And that's EXACLTY how the Jesse Jackson shakedown works.
"Do what I say or I'll call you a RAAAAAACIST!!!"
Jackson really should patent that. It's a hell of an effective "business" method.
Well, I have seen racism in dev shops before, to be sure, but not the sort that Reverend Jackson wants shakedown money for. I've worked for more than one place where "white men born in America" were about 2% of engineers. Normally, it's just not an issue, but at one place the racism was so bad that everyone not of the preferred race left over the course of 6 months after a shift of management. (Not saying what that race was, as the problem was just a couple of assholes, and not a more general problem).
I've also seen straight-up redneck racist at the first dev shop I ever worked at, back when we rode dinosaurs to work, but that company was so exploitive that racism only makes the middle of its list of abuses.
There are plenty of smart engineers working for Visa. How much would $CLEVER_IDEA cost? How much does this sort of fraud cost? You can bet someone did the math.
The concept of merchants eating costs is a bit nonsensical anyhow: most of what we buy on a daily basis is sold on a very thin margin, so when an external cost is imposed across the market, it has to come from the customers.
The money in your bank account also continues to exist regardless of data connections where you go. And your ability to spend a given physical currency vary depending on where you go - dollars are special, but e.g. a rupee note isn't going to spend well in the US.
Specie-based currency has at least some value everywhere, but these days it's easier in most of the world to find a data connection than someone who trades in gold (plus a whole host of other problems).
SF is the abbreviation for "real science fiction". SciFi is the abbreviation for action/horror movies with futuristic explosions. Harlan Ellison suggests "skiffy" as the pronunciation of the latter, and some have taken to writing it that way too. I hear Edge of Tomorrow was actually good SF, but I haven't seen it yet - but 1 a year is lucky for SF films.
Plus you have films like Gravity, which wasn't even SciFi, but instead a historical period piece. Remember when we had shuttles, and the will to build vehicles that could launch men into space? Good times; good times.
If your costs for a box are $1 production, $1000 R&D, then your replacement costs for shrinkage and shipping damage and so on are: $1/box. This guy mightt be 1 lost sale, but he certainly isn't 40.
The customer didn't print special cards here - they're just normal, expired cards.
The store doesn't call the number on the back of the card - the store calls their own merchant bank.
This was just straightforward grift (a con game), not some glaring flaw in the banking system. The sales clerks got suckered, perhaps due to lack of training by Apple, or perhaps the con-man was just that good.
The truth is that credit card interest is the highest profit gig in the whole world. Because of this, Visa/MasterCard
Visa/MasterCard make $0 off of interest. They charge a fee for the convenience of not having to use cash. They're not in the "loaning money" business at all, and of course TFS talks about debit cards, not credit cards.
Vendors are not even allowed to do things like require an ID, (I know they do, but it is against the vendor agreement), even though it would make purchases a lot more secure, because EASY trumps everything, EASY makes billions.
Easy is what the customers want. For normal fraud with actual credit cards (nothing to do with this story, of course), it's the merchant who eats the fraud for ID theft. But merchants sign up for that, because they'll have less business if they're inconvenient for their customers.
Security is not the primary goal here, nor should it be. The only goal of any security here is to limit losses system-wide to something manageable. And it does that just fine.
Gold notes were just as virtual as anything else. Physical gold coins, or barter for consumables, is the only way to avoid virtuality, and there were many practical reasons we went away from that. Nothing, of course, will prevent a government from debasing a currency - it's what they do, it's all they do.
I disagree. If you can hold down a professional job in America, you should get a green card (after only a criminal background check). If you can hold down any job in America, you should get a work visa (after only a criminal background check). The only way in which legal immigration can be bad for us is when people come here without jobs to consume federal programs. Have a job? Welcome aboard!
If native population were growing fast, it might be a different story, but since native population is shrinking (birth rate below replacement rate), we need people, those with professional skills preferred.
The problem isn't people coming here on H1-Bs, but their difficulty in turn that into a green card. The "apprentices" would mostly stay here if they could. And does anyone really want to argue that immigration of well-educated, highly-skilled engineers is bad for America?
All the focus on the political immigration debate seems to be on low-skilled workers, and the answers aren't so easy there. But anyone who can come here and work a job that pays $100k+? Keep em coming, I say.
From what I hear, death threats are quite normal in the video games industry. Certainly the vitriol flies on gaming forums (can't imagine how busy the moderators for official game forums must be). This article seems to boil down to "but women get rape threats too". OK, sure, men don't often get those, fair point. But in an industry thick with death threats, how many developers or commentators have actually been lynched by angry fans since the beginning of time? Roughly zero? It's not rational to actually be creeped out or worried about this stuff.
For goodness sake, Jack Thompson is still alive and well. If any of these threats of violence could be taken seriously, he'd be the first casualty. Think you're more hated than that guy?
I have 100 discs in my Netflix queue that aren't available on streaming. Go through about 6 a week, and have for years (I don't have cable). Only about 10% or what I watch can be streamed. And sadly the count of "very long wait" is up to 20 now, and climbing.
For the most part, it's only recent (but not too recent) content that's streamable. Heck, you can't even stream The Wire, and that's not that old. You can't stream any of the pre-reboot Dr Who episodes, and I could add another 100 discs to my queue just for Dr Who (does the BBC have these streaming yet?)
If there were an alternative to Netflix for disc shipment, I'd switch today. I might pay double, certainly 50% more, for the breadth of selection Netflix once had, if catalog growth continued, stuff got upgraded to BluRay, and so on.
But there's no such animal. Kids these days are all about streaming. Netflix's model of "delayed gratification" for TV watching was a miracle in the first place. I'm amazed it's lasted as long as it has.
The advertisement for Hulu plus will resume after this commercial break. Stay tuned afterwards for our Best of Commercials Spectacular, we're sure you'll love it.
Netflix streaming is nearly-worthless - there's just no content.
Hulu streaming is totally worthless garbage. Fuck commercials.
Amazon has the wrong model. PPV isn't where it's at.
There's no question Netflix is gradually ending their disc service (selection is falling rapidly), and that really sucks. The ~$1.50 price to watch a disc was right for me, and it's sad to see it die. There's so very much great stuff from the 20th century that seems doomed to vanish with the death of physical media (and the complete and utter failure of government and the legal system when it comes to streaming and licensing).
At this point, I can only hope good rips of everything are around somewhere and being archived by hobbyists, awaiting some fix to copyright law. (Torrents may be plentiful for new stuff, but new stuff is easily available in legal ways for those who aren't broke anyhow. Torrents for last-century works are a different story).
I don't think the question is really whether the judge can order such a thing. I think it's more of a question of whether it is justified in this case.
We lack the data to second-guess the judge's judgment. I'm elated by this story, personally. There was a judge; there was a warrant; that's amazing progress for email!
You seem blind to the fact that your arguments only make sense when viewed through the "only Americans matter" lens, but are obviously false otherwise. How else do you explain it?
The thing is if employers want the duty to just pay you for services, then they should get out of everything that does not involve work.
I couldn't agree more. And that goes double for the government. Heck, even the concept of health "insurance" as we have it today seems broken - does my car insurance pay for tune-ups? I'd like nothing more than being able to buy catastrophic care insurance (what was once called "major medical") like I buy car insurance (including the government-mandated high-risk pool so that no one gets priced out - we made that work for car insurance after all), and let all the day-to-day medical stuff be a cash transaction no different from an oil change.
BTW, on the QA side, Microsoft did in fact give people a few months to apply internally for dev jobs (it wasn't official that the rest would face lay-offs, but the writing was on the wall). About half of them made that jump. That's not re-training, of course, but it's nicer than most corporate layoffs.
I know plenty of people at MS. Several months ago, they announced the end of SDT (QA) as a thing. About half the SDT guys found internal transfers to the development teams. The other half were clearly looking for seats before the music stopped. Well, the music stopped.
That's the thing about software - whatever your technical skills, they have a half-life. You have to keep on top of that, or you'll find that what you know how to do simply isn't valuable any more. SDT was supposed to be a "developer, but writing test code" job all along. Now that MS is following the herd in making all test automation part of dev's job, those who had the talent and inclination to become normal devs had plenty of time to make that transfer. And about half of them did.
Your employer's duty is to give you money, not hold your hand and guide you through life.
Microsoft had a very generous severance package for engineers. They're on the payroll for 2 months after "being layed off", they get 2 weeks pay per 6 months tenure up to some high cap, from what I've heard.
When I got layed off in the dot-bust, my employer gave me a check and a shove out the door, but not having to work for 6 months gave me plenty of time brush up my skill set and to place myself with another company.
A free man doesn't expect his employer to be his mommy too - that's how a serf thinks. A company who wants to hire professionals ever again, after laying some of them off, will make sure to have a decent severance package - and MS did that. Most big companies that aren't in a death spiral do.
They must take out more value (than they could possibly even theoretically add) or else they would be broke.
Ahh, liberals, forever convinced economics is a zero-sum game.
Market spreads and brokerage prices had been coming down way before HFT were inserted into the system. It's like all the efficiencies of the last couple decades have been so great that you don't even notice when HFT quietly slip in a new tax on everyone.
It's all the same trend. HFT isn't some cliff we fell off - trade frequency and market maker participation has been increasing steadily for 20 years as technological advance made it more and more practical. Spreads fell steadily during this time as a result.
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And that's EXACLTY how the Jesse Jackson shakedown works.
"Do what I say or I'll call you a RAAAAAACIST!!!"
Jackson really should patent that. It's a hell of an effective "business" method.
Well, I have seen racism in dev shops before, to be sure, but not the sort that Reverend Jackson wants shakedown money for. I've worked for more than one place where "white men born in America" were about 2% of engineers. Normally, it's just not an issue, but at one place the racism was so bad that everyone not of the preferred race left over the course of 6 months after a shift of management. (Not saying what that race was, as the problem was just a couple of assholes, and not a more general problem).
I've also seen straight-up redneck racist at the first dev shop I ever worked at, back when we rode dinosaurs to work, but that company was so exploitive that racism only makes the middle of its list of abuses.
There are plenty of smart engineers working for Visa. How much would $CLEVER_IDEA cost? How much does this sort of fraud cost? You can bet someone did the math.
The concept of merchants eating costs is a bit nonsensical anyhow: most of what we buy on a daily basis is sold on a very thin margin, so when an external cost is imposed across the market, it has to come from the customers.
The money in your bank account also continues to exist regardless of data connections where you go. And your ability to spend a given physical currency vary depending on where you go - dollars are special, but e.g. a rupee note isn't going to spend well in the US.
Specie-based currency has at least some value everywhere, but these days it's easier in most of the world to find a data connection than someone who trades in gold (plus a whole host of other problems).
As sibling says, Visa charges this fee to the merchant, not the customer. Visa is in the transaction-processing business; it's banks that loan money.
SF is the abbreviation for "real science fiction". SciFi is the abbreviation for action/horror movies with futuristic explosions. Harlan Ellison suggests "skiffy" as the pronunciation of the latter, and some have taken to writing it that way too. I hear Edge of Tomorrow was actually good SF, but I haven't seen it yet - but 1 a year is lucky for SF films.
Plus you have films like Gravity, which wasn't even SciFi, but instead a historical period piece. Remember when we had shuttles, and the will to build vehicles that could launch men into space? Good times; good times.
If your costs for a box are $1 production, $1000 R&D, then your replacement costs for shrinkage and shipping damage and so on are: $1/box. This guy mightt be 1 lost sale, but he certainly isn't 40.
The customer didn't print special cards here - they're just normal, expired cards.
The store doesn't call the number on the back of the card - the store calls their own merchant bank.
This was just straightforward grift (a con game), not some glaring flaw in the banking system. The sales clerks got suckered, perhaps due to lack of training by Apple, or perhaps the con-man was just that good.
The truth is that credit card interest is the highest profit gig in the whole world. Because of this, Visa/MasterCard
Visa/MasterCard make $0 off of interest. They charge a fee for the convenience of not having to use cash. They're not in the "loaning money" business at all, and of course TFS talks about debit cards, not credit cards.
Vendors are not even allowed to do things like require an ID, (I know they do, but it is against the vendor agreement), even though it would make purchases a lot more secure, because EASY trumps everything, EASY makes billions.
Easy is what the customers want. For normal fraud with actual credit cards (nothing to do with this story, of course), it's the merchant who eats the fraud for ID theft. But merchants sign up for that, because they'll have less business if they're inconvenient for their customers.
Security is not the primary goal here, nor should it be. The only goal of any security here is to limit losses system-wide to something manageable. And it does that just fine.
Gold notes were just as virtual as anything else. Physical gold coins, or barter for consumables, is the only way to avoid virtuality, and there were many practical reasons we went away from that. Nothing, of course, will prevent a government from debasing a currency - it's what they do, it's all they do.
I disagree. If you can hold down a professional job in America, you should get a green card (after only a criminal background check). If you can hold down any job in America, you should get a work visa (after only a criminal background check). The only way in which legal immigration can be bad for us is when people come here without jobs to consume federal programs. Have a job? Welcome aboard!
If native population were growing fast, it might be a different story, but since native population is shrinking (birth rate below replacement rate), we need people, those with professional skills preferred.
The problem isn't people coming here on H1-Bs, but their difficulty in turn that into a green card. The "apprentices" would mostly stay here if they could. And does anyone really want to argue that immigration of well-educated, highly-skilled engineers is bad for America?
All the focus on the political immigration debate seems to be on low-skilled workers, and the answers aren't so easy there. But anyone who can come here and work a job that pays $100k+? Keep em coming, I say.
Can I use kittens in my design?
Yes, as long as they fit in the box (so you're likely limited to 1 kitten), and as long as they're not water cooled kittens.
From what I hear, death threats are quite normal in the video games industry. Certainly the vitriol flies on gaming forums (can't imagine how busy the moderators for official game forums must be). This article seems to boil down to "but women get rape threats too". OK, sure, men don't often get those, fair point. But in an industry thick with death threats, how many developers or commentators have actually been lynched by angry fans since the beginning of time? Roughly zero? It's not rational to actually be creeped out or worried about this stuff.
For goodness sake, Jack Thompson is still alive and well. If any of these threats of violence could be taken seriously, he'd be the first casualty. Think you're more hated than that guy?
I have 100 discs in my Netflix queue that aren't available on streaming. Go through about 6 a week, and have for years (I don't have cable). Only about 10% or what I watch can be streamed. And sadly the count of "very long wait" is up to 20 now, and climbing.
For the most part, it's only recent (but not too recent) content that's streamable. Heck, you can't even stream The Wire, and that's not that old. You can't stream any of the pre-reboot Dr Who episodes, and I could add another 100 discs to my queue just for Dr Who (does the BBC have these streaming yet?)
If there were an alternative to Netflix for disc shipment, I'd switch today. I might pay double, certainly 50% more, for the breadth of selection Netflix once had, if catalog growth continued, stuff got upgraded to BluRay, and so on.
But there's no such animal. Kids these days are all about streaming. Netflix's model of "delayed gratification" for TV watching was a miracle in the first place. I'm amazed it's lasted as long as it has.
The advertisement for Hulu plus will resume after this commercial break. Stay tuned afterwards for our Best of Commercials Spectacular, we're sure you'll love it.
Netflix streaming is nearly-worthless - there's just no content.
Hulu streaming is totally worthless garbage. Fuck commercials.
Amazon has the wrong model. PPV isn't where it's at.
There's no question Netflix is gradually ending their disc service (selection is falling rapidly), and that really sucks. The ~$1.50 price to watch a disc was right for me, and it's sad to see it die. There's so very much great stuff from the 20th century that seems doomed to vanish with the death of physical media (and the complete and utter failure of government and the legal system when it comes to streaming and licensing).
At this point, I can only hope good rips of everything are around somewhere and being archived by hobbyists, awaiting some fix to copyright law. (Torrents may be plentiful for new stuff, but new stuff is easily available in legal ways for those who aren't broke anyhow. Torrents for last-century works are a different story).
I don't think the question is really whether the judge can order such a thing. I think it's more of a question of whether it is justified in this case.
We lack the data to second-guess the judge's judgment. I'm elated by this story, personally. There was a judge; there was a warrant; that's amazing progress for email!
You seem blind to the fact that your arguments only make sense when viewed through the "only Americans matter" lens, but are obviously false otherwise. How else do you explain it?
The thing is if employers want the duty to just pay you for services, then they should get out of everything that does not involve work.
I couldn't agree more. And that goes double for the government. Heck, even the concept of health "insurance" as we have it today seems broken - does my car insurance pay for tune-ups? I'd like nothing more than being able to buy catastrophic care insurance (what was once called "major medical") like I buy car insurance (including the government-mandated high-risk pool so that no one gets priced out - we made that work for car insurance after all), and let all the day-to-day medical stuff be a cash transaction no different from an oil change.
It's an imperfect world.
BTW, on the QA side, Microsoft did in fact give people a few months to apply internally for dev jobs (it wasn't official that the rest would face lay-offs, but the writing was on the wall). About half of them made that jump. That's not re-training, of course, but it's nicer than most corporate layoffs.
I know plenty of people at MS. Several months ago, they announced the end of SDT (QA) as a thing. About half the SDT guys found internal transfers to the development teams. The other half were clearly looking for seats before the music stopped. Well, the music stopped.
That's the thing about software - whatever your technical skills, they have a half-life. You have to keep on top of that, or you'll find that what you know how to do simply isn't valuable any more. SDT was supposed to be a "developer, but writing test code" job all along. Now that MS is following the herd in making all test automation part of dev's job, those who had the talent and inclination to become normal devs had plenty of time to make that transfer. And about half of them did.
Your employer's duty is to give you money, not hold your hand and guide you through life.
Microsoft had a very generous severance package for engineers. They're on the payroll for 2 months after "being layed off", they get 2 weeks pay per 6 months tenure up to some high cap, from what I've heard.
When I got layed off in the dot-bust, my employer gave me a check and a shove out the door, but not having to work for 6 months gave me plenty of time brush up my skill set and to place myself with another company.
A free man doesn't expect his employer to be his mommy too - that's how a serf thinks. A company who wants to hire professionals ever again, after laying some of them off, will make sure to have a decent severance package - and MS did that. Most big companies that aren't in a death spiral do.
They must take out more value (than they could possibly even theoretically add) or else they would be broke.
Ahh, liberals, forever convinced economics is a zero-sum game.
Market spreads and brokerage prices had been coming down way before HFT were inserted into the system. It's like all the efficiencies of the last couple decades have been so great that you don't even notice when HFT quietly slip in a new tax on everyone.
It's all the same trend. HFT isn't some cliff we fell off - trade frequency and market maker participation has been increasing steadily for 20 years as technological advance made it more and more practical. Spreads fell steadily during this time as a result.