Now the contractors are begging for people with clearances, but it's too late, they have all expired.
Too bad for them - they can pay to have the BIs done and new clearances issued then. From personal experience with a few defense contractors and some of the shady bookeeping practices that they employed at my expense as a taxpayer, I have no sympathy for them.
You're employer is allowed to stipulate whatever they like in the contract.
They sure are, but if the IRS comes in and investigates the situation and they fail the "20 questions" test, the contract isn't going to mean squat when employer ends up having to write a big check to them.
And that contract is going to figure into the IRS's determination of your true employment status. If your contract says you'll be there from X o'clock to Y o'clock, performing your work as directed by the employer, with the employer's equipment and on the employer's premises, it's going to be pretty hard for anyone to argue to the IRS that you're not an employee, regardless of what's in the contract.
The Satchmo version of "Oops" is a fake, albeit a very funny one. Just the same, I do actually find "Oops" (and a surprising amount of other pop music) to be fairly interesting harmonically, though I could do without the vapid lyrics and Britney's singing. She might actually have a decent set of pipes, but we won't know until she stops it with that little fake pop-tart voice. Madonna stopped doing that after her first couple of albums, and showed herself to be in possession of a remarkably rich voice.
Britney's also not too bad to look at, but I doubt she'll hold up over the years as well as Kylie Minogue has.:-)
Thus, I disagree whole-heartedly. Law is the best safe-gaurd against criminals. Providing and advocating a legal recourse against online fraud will provide an avenue for banks to fight back. And it would be completely transparent for the end-user. They keep getting scammed while the banks go around pressing charges on the scammers until they're gone.
Laws don't mean squat if they can't be enforced, and the laws you're talking about can't be enforced as regards phishers operating in foreign countries. Convincing a foreign government to spend thousands of dollars' worth of resources to catch and extradite some two-bit phisher that stole a few bucks from someone's bank account, got their credit card information, or screwed up their credit just isn't going to happen. Hell, there are phishers here in the U.S. that aren't getting caught, so there is going to have to be some form of practical, technical means of preventing this. By definition, criminals don't pay much heed to laws.
I'm saddened that on a site as big as Slashdot, this is the best the trolls can do? The "music store owner" angle is fairly original, but consistency is the key to any proper troll - you have to make your reader believe you're for real. This post has none of that needed consistency. There really should be a website for those just starting out in the trolling art, to provide pointers and techniques so embarassments like this don't make it out it public.
This is rather self-explanatory. Despite Slashdot calling for the RIAA to go after individual infringers back during the Napster lawsuit, Slashdot has done a 180 and is against that now, using anti-capitalist rhetoric to avoid discussing the issues of music piracy. You scapegoat "greedy corporations" with non-specific accusations in order to distract from discussing the artists not getting paid.
I still believe that the RIAA members should be going after individual offenders, but the method by which they're doing it now is ridiculous. It appears that their entire legal effort has centered around funneling their targets to their "settlement center", and extracting money from them with the explicit aim of avoiding court. The outcome of the hearing in the Santangelo case seems to indicate that the RIAA hasn't seriously prepared for court, and I don't believe that they ever had the intention of actually bringing anyone to court - it's cheaper and better PR if they just twist people's arms really hard. Going by the numbers I've seen, the RIAA members have secured about $12-15 million in settlements thus far, with practically no work required. It's free money that they get simply by threatening people.
When the RIAA members actually bring someone to court with actual proof that they've done what they're accused of, and some reasonable means of showing damages suffered, I'll back that action 100%. At present, what they're doing I consider to be extortion because they know that the vast majority of their victims aren't even going to be able to afford to retain counsel to defend themselves, and thus it's a very low-risk means of lining their pockets. Their settlement amounts are on par with what it would cost to defend oneself, and thus the defendant is presented with a choice of settling, or paying a comparable amount to a lawyer to defend them. I'm sure that the amounts are similar is just a coincidence, and unlike the lawyer, the RIAA will be more flexible with the payment terms.
Even 9-to-5 jobs require an employee agreement and, unless you're financially wealthy enough to be able to afford to turn them down, there's nothing you can do but accept an unfair agreement.
As someone that is in the relatively tiny segment of the U.S. population that works under an employment agreement, I think I can say that statement simply isn't true. The agreement I work under now doesn't contain anything I consider to be unfair, and at my previous job I ended up going to the mat with the CEO of the company regarding several clauses in my contract that I felt to be ridiculous. End result? I got the offending language removed from the contract. You don't have to accept an unfair agreement, but you do have to have the balls to walk away from it if it gives the other party too much. I'm not independently wealthy, and can't afford not to work, but I also can't afford to work under an agreement that gives my employer too much.
Freezing rain happens whenever rain becomes supercooled (i.e. below freezing) before it hits the frozen ground and then freezes almost instantly once it does. Supercooled rain requires warm temperatures at altitude, but a shallow cover of sub-freezing surface air. If the surface air is above freezing, you get regular rain. If the mass of cold surface air is too thick, you get sleet. If the surface air is above freezing but the ground is frozen, the rain on the ground may eventually freeze but you won't get ice accumulations on tree branches, power lines, etc.
/has seen plenty of freezing rain with 20-25 degree surface air temps
That's why you have a filter in-line - you could make the entire system from stainless steel, but crap is still going to find its way into the water. It's really not a problem with a decent DI filter on the system, and the laser systems I mentioned before were not really that much better than what what you might find yourself with from Newegg.
The best selling cars in the US are the Ford F-150, and the Chevy Silverado--gas guzzlers, with MSRPs that start at about 10 grand more.
Methinks you haven't priced light trucks lately. My 2002 GMC Sierra had a sticker of about $27K, and that was with a lot of options that aren't on the base vehicle. According to Edmunds, F-150s start at about $21K, and Silverados at about $19K, well below the quoted average.
An ice storm is caused by freezing rain. Meat will thaw sitting on ice at 32 degrees. Ice cream will melt.
Very true, assuming the air and/or surface temperature is higher than the freezing point of whatever it is you're trying to freeze, which is usually the case in the scenario you described with the ice chest. However, once a given volume of water has totally frozen it will then be able to match whatever the ambient temperature is. If the air temp is 20 degrees, then the ice outside also will be at 20 degrees, which should be cold enough to preserve just about anything you'd find in an average freezer.
Having said that, I agree it's easier just to flip a switch or even run an extension cord than lug a few hundred pounds of food outside and then have to bring it back in.
The coolest ones are that inert 3M material they show that is ALLMOST as thermally conductive as water, and completely inert (safe if it gets on your system, and even for submersion cooling, unfortunately the stuff costs about $500/gallon).
Water can be made pretty damn close to inert if you have a de-ionization filter somewhere in the loop. The dual-loop chillers for the laser systems I used to work with ran water directly over a 130VDC arc lamp drawing 60 amps (and was directly in contact with both electrodes at all times) but because it was DI it wouldn't conduct electricity to any real degree. Having said that, it's still possible that the crap that might be on your motherboard would dissolve in your nice, clean water and make it conductive if you spilled some on the CPU.
Ah, that photo takes me back to my Apple II days. I don't recall that I ever had an Elephant floppy go bad on me, which is more than I can say for some other brands...
And the only difference between Marie Antoinette at 36 years and 37 years was that the later version was about 8-9 pounds lighter. Less didn't exactly work out to be "valuable and good" for her, did it?
Disney's system in Florida has most definitely experiences movement of more than an inch through a couple of mechanisms. On extremely cold days (less than 30 F), the trains often have to be slowed to cross over certain expansion joints in the beamway because they've separated completely. It's not a safety issue, but it's like running over a pothole in the road and people will whine if you try to do it at speed. Also, because the beams on the Epcot loop were not cast in a temperature/humidity-controlled environment, they warped as they cured and as a result many segments are not perfectly straight as they should be, with one notable segment on the northbound beam near Epcot that has warped about six inches out of true. Practically, that's made no difference at all, and unless you're a driver you'd never notice it. Even a train passing over is enough to visibly flex the beam and pylons.
As far as track maintenance goes, the only real maintenance required is to Quik-crete the occasional ding from lightning strikes or to replace sections of buss bar when something breaks on a train and physically damages the beam, but that's not a common occurrence by any stretch, and is still way cheaper and faster than replacing crossties or re-ballasting for a traditional railway, and way, way cheaper than rail replacement or straightening.
I don't feel I'm owed any sympathy, and I bought an 1st-gen iPod a couple of days after they were introduced. Yeah, my iPod has some scratches on it, but I knew that polycarbonate wasn't going to be particularly scratch-resistant (nor was the polished metal back - I have no idea why they didn't just use brushed aluminum), and adjusted my expectations accordingly. On the other hand, I seem to be the only 1st-gen owner that hasn't had any battery issues, and my iPod continues to work as well now as when I bought it. [shrug]
Also, I suspect that the extra effort an applicant has to go to to get a job overseas is a good filter - you only get the bright and motivated who have passed the extra hurdles.
I guess that's why at my last job I, who holds a high school diploma and nothing more, was consistently having to go back and fix driver code written by an Indian H1B with a M.S. because he couldn't seem to get his head around how interrupts needed to be handled by the hardware. He also couldn't seem to understand how to read schematics, and consequently couldn't figure out basic stuff like how to determine I/O addresses on an ISA-interfaced 8255 from reading said schematics. From my own experience, it seems that H1Bs are just like domestic workers - a few are really great, more are worthless, and the majority are somewhere in between. FWIW, almost all of the Sri Lankan workers I've come in contact with seem to really have it together.
Also, companies are obligated to pay a minimum salary set by the government.
They're certainly supposed to, but it's been my experience that plenty of places don't, and the government doesn't really seem to put any effort into enforcement of the "prevailing wage" requirements.
Having said all of that, I will agree that education in the U.S. needs a serious overhaul. In the grade schools in particular, we're concentrating on "self-esteem" and other fluff to the exclusion of the actual subject matter. When I was young, if you didn't meet the expected academic standards, you were held back, and the shame you felt for it motivated you to prevent it from happening again. We can't do that now though, because we might hurt the little darlings' feelings, so we lower our standards to laughable levels. Colleges on the other hand seem to do a reasonably good job of instilling knowledge of the subject matter, but do little to promote common sense thinking, and basic critical thinking skills.
I would challenge you to find anything open source developers can do process-wise that is not feasible in private enterprise. I have yet to find something.
Here's one - never having to hear "Ship it!". People working on OSS projects on their own time aren't generally being told, "you have to ship before Dec. 31st so we can get the revenue on this quarter's books", with no regard to whether that date is reasonable. Lots and lots of companies do it, and almost invariably the preference is to hit the ship date rather than spend the extra time to get it right. It really bothers me and everyone else I work with when we have to ship something we know is broken simply because the powers-that-be won't agree to a reasonable date that allows us to get it right the first time.
I'm rather surprised that Microsoft got their priorities straight this time, but you'll notice from the article that management wasn't exactly a friend to the process.
I'm quite familiar with the concept of a universal joint, but that's not what this is. As regards the "eminent domain" in the title, well, we have a situation where the government has taken property from one party and given it to another under the guise of doing it for the good of the people, which is an exercise of the power of eminent domain. As has happened in many cases recently, the government has done so without offering fair compensation to the owner of the property.
They're *supposed* to give you fair market value, but as the recent cases involving Wal-Mart, etc. have shown, that "fair market value" is often nothing of the sort, and equates to theft just as much as the situation in the article. "Eminent domain" in the headline was intended to be seen in that context, not necessarily in the strictest definition of the term.
Worse, companies like speakeasy cannot deliver to locations fed by remote access DSLAMs, quite common in new developments.
Until I moved about a year ago, I had DSL service through Megapath (great company, BTW - top notch service) over BellSouth copper, and as I recall I was going through a remote terminal owing to the 27K foot distance from the CO. I've heard great things about Speakeasy too, so if I were going for DSL again I'd definitely go with a reseller - unlike the Baby Bells, they really understand that customers have a choice.
5ESS switches actually achieve six nines reliability
It's great that Lucent can offer such impressive availability numbers, but it's too bad that you'd never know it from dealing with the phone company itself. Those six nines don't do you any good when, for instance, the idiots swap your pairs because they don't verify the address of a new customer that carelessly gives them *your* address, and you don't find out about it until a week later and every single person that's tried to call you in the meantime has been told your number is disconnected.
/got Vonage, and BellSouth can kiss my ass for a variety of reasons
Slashdot Mirror
Now the contractors are begging for people with clearances, but it's too late, they have all expired.
Too bad for them - they can pay to have the BIs done and new clearances issued then. From personal experience with a few defense contractors and some of the shady bookeeping practices that they employed at my expense as a taxpayer, I have no sympathy for them.
You're employer is allowed to stipulate whatever they like in the contract.
They sure are, but if the IRS comes in and investigates the situation and they fail the "20 questions" test, the contract isn't going to mean squat when employer ends up having to write a big check to them.
Depends on the what the contract says, dude.
And that contract is going to figure into the IRS's determination of your true employment status. If your contract says you'll be there from X o'clock to Y o'clock, performing your work as directed by the employer, with the employer's equipment and on the employer's premises, it's going to be pretty hard for anyone to argue to the IRS that you're not an employee, regardless of what's in the contract.
...and right next to it is the same machine, with a 40 GB drive plus a 52x CD-ROM for $20 more...
The Satchmo version of "Oops" is a fake, albeit a very funny one. Just the same, I do actually find "Oops" (and a surprising amount of other pop music) to be fairly interesting harmonically, though I could do without the vapid lyrics and Britney's singing. She might actually have a decent set of pipes, but we won't know until she stops it with that little fake pop-tart voice. Madonna stopped doing that after her first couple of albums, and showed herself to be in possession of a remarkably rich voice.
:-)
Britney's also not too bad to look at, but I doubt she'll hold up over the years as well as Kylie Minogue has.
Thus, I disagree whole-heartedly. Law is the best safe-gaurd against criminals. Providing and advocating a legal recourse against online fraud will provide an avenue for banks to fight back. And it would be completely transparent for the end-user. They keep getting scammed while the banks go around pressing charges on the scammers until they're gone.
Laws don't mean squat if they can't be enforced, and the laws you're talking about can't be enforced as regards phishers operating in foreign countries. Convincing a foreign government to spend thousands of dollars' worth of resources to catch and extradite some two-bit phisher that stole a few bucks from someone's bank account, got their credit card information, or screwed up their credit just isn't going to happen. Hell, there are phishers here in the U.S. that aren't getting caught, so there is going to have to be some form of practical, technical means of preventing this. By definition, criminals don't pay much heed to laws.
I'm saddened that on a site as big as Slashdot, this is the best the trolls can do? The "music store owner" angle is fairly original, but consistency is the key to any proper troll - you have to make your reader believe you're for real. This post has none of that needed consistency. There really should be a website for those just starting out in the trolling art, to provide pointers and techniques so embarassments like this don't make it out it public.
This is rather self-explanatory. Despite Slashdot calling for the RIAA to go after individual infringers back during the Napster lawsuit, Slashdot has done a 180 and is against that now, using anti-capitalist rhetoric to avoid discussing the issues of music piracy. You scapegoat "greedy corporations" with non-specific accusations in order to distract from discussing the artists not getting paid.
I still believe that the RIAA members should be going after individual offenders, but the method by which they're doing it now is ridiculous. It appears that their entire legal effort has centered around funneling their targets to their "settlement center", and extracting money from them with the explicit aim of avoiding court. The outcome of the hearing in the Santangelo case seems to indicate that the RIAA hasn't seriously prepared for court, and I don't believe that they ever had the intention of actually bringing anyone to court - it's cheaper and better PR if they just twist people's arms really hard. Going by the numbers I've seen, the RIAA members have secured about $12-15 million in settlements thus far, with practically no work required. It's free money that they get simply by threatening people.
When the RIAA members actually bring someone to court with actual proof that they've done what they're accused of, and some reasonable means of showing damages suffered, I'll back that action 100%. At present, what they're doing I consider to be extortion because they know that the vast majority of their victims aren't even going to be able to afford to retain counsel to defend themselves, and thus it's a very low-risk means of lining their pockets. Their settlement amounts are on par with what it would cost to defend oneself, and thus the defendant is presented with a choice of settling, or paying a comparable amount to a lawyer to defend them. I'm sure that the amounts are similar is just a coincidence, and unlike the lawyer, the RIAA will be more flexible with the payment terms.
Even 9-to-5 jobs require an employee agreement and, unless you're financially wealthy enough to be able to afford to turn them down, there's nothing you can do but accept an unfair agreement.
As someone that is in the relatively tiny segment of the U.S. population that works under an employment agreement, I think I can say that statement simply isn't true. The agreement I work under now doesn't contain anything I consider to be unfair, and at my previous job I ended up going to the mat with the CEO of the company regarding several clauses in my contract that I felt to be ridiculous. End result? I got the offending language removed from the contract. You don't have to accept an unfair agreement, but you do have to have the balls to walk away from it if it gives the other party too much. I'm not independently wealthy, and can't afford not to work, but I also can't afford to work under an agreement that gives my employer too much.
Freezing rain happens whenever rain becomes supercooled (i.e. below freezing) before it hits the frozen ground and then freezes almost instantly once it does. Supercooled rain requires warm temperatures at altitude, but a shallow cover of sub-freezing surface air. If the surface air is above freezing, you get regular rain. If the mass of cold surface air is too thick, you get sleet. If the surface air is above freezing but the ground is frozen, the rain on the ground may eventually freeze but you won't get ice accumulations on tree branches, power lines, etc.
/has seen plenty of freezing rain with 20-25 degree surface air temps
That's why you have a filter in-line - you could make the entire system from stainless steel, but crap is still going to find its way into the water. It's really not a problem with a decent DI filter on the system, and the laser systems I mentioned before were not really that much better than what what you might find yourself with from Newegg.
The best selling cars in the US are the Ford F-150, and the Chevy Silverado--gas guzzlers, with MSRPs that start at about 10 grand more.
Methinks you haven't priced light trucks lately. My 2002 GMC Sierra had a sticker of about $27K, and that was with a lot of options that aren't on the base vehicle. According to Edmunds, F-150s start at about $21K, and Silverados at about $19K, well below the quoted average.
An ice storm is caused by freezing rain. Meat will thaw sitting on ice at 32 degrees. Ice cream will melt.
Very true, assuming the air and/or surface temperature is higher than the freezing point of whatever it is you're trying to freeze, which is usually the case in the scenario you described with the ice chest. However, once a given volume of water has totally frozen it will then be able to match whatever the ambient temperature is. If the air temp is 20 degrees, then the ice outside also will be at 20 degrees, which should be cold enough to preserve just about anything you'd find in an average freezer.
Having said that, I agree it's easier just to flip a switch or even run an extension cord than lug a few hundred pounds of food outside and then have to bring it back in.
The coolest ones are that inert 3M material they show that is ALLMOST as thermally conductive as water, and completely inert (safe if it gets on your system, and even for submersion cooling, unfortunately the stuff costs about $500/gallon).
Water can be made pretty damn close to inert if you have a de-ionization filter somewhere in the loop. The dual-loop chillers for the laser systems I used to work with ran water directly over a 130VDC arc lamp drawing 60 amps (and was directly in contact with both electrodes at all times) but because it was DI it wouldn't conduct electricity to any real degree. Having said that, it's still possible that the crap that might be on your motherboard would dissolve in your nice, clean water and make it conductive if you spilled some on the CPU.
Ah, that photo takes me back to my Apple II days. I don't recall that I ever had an Elephant floppy go bad on me, which is more than I can say for some other brands...
And the only difference between Marie Antoinette at 36 years and 37 years was that the later version was about 8-9 pounds lighter. Less didn't exactly work out to be "valuable and good" for her, did it?
Stupid analogy.
with pillars that cannot move/settle one inch
Disney's system in Florida has most definitely experiences movement of more than an inch through a couple of mechanisms. On extremely cold days (less than 30 F), the trains often have to be slowed to cross over certain expansion joints in the beamway because they've separated completely. It's not a safety issue, but it's like running over a pothole in the road and people will whine if you try to do it at speed. Also, because the beams on the Epcot loop were not cast in a temperature/humidity-controlled environment, they warped as they cured and as a result many segments are not perfectly straight as they should be, with one notable segment on the northbound beam near Epcot that has warped about six inches out of true. Practically, that's made no difference at all, and unless you're a driver you'd never notice it. Even a train passing over is enough to visibly flex the beam and pylons.
As far as track maintenance goes, the only real maintenance required is to Quik-crete the occasional ding from lightning strikes or to replace sections of buss bar when something breaks on a train and physically damages the beam, but that's not a common occurrence by any stretch, and is still way cheaper and faster than replacing crossties or re-ballasting for a traditional railway, and way, way cheaper than rail replacement or straightening.
I don't feel I'm owed any sympathy, and I bought an 1st-gen iPod a couple of days after they were introduced. Yeah, my iPod has some scratches on it, but I knew that polycarbonate wasn't going to be particularly scratch-resistant (nor was the polished metal back - I have no idea why they didn't just use brushed aluminum), and adjusted my expectations accordingly. On the other hand, I seem to be the only 1st-gen owner that hasn't had any battery issues, and my iPod continues to work as well now as when I bought it. [shrug]
Also, I suspect that the extra effort an applicant has to go to to get a job overseas is a good filter - you only get the bright and motivated who have passed the extra hurdles.
I guess that's why at my last job I, who holds a high school diploma and nothing more, was consistently having to go back and fix driver code written by an Indian H1B with a M.S. because he couldn't seem to get his head around how interrupts needed to be handled by the hardware. He also couldn't seem to understand how to read schematics, and consequently couldn't figure out basic stuff like how to determine I/O addresses on an ISA-interfaced 8255 from reading said schematics. From my own experience, it seems that H1Bs are just like domestic workers - a few are really great, more are worthless, and the majority are somewhere in between. FWIW, almost all of the Sri Lankan workers I've come in contact with seem to really have it together.
Also, companies are obligated to pay a minimum salary set by the government.
They're certainly supposed to, but it's been my experience that plenty of places don't, and the government doesn't really seem to put any effort into enforcement of the "prevailing wage" requirements.
Having said all of that, I will agree that education in the U.S. needs a serious overhaul. In the grade schools in particular, we're concentrating on "self-esteem" and other fluff to the exclusion of the actual subject matter. When I was young, if you didn't meet the expected academic standards, you were held back, and the shame you felt for it motivated you to prevent it from happening again. We can't do that now though, because we might hurt the little darlings' feelings, so we lower our standards to laughable levels. Colleges on the other hand seem to do a reasonably good job of instilling knowledge of the subject matter, but do little to promote common sense thinking, and basic critical thinking skills.
I would challenge you to find anything open source developers can do process-wise that is not feasible in private enterprise. I have yet to find something.
Here's one - never having to hear "Ship it!". People working on OSS projects on their own time aren't generally being told, "you have to ship before Dec. 31st so we can get the revenue on this quarter's books", with no regard to whether that date is reasonable. Lots and lots of companies do it, and almost invariably the preference is to hit the ship date rather than spend the extra time to get it right. It really bothers me and everyone else I work with when we have to ship something we know is broken simply because the powers-that-be won't agree to a reasonable date that allows us to get it right the first time.
I'm rather surprised that Microsoft got their priorities straight this time, but you'll notice from the article that management wasn't exactly a friend to the process.
I'm quite familiar with the concept of a universal joint, but that's not what this is. As regards the "eminent domain" in the title, well, we have a situation where the government has taken property from one party and given it to another under the guise of doing it for the good of the people, which is an exercise of the power of eminent domain. As has happened in many cases recently, the government has done so without offering fair compensation to the owner of the property.
They're *supposed* to give you fair market value, but as the recent cases involving Wal-Mart, etc. have shown, that "fair market value" is often nothing of the sort, and equates to theft just as much as the situation in the article. "Eminent domain" in the headline was intended to be seen in that context, not necessarily in the strictest definition of the term.
Just because something is in the ToS doesn't mean that clause is enforcable, however.
Worse, companies like speakeasy cannot deliver to locations fed by remote access DSLAMs, quite common in new developments.
Until I moved about a year ago, I had DSL service through Megapath (great company, BTW - top notch service) over BellSouth copper, and as I recall I was going through a remote terminal owing to the 27K foot distance from the CO. I've heard great things about Speakeasy too, so if I were going for DSL again I'd definitely go with a reseller - unlike the Baby Bells, they really understand that customers have a choice.
5ESS switches actually achieve six nines reliability
/got Vonage, and BellSouth can kiss my ass for a variety of reasons
It's great that Lucent can offer such impressive availability numbers, but it's too bad that you'd never know it from dealing with the phone company itself. Those six nines don't do you any good when, for instance, the idiots swap your pairs because they don't verify the address of a new customer that carelessly gives them *your* address, and you don't find out about it until a week later and every single person that's tried to call you in the meantime has been told your number is disconnected.