Well, thereâ(TM)s an easy solution for that. First, stop using âoeunlimitedâ in the ads. Second, sell me a guaranteed and burst nitrate... none of this âoeup to 50Mbpsâ crap when Iâ(TM)m really just barely getting ISDN equivalence. Third, frack off about how, when, where, and why I use it. I neither need nor want another parent; just a dumb pipe to the internet.
I would be fairly surprised if they're getting $0.80 per CD; unless perhaps it's at the merchandise table at one of their concerts. But even so, when purchased in bulk, that $2 sticker I mentioned costs somewhere between $0.05 and $0.25 to print, depending on the size of the run, it's dimensions, and how many colors of ink the design needs. So that $1.75-$1.95 still works out better than a $0.80 CD sale. And if the $0.10 figure is more accurate, then the sticker give the band more money than their entire catalog, unless they are exceptionally prolific anyway.
For a point of reference, when I knew local bands and DJs, and how they promoted themselves, nearly everyone's go to vendor was The Sticker Guy. And TSG is low-volume/high-price compared to what a big name act like TMBG could command.
The South Bay, down Facebook and Google way, is generally excruciatingly hot... usually at least 10, and often 15-20, degrees hotter than the city. I do usually have an emergency hoodie in the car when I drive down there, because I've lived in California long enough to know better than to not have an extra layer handy just in case. But I don't think I've had to break it out south of Redwood City or so in the last decade.
> 3. Do you have any data that the artist will make > more money from donations vs royalty payments?
It's not "data", per se. But take your pick of Steve Albini or Courtney Love, depending on how old you are, and read either of their essays about music industry royalties and the accounting shenanigans behind them. The tl;dr of it is that the royalties payments for the music are, and always have been, peanuts. And the internet did nothing to change that. If you go to their concert, and buy a $2 vinyl sticker with the band's logo from the merch table, you've given the band/artist more more money than if you bought their entire CD catalog. The album money goes nearly entirely to the RIAA parasites.
Well, if I'm ordering a $2000 BTO MacBook, a $600 Apple Watch, or even just a $160 pair of AirPods, I'm not especially inclined to entrust it to the mailman who just drops packages on my driveway without so much as ringing the doorbell, the UPS guy who gives my packages to random neighbors if I'm not home, or the OnTrac guys who seem to enjoy the pastime of playing football with my packages for a while before delivering them... assuming they can be bothered to deliver them at all. When I place my order, instead, I'm going to choose the option to pickup at the Apple Store. Presumably, that counts towards the store's numbers.
Remote work isn't all it's cracked up to be. Or, rather, maybe it works well for some work styles and personality types. But it definitely does not work for everyone.
I had a job a while back where the company closed it's office in the city and put those of up who didn't want to relocate (and take a pay cut) on full-time work from home. It was nice at first. No commute, no rush, more time with the dogs. over time I put in the investment in extra monitors to match the office and a desk that was better for working. And it worked reasonably well for tasks I could work on by myself, independently of my coworkers.
But it was awful for collaborative work. Sure, I had high-speed internet. And we have all of these great tools for remote collaboration: hipchat/slack, hangouts, webex, and so on. But I found that there was really no substitute for sitting down with the people you're working with and working things out. Architecture and task planning was definitely this way. A couple days work of back-and-forth emails, Jira work, hangouts, virtual whiteboards, and hipchat discussions could be condensed into an hour; if you could get everyone into a conference room to hash things out in person. That, and eventually I started catching myself having conversations with the dogs. When that happened, it was a pretty good sign that I was going stir-crazy and it was time to move on and get some more human contact.
So, while remote work may help the situation, it won't be a panacea. Some people... I would bet quite a lot of people, actually... just aren't suited to it because of their style or personality. Others just don't have a good distraction-free work from home environment (Having kids around seemed to be a major problem for a number of my coworkers in this regard.).
Honestly though, if you're in the habit of plugging random USB thumb-drives you found into your regular computer, you're probably not the sharpest cookie in the first place. It's such a common vector for nefarious actors to inject malware that it's almost a cliche at this point. It shouldn't be an "instantly escorted out of the building" offense. But a very stern talking to on the part of the infosec team would definitely be in order.
Seriously. Smartphones with full-up web browsers have been around over a decade. And unicode has been a thing for just HOW long now? I'd be embarrassed to be a Slashdot developer... or staffer of any kind... what with 1990s-esque deficiencies like this. It make me wonder, just where Slashdot spends its income. They're certainly not spending their money on writing, editorial, or operations staff. And I guess not on developers (or good developers anyway) either.
Well, the New York Times at least has Google as one of its login options (Along with Facebook and Username/Email). So presumably that's the obvious and easiest way for Google to know. I try to avoid using Google/Facebook for logins when I can. I figure, the few things that can be compromised if one password gets loose, the better. But a lot of people do use those options for ease of use. I would also guess that Google could also just read the NYTimes cookie that keeps you logged in.
NYTimes in the only newspaper to which I have a paid subscription. So I can't speak to the others. But it does seem obvious that the rest would use the same solutions.
> Despite all the high tech weapons and whatnot, any > kind of sustained operation still relies on boots on > the ground. And I think you'd be surprised at how > quickly the desertion rate would approach 100% if > something like that came to pass -- the brainwashing > of rank and file grunts is not *that*.. effective
I believe the student body of Kent State might have a differing experience on that score.
How about the exact same rational gun laws that have been enacted in places like the UK, The Netherlands, Australia, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, or any number of other countries where mass shootings like this DON'T HAPPEN. This is not rocket science. And it's a solved problem. We just need our politicians to grow enough of a pair to develop the political will to tell the NRA to go fuck itself; and to pick and implement the exact same solution as any of my examples dozens of others.
"Failed?" John Oliver has a hit TV show that's renewed at least through 2020, a multimillion dollar salary, multiple Emmys and WGA awards, and at least one Peabody to his name. If that's your "failure" in your mind then, as Fezzik, would say, I do not think it means what you think it means.
Also, your assertion that HBO is a subsidiary of DNC is demonstrably untrue. They are, in (a quite easily-verifiable) fact, a subsidiary of Time Warner which is, in turn, a publicly traded corporation and now a subsidiary of anything (Though that would change if the AT&T acquisition goes through.). But hey, don't let little things like facts get in the way of whatever your rant is about.
1) Companies have no loyalty to employees these days. Any given down quarter... even if the company is profitable, just not AS profitable as the board would like... you're liable to be laid off to cut costs so some C-Level can still get his bonus. If the company has zero loyalty to you, why should you be loyal to the company?
2) Many companies fail to keep ongoing wages and benefits competitive with the industry standards. Sometimes annual increases don't even keep up with inflation. If you've worked for a company for three years getting annual "merit increases" that barely even cover inflation, much less the rise in median wages for your position; new people with less experience than you are making more because they're getting hired into the position at currently-competitive wages; and you can get a 35% raise by changing jobs? You'd be a fool not to leave.
Fix these two problems, and I'd wager that companies would see significantly less turnover.
Well, aside from the negative baggage his support for 45 and his Gawker lawsuit bring, there's also his *other* company... the one that most people seem to forget about:
Panantir: The creepy-as-fuck company he started to help the various three letter agencies spy on us. (Named after the talisman that the dark lord Sauron used to corrupt Saruman the White to evil and to drive Denethor to madness and suicide. Seriously, THAT is the image you want to invoke when you name your startup???)
Between the FBI trying to force Apple to build backdoors into the iPhone, the NSA intercepting Cisco shipments coming into the US to add surveillance backdoors, to the same NSA tagging Google's cross-datacenter links, to dedicated rooms in AT&T switching centers for government taps to go in, to the Equifax breach, to the general concern about the amount of data that Facebook and Google have and the goldmine it would be if the TLAs had unrestricted access...
Thiel's founding and chairmanship of Palintir... and the legacy of his association with the company even if he were to resign... would make him a liability at any company that wanted users to believe, in any way, that their data would be secure and not simply handed on a platter to the TLAs; or to any company that wanted to operate in the EU, where the governments actually give a modicum of a care about citizens' privacy.
That was nothing more than a pretext and you know it. Peter Thiel never gave a flying shit about Hulk Hogan. He was nursing a (Totally nonsensical, considering he lived in California, and for now in the Bay Area no less.) years-long grudge against Gawker for mentioning that he's gay in an article last decade. Pretending that the lawsuit was really just about the sex tape is purposefully obtuse at best, really more like intellectual dishonesty, and at worst nothing more than trolling.
6. Sundar Pichai was on vacation when Damore decided to throw his little controversy party. And Pichai had to end said vacation prematurely and return to Google to deal with the fallout. California being an at-will state, "pissed off the CEO by ruining his vacation" is a 100% legit reason to fire someone.
No, the head of the FBI merely controls politicians via illegal spying, blackmail, and other general thuggery. I think too many of us have let The X-Files go to our heads and think about the FBI as if it were really the sort of warm and fuzzy place that would employ Fox Mulder and Dana Sculley. The reality its that it is the house the J Edgar Hoover built. It still reveres Hoover's memory. And, indeed, it resides in the building constructed as a monument to Hoover and bearing his name.
In reality, Mulder and Sculley would have been locked away like Chelsea Manning was or Edward Snowden will be if he ever sets foot on US soil again... and that's if they were lucky. More likely they would have been subjected to "rendition" and shuffled off to some banana republic to be tortured and murdered.
No. If they sat there and did nothing, they would face liability under the civil rights act for allowing a hostile work environment to exist for a protected class. And even though they are still statistically underrepresented, there are many thousands of women working at Google. There's only one James Damore. The math is fairly straightforward.
> I personally am pretty amazed at how good > YouTube's algorithms are at suggesting stuff I might > actually want to see. And almost never suggests > anything I probably wouldn't like.
And yet, YouTube... jaw-dropping amazingly, considering that they're part of Google... has gotten it's targeted *advertising* so wrong that it's somewhere between comically bad and outright dumbfounding. It doesn't matter has many times you tell me that it's the "champagne of beers", I will never be a customer of miller low-life. They persist almost incessantly in showing me ads for the dipshittery that are various pay-to-win microtransaction shovel-ware "games". And, even though I'm pretty sure I've *never* accessed YouTube with a device that wasn't made by Apple, I still get Samsung ads with notable regularity.
But yeah, their recommendations for the actual content is pretty spot-on.
It wasn't so bad as you might think. Our lawyers were mostly full-time on-staff. While we brought in dedicated specialists from law firms when needed; for routine matters like griefing ASGs, our salaried guys could generally keep the requite steady stream of bile flowing as part of their 9-5. Also, due to the nature of the business, a number of said lawyers in addition to many of our execs, had contacts in the federal government and knew exactly who to go over-their-heads to, so as to expedite the shit rolling downhill to the ASGs. (Our CEO had had a very bad experience with the TSA not long after it got started... circa 2003 or so... which left him with something of a burning hatred of the agency. So various surliness, circumvention, uncooperativeness, and outright hostility towards it, and the various TLS spinoffs comprising the rest of the ASGs, while not mandatory, was actively encouraged.). Finally, the laptops themselves were insured.
And at the end of the day, the laptop is nowhere near as valuable as the data; and not just for our own sake. For a decent number of our customers, including the part of the federal government we directly dealt with, we were contractually obligated to protect said data. And releasing it to some ASG yahoo was NOT part of those contracts (Not even with the feds.). And the penalties for leaking it would have been well in excess of the cost of eating a laptop, assuming we never got it back and insurance never paid out.
> I've always wondered what would happen in such a > regime if the password you give them doesn't work > for them because it's biometrically keyed to work > only for you?
Similar issue: A company I used to work for always but ALWAYS required travel with loaner laptops only. (Didn't matter if it was just to LA, or all the way to China. And, by his own decree, the policy included everyone up to and including the CEO.). All of the important data was on an encrypted partition, with just the basic OS unencrypted. Tricky bit was: we used a split-key system where the traveling employee had to:
1) Plug in his USB key, input the PIN on the USB, and its password on the computer to unlock his half of the key. then 2) Connect to the company VPN, from which he would fetch the other half of the key, which was only stored in RAM and never swapped to disk.
Only with both parts of the key could the encrypted partition be accessed. And we always suspended VPN access while the employee was en route; making it literally *impossible* for him/her to give up the secured data, even to "rubber hose decryption". If some airport security goon got the notion in his little head that he wanted to see the contents of the laptop, he could go tell it to a real LEO, who could tell it to a judge, who could issue a subpoena or warrant, which our lawyers could fight. The ASG itself could go get bent. That data was OURS, not the employee's, and certainly not the airport's.
It was an issue only once while I worked there. An employee was returning from Singapore & vicinity; and some ASG wanted to see the contents of his laptop. After explaining the situation that the data was privileged and protected to them, our guy actually called up InfoSec, put him on speaker with the airport goon, and reportedly grinned ludicrously as InfoSec told the ASG not just that we wouldn't be unlocking the laptop, but also exactly what we thought of him, his kind, his agency, his "mission", his manhood and the lack thereof, his family and it's canine/porcine pedigree, and so on (Said InfoSec guy had been an army drill instructor in his past. So he had the talent. And I understand that the looks on the faces of the other overhearing travelers was fairly priceless.); with an admonition to not-so-kindly go fuck himself sideways with some rusty farm implements and to call legal if he had a problem and could somehow conjure up the mental wherewithal to operate a telephone himself. The laptop did stay at the airport; but not for long. Legal wrote a nastygram, in blood, on asbestos paper, and delivered by a black raven. And I think it only took about a month or so to get it back.
I like throwing my Mazda through corners as much as... well... any Mazda owner. But if you think electric cars aren't fun, you're about ten years behind the times and have obviously never sat in a Tesla. Not all electric cars are the G-Wiz or electric Scion iQ.
No harm no foul. And I guess I should have specified that I was using the plural "you" and not trying to attack you singularly. So, my bad there.
But the "flyover country" thing really does tickle me. First, because I was telling the truth when I said I hardly ever hear people here on the coast use it derisively against the midwest as a whole. But two, the dichotomy between one day being offended at the notion that we only fly over, and the next making it very clear that we would not be welcome there. And it is kind of hard to miss the rhetoric: "People's Republic of California", "Sodom by the Bay", "San Francisco Values", "Damn Yankees", and so on.
You know, as one of the "coastal liberals" you hate so much; I can't recall the last time I've heard anyone derisively refer to the midwest as "fly over country". Probably 90% of the time I hear or read the phrase are cases exactly like this one: Midwestern republicans complaining about coastal liberals derisively referring to the midwest as flyover country. Most of that last 10% is liberals. But they're not derisively referring to the midwest as flyover country. They're mocking you midwestern republicans for bitching about how they supposedly derisively refer to the midwest as flyover country. In the real world, mostly people are too busy living their lives and don't really think about the midwest unless they have family there.
And while we're at It though; what exactly, pray tell, would be wrong with just flying over in the first place? We wouldn't be welcome anyway... and in some cases, not safe... in your red states, and only in smallish islands in the blue ones. (Yes, I've seen your map breaking red/blue down by county. I reject its legitimacy in most of the contexts I've seen it. To me, people are important, not dirt. But I do understand its implications.) You've made it quite clear that you hate our guts and don't consider us "real Americans", whatever that means (MAGA hats?). Hell, one of dear leader's offspring is even on-record and camera as saying he doesn't even consider liberals to even be real human beings.
Iâ(TM)m no fan of Gates. But by most accounts, Microsoft paid quite well... above the industry average, and WELL above if you count stock grants... during his tenure as CEO.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, thereâ(TM)s an easy solution for that. First, stop using âoeunlimitedâ in the ads. Second, sell me a guaranteed and burst nitrate... none of this âoeup to 50Mbpsâ crap when Iâ(TM)m really just barely getting ISDN equivalence. Third, frack off about how, when, where, and why I use it. I neither need nor want another parent; just a dumb pipe to the internet.
I would be fairly surprised if they're getting $0.80 per CD; unless perhaps it's at the merchandise table at one of their concerts. But even so, when purchased in bulk, that $2 sticker I mentioned costs somewhere between $0.05 and $0.25 to print, depending on the size of the run, it's dimensions, and how many colors of ink the design needs. So that $1.75-$1.95 still works out better than a $0.80 CD sale. And if the $0.10 figure is more accurate, then the sticker give the band more money than their entire catalog, unless they are exceptionally prolific anyway.
For a point of reference, when I knew local bands and DJs, and how they promoted themselves, nearly everyone's go to vendor was The Sticker Guy. And TSG is low-volume/high-price compared to what a big name act like TMBG could command.
Bullocks.
The South Bay, down Facebook and Google way, is generally excruciatingly hot... usually at least 10, and often 15-20, degrees hotter than the city. I do usually have an emergency hoodie in the car when I drive down there, because I've lived in California long enough to know better than to not have an extra layer handy just in case. But I don't think I've had to break it out south of Redwood City or so in the last decade.
> 3. Do you have any data that the artist will make
> more money from donations vs royalty payments?
It's not "data", per se. But take your pick of Steve Albini or Courtney Love, depending on how old you are, and read either of their essays about music industry royalties and the accounting shenanigans behind them. The tl;dr of it is that the royalties payments for the music are, and always have been, peanuts. And the internet did nothing to change that. If you go to their concert, and buy a $2 vinyl sticker with the band's logo from the merch table, you've given the band/artist more more money than if you bought their entire CD catalog. The album money goes nearly entirely to the RIAA parasites.
Well, if I'm ordering a $2000 BTO MacBook, a $600 Apple Watch, or even just a $160 pair of AirPods, I'm not especially inclined to entrust it to the mailman who just drops packages on my driveway without so much as ringing the doorbell, the UPS guy who gives my packages to random neighbors if I'm not home, or the OnTrac guys who seem to enjoy the pastime of playing football with my packages for a while before delivering them... assuming they can be bothered to deliver them at all. When I place my order, instead, I'm going to choose the option to pickup at the Apple Store. Presumably, that counts towards the store's numbers.
Remote work isn't all it's cracked up to be. Or, rather, maybe it works well for some work styles and personality types. But it definitely does not work for everyone.
I had a job a while back where the company closed it's office in the city and put those of up who didn't want to relocate (and take a pay cut) on full-time work from home. It was nice at first. No commute, no rush, more time with the dogs. over time I put in the investment in extra monitors to match the office and a desk that was better for working. And it worked reasonably well for tasks I could work on by myself, independently of my coworkers.
But it was awful for collaborative work. Sure, I had high-speed internet. And we have all of these great tools for remote collaboration: hipchat/slack, hangouts, webex, and so on. But I found that there was really no substitute for sitting down with the people you're working with and working things out. Architecture and task planning was definitely this way. A couple days work of back-and-forth emails, Jira work, hangouts, virtual whiteboards, and hipchat discussions could be condensed into an hour; if you could get everyone into a conference room to hash things out in person. That, and eventually I started catching myself having conversations with the dogs. When that happened, it was a pretty good sign that I was going stir-crazy and it was time to move on and get some more human contact.
So, while remote work may help the situation, it won't be a panacea. Some people... I would bet quite a lot of people, actually... just aren't suited to it because of their style or personality. Others just don't have a good distraction-free work from home environment (Having kids around seemed to be a major problem for a number of my coworkers in this regard.).
Honestly though, if you're in the habit of plugging random USB thumb-drives you found into your regular computer, you're probably not the sharpest cookie in the first place. It's such a common vector for nefarious actors to inject malware that it's almost a cliche at this point. It shouldn't be an "instantly escorted out of the building" offense. But a very stern talking to on the part of the infosec team would definitely be in order.
Seriously. Smartphones with full-up web browsers have been around over a decade. And unicode has been a thing for just HOW long now? I'd be embarrassed to be a Slashdot developer... or staffer of any kind... what with 1990s-esque deficiencies like this. It make me wonder, just where Slashdot spends its income. They're certainly not spending their money on writing, editorial, or operations staff. And I guess not on developers (or good developers anyway) either.
Well, the New York Times at least has Google as one of its login options (Along with Facebook and Username/Email). So presumably that's the obvious and easiest way for Google to know. I try to avoid using Google/Facebook for logins when I can. I figure, the few things that can be compromised if one password gets loose, the better. But a lot of people do use those options for ease of use. I would also guess that Google could also just read the NYTimes cookie that keeps you logged in.
NYTimes in the only newspaper to which I have a paid subscription. So I can't speak to the others. But it does seem obvious that the rest would use the same solutions.
> Despite all the high tech weapons and whatnot, any .. effective
> kind of sustained operation still relies on boots on
> the ground. And I think you'd be surprised at how
> quickly the desertion rate would approach 100% if
> something like that came to pass -- the brainwashing
> of rank and file grunts is not *that*
I believe the student body of Kent State might have a differing experience on that score.
How about the exact same rational gun laws that have been enacted in places like the UK, The Netherlands, Australia, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, or any number of other countries where mass shootings like this DON'T HAPPEN. This is not rocket science. And it's a solved problem. We just need our politicians to grow enough of a pair to develop the political will to tell the NRA to go fuck itself; and to pick and implement the exact same solution as any of my examples dozens of others.
"Failed?" John Oliver has a hit TV show that's renewed at least through 2020, a multimillion dollar salary, multiple Emmys and WGA awards, and at least one Peabody to his name. If that's your "failure" in your mind then, as Fezzik, would say, I do not think it means what you think it means.
Also, your assertion that HBO is a subsidiary of DNC is demonstrably untrue. They are, in (a quite easily-verifiable) fact, a subsidiary of Time Warner which is, in turn, a publicly traded corporation and now a subsidiary of anything (Though that would change if the AT&T acquisition goes through.). But hey, don't let little things like facts get in the way of whatever your rant is about.
You omit the main reasons for job-hopping.
1) Companies have no loyalty to employees these days. Any given down quarter... even if the company is profitable, just not AS profitable as the board would like... you're liable to be laid off to cut costs so some C-Level can still get his bonus. If the company has zero loyalty to you, why should you be loyal to the company?
2) Many companies fail to keep ongoing wages and benefits competitive with the industry standards. Sometimes annual increases don't even keep up with inflation. If you've worked for a company for three years getting annual "merit increases" that barely even cover inflation, much less the rise in median wages for your position; new people with less experience than you are making more because they're getting hired into the position at currently-competitive wages; and you can get a 35% raise by changing jobs? You'd be a fool not to leave.
Fix these two problems, and I'd wager that companies would see significantly less turnover.
Well, aside from the negative baggage his support for 45 and his Gawker lawsuit bring, there's also his *other* company... the one that most people seem to forget about:
Panantir: The creepy-as-fuck company he started to help the various three letter agencies spy on us. (Named after the talisman that the dark lord Sauron used to corrupt Saruman the White to evil and to drive Denethor to madness and suicide. Seriously, THAT is the image you want to invoke when you name your startup???)
Between the FBI trying to force Apple to build backdoors into the iPhone, the NSA intercepting Cisco shipments coming into the US to add surveillance backdoors, to the same NSA tagging Google's cross-datacenter links, to dedicated rooms in AT&T switching centers for government taps to go in, to the Equifax breach, to the general concern about the amount of data that Facebook and Google have and the goldmine it would be if the TLAs had unrestricted access...
Thiel's founding and chairmanship of Palintir... and the legacy of his association with the company even if he were to resign... would make him a liability at any company that wanted users to believe, in any way, that their data would be secure and not simply handed on a platter to the TLAs; or to any company that wanted to operate in the EU, where the governments actually give a modicum of a care about citizens' privacy.
That was nothing more than a pretext and you know it. Peter Thiel never gave a flying shit about Hulk Hogan. He was nursing a (Totally nonsensical, considering he lived in California, and for now in the Bay Area no less.) years-long grudge against Gawker for mentioning that he's gay in an article last decade. Pretending that the lawsuit was really just about the sex tape is purposefully obtuse at best, really more like intellectual dishonesty, and at worst nothing more than trolling.
I would also point out:
6. Sundar Pichai was on vacation when Damore decided to throw his little controversy party. And Pichai had to end said vacation prematurely and return to Google to deal with the fallout. California being an at-will state, "pissed off the CEO by ruining his vacation" is a 100% legit reason to fire someone.
No, the head of the FBI merely controls politicians via illegal spying, blackmail, and other general thuggery. I think too many of us have let The X-Files go to our heads and think about the FBI as if it were really the sort of warm and fuzzy place that would employ Fox Mulder and Dana Sculley. The reality its that it is the house the J Edgar Hoover built. It still reveres Hoover's memory. And, indeed, it resides in the building constructed as a monument to Hoover and bearing his name.
In reality, Mulder and Sculley would have been locked away like Chelsea Manning was or Edward Snowden will be if he ever sets foot on US soil again... and that's if they were lucky. More likely they would have been subjected to "rendition" and shuffled off to some banana republic to be tortured and murdered.
No. If they sat there and did nothing, they would face liability under the civil rights act for allowing a hostile work environment to exist for a protected class. And even though they are still statistically underrepresented, there are many thousands of women working at Google. There's only one James Damore. The math is fairly straightforward.
> I personally am pretty amazed at how good
> YouTube's algorithms are at suggesting stuff I might
> actually want to see. And almost never suggests
> anything I probably wouldn't like.
And yet, YouTube... jaw-dropping amazingly, considering that they're part of Google... has gotten it's targeted *advertising* so wrong that it's somewhere between comically bad and outright dumbfounding. It doesn't matter has many times you tell me that it's the "champagne of beers", I will never be a customer of miller low-life. They persist almost incessantly in showing me ads for the dipshittery that are various pay-to-win microtransaction shovel-ware "games". And, even though I'm pretty sure I've *never* accessed YouTube with a device that wasn't made by Apple, I still get Samsung ads with notable regularity.
But yeah, their recommendations for the actual content is pretty spot-on.
It wasn't so bad as you might think. Our lawyers were mostly full-time on-staff. While we brought in dedicated specialists from law firms when needed; for routine matters like griefing ASGs, our salaried guys could generally keep the requite steady stream of bile flowing as part of their 9-5. Also, due to the nature of the business, a number of said lawyers in addition to many of our execs, had contacts in the federal government and knew exactly who to go over-their-heads to, so as to expedite the shit rolling downhill to the ASGs. (Our CEO had had a very bad experience with the TSA not long after it got started... circa 2003 or so... which left him with something of a burning hatred of the agency. So various surliness, circumvention, uncooperativeness, and outright hostility towards it, and the various TLS spinoffs comprising the rest of the ASGs, while not mandatory, was actively encouraged.). Finally, the laptops themselves were insured.
And at the end of the day, the laptop is nowhere near as valuable as the data; and not just for our own sake. For a decent number of our customers, including the part of the federal government we directly dealt with, we were contractually obligated to protect said data. And releasing it to some ASG yahoo was NOT part of those contracts (Not even with the feds.). And the penalties for leaking it would have been well in excess of the cost of eating a laptop, assuming we never got it back and insurance never paid out.
> I've always wondered what would happen in such a
> regime if the password you give them doesn't work
> for them because it's biometrically keyed to work
> only for you?
Similar issue: A company I used to work for always but ALWAYS required travel with loaner laptops only. (Didn't matter if it was just to LA, or all the way to China. And, by his own decree, the policy included everyone up to and including the CEO.). All of the important data was on an encrypted partition, with just the basic OS unencrypted. Tricky bit was: we used a split-key system where the traveling employee had to:
1) Plug in his USB key, input the PIN on the USB, and its password on the computer to unlock his half of the key.
then
2) Connect to the company VPN, from which he would fetch the other half of the key, which was only stored in RAM and never swapped to disk.
Only with both parts of the key could the encrypted partition be accessed. And we always suspended VPN access while the employee was en route; making it literally *impossible* for him/her to give up the secured data, even to "rubber hose decryption". If some airport security goon got the notion in his little head that he wanted to see the contents of the laptop, he could go tell it to a real LEO, who could tell it to a judge, who could issue a subpoena or warrant, which our lawyers could fight. The ASG itself could go get bent. That data was OURS, not the employee's, and certainly not the airport's.
It was an issue only once while I worked there. An employee was returning from Singapore & vicinity; and some ASG wanted to see the contents of his laptop. After explaining the situation that the data was privileged and protected to them, our guy actually called up InfoSec, put him on speaker with the airport goon, and reportedly grinned ludicrously as InfoSec told the ASG not just that we wouldn't be unlocking the laptop, but also exactly what we thought of him, his kind, his agency, his "mission", his manhood and the lack thereof, his family and it's canine/porcine pedigree, and so on (Said InfoSec guy had been an army drill instructor in his past. So he had the talent. And I understand that the looks on the faces of the other overhearing travelers was fairly priceless.); with an admonition to not-so-kindly go fuck himself sideways with some rusty farm implements and to call legal if he had a problem and could somehow conjure up the mental wherewithal to operate a telephone himself. The laptop did stay at the airport; but not for long. Legal wrote a nastygram, in blood, on asbestos paper, and delivered by a black raven. And I think it only took about a month or so to get it back.
> They're so much fun to drive.
I like throwing my Mazda through corners as much as... well... any Mazda owner. But if you think electric cars aren't fun, you're about ten years behind the times and have obviously never sat in a Tesla. Not all electric cars are the G-Wiz or electric Scion iQ.
No harm no foul. And I guess I should have specified that I was using the plural "you" and not trying to attack you singularly. So, my bad there.
But the "flyover country" thing really does tickle me. First, because I was telling the truth when I said I hardly ever hear people here on the coast use it derisively against the midwest as a whole. But two, the dichotomy between one day being offended at the notion that we only fly over, and the next making it very clear that we would not be welcome there. And it is kind of hard to miss the rhetoric: "People's Republic of California", "Sodom by the Bay", "San Francisco Values", "Damn Yankees", and so on.
You know, as one of the "coastal liberals" you hate so much; I can't recall the last time I've heard anyone derisively refer to the midwest as "fly over country". Probably 90% of the time I hear or read the phrase are cases exactly like this one: Midwestern republicans complaining about coastal liberals derisively referring to the midwest as flyover country. Most of that last 10% is liberals. But they're not derisively referring to the midwest as flyover country. They're mocking you midwestern republicans for bitching about how they supposedly derisively refer to the midwest as flyover country. In the real world, mostly people are too busy living their lives and don't really think about the midwest unless they have family there.
And while we're at It though; what exactly, pray tell, would be wrong with just flying over in the first place? We wouldn't be welcome anyway... and in some cases, not safe... in your red states, and only in smallish islands in the blue ones. (Yes, I've seen your map breaking red/blue down by county. I reject its legitimacy in most of the contexts I've seen it. To me, people are important, not dirt. But I do understand its implications.) You've made it quite clear that you hate our guts and don't consider us "real Americans", whatever that means (MAGA hats?). Hell, one of dear leader's offspring is even on-record and camera as saying he doesn't even consider liberals to even be real human beings.
Iâ(TM)m no fan of Gates. But by most accounts, Microsoft paid quite well... above the industry average, and WELL above if you count stock grants... during his tenure as CEO.