You seem to be intimating that the ridiculous efforts Aereo had to go to, to get the single to another part of the country was Aereos fault. It's not. The single is broadcast by the network of their own will... the user could, technically, set up their own highly sensitive antenna equipment and amplifiers and get a TV signal from any station in the country... but that would be very expensive. The idea that there's a distinction between such a setup, relaying the data across IP or the crazy Antenna setup that Aereo came up with is ridiculous. The content industry is trying to get the law to make technology operate the way they wish it would, rather than how it actually does. This is a problem entirely invented by the content industry and the politicians they paid to get irrational laws passed to protect their non-existent product.
I just want to point out to any Aereo users that should they get shut down, you can still go back to the Pirate bay and start real piracy again. It's a lot easier than this nonsense, all the commercials are edited out for you already AND if you thought you were sticking it to the broadcasting industry before, you'd really be sticking it to them now.
This has been available on Google earth for years. It's just new to Google Maps. The most useful aspect of this is if you're buying a house. You can look back at past records to see just how old that swimming pool really is... or did the owner really build that garage last year?
It's the opposite of handy if you're selling however;-)
I see everyone going off on either Libertarian or Leftist rants here... but it's not quite that simple.
First, my son is black, I'm white... so I have a vested interest in both races succeeding:-) So that's full disclosure I guess...
First, the reason for affirmative action is often argued as a way to help "the disadvantaged" Well, this is just flat out wrong. Diversity in a school, or anywhere for that matter, doesn't aid the minority students all that much. Yea, sure, they would have gotten in where maybe they otherwise couldn't, but does that really help them? Do get into a school they weren't qualified for? Diversity helps the SCHOOL and the students of the majority. If you went to an all white school, how well prepared do you think you would be for the modern working world? Diversity gives the school and the students have a broader view of the world. Marketing students gets more experience with other races and cultures. Programers learn how to communicate with people that might not speak English that well. (I just got out of a metting where my 60yr old co-worker was completely lost because the guy leading the meeting was teleconferencing from India. I didn't have a problem.) Engineering students learn new techniques from people that may have had different experiences.
With regard to my son, it's really hard to find good role models for him. Yes, there are plenty of great African American Scientists form throughout history. But they are not held in that high of a regard by the African American community. I get to go to "African American Parents groups" and I see it there. It's kind of weird that an the majority of a communities basis for success is related to professional athletes. It's something I had not anticipating as being that big of a problem, but I can really see it now that I have a son that's black. Obama, though I disagree with almost all of his policies, has been a huge boon in that regard. I can point to him and say "See? The most important person in the free world looks like you!" and yes, that is something he's asked about. I think the only real problem he has now is he wishes he had strait hair because he wants to have more than 3 options (shaved, Mohawk or Afro) when he goes to the barber.
So the question is: Should the schools garner this diversity benefit at the expense of white kids? I say no. And again, I think the arguments been reversed. It's not a dis-service to the white students. They'll get a degree from somewhere. But what does this do to the minority community? I don't want my son to EVER think he deserves something because of the color of his skin, or some injustice that happened to his ancestors. I want him to know that when he succeeds that it was on his own merits. Granted, my son will never be in poverty while I'm around (providing the job market doesn't crash) but I'd say that if poverty is your concern you should address that directly. Donate to charities that help with school and give scholarships. A scholarship can be race based, I have no problem with that. But don't you ever tell my son he's less of a person because of his ancestry and needs the states help to get into college.
Those issues sound like any feature in any other software project I've worked on...
Are there "Save" buttons in your application? Can the user click them? Can the user click every button in the application? What tells a user a button is click-able? What happens if there are two user? Does it become read only after both users click it? What if the UI is REALLY BIG and controls can't all exist at the same time?' 'Network Programmer: "Do all the users need to see the record save at the same time? Release Engineer: "You need to get your buttons in by 3pm if you want them on the disk. Producer: "Do we need to give everyone those buttons or can we save them for phase 2?
So we have a $1500 camera with a pretty piss poor design ergonomically, that takes picuteres that can only be viewed via propriety software? Yep, sounds like an apple product alright.
Well, I think the problem with a lot of people not being concerned about privacy is because, we've all already had our data stolen. Most people didn't even know it was a "thing" until it was too late. Kind of like going to church or exercising. As an adult you think back "I wish I had gone to church or exercised instead of doing all that coke and killing that hooker... hey... I could make my kid do it the right way though!" and viola...
Google is only offering Fiber in High density Urban areas. Most of the customers in those areas already had access to 15mb > service. The problem is the other 99.9% of the country that lives in areas that are less dense and therefor incredibly expensive to serve.
If you're going to bash a legitimate attempt to introduce a modicum of competition to US broadband, you should at least use credible numbers. By concentrating on urbanized areas, Google is ignoring almost 20% of the country.
If you want to live 20 miles from the nearest intersection, low bandwidth may be one of the sacrifices you have to make.
Um... Google is serving a few thousand customers at most right now. That's well under 0.1% of the country.
And we're not talking about "20 miles from the nearest intersection" The equipment that provides you with internet all costs the same. It's irrelevant where you live, or what you are paying for. Laying Fiberoptic or copper costs hundreds of thousands of dollars per mile, interruption of peoples lives and property and is generally a nightmare. This doesn't even account for the equipment in the actual remote. The most sophisticated tech out there can deliver DSL/Cable over copper to about 45k feet max. So the real question is, How many people live within 45k feet of you? That's how many people that remote can serve. In the areas Google is offering its service the density per remote is in the thousands. The majority of the country its at most 200.
So if you owned a business, with 200 customers paying $35/month for your service, and of that about $6 was profit, would you spend $500k to upgrade that remote? Even $100k? What if your 2 competitors in town only had to serve people that lived in the areas where there were 5k+ per remote? How would you like that?
Ok, lets say the feds showed up and PAID to upgrade the remote. Fantastic! But the feds paid you $200k... which was enough to upgrade it to 20mb of total bandwidth but the feds also required you to meet their standards that all 200 people on that remote could get at least 5mb service? And most of your customers log on to netflix on Friday evenings... Are the feds going to stick around for that bit? No. And ISPs have been burned by this over and over again. So even though the feds are willing to pay for the upgrade the ISP will still refuse to take it because they don't want to be accept the further regulation of their service. The regulation is far more expensive than what the feds are offering in return. Yes, they'll take the cash in certain areas where the density is high enough.
I think the last stat I heard on this was that Obamas broadband Stimulus plan cost about $350k per customer. And no, I'm not kidding. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/pa...
Being an ISP is not cheap, and certainly not the way to make lots of money quickly.
A number of years ago I worked for a large (Global) company that wanted to make their new ticketing system secure. So they implemented a new password standard for the system that required a 35 character password, it reset every 30 days, and required 5 non-alpha numeric characters. The result? Within a week everyone in my department had their passwords written on a post-it note stuck to their monitor. The biggest problem with network security is usually the network security department.
Use common sense 2 factor authentication that's not too difficult for your users to comply with and they WILL comply. Make it overly complex and hard for the average non-tech person to understand and your own people will undermine all of your security efforts. Publicly fire any employe that violates your simple rules and it will quickly become apparent that adhering to those easy to follow rules is worth the effort.
Re:And all this after we have paid them to do it..
on
AT&T's Gigabit Smokescreen
·
· Score: 1, Informative
You've linked to a poor source that gets its data from even worse sources. AT&T is only worth $189 billion as of today. So what did they do with that $200 billion they supposedly got? Set it on fire? I dislike AT&T as much as the next guy, but let not create flat out lies.
Google is only offering Fiber in High density Urban areas. Most of the customers in those areas already had access to 15mb > service. The problem is the other 99.9% of the country that lives in areas that are less dense and therefor incredibly expensive to serve.
AT&T is currently trying to sell off as much of these low-density customers as possible because the regulations over telecoms make them far less profitable than what the unregulated cable providers offer. They're also lobbying to get themselves unregulated, which may seem fair at first, but when you realize that large portions of the country would quickly lose phone service it doesn't seem that fair at all.
Not that I'll defend AT&T. They suck for more reasons than just this. But telecoms in general are definitely in a hard place right now due to unregulated competitors like Google and the Cable providers. Force Google to provide phone service to everyone in that particular territory like the telecom is and you'll see googles rates shoot up to about the same place AT&T is at right now.
You have a choice. A T1 will give you guaranteed 1.5MB service 24/7 which is what you seem to think DSL/Cable should provide you. The cheapest I've ever seen a T1 go for was $200/month (and that's insanely cheap and only given to companies that order dozens or more) So if you want to pay $200 a month for 1.5mb/sec go right ahead. You wont be streaming HD content over that though.
However, if you do not want guaranteed speeds but a lower price, that's what DSL and Cable is for. You have a max speed, but if everyone jumps on at the same time it's going to slow down. That's how the tech works. No ISP on earth will give a residential customer with a single line guaranteed 15mb/sec 24/7 for less than a couple of grand a month. You seem to be complaining about their advertising. Go right ahead, but the idea that advertising is misleading and untruthful isn't a new concept. Does your car get the MPG the tag claimed? I sure it would if you only drove it in June and stayed under 20mph. Lobby your congressman for some "Truth in advertising" laws. People have been asking for that since the founding of the country so don't hold your breath.
With regards to Neflix's joke "Cache" servers... First read point #1 of their guidelines:
General Requirements
The ISP network must be located in or connected to the same peering locations as the Netflix network (AS2906).
To save you time... there are none. It's complete bullshit. They don't even provide the equipment anymore because no-one would except their guidelines. If you know anything about enterprise networking, the legal ramifications of agreeing to their terms, etc... you'd pretty quickly realize the entire thing is a load of crap setup for PR. No ISP would agree to the terms even if they still offered the service. Especially when netflix could take any one of the hundreds of open source media caching code, put it into their software and be done with it. They're already using MS silverlight for christs sake. It would be so simple for them to change. The effect on their customers local ISP issues would be immediate and dramatic.
That's most likely due to "Tech" being considered more and more important in corporations and therefor leading clueless Directors and VPs to change their titles to include some tech sounding title to further their carers.
The ironic part of your argument is that, to accept it, you have to generalize your opinion of both men and women. You need to accept the stereotypes you've put forth. Which is exactly the kind of thing harassment is about. I deal in facts, not generalizations. Accusations require proof, not guesses based on the history of your side of the gender gap.
Netflix made their own bed. There are plenty of content providers that actually worked with the ISPs to reduce their load. Netflix intentionally did things to drive up their bandwidth usage. A very simple change to their service: Allowing users to cache movies locally to be watched later (i.e. I want to watch my movie tonight so I set it up before I go to work...) would have eliminated this problem years ago and the ISPs would have dropped it. But Netflix told the ISPs do go screw themselves and decided to just have all their customers hammer the ISPs at once. Google doesn't do this, Microsoft doesn't do it... No one but netflix acts like this. And this is just one of the things they did to screw the ISPs. They also switch network providers at random... again, anyone else in the industry has agreements with the ISPs to notify them and work with them so they can sign contracts with the appropriate network providers. But not netflix. The ISP may have a 10gig trunk with AT&T because they get 10gig of traffic from netflix via AT&T. But then on some random monday Netflix switches to Sprint (or whomever) and now the ISP has to scramble to get a 10gig trunk with sprint and are still stuck in their contract with AT&T. In the normal world the content provider would have notified the ISP well in advance so as not to inconvenience their users with poor performance. But not netflix.
Well now Netflix has to pay. I would really prefer net neutrality but this is definitely netflixes fault. The last mile of your internet connection is by far the most expensive part of the infrastructure. ISPs that aren't in city centers are losing money hand over fist because of netflix. I don't blame them at all.
Except that, we have no idea what happened. The problem with harassment is that it's a he said/she said thing. There is one allegation, from one person and we have no idea about either persons integrity. He quit but it may very well just been out of disgust. Or maybe they were having an affair and it got out of hand. We have no idea. Judging either of them based on no other evidence than what they've both said would be wrong. If there were more allegations, if the guy hadn't been working there for years without incident, I might have another opinion. Yes, men do say things to women they shouldn't. But there are also plenty of women out there that will use harassment as a revenge tactic against men they dislike. I have no idea which happened here, so I reserve judgement until there is more evidence.
Apparently you've never been to court. The judge sure as hell doesn't care how much money you have or if you'll ever be able to repay it. I've had a large settlement against a guy since the early 90s (he broke into my house while drunk and destroyed everything I owned at the time.) He sends me about $50/yr because, even 20yrs later he's still a looser and in and out of jail. The only reason he sends me anything is because he's basically constantly on parole and they make it a condition. I could sue him, but that would be an exercise in futility and cost me thousands. But, the point is, when he lost the original case, the judge had no problem fining him for the actual damages, even though there was basically never a way for him to pay it off unless he won the lottery.
Oh for Christs sake don't reply to my posts with this inane anti-immigrant crap. All the Indians I work with are damn good at what they do. The problem with immigration is that people like them, that are law abiding citizens, great at what they do, and highly desirable in the workplace, aren't given immediate citizenship. If you want to come to this country, have no criminal record, and can hold a job for a year or two without incident you should be given citizenship. Immigration issues would be over and done with.
This is what happens when your field turns from a niche specialist thing where only experts will have a chance to get in... into a field where they're selling degrees during commercial breaks for Jerry Springer. You want the smarts ones, you need to pay for them.
Slashdot Mirror
To all the spelling Nazis out there: It's not my fault Firefox's spellcheck is the worst on earth. Sorry about getting my "singles" crossed. :-p
Netflix
You seem to be intimating that the ridiculous efforts Aereo had to go to, to get the single to another part of the country was Aereos fault. It's not. The single is broadcast by the network of their own will... the user could, technically, set up their own highly sensitive antenna equipment and amplifiers and get a TV signal from any station in the country... but that would be very expensive. The idea that there's a distinction between such a setup, relaying the data across IP or the crazy Antenna setup that Aereo came up with is ridiculous. The content industry is trying to get the law to make technology operate the way they wish it would, rather than how it actually does. This is a problem entirely invented by the content industry and the politicians they paid to get irrational laws passed to protect their non-existent product.
I just want to point out to any Aereo users that should they get shut down, you can still go back to the Pirate bay and start real piracy again. It's a lot easier than this nonsense, all the commercials are edited out for you already AND if you thought you were sticking it to the broadcasting industry before, you'd really be sticking it to them now.
This has been available on Google earth for years. It's just new to Google Maps. The most useful aspect of this is if you're buying a house. You can look back at past records to see just how old that swimming pool really is... or did the owner really build that garage last year?
It's the opposite of handy if you're selling however ;-)
I see everyone going off on either Libertarian or Leftist rants here... but it's not quite that simple.
First, my son is black, I'm white... so I have a vested interest in both races succeeding :-) So that's full disclosure I guess...
First, the reason for affirmative action is often argued as a way to help "the disadvantaged" Well, this is just flat out wrong. Diversity in a school, or anywhere for that matter, doesn't aid the minority students all that much. Yea, sure, they would have gotten in where maybe they otherwise couldn't, but does that really help them? Do get into a school they weren't qualified for? Diversity helps the SCHOOL and the students of the majority. If you went to an all white school, how well prepared do you think you would be for the modern working world? Diversity gives the school and the students have a broader view of the world. Marketing students gets more experience with other races and cultures. Programers learn how to communicate with people that might not speak English that well. (I just got out of a metting where my 60yr old co-worker was completely lost because the guy leading the meeting was teleconferencing from India. I didn't have a problem.) Engineering students learn new techniques from people that may have had different experiences.
With regard to my son, it's really hard to find good role models for him. Yes, there are plenty of great African American Scientists form throughout history. But they are not held in that high of a regard by the African American community. I get to go to "African American Parents groups" and I see it there. It's kind of weird that an the majority of a communities basis for success is related to professional athletes. It's something I had not anticipating as being that big of a problem, but I can really see it now that I have a son that's black. Obama, though I disagree with almost all of his policies, has been a huge boon in that regard. I can point to him and say "See? The most important person in the free world looks like you!" and yes, that is something he's asked about. I think the only real problem he has now is he wishes he had strait hair because he wants to have more than 3 options (shaved, Mohawk or Afro) when he goes to the barber.
So the question is: Should the schools garner this diversity benefit at the expense of white kids? I say no. And again, I think the arguments been reversed. It's not a dis-service to the white students. They'll get a degree from somewhere. But what does this do to the minority community? I don't want my son to EVER think he deserves something because of the color of his skin, or some injustice that happened to his ancestors. I want him to know that when he succeeds that it was on his own merits. Granted, my son will never be in poverty while I'm around (providing the job market doesn't crash) but I'd say that if poverty is your concern you should address that directly. Donate to charities that help with school and give scholarships. A scholarship can be race based, I have no problem with that. But don't you ever tell my son he's less of a person because of his ancestry and needs the states help to get into college.
Those issues sound like any feature in any other software project I've worked on...
Are there "Save" buttons in your application?
Can the user click them?
Can the user click every button in the application?
What tells a user a button is click-able?
What happens if there are two user?
Does it become read only after both users click it?
What if the UI is REALLY BIG and controls can't all exist at the same time?'
'Network Programmer: "Do all the users need to see the record save at the same time?
Release Engineer: "You need to get your buttons in by 3pm if you want them on the disk.
Producer: "Do we need to give everyone those buttons or can we save them for phase 2?
So we have a $1500 camera with a pretty piss poor design ergonomically, that takes picuteres that can only be viewed via propriety software? Yep, sounds like an apple product alright.
Well, I think the problem with a lot of people not being concerned about privacy is because, we've all already had our data stolen. Most people didn't even know it was a "thing" until it was too late. Kind of like going to church or exercising. As an adult you think back "I wish I had gone to church or exercised instead of doing all that coke and killing that hooker... hey... I could make my kid do it the right way though!" and viola...
So you can stream 5 porn videos AND power your space heater at the same time?
Google is only offering Fiber in High density Urban areas. Most of the customers in those areas already had access to 15mb > service. The problem is the other 99.9% of the country that lives in areas that are less dense and therefor incredibly expensive to serve.
If you're going to bash a legitimate attempt to introduce a modicum of competition to US broadband, you should at least use credible numbers. By concentrating on urbanized areas, Google is ignoring almost 20% of the country.
If you want to live 20 miles from the nearest intersection, low bandwidth may be one of the sacrifices you have to make.
Um... Google is serving a few thousand customers at most right now. That's well under 0.1% of the country.
And we're not talking about "20 miles from the nearest intersection" The equipment that provides you with internet all costs the same. It's irrelevant where you live, or what you are paying for. Laying Fiberoptic or copper costs hundreds of thousands of dollars per mile, interruption of peoples lives and property and is generally a nightmare. This doesn't even account for the equipment in the actual remote. The most sophisticated tech out there can deliver DSL/Cable over copper to about 45k feet max. So the real question is, How many people live within 45k feet of you? That's how many people that remote can serve. In the areas Google is offering its service the density per remote is in the thousands. The majority of the country its at most 200.
So if you owned a business, with 200 customers paying $35/month for your service, and of that about $6 was profit, would you spend $500k to upgrade that remote? Even $100k? What if your 2 competitors in town only had to serve people that lived in the areas where there were 5k+ per remote? How would you like that?
Ok, lets say the feds showed up and PAID to upgrade the remote. Fantastic! But the feds paid you $200k... which was enough to upgrade it to 20mb of total bandwidth but the feds also required you to meet their standards that all 200 people on that remote could get at least 5mb service? And most of your customers log on to netflix on Friday evenings... Are the feds going to stick around for that bit? No. And ISPs have been burned by this over and over again. So even though the feds are willing to pay for the upgrade the ISP will still refuse to take it because they don't want to be accept the further regulation of their service. The regulation is far more expensive than what the feds are offering in return. Yes, they'll take the cash in certain areas where the density is high enough.
I think the last stat I heard on this was that Obamas broadband Stimulus plan cost about $350k per customer. And no, I'm not kidding.
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/pa...
Being an ISP is not cheap, and certainly not the way to make lots of money quickly.
A number of years ago I worked for a large (Global) company that wanted to make their new ticketing system secure. So they implemented a new password standard for the system that required a 35 character password, it reset every 30 days, and required 5 non-alpha numeric characters. The result? Within a week everyone in my department had their passwords written on a post-it note stuck to their monitor. The biggest problem with network security is usually the network security department.
Use common sense 2 factor authentication that's not too difficult for your users to comply with and they WILL comply. Make it overly complex and hard for the average non-tech person to understand and your own people will undermine all of your security efforts. Publicly fire any employe that violates your simple rules and it will quickly become apparent that adhering to those easy to follow rules is worth the effort.
You've linked to a poor source that gets its data from even worse sources.
AT&T is only worth $189 billion as of today. So what did they do with that $200 billion they supposedly got? Set it on fire? I dislike AT&T as much as the next guy, but let not create flat out lies.
Google is only offering Fiber in High density Urban areas. Most of the customers in those areas already had access to 15mb > service. The problem is the other 99.9% of the country that lives in areas that are less dense and therefor incredibly expensive to serve.
AT&T is currently trying to sell off as much of these low-density customers as possible because the regulations over telecoms make them far less profitable than what the unregulated cable providers offer. They're also lobbying to get themselves unregulated, which may seem fair at first, but when you realize that large portions of the country would quickly lose phone service it doesn't seem that fair at all.
Not that I'll defend AT&T. They suck for more reasons than just this. But telecoms in general are definitely in a hard place right now due to unregulated competitors like Google and the Cable providers. Force Google to provide phone service to everyone in that particular territory like the telecom is and you'll see googles rates shoot up to about the same place AT&T is at right now.
You have a choice. A T1 will give you guaranteed 1.5MB service 24/7 which is what you seem to think DSL/Cable should provide you. The cheapest I've ever seen a T1 go for was $200/month (and that's insanely cheap and only given to companies that order dozens or more) So if you want to pay $200 a month for 1.5mb/sec go right ahead. You wont be streaming HD content over that though.
However, if you do not want guaranteed speeds but a lower price, that's what DSL and Cable is for. You have a max speed, but if everyone jumps on at the same time it's going to slow down. That's how the tech works. No ISP on earth will give a residential customer with a single line guaranteed 15mb/sec 24/7 for less than a couple of grand a month. You seem to be complaining about their advertising. Go right ahead, but the idea that advertising is misleading and untruthful isn't a new concept. Does your car get the MPG the tag claimed? I sure it would if you only drove it in June and stayed under 20mph. Lobby your congressman for some "Truth in advertising" laws. People have been asking for that since the founding of the country so don't hold your breath.
With regards to Neflix's joke "Cache" servers...
First read point #1 of their guidelines:
General Requirements
The ISP network must be located in or connected to the same peering locations as the Netflix network (AS2906).
Then click on the link to see where their peering locations are:
https://www.netflix.com/openco...
To save you time... there are none. It's complete bullshit. They don't even provide the equipment anymore because no-one would except their guidelines. If you know anything about enterprise networking, the legal ramifications of agreeing to their terms, etc... you'd pretty quickly realize the entire thing is a load of crap setup for PR. No ISP would agree to the terms even if they still offered the service. Especially when netflix could take any one of the hundreds of open source media caching code, put it into their software and be done with it. They're already using MS silverlight for christs sake. It would be so simple for them to change. The effect on their customers local ISP issues would be immediate and dramatic.
What?!? According to the whitehouse, inflation's been at 0% since Jimmy Carter!
That's most likely due to "Tech" being considered more and more important in corporations and therefor leading clueless Directors and VPs to change their titles to include some tech sounding title to further their carers.
The ironic part of your argument is that, to accept it, you have to generalize your opinion of both men and women. You need to accept the stereotypes you've put forth. Which is exactly the kind of thing harassment is about. I deal in facts, not generalizations. Accusations require proof, not guesses based on the history of your side of the gender gap.
Isn't Facebook basically under defacto control of the NSA anyway.
Netflix made their own bed. There are plenty of content providers that actually worked with the ISPs to reduce their load. Netflix intentionally did things to drive up their bandwidth usage. A very simple change to their service: Allowing users to cache movies locally to be watched later (i.e. I want to watch my movie tonight so I set it up before I go to work...) would have eliminated this problem years ago and the ISPs would have dropped it. But Netflix told the ISPs do go screw themselves and decided to just have all their customers hammer the ISPs at once. Google doesn't do this, Microsoft doesn't do it... No one but netflix acts like this. And this is just one of the things they did to screw the ISPs. They also switch network providers at random... again, anyone else in the industry has agreements with the ISPs to notify them and work with them so they can sign contracts with the appropriate network providers. But not netflix. The ISP may have a 10gig trunk with AT&T because they get 10gig of traffic from netflix via AT&T. But then on some random monday Netflix switches to Sprint (or whomever) and now the ISP has to scramble to get a 10gig trunk with sprint and are still stuck in their contract with AT&T. In the normal world the content provider would have notified the ISP well in advance so as not to inconvenience their users with poor performance. But not netflix.
Well now Netflix has to pay. I would really prefer net neutrality but this is definitely netflixes fault. The last mile of your internet connection is by far the most expensive part of the infrastructure. ISPs that aren't in city centers are losing money hand over fist because of netflix. I don't blame them at all.
Except that, we have no idea what happened. The problem with harassment is that it's a he said/she said thing. There is one allegation, from one person and we have no idea about either persons integrity. He quit but it may very well just been out of disgust. Or maybe they were having an affair and it got out of hand. We have no idea. Judging either of them based on no other evidence than what they've both said would be wrong. If there were more allegations, if the guy hadn't been working there for years without incident, I might have another opinion. Yes, men do say things to women they shouldn't. But there are also plenty of women out there that will use harassment as a revenge tactic against men they dislike. I have no idea which happened here, so I reserve judgement until there is more evidence.
The absolute cheapest you can buy a compressed gas tank for is about $100. I don't know how much the mask would be but I'm betting another $100.
A ticket for the same trip is $450.
So... yea, if YOU want to risk your life to save less than $200, go right ahead.
Apparently you've never been to court. The judge sure as hell doesn't care how much money you have or if you'll ever be able to repay it. I've had a large settlement against a guy since the early 90s (he broke into my house while drunk and destroyed everything I owned at the time.) He sends me about $50/yr because, even 20yrs later he's still a looser and in and out of jail. The only reason he sends me anything is because he's basically constantly on parole and they make it a condition. I could sue him, but that would be an exercise in futility and cost me thousands. But, the point is, when he lost the original case, the judge had no problem fining him for the actual damages, even though there was basically never a way for him to pay it off unless he won the lottery.
Oh for Christs sake don't reply to my posts with this inane anti-immigrant crap. All the Indians I work with are damn good at what they do. The problem with immigration is that people like them, that are law abiding citizens, great at what they do, and highly desirable in the workplace, aren't given immediate citizenship. If you want to come to this country, have no criminal record, and can hold a job for a year or two without incident you should be given citizenship. Immigration issues would be over and done with.
This is what happens when your field turns from a niche specialist thing where only experts will have a chance to get in... into a field where they're selling degrees during commercial breaks for Jerry Springer. You want the smarts ones, you need to pay for them.