Actually not true, in fact getting 'all corporationy' really means how far can you minimise...
And the answer is not far at all... Just wait for these orders to finally arrive and people try to get support for them... Dell got a lot of flaming over outsourcing support to India — OLPC outsourced it to the even worse-trained rural teachers, etc. There'll be more horror-stories — watch this place.
All OLPC needs to do is... subcontract those services out to a logistics company
Yes, I agree, that's one way to get "corporationy" — unless you can name a logistics co-op/commune, that is...
Starry-eyed desire to save the world is a good drive, but fulfilling the orders and delivering on the promises requires a lot of mundane work. One needs to get "all corporationy" to provide consistently good service...
Some young women are treated with Iodine 125 to treat overactive thyroids. "Ok now the bomb is headed to The Gap, no - now it's going to Forever 21."
The point of such systems, AFAIK, is not to detect "the source", it is to detect unusual patterns. A single radioactive seed will not register as anything more than a spec, but a consistent set of reports from the same location will raise attention.
I have a pretty long password, and I'm pretty bad at remembering things.
You can not login as root to a BSD-machine, even if you enter the password correctly from the first attempt. That's the point. And if you are a legitimate user here, you would know this and would not even try.
Which means, all those, who try, are not legitimate and should be blocked on-sight...
No, you missread my point. I said the person who authorized the pay which would not be the HR person should go to jail
Well, here is your point quoted below. You wanted the HR "morons" to be jailed:
The Human Resources department has a legal responsibility to advocate on behalf of the employee to the company when the law is in their favor. The morons who approved making people Salary-Exempt when they knew damn well they didn't qualify to exempt them from overtime pay should be sent to jail.
But, whatever. This subthread, really, is off-topic. People win/lose arguments over overtime pay all the time. What's interesting about this case, is that the canny employer cut their base salary in order to continue paying them the same amount of money while complying with the court's ruling.
Your proposal to jail the losers sometimes does not appeal to me. In fact, I think, it is stupid and one-sided. You don't advocate jail-time for those, who attack their employer and lose, for example. Nor are you suggesting, we jail any other meritless claimants... Discuss it with your lawmaker — it is off-topic here...
Dangerous if you don't have easy physical access to your machine.
No, it is not. On *BSD family of Operating Systems root can only login on the local console anyway.
If you screw something up badly, you ssh in as yourself first, and then perform `su' — something, that only members of the wheel-group (gid 0) are allowed to do.
My FreeBSD machines all run a crude log-watcher, which blocks-out machines, from where root- and similar logins are attempted, immediately.
Let's see... You are proposing a law, that would put non-violent middle-class people to prison over, uhm, not defending somebody's right for slightly more money than they are already getting.. Or defending, but with insufficient vigor. That's fairly draconian — you are not even suggesting a rehab/education — not even for the first-time offenders...
Try talking to your lawmaker, but I doubt, you'll get very far on this one...
No, the law is there for good reason. We tried employement without restriction in the 1900s. Go research how well that did; people became little more than disposible machines.
It was doing perfectly fine. The "disposible" machines part BS — people weren't any more or less "disposible" than they are now.
You also miss the point; without the "silly" laws, there would be no greener pastures to go to.
Please, substantiate this claim, while I substantiate the opposite. The "silly" (more like "idiotic") laws make companies more reluctant to hire people, although in the US the situation is not as bad as in the illiberal Europe. Because if I can not fire someone (or lower their pay) at will, I'll think twice and thrice about hiring them.
The real point in all of this is that we are all employers — to some degree. If you don't want the government to dictate, how much you pay the babysitter, how much tip you leave to the waiter, if you wish to be able to choose, which supermarket or laundromat to patronize (thus "firing" the others), you should defend the IBM's right to pay what they want to their employees.
All of those idiotic laws you advocate ought to apply to your relationship with the people you are paying just as much, as you would like them to apply to the relationships, where someone else pays you.
They don't have a right to cut someone's pay when they are caught and that person has planned things so that his salary DOES meet his financial responsibilities.
Of course they do have the right to cut anybody's pay — unless a law or a contract says otherwise. And neither is the case here.
I think the fundamental problem with today's society are sociopaths like you that feel they can do whatever they want to employees, because its THEIR company. Sorry, but your right to swing your fist ends at other people's faces.
What a profound demagoguery! So my decisions to cut somebody's pay are equivalent to my punching somebody's nose? What else is equivalent in your opinion? Action vs. inaction?..
But please do cite a LAW supporting your claims. What LAW — other than the minimum wage regulation — affects the amounts an employer must pay their employees? Put up or shut up...
"Sociopath"? Did you call him a sociopath, commie? You belong on a lamp-post, asshole — along with all the other illiberals hell-bent on dictating free men, what they must pay for what...
Others now have to give more of their life to the company for less money. Sounds dangerously close to slavery to me.
Oh, I see. You are not really an asshole — just a moron... "Dangerously close to slavery" — awesome!.. Slavery, dear, is when you can not leave — held against your will, deprived of personal freedoms, and compelled to work. None of this is true about the employees in question. None...
First off, IBM is a corporation, a legal fiction we allow to exist to better society.
False. And irrelevant — there is nothing in this story about IBM doing something, that an individual would/could not do.
Again, companies are not people and should not have rights.
Owners of the companies are people. And they have rights, however irritating that may be to you. The "legal fiction", that you call a corporation, derives its rights from the rights of its owners.
So, they broke the law, and caused harm to their employees by not paying overtime which they were entitled. They then turn around and cut their employees pay, undoing the correction of their previous harm.
Yep — it is a silly law to begin with. It should, of course, be obeyed, because it is still a law — if you can describe, how IBM is disobeying it now, please do...
The end result is that the employees are still harmed and treated unfairly.
"Unfairly" is not a legal term, but all of your arguments are of legal kind ("broke a law", "legal fiction"). In other words, the claim of "unfair" treatment is unsubstantiated... The employees in question are not slaves — if they feel unfair treatment, they can leave for greener pastures.
But if you do work for them, its reasonable to expect to be treated reasonably and within the confines of the law.
Well, it seems like IBM has found a way to do both — continue to treat them reasonably and get into compliance with the law (however unreasonable the law). This may not be quite what the employees expected, when they initiated the lawsuits, but — given their complete freedom to chose different employment and not doing so — I think, their compensation remains "reasonable".
If you want to keep your employees, or keep them motivated, showing them a modicum of respect and some common goddamn decency goes a long way, though.
Agreed immediately. However, the story moved from the realm of "normal" relationship, when the employees tried to force IBM via lawsuits. That "meant war" and moved things into the legal realms. Now IBM is simply looking for legal ways to continue paying these people, what they have always been paid.
If that is making a mockery of the law, well, the laws, which attempt to regulate relationship between private parties, are largely idiotic to begin with...
Free market can do no wrong — by definition. What may happen is some hyperventilating politician pushing a law outlawing IBM's move on some pretext or another — and making the market less free...
i know if i was working there i'd be shopping my resume around after a slap in the face like this.
Maybe, the job is still very good — interesting and otherwise rewarding, khm?.. This does sound like a slap in the face, but the first slap was by the employees — suing your employer (or anyone) "means war".
Yeah, imagine somebody trying to use this sort of argument to defend a theory with political ramifications...
"... fails to detect Global Warming, but that's a valuable contribution anyway, as it helped to distinguish between competing models for what causes GW"
The head would be still alive flying in the air looking at the rest of the body being ripped into smaller and smaller pieces...
The existing "egalitarian" approach is that everyone is stuck in traffic equally — you can not pay more to get better commute.
The proposal would certainly be an improvement. The "(non)-egalitarian" is a red herring — I don't see anyone complaining, that "the rich" have better TV-sets, jewelry, or, indeed, cars.
What we really need is some accountability for the road-maintainers, which are, unfortunately, mostly local governments, who are paid, mostly, by the Federal government... But, at least on the toll-roads, there could be rules instituted, mandating an automatic full refund of the tolls, if, for example, the average speed of the vehicle between the entrance and the exit was below, say, 40mph...
"Ars Technica has up a nice article on why security consultant Ed Giorgio's statement that 'privacy and security are a zero-sum game' is wrong.
What the heck is "privacy" if not a belief in one's ownership of their private information — an imaginary property, which the article's prolific submitter holds in such disdain?..
I repeat; Open sourcing is the equivalent of selling the source for zero dollars.
False. Remarkably false, in fact. Java's source was available for download for years, but downloading it never meant gaining ownership of it. You could not even redistribute it without modifications...
Similarly with BSD/OS, which would always come with the source code. Being able to recompile, read, and tweak that code, however, never meant owning it.
Similarly your procession of a book, an audio-, or a video-recording does not mean, you own the content — you are merely permitted (licensed) to use it in certain ways by the owner. You are typically prohibited from reprinting the book, playing the recordings to the public, or (cough-cough) sharing them via the Internet.
Free software is the same — whether it is Creative Commons-, GPL-, or BSD-, or whatever-licensed, you don't get to own it by simply downloading the source.
Heck, this very posting is available to all for download, but it remains my property — says so on the bottom of Slashdot's every page:)
It sounds to me as if your main objection is to being made to do things at gunpoint. How curious, then, that disarming society is not item #1 on the agenda!
Maybe, it is because I never faced a gun of a fellow American? Only that of the Government...
A regulated economy that balances the benefits of the free market (innovation, economic growth, job creation, etc) with the legitimate concerns of the population about abuses of that market (monopolies, shareholder protection, environmental protection etc).
Oh, yes, "a regulated economy". I've seen it tried. Most years of my life were spent in an economy regulated by GOSPLAN. Even if we leave the fundamental human rights issues aside for a second, it was just terribly inefficient!
Huge volumes can be filled out with examples of the inefficiency, so let me just say — since we are talking about Comcast and its lobbying of the lawmakers — that there was no cable-TV to begin with. Heck, a color TV-set was a luxury, and nobody had access to more than 4 different broadcast channels.
You may cringe at the advertisements on the "capitalist" TV, but, trust me, the Soviet propaganda on those few channels was far worth — they rarely bothered even with the subtlety called as "product placement".
Slashdot Mirror
And the answer is not far at all... Just wait for these orders to finally arrive and people try to get support for them... Dell got a lot of flaming over outsourcing support to India — OLPC outsourced it to the even worse-trained rural teachers, etc. There'll be more horror-stories — watch this place.
Yes, I agree, that's one way to get "corporationy" — unless you can name a logistics co-op/commune, that is...
Starry-eyed desire to save the world is a good drive, but fulfilling the orders and delivering on the promises requires a lot of mundane work. One needs to get "all corporationy" to provide consistently good service...
The point of such systems, AFAIK, is not to detect "the source", it is to detect unusual patterns. A single radioactive seed will not register as anything more than a spec, but a consistent set of reports from the same location will raise attention.
You can not login as root to a BSD-machine, even if you enter the password correctly from the first attempt. That's the point. And if you are a legitimate user here, you would know this and would not even try.
Which means, all those, who try, are not legitimate and should be blocked on-sight...
Well, here is your point quoted below. You wanted the HR "morons" to be jailed:
But, whatever. This subthread, really, is off-topic. People win/lose arguments over overtime pay all the time. What's interesting about this case, is that the canny employer cut their base salary in order to continue paying them the same amount of money while complying with the court's ruling.
Your proposal to jail the losers sometimes does not appeal to me. In fact, I think, it is stupid and one-sided. You don't advocate jail-time for those, who attack their employer and lose, for example. Nor are you suggesting, we jail any other meritless claimants... Discuss it with your lawmaker — it is off-topic here...
No, it is not. On *BSD family of Operating Systems root can only login on the local console anyway.
If you screw something up badly, you ssh in as yourself first, and then perform `su' — something, that only members of the wheel-group (gid 0) are allowed to do.
My FreeBSD machines all run a crude log-watcher, which blocks-out machines, from where root- and similar logins are attempted, immediately.
Let's see... You are proposing a law, that would put non-violent middle-class people to prison over, uhm, not defending somebody's right for slightly more money than they are already getting .. Or defending, but with insufficient vigor. That's fairly draconian — you are not even suggesting a rehab/education — not even for the first-time offenders...
Try talking to your lawmaker, but I doubt, you'll get very far on this one...
It was doing perfectly fine. The "disposible" machines part BS — people weren't any more or less "disposible" than they are now.
Please, substantiate this claim, while I substantiate the opposite. The "silly" (more like "idiotic") laws make companies more reluctant to hire people, although in the US the situation is not as bad as in the illiberal Europe. Because if I can not fire someone (or lower their pay) at will, I'll think twice and thrice about hiring them.
The real point in all of this is that we are all employers — to some degree. If you don't want the government to dictate, how much you pay the babysitter, how much tip you leave to the waiter, if you wish to be able to choose, which supermarket or laundromat to patronize (thus "firing" the others), you should defend the IBM's right to pay what they want to their employees.
All of those idiotic laws you advocate ought to apply to your relationship with the people you are paying just as much, as you would like them to apply to the relationships, where someone else pays you.
For that, they must've violated a criminal law. Have they? Can you cite the law? If you can, please, call the District Attorney.
Yep, that's what I think every time a jay-walker forces me to slow down on the street...
Of course they do have the right to cut anybody's pay — unless a law or a contract says otherwise. And neither is the case here.
What a profound demagoguery! So my decisions to cut somebody's pay are equivalent to my punching somebody's nose? What else is equivalent in your opinion? Action vs. inaction?..
But please do cite a LAW supporting your claims. What LAW — other than the minimum wage regulation — affects the amounts an employer must pay their employees? Put up or shut up...
"Sociopath"? Did you call him a sociopath, commie? You belong on a lamp-post, asshole — along with all the other illiberals hell-bent on dictating free men, what they must pay for what...
Oh, I see. You are not really an asshole — just a moron... "Dangerously close to slavery" — awesome!.. Slavery, dear, is when you can not leave — held against your will, deprived of personal freedoms, and compelled to work. None of this is true about the employees in question. None...
False. And irrelevant — there is nothing in this story about IBM doing something, that an individual would/could not do.
Owners of the companies are people. And they have rights, however irritating that may be to you. The "legal fiction", that you call a corporation, derives its rights from the rights of its owners.
Yep — it is a silly law to begin with. It should, of course, be obeyed, because it is still a law — if you can describe, how IBM is disobeying it now, please do...
"Unfairly" is not a legal term, but all of your arguments are of legal kind ("broke a law", "legal fiction"). In other words, the claim of "unfair" treatment is unsubstantiated... The employees in question are not slaves — if they feel unfair treatment, they can leave for greener pastures.
Well, it seems like IBM has found a way to do both — continue to treat them reasonably and get into compliance with the law (however unreasonable the law). This may not be quite what the employees expected, when they initiated the lawsuits, but — given their complete freedom to chose different employment and not doing so — I think, their compensation remains "reasonable".
Agreed immediately. However, the story moved from the realm of "normal" relationship, when the employees tried to force IBM via lawsuits. That "meant war" and moved things into the legal realms. Now IBM is simply looking for legal ways to continue paying these people, what they have always been paid.
If that is making a mockery of the law, well, the laws, which attempt to regulate relationship between private parties, are largely idiotic to begin with...
That's up to you entirely.
Off-topic.
Free market can do no wrong — by definition. What may happen is some hyperventilating politician pushing a law outlawing IBM's move on some pretext or another — and making the market less free...
Maybe, the job is still very good — interesting and otherwise rewarding, khm?.. This does sound like a slap in the face, but the first slap was by the employees — suing your employer (or anyone) "means war".
But yes, the market will sort it out...
Nobody forces anyone to work. No one is entitled to any particular salary.
As predicted, the bites are already being ripped out of my flesh...
To which I reply:
Yeah, imagine somebody trying to use this sort of argument to defend a theory with political ramifications...
"... fails to detect Global Warming, but that's a valuable contribution anyway, as it helped to distinguish between competing models for what causes GW"
The head would be still alive flying in the air looking at the rest of the body being ripped into smaller and smaller pieces...
"You might have" or "You might've", darn it... Do you really need a Ukrainian to point this out?
The "of" can not belong there in any possible sentence...
The existing "egalitarian" approach is that everyone is stuck in traffic equally — you can not pay more to get better commute.
The proposal would certainly be an improvement. The "(non)-egalitarian" is a red herring — I don't see anyone complaining, that "the rich" have better TV-sets, jewelry, or, indeed, cars.
What we really need is some accountability for the road-maintainers, which are, unfortunately, mostly local governments, who are paid, mostly, by the Federal government... But, at least on the toll-roads, there could be rules instituted, mandating an automatic full refund of the tolls, if, for example, the average speed of the vehicle between the entrance and the exit was below, say, 40mph...
What the heck is "privacy" if not a belief in one's ownership of their private information — an imaginary property, which the article's prolific submitter holds in such disdain?..
False. Remarkably false, in fact. Java's source was available for download for years, but downloading it never meant gaining ownership of it. You could not even redistribute it without modifications...
Similarly with BSD/OS, which would always come with the source code. Being able to recompile, read, and tweak that code, however, never meant owning it.
Similarly your procession of a book, an audio-, or a video-recording does not mean, you own the content — you are merely permitted (licensed) to use it in certain ways by the owner. You are typically prohibited from reprinting the book, playing the recordings to the public, or (cough-cough) sharing them via the Internet.
Free software is the same — whether it is Creative Commons-, GPL-, or BSD-, or whatever-licensed, you don't get to own it by simply downloading the source.
Heck, this very posting is available to all for download, but it remains my property — says so on the bottom of Slashdot's every page :)
First, the alternative track may not be "right" for the tram — old/decrepit, too curvy for the tram's usual speed, etc.
Second the driver(s) may have panicked and done something stupid because of the sudden change of direction...
Maybe, it is because I never faced a gun of a fellow American? Only that of the Government...
Oh, yes, "a regulated economy". I've seen it tried. Most years of my life were spent in an economy regulated by GOSPLAN. Even if we leave the fundamental human rights issues aside for a second, it was just terribly inefficient!
Huge volumes can be filled out with examples of the inefficiency, so let me just say — since we are talking about Comcast and its lobbying of the lawmakers — that there was no cable-TV to begin with. Heck, a color TV-set was a luxury, and nobody had access to more than 4 different broadcast channels.
You may cringe at the advertisements on the "capitalist" TV, but, trust me, the Soviet propaganda on those few channels was far worth — they rarely bothered even with the subtlety called as "product placement".