... led yet another Microsoft CEO to take the "Borvell" option, radically scaling the company down to a server-and-app-dev business, following in the footsteps of once-mighty Borland Software and Novell.
Certain elements of the community that developed here, unfortunately, creep me out.
In the interest of living a life a certain good book suggests (turning the other cheek), most of the people who donated to Bruce's site were Novell employees.
I agree with you that some churches are better than others, and that the good ones will gladly open their books for you. I don't know that most secular non-profits are more thrifty than most churches however. We can probably agree that public sector organizations have some large inefficiencies. (I used to work for the local County Health Department, and fully know both the good and the bad of a government run health department).
As far as tax-exempt status goes, you do know that churches pay property tax, right? So they don't necessarily get all those local services 100% gratis. They don't pay income tax, so the federal level services *are* free - but now we're talking military protection from invading armies, the EPA, Ag Department, National Parks, banking regulations, and bond debt service, et. cetera. They also don't collect sales tax; so the city (not county) services *are* free. The funding can get a little blurry - the police officer patrolling the street is probably city funded (sales tax), but the officer guarding the prisoner in jail is almost certainly county (property tax). If you live in a state without sales tax, then the church does benefit a little more than those in other states.
I'll also point out that clergy don't pay income tax, but they don't get Social Security either. And only the mega-churches provide retirement plans. I know my little church couldn't dream of it. I don't know if your employer takes out SSI. But if they do, that's a tax funded safety net you have because you pay taxes. Don't assume that those that don't pay taxes get all the benefits you do.
Lastly, there's the difference between non-profits that get to bill the government for services provided, and churches, which don't. Technically, my local hospital is a non-profit, but the amount of money it sucks down is shameful. $60 for a single tablet of Motrin. It's clearly thievery; but, as long as they can spend 9/10ths of their income, they can claim they only cost 10% admin overhead. I think that a church that hosts an AA meeting is a far more benevolent organization than, say, The American Red Cross, who takes donated blankets and sells them to disaster victims. The charity provided by a church is 100% charity. Not so with most secular non-profits.
I can see where you don't trust an organization that doesn't publish it's finances. But I've also taken enough bookkeeping and seen enough financial finagling (in all sorts of organizations) to know that a claimed overhead rate, even when published, isn't a valid measure of trustworthiness. Which is why I suggested that to know the real truth requires actual in-person knowledge. Even if they published their ratio of income/outgo, that isn't as valuable as knowing if the travertine is in fact a gift from a wealthy parishioner. And if it isn't, shame on them.
How about you take a look? The church I attended was happy to let any one look at their finances - because indeed, they were doing the right thing. So the obvious answer to your challenge is: walk to the nearest church, and ask the pastor if you can look at his books. State that you've been told that churches do charitable work, and you don't believe it's as valuable as you've been told. Ask the pastor how many hours of counseling he does per week. Ask how many meetings are held per week. Ask how much money the church donates to outside organizations to send doctors and nurses to third world countries on childhood vaccination missions. Ask how much of the billable time (if it were a private sector business / public sector clinic) is actually billed.
It's obvious to me that the GP is right. It's also obvious to me from your attitude that you won't believe anything less than the truth as seen by your own eyes. I'm OK with that. March your eyes down to the closest church and check it out.
Of course, if the closest church to you is the Scientology Center, I'm screwed.;-)
As I was getting ready for work, I remembered a problem. Management of the network did get worse with the transistion to SuSE in the realm of DNS / DHCP. On Linux, DNS / DHCP management is practically a stone-age operation. On NetWare it was far better, with a Windows app that did syntax checking, and the data was stored in eDirectory (which means auto-replication and redundancy). So my portrayal that the migration is completely rosey is flawed. Wanted to fess up that there IS some pain involved, and that it's not all 100% UPgrade.
We're getting painless migration. So far, we've migrated about 30 servers from NetWare to SuSE, and there has been litterally zero impact (almost*). Admin functions are still done on Windows workstations using ConsoleOne or iManager. People still use their Windows PCs, accessing NCP volumes (although the NCP "volume" is actually an NCP layer on the server: the files are actually on ext3 or reiser). We notify our clients of the brief outage while we switch, but other than that, they can't tell anything changed.
Mostly the benefit is that the Service Desk still uses the same tools it always did for user management. There's been zero change for GroupWise, ZENworks, remote control, file system permissions, print driver roll-out - you name it. It all just works, same as it ever did.
On the back-end, it did get a little more complicated, as there is a greater reliance on PKI. In the NetWare environment, the PKI was so built-in as to be almost invisible. In the SuSE environment, it isn't really invisible / automated. I imagine it will get better, but I'd be lying to you if I said it was as easy on SuSE as it was on NetWare.
*OK - yes, there was this one DOS app built ten years ago that has it's own internal database, that didn't like the change from a NSS volume to a NCP emulated ext3 volume. But that's the only exception out of about 800 users and 100+ apps.
The TFA doesn't say if it has color or not. If the nano structures are small enough and transparent enough, it might make a nice windshield coating. I wouldn't mind a windshield with a permanent coating of Rain-X. Come to think of it, just regular windows would be nice to be permanently dry. No water spots, because the rain didn't have enough time to hang around and dry.
It would probably make a pretty good shower stall door / shower curtain coating.
Actually, there is a general requirement - although it's a special case, kind of. It's called FRCP - Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. So, it's a special case in that it only applies when you show up in Federal court. But it's a general requirement in that any case that gets ruled against can be appealed, and after enough appeals, you end up in Federal court. The Cornell link also points out that a lot of state courts are accepting the FRCP rules as reasonable for their proceedings.
I've been told by our legal counsel the same thing mentioned in TFA: "If litigation is anticipated, the party has a duty to preserve potentially relevant documents". The obvious case is when someone's death (due to negligence) is involved. The less obvious case is when the boss starts an affair with one of the administrative assistants. Do you keep the love letters? Is litigation anticipated? What if the boss has authority over job promotions?
Problem 1 is that the automated "we delete after 90 days" system may not have a provision for "well, delete all except foo and bar". (And, BTW, foo might take five years to get to court, and bar might never). Problem 2 is that it's probably not reasonable to expect end users to be able to classify keepers from trash. If they weren't love letters, but rather evidence of sexual harassment, should the victim have been allowed to keep them? If corporate policy says no....
I don't know if this was the same case you were thinking of, but Morgan Stanley agreed to pay $15 million in fines for its failure to retain e-mail messages.
What it comes down to is the definition of a "record". If you and your boss make a decision over the phone, and it's followed up with an email, then that is the record of the decision. In the Bad Old Day, a record was paper. The transition to email doesn't get rid of the need for records - it just changed the form.
I work in government, and we have to live under 'open meeting rules'. In other words, elected officials have to be careful not to discuss items with each other (and thus be at risk for the accusation of holding a secret meeting). So now, we have to copy their BlackBerry text messages and phone call records to make sure they aren't texting each other in violation of the rules.
Records requirements have been around forever. Just because it's email or IM or voice doesn't mean it shouldn't be a record. In fact, a record should be made if the communication changes the behavior (practice) of the organization.
I built a 16 GB RAM + quad core Yorkfield box about two months ago. From Newegg, parts came to about $1,800. This gets me a 4 guest VM host reasonably cheap - AND - I'm not burning a lot of power (heat) doing it. (I did not load up on hard drives - one 750 GB SATA is going to have to be enough).
I'm going to disagree that she is mentally ill. She valued her pride above her common sense. She was too prideful to admit that she made a terrible mistake, and that turned into an obsession. But that doesn't equate to insanity, any more than the compulsion of people who buy lottery tickets in the face of 1 to 54,000,000 odds of winning The Big Prize. Sure, it's foolish, but it doesn't rank up there with schizophrenia.
On the other hand, I do agree that her husband should never have signed over his retirement. After the first $10,000 he should have thrown a conniption fit with his wife and demand the bank move all the money into an account only he had access to. After a few months, the scammers would have given up on her, and the reality of how big a fool she was would sink in. I think once her pride was broken, she wouldn't send them another dime. That would be the actual test of mental illness - if even today she continues to hope the Nigerians will still honor their promises. If someone gave her $1,000 today, would she send it to the Nigerians? If so, then yes, she's delusional. If not, then she's not mentally ill, she's merely foolish.
To paraphrase John Wayne (in a quote in the.sig of redhead-kitten: Life is hard. It's even harder if you're stupid.
Except that they told us their store is empty (we were the second customer they had all day), and their bumbling means I won't be recommending them to any of my friends. I would have, if they'd done the deal right the first time. If they were trying to scam me, then they deserve to lose their jobs. If they are just dumb, well "Life is hard. It's harder if you're stupid." (Thanks to redheadedkitten for paraphrasing the John Wayne quote).
I respectfully disagree with the idea that the first score condemns the child to failure. Further, two tests (total) isn't a valid test of subject matter mastery. How about testing the kid ten times during a quarter? So either the kid averages out at (slightly less than) 70%, or he learns that he doesn't know the material.
I guess the problem you are describing is that you don't think the minimum proficiency should be measured as getting 50% of the questions right (and, average is defined as 70%). I don't have a problem if the questions are picked so that half of them are completely obvious if you know the material at all. If anything, the marginal kids would be encouraged that they got as many right.
So I went to the store a couple days ago, and offered the (four!) sales people the following deal: I'll buy the cell phone at the normal price, one bluetooth headset at full price, if you'll give me three of the accessories at half price. I'll buy the expensive bluetooth headset at 100% of it's retail price, if you will sell me the cheap bluetooth + rubber skin + leather case at 50% off.
The one salesman jumped at the chance to make the sale. One guy (the manager) backed off, but the two of other three thought it was a good idea. They processed my order. It was late, my wife and I were hungry - we went home. Looking at the order, they shafted us $36 on the 50% off.
Called them up and told them there was a problem. Went in the next day to sort it all out.
Not one, but two of these twenty-somethings insisted that "50% off" works, when you take 10% off the expensive item, and 20% off the two inexpensive items. 10 + 20 + 20 = 50, y'know?
o_O
I had to insult their intelligence and ask if 50% off a car can be computed by taking 49% off the cost of the radio, and 1% off the cost of the engine.
Eventually, they did make it right (mostly) but it reminded me again of just how stupid youngsters can be getting out of high school.
If a kid tries hard and cannot get four questions right on a twenty question test, maybe he needs to stay back a year. Wouldn't that be more kind than fooling the child into thinking he's got a shot? Let him/her be the big fish in next year's pond, instead of a struggling minnow in this year's pond.
Actually this strategy could cause you to auto-lose your case. Obviously, it depends on the evidence the person has that is taking you to court. If they don't have much, you might get away with it. If they do have even a little evidence, and you give the finger to the court, the results won't be pretty.
I've become the e-discovery guy (at least for email) where I work. Our lawyers told me that the latest revision of FRCP (Federal Rules of Civil Procedure) require an entity to keep evidence, even if automatic purging systems are in place.
Rule 37 of FRCP says that if you are ordered to hand over the evidence, and you cannot, then the judge can order that "designated facts be taken as established for purposes of the action, as the prevailing party claims". In other words, if the person suing you claims you sent them an email offering a million dollars to not go to court, and you auto-purge your email (taking away the ability to prove you didn't send the email), the judge has the option of deciding that yes you did make an offer of a million dollars via email. T'would suck to be you.
It even gets a little worse. Although you must keep evidence after being told you are being taken to court, it turns out you need to keep all evidence in case you are taken to court. I'm told that the criteria here is "reasonable expectation that the matter will go to court". It's reasonable (for example) to expect to end up in court if an employee dies while on the job (and it wasn't due to natural causes). The point here is that if a person dies, you'd better keep any email about the situation that lead to death - 60 day auto-purging email expiration practice be damned.
Auto-purging is a fine thing, as long as you have the ability to except items out, in case they become evidence.
As it turns out, I just received a paper copy of the complaint, as the law firm that filed it used my name in it. I had filed a comment with the FCC, and it was good enough that they referred to my distress in the complaint.
Reading it, the complaint makes a very strong case that what Comcast is doing is selective trashing of competitive service, under the guise of managing bandwidth. The complaint points out (essentially) that someone could script FTP or WGET downloads and completely saturate the network, and the Sandvine software wouldn't forge reset packets to kill it. But Sandvine does target BitTorrent (which often supplies video) and thus is a competitor to Comcast's own Video On Demand money maker.
What the complaint asked for, was that Comcast change it's bandwidth management scheme to something fair, and that they provide some transparency into the parameters of that scheme. Four FCC Commissioners agreed with the initial complaint, one did not. When the ruling came down, it was 3-2 but that's still enough.
The complaint also asked that Comcast be given relatively short deadlines (two months per step, where each step gets them closer to complying with the FCC decision). Filing an appeal to the order isn't what's best for Comcast customers; it's just less work for Comcast who already has Sandvine in place, and doesn't want to have to implement real QOS. Comcast may be playing a game of legal "chicken" to avoid having to play by the FCC rules.
I understand your point, and agree that this simplifies the SQL server (which is a good thing). To answer your (implied) question though: SOAP was never a speed demon to begin with, so adding a middle-man in the form of a web server would (will?) likely make the speed dreadful. If you want fast access to the data, you want to talk to the box closest to the data.
I respectfully disagree. Of anyone, the Controller should be be on Arnold's side, saying that it's illegal to print checks when the bank account is empty. Do you think it's appropriate write bad checks? How about writing checks against an account that you haven't moved money into yet? Yes you have the money in your savings account, but you don't have permission to move the money from savings to checking - and it could be months before you get permission. Is it still appropriate to write checks against an empty checking account?
The guy is the Accountant for the state. You'd think maintaining the integrity of the books would matter to him.
Obviously, the state has the money - the problem is that the legislature is withholding the budget. You can blame Arnold; but that's ignoring the fact that it take two to tango.
It's not like June 30 was some mystical event that changes with the clouds and the wind. In fact, the legislature had 365 days to prepare the FY 08-09 budget.
That it's not done by now is design - not chance.
Every state worker knows this. If one is a state worker, and got caught by surprise with the budget delay, they are either a complete state employee newbie, or willfully ignorant. This happens every year. To not be prepared for it is foolish.
If anything, writing minimum wage checks is a softer blow than issuing temporary pink slips....
I don't see it as Arnold vindictively striking out at rank and file workers. I see it as a politician applying pressure to elected officials guilty of fiduciary negligence. And because the state employees know the game, it's not as bad as it sounds.
Obviously, if you suspect that an email could be used against you, you don't have to keep it. But consider that when it comes down to it, the judge has to decide between "you said, they said". If the plaintiff says you promised them $10,000 to resolve a problem, when really you said that you'd make good with a $5,000 credit on their bill with provisions that they accept the deal 'as-is', the lack of email evidence will probably hurt you. If your defense is "I deleted all my email because I thought it would make me look bad" - Magic 8 Ball says "Outlook not so good".;-).
Obviously, you would say your email retention policy is the reason you deleted the email, but what's the difference? From the judge's point of view, if you were interested in the truthful representation of business between yourself and your business partners, you would have kept the email.
I know it's off-topic, but consider Hans Reiser's case. If, immediately after killing his wife, he went with his lawyer and turned himself in, after pleading guilty, he would probably have been sentenced to 8-10 years for manslaughter (a crime of passion). But because he hid the evidence, he was sentenced to life in prison for murder. This was a criminal case, instead of a civil case, but disposing of evidence never makes the court happy.
You can take the chance that deleting the email will help you. But FRCP declares that the judge is fully correct to assume that the reason you deleted the email is because it incriminated you.
Essentially, FRCP doesn't care that email storage costs money. In small quantities, the cost is negligible. In large quantities, email storage is a cost of doing business. Records are records, and you are expected to keep them. You can take the gamble that shredding your records is a good idea - but I think it's a terrible bet to make.
I think you got it right. If you have a policy, and you suspend that policy after getting a litigation hold letter, the court won't look at you as if you were purposefully deleting evidence. The catch with FRCP (as I understand what our legal department told me) is that even if you don't get a litigation hold letter, but a lawsuit is obvious, you still need to keep the data. A perfect example would be if you had two applicants for a unit, and you chose one over the other. If you have messages to/from both applicants, and the person who lost immediately sends you an email stating they are 'a protected class, and you have no right to deny me a rental' - it is reasonable to expect trouble. Whether or not your 180 day rule lets you delete the mail, the court will look upon you more kindly if you kept the email than if you didn't.
I'm in government, and yes, 180 days seems too short to me, too. You know how there is no statute of limitations on murder? That means email needs to be kept literally "forever" (if the email contains important data in reference to the unsolved murder case). Oy.
It's probably worth noting that I'm having to operate in the federal civil court area. I'm told that the judges in the upper courts don't excuse behavior just because a policy allows it. If your case makes it up to federal civil court, then those judges will expect you to produce - and if you don't, then you weren't interested in winning your case after all (no excuses).
You have to be able to answer the question: can you reasonably be expected to know that the email was (would have been) evidence?
If the answer is yes, then deleting the email anyway (using the retention policy as an excuse) is willful destruction of evidence. If the answer is no, then feel free to delete away.
If your company is defrauding customers or vendors, then you better keep your email. If a customer or vendor sends you an email saying they are going to sue, then you better keep your email. If a contract is for an enormously large amount of money, then you better keep your email. If a person dies because of a malfunction of your product or service, then you better keep your email.
It may or may not be a crime to delete your incident-related-email. But if it's obvious that there was a likelihood that you will end up in court, and you try to pull a trick and delete your email, then don't whine about how unfair the system is when you lose the case because you willfully destroyed evidence.
Obviously, if you end up in this sort of trouble, the question is going to boil down to: "So, Dan541, you admit deleted your email to and from PersonXXX. You also admit that the relationship (business or otherwise) between you and PersonXXX was destined for trouble. How can you say your deletion of email met the requirements of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure?"
That's the gist of it: does your argument on why you deleted evidence hold up?
If PersonXXX counters with "Dan541 deleted the email because it would be incriminating", then you lose. At least under FRCP, you lose.
Unless you didn't delete the email, and the email was not incriminating.
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From TFA:
Borvell = Borland & Novell.
In the interest of living a life a certain good book suggests (turning the other cheek), most of the people who donated to Bruce's site were Novell employees.
I agree with you that some churches are better than others, and that the good ones will gladly open their books for you. I don't know that most secular non-profits are more thrifty than most churches however. We can probably agree that public sector organizations have some large inefficiencies. (I used to work for the local County Health Department, and fully know both the good and the bad of a government run health department).
As far as tax-exempt status goes, you do know that churches pay property tax, right? So they don't necessarily get all those local services 100% gratis. They don't pay income tax, so the federal level services *are* free - but now we're talking military protection from invading armies, the EPA, Ag Department, National Parks, banking regulations, and bond debt service, et. cetera. They also don't collect sales tax; so the city (not county) services *are* free. The funding can get a little blurry - the police officer patrolling the street is probably city funded (sales tax), but the officer guarding the prisoner in jail is almost certainly county (property tax). If you live in a state without sales tax, then the church does benefit a little more than those in other states.
I'll also point out that clergy don't pay income tax, but they don't get Social Security either. And only the mega-churches provide retirement plans. I know my little church couldn't dream of it. I don't know if your employer takes out SSI. But if they do, that's a tax funded safety net you have because you pay taxes. Don't assume that those that don't pay taxes get all the benefits you do.
Lastly, there's the difference between non-profits that get to bill the government for services provided, and churches, which don't. Technically, my local hospital is a non-profit, but the amount of money it sucks down is shameful. $60 for a single tablet of Motrin. It's clearly thievery; but, as long as they can spend 9/10ths of their income, they can claim they only cost 10% admin overhead. I think that a church that hosts an AA meeting is a far more benevolent organization than, say, The American Red Cross, who takes donated blankets and sells them to disaster victims. The charity provided by a church is 100% charity. Not so with most secular non-profits.
I can see where you don't trust an organization that doesn't publish it's finances. But I've also taken enough bookkeeping and seen enough financial finagling (in all sorts of organizations) to know that a claimed overhead rate, even when published, isn't a valid measure of trustworthiness. Which is why I suggested that to know the real truth requires actual in-person knowledge. Even if they published their ratio of income/outgo, that isn't as valuable as knowing if the travertine is in fact a gift from a wealthy parishioner. And if it isn't, shame on them.
People will search the 'dot for Pron and find that Octopuses Have No Personalities and Enjoy HDTV.
If that doesn't lead to an intellectual wake-up call, I don't know what will.
How about you take a look? The church I attended was happy to let any one look at their finances - because indeed, they were doing the right thing. So the obvious answer to your challenge is: walk to the nearest church, and ask the pastor if you can look at his books. State that you've been told that churches do charitable work, and you don't believe it's as valuable as you've been told. Ask the pastor how many hours of counseling he does per week. Ask how many meetings are held per week. Ask how much money the church donates to outside organizations to send doctors and nurses to third world countries on childhood vaccination missions. Ask how much of the billable time (if it were a private sector business / public sector clinic) is actually billed.
It's obvious to me that the GP is right. It's also obvious to me from your attitude that you won't believe anything less than the truth as seen by your own eyes. I'm OK with that. March your eyes down to the closest church and check it out.
Of course, if the closest church to you is the Scientology Center, I'm screwed. ;-)
As I was getting ready for work, I remembered a problem. Management of the network did get worse with the transistion to SuSE in the realm of DNS / DHCP. On Linux, DNS / DHCP management is practically a stone-age operation. On NetWare it was far better, with a Windows app that did syntax checking, and the data was stored in eDirectory (which means auto-replication and redundancy). So my portrayal that the migration is completely rosey is flawed. Wanted to fess up that there IS some pain involved, and that it's not all 100% UPgrade.
We're getting painless migration. So far, we've migrated about 30 servers from NetWare to SuSE, and there has been litterally zero impact (almost*). Admin functions are still done on Windows workstations using ConsoleOne or iManager. People still use their Windows PCs, accessing NCP volumes (although the NCP "volume" is actually an NCP layer on the server: the files are actually on ext3 or reiser). We notify our clients of the brief outage while we switch, but other than that, they can't tell anything changed.
Mostly the benefit is that the Service Desk still uses the same tools it always did for user management. There's been zero change for GroupWise, ZENworks, remote control, file system permissions, print driver roll-out - you name it. It all just works, same as it ever did.
On the back-end, it did get a little more complicated, as there is a greater reliance on PKI. In the NetWare environment, the PKI was so built-in as to be almost invisible. In the SuSE environment, it isn't really invisible / automated. I imagine it will get better, but I'd be lying to you if I said it was as easy on SuSE as it was on NetWare.
*OK - yes, there was this one DOS app built ten years ago that has it's own internal database, that didn't like the change from a NSS volume to a NCP emulated ext3 volume. But that's the only exception out of about 800 users and 100+ apps.
The TFA doesn't say if it has color or not. If the nano structures are small enough and transparent enough, it might make a nice windshield coating. I wouldn't mind a windshield with a permanent coating of Rain-X. Come to think of it, just regular windows would be nice to be permanently dry. No water spots, because the rain didn't have enough time to hang around and dry.
It would probably make a pretty good shower stall door / shower curtain coating.
Actually, there is a general requirement - although it's a special case, kind of. It's called FRCP - Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. So, it's a special case in that it only applies when you show up in Federal court. But it's a general requirement in that any case that gets ruled against can be appealed, and after enough appeals, you end up in Federal court. The Cornell link also points out that a lot of state courts are accepting the FRCP rules as reasonable for their proceedings.
I've been told by our legal counsel the same thing mentioned in TFA: "If litigation is anticipated, the party has a duty to preserve potentially relevant documents". The obvious case is when someone's death (due to negligence) is involved. The less obvious case is when the boss starts an affair with one of the administrative assistants. Do you keep the love letters? Is litigation anticipated? What if the boss has authority over job promotions?
Problem 1 is that the automated "we delete after 90 days" system may not have a provision for "well, delete all except foo and bar". (And, BTW, foo might take five years to get to court, and bar might never). Problem 2 is that it's probably not reasonable to expect end users to be able to classify keepers from trash. If they weren't love letters, but rather evidence of sexual harassment, should the victim have been allowed to keep them? If corporate policy says no....
I don't know if this was the same case you were thinking of, but Morgan Stanley agreed to pay $15 million in fines for its failure to retain e-mail messages.
What it comes down to is the definition of a "record". If you and your boss make a decision over the phone, and it's followed up with an email, then that is the record of the decision. In the Bad Old Day, a record was paper. The transition to email doesn't get rid of the need for records - it just changed the form.
I work in government, and we have to live under 'open meeting rules'. In other words, elected officials have to be careful not to discuss items with each other (and thus be at risk for the accusation of holding a secret meeting). So now, we have to copy their BlackBerry text messages and phone call records to make sure they aren't texting each other in violation of the rules.
Records requirements have been around forever. Just because it's email or IM or voice doesn't mean it shouldn't be a record. In fact, a record should be made if the communication changes the behavior (practice) of the organization.
I built a 16 GB RAM + quad core Yorkfield box about two months ago. From Newegg, parts came to about $1,800. This gets me a 4 guest VM host reasonably cheap - AND - I'm not burning a lot of power (heat) doing it. (I did not load up on hard drives - one 750 GB SATA is going to have to be enough).
I'm going to disagree that she is mentally ill. She valued her pride above her common sense. She was too prideful to admit that she made a terrible mistake, and that turned into an obsession. But that doesn't equate to insanity, any more than the compulsion of people who buy lottery tickets in the face of 1 to 54,000,000 odds of winning The Big Prize. Sure, it's foolish, but it doesn't rank up there with schizophrenia.
On the other hand, I do agree that her husband should never have signed over his retirement. After the first $10,000 he should have thrown a conniption fit with his wife and demand the bank move all the money into an account only he had access to. After a few months, the scammers would have given up on her, and the reality of how big a fool she was would sink in. I think once her pride was broken, she wouldn't send them another dime. That would be the actual test of mental illness - if even today she continues to hope the Nigerians will still honor their promises. If someone gave her $1,000 today, would she send it to the Nigerians? If so, then yes, she's delusional. If not, then she's not mentally ill, she's merely foolish.
To paraphrase John Wayne (in a quote in the .sig of redhead-kitten: Life is hard. It's even harder if you're stupid.
Except that they told us their store is empty (we were the second customer they had all day), and their bumbling means I won't be recommending them to any of my friends. I would have, if they'd done the deal right the first time. If they were trying to scam me, then they deserve to lose their jobs. If they are just dumb, well "Life is hard. It's harder if you're stupid." (Thanks to redheadedkitten for paraphrasing the John Wayne quote).
I respectfully disagree with the idea that the first score condemns the child to failure. Further, two tests (total) isn't a valid test of subject matter mastery. How about testing the kid ten times during a quarter? So either the kid averages out at (slightly less than) 70%, or he learns that he doesn't know the material.
I guess the problem you are describing is that you don't think the minimum proficiency should be measured as getting 50% of the questions right (and, average is defined as 70%). I don't have a problem if the questions are picked so that half of them are completely obvious if you know the material at all. If anything, the marginal kids would be encouraged that they got as many right.
So I went to the store a couple days ago, and offered the (four!) sales people the following deal: I'll buy the cell phone at the normal price, one bluetooth headset at full price, if you'll give me three of the accessories at half price. I'll buy the expensive bluetooth headset at 100% of it's retail price, if you will sell me the cheap bluetooth + rubber skin + leather case at 50% off.
The one salesman jumped at the chance to make the sale. One guy (the manager) backed off, but the two of other three thought it was a good idea. They processed my order. It was late, my wife and I were hungry - we went home. Looking at the order, they shafted us $36 on the 50% off.
Called them up and told them there was a problem. Went in the next day to sort it all out.
Not one, but two of these twenty-somethings insisted that "50% off" works, when you take 10% off the expensive item, and 20% off the two inexpensive items. 10 + 20 + 20 = 50, y'know?
o_O
I had to insult their intelligence and ask if 50% off a car can be computed by taking 49% off the cost of the radio, and 1% off the cost of the engine.
Eventually, they did make it right (mostly) but it reminded me again of just how stupid youngsters can be getting out of high school.
If a kid tries hard and cannot get four questions right on a twenty question test, maybe he needs to stay back a year. Wouldn't that be more kind than fooling the child into thinking he's got a shot? Let him/her be the big fish in next year's pond, instead of a struggling minnow in this year's pond.
For a while, my .sig here was "Define the finite space of spelling definitely - no 'a' exists there."
Actually this strategy could cause you to auto-lose your case. Obviously, it depends on the evidence the person has that is taking you to court. If they don't have much, you might get away with it. If they do have even a little evidence, and you give the finger to the court, the results won't be pretty.
I've become the e-discovery guy (at least for email) where I work. Our lawyers told me that the latest revision of FRCP (Federal Rules of Civil Procedure) require an entity to keep evidence, even if automatic purging systems are in place.
Rule 37 of FRCP says that if you are ordered to hand over the evidence, and you cannot, then the judge can order that "designated facts be taken as established for purposes of the action, as the prevailing party claims". In other words, if the person suing you claims you sent them an email offering a million dollars to not go to court, and you auto-purge your email (taking away the ability to prove you didn't send the email), the judge has the option of deciding that yes you did make an offer of a million dollars via email. T'would suck to be you.
It even gets a little worse. Although you must keep evidence after being told you are being taken to court, it turns out you need to keep all evidence in case you are taken to court. I'm told that the criteria here is "reasonable expectation that the matter will go to court". It's reasonable (for example) to expect to end up in court if an employee dies while on the job (and it wasn't due to natural causes). The point here is that if a person dies, you'd better keep any email about the situation that lead to death - 60 day auto-purging email expiration practice be damned.
Auto-purging is a fine thing, as long as you have the ability to except items out, in case they become evidence.
As it turns out, I just received a paper copy of the complaint, as the law firm that filed it used my name in it. I had filed a comment with the FCC, and it was good enough that they referred to my distress in the complaint.
Reading it, the complaint makes a very strong case that what Comcast is doing is selective trashing of competitive service, under the guise of managing bandwidth. The complaint points out (essentially) that someone could script FTP or WGET downloads and completely saturate the network, and the Sandvine software wouldn't forge reset packets to kill it. But Sandvine does target BitTorrent (which often supplies video) and thus is a competitor to Comcast's own Video On Demand money maker.
What the complaint asked for, was that Comcast change it's bandwidth management scheme to something fair, and that they provide some transparency into the parameters of that scheme. Four FCC Commissioners agreed with the initial complaint, one did not. When the ruling came down, it was 3-2 but that's still enough.
The complaint also asked that Comcast be given relatively short deadlines (two months per step, where each step gets them closer to complying with the FCC decision). Filing an appeal to the order isn't what's best for Comcast customers; it's just less work for Comcast who already has Sandvine in place, and doesn't want to have to implement real QOS. Comcast may be playing a game of legal "chicken" to avoid having to play by the FCC rules.
I understand your point, and agree that this simplifies the SQL server (which is a good thing). To answer your (implied) question though: SOAP was never a speed demon to begin with, so adding a middle-man in the form of a web server would (will?) likely make the speed dreadful. If you want fast access to the data, you want to talk to the box closest to the data.
But if they are not using it, maybe it's a time-sink that needs to be dropped.
I respectfully disagree. Of anyone, the Controller should be be on Arnold's side, saying that it's illegal to print checks when the bank account is empty. Do you think it's appropriate write bad checks? How about writing checks against an account that you haven't moved money into yet? Yes you have the money in your savings account, but you don't have permission to move the money from savings to checking - and it could be months before you get permission. Is it still appropriate to write checks against an empty checking account?
The guy is the Accountant for the state. You'd think maintaining the integrity of the books would matter to him.
Obviously, the state has the money - the problem is that the legislature is withholding the budget. You can blame Arnold; but that's ignoring the fact that it take two to tango.
It's not like June 30 was some mystical event that changes with the clouds and the wind. In fact, the legislature had 365 days to prepare the FY 08-09 budget.
That it's not done by now is design - not chance.
Every state worker knows this. If one is a state worker, and got caught by surprise with the budget delay, they are either a complete state employee newbie, or willfully ignorant. This happens every year. To not be prepared for it is foolish.
If anything, writing minimum wage checks is a softer blow than issuing temporary pink slips....
I don't see it as Arnold vindictively striking out at rank and file workers. I see it as a politician applying pressure to elected officials guilty of fiduciary negligence. And because the state employees know the game, it's not as bad as it sounds.
Obviously, if you suspect that an email could be used against you, you don't have to keep it. But consider that when it comes down to it, the judge has to decide between "you said, they said". If the plaintiff says you promised them $10,000 to resolve a problem, when really you said that you'd make good with a $5,000 credit on their bill with provisions that they accept the deal 'as-is', the lack of email evidence will probably hurt you. If your defense is "I deleted all my email because I thought it would make me look bad" - Magic 8 Ball says "Outlook not so good". ;-).
Obviously, you would say your email retention policy is the reason you deleted the email, but what's the difference? From the judge's point of view, if you were interested in the truthful representation of business between yourself and your business partners, you would have kept the email.
I know it's off-topic, but consider Hans Reiser's case. If, immediately after killing his wife, he went with his lawyer and turned himself in, after pleading guilty, he would probably have been sentenced to 8-10 years for manslaughter (a crime of passion). But because he hid the evidence, he was sentenced to life in prison for murder. This was a criminal case, instead of a civil case, but disposing of evidence never makes the court happy.
You can take the chance that deleting the email will help you. But FRCP declares that the judge is fully correct to assume that the reason you deleted the email is because it incriminated you.
Essentially, FRCP doesn't care that email storage costs money. In small quantities, the cost is negligible. In large quantities, email storage is a cost of doing business. Records are records, and you are expected to keep them. You can take the gamble that shredding your records is a good idea - but I think it's a terrible bet to make.
I think you got it right. If you have a policy, and you suspend that policy after getting a litigation hold letter, the court won't look at you as if you were purposefully deleting evidence. The catch with FRCP (as I understand what our legal department told me) is that even if you don't get a litigation hold letter, but a lawsuit is obvious, you still need to keep the data. A perfect example would be if you had two applicants for a unit, and you chose one over the other. If you have messages to/from both applicants, and the person who lost immediately sends you an email stating they are 'a protected class, and you have no right to deny me a rental' - it is reasonable to expect trouble. Whether or not your 180 day rule lets you delete the mail, the court will look upon you more kindly if you kept the email than if you didn't.
I'm in government, and yes, 180 days seems too short to me, too. You know how there is no statute of limitations on murder? That means email needs to be kept literally "forever" (if the email contains important data in reference to the unsolved murder case). Oy.
It's probably worth noting that I'm having to operate in the federal civil court area. I'm told that the judges in the upper courts don't excuse behavior just because a policy allows it. If your case makes it up to federal civil court, then those judges will expect you to produce - and if you don't, then you weren't interested in winning your case after all (no excuses).
You have to be able to answer the question: can you reasonably be expected to know that the email was (would have been) evidence?
If the answer is yes, then deleting the email anyway (using the retention policy as an excuse) is willful destruction of evidence. If the answer is no, then feel free to delete away.
If your company is defrauding customers or vendors, then you better keep your email. If a customer or vendor sends you an email saying they are going to sue, then you better keep your email. If a contract is for an enormously large amount of money, then you better keep your email. If a person dies because of a malfunction of your product or service, then you better keep your email.
It may or may not be a crime to delete your incident-related-email. But if it's obvious that there was a likelihood that you will end up in court, and you try to pull a trick and delete your email, then don't whine about how unfair the system is when you lose the case because you willfully destroyed evidence.
Obviously, if you end up in this sort of trouble, the question is going to boil down to: "So, Dan541, you admit deleted your email to and from PersonXXX. You also admit that the relationship (business or otherwise) between you and PersonXXX was destined for trouble. How can you say your deletion of email met the requirements of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure?"
That's the gist of it: does your argument on why you deleted evidence hold up?
If PersonXXX counters with "Dan541 deleted the email because it would be incriminating", then you lose. At least under FRCP, you lose.
Unless you didn't delete the email, and the email was not incriminating.