Is that a PC in your Pocket?

The whole point of a competitive marketplace is to keep costs low. In America this concept is dead. When Verizon put out their Shared plan I looked at it and thought it was outrageous, but that AT&T would offer something a little lower and the cost would eventually drop. But it looks to me like AT&T mirrored Verizon's Share Everything plan with a change here or there. So what's the point in competition if all the participants agree to gouge the customer? It seems to me like it's time for a government breakup of the large carriers, similar to what happened to the Bells in the 80's.

What a GREAT idea. Am I the only chess player here that can see the next moves clearly before they happen? It'll go something like this: 1. CAPTCHA-enabled ads force you to type something to continue 2. Some honest-yet-enterprising programmer that wants to make a little cash will (finally) write a program to recognize CAPTCHAs reliably. 3a. He'll make approximately $5 before some other arsehole copies his work and releases a free version, -or- 3b. He'll make approximately $5 before some other arsehole cracks his program and releases the crack on BitTorrent 4. Due to the above copy/crack, spammers previously stopped by CAPTCHAs (you know, all 3 of them) will use his programming to bypass existing CAPTCHAs 5. Final result: more spam. Thanks, NuCaptcha and Disney. We love you too.

I thought someone said it best when they said

"Terry Childs nearly built the San Francisco computer network by himself, to the point of actually filing for copyright on his design of the network. Management in the San Francisco IT department apparently couldn't fathom half of what he was doing and Terry Childs himself called them incompetent on numerous occasions, which is pretty much what the sole standing charge is all about. Refusing to hand over the network to incompetent imbeciles."
http://blogs.computerworld.com/14592/good_news_for_jailed_sf_net_admin_terry_childs

I'm not defending Childs' decision to hand over the passwords when asked, but I can sure see his perspective on it. As a consulting network engineer, I've frequently been put in the position of having to decide whether giving someone the keys to the kingdom will put the kingdom at too great a risk.

The problem here is that there was not a documented policy on passwords. As a former government IT employee, we had a documented policy concerning passwords. They were all documented in a password-protected spreadsheet kept on a server that only admins had the access and technical skills to get to. They weren't withheld, per se, they were just in a place that was inconvenient to get to unless there was an emergency situation that required the inconvenience.

The impression I get is that San Francisco's IT department had old-timers waiting for their retirement date and their pensions to mature. They were stuck in the days of mainframes, modems, and 8088's. Here comes Terry Childs, who has not only a clue but a plan for getting them into the 90's, if not the 21st century. He intimidates his superiors because he knows what he's doing, and they don't. He builds a network for the city that his peers should be proud of. Instead they are intimidated. They ask for passwords, and he politely refuses to give over until they understand the enormity of what those passwords do. They get mad and accuse him of hacking.

The worst thing about this case is that Terry Childs did nothing wrong, other than withholding the passwords too long. He's intelligent. He intimidated people with his intelligence. They couldn't fire him without cause, so they created a cause by insisting that he was hacking, even though the evidence does not show this.

The insult to injury here is that by dragging this out, the San Francisco IT department is just putting more egg on their face. Anyone following the case can see that they were incompetent and Terry Childs was trying to protect them from their incompetence. His crime was not knowing when he'd lost the game at the key moment.

Were I living in San Francisco, I'd want an audit of the technical skills of the IT department. It sure sounds to me like there are some people that need some training. If they can't learn from the training, reassignment. If they can't be reassigned, early retirement. But for all that's good and holy, get the incompetence out of the IT departments!