I'm in favor of partial legalization and regulation. Smoking kills 300k a year. Something like widespread meth use could come in 10x, 20x that. The reason drugs can get banned is because they are so incredibly devastating to individuals to families and to communities when their use becomes common. Pretending they are harmless undermines other points.
It's also devastating to individuals, families, and communities to take someone like Anaya and throw him in jail for 24 years. Pretending that it's harmless undermines other points.
"A Connecticut policeman told Lupica 'it sounded like a doctoral thesis, that was the quality of the research', and added, '[Mass killers such as Lanza] don't believe this was just a spreadsheet. They believe it was a score sheet. This was the work of a video gamer'."
Video games don't kill people, guns do. It's the arms manufacturers who should be held to account. Any lawyers out there up for a class action suit.
Yep, video games, spreadsheets, guns - anything but that person who actually committed the crime...
Democracy includes irrational people. Do you really think they should be denied any representation or influence? Who decides who's rational "enough" for you?
This has nothing to do with Democracy or our Republic. The rules were made by stupid bureaucrats who lack any accountability and certainly aren't elected. It's surprising that a senator has to go to much effort to get something like this changed.
Bingo. Use taxes are illegal per the Constitution. Only the federal government has the authority to tax interstate commerce. And, sorry, changing the name of it doesn't change the nature of it.
Years ago a client decided to save money by hiring a recent college graduate. I helped them in every way that I could. About two months later they asked me to help write the support documentation for the firing.
I've been on the other side, too. I had a client early on (mid 90s) that was paying me $60/hour. They had, according to them, never paid anyone more than $7/hour before. They were explaining this to me as part of a conversation about how I was actually much much cheaper than any of the $7/hour guys because I could easily finish in a few hours a chore that would take those guys a week to do.
Anybody who thinks that a lower hourly rate means a lower cost is an idiot.
Any chance there's public documentation on this? My cynical side is finding it hard to believe that people whose main source of profit is petroleum would even consider switching to a renewable source. I'd like to believe it, but it is tough.
It would be hard to believe if oil were some infinite resource that they could milk forever. But it's not, it's peaked, and we all know it. What would be "hard to believe" is that they're sitting on their hands while the oil runs out and their current business model goes down the drain.
"But the president still faces an uphill battle passing any major energy law, given how politicized programs to promote clean energy have become in the wake of high-profile failures of government-backed companies that were owned and run by Obama's friends and campaign donors."
And I would have renewed their cert had I been able.
Look, the bottom line is that they haven't learned anything in the past 13 years (wow, I feel old). The sloppiness that allowed a domain registration to lapse is the sloppiness that allows a cert to expire. This is a cultural issue that will likely never be overcome.
To step into another industry, let's look at phone service. The "Phone Company" (AT&T back in the day, then the baby bells) had a culture of "this service has to work, period". I'm 45 today and there have been now 3 times in my life that I've picked the phone up and there wasn't a dial tone. In our parlance, they have good "up time".
The cable company, on the other hand, has never had that culture. Their product isn't necessary in the way that a phone is and outages are fairly common. If they have to work on something your service may be unexpectedly down for a few minutes. Or hours. Whatever. My internet has more outages every month than my phone service has had over my lifetime.
The point is that Microsoft's culture is more like the cable company. They are a software company and having to keep servers "up" hasn't been their deal until kind of recently. Companies like Amazon or Google, on the other hand, have had to have a phone-company-like culture from the beginning. They write software, yes, but their main product is a web site that has to be up come hell or high water. And, yes, I know that there have been a couple of high-profile outages, but those outages weren't caused by the kind of sloppiness that results in someone forgetting to renew a domain registration.
So I use Amazon for my stuff but would switch to Google if there were problems at Amazon.
But Microsoft? Are you kidding? I feel like I diapered them on Christmas Day of 1999, so I probably have less respect due to that.
Technically, the shareholders *should* be able to do this already through the Board. I think the problem in the US is that few people invest in companies directly nowadays - instead they invest in mutual funds which in turn own companies.
I always suggest that people who work in publicly traded companies own stock and show up at annual meetings when possible. The problem is that for the normal worker they can't buy stock at the same pace that it's being given to the executives. My wife's former company was terrible about that - execs and even divisional managers were being given thousands of shares each year, either outright or as options that allowed them to buy the stock at a low price and sell it immediately at a much higher price, with the risk totally eliminated by the fact that they had no requirement to buy in the first place.
We really need to get back to free market principles here, instead of this crazy system where executives rape companies and get huge bonuses or parting gifts.
There is no 'unnatural selection'. If we killed off the one we didn't like then we were just one more evolutionary pressure just like meteor strike or sudden climate change would be.
The proper term is "artificial selection" and it very much exists. Natural selection occurs from the results of natural pressures - typically animals gain some advantage in reproduction due to an outside influence (which may be human). In artificial selection two dogs are mated based on certain traits that their human breeders desire - e.g. large paws for swimming (spaniels) or a great sense of smell (bloodhounds). That's a very different kind of outside pressure, and quite distinct from natural selection. It also doesn't necessarily mean that any particular animal is killed or even prevented from mating. It's mainly a matter of who mates with whom.
Furthermore, this budget cut takes us back to the federal spending level of, what, 2011? Was our country in such horrible shape a couple of years ago before we spent even more?
I wrote about this recently, but here's the relevant part:
"My wife came here on an H-1A as an RN. They brought her to work for substandard wages at shitty nursing homes. The nursing homes could easily have hired Americans to work for them, but they found it was cheaper to claim they couldn't find anybody (a legal requirement for petitioning an H-1x) and then hire some foreigner to do it at a paltry wage. They're supposed to treat them well, but trust me - there's a world of difference between a boss that can fire you and one that can put your ass on a plane back to Asia."
If you're here on an H-1x visa, you don't have the option to quit and find another job unless that other job will petition you immediately. The minute you quit your job you have a couple of weeks to leave the US legally, and if you don't, you end up on the USCIS shit list of people who can't come to the US for x years.
The result is that your employer can treat you like shit because you can't leave. It doesn't matter if they give you raises or bonuses - you can't leave. This dramatically changes the employer/employee relationship.
As an aside, the nursing home where my wife worked was chronically understaffed and underpaid. The state department that inspected nursing homes would warn the employer when the "surprise" inspections were going to be, so they would bring the staffing up to legal levels for those few weeks and then drop it back after the inspection was done. My wife was a supervisor there, and when we got married I strongly suggested she quit before the predictable disaster hit. I had no idea how bad it would be when it did. About 3 years after she quit one of the patient rooms on the second floor caught fire during the night. The building had been grandfathered in and had inadequate fire suppression (one single sprinkler in the entire building - in the kitchen). 8 of the patients ended up dead and 20 badly injured - given the staffing level it's amazing that only 8 died. Keep that in mind when your mom gets old.
The victim was an unreliable witness because of his mental problems, the victim's father based his testimony on the victim's statements (meaning that the father's testimony was of limited value)
Right. And this is the same LAPD that protected a murderer in their ranks - Stephanie Lazarus - for 25 years. At best, we just hit "even" on reliability.
Yeah, she was ragging on his copy/paste skills, not the fact that he copied and pasted his PhD. Let's face it, she's apparently an expert in copy/paste PhD work.
There are many people in Congress (mostly Tea Party types) that want the USPS to be a relic of the past
Really? Name... 10.
Not ones who say "I don't think the Post Office is run well" or "Lines at the DMV or Post Office are too long... just wait until Obamacare is in full force"... but ones who have actually said "Death to the Post Office!!!" or been similarly explicit.
Go on... I dare you.
Hell, let me make this easier - name one.
Nobody wants the postal service to go away. Congress just needs to quit meddling with it. They need to can the pension system and move to IRAs like everybody else is doing and allow the postal service to price their service however they see fit. Of course, Congress wants to use their pension system as a cookie jar to fund other projects, so that will never happen.
Slashdot Mirror
"desktops, laptops, tablets and smartphones powered by Microsoft's various Windows operating systems"
"tablet" and "smartphone" shouldn't be plural.
I'm in favor of partial legalization and regulation. Smoking kills 300k a year. Something like widespread meth use could come in 10x, 20x that. The reason drugs can get banned is because they are so incredibly devastating to individuals to families and to communities when their use becomes common. Pretending they are harmless undermines other points.
It's also devastating to individuals, families, and communities to take someone like Anaya and throw him in jail for 24 years. Pretending that it's harmless undermines other points.
"A Connecticut policeman told Lupica 'it sounded like a doctoral thesis, that was the quality of the research', and added, '[Mass killers such as Lanza] don't believe this was just a spreadsheet. They believe it was a score sheet. This was the work of a video gamer'."
Video games don't kill people, guns do. It's the arms manufacturers who should be held to account. Any lawyers out there up for a class action suit.
Yep, video games, spreadsheets, guns - anything but that person who actually committed the crime...
Democracy includes irrational people. Do you really think they should be denied any representation or influence? Who decides who's rational "enough" for you?
This has nothing to do with Democracy or our Republic. The rules were made by stupid bureaucrats who lack any accountability and certainly aren't elected. It's surprising that a senator has to go to much effort to get something like this changed.
Bingo. Use taxes are illegal per the Constitution. Only the federal government has the authority to tax interstate commerce. And, sorry, changing the name of it doesn't change the nature of it.
Years ago a client decided to save money by hiring a recent college graduate. I helped them in every way that I could. About two months later they asked me to help write the support documentation for the firing.
I've been on the other side, too. I had a client early on (mid 90s) that was paying me $60/hour. They had, according to them, never paid anyone more than $7/hour before. They were explaining this to me as part of a conversation about how I was actually much much cheaper than any of the $7/hour guys because I could easily finish in a few hours a chore that would take those guys a week to do.
Anybody who thinks that a lower hourly rate means a lower cost is an idiot.
Any chance there's public documentation on this? My cynical side is finding it hard to believe that people whose main source of profit is petroleum would even consider switching to a renewable source. I'd like to believe it, but it is tough.
It would be hard to believe if oil were some infinite resource that they could milk forever. But it's not, it's peaked, and we all know it. What would be "hard to believe" is that they're sitting on their hands while the oil runs out and their current business model goes down the drain.
"But the president still faces an uphill battle passing any major energy law, given how politicized programs to promote clean energy have become in the wake of high-profile failures of government-backed companies that were owned and run by Obama's friends and campaign donors."
Fixed it.
Do tell...
Yep, still here.
Right, there will always be outages. The point is that most of them aren't caused by general numbskullery.
And I would have renewed their cert had I been able.
Look, the bottom line is that they haven't learned anything in the past 13 years (wow, I feel old). The sloppiness that allowed a domain registration to lapse is the sloppiness that allows a cert to expire. This is a cultural issue that will likely never be overcome.
To step into another industry, let's look at phone service. The "Phone Company" (AT&T back in the day, then the baby bells) had a culture of "this service has to work, period". I'm 45 today and there have been now 3 times in my life that I've picked the phone up and there wasn't a dial tone. In our parlance, they have good "up time".
The cable company, on the other hand, has never had that culture. Their product isn't necessary in the way that a phone is and outages are fairly common. If they have to work on something your service may be unexpectedly down for a few minutes. Or hours. Whatever. My internet has more outages every month than my phone service has had over my lifetime.
The point is that Microsoft's culture is more like the cable company. They are a software company and having to keep servers "up" hasn't been their deal until kind of recently. Companies like Amazon or Google, on the other hand, have had to have a phone-company-like culture from the beginning. They write software, yes, but their main product is a web site that has to be up come hell or high water. And, yes, I know that there have been a couple of high-profile outages, but those outages weren't caused by the kind of sloppiness that results in someone forgetting to renew a domain registration.
So I use Amazon for my stuff but would switch to Google if there were problems at Amazon.
But Microsoft? Are you kidding? I feel like I diapered them on Christmas Day of 1999, so I probably have less respect due to that.
If you keep pointing at one party, you'll let the other one off the hook.
That's typically the point of the "Republicans are idiots" trolls...
Gates also FOUNDED the company. There's a world of difference between him and someone brought in after it's already built.
Technically, the shareholders *should* be able to do this already through the Board. I think the problem in the US is that few people invest in companies directly nowadays - instead they invest in mutual funds which in turn own companies.
I always suggest that people who work in publicly traded companies own stock and show up at annual meetings when possible. The problem is that for the normal worker they can't buy stock at the same pace that it's being given to the executives. My wife's former company was terrible about that - execs and even divisional managers were being given thousands of shares each year, either outright or as options that allowed them to buy the stock at a low price and sell it immediately at a much higher price, with the risk totally eliminated by the fact that they had no requirement to buy in the first place.
We really need to get back to free market principles here, instead of this crazy system where executives rape companies and get huge bonuses or parting gifts.
If you were trying to store grain 3000 years ago you would feel *very* differently about cats.
There is no 'unnatural selection'. If we killed off the one we didn't like then we were just one more evolutionary pressure just like meteor strike or sudden climate change would be.
The proper term is "artificial selection" and it very much exists. Natural selection occurs from the results of natural pressures - typically animals gain some advantage in reproduction due to an outside influence (which may be human). In artificial selection two dogs are mated based on certain traits that their human breeders desire - e.g. large paws for swimming (spaniels) or a great sense of smell (bloodhounds). That's a very different kind of outside pressure, and quite distinct from natural selection. It also doesn't necessarily mean that any particular animal is killed or even prevented from mating. It's mainly a matter of who mates with whom.
Anyone have the link?
Furthermore, this budget cut takes us back to the federal spending level of, what, 2011? Was our country in such horrible shape a couple of years ago before we spent even more?
I wrote about this recently, but here's the relevant part:
"My wife came here on an H-1A as an RN. They brought her to work for substandard wages at shitty nursing homes. The nursing homes could easily have hired Americans to work for them, but they found it was cheaper to claim they couldn't find anybody (a legal requirement for petitioning an H-1x) and then hire some foreigner to do it at a paltry wage. They're supposed to treat them well, but trust me - there's a world of difference between a boss that can fire you and one that can put your ass on a plane back to Asia."
If you're here on an H-1x visa, you don't have the option to quit and find another job unless that other job will petition you immediately. The minute you quit your job you have a couple of weeks to leave the US legally, and if you don't, you end up on the USCIS shit list of people who can't come to the US for x years.
The result is that your employer can treat you like shit because you can't leave. It doesn't matter if they give you raises or bonuses - you can't leave. This dramatically changes the employer/employee relationship.
As an aside, the nursing home where my wife worked was chronically understaffed and underpaid. The state department that inspected nursing homes would warn the employer when the "surprise" inspections were going to be, so they would bring the staffing up to legal levels for those few weeks and then drop it back after the inspection was done. My wife was a supervisor there, and when we got married I strongly suggested she quit before the predictable disaster hit. I had no idea how bad it would be when it did. About 3 years after she quit one of the patient rooms on the second floor caught fire during the night. The building had been grandfathered in and had inadequate fire suppression (one single sprinkler in the entire building - in the kitchen). 8 of the patients ended up dead and 20 badly injured - given the staffing level it's amazing that only 8 died. Keep that in mind when your mom gets old.
Here, I'll post it here to save you time:
503 Service Unavailable
No server is available to handle this request.
Not sure what language that's in.
The victim was an unreliable witness because of his mental problems, the victim's father based his testimony on the victim's statements (meaning that the father's testimony was of limited value)
Right. And this is the same LAPD that protected a murderer in their ranks - Stephanie Lazarus - for 25 years. At best, we just hit "even" on reliability.
These weren't investments - they go to Obama's rich donors. If they were potentially good investments private investors would be giving them money.
Yeah, she was ragging on his copy/paste skills, not the fact that he copied and pasted his PhD. Let's face it, she's apparently an expert in copy/paste PhD work.
Really? Name... 10.
Not ones who say "I don't think the Post Office is run well" or "Lines at the DMV or Post Office are too long... just wait until Obamacare is in full force"... but ones who have actually said "Death to the Post Office!!!" or been similarly explicit.
Go on... I dare you.
Hell, let me make this easier - name one.
Nobody wants the postal service to go away. Congress just needs to quit meddling with it. They need to can the pension system and move to IRAs like everybody else is doing and allow the postal service to price their service however they see fit. Of course, Congress wants to use their pension system as a cookie jar to fund other projects, so that will never happen.