I am 'willing' to not get downsized in the next set of sweeps
Lay me off, bossman - About the only way I'll ever get more than two weeks of vacation in a row (and layoffs make it paid vacation as a perk!), in this sick worker/slave mentality we have in the US.
I am 'willing' to keep my income from stagnating
I am "willing" to work for a company as long as they keep me happy. I value "happy" over income, but the ability to afford toys helps keep me happy.
I am 'willing' to not seem less competitive than other workers
I don't even bother entering the race, never mind trying to beat the other rats at it. I don't try to stab my coworkers in the back, and they frequently come to me for help when they need it. And so far, looking composed and correct, rather than competitive, has worked pretty damned well for me.
As a personal experience I tried just this, saying no. It lasted all of 2 months.
Going on 20 years work-tied-gadget free, here. I don't check work email on my off time, and I don't do "on-call" slavery. I've always made that very clear to my employers right from the very beginning... And if that stance has cost me any potential jobs - Good riddance, I don't want 'em.
The most difficult part of this is that many tech jobs are setup to NEED such access to the employee (ie: developer/support roles).
As a developer, if I need to take after-hours support calls short of "the server burned down, we'll have beer waiting if you come in on Saturday to rebuild our business-critical-DB", I've already failed to do my job.
Not sure if this is everyone's experience, but when I informed people I didn't want to get work email on my phone, I was greeted with both awkward looks and suspicion.
I'd call it "awe", that someone would actually turn down a velvet leash.
How odd. I would have thought that, of all places, Silicon Valley would have launched its "B" Ark full of all the PHBs who can't believe people can actually do their jobs while sitting at home in bunny-slippers.
Fellow geeks - Telecommuting! We need to stop putting up with this "physical presence" crap and start making the number of days per month we actually go into the office a core negotiating point in any interview. "You want me Tuesdays and Thursdays? Okay, I want an extra week of vacation to make up for the needlessly wasted hours of my life spent in traffic to humor your delusions that I can somehow program better in an uncomfortable, harshly-lit, noisy environment surrounded by people who want to tell me all about what vile substance their kids/cats spewed on innocent bystanders this past weekend."
/ And let's not even talk about how I have a triplet of 28" monitors on my home workstation while getting a mere second 22-incher at work took nearly an act-of-god
Simple answer: Anywhere you see a power line, and then some.
Aside from the unparalleled powers of eminent domain enjoyed by utility companies in most states, you also have simple "prescriptive" easements just about anywhere you can see a power line.
So the short answer: Everywhere. The first three feet in from the road of just about every property in the US counts as a utility right-of-way.
Do you honestly think that you could fight the U.S. government with any amount of weapons you as an individual, or even organized with your buddies, could ever accumulate?
Nope. No chance at all of winning at all. And I'll fight back anyway if it comes to that.
Were you not paying attention to stories about Ruby Ridge, Waco, etc.? Or hell, for that matter, the Civil War?
The last counts as something of a special case; The first two garnered far more sympathy from the general public than Reno would have liked. Personally, I remember watching (as a wee impressionable child) the uncensored satellite news feeds at the time (remember how the government banned domestic reporters from using high-zoom lenses? LOL); watching the FBI helicopters strafe through stucco walls, hitting their OWN people on the other side, and the "criminals" coming out to help the FBI tend to their wounded. We might not have had a clear "good guy / bad guy" scenario in Waco, but our taxes definitely funded the wrong side.
Anyway - When you have the BATF / DEA / FBI / TLA killing one group of tax evading religious losers a year, people don't get their knickers in a knot. When you start hearing about it on a monthly basis? Weekly? Daily? When they have more than one such raid going on at a time, and for "crimes" such as "refusal to complete the screening process"?
Fight back. Even if you lose, it will send a message - and honestly, I'd rather die fighting for my liberty than rot in the federal pen for any significant fraction of my remaining natural lifespan.
Can anyone with more civics experience clarify this?
Sure, glad to!
"No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law."
Remember, Mr. Romney, "Corporations are people!"
/ C'mon, guys, I don't really likeeither of you - To get my vote, you just need to stop doing shit that makes me want to vote against you! // Yet, you keep trading places on a daily basis.
Comparing the Extremism the Fundamentalist Islamists get away with around the world to whatever drama the Fundamentalist Christians try to perpetrate is -- really -- just ridiculous.
Not really - Just a matter of degree, limited solely by how much power each group has over their respective countries... AIDS sucks more than the flu, but you don't really want to catch either of them.
But hey, I hear ya - It makes perfect sense to devote the full resources of the US government to hashing out whether or not whores... er... "young women"... should have the right to autonomy over their own bodies when it comes to reproductive health. Certainly, no fine upstanding Fundies would suggest beating people to death just because their god whispers sweet, sweet nothings to them in the dark...
Religion is a disease, which any sane person would seek to cure ASAP.
"...Now give us control of the root DNS servers so we can take down anyone daring to express unpopular ideas about WWII, religion, socialism, or the latest pseudo-royal who can afford a super-injunction to hide the bink he boinked."
A big part of university should be learning how research and think critically
"Should be" does not equal "is".
More importantly, you seem to have missed the part about this coming from a Business school. What sort of "research" would they teach, "How to use the Myers-Briggs classification system to discriminate without breaking the law in six easy steps"?
The SFLC advice to us was that the FSF could require key disclosure if some OEM screwed up.
Yes! Yes, they could - Because it would mean that the OEM had "accidentally" taken away the user's right to do whatever the fuck they want with hardware bought and paid for by that user. And I have no problem with requiring key disclosure in that situation.
Look, Shuttles, we get the idea that you want every bit as much control over Ubuntu as Microsoft has over Windows, and UEFI has the potential to finally fulfill your little wet dream there. You seem to have overestimated your importance in the Linux world, however - If you won't honor the spirit of "free" software, we'll simply use a distro that does.
I'd bet most people don't even know who he is. Of those who know who he is, I'd bet most think he is a rapist.
I'll agree with your first point (though most people know of "that Wikileaks guy", and some vague notion that the government has tried to frame him for something-or-other); On your second point, I have yet to meet a non-feminist who doesn't consider this a blatant attempt to destroy a random guy's life for embarrassing the US government.
Assange may count as the worst sort of scum. I have 100% confidence he has no shot whatsoever at ever getting anything even remotely resembling a fair trial, either in Sweden or in the US.
I only hope "we" let him go down in a Swedish court rather than one of our sham anti-terrorism tribunals - They have a hell of a lot nicer prisons than we do.
Of course they didn't literally say "take that, Tevatron!", they're not kids.
Not to mention - The Tevatron found it first! They didn't have enough of them to claim it to 5 sigma (Seriously Slashdot? 2012 and I can't use even basic HTML entities, never mind Unicode???). But they definitely found the same thing.
Don't take this the wrong way, consider me very excited to hear we've finally discovered the Higgs boson.
But honestly? I would have preferred we didn't find it. However deep we look, the universe appears to fit the standard model flawlessly, just a matter of adding more decimal places to our store of knowledge. So, we found it, the standard model prevails yet again - Where does that leave gravity and QCD? What do we look for now?
Or perhaps more to the point, does finding the Higgs, that everyone fully expected to find roughly where they found it, really answer anything? At the risk
of sounding like I would ascribe some sense of agency to the question (I do not mean to - consider me an agnostic in the strictest epistemological sense), this just barely answers the "what"; Yet with billions of dollars and millions of man-hours and the highest tech known to Man, we haven't even come close to answering the "why". We have a handful of nice tidy self-contained islands that make up the fabric of the universe, with no better idea of why they exist or how they interact (in the mechanism sense, not the phenomenal sense) than we did a decade and many billions of dollars ago.
Ease up on the tinfoil. The mean ole gubmint isn't instituting rolling blackouts just to fuck with you.
My previous electric supplier would shut the power off in my neighborhood at 7:10am every Saturday morning, for juuuust long enough to turn off any "soft-on" controlled devices like computers, TVs, and newer air conditioners.
You want to try to tell me I just had squirrel living in the substation with an excellent sense of timing?
That said, you have it right, they didn't need a smartmeter to do that.
Try building your crap in the US. It takes a hell of a lot more effort (and actual evidence presented in a real live US court as opposed to a shadowy meeting with a "committee" of one guy) to have a domestically produced product impounded, than to convince the largely unregulated and capricious CBP to impound something ill-defined.
Domestic fireworks: Okay. Foreign candies with toys inside: Banned.
Domestic hardcore humiliation porn: Okay. Foreign Playboys: Banned.
Domestic overpriced mislabeled antidepressants marketed at kids: Okay. Foreign 100% legit heart meds for 1/10th the price: Banned.
I don't consider myself a bit "HuAH, Made in America" fan, but hey, nice to have someone employed capable of buying your crappy phones, eh?
I mean really - if this was fixed a year ago, what is the excuse for still running the old problematic version?
The excuse? I have a file server and a router that run 24/7/365.24 (+1/86400, on occasion), and they just work. I have no interest in even logging into them, and they will remain "stock" systems until either a critical SSL vulnerability (in the case of the router) or I absolutely need a feature not possible with that old of a system. And when I say "old", I mean, talking "Slackware 4" here until about a year ago.
One of the nice things about Linux - It just works. You don't get random reboots every two weeks when Microsoft decides you must install this particular update, It doesn't get "crufty" the same way the Windows registry does, it doesn't suddenly fail to boot one morning (though in fairness, the fact that we never shut them down probably leads to a bias in that regard). It just works, day after day, year after year. If it worked yesterday and no hardware failed overnight, it will work today.
Now... If you want to call that something that we complain about in Windows... Hey, I'll admit it, I want my software to "just work". Whether that means a Linux server that never goes down, or an XP desktop environment that (for the 18-24 months between puking) everything supports, I just want my hammer to pound nails and my crowbar to pull them back out, and I don't care if my screwdriver believes in Buddha or Jesus or Xenu.
Targeted TV Ads: Silver Bullet Or Privacy Nightmare?
I fall into the category of commercial-hating casual viewer (I don't even have a pay-TV subscription, though I do have a NetFlix subscription) who will do just about anything, legal or not, to avoid commercials.
I also take every step practical to preserve my privacy from the likes of Google and Apple and pretty much any legal-fictional entity described as "incorporated".
So far, Google's - The best of the best - attempts to "target" me via GMail sidebar ads has consisted of a laughable extraction of less-common keywords from my email... And they quite likely have more information about me than any other organization on this planet - Including the US government.
That said, I have found exactly one form of advertising that works on me... If you want to sell me something I already - key point there - want, massively below the normal - normal, not inflated-and-marked-down - price, I'll buy from you instead of through my regular channels (I also have no brand loyalty, so don't bother appealing to me with any sort of "loyalty" "rewards"). But trying to sell me something I don't already want makes me more likely to never buy from you than if I'd never heard of you.
That would be a valid point if shoplifting were just a harmless passtime. However, since it's a crime why not fine them 100 times the cost of what they stole? It might teach them not to do it again. If they only get fined what they steal that's precisely the same as them paying for it at the checkout but with the added bonus that they might well get away with it.
And you would have a valid point except that the courts already decided that not enough evidence exists to call it a crime - Making your calling them guilty of a "crime" nothing short of libelous. Someone should sue you for 100x the cost of the original accusation, to make up for all the others who go un-sued after defaming these non-criminals.;)
This involves nothing more than megacorps getting a second turn at raping people they already tried once to rake over the coals. This behavior preys on the weak who can't defend themselves, nothing more and nothing less.
Netflix cannot comply with the ADA in this case, because doing so would create a derivative work of the original, without the permission of the copyright holder.
Simple as that.
Now, whether or not Netflix still has to comply... Well, perhaps we can twist this to our own gain - Does the obligation to make their content "accessible" trump copyright? If so, you can bet your left nut I'll have a business model the very next day designed to exploit that fact.
Your turn, courts - Punish us all to protect the weak, or give up your paternalistic attitude toward Big Media.
I gave up on cable about five years ago, and have yet to regret it. I can get full seasons, commercial free, from NetFlix within a year of their original airing.
I seriously wonder why I ever paid over $1200/year for something I can get for a tenth that, and without the single biggest nuisance associated with live TV - The one that people pay more for devices to extract - Commercials.
We the people (whether in the US or not) quite simply don't give a flying fuck about what you EU assholes decide to do or not do.
We may not have a corporate death penalty, but we will continue to "steal" your content until you and your entire generation die the death of a thousand cuts, one... pirated... disc... at... a... time.
In any case, five years from now the EU will have collapsed and all your expenditure of political capital on behalf of your corporate masters will have gone for nothing - "Nothing", like the worth of your sad, hollow life.
What the hell do all of you "oooh, don't do it, if they want you to sit there and drool, you'd damned well better sit there and drool" people have wrong with you? Because seriously, mere subservience doesn't suffice to explain it.
Unless you are hired to learn new things to expand job responsibilities then you are stealing. 90% of the real world would be fired or would be laid off as it shows his boss over hired. I find this practice unethical.
Stealing? Chill on the hyperbole. Very few jobs involve an even 24/7/365 workload; many have seasonal variations, some have monthly variations, some have huge daily swings. And although you can hire and fire untrained salesdrones and telemarketers on a whim, you don't just get rid of 30% of your accounting staff because the 2nd week of the fiscal month doesn't have much to do.
The average office worker spends their down time playing Solitaire, or if allowed to go online, reading Facebook or sports news. I wish some of my coworkers would do something like learn a new skill instead. That said, I have nothing against Solitaire, but as long as you have people on the clock but no work for them to do, why not encourage them to do something at least tangentially productive?
This guy wants to learn to program while staying within the company rules - He didn't ask how to root his machine to install a compiler, he didn't ask how to hide his activity, he just asked for a no-install coding playground.
We freed the slaves in the late 1800s. Stop acting like one.
It is illegal for a private individual to imprison somebody. With proper safeguards and oversight though, we allow the government to conduct a whole legal process that includes such actions.
Great example!
So, for example, if we had one group - ie, the US government - absolutely forbidden from searching and seizing someone's person, house, papers, and effects, without a warrant issued in response to an oath or affirmation of probable cause - That group couldn't just randomly go around flying spy planes over my backyard without a good reason to suspect me of illegal activity. With proper safeguards and oversight, though, we could allow any group not bound by such a restriction, however - ie, Google - to conduct such flyovers.
Oh, wait, you didn't mean to make that point? Huh. Oh well. Please step into the scanner, sir.
Slashdot Mirror
I am 'willing' to not get downsized in the next set of sweeps
Lay me off, bossman - About the only way I'll ever get more than two weeks of vacation in a row (and layoffs make it paid vacation as a perk!), in this sick worker/slave mentality we have in the US.
I am 'willing' to keep my income from stagnating
I am "willing" to work for a company as long as they keep me happy. I value "happy" over income, but the ability to afford toys helps keep me happy.
I am 'willing' to not seem less competitive than other workers
I don't even bother entering the race, never mind trying to beat the other rats at it. I don't try to stab my coworkers in the back, and they frequently come to me for help when they need it. And so far, looking composed and correct, rather than competitive, has worked pretty damned well for me.
As a personal experience I tried just this, saying no. It lasted all of 2 months.
Going on 20 years work-tied-gadget free, here. I don't check work email on my off time, and I don't do "on-call" slavery. I've always made that very clear to my employers right from the very beginning... And if that stance has cost me any potential jobs - Good riddance, I don't want 'em.
The most difficult part of this is that many tech jobs are setup to NEED such access to the employee (ie: developer/support roles).
As a developer, if I need to take after-hours support calls short of "the server burned down, we'll have beer waiting if you come in on Saturday to rebuild our business-critical-DB", I've already failed to do my job.
Not sure if this is everyone's experience, but when I informed people I didn't want to get work email on my phone, I was greeted with both awkward looks and suspicion.
I'd call it "awe", that someone would actually turn down a velvet leash.
How odd. I would have thought that, of all places, Silicon Valley would have launched its "B" Ark full of all the PHBs who can't believe people can actually do their jobs while sitting at home in bunny-slippers.
Fellow geeks - Telecommuting! We need to stop putting up with this "physical presence" crap and start making the number of days per month we actually go into the office a core negotiating point in any interview. "You want me Tuesdays and Thursdays? Okay, I want an extra week of vacation to make up for the needlessly wasted hours of my life spent in traffic to humor your delusions that I can somehow program better in an uncomfortable, harshly-lit, noisy environment surrounded by people who want to tell me all about what vile substance their kids/cats spewed on innocent bystanders this past weekend."
/ And let's not even talk about how I have a triplet of 28" monitors on my home workstation while getting a mere second 22-incher at work took nearly an act-of-god
Simple answer: Anywhere you see a power line, and then some.
Aside from the unparalleled powers of eminent domain enjoyed by utility companies in most states, you also have simple "prescriptive" easements just about anywhere you can see a power line.
So the short answer: Everywhere. The first three feet in from the road of just about every property in the US counts as a utility right-of-way.
Do you honestly think that you could fight the U.S. government with any amount of weapons you as an individual, or even organized with your buddies, could ever accumulate?
Nope. No chance at all of winning at all. And I'll fight back anyway if it comes to that.
Were you not paying attention to stories about Ruby Ridge, Waco, etc.? Or hell, for that matter, the Civil War?
The last counts as something of a special case; The first two garnered far more sympathy from the general public than Reno would have liked. Personally, I remember watching (as a wee impressionable child) the uncensored satellite news feeds at the time (remember how the government banned domestic reporters from using high-zoom lenses? LOL); watching the FBI helicopters strafe through stucco walls, hitting their OWN people on the other side, and the "criminals" coming out to help the FBI tend to their wounded. We might not have had a clear "good guy / bad guy" scenario in Waco, but our taxes definitely funded the wrong side.
Anyway - When you have the BATF / DEA / FBI / TLA killing one group of tax evading religious losers a year, people don't get their knickers in a knot. When you start hearing about it on a monthly basis? Weekly? Daily? When they have more than one such raid going on at a time, and for "crimes" such as "refusal to complete the screening process"?
Fight back. Even if you lose, it will send a message - and honestly, I'd rather die fighting for my liberty than rot in the federal pen for any significant fraction of my remaining natural lifespan.
Oh, ok. Go ahead and reveal to me the plan available in Minnesota
You missed the point there - Not that you can get something cheaper, but that you see nothing wrong with a $300 phone bill.
Really, how does being offered discounts on products you actually buy and use constitute a bad thing.
Just make them cheaper to start with and skip the games. Simple enough for ya?
Are you such a sick deviant fuck that you are ashamed by your purchases, or buying illegal things, or buying things to commit illegal actions?
8/10.
Seriously? Get over it.
I pay with cash. Consider me over it.
Can anyone with more civics experience clarify this?
// Yet, you keep trading places on a daily basis.
Sure, glad to!
"No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law."
Remember, Mr. Romney, "Corporations are people!"
/ C'mon, guys, I don't really like either of you - To get my vote, you just need to stop doing shit that makes me want to vote against you!
Comparing the Extremism the Fundamentalist Islamists get away with around the world to whatever drama the Fundamentalist Christians try to perpetrate is -- really -- just ridiculous.
Not really - Just a matter of degree, limited solely by how much power each group has over their respective countries... AIDS sucks more than the flu, but you don't really want to catch either of them.
But hey, I hear ya - It makes perfect sense to devote the full resources of the US government to hashing out whether or not whores... er... "young women"... should have the right to autonomy over their own bodies when it comes to reproductive health. Certainly, no fine upstanding Fundies would suggest beating people to death just because their god whispers sweet, sweet nothings to them in the dark...
Religion is a disease, which any sane person would seek to cure ASAP.
in particular freedom of expression
"...Now give us control of the root DNS servers so we can take down anyone daring to express unpopular ideas about WWII, religion, socialism, or the latest pseudo-royal who can afford a super-injunction to hide the bink he boinked."
A big part of university should be learning how research and think critically
"Should be" does not equal "is".
More importantly, you seem to have missed the part about this coming from a Business school. What sort of "research" would they teach, "How to use the Myers-Briggs classification system to discriminate without breaking the law in six easy steps"?
The SFLC advice to us was that the FSF could require key disclosure if some OEM screwed up.
Yes! Yes, they could - Because it would mean that the OEM had "accidentally" taken away the user's right to do whatever the fuck they want with hardware bought and paid for by that user. And I have no problem with requiring key disclosure in that situation.
Look, Shuttles, we get the idea that you want every bit as much control over Ubuntu as Microsoft has over Windows, and UEFI has the potential to finally fulfill your little wet dream there. You seem to have overestimated your importance in the Linux world, however - If you won't honor the spirit of "free" software, we'll simply use a distro that does.
I'd bet most people don't even know who he is. Of those who know who he is, I'd bet most think he is a rapist.
I'll agree with your first point (though most people know of "that Wikileaks guy", and some vague notion that the government has tried to frame him for something-or-other); On your second point, I have yet to meet a non-feminist who doesn't consider this a blatant attempt to destroy a random guy's life for embarrassing the US government.
Assange may count as the worst sort of scum. I have 100% confidence he has no shot whatsoever at ever getting anything even remotely resembling a fair trial, either in Sweden or in the US.
I only hope "we" let him go down in a Swedish court rather than one of our sham anti-terrorism tribunals - They have a hell of a lot nicer prisons than we do.
Of course they didn't literally say "take that, Tevatron!", they're not kids.
;)
Not to mention - The Tevatron found it first! They didn't have enough of them to claim it to 5 sigma (Seriously Slashdot? 2012 and I can't use even basic HTML entities, never mind Unicode???). But they definitely found the same thing.
So... Take that, brie-eating Europeans!
Don't take this the wrong way, consider me very excited to hear we've finally discovered the Higgs boson.
But honestly? I would have preferred we didn't find it. However deep we look, the universe appears to fit the standard model flawlessly, just a matter of adding more decimal places to our store of knowledge. So, we found it, the standard model prevails yet again - Where does that leave gravity and QCD? What do we look for now?
Or perhaps more to the point, does finding the Higgs, that everyone fully expected to find roughly where they found it, really answer anything? At the risk of sounding like I would ascribe some sense of agency to the question (I do not mean to - consider me an agnostic in the strictest epistemological sense), this just barely answers the "what"; Yet with billions of dollars and millions of man-hours and the highest tech known to Man, we haven't even come close to answering the "why". We have a handful of nice tidy self-contained islands that make up the fabric of the universe, with no better idea of why they exist or how they interact (in the mechanism sense, not the phenomenal sense) than we did a decade and many billions of dollars ago.
Ease up on the tinfoil. The mean ole gubmint isn't instituting rolling blackouts just to fuck with you.
My previous electric supplier would shut the power off in my neighborhood at 7:10am every Saturday morning, for juuuust long enough to turn off any "soft-on" controlled devices like computers, TVs, and newer air conditioners.
You want to try to tell me I just had squirrel living in the substation with an excellent sense of timing?
That said, you have it right, they didn't need a smartmeter to do that.
Try building your crap in the US. It takes a hell of a lot more effort (and actual evidence presented in a real live US court as opposed to a shadowy meeting with a "committee" of one guy) to have a domestically produced product impounded, than to convince the largely unregulated and capricious CBP to impound something ill-defined.
Domestic fireworks: Okay. Foreign candies with toys inside: Banned.
Domestic hardcore humiliation porn: Okay. Foreign Playboys: Banned.
Domestic overpriced mislabeled antidepressants marketed at kids: Okay. Foreign 100% legit heart meds for 1/10th the price: Banned.
I don't consider myself a bit "HuAH, Made in America" fan, but hey, nice to have someone employed capable of buying your crappy phones, eh?
I mean really - if this was fixed a year ago, what is the excuse for still running the old problematic version?
The excuse? I have a file server and a router that run 24/7/365.24 (+1/86400, on occasion), and they just work. I have no interest in even logging into them, and they will remain "stock" systems until either a critical SSL vulnerability (in the case of the router) or I absolutely need a feature not possible with that old of a system. And when I say "old", I mean, talking "Slackware 4" here until about a year ago.
One of the nice things about Linux - It just works. You don't get random reboots every two weeks when Microsoft decides you must install this particular update, It doesn't get "crufty" the same way the Windows registry does, it doesn't suddenly fail to boot one morning (though in fairness, the fact that we never shut them down probably leads to a bias in that regard). It just works, day after day, year after year. If it worked yesterday and no hardware failed overnight, it will work today.
Now... If you want to call that something that we complain about in Windows... Hey, I'll admit it, I want my software to "just work". Whether that means a Linux server that never goes down, or an XP desktop environment that (for the 18-24 months between puking) everything supports, I just want my hammer to pound nails and my crowbar to pull them back out, and I don't care if my screwdriver believes in Buddha or Jesus or Xenu.
Targeted TV Ads: Silver Bullet Or Privacy Nightmare?
I fall into the category of commercial-hating casual viewer (I don't even have a pay-TV subscription, though I do have a NetFlix subscription) who will do just about anything, legal or not, to avoid commercials.
I also take every step practical to preserve my privacy from the likes of Google and Apple and pretty much any legal-fictional entity described as "incorporated".
So far, Google's - The best of the best - attempts to "target" me via GMail sidebar ads has consisted of a laughable extraction of less-common keywords from my email... And they quite likely have more information about me than any other organization on this planet - Including the US government.
That said, I have found exactly one form of advertising that works on me... If you want to sell me something I already - key point there - want, massively below the normal - normal, not inflated-and-marked-down - price, I'll buy from you instead of through my regular channels (I also have no brand loyalty, so don't bother appealing to me with any sort of "loyalty" "rewards"). But trying to sell me something I don't already want makes me more likely to never buy from you than if I'd never heard of you.
That would be a valid point if shoplifting were just a harmless passtime. However, since it's a crime why not fine them 100 times the cost of what they stole? It might teach them not to do it again. If they only get fined what they steal that's precisely the same as them paying for it at the checkout but with the added bonus that they might well get away with it.
;)
And you would have a valid point except that the courts already decided that not enough evidence exists to call it a crime - Making your calling them guilty of a "crime" nothing short of libelous. Someone should sue you for 100x the cost of the original accusation, to make up for all the others who go un-sued after defaming these non-criminals.
This involves nothing more than megacorps getting a second turn at raping people they already tried once to rake over the coals. This behavior preys on the weak who can't defend themselves, nothing more and nothing less.
Netflix cannot comply with the ADA in this case, because doing so would create a derivative work of the original, without the permission of the copyright holder.
Simple as that.
Now, whether or not Netflix still has to comply... Well, perhaps we can twist this to our own gain - Does the obligation to make their content "accessible" trump copyright? If so, you can bet your left nut I'll have a business model the very next day designed to exploit that fact.
Your turn, courts - Punish us all to protect the weak, or give up your paternalistic attitude toward Big Media.
Thirded.
I gave up on cable about five years ago, and have yet to regret it. I can get full seasons, commercial free, from NetFlix within a year of their original airing.
I seriously wonder why I ever paid over $1200/year for something I can get for a tenth that, and without the single biggest nuisance associated with live TV - The one that people pay more for devices to extract - Commercials.
Cut the cord, dude! You'll never regret it.
Dear Karl:
We the people (whether in the US or not) quite simply don't give a flying fuck about what you EU assholes decide to do or not do.
We may not have a corporate death penalty, but we will continue to "steal" your content until you and your entire generation die the death of a thousand cuts, one... pirated... disc... at... a... time.
In any case, five years from now the EU will have collapsed and all your expenditure of political capital on behalf of your corporate masters will have gone for nothing - "Nothing", like the worth of your sad, hollow life.
Cheers!
What the hell do all of you "oooh, don't do it, if they want you to sit there and drool, you'd damned well better sit there and drool" people have wrong with you? Because seriously, mere subservience doesn't suffice to explain it.
Unless you are hired to learn new things to expand job responsibilities then you are stealing. 90% of the real world would be fired or would be laid off as it shows his boss over hired. I find this practice unethical.
Stealing? Chill on the hyperbole. Very few jobs involve an even 24/7/365 workload; many have seasonal variations, some have monthly variations, some have huge daily swings. And although you can hire and fire untrained salesdrones and telemarketers on a whim, you don't just get rid of 30% of your accounting staff because the 2nd week of the fiscal month doesn't have much to do.
The average office worker spends their down time playing Solitaire, or if allowed to go online, reading Facebook or sports news. I wish some of my coworkers would do something like learn a new skill instead. That said, I have nothing against Solitaire, but as long as you have people on the clock but no work for them to do, why not encourage them to do something at least tangentially productive?
This guy wants to learn to program while staying within the company rules - He didn't ask how to root his machine to install a compiler, he didn't ask how to hide his activity, he just asked for a no-install coding playground.
We freed the slaves in the late 1800s. Stop acting like one.
It is illegal for a private individual to imprison somebody. With proper safeguards and oversight though, we allow the government to conduct a whole legal process that includes such actions.
Great example!
So, for example, if we had one group - ie, the US government - absolutely forbidden from searching and seizing someone's person, house, papers, and effects, without a warrant issued in response to an oath or affirmation of probable cause - That group couldn't just randomly go around flying spy planes over my backyard without a good reason to suspect me of illegal activity. With proper safeguards and oversight, though, we could allow any group not bound by such a restriction, however - ie, Google - to conduct such flyovers.
Oh, wait, you didn't mean to make that point? Huh. Oh well. Please step into the scanner, sir.