Maybe after the EU human rights court gets done listening to Snowden they can take a look inwards at their own terrible examples of not respecting human rights.
Puting a guy in solitary because he ran a file sharing website? God in Wisconsin you can drive drunk and your first offence is just a traffic ticket. You can kill people driving drunk, I don't understand why we punish guys who threaten profits more than guys who threaten lives.
What if Snowden was a former employee/contractor for GCHQ, and he leaked documents illuminating GCHQ spying on the US, Russia, and other non European nations? Would the EU still allow him to testify, or would they be calling for him to return to face their courts?
Don't large corporations control congress? Don't congress members want to stay in the good graces of corporations so they continue to get campaign donations and board positions upon retirement from public service?
Why aren't large corporations pressuring congress to reign in the NSA?
I understand that if he said these things while holding his position that he would have effectively ended his ability to do his job and that would be irresponsible.
You could have just said that you catch more flies with honey than vinegar.
I understand that is the way the world works (a big reason I resist going into management). However I feel like once in a while it is really usefull for someone to really tell it like it is. It might ruin their career, it might screw up their organization in the short term, but how else do things change?
It is a trivial example but I see this all the time in projects. The project leader knows everything is fucked, they know that the test lab doesn't really test anything. They know that the firmware group is cutting corners. They know marketing is bullshitting numbers to make everything look good. But they never say that openly. And at the end of the project when the Boss asks why everything was late, the defect rate is high, and the sales are below forecast, the project manager shrugs and says "well everyone told me things were going great". That happens a few times and then the project leader starts looking for another position and then on his/her way out explains all of the troubles of the organization.
What if in the beginning the project lead would say something like "well from my standpoint the test lab needs better procedures and needs to be accountable if they don't follow their test plans, the firmware group needs accountability and more peer review, and the marketing organization needs to explain why their numbers are always overly optimistic". That project leader just pissed off all of the other groups and might have jeopardized their career, but it was the truth.
I saw most of Congress as uncivil, incompetent at fulfilling their basic constitutional responsibilities (such as timely appropriations), micromanagerial, parochial, hypocritical, egotistical, thin-skinned, and prone to put self (and re-election) before country.
He never said any of this publicly while holding his position because he didn't want to lose his job. I feel that most politicians and cabinet appointees feel this way, but they always hold it all in until they leave office and are ready to author their "tell all" memoir. Maybe if someone actually spoke the truth while in office the problems plaguing our government would have a better chance of being addressed.
Of course since they are all "prone to put self (and re-election) before country" they would never dare to challenge the party line. Robert Gates included.
See, when you take guns away from normal people, you make gun violence SAFE for criminals. They wave their gun around without fear of getting shot.
That is the result.
Is that what you want?
Do you think being in a gang in Chicago is safe? Do you really think an average joe is going to pull a gun on a gang member on the south side of Chicago? Do you know how gangs work? You kill one of them, they come and kill someone from your gang. Not in a gang? Even better, they just come kill you. "Normal" people aren't going to become RoboCop and stand up to criminals, that's suicide.
There is crime in Chicago not because criminals feel like they can act with impunity, but because so many people know nothing else than crime and violence and there are very few opportunities to support yourself without turning to crime. No one is going to say "man, gang banging is dangerous now that "normal" people have guns, I'm going to go become a bank teller". I really can't understand how you can convince yourself of such nonsense.
Neither more or less guns are going to fix the problem in Chicago.
I hope you aren't a statistician. I'm guessing that the study you mention doesn't take into account how segregated Chicago is in terms of poverty and crime. Gun ownership in Lincoln Park isn't going to lower the murder rate in Chatham. Do you really think flooding the south side with handguns would actually lower the murder rate?
If managers are there to shield engineers from "political nonsense and red tape" it is probably more cost effective to reduce the political nonsense and red tape instead of hiring someone to deal with it.
If there are too many meetings address that issue. If there is political bullshit address it. If the processes are all fucked up and you have guys jumping through hoops just because some process document says to, fix it. Fixing the actual problems will benefit the company way more than hiring a guy to shield the engineers from it. The last non technical manager I had just invited me to all the meetings he went to because he wasn't able to answer anyones questions. He literally did nothing and when he quit after being denied a promotion he applied for his position was not backfilled
In my opinion you want the engineers to interface with the rest of the company. That is how problems get solved. Engineers getting feedback from customers, tech support, manufacturing, and ops. Then engineers figure out how long it would take and how much it would cost to solve the issues and present that data to marketing and project management. Then you get representatives from each group together to decide based on marketing data and project management input what features to prioritize, what features to drop, and so on. ( I know this never happens in the real world)
All too often marketing draws up some Marketing Requirements Document, which is usually fucked to begin with because marketing doesn't present the engineering group with the customers problems, instead marketing presents the engineering group with marketing's (usually poor) solutions to the customers problems. Then some project management people get together with the non technical manager and agree upon some crazy timeline based on no input from the actual people responsible for doing the work. Then the engineers get a product spec document that basically says to invent a perpetual motion device in a couple of months. When they don't do it everyone blames the engineering group for not following through once again. Set up to fail from the start... In my experience non technical managers don't do anything but add additional noise to the signal.
Jesus, talk about narcissistic. You really think that YOU are worth a billboard drone? I seriously hope we don't come to the point where drones are THAT affordable.
You lack foresight. Its not a question of if drones become cheap enough to target individuals, its a question of when.
Why doesn't he have any work lined up? I worked at a grocery store 9 years ago and we all knew Dominicks was fucked. They have been doing poorly in the Chicagoland market for years. I know there has been lots of talk about the stores closing. If he hasn't looked for anything yet then that is his fault.
Lucky for him Gov. Quinn established a "Grocery Store Taskforce" to assist these poor people on finding new entry level jobs. Illinois has plenty of money to pay for this shit.
Materially negative consequences. You probably don't spend enough money there to make a difference, nor would it make a difference if 100 of us stopped shopping there. In a short amount of time this will blow over like every other corporate transgression and 99% of everyone will forget about it and move on.
Bad press isn't enough to make people stop shopping somewhere. Look at McD, their profits have been growing. WalMart isn't doing bad. Sony is doing well. Google is doing amazing. God look at BP, they fucking killed cute little sea creatures and they are once again a money printing machine.
Consumers are idiots. You may not be but that still isn't going to deter bad corporate behavior.
Does anyone else think that before we allow commercial drone use we should also start thinking about some laws on how drones can be used?
For example, should it be legal for an advertising company to buzz around my home with a drone based billboard?
Should Amazon or some other retailer be allowed to surveil me with a drone to compile my shopping habits and then make me offers?
Should my employer be able to use a drone to monitor if I am interviewing at a competitor?
We're in a bit of a privacy crisis right now partially due to the fact that online privacy laws were about 10 years behind the technology. Lets try to avoid that with drones.
I guess that is one way to look at it. Another way to look at it is that they were out competed by larger stores and customers voted with their wallets. I'm from Chicagoland, this isn't as simple as some CxOs running a company into the ground. Woodmans, Target, and WalMart are all relatively new competitors in the grocery store market. Jewel Osco and Dominicks have been hurting for a while because of that.
What it boils down to is that people would rather pay $1 for a loaf of bread from WalMart than $1.20 for a loaf of bread from Dominicks. Why is it more expensive at Dominicks? Well for one they are unionized with means very generous benefits for the workers (when I worked at Jewel-Osco in highschool I had 2+ weeks of paid vacation and made time and a half on Sunday, and made holiday pay even if I didn't work that day. Some holidays made 2.5 times my base pay due to it falling on Sunday.) Another reason might be that Woodmans and WalMart are much larger than a typical Jewel or Dominicks so they can purchase in larger quantities and offer a larger selection.
The guy was suspended for a day.... Common I would hardly call that kicking someone when they are down. For all we know he might not even have been scheduled to work that day. So the guy is maybe out at most $100 in missed pay, bummer but I wouldn't call that cause for moral outrage.
I do actually agree that this article was posted to incite anti-corporate feelings. That's why I asked the question, and that's why I suggested not shopping there if you don't agree with it. I really feel like this is petty shit compared to real abuses and what makes me upset is the people who are going to get all bent out of shape over this and complain about corporations treating people like shit using this as evidence. Corporations do treat people like shit, but its happening all around you in much worse ways than some guy getting suspended for a day. Be outraged about that.
Are you implying that something negative will happen because they suspended the guy? I really doubt there are any materially negative consequences for Safeway.
I feel like I might know how something like this happened.
Dev: "Hey we need to spend some time on security, for example the USB ports are not disabled, if we wan't to use them for service we should put authentication on them."
Project Manager: "Well, you have a point but none of our competitors focus on security either and were also behind on the project. It will be fine and we can fix it next time"
There are some people that I would consider "smart" that don't even know who Snowden is or what the NSA does. These people are successful professionals, some valedictorians of their undergraduate colleges. There is always going to be a small segment of the population that is critical of the government, paranoid about the encroachment on civil liberties, and overall dissatisfied with the status quo. But that isn't a majority. Its not even half. I would guess it's less than 25%.
Snowden sacrificed a lot for the world. I wish I knew of a way to get the world to care.
It could be argued that Silicon Valley has benefitted the most from the California taxpayer. This proposal doesn't sound too bad as long as Old California's debt is distributed to the new states in a equitable way. The problem would be defining equitable.
There is a really small but similar sentiment in Illinois too. The people who live in rural Illinois feel like the people who live in Chicago and the suburban areas surrounding Chicago disproportionately affect Illinois politics. They feel that the state would be better without Chicago.
As someone that runs NoScript, almost all of the websites on the modern Internet just don't work without JavaScript. They aren't even written to fail gracefully if JavaScript support isn't detected.
If I had made a bundle in the dot com bubble or something, I could see myself teaching CS in CPS. Or at least trying -- I teach grad school and don't know if I have the personality for younger students.
Then you illustrate my point exactly. If you were already independently wealthy you would do it. But would you have chosen that career path straight out of college or after a few years in industry?
Also $75K isn't much if you want to live in Chicago, home of the 12%+ sales tax. I recently lived in Chicago and as a single guy I could be pretty comfortable on $75K but I wouldn't want to support a family on that. If $75K is the average then thats probably for a teacher with 10+ years of experience and some advanced education. You are not going to draw away talent from the private sector or draw talented graduates out of university for a starting salary below $50K in a high cost of living area. The teachers union won't allow you to pay talented professionals more than a teacher with more years in the district, so someone out of industry will start in the bottom range of salary.
They feel good, blah blah blah, ect... I knew several people who did Teach for America and I know 2 teachers who left CPS, one for a suburban district and the other to go back to school. Teaching in CPS and other inner city public and charter schools sucks. Its exhausting, thankless, low paying, and sometimes dangerous. You might think you are "changing the world, making a difference, impacting someone's life", but you aren't and that has a huge affect on young teachers moral when they realize it. You are babysitting the students, you will have no professional support, no supplies, no budget, and some really old and outdated books. You might be lucky if your students are only a few years behind the curriculum of the actual grade they are in. Fuck that.
CPS has a big budget problem, just like the rest of Illinois. CPS also has a very poor relationship with the public teachers union, the teachers went on strike last year and shut the district down.
Where exactly is CPS going to find people who are passionate and knowledgeable about CS who also want to teach in a public district in Illinois? Stipends and training are nice but I don't feel like forcing students to take a CS course, taught by a teacher who may have no real experience in CS, is going to encourage anyone already not determined to go to university for CS to change their mind. It may actually dissuade potential CS majors.
While legality might be relevant to you in determining the level of asshatery, legality is not relevant in determining if a person or group is an activist.
I understand what you are saying, you don't like Anonymous and you think they are asshats because they go on DDOS rampages against anyone who makes them upset, much like children throw fits when they don't get what they want.
I still don't think you can say they aren't activists because you don't agree with their goals and methods. Well you can say whatever you want, but it doesn't make it so.
Slashdot Mirror
Why does this summery link to itself?
I would expect google.fr to link to the French google homepage.
Maybe after the EU human rights court gets done listening to Snowden they can take a look inwards at their own terrible examples of not respecting human rights.
Puting a guy in solitary because he ran a file sharing website? God in Wisconsin you can drive drunk and your first offence is just a traffic ticket. You can kill people driving drunk, I don't understand why we punish guys who threaten profits more than guys who threaten lives.
What if Snowden was a former employee/contractor for GCHQ, and he leaked documents illuminating GCHQ spying on the US, Russia, and other non European nations? Would the EU still allow him to testify, or would they be calling for him to return to face their courts?
Don't large corporations control congress? Don't congress members want to stay in the good graces of corporations so they continue to get campaign donations and board positions upon retirement from public service?
Why aren't large corporations pressuring congress to reign in the NSA?
Who's holding the puppet strings?
I understand that if he said these things while holding his position that he would have effectively ended his ability to do his job and that would be irresponsible.
You could have just said that you catch more flies with honey than vinegar.
I understand that is the way the world works (a big reason I resist going into management). However I feel like once in a while it is really usefull for someone to really tell it like it is. It might ruin their career, it might screw up their organization in the short term, but how else do things change?
It is a trivial example but I see this all the time in projects. The project leader knows everything is fucked, they know that the test lab doesn't really test anything. They know that the firmware group is cutting corners. They know marketing is bullshitting numbers to make everything look good. But they never say that openly. And at the end of the project when the Boss asks why everything was late, the defect rate is high, and the sales are below forecast, the project manager shrugs and says "well everyone told me things were going great". That happens a few times and then the project leader starts looking for another position and then on his/her way out explains all of the troubles of the organization.
What if in the beginning the project lead would say something like "well from my standpoint the test lab needs better procedures and needs to be accountable if they don't follow their test plans, the firmware group needs accountability and more peer review, and the marketing organization needs to explain why their numbers are always overly optimistic". That project leader just pissed off all of the other groups and might have jeopardized their career, but it was the truth.
I saw most of Congress as uncivil, incompetent at fulfilling their basic constitutional responsibilities (such as timely appropriations), micromanagerial, parochial, hypocritical, egotistical, thin-skinned, and prone to put self (and re-election) before country.
He never said any of this publicly while holding his position because he didn't want to lose his job. I feel that most politicians and cabinet appointees feel this way, but they always hold it all in until they leave office and are ready to author their "tell all" memoir. Maybe if someone actually spoke the truth while in office the problems plaguing our government would have a better chance of being addressed.
Of course since they are all "prone to put self (and re-election) before country" they would never dare to challenge the party line. Robert Gates included.
See, when you take guns away from normal people, you make gun violence SAFE for criminals. They wave their gun around without fear of getting shot.
That is the result.
Is that what you want?
Do you think being in a gang in Chicago is safe? Do you really think an average joe is going to pull a gun on a gang member on the south side of Chicago? Do you know how gangs work? You kill one of them, they come and kill someone from your gang. Not in a gang? Even better, they just come kill you. "Normal" people aren't going to become RoboCop and stand up to criminals, that's suicide.
There is crime in Chicago not because criminals feel like they can act with impunity, but because so many people know nothing else than crime and violence and there are very few opportunities to support yourself without turning to crime. No one is going to say "man, gang banging is dangerous now that "normal" people have guns, I'm going to go become a bank teller". I really can't understand how you can convince yourself of such nonsense.
Neither more or less guns are going to fix the problem in Chicago.
I hope you aren't a statistician. I'm guessing that the study you mention doesn't take into account how segregated Chicago is in terms of poverty and crime. Gun ownership in Lincoln Park isn't going to lower the murder rate in Chatham. Do you really think flooding the south side with handguns would actually lower the murder rate?
The name of a smartphone keyboard manufacturer is Typo?
Also, Ryan Seacrest is a founder of the company.
If managers are there to shield engineers from "political nonsense and red tape" it is probably more cost effective to reduce the political nonsense and red tape instead of hiring someone to deal with it.
If there are too many meetings address that issue. If there is political bullshit address it. If the processes are all fucked up and you have guys jumping through hoops just because some process document says to, fix it. Fixing the actual problems will benefit the company way more than hiring a guy to shield the engineers from it. The last non technical manager I had just invited me to all the meetings he went to because he wasn't able to answer anyones questions. He literally did nothing and when he quit after being denied a promotion he applied for his position was not backfilled
In my opinion you want the engineers to interface with the rest of the company. That is how problems get solved. Engineers getting feedback from customers, tech support, manufacturing, and ops. Then engineers figure out how long it would take and how much it would cost to solve the issues and present that data to marketing and project management. Then you get representatives from each group together to decide based on marketing data and project management input what features to prioritize, what features to drop, and so on. ( I know this never happens in the real world)
All too often marketing draws up some Marketing Requirements Document, which is usually fucked to begin with because marketing doesn't present the engineering group with the customers problems, instead marketing presents the engineering group with marketing's (usually poor) solutions to the customers problems. Then some project management people get together with the non technical manager and agree upon some crazy timeline based on no input from the actual people responsible for doing the work. Then the engineers get a product spec document that basically says to invent a perpetual motion device in a couple of months. When they don't do it everyone blames the engineering group for not following through once again. Set up to fail from the start... In my experience non technical managers don't do anything but add additional noise to the signal.
Jesus, talk about narcissistic. You really think that YOU are worth a billboard drone? I seriously hope we don't come to the point where drones are THAT affordable.
You lack foresight. Its not a question of if drones become cheap enough to target individuals, its a question of when.
Why doesn't he have any work lined up? I worked at a grocery store 9 years ago and we all knew Dominicks was fucked. They have been doing poorly in the Chicagoland market for years. I know there has been lots of talk about the stores closing. If he hasn't looked for anything yet then that is his fault.
Lucky for him Gov. Quinn established a "Grocery Store Taskforce" to assist these poor people on finding new entry level jobs. Illinois has plenty of money to pay for this shit.
Materially negative consequences. You probably don't spend enough money there to make a difference, nor would it make a difference if 100 of us stopped shopping there. In a short amount of time this will blow over like every other corporate transgression and 99% of everyone will forget about it and move on.
Bad press isn't enough to make people stop shopping somewhere. Look at McD, their profits have been growing. WalMart isn't doing bad. Sony is doing well. Google is doing amazing. God look at BP, they fucking killed cute little sea creatures and they are once again a money printing machine.
Consumers are idiots. You may not be but that still isn't going to deter bad corporate behavior.
Does anyone else think that before we allow commercial drone use we should also start thinking about some laws on how drones can be used?
For example, should it be legal for an advertising company to buzz around my home with a drone based billboard?
Should Amazon or some other retailer be allowed to surveil me with a drone to compile my shopping habits and then make me offers?
Should my employer be able to use a drone to monitor if I am interviewing at a competitor?
We're in a bit of a privacy crisis right now partially due to the fact that online privacy laws were about 10 years behind the technology. Lets try to avoid that with drones.
I guess that is one way to look at it. Another way to look at it is that they were out competed by larger stores and customers voted with their wallets. I'm from Chicagoland, this isn't as simple as some CxOs running a company into the ground. Woodmans, Target, and WalMart are all relatively new competitors in the grocery store market. Jewel Osco and Dominicks have been hurting for a while because of that.
What it boils down to is that people would rather pay $1 for a loaf of bread from WalMart than $1.20 for a loaf of bread from Dominicks. Why is it more expensive at Dominicks? Well for one they are unionized with means very generous benefits for the workers (when I worked at Jewel-Osco in highschool I had 2+ weeks of paid vacation and made time and a half on Sunday, and made holiday pay even if I didn't work that day. Some holidays made 2.5 times my base pay due to it falling on Sunday.) Another reason might be that Woodmans and WalMart are much larger than a typical Jewel or Dominicks so they can purchase in larger quantities and offer a larger selection.
The guy was suspended for a day.... Common I would hardly call that kicking someone when they are down. For all we know he might not even have been scheduled to work that day. So the guy is maybe out at most $100 in missed pay, bummer but I wouldn't call that cause for moral outrage.
I do actually agree that this article was posted to incite anti-corporate feelings. That's why I asked the question, and that's why I suggested not shopping there if you don't agree with it. I really feel like this is petty shit compared to real abuses and what makes me upset is the people who are going to get all bent out of shape over this and complain about corporations treating people like shit using this as evidence. Corporations do treat people like shit, but its happening all around you in much worse ways than some guy getting suspended for a day. Be outraged about that.
Are you implying that something negative will happen because they suspended the guy? I really doubt there are any materially negative consequences for Safeway.
Is this on /. because the guy used some action/sci fi type graphics?
If this makes you upset don't go to SafeWay anymore.
I feel like I might know how something like this happened.
Dev: "Hey we need to spend some time on security, for example the USB ports are not disabled, if we wan't to use them for service we should put authentication on them."
Project Manager: "Well, you have a point but none of our competitors focus on security either and were also behind on the project. It will be fine and we can fix it next time"
As a embedded dev I have had that conversation.
There are some people that I would consider "smart" that don't even know who Snowden is or what the NSA does. These people are successful professionals, some valedictorians of their undergraduate colleges. There is always going to be a small segment of the population that is critical of the government, paranoid about the encroachment on civil liberties, and overall dissatisfied with the status quo. But that isn't a majority. Its not even half. I would guess it's less than 25%.
Snowden sacrificed a lot for the world. I wish I knew of a way to get the world to care.
It could be argued that Silicon Valley has benefitted the most from the California taxpayer. This proposal doesn't sound too bad as long as Old California's debt is distributed to the new states in a equitable way. The problem would be defining equitable.
There is a really small but similar sentiment in Illinois too. The people who live in rural Illinois feel like the people who live in Chicago and the suburban areas surrounding Chicago disproportionately affect Illinois politics. They feel that the state would be better without Chicago.
- support java/javascript/whatever code.
As someone that runs NoScript, almost all of the websites on the modern Internet just don't work without JavaScript. They aren't even written to fail gracefully if JavaScript support isn't detected.
If I had made a bundle in the dot com bubble or something, I could see myself teaching CS in CPS. Or at least trying -- I teach grad school and don't know if I have the personality for younger students.
Then you illustrate my point exactly. If you were already independently wealthy you would do it. But would you have chosen that career path straight out of college or after a few years in industry?
Also $75K isn't much if you want to live in Chicago, home of the 12%+ sales tax. I recently lived in Chicago and as a single guy I could be pretty comfortable on $75K but I wouldn't want to support a family on that. If $75K is the average then thats probably for a teacher with 10+ years of experience and some advanced education. You are not going to draw away talent from the private sector or draw talented graduates out of university for a starting salary below $50K in a high cost of living area. The teachers union won't allow you to pay talented professionals more than a teacher with more years in the district, so someone out of industry will start in the bottom range of salary.
They feel good, blah blah blah, ect... I knew several people who did Teach for America and I know 2 teachers who left CPS, one for a suburban district and the other to go back to school. Teaching in CPS and other inner city public and charter schools sucks. Its exhausting, thankless, low paying, and sometimes dangerous. You might think you are "changing the world, making a difference, impacting someone's life", but you aren't and that has a huge affect on young teachers moral when they realize it. You are babysitting the students, you will have no professional support, no supplies, no budget, and some really old and outdated books. You might be lucky if your students are only a few years behind the curriculum of the actual grade they are in. Fuck that.
CPS has a big budget problem, just like the rest of Illinois. CPS also has a very poor relationship with the public teachers union, the teachers went on strike last year and shut the district down.
Where exactly is CPS going to find people who are passionate and knowledgeable about CS who also want to teach in a public district in Illinois? Stipends and training are nice but I don't feel like forcing students to take a CS course, taught by a teacher who may have no real experience in CS, is going to encourage anyone already not determined to go to university for CS to change their mind. It may actually dissuade potential CS majors.
While legality might be relevant to you in determining the level of asshatery, legality is not relevant in determining if a person or group is an activist.
I understand what you are saying, you don't like Anonymous and you think they are asshats because they go on DDOS rampages against anyone who makes them upset, much like children throw fits when they don't get what they want.
I still don't think you can say they aren't activists because you don't agree with their goals and methods. Well you can say whatever you want, but it doesn't make it so.