1) Who cares? People gamble. Get over it. 2) What is the penalty for offline gambling in WA? Why does such an arbitrary distinction lead to a five-years term for playing POKER. Wild Bill Hickok would roll over in his grave.
you are bully's. I feel threatened by you. if you don't like what you see here then do not come here its that simple. I'm pretty sure when you suspended Sam you brought her to tears, you are a bully and you make me sick. there's nothing you can do about us posting about parties we've been to and how much liquor we had or how much pot was smoked, the police need to do a better job, you are not the police. and how is it that you feel threatened what was said that was so threatening. I feel threatened by you, I cant even have a public web page with out you bullying me and telling me what has to be removed. where is this freedom of speech that this government is sworn to uphold? none of this is posted at school, its all posted from our home computers, and once we step foot into our homes we are not on school property any more. you are just power hungry, don't you ever think? did you stop to think that maybe this will make parents angry that you are bullying their children around? did you ever stop to think that maybe now you really are going to have a threat on your hands now that you have just pissed off kids for voicing their opinions? did you ever stop to think this will start a community backlash? The kids at Columbine did what they did because they were bullied. In my opinion you are the real threat here. None of us ever put in our xanga's that they were going to kill or bring harm to any one. we voiced our opinions. you are the real threat here. you are depriving us of our right to learn. now stick that in your pipe and smoke it.
Bold/italic emphasis mine, since this is probably the part that allowed the small-minded administrators at the school to take action... Since when is BRINGING UP Columbine automatically a veiled threat? In the context of a threatening message, it could be considered that, certainly. Yet, if you read it in context here it doesn't seem threatening at all. It seems like a statement of fact: The kids at Columbine were bullied, and there's very little difference between bullying committed by students as opposed to faculty/staff. Telling somebody to shut up for criticizing you could be described as bullying...
Certainly, what he has written here is not fine literature, but hardly a "Veiled threat." He was, inartfully, making the point that by punishing students for blog posts in order to "protect the kids" the school administration might, ironically, be creating the very problem it seeks to prevent. He explicitly says they didn't intend to threaten anybody, simply posting reactions to events from their own lives as an act of free expression.
This is a clear over-reach by the school system--He didn't post the page from school on their computer or internet connection, he did it from home. Further, other media sources have indicated that Xanga/MySpace/Friendster (the "social networking" sites) aren't accessible from the school, so there is no chance of this kid's web-site being "disruptive to the educational process," which was the last standard I am aware of for determining whether a school can abridge student civili rights or not. The school's claim that the message was threatening is dubious at best when taken in context.
It seems more likely that some administrators came down hard on somebody this person knew, and he wrote a scathing (in its own way) response that depicts those administrators as ogres. Instead of disrupting the school with a protest, he went home and wrote constitutionally protected editorial article on his web-site. Administrators decided to further-overreact by suspending him and threatening expulsion. Now they're really up shit creek, because if they back down they're "caving" in the eyes of everybody because of the previous hardline stance they've taken. If they go forward and expel him, it essentially validates everything in the kid's post--that they are taking away kids educational opportunities.
In my youth i had an embarassing job requiring a half-assed bow-tie--not the tying kind, the clipping shut kind. I swore after that I would never wear a clip-on tie, and learned to tie a necktie two ways REALLY well, and a third half-assed way, which I don't use.
Now that I know how, I can't believe I ever DIDN'T know. As a matter of pride, if I worked at the Geek Squad (I don't) I'd buy my own regular necktie. Clip-ons are... um... not a good look.
Man, on X-Box live those 9 year olds are most likely the ones doing the cussing.
Is that before or after they wax my ass with a sniper rifle from the far corner of the map? Seriously, some of these kids--they are the reason that "Professional Video Games League" is not just a joke anymore.
...a Slashdot contest to pick somebody for a cameo role in the movie? It would be the ultimate marketing tie-in... Except that most of us probably wouldn't pay money to see a remake of Revenge of the Nerds.
...the value depends on the credibility of the certifying authority. Microsoft Certifications have become almost worthless because MS was printing money with the MCP program in the 1990's. Now the tests are (a little) harder, but the barrier to getting certified is still really low in the MS world. Result? MCSE is basically worthless to have these days.
On the other hand, TFA points out the going-rate for certain Cisco certifications is on the rise. Not coincidentally, some of the Cisco certs they refer to are among the hardest to get. MCPs are easy to get, are more common, and thus do not denote any exceptional level of expertise.
Of course, I'd rather hire somebody with a mile-long list of successful projects they've accomplished than an alphabet-soup of certifications. In every hiring scenario I've been involved in so-far, I have always put the people who have DONE something ahead of the certification monkeys. Of crouse, if somebody with experience and "hard" certifications comes along, it doesn't hurt matters.
Of course I'd still be surprised if OSX had anywhere near as many security flaws as Windows, but it only takes one...
I'm thinking it would take two flaws...
1) The flaw you want to exploit. 2) A flaw in the OS to allow exploit #1's installation without throwing up the "Enter your administrator password" dialog so the user isn't tipped off something bad is happening.
This is a big barrier--not impossible, but a big one to get past. The Apple "limited-Administrator" model is vastly preferable to the "Everybody is totally-Administrator with no checks ever" model in Windows. Don't underestimate the efficacy of a simple mechanism like verifying an admin password to do "admin" things. Who's going to put in their Admin password to visit CNN.com? If it pops up at an unexpected time, the user becomes suspicious, and the machine is less likely to be exploited.
...Or at least, most of it. We're implementing the "spam firewall" box option that has been the vogue for the last few years because our Exchange spam filter is, likewise, coming up for license renewal. The last straw for me was when it came to image-only spam--for about two dozen of my 300 users, it won't block it. But it does block it for SOME people... Irritating, and hard to explain to a sales manager in the field getting six of these penny-stock-scam messages per day. I even have one guy who gets some penny-stock image-only messages blocked, others not.
Our new plan is to filter on the spam firewall for viruses and spam, dropping messages with viruses immediately, and dropping spam with a very high and obvious spam score. Anything that isn't spam at this point gets forwarded to Exchange. Spam below a certain point gets pre-pended with "SPAM:" in the subject so it is automagically filed by the tier 2 spam-filter and routed to the SPAM folder in Outlook. Spam above our threshold will not be forrwarded to Exchange and gets dropped.
On Exchange, the tier 2 filter will route the SPAM: messages that made it (our precaution against false positives getting totally dropped) to the SPAM folder in Outlook. The tier 2 filter will also be looking for spam/viruses that somehow got missed at tier 1, or for if a client gets a virus and starts spewing junk we want to block (from inside the SPAM firewall...)
It is convoluted, but we are having performance issues with Exchange related to spam being "filtered" on the Exchange server. In the recent past we've seen a drastic increase in spam volume because our company has put up an e-commerce web-site, so we're attracting more traffic and attention to our domain. In our current configuration, because every message that got dropped entirely (viruses) still had to come into the store, then be moved, and deleted, all contributing to log growth, store growth (exchange stores go one direction) and performance degradation.
By filtering the most obviously unwanted messages before they hit the Exchange store we keep growth of the stores to a minimum, they don't get fragmented and bog-down to molasses as often, and the customers don't complain as much/ever about "Outlook is requesting data..." (Anybody with large exchange stores in their life knows about the molasses phase some stores go through, and the wonderful "Outlook is requesting data..." phenomenon.
...but it seems to me writing binaries would be a mistake, and that the best route would be browser-based. If you're doing this as a "public consumption" application, requiring novice PC users to learn a special application to do something like this will make part of your audience reticent to try your application. If you tell them "Open your web-browser and go this private web-site at http://www.whatever/" it won't seem as imposing--so many musicians have MySpace pages, seeing it as a web-page to visit a la Google is vastly superior than perceiving it as a "Program I have to learn how to use." Musicians like simple: If you can do it in a browser with a handful of elegant controls, you are better off, since a well-implemented browser-based application is effectively client-OS-independent. It might matter what runs on your web, DB, and app servers, but otherwise, not an issue unless you're talking about an Apple IIgs running ProDos 16 and an alpha release of Mosaic over your token-ring LAN... But how many of your users are going to be in that weird of a configuration?
Solaris, BSD, Linux, Windows, Mac OS, all of the above have standards-compliant web-browsers, and all have a Java Virtual Machine--a challenge to make all the platforms have identical performance, but easier than writing ten different client applications, and more likely to be usable.
If I assumed in error, then I apologize for labelling you incorrectly.
Now, it's because I realize the difference between perjury, a crime, and a bunch of nonsense that is... in many cases, not even criminal. For instance, the original poster claimed "profiteering", which is just nebulous nonsense... its "not even wrong".. and, my favorite, "massive debt" which isn't even a crime.
It is bad form to not accept a genuine apology. Shame on you.
I'm glad you support an investigation--a wise man is never afraid of the truth--but your shrill tone and repeated references to verbatim Republican talking points are probably throwing people off a little bit. Certainly, it threw me off.
irst of all, assuming I am conservative because I realize the difference between doing something provably illegal (perjury) and "massive debt" or whatever other nosense the GP posted, is really your first mistake.
My assumption was actually based on your supportive statement on the Clinton impeachment. Second, I also assumed it based on your astro-turfing for Bush: "Prove what laws he's broken" is a Republican Party talking point designed to deflect media attention away from how actively BushCo is preventing anybody FROM proving anything. Statements like that conveniently ignore the massive stonewalling effort currently in progress at every level of the executive branch to keep anybody from providing the proof you're requesting. Obstruction of Justice is a big deal, its what they would have gotten Nixon for if he hadn't resigned.
If I assumed in error, then I apologize for labelling you incorrectly.
As for what "allegations" I'm talking about... take your pick. The wiretapping is the most egregious, but selective leaking of misleading intelligence to fear-monger people into supporting an un-neccessary war is a close-second. I imagine that probably constitutes "official misconduct," or whatever the Presidential equivalent of that is. Certainly, lying to the American people about the gravest matters of national security should carry at least the same punishment as lying about sex outside your marriage in a bogus sexual-harrassment lawsuit.
All things considered, Bush is acting very Nixonian lately. You'll know its all over when he starts wandering the West Wing at 3am and shouting at paintings of James K. Polk...
The real point of all this is that there is a dangerous undercurrent of cynicism sweeping the nation... If enough people think Bush is a crook, and nothing happens to him, it ultimately damages our system of government by lowering the credibility of all elected officials. If everybody just assumes the whole government is crooked, eventually it will be.
Until you can explain to me which laws Bush broke, with a sufficient amount of evidence, you have no business brining up the "i" word.
So I assume, then, you would support an investigation of the most egregious potential violations?
After all, you seem to think the six-year witch-hunt that was Whitewater was appropriate (as evidenced by your statement of support for clinton's impeachment,) certainly you must agree that the allegations against Bush are far more serious--and if an investigation proves them out, warrant impeachment and removal from office?
Because you aren't the first conservative I've run across to say "prove what laws he broke" to me--but when I ask them "So based on the credible evidence we have, should there be an investigation by Congress?" they immediately start ranting about "liberal media conspiracies" and "diminishing the Presidency during wartime,"--a few have called me the "t" word--traitor--for suggesting we should INVESTIGATE.
Is anybody else noticing how many aricles are being tagged "troll"? Won't make for a very good indexing mechanism is every third article has the same keyword...
It might help your karma if you took the political crap out of your signature. Just a thought.
And,yes, you have the right to air your opinion, and in fact you have; but others also have the right to dislike it and see it as unnecessary, irrelevant, exploitative, and argumentative. That goes for either or any party.
1) My karma's fine, thanks. "Excellent," in fact.
2) I'll take it out of my.sig when the President leaves office, either through resignation, impeachment, or normal course of term. OR when he comes clean about the various hoodwinkings the public has been subjected to during his administration.
3) What you are referring to is more accurately described as "abuse of the moderation system" than "political discourse." A political discourse involves reubtting somebody else's point of view, not simply silencing them. When comments are modded down because the moderator disagrees with them they are abusing the moderation system, per the moderation guidelines.
Also, 4) I was complaining about crack-ass moderation of somebody else's comments, and am thoroughly amused that somebody (multiple-somebodies) wasted mod-points on a message from me complaining about... Wasted mod-points.
Are you suggesting that conservatives really that desperate to believe in Bush (and petty enough) that they throw mod-points at people they don't agree with? Could that be a larger symptom of a weak argument, more than a symptom of my post being inappropriate?
In the 90's, liberals and moderates had to accept that Clinton was a dud, why can't the far-right accept that Bush is, likewise, a total disaster for this country? Why can't the dialog shift from "Bush sucks worse than Clinton! No! Clinton sucks worse than Bush!" to "How did we get stuck with two crappy, law-breaking, constitutionally-clueless Presidents in a row?"
Sorry crack-smoking mods, but pointing out that a story is a dupe is NOT a troll. Note: Unfair use of the "Troll" designation on valid criticisms of Slashdot will be meta-moderated unfair.
Why couldn't they fire him for being bad at sales, why use the no web surfing policy?
Because "bad at sales" is a subjective judgement of performance, which could require expensive litigation to defend. Also complicating this route is the fact that, if there were other sales people who were arguably "worse" than this person, but who weren't fired, it would then look bad for the employer if it went to court, especially if, say, the person fired was a minority of some sort and the person not-fired for same conduct wasn't.
"Hmm, you didn't fire salesman Y for the same performance, but you did fire salesman Z and he's [insert minority group here.]"
Termination for cause is a bear-trap... It is easier (and cheaper in the long run) to fire people for a black and white violation of policy rather than a debatable reason like "doing a bad job," even if the person REAAAALLY deserves it. Our VP of Finance told me about a year ago that was why we were writing an "employee handbook": To make firing people easier, since the lawyers rarely sign off on terminations for "doing a shitty job" anymore. Of course, that same person was fired for cause for gross-incompetence, so he might have been full of shit.
You are describing the abuses of the system, and that hurts the system in 2 ways
I would hope the H1-B system is designed to help startups, but we all know it wasn't: Otherwise there wouldn't be loopholes to exploit big enough for the Fortune 500 to drive a cement-mixer through. The reason should be fairly obvious if you've been following politics in the U.S. in the last thirty or so years: Money.
Startups with a dozen employees don't make massive campaign contributions to keep Congress-critters in office. If they did, you'd see safeguards in the H1-B program to make sure it was actually being used to benefit companies with legitimate needs to import labor. But those safeguards don't exist for a simple reason: It was in the best interest of the campaign-funders that they not exist.
It has been said many times, but failure to put safeguards against abuse into a system is tantamount to inviting the system to be abused, and should not be seen as an "unforeseen circumstance" when it, inevitably, happens.
it's that kind of attitude that has created for us this big shitstorm over illegal immigration: People want to work in this country, and our companies are willing to hire them over American workers, and they aren't going to take no for an answer, so you might as well let them have what they want, but on your terms.
Actually, I think they WILL take no for an answer if we start exposing some of the sleaze inherent in the H1-B scam.
How many of you have seen ads for "DBA/Programmer/Network engineer" positions paying $25k in the paper? Ever wondered why those positions are even advertised? So that, when they can't find any American that can afford to work at that price, they can go off an get another H1-B into the country so they can hire somebody at this slave wage, and then abuse them for six years. In the H1-B scam, everybody loses, except the short-term-manager, whose quarterly bonus is long-since paid and spent before anybody notices how much it sucks that their most important technical-expert employees have visas that expire every six years. Instead of grooming future generations of technical team leaders, managers, and directors, that expertise gets sent back to India/China/wherever and is used to found your next competitor.
What the H1-B scam does is creates a perpetual, false, "shortage." This enables them to import a "cheap" Indian, Chinese, or Russian professional for what Americans would consider slavery-wages. In turn, this makes more Americans available to other companies. Recall from Economics 101 the law of supply & demand:
More supply (available American workers) + less demand (one fewer job available now that the H1-B has it) == lower wages for all.
When you factor in the long-term organizational "dumbing-down" that this type of hiring practice leads to, nobody is winning except the snake-oil salesman/MBA-fucker who proposed this deal in the first place.
The problem is that if I'm typing a mail in Outlook and suddenly it can't access the server any more (network congestion probably) then it panics.
Microsoft "fixed" this problem in Outlook XP/2003......Instead of freezing, it throws up a balloon that says "Outlook is requesting data." Which is just useless enough to make a user call. "Hey, what the hell does 'Outlook is requesting data' mean?"
Thanks, Bill. Glad we put our eggs in your wicker basket...
Attention dumbass moderators: It isn't redundant if I'm the first person to mention it. Since there were two other posts logged before me, neither one mentioning a dupe, it isn't redundant.
Slashdot Mirror
Two things:
1) Who cares? People gamble. Get over it.
2) What is the penalty for offline gambling in WA? Why does such an arbitrary distinction lead to a five-years term for playing POKER. Wild Bill Hickok would roll over in his grave.
I wanted to mod your message up but there's no "+1 Frighteningly Insightful"...
Bold/italic emphasis mine, since this is probably the part that allowed the small-minded administrators at the school to take action... Since when is BRINGING UP Columbine automatically a veiled threat? In the context of a threatening message, it could be considered that, certainly. Yet, if you read it in context here it doesn't seem threatening at all. It seems like a statement of fact: The kids at Columbine were bullied, and there's very little difference between bullying committed by students as opposed to faculty/staff. Telling somebody to shut up for criticizing you could be described as bullying...
Certainly, what he has written here is not fine literature, but hardly a "Veiled threat." He was, inartfully, making the point that by punishing students for blog posts in order to "protect the kids" the school administration might, ironically, be creating the very problem it seeks to prevent. He explicitly says they didn't intend to threaten anybody, simply posting reactions to events from their own lives as an act of free expression.
This is a clear over-reach by the school system--He didn't post the page from school on their computer or internet connection, he did it from home. Further, other media sources have indicated that Xanga/MySpace/Friendster (the "social networking" sites) aren't accessible from the school, so there is no chance of this kid's web-site being "disruptive to the educational process," which was the last standard I am aware of for determining whether a school can abridge student civili rights or not. The school's claim that the message was threatening is dubious at best when taken in context.
It seems more likely that some administrators came down hard on somebody this person knew, and he wrote a scathing (in its own way) response that depicts those administrators as ogres. Instead of disrupting the school with a protest, he went home and wrote constitutionally protected editorial article on his web-site. Administrators decided to further-overreact by suspending him and threatening expulsion. Now they're really up shit creek, because if they back down they're "caving" in the eyes of everybody because of the previous hardline stance they've taken. If they go forward and expel him, it essentially validates everything in the kid's post--that they are taking away kids educational opportunities.
In my youth i had an embarassing job requiring a half-assed bow-tie--not the tying kind, the clipping shut kind. I swore after that I would never wear a clip-on tie, and learned to tie a necktie two ways REALLY well, and a third half-assed way, which I don't use.
Now that I know how, I can't believe I ever DIDN'T know. As a matter of pride, if I worked at the Geek Squad (I don't) I'd buy my own regular necktie. Clip-ons are... um... not a good look.
There's a million bucks in the mix in this thing! To quote one of the 9-year-olds, Shit! You can't make this stuff up...
...I don't know about you, but I don't want my Grandkids/Wife/whoever knowing how many hookers I beat up while playing GTA3: Vice City.
...a Slashdot contest to pick somebody for a cameo role in the movie? It would be the ultimate marketing tie-in... Except that most of us probably wouldn't pay money to see a remake of Revenge of the Nerds.
...the value depends on the credibility of the certifying authority. Microsoft Certifications have become almost worthless because MS was printing money with the MCP program in the 1990's. Now the tests are (a little) harder, but the barrier to getting certified is still really low in the MS world. Result? MCSE is basically worthless to have these days.
On the other hand, TFA points out the going-rate for certain Cisco certifications is on the rise. Not coincidentally, some of the Cisco certs they refer to are among the hardest to get. MCPs are easy to get, are more common, and thus do not denote any exceptional level of expertise.
Of course, I'd rather hire somebody with a mile-long list of successful projects they've accomplished than an alphabet-soup of certifications. In every hiring scenario I've been involved in so-far, I have always put the people who have DONE something ahead of the certification monkeys. Of crouse, if somebody with experience and "hard" certifications comes along, it doesn't hurt matters.
I'm thinking it would take two flaws...
1) The flaw you want to exploit.
2) A flaw in the OS to allow exploit #1's installation without throwing up the "Enter your administrator password" dialog so the user isn't tipped off something bad is happening.
This is a big barrier--not impossible, but a big one to get past. The Apple "limited-Administrator" model is vastly preferable to the "Everybody is totally-Administrator with no checks ever" model in Windows. Don't underestimate the efficacy of a simple mechanism like verifying an admin password to do "admin" things. Who's going to put in their Admin password to visit CNN.com? If it pops up at an unexpected time, the user becomes suspicious, and the machine is less likely to be exploited.
...Or at least, most of it. We're implementing the "spam firewall" box option that has been the vogue for the last few years because our Exchange spam filter is, likewise, coming up for license renewal. The last straw for me was when it came to image-only spam--for about two dozen of my 300 users, it won't block it. But it does block it for SOME people... Irritating, and hard to explain to a sales manager in the field getting six of these penny-stock-scam messages per day. I even have one guy who gets some penny-stock image-only messages blocked, others not.
Our new plan is to filter on the spam firewall for viruses and spam, dropping messages with viruses immediately, and dropping spam with a very high and obvious spam score. Anything that isn't spam at this point gets forwarded to Exchange. Spam below a certain point gets pre-pended with "SPAM:" in the subject so it is automagically filed by the tier 2 spam-filter and routed to the SPAM folder in Outlook. Spam above our threshold will not be forrwarded to Exchange and gets dropped.
On Exchange, the tier 2 filter will route the SPAM: messages that made it (our precaution against false positives getting totally dropped) to the SPAM folder in Outlook. The tier 2 filter will also be looking for spam/viruses that somehow got missed at tier 1, or for if a client gets a virus and starts spewing junk we want to block (from inside the SPAM firewall...)
It is convoluted, but we are having performance issues with Exchange related to spam being "filtered" on the Exchange server. In the recent past we've seen a drastic increase in spam volume because our company has put up an e-commerce web-site, so we're attracting more traffic and attention to our domain. In our current configuration, because every message that got dropped entirely (viruses) still had to come into the store, then be moved, and deleted, all contributing to log growth, store growth (exchange stores go one direction) and performance degradation.
By filtering the most obviously unwanted messages before they hit the Exchange store we keep growth of the stores to a minimum, they don't get fragmented and bog-down to molasses as often, and the customers don't complain as much/ever about "Outlook is requesting data..." (Anybody with large exchange stores in their life knows about the molasses phase some stores go through, and the wonderful "Outlook is requesting data..." phenomenon.
...but it seems to me writing binaries would be a mistake, and that the best route would be browser-based. If you're doing this as a "public consumption" application, requiring novice PC users to learn a special application to do something like this will make part of your audience reticent to try your application. If you tell them "Open your web-browser and go this private web-site at http://www.whatever/" it won't seem as imposing--so many musicians have MySpace pages, seeing it as a web-page to visit a la Google is vastly superior than perceiving it as a "Program I have to learn how to use." Musicians like simple: If you can do it in a browser with a handful of elegant controls, you are better off, since a well-implemented browser-based application is effectively client-OS-independent. It might matter what runs on your web, DB, and app servers, but otherwise, not an issue unless you're talking about an Apple IIgs running ProDos 16 and an alpha release of Mosaic over your token-ring LAN... But how many of your users are going to be in that weird of a configuration?
Solaris, BSD, Linux, Windows, Mac OS, all of the above have standards-compliant web-browsers, and all have a Java Virtual Machine--a challenge to make all the platforms have identical performance, but easier than writing ten different client applications, and more likely to be usable.
It is bad form to not accept a genuine apology. Shame on you.
I'm glad you support an investigation--a wise man is never afraid of the truth--but your shrill tone and repeated references to verbatim Republican talking points are probably throwing people off a little bit. Certainly, it threw me off.
My assumption was actually based on your supportive statement on the Clinton impeachment. Second, I also assumed it based on your astro-turfing for Bush: "Prove what laws he's broken" is a Republican Party talking point designed to deflect media attention away from how actively BushCo is preventing anybody FROM proving anything. Statements like that conveniently ignore the massive stonewalling effort currently in progress at every level of the executive branch to keep anybody from providing the proof you're requesting. Obstruction of Justice is a big deal, its what they would have gotten Nixon for if he hadn't resigned.
If I assumed in error, then I apologize for labelling you incorrectly.
As for what "allegations" I'm talking about... take your pick. The wiretapping is the most egregious, but selective leaking of misleading intelligence to fear-monger people into supporting an un-neccessary war is a close-second. I imagine that probably constitutes "official misconduct," or whatever the Presidential equivalent of that is. Certainly, lying to the American people about the gravest matters of national security should carry at least the same punishment as lying about sex outside your marriage in a bogus sexual-harrassment lawsuit.
All things considered, Bush is acting very Nixonian lately. You'll know its all over when he starts wandering the West Wing at 3am and shouting at paintings of James K. Polk...
The real point of all this is that there is a dangerous undercurrent of cynicism sweeping the nation... If enough people think Bush is a crook, and nothing happens to him, it ultimately damages our system of government by lowering the credibility of all elected officials. If everybody just assumes the whole government is crooked, eventually it will be.
So I assume, then, you would support an investigation of the most egregious potential violations?
After all, you seem to think the six-year witch-hunt that was Whitewater was appropriate (as evidenced by your statement of support for clinton's impeachment,) certainly you must agree that the allegations against Bush are far more serious--and if an investigation proves them out, warrant impeachment and removal from office?
Because you aren't the first conservative I've run across to say "prove what laws he broke" to me--but when I ask them "So based on the credible evidence we have, should there be an investigation by Congress?" they immediately start ranting about "liberal media conspiracies" and "diminishing the Presidency during wartime,"--a few have called me the "t" word--traitor--for suggesting we should INVESTIGATE.
...Now we can have a technical debate settled in the best way possible... with marketing!
After all, it worked with VHS vs. Beta. Marketing talked about the merits of both and "the market" picked the best standard.
[/sarcasm]
I think a new batch of users got their first run at Mod points this week... There have been some absolute travesties of moderation going on this week.
Is anybody else noticing how many aricles are being tagged "troll"? Won't make for a very good indexing mechanism is every third article has the same keyword...
1) My karma's fine, thanks. "Excellent," in fact.
2) I'll take it out of my
3) What you are referring to is more accurately described as "abuse of the moderation system" than "political discourse." A political discourse involves reubtting somebody else's point of view, not simply silencing them. When comments are modded down because the moderator disagrees with them they are abusing the moderation system, per the moderation guidelines.
Also, 4) I was complaining about crack-ass moderation of somebody else's comments, and am thoroughly amused that somebody (multiple-somebodies) wasted mod-points on a message from me complaining about... Wasted mod-points.
Are you suggesting that conservatives really that desperate to believe in Bush (and petty enough) that they throw mod-points at people they don't agree with? Could that be a larger symptom of a weak argument, more than a symptom of my post being inappropriate?
In the 90's, liberals and moderates had to accept that Clinton was a dud, why can't the far-right accept that Bush is, likewise, a total disaster for this country? Why can't the dialog shift from "Bush sucks worse than Clinton! No! Clinton sucks worse than Bush!" to "How did we get stuck with two crappy, law-breaking, constitutionally-clueless Presidents in a row?"
Sorry crack-smoking mods, but pointing out that a story is a dupe is NOT a troll. Note: Unfair use of the "Troll" designation on valid criticisms of Slashdot will be meta-moderated unfair.
Because "bad at sales" is a subjective judgement of performance, which could require expensive litigation to defend. Also complicating this route is the fact that, if there were other sales people who were arguably "worse" than this person, but who weren't fired, it would then look bad for the employer if it went to court, especially if, say, the person fired was a minority of some sort and the person not-fired for same conduct wasn't.
"Hmm, you didn't fire salesman Y for the same performance, but you did fire salesman Z and he's [insert minority group here.]"
Termination for cause is a bear-trap... It is easier (and cheaper in the long run) to fire people for a black and white violation of policy rather than a debatable reason like "doing a bad job," even if the person REAAAALLY deserves it. Our VP of Finance told me about a year ago that was why we were writing an "employee handbook": To make firing people easier, since the lawyers rarely sign off on terminations for "doing a shitty job" anymore. Of course, that same person was fired for cause for gross-incompetence, so he might have been full of shit.
I would hope the H1-B system is designed to help startups, but we all know it wasn't: Otherwise there wouldn't be loopholes to exploit big enough for the Fortune 500 to drive a cement-mixer through. The reason should be fairly obvious if you've been following politics in the U.S. in the last thirty or so years: Money.
Startups with a dozen employees don't make massive campaign contributions to keep Congress-critters in office. If they did, you'd see safeguards in the H1-B program to make sure it was actually being used to benefit companies with legitimate needs to import labor. But those safeguards don't exist for a simple reason: It was in the best interest of the campaign-funders that they not exist.
It has been said many times, but failure to put safeguards against abuse into a system is tantamount to inviting the system to be abused, and should not be seen as an "unforeseen circumstance" when it, inevitably, happens.
Actually, I think they WILL take no for an answer if we start exposing some of the sleaze inherent in the H1-B scam.
How many of you have seen ads for "DBA/Programmer/Network engineer" positions paying $25k in the paper? Ever wondered why those positions are even advertised? So that, when they can't find any American that can afford to work at that price, they can go off an get another H1-B into the country so they can hire somebody at this slave wage, and then abuse them for six years. In the H1-B scam, everybody loses, except the short-term-manager, whose quarterly bonus is long-since paid and spent before anybody notices how much it sucks that their most important technical-expert employees have visas that expire every six years. Instead of grooming future generations of technical team leaders, managers, and directors, that expertise gets sent back to India/China/wherever and is used to found your next competitor.
What the H1-B scam does is creates a perpetual, false, "shortage." This enables them to import a "cheap" Indian, Chinese, or Russian professional for what Americans would consider slavery-wages. In turn, this makes more Americans available to other companies. Recall from Economics 101 the law of supply & demand:
More supply (available American workers) + less demand (one fewer job available now that the H1-B has it) == lower wages for all.
When you factor in the long-term organizational "dumbing-down" that this type of hiring practice leads to, nobody is winning except the snake-oil salesman/MBA-fucker who proposed this deal in the first place.
Microsoft "fixed" this problem in Outlook XP/2003...
Thanks, Bill. Glad we put our eggs in your wicker basket...
Attention dumbass moderators: It isn't redundant if I'm the first person to mention it. Since there were two other posts logged before me, neither one mentioning a dupe, it isn't redundant.