Actually, as someone else pointed out, Google is lousy at search. Where they excel is at using social network information to create an index that lists links that are relevant to keywords. I.e. Google is good at showing people the links that we want. They take the same input as a search engine and produce the same type of output; they just process it in a different fashion.
This is why they aren't so good at desktop search. Too individual. They don't have any social information to hint to them what documents are really relevant.
Yep, that's why Comcast is partnering with them. It couldn't be that its because Tivo is kicking their butts in the PVR market.
Not to mention that their partnership with Netflix (who just beat freakin' *WAL*MART* into submission) has the potential to be the next iTunes. For that matter, context sensitive ads could be the next adSense.
"You will see wireless headsets that can be used with iPod before you see convergence."
Exactly. I find it far more likely that Jobs will bring us a cell phone killer than that Gates will bring us an iPod killer.
People are overimpressed with Microsoft. They have three profitable divisions: business software, desktop OS, and server OS. They have three not as bad as they used to be businesses: small device windows, internet access, and gaming.
If they take out Palm, AOL, and PlayStation, then maybe I will take them seriously as a threat against iPod. The more likely effect of this is to prevent other people from competing. Apple will be the initial player and Microsoft will become the number two. Apple will set prices with their economies of scale; Microsoft will match those prices and lose money (just as they do vs. AOL and Sony).
People view Microsoft as this awesome force (2a. The power to inspire dread.). In truth, they got lucky once (IBM basically forced them to purchase DOS for IBM's computers) and did a smart thing once (we may think of them as being behind Apple in regards to GUIs, but they were ahead of WordPerfect and Lotus...what really mattered). Most everything else has been skiing down hill.
"and sure, courts have upheld their use of that trademark ("Lindows" dispute, et al),"
Actually, Microsoft bought out the Lindows claim. While Microsoft won in some non-English speaking country, they were poised to lose in the US. IIRC, it was about $20 million that Microsoft paid to settle the case.
Lindows jumped at it because they still would have needed a new name for the country in which Microsoft won.
The real success of WebTV for Microsoft is that it *didn't* become popular. Why the heck would they want to undercut their PC market? Cheap computers that do everything that most common users need? Where's the profit in that?
Microsoft bought WebTV to keep them from undercutting their market. They succeeded.
Gore and Kerry lost. Bush won. The US doesn't have antitrust laws anymore...at least not any that are in danger of being enforced.
The Clinton administration would certainly have blocked a takeover (which requires SEC approval). The Bush administration might not. Note that the last suit died when Bush took office.
It's also worth noting that in the area of servers, Microsoft is nowhere near a monopoly. All of Sun, Red Hat, and Suse compete in that space with large market share. Not to mention the free products, e.g. OpenBSD.
I like being warned about PDF because the Adobe browser plug in uses some odd part of Windows (Journal Viewer?) that I have turned off. As a result, it's a lot easier to do a "Save Link As" than to try to click on it.
"I thought that [the intent] would have been apparent since I was replying to a post that..., implying..."
That is not a good approach. On slashdot, you should never assume that anyone has read your parent. It is quite possible for you to get modded up and the parent not (as happened in this case). You should always view your post as existing in a vacuum. Any context that is necessary needs to be included in the post.
Not that I always do that properly either. It's not as easy as it sounds. My point is that one's goal should be to write posts that are self contained. Those who don't will find themselves having to come back and clarify their posts. Just like you did here:)
"A better question is why do we continue to send our criminals back into a system that doesn't fix anything?"
What else would you do with them? There is this myth that prisons are designed to rehabilitate criminals. They aren't. Prisons are designed to keep criminals from preying on the general population during the time of their incarceration. A side effect is that the threat of prison terms has some deterrent value.
What's your solution? Not prosecute crimes? What? It's not enough to say that the current system sucks; you need to propose a better system.
One doesn't need a penis to perform oral sex on a boy
No, one wouldn't. However, no one is suggesting removing the penis. The suggestion is to remove the *testicles*, since they produce the hormones associated with lust. Yes, it would still be physically possible to engage in sex acts with minors. However, most won't feel the urge to do so. Castration is an option now. Some offenders do in fact opt for it (and a shorter sentence).
Second, what would you remove in the case of a female offender?
Who cares? If there is a hormonal cause, remove the equivalent hormone producer. If not, then leave her in jail. Note that the link defines the ovaries as the equivalent of the testicles (i.e. a women can be castrated).
He can always be released from prison, but what do you do if you've castrated the wrong fellow?
Can you take back the years in prison? I didn't think so. The only punishment that is reversible is a fine. Chemical castration is as cancellable as prison (i.e. you can stop it). Physical castration is partially cancellable (hormone supplements are available -- just ask someone who had testicular cancer).
"They didn't rig the poll's necessarily, they just don't share the fact they don't poll at every voting location. Then they try to make it seem odd that the results don't match their bad prediction method."
That's not entirely true. The issue is not that the people running the polls are claiming that they mean anything. They aren't. Other people are trying to use the exit polls to predict the vote. The people who ran the polls know that they didn't run them in a way that can actually predict the vote.
Exit polls are not intended to predict the results of the election. They are intended to explain why people voted the way that they do.
If someone wants to do a real prediction poll, you would need to do the following:
1. Pick a scattering of polling places, controlling for demographics (e.g. race of registered voters, party of registration, gender, etc.). The demographics of the polling areas should mirror overall demographics.
2. Poll everyone. Traditional exit polls only poll a sample of people. As a result, they tend to be skewed towards easier targets (i.e. the people who don't cut across the lawn to avoid the pollsters). It is important to track people whom you would like to poll but who don't want to participate. In particular, it is quite possible that one political party might be less likely to talk to pollsters than to vote. That's relevant info when you are trying to project results.
3. Poll all day. Polling results from 8-4 will differ from the full 7-8 results. In particular, they undercount employed people (many of whom can't vote during work hours).
"Anyway, the poster may have had a point if the dev was blogging about KHTML security, but he wasn't even remotely near that topic."
In the blog, a KDE developer (Zack Rusin) is quoted as saying, "In fixing one problem, they were breaking a whole bunch of other things."
One of the things that they could have been breaking was security. Now, it's not definite that they had a security example, but security is under the aegis of "things that can be broken by quick fixes." In fact, it's the first thing that came to my mind as well. To my mind, when discussing bugs in software, security is *always* on the table. The mindset that it isn't is part of the reason why Firefox and IE keep popping out security holes.
The shell exploit was a clear example of something about which Firefox knew for several *years*, but waited until there was an active exploit to fix. Yes, the real hole was in the MS Windows security model. However, it was exploitable through the browser.
The exploit that 1.04 fixes is interesting because it's actually *two* security holes and a paradigm issue (Mozilla trusts update.mozilla.org by default; without that, even both security holes would not have been exploitable). Similar issue even, they trust by default.
Firefox is in fact more agressive about adding features than maintaining security, much like IE. Now, they seem to be doing better than IE, but that doesn't mean that they couldn't be doing even better.
I suspect that Fillion meant that *Universal* was blocking the TV show for the next three years. I.e. for the next three years, Serenity can only appear on the big screen.
Universal would have to be worried that Fox might renew the show and they'd lose all the advantages from the movie. Sequels are easy, safe money. If Universal is taking the risk of a possible flop of a movie (Whedon has had far more success with TV than movies -- his best aspect is his ability to evolve characters in interesting ways over time, not very useful in a ninety minute movie), I'm sure they want to have a guaranteed option on a couple sequels.
"Just imagine Sun running out of money and selling everything valuable (if you think this is impossible, just remember what almost happened to big blue)"
Digital's a better example. They also made unix workstations and servers (like Sun). Their IP is mostly owned by HP now (HP merged with Compaq who bought Digital). No "almost" about Digital.
Crazy stuff happens in the IP world. Look at the Woody Guthrie song ("This Land Is Your Land") that he issued with an open source style license (do whatever you want with it). The original license expired with the original copyright period. However, the copyright period was extended. As a result, something that the writer intended to be public domain is not. Part of the evils of perpetual copyright. Writers lose control of their works to their heirs.
Hmmm...just looked into the Guthrie issue some more. Apparently it may have worked out. It turns out that the original copyright might have been in '45, not '56. As a result, the extension was requested too late. However, the point holds. If they had requested the extension in '73, they would have been able to enforce copyright despite Guthrie's clear intention that they should not. Especially ludicrous is that prior to '73, they could not have enforced the copyright, as the song was originally issued with a license to copy and modify.
"So why can I borrow books for free but not movies?"
There are movies for free at some libraries.
It's also worth noting that movies are more expensive to produce than books. An author can turn out a fairly lengthy book in two years (e.g. the Wheel of Time books). The average movie takes hundreds of people to produce, not to mention materials.
"Patents and trademarks are based on the same notion that as a society we can agree on laws to restrict copying of information."
Err...no. Neither says anything about copying information. That's what copyright does. A patent regards *USE* of information. I.e. you can't use patented info without getting the patent owner's permission. You can copy patented info all that you want.
A trademark is about identity. A company can trademark, e.g., NutraSweet. They are then the only ones who can claim to sell NutraSweet. Therefore, you know that something labelled NutraSweet is backed by that company. Once the patent on aspartame expires (it may already have), then anyone can use the information to make aspartame.
The idea behind trademark is that a company can choose to be high quality. Have you ever heard the term, "the real McCoy?" It's based on the engineering of Elijah McCoy. His products were known as higher quality than those of his competitors. As a result, people wanted a "real McCoy" rather than an imitation.
"Why would we require something other than a passport if we need an ID for traveling within the country?"
Because I don't have a passport, but I do have a driver's license? A driver's license (or equivalent ID) is required to
1. Drink. 2. Drive. 3. Take a plane or bus. 4. Cash a check. 5. Some credit card transactions (note: the CC companies always require it for in person transactions; some businesses don't bother to enforce that requirement). 6. Work.
A passport can allow someone to do some of those things as well, but it's not the first thing that will be requested.
"they get to see how often each link is actually used to get to the page. That's extremely valuable, because it's hard to fake convincingly."
Err, no it isn't. It's dead easy to fake. Just send requests through the Google Web Accelerator. The page rank links are harder to fake, since you can cancel the benefits of certain sites manually (i.e. Google has the capability to ban people from their index). It's hard to fake a link from nbc.com. It is easy to fake clicking on a link on fake-site.com.
The best response that I could see to that would be to only use long established accounts for the page rank. Of course, that just makes virus zombies valuable again. If you corrupt a PC, you can spam their GWA proxy with your links. As a result, they will probably only use a small amount of this info in Page Rank.
"It could still be factually accurate. In fact, it almost certainly does cost between $20000 and £22000, since both numbers in either currencty would be within that range."
Yes, the statement was true. However, it did not have the meaning intended (which was to limit the range to 2000 of one currency unit or the other).
"Ah, no. I've watched plenty of people use their vacation to fill out their time when they were switching jobs. It's not a requirement."
I've done it actually (without an exit interview). You are mixing things though. The company does not have to require you to come in for an exit interview. They can waive that requirement if they want. The point is that they *can* require you to come back after a vacation to get paid for the vacation. They don't have to make you come back (heck, they can give you a bonus for nothing if they want), but they can.
"Say again how standard procedure justifies something which is illegal?"
What's illegal again? It is legal to require you to come to work to get paid for working. Period. You did not come to work. Therefore, you did not get paid. If they had withheld pay for time when you did come to work, then you would have had recourse. You do not have recourse for not getting paid for not going to work.
They only time that you would have been able to insist on vacation pay *after* leaving the job would have been if it was explicitly in your employment contract. Since most people don't think about that when getting a job, it usually isn't there.
Maybe the law should require that you get all vacation pay after quitting, but it generally doesn't. Part of the reason is that the point of vacation pay is to get you to take vacations so that you are rested and working better. If you didn't take the vacation during normal work, then they weren't getting the benefit from it.
Frankly, it's possible that they didn't have to offer you the opportunity to come in for the exit interview and collect the vacation pay. You walked out on them. Depending on the exact law and policy, you might have lost all your benefits at that moment.
"Standard procedure does not require a victim to go through an exit interview with their assailant."
Standard procedure does require victims to go through exit interviews with their assailants; it's called a trial. Victims are required to attend them. If the victim skips out, then the trial is thrown out and the defendant wins. Defendants have the right to face their accusers. Really though, that's irrelevant here.
If they actually did something that rose to the level of assailing you, forget this wimpy employment law/money stuff. You should have filed criminal charges against them.
Again, it's quite possible that they were doing something that should have been criminal but wasn't. That has nothing to do with the current subject, which is the question of whether or not an employer can be compelled to issue a paycheck for time worked.
"Are there any government agencies for job-related conflicts, like in Socialist Europe?"
In the US, there is a federal labor board and usually a state labor board. It would almost certainly be the state agency that would have jurisdiction in this case.
I see this as less of a question about legal options. Those can be determined by calling the state labor department. The question here is how the person should handle interaction with the boss. The goal being *not* to go to court.
Even if there weren't regulations, the US is a common law country. There is a great deal of contract law precedent.
"he said basically said that he'd falsify paperwork saying that I had already used my vacation time."
Yep, that's a good idea. It's not possible to detect false paperwork. Just ask Enron, Worldcomm, etc.
Withholding a paycheck is a civil case. At worst, it's a fine. Faking paperwork and testifying to it (assuming you sued over it) is a *crime*. People go to jail for it.
"They wrote me off, denied my unemployment claim, and withheld the paycheck for the two weeks' vacation."
Technically, they may have been legally in the right in your case. To take a vacation, you have to come back at the end. I.e. you were required to come in for the exit interview.
This guy's situation is different. He's actively working. It is not legal to withhold a pay check for work actually done. It is legal to fire someone (and not pay them) for not complying with reasonable work demands (e.g. an exit interview).
I'm sorry to hear that you had such a bad work experience. However, an exit interview is not an unreasonable request. Heck, I'd think of it as standard procedure.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, but Microsoft's buying Red Hat. They said it on /. so it must be true.
"so Google only does searching"
Actually, as someone else pointed out, Google is lousy at search. Where they excel is at using social network information to create an index that lists links that are relevant to keywords. I.e. Google is good at showing people the links that we want. They take the same input as a search engine and produce the same type of output; they just process it in a different fashion.
This is why they aren't so good at desktop search. Too individual. They don't have any social information to hint to them what documents are really relevant.
"TiVo will be next"
Yep, that's why Comcast is partnering with them. It couldn't be that its because Tivo is kicking their butts in the PVR market.
Not to mention that their partnership with Netflix (who just beat freakin' *WAL*MART* into submission) has the potential to be the next iTunes. For that matter, context sensitive ads could be the next adSense.
"You will see wireless headsets that can be used with iPod before you see convergence."
Exactly. I find it far more likely that Jobs will bring us a cell phone killer than that Gates will bring us an iPod killer.
People are overimpressed with Microsoft. They have three profitable divisions: business software, desktop OS, and server OS. They have three not as bad as they used to be businesses: small device windows, internet access, and gaming.
If they take out Palm, AOL, and PlayStation, then maybe I will take them seriously as a threat against iPod. The more likely effect of this is to prevent other people from competing. Apple will be the initial player and Microsoft will become the number two. Apple will set prices with their economies of scale; Microsoft will match those prices and lose money (just as they do vs. AOL and Sony).
People view Microsoft as this awesome force (2a. The power to inspire dread.). In truth, they got lucky once (IBM basically forced them to purchase DOS for IBM's computers) and did a smart thing once (we may think of them as being behind Apple in regards to GUIs, but they were ahead of WordPerfect and Lotus...what really mattered). Most everything else has been skiing down hill.
"and sure, courts have upheld their use of that trademark ("Lindows" dispute, et al),"
Actually, Microsoft bought out the Lindows claim. While Microsoft won in some non-English speaking country, they were poised to lose in the US. IIRC, it was about $20 million that Microsoft paid to settle the case.
Lindows jumped at it because they still would have needed a new name for the country in which Microsoft won.
The real success of WebTV for Microsoft is that it *didn't* become popular. Why the heck would they want to undercut their PC market? Cheap computers that do everything that most common users need? Where's the profit in that?
Microsoft bought WebTV to keep them from undercutting their market. They succeeded.
Gore and Kerry lost. Bush won. The US doesn't have antitrust laws anymore...at least not any that are in danger of being enforced.
The Clinton administration would certainly have blocked a takeover (which requires SEC approval). The Bush administration might not. Note that the last suit died when Bush took office.
It's also worth noting that in the area of servers, Microsoft is nowhere near a monopoly. All of Sun, Red Hat, and Suse compete in that space with large market share. Not to mention the free products, e.g. OpenBSD.
I like being warned about PDF because the Adobe browser plug in uses some odd part of Windows (Journal Viewer?) that I have turned off. As a result, it's a lot easier to do a "Save Link As" than to try to click on it.
"I thought that [the intent] would have been apparent since I was replying to a post that ..., implying ..."
:)
That is not a good approach. On slashdot, you should never assume that anyone has read your parent. It is quite possible for you to get modded up and the parent not (as happened in this case). You should always view your post as existing in a vacuum. Any context that is necessary needs to be included in the post.
Not that I always do that properly either. It's not as easy as it sounds. My point is that one's goal should be to write posts that are self contained. Those who don't will find themselves having to come back and clarify their posts. Just like you did here
"(No, I *don't* like tabs!)"
Amen.
"A better question is why do we continue to send our criminals back into a system that doesn't fix anything?"
What else would you do with them? There is this myth that prisons are designed to rehabilitate criminals. They aren't. Prisons are designed to keep criminals from preying on the general population during the time of their incarceration. A side effect is that the threat of prison terms has some deterrent value.
What's your solution? Not prosecute crimes? What? It's not enough to say that the current system sucks; you need to propose a better system.
One doesn't need a penis to perform oral sex on a boy
No, one wouldn't. However, no one is suggesting removing the penis. The suggestion is to remove the *testicles*, since they produce the hormones associated with lust. Yes, it would still be physically possible to engage in sex acts with minors. However, most won't feel the urge to do so. Castration is an option now. Some offenders do in fact opt for it (and a shorter sentence).
Second, what would you remove in the case of a female offender?
Who cares? If there is a hormonal cause, remove the equivalent hormone producer. If not, then leave her in jail. Note that the link defines the ovaries as the equivalent of the testicles (i.e. a women can be castrated).
He can always be released from prison, but what do you do if you've castrated the wrong fellow?
Can you take back the years in prison? I didn't think so. The only punishment that is reversible is a fine. Chemical castration is as cancellable as prison (i.e. you can stop it). Physical castration is partially cancellable (hormone supplements are available -- just ask someone who had testicular cancer).
"They didn't rig the poll's necessarily, they just don't share the fact they don't poll at every voting location. Then they try to make it seem odd that the results don't match their bad prediction method."
That's not entirely true. The issue is not that the people running the polls are claiming that they mean anything. They aren't. Other people are trying to use the exit polls to predict the vote. The people who ran the polls know that they didn't run them in a way that can actually predict the vote.
Exit polls are not intended to predict the results of the election. They are intended to explain why people voted the way that they do.
If someone wants to do a real prediction poll, you would need to do the following:
1. Pick a scattering of polling places, controlling for demographics (e.g. race of registered voters, party of registration, gender, etc.). The demographics of the polling areas should mirror overall demographics.
2. Poll everyone. Traditional exit polls only poll a sample of people. As a result, they tend to be skewed towards easier targets (i.e. the people who don't cut across the lawn to avoid the pollsters). It is important to track people whom you would like to poll but who don't want to participate. In particular, it is quite possible that one political party might be less likely to talk to pollsters than to vote. That's relevant info when you are trying to project results.
3. Poll all day. Polling results from 8-4 will differ from the full 7-8 results. In particular, they undercount employed people (many of whom can't vote during work hours).
Short of that, polls don't mean much.
"Anyway, the poster may have had a point if the dev was blogging about KHTML security, but he wasn't even remotely near that topic."
In the blog, a KDE developer (Zack Rusin) is quoted as saying, "In fixing one problem, they were breaking a whole bunch of other things."
One of the things that they could have been breaking was security. Now, it's not definite that they had a security example, but security is under the aegis of "things that can be broken by quick fixes." In fact, it's the first thing that came to my mind as well. To my mind, when discussing bugs in software, security is *always* on the table. The mindset that it isn't is part of the reason why Firefox and IE keep popping out security holes.
The shell exploit was a clear example of something about which Firefox knew for several *years*, but waited until there was an active exploit to fix. Yes, the real hole was in the MS Windows security model. However, it was exploitable through the browser.
The exploit that 1.04 fixes is interesting because it's actually *two* security holes and a paradigm issue (Mozilla trusts update.mozilla.org by default; without that, even both security holes would not have been exploitable). Similar issue even, they trust by default.
Firefox is in fact more agressive about adding features than maintaining security, much like IE. Now, they seem to be doing better than IE, but that doesn't mean that they couldn't be doing even better.
I suspect that Fillion meant that *Universal* was blocking the TV show for the next three years. I.e. for the next three years, Serenity can only appear on the big screen.
Universal would have to be worried that Fox might renew the show and they'd lose all the advantages from the movie. Sequels are easy, safe money. If Universal is taking the risk of a possible flop of a movie (Whedon has had far more success with TV than movies -- his best aspect is his ability to evolve characters in interesting ways over time, not very useful in a ninety minute movie), I'm sure they want to have a guaranteed option on a couple sequels.
"Just imagine Sun running out of money and selling everything valuable (if you think this is impossible, just remember what almost happened to big blue)"
Digital's a better example. They also made unix workstations and servers (like Sun). Their IP is mostly owned by HP now (HP merged with Compaq who bought Digital). No "almost" about Digital.
Crazy stuff happens in the IP world. Look at the Woody Guthrie song ("This Land Is Your Land") that he issued with an open source style license (do whatever you want with it). The original license expired with the original copyright period. However, the copyright period was extended. As a result, something that the writer intended to be public domain is not. Part of the evils of perpetual copyright. Writers lose control of their works to their heirs.
Hmmm...just looked into the Guthrie issue some more. Apparently it may have worked out. It turns out that the original copyright might have been in '45, not '56. As a result, the extension was requested too late. However, the point holds. If they had requested the extension in '73, they would have been able to enforce copyright despite Guthrie's clear intention that they should not. Especially ludicrous is that prior to '73, they could not have enforced the copyright, as the song was originally issued with a license to copy and modify.
"So why can I borrow books for free but not movies?"
There are movies for free at some libraries.
It's also worth noting that movies are more expensive to produce than books. An author can turn out a fairly lengthy book in two years (e.g. the Wheel of Time books). The average movie takes hundreds of people to produce, not to mention materials.
"Patents and trademarks are based on the same notion that as a society we can agree on laws to restrict copying of information."
Err...no. Neither says anything about copying information. That's what copyright does. A patent regards *USE* of information. I.e. you can't use patented info without getting the patent owner's permission. You can copy patented info all that you want.
A trademark is about identity. A company can trademark, e.g., NutraSweet. They are then the only ones who can claim to sell NutraSweet. Therefore, you know that something labelled NutraSweet is backed by that company. Once the patent on aspartame expires (it may already have), then anyone can use the information to make aspartame.
The idea behind trademark is that a company can choose to be high quality. Have you ever heard the term, "the real McCoy?" It's based on the engineering of Elijah McCoy. His products were known as higher quality than those of his competitors. As a result, people wanted a "real McCoy" rather than an imitation.
"Why would we require something other than a passport if we need an ID for traveling within the country?"
Because I don't have a passport, but I do have a driver's license? A driver's license (or equivalent ID) is required to
1. Drink.
2. Drive.
3. Take a plane or bus.
4. Cash a check.
5. Some credit card transactions (note: the CC companies always require it for in person transactions; some businesses don't bother to enforce that requirement).
6. Work.
A passport can allow someone to do some of those things as well, but it's not the first thing that will be requested.
"they get to see how often each link is actually used to get to the page. That's extremely valuable, because it's hard to fake convincingly."
Err, no it isn't. It's dead easy to fake. Just send requests through the Google Web Accelerator. The page rank links are harder to fake, since you can cancel the benefits of certain sites manually (i.e. Google has the capability to ban people from their index). It's hard to fake a link from nbc.com. It is easy to fake clicking on a link on fake-site.com.
The best response that I could see to that would be to only use long established accounts for the page rank. Of course, that just makes virus zombies valuable again. If you corrupt a PC, you can spam their GWA proxy with your links. As a result, they will probably only use a small amount of this info in Page Rank.
"It could still be factually accurate. In fact, it almost certainly does cost between $20000 and £22000, since both numbers in either currencty would be within that range."
Yes, the statement was true. However, it did not have the meaning intended (which was to limit the range to 2000 of one currency unit or the other).
"Ah, no. I've watched plenty of people use their vacation to fill out their time when they were switching jobs. It's not a requirement."
I've done it actually (without an exit interview). You are mixing things though. The company does not have to require you to come in for an exit interview. They can waive that requirement if they want. The point is that they *can* require you to come back after a vacation to get paid for the vacation. They don't have to make you come back (heck, they can give you a bonus for nothing if they want), but they can.
"Say again how standard procedure justifies something which is illegal?"
What's illegal again? It is legal to require you to come to work to get paid for working. Period. You did not come to work. Therefore, you did not get paid. If they had withheld pay for time when you did come to work, then you would have had recourse. You do not have recourse for not getting paid for not going to work.
They only time that you would have been able to insist on vacation pay *after* leaving the job would have been if it was explicitly in your employment contract. Since most people don't think about that when getting a job, it usually isn't there.
Maybe the law should require that you get all vacation pay after quitting, but it generally doesn't. Part of the reason is that the point of vacation pay is to get you to take vacations so that you are rested and working better. If you didn't take the vacation during normal work, then they weren't getting the benefit from it.
Frankly, it's possible that they didn't have to offer you the opportunity to come in for the exit interview and collect the vacation pay. You walked out on them. Depending on the exact law and policy, you might have lost all your benefits at that moment.
"Standard procedure does not require a victim to go through an exit interview with their assailant."
Standard procedure does require victims to go through exit interviews with their assailants; it's called a trial. Victims are required to attend them. If the victim skips out, then the trial is thrown out and the defendant wins. Defendants have the right to face their accusers. Really though, that's irrelevant here.
If they actually did something that rose to the level of assailing you, forget this wimpy employment law/money stuff. You should have filed criminal charges against them.
Again, it's quite possible that they were doing something that should have been criminal but wasn't. That has nothing to do with the current subject, which is the question of whether or not an employer can be compelled to issue a paycheck for time worked.
"Are there any government agencies for job-related conflicts, like in Socialist Europe?"
In the US, there is a federal labor board and usually a state labor board. It would almost certainly be the state agency that would have jurisdiction in this case.
I see this as less of a question about legal options. Those can be determined by calling the state labor department. The question here is how the person should handle interaction with the boss. The goal being *not* to go to court.
Even if there weren't regulations, the US is a common law country. There is a great deal of contract law precedent.
"he said basically said that he'd falsify paperwork saying that I had already used my vacation time."
Yep, that's a good idea. It's not possible to detect false paperwork. Just ask Enron, Worldcomm, etc.
Withholding a paycheck is a civil case. At worst, it's a fine. Faking paperwork and testifying to it (assuming you sued over it) is a *crime*. People go to jail for it.
"They wrote me off, denied my unemployment claim, and withheld the paycheck for the two weeks' vacation."
Technically, they may have been legally in the right in your case. To take a vacation, you have to come back at the end. I.e. you were required to come in for the exit interview.
This guy's situation is different. He's actively working. It is not legal to withhold a pay check for work actually done. It is legal to fire someone (and not pay them) for not complying with reasonable work demands (e.g. an exit interview).
I'm sorry to hear that you had such a bad work experience. However, an exit interview is not an unreasonable request. Heck, I'd think of it as standard procedure.