All this with one salary for a blue collar job with decent job security, benefits and a pension plan.
True, and that's also a highly desirable state for us to get back to. But it's not going to happen anytime soon, and for some very good reasons.
High-paying blue collar jobs have been disappearing in the US for decades, largely due to globalization. For every person who might once have had a blue-collar manufacturing job here, there is probably someone elsewhere in the world willing to do it for less. And that's bad for American blue collar workers but actually good for the world overall - there are a lot of people in countries like Bangladesh, China etc. who a generation ago who might have been subsistence farmers not really participating in the global economy and now they are moving to cities, taking jobs and buying things. That fuels tax revenues in their countries, allowing the building of infrastructure and the improvement of quality of life in many of these third world countries. Again, that's bad for us but good for the world's economic development overall.
This is certainly an arguable point among economists, but there is a lot of data pointing to the idea that pensions were always a bit of a ponzi scheme. When people are living longer, it's just not economically sustainable to carry costs like that when you could be spending that money on hiring new workers or paying your active workers more. Paying for retiree pensions and health care benefits used to add around $1500 in "dead weight" to the cost of each car for General Motors, as I recall. You saw in most of the recent airline bankruptcies that their pension obligations were the first thing that they shed to return themselves to sustainable profitability. Defined benefit plans are on the way out everywhere in the US - except the government - and arguably should be because, while it's great for the worker - was never really going to make sense in the long run to begin with.
And job security has always been a bit of a lie. In the postwar US economy that the baby boomers grew up in, the economy as a whole expanded significantly and a rising tide lifted all boats. Nobody needed to be laid off because everything was growing. But when you reach a point where some industries are going away, others change rapidly and companies reach an equilibrium point where they grow or shrink organically, people are going to lose their jobs sometimes. It's unfortunate but it's a reality.
So all your points are desirable and the US really does need to find a way to bring back a real blue collar middle class. But many of the things these folks got used to were temporary things rather than permanent. The US economy is rapidly splitting in two, into a blue-collar/lower education economy where unemployment is high and job prospects are low; and a white-collar/higher education economy where unemployment is low and that's where all the growth is happening (tech, finance, etc.) That's unlikely to change in the foreseeable future and the US needs to find a way to bring more of its workforce into the second economy where there are jobs because the first one is just not coming back.
Which brings up the question is it slander/libel when the things told about you are not specifically reputation ruining, just generally wrong.
In the US, at least, there are different rules for people based on whether they are "public figures" or not. Libel (for the record, slander applies to something you say; libel applies to something you print) laws generally say that if you are Joe/Jane Average, you can successfully sue someone for saying something wrong about you. If that wrong thing caused you harm, you can win monetary or other damages. If you are someone who is already "in the public eye" then in order to successfully sue for libel you must also prove that the publication knowingly printed false information about you.
This is why, for example, Richard Jewell was able to successfully sue the Atlanta Journal-Constitution when they incorrectly accused him of being the Olympic Bomber: they were wrong, he was a private shmoe, so the barrier of proof was just being wrong. It is also why Tom Cruise couldn't win against that German gossip rag that said he was gay: it was incorrect(?) but he couldn't prove that it was printed while the newspaper knew (or reasonably should have known) it was false. It's set up this way because there would be a major chilling effect on public discourse if, for example, a newspaper could be sued for reporting today on allegations of corruption by an official that seem credible but are ultimately proven false tomorrow.
Should he decide to sue, Nakamoto could probably make a good case that he is a private citizen rather than a public figure. Assuming, of course, that all this turns out not to be true in the first place, which is still very open to debate.
"Off the record" means "this will get into the headline"
No offense, but you have no idea what you're talking about. In journalism, certain words have certain meanings and any journalist working for a reputable publication will adhere to those strictly.
"Off the record" means "I am telling you, Mr./Ms. Reporter, because I think you should know, but you can't print it or link it to me." The information may still show up in the article because there is no prohibition on "second sourcing," however - it means that if I say "off the record, X got fired for embezzling" and the reporter asks someone else that question and they say yes with it not being off the record, then it's fair game. Experienced interviewees use "off the record" as a tool to either influence the reporter's contextual view of the situation or to lead them to ask questions of other people in that direction. Inexperienced interviewees don't know how to use it, or are not good about making very clear what is on/off the record, and frequently end up getting burned.
Similarly, "on background" means "You can report this piece of information, but you can't say it was me who told you." Whenever you read a story that says "Senior administration officials said..." it is because the person who told that to the reporter said it "on background." It's usually used when people want to get information out but they would get in trouble if people knew who it was that said it.
These are the kinds of rules that a reporter from The Washington Post, CNN or other "mainstream media" outlets will follow scrupulously. If you're talking to someone from Huffington Post, Gawker or sensationalist rags like that - not so much. That's why it's very important to know whom you're talking to and judge the information you disclose accordingly.
Dealing with the media is pretty straightforward if you know the rules, but most "regular" people (i.e. not celebrities, politicians, etc.) don't know or understand the rules and they can be burned by them. The bottom line is that if you are savvy and experienced with the media, you can use tools like "off the record" and "on background" to your benefit. If you are not experienced, the best idea is to avoid them and not say anything that you do not want to see in print, connected to your name.
The two best responses to a request for an interview are to file a restraining order
Oh, and by the way, as a former reporter, I can tell you that if I asked you for an interview and you tried to get a restraining order, that would 1.) never be granted by a judge, and 2.) would make me dig into your story far more deeply because I'm pretty sure you have something to hide. If you have nothing to hide but just don't want to do the interview for privacy reasons (or you suspect the agenda of the reporter), simply decline the interview politely or ask to do it by e-mail where you will have the ability to consider your answers and have everything in writing in case your are misquoted. If you do actually have something to hide, either just decline the interview request or - preferably - have your lawyer answer it.
Giving Linux credit for Android is like saying that FreeBSD is a major desktop OS because of MacOS X, or a major mobile OS because of iOS. It's not. All the bits that make it a success were added by someone else and the underlying kernel is essentially invisible to the end user.
Celebrate Google's success with Android. Don't try to turn it into a success story for Linux when it's not. Linux has succeeded remarkably well in the server and embedded spaces but has not been terribly successful in the desktop or mobile spaces. And you know what? That's okay.
he has underestimated the way the rich and the US are trying to sabotage his policy.
Of course it's somebody else's fault, preferably the US. I mean, it's just not possible that Chavez and then Maduro were running a terribly unsustainable economic model where they got very popular by subsidizing consumer goods with massive oil profits and then as soon as oil prices went down the country was exposed to the real economic world, is it?
The ISP is responsible for his peering relationships - that is what makes the ISP a part of the internet.
To indulge in a bit of reductio ad absurdam but, hey, why not:
WallaWallaNet: Hello, Verizon? Verizon: Yes, hello? WallaWallaNet: Hi, I'm an ISP in Walla Walla Washington, and I'd like access to your subscribers.
Verizon: Super! You can buy a T3 for $1k/month for the local loop and $7k/month for Internet transit. WallaWallaNet: Ooh, here's the problem. I host "www.awesomepixofdogslickingthemselves.com." Your subscribers want the whole Internet - including all the pictures of dogs licking themselves that they could ever want - so I think it's incumbent upon you to peer with me for only the cost of my local loop at the nearest available peering point to me. I mean, www.awesomepixofdogslickingthemselves.com is worth enough to your subscribers to forego that money you were going to charge me for transit, right? Verizon: Excellent point! Please mention the vital importance of www.awesomepixofdogslickingthemselves.com when you call every other major ISP on the planet and ask them for peering! I just need one more piece of information from you and we can get this all set up. WallaWallaNet: Sure, what is it? Verizon: What color is the sky on the planet where you live?
That makes no sense. Both sides are sharing the burden, regardless of the direction of the traffic. You still have the packets on your wires. It doesn't matter if they're going left or right.
It very much does matter if you're hauling the bits from a couple data centers out to the nearest peering point, or if you're hauling them all over the US or the globe to deliver them to users in BFE, West Virginia. Hence the tension over who should pay whom.
It has been a while since I was in the peering game - that was back when UUNet meant something and please get off my lawn - but here's the general idea:
To provide access to the Internet - either as a content host or a content consumer - you need a full view of routes to get to all other ISPs where your sources or destinations are. To get the routes, you need "peering" with the other ISPs or you need to buy "transit" from some other ISP that gets their routes via peering or transit.
Some ISPs are, frankly, more important than others because they provide access to more subscribers or more content than others - they used to be called "Tier 1" ISPs. Peering is valuable because it's traffic you're exchanging for free that you could otherwise be charging a lot of money for. Tier 1 ISPs generally agree to peer with each other because they all need each other, and it makes economic sense for them to say they're all on an equal footing - they were "peers." The economic rationale was because Tier 1 ISPs had to pay for large national or global networks, while Tier 2 or 3 ISPs had small or regional networks and that the Tier 1 ISP was bearing most of the cost of delivery. Traffic ratios were preferred to be equal (content vs. users) for peering, because if you're a content host with one datacenter and some outbound circuits, your cost is far less than having a big national network to serve end users - so web hosting/colo provider ISPs had a harder time getting peering with the big consumer/business access providers. The Tier 2 or Tier 3 ISPs would peer with each other freely because they had equivalent footprints, etc., but the big guys knew that access to their network was extremely valuable and it would be foolish to give it away for free.
So if you're a smaller ISP, and *you* need the Tier 1 more than *they* need you, don't expect to get peering. The ISP will tell you to buy transit from them, or at least buy transit from someone else who does (and the fewer "hops" to get from you to them, the better for your customers). Cogent may host much of Netflix, but they are by no means a Tier 1. This may no longer be the case - like I said, I have been out of the Tier 1 ISP world for years - but at least historically Cogent was known as a bottom feeder of the industry. They charged dirt-cheap rates but ran a crappy network and skimped on their upstream connections to cut costs.
So what's happening here most likely is that Cogent has either bought transit from Verizon and doesn't want to buy more and says "peer with us, we won't buy more." Or Cogent does have peering with Verizon but VZ has said, in effect, "you are not our 'peer'" and beyond a certain amount of peering bandwidth, you should start buying." Cogent is using Netflix to try to argue that "our content is more important to Verizon customers than the other way around," and Verizon is saying, "Um, nope." I won't say who I think is right or wrong here, but this is not the first time Cogent has had peering fights with other large ISPs and I think you can see a pattern here.
If I could get reliable cell coverage in my home, I'd pay $200-300 for that
You can already do that today, that's what femtocells are all about. AT&T version here, Verizon version here. I'm sure most other carriers have similar options... no fancy new technologies required.
There is a much more dangerous issue here that makes it a terrible idea: decoupling the provider and user from the costs involved is exactly why the US healthcare system is so screwed up. Today, colleges have a cost that is known to the student, and students factor that in to their education "purchase." I might like to go to a college that charges $50K a year, but if there's another one that charges $30K a year and provides a similar education, I may choose the cheaper one. Colleges know this and they model their cost structure to fall within a tuition rate that students will be willing to pay.
But now, with students and colleges not having to consider price, no college has any incentive not to inflate its costs - hey, if cost is no object to the student, why not? New Ferraris for all the administrators and a shiny new $50M Center For the Study of Basket-Weaving! The college is getting paid either way, and the student doesn't care because they don't see a bill. Maybe that provides a better quality education for some people, but it's dubious as to whether the benefit outweighs the costs to all the people who have graduated and are now paying for $100K/year per student tuition rates.
This is the same thing that happens in the US medical system today - doctors don't have to think about what procedures cost, so, hey, why not run a bunch of tests that cost $15,000 a pop just to be safe? They're getting paid either way. And the patient typically doesn't see much of that cost directly because (post-deductible, blah blah) most of it is absorbed by their insurance company. Nobody (for the most part) chooses which hospital to go to based on what it costs, and there is no incentive to reduce costs for anyone except the insurance companies. (If you want to hear the gory details, NPR did an awesome story on this several years ago.)
At any rate, while improving access to college education is a great goal, the healthcare example should scare anyone sane that taking "what college costs you to deliver or receive" out of the equation is a recipe for costing everyone way more money than it should.
Just to make sure that I understand the Slashdot logic correctly:
When public companies lay off employees, they are evil because they are screwing the employees to benefit the greedy shareholders
When public companies don't lay off employees, they are evil because they are screwing the shareholders
The fact is that slashing employees is SOP after a buyout. LBOs are a rich person's financial game, and it generally benefits none of the stakeholders except the big investors (i.e. Michael Dell). If you haven't already, read this book to get a feel for how and why these things are done.
The Iron Curtain kept people from escaping from oppressive regimes
oh you mean like the united states government
I know I shouldn't feed the trolls, but this just pissed me off way too badly. Whom has the US kept from escaping its regime? The US has had thousands of willing expatriates over the years to Communist countries.
Do you seriously want to draw an equivalency between the NATO (US and European allies) policy on expatriation versus that of the Warsaw Pact countries? Are you utterly ignorant of the Refuseniks? Do you really dishonor the memory of the Berlin Wall dead so badly in the name of your political hatred of the US?
I grow increasingly ashamed of continuing to read Slashdot, based on the sadly decreasing quality of commenters.
I will do whatever the fuck I want to with that recording, within the confines of the copyright laws of the country I live in
You are correct, but that is also the point of the OP above. You have complete ownership of the physical media - to resell it, use it as a coaster or frisbee, whatever. What you can do with the recording (e.g. play it, format shift it or redistribute it to others) is circumscribed by the copyright laws of your country and is, in effect, a license.
It may sound pedantic, but it is nonetheless a real distinction between total ownership and a license to use the content. Same deal goes with DVDs, software installer media (remember those?), et cetera.
it simply isn't going to work well if you try to run it in an environment that absolutely needs to be 100% compatible with Windows software and standards. However, this is true for Mac OSX too, and I don't ever see anyone saying "Mac OS is not a serious desktop OS".
I guess it depends on how you define "serious desktop OS." I don't think most people define it your way, e.g. "100% Windows compatible." I think most people define it as being explicitly supported "out of the box" by a critical mass of parts of the PC ecosystem:
Major commercial software vendors
Networking equipment, printer/scanners, and other accessory vendors
Native commercial game ports/support
Support from ISPs, cloud backup services, etc.
The reason is that most people who use computers - not most Slashdotters, but most people - want to buy things with which other important things will "just work." Geeks will seek out how they can make things work in unapproved configurations - and will find it great fun! - but the vast majority of computer users and even corporate IT departments will not.
So basically unless you can walk into a Best Buy or something and walk up and down the aisles of boxed software, games, peripherals, monitors, yadda yadda and see your OS listed under in the "Supported Systems" or "System Requirements" fine print on the boxes, then you are not a serious desktop OS for the mass market.
Your mileage may vary - I am just proposing a definition based on mass market usage. There are Slashdotters, I'm sure, who use Plan 9 every day and it is a "serious desktop OS" to them. But for the world at large, I think most people find a different definition.
Huh? Any, um, evidence for that? What does "major contributor" even mean?
If Slashdot had "major contributors" its owners wouldn't keep trying to unload it, and it wouldn't have been sold for peanuts to a marginal company like Dice that doesn't really have much strategic use for it other than a dwindling number of techie eyeballs.
I mean, not to get in the way of bashing Slashdot - the frequent "Dice-vertorials" are shamefully bad - but you may wish to have some evidence for your assertions rather than just assuming a story you don't like was posted there specifically at the wishes of the aforementioned Fortune 500 companies.
That the "US dollar" exists is the biggest lie in America.
That's funny, I have several here in my wallet right now.
The US dollar (or, more precisely, the US $20 or $100 bill) is the most fungible fucking thing on the planet Earth right now. You can spend it or exchange it almost anywhere else on the planet for goods or services at a well established market rate. THAT'S WHAT A CURRENCY IS SUPPOSED TO DO.
I keep promising myself that I'll stop reading the Slashdot articles about Bitcoin, but I don't... that must be what the Dice Overlords are counting on in the hopes that their banner ads sparking my purchases of clever T-shirts or IBM... something... will finally pay off. Brilliant!
Did this manager friend ever write something about the experience? A lot of people, myself included, would be fascinated to read about the political and management part of, um, "U Something Something Something" history. If he didn't, can you encourage him to do so?
If you're doing actual work, you're on the bottom of the corporate hierarchy. The only thing that's really valued is the ability to lead.
Not entirely true - at least not where I work (a giant, soulless telecom megacorporation). On the non-technical side (where I work), yes, you need to become a manager of more and more people to progress "up the ladder" in terms of pay and perks. But in our technical organization, it's well recognized that there are people who have increasingly valuable skills and insight who have no interest in management (or, frankly, should not be allowed within 100 feet of managing others). There is a whole separate track of Individual Contributor titles on our technical teams (lead architect, principal member of technical staff, distinguished member of technical staff, etc.) which run "parallel" to management titles and allows technical staff to progress in pay and perks while not technically being managers of other employees. It seems to work out well for everyone involved.
This has absolutely zero to do with our education system. It has only to do with people who want to believe a certain thing leveraging typical human traits like confirmation bias and a disinterest in critical thinking to arrive at the desired conclusion. You can subject someone to three years of advanced biology classes and if they don't want to believe in evolution, they won't. I'd like to think that critical thinking skills can be taught, but - as reading Slashdot reminds me so frequently - people who pride themselves on their critical thinking skills about one topic (e.g. evolution) can throw those same critical thinking skills out the window when it comes to a different topic they want to believe in (e.g. conspiracy theories).
The bottom line is that all the education in the world won't do any good for someone that does not want to believe in what is being taught. If this is a failure of anything, it's a failure of humans in general to be willing to listen to reason when it interferes with their biases - something which has remained more or less constant over time.
Don't worry. Knowing the French, they will just use these expanded surveillance powers searching for and punishing users of forbidden "franglais" terms. Violators will be captured by SWAT teams wearing stylish berets and ascots, then locked in solitary confinement to read "The Little Prince" over and over again for as long as it takes until the next time the jailers go on strike.
9/10 of everything I get local delivered is a sales pitch to "Current Resident".
Exactly. Those guys, by sheer volume, are the ones paying enough money to keep the lights on at the post office. If they raise that rate too much, then advertisers will just find another, more cost-effective medium and the price of your Christmas card to grandma will go up to about $3, or maybe even more.
As unfortunate as it is, that crapmail is what is subsidizing the rest of the traditional government-chartered snail mail industry. And sorting through all the crapmail is the price (no pun intended) we pay for sending letters for less than the $8-$12 FedEx will charge you for a letter-size envelope at their slowest delivery pace.
You could sack the entire top tier of every Fortune 500 company tomorrow and there'd be plenty enough equally or even more competent people lining up to replace them for only a fraction of their salaries.
Let me guess - you have never actually worked up close with senior management at a Fortune 500 company and have no idea what those jobs entail, but you're pretty sure it must be easy. Right? Of course I'm right, this is Slashdot.
It is not at all the same thing to manage a team of ten people as it is to manage an organization of ten thousand. Ditto for taking a small business loan out from a bank vs. issuing billions in bonds, or dealing with a small ownership group versus having millions of shareholders. There are very specific skills required to run very large companies, and however smart you are you probably do not have those skills unless you have actually... you know, run a large company. So while there may be million people well qualified to manage a small business, by the time you get to the top tier there really is a small pool to draw from. The entrepreneur who can go from a garage to a F500 boardroom successfully is almost vanishingly rare, and arguably many of the Gates and Zuckerberg types who have done so would have been better off hiring "grown ups" with experience in these things.
Top corporate salaries are far too high, and there are plenty of good reasons that they should come down. But "their jobs are easy and can be easily replaced" is not one of them.
Some recent scientific results (*) have clarified obesity, and are completely at odds with every "common knowledge" explanation. The bad news is that we don't know what causes obesity and there's nothing anyone can do [currently] to combat it. The good news is that it's not related to a) what you eat(**) b) how much you eat, c) your willpower, d) genetics, or e) exercise.
I have not done a scientific study, but I am pretty sure that if I eat three Denny's meals per day and do no exercise, I will become obese. I know some obese people, and I can verify that their caloric intake vs. mine (minus exercise) does not net out to 30 calories per day.
If that's not the case, please let me know... I am tired of cardio and would be interested in partaking in their forthcoming Hobbit-themed breakfasts if there's no relationship to weight gain.;-)
Don't do bad shit, so you don't have to feel bad about it.
Disclaimer: I am writing this as someone who believes that the current US scope of electronic snooping is improperly controlled, far out of bounds, and wholly counterproductive.
From reading the comments here so far, I have come to realize that there is a major "culture gap" between the people who comment on Slashdot and those who work in places like the NSA, the US military, the police or other "authority" organizations. Being (apparently) one of the few people in the former category who also knows and admires friends in the latter category, I thought it might be useful to attempt to explain the cultural gap that otherwise prevents the two groups from understanding each other.
Most employed Americans - including nearly all Slashdotters - have a job. They may like it or hate it, but they fundamentally view themselves as free agents within an economy where their employer wants to get the most work out of them for the least money, and they want to get the most happiness for the least work. Employer/employee loyalty is not particularly important (except where it is grudgingly mandated through unions, which dulls the "free agent" concept as well). Work is what they do to provide for themselves and not their "calling."
Some employed Americans believe themselves instead to have a calling of national service, such as military personnel, or employees of other national-security related agencies. (A similar argument for a "calling" as employment could be made for teachers, firemen, police, community volunteers, etc.) They forego monetary or other opportunity in the belief that the work they are doing to serve their country is a "higher calling" that makes the trade-offs worthwhile. An important difference between "national service" callings vs. some others is an implicit understanding of a military-style discipline - the military does not work if the captain says "let's attack hill X" and the private decides to shoot at hill Y instead.
This is not an attempt to absolve "but I vas only taking orders, herr prosecutor!" behavior. These people still maintain an individual conscience and are willing to exercise it. But by and large, there is a trust that individual employees have (necessarily) only a limited view of the big picture, and the responsibility for figuring out what's right or wrong to do is being shouldered by the executive-level ranks who do actually have the big picture. (For example, you wouldn't want an individual CIA analyst to say "I won't put surveillance on this address" because it's a US address when they don't have the full picture that it's being used by a foreign agent.)
Far too long story short - NSA employees don't feel like their work is spying on Grandma. They think their work is very valuable, and it's spying on potential terrorists or otherwise giving the US political leadership all the data it needs about what is going on anywhere else in the world.. They are not going to spend their time reading up on every secret court ruling about what is or isn't kosher spying - most of them don't have access to all the information anyway! They feel hung out to dry because the senior government officials who they trusted to answer "is this OK?" said "yes" and then didn't back them up when an angry US and world public said, 'WTF?'"
You may agree, you may not agree. Apologies for any misrepresentations to the people I am speaking on behalf of. But I thought it might be useful for most Slashdotters to at least hear the thinking of the people on the "other side" and why it may not be a cut-and-dried issue.
You must have some strange notion that democracies are run on behalf of the people or something.
This is not exactly what you said, but the fact is that representatives in democracies are at least chosen by the people, and their continuing re-election is subject to the approval of those same people. The fact that those people make terrible choices (or at least ones you don't agree with) does not make democracy any less a government by, for and of "the people." You seem to think the system is rigged in some way, when it's really not. People who have a viewpoint - left, right, rich people, unions, whoever - spend money to convince others of that viewpoint, good or bad. If you don't like the way that people voted or who they elected, then maybe you should get more involved with ensuring that your viewpoint gets more votes.
The problem that the world faces is that the media conspires to hide the extent of the fucking over... modern technology seeks to limit the peoples ability to make a choice.
These two sentences taken together are almost self-contradictory. Maybe it would have made sense to say this decades ago if you mistakenly bought into the idea that CBS, NBC and ABC plus all the big newspapers somehow weren't filled with journalists who salivate at the concept of blowing the whistle on the powers that be. (Remember Watergate?) But "modern technology" - remember that Internet thing? - makes it possible to expose billions of people to whatever your crazy-ass viewpoint is at a negligible cost. People have the freedom to listen to all kinds of "news" sources that they never had before. The fact that people don't agree with what you're saying is not proof that someone else has "conspired" to limit the public discourse in the favor of the un-named "elites" that you seem to be very unhappy about.
Slashdot Mirror
All this with one salary for a blue collar job with decent job security, benefits and a pension plan.
True, and that's also a highly desirable state for us to get back to. But it's not going to happen anytime soon, and for some very good reasons.
High-paying blue collar jobs have been disappearing in the US for decades, largely due to globalization. For every person who might once have had a blue-collar manufacturing job here, there is probably someone elsewhere in the world willing to do it for less. And that's bad for American blue collar workers but actually good for the world overall - there are a lot of people in countries like Bangladesh, China etc. who a generation ago who might have been subsistence farmers not really participating in the global economy and now they are moving to cities, taking jobs and buying things. That fuels tax revenues in their countries, allowing the building of infrastructure and the improvement of quality of life in many of these third world countries. Again, that's bad for us but good for the world's economic development overall.
This is certainly an arguable point among economists, but there is a lot of data pointing to the idea that pensions were always a bit of a ponzi scheme. When people are living longer, it's just not economically sustainable to carry costs like that when you could be spending that money on hiring new workers or paying your active workers more. Paying for retiree pensions and health care benefits used to add around $1500 in "dead weight" to the cost of each car for General Motors, as I recall. You saw in most of the recent airline bankruptcies that their pension obligations were the first thing that they shed to return themselves to sustainable profitability. Defined benefit plans are on the way out everywhere in the US - except the government - and arguably should be because, while it's great for the worker - was never really going to make sense in the long run to begin with.
And job security has always been a bit of a lie. In the postwar US economy that the baby boomers grew up in, the economy as a whole expanded significantly and a rising tide lifted all boats. Nobody needed to be laid off because everything was growing. But when you reach a point where some industries are going away, others change rapidly and companies reach an equilibrium point where they grow or shrink organically, people are going to lose their jobs sometimes. It's unfortunate but it's a reality.
So all your points are desirable and the US really does need to find a way to bring back a real blue collar middle class. But many of the things these folks got used to were temporary things rather than permanent. The US economy is rapidly splitting in two, into a blue-collar/lower education economy where unemployment is high and job prospects are low; and a white-collar/higher education economy where unemployment is low and that's where all the growth is happening (tech, finance, etc.) That's unlikely to change in the foreseeable future and the US needs to find a way to bring more of its workforce into the second economy where there are jobs because the first one is just not coming back.
Which brings up the question is it slander/libel when the things told about you are not specifically reputation ruining, just generally wrong.
In the US, at least, there are different rules for people based on whether they are "public figures" or not. Libel (for the record, slander applies to something you say; libel applies to something you print) laws generally say that if you are Joe/Jane Average, you can successfully sue someone for saying something wrong about you. If that wrong thing caused you harm, you can win monetary or other damages. If you are someone who is already "in the public eye" then in order to successfully sue for libel you must also prove that the publication knowingly printed false information about you.
This is why, for example, Richard Jewell was able to successfully sue the Atlanta Journal-Constitution when they incorrectly accused him of being the Olympic Bomber: they were wrong, he was a private shmoe, so the barrier of proof was just being wrong. It is also why Tom Cruise couldn't win against that German gossip rag that said he was gay: it was incorrect(?) but he couldn't prove that it was printed while the newspaper knew (or reasonably should have known) it was false. It's set up this way because there would be a major chilling effect on public discourse if, for example, a newspaper could be sued for reporting today on allegations of corruption by an official that seem credible but are ultimately proven false tomorrow.
Should he decide to sue, Nakamoto could probably make a good case that he is a private citizen rather than a public figure. Assuming, of course, that all this turns out not to be true in the first place, which is still very open to debate.
"Off the record" means "this will get into the headline"
No offense, but you have no idea what you're talking about. In journalism, certain words have certain meanings and any journalist working for a reputable publication will adhere to those strictly.
"Off the record" means "I am telling you, Mr./Ms. Reporter, because I think you should know, but you can't print it or link it to me." The information may still show up in the article because there is no prohibition on "second sourcing," however - it means that if I say "off the record, X got fired for embezzling" and the reporter asks someone else that question and they say yes with it not being off the record, then it's fair game. Experienced interviewees use "off the record" as a tool to either influence the reporter's contextual view of the situation or to lead them to ask questions of other people in that direction. Inexperienced interviewees don't know how to use it, or are not good about making very clear what is on/off the record, and frequently end up getting burned.
Similarly, "on background" means "You can report this piece of information, but you can't say it was me who told you." Whenever you read a story that says "Senior administration officials said..." it is because the person who told that to the reporter said it "on background." It's usually used when people want to get information out but they would get in trouble if people knew who it was that said it.
These are the kinds of rules that a reporter from The Washington Post, CNN or other "mainstream media" outlets will follow scrupulously. If you're talking to someone from Huffington Post, Gawker or sensationalist rags like that - not so much. That's why it's very important to know whom you're talking to and judge the information you disclose accordingly.
Dealing with the media is pretty straightforward if you know the rules, but most "regular" people (i.e. not celebrities, politicians, etc.) don't know or understand the rules and they can be burned by them. The bottom line is that if you are savvy and experienced with the media, you can use tools like "off the record" and "on background" to your benefit. If you are not experienced, the best idea is to avoid them and not say anything that you do not want to see in print, connected to your name.
The two best responses to a request for an interview are to file a restraining order
Oh, and by the way, as a former reporter, I can tell you that if I asked you for an interview and you tried to get a restraining order, that would 1.) never be granted by a judge, and 2.) would make me dig into your story far more deeply because I'm pretty sure you have something to hide. If you have nothing to hide but just don't want to do the interview for privacy reasons (or you suspect the agenda of the reporter), simply decline the interview politely or ask to do it by e-mail where you will have the ability to consider your answers and have everything in writing in case your are misquoted. If you do actually have something to hide, either just decline the interview request or - preferably - have your lawyer answer it.
So what?
Giving Linux credit for Android is like saying that FreeBSD is a major desktop OS because of MacOS X, or a major mobile OS because of iOS. It's not. All the bits that make it a success were added by someone else and the underlying kernel is essentially invisible to the end user.
Celebrate Google's success with Android. Don't try to turn it into a success story for Linux when it's not. Linux has succeeded remarkably well in the server and embedded spaces but has not been terribly successful in the desktop or mobile spaces. And you know what? That's okay.
he has underestimated the way the rich and the US are trying to sabotage his policy.
Of course it's somebody else's fault, preferably the US. I mean, it's just not possible that Chavez and then Maduro were running a terribly unsustainable economic model where they got very popular by subsidizing consumer goods with massive oil profits and then as soon as oil prices went down the country was exposed to the real economic world, is it?
Here's a pretty good explanation of the situation economically.
The ISP is responsible for his peering relationships - that is what makes the ISP a part of the internet.
To indulge in a bit of reductio ad absurdam but, hey, why not:
WallaWallaNet: Hello, Verizon?
Verizon: Yes, hello?
WallaWallaNet: Hi, I'm an ISP in Walla Walla Washington, and I'd like access to your subscribers.
Verizon: Super! You can buy a T3 for $1k/month for the local loop and $7k/month for Internet transit.
WallaWallaNet: Ooh, here's the problem. I host "www.awesomepixofdogslickingthemselves.com." Your subscribers want the whole Internet - including all the pictures of dogs licking themselves that they could ever want - so I think it's incumbent upon you to peer with me for only the cost of my local loop at the nearest available peering point to me. I mean, www.awesomepixofdogslickingthemselves.com is worth enough to your subscribers to forego that money you were going to charge me for transit, right?
Verizon: Excellent point! Please mention the vital importance of www.awesomepixofdogslickingthemselves.com when you call every other major ISP on the planet and ask them for peering! I just need one more piece of information from you and we can get this all set up.
WallaWallaNet: Sure, what is it?
Verizon: What color is the sky on the planet where you live?
That makes no sense. Both sides are sharing the burden, regardless of the direction of the traffic. You still have the packets on your wires. It doesn't matter if they're going left or right.
It very much does matter if you're hauling the bits from a couple data centers out to the nearest peering point, or if you're hauling them all over the US or the globe to deliver them to users in BFE, West Virginia. Hence the tension over who should pay whom.
It has been a while since I was in the peering game - that was back when UUNet meant something and please get off my lawn - but here's the general idea:
To provide access to the Internet - either as a content host or a content consumer - you need a full view of routes to get to all other ISPs where your sources or destinations are. To get the routes, you need "peering" with the other ISPs or you need to buy "transit" from some other ISP that gets their routes via peering or transit.
Some ISPs are, frankly, more important than others because they provide access to more subscribers or more content than others - they used to be called "Tier 1" ISPs. Peering is valuable because it's traffic you're exchanging for free that you could otherwise be charging a lot of money for. Tier 1 ISPs generally agree to peer with each other because they all need each other, and it makes economic sense for them to say they're all on an equal footing - they were "peers." The economic rationale was because Tier 1 ISPs had to pay for large national or global networks, while Tier 2 or 3 ISPs had small or regional networks and that the Tier 1 ISP was bearing most of the cost of delivery. Traffic ratios were preferred to be equal (content vs. users) for peering, because if you're a content host with one datacenter and some outbound circuits, your cost is far less than having a big national network to serve end users - so web hosting/colo provider ISPs had a harder time getting peering with the big consumer/business access providers. The Tier 2 or Tier 3 ISPs would peer with each other freely because they had equivalent footprints, etc., but the big guys knew that access to their network was extremely valuable and it would be foolish to give it away for free.
So if you're a smaller ISP, and *you* need the Tier 1 more than *they* need you, don't expect to get peering. The ISP will tell you to buy transit from them, or at least buy transit from someone else who does (and the fewer "hops" to get from you to them, the better for your customers). Cogent may host much of Netflix, but they are by no means a Tier 1. This may no longer be the case - like I said, I have been out of the Tier 1 ISP world for years - but at least historically Cogent was known as a bottom feeder of the industry. They charged dirt-cheap rates but ran a crappy network and skimped on their upstream connections to cut costs.
So what's happening here most likely is that Cogent has either bought transit from Verizon and doesn't want to buy more and says "peer with us, we won't buy more." Or Cogent does have peering with Verizon but VZ has said, in effect, "you are not our 'peer'" and beyond a certain amount of peering bandwidth, you should start buying." Cogent is using Netflix to try to argue that "our content is more important to Verizon customers than the other way around," and Verizon is saying, "Um, nope." I won't say who I think is right or wrong here, but this is not the first time Cogent has had peering fights with other large ISPs and I think you can see a pattern here.
If I could get reliable cell coverage in my home, I'd pay $200-300 for that
You can already do that today, that's what femtocells are all about. AT&T version here, Verizon version here. I'm sure most other carriers have similar options... no fancy new technologies required.
There is a much more dangerous issue here that makes it a terrible idea: decoupling the provider and user from the costs involved is exactly why the US healthcare system is so screwed up. Today, colleges have a cost that is known to the student, and students factor that in to their education "purchase." I might like to go to a college that charges $50K a year, but if there's another one that charges $30K a year and provides a similar education, I may choose the cheaper one. Colleges know this and they model their cost structure to fall within a tuition rate that students will be willing to pay.
But now, with students and colleges not having to consider price, no college has any incentive not to inflate its costs - hey, if cost is no object to the student, why not? New Ferraris for all the administrators and a shiny new $50M Center For the Study of Basket-Weaving! The college is getting paid either way, and the student doesn't care because they don't see a bill. Maybe that provides a better quality education for some people, but it's dubious as to whether the benefit outweighs the costs to all the people who have graduated and are now paying for $100K/year per student tuition rates.
This is the same thing that happens in the US medical system today - doctors don't have to think about what procedures cost, so, hey, why not run a bunch of tests that cost $15,000 a pop just to be safe? They're getting paid either way. And the patient typically doesn't see much of that cost directly because (post-deductible, blah blah) most of it is absorbed by their insurance company. Nobody (for the most part) chooses which hospital to go to based on what it costs, and there is no incentive to reduce costs for anyone except the insurance companies. (If you want to hear the gory details, NPR did an awesome story on this several years ago.)
At any rate, while improving access to college education is a great goal, the healthcare example should scare anyone sane that taking "what college costs you to deliver or receive" out of the equation is a recipe for costing everyone way more money than it should.
Just to make sure that I understand the Slashdot logic correctly:
The fact is that slashing employees is SOP after a buyout. LBOs are a rich person's financial game, and it generally benefits none of the stakeholders except the big investors (i.e. Michael Dell). If you haven't already, read this book to get a feel for how and why these things are done.
The Iron Curtain kept people from escaping from oppressive regimes
oh you mean like the united states government
I know I shouldn't feed the trolls, but this just pissed me off way too badly. Whom has the US kept from escaping its regime? The US has had thousands of willing expatriates over the years to Communist countries.
Do you seriously want to draw an equivalency between the NATO (US and European allies) policy on expatriation versus that of the Warsaw Pact countries? Are you utterly ignorant of the Refuseniks? Do you really dishonor the memory of the Berlin Wall dead so badly in the name of your political hatred of the US?
I grow increasingly ashamed of continuing to read Slashdot, based on the sadly decreasing quality of commenters.
I will do whatever the fuck I want to with that recording, within the confines of the copyright laws of the country I live in
You are correct, but that is also the point of the OP above. You have complete ownership of the physical media - to resell it, use it as a coaster or frisbee, whatever. What you can do with the recording (e.g. play it, format shift it or redistribute it to others) is circumscribed by the copyright laws of your country and is, in effect, a license.
It may sound pedantic, but it is nonetheless a real distinction between total ownership and a license to use the content. Same deal goes with DVDs, software installer media (remember those?), et cetera.
it simply isn't going to work well if you try to run it in an environment that absolutely needs to be 100% compatible with Windows software and standards. However, this is true for Mac OSX too, and I don't ever see anyone saying "Mac OS is not a serious desktop OS".
I guess it depends on how you define "serious desktop OS." I don't think most people define it your way, e.g. "100% Windows compatible." I think most people define it as being explicitly supported "out of the box" by a critical mass of parts of the PC ecosystem:
The reason is that most people who use computers - not most Slashdotters, but most people - want to buy things with which other important things will "just work." Geeks will seek out how they can make things work in unapproved configurations - and will find it great fun! - but the vast majority of computer users and even corporate IT departments will not.
So basically unless you can walk into a Best Buy or something and walk up and down the aisles of boxed software, games, peripherals, monitors, yadda yadda and see your OS listed under in the "Supported Systems" or "System Requirements" fine print on the boxes, then you are not a serious desktop OS for the mass market.
Your mileage may vary - I am just proposing a definition based on mass market usage. There are Slashdotters, I'm sure, who use Plan 9 every day and it is a "serious desktop OS" to them. But for the world at large, I think most people find a different definition.
who are major contributors to /.
Huh? Any, um, evidence for that? What does "major contributor" even mean?
If Slashdot had "major contributors" its owners wouldn't keep trying to unload it, and it wouldn't have been sold for peanuts to a marginal company like Dice that doesn't really have much strategic use for it other than a dwindling number of techie eyeballs.
I mean, not to get in the way of bashing Slashdot - the frequent "Dice-vertorials" are shamefully bad - but you may wish to have some evidence for your assertions rather than just assuming a story you don't like was posted there specifically at the wishes of the aforementioned Fortune 500 companies.
That the "US dollar" exists is the biggest lie in America.
That's funny, I have several here in my wallet right now.
The US dollar (or, more precisely, the US $20 or $100 bill) is the most fungible fucking thing on the planet Earth right now. You can spend it or exchange it almost anywhere else on the planet for goods or services at a well established market rate. THAT'S WHAT A CURRENCY IS SUPPOSED TO DO.
I keep promising myself that I'll stop reading the Slashdot articles about Bitcoin, but I don't... that must be what the Dice Overlords are counting on in the hopes that their banner ads sparking my purchases of clever T-shirts or IBM ... something ... will finally pay off. Brilliant!
Messrs K&R, who were developing a project, U
But whatever could that be?
Did this manager friend ever write something about the experience? A lot of people, myself included, would be fascinated to read about the political and management part of, um, "U Something Something Something" history. If he didn't, can you encourage him to do so?
If you're doing actual work, you're on the bottom of the corporate hierarchy. The only thing that's really valued is the ability to lead.
Not entirely true - at least not where I work (a giant, soulless telecom megacorporation). On the non-technical side (where I work), yes, you need to become a manager of more and more people to progress "up the ladder" in terms of pay and perks. But in our technical organization, it's well recognized that there are people who have increasingly valuable skills and insight who have no interest in management (or, frankly, should not be allowed within 100 feet of managing others). There is a whole separate track of Individual Contributor titles on our technical teams (lead architect, principal member of technical staff, distinguished member of technical staff, etc.) which run "parallel" to management titles and allows technical staff to progress in pay and perks while not technically being managers of other employees. It seems to work out well for everyone involved.
This is a sad reflection on our education system.
This has absolutely zero to do with our education system. It has only to do with people who want to believe a certain thing leveraging typical human traits like confirmation bias and a disinterest in critical thinking to arrive at the desired conclusion. You can subject someone to three years of advanced biology classes and if they don't want to believe in evolution, they won't. I'd like to think that critical thinking skills can be taught, but - as reading Slashdot reminds me so frequently - people who pride themselves on their critical thinking skills about one topic (e.g. evolution) can throw those same critical thinking skills out the window when it comes to a different topic they want to believe in (e.g. conspiracy theories).
The bottom line is that all the education in the world won't do any good for someone that does not want to believe in what is being taught. If this is a failure of anything, it's a failure of humans in general to be willing to listen to reason when it interferes with their biases - something which has remained more or less constant over time.
Don't worry. Knowing the French, they will just use these expanded surveillance powers searching for and punishing users of forbidden "franglais" terms. Violators will be captured by SWAT teams wearing stylish berets and ascots, then locked in solitary confinement to read "The Little Prince" over and over again for as long as it takes until the next time the jailers go on strike.
9/10 of everything I get local delivered is a sales pitch to "Current Resident".
Exactly. Those guys, by sheer volume, are the ones paying enough money to keep the lights on at the post office. If they raise that rate too much, then advertisers will just find another, more cost-effective medium and the price of your Christmas card to grandma will go up to about $3, or maybe even more.
As unfortunate as it is, that crapmail is what is subsidizing the rest of the traditional government-chartered snail mail industry. And sorting through all the crapmail is the price (no pun intended) we pay for sending letters for less than the $8-$12 FedEx will charge you for a letter-size envelope at their slowest delivery pace.
You could sack the entire top tier of every Fortune 500 company tomorrow and there'd be plenty enough equally or even more competent people lining up to replace them for only a fraction of their salaries.
Let me guess - you have never actually worked up close with senior management at a Fortune 500 company and have no idea what those jobs entail, but you're pretty sure it must be easy. Right? Of course I'm right, this is Slashdot.
It is not at all the same thing to manage a team of ten people as it is to manage an organization of ten thousand. Ditto for taking a small business loan out from a bank vs. issuing billions in bonds, or dealing with a small ownership group versus having millions of shareholders. There are very specific skills required to run very large companies, and however smart you are you probably do not have those skills unless you have actually ... you know, run a large company. So while there may be million people well qualified to manage a small business, by the time you get to the top tier there really is a small pool to draw from. The entrepreneur who can go from a garage to a F500 boardroom successfully is almost vanishingly rare, and arguably many of the Gates and Zuckerberg types who have done so would have been better off hiring "grown ups" with experience in these things.
Top corporate salaries are far too high, and there are plenty of good reasons that they should come down. But "their jobs are easy and can be easily replaced" is not one of them.
Some recent scientific results (*) have clarified obesity, and are completely at odds with every "common knowledge" explanation. The bad news is that we don't know what causes obesity and there's nothing anyone can do [currently] to combat it. The good news is that it's not related to a) what you eat(**) b) how much you eat, c) your willpower, d) genetics, or e) exercise.
I have not done a scientific study, but I am pretty sure that if I eat three Denny's meals per day and do no exercise, I will become obese. I know some obese people, and I can verify that their caloric intake vs. mine (minus exercise) does not net out to 30 calories per day.
If that's not the case, please let me know... I am tired of cardio and would be interested in partaking in their forthcoming Hobbit-themed breakfasts if there's no relationship to weight gain. ;-)
Don't do bad shit, so you don't have to feel bad about it.
Disclaimer: I am writing this as someone who believes that the current US scope of electronic snooping is improperly controlled, far out of bounds, and wholly counterproductive.
From reading the comments here so far, I have come to realize that there is a major "culture gap" between the people who comment on Slashdot and those who work in places like the NSA, the US military, the police or other "authority" organizations. Being (apparently) one of the few people in the former category who also knows and admires friends in the latter category, I thought it might be useful to attempt to explain the cultural gap that otherwise prevents the two groups from understanding each other.
Most employed Americans - including nearly all Slashdotters - have a job. They may like it or hate it, but they fundamentally view themselves as free agents within an economy where their employer wants to get the most work out of them for the least money, and they want to get the most happiness for the least work. Employer/employee loyalty is not particularly important (except where it is grudgingly mandated through unions, which dulls the "free agent" concept as well). Work is what they do to provide for themselves and not their "calling."
Some employed Americans believe themselves instead to have a calling of national service, such as military personnel, or employees of other national-security related agencies. (A similar argument for a "calling" as employment could be made for teachers, firemen, police, community volunteers, etc.) They forego monetary or other opportunity in the belief that the work they are doing to serve their country is a "higher calling" that makes the trade-offs worthwhile. An important difference between "national service" callings vs. some others is an implicit understanding of a military-style discipline - the military does not work if the captain says "let's attack hill X" and the private decides to shoot at hill Y instead.
This is not an attempt to absolve "but I vas only taking orders, herr prosecutor!" behavior. These people still maintain an individual conscience and are willing to exercise it. But by and large, there is a trust that individual employees have (necessarily) only a limited view of the big picture, and the responsibility for figuring out what's right or wrong to do is being shouldered by the executive-level ranks who do actually have the big picture. (For example, you wouldn't want an individual CIA analyst to say "I won't put surveillance on this address" because it's a US address when they don't have the full picture that it's being used by a foreign agent.)
Far too long story short - NSA employees don't feel like their work is spying on Grandma. They think their work is very valuable, and it's spying on potential terrorists or otherwise giving the US political leadership all the data it needs about what is going on anywhere else in the world.. They are not going to spend their time reading up on every secret court ruling about what is or isn't kosher spying - most of them don't have access to all the information anyway! They feel hung out to dry because the senior government officials who they trusted to answer "is this OK?" said "yes" and then didn't back them up when an angry US and world public said, 'WTF?'"
You may agree, you may not agree. Apologies for any misrepresentations to the people I am speaking on behalf of. But I thought it might be useful for most Slashdotters to at least hear the thinking of the people on the "other side" and why it may not be a cut-and-dried issue.
You must have some strange notion that democracies are run on behalf of the people or something.
This is not exactly what you said, but the fact is that representatives in democracies are at least chosen by the people, and their continuing re-election is subject to the approval of those same people. The fact that those people make terrible choices (or at least ones you don't agree with) does not make democracy any less a government by, for and of "the people." You seem to think the system is rigged in some way, when it's really not. People who have a viewpoint - left, right, rich people, unions, whoever - spend money to convince others of that viewpoint, good or bad. If you don't like the way that people voted or who they elected, then maybe you should get more involved with ensuring that your viewpoint gets more votes.
The problem that the world faces is that the media conspires to hide the extent of the fucking over ... modern technology seeks to limit the peoples ability to make a choice.
These two sentences taken together are almost self-contradictory. Maybe it would have made sense to say this decades ago if you mistakenly bought into the idea that CBS, NBC and ABC plus all the big newspapers somehow weren't filled with journalists who salivate at the concept of blowing the whistle on the powers that be. (Remember Watergate?) But "modern technology" - remember that Internet thing? - makes it possible to expose billions of people to whatever your crazy-ass viewpoint is at a negligible cost. People have the freedom to listen to all kinds of "news" sources that they never had before. The fact that people don't agree with what you're saying is not proof that someone else has "conspired" to limit the public discourse in the favor of the un-named "elites" that you seem to be very unhappy about.