Why don't I vote anymore? I don't have much real choice when I look at what's being offered. Propositions that are either "Yes" or "No" are an exception to this statement. Reelection of judges (again, sort of a "Yes" or "No" option) are not quite as comprehensive - it isn't clear what a preponderance of "No" votes entails.
As for voting that gives me a choice of "Candidate A" versus "Candidate B," the "choice" I'm offered is, in a realpolitik sense, no choice at all. Until I have the option of a "Neither" vote that has real consequences (for example, the office remains vacant and neither candidate is permitted to run again until the office is filled by a "Not-A and Not-B" person) then all such selections are meaningless. They provide no incentive for any party to get its act together and actually respond to the wishes of the people, because we in the U.S. don't have a Constitutional fall-through to deal with the very realistic cases of unacceptably low voter turnout or its vocal equivalent, the extreme no-confidence vote. I don't think the current state of the election process is what the Founding Fathers had in mind when they set about establishing the Republic. And I reject the assertion that this mess is what the soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen of the past and present fought and died for. Instead it is the living that have so spitefully and wantonly degraded our political process to the place it find itself today. Fans of Heinlein's book Starship Troopers, can I get an Amen?
So, you can say period, end of story all you want. Until I am offered a full frame of discernment (those of you who have studied Dempster-Shafer Theory, or evidential reasoning, will know what I'm talking about) on my ballot, I won't come back. Let the stupid and the smart fight it out with hot dogs and doughnuts, because that's all that's available under the current system. I'll still get fed the same junk anyway and I can ignore the entire process, saving myself from no end of aggravation and disgust along the way. At least I don't have to feel like I actually affirmed the grand vision of some corrupt greedy dingbat degenerate when all I really wanted was to prevent an even more corrupt greedy dingbat degenerate from holding the same office.
In summary: a choice for the evil of two (or more) lessers (I jumbled your statement intentionally, I like my version better) is no choice at all. I shall abstain ad infinitum until I can effect change by voting "No Confidence" across the board. Go ahead, mod me bitter...
I am a US citizen working in the defense industry. The work I do requires that I provide a large amount of very personal information to the US DoD. They ask for and get the names of family members, friends, past coworkers, etc. as well as sworn testimony regarding any criminal activity, chemical dependency, and on and on.
It is reasonable to believe that many people would be unwilling to provide this scope of personal information to a government agency just to be employed. That said, there are some very seriously protected rights that every submitter of such information is entitled to as a citizen, with the US government liable for any unauthorized use of the sensitive information it requests and obtains in these sorts of background investigations.
Now consider the following creepy factors in play with HP's investigation:
1. Targets were not informed that they could be investigated prior to or during the events that led to the "pretext" investigation.
2. Outside personnel (a law firm and some unscrupulous PIs) were given the personal information of HP's own employees and journalists not employed by HP as well as the personal information for said journalists' family members!
3. All of this was motivated by a corporate information leak. No government secrets were involved, and the assertion that a competitive advantage was compromised (I am assuming such an assertion was made by Frau Patricia even though those exact words were not used) has, to date, not been proven.
4. We're already more than a few days along with this story and I haven't heard even one executive of another large firm defend any of the behavior of HP's board members or their soon-to-be co-defendants in this matter. Although the "pretexting" approach is not something pioneered by HP's clown college, they just seem like the largest name yet asociated with such an attack.
5. Hello, you run a major technology corporation with millions of customers and tens of millions of potential customers watching this entire story unfold. Think information security and privacy issues aren't a hot topic yet? Now they are!
6. Oh yeah, and your own employees are watching, too.
I could go on. Others here will make more and better observations than I.
I think it is my obligation as a US citizen and a technical professional (read: today's equivalent of a production-line blue-collar worker of the 60s and 70s) to express my abhorrence of HP's behavior in this matter and of the "pretexting" tactic that was used to invade the privacy of US citizens (and maybe some non-citizens too for that matter), all within the borders of the United States. I think any assertion on HP's part that this was justified is disgusting and wrong. Heads absolutely should roll and they should start from the very top.
I can't help wondering if the increasingly strident attitudes regarding the surreptitious gathering of citizens' personal information that are expressed by many people and agencies of the state and federal governments of the US has started to leach into the corporate mindset. Not that I thought that they were honest and fair before... just that they weren't so brazenly foolish as to risk discovery of illegal behavior sanctioned by highly placed management and their well-heeled legal advisors.
Needless to say, I will never work for HP, not after this. How the mighty have fallen. HP used to be one of my top future career destinations, based on their technical aptitude and their culture of innovation and excellence. That all must be long gone by now.
And I will definitely ask any future employer about their policies in this regard. At least I know where I stand with the DoD and my rights. These corporate goons, on the other hand, are making things up as they go. Bad... in the end the only ones who will win are the lawyers and raider traders.
Norm Augustine published a law relating the behavior of software to the rest of the physical universe. Quoting his most excellent book:
Augustine's Law XVII, the Law of the Piranha, has its origin in the fact that many contractors are devotees of the "Big Bang" Theory of Software Development, a policy which eats money by the bushel. For its explanation it borrows a concept from high-school physics known as "entropy":
Software is like entropy. It is difficult to grasp, weighs nothing, and obeys the Second Law of Thermodynamics; i.e., it always increases.
The contractors Augustine refers to are aerospace/defense contractors, though the Law of the Piranha applies universally to software development projects without regard to their nation of origin, market sector, or profit motive. Norm Augustine was the Chairman and CEO of Lockheed Martin Corporation for many years. He also served as the Chairman of the National Academy of Engineering. He earned his Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees in Engineering from Princeton University.
Agreed, the default Mac OS X account setup is aimed at a person who wants to get online, load their iPod with music, play with some photos, dash off a quick memo in Word, etc. And since Apple markets machines that are easy and intuitive, especially for regular folks and computer neophytes, this is understandable.
Since the underlying system tools and configuration mechanisms are *nix-like, a security-conscious administrator or user can harden their system much the same way any other *nix admin would do. There are some interesting differences between OS X and other *nixen; it is vital to know and understand these differences.
I like the book Mac OS X Security, by Bruce Potter, Preston Norvell and Brian Wotring. Published in 2003 it is a bit out of date w/r/t/ Tiger, but the majority of the material is still current and will remain so for years. In fact much of the information is also useful to other *nix systems. It covers issues from system installation to application security (often overlooked by users and by other security how-tos) to network security to after-the-fact forensics. All together it is a very good treatment on security for Mac OS X and I use it often as I set up or tweak my Macs.
I don't work for the publisher or any of the authors, but I use the book pretty regularly as a resource.
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Why don't I vote anymore? I don't have much real choice when I look at what's being offered. Propositions that are either "Yes" or "No" are an exception to this statement. Reelection of judges (again, sort of a "Yes" or "No" option) are not quite as comprehensive - it isn't clear what a preponderance of "No" votes entails.
As for voting that gives me a choice of "Candidate A" versus "Candidate B," the "choice" I'm offered is, in a realpolitik sense, no choice at all. Until I have the option of a "Neither" vote that has real consequences (for example, the office remains vacant and neither candidate is permitted to run again until the office is filled by a "Not-A and Not-B" person) then all such selections are meaningless. They provide no incentive for any party to get its act together and actually respond to the wishes of the people, because we in the U.S. don't have a Constitutional fall-through to deal with the very realistic cases of unacceptably low voter turnout or its vocal equivalent, the extreme no-confidence vote. I don't think the current state of the election process is what the Founding Fathers had in mind when they set about establishing the Republic. And I reject the assertion that this mess is what the soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen of the past and present fought and died for. Instead it is the living that have so spitefully and wantonly degraded our political process to the place it find itself today. Fans of Heinlein's book Starship Troopers, can I get an Amen?
So, you can say period, end of story all you want. Until I am offered a full frame of discernment (those of you who have studied Dempster-Shafer Theory, or evidential reasoning, will know what I'm talking about) on my ballot, I won't come back. Let the stupid and the smart fight it out with hot dogs and doughnuts, because that's all that's available under the current system. I'll still get fed the same junk anyway and I can ignore the entire process, saving myself from no end of aggravation and disgust along the way. At least I don't have to feel like I actually affirmed the grand vision of some corrupt greedy dingbat degenerate when all I really wanted was to prevent an even more corrupt greedy dingbat degenerate from holding the same office.
In summary: a choice for the evil of two (or more) lessers (I jumbled your statement intentionally, I like my version better) is no choice at all. I shall abstain ad infinitum until I can effect change by voting "No Confidence" across the board. Go ahead, mod me bitter...
It is reasonable to believe that many people would be unwilling to provide this scope of personal information to a government agency just to be employed. That said, there are some very seriously protected rights that every submitter of such information is entitled to as a citizen, with the US government liable for any unauthorized use of the sensitive information it requests and obtains in these sorts of background investigations.
Now consider the following creepy factors in play with HP's investigation:
1. Targets were not informed that they could be investigated prior to or during the events that led to the "pretext" investigation.
2. Outside personnel (a law firm and some unscrupulous PIs) were given the personal information of HP's own employees and journalists not employed by HP as well as the personal information for said journalists' family members!
3. All of this was motivated by a corporate information leak. No government secrets were involved, and the assertion that a competitive advantage was compromised (I am assuming such an assertion was made by Frau Patricia even though those exact words were not used) has, to date, not been proven.
4. We're already more than a few days along with this story and I haven't heard even one executive of another large firm defend any of the behavior of HP's board members or their soon-to-be co-defendants in this matter. Although the "pretexting" approach is not something pioneered by HP's clown college, they just seem like the largest name yet asociated with such an attack.
5. Hello, you run a major technology corporation with millions of customers and tens of millions of potential customers watching this entire story unfold. Think information security and privacy issues aren't a hot topic yet? Now they are!
6. Oh yeah, and your own employees are watching, too.
I could go on. Others here will make more and better observations than I.
I think it is my obligation as a US citizen and a technical professional (read: today's equivalent of a production-line blue-collar worker of the 60s and 70s) to express my abhorrence of HP's behavior in this matter and of the "pretexting" tactic that was used to invade the privacy of US citizens (and maybe some non-citizens too for that matter), all within the borders of the United States. I think any assertion on HP's part that this was justified is disgusting and wrong. Heads absolutely should roll and they should start from the very top.
I can't help wondering if the increasingly strident attitudes regarding the surreptitious gathering of citizens' personal information that are expressed by many people and agencies of the state and federal governments of the US has started to leach into the corporate mindset. Not that I thought that they were honest and fair before... just that they weren't so brazenly foolish as to risk discovery of illegal behavior sanctioned by highly placed management and their well-heeled legal advisors.
Needless to say, I will never work for HP, not after this. How the mighty have fallen. HP used to be one of my top future career destinations, based on their technical aptitude and their culture of innovation and excellence. That all must be long gone by now.
And I will definitely ask any future employer about their policies in this regard. At least I know where I stand with the DoD and my rights. These corporate goons, on the other hand, are making things up as they go. Bad... in the end the only ones who will win are the lawyers and raider traders.
Norm Augustine published a law relating the behavior of software to the rest of the physical universe. Quoting his most excellent book:
The contractors Augustine refers to are aerospace/defense contractors, though the Law of the Piranha applies universally to software development projects without regard to their nation of origin, market sector, or profit motive. Norm Augustine was the Chairman and CEO of Lockheed Martin Corporation for many years. He also served as the Chairman of the National Academy of Engineering. He earned his Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees in Engineering from Princeton University.
Agreed, the default Mac OS X account setup is aimed at a person who wants to get online, load their iPod with music, play with some photos, dash off a quick memo in Word, etc. And since Apple markets machines that are easy and intuitive, especially for regular folks and computer neophytes, this is understandable. Since the underlying system tools and configuration mechanisms are *nix-like, a security-conscious administrator or user can harden their system much the same way any other *nix admin would do. There are some interesting differences between OS X and other *nixen; it is vital to know and understand these differences. I like the book Mac OS X Security, by Bruce Potter, Preston Norvell and Brian Wotring. Published in 2003 it is a bit out of date w/r/t/ Tiger, but the majority of the material is still current and will remain so for years. In fact much of the information is also useful to other *nix systems. It covers issues from system installation to application security (often overlooked by users and by other security how-tos) to network security to after-the-fact forensics. All together it is a very good treatment on security for Mac OS X and I use it often as I set up or tweak my Macs. I don't work for the publisher or any of the authors, but I use the book pretty regularly as a resource.