Lobbyists and insurance companies are what got us into this mess.
Doctors and medical establishments learned that they had insurance companies by the balls at one point. Approved procedure could cost whatever they wanted, and insurance would pay it. Then they got all butthurt because real people couldn't afford to pay that much at all. Then insurance companies got revenge when everyone decided that doctors were a blank check in terms of lawsuit money. Insurance companies then offered insurance against lawsuits to the doctors, for a very high price.
So now what we have is a system where it costs two weeks worth of pay for the average American to get a single fucking X-ray that department stores were doing for free in the 60s. Of course I expect the expert opinion of the doctor to cost some money, but its ridiculous. And one of the reasons is because of this never ending war between doctors, lawsuits, and insurance companies.
I say we research some way to break the cycle. Like maybe making doctors and medical establishments explain why that aspirin costs a patient $100, when the entire bottle of 500 costs them 5% of that if they were to buy it themselves at a wholesale pharmacy.
Honestly, I wondered why this hadn't happen sooner.
Now, instead of the people taking a risk of getting cheated out of their money, they 100% did get cheated out of their money.
The companies should be allowed to pay-out what has already been accumulated, but no more after that. There's no guarantee whatsoever that the gamblers themselves weren't going to pay taxes on the money that they won.
You don't get decent speed or armor, you don't get awesome firepower like a 120mm cannon.
Basically, powered exoskeletons are not strong enough to withstand an RPG attack, aren't fast enough to dodge them, and aren't armed enough to deal with anything beyond a few AK-47 wielders.
How do we fix it? Easy. Make them pretty much immune to small arms fire. Make them faster. Adopt tactics to cover each other. Implement scanners and other intelligence devices so you know where the enemy is coming from and maybe where those IEDs are hidden.
The problem is that there's little reason to log on.
The arena, even if you do poorly, will give you equipment that's 90% as strong as the best equipment. In only a few weeks. Without having to 'roll' on it and compete with people who can't even use the equipment in question.
And in six months to a year, Palm's timer in these units will start to go off.
Telling the phone to start crashing a few times a day and disabling random applications until you reinstall them, and people's factory charger cord will be so loose it'll pull out under its own horizontal weight.
Correct. Audits and inspections are always point-in-time snapshots of the state of whatever is being audited or inspected. It should be held accordingly. Auditors and inspectors can not be held accountable for things found out after the inspection. Like that steel really does have shitty 60-year durability specs or that bind is a buggy piece of shit.
All of that being said, there's no reason an inspector should sign off on a system with open shares and no firewall or a bridge with eroded foundations.
Inspectors of things like elevators are not responsible if their target checked out at the time of inspection, and later failed. For example, you could sign off on the construction of a bridge or an installation of an elevator because everything looked good, but when the bridge company doesn't maintain the bridge properly or the elevator company fails to do the same, the inspector is not held liable, even though they were certified as good.
Auditing a network should be the same way. Of course, an auditor should NOT be held responsible for undiscovered bugs or holes in software. Instead, their job should focus on general security. It would be like a bridge inspector trying to certify a bridge when the gravitational constant of the universe were in a state of flux. How do you guarantee that steel is the best material or that the iron won't suddenly turn liquid at room temperature? That about sums up the state of software development and bug discovery.
If an inspector inspects and then signs off on an elevator, and the elevator subsequently catastrophically fails due to some reason the inspector should have caught, the inspector can be held liable, unless they can show that his inspection was somehow tampered with. Like perhaps the safety interlocks were just for show and didn't have any real parts inside of them.
Auditors should be held to the same standard, and given the same rights to defend themselves.
I don't want to sound harsh, but considering people pay auditors to do a job, if the job isn't done right, they need to suffer the consequences.
Purchase a gallon of gas from a place that has E10 clearly marked on the pumps. Have it tested for ethanol content. If it exceeds 10%, sue for false advertising. Go for the maximum penalty.
Another idea:
Purchase a gallon of gas from a place that doesn't have E10 marked on their pumps. Have it tested for ethanol content. If it exceeds 0%, sue for false advertising. Go for the maximum penalty.
Gas station owners keep water out of their fuel because water will cost them money when they have to pay to repair people's cars. The benefit to adding more ethanol is that the damage isn't instant. You won't be able to sue a gas station for repairs when your fuel injector dies, because you won't know which one was responsible. The lawyers will eat that one up in court.
Can't go wrong for suing for false advertising, though, and it carries some pretty stiff penalties. Especially when the false advertising can lead to property damage or injury, as in the case of high ethanol content.
How can you call this stealing service? All Verizon had to do was push a button and within seconds they could have been able to locate the person. The police were not asking them to turn on a few months of free service and maybe add in a free texting plan.
I suppose you'd also ask the cops to buy a movie ticket before responding to a call within a movie theater, or rent a room at the hotel they're doing a drug bust in?
I remember some stores had the pants sued off of them (no pun intended) when people found out the dressing rooms were being monitored by cameras, to prevent theft.
Lots of high end places have bathroom attendants. Their job is two-fold. I'm not quite sure of the first one, but I know the second one is to make sure people know that it isn't a place where they can go and shit in the sink or assemble guns from the parts they have hidden in their underwear.
You know, anyone past the first tier support person should have seen this as an opportunity for some good publicity. They could have issued a press release saying that they turned the guy's phone back on so the police could save him. Then they could have advertised how having their service helps keep people safe. Etc. Etc.
But they didn't.
I don't know what's a worse. Not turning the phone on or running your company so poorly that no one ever thinks of alternative solutions or thinks more than five minutes ahead.
Enjoy your bad publicity, Verizon. You've earned it.
Have any of you played Ultima Online that didn't specifically stress using a hotbar? It was difficult. There was a lot of macroing, a lot of memorization of keys, etc. Really took away from the immersion.
With hotbars, you know where your favorite skills are. You can pretty much set the keyboard up as you like, in terms of your skills.
Can we do better? Yes, but not with conventional keyboard/mouse/monitor devices.
What about some of the other typical things found in most MMORPGs?
Levels? Ultima Online did just fine without them. All it had was stats and skills, and you just needed to practice what you wanted to get better at. This was a good system, I think. Not for everyone though.
Health/Mana/Etc? Warhammer Online did an excellent job with these. They all regenerated very quickly. In essence, you could technically fight forever as long as your health held out. Your mana with which to cast spells came back quickly enough to cast over and over, but not quickly enough to cast the best things over and over.
Quests? Not everyone likes to grind enemies for a long time. However, not everyone likes to quest. Rappelz had a good idea. Lots and lots of traditional quests, and lots and lots of kill quests. This satisfied both types of player.
One-player control? Sword of the New World, I believe, let you control multiple characters that you had created.
Real-time play? Actually, a turn-based combat MMORPG would be nice. Think something along the lines of Final Fantasy Tactics during battle.
Point is, there's lots of things you COULD change. But most of the things are there for reasons. World of Warcraft is the best at the moment because it learned from everyone elses' mistakes. It also learned from their successes. World of Warcraft is the MMORPG analogue to the Borg from Star Trek.
Why design a very complex robot to do clean a somewhat-simple machine..when you could instead spend all that time and energy developing a somewhat-simple machine that doesn't require cleaning? Or maybe one that's very easy to clean?
The Phalanx CIWS is an anti-aircraft gun mounted on ships. Its relatively self contained and can practically be bolted-on to some ships.
If an aircraft approaches and doesn't identify itself, the default action is for the Phalanx to blow it out of the sky. This is a specialized system, of course, but imagine if it were a military jet full of refugees, with a broken communication system, and had no idea the ship was there.
This is legal, because the ship operates in international waters.
Its setup to not attack aircraft under a certain speed, and can be manually disabled or enabled.
In short, the system doesn't decide to attack, but rather, it will ALWAYS attack if certain criteria are met and the system isn't disabled.
Good points, but I don't think this is about robotic soldiers lumbering over battlefields just yet. I think this will, at first, be more about semi-automated fire control systems and drones. Like a future Predator drone might decide to wait to fire its Hellfire missile if it thinks there's too many civilians in the area and the projected accuracy is too low due to interference. Or a point-defense system might see a kid walking around in a field and decide that he's not a threat, because he's not carrying any weapons or moving in a threatening manner.
Since our drones are still somewhat dumb, most of the ethical considerations are the responsibility of the programmers and project commanders. For example, that drone might be programmed to distinguish straight dusty road with no other cars or civilians around from twisty road in the middle of downtown with lots of civilians walking around and a poor chance to hit the target.
Besides, if a robotic soldier were pointing a gun at you and demanding that you surrender, it would probably be tracking you with multiple sensors and would blow your face off as soon as your finger twitched in the direction of your gun.
A lot of proprietary systems have protection in place to prevent you from modifying/overwriting the main OS. Cell phones, for example. They don't want you opening up those extra features they can charge you for, after all.
Because Adobe still hasn't fixed their kludged/messy/slow/buggy/piecemeal program that is Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Acrobat Reader. Other companies instead stepped in and made free readers that use up much less resources and won't get your machine owned.
I would support an increase on fuel taxes if it were based on the type of vehicle the gas is going into.
SUVs will get taxed the most, up there with giant RVs and yachts. Large trucks will get taxed a little less. Fuel-efficient cars will get taxed a small amount. Hybrid cars and cargo vehicles will get taxed the least.
Not saying any of this is even really enforceable..but you know.
When an SUV-driver is going to get charged a dollar a gallon, and the guy in the fuel-efficient car is getting charged twenty cents a gallon, the shit will hit the fan. Maybe daddy's little girl doesn't need a full-sized Expedition to ensure that she doesn't get crushed under another full-sized Expedition on the way to the mall. Maybe you don't really need that giant F450 for 'work' when you've never had to haul anything besides a boxed lunch. Maybe, just maybe, that hybrid car that's saving you $100 or more a month in gas is a better idea.
The police in many areas don't have the resources necessary to take down that many prostitutes. There's a lot of legal legwork involved with prostitution arrests. You can't just arrest a woman that has money on her and the man that just left her house. Most of the time the only way a bust is going to be good in court is if either the 'john' or 'hooker' is actually a police officer trying to bait the other party into giving away their intentions.
Sexual harassment laws are certainly necessary, but do need to be reformed.
As it stands, you can get about anyone fired by claiming sexual harassment. If they don't get fired then you can just quit and sue the company for a few million and settle out-of-court for ten thousand or so. This is with NO proof, NO prior record, etc.
Its pretty much a blank check for whoever wants to claim sexual harassment.
Human resource departments work with legal matters all the time, and they start to foam at the mouth whenever they hear sexual harassment. Its a lot harder to win a sexual harassment suit if the company has already fired the accused harasser. They create a hostile work environment simply because of the dire consequences. You're certainly going to lose an employee or you're going to pay up..be it legal fees..settlement fees..or lawsuit fees.
Not to the death, like during colonial times. But you go in, you fight each other in a 'safe' environment where no one's going to have access to a knife or their 'crew'
You sign paperwork saying that you will not sue, you will not hit them when they're down, you will not intentionally try to damage their reproductive capabilities, etc. You strap on some boxing gloves and take your shoes and shirt off, and you fight. You beat on each other until someone gives up, taps out, or the two of you reach an understand. The paperwork ALSO says that honor is at stake. Meaning that if you lose the fight and spit in your opponent's face, your friends, family, and everyone within earshot has a right to look down upon you. If you take your beating like a good sport, then you've lost honorably.
This all sounds retarded and backwards, but I think that violence under some situations can lead to problems being solved.
Anyone is well within their rights to put these letters into their email address. Just like Yahoo can't stop people from putting Yahoo in their non-Yahoo email addresses.
The college is well within their rights to threaten to sue, as you can pretty much sue for any reason, but the court will decide if it needs to be shot down or actually go to trial. Scare tactics.
Not everyone is capable of keeping work separate from real life. They think they're just going to get on the computer and bam they're working. But no, they're probably reading about the Swine Flu or making breakfast for the kids..after all..since they're home why send the kids to daycare? Maybe they're going to catch a soap opera on TV. Run to the store. Pretty soon they haven't accomplished anything work-worthy.
And lets assume for a second that those people don't exist. That everyone is as efficient at work as they are at home. There will still be people in management that take note of how many times you go to the bathroom over the day so they can deny you your performance raise. There's still the people that want to make sure that you're in your desk, working, for at least 8 hours a day. A five minute break or run to the break room is not acceptable if you're not on break. And if they catch you checking your personal email? You're fired.
So lets assume THOSE people don't exist.
Who gets to pay for the internet connection since you're VPN'd into the company computer and it uses lots of bandwidth? Sorry, you've gone over your bandwidth cap and are now cut off.
Working from home sounds good on paper, but it doesn't often work out in the real world. It would take a complete shift of our culture to enable working from home to really take off.
Disclaimer: I know a lot of you have cool jobs, with cool bosses, cool co-workers, and can be trusted to do your job when no supervisors are around. But there are a lot of people who simply aren't. There are shitty bosses who would dock your pay for an hour if you yawned, shitty employees who would sleep at their desks for six hours a day, shitty workplaces that are way too loud/bright/dark/smelly/etc to work effectively in, and there's a lot of shitty traffic.
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Lobbyists and insurance companies are what got us into this mess.
Doctors and medical establishments learned that they had insurance companies by the balls at one point. Approved procedure could cost whatever they wanted, and insurance would pay it. Then they got all butthurt because real people couldn't afford to pay that much at all. Then insurance companies got revenge when everyone decided that doctors were a blank check in terms of lawsuit money. Insurance companies then offered insurance against lawsuits to the doctors, for a very high price.
So now what we have is a system where it costs two weeks worth of pay for the average American to get a single fucking X-ray that department stores were doing for free in the 60s. Of course I expect the expert opinion of the doctor to cost some money, but its ridiculous. And one of the reasons is because of this never ending war between doctors, lawsuits, and insurance companies.
I say we research some way to break the cycle. Like maybe making doctors and medical establishments explain why that aspirin costs a patient $100, when the entire bottle of 500 costs them 5% of that if they were to buy it themselves at a wholesale pharmacy.
Honestly, I wondered why this hadn't happen sooner.
Now, instead of the people taking a risk of getting cheated out of their money, they 100% did get cheated out of their money.
The companies should be allowed to pay-out what has already been accumulated, but no more after that. There's no guarantee whatsoever that the gamblers themselves weren't going to pay taxes on the money that they won.
Why is this marked as troll? The poster has a good point. A point good enough that, if true, Airbus should look into.
They are actually a poor system.
You don't get decent speed or armor, you don't get awesome firepower like a 120mm cannon.
Basically, powered exoskeletons are not strong enough to withstand an RPG attack, aren't fast enough to dodge them, and aren't armed enough to deal with anything beyond a few AK-47 wielders.
How do we fix it? Easy. Make them pretty much immune to small arms fire. Make them faster. Adopt tactics to cover each other. Implement scanners and other intelligence devices so you know where the enemy is coming from and maybe where those IEDs are hidden.
The problem is that there's little reason to log on.
The arena, even if you do poorly, will give you equipment that's 90% as strong as the best equipment. In only a few weeks. Without having to 'roll' on it and compete with people who can't even use the equipment in question.
I love PvP, but PvP will not float WoW alone.
And in six months to a year, Palm's timer in these units will start to go off.
Telling the phone to start crashing a few times a day and disabling random applications until you reinstall them, and people's factory charger cord will be so loose it'll pull out under its own horizontal weight.
Correct. Audits and inspections are always point-in-time snapshots of the state of whatever is being audited or inspected. It should be held accordingly. Auditors and inspectors can not be held accountable for things found out after the inspection. Like that steel really does have shitty 60-year durability specs or that bind is a buggy piece of shit.
All of that being said, there's no reason an inspector should sign off on a system with open shares and no firewall or a bridge with eroded foundations.
Inspectors of things like elevators are not responsible if their target checked out at the time of inspection, and later failed. For example, you could sign off on the construction of a bridge or an installation of an elevator because everything looked good, but when the bridge company doesn't maintain the bridge properly or the elevator company fails to do the same, the inspector is not held liable, even though they were certified as good.
Auditing a network should be the same way. Of course, an auditor should NOT be held responsible for undiscovered bugs or holes in software. Instead, their job should focus on general security. It would be like a bridge inspector trying to certify a bridge when the gravitational constant of the universe were in a state of flux. How do you guarantee that steel is the best material or that the iron won't suddenly turn liquid at room temperature? That about sums up the state of software development and bug discovery.
If an inspector inspects and then signs off on an elevator, and the elevator subsequently catastrophically fails due to some reason the inspector should have caught, the inspector can be held liable, unless they can show that his inspection was somehow tampered with. Like perhaps the safety interlocks were just for show and didn't have any real parts inside of them.
Auditors should be held to the same standard, and given the same rights to defend themselves.
I don't want to sound harsh, but considering people pay auditors to do a job, if the job isn't done right, they need to suffer the consequences.
Idea:
Purchase a gallon of gas from a place that has E10 clearly marked on the pumps. Have it tested for ethanol content. If it exceeds 10%, sue for false advertising. Go for the maximum penalty.
Another idea:
Purchase a gallon of gas from a place that doesn't have E10 marked on their pumps. Have it tested for ethanol content. If it exceeds 0%, sue for false advertising. Go for the maximum penalty.
Gas station owners keep water out of their fuel because water will cost them money when they have to pay to repair people's cars. The benefit to adding more ethanol is that the damage isn't instant. You won't be able to sue a gas station for repairs when your fuel injector dies, because you won't know which one was responsible. The lawyers will eat that one up in court.
Can't go wrong for suing for false advertising, though, and it carries some pretty stiff penalties. Especially when the false advertising can lead to property damage or injury, as in the case of high ethanol content.
How can you call this stealing service? All Verizon had to do was push a button and within seconds they could have been able to locate the person. The police were not asking them to turn on a few months of free service and maybe add in a free texting plan.
I suppose you'd also ask the cops to buy a movie ticket before responding to a call within a movie theater, or rent a room at the hotel they're doing a drug bust in?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this illegal?
I remember some stores had the pants sued off of them (no pun intended) when people found out the dressing rooms were being monitored by cameras, to prevent theft.
Lots of high end places have bathroom attendants. Their job is two-fold. I'm not quite sure of the first one, but I know the second one is to make sure people know that it isn't a place where they can go and shit in the sink or assemble guns from the parts they have hidden in their underwear.
You know, anyone past the first tier support person should have seen this as an opportunity for some good publicity. They could have issued a press release saying that they turned the guy's phone back on so the police could save him. Then they could have advertised how having their service helps keep people safe. Etc. Etc.
But they didn't.
I don't know what's a worse. Not turning the phone on or running your company so poorly that no one ever thinks of alternative solutions or thinks more than five minutes ahead.
Enjoy your bad publicity, Verizon. You've earned it.
Hotbars came about for a reason.
Have any of you played Ultima Online that didn't specifically stress using a hotbar? It was difficult. There was a lot of macroing, a lot of memorization of keys, etc. Really took away from the immersion.
With hotbars, you know where your favorite skills are. You can pretty much set the keyboard up as you like, in terms of your skills.
Can we do better? Yes, but not with conventional keyboard/mouse/monitor devices.
What about some of the other typical things found in most MMORPGs?
Levels? Ultima Online did just fine without them. All it had was stats and skills, and you just needed to practice what you wanted to get better at. This was a good system, I think. Not for everyone though.
Health/Mana/Etc? Warhammer Online did an excellent job with these. They all regenerated very quickly. In essence, you could technically fight forever as long as your health held out. Your mana with which to cast spells came back quickly enough to cast over and over, but not quickly enough to cast the best things over and over.
Quests? Not everyone likes to grind enemies for a long time. However, not everyone likes to quest. Rappelz had a good idea. Lots and lots of traditional quests, and lots and lots of kill quests. This satisfied both types of player.
One-player control? Sword of the New World, I believe, let you control multiple characters that you had created.
Real-time play? Actually, a turn-based combat MMORPG would be nice. Think something along the lines of Final Fantasy Tactics during battle.
Point is, there's lots of things you COULD change. But most of the things are there for reasons. World of Warcraft is the best at the moment because it learned from everyone elses' mistakes. It also learned from their successes. World of Warcraft is the MMORPG analogue to the Borg from Star Trek.
Why design a very complex robot to do clean a somewhat-simple machine..when you could instead spend all that time and energy developing a somewhat-simple machine that doesn't require cleaning? Or maybe one that's very easy to clean?
The Phalanx CIWS is an anti-aircraft gun mounted on ships. Its relatively self contained and can practically be bolted-on to some ships.
If an aircraft approaches and doesn't identify itself, the default action is for the Phalanx to blow it out of the sky. This is a specialized system, of course, but imagine if it were a military jet full of refugees, with a broken communication system, and had no idea the ship was there.
This is legal, because the ship operates in international waters.
Its setup to not attack aircraft under a certain speed, and can be manually disabled or enabled.
In short, the system doesn't decide to attack, but rather, it will ALWAYS attack if certain criteria are met and the system isn't disabled.
Good points, but I don't think this is about robotic soldiers lumbering over battlefields just yet. I think this will, at first, be more about semi-automated fire control systems and drones. Like a future Predator drone might decide to wait to fire its Hellfire missile if it thinks there's too many civilians in the area and the projected accuracy is too low due to interference. Or a point-defense system might see a kid walking around in a field and decide that he's not a threat, because he's not carrying any weapons or moving in a threatening manner.
Since our drones are still somewhat dumb, most of the ethical considerations are the responsibility of the programmers and project commanders. For example, that drone might be programmed to distinguish straight dusty road with no other cars or civilians around from twisty road in the middle of downtown with lots of civilians walking around and a poor chance to hit the target.
Besides, if a robotic soldier were pointing a gun at you and demanding that you surrender, it would probably be tracking you with multiple sensors and would blow your face off as soon as your finger twitched in the direction of your gun.
Plenty of prior art for that one.
A lot of proprietary systems have protection in place to prevent you from modifying/overwriting the main OS. Cell phones, for example. They don't want you opening up those extra features they can charge you for, after all.
Because Adobe still hasn't fixed their kludged/messy/slow/buggy/piecemeal program that is Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Acrobat Reader. Other companies instead stepped in and made free readers that use up much less resources and won't get your machine owned.
I would support an increase on fuel taxes if it were based on the type of vehicle the gas is going into.
SUVs will get taxed the most, up there with giant RVs and yachts.
Large trucks will get taxed a little less.
Fuel-efficient cars will get taxed a small amount.
Hybrid cars and cargo vehicles will get taxed the least.
Not saying any of this is even really enforceable..but you know.
When an SUV-driver is going to get charged a dollar a gallon, and the guy in the fuel-efficient car is getting charged twenty cents a gallon, the shit will hit the fan. Maybe daddy's little girl doesn't need a full-sized Expedition to ensure that she doesn't get crushed under another full-sized Expedition on the way to the mall. Maybe you don't really need that giant F450 for 'work' when you've never had to haul anything besides a boxed lunch. Maybe, just maybe, that hybrid car that's saving you $100 or more a month in gas is a better idea.
The police in many areas don't have the resources necessary to take down that many prostitutes. There's a lot of legal legwork involved with prostitution arrests. You can't just arrest a woman that has money on her and the man that just left her house. Most of the time the only way a bust is going to be good in court is if either the 'john' or 'hooker' is actually a police officer trying to bait the other party into giving away their intentions.
Sexual harassment laws are certainly necessary, but do need to be reformed.
As it stands, you can get about anyone fired by claiming sexual harassment. If they don't get fired then you can just quit and sue the company for a few million and settle out-of-court for ten thousand or so. This is with NO proof, NO prior record, etc.
Its pretty much a blank check for whoever wants to claim sexual harassment.
Human resource departments work with legal matters all the time, and they start to foam at the mouth whenever they hear sexual harassment. Its a lot harder to win a sexual harassment suit if the company has already fired the accused harasser. They create a hostile work environment simply because of the dire consequences. You're certainly going to lose an employee or you're going to pay up..be it legal fees..settlement fees..or lawsuit fees.
Which brings up my idea.
Dueling arenas.
Not to the death, like during colonial times. But you go in, you fight each other in a 'safe' environment where no one's going to have access to a knife or their 'crew'
You sign paperwork saying that you will not sue, you will not hit them when they're down, you will not intentionally try to damage their reproductive capabilities, etc. You strap on some boxing gloves and take your shoes and shirt off, and you fight. You beat on each other until someone gives up, taps out, or the two of you reach an understand. The paperwork ALSO says that honor is at stake. Meaning that if you lose the fight and spit in your opponent's face, your friends, family, and everyone within earshot has a right to look down upon you. If you take your beating like a good sport, then you've lost honorably.
This all sounds retarded and backwards, but I think that violence under some situations can lead to problems being solved.
Anyone is well within their rights to put these letters into their email address. Just like Yahoo can't stop people from putting Yahoo in their non-Yahoo email addresses.
The college is well within their rights to threaten to sue, as you can pretty much sue for any reason, but the court will decide if it needs to be shot down or actually go to trial. Scare tactics.
In a perfect world, yes.
In this world, no.
Not everyone is capable of keeping work separate from real life. They think they're just going to get on the computer and bam they're working. But no, they're probably reading about the Swine Flu or making breakfast for the kids..after all..since they're home why send the kids to daycare? Maybe they're going to catch a soap opera on TV. Run to the store. Pretty soon they haven't accomplished anything work-worthy.
And lets assume for a second that those people don't exist. That everyone is as efficient at work as they are at home. There will still be people in management that take note of how many times you go to the bathroom over the day so they can deny you your performance raise. There's still the people that want to make sure that you're in your desk, working, for at least 8 hours a day. A five minute break or run to the break room is not acceptable if you're not on break. And if they catch you checking your personal email? You're fired.
So lets assume THOSE people don't exist.
Who gets to pay for the internet connection since you're VPN'd into the company computer and it uses lots of bandwidth? Sorry, you've gone over your bandwidth cap and are now cut off.
Working from home sounds good on paper, but it doesn't often work out in the real world. It would take a complete shift of our culture to enable working from home to really take off.
Disclaimer: I know a lot of you have cool jobs, with cool bosses, cool co-workers, and can be trusted to do your job when no supervisors are around. But there are a lot of people who simply aren't. There are shitty bosses who would dock your pay for an hour if you yawned, shitty employees who would sleep at their desks for six hours a day, shitty workplaces that are way too loud/bright/dark/smelly/etc to work effectively in, and there's a lot of shitty traffic.