If it was about that, then they'd open those lines to anyone who had been vetted by the government already. They don't. The lines are open for those who pay.
Please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong (I use the TSA PreCheck program, which I paid for, but am not a US government employee with a security clearance). But I believe that if you've already been vetted by the US government in terms of a security clearance or a DoD ID then you don't need to pay for PreCheck, you can just use those lanes automatically. And the average US civilian/military security clearance investigation costs upwards of $50K.
Not to sound like a PreCheck fanboy, but if you fly more than a few times a year it is absolutely in your best interest to pay for PreCheck. Basically they look (from what I understand) to see if you're a felon, are on a no-fly watchlist, and/or have firearms related offenses or "I freaked out in the airport when they frisked me" issues. They take your fingerprints, too.
If you don't have any concerns with the above, then the $85 that PreCheck costs (for a five year term) is amortized over the cost of your time waiting in lines over five years in airport lines. I can't speak for every airport, but in Seattle the time differential between PreCheck and general boarding is often 45 minutes of waiting or more, as well as not having to take off my shoes, not having to take my laptop out of my bag, and generally being treated more like a human being than a Gitmo detainee.
You can make a cogent argument that none of the above is necessary and that it's all Security Theater. But you can't say that PreCheck is something for the one percenters when it averages out to $17/year. If you fly more than a couple times a year - and you value your time - then it's a no-brainer.
Do I believe that the government should prefer a "safe by default" rather than a "safe by exception" profile for its citizens? Yes, absolutely. There's no reason that an 85-year-old grandmother from Minnesota in a wheelchair should face a pat-down and the same security precautions as a 23-year-old Syrian national. I've flown to Israel multiple times (on El Al) and their security precautions (while undoubtedly invasive to anyone) are tailored to the perceived "risk profiles" of the passengers.The US should absolutely tailor its security procedures to risk profiles.
But the TL;DR version is that US security screening, for all its faults, isn't based on who can pay. It's based on an assumption (however faulty) that everyone is a potential terrorist, and that those who fly a lot can make an effort to show that they are less of a risk - at a very low cost when averaged over how often they fly.
In this context, I would guess "developer" is used similarly to "business development" which means sales.
What "developer" means in any real estate-related context is the company that bought the land when it had something else (or nothing) on it, figured out a business case for what to build on that land, got the permits, borrowed the money, built the building(s) and assumed the risk/reward of trying to sell the resulting building space to people or companies. It doesn't refer to any specific business function within the company, because any sizeable real estate developer will have on staff (or contracted) any number of people ranging from architects to engineers to project managers to accountants to people who make the glossy "buy an apartment here" brochure.
When a news article says that "[Company] said that..." what they mean is that someone authorized by the company to make statements on the company's behalf. That could be anyone from the CEO or a board member to a lawyer to a PR person.
Long story short, a "developer" incorporates all the functions above, even if the person saying the words is more likely from the sales or marketing side. But there's no way in Hell they are saying things unsupported by their engineers, architects, regulatory staff and lawyers because making willingly false statements about a building's safety can expose you to undreamed-of liability in the case of a failure. Also - this is San Francisco we're talking about. Do you think there's any chance that a building of this size wasn't subject to years upon years of government reviews for safety, stability, environmental impact, community impact, infrastructure impact, etc. etc. etc.?
You mean along the lines of those European "right to be forgotten" laws which require Google remove certain search results form their indices?
Let's be fair - that's been going on for a while now. Why didn't archive.org get worked up over that?
Umm.. because those laws were in Europe, the Internet Archive was in the US (with no vital business dealings in the EU) and so they didn't apply?
The Internet Archive is basically saying that for the first time they are now actively concerned that Internet scrubbing laws*, executive orders, regulations, whatever will be enacted in the United States where they are based. Hence the move to mirror the archive in Canada.
* Excluding laws about taking stuff off the net that violated laws or copyright statutes etc.; that has always been illegal in the US, and that has not seemed to bother the Internet Archive.
Only profits (going either to shareholders or sitting in reserve), after all the expenses are paid, get taxed.
Just FYI, the profits going to shareholders are already being taxed to the people receiving them - as income on dividends on capital gains tax on increased stock price when they sell their shares. And the reserve is either reflected in an increased stock price (taxed in capital gains on sales) or eventually used in some other way that will get taxed. If they use that reserve to buy other companies, the individuals who held shares in the acquired company will pay tax on the gains commensurate with the price paid. Companies can't "sit" on money forever without it ending up being taxed in some other way.
Or is it more likely that the vast majority of Americans thought that the Greens and Libertarians were nut jobs and didn't want to vote for them?
Your choice. Massive alleged voted fraud and "actual full on collusion" between bitter political opponents, or your preferred parties just didn't get that many votes. As the late great Carl Sagan said, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof." Please elaborate. Links to Reddit != "extraordinary proof."
I hate to keep pointing this out, but everybody loves "democracy" until their candidate doesn't win. Then there must be some reason that said candidate didn't win like voter fraud OMG! Nobody ever says, "Well, shit. More people support that other thing than what I support. I guess I need to accept the results and move on." (Full disclosure: my candidate didn't win, either. I wrote in for Alexander Hamilton.)
Not saying the NSA collecting is going to halt, but it is going to be reigned in.
Hi, friendly Grammar Nazi here! No offense intended to anyone, so to my liberal friends I am a "grammarian." To my Breitbart-reading friends, I am a "grammar-conscious Nationalist Socialist German Workers' Party member."
The recent election has brought up the use of the phrase "reigning in" or "reining in" on Slashdot like seemingly never before. I figured I'd provide a bit of helpful guidance to reduce ambiguity.
To "reign" is to rule in the sense of "regnal/royal" or kingly/queenly control over a kingdom, state or prom court. It is generally used with the preposition "over," as in "to reign over the prom and orchestrate choruses of "NEEEERRRRDDDDSSSSSS!" at the people who couldn't get dates tonight but will later shame us all at the 20 year reunion."
To "rein" is to control an animal (e.g. a horse) tethered to a rider. When used in the phrase describing someone wanting to pull something back from its current pace, "rein in" (e.g. government growth, spending, post-prom unwanted pregnancies) this form is normally used.
Happy reining and/or reigning, depending on your intended expression and/or high school prom experience.
all those people complaining about elites and insiders are in for a shock
That's the problem with voting for "change." You are going to get it.
I was very surprised, just based off reading comments on this site over the past few days, how many ardent Trump supporters are here. I say surprised not because I am assessing a value judgement but because US presidential voting in recent years has become much more strongly correlated with education level, and I presumed that a tech site would reflect certain patterns as a result. (Full disclosure: I did not like any of the available ballot options and wrote in my presidential vote for Alexander Hamilton. I live in a solidly colored state on the West Coast and knew that my little exercise in protest would not have any meaningful effect on my state's electoral college votes, otherwise I would have voted seriously.)
At any rate, it turned out that many many more people than pollsters and the media expected cast their votes in the cause of upsetting the status quo. There's nothing wrong with being unsatisfied with the way things are and wanting to lob a big water balloon full of "f--k you" at the powers that be in this country.
When you vote for the loser, you enter a world of "coulda woulda shoulda" and you can just theorize how things would have been better. But when you vote for the winner, you have to own that vote because you're getting what you said you wanted. That's the price of winning. And it will be fascinating to see whether the people who cast a ballot to shake up the system like what they get when the system actually gets shaken up...
It's just anti-intellectualism to assume every person running for office is equally corrupt.
Agreed.But "corruption" - in the dictionary sense of giving outside parties undue influence for personal gain - isn't the only criterion for a person's vote. I think, to your statement, that Clinton is certainly more "corrupt" due to providing favored access and potentially some degree of quid pro quo to donors to her family foundation. But it's possible - although unpalatable - that someone is more corrupt but still better prepared to do their job.
It sucks that we have such poor choices to pick from, but I think many voters will think of it in terms of this analogy. Which would you rather want to be the CEO of your company - a qualified, stable executive who will keep things going OK but has a penchant for lining their own pockets through business deals favorable to their pay? Or an unqualified, loutish, narcissistic executive who says he wants to turn the company upside down to fix things? It's possible that the latter's ideas might be good, or they might be terrible. Many people will probably pick the distasteful #1 over the tremendous upside/downside risk of #2.
Liberals just can't accept the facts: Clinton is evil. Trump says mean things.
I'm not a liberal across the board (socially liberal but conservative in fiscal and national security issues) but I take issue with the oversimplification in this statement.
Clinton is venal, secretive, entitled and a cold fish. Trump says mean things. But he doesn't just say mean things, he believes them. Or at least he does today. Tomorrow it might change. But it seems like he's prepared to take positions based on what he read on the Internet yesterday. If your CIO read an article yesterday about how Azure was great today and tomorrow recommended that everything should be outsourced to the cloud, would you trust his judgment?
Hurting people's feelings isn't the problem. I hate the idea of Safe Spaces and people reading only the websites or watching the TV networks that agree with their preconceived notions. Fuck that.
But ultimately it's very possible that a smart person will be better at being President than a dumb person (or at least one who lacks critical thinking skills). I don't like Clinton at all but I think she's at least intelligent and capable of dealing with things rationally (if with a side dish of self interest). If you think there's an easy solution to a problem that other smart people have worked on for decades and found no clear answer (e.g. immigration) then you're dumb. If you think that you can solve problems with a magic bullet (e.g. the answer to everything is "I would negotiate a better deal" with no explanation of why) then you're dumb. If you say you can solve thorny multi-dimensional problems easily (e.g. "I would defeat ISIS in 60 days but I can't tell you why") then you're dumb.
TL/DR. America faces a presidential choice between two deeply unlikeable human beings. Your choice will probably hinge on your preconceptions but there are some substantive differences between the two evils you are expected to choose the lesser of. The lesser of two evils is still evil, but is also still lesser.
Why the fuck is Holmes still CEO? What the fuck is wrong with investors?
There's a pretty simple answer to that. Like Brin and Page at Google, or Zuckerberg at Facebook, she owns all the voting shares.
Not all shares in a public or even private company are created equal. You can create different classes of shares where you still own a piece of the company, but voting rights are different. I could start a company and create 100 shares that get one vote each and sell those, but retain 10 shares of a special class that get to cast 100 votes each, thereby retaining control of the company, even if I only own 9% of the company and its profits.
These arrangements are hardly uncommon, especially among tech startups (see Google and Facebook). These facts are disclosed to investors and it's up to them to decide whether they trust the founders/executives/etc. with the voting shares enough to still invest in the company anyway even though they don't get to call the shots proportionally by voting their shares.
TBH, the headline should be 26 Cases of Samsung Note Fires Have No Evidence Of Being Caused By Faulty Phones. But that's long and not very click-baity so nobody would read it.
TBH, the headline should be "I'm not saying it was aliens, but it was aliens." Look at the beginning of the article:
Lately, a lot of behind the scene conversations have been suggesting that perhaps the Note 7 battery explosion fiasco has been blown out of the (sic) proportion. There's no evidence of any of that, so we won't discuss it any further, but
Then goes on to discuss it. At length.
Makes you think doesn't it?
Really? You went there? Manishs should just had the balls to have written a headline saying "Samsung Note 7s Actually Had No Problems, Everybody Look Over There" then gone back to trawling the dark corners of the web to find a post on a forum in Crimea where the user claimed that his iPhone 7 gave him cancer and post that story to Slashdot as a proven fact.
Because the law of unintended consequences is nowhere stronger, more visible or more impactful than it is in foreign relations.
I think the Obama administration's foreign policy in the Middle East has been feckless at best. But it's earnestly debatable whether that is worse than nothing at all.
Think about it - the George W. Bush invasion of Iraq in 2003 was an attempt to "fix where they live." For some people, it made their lives better. For most others, it made it far worse. I think arguments that "how" it was done made the difference are largely specious - to quote the apocryphal Colin Powell "Pottery Barn Rule," we (the US) broke it and we bought it. We took on all the problems of a region divided by sectarian religious and ethnic divisions more than a millennium old that make the US Republican/Democrat divide look like an intramural volleyball game. There was just not going to be a happy ending there.
So we go and get involved in Libya. Did that help or hurt? Probably hurt. So we don't really get involved in Syria. Did that help or hurt? Probably hurt.
That's the thing, there is no unambiguously good or right answer to getting involved in areas where the fundamental tension is too big, too old and/or too "foreign" for you to solve. Was the Republican approach in 2003 bad? Yes. Was the Democratic approach in 2011 bad? Yes. There is no clear right approach and the end result is more dependent on luck and externalities than anything else.
And by the way, this is no endorsement of Trump - rather the opposite. I think the above is proof that anyone who thinks there are simple answers to questions that thousands of smart and informed people have struggled for decades to solve is an idiot. Easy answers sound good, but in situations like these there is simply no such thing as any easy answer. Anything you do will almost invariably have unintended consequences. Getting involved has them, as does not getting involved. Dealing with toxic areas of the world has only "least bad options" at best. "And when you sup with the devil, you should bring a long spoon."
There is no such thing as "off the record". Anyone working PR knows this.
Then you pretty clearly don't work in PR. "Off the record," "on background," "not for attribution" and other deals between sources and reporters are real and specific things and are used frequently every day in "grownup" journalism. These concepts "work" because of mutual self-interest: the journalist doesn't want to burn the source/PR rep/whatever and vice versa because they (or at least their respective organizations) will continue to have to work together in the future.
Dealing with bloggers from sites nobody has heard of and hence have no reputation to uphold by adhering to agreements? Not so much. The PR rep should have known better than to treat a random blogger whining about speaking time/genitals/skin color ratios like a grownup, but that doesn't mean those concepts don't exist and aren't employed frequently.
Just out of curiosity, is anything ever IT's fault? Or is it always the evil MBAs? Is there any chance that we, the collective Slashdot audience, have absolutely no clue what the internal funding, competency, vendor choices and strategy of Delta are?
Sick of seeing profitable companies laying people off like this...Had a great quarter then the next day after earnings released "By the way we need to lay off 3% of staff to position us better for next quarter."
This used to mystify me as well until I actually went to work for a really, really big company. The false assumption here is that all employees/divisions/lines of business are contributing equally to the company's profitability. I will take my own giant, soulless mega-corporation as an example. Each quarter the wireless division cranks out a profit, and the legacy wireline division takes a loss. The wireline division loses customers, too. So - even though we made a profit overall, why doesn't it make sense to cut jobs in the areas that are losing business and have less demand?
I'm sure the response will be "you should invest in training for your employees," which theoretically is a very fair statement. But - at least in my company's case - I have seen the situation at first hand. No amount of training is going to make a dip-chewing unionized redneck who has been climbing telephone poles in rural Alabama for 30 years (who we don't need anymore) into a LTE network architect in Seattle (who we do need). It just doesn't work that way.
I guess my point is that you might reasonably hope that a company would look at its workers paternalistically and say "Well, division X is shrinking and we don't need all these people anymore, but we will subsidize their business so we can keep people in jobs." But that's not the case. And in any highly competitive market where your reducing your operating costs can help you improve your pricing and gain customers, I don't think you can really blame the companies for taking this approach.
The US elections are ran and decided by the ultra-rich.
Sorry to sound confrontational, but that's bullshit. It just is. And ironically Donald Trump is the one that proves it.
Yes, his election to GOP nominee isn't an election for office, but he was detested and denigrated by pretty much every single Republican establishment "ultra rich" figure. He won because the Joe Sixpacks of the GOP - their wisdom in doing so is a separate discussion topic - actually voted for him more than anyone else. Despite all the best efforts of the "rich" and the "establishment" in the party, the demagogue with popular support ACTUALLY WON.
If the fact that the Republican Party - the REPUBLICAN FUCKING PARTY - can be taken over by popular votes against the fervent wishes of the Koch Brothers, the Bushes, the Cruz Evangelicals and everyone else who hated them, then nothing will. The rich did not get their way. And spare me any "false flag" bullshit. The Republican Powers That Be did not conspire to sink their own party. Joe and Jane Sixpack voted for somebody else, and they had to suck it up.
Saying that the rich own elections is a cop-out. Yes, the US is a democratic republic. Yes, the elections for the two highest offices in the land are mediated through an Electoral College. But by and large, the US is absolutely a functional democracy. It's easy to claim it's not because you don't like who got elected... but really you should think about the idea that the people in power are really there because 51% of the voting public wanted them there, even if they disagree with you. Not liking the results of democracy is its great hazard.
This would be good for startup owners who no longer have to worry about where their next meal is coming from.
I understand your intent but that fundamentally misunderstands the nature of startups and funding. Nobody is going to be able to create a startup they otherwise wouldn't have because they are getting a $10K UBI instead of working at a job. Start-ups cost money - usually a lot of it - because they need resources and people who require actual money to get paid for. (If your startup employees were going to work for less than $10K/year or UBI income anyway, then they didn't need this incentive.) Most software startups generally require - depending on scope - anywhere from $100K to $250K just to get started in the first year, and that is far beyond what UBI can provide. If your startup is in hardware, expect your first year to require an order of magnitude more startup funding.
The point being that UBI does nothing to encourage new startups. Entrepreneurs need capital - which (at least for non-billionaires, who are only a tiny percentage of investors in startups) arguably might be lessened if potential investors were paying the increased taxes necessary for the government to dole out UBIs.
There is no fundamental reason why people should have to work more than a few hours a week, as this is all that is really required to maintain society.
I do a job which requires me to work 50-60 hours a week because it requires a relatively (within my field) unique combination of skills and knowledge, plus there needs to be one person making a consistent set of decisions for the people underneath me in the organization structure. Much like getting nine women pregnant won't produce a child in a month, having more people do my job won't decrease the amount of work I have to do, and having multiple managers giving out potentially contradictory instructions would potentially make it far far worse.
The real/sad truth is that if your job is fungible - if literally almost anyone else could pick it up and do the same thing, like working on an assembly line - then yes there is no "need" for you to work much. That's because you can be replaced at whim with pretty much anyone, and there is a large supply of "pretty much anyone." And no offense, but in a capitalist economy, your job is going to be the first to go.
Communism - at least in theory - does a great job at protecting people who have few differentiated skills and fungible jobs. It does an absolutely fucking dreadful job at incentivizing those who have differentiated skills or ambitions. Which of these systems you prefer, as the old saying goes, follows the dictum that "where you stand depends on where you sit."
I was going to ask the same thing. To be a "whistleblower" organization (as described in the summary) is to call attention to illegal activities that have been suppressed. If there is no evidence of wrongdoing here, all Wikileaks is doing is violating people's privacy. While it might be interesting to read the internal e-mails of politicians, executives or celebrities, if there is nothing illegal going on then it's ultimately just voyeurism that doesn't justify distribution from a dodgily (probably illegally) obtained source.
What does unlimited mean? And why do you get penalized if you actually use it as such?
"Unlimited" means the exact same thing as "all you can eat." Which is to say that it is unlimited relative to a reasonably expected degree of consumption and within the bounds of what the provider considers to be the constraints of sharing a fixed amount of resources among multiple paying customers. If you go to the buffet and grab all the food before anyone else can eat it, and continue to do so until the restaurant's food is all gone, you can be pretty sure they are going to kick you out, regardless of how many times you protest that the language says "all you can eat."
The only social nets I can spot currently are keeping banks and other "important" entities propped up. Can't identify any normal people in there.
I'm pretty sure it's not the banks who are signed up for Obamacare. Or GW Bush's prescription drug benefit expansion. Companies pay into Social Security, Medicare and unemployment insurance, not receive money from them.
I know it's cool and hip to say that the US government helps nobody except banks or something - usually not a charge leveled at Democratic administrations, but whatever - but it's not true and contributes nothing positive to the discussion. In the 2015 US Federal budget including discretionary and nondiscretionary spending, 53% of all spending goes to Health and Human Services or Social Security. (Education accounts for 3% and veterans spending accounts for another 4% if you want to consider those as part of the social safety net, which would bring the total to 60%.) By contrast, the military and homeland security receive 16%. So, yes, the "social safety net" is alive and bigger by percentage of spending than before.
Suddenly, your car won't have any urge to stop on the way home for an impulse burger or pack of smokes
I'm pretty sure it wasn't your car that wanted those things in the first place. As long as there is a meatbag inside of it, your car will still be stopping for those things.
Now that that pesky democracy thing has been nipped in the bud
People keep saying this and I really, really don't understand it. Donald Trump's nomination - in the face of implacable opposition from nearly every major Republican officeholder, megabucks donor and deep pocketed SuperPAC - is proof that democracy is alive and well, in the sense that the guy who got the most votes won. Against all the entrenched elites and gigabucks influencers, the guy who got the majority of votes from our assembled Joe Sixpacks actually got the nomination.
Personally, I believe he's a buffoon and would be a catastrophe as President. (I think Hillary would be awful too but for different reasons.) But how can you say that democracy has been replaced with the politics of oligarchs and moneyed interests has replaced "one person, one vote?" Republican voters voted and got who they asked for. Not liking the results of democracy is one of its hazards.
Oh, and FWIW, both Trump and Clinton oppose the TPP despite the "establishment" of both of their parties supporting it. So there's another reason not to suggest that the Powers That Be will always get their way...
Slashdot Mirror
If it was about that, then they'd open those lines to anyone who had been vetted by the government already. They don't. The lines are open for those who pay.
Please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong (I use the TSA PreCheck program, which I paid for, but am not a US government employee with a security clearance). But I believe that if you've already been vetted by the US government in terms of a security clearance or a DoD ID then you don't need to pay for PreCheck, you can just use those lanes automatically. And the average US civilian/military security clearance investigation costs upwards of $50K.
Not to sound like a PreCheck fanboy, but if you fly more than a few times a year it is absolutely in your best interest to pay for PreCheck. Basically they look (from what I understand) to see if you're a felon, are on a no-fly watchlist, and/or have firearms related offenses or "I freaked out in the airport when they frisked me" issues. They take your fingerprints, too.
If you don't have any concerns with the above, then the $85 that PreCheck costs (for a five year term) is amortized over the cost of your time waiting in lines over five years in airport lines. I can't speak for every airport, but in Seattle the time differential between PreCheck and general boarding is often 45 minutes of waiting or more, as well as not having to take off my shoes, not having to take my laptop out of my bag, and generally being treated more like a human being than a Gitmo detainee.
You can make a cogent argument that none of the above is necessary and that it's all Security Theater. But you can't say that PreCheck is something for the one percenters when it averages out to $17/year. If you fly more than a couple times a year - and you value your time - then it's a no-brainer.
Do I believe that the government should prefer a "safe by default" rather than a "safe by exception" profile for its citizens? Yes, absolutely. There's no reason that an 85-year-old grandmother from Minnesota in a wheelchair should face a pat-down and the same security precautions as a 23-year-old Syrian national. I've flown to Israel multiple times (on El Al) and their security precautions (while undoubtedly invasive to anyone) are tailored to the perceived "risk profiles" of the passengers.The US should absolutely tailor its security procedures to risk profiles.
But the TL;DR version is that US security screening, for all its faults, isn't based on who can pay. It's based on an assumption (however faulty) that everyone is a potential terrorist, and that those who fly a lot can make an effort to show that they are less of a risk - at a very low cost when averaged over how often they fly.
In this context, I would guess "developer" is used similarly to "business development" which means sales.
What "developer" means in any real estate-related context is the company that bought the land when it had something else (or nothing) on it, figured out a business case for what to build on that land, got the permits, borrowed the money, built the building(s) and assumed the risk/reward of trying to sell the resulting building space to people or companies. It doesn't refer to any specific business function within the company, because any sizeable real estate developer will have on staff (or contracted) any number of people ranging from architects to engineers to project managers to accountants to people who make the glossy "buy an apartment here" brochure.
When a news article says that "[Company] said that..." what they mean is that someone authorized by the company to make statements on the company's behalf. That could be anyone from the CEO or a board member to a lawyer to a PR person.
Long story short, a "developer" incorporates all the functions above, even if the person saying the words is more likely from the sales or marketing side. But there's no way in Hell they are saying things unsupported by their engineers, architects, regulatory staff and lawyers because making willingly false statements about a building's safety can expose you to undreamed-of liability in the case of a failure. Also - this is San Francisco we're talking about. Do you think there's any chance that a building of this size wasn't subject to years upon years of government reviews for safety, stability, environmental impact, community impact, infrastructure impact, etc. etc. etc.?
You mean along the lines of those European "right to be forgotten" laws which require Google remove certain search results form their indices? Let's be fair - that's been going on for a while now. Why didn't archive.org get worked up over that?
Umm.. because those laws were in Europe, the Internet Archive was in the US (with no vital business dealings in the EU) and so they didn't apply?
The Internet Archive is basically saying that for the first time they are now actively concerned that Internet scrubbing laws*, executive orders, regulations, whatever will be enacted in the United States where they are based. Hence the move to mirror the archive in Canada.
* Excluding laws about taking stuff off the net that violated laws or copyright statutes etc.; that has always been illegal in the US, and that has not seemed to bother the Internet Archive.
Only profits (going either to shareholders or sitting in reserve), after all the expenses are paid, get taxed.
Just FYI, the profits going to shareholders are already being taxed to the people receiving them - as income on dividends on capital gains tax on increased stock price when they sell their shares. And the reserve is either reflected in an increased stock price (taxed in capital gains on sales) or eventually used in some other way that will get taxed. If they use that reserve to buy other companies, the individuals who held shares in the acquired company will pay tax on the gains commensurate with the price paid. Companies can't "sit" on money forever without it ending up being taxed in some other way.
Hi! Occam's Razor here! It is more likely that:
There was election fraud going on and it was collusion between the establishment Republicans and establishment Democrats
Both of whom LOVED Trump and wanted to see him elected, right?
establishment Democrats who are looking to get kicked out of the political party they are paid by the corporations to control
Because most large corporations LOVE the Democrats. And most people love getting kicked out of power, too!
focus in on those areas where the Greens and the Libertarians should have done much better
I believe the votes in Candy Land County and Galt's Gulch were already re-counted.
Or is it more likely that the vast majority of Americans thought that the Greens and Libertarians were nut jobs and didn't want to vote for them?
Your choice. Massive alleged voted fraud and "actual full on collusion" between bitter political opponents, or your preferred parties just didn't get that many votes. As the late great Carl Sagan said, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof." Please elaborate. Links to Reddit != "extraordinary proof."
I hate to keep pointing this out, but everybody loves "democracy" until their candidate doesn't win. Then there must be some reason that said candidate didn't win like voter fraud OMG! Nobody ever says, "Well, shit. More people support that other thing than what I support. I guess I need to accept the results and move on." (Full disclosure: my candidate didn't win, either. I wrote in for Alexander Hamilton.)
Not saying the NSA collecting is going to halt, but it is going to be reigned in.
Hi, friendly Grammar Nazi here! No offense intended to anyone, so to my liberal friends I am a "grammarian." To my Breitbart-reading friends, I am a "grammar-conscious Nationalist Socialist German Workers' Party member."
The recent election has brought up the use of the phrase "reigning in" or "reining in" on Slashdot like seemingly never before. I figured I'd provide a bit of helpful guidance to reduce ambiguity.
To "reign" is to rule in the sense of "regnal/royal" or kingly/queenly control over a kingdom, state or prom court. It is generally used with the preposition "over," as in "to reign over the prom and orchestrate choruses of "NEEEERRRRDDDDSSSSSS!" at the people who couldn't get dates tonight but will later shame us all at the 20 year reunion."
To "rein" is to control an animal (e.g. a horse) tethered to a rider. When used in the phrase describing someone wanting to pull something back from its current pace, "rein in" (e.g. government growth, spending, post-prom unwanted pregnancies) this form is normally used.
Happy reining and/or reigning, depending on your intended expression and/or high school prom experience.
all those people complaining about elites and insiders are in for a shock
That's the problem with voting for "change." You are going to get it.
I was very surprised, just based off reading comments on this site over the past few days, how many ardent Trump supporters are here. I say surprised not because I am assessing a value judgement but because US presidential voting in recent years has become much more strongly correlated with education level, and I presumed that a tech site would reflect certain patterns as a result. (Full disclosure: I did not like any of the available ballot options and wrote in my presidential vote for Alexander Hamilton. I live in a solidly colored state on the West Coast and knew that my little exercise in protest would not have any meaningful effect on my state's electoral college votes, otherwise I would have voted seriously.)
At any rate, it turned out that many many more people than pollsters and the media expected cast their votes in the cause of upsetting the status quo. There's nothing wrong with being unsatisfied with the way things are and wanting to lob a big water balloon full of "f--k you" at the powers that be in this country.
When you vote for the loser, you enter a world of "coulda woulda shoulda" and you can just theorize how things would have been better. But when you vote for the winner, you have to own that vote because you're getting what you said you wanted. That's the price of winning. And it will be fascinating to see whether the people who cast a ballot to shake up the system like what they get when the system actually gets shaken up...
he seemed more willing to reign in the abuses
Freudian slip?
Whaaaat? You mean a Russian alternative to GPS that they own and operate? That's crazy talk.
It's just anti-intellectualism to assume every person running for office is equally corrupt.
Agreed.But "corruption" - in the dictionary sense of giving outside parties undue influence for personal gain - isn't the only criterion for a person's vote. I think, to your statement, that Clinton is certainly more "corrupt" due to providing favored access and potentially some degree of quid pro quo to donors to her family foundation. But it's possible - although unpalatable - that someone is more corrupt but still better prepared to do their job.
It sucks that we have such poor choices to pick from, but I think many voters will think of it in terms of this analogy. Which would you rather want to be the CEO of your company - a qualified, stable executive who will keep things going OK but has a penchant for lining their own pockets through business deals favorable to their pay? Or an unqualified, loutish, narcissistic executive who says he wants to turn the company upside down to fix things? It's possible that the latter's ideas might be good, or they might be terrible. Many people will probably pick the distasteful #1 over the tremendous upside/downside risk of #2.
Liberals just can't accept the facts: Clinton is evil. Trump says mean things.
I'm not a liberal across the board (socially liberal but conservative in fiscal and national security issues) but I take issue with the oversimplification in this statement.
Clinton is venal, secretive, entitled and a cold fish. Trump says mean things. But he doesn't just say mean things, he believes them. Or at least he does today. Tomorrow it might change. But it seems like he's prepared to take positions based on what he read on the Internet yesterday. If your CIO read an article yesterday about how Azure was great today and tomorrow recommended that everything should be outsourced to the cloud, would you trust his judgment?
Hurting people's feelings isn't the problem. I hate the idea of Safe Spaces and people reading only the websites or watching the TV networks that agree with their preconceived notions. Fuck that.
But ultimately it's very possible that a smart person will be better at being President than a dumb person (or at least one who lacks critical thinking skills). I don't like Clinton at all but I think she's at least intelligent and capable of dealing with things rationally (if with a side dish of self interest). If you think there's an easy solution to a problem that other smart people have worked on for decades and found no clear answer (e.g. immigration) then you're dumb. If you think that you can solve problems with a magic bullet (e.g. the answer to everything is "I would negotiate a better deal" with no explanation of why) then you're dumb. If you say you can solve thorny multi-dimensional problems easily (e.g. "I would defeat ISIS in 60 days but I can't tell you why") then you're dumb.
TL/DR. America faces a presidential choice between two deeply unlikeable human beings. Your choice will probably hinge on your preconceptions but there are some substantive differences between the two evils you are expected to choose the lesser of. The lesser of two evils is still evil, but is also still lesser.
Why the fuck is Holmes still CEO? What the fuck is wrong with investors?
There's a pretty simple answer to that. Like Brin and Page at Google, or Zuckerberg at Facebook, she owns all the voting shares.
Not all shares in a public or even private company are created equal. You can create different classes of shares where you still own a piece of the company, but voting rights are different. I could start a company and create 100 shares that get one vote each and sell those, but retain 10 shares of a special class that get to cast 100 votes each, thereby retaining control of the company, even if I only own 9% of the company and its profits.
These arrangements are hardly uncommon, especially among tech startups (see Google and Facebook). These facts are disclosed to investors and it's up to them to decide whether they trust the founders/executives/etc. with the voting shares enough to still invest in the company anyway even though they don't get to call the shots proportionally by voting their shares.
TBH, the headline should be 26 Cases of Samsung Note Fires Have No Evidence Of Being Caused By Faulty Phones. But that's long and not very click-baity so nobody would read it.
TBH, the headline should be "I'm not saying it was aliens, but it was aliens." Look at the beginning of the article:
Lately, a lot of behind the scene conversations have been suggesting that perhaps the Note 7 battery explosion fiasco has been blown out of the (sic) proportion. There's no evidence of any of that, so we won't discuss it any further, but
Then goes on to discuss it. At length.
Makes you think doesn't it?
Really? You went there? Manishs should just had the balls to have written a headline saying "Samsung Note 7s Actually Had No Problems, Everybody Look Over There" then gone back to trawling the dark corners of the web to find a post on a forum in Crimea where the user claimed that his iPhone 7 gave him cancer and post that story to Slashdot as a proven fact.
How about just fixing where they live?
Because the law of unintended consequences is nowhere stronger, more visible or more impactful than it is in foreign relations.
I think the Obama administration's foreign policy in the Middle East has been feckless at best. But it's earnestly debatable whether that is worse than nothing at all.
Think about it - the George W. Bush invasion of Iraq in 2003 was an attempt to "fix where they live." For some people, it made their lives better. For most others, it made it far worse. I think arguments that "how" it was done made the difference are largely specious - to quote the apocryphal Colin Powell "Pottery Barn Rule," we (the US) broke it and we bought it. We took on all the problems of a region divided by sectarian religious and ethnic divisions more than a millennium old that make the US Republican/Democrat divide look like an intramural volleyball game. There was just not going to be a happy ending there.
So we go and get involved in Libya. Did that help or hurt? Probably hurt. So we don't really get involved in Syria. Did that help or hurt? Probably hurt.
That's the thing, there is no unambiguously good or right answer to getting involved in areas where the fundamental tension is too big, too old and/or too "foreign" for you to solve. Was the Republican approach in 2003 bad? Yes. Was the Democratic approach in 2011 bad? Yes. There is no clear right approach and the end result is more dependent on luck and externalities than anything else.
And by the way, this is no endorsement of Trump - rather the opposite. I think the above is proof that anyone who thinks there are simple answers to questions that thousands of smart and informed people have struggled for decades to solve is an idiot. Easy answers sound good, but in situations like these there is simply no such thing as any easy answer. Anything you do will almost invariably have unintended consequences. Getting involved has them, as does not getting involved. Dealing with toxic areas of the world has only "least bad options" at best. "And when you sup with the devil, you should bring a long spoon."
There is no such thing as "off the record". Anyone working PR knows this.
Then you pretty clearly don't work in PR. "Off the record," "on background," "not for attribution" and other deals between sources and reporters are real and specific things and are used frequently every day in "grownup" journalism. These concepts "work" because of mutual self-interest: the journalist doesn't want to burn the source/PR rep/whatever and vice versa because they (or at least their respective organizations) will continue to have to work together in the future.
Dealing with bloggers from sites nobody has heard of and hence have no reputation to uphold by adhering to agreements? Not so much. The PR rep should have known better than to treat a random blogger whining about speaking time/genitals/skin color ratios like a grownup, but that doesn't mean those concepts don't exist and aren't employed frequently.
Really? II do not think it is a status thing. The iPhone is for followers, Android is for leaders.
Ooh, this seems like a fun game. I'll spot you a few more that all have an equal amount of substance as your suggestion:
Or maybe I'll just go with the more obvious "making sweeping generalizations about people based on products they buy is for assholes."
Just out of curiosity, is anything ever IT's fault? Or is it always the evil MBAs? Is there any chance that we, the collective Slashdot audience, have absolutely no clue what the internal funding, competency, vendor choices and strategy of Delta are?
Sick of seeing profitable companies laying people off like this ...Had a great quarter then the next day after earnings released "By the way we need to lay off 3% of staff to position us better for next quarter."
This used to mystify me as well until I actually went to work for a really, really big company. The false assumption here is that all employees/divisions/lines of business are contributing equally to the company's profitability. I will take my own giant, soulless mega-corporation as an example. Each quarter the wireless division cranks out a profit, and the legacy wireline division takes a loss. The wireline division loses customers, too. So - even though we made a profit overall, why doesn't it make sense to cut jobs in the areas that are losing business and have less demand?
I'm sure the response will be "you should invest in training for your employees," which theoretically is a very fair statement. But - at least in my company's case - I have seen the situation at first hand. No amount of training is going to make a dip-chewing unionized redneck who has been climbing telephone poles in rural Alabama for 30 years (who we don't need anymore) into a LTE network architect in Seattle (who we do need). It just doesn't work that way.
I guess my point is that you might reasonably hope that a company would look at its workers paternalistically and say "Well, division X is shrinking and we don't need all these people anymore, but we will subsidize their business so we can keep people in jobs." But that's not the case. And in any highly competitive market where your reducing your operating costs can help you improve your pricing and gain customers, I don't think you can really blame the companies for taking this approach.
The US elections are ran and decided by the ultra-rich.
Sorry to sound confrontational, but that's bullshit. It just is. And ironically Donald Trump is the one that proves it.
Yes, his election to GOP nominee isn't an election for office, but he was detested and denigrated by pretty much every single Republican establishment "ultra rich" figure. He won because the Joe Sixpacks of the GOP - their wisdom in doing so is a separate discussion topic - actually voted for him more than anyone else. Despite all the best efforts of the "rich" and the "establishment" in the party, the demagogue with popular support ACTUALLY WON.
If the fact that the Republican Party - the REPUBLICAN FUCKING PARTY - can be taken over by popular votes against the fervent wishes of the Koch Brothers, the Bushes, the Cruz Evangelicals and everyone else who hated them, then nothing will. The rich did not get their way. And spare me any "false flag" bullshit. The Republican Powers That Be did not conspire to sink their own party. Joe and Jane Sixpack voted for somebody else, and they had to suck it up.
Saying that the rich own elections is a cop-out. Yes, the US is a democratic republic. Yes, the elections for the two highest offices in the land are mediated through an Electoral College. But by and large, the US is absolutely a functional democracy. It's easy to claim it's not because you don't like who got elected... but really you should think about the idea that the people in power are really there because 51% of the voting public wanted them there, even if they disagree with you. Not liking the results of democracy is its great hazard.
This would be good for startup owners who no longer have to worry about where their next meal is coming from.
I understand your intent but that fundamentally misunderstands the nature of startups and funding. Nobody is going to be able to create a startup they otherwise wouldn't have because they are getting a $10K UBI instead of working at a job. Start-ups cost money - usually a lot of it - because they need resources and people who require actual money to get paid for. (If your startup employees were going to work for less than $10K/year or UBI income anyway, then they didn't need this incentive.) Most software startups generally require - depending on scope - anywhere from $100K to $250K just to get started in the first year, and that is far beyond what UBI can provide. If your startup is in hardware, expect your first year to require an order of magnitude more startup funding.
The point being that UBI does nothing to encourage new startups. Entrepreneurs need capital - which (at least for non-billionaires, who are only a tiny percentage of investors in startups) arguably might be lessened if potential investors were paying the increased taxes necessary for the government to dole out UBIs.
There is no fundamental reason why people should have to work more than a few hours a week, as this is all that is really required to maintain society.
I do a job which requires me to work 50-60 hours a week because it requires a relatively (within my field) unique combination of skills and knowledge, plus there needs to be one person making a consistent set of decisions for the people underneath me in the organization structure. Much like getting nine women pregnant won't produce a child in a month, having more people do my job won't decrease the amount of work I have to do, and having multiple managers giving out potentially contradictory instructions would potentially make it far far worse.
The real/sad truth is that if your job is fungible - if literally almost anyone else could pick it up and do the same thing, like working on an assembly line - then yes there is no "need" for you to work much. That's because you can be replaced at whim with pretty much anyone, and there is a large supply of "pretty much anyone." And no offense, but in a capitalist economy, your job is going to be the first to go.
Communism - at least in theory - does a great job at protecting people who have few differentiated skills and fungible jobs. It does an absolutely fucking dreadful job at incentivizing those who have differentiated skills or ambitions. Which of these systems you prefer, as the old saying goes, follows the dictum that "where you stand depends on where you sit."
I was going to ask the same thing. To be a "whistleblower" organization (as described in the summary) is to call attention to illegal activities that have been suppressed. If there is no evidence of wrongdoing here, all Wikileaks is doing is violating people's privacy. While it might be interesting to read the internal e-mails of politicians, executives or celebrities, if there is nothing illegal going on then it's ultimately just voyeurism that doesn't justify distribution from a dodgily (probably illegally) obtained source.
What does unlimited mean? And why do you get penalized if you actually use it as such?
"Unlimited" means the exact same thing as "all you can eat." Which is to say that it is unlimited relative to a reasonably expected degree of consumption and within the bounds of what the provider considers to be the constraints of sharing a fixed amount of resources among multiple paying customers. If you go to the buffet and grab all the food before anyone else can eat it, and continue to do so until the restaurant's food is all gone, you can be pretty sure they are going to kick you out, regardless of how many times you protest that the language says "all you can eat."
The only social nets I can spot currently are keeping banks and other "important" entities propped up. Can't identify any normal people in there.
I'm pretty sure it's not the banks who are signed up for Obamacare. Or GW Bush's prescription drug benefit expansion. Companies pay into Social Security, Medicare and unemployment insurance, not receive money from them.
I know it's cool and hip to say that the US government helps nobody except banks or something - usually not a charge leveled at Democratic administrations, but whatever - but it's not true and contributes nothing positive to the discussion. In the 2015 US Federal budget including discretionary and nondiscretionary spending, 53% of all spending goes to Health and Human Services or Social Security. (Education accounts for 3% and veterans spending accounts for another 4% if you want to consider those as part of the social safety net, which would bring the total to 60%.) By contrast, the military and homeland security receive 16%. So, yes, the "social safety net" is alive and bigger by percentage of spending than before.
Suddenly, your car won't have any urge to stop on the way home for an impulse burger or pack of smokes
I'm pretty sure it wasn't your car that wanted those things in the first place. As long as there is a meatbag inside of it, your car will still be stopping for those things.
Now that that pesky democracy thing has been nipped in the bud
People keep saying this and I really, really don't understand it. Donald Trump's nomination - in the face of implacable opposition from nearly every major Republican officeholder, megabucks donor and deep pocketed SuperPAC - is proof that democracy is alive and well, in the sense that the guy who got the most votes won. Against all the entrenched elites and gigabucks influencers, the guy who got the majority of votes from our assembled Joe Sixpacks actually got the nomination.
Personally, I believe he's a buffoon and would be a catastrophe as President. (I think Hillary would be awful too but for different reasons.) But how can you say that democracy has been replaced with the politics of oligarchs and moneyed interests has replaced "one person, one vote?" Republican voters voted and got who they asked for. Not liking the results of democracy is one of its hazards.
Oh, and FWIW, both Trump and Clinton oppose the TPP despite the "establishment" of both of their parties supporting it. So there's another reason not to suggest that the Powers That Be will always get their way...