Take marijuana off the black market and the funding for many other criminal operations will dry up.
I wonder to what extent this is true, I would think that the money lies in powdered drugs like cocaine and heroin. It's very common for suppliers to cut their product to increase profit. You can't really do that with marijuana unless you do something like spray it with sugar water. It's also incredibly easy to grow a plant in a small space with mail-order seeds, you can't do that with a lot of other recreational drugs.
I think these dark markets are a great development as they take away the risk of violence. Funds are sent over the Internet and product is delivered by mail. Bad sellers get sorted out based on community feedback. Drug scheduling in the U.S. means that a lot of substances people want to research cannot be obtained legally.
Back in the 90's UIC's MS/CS department had a computer lab with workstations running NeXTStep. The lab had mostly Intel-based pizza-boxes, but later on they purchased some HP-PA machines (models 715 and 815 IIRC). Some of the professors had a NeXTstation or NeXTcube (some with the NeXTdimension board) in their office. I really got a kick out of the magneto-optical drives.
I worked as an admin in the lab for a time and compiled a lot of open source code on those machines. GNU's autotools weren't used by a lot of projects, so I had to fix a lot of compile-time issues with header files and datatype names. Looking back, that was a pretty good learning experience for a newbie.
I honestly believe that I could go back to school and be up to speed an a semester or two.
School is for fools! You definitely don't want to spend your time in school for tech unless you still need to learn the basics. They are not going to cover anything modern and won't teach you actual job skills, mostly just theory with some small machine problems. You're much better off either learning on your own time or getting a tech position where you can learn on the job.
I'm not sure where you're located, but there are plenty of tech jobs available in the larger cities. Especially for front-end developers. There also seems to be a lot of demand for good server-side (*nix) people. I would recommend avoiding the large corporations and looking for jobs with small and medium sized businesses. Contract work is also good, I've been very happy with the agency I worked with in the past.
It is legal if you pay over $47,476 per year, and I assume you make more than that in a tech-related job.
No, that is not correct. There is not a magic dollar amount where you suddenly become overtime exempt. There are Federal laws regulating overtime.
The FLSA requires that most employees in the United States be paid at least the federal minimum wage for all
hours worked and overtime pay at time and one-half the regular rate of pay for all hours worked over 40 hours
in a workweek.
However, Section 13(a)(1) of the FLSA provides an exemption from both minimum wage and overtime pay for
employees employed as bona fide executive, administrative, professional and outside sales employees. Section
13(a)(1) and Section 13(a)(17) also exempt certain computer employees. To qualify for exemption, employees
generally must meet certain tests regarding their job duties and be paid on a salary basis at not less than $455
per week. Job titles do not determine exempt status. In order for an exemption to apply, an employee’s specific
job duties and salary must meet all the requirements of the Department’s regulations.
Additional guidance is provided for computer-related occupations:
To qualify for the computer employee exemption, the following tests must be met:
The employee must be compensated either on a salary or fee basis at a rate not less than $455 per week
or, if compensated on an hourly basis, at a rate not less than $27.63 an hour;
The employee must be employed as a computer systems analyst, computer programmer, software
engineer or other similarly skilled worker in the computer field performing the duties described below;
The employee’s primary duty must consist of:
1) The application of systems analysis techniques and procedures, including consulting with users, to
determine hardware, software or system functional specifications;
2) The design, development, documentation, analysis, creation, testing or modification of computer
systems or programs, including prototypes, based on and related to user or system design
specifications;
3) The design, documentation, testing, creation or modification of computer programs related to
machine operating systems; or
4) A combination of the aforementioned duties, the performance of which requires the same level of
skills.
The computer employee exemption does not include employees engaged in the manufacture or repair of
computer hardware and related equipment. Employees whose work is highly dependent upon, or facilitated by,
the use of computers and computer software programs (e.g., engineers, drafters and others skilled in computer-aided design software), but who are not primarily engaged in computer systems analysis and programming or
other similarly skilled computer-related occupations identified in the primary duties test described above, are
also not exempt under the computer employee exemption.
If an employer claims you are overtime exempt you need to have them specify to which exempt class you belong.
I work at Microsoft for a vendor, and we get paid hourly if we work less than forty hours or flat forty salary if we work more than forty.
You need to speak to a labor attorney, that arrangement does not sound legal. An employer cannot reclassify workers as hourly or salaried on a week-to-week basis.
If I am smarter than the next guy and gave a task to do I may get it done in half the time and go home early while the guy who is having a harder time is putting in overtime. Thus he is getting paid more for doing more work however the outcome is the same.
If you are being paid based on time spent at work, then you're most definitely not working smarter by getting the job done quicker. The smart worker will realize that he needs to find ways to put in as many hours as possible while doing as little as possible, but still keep his employer happy.
Same thing with questioning the authority that feeds (pays) you. You might think you're being smart by suggesting improvements, but if the boss doesn't want to hear them, then you're actually being stupid and working against your own interests (keeping the job).
One of the first things I learned when I started working for others is that there are things that matter more than the actual job you do. Things like getting along with others and keeping your boss happy. It's not like school where you can be an asshole, be disliked by the teacher and your classmates and still ace the test to get an A.
The Olympics charge the broadcast and cable companies a fortune for coverage rights. Comcast NBC paid $1.23 billion for Rio alone.
I really dislike the fact that a bunch of elites are making money off the backs of the Olympic athletes and the people watching and attending the games. Countries should contribute funding, but commercial exploitation/advertising should be prohibited.
There should be official coverage that's available to watch for free over the Internet or other broadcast channels. Third-parties should be free to broadcast their own coverage if they want to.
Try being poor sometime and being unable to get a driver's license or state issued ID card, unable to take time off of work to get one, unable to pay the fees, etc.
And yet the poor somehow manage to get an identification card for their welfare benefits.
In my state an id costs $20, I wouldn't call that a burden, and the fee is waived for the homeless.
If all you hire are white men you're only going to ever have the viewpoints of white men.
So you're telling me that all white men have the same viewpoints?
When people talk about diversity these days, they tend to be referring to someone's skin color and cultural background. They are generally not talking about a diversity of ideas or viewpoints.
When people talk about improving the diversity of an organization they're talking about meeting arbitrary racial quotas. That's why, for example, the City of Chicago has been promoting Hispanic fire fighters ahead of more qualified Caucasian candidates.
Some of these questionable policies are driven by business regulations and auditors. If you're going through a PCI or Sarbanes-Oxley certification process you're going to have to get all of those checkboxes marked on the auditors' spreadsheets, whether or not they make sense.
Good luck trying to get the auditor to explain why you need to change your passwords every 90 days, in my experience they can't defend their requirements and simply say things like it's "best practice".
Lots of people still go to the movies. $60 million in just one weekend for Star Trek alone? Someone is buying tickets. Just not anyone that frequents this site.
"No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people."
-- H. L. Mencken
Several people have already been prosecuted for running an unlicensed money transmitting business and money laundering, including people using the localbitcoins website. If this judge just ruled that Bitcoin isn't money, then how does that affect those other cases?
The Docker Registry deployment instructions specifically walk you through restricting access using basic auth. Did someone not read the instructions, or did they try to get fancy and screw something up?
I've got a Pebble Time Steel and the killer app for me is Music Boss. It lets me control my music player from my wrist instead of having to pull a phone from my pocket and key in the password every time I want to change tracks. Album art and track info is displayed on the watch face. Very handy when commuting on a crowded train.
I have also found the sleep and step tracking more useful than I would have imagined. The tracking may not be entirely accurate, but seeing the trends has motivated me to change my behavior.
Being able to receive and reply to SMS message from my wrist is nice. It's pretty handy for receiving codes for sites that use fake two-factor authentication. Reading email from the watch face is nice if I'm out walking when a message comes in; long messages do get cut off unfortunately.
Being able to switch watch faces is also handy. I use a face with dual timezones when I'm working and need to read log files with GMT timestamps and then switch to something artsy when I just need the local time.
Birkenstock's position doesn't make much sense to me. If there's a problem with counterfeit product, wouldn't you want to solve that by opening an official Birkenstock seller's account with Amazon and then letting people know to order from them to ensure they get the real thing?
You got the service manuals, great. Now what about the special programming tools for your ECU?
I've got a Mitsubishi Lancer and it's a total PITA to get the TPMS programmed. It's 90 minutes to the local dealership and half the time they forget to reprogram the system after installing my summer or winter wheels. You can order the required MUT-III toolkit from the official supplier and do it yourself, but it's $8,000.
People are overweight because they consume more calories than they burn. It is that simple.
No, it's not that simple. Recent studies have shown that your gut biome helps to determine if you stay thin or gain weight.
In 2006, Jeffrey Gordon, MD, and his colleagues at the Washington University Medical School in St Louis published a paper in the journal Nature demonstrating that thin mice and obese mice have different populations of gut bacteria. Furthermore, they proved that one particular type of bacteria caused obesity, rather than obesity changing the types of bacteria.
When the scientists isolated a strain of Firmicutes bacteria from chubby mice and then introduced them into the bacteria-free guts of thin mice raised in a sterile environment, the skinny mice fattened up in just 10 to 14 days.
Slashdot Mirror
Take marijuana off the black market and the funding for many other criminal operations will dry up.
I wonder to what extent this is true, I would think that the money lies in powdered drugs like cocaine and heroin. It's very common for suppliers to cut their product to increase profit. You can't really do that with marijuana unless you do something like spray it with sugar water. It's also incredibly easy to grow a plant in a small space with mail-order seeds, you can't do that with a lot of other recreational drugs.
I think these dark markets are a great development as they take away the risk of violence. Funds are sent over the Internet and product is delivered by mail. Bad sellers get sorted out based on community feedback. Drug scheduling in the U.S. means that a lot of substances people want to research cannot be obtained legally.
Back in the 90's UIC's MS/CS department had a computer lab with workstations running NeXTStep. The lab had mostly Intel-based pizza-boxes, but later on they purchased some HP-PA machines (models 715 and 815 IIRC). Some of the professors had a NeXTstation or NeXTcube (some with the NeXTdimension board) in their office. I really got a kick out of the magneto-optical drives.
I worked as an admin in the lab for a time and compiled a lot of open source code on those machines. GNU's autotools weren't used by a lot of projects, so I had to fix a lot of compile-time issues with header files and datatype names. Looking back, that was a pretty good learning experience for a newbie.
I honestly believe that I could go back to school and be up to speed an a semester or two.
School is for fools! You definitely don't want to spend your time in school for tech unless you still need to learn the basics. They are not going to cover anything modern and won't teach you actual job skills, mostly just theory with some small machine problems. You're much better off either learning on your own time or getting a tech position where you can learn on the job.
I'm not sure where you're located, but there are plenty of tech jobs available in the larger cities. Especially for front-end developers. There also seems to be a lot of demand for good server-side (*nix) people. I would recommend avoiding the large corporations and looking for jobs with small and medium sized businesses. Contract work is also good, I've been very happy with the agency I worked with in the past.
So what if some unions did some good things in the past? We're talking about today's unions.
Politicians colluding with unions are one of the primary reasons my state, county and city are a financial disaster.
It is legal if you pay over $47,476 per year, and I assume you make more than that in a tech-related job.
No, that is not correct. There is not a magic dollar amount where you suddenly become overtime exempt. There are Federal laws regulating overtime.
Fact Sheet #17A: Exemption for Executive, Administrative, Professional, Computer & Outside Sales Employees Under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA)
Additional guidance is provided for computer-related occupations:
Fact Sheet #17E: Exemption for Employees in Computer-Related Occupations Under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) [emphasis mine]
If an employer claims you are overtime exempt you need to have them specify to which exempt class you belong.
I work at Microsoft for a vendor, and we get paid hourly if we work less than forty hours or flat forty salary if we work more than forty.
You need to speak to a labor attorney, that arrangement does not sound legal. An employer cannot reclassify workers as hourly or salaried on a week-to-week basis.
If I am smarter than the next guy and gave a task to do I may get it done in half the time and go home early while the guy who is having a harder time is putting in overtime. Thus he is getting paid more for doing more work however the outcome is the same.
If you are being paid based on time spent at work, then you're most definitely not working smarter by getting the job done quicker. The smart worker will realize that he needs to find ways to put in as many hours as possible while doing as little as possible, but still keep his employer happy.
Same thing with questioning the authority that feeds (pays) you. You might think you're being smart by suggesting improvements, but if the boss doesn't want to hear them, then you're actually being stupid and working against your own interests (keeping the job).
One of the first things I learned when I started working for others is that there are things that matter more than the actual job you do. Things like getting along with others and keeping your boss happy. It's not like school where you can be an asshole, be disliked by the teacher and your classmates and still ace the test to get an A.
The Olympics charge the broadcast and cable companies a fortune for coverage rights. Comcast NBC paid $1.23 billion for Rio alone.
I really dislike the fact that a bunch of elites are making money off the backs of the Olympic athletes and the people watching and attending the games. Countries should contribute funding, but commercial exploitation/advertising should be prohibited.
There should be official coverage that's available to watch for free over the Internet or other broadcast channels. Third-parties should be free to broadcast their own coverage if they want to.
Try being poor sometime and being unable to get a driver's license or state issued ID card, unable to take time off of work to get one, unable to pay the fees, etc.
And yet the poor somehow manage to get an identification card for their welfare benefits.
In my state an id costs $20, I wouldn't call that a burden, and the fee is waived for the homeless.
If all you hire are white men you're only going to ever have the viewpoints of white men.
So you're telling me that all white men have the same viewpoints?
When people talk about diversity these days, they tend to be referring to someone's skin color and cultural background. They are generally not talking about a diversity of ideas or viewpoints.
When people talk about improving the diversity of an organization they're talking about meeting arbitrary racial quotas. That's why, for example, the City of Chicago has been promoting Hispanic fire fighters ahead of more qualified Caucasian candidates.
Latino Firefighters Bullied Into Taking Race-Based Promotions, They Say
It doesn't help matters when your mother is a size 0. Average sized women seem quite large to me.
Yes, it does happen all the time to regular banks too! The Incredible Story Of How Hackers Stole $100 Million From The New York Fed
How do you trade your Bitcoins if they are in a wallet on your computer? Your suggestion doesn't help people who trade on the exchanges.
Some of these questionable policies are driven by business regulations and auditors. If you're going through a PCI or Sarbanes-Oxley certification process you're going to have to get all of those checkboxes marked on the auditors' spreadsheets, whether or not they make sense.
Good luck trying to get the auditor to explain why you need to change your passwords every 90 days, in my experience they can't defend their requirements and simply say things like it's "best practice".
Republic Wireless has some new phones and I thought the same thing while browsing the selection. $800 for a Galaxy S7 Edge is pretty damn expensive!
Fortunately there are a lot of phones available at a variety of price points these days. The Galaxy J3 is only $179.
Just because it doesn't create smoke like a conventional cigarette doesn't mean that the vapors and your exhalations aren't harmful.
Fun fact, human exhalations contain carbon dioxide which contributes to global warming and is poisonous in high concentrations.
Maybe you could be a little more considerate of the rest of us and stop breathing?
I really hate the fact that these devices are called e-cigarette; you don't have to use an e-juice that contains nicotine.
Are dry herb vaporizers going to be regulated as well?
Lots of people still go to the movies. $60 million in just one weekend for Star Trek alone? Someone is buying tickets. Just not anyone that frequents this site.
"No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people."
-- H. L. Mencken
Several people have already been prosecuted for running an unlicensed money transmitting business and money laundering, including people using the localbitcoins website. If this judge just ruled that Bitcoin isn't money, then how does that affect those other cases?
The Docker Registry deployment instructions specifically walk you through restricting access using basic auth. Did someone not read the instructions, or did they try to get fancy and screw something up?
Do yourself a favor and go buy an Intel NUC. It's much smaller than an XBone, runs on less power and has better media support.
I've got a Pebble Time Steel and the killer app for me is Music Boss. It lets me control my music player from my wrist instead of having to pull a phone from my pocket and key in the password every time I want to change tracks. Album art and track info is displayed on the watch face. Very handy when commuting on a crowded train.
I have also found the sleep and step tracking more useful than I would have imagined. The tracking may not be entirely accurate, but seeing the trends has motivated me to change my behavior.
Being able to receive and reply to SMS message from my wrist is nice. It's pretty handy for receiving codes for sites that use fake two-factor authentication. Reading email from the watch face is nice if I'm out walking when a message comes in; long messages do get cut off unfortunately.
Being able to switch watch faces is also handy. I use a face with dual timezones when I'm working and need to read log files with GMT timestamps and then switch to something artsy when I just need the local time.
Birkenstock's position doesn't make much sense to me. If there's a problem with counterfeit product, wouldn't you want to solve that by opening an official Birkenstock seller's account with Amazon and then letting people know to order from them to ensure they get the real thing?
Do you not remember the moral panic in the 1980's over Dungeons and Dragons? Or the Judas Priest subliminal message trial?
All society's suffer from this sort of insanity from time to time.
You got the service manuals, great. Now what about the special programming tools for your ECU?
I've got a Mitsubishi Lancer and it's a total PITA to get the TPMS programmed. It's 90 minutes to the local dealership and half the time they forget to reprogram the system after installing my summer or winter wheels. You can order the required MUT-III toolkit from the official supplier and do it yourself, but it's $8,000.
People are overweight because they consume more calories than they burn. It is that simple.
No, it's not that simple. Recent studies have shown that your gut biome helps to determine if you stay thin or gain weight.
In 2006, Jeffrey Gordon, MD, and his colleagues at the Washington University Medical School in St Louis published a paper in the journal Nature demonstrating that thin mice and obese mice have different populations of gut bacteria. Furthermore, they proved that one particular type of bacteria caused obesity, rather than obesity changing the types of bacteria. When the scientists isolated a strain of Firmicutes bacteria from chubby mice and then introduced them into the bacteria-free guts of thin mice raised in a sterile environment, the skinny mice fattened up in just 10 to 14 days.
Why You Can't Lose Weight