"They really don't stand for anything important, except a bunch of confused people with no particular ideology that just vote together for the sake of voting together. If they had an actual purpose, I imagine that people who weren't trained lapdogs (i.e. people who vote with their minds rather than their habits) might vote for them more often."
You know, that IS an actual purpose. A set a people with disimilar ideologies voting as a block has greater influence than the individuals alone. Of course, I personally believe a heck of a lot of voters vote for Republicans based on one issue alone. And that issue doesn't imply mcuh thinking. So as far as I am concerned, your rant applies to both parties....
"This would have a chilling effect on Congress and their attempts to pass laws which otherwise wouldn't be passed."
Thanks. I needed a really good laugh this morning. Such an amendment would do, well, almost nothing, to curb such things. Many states have similar requirements and riders are attached all the time. And are VERY hard to strike down even if taken to court.
A couple of reasons: Courts are VERY reluctant to interfere with the legislative process. Not to mention most riders can be made to have at least a passing relationship to the main bill.
"At least they're not touting this as an anti-terrorist measure. I guess that's no longer as credible as it used to be."
Yeah, all those cameras present seemed to prevent that "attack" at the British consulate recently in New York. I wonder if they caught the people responsible yet.... Of course, maybe the camera coverage is better in the UK:)
There is nothing wrong inherently wrong with FUD. It is a fact of life. And a component of all decisions, including the desire to act to prevent the global warming that many believe humans are causing. Otherwise the decisions would be easy.
There is always going to be legitimate FUD around this issue. The trick is to get rid of the useless FUD. Inaccurate research is always bad.
"Thus, any argument against that a global warming threat exists has to be very solid."
As near as I can tell, the debate is whether it's our fault or not. If the Earth is warming and is going to screw us over no matter what we do, what does it matter if you keep driving your SUV or not?
The real question is how much effect does that SUV have on climate change. Not easy to determine. Until it's too late or we have spent a lot of money that we may not have had too. Remember Y2K? Lots of people believe it wasn't a problem because nothing much happened. In some ways, you can't win.
"While I agree with the parent's message in spirit, in practice it is incorrect to treat a corporation as monolithic."
Sure, in reality they aren't, but in reality it doesn't really matter. They were either allowed to do it (standing policy) or broke policy while doing it. But if someone does something in the name of their employer (a corp) it tends to become "corporate policy" regardless of the actual policy unless it is quickly and unequivocally dealt with.
This would probably fall under their external PR guidelines. Possibly customer relations. There is a textbook response for everything. For PR (aka anything negative, it is probably "no comment" and contact our PR rep in state X. For customer service, it is probably similarly scripted. While employees may not follow it in practice, they tend to be herded into line when it becomes public...
"Many many "herbivores" eat meat and carnivores eat vegetables."
Then aren't they more properly termed omnivores? Calling them one or the other is incorrect, but common. I suspect we base dinosaur diet mainly off of their body type. Which doesn't work very well-as you have pointed out. Personally, I find it utterly unremarkable that these critters may have eaten veggies. The mass preservation (including some of their diet, apparently) is much more interesting.
This article seems to be a whole bunch of nothing. Probably butchered what the scientist(s) said. Or there was (more likely) nothing definite to say. Well, we think X ate meat because of all the sharp teeth but Y, a relative, seemed to have eaten some plants. Diet probably evolved.
Reporter/submitter takes it to say they evolved to herbivores. More likely, they were never true carnivores to begin with. Hell, people would assume a bear is a carnivore and be very wrong...
Huh? Could I have some of what you are smoking? It must be really good.
Evolution CAN be disproven. Hard to be a scientific theory if it couldn't.... In other words, if evolution says X should happpen but Y does, well then, there is a problem. Granted, evolution is a very large and complex theory and disproving it would not be easy to do. Probably why it is used so much....
"De-emphasize means that we can teach the scientific process and research methods without saying everything came from this species billions and billions of eons ago, and than magically transformed into this species. You know, actual science instead of fairy tales."
I'll be nice and assume you are not a troll. But if you REALLY believe what you say, you are ignorant bordering on the clueless. On the most basic level, antibiotic resistant bacteria are pretty much proof that evolution happens. More advanced would be intermediate species known in the fossil record (for periods of time less than 100k years). Just because you don't know about them doesn't make them fairy tales....
"Lift a gigabyte of restricted documents no one will notice, but send an email with a rude word in it and you get counselled for "unnaceptable" conduct.
security concious? no. righteous and moral? yes. wrong focus for a business, I think."
It may have very little to do with righteous and moral (at least with regards to the company). After all, if someone wants to leave with sensitive info, they will. The brain can hold a lot. After all, how much info that is "sensitive" is REALLY unknown to competitors?
But one or a few email(s) can do a LOT of damage. They probably believe the potential lawsuits/loss of image may be worse than any technical data loss that they really cannot prevent anyway.
Of course, it is highly likely they are clueless....
"I think this incidence shows how trigger happy and uncompetent the US troops are."
Yes and no. US troops are not incompetent. Nor are they trigger happy. But they are not well trained for police/anti-insurgent/occupation duties. That training is not easy, cheap, or quick. It also wasn't a priority. So the soldiers weren't trained in it. As a result, the soldiers are much closer to scared than trigger happy.
It is obvious that the military leadership is poor. Exactly what level(s) you want to put the blame at is up to you. There is plenty to go around.
"They should arrange their roadblocks with clear warnings - and preferrable also with physical blocks, using tire puncturing blocks etc."
Well, it was probably an impromptu roadblock. So physical blocks were out. The point of a road block is not to disable cars but to check them, so puncture devices are out. And if you give enough warning, well, people will likely go around, negating their effectiveness.
But hell, what kind of field "intelligence" officer doesn't understand the concept of a roadblock or the current environment of the locality they are operating in?
"I call BS. Go sit in a car and ask somebody to fire at you with the type of machine gun they used. You will think an whole army of tanks is shooting you to pieces (and wet your pants while you're at it)."
The problem isn't the orginal statement. It's one thing to think you were shot at by a tank and hundreds of rounds, learn differently, and correct your statements. When you learn the facts and ignore them, that's when your character and motives are rightly called into question.
"One of the Italians is dead. So he isn't saying anything.
He was also a trained intelligence agent with more time in service than most of the people in the US unit COMBINED.
So, why do you ASSUME that he made any mistakes?"
I think you answered your own question. When a so-called experienced intelligence agent gets killed by relatively inexperienced servicemen, it is reasonable to assume he made a mistake. Some of your other choices include, but are not limited to: he wasn't very good, it was a deliberate decision, unlucky (although "luck" tends to favor the prepared and the capable), etc.
All in all, I think it is very reasonable to assume he made a mistake.
"Given this extremely owner-favorable and employee-indifferent system, I'm surprised the champions and defenders of business have not moved to make gratuity-based occupations simply wage free."
If they thought they could, I'm sure they would try. But let's face it-politicians want to win elections. This would be bad from their point of view. Business owners want employees, even crappy ones. Based purely on tips, this wouldn't happen. Finally, how many people REALLY know that their server makes less than minimum wage? And if their tips don't make up the difference, how many would get fired for asking their employer to make up the difference (yes it is illegal, but you rarely take those jobs because you WANT to and they can always find another legal reason....)
"I hate tipping because a customer's idea of a good tip isn't necessarily the same as the waiter/waitress's idea."
That's the real reason I hate tipping. What is "good" service. What isn't. This definition also varies depending on my mood-some days what I would consider good service would be annoying. Frankly, I don't think too hard about tipping any longer. Which means my tip varies-and is often not dependent upon quality of service. Oh well, not my problem...
"And what's wrong with the customer paying for performance." It's called "incentive".
A better term would be "bonus". For going above and beyond the required amount. Paying for performance is what I call a wage. Incentive I define as doing well enough to keep my job:)
Why not just add a gratuity and allow customers to remove it? If you have bad service you (owner) have a good way to track it. Adequate to good service, it's easy. Excellent service, well they can tip more.
Or, they could operate like every other business and pay their employees a regular wage, price their products appropriately, and reward their good employees (or not, as is often the case....)
"BTW, the assured-clear-distance tickets, reckless operation citations, etc are finable offenses, so the "no revenue" accusation doesn't wash. Fact is, fewer of those offenses are ticketed because people take great pains not to commit them in front of police."
This is only partly true. I have seen people run red lights in front of police officers. Nothing happened. I have seen them tailgate regularly in front of officers. Nothing happened. Of course, I have also seen them speed in front of officers regularly and nothing happened too.
Speeding is easy to prove. The other offenses are more subjective. Guess which will be enforced more readily. The police and prosecutors are just as lazy as the rest of us.
One of the problems is the fact that almost everyone (if not everyone) breaks traffic laws at some point. But only a percentage are ticketed with negative consequences. This is a recipe for widespread dissatifaction. Of course, if they could ticket everyone, heads would roll (laws, speed limits, and elected officials would quickly change)....
I hate to break it to you, but even I would be sorely tempted to ask for a refund if it were freely available (if I didn't REALLY like the movie-which means I disliked the movie in part). Therefore, they would lose their shirt and not learn a whole lot.
I think if the movie was really bad, you should have no problem getting your money back or at least a free pass. Especially if you don't stay for the whole thing...
"I have about a 60% success rate with hard disks working more than a year, my wireless router lasted just past one year."
While it may be possible you just had bad luck, I suspect something in your computing environment sucks. As in, incredibly hard on equipment. I've had one CDRW fail out of all my components and I wouldn't consider myself easy on them. I don't buy high priced stuff either.
Of course, it is entirely possible that you just got "lucky" getting hardware likely to fail. Both our experiences are merely anecdotal....
"I agree with you, for all the crappy software that BillG has caused to be created, for all the good companies that MS has mercilessly killed, he's more than made up for, by donating billions to charity."
You know, if I had a choice, I would rather his company have competed fairly rather than being able to donate billions to charity. It is entirely possible that the same amount of money could/would have been donated by many people rather than one. But it is better than nothing.
"Pretty much everybody except Linus is in agreement that Tridge isn't doing anthing untoward, nothing different from the work he did in writing Samba."
So where is that BK clone? Oh, he didn't create one? So it IS different that the work he did in writing SAMBA.
"Everybody see that Linus is being hypocritical at best,...."
Sorry, see no evidence of that. Of course, I don't have a particular agenda.
Slashdot Mirror
"They really don't stand for anything important, except a bunch of confused people with no particular ideology that just vote together for the sake of voting together. If they had an actual purpose, I imagine that people who weren't trained lapdogs (i.e. people who vote with their minds rather than their habits) might vote for them more often."
You know, that IS an actual purpose. A set a people with disimilar ideologies voting as a block has greater influence than the individuals alone. Of course, I personally believe a heck of a lot of voters vote for Republicans based on one issue alone. And that issue doesn't imply mcuh thinking. So as far as I am concerned, your rant applies to both parties....
"This would have a chilling effect on Congress and their attempts to pass laws which otherwise wouldn't be passed."
Thanks. I needed a really good laugh this morning. Such an amendment would do, well, almost nothing, to curb such things. Many states have similar requirements and riders are attached all the time. And are VERY hard to strike down even if taken to court.
A couple of reasons: Courts are VERY reluctant to interfere with the legislative process. Not to mention most riders can be made to have at least a passing relationship to the main bill.
"1) It creates MORE government, not less. Republicans are supposed to be for smaller government, but this flies in the face of that policy."
:)
Hmm, seems you missed the memo. The Republicans now only SAY they are for less government.
I do find it interesting that the Libertarian party seems to be what Republicans claim to be. Proof, apparently that marketing wins over substance.
"At least they're not touting this as an anti-terrorist measure. I guess that's no longer as credible as it used to be."
:)
Yeah, all those cameras present seemed to prevent that "attack" at the British consulate recently in New York. I wonder if they caught the people responsible yet.... Of course, maybe the camera coverage is better in the UK
There is nothing wrong inherently wrong with FUD. It is a fact of life. And a component of all decisions, including the desire to act to prevent the global warming that many believe humans are causing. Otherwise the decisions would be easy.
There is always going to be legitimate FUD around this issue. The trick is to get rid of the useless FUD. Inaccurate research is always bad.
"Thus, any argument against that a global warming threat exists has to be very solid."
As near as I can tell, the debate is whether it's our fault or not. If the Earth is warming and is going to screw us over no matter what we do, what does it matter if you keep driving your SUV or not?
The real question is how much effect does that SUV have on climate change. Not easy to determine. Until it's too late or we have spent a lot of money that we may not have had too. Remember Y2K? Lots of people believe it wasn't a problem because nothing much happened. In some ways, you can't win.
"While I agree with the parent's message in spirit, in practice it is incorrect to treat a corporation as monolithic."
Sure, in reality they aren't, but in reality it doesn't really matter. They were either allowed to do it (standing policy) or broke policy while doing it. But if someone does something in the name of their employer (a corp) it tends to become "corporate policy" regardless of the actual policy unless it is quickly and unequivocally dealt with.
This would probably fall under their external PR guidelines. Possibly customer relations. There is a textbook response for everything. For PR (aka anything negative, it is probably "no comment" and contact our PR rep in state X. For customer service, it is probably similarly scripted. While employees may not follow it in practice, they tend to be herded into line when it becomes public...
"Many many "herbivores" eat meat and carnivores eat vegetables."
Then aren't they more properly termed omnivores? Calling them one or the other is incorrect, but common. I suspect we base dinosaur diet mainly off of their body type. Which doesn't work very well-as you have pointed out. Personally, I find it utterly unremarkable that these critters may have eaten veggies. The mass preservation (including some of their diet, apparently) is much more interesting.
It's good that someone realizes that.
This article seems to be a whole bunch of nothing. Probably butchered what the scientist(s) said. Or there was (more likely) nothing definite to say. Well, we think X ate meat because of all the sharp teeth but Y, a relative, seemed to have eaten some plants. Diet probably evolved.
Reporter/submitter takes it to say they evolved to herbivores. More likely, they were never true carnivores to begin with. Hell, people would assume a bear is a carnivore and be very wrong...
Well, engineers are well known for wanting "the answer" and otherwise disliking uncertainty.... :)
Remember, engineers are not the same thing as scientists.
"There is no way to disprove evolution."
Huh? Could I have some of what you are smoking? It must be really good.
Evolution CAN be disproven. Hard to be a scientific theory if it couldn't.... In other words, if evolution says X should happpen but Y does, well then, there is a problem. Granted, evolution is a very large and complex theory and disproving it would not be easy to do. Probably why it is used so much....
"De-emphasize means that we can teach the scientific process and research methods without saying everything came from this species billions and billions of eons ago, and than magically transformed into this species. You know, actual science instead of fairy tales."
I'll be nice and assume you are not a troll. But if you REALLY believe what you say, you are ignorant bordering on the clueless. On the most basic level, antibiotic resistant bacteria are pretty much proof that evolution happens. More advanced would be intermediate species known in the fossil record (for periods of time less than 100k years). Just because you don't know about them doesn't make them fairy tales....
"Lift a gigabyte of restricted documents no one will notice, but send an email with a rude word in it and you get counselled for "unnaceptable" conduct.
security concious? no. righteous and moral? yes. wrong focus for a business, I think."
It may have very little to do with righteous and moral (at least with regards to the company). After all, if someone wants to leave with sensitive info, they will. The brain can hold a lot. After all, how much info that is "sensitive" is REALLY unknown to competitors?
But one or a few email(s) can do a LOT of damage. They probably believe the potential lawsuits/loss of image may be worse than any technical data loss that they really cannot prevent anyway.
Of course, it is highly likely they are clueless....
"I think this incidence shows how trigger happy and uncompetent the US troops are."
Yes and no. US troops are not incompetent. Nor are they trigger happy. But they are not well trained for police/anti-insurgent/occupation duties. That training is not easy, cheap, or quick. It also wasn't a priority. So the soldiers weren't trained in it. As a result, the soldiers are much closer to scared than trigger happy.
It is obvious that the military leadership is poor. Exactly what level(s) you want to put the blame at is up to you. There is plenty to go around.
"They should arrange their roadblocks with clear warnings - and preferrable also with physical blocks, using tire puncturing blocks etc."
Well, it was probably an impromptu roadblock. So physical blocks were out. The point of a road block is not to disable cars but to check them, so puncture devices are out. And if you give enough warning, well, people will likely go around, negating their effectiveness.
But hell, what kind of field "intelligence" officer doesn't understand the concept of a roadblock or the current environment of the locality they are operating in?
"I call BS. Go sit in a car and ask somebody to fire at you with the type of machine gun they used. You will think an whole army of tanks is shooting you to pieces (and wet your pants while you're at it)."
The problem isn't the orginal statement. It's one thing to think you were shot at by a tank and hundreds of rounds, learn differently, and correct your statements. When you learn the facts and ignore them, that's when your character and motives are rightly called into question.
"One of the Italians is dead. So he isn't saying anything.
He was also a trained intelligence agent with more time in service than most of the people in the US unit COMBINED.
So, why do you ASSUME that he made any mistakes?"
I think you answered your own question. When a so-called experienced intelligence agent gets killed by relatively inexperienced servicemen, it is reasonable to assume he made a mistake. Some of your other choices include, but are not limited to: he wasn't very good, it was a deliberate decision, unlucky (although "luck" tends to favor the prepared and the capable), etc.
All in all, I think it is very reasonable to assume he made a mistake.
"Given this extremely owner-favorable and employee-indifferent system, I'm surprised the champions and defenders of business have not moved to make gratuity-based occupations simply wage free."
If they thought they could, I'm sure they would try. But let's face it-politicians want to win elections. This would be bad from their point of view. Business owners want employees, even crappy ones. Based purely on tips, this wouldn't happen. Finally, how many people REALLY know that their server makes less than minimum wage? And if their tips don't make up the difference, how many would get fired for asking their employer to make up the difference (yes it is illegal, but you rarely take those jobs because you WANT to and they can always find another legal reason....)
"I hate tipping because a customer's idea of a good tip isn't necessarily the same as the waiter/waitress's idea."
That's the real reason I hate tipping. What is "good" service. What isn't. This definition also varies depending on my mood-some days what I would consider good service would be annoying. Frankly, I don't think too hard about tipping any longer. Which means my tip varies-and is often not dependent upon quality of service. Oh well, not my problem...
"And what's wrong with the customer paying for performance." It's called "incentive".
:)
A better term would be "bonus". For going above and beyond the required amount. Paying for performance is what I call a wage. Incentive I define as doing well enough to keep my job
Why not just add a gratuity and allow customers to remove it? If you have bad service you (owner) have a good way to track it. Adequate to good service, it's easy. Excellent service, well they can tip more.
Or, they could operate like every other business and pay their employees a regular wage, price their products appropriately, and reward their good employees (or not, as is often the case....)
So, the class DID prepare you for real life then, didn't it :)
"BTW, the assured-clear-distance tickets, reckless operation citations, etc are finable offenses, so the "no revenue" accusation doesn't wash. Fact is, fewer of those offenses are ticketed because people take great pains not to commit them in front of police."
This is only partly true. I have seen people run red lights in front of police officers. Nothing happened. I have seen them tailgate regularly in front of officers. Nothing happened. Of course, I have also seen them speed in front of officers regularly and nothing happened too.
Speeding is easy to prove. The other offenses are more subjective. Guess which will be enforced more readily. The police and prosecutors are just as lazy as the rest of us.
One of the problems is the fact that almost everyone (if not everyone) breaks traffic laws at some point. But only a percentage are ticketed with negative consequences. This is a recipe for widespread dissatifaction. Of course, if they could ticket everyone, heads would roll (laws, speed limits, and elected officials would quickly change)....
I hate to break it to you, but even I would be sorely tempted to ask for a refund if it were freely available (if I didn't REALLY like the movie-which means I disliked the movie in part). Therefore, they would lose their shirt and not learn a whole lot.
I think if the movie was really bad, you should have no problem getting your money back or at least a free pass. Especially if you don't stay for the whole thing...
"When a CEO bitches like that, he's just scared of competition."
Or his marketing department....
Hey, that's a great advertising campaign! Oh damn, now our customers expect us to meet our overblown promises!
"I have about a 60% success rate with hard disks working more than a year, my wireless router lasted just past one year."
While it may be possible you just had bad luck, I suspect something in your computing environment sucks. As in, incredibly hard on equipment. I've had one CDRW fail out of all my components and I wouldn't consider myself easy on them. I don't buy high priced stuff either.
Of course, it is entirely possible that you just got "lucky" getting hardware likely to fail. Both our experiences are merely anecdotal....
"I agree with you, for all the crappy software that BillG has caused to be created, for all the good companies that MS has mercilessly killed, he's more than made up for, by donating billions to charity."
You know, if I had a choice, I would rather his company have competed fairly rather than being able to donate billions to charity. It is entirely possible that the same amount of money could/would have been donated by many people rather than one. But it is better than nothing.
"Pretty much everybody except Linus is in agreement that Tridge isn't doing anthing untoward, nothing different from the work he did in writing Samba."
...."
So where is that BK clone? Oh, he didn't create one? So it IS different that the work he did in writing SAMBA.
"Everybody see that Linus is being hypocritical at best,
Sorry, see no evidence of that. Of course, I don't have a particular agenda.