blackh, spamcp, sh, njabls, sorbs, abuseat-> online blacklists
spamtrap -> if a message comes to a non-existant user (someone who only receives spam) the sender's ip is blacklisted forever
rumple -> if a certain IP sends keeps trying different user names (without sending anything), they're blocked. Sometimes this one can get quite high.
grylst -> greylisting
clamav -> clamav set up to detect spam images, list updated nightly.
After all that, the spam still has to go through spamassassin and the junk mail filters on each user's thunderbird process which further reduces the spam received down to near zero.
Although the formatting isn't that great, you can see that "spamtrap" gets a very small portion of the blocks while smapcop and greylisting take the vast majority. Like I said before, I've been doing this for years, and my predecessor was doing it for years before that. This new method is only different in that it looks at legitimate users as well. It probably takes up more
The man was hired and fired before I began working here, but from what I've heard, he was capable, but not fast. An average person could assemble the part in less than half the time. He was only worth half the amount, but still an amount that was worth having him on for. And yes, there were going to be legal ramifications if we continued to pay him less than allowable, and I'm not sure if there were any fines or what for the time we did hire him.
Unions should have but one purpose: to protect the well being of their members. To start out with, this meant making sure they didn't die of black lung disease or get their arm eaten by the sausage machine. The companies, of course, were reluctant to provide safety because it cut into their bottem line. Unions, however, should not have the ability to dictate safety codes, that's the job of the goverment. Overall, this helps society because when the sausage factory workers strike because of no safety standards, and the government passes safety laws, the butcher shops and and bacon plant also have to abide them without their workers needing to strike. Of course, as we are not talking about hypotheticals here, but actual history, and we can see that that is roughly what happened. During the depressions of post Civil War and post World War I, many unions were created with the idea that their workers were worth more than they were being paid. I don't think union-breakers or police intervention should have been used, but I also don't see why the people who decided that gauranteeing a meal on their table was worth more to them then a slightly higher wage were ostracized, beaten, and sometimes killed. Every worker should, gasp, decide for themselves what they're willing to work for. Obviously everyone would like more money for what they do, but the economics of the situtation reveal how much a worker is actually worth to a company. When a company can't afford to pay union wages for all their workers, they hire less workers. When the goverment comes in and demands they hire more workers, the company loses profits, and often times, will need goverment assistance to stay in business. At this point capitilism becomes merely a veneer on socialism, and we all lose.
So their labor monopoly really doesn't exist, and doesn't have government protection.
Have you ever heard of prevailing wage? I work for a company that receives the bulk of its profits from government contracts. We often hire workers in a local city, we pay them what they demand, because there's only so many construction companies. Often times the contractor will hire union workers, often times not. We also have our own install crews that aren't unionized. We can't, however, pay them what we like. Depending on the city, county, state, we have to pay our own workers "prevailing wage." Unions have negotiated rates at which all sorts of skilled (and IMHO unskilled) laborers get paid. Rough numbers seem to be in the $40 to $60 an hour rate for welders, forklift drivers, crane operators, electricians, etc. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to any of it. In one city a welder will earn $35 an hour, and an electrician $80. In a city across the country the numbers will completely reversed. Of course, we pay the local rates when we use the local labor, so no problem. When we have our own team do the install we have to pay them forklift driver rates when they're driving a forklift, electrician rates when they're pulling cat5 cables, and metal-worker rates when they're bolting a 1/2 steel plate to the ceiling or walls. These are the same 3 or 4 people doing all of these jobs and we have to pay them $40 an hour for 30 minutes, $70 an hour for 3 hours, and $25 hour for four hours, and our normal rate for when they're eating lunch or taking a dump. It's extremely complicated, especially when the local unions decide to visit to see why we aren't hiring their guy for 15 minutes of work.
From my limited company experience from inside the IT office I'd say we are required by law to pay prevailing wage somewhere in the range of 50-60% of the time. All of these costs we pass on to the customer (we itemize install costs as part of the total price of installation) who in turn, passes it on to their source of income, who is almost always you, the taxpayer. So the next time you see an article in the newspaper about a new training facility for your local police department, correctional facility, or SWAT team, just think about how you likely helped pay a few Joes in Utah an extra few thousand dollars beyond what they were willing to work at, if only your local government didn't have prevailing wage contracts with the local unions.
Does it hurt society to enforce a minimum adequate wage? No, and if you want to argue this point then that's an entirely different track to get off on.
It does hurt society to have a minimum wage. By setting a floor on the amount a business can hire at, the number of employees, and thus the number unemployeed, is off from what the market could handle. Does a teenager working at McDonalds earn $6 an hour for the company? Sure, but would the McDonalds not be able to offer better service if it could hire two teenagers working for $3 an hour? At a point, the only people willing to work at a very low wage ($7.50 or less) are those whose skillsets can't afford them a better job. Sure it would be nice if everyone had some special skill that could make them hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, but that's just not the case. The population contains the entire gamut of skillsets from the brightest engineer working for NASA to the janitor who keeps mixing ammonia and chlorine. Not all of these people are capable of producing a profit for a company with their skillset.
A prime example of would be the mentally or physically disabled. My company, years and years ago, hired a man who was moderately mentally handicapped. He was perfectly proficient at doing the same simple task over and over and over all day long. He wasn't as quick as the average Joe we were hiring at minimum wage (probably $3 or $4 at the time), so we paid him less. This was the only job he could get, and he was contributing to society. When we finally got caught, we had to fire him. Now he has no job and just sits in his room at a home all day. Before he was helping pay his way at the home, now the state is paying his entire way, and he is, to put it bluntly, a burden on society. The argument could be made that we were exploiting this man, but the reality is, we were paying him what he was worth to us (there is no such thing "real worth") under the supervision of the home. When we were forced to pay him minimum wage, he was no longer profitable to keep. We could have kept him on as a charity case, and that might have been profitable from a PR viewpoint, but that was not the decision that was made at the time. More businesses could be profitable and less would go bankrupt if minimum wages were abolished. Sadly, the people who do not earn their wage for the company will have a loss in standard of living, and might even have to take on a second or third job, but if there were enough of an incentive to the companies to hire those that were worth their cost, society as a whole would gain.
If you want to talk cartels, than maybe we should ask why our government has put so much work into breaking up the "labor cartel" and so little into breaking up the oil cartel.
Which government exactly is it that's breaking up unions? Please let me know, I'd like to sign up.
I'm not going to say that you're narrow minded like the GP, merely under-educated. Please take a basic economics course from your local college. When the teacher and the textbooks say pretty much what I and others have just said, and you still think you're right, then you'll be narrow minded. If you've already passed an economics class, then please disregard this paragraph; you are narrow minded. Econonics is a science. Its tenants are guided by observation from actual data just like every other science. What you have are not opinions, they are non-facts. You might think you're right, but just like young-earthers, your beliefs have no basis in reality.
Socialism doesn't help below average earners. There is not one example in all of history where the goverment has been able to adequetely manage the economy to the point of bringing everyone out of poverty. The only socialized countries that do well are ones that already had an above average standard of living.
In India the government used to (until rather recently) highly regulate all imports and exports to protect the local economy and the local impoverished population. Of course after many years they've finally realised that it wasn't helping and the import of goods from other countries, and the export of talent and goods has drastically raised the standard of living for much of the population from the highest tier to the bottom rung. They still have much poverty, but it's getting better through open markets and lack of government interference.
Socialism, communism, and all the ilk fail at their one goal: help the little man. They have points that help the middle-classed, elite, and everyone inbetween, but do little to help the bottom tier.
I agree, this has absolutely nothing to do with right or wrong; capatilism is merely the most efficient way to achieve a higher standard of living for the whole population. People, on the other hand, tend to vote for what is right or wrong, or at least what they think is right or wrong. This is why, especially in impoverished countries like Venezuela the people are voting for socialism. The think, and quite possibly the politicians also think, that the goverment should help people by lowering prices, raising wages, etc. Governments are notoriously bad at this. Any organization would be. The problem is simply too large. For example, if the main staple food, say wheat, were to drastically raise in price (either from increased demand or from decreased supply) the government would come in and set the price to the "correct" price of what is was before it rose to a too costly of price. Of course, as there is already a too high of demand or too little of supply, the amount of food will simply run out. The businesses and farmers who grew the wheat are no longer getting the amount of money possible from the crop, and the people still don't have enough wheat. On the other hand, if the goverment did nothing, people would have been forced to purchase other food to feed their families, the demand for wheat at the price given would drop, and the wheat would not necessarily run out. Everyone would still have access, but they'd cut down on wheat usage and end up with higher use potatoes, corn, rice, etc. How exactly is the government helping the lower class by setting a cap on the price of wheat?
How is raising the floor for entry not price fixing? If there were 100 teachers willing to work for 40,000, 50 willing to work for 30,000, and 10 willing to work for 20,000, why should we not be allowed to hire those bottom 10 at the rate they are worth? Many teachers leave the practice because wages are low, but that's their choice. If there were no teachers available at 20,000, don't you think schools would hire the ones that are available at a higher rate? All jobs in all walks of life get paid exactly as much as they should be, unless they are at the floor or ceiling of any price fixing strategy. People might feel that they "deserve" better or are "worth" more, but if there's someone waiting behind you to do the same job for the same price or less, you're worth only that amount. Price fixing isn't just about setting a maximum (like sports owners sometimes try to create) but rather about setting any rate as the rate for a given job or product.
Believe me, I think unions are fine for other things such as raising legislative concerns about working safety conditions, breaks, etc, but price is always best decided by the market. If bricks are too expensive, build with wood, if wood's too expensive, build with steel, if steel's too expensive, buy a used house or rent for a while to save more money. If teacher's aren't being hired, raise the base rate. Don't complain that teachers aren't paid enough unless teachers are quitting for better jobs at such a rate that there is a shortage. Once there is a shortage the prices will inevitably rise to more palatable rate.
That's why I said "back in the day." I don't recall the exact dates, but we're talking dozens of years before people stopped building/buying earthquake coded houses. Goverment regulation on coding really jumstarted with the San Francisco earthquake.
Why is it that in America is is illegal for companies to fix prices and perfectly legal for individuals to fix wages?
If companies were allowed to collude on prices the consumer loses, and thus the economy loses. Why is it that no one seems to be able to see that when individuals collude on wages businesses lose, thus the consumer loses, and finally the economy loses?
Here in Utah there was a raging debate recently about how to "fix" public education by allowing a voucher system. The argument was that this would force public schools to "compete" with the private schools and eachother. Of course, this argument had the vast flaw that the public schools don't have to compete because the teachers' union ensures that teachers get paid for being there, not for actual performance. In a local private school my boss is on the board for there was a problem with a teacher telling an off-color joke to elementry students. When the students repeated the joke to their parents the parents told the board, the board conferred with the principal, and the teacher was immediately fired. Within two weeks they had another teacher in the classroom. When I was in 7th grade there was an aging teacher who should have been in a mental institution. She hadn't taught a lesson in at least 10 years, but the school couldn't fire her. She told students that she lived underneath a neighboring city with aliens, and I'm pretty sure she believed it herself. Well, about a week before class started she finally died. The entire first semester they weren't able to hire a new teacher because of union rules. The private school had a substitute for two weeks, the private school had a team of substitutes for four months.
Back in the day, before unions, houses were built by the thousands with bricks. Not because they were the best, or the cheapest, but because it was the style. The bricklayers, feeling that they were being grifted, unionized, as was the style of the time. Very quickly the cost of building with bricks became too prohibitive, and the bricklayers mostly lost their jobs. Overall society didn't hurt too much, but it had a large impact on the southern California economy.
That leaves us with the current WGA prediciment. The WGA prevents companies who hire their members from hiring non-members as best they can. Now, when the writers finally figure out that the guild has left them with a shitty contract (which has been shitty for dozens of years now) they strike, leaving a gap in the economy. Admittedly, this is a small gap, but a gap nonetheless. If the guild had not been fixing wages/contracts for its hundreds (thousands?) of members, each individual would instead be creating their own contract allowing them to ask for what they need. The studios would only be able to hire workers at market price (whether higher or lower than existing is impossible to know) giving market benifits, royalties, etc.
So this all leaves me with the lingering question, why is it that businesses can't fix prices while people can?
The downloader appears to only be necessary to download entire albums, not individual songs. If you click "Buy MP3 Album" you get the download or cancel purchase page. If you click "Buy MP3" you get a page that recommends you download the downloader (to download the song), but you can click "Skip Installation" and download the file directly.
Well, I don't know what you think a fair price should be. Do a search for "50 cent" and you'll see that the prices vary slightly, but are overall pretty good. Either 89 cents or 99 cents per song, albums weigh in at $5.99, $8.99, and $9.99. All of these prices trump are on par with the competition or slightly better. Don't forget a major competition piece: the $16.95 brick and mortar cd price.
Well let's see...Spoon? check. Apples in Stereo? check. Radiohead, Bowie, Beach Boys? check, check, check. Pink Floyd, Hendrix, Nirvana? all check.
Hmm...maybe something harder...Neutral Milk Hotel? check. Danielle Dax? aww...so sad, not check. Mongol 800? no...too bad.
It seems just about everything that I listen to that is available somewhere is available here, so what am I missing? Even better though, if it's not available as an MP3 Amazon redirects me to a cd or vinyl copy. iTunes, etc. don't do that.
It's not illegal to unlock a phone because of an excemption in the DMCA, but the DMCA says nothing about requiring warranties remain invalid. If this law were used to force Apple into maintaining warranties on unlocked iPhones, then wouldn't Microsoft be also obliged to maintain warranties on 'chipped Xbox's. Right now they're merely banning them from Xbox live, but shouldn't the inability to get online with a product which heralds its online capabilities be a warranty issue?
They should be putting him on a pedestal and making this a nationwide policy.
Because, after all, gamestop should be parenting rather than, oh, I don't know, the parents. If parents wants to let their kids play games all day instead of studying they're not exactly right, but more power to them. You can't force people to make the right desisions.
My company is constantly tightening the security belt on its employees, but we find we can only tighten it so much.
If we give every employee access to everything, yes problems will happen. But if we give most employees access to most things their jobs are a lot easier, and more work gets done (or the same amount of work gets done, but with less stress and overworking).
If one of our employees decides to steal information, we'll deal with it with that employee, but that's as far as we go. We can't live in fear of an inside attack just because it's more likely than a virus (especially for a linux only shop like ourselves). A balance must be struck between full access and full security.
the data base the hackers had access to also had birth dates, social security numbers and everything else necessary to steal account holders' identities
And why, pray tell, does TD Amiritrade require all of that in their main database? If set up properly they could have one database with financial information, and database with contact information, and a link between them. At the very least it's possible (I'm not in any way assuming likely) that the unauthorized code didn't have sufficient database privileges to access the more secure information.
Either way, I'd recommend a strongly worded letter to TD A. and a watchful eye on your credit.
I don't know, but inside the my local brick & mortar store there was a 7 foot tall Big Daddy. I don't what it cost, but it's awesomeness surely pushed many people to at the very least ask about the game, and probably many to go ahead and buy.
IMHO people are getting pretty fed up with pervasive advertising. Part of Tivo's initial popularity came from the ability to skip advertisements. The people quite obviously want less ads, not more. As all of google's money now seems to come from advertising, and they seem to only be innovating new ways to push ads, I'd say that they're going down the wrong path.
Interesting to see that the faster 100Gbps also has the longer cable lengths built into the standard. From TFA:
40Gbps can be 1 meter long on the backplane, 10 meters for copper cable and 100 meters for fiber-optics. The 100Gbps standard includes specifications for 10 kilometer and 40 kilometer connections over single-mode fiber.
I'm seeing the 100Gbps used for infrastructure with its larger bandwidth and longer cable length while the 40Gbps would be used for datacenters, server rooms, etc. with its faster "connect" speeds (clarification on what exactly this would mean?).
Slashdot Mirror
blackh, spamcp, sh, njabls, sorbs, abuseat-> online blacklistsspamtrap -> if a message comes to a non-existant user (someone who only receives spam) the sender's ip is blacklisted forever
rumple -> if a certain IP sends keeps trying different user names (without sending anything), they're blocked. Sometimes this one can get quite high.
grylst -> greylisting
clamav -> clamav set up to detect spam images, list updated nightly.
After all that, the spam still has to go through spamassassin and the junk mail filters on each user's thunderbird process which further reduces the spam received down to near zero.
Although the formatting isn't that great, you can see that "spamtrap" gets a very small portion of the blocks while smapcop and greylisting take the vast majority. Like I said before, I've been doing this for years, and my predecessor was doing it for years before that. This new method is only different in that it looks at legitimate users as well. It probably takes up more
The man was hired and fired before I began working here, but from what I've heard, he was capable, but not fast. An average person could assemble the part in less than half the time. He was only worth half the amount, but still an amount that was worth having him on for. And yes, there were going to be legal ramifications if we continued to pay him less than allowable, and I'm not sure if there were any fines or what for the time we did hire him.
Unions should have but one purpose: to protect the well being of their members. To start out with, this meant making sure they didn't die of black lung disease or get their arm eaten by the sausage machine. The companies, of course, were reluctant to provide safety because it cut into their bottem line. Unions, however, should not have the ability to dictate safety codes, that's the job of the goverment. Overall, this helps society because when the sausage factory workers strike because of no safety standards, and the government passes safety laws, the butcher shops and and bacon plant also have to abide them without their workers needing to strike. Of course, as we are not talking about hypotheticals here, but actual history, and we can see that that is roughly what happened. During the depressions of post Civil War and post World War I, many unions were created with the idea that their workers were worth more than they were being paid. I don't think union-breakers or police intervention should have been used, but I also don't see why the people who decided that gauranteeing a meal on their table was worth more to them then a slightly higher wage were ostracized, beaten, and sometimes killed. Every worker should, gasp, decide for themselves what they're willing to work for. Obviously everyone would like more money for what they do, but the economics of the situtation reveal how much a worker is actually worth to a company. When a company can't afford to pay union wages for all their workers, they hire less workers. When the goverment comes in and demands they hire more workers, the company loses profits, and often times, will need goverment assistance to stay in business. At this point capitilism becomes merely a veneer on socialism, and we all lose.
Have you ever heard of prevailing wage? I work for a company that receives the bulk of its profits from government contracts. We often hire workers in a local city, we pay them what they demand, because there's only so many construction companies. Often times the contractor will hire union workers, often times not. We also have our own install crews that aren't unionized. We can't, however, pay them what we like. Depending on the city, county, state, we have to pay our own workers "prevailing wage." Unions have negotiated rates at which all sorts of skilled (and IMHO unskilled) laborers get paid. Rough numbers seem to be in the $40 to $60 an hour rate for welders, forklift drivers, crane operators, electricians, etc. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to any of it. In one city a welder will earn $35 an hour, and an electrician $80. In a city across the country the numbers will completely reversed. Of course, we pay the local rates when we use the local labor, so no problem. When we have our own team do the install we have to pay them forklift driver rates when they're driving a forklift, electrician rates when they're pulling cat5 cables, and metal-worker rates when they're bolting a 1/2 steel plate to the ceiling or walls. These are the same 3 or 4 people doing all of these jobs and we have to pay them $40 an hour for 30 minutes, $70 an hour for 3 hours, and $25 hour for four hours, and our normal rate for when they're eating lunch or taking a dump. It's extremely complicated, especially when the local unions decide to visit to see why we aren't hiring their guy for 15 minutes of work.
From my limited company experience from inside the IT office I'd say we are required by law to pay prevailing wage somewhere in the range of 50-60% of the time. All of these costs we pass on to the customer (we itemize install costs as part of the total price of installation) who in turn, passes it on to their source of income, who is almost always you, the taxpayer. So the next time you see an article in the newspaper about a new training facility for your local police department, correctional facility, or SWAT team, just think about how you likely helped pay a few Joes in Utah an extra few thousand dollars beyond what they were willing to work at, if only your local government didn't have prevailing wage contracts with the local unions.
It does hurt society to have a minimum wage. By setting a floor on the amount a business can hire at, the number of employees, and thus the number unemployeed, is off from what the market could handle. Does a teenager working at McDonalds earn $6 an hour for the company? Sure, but would the McDonalds not be able to offer better service if it could hire two teenagers working for $3 an hour? At a point, the only people willing to work at a very low wage ($7.50 or less) are those whose skillsets can't afford them a better job. Sure it would be nice if everyone had some special skill that could make them hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, but that's just not the case. The population contains the entire gamut of skillsets from the brightest engineer working for NASA to the janitor who keeps mixing ammonia and chlorine. Not all of these people are capable of producing a profit for a company with their skillset.
A prime example of would be the mentally or physically disabled. My company, years and years ago, hired a man who was moderately mentally handicapped. He was perfectly proficient at doing the same simple task over and over and over all day long. He wasn't as quick as the average Joe we were hiring at minimum wage (probably $3 or $4 at the time), so we paid him less. This was the only job he could get, and he was contributing to society. When we finally got caught, we had to fire him. Now he has no job and just sits in his room at a home all day. Before he was helping pay his way at the home, now the state is paying his entire way, and he is, to put it bluntly, a burden on society. The argument could be made that we were exploiting this man, but the reality is, we were paying him what he was worth to us (there is no such thing "real worth") under the supervision of the home. When we were forced to pay him minimum wage, he was no longer profitable to keep. We could have kept him on as a charity case, and that might have been profitable from a PR viewpoint, but that was not the decision that was made at the time. More businesses could be profitable and less would go bankrupt if minimum wages were abolished. Sadly, the people who do not earn their wage for the company will have a loss in standard of living, and might even have to take on a second or third job, but if there were enough of an incentive to the companies to hire those that were worth their cost, society as a whole would gain.
Which government exactly is it that's breaking up unions? Please let me know, I'd like to sign up.
I'm not going to say that you're narrow minded like the GP, merely under-educated. Please take a basic economics course from your local college. When the teacher and the textbooks say pretty much what I and others have just said, and you still think you're right, then you'll be narrow minded. If you've already passed an economics class, then please disregard this paragraph; you are narrow minded. Econonics is a science. Its tenants are guided by observation from actual data just like every other science. What you have are not opinions, they are non-facts. You might think you're right, but just like young-earthers, your beliefs have no basis in reality.
In India the government used to (until rather recently) highly regulate all imports and exports to protect the local economy and the local impoverished population. Of course after many years they've finally realised that it wasn't helping and the import of goods from other countries, and the export of talent and goods has drastically raised the standard of living for much of the population from the highest tier to the bottom rung. They still have much poverty, but it's getting better through open markets and lack of government interference.
Socialism, communism, and all the ilk fail at their one goal: help the little man. They have points that help the middle-classed, elite, and everyone inbetween, but do little to help the bottom tier.
I agree, this has absolutely nothing to do with right or wrong; capatilism is merely the most efficient way to achieve a higher standard of living for the whole population. People, on the other hand, tend to vote for what is right or wrong, or at least what they think is right or wrong. This is why, especially in impoverished countries like Venezuela the people are voting for socialism. The think, and quite possibly the politicians also think, that the goverment should help people by lowering prices, raising wages, etc. Governments are notoriously bad at this. Any organization would be. The problem is simply too large. For example, if the main staple food, say wheat, were to drastically raise in price (either from increased demand or from decreased supply) the government would come in and set the price to the "correct" price of what is was before it rose to a too costly of price. Of course, as there is already a too high of demand or too little of supply, the amount of food will simply run out. The businesses and farmers who grew the wheat are no longer getting the amount of money possible from the crop, and the people still don't have enough wheat. On the other hand, if the goverment did nothing, people would have been forced to purchase other food to feed their families, the demand for wheat at the price given would drop, and the wheat would not necessarily run out. Everyone would still have access, but they'd cut down on wheat usage and end up with higher use potatoes, corn, rice, etc. How exactly is the government helping the lower class by setting a cap on the price of wheat?
Believe me, I think unions are fine for other things such as raising legislative concerns about working safety conditions, breaks, etc, but price is always best decided by the market. If bricks are too expensive, build with wood, if wood's too expensive, build with steel, if steel's too expensive, buy a used house or rent for a while to save more money. If teacher's aren't being hired, raise the base rate. Don't complain that teachers aren't paid enough unless teachers are quitting for better jobs at such a rate that there is a shortage. Once there is a shortage the prices will inevitably rise to more palatable rate.
That's why I said "back in the day." I don't recall the exact dates, but we're talking dozens of years before people stopped building/buying earthquake coded houses. Goverment regulation on coding really jumstarted with the San Francisco earthquake.
If companies were allowed to collude on prices the consumer loses, and thus the economy loses. Why is it that no one seems to be able to see that when individuals collude on wages businesses lose, thus the consumer loses, and finally the economy loses?
Here in Utah there was a raging debate recently about how to "fix" public education by allowing a voucher system. The argument was that this would force public schools to "compete" with the private schools and eachother. Of course, this argument had the vast flaw that the public schools don't have to compete because the teachers' union ensures that teachers get paid for being there, not for actual performance. In a local private school my boss is on the board for there was a problem with a teacher telling an off-color joke to elementry students. When the students repeated the joke to their parents the parents told the board, the board conferred with the principal, and the teacher was immediately fired. Within two weeks they had another teacher in the classroom. When I was in 7th grade there was an aging teacher who should have been in a mental institution. She hadn't taught a lesson in at least 10 years, but the school couldn't fire her. She told students that she lived underneath a neighboring city with aliens, and I'm pretty sure she believed it herself. Well, about a week before class started she finally died. The entire first semester they weren't able to hire a new teacher because of union rules. The private school had a substitute for two weeks, the private school had a team of substitutes for four months.
Back in the day, before unions, houses were built by the thousands with bricks. Not because they were the best, or the cheapest, but because it was the style. The bricklayers, feeling that they were being grifted, unionized, as was the style of the time. Very quickly the cost of building with bricks became too prohibitive, and the bricklayers mostly lost their jobs. Overall society didn't hurt too much, but it had a large impact on the southern California economy.
That leaves us with the current WGA prediciment. The WGA prevents companies who hire their members from hiring non-members as best they can. Now, when the writers finally figure out that the guild has left them with a shitty contract (which has been shitty for dozens of years now) they strike, leaving a gap in the economy. Admittedly, this is a small gap, but a gap nonetheless. If the guild had not been fixing wages/contracts for its hundreds (thousands?) of members, each individual would instead be creating their own contract allowing them to ask for what they need. The studios would only be able to hire workers at market price (whether higher or lower than existing is impossible to know) giving market benifits, royalties, etc.
So this all leaves me with the lingering question, why is it that businesses can't fix prices while people can?
The downloader appears to only be necessary to download entire albums, not individual songs. If you click "Buy MP3 Album" you get the download or cancel purchase page. If you click "Buy MP3" you get a page that recommends you download the downloader (to download the song), but you can click "Skip Installation" and download the file directly.
Well, I don't know what you think a fair price should be. Do a search for "50 cent" and you'll see that the prices vary slightly, but are overall pretty good. Either 89 cents or 99 cents per song, albums weigh in at $5.99, $8.99, and $9.99. All of these prices trump are on par with the competition or slightly better. Don't forget a major competition piece: the $16.95 brick and mortar cd price.
Hmm...maybe something harder...Neutral Milk Hotel? check. Danielle Dax? aww...so sad, not check. Mongol 800? no...too bad.
It seems just about everything that I listen to that is available somewhere is available here, so what am I missing? Even better though, if it's not available as an MP3 Amazon redirects me to a cd or vinyl copy. iTunes, etc. don't do that.
Raise your hand if you both a) have heard of AnywhereCD and b) purchased anything from them.
It's not illegal to unlock a phone because of an excemption in the DMCA, but the DMCA says nothing about requiring warranties remain invalid. If this law were used to force Apple into maintaining warranties on unlocked iPhones, then wouldn't Microsoft be also obliged to maintain warranties on 'chipped Xbox's. Right now they're merely banning them from Xbox live, but shouldn't the inability to get online with a product which heralds its online capabilities be a warranty issue?
Because, after all, gamestop should be parenting rather than, oh, I don't know, the parents. If parents wants to let their kids play games all day instead of studying they're not exactly right, but more power to them. You can't force people to make the right desisions.
If we give every employee access to everything, yes problems will happen. But if we give most employees access to most things their jobs are a lot easier, and more work gets done (or the same amount of work gets done, but with less stress and overworking).
If one of our employees decides to steal information, we'll deal with it with that employee, but that's as far as we go. We can't live in fear of an inside attack just because it's more likely than a virus (especially for a linux only shop like ourselves). A balance must be struck between full access and full security.
And why, pray tell, does TD Amiritrade require all of that in their main database? If set up properly they could have one database with financial information, and database with contact information, and a link between them. At the very least it's possible (I'm not in any way assuming likely) that the unauthorized code didn't have sufficient database privileges to access the more secure information.
Either way, I'd recommend a strongly worded letter to TD A. and a watchful eye on your credit.
Hopefully their investigation turns up who's profiting from it and the SEC turns the screws on them.
Plus, insurance companies have more money to get from a lawsuit
I don't know, but inside the my local brick & mortar store there was a 7 foot tall Big Daddy. I don't what it cost, but it's awesomeness surely pushed many people to at the very least ask about the game, and probably many to go ahead and buy.
Aw...and I was always welcoming our old icy meteorite overlords.
It's just like when you inflate a balloon and bad stuff happens.
IMHO people are getting pretty fed up with pervasive advertising. Part of Tivo's initial popularity came from the ability to skip advertisements. The people quite obviously want less ads, not more. As all of google's money now seems to come from advertising, and they seem to only be innovating new ways to push ads, I'd say that they're going down the wrong path.
40Gbps can be 1 meter long on the backplane, 10 meters for copper cable and 100 meters for fiber-optics. The 100Gbps standard includes specifications for 10 kilometer and 40 kilometer connections over single-mode fiber.
I'm seeing the 100Gbps used for infrastructure with its larger bandwidth and longer cable length while the 40Gbps would be used for datacenters, server rooms, etc. with its faster "connect" speeds (clarification on what exactly this would mean?).