The question I have is what you mean by 'signing' a document.
If you mean that a piece of paper has been physically signed by someone and then scanned and an image retained, then you need a document imaging system.
If you mean to go paperless and can get people to fill out online forms, you can make the case that they are doing the electronic equivalent of signing when they log into the system with their own username and password AND they click on a given button (eg. "Submit" or "Apply Signature") and perhaps type in their initials into a small text field.
There are at least two ways you can handle online forms with Plone: PloneFormGen or custom content types via Archetypes. If you use custom content types, the History tab shows you changes to the content item (who, when), and if you have a workflow assigned to it, the workflow history is retained as well, showing when the item was transitioned to, say, the "signed" state and by whom. If you use PloneFormGen, simply include in the form two hidden and/or non-user-editable fields (datetime with default value the current date/time, and username with default value the currently logged in user).
You must not have a very good hiring process or your young employees don't have the right mix of incentives. The very young intern that I recently hired is one of the most motivated, goal-driven, interested people I have worked with in almost 20 years of full time work and 30 years of programming (I am in my early 40s in IT). Your generalizations only worsen the problem by making many young people think that all people in their 40s see them in the negative way you do. In any generation there are motivated and unmotivated people. You just need to do a better job of finding them and of giving them what THEY want. Employment is a two-way street: you can only get what you want if it matches what the other party wants.
> I want to rule the salary just because I pay the salary. I want to be able to stop paying it because it's mine.
The thing you're forgetting (?) is that you pay the salary in exchange for the worker's time or expertise. The salary is not yours - it is an agreed upon exchange. I hope for your sake and that of your employees that you have stipulated in their contract exactly what sorts of out-of-work rules you expect them to live by, so that you aren't arbitrarily deciding after the fact what they could not do (but did not know they could not do). I pity your employees, however, and I expect that the most qualified people will not want to work for you. I certainly wouldn't. It seems you are a 21st century Ross Perot (he hired detectives to spy on his employees' personal lives, even rooting out - gasp - homosexuals).
Years ago when I was given employment contracts with ridiculous clauses about ownership of intellectual property even on things I created on my own time outside of and unrelated to my full time work, I would refuse to sign - I struck out those clauses and was prepared to walk if the employer insisted on those clauses. If I found out what unreasonable expectations you have for my life outside of and unrelated to work, I wouldn't even bother striking out the clause - I'd walk out the door.
> your employer has the right (or should) to fire you for any reason
This has got to be one of the stupidest things allowed by law (thankfully, as I said above, not in all US states and not in union-protected jobs). From there it's a slippery slope back to racial, gender, sexual, and any other irrelevant and mean spirited discrimination.
You have an interesting point of view, but it's not one that I share. If I am paid by Company X for 40 hours of work a week, I abide by the company's rules and policies for those 40 hours a week. If the company wants me to be a model employee 24 hours a day, shouldn't I be paid 24 hours a day?
I was once a part owner of a company, and while I agree that ownership brings with it many headaches and worries, it also brings with it greater rewards. Don't give us a sob story about how tough life is for you; obviously you are getting more out of being an owner than you think you would by being an employee, whether it's monetary rewards or other things. I treated our employees as well as I would want to be treated, which is as a human being who actually has a life outside of work and does not appreciate being told by anyone how to live my life when it has absolutely nothing to do with my work or my clients.
In what's left of the free world, we still (theoretically, anyway) have the right to express ourselves freely, and anal retentive employers like you have the right to be offended. "Weird" isn't necessarily "wrong" nor "relevant" to an employer.
Thankfully there are still some enlightened states (Colorado, Minnesota) where people like you can't go around pretending they rule the world just because they pay a salary.
totally painless and seamless provider switch
on
HR 5252 Bill Dies
·
· Score: 1
The few competitors that are left are selling DSL on much the same terms but you can't really switch from AT&T to them since AT&T is using your copper pair to provide that DSL service to you, the one they just jacked up the rates on. If you want to switch you have to first cancel the AT&T DSL and wait 2 months for them to "release the line", after which the competitor can hook you up.
You get 2 months downtime. So no real competition.
That was not my experience.
As my first year of Yahoo AT&T DSL was coming to an end, news reports revealed how AT&T was handing over its customers' calling records to the government, and I decided I was not going to support AT&T financially any longer. (Plus, they jacked my rate up to $35/month for the DSL, not the $27 I expected, then gave me a song and dance, then a shell game, about how I could cut my monthly rate down if I paid more for services I did not need or want).
I switched to TDS Metrocom (http://www.tdsmetro.com/), and it was a completely painless switch. Our phone line and our DSL connection switches were handled entirely by TDS, and it was all done quite a bit faster than even they had promised. I had zero downtime. One day my AT&T DSL connection stopped working, so I pulled the TDS DSL modem out of the box, set it up, and was off to the races.
In the end I'm paying in total (phone plus DSL) a bit more a month to TDS than I did to AT&T, but it pleases me to know that TDS will hand my calling info to the government only as a result of due process (what's left of it, anyhow), and I get slightly faster upload speeds (woohoo!). Let's face it, there's no point b*tching about corporate misbehaviour if you're going to just bite your lip and continue letting them ream you. Money talks.
In the long term, you're best off renting your place out via a rental agency that will take care of all the maintenance, emergency repairs, tenant screening, and rent collection for a small percentage of the rent. Depending on your house, its location, and the type of furnishings you have, a rental agency might even be able to rent it out for shorter terms, but usually that's more easily done with condos.
In the past I've had friends come by and look in on my condo, but that got old pretty quickly for all involved, not to mention the increasing sense of obligation I felt. As another commenter cautioned, I found out that my homeowner's insurance policy did not cover prolonged absences, and the insurance broker eventually asked emphatically to back out of the policy. Fortunately by that time I had already obtained the services of a rental agency and they had a tenant lined up.
For warnings about freezing, I've found a cheap device that does what I need for my house: the Freeze Alarm (see http://www.freezealarm.com/) which calls a set phone number when the temperature drops below 45F (7C). It uses a 9V battery and must be hooked up to a phone. I paid $30 USD for it at the local hardware store; the web site lists it at $99 USD, so look around for a better price!
A slightly more advanced model will call up to 3 programmed phone numbers, and will also call if the power goes out or the battery is failing; you can also call it to find out the temperature in your home. Both models play a recorded (hardcoded) voice message and continue to call until you acknowledge the alarm. What I like about these devices is they are very very simple; not much can go wrong with them aside from the battery dying. (There is a third deluxe model which hooks up to water alarm and motion detection devices). I considered some of the more complicated internet-enabled setups but I've seen my share of routers, cable modems, and DSL modems require hard resets; many more things can go wrong.
University IT departments have dates to meet - for example the summer is basically the only time we have to put in major system upgrades. Many other system changes need to be completed (from start to finish) between other dates that are dictated by when state and federal government reports are due, or by dates stipulated by law, for example.
The difference between my previous jobs and my current one at a university is partly due (as you say) to there being no direct financial pressure to deliver software on specific dates, partly due to there being no one at the university in the morally grey territory of benefitting from a sales commission received for having closed a deal that cannot possibly be fulfilled as promised, and partly due to my director and higher management understanding the importance of planning.
It might also have a lot to do with the fact that my director once worked as a professional programmer in our department and therefore is able to apply the lessons he learned years ago.
The other job I had where everything was planned appropriately, an iron fist controlled scope creep, and we delivered the final system months early and under budget was in an IT group at a major bank. I expect that here too the reward for the project director (an appointment as a bank VP) was given largely for the successful completion of the project. Upper management considered timeliness, quality, and budgetary discipline to be important, none of which can be attained without proper planning and execution.
I completely agree that death marches are a sign of failed management.
I have worked in commercial outfits creating big software systems (and I've been working as a programmer for 21 years now). At every place that worked its programmers 60-80 hour weeks (often more) it was because of poor planning, poor feature management, poor testing, and a culture where "working hard" was more important than "working smart".
For example, one job I took in the month of February was for a project I quickly found out had been set for a delivery date of the previous December. At that same company, another project I worked on was due for delivery in mid-May but the VP did not order the servers and development workstations until late February and began his staffing of the project by hiring only contractors (I was the first full timer on the project sometime in March). In both cases we were expected/required to work extremely long hours, for weeks at a time, and I even made the mistake (chalk it up to my 2nd full time job out of grad school) of delaying a vacation to try to meet a date that was a totally lost cause.
The other place I worked at that had crazy work expectations was culturally imbued with lack of planning, no customer expectation management to speak of, and a president/owner whose "of the moment, and only for the moment" thinking had programmers adding complex new features at the last minute, without any kind of planning or coordination. Not surprisingly, simple projects would turn into year long nightmares as the scope expanded and the company made no effort to try to control customer expectations.
So, needless to say, I was relieved to leave both places. I benefitted greatly from the experience both jobs gave me (at the coding/development and the management levels), and I learned never to put myself in that situation again where management is incapable of planning and makes no effort to plan. You can smell a company that reeks of "long hour code jocks" during the interviews. Just run away, unless you want to live for the job.
(Coda: I now work as a programmer at a university where not only do I get to work on interesting projects that are meaningful but I also am never expected nor required to work longer than 40 hours a week; I have breathing space so I can plan and execute my work effectively.)
I beg to differ: you overly generalize. The ease or difficulty of setup is entirely dependent on the particular requirements, such as topology of the replicated machines (hub and spoke, server to server, multimaster fully connected networks, uni- or bi-directional data flow), allowable propagation time, network speed, whether you need the full set of data at each site, and so on.
For relatively straightforward projects I have set up commercial replication products in a couple of hours. You do need to know the requirements in great detail up front, however, and that means you have to understand the data model, the table relationships, the kinds of transactions written by the application, how the users and the administrators need the replicated system to run, etc.
It helps if you can work closely with someone who knows the data model inside out and someone who understands the app inside out (preferably the same person!).
All too often, people end up trying to shoehorn a replication product (usually the "free" one that comes with the RDBMS) without really understanding how replication will affect the app. The most complicated installs I saw were in cases like this, or where the application could not be modified to correctly handle the fact that the underlying data were being replicated. And in many of these cases, no replication product would ever work.
(In case you're wondering, I once wore many hats at PeerDirect, which has a replication engine that works on several RDBMS', including PostgreSQL, Oracle, etc., but I no longer work there).
The upshot: do a lot of research into how you need the app to behave, how the overall system should handle site downtime, how the system should behave once a downed site comes back online, and then make sure the replication product will do what you need. Some products really are a pain in the arse; others aren't, and it all comes back to those pesky requirements.
The problem is that you are expecting the end product of the US legal system to be consistent and reasonable. This is, after all, the country in which persons who steal millions of dollars are free to live lives of luxury and fame, and poor people are thrown in jail for life for petty theft (and worse, people are regularly executed for crimes they did not even commit).
In the US there is a trend in which prosecutors are attempting to have more and more minors tried in adult court for their crimes, to appeal to the "tough on crime" political platform so often adopted by conservative candidates. Their success so far is a result of a perceived increase in violent crime as portrayed constantly on television (cf. "Cops", hysterical news reports), despite real evidence to the contrary. Because of this engendered fear of violent crime, the public (through its prosecutors) is asking to have the book thrown at these minors.
There are recent studies that show that the frontal lobes of humans are not fully developed until the ages of 20-30. This means that the decisions made by young persons such as this 12 year old girl (she's not even old enough to be called a teenager) should never be seen as evidence of true criminal intent, where the person was in full possession of his or her mental faculties and made a conscious, informed decision to commit the crime.
Until the public in the US stops being afraid of itself, and until television and news outlets stop their fear mongering, prosecutors will continue to demand harsher and harsher punishment of younger and younger children.
What if you don't live in a state where driver education is a requirement for a licence? How would you have known that it is a crime? I did not realize it was a crime to drive with very little tread; I know it is not safe and it is foolish. And yet (here's the kicker) I took a driver's ed course, in which no mention was made of this particular crime.
Did you know that in Ontario until very recently it was a crime to drive your automobile unless a man carrying a red flag walked ahead of it to warn of your approach? (Thanks, we don't need any Canadian-bashing jokes about this, ok!)
My point is that in many cases it seems reasonable that ignorance of a particular law should be considered in someone's defence. Especially in this case, where a young girl could not reasonably be expected to be aware of the RIAA's campaign, and a mother could not reasonably be expected to police her child's every move online.
You owe it to yourself and your self-esteem to start looking hard for an alternative to this job. Once your boss belittles your worth and contribution, your best answer is to find another job (not that I'm recommending you jump out of the pan and into the fire, though) because:
a) you will learn something new at a new job
b) you will feel better for having found work where you are appreciated
c) you will allow your former boss the opportunity to determine for himself just how important your contribution really was
By the very fact you read this web site, you are more informed than many and your desire to stay abreast of current developments in tech means you most likely have retained (or even added to) your senior admin skills during your time at Kodak.
Consider non-standard jobs, or start contributing to existing free/open source projects in your spare time now, and that may help you connect with people in a position to hire.
As a former product manager, I created marketing materials and literature for products that were in development and were about to be released on schedule but then were cancelled for reasons that we could not anticipate (basically, we had a management overhaul, and new management cancelled the products). Should that constitute criminal behaviour? I think not.
The Sony Ericsson T200 and the Ericsson R520M both have editable shortcuts - you pick & choose which of the phone's many functions you want to put into your group of shortcuts. They are then easily navigated to from the shortcut menu. You can put 9 of them on that menu.
Actually the topic of fake vs. real animals comes up when Deckard visits the snake woman/replicant in her dressing room. She replies that if the snake were real she wouldn't be working there... (implication is that only rich people can afford real animals).
Re: reissuing more versions of movies, if people keep buying them, let the directors keep reissuing!
Actually, the terms of service shown in a post above say that they reserve the right to do anything with the information as part of their business.
I always thought this technique for collecting very precise surfing habits (as well as other uses of the net) was far superior to the dorky cookie tracking set up by DoubleClick et al. I'm surprised no one has used this technique sooner.
It does make me sad that Zero Knowledge killed their cloaking service...
Anyone caught reading or posting to Slashdot is a likely surveillance candidate for various governmental (and extra-governmental) agencies.
~~~
Confidentiality of Information: Comcast considers the personally identifiable Customer information that is collected to be confidential. Comcast will disclose to third parties personally identifiable information that Comcast maintains related to customers only when it is necessary to deliver the Service to customers or carry out related business activities, in the ordinary course of business, for ordinary business purposes, and at a frequency dictated by Comcast's particular business need, or pursuant to a court order or order of any regulatory body having jurisdiction over matters which are the subject of this Agreement.
Slashdot Mirror
The question I have is what you mean by 'signing' a document.
If you mean that a piece of paper has been physically signed by someone and then scanned and an image retained, then you need a document imaging system.
If you mean to go paperless and can get people to fill out online forms, you can make the case that they are doing the electronic equivalent of signing when they log into the system with their own username and password AND they click on a given button (eg. "Submit" or "Apply Signature") and perhaps type in their initials into a small text field.
There are at least two ways you can handle online forms with Plone: PloneFormGen or custom content types via Archetypes. If you use custom content types, the History tab shows you changes to the content item (who, when), and if you have a workflow assigned to it, the workflow history is retained as well, showing when the item was transitioned to, say, the "signed" state and by whom. If you use PloneFormGen, simply include in the form two hidden and/or non-user-editable fields (datetime with default value the current date/time, and username with default value the currently logged in user).
You must not have a very good hiring process or your young employees don't have the right mix of incentives. The very young intern that I recently hired is one of the most motivated, goal-driven, interested people I have worked with in almost 20 years of full time work and 30 years of programming (I am in my early 40s in IT). Your generalizations only worsen the problem by making many young people think that all people in their 40s see them in the negative way you do. In any generation there are motivated and unmotivated people. You just need to do a better job of finding them and of giving them what THEY want. Employment is a two-way street: you can only get what you want if it matches what the other party wants.
You wrote:
> I want to rule the salary just because I pay the salary. I want to be able to stop paying it because it's mine.
The thing you're forgetting (?) is that you pay the salary in exchange for the worker's time or expertise. The salary is not yours - it is an agreed upon exchange. I hope for your sake and that of your employees that you have stipulated in their contract exactly what sorts of out-of-work rules you expect them to live by, so that you aren't arbitrarily deciding after the fact what they could not do (but did not know they could not do). I pity your employees, however, and I expect that the most qualified people will not want to work for you. I certainly wouldn't. It seems you are a 21st century Ross Perot (he hired detectives to spy on his employees' personal lives, even rooting out - gasp - homosexuals).
Years ago when I was given employment contracts with ridiculous clauses about ownership of intellectual property even on things I created on my own time outside of and unrelated to my full time work, I would refuse to sign - I struck out those clauses and was prepared to walk if the employer insisted on those clauses. If I found out what unreasonable expectations you have for my life outside of and unrelated to work, I wouldn't even bother striking out the clause - I'd walk out the door.
> your employer has the right (or should) to fire you for any reason
This has got to be one of the stupidest things allowed by law (thankfully, as I said above, not in all US states and not in union-protected jobs). From there it's a slippery slope back to racial, gender, sexual, and any other irrelevant and mean spirited discrimination.
You have an interesting point of view, but it's not one that I share. If I am paid by Company X for 40 hours of work a week, I abide by the company's rules and policies for those 40 hours a week. If the company wants me to be a model employee 24 hours a day, shouldn't I be paid 24 hours a day?
I was once a part owner of a company, and while I agree that ownership brings with it many headaches and worries, it also brings with it greater rewards. Don't give us a sob story about how tough life is for you; obviously you are getting more out of being an owner than you think you would by being an employee, whether it's monetary rewards or other things. I treated our employees as well as I would want to be treated, which is as a human being who actually has a life outside of work and does not appreciate being told by anyone how to live my life when it has absolutely nothing to do with my work or my clients.
In what's left of the free world, we still (theoretically, anyway) have the right to express ourselves freely, and anal retentive employers like you have the right to be offended. "Weird" isn't necessarily "wrong" nor "relevant" to an employer.
Thankfully there are still some enlightened states (Colorado, Minnesota) where people like you can't go around pretending they rule the world just because they pay a salary.
That was not my experience.
As my first year of Yahoo AT&T DSL was coming to an end, news reports revealed how AT&T was handing over its customers' calling records to the government, and I decided I was not going to support AT&T financially any longer. (Plus, they jacked my rate up to $35/month for the DSL, not the $27 I expected, then gave me a song and dance, then a shell game, about how I could cut my monthly rate down if I paid more for services I did not need or want).
I switched to TDS Metrocom (http://www.tdsmetro.com/), and it was a completely painless switch. Our phone line and our DSL connection switches were handled entirely by TDS, and it was all done quite a bit faster than even they had promised. I had zero downtime. One day my AT&T DSL connection stopped working, so I pulled the TDS DSL modem out of the box, set it up, and was off to the races.
In the end I'm paying in total (phone plus DSL) a bit more a month to TDS than I did to AT&T, but it pleases me to know that TDS will hand my calling info to the government only as a result of due process (what's left of it, anyhow), and I get slightly faster upload speeds (woohoo!). Let's face it, there's no point b*tching about corporate misbehaviour if you're going to just bite your lip and continue letting them ream you. Money talks.
In the long term, you're best off renting your place out via a rental agency that will take care of all the maintenance, emergency repairs, tenant screening, and rent collection for a small percentage of the rent. Depending on your house, its location, and the type of furnishings you have, a rental agency might even be able to rent it out for shorter terms, but usually that's more easily done with condos.
In the past I've had friends come by and look in on my condo, but that got old pretty quickly for all involved, not to mention the increasing sense of obligation I felt. As another commenter cautioned, I found out that my homeowner's insurance policy did not cover prolonged absences, and the insurance broker eventually asked emphatically to back out of the policy. Fortunately by that time I had already obtained the services of a rental agency and they had a tenant lined up.
For warnings about freezing, I've found a cheap device that does what I need for my house: the Freeze Alarm (see http://www.freezealarm.com/) which calls a set phone number when the temperature drops below 45F (7C). It uses a 9V battery and must be hooked up to a phone. I paid $30 USD for it at the local hardware store; the web site lists it at $99 USD, so look around for a better price!
A slightly more advanced model will call up to 3 programmed phone numbers, and will also call if the power goes out or the battery is failing; you can also call it to find out the temperature in your home. Both models play a recorded (hardcoded) voice message and continue to call until you acknowledge the alarm. What I like about these devices is they are very very simple; not much can go wrong with them aside from the battery dying. (There is a third deluxe model which hooks up to water alarm and motion detection devices). I considered some of the more complicated internet-enabled setups but I've seen my share of routers, cable modems, and DSL modems require hard resets; many more things can go wrong.
The difference between my previous jobs and my current one at a university is partly due (as you say) to there being no direct financial pressure to deliver software on specific dates, partly due to there being no one at the university in the morally grey territory of benefitting from a sales commission received for having closed a deal that cannot possibly be fulfilled as promised, and partly due to my director and higher management understanding the importance of planning.
It might also have a lot to do with the fact that my director once worked as a professional programmer in our department and therefore is able to apply the lessons he learned years ago.
The other job I had where everything was planned appropriately, an iron fist controlled scope creep, and we delivered the final system months early and under budget was in an IT group at a major bank. I expect that here too the reward for the project director (an appointment as a bank VP) was given largely for the successful completion of the project. Upper management considered timeliness, quality, and budgetary discipline to be important, none of which can be attained without proper planning and execution.
I have worked in commercial outfits creating big software systems (and I've been working as a programmer for 21 years now). At every place that worked its programmers 60-80 hour weeks (often more) it was because of poor planning, poor feature management, poor testing, and a culture where "working hard" was more important than "working smart".
For example, one job I took in the month of February was for a project I quickly found out had been set for a delivery date of the previous December. At that same company, another project I worked on was due for delivery in mid-May but the VP did not order the servers and development workstations until late February and began his staffing of the project by hiring only contractors (I was the first full timer on the project sometime in March). In both cases we were expected/required to work extremely long hours, for weeks at a time, and I even made the mistake (chalk it up to my 2nd full time job out of grad school) of delaying a vacation to try to meet a date that was a totally lost cause.
The other place I worked at that had crazy work expectations was culturally imbued with lack of planning, no customer expectation management to speak of, and a president/owner whose "of the moment, and only for the moment" thinking had programmers adding complex new features at the last minute, without any kind of planning or coordination. Not surprisingly, simple projects would turn into year long nightmares as the scope expanded and the company made no effort to try to control customer expectations.
So, needless to say, I was relieved to leave both places. I benefitted greatly from the experience both jobs gave me (at the coding/development and the management levels), and I learned never to put myself in that situation again where management is incapable of planning and makes no effort to plan. You can smell a company that reeks of "long hour code jocks" during the interviews. Just run away, unless you want to live for the job.
(Coda: I now work as a programmer at a university where not only do I get to work on interesting projects that are meaningful but I also am never expected nor required to work longer than 40 hours a week; I have breathing space so I can plan and execute my work effectively.)
Cell phone towers will work for only so long before the power outage drains their batteries.
For relatively straightforward projects I have set up commercial replication products in a couple of hours. You do need to know the requirements in great detail up front, however, and that means you have to understand the data model, the table relationships, the kinds of transactions written by the application, how the users and the administrators need the replicated system to run, etc.
It helps if you can work closely with someone who knows the data model inside out and someone who understands the app inside out (preferably the same person!).
All too often, people end up trying to shoehorn a replication product (usually the "free" one that comes with the RDBMS) without really understanding how replication will affect the app. The most complicated installs I saw were in cases like this, or where the application could not be modified to correctly handle the fact that the underlying data were being replicated. And in many of these cases, no replication product would ever work.
(In case you're wondering, I once wore many hats at PeerDirect, which has a replication engine that works on several RDBMS', including PostgreSQL, Oracle, etc., but I no longer work there).
The upshot: do a lot of research into how you need the app to behave, how the overall system should handle site downtime, how the system should behave once a downed site comes back online, and then make sure the replication product will do what you need. Some products really are a pain in the arse; others aren't, and it all comes back to those pesky requirements.
The problem is that you are expecting the end product of the US legal system to be consistent and reasonable. This is, after all, the country in which persons who steal millions of dollars are free to live lives of luxury and fame, and poor people are thrown in jail for life for petty theft (and worse, people are regularly executed for crimes they did not even commit).
In the US there is a trend in which prosecutors are attempting to have more and more minors tried in adult court for their crimes, to appeal to the "tough on crime" political platform so often adopted by conservative candidates. Their success so far is a result of a perceived increase in violent crime as portrayed constantly on television (cf. "Cops", hysterical news reports), despite real evidence to the contrary. Because of this engendered fear of violent crime, the public (through its prosecutors) is asking to have the book thrown at these minors.
There are recent studies that show that the frontal lobes of humans are not fully developed until the ages of 20-30. This means that the decisions made by young persons such as this 12 year old girl (she's not even old enough to be called a teenager) should never be seen as evidence of true criminal intent, where the person was in full possession of his or her mental faculties and made a conscious, informed decision to commit the crime.
Until the public in the US stops being afraid of itself, and until television and news outlets stop their fear mongering, prosecutors will continue to demand harsher and harsher punishment of younger and younger children.
1/16". Learned that one in driver education.
What if you don't live in a state where driver education is a requirement for a licence? How would you have known that it is a crime? I did not realize it was a crime to drive with very little tread; I know it is not safe and it is foolish. And yet (here's the kicker) I took a driver's ed course, in which no mention was made of this particular crime.
Did you know that in Ontario until very recently it was a crime to drive your automobile unless a man carrying a red flag walked ahead of it to warn of your approach? (Thanks, we don't need any Canadian-bashing jokes about this, ok!)
My point is that in many cases it seems reasonable that ignorance of a particular law should be considered in someone's defence. Especially in this case, where a young girl could not reasonably be expected to be aware of the RIAA's campaign, and a mother could not reasonably be expected to police her child's every move online.
You owe it to yourself and your self-esteem to start looking hard for an alternative to this job. Once your boss belittles your worth and contribution, your best answer is to find another job (not that I'm recommending you jump out of the pan and into the fire, though) because:
a) you will learn something new at a new job
b) you will feel better for having found work where you are appreciated
c) you will allow your former boss the opportunity to determine for himself just how important your contribution really was
By the very fact you read this web site, you are more informed than many and your desire to stay abreast of current developments in tech means you most likely have retained (or even added to) your senior admin skills during your time at Kodak.
Consider non-standard jobs, or start contributing to existing free/open source projects in your spare time now, and that may help you connect with people in a position to hire.
Good luck, and don't let bozos make you feel bad!
As a former product manager, I created marketing materials and literature for products that were in development and were about to be released on schedule but then were cancelled for reasons that we could not anticipate (basically, we had a management overhaul, and new management cancelled the products). Should that constitute criminal behaviour? I think not.
The Sony Ericsson T200 and the Ericsson R520M both have editable shortcuts - you pick & choose which of the phone's many functions you want to put into your group of shortcuts. They are then easily navigated to from the shortcut menu. You can put 9 of them on that menu.
Actually the topic of fake vs. real animals comes up when Deckard visits the snake woman/replicant in her dressing room. She replies that if the snake were real she wouldn't be working there... (implication is that only rich people can afford real animals).
Re: reissuing more versions of movies, if people keep buying them, let the directors keep reissuing!
Actually, the terms of service shown in a post above say that they reserve the right to do anything with the information as part of their business.
I always thought this technique for collecting very precise surfing habits (as well as other uses of the net) was far superior to the dorky cookie tracking set up by DoubleClick et al. I'm surprised no one has used this technique sooner.
It does make me sad that Zero Knowledge killed their cloaking service...
Anyone caught reading or posting to Slashdot is a likely surveillance candidate for various governmental (and extra-governmental) agencies.
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Confidentiality of Information: Comcast considers the personally identifiable Customer information that is collected to be confidential. Comcast will disclose to third parties personally identifiable information that Comcast maintains related to customers only when it is necessary to deliver the Service to customers or carry out related business activities, in the ordinary course of business, for ordinary business purposes, and at a frequency dictated by Comcast's particular business need, or pursuant to a court order or order of any regulatory body having jurisdiction over matters which are the subject of this Agreement.
What are you talking about? Our govt is discussing passing a law similar to DCMA. Sure we'd take him but would he want us?