ramblings of a {sys,net}admin…

 

  

I understand the next question was “What constitutes a billionaire?”

Hillary Clinton and her driver were cruising along a country road one evening when suddenly an ancient cow appeared in front of the car. The driver tried to avoid it but couldn’t — the aged bovine was struck and killed. Hillary told her driver to go up to the farmhouse and explain to the owners what had happened. She stayed in the car making phone calls to lobbyists.

About an hour later the driver staggered back to the car with his clothes in disarray. He was holding a half-empty bottle of expensive wine in one hand, a rare Cuban cigar in the other, and was smiling happily, smeared with lipstick.

“Oh my! What happened to you!?” asked Hillary.

“Well,” the driver replied, “the farmer gave me the cigar, his wife gave me the wine, and their beautiful twin daughters made passionate love to me!”

“My God, what did you tell them?” asked Hillary.

The driver replied, “I just stepped inside the door and said, ‘I’m Hillary Clinton’s driver and I’ve just killed the old cow’”.

You have to hope that this study is flawed, but the evidence is irrefutable. Several months ago, scientists at Europe’s annual human reproduction conference suggested that the results of a recent analysis revealed the presence of female hormones in beer, and suggested that men should take a look at their beer consumption. The theory is that drinking beer makes men turn into women.

To test the theory, 100 men were each fed six pints of beer within a one-hour period. It was then observed that 100 percent of the men gained weight, talked excessively without making sense, became overly emotional, couldn’t drive, failed to think rationally, argued over nothing, had to sit down while urinating, couldn’t perform sexually, and refused to apologize when wrong.

No further testing is planned.

I teach a course entitled “Linux Networking/Security”. A few weeks ago we covered chapter seven, “Security, Ethics, and Privacy”. The homework for that class was a three-part assignment in which the student plays the role of system administrator for a fictional financial services company named Safety First Financial Services, Inc.

The last part of the assignment read as follows:

You came in to work at Safety First this morning and reviewed your system logs, only to discover that a cracker had broken into the retirement calculator Web site during the night and downloaded the registration details and retirement plan summaries of about 400 customers. What will you do today?

I got some good answers to that question, which we discussed in class. Responses included things like contacting HR and Legal, removing the server from the network, attempting to find the exploited vulnerability, etc. The best response I received came from a student who broke down her day into steps:

I decided to put this one into steps. Some steps will be going on at the same time and these are not truly in a specific order.

1. Really loudly say “AAH FUCK!”
2. …

I laughed when I first read that, then thought for a moment and decided to give her extra points for that. Honestly, it’s the first thing I’d do too. =)

Women freak out. Often at you. Often for no discernible reason. You say something that you consider totally innocuous, or even downright nice, only to find that you’ve offended, enraged, or annoyed us. Your first problem–being attracted to women, a very weird group of people–is not going to go away. But here’s a problem you can solve: word choice. You need to know the phrases that, once introduced to her volatile atmosphere, will result in explosion (or quiet contempt–no picnic either). Then you need to strike them from your vocabulary.

[ Read more… ]

From http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/Top/ecomments/4754/:

If you were a man walking across the campus of Florida State University in 1978, an attractive young woman might have approached you and said these exact words: “I have been noticing you around campus. I find you to be attractive. Would you go to bed with me tonight?”

If you were that man, you probably would have thought that you had just gotten incredibly lucky. But not really. You were actually an unwitting subject in an experiment designed by the psychologist Russell Clark.

Clark had persuaded the students of his social psychology class to help him find out which gender, in a real-life situation, would be more receptive to a sexual offer from a stranger. The only way to find out, he figured, was to actually get out there and see what would happen. So young men and women from his class fanned out across campus and began propositioning strangers.

The results weren’t very surprising. Seventy-five percent of guys were happy to oblige an attractive female stranger (and those who said no typically offered an excuse such as, “I’m married”). But not a single woman accepted the identical offer of an attractive male. In fact, most of them demanded the guy leave her alone.

At first the psychological community dismissed Clark’s experiment as a trivial stunt, but gradually his experiment gained first acceptance, and then praise for how dramatically it revealed the differing sexual attitudes of men and women. Today it’s considered a classic. But why men and women display such different attitudes remains as hotly debated as ever.

Geez, suprising results, huh? I could’ve saved ‘em the time and told ‘em how it would turn out, had they only asked.

w00t!

For the reasons stated above, the court concludes that Novell is the owner of the UNIX and UnixWare copyrights. Therefore, SCO’s First Claim for Relief for slander of title and Third Claim for specific performance are dismissed, as are the copyright ownership portinos of SCO’s Fifth Claim for Relief for unfair competition and Second Claim for Relief for breach of implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing. The court denies SCO’s cross-motion for summary judgment on its own slander of title, breach of contract, and unfair competition claims, and on Novell’s slander of title claim. Accordingly, Novell’s slander of title claim is still at issue.

The court also concludes that, to the extent that SCO has a copyright to enforce, SCO can simultaneously pursue both a copyright infringement claim and a breach of contract claim based on the non-compete restrictions in the license back of the Licensed Technology under APA and the TLA. The court further concludes that there has not been a change of control that released the non-compete restrictions of the license, and the non-compete restrictions of the license are not void under California law. Accordingly, Novell’s motion for summary judgment on SCO’s non-compete claim in its Second Claim for breach of contract and Fifth Claim for unfair competition is granted to the extent that SCO’s claims require ownership of the UNIX and UnixWare copyrights, and denied in all other regards.

[ Read more… ]