The impairment charge works out so they are paying about $974,000 per employee to lay them off. Too bad the former employees aren't the ones getting that money.
There's already constitutional processes in place for removing offending parties from the executive and legislative branches. The military getting involved in it is definitely NOT constitutional and reeks of the likelihood of abuse.
After an incident that creates an emergency is not the time to be passing any laws. It should be the time for the systems that were put in place beforehand to start doing what they were designed to do.
If such systems are in place, passing emergency laws in this time period would effectively kneecap them and perhaps sever their carotid, then rip those systems out and replace them with something less-functional and more reactionary (and invasive).
Probably to cover up the fact that the procedures in place beforehand weren't constructed with due diligence because the politicians behind it were paying all their attention to whose dick is going into whom, and the officers (government or military) were concentrating more on guaranteeing their funding.
Settings > Control Panel > Java > Advanced tab
Scroll down to the Miscellaneous section (bottom of the list)
Populate the checkbox labeled "Suppress sponsor offers when installing or updating Java"
Oh, cut the bleeding heart crap, will ya? We've all got our switches, lights, and knobs to deal with, Striker. I mean, down here there are literally hundreds and thousands of blinking, beeping, and flashing lights. Blinking and beeping and flashing - they're *flashing* and they're *beeping*. I can't stand it anymore! They're *blinking* and *beeping* and *flashing*! Why doesn't somebody pull the plug?
If you associate the patrol car's location at the time it is scanning with the mobile ALR, what's the difference between that and having a network of stationary ALRs?
The invasion of privacy comes when the data isn't immediately discarded if it doesn't get a hit for taking action on the spot. Because you know if they store the data it is only a matter of time before it is either sold to private entities to get the police/city/state more money, or that someone hacks their system and gets access to the data.
This just may be the first thing I've heard of Jindal doing that doesn't make me want to scream "Douchebag!" at him.
Just imagine a world where instead of tailoring their message to what the people say they want to hear, they have to put out a message of what they really plan on doing and the people make their voting decisions based on that.
We also need a much cheaper and easier method of recalling elected officials. Right now they really couldn't care less about offending the voters because they have a guaranteed job for the next several years, and by the time the next election rolls around most folks have forgotten what wrongs they've done. If a supermarket manager did something on the same relative scale of wrongness that some of these congresscritters do weekly, they'd be out of a job before the sun set. Congress needs to have the same immediate fear for their jobs. After all, can't kill them, can't staple bologna to their foreheads.
People do tend to live up to expectations, and when someone is being punished for things based on accusation rather than conviction, they've lost most of the disincentive that would normally have prevented them from doing bad acts. (If you've been made to pay for the car, why not drive off in it?)
And, of course, when sociopaths see that everyone more or less expects politicians to act like sociopaths, what better job is there for them to pursue? They're already qualified in most people's eyes and the pay's certainly better than that of an indifferent ice cream truck driver.
As societies we need to start changing how we talk about our politicians and start expressing some more realistic (and more optimistic) expectations of our "leaders". It won't magically fix everything, but it can make the job of fixing things easier.
Regardless of how bad a corporation or government agency has been in the past, there's nothing wrong with lauding them whenever they take a step in the right direction. It might not get them all the way to the place you want them to already be, but they're all going to move in the direction of encouragement and what gets them better results. And the faster they get the positive or negative feedback, the more effective it will be. Continuously lambasting Apple today for something that Jobs did in the past will only make them not care about your opinion even more, since we're all pretty sure they're not going to be able to convince Jobs to change his view and publicly apologize at this point. The company will follow what gets them good PR and more money - so we've got to give them a visible path to what they want, that just happens to be sitting on top of what we want.
Negative reinforcement is much better at convincing people to not get caught more than it does to just not do it.
That's unheard of! http://www.damninteresting.com...
Unless you count the thousands of still-living people there that have been declared legally dead by bribed public officials and stripped of their property.
Because every time people try to legislate morality, it turns out bad, Perhaps if everyone had the exact same religion and same sexual preferences that might work out, but we live in the real world. Some people have mutually consensual open marriages - what would making adultery mean for them?
If there is anything that would drive a number of nails into the coffin of the institution of marriage, it would be outlawing adultery. When there's a choice between criminal adultery or worry-free premarital sex, why open yourself up to the liability? On top of the problems with losing half your stuff in a divorce, there wouldn't be enough benefits left to convince all that many people to go for it.
> If they're able to train the replacements then they're clearly qualified to do the job.
Doesn't that actually prove that they're more qualified to do the job than their replacements? They know how to do it already, and they're evidently qualified enough to teach others how to do it as well, while the H1-B folks require training in order to do it.
The problem with that argument is that the "parents" in this case are not qualified to make that decision. They don't have the education nor the data to determine whether or not their child might be susceptible to one of those "serious side effects" that may strike 1/1000 of a percent, at most. When considering that the potential equivalently-bad-or-worse consequences from the diseases themselves have percentages on the left side of the decimal point, they are avoiding a slim chance of something rare by almost guaranteeing a bad outcome if their child gets exposed. And they volunteer their child into the service of exposing other people to that illness.
If we didn't have the anti-vaxxers or the people who think vaccines are a plot for some kind of non-microscopic genocide, we'd probably have a few less diseases in the world to worry about or continue vaccinating against. After all, how many people get a small pox vaccination these days?
"Benefits society" != "gets them lots of cash".
Sure, those two categories frequently overlap, but there are also many occasions where that overlap is mere accident or as a consequence of some legal requirement that isn't that much of a "benefit". There's many occasions where people have been lured from doing something that would be massively beneficial to society to do something that ends up being only marginally beneficial (or outright harmful) by offering them more cash to do it. The ability to extract cash isn't a reliable indicator of benefit.
People get more money if the knowledge they have is rare and in short supply - passing that knowledge on to others and training them how to use it is of a huge benefit to society. Holding on to that knowledge themselves preserves that shortness of supply and will get them more money, but at the cost of many other advances delayed because the company (in this case Uber) paying them the money wants the benefits for themselves.
Please, try thinking outside of the patterns of old, trite memes coined by pessimistic opportunists who can't see the value in things that don't benefit themselves immediately.
This seems like a ready-made tool for blackmail and extortion. It creates a list of everyone in the country that wants access to online porn of any sort. What are the odds that no one with access to such a list would ever have any inclination to misuse it? For example, threatening to leak a relevant portion of the list to a local church group or to your employers?
Society doesn't need to construct more barriers to use to separate people.
Wouldn't we be better off if we outright banned mergers involving companies that hold (at least) double-digit percentages of their market? (with a possible exception in case of bankruptcy on a "likely to destroy the company" level) The biggest benefit of mergers, aside from cash infusions, is removing competition - which is rarely (or never) in the interests of the customers.
Slashdot Mirror
The impairment charge works out so they are paying about $974,000 per employee to lay them off. Too bad the former employees aren't the ones getting that money.
There's already constitutional processes in place for removing offending parties from the executive and legislative branches. The military getting involved in it is definitely NOT constitutional and reeks of the likelihood of abuse.
Without the sin, what would be the point of going on the internet in the first place?
Oh yeah, the only other thing people use the internet for: confirmation bias via disreputable sources.
IE 11 really stands for Internet Evil ^11
After an incident that creates an emergency is not the time to be passing any laws. It should be the time for the systems that were put in place beforehand to start doing what they were designed to do.
If such systems are in place, passing emergency laws in this time period would effectively kneecap them and perhaps sever their carotid, then rip those systems out and replace them with something less-functional and more reactionary (and invasive). Probably to cover up the fact that the procedures in place beforehand weren't constructed with due diligence because the politicians behind it were paying all their attention to whose dick is going into whom, and the officers (government or military) were concentrating more on guaranteeing their funding.
Settings > Control Panel > Java > Advanced tab
Scroll down to the Miscellaneous section (bottom of the list)
Populate the checkbox labeled "Suppress sponsor offers when installing or updating Java"
> it's questionable behavior.
it's question-free behavior.
Time to call residual human resources.
Oh, cut the bleeding heart crap, will ya? We've all got our switches, lights, and knobs to deal with, Striker. I mean, down here there are literally hundreds and thousands of blinking, beeping, and flashing lights. Blinking and beeping and flashing - they're *flashing* and they're *beeping*. I can't stand it anymore! They're *blinking* and *beeping* and *flashing*! Why doesn't somebody pull the plug?
- Buck Murdock
Are you required to notify the DMV when you get your car painted?
If you associate the patrol car's location at the time it is scanning with the mobile ALR, what's the difference between that and having a network of stationary ALRs? The invasion of privacy comes when the data isn't immediately discarded if it doesn't get a hit for taking action on the spot. Because you know if they store the data it is only a matter of time before it is either sold to private entities to get the police/city/state more money, or that someone hacks their system and gets access to the data. This just may be the first thing I've heard of Jindal doing that doesn't make me want to scream "Douchebag!" at him.
Just imagine a world where instead of tailoring their message to what the people say they want to hear, they have to put out a message of what they really plan on doing and the people make their voting decisions based on that. We also need a much cheaper and easier method of recalling elected officials. Right now they really couldn't care less about offending the voters because they have a guaranteed job for the next several years, and by the time the next election rolls around most folks have forgotten what wrongs they've done. If a supermarket manager did something on the same relative scale of wrongness that some of these congresscritters do weekly, they'd be out of a job before the sun set. Congress needs to have the same immediate fear for their jobs. After all, can't kill them, can't staple bologna to their foreheads.
Everyone knows the only real cure for those conditions is ground up poacher skull. And I heard dried and ground poacher penis cures the gay.
People do tend to live up to expectations, and when someone is being punished for things based on accusation rather than conviction, they've lost most of the disincentive that would normally have prevented them from doing bad acts. (If you've been made to pay for the car, why not drive off in it?)
And, of course, when sociopaths see that everyone more or less expects politicians to act like sociopaths, what better job is there for them to pursue? They're already qualified in most people's eyes and the pay's certainly better than that of an indifferent ice cream truck driver.
As societies we need to start changing how we talk about our politicians and start expressing some more realistic (and more optimistic) expectations of our "leaders". It won't magically fix everything, but it can make the job of fixing things easier.
Regardless of how bad a corporation or government agency has been in the past, there's nothing wrong with lauding them whenever they take a step in the right direction. It might not get them all the way to the place you want them to already be, but they're all going to move in the direction of encouragement and what gets them better results. And the faster they get the positive or negative feedback, the more effective it will be. Continuously lambasting Apple today for something that Jobs did in the past will only make them not care about your opinion even more, since we're all pretty sure they're not going to be able to convince Jobs to change his view and publicly apologize at this point. The company will follow what gets them good PR and more money - so we've got to give them a visible path to what they want, that just happens to be sitting on top of what we want. Negative reinforcement is much better at convincing people to not get caught more than it does to just not do it.
That's unheard of!
http://www.damninteresting.com...
Unless you count the thousands of still-living people there that have been declared legally dead by bribed public officials and stripped of their property.
> Why should adultery not be a crime
Because every time people try to legislate morality, it turns out bad, Perhaps if everyone had the exact same religion and same sexual preferences that might work out, but we live in the real world. Some people have mutually consensual open marriages - what would making adultery mean for them? If there is anything that would drive a number of nails into the coffin of the institution of marriage, it would be outlawing adultery. When there's a choice between criminal adultery or worry-free premarital sex, why open yourself up to the liability? On top of the problems with losing half your stuff in a divorce, there wouldn't be enough benefits left to convince all that many people to go for it.
> If they're able to train the replacements then they're clearly qualified to do the job.
Doesn't that actually prove that they're more qualified to do the job than their replacements? They know how to do it already, and they're evidently qualified enough to teach others how to do it as well, while the H1-B folks require training in order to do it.
The problem with that argument is that the "parents" in this case are not qualified to make that decision. They don't have the education nor the data to determine whether or not their child might be susceptible to one of those "serious side effects" that may strike 1/1000 of a percent, at most. When considering that the potential equivalently-bad-or-worse consequences from the diseases themselves have percentages on the left side of the decimal point, they are avoiding a slim chance of something rare by almost guaranteeing a bad outcome if their child gets exposed. And they volunteer their child into the service of exposing other people to that illness.
If we didn't have the anti-vaxxers or the people who think vaccines are a plot for some kind of non-microscopic genocide, we'd probably have a few less diseases in the world to worry about or continue vaccinating against. After all, how many people get a small pox vaccination these days?
Don't forget the Jehova's Witnesses, who believe blood transfusions are against their faith. And celebrating birthdays or other holidays.
I'm surprised they didn't just charge the money with a crime and seize it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U...
> suffer the bitching and moaning about "Windows was not shut down properly", and then the "Windows needs to Restart"
You left out the "Windows wants you to use lube next time" and "Windows *really* doesn't like anal - what kind of an OS do you think I am?"
"Benefits society" != "gets them lots of cash". Sure, those two categories frequently overlap, but there are also many occasions where that overlap is mere accident or as a consequence of some legal requirement that isn't that much of a "benefit". There's many occasions where people have been lured from doing something that would be massively beneficial to society to do something that ends up being only marginally beneficial (or outright harmful) by offering them more cash to do it. The ability to extract cash isn't a reliable indicator of benefit. People get more money if the knowledge they have is rare and in short supply - passing that knowledge on to others and training them how to use it is of a huge benefit to society. Holding on to that knowledge themselves preserves that shortness of supply and will get them more money, but at the cost of many other advances delayed because the company (in this case Uber) paying them the money wants the benefits for themselves. Please, try thinking outside of the patterns of old, trite memes coined by pessimistic opportunists who can't see the value in things that don't benefit themselves immediately.
This seems like a ready-made tool for blackmail and extortion. It creates a list of everyone in the country that wants access to online porn of any sort. What are the odds that no one with access to such a list would ever have any inclination to misuse it? For example, threatening to leak a relevant portion of the list to a local church group or to your employers?
Society doesn't need to construct more barriers to use to separate people.
Wouldn't we be better off if we outright banned mergers involving companies that hold (at least) double-digit percentages of their market? (with a possible exception in case of bankruptcy on a "likely to destroy the company" level) The biggest benefit of mergers, aside from cash infusions, is removing competition - which is rarely (or never) in the interests of the customers.