Most large companies self-insure health benefits in the US. It's not unusual at all; it makes the benefits cheaper; as an added bonus, they become governed by the rather loose ERISA law instead of the (usually stricter) regulations of 50 different states. I'm sure there are other advantages, but you'd have to ask an accountant what they are.
My company does this; they hire an administrator to handle claims, but the funding to pay said claims comes direct from the company's coffers. Why pay an insurance company to assume risks you can easily cover yourself? No matter how sick I, my or any of my colleagues, or our families get, we are unlikely to pose any acute financial danger to a company pulling in $B/quarter.
Until recently, I wasn't even aware GMail offered 2-factor authentication. I think it was a little note on the login screen one day that it even existed.
I did set it up immediately, as my entire life runs through that account, but had been running for years without it.
A) Impending foreclosure, unemployment, hunger, and bankruptcy. B) Making sure you keep to a strange term in a unilateral contract that you are being asked to violate under duress.
Gee... such a tough decision.
There are times to draw a line in the sand, and turning down much-needed employment in order to enforce Facebook's ToS isn't one of them.
My wife and I work for the same employer, although we no longer work together (we did when we met, although not when we started dating. We did, however, get to go on a business trip together after we were married when a customer needed both of our skills. For a month. In Hawaii.:-)
Quite frankly, if you are offended by a quick hug or kiss when a couple bump into each other in the hallway, you need to grow a thicker skin. A total makeout session is indeed inappropriate, but a quick display of affection between a couple is certainly not out of line.
Standing up for your rights when an employer asks you to do something legal, but unreasonable is all well and good if you are actually in a position to refuse. But if you are out of work, and really need the money, refusing an offer or aborting an interview because of crap like this is quite a bit harder.
If you are out of work, really need a job, and an employer is making an unreasonable (but still legal) demand, you are in a rather unequal bargaining position. It's all well and good to stick up for yourself if you have the luxury of turning down a new job or aborting a promising interview, but not everyone is in that position. The law levels the playing field by prohibiting employers from even asking for something they have no business getting.
Who's asking you to abridge your freedom of thought and expression? All I'm saying is that if you want a copy of my work (and/or want to distribute it to others) you are going to have to pay me for it.
My, my, how short memories are. Do you not remember the YEARS IBM fought the SCO litigation, which was about how evil IBM was for contributing to Linux? (And the suit is still ongoing, but it's now a stupid contract dispute, as Novell pre-empted the original claims due to SCOs contract language.)
And IBM has consistently pledged not to use it's patent portfolio against Linux and all of their contributions have been under the GPL, just like the rest of the kernel.
I don't see how you, user, can claim any sort of moral authority to do whatever you like with my hard-earned time and effort. (Assuming, of course, my time and effort isn't based on Free software.) You want to write your own software and give it away for free to all and sundry, be my guest. But do not presume that I am under an obligation of any sort to give my product away. If that's a problem for you, you are certainly Free to not use anything I (or other developer of non-Free software) have created.
You can not trust proprietary software all you like and refuse to use it; that's fine by me. Nobody's forcing software on you. Now certainly interop and standards are a big deal, but if a standard requires interop with non-Free products... well, develop your own standard. Linus wanted a UNIX kernel that was Free, so instead of whining about how mean AT&T was, he wrote one.
There are indeed many pragmatic reasons to use the GPL, and as I stated earlier, I have absolutely no issues with it. None. I can see why a developer would choose it, and I think that it's a great tool. I applaud the efforts of those who want to make sure there are viable Linux distributions free of proprietary encumbrances.
Linux "stands for" a Free OS. Nothing more. I don't recall Linus ever stating he didn't want proprietary software to run on top of it.
By "proprietary software", I was referring to software the user is not authorized to redistribute without payment to the original developer.
RMS is not happy for users to merely receive the source and be allowed to modify it (this is actually a pretty common way for commercial packages to be distributed, such as the original UNIX); his explicit goal is for the user to be able to, in turn, redistribute the software without further monetary payment to the original author. This is a significant distinction.
And since the GNU license allows any purchaser of the software to redistribute the source (and/or compiled binaries) at will, supporting yourself by "selling" the software you've developed isn't a real lucrative business model. RMS supported himself as an employee of the MIT AI lab prior to running the FSF; the emacs tapes were a sideline. There is money in support, but not as much as RMS thinks there is.
Firstly, the article was written by Richard Stallman himself (you know, the founder of the FSF, and the architect of much of GNU); I would think he would know what its goals are.
Linus's goal is to provide a free core system. The goal of the FSF is to convince the world that proprietary software is bad and should not exist. ("GNU" is a system, and therefore cannot have goals in and of itself.) Please refer to such fine articles like "Why Software Should Not Have Owners" ( http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-free.html ) or Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software ( http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html )
Frankly, I'm surprised that there was some non-trivial number of Slashdot mods equally ignorant of who RMS is and the goals of the FSF.
If a developer chooses to restrict the choices of his/her users, the user is more than welcome to find another solution to his/her problem, leaving the user in the exact same position as if the software was never developed. The users have had nothing taken from them. (We'll leave software patents out of it, which are separate from copyright; you'll get no argument from me that software patents are a good idea. Most developers of proprietary software hate them just as much as RMS.)
I have no issues whatsoever with the GPL itself. I have no issues with the obligations it puts on distributors and re developers of the software. I DO have issues with the idea that developers should feel morally obligated to use it, or something like it. The developers should be free to choose whatever license he/she wishes, as long as the terms are disclosed to the user prior to purchase.
Yes, I know that there are a bunch of ingrates on here, but that's why I said "as close as Slashdot gets." There are always going to be trolls or the terminally stupid...
If you refer you yourself and your peers as sexist and crude, I'd say you probably ARE over any line that counts. (Namely the one that's going to get you sued (and lose badly), and/or get you fired.)
Looking through the comments posted so far, this appears to be as close as Slashdot gets to unanimous agreement. The conclusion? The OP is a complete, utter, blithering idiot, well on his way to getting himself and his entire team fired and his company sued for every penny that can be wrung out of them.
OP: Unless you hit yourself repeatedly on the head with a spiked clue-by-four, and then threaten to do the same to the collection of frat boys you have apparently been saddled with, start laying in funds for an extended period of unemployment, and advise your co-workers to do the same.
While certainly firing an otherwise competent professional for dropping a curse word is extreme, being "sexist and crude" in the workplace is simply out of line if somebody really wants to consider themselves a professional.
How, precisely, does one avoid "litigious" people? Only the terminally stupid are going to mention anything of that nature during the job interview, and you can't very well ask.
At my workplace, a very serious firm you most certainly have heard of, I hold hands and kiss my wife all the time. It hasn't been a problem. But if I were to start making sexist and crude jokes about my female coworkers, you'd bet I'd be on my ass before the week was out.
For the number of passengers Amtrak carries every year, it's subsidy surpasses pretty much every other form of transportation besides space travel. I think it's easy to see we get a bit more "bang for our buck" spending 3.5B on airports vs 2.6B on Amtrak.
Firstly, lots of people have bad divorces. That's never going to fly as circumstances for reducing a murder charge.
2nd, he already tried the "Munchhausen by Proxy" defense in the original trial. It was sad, pathetic, bullshit by a raving lunatic then, and it still is. (Just read the first-hand trial accounts...)
Last, Hans has already admitted to the crime and voluntarily waived all appeals. (He revealed the location of the body in return for a sentencing reduction.) This act of fighting the wrongful death suit is just another way for Hans to re-try the case he lost, and lost badly. He'll lose again, and lose badly, since he is so adept at making an utter fool of himself in court.
In Hans' world, everyone is to blame Nina's death, and his conviction for it, but himself.
"But inside, in a third-floor apartment, there are enough Ikea bunk beds to sleep 10 people, crammed into two bedrooms." And they mention that the house "captain" gets his/her own room, meaning you have 11 people in a single apartment.
This violates so many different housing codes, it's not even funny. Cramming that many people into such a small space is downright dangerous. Fire, sanitation, etc.,... all problems. These are not niggling little "lets find something to fine you for" issues... this is a serious safety problem.
"Katy Levinson, who runs another hacker house, declined to give its exact location because she had heard about several houses being shut down after running into trouble with landlords."
She doesn't even OWN the house? That tells me two things: 1) She's badly violating the terms of any lease agreement, which certainly would not allow subletting of this magnitude. 2) She's utterly ignoring any landlord-tenant laws herself.
RIM has yet to present any vision where it has a plausible future as anything but, at best, a marginal maker of nice "feature phones", and even that's unlikely, given their cost structure. Yes, they have cash on hand now, but what good is it doing them? What can they invest it in, beyond the new software, to rescue the company from the death spiral? RIM is in the same boat as Nokia right now, only without the MS-funded lifeline; they are a company with an expensive cost structure selling a shitload of phones into very cost-sensitive markets. One that the Koreans are becoming better and better at, for a lot less money.
They are stupendously late to the smartphone party, and they just announced it'll be another six months. It doesn't matter if the new software is so great, it ushers in the second coming of Steve Jobs; it's horribly late, and cannot possibly bring anything compelling enough to the party that they'll attract the developers needed to make it a viable platform.
Apple rose from certain doom because it outright created, from whole cloth, the MP3 player market. Existing MP3 players at that point were clunky and awkward geek toys that rightfully sold poorly; the iPod brought something truly different to the party, with a nice computer-based back end for an elegant front-end. Nothing we have seen about the new BB software has shown it to be paradigm-changing in any way. It's just another mobile operating system, in a market that already has three perfectly usable players. They simply haven't announced a single compelling feature that cannot be quickly duplicated on another platform. Their traditional strength, the enterprise market, has already shifted to the other players, which have more than caught up in that space.
The most likely outcome of a venture into entrepreneurship, is stress, financial strain, and business failure. It has ever been thus, in the US or anywhere. It's not for everyone, and for someone craving stability, like the OP, it's downright suicidal.
I've said this before, and I'll say it again: Don't look at "working for the man" as "the man" taking a cut of your hard-earned labor. Look at it as "the man" doing the sort of stuff you don't want to do and/or have no aptitude for a pittance over cost. I get to do a job I enjoy and am good at (low level network diagnostics), "the man" takes care of sales, marketing, legal, HR, product design, business planning, international compliance, manufacturing, management, etc. And they do this for a puny 8% over cost (a.k.a. my company's profit margin.) If I strike out on my own, I'm rather unlikely to be able to hire somebody to do those things for me for such a low price, and I know I'd suck at many/most of them if I were to take on those responsibilities myself.
If you have the stomach for the risk, the right skills, and a LOT of luck, entrepreneurship may be personally and financially rewarding. But it's certainly not a panacea for a stagnating career.
Slashdot Mirror
Most large companies self-insure health benefits in the US. It's not unusual at all; it makes the benefits cheaper; as an added bonus, they become governed by the rather loose ERISA law instead of the (usually stricter) regulations of 50 different states. I'm sure there are other advantages, but you'd have to ask an accountant what they are.
My company does this; they hire an administrator to handle claims, but the funding to pay said claims comes direct from the company's coffers. Why pay an insurance company to assume risks you can easily cover yourself? No matter how sick I, my or any of my colleagues, or our families get, we are unlikely to pose any acute financial danger to a company pulling in $B/quarter.
Until recently, I wasn't even aware GMail offered 2-factor authentication. I think it was a little note on the login screen one day that it even existed.
I did set it up immediately, as my entire life runs through that account, but had been running for years without it.
No, I'm not ok with such an employer. But I'm even LESS ok with losing my house, car, etc.
I'd probably bail as soon as possible, but in the meantime the proverbial beggars can't be choosers.
Hmmmm.... you can choose between:
A) Impending foreclosure, unemployment, hunger, and bankruptcy.
B) Making sure you keep to a strange term in a unilateral contract that you are being asked to violate under duress.
Gee... such a tough decision.
There are times to draw a line in the sand, and turning down much-needed employment in order to enforce Facebook's ToS isn't one of them.
OP here.
My wife and I work for the same employer, although we no longer work together (we did when we met, although not when we started dating. We did, however, get to go on a business trip together after we were married when a customer needed both of our skills. For a month. In Hawaii. :-)
Quite frankly, if you are offended by a quick hug or kiss when a couple bump into each other in the hallway, you need to grow a thicker skin. A total makeout session is indeed inappropriate, but a quick display of affection between a couple is certainly not out of line.
Standing up for your rights when an employer asks you to do something legal, but unreasonable is all well and good if you are actually in a position to refuse. But if you are out of work, and really need the money, refusing an offer or aborting an interview because of crap like this is quite a bit harder.
If you are out of work, really need a job, and an employer is making an unreasonable (but still legal) demand, you are in a rather unequal bargaining position. It's all well and good to stick up for yourself if you have the luxury of turning down a new job or aborting a promising interview, but not everyone is in that position. The law levels the playing field by prohibiting employers from even asking for something they have no business getting.
Who's asking you to abridge your freedom of thought and expression? All I'm saying is that if you want a copy of my work (and/or want to distribute it to others) you are going to have to pay me for it.
My, my, how short memories are. Do you not remember the YEARS IBM fought the SCO litigation, which was about how evil IBM was for contributing to Linux? (And the suit is still ongoing, but it's now a stupid contract dispute, as Novell pre-empted the original claims due to SCOs contract language.)
And IBM has consistently pledged not to use it's patent portfolio against Linux and all of their contributions have been under the GPL, just like the rest of the kernel.
A users ability to run a piece of software can't be taken if he/she never had it to begin with.
If no similar product exists and the user doesn't want to accept my terms? Tough $hit.
I don't see how you, user, can claim any sort of moral authority to do whatever you like with my hard-earned time and effort. (Assuming, of course, my time and effort isn't based on Free software.) You want to write your own software and give it away for free to all and sundry, be my guest. But do not presume that I am under an obligation of any sort to give my product away. If that's a problem for you, you are certainly Free to not use anything I (or other developer of non-Free software) have created.
You can not trust proprietary software all you like and refuse to use it; that's fine by me. Nobody's forcing software on you. Now certainly interop and standards are a big deal, but if a standard requires interop with non-Free products... well, develop your own standard. Linus wanted a UNIX kernel that was Free, so instead of whining about how mean AT&T was, he wrote one.
There are indeed many pragmatic reasons to use the GPL, and as I stated earlier, I have absolutely no issues with it. None. I can see why a developer would choose it, and I think that it's a great tool. I applaud the efforts of those who want to make sure there are viable Linux distributions free of proprietary encumbrances.
Linux "stands for" a Free OS. Nothing more. I don't recall Linus ever stating he didn't want proprietary software to run on top of it.
By "proprietary software", I was referring to software the user is not authorized to redistribute without payment to the original developer.
RMS is not happy for users to merely receive the source and be allowed to modify it (this is actually a pretty common way for commercial packages to be distributed, such as the original UNIX); his explicit goal is for the user to be able to, in turn, redistribute the software without further monetary payment to the original author. This is a significant distinction.
And since the GNU license allows any purchaser of the software to redistribute the source (and/or compiled binaries) at will, supporting yourself by "selling" the software you've developed isn't a real lucrative business model. RMS supported himself as an employee of the MIT AI lab prior to running the FSF; the emacs tapes were a sideline. There is money in support, but not as much as RMS thinks there is.
Firstly, the article was written by Richard Stallman himself (you know, the founder of the FSF, and the architect of much of GNU); I would think he would know what its goals are.
Linus's goal is to provide a free core system. The goal of the FSF is to convince the world that proprietary software is bad and should not exist. ("GNU" is a system, and therefore cannot have goals in and of itself.) Please refer to such fine articles like "Why Software Should Not Have Owners" ( http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-free.html ) or Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software ( http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html )
Frankly, I'm surprised that there was some non-trivial number of Slashdot mods equally ignorant of who RMS is and the goals of the FSF.
If a developer chooses to restrict the choices of his/her users, the user is more than welcome to find another solution to his/her problem, leaving the user in the exact same position as if the software was never developed. The users have had nothing taken from them. (We'll leave software patents out of it, which are separate from copyright; you'll get no argument from me that software patents are a good idea. Most developers of proprietary software hate them just as much as RMS.)
I have no issues whatsoever with the GPL itself. I have no issues with the obligations it puts on distributors and re developers of the software. I DO have issues with the idea that developers should feel morally obligated to use it, or something like it. The developers should be free to choose whatever license he/she wishes, as long as the terms are disclosed to the user prior to purchase.
Yes, I know that there are a bunch of ingrates on here, but that's why I said "as close as Slashdot gets." There are always going to be trolls or the terminally stupid...
If you refer you yourself and your peers as sexist and crude, I'd say you probably ARE over any line that counts. (Namely the one that's going to get you sued (and lose badly), and/or get you fired.)
Looking through the comments posted so far, this appears to be as close as Slashdot gets to unanimous agreement. The conclusion? The OP is a complete, utter, blithering idiot, well on his way to getting himself and his entire team fired and his company sued for every penny that can be wrung out of them.
OP: Unless you hit yourself repeatedly on the head with a spiked clue-by-four, and then threaten to do the same to the collection of frat boys you have apparently been saddled with, start laying in funds for an extended period of unemployment, and advise your co-workers to do the same.
Who exactly are your "peers"?
While certainly firing an otherwise competent professional for dropping a curse word is extreme, being "sexist and crude" in the workplace is simply out of line if somebody really wants to consider themselves a professional.
How, precisely, does one avoid "litigious" people? Only the terminally stupid are going to mention anything of that nature during the job interview, and you can't very well ask.
At my workplace, a very serious firm you most certainly have heard of, I hold hands and kiss my wife all the time. It hasn't been a problem. But if I were to start making sexist and crude jokes about my female coworkers, you'd bet I'd be on my ass before the week was out.
The FDA only regulates pesticides as they relate to residues left on human-consumed food (because they then become a food contaminant.)
Regulation of the pesticide's environmental impact is the EPAs job.
For the number of passengers Amtrak carries every year, it's subsidy surpasses pretty much every other form of transportation besides space travel. I think it's easy to see we get a bit more "bang for our buck" spending 3.5B on airports vs 2.6B on Amtrak.
Firstly, lots of people have bad divorces. That's never going to fly as circumstances for reducing a murder charge.
2nd, he already tried the "Munchhausen by Proxy" defense in the original trial. It was sad, pathetic, bullshit by a raving lunatic then, and it still is. (Just read the first-hand trial accounts...)
Last, Hans has already admitted to the crime and voluntarily waived all appeals. (He revealed the location of the body in return for a sentencing reduction.) This act of fighting the wrongful death suit is just another way for Hans to re-try the case he lost, and lost badly. He'll lose again, and lose badly, since he is so adept at making an utter fool of himself in court.
In Hans' world, everyone is to blame Nina's death, and his conviction for it, but himself.
What you cites is true only for housing designed to house people in this way. Youth hostels are certainly not illegal.
Putting great numbers of people in a regular apartment? Not so much.
"But inside, in a third-floor apartment, there are enough Ikea bunk beds to sleep 10 people, crammed into two bedrooms." And they mention that the house "captain" gets his/her own room, meaning you have 11 people in a single apartment.
This violates so many different housing codes, it's not even funny. Cramming that many people into such a small space is downright dangerous. Fire, sanitation, etc., ... all problems. These are not niggling little "lets find something to fine you for" issues... this is a serious safety problem.
"Katy Levinson, who runs another hacker house, declined to give its exact location because she had heard about several houses being shut down after running into trouble with landlords."
She doesn't even OWN the house? That tells me two things:
1) She's badly violating the terms of any lease agreement, which certainly would not allow subletting of this magnitude.
2) She's utterly ignoring any landlord-tenant laws herself.
RIM has yet to present any vision where it has a plausible future as anything but, at best, a marginal maker of nice "feature phones", and even that's unlikely, given their cost structure. Yes, they have cash on hand now, but what good is it doing them? What can they invest it in, beyond the new software, to rescue the company from the death spiral? RIM is in the same boat as Nokia right now, only without the MS-funded lifeline; they are a company with an expensive cost structure selling a shitload of phones into very cost-sensitive markets. One that the Koreans are becoming better and better at, for a lot less money.
They are stupendously late to the smartphone party, and they just announced it'll be another six months. It doesn't matter if the new software is so great, it ushers in the second coming of Steve Jobs; it's horribly late, and cannot possibly bring anything compelling enough to the party that they'll attract the developers needed to make it a viable platform.
Apple rose from certain doom because it outright created, from whole cloth, the MP3 player market. Existing MP3 players at that point were clunky and awkward geek toys that rightfully sold poorly; the iPod brought something truly different to the party, with a nice computer-based back end for an elegant front-end. Nothing we have seen about the new BB software has shown it to be paradigm-changing in any way. It's just another mobile operating system, in a market that already has three perfectly usable players. They simply haven't announced a single compelling feature that cannot be quickly duplicated on another platform. Their traditional strength, the enterprise market, has already shifted to the other players, which have more than caught up in that space.
The most likely outcome of a venture into entrepreneurship, is stress, financial strain, and business failure. It has ever been thus, in the US or anywhere. It's not for everyone, and for someone craving stability, like the OP, it's downright suicidal.
I've said this before, and I'll say it again: Don't look at "working for the man" as "the man" taking a cut of your hard-earned labor. Look at it as "the man" doing the sort of stuff you don't want to do and/or have no aptitude for a pittance over cost. I get to do a job I enjoy and am good at (low level network diagnostics), "the man" takes care of sales, marketing, legal, HR, product design, business planning, international compliance, manufacturing, management, etc. And they do this for a puny 8% over cost (a.k.a. my company's profit margin.) If I strike out on my own, I'm rather unlikely to be able to hire somebody to do those things for me for such a low price, and I know I'd suck at many/most of them if I were to take on those responsibilities myself.
If you have the stomach for the risk, the right skills, and a LOT of luck, entrepreneurship may be personally and financially rewarding. But it's certainly not a panacea for a stagnating career.