Some people are just too stupid to train in this manner. This is especially true if you are a system admin for an office that employs dolly bird PA's just to make tea and look pretty on the front desk when a client comes to visit.

Blokes can be just as stupid too though, I had to clear up a PC after one of our support team clicked on one of these BS fishing emails as he installed some software that "cleaned" his Windows XP PC. He just has an inability to pay attention to what he is doing. He will most likely spend his entire like manning a helpdesk phone line helping people allow popups (We have to use them as many elearning courses are designed to only work in a popup and we host other peoples courseware).

Often these people are employed in dead end jobs earning no money so training them to take their head out of their arse is like trying to get blood out of a stone. Hiring someone with a brain would cost more and they might not need it for the job they have to do anyway.

Not that any form of network security for this is a magic bullet either. Unfortunately there is no one solution. All you can do is try and block as much as possible at the email gateway via a decent spam filter and make sure people only have the minimum admin rights on the PC's that they need to do their job. The final layer of protection though is making sure you have a damn good disaster recovery policy to allow you to recover a machine from nightly backups easily and can also rollback to previous days until you get a clean image.

In the real world that is simply not an option. I have to be able to view PDF's on my work PC.

This original question seemed to be posed by someone wanting to protect a network, in that case he definitely cannot mandate no PDF's. The trick to being a good admin is doing your best without getting in peoples way. Blocking all PDF's at the mail server would definately get in peoples way.

What about the victims right to privacy? Ok, they had a right to life that was violated by their killer but didn't they also have a right to privacy? What if the victim has no clothes on when they are killed should it still be ok to publish the video of their killing?

I actually think this is somewhat similar to child porn in that it should be illegal not just to make snuff movies, but also just to be in possession of one. This would make online distribution a definite no-no.

Why?

Selling 50,000,000 copies for $1 generates the same turnover as selling 100,000,000 for 50c. The difference is that processing 50,000,000 transactions is cheaper than processing 100,000,000 so they make more profit by selling half as many at twice the price. These are just figures plucked out of the air but they are designed to illustrate how choosing a higher price point can make you more money even though less people can afford to pay it.

Since I am not a record company accountant I cannot be 100% sure which way they make more money, but I reckon they probably choose to keep prices high for a reason.

I hadn't checked in a while my hourly rate as I have been salaried for the past decade so was plucking figures out of thin air. After having worked it out it seems more like 2 minutes to earn each dollar.

Home TV screens being bigger mainly.

Also, there are now other forms of entertainment to take into account too like computer games.

I think if you take the amount spent on movies, tv, music and games all together you will find that it has not change much over the past few years. It might have gone down a little actually but that is probably just due to the means of delivery getting cheaper so the costs to and user going down as well when you take inflation into account. I think if you compare the cost of an album in the shops now to in the 60's the price has actually fallen.

The big change though is that piracy has become easier from a technical perspective with the advent of digital recordings so people who refuse to pay for their entertainment find it easier. Also, there is the notion that nothing is lost by that extra copy somehow making it acceptable.

Are you sure? I earn $1 in about 5 minutes so it seems fair to pay that to me, especially for the amount of time and effort someone has to put in to create a song that I like. The problem is that to most young people (who engage in most piracy) that 1$ is worth far more since they earn less. A cup of coffee that last about 5 minutes costs twice that and can't be consumed twice.

When I was a kid I would go round gathering up supermarket trolleys to return that people had walked off and left the coin deposit in. I could not understand why the hell anybody did this, now I can. If I lose $10 I am slightly annoyed but nothing more, to really piss me off I would have to lose a few hundred. If get too drunk and miss the last train home I just get a cab all the way, that costs about $80.

This is the real problem, the vast gap in earnings between those of us who have a real career type job and the low wage McJobs that are open to young people. That vast gap in ability to earn money means that the price points chosen for lots of products like DVD's and music now are very high from young peoples point of view. Young professionals are often the target market for music and entertainment now, and that means if you are still a student the prices chosen seem obscene.

Yes but it did enable Iraqi oil to be sold on the open market again, unlike before when it was blackmarket sale only. It could have gone on like that for decades too as no fucker in Iraq was ever going to rise up and get rid of Saddam. The only people who might have are Iran and they are the last people we wanted to have the Iraqi oil fields.

The second amendment now is just a way of making sure the american arms industry has a good market for its products at home. Any idea of it helping keep the US population safe has long since gone out the window, it is about the companies the donate to the NRA wanting to make as much money as possible and that means having as larger market for their products as possible.

Guns make individual people feel safer, they do not necessarily make society as a whole safer.

It made sense when it was enacted a few hundred years ago before massive but also densely populated cities existed but things have changed and will carry on changing. Most other countries have been able to let their gun laws evolve but in the US this is more difficult.

So people who are never going to rise up against the government however tyrannical it gets, have no need to hunt, live in a built up area and have no need to protect themselves from anyone apart from their neighbours and fellow citizens can get a gun. Maybe this would be ok if you could stop criminals getting them but that is impossible when they are so easy for normal people to buy. I can buy a gun, then just give it to a criminal with very little comeback but making a healthy markup. Changing this would be a damn good start but even that the NRA is against changing as it would mean less guns sold and that would affect those donations from companies making money from the civilian market.

I understand what caricaturing is, I do not understand why the hell you put it in quotation marks if it was not a quotation.

Ok, your first problem is that you are going to need a job.

I hate to break it to you but sometimes managers can be a little caustic, they are generally very well paid but have to put up with quite a lot of stress. Sometimes, this makes them get angry with you if you are contributing to that stress or they feel you are. They should not, they know they should not but we are only human and sometimes we make mistakes. You are just going to have to get used to it.

I have worked in a few different roles (shop assistant, telesales, rigger, developer). The only job I had where people were always polite to each other was when working a rigger because you had an awful lot of very large, physically able men who would seriously make a mess of you if you were rude. In every other job I found managers sometimes get stressed and pissed off. They might try not to, but if you make mistakes you will sooner or later either get shouted at or you just get fired. People always make mistakes so sooner or later you will get shouted it, even if only because the underlying reason was the boss having a bad day.

The difference with the linux kernel is that every time this happens everyone hears about it. That should not stop you getting involved though because you are unlikely to have to deal with these people as you are just not good enough yet. In about 5 years you might be if you can get your million hours of C coding in but by then you might be more tolerant of people being caustic. You might not, but cross that bridge later. You might find you contribute to other open source projects where everyone is more polite, the kernel is one of the most stressful and complicated so not all OSS projects are like that.

If you ever spoke to me like that I would punch your lights out :)

Not necessarily. He mentions in his reply that he does not hold grudges. Many people are like this, we forget about disagreements quickly and don't let them tarnish future communications.

It means that some people might be talking to him politely, because he is talking politely to you at that time because there is not disagreement over the current topic of conversation. How you communicated yesterday over a different topic is of no relevance. if you force it to still be relevant because you bear a grudge then that may be something you need to resolve, not them.

In my opinion after reading what she reacted to like this it is obvious that this is not a reaction to the actual email she replied to, as the email she replied to was obviously a joke about accidentally squashing someone.

It sounds like she replied to that but was actually taking issue with something else, probably the caustic nature of a bunch of male developers who all incredibly passionate about something that has very much become their baby. They no longer (and probably never have) viewed their work on the kernel as job. It is a hobby that they started getting paid for.

As to whether she is right I guess it depends. I know of many careers where rudeness is accepted, you just get used to being spoken to in that manner if you know their is no maliciousness behind it. I always remember by stepfather taking about journalism and how his editors spoke to him, they would still all socialise together though as soon as the broadcast went out and both parties always knew that there was no real ill meant, it was just one way of blowing off steam that was acceptable in their workplace.

Lol, that site is about as far from impartial as you can get.

Not sure where that came from, it is not a quote from my reply to you or wikipedia. You do not source it, so not really sure how it pertains to anything unless it is what you are saying, in which case I am just confused by the quotation marks around it.

That WAS the main thrust of the criticism on the wikipedia page linked to originally though.

I was not really thinking about jobs moving over seas, I was thinking more about them simply never happening. Once a company exists in a particular place, then you are right, there is no way they would move.

I was thinking more along the lines of if the US lacks STEM graduates then there will be less startups and also that if you are looking at getting a new project off the ground you would outsource it to a country where it could be done more quickly rather than waiting the time it would take to hire enough people. Assuming you already have enough people though then this is unlikely to be an issue as you say.