That "ridiculous lawmaking" is state and local governments trying to collect sales taxes.
No, that's state and local governments trying to coerce corporations into collecting sales tax for them, when there is already a use tax law, and it's the state and local governments job to do the collecting.
As far as i can see, MS wants google to maintain a non-standard (non html5) interface to youtube. The precedence cases it cites for such an interface are apps which existed before html5 was settled enough to be ready for that. Google wants to serve cotent by html5 and advised MS to use html5 to *correctly* display the videos. MS like to do their own shit and expects google to maintain an interface for them.
Google did this for Apple.
All it took was for Apple to point the default search engine in their browser at Google. I'm sure Google would happily maintain a YouTube interface for Microsoft, in exchange for Microsoft pointing their browser's default search engine at Google.
I happen to know how Samsung builds products. And RSI is actually not an issue. This is a payoff fishing expedition from Brazil needing currency, now that they've closed down external bank transfers in US dollars, and shut down a large sector of their economy. Rather than admit their mistake and undo it, they are now looking to get their money a different way.
Strange, but Apple (contractors Pegatron and Honhai) have faced the same charges in other countries. Could it be that Samsung manufactures phones so dramatically differently that all Brazil can do shake Samsung down for a couple hundred thousand?
I'm under NDA on the exact process; they consider it proprietary. It's very weird, but in the limit, it makes a lot of sense, even if it adds some overhead that a traditional RSI-prone process would not have.
It's either a fishing expedition on the payola, as I said earlier, or it's a fishing expedition on the assembly process. I think they could have just hired an independent auditor to ask about it, sign the same NDA, the auditor would have just said "Oh." and told them to drop the RSI claim.
They may still have claims on the ergonomic furniture and the breaks, assuming workers in other manufacturing plants in Brazil get more breaks and, say, Herman Miller or other highly ergonomic chairs. It looks like they've already agreed to a modification of the work hours, specifically regarding mandatory overtime.
PS: If you do a more than trivial look at the earlier China Labor Watch complaint, you'll see the same overtime issue, but that the basic labor rights issues were (eventually) admitted to be limited to the two third party suppliers, rather than the Samsung plants themselves.
I happen to know how Samsung builds products. And RSI is actually not an issue. This is a payoff fishing expedition from Brazil needing currency, now that they've closed down external bank transfers in US dollars, and shut down a large sector of their economy. Rather than admit their mistake and undo it, they are now looking to get their money a different way.
Well, TFA says that revenues have been going up while the last couple years of layoffs have been going on (about 8k firings in 2011 & 20012). And they are cutting sales people in addition to engineers, so not all cuts are necessarily ones that would only improve the short term at expense of long term growth.
Since they have been able to increase revenues (not just profit) while cutting significant number of sales personnel it looks like their current cuts worked out for the best. Sometimes a company's needs change to a point where their labor needs change. Maybe management noticed some areas where they were being excessive and trimmed their costs.
Actually, most of the previous cuts were in their appliance services-in-a-box division, and the majority were sales persons, although for the appliance, there were engineering and other staff cuts. The other cuts were in other divisions that were pure services plays, and were mostly sales staff, since once that stuff is written, it needs minor maintenance. The last large cuts were in the Collaboration division (appliance, mostly the remote support people who remotely control the customer's machine to help them out), and the WAAS - Web services.
My understanding is that there were a number of companies, predominantly in India and Pakistan, that would use the Cisco solutions and call up customers claiming to be Microsoft support people calling to help the person out with the malware on their computer. Then they would proceed to install malware after getting you to open things up. The jobs became redundant when a Microsoft intrinsic firewall update to Windows caused the product to quit working.
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One thing you have to realize about Cisco, is that they are a very unique company. It's not so much that they are innovative, but that they acquire other companies that have innovated. And they are seriously bad-ass good at acquisition and integration of other companies. In fact, they are the #1 company at it, by some metrics.
The important metric in this case is post-acquisition attrition from the acquired company. I worked at a startup which was acquired by IBM. We all, across the board, got an immediate 25% "pay for stay" bonus for agreeing to stick around for 6 months. I know this because we had a company-wdie meeting where IBM HR announced it. The attrition in the first 6 months, where people left 1/4 of their salary on the table and went elsewhere? 25%. The second six months, there was an addition pay-for-stay for 6 months; this round didn't include everyone. Those of us who got it, got a 40%-60% of their salary bonus for agreeing to stay another 6 months (we talked amongst ourselves). The attrition rate over the next 6 months was another 20%. That's a grand total of 45% attrition in the first year, with people being offered 1.65-1.85 times their previous salary.
Other companies do better at integrating acquisitions than IBM, which is pretty piss-poor at it (one issue: they immediately replace support and HR staff as redundant, and you end up having to go to someone you never met with personal leave and insurance and other HR problems). When McAfee acquires a company, expect around a 25% attrition in the first year. Apple, when it acquired PA Semi and switched their chip guys from designing G5 class Power Architecture chips that were about 5 times as energy efficient as IBM was able to build, to ARM - lost about 15% off the bat; this was highly publicized, since they went to Google. No idea what they lost after that, only that it was non-zero.
What is Cisco's average attrition rate after one year for an acquired company? Much better... 15%? Lower. 10%? Lower. 5%? No... it's 2%. Depending on who you acquired and how big they were, this could be 4 friends dying in a boating accident up at Tahoe.
So after a while, Cisco needs to force attrition. It tries to get rid of people it doesn't actually need, and a lot of time, it's not engineering types, it's sales types, or HR or su
Stiletto is right about who is buying houses. The market hasn't actually recovered in the Bay Area, it's actually riding a bubble by people who believe that they can buy the property for rentals, or can do a fix-and-flip again. Actual housing prices in places like the Inner Sunset in San Francisco are in the $535/square foot range, which puts a $180,000 house in Utah in about the $750,000 range in the Inner Sunset. Some of the flip condos that have been fixed but not yet flipped are sitting at $650/square foot.
Compare this to Manhattan "Million Dollar Listing prices at $2600-$3000/square foot, which basically gets you a (purchased) apartment for in the $6 range. You have to work at it to find this in the Bay Area - like across the pond from the Columns Of The Palace Of Fine Arts park. Or near Robin Williams house in the Sea Cliff neighborhood.
The cities that these big tech companies are in have very little problem with that sort of income. SF, Moutain View, Palo Alto, Cupertino, San Jose, and Milpitas do just fine.
To be fair to San Francisco, Mayor "Down Town Willie Brown" did spend a buttload of money gold plating some of the buildings, instead of paying for things the public actually needed. But it's OK, Mayor "Grabbin' Gavin Newsome" has more than made up for it by quadrupling parking fines and extending active metering hours, while at the same time shortening the max time you can actually put on a meter without going out and adding more money to it so as to trigger more of those fines.
This article is stupid, and the author doesn't know what they're talking about.
I was annoyed at the reference to the illegal immigrants as immigrants, and annoyed that they claimed they'd be deported, when everyone knows San Francisco is a "sanctuary city" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanctuary_city and they are in no danger of being deported. Yeah, they're there illegally and not making very much money because, being undocumented, they are only ever hired under the table. They don't pay taxed on what they are paid.
I was also annoyed at the characterization of the homeless issue in San Francisco resulting from people being evicted, rather than being mentally ill or self-medicating drug addicts or whatever; most homeless in San Francisco are not the result of evictions from apartment building "going condo" or "going TIC" or whatever. Despite the state laws being changed to allow it, there are city laws that prohibit exactly the behaviour the author described.
I'm more appalled at the construction of skyscrapers (well, what passes for them in an earthquake zone) that sit empty because no one wants to pay the per-square-foot rate the owners want to charge, and so they sit there as empty tax write-offs based on how much total square footage they contain. San Francisco is rapidly turning its business district int the U.S. equivalent of China's Ordos City http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordos_City . Thank the Kaiser family trust for that one, since they're the ones who, at the last minute, got prop 13 modified to include non-residential commercial property.
So yeah, some things are going down hill, just not in the way the author of the article claims.
"They may have thought that you might not know the cost of living, and they could get you and sell you cheaply, and you'd hang on for the year required for their finder's fee to be non-refundable."
Exactly. When I've shown recruiters the math, they just moved on. Presumably to find some poor young soul who will swallow their (seemingly but actually not so) generous offer.
Recruiters, the new real estate agents... underpay the seller, overcharge the buyer, nobody gets exactly what they want.
The worst are the "stagers"; just like you can "stage" an apartment, they offer to "help write a good resume", hold "interviewing seminars/classes", and sell people in above their ability, and beat feet with their commission.
I guess for profit education, which is basically "seller pays fixer-uppers", may come a close second.
I've seriously considered trying to do something about this, starting with a ratings site, and going from there, up to the point of the equivalent of "the board of realtors" for recruiters, but I'd really hate to displace Paul Vixie as "The most sued person in America".
You can't make public transport better. It doesn't meet the necessary requirements, and making it meet them would make it practically useless as public transportation. Here are the requirements:
#1: You only associate with the employees of your company during your trip, so that any work-chat isn't heard by an employee of a competitor.
#2: Any networking on the bus is secured to internal company network standards to avoid electronic eavesdropping.
#3: To avoid terrorism, targeted attacks on the company or its employees, or protest-based denial-of-employee presence at work via stopping the transportation, either through things like spike-strips or human chains, etc., the transportation must not be marked by operator, route, or destination (the "Google bus" in the movie "Interns" was a specially built prop; real Google busses look exactly like the Apple, Facebook, Genentech, and other tech company busses).
#4: The trip must be quick to maximize employee productivity; this means very few stops at either endpoint area, and no stops in between.
#5: The trip must be quick between origin and destination, in order to make it more attractive than taking a personal car, since everyone can afford to have a personal car.
#6: At the near end point, you can use personal transportation belonging to yourself; at the far endpoint, loaner personal transportation must be available in order to make up for not having personal transportation available. There should be no or low flat rate subscription cost for this loaner transport.
#7: The transport must run frequently; in general, this can be up to 12 times more frequently (5 minute intervals) for some areas.
#8: The transport must run exceedingly early, somewhat late, and sometimes exceedingly late, when there are company functions, such as "all hands meetings", "beer bashes", and so on.
#9: Alternate transport at no extra cost must be provided for a minimum number of "emergency" trips per month. There must be no extra charge unless this number is exceeded. Exceeding this number must be capable of being reimbursed on a case by case basis, and emergency trips must be counted as a single event for round trips with an arbitrary intermediate delay at the emergency destination.
#10: The transportation must be comfortable; there must be at least one restroom, adequate lighting, comfortable seating, etc.....I really don't see public transport meeting any of these criteria today, and I don't see it meeting 6, 7, 9, and 10 without a near-infinite amount of funding, given the way publicly administered transportation services have to spend about 60%+ of their budget funding pensions and benefits to union employees in California.
Depending on what your skill set is, and how much you are being paid where you currently are, 3X may be no problem. Wages tend to be significantly higher in the area.
They may have thought that you might not know the cost of living, and they could get you and sell you cheaply, and you'd hang on for the year required for their finder's fee to be non-refundable.
(1) "More expensive printers with cheaper and standard consumables"... You have just asked any potential printer manufacturer out there to give up their business model.
(2) Power outage... now how do you get all the intermediate backup paper records generated during the outage into electronic form?
(3) A temporary or one-time referral from an "electronic" to a "paper" clinic: same problem as #2, only the paper records aren't even available at your location in order to scan/enter them by hand
No matter how you slice it, mixing these systems, even if you had infinitely reliable power where you had power available, isn't going to work out, unless you can force a unification of your recording and reporting records at all possible treatment locations.
A recession is defined as two consecutive quarters of negative growth. Thus, the recession is technically over.
Which doesn't mean it can't come back later.
"A recession is when your neighbor loses his job. A depression is when you lose yours. And recovery is when Jimmy Carter loses his." -- Ronald Wilson Reagan
FTFA: "Changes in Earth's orbit today are not an important factor in the rapid warming that has been observed recently...Earth's orbit changes on the scale of thousands of years, but carbon dioxide today is changing on the scale of decades so climate change is happening much faster today."
Yeah, I read that part too, and it's the only part of the article that bothered me. It was something of an unnecessary sensationalist jab in an otherwise informative article. Had they left that last sentence off, it would not have been any less informative, without dragging in T. J. Fudge's poke in the eye of the anthropogenic global warming controversy. Anything to bait the clicks, I suppose...
I don't see it. Horse breeding is not Horse cloning. Bad idea. Very bad. I can't even fathom the idea that they can force them to take cloned animals.
The point of getting them registered is to allow them to breed, and their offspring to be on the registry, and to race. You don't necessarily have to race the clones for registration to be worthwhile, and given the premature senescence of clones such as Dolly, they likely are not very good for racing in any case.
People complaining loudly about how Apple's next version of iOS or OS X is going to suck is not exactly a new thing. I've been a Mac user since 2003, and I have been watching this theater since... 2003.
I think we need to ask this question: Of the top 5 engineers you know, potentially including yourself, what would it take to get them to go to work for Blackberry? Discounting the top people you know who wouldn't want to leave their current employer, of the top 5 who have a willingness to move for the right offer, what would it take to get them to go to work for Blackberry?
The fish rots from the head, and of the people matching this description who I know, it would take interesting work, the ability to make a difference to the company's bottom line, and the ability to get a product they'd worked on into the hands of millions of people and thereby make a difference in those people's lives.
I've asked some of them in both sets of 5, and, after they had stopped laughing, a few of them told me I had made their day. None of them felt that Blackberry embodied any of those requirements, or that Blackberry was even capable of embodying them at any point in the near future, even with drastic management changes. The general consensus is that it's going to be parted out, and that a patent troll will purchase Certicom in hopes that Elliptic Curve Cryptography becomes a big thing they can use to blackmail licenses out of companies.
What is this magic healthcare we pay for that makes them healthy and keeps them alive as long as you and I?
It's called "private medical research" and "medical tourism".
My understanding is no amount of money will fix type 2 diabetes and obesity in a non-compliant patient.
Your understanding is out of date. We are currently using Porcine stem cells and islet transplants to treat diabetes, albeit it's still considered experimental treatment in the U.S. so that insurance companies, which we still have to pay for our healthcare, rather than having a single payer system like the rest of the world, don't have to pay for the treatment:
On the other hand, if you are willing to travel to Russia, Finland, the Ukraine, the Czech Republic, Panama, or Poland, they'll happily take your money, and provide treatment for Diabetes, Parkinsons, and a half dozen other conditions, and several of the countries will even let you buy antiaging treatments as well.
When Porcine stem cells are used, you have to sign some pretty strict agreements, since they down't want PERV (Porcine Endogenous Retro Virus) crossing species boundaries, unless you agree to sexually isolate yourself on the order of the protection necessary to prevent the spread of AIDS (condoms, etc.).
vPro requires a fair amount of setup to use, so claiming that it's going to backdoored is really just silly.
You failed to read my first link.
"Intel's vPro technology provides IT managers with a collection of security and manageability features, including remote access to the PC independent of the state of the operating system or that of the computer's power. The newest vPro processors include an identity protection technology with public key infrastructure (Intel IPT with PKI), which provides a new second layer of authentication embedded into the PC that allows websites and business networks to validate that a legitimate user is logging on from a trusted PC by using a private key stored in a PC's firmware."
So it allows remote access to the machine using a remote access facility built into firmware, and for which source code is not provided by Intel to allow it to be audited by an independent third party.
For "websites and business networks", read "media distribution companies intent on renting you something instead of selling it to you, even though book licenses are why we started granting media companies copyrights in the first place", i.e. it was in trade for them not being assholes, but now they are back to being assholes, and have lobbied legislators like Pelosi and Feinstein to get the DMCA passed, and criminalize a civil matter.
I'd rather my machine not identify me in a non-repudiable way to a remote attacker of my Article 12 rights under the U.S. Constitution, thanks.
Don't buy a TPM module? Just because a motherboard supports it doesn't mean you have to turn it on... or am I missing something?
It's pretty much impossible to get a new system with any reasonable compute ability without at least some form of back doored TPM-like facility these days. For example, the new Intel Ivy Bridge Chipsets have vPro, which gives similar capabilities. Likewis, the new AMD systems currently being planned have the ability to run TZones in the on-board ARM processor to implement a software TPM, as long as they aren't exposed out directly.
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They should just appoint a special investigator.
They could give the investigator over-arching extra-legal authority, just like the agency he'd be investigating.
I hear Edward Snowden has some experience in this area, and is currently in need of a job...
It doesn't steal the crown... ...until we can freeze Han Solo in it.
I'm holding out for carbonite.
That "ridiculous lawmaking" is state and local governments trying to collect sales taxes.
No, that's state and local governments trying to coerce corporations into collecting sales tax for them, when there is already a use tax law, and it's the state and local governments job to do the collecting.
As far as i can see, MS wants google to maintain a non-standard (non html5) interface to youtube. The precedence cases it cites for such an interface are apps which existed before html5 was settled enough to be ready for that. Google wants to serve cotent by html5 and advised MS to use html5 to *correctly* display the videos. MS like to do their own shit and expects google to maintain an interface for them.
Google did this for Apple.
All it took was for Apple to point the default search engine in their browser at Google. I'm sure Google would happily maintain a YouTube interface for Microsoft, in exchange for Microsoft pointing their browser's default search engine at Google.
They blocked it with a weird message.
Instead, they could have Rick-Rolled them, which would have shown a sense of style, panache, and humor.
Shame on you, Google!
By jove! They've invented acoustic coupled modems!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_coupler
Someone has been watching War Games again!
Except there is no enemy, and there was no aid or comfort given.
And there were no articles of war, signed by the president, and ratified by congress.
I happen to know how Samsung builds products. And RSI is actually not an issue. This is a payoff fishing expedition from Brazil needing currency, now that they've closed down external bank transfers in US dollars, and shut down a large sector of their economy. Rather than admit their mistake and undo it, they are now looking to get their money a different way.
Strange, but Apple (contractors Pegatron and Honhai) have faced the same charges in other countries.
Could it be that Samsung manufactures phones so dramatically differently that all Brazil can do shake Samsung down for a couple hundred thousand?
I'm under NDA on the exact process; they consider it proprietary. It's very weird, but in the limit, it makes a lot of sense, even if it adds some overhead that a traditional RSI-prone process would not have.
It's either a fishing expedition on the payola, as I said earlier, or it's a fishing expedition on the assembly process. I think they could have just hired an independent auditor to ask about it, sign the same NDA, the auditor would have just said "Oh." and told them to drop the RSI claim.
They may still have claims on the ergonomic furniture and the breaks, assuming workers in other manufacturing plants in Brazil get more breaks and, say, Herman Miller or other highly ergonomic chairs. It looks like they've already agreed to a modification of the work hours, specifically regarding mandatory overtime.
Here's an article on the lawsuit not behind a pay-wall, since the original link in the summary is generally unreadable:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323455104579012712866922406.html
Note that they actually own up to the overtime policy and agree to change it.
PS: If you do a more than trivial look at the earlier China Labor Watch complaint, you'll see the same overtime issue, but that the basic labor rights issues were (eventually) admitted to be limited to the two third party suppliers, rather than the Samsung plants themselves.
I happen to know how Samsung builds products. And RSI is actually not an issue. This is a payoff fishing expedition from Brazil needing currency, now that they've closed down external bank transfers in US dollars, and shut down a large sector of their economy. Rather than admit their mistake and undo it, they are now looking to get their money a different way.
Well, TFA says that revenues have been going up while the last couple years of layoffs have been going on (about 8k firings in 2011 & 20012). And they are cutting sales people in addition to engineers, so not all cuts are necessarily ones that would only improve the short term at expense of long term growth.
Since they have been able to increase revenues (not just profit) while cutting significant number of sales personnel it looks like their current cuts worked out for the best. Sometimes a company's needs change to a point where their labor needs change. Maybe management noticed some areas where they were being excessive and trimmed their costs.
Actually, most of the previous cuts were in their appliance services-in-a-box division, and the majority were sales persons, although for the appliance, there were engineering and other staff cuts. The other cuts were in other divisions that were pure services plays, and were mostly sales staff, since once that stuff is written, it needs minor maintenance. The last large cuts were in the Collaboration division (appliance, mostly the remote support people who remotely control the customer's machine to help them out), and the WAAS - Web services.
My understanding is that there were a number of companies, predominantly in India and Pakistan, that would use the Cisco solutions and call up customers claiming to be Microsoft support people calling to help the person out with the malware on their computer. Then they would proceed to install malware after getting you to open things up. The jobs became redundant when a Microsoft intrinsic firewall update to Windows caused the product to quit working.
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One thing you have to realize about Cisco, is that they are a very unique company. It's not so much that they are innovative, but that they acquire other companies that have innovated. And they are seriously bad-ass good at acquisition and integration of other companies. In fact, they are the #1 company at it, by some metrics.
The important metric in this case is post-acquisition attrition from the acquired company. I worked at a startup which was acquired by IBM. We all, across the board, got an immediate 25% "pay for stay" bonus for agreeing to stick around for 6 months. I know this because we had a company-wdie meeting where IBM HR announced it. The attrition in the first 6 months, where people left 1/4 of their salary on the table and went elsewhere? 25%. The second six months, there was an addition pay-for-stay for 6 months; this round didn't include everyone. Those of us who got it, got a 40%-60% of their salary bonus for agreeing to stay another 6 months (we talked amongst ourselves). The attrition rate over the next 6 months was another 20%. That's a grand total of 45% attrition in the first year, with people being offered 1.65-1.85 times their previous salary.
Other companies do better at integrating acquisitions than IBM, which is pretty piss-poor at it (one issue: they immediately replace support and HR staff as redundant, and you end up having to go to someone you never met with personal leave and insurance and other HR problems). When McAfee acquires a company, expect around a 25% attrition in the first year. Apple, when it acquired PA Semi and switched their chip guys from designing G5 class Power Architecture chips that were about 5 times as energy efficient as IBM was able to build, to ARM - lost about 15% off the bat; this was highly publicized, since they went to Google. No idea what they lost after that, only that it was non-zero.
What is Cisco's average attrition rate after one year for an acquired company? Much better... 15%? Lower. 10%? Lower. 5%? No... it's 2%. Depending on who you acquired and how big they were, this could be 4 friends dying in a boating accident up at Tahoe.
So after a while, Cisco needs to force attrition. It tries to get rid of people it doesn't actually need, and a lot of time, it's not engineering types, it's sales types, or HR or su
They rent. Apartments. Or with roommates.
Stiletto is right about who is buying houses. The market hasn't actually recovered in the Bay Area, it's actually riding a bubble by people who believe that they can buy the property for rentals, or can do a fix-and-flip again. Actual housing prices in places like the Inner Sunset in San Francisco are in the $535/square foot range, which puts a $180,000 house in Utah in about the $750,000 range in the Inner Sunset. Some of the flip condos that have been fixed but not yet flipped are sitting at $650/square foot.
Compare this to Manhattan "Million Dollar Listing prices at $2600-$3000/square foot, which basically gets you a (purchased) apartment for in the $6 range. You have to work at it to find this in the Bay Area - like across the pond from the Columns Of The Palace Of Fine Arts park. Or near Robin Williams house in the Sea Cliff neighborhood.
The cities that these big tech companies are in have very little problem with that sort of income. SF, Moutain View, Palo Alto, Cupertino, San Jose, and Milpitas do just fine.
To be fair to San Francisco, Mayor "Down Town Willie Brown" did spend a buttload of money gold plating some of the buildings, instead of paying for things the public actually needed. But it's OK, Mayor "Grabbin' Gavin Newsome" has more than made up for it by quadrupling parking fines and extending active metering hours, while at the same time shortening the max time you can actually put on a meter without going out and adding more money to it so as to trigger more of those fines.
This article is stupid, and the author doesn't know what they're talking about.
I was annoyed at the reference to the illegal immigrants as immigrants, and annoyed that they claimed they'd be deported, when everyone knows San Francisco is a "sanctuary city" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanctuary_city and they are in no danger of being deported. Yeah, they're there illegally and not making very much money because, being undocumented, they are only ever hired under the table. They don't pay taxed on what they are paid.
I was also annoyed at the characterization of the homeless issue in San Francisco resulting from people being evicted, rather than being mentally ill or self-medicating drug addicts or whatever; most homeless in San Francisco are not the result of evictions from apartment building "going condo" or "going TIC" or whatever. Despite the state laws being changed to allow it, there are city laws that prohibit exactly the behaviour the author described.
I'm more appalled at the construction of skyscrapers (well, what passes for them in an earthquake zone) that sit empty because no one wants to pay the per-square-foot rate the owners want to charge, and so they sit there as empty tax write-offs based on how much total square footage they contain. San Francisco is rapidly turning its business district int the U.S. equivalent of China's Ordos City http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordos_City . Thank the Kaiser family trust for that one, since they're the ones who, at the last minute, got prop 13 modified to include non-residential commercial property.
So yeah, some things are going down hill, just not in the way the author of the article claims.
"They may have thought that you might not know the cost of living, and they could get you and sell you cheaply, and you'd hang on for the year required for their finder's fee to be non-refundable."
Exactly. When I've shown recruiters the math, they just moved on. Presumably to find some poor young soul who will swallow their (seemingly but actually not so) generous offer.
Recruiters, the new real estate agents... underpay the seller, overcharge the buyer, nobody gets exactly what they want.
The worst are the "stagers"; just like you can "stage" an apartment, they offer to "help write a good resume", hold "interviewing seminars/classes", and sell people in above their ability, and beat feet with their commission.
I guess for profit education, which is basically "seller pays fixer-uppers", may come a close second.
I've seriously considered trying to do something about this, starting with a ratings site, and going from there, up to the point of the equivalent of "the board of realtors" for recruiters, but I'd really hate to displace Paul Vixie as "The most sued person in America".
You can't make public transport better. It doesn't meet the necessary requirements, and making it meet them would make it practically useless as public transportation. Here are the requirements:
#1: You only associate with the employees of your company during your trip, so that any work-chat isn't heard by an employee of a competitor.
#2: Any networking on the bus is secured to internal company network standards to avoid electronic eavesdropping.
#3: To avoid terrorism, targeted attacks on the company or its employees, or protest-based denial-of-employee presence at work via stopping the transportation, either through things like spike-strips or human chains, etc., the transportation must not be marked by operator, route, or destination (the "Google bus" in the movie "Interns" was a specially built prop; real Google busses look exactly like the Apple, Facebook, Genentech, and other tech company busses).
#4: The trip must be quick to maximize employee productivity; this means very few stops at either endpoint area, and no stops in between.
#5: The trip must be quick between origin and destination, in order to make it more attractive than taking a personal car, since everyone can afford to have a personal car.
#6: At the near end point, you can use personal transportation belonging to yourself; at the far endpoint, loaner personal transportation must be available in order to make up for not having personal transportation available. There should be no or low flat rate subscription cost for this loaner transport.
#7: The transport must run frequently; in general, this can be up to 12 times more frequently (5 minute intervals) for some areas.
#8: The transport must run exceedingly early, somewhat late, and sometimes exceedingly late, when there are company functions, such as "all hands meetings", "beer bashes", and so on.
#9: Alternate transport at no extra cost must be provided for a minimum number of "emergency" trips per month. There must be no extra charge unless this number is exceeded. Exceeding this number must be capable of being reimbursed on a case by case basis, and emergency trips must be counted as a single event for round trips with an arbitrary intermediate delay at the emergency destination.
#10: The transportation must be comfortable; there must be at least one restroom, adequate lighting, comfortable seating, etc.. ...I really don't see public transport meeting any of these criteria today, and I don't see it meeting 6, 7, 9, and 10 without a near-infinite amount of funding, given the way publicly administered transportation services have to spend about 60%+ of their budget funding pensions and benefits to union employees in California.
Depending on what your skill set is, and how much you are being paid where you currently are, 3X may be no problem. Wages tend to be significantly higher in the area.
They may have thought that you might not know the cost of living, and they could get you and sell you cheaply, and you'd hang on for the year required for their finder's fee to be non-refundable.
Three big issues...
(1) ...
"More expensive printers with cheaper and standard consumables"
You have just asked any potential printer manufacturer out there to give up their business model.
(2)
Power outage... now how do you get all the intermediate backup paper records generated during the outage into electronic form?
(3)
A temporary or one-time referral from an "electronic" to a "paper" clinic: same problem as #2, only the paper records aren't even available at your location in order to scan/enter them by hand
No matter how you slice it, mixing these systems, even if you had infinitely reliable power where you had power available, isn't going to work out, unless you can force a unification of your recording and reporting records at all possible treatment locations.
A recession is defined as two consecutive quarters of negative growth. Thus, the recession is technically over.
Which doesn't mean it can't come back later.
"A recession is when your neighbor loses his job. A depression is when you lose yours. And recovery is when Jimmy Carter loses his."
-- Ronald Wilson Reagan
FTFA: "Changes in Earth's orbit today are not an important factor in the rapid warming that has been observed recently...Earth's orbit changes on the scale of thousands of years, but carbon dioxide today is changing on the scale of decades so climate change is happening much faster today."
Yeah, I read that part too, and it's the only part of the article that bothered me. It was something of an unnecessary sensationalist jab in an otherwise informative article. Had they left that last sentence off, it would not have been any less informative, without dragging in T. J. Fudge's poke in the eye of the anthropogenic global warming controversy. Anything to bait the clicks, I suppose...
I wonder... colud this be abused to cause the blocvking site to block the blocking site?
You know, the way all the "net nanny" sites fail to include themselves when the "intolerance" or "censorship" checkbox is checked?
I don't see it. Horse breeding is not Horse cloning. Bad idea. Very bad. I can't even fathom the idea that they can force them to take cloned animals.
The point of getting them registered is to allow them to breed, and their offspring to be on the registry, and to race. You don't necessarily have to race the clones for registration to be worthwhile, and given the premature senescence of clones such as Dolly, they likely are not very good for racing in any case.
People complaining loudly about how Apple's next version of iOS or OS X is going to suck is not exactly a new thing. I've been a Mac user since 2003, and I have been watching this theater since... 2003.
It actually sucking is kind of new...
I think we need to ask this question: Of the top 5 engineers you know, potentially including yourself, what would it take to get them to go to work for Blackberry? Discounting the top people you know who wouldn't want to leave their current employer, of the top 5 who have a willingness to move for the right offer, what would it take to get them to go to work for Blackberry?
The fish rots from the head, and of the people matching this description who I know, it would take interesting work, the ability to make a difference to the company's bottom line, and the ability to get a product they'd worked on into the hands of millions of people and thereby make a difference in those people's lives.
I've asked some of them in both sets of 5, and, after they had stopped laughing, a few of them told me I had made their day. None of them felt that Blackberry embodied any of those requirements, or that Blackberry was even capable of embodying them at any point in the near future, even with drastic management changes. The general consensus is that it's going to be parted out, and that a patent troll will purchase Certicom in hopes that Elliptic Curve Cryptography becomes a big thing they can use to blackmail licenses out of companies.
What is this magic healthcare we pay for that makes them healthy and keeps them alive as long as you and I?
It's called "private medical research" and "medical tourism".
My understanding is no amount of money will fix type 2 diabetes and obesity in a non-compliant patient.
Your understanding is out of date. We are currently using Porcine stem cells and islet transplants to treat diabetes, albeit it's still considered experimental treatment in the U.S. so that insurance companies, which we still have to pay for our healthcare, rather than having a single payer system like the rest of the world, don't have to pay for the treatment:
http://www.mmf.umn.edu/diabetes/
On the other hand, if you are willing to travel to Russia, Finland, the Ukraine, the Czech Republic, Panama, or Poland, they'll happily take your money, and provide treatment for Diabetes, Parkinsons, and a half dozen other conditions, and several of the countries will even let you buy antiaging treatments as well.
When Porcine stem cells are used, you have to sign some pretty strict agreements, since they down't want PERV (Porcine Endogenous Retro Virus) crossing species boundaries, unless you agree to sexually isolate yourself on the order of the protection necessary to prevent the spread of AIDS (condoms, etc.).
vPro requires a fair amount of setup to use, so claiming that it's going to backdoored is really just silly.
You failed to read my first link.
"Intel's vPro technology provides IT managers with a collection of security and manageability features, including remote access to the PC independent of the state of the operating system or that of the computer's power. The newest vPro processors include an identity protection technology with public key infrastructure (Intel IPT with PKI), which provides a new second layer of authentication embedded into the PC that allows websites and business networks to validate that a legitimate user is logging on from a trusted PC by using a private key stored in a PC's firmware."
So it allows remote access to the machine using a remote access facility built into firmware, and for which source code is not provided by Intel to allow it to be audited by an independent third party.
For "websites and business networks", read "media distribution companies intent on renting you something instead of selling it to you, even though book licenses are why we started granting media companies copyrights in the first place", i.e. it was in trade for them not being assholes, but now they are back to being assholes, and have lobbied legislators like Pelosi and Feinstein to get the DMCA passed, and criminalize a civil matter.
I'd rather my machine not identify me in a non-repudiable way to a remote attacker of my Article 12 rights under the U.S. Constitution, thanks.
Don't buy a TPM module? Just because a motherboard supports it doesn't mean you have to turn it on... or am I missing something?
It's pretty much impossible to get a new system with any reasonable compute ability without at least some form of back doored TPM-like facility these days. For example, the new Intel Ivy Bridge Chipsets have vPro, which gives similar capabilities. Likewis, the new AMD systems currently being planned have the ability to run TZones in the on-board ARM processor to implement a software TPM, as long as they aren't exposed out directly.
http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/news/Intel-Launches-Ivy-Bridge-CPUs-with-vPro-Technology/6464
http://newsroom.intel.com/community/intel_newsroom/blog/2012/05/15/intel-strengthens-security-boosts-performance-for-business-with-3rd-generation-intel-core-vpro-platforms