Sun had 2 specific problems that Apple doesn't have.
1) When the internet bubble burst in the last 90s, Sun's great sales suddenly became a massive liability. Internet bubble companies suddenly stopped paying for the Sun equipment as they went bust. I don't know how much Sun actually got in terms of real revenue vs. billable charges that would have eventually been paid has those companies survived. But this led to a glut of barely used Sun equipment that depressed their prices on new machines and was maybe more than the market could absorb. It's unfair, but Sun basically ended up being punished for being successful.
2) Their failure to quickly respond to the market's demand for lower priced blade type servers vs. their legacy, expensive servers meant that companies who didn't do so well in the bubble like HP and IBM suddenly were selling cheap servers by the truckload in the new market demanding lower cost. Sun lost this segment and even though they eventually sold servers in it, the business that went away didn't ever come back.
There has been a slow, but steadily increasing approach between China and Europe for the last couple of decades, in many ways: trade agreements, Chinese interest in European education and scientific development, even what could be the first, tenuous signs of political alignment. One of the reasons, in my view, is simply that Europe isn't the US - America has for many years employed a very aggressive rhetoric against China, where Europe has been more moderate, and it does seem to have left a lasting impression. On that background, I don't think it is at all surprising that they will build a Moon base together. I think it is great that China shows leadership and determination in this hugely important area; sure, it stings a bit that we in the West aren't in the lead, but I'm sure the Chinese will allow America to take part, when they are ready to commit to it.
Europe basically would sell their own mother for a nickel if they could get some kind of money out of it from China. That's why their interests are aligning. As a person who's spent a lot of time in Europe and used to work for a European company in the USA, I'm not just some kind of xenophobic American talking here. Good grief. A few years ago some high ranking British cabinet official acted like a giddy school girl when President Xi came over for a visit. I thought the guy's comments to the press were completely ridiculous for a cabinet minister to say. Europe has no spine, so they turn a blind eye to China's constant threat to invade Taiwan. When is the last time in your life that a major power threatened to invade a much small country (Or "province" if you are European and buy China's bs line on this) simply because that other country wouldn't bow down to it in obedience? Geez, the closest example I can think of is the Czechoslovakian situation right before World War II started. Does any European government even dare to suggest that it would be unacceptable for China to invade Taiwan? Nope. Because that would require the EU countries to have a spine. Even the UK, who honestly gets very little out of their China trade, lacks the spine to even suggest that China could really tone down the rhetoric a bit with regards to Tibet. Nobody in the EU has any kind of conscience about China and as long as cheap Chinese made good keep coming over, they'll shrug every Chinese outrage off.
I have no personal problem with China and the European Space Agency putting a base on the moon and if that spurs the USA to do so too, that would be great. But people in the EU and China are not in agreement because of any reason other than the EU members have no soul and they can be bought off on anything for the right price.
Trump knows there is no future in coal and it's not coming back. He's basically keeping a campaign promise. People in coal mining country were told by Hillary Clinton what they didn't want to hear, namely that there was no future in coal and, in a much quieter voice that apparently nobody heard, that they'd supposedly be retrained for new jobs. Trump simply told coal miners that their problems were somebody else's fault and he would remove restrictions on coal. In the short term it will probably save enough jobs for the over 50 crowd that they can retire from the mines, but there's no future for younger people in the field and Trump knows it. He's not going to say it out loud as the coal miners prefer to live in the delusion that they can turn back the clock here and they voted Republican and he wants their votes in the future, but I'm sure he knows it.
Of course, I'm skipping over some technical details, but that's basically the gist of it. Also, I should mention that it's much easier to crack one card in a couple of weeks and clone it 1,000 times than having to crack 1,000 separate cards to clone them once. And also, some chipped cards are allowed to be used without the pin, because not everything on a chipped card is encrypted, and that's ok for some businesses because they'll limit the amount of the transaction when the pin is not used, and also they can take other security measures, like video recording the person, or video recording the car of the person who used it, or something else entirely..
Not your fault as your points are sound, but I find your statements to be a bit ironic. You see, you started your post because somebody bitched about how the chip does nothing in the USA except delay the whole process. I guess you don't know because you're not like this, but the people who say stuff like "The chip does NOTHING in the USA except make the whole process take longer." are also the super paranoid people who find everything to be an invasion of their rights, so they'd also never agree to your suggestions of videotaping their cars, the transaction itself, and so on.
Like other great Sci-Fi (Fritz Lang's Metropolis, The Day The Earth Stood Still, Westworld (the original), etc).
I saw Westworld as a kid and loved it then and I decided it might be fun to watch it again before the HBO series started. It's really not very good. Yul Brenner is fine, as he always is, but overall it's just not very good and doesn't hold up well at all. Another film I'd make the same comment about from the time is Soylent Green, which is really just not very good or interesting at all outside of its famous plot twist.
My previous job was working in a major US office for a European company. I still have some grudges against my former employer so I don't like to name them or the country they operated out of because I don't want to take the chance of them getting any publicity. They have major sales problems in North America because nobody has ever heard of them and frankly, they deserve it. However, I will say that the country our HQ operated in was rather infamous for having 7 hour work days so you can probably make a good guess as to which major EU country this was.
So anyway, one time I got sent overseas to HQ and got to meet a bunch of my colleagues who I had only talked to on the phone before. Although their country officially had 7 hour work days. they were usually at work 9 to 10 hours a day. I asked them why. They all said that their management got really upset if they left after those 7 hours so they stayed at work a few extra hours a day and basically did nothing in those extra hours because that shut up management. So I can tell you that even if the law says you can only work 6-7 hours, there are probably going to be places where people are going to be forced to work more anyway off the books.
Is that for now, it seems that trying IP cases in China's courts results in fair verdicts. But note that this in no way impacts other areas that might be of concern such as human rights and the little guy being screwed over by the rich big guy in their legal system. And I sure wouldn't conclude that any awesome political freedoms are coming to the average Chinese citizen because China now defends global markets and free trade. Look at Hong Kong.
This is what happens when you let one party have a complete stranglehold on state government. The number of Republicans in the state senate are almost 6 to 1 in favor of Republicans. It's almost 3-1 in favor of Republicans in the state house. The governor in Republican and there's no accountability. Voters have shown consistently that the vast majority of them only care about whether a D or R is next to a candidate's name and everything else is negotiable. I'm sure we'll get a few "Throw the bums out" posts, but that's not going to happen. Most of the state governments in the southeastern USA have sizable Republican majorities. I've seen corrupt practices out of the Democrats too when they had strangleholds on states with huge majorities in the state legislature. It's what happens when one party gets entrenched and there's no hope of getting them out.
Bullshit. It was not a lawful order. You do not have to follow an unlawful order.
Two different lawyer friends both said that they felt that the order to leave the plane was lawful and the customer was in the wrong for refusing to do so. However, that doesn't mean that the customer can't go to court and get a big payout anyway. I asked one for some more details and asked specifically if he felt that the customer was assaulted in being forcibly dragged off the plane. He said that in his opinion he felt that a jury probably wouldn't rule that way. You do need to realize that anything can happen once a jury gets the case, so the fact that he said he didn't think a jury would find that to be assault doesn't mean with absolute certainty that's the verdict they would return. But both lawyers still thought the situation was horribly handled by United and the customer can probably make big money in a settlement as they doubt it will go to trial.
1) Class wars. The "rich", which may include your company, who agree to pay full fares and get little or no discounts are allowed to cancel up until just about the very last minute at no penalty or almost no penalty. I have a friend who owns his own business and he runs just about every charge he has through an airline credit card. This gives him some kind of super elite status with the airline in question and they allow him to book flights months in advance and cancel them with no penalty at all. He's a big fan of the NFL, so during the playoffs he booked flights for cities his favorite team might have to go to for a playoff game and he canceled the ones he didn't need. He didn't pay anything for the cancellations. Letting people do this leads to...
2) Empty seats. Airlines want to avoid this. So they overbook to increase their chances of selling out flights.
The airlines are kind of stuck because letting people cancel for free or almost free is big part of why overbooking is needed, but if they punished people for doing that, people would likely take a harder line on price. Right now a minority of customers are willing to pay really high charges in exchange for free (or almost free) cancellations. The airlines depend on this money and it helps the rest of us pay less for our seats, although in exchange for a lower price we often get severe restrictions on changes.
I don't pretend to know who did it, but I think a very relevant question is who gains from the release of chemical weapons? Right now I can see ways in which the rebels gain, Trump gains, the US military-industrial-complex gains, and even perhaps Russia gains some perverse way. Assad, on the other hand, what does he gain?.
I know that a lot of people assume Assad did this by choice because - evil - but one of the things that people should consider is that in dictatorial regimes (this includes communist regimes) many people under the top guy but in positions of power like to anticipate the wishes of the top guy. So you'll see highly placed underlings who take this on themselves do the dirty work, thinking the top guy will be pleased. The poisoning of former Ukrainian president VIktor Yushchenko, which eventually led to the Orange Revolution, is believed to have been orchestrated by an underling of the Ukrainian president at the time who thought the president would be pleased. In fact, this became a nightmare for the president's political party and played a big role in why they eventually lost the presidential election. So I can certainly believe that some guy under Assad ordered this and thought Assad would be happy about it and didn't consider the consequences.
I don't understand why companies would even give a shit about cultural or demographic homogeneity issues. They exist to make money, period. Nothing else matters, except as it relates to that.
In the USA it's federal law. Federal law prohibits discrimination on a pretty wide variety of reasons. How do you not know this?
Part of the challenge is foreign tourism tends to concentrate in certain areas, such as Disney, NYC, Hawaii, etc and is not spread more evenly across the country. Thus, despite the significant impact it may have on some areas others will think it's Ok because well, Trump; proving you can't fix stupid.
As an American, this is quite right. I actually have traveled to a lot of foreign countries because I just like traveling and sightseeing. I've been to over 14 different countries, but a few places I've been to aren't really countries so much as territories or something like that, so my actual count could be higher depending on how loose you view the definition of "countries". This makes me some kind of wild, crazy international traveler by American standards. Among my friends, it's really difficult to find anybody who's ever been outside of North America. I've got friends who have never left the USA at all. One guy I can think of went to a Mexican resort - once. Another friend has been to Canada twice in his life and for a while there he acted like he was some kind of hardcore seasoned international traveler because of that. Another friend went to somewhere in the Caribbean once because work sent him there for a conference. Another guy I knew went to the UK once and he'd love to go back, but that would require him to actually leave his house, something he rarely does (he has major issues). Honestly, I'm finding it hard in my circle of friends to find people who care at all if foreign travelers can't come to the USA or choose to avoid it. Lots of people really don't care. I'm not in favor of the US losing tourism business, but I really seem to have a minority viewpoint here. I grew up in a small town about 2 hours from our state capitol and my first post-college job was in that town. I worked with a few people who had never been to our state capitol and had never left the state and had no plans to do either. This has been going on for a long time and it's not just a Trump thing, although maybe he's bringing more of these kind of people out into the open.
If the FCC cared, they'd have had this ironed out years ago.
Perhaps you don't know how the FCC works. They suffer from exactly the same political party biases as any part of Washington D.C. does. They have a board of 5 commissioners and by law no more than 3 can belong to the same political party. The current makeup is 2 Republicans and 1 Democrat and 2 unfilled seats. I don't know why the 2 seats are unfilled. Could be that Obama appointed people and the Senate refused to consider them. As far i know there's nothing to stop Trump from appointing a Republican to one vacant seat and leaving the other vacant, giving the Republicans a 3-1 edge. The FCC has been in Republican control for a really long time now. Michael Powell, Gen. Colin Powell's son, ran them for a while but he was controversial as he always sided with big business on everything they wanted. I don't know if it's fair to say they don't care so much as it is more accurate to say the Republicans have the majority there and they definitely don't care.
There's no reason that ESPN couldn't be the go-to source of high quality online streams of sporting events, along with very lucrative ways of monetizing them, if they'd actually thought about this a few years ago.
They did actually see this coming years ago, but that depends on who I define as "they". If that definition applies to their parent company, the Walt Disney Company, yes Disney certainly did see this coming years ago. I own Disney stock so I follow them as a business fairly well. Disney has made a ton of deals involving ESPN and other properties that show that they, Disney, have seen this coming for a long time. Now if we define "they" as people who work at ESPN itself, yes, they seem to be quite a bit in denial about a lot of things.
ESPN does stream things and their streams are high quality, but as I almost never make use of that as I am not a 20 year old hipster doofus who has to watch everything on his phone and I have a real job and a real TV with a real cable subscription at my house, I can't really say much about that.
Trump is Schrodinger's president. He can be both an isolationist hate filled xenophobe and a globalist sellout at the same time, whichever his detractors think is worse in the moment!
Queue the mental gymnastics trying to show the president is a white supremacist yet is selling out his nation.
While being an isolationist and a globalist is a contradiction, there's nothing at all about being a white supremacist that would prevent such a person from selling out their nation. No mental gymnastics required.
Your post made me think of last year how someone pointed out that some people accused Hillary Clinton of being a cold blooded killer who ordered the death of anybody who might expose her crimes, yet somehow she was at the same time too weak to deal with Putin.
In the wake of the Kelo vs. City of New London case, where the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that municipalities can forcibly buy out your land under eminent domain just to do a redevelopment of some kind, some guy went public that he wanted to buy out Justice David Souter's house and raze it and build a bed and breakfast on it. I was greatly pleased with this idea as I'm still pretty angry about the verdict, but this just ended up being 100% talk and nothing even came close to being done. No development was ever actually done on the land acquired. It's currently a vacant lot. So you can thank the Supreme Court for the idea that if anybody in your local government has a grievance against you, they can get a bogus developer to come up with a phony plan to redevelop your land, force you to sell it to them, tear down your house and then do absolutely nothing with the property and it's all 100% legal.
To be honest with you, I would expect the Congresscritters involved to complain a lot about this plan and wouldn't be surprised if they pass legislation to make it illegal to harvest their data and only theirs. But most voters don't care about anything but whether there is an R or a D by a candidate's name and I wouldn't expect any browsing revelations to matter in the next election, nor would Congress even protecting themselves from such matter. If the past election taught us anything, it's that for 80% or more of the voters, no matter what they say, they really don't care about anything except party affiliation of the candidates.
For the life of me, I can't fathom why anyone would want to live in a big city. Every perk I hear touted, I can beat. It's quiet, I have a yard, and I have more spending money that the saps choking on smog.
I'd like to take a crack at this.
We have major league sports teams. Of course, if you don't like sports, that's not a selling point for you. We have symphony orchestra and museums if you like the artsy side of things. We have restaurants that are fancier that Wendy's. We have pizza places that aren't just Papa John's. We also have Asian restaurants that only serve Japanese food or only serve Thai food and so on. Check out the Oatmeal cartoon on Asian food in a small town here : http://theoatmeal.com/comics/a...
That's where you live.
But actually the best argument against the small town lifestyle is that in many small towns there's only maybe one major employer and you're lucky enough to work for them in IT. What happens when they go out of business? What happens if they lay you off because they need to save money by either replacing you with offshore IT or just eliminating your position? You end up like so many others - you won't leave your town, but you can't find any other IT work to do. Ever read about those IT workers who got laid 2+ years ago and still can't find a job? That's what happens in small towns.
As an aside, I hate the current mod point system. They expire so quickly that even when I get them, I can barely use any of them before they are gone forever.
My two cents - we have an open office plan where I work. So I like to stay after hours and work. Why? Because the lights are off, I don't have to listen to people milling around me all the time having conversations about the weather or last Sunday's game. Just me and the work I have to do. No distractions. It's blissful.
I can get more done in 2 hours like that than the previous 8.
I work for a Fortune 500 company and while they are not perfect, in general they're pretty good. I've had worse employers for sure. We're in the process of moving to an open floor plan. While our management is pretty smart, this plan is simply throwing spaghetti at a wall and seeing what sticks. We're doing it because some other company did it and claimed it made things so much better. No real thought was given to it. My company thinks that it's going to make all our devs super engaged and more productive, but I have my doubts. We have decent sized cubicles right now but there's no real privacy. Another group sits on the other side of my cubicle wall and they are in training and customer service and they are on the phone roughly 50% of the day, sometimes more. I'm pretty good at tuning out distractions, but I'm not a dev guy. I can only imagine dev people going nuts if they had to sit where I do and listen to their incessant phone calls all day long. It would be even worse to be in an open office where there's nothing between you and these people. My company won't let them work at home and we have insufficient conference rooms so they can't use those. It can get really bad when 3 of them are on the phone at the same time, all talking to different people about different subjects. Note too that none of our managers will be given up their private offices under this new plan. That's not a bad thing in my opinion as who wants a manager able to watch your every move, but it shows how little thought was given to this and how the managers all think that what's good for their minions isn't necessarily good for them.
It reminds me of how people were talking about the Podesta email incident as some massively complex hacking job. It wasn't -- they found out he still used Yahoo Mail and phished him. I can't believe that (a) one of the most powerful political operatives in the Clinton campaign uses Yahoo Mail, and (b) that he fell for it.
Actually the email seemed suspicious to Podesta so he asked his 20-something security "expert" to look at it. Now keep in mind that probably almost all of us know to have a mouse hover over a link in an email to see where it really goes. For example, if a link supposed to go to mycompany.com actually goes to gizshiz.com or mycompanyname.ru, yeah, you should be smart enough to think those are probably not really mycompany.com. The problem was that his "expert" didn't do this. He simply looked at the email, immediately proclaimed it to be legit and insisted that Podesta immediately click on the link and change his password. Insiders refused to name the "expert" or say whether he still has a job. My guess is that he does. But Podesta correctly got suspicious and asked for help, he just put his faith in someone to help him who didn't deserve it. For all the reported use the Democratic Party made of cutting edge analytics when Obama ran for president, they seem to have really weird ideas at the very top about security. I still maintain that had Bill and Hillary used their fortunes to hire real security experts for the foundation's email server and ran something like a hardened form of BSD on it, it could have mitigated a lot of the damage of using a private server, but no, they just had to use some local 2 man operation that was basically a small, local equivalent of Geek Squad and they used them because they were nearby and cheap, not good.
It's not entirely clear what Asian country everyone is from (or perhaps they're Asian-American), but assuming none of them are from the U.S., it should make those in government U.S. cybersecurity a bit anxious, and perhaps give pause to our new-found love of immigration restrictions.
Unlikely. The people that are in love with the restrictions don't really want anybody coming over. I have an Asian friend who lives on the other coast of the US from me. She's ethnically Chinese but immigrated by marriage from her home country to the USA. She's told me some recent stories about having white women make very prejudiced remarks towards her both at work and while shopping. And keep in mind that she's not Muslim so none of this is caused by religious wear like a hijab. People who voted for Trump are no longer afraid to hide their prejudices any more. I see some pretty shocking stuff on Facebook from a small number of people I know along these lines.
Is John Deere legally liable if an UNMODIFIED tractor malfunctions and hurts someone? Nope, that's right there in the summary of the license agreement. Why do you think THAT will change because of modified firmware?
Like most here, you don't understand how US law really works. My best friend is a lawyer, we've known each other since college, and he's taught me a lot over the years. One of the things he's taught me is that when you sign an agreement that says you sign away your rights, that doesn't necessarily mean you actually have signed away your rights. There are various ways around this kind of thing, including arguing something that amounts to saying that John Deere coerced you into signing that and you had no choice but to agree. Also, you seem to not realize that once you get to court, anything is possible. Depending on how good the lawyers are, the judge's personal involvement in the case (whether he/she steers the jury with comments or leaves them alone to do whatever they will), and the jury itself, any kind of verdict is possible.
How is anyone ok with putting up with this nonsense?
Yep. I am quite fine with it. And I didn't vote for Trump either. And I bet I travel more internationally than you do. I don't feel one bit sorry for people who have to do work in the cabin while flying. Wah wah wah! There was a time not all that long ago when laptops didn't exist and you couldn't do that kind of work anyway. And let's be real here. It's not like coach has so much awesome room in it that the person sitting next to you isn't going to seriously encroach on your precious, small personal space when they whip up their laptop to do that presentation they should have done 2 weeks ago in the office.
Killing off the free press was always one of Trump's stated goals with his desire to open up libel laws in order to facilitate suing the press.
That's not exactly right. He doesn't really want to kill the free press. He wants try to make everybody but Fox News report from the sideline so that they lose influence. He's not trying to shut down, say, CNN, but he wants to limit their access to him. I have friends who honestly believe that the only fair and impartial news source at all is Fox News. They all believe that CNN is insanely liberal and they have no idea at all that MSNBC is actually pretty far left of CNN. They don't seem to know that MSNBC even exists. There's no need to kill the free press when half the country believes that only one news sources is accurate and impartial and that news source is so biased it's not ever going to say anything against a Republican. You can let CNN, MSNBC, NPR, etc. report all they want to, but when half the country by choice refuses to listen to what they say, they are pretty effectively silenced although technically still alive.
Hang on let me get this straight. The man who interfered with the election is accusing Russia of interfering with the election?
Only in America!
No, he's pretending to investigate the Trump campaign. I am sure his actions in the final weeks were clearly designed to ensure Trump's victory under the cover of being open and impartial. More than anything else, I believe this pushed the last undecideds into the Trump corner because it convinced them the email issue was never, ever going to go away and if Hillary was president, she was just going to resign in disgrace or be removed from office soon enough over it anyway and nobody wanted to watch Tim Kane become president by default. So given the help he gave the Trump campaign, I'm pretty sure that the final result of this investigation will be the shocking revelation that nobody in the Trump campaign did anything wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
Sun had 2 specific problems that Apple doesn't have.
1) When the internet bubble burst in the last 90s, Sun's great sales suddenly became a massive liability. Internet bubble companies suddenly stopped paying for the Sun equipment as they went bust. I don't know how much Sun actually got in terms of real revenue vs. billable charges that would have eventually been paid has those companies survived. But this led to a glut of barely used Sun equipment that depressed their prices on new machines and was maybe more than the market could absorb. It's unfair, but Sun basically ended up being punished for being successful.
2) Their failure to quickly respond to the market's demand for lower priced blade type servers vs. their legacy, expensive servers meant that companies who didn't do so well in the bubble like HP and IBM suddenly were selling cheap servers by the truckload in the new market demanding lower cost. Sun lost this segment and even though they eventually sold servers in it, the business that went away didn't ever come back.
There has been a slow, but steadily increasing approach between China and Europe for the last couple of decades, in many ways: trade agreements, Chinese interest in European education and scientific development, even what could be the first, tenuous signs of political alignment. One of the reasons, in my view, is simply that Europe isn't the US - America has for many years employed a very aggressive rhetoric against China, where Europe has been more moderate, and it does seem to have left a lasting impression. On that background, I don't think it is at all surprising that they will build a Moon base together. I think it is great that China shows leadership and determination in this hugely important area; sure, it stings a bit that we in the West aren't in the lead, but I'm sure the Chinese will allow America to take part, when they are ready to commit to it.
Europe basically would sell their own mother for a nickel if they could get some kind of money out of it from China. That's why their interests are aligning. As a person who's spent a lot of time in Europe and used to work for a European company in the USA, I'm not just some kind of xenophobic American talking here. Good grief. A few years ago some high ranking British cabinet official acted like a giddy school girl when President Xi came over for a visit. I thought the guy's comments to the press were completely ridiculous for a cabinet minister to say. Europe has no spine, so they turn a blind eye to China's constant threat to invade Taiwan. When is the last time in your life that a major power threatened to invade a much small country (Or "province" if you are European and buy China's bs line on this) simply because that other country wouldn't bow down to it in obedience? Geez, the closest example I can think of is the Czechoslovakian situation right before World War II started. Does any European government even dare to suggest that it would be unacceptable for China to invade Taiwan? Nope. Because that would require the EU countries to have a spine. Even the UK, who honestly gets very little out of their China trade, lacks the spine to even suggest that China could really tone down the rhetoric a bit with regards to Tibet. Nobody in the EU has any kind of conscience about China and as long as cheap Chinese made good keep coming over, they'll shrug every Chinese outrage off.
I have no personal problem with China and the European Space Agency putting a base on the moon and if that spurs the USA to do so too, that would be great. But people in the EU and China are not in agreement because of any reason other than the EU members have no soul and they can be bought off on anything for the right price.
Trump knows there is no future in coal and it's not coming back. He's basically keeping a campaign promise. People in coal mining country were told by Hillary Clinton what they didn't want to hear, namely that there was no future in coal and, in a much quieter voice that apparently nobody heard, that they'd supposedly be retrained for new jobs. Trump simply told coal miners that their problems were somebody else's fault and he would remove restrictions on coal. In the short term it will probably save enough jobs for the over 50 crowd that they can retire from the mines, but there's no future for younger people in the field and Trump knows it. He's not going to say it out loud as the coal miners prefer to live in the delusion that they can turn back the clock here and they voted Republican and he wants their votes in the future, but I'm sure he knows it.
Of course, I'm skipping over some technical details, but that's basically the gist of it. Also, I should mention that it's much easier to crack one card in a couple of weeks and clone it 1,000 times than having to crack 1,000 separate cards to clone them once. And also, some chipped cards are allowed to be used without the pin, because not everything on a chipped card is encrypted, and that's ok for some businesses because they'll limit the amount of the transaction when the pin is not used, and also they can take other security measures, like video recording the person, or video recording the car of the person who used it, or something else entirely. .
Not your fault as your points are sound, but I find your statements to be a bit ironic. You see, you started your post because somebody bitched about how the chip does nothing in the USA except delay the whole process. I guess you don't know because you're not like this, but the people who say stuff like "The chip does NOTHING in the USA except make the whole process take longer." are also the super paranoid people who find everything to be an invasion of their rights, so they'd also never agree to your suggestions of videotaping their cars, the transaction itself, and so on.
Clearly.
Like other great Sci-Fi (Fritz Lang's Metropolis, The Day The Earth Stood Still, Westworld (the original), etc).
I saw Westworld as a kid and loved it then and I decided it might be fun to watch it again before the HBO series started. It's really not very good. Yul Brenner is fine, as he always is, but overall it's just not very good and doesn't hold up well at all. Another film I'd make the same comment about from the time is Soylent Green, which is really just not very good or interesting at all outside of its famous plot twist.
My previous job was working in a major US office for a European company. I still have some grudges against my former employer so I don't like to name them or the country they operated out of because I don't want to take the chance of them getting any publicity. They have major sales problems in North America because nobody has ever heard of them and frankly, they deserve it. However, I will say that the country our HQ operated in was rather infamous for having 7 hour work days so you can probably make a good guess as to which major EU country this was.
So anyway, one time I got sent overseas to HQ and got to meet a bunch of my colleagues who I had only talked to on the phone before. Although their country officially had 7 hour work days. they were usually at work 9 to 10 hours a day. I asked them why. They all said that their management got really upset if they left after those 7 hours so they stayed at work a few extra hours a day and basically did nothing in those extra hours because that shut up management. So I can tell you that even if the law says you can only work 6-7 hours, there are probably going to be places where people are going to be forced to work more anyway off the books.
Is that for now, it seems that trying IP cases in China's courts results in fair verdicts. But note that this in no way impacts other areas that might be of concern such as human rights and the little guy being screwed over by the rich big guy in their legal system. And I sure wouldn't conclude that any awesome political freedoms are coming to the average Chinese citizen because China now defends global markets and free trade. Look at Hong Kong.
This is what happens when you let one party have a complete stranglehold on state government. The number of Republicans in the state senate are almost 6 to 1 in favor of Republicans. It's almost 3-1 in favor of Republicans in the state house. The governor in Republican and there's no accountability. Voters have shown consistently that the vast majority of them only care about whether a D or R is next to a candidate's name and everything else is negotiable. I'm sure we'll get a few "Throw the bums out" posts, but that's not going to happen. Most of the state governments in the southeastern USA have sizable Republican majorities. I've seen corrupt practices out of the Democrats too when they had strangleholds on states with huge majorities in the state legislature. It's what happens when one party gets entrenched and there's no hope of getting them out.
Bullshit. It was not a lawful order. You do not have to follow an unlawful order.
Two different lawyer friends both said that they felt that the order to leave the plane was lawful and the customer was in the wrong for refusing to do so. However, that doesn't mean that the customer can't go to court and get a big payout anyway. I asked one for some more details and asked specifically if he felt that the customer was assaulted in being forcibly dragged off the plane. He said that in his opinion he felt that a jury probably wouldn't rule that way. You do need to realize that anything can happen once a jury gets the case, so the fact that he said he didn't think a jury would find that to be assault doesn't mean with absolute certainty that's the verdict they would return. But both lawyers still thought the situation was horribly handled by United and the customer can probably make big money in a settlement as they doubt it will go to trial.
1) Class wars. The "rich", which may include your company, who agree to pay full fares and get little or no discounts are allowed to cancel up until just about the very last minute at no penalty or almost no penalty. I have a friend who owns his own business and he runs just about every charge he has through an airline credit card. This gives him some kind of super elite status with the airline in question and they allow him to book flights months in advance and cancel them with no penalty at all. He's a big fan of the NFL, so during the playoffs he booked flights for cities his favorite team might have to go to for a playoff game and he canceled the ones he didn't need. He didn't pay anything for the cancellations. Letting people do this leads to ...
2) Empty seats. Airlines want to avoid this. So they overbook to increase their chances of selling out flights.
The airlines are kind of stuck because letting people cancel for free or almost free is big part of why overbooking is needed, but if they punished people for doing that, people would likely take a harder line on price. Right now a minority of customers are willing to pay really high charges in exchange for free (or almost free) cancellations. The airlines depend on this money and it helps the rest of us pay less for our seats, although in exchange for a lower price we often get severe restrictions on changes.
I don't pretend to know who did it, but I think a very relevant question is who gains from the release of chemical weapons? Right now I can see ways in which the rebels gain, Trump gains, the US military-industrial-complex gains, and even perhaps Russia gains some perverse way. Assad, on the other hand, what does he gain? .
I know that a lot of people assume Assad did this by choice because - evil - but one of the things that people should consider is that in dictatorial regimes (this includes communist regimes) many people under the top guy but in positions of power like to anticipate the wishes of the top guy. So you'll see highly placed underlings who take this on themselves do the dirty work, thinking the top guy will be pleased. The poisoning of former Ukrainian president VIktor Yushchenko, which eventually led to the Orange Revolution, is believed to have been orchestrated by an underling of the Ukrainian president at the time who thought the president would be pleased. In fact, this became a nightmare for the president's political party and played a big role in why they eventually lost the presidential election. So I can certainly believe that some guy under Assad ordered this and thought Assad would be happy about it and didn't consider the consequences.
I don't understand why companies would even give a shit about cultural or demographic homogeneity issues. They exist to make money, period. Nothing else matters, except as it relates to that.
In the USA it's federal law. Federal law prohibits discrimination on a pretty wide variety of reasons. How do you not know this?
Part of the challenge is foreign tourism tends to concentrate in certain areas, such as Disney, NYC, Hawaii, etc and is not spread more evenly across the country. Thus, despite the significant impact it may have on some areas others will think it's Ok because well, Trump; proving you can't fix stupid.
As an American, this is quite right. I actually have traveled to a lot of foreign countries because I just like traveling and sightseeing. I've been to over 14 different countries, but a few places I've been to aren't really countries so much as territories or something like that, so my actual count could be higher depending on how loose you view the definition of "countries". This makes me some kind of wild, crazy international traveler by American standards. Among my friends, it's really difficult to find anybody who's ever been outside of North America. I've got friends who have never left the USA at all. One guy I can think of went to a Mexican resort - once. Another friend has been to Canada twice in his life and for a while there he acted like he was some kind of hardcore seasoned international traveler because of that. Another friend went to somewhere in the Caribbean once because work sent him there for a conference. Another guy I knew went to the UK once and he'd love to go back, but that would require him to actually leave his house, something he rarely does (he has major issues). Honestly, I'm finding it hard in my circle of friends to find people who care at all if foreign travelers can't come to the USA or choose to avoid it. Lots of people really don't care. I'm not in favor of the US losing tourism business, but I really seem to have a minority viewpoint here. I grew up in a small town about 2 hours from our state capitol and my first post-college job was in that town. I worked with a few people who had never been to our state capitol and had never left the state and had no plans to do either. This has been going on for a long time and it's not just a Trump thing, although maybe he's bringing more of these kind of people out into the open.
If the FCC cared, they'd have had this ironed out years ago.
Perhaps you don't know how the FCC works. They suffer from exactly the same political party biases as any part of Washington D.C. does. They have a board of 5 commissioners and by law no more than 3 can belong to the same political party. The current makeup is 2 Republicans and 1 Democrat and 2 unfilled seats. I don't know why the 2 seats are unfilled. Could be that Obama appointed people and the Senate refused to consider them. As far i know there's nothing to stop Trump from appointing a Republican to one vacant seat and leaving the other vacant, giving the Republicans a 3-1 edge. The FCC has been in Republican control for a really long time now. Michael Powell, Gen. Colin Powell's son, ran them for a while but he was controversial as he always sided with big business on everything they wanted. I don't know if it's fair to say they don't care so much as it is more accurate to say the Republicans have the majority there and they definitely don't care.
They should have seen this coming years ago.
There's no reason that ESPN couldn't be the go-to source of high quality online streams of sporting events, along with very lucrative ways of monetizing them, if they'd actually thought about this a few years ago.
They did actually see this coming years ago, but that depends on who I define as "they". If that definition applies to their parent company, the Walt Disney Company, yes Disney certainly did see this coming years ago. I own Disney stock so I follow them as a business fairly well. Disney has made a ton of deals involving ESPN and other properties that show that they, Disney, have seen this coming for a long time. Now if we define "they" as people who work at ESPN itself, yes, they seem to be quite a bit in denial about a lot of things.
ESPN does stream things and their streams are high quality, but as I almost never make use of that as I am not a 20 year old hipster doofus who has to watch everything on his phone and I have a real job and a real TV with a real cable subscription at my house, I can't really say much about that.
Trump is Schrodinger's president. He can be both an isolationist hate filled xenophobe and a globalist sellout at the same time, whichever his detractors think is worse in the moment!
Queue the mental gymnastics trying to show the president is a white supremacist yet is selling out his nation.
While being an isolationist and a globalist is a contradiction, there's nothing at all about being a white supremacist that would prevent such a person from selling out their nation. No mental gymnastics required.
Your post made me think of last year how someone pointed out that some people accused Hillary Clinton of being a cold blooded killer who ordered the death of anybody who might expose her crimes, yet somehow she was at the same time too weak to deal with Putin.
In the wake of the Kelo vs. City of New London case, where the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that municipalities can forcibly buy out your land under eminent domain just to do a redevelopment of some kind, some guy went public that he wanted to buy out Justice David Souter's house and raze it and build a bed and breakfast on it. I was greatly pleased with this idea as I'm still pretty angry about the verdict, but this just ended up being 100% talk and nothing even came close to being done. No development was ever actually done on the land acquired. It's currently a vacant lot. So you can thank the Supreme Court for the idea that if anybody in your local government has a grievance against you, they can get a bogus developer to come up with a phony plan to redevelop your land, force you to sell it to them, tear down your house and then do absolutely nothing with the property and it's all 100% legal.
To be honest with you, I would expect the Congresscritters involved to complain a lot about this plan and wouldn't be surprised if they pass legislation to make it illegal to harvest their data and only theirs. But most voters don't care about anything but whether there is an R or a D by a candidate's name and I wouldn't expect any browsing revelations to matter in the next election, nor would Congress even protecting themselves from such matter. If the past election taught us anything, it's that for 80% or more of the voters, no matter what they say, they really don't care about anything except party affiliation of the candidates.
For the life of me, I can't fathom why anyone would want to live in a big city. Every perk I hear touted, I can beat. It's quiet, I have a yard, and I have more spending money that the saps choking on smog.
I'd like to take a crack at this.
We have major league sports teams. Of course, if you don't like sports, that's not a selling point for you. We have symphony orchestra and museums if you like the artsy side of things. We have restaurants that are fancier that Wendy's. We have pizza places that aren't just Papa John's. We also have Asian restaurants that only serve Japanese food or only serve Thai food and so on. Check out the Oatmeal cartoon on Asian food in a small town here :
http://theoatmeal.com/comics/a...
That's where you live.
But actually the best argument against the small town lifestyle is that in many small towns there's only maybe one major employer and you're lucky enough to work for them in IT. What happens when they go out of business? What happens if they lay you off because they need to save money by either replacing you with offshore IT or just eliminating your position? You end up like so many others - you won't leave your town, but you can't find any other IT work to do. Ever read about those IT workers who got laid 2+ years ago and still can't find a job? That's what happens in small towns.
I'm out of mod points or I'd mod you up.
As an aside, I hate the current mod point system. They expire so quickly that even when I get them, I can barely use any of them before they are gone forever.
My two cents - we have an open office plan where I work. So I like to stay after hours and work. Why? Because the lights are off, I don't have to listen to people milling around me all the time having conversations about the weather or last Sunday's game. Just me and the work I have to do. No distractions. It's blissful.
I can get more done in 2 hours like that than the previous 8.
I work for a Fortune 500 company and while they are not perfect, in general they're pretty good. I've had worse employers for sure. We're in the process of moving to an open floor plan. While our management is pretty smart, this plan is simply throwing spaghetti at a wall and seeing what sticks. We're doing it because some other company did it and claimed it made things so much better. No real thought was given to it. My company thinks that it's going to make all our devs super engaged and more productive, but I have my doubts. We have decent sized cubicles right now but there's no real privacy. Another group sits on the other side of my cubicle wall and they are in training and customer service and they are on the phone roughly 50% of the day, sometimes more. I'm pretty good at tuning out distractions, but I'm not a dev guy. I can only imagine dev people going nuts if they had to sit where I do and listen to their incessant phone calls all day long. It would be even worse to be in an open office where there's nothing between you and these people. My company won't let them work at home and we have insufficient conference rooms so they can't use those. It can get really bad when 3 of them are on the phone at the same time, all talking to different people about different subjects. Note too that none of our managers will be given up their private offices under this new plan. That's not a bad thing in my opinion as who wants a manager able to watch your every move, but it shows how little thought was given to this and how the managers all think that what's good for their minions isn't necessarily good for them.
It reminds me of how people were talking about the Podesta email incident as some massively complex hacking job. It wasn't -- they found out he still used Yahoo Mail and phished him. I can't believe that (a) one of the most powerful political operatives in the Clinton campaign uses Yahoo Mail, and (b) that he fell for it.
Actually the email seemed suspicious to Podesta so he asked his 20-something security "expert" to look at it. Now keep in mind that probably almost all of us know to have a mouse hover over a link in an email to see where it really goes. For example, if a link supposed to go to mycompany.com actually goes to gizshiz.com or mycompanyname.ru, yeah, you should be smart enough to think those are probably not really mycompany.com. The problem was that his "expert" didn't do this. He simply looked at the email, immediately proclaimed it to be legit and insisted that Podesta immediately click on the link and change his password. Insiders refused to name the "expert" or say whether he still has a job. My guess is that he does. But Podesta correctly got suspicious and asked for help, he just put his faith in someone to help him who didn't deserve it. For all the reported use the Democratic Party made of cutting edge analytics when Obama ran for president, they seem to have really weird ideas at the very top about security. I still maintain that had Bill and Hillary used their fortunes to hire real security experts for the foundation's email server and ran something like a hardened form of BSD on it, it could have mitigated a lot of the damage of using a private server, but no, they just had to use some local 2 man operation that was basically a small, local equivalent of Geek Squad and they used them because they were nearby and cheap, not good.
It's not entirely clear what Asian country everyone is from (or perhaps they're Asian-American), but assuming none of them are from the U.S., it should make those in government U.S. cybersecurity a bit anxious, and perhaps give pause to our new-found love of immigration restrictions.
Unlikely. The people that are in love with the restrictions don't really want anybody coming over. I have an Asian friend who lives on the other coast of the US from me. She's ethnically Chinese but immigrated by marriage from her home country to the USA. She's told me some recent stories about having white women make very prejudiced remarks towards her both at work and while shopping. And keep in mind that she's not Muslim so none of this is caused by religious wear like a hijab. People who voted for Trump are no longer afraid to hide their prejudices any more. I see some pretty shocking stuff on Facebook from a small number of people I know along these lines.
Is John Deere legally liable if an UNMODIFIED tractor malfunctions and hurts someone? Nope, that's right there in the summary of the license agreement. Why do you think THAT will change because of modified firmware?
Like most here, you don't understand how US law really works. My best friend is a lawyer, we've known each other since college, and he's taught me a lot over the years. One of the things he's taught me is that when you sign an agreement that says you sign away your rights, that doesn't necessarily mean you actually have signed away your rights. There are various ways around this kind of thing, including arguing something that amounts to saying that John Deere coerced you into signing that and you had no choice but to agree. Also, you seem to not realize that once you get to court, anything is possible. Depending on how good the lawyers are, the judge's personal involvement in the case (whether he/she steers the jury with comments or leaves them alone to do whatever they will), and the jury itself, any kind of verdict is possible.
How is anyone ok with putting up with this nonsense?
Yep. I am quite fine with it. And I didn't vote for Trump either. And I bet I travel more internationally than you do. I don't feel one bit sorry for people who have to do work in the cabin while flying. Wah wah wah! There was a time not all that long ago when laptops didn't exist and you couldn't do that kind of work anyway. And let's be real here. It's not like coach has so much awesome room in it that the person sitting next to you isn't going to seriously encroach on your precious, small personal space when they whip up their laptop to do that presentation they should have done 2 weeks ago in the office.
Killing off the free press was always one of Trump's stated goals with his desire to open up libel laws in order to facilitate suing the press.
That's not exactly right. He doesn't really want to kill the free press. He wants try to make everybody but Fox News report from the sideline so that they lose influence. He's not trying to shut down, say, CNN, but he wants to limit their access to him. I have friends who honestly believe that the only fair and impartial news source at all is Fox News. They all believe that CNN is insanely liberal and they have no idea at all that MSNBC is actually pretty far left of CNN. They don't seem to know that MSNBC even exists. There's no need to kill the free press when half the country believes that only one news sources is accurate and impartial and that news source is so biased it's not ever going to say anything against a Republican. You can let CNN, MSNBC, NPR, etc. report all they want to, but when half the country by choice refuses to listen to what they say, they are pretty effectively silenced although technically still alive.
Hang on let me get this straight. The man who interfered with the election is accusing Russia of interfering with the election?
Only in America!
No, he's pretending to investigate the Trump campaign. I am sure his actions in the final weeks were clearly designed to ensure Trump's victory under the cover of being open and impartial. More than anything else, I believe this pushed the last undecideds into the Trump corner because it convinced them the email issue was never, ever going to go away and if Hillary was president, she was just going to resign in disgrace or be removed from office soon enough over it anyway and nobody wanted to watch Tim Kane become president by default. So given the help he gave the Trump campaign, I'm pretty sure that the final result of this investigation will be the shocking revelation that nobody in the Trump campaign did anything wrong.