Once again Timothy couldn't let something by without stupid editorializing.
Very few environmentalists want us to drop off a petroleum-based economy precipitously. It will take a few years for the excess 5 billion people to die off as the population returns to what's supportable in a pre-mechanical society, and they won't go quietly. You'll find few trees and few wild animals outside of the remote Canada and Siberia.
What we want is wise use, not no use. E.g., it's better to have 30% of the car fleet using hybrid gas/electric motors with 80 MPG, not 30% of the fleet monster SUVs with <15 MPG while the idealistic zero emissions cars are <1% of the fleet because few people are willing to buy cars that can never go more than a few hundred miles.
You have the right idea, but your technology is about a decade out of date.
You can get smart cards/crypto cards or dongles that keep the keys on the card. It's *never* revealed, and all crypto is done on the card or dongle. They aren't expensive - I bought a set of 5 cards for $100, and the Linux development kit including reader was under $100.
However this system use PKIX, not OpenPGP, and the infrastructure is different.
Have you considered going with a wired solution instead of a wireless one?
I assume that the units already have cable TV. If they do, you should be able to run a cat-5 cable beside the cable coax and replace the wall plates with one that includes both a coax port and cat-5 port. You then run the cables to a centralized 10base2 switch for each building, and thence to a central switch for the complex. You shouldn't skimp on these - get hubs with real VLANs. Commodity switches still leak information between the ports.
This will initially be more expensive than tossing up some WAPs, but it will probably save you a lot of headaches down the road because you don't need to worry about people running AirSnort, or interference from common household electronics, or any other crap like that. If people really want wireless access, let them set up their own WAP, but make sure they know their access will be cut off if it's abused.
What's scary is the MPAA-knockoff patent
on
Pop-Under Ads Patented
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· Score: 2, Offtopic
What's scary isn't a patent for a pop-under ad.
It's the MPAA-inspired patent on blocking pop-under ads... a patent that exists solely to prevent you from implementing it. You WILL watch every commercial, you WILL read every popup add, you WILL navigate every site from the base page (no deep links), etc....
Depending on where you live, nothing you do will make a bit of difference. No internship or certification can compete with someone with years of experience forced into an entry level job to pay the mortgage.
What can I say, recessions suck. The only thing worse is recessions that politicians are bending over backwards to deny exist. (E.g., our governor says that we're past the worst of it, the economy is picking up... and a few pages into the paper the person in charge of the unemployment compensation/job matching agency admits that they're still overwhelmed by the unprecedented demand from thousands of people new to the system.)
P.S., I started out in similar (but localized) conditions. A major employer announced massive layoffs, and suddenly I was competing against people with years of experience. I found a job at about 2/3 of what I was discussing weeks earlier, and the entire organization was pathological. But it was a job and where they saw me putting in lots of unpaid overtime, I saw squeezing a year of experience into 6 months. Just keep repeating "this too shall pass."
You forgot your "IACATL" (I am clueless about the law.) IANAL, but this is basic business law stuff that anyone in the workforce should know.
Employees, on the job, act as agents of their employer and all email received is the property of the company. They are merely agents handling that email on behalf of their employer.
(This skips some specific situations where this isn't the case because they are clearly irrelevant in this case.)
Intel can't say 'boo' about what mail is sent to employees on their personal accounts, but it certainly has the right to restrict disruptive mail sent to its employees via the corporate email accounts. It's really no different than a former employee harassing employees in the company parking lot. (In this case it's again 'trespass,' and the protester can be arrested if he persists.)
A good rule of thumb that Katz forgot
on
Disconnecting
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· Score: 2
Katz forgot a good rule of thumb: if you have *any* flack about cancelling a service, demand a physical address and name for a followup letter and the customer server's rep's name, ID, whatever.
Then write a letter reiterating your cancellation, pointedly noting any information that the customer service rep refused to provide. Then send two copies - one in regular mail with receipt, the second registered with return receipt. You need two because many companies refuse to accept registered mail. If they do, you have the returned letter and the receipt for the unregistered letter with the same contents.
When your CC shows another charge - and many companies that make it that hard to cancel tend to be sloppy about stopping the charges, you *immediately* dispute the charge with copies of the proof that they were notified in writing.
If they do it again, you have the evidence to immediately escalate to a criminal "fradulent activity" complaint. That gives your bank the right to refuse charges, and does tend to get LEA's attention.
The final case is companies that refuse to provide even a mailing address. It's true, a few morons "accidently" hit the telephone hook and think that will make the problem go away. In that case you immediately call your own bank, report the problem properly notifying the company that you're cancelling the service, and ask them to note this in their records. Follow up with a physical letter. Then if you continue to get billed, your bank can present that letter with the notification of a disputed charge and the other company should have more 'splaining to do.
Then you file criminal complaints
on
Disconnecting
·
· Score: 3, Informative
That's really not a problem, although your own CC may not be forthcoming in providing this information unless it's clearly criminal from the beginning. (E.g., the way I "signed up" for some porn sites, for the first time in my life, while literally on a ship at sea without internet access.)
The first letter to your CC is a dispute saying that the account has been cancelled. The second, when they rebill you, is a criminal complaint of fradulent activity. This gives the bank a lot more authority to stop the charges.
It's much more complex than that. IIRC, since the end of WW2 the definition of "militia" under the Uniform Code of Military Justice (I think) was "able-bodied men between the ages of 18 and 45," basically everyone who was subject to being drafted.
Call me crazy, but I think the UCMJ (which covers all active duty and reserve military personnel) might just have a better idea about what a "well-regulated militia" needs than parttime state legislators and people with an axe to grind (on both sides).
The bottom line is that there's never been a real consensus on this issue, not if you look beyond the facile arguments.
There's one small problem with your argument, something the authors of the Constitution were well aware of and very clear about.
Who would decide what's the "legitimate press?" Why, the very government that's being challenged by the "illegitimate press" unprotected by a restricted First Amendment.
This is an intolerable conflict of interest. Some individuals may be able to avoid the temptation to suppress critical speech, but they are rare (look at the petty power exercised by most HS principals over their student newspapers) and the net result would be a huge chilling effect on every publisher.
That's why "Freedom of Press" and "Freedom of Speech" have historically covered *any* speech, oral or written, except for those items where there's specific harm caused by that speech. (E.g., slander and libel, respectively, or reasonable "time, manner and place" restrictions intended to balance First Amendment rights with other's right of peaceful enjoyment of their property and public spaces.) It doesn't matter if you have a publication in the millions, or an audience of one.
Quit feeding the trolls. MP3 files are perfectly legal - the MP3 I rip for my personal use to avoid scratching the original disc are no more illegal than the tapes I dub so I can listen to the same songs in my car. The RIAA lawyers may play dumb, but this is clearly covered as fair use.
What's illegal, maybe, is sharing those MP3 with others in your office. Or it may be legal as well - fundamentally no different than people playing their own personal CDs in a community player. This wouldn't be legal in a "commercial establishment," but the latter refers to businesses open the public such as bars and restaurants, not offices.
Reminder: P2P software should not be run on our networks... isn't an admission of guilt. It's just a reminder of corporate policy in response to a suggestion that some employees may have forgotten it.
Quick, delete your P2P software because we got a C&D order and expect to be audited RSN... is an admission of guilt.
Oscurity is greatly overrated. It's important when you're talking about *physical* security, e.g., you don't want your data center to have a big sign announcing its presence to anyone driving down the street, but almost always worthless (or worse) when you're talking about software unless it's already protected by some measure of physical security. (E.g., armed guards with orders to "shoot to kill" anyone trying to access the crypto gear without authorization.)
While there's a superficial resemblence, there's a huge difference between the old oscillatory models and this one.
In the old models, the universe collapsed from many billions of light years across (or even larger - we really have no idea of how big the universe is) back to the singularity of the big bang.
In this model, the universes (plural) only have to move a few millimeters. The big bang occurs when the branes separate (we're in one brane, the other universe is in another), and the big crunch occurs when they collapse again. The point of intersection can even travel faster than the speed of light without violating relativity - it's okin to the scan of a lighthouse beam against a wall a very long distance away.
There are two parts to this problem. The first is somebody else impersonating you, something biometrics can address.
The second is your right to remain anonymous. Or, at least, to avoid having information from one transaction being brought into an unrelated one. We're seeing this now (e.g., many insurance companies now raise rates for drivers with bad credit ratings, but you can get a "bad" rating if you're a careful shopper and visit many local car dealerships who (technically illegal, but common practice) run a credit check on everyone who seems to be a serious buyer.
Neither of those examples is either "anonymous" or "aggregate."
As I've told some of the marketing droids so confident that they would "never" misuse information gathered by shopping cards, if they truly respected my concerns there would be a basket of shopper cards at the service counter and I could just grab one and walk away. They could collect all of the information they wanted about me... except who I am. (That's also why I pay with cash, etc.)
But when they want me to fill out a form, then it's not anonymous. It may be pseudonymous (if I use a bogus name and address), but that's not the same thing as anonymous.
As for aggregate data, that's what the stores collect when they ask you for your ZIP code and cross-correlate purchases, ZIP code and store location. It would be the number of people in a square mile (or greater) watching HBO at 10 PM on Sunday night. It's not something tied to your individual PVR.
SDTS is a superset of ISO-8821. (8821 specifies how the data is formatted, SDTS specifies what it means.)
The dataset I have is the 1:100,000 DLG data, but I don't seem to have recorded the URL of the website. But I definitely recall the data being described as "TIGR", not "TIGER."
This isn't a direct answer to your question, but the USGS has made its TIGR data set available for FREE download. This data is dated (looking at some of the places I've lived, it looks like it's about 15-20 years old now), but if you're learning how to work with GIS data it's good enough.
And did I mention it's FREE? This is a non-trivial concern - I'm pretty sure this is the dataset that Bruce Perens bought a number of years ago to turn over to OSS projects, at a cost of something like $2000. But now you can download it from their website.
If you go this way, you'll need at least 16 GB for the data. You'll also need to write your own ISO-8821 decoder. It's not too hard - it's not even hard to write tools that can read the compressed tar balls directly. But knowing what to do with that data is another matter....
Real has Linux drivers, and I've even been able to use it to watch my secret shame (the US version of Big Bother) until they started charging for the feed.
I wouldn't describe the Linux driver as particularly good, but from what others said it isn't much worst than the Windows version. That's why I didn't pick up the MLB baseball season ticket (which would have gotten me BB for half the price advertised) I have a cable modem connection, but the quality of the image just wasn't acceptable.
There's a HUGE difference between giving a suddenly widowed employee six months to process the death of her husband, or an employee a few hours to deal with a mechanical failure of their car, and letting stuff slide indefinitely.
I'm not saying that a single mother has 6 months to find a husband and get married, but she needs to find a workable solution. Fast. Management can cut her some slack if her usual daycare provider is sick and can't take care of her kids, but can't let her constantly go home early while her coworkers all work late several times a week because her current daycare provider requires her to pick up the kid early. She needs to either find another daycare provider or another job, or some other solution (e.g., *always* being the first person in the office because she puts in her extra hours in the morning).
The best example I've ever seen of this was a blind sysadmin. He was regularly asked how he would get to work during interviews, and he told the interviewer that that was his concern, not theirs. He asked for no accomodation on that, only modest accomodations (in one-time purchases for things like text-to-speech synthesizers) required to do his actual work.
Others have already pointed out "right to work" vs "hire at will," so I'll point out your other idiocy.
An employment contract is still a contract, and equally enforceable. People sue *and win* over them all the time.
What you've overlooked is that employment contracts are rare, and only used where the person moving to a competitor will cause a lot of harm. Senior executives, TV and radio "personalities" and the like.
Working grunts rarely see employment contracts. The offer letter gives you limited protection, but usually only immediately after your employment. But as a rule most of us have no contracts, and no protection other than that required by the state.
(As an aside, some people have said that if people are fired for refusing to accept a 50% cut, they won't get unemployment benefits. I find that unlikely - you can always file the claim and if the company contests it goes before an administrative review board. They may side with the company for a mandatory 10% or 20% cut, but I doubt any board would deny benefits after a 50% cut, esp. among the lower-paid cohort.)
They announced this huge cut about one week before it took effect. No other warnings.
So why on earth would anyone not believe this is a permanent paycut? At best, they should assume that every quarter will end with a 50% pay cut since the sheep are willing to accept it. That's not a 3.8% cut, that's a 15.2% cut. Or the company may just a similar announcement every month.
The other serious problem with this plan is that "across the board cuts" are rarely fair. That person making $60k, now making $30k, is probably living close to paycheck-to-paycheck. If they're lucky, they might have a one-month buffer which will now be cut in half without warning. They shouldn't have a cut of more than 10-15%.
On the other hand, people earning more than 100k should have more of a buffer, and can handle larger paycuts. And it goes without saying that senior management (which usually has forms of compensation besides salary alone) should be working for free.
I'm struggling to come to terms with 13 million square feet of office space.
That's substantially over a square kilometer.
It's just under a half-square mile. (10 city blocks by 5 city blocks.)
Of course, the real issue isn't the amount of office space they need, it's that incomprehensible 25% of revenue going into overhead. Not production, but overhead. That's one central office person for every three people who actually produce the product or directly support those who do.
Close. The goal with abstraction is that you can usually swap one object for another with a single change to the source file. You shouldn't have to make any other changes in the source code. You choose the object precisely because of the different costs of different types of operations.
This is much clearer in Java than in C++, since the interface is distinct from the class that implements it. E.g., in Java I can specify that I want a "SortedSet" interface (which describes the operations that are valid on the object - and which isn't easily changed), and the constructor specifies that I want it actually implemented with a "TreeSet."
Slashdot Mirror
Once again Timothy couldn't let something by without stupid editorializing.
Very few environmentalists want us to drop off a petroleum-based economy precipitously. It will take a few years for the excess 5 billion people to die off as the population returns to what's supportable in a pre-mechanical society, and they won't go quietly. You'll find few trees and few wild animals outside of the remote Canada and Siberia.
What we want is wise use, not no use. E.g., it's better to have 30% of the car fleet using hybrid gas/electric motors with 80 MPG, not 30% of the fleet monster SUVs with <15 MPG while the idealistic zero emissions cars are <1% of the fleet because few people are willing to buy cars that can never go more than a few hundred miles.
You have the right idea, but your technology is about a decade out of date.
You can get smart cards/crypto cards or dongles that keep the keys on the card. It's *never* revealed, and all crypto is done on the card or dongle. They aren't expensive - I bought a set of 5 cards for $100, and the Linux development kit including reader was under $100.
However this system use PKIX, not OpenPGP, and the infrastructure is different.
Have you considered going with a wired solution instead of a wireless one?
I assume that the units already have cable TV. If they do, you should be able to run a cat-5 cable beside the cable coax and replace the wall plates with one that includes both a coax port and cat-5 port. You then run the cables to a centralized 10base2 switch for each building, and thence to a central switch for the complex. You shouldn't skimp on these - get hubs with real VLANs. Commodity switches still leak information between the ports.
This will initially be more expensive than tossing up some WAPs, but it will probably save you a lot of headaches down the road because you don't need to worry about people running AirSnort, or interference from common household electronics, or any other crap like that. If people really want wireless access, let them set up their own WAP, but make sure they know their access will be cut off if it's abused.
What's scary isn't a patent for a pop-under ad.
It's the MPAA-inspired patent on blocking pop-under ads... a patent that exists solely to prevent you from implementing it. You WILL watch every commercial, you WILL read every popup add, you WILL navigate every site from the base page (no deep links), etc....
Depending on where you live, nothing you do will make a bit of difference. No internship or certification can compete with someone with years of experience forced into an entry level job to pay the mortgage.
What can I say, recessions suck. The only thing worse is recessions that politicians are bending over backwards to deny exist. (E.g., our governor says that we're past the worst of it, the economy is picking up... and a few pages into the paper the person in charge of the unemployment compensation/job matching agency admits that they're still overwhelmed by the unprecedented demand from thousands of people new to the system.)
P.S., I started out in similar (but localized) conditions. A major employer announced massive layoffs, and suddenly I was competing against people with years of experience. I found a job at about 2/3 of what I was discussing weeks earlier, and the entire organization was pathological. But it was a job and where they saw me putting in lots of unpaid overtime, I saw squeezing a year of experience into 6 months. Just keep repeating "this too shall pass."
You forgot your "IACATL" (I am clueless about the law.) IANAL, but this is basic business law stuff that anyone in the workforce should know.
Employees, on the job, act as agents of their employer and all email received is the property of the company. They are merely agents handling that email on behalf of their employer.
(This skips some specific situations where this isn't the case because they are clearly irrelevant in this case.)
Intel can't say 'boo' about what mail is sent to employees on their personal accounts, but it certainly has the right to restrict disruptive mail sent to its employees via the corporate email accounts. It's really no different than a former employee harassing employees in the company parking lot. (In this case it's again 'trespass,' and the protester can be arrested if he persists.)
Katz forgot a good rule of thumb: if you have *any* flack about cancelling a service, demand a physical address and name for a followup letter and the customer server's rep's name, ID, whatever.
Then write a letter reiterating your cancellation, pointedly noting any information that the customer service rep refused to provide. Then send two copies - one in regular mail with receipt, the second registered with return receipt. You need two because many companies refuse to accept registered mail. If they do, you have the returned letter and the receipt for the unregistered letter with the same contents.
When your CC shows another charge - and many companies that make it that hard to cancel tend to be sloppy about stopping the charges, you *immediately* dispute the charge with copies of the proof that they were notified in writing.
If they do it again, you have the evidence to immediately escalate to a criminal "fradulent activity" complaint. That gives your bank the right to refuse charges, and does tend to get LEA's attention.
The final case is companies that refuse to provide even a mailing address. It's true, a few morons "accidently" hit the telephone hook and think that will make the problem go away. In that case you immediately call your own bank, report the problem properly notifying the company that you're cancelling the service, and ask them to note this in their records. Follow up with a physical letter. Then if you continue to get billed, your bank can present that letter with the notification of a disputed charge and the other company should have more 'splaining to do.
That's really not a problem, although your own CC may not be forthcoming in providing this information unless it's clearly criminal from the beginning. (E.g., the way I "signed up" for some porn sites, for the first time in my life, while literally on a ship at sea without internet access.)
The first letter to your CC is a dispute saying that the account has been cancelled. The second, when they rebill you, is a criminal complaint of fradulent activity. This gives the bank a lot more authority to stop the charges.
It's much more complex than that. IIRC, since the end of WW2 the definition of "militia" under the Uniform Code of Military Justice (I think) was "able-bodied men between the ages of 18 and 45," basically everyone who was subject to being drafted.
Call me crazy, but I think the UCMJ (which covers all active duty and reserve military personnel) might just have a better idea about what a "well-regulated militia" needs than parttime state legislators and people with an axe to grind (on both sides).
The bottom line is that there's never been a real consensus on this issue, not if you look beyond the facile arguments.
There's one small problem with your argument, something the authors of the Constitution were well aware of and very clear about.
Who would decide what's the "legitimate press?" Why, the very government that's being challenged by the "illegitimate press" unprotected by a restricted First Amendment.
This is an intolerable conflict of interest. Some individuals may be able to avoid the temptation to suppress critical speech, but they are rare (look at the petty power exercised by most HS principals over their student newspapers) and the net result would be a huge chilling effect on every publisher.
That's why "Freedom of Press" and "Freedom of Speech" have historically covered *any* speech, oral or written, except for those items where there's specific harm caused by that speech. (E.g., slander and libel, respectively, or reasonable "time, manner and place" restrictions intended to balance First Amendment rights with other's right of peaceful enjoyment of their property and public spaces.) It doesn't matter if you have a publication in the millions, or an audience of one.
Quit feeding the trolls. MP3 files are perfectly legal - the MP3 I rip for my personal use to avoid scratching the original disc are no more illegal than the tapes I dub so I can listen to the same songs in my car. The RIAA lawyers may play dumb, but this is clearly covered as fair use.
What's illegal, maybe, is sharing those MP3 with others in your office. Or it may be legal as well - fundamentally no different than people playing their own personal CDs in a community player. This wouldn't be legal in a "commercial establishment," but the latter refers to businesses open the public such as bars and restaurants, not offices.
Reminder: P2P software should not be run on our networks... isn't an admission of guilt. It's just a reminder of corporate policy in response to a suggestion that some employees may have forgotten it.
Quick, delete your P2P software because we got a C&D order and expect to be audited RSN... is an admission of guilt.
Oscurity is greatly overrated. It's important when you're talking about *physical* security, e.g., you don't want your data center to have a big sign announcing its presence to anyone driving down the street, but almost always worthless (or worse) when you're talking about software unless it's already protected by some measure of physical security. (E.g., armed guards with orders to "shoot to kill" anyone trying to access the crypto gear without authorization.)
While there's a superficial resemblence, there's a huge difference between the old oscillatory models and this one.
In the old models, the universe collapsed from many billions of light years across (or even larger - we really have no idea of how big the universe is) back to the singularity of the big bang.
In this model, the universes (plural) only have to move a few millimeters. The big bang occurs when the branes separate (we're in one brane, the other universe is in another), and the big crunch occurs when they collapse again. The point of intersection can even travel faster than the speed of light without violating relativity - it's okin to the scan of a lighthouse beam against a wall a very long distance away.
There are two parts to this problem. The first is somebody else impersonating you, something biometrics can address.
The second is your right to remain anonymous. Or, at least, to avoid having information from one transaction being brought into an unrelated one. We're seeing this now (e.g., many insurance companies now raise rates for drivers with bad credit ratings, but you can get a "bad" rating if you're a careful shopper and visit many local car dealerships who (technically illegal, but common practice) run a credit check on everyone who seems to be a serious buyer.
Neither of those examples is either "anonymous" or "aggregate."
As I've told some of the marketing droids so confident that they would "never" misuse information gathered by shopping cards, if they truly respected my concerns there would be a basket of shopper cards at the service counter and I could just grab one and walk away. They could collect all of the information they wanted about me... except who I am. (That's also why I pay with cash, etc.)
But when they want me to fill out a form, then it's not anonymous. It may be pseudonymous (if I use a bogus name and address), but that's not the same thing as anonymous.
As for aggregate data, that's what the stores collect when they ask you for your ZIP code and cross-correlate purchases, ZIP code and store location. It would be the number of people in a square mile (or greater) watching HBO at 10 PM on Sunday night. It's not something tied to your individual PVR.
SDTS is a superset of ISO-8821. (8821 specifies how the data is formatted, SDTS specifies what it means.)
The dataset I have is the 1:100,000 DLG data, but I don't seem to have recorded the URL of the website. But I definitely recall the data being described as "TIGR", not "TIGER."
You might also want to look into PostGIS. It's a set of extensions to PostgreSQL so that the later understands shape files, etc.
Their site should also have pointers to some projects that have successfully used the software.
This isn't a direct answer to your question, but the USGS has made its TIGR data set available for FREE download. This data is dated (looking at some of the places I've lived, it looks like it's about 15-20 years old now), but if you're learning how to work with GIS data it's good enough.
And did I mention it's FREE? This is a non-trivial concern - I'm pretty sure this is the dataset that Bruce Perens bought a number of years ago to turn over to OSS projects, at a cost of something like $2000. But now you can download it from their website.
If you go this way, you'll need at least 16 GB for the data. You'll also need to write your own ISO-8821 decoder. It's not too hard - it's not even hard to write tools that can read the compressed tar balls directly. But knowing what to do with that data is another matter....
Real has Linux drivers, and I've even been able to use it to watch my secret shame (the US version of Big Bother) until they started charging for the feed.
I wouldn't describe the Linux driver as particularly good, but from what others said it isn't much worst than the Windows version. That's why I didn't pick up the MLB baseball season ticket (which would have gotten me BB for half the price advertised) I have a cable modem connection, but the quality of the image just wasn't acceptable.
Please, get a grip!
There's a HUGE difference between giving a suddenly widowed employee six months to process the death of her husband, or an employee a few hours to deal with a mechanical failure of their car, and letting stuff slide indefinitely.
I'm not saying that a single mother has 6 months to find a husband and get married, but she needs to find a workable solution. Fast. Management can cut her some slack if her usual daycare provider is sick and can't take care of her kids, but can't let her constantly go home early while her coworkers all work late several times a week because her current daycare provider requires her to pick up the kid early. She needs to either find another daycare provider or another job, or some other solution (e.g., *always* being the first person in the office because she puts in her extra hours in the morning).
The best example I've ever seen of this was a blind sysadmin. He was regularly asked how he would get to work during interviews, and he told the interviewer that that was his concern, not theirs. He asked for no accomodation on that, only modest accomodations (in one-time purchases for things like text-to-speech synthesizers) required to do his actual work.
Others have already pointed out "right to work" vs "hire at will," so I'll point out your other idiocy.
An employment contract is still a contract, and equally enforceable. People sue *and win* over them all the time.
What you've overlooked is that employment contracts are rare, and only used where the person moving to a competitor will cause a lot of harm. Senior executives, TV and radio "personalities" and the like.
Working grunts rarely see employment contracts. The offer letter gives you limited protection, but usually only immediately after your employment. But as a rule most of us have no contracts, and no protection other than that required by the state.
(As an aside, some people have said that if people are fired for refusing to accept a 50% cut, they won't get unemployment benefits. I find that unlikely - you can always file the claim and if the company contests it goes before an administrative review board. They may side with the company for a mandatory 10% or 20% cut, but I doubt any board would deny benefits after a 50% cut, esp. among the lower-paid cohort.)
They announced this huge cut about one week before it took effect. No other warnings.
So why on earth would anyone not believe this is a permanent paycut? At best, they should assume that every quarter will end with a 50% pay cut since the sheep are willing to accept it. That's not a 3.8% cut, that's a 15.2% cut. Or the company may just a similar announcement every month.
The other serious problem with this plan is that "across the board cuts" are rarely fair. That person making $60k, now making $30k, is probably living close to paycheck-to-paycheck. If they're lucky, they might have a one-month buffer which will now be cut in half without warning. They shouldn't have a cut of more than 10-15%.
On the other hand, people earning more than 100k should have more of a buffer, and can handle larger paycuts. And it goes without saying that senior management (which usually has forms of compensation besides salary alone) should be working for free.
I'm struggling to come to terms with 13 million square feet of office space.
That's substantially over a square kilometer.
It's just under a half-square mile. (10 city blocks by 5 city blocks.)
Of course, the real issue isn't the amount of office space they need, it's that incomprehensible 25% of revenue going into overhead. Not production, but overhead. That's one central office person for every three people who actually produce the product or directly support those who do.
Close. The goal with abstraction is that you can usually swap one object for another with a single change to the source file. You shouldn't have to make any other changes in the source code. You choose the object precisely because of the different costs of different types of operations.
This is much clearer in Java than in C++, since the interface is distinct from the class that implements it. E.g., in Java I can specify that I want a "SortedSet" interface (which describes the operations that are valid on the object - and which isn't easily changed), and the constructor specifies that I want it actually implemented with a "TreeSet."