Someone please tell me how a corporation based in Washington State and legally incorporated in Delaware suddenly becomes a tax collector for states in which it does not have a physical presence?
I think the problem Amazon is having is that they had associates that were based in California. These associates have a physical presence in California and forces Amazon to abide by state law. Amazon wants to continue to have an associate program, yet not have to keep track of sales tax for each state that an associate exists. This is why Amazon is lobbying for this referendum in California.
It's not just associates in California. A9 is in Palo Alto. The Kindle was designed in Cupertino. Hard to say they don't have a significant local presence, though I'm sure some legal loopholes make it so.
While on the topic of moderation, why do people always confuse "Insightful" and "Funny"?
People don't confuse the two moderations. Instead, "Insightful" grants karma while "Funny" does not. Thus, especially witty comments get modded "Insightful" so that the poster gains karma.
From the/. FAQ: "Note that being moderated Funny doesn't help your karma. You have to be smart, not just a smart-ass."
Does SEC, or anyone in the U.S. for that matter, have jurisdiction over supposedly illegal acts outside of the country? Is it even SEC's business that officials abroad were bribed? Shouldn't the Chinese slap them with, say, imprisonment of responsible persons?
In public schools, it's not even about training attendance, it's about the money. Simply put, students attending class get the school money. Students on suspension (in-school or otherwise) ALSO get the school money! The schools are incentivized to either get kids in class OR suspend them. Absences are expensive, as are expulsions! This is why kids get full-year suspensions (at home under their parent's care) rather than expulsion from the district.
It appears that the slashdot crowd has no need for a liberal arts (in the classical sense) education. They only want job training instead. This is the problem with our current concept of college. Instead of going to get a well-rounded education that makes us better thinkers, more able to understand and inquire about the world around us, and generally improve our ability to be inquisitive successfully, college in America (and some other countries) is viewed as a way of gaining specialized job skills.
IMO, this is largely due to most technical companies' hiring practices, especially when seeking entry-level-professional employees - those who recently completed formal training. (I assume this covers most of the job opportunities recently-graduated/.ers consider.) What these companies truly seek is a person trained in a certain field to do certain tasks. As an indication of basic competence, companies use completion of a related academic degree, yet they don't truly value many of the academics that backstop that degree. Mostly, these companies value training and experience that are immediately and directly related to their current business needs. Secondarily, they may value the communication skills (especially writing skills) implied by completion of a bachelor's degree. Critical-thinking and ability-to-learn skills are often less valued, and certainly less easily assessed, during the hiring process.
Two considerations emerge. First, currently there is a glut of trained people in the entry-level category. As a hiring manager, even if the core technical qualifications are identical between two candidates, the one who completed a bachelor's will be chosen over the one who only completed an associate's degree. The higher academic degree implies more commitment to long-term goals, giving an edge to a four-year-degreed candidate over a vocationally-trained candidate. Second (and relatedly), entry-level compensation is largely based on job description (within a geographic area. Yes, school reputation, projects, experience, etc factor in. And at my company, a national top-tier-school, 4.0 GPA, undergraduate with 4 summer internships at our company, is offered about a 15% premium over someone who squirts past the HR filter with a relevant associates degree at a community college, having a 3.0 GPA and no related work experience. (Assuming the candidate with only an Associate's is even offered a job.) If the BA and the AA job candidates (BS/AS if you prefer) cost approximately the same, I may as well hire the one with a bachelor's. They've proven more commitment to long-term tasks, if nothing else
All that to say, while hiring companies mostly value the skills learned during an associate's degree, the nontechnical skills implicitly learned during a bachelor's degree are also valued as differentiators among candidates. Hiring companies use completion of the degree as an indication that the candidate learned those other skills. Thus, the student has an incentive to pass the general education classes. The incentive is mostly independent of what the student learns in those classes, but is instead dependent on the grade recorded in those classes. Thus students are incentivized to cheat. They are not incentivized to actually learn.
Hairyfeet, let me introduce you to Pigeonhole Principle. I'm sure you'll get along fabulously.
Unless I understand things wrong, the Pigeonhole Principle doesn't apply, as the number of IPV6 addresses are > IPV4 addresses. Every IPV4 address could have a fixed IPV6 address assigned - perhaps as leading zeros of the existing IPV4 address - and still leave an enormous number of IPV6 addresses assigned.
The pigeonhole principle is for fitting m objects into n spaces, where m > n. In this case, m is IPV6 addresses and n is IPV4 addresses, and m < n.
What you say is true if you continue on to a master's degree. If, like many people, you plan to join the workforce after undergrad, the school you attended matters a lot. Undergrads joining the workforce generally haven't done independent research or published, so employers can look at GPA, school/degree reputation, extracurriculars, and maybe senior projects at best. The hiring managers I've talked to rate undergrad engineering school reputation equivalent to almost half a GPA point. That is, a 3.0 at *big name school* is equivalent to a 3.5 at *I think I heard of that school once*.
When they do the regressions, it turns out the schools you got turned down from were the biggest factor on career success, far more than where you actually attend.
All the studies I've seen have been that students accepted to "more prestigious" schools that matriculated elsewhere did as well in life as those who enrolled at the top-tier schools. I have a hard time believing that someone denied by Harvard among others and only accepted by no-name-state-college does as well in life as someone who was accepted at, say, an Ivy, much less as well as someone who attended such a school.
As far as I know, Slashdot does a short port scan on your IPv4 address when you preview or post a comment in order to make sure that your machine isn't an open proxy that might be abused for vandalism. That's why your first preview of the day from a given machine is so slow: it has to wait for the connections to time out.
Slow previews explained. You, sir, are truly a king amongst men.
The "sexual history" questions will unfortunately remain relevant in background checks for highly important/secret positions so long as sexual history related topics remain highly taboo in society. The (intended) purpose of these questions is to determine if the applicant has anything in their past that would make particularly them subjective to blackmail.
Which is just fine for a *security clearance* background check. These researchers work on unclassified projects, which is why they're objecting to the background checks.
The fact that it triggers on as little as 1/3 of the legal limit is also troubling. Maybe they should trigger at slightly below the legal limit, but 1/3? They couldn't get convicted of a DWI at that number, and yet you're going to shut off their car?
Generally those convicted of / pled nolo contendre to DWI, especially misdemeanor first offense, are put on unsupervised court probation, of which one condition is that driving with any detectable blood alcohol is a violation of the probation. So, yes, it triggers significantly below the general legal limit, because that is one of the terms of their sentence. The breathalyzer is another.
Whether this is appropriate or just is another issue entirely.
It's been a long time since/. has been about breaking the news. It has transformed into a place to discuss recent news. The news isn't reported first on/. but it is still timely. I certainly talk with coworkers about items in the news a few days after they are initially reported./. is less like the newsroom at any of the big networks and is more like the local coffee shop shortly after the networks report on an event. Yes, most people have heard the news already, but they've gathered together to discuss it, and that is the value/. brings to the table - it's the place to talk about the news, not the place to learn about the news as it happens.
[...] regarding how to respond to improperly handled classified forms. Step 1 is "delete/destroy any copies within reach", and Step 2 is "call the security folks".
Close, but not quite. Step 1 is secure the information from further unauthorized access, but do not destroy if it can be safely secured in another manner. (i.e. all copies remain in the possession of a cleared person with need to know, in a locked and opaque case.) Step 2 is call the security folks, so that they can determine the ramifications of the exposure of the information. Step 3, I will admit, is generally destroy the information.
I'd bet that they never patented it, but instead kept it as a trade secret. While the composition would probably be easy to determine, reverse-engineering the process to make it is likely nearly as difficult as inventing it in the first place.
When we lose Hubble we lose some unique capability. Even successor telescopes that don't work in optical light will not fill that void. Adaptive optics will only be useful in some circumstances whereas Hubble would have been useful in the general case. Oversimplifications like this story don't belong on a techy site like slashdot.
What I don't understand is why we don't have a direct successor to Hubble. James Webb will be an infrared satellite, not visible light, so I don't see how it's a direct successor (IANAA I Am Not An Astrophysicist). I know of no other satellites that overlap but improve Hubble's coverage. Yes, I understand that today, adaptive optics beat Hubble, but Hubble was launched in 1990. Twenty years later the ground-based coverage bested space-based, but what could we conceivably learn from a visible-wavelength orbital observatory in the next 20 years before the ground-based ones catch up?
Beyond that, visible-light satellites have the capacity to excite the public like no others. Humans see the visible spectrum directly, and are just more impressed by visual wavelength images than false-color imagines of, say, X-rays. Non-visible wavelengths may be more scientifically important that visible ones, but the visible wavelengths are the ones that the public will pay for.
There are two major problems with classified information, one real and one practical:
Realistically, unclassified information can be combined to deduce classified information. For example, let's suppose that the F-22 combat radius was classified. If its max fuel load, cruising speed, and fuel consumption at cruise were unclassified, the classified information could easily be determined from unclassified information. Toward this end, many things end up classified higher than their individual information may warrant.
Practically, separating classified and unclassified information is difficult and costly. Say there is a program with only a small amount of classified information. Yes, it is costly to set up the classified network and facilities to process only that, and leave the rest open. But say the program is mostly classified. In that case, it's more expensive and difficult to access the unclassified information than the classified info (due to having separate networks, facilities, etc, for the unclassified info. Remember, anything electronic that accesses classified info is considered to be classified at that level. So if your computer accesses Secret information, anything that ever gets onto that computer is presumed Secret.) So in practice, everything used on that network ends up classified, for ease of use and lower cost.
Between these two reasons, yes, many things are classified that should not be. No, generally it is not a malicious coverup.
Disclaimer: this applies very much at defense contractors for the systems they design, especially for build processes, designs, capabilities, etc. Needs and reasons for operational classification may be different.
If this is the case, why would they want a third trial? Seems it would only serve to further reduce the judgement, if anything, and certainly incur more costs.
Just like all the items in that list, a gun is a very versatile tool with a wide variety of uses, and is not made for the sole purpose of killing people.
FTFY. Guns are pretty much designed for killing, though animals get included along with people.
Generally when someone refers to "Free Software" they mean free as in freedom (libre), not free as in beer (gratis). Wikipedia. In that regards, Opera is free (zero cost) but not Free (users have the right to have and modify the source code as they see fit). In that sense, GP is right that Opera is not Free Software.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the problem Amazon is having is that they had associates that were based in California. These associates have a physical presence in California and forces Amazon to abide by state law. Amazon wants to continue to have an associate program, yet not have to keep track of sales tax for each state that an associate exists. This is why Amazon is lobbying for this referendum in California.
It's not just associates in California. A9 is in Palo Alto. The Kindle was designed in Cupertino. Hard to say they don't have a significant local presence, though I'm sure some legal loopholes make it so.
While on the topic of moderation, why do people always confuse "Insightful" and "Funny"?
People don't confuse the two moderations. Instead, "Insightful" grants karma while "Funny" does not. Thus, especially witty comments get modded "Insightful" so that the poster gains karma.
From the /. FAQ: "Note that being moderated Funny doesn't help your karma. You have to be smart, not just a smart-ass."
In general, I agree about the outlook of the undergrad compared to the Ph.D. Where does the masters student fit in?
Does SEC, or anyone in the U.S. for that matter, have jurisdiction over supposedly illegal acts outside of the country? Is it even SEC's business that officials abroad were bribed? Shouldn't the Chinese slap them with, say, imprisonment of responsible persons?
Thanks to the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, foreign bribery is the SEC's business.
In public schools, it's not even about training attendance, it's about the money. Simply put, students attending class get the school money. Students on suspension (in-school or otherwise) ALSO get the school money! The schools are incentivized to either get kids in class OR suspend them. Absences are expensive, as are expulsions! This is why kids get full-year suspensions (at home under their parent's care) rather than expulsion from the district.
This al
It appears that the slashdot crowd has no need for a liberal arts (in the classical sense) education. They only want job training instead. This is the problem with our current concept of college. Instead of going to get a well-rounded education that makes us better thinkers, more able to understand and inquire about the world around us, and generally improve our ability to be inquisitive successfully, college in America (and some other countries) is viewed as a way of gaining specialized job skills.
IMO, this is largely due to most technical companies' hiring practices, especially when seeking entry-level-professional employees - those who recently completed formal training. (I assume this covers most of the job opportunities recently-graduated /.ers consider.) What these companies truly seek is a person trained in a certain field to do certain tasks. As an indication of basic competence, companies use completion of a related academic degree, yet they don't truly value many of the academics that backstop that degree. Mostly, these companies value training and experience that are immediately and directly related to their current business needs. Secondarily, they may value the communication skills (especially writing skills) implied by completion of a bachelor's degree. Critical-thinking and ability-to-learn skills are often less valued, and certainly less easily assessed, during the hiring process.
Two considerations emerge. First, currently there is a glut of trained people in the entry-level category. As a hiring manager, even if the core technical qualifications are identical between two candidates, the one who completed a bachelor's will be chosen over the one who only completed an associate's degree. The higher academic degree implies more commitment to long-term goals, giving an edge to a four-year-degreed candidate over a vocationally-trained candidate. Second (and relatedly), entry-level compensation is largely based on job description (within a geographic area. Yes, school reputation, projects, experience, etc factor in. And at my company, a national top-tier-school, 4.0 GPA, undergraduate with 4 summer internships at our company, is offered about a 15% premium over someone who squirts past the HR filter with a relevant associates degree at a community college, having a 3.0 GPA and no related work experience. (Assuming the candidate with only an Associate's is even offered a job.) If the BA and the AA job candidates (BS/AS if you prefer) cost approximately the same, I may as well hire the one with a bachelor's. They've proven more commitment to long-term tasks, if nothing else
All that to say, while hiring companies mostly value the skills learned during an associate's degree, the nontechnical skills implicitly learned during a bachelor's degree are also valued as differentiators among candidates. Hiring companies use completion of the degree as an indication that the candidate learned those other skills. Thus, the student has an incentive to pass the general education classes. The incentive is mostly independent of what the student learns in those classes, but is instead dependent on the grade recorded in those classes. Thus students are incentivized to cheat. They are not incentivized to actually learn.
Hairyfeet, let me introduce you to Pigeonhole Principle. I'm sure you'll get along fabulously.
Unless I understand things wrong, the Pigeonhole Principle doesn't apply, as the number of IPV6 addresses are > IPV4 addresses. Every IPV4 address could have a fixed IPV6 address assigned - perhaps as leading zeros of the existing IPV4 address - and still leave an enormous number of IPV6 addresses assigned.
The pigeonhole principle is for fitting m objects into n spaces, where m > n. In this case, m is IPV6 addresses and n is IPV4 addresses, and m < n.
Granted 6 is a small sample, but 1 out of 6 is 16.67%, within the range you quoted for the other models.
What you say is true if you continue on to a master's degree. If, like many people, you plan to join the workforce after undergrad, the school you attended matters a lot. Undergrads joining the workforce generally haven't done independent research or published, so employers can look at GPA, school/degree reputation, extracurriculars, and maybe senior projects at best. The hiring managers I've talked to rate undergrad engineering school reputation equivalent to almost half a GPA point. That is, a 3.0 at *big name school* is equivalent to a 3.5 at *I think I heard of that school once*.
When they do the regressions, it turns out the schools you got turned down from were the biggest factor on career success, far more than where you actually attend.
All the studies I've seen have been that students accepted to "more prestigious" schools that matriculated elsewhere did as well in life as those who enrolled at the top-tier schools. I have a hard time believing that someone denied by Harvard among others and only accepted by no-name-state-college does as well in life as someone who was accepted at, say, an Ivy, much less as well as someone who attended such a school.
As far as I know, Slashdot does a short port scan on your IPv4 address when you preview or post a comment in order to make sure that your machine isn't an open proxy that might be abused for vandalism. That's why your first preview of the day from a given machine is so slow: it has to wait for the connections to time out.
Slow previews explained. You, sir, are truly a king amongst men.
The "sexual history" questions will unfortunately remain relevant in background checks for highly important/secret positions so long as sexual history related topics remain highly taboo in society. The (intended) purpose of these questions is to determine if the applicant has anything in their past that would make particularly them subjective to blackmail.
Which is just fine for a *security clearance* background check. These researchers work on unclassified projects, which is why they're objecting to the background checks.
The fact that it triggers on as little as 1/3 of the legal limit is also troubling. Maybe they should trigger at slightly below the legal limit, but 1/3? They couldn't get convicted of a DWI at that number, and yet you're going to shut off their car?
Generally those convicted of / pled nolo contendre to DWI, especially misdemeanor first offense, are put on unsupervised court probation, of which one condition is that driving with any detectable blood alcohol is a violation of the probation. So, yes, it triggers significantly below the general legal limit, because that is one of the terms of their sentence. The breathalyzer is another.
Whether this is appropriate or just is another issue entirely.
Thank you Slashdot.
Sincerely,
All your readers outside of polar areas that won't be able to see anything anyway.
It's been a long time since /. has been about breaking the news. It has transformed into a place to discuss recent news. The news isn't reported first on /. but it is still timely. I certainly talk with coworkers about items in the news a few days after they are initially reported. /. is less like the newsroom at any of the big networks and is more like the local coffee shop shortly after the networks report on an event. Yes, most people have heard the news already, but they've gathered together to discuss it, and that is the value /. brings to the table - it's the place to talk about the news, not the place to learn about the news as it happens.
[...] regarding how to respond to improperly handled classified forms. Step 1 is "delete/destroy any copies within reach", and Step 2 is "call the security folks".
Close, but not quite. Step 1 is secure the information from further unauthorized access, but do not destroy if it can be safely secured in another manner. (i.e. all copies remain in the possession of a cleared person with need to know, in a locked and opaque case.) Step 2 is call the security folks, so that they can determine the ramifications of the exposure of the information. Step 3, I will admit, is generally destroy the information.
I'd bet that they never patented it, but instead kept it as a trade secret. While the composition would probably be easy to determine, reverse-engineering the process to make it is likely nearly as difficult as inventing it in the first place.
When we lose Hubble we lose some unique capability. Even successor telescopes that don't work in optical light will not fill that void. Adaptive optics will only be useful in some circumstances whereas Hubble would have been useful in the general case. Oversimplifications like this story don't belong on a techy site like slashdot.
What I don't understand is why we don't have a direct successor to Hubble. James Webb will be an infrared satellite, not visible light, so I don't see how it's a direct successor (IANAA I Am Not An Astrophysicist). I know of no other satellites that overlap but improve Hubble's coverage. Yes, I understand that today, adaptive optics beat Hubble, but Hubble was launched in 1990. Twenty years later the ground-based coverage bested space-based, but what could we conceivably learn from a visible-wavelength orbital observatory in the next 20 years before the ground-based ones catch up?
Beyond that, visible-light satellites have the capacity to excite the public like no others. Humans see the visible spectrum directly, and are just more impressed by visual wavelength images than false-color imagines of, say, X-rays. Non-visible wavelengths may be more scientifically important that visible ones, but the visible wavelengths are the ones that the public will pay for.
There are two major problems with classified information, one real and one practical:
Realistically, unclassified information can be combined to deduce classified information. For example, let's suppose that the F-22 combat radius was classified. If its max fuel load, cruising speed, and fuel consumption at cruise were unclassified, the classified information could easily be determined from unclassified information. Toward this end, many things end up classified higher than their individual information may warrant.
Practically, separating classified and unclassified information is difficult and costly. Say there is a program with only a small amount of classified information. Yes, it is costly to set up the classified network and facilities to process only that, and leave the rest open. But say the program is mostly classified. In that case, it's more expensive and difficult to access the unclassified information than the classified info (due to having separate networks, facilities, etc, for the unclassified info. Remember, anything electronic that accesses classified info is considered to be classified at that level. So if your computer accesses Secret information, anything that ever gets onto that computer is presumed Secret.) So in practice, everything used on that network ends up classified, for ease of use and lower cost.
Between these two reasons, yes, many things are classified that should not be. No, generally it is not a malicious coverup.
Disclaimer: this applies very much at defense contractors for the systems they design, especially for build processes, designs, capabilities, etc. Needs and reasons for operational classification may be different.
If this is the case, why would they want a third trial? Seems it would only serve to further reduce the judgement, if anything, and certainly incur more costs.
Just like all the items in that list, a gun is a very versatile tool with a wide variety of uses, and is not made for the sole purpose of killing people.
FTFY. Guns are pretty much designed for killing, though animals get included along with people.
Weird, I never had to "train" my bookmarks menu. This is considered "better" how exactly?
I'd say you trained your bookmarks menu every time you added something to it or organized it.
Well, O'Brien was a non-com, which kinda counts. Still, no enlisted crewmen come to mind.
I'll be completely honest, I don't care. It isn't Free Software. Until that changes, I'd rather use w3m than touch it.
Where the fuck have you been for the past 5 years? Of course Opera is free.
http://www.opera.com/press/releases/2005/09/20/
Generally when someone refers to "Free Software" they mean free as in freedom (libre), not free as in beer (gratis). Wikipedia. In that regards, Opera is free (zero cost) but not Free (users have the right to have and modify the source code as they see fit). In that sense, GP is right that Opera is not Free Software.
I dunno, Buzz has a pretty mean right hook.