It's true, a requirement for obtaining a high-level position in IT for a state govt. seems to be incompetence.
This was fun to watch unfold, first-hand. All of the systems designed and implemented by Accenture for the Colorado State Government were faulty. Every single one. Yet they kept getting contracts. No one even bothered to Google the company, they just bid low, said they could do it, and no one checked up on 'em until the systems started breaking. And I don't mean breaking like a small problem here, small problem there...the Dept. of Revenue computers (Dept. of A, T & F computers, DMV computers, tax computers, unemployment benefit computers, dept. of labor computers) would shut down and wouldn't fully come back on and be ready to use for a day or two at a time once or twice a month. Servers and workstations, just shutting down all over the place, for no discernible (at least by someone like me) reason. The computers in my office would shut down and I'd check cables 'n stuff and then call the IT dept. (the phone system is and always has been ok, at least) and you could feel the rage and shame oozing through the phone when the guy would say he didn't know what was wrong...the computer systems from Accenture came without usable documentation and without support agreements. Then I'd just tell everyone that we were getting another paid two-day break (union). Good times.
How much Fear Uncertainty, Confusion, Extortion, and Doubt will be needed to maintain the revenue growth? (Someone please give me a good K-word to make a good acronym to upgrade FUD).
I haven't been able to board airplanes since 2005. I was born in Denver, lived here all my life except for two years when I lived in Seattle, '00-'02. I'm of Swedish, Irish and German descent. I've flown to Europe a couple of times, but only to places like England, Italy and France. I used to fly a LOT for work, now I drive or take trains. Being put on some shitty little list has been one of the best things that's happened to me. I get to see things I'd never see while flying and I get to experience different local flavors that I surely would've missed out on in the past. I've never been told exactly why I can't get on a plane, but it can't be my appearance, I'm 6'4" with blue eyes and blonde hair. I look as Aryan as anyone can. I've never been a member of any political organization that would like to see the current government overthrown (not counting being a member of the general populace) and I've never been convicted of a felony. If the airlines are happy with participating in keeping away the tens of thousands of dollars I used to spend on flying every year, that's ok with me, fuck them and the tax money they generate. I don't know what I'm trying to say here except that I hope the flight industry dies. Let's get some fuckin' bullet-trains built. France has one.
I have a 15-year-old cousin, when he was 10 he removed the password protection of "blocked" channels on his families cable boxes. When he was 12 he circumvented all of the internet kid-protection software my uncle put on his computer, he'd just log in as the admin and remove it, my uncle didn't even know what an admin account was or what it was for or how to log in to it. Go ahead FCC, waste more money and time on parental-supervision-replacement technology. I can see it now, real-life Rosies that chase the kids around, deleting porn and changing channels. I'm sure the little jerk will see it as a fantastically fun challenge to get around a new V-chip so he can download porn on his cell phone in school. In the meantime, my aunt and uncle will continue to scream from the mountaintop that they're wonderful parents, they pay attention, they do their jobs...I wonder what they'd say if they knew my cousin once made dynamite in their half-million dollar home, or what they'd do if they ever found out that he grew a bunch of pot plants on their property last year. So, todays-parents-suck-at-being-parents-posts +1.
I deposit money into my sisters BoA account regularly at the drive-through. I just drive up with an account number and a deposit slip. Have a nice day...what REALLY bothers me is the fact that I'm 6'3" and hairy and they still give me suckers.
I find that I'm both infinitely entertained as well as disturbed at the same time by the fact that motherfucking American citizens are under the thumb of an organization that includes goddamned Björk in its ranks. I put a call out to all right-wing-left-wing-any-wing, paranoid, well-stocked, heavily armed and crafty men from the hills of Montana, lay not down your arms, nay, lift them up with a cry to your God that the shot should meet its target with all swiftness and accuracy and deliver us from this unjust evil. It's time to fight for your country.
Hahahahahahaha.
Seriously, I hope you're out of that business. As a former military ELINT/COMINT techie with a lot of friends in that community along with a number of relatives in local law enforcement you personally would have suffered. I wouldn't have pushed the envelope as much as my father, but he was an EOD jarhead and I will honestly say he'd have dropped you on the spot (the old man is greased lightning with ye olde 1911) if you'd have approached him as he was picking me and my brother up from school, bedamned the jail time. He would have been quite a bit more civil if you'd have caught him alone or on the job though.
Then again, my family isn't exactly well off, so if somebody's going to repo an '02 Camry I don't think they're going to go to that extent.;)
Well, I would hope that any member of a military family wouldn't warrant the attention of the company I used to work for. I worked for the company for a mere three years and we had as many ex-military debtors during my time there. If, however, we had to go after someone who was ex-military, that was of course taken into consideration and we'd plan accordingly. The bordering-on-menacing shit was a last resort for the most evasive of debtors, it was for guys who owed hundreds of thousands of dollars to numerous lenders and various companies or private parties. Probably 70% of those people were shady construction contractors and had never been in the military. For those guys, 5 or 6 of us operated with company-issued vests, tazers and S&W 1911s. The two owners of the company were decorated and honorable ex-military, one USMC (tattooed across the back of his head), the other an ex-Ranger; we didn't WANT to fuck with ex-military. And the thing is, if we were going to go after someone for an '02 Camry, it wouldn't be because of one Camry, it'd be for 10 of them and maybe a Dodge truck or six, nahda mean?
I had the opportunity to work for such an outfit. Our jobs were given to us mostly by private parties, but sometimes we'd get something from an all-on-paper debt collection agency if the debt was large enough (>$50,000). There were a lot of little rules involved (being armed was a requirement, as was having extensive and professional (military service or training from ex-military) weapons training, certain licensing, repeated filing of planned actions with the courts system, surveillance and legal training, blah blah blah), but we were pretty much allowed to enter private property and go and rip garage doors off of houses (fun), break down front doors (fun), take peoples kids' property (mostly electronics and crappy Hondas, not so fun), and we were even somewhat allowed to menace (really not fun); It was, at the time, fully within the bounds of the law to go have chats with people just as they were picking their children up from school. Although I don't like using the term for such a business, we were one of your more professional firms. We'd get the names, addresses, places of business, school names and locations and recreational habits of all debtors involved, as well as that of their immediate and extended families on both sides of a marriage and any and all business partners. We performed surveillance operations for a week or two, or sometimes up to a few months if the jerk was sneaky, and performed detailed analyses of the persons activities and that of their family members and co-workers. One single case would often yield several thousand separate documents, hundreds and hundreds of MBs of pictures and gigs of video. Now to the point; a heavily-utilized research tool was Google. People are very very lax with the information they're willing to put on the Internet. I think a lot of people figure there's risk in putting information on the Internet only if you're a little kid. Not so, not so at ALL. Be VERY careful with what you let anonymous nerds know about you, you never know when one of the crazier ones will take an unhealthy interest in you, you never know when ol' Jeff might wanna show up at 2 AM to take your shit or, as in this case, smash you in the face with a stick. It's not so bad to be a little paranoid on the web. Even I, myself, am lax about what I put on the Internet...but, then again, I don't owe anyone anything, nor do I engage in silly text-fights with crazy fucks in Islamic Yahoo chat rooms.
You've gotta be fuckin' kidding me. Schoolyard piracy? Really? If a lawyer ever tried to sue my son or daughter for "schoolyard piracy," first I'd slap a "Jab-me-in-the-asshole-with-a-cow-prod" sign on his back before court proceedings began, and I'd bring an ass-load of counter-suits against him personally, the organization he worked for, whoever the artist was whose music got copied...and then I'd sue that lawyers dad for unleashing such a dickhead upon my society. I realize that I wouldn't win a fuckin' one, but I have 13 (soon to be 16, go NYU) Jewish lawyers in the family, I could at the very least waste a lot of their time and money, and send one of their lawyers packing home with a severe asshole wound. As for my time and money, my whole life I've worked towards the goal of not ever having to do anything anymore. And my family works for family pro-bono. So c'mon all of you RIAA lawyers, sue my kids, let's get this rolling. You trot out the paper, I'll bring the cow-prod, whaddaya say? The new Family vs. the old Family. Let's do this.
I need to make sure I drink more coffee before reading shit like this...
I know this will sound like a stupid "If you've got nothing to hide...", but really, if there weren't anything hidden out there, and AOL could be made sure to fix any damage the do (grass, trees, etc).. why would you fight this? Wouldn't it simply be AMUSING to watch them flail blindly?
you are obviously NOT a homeowner. i spend a decent amount of money and time on making the yard around my house look nice. if i woke up one morning and saw a bunch of dickheads running around in my back yard wearing tri-tip hats with the aol logo on them, i'd have to turn the hose on them and knock those silly hats off and tell them to get the fuck out of here or i'd call their parents. of course, if they'd be willing to put down a 30,000 dollar deposit BEFOREHAND, i'd say go for it, pirate-ships for life...but for some reason, i don't think aol would offer to do anything like that.
I thought there may have been some opinion-changing information in the full article...but after reading it, I think I understand why people do drugs, now.
This is a broad topic, for whatever points or pieces of it I miss, I apologize, I'm busy. There are two types of people when it comes to drug use, non-addicts and addicts or, as they're more commonly known, those who can handle drugs and those who can't. I believe what defines an addict is someone who continues to do something in the face of consequences. When a kid gets caught smoking pot by his parents and they take everything out of his room and ground him for two months but he still keeps smoking pot, he's quite on his way to being an addict. Your non-addicts are the people who might drink a beer or two at a barbecue or on the 4th, and I'm not saying that anyone drinks more often than that is an addict, I'm just using myself as an example; having some beers doesn't get me in trouble, if it did I'd stop. Most of the time the people who become addicts are just looking for a way to regulate feelings. Maybe some budget shifting should take place to ease up on putting people in jail and focus a little more on treating them and showing them better ways, be it therapy or pills or both, to regulate what's going on inside their heads. I realize that there're a ton of problems inherent in doing something like that. For instance, these people aren't going to get better unless they want to, which is a real bitch of a problem...but how often does jail cure someone? What's the effect on society and the final cost to the taxpayer when that junkie who spent 4 years in jail (and got high on whatever while he was in there) gets out and still doesn't know how to do anything but try to get fucked up? Either option could seem very grim, but why not opt for the path with a potentially more positive end? Oh and PS, most of this doesn't apply to violent offenders. We shouldn't have to put up with that. If violence is involved in a drug-users crimes, fuck 'em, shoot 'em out of a circus cannon into a brick wall.
Hahahahaha. What, am I about to get hacked with a 100-dollar hand-crank laptop? Thanks DHS, but the record shows that I seem to be much more adept at computer security than the DHS...and I get high. Regularly.
i dunno about where you live, but in my state (CO) community (there're pretty strict rules here that define what a community is and where its borders are, ask a cop if you have anything like that going on where you live) rule usually goes. if some old duffer was doing stuff like this, all we'd have to do is get the neighbors together, have everyone sign a letter to the city, send it to the police chief and the the mayor, or present it at a city council meeting. then the dude would be presented with a few options by a police officer, those options being the guy takes the mosquito-noisemaker down or the cop does. of course, all of these actions could be preempted by a well-aimed (and frozen, if you're dealing with a metal target) potato gun round.
this is retarded. you're gonna push a format that isn't supported by most standalone CD players in existence? so, i go and buy the new atreyu audio dvd, right, then i take it home. shit, can't put it in the stereo inthe living room. guess i'll hafta put it in my computer...and rip it. and put everything on my ipod so i can listen to it in the living room. i'm fucking confused, do they or do they not want us to copy music?
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. an ad-supported OS, huh? windows xp isn't ad-supported and i didn't pay for it. can you IMAGINE the whole vast slew of problems this would cause? "man, the bigass at at the top of IE9 installed something that yells at me about having a tiny, limp penis and being poor and un-refinanced about every 8 minutes."
I'm about 6-8 months from getting 2 bachelors degrees from CU (go-go-gadget-concurrency). Even before I started college my uncle took some inheritance and invested it in gold, for me. That paid off a quarter of my total loans (~6%, btw). It's already been stated, but it's just as true now as it was 20 posts ago; commodities, commodities, commodities...but if you absolutely, positively MUST get into the stock market right now, consider defense contractors or pharmaceutical companies, maybe even a foreign auto-maker like Toyota.
i recently got rid of my cell phone. that was the best decision i've ever made. stress is down, time spent on the back porch drinking iced tea is up, income stays the same. go ahead and have a mobile world, i'll be on the a porch passed out naked.
Slashdot Mirror
It's true, a requirement for obtaining a high-level position in IT for a state govt. seems to be incompetence.
This was fun to watch unfold, first-hand. All of the systems designed and implemented by Accenture for the Colorado State Government were faulty. Every single one. Yet they kept getting contracts. No one even bothered to Google the company, they just bid low, said they could do it, and no one checked up on 'em until the systems started breaking. And I don't mean breaking like a small problem here, small problem there...the Dept. of Revenue computers (Dept. of A, T & F computers, DMV computers, tax computers, unemployment benefit computers, dept. of labor computers) would shut down and wouldn't fully come back on and be ready to use for a day or two at a time once or twice a month. Servers and workstations, just shutting down all over the place, for no discernible (at least by someone like me) reason. The computers in my office would shut down and I'd check cables 'n stuff and then call the IT dept. (the phone system is and always has been ok, at least) and you could feel the rage and shame oozing through the phone when the guy would say he didn't know what was wrong...the computer systems from Accenture came without usable documentation and without support agreements. Then I'd just tell everyone that we were getting another paid two-day break (union). Good times.
I wonder if anyone in the house or senate is at all uneasy or even concerned about the American public running out of options...
they used pure pity to move him, that's why he has so much of it for so many people.
appearance is part of the profile
I haven't been able to board airplanes since 2005. I was born in Denver, lived here all my life except for two years when I lived in Seattle, '00-'02. I'm of Swedish, Irish and German descent. I've flown to Europe a couple of times, but only to places like England, Italy and France. I used to fly a LOT for work, now I drive or take trains. Being put on some shitty little list has been one of the best things that's happened to me. I get to see things I'd never see while flying and I get to experience different local flavors that I surely would've missed out on in the past. I've never been told exactly why I can't get on a plane, but it can't be my appearance, I'm 6'4" with blue eyes and blonde hair. I look as Aryan as anyone can. I've never been a member of any political organization that would like to see the current government overthrown (not counting being a member of the general populace) and I've never been convicted of a felony. If the airlines are happy with participating in keeping away the tens of thousands of dollars I used to spend on flying every year, that's ok with me, fuck them and the tax money they generate. I don't know what I'm trying to say here except that I hope the flight industry dies. Let's get some fuckin' bullet-trains built. France has one.
I have a 15-year-old cousin, when he was 10 he removed the password protection of "blocked" channels on his families cable boxes. When he was 12 he circumvented all of the internet kid-protection software my uncle put on his computer, he'd just log in as the admin and remove it, my uncle didn't even know what an admin account was or what it was for or how to log in to it. Go ahead FCC, waste more money and time on parental-supervision-replacement technology. I can see it now, real-life Rosies that chase the kids around, deleting porn and changing channels. I'm sure the little jerk will see it as a fantastically fun challenge to get around a new V-chip so he can download porn on his cell phone in school. In the meantime, my aunt and uncle will continue to scream from the mountaintop that they're wonderful parents, they pay attention, they do their jobs...I wonder what they'd say if they knew my cousin once made dynamite in their half-million dollar home, or what they'd do if they ever found out that he grew a bunch of pot plants on their property last year. So, todays-parents-suck-at-being-parents-posts +1.
sieg heil
I deposit money into my sisters BoA account regularly at the drive-through. I just drive up with an account number and a deposit slip. Have a nice day...what REALLY bothers me is the fact that I'm 6'3" and hairy and they still give me suckers.
Well, I would hope that any member of a military family wouldn't warrant the attention of the company I used to work for. I worked for the company for a mere three years and we had as many ex-military debtors during my time there. If, however, we had to go after someone who was ex-military, that was of course taken into consideration and we'd plan accordingly. The bordering-on-menacing shit was a last resort for the most evasive of debtors, it was for guys who owed hundreds of thousands of dollars to numerous lenders and various companies or private parties. Probably 70% of those people were shady construction contractors and had never been in the military. For those guys, 5 or 6 of us operated with company-issued vests, tazers and S&W 1911s. The two owners of the company were decorated and honorable ex-military, one USMC (tattooed across the back of his head), the other an ex-Ranger; we didn't WANT to fuck with ex-military. And the thing is, if we were going to go after someone for an '02 Camry, it wouldn't be because of one Camry, it'd be for 10 of them and maybe a Dodge truck or six, nahda mean?
I had the opportunity to work for such an outfit. Our jobs were given to us mostly by private parties, but sometimes we'd get something from an all-on-paper debt collection agency if the debt was large enough (>$50,000). There were a lot of little rules involved (being armed was a requirement, as was having extensive and professional (military service or training from ex-military) weapons training, certain licensing, repeated filing of planned actions with the courts system, surveillance and legal training, blah blah blah), but we were pretty much allowed to enter private property and go and rip garage doors off of houses (fun), break down front doors (fun), take peoples kids' property (mostly electronics and crappy Hondas, not so fun), and we were even somewhat allowed to menace (really not fun); It was, at the time, fully within the bounds of the law to go have chats with people just as they were picking their children up from school. Although I don't like using the term for such a business, we were one of your more professional firms. We'd get the names, addresses, places of business, school names and locations and recreational habits of all debtors involved, as well as that of their immediate and extended families on both sides of a marriage and any and all business partners. We performed surveillance operations for a week or two, or sometimes up to a few months if the jerk was sneaky, and performed detailed analyses of the persons activities and that of their family members and co-workers. One single case would often yield several thousand separate documents, hundreds and hundreds of MBs of pictures and gigs of video. Now to the point; a heavily-utilized research tool was Google. People are very very lax with the information they're willing to put on the Internet. I think a lot of people figure there's risk in putting information on the Internet only if you're a little kid. Not so, not so at ALL. Be VERY careful with what you let anonymous nerds know about you, you never know when one of the crazier ones will take an unhealthy interest in you, you never know when ol' Jeff might wanna show up at 2 AM to take your shit or, as in this case, smash you in the face with a stick. It's not so bad to be a little paranoid on the web. Even I, myself, am lax about what I put on the Internet...but, then again, I don't owe anyone anything, nor do I engage in silly text-fights with crazy fucks in Islamic Yahoo chat rooms.
You've gotta be fuckin' kidding me. Schoolyard piracy? Really? If a lawyer ever tried to sue my son or daughter for "schoolyard piracy," first I'd slap a "Jab-me-in-the-asshole-with-a-cow-prod" sign on his back before court proceedings began, and I'd bring an ass-load of counter-suits against him personally, the organization he worked for, whoever the artist was whose music got copied...and then I'd sue that lawyers dad for unleashing such a dickhead upon my society. I realize that I wouldn't win a fuckin' one, but I have 13 (soon to be 16, go NYU) Jewish lawyers in the family, I could at the very least waste a lot of their time and money, and send one of their lawyers packing home with a severe asshole wound. As for my time and money, my whole life I've worked towards the goal of not ever having to do anything anymore. And my family works for family pro-bono. So c'mon all of you RIAA lawyers, sue my kids, let's get this rolling. You trot out the paper, I'll bring the cow-prod, whaddaya say? The new Family vs. the old Family. Let's do this.
I need to make sure I drink more coffee before reading shit like this...
you are obviously NOT a homeowner. i spend a decent amount of money and time on making the yard around my house look nice. if i woke up one morning and saw a bunch of dickheads running around in my back yard wearing tri-tip hats with the aol logo on them, i'd have to turn the hose on them and knock those silly hats off and tell them to get the fuck out of here or i'd call their parents. of course, if they'd be willing to put down a 30,000 dollar deposit BEFOREHAND, i'd say go for it, pirate-ships for life...but for some reason, i don't think aol would offer to do anything like that.
I thought there may have been some opinion-changing information in the full article...but after reading it, I think I understand why people do drugs, now.
This is a broad topic, for whatever points or pieces of it I miss, I apologize, I'm busy. There are two types of people when it comes to drug use, non-addicts and addicts or, as they're more commonly known, those who can handle drugs and those who can't. I believe what defines an addict is someone who continues to do something in the face of consequences. When a kid gets caught smoking pot by his parents and they take everything out of his room and ground him for two months but he still keeps smoking pot, he's quite on his way to being an addict. Your non-addicts are the people who might drink a beer or two at a barbecue or on the 4th, and I'm not saying that anyone drinks more often than that is an addict, I'm just using myself as an example; having some beers doesn't get me in trouble, if it did I'd stop. Most of the time the people who become addicts are just looking for a way to regulate feelings. Maybe some budget shifting should take place to ease up on putting people in jail and focus a little more on treating them and showing them better ways, be it therapy or pills or both, to regulate what's going on inside their heads. I realize that there're a ton of problems inherent in doing something like that. For instance, these people aren't going to get better unless they want to, which is a real bitch of a problem...but how often does jail cure someone? What's the effect on society and the final cost to the taxpayer when that junkie who spent 4 years in jail (and got high on whatever while he was in there) gets out and still doesn't know how to do anything but try to get fucked up? Either option could seem very grim, but why not opt for the path with a potentially more positive end? Oh and PS, most of this doesn't apply to violent offenders. We shouldn't have to put up with that. If violence is involved in a drug-users crimes, fuck 'em, shoot 'em out of a circus cannon into a brick wall.
Hahahahaha. What, am I about to get hacked with a 100-dollar hand-crank laptop? Thanks DHS, but the record shows that I seem to be much more adept at computer security than the DHS...and I get high. Regularly.
i dunno about where you live, but in my state (CO) community (there're pretty strict rules here that define what a community is and where its borders are, ask a cop if you have anything like that going on where you live) rule usually goes. if some old duffer was doing stuff like this, all we'd have to do is get the neighbors together, have everyone sign a letter to the city, send it to the police chief and the the mayor, or present it at a city council meeting. then the dude would be presented with a few options by a police officer, those options being the guy takes the mosquito-noisemaker down or the cop does. of course, all of these actions could be preempted by a well-aimed (and frozen, if you're dealing with a metal target) potato gun round.
this is retarded. you're gonna push a format that isn't supported by most standalone CD players in existence? so, i go and buy the new atreyu audio dvd, right, then i take it home. shit, can't put it in the stereo inthe living room. guess i'll hafta put it in my computer...and rip it. and put everything on my ipod so i can listen to it in the living room. i'm fucking confused, do they or do they not want us to copy music?
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. an ad-supported OS, huh? windows xp isn't ad-supported and i didn't pay for it. can you IMAGINE the whole vast slew of problems this would cause? "man, the bigass at at the top of IE9 installed something that yells at me about having a tiny, limp penis and being poor and un-refinanced about every 8 minutes."
I'm about 6-8 months from getting 2 bachelors degrees from CU (go-go-gadget-concurrency). Even before I started college my uncle took some inheritance and invested it in gold, for me. That paid off a quarter of my total loans (~6%, btw). It's already been stated, but it's just as true now as it was 20 posts ago; commodities, commodities, commodities...but if you absolutely, positively MUST get into the stock market right now, consider defense contractors or pharmaceutical companies, maybe even a foreign auto-maker like Toyota.
i recently got rid of my cell phone. that was the best decision i've ever made. stress is down, time spent on the back porch drinking iced tea is up, income stays the same. go ahead and have a mobile world, i'll be on the a porch passed out naked.