Fire away until destroyed. Gets the job done and it's fun.

The amount of administrative red tape to hire a "permanent" employee is immense. In government, this is tantamount to a lifetime offer of employment, so it is not to be undertaken lightly. Management needs to be sure there is a lifetime of work for the position and the candidate has to be a good long-term investment risk.

With a lot less red tape, it is possible to scrape some budget money together THIS YEAR to hire a contractor. And it's not all that hard to get this year's money carried over to next year. And if by some chance the budget is cut, there is no collective bargaining crisis to determine who bumps who and which unfortunate soul loses a game of musical chairs.

Hiring contractors is the workaround to almost any administrative obstacle. Government has MANY hiring policies (affirmative action for example). Outsourcers can do a better job of ignoring (or pretending to comply with) just about any HR policy mandate. Hypothetically, you can verbally tell an outsourcer that you want an attractive blonde woman for a certain job, and they will present a list of candidates, all of whom happen to be cute blondes. The only people who will even know about the opportunity are those who meet the undocumented pre-screening requirements. I'm exaggerating with the specifics of my example, but this kind of thing happens all the time.

Kickbacks are part of the game as well. The outsourcing machine has a lot of moving parts, lubricated with an abundance of grease.

Big university sports programs are associated with capitalism because they are self-sustaining. A successful program (a winning team with solid marketing) will attract revenue from television, branded merchandise, and alumni donors. Some of this revenue leads to scholarships which enable the university to land the best available players out of high school. Failures on the field or in the marketing department lead directly to shrinking revenue and a smaller program.

In any other aspect of university business, failures are routinely bundled into the next budget year, often in the form of a tuition increase.

Although state funding is in decline, there is NO decline is state-mandated overhead. State universities are run by state employees (usually unionized). States have a lot to say about all sorts of policy: employment, admissions, curriculum, etc. Pretty soon the states will be contributing so little money to the budget, the universities might reasonably ask to have their funding cut to zero and set up a private foundation that offers private sector (non-union) employment to most of the existing staff and faculty. The trajectory we are on is "privatization by 1,000 cuts". We might as well carry the concept directly to its conclusion.

Across the country, state legislatures have been treating public higher education as a "splurge"; something that's nice to have but not really necessary. Welfare is a necessity, but public higher ed is not. Gotta love that logic.

Public funding has been a declining percentage of the universities' budgets for a long time. In a few years, they won't be "public" at all.

Wasting 10 minutes of their time on the phone is a good start, but teledroids don't cost enough for the scammers to worry about.

Your throwaway VM idea is interesting. I wonder if you can get into any trouble by launching an attack against someone who is trying to scam you. Who are they going to call? These phony helpers might be more fun than a trip to Disney. My guess is their environment is not prepared for everything a bunch of angry Slashdotters might try. If they get clobbered, it will take a lot longer than 10 minutes to get back online.

I suspect you got modded down by someone who profits from outsourcing on the buyer's side. The CIO who chooses outsourcing often gets some nifty perks and -- best of all -- a happy landing if he/she gets fired when the outsourcing strategy goes into epic fail mode. In the short run, it scores brownie points with CFO and CEO types while maintaining one's membership in the executive golf committee. When things go wrong, a smart executive knows how to get paid for failure. I know of several CIOs who bungled major outsourcing initiatives. Each of them landed a job with the outsourcer or a nifty promotion to another company where the same outsourcer already had a big presence. Nothing can propel your career like a well-managed failure. There is money to be made by properly managing a cycle of fail.

Below the executive level, you have the entire food chain of outsourced employees, who do the same jobs that conventional employees did before. Remember that many companies have dreadful salary scales for IT. In a past life, I had arguments with my HR department's treatment of IT positions. In many cases, they "require" a BSCS or above, while offering a salary less than an executive secretary. Sometimes outsourcing is the only way a company will allow itself to get a halfway intelligent person to work in IT. The stereotype is that good paying jobs are cut and cheapie temps take over. Employers love the concept, but reality can be a different story. The temp jobs are not always temporary and the hourly rates can be several times what a "permanent" employee would cost. But you won't find that in the brochure.

And lets not forget the additional people who work in the overhead departments of outsourcers. You have accounting people, a large well-paid sales department, and various executives that form the basis of a corporate management team that would not even exist if companies managed IT internally. If any of them are reading your post, they'll mod it down too!

Sometimes employees get screwed by outsourcing, but at least half the time it's the customer who gets fleeced. If you can't be part of the solution, there is money to be made by prolonging the problem.

RHEL support fees don't work for me, but I am OK with waiting for CentOS. I don't need cutting-edge Linux, just a distro that doesn't choke on a tarball. For those things that truly need to be absolutely current, I'll go get the source code and install the old fashioned way.

the purpose of attackwatch.com

But they forgot to leave a way to upload pictures of the targets to be terminated. Oops.

MS gets a token payment from Casio in exchange for discounts and freebies on MS products. It wouldn't be the first time a company offered $2 of free stuff for a $1 "purchase" of a patent license. As I recall, SCO was bundling Linux "licenses" into a variety of unrelated contract matters and calling it a "sale".

Given the unwillingness of MS to identify (much less litigate) these mysterious patents, the salesmanship must be very creative.

I agree with part of what you say. The market cannot consist entirely of day traders using the same system. Fortunately, this is not the case.

It all depends on which stock symbols you choose to track. Some stocks are lightly traded, and MANY stocks have lightly traded options. When a stock all of a sudden has option activity 100x normal volume, something is up even if (especially if) the underlying stock hasn't moved yet.

The more heavily traded the stock, the more you find hedge funds and other professionals who might be trading on factors other than insider knowledge. I think low volume stocks are more predictable by watching the options data, but not everyone agrees.

Not every stock lends itself to this kind of automated analysis, and not every big options transaction is the result of insider trading. But if you pick the right stocks to watch, there is a better than random chance that the stock will move in the direction indicated by the options data.

Insider trading regulations are designed so that shareholders are treated fairly (relative to each other) as far as access to information is concerned. As long as the decision to exit the hardware market was kept confidential, no problem. If insiders (or people with access to insiders) traded HP stock with advance knowledge of the plan, that's a different story.

With enough degrees of deniability, it's possible that someone traded HP stock based on 3rd or 4th hand information, at which point they acted on speculation that 3rd or 4th hand information was accurate. Very little can be done about that, and it happens more often than you think.

As a Slashdotter, you may be thinking, "Who cares about HP? How can I profit from insider shenanigans without being an insider and risking the wrath of the SEC?"

1. Monitor the options trading activity for a limited number of stock symbols where you suspect insider trading.

2. Build a database that is continuously updated with both option and stock pricing and volume.

3. Watch for a condition in which options activity and volume moves out of sync with the underlying stock. This doesn't prove insider trading, but if insiders are going to cheat, this is the easiest way for them to make a quick buck.

4. Use the options activity as a leading indicator on the stock.

5. Profit!!!!

I am not a financial advisor. This is not financial advice. Your actual mileage may vary.

I guess banner ads are not enough.

I never said it was a GOOD plan.

The path to counterfeit routers might involve surplus or QA-reject circuit boards, populated with surplus or QA-reject parts, assembled by low-cost electronics workers from the toy industry. The Chinese are unlikely to throw away ANYTHING that can be assembled into a marketable product. My guess is the cheap/counterfeit routers were supposed to end up on the domestic Chinese market, but somebody discovered they could get more for them in the US.

If the goal was espionage, it would make more sense to retrofit the REAL product so there would be no quality issues. Since any communications worth stealing would probably be encrypted before it hits the router, I think they could get a lot more mileage out of spyware on PCs and laptops.