so if you're gonna rant about H-1B visas, don't bother.
I suppose you can rant about legal immigration in general, if you want.
I thought this would be a fine example of the problems with H1-B workers, but the phrase "49-year-old Chunlai Yang, who is a naturalised US citizen," kept coming up in news articles about the arrest, so I had to give it up.
While that sounds rather Facebook-ish, it's contraindicated by how Google's handling profiles now. If you have a private profile, they're not throwing it open to the public, they're deleting it. It would be spectacularly back-door to then, at a later date, surreptitiously create a public profile for you, even though you didn't opt in by not voluntarily creating your own public profile.
In other words, the approach you're suggesting is much too "evil mastermind with the excessively slow dipping machine" for the normal stupid arrogant evil done by most web media corps. Google's history hasn't been much of slow stepwise refinement of evil (like others... I'm looking at you, Zuckerberg...), but usually instead single blunders of evil followed by panicked backpedaling when the shitstorm hits.
That's the funny thing about Slashdot. No matter how extreme, over-the-top, and sarcastic you try to make a humorous (or darkly worst-case) post, someone will take you seriously.
Goodness. I wasn't trying to troll, but I guess no matter how evil I try to pretend to be, someone will think I'm not pretending. Sheesh. Maybe next time I'll add a "pinky-to-corner-of-the-mouth" emote, or something involving ill-tempered sea bass.
As I recall, people thought Jonathon Swift was serious when he wrote this.
Under some fairness-in-contracting laws, what you say is somewhat true. However, it's not necessarily true in all cases. As far as I can tell, Nebraska doesn't have any such law, so "kickbacks" (rebates) and "bribes" (incentives) would not be illegal. Federal fairness-in-contracting law wouldn't be applicable, either, since this is strictly a State contract.
Money in the personal or campaign pockets of decision makers would be illegal under any reasonable definition of "anti-corruption" or "anti-bribery" law, but that's not what's happening here. (Not even Microsoft is stupid enough to boast about this as a marketing success.)
"Illegal" is about what is specifically in the letter of the law, not what we wish were there or wish it meant, or what we think is right or wrong. If there's no letter of the law, there's no law. Q.E.D.
Besides, what makes you think Microsoft marketing is stupid enough to not submerge such "payola" in the terms of final pricing, so it just looks like a bottom-line price discount? Even if cash under the table is illegal, reducing purchase price by the equivalent amount and making the "payoff" by allowing the customer to just keep that money in their pockets would never be illegal.
Your moral outrage is noted. It's just not meaningful. This is not against the law, and unless Federal-style certified pricing is brought into effect, even if it were against the law, it'd be easily circumvented.
Is a $2000 consumer rebate on buying a 2012 Pigmobile a bribe? Even if you actually take the money in hand, rather than having it applied as a discount on the purchase price? (Because, you know, the former is income to be taxed, whereas the latter might reduce sales-taxable purchase price (depending on jurisdiction).)
Or... and let's be honest here... is it evil because that convicted monopolist is doing it, and anything that they do to get any sale at the expense of any competitor is EVIL.
I swear. There seems to be a huge contingent of slashdotters who think that Microsoft is morally obligated to take any action it needs to in order to become the provider of last choice, perhaps in atonement for past evil, perhaps on the general principle that anything SO EVIL is obligated to starve itself to death.
You're welcome to hold and espouse that perspective; to some extent, it's a free world, after all. But don't expect too many rational people to agree with your irrational fantasies.
If I discount your purchase of my product because of competitive pricing by a market adversary, is that unethical? Because last time I looked, that's called "competitive pricing".... kinda like negotiating a better price at $BIGBOX_ELECTRONICS_STORE because you saw a deal at $ONLINE_ELECTRONICS_RETAILER. Which, btw, you can do, successfully, sometimes.
It was a discount. TFS is wrong, almost to the point of libel.
That said, since Microsoft took a quarter-million dollar hit in the "Expected Sales" column, and NU got to walk away from (ick) Lotus Notes... there are no losers. Except Lotus, but they can't fix that no matter what they do, short of complete self-destruction.
Hell, you're not going far enough. At least homeopathic "remedies" don't actually give you diseases. Most fake AV products are active trojans, infecting your machine and (A) providing backdoors and further infection vectors (like disabling real AV) and (B) demanding more money to "fix" the damage it caused (and "fix" is scarequoted because at best, they do nothing; at worst, it's just paying to be trojaned further.)
Fake AV is equivalent to homeopathic medicine made with 100% all-natural anthrax and HIV.
It's a risk, but it's worth it. Travel can continue, airlines can generate revenues, taxes are paid (not the companies... travellers), and (as noted earlier) flights have a higher head-count and lower customer service needs. The occasional death is unfortunate, but a minor consideration in the cost/benefit analysis, since no one that actually matters bears that risk; just the individual traveler, and those costs can be mitigated through the mandatory and binding liability waiver required to travel to begin with.
If you're laboring under the impression that the criticism is "China is doing it, BAAAAD... The West is doing, it, YAAAY!"... you haven't been paying attention.
China refuses to knuckle under to Western imperialism.
Oh. That's interesting. I didn't notice until just now that you were using the Troll Safeword of the Day. <wink> Right. Carry on.
Cable made with ultra-virgin oxygen-free 5-gauge depleted uranium are pretty heavy, and pretty expensive. To get the best (slightly radioactive quality), you have to pay a bit, and reinforce the floor.
Seriously. The first mistake is thinking "The Web" is a Thing. It's not. It's just information, some of it seriously wrong, the rest of it poorly organized and miserably presented.
tl;dr version of the story: Mozilla is in love with "release early, release often". Large organizations move much more methodically. Mozilla is playing the populist card. Large organizations are anything but populist. When push comes to shove, slow-moving organizations will migrate away from Mozilla, and neither side will miss each other much. The End.
Neither Moz nor corporate interests are "wrong" here. They just have incompatible and mutually-exclusive goals.
I wonder if any corps have thought about supporting their own fork of Moz? They don't have to keep up with the Joneses. The only risk is that old source code won't easily get security-related backports from newer versions, especially if whole code engines change over time.
Good plan. Now, how are you going to secure the database of private keys versus TPM serial numbers for all the computers in your care, so that the dongles can't be cloned and hacked? Hint: Ask the RSA SecurID people what they'd do, and then do something completely different.
To be fair, it only says that the game cannot be reset. I suppose it is still possible that it can be played as many times as one wants, just that once you start, there's no going back till you finish.
To be accurate, it's possible that it can be played as many times as one wants, as long as you're willing to redo the last fight over and over and over... assuming there's no "GAME OVER" save point after winning, in which case you can relive the closing cinematic and credit roll over and over.
It's been confirmed that Resident Evil: Mercenaries 3D for the Nintendo 3DS is a game that once finished, cannot be reset for complete replay. According to both the U.S. and U.K. game's instruction manual "saved data on this software cannot be reset."
The way I'm reading that, there's no "NEW GAME" option on the front menu. There' no front menu at all, possibly. You start the game for the first time, you're thrust into the action from the beginning. You start the game the second time you're thrust into the action starting with your last checkpoint. You start the game after you've won, you're thrust into the credits. Game over.
A real real geek would have done it from an HP 48g emulated on an Android phone emulated (very very slowly) on a Commodore 64. Unless they're British, in which case a BBC Micro or a Spectrum are acceptable substitutes.
I think that's what the author is complaining about: everyone with any interest in foo calls themselves a foo geek
I pity the foo. Not the bar, though. BTW, it's a fine line between a foo geek and a faux geek. (OK, enough PUNishment.)
Too many people call themselves food geeks, when all they do is watch Hell's Kitchen regularly. They can't tell a paring knife from a filet knife, but they don't care about that distinction. I don't know Miss USA, but judging from past contestants, it's quite possible that she's overselling her geek credentials. Is it guaranteed? No - brains and beauty are not mutually exclusive, more like orthogonal to each other. But I think it's fair to say that judging from past contestants, her claim of being a huge history geek should at least be tested.
FWIW, self-identification of geekdom has long been held suspect by actual geeks. See also "wannabee" and "script kiddie", neither of which is typically a form of self-identification and both have been in use since at least the 1980s.
The people who failed that test should be... Kicked from the #law_of_the_land chat channel as an obvious bot. Think of it as a human rights Turing Test.
Look, if you're going to engage in culturally-distinctive signaling, you're obligated by the Slashdot Terms of Service* to make it crystal clear. So, If you're going to use rhyming slang, it's mandatory that you lace the rest of your post with faux East End slang and call people Guv'nor and such. Gruesomely obvious and stereotypical cultural marking is only fair to the otherwise uninformed. Think of it as cultural smilies. Thanks.
Slashdot Mirror
obPedant: It's Wacker Drive, not Wall Street. Completely different city, too.
The Nixon Doctrine: It's not illegal if the President does it, or orders it done.
so if you're gonna rant about H-1B visas, don't bother.
I suppose you can rant about legal immigration in general, if you want.
I thought this would be a fine example of the problems with H1-B workers, but the phrase "49-year-old Chunlai Yang, who is a naturalised US citizen," kept coming up in news articles about the arrest, so I had to give it up.
While that sounds rather Facebook-ish, it's contraindicated by how Google's handling profiles now. If you have a private profile, they're not throwing it open to the public, they're deleting it. It would be spectacularly back-door to then, at a later date, surreptitiously create a public profile for you, even though you didn't opt in by not voluntarily creating your own public profile.
In other words, the approach you're suggesting is much too "evil mastermind with the excessively slow dipping machine" for the normal stupid arrogant evil done by most web media corps. Google's history hasn't been much of slow stepwise refinement of evil (like others... I'm looking at you, Zuckerberg...), but usually instead single blunders of evil followed by panicked backpedaling when the shitstorm hits.
That's the funny thing about Slashdot. No matter how extreme, over-the-top, and sarcastic you try to make a humorous (or darkly worst-case) post, someone will take you seriously.
Goodness. I wasn't trying to troll, but I guess no matter how evil I try to pretend to be, someone will think I'm not pretending. Sheesh. Maybe next time I'll add a "pinky-to-corner-of-the-mouth" emote, or something involving ill-tempered sea bass.
As I recall, people thought Jonathon Swift was serious when he wrote this.
Under some fairness-in-contracting laws, what you say is somewhat true. However, it's not necessarily true in all cases. As far as I can tell, Nebraska doesn't have any such law, so "kickbacks" (rebates) and "bribes" (incentives) would not be illegal. Federal fairness-in-contracting law wouldn't be applicable, either, since this is strictly a State contract.
Money in the personal or campaign pockets of decision makers would be illegal under any reasonable definition of "anti-corruption" or "anti-bribery" law, but that's not what's happening here. (Not even Microsoft is stupid enough to boast about this as a marketing success.)
"Illegal" is about what is specifically in the letter of the law, not what we wish were there or wish it meant, or what we think is right or wrong. If there's no letter of the law, there's no law. Q.E.D.
Besides, what makes you think Microsoft marketing is stupid enough to not submerge such "payola" in the terms of final pricing, so it just looks like a bottom-line price discount? Even if cash under the table is illegal, reducing purchase price by the equivalent amount and making the "payoff" by allowing the customer to just keep that money in their pockets would never be illegal.
Your moral outrage is noted. It's just not meaningful. This is not against the law, and unless Federal-style certified pricing is brought into effect, even if it were against the law, it'd be easily circumvented.
Now voice-response menu systems are artificially intelligent. This is not an improvement.
Is a $2000 consumer rebate on buying a 2012 Pigmobile a bribe? Even if you actually take the money in hand, rather than having it applied as a discount on the purchase price? (Because, you know, the former is income to be taxed, whereas the latter might reduce sales-taxable purchase price (depending on jurisdiction).)
Or... and let's be honest here... is it evil because that convicted monopolist is doing it, and anything that they do to get any sale at the expense of any competitor is EVIL.
I swear. There seems to be a huge contingent of slashdotters who think that Microsoft is morally obligated to take any action it needs to in order to become the provider of last choice, perhaps in atonement for past evil, perhaps on the general principle that anything SO EVIL is obligated to starve itself to death.
You're welcome to hold and espouse that perspective; to some extent, it's a free world, after all. But don't expect too many rational people to agree with your irrational fantasies.
If I discount your purchase of my product because of competitive pricing by a market adversary, is that unethical? Because last time I looked, that's called "competitive pricing".... kinda like negotiating a better price at $BIGBOX_ELECTRONICS_STORE because you saw a deal at $ONLINE_ELECTRONICS_RETAILER. Which, btw, you can do, successfully, sometimes.
It was a discount. TFS is wrong, almost to the point of libel.
That said, since Microsoft took a quarter-million dollar hit in the "Expected Sales" column, and NU got to walk away from (ick) Lotus Notes... there are no losers. Except Lotus, but they can't fix that no matter what they do, short of complete self-destruction.
Hell, you're not going far enough. At least homeopathic "remedies" don't actually give you diseases. Most fake AV products are active trojans, infecting your machine and (A) providing backdoors and further infection vectors (like disabling real AV) and (B) demanding more money to "fix" the damage it caused (and "fix" is scarequoted because at best, they do nothing; at worst, it's just paying to be trojaned further.)
Fake AV is equivalent to homeopathic medicine made with 100% all-natural anthrax and HIV.
It's a risk, but it's worth it. Travel can continue, airlines can generate revenues, taxes are paid (not the companies... travellers), and (as noted earlier) flights have a higher head-count and lower customer service needs. The occasional death is unfortunate, but a minor consideration in the cost/benefit analysis, since no one that actually matters bears that risk; just the individual traveler, and those costs can be mitigated through the mandatory and binding liability waiver required to travel to begin with.
No real downsides. Expect this within 15 years.
If you're laboring under the impression that the criticism is "China is doing it, BAAAAD... The West is doing, it, YAAAY!"... you haven't been paying attention.
Oh. That's interesting. I didn't notice until just now that you were using the Troll Safeword of the Day. <wink> Right. Carry on.
Cable made with ultra-virgin oxygen-free 5-gauge depleted uranium are pretty heavy, and pretty expensive. To get the best (slightly radioactive quality), you have to pay a bit, and reinforce the floor.
"Your [chess program] is both good and original; but the parts that are good are not original, and the parts that are original are not good."
It's not "suddenly news". It's a decades-old dupe that finally cleared queue.
Say what you will, IE6 has the market staying power and brand loyalty that any number of consumer brands would kill for.
It doesn't like it when you do that.
Seriously. The first mistake is thinking "The Web" is a Thing. It's not. It's just information, some of it seriously wrong, the rest of it poorly organized and miserably presented.
"The Enterprise" is as illusory, although at least it had some tangible incarnation at some point.
tl;dr version of the story: Mozilla is in love with "release early, release often". Large organizations move much more methodically. Mozilla is playing the populist card. Large organizations are anything but populist. When push comes to shove, slow-moving organizations will migrate away from Mozilla, and neither side will miss each other much. The End.
Neither Moz nor corporate interests are "wrong" here. They just have incompatible and mutually-exclusive goals.
I wonder if any corps have thought about supporting their own fork of Moz? They don't have to keep up with the Joneses. The only risk is that old source code won't easily get security-related backports from newer versions, especially if whole code engines change over time.
Good plan. Now, how are you going to secure the database of private keys versus TPM serial numbers for all the computers in your care, so that the dongles can't be cloned and hacked? Hint: Ask the RSA SecurID people what they'd do, and then do something completely different.
To be fair, it only says that the game cannot be reset. I suppose it is still possible that it can be played as many times as one wants, just that once you start, there's no going back till you finish.
To be accurate, it's possible that it can be played as many times as one wants, as long as you're willing to redo the last fight over and over and over... assuming there's no "GAME OVER" save point after winning, in which case you can relive the closing cinematic and credit roll over and over.
The way I'm reading that, there's no "NEW GAME" option on the front menu. There' no front menu at all, possibly. You start the game for the first time, you're thrust into the action from the beginning. You start the game the second time you're thrust into the action starting with your last checkpoint. You start the game after you've won, you're thrust into the credits. Game over.
A real real geek would have done it from an HP 48g emulated on an Android phone emulated (very very slowly) on a Commodore 64. Unless they're British, in which case a BBC Micro or a Spectrum are acceptable substitutes.
I think that's what the author is complaining about: everyone with any interest in foo calls themselves a foo geek
I pity the foo. Not the bar, though. BTW, it's a fine line between a foo geek and a faux geek. (OK, enough PUNishment.)
Too many people call themselves food geeks, when all they do is watch Hell's Kitchen regularly. They can't tell a paring knife from a filet knife, but they don't care about that distinction. I don't know Miss USA, but judging from past contestants, it's quite possible that she's overselling her geek credentials. Is it guaranteed? No - brains and beauty are not mutually exclusive, more like orthogonal to each other. But I think it's fair to say that judging from past contestants, her claim of being a huge history geek should at least be tested.
FWIW, self-identification of geekdom has long been held suspect by actual geeks. See also "wannabee" and "script kiddie", neither of which is typically a form of self-identification and both have been in use since at least the 1980s.
The people who failed that test should be... Kicked from the #law_of_the_land chat channel as an obvious bot. Think of it as a human rights Turing Test.
New trend in HR: Pup-peroni and Beggin' Strips as Recruitment and Retention Tools!
Look, if you're going to engage in culturally-distinctive signaling, you're obligated by the Slashdot Terms of Service* to make it crystal clear. So, If you're going to use rhyming slang, it's mandatory that you lace the rest of your post with faux East End slang and call people Guv'nor and such. Gruesomely obvious and stereotypical cultural marking is only fair to the otherwise uninformed. Think of it as cultural smilies. Thanks.
*You did read the Terms of Service, didn't you?
The truth may be easy to hide, but obvious trolls will always be obvious.