Wow, it took you less than a day to change from "the people won" to "voters are idiots."
The people didn't win, they just think they did. In the long run, nothing of consequence will change. In the short run, some jobs will be lost, a fairly sizable amount of money has already been lost. In an aggregate sense, The people of Britain just voted to club their financial selves over the head with a 2x4. The folks who had very little money to lose will pay (statistically speaking) with their jobs and their very livelihood. In the end, its still the same breed of scumbag running things, even if it is a different set of faces, and you'd better bet that none of those so called leaders is in it for anyones well being except their own. If they were really in it for the good of the people, they would not be looking at polls to figure out whether they are doing a good job or not...
Ever think that's because advocates of nullification are generally assholes that want to make trials to be about _them_ for egocentric reasons instead of the actual court case?
Every trial should be looked at as an opportunity for Jury Nullification. It is one of the very few opportunities the people have left to have their voice heard in any meaningful way. I think it is appropriate that any group of 12 citizens may nullify a law related to a case they have been asked to hear, and any judge that truly believes in democracy should advise their jurists that this is an option before the start of any trial.
Actually, most of the "impteen million apps" are crap, even for those that have tried them. If you have ten active users of your "app", and Billions of people don't want / need you have a very small niche market. That makes it more or less "crap" for the rest of the billions of people.
When people are buying a phone, they care about the apps in two regards. They care the total number of apps available for that platform, even if it doesn't mean anything practical, and they care that the specific apps they want are available. When windows phone only had 1/10th of the apps that android and ios had, *that* is what killed the platform, even if almost every single person wouldn't have been able to identify an app that they wanted that wasnt available on WP. It wasn't what was specifically missing that concerned them, it was the potential to be missing the next great app(TM) that convinced people to avoid WP and get an android instead. The dearth of apps killed Blackberry, and it is in the process of killing WP.
I don't give a shit about the milions of apps on the different app stores. You don't need a rich ecosystem of apps, you need a small number of useful apps.
You need the whole gamut, because one persons useful apps are another persons garbage. Just because you have no desire to use any of the other umpteen million apps doesn't mean that other people don't want them. Blackberry had the same opinion of the cornucopia of "useless apps" that you do, and their products represented that market viewpoint. The market taught Blackberry otherwise, and it damn near killed the company learning the lesson.
In short, the data just doesn't support your argument
I've had far worse experience with my android phones and the carriers seem to never want to update/support them.
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And I have had every iphone update ever attempted brick the phone. The last time, I had the guys at the genius bar do the update with the whole store watching. The only difference was they bricked the phone so badly it couldn't be restored to factory default and had to be replaced under warranty. They were good about it, but it doesn't change the fact that the only way I have ever effectively updated an iphone is by replacing it.
Looks like I'm gonna be limited to the iPhone SE when I finally upgrade off my 5.
I love how it doesn't even appear to have occurred to him to buy anything other than an apple product. Talk about brainwashed in the extreme. I can't in good conscience recommend anything Microsoft or Blackberry right now, but in two years? who knows, somebody might find Jesus between now and then and release a truly exceptional product.
How do you deal with tickets that are purchased by entities then given away promotionally - think radio station contents and other giveaways? This solution is not viable - the only viable solution is to make the criminal penalties for scalping tickets so powerful to deter anyone from trying make money...
Simple. Larger *certified* entities like a station that *are authorized* to do so, may purchase tickets that do not yet have a name associated with them.
You could do this with individuals as well. Allow any given ticket to be transferred to a new ticket holder, but limit transfers so that a single individual may not transfer more than 5 tickets per year. There are lots of ways to enforce these types of things. The only reason no one has is because ticket scalping is a fundamental outgrowth of capitalism. Supply and Demand in its purest form. Anyone who doesn't like the logical outcome that we have now, should be sat down and shown how the stock market is functioning in exactly the same way, to exactly the same effect, only with several order of magnitude more money at stake.
Neither is it among the top 3, regardless which metric you use: lines of code produced per year, numbers of developers sought for projects, amount of money earned or payed in using it.
I'm sorry, but you're just plain wrong. Most language popularity lists use existing jobs and job postings that require language XYZ to determine how popular they are. Most of the remaining lists that use surveys instead, miss entire blocks of programmers who are writing embedded code because they are not classified as programmers, but embedded engineers, FPGA designers, etc... Some of the better lists do manage to include Firmware engineers in their surveys, but by and large they miss the embedded space altogether.
That is a critical failure because there are as many lines of code written for embedded systems as there are for all of the remainder of the software realm combined. Embedded code is in everything, and all of it is C. It is so ubiquitous in the embedded space that a job listing for an embedded engineer will not even specify the C language as a requirement. If you know even a small fraction of the other requirements, you will know C. For example, the Freescale line of coldfire processors all use a tool called codewarrior. This requirement is what will show up on the job posting. The fact that codewarrior uses only C is not mentioned, nor does it even need to be mentioned in the job posting. If you know codewarrior, you know C. C has been ported to every instruction set that has ever been invented, and there are more C compilers in the world than there are Java, C++ and Python compilers / interpreters combined.
The IEEE keeps a list of the top languages, and their list includes the embedded space which is ignored by these other lists. C and C++ take the #2 and #3 spots, which accurately reflects the underlying reality.
Sometimes people fuck things up. If one guy packing shit in a warehouse screws up one time, you want to dismantle an entire company?
I have a great deal of experience both working on a line, and as a supervisor, and I can tell you without doubt that properly trained people do not make mistakes at that level. Mistakes like this happen because an entire series of events, that should have happened, didn't happen. A properly constructed process ensures that all of the critical paths to failure are covered multiple ways with validations in place. Failure to train is one of those basic steps, as is failure to hold your management accountable. If you want a company to ensure a proper process, then yes, I think it acceptable to burn a company to the ground for failing to put in place *any* of the dozens of procedures they should have had to prevent this kind of thing. That kind of behavior (and getting away with it) out of any company needs to be immediately squashed with a violent fury, because anything short of that does not change behaviors.
WTF? She was sitting in the passenger seat of a parked car! [wikipedia.org]
She claimed the car was parked. The fact that she spilled a very significant percentage of the liquid on herself strongly suggests otherwise.
Try this simple experiment. Put on a pair of sweat pants, place a 10Oz cup of water with a fast food lid on it between your legs. Now try to open that lid and see where the water goes, and how much. You will find that even opening the cup fairly violently the water will not reach your genitals. Now try again with the cup squarely in your crotch. For grins, now try it in a moving vehicle. You will find the facts strongly suggest, but fall just short of outright proof, that the litigant lied under oath. That is why the judge ultimately found her to be 20% responsible, and reduced the award from $200,000 to $160,000 (for damages, not punitive). My personal belief is that the car was still moving when she tried to open the cup. Had she not been 79 years old, this surely should have qualified her for a Darwin honorable mention.
That having been said, both parties engaged in questionable behavior, and both parties should have been made to face the consequences of stupid behavior.
Amazon can just pass the blame to the 3rd party staffing firms at the shipping centers
That is precisely why we need to end limited liability shielding. Forget about what Amazon did or did not know. Make it their job to know, and then they are culpable when something happens because they either knew and didn't care, or didn't know and should have. Get rid of this idiotic gray area of "we didn't know"
Our legal system long ago had to solve this same basic problem, and the solution was simplicity itself: Ignorance of the law is not a defense.
There is ground shipping to/through AK... but not everywhere, and not all year
And even ground shipped hazardous materials need to be properly labeled. In his case, the labeling should have included the designation ORMD (other regulated material), which would have precluded the transportation company from putting the item on a plane. There are far too many people out there who think you can just put anything you want in a box and ship it. That is why, when you bring a pre-packed box to a carrier to ship it, you have to play 20 questions. The Carriers learned long ago that the general public does not understand hazmat shipping, so packages have to be screened at the point of entry. In order to get one of the carriers to accept a hazardous package without proper hazmat paperwork, you would either have to have an account with the carrier, or lie to the customer counter person who accepts your package for shipment. Both of those situations would require the individual to know that what they were doing was prohibited.
The important figure would be number of violations per 100,000 packages shipped. Not raw number of packages in violation.
That number needs to be further refined to the number of violations per number of hazardous packages shipped. i.e. what percentage of the time were they doing it right, and what percentage of the time were they doing it wrong. Hazardous packages make up only a tiny fraction of Amazons business, so you shouldn't count any of the non-hazardous packages in the determination. When you do that, you will discover that Amazon is improperly shipping hazardous materials 100% of the time. That is because hazardous shipping is expensive and restrictive. That $5 bottle of drain cleaner now costs $50 when it has to be shipped as a hazardous material, and Amazon isn't willing to charge that much. The standard punishment in the shipping industry is for a shipper to be blacklisted for a year after three strikes. The only reason no one holds Amazon to this standard is because Amazon makes up 20% of UPS shipping business. Cutting them off for a year would not only kill Amazon, but would do serious damage to UPS as well. The FAA fine was surely a compromise between UPS and the FAA (possibly including input form OSHA as well).
It is different because the litigant made the situation worse by placing a container, known to her to be filled with a dangerous liquid, between her legs while trying to operate a moving vehicle. This situation, while not technically illegal, was in violation of the spirit of reckless driving laws.
The accident in question would not have happened if either party had been following the safety manuals for the equipment they were operating. While that does not exonerate the hot coffee provider, it should not reward the litigant either. The appropriate outcome would have been for the judge to award the litigant 0 dollars, then fine the coffee provider the 2.7M for safety violations. In that way both failures are acknowledged and punished appropriately.
"Hey, you! We're gonna take 10% of your worth because one of your hundreds of thousands of hires fucked up doing a couple of the millions of things your company does every day!"
The problem with that line of thinking is three-fold.
First, it *is* the corporate officers (as well as management all the way up and down) to make sure that the employees are properly trained to do their jobs. The vast majority of times an employee screws up, its because they weren't trained to do the job properly (or at all in some cases).
This is a symptom of point 2: Shareholders (including the CEO) are not liable for the liabilities of the company, even in criminal cases. This gives the shareholders impunity to not care what the CEO does as long as it brings in more money. You want to ensure that CEOs pay closer attention to what is going on, end limited liability, and ensure that the shareholders have a reason to breathe down the neck of the CEO for everything that might get them sued. To those that think ending limited liability would be the end of the world, I would suggest that people with extra money are always going to chase the best interest rates. Business will continue, just the investors will be a whole lot more careful about where they put their money. This kind of limited liability would have killed SCO instantly, as the likes of Microsoft and others would not have been willing to risk any investment with all of the downside risk SCO had.
Third, the inept employee is largely a symptom of wage inequality. Why would some peon on the bottom rung be willing to go the extra steps when they know that their extra efforts wil benefit the corporate officers and the shareholders far more than it benefits themselves? Employees used to be loyal to the company because the company appeared to do things that were beneficial for the employees. More recently, companies have taken the overriding approach of figuring out how to make absolutely certain that every employee is expendable and replaceable. That cuts both ways, if an employee know they are replaceable at the drop of a hat, and the compensation for their time is crap, then they will do their level best to fulfill those expectations.
In summary, ethical behavior on the part of a company is directly opposed to profits. Given our societal attitude to capitalism, this will continue to create the kinds of behavior we have seen in the last three decades. In order to fix the problem, capitalism has to go. The big mystery is what do we replace it with?
why should you be protected if you're a criminal? What's the reasoning. Stop committing crimes.
Because if there was a way to know in advance who the criminals are, getting the warrants would be trivial, even for large numbers of them. Your entire point is that it should be permitted for agencies to go on "fishing expeditions". That is exactly the kind of government behavior that our constitution forbids, and with good reason.
The simplest counter argument I have is that drug use *shouldn't be illegal*, so what is and is not criminal seems to be up for debate, so giving the government wholesale powers of enforcement for what many believe shouldn't even be crimes is just begging for trouble. What happens when tomorrow our government declares that being a democrat is illegal? Think that sounds ridiculous? I believe Joseph McCarthy proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that this a is a very real possibility. Every time we grant the government *any* new powers, they take one step closer to the same status as the Taliban. Remember that when you want to give these agencies powers they never had before. The only thing that would stop a president Trump from doing half the crazy things he says he will do, is the fact that our constitution expressly prohibits him from getting away with it, even if he is elected president.
What is with all these requests for data without a warrant? If they have a legitimate request for access, it will be very easy for them to get a warrant. The only reason I can think of to want warrantless access is to circumvent constitutional protections.
You are absolutely right in that many, many companies are locked into Microsoft in a severe way, but they have broguht it on themselves through their own incompetence. To explain, let me describe a situation I dealt with not that long ago. A company I was working with was releasing a new internal tool. That new tool would be needed in operations, and all of the management team would need to learn how to use it.
Given that, there are several ways to approach making this particular tool. The tool required extensive interaction with a large database to provide information and record inventory. Given that, there are several front end options, and several back end options. For the back end, option 1 is to deploy database software to existing hardware infrastructure and see if it will be sufficient to the task. Some basic testing would be appropriate to this approach to verify that the hardware and software could handle the load. This was not done, and the system got into production before it was discovered that in spite of Microsoft's assurances, the Windows server based database machines couldn't handle the load, so they had to buy all new hardware, and consequently all new windows licenses, as the database was mssql. Way to lock themselves in on that one. Turns out no other database software was even considered and since they didn't do due diligence, they had no idea it wouldn't work as planned. The better option would have been to at least do same comparison testing between DB options to find out which ones could perform under this type of load. An even better option would have been to limit their selections to only DBs that were platform independent, and could be run on multiple different OS'. That wasn't done either. All down the line it was Microsoft or nothing, without even a look at the alternatives.
All that pales to the front end idiocy. On the front end, you have several options as well. You could lock in to any of a number of specific OS' by compiling to a specific platform. This is what was done. Again Microsoft was selected without even considering or evaluating any alternatives. The far better solution would have been to go with a browser based application that could have been 100% platform agnostic. That way they could have stuck with Microsoft as the operating system in the future, but were by no means tied to it for the sake of this application.
When it is all said and done, because this application is tied to windows, the company is committed to an annual cost of $10M in licensing fees to Microsoft just to support this one application (All of the terminals turned out to be dedicated to this one application because their placement in ops rendered them too awkward to use for anything else). That amounts to 5% of the IT operating budget in perpetuity because they chose to lock themselves to Microsoft. Had they gone with the browser option, they could have reduced that cost to just $2M annually (the cost of the DB server licensing).
When I talk about incompetent IT management, that is what I mean. Continued ignorance and perpetual vendor lock in in this day and age are unforgivable failings of IT management in any company. The only reason it is not the basis for a significant number of shareholder lawsuits is that shareholders understand the technology even less than the IT management does.
Linux is still not a credible replacement desktop OS short of simple browsing and media playback.
Last I checked, browsing, media playback and games were what 85% of the population uses PCs for. That is why tablets and smart-phones are a thing and PCs are slowly loosing market share. In a very real sense, Android is the coming of Linux on the desktop...
Schematic capture, FPGA design and simulation tools. Multichannel audio and video editing.
Funny you should mention those. I use gEda quite regularly. Although it is far and gone away from being as powerful as Orcad, it is also free (as in beer), and I am one more tool chain away from MS. The reduced feature set doesn't slow me down enough to justify the yearly maintenance contract.
All of the FPGA / ASIC design tools I have ever used have been *NIX only tools. Mostly HPUX, but more recently Debian and BSD based, but easy as hell to port to other flavors. I have heard there are windows versions of much of it, but why would I care?
Last I had heard, pretty much all serious video editing was done on MACs, and not Windows based systems. From my experiences with several windows based Video editing hardware and software setups, I can easily understand why that is.
As someone else mentioned above, If you insist on backing yourself into a corner with particular design suites, or are simply incapable of learning different software to perform the same task then yes, you will be locked in to whatever vendors have managed to get their claws in you. As an independent contractor, I can underbid most competitors by virtue of having almost zero tools costs. I specify in all bids the additional costs associated with toolchain requirements and let my customers make the decision. Some of them insist on a particular toolset, most go with the cheapest alternative. The key to that flexibility is being able to pick up whatever tool is needed and learn to use it fast (I don't get paid to learn, I get paid to create).
Hulk Hogan and Peter Thiel are true American heroes.
Every time I read that, I get a completely different vibe and connotation off of it. Truly excellent statement, I genuinely can't tell if you're for or against the dynamic duo, if you are being sarcastic or reverent, or if American heroes is supposed to be a good thing or a bad thing.
It is open sourced and would get forked in a New York minute. People have already talked a good line about another Debian fork just to avoid systemd (although I have yet to see more than just empty rhetoric).
Even systemd has not been forced on anyone. There is absolutely nothing preventing someone from continuing to use upstart with Ubuntu, or building something better on their own. The reality is that the things about systemd that people dont like are not enough to cause them to do actual work to change, so they live with it. Some of the more savvy ones have taken an active role in helping maintain systemd so they can modify the behavior to better suit their particular desires.
I actually wish someone would hurry up and complete a Debian fork without systemd just so that we could finally get some idea of the actual popularity (plus we could get side by side comparisons of features and performance), all we have right now is FUD and rhetoric.
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Wow, it took you less than a day to change from "the people won" to "voters are idiots."
The people didn't win, they just think they did. In the long run, nothing of consequence will change. In the short run, some jobs will be lost, a fairly sizable amount of money has already been lost. In an aggregate sense, The people of Britain just voted to club their financial selves over the head with a 2x4. The folks who had very little money to lose will pay (statistically speaking) with their jobs and their very livelihood. In the end, its still the same breed of scumbag running things, even if it is a different set of faces, and you'd better bet that none of those so called leaders is in it for anyones well being except their own. If they were really in it for the good of the people, they would not be looking at polls to figure out whether they are doing a good job or not...
Ever think that's because advocates of nullification are generally assholes that want to make trials to be about _them_ for egocentric reasons instead of the actual court case?
Every trial should be looked at as an opportunity for Jury Nullification. It is one of the very few opportunities the people have left to have their voice heard in any meaningful way. I think it is appropriate that any group of 12 citizens may nullify a law related to a case they have been asked to hear, and any judge that truly believes in democracy should advise their jurists that this is an option before the start of any trial.
Actually, most of the "impteen million apps" are crap, even for those that have tried them. If you have ten active users of your "app", and Billions of people don't want / need you have a very small niche market. That makes it more or less "crap" for the rest of the billions of people.
When people are buying a phone, they care about the apps in two regards. They care the total number of apps available for that platform, even if it doesn't mean anything practical, and they care that the specific apps they want are available. When windows phone only had 1/10th of the apps that android and ios had, *that* is what killed the platform, even if almost every single person wouldn't have been able to identify an app that they wanted that wasnt available on WP. It wasn't what was specifically missing that concerned them, it was the potential to be missing the next great app(TM) that convinced people to avoid WP and get an android instead. The dearth of apps killed Blackberry, and it is in the process of killing WP.
I don't give a shit about the milions of apps on the different app stores. You don't need a rich ecosystem of apps, you need a small number of useful apps.
You need the whole gamut, because one persons useful apps are another persons garbage. Just because you have no desire to use any of the other umpteen million apps doesn't mean that other people don't want them. Blackberry had the same opinion of the cornucopia of "useless apps" that you do, and their products represented that market viewpoint. The market taught Blackberry otherwise, and it damn near killed the company learning the lesson.
In short, the data just doesn't support your argument
I've had far worse experience with my android phones and the carriers seem to never want to update/support them. Flag as Inappropriate
And I have had every iphone update ever attempted brick the phone. The last time, I had the guys at the genius bar do the update with the whole store watching. The only difference was they bricked the phone so badly it couldn't be restored to factory default and had to be replaced under warranty. They were good about it, but it doesn't change the fact that the only way I have ever effectively updated an iphone is by replacing it.
Looks like I'm gonna be limited to the iPhone SE when I finally upgrade off my 5.
I love how it doesn't even appear to have occurred to him to buy anything other than an apple product. Talk about brainwashed in the extreme. I can't in good conscience recommend anything Microsoft or Blackberry right now, but in two years? who knows, somebody might find Jesus between now and then and release a truly exceptional product.
How do you deal with tickets that are purchased by entities then given away promotionally - think radio station contents and other giveaways? This solution is not viable - the only viable solution is to make the criminal penalties for scalping tickets so powerful to deter anyone from trying make money...
Simple. Larger *certified* entities like a station that *are authorized* to do so, may purchase tickets that do not yet have a name associated with them.
You could do this with individuals as well. Allow any given ticket to be transferred to a new ticket holder, but limit transfers so that a single individual may not transfer more than 5 tickets per year. There are lots of ways to enforce these types of things. The only reason no one has is because ticket scalping is a fundamental outgrowth of capitalism. Supply and Demand in its purest form. Anyone who doesn't like the logical outcome that we have now, should be sat down and shown how the stock market is functioning in exactly the same way, to exactly the same effect, only with several order of magnitude more money at stake.
Neither is it among the top 3, regardless which metric you use: lines of code produced per year, numbers of developers sought for projects, amount of money earned or payed in using it.
I'm sorry, but you're just plain wrong. Most language popularity lists use existing jobs and job postings that require language XYZ to determine how popular they are. Most of the remaining lists that use surveys instead, miss entire blocks of programmers who are writing embedded code because they are not classified as programmers, but embedded engineers, FPGA designers, etc... Some of the better lists do manage to include Firmware engineers in their surveys, but by and large they miss the embedded space altogether.
That is a critical failure because there are as many lines of code written for embedded systems as there are for all of the remainder of the software realm combined. Embedded code is in everything, and all of it is C. It is so ubiquitous in the embedded space that a job listing for an embedded engineer will not even specify the C language as a requirement. If you know even a small fraction of the other requirements, you will know C. For example, the Freescale line of coldfire processors all use a tool called codewarrior. This requirement is what will show up on the job posting. The fact that codewarrior uses only C is not mentioned, nor does it even need to be mentioned in the job posting. If you know codewarrior, you know C. C has been ported to every instruction set that has ever been invented, and there are more C compilers in the world than there are Java, C++ and Python compilers / interpreters combined.
The IEEE keeps a list of the top languages, and their list includes the embedded space which is ignored by these other lists. C and C++ take the #2 and #3 spots, which accurately reflects the underlying reality.
God forbid my parents see me naked
Or my wife... That could end my marriage
Clinton is just as much (possibly more) a big business shill as Trump.
Trump is pro business in the he wants limited liability sense
Clinton is pro business in the already sold out to specific ones sense
Sometimes people fuck things up. If one guy packing shit in a warehouse screws up one time, you want to dismantle an entire company?
I have a great deal of experience both working on a line, and as a supervisor, and I can tell you without doubt that properly trained people do not make mistakes at that level. Mistakes like this happen because an entire series of events, that should have happened, didn't happen. A properly constructed process ensures that all of the critical paths to failure are covered multiple ways with validations in place. Failure to train is one of those basic steps, as is failure to hold your management accountable. If you want a company to ensure a proper process, then yes, I think it acceptable to burn a company to the ground for failing to put in place *any* of the dozens of procedures they should have had to prevent this kind of thing. That kind of behavior (and getting away with it) out of any company needs to be immediately squashed with a violent fury, because anything short of that does not change behaviors.
WTF? She was sitting in the passenger seat of a parked car! [wikipedia.org]
She claimed the car was parked. The fact that she spilled a very significant percentage of the liquid on herself strongly suggests otherwise.
Try this simple experiment. Put on a pair of sweat pants, place a 10Oz cup of water with a fast food lid on it between your legs. Now try to open that lid and see where the water goes, and how much. You will find that even opening the cup fairly violently the water will not reach your genitals. Now try again with the cup squarely in your crotch. For grins, now try it in a moving vehicle. You will find the facts strongly suggest, but fall just short of outright proof, that the litigant lied under oath. That is why the judge ultimately found her to be 20% responsible, and reduced the award from $200,000 to $160,000 (for damages, not punitive). My personal belief is that the car was still moving when she tried to open the cup. Had she not been 79 years old, this surely should have qualified her for a Darwin honorable mention.
That having been said, both parties engaged in questionable behavior, and both parties should have been made to face the consequences of stupid behavior.
Amazon can just pass the blame to the 3rd party staffing firms at the shipping centers
That is precisely why we need to end limited liability shielding. Forget about what Amazon did or did not know. Make it their job to know, and then they are culpable when something happens because they either knew and didn't care, or didn't know and should have. Get rid of this idiotic gray area of "we didn't know"
Our legal system long ago had to solve this same basic problem, and the solution was simplicity itself: Ignorance of the law is not a defense.
There is ground shipping to/through AK... but not everywhere, and not all year
And even ground shipped hazardous materials need to be properly labeled. In his case, the labeling should have included the designation ORMD (other regulated material), which would have precluded the transportation company from putting the item on a plane. There are far too many people out there who think you can just put anything you want in a box and ship it. That is why, when you bring a pre-packed box to a carrier to ship it, you have to play 20 questions. The Carriers learned long ago that the general public does not understand hazmat shipping, so packages have to be screened at the point of entry. In order to get one of the carriers to accept a hazardous package without proper hazmat paperwork, you would either have to have an account with the carrier, or lie to the customer counter person who accepts your package for shipment. Both of those situations would require the individual to know that what they were doing was prohibited.
The important figure would be number of violations per 100,000 packages shipped. Not raw number of packages in violation.
That number needs to be further refined to the number of violations per number of hazardous packages shipped. i.e. what percentage of the time were they doing it right, and what percentage of the time were they doing it wrong. Hazardous packages make up only a tiny fraction of Amazons business, so you shouldn't count any of the non-hazardous packages in the determination. When you do that, you will discover that Amazon is improperly shipping hazardous materials 100% of the time. That is because hazardous shipping is expensive and restrictive. That $5 bottle of drain cleaner now costs $50 when it has to be shipped as a hazardous material, and Amazon isn't willing to charge that much. The standard punishment in the shipping industry is for a shipper to be blacklisted for a year after three strikes. The only reason no one holds Amazon to this standard is because Amazon makes up 20% of UPS shipping business. Cutting them off for a year would not only kill Amazon, but would do serious damage to UPS as well. The FAA fine was surely a compromise between UPS and the FAA (possibly including input form OSHA as well).
How is the situation different?
It is different because the litigant made the situation worse by placing a container, known to her to be filled with a dangerous liquid, between her legs while trying to operate a moving vehicle. This situation, while not technically illegal, was in violation of the spirit of reckless driving laws.
The accident in question would not have happened if either party had been following the safety manuals for the equipment they were operating. While that does not exonerate the hot coffee provider, it should not reward the litigant either. The appropriate outcome would have been for the judge to award the litigant 0 dollars, then fine the coffee provider the 2.7M for safety violations. In that way both failures are acknowledged and punished appropriately.
"Hey, you! We're gonna take 10% of your worth because one of your hundreds of thousands of hires fucked up doing a couple of the millions of things your company does every day!"
The problem with that line of thinking is three-fold.
First, it *is* the corporate officers (as well as management all the way up and down) to make sure that the employees are properly trained to do their jobs. The vast majority of times an employee screws up, its because they weren't trained to do the job properly (or at all in some cases).
This is a symptom of point 2: Shareholders (including the CEO) are not liable for the liabilities of the company, even in criminal cases. This gives the shareholders impunity to not care what the CEO does as long as it brings in more money. You want to ensure that CEOs pay closer attention to what is going on, end limited liability, and ensure that the shareholders have a reason to breathe down the neck of the CEO for everything that might get them sued. To those that think ending limited liability would be the end of the world, I would suggest that people with extra money are always going to chase the best interest rates. Business will continue, just the investors will be a whole lot more careful about where they put their money. This kind of limited liability would have killed SCO instantly, as the likes of Microsoft and others would not have been willing to risk any investment with all of the downside risk SCO had.
Third, the inept employee is largely a symptom of wage inequality. Why would some peon on the bottom rung be willing to go the extra steps when they know that their extra efforts wil benefit the corporate officers and the shareholders far more than it benefits themselves? Employees used to be loyal to the company because the company appeared to do things that were beneficial for the employees. More recently, companies have taken the overriding approach of figuring out how to make absolutely certain that every employee is expendable and replaceable. That cuts both ways, if an employee know they are replaceable at the drop of a hat, and the compensation for their time is crap, then they will do their level best to fulfill those expectations.
In summary, ethical behavior on the part of a company is directly opposed to profits. Given our societal attitude to capitalism, this will continue to create the kinds of behavior we have seen in the last three decades. In order to fix the problem, capitalism has to go. The big mystery is what do we replace it with?
why should you be protected if you're a criminal? What's the reasoning. Stop committing crimes.
Because if there was a way to know in advance who the criminals are, getting the warrants would be trivial, even for large numbers of them. Your entire point is that it should be permitted for agencies to go on "fishing expeditions". That is exactly the kind of government behavior that our constitution forbids, and with good reason.
The simplest counter argument I have is that drug use *shouldn't be illegal*, so what is and is not criminal seems to be up for debate, so giving the government wholesale powers of enforcement for what many believe shouldn't even be crimes is just begging for trouble. What happens when tomorrow our government declares that being a democrat is illegal? Think that sounds ridiculous? I believe Joseph McCarthy proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that this a is a very real possibility. Every time we grant the government *any* new powers, they take one step closer to the same status as the Taliban. Remember that when you want to give these agencies powers they never had before. The only thing that would stop a president Trump from doing half the crazy things he says he will do, is the fact that our constitution expressly prohibits him from getting away with it, even if he is elected president.
What is with all these requests for data without a warrant? If they have a legitimate request for access, it will be very easy for them to get a warrant. The only reason I can think of to want warrantless access is to circumvent constitutional protections.
You are absolutely right in that many, many companies are locked into Microsoft in a severe way, but they have broguht it on themselves through their own incompetence. To explain, let me describe a situation I dealt with not that long ago. A company I was working with was releasing a new internal tool. That new tool would be needed in operations, and all of the management team would need to learn how to use it.
Given that, there are several ways to approach making this particular tool. The tool required extensive interaction with a large database to provide information and record inventory. Given that, there are several front end options, and several back end options. For the back end, option 1 is to deploy database software to existing hardware infrastructure and see if it will be sufficient to the task. Some basic testing would be appropriate to this approach to verify that the hardware and software could handle the load. This was not done, and the system got into production before it was discovered that in spite of Microsoft's assurances, the Windows server based database machines couldn't handle the load, so they had to buy all new hardware, and consequently all new windows licenses, as the database was mssql. Way to lock themselves in on that one. Turns out no other database software was even considered and since they didn't do due diligence, they had no idea it wouldn't work as planned. The better option would have been to at least do same comparison testing between DB options to find out which ones could perform under this type of load. An even better option would have been to limit their selections to only DBs that were platform independent, and could be run on multiple different OS'. That wasn't done either. All down the line it was Microsoft or nothing, without even a look at the alternatives.
All that pales to the front end idiocy. On the front end, you have several options as well. You could lock in to any of a number of specific OS' by compiling to a specific platform. This is what was done. Again Microsoft was selected without even considering or evaluating any alternatives. The far better solution would have been to go with a browser based application that could have been 100% platform agnostic. That way they could have stuck with Microsoft as the operating system in the future, but were by no means tied to it for the sake of this application.
When it is all said and done, because this application is tied to windows, the company is committed to an annual cost of $10M in licensing fees to Microsoft just to support this one application (All of the terminals turned out to be dedicated to this one application because their placement in ops rendered them too awkward to use for anything else). That amounts to 5% of the IT operating budget in perpetuity because they chose to lock themselves to Microsoft. Had they gone with the browser option, they could have reduced that cost to just $2M annually (the cost of the DB server licensing).
When I talk about incompetent IT management, that is what I mean. Continued ignorance and perpetual vendor lock in in this day and age are unforgivable failings of IT management in any company. The only reason it is not the basis for a significant number of shareholder lawsuits is that shareholders understand the technology even less than the IT management does.
Linux is still not a credible replacement desktop OS short of simple browsing and media playback.
Last I checked, browsing, media playback and games were what 85% of the population uses PCs for. That is why tablets and smart-phones are a thing and PCs are slowly loosing market share. In a very real sense, Android is the coming of Linux on the desktop...
Schematic capture, FPGA design and simulation tools. Multichannel audio and video editing.
Funny you should mention those. I use gEda quite regularly. Although it is far and gone away from being as powerful as Orcad, it is also free (as in beer), and I am one more tool chain away from MS. The reduced feature set doesn't slow me down enough to justify the yearly maintenance contract.
All of the FPGA / ASIC design tools I have ever used have been *NIX only tools. Mostly HPUX, but more recently Debian and BSD based, but easy as hell to port to other flavors. I have heard there are windows versions of much of it, but why would I care?
Last I had heard, pretty much all serious video editing was done on MACs, and not Windows based systems. From my experiences with several windows based Video editing hardware and software setups, I can easily understand why that is.
As someone else mentioned above, If you insist on backing yourself into a corner with particular design suites, or are simply incapable of learning different software to perform the same task then yes, you will be locked in to whatever vendors have managed to get their claws in you. As an independent contractor, I can underbid most competitors by virtue of having almost zero tools costs. I specify in all bids the additional costs associated with toolchain requirements and let my customers make the decision. Some of them insist on a particular toolset, most go with the cheapest alternative. The key to that flexibility is being able to pick up whatever tool is needed and learn to use it fast (I don't get paid to learn, I get paid to create).
Hulk Hogan and Peter Thiel are true American heroes.
Every time I read that, I get a completely different vibe and connotation off of it. Truly excellent statement, I genuinely can't tell if you're for or against the dynamic duo, if you are being sarcastic or reverent, or if American heroes is supposed to be a good thing or a bad thing.
Well done sir.
He's not dead yet.
True, but if this doesn't give him a massive stroke, I don't know what will.
What would stop them? Community uproar? HA!
It is open sourced and would get forked in a New York minute. People have already talked a good line about another Debian fork just to avoid systemd (although I have yet to see more than just empty rhetoric).
Even systemd has not been forced on anyone. There is absolutely nothing preventing someone from continuing to use upstart with Ubuntu, or building something better on their own. The reality is that the things about systemd that people dont like are not enough to cause them to do actual work to change, so they live with it. Some of the more savvy ones have taken an active role in helping maintain systemd so they can modify the behavior to better suit their particular desires.
I actually wish someone would hurry up and complete a Debian fork without systemd just so that we could finally get some idea of the actual popularity (plus we could get side by side comparisons of features and performance), all we have right now is FUD and rhetoric.