Can I expense my clothing bill?
on
Suit Up Or Ship Out?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Can I expense my clothing bill? How about a tax deduction? (I'm serious -- if the clothing standards are "required" by the company, then there should be some compensation.)
The thing about this and any management-mandate is, if you are not replaceable and management realizes this, (and not being able to replace you means failure of the department, division, or company) then you have virtually unlimited bargaining power.
Otherwise, you need to toe the line. It's that simple.
No. The government has specific immunities from the sort of lawsuit you suggest. The recourse you, as a citizen, have is: The right to petition for redress of grievances, and the right to vote. If all the people who complained, would vote (at ALL levels), we'd see some serious changes. Unfortunately, people have been propagandized into believing that voting won't make a difference, so instead our process runs on apathy. The status quo DEPENDS on voter apathy!
Ah. Okay. I'm still struggling with what's meant by a Hilbert Space. Actually, I'm still struggling with the plane, r-theta coords, and I totally suck at arithmetic.:-)
But I'm still going to keep taking maths and eventually get up to number theory and scientific computing. It might take 10 more years but I'm working on it.
"Maybe, just maybe... the EULA doesn't violate the banking laws."
Maybe it doesn't. Probably it doesn't.
The question is whether a party is entitled to agree to the EULA. If they are bound by other conditions then they might not be able to.
Say I have a product to sell you, and an agreement that goes along with that sale. Let's say it's something perfectly legal for me to sell it, and there's nothing really wrong with the terms of the agreement.
Now, if you have a contract with someone that says you won't buy that product from me, or if you have a court order forbidding you to buy it, it's not legal for you to do this business with me. I haven't broken the law if you do, but you might have.
If a bank has an agreement with the Federal government or with their customer that precludes agreeing to the EULA, they are not entitled to use this product, and they may have created some liability and legal exposure by doing so.
Now, as to the scope of the exposure, it's not clear whether we're talking about "losing a customer or two", "CEO does jail time", "Company gets a bankrupting fine", or "nothing really happens".
The question is not whether the EULA is legal, but whether certain types of organizations can agree to it because they are bound by prior agreements with others. Probably all that will come of this will be a differently worded license from Microsoft for their financial/medical customers. Consumers will still get the full shaft.
"This is known as the birthday paradox, so named because this precise logic means that given 23 people in a room, there's a +50% chance that two people have the same birthday."
The same Month and Day, right? What are the odds of two people having the same Birtdate (Month, Day, and Year?) Much lower, and depends on the distribution of your domain, right?
All this yammering about how "we can't do this" because "we don't have the source code" that.
We tell the media companies they should adapt or die. Well, we should adapt to. We aren't going to get the source code. So get working on techniques to manage and modify object code. It's ugly and it's hard, sure.
Let's go further than the tired old "free as in speech" versus "free as in beer" argument. Let's start living in the present, playing the hand we've been dealt.
It surprises me that one never sees binary patches from the user community. Back in the day, we worked with object code. Today, a program will have orders of magnitude more object code to work with, and it will have been created by compilers which do unbelievably crazy things to the code, but, at least we have it.
So please, somebody make the software analysis breakthrough that renders source code obsolete. Yes, it's a big job. Should be interesting.
The languange universities use regarding cheating, is "...repeat the course, possibly at another institution."
I was paraphrasing that and applying it here. My intention was not to suggest specific strategies, but to point out that, if one is not in a position to enforce policy, then he is merely in an advisory role. Either his employees are empowered to ignore his suggestions or they are not.
I have seen workplaces where the security guards have as much authority as I am suggesting for this *regulatory* role (MANDATED by the Federal Government, mind you!). So why not have teeth? Have everyone agree to the policy, have them understand that the consequences for not supporting the company policy will *begin* with firing and could include *prosecution*, get it in writing. Either do that, or else communicate to them that it really isn't all that important, and they can choose to comply or not, with no real consequences either way.
I understand your message, but, I still say you should approach taking this kind of authority from a position of strength -- one where exceptions are not made, not even for the president or board members. If it were something like air traffic controllers and hard drug use, you'd be able to say "follow this policy or don't work in this industry." What makes this scenario so fundamentally different from that one?
Most people don't seem to realize that the base system is a fairly complete server OS. You might get away with the 15 meg base system, plus the apache and openssl debs. Practically everything after the base system install is optional. If you aren't going for minimalism (as I was when I discovered this), just install the "required" debs, which are preselected the first time you run dselect and be done with it. If you don't want to bother learning how the apt system works, you really are not in a position to criticize it.
"Why? because you need the incompe produced by two to even approach the style of living that took one (income) then. "
I'm not at all convinced that the standard of living that people are trying to approach today, really compares to that of the typical American family in the 1950's. Some of the things we consider essential would not have existed. Some of the luxuries we pursue and take for granted were not considered very often in those days.
I wonder if we are pursuing a myth, that is presented as 'normal' by the media? Most people in the 50's lived in rural areas. Now we seem to think huge houses in the sububs, big/luxury cars etc. are somehow 'average' accomodations.
One thing that strikes me is population: The 40's and 50's gave us birth control. What did we do with it? Quadrupled the population?
If you wanted to live in a small town in East Texas, I can sell you an acre of land with a 2-story 3-bedroom house for maybe $30K (because I don't want to live there either). But no, you want a view of Puget Sound, or a Boston Colonial, or maybe a townhouse in La Jolla. For half a million or more. And you think that wouldn't have been pretty expensive 40-50 years ago?
So how do they stop us from converting USD to the lesser currency, purchasing in a foreign market, and shipping it to the US?
This won't work for McDonald's, because a cheeseburger is stale if you ship it (and because the shipping is higher than the difference), but why not for software or consumer electronics? I'm surprised this hasn't become the standard way to buy stuff.
I'd like to get some of the gadgets they get in Asian markets that never make it to the West; if you could get them at bargain prices because of currency exchanges, so much the better!
Nobody likes telemarketers. But we're talking about a *lot* of jobs. It sucks that people don't have actual skills, literacy, insights, money to invest, etc. But the bottom line is that call center jobs are sometimes the only game in town.
The real problem is that the telemarketing industry is part of our welfare system...
No doubt she painstakingly learned the pattern. Some marketroid will probably decide it's a swell idea to make arbitrary changes to the order of the prompts.
Price versus Quality is the choice that the people in your group are making.
The same people that would have traded their brownies for instamatics (126), and then 110's, are going to cheap digital today.
These are NOT the people using Leica M's and Nikon F's, carefully selecting their film and paper, and being creative in the darkroom.
Average consumer just wants snapshots. Maybe a few of them will crop and fix contrast with photoshop LE. And your production houses are more concerned with productivity and reproducibility, than with the photograph as an individual work of art.
As an art form, digital photography will not replace film any more than film replaced oil painting. (Photographic portraits replaced oil portraits and made the portrait accessible to all classes, but that's just another commercial aspect of technology.)
There are qualities of film which derive from its imperfections and these are not addressed by a strict comparison of the various media based on criteria such as pixel size or color accuracy.
To me, there are also some abstract issues, such as the fact that people take a LOT more pictures today, with digital cameras, than they ever would have done with film. I remember when 3:20 of super-8 film would cost about $4.00, $8.00 to process, and projector bulbs were not cheap.
Also consider the environmental impact of film photography. I cannot stand to even go into the town of Longview Texas, where the Eastman Kodak factory spews the waste products of film manufacturing. It literally makes me ill to breath the "air" for MILES around the plant. They claim their emissions are safe (but nobody should ever have to breathe air that smells this horrible). According to my sources, that town has the highest proportion of ancephalic babies in the country, and it is very common for kids to be ADHD. I can't make a credible correlation, but I can say with certainty that it is not a place where I would ever choose to set foot again.
So, if the digital revolution reduces the environmental impact from film manufacturing, I'm all for it.
There is a question of permanence also. We take digital photographs with no regard to the fact that the formats might be locking us out of access to our own work, or that the storage used is rather ephemeral.
Is there a digital alternative to the sort of photography that would be considered museum quality? How about X-Ray film? Infrared?
I wrote a Turing machine simulator, a lexical analyzer (actually more of a weighted million monkeys simulator), and a card game in fortran, between 1978 and 1979. I wrote my own random number generator also. My programs worked on the compiler in the Burroughs B6700 and the Microsoft compiler for TRS-80 Model I. Somewhere I have all this on paper tape, printouts, and 5.25" floppies.
"You don't get that protection for mail order either"
Well, undetected, easily accomplished man-in-the-middle is not quite the same risk as it is on the web. Also, there is protection available for mail order: Certified and Registered mail, and, the stiff criminal penalties that exist for mail fraud.
"Yeah, because $200 is going to really break the MPAA and RIAA."
Yes, but, the idea of laws is that they carry enough force to dissuade people from routinely violating them. A party who willfully breaks a law, considering the fines to be merely a cost of doing business, should be punished harshly on the basis of their contempt for the law, regardless of the fine.
If there's a $100.00 fine for dumping, you cannot dump your trash there once a week and drop off a check for $100.00 at the courthouse clerk's office. The willful, repetitive nature of your violation will take on a legal signifigance beyond the scope of the original violation.
In practice, of course, many *do* get away with such practices, but not indefinitely, and not without risk.
Slashdot Mirror
Can I expense my clothing bill? How about a tax deduction? (I'm serious -- if the clothing standards are "required" by the company, then there should be some compensation.)
The thing about this and any management-mandate is, if you are not replaceable and management realizes this, (and not being able to replace you means failure of the department, division, or company) then you have virtually unlimited bargaining power.
Otherwise, you need to toe the line. It's that simple.
No. The government has specific immunities from the sort of lawsuit you suggest. The recourse you, as a citizen, have is: The right to petition for redress of grievances, and the right to vote. If all the people who complained, would vote (at ALL levels), we'd see some serious changes. Unfortunately, people have been propagandized into believing that voting won't make a difference, so instead our process runs on apathy. The status quo DEPENDS on voter apathy!
Ah. Okay. I'm still struggling with what's meant by a Hilbert Space. Actually, I'm still struggling with the plane, r-theta coords, and I totally suck at arithmetic. :-)
But I'm still going to keep taking maths and eventually get up to number theory and scientific computing. It might take 10 more years but I'm working on it.
>Suppose the universe doesn't have any "edges"...
>...Finally, suppose that the universe is finite in volume.
How can it be both?
"Maybe, just maybe... the EULA doesn't violate the banking laws."
Maybe it doesn't. Probably it doesn't.
The question is whether a party is entitled to agree to the EULA. If they are bound by other conditions then they might not be able to.
Say I have a product to sell you, and an agreement that goes along with that sale. Let's say it's something perfectly legal for me to sell it, and there's nothing really wrong with the terms of the agreement.
Now, if you have a contract with someone that says you won't buy that product from me, or if you have a court order forbidding you to buy it, it's not legal for you to do this business with me. I haven't broken the law if you do, but you might have.
If a bank has an agreement with the Federal government or with their customer that precludes agreeing to the EULA, they are not entitled to use this product, and they may have created some liability and legal exposure by doing so.
Now, as to the scope of the exposure, it's not clear whether we're talking about "losing a customer or two", "CEO does jail time", "Company gets a bankrupting fine", or "nothing really happens".
The question is not whether the EULA is legal, but whether certain types of organizations can agree to it because they are bound by prior agreements with others. Probably all that will come of this will be a differently worded license from Microsoft for their financial/medical customers. Consumers will still get the full shaft.
"This is known as the birthday paradox, so named because this precise logic means that given 23 people in a room, there's a +50% chance that two people have the same birthday."
The same Month and Day, right? What are the odds of two people having the same Birtdate (Month, Day, and Year?) Much lower, and depends on the distribution of your domain, right?
>the original people adapted?
If they had an overwhelming amount of power and/or money, they didn't adapt. They quashed.
Nothing new under the sun.
All this yammering about how "we can't do this"
because "we don't have the source code" that.
We tell the media companies they should adapt or die. Well, we should adapt to. We aren't going to get the source code. So get working on techniques to manage and modify object code. It's ugly and it's hard, sure.
Let's go further than the tired old "free as in speech" versus "free as in beer" argument. Let's start living in the present, playing the hand we've been dealt.
It surprises me that one never sees binary patches from the user community. Back in the day, we worked with object code. Today, a program will have orders of magnitude more object code to work with, and it will have been created by compilers which do unbelievably crazy things to the code, but, at least we have it.
So please, somebody make the software analysis breakthrough that renders source code obsolete. Yes, it's a big job. Should be interesting.
The languange universities use regarding cheating,
is "...repeat the course, possibly at another institution."
I was paraphrasing that and applying it here. My intention was not to suggest specific strategies, but to point out that, if one is not in a position to enforce policy, then he is merely in an advisory role. Either his employees are empowered to ignore his suggestions or they are not.
I have seen workplaces where the security guards have as much authority as I am suggesting for this *regulatory* role (MANDATED by the Federal Government, mind you!). So why not have teeth? Have everyone agree to the policy, have them understand that the consequences for not supporting the company policy will *begin* with firing and could include *prosecution*, get it in writing. Either do that, or else communicate to them that it really isn't all that important, and they can choose to comply or not, with no real consequences either way.
I understand your message, but, I still say you should approach taking this kind of authority from a position of strength -- one where exceptions are not made, not even for the president or board members. If it were something like air traffic controllers and hard drug use, you'd be able to say "follow this policy or don't work in this industry." What makes this scenario so fundamentally different from that one?
You need the authority to say "you will follow these procedures, or you will work elsewhere; preferably in another industry."
Until you have THAT authority, you do not really have the job that you think you have.
Most people don't seem to realize that the base system is a fairly complete server OS. You might get away with the 15 meg base system, plus the apache and openssl debs. Practically everything after the base system install is optional. If you aren't going for minimalism (as I was when I discovered this), just install the "required" debs, which are preselected the first time you run dselect and be done with it. If you don't want to bother learning how the apt system works, you really are not in a position to criticize it.
>>8. Just too many people in general
So which is it? People aren't going to movies anymore, or, the experience is undesirable because the theatres are crowded?
They risked their lives on the trust of their confederates. Sometimes they died.
Consider the case of Mary Queen of Scots, accused of treason, and trusting her life to the strength of a cipher. [Simon Singh, The Code Book]
>Why should eBay be any different?
Whenever a woman is raped inside eBay, it will be news, and I'm sure justice will be served.
You did not mention whether your credit card covered the loss. Do you want "justice", or just your money back?
"Why? because you need the incompe produced by two to even approach the style of living that took one (income) then. "
I'm not at all convinced that the standard of living that people are trying to approach today, really compares to that of the typical American family in the 1950's. Some of the things we consider essential would not have existed. Some of the luxuries we pursue and take for granted were not considered very often in those days.
I wonder if we are pursuing a myth, that is presented as 'normal' by the media? Most people in the 50's lived in rural areas. Now we seem to think huge houses in the sububs, big/luxury cars etc. are somehow 'average' accomodations.
One thing that strikes me is population: The 40's and 50's gave us birth control. What did we do with it? Quadrupled the population?
If you wanted to live in a small town in East Texas, I can sell you an acre of land with a 2-story 3-bedroom house for maybe $30K (because I don't want to live there either). But no, you want a view of Puget Sound, or a Boston Colonial, or maybe a townhouse in La Jolla. For half a million or more. And you think that wouldn't have been pretty expensive 40-50 years ago?
So how do they stop us from converting USD to the lesser currency, purchasing in a foreign market, and shipping it to the US?
This won't work for McDonald's, because a cheeseburger is stale if you ship it (and because the shipping is higher than the difference), but why not for software or consumer electronics? I'm surprised this hasn't become the standard way to buy stuff.
I'd like to get some of the gadgets they get in Asian markets that never make it to the West; if you could get them at bargain prices because of currency exchanges, so much the better!
Employement.
Nobody likes telemarketers. But we're talking about a *lot* of jobs. It sucks that people don't have actual skills, literacy, insights, money to invest, etc. But the bottom line is that call center jobs are sometimes the only game in town.
The real problem is that the telemarketing industry is part of our welfare system...
"I would give my money to another airline that had a more readable website."
You do realize how much cheaper SWA is than any other airline in their markets, right?
No doubt she painstakingly learned the pattern.
Some marketroid will probably decide it's a swell
idea to make arbitrary changes to the order of the prompts.
Price versus Quality is the choice that the people in your group are making.
The same people that would have traded their brownies for instamatics (126), and then 110's, are going to cheap digital today.
These are NOT the people using Leica M's and Nikon F's, carefully selecting their film and paper, and being creative in the darkroom.
Average consumer just wants snapshots. Maybe a few of them will crop and fix contrast with photoshop LE. And your production houses are more concerned with productivity and reproducibility, than with the photograph as an individual work of art.
As an art form, digital photography will not replace film any more than film replaced oil painting. (Photographic portraits replaced oil portraits and made the portrait accessible to all classes, but that's just another commercial aspect of technology.)
There are qualities of film which derive from its imperfections and these are not addressed by a strict comparison of the various media based on criteria such as pixel size or color accuracy.
To me, there are also some abstract issues, such as the fact that people take a LOT more pictures today, with digital cameras, than they ever would have done with film. I remember when 3:20 of super-8 film would cost about $4.00, $8.00 to process, and projector bulbs were not cheap.
Also consider the environmental impact of film photography. I cannot stand to even go into the town of Longview Texas, where the Eastman Kodak factory spews the waste products of film manufacturing. It literally makes me ill to breath the "air" for MILES around the plant. They claim their emissions are safe (but nobody should ever have to breathe air that smells this horrible). According to my sources, that town has the highest proportion of ancephalic babies in the country, and it is very common for kids to be ADHD. I can't make a credible correlation, but I can say with certainty that it is not a place where I would ever choose to set foot again.
So, if the digital revolution reduces the environmental impact from film manufacturing, I'm all for it.
There is a question of permanence also. We take digital photographs with no regard to the fact that the formats might be locking us out of access to our own work, or that the storage used is rather ephemeral.
Is there a digital alternative to the sort of photography that would be considered museum quality? How about X-Ray film? Infrared?
I wrote a Turing machine simulator, a lexical analyzer (actually more of a weighted million monkeys simulator), and a card game in fortran, between 1978 and 1979. I wrote my own random number generator also. My programs worked on the compiler in the Burroughs B6700 and the Microsoft compiler for TRS-80 Model I. Somewhere I have all this on paper tape, printouts, and 5.25" floppies.
"You don't get that protection for mail order either"
Well, undetected, easily accomplished man-in-the-middle is not quite the same risk as it is on the web. Also, there is protection available for mail order: Certified and Registered mail, and, the stiff criminal penalties that exist for mail fraud.
"Yeah, because $200 is going to really break the MPAA and RIAA."
Yes, but, the idea of laws is that they carry enough force to dissuade people from routinely violating them. A party who willfully breaks a law, considering the fines to be merely a cost of doing business, should be punished harshly on the basis of their contempt for the law, regardless of the fine.
If there's a $100.00 fine for dumping, you cannot dump your trash there once a week and drop off a check for $100.00 at the courthouse clerk's office. The willful, repetitive nature of your violation will take on a legal signifigance beyond the scope of the original violation.
In practice, of course, many *do* get away with such practices, but not indefinitely, and not without risk.