We had two big trees in our backyard whose branches went around various wires in our backyard. We called the power company to trim them and they claimed it was the cable company's responsibility because it was closer to those lines. We called the cable company and they claimed it was the power company's job. Meanwhile, every storm we would worry about a branch snapping and taking out our power. (We wound up taking down our trees for unrelated reasons - one was dead and the second dropped berries all over our lawn rendering our back yard unusable and attracting flies.)
I disagree. My employer actually knows about my Twitter account. However, I don't tweet anything about my day job. I don't even mention where I work ever. The things I discuss on Twitter are totally separate from my work. If my employer ever told me to start posting glowingly positive things about my company on my personal Twitter account, I'd refuse on the grounds that it is my personal account, not a work account. If they wanted to open a company Twitter account and have me manage it - posting positive things about my company during working hours - I'd be more than happy to. I just refuse to let my work life bleed into my personal life.
Sure they care. They care a lot. They just don't care in the way that you care. They care about whether their efforts to maintain the status quo succeed
Actually, I think politicians like this care about three things:
1) Getting Re-elected. Unfortunately, they have found that scaring people ("terrorists are hiding behind your chair RIGHT NOW!!!!") is a good way to shut down people's critical thinking skills (or what rudimentary ones some people have). When people are scared, they look for an immediate solution and the politician is right there with a proposal ("I'll ban chairs and then terrorists won't be able to hide behind them!"). It doesn't matter if the proposal is idiotic, the politician is good at making it sound reasonable enough if you are scared. Plus, if his proposal fails and something bad happens, they can blame the "bad event" on the fact that their proposal wasn't enacted (even if it wouldn't have prevented it). This can be used against any politician that tries using reason in the face of scare tactics. (There are a few of these, but they are a rare and endangered species.)
2) Obtaining Power: Being re-elected is good, but getting power is better. The more power you have, the less you have to rely on the whims of others and the more you can shape things to be how you want them to be. When you scare people, you can make them give up liberties in exchange for freedom. ("We need to put cameras in everyone's home to look out for terrorists hiding behind your chairs.") The more freedoms the populace gives up, the more power the politician has and the more he can misuse this power to crush his opponents. (That last part must never be spoken out loud to a crowd, though.)
3) Obtaining Money: Putting all these "security" systems in place requires a lot of equipment. Who's going to supply it? Obviously, the politician isn't going to be spending his time hand-crafting chair-terrorist cameras in his basement. No, he'll just contract it out to a big company. Which big company? Why the one who is willing to give him the biggest kick-back and/or perk, of course. This way, the company profits, the politician profits, and everyone is happy. Well, except those people with cameras in their homes, but they don't matter.
Should use of force be solely reserved for the state? And if the state refuses to exercise its authority?
The problem with this is that you then get every nut-job taking the law into their own hands for every perceived slight against "what should be done." To some, homosexuality is a horrible sin deserving of death. However, the government (in the USA at least) stubbornly refuses to round up homosexuals and execute them. Therefore (in the mind of this delusional person), going around shooting people based on sexual preference is acceptable since he is just righting the wrongs of the world.
If the government doesn't punish behavior that you think ought to be punished, you can lobby for this behavior to be punished. You can speak with your politicians and vote for candidates willing to punish this behavior. If, however, the majority doesn't see this behavior as wrong and refuses to punish everyone for it, you have to just accept that it won't be punished right now. You can keep railing against it in the hopes that people will listen and side with you, but you can't take the law into your own hands and bring punishment down upon those you feel did wrong.
So only 1 in 10 galaxies can possibly support life? Out of 100 billion galaxies, this means "just" 10 billion galaxies might be life-friendly (relatively speaking). In each of those, there are billions of potential stars hosting billions of potential planets for complex life to reside on. I still think the odds of there being complex life - or even intelligent life - out there is staggeringly huge. (Communicating with said life is a completely different story, unfortunately.)
On the other hand, perhaps life in the gamma ray burst galaxies developed a taste for gamma ray bursts. After all, we have bacteria that can live off of nuclear waste. Is it that much of a leap to imagine organisms evolving protection against the intense bursts of radiation? Every time we think we've spotted life's limits, we find life that endures and even thrives in those environments. Of course, life in those galaxies may look nothing like what we think of when we envision life, but it'd still be life.
I like Google Voice for this reason. If I mark a caller as "spam", they get a message saying "This number has been disconnected." My phones don't even ring. I think Google even auto-marks numbers as spam if enough people do so. (Similar to how, if enough people mark an e-mail as spam, all further instances of that e-mail will be marked as spam.)
That was my first reaction too. I don't live in NYC but remember that the new mayor made a big deal about stopping Stop and Frisk. Looking at Wikipedia, it looks like de Blasio only promised to "reform" the program. Stop and Frisk was reduced but still happens (mostly in Latino and African-American neighborhoods).
My kids watch TV, but they prefer to watch on demand content such as Netflix over scheduled TV. Very rarely do they watch live TV (unless it is being used as background noise while they play with something else).
Normally, no there wouldn't be. The cable ISPs, however, own a monopoly on wired broadband Internet access, however. This means that there are different rules in play. You can't use your monopoly good/service to boost your non-monopoly good/service above its competitors.
I would think this would run afoul of laws governing monopolies. Cable companies have - for the most part - a monopoly on wired broadband Internet access. Sure, there are some telecoms here and there, but that mostly brings those areas into duopoly. When it comes to television service, though, there is competition. Not just from people cutting the cord, but from people who go to satellite TV (Dish, DirectTV) over cable TV.
When the cable companies price Internet only over the cost of Internet + Cable TV, they are unfairly using their ISP monopoly to gain a competitive advantage over other TV providers.
Coming soon from ISPs: Legalese buried deep in your contract with them that essentially states "We [the ISP] have the contractual obligation to muck with any website as we see fit whenever we want to do so."
They're contractually obligated to slow down your Netflix speeds because they really wanted to and the contract means they are now obligated to slow down Netflix.
I've had Walmart do this to us too. The price on Walmart.com was cheaper and there was "ship to store", but they wouldn't match the price on the exact same item in the store. The sales associate said that the online store and physical stores are two separate entities. She also mentioned that she's had to deal with this herself. She would go to her car during her lunch break, order something from Walmart.com to pick up in the store, and then grab the item when she left her shift.
Target does something like this. If you want to price match against Amazon, you take the item to the customer service desk, not the register. There, they look at the Amazon page, approve the price matching, and you buy the item right there at the matched price.
This way, you only need to train the customer service desk folks, not everyone who works a register.
Or, if you're using Chrome the built-in Developer Tools. Even IE has built-in tools to manipulate live HTML. Hey, this iPhone is on sale for $79.99!
(NOTE: I don't actually advocate altering a page, printing it out, and getting a price match on the altered price. That would be fraud. That said, it can be fun to mess with the live HTML of web pages.)
Here's a test: The person is creating an Amazon seller page and marking the item as "on sale" for a deeply discounted price, right? What if a few people were to find the page and order the product? Would the "seller" be willing to fulfill the order at that price? If so, then perhaps he isn't committing fraud. If the orders would be cancelled for no reason, the account closed, and a new one opened, then this is just fraud.
Walmart price matching is even worse than this. Despite our general dislike of Walmart, there was a toy my son wanted that we were going to buy him. Walmart had the best price on their website so we went into the store and found the toy. Unfortunately, it was more than the price on their website for some reason. We went to the customer service desk and were told they don't price match Walmart.com because the physical store and online store are two separate entities. We could order it from the website, choose "pick up in store", and get that same exact toy from that same exact store an hour later, but they couldn't mark the toy down to the Walmart.com price and sell it to us.
Their price matching policy is completely twisted.
If loss leaders are made illegal, then most supermarkets in America would need to be charged also. All of them price certain items cheaper than their cost to lure you into the store. Some sales are this way too. They get you into the store promising X at a really good price. And while you're there, they hope you'll impulse-buy Y, Z, and a few other things. This is a standard business practice that everyone engages in, not some shady trick designed to eliminate competition.
(Which isn't to say that Walmart doesn't engage in shady tricks. They definitely do. Loss leaders just don't count as one of them.)
But what if you've already downloaded the app. You see that Cool Game X is labeled as "free" (thus doesn't cost anything or have any in-app purchases) so you download it. A couple of weeks later, there's an update that promises new levels so you install the update. Suddenly, you're told you can get new levels for $1.99 each, a heap-load of premium currency for $25, etc.
I'll admit that I primarily use Android devices so perhaps Apple is different, but on Android, you don't see a "free/get" button when you update apps. There's just an "Update" and "Uninstall" button. (You could alert the user to the new IAPs in a permissions screen, but how many people don't read those at all?)
"Looks like your shotgun is out of ammo. Additional rounds of 100 shotgun shells cost 50 Doom-bucks. You can occasionally find Doom-bucks scattered around the levels (but it will take you days to find it and you have no more ammo so you'll be defenseless), you can pester your friends on Facebook about playing Doom to earn 10 Doom-bucks per friend, or you can buy more Doom-bucks (on sale today: 45 Doom-Bucks for $19.99!)."
Wait... so when I was growing up and playing with He-Man figures, I *shouldn't* have lifted a sword high in the air and shouted "By the Power of Greyskull" as a workout routine? No wonder that never worked right. (And don't even get me started on trying to get a jungle cat as a pet.)
Dora the Explorer is as boring as most government-sponsored things tend to be
I actually find Dora more maddening than boring. I know her asking kids to help her is supposed to be engaging the young audience but it comes off as Dora being an idiot.
Dora (standing with a bridge in the background): "Help me find the bridge. Do you see the bridge? You do? Where? Where is the bridge? Is it to my left? Is it to my right? Is it above me? Is it below me? Where is the bridge?" (By this point, the kids are usually screaming at the TV that Dora should just shut up and look behind her.)
I'm so glad my boys have grown out of their Dora phase.
Amazon should be free to hire who them like, even only bald man, or only black man, or only white bald tall women - it's property and freedom that we gained (and now lost again back to communist-socialism). And you are free to criticize them for such choices.
Giving businesses the "freedom" to do this would be to return to the days when businesses would place a sign in their window stating "Irish/Jews need not apply."
Yes, the public can decide not to do business with a store with such policies, but what if the group being excluded from employment is an unpopular one? Would enough people complain about "Athiests need not apply" to persuade the store to change? What about "Muslims need not apply" or "Transgender need not apply"?
The main point of anti-discrimination laws isn't to protect popular groups from one or two small discriminatory groups (though it can be used for this reason), but to keep large groups from deciding that some small, powerless group shouldn't be allowed employment based solely on the fact that they are part of that small, unpopular group.
Slashdot Mirror
We had two big trees in our backyard whose branches went around various wires in our backyard. We called the power company to trim them and they claimed it was the cable company's responsibility because it was closer to those lines. We called the cable company and they claimed it was the power company's job. Meanwhile, every storm we would worry about a branch snapping and taking out our power. (We wound up taking down our trees for unrelated reasons - one was dead and the second dropped berries all over our lawn rendering our back yard unusable and attracting flies.)
I disagree. My employer actually knows about my Twitter account. However, I don't tweet anything about my day job. I don't even mention where I work ever. The things I discuss on Twitter are totally separate from my work. If my employer ever told me to start posting glowingly positive things about my company on my personal Twitter account, I'd refuse on the grounds that it is my personal account, not a work account. If they wanted to open a company Twitter account and have me manage it - posting positive things about my company during working hours - I'd be more than happy to. I just refuse to let my work life bleed into my personal life.
Actually, I think politicians like this care about three things:
1) Getting Re-elected. Unfortunately, they have found that scaring people ("terrorists are hiding behind your chair RIGHT NOW!!!!") is a good way to shut down people's critical thinking skills (or what rudimentary ones some people have). When people are scared, they look for an immediate solution and the politician is right there with a proposal ("I'll ban chairs and then terrorists won't be able to hide behind them!"). It doesn't matter if the proposal is idiotic, the politician is good at making it sound reasonable enough if you are scared. Plus, if his proposal fails and something bad happens, they can blame the "bad event" on the fact that their proposal wasn't enacted (even if it wouldn't have prevented it). This can be used against any politician that tries using reason in the face of scare tactics. (There are a few of these, but they are a rare and endangered species.)
2) Obtaining Power: Being re-elected is good, but getting power is better. The more power you have, the less you have to rely on the whims of others and the more you can shape things to be how you want them to be. When you scare people, you can make them give up liberties in exchange for freedom. ("We need to put cameras in everyone's home to look out for terrorists hiding behind your chairs.") The more freedoms the populace gives up, the more power the politician has and the more he can misuse this power to crush his opponents. (That last part must never be spoken out loud to a crowd, though.)
3) Obtaining Money: Putting all these "security" systems in place requires a lot of equipment. Who's going to supply it? Obviously, the politician isn't going to be spending his time hand-crafting chair-terrorist cameras in his basement. No, he'll just contract it out to a big company. Which big company? Why the one who is willing to give him the biggest kick-back and/or perk, of course. This way, the company profits, the politician profits, and everyone is happy. Well, except those people with cameras in their homes, but they don't matter.
The problem with this is that you then get every nut-job taking the law into their own hands for every perceived slight against "what should be done." To some, homosexuality is a horrible sin deserving of death. However, the government (in the USA at least) stubbornly refuses to round up homosexuals and execute them. Therefore (in the mind of this delusional person), going around shooting people based on sexual preference is acceptable since he is just righting the wrongs of the world.
If the government doesn't punish behavior that you think ought to be punished, you can lobby for this behavior to be punished. You can speak with your politicians and vote for candidates willing to punish this behavior. If, however, the majority doesn't see this behavior as wrong and refuses to punish everyone for it, you have to just accept that it won't be punished right now. You can keep railing against it in the hopes that people will listen and side with you, but you can't take the law into your own hands and bring punishment down upon those you feel did wrong.
So only 1 in 10 galaxies can possibly support life? Out of 100 billion galaxies, this means "just" 10 billion galaxies might be life-friendly (relatively speaking). In each of those, there are billions of potential stars hosting billions of potential planets for complex life to reside on. I still think the odds of there being complex life - or even intelligent life - out there is staggeringly huge. (Communicating with said life is a completely different story, unfortunately.)
On the other hand, perhaps life in the gamma ray burst galaxies developed a taste for gamma ray bursts. After all, we have bacteria that can live off of nuclear waste. Is it that much of a leap to imagine organisms evolving protection against the intense bursts of radiation? Every time we think we've spotted life's limits, we find life that endures and even thrives in those environments. Of course, life in those galaxies may look nothing like what we think of when we envision life, but it'd still be life.
"This clause saying they can harvest my organs and sell my kids is outrageous! I'm going to start a Facebook page protesting this at once!"
The good news is that your phone's battery life will now outlive you.
The bad news is that your phone was designed to have a battery life of one year.
I like Google Voice for this reason. If I mark a caller as "spam", they get a message saying "This number has been disconnected." My phones don't even ring. I think Google even auto-marks numbers as spam if enough people do so. (Similar to how, if enough people mark an e-mail as spam, all further instances of that e-mail will be marked as spam.)
Hey, don't blame Hydra. Sure, they are a ruthless, evil organization dedicated to world domination but even they have standards!
That was my first reaction too. I don't live in NYC but remember that the new mayor made a big deal about stopping Stop and Frisk. Looking at Wikipedia, it looks like de Blasio only promised to "reform" the program. Stop and Frisk was reduced but still happens (mostly in Latino and African-American neighborhoods).
My kids watch TV, but they prefer to watch on demand content such as Netflix over scheduled TV. Very rarely do they watch live TV (unless it is being used as background noise while they play with something else).
Normally, no there wouldn't be. The cable ISPs, however, own a monopoly on wired broadband Internet access, however. This means that there are different rules in play. You can't use your monopoly good/service to boost your non-monopoly good/service above its competitors.
I would think this would run afoul of laws governing monopolies. Cable companies have - for the most part - a monopoly on wired broadband Internet access. Sure, there are some telecoms here and there, but that mostly brings those areas into duopoly. When it comes to television service, though, there is competition. Not just from people cutting the cord, but from people who go to satellite TV (Dish, DirectTV) over cable TV.
When the cable companies price Internet only over the cost of Internet + Cable TV, they are unfairly using their ISP monopoly to gain a competitive advantage over other TV providers.
Coming soon from ISPs: Legalese buried deep in your contract with them that essentially states "We [the ISP] have the contractual obligation to muck with any website as we see fit whenever we want to do so."
They're contractually obligated to slow down your Netflix speeds because they really wanted to and the contract means they are now obligated to slow down Netflix.
I've had Walmart do this to us too. The price on Walmart.com was cheaper and there was "ship to store", but they wouldn't match the price on the exact same item in the store. The sales associate said that the online store and physical stores are two separate entities. She also mentioned that she's had to deal with this herself. She would go to her car during her lunch break, order something from Walmart.com to pick up in the store, and then grab the item when she left her shift.
Target does something like this. If you want to price match against Amazon, you take the item to the customer service desk, not the register. There, they look at the Amazon page, approve the price matching, and you buy the item right there at the matched price.
This way, you only need to train the customer service desk folks, not everyone who works a register.
Or, if you're using Chrome the built-in Developer Tools. Even IE has built-in tools to manipulate live HTML. Hey, this iPhone is on sale for $79.99!
(NOTE: I don't actually advocate altering a page, printing it out, and getting a price match on the altered price. That would be fraud. That said, it can be fun to mess with the live HTML of web pages.)
Here's a test: The person is creating an Amazon seller page and marking the item as "on sale" for a deeply discounted price, right? What if a few people were to find the page and order the product? Would the "seller" be willing to fulfill the order at that price? If so, then perhaps he isn't committing fraud. If the orders would be cancelled for no reason, the account closed, and a new one opened, then this is just fraud.
Walmart price matching is even worse than this. Despite our general dislike of Walmart, there was a toy my son wanted that we were going to buy him. Walmart had the best price on their website so we went into the store and found the toy. Unfortunately, it was more than the price on their website for some reason. We went to the customer service desk and were told they don't price match Walmart.com because the physical store and online store are two separate entities. We could order it from the website, choose "pick up in store", and get that same exact toy from that same exact store an hour later, but they couldn't mark the toy down to the Walmart.com price and sell it to us.
Their price matching policy is completely twisted.
If loss leaders are made illegal, then most supermarkets in America would need to be charged also. All of them price certain items cheaper than their cost to lure you into the store. Some sales are this way too. They get you into the store promising X at a really good price. And while you're there, they hope you'll impulse-buy Y, Z, and a few other things. This is a standard business practice that everyone engages in, not some shady trick designed to eliminate competition.
(Which isn't to say that Walmart doesn't engage in shady tricks. They definitely do. Loss leaders just don't count as one of them.)
But what if you've already downloaded the app. You see that Cool Game X is labeled as "free" (thus doesn't cost anything or have any in-app purchases) so you download it. A couple of weeks later, there's an update that promises new levels so you install the update. Suddenly, you're told you can get new levels for $1.99 each, a heap-load of premium currency for $25, etc.
I'll admit that I primarily use Android devices so perhaps Apple is different, but on Android, you don't see a "free/get" button when you update apps. There's just an "Update" and "Uninstall" button. (You could alert the user to the new IAPs in a permissions screen, but how many people don't read those at all?)
And don't forget having to pay for more ammo.
"Looks like your shotgun is out of ammo. Additional rounds of 100 shotgun shells cost 50 Doom-bucks. You can occasionally find Doom-bucks scattered around the levels (but it will take you days to find it and you have no more ammo so you'll be defenseless), you can pester your friends on Facebook about playing Doom to earn 10 Doom-bucks per friend, or you can buy more Doom-bucks (on sale today: 45 Doom-Bucks for $19.99!)."
Wait... so when I was growing up and playing with He-Man figures, I *shouldn't* have lifted a sword high in the air and shouted "By the Power of Greyskull" as a workout routine? No wonder that never worked right. (And don't even get me started on trying to get a jungle cat as a pet.)
I actually find Dora more maddening than boring. I know her asking kids to help her is supposed to be engaging the young audience but it comes off as Dora being an idiot.
Dora (standing with a bridge in the background): "Help me find the bridge. Do you see the bridge? You do? Where? Where is the bridge? Is it to my left? Is it to my right? Is it above me? Is it below me? Where is the bridge?" (By this point, the kids are usually screaming at the TV that Dora should just shut up and look behind her.)
I'm so glad my boys have grown out of their Dora phase.
Giving businesses the "freedom" to do this would be to return to the days when businesses would place a sign in their window stating "Irish/Jews need not apply."
Yes, the public can decide not to do business with a store with such policies, but what if the group being excluded from employment is an unpopular one? Would enough people complain about "Athiests need not apply" to persuade the store to change? What about "Muslims need not apply" or "Transgender need not apply"?
The main point of anti-discrimination laws isn't to protect popular groups from one or two small discriminatory groups (though it can be used for this reason), but to keep large groups from deciding that some small, powerless group shouldn't be allowed employment based solely on the fact that they are part of that small, unpopular group.