Of course, my beloved evil black cat Sophie is looking out the window and not seeing me write this. I wouldn't want her to think that she would ever be on the menu. The only menu she wants to be on is the one that I can't read because she's standing on it demanding to be petted. I can't train her but she's got me pretty well trained.
I believe that you are paid far more than the lowly Apple Store clerk, unless you are one of those pilots who work for one of those awful regional airlines. I find your lack of sympathy to be quite callous and arrogant. But I am hardly in a position to judge you.
In California, under state law it is very expensive for an employer to employ shenanigans like this. The fines can be quite large, the litigation can be quite expensive, and there is a potential for the employees to be paid wages while the issue is being resolved by the courts (at least as I understand the law). There is a reason why employers don't like California regulations, employees have the potential to grab the employer by the balls and twist and twist if the state EDD finds that the charges have merit.
Anyway, this case is just another example of just how evil Apple is as a company. It is unfortunate because I like its products (mostly) and I've owned several over the years.
This reminds me of the "Space Gun" depicted in the 1937 British sci-fi classic (almost an oxymoron since history has shown that the best science fiction Britain has been able to produce is "Doctor Who", not a ringing endorsement) "Things to Come". We get to see it shoot the capsule into space and using a big telescope the final protagonists are able to see we don't get to see the red goo the two occupants were turned into by the G forces.
I voted for Obama the first time around. I stopped voting after that and I don't vote any more. I don't see the point. The only change that anyone really understands comes from the barrel of an artillery piece and I don't see that happening in the US any time soon. We vote for judges and they still send far too many people into a prison system that they know is massively overcrowded and is very good at producing more prison fodder in the future. We vote for politicians and they still are more interested in their own wealth and re-election prospects than my welfare or that of any other citizen.
Ah well, as Winston Churchill once said: "Many forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."
They'll just put him in prison with a bunk mate that is a total psychopath and let him torture/murder Snowden - plausible deniability!
Bunkmate? You think he'll have a bunkmate? No, he will be put in solitary confinement after he is captured "for his own safety as well as security of the nation because of what he knows", found guilty in a trial that will be neither open nor fair because he will not be able to introduce the witnesses or evidence he'd like because of the classified nature of what he revealed, then sent to USP Florence ADMAX where he will continue to be housed in solitary confinement for the rest of his life where he will have Robert Hanssen, the Unibomber, and various terrorists such as the shoe bomber and the underwear bomber as neighbors although he'll never meet them.
Solitary confinement IS an effective form of psychological torture. It does permanent psychological damage. Eric Holder is a liar. Mr. Snowden will be tortured; there is no doubt of it. It's just that he, unlike the rest of the world, doesn't consider things like solitary confinement and water boarding to be torture.
I would opine that Windows 95 was actually the last innovative product that Microsoft brought out. Think about it: 16- and 32-bit program support, plug and play (or "plug and pray" as we called it early on), protected memory support, good virtual memory support, pre-emptive multitasking, networking support. Yes, as a multitasking operating system is was mediocre and its stability left little to be desired when compared to Windows NT, but compared to available alternatives (Windows 3.11 and MacOS) it was miraculous. AND it ran on just about every configuration of PC hardware imaginable.
This comment is spot on. This is a blatant lie by the NSA and National Geographic should be lining up their expert witnesses to back up such a claim in order to get the judge to force the NSA to "create" such a capability.... quickly. A computer-savvy high school kid can build an e-mail system search tool. There is no reason why someone at the NSA can't do something similar in a short period of time.
First, Microsoft sells them at about twice what an ordinary tablet sells at. That in itself is enough to make me not want to buy one. After all, if I want to buy overpriced computer hardware I'll buy it from Apple (which I do already—Macs, though, not the iPac/iPhone). Then there is that boot sector virus they call an operating system that runs on it. It's awful on a desktop or a laptop; it's only marginally better on the Surface because using one's finger is a little bit more intuitive in the way they have it laid out. So, the question I want to have answered is why did they actually sell so many? Are there really that many stupid people with the money to throw away? Lots of money and stupidity usually don't correlate unless you're in Congress (especially if you're a Republican) or you've won the lottery.
As if the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation doesn't have enough problems on its hands being forced to downsize the population of its myriad gulags, they have two prisons near Ground Zero of this disease and several more in the general vicinity. It would not be surprising if they are forced by a court eventually to close these prisons because of valley fever. I, for one, would be pleased to see a reversal in the trend in the United States to imprison instead of rehabilitate those who are eminently rehabilitatable.
This is great news, not surprising, but great none the less. It's just that more evidence that Mars was a living, breathing planet, and might still be that way in some limited forms. Or perhaps not even all that limited if life on Mars never went beyond the microscopic form. But I'll get really excited and piss in my pants with giddiness if we learn that the transpermia theory has been confirmed and that life on Earth started on Mars. But that's a long, long way away.
This has already been settled in court. If you can't prove that you were harmed by a secret program, you don't have standing to sue. (Regardless of the fact that you can never prove that you were harmed because, you know, it's a secret)
Technically true but there is ample Supreme Court precedent from the civil rights days that says, more or less, the fact that the government knows who you associate with harms you. I refer to you NAACP v.Alabama, 357 U.S. 449 (1958) which made it clear that people had the right to associate anonymously which was echoed a few years later in NAACP v. Alabama ex. rel. Flowers, 377 U.S. 288 (1964). I believe you will agree that the NSA collecting this information the way it does makes anonymous telephonic association for legal purposes impossible.
Either spelling is acceptable. The people who invented the language spell it with a 'c'.
I wouldn't give the people who invented the language much credit. They inflicted upon the Anglophone world their horrible spelling conventions that are the root of this particular, completely-unrelated-to-George-Zimmerman controversy.
It sounds like the Florida State Attorney's Office has some s'plainin' to do. Withholding evidence from the defense is really, super unethical; I wouldn't be surprised if you could be disbarred for it.
You can be disbarred for it. It's also a criminal offense in many states, usually a felony which will result in immediate disbarment anyway. It's also a civil rights violation which makes it a criminal as well as a civil federal offense, the civil right being a fair trial. Fortunately for the AG, Mr. Zimmerman was acquitted. If he were found guilty and did go to prison, if it could be shown that that AG knew about this information and purposely withheld it, he could be sent to prison and Zimmerman would likely get a new trial.
Florida is a Right to Fire... erm, Hire state. I always confuse the two words because whenever I hear the phrase, it's always used in the context of firing people. Anyway, incompetence is a Florida-based employer's way of firing you simply because they don't like you. If you don't cross enough T's and dot enough I's it is grounds for incompetence.
It is a federal offense to fire an employee for whistleblowing. I refer you to this for further information.
Actually, as I understand civil rights law (and I do since I've researched the topic in order to file one soon), not only does this IT director have a good Federal 1983 civil rights case against the state of Florida, he can and should sue the Attorney General in both his official and his personal capacity. Government employees usually have immunity from liability for their official actions but if they knowingly or should have known that their actions were illegal or unconstitutional, either a violation of statute or goes against well-established court opinions on the subject (case law), they lose that immunity and can be sued in their person capacity. That means that the FL AG has just opened himself up to being liable to have to pay damages to this guy. Now, usually, when a government employee is found to be personally liable, the government will pay what he has been ordered to pay... but it doesn't have to and sometimes when the action is egregiously illegal as in this case it refuses to do so. Ultimately, when the AG loses (which he likely will given the facts of the case in the article) the Governor will have him by the balls since I suspect that he will be the one who ultimately makes the decision whether to pay.
Well, there are worse things he can do in his spare time (something he has a lot of in a prison cell) than design a vacuum cleaner. While the world does not need another terrorist since the so-called Third World and American fringe element nut jobs are very good at making those, the world can always use another good vacuum cleaner. My Dyson vacuum cleaner is good but I need one that is powered by a tame black hole for better sucking qualities. Also, with a tame black hole, I won't need to empty the dust container. Perhaps he can design one, even build it, make a mistake and suck himself out of existence!
Aside from the fact that it exists and that it's expensive is the experience we had in the mid-1980's with it when I was an undergrad. It ran on a Prime minicomputer. Even though only students were banging away at the server, it crashed a lot. The computer operator in the mainframe fishbowl had to called to restart it. If it was at night when there was no operator on duty, no Oracle. A very reliable minicomputer running a then unreliable database server. I suspect they've fixed their problems since then.
Hey! I have an old manual typewriter (K-Mart brand but might be a Royal on the inside) and I'm not a hipster. For one thing, I wear my hair short and when I grew a beard I couldn't get rid of it quickly enough. Second, I'm a registered Republican.... (but I usually vote for Democrats). However, I learned to touch type (that's to type without looking at the keyboard) on a manual typewriter so, unlike most of you kids here, I know how to properly use it.
No matter how deep a background check goes, no matter how thorough the inquiry is into a person's character, no matter how many interviews are made of friends and family, and no matter how many polygraph tests are performed, if a person is given a position that requires some trust there is always going to be a chance that this person is going to abuse the trust. Psychopaths and sociopaths the the scariest of these people because they have no problem with lying, are good at it because they are usually good at being manipulative, are often very well liked by family and friends, and can lie without end like a baby-kissing politician running for re-election and still pass a polygraph test.
Perhaps the problem is in the kind of people being sought for these jobs that require great trust. While a person needs to be squeaky clean to get security clearance, perhaps the squeaky clean requirement is causing the government to choose some from the wrong pool of candidates. My experience has been that you will have a better chance of finding an honest man (or woman) by looking at those who have messed up in his or her life, is genuinely repentent, and has demonstrated through years of clean and honest living that he or she is worthy of such great trust. The gratitude that comes from being given this second chance is an incredible motivator in steering a straight and narrow course through life.
Melville Dewey, the progenitor of librarianship in this country and the creator of the Dewey Decimal System for call numbers on books that is used throughout much of the world (including most public libraries in the English-speaking world), was an advocate for phonetic spelling. He often spelled his own name Melvil Dui. However, Dewey was kind of a harmless lunatic and, as I remember, not many took him seriously.
Honestly, can you imagine the difficulty that would be caused by having to learn how to spell words differently after having slogged through years of primary school learning how to spell them the "old-fashioned" way? It would be sort of like the revolution created by Kamal Attaturk created in Turkey by using the authority of the government to abolish the use of the Arabic alphabet for writing Turkish in favor of the Latin alphabet.
Anyway, this nut job who wants to create a whole new letter to replace an archaic one we ditched centuries ago because he's lazy should just go away and get a life.
Slashdot Mirror
As I saw on a bumper sticker many years ago:
CAT: THE OTHER WHITE MEAT
Of course, my beloved evil black cat Sophie is looking out the window and not seeing me write this. I wouldn't want her to think that she would ever be on the menu. The only menu she wants to be on is the one that I can't read because she's standing on it demanding to be petted. I can't train her but she's got me pretty well trained.
I believe that you are paid far more than the lowly Apple Store clerk, unless you are one of those pilots who work for one of those awful regional airlines. I find your lack of sympathy to be quite callous and arrogant. But I am hardly in a position to judge you.
In California, under state law it is very expensive for an employer to employ shenanigans like this. The fines can be quite large, the litigation can be quite expensive, and there is a potential for the employees to be paid wages while the issue is being resolved by the courts (at least as I understand the law). There is a reason why employers don't like California regulations, employees have the potential to grab the employer by the balls and twist and twist if the state EDD finds that the charges have merit.
Anyway, this case is just another example of just how evil Apple is as a company. It is unfortunate because I like its products (mostly) and I've owned several over the years.
This reminds me of the "Space Gun" depicted in the 1937 British sci-fi classic (almost an oxymoron since history has shown that the best science fiction Britain has been able to produce is "Doctor Who", not a ringing endorsement) "Things to Come". We get to see it shoot the capsule into space and using a big telescope the final protagonists are able to see we don't get to see the red goo the two occupants were turned into by the G forces.
Any store like this would be one that I would not shop in. A Minority Report-type world makes me want to live off the grid.
I voted for Obama the first time around. I stopped voting after that and I don't vote any more. I don't see the point. The only change that anyone really understands comes from the barrel of an artillery piece and I don't see that happening in the US any time soon. We vote for judges and they still send far too many people into a prison system that they know is massively overcrowded and is very good at producing more prison fodder in the future. We vote for politicians and they still are more interested in their own wealth and re-election prospects than my welfare or that of any other citizen.
Ah well, as Winston Churchill once said: "Many forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."
They'll just put him in prison with a bunk mate that is a total psychopath and let him torture/murder Snowden - plausible deniability!
Bunkmate? You think he'll have a bunkmate? No, he will be put in solitary confinement after he is captured "for his own safety as well as security of the nation because of what he knows", found guilty in a trial that will be neither open nor fair because he will not be able to introduce the witnesses or evidence he'd like because of the classified nature of what he revealed, then sent to USP Florence ADMAX where he will continue to be housed in solitary confinement for the rest of his life where he will have Robert Hanssen, the Unibomber, and various terrorists such as the shoe bomber and the underwear bomber as neighbors although he'll never meet them.
Solitary confinement IS an effective form of psychological torture. It does permanent psychological damage. Eric Holder is a liar. Mr. Snowden will be tortured; there is no doubt of it. It's just that he, unlike the rest of the world, doesn't consider things like solitary confinement and water boarding to be torture.
I would opine that Windows 95 was actually the last innovative product that Microsoft brought out. Think about it: 16- and 32-bit program support, plug and play (or "plug and pray" as we called it early on), protected memory support, good virtual memory support, pre-emptive multitasking, networking support. Yes, as a multitasking operating system is was mediocre and its stability left little to be desired when compared to Windows NT, but compared to available alternatives (Windows 3.11 and MacOS) it was miraculous. AND it ran on just about every configuration of PC hardware imaginable.
This comment is spot on. This is a blatant lie by the NSA and National Geographic should be lining up their expert witnesses to back up such a claim in order to get the judge to force the NSA to "create" such a capability.... quickly. A computer-savvy high school kid can build an e-mail system search tool. There is no reason why someone at the NSA can't do something similar in a short period of time.
First, Microsoft sells them at about twice what an ordinary tablet sells at. That in itself is enough to make me not want to buy one. After all, if I want to buy overpriced computer hardware I'll buy it from Apple (which I do already—Macs, though, not the iPac/iPhone). Then there is that boot sector virus they call an operating system that runs on it. It's awful on a desktop or a laptop; it's only marginally better on the Surface because using one's finger is a little bit more intuitive in the way they have it laid out. So, the question I want to have answered is why did they actually sell so many? Are there really that many stupid people with the money to throw away? Lots of money and stupidity usually don't correlate unless you're in Congress (especially if you're a Republican) or you've won the lottery.
From the summary:
It never leaves the body and symptoms can be triggered again.
From the linked article
The infection ordinarily resolves leaving the patient with a specific immunity to re-infection.
Both cannot be true.
Yes they can. The body can obtain an immunity to it but not completely leave. Think HIV or the various herpes viruses.
As if the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation doesn't have enough problems on its hands being forced to downsize the population of its myriad gulags, they have two prisons near Ground Zero of this disease and several more in the general vicinity. It would not be surprising if they are forced by a court eventually to close these prisons because of valley fever. I, for one, would be pleased to see a reversal in the trend in the United States to imprison instead of rehabilitate those who are eminently rehabilitatable.
This is great news, not surprising, but great none the less. It's just that more evidence that Mars was a living, breathing planet, and might still be that way in some limited forms. Or perhaps not even all that limited if life on Mars never went beyond the microscopic form. But I'll get really excited and piss in my pants with giddiness if we learn that the transpermia theory has been confirmed and that life on Earth started on Mars. But that's a long, long way away.
This has already been settled in court. If you can't prove that you were harmed by a secret program, you don't have standing to sue. (Regardless of the fact that you can never prove that you were harmed because, you know, it's a secret)
Technically true but there is ample Supreme Court precedent from the civil rights days that says, more or less, the fact that the government knows who you associate with harms you. I refer to you NAACP v.Alabama, 357 U.S. 449 (1958) which made it clear that people had the right to associate anonymously which was echoed a few years later in NAACP v. Alabama ex. rel. Flowers, 377 U.S. 288 (1964). I believe you will agree that the NSA collecting this information the way it does makes anonymous telephonic association for legal purposes impossible.
And it's defense, not defence.
Either spelling is acceptable. The people who invented the language spell it with a 'c'.
I wouldn't give the people who invented the language much credit. They inflicted upon the Anglophone world their horrible spelling conventions that are the root of this particular, completely-unrelated-to-George-Zimmerman controversy.
It sounds like the Florida State Attorney's Office has some s'plainin' to do. Withholding evidence from the defense is really, super unethical; I wouldn't be surprised if you could be disbarred for it.
You can be disbarred for it. It's also a criminal offense in many states, usually a felony which will result in immediate disbarment anyway. It's also a civil rights violation which makes it a criminal as well as a civil federal offense, the civil right being a fair trial. Fortunately for the AG, Mr. Zimmerman was acquitted. If he were found guilty and did go to prison, if it could be shown that that AG knew about this information and purposely withheld it, he could be sent to prison and Zimmerman would likely get a new trial.
Oh yes he can sue. He can sue in Federal court for being dismissed as a whistleblower. That is illegal under Federal law.
Florida is a Right to Fire... erm, Hire state. I always confuse the two words because whenever I hear the phrase, it's always used in the context of firing people. Anyway, incompetence is a Florida-based employer's way of firing you simply because they don't like you. If you don't cross enough T's and dot enough I's it is grounds for incompetence.
It is a federal offense to fire an employee for whistleblowing. I refer you to this for further information.
Actually, as I understand civil rights law (and I do since I've researched the topic in order to file one soon), not only does this IT director have a good Federal 1983 civil rights case against the state of Florida, he can and should sue the Attorney General in both his official and his personal capacity. Government employees usually have immunity from liability for their official actions but if they knowingly or should have known that their actions were illegal or unconstitutional, either a violation of statute or goes against well-established court opinions on the subject (case law), they lose that immunity and can be sued in their person capacity. That means that the FL AG has just opened himself up to being liable to have to pay damages to this guy. Now, usually, when a government employee is found to be personally liable, the government will pay what he has been ordered to pay... but it doesn't have to and sometimes when the action is egregiously illegal as in this case it refuses to do so. Ultimately, when the AG loses (which he likely will given the facts of the case in the article) the Governor will have him by the balls since I suspect that he will be the one who ultimately makes the decision whether to pay.
Well, there are worse things he can do in his spare time (something he has a lot of in a prison cell) than design a vacuum cleaner. While the world does not need another terrorist since the so-called Third World and American fringe element nut jobs are very good at making those, the world can always use another good vacuum cleaner. My Dyson vacuum cleaner is good but I need one that is powered by a tame black hole for better sucking qualities. Also, with a tame black hole, I won't need to empty the dust container. Perhaps he can design one, even build it, make a mistake and suck himself out of existence!
Aside from the fact that it exists and that it's expensive is the experience we had in the mid-1980's with it when I was an undergrad. It ran on a Prime minicomputer. Even though only students were banging away at the server, it crashed a lot. The computer operator in the mainframe fishbowl had to called to restart it. If it was at night when there was no operator on duty, no Oracle. A very reliable minicomputer running a then unreliable database server. I suspect they've fixed their problems since then.
Hey! I have an old manual typewriter (K-Mart brand but might be a Royal on the inside) and I'm not a hipster. For one thing, I wear my hair short and when I grew a beard I couldn't get rid of it quickly enough. Second, I'm a registered Republican.... (but I usually vote for Democrats). However, I learned to touch type (that's to type without looking at the keyboard) on a manual typewriter so, unlike most of you kids here, I know how to properly use it.
This idea is absolutely nuts. But if they're hiring park rangers I'll be in line!
No matter how deep a background check goes, no matter how thorough the inquiry is into a person's character, no matter how many interviews are made of friends and family, and no matter how many polygraph tests are performed, if a person is given a position that requires some trust there is always going to be a chance that this person is going to abuse the trust. Psychopaths and sociopaths the the scariest of these people because they have no problem with lying, are good at it because they are usually good at being manipulative, are often very well liked by family and friends, and can lie without end like a baby-kissing politician running for re-election and still pass a polygraph test.
Perhaps the problem is in the kind of people being sought for these jobs that require great trust. While a person needs to be squeaky clean to get security clearance, perhaps the squeaky clean requirement is causing the government to choose some from the wrong pool of candidates. My experience has been that you will have a better chance of finding an honest man (or woman) by looking at those who have messed up in his or her life, is genuinely repentent, and has demonstrated through years of clean and honest living that he or she is worthy of such great trust. The gratitude that comes from being given this second chance is an incredible motivator in steering a straight and narrow course through life.
Melville Dewey, the progenitor of librarianship in this country and the creator of the Dewey Decimal System for call numbers on books that is used throughout much of the world (including most public libraries in the English-speaking world), was an advocate for phonetic spelling. He often spelled his own name Melvil Dui. However, Dewey was kind of a harmless lunatic and, as I remember, not many took him seriously.
Honestly, can you imagine the difficulty that would be caused by having to learn how to spell words differently after having slogged through years of primary school learning how to spell them the "old-fashioned" way? It would be sort of like the revolution created by Kamal Attaturk created in Turkey by using the authority of the government to abolish the use of the Arabic alphabet for writing Turkish in favor of the Latin alphabet.
Anyway, this nut job who wants to create a whole new letter to replace an archaic one we ditched centuries ago because he's lazy should just go away and get a life.