The difference is that the private sector has competition. If Company A is billing a certain amount of hours to get a job done, and Company B is billing less to get the same job done, then Company A will eventually start losing work to Company B. Similarly if Company A is turning out half assed work, or doing the professional equivalent of finishing their homework right before class, they will lose business to other organizations who deliver better results.

The company I work for is facing the first challenge of spending too much time on projects. A good portion of our engagements are spent re-inventing the wheel on basic project setup and management activities. It looks good for the Directors in charge of the projects because their people are 100%+ utilized. It kills us in the marketplace because our competitors have good processes in place that allow them to execute projects in less time and for less cost. The company has no choice but to become more efficient.

The patent office has no such competition. Nobody else can grant patents. Therefore they can half ass their way through it and there will not be any consequences for them.

Sounds about right for most "enterprise IT 'talent'" these days. Heaven forbid anyone should have even a passing familiarity with any systems beyond the small handful that they work with.

That is why the time to fight this is now.

I see this all the time. Fighting without a goal in mind is futile. Right now there are a small handful of people who are upset about some issues, but nobody is proposing an alternatives. Not only that, but nobody has come up with a concrete example of how their much better alternative reality is being hindered by censorship.

I agree with you that the timing is suspicious. It is also coming out at the same time as the story about the FBI infecting Tor users with malware and using that as a means to bring child porn charges against a number of people. (http://gizmodo.com/the-fbi-is-infecting-tor-users-with-malware-to-catch-ki-1616363114). Obviously the message is that Tor is evil and is only used to facilitate child porn, drugs and murder for hire.

I have no idea how large the child porn community is, but I have the sense that it is not really as big and far reaching as the authorities want to make it out to be. On the other hand, maybe the child porn kink is as common as women who like having their hair pulled. Like you said though, it is a convenient boogey man to trot out from time to time to use as cover for much wider ranging programs. "Ignore the fact that we are eavesdropping on EVERYONE because look, we caught a dozen people looking at kiddie porn." Nobody is going to come out and say, "But kiddie porn is a-okay!" And the government also gets to tar anyone against dragnet surveillance. "You mean you DON'T want us to catch perverts into kiddie porn? What are you, a kiddie porn consuming terrorist?!?!"

Can you produce some evidence of some non-objectionable content that is being censored? That is what I am waiting for. I see this slippery slope argument all the time, but I do not see the censorship.

It can be argued that the media is controlled via centralization and therefore heavy handed censorship is not even necessary. It is not necessary because the major media outlets can choose to ignore anything that goes against the status quo.

The MH17 shoot down in the Ukraine is a good example. There is plenty of material out there that calls into question the narrative being put out by the White House and the State Department. But that information is not being pulled off of the internet. It is not being filtered by the ISPs. They do not need to filter it. The average American does not care. You can put the information in front of them. You can show them that we are being herded into World War 3. Unless the message comes from CNN or Time Magazine or the Washington Post, they will not believe it.

I agree. And this is why I posed the question to the OP. He is against "any" censorship. I was curious if that also applies to censorship of negative things that happen to someone close to him who he presumably loves and cares for.

It is one thing to try to portray kiddie porn as "just pictures". It is another thing entirely when they are "just pictures" of your child, or your niece.

This is going to be a bit too metaphysical for this audience, but there truly is "good" and "evil" energy in the world. I do not mean in the Christian sense of heaven and hell. I mean real evil. Real, emotional and mental sickness that should have no place in a civilized society. Yet at the same time, an evil that is inevitable given the reality that the universe must be balanced, and that every action must have an equal and opposite reaction. Evil that is the polar opposite of love and compassion and caring.

Let's use an extreme example here. Someone rapes your mom and takes pictures and posts them on the internet. Would you be opposed to allowing your mother to issue a DMCA take down notice? That is censorship.

Following your logic as I think you are laying it out, you would have to be opposed to that too. After all, rape is bad and we are not necessarily condoning rape. We are simply looking at images of something that has already happened. We are not profiting from them. The rapist is not profiting from them. The victim is already victimized and will not be un-victimized. So censorship is abhorrent and therefore raped mom on the internet is okay. Right?

I am willing to agree that blanket censorship is a bad thing.

How can you be opposed to the censorship of child pornography? Please avoid the slippery slope argument. That one has been played out.

The harm is in the production of the images in the first place, not in the viewing of them. The viewing supports the production. Or the production supports the viewing. I am not sure, given that I do not operate in those circles. From what I have read about it, the consensus seems to be that most kiddie porn is produced by family members abusing their younger relatives.

It can probably be argued that the people making the images would continue to make them even if they did not have an audience to share them with. Even so, there is still some social value in discouraging people from consuming the images. If people are interested in the images, that is a form of social acceptance for those who make the images.

It is bad enough that people have these demons that they struggle with. It is terrible that they abuse those who are too young to protect themselves and in most cases, do not even realize how wrong the activities are. The last thing that we need as a society is to encourage others to consume the evidence of that abuse.

For an interesting thought project, work backwards to how much the advertisers must be paying the networks to support those kinds of salaries for the actors. Do not forget to factor in production costs, everyone working below the line, etc.

I have always defined an upgrade as connecting parts to the existing motherboard. As soon as you replace the board it is no longer an upgrade but a "new computer for which I have reused some parts."

I read this and get the sense that you do not feel that the person behind the desk is worth the time it would take to treat them like you would treat a friend.

By all means, let's further remove interpersonal communication and support the notion that computers do things better... and people whose jobs have not yet been replaced by computers, should act more like them.

ProTop - The "personality type" that you seem so against is one who can ask simple questions like, "How you are doing today?", genuinely pay attention to the answer, and treat the person who you are dealing with like a person, who has a life outside of work and a larger purpose than taking your credit card in exchange for a room key.

I am always social with the desk clerk. Being friendly with the clerk is the number one way to get a complimentary upgrade.

As much as I am not a fan of government regulation, my professional experience has shown me that the only time people get IT anywhere close to right is when there is a risk of financial penalty involved in getting it wrong. Regulation seems to be the only solution to people working for peanuts. The people who work for peanuts make mistakes. If those mistakes cost the company more than the company saves by hiring those people, they will not hire those people.

Out of all of the industries that I have worked with, the financial services industries seem to be the most together. They are not perfect, but the penalties associated with losing customer data makes them more careful.

You bring up a good point. Given the extent out of the impact of the change, they probably should have just declared a disaster and gone with Plan B. Yet, given that they blew a system change and did not have a rollback plan, I am fairly confident that any sort of DR strategy is equally broken and worthless.

Situations like this always put a smile on my face, because I know that my job is secure. If an organization as large as the United States government cannot get these basics right, but I can... I know that I will always be in a position to make improvements somewhere, and will never be faced with a shortage of things to do.

I see the same thing with the major Fortune 50 corporations that I work with. I am thoroughly convinced that from the smallest shops, up to the largest organizations, the majority of IT departments are barely functioning and are just one bad change away from serious down time with no hope of recovering in any sort of reasonable amount of time.