It is not very complicated. It is called the '3-of-5' rule:
If you report a profit in at least 3 of 5 years, it is presumed to be a for-profit business.
If you report a loss in at least 3 of 5 years, it is presumed to be a not-for-profit hobby.
But since not all business are always profitable...
If you don't make a profit for a few years, there is also a 9-factor test the IRS applies if you want them to. Mostly it is useful for startups that want to be considered a business in spite of an economic loss, and for larger corporations that are going through a structured bankruptcy recovery plan.
The interesting thing about Superman is (would have been) to see him remain all perfect... If Nolan & Co. had made the movie about that, and then added the whole eyecandy, awesome fights and whatnot, it would have been a much better movie.
The comic book Superman goes to a trainyard to save lives, not to get ammunition.
The comic book Superman saves the buildings from destruction, he doesn't destroy them.
The comic book Superman prevents the bad guy from knocking over skyscrapers 9/11 style, he doesn't join in.
If you treat it as a movie about a random superhero it was passable. But it absolutely was not classic Superman from the late '40s to the present in terms of the comic book.
The early 1940's Superman was an apathetic murderer who didn't care about who died or what was destroyed as long as he stopped (and usually killed) the bad guy. When Ellsworth took over he banned the character from ever killing again. This movie Superman took no notice of those who died, didn't care about the buildings or lives lost. Seems like Nolan took his cues from the wrong era of Superman.
I really don't think it was EA this time. Sure EA implemented the changes, but they are just the middle men.
I have worked with Hasbro (owner of Scrabble) before. They are zealots about making sure people precisely follow their brands.
My guess is that Hasbro brand managers went nuts over things like the dictionary choice, and demanded EA (who is the exclusive Hasbro licensee) make the changes. I can also see Hasbro brand managers demanding that people who gained a score on the unofficial rule sets have those scores wiped.
Point your angry fingers at HASBRO who actually owns the property.
And remember...they didn't do anything illegal, and it's only bad if it's illegal.
That is where it gets tricky.
It is easy to jump to conclusions, but just like any other technical field, you need to pay attention to the legal details.
Technically what they did is legal. It is a loophole that has been in place for two centuries, ever since the Bill of Rights came into effect.
Police found early on that they cannot compel the person to give up their own records, so they went for business records on the people. For example, if you want to get evidence of tax evasion you don't audit the individual, you get their bank records and other business records. The individual's own records are of very little value to the government. Other examples are your credit report (it is not your data, it is the credit bureau's data), and medical history (it is not your data, it is the hospital's data). They followed the legal steps to compel businesses to give up information about you.
In that respect, they did follow the law. The spy organizations went to the courts, got a court order demanding business records, and executed the order. The codified law allows those requests, and the individual requests are legal. Congress knew about it, they made it legal. The courts knew about it, they have ruled on it many times. The spy agencies knew about it, they helped craft the laws. That is the law, and they followed it.
So leads to the difficulty.
Collecting some records is normally fine. That is how government has operated for two centuries now: Go to the courts, get a rubber stamp, get data from a business. For example, phone records may tie you (or your phone) to a crime. Police get a court's rubber stamp, get the record of an individual call from the phone company and proceed with their investigation. This is a long-established acceptable pattern.
The law allows for collection of all kinds of data. Collecting all records in aggregate CAN mean something different than individual records. Collecting every record means you CAN track associations and assembly (First Amendment) and your general security (Fourth Amendment). It is a little shaky because they didn't directly interfere with the rights of the individual. The aggregate data MAY be used that way. But just because something CAN happen and MAY be done, but so far nobody can PROVE they were used to actually violate either set of constitutional rights.
Without that proof, this is a very broad but still perfectly legal demand for data. Hence the difficulty under the law.
Although I can easily argue that mass collection of data violates the First and Fourth, I am unable to draw a line between where obtaining some records is legal (and it needs to be legal for the system to work) and where it is enough that it violates the constitution. That line needs to be figured out.
For the corporation's part, if they choose to cooperate they get immunity and they get paid well by the government; Congress ensured the financial incentives were strong in FISAAA of 2008. See 50 USC 1802(a). Cooperate and you get immunity and money.
If the companies choose not to cooperate, then certain executives get prison time and the violation still occurs; but they don't get immunity and they don't get paid.
Looks like from TFA he posted both the flaw and the working exploit as himself, not as an employee. So that is at least something.
He should have known about proper disclosure practices: File a defect report, permit the company to fix the exploit, and then release the exploit to the wild at the same time the fix is released, or release it if the company fails to take action. Instead of following the protocol he put the information about the exploit both on his personal blog and on the disclosure newsgroup, with the comment that he doesn't have time to deal with it. (But apparently he does have time to blog about it.)
Was it wrong? Absolutely. There is a protocol to follow that generally protects the public and still discloses the vulnerability if it is not fixed immediately.
Should he be fired from his job as a security programmer? Maybe. He should at least get a chat with his boss and HR to explain his side.
If all you care about is the perspective of the boring desktop business app, then this processor doesn't have much to excite you. Of course, that's just one field. Sending a few database queries over the wire or updating your text boxes doesn't exactly saturate a quad-core box. Business desktop apps don't really see much no matter what.
For data-heavy, cache-intensive, and parallel-intensive programs the processor looks to offer quite a lot. HPC developers like that.
For notebooks and low-power devices the processor is wonderful. If you are paying the power bill for a data center, the energy use will add up. Accountants and laptop users will like that.
The option to have graphics integrated to the chip this way means better SOC options. Embedded developers will like that.
Many fields will see great things out of this chip.
If you are fixated on the world of desktop business software, you still get an incremental ~10% improvement. Unlike technologies such as SIMD, you get it without changing a line of code. So now you can add 10% more text boxes to fill out, or maybe pick up some more wasteful coding habits.
Financial institutions want to keep their vulnerabilities quiet. People who shout them to the world face lawsuits
If you are smart enough to discover a major exploit, also be smart in how you notify them. There are many great security companies who work as middle-men to help submit the bugs to the corporations and at an appropriate time make the information public so it gets fixed.
Going through a security company is free, and means you won't get the big splash on news sites or all the public attention, but it also means you can generally avoid hiring a lawyer, or worse, having he cops knock at your door with warrants.
That's an amazing list of some the lower-paying specialties in the field. But it's a basic rule of all engineering that "fun, difficult, and engaging problems" == "we can pay you less and you'll still do it".
For beginners in the fields, often that is true. And if you are foolish and never specialize, well, that's your choice. Once you've got a few years of experience in specialty fields you can generally find excellent pay. I've got some recruiter friends who are constantly hunting for experienced graphics specialists in the $150K pay range. If the programmer has skill in negotiating they can get more.
If you've got a few years of specialized game experience and you are making less than your business-database-programming friends and relatives it is time to shop for a new employer.
I have been hiring IT professionals for years, hardware, networking, security, and software gurus.
If you are hiring IT professionals and gurus, you don't need computer scientists.
I work in the video games industry, inside the guts on game engines. I absolutely need math.
If you are simply working on 3D games you need math through linear algebra and calculus. If you are working on any high-performance graphics processing you will need sharp math skills. When you are talking about a billion polygons per second you don't have the luxury of allowing a computer to do all the work for you; you need to pre-solve everything you can, which in turn means having solid mathematics skill.
If you are working on games physics simulations, all those PDEs in college will look easy. You also better know your stuff from the highest level concepts of math down to the details of getting the most from associative caches. Again, a solid mathematics background is a must.
If you want to get a job as an "IT Professional" writing crappy business software, the math (and really, the whole computer science degree) doesn't really matter.
If you are a business programmer where 20ms means a database transaction, you don't need the math.
If you want to write any kind of scientific work or any kind of high performance software, anything from video games to weather simulations to military simulations to oil and gas exploration, you absolutely need the math skills.
Many non-GMO plants have already become heavily contaminated by GMO strains.
In the US, all three of canola, corn, and soybean are near-universally contaminated. You can no longer find non-GMO canola in Canada due to cross-contamination.
GMO-contaminated wheat is rapidly joining the ranks.
BYOD is not just about cell phones or property. It's about people taking work laptops home and home phones to work.
We were recently stung by this little feature.
License true-ups and program audits are fun.
People install the products on their laptops with the corporate keys, and pass it around to their co-workers saying the installs are business related. For us, a two-week network scan found nearly two million dollars in improperly-licensed and unexpectedly-installed software on all those BYOD laptops.
A whole lot of people got one-on-one meetings with management, a few lost their jobs.
From the IT side, it means a nasty festering pile of vulnerabilities. It means more vectors for the Chinese hackers, more attack vectors for competitors, more attack vectors for malware, more vectors for government and corporate spying, and more ways for information to accidentally leak.
From the personal side, it means being on the clock continuously without additional pay. It means additional personal liability. It means if something goes wrong at work the powers that be can brick your phone. It means that your boss or peers are always watching, sometimes expecting you to reply to emails at all hours or work on reports over the weekend.
From the bottom line perspective you may get a little more hours out of the worker, but at the cost of reduced total productivity from them never disengaging and the costs of supporting an alphabet soup of devices.
But the claim is that she had no relationship with Facebook.
The girl had a Facebook account, and wrote her suicide note on it.
FTFA: she leapt to her death from her third-floor bedroom window, writing on Facebook: ''Forgive me if I am not strong. I cannot take it any longer.''
Facebook keeps a digital paper trail on their accounts for when they signed up, the email accounts used, the age they said they were, and parental verification emails. If the parents didn't know she was on Facebook then the girl committed fraud. It will be easy for Facebook to prove they jumped through those legal hoops.
If they try to hold Facebook liable, they've got an uphill battle.
Facebook has a well-documented history of working to block pre-teen minors from getting accounts, and also for requiring parental consent for teenage minors. They publish their stats, and last year's report was that about 38% of minor accounts were illegal. That is actually a really good number.
The girl was underage. She either filled out the forms properly and had parental consent *OR* she committed fraud and misrepresented her age or her parental consent.
That will play out thusly in court:
From the allegations: ''Italian law forbids minors under 18 signing contracts, yet Facebook is effectively entering into a contract with minors regarding their privacy, without their parents knowing.''
Facebook: We do everything we can to prevent children from committing fraud. Your daughter created an account on [datestamp]. The law required us to ask these questions, and we did. We sent the privacy forms to [email address] on [datestamp] and got a confirmation on [datestamp]. We met the standard required by law. You or your daughter committed fraud.
Court: The paper-trail meets the legal requirements. Dismissed.
You have a strange definition of "free". Publicly funded is better wording.
According to government numbers the NHS takes just over 18% of the income taxes, or about £1500-2000 or so per year depending on your income. It is also paid by other specific taxes (such as tobacco tax) and through general funds.
Thanks to the NHS guidelines, your wait time in the queue is to be no more than 18 weeks. Usually.
America pays more, but they can also generally see a specialist for any field within a matter of days or sometimes hours for non-emergency care.
And for emergency care.... Many American hospitals are putting their emergency room wait times up in phone apps so you can compare wait times. I have heard it is common to see 5-10 minutes between entering the hospital and being treated for urgent situations. In contrast, I sat in a hospital with my daughter, her hand oozing blood after being crushed and having two broken bones and severe lacerations and soft tissue injuries, for nearly THREE HOURS before being treated. Watching her quietly cry the whole time I would have gladly written an American-sized cheque for £1000 to have her treated immediately.
Most notable is the last paragraph of the court's ruling:
Our holding today is limited—addressing the situation before us, rather than every one involving a self-replicating product. We recognize that such inventions are becoming ever more prevalent, complex, and diverse. In another case, the article’s self-replication might occur outside the purchaser’s control. Or it might be a necessary but incidental step in using the item for another purpose. We need not address here whether or how the doctrine of patent exhaustion would apply in such circumstances. In the case at hand, Bowman planted
Monsanto’s patented soybeans solely to make and market replicas of them, thus depriving the company of the reward patent law provides for the sale of each article. Patent exhaustion provides no haven for that conduct.
If he didn't use the pesticide he probably would have been fine. Since various sources said about 90% of the beans would be GMO-infected he could simply have planted the seeds directly and would have had a much stronger defense.
And of course, the court left the more thorny issues open for a future lawsuit.
The problem with a diagnosis is that it's a label. Someone who says "I'm bipolar"...
And any person who says that needs some behavior modification anyways. No one walks around saying "I'm heart disease" or "I'm the flu" when they are suffering from those disorders or illnesses.
"I'm bipolar" is correct, just like "I'm diabetic", I'm depressed", or "I'm hungry" are all correct.
As for something better, software developers found it in the late 1990's. It is called Software As A Service (SaaS). It doesn't work for other forms of art, like movies and music, but it is extremely effective for software.
Consumers don't own a copy of the software behind Facebook or Twitter or Steam or Origin or Instagram or Google Docs or Office 365. Even though they don't own a copy, the masses are more than willing to invest fortunes on the platforms. Using them requires an Internet connection, and it requires that their servers are running.
When you start editing your documents on Google Docs or Office 365 you do not own a copy of the editor. You are relying entirely on software outside your control.
My company is just one of countless others that have made a hard choice; the choice to get Office 365 where they do not have a copy of the software. On the one hand this greatly simplifies our IT department's job, it is one less piece of software to install on thousands of computers, and it is far cheaper to license.
But the down side is we don't have our own copy of the software. If our Internet access goes down, Office is down. If Office365 servers have maintenance we are dead in the water. And most relevant: we are entirely at the mercy of the company for access to the software.
Services come and go over time. Usually they die when their customer base shrinks low enough. It is unlikely that Google Docs and Office 365 will suddenly stop services today, but we can be sure they will turn off the servers at the end of the product's life. That will be either when a new product is available or when most users have moved on. Anyone relying on their services at that time will simply be out of luck; whatever they had on the services will be lost.
This protects the interest of the creator --- they will get paid. And they can get paid on an annual or per-use basis.
It impacts the customer in that the consumer because, in order to keep their business competitive the vendor must continuously add features and functionality. But it also has the fatal flaw: the moment the creator stops supporting the product, they are left with a useless smart-client with no server.
I agree. Fortunately for me at least, I happen to be in the happy world where management supports us in realistic timelines and realistic scoping.
Spanning almost seven years now and well over a hundred assorted projects we have been overdue on projects two times total. One of those was during the exceptional case of a co-worker getting in a car accident and breaking 13 ribs, the other was an exceptional case where very serious external forces caused the design to shift mid-development. In no case has it been due to poor estimation.
We have come to learn the development cycle for our small teams:
Before the project begins, we spend about 10% of the previous project time scoping and prototyping the next project. The usually three developers are each individually required to build the estimates for their parts of the project, and to collectively work out the details of how all the pieces come together. Accurate time estimates and prototypes are required from each developer.
Now the project is officially started. This 30% initial development is where we implement the features required. Everything in the project is scoped during estimates so that this 30% of the schedule will meet our understanding of the product. The design is locked and developers are held accountable for meeting these deadlines. Since there are only about three developers on each project and each one is accountable for a specific subset of the work, we can lay accountability directly on the shoulders of that one individual. We also make a point of celebrating each developer's success of hitting their individual milestones, and the even bigger success of hitting a milestone early.
The product owners are given a chance to review the implementation and also modify their design. The changes are estimated and must not exceed 10% of the total development time. Usually we limit them to about 5% of the total development time. The features are prioritized and work on until we hit 35-40% of the schedule (depending on if we limited them to 5% or 10% of the development time). This would likely be called alpha. Again the individual developers are held accountable for their estimates.
The next 20-25% is bug fixes where new features are not added but product owners can submit bugs where existing features may be adjusted. We bring in our QA team and start testing. This is the tail end of main development. Many people would call this beta. This brings us to 60% of the development time.
For the next 20%, no existing features may be adjusted. Individual bugs are still handled and occasionally a product owner may manage sneak in a design-by-bug change for an absolute critical change, but otherwise this is the final cleanup cycle. At this point we should be comfortable shipping the code. That brings us to 80%.
For the final 20% almost no changes are made. Changes are reviewed by all of the developers, and must have sign-off by the developers AND by management before submitting to version control. Most of the development team moves on to prototyping the next project. (This is the 10% mentioned up top.)
When I hear about other groups hitting 60% or later in their development cycles and still not getting feature complete, I pity them. They have made the mistakes the original article warned about, and were probably driven to that madness by the poor management you mention.
Brilliant. Photos of themselves committing the crime, posing with the animals they released, posted publicly. How about they just turn themselves in to the police right now?
Restore the courts by eliminating plea bargains by prosecutors. (Defendants can still plead guilty and ask for mercy from the court, not from the prosecutors.)
Slashdot Mirror
It is not very complicated. It is called the '3-of-5' rule:
If you report a profit in at least 3 of 5 years, it is presumed to be a for-profit business.
If you report a loss in at least 3 of 5 years, it is presumed to be a not-for-profit hobby.
But since not all business are always profitable...
If you don't make a profit for a few years, there is also a 9-factor test the IRS applies if you want them to. Mostly it is useful for startups that want to be considered a business in spite of an economic loss, and for larger corporations that are going through a structured bankruptcy recovery plan.
The interesting thing about Superman is (would have been) to see him remain all perfect ... If Nolan & Co. had made the movie about that, and then added the whole eyecandy, awesome fights and whatnot, it would have been a much better movie.
The comic book Superman goes to a trainyard to save lives, not to get ammunition.
The comic book Superman saves the buildings from destruction, he doesn't destroy them.
The comic book Superman prevents the bad guy from knocking over skyscrapers 9/11 style, he doesn't join in.
If you treat it as a movie about a random superhero it was passable. But it absolutely was not classic Superman from the late '40s to the present in terms of the comic book.
The early 1940's Superman was an apathetic murderer who didn't care about who died or what was destroyed as long as he stopped (and usually killed) the bad guy. When Ellsworth took over he banned the character from ever killing again. This movie Superman took no notice of those who died, didn't care about the buildings or lives lost. Seems like Nolan took his cues from the wrong era of Superman.
I really don't think it was EA this time. Sure EA implemented the changes, but they are just the middle men.
I have worked with Hasbro (owner of Scrabble) before. They are zealots about making sure people precisely follow their brands.
My guess is that Hasbro brand managers went nuts over things like the dictionary choice, and demanded EA (who is the exclusive Hasbro licensee) make the changes. I can also see Hasbro brand managers demanding that people who gained a score on the unofficial rule sets have those scores wiped.
Point your angry fingers at HASBRO who actually owns the property.
It's not EA's copyright it's Mattel's
Agreed.
I have worked with Hasbro (owner of Scrabble) before. They are zealots about making sure people precisely follow their brands.
My guess is that Hasbro went nuts over things like the dictionary choice, and demanded EA (who is the licensee) make the changes.
Point your angry fingers at HASBRO who owns the property.
This presupposes that privacy is a right, rather than a privilege.
This is part of the reasons we have so many problems with government. At the time the US government was formed the premise was:
The people have all the rights; the government has no rights at all, except those granted by the people through the constitution.
For most people today the belief similar, except they swap people and government.
And remember...they didn't do anything illegal, and it's only bad if it's illegal.
That is where it gets tricky.
It is easy to jump to conclusions, but just like any other technical field, you need to pay attention to the legal details.
Technically what they did is legal. It is a loophole that has been in place for two centuries, ever since the Bill of Rights came into effect.
Police found early on that they cannot compel the person to give up their own records, so they went for business records on the people. For example, if you want to get evidence of tax evasion you don't audit the individual, you get their bank records and other business records. The individual's own records are of very little value to the government. Other examples are your credit report (it is not your data, it is the credit bureau's data), and medical history (it is not your data, it is the hospital's data). They followed the legal steps to compel businesses to give up information about you.
In that respect, they did follow the law. The spy organizations went to the courts, got a court order demanding business records, and executed the order. The codified law allows those requests, and the individual requests are legal. Congress knew about it, they made it legal. The courts knew about it, they have ruled on it many times. The spy agencies knew about it, they helped craft the laws. That is the law, and they followed it.
So leads to the difficulty.
Collecting some records is normally fine. That is how government has operated for two centuries now: Go to the courts, get a rubber stamp, get data from a business. For example, phone records may tie you (or your phone) to a crime. Police get a court's rubber stamp, get the record of an individual call from the phone company and proceed with their investigation. This is a long-established acceptable pattern.
The law allows for collection of all kinds of data. Collecting all records in aggregate CAN mean something different than individual records. Collecting every record means you CAN track associations and assembly (First Amendment) and your general security (Fourth Amendment). It is a little shaky because they didn't directly interfere with the rights of the individual. The aggregate data MAY be used that way. But just because something CAN happen and MAY be done, but so far nobody can PROVE they were used to actually violate either set of constitutional rights.
Without that proof, this is a very broad but still perfectly legal demand for data. Hence the difficulty under the law.
Although I can easily argue that mass collection of data violates the First and Fourth, I am unable to draw a line between where obtaining some records is legal (and it needs to be legal for the system to work) and where it is enough that it violates the constitution. That line needs to be figured out.
Careful with wording.
One can cooperate without it being voluntary.
Cooperation under duress can get the job done.
For the corporation's part, if they choose to cooperate they get immunity and they get paid well by the government; Congress ensured the financial incentives were strong in FISAAA of 2008. See 50 USC 1802(a). Cooperate and you get immunity and money.
If the companies choose not to cooperate, then certain executives get prison time and the violation still occurs; but they don't get immunity and they don't get paid.
Not much of a choice.
Looks like from TFA he posted both the flaw and the working exploit as himself, not as an employee. So that is at least something.
He should have known about proper disclosure practices: File a defect report, permit the company to fix the exploit, and then release the exploit to the wild at the same time the fix is released, or release it if the company fails to take action. Instead of following the protocol he put the information about the exploit both on his personal blog and on the disclosure newsgroup, with the comment that he doesn't have time to deal with it. (But apparently he does have time to blog about it.)
Was it wrong? Absolutely. There is a protocol to follow that generally protects the public and still discloses the vulnerability if it is not fixed immediately.
Should he be fired from his job as a security programmer? Maybe. He should at least get a chat with his boss and HR to explain his side.
If all you care about is the perspective of the boring desktop business app, then this processor doesn't have much to excite you. Of course, that's just one field. Sending a few database queries over the wire or updating your text boxes doesn't exactly saturate a quad-core box. Business desktop apps don't really see much no matter what.
For data-heavy, cache-intensive, and parallel-intensive programs the processor looks to offer quite a lot. HPC developers like that.
For notebooks and low-power devices the processor is wonderful. If you are paying the power bill for a data center, the energy use will add up. Accountants and laptop users will like that.
The option to have graphics integrated to the chip this way means better SOC options. Embedded developers will like that.
Many fields will see great things out of this chip.
If you are fixated on the world of desktop business software, you still get an incremental ~10% improvement. Unlike technologies such as SIMD, you get it without changing a line of code. So now you can add 10% more text boxes to fill out, or maybe pick up some more wasteful coding habits.
Sadly, he probably will.
Financial institutions want to keep their vulnerabilities quiet. People who shout them to the world face lawsuits
If you are smart enough to discover a major exploit, also be smart in how you notify them. There are many great security companies who work as middle-men to help submit the bugs to the corporations and at an appropriate time make the information public so it gets fixed.
Going through a security company is free, and means you won't get the big splash on news sites or all the public attention, but it also means you can generally avoid hiring a lawyer, or worse, having he cops knock at your door with warrants.
That's an amazing list of some the lower-paying specialties in the field. But it's a basic rule of all engineering that "fun, difficult, and engaging problems" == "we can pay you less and you'll still do it".
For beginners in the fields, often that is true. And if you are foolish and never specialize, well, that's your choice. Once you've got a few years of experience in specialty fields you can generally find excellent pay. I've got some recruiter friends who are constantly hunting for experienced graphics specialists in the $150K pay range. If the programmer has skill in negotiating they can get more.
If you've got a few years of specialized game experience and you are making less than your business-database-programming friends and relatives it is time to shop for a new employer.
I have been hiring IT professionals for years, hardware, networking, security, and software gurus.
If you are hiring IT professionals and gurus, you don't need computer scientists.
I work in the video games industry, inside the guts on game engines. I absolutely need math.
If you are simply working on 3D games you need math through linear algebra and calculus. If you are working on any high-performance graphics processing you will need sharp math skills. When you are talking about a billion polygons per second you don't have the luxury of allowing a computer to do all the work for you; you need to pre-solve everything you can, which in turn means having solid mathematics skill.
If you are working on games physics simulations, all those PDEs in college will look easy. You also better know your stuff from the highest level concepts of math down to the details of getting the most from associative caches. Again, a solid mathematics background is a must.
If you want to get a job as an "IT Professional" writing crappy business software, the math (and really, the whole computer science degree) doesn't really matter.
If you are a business programmer where 20ms means a database transaction, you don't need the math.
If you want to write any kind of scientific work or any kind of high performance software, anything from video games to weather simulations to military simulations to oil and gas exploration, you absolutely need the math skills.
Too late.
Many non-GMO plants have already become heavily contaminated by GMO strains.
In the US, all three of canola, corn, and soybean are near-universally contaminated. You can no longer find non-GMO canola in Canada due to cross-contamination.
GMO-contaminated wheat is rapidly joining the ranks.
>> an intricate electronic folder structure comprised of approximately 6,712 folders and subfolders, approximately 707,307 files
Sounds like a regular disk drive structure to me. Nothing particularly "intricate" about it.
BYOD is not just about cell phones or property. It's about people taking work laptops home and home phones to work.
We were recently stung by this little feature.
License true-ups and program audits are fun.
People install the products on their laptops with the corporate keys, and pass it around to their co-workers saying the installs are business related. For us, a two-week network scan found nearly two million dollars in improperly-licensed and unexpectedly-installed software on all those BYOD laptops.
A whole lot of people got one-on-one meetings with management, a few lost their jobs.
From the IT side, it means a nasty festering pile of vulnerabilities. It means more vectors for the Chinese hackers, more attack vectors for competitors, more attack vectors for malware, more vectors for government and corporate spying, and more ways for information to accidentally leak.
From the personal side, it means being on the clock continuously without additional pay. It means additional personal liability. It means if something goes wrong at work the powers that be can brick your phone. It means that your boss or peers are always watching, sometimes expecting you to reply to emails at all hours or work on reports over the weekend.
From the bottom line perspective you may get a little more hours out of the worker, but at the cost of reduced total productivity from them never disengaging and the costs of supporting an alphabet soup of devices.
Nobody wins.
But the claim is that she had no relationship with Facebook.
The girl had a Facebook account, and wrote her suicide note on it.
FTFA: she leapt to her death from her third-floor bedroom window, writing on Facebook: ''Forgive me if I am not strong. I cannot take it any longer.''
Facebook keeps a digital paper trail on their accounts for when they signed up, the email accounts used, the age they said they were, and parental verification emails. If the parents didn't know she was on Facebook then the girl committed fraud. It will be easy for Facebook to prove they jumped through those legal hoops.
If they try to hold Facebook liable, they've got an uphill battle.
Facebook has a well-documented history of working to block pre-teen minors from getting accounts, and also for requiring parental consent for teenage minors. They publish their stats, and last year's report was that about 38% of minor accounts were illegal. That is actually a really good number.
The girl was underage. She either filled out the forms properly and had parental consent *OR* she committed fraud and misrepresented her age or her parental consent.
That will play out thusly in court:
From the allegations: ''Italian law forbids minors under 18 signing contracts, yet Facebook is effectively entering into a contract with minors regarding their privacy, without their parents knowing.''
Facebook: We do everything we can to prevent children from committing fraud. Your daughter created an account on [datestamp]. The law required us to ask these questions, and we did. We sent the privacy forms to [email address] on [datestamp] and got a confirmation on [datestamp]. We met the standard required by law. You or your daughter committed fraud.
Court: The paper-trail meets the legal requirements. Dismissed.
You have a strange definition of "free". Publicly funded is better wording.
According to government numbers the NHS takes just over 18% of the income taxes, or about £1500-2000 or so per year depending on your income. It is also paid by other specific taxes (such as tobacco tax) and through general funds.
Thanks to the NHS guidelines, your wait time in the queue is to be no more than 18 weeks. Usually.
America pays more, but they can also generally see a specialist for any field within a matter of days or sometimes hours for non-emergency care.
And for emergency care. ... Many American hospitals are putting their emergency room wait times up in phone apps so you can compare wait times. I have heard it is common to see 5-10 minutes between entering the hospital and being treated for urgent situations. In contrast, I sat in a hospital with my daughter, her hand oozing blood after being crushed and having two broken bones and severe lacerations and soft tissue injuries, for nearly THREE HOURS before being treated. Watching her quietly cry the whole time I would have gladly written an American-sized cheque for £1000 to have her treated immediately.
Most notable is the last paragraph of the court's ruling:
Our holding today is limited—addressing the situation before us, rather than every one involving a self-replicating product. We recognize that such inventions are becoming ever more prevalent, complex, and diverse. In another case, the article’s self-replication might occur outside the purchaser’s control. Or it might be a necessary but incidental step in using the item for another purpose. We need not address here whether or how the doctrine of patent exhaustion would apply in such circumstances. In the case at hand, Bowman planted Monsanto’s patented soybeans solely to make and market replicas of them, thus depriving the company of the reward patent law provides for the sale of each article. Patent exhaustion provides no haven for that conduct.
If he didn't use the pesticide he probably would have been fine. Since various sources said about 90% of the beans would be GMO-infected he could simply have planted the seeds directly and would have had a much stronger defense.
And of course, the court left the more thorny issues open for a future lawsuit.
The problem with a diagnosis is that it's a label. Someone who says "I'm bipolar" ...
And any person who says that needs some behavior modification anyways. No one walks around saying "I'm heart disease" or "I'm the flu" when they are suffering from those disorders or illnesses.
"I'm bipolar" is correct, just like "I'm diabetic", I'm depressed", or "I'm hungry" are all correct.
As for something better, software developers found it in the late 1990's. It is called Software As A Service (SaaS). It doesn't work for other forms of art, like movies and music, but it is extremely effective for software.
Consumers don't own a copy of the software behind Facebook or Twitter or Steam or Origin or Instagram or Google Docs or Office 365. Even though they don't own a copy, the masses are more than willing to invest fortunes on the platforms. Using them requires an Internet connection, and it requires that their servers are running.
When you start editing your documents on Google Docs or Office 365 you do not own a copy of the editor. You are relying entirely on software outside your control.
My company is just one of countless others that have made a hard choice; the choice to get Office 365 where they do not have a copy of the software. On the one hand this greatly simplifies our IT department's job, it is one less piece of software to install on thousands of computers, and it is far cheaper to license.
But the down side is we don't have our own copy of the software. If our Internet access goes down, Office is down. If Office365 servers have maintenance we are dead in the water. And most relevant: we are entirely at the mercy of the company for access to the software.
Services come and go over time. Usually they die when their customer base shrinks low enough. It is unlikely that Google Docs and Office 365 will suddenly stop services today, but we can be sure they will turn off the servers at the end of the product's life. That will be either when a new product is available or when most users have moved on. Anyone relying on their services at that time will simply be out of luck; whatever they had on the services will be lost.
This protects the interest of the creator --- they will get paid. And they can get paid on an annual or per-use basis.
It impacts the customer in that the consumer because, in order to keep their business competitive the vendor must continuously add features and functionality. But it also has the fatal flaw: the moment the creator stops supporting the product, they are left with a useless smart-client with no server.
I agree. Fortunately for me at least, I happen to be in the happy world where management supports us in realistic timelines and realistic scoping.
Spanning almost seven years now and well over a hundred assorted projects we have been overdue on projects two times total. One of those was during the exceptional case of a co-worker getting in a car accident and breaking 13 ribs, the other was an exceptional case where very serious external forces caused the design to shift mid-development. In no case has it been due to poor estimation.
We have come to learn the development cycle for our small teams:
When I hear about other groups hitting 60% or later in their development cycles and still not getting feature complete, I pity them. They have made the mistakes the original article warned about, and were probably driven to that madness by the poor management you mention.
https://secure.flickr.com/photos/fermaregreenhill/
Brilliant. Photos of themselves committing the crime, posing with the animals they released, posted publicly. How about they just turn themselves in to the police right now?
Restore the vote by eliminating gerrymandering.
Restore the courts by eliminating plea bargains by prosecutors. (Defendants can still plead guilty and ask for mercy from the court, not from the prosecutors.)
Restore accountability in government by reducing government immunity from lawsuits. Those who enforce the law should not be immune from it. Police officers who lie under oath should be jailed. Destruction of evidence, including failure to collect exculpatory evidence, and the failure of prosecutors to reveal potentially exculpatory evidence as required by the Constitution, should also not be prevented by governmental immunity and should result in prison time for any detectives and prosecutors involved.