getting completely and utterly obsessed with work and some Americans resent that.
I remember a few years ago here on Slashdot the subject of "Just sue them for discrimination" came up and a real lawyer (yes, we have some) weighed in on the subject. He basically said that employment discrimination cases are almost impossible to win and he will almost never take them because of that. They basically get into a "he said, she said" kind of thing and that rarely results in an outcome favorable to the plaintiff. He said that when clients came to him wanting to sue their employer his advice was that they would be better off to just accept the job loss and find another job.
Your post seems to be a bunch of complaining on how your company seems completely and utterly powerless to do anything about stupid behavior by its employees. Just have your mail admins deny attachments on email. For example, if it comes from external sources, don't let attachments of any kind get through or only allow certain ones. This is rather trivial to fix. I have to wonder just how smart your "large tech company" is since they seem to have no clue on how to stop this sort of thing.
Your subject is correct, but your post itself is not.
Chinese Communist Party = Chinese state
The PLA works for the Chinese state and its actions are well known by the state leaders.
I think you made a really good post, but I disagree on a couple of items. We live in a "must... have... it... now!" society. I've learned that to some people, saving money or getting better is completely irrelevant if they can get it now over waiting a few days for it come by UPS, Fed Ex, etc. These people aren't going to buy online anyway and they're more numerous than you may think.
The other problem I have is with your taxes comment. Lots of Americans seem to equate paying taxes with flushing money in the toilet - paying for military equipment for wars they don't support, paying some government employee's salary to do nothing every day at work, and so on. Believe me, if you were to live in some kind of Libertarian utopia where you never paid taxes you'd wish the current system was back. Know those roads you drive in that hopefully don't have giant potholes in them? Your taxes paid for that. Know those police and fireman who come quickly when you call instead of making you give a credit card number first before they'll come to your house? Your taxes paid for that. Got kids? Well, if you use public schools, your money went to help educate your kids and your neighbor's kids.
Oddly, I have had experience in previous jobs with Profs, Notes and Citrix. My first job after college was working as a civilian employee of the US Department of Defense at a US military base as a computer programmer. We had Profs there, but its use was restricted to upper level military (maybe Lt. Col. and above) and high grade civilian employees. Yes, I'm sure it worked great - on the mainframe - but it was rather infamous for not being able to talk well at all to non-IBM mainframes. We kept it around because the general who ran our base loved it and refused to use any other mail program, so we kept it around merely to placate him. I kid you not - as soon as he retired, our Profs system was shut down permanently as his successor had no interest in using it. The upper military and civilian employees had to maintain two email accounts while that general who loved Profs was there - one just for Profs in case he sent them email or they needed to email him and one email account on our Unix mail server where everybody who wasn't the general preferred to send email.
My previous employer used Notes. Almost everybody in IT hated it when we switched to it. I will simply say what I said at the time - we picked Notes because non-technical managers could use it, not because it was any good.
The same previous employer also tangled with Citrix. I'll skip a long story that made us look bad with regard to Citrix and simply say that yes, it sucks. I've always felt that it was bought and used mostly by PHB types who don't know any other way to do things except the Windows way.
I can speak Russian rather well (not really good at Ukrainian though) and I've spent a decent amount of time in Ukraine and I have a few friends who live there. I can tell you that justice goes to the highest bidder there at the local level. If the US government wants to bribe a judge, they can get whatever verdict they want. Or if they can convince President Yanukovich that he'll get something back in exchange for sending an "evil pirate" to jail, then his office will just tell the judge what to do. However, if the US just expects the local justice system to act like it would in a western country and they don't bribe or tell the Pres what to do, then anyone facing charges can just bribe the judge himself and get off. It will be interesting to see the outcome, but whatever the verdict is, I have no doubts that it will be completely dishonest and someone will have bribed or cajoled their way into it.
It's just "Ukraine" not "the Ukraine." (Perhaps you're thinking of "the U.K.")
The rule is that when it was part of the Soviet Union and a specific region, it was OK to call it "The Ukraine" but since independence the country has been quite clear in its official documents, embassy names, etc. that in the English language it is now simply known as Ukraine. Rules for other languages such as French may be different.
I got into an argument once via email with a Ukrainian woman in Kiev who insisted that because some English grammar book written in the 1980s (she actually quoted me the page and relevant section) said that it was "The Ukraine" that apparently this meant that until the end of time the country is to be called The Ukraine in the English speaking world. I thought it was a really odd argument to make as most Ukrainians will insist on not using the "The" when referring to their country if they can speak English, but it just goes to show you how old habits die hard.
Here's the deal. They do have a "legitimate right" to launch satellites. However, all their "satellite" launches under the previous Kim's government were fairly transparent attempts to test ICBMs. UN sanctions do not give them the right to test ICBMs. So what they do is insist that they are launching satellites and use that as an ICBM test. They may have actually gotten a satellite into orbit on the most recent launch, a first for the country, but everybody knows that the real purpose is to test more powerful missiles.
In the late 1990s I had a job where I was a Unix system admin and our group needed to hire a replacement for the guy who left. The job required some marginal Unix/Linux user knowledge but most of the work would be repairing and building out PCs for our test group. Our PCs weren't the best and needed constant maintenance. The previous 2 guys who held the job were nuts. Guy number 1 was bipolar and told us on his first day of work that he was bipolar and that he saw no need to take medicine for it. It ended up being 6 months of hell where we basically had a guy who alternated between being a crybaby and Captain Angry All The Time. He left us to become some other company's problem, but we foolishly brought in his replacement before he left and had him train the new guy. Much to our surprise, he became BFFs with guy number 2 and he poisoned guy number 2 against our group. Guy number 2 basically had a permanent hostile attitude towards our group until he left us for another company. So we let guy number 2 leave before we ever started to look for his replacement because we were not going to repeat the previous mistake of letting a departing employee have a negative influence on his replacement.
We interviewed several people and we actually flew a guy in from another state who seemed promising for an interview. I don't remember exactly what it was, but we had some ongoing problem related to our PCs that neither of the 2 previous crazy guys could ever solve. So after we interviewed the guy, my manager brought him into his office and asked him about the problem. He got it fixed on the spot for us within 5 minutes. He was hired that day. His ability to fix that ongoing problem on the spot clinched it for him. He was a fantastic employee for us. So while I'm sure that maybe some sleazebag companies are just trying to get free help, trust me, you don't want to work for them anyway. Some companies may just be using it to test your abilities and if you can solve their problem, you'll get the job. I've seen it firsthand.
You've had some good answers. However, I want to point out that for the most part programming these days is all object oriented. This is a huge change from the procedural based programming you learned years ago. To give you an analogy, it's kind of like studying Russian 20 years ago and now being asked to study Mandarin. They're pretty different from each other. Basically nothing you did in the past will help you to learn OO programming. You will either get the concept or you won't. If you don't, you won't likely find any programming jobs unless you get really lucky and are able to do something that doesn't require OO. I've worked for two companies that have hired senior programmers around your age (including my current employer) and both companies were pleased with the hires. Basically if you can do the job, they'll hire you and being willing to work cheaper than others may actually be an advantage. But on the downside, a lot of programming has impossible deadlines. The programmers where I work now who sit somewhat close to me are really tired because they are working on a fairly new product we are selling and it's got aggressive deadlines. As an older guy, you may find the constant demand for 50-60 hours a week of work to be too much. One programmer told me somewhat recently that he has to work every Saturday too and he feels lucky if he gets a Sunday off - sometimes he doesn't.
Current? Here's the constitutional amendment Rand proposed: "Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of production and trade. . ."
That means no safety regulations, no minimum wage, no antitrust legislation, no public roads, and no regulations on the financial markets. It means that if I sell you a product that is poisonous and it debilitates you for the rest of your life, you can sue me in civil court and that's the solution to keep things like lead paint off of products (and, of course, if you're too poor to sue me in civil court you're a worthless fuck who deserves lead poisoning; i.e., all low income housing would be painted with lead paint).
So true. My first exposure to libertarianism was back in the mid-1990s when I had a friend at work who was a developer and a hard core libertarian. I used to ask him questions and this is basically what he believed.
1) The government would have a military that it would use only to defend the US from foreign attack. But just about everything else in the government would be gone. Whatever was left of government, it would likely be maybe 10% or even less of its current size.
2) Since the government will be weak and basically doing very little other than making sure the military stayed functional, everything had to be settled in the courts. If someone sells you ice cream and it's poison and you die, you file a lawsuit. To him, this seemed perfectly reasonable and a logical way to handle things because the "bad" people under libertarianism will go out of business due to the negative publicity of the lawsuits and stop killing people that way. So libertarians are not telling you that their system requires a massive expansion of courts and lawyers. Does that seem rational? To me it doesn't, but it sure did to him.
3) I quickly realized something that all libertarians seem to fail to get - all it takes is one guy to not play by the rules and game the system and everything comes crashing down like a house of cards. It's exactly like RazorSharp said - it's a utopian paradise and it fails when one guy breaks the rules. I've told people that communism makes a lot more sense than libertarianism does. That is because to 99% of "libertarian" Americans, libertarianism means essentially "I don't have to pay any more taxes and Uncle Sam can't tell me what to do". There's no deeper thought than that about the political philosophy they espouse and how it would work in reality.
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The problem is that this cannibalizes Windows to an extent that I don't Redmond is prepared to accept. They could just simply offer a cheapish tablet with features like this without it necessarily being a direct threat to Windows.
Somewhere along the line, it must be technically possible to identify that the number isn't coming from where it claims to be.
I second this. Interestingly, I got a robocall today on my cell phone. Every month or two, I keep getting a call during the daytime offering me a fantastic deal on some sort of cruise they claim I have won. I have looked into it and the callers are rather infamous but what they do is they change their number every time they call. So it does no good to file a report (I have actually done this before) as the number you report is something they'll never use again and probably never really had to begin with. I began to see the problems with this in the 1990s when some free PBX software package for Linux started getting popular and one of its features was it enabled you to use any number you wanted as your identifying phone number.
1) I understand your argument, but I sure wouldn't want to be the one rolling the dice in a US court to see if a court would find it legal or not. Lots of developed countries have the idea that their laws apply everywhere in the world. .... JUST ... DON'T ... CARE. Most Americans don't travel outside of North America, so there's just not a lot of interest in unlocked phones. Some Americans do care a lot, but most don't. In fact, my unlocked phone is powered off and in storage. My main mobile phone (or "cell phone" as we Americans say) is an iPhone and my work requires it to be unjailbroken, so I can't unlock it. They pay the bills for it, so I have to live by their rules. The next time I travel overseas, I'll just take my unlocked phone with me. I doubt that putting unlocking businesses right across the border would be very lucrative. I'm not sure about this, but I'm under the impression that the Canadian market is pretty much just like the American one and subsidized locked phones are the way everybody goes.
2) I have an unlocked phone (I bought it unlocked some years ago) but the fact is that most Americans
Why is colinneagle so important that Adobe was willing to dig up 17 year old software for him to help out on something that is impractical and only has a "Gee whiz" factor going for it? I'm hardly an Adobe expert, but my limited experience is that like any normal software vendor they are trying to get people on the latest and greatest, not make stuff from 17 years ago still work. I guess it's fantastic for him that this works, but given how hard it would be for John Q. Public to find Windows 3.1 and probably also to find an ancient copy of Photoshop, this is starting to sound like a bit of a taunt on how he was able to do something that almost nobody else will be able to do.