Except that it's Obama's Federal attorney who got the money back. It's Republican Bloomberg who helped SAIC rob it.
You Republicans have a very limited playbook: commit a crime, and blame the Democrat who catches you. It's a mental disease.
Calling Bloomberg a Republican isn't exactly accurate... until 2001, he was a Democrat. Then he switched to the Republican party--until he declared himself an Independent in 2007. I think it's fair to simply call him a corrupt, opportunistic scumbag. Of course, this is true of most politicians.
That is the problem with the entire stock trading mentality. Stocks are viewed as commodity that makes the investor rich, no one views them as investing a company that will succeed with the investor's money.
Given that so many companies don't pay dividends, I can't help but wonder what "investors" are actually investing in? I mean, I'll grant it's not true across the board, but pick any tech company, and if they're making money, it's for the sole purpose of sticking it in the bank. Apple has, what, $100B in the bank? To what end? It's not hard to see why we have this mentality, and why our market is all about finding a bigger idiot.
FWIW, my money says that one day we're going to find that something like the Teamster's pension scandal has happened again.
> he traded immortality for the knowledge of good and evil. Essentially for a loss of innocence. Pretty crappy trade if you ask me.
You think that's bad? The Highlander fought and beat every other immortal to gain "the prize". What was "the prize" you ask? He lost his immortality and gained mind-reading. That's like picking the goat behind door number 3.
Ignoring the mind-reading bit, the loss of immortality as the prize does make quite a bit of sense--I mean, listen to the words of "who wants to live forever."
The US military budget exceeds the rest of the world's combined military budget by $200 billion. Our military budget represents about 43% of world military spending.
I'm, not disagreeing with your basic point, but the above two statements are mutually exclusive.
The military (in any country) are driven by matters of life and death which trump merely economic matters. If the US military goes metric it's a hint that metric is superior to imperial units..
"Superior" doesn't enter into it--it's because of NATO.
There are two doors. Each guarded by one guard. Both will tell you which door goes where (one to where you want to go, the other to certain doom), but there's a catch. You can only ask one of them, and one always tells the truth while the other always lies. So you ask one of them "If I had asked the other guard which door was the correct door, which door would he have pointed to?", and whichever door he points to, you take the other one. It's a twisted logic, but there you go.
why didn't you switch when you could use ebay as search engine in firefox? or wikipedia? or amazon? or bing? or yagoo? have you noticed, default is google, and every single engine can be set as default, should you want to.
basically, you're dumb.
I don't think he's complaining about the fact that there are search engine choices, but rather that the biggest new feature in a major version update is "you can use twitter as the default search engine." I mean, seriously, this is Mozilla saying, "We broke all your addons, but in return for the massive inconvenience, we've given you a trivially implemented new feature."
Landing? Shit, ILS approaches are so easy six-year-olds can do them.
I've made exactly one ILS approach in my life (during my PP-ASEL training, my CFI was a little bored and had me try one while we were doing some hood time) and I would never suggest it is something so easy anyone can do it. Even in a C172 moving along at 60kts it was a hell of an exercise (especially since it wasn't briefed before hand). I would have made the runway, but it was an ugly assed approach.
Yes, I'm sure a six year old could be taught to do it. That doesn't make it easy.
We have a different type of electronic voting. Oregon uses vote by mail, and each person fills out a scan-tron form (something a 2nd grader can do). Not only is there a paper trail, but it is proven technology.
Voting intimidation is eliminated when you vote in your own home and you don't have to deal with crowded poll places. I don't understand why more states don't do this.
You think this is less prone to voter intimidation? It seems that something like, "bring your ballot to Joe's Bar at 2:00PM on Friday. We're going to fill it out and vote for $CANDIDATE, then we're going to drop it in the mailbox. If you don't comply, I'll break your legs," would be a rather trivial exercise.
idiots in the US voted in a corporate puppet who couldn't articulate two sentences in a row TWICE.
Oh, come now. Bush managed to string together a coherent statement at least three--maybe even four--times in his eight years. Saying he couldn't manage to do it just twice is base libel.
There is absolutely nothing unreasonable about allowing a family to benefit from another family member's labors. Lord of the Rings is a great example.
While it's arguable that the mithril shirt and Sting came in quite handy, I can't agree that Frodo really benefited from Bilbo's labors--in the end, they brought him nothing but pain.
...okay, so that's really bad humor, but I couldn't resist.
I always liked the Kevin Spacey quote from the end of K-PAX:
Prot: I wanna tell you something Mark, something you do not yet know, that we K-PAXians have been around long enough to have discovered. The universe will expand, then it will collapse back on itself, then will expand again. It will repeat this process forever. What you don't you know is that when the universe expands again, everything will be as it is now. Whatever mistakes you make this time around, you will live through on your next pass. Every mistake you make, you will live through again, & again, forever. So my advice to you is to get it right this time around. Because this time is all you have.
Honestly, it's a marketing gimmick. An OC3 is a specified bandwidth I can saturate 24/7/365/1000 That OC3 has 150meg UP and DOWN. No bandwidth caps, no ports blocked, no throttling, etc....
This is a true statement, but when you read slashdot posts, this is what people expect out of a residential internet connection, even though this expectation just isn't realistic. "zOMG, Comcast is throttling teh bittorrentz!!!!11one" is a common refrain, and we hear about how over subscription is immoral, should be illegal, etc.
Take away these limitations, though, and you're left with the idea that people want the performance and class of service of an enterprise grade circuit, and want to pay peanuts for it. I stand by my statement above: I cannot understand why people find this "expensive."
You know, the kind the rest of us get for our work. You've never worked in the private sector, have you...I mean that's just hilarious.
FWIW, I've almost always received merit raises, even when faced with a relatively bad economy. They might not be the biggest in the world when the company was struggling, but they were more than fair when things were going well. I've worked for companies with 50 employees and a few hundred thousand a year in sales, and I've also worked for a company with 400,000 employees and $100B in sales, and my experiences were largely similar in this regard.
Be good at what you do. Be willing to take on responsibilities outside your core job functions. Be someone your boss doesn't have to actively manage. Don't be a dick. Understand what the company you work for does, and how they do it. (I'll concede this last one may not be feasible if you work for a large company with a very diverse business... you should be able to figure things out at the division level, though).
Do these things and you will, typically, be well compensated for it. If not, find a better class of employer.
As long as everybody is equally unhappy, then things are fair. What would be unfair is for certain people to be happy when others are not.
Based on the rest of your post, I don't think you are advocating this position (merely stating why someone would do this). Still, I'd suggest that anyone who agrees with this notion to read Harrison Bergeron, where "equality of outcome" is the central theme. This is where we will eventually be led.
That's actually why there's blackout periods for insiders buying/selling shares, as part of the Sarbanes-Oxley rules. When I was at Dell, I wasn't allowed to buy/sell within 30 days (either way) of any public statement regarding earnings or future plans.
Is that really correct? I'm generally in favor of laws and rules that prevent insiders from profiting on confidential information at the expense of the public, but the above seems really, really, harsh. The company does, at a minimum, four such statements a year (quarterly earnings), not counting other possible announcements (forecasts, Jobs doing his "one more thing" bit, etc). I mean, even just looking at quarterly announcements, assuming that they were equally spread across the year, you would prohibit anyone classified as an insider from trading for 244 calendar days, or 2/3rds of the year! Add on anything outside of this, and you are basically locked in or locked out of the market. completely.
It's like one of those laws that says sex offenders can't live within 1000' of a school--good luck finding anywhere that actually meets this definition in any US city.
The average Canadian should start using end-to-end encryption. And why not? It's what the criminals are already doing. May as well achieve parity with them.
If DPI is on the table, then DPI-SSL is the next logical step. Appliances to do this already exist for the corporate LAN, and basically executing a MITM attack, and proxying the traffic. The enterprise admin just installs a certificate on the client devices, and, as far as the user is concerned, everything is pretty much transparent.
Once the government gets you used to reading all of your unencrypted traffic, then when they go after your encrypted traffic, they will have already mostly won the fight--they will make the argument that "only those with something to hide would object," and they will succeed.
Offshoring maintenance? As in having maint done in a stopover in Hong Kong or Cyprus instead of the States? I hadn't heard of that. Any more info on that?
Worse than this. See this NPR story. Aircraft are flown from their home base to Mexico or South America for maintenance by some airlines, because the overall costs (including the rather high per hour operating costs of moving the aircraft) is cheaper than domestic. Another NPR story lists some of the problems with this. An except from the second story:
One mechanic says that just a few days earlier, he and his colleagues were replacing a kind of rivet, commonly called a Hi-Lok, along the fuselage. The airline's manual said they should use a "shear" Hi-Lok that's carefully engineered to withstand a specific amount of pressure on a specific part of the plane. But the mechanic says Aeroman didn't have the right Hi-Loks on hand, so the supervisor told them to use "tension" Hi-Loks that weren't approved for that repair.
The mechanic says he resisted, because the wrong Hi-Loks "would cause, actually, a crack in the fuselage when there is turbulence." When the supervisor pressured him to use the incorrect part anyway, "I told him no, because the manual does not allow me to do that," he says. But the supervisor ordered him "to go ahead and install it, because we were in a hurry to turn around the airplane."
Another mechanic ticked off other problems at Aeroman. Some employees don't store glues at the required temperatures, he says. That means the glues could fail — which potentially means that parts of the airplane could fall apart.
And this mechanic says some workers can't even read the airlines' repair manuals. The manuals are written in English, but some mechanics at Aeroman can't read English — including him. So, the mechanic says, "you have to ask for help [from] another colleague. And in my case I ask for help, often." The problem is mechanics are under so much pressure to finish the repairs that they don't have much time to coach their colleagues.
I really fail to see how it is Apples fault that a third part App does something.
When you require that EVERY application that can run on your platform be approved by your personnel for sale, I'd say that you bear some (though by no means all) responsibility for the application's behavior.
Well, unless you are one of those strict Constitutionalists that hypocritically asserts that Obama should have unconstitutionally ignored Bush's last budget, in which case I'm calling you a hypocritical ass.
Most assuredly not... to suggest so would be to invite anarchy as the Executive does whatever the hell it wants.
Your point about Bush signing that budget is, however, well taken. I believe I owe Red Flayer a bit of an apology for not taking that into account. However, I stand by what I said above: the legislature controls the purse strings, and the democrats have controlled that since 2007.
Slashdot Mirror
Except that it's Obama's Federal attorney who got the money back. It's Republican Bloomberg who helped SAIC rob it.
You Republicans have a very limited playbook: commit a crime, and blame the Democrat who catches you. It's a mental disease.
Calling Bloomberg a Republican isn't exactly accurate... until 2001, he was a Democrat. Then he switched to the Republican party--until he declared himself an Independent in 2007. I think it's fair to simply call him a corrupt, opportunistic scumbag. Of course, this is true of most politicians.
Dell still has AMD Optiplex machines, so I don't quite see where you're going with this...
That is the problem with the entire stock trading mentality. Stocks are viewed as commodity that makes the investor rich, no one views them as investing a company that will succeed with the investor's money.
Given that so many companies don't pay dividends, I can't help but wonder what "investors" are actually investing in? I mean, I'll grant it's not true across the board, but pick any tech company, and if they're making money, it's for the sole purpose of sticking it in the bank. Apple has, what, $100B in the bank? To what end? It's not hard to see why we have this mentality, and why our market is all about finding a bigger idiot.
FWIW, my money says that one day we're going to find that something like the Teamster's pension scandal has happened again.
> he traded immortality for the knowledge of good and evil. Essentially for a loss of innocence. Pretty crappy trade if you ask me.
You think that's bad? The Highlander fought and beat every other immortal to gain "the prize". What was "the prize" you ask? He lost his immortality and gained mind-reading. That's like picking the goat behind door number 3.
Ignoring the mind-reading bit, the loss of immortality as the prize does make quite a bit of sense--I mean, listen to the words of "who wants to live forever."
The US military budget exceeds the rest of the world's combined military budget by $200 billion. Our military budget represents about 43% of world military spending.
I'm, not disagreeing with your basic point, but the above two statements are mutually exclusive.
The military (in any country) are driven by matters of life and death which trump merely economic matters. If the US military goes metric it's a hint that metric is superior to imperial units..
"Superior" doesn't enter into it--it's because of NATO.
This is my favorite solution to the problem.
I don't think he's complaining about the fact that there are search engine choices, but rather that the biggest new feature in a major version update is "you can use twitter as the default search engine." I mean, seriously, this is Mozilla saying, "We broke all your addons, but in return for the massive inconvenience, we've given you a trivially implemented new feature."
I've made exactly one ILS approach in my life (during my PP-ASEL training, my CFI was a little bored and had me try one while we were doing some hood time) and I would never suggest it is something so easy anyone can do it. Even in a C172 moving along at 60kts it was a hell of an exercise (especially since it wasn't briefed before hand). I would have made the runway, but it was an ugly assed approach.
Yes, I'm sure a six year old could be taught to do it. That doesn't make it easy.
This is what you want. Not, strictly speaking, legal, but pretty much every sport you may want to watch can usually be found on the forums, live.
You think this is less prone to voter intimidation? It seems that something like, "bring your ballot to Joe's Bar at 2:00PM on Friday. We're going to fill it out and vote for $CANDIDATE, then we're going to drop it in the mailbox. If you don't comply, I'll break your legs," would be a rather trivial exercise.
Add the user to your foes list, and set your modifier for foes to -6, and your threshold to some value greater than or equal to 0?
Oh, come now. Bush managed to string together a coherent statement at least three--maybe even four--times in his eight years. Saying he couldn't manage to do it just twice is base libel.
While it's arguable that the mithril shirt and Sting came in quite handy, I can't agree that Frodo really benefited from Bilbo's labors--in the end, they brought him nothing but pain.
...okay, so that's really bad humor, but I couldn't resist.
I always liked the Kevin Spacey quote from the end of K-PAX:
Prot: I wanna tell you something Mark, something you do not yet know, that we K-PAXians have been around long enough to have discovered. The universe will expand, then it will collapse back on itself, then will expand again. It will repeat this process forever. What you don't you know is that when the universe expands again, everything will be as it is now. Whatever mistakes you make this time around, you will live through on your next pass. Every mistake you make, you will live through again, & again, forever. So my advice to you is to get it right this time around. Because this time is all you have.
This is a true statement, but when you read slashdot posts, this is what people expect out of a residential internet connection, even though this expectation just isn't realistic. "zOMG, Comcast is throttling teh bittorrentz!!!!11one" is a common refrain, and we hear about how over subscription is immoral, should be illegal, etc.
Take away these limitations, though, and you're left with the idea that people want the performance and class of service of an enterprise grade circuit, and want to pay peanuts for it. I stand by my statement above: I cannot understand why people find this "expensive."
You know, the kind the rest of us get for our work.
You've never worked in the private sector, have you...I mean that's just hilarious.
FWIW, I've almost always received merit raises, even when faced with a relatively bad economy. They might not be the biggest in the world when the company was struggling, but they were more than fair when things were going well. I've worked for companies with 50 employees and a few hundred thousand a year in sales, and I've also worked for a company with 400,000 employees and $100B in sales, and my experiences were largely similar in this regard.
Be good at what you do. Be willing to take on responsibilities outside your core job functions. Be someone your boss doesn't have to actively manage. Don't be a dick. Understand what the company you work for does, and how they do it. (I'll concede this last one may not be feasible if you work for a large company with a very diverse business... you should be able to figure things out at the division level, though).
Do these things and you will, typically, be well compensated for it. If not, find a better class of employer.
Based on the rest of your post, I don't think you are advocating this position (merely stating why someone would do this). Still, I'd suggest that anyone who agrees with this notion to read Harrison Bergeron, where "equality of outcome" is the central theme. This is where we will eventually be led.
I honestly can't believe that people bitch about paying $200 a month for speed comparable to an OC3 ($20k/month).
Is that really correct? I'm generally in favor of laws and rules that prevent insiders from profiting on confidential information at the expense of the public, but the above seems really, really, harsh. The company does, at a minimum, four such statements a year (quarterly earnings), not counting other possible announcements (forecasts, Jobs doing his "one more thing" bit, etc). I mean, even just looking at quarterly announcements, assuming that they were equally spread across the year, you would prohibit anyone classified as an insider from trading for 244 calendar days, or 2/3rds of the year! Add on anything outside of this, and you are basically locked in or locked out of the market. completely.
It's like one of those laws that says sex offenders can't live within 1000' of a school--good luck finding anywhere that actually meets this definition in any US city.
If DPI is on the table, then DPI-SSL is the next logical step. Appliances to do this already exist for the corporate LAN, and basically executing a MITM attack, and proxying the traffic. The enterprise admin just installs a certificate on the client devices, and, as far as the user is concerned, everything is pretty much transparent.
Once the government gets you used to reading all of your unencrypted traffic, then when they go after your encrypted traffic, they will have already mostly won the fight--they will make the argument that "only those with something to hide would object," and they will succeed.
I give it 5-10 years before this is a reality.
Offshoring maintenance? As in having maint done in a stopover in Hong Kong or Cyprus instead of the States? I hadn't heard of that. Any more info on that?
Worse than this. See this NPR story. Aircraft are flown from their home base to Mexico or South America for maintenance by some airlines, because the overall costs (including the rather high per hour operating costs of moving the aircraft) is cheaper than domestic. Another NPR story lists some of the problems with this. An except from the second story:
I really fail to see how it is Apples fault that a third part App does something.
When you require that EVERY application that can run on your platform be approved by your personnel for sale, I'd say that you bear some (though by no means all) responsibility for the application's behavior.
I noted elsewhere in here that I owed Red Flayer an apology for not catching that subtlety. You're correct, of course.
Most assuredly not... to suggest so would be to invite anarchy as the Executive does whatever the hell it wants.
Your point about Bush signing that budget is, however, well taken. I believe I owe Red Flayer a bit of an apology for not taking that into account. However, I stand by what I said above: the legislature controls the purse strings, and the democrats have controlled that since 2007.