It's not impossible for them to be MORE law abiding. If you've got an ounce of weed in the car, you're less likely (if you have any brains) to speed or commit other moving violations that would cause you to be pulled over.
Your logic is specious and based solely on your own opinion on the matter. (As is mine, but I'm not drawing any conclusions.)
So the spontaniously appear, or did someone ( incompetently ) hire them?
Several possibilities:
1) HR is blatantly incompetent at recruiting IT workers; 2) The recruiters that HR outsourced to are blatantly incompetent at recruiting IT workers; 3) The idiot is someone's brother-in-law (or other forms of nepotism); 4) Management refuses to offer a salary/benefit package that would allow for the appropriately talented worker to be hired; 5) The idiot involved is good at selling themselves in an interview; 6) Time ran out on the hiring time-frame and the department was forced to hire whoever they could find or lose the budget for the position; 7) Other duties as assigned by management (both on the job description and in the form of excessive meddling in the process by some overpaid suit.)
Or to make a direct statement, management needs to own the issue of who they hired.
Management is allergic to accountability. So long as there's a lead or technical manager (as in someone who actually knows their ass from a hole in the ground, not some MBA with a room temperature IQ) to blame, management is insulated from paying for their own mistakes.
What happens when everyone on a technical team knows that a project is doomed to failure (catastrophic or otherwise) because of who is assigned to manage it? I kid you not, the beta of the next version of our product is being managed by the marketing director. Said director has never run a beta for a program that runs on Windows, as most of the company's other products run on a flavor of Unix. This person is technically incompetent, a poor communicator, and just generally not that bright. There's confusion regarding which of our customers are even participating in the beta. This cannot end well, but there is nothing that any of us (seemingly) can do about it.
I really didn't want to be in a position to dust off my resume after 7 months, but I might not have a choice.
We still use paper checks because there's a paper trail associated with it. We get our checks back, cancelled, and have that tangible proof of payment. No "the system doesn't have a record of that payment", no endless phone calls to billing, no nothing. Bill shows up, reflecting non-payment, you call billing and say "I have the check, it's number XXXX and you cashed it on MM/DD/YYYY".
I don't trust comcast to process an online payment, and I definitely don't trust them to make an automatic debit from my checking account. They don't need to know my checking account number. All it takes is for them to mangle a payment and deduct $200 instead of $100, and checks all go bouncy bouncy, potentially costing me hundreds of dollars in overdraft fees and penalties from other payees.
I suppose we could use a credit card, but the same applies. They don't need to know my credit card number. The fewer people that have a record of my CC, the better, seeing as how most companies protect their billing information about as well as a wet tissue protects from a bowling ball falling through it. (I live within 20 minutes of TJX. I can't believe that not only are they still in business, but their revenues are actually UP in the last couple of quarters. See my sig.)
(Disclaimer: I work for a company that has an anti-spyware product, and I'm basically the guy that decides what gets listed and what doesn't.)
I'd like to know what rights you think have been thrown away?
When a company whose product I've paid for decides that they want to decrease my access to due process (by whitelisting software for law enforcement WITHOUT a warrant, just on the LEO's say-so) my fourth amendment rights have been violated.
With a warrant/court order? Sure, I'd expect any reputable company to comply, to the extent possible/practical. Trouble is, with a (largely) fingerprint-based system, depending on how sophisticated your update procedure is, it may not be possible to whitelist something after it's been installed in the field. That, and it's nearly impossible to distinguish between a keylogger installed by the FBI and one installed by someone who wants to steal your credit card number.
I can tell you that on a personal level, if I was asked to decide whether or not to remove something at the request of law enforcement in such a situation, the critical factor would be the existence of a court order. I would resign before I removed something in order to circumvent due process.
And nowhere did I claim you said that. See, you're not even smart enough to actually read my post. Go ahead, show me where I claimed you said that.
Ok. From your earlier post:
Because governments are stupid, corrupt, and wasteful, and handing them control of my health care is an idea that scares the hell out of me.
Implying, of course that I'd proposed the government take over the health care system. Otherwise, why would you mention it? Either you were implying that I had made such a proposal, or were introducing the argument so you could refute it. Just because you have an argument against a position doesn't mean you can force the position so you can argue against it.
"And what would you call pork projects like the Bridge to Nowhere?" A straw man. Nice try though.
Heh, this is perfect. You accuse me of the very action that you yourself just took with health care. From Wikipedia:
One can set up a straw man in the following ways:
1. Present a misrepresentation of the opponent's position, refute it, and pretend that the opponent's actual position has been refuted.
Ah, the hypocrite, calling others out for behavior they themselves have just engaged in.
See above. You're very good at arguing against yourself.
"Ah, the ad hominem attack, favored weapon of the neocon"
Ah, the hypocrite, calling others out for behavior they themselves have just engaged in. You're a liberal, so I knew you'd do that before you did it, it's your fallback in cases where you're obviously wrong, like now.
What I did was argue against your position, and give you the label of "neocon". What you did was attack me personally, and characterize an entire political group as out of touch and stupid. These are two different things. You can attack an argument without attacking the person. As far as "obviously wrong", there's a difference between "the sky is blue" and "we have a difference of opinion". We disagree, that doesn't mean one of us is right and the other is wrong.
Of course you are, you've lost the debate and have no refutation. It's no surprise you'd rather quit than deal with the fact that your points are without merit and your intellect is insufficient.
Thanks for admitting I win though, I love it when you losers run and hide like you just did.
You know, you make some good points. All up until the point where you started calling me names.
Do yourself and your political peers a favor and keep a civil tongue in your head when you're debating. Let me address your assertions in order:
1. Where do you idiot left wingers want to draw the line? I'm not an idiot, and I don't think you are either. I'm also not a left winger; I have mixed political views.
2. 50 million enough? 300 million? How about all of them? The USA is the richest country in the world. We have too much money to deny opportunities to those who are willing to work hard and earn it. The current system is arbitrary and politically unmanageable. I'm not saying we should let 300 million immigrants in tomorrow, just saying that it's insanely hard to play by the rules.. especially when the powers that be "forget" about issuing thousands of greencards. (Heard that one on NPR the other day.)
3. Or maybe just to the point where you guys have enough illegal gotten votes where you can scrub the Constitution? Ok, first of all, if you're going to accuse me personally of election fraud (or even those who might share my views), you better have some proof to back it up. (Nevermind that it's pretty hypocritical for someone who describes himself as conservative to be lecturing someone about voter fraud. Diebold, anyone?) Second, the neocons seem to have the "scrubbing the constitution" franchise pretty well tied up.
This is exactly what I'm talking about. Any time you challenge someone on the right using reason (no matter how opinion-based that reason might be) you get attacked as a tree-hugging, illegal-immigrant-allowing, election-rigging, Constitution-shredding traitor. There's room to disagree on principle and tactics here, but you've filled it up with venom and wild accusations.
Also, why is it against "national interest" to allow more legal immigrants? I'm afraid you lost me there.
Sorry, did the 1st Amendment get abolished in between my post and yours?
I didn't say you couldn't express your opinion; I meant that unless you're willing to put the rubber on the road (even if it means increased taxes), then I think you're a hypocrite. Go on, say anything you want. Nobody's stopping you. I was expressing an opinion, just like you.
Is every illegal alien a murderer? No, but upwards of 4,000 murders a year are committed by them (plus an equivilent number of deaths from drunk driving).
I see what you did there. Put a statement out there that you claim to disagree with (and which isn't true, regarding every illegal being a murderer) and rely on the subliminal meaning to get the idea into people's heads that illegals are all lawless murdering scum. Well done.
As for deporting 12,000,000 illegals, you do it the same way you deport 5,000 illegals. One person at a time, or by the busload.
You can't do 12 million of ANYTHING the way you do 5,000 of anything. We don't have the personnel, facilities, or will to deport 12 million people. We're talking about rounding up people like cattle (and treating them about as well). It's all a little too "Japanese-American internment camp" for me, thank you.
There is NO rational argument to the amount of illegal immigration we are allowing in.
Nor is there a rational argument for how difficult it is to obtain legal status, so you can support your family back home AND pay taxes to support the social services you consume.
Because governments are stupid, corrupt, and wasteful, and handing them control of my health care is an idea that scares the hell out of me.
Objection, your Honor. Facts not in evidence. Nowhere did I say that the government should take that role. True, the funding would come from taxes (as it does now, under the current situation) but I'm sure privatizing the service would make the business lobby happy.
Great, thanks for admitting that. At least you're not too stupid to see that these programs are bribes for minorities that guarantee votes in the future. "REPUBLICANS HATE BLACK PEOPLE" means "REPUBLICANS DON'T WANT TO PAY US TO VOTE FOR THEM".
And what would you call pork projects like the Bridge to Nowhere? How is that not buying votes? The principle is the same, just the currency is different (ie corporate welfare vs. individual welfare.)
But you're a liberal, so you and smart rarely travel together.
Ah, the ad hominem attack, favored weapon of the neocon who dislikes being challenged on anything. We're done.
I'm all for making a stand on principle, but you have to remember it's not a black or white thing. Working out a compromise doesn't necessarily mean you've abandoned your principles. It means that other people have principles that conflict with yours, and a good compromise leaves everyone unhappy.
Immigration reform is a complicated issue. I can understand why conservatives find themselves conflicted about it. On the one hand you've got all these "lawbreakers" who should be deported; on the other, you've got a cheap and easily exploitable labor pool. Some call for instant deportation of all the illegals, without any idea as to how you deport 12 million people in any reasonable length of time. W was in favor of a "guest worker" program which maintains that cheap and easily exploitable labor pool.
As far as border security goes.. Fund it. Raise taxes if you have to. Until then, I don't want to hear it.
(For example they give far more to charity than liberals, both in absolute amount, and as a percentage of income.)
All this means is that people with money tend to be conservative. It's really easy to write a check and pretend that you care about the less fortunate. It's much harder to give your time and energy to a cause, which is what liberals tend to do, rather than just writing a check.
Conservatives accuse liberals of "throwing money" at problems all the time, yet that's what they do when they try to compensate for their general disdain for the poor by writing a check.
"non-whites are too dumb to make a living and support themselves, so give us $10,000 so we can hire 9 dumb people for $1,000 each to figure out how to give your other $1,000 to some other dumb person. Then we will all soon be living in nirvana, and there will be no war."
Hey, GOP: While you're at it, make a stand against racism, will you?
I know plenty of white trash that take advantage of social programs. What the radical right fails to comprehend, however, is that discontinuing these programs (like WIC, food stamps, welfare, etc) might save some money today, but it'll cost a lot more later (in terms of uncompensated health care, crime, civil unrest).
I'll use the health care system as an example. I know that a lot of conservatives would rather cut an arm off than consider a Canadian-style universal health care system, and their main argument is that our tax burden would go up. To which I say this: Who the hell do you think is paying for the uninsured NOW? Just because you don't have health insurance doesn't mean you don't get hit by a bus, or cancer, or necrotizing fasciitis, or $EXPENSIVE_HEALTH_CONDITION. Billions of taxpayer dollars go into uncompensated care pools, Medicaid, and Medicare. So we're already footing the bill for it, why don't we see if maybe we can cut out the bullshit and provide preventative/managed care up front with that money?
Similarly, doing away with Welfare doesn't make poor people (and the problems they have/cause) disappear. Removing food stamps doesn't mean people stop getting hungry. Removing Medicare doesn't mean people stop getting old/deathly ill/fully disabled.
It'd be great if none of these programs were necessary. While I'm at it, I'd like a pony.
Blaming "non-whites" for causing the issue is the biggest racist cop-out you can use. Are minorities over-represented in these programs? Sure. Are they over-represented in the population that these programs are intended to serve? Sure. Does this mean that non-whites are too stupid to make a living? Hell no.
People call liberals "impractical". Kettle, it's Pot. You're black.
But the cheap price and social acceptance would cause drug USE to go up, and therefore more crimes would be committed by people USING drugs.
Yes, because as we all know, the primary effect of any illegal drug is to cause an uncontrollable desire to commit a felony.
Oh wait, no it isn't. Care to explain?
Also, your assertion that use would go up if drugs were decriminalized/legalized is specious at best, and real-world examples (Spain, the Netherlands) have indicated that usage does not rise long-term as a result of legal status. Legal or illegal, if someone wants street drugs, they can find them.
As for social acceptance, you prove the opposite of your assertion. What's likely is that your stubborn attitude of "drugs = bad" in the face of any evidence of the opposite will be a very common one, and street drugs will remain socially unacceptable for some time to come.
Actually, what the neocons mean when they say "smaller government" is "those stupid poor people deserve to die because they're poor, why should we help them avoid it". (I'm drawing a distinction here between BushCo and the GOP in general.. Guys, toss this retard out on his ass and save your party. In order to have an effective bipartisan government both sides need to be willing to compromise, and BushCo operates under the assumption that to compromise would be un-American. Nothing could be further from the truth.)
Reminds me of a bumper sticker I saw on the way in this morning: 'Annoy a conserative, help somebody'.
Juries apply the law, based on evidence presented by the two parties and instructions from the presiding judge. Judges exist to decide how the law applies to the matter at hand, and provide clarification for the jury composed of laypersons. This in and of itself requires interpretation, as very frequently law is not black and white, or two laws may conflict, or there is a question of whose rights supersede the rights of others.
Law isn't math or physics. There very frequently is no "right" or "wrong", just a matter of perspective. Judges are there to provide that perspective. This almost always requires interpretation, right or wrong.
So sandbox all your customers who won't do the work to upgrade to php5 off on discrete servers (or use virtualization to accomplish the same thing). Make sure your customers understand (or at the very least are given information regarding) the fact that their security is affected by php4 no longer being maintained, and let them make the decision. Do your due diligence as far as security is concerned (code audits if you're able) but, ultimately, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't keep him from getting eaten by the script kiddy pirahnas.
Net radio stations (the ones that stream copyrighted content, not the ones that produce their own content or are licensees, such as NPR) have had a free ride.
Wrong. They're talking about increasing those royalties, not creating something new. Net radio has been paying for the use of this content all along.
Movie distributors don't try to get more money from the theater chains because they know if the movies get too expensive, the theaters won't be able to afford them, and they'll go out of business, taking their revenue with them. So the distributors charge what the market will bear. Sure, the chains can refuse to pay what they think is exorbitant rates, but then their business is dead. The distributors have virtually extortive power over the chains, but they realize that they need them around to pay for their product.
What the RIAA doesn't realize is that by killing net radio, they're losing a huge promotional channel that has yet to be fully exploited. Net radio could, in theory, stick to content that the RIAA doesn't control and is not subject to these new rates, but the truth of the matter is, if they did that, they'll lose all their listeners. This is nothing more than the RIAA making them an offer they can't refuse.
There's a difference between "being cheap" and "not wanting to be ripped off." Let's use a metaphor:
Let's say the RIAA has decided that we've all been paying too little for our music on CD. (Oh, excuse me, THEIR music that they've decided to let us listen to.) They pay off enough lawmakers to get some sort of subsidy on the CDs that suddenly makes them $100 a pop, retroactively. Then they start suing people who own legitimately purchased CDs, as they haven't paid enough for them.
Another: The MPAA decides that the movie theater chains haven't been paying enough for the right to show the films they control. They hike the rates to the point where the chains would have to charge $50 a ticket to stay afloat. Nobody's going to stand for that, so the chains go out of business. (This example is considerably more suicidal than what's happening to net radio, but otherwise, it fits.)
The RIAA hates what it can't control. It hates P2P (despite all the free promotion), barely tolerates iTunes (even though they've made hundreds of millions of dollars from ITMS sales), and has even sought to stop public libraries from lending out music (communists!) This move isn't about revenue, it's about killing net radio. The RIAA knows that it's impractical (if not outright impossible) to strongarm every net radio station out there like they do with terrestrial or satellite radio, so they destroy what they can't control.
Make sure you print out your resume, while you're at it. Just because you warned someone about something and they refused to authorize a fix, doesn't mean that you won't get blamed for that something. In a working environment where people can be fired for no reason whatsoever, don't think that your PHB won't throw you under the bus to save his/her own ass.
It sounds like you need a new job anyway. If they're paying you for your expertise and recommendations, and then refusing to adopt them (or even to listen to them, which is what this sounds like) then they're setting you up for failure. Dust off the resume, friend.
Might be a good idea to get some alphabet soup to put on the resume before you do that. Sounds like you could start with at least the Network+, if you don't already have it, then possibly a Cisco cert. You might not learn anything from these courses (less so the Cisco certs), but the alphabet soup gets you past the HR morons and gets your resume in front of the people who matter.
And for the love of the FSM, pull your personal equipment out of there. There's no excuse for that.
Cell phones and VoIP are making POTS a thing of the past.
While that may be true for those of us who have options other than dialup for IP access, that's really not the point here.
The point is that Verizon is taking (probably illegal) actions with or without the customer's knowledge or consent. Verizon has a long history of interpreting the rules in their favor, regardless of the ethics or legality involved.
Verizon needs to be forced to comply with the rules, either through legal action or market pressures. They're not above the law, as much as they might like to think they are.
Then you were lucky, IMHO. I've seen plenty of H1Bs get abused and exploited.
The problem there is that, in this state at least, you can be terminated from your job for no reason with no notice. You can literally be fired for the color of your shirt.. but of course they won't say that. They don't need to say anything at all. Correct me if I'm wrong, but that means, in effect, that if you do something your employer doesn't like (like file a complaint for wages below market rate) you're on a plane back home.
Yeah, but then you'd have to live there. And that's not where the jobs are; if it were, it wouldn't be so cheap.
I run into this all the time. I live in Massachusetts, and consider myself cosmically fortunate that I was able to find a house (ANY house) for 200k five years ago. It's smaller than a lot of condos, and I have to mow my own lawn, but it's mine and I don't have to share a wall. I look in the paper these days and can't find a buildable lot for 200k, nevermind one with a house on it.
I talk with people in other states and they always tell me "for that much you could have afforded 4 bedrooms and 3 baths on an acre with a pool down here".. which doesn't do me any good, since then I'd have to live there.
Good jobs dictate cost-of-living. Maybe not at first, but as soon as an area becomes desirable for employers (low cost-of-living therefore they can screw pe.. I mean pay lower sal.. I mean "be competitive") people start moving there in droves for the jobs, and demand for housing/services goes up, and so do prices.
To get back OT: I have *ZERO* sympathy for big business whining about not being able to bring in enough H1-B workers. They want the H1-Bs because they can treat them like total crap, make them do 3 peoples' jobs, and pay them crap wages. Yeah, they're *supposed* to pay them market rates, but when the price of complaining is a one-way-ticket back to Nowherestan, you don't complain very much. I agree that current US immigration policy is horseshit and needs to be overhauled, but in the meantime, all those rich-ass executives can take the 1% cut in pay that it would cost to pay American workers instead of virtual slaves.
1% of the population controls 20% of the money. You tell me what the problem is.
How would the software differentiate between a locally created backup copy and one that was downloaded?
Under the MPAA's theory (nobody has a right to make a backup) it wouldn't matter what the source of the copy was (local rip or downloaded) because they don't give you permission to make a backup of ANY sort.
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It's not impossible for them to be MORE law abiding. If you've got an ounce of weed in the car, you're less likely (if you have any brains) to speed or commit other moving violations that would cause you to be pulled over.
Your logic is specious and based solely on your own opinion on the matter. (As is mine, but I'm not drawing any conclusions.)
1) HR is blatantly incompetent at recruiting IT workers;
2) The recruiters that HR outsourced to are blatantly incompetent at recruiting IT workers;
3) The idiot is someone's brother-in-law (or other forms of nepotism);
4) Management refuses to offer a salary/benefit package that would allow for the appropriately talented worker to be hired;
5) The idiot involved is good at selling themselves in an interview;
6) Time ran out on the hiring time-frame and the department was forced to hire whoever they could find or lose the budget for the position;
7) Other duties as assigned by management (both on the job description and in the form of excessive meddling in the process by some overpaid suit.)Management is allergic to accountability. So long as there's a lead or technical manager (as in someone who actually knows their ass from a hole in the ground, not some MBA with a room temperature IQ) to blame, management is insulated from paying for their own mistakes.
What happens when everyone on a technical team knows that a project is doomed to failure (catastrophic or otherwise) because of who is assigned to manage it? I kid you not, the beta of the next version of our product is being managed by the marketing director. Said director has never run a beta for a program that runs on Windows, as most of the company's other products run on a flavor of Unix. This person is technically incompetent, a poor communicator, and just generally not that bright. There's confusion regarding which of our customers are even participating in the beta. This cannot end well, but there is nothing that any of us (seemingly) can do about it.
I really didn't want to be in a position to dust off my resume after 7 months, but I might not have a choice.
Yes, my bad. But my point remains clear; I don't want them mucking with my checking account.
You could always write them a check.
We still use paper checks because there's a paper trail associated with it. We get our checks back, cancelled, and have that tangible proof of payment. No "the system doesn't have a record of that payment", no endless phone calls to billing, no nothing. Bill shows up, reflecting non-payment, you call billing and say "I have the check, it's number XXXX and you cashed it on MM/DD/YYYY".
I don't trust comcast to process an online payment, and I definitely don't trust them to make an automatic debit from my checking account. They don't need to know my checking account number. All it takes is for them to mangle a payment and deduct $200 instead of $100, and checks all go bouncy bouncy, potentially costing me hundreds of dollars in overdraft fees and penalties from other payees.
I suppose we could use a credit card, but the same applies. They don't need to know my credit card number. The fewer people that have a record of my CC, the better, seeing as how most companies protect their billing information about as well as a wet tissue protects from a bowling ball falling through it. (I live within 20 minutes of TJX. I can't believe that not only are they still in business, but their revenues are actually UP in the last couple of quarters. See my sig.)
With a warrant/court order? Sure, I'd expect any reputable company to comply, to the extent possible/practical. Trouble is, with a (largely) fingerprint-based system, depending on how sophisticated your update procedure is, it may not be possible to whitelist something after it's been installed in the field. That, and it's nearly impossible to distinguish between a keylogger installed by the FBI and one installed by someone who wants to steal your credit card number.
I can tell you that on a personal level, if I was asked to decide whether or not to remove something at the request of law enforcement in such a situation, the critical factor would be the existence of a court order. I would resign before I removed something in order to circumvent due process.
One can set up a straw man in the following ways:
1. Present a misrepresentation of the opponent's position, refute it, and pretend that the opponent's actual position has been refuted.See above. You're very good at arguing against yourself.What I did was argue against your position, and give you the label of "neocon". What you did was attack me personally, and characterize an entire political group as out of touch and stupid. These are two different things. You can attack an argument without attacking the person. As far as "obviously wrong", there's a difference between "the sky is blue" and "we have a difference of opinion". We disagree, that doesn't mean one of us is right and the other is wrong.
Then again, you might just be a troll.
You know, you make some good points. All up until the point where you started calling me names.
Do yourself and your political peers a favor and keep a civil tongue in your head when you're debating. Let me address your assertions in order:
1. Where do you idiot left wingers want to draw the line?
I'm not an idiot, and I don't think you are either. I'm also not a left winger; I have mixed political views.
2. 50 million enough? 300 million? How about all of them?
The USA is the richest country in the world. We have too much money to deny opportunities to those who are willing to work hard and earn it. The current system is arbitrary and politically unmanageable. I'm not saying we should let 300 million immigrants in tomorrow, just saying that it's insanely hard to play by the rules.. especially when the powers that be "forget" about issuing thousands of greencards. (Heard that one on NPR the other day.)
3. Or maybe just to the point where you guys have enough illegal gotten votes where you can scrub the Constitution?
Ok, first of all, if you're going to accuse me personally of election fraud (or even those who might share my views), you better have some proof to back it up. (Nevermind that it's pretty hypocritical for someone who describes himself as conservative to be lecturing someone about voter fraud. Diebold, anyone?) Second, the neocons seem to have the "scrubbing the constitution" franchise pretty well tied up.
This is exactly what I'm talking about. Any time you challenge someone on the right using reason (no matter how opinion-based that reason might be) you get attacked as a tree-hugging, illegal-immigrant-allowing, election-rigging, Constitution-shredding traitor. There's room to disagree on principle and tactics here, but you've filled it up with venom and wild accusations.
Also, why is it against "national interest" to allow more legal immigrants? I'm afraid you lost me there.
I'm all for making a stand on principle, but you have to remember it's not a black or white thing. Working out a compromise doesn't necessarily mean you've abandoned your principles. It means that other people have principles that conflict with yours, and a good compromise leaves everyone unhappy.
Immigration reform is a complicated issue. I can understand why conservatives find themselves conflicted about it. On the one hand you've got all these "lawbreakers" who should be deported; on the other, you've got a cheap and easily exploitable labor pool. Some call for instant deportation of all the illegals, without any idea as to how you deport 12 million people in any reasonable length of time. W was in favor of a "guest worker" program which maintains that cheap and easily exploitable labor pool.
As far as border security goes.. Fund it. Raise taxes if you have to. Until then, I don't want to hear it.
Conservatives accuse liberals of "throwing money" at problems all the time, yet that's what they do when they try to compensate for their general disdain for the poor by writing a check.
I know plenty of white trash that take advantage of social programs. What the radical right fails to comprehend, however, is that discontinuing these programs (like WIC, food stamps, welfare, etc) might save some money today, but it'll cost a lot more later (in terms of uncompensated health care, crime, civil unrest).
I'll use the health care system as an example. I know that a lot of conservatives would rather cut an arm off than consider a Canadian-style universal health care system, and their main argument is that our tax burden would go up. To which I say this: Who the hell do you think is paying for the uninsured NOW? Just because you don't have health insurance doesn't mean you don't get hit by a bus, or cancer, or necrotizing fasciitis, or $EXPENSIVE_HEALTH_CONDITION. Billions of taxpayer dollars go into uncompensated care pools, Medicaid, and Medicare. So we're already footing the bill for it, why don't we see if maybe we can cut out the bullshit and provide preventative/managed care up front with that money?
Similarly, doing away with Welfare doesn't make poor people (and the problems they have/cause) disappear. Removing food stamps doesn't mean people stop getting hungry. Removing Medicare doesn't mean people stop getting old/deathly ill/fully disabled.
It'd be great if none of these programs were necessary. While I'm at it, I'd like a pony.
Blaming "non-whites" for causing the issue is the biggest racist cop-out you can use. Are minorities over-represented in these programs? Sure. Are they over-represented in the population that these programs are intended to serve? Sure. Does this mean that non-whites are too stupid to make a living? Hell no.
People call liberals "impractical". Kettle, it's Pot. You're black.
Oh wait, no it isn't. Care to explain?
Also, your assertion that use would go up if drugs were decriminalized/legalized is specious at best, and real-world examples (Spain, the Netherlands) have indicated that usage does not rise long-term as a result of legal status. Legal or illegal, if someone wants street drugs, they can find them.
As for social acceptance, you prove the opposite of your assertion. What's likely is that your stubborn attitude of "drugs = bad" in the face of any evidence of the opposite will be a very common one, and street drugs will remain socially unacceptable for some time to come.
Actually, what the neocons mean when they say "smaller government" is "those stupid poor people deserve to die because they're poor, why should we help them avoid it". (I'm drawing a distinction here between BushCo and the GOP in general.. Guys, toss this retard out on his ass and save your party. In order to have an effective bipartisan government both sides need to be willing to compromise, and BushCo operates under the assumption that to compromise would be un-American. Nothing could be further from the truth.)
Reminds me of a bumper sticker I saw on the way in this morning: 'Annoy a conserative, help somebody'.
Gee, with an attitude like that, it becomes more and more clear why the US is so disliked.
Congratulations on proving the exact point you were arguing against. Asshole.
Juries apply the law, based on evidence presented by the two parties and instructions from the presiding judge. Judges exist to decide how the law applies to the matter at hand, and provide clarification for the jury composed of laypersons. This in and of itself requires interpretation, as very frequently law is not black and white, or two laws may conflict, or there is a question of whose rights supersede the rights of others.
Law isn't math or physics. There very frequently is no "right" or "wrong", just a matter of perspective. Judges are there to provide that perspective. This almost always requires interpretation, right or wrong.
So sandbox all your customers who won't do the work to upgrade to php5 off on discrete servers (or use virtualization to accomplish the same thing). Make sure your customers understand (or at the very least are given information regarding) the fact that their security is affected by php4 no longer being maintained, and let them make the decision. Do your due diligence as far as security is concerned (code audits if you're able) but, ultimately, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't keep him from getting eaten by the script kiddy pirahnas.
Movie distributors don't try to get more money from the theater chains because they know if the movies get too expensive, the theaters won't be able to afford them, and they'll go out of business, taking their revenue with them. So the distributors charge what the market will bear. Sure, the chains can refuse to pay what they think is exorbitant rates, but then their business is dead. The distributors have virtually extortive power over the chains, but they realize that they need them around to pay for their product.
What the RIAA doesn't realize is that by killing net radio, they're losing a huge promotional channel that has yet to be fully exploited. Net radio could, in theory, stick to content that the RIAA doesn't control and is not subject to these new rates, but the truth of the matter is, if they did that, they'll lose all their listeners. This is nothing more than the RIAA making them an offer they can't refuse.
There's a difference between "being cheap" and "not wanting to be ripped off." Let's use a metaphor:
Let's say the RIAA has decided that we've all been paying too little for our music on CD. (Oh, excuse me, THEIR music that they've decided to let us listen to.) They pay off enough lawmakers to get some sort of subsidy on the CDs that suddenly makes them $100 a pop, retroactively. Then they start suing people who own legitimately purchased CDs, as they haven't paid enough for them.
Another: The MPAA decides that the movie theater chains haven't been paying enough for the right to show the films they control. They hike the rates to the point where the chains would have to charge $50 a ticket to stay afloat. Nobody's going to stand for that, so the chains go out of business. (This example is considerably more suicidal than what's happening to net radio, but otherwise, it fits.)
The RIAA hates what it can't control. It hates P2P (despite all the free promotion), barely tolerates iTunes (even though they've made hundreds of millions of dollars from ITMS sales), and has even sought to stop public libraries from lending out music (communists!) This move isn't about revenue, it's about killing net radio. The RIAA knows that it's impractical (if not outright impossible) to strongarm every net radio station out there like they do with terrestrial or satellite radio, so they destroy what they can't control.
Make sure you print out your resume, while you're at it. Just because you warned someone about something and they refused to authorize a fix, doesn't mean that you won't get blamed for that something. In a working environment where people can be fired for no reason whatsoever, don't think that your PHB won't throw you under the bus to save his/her own ass.
It sounds like you need a new job anyway. If they're paying you for your expertise and recommendations, and then refusing to adopt them (or even to listen to them, which is what this sounds like) then they're setting you up for failure. Dust off the resume, friend.
Might be a good idea to get some alphabet soup to put on the resume before you do that. Sounds like you could start with at least the Network+, if you don't already have it, then possibly a Cisco cert. You might not learn anything from these courses (less so the Cisco certs), but the alphabet soup gets you past the HR morons and gets your resume in front of the people who matter.
And for the love of the FSM, pull your personal equipment out of there. There's no excuse for that.
The point is that Verizon is taking (probably illegal) actions with or without the customer's knowledge or consent. Verizon has a long history of interpreting the rules in their favor, regardless of the ethics or legality involved.
Verizon needs to be forced to comply with the rules, either through legal action or market pressures. They're not above the law, as much as they might like to think they are.
Then you were lucky, IMHO. I've seen plenty of H1Bs get abused and exploited.
The problem there is that, in this state at least, you can be terminated from your job for no reason with no notice. You can literally be fired for the color of your shirt.. but of course they won't say that. They don't need to say anything at all. Correct me if I'm wrong, but that means, in effect, that if you do something your employer doesn't like (like file a complaint for wages below market rate) you're on a plane back home.
Yeah, but then you'd have to live there. And that's not where the jobs are; if it were, it wouldn't be so cheap.
I run into this all the time. I live in Massachusetts, and consider myself cosmically fortunate that I was able to find a house (ANY house) for 200k five years ago. It's smaller than a lot of condos, and I have to mow my own lawn, but it's mine and I don't have to share a wall. I look in the paper these days and can't find a buildable lot for 200k, nevermind one with a house on it.
I talk with people in other states and they always tell me "for that much you could have afforded 4 bedrooms and 3 baths on an acre with a pool down here".. which doesn't do me any good, since then I'd have to live there.
Good jobs dictate cost-of-living. Maybe not at first, but as soon as an area becomes desirable for employers (low cost-of-living therefore they can screw pe.. I mean pay lower sal.. I mean "be competitive") people start moving there in droves for the jobs, and demand for housing/services goes up, and so do prices.
To get back OT: I have *ZERO* sympathy for big business whining about not being able to bring in enough H1-B workers. They want the H1-Bs because they can treat them like total crap, make them do 3 peoples' jobs, and pay them crap wages. Yeah, they're *supposed* to pay them market rates, but when the price of complaining is a one-way-ticket back to Nowherestan, you don't complain very much. I agree that current US immigration policy is horseshit and needs to be overhauled, but in the meantime, all those rich-ass executives can take the 1% cut in pay that it would cost to pay American workers instead of virtual slaves.
1% of the population controls 20% of the money. You tell me what the problem is.
Hmm, I see your point. My bad.