Elsewhere in this thread, it's pointed out that you shouldn't have to be an expert in crash testing to be able to buy a car that's safe. I tend to agree. While I see your point about PHBs and throwing money at problems, I've also reached the stage in life where I have (some) money and little enough time to futz around with doing everything from scratch. When I was a kid, I personally, carefully, expertly assembled every round of ammunition I shot; nowadays I'm likely to grab a box off 9's at the sporting goods store and go have some fun. So what about the instant case?
I have the same attitude about crypto. I recognize I need an encrypted USB device but I also have a life. So I studied a bit, enough to make an informed decision, and bought one of
these.
I never saw too much crap like that back in the day. The response was simply for the object of the prank to order any random group of footballers to fix the problem. Said group would fix the problem and then proceed to figure out who had caused the problem and beat the shit out of them. (Unless, of course, they were the ones who originally did it. In that case, they'd walk away chastised and the situation was over.)
When the rules of polite personal interaction are violated, it's best to be mindful of the way things can escalate.
(Note that a U.S.-centric view is presented henceforth.)
Income is taxed when earned. Income includes not just dollars but anything of value, including in-game items. If the IRS were going to be consistent, in-game earnings would already be forcing gamers to file horrendously complex returns and pay lots more taxes. It hasn't happened yet simply because it's a terrific pain in the ass and it's not yet a big enough revenue-loser to inspire the IRS to jump in (or inspire Congress to force the IRS to jump in).
If it was written for a U.S. audience, the post above is nonsense, through and through. YMMV in other countries. Please mod it down to the basement where it belongs.
In my experience, if you red shirt your kid (keep him out of school as long as possible so that he's older and bigger than his classmates and has an advantage in sports) then you do more harm than good. He gets his license first, so he's got more chances to be the drunk driver that kills his passengers. He turns 18 long before high school is done, so he has more chances to go to jail for statutory rape for what he does with his sophomore girlfriend.
As counter-intuitive as it seems, I say put 'em in school as early as you can.
My take on this thing is that experience can't be taught. We can't stop kids from doing things we now know were stupid. The best parents can do is instill in their children the ideals and skills necessary to handle those dangers when they arise. Too many parents fall back on "just say no" and "zero tolerance"; those things don't work. If someone is truly worried about the effects of violent games on children, then banning the games from the house is stupid and way too late. The conversations should have started years ago, when you're watching a Bugs Bunny marathon with your very little kids. *That's* the time (and Bugs gives you plenty of opportunities) to discuss the difference between real violence and make believe. That's the time to assure yourself that your kid has their head on straight enough to know the difference.
What bugs me about so much of the child-rearing I see is that people try to prohibit bad things. That only works while the parent is in the room. Parents should anticipate and teach long before the need arises to prohibit. Then they should trust that their kids got the point and won't screw up too bad while gaining their own experience, which just happens to be the only experience they'll ever actually benefit from.
The failure to teach is bad parenting. The failure to trust is disrespectful. And people that can do neither shouldn't have kids.
Pardon me while I book my return ticket from Never-Never Land. I don't quite know how I got here...
That's not a troll, really. The most obvious and ageless example is sex. We did as much as we could as soon as we could get away with it. Now, as hypocrytical, older parents, we can't stand the concept of our precious little darlings doing the nasty at... well... whatever age it was that we first wanted to. (Actual age citation omitted so that I don't draw too much negative response. God knows that the ages of kids getting naked and freaky on their webcams is sufficiently low that it may never be mentioned in polite company; adults just don't want to hear about that stuff.)
It's the same for alcohol. We got drunk on our ass at 16, most of us got away with it, and we think we were *special* and could handle it. Our kids? Those morons couldn't handle a sip of ceremonial wine before they turn 21.
Video games. Driving fast. Ditching school. Going out in the woods with some dynamite and blowing shit up. (OK, that last one was pretty personal, I guess.) No matter the subject, we simply don't think our kids can do the things we did. We're hypocrites. All parents are and always have been.
Adults have no respect for children so we treat them differently than we still think we should have been treated when we were their age.
Hypocrisy and lack of respect from parents towards children? This is news? Is this surprising to anyone?
I have points at the moment but you've already been modded to 5, so I'm just going to take a moment to thank you. That reference is incredibly on-point in my life at the moment and it is, by far, the most informative and useful thing I've ever seen on the subject.
Interesting ideas, all, but access to the jet stream is a big deal requiring big bucks. I'm wondering about small projects.
When I was a kid, I got one of those big, plastic "bat" kites. (They were new on the U.S. toy market at the time, so that tells you how old I am.) I found it horrifically unstable, so I attached a tail made of torn cloth and other stuff. It was quite long and weighed several pounds, making the kite a pain to launch. Once it had gained some altitude, though, it was stable and pulled steadily. I ran out of kite twine, so I drove a stake in the ground and tied it off. Then I rooted around in the garage and found a giant spool of 100lb test fishing line. (Why we had it since it had been years since we'd lived near the Gulf Coast and gone offshore fishing, I didn't know.) I attached this new line to the kite string and let it play out. Quick as a wink, that kite was hundreds of yards high, just hanging there, pulling hard and steady. My older sis had a party that night and all the high school boys wanted to show off how manly they were, so they pulled in the kite for me. They had to work hard for over an hour, pulling it in as fast as they could, to get it to the ground. They were tired, sweaty, and pissed at me by the time they were finished.
I haven't thought about that episode in years. I wonder, though, if it would be possible to put up a fairly large kite to an altitude of just a few hundred yards and keep it aloft (semi-)long term with some sort of small wind generator hanging from it (I know that kite I launched in my youth could have held up 20 or 30 pounds, easily, once it was in the air.) and a small cable leading back to the ground. I live in a fairly mild climate and could pull it in if the weather got bad. I'm just wondering if this could produce enough energy to bank to some batteries that the exercise would be worthwhile.
I know lots of people have tried to go off the grid using power generated from small, often home-built terrestrial windmills. Because the wind at ground level is capricious, they need to feed big battery banks to tide them over the inevitable down time. I'm just wondering if putting a small windmill up at an altitude where air movement is more reliable could actually be a workable approach to the problem.
Of course, this is all just an unformed idea from someone who knows nothing about this stuff. For all I know, the wind at 1000 feet is no more reliable than the wind at ground level and that's why TFA is talking about getting up into the jet stream. Still, it's an intriguing idea to me.
The unicorn dream communicated several things, I suppose, but the most obvious was that Deckard was originally created as a replicant. When his handler (the cop with the cane) left him an origami unicorn, the movie was clearly saying that his handler knew his thoughts. That's only possible if Deckard was originally created as a replicant.
The interesting questions in the movie are the ones you allude to - What is human? Has he become human?
However, my more narrow point was that (way back in the day, before the directors cut was released) fanboys would endlessly debate whether Deckard was originally created a replicant or if he was a natural-born human. The directors cut put that little controversy away for good.
Still, all the good questions remain. It was a great movie, even if it suffers by comparison to the source material, as another in this thread has pointed out.
Blade Runner...The questions that the plot raised...Was the cop human or not?...are all pretty...ambigious.
Uh, no. Not *that* question, at least. As a kid, the first time I saw it, I figured there was a high probability the cop was a replicant. Later, the expanded director's cut (or whatever they called it) with the unicorn sequence made it completely, unapologetically, smack-me-in-the-head-with-a-two-by-four obvious that the cop was a replicant. I had my misgivings about the need to make it so obvious but ultimately decided that having this knowledge while following Deckard on his journey of self-discovery (We know he's a replicant, but just when, if ever, does he figure it out? Now, that's heavy stuff, there.) made for a better movie.
Yeah, I agree that there were lots of great questions about the human condition in the movie. It was a great movie. Absolute top of my list. All the questions were beautifully asked. But as for the status of the cop - by the end of the movie, there was no ambiguity there.
Special Agents travel in groups and have extensive background work on the people they approach. I was one of those people who collects money, going out with no background on the people I was looking for and no backup. Special Agents get killed more often when things go sour (which is, in reality, virtually never). Officers, on the other hand, were *much* more likely to find themselves in a more low-level conflict simply because the nature of our jobs was such that we blundered into bad situations regularly.
I'm not in that work any more having left it many years ago. I should note that due to the availability of cell phones, networks that connect us to useful information sources, and changes in the law, Officers are *FAR* less likely to get into bad situations nowadays. Their job is a good deal more boring, too, but you take the bad with the good, I suppose.
Most of that stuff happened while I was an Officer with the Internal Revenue Service. By itself, that's enough to incite violence in some people. My problem was compounded by the fact that I worked a very tough area.
I was once on a break during voir dire (sp?), you know, picking a jury. We were all standing around and one of my fellow prospective jurors walked up and clearly, plainly told me that he'd kill me if I ever set foot on his property. Then he walked off. The other folks standing around just stared and couldn't believe I didn't get upset.
"It happens all the time" was all I could say.
PS - He got picked for jury duty; I got passed over. Being a violent jerk is more acceptable to society than working for the IRS.
...you either knew who was attacking you or had someone who's job it was to protect you...
Nope. Only in the two cases where I was assigned a bodyguard did I know who the attackers were before they struck.
I can identify with where you're coming from. I am, however, qualified based on experience to judge these things. For a number of years, my job involved going to places that were just an address on a piece of paper to look for someone who didn't want to be found, tell them things they didn't want to hear, and make them do things they didn't want to do. I did this alone, without backup, before 'net access, when cell phones were too expensive to issue to peons like me, without any forwarning if the person I was looking for was a doper, a felon, or just some nice guy who had screwed up. I knocked on the doors of crack houses, got chased by packs of feral dogs (Being a big, fat guy, I was proud of the way I learned to climb atop my car in the blink of an eye), got cornered by a drunk in a auto shop who spent the entire conversation swinging a giant wrench casually at his side, and once was held hostage for four hours by a mentally ill vagrant. (Frankly, I was too good for my own good at finding people who didn't really need to be found.)
Here's my point: Evil, stupid, violent people can intrude on your existence at any time. In any reasonably large group (say, the parents in the stands at your kids Little League game, or even the Sunday morning worship assembly) there is a statistical certainty that some of those people within a hundred yards of you are nuts and would kill you under the right circumstances. Example? I was once attacked, not on the job this time, at a Heart concert by a doper. His excuse was "He was looking at me." There are nuts everywhere. You don't even have to be in a crowd. You can be an innocent preteen girl sitting in a one-room schoolhouse in about the safest, most religious little farming community to be found - there's still the danger of a nut-job intent on committing mass rape busting in, tying you up, and blowing you away when his plan to force you to have sex is interrupted.
There are nut jobs out there. You can't change the way you live your life because of them. You have to rationally understand that your chances of actually being hurt are miniscule and then go on with your life. Everyone should be aware of their circumstances, of course, but constant, numbing worry on this topic is just wrong.
If this woman is just figuring out that there are nuts around, that she may unexpectedly be attacked by some person previously unknown to her, then I have to say she's led a sheltered life. I'm sorry the realization has been so tough on her. I can forgive her for hiding for a while to get her head together; a break in your world view certainly calls for a pause to reconsider things. But I stand by my earlier statement; if she's still afraid to leave her yard next week, she's got a problem over and above (and, in reality, more serious than) these threats.
In response to vile, arguably illegal threats in cyberspace, the object of those threats has written:
I have cancelled all speaking engagements.
I am afraid to leave my yard.
I will never feel the same. I will never be the same.
Yes, the threats were vile and intended to cause emotional distress. The seriousness of them and the capacity of the posters to act in accordance with their stated intentions is very much in question. But EVEN IF THE THREATS ARE REAL, meaning, even if the posters really would kill her given the chance, her reaction is excessive. Way excessive.
You must live your life. Despite the wackos, you must live your life. Sticking your head in the sand solves nothing.
I've had jobs that put me in conflict with people rather severely. On two occasions, I've been assigned a personal bodyguard for a period of weeks until the person trying to kill me was caught and jailed. I've been chased on foot by a drug-addled cowboy who continually screamed that he was going to kill me. I've been chased in my vehicle twice, once by someone who tried to run me off the road and once by someone who was trying to follow me to my destination to do me violence. Hell, I've had a shotgun unloaded at me (from an excessive distance by a drunk with lousy aim, thank God).
I didn't stop living my life. After each of those events (and sometimes during) I walked out my front door and went to work just like normal. I can't imagine someone being so weak of spirit that they would do otherwise.
OK, go ahead and scream at me that I'm blaming the victim. I'm not. For the short term, recoiling in horror from a threat is reasonable. For the short term, only until the threat can be assessed fully, it's a reasonable reaction. But if this lady remains afraid to leave her yard next week, she's got far bigger problems than a few weirdos who might or might not pose a threat to her.
...of the competitors in this market space. Several companies have been doing this for years with good track records.
I think these links are still good.
I'd much rather just have the payroll tax and be done with it, as long as I can't be held personally liable for failing to pay it. If it's just a payroll tax, then who is liable though? It can't be the person who runs payroll.
Yes, the person who runs payroll might be liable.
What you're asking about is how to collect withheld taxes when they become delinquent. Obviously, the business is supposed to pay them timely. If that doesn't happen, the business is contacted and asked to pay; collection action against the business can happen. If the business no longer exists or otherwise cannot/will not pay, then things get interesting.
The withheld portion of your taxes is called the trust fund portion. When it becomes clear that the business won't (in some reasonable time frame or ever) pay the trust fund taxes, they can be written off. However, a penalty will then be assessed against any party responsible for the non-payment of the trust fund in an amount equal to the total trust fund liability. (This "trust fund recovery penalty" used to be called the "100% penalty" because it was equal to 100% of the amount that had been stolen from the employees.) Normally, these are the coprorate officers. (Yes, the trust fund penalty "pierces the corporate veil.") However, ANY person who could have remedied the situation can be held liable. If the person who does payroll knew the taxes were owed and had the ability to write a check, they can be held responsible.
What happens is that the total trust fund recovery penalty is assessed against as many people as possible (usually all the officers plus a few key workers) and then collection action is taken against them. Once the penalty is collected from any one of them, collection action against the others stops. The trust fund recovery penalty is a great way to go after scumbags who start multiple corporations, don't pay their debts, and then try to get away with just shutting down the corp and moving on. The bad part of it is that those same sorts of scumbags will often hire some naive stooge to do the payroll and give that person lots of power (only) on paper, making it look like the business was theirs. Then when scumbag flees, stooge is left holding the bag. I've seen college students who thought they had gotten a lucky break with such a killer good first job saddled with hundreds of thousands of dollars in tax debt.
The moral? Don't be stupid. If you work for someone who neglects to pay payroll (U.S. tax Form 941) taxes, then you work for a thief. Resign immediately. When the IRS comes to call, being able to truthfully say you resigned as soon as (in the same quarter as) you found out about the withholding shenanigans is the only really good (though not perfect) protection against being saddled with huge penalties.
I'm only going to dash off a quick response here because if I take the time to explore the topic fully I won't get any work done today. To be fair to the spirit of your inquiry, I'm not going to look at Wikipedia before I write this.
My working definition of trolling is "deliberate ignorance." To me, a troll isn't really a troll unless they (apparently) deliberately ignore obvious facts in evidence that contradict them. Admittedly, even this is a fluid definition. In an anti-gun-rights forum, saying "Guns kill people" isn't trolling because everyone agrees. In a pro-gun-rights forum, the same statement (out of any clarifying context) is a troll because, obviously, no gun can pull its own trigger.
For another example that moves beyond the realm of religion, I once had a discussion online about appropriate speed limits on the highway. I wanted to be open and genuinely communicative, so I tried to define terms and find common ground. I made a simple statement that two objects could never collide if they traveled the same speed and stayed on parallel courses and that traffic accidents could only happen if one of those two conditions was not met. This is so simple that it should be no more controversial than the notion that gravity makes things fall down. Yet the person I was talking to staunchly refused to agree to even this most basic statement and continued to wail emotionally about the human cost of traffic accidents. At that point, because he was unwilling to stipulate to obvious facts that would give us a common ground from which to proceed with discussion, I could only brand him a troll and abandon the conversation.
Trolls don't listen. They put their fingers in their ears and hum when presented with facts, as opposed to logically arguing their points by showing how my interpretation of those facts is flawed. That's deliberate ignorance and the hallmark of a troll.
Yeah, there's more to it, especially the part about how you're not really trolling unless you're trying to elicit a response. But I gotta go to work, now. Thanks for the good question.
allows its users to discuss, criticize, and attack other law students and lawyers by name. Is this an example of free speech and anonymity gone too far, or is internet trolling just a necessary side effect
First off, discussing/criticizing/attacking others by name isn't necessarily trolling. Sure, even a reasonable discussion criticizing named parties will be viewed by those parties as not just attacking but also trolling. That doesn't make it so. The LACK of names and specifics is what makes many discussion boards so meaningless; without real-world examples, most discussions are just the proverbial angels dancing on the head of a pin.
If there's any crowd that would both benefit from and be able to not get too insulted by gloves-off commentary, it SHOULD be lawyers.
Thanks for the thought. I hadn't considered SOX or HIPAA. I work in a highly secure environment where we're required, under various laws dating back decades and mandating prison sentences for noncompliance, to keep data secure. We don't, however, have much in the way of logging requirements. Thus, I tend to think of data protection as being accomplished through access control; in practical terms this is accomplished via network privileges and encryption. In my environment, logging/tracking is a peripheral concern. It's always nice to be forced to think outside my normal routine; thanks.
Of course, there is a lot of email that can NOT be encrypted. For example, my company has a strict policy that encrypting any communications can be cause for immediate termination.
Huh? Could you please explain the reasoning behind this? In my organization, we're rapidly moving toward encrypting all internal email (and as much external traffic as we can). I can't imagine any organization where there's NO data that isn't recognized as sufficiently sensitive that it should be protected when it's put in email. Even if it's just at the highest level (takeover offers, executive headhunting and salary negotiations, stuff like that), surely the top-level execs at your organization cannot believe that it's proper to leave all of their email in plain text on servers where an admin with sufficient privileges could read it.
Did you mis-state? Is the policy not *quite* universal?
Really, I find your statement fascinating and I just wanted a little background. TIA if you choose to reply.
I wouldn't call what was on the door a reader. There was a big steel appliance of some sort built into the wall and doorframe at the door lock. Based on the consistent styling of the trim pieces, it appeared that the lock, door handle and the stuff built into the wall were a unit. When employees entered, they didn't have to swipe anything; that's why I wouldn't call it a "reader," which I take to mean something against which the card must be swiped/pressed/etc.
Yes, the badges these guys wore were quite thick. I always figured there was a battery and some electronics of some sort inside them.
I'm trying to figure out why proximity cards with significant range would be used merely to unlock a door. The thought occurs to me that the entire store was set up as a sort of warehouse, possibly by the same folks who moved inventory in and out of storage at Compaq. Proximity cards would be a standard choice, I suppose, for people who need to be moving pallets (and maybe forklifts) through doors and didn't want to have to take hands off their equipment while doing so. The fact that the same stuff got installed up at the front office might have just been for the sake of consistency.
All this, however, is just a wild guess. I'll never know; that store closed many years ago. Thank you for taking the time to satisfy the curiosity of a random correspondent; I really appreciate it.
Thanks for the info. I'm not sure why I find this so fascinating.
Still, the system could not have been motion or heat activated. The locks didn't open when a customer entered the hallway on the way to the restroom; they only opened for employees (who were all wearing badges, so I assumed that had something to do with it).
OK, I know nothing about these systems so I'm going to ask a stupid question. The very first time I ever saw an access control that opened a door lock when a card-bearer approached was in the giant Compaq retail/factory warehouse clearance outlet in Houston, more than a decade ago. (Great place. Old stock, reconditioned stuff, and odds 'n ends out the ying-yang, all at firesale prices and the staff actually worked for Compaq, meaning they knew what they were doing.) That system opened the door between the public space and the employee offices whenever an employee got within 10-12 feet of it. The door in question was at the end of a short hall that you had to traverse to get to the public restrooms. Whenever any employee set foot into that hall, there was a big *Klunk* as the door unlocked. They unlocked the door even when they were just going to the bathroom. I think the system was prototypical and it certainly had problems, but I was always fascinated by it.
What sort of access control tech would open locks from that sort of distance?
This is the mysterious "IT guy" who thinks he knows the fixed-length list of things that each and every person in the company needs to do their job. They create a blacklist of everything they think you could do on your computer that is bad, and use some 3rd-party product to scan everything you do and disable those actions. They already know better than you every tool needed for every position in the company.
In my organization, it's not a mysterious IT guy. It's actually a 300+ page service level agreement, renegotiated annually, between IT and the customers. Our customers tell us, at the highest level, everything they need. We agree to support that. If someone at the customer division grunt level wants to tell us at the IT division grunt level that they have inadequate tools, we tell them that the fault lies with their management. Their management has told us that only X tools are required and that's all that's going to be supported. If they need something else, they need to tell their management who can toss it into the hat at the next SLA renegotiation.
Otherwise, the answer is "NO!" Is there anything difficult or unfair about that?
The countries on the priority watch list are: China and Russia (listed first and discussed at substantially more length because the report considers them the worst), Argentina, Belize, Brazil, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Israel, Lebanon, Turkey, Ukraine, and Venezuela.
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Elsewhere in this thread, it's pointed out that you shouldn't have to be an expert in crash testing to be able to buy a car that's safe. I tend to agree. While I see your point about PHBs and throwing money at problems, I've also reached the stage in life where I have (some) money and little enough time to futz around with doing everything from scratch. When I was a kid, I personally, carefully, expertly assembled every round of ammunition I shot; nowadays I'm likely to grab a box off 9's at the sporting goods store and go have some fun. So what about the instant case?
I have the same attitude about crypto. I recognize I need an encrypted USB device but I also have a life. So I studied a bit, enough to make an informed decision, and bought one of these.
Does that mark me as totally clueless?
I never saw too much crap like that back in the day. The response was simply for the object of the prank to order any random group of footballers to fix the problem. Said group would fix the problem and then proceed to figure out who had caused the problem and beat the shit out of them. (Unless, of course, they were the ones who originally did it. In that case, they'd walk away chastised and the situation was over.)
When the rules of polite personal interaction are violated, it's best to be mindful of the way things can escalate.
Gross factual errors get modded to +5?
(Note that a U.S.-centric view is presented henceforth.)
Income is taxed when earned. Income includes not just dollars but anything of value, including in-game items. If the IRS were going to be consistent, in-game earnings would already be forcing gamers to file horrendously complex returns and pay lots more taxes. It hasn't happened yet simply because it's a terrific pain in the ass and it's not yet a big enough revenue-loser to inspire the IRS to jump in (or inspire Congress to force the IRS to jump in).
If it was written for a U.S. audience, the post above is nonsense, through and through. YMMV in other countries. Please mod it down to the basement where it belongs.
In my experience, if you red shirt your kid (keep him out of school as long as possible so that he's older and bigger than his classmates and has an advantage in sports) then you do more harm than good. He gets his license first, so he's got more chances to be the drunk driver that kills his passengers. He turns 18 long before high school is done, so he has more chances to go to jail for statutory rape for what he does with his sophomore girlfriend.
As counter-intuitive as it seems, I say put 'em in school as early as you can.
You're right, but I don't think I'm wrong.
My take on this thing is that experience can't be taught. We can't stop kids from doing things we now know were stupid. The best parents can do is instill in their children the ideals and skills necessary to handle those dangers when they arise. Too many parents fall back on "just say no" and "zero tolerance"; those things don't work. If someone is truly worried about the effects of violent games on children, then banning the games from the house is stupid and way too late. The conversations should have started years ago, when you're watching a Bugs Bunny marathon with your very little kids. *That's* the time (and Bugs gives you plenty of opportunities) to discuss the difference between real violence and make believe. That's the time to assure yourself that your kid has their head on straight enough to know the difference.
What bugs me about so much of the child-rearing I see is that people try to prohibit bad things. That only works while the parent is in the room. Parents should anticipate and teach long before the need arises to prohibit. Then they should trust that their kids got the point and won't screw up too bad while gaining their own experience, which just happens to be the only experience they'll ever actually benefit from.
The failure to teach is bad parenting. The failure to trust is disrespectful. And people that can do neither shouldn't have kids.
Pardon me while I book my return ticket from Never-Never Land. I don't quite know how I got here...
That's not a troll, really. The most obvious and ageless example is sex. We did as much as we could as soon as we could get away with it. Now, as hypocrytical, older parents, we can't stand the concept of our precious little darlings doing the nasty at ... well ... whatever age it was that we first wanted to. (Actual age citation omitted so that I don't draw too much negative response. God knows that the ages of kids getting naked and freaky on their webcams is sufficiently low that it may never be mentioned in polite company; adults just don't want to hear about that stuff.)
It's the same for alcohol. We got drunk on our ass at 16, most of us got away with it, and we think we were *special* and could handle it. Our kids? Those morons couldn't handle a sip of ceremonial wine before they turn 21.
Video games. Driving fast. Ditching school. Going out in the woods with some dynamite and blowing shit up. (OK, that last one was pretty personal, I guess.) No matter the subject, we simply don't think our kids can do the things we did. We're hypocrites. All parents are and always have been.
Adults have no respect for children so we treat them differently than we still think we should have been treated when we were their age.
Hypocrisy and lack of respect from parents towards children? This is news? Is this surprising to anyone?
I have points at the moment but you've already been modded to 5, so I'm just going to take a moment to thank you. That reference is incredibly on-point in my life at the moment and it is, by far, the most informative and useful thing I've ever seen on the subject.
I can't thank you enough. Bless you.
Interesting ideas, all, but access to the jet stream is a big deal requiring big bucks. I'm wondering about small projects.
When I was a kid, I got one of those big, plastic "bat" kites. (They were new on the U.S. toy market at the time, so that tells you how old I am.) I found it horrifically unstable, so I attached a tail made of torn cloth and other stuff. It was quite long and weighed several pounds, making the kite a pain to launch. Once it had gained some altitude, though, it was stable and pulled steadily. I ran out of kite twine, so I drove a stake in the ground and tied it off. Then I rooted around in the garage and found a giant spool of 100lb test fishing line. (Why we had it since it had been years since we'd lived near the Gulf Coast and gone offshore fishing, I didn't know.) I attached this new line to the kite string and let it play out. Quick as a wink, that kite was hundreds of yards high, just hanging there, pulling hard and steady. My older sis had a party that night and all the high school boys wanted to show off how manly they were, so they pulled in the kite for me. They had to work hard for over an hour, pulling it in as fast as they could, to get it to the ground. They were tired, sweaty, and pissed at me by the time they were finished.
I haven't thought about that episode in years. I wonder, though, if it would be possible to put up a fairly large kite to an altitude of just a few hundred yards and keep it aloft (semi-)long term with some sort of small wind generator hanging from it (I know that kite I launched in my youth could have held up 20 or 30 pounds, easily, once it was in the air.) and a small cable leading back to the ground. I live in a fairly mild climate and could pull it in if the weather got bad. I'm just wondering if this could produce enough energy to bank to some batteries that the exercise would be worthwhile.
I know lots of people have tried to go off the grid using power generated from small, often home-built terrestrial windmills. Because the wind at ground level is capricious, they need to feed big battery banks to tide them over the inevitable down time. I'm just wondering if putting a small windmill up at an altitude where air movement is more reliable could actually be a workable approach to the problem.
Of course, this is all just an unformed idea from someone who knows nothing about this stuff. For all I know, the wind at 1000 feet is no more reliable than the wind at ground level and that's why TFA is talking about getting up into the jet stream. Still, it's an intriguing idea to me.
So who wants to be the first to shoot it down?
(Yes, I love bad puns, too.)
The unicorn dream communicated several things, I suppose, but the most obvious was that Deckard was originally created as a replicant. When his handler (the cop with the cane) left him an origami unicorn, the movie was clearly saying that his handler knew his thoughts. That's only possible if Deckard was originally created as a replicant.
The interesting questions in the movie are the ones you allude to - What is human? Has he become human?
However, my more narrow point was that (way back in the day, before the directors cut was released) fanboys would endlessly debate whether Deckard was originally created a replicant or if he was a natural-born human. The directors cut put that little controversy away for good.
Still, all the good questions remain. It was a great movie, even if it suffers by comparison to the source material, as another in this thread has pointed out.
Uh, no. Not *that* question, at least. As a kid, the first time I saw it, I figured there was a high probability the cop was a replicant. Later, the expanded director's cut (or whatever they called it) with the unicorn sequence made it completely, unapologetically, smack-me-in-the-head-with-a-two-by-four obvious that the cop was a replicant. I had my misgivings about the need to make it so obvious but ultimately decided that having this knowledge while following Deckard on his journey of self-discovery (We know he's a replicant, but just when, if ever, does he figure it out? Now, that's heavy stuff, there.) made for a better movie.
Yeah, I agree that there were lots of great questions about the human condition in the movie. It was a great movie. Absolute top of my list. All the questions were beautifully asked. But as for the status of the cop - by the end of the movie, there was no ambiguity there.
Uh, no.
Heat-packing == Special Agent. I was an Officer.
Special Agents travel in groups and have extensive background work on the people they approach. I was one of those people who collects money, going out with no background on the people I was looking for and no backup. Special Agents get killed more often when things go sour (which is, in reality, virtually never). Officers, on the other hand, were *much* more likely to find themselves in a more low-level conflict simply because the nature of our jobs was such that we blundered into bad situations regularly.
I'm not in that work any more having left it many years ago. I should note that due to the availability of cell phones, networks that connect us to useful information sources, and changes in the law, Officers are *FAR* less likely to get into bad situations nowadays. Their job is a good deal more boring, too, but you take the bad with the good, I suppose.
Most of that stuff happened while I was an Officer with the Internal Revenue Service. By itself, that's enough to incite violence in some people. My problem was compounded by the fact that I worked a very tough area.
I was once on a break during voir dire (sp?), you know, picking a jury. We were all standing around and one of my fellow prospective jurors walked up and clearly, plainly told me that he'd kill me if I ever set foot on his property. Then he walked off. The other folks standing around just stared and couldn't believe I didn't get upset.
"It happens all the time" was all I could say.
PS - He got picked for jury duty; I got passed over. Being a violent jerk is more acceptable to society than working for the IRS.
Nope. Only in the two cases where I was assigned a bodyguard did I know who the attackers were before they struck.
I can identify with where you're coming from. I am, however, qualified based on experience to judge these things. For a number of years, my job involved going to places that were just an address on a piece of paper to look for someone who didn't want to be found, tell them things they didn't want to hear, and make them do things they didn't want to do. I did this alone, without backup, before 'net access, when cell phones were too expensive to issue to peons like me, without any forwarning if the person I was looking for was a doper, a felon, or just some nice guy who had screwed up. I knocked on the doors of crack houses, got chased by packs of feral dogs (Being a big, fat guy, I was proud of the way I learned to climb atop my car in the blink of an eye), got cornered by a drunk in a auto shop who spent the entire conversation swinging a giant wrench casually at his side, and once was held hostage for four hours by a mentally ill vagrant. (Frankly, I was too good for my own good at finding people who didn't really need to be found.)
Here's my point: Evil, stupid, violent people can intrude on your existence at any time. In any reasonably large group (say, the parents in the stands at your kids Little League game, or even the Sunday morning worship assembly) there is a statistical certainty that some of those people within a hundred yards of you are nuts and would kill you under the right circumstances. Example? I was once attacked, not on the job this time, at a Heart concert by a doper. His excuse was "He was looking at me." There are nuts everywhere. You don't even have to be in a crowd. You can be an innocent preteen girl sitting in a one-room schoolhouse in about the safest, most religious little farming community to be found - there's still the danger of a nut-job intent on committing mass rape busting in, tying you up, and blowing you away when his plan to force you to have sex is interrupted.
There are nut jobs out there. You can't change the way you live your life because of them. You have to rationally understand that your chances of actually being hurt are miniscule and then go on with your life. Everyone should be aware of their circumstances, of course, but constant, numbing worry on this topic is just wrong.
If this woman is just figuring out that there are nuts around, that she may unexpectedly be attacked by some person previously unknown to her, then I have to say she's led a sheltered life. I'm sorry the realization has been so tough on her. I can forgive her for hiding for a while to get her head together; a break in your world view certainly calls for a pause to reconsider things. But I stand by my earlier statement; if she's still afraid to leave her yard next week, she's got a problem over and above (and, in reality, more serious than) these threats.
In response to vile, arguably illegal threats in cyberspace, the object of those threats has written:
Yes, the threats were vile and intended to cause emotional distress. The seriousness of them and the capacity of the posters to act in accordance with their stated intentions is very much in question. But EVEN IF THE THREATS ARE REAL, meaning, even if the posters really would kill her given the chance, her reaction is excessive. Way excessive.
You must live your life. Despite the wackos, you must live your life. Sticking your head in the sand solves nothing.
I've had jobs that put me in conflict with people rather severely. On two occasions, I've been assigned a personal bodyguard for a period of weeks until the person trying to kill me was caught and jailed. I've been chased on foot by a drug-addled cowboy who continually screamed that he was going to kill me. I've been chased in my vehicle twice, once by someone who tried to run me off the road and once by someone who was trying to follow me to my destination to do me violence. Hell, I've had a shotgun unloaded at me (from an excessive distance by a drunk with lousy aim, thank God).
I didn't stop living my life. After each of those events (and sometimes during) I walked out my front door and went to work just like normal. I can't imagine someone being so weak of spirit that they would do otherwise.
OK, go ahead and scream at me that I'm blaming the victim. I'm not. For the short term, recoiling in horror from a threat is reasonable. For the short term, only until the threat can be assessed fully, it's a reasonable reaction. But if this lady remains afraid to leave her yard next week, she's got far bigger problems than a few weirdos who might or might not pose a threat to her.
...of the competitors in this market space. Several companies have been doing this for years with good track records. I think these links are still good.
Yes, the person who runs payroll might be liable.
What you're asking about is how to collect withheld taxes when they become delinquent. Obviously, the business is supposed to pay them timely. If that doesn't happen, the business is contacted and asked to pay; collection action against the business can happen. If the business no longer exists or otherwise cannot/will not pay, then things get interesting.
The withheld portion of your taxes is called the trust fund portion. When it becomes clear that the business won't (in some reasonable time frame or ever) pay the trust fund taxes, they can be written off. However, a penalty will then be assessed against any party responsible for the non-payment of the trust fund in an amount equal to the total trust fund liability. (This "trust fund recovery penalty" used to be called the "100% penalty" because it was equal to 100% of the amount that had been stolen from the employees.) Normally, these are the coprorate officers. (Yes, the trust fund penalty "pierces the corporate veil.") However, ANY person who could have remedied the situation can be held liable. If the person who does payroll knew the taxes were owed and had the ability to write a check, they can be held responsible.
What happens is that the total trust fund recovery penalty is assessed against as many people as possible (usually all the officers plus a few key workers) and then collection action is taken against them. Once the penalty is collected from any one of them, collection action against the others stops. The trust fund recovery penalty is a great way to go after scumbags who start multiple corporations, don't pay their debts, and then try to get away with just shutting down the corp and moving on. The bad part of it is that those same sorts of scumbags will often hire some naive stooge to do the payroll and give that person lots of power (only) on paper, making it look like the business was theirs. Then when scumbag flees, stooge is left holding the bag. I've seen college students who thought they had gotten a lucky break with such a killer good first job saddled with hundreds of thousands of dollars in tax debt.
The moral? Don't be stupid. If you work for someone who neglects to pay payroll (U.S. tax Form 941) taxes, then you work for a thief. Resign immediately. When the IRS comes to call, being able to truthfully say you resigned as soon as (in the same quarter as) you found out about the withholding shenanigans is the only really good (though not perfect) protection against being saddled with huge penalties.
Ooooh! That's a good question.
I'm only going to dash off a quick response here because if I take the time to explore the topic fully I won't get any work done today. To be fair to the spirit of your inquiry, I'm not going to look at Wikipedia before I write this.
My working definition of trolling is "deliberate ignorance." To me, a troll isn't really a troll unless they (apparently) deliberately ignore obvious facts in evidence that contradict them. Admittedly, even this is a fluid definition. In an anti-gun-rights forum, saying "Guns kill people" isn't trolling because everyone agrees. In a pro-gun-rights forum, the same statement (out of any clarifying context) is a troll because, obviously, no gun can pull its own trigger.
For another example that moves beyond the realm of religion, I once had a discussion online about appropriate speed limits on the highway. I wanted to be open and genuinely communicative, so I tried to define terms and find common ground. I made a simple statement that two objects could never collide if they traveled the same speed and stayed on parallel courses and that traffic accidents could only happen if one of those two conditions was not met. This is so simple that it should be no more controversial than the notion that gravity makes things fall down. Yet the person I was talking to staunchly refused to agree to even this most basic statement and continued to wail emotionally about the human cost of traffic accidents. At that point, because he was unwilling to stipulate to obvious facts that would give us a common ground from which to proceed with discussion, I could only brand him a troll and abandon the conversation.
Trolls don't listen. They put their fingers in their ears and hum when presented with facts, as opposed to logically arguing their points by showing how my interpretation of those facts is flawed. That's deliberate ignorance and the hallmark of a troll.
Yeah, there's more to it, especially the part about how you're not really trolling unless you're trying to elicit a response. But I gotta go to work, now. Thanks for the good question.
First off, discussing/criticizing/attacking others by name isn't necessarily trolling. Sure, even a reasonable discussion criticizing named parties will be viewed by those parties as not just attacking but also trolling. That doesn't make it so. The LACK of names and specifics is what makes many discussion boards so meaningless; without real-world examples, most discussions are just the proverbial angels dancing on the head of a pin.
If there's any crowd that would both benefit from and be able to not get too insulted by gloves-off commentary, it SHOULD be lawyers.
Thanks for the thought. I hadn't considered SOX or HIPAA. I work in a highly secure environment where we're required, under various laws dating back decades and mandating prison sentences for noncompliance, to keep data secure. We don't, however, have much in the way of logging requirements. Thus, I tend to think of data protection as being accomplished through access control; in practical terms this is accomplished via network privileges and encryption. In my environment, logging/tracking is a peripheral concern. It's always nice to be forced to think outside my normal routine; thanks.
Huh? Could you please explain the reasoning behind this? In my organization, we're rapidly moving toward encrypting all internal email (and as much external traffic as we can). I can't imagine any organization where there's NO data that isn't recognized as sufficiently sensitive that it should be protected when it's put in email. Even if it's just at the highest level (takeover offers, executive headhunting and salary negotiations, stuff like that), surely the top-level execs at your organization cannot believe that it's proper to leave all of their email in plain text on servers where an admin with sufficient privileges could read it.
Did you mis-state? Is the policy not *quite* universal?
Really, I find your statement fascinating and I just wanted a little background. TIA if you choose to reply.
I wouldn't call what was on the door a reader. There was a big steel appliance of some sort built into the wall and doorframe at the door lock. Based on the consistent styling of the trim pieces, it appeared that the lock, door handle and the stuff built into the wall were a unit. When employees entered, they didn't have to swipe anything; that's why I wouldn't call it a "reader," which I take to mean something against which the card must be swiped/pressed/etc.
Yes, the badges these guys wore were quite thick. I always figured there was a battery and some electronics of some sort inside them.
I'm trying to figure out why proximity cards with significant range would be used merely to unlock a door. The thought occurs to me that the entire store was set up as a sort of warehouse, possibly by the same folks who moved inventory in and out of storage at Compaq. Proximity cards would be a standard choice, I suppose, for people who need to be moving pallets (and maybe forklifts) through doors and didn't want to have to take hands off their equipment while doing so. The fact that the same stuff got installed up at the front office might have just been for the sake of consistency.
All this, however, is just a wild guess. I'll never know; that store closed many years ago. Thank you for taking the time to satisfy the curiosity of a random correspondent; I really appreciate it.
Thanks for the info. I'm not sure why I find this so fascinating.
Still, the system could not have been motion or heat activated. The locks didn't open when a customer entered the hallway on the way to the restroom; they only opened for employees (who were all wearing badges, so I assumed that had something to do with it).
Thanks again.
OK, I know nothing about these systems so I'm going to ask a stupid question. The very first time I ever saw an access control that opened a door lock when a card-bearer approached was in the giant Compaq retail/factory warehouse clearance outlet in Houston, more than a decade ago. (Great place. Old stock, reconditioned stuff, and odds 'n ends out the ying-yang, all at firesale prices and the staff actually worked for Compaq, meaning they knew what they were doing.) That system opened the door between the public space and the employee offices whenever an employee got within 10-12 feet of it. The door in question was at the end of a short hall that you had to traverse to get to the public restrooms. Whenever any employee set foot into that hall, there was a big *Klunk* as the door unlocked. They unlocked the door even when they were just going to the bathroom. I think the system was prototypical and it certainly had problems, but I was always fascinated by it.
What sort of access control tech would open locks from that sort of distance?
In my organization, it's not a mysterious IT guy. It's actually a 300+ page service level agreement, renegotiated annually, between IT and the customers. Our customers tell us, at the highest level, everything they need. We agree to support that. If someone at the customer division grunt level wants to tell us at the IT division grunt level that they have inadequate tools, we tell them that the fault lies with their management. Their management has told us that only X tools are required and that's all that's going to be supported. If they need something else, they need to tell their management who can toss it into the hat at the next SLA renegotiation.
Otherwise, the answer is "NO!" Is there anything difficult or unfair about that?
...is a pdf file to be found here:
Priority Watch List
The countries on the priority watch list are: China and Russia (listed first and discussed at substantially more length because the report considers them the worst), Argentina, Belize, Brazil, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Israel, Lebanon, Turkey, Ukraine, and Venezuela.