Microsoft aren't also bastards from a software source code point of view, but also in dodgy business practices, mainly involving bribing schools (ok, harsh word, but that's how I see it) with free software to use their products, and not teach the kids about software alternatives.
Damn straight. Nobody should just give software away......erm, wait, shit.
A soldier is not supposed to blindly follow orders, period, whether the order is known to be authentic or not. For starters, soldiers should only follow LAWFUL orders. If your superior orders you to torture that prisoner, you better disobey that order.
Also, a soldier's obligation to follow an order from a superior doesn't mean a soldier is obligated to follow it without comment. The military doesn't want soldiers just blindly doing what their superiors tell them - if an order seems to be stupid, a soldier (depending on the circumstances) should raise objection to the order. They still need to follow the order if the superior doesn't heed the objection, but good officers will get input from their subordinates and good soldiers will provide input to their superiors.
If PVR providers are allowed to have this kind of information, there is nothing to prevent them from using it to show me ads for stuff I might actually buy instead of tampons, facial cream, and herpes and erectile dysfunction meds.
I'm paying good money for my cable company to tell me which vaginal cream is the best at fighting yeast invfection, and I'll be damned if PVR providers are going to take that away from me!
Can you believe those "institutions of higher learning" actually CHARGE people to do work, a lot if which will never even be used? Talk about exploitation!
Seriously though, what's odd is that the slashdot audience expects internships to be paid at all - in MOST sectors (advertising, politics, whatever), interns are not paid AT ALL, or only receive a small stipend.
Students pay a big chunk of change to get an ducation by performing meaningless tasks which are then evaluated by someone. Jobs pay you real money to do essential tasks that generally need to be done well. Internships are meant to tbe the bridge - whoever is providing the internship is still expected to provide you with education/training/experience, in exchange for some contribution to whatever their doing in lieu of tuition.
Fortunately for the slashdot crowd, even novice technical (programming/engineering) work is valuable, and it's thus worth paying for interns. But there are plenty of people who would kill for an unpaid internship at a major consulting firm or advertising firm or TV studio/station or senate office or the White House, even if all they do is deliver coffee - the whole point there is to get people who can hire you after school to have a clue who you are.
I am a native English speaker, having grown up in the US. I learned GErman (Deutsch) in Junior High and High School, and also lived in Germany for a year.
I have absolutely no clue what the rules of English grammar are, while I am intimately familiar with the rules of German grammar, for the very simple reason that I've learned english by listening to other English speakers (whose grammar is equally bad), while I've learned German by studying the rules of German grammar.
Actually, this is a bit of a simplification - I *DO* know many rules of English grammar, but only because I took German - I was never taught grammar in any of my English (or reading, etc) classes, but I learned a lot of grammar in German, and many of the grammar rules there apply to english.
That you read what you wanted to read, and not what it said. I was saying my job growth included sometimes unobvious growth in skills etc IN ADDITION to obvious growth in title and salaray, not in lieu of.;)
So has your wife raised this issue with anyone at the office? It's interesting that you tell the joke, but don't seem to consider that maybe the problem is that your wife is the schmuck? Has she explained this issue to her management? It's quite possible that while it's obvious to her that this is the situation, her managers just know that she can fix problems, so they assign her to fix problems. One of the best ways to get a raise is to ask for one.
I've been working at my job doing verification work for about 5 years. I generally feel like I'm doing the same job I was doing 5 yeas ago without any real change or growth.
But today I had one of our new hires come in and ask a few questions about solutions that are pretty much daily routine - obvious - to me now. And I realized that 5 years ago, I had to ask very similar questions. Since then, I had become the expert. And thinking about it, there are a lot of job proficiencies and responsibilities I've acquired over the 5 years that I just wasn't consciously aware of on a daily basis without actually stopping to think about them.
It's easy to forget that you didn't always know everything you know now, and that your job has changed more than just salary grades and amounts.
I predict an immediate exit of qualified people from the IT industry in favor of more fullfilling careers like chip frying, garbage hauling, and TV/VCR repair.
Whoever "they" is, they are absoutely 100% ok with killing for progress. Especially if "they" happen to be certain Republicans in the executive branch of the American government.
We take human life all the time. We take it when we have people work in extremely hazerdous conditions - like mining, or in the old days, building bridges. We take it when we decide we need a regime change. We take it when we allow the sale of tobacco products, or alcohol. We take it when we allow people to operate motor vehicles. WE take it when we revolt against an oppressive government.
As a society, we routinely accept the sacrifice of human life when we believe the benefits to society outweigh the sacrifice, and sometimes even if not.
It is simply not logical to be OK with sacrificing american lives and spending billions of american taxpayer dollars blowing thousands of living, breathing, thinking, feeling, walking-around Iraqi children to little bits to potentially improve Iraqi society and at the same time have a panic of conscience at the suggestion that millions of federal dollars be spent sacrificing a few hundred embryos smaller than a pinhead that are going to be discarded anyway to potentially provide medical relief to hundreds of thousands of American citizens.
As you can see, this island is in a straight between Canada and Greenland. It's not in international waters - it's pretty much right on the line between Canada and Greenland. Control of this island has no bearing whatsoever on control of natural resources, nor does it have any bearing on control of a shipping route - both because Canada and Greenland each control one half of the straight no matter who controls the island, and because nobody would ship through this straight in the first place - it's quite a bit north of any northwest passage route (and also nowhere near alaska).
Maybe next time you should figure out where the island is before you pretend you have a clue.;)
By the time these kids grow up, IM and email will be the same thing. They've been becoming closer and closer to the same thing for years.
It *USED* to be that in order to talk to someone with IM, you and they had to be on the computer at the same time. This is no longer the case - on Yahoo IM, for example, you can IM someone who is not online, and they will receive the message later when they do log in (ICQ has done this for ages). It also used to be that IM conversations went away when you were done with them, but all IM applications now have the ability to log conversations to file.
It *USED* to be that when you sent an email, the recipient wouldn't get it until they got back into their office or home and logged in and checked their email. Now lots of people get their emails instantly, all the time, wherever they are, on blackberries or sidekicks or similar devices.
So, if people are receiving email instantly wherever they are, and you can send IMs that can be received later, what's the difference?
Nothing, except tradition and protocol, and that will go away. Email will continue to act more and more like an instant message if the recipient happens to be online when the email is sent, and IM will continue to act more and more like an email if the recipient isnot online when it is sent.
Problem, here. Let's say there's a group of 20 people getting a given wage. They have a certain amount of buying power, based on that wage and the cost of living where they are. If you cut their wages, they're still employed, but their buying power decreases. *They* don't get more stuff. (Wal-Mart providing lower prices doesn't make up for their loss in buying power. And you can't buy *everything* at Wal-Mart, eventually you're going to need a car or a refrigerator.) Multiply that by the literally millions of people that Wal-Mart employs, and you're talking about a serious dent in the public's ability to keep the economy running. Please see the grandparent for why this could spell disaster for the economy.
That would be a problem, if WalMart were the only part of the economy becoming more efficient. But fortunately the economy doesn't work like that. The money everybody isn't spending on groceries now gets spent on other things, which makes them cheaper just on economy of scale alone. And other intustries also become more efficient - so prices across the board go down (well, the reality is prices go up, but wages go up more than prices. Been a long-term trend that wages go up more than prices.)
I said retailers, not supermarket workers. You're also missing another problem: Wal-Mart has many more rural-area employees (on average) than supermarkets do (on average), as Wal-Mart is only recently breaking into urban, and more wealthy, areas. So while the dollar wage may be less, the buying power ofthat wage is not less in the same percentage. Another cause of the difference is that Wal-Mart employees are not unionized, while most supermarket employees are, and some of that wage difference also goes to paying the union.
Whether corporate health insurance is cheaper to the economy than emergency room treatment is debatable - but isn't a cause for blaming walmart for not providing healthcare, it's a cause for changing the rather stupid way we provide medical care to the uninsured.
Lower prices are almost ALWAYS a good thing, because they mean you're producing a good more effeciently. More efficient production frees up money to be spent on other things - we keep the same number of people employed, and we *ALL* get more stuff.
When that's hand-in-hand with 20% lower wages, there's no benefit. That supercenter is cheaper now because it's in the "destroy the competition" phase of its lifetime. When all the other supermarkets in the area go out of business (putting people out of work) you'll see those prices go up. And the people who are out of work will probably have to work at the supercenter at lower wages.
It's a benefit to me, since my wages havn't gone down and my groceries are cheaper, just like it's a benefit to everyone else who doesn't work at Wal-Mart.
Of course, your whole point assumes that Wal-Mart pays its employees less than other retailers. This is unlikely to be true.
Additionally, Wal-Mart never gets out of kill-the-competition mode. It's not like Wal-Mart is the only company that has supercenters - you may kill off a local grocery or two, but some will remain just because many people like to buy grocieries at the place that is closest to their home. And other companies have a business model similar to walmart - walmart may be better at it, but there's also Target supercenters, Meijer supercenters, and whatever else there is outside of the Midwest.
If someone is making minimum wage working at Wal-Mart, chances are that it's because all the other jobs they could do with their skill set have disappeared because Wal-Mart has crushed them. Believe it or not, customer service, inventory management, employee management, etc. are all job skills.
And...? If Wal-Mart has figured out how to sell grocereies without needing to pay people to manage inventory, that's a GOOD thing - it allows our economy to be more productive. Automotive assembly is a job skill, but one of the reasons our cars are so good but stilll affordable is automated assembly. That means a lot fewer people are employed building cars, but cars are also a lot cheaper. The benefits elsewhere in the economy of cheaper cars outweigh the cost to the economy of the lost assembly jobs. The same is tue here - if we don't need to pay people to manage inventory, then we can take that cost out of the good, and then consumers can spend that money on something else. Like electronics.
This is true on a level playing field. However, a large part of Wal-Mart's business model is elimination of the competition. When there are fewer jobs available to workers in a given talent pool, wages go down. What the worker is worth isn't a consideration, it's how little they can get away with paying them.
This is true for EVERY business that exists in a competitive environment, so what's your point?
True, living wages would have an effect on consumer pricing, because big business would simply pass the costs on to the consumer instead of taking as much as a 1% hit to their profits.
Huh? Could you be using a number like 1% because it's small and easier to pull out of your ass? Maybe you mean 1% of revenue? Minimum wage is what, $5.15? Let's assume Wal-Mart pays its work force minimum wage (which it doesn't), and let's say Wal-Mart were, just because it suddenly decides to be a welfare company, to raise everyone's wage to $6.2. That's a 20% increase.
In order for that 20% increase to ONLY result in a 1% change in expenses, wages would need to make up less than 5% of expenses, which is obviously too low, but we'll assume you meant that it wouldonly make a 1% difference in expenses and that, if you had actually said that, you'd be right.
Wal-Mart made 2.5 billion in net income on 70.6 billion in revenue in Q1CY05, leaving 69.1 billion in expenses. 1% of 69.1 billion is 690 million - or over 25% of profit, not 1%. Andthat's after giving you several very generous assumptions. Clearly, whatever you were trying to say here is just made-up garbage.
However, by paying as little as they do, Wal-Mart costs the American taxpayer (read: everyone, including you) billions of dollars each year. This might not make sense until you realize that the majority of people wor
Wal-Mart prides itself on its "family values" (while ironically keeping many families firmly in the category of the "working poor").
Wal-Mart prides itself on keeping many people firmly in the category of "employed at all", as well as in the category of "Providing less expensive goods for the poor." We just had a walmart super center open up here. The groceries at Wal-Mart are cheaper than the groceries at the other grocery stores in town - and not 5% cheaper, often 20% cheaper. That means the working poor just had their food bills go down 20%.
If someone is making minimum wage working at Wal-Mart, it's because they never developed any job skills worth more than the minimum wage. That's not Wal-Mart's problem. Wal-Mart shouldn't have to pay more money for employees than the employees are worth (as dictated by supply of labor with the requisite skill set), and more importantly, I shouldn't have to pay more for groceries because people feel like they're entitled to more of my money 'just because', as it's ultimately me, the consumer, who pays for higher labor costs.
I earned good grades in high school, went to collee, and now have a real job. Some of my classmates screwed around in high school, didn't go to college, and now work at Wal-Mart. We live in a society where you have the freedom of choice. Consequences are the price you pay for choice.
Which is also evolution, as the seals who do not respond to the presence of a predator by doing silly tricks will be more likely to reproduce, eventually causing the flipping behavior to only exist in captivity.
Given enough time and resources, I have physical access to anything. If your computer is in a locked case, is that physically secure? In a lab that is always staffed? Behind a locked door? With a guard?
For many situations, a computer with a locked case in a room that is staffed is considered "physically secure", as it's not likely that you'll break the physical security (lock on the case) without attracting the attention of the staff. Hell, even a computer in a staffed room in a case that has screws on it is fairly physically secure. The USB problem circumvents the physical security.
Security is all about deterrent. My apartment has a dead bolt lock on the door. Does this mean it's impossible to break into my apartment? Of course not - it just makes it harder.
Being able to break security on a locked computer with a USB drive is like leaving the key to your apartment under your door mat.
Making them work correctly is both tedious and mysterious, requiring unintuitive inputs which often produce unexpected results.
At least with Apache, you'd think someone could create a GUI application that would spit out an Apache configuration file; after all, the configuration file is just glorified data storage.
I'll pay big money for someone who can write a GUI application for interfacing with my wife.
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft aren't also bastards from a software source code point of view, but also in dodgy business practices, mainly involving bribing schools (ok, harsh word, but that's how I see it) with free software to use their products, and not teach the kids about software alternatives.
...erm, wait, shit.
Damn straight. Nobody should just give software away...
A soldier is not supposed to blindly follow orders, period, whether the order is known to be authentic or not. For starters, soldiers should only follow LAWFUL orders. If your superior orders you to torture that prisoner, you better disobey that order.
Also, a soldier's obligation to follow an order from a superior doesn't mean a soldier is obligated to follow it without comment. The military doesn't want soldiers just blindly doing what their superiors tell them - if an order seems to be stupid, a soldier (depending on the circumstances) should raise objection to the order. They still need to follow the order if the superior doesn't heed the objection, but good officers will get input from their subordinates and good soldiers will provide input to their superiors.
If PVR providers are allowed to have this kind of information, there is nothing to prevent them from using it to show me ads for stuff I might actually buy instead of tampons, facial cream, and herpes and erectile dysfunction meds.
I'm paying good money for my cable company to tell me which vaginal cream is the best at fighting yeast invfection, and I'll be damned if PVR providers are going to take that away from me!
Use small bugs, like gnats.
Can you believe those "institutions of higher learning" actually CHARGE people to do work, a lot if which will never even be used? Talk about exploitation!
Seriously though, what's odd is that the slashdot audience expects internships to be paid at all - in MOST sectors (advertising, politics, whatever), interns are not paid AT ALL, or only receive a small stipend.
Students pay a big chunk of change to get an ducation by performing meaningless tasks which are then evaluated by someone. Jobs pay you real money to do essential tasks that generally need to be done well. Internships are meant to tbe the bridge - whoever is providing the internship is still expected to provide you with education/training/experience, in exchange for some contribution to whatever their doing in lieu of tuition.
Fortunately for the slashdot crowd, even novice technical (programming/engineering) work is valuable, and it's thus worth paying for interns. But there are plenty of people who would kill for an unpaid internship at a major consulting firm or advertising firm or TV studio/station or senate office or the White House, even if all they do is deliver coffee - the whole point there is to get people who can hire you after school to have a clue who you are.
I am a native English speaker, having grown up in the US. I learned GErman (Deutsch) in Junior High and High School, and also lived in Germany for a year.
I have absolutely no clue what the rules of English grammar are, while I am intimately familiar with the rules of German grammar, for the very simple reason that I've learned english by listening to other English speakers (whose grammar is equally bad), while I've learned German by studying the rules of German grammar.
Actually, this is a bit of a simplification - I *DO* know many rules of English grammar, but only because I took German - I was never taught grammar in any of my English (or reading, etc) classes, but I learned a lot of grammar in German, and many of the grammar rules there apply to english.
That you read what you wanted to read, and not what it said. I was saying my job growth included sometimes unobvious growth in skills etc IN ADDITION to obvious growth in title and salaray, not in lieu of. ;)
So has your wife raised this issue with anyone at the office? It's interesting that you tell the joke, but don't seem to consider that maybe the problem is that your wife is the schmuck? Has she explained this issue to her management? It's quite possible that while it's obvious to her that this is the situation, her managers just know that she can fix problems, so they assign her to fix problems. One of the best ways to get a raise is to ask for one.
I've been working at my job doing verification work for about 5 years. I generally feel like I'm doing the same job I was doing 5 yeas ago without any real change or growth.
But today I had one of our new hires come in and ask a few questions about solutions that are pretty much daily routine - obvious - to me now. And I realized that 5 years ago, I had to ask very similar questions. Since then, I had become the expert. And thinking about it, there are a lot of job proficiencies and responsibilities I've acquired over the 5 years that I just wasn't consciously aware of on a daily basis without actually stopping to think about them.
It's easy to forget that you didn't always know everything you know now, and that your job has changed more than just salary grades and amounts.
I predict an immediate exit of qualified people from the IT industry in favor of more fullfilling careers like chip frying, garbage hauling, and TV/VCR repair.
I hope the Celine Dion producers are reading this. This is exactly how the Celine Dion tour should be continued - with a new Celine Dion!
Whoever "they" is, they are absoutely 100% ok with killing for progress. Especially if "they" happen to be certain Republicans in the executive branch of the American government.
We take human life all the time. We take it when we have people work in extremely hazerdous conditions - like mining, or in the old days, building bridges. We take it when we decide we need a regime change. We take it when we allow the sale of tobacco products, or alcohol. We take it when we allow people to operate motor vehicles. WE take it when we revolt against an oppressive government.
As a society, we routinely accept the sacrifice of human life when we believe the benefits to society outweigh the sacrifice, and sometimes even if not.
It is simply not logical to be OK with sacrificing american lives and spending billions of american taxpayer dollars blowing thousands of living, breathing, thinking, feeling, walking-around Iraqi children to little bits to potentially improve Iraqi society and at the same time have a panic of conscience at the suggestion that millions of federal dollars be spent sacrificing a few hundred embryos smaller than a pinhead that are going to be discarded anyway to potentially provide medical relief to hundreds of thousands of American citizens.
Here is Hans Island:
4 3463,-67.236328&sll=37.062500,-95.677068&spn=3.465 168,16.699219&sspn=68.872962,70.312500&num=4&start =0&hl=en
;)
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=hans+island&ll=80.6
As you can see, this island is in a straight between Canada and Greenland. It's not in international waters - it's pretty much right on the line between Canada and Greenland. Control of this island has no bearing whatsoever on control of natural resources, nor does it have any bearing on control of a shipping route - both because Canada and Greenland each control one half of the straight no matter who controls the island, and because nobody would ship through this straight in the first place - it's quite a bit north of any northwest passage route (and also nowhere near alaska).
Maybe next time you should figure out where the island is before you pretend you have a clue.
WiFi is essential for making sure you don't accidentally meet any women.
By the time these kids grow up, IM and email will be the same thing. They've been becoming closer and closer to the same thing for years.
It *USED* to be that in order to talk to someone with IM, you and they had to be on the computer at the same time. This is no longer the case - on Yahoo IM, for example, you can IM someone who is not online, and they will receive the message later when they do log in (ICQ has done this for ages). It also used to be that IM conversations went away when you were done with them, but all IM applications now have the ability to log conversations to file.
It *USED* to be that when you sent an email, the recipient wouldn't get it until they got back into their office or home and logged in and checked their email. Now lots of people get their emails instantly, all the time, wherever they are, on blackberries or sidekicks or similar devices.
So, if people are receiving email instantly wherever they are, and you can send IMs that can be received later, what's the difference?
Nothing, except tradition and protocol, and that will go away. Email will continue to act more and more like an instant message if the recipient happens to be online when the email is sent, and IM will continue to act more and more like an email if the recipient isnot online when it is sent.
"Bad news boys, our counterfeiting operations have been foiled. They changed the size of the bills!"
Yeah, that'll stop 'em.
If this stuff just falls off all the time anyway, it can't be that important - why put it on there in the first place?
Problem, here. Let's say there's a group of 20 people getting a given wage. They have a certain amount of buying power, based on that wage and the cost of living where they are. If you cut their wages, they're still employed, but their buying power decreases. *They* don't get more stuff. (Wal-Mart providing lower prices doesn't make up for their loss in buying power. And you can't buy *everything* at Wal-Mart, eventually you're going to need a car or a refrigerator.) Multiply that by the literally millions of people that Wal-Mart employs, and you're talking about a serious dent in the public's ability to keep the economy running. Please see the grandparent for why this could spell disaster for the economy.
That would be a problem, if WalMart were the only part of the economy becoming more efficient. But fortunately the economy doesn't work like that. The money everybody isn't spending on groceries now gets spent on other things, which makes them cheaper just on economy of scale alone. And other intustries also become more efficient - so prices across the board go down (well, the reality is prices go up, but wages go up more than prices. Been a long-term trend that wages go up more than prices.)
If you were to find yourself standing on the golden gate bridge, would you think "Well, somebody is going to jump, so I might as well do it."?
I said retailers, not supermarket workers. You're also missing another problem: Wal-Mart has many more rural-area employees (on average) than supermarkets do (on average), as Wal-Mart is only recently breaking into urban, and more wealthy, areas. So while the dollar wage may be less, the buying power ofthat wage is not less in the same percentage. Another cause of the difference is that Wal-Mart employees are not unionized, while most supermarket employees are, and some of that wage difference also goes to paying the union.
Whether corporate health insurance is cheaper to the economy than emergency room treatment is debatable - but isn't a cause for blaming walmart for not providing healthcare, it's a cause for changing the rather stupid way we provide medical care to the uninsured.
Lower prices are almost ALWAYS a good thing, because they mean you're producing a good more effeciently. More efficient production frees up money to be spent on other things - we keep the same number of people employed, and we *ALL* get more stuff.
When that's hand-in-hand with 20% lower wages, there's no benefit. That supercenter is cheaper now because it's in the "destroy the competition" phase of its lifetime. When all the other supermarkets in the area go out of business (putting people out of work) you'll see those prices go up. And the people who are out of work will probably have to work at the supercenter at lower wages.
It's a benefit to me, since my wages havn't gone down and my groceries are cheaper, just like it's a benefit to everyone else who doesn't work at Wal-Mart.
Of course, your whole point assumes that Wal-Mart pays its employees less than other retailers. This is unlikely to be true.
Additionally, Wal-Mart never gets out of kill-the-competition mode. It's not like Wal-Mart is the only company that has supercenters - you may kill off a local grocery or two, but some will remain just because many people like to buy grocieries at the place that is closest to their home. And other companies have a business model similar to walmart - walmart may be better at it, but there's also Target supercenters, Meijer supercenters, and whatever else there is outside of the Midwest.
If someone is making minimum wage working at Wal-Mart, chances are that it's because all the other jobs they could do with their skill set have disappeared because Wal-Mart has crushed them. Believe it or not, customer service, inventory management, employee management, etc. are all job skills.
And...? If Wal-Mart has figured out how to sell grocereies without needing to pay people to manage inventory, that's a GOOD thing - it allows our economy to be more productive. Automotive assembly is a job skill, but one of the reasons our cars are so good but stilll affordable is automated assembly. That means a lot fewer people are employed building cars, but cars are also a lot cheaper. The benefits elsewhere in the economy of cheaper cars outweigh the cost to the economy of the lost assembly jobs. The same is tue here - if we don't need to pay people to manage inventory, then we can take that cost out of the good, and then consumers can spend that money on something else. Like electronics.
This is true on a level playing field. However, a large part of Wal-Mart's business model is elimination of the competition. When there are fewer jobs available to workers in a given talent pool, wages go down. What the worker is worth isn't a consideration, it's how little they can get away with paying them.
This is true for EVERY business that exists in a competitive environment, so what's your point?
True, living wages would have an effect on consumer pricing, because big business would simply pass the costs on to the consumer instead of taking as much as a 1% hit to their profits.
Huh? Could you be using a number like 1% because it's small and easier to pull out of your ass? Maybe you mean 1% of revenue? Minimum wage is what, $5.15? Let's assume Wal-Mart pays its work force minimum wage (which it doesn't), and let's say Wal-Mart were, just because it suddenly decides to be a welfare company, to raise everyone's wage to $6.2. That's a 20% increase.
In order for that 20% increase to ONLY result in a 1% change in expenses, wages would need to make up less than 5% of expenses, which is obviously too low, but we'll assume you meant that it wouldonly make a 1% difference in expenses and that, if you had actually said that, you'd be right.
Wal-Mart made 2.5 billion in net income on 70.6 billion in revenue in Q1CY05, leaving 69.1 billion in expenses. 1% of 69.1 billion is 690 million - or over 25% of profit, not 1%. Andthat's after giving you several very generous assumptions. Clearly, whatever you were trying to say here is just made-up garbage.
However, by paying as little as they do, Wal-Mart costs the American taxpayer (read: everyone, including you) billions of dollars each year. This might not make sense until you realize that the majority of people wor
Wal-Mart prides itself on its "family values" (while ironically keeping many families firmly in the category of the "working poor").
Wal-Mart prides itself on keeping many people firmly in the category of "employed at all", as well as in the category of "Providing less expensive goods for the poor." We just had a walmart super center open up here. The groceries at Wal-Mart are cheaper than the groceries at the other grocery stores in town - and not 5% cheaper, often 20% cheaper. That means the working poor just had their food bills go down 20%.
If someone is making minimum wage working at Wal-Mart, it's because they never developed any job skills worth more than the minimum wage. That's not Wal-Mart's problem. Wal-Mart shouldn't have to pay more money for employees than the employees are worth (as dictated by supply of labor with the requisite skill set), and more importantly, I shouldn't have to pay more for groceries because people feel like they're entitled to more of my money 'just because', as it's ultimately me, the consumer, who pays for higher labor costs.
I earned good grades in high school, went to collee, and now have a real job. Some of my classmates screwed around in high school, didn't go to college, and now work at Wal-Mart. We live in a society where you have the freedom of choice. Consequences are the price you pay for choice.
and the seals flip out when they see them
Which is also evolution, as the seals who do not respond to the presence of a predator by doing silly tricks will be more likely to reproduce, eventually causing the flipping behavior to only exist in captivity.
We here at Hormel would like to remind everyone that Spam comes in a can. And is pink. And oh-so-delicious.
Given enough time and resources, I have physical access to anything. If your computer is in a locked case, is that physically secure? In a lab that is always staffed? Behind a locked door? With a guard?
For many situations, a computer with a locked case in a room that is staffed is considered "physically secure", as it's not likely that you'll break the physical security (lock on the case) without attracting the attention of the staff. Hell, even a computer in a staffed room in a case that has screws on it is fairly physically secure. The USB problem circumvents the physical security.
Security is all about deterrent. My apartment has a dead bolt lock on the door. Does this mean it's impossible to break into my apartment? Of course not - it just makes it harder.
Being able to break security on a locked computer with a USB drive is like leaving the key to your apartment under your door mat.
Making them work correctly is both tedious and mysterious, requiring unintuitive inputs which often produce unexpected results.
At least with Apache, you'd think someone could create a GUI application that would spit out an Apache configuration file; after all, the configuration file is just glorified data storage.
I'll pay big money for someone who can write a GUI application for interfacing with my wife.