I don't know where *you've* been living, but here in the US, the financial meltdown we're still going through was the direct result of government involving itself too much in the lending market. Sure, that wasn't the only cause - greed was also a necessary component - but a lot of inadvisable loans loans were made that would not have been made but for government policy favoring those kinds of loans.
If you think a government monopoly isn't worse than a corporate one, I guess you've never lived under a government monopoly. I've lived in places with socialized medicine and hope to never do so again.
If a corporate monopoly is in all other respects just as bad as a government one, there is at least one thing less bad about it: a corporate one can be broken without a revolution. Even Microsoft isn't what it once was, nor will it ever be again.
That would be the ones with the permanent 10% unemployment rate? We currently have about a 10% unemployment rate here in the United States, and it's considered a catastrophe. In those so-called prosperous countries, they've come to see that as normal.
When I lived in Asia, I worked with a German guy, and he was thrilled to be working outside Germany, because at home he'd been in a 50% tax bracket.
Stop and let that number roll around in your mind for a while. The government taking 50% of your salary off the top. Half of your money that you never even get to see. Kind of makes you wonder why you should bother working.
And no, this guy wasn't rich. He was a sysadmin, like me, and was earning a middle-class salary.
And you think it's not the mantra of the left, too?
Most on the left aren't evil (although a good many are), but the argument for stupid is a lot stronger, at least in the area of economics and government control. They sure believe in a lot of fairy tales where taxation and government power are concerned. If you want prosperity, low taxes are an essential component. That's so basic I can't believe there are people who don't understand it. And I think we've all pretty well seen for ourselves that government isn't the answer, it's the problem. To truly screw things up requires a law and a bureaucracy. That doesn't mean I favor anarchy or all-out libertarianism, but the government today is far too large, and utterly unresponsive to the people, as large governments always are. The amount of freedom we have lost in this country over the past 40 years is truly astonishing. If you weren't here 40 years ago, you probably find it difficult to imagine how messed up things are today. We have zero tolerance for just about everything, especially for freedom and self-responsibility.
To be fair, many on the right these days also don't seem to understand that government is more often the problem rather than the solution. The government sure got bigger on GWB's watch and as far as I can tell it did not in any way get better. Just the opposite.
Obama's not going to do anything to change that, either. A member of the big government party inherits a huge government, complete with TSA, from his predecessor who is a member of the party that's supposed to by small government but isn't anymore. What more could a socialist-leaning leftist want?
Exactly what I was going to say: this firmware update would remove the ability to do a break start, thus making it harder to win drag races. I wouldn't do it:)
That all depends; if Acme's contract is with the individual, yes, that might happen.
If Acme's contract is with SuperHotProgrammer, LLC, not so much. SuperHotProgrammer, LLC, is responsible for paying salary to, and withholding taxes from, its employees.
I realize this could vary depending on where you live, but at least in most places, it's not illegal to have an offensive SSID. In fact, having an offensive SSID is kind of the point of TFA.
Racially abusive? WTF is that? Racially offensive would make sense. Again, at least in most places it's not illegal (and shouldn't be anywhere, IMO) to have a racially offensive SSID. Of course, it's not smart, either. I don't recommend SSIDs that might get you beaten up. Plus, if you're going to set out to offend someone, you should offend based on behavior. A person's race is not good or bad, it just is. Behavior is good or bad.
Of course, at the rate the US is going, I expect "asshole" to become a protected class any day now, with people able to claim discrimination if won't have anything to do with them because they're assholes.
Fair enough, but in that vein, our response to 9/11, around 9/13 or so, when we were sure who did it, should have been to blanket Afghanistan with nukes and leave nothing much larger than a cockroach alive in the entire country and hold it up as an example of what will happen to you if you screw with us.
One should always avoid a fair fight. The object of a fight is to win, not to make it fair. Next, I expect you to tell me that in a boxing match, the one who is considered a strong boxer should have to fight with one arm tied, or under the influence of a CNS depressant, or with weights on the upper arms to cause slower punching, in the interest of fairness?
Uh-uh. If you have to fight somebody, you make it as unfair as possible in your favor. If somebody pulls a knife and demands your wallet, pulling a gun would be a good move. Pulling a knife yourself would not be a good move.
If it's a war, you bring the biggest, best-equipped army you can, get the best battlefield intelligence you can, and fight from the most advantageous terrain you can and with the best air support you can bring.
Next, you'll want us to not use medicine when we're sick because it's not fair to the bacteria?
About eating stuff I've killed and gutted myself? Check.
Wanna see something that really makes you not want to eat meat that you didn't kill yourself? Tour a slaughterhouse.
Uh, know, that's not what happened. There's a great deal of information about this incident on the web, I'll let you google it for yourself.
The students are allowed to take the laptops home and typically do so. One of the major goals of the program was to make sure that those who could not afford home computers would have access to one for doing homework blah blah blah.
What was apparently going on is the school was using the remote spy software they loaded onto the computers to spy on kids they thought (whether rightly or wrongly) were 'bad apples" to try and catch them doing something. The vice principal saw him taking what was believed to be some kind of pill and saved the photo. He says it was a Mike N Ike candy. Maybe, maybe not. I don't think anyone could discern that on something with the resolution of a web cam. In any case, even if he was popping pills, they seem to have opened a legal can of worms, and it's pretty unlikely that the photo would be admissible as evidence.
At least 8 students were spied on and are suing the district as students Doe 1-8.
Even if we assume for the sake of argument that this kid is in fact a bad apple and does use and/or deal drugs, etc., what the school did is far worse than what he may or may not have done. There's a reason the Constitution places such tight controls on government power: the authors knew first hand what happens when you don't. Sadly, a general lack of vigilance has resulted in the government running roughshod over the Constitution on a pretty regular basis and usually getting away with it.
I'm nearing 50; those of you who are now in your twenties or in high school may be looking at how much freedom we have lost in this country since you were in primary school, but let me tell you, it's far worse than you think. The amount of freedom we've lost since _I_ was in primary school is astonishing, and we're get it from both sides. On one hand we have neocons who think an all-powerful central government is the way to promote security and allegedly conservative values, and on the other hand we have the neolibs/progressives, who are really just socialists and communists who don't call themselves that.
The authors of the Constitution and leaders of the US revolution were flaming liberals of their day, but they were liberals in the classical sense, far different from most of those who call themselves liberals today. John Kennedy, who remains the darling of the left, has far more in common with true conservatives today than he does with those who call themselves liberals today.
What we need to get back to is a highly reigned-in federal government, because any powers not explicitly assigned to it are reserved for the states, and highly reigned in state governments because any powers not explicitly assigned to them are reserved for the people, who are the source and seat of sovereignty. It's been a long time since we really had a government that was of, by, and for the people.
I'm not a libertarian and have never before voted libertarian, but I will be in the next elections. Both the Republicans and the Democrats need to be punished. The Libertarian party looks like a good club with which to beat them both.
I'll leave it someone less lazy than I to check if there was an ice age around the time they think the tools were made.
If we assume for the moment that there wasn't, and further assume that there are no islands in between Crete and Greece, I still could be convinced that ancient humans might have made such a voyage. After all, Pacific islanders have been known to make long sea journeys in outrigger canoes without navigational tools. Plus, as TFA states, the human migration to Australia started about 60K years ago, and you can bet nobody walked there.
I certainly wouldn't recommend using programs from the Debian respos on any *buntu flavor. It might work, but there's also a good chance it might not. For experienced Linux users who want to mess around with that and can fix what goes wrong, fine, but for first-timers who neither know nor care anything about computers (like most users, regardless of platform)? Not such a good idea, IMO.
Why would a bank have your fingerprints? Mine doesn't. A bank I once worked for does (or did; that was a long time ago and they fingerprinted all employees because it was a federal requirement even in the 1970s).
Do you know what else is actually still not a bad search engine? The one that was my primary search engine before Google appeared: Alta Vista.
Of course, nothing compares to Google. Not Bing. Not Yahoo or Alta Vista or any of the others I used before Google appeared. I used different search engines for different things in the 90s. Then came Google, and even when it was still in beta, it was better at everything than all the other search engines.
Competition is good and I'd like to see more good search engines out there, but really, I don't know if it's possible to be so much better than Google that a large portion of people would choose another engine as their default. So far, no one has shown that it's possible to even be better than Google at all.
Exactly. Computers really have little to no place in a classroom unless the subject being taught is computers. And in those cases, most of the students are probably already way ahead of the teachers anyway:-)
Fortunately, at my daughters' school, technology is used pretty appropriately. By that, I mean "hardly at all." They have a couple computers in the classrooms, and they are used for reading comprehension tests for determining lexile level. This is an appropriate use of technology because it speeds up something that used to be done on paper.
For actual learning, they learn reading using books. They learn math using pencil and paper. The teacher teaches. She doesn't rely on technology as a crutch. I don't know if she even knows anything about computers, and frankly, I rather prefer teachers that have little use for computers in their classrooms. When computers start getting used as the teaching medium, they serve as nothing but a distraction. This is true even at the college level.
When I was in university, I had a job as an English tutor both on my campus and at one of the local community colleges. At the community college, there was a remedial reading program that had a computer at every seat. I assisted in this class, and guess what? The main purpose the computers served was to distract the attention of the students so they weren't usually paying attention to the instructor. They couldn't read worth a lick, but they knew how to screw around with computers just fine.
The best thing they could have done with those computers was either just give them to the CS department or sell them and use the proceeds to, I dunno, buy some books or something. Or even just blow the money on a beer bash. Even that would have been a better use of funds than wasting all that desk space an attention by putting computers on desks in a remedial reading program.
It's not only legal, it's mandated by law, or almost. When you get a job here, somewhere on your forms (often on the application itself) there is a section called race, with a bunch of check boxes. You don't have to answer it, and often there is a check box called something like "decline to state" or something else along those lines. My kids are all mixed race, and it's rare in my experience to see any kind of mixed-race box on these forms. It will be interesting to see what they fill out when they reach that age.
The reason it's there has to do with federal reporting requirements. If, say, 10% of your applicants are black, 10% are hispanic, and 25% are female, yet the total of your black, hispanic, and female hires is something like 5% of your work force, the government might be interested in that. So might more than a few lawyers.
This has to do with a doctrine/policy called Affirmative Action, which in the simplest terms, holds that in order to prove you aren't discriminating in hiring, you'd better make sure you're hiring at least X percent minorities. I have, in the fairly distant past, worked with people who were most obviously hired solely because they were part of a protected class. Certainly, they were not hired because of either their competence or their work ethic because they had neither. One particularly stands out in my mind because he earned the nickname "deathbed" because at least twice a month (including every payday - how convenient) would call in sick, claiming that he felt like he was on his deathbed.
Other times, he just didn't show up. On many of those occasions, his wife would call and ask to talk to him and we'd have to say "Uh, sorry, he's not here."
It was quite obvious that he had never done the work he claimed he had done (mainframe operator) on his resume at his previous job. We eventually figured out from the one thing he could sort of do that he must have been a tape librarian. Later, a couple of us met someone who worked at his previous employer and who told us "Oh, that guy? Yeah, he was a tape librarian. We fired him. He's working for you guys now?! That's too bad."
In his first three months on the job, his absense rate exceeded (by far) the number of absences at which a person could be terminated, yet he didn't even get reprimanded. I assure you, those of us who worked our way up through the ranks in that company would certainly have been reprimanded, most likely fired. The PHB who hired him was obviously going to take no action, however. He was well known for making bad outside hiring decisions and never disciplining those people.
Finally, after about a year, we got a different manager, and he'd heard all about deathbed and was going to have none of his crap. Within a couple months, deathbed was fired and there was great rejoicing. And deathbed himself? He robbed a nearby liquor store a few days later and was arrested. No one was surprised.
That was in the early eighties. Things like that don't happen too much anymore, at least in my experience, although they probably do at government agencies.
There was a lawsuit that ended not long ago in which some city had held promotional exams for firefighters (for lieutenant or captain, IIRC). None of the firefighters that passed the exam was a minority, so what did the city do? They threw out the results completely. They'd made up their minds that they were going to have minorities pass the test and be promoted. Naturally, the firefighters who had passed the test and would have been eligible for promotion sued. A few months ago, they won and had their eligibility for promotion reinstated.
On the flip side, there are charter schools in the US that are 100% minority, or nearly, and are so by the choice of the students and their parents, who believe that the programs, specifically tailored to the ethnic groups and the challenges they face in often high-crime neighborhoods, give them a better chance of a good education and completing school. I wholly support them. Nobody knows better than the
Reminds me of a business trip to Canada I took a few years ago. Not a lot of high tech geegaws to deal with, the the Customs & Immigration officer at Winnipeg had eyes that could look right through a person, and I'm really, really sure that if somebody were BSing him about why they were coming to Canada, he'd be all over it and have them right off to secondary inspection. We need more of that ourselves, and a lot less of what we've got.
Yeah, weird stuff is aweome! I'm glad I live near there too, but not too near or I might go in there too often:-)
It reminds me of the used gear shops of Akihabara from my days in Japan. One never knew what neat treasure might be found on an Akihabara crawl.
Once, I picked up the coolest notebook computer there. It was made by DEC in the 1980s and had a trackball even better than the ones on the old PowerBooks. It only had a 486-DX4/75 and maxed out at (IIRC) 12 meg of memory and had only 640 x 480 graphics, it worked very well with Linux and WindowMaker.
The awesome thing about it was the appearance. I picked it up in the very late nineties (might even have been 2000) and if you just stuck it on a shelf next to new notebooks of the day, it wouldn't have looked out of place even next to the Vaio line. It was a very thing wedge shape and was very light weight. A little googling revealed that the thing sold for $5000 as a new computer. I used it for several years. I think I passed it on when I left Japan; OTOH I wouldn't be surprised if it emerged from some box someday:-)
Ancient Chinese authors sampled from other works all the time, too, but it was the "savvy audience/nod to their forebears" angle that you cite: their readers were expected to recognize the references. Far different from her approach, it would seem.
Oh, that may well be accurate. For example, I work for an email and web security company. Our customers spend a lot of money each year for our services. The same is true for our competitors. If there were no spam, no viruses, trojans, bots, they wouldn't have to spend all that extra money. The email and web security business is a billions-of-dollars industry.
Then there's the extra staff they need to help clean up problems when people do smart things like release that phish or malware message from quarantine and go right ahead and click on the link.
Yes, losses to business from spam/malware are in the billions of real dollars every year, since they wouldn't have to spend that money if it didn't exist.
That's very different from the RIAA/MPAA/BSA numbers, which seem to make the ridiculous assumption that most of the people unlawfully using music or software would have gone out and bought it if they couldn't have gotten it for free. That's work of fiction (genre: fantasy) on their part. I'm sure file sharing has hurt sales of CDs and online music stores to some extent, but the main problem is that the big record companies just aren't making anything compelling. I don't do downloading, but I also haven't bought a major-label CD in about 10 years. Even on indepedent labels, it's been a few years since I've made a buy. I just don't see much compelling work out there.
All of my most recent CD purchases have been directly from the musicians themselves, who self-produced their work.
I also worked at a smallish company that was acquired by Microsoft (funny it wasn't on the list in TFA, it fits the time span of five years, and some of the companies mentioned in TFA were acquired fist). My description of MSFT's internal culture would be "pathological," but I guess "toxic" works, too.
How pathological? *Every one* was required to go through a full series of Microsoft interviews in order to keep our jobs. Submit your resume, the whole nine yards. Of course, most of my interviewers quite obviously hadn't even bothered to read my resume, leading to some pretty "interesting" questions and some answers along the lines of "I don't know; I don't do that."
One of them actually admitted point-blank that he hadn't read my resume and said he was too busy to bother with that. Classy, that. I bet he fits in pretty well at MSFT, though. A couple of others also pretty obviously hadn't but didn't 'fess up. So mostly, my "interviews" consisted of explaining to people who hadn't a clue what I did or what my team did what it was we did, since they seemed to have not read our job descriptions either.
I met a former Danger employee not long ago. Some interesting stories there, too.
Window dressing? I doubt it. There are bad hospitals in the US, surely (King Drew, in LA, for example), but typically, hospitals here are very, very good.
As far as better government goes, having less of it is one of the main points to getting good government. Good government is government that keeps its nose out of your business. Why is the US anti-government? Look at how we got started, for an answer to that one. The founders quite correctly understood that government needs to be severely controlled to prevent it from trampling on the rights of the people. Our government today is out of control and doing an awful lot of trampling these days.
The US has less social mobility than Europe? I personally know a large number of immigrants who came here with nothing but the clothes on their backs and who are now prosperous middle-class homeowners who would certainly disagree with you about that. There's a reason why everybody wants to go to the United States. Granted, the US isn't as good a place to live as it used to be, not by a long shot, and yeah, excessive and over-spending government is a lot of why, but it's still where everybody wants to go.
When I lived in Asia, I worked with a German guy who was so happy to be living in Asia because it meant he didn't have to pay 50 percent of his income in taxes anymore. Great social mobility, that.
Europe is so far from having its act together in so many areas that it can hardly afford to throw stones at us.
P.S. Nice try with the racist reference to rich, young white guys. There's nothing wrong with being rich, young, and white, and it doesn't make you somehow automatically wrong.
P.P.S. We don't spend more and get less than any other western nation. Health care may be tremendously expensive here, but it's also by and large tremendously good. Far better than any other country I've been to. My wife - who is not an American - says the same. She's constantly astounded by how good the health care system is here. That doesn't mean there aren't spending areas to be fixed, but the suggestion that we don't get good health care for the spend is preposterous.
Having lived in countries with national health care systems (someplace in Asia), with private insurance (US), and with no insurance at all but low prices (some other palce in Asia), I have found the highest level of care by far to be in the United States. The worst care, by far, was in the place with no insurance but cheap prices. In most hospitals there, if you're not bribing the staff (and thus raising the price), you'll get almost no care. The place with a national health insurance system was a middle case. Primary care and ob/gyn care is reasonably good (but not as good as the US; our first child was conceived in that country but born in the other place in Asia) and the co-pays were roughly price-equivalent to the US. Hospital stays there, however, fall far short of what you get here. I spend a week in the hospital there, and it was most unpleasant. The national health insurance only paid for a bed in a six-patient room and I was surrounded by people who were far sicker than I, with all the noise, smells, and potential cross-infection that goes with that. The equipment was lousy (I couldn't even get an IV tree with wheels; I had to carry the thing to the communal bathroom; no in-room bathroom or shower). The nursing care was fair, and the food was disgusting. I lived off the convenience store in the basement and a pizza a friend brought me.
Do I want the US health care system to become like the middle case I described? No way. We're way, way better than that now. My wife, who is from one of those other places, agrees that our quality of health care is the best. Going to a national insurance system will probably pull that quality down.
What, then, do we need to fix? A few things:
1) Fix the extremely hostile and litigious malpractice lawsuit industry; it's a major factor in what makes health care and insurance so expensive here. It desperately needs reform. And by "fix" I mean that it needs to be far, far harder to sue someone for malpractice, that you need to really prove they fucked up hugely, along the lines of something that could cause a license suspension or revocation.
2) The way health insurance companies can screw people by doing things like declaring a pre-existing condition uncovered, charging people who actually get sick and use their insurance more money (it's supposed to be a shared risk pool; everyone should pay the same).
3) Get better standardization of forms, etc., so it doesn't cost doctors so much to deal with health insurance. The best thing about the country with national health insurance is that doctors easily knew where they stood and didn't need to employ one or more insurance specialists.
4) Use the forms in points 1-3 to make health insurance cheaper and available to all. Subsidize the cost with tax credits for people who are low income if you have to.
That's how we need to reform health care. What we definitely don't need is national health insurance.
What's so scary about a national health insurance system? To *really* fuck something up requires a government. The US government, in particular is very good at that, and is also very good at ridiculously underestimating what something will cost (or more likely, lying about it). One thing is for certain: spending 100 dollars on government health care will most certainly not get you better health care than spending 100 dollars on private health care. The government never, ever does things better and cheaper. Typically, it's both worse and more expensive.
Government is rarely the solution. More government is even more rarely the solution. Mostly, government is the problem. Sure, we have improvements to be made, but a huge, bloated and expensive government health care bureaucracy isn't the way to do it.
I'm know I'm just feeding a troll, but getting fired for looking at those sorts of photos at work has nothing to do with neocons.
Why do most companies have policies under which you can get fired for doing that? Because of past sexual harassment type lawsuits. The phrase is along the lines of "created a hostile and/or intimidating working environment."
If you violate the rules in a way that could get your company sued, you're quite likely to lose your job.
Note that I'm not arguing in favor of his getting fired; I also believe that the punishment doesn't fit the crime and a real solid ass-kicking in his manager's office, plus the public embarrassment he has already suffered, is more than sufficient punishment, and should also be more than sufficient to ensure that he - and others - don't do it again.
However, to say that these workplace rules stem from neocons is ridiculous. Pragmatically, they come from the desire to not be sued. Ideologically, they are more left than right.
However, looking at racy pictures isn't what he is most likely to get fired for: publicly embarrassing his employer on TV, and all over the world via the Internet, is what he's really in trouble for.
I'm also an ex-Microsoftie, and I got there by acquisition. To say the least, it was not at all my cup of tea.
TFA is pretty accurate that it has a culture problem. The culture there is really pathological in so many ways. A former co-worker of mine who immigrated to the United States from the USSR said the propaganda level was strikingly similar to living in a communist country. I completely agreed with him, having lived in one myself for a while.
When my former employer was acquired by Microsoft (we were in the security area) and we started benchmarking our product against Microsoft's own and were blowing theirs away despite the fact that we were using data we'd never seen before or trained on, did they say "Wow, you guys rock!!" - um, no. They questioned our methodology, our stats, everything. It was incomprehensible to them that we could be that much better, right from the gate, against a product they'd been working on for years. It took months before they gave up and grudgingly admitted we were right. "Not Invented Here" runs deep in Redmond. Really, really deep. Despite the fact that they have indeed bought our copied for almost everything in their product line. Go figure.
As far as the culture of acquired companies goes, the MSFT approach is to exterminate it. That part is quick and brutal. Resistance truly is futile and you will be assimilated. Or you'll quit. I chose the latter.
As TFA says, there are thousands of really smart people at Microsoft, and it's not just the engineers, either. HR people, admin assistants, everywhere you look, people are really sharp. Even the receptionists are the best I've run across, and they have great things like at least one IT desk in every building where you can go if you're having problems with your computer. Kind of like an internal Apple Genius Bar. That's a tremendous idea.
The problem is, Microsoft has these armies of really, really smart, innovative people but the whole that is produced from all this intelligence and innovativeness is way, way less than the sum of the parts. IMO most of those supersmart people ought to be at Apple rather than MSFT, or at Google (neither of which is my current employer). They could really shine there and get a lot more of there best ideas out there and make a difference. Sounds like Dick Brass should have worked at Apple or Google, too, really.
My present employer is another big company whose name is a household word, and in pretty much every way it's better than Microsoft. I got there by acquisition too, and I love it. It's a great place to work.
Culturally, not only has the culture of my acquired employer not been extinguished, we have actually had some success at spreading it to our broader business unit while at the same time absorbing the best of the new culture. IMO there is no way that could happen at MSFT.
This doesn't mean I think Microsoft can be written off as a competitor. They remain hypercompetitive are very good at exploiting their market dominance to drive out other solutions and push mixed shops to go all MSFT. I can't imagine why on earth a shop would want to convert from anything else to Exchange, but I see it happen all the time. Rarely do I hear of anyplace dumping Exchange for something else, even when something else would be a better solution.
But an innovator? Nah, Microsoft just ain't that. They never were, really.
Slashdot Mirror
You think so, huh?
I don't know where *you've* been living, but here in the US, the financial meltdown we're still going through was the direct result of government involving itself too much in the lending market. Sure, that wasn't the only cause - greed was also a necessary component - but a lot of inadvisable loans loans were made that would not have been made but for government policy favoring those kinds of loans.
If you think a government monopoly isn't worse than a corporate one, I guess you've never lived under a government monopoly. I've lived in places with socialized medicine and hope to never do so again.
If a corporate monopoly is in all other respects just as bad as a government one, there is at least one thing less bad about it: a corporate one can be broken without a revolution. Even Microsoft isn't what it once was, nor will it ever be again.
That would be the ones with the permanent 10% unemployment rate? We currently have about a 10% unemployment rate here in the United States, and it's considered a catastrophe. In those so-called prosperous countries, they've come to see that as normal.
When I lived in Asia, I worked with a German guy, and he was thrilled to be working outside Germany, because at home he'd been in a 50% tax bracket.
Stop and let that number roll around in your mind for a while. The government taking 50% of your salary off the top. Half of your money that you never even get to see. Kind of makes you wonder why you should bother working.
And no, this guy wasn't rich. He was a sysadmin, like me, and was earning a middle-class salary.
And you think it's not the mantra of the left, too?
Most on the left aren't evil (although a good many are), but the argument for stupid is a lot stronger, at least in the area of economics and government control. They sure believe in a lot of fairy tales where taxation and government power are concerned. If you want prosperity, low taxes are an essential component. That's so basic I can't believe there are people who don't understand it. And I think we've all pretty well seen for ourselves that government isn't the answer, it's the problem. To truly screw things up requires a law and a bureaucracy. That doesn't mean I favor anarchy or all-out libertarianism, but the government today is far too large, and utterly unresponsive to the people, as large governments always are. The amount of freedom we have lost in this country over the past 40 years is truly astonishing. If you weren't here 40 years ago, you probably find it difficult to imagine how messed up things are today. We have zero tolerance for just about everything, especially for freedom and self-responsibility.
To be fair, many on the right these days also don't seem to understand that government is more often the problem rather than the solution. The government sure got bigger on GWB's watch and as far as I can tell it did not in any way get better. Just the opposite.
Obama's not going to do anything to change that, either. A member of the big government party inherits a huge government, complete with TSA, from his predecessor who is a member of the party that's supposed to by small government but isn't anymore. What more could a socialist-leaning leftist want?
Exactly what I was going to say: this firmware update would remove the ability to do a break start, thus making it harder to win drag races. I wouldn't do it :)
That all depends; if Acme's contract is with the individual, yes, that might happen.
If Acme's contract is with SuperHotProgrammer, LLC, not so much. SuperHotProgrammer, LLC, is responsible for paying salary to, and withholding taxes from, its employees.
I realize this could vary depending on where you live, but at least in most places, it's not illegal to have an offensive SSID. In fact, having an offensive SSID is kind of the point of TFA.
Racially abusive? WTF is that? Racially offensive would make sense. Again, at least in most places it's not illegal (and shouldn't be anywhere, IMO) to have a racially offensive SSID. Of course, it's not smart, either. I don't recommend SSIDs that might get you beaten up. Plus, if you're going to set out to offend someone, you should offend based on behavior. A person's race is not good or bad, it just is. Behavior is good or bad.
Of course, at the rate the US is going, I expect "asshole" to become a protected class any day now, with people able to claim discrimination if won't have anything to do with them because they're assholes.
Fair enough, but in that vein, our response to 9/11, around 9/13 or so, when we were sure who did it, should have been to blanket Afghanistan with nukes and leave nothing much larger than a cockroach alive in the entire country and hold it up as an example of what will happen to you if you screw with us.
No, I'm not trolling. Or kidding.
One should always avoid a fair fight. The object of a fight is to win, not to make it fair. Next, I expect you to tell me that in a boxing match, the one who is considered a strong boxer should have to fight with one arm tied, or under the influence of a CNS depressant, or with weights on the upper arms to cause slower punching, in the interest of fairness?
Uh-uh. If you have to fight somebody, you make it as unfair as possible in your favor. If somebody pulls a knife and demands your wallet, pulling a gun would be a good move. Pulling a knife yourself would not be a good move.
If it's a war, you bring the biggest, best-equipped army you can, get the best battlefield intelligence you can, and fight from the most advantageous terrain you can and with the best air support you can bring.
Next, you'll want us to not use medicine when we're sick because it's not fair to the bacteria?
About eating stuff I've killed and gutted myself? Check.
Wanna see something that really makes you not want to eat meat that you didn't kill yourself? Tour a slaughterhouse.
Uh, know, that's not what happened. There's a great deal of information about this incident on the web, I'll let you google it for yourself.
The students are allowed to take the laptops home and typically do so. One of the major goals of the program was to make sure that those who could not afford home computers would have access to one for doing homework blah blah blah.
What was apparently going on is the school was using the remote spy software they loaded onto the computers to spy on kids they thought (whether rightly or wrongly) were 'bad apples" to try and catch them doing something. The vice principal saw him taking what was believed to be some kind of pill and saved the photo. He says it was a Mike N Ike candy. Maybe, maybe not. I don't think anyone could discern that on something with the resolution of a web cam. In any case, even if he was popping pills, they seem to have opened a legal can of worms, and it's pretty unlikely that the photo would be admissible as evidence.
At least 8 students were spied on and are suing the district as students Doe 1-8.
Even if we assume for the sake of argument that this kid is in fact a bad apple and does use and/or deal drugs, etc., what the school did is far worse than what he may or may not have done. There's a reason the Constitution places such tight controls on government power: the authors knew first hand what happens when you don't. Sadly, a general lack of vigilance has resulted in the government running roughshod over the Constitution on a pretty regular basis and usually getting away with it.
I'm nearing 50; those of you who are now in your twenties or in high school may be looking at how much freedom we have lost in this country since you were in primary school, but let me tell you, it's far worse than you think. The amount of freedom we've lost since _I_ was in primary school is astonishing, and we're get it from both sides. On one hand we have neocons who think an all-powerful central government is the way to promote security and allegedly conservative values, and on the other hand we have the neolibs/progressives, who are really just socialists and communists who don't call themselves that.
The authors of the Constitution and leaders of the US revolution were flaming liberals of their day, but they were liberals in the classical sense, far different from most of those who call themselves liberals today. John Kennedy, who remains the darling of the left, has far more in common with true conservatives today than he does with those who call themselves liberals today.
What we need to get back to is a highly reigned-in federal government, because any powers not explicitly assigned to it are reserved for the states, and highly reigned in state governments because any powers not explicitly assigned to them are reserved for the people, who are the source and seat of sovereignty. It's been a long time since we really had a government that was of, by, and for the people.
I'm not a libertarian and have never before voted libertarian, but I will be in the next elections. Both the Republicans and the Democrats need to be punished. The Libertarian party looks like a good club with which to beat them both.
I'll leave it someone less lazy than I to check if there was an ice age around the time they think the tools were made.
If we assume for the moment that there wasn't, and further assume that there are no islands in between Crete and Greece, I still could be convinced that ancient humans might have made such a voyage. After all, Pacific islanders have been known to make long sea journeys in outrigger canoes without navigational tools. Plus, as TFA states, the human migration to Australia started about 60K years ago, and you can bet nobody walked there.
I certainly wouldn't recommend using programs from the Debian respos on any *buntu flavor. It might work, but there's also a good chance it might not. For experienced Linux users who want to mess around with that and can fix what goes wrong, fine, but for first-timers who neither know nor care anything about computers (like most users, regardless of platform)? Not such a good idea, IMO.
Why would a bank have your fingerprints? Mine doesn't. A bank I once worked for does (or did; that was a long time ago and they fingerprinted all employees because it was a federal requirement even in the 1970s).
Do you know what else is actually still not a bad search engine? The one that was my primary search engine before Google appeared: Alta Vista.
Of course, nothing compares to Google. Not Bing. Not Yahoo or Alta Vista or any of the others I used before Google appeared. I used different search engines for different things in the 90s. Then came Google, and even when it was still in beta, it was better at everything than all the other search engines.
Competition is good and I'd like to see more good search engines out there, but really, I don't know if it's possible to be so much better than Google that a large portion of people would choose another engine as their default. So far, no one has shown that it's possible to even be better than Google at all.
Exactly. Computers really have little to no place in a classroom unless the subject being taught is computers. And in those cases, most of the students are probably already way ahead of the teachers anyway :-)
Fortunately, at my daughters' school, technology is used pretty appropriately. By that, I mean "hardly at all." They have a couple computers in the classrooms, and they are used for reading comprehension tests for determining lexile level. This is an appropriate use of technology because it speeds up something that used to be done on paper.
For actual learning, they learn reading using books. They learn math using pencil and paper. The teacher teaches. She doesn't rely on technology as a crutch. I don't know if she even knows anything about computers, and frankly, I rather prefer teachers that have little use for computers in their classrooms. When computers start getting used as the teaching medium, they serve as nothing but a distraction. This is true even at the college level.
When I was in university, I had a job as an English tutor both on my campus and at one of the local community colleges. At the community college, there was a remedial reading program that had a computer at every seat. I assisted in this class, and guess what? The main purpose the computers served was to distract the attention of the students so they weren't usually paying attention to the instructor. They couldn't read worth a lick, but they knew how to screw around with computers just fine.
The best thing they could have done with those computers was either just give them to the CS department or sell them and use the proceeds to, I dunno, buy some books or something. Or even just blow the money on a beer bash. Even that would have been a better use of funds than wasting all that desk space an attention by putting computers on desks in a remedial reading program.
It's not only legal, it's mandated by law, or almost. When you get a job here, somewhere on your forms (often on the application itself) there is a section called race, with a bunch of check boxes. You don't have to answer it, and often there is a check box called something like "decline to state" or something else along those lines. My kids are all mixed race, and it's rare in my experience to see any kind of mixed-race box on these forms. It will be interesting to see what they fill out when they reach that age.
The reason it's there has to do with federal reporting requirements. If, say, 10% of your applicants are black, 10% are hispanic, and 25% are female, yet the total of your black, hispanic, and female hires is something like 5% of your work force, the government might be interested in that. So might more than a few lawyers.
This has to do with a doctrine/policy called Affirmative Action, which in the simplest terms, holds that in order to prove you aren't discriminating in hiring, you'd better make sure you're hiring at least X percent minorities. I have, in the fairly distant past, worked with people who were most obviously hired solely because they were part of a protected class. Certainly, they were not hired because of either their competence or their work ethic because they had neither. One particularly stands out in my mind because he earned the nickname "deathbed" because at least twice a month (including every payday - how convenient) would call in sick, claiming that he felt like he was on his deathbed.
Other times, he just didn't show up. On many of those occasions, his wife would call and ask to talk to him and we'd have to say "Uh, sorry, he's not here."
It was quite obvious that he had never done the work he claimed he had done (mainframe operator) on his resume at his previous job. We eventually figured out from the one thing he could sort of do that he must have been a tape librarian. Later, a couple of us met someone who worked at his previous employer and who told us "Oh, that guy? Yeah, he was a tape librarian. We fired him. He's working for you guys now?! That's too bad."
In his first three months on the job, his absense rate exceeded (by far) the number of absences at which a person could be terminated, yet he didn't even get reprimanded. I assure you, those of us who worked our way up through the ranks in that company would certainly have been reprimanded, most likely fired. The PHB who hired him was obviously going to take no action, however. He was well known for making bad outside hiring decisions and never disciplining those people.
Finally, after about a year, we got a different manager, and he'd heard all about deathbed and was going to have none of his crap. Within a couple months, deathbed was fired and there was great rejoicing. And deathbed himself? He robbed a nearby liquor store a few days later and was arrested. No one was surprised.
That was in the early eighties. Things like that don't happen too much anymore, at least in my experience, although they probably do at government agencies.
There was a lawsuit that ended not long ago in which some city had held promotional exams for firefighters (for lieutenant or captain, IIRC). None of the firefighters that passed the exam was a minority, so what did the city do? They threw out the results completely. They'd made up their minds that they were going to have minorities pass the test and be promoted. Naturally, the firefighters who had passed the test and would have been eligible for promotion sued. A few months ago, they won and had their eligibility for promotion reinstated.
On the flip side, there are charter schools in the US that are 100% minority, or nearly, and are so by the choice of the students and their parents, who believe that the programs, specifically tailored to the ethnic groups and the challenges they face in often high-crime neighborhoods, give them a better chance of a good education and completing school. I wholly support them. Nobody knows better than the
Reminds me of a business trip to Canada I took a few years ago. Not a lot of high tech geegaws to deal with, the the Customs & Immigration officer at Winnipeg had eyes that could look right through a person, and I'm really, really sure that if somebody were BSing him about why they were coming to Canada, he'd be all over it and have them right off to secondary inspection. We need more of that ourselves, and a lot less of what we've got.
Yeah, weird stuff is aweome! I'm glad I live near there too, but not too near or I might go in there too often :-)
It reminds me of the used gear shops of Akihabara from my days in Japan. One never knew what neat treasure might be found on an Akihabara crawl.
Once, I picked up the coolest notebook computer there. It was made by DEC in the 1980s and had a trackball even better than the ones on the old PowerBooks. It only had a 486-DX4/75 and maxed out at (IIRC) 12 meg of memory and had only 640 x 480 graphics, it worked very well with Linux and WindowMaker.
The awesome thing about it was the appearance. I picked it up in the very late nineties (might even have been 2000) and if you just stuck it on a shelf next to new notebooks of the day, it wouldn't have looked out of place even next to the Vaio line. It was a very thing wedge shape and was very light weight. A little googling revealed that the thing sold for $5000 as a new computer. I used it for several years. I think I passed it on when I left Japan; OTOH I wouldn't be surprised if it emerged from some box someday :-)
+1.
Ancient Chinese authors sampled from other works all the time, too, but it was the "savvy audience/nod to their forebears" angle that you cite: their readers were expected to recognize the references. Far different from her approach, it would seem.
Oh, that may well be accurate. For example, I work for an email and web security company. Our customers spend a lot of money each year for our services. The same is true for our competitors. If there were no spam, no viruses, trojans, bots, they wouldn't have to spend all that extra money. The email and web security business is a billions-of-dollars industry.
Then there's the extra staff they need to help clean up problems when people do smart things like release that phish or malware message from quarantine and go right ahead and click on the link.
Yes, losses to business from spam/malware are in the billions of real dollars every year, since they wouldn't have to spend that money if it didn't exist.
That's very different from the RIAA/MPAA/BSA numbers, which seem to make the ridiculous assumption that most of the people unlawfully using music or software would have gone out and bought it if they couldn't have gotten it for free. That's work of fiction (genre: fantasy) on their part. I'm sure file sharing has hurt sales of CDs and online music stores to some extent, but the main problem is that the big record companies just aren't making anything compelling. I don't do downloading, but I also haven't bought a major-label CD in about 10 years. Even on indepedent labels, it's been a few years since I've made a buy. I just don't see much compelling work out there.
All of my most recent CD purchases have been directly from the musicians themselves, who self-produced their work.
Yeah, what he said.
I also worked at a smallish company that was acquired by Microsoft (funny it wasn't on the list in TFA, it fits the time span of five years, and some of the companies mentioned in TFA were acquired fist). My description of MSFT's internal culture would be "pathological," but I guess "toxic" works, too.
How pathological? *Every one* was required to go through a full series of Microsoft interviews in order to keep our jobs. Submit your resume, the whole nine yards. Of course, most of my interviewers quite obviously hadn't even bothered to read my resume, leading to some pretty "interesting" questions and some answers along the lines of "I don't know; I don't do that."
One of them actually admitted point-blank that he hadn't read my resume and said he was too busy to bother with that. Classy, that. I bet he fits in pretty well at MSFT, though. A couple of others also pretty obviously hadn't but didn't 'fess up. So mostly, my "interviews" consisted of explaining to people who hadn't a clue what I did or what my team did what it was we did, since they seemed to have not read our job descriptions either.
I met a former Danger employee not long ago. Some interesting stories there, too.
Give me some examples of those worse results.
Window dressing? I doubt it. There are bad hospitals in the US, surely (King Drew, in LA, for example), but typically, hospitals here are very, very good.
As far as better government goes, having less of it is one of the main points to getting good government. Good government is government that keeps its nose out of your business. Why is the US anti-government? Look at how we got started, for an answer to that one. The founders quite correctly understood that government needs to be severely controlled to prevent it from trampling on the rights of the people. Our government today is out of control and doing an awful lot of trampling these days.
The US has less social mobility than Europe? I personally know a large number of immigrants who came here with nothing but the clothes on their backs and who are now prosperous middle-class homeowners who would certainly disagree with you about that. There's a reason why everybody wants to go to the United States. Granted, the US isn't as good a place to live as it used to be, not by a long shot, and yeah, excessive and over-spending government is a lot of why, but it's still where everybody wants to go.
When I lived in Asia, I worked with a German guy who was so happy to be living in Asia because it meant he didn't have to pay 50 percent of his income in taxes anymore. Great social mobility, that.
Europe is so far from having its act together in so many areas that it can hardly afford to throw stones at us.
P.S. Nice try with the racist reference to rich, young white guys. There's nothing wrong with being rich, young, and white, and it doesn't make you somehow automatically wrong.
P.P.S. We don't spend more and get less than any other western nation. Health care may be tremendously expensive here, but it's also by and large tremendously good. Far better than any other country I've been to. My wife - who is not an American - says the same. She's constantly astounded by how good the health care system is here. That doesn't mean there aren't spending areas to be fixed, but the suggestion that we don't get good health care for the spend is preposterous.
I can maybe answer some of that.
Having lived in countries with national health care systems (someplace in Asia), with private insurance (US), and with no insurance at all but low prices (some other palce in Asia), I have found the highest level of care by far to be in the United States. The worst care, by far, was in the place with no insurance but cheap prices. In most hospitals there, if you're not bribing the staff (and thus raising the price), you'll get almost no care. The place with a national health insurance system was a middle case. Primary care and ob/gyn care is reasonably good (but not as good as the US; our first child was conceived in that country but born in the other place in Asia) and the co-pays were roughly price-equivalent to the US. Hospital stays there, however, fall far short of what you get here. I spend a week in the hospital there, and it was most unpleasant. The national health insurance only paid for a bed in a six-patient room and I was surrounded by people who were far sicker than I, with all the noise, smells, and potential cross-infection that goes with that. The equipment was lousy (I couldn't even get an IV tree with wheels; I had to carry the thing to the communal bathroom; no in-room bathroom or shower). The nursing care was fair, and the food was disgusting. I lived off the convenience store in the basement and a pizza a friend brought me.
Do I want the US health care system to become like the middle case I described? No way. We're way, way better than that now. My wife, who is from one of those other places, agrees that our quality of health care is the best. Going to a national insurance system will probably pull that quality down.
What, then, do we need to fix? A few things:
1) Fix the extremely hostile and litigious malpractice lawsuit industry; it's a major factor in what makes health care and insurance so expensive here. It desperately needs reform. And by "fix" I mean that it needs to be far, far harder to sue someone for malpractice, that you need to really prove they fucked up hugely, along the lines of something that could cause a license suspension or revocation.
2) The way health insurance companies can screw people by doing things like declaring a pre-existing condition uncovered, charging people who actually get sick and use their insurance more money (it's supposed to be a shared risk pool; everyone should pay the same).
3) Get better standardization of forms, etc., so it doesn't cost doctors so much to deal with health insurance. The best thing about the country with national health insurance is that doctors easily knew where they stood and didn't need to employ one or more insurance specialists.
4) Use the forms in points 1-3 to make health insurance cheaper and available to all. Subsidize the cost with tax credits for people who are low income if you have to.
That's how we need to reform health care. What we definitely don't need is national health insurance.
What's so scary about a national health insurance system? To *really* fuck something up requires a government. The US government, in particular is very good at that, and is also very good at ridiculously underestimating what something will cost (or more likely, lying about it). One thing is for certain: spending 100 dollars on government health care will most certainly not get you better health care than spending 100 dollars on private health care. The government never, ever does things better and cheaper. Typically, it's both worse and more expensive.
Government is rarely the solution. More government is even more rarely the solution. Mostly, government is the problem. Sure, we have improvements to be made, but a huge, bloated and expensive government health care bureaucracy isn't the way to do it.
I'm know I'm just feeding a troll, but getting fired for looking at those sorts of photos at work has nothing to do with neocons.
Why do most companies have policies under which you can get fired for doing that? Because of past sexual harassment type lawsuits. The phrase is along the lines of "created a hostile and/or intimidating working environment."
If you violate the rules in a way that could get your company sued, you're quite likely to lose your job.
Note that I'm not arguing in favor of his getting fired; I also believe that the punishment doesn't fit the crime and a real solid ass-kicking in his manager's office, plus the public embarrassment he has already suffered, is more than sufficient punishment, and should also be more than sufficient to ensure that he - and others - don't do it again.
However, to say that these workplace rules stem from neocons is ridiculous. Pragmatically, they come from the desire to not be sued. Ideologically, they are more left than right.
However, looking at racy pictures isn't what he is most likely to get fired for: publicly embarrassing his employer on TV, and all over the world via the Internet, is what he's really in trouble for.
I'm also an ex-Microsoftie, and I got there by acquisition. To say the least, it was not at all my cup of tea.
TFA is pretty accurate that it has a culture problem. The culture there is really pathological in so many ways. A former co-worker of mine who immigrated to the United States from the USSR said the propaganda level was strikingly similar to living in a communist country. I completely agreed with him, having lived in one myself for a while.
When my former employer was acquired by Microsoft (we were in the security area) and we started benchmarking our product against Microsoft's own and were blowing theirs away despite the fact that we were using data we'd never seen before or trained on, did they say "Wow, you guys rock!!" - um, no. They questioned our methodology, our stats, everything. It was incomprehensible to them that we could be that much better, right from the gate, against a product they'd been working on for years. It took months before they gave up and grudgingly admitted we were right. "Not Invented Here" runs deep in Redmond. Really, really deep. Despite the fact that they have indeed bought our copied for almost everything in their product line. Go figure.
As far as the culture of acquired companies goes, the MSFT approach is to exterminate it. That part is quick and brutal. Resistance truly is futile and you will be assimilated. Or you'll quit. I chose the latter.
As TFA says, there are thousands of really smart people at Microsoft, and it's not just the engineers, either. HR people, admin assistants, everywhere you look, people are really sharp. Even the receptionists are the best I've run across, and they have great things like at least one IT desk in every building where you can go if you're having problems with your computer. Kind of like an internal Apple Genius Bar. That's a tremendous idea.
The problem is, Microsoft has these armies of really, really smart, innovative people but the whole that is produced from all this intelligence and innovativeness is way, way less than the sum of the parts. IMO most of those supersmart people ought to be at Apple rather than MSFT, or at Google (neither of which is my current employer). They could really shine there and get a lot more of there best ideas out there and make a difference. Sounds like Dick Brass should have worked at Apple or Google, too, really.
My present employer is another big company whose name is a household word, and in pretty much every way it's better than Microsoft. I got there by acquisition too, and I love it. It's a great place to work.
Culturally, not only has the culture of my acquired employer not been extinguished, we have actually had some success at spreading it to our broader business unit while at the same time absorbing the best of the new culture. IMO there is no way that could happen at MSFT.
This doesn't mean I think Microsoft can be written off as a competitor. They remain hypercompetitive are very good at exploiting their market dominance to drive out other solutions and push mixed shops to go all MSFT. I can't imagine why on earth a shop would want to convert from anything else to Exchange, but I see it happen all the time. Rarely do I hear of anyplace dumping Exchange for something else, even when something else would be a better solution.
But an innovator? Nah, Microsoft just ain't that. They never were, really.