Medicine is full of foreigners who manage to get some kind of accreditation to practice in the US. I've been to urgent care offices in Minnesota and had doctors with accents so thick I could hardly understand them. Obviously they are here and working the Wal Mart of medicine because they are cheaper than some American educated doctor.
And what you're really asking is for is trade unionism in IT, because that's what licensed professional associations end up being without being called trade unions. They use licensing and "standards" as a way to keep the pool as small as possible and limit competition. Do you think hair stylists and masseuses need licenses because of the life-threatening nature of haircuts and massages, or because it keeps the competition down?
Professional associations obviously do some good at enforcing standards among their members, but they also do a lot to hinder people who question those standards by making one of the first avenues of complaint against their members be to a board made up of those same members who judges the complaint, and in some places a mandatory step enshrined in law. Obviously we wouldn't want to choke our court system with needless malpractice suits the standards boards deem without merit.
I had a friend who went into for dental work and after he was in terrible pain. Out of despration, he went to another dentist who looked in his mouth and said "Oh my god, who worked on you?" The second dentist fixed the problems and created a detailed chart of what was done wrong. My friend filed a complaint against the original dentist and presented the evidence compiled by another dentist of the mistakes to the dental board. The outcome? Complaint not sustained. Of course, because the dentists as a whole have a vested interest in making complaints against dentists go away.
And good luck with your malpractice suit when the dental board has dismissed your complaint.
Democrats make the best endorsers of H1B visa expansion because they're eager to pander to "high tech" companies and gain a "pro business" reputation and always quick to criticize opposition to H1Bs as racism/xenophobia.
There's probably some cynical strategy that could be formed to make H1Bs look bad.
Use the Democrats' strength with African Americans against them by funding a campaign that makes weak Black employment in the technology sector a result of Democrats H1B policies, not racist employers.
Use the Republicans desire to support business against them, by finding businesses who benefit by not expanding H1Bs and getting them to find politicians with enough existing pro-business credentials to block H1Bs while being supported by those businesses.
Make the Democrats explain why they don't want Blacks to get good jobs in the high tech sector and find upward economic mobility and why they want to give those jobs to foreigners. Get Republicans behind a "pro American business" mantra that makes support for H1Bs seem like it benefits overseas multinationals.
The problem seems to be that it's not really the artists pushing this, but the media empires that pushes the notion of perpetual, rent-seeking copyrights to shield business models.
The artist gets trotted out as phony victim of limits on copyright, like a marionette, and we're supposed to feel sorry for them and let the media empires keep finding ways to control all intellectual property forever.
In terms of performing artists, I think there's also a sense that they're being overcompensated for recordings -- basically a single performance. Historically, performers haven't made fortunes off narrow control of copyrighted material, they've been paid for performing. You strummed your lute at the Ye Olde Pub and collected some farthings. If you were lucky, you played for the court and got some gold coins.
Whether this is a fair concept or not, it's kind of how performers have been rewarded financially for most of history. Material inventions like dynamite seem to be different than creative performances.
I cut over to a cell-only setup. I bought a box called "X-Link" that you pair via bluetooth and plug into an existing phone jack. It will ring all the old analog phones on the circuit when the phone rings, you can make calls from the analog phones, and it passes caller ID, too.
It works pretty well, but really, I always have my cell phone with me anymore. It's MORE convenient than any extension because it's within reach.
Plus, nobody calls much anymore. They text or email. Kids these days.
At least on a PHONE? The cellular network provides a very high quality time signal to begin with, probably better than the internal clock can deliver. AFAIK it's also the iPhone default.
The only reason I can see why you would want to would be to lock the time zone to a specific one different from the one you're in (iPhone seems to set the timezone either via GPS or from the cell network). OK, maybe this is someone's preference, but every time I have done something similar out of my timezone it always fucks me up to be out of sync with local time.
And why on earth would you want to be on a different date?
Again, it's less about what's humanly possible or making the SportsCenter top 10 plays of the day.
It's about restoring some sanity to the last minutes of the game. End the ridiculous, drawn-out chess match over clock control. It's like games are two games in one -- one, a normal basketball game for 95% of the time and the rest this, weird, stop-and-go half-court set piece game which takes half an hour for 2 minutes of game clock.
From what I remember reading, Sherman's March to the Sea had general orders to destroy Southern economic output but not to wantonly harm civilian population or things necessary to keep them alive, although even if true, it's an open question on what level of discipline was maintained over the campaign at the unit level.
The Romans largely set the gold standard for total warfare, often annihilating their opponents armies completely, burning their cities to the ground, looting everything of value and enslaving anyone left. Carthage and Gaul come to mind. Marcus Licinius Crassus had 6,000 rebel slaves crucified on a stretch of the Appian Way miles long to serve as a warning to any continuation of the rebellion.
The thing is, in modern military campaigns I don't think you would have to actually destroy an entire country completely or kill all their civilians. My sense is that after a brief period of time where you had firmly established total warfare as the core strategy you would cow the population. A path through Iraq or Syria wide enough for a couple of divisions of mechanized infantry where every form of resistance was met with total destruction would result in a quick calculus that resistance really was futile and that subjugation was a better choice.
It's only a bad idea from the sense that *some* sub-second plays can be executed.
It's a good idea in that it dents some of the relentless dragging out of games at the end by imposing some reality on the nature of a timed competition.
The old saw about basketball is that the first 75% of the game doesn't matter and it's gotten increasingly like nothing but the last sixty seconds matter. Unless the point differential is 6+ points you end up with a completely different game played at the end being managed for control of the clock. Most often unless the game is within about 4 points or less, the losing team's efforts don't accomplish much but drag out the inevitable.
I'd even go so far as to say that there should be no clock stoppage *at all* in the last 30 seconds, up to maybe even two minutes, so that the pace of play stays what it was in the rest of the game.
If you want to play a control-the-clock game, make the entire thing 5 minutes and give each side 6 time outs. That might be interesting on its own, but it makes no sense to me to have 38 or 58 minutes of open-floor basketball and then change the flow to chess match half-court at the very end.
Football has sort of gotten into this, I think they eliminated certain clock stoppages in the last two minutes to get to the end.
Make the clock only full second resolution AND make some kind of rule that says that inbounding the ball to a player is a full-second play. This way the only play allowed with 1 second on the clock would be a free throw, which is immune from the clock (I've seen free throws done with no time on the clock). Fouling the in-bounding team with 1 second on the clock would be pointless then.
This idea that you can stop the clock with a fraction of a second on the clock and actually execute a play is silly, and reduces the last few seconds of a basketball game into a tedious chess match of clock stoppage strategy.
If the teams are tied with 1-2 seconds remaining, conceptually it's a tie and they should play an overtime period, not see who can decide the game on a single desperation play.
I would argue that many of the most successful military campaigns have involved total warfare, which includes targeting civilian populations. The strategic argument is that it demoralizes your opponent, disrupts his economic system and supply of materiel, and damages his political power and control.
The trend towards less aggressive use of total warfare seems to be mostly a byproduct of media exposure of the military theater to non-combatants, resulting in negative public opinion and diplomatic pressure.
The US, for example, could have put down the Iraqi insurgency after the invasion in a manner patterned after Fallujah -- expel civilians, ring the city, and level it going after insurgents. We most likely would have killed enough insurgents and cowed the population to end the insurgency. However, public opinion and diplomacy would have made widespread destruction quickly unpopular, especially with a domestic audience already somewhat divided by the war.
It might even be argued that *not* pursuing total warfare resulted in greater suffering by stringing out the conflict over a couple of decades and leaving the theater badly damaged regardless. It also results in high costs for the aggressors, as they expend lives and materiel without really accomplishing their goals.
I guess I haven't followed it closely enough or Madoff hasn't talked enough but I don't have a sense of how apologetic, defiant, or what his personal reaction to getting caught was.
Without thinking about it for more than 5 minutes, my gut reaction is a guy who does something like that because he craves consistency and has to have it his way isn't going to come off feeling guilty or apologetic, he's actually probably proud of how he managed to keep it consistent in spite of the fact that he was running a billion dollar ponzi.
Whereas a guy who did it because he was desperate and was covering up losses and now can't get out of the hole? He feels terrible but can't quit because of the fear. I guy like this seems like he would be desperately apologetic.
A smart watch that can't do much on its own and can't be paired in any way with a phone because it is no longer a supported software release sounds dumb.
I don't know if they did, but I wish Apple had built in some protocol primitives that while they could be extended, would also retain full backwards compatibility so that you could push basic data that isn't likely to change (SMS or contact info or whatever) over a long timespan.
There are issues, like the length, but complaining that it's a Chinese "off-brand" (meaning not American) is just racist.
That's a bit of a leap, isn't it?
I mean, I generally love generally high quality and extremely low cost made in China stuff, but the fact of the matter is there is there is some really crappy, off-brand Chinese made stuff, like the dual port 2.1A USB car adapters I bought that are undersized by several mm and won't make contact well enough to even work.
How exactly does it disparage the race of the makers if I describe it as off-brand Chinese parts? It indicates where it came from and that it is not even a brand you've heard from, even only on Amazon, like Anker?
I'm thinking the explanation was simpler, like he experienced some initial success, overestimated his ability and began to lose money, decided to fake some financial records and found he could get away with it. Once you start a ponzi, it's very difficult to get out of it. So Madoff just kept going.
Seriously, if they ever want to make it the year of Linux on the desktop they would adopt RDP as the protocol (as in compatible with mstsc.exe). It'd be a massive potential userbase of people running windows who could be immediate users of free software. I could see virtual desktops as a mass-market business, not the niche corporate Citrix/TS/VDI thing it is now.
I always wonder why I don't make my own dekstop a VM and quit customizing or even caring if the actual machines I connect from do anything other than run the remote access client well.
what made her think that she's right for this job?
You could make an argument that nobody is "right" for this job and that the best possible qualification is somebody with excellent executive (the adjective, not the position) functioning skills and management ability. The President doesn't actually do very much but make decisions and usually based on information provided by extremely qualified specialists with decades of experience.
The biggest inherent skills a President probably needs are, sadly, personal charisma and political intelligence.
There's a very slim chance that there may be an extremely secret cabal of very high level DPRK leadership that have some kind of "we're gonna die anyway" plan for deposing Fearless Leader in the event he goes all the way off the reservation and starts a war with a major power like the US.
But...Kim Jong-Un executed a whole bunch of very senior guys not long after he took power, including guys who had been close to his father for decades and he also is fond of shuffling top generals from time to time. All of this is designed to put the "fear of Juche" into his senior leadership and make any kind of coup plan impossible to organize.
Plus it's such a shit-ass backwards place to live that you just know the good perks (like eating, heat in the winter, and other luxuries) are doled out to anyone willing to squeal anything remotely like a coup attempt and I'm sure they all squeal on each all the time in a desperate attempt to keep their positions and perks.
It may be debatable how long the DPRK army is able and willing to fight. Fuel shortages could be a problem and their army is hardly positively motivated to stay in the fight, especially if they had to face something like sustained heavy air campaigns involving carpet, thermobaric or firebombing. Cut supply lines, morale, etc. may cause them to collapse early. Or given the last 50 years available, they may be so deeply dug in that they are able to ride it out for months.
The story raises so many interesting questions, especially since you're so conservative yourself. The main one being, was it even "gay fetish sex photos"? What, you saw a dick and you thought "gay"? And then from there you had this whole reaction about how dare he be gay when he lives a conservative lifestyle with a wife? From there you immediately assumed his wife didn't know? That he was a hypocrite? And 20 years later you still don't understand what an asshole you were being?
I can only surmise that two men sharing sexually explicit photos of themselves somehow qualifies as having at the very least a strong undertone of homosexuality.
I don't know what world you live in, but surely 20 years ago, there were very few conservative religious institutions that were openly supportive of poly-amorous marriages, especially those which involved bisexual or homosexual relationships.
I think assuming that he was engaged in a secretive, homosexually-oriented relationship in contradiction to his stated religious beliefs and in contradiction to his marriage vows isn't exactly going out on a limb with my own personal biases.
Of course, if you're inclined you can choose to believe some counterfactual argument that exchanging photos of one's genitalia with a member of the same sex isn't homosexual behavior on any level, that his wife knew of and approved of this, and that he belonged to a Christian religious denomination that approved of poly-amorous marital relations involving sexual behavior with a member of the same sex. Hell, you might even throw in the idea that his employer endorsed using his work email account for this, since it's about as likely to be true as any of the other counterfactual arguments.
Why do you presuppose being gay means you can't be conservative or religious or have a family?
In every Christian denomination I can think of, including the current Mormon church, a marriage is an exclusive relationship between two people. Until only very recently that same thing would have been true written as "...between a man and a woman" and still is in a huge number of mainstream religions.
Given the definition of "exclusive" and "two people" as being basically immutable, I don't really see how engaging in fetishistic and surreptitious (even if not explicitly homosexual) sexual behavior with other people actually fits the exclusive part.
I think it's beyond debate that doing this with your work account is downright stupid.
While their belief that people who don't like them won't click on them is true, advertisers are kind of like proselytizing religions. Their deepest motivation isn't to convert the mostly converted, but to reach those who are the hardest to convert. Marketers are convinced of the idea that selling to the man who doesn't want to be sold to is only a matter of reaching him with the right campaign.
We'd never invade DPRK. They are basically a giant warehouse of every infantry weapon system ever developed by the Russians or Chinese. It would be a monumental effort to invade them with infantry, even after a conventional bombing campaign of months.
I would wager a nuclear reprisal by the US is more likely following even a flawed launch that dropped a nuke into the ocean. The Republican congress would declare war and impeach the President the same day if he wouldn't sign onto it. Given our current level of political divisiveness, I wouldn't put a coup d'etat against a reluctant Democratic president outside the realm of possible.
I think in terms of total probability, the US is more likely to launch a nuclear strike on DPRK than it is to invade and fight a ground war there.
DPRK is armed to the teeth with conventional weapons and has had 60 years to dig in deep, making a conventional ground assault extremely painful. Not that the US couldn't *win* such a fight should it choose to dedicate the resources, but it would be extremely resource and manpower intensive.
And for what possible gain? No appreciable natural resources, a civilian refugee crisis of epic proportions, a diplomatic shitshow with China and Russia, both of which would use a US commitment to pursue every bit of mischief they are capable of and a price tag in the trillions. Not to mention the global economic ding from the likely destruction Seoul and the disruption to a not-insignificant part of the global supply chain.
Kim's nuclear ambitions are equally ridiculous. They're decades away from any kind of reliable and effective long-range nuclear weapons program and even when they get to the point where they have a half-assed accurate ICBM that can deliver a half-assed effective nuclear weapon, what are they going to do? Any serious *attempt* at using it or even believably threatening to use it, faces the existential threat of a US retaliation that would annihilate them, something that not even the USSR at its peak could avoid, either.
At an old job back in the 1990s when we had the first company-wide email system with Internet connectivity we used an old version of Groupwise. The SMTP gateway was a standalone DOS system and it used to choke from time to time, requiring extracting the queued message it couldn't process. I used to pull these out and if possible, decode the message and attachments for the intended user.
One of these messages was to a "rising star" in the company and featured some personal chatter between the employee and some outside personal contact, complete with pictures of both of them wearing fancy suits in staged poses, but with their genitals hanging out.
The "rising star" employee was well-liked for being humble, hard-working and smart. He was also socially conservative, with pictures of his young, stay-at-home wife and fairly open about his involvement at church.
I thought the whole situation was just kind of icky -- guy trading gay fetish sex photos, while positioning himself as a conservative, religious family man. It wasn't the photos, but just the hypocrisy. I had a hard time working with the guy (which I didn't very much anyway) after because it was all just kind of creepy.
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Medicine is full of foreigners who manage to get some kind of accreditation to practice in the US. I've been to urgent care offices in Minnesota and had doctors with accents so thick I could hardly understand them. Obviously they are here and working the Wal Mart of medicine because they are cheaper than some American educated doctor.
And what you're really asking is for is trade unionism in IT, because that's what licensed professional associations end up being without being called trade unions. They use licensing and "standards" as a way to keep the pool as small as possible and limit competition. Do you think hair stylists and masseuses need licenses because of the life-threatening nature of haircuts and massages, or because it keeps the competition down?
Professional associations obviously do some good at enforcing standards among their members, but they also do a lot to hinder people who question those standards by making one of the first avenues of complaint against their members be to a board made up of those same members who judges the complaint, and in some places a mandatory step enshrined in law. Obviously we wouldn't want to choke our court system with needless malpractice suits the standards boards deem without merit.
I had a friend who went into for dental work and after he was in terrible pain. Out of despration, he went to another dentist who looked in his mouth and said "Oh my god, who worked on you?" The second dentist fixed the problems and created a detailed chart of what was done wrong. My friend filed a complaint against the original dentist and presented the evidence compiled by another dentist of the mistakes to the dental board. The outcome? Complaint not sustained. Of course, because the dentists as a whole have a vested interest in making complaints against dentists go away.
And good luck with your malpractice suit when the dental board has dismissed your complaint.
Democrats make the best endorsers of H1B visa expansion because they're eager to pander to "high tech" companies and gain a "pro business" reputation and always quick to criticize opposition to H1Bs as racism/xenophobia.
There's probably some cynical strategy that could be formed to make H1Bs look bad.
Use the Democrats' strength with African Americans against them by funding a campaign that makes weak Black employment in the technology sector a result of Democrats H1B policies, not racist employers.
Use the Republicans desire to support business against them, by finding businesses who benefit by not expanding H1Bs and getting them to find politicians with enough existing pro-business credentials to block H1Bs while being supported by those businesses.
Make the Democrats explain why they don't want Blacks to get good jobs in the high tech sector and find upward economic mobility and why they want to give those jobs to foreigners. Get Republicans behind a "pro American business" mantra that makes support for H1Bs seem like it benefits overseas multinationals.
The problem seems to be that it's not really the artists pushing this, but the media empires that pushes the notion of perpetual, rent-seeking copyrights to shield business models.
The artist gets trotted out as phony victim of limits on copyright, like a marionette, and we're supposed to feel sorry for them and let the media empires keep finding ways to control all intellectual property forever.
In terms of performing artists, I think there's also a sense that they're being overcompensated for recordings -- basically a single performance. Historically, performers haven't made fortunes off narrow control of copyrighted material, they've been paid for performing. You strummed your lute at the Ye Olde Pub and collected some farthings. If you were lucky, you played for the court and got some gold coins.
Whether this is a fair concept or not, it's kind of how performers have been rewarded financially for most of history. Material inventions like dynamite seem to be different than creative performances.
I cut over to a cell-only setup. I bought a box called "X-Link" that you pair via bluetooth and plug into an existing phone jack. It will ring all the old analog phones on the circuit when the phone rings, you can make calls from the analog phones, and it passes caller ID, too.
It works pretty well, but really, I always have my cell phone with me anymore. It's MORE convenient than any extension because it's within reach.
Plus, nobody calls much anymore. They text or email. Kids these days.
At least on a PHONE? The cellular network provides a very high quality time signal to begin with, probably better than the internal clock can deliver. AFAIK it's also the iPhone default.
The only reason I can see why you would want to would be to lock the time zone to a specific one different from the one you're in (iPhone seems to set the timezone either via GPS or from the cell network). OK, maybe this is someone's preference, but every time I have done something similar out of my timezone it always fucks me up to be out of sync with local time.
And why on earth would you want to be on a different date?
Again, it's less about what's humanly possible or making the SportsCenter top 10 plays of the day.
It's about restoring some sanity to the last minutes of the game. End the ridiculous, drawn-out chess match over clock control. It's like games are two games in one -- one, a normal basketball game for 95% of the time and the rest this, weird, stop-and-go half-court set piece game which takes half an hour for 2 minutes of game clock.
From what I remember reading, Sherman's March to the Sea had general orders to destroy Southern economic output but not to wantonly harm civilian population or things necessary to keep them alive, although even if true, it's an open question on what level of discipline was maintained over the campaign at the unit level.
The Romans largely set the gold standard for total warfare, often annihilating their opponents armies completely, burning their cities to the ground, looting everything of value and enslaving anyone left. Carthage and Gaul come to mind. Marcus Licinius Crassus had 6,000 rebel slaves crucified on a stretch of the Appian Way miles long to serve as a warning to any continuation of the rebellion.
The thing is, in modern military campaigns I don't think you would have to actually destroy an entire country completely or kill all their civilians. My sense is that after a brief period of time where you had firmly established total warfare as the core strategy you would cow the population. A path through Iraq or Syria wide enough for a couple of divisions of mechanized infantry where every form of resistance was met with total destruction would result in a quick calculus that resistance really was futile and that subjugation was a better choice.
It's only a bad idea from the sense that *some* sub-second plays can be executed.
It's a good idea in that it dents some of the relentless dragging out of games at the end by imposing some reality on the nature of a timed competition.
The old saw about basketball is that the first 75% of the game doesn't matter and it's gotten increasingly like nothing but the last sixty seconds matter. Unless the point differential is 6+ points you end up with a completely different game played at the end being managed for control of the clock. Most often unless the game is within about 4 points or less, the losing team's efforts don't accomplish much but drag out the inevitable.
I'd even go so far as to say that there should be no clock stoppage *at all* in the last 30 seconds, up to maybe even two minutes, so that the pace of play stays what it was in the rest of the game.
If you want to play a control-the-clock game, make the entire thing 5 minutes and give each side 6 time outs. That might be interesting on its own, but it makes no sense to me to have 38 or 58 minutes of open-floor basketball and then change the flow to chess match half-court at the very end.
Football has sort of gotten into this, I think they eliminated certain clock stoppages in the last two minutes to get to the end.
Make the clock only full second resolution AND make some kind of rule that says that inbounding the ball to a player is a full-second play. This way the only play allowed with 1 second on the clock would be a free throw, which is immune from the clock (I've seen free throws done with no time on the clock). Fouling the in-bounding team with 1 second on the clock would be pointless then.
This idea that you can stop the clock with a fraction of a second on the clock and actually execute a play is silly, and reduces the last few seconds of a basketball game into a tedious chess match of clock stoppage strategy.
If the teams are tied with 1-2 seconds remaining, conceptually it's a tie and they should play an overtime period, not see who can decide the game on a single desperation play.
Austrian economics minister supports Austrian economics, film at 11.
I would argue that many of the most successful military campaigns have involved total warfare, which includes targeting civilian populations. The strategic argument is that it demoralizes your opponent, disrupts his economic system and supply of materiel, and damages his political power and control.
The trend towards less aggressive use of total warfare seems to be mostly a byproduct of media exposure of the military theater to non-combatants, resulting in negative public opinion and diplomatic pressure.
The US, for example, could have put down the Iraqi insurgency after the invasion in a manner patterned after Fallujah -- expel civilians, ring the city, and level it going after insurgents. We most likely would have killed enough insurgents and cowed the population to end the insurgency. However, public opinion and diplomacy would have made widespread destruction quickly unpopular, especially with a domestic audience already somewhat divided by the war.
It might even be argued that *not* pursuing total warfare resulted in greater suffering by stringing out the conflict over a couple of decades and leaving the theater badly damaged regardless. It also results in high costs for the aggressors, as they expend lives and materiel without really accomplishing their goals.
I guess I haven't followed it closely enough or Madoff hasn't talked enough but I don't have a sense of how apologetic, defiant, or what his personal reaction to getting caught was.
Without thinking about it for more than 5 minutes, my gut reaction is a guy who does something like that because he craves consistency and has to have it his way isn't going to come off feeling guilty or apologetic, he's actually probably proud of how he managed to keep it consistent in spite of the fact that he was running a billion dollar ponzi.
Whereas a guy who did it because he was desperate and was covering up losses and now can't get out of the hole? He feels terrible but can't quit because of the fear. I guy like this seems like he would be desperately apologetic.
I don't know which Madoff was.
For me it's charging and obsolescence.
A smart watch that can't do much on its own and can't be paired in any way with a phone because it is no longer a supported software release sounds dumb.
I don't know if they did, but I wish Apple had built in some protocol primitives that while they could be extended, would also retain full backwards compatibility so that you could push basic data that isn't likely to change (SMS or contact info or whatever) over a long timespan.
There are issues, like the length, but complaining that it's a Chinese "off-brand" (meaning not American) is just racist.
That's a bit of a leap, isn't it?
I mean, I generally love generally high quality and extremely low cost made in China stuff, but the fact of the matter is there is there is some really crappy, off-brand Chinese made stuff, like the dual port 2.1A USB car adapters I bought that are undersized by several mm and won't make contact well enough to even work.
How exactly does it disparage the race of the makers if I describe it as off-brand Chinese parts? It indicates where it came from and that it is not even a brand you've heard from, even only on Amazon, like Anker?
I'm thinking the explanation was simpler, like he experienced some initial success, overestimated his ability and began to lose money, decided to fake some financial records and found he could get away with it. Once you start a ponzi, it's very difficult to get out of it. So Madoff just kept going.
Seriously, if they ever want to make it the year of Linux on the desktop they would adopt RDP as the protocol (as in compatible with mstsc.exe). It'd be a massive potential userbase of people running windows who could be immediate users of free software. I could see virtual desktops as a mass-market business, not the niche corporate Citrix/TS/VDI thing it is now.
I always wonder why I don't make my own dekstop a VM and quit customizing or even caring if the actual machines I connect from do anything other than run the remote access client well.
Isn't the punchline to this "No, and based on my ownership experience, neither does Trane."
what made her think that she's right for this job?
You could make an argument that nobody is "right" for this job and that the best possible qualification is somebody with excellent executive (the adjective, not the position) functioning skills and management ability. The President doesn't actually do very much but make decisions and usually based on information provided by extremely qualified specialists with decades of experience.
The biggest inherent skills a President probably needs are, sadly, personal charisma and political intelligence.
There's a very slim chance that there may be an extremely secret cabal of very high level DPRK leadership that have some kind of "we're gonna die anyway" plan for deposing Fearless Leader in the event he goes all the way off the reservation and starts a war with a major power like the US.
But...Kim Jong-Un executed a whole bunch of very senior guys not long after he took power, including guys who had been close to his father for decades and he also is fond of shuffling top generals from time to time. All of this is designed to put the "fear of Juche" into his senior leadership and make any kind of coup plan impossible to organize.
Plus it's such a shit-ass backwards place to live that you just know the good perks (like eating, heat in the winter, and other luxuries) are doled out to anyone willing to squeal anything remotely like a coup attempt and I'm sure they all squeal on each all the time in a desperate attempt to keep their positions and perks.
It may be debatable how long the DPRK army is able and willing to fight. Fuel shortages could be a problem and their army is hardly positively motivated to stay in the fight, especially if they had to face something like sustained heavy air campaigns involving carpet, thermobaric or firebombing. Cut supply lines, morale, etc. may cause them to collapse early. Or given the last 50 years available, they may be so deeply dug in that they are able to ride it out for months.
The story raises so many interesting questions, especially since you're so conservative yourself. The main one being, was it even "gay fetish sex photos"? What, you saw a dick and you thought "gay"? And then from there you had this whole reaction about how dare he be gay when he lives a conservative lifestyle with a wife? From there you immediately assumed his wife didn't know? That he was a hypocrite? And 20 years later you still don't understand what an asshole you were being?
I can only surmise that two men sharing sexually explicit photos of themselves somehow qualifies as having at the very least a strong undertone of homosexuality.
I don't know what world you live in, but surely 20 years ago, there were very few conservative religious institutions that were openly supportive of poly-amorous marriages, especially those which involved bisexual or homosexual relationships.
I think assuming that he was engaged in a secretive, homosexually-oriented relationship in contradiction to his stated religious beliefs and in contradiction to his marriage vows isn't exactly going out on a limb with my own personal biases.
Of course, if you're inclined you can choose to believe some counterfactual argument that exchanging photos of one's genitalia with a member of the same sex isn't homosexual behavior on any level, that his wife knew of and approved of this, and that he belonged to a Christian religious denomination that approved of poly-amorous marital relations involving sexual behavior with a member of the same sex. Hell, you might even throw in the idea that his employer endorsed using his work email account for this, since it's about as likely to be true as any of the other counterfactual arguments.
Why do you presuppose being gay means you can't be conservative or religious or have a family?
In every Christian denomination I can think of, including the current Mormon church, a marriage is an exclusive relationship between two people. Until only very recently that same thing would have been true written as "...between a man and a woman" and still is in a huge number of mainstream religions.
Given the definition of "exclusive" and "two people" as being basically immutable, I don't really see how engaging in fetishistic and surreptitious (even if not explicitly homosexual) sexual behavior with other people actually fits the exclusive part.
I think it's beyond debate that doing this with your work account is downright stupid.
While their belief that people who don't like them won't click on them is true, advertisers are kind of like proselytizing religions. Their deepest motivation isn't to convert the mostly converted, but to reach those who are the hardest to convert. Marketers are convinced of the idea that selling to the man who doesn't want to be sold to is only a matter of reaching him with the right campaign.
We'd never invade DPRK. They are basically a giant warehouse of every infantry weapon system ever developed by the Russians or Chinese. It would be a monumental effort to invade them with infantry, even after a conventional bombing campaign of months.
I would wager a nuclear reprisal by the US is more likely following even a flawed launch that dropped a nuke into the ocean. The Republican congress would declare war and impeach the President the same day if he wouldn't sign onto it. Given our current level of political divisiveness, I wouldn't put a coup d'etat against a reluctant Democratic president outside the realm of possible.
I think in terms of total probability, the US is more likely to launch a nuclear strike on DPRK than it is to invade and fight a ground war there.
DPRK is armed to the teeth with conventional weapons and has had 60 years to dig in deep, making a conventional ground assault extremely painful. Not that the US couldn't *win* such a fight should it choose to dedicate the resources, but it would be extremely resource and manpower intensive.
And for what possible gain? No appreciable natural resources, a civilian refugee crisis of epic proportions, a diplomatic shitshow with China and Russia, both of which would use a US commitment to pursue every bit of mischief they are capable of and a price tag in the trillions. Not to mention the global economic ding from the likely destruction Seoul and the disruption to a not-insignificant part of the global supply chain.
Kim's nuclear ambitions are equally ridiculous. They're decades away from any kind of reliable and effective long-range nuclear weapons program and even when they get to the point where they have a half-assed accurate ICBM that can deliver a half-assed effective nuclear weapon, what are they going to do? Any serious *attempt* at using it or even believably threatening to use it, faces the existential threat of a US retaliation that would annihilate them, something that not even the USSR at its peak could avoid, either.
At an old job back in the 1990s when we had the first company-wide email system with Internet connectivity we used an old version of Groupwise. The SMTP gateway was a standalone DOS system and it used to choke from time to time, requiring extracting the queued message it couldn't process. I used to pull these out and if possible, decode the message and attachments for the intended user.
One of these messages was to a "rising star" in the company and featured some personal chatter between the employee and some outside personal contact, complete with pictures of both of them wearing fancy suits in staged poses, but with their genitals hanging out.
The "rising star" employee was well-liked for being humble, hard-working and smart. He was also socially conservative, with pictures of his young, stay-at-home wife and fairly open about his involvement at church.
I thought the whole situation was just kind of icky -- guy trading gay fetish sex photos, while positioning himself as a conservative, religious family man. It wasn't the photos, but just the hypocrisy. I had a hard time working with the guy (which I didn't very much anyway) after because it was all just kind of creepy.