So every other private (non-public) retirement/pension plan EXCEPT the USPS plan is fully-funded? I'd like to see proof of that!
Then the keywords for you to Google are "ERISA" and "Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation". ERISA is the federal law that says pension and other retirement programs offered by private companies must be properly funded *at the time the employee earns the benefit by doing the work*, not 30 years later, after they've already retired and payments are due. They also must be insured by PGGC, just as bank accounts are insured by the FDIC.
> The post office has the best-funded pension/retirement plan of ANY federal program
Laughably false. In general federal employees are enrolled in the Federal Employees Retirement System, which like private plans, is 100% fully funded every time an employee earns a paycheck. They don't hope to somehow come up with funding 30 or 40 years later, like the USPS does, they fund the payments at the time they are earned and therefore become owed.
Let's look at your own quote about the USPS system carefully, where you quoted USPS making their best case that USPS isn't utterly screwed:
> 83 percent of estimated future payouts. Its pension plans are nearly completely funded and its retiree healthcare liability is 50 percent funded
According to their own estimates, which they slant toward looking good, fully half of the healthcare benefits they've promised to employees they can't actually pay for. 17% of retirement payments they've promised to make, they can't actually make. And that's *their* "things aren't that bad" estimate. If your mortgage and bills you owe for the year are $100,000 and you only make $83,000 would you say "there's no problem?" Would you still say that if you also owed another $50,000 you promised to pay for your kids healthcare?
He then goes on to say that while they are $83 billion short on making good on their retirement promises, theoretically they could sell off all the post offices and all of their equipment, which is valued at $13 billion. So if they shut down and sold off their properties they'd "only" screw their employees out of $70 billion that they owe them. No problem, right?
In the1980s the US realized this was a big problem with the Civil Service Retirement Fund, so they switched to the "fully funded" Federal Employees Retirement System for people hired since 1984.
CSRF has a trust fund too, but it's not enough. One might think "1984 was a long time ago, it's okay now". But that was for people HIRED then. Some people were hired in 1980 and worked under CSRF until 2010. They'll be getting retirement payments in 2040.
Under both CSRF and FERS, each government *agency* pays in their contribution with each employee's paycheck
So for example the US RDA, FBI, and FCC don't have these unfunded liabilities; they've already paid the retirement costs into the separate fund.
The other problem with the federal trust funds, including also social security, is that the trust funds are invested in the safest investment - US government bonds. In other words, the government lent the money to themselves. In other words, they spent it. They say there is a "trust fund", but if you look inside the box there is nothing but a stack of IOUs from the government. The debt shows up as bond debt rather than as unfunded liabilities, so it's on the books, but the money has most definitely been spent.
Between CSRF, Medicare, etc the US government unfunded liabilities are around $100 trillion, or five years of GDP.
> that they pre-fund their retirement account fully within five years.
False. The five-year requirement is that every five years they have to calculate how far in the hole they are. (How much they owe to workers who have already worked, or are working on today, and whom they've promised decades of retirement pay to, without funding that promise.)
> If every employee retired now (even if they were just hired and thus are not eligible for retirement benefits...) the full amount of their retirement pension is covered.
Laughably false. They owe over $120 billion to workers who have already done the work and been promised retirement payments, but that the USPS has no way to pay for. In other words, they are $120 billion in the hole, to pay workers who have already done the work.
> that they pre-fund their retirement account fully within five years
The five-year requirement in the act is that every five years they have to figure out how much debt they have (retirement payments earned by workers) and compare it to how much they have set aside to make those payments. That's it - they just have to figure out how bad it is and issue report every five years.
What the postal service was doing, and is supposed to stop doing, is the kind of accounting that sent Enron executives to prison. If anyone but the postal service was hiding a $120 billion liability, it would be called "fraud".
What they were doing is saying to employees "work for us today, and we'll not only pay you today, we'll keep paying you after you retire, until you die." Someone can retire from USPS at the age of 56, so their retirement payments may be almost as much as their salary, or even more. Over the course of 30 years of retirement, the worker might be owed $840,000. So they had workers doing the work in say 1995, promised to pay them hundreds of thousands of dollars "later", but never set aside any money to be able to make good on those promises.
They owe about $120 billion - for work already done, and hadn't set anything aside to pay it. Most "every other business in the country" funds your 401K or other retirement by sending their contribution to a third-party investment bank every time you get a paycheck. You work this month, they pay for it this month, including the retirement part. State retirement plans work the same way, at least where I'm from in Texas - whichever agency you work for, when they pay for this year's work, they also pay whatever retirement they'll owe for this year's work. They don't have you work today and say "we'll worry about how to pay for it 20 years from now".
In 2006 they were given fifteen years to get caught up on the retirement they owed. They haven't come come close, because they are losing money. Any "profit" has to go toward funding the retirement promises they've made, but the "profit" hasn't been nearly enough and the number of letters they carry has fallen 30% over the last ten years, so it's unlikely they'll ever be able to pay for the retirement they are promising today's employees. They'll need the taxpayers to bail them out.
What the postal service was doing, and is supposed to stop doing, is the kind of accounting that sent Enron executives to prison. If anyone but the postal service was hiding a $120 billion liability, it would be called "fraud".
What they were doing is saying to employees "work for us today, and we'll not only pay you today, we'll keep paying you after you retire, until you die." Someone can retire from USPS at the age of 56, so their retirement payments may be almost as much as their salary, or even more. Over the course of 30 years of retirement, the worker might be owed $840,000. So they had workers doing the work in say 1995, promised to pay them hundreds of thousands of dollars "later", but never set aside any money to be able to make good on those promises.
They owe about $120 billion - for work already done, and hadn't set anything aside to pay it. Most "every other business in the country" funds your 401K or other retirement by sending their contribution to a third-party investment bank every time you get a paycheck. You work this month, they pay for it this month, including the retirement part. State retirement plans work the same way, at least where I'm from in Texas - whichever agency you work for, when they pay for this year's work, they also pay whatever retirement they'll owe for this year's work. They don't have you work today and say "we'll worry about how to pay for it 20 years from now".
In 2006 they were given fifteen years to get caught up on the retirement they owed. They haven't come come close, because they are losing money. Any "profit" has to go toward funding the retirement promises they've made, but the "profit" hasn't been nearly enough and the number of letters they carry has fallen 30% over the last ten years, so it's unlikely they'll ever be able to pay for the retirement they are promising today's employees. They'll need the taxpayers to bail them out.
A lot of leases are bad deals. AND if car leasing was a guaranteed way to make good money for anyone good at business, everyone good at business would start leasing cars.
Industry profits are self-regulating that way. If one industry has high profits and low risk, more companies will enter that market. More competition drives down prices and profits. Note that's true of profitable *industries*, not *companies*. One company might just be really good at what they do and make a nice profit.
The thing about offering leases that are really bad deals for consumers is that people who sign up for a bad lease are people who make bad decisions. Which means the leasing company is loaning brand new cars to people who make bad decisions. You can imagine how that could create problems for the owner of the cars, the leasing company.
Harvard is accredited by The New England Association of Schools and Colleges'. Stanford is accredited by Western Association of Schools and Colleges. WGU has been accredited by BOTH.
It's also a state university in several states, like University of Texas, UCLA, etc.
I probably wouldn't pursue a college degree (from anywhere) unless you wanted a college degree, and the salary increase that normally comes with that. In the WGU case, it also includes industry certifications from Cisco, Microsoft, etc. If you want to learn for your own pleasure AND have the self-discipline to do it, school doesn't offer that much more than you could do reading on the internet.
In that regard WGU, is a better value than most schools because the $6,000 tuition ($4,500 after tax credit) includes high-quality content from Cisco and others than people not in school do choose to pay for from their own pocket, and includes certifications which would otherwise be expensive. Some people do some studying before enrolling in WGU, then spend a year at WGU to get their degree. So they get all their certifications, and curriculum to learn the certification material, plus the degree itself, for $6,000. That's not bad.
Curriculum quality varies at WGU. Some isn't great, some is. Overall, I think it's an excellent value. Before I graduated, the certifications alone increased my income by more than the tuition cost, so the schooling literally paid for itself, while I was still in school.
> vocational education so people can... use the GUI and enter the command lines they are told.
The PROBLEM is that admins and programmers follow a set of instructions that might have been okay for one situation, without understanding and carefully considering the ramifications for *their* situation, on *their* network, considering *current* threat trends. Often they get the commands to enter or the GUI buttons to click from sites like Stackoverflow or Serverfault. The answers on Stackoverflow might more or less answer the question and might more or less work, they do turn on the requested function.
If you don't fully understand what you're doing though, and what "enabling RPC" actually means, that's when you create a giant security hole.
What makes hacking "hacking" is precisely that's it's outside-the-box thinking, coming up with how to leverage things in ways nobody intended. Information security thinking is precisely the opposite of following a standard checklist. It's all about finding the "cheat", not following the rules.
There certainly IS a role for people with basic IT knowledge. Mostly working under someone with advanced IT knowledge with their work reviewed by a security professional. The security person should be a devious, clever type who comes up with ways to get around the rules.
I used to read Slashdot a LOT. I cut my Slashdot time in half and used that time to read for school (WGU). I got my degree mostly in the time I used to be on Slashdot. Soon I'll start my masters from Georgia Tech online.
Mac addresses aren't needed, a random number does just fine. The whole idea of cookies, the definition of a cookie, is that the device returns back the same value that was previously set. So the server sets a cookie called device=7573+4758585 and next time the browser sends back that number.
Obviously the cookie is only one of many parameters used. Cookies might be "blocked" (which often just means they are cleared when you shut down your browser, session cookies typically aren't blocked). To "track" a user, to recognize the same user when they come back, you look at maybe eight or ten different parameters. Any three of the eight are sufficient.
I find it interesting that the author didn't ask "should Facebook have a 'start over' button?"
The author seems unclear not only about what solution might work, but what problem they are trying to solve " antitrust... data Facebook can use to target ads... Things we said in 2011 may or may not represent us today."
They aren't clear on what the problem is they are concerned about, they don't ask "should Facebook offer this option", indeed they don't ask "does Facebook offer a 'start over' button' (yes they do); they seem to start with the assumption that "regulators force - something" and go from there asking what it is that bureaucrats should force Facebook to do.
I'll start with a different set of questions:
Is it helpful for Facebook to offer a way to "start over", to delete all your posts and friend requests?
Does this author realize there already is that option, and many people do that, without bureaucrats being brought in to force anything?
> Even if my device is randomly hopping among IPv6 addresses, they're all on the same subnet (does that term still apply) meaning they can all be used to id me.
Yes they will be chosen from a range of 9,007,199,254,740,991 addresses or so. Some ISPs will assign you 32 times that many addresses, some a bit fewer, but roughly 9 quadrillion addresses. Compared to your ONE IPv4 address. As someone who has developed security systems which use IP addresses as one indicator of whether it's the same person, I'll tell you it's much easier to track your single IPv4 address than to figure out which 9, or 288 quadrillion, or 18 quadrillion, or whatever might be assigned to the same customer.
> you think I'm the kind of person who can handle user-agent-strings (and other browser fingerprinting) and cookies?
To be 100% completely honest with you, based on your posts I'd guess you're the type of person who thinks they kinda get it, so they make some attempts to hide stuff, and therefore stick out like a sore thumb in the sea of people who present standard, default profiles. When you're the guy who mucks with his iPad's user agent, but of course it still shows iPad resolution, you're the only hot on the whole site reporting 2048Ã--1536 on "Windows" and it makes you very easy to spot.
> anonymization about which device beyond the firewall is using a service.
You're not really hiding anything. Between user agent strings, cookies, etc., the trackers know one device from another. In fact since most web access is from mobile devices these days, and mobiles get new IPs all the time, IPs aren't used much for tracking anymore anyway.
Because IPv4 lacks enough addresses, you're pretty much forced to use only one IP for all of your devices. That's a hack and while it works well enough most of the time, for most people, it does have some problems.
You *can* still do that with IPv6; you aren't forced to. As mentioned above, it doesn't do you much good anyway. You can also have your devices randomly switch between millions of IPs. That's as effective as IPv4 NAT. Of course neither do anything when there are cookies involved and sch.
> How is it worse that the USA's mysterious "no-fly" lists
There are two lists called "no-fly" lists. One is an actual list of people not allowed to fly on US airlines. It includes a couple hundred people who have been actively involved in plotting hijackings and that sort of thing.
The other list, thousands of people (out of 300 million) are people whom the FBI wants to talk to before they leave the country, or enter the country. It applies to international flights.
There are a bunch of listed people the FBI wants to talk to if they try to come into the US. How is that different from everyone having to show ID and be tracked by the government every time they buy gas, you ask.
There are, of course, legitimate concerns about these lists. The FBI should probably be more transparent about them. By pretending it's the same thing as the government tracking everything all citizens do, one sounds quite silly and tends to encourage readers to see criticism of the FBI lists as silly in general. It's like comparing red-light cameras to Nazi concentration camps - the comparison is so ridiculous that it undermines the argument against red-light cameras.
> If you gave graphene or even a metamaterial to a scientist to analyse to a scientist 20 years ago he would have probably said "these are unknown materials".
Philip Russel Wallace published a thorough analysis of the properties of graphene in 1947. Others discussed it as early as 1856. In 1948 Ruess and Vogt published electron microscopy images of proto-graphene a few molecules thick. What was new 15 years ago was an efficient method of producing it (the scotch tape method).
Someone analyzing graphene 20 years ago would be able to very easily identify it as an extremely thin, one molecule thin, piece of graphite, and they could refer to the P.R. Wallace papers to learn about it's properties. They'd then ask "how did you slice it so thin?!"
Graphene 20 years ago was roughly like an ant today - we can't make an ant, we do understand them.
> OLEDs are already coming off the line, so no new tech.
It's still a cost, whether they do the R&D this year, or they borrowed money for it last year and pay that back this year, or they "borrowed" from themselves and need to replenish their funds. The cost is spread over all the displays that use the exact same tech, though, so their R&D cost for this year's displays is less if by sharing the cost with last year's production.
There are advantages to centralization, and to decentralization. It seems to me a lot of things tend to naturally move to take advantage of both with a hub-and-spoke architecture. The internet is decentralized, right? If you look at a map of fiber lines in the US, you'll see all the fattest pipes converge at a very few hundred locations, each feeding smaller sub-hubs.
Amazon needs to have their products close to consumers for fast delivery, but big centralized warehouses that have everything also make sense. The map of Amazon's distribution network looks similar to the internet map - several primary warehouses and 100 or so sub distribution centers, basically one for each major city. A lot of things are distributed clusters like that.
Git is kinda a bad example of "no benefit to decentralization" because the original Git repo, Linus's Linux repo, got wiped in a disk failure once. No need to restore from backup, he just pulled from someone else's repo. His isn't "central" in any way technology wise, that's a purely social concept that isn't based on the technology - there's nothing that marks it as different from any other copy.
At work I regularly pull from co-workers' repos and send them pul requests. Maybe half my work isn't pushed directly to "corporate" repo that ships to customers. Instead, a co-worker does a pull request and in code review (looking at their repo) I see a change that would improve their work. I then pull from them, make my updates, and send them a pull request. They pull my changes to their changes into their repo. Another co-worker might do the same. When we're done working on the feature, whoever owns that feature sends a PR for the repo that goes to customers. So work moves around from co-worker to co-worker directly, without involving any central repo.
> ? How is this different than a job fair at college?
There are entry level jobs for new graduates. I'm 41 and I just graduated. Over half of the people I was in school with were over 30. "Recent graduate" != age 20-25. It's fine, I think, to target recent graduates.
> Or at a senior center for that matter?
Right or wrong, it's LEGAL to seek people over 40, black people, and women. It's illegal to discriminate *against* these people, favoring whites, men, or young people. I don't necessarily agree that *should* be the law. Maybe it *should* be illegal to discriminate on the basis of race, but it is legal to target racial minorities for hiring, and it's legal to try to recruit older workers.
It's sad to me that I have to explain the US government, and 50% of voters, have decided that because she's "black" she needs "extra points" (a head start, pity points) in order to get into a good college. That they think black people are too stupid to compete with whites on an even footing is deeply offensive, but it's the law in America today. I have a dream that one day Americans will realize that the patronizing racism of saying black candidates, and women, need a head start in order to be able to compete for jobs or schools, that they can never simply be *better qualified* than any white male, is a more damaging form of racism and sexism than David Duke's "I hate black people" form. When Duke says "I hate you", my daughter can say "well fine, I hate you back", or even "I'll pray for you". When Hillary says, or implies, to my daughter "I feel sorry for you, I have pity for you because you're just a black woman, and can't do anything without my help", hearing that over and over, as official policy, strikes at my daughter's soul.
* PS the color of her skin is in fact brown, not anywhere near the color black. If you use the blur and color picker tool in Photoshop you'll discover Morgan Freeman and Oprah Winfrey have skin that's closer to WHITE than black. If you want to categorize people it "black" or "white" based on what color their skin is, we're all "white", so the entire concept is stupid.
> This will allow him to plan a cautious transition. He will want the time to do it gradually rather than all at once. Trust me, your boss will love the idea of giving the new guy time to master each piece of the job before taking on the next one. Orderly transitions are worth the money.
All true and good. I'll add that where I worked the person leaving did a lot of the transition planning and that worked well because they were effectively TELLING their boss and everyone "here's what needs to be done before I go, and how long it will take". Looking at it in reverse "here's a ton of stuff that won't get done, and will cause problems, if you don't keep me until July."
So we'd have a rough schedule:
Over the next few weeks I'll document the processes for X, Y, and Z, and all admin passwords needed and other access information, etc.
Next month I'll show Bob how to do A, B, and C.
Then I'll let Bob do it himself (asking me questions as needed) and I'll check his work, clarifying any issues. We can then discuss whether it appears that Bob will be able to take over these tasks, or if someone else is needed to help.
In February we'll finish up the project I've been leading for the last year, etc. Bob will need a backup in case something happens to him, so in March Bob and I will walk through the processes with Sue, so she is also familiar with them. February and March I'll bring Bob into the monthly meeting with Very Important Client so they can meet him, and he can see how we conduct that monthly meeting.
The flip side of that is you're telling the boss "if I leave today, nobody will know how to do X, Y and Z, or A, B, and C."
At my last job, retirements were planned a couple YEARS in advance. That made for smooth transitions. When I left for a new job, I started planning an orderly transition as soon as I had a good interview, more than three weeks before my last day.
If the job is appropriate for recent college grads, show it to recent grads. I'm 41 and just got my degree, and significant portion of students at my school are similarly not in their 20s.
Perhaps my post was too strongly worded, in response to a very strongly worded claim. GGP said "they will literally sell that information to anyone willing to pay". That person may have been thinking of other companies whose products are indeed lists of names, addresses, and various information about the people. You can buy a list of people who are into hunting, a list of people who supported Ron Paul, etc. You'll find various lists available on the order forms from these companies.
You will find no such order form anywhere on Google's site. You sure will find adwords, though! Their TOC / privacy policy *allows* them to share information with partners, but that's not what they generally do. They will show ads for "anyone willing to pay", they will not, generally "will literally sell that information to anyone willing to pay", though if they have your consent, they could do so by the terms of the privacy policy.
The other day I was trying to get somewhere in a large hospital complex and I noticed Google had a map of each floor of the building. I could seIect which floor I wanted a map of. I see new features like that being added; I haven't noticed features being removed.
> but they will literally sell that information to anyone willing to pay.
Quite the opposite. Older companies that acquired data used to sell it, and some still do. One thing. That has made Google so successful is that they are careful to keep the data to themselves. It's their golden goose. They sell ADS that are targeted using the data. That way they can keep selling ads to the same companies for years, rather than selling data once. They never sell the data because then it could be passed around and that would reduce their competitive advantage.
The drop in frequency itself isn't the big problem, it's a gauge, an indicator.
The frequency tells you how fast the generators are turning. They are automatically throttled to try to spin at the right speed to produce 50Hz. If they aren't producing 50Hz, that means they are full wide open throttle and still can't keep up. It means they can't produce enough power.
Slashdot Mirror
So every other private (non-public) retirement/pension plan EXCEPT the USPS plan is fully-funded? I'd like to see proof of that!
Then the keywords for you to Google are "ERISA" and "Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation". ERISA is the federal law that says pension and other retirement programs offered by private companies must be properly funded *at the time the employee earns the benefit by doing the work*, not 30 years later, after they've already retired and payments are due. They also must be insured by PGGC, just as bank accounts are insured by the FDIC.
> The post office has the best-funded pension/retirement plan of ANY federal program
Laughably false.
In general federal employees are enrolled in the Federal Employees Retirement System, which like private plans, is 100% fully funded every time an employee earns a paycheck. They don't hope to somehow come up with funding 30 or 40 years later, like the USPS does, they fund the payments at the time they are earned and therefore become owed.
Let's look at your own quote about the USPS system carefully, where you quoted USPS making their best case that USPS isn't utterly screwed:
> 83 percent of estimated future payouts. Its pension plans are nearly completely funded and its retiree healthcare liability is 50 percent funded
According to their own estimates, which they slant toward looking good, fully half of the healthcare benefits they've promised to employees they can't actually pay for. 17% of retirement payments they've promised to make, they can't actually make. And that's *their* "things aren't that bad" estimate. If your mortgage and bills you owe for the year are $100,000 and you only make $83,000 would you say "there's no problem?" Would you still say that if you also owed another $50,000 you promised to pay for your kids healthcare?
He then goes on to say that while they are $83 billion short on making good on their retirement promises, theoretically they could sell off all the post offices and all of their equipment, which is valued at $13 billion. So if they shut down and sold off their properties they'd "only" screw their employees out of $70 billion that they owe them. No problem, right?
In the1980s the US realized this was a big problem with the Civil Service Retirement Fund, so they switched to the "fully funded" Federal Employees Retirement System for people hired since 1984.
CSRF has a trust fund too, but it's not enough. One might think "1984 was a long time ago, it's okay now". But that was for people HIRED then. Some people were hired in 1980 and worked under CSRF until 2010. They'll be getting retirement payments in 2040.
Under both CSRF and FERS, each government *agency* pays in their contribution with each employee's paycheck
So for example the US RDA, FBI, and FCC don't have these unfunded liabilities; they've already paid the retirement costs into the separate fund.
The other problem with the federal trust funds, including also social security, is that the trust funds are invested in the safest investment - US government bonds. In other words, the government lent the money to themselves. In other words, they spent it. They say there is a "trust fund", but if you look inside the box there is nothing but a stack of IOUs from the government. The debt shows up as bond debt rather than as unfunded liabilities, so it's on the books, but the money has most definitely been spent.
Between CSRF, Medicare, etc the US government unfunded liabilities are around $100 trillion, or five years of GDP.
> that they pre-fund their retirement account fully within five years.
False. The five-year requirement is that every five years they have to calculate how far in the hole they are. (How much they owe to workers who have already worked, or are working on today, and whom they've promised decades of retirement pay to, without funding that promise.)
> If every employee retired now (even if they were just hired and thus are not eligible for retirement benefits...) the full amount of their retirement pension is covered.
Laughably false. They owe over $120 billion to workers who have already done the work and been promised retirement payments, but that the USPS has no way to pay for. In other words, they are $120 billion in the hole, to pay workers who have already done the work.
> that they pre-fund their retirement account fully within five years
The five-year requirement in the act is that every five years they have to figure out how much debt they have (retirement payments earned by workers) and compare it to how much they have set aside to make those payments. That's it - they just have to figure out how bad it is and issue report every five years.
What the postal service was doing, and is supposed to stop doing, is the kind of accounting that sent Enron executives to prison. If anyone but the postal service was hiding a $120 billion liability, it would be called "fraud".
What they were doing is saying to employees "work for us today, and we'll not only pay you today, we'll keep paying you after you retire, until you die." Someone can retire from USPS at the age of 56, so their retirement payments may be almost as much as their salary, or even more. Over the course of 30 years of retirement, the worker might be owed $840,000. So they had workers doing the work in say 1995, promised to pay them hundreds of thousands of dollars "later", but never set aside any money to be able to make good on those promises.
They owe about $120 billion - for work already done, and hadn't set anything aside to pay it. Most "every other business in the country" funds your 401K or other retirement by sending their contribution to a third-party investment bank every time you get a paycheck. You work this month, they pay for it this month, including the retirement part. State retirement plans work the same way, at least where I'm from in Texas - whichever agency you work for, when they pay for this year's work, they also pay whatever retirement they'll owe for this year's work. They don't have you work today and say "we'll worry about how to pay for it 20 years from now".
In 2006 they were given fifteen years to get caught up on the retirement they owed. They haven't come come close, because they are losing money. Any "profit" has to go toward funding the retirement promises they've made, but the "profit" hasn't been nearly enough and the number of letters they carry has fallen 30% over the last ten years, so it's unlikely they'll ever be able to pay for the retirement they are promising today's employees. They'll need the taxpayers to bail them out.
https://www.cnbc.com/id/450184...
https://www.govtrack.us/congre...
What the postal service was doing, and is supposed to stop doing, is the kind of accounting that sent Enron executives to prison. If anyone but the postal service was hiding a $120 billion liability, it would be called "fraud".
What they were doing is saying to employees "work for us today, and we'll not only pay you today, we'll keep paying you after you retire, until you die." Someone can retire from USPS at the age of 56, so their retirement payments may be almost as much as their salary, or even more. Over the course of 30 years of retirement, the worker might be owed $840,000. So they had workers doing the work in say 1995, promised to pay them hundreds of thousands of dollars "later", but never set aside any money to be able to make good on those promises.
They owe about $120 billion - for work already done, and hadn't set anything aside to pay it. Most "every other business in the country" funds your 401K or other retirement by sending their contribution to a third-party investment bank every time you get a paycheck. You work this month, they pay for it this month, including the retirement part. State retirement plans work the same way, at least where I'm from in Texas - whichever agency you work for, when they pay for this year's work, they also pay whatever retirement they'll owe for this year's work. They don't have you work today and say "we'll worry about how to pay for it 20 years from now".
In 2006 they were given fifteen years to get caught up on the retirement they owed. They haven't come come close, because they are losing money. Any "profit" has to go toward funding the retirement promises they've made, but the "profit" hasn't been nearly enough and the number of letters they carry has fallen 30% over the last ten years, so it's unlikely they'll ever be able to pay for the retirement they are promising today's employees. They'll need the taxpayers to bail them out.
https://www.cnbc.com/id/450184...
https://www.govtrack.us/congre...
I see one of your businesses left you with excess inventory of quotation marks, which you are now trying to use up.
A lot of leases are bad deals. AND if car leasing was a guaranteed way to make good money for anyone good at business, everyone good at business would start leasing cars.
Industry profits are self-regulating that way. If one industry has high profits and low risk, more companies will enter that market. More competition drives down prices and profits. Note that's true of profitable *industries*, not *companies*. One company might just be really good at what they do and make a nice profit.
The thing about offering leases that are really bad deals for consumers is that people who sign up for a bad lease are people who make bad decisions. Which means the leasing company is loaning brand new cars to people who make bad decisions. You can imagine how that could create problems for the owner of the cars, the leasing company.
Harvard is accredited by The New England Association of Schools and Colleges'. Stanford is accredited by Western Association of Schools and Colleges. WGU has been accredited by BOTH.
It's also a state university in several states, like University of Texas, UCLA, etc.
I probably wouldn't pursue a college degree (from anywhere) unless you wanted a college degree, and the salary increase that normally comes with that. In the WGU case, it also includes industry certifications from Cisco, Microsoft, etc. If you want to learn for your own pleasure AND have the self-discipline to do it, school doesn't offer that much more than you could do reading on the internet.
In that regard WGU, is a better value than most schools because the $6,000 tuition ($4,500 after tax credit) includes high-quality content from Cisco and others than people not in school do choose to pay for from their own pocket, and includes certifications which would otherwise be expensive. Some people do some studying before enrolling in WGU, then spend a year at WGU to get their degree. So they get all their certifications, and curriculum to learn the certification material, plus the degree itself, for $6,000. That's not bad.
Curriculum quality varies at WGU. Some isn't great, some is. Overall, I think it's an excellent value. Before I graduated, the certifications alone increased my income by more than the tuition cost, so the schooling literally paid for itself, while I was still in school.
> vocational education so people can ... use the GUI and enter the command lines they are told.
The PROBLEM is that admins and programmers follow a set of instructions that might have been okay for one situation, without understanding and carefully considering the ramifications for *their* situation, on *their* network, considering *current* threat trends. Often they get the commands to enter or the GUI buttons to click from sites like Stackoverflow or Serverfault. The answers on Stackoverflow might more or less answer the question and might more or less work, they do turn on the requested function.
If you don't fully understand what you're doing though, and what "enabling RPC" actually means, that's when you create a giant security hole.
What makes hacking "hacking" is precisely that's it's outside-the-box thinking, coming up with how to leverage things in ways nobody intended. Information security thinking is precisely the opposite of following a standard checklist. It's all about finding the "cheat", not following the rules.
There certainly IS a role for people with basic IT knowledge. Mostly working under someone with advanced IT knowledge with their work reviewed by a security professional. The security person should be a devious, clever type who comes up with ways to get around the rules.
I used to read Slashdot a LOT. I cut my Slashdot time in half and used that time to read for school (WGU). I got my degree mostly in the time I used to be on Slashdot. Soon I'll start my masters from Georgia Tech online.
Mac addresses aren't needed, a random number does just fine. The whole idea of cookies, the definition of a cookie, is that the device returns back the same value that was previously set. So the server sets a cookie called device=7573+4758585 and next time the browser sends back that number.
Obviously the cookie is only one of many parameters used. Cookies might be "blocked" (which often just means they are cleared when you shut down your browser, session cookies typically aren't blocked). To "track" a user, to recognize the same user when they come back, you look at maybe eight or ten different parameters. Any three of the eight are sufficient.
I find it interesting that the author didn't ask "should Facebook have a 'start over' button?"
The author seems unclear not only about what solution might work, but what problem they are trying to solve " antitrust ... ... Things we said in 2011 may or may not represent us today."
data Facebook can use to target ads
They aren't clear on what the problem is they are concerned about, they don't ask "should Facebook offer this option", indeed they don't ask "does Facebook offer a 'start over' button' (yes they do); they seem to start with the assumption that "regulators force - something" and go from there asking what it is that bureaucrats should force Facebook to do.
I'll start with a different set of questions:
Is it helpful for Facebook to offer a way to "start over", to delete all your posts and friend requests?
Does this author realize there already is that option, and many people do that, without bureaucrats being brought in to force anything?
> Even if my device is randomly hopping among IPv6 addresses, they're all on the same subnet (does that term still apply) meaning they can all be used to id me.
Yes they will be chosen from a range of 9,007,199,254,740,991 addresses or so. Some ISPs will assign you 32 times that many addresses, some a bit fewer, but roughly 9 quadrillion addresses. Compared to your ONE IPv4 address. As someone who has developed security systems which use IP addresses as one indicator of whether it's the same person, I'll tell you it's much easier to track your single IPv4 address than to figure out which 9, or 288 quadrillion, or 18 quadrillion, or whatever might be assigned to the same customer.
> you think I'm the kind of person who can handle user-agent-strings (and other browser fingerprinting) and cookies?
To be 100% completely honest with you, based on your posts I'd guess you're the type of person who thinks they kinda get it, so they make some attempts to hide stuff, and therefore stick out like a sore thumb in the sea of people who present standard, default profiles. When you're the guy who mucks with his iPad's user agent, but of course it still shows iPad resolution, you're the only hot on the whole site reporting 2048Ã--1536 on "Windows" and it makes you very easy to spot.
> anonymization about which device beyond the firewall is using a service.
You're not really hiding anything. Between user agent strings, cookies, etc., the trackers know one device from another. In fact since most web access is from mobile devices these days, and mobiles get new IPs all the time, IPs aren't used much for tracking anymore anyway.
Because IPv4 lacks enough addresses, you're pretty much forced to use only one IP for all of your devices. That's a hack and while it works well enough most of the time, for most people, it does have some problems.
You *can* still do that with IPv6; you aren't forced to. As mentioned above, it doesn't do you much good anyway. You can also have your devices randomly switch between millions of IPs. That's as effective as IPv4 NAT. Of course neither do anything when there are cookies involved and sch.
> How is it worse that the USA's mysterious "no-fly" lists
There are two lists called "no-fly" lists. One is an actual list of people not allowed to fly on US airlines. It includes a couple hundred people who have been actively involved in plotting hijackings and that sort of thing.
The other list, thousands of people (out of 300 million) are people whom the FBI wants to talk to before they leave the country, or enter the country. It applies to international flights.
There are a bunch of listed people the FBI wants to talk to if they try to come into the US. How is that different from everyone having to show ID and be tracked by the government every time they buy gas, you ask.
There are, of course, legitimate concerns about these lists. The FBI should probably be more transparent about them. By pretending it's the same thing as the government tracking everything all citizens do, one sounds quite silly and tends to encourage readers to see criticism of the FBI lists as silly in general. It's like comparing red-light cameras to Nazi concentration camps - the comparison is so ridiculous that it undermines the argument against red-light cameras.
> If you gave graphene or even a metamaterial to a scientist to analyse to a scientist 20 years ago he would have probably said "these are unknown materials".
Philip Russel Wallace published a thorough analysis of the properties of graphene in 1947. Others discussed it as early as 1856. In 1948 Ruess and Vogt published electron microscopy images of proto-graphene a few molecules thick. What was new 15 years ago was an efficient method of producing it (the scotch tape method).
Someone analyzing graphene 20 years ago would be able to very easily identify it as an extremely thin, one molecule thin, piece of graphite, and they could refer to the P.R. Wallace papers to learn about it's properties. They'd then ask "how did you slice it so thin?!"
Graphene 20 years ago was roughly like an ant today - we can't make an ant, we do understand them.
> OLEDs are already coming off the line, so no new tech.
It's still a cost, whether they do the R&D this year, or they borrowed money for it last year and pay that back this year, or they "borrowed" from themselves and need to replenish their funds. The cost is spread over all the displays that use the exact same tech, though, so their R&D cost for this year's displays is less if by sharing the cost with last year's production.
There are advantages to centralization, and to decentralization. It seems to me a lot of things tend to naturally move to take advantage of both with a hub-and-spoke architecture. The internet is decentralized, right? If you look at a map of fiber lines in the US, you'll see all the fattest pipes converge at a very few hundred locations, each feeding smaller sub-hubs.
Amazon needs to have their products close to consumers for fast delivery, but big centralized warehouses that have everything also make sense. The map of Amazon's distribution network looks similar to the internet map - several primary warehouses and 100 or so sub distribution centers, basically one for each major city. A lot of things are distributed clusters like that.
Git is kinda a bad example of "no benefit to decentralization" because the original Git repo, Linus's Linux repo, got wiped in a disk failure once. No need to restore from backup, he just pulled from someone else's repo. His isn't "central" in any way technology wise, that's a purely social concept that isn't based on the technology - there's nothing that marks it as different from any other copy.
At work I regularly pull from co-workers' repos and send them pul requests. Maybe half my work isn't pushed directly to "corporate" repo that ships to customers. Instead, a co-worker does a pull request and in code review (looking at their repo) I see a change that would improve their work. I then pull from them, make my updates, and send them a pull request. They pull my changes to their changes into their repo. Another co-worker might do the same. When we're done working on the feature, whoever owns that feature sends a PR for the repo that goes to customers. So work moves around from co-worker to co-worker directly, without involving any central repo.
> ? How is this different than a job fair at college?
There are entry level jobs for new graduates. I'm 41 and I just graduated. Over half of the people I was in school with were over 30. "Recent graduate" != age 20-25. It's fine, I think, to target recent graduates.
> Or at a senior center for that matter?
Right or wrong, it's LEGAL to seek people over 40, black people, and women. It's illegal to discriminate *against* these people, favoring whites, men, or young people. I don't necessarily agree that *should* be the law. Maybe it *should* be illegal to discriminate on the basis of race, but it is legal to target racial minorities for hiring, and it's legal to try to recruit older workers.
It's sad to me that I have to explain the US government, and 50% of voters, have decided that because she's "black" she needs "extra points" (a head start, pity points) in order to get into a good college. That they think black people are too stupid to compete with whites on an even footing is deeply offensive, but it's the law in America today. I have a dream that one day Americans will realize that the patronizing racism of saying black candidates, and women, need a head start in order to be able to compete for jobs or schools, that they can never simply be *better qualified* than any white male, is a more damaging form of racism and sexism than David Duke's "I hate black people" form. When Duke says "I hate you", my daughter can say "well fine, I hate you back", or even "I'll pray for you". When Hillary says, or implies, to my daughter "I feel sorry for you, I have pity for you because you're just a black woman, and can't do anything without my help", hearing that over and over, as official policy, strikes at my daughter's soul.
* PS the color of her skin is in fact brown, not anywhere near the color black. If you use the blur and color picker tool in Photoshop you'll discover Morgan Freeman and Oprah Winfrey have skin that's closer to WHITE than black. If you want to categorize people it "black" or "white" based on what color their skin is, we're all "white", so the entire concept is stupid.
> This will allow him to plan a cautious transition. He will want the time to do it gradually rather than all at once. Trust me, your boss will love the idea of giving the new guy time to master each piece of the job before taking on the next one. Orderly transitions are worth the money.
All true and good. I'll add that where I worked the person leaving did a lot of the transition planning and that worked well because they were effectively TELLING their boss and everyone "here's what needs to be done before I go, and how long it will take". Looking at it in reverse "here's a ton of stuff that won't get done, and will cause problems, if you don't keep me until July."
So we'd have a rough schedule:
Over the next few weeks I'll document the processes for X, Y, and Z, and all admin passwords needed and other access information, etc.
Next month I'll show Bob how to do A, B, and C.
Then I'll let Bob do it himself (asking me questions as needed) and I'll check his work, clarifying any issues. We can then discuss whether it appears that Bob will be able to take over these tasks, or if someone else is needed to help.
In February we'll finish up the project I've been leading for the last year, etc. Bob will need a backup in case something happens to him, so in March Bob and I will walk through the processes with Sue, so she is also familiar with them. February and March I'll bring Bob into the monthly meeting with Very Important Client so they can meet him, and he can see how we conduct that monthly meeting.
The flip side of that is you're telling the boss "if I leave today, nobody will know how to do X, Y and Z, or A, B, and C."
At my last job, retirements were planned a couple YEARS in advance. That made for smooth transitions. When I left for a new job, I started planning an orderly transition as soon as I had a good interview, more than three weeks before my last day.
If the job is appropriate for recent college grads, show it to recent grads. I'm 41 and just got my degree, and significant portion of students at my school are similarly not in their 20s.
Perhaps my post was too strongly worded, in response to a very strongly worded claim. GGP said "they will literally sell that information to anyone willing to pay". That person may have been thinking of other companies whose products are indeed lists of names, addresses, and various information about the people. You can buy a list of people who are into hunting, a list of people who supported Ron Paul, etc. You'll find various lists available on the order forms from these companies.
You will find no such order form anywhere on Google's site. You sure will find adwords, though! Their TOC / privacy policy *allows* them to share information with partners, but that's not what they generally do. They will show ads for "anyone willing to pay", they will not, generally "will literally sell that information to anyone willing to pay", though if they have your consent, they could do so by the terms of the privacy policy.
The other day I was trying to get somewhere in a large hospital complex and I noticed Google had a map of each floor of the building. I could seIect which floor I wanted a map of. I see new features like that being added; I haven't noticed features being removed.
> but they will literally sell that information to anyone willing to pay.
Quite the opposite. Older companies that acquired data used to sell it, and some still do. One thing. That has made Google so successful is that they are careful to keep the data to themselves. It's their golden goose. They sell ADS that are targeted using the data. That way they can keep selling ads to the same companies for years, rather than selling data once. They never sell the data because then it could be passed around and that would reduce their competitive advantage.
The drop in frequency itself isn't the big problem, it's a gauge, an indicator.
The frequency tells you how fast the generators are turning. They are automatically throttled to try to spin at the right speed to produce 50Hz. If they aren't producing 50Hz, that means they are full wide open throttle and still can't keep up. It means they can't produce enough power.
> Unless all those leaving are concentrating in one area when they settle back down
They ARE concentrated in Denver, Austin, and Dallas. A significant percentage of Austin residents came to Austin from the bay area.