My point stands just as well whether the cards factor in or not. Many people cannot really afford to go that long without a paycheck--not getting paid for one or two weeks is a huge hardship.
These cards are usually given to people who are working paycheck-to-paycheck for not much money. Going an extra couple weeks (or even just one week) without getting paid can be the difference between eating and not eating.
Your setup where you withdraw from your mortgage is a luxury that I would say most people--especially those who are most likely to be offered payroll debit cards--are very unlikely to have access to.
These cards are usually issued to people who work in low-wage, low-skill jobs who may not have the means to acquire a traditional checking account. Many banks require you to keep a minimum balance in order to have a checking account, and we're talking about people who largely live paycheck-to-paycheck and would find it difficult to impossible to keep a few hundred dollars just lying around, untouched.
Payroll debit cards are seen as an advantage for people in this situation, because they can use it virtually anywhere and don't need a bank account.
Depends on whether they are offering severance. A lot of companies make your severance contingent on training your replacement. You want that 6 weeks of severance? You're going to train the new guy. Most people can't afford not to do that, and in this job market, you need everything you can get. I can't blame anyone for just swallowing their pride and doing it to make sure their family stays fed.
That said, I think it is a horrible and unethical practice.
What I've found to be truly bizarre is that a lot of the official documentation makes no sense, in and of itself. It's vague and difficult to interpret. You normally have to scroll down to the comments to see how people actually use it, and it's only at that point that the function in question begins to make any sense. The documentation itself is just too barebones to be adequate.
Python's practice of including simple examples with the documentation of virtually every command and function and feature is incredibly handy.
I don't know what kind of environment you work in, but in my experience you really need something like git's staging area if you are doing any major application work. Most developers are working on multiple things at a time, and they don't want to just commit everything at once, or even every modified part of a given file. Without that, you are forced to either hold off modifying some files, or keeping multiple copies lying around. (Git also supports the latter via stash, if that's your preference.)
Managing this via a command-line interface is excruciating, though. I stick to a GUI for daily work and use the command line only for deeper repo analysis and to feed programs that script git to do something.
SmartGit, Git Extensions, the GitHub for Windows client, and the git functionality built into things like NetBeans all make using git on Windows pretty straightforward.
I've spent the most time using Git Extensions as it seems to support the broadest set of git commands, but I'll grant that it doesn't have the friendliest interface.
Then I suppose all the IRS would need to do is state what cash value they determine Bitcoins to have for a given tax year, so you can pay tax on them appropriately.
If you hold Bitcoins, they have no cash value, and thus are not taxable. If you cash them out into USD (or any other official currency), that is taxable income--or capital gains. That part is not clear, but you'd have to pay taxes on it either way.
If someone duped D3 gold and managed to cash it out to the tune of $100K, then yes, they would have to pay taxes on that. Income is income.
Given that there are plenty of good alternatives, it seems that the real value in MySQL is the branding. Oracle could've bought any DB engine they wanted, but which open-source one has the most name recognition? Sometimes, "what's in a name" turns out to be "everything."
Parent and grandparent post make the right points.
The US has opted to spend less money building and supporting the middle class, instead spending more money instruments of state control: prisons, police equipment, military hardware (the latter two being less and less distinct as time goes on), surveillance. Educating the public simply isn't a priority. The continued rise of anti-intellectual politicians has certainly nurtured this, but there's also a very utilitarian government interest in having a cowed and uninformed populace. You'd think having a more dynamic, informed, educated, productive economy would more than outweigh having a complacent, idiotic populace, but it turns out the latter is a lot easier to do than the former, and politics is nothing if not pragmatic.
It's not even "the government" that's militarized--as in the feds and states--but police. Our police have adopted military hardware, tactics, and attitudes. Even on the local level, this is commonplace. A lot of it comes from the "War on Drugs," which called for military-like tactics since we were dealing with highly organized and capable criminals such as drug cartels. Then we had the WTO riots in Seattle in '99, which demonstrated just how unprepared our police were for that kind of chaos. It shocked them out of their complacency and accelerated the militarization of our police forces. Finally, 9/11 put it all together, bringing boatloads of federal money and input into local police forces. Americans have often worried about the federal government running amok and using the military to suppress insurrection and dissent. Well, they don't even have to. Your local cops will happily do that. These are the same police who shoot folks who are unarmed or lightly armed, who tase virtually defenseless individuals who fail to comply by even the smallest margin, and who respond to peaceful, non-violent protests with pepper spray, tear gas, and physical force. You're damn right that people are afraid of the government, but it turns out you don't so much have to fear the feds knocking down your door, just the local cops who've been trained to view almost everyone as a potentially lethal enemy.
And yet the prevailing political philosophy I see expressed by Slashdot commenters falls somewhere in the anarchist/libertarian area of the political graph, where there's little to no government and virtually unfettered personal (and corporate) behavior. In concept, it's nice to imagine a world where everyone can do anything they want as long as it's not harming anyone else. In practice, we find that "harm" is not always easy to see, and can result from complex sequences of events and interactions that are not individually problematic but nevertheless result in systemic harms.
I am by no means saying that government is the perfect solution to every problem. In fact, there is no perfect solution to most problems. There's only bricolage and compromise. Some things are better managed by government. Some things are better managed by the private sector. Both need to be accountable, though: the business world is accountable to the government, and the government is accountable to the people. When any of those mechanisms fails, the system has failed.
That is to say, I am deeply unhappy with the current state of US politics, since any efforts at accountability for government are stymied by the total lack of accountability in the business world.
But there's no way I'm going to take that and conclude the option is to nearly get rid of the government and just trust the market to work everything out. That way lies insanity, or at least a whole lot of misery.
Is encrypted data just gibberish until it's decrypted, at which point it becomes information? No, it was always information, it was just hidden or impractical to get at without the right tools.
Same with human iris patterns. It's been information all along, it just wasn't easy or cheap to extract.
You'd have to be working with a definition of "information" so narrow as to be useless.
Indeed. If you only have one highly-qualified nurse on-staff, you've got a big problem in the first place. You should have several, and they can rotate which holidays they work.
This is how it works in other industries that may require on-call staff during holidays. It's a solved problem.
If you're staffed entirely with n00bs who don't know how to do their jobs... good luck with that.
Apple's not announced any amazing new products! Apple is doomed! SELL SELL SELL!
I don't care much about Apple either way, but the way people speculate about it is so silly. Of course, this is the company that manages to meet its own stated revenue targets but takes a stock hit for not meeting third-party analysts' made-up targets. All I can do is laugh.
My parents bought an Amstrad 286 (12MB hard drive space! 512KB RAM! VGA graphics! 3.5" floppy drive! MS-DOS 5.01!) and it came with this enormous GWBASIC manual. I was 8 years old and had been mildly curious about computers for a couple years, but my dad wouldn't let me touch his TRS-80. My grandfather had a Commodore 64 that I knew enough about to load games, but that was it. Once we got that 286 with the huge GWBASIC manual, I realized that I could tell the computer what to do, too. After that, I was programming on Apple IIs, C64s, and TRS-80s--pretty much anything I had access to with some flavor of BASIC.
That got me through until high school, when the Web really started to take off, at which point I learned perl. I've since used more languages than I could probably list.
I'm definitely glad my parents found it worthwhile to get a computer and just let me have at it. They were pretty forgiving when my tinkering screwed up AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS so badly they had to wipe the hard drive and start over. They didn't really know better at the time, and I didn't know enough to fix it. They sure learned to back up important files to floppies, though.
Slashdot Mirror
My point stands just as well whether the cards factor in or not. Many people cannot really afford to go that long without a paycheck--not getting paid for one or two weeks is a huge hardship.
These cards are usually given to people who are working paycheck-to-paycheck for not much money. Going an extra couple weeks (or even just one week) without getting paid can be the difference between eating and not eating.
Your setup where you withdraw from your mortgage is a luxury that I would say most people--especially those who are most likely to be offered payroll debit cards--are very unlikely to have access to.
These cards are usually issued to people who work in low-wage, low-skill jobs who may not have the means to acquire a traditional checking account. Many banks require you to keep a minimum balance in order to have a checking account, and we're talking about people who largely live paycheck-to-paycheck and would find it difficult to impossible to keep a few hundred dollars just lying around, untouched.
Payroll debit cards are seen as an advantage for people in this situation, because they can use it virtually anywhere and don't need a bank account.
That said, charging a bunch of fees is bullshit.
It's a commentary made at the expense of Indian workers who, you know, just want to make a living, too.
But hey, getting people who work for a living to distrust and tar each other is a great way to maintain the status quo.
Depends on whether they are offering severance. A lot of companies make your severance contingent on training your replacement. You want that 6 weeks of severance? You're going to train the new guy. Most people can't afford not to do that, and in this job market, you need everything you can get. I can't blame anyone for just swallowing their pride and doing it to make sure their family stays fed.
That said, I think it is a horrible and unethical practice.
Nice to see racist drivel getting modded up on Slashdot. Go fuck yourself.
He should have stuck around because the Obama administration's been just so lenient and favorable to whistleblowers, right? Get a grip.
What I've found to be truly bizarre is that a lot of the official documentation makes no sense, in and of itself. It's vague and difficult to interpret. You normally have to scroll down to the comments to see how people actually use it, and it's only at that point that the function in question begins to make any sense. The documentation itself is just too barebones to be adequate.
Python's practice of including simple examples with the documentation of virtually every command and function and feature is incredibly handy.
It's not wrong if you're using git to do it. :)
I don't know what kind of environment you work in, but in my experience you really need something like git's staging area if you are doing any major application work. Most developers are working on multiple things at a time, and they don't want to just commit everything at once, or even every modified part of a given file. Without that, you are forced to either hold off modifying some files, or keeping multiple copies lying around. (Git also supports the latter via stash, if that's your preference.)
Managing this via a command-line interface is excruciating, though. I stick to a GUI for daily work and use the command line only for deeper repo analysis and to feed programs that script git to do something.
SmartGit, Git Extensions, the GitHub for Windows client, and the git functionality built into things like NetBeans all make using git on Windows pretty straightforward.
I've spent the most time using Git Extensions as it seems to support the broadest set of git commands, but I'll grant that it doesn't have the friendliest interface.
Then I suppose all the IRS would need to do is state what cash value they determine Bitcoins to have for a given tax year, so you can pay tax on them appropriately.
Again: not complicated.
This is a lot easier than you think it is.
If you hold Bitcoins, they have no cash value, and thus are not taxable. If you cash them out into USD (or any other official currency), that is taxable income--or capital gains. That part is not clear, but you'd have to pay taxes on it either way.
If someone duped D3 gold and managed to cash it out to the tune of $100K, then yes, they would have to pay taxes on that. Income is income.
If homosexuals had their way, no one who denigrates homosexuals or denies them the same rights as everyone else would ever get elected.
The problem, then, is not homosexuals themselves.
Given that there are plenty of good alternatives, it seems that the real value in MySQL is the branding. Oracle could've bought any DB engine they wanted, but which open-source one has the most name recognition? Sometimes, "what's in a name" turns out to be "everything."
Parent and grandparent post make the right points.
The US has opted to spend less money building and supporting the middle class, instead spending more money instruments of state control: prisons, police equipment, military hardware (the latter two being less and less distinct as time goes on), surveillance. Educating the public simply isn't a priority. The continued rise of anti-intellectual politicians has certainly nurtured this, but there's also a very utilitarian government interest in having a cowed and uninformed populace. You'd think having a more dynamic, informed, educated, productive economy would more than outweigh having a complacent, idiotic populace, but it turns out the latter is a lot easier to do than the former, and politics is nothing if not pragmatic.
It's not even "the government" that's militarized--as in the feds and states--but police. Our police have adopted military hardware, tactics, and attitudes. Even on the local level, this is commonplace. A lot of it comes from the "War on Drugs," which called for military-like tactics since we were dealing with highly organized and capable criminals such as drug cartels. Then we had the WTO riots in Seattle in '99, which demonstrated just how unprepared our police were for that kind of chaos. It shocked them out of their complacency and accelerated the militarization of our police forces. Finally, 9/11 put it all together, bringing boatloads of federal money and input into local police forces. Americans have often worried about the federal government running amok and using the military to suppress insurrection and dissent. Well, they don't even have to. Your local cops will happily do that. These are the same police who shoot folks who are unarmed or lightly armed, who tase virtually defenseless individuals who fail to comply by even the smallest margin, and who respond to peaceful, non-violent protests with pepper spray, tear gas, and physical force. You're damn right that people are afraid of the government, but it turns out you don't so much have to fear the feds knocking down your door, just the local cops who've been trained to view almost everyone as a potentially lethal enemy.
Yeah, that was surprisingly good. Seems he actually can be a competent director, when he feels like it.
And yet the prevailing political philosophy I see expressed by Slashdot commenters falls somewhere in the anarchist/libertarian area of the political graph, where there's little to no government and virtually unfettered personal (and corporate) behavior. In concept, it's nice to imagine a world where everyone can do anything they want as long as it's not harming anyone else. In practice, we find that "harm" is not always easy to see, and can result from complex sequences of events and interactions that are not individually problematic but nevertheless result in systemic harms.
I am by no means saying that government is the perfect solution to every problem. In fact, there is no perfect solution to most problems. There's only bricolage and compromise. Some things are better managed by government. Some things are better managed by the private sector. Both need to be accountable, though: the business world is accountable to the government, and the government is accountable to the people. When any of those mechanisms fails, the system has failed.
That is to say, I am deeply unhappy with the current state of US politics, since any efforts at accountability for government are stymied by the total lack of accountability in the business world.
But there's no way I'm going to take that and conclude the option is to nearly get rid of the government and just trust the market to work everything out. That way lies insanity, or at least a whole lot of misery.
lolwut
Is encrypted data just gibberish until it's decrypted, at which point it becomes information? No, it was always information, it was just hidden or impractical to get at without the right tools.
Same with human iris patterns. It's been information all along, it just wasn't easy or cheap to extract.
You'd have to be working with a definition of "information" so narrow as to be useless.
Indeed. If you only have one highly-qualified nurse on-staff, you've got a big problem in the first place. You should have several, and they can rotate which holidays they work.
This is how it works in other industries that may require on-call staff during holidays. It's a solved problem.
If you're staffed entirely with n00bs who don't know how to do their jobs... good luck with that.
Auto-parked the heads, I meant. I need to proofread more.
Oh, yes. We always did that, too. I remember when I later got a 386 and was astonished that it auto-parked the heats when you shut it off. SORCERY.
Apple's not announced any amazing new products! Apple is doomed! SELL SELL SELL!
I don't care much about Apple either way, but the way people speculate about it is so silly. Of course, this is the company that manages to meet its own stated revenue targets but takes a stock hit for not meeting third-party analysts' made-up targets. All I can do is laugh.
I hear that.
My parents bought an Amstrad 286 (12MB hard drive space! 512KB RAM! VGA graphics! 3.5" floppy drive! MS-DOS 5.01!) and it came with this enormous GWBASIC manual. I was 8 years old and had been mildly curious about computers for a couple years, but my dad wouldn't let me touch his TRS-80. My grandfather had a Commodore 64 that I knew enough about to load games, but that was it. Once we got that 286 with the huge GWBASIC manual, I realized that I could tell the computer what to do, too. After that, I was programming on Apple IIs, C64s, and TRS-80s--pretty much anything I had access to with some flavor of BASIC.
That got me through until high school, when the Web really started to take off, at which point I learned perl. I've since used more languages than I could probably list.
I'm definitely glad my parents found it worthwhile to get a computer and just let me have at it. They were pretty forgiving when my tinkering screwed up AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS so badly they had to wipe the hard drive and start over. They didn't really know better at the time, and I didn't know enough to fix it. They sure learned to back up important files to floppies, though.