Is that EBITA or net? Net 2% isn't too bad, and of course is post-tech profit.
Which would be the right way to calculate 'profit'.
And this story brings up the reason why I don't log into WiFi in the stores I go to. With that, they track everything. Think not? You cling to your antiquated ideas of privacy, my friend. And read the Ts&Cs offered. Yeah, I know; tl:dr.
First issue; did you leave your employer on good or at least pleasant terms? If so, call them up. Ask first if they would offer a reference for the work you did. If so, excellent. Let your prospective employer break the news ot them that someone else just tried to take credit and more for the work. If not, well, they were never a very good reference. Dangerous ground there.
Second, if you did leave on good terms, after this dust settles, a call to them may be order, to let them know the code has been commented in a way that seems inappropriate. You may find they allowed it.
You'll want to negotiate rights to at least reference your work with future employers.
"According to law, any email older than 6 months on a server (example yahoo or google mail) is considered abandoned and available to investigative groups and agencies without warrant."
"investigative groups and agencies' is limited to the Government. By law. Which obviously should be repealed. And probably doesn't cover government servers, and should not cover my corporate servers.
And if the response is that these addresses were also limited to receiving mail from specified senders, well, that's probably good enough to be called illegal also.
Ditto. It is malice to obfuscate the email system.
But, more important, these email addresses aren't really 'secret'. They were presumably used, so those who needed/wanted to use them knew them. This is just an undisclosed system. FOIA requires disclosure. The cost of uncovering a surreptitious system should not be borne by the requester.
And truly, if the agency is claiming they cannot determine the addresses of their email system(s), be they acknowledged or surreptitious, perhaps they need to hire in some contractors to fix that for them. Like the FBI. It is illegal, you know.
"everyone but Microsoft knows it's a mess of an OS"
Huh?
You may not like the UI, but I'm not hearing that 8 is flaky or unreliable, any more than 7. The complaints are focused on the UI, and RT marketing.
And if there is a mess under the hood that I've managed to not pay attention to, Microsoft knows it better than you think. You can call them stupid for their decisions, but they are not oblivious to reality. Just trying to bend it to their will. Claiming "everyone but Microsoft knows it's a mess of an OS" is just stupid. Stick to the reality of the situation, that's bad enough.
IOS doesn't run on desktops. iPads are not desktops. No one except the low-information luser is expecting the same apps to run on their Air as their iPad.
Android, OTOH, does run on 'desktops', as in snazzy netbooks, like the Transformer.
You are only half wrong, and then actually mostly wrong. Windows RT is just a confusing thing, and it has been shown that salespeople in that big blue box store were equally clueless about it. No, Virginia, you aren't running Office 2003 on your new RT gizmo. Not now, not ever.
And that really isn't Microsoft's fault. They are, however, marketing it as vaguely as possible, which is probably a good thing. Works for Apple. Wait, Apple has cool stuff. Bad Microsoft! Stop trying to be cool! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!
It's not about whether the police (or the State) should be taking your DNA and/or retaining it, because they already have fingerprints and a photo.
If fingerprints and a photograph are enough to identify you, then that is sufficient. Requiring more should also require reasonable needs. Is DNA somehow more useful to them in any way?
Do you waive your Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights when you are arrested? If so, well, do you regain them if acquitted, or especially if charges are not brought in conjunction with that arrest? If so, then asking for the records to be destroyed or sealed is reasonable. If not, then why am I being treated as a if I was convicted, when I was not?
And if these records are retained, why not require that I be notified when they are accessed for any reason, even if notice is that a request was made, and that the results were kept secret? Oh, because we should not, for a moment, believe our government when it says it will only keep the data, but not use it. It stretched credulity to believe that the government will not use the data if they have it. There is NO other reason to keep it. None. If they want to keep it, they want to be able to use it. And I suspect they will not want to be held accountable for that use, even when they can merely declare it is 'necessary', and go right ahead.
We should require the government to offer substantive need to both collect and retain any information about us, no matter the circumstances. And this goes to the core of limited government arguments. Our government serves us. We do not serve our government.
Time to start voting smart, gang. Wise up, pr pay up.
If I want to access my mail virtually anywhere i can get a signal, I need something 'out there' to do it. And if the government declares that anything left on a server for more than 6 months is fair game, they are either telling me to give up on 6 month old mail if I want it to be safe from the Government's prying tentacles, or move it somewhere offline, which limits its usefulness greatly.
So why should I accept the Government's assertion of their right to access my personal communications, without a warrant or any oversight, merely because I store it somewhere they declare to be in any way accessible to them because it is remote to me?
More importantly, however, is the problem I would have securing a server of my own in an expedient and reasonable manner. I could run a server at my home, and challenge the Government's assertion that they can access *my* server just because it is accessible to me alone over the Internet. But my ISP would like to bill me a lot more money for me to do so. Why should I jump through that hoop and find, in the end, that the Government will only change their tune and declare my server is also covered by their self0asserted 'right' to read my email etc. merely because that's the way it works.
Not much different than the Government claiming that my physical postal mail is subject to inspection because it is, for some time, outside the control of both the sender and receiver. Wait, postal law mostly prevents that.
Why not extend the principles of postal law to electronic communications also?
Once again, proof the Constitution is intended to limit Government, not the people.
The government is the client. If they are not sufficiently distanced from the dev team, they cannot properly manage the project.
My CIO laments that 30-40% of our projects fail. That seems below the norm. So Britain should expect this to take 2-3 tries to get right. And then start over Judy because there is a new development paradigm.
In software, lawyering, and baseball can you get paid to fall so much.
As a TMO subscriber, I (now) fully understand the 'no contract' thing. If I fulfill my contract, and the 24 monthly payments for my phone, I don't pay for the phone any more. I can bail on the contract, but I agreed to pay for the phone, so the balance is due. This replaces the ETF, which was probably mostly to recover phone subsidy, though of course an ETF that doesn't decrease over the term of the contract is profitable. That means gouging, unethical, or usurous in this context.
But if your contract permits you to bail without ETF if the terms change, and the terms allowed include fee increases or new fees, vote with your feet. If not, well, this is not only NOT NEW for AT&T, but virtually every carrier has done this.
My intention with thge TMO 'no contract' thing is to outlive the contract. My last phone failed, so I lost that bet, but the two before outlived my contract by 6-9 months. Each time my monthly cost did not decrease, though I had fulfilled my contract, and supposedly paid the subsidy. I won;t do that again if I can help it, though I may one day buy a phone outright.
And please, please explain how Europe has it so right, where most users buy their phones. And explain, if you would, how that model could work here in the US, where there are at least 2 different technologies, and multiple spectrum differences. Could I take my TMO-branded phone over to Sprint? Can my Cricket phone work on AT&T? How about my AT&T phone on Verizon? Europe has it simpler with GSM the standard and fewer spectrum problems. Different market, different solutions. In the US, phone interoperability is largely nonexistent. You buy your phone from your carrier because it works.
"If I had a diagnosis that gave me a 25% chance of dying in the next year, I believe that I have the right to decide who knows that."
I was just thinking your employer, if you have one, might want to know that. But if we go very far down that path, employers may have to weigh your likely health status when hiring. Even the length of your commute, and the relative likelihood of a traffic accident and resulting time lost, if not death and replacement cost.
Sounds a bit more Orwellian than I like. In that scenario, ageism is not just a valid policy, it's almost mandatory. Which fits right in with the youth unemployment problem and longevity. Knowledge workers can be productive well past traditional retirement age, but steelworkers and factory jobs take their toll. The robots solve this and create the problem of unemployment and the surge to nonmanual work. Only I'm working into retirement age, and not about to give up my job just so the young squirts can have something to do.
Growth is the only solution. One our current Administration doesn't seem able to deliver. But then again, in the U.S., the government should NOT be in the business of running the economy. Referee, maybe. General manager, no.
Nationalized health care is not insurance. Once you understand that, you let go of a lot of other complaints, and can focus on the real problems with this. Like how to control costs, what is essential, and the need for supplemental insurance to pay for what the State will not, but you would choose to.
The real issue with the ACA, or nationalized healthcare as provided by it, is that it seems that my choice to pay more for care is denied me. Secondarily, I'm punished for doing so. Rights that include restrictions are not necessarily wrong, but in this case, we are pretending to extend the right to healthcare by merely changing the financing method.
True, in much of the world the poor and needy are not cared for.
But that doesn't make access to healthcare any less a right. It just means their community, their government, their nation cares not to protect, defend, and guarantee that right. Or are unable to. Having a robust economy sure makes that easier.
I don't need a lot to cure my bad toenail. I might need more to solve my shoulder problems, my hip issue, my knee problem. And the injustice will be that I and my employers paid dearly for my insurance for decades, and when it is needed, I will find myself in a legislative environment where the decision is not if I can afford it, but if the 'system' can afford it. And I will risk being denied care not based on need or ability to pay, but on the needs of the many. Who may or may not have paid anything.
Yes, Larry, good for you you chose to disclose some of your health information, given that you are an officer in a publicly-held corporation, and have a responsitiblity to disclose material facts that may affect corporate performance or investor behavior. When do we see the rest of your health records?
So, in business, the profit motive causes unethical and damaging (to everything, even profit sometimes) behavior by businesses and individuals. Criminal activity, safety violations, tax evasion, outright theft, and a host of other behaviors, motivated by the opportunity of profit.
And the government is somehow immune to this?
Obviously not.
For business, the solution is not to remove profit, since that is the purpose of business.
But for government, profit replaces taxation. So stop it. Stop letting government derive revenue from profit. Require them to do so by taxation, fees, blah, and let fines and penalties function only as deterrence or cost recovery.
Cranking down the caution light delay is not intended to recover any cost. It is intended to increase revenue. Profit.
Around where I live (Phoenix area) the red light camera are a pox, but we complain bitterly when they manage to shorten the interval too much. It usually works. My mother, however, lives in Florida, and she is not at all surprised that this strategy of extracting profit from drivers is afoot there. She expects it, and does not expect the government to give this up without a fight. I believe her.
At every level, our government must watched, restrained, and held to account. Every level.
It's not ticket sales. They can't figure out a way to gouge the local TV market for even more $$$. Mostly because the local TV market is refusing to pay for what is given freely OTA in the next county/state.
Slashdot Mirror
Is that EBITA or net? Net 2% isn't too bad, and of course is post-tech profit.
Which would be the right way to calculate 'profit'.
And this story brings up the reason why I don't log into WiFi in the stores I go to. With that, they track everything. Think not? You cling to your antiquated ideas of privacy, my friend. And read the Ts&Cs offered. Yeah, I know; tl:dr.
How did this get modded funny?
First issue; did you leave your employer on good or at least pleasant terms? If so, call them up. Ask first if they would offer a reference for the work you did. If so, excellent. Let your prospective employer break the news ot them that someone else just tried to take credit and more for the work. If not, well, they were never a very good reference. Dangerous ground there.
Second, if you did leave on good terms, after this dust settles, a call to them may be order, to let them know the code has been commented in a way that seems inappropriate. You may find they allowed it.
You'll want to negotiate rights to at least reference your work with future employers.
"According to law, any email older than 6 months on a server (example yahoo or google mail) is considered abandoned and available to investigative groups and agencies without warrant."
"investigative groups and agencies' is limited to the Government. By law. Which obviously should be repealed. And probably doesn't cover government servers, and should not cover my corporate servers.
And if the response is that these addresses were also limited to receiving mail from specified senders, well, that's probably good enough to be called illegal also.
Ditto. It is malice to obfuscate the email system.
But, more important, these email addresses aren't really 'secret'. They were presumably used, so those who needed/wanted to use them knew them. This is just an undisclosed system. FOIA requires disclosure. The cost of uncovering a surreptitious system should not be borne by the requester.
And truly, if the agency is claiming they cannot determine the addresses of their email system(s), be they acknowledged or surreptitious, perhaps they need to hire in some contractors to fix that for them. Like the FBI. It is illegal, you know.
"everyone but Microsoft knows it's a mess of an OS"
Huh?
You may not like the UI, but I'm not hearing that 8 is flaky or unreliable, any more than 7. The complaints are focused on the UI, and RT marketing.
And if there is a mess under the hood that I've managed to not pay attention to, Microsoft knows it better than you think. You can call them stupid for their decisions, but they are not oblivious to reality. Just trying to bend it to their will. Claiming "everyone but Microsoft knows it's a mess of an OS" is just stupid. Stick to the reality of the situation, that's bad enough.
IOS doesn't run on desktops. iPads are not desktops. No one except the low-information luser is expecting the same apps to run on their Air as their iPad.
Android, OTOH, does run on 'desktops', as in snazzy netbooks, like the Transformer.
You are only half wrong, and then actually mostly wrong. Windows RT is just a confusing thing, and it has been shown that salespeople in that big blue box store were equally clueless about it. No, Virginia, you aren't running Office 2003 on your new RT gizmo. Not now, not ever.
And that really isn't Microsoft's fault. They are, however, marketing it as vaguely as possible, which is probably a good thing. Works for Apple. Wait, Apple has cool stuff. Bad Microsoft! Stop trying to be cool! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!
"I must be quick to point out that nobody in the media or universities of this dimension praises Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pot."
You are incorrect. On all three counts.
You are correct. The media has not changed so much.
They are more effective, and more successful, at their efforts.
It's not about whether the police (or the State) should be taking your DNA and/or retaining it, because they already have fingerprints and a photo.
If fingerprints and a photograph are enough to identify you, then that is sufficient. Requiring more should also require reasonable needs. Is DNA somehow more useful to them in any way?
Do you waive your Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights when you are arrested? If so, well, do you regain them if acquitted, or especially if charges are not brought in conjunction with that arrest? If so, then asking for the records to be destroyed or sealed is reasonable. If not, then why am I being treated as a if I was convicted, when I was not?
And if these records are retained, why not require that I be notified when they are accessed for any reason, even if notice is that a request was made, and that the results were kept secret? Oh, because we should not, for a moment, believe our government when it says it will only keep the data, but not use it. It stretched credulity to believe that the government will not use the data if they have it. There is NO other reason to keep it. None. If they want to keep it, they want to be able to use it. And I suspect they will not want to be held accountable for that use, even when they can merely declare it is 'necessary', and go right ahead.
We should require the government to offer substantive need to both collect and retain any information about us, no matter the circumstances. And this goes to the core of limited government arguments. Our government serves us. We do not serve our government.
Time to start voting smart, gang. Wise up, pr pay up.
So I use my own mail server, and GMail ,and Yahoo!
If I want to access my mail virtually anywhere i can get a signal, I need something 'out there' to do it. And if the government declares that anything left on a server for more than 6 months is fair game, they are either telling me to give up on 6 month old mail if I want it to be safe from the Government's prying tentacles, or move it somewhere offline, which limits its usefulness greatly.
So why should I accept the Government's assertion of their right to access my personal communications, without a warrant or any oversight, merely because I store it somewhere they declare to be in any way accessible to them because it is remote to me?
More importantly, however, is the problem I would have securing a server of my own in an expedient and reasonable manner. I could run a server at my home, and challenge the Government's assertion that they can access *my* server just because it is accessible to me alone over the Internet. But my ISP would like to bill me a lot more money for me to do so. Why should I jump through that hoop and find, in the end, that the Government will only change their tune and declare my server is also covered by their self0asserted 'right' to read my email etc. merely because that's the way it works.
Not much different than the Government claiming that my physical postal mail is subject to inspection because it is, for some time, outside the control of both the sender and receiver. Wait, postal law mostly prevents that.
Why not extend the principles of postal law to electronic communications also?
Once again, proof the Constitution is intended to limit Government, not the people.
The government is the client. If they are not sufficiently distanced from the dev team, they cannot properly manage the project.
My CIO laments that 30-40% of our projects fail. That seems below the norm. So Britain should expect this to take 2-3 tries to get right. And then start over Judy because there is a new development paradigm.
In software, lawyering, and baseball can you get paid to fall so much.
As a TMO subscriber, I (now) fully understand the 'no contract' thing. If I fulfill my contract, and the 24 monthly payments for my phone, I don't pay for the phone any more. I can bail on the contract, but I agreed to pay for the phone, so the balance is due. This replaces the ETF, which was probably mostly to recover phone subsidy, though of course an ETF that doesn't decrease over the term of the contract is profitable. That means gouging, unethical, or usurous in this context.
But if your contract permits you to bail without ETF if the terms change, and the terms allowed include fee increases or new fees, vote with your feet. If not, well, this is not only NOT NEW for AT&T, but virtually every carrier has done this.
My intention with thge TMO 'no contract' thing is to outlive the contract. My last phone failed, so I lost that bet, but the two before outlived my contract by 6-9 months. Each time my monthly cost did not decrease, though I had fulfilled my contract, and supposedly paid the subsidy. I won;t do that again if I can help it, though I may one day buy a phone outright.
And please, please explain how Europe has it so right, where most users buy their phones. And explain, if you would, how that model could work here in the US, where there are at least 2 different technologies, and multiple spectrum differences. Could I take my TMO-branded phone over to Sprint? Can my Cricket phone work on AT&T? How about my AT&T phone on Verizon? Europe has it simpler with GSM the standard and fewer spectrum problems. Different market, different solutions. In the US, phone interoperability is largely nonexistent. You buy your phone from your carrier because it works.
Back around 2000--2001 I used POTP email client from, an Israeli company to satisfy a client's perceived need for encrypted communications.
It solved the exchange problem on an initial or any sync message, and after that passed new pads each time.
Pretty much unbreakable. I still have a copy, but I doubt it would run, and I need a partner to test it, sort of.
"for every dollar of electricity to power a data center, $1.4 dollars were spent to cool it. That dropped to 1.8 recently, an improvement to be sure."
Sure, 1.4 dropped to 1.8. Progress.
If the rest of the article makes that much sense, I'm not wasting any more time. Typos are typos, but typoing the premise leaves me, well, feh.
"If I had a diagnosis that gave me a 25% chance of dying in the next year, I believe that I have the right to decide who knows that."
I was just thinking your employer, if you have one, might want to know that. But if we go very far down that path, employers may have to weigh your likely health status when hiring. Even the length of your commute, and the relative likelihood of a traffic accident and resulting time lost, if not death and replacement cost.
Sounds a bit more Orwellian than I like. In that scenario, ageism is not just a valid policy, it's almost mandatory. Which fits right in with the youth unemployment problem and longevity. Knowledge workers can be productive well past traditional retirement age, but steelworkers and factory jobs take their toll. The robots solve this and create the problem of unemployment and the surge to nonmanual work. Only I'm working into retirement age, and not about to give up my job just so the young squirts can have something to do.
Growth is the only solution. One our current Administration doesn't seem able to deliver. But then again, in the U.S., the government should NOT be in the business of running the economy. Referee, maybe. General manager, no.
Nationalized health care is not insurance. Once you understand that, you let go of a lot of other complaints, and can focus on the real problems with this. Like how to control costs, what is essential, and the need for supplemental insurance to pay for what the State will not, but you would choose to.
The real issue with the ACA, or nationalized healthcare as provided by it, is that it seems that my choice to pay more for care is denied me. Secondarily, I'm punished for doing so. Rights that include restrictions are not necessarily wrong, but in this case, we are pretending to extend the right to healthcare by merely changing the financing method.
True, in much of the world the poor and needy are not cared for.
But that doesn't make access to healthcare any less a right. It just means their community, their government, their nation cares not to protect, defend, and guarantee that right. Or are unable to. Having a robust economy sure makes that easier.
I don't need a lot to cure my bad toenail. I might need more to solve my shoulder problems, my hip issue, my knee problem. And the injustice will be that I and my employers paid dearly for my insurance for decades, and when it is needed, I will find myself in a legislative environment where the decision is not if I can afford it, but if the 'system' can afford it. And I will risk being denied care not based on need or ability to pay, but on the needs of the many. Who may or may not have paid anything.
Yes, Larry, good for you you chose to disclose some of your health information, given that you are an officer in a publicly-held corporation, and have a responsitiblity to disclose material facts that may affect corporate performance or investor behavior. When do we see the rest of your health records?
I thought so.
So, in business, the profit motive causes unethical and damaging (to everything, even profit sometimes) behavior by businesses and individuals. Criminal activity, safety violations, tax evasion, outright theft, and a host of other behaviors, motivated by the opportunity of profit.
And the government is somehow immune to this?
Obviously not.
For business, the solution is not to remove profit, since that is the purpose of business.
But for government, profit replaces taxation. So stop it. Stop letting government derive revenue from profit. Require them to do so by taxation, fees, blah, and let fines and penalties function only as deterrence or cost recovery.
Cranking down the caution light delay is not intended to recover any cost. It is intended to increase revenue. Profit.
Around where I live (Phoenix area) the red light camera are a pox, but we complain bitterly when they manage to shorten the interval too much. It usually works. My mother, however, lives in Florida, and she is not at all surprised that this strategy of extracting profit from drivers is afoot there. She expects it, and does not expect the government to give this up without a fight. I believe her.
At every level, our government must watched, restrained, and held to account. Every level.
We use Voltage here, the Outlook plug-in is what users see, and it is trouble-free.
But we have 65,000 users. YMMV.
Couldn't care less, or would have preferred?
I don't think you can have it both ways.
"And why is a Republican trying to put regulation on business?"
Um, to pander for votes?
It's not ticket sales. They can't figure out a way to gouge the local TV market for even more $$$. Mostly because the local TV market is refusing to pay for what is given freely OTA in the next county/state.
"Him being a mormon, only mattered to folks who would never vote for a black president anyway."
My experience has shown me that PRECISELY THE OPPOSITE IS TRUE.
Precisely. The. Opposite.
Wow. You must live in a small universe.
Both Bushes suffered from this. One for engaging an enemy after they invaded a friend.
The other because the enemy he was facing was very very different, and significantly more dangerous.
In war, mistakes are made.