Even South Park made fun of England's libel courts which are absurdly tilted in favor of whomever has the money and the power. Perhaps Obama can start suing them all there. Why not? It's not as if anyone cares whether we live in a tyranny or not.
What I've said to the admins and owners of intensely partisan websites for years is that lieu of fanatically deleting comments they don't like and banning readers just because they disagree with them - why not put all their comments behind a paywall? That way only the nutcases they love would be sufficiently motivated to pay them for the 'freedom' to a be nutcase with all their other nutcases and the nutcases are less likely to stumble across someone who butthurts their delicate sensibilities at all.
To get it to actually work will require 10x that in money and time. But long before then everyone will wind up in court, the whole thing will be scrapped and they'll start over with an Indian company in India.
Who automatically scream the west is of course worse. Because as everyone knows the US is a medieval theocratic death chamber where this sort of thing in fact takes place 1000's of times a day. By law.
No really it will. Apparently there's a law that says to have a website you have to run 45 different Javascripts nested 4 layers deep or more. And because of it basically 99% of the hosts out there are essentially slow junk.
Apple is now officially a shit company run by lawyers and accountants. Two years after Jobs and they are dead in the water. It's not that they CAN'T come with any good ideas, it's just cheaper to buy politicians and judges.
I mean the school admins. Have any of them ever seen first hand what kids to do EVERYTHING? Seriously. I will personally give a hundred dollars to the admin who never saw a kid playing paper ball tennis with one or never saw a kid throw one across the room. Kids are animals. They break HARDBACK BOOKS for fuck's sake.
But the best one is the power company charges me $5 to NOT get a paper bill OR $5 for a paper bill. One is a convenience charge and the other is for, oh who knows- recycling?
I can tell you that the only reason the company hasn't imploded is because there are physically not enough seconds in the known universe with which to schedule all the conference calls needed to schedule the conference calls needed to round up the list of people needed to hold conference calls about who knows fucking what about anything. It's a company that in reality runs on its own through sheer inertia. There may not even BE anyone in charge and it wouldn't matter anyway.
HP clearly has too much empty real estate they can't sell so their accountants told them to use it all. Whether they have 80,000 seats open or not isn't the point - 'people will make do' typically 3 to an office.
HP clearly wants to throw as much US employment out the window as possible. What better way to do that when your staff quits on their own. No lawsuits no severance. And better yet America's Next Top Female Executive of the Ages, Marissa Meyer (All Hail and Amen: we're down to only 8 columns a day on her over at Henry Blodgett's Business Insider) did it already. So they won't even get much bad PR from it.
But importantly - HP has no earthly fucking clue what they are doing. And this is more of that. They were sitting around the Boardroom one day and one of them mentioned "Hey are there any companies out there we can buy for an absurd premium, fuck up and write off 90%?" Not hearing any good ideas, their response was "Well ok then let's fire our American workforce on the sly. We're run by a woman so how bad could the fallout possibly be?"
Because I don't know about you but there's nothing better than being nanomanaged by someone who can't even be happy with anything you do especially if it's to the tiniest detail the exact thing they demanded on the 50th revision of the thing they told you to do but endlessly tweaked and corrected.
Yeah that's the shit. That's great. I tell you it's even better when the nanomanager has OCD so they constantly go over and over and over and over and over the same things the same way making an infinitesimal change then changing it back then changing it back again.
But the best I mean the really really best thing of all is when your nanomanager scolds you in public for dragging your heels because that 100th change just wasn't perfect enough or on time.
Yes of course detaining someone for up to 8 or 9 hours per the law for stealing a trove of top secret documents is a war crime. Of course it is. 58,000 stolen documents
No one WANTS to do security. It doesn't advance anyone's career. On the other hand government is terrible at it too because all it ever wants to do is spend years writing another 2,600 page NIST standard no one can follow.
And Greenwald's husband was detained per law for being in possession of 58,000 classified secret and top secret documents belonging to the UK but that too was branded an abuse of power. Oh well. I guess we need to have no government at all.
When someone comes to me with free pollution free energy with zero transition costs and it can be online in about a week the Greens will moan it's still a terrible idea, somehow.
Or do we need mother government to also dictate the power output so we don't accidentally burn up all our devices, houses and cars too?
Hey here's an idea - why not mandate a single standard hardware platform and form factor for everything because lord knows, the EU, which has today an 80 page specification for the steering wheel of a bus is the best place to go for something like this.
That is, in IBM's mad rush to eliminate 100% of all US employment (except for executives) by 2015 they, admittedly occasionally, offer a devil's bargain to US based employees being cut: relocate overseas on your dime to take a job at CURRENT LOCAL wages and you get to keep your job.
Makes you wonder how much longer IBM will be an American company, legally. They may as well re incorporate in India or Ireland at this point. 50,000 regular full time employees in the US and dropping. Most new jobs going to low skill contractors. And the funny thing is that IBM routinely comes up in surveys as not one of the companies one would want to work for - not because it's a bureaucratic meatgrinder run by spreadsheet wielding accounts but because there's simply very very few actual jobs at IBM in the US anymore. If you're not an executive then you're either a recent college grad who might stay for 3 years or less or you're an old timer hanging on for dear life. There's nothing in the middle of that any more. There's basically zero IBM employees between the ages of 30 and 50. And the 50 year olds aren't going to 'share' their experience with anyone else, it's too risky. They've all become 'program managers' which is a fancy way of saying a staff job that consists of reporting the status reporting of status reporting of metrics of status reporting and creating new processes to report on the status of that.
Slashdot Mirror
That some group of Greens and dirty hippies bands together to protest this because it might harm some heretofore unknown desert lizard.
Even South Park made fun of England's libel courts which are absurdly tilted in favor of whomever has the money and the power. Perhaps Obama can start suing them all there. Why not? It's not as if anyone cares whether we live in a tyranny or not.
What I've said to the admins and owners of intensely partisan websites for years is that lieu of fanatically deleting comments they don't like and banning readers just because they disagree with them - why not put all their comments behind a paywall? That way only the nutcases they love would be sufficiently motivated to pay them for the 'freedom' to a be nutcase with all their other nutcases and the nutcases are less likely to stumble across someone who butthurts their delicate sensibilities at all.
So they can remotely send your car to impound.
To get it to actually work will require 10x that in money and time. But long before then everyone will wind up in court, the whole thing will be scrapped and they'll start over with an Indian company in India.
Who automatically scream the west is of course worse. Because as everyone knows the US is a medieval theocratic death chamber where this sort of thing in fact takes place 1000's of times a day. By law.
No really it will. Apparently there's a law that says to have a website you have to run 45 different Javascripts nested 4 layers deep or more. And because of it basically 99% of the hosts out there are essentially slow junk.
Apple is now officially a shit company run by lawyers and accountants. Two years after Jobs and they are dead in the water. It's not that they CAN'T come with any good ideas, it's just cheaper to buy politicians and judges.
I mean the school admins. Have any of them ever seen first hand what kids to do EVERYTHING? Seriously. I will personally give a hundred dollars to the admin who never saw a kid playing paper ball tennis with one or never saw a kid throw one across the room. Kids are animals. They break HARDBACK BOOKS for fuck's sake.
But the best one is the power company charges me $5 to NOT get a paper bill OR $5 for a paper bill. One is a convenience charge and the other is for, oh who knows- recycling?
Fuck them all to flaming uranium hell forever.
I can tell you that the only reason the company hasn't imploded is because there are physically not enough seconds in the known universe with which to schedule all the conference calls needed to schedule the conference calls needed to round up the list of people needed to hold conference calls about who knows fucking what about anything. It's a company that in reality runs on its own through sheer inertia. There may not even BE anyone in charge and it wouldn't matter anyway.
HP clearly has too much empty real estate they can't sell so their accountants told them to use it all. Whether they have 80,000 seats open or not isn't the point - 'people will make do' typically 3 to an office.
HP clearly wants to throw as much US employment out the window as possible. What better way to do that when your staff quits on their own. No lawsuits no severance. And better yet America's Next Top Female Executive of the Ages, Marissa Meyer (All Hail and Amen: we're down to only 8 columns a day on her over at Henry Blodgett's Business Insider) did it already. So they won't even get much bad PR from it.
But importantly - HP has no earthly fucking clue what they are doing. And this is more of that. They were sitting around the Boardroom one day and one of them mentioned "Hey are there any companies out there we can buy for an absurd premium, fuck up and write off 90%?" Not hearing any good ideas, their response was "Well ok then let's fire our American workforce on the sly. We're run by a woman so how bad could the fallout possibly be?"
And off they went.
Because I don't know about you but there's nothing better than being nanomanaged by someone who can't even be happy with anything you do especially if it's to the tiniest detail the exact thing they demanded on the 50th revision of the thing they told you to do but endlessly tweaked and corrected.
Yeah that's the shit. That's great. I tell you it's even better when the nanomanager has OCD so they constantly go over and over and over and over and over the same things the same way making an infinitesimal change then changing it back then changing it back again.
But the best I mean the really really best thing of all is when your nanomanager scolds you in public for dragging your heels because that 100th change just wasn't perfect enough or on time.
Yes of course detaining someone for up to 8 or 9 hours per the law for stealing a trove of top secret documents is a war crime. Of course it is. 58,000 stolen documents
No one WANTS to do security. It doesn't advance anyone's career. On the other hand government is terrible at it too because all it ever wants to do is spend years writing another 2,600 page NIST standard no one can follow.
And Greenwald's husband was detained per law for being in possession of 58,000 classified secret and top secret documents belonging to the UK but that too was branded an abuse of power. Oh well. I guess we need to have no government at all.
He'd be locked away w/o trial in Europe per their own freedom and peace loving laws. Just so we're clear about that.
Oh wait, more people here take her seriously than this moron.
They'd sue Apple for this.
When someone comes to me with free pollution free energy with zero transition costs and it can be online in about a week the Greens will moan it's still a terrible idea, somehow.
It's occasionally funny when the two mix. Like when liberals defend neo nazis.
Or, in the long run it's a self correcting problem.
Or do we need mother government to also dictate the power output so we don't accidentally burn up all our devices, houses and cars too?
Hey here's an idea - why not mandate a single standard hardware platform and form factor for everything because lord knows, the EU, which has today an 80 page specification for the steering wheel of a bus is the best place to go for something like this.
That is, in IBM's mad rush to eliminate 100% of all US employment (except for executives) by 2015 they, admittedly occasionally, offer a devil's bargain to US based employees being cut: relocate overseas on your dime to take a job at CURRENT LOCAL wages and you get to keep your job.
Makes you wonder how much longer IBM will be an American company, legally. They may as well re incorporate in India or Ireland at this point. 50,000 regular full time employees in the US and dropping. Most new jobs going to low skill contractors. And the funny thing is that IBM routinely comes up in surveys as not one of the companies one would want to work for - not because it's a bureaucratic meatgrinder run by spreadsheet wielding accounts but because there's simply very very few actual jobs at IBM in the US anymore. If you're not an executive then you're either a recent college grad who might stay for 3 years or less or you're an old timer hanging on for dear life. There's nothing in the middle of that any more. There's basically zero IBM employees between the ages of 30 and 50. And the 50 year olds aren't going to 'share' their experience with anyone else, it's too risky. They've all become 'program managers' which is a fancy way of saying a staff job that consists of reporting the status reporting of status reporting of metrics of status reporting and creating new processes to report on the status of that.
No doubt some Imam is screaming for national arson day unless it's pulled off the air.