swore to obey the orders of the President, and the officers appointed over him
I'm no US citizen, but I was under the impression that American soldiers' loyalty was to the US Constitution, and not to any individual person(s).
"I, _____, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God."
Hey! Now I'm under the impression that non-US citizens don't know how to Google! I'm so impressionable! Can I haz mod points for writing a clever response plz, k thx bai.
Which is the most chilling implication of the experiment! The idea that you can always find people willing to do harmful things while the rest stand aside is enough to undermine the whole concept of individual morality.
Together with the equally infamous Milgram experiment, which has been shown to be reproducible under all sorts of conditions, Zimbardo's work shows how humans, as basically non-'evil' beings, rationalize and perpetuate organized acts of evil. (How many times have you heard someone say, "If I don't do $BAD_THING, somebody else will. Maybe the best thing to do is for me to take the job, and try to change the system from within"?)
Unites States Marines go through thirteen weeks of that stuff. It doesn't even make sense for prison operation because their goal is to rehabilitate civilians and it's not really sustainable anyway. It's too expensive, you'd have to rotate guards often because they will get weak eventually, and would require tons of training. The "prisoners" will adjust eventually. You can't permanently break someone's will and still be anywhere near the realm of merely 'questionable' ethics.
I think you guys are reading too far into the reasons for conducting the experiment, and what was genuinely learned from it.
It's too bad they had to go and declare true nerds the enemy with their iProducts. After using my 2006 MacBook and enjoying every minute of using OS X, they had to go and take a hostile approach to software development and control over things they sold.
I can't support them now. And sadly that means the now reduced OS X partition on my MacBook likely won't be seeing Lion, despite having seen up through Snow Leopard.
Outside the basement, it's OK to prefer products in different categories from different vendors at the same time.
But yah.. I get it.. this is like trying to tell an average person that it's OK to prefer Chevy minivans and Ford trucks _at the same time_.
Actually, I have a hard time calling anyone who sticks to party lines a "true nerd". Amazingly, OS X is still the most polished UNIX desktop OS out there, despite the existence of iOS, whatever that is. Oh, and get this, despite me thinking UNIX design is pretty cool, I think Microsoft does a lot of things right! I even have a love/hate relationship with open source! How is that even possible?!!112
Good to see anti-FOSS trolls are all over Slashdot these days too.
Don't confuse pro-professionalism, entrepreneurism, maturity types with anti-FOSS types.
They may completely overlap, but there's an important difference.
I mean there are people who just hate FOSS people, but then there are people who think anything goes, no risk, no commitment software development is _stupid_ and people who assert all software should be like that are _insane_.
Honest to God, why do highly educated and credentialed people keep overlooking things that have been known for a years?!
I wouldn't even dare say that about the readers of Popular Science, but absolutely not the Slashdot readership. Subtract from it all those who don't post to correct some random dumbass on the Internet, or at all, and you've got.. us.
Roundabouts are fine if the flow remains below a certain threshold, but once it gets too busy, some entrances and exits start backing up solid, people get frustrated, take chances, WHAM, BAM, and that's everybody's day ruined, and in go the lights.
The same goes for highways. There's always a point where flow control will be beneficial.
There is no more OpenSolaris; Oracle already kicked that project in the nads back in August. You might use the derived OpenIndiana distribution instead, but there's a whole different path to uncharted territory.
To be clear, in terms of "using it", it has only been renamed to Solaris 11 Express. You just pkg image-update to it and get an Oracle logo on your desktop.
If you were an outside contributor, then sure, that is no more.
After all, what kind of idiot would make the mistake of buying new Sun hardware now that they've seen how things are going to work? All of the database server customers I deal with are replacing what used to racks full of Sun boxes running Solaris with Dell + Linux as fast as they can afford to replace the hardware.
They did not axe Solaris on x86. A Sparc to x86 migration does not necessitate a Solaris to Linux migration. I'm not going to get into relative merits of different makes of x86 servers, they all suck equally far as I'm concerned. However Sun's iLoms suck less with Solaris x86 than a iDrac does with Linux.
In any case, it's still a particularly nasty thing for Skype to have done. Options generally have a "30 day" clause so you're not screwed in case of termination. This is supposed to add potential value to the options: you don't constantly run the risk of losing them all at the whim of the company. Skype effectively has a termination clause which takes away all your options any time they want. The difference is huge: I currently work on the assumption that my options are "safe" and I don't have to worry about them vs termination. My employer has written their options clauses to effectively say "we cannot be a dick - we are bound to allow you a grace period". Skype didn't. Their employees must treat options as directly bound to their employment, and if they're working under an "at will" contract, they can be gone in an instant. Skype took away a vast amount of value in their options due to the buy-back clause.
This article has no mention of these being non-qualified or ISOs.
Without knowing that, why is this discussion even being had?
If they were ISOs, WTF didn't he exercise them as soon as as they vested and hold onto the shares? This is Skype.. what was he thinking...
Maybe they were non qualified. "I would have never gone to work there had I known,"... This is bogus. He left the company after a year without exercising the options that had vested. I find it hard to believe the decision to join was based on stock options granted to him.
"After a month of back-and-forth with Skype's human resources department, Lee learned that even his "vested" options were worthless. " I don't understand why he is surprised. If you really care about your stock options, read the fucking legalese you have a signed copy of BEFORE YOU QUIT YOUR JOB.
He's just pissed because of the Microsoft deal a month after he quit. He did not value them prior to that. Why would someone pass on shares of Skype, unless the options were just stupidly priced. He must have thought they were a bad deal, then hindsight smacks him like a bitch.
I worked for a startup, was given stock options, then the company went public. After about a month my options were worth about $1M on paper but I couldn't exercise them because that would have diluted the company founder's share value as they busily unloaded their shares. In the end I wrote a check for $24k to the IRS and ended up with nearly worthless options while the company founders cashed in and took their millions off to another startup to repeat the process.
Are you talking about the lockout period?? That affects insiders and majority share holders alike!
And why would you pay taxes on _OPTIONS_ ?? If you exercised them, and sold the resulting shares, and paid taxes on the gains from THOSE, then you still came out ahead.
If you are given options that have a market value of $X, the IRS considers you to have gotten taxable income of $X, even if you can't currently sell them. Even though they only take tax payments in cash and didn't *get* any cash. Yes, a lot of people have been very thoroughly screwed by this.
Not all stock options are taxed like that. ISOs are not, and you only pay long-term capital gains tax if you hold onto them for a year.
They are also _options_... you don't have to exercise them regardless of the type.
Unngg.. the comments are getting hard to read on this page. Options aren't THAT hard to figure out, why is there a trend of people shitting on them here...
It won't help the U.S! We keep demanding cheap goods, no matter how poorly made they are, and the only way to get that is to take advantage of poorer countries and manufacture overseas. Of course, that means there are no manufacturing jobs anywhere in the country, so in another few years, the only place in the U.S. where anyone will be able to shop or work will be Walmart.
On the one hand, you have the iPhone--built in China and it's an absolute miracle of modern technology. Have you SEEN one of those things on the inside? Rows and rows of tiny little dots on a board and I can't even guess what any of it does. I'm sure, given U.S. labor costs, it would cost a lot more than it currently does.
On the other hand, I don't know where to buy decent clothes. I bought a 12-pack of socks a couple weeks ago and three of them were mis-sewn. Every time my wife buys a 3-pack of underwear for the kid, she takes them out of the package, washes them, and 1 or 2 will come out of the washer--their first wash, having never been worn--with the waistline frayed.
I'm not saying that everything that is (or was) made in America is automatically great, but wouldn't it be great if people DID give a shit about the quality of what they made, and that the money would stay within our borders?
I don't understand, you seem to be saying both
You get what you pay for! and You get what you pay for?
Fucking adopt. Seriously. Instead of being a bunch of selfish fuckwads demanding to xerox as exact a copy of yourself
Wait, if we're selfish, what the hell do you call the "parents" of most of these orphans? If you think there's something wrong with a couple having their OWN child, you're a fucking moron.
If your going to tell anyone to not have kids, look at the demographics that are orphan factories, not _everyone else_.
It is a coercive, destructive, military act, 100% consistent with what our Founding Fathers meant when they wrote "war". Therefore I don't give a crap whether somebody re-defines it as "hostile" or "friendly" or a "love tap". It's illegal as hell.
The War Powers Act was passed in 1973, not um, at our founding.
You might be surprised which side the founding fathers would be on here...
About $2 million is traded at mt gox every day. And it is always going up. You could get $500,000 in about a week without effecting prices much. No problem.
This whole system SCREAMS money laundering.
Why would you invest in this "currency" as opposed to any other fiat currency on earth backed by a central bank?... because it's digital??1! Money laundering.
There's a lot of Java-ites who claim that Java is just as fast. They're idiots, but they're vocal.
There are people who say things like "my car is faster than yours", and there are those who understand the many different performance metrics to rate a car by and how they interact with different track conditions. The same applies to many topics, and many things in computing for instance.
Now, I'm not going to call you an idiot in the direct manner you might prefer, but we both know the first group of people has BY FAR the most vocal idiots.
Actually, I'd say that the difference between a professional craftsman and a hobbyist who builds stuff in his garage is often largely because the professional has a much larger assortment of tools to use.
I think they also typically differ in how much discipline is exercised Not only the tools, but whole processes differ between projects of different scopes, giving the experienced craftsman a bigger mental toolbox.
We do seem to be the new villains. And easy to villainize, I suppose. We have no one voice to decry actions of others, no standard that can be recognized, no motive that can be twisted for someone's benefit. Although some have tried. Once this kind of crackdown comes to our shores (yes I am wearing a tin-foil hat), it will we more along the lines of "Suspected pedophile and member of Anonymous..." Posted Anonymously.
I love how at the _same time_ people think "information should be free", "once something is online it will be there forever", and "the Internet routes around censorship like damage", they believe anonymity exists as if all the above doesn't apply to digital access logs, billing records, CCTV, etc.
Your anonymity is on borrowed time, and I hope you've enjoyed squandering it on stupid shit for laughs.
Slashdot Mirror
swore to obey the orders of the President, and the officers appointed over him
I'm no US citizen, but I was under the impression that American soldiers' loyalty was to the US Constitution, and not to any individual person(s).
"I, _____, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God."
Hey! Now I'm under the impression that non-US citizens don't know how to Google! I'm so impressionable! Can I haz mod points for writing a clever response plz, k thx bai.
Am I the only one who doesn't want a touchscreen kindle? I do not want to see my finger prints all over the screen while I try to read a book.
Wash your hands between meals and touching dirty shit. Geez. If you can see your fingerprint through a backlit screen, that's pretty grody.
I bet you can scrape a layer of film off your keyboard, can't you?
Which is the most chilling implication of the experiment! The idea that you can always find people willing to do harmful things while the rest stand aside is enough to undermine the whole concept of individual morality.
Together with the equally infamous Milgram experiment, which has been shown to be reproducible under all sorts of conditions, Zimbardo's work shows how humans, as basically non-'evil' beings, rationalize and perpetuate organized acts of evil. (How many times have you heard someone say, "If I don't do $BAD_THING, somebody else will. Maybe the best thing to do is for me to take the job, and try to change the system from within"?)
Unites States Marines go through thirteen weeks of that stuff. It doesn't even make sense for prison operation because their goal is to rehabilitate civilians and it's not really sustainable anyway. It's too expensive, you'd have to rotate guards often because they will get weak eventually, and would require tons of training. The "prisoners" will adjust eventually. You can't permanently break someone's will and still be anywhere near the realm of merely 'questionable' ethics.
I think you guys are reading too far into the reasons for conducting the experiment, and what was genuinely learned from it.
From what I briefly read, the conditions sound just like Marine Corps boot camp, and not a prison so much...
It's too bad they had to go and declare true nerds the enemy with their iProducts. After using my 2006 MacBook and enjoying every minute of using OS X, they had to go and take a hostile approach to software development and control over things they sold.
I can't support them now. And sadly that means the now reduced OS X partition on my MacBook likely won't be seeing Lion, despite having seen up through Snow Leopard.
Outside the basement, it's OK to prefer products in different categories from different vendors at the same time.
But yah.. I get it.. this is like trying to tell an average person that it's OK to prefer Chevy minivans and Ford trucks _at the same time_.
Actually, I have a hard time calling anyone who sticks to party lines a "true nerd". Amazingly, OS X is still the most polished UNIX desktop OS out there, despite the existence of iOS, whatever that is. Oh, and get this, despite me thinking UNIX design is pretty cool, I think Microsoft does a lot of things right! I even have a love/hate relationship with open source! How is that even possible?!!112
Good to see anti-FOSS trolls are all over Slashdot these days too.
Don't confuse pro-professionalism, entrepreneurism, maturity types with anti-FOSS types.
They may completely overlap, but there's an important difference.
I mean there are people who just hate FOSS people, but then there are people who think anything goes, no risk, no commitment software development is _stupid_ and people who assert all software should be like that are _insane_.
Honest to God, why do highly educated and credentialed people keep overlooking things that have been known for a years?!
I wouldn't even dare say that about the readers of Popular Science, but absolutely not the Slashdot readership. Subtract from it all those who don't post to correct some random dumbass on the Internet, or at all, and you've got.. us.
That is all.
Roundabouts are fine if the flow remains below a certain threshold, but once it gets too busy, some entrances and exits start backing up solid, people get frustrated, take chances, WHAM, BAM, and that's everybody's day ruined, and in go the lights.
The same goes for highways. There's always a point where flow control will be beneficial.
There is no more OpenSolaris; Oracle already kicked that project in the nads back in August. You might use the derived OpenIndiana distribution instead, but there's a whole different path to uncharted territory.
To be clear, in terms of "using it", it has only been renamed to Solaris 11 Express. You just pkg image-update to it and get an Oracle logo on your desktop.
If you were an outside contributor, then sure, that is no more.
After all, what kind of idiot would make the mistake of buying new Sun hardware now that they've seen how things are going to work? All of the database server customers I deal with are replacing what used to racks full of Sun boxes running Solaris with Dell + Linux as fast as they can afford to replace the hardware.
They did not axe Solaris on x86. A Sparc to x86 migration does not necessitate a Solaris to Linux migration. I'm not going to get into relative merits of different makes of x86 servers, they all suck equally far as I'm concerned. However Sun's iLoms suck less with Solaris x86 than a iDrac does with Linux.
If you're hiring someone, and he says "let me call my lawyer", don't you get a knot in your stomach,
How about reading any stock option plan you signed, at ANY POINT BEFORE DECIDING TO QUIT YOUR JOB?
He did not value those options. This is sour grapes because he left a month before the MS deal.
In any case, it's still a particularly nasty thing for Skype to have done. Options generally have a "30 day" clause so you're not screwed in case of termination. This is supposed to add potential value to the options: you don't constantly run the risk of losing them all at the whim of the company. Skype effectively has a termination clause which takes away all your options any time they want. The difference is huge: I currently work on the assumption that my options are "safe" and I don't have to worry about them vs termination. My employer has written their options clauses to effectively say "we cannot be a dick - we are bound to allow you a grace period". Skype didn't. Their employees must treat options as directly bound to their employment, and if they're working under an "at will" contract, they can be gone in an instant. Skype took away a vast amount of value in their options due to the buy-back clause.
This article has no mention of these being non-qualified or ISOs.
Without knowing that, why is this discussion even being had?
If they were ISOs, WTF didn't he exercise them as soon as as they vested and hold onto the shares? This is Skype.. what was he thinking...
Maybe they were non qualified. "I would have never gone to work there had I known," ... This is bogus. He left the company after a year without exercising the options that had vested. I find it hard to believe the decision to join was based on stock options granted to him.
"After a month of back-and-forth with Skype's human resources department, Lee learned that even his "vested" options were worthless. "
I don't understand why he is surprised. If you really care about your stock options, read the fucking legalese you have a signed copy of BEFORE YOU QUIT YOUR JOB.
He's just pissed because of the Microsoft deal a month after he quit. He did not value them prior to that. Why would someone pass on shares of Skype, unless the options were just stupidly priced. He must have thought they were a bad deal, then hindsight smacks him like a bitch.
I worked for a startup, was given stock options, then the company went public. After about a month my options were worth about $1M on paper but I couldn't exercise them because that would have diluted the company founder's share value as they busily unloaded their shares. In the end I wrote a check for $24k to the IRS and ended up with nearly worthless options while the company founders cashed in and took their millions off to another startup to repeat the process.
Are you talking about the lockout period?? That affects insiders and majority share holders alike!
And why would you pay taxes on _OPTIONS_ ?? If you exercised them, and sold the resulting shares, and paid taxes on the gains from THOSE, then you still came out ahead.
Troll.
If you are given options that have a market value of $X, the IRS considers you to have gotten taxable income of $X, even if you can't currently sell them. Even though they only take tax payments in cash and didn't *get* any cash. Yes, a lot of people have been very thoroughly screwed by this.
Not all stock options are taxed like that. ISOs are not, and you only pay long-term capital gains tax if you hold onto them for a year.
They are also _options_... you don't have to exercise them regardless of the type.
Unngg.. the comments are getting hard to read on this page. Options aren't THAT hard to figure out, why is there a trend of people shitting on them here...
but if you can't afford that then it pays to not have kids and just take care of yourself.
Um, 'too expensive to have a family and raise kids' is not a characteristic of a good health care system.
You just supported everyone else in saying the system is broke.
It won't help the U.S! We keep demanding cheap goods, no matter how poorly made they are, and the only way to get that is to take advantage of poorer countries and manufacture overseas. Of course, that means there are no manufacturing jobs anywhere in the country, so in another few years, the only place in the U.S. where anyone will be able to shop or work will be Walmart.
On the one hand, you have the iPhone--built in China and it's an absolute miracle of modern technology. Have you SEEN one of those things on the inside? Rows and rows of tiny little dots on a board and I can't even guess what any of it does. I'm sure, given U.S. labor costs, it would cost a lot more than it currently does.
On the other hand, I don't know where to buy decent clothes. I bought a 12-pack of socks a couple weeks ago and three of them were mis-sewn. Every time my wife buys a 3-pack of underwear for the kid, she takes them out of the package, washes them, and 1 or 2 will come out of the washer--their first wash, having never been worn--with the waistline frayed.
I'm not saying that everything that is (or was) made in America is automatically great, but wouldn't it be great if people DID give a shit about the quality of what they made, and that the money would stay within our borders?
I don't understand, you seem to be saying both
You get what you pay for!
and
You get what you pay for?
at the same time.
Agreed. I've never understood the need to waste resources on reproduction when there are so many unwanted children in the world looking for a home.
Well I don't know why you're still wasting my air by breathing it. Stop, please.
Fucking adopt. Seriously. Instead of being a bunch of selfish fuckwads demanding to xerox as exact a copy of yourself
Wait, if we're selfish, what the hell do you call the "parents" of most of these orphans?
If you think there's something wrong with a couple having their OWN child, you're a fucking moron.
If your going to tell anyone to not have kids, look at the demographics that are orphan factories, not _everyone else_.
It is a coercive, destructive, military act, 100% consistent with what our Founding Fathers meant when they wrote "war". Therefore I don't give a crap whether somebody re-defines it as "hostile" or "friendly" or a "love tap". It's illegal as hell.
The War Powers Act was passed in 1973, not um, at our founding.
You might be surprised which side the founding fathers would be on here...
About $2 million is traded at mt gox every day. And it is always going up. You could get $500,000 in about a week without effecting prices much. No problem.
This whole system SCREAMS money laundering.
Why would you invest in this "currency" as opposed to any other fiat currency on earth backed by a central bank? ... because it's digital??1! Money laundering.
There's a lot of Java-ites who claim that Java is just as fast. They're idiots, but they're vocal.
There are people who say things like "my car is faster than yours", and there are those who understand the many different performance metrics to rate a car by and how they interact with different track conditions. The same applies to many topics, and many things in computing for instance.
Now, I'm not going to call you an idiot in the direct manner you might prefer, but we both know the first group of people has BY FAR the most vocal idiots.
Thank you for your time.
Actually, I'd say that the difference between a professional craftsman and a hobbyist who builds stuff in his garage is often largely because the professional has a much larger assortment of tools to use.
I think they also typically differ in how much discipline is exercised Not only the tools, but whole processes differ between projects of different scopes, giving the experienced craftsman a bigger mental toolbox.
We do seem to be the new villains. And easy to villainize, I suppose. We have no one voice to decry actions of others, no standard that can be recognized, no motive that can be twisted for someone's benefit. Although some have tried. Once this kind of crackdown comes to our shores (yes I am wearing a tin-foil hat), it will we more along the lines of "Suspected pedophile and member of Anonymous..." Posted Anonymously.
I love how at the _same time_ people think "information should be free", "once something is online it will be there forever", and "the Internet routes around censorship like damage", they believe anonymity exists as if all the above doesn't apply to digital access logs, billing records, CCTV, etc.
Your anonymity is on borrowed time, and I hope you've enjoyed squandering it on stupid shit for laughs.
it's also possible that Turkey is cracking down on dissidents, using Anonymous as a cover story.
Uh, you'd need a cover story for that kind of stuff these days? Are we living on the same planet?
They're not a bank!
If this went through, I'd be hard pressed to see how they could keep up that facade.
1. There are lots of non-bank players in the payment card industry.
2. Lots of closed loop systems exist that don't involve Visa, MasterCard, Discover, American Express, etc, and a sponsor bank.
3. There are a thousand different ways this could go, and 'become a bank' is not in all of them.