the supervisor was shown the door rather quickly, that tech had friends in high places.
Very effective.... use a sacrificial supervisor/lower-level-employee to break the law and fire folks over Section 7 rights exercise / unionization attempts.. Supervisor fired, and plausible deniability regained.
In theory they could still be sued, but it's probably exceedingly unlikely.
That's why... if you want to do a unionization effort, then you better make sure it succeeds, and ideally involve observers outside the company with legal assistance.
Initially... some verbal discussions of pay information in safe place off work premises is probably harder for management to combat.
Ideally, there would be legal papers written up, letters already crafted, and backup plans established to address retaliation attempts, before management becomes aware... if an organizer gets canned, then management should be served with legal papers the same day.
No.... it's a 3rd party messaging service using HTML E-mail and a custom browser extension. To enforce the "self-destruct" rule, the e-mail is hosted on the Dmail provider's mail servers instead of the content being sent in the e-mail message.
Nothing to see here..... I'm not going to be accepting any e-mail sent using such a service. I will tell the sender "No, send me a normal e-mail message; I can't read that one."
if google fired a significant number of those people, they'd have an unwinnable class action suit on their hands
There will be enough plausible deniability to go around when they batch those dismissals with their next mass layoff that includes people not on the list as well.
And they don't have to fire them all at once..... just make sure that over time the people putting themselves on the list don't do well on the company, and those that are promoted are always the people that maintain the expected confidentiality.
They can start an informal informal internal investigation to figure out who was responsible for setting this whole thing up.
Then have a discussion with their respective managers and make sure their next performance review will reflect abysmal performance.
And promote the people not on that list offer benefits and bonuses conjoined with a confidentiality requirement on those bonus deals....
I'm just going to say that the case says nothing about this issue; discrimination is a totally different bit of legal code, it's also a taboo in society with different status in the courtroom. Find a case where an employee was laid off or fired, and the employer was fined a big sum, since it was found to be retaliation for divulging salary, even though the employer said they had a very different reason.
they don't put that they fired them because they were pregnant.
The employee had a conversation with their boss where they were urged to quit or told their performance would be bad because they were pregnant.
They didn't have a credible reason for the firing, And their management created witnesses to a scheme for creating a bogus reason to fire.
A manager creating a scheme to frame someone for a firing offense seems pretty convincing that there is not a legal reason for the firing, otherwise they would not feel a need to do something in order to falsify a reason, since a manager can just fire them.
For overt acts involving sex-based discrimination and discrimination based on pregnancy.
They could have avoided paying out damages if they weren't actively discriminating based on sex And their firing reason was based on performance reviews showing a failure by the employee to do their job w.o./ insinuation that pregnancy was a reason for the firing.
However..... people are not commodities, so two different people can have the same job role and yet provide completely different level of value; that makes this hard.
Yup. Same law that says you can unionize says they can't stop you from sharing pay and benefits information.
The law says they cannot; However, most employers feel the law is unfair to the employer and may very well intentionally disobey the law in a subtle manner.
If they find you shared your salary, then your company might find another reason to fire you and terminate you for that other reason. In an at-will state it's easier..... "According to the latest performance review, you're just not a good fit for our company, so we have to let you go."
Google could technically do the same for everyone on that spreadsheet.
Sharing their own salary info would not be mentioned on the official papers as reason for termination, But their accessing/showing the spreadsheet could be grounds for termination upon suspicion of gaining unauthorized access to HR systems.
Companies need to make the money, and employment costs going up would be a huge negative for the shareholders and managers' bonuses.
I predict that men will whine that they can't see videos set so that only women can see them.
Owing to this new change to Facebook.... I have decided to change the Gender in my profile from "Male" to "Both" or from "Male" to "It's complicated"
Next, in case they block me from seeing any videos based on that anyways..... I intend to file a lawsuit against Facebook for discrimination against LGBT people.
Best of all, its now REQUIRED to post comments on youtube. Fuck that.
What do you mean? I still post comments on Youtube using my original pre-Google Youtube ID that Google forced me to link to a Google account or turn into a Google account, but I still keep separate from my G+ / Youtube real-name ID which I avoid using (Sometimes with pain, because they sometimes like to randomly switch my Youtube window back to another ID, or open an annoying prompt to ask me which Identity I would like to use).
Don't worry.... as soon as it becomes legal, there are manufacturers that are going to make specialized drone-killing weapons that pose little/no danger to humans themselves, As long as the drone crashing doesn't itself pose a danger.
without 4 yr degrees who were better engineers that some of the code monkeys coming out of school.
The point of requiring creds is not to give a fine-grained measure of quality, but to provide a way of filtering out Bob from Marketing/Website Design who this morning decides he wants to be hired for a C++ solution architect role with no experience, so he can see what it's like....
If they don't have an engineering education, than they are not engineers. Just really really good code monkeys who happened to meet whatever need you had at the time.
You have to vet the school, and require a transcript, check GPA and require at least 1 educational reference. Not all 4 year programs are created equal, and not everyone who completed a 4yr program performed equally well.
Just like not all CCNPs have equal knowledge; the credential is just confirming a baseline.
Before long $10k each for a batch of a half dozen toilets seat that are space rated
There is a justification for this however.. If you are sitting on the only potty in HQ and the toilet seat collapses beneath you, then your ass is in deep shit....
I know that no part has a 0% defect rate, so perhaps they should engineer their system so that a failure of no one strut is not catastrophic.
If the strut would need to bear 2000 pounds on its own, then they should spec. it to the manufacturer for 4000 pounds and add more struts to spread the load.
If this was the definition then anything with a power indicator...
If the device with a power indicator also plugs into the bus and exchanges information with the CPU, then yes, it is also an I/O device. Just because once upon a time there were Purely Input-only devices such as I-Only Keyboards, and Purely Output-only devices such as Line printers, does not mean the modern equivalent is still Input or Output-only.
Heck.... modern Keyboards have their own microprocessors, there are even wireless ones that do a radio handshake with a partner. Many printers have complicated configurations that can be entered on the panel and run webservers that both read and write data from the user.
A modern keyboard is an I/O device, because data is transferred in both directions over the bus. It doesn't matter what that data is. Also, modern displays transmit Input data as well, so they are also I/O devices; they Input information about the display itself.
A monitor receives data that is all about changing the properties of the device itself too --- specifically, the properties of all the pixels on the device's surface, and that's what makes a monitor also an Output device. What exactly you use those pixels to represent is a software issue.
If you are so inclined, you can write software that will use the keyboard status LEDs to send you messages in morse code or show system load average: you can do anything with them.
They are simple limited outputs, but still outputs.
Yes the LEDs are under the computer's control. But that still doesn't make those LEDs "output devices" in the general sense of the word.
A modern keyboard is both an input and output device. At a high level its primary function is to input things into the computer; however, the USB HID communications are bi-directional communications, there is both Input and Output.
The computer can set the state of LEDs and some other features of the keyboard.
In some cases, the computer can upgrade the firmware on the Keyboard which definitely requires sending output.
the only people who don't see the value in them are those who don't have the skills/experience or sufficient free time and disposable money to throw away necessary to acquire them.
However most of them quickly convert it to dollars or another currency.
The important thing is they accept it for trade, Not that they choose BTC as a long-term store of value.
Surely anyone can see how that could create undesirable risk.
Merchants might accept BTC, but most of their suppliers, including employees and the tax man are going to want
their payments denominated in local currency.
when can I exchange it for money that shops actually accept
Of course you can exchange it for money that shops actually accept.
What's not happened yet.... is.... most shops won't yet provide acceptance of Bitcoin directly for goods.
However, you can exchange some BTC yourself for cash in your local currency.
There also may be some options where you fund a prepaid credit card using BTC,
Or accounts where you charge the CC transaction and they convert from a held BTC balance.
In the US, the regulations required to hold a telecom license require retaining a record of every phone call for at least 18 months, and I believe this required minimum period is likely being increased to 5+ years.
Per telecom regulations, the carriers have to be cooperative and answer records requests which just involve simple form letter, or they can be subject to immediate penalties, no warrant or anything signed by an official.
You can change your mind and take amputation later
Ability to change your mind is a great idea..... especially if you can grow an entirely brand new body and have your mind transferred to the new body through a simple process, with your choice of keeping or changing your physical appearance, that would be ideal.
It would be even better if this mind transfer could be done almost entirely in "software", so only select physical parts of your brain actually need to move at a time, and essentially, your mind and body will be completely replaced with new cells, but you'll retain every memory and all knowledge and such you had before, even if your newly built body is 30 years younger than the one you are changing mind from.
Limb salvage --- likely to never be 100% of what it was before.
Amputee --- now you have non-biological components to maintain that are probably not as robust as what you were born with.
I'm really hoping Option 3. will come out before too long.
Use technology to construct and grow new organs, skin, bones, muscles, nerves, and other biological components to replace damaged ones..... in other words, build an entirely new limb, if a limb was lost. Build an entirely new ear, or eye, mouth, kidney, stomach, heart, etc, to completely replace a damaged one with a perfect compatible one.
Seems like this is a great opportunity for Trend to sinkhole some traffic or capture the C and C traffic for analysis and to help with remediation efforts and notifying owners of networks with infected systems.
Said owners will then be endeared to Trend for helping them and possibly purchase Trend products or tell their friends about it etc
Slashdot Mirror
the supervisor was shown the door rather quickly, that tech had friends in high places.
Very effective.... use a sacrificial supervisor/lower-level-employee to break the law and fire folks over Section 7 rights exercise / unionization attempts.. Supervisor fired, and plausible deniability regained.
In theory they could still be sued, but it's probably exceedingly unlikely.
That's why... if you want to do a unionization effort, then you better make sure it succeeds, and ideally involve observers outside the company with legal assistance.
Initially... some verbal discussions of pay information in safe place off work premises is probably harder for management to combat.
Ideally, there would be legal papers written up, letters already crafted, and backup plans established to address retaliation attempts, before management becomes aware... if an organizer gets canned, then management should be served with legal papers the same day.
No.... it's a 3rd party messaging service using HTML E-mail and a custom browser extension. To enforce the "self-destruct" rule, the e-mail is hosted on the Dmail provider's mail servers instead of the content being sent in the e-mail message.
Nothing to see here..... I'm not going to be accepting any e-mail sent using such a service. I will tell the sender "No, send me a normal e-mail message; I can't read that one."
if google fired a significant number of those people, they'd have an unwinnable class action suit on their hands
There will be enough plausible deniability to go around when they batch those dismissals with their next mass layoff that includes people not on the list as well.
And they don't have to fire them all at once..... just make sure that over time the people putting themselves on the list don't do well on the company, and those that are promoted are always the people that maintain the expected confidentiality.
They can start an informal informal internal investigation to figure out who was responsible for setting this whole thing up.
Then have a discussion with their respective managers and make sure their next performance review will reflect abysmal performance.
And promote the people not on that list offer benefits and bonuses conjoined with a confidentiality requirement on those bonus deals....
Pattern is the evidence of discrimination
No... Pattern warrants investigation.
I'm just going to say that the case says nothing about this issue; discrimination is a totally different bit of legal code, it's also a taboo in society with different status in the courtroom. Find a case where an employee was laid off or fired, and the employer was fined a big sum, since it was found to be retaliation for divulging salary, even though the employer said they had a very different reason.
they don't put that they fired them because they were pregnant.
The employee had a conversation with their boss where they were urged to quit or told their performance would be bad because they were pregnant.
They didn't have a credible reason for the firing, And their management created witnesses to a scheme for creating a bogus reason to fire.
A manager creating a scheme to frame someone for a firing offense seems pretty convincing that there is not a legal reason for the firing, otherwise they would not feel a need to do something in order to falsify a reason, since a manager can just fire them.
$185 million in damages to a former employee
For overt acts involving sex-based discrimination and discrimination based on pregnancy.
They could have avoided paying out damages if they weren't actively discriminating based on sex And their firing reason was based on performance reviews showing a failure by the employee to do their job w.o./ insinuation that pregnancy was a reason for the firing.
However..... people are not commodities, so two different people can have the same job role and yet provide completely different level of value; that makes this hard.
Yup. Same law that says you can unionize says they can't stop you from sharing pay and benefits information.
The law says they cannot; However, most employers feel the law is unfair to the employer and may very well intentionally disobey the law in a subtle manner.
If they find you shared your salary, then your company might find another reason to fire you and terminate you for that other reason. In an at-will state it's easier..... "According to the latest performance review, you're just not a good fit for our company, so we have to let you go."
Google could technically do the same for everyone on that spreadsheet. Sharing their own salary info would not be mentioned on the official papers as reason for termination, But their accessing/showing the spreadsheet could be grounds for termination upon suspicion of gaining unauthorized access to HR systems.
Companies need to make the money, and employment costs going up would be a huge negative for the shareholders and managers' bonuses.
I predict that men will whine that they can't see videos set so that only women can see them.
Owing to this new change to Facebook.... I have decided to change the Gender in my profile from "Male" to "Both" or from "Male" to "It's complicated"
Next, in case they block me from seeing any videos based on that anyways..... I intend to file a lawsuit against Facebook for discrimination against LGBT people.
Or, as I put it, the people who aren't on Google+ are the reason I am on Google+
Yep... and with that in mind; I'm going to go back and login to my Orkut account and partake in the conversation.
Wait...
What the?
Oh Shit..... when the hell did Google hijack their web page and turn off the social community features?
Best of all, its now REQUIRED to post comments on youtube. Fuck that.
What do you mean? I still post comments on Youtube using my original pre-Google Youtube ID that Google forced me to link to a Google account or turn into a Google account, but I still keep separate from my G+ / Youtube real-name ID which I avoid using (Sometimes with pain, because they sometimes like to randomly switch my Youtube window back to another ID, or open an annoying prompt to ask me which Identity I would like to use).
Don't worry.... as soon as it becomes legal, there are manufacturers that are going to make specialized drone-killing weapons that pose little/no danger to humans themselves, As long as the drone crashing doesn't itself pose a danger.
The first thing that comes to mind is a HERF gun.
without 4 yr degrees who were better engineers that some of the code monkeys coming out of school.
The point of requiring creds is not to give a fine-grained measure of quality, but to provide a way of filtering out Bob from Marketing/Website Design who this morning decides he wants to be hired for a C++ solution architect role with no experience, so he can see what it's like....
If they don't have an engineering education, than they are not engineers. Just really really good code monkeys who happened to meet whatever need you had at the time.
You have to vet the school, and require a transcript, check GPA and require at least 1 educational reference. Not all 4 year programs are created equal, and not everyone who completed a 4yr program performed equally well.
Just like not all CCNPs have equal knowledge; the credential is just confirming a baseline.
Before long $10k each for a batch of a half dozen toilets seat that are space rated
There is a justification for this however.. If you are sitting on the only potty in HQ and the toilet seat collapses beneath you, then your ass is in deep shit....
I know that no part has a 0% defect rate, so perhaps they should engineer their system so that a failure of no one strut is not catastrophic.
If the strut would need to bear 2000 pounds on its own, then they should spec. it to the manufacturer for 4000 pounds and add more struts to spread the load.
If this was the definition then anything with a power indicator ...
If the device with a power indicator also plugs into the bus and exchanges information with the CPU, then yes, it is also an I/O device. Just because once upon a time there were Purely Input-only devices such as I-Only Keyboards, and Purely Output-only devices such as Line printers, does not mean the modern equivalent is still Input or Output-only.
Heck.... modern Keyboards have their own microprocessors, there are even wireless ones that do a radio handshake with a partner. Many printers have complicated configurations that can be entered on the panel and run webservers that both read and write data from the user.
A modern keyboard is an I/O device, because data is transferred in both directions over the bus. It doesn't matter what that data is. Also, modern displays transmit Input data as well, so they are also I/O devices; they Input information about the display itself.
A monitor receives data that is all about changing the properties of the device itself too --- specifically, the properties of all the pixels on the device's surface, and that's what makes a monitor also an Output device. What exactly you use those pixels to represent is a software issue.
If you are so inclined, you can write software that will use the keyboard status LEDs to send you messages in morse code or show system load average: you can do anything with them.
They are simple limited outputs, but still outputs.
Yes the LEDs are under the computer's control. But that still doesn't make those LEDs "output devices" in the general sense of the word.
A modern keyboard is both an input and output device. At a high level its primary function is to input things into the computer; however, the USB HID communications are bi-directional communications, there is both Input and Output. The computer can set the state of LEDs and some other features of the keyboard.
In some cases, the computer can upgrade the firmware on the Keyboard which definitely requires sending output.
Don't certify developers. Certify IT workers.
The best demonstration of developer quality is their portfolio of code and a 4 year university degree from a suitable full-time schooling program.
the only people who don't see the value in them are those who don't have the skills/experience or sufficient free time and disposable money to throw away necessary to acquire them.
TFTFY.
However most of them quickly convert it to dollars or another currency.
The important thing is they accept it for trade, Not that they choose BTC as a long-term store of value. Surely anyone can see how that could create undesirable risk.
Merchants might accept BTC, but most of their suppliers, including employees and the tax man are going to want their payments denominated in local currency.
when can I exchange it for money that shops actually accept
Of course you can exchange it for money that shops actually accept.
What's not happened yet.... is.... most shops won't yet provide acceptance of Bitcoin directly for goods.
However, you can exchange some BTC yourself for cash in your local currency. There also may be some options where you fund a prepaid credit card using BTC, Or accounts where you charge the CC transaction and they convert from a held BTC balance.
Software (yes, I know, with some exceptions) can mostly be written anywhere.
If that were true, then how come there is a need for H1Bs? Why not just outsource the work?
No, there must be some value loss from outsourcing, otherwise they wouldn't need to bring people into the US and have exiting workers here train them.
And the telecoms are very cooperative.
In the US, the regulations required to hold a telecom license require retaining a record of every phone call for at least 18 months, and I believe this required minimum period is likely being increased to 5+ years.
Per telecom regulations, the carriers have to be cooperative and answer records requests which just involve simple form letter, or they can be subject to immediate penalties, no warrant or anything signed by an official.
You can change your mind and take amputation later
Ability to change your mind is a great idea..... especially if you can grow an entirely brand new body and have your mind transferred to the new body through a simple process, with your choice of keeping or changing your physical appearance, that would be ideal.
It would be even better if this mind transfer could be done almost entirely in "software", so only select physical parts of your brain actually need to move at a time, and essentially, your mind and body will be completely replaced with new cells, but you'll retain every memory and all knowledge and such you had before, even if your newly built body is 30 years younger than the one you are changing mind from.
Limb salvage --- likely to never be 100% of what it was before.
Amputee --- now you have non-biological components to maintain that are probably not as robust as what you were born with.
I'm really hoping Option 3. will come out before too long. Use technology to construct and grow new organs, skin, bones, muscles, nerves, and other biological components to replace damaged ones..... in other words, build an entirely new limb, if a limb was lost. Build an entirely new ear, or eye, mouth, kidney, stomach, heart, etc, to completely replace a damaged one with a perfect compatible one.
Seems like this is a great opportunity for Trend to sinkhole some traffic or capture the C and C traffic for analysis and to help with remediation efforts and notifying owners of networks with infected systems.
Said owners will then be endeared to Trend for helping them and possibly purchase Trend products or tell their friends about it etc