Disney's labor practices are already disgusting - this is icing on the cake.
Much of their parks are staffed by interns or other 'temporary' staff with no benefits and crummy pay. When things go well the 'promote' you to PART. TIME. Oh, and part time doesn't qualify for much in the way of benefits AFAIK.
For better or worse, its (oh so magical I dreamed about working there as a kid) Disney. People will gladly go be abused...erm work...there for the dream and Disney will gladly take advantage of paying someone peanuts to sell...well peanuts. Oh, and over-priced everything else.
It's beyond time to eradicate the program entirely.
Something like this case - where disney literally laid off staff in order to directly replace them with H1B workers - should be immediately illegal and stopped before they even brought them in + fines and penalties and so on.
The fact that we're here on the internet complaining about this and the workers are only filing lawsuits after the fact shows just how broken the program is.
The problem is big business buys politicians and votes and then write the laws that best suit their shareholders (i.e. profit). Disney is great at getting away with this - look at the copyright extension that directly follows when Mickey Mouse would otherwise enter the public domain.
Self driving cars can and will react faster than any person ever could.
Yes, there's definitely some intuition...you see that car and know it's going through the light or that pedestrian is about to sprint across 6 lanes of traffic. However you can program at least some of that in:
Evaluation - clear intersection, green light, right of way Tracking - other vehicles approaching driving path; current speed and direction is towards this vehicle Evaluation - other vehicles are required to yield due to traffic signal; evaluate delta-V of other vehicle; evaluate probability of vehicle stopping to avoid collision
Pretty sure this already exists in a more robust form or no driverless vehicle would go through an intersection while someone is approaching the perpendicular red light. There are some interesting things you can do with a driver that's constantly vigilant and has an unlimited attention span.
What other industry can legally and directly charge more (i.e. discriminate) based on AGE, GENDER, marital status (which, until recently, was also linked to sexual orientation), education, neighborhood, non-felony convictions (i.e. tickets)?
People flip their lid if a cop decides to search a black person driving an expensive car with tints and a loud stereo through a terrible neighborhood and repeatedly past a known crack house...but an insurance company blithely does their equivalent with every single customer.
Even looking at the most basic premises - you (collectively, over time) pay X dollars, the insurance company pays out Y dollars. If Y > X then the insurance company goes bankrupt.
So by design, premiums MUST exceed payouts. On average it will always be cheaper to pay for things yourself, however people are NOT any good at saving $50K of oh-sh*t money in case they total someone's benz. Much easier for them to pay a $4K premium over 20 years.
In reality, the only thing insurance protects you from that you couldn't do on your own are the extreme situations. You total someone's ferrari and kill three people. Granted, without insurance you just declare bankruptcy.
I won't miss our insurance overlords...but I'm sure they'll pass bills requiring similarly priced insurance on driverless cars or something...by 'expanding' coverage or some 'for the people/children/etc.' reason.
On a test bed, sure the right amount of urea is dispensed. While accelerating through 24 gears from the traffic lights up hill? there is not a bat's chance in hell that the amount is correct.
The so called "clean diesel" is not only emitting vast amounts of NOx, it is also emitting vast amounts of un-reacted urea.
Why? Why is it not possible that the correct amount of urea can be applied during any combination of RPM, throttle position, air temp, etc. when we can do that just fine for fuel (in diesel or gas engines)?
And vast amounts of urea? You need to do a bit more homework since urea (well, DEF which is urea + H2O) consumption is only ~1/20th the amount of diesel the engine consumes. Take into account that urea is safe anyway (did you forget to google what urea is and what ELSE it's used for?) and this whole point is kind of... well just plain silly.
VW still cheated but that's another story entirely.
There's tons of existing audit tracking file storage options.
Storage? Amazon or google are easy places to start - you can host the entire thing there. Heck, google can probably provide a youtube type interface for compressing footage etc. If they can handle umpteen billion hours of video then i'm sure they can handle police cameras.
Sure, until they point to the contract they signed with Taser, etc. with some random stipulations which make it impossible (or at least very difficult/costly) to disclose. Just like the cell tower spoofing which someone was contractually secret even though that should have been overriden by existing laws.
"Ok, let's write this agreement so when things disappear it's no ones fault, no one can request open access, no one can get files they want without lots of hoops and lawsuits, oh, and anything potentially harmful to the IT company is off limits...and *wink wink* we know that you providing footage of a cop committing murder would be harmful."
Phone contracts are 1 or 2 years typically (though now they're going out of vogue)...
People 'grandfathered' in to various perks are left alone for PR reasons I assume...that or because many old plans are probably more profitable and it's easier to leave them all alone. There's no reason a cell carrier can't tell someone 'we no longer offer your xyz 'grandfathered' plan; you will need to pick a new one from our current choices.'
On the surface, I agree but when you dig a bit deeper it's not entirely true.
Individual uplinks aren't the issue here, neither is (to a larger degree) neighborhood level traffic. It's your ISP's connection(s) into the backbone and thus to netflix itself. This is why netflix offers ISPs cache boxes to reduce traffic going out of their network.
So Ch. 4 might "cost" more locally to stream but it's not using any actual internet bandwidth (except maybe a single stream inwards on a dedicated line which feeds all their customers).
Then again, assuming there's a netflix cache your netflix stream isn't 'costing' the ISP either. Then again again all the lawsuits about equal priority for internet traffic.
In the end I think it's ridiculous that ISPs are now trying to impose caps on wired bandwidth. They see all the big $ that the wireless carriers are getting out of the same scam and cry big crocodile tears.
No need! They're training poor people to be corporate minions. They can pay them about the same as those in Brazil except you don't have to fly someone all the way down there, build them a nice house, import nice cars, security, and food, to crack the whip over your slave^^^^^employees.
Newsflash: Not everyone has the same everything. That's communism.
Discrimination is one thing...and it's wrong.
At the same time this amounts to reverse discrimination. Any random minority* is automatically given assistance in any of a number of ways which give them advantages not available to many others. Of course, it's only if you fit in the right group that's crying about how they're wronged and oppressed. I'd love to see how well a white male scholarship fund does.
*Minority has a star since what's considered minorities these days outnumber the "majority". Protip: the world is pretty racially diverse in first world countries.
TBH, the link is more in the social norms of the group. The stereotype exists because, unfortunately, it's common.
Working poor? Yes, dual income + assistance barely puts food on the table.
Public assistance poor? They don't typically work. Have full access to medical programs, food, free education, etc. Heck, non-working parents on welfare apparently get an allowance for *daycare* as I understand it. In theory those parents have all the time in the world to spend raising their kids. They could learn right along with them if they're uneducated from all the take-home work and books if they were so motivated.
Nah. Tech giants are interested in programing...erm grooming...erm educating future drones.
It's somewhat tongue in cheek but also I have to look at both sides. Yes, these companies want STEM grads... heck they need them. And I think the H1-B thing is finally catching up enough with companies that they see the twilight coming.
The answer? Take poor kids and give them enough education (and, of course, propaganda about how great these companies are) to meet the same requirements.
Then you remember they're poor. So if you take a welfare-income family and pay their 20yo kid engineer/programmer 40K our of school they'll think they're rich. It's H1-B, plan B.
Or maybe I'm just in a pessimistic mood today and corporate greed evaporated overnight.
Or rather...let me buy my *content* in a convenient way.
Netflix streaming was great until they started removing lots of movies.
Now the providers are fracturing the content between multiple services... so you do kind of get the ala carte except you have to buy from a half dozen places. Oh, and fight with wonky interfaces that differ between them all. And you generally can't watch offline. And...so on.
Or just torrent whatever you want for free of course. I killed off cable TV ~5 years ago and still don't miss it.
AM would pay. They would (and probably are) offering that themselves.
Think about it. Someone says "I'm going to kill you and steal your wallet"... typically someone hands over the wallet freely and asks what else they can do to not be killed.
Plus they way they're doing it will earn them a lot less negativity (especially among the "conservative" folks who "abhor" those kind of websites... and secretly use them of course) than an actual blackmail threat.
Yes! Because every accountant, secretary, executive, and clerk is an expert on security and should be entitled to put the company at risk based on their own judgment. Try applying that same example to money within a company...
We live in a very imperfect world though. Your suggestion makes multiple assumptions, requires a fair bit of additional infrastructure (can't RDP without jumphost, can't video conference internally without a host, backups need to be daily and quick to restore), and still leaves the door wide open to information *loss*. Oh, and it requires a monitoring system to watch all file access in realtime and compare to some arbitrary standard...either in passive mode which means you're screwed already or active mode which means you have to deal with blocking people from accessing internal files.
Or I can just block blog content, gmail, and so on. It sucks but it sucks more to leave the door wide open.
Thank you for the voice of sanity. I think a lot of the comments about filtering == bad come from small to medium size businesses.
Move to enterprise scale, financials, anything subject to regulatory oversight, etc. and it's a totally different ballgame. Lots of comments about trusting users to Do The Right Thing. Guess what though...many don't realize what's Wrong and Right here...or it's far too easy to justify Wrong. Ignoring my personal opinions, pirating music is still illegal is the US...but plenty of people wouldn't think twice about loading a torrent client because they "have to" play this particular tune for the boss that's so perfect for etc. etc. etc.
I can't tell you how many "work" computers I've dealt with in the past that are loaded with personal information, pictures, pirated software/music/movies, porn, etc.
NBD in a small office...but potentially a huge legal issue for Big Business LLC.
And a pint is a pound... it's not that complicated and how often do you really care how much a liquid weighs in your personal life? If you do this professionally/scientifically then it's just working knowledge to know this stuff.
Don't get me wrong, the metric system definitely easier to use in a lot of cases...but not so much easier that it really matters for daily life.
I've been replaying FO3 on PS3 and... I can't even begin to count the number of crashes ESPECIALLY in the DLC. I save more out of fear of a crash than dying.
This is the GOTY edition which *should* have all the latest updates or patches too. I wish the load screen stats included a 'Still playing after xxx crashes' stat
If it costs more and has a fancy sticker (or IS a fancy sticker) it MUST be better right?
Does anyone actually believe the fancy-pants buzz-word laden spec sheets for consoles actually mean those "dedicated" chips do something special? Especially when the majority of people are probably going to use cheapy headphones or the speakers built into their TV anyway.
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Disney's labor practices are already disgusting - this is icing on the cake.
Much of their parks are staffed by interns or other 'temporary' staff with no benefits and crummy pay. When things go well the 'promote' you to PART. TIME. Oh, and part time doesn't qualify for much in the way of benefits AFAIK.
For better or worse, its (oh so magical I dreamed about working there as a kid) Disney. People will gladly go be abused...erm work...there for the dream and Disney will gladly take advantage of paying someone peanuts to sell...well peanuts. Oh, and over-priced everything else.
It's beyond time to eradicate the program entirely.
Something like this case - where disney literally laid off staff in order to directly replace them with H1B workers - should be immediately illegal and stopped before they even brought them in + fines and penalties and so on.
The fact that we're here on the internet complaining about this and the workers are only filing lawsuits after the fact shows just how broken the program is.
The problem is big business buys politicians and votes and then write the laws that best suit their shareholders (i.e. profit). Disney is great at getting away with this - look at the copyright extension that directly follows when Mickey Mouse would otherwise enter the public domain.
Self driving cars can and will react faster than any person ever could.
Yes, there's definitely some intuition...you see that car and know it's going through the light or that pedestrian is about to sprint across 6 lanes of traffic. However you can program at least some of that in:
Evaluation - clear intersection, green light, right of way
Tracking - other vehicles approaching driving path; current speed and direction is towards this vehicle
Evaluation - other vehicles are required to yield due to traffic signal; evaluate delta-V of other vehicle; evaluate probability of vehicle stopping to avoid collision
Pretty sure this already exists in a more robust form or no driverless vehicle would go through an intersection while someone is approaching the perpendicular red light. There are some interesting things you can do with a driver that's constantly vigilant and has an unlimited attention span.
Yup.
Insurance is also discriminatory, legally.
What other industry can legally and directly charge more (i.e. discriminate) based on AGE, GENDER, marital status (which, until recently, was also linked to sexual orientation), education, neighborhood, non-felony convictions (i.e. tickets)?
People flip their lid if a cop decides to search a black person driving an expensive car with tints and a loud stereo through a terrible neighborhood and repeatedly past a known crack house...but an insurance company blithely does their equivalent with every single customer.
Insurance, by design, is a sham and a scam.
Even looking at the most basic premises - you (collectively, over time) pay X dollars, the insurance company pays out Y dollars. If Y > X then the insurance company goes bankrupt.
So by design, premiums MUST exceed payouts. On average it will always be cheaper to pay for things yourself, however people are NOT any good at saving $50K of oh-sh*t money in case they total someone's benz. Much easier for them to pay a $4K premium over 20 years.
In reality, the only thing insurance protects you from that you couldn't do on your own are the extreme situations. You total someone's ferrari and kill three people. Granted, without insurance you just declare bankruptcy.
I won't miss our insurance overlords...but I'm sure they'll pass bills requiring similarly priced insurance on driverless cars or something...by 'expanding' coverage or some 'for the people/children/etc.' reason.
On a test bed, sure the right amount of urea is dispensed. While accelerating through 24 gears from the traffic lights up hill? there is not a bat's chance in hell that the amount is correct.
The so called "clean diesel" is not only emitting vast amounts of NOx, it is also emitting vast amounts of un-reacted urea.
Why? Why is it not possible that the correct amount of urea can be applied during any combination of RPM, throttle position, air temp, etc. when we can do that just fine for fuel (in diesel or gas engines)?
And vast amounts of urea? You need to do a bit more homework since urea (well, DEF which is urea + H2O) consumption is only ~1/20th the amount of diesel the engine consumes. Take into account that urea is safe anyway (did you forget to google what urea is and what ELSE it's used for?) and this whole point is kind of ... well just plain silly.
VW still cheated but that's another story entirely.
So you're actually *complaining* that the carriers finally separated out the cost of the phone from the cost of their service?
There's tons of existing audit tracking file storage options.
Storage? Amazon or google are easy places to start - you can host the entire thing there. Heck, google can probably provide a youtube type interface for compressing footage etc. If they can handle umpteen billion hours of video then i'm sure they can handle police cameras.
Sure, until they point to the contract they signed with Taser, etc. with some random stipulations which make it impossible (or at least very difficult/costly) to disclose. Just like the cell tower spoofing which someone was contractually secret even though that should have been overriden by existing laws.
"Ok, let's write this agreement so when things disappear it's no ones fault, no one can request open access, no one can get files they want without lots of hoops and lawsuits, oh, and anything potentially harmful to the IT company is off limits...and *wink wink* we know that you providing footage of a cop committing murder would be harmful."
Phone contracts are 1 or 2 years typically (though now they're going out of vogue) ...
People 'grandfathered' in to various perks are left alone for PR reasons I assume...that or because many old plans are probably more profitable and it's easier to leave them all alone. There's no reason a cell carrier can't tell someone 'we no longer offer your xyz 'grandfathered' plan; you will need to pick a new one from our current choices.'
On the surface, I agree but when you dig a bit deeper it's not entirely true.
Individual uplinks aren't the issue here, neither is (to a larger degree) neighborhood level traffic. It's your ISP's connection(s) into the backbone and thus to netflix itself. This is why netflix offers ISPs cache boxes to reduce traffic going out of their network.
So Ch. 4 might "cost" more locally to stream but it's not using any actual internet bandwidth (except maybe a single stream inwards on a dedicated line which feeds all their customers).
Then again, assuming there's a netflix cache your netflix stream isn't 'costing' the ISP either. Then again again all the lawsuits about equal priority for internet traffic.
In the end I think it's ridiculous that ISPs are now trying to impose caps on wired bandwidth. They see all the big $ that the wireless carriers are getting out of the same scam and cry big crocodile tears.
No need! They're training poor people to be corporate minions. They can pay them about the same as those in Brazil except you don't have to fly someone all the way down there, build them a nice house, import nice cars, security, and food, to crack the whip over your slave^^^^^employees.
Newsflash: Not everyone has the same everything. That's communism.
Discrimination is one thing...and it's wrong.
At the same time this amounts to reverse discrimination. Any random minority* is automatically given assistance in any of a number of ways which give them advantages not available to many others. Of course, it's only if you fit in the right group that's crying about how they're wronged and oppressed. I'd love to see how well a white male scholarship fund does.
*Minority has a star since what's considered minorities these days outnumber the "majority". Protip: the world is pretty racially diverse in first world countries.
TBH, the link is more in the social norms of the group. The stereotype exists because, unfortunately, it's common.
Working poor? Yes, dual income + assistance barely puts food on the table.
Public assistance poor? They don't typically work. Have full access to medical programs, food, free education, etc. Heck, non-working parents on welfare apparently get an allowance for *daycare* as I understand it. In theory those parents have all the time in the world to spend raising their kids. They could learn right along with them if they're uneducated from all the take-home work and books if they were so motivated.
Sad but true.
Nah. Tech giants are interested in programing...erm grooming...erm educating future drones.
It's somewhat tongue in cheek but also I have to look at both sides. Yes, these companies want STEM grads ... heck they need them. And I think the H1-B thing is finally catching up enough with companies that they see the twilight coming.
The answer? Take poor kids and give them enough education (and, of course, propaganda about how great these companies are) to meet the same requirements.
Then you remember they're poor. So if you take a welfare-income family and pay their 20yo kid engineer/programmer 40K our of school they'll think they're rich. It's H1-B, plan B.
Or maybe I'm just in a pessimistic mood today and corporate greed evaporated overnight.
Even your coax was pushing a digital signal. It's not exactly IPTV but it's not all different anyhow.
Or rather...let me buy my *content* in a convenient way.
Netflix streaming was great until they started removing lots of movies.
Now the providers are fracturing the content between multiple services ... so you do kind of get the ala carte except you have to buy from a half dozen places. Oh, and fight with wonky interfaces that differ between them all. And you generally can't watch offline. And...so on.
Or just torrent whatever you want for free of course. I killed off cable TV ~5 years ago and still don't miss it.
Oh that old gag...
A credible threat of bodily injury should be a crime. The specific means of accomplishing that should be irrelevant.
AM would pay. They would (and probably are) offering that themselves.
Think about it. Someone says "I'm going to kill you and steal your wallet" ... typically someone hands over the wallet freely and asks what else they can do to not be killed.
Plus they way they're doing it will earn them a lot less negativity (especially among the "conservative" folks who "abhor" those kind of websites ... and secretly use them of course) than an actual blackmail threat.
Yes! Because every accountant, secretary, executive, and clerk is an expert on security and should be entitled to put the company at risk based on their own judgment. Try applying that same example to money within a company...
Sure, in a perfect world.
We live in a very imperfect world though. Your suggestion makes multiple assumptions, requires a fair bit of additional infrastructure (can't RDP without jumphost, can't video conference internally without a host, backups need to be daily and quick to restore), and still leaves the door wide open to information *loss*. Oh, and it requires a monitoring system to watch all file access in realtime and compare to some arbitrary standard...either in passive mode which means you're screwed already or active mode which means you have to deal with blocking people from accessing internal files.
Or I can just block blog content, gmail, and so on. It sucks but it sucks more to leave the door wide open.
Thank you for the voice of sanity. I think a lot of the comments about filtering == bad come from small to medium size businesses.
Move to enterprise scale, financials, anything subject to regulatory oversight, etc. and it's a totally different ballgame. Lots of comments about trusting users to Do The Right Thing. Guess what though...many don't realize what's Wrong and Right here...or it's far too easy to justify Wrong. Ignoring my personal opinions, pirating music is still illegal is the US...but plenty of people wouldn't think twice about loading a torrent client because they "have to" play this particular tune for the boss that's so perfect for etc. etc. etc.
I can't tell you how many "work" computers I've dealt with in the past that are loaded with personal information, pictures, pirated software/music/movies, porn, etc.
NBD in a small office...but potentially a huge legal issue for Big Business LLC.
And a pint is a pound ... it's not that complicated and how often do you really care how much a liquid weighs in your personal life? If you do this professionally/scientifically then it's just working knowledge to know this stuff.
Don't get me wrong, the metric system definitely easier to use in a lot of cases...but not so much easier that it really matters for daily life.
I've been replaying FO3 on PS3 and ... I can't even begin to count the number of crashes ESPECIALLY in the DLC. I save more out of fear of a crash than dying.
This is the GOTY edition which *should* have all the latest updates or patches too. I wish the load screen stats included a 'Still playing after xxx crashes' stat
but ... but ... but ...
If it costs more and has a fancy sticker (or IS a fancy sticker) it MUST be better right?
Does anyone actually believe the fancy-pants buzz-word laden spec sheets for consoles actually mean those "dedicated" chips do something special? Especially when the majority of people are probably going to use cheapy headphones or the speakers built into their TV anyway.