I've always been curious about this. It's a dumb thing to do, and makes the person look foolish, but beyond that why is this actually a crime in some places? I mean I can pretend that Obama was never president, but that doesn't make it so and it makes me look really stupid, but they would never make that a crime (Note to Self: Check back in 10 years and see if they did indeed make this a crime). Just ignore the morons and let them play in their little pretend world.
I'm not anti-European. I've been to, I think, 14 different European countries and I consider myself a lot more in favor of Europe than against it. But it seems to me that this is a crime because when a pendulum swings too far one way, the natural human reaction is to swing it too far the other way. In the US, free speech is protected by the Constitution. Courts consistently rule to protect it here. There's no such constitutional protection in Europe on speech. Keep in mind that even the US protection is not absolute. You can't deliberately say something to cause an unnecessary panic (the classic example is yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theater when there is no fire) but saying things that people disagree with or don't like is not a crime here. So I think that to combat what led to Nazi Germany, they went too far in the other direction and made even denying the Holocaust a crime. Many European nations have similar, in my opinion as an outsider, overreactions to crime where their anti-death penalty zeal has resulted in situations where they can't really punish truly bad people very much. I'll refrain from commenting more on that lest this drift off course.
You are jumping to conclusions that are not supported by evidence. We was fired on his first day of work. The reasons for that are not clear, but there is almost always more to these stories than what is on the surface. You are only hearing one very biased side of it.
I'm sure that this is it. I've been involved in interviewing candidates for IT jobs for the past 20 or so years even though I'm not in management and almost certainly there is a lot more to this story than the simplistic version of "My manager said it was OK but HRB flipped out and fired me for no reason". Since this is in the USA, I have a feeling that he's not likely to win in court.
I'm seriously puzzled that he would change jobs at this time. I read the article and I have a lot of doubts about exactly what kind of work he was doing prior to this job. Usually when people have steady jobs that have health insurance and someone covered has a serious illness, they won't change jobs because doing so has possible health insurance implications that could be negative. The article also has a claim that he was told he had to be in the office 24/7 which is on the surface completely absurd and there's almost certainly no way he was told that. The whole thing just seems odd.
For those who haven't seen the movie 'Brazil,' this event is so close to the premise of that movie that it's eerie.
Well, I suppose that might be a bit up for debate in that Brazil has nothing to do with a man falsely accused of being a pedophile. But both involve a bureaucracy making mistakes that innocent people pay for.
For those who haven't seen Brazil, thank your lucky stars. This is going to get my comment 1 point, but it's truly awful. I love Monty Python, but I'll be very blunt and say that I think that Terry Gilliam's movies are very hit and miss and this is a miss for sure. Years ago on another job a colleague loaned me a DVD of the Criterion Collection version after raving about it how great it was. So I watched the uncut director's version. It's awful. If you don't cringe when you see what they predicted computers in the future will look like, I really don't know what to say. Gilliam's preferred ending is terrible and the studio was quite right in my opinion to demand the film be cut and the ending changed. I didn't even bother to watch the theatrical version or the supplements. I read about the differences between Gilliam's cut and the theatrical version and I'm content to never watch any version of it again. It's not the worst movie I've seen or even close to it, but it is without a doubt the most overrated so called "classic" movie I've ever seen. It's one of those films where the people who love it really really love it and they'll defend it to death, but the vast majority of people who see it won't like it very much. For what it's worth, famed movie critic Roger Ebert didn't like it very much either, although he did think it was simply hard to understand and a bit pointless rather than "terrible" as I stated. If you want to be more depressed, watch Gilliam's version. If you want to be somewhat less depressed, watch the edited theatrical version.
What? The company lost 95% of value in the last ten years, five of those under Mayer.
That's absolutely not true and it's easy to prove. You can go to a place like Yahoo Finance (no joke intended - their website is free and easy to navigate) and look up a 10 year run of the stock. On March 13, 2007 Yahoo was worth $29.56 a share at close. It's currently worth about $46.57 a share as I write this on March 13, 2007. That's a gain, not a loss. Maybe something like profits or income went down 95%, as you state, over the values 10 years ago, but that is not reflected in the stock price or the company's market valuation, which is more important (for now) than the money it actually pulls in. Yahoo is valued at almost $45 billion. That's a lot of money. Even if basically she ran the true Yahoo business into the ground and got lucky with Alibaba and the fact that Yahoo Japan is not messed up and has real value, the US stock market has not punished her for this, so to a certain extent you can argue that she did her job.
Many co-op opportunities are just there to exploit free or cheap labour.
That's true, but they can still lead to real jobs. I went to a small university back when computer science was a somewhat uncommon major. Of my fellow graduates, the guy who got the best paying job and the most job offers was the only co-op student in my graduating class. He told me about his co-op job. It was for the federal government and they didn't actually let him do very much, but the co-op experience was a huge difference maker and it made him stand out from the rest of us. My current employer used to bring on co-ops and we hired the last 2 that we brought on. They got real jobs with our company after graduating college because the company liked them.
I welcome this and hope they do it because as the film "Gravity" explicitly said and the recent National Geographic series "Mars" implied if you read between the lines (the first crew to go to Mars had a Russian on it but the only Asian was Korean American... hmmm....) it's going to take this before the US ever gets serious again about manned exploration of space.
What I'd really like to know is why aren't US citizens showing their outrage at having their basic constitutional right to privacy as well as due process to search of private data (which often resides in their home) violated on a daily (more likely many. many times per day) basis. Americans' need to stand up for what they say they believe in.
OK. I'll explain it to you. Short version - you're basically the old man yelling for the kids to stay off his lawn but you don't realize it. Society has changed and you are stuck in how things used to be, not how they are.
Today's millennials grow up with all aspects of their life documented on video and publicly available for viewing. Even stupid things. I'm sure most of us have read about crimes that some dumb young person will do, get a friend to record it to video on a cell phone, share it publicly in some way like Facebook and then act totally shocked when the law comes after them. Anthony Weiner is over 50 years old and he's best known for being so addicted to what they call "sexting" that even despite losing good paying jobs and having his wife separate from him, he can't stop doing it. Does that seem rational? How many of your male friends, and I assume you are male, wake up in the morning and go "Hmm.... I think my best plan for today is to take a picture of Little Joey and send it to a person I've never actually met in person". I've got friends close to 50 years old on both sides of that age who seemingly can't live without posting photos every day to Facebook. One is the wife of a good friend and she seems to be a good person, but I feel kind of sorry for her because it just seems like it's extremely important to her to get positive feedback on Facebook for photos she posts of herself. And I know a guy who it seems like every other day posts a new photo of him and his girlfriend with text saying how much he loves her and I'm starting to wonder who exactly he is trying to convince here. The right to privacy is pretty much gone and people gave it up willingly. You don't have to like it, but you could at least accept the reality of it. As far as your complain about the search of private data in homes goes, currently that still requires a court order. Maybe that will change, but we're not there yet. I'm sorry but society decided it wanted to live in a world with a lot less privacy and I get that you weren't asked to agree to this, but that's how it is.
Wikileaks is one of the few remaining upstanding journalistic organizations..
The fact that you don't like how the US operates does not in and of itself prove that Wikileads is as upstanding as you hope. Take a look at Russia and China. Can you and I at least agree that those countries have their own problems of various kinds? Don't you find it funny that nobody, not one single person, who lives there and has access to their secrets is willing to send them to Wikileaks? Back in the old days of the USSR, the US was able to find Soviet citizens who would risk their lives to pass on information to the US and not for profit. Why is it that today nobody seems willing to leak documentation on Russia and China? It's not difficult to find born and raised in China people who aren't very fond of their government. So I wonder could it possibly be that people actually are submitting leaks from Russia and China and Wikipedia isn't publishing them? I don't know. But I think anybody who blindly supports Wikileaks as the champion of right should wonder why it seems that only leaks from the USA (and apparently Saudi Arabia once) make it there.
But I work in IT for a Fortune 500 company and every now and then my job requires me to work with customers who have problems getting files from us or decrypting them. I can tell you that customers often do a very bad job of describing their problems and often come to erroneous conclusions about what the problem is. I can just imagine that fun of this job where a customer leads the mechanic to think the problem is one thing and it's actually something else completely unrelated that the mechanic didn't bring the parts for because they believed the customer was accurately describing the problem.
I live in the USA and I can tell you that the vast majority of my male friends can't even do as little as change their own air filters in their cars. So I can see how a lot of simple tasks could be done in a person's driveway. I just wonder what happens if the problem ends up being much more complex than anticipated and the car has to go into a shop.
Um, no. The only leverage North Korea has over China is that China doesn't want to deal with millions of North Korean refugees, and doesn't want the US or an ally right on it's border.
China tolerates North Korea in so far as it prevents either of these things happening, but right now the prospect of refugees and a US allied nation on it's border are beginning to look less and less like the worse option for China.
I don't think China sees it that way at all. I wrote up a much longer response explaining why that is currently pretty much DOA (2 points at present), so nobody is going to read it. So I'll try a much shorter response here on a subject that deserves a better write up. China makes real profits off North Korean rare earths, which it gets at a cut rate price for propping up the regime. China doesn't want the US on its border because that could interfere with their attempts to claim essentially the entire South China Sea and eventually invade Taiwan. China truly sees all possible outcomes of a post-North Korea era as bad for them even though they know that eventually the North Korean regime will fall one way or another. They are just trying to postpone that day into the future. The North Koreans saw what happened to Saddam Hussein after the US invaded Iraq and they really paid attention to what happened to Muammar Gaddafi, who was removed from power after cooperating with the US and European powers. This means that they will never agree to give up their nukes. The Stalinist nature of the government means that internal revolution is essentially impossible because nobody can admit to being disloyal for fear of death, so they can't recruit help to overthrow the government. If Kim Jong Un is ever overthrown, it's going to be a crime of opportunity where some general sacrificed himself to kill Jim Kong Un and then the survivors picked up the pieces. But propaganda is pretty strong and just like China constantly has their military on a hair trigger alert by continually telling them that the US is ready to destroy them at a moment's notice, I can't say that any post-Kim military controlled North Korea would be better than the current regime is.
I suggest to any interested parties that they read Victor Cha's book "The Impossible State: North Korea, Past and Future". Cha worked for a lot of different US administrations in dealing with North Korea and having actually been there and participated in negotiations, he has an insider's look at things.
Basically, China has more influence than they are willing to use, but not as much as outsiders think. China paid a real price in blood to defend the North in the Korean War. One of Mao's own sons was killed in the conflict, although if you look up the information about this, you may realize that he put himself in jeopardy when it happened. China seems to have used what I will call a brute force approach to the war after entering it, but simply throwing huge amounts of soldiers into battle and suffering horrific casualties, but winning enough ground to push UN forces back about to the current dividing line. Even though the vast majority of the Chinese Communist Party leadership either were kids when this happened or not born yet, the CCP does still like to bring this up. They still drill into school children in China about how Mao himself lost a son in the conflict.
The Soviet Union and China had been vying for position and influence in North Korea and Kim Il Sung was a master of playing them off each other. In fact, the whole reason they have nuclear weapons is because the Soviet Union gave them their reactors and the technical know-how that led to them developing the weapon. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Boris Yeltsin immediately cut off all aid to North Korea, leaving China to look around and sort of say "What just happened?" China picked up the slack in terms of providing aid. Some of this is because of the shared legacy of the Korean War. A lot of it is that China benefits big time from North Korea's existence. North Korea has a lot of rare earth deposits which China gets at a huge discount for helping them. And as North Korea borders a Chinese province with a very large ethnic Korean population (China took it by force from an old Korean kingdom almost 800 years ago), China fears that if the North Korean government collapses, there will be a humanitarian crisis and tons of illegal immigrants will flee into China in desperation. China is telling the truth when they say they want stability in the peninsula and when they say they want it denuclearized, but China sees the status quo as totally in their favor and views all changes as bad outcomes for China, so there are real limits as how far they will push things. Here's what China fears if North Korea collapses.
1) A huge influx of refugees will cross the border, causing China to have to spend large amounts of resources to feed and house them and it will take away from using these resources to keep their own population in check.
2) International aid organizations will likely demand access to China to help, which China doesn't want.
3) North Korea's nuclear weapons could end up in South Korea's hands, which China doesn't want.
4) A united Korea would definitely be a US ally. It could be that instead of the US leaving, that the US ends up having military bases in the former North Korea and thus are right on China's doorstep.
5) China will no longer get North Korean rare earths at a bargain price. In fact, there may be so much resentment towards China for helping to prop up the North Korean government that those rare earths go anywhere but China.
China realizes that eventually the North Korean state will collapse. But they hope to push that date as far into the future as possible as, like I said, they view all post-North Korean outcomes as very bad for them. Note too that China is very good at the duplicity game of telling outside countries that they need to do something which China itself is unwilling to do. I get that they don't like THADD going to South Korea, and personally I think that sending it there should never have been made public, but their lack of interest in really turning the screws on North Korea has led to this and they seem unwilling to accept their own responsibility here.
For a moment I thought there's really one area where the Dems are even stupider than the GOP.
Pence's use of AOL is likely stupid. He's basically a new, older looking, less boyishly handsome version of Dan Quayle. Hillary Clinton's use of personal email was all hubris and greed rather than stupidity. Hillary is smart, but she's also arrogant and greedy. I'm not saying it would have been OK to do this, but had she and Bill hired true IT security gurus, and their money and power gave them access to such people and such people may well be Democratic Party supporters on top of that, and used, say, a really hardened version of one of the BSD operating systems and had super tight firewall and security controls in place on their personal email server, they could have at least argued that their server was better than what Uncle Sam was using. I'm not saying that would have justified using it from a legal standpoint, but it would have changed the argument. Instead, they hired what I call "Two Windoze Dudez" to do their email. Apparently it was some strip mall PC shop that 2 guys ran and there was nothing special at all about it or their background. They got picked because they were nearby and cheap. Now that I think about it, I suppose one could argue that thinking that hiring "Two Windoze Dudez" to do this kind of thing was a pretty stupid decision, but I think the motivator was more about saving money than anything else and the impression I've had about Pence ever since he got picked by Trump is that he's just not the sharpest knife in the drawer.
Twitter is currently trading within two dollars of its 52 week low as concerns mount that it may not ever be profitable. I don't use Snapchat. I have nothing against it, but I have no use for it. I have read recently that all of their competitors do everything that Snapchat does, but they all do it better. Snapchat was just there first. I'm sure that some people will make money on this stock. Those who got in close to the IPO opening price may have already sold it off for a profit. The investment bank that backed the IPO certainly has already made a ton from today's market action. But this is the same market with the same investors who kept SCO alive for years at almost $5 a share in the hopes that it would win its lawsuit so I won't be surprised if Snapchat eventually dies and many of those investors end up taking big losses on it.
I have a barely used 2015 Chevy that I bought recently. It has OnStar. I like the car a lot. I don't like OnStar. In my car I can connect my cell phone to the car audio system by Bluetooth but I can either only connect it to answer phone calls or I can connect it only to stream music from it. Not both from the same device - only one of those per connected device. So I opted to answer phone calls. I have come to realize that OnStar is deliberately designed crippled service and the reason they do that is that they want you to pay them money so they can send you step by driving directions over the audio system instead of you using a free service like Google Maps. Additionally they want old people to pay for phone call minutes so they use their cars to call people instead of using the phone to do so. One of the constant frustrating problems I have with OnStar is that because I set up the car to use hands free answering of incoming calls through it, it intercepts EVERY attempt I make to talk to the phone. I have an iPhone so I can't talk to Siri or use voice on any Google feature because the stupid system intercepts my attempt to do so but because it's not an actual call it's too stupid to pass the voice data on to the service trying to use it. That means that use Google Maps I have to type in every destination because I can't use voice as OnStar won't let me. And since it won't let me stream the Google Maps audio through the audio system because I have it set up to do hands free calls, I have to turn off the sound system when using Google Maps and pump up the volume as loud as my phone will go. So I'm very skeptical indeed about any tie in with OnStar.
I think this is spot on, and I suggest we fix the education system.
We don't have schools.
We have day care centers.
While I agree that to a certain extent schools do serve as de facto day care centers, do you have any ideas for improvement or just complaints? I wish I had the answers. I really do. A large part of this is because it's what parents want and they pay the taxes. Homework is at a ridiculous level pretty much everywhere, and again, it's what parents want. Then these same parents complain without any sense of responsibility for the mess that their kids don't get enough sleep and are always tired when they have 3-4 hours of homework a night and have activities on top of that. Within a few miles from my house I sometimes see kids getting off a school bus at 6 PM. When that alone doesn't strike anybody as abnormal and bad, I can't personally fix that kind of thinking.
Now if you just want big changes and maybe they work, maybe they don't, then you should be thrilled with current Dept. of Education Secretary Besty DeVos. She's related by marriage to the founder of Amway and married to a former CEO of it and also the sister of a guy who started the sleazy military-industrial complex company formerly known as Blackwater. So this background not only makes her completely detached from the realities of today's schooling, her goal is to destroy public schooling and replace them all with charter schools and she believes (the atheists here will love this) that she's on a mission from God to do so. No kidding.
I realize that this is going to end up getting comments that digress, so sorry in advance.
I'm an American white person and I don't consider myself a SJW but I'm sympathetic to the concerns of African Americans regarding their dealings with the police. I can understand, as best as is possible given my background, that they are really tired of seeing police shoot and kill unarmed African Americans. The police do this to white people too. They just don't do it in big enough numbers to attract the wrath of White America, but it definitely happens to white people too. I absolutely believe that it happens disproportionately to African Americans. The point that cops kill lots of people without justification is important for my next point.
After reading about many of these cases, I've come to the conclusion that as long as the cop in question doesn't act like a complete sociopath on the witness stand, all they have to do is say "I was scared for my life". It doesn't have to be true. They just have to say it. And once they say those magic words, 90% of the time they're going to be acquitted by the jury. All the evidence in the world is not going to change the jury. We've seen trials that have proved this. I read what the cop said in the infamous Ferguson, MO trial and his account of events was not credible. I'd put it at maybe 1 in 1000 that what he said really happened. I'm positive he's lying. But the jury completely bought it. There have been other cases too where there is video evidence contradicting the cop's story but once the cop says "I was scared for my life" the jury finds the shooting to be justified. So I'm sure that some of the solutions proposed will work in terms of getting the video cameras on, but we've already seen that juries really don't care what the video shows and all they really care about is if the cop says he/she was scared at the time.
I doubt that companies that want to do the old "Surprise! Write code with no reference materials to do complicated task X" are interested though. On a previous job I was allowed to interview by my manager for potential hires into the group and I would give people a simple problem and ask them to vaguely verbally describe a way to resolve it, like to take a file of names in first name, space, last name order that was sorted on first names and produce the same type of output (first name, space, last name) but sorted on last names. I just wanted to see that they had some kind of logical process to resolve this kind of issue. Something like using the right arguments to Unix/Linux sort to do it, use AWK or Perl to sort the 2nd field alphabetically, etc. were good enough answers. I remember in those days that recruiters would flood us with a bunch of unqualified candidates (it was a sys admin type job) and we got annoyed that people would say on their resumes that they totally knew Unix/Linux but we'd interview them and find out they didn't. So we started asking candidates "What command do you use on the command line to delete a file?" and got rid of the ones who couldn't answer that. That worked pretty well at the time. So I do get that they are looking for a certain type of employee and trying this as a way to find them.
However, the kind of people who are totally geeky enough to pass these types of tests do not always make for great colleagues. I know a guy at work who is now in a different department who would ace this kind of thing and he is smart but he is also super challenging to deal with in person. He's been given permission to work from home pretty much all the time because he's so challenging to deal with in person. I remember another really good programmer who one time disappeared for like a week with no word to his office. His manager had a couple of guys from work go to his apartment and they expected to find him dead. They knocked on the door and the dude answers. Told them that he hurt his ribs. He didn't bother to call work or his manager about it. Just didn't show up to work. So yeah, these are the kind of guys who pass that kind of test.
I read linked article, and nothing in the transcript there stands out as wrong. You buy a $100K car to run Uber?! Take responsibility for your actions if it doesn't work out.
Yes, Uber shits on everyone. Yes, Uber isn't socially responsible company. No, in this case CEO wasn't wrong in pointing out that it was driver, and not Uber that f-up.
You and I seem to be the only ones who picked up on this. If you as one person are dumb enough to invest $100,000 in one car and hope to make it up driving for Uber, well, you just may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer.
Wu's only real "in" here, is that Lynch is considered moderate. No idea on how that particular congressional district trends. ..
Given that she's trying to knock off a popular incumbent in the primary who's done nothing to hurt his chances for re-election over the years, this was a long shot under the best of circumstances. Her only possible means of attack is to argue that Lynch is not liberal enough, which seems like a low percentage move to me. Lynch once said that being "least liberal" member of the House from Massachusetts is a bit like being the slowest Kenyan in the marathon. You're still a lot more liberal/fast than most of the others. Are there really all that many voters who rank transgender issues as their number 1 above all else concern? Probably not.
Geez. Newt Gingrich got savagely and unfairly criticized in 2012 for suggesting that putting a permanent base on the moon was a good idea and that was a pretty rational idea that I'm sure a decent number of Slashdotters would support. I really have question Wu's fitness for office for simply lacking the self-awareness to know that what she said makes her sound like a crackpot. "Vote for me. I'm crazy and I only care about edge issues that don't effect the vast majority of the district." Yes, that sounds like a good plan - not.
You can always find cases of unfair sentencing where small crime X is punished at level Y in one place but at level 2 times Y or 3 times Y at another place. I have a relative who got caught for DUI on a two lane (one lane in each direction - no median) surface road within 2 miles of his house while driving home when he came upon a police roadblock he could not avoid. First offense. He had a lawyer. Still went to jail for a week over it. No wreck. No injuries. Barely crossed the DUI threshold. My best friend is a lawyer and I've learned from him that all of the following can play a role in sentencing.
1) Judge might be a hard liner.
2) Judge wants to send a message that the incident in question is not acceptable and deter others from doing the same (ie. DUI incident I referenced).
3) Defendant might have used a public defender and this almost always leads to a bad outcome for the defendant. My lawyer friend sometimes does criminal defense work and he's told me that the DA will often completely back down and offer greatly reduced penalties if he simply shows up in court to fight for his client. Defendants with PDs don't get these sweet deals.
4) Defendant could be a combative jerk in court and that played a role in the sentence.
I checked and their stock is trading in the over the counter market. It's currently at 6/10 of one cent per share. That's right. A share costs less than one penny. At some point in the past year it was worth something like 38 cents a share. Given how even by OTC standards their stock is practically worthless, I would imagine that they don't have the funds on hand to pay the ransom and they probably can't fix the problems either, if they even cared to (not sure that they do). What people are saying about how this worked, when it did actually do what it was supposed to, doesn't suggest that security was given much thought. They probably thought nobody would care enough to hack a children's toy.
Now techies, many of whom are among the highest 1 percent of earners, are complaining that they, too, are being priced out. The Twitter employee said he hit a low point in early 2014 when the company changed its payroll schedule, leaving him with a hole in his budget. "I had to borrow money to make it through the month." He was one of several tech workers, earning between $100,000 and $700,000 a year, who vented to the Guardian about their financial situation.
In 2013 to be in the top 1% of US earners you had to earn over $1.15 million per year. That's quite a bit more than $100,000 and even $700,000 a year. See here: http://www.mlive.com/news/inde...
I'd guess the top 1% is even higher now.
It's an objective, publicly available piece of information. Birth records aren't secret, or in any way protected from public view.
I'm not sure that if you knew my name and the approximate year I was born that you could find my birth record. Probably depends on whether there was a birth announcement in the local paper when I was born and it is currently searchable on the internet. I can tell you that I can probably count on one or two hands the number of people who know me who know the city and state I was born in. I have very good friends who know my birthday but have no idea where I was born. I took a look and my state of birth would not allow you to get a copy of my birth certificate, so if you knew the place but not the date, you'd be out of luck there too. So birth records aren't really as open as you might think. Try looking up your own via an internet search. You might find it's harder to find than you think. This is a good thing as one of the ways identity theft gets done is via knowing a person's birth date and year, but that's in part a factor of greed in businesses being willing to give credit cards, loans, etc. on insufficient proof that you really are who you claim to be.
Somebody here has probably done the math. Does it really make sense economically for Uber to get 100% of the cost of a ride this way but having to spend money to buy main, maintain and insure cars? Or is this another sign of a company that doesn't know what it is doing, perhaps most recently suggested by the recent charges of sexism and sexual harassment?
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I've always been curious about this. It's a dumb thing to do, and makes the person look foolish, but beyond that why is this actually a crime in some places? I mean I can pretend that Obama was never president, but that doesn't make it so and it makes me look really stupid, but they would never make that a crime (Note to Self: Check back in 10 years and see if they did indeed make this a crime). Just ignore the morons and let them play in their little pretend world.
I'm not anti-European. I've been to, I think, 14 different European countries and I consider myself a lot more in favor of Europe than against it. But it seems to me that this is a crime because when a pendulum swings too far one way, the natural human reaction is to swing it too far the other way. In the US, free speech is protected by the Constitution. Courts consistently rule to protect it here. There's no such constitutional protection in Europe on speech. Keep in mind that even the US protection is not absolute. You can't deliberately say something to cause an unnecessary panic (the classic example is yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theater when there is no fire) but saying things that people disagree with or don't like is not a crime here. So I think that to combat what led to Nazi Germany, they went too far in the other direction and made even denying the Holocaust a crime. Many European nations have similar, in my opinion as an outsider, overreactions to crime where their anti-death penalty zeal has resulted in situations where they can't really punish truly bad people very much. I'll refrain from commenting more on that lest this drift off course.
You are jumping to conclusions that are not supported by evidence. We was fired on his first day of work. The reasons for that are not clear, but there is almost always more to these stories than what is on the surface. You are only hearing one very biased side of it.
I'm sure that this is it. I've been involved in interviewing candidates for IT jobs for the past 20 or so years even though I'm not in management and almost certainly there is a lot more to this story than the simplistic version of "My manager said it was OK but HRB flipped out and fired me for no reason". Since this is in the USA, I have a feeling that he's not likely to win in court.
I'm seriously puzzled that he would change jobs at this time. I read the article and I have a lot of doubts about exactly what kind of work he was doing prior to this job. Usually when people have steady jobs that have health insurance and someone covered has a serious illness, they won't change jobs because doing so has possible health insurance implications that could be negative. The article also has a claim that he was told he had to be in the office 24/7 which is on the surface completely absurd and there's almost certainly no way he was told that. The whole thing just seems odd.
For those who haven't seen the movie 'Brazil,' this event is so close to the premise of that movie that it's eerie.
Well, I suppose that might be a bit up for debate in that Brazil has nothing to do with a man falsely accused of being a pedophile. But both involve a bureaucracy making mistakes that innocent people pay for.
For those who haven't seen Brazil, thank your lucky stars. This is going to get my comment 1 point, but it's truly awful. I love Monty Python, but I'll be very blunt and say that I think that Terry Gilliam's movies are very hit and miss and this is a miss for sure. Years ago on another job a colleague loaned me a DVD of the Criterion Collection version after raving about it how great it was. So I watched the uncut director's version. It's awful. If you don't cringe when you see what they predicted computers in the future will look like, I really don't know what to say. Gilliam's preferred ending is terrible and the studio was quite right in my opinion to demand the film be cut and the ending changed. I didn't even bother to watch the theatrical version or the supplements. I read about the differences between Gilliam's cut and the theatrical version and I'm content to never watch any version of it again. It's not the worst movie I've seen or even close to it, but it is without a doubt the most overrated so called "classic" movie I've ever seen. It's one of those films where the people who love it really really love it and they'll defend it to death, but the vast majority of people who see it won't like it very much. For what it's worth, famed movie critic Roger Ebert didn't like it very much either, although he did think it was simply hard to understand and a bit pointless rather than "terrible" as I stated. If you want to be more depressed, watch Gilliam's version. If you want to be somewhat less depressed, watch the edited theatrical version.
What? The company lost 95% of value in the last ten years, five of those under Mayer.
That's absolutely not true and it's easy to prove. You can go to a place like Yahoo Finance (no joke intended - their website is free and easy to navigate) and look up a 10 year run of the stock. On March 13, 2007 Yahoo was worth $29.56 a share at close. It's currently worth about $46.57 a share as I write this on March 13, 2007. That's a gain, not a loss. Maybe something like profits or income went down 95%, as you state, over the values 10 years ago, but that is not reflected in the stock price or the company's market valuation, which is more important (for now) than the money it actually pulls in. Yahoo is valued at almost $45 billion. That's a lot of money. Even if basically she ran the true Yahoo business into the ground and got lucky with Alibaba and the fact that Yahoo Japan is not messed up and has real value, the US stock market has not punished her for this, so to a certain extent you can argue that she did her job.
Many co-op opportunities are just there to exploit free or cheap labour.
That's true, but they can still lead to real jobs. I went to a small university back when computer science was a somewhat uncommon major. Of my fellow graduates, the guy who got the best paying job and the most job offers was the only co-op student in my graduating class. He told me about his co-op job. It was for the federal government and they didn't actually let him do very much, but the co-op experience was a huge difference maker and it made him stand out from the rest of us. My current employer used to bring on co-ops and we hired the last 2 that we brought on. They got real jobs with our company after graduating college because the company liked them.
I welcome this and hope they do it because as the film "Gravity" explicitly said and the recent National Geographic series "Mars" implied if you read between the lines (the first crew to go to Mars had a Russian on it but the only Asian was Korean American... hmmm....) it's going to take this before the US ever gets serious again about manned exploration of space.
What I'd really like to know is why aren't US citizens showing their outrage at having their basic constitutional right to privacy as well as due process to search of private data (which often resides in their home) violated on a daily (more likely many. many times per day) basis. Americans' need to stand up for what they say they believe in.
OK. I'll explain it to you. Short version - you're basically the old man yelling for the kids to stay off his lawn but you don't realize it. Society has changed and you are stuck in how things used to be, not how they are.
Today's millennials grow up with all aspects of their life documented on video and publicly available for viewing. Even stupid things. I'm sure most of us have read about crimes that some dumb young person will do, get a friend to record it to video on a cell phone, share it publicly in some way like Facebook and then act totally shocked when the law comes after them. Anthony Weiner is over 50 years old and he's best known for being so addicted to what they call "sexting" that even despite losing good paying jobs and having his wife separate from him, he can't stop doing it. Does that seem rational? How many of your male friends, and I assume you are male, wake up in the morning and go "Hmm.... I think my best plan for today is to take a picture of Little Joey and send it to a person I've never actually met in person". I've got friends close to 50 years old on both sides of that age who seemingly can't live without posting photos every day to Facebook. One is the wife of a good friend and she seems to be a good person, but I feel kind of sorry for her because it just seems like it's extremely important to her to get positive feedback on Facebook for photos she posts of herself. And I know a guy who it seems like every other day posts a new photo of him and his girlfriend with text saying how much he loves her and I'm starting to wonder who exactly he is trying to convince here. The right to privacy is pretty much gone and people gave it up willingly. You don't have to like it, but you could at least accept the reality of it. As far as your complain about the search of private data in homes goes, currently that still requires a court order. Maybe that will change, but we're not there yet. I'm sorry but society decided it wanted to live in a world with a lot less privacy and I get that you weren't asked to agree to this, but that's how it is.
Wikileaks is one of the few remaining upstanding journalistic organizations. .
The fact that you don't like how the US operates does not in and of itself prove that Wikileads is as upstanding as you hope. Take a look at Russia and China. Can you and I at least agree that those countries have their own problems of various kinds? Don't you find it funny that nobody, not one single person, who lives there and has access to their secrets is willing to send them to Wikileaks? Back in the old days of the USSR, the US was able to find Soviet citizens who would risk their lives to pass on information to the US and not for profit. Why is it that today nobody seems willing to leak documentation on Russia and China? It's not difficult to find born and raised in China people who aren't very fond of their government. So I wonder could it possibly be that people actually are submitting leaks from Russia and China and Wikipedia isn't publishing them? I don't know. But I think anybody who blindly supports Wikileaks as the champion of right should wonder why it seems that only leaks from the USA (and apparently Saudi Arabia once) make it there.
But I work in IT for a Fortune 500 company and every now and then my job requires me to work with customers who have problems getting files from us or decrypting them. I can tell you that customers often do a very bad job of describing their problems and often come to erroneous conclusions about what the problem is. I can just imagine that fun of this job where a customer leads the mechanic to think the problem is one thing and it's actually something else completely unrelated that the mechanic didn't bring the parts for because they believed the customer was accurately describing the problem.
I live in the USA and I can tell you that the vast majority of my male friends can't even do as little as change their own air filters in their cars. So I can see how a lot of simple tasks could be done in a person's driveway. I just wonder what happens if the problem ends up being much more complex than anticipated and the car has to go into a shop.
Um, no. The only leverage North Korea has over China is that China doesn't want to deal with millions of North Korean refugees, and doesn't want the US or an ally right on it's border.
China tolerates North Korea in so far as it prevents either of these things happening, but right now the prospect of refugees and a US allied nation on it's border are beginning to look less and less like the worse option for China.
I don't think China sees it that way at all. I wrote up a much longer response explaining why that is currently pretty much DOA (2 points at present), so nobody is going to read it. So I'll try a much shorter response here on a subject that deserves a better write up. China makes real profits off North Korean rare earths, which it gets at a cut rate price for propping up the regime. China doesn't want the US on its border because that could interfere with their attempts to claim essentially the entire South China Sea and eventually invade Taiwan. China truly sees all possible outcomes of a post-North Korea era as bad for them even though they know that eventually the North Korean regime will fall one way or another. They are just trying to postpone that day into the future. The North Koreans saw what happened to Saddam Hussein after the US invaded Iraq and they really paid attention to what happened to Muammar Gaddafi, who was removed from power after cooperating with the US and European powers. This means that they will never agree to give up their nukes. The Stalinist nature of the government means that internal revolution is essentially impossible because nobody can admit to being disloyal for fear of death, so they can't recruit help to overthrow the government. If Kim Jong Un is ever overthrown, it's going to be a crime of opportunity where some general sacrificed himself to kill Jim Kong Un and then the survivors picked up the pieces. But propaganda is pretty strong and just like China constantly has their military on a hair trigger alert by continually telling them that the US is ready to destroy them at a moment's notice, I can't say that any post-Kim military controlled North Korea would be better than the current regime is.
I suggest to any interested parties that they read Victor Cha's book "The Impossible State: North Korea, Past and Future". Cha worked for a lot of different US administrations in dealing with North Korea and having actually been there and participated in negotiations, he has an insider's look at things.
Basically, China has more influence than they are willing to use, but not as much as outsiders think. China paid a real price in blood to defend the North in the Korean War. One of Mao's own sons was killed in the conflict, although if you look up the information about this, you may realize that he put himself in jeopardy when it happened. China seems to have used what I will call a brute force approach to the war after entering it, but simply throwing huge amounts of soldiers into battle and suffering horrific casualties, but winning enough ground to push UN forces back about to the current dividing line. Even though the vast majority of the Chinese Communist Party leadership either were kids when this happened or not born yet, the CCP does still like to bring this up. They still drill into school children in China about how Mao himself lost a son in the conflict.
The Soviet Union and China had been vying for position and influence in North Korea and Kim Il Sung was a master of playing them off each other. In fact, the whole reason they have nuclear weapons is because the Soviet Union gave them their reactors and the technical know-how that led to them developing the weapon. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Boris Yeltsin immediately cut off all aid to North Korea, leaving China to look around and sort of say "What just happened?" China picked up the slack in terms of providing aid. Some of this is because of the shared legacy of the Korean War. A lot of it is that China benefits big time from North Korea's existence. North Korea has a lot of rare earth deposits which China gets at a huge discount for helping them. And as North Korea borders a Chinese province with a very large ethnic Korean population (China took it by force from an old Korean kingdom almost 800 years ago), China fears that if the North Korean government collapses, there will be a humanitarian crisis and tons of illegal immigrants will flee into China in desperation. China is telling the truth when they say they want stability in the peninsula and when they say they want it denuclearized, but China sees the status quo as totally in their favor and views all changes as bad outcomes for China, so there are real limits as how far they will push things. Here's what China fears if North Korea collapses.
1) A huge influx of refugees will cross the border, causing China to have to spend large amounts of resources to feed and house them and it will take away from using these resources to keep their own population in check.
2) International aid organizations will likely demand access to China to help, which China doesn't want.
3) North Korea's nuclear weapons could end up in South Korea's hands, which China doesn't want.
4) A united Korea would definitely be a US ally. It could be that instead of the US leaving, that the US ends up having military bases in the former North Korea and thus are right on China's doorstep.
5) China will no longer get North Korean rare earths at a bargain price. In fact, there may be so much resentment towards China for helping to prop up the North Korean government that those rare earths go anywhere but China.
China realizes that eventually the North Korean state will collapse. But they hope to push that date as far into the future as possible as, like I said, they view all post-North Korean outcomes as very bad for them. Note too that China is very good at the duplicity game of telling outside countries that they need to do something which China itself is unwilling to do. I get that they don't like THADD going to South Korea, and personally I think that sending it there should never have been made public, but their lack of interest in really turning the screws on North Korea has led to this and they seem unwilling to accept their own responsibility here.
For a moment I thought there's really one area where the Dems are even stupider than the GOP.
Pence's use of AOL is likely stupid. He's basically a new, older looking, less boyishly handsome version of Dan Quayle. Hillary Clinton's use of personal email was all hubris and greed rather than stupidity. Hillary is smart, but she's also arrogant and greedy. I'm not saying it would have been OK to do this, but had she and Bill hired true IT security gurus, and their money and power gave them access to such people and such people may well be Democratic Party supporters on top of that, and used, say, a really hardened version of one of the BSD operating systems and had super tight firewall and security controls in place on their personal email server, they could have at least argued that their server was better than what Uncle Sam was using. I'm not saying that would have justified using it from a legal standpoint, but it would have changed the argument. Instead, they hired what I call "Two Windoze Dudez" to do their email. Apparently it was some strip mall PC shop that 2 guys ran and there was nothing special at all about it or their background. They got picked because they were nearby and cheap. Now that I think about it, I suppose one could argue that thinking that hiring "Two Windoze Dudez" to do this kind of thing was a pretty stupid decision, but I think the motivator was more about saving money than anything else and the impression I've had about Pence ever since he got picked by Trump is that he's just not the sharpest knife in the drawer.
Twitter is currently trading within two dollars of its 52 week low as concerns mount that it may not ever be profitable. I don't use Snapchat. I have nothing against it, but I have no use for it. I have read recently that all of their competitors do everything that Snapchat does, but they all do it better. Snapchat was just there first. I'm sure that some people will make money on this stock. Those who got in close to the IPO opening price may have already sold it off for a profit. The investment bank that backed the IPO certainly has already made a ton from today's market action. But this is the same market with the same investors who kept SCO alive for years at almost $5 a share in the hopes that it would win its lawsuit so I won't be surprised if Snapchat eventually dies and many of those investors end up taking big losses on it.
I have a barely used 2015 Chevy that I bought recently. It has OnStar. I like the car a lot. I don't like OnStar. In my car I can connect my cell phone to the car audio system by Bluetooth but I can either only connect it to answer phone calls or I can connect it only to stream music from it. Not both from the same device - only one of those per connected device. So I opted to answer phone calls. I have come to realize that OnStar is deliberately designed crippled service and the reason they do that is that they want you to pay them money so they can send you step by driving directions over the audio system instead of you using a free service like Google Maps. Additionally they want old people to pay for phone call minutes so they use their cars to call people instead of using the phone to do so. One of the constant frustrating problems I have with OnStar is that because I set up the car to use hands free answering of incoming calls through it, it intercepts EVERY attempt I make to talk to the phone. I have an iPhone so I can't talk to Siri or use voice on any Google feature because the stupid system intercepts my attempt to do so but because it's not an actual call it's too stupid to pass the voice data on to the service trying to use it. That means that use Google Maps I have to type in every destination because I can't use voice as OnStar won't let me. And since it won't let me stream the Google Maps audio through the audio system because I have it set up to do hands free calls, I have to turn off the sound system when using Google Maps and pump up the volume as loud as my phone will go. So I'm very skeptical indeed about any tie in with OnStar.
I think this is spot on, and I suggest we fix the education system.
We don't have schools.
We have day care centers.
While I agree that to a certain extent schools do serve as de facto day care centers, do you have any ideas for improvement or just complaints? I wish I had the answers. I really do. A large part of this is because it's what parents want and they pay the taxes. Homework is at a ridiculous level pretty much everywhere, and again, it's what parents want. Then these same parents complain without any sense of responsibility for the mess that their kids don't get enough sleep and are always tired when they have 3-4 hours of homework a night and have activities on top of that. Within a few miles from my house I sometimes see kids getting off a school bus at 6 PM. When that alone doesn't strike anybody as abnormal and bad, I can't personally fix that kind of thinking.
Now if you just want big changes and maybe they work, maybe they don't, then you should be thrilled with current Dept. of Education Secretary Besty DeVos. She's related by marriage to the founder of Amway and married to a former CEO of it and also the sister of a guy who started the sleazy military-industrial complex company formerly known as Blackwater. So this background not only makes her completely detached from the realities of today's schooling, her goal is to destroy public schooling and replace them all with charter schools and she believes (the atheists here will love this) that she's on a mission from God to do so. No kidding.
I realize that this is going to end up getting comments that digress, so sorry in advance.
I'm an American white person and I don't consider myself a SJW but I'm sympathetic to the concerns of African Americans regarding their dealings with the police. I can understand, as best as is possible given my background, that they are really tired of seeing police shoot and kill unarmed African Americans. The police do this to white people too. They just don't do it in big enough numbers to attract the wrath of White America, but it definitely happens to white people too. I absolutely believe that it happens disproportionately to African Americans. The point that cops kill lots of people without justification is important for my next point.
After reading about many of these cases, I've come to the conclusion that as long as the cop in question doesn't act like a complete sociopath on the witness stand, all they have to do is say "I was scared for my life". It doesn't have to be true. They just have to say it. And once they say those magic words, 90% of the time they're going to be acquitted by the jury. All the evidence in the world is not going to change the jury. We've seen trials that have proved this. I read what the cop said in the infamous Ferguson, MO trial and his account of events was not credible. I'd put it at maybe 1 in 1000 that what he said really happened. I'm positive he's lying. But the jury completely bought it. There have been other cases too where there is video evidence contradicting the cop's story but once the cop says "I was scared for my life" the jury finds the shooting to be justified. So I'm sure that some of the solutions proposed will work in terms of getting the video cameras on, but we've already seen that juries really don't care what the video shows and all they really care about is if the cop says he/she was scared at the time.
I doubt that companies that want to do the old "Surprise! Write code with no reference materials to do complicated task X" are interested though. On a previous job I was allowed to interview by my manager for potential hires into the group and I would give people a simple problem and ask them to vaguely verbally describe a way to resolve it, like to take a file of names in first name, space, last name order that was sorted on first names and produce the same type of output (first name, space, last name) but sorted on last names. I just wanted to see that they had some kind of logical process to resolve this kind of issue. Something like using the right arguments to Unix/Linux sort to do it, use AWK or Perl to sort the 2nd field alphabetically, etc. were good enough answers. I remember in those days that recruiters would flood us with a bunch of unqualified candidates (it was a sys admin type job) and we got annoyed that people would say on their resumes that they totally knew Unix/Linux but we'd interview them and find out they didn't. So we started asking candidates "What command do you use on the command line to delete a file?" and got rid of the ones who couldn't answer that. That worked pretty well at the time. So I do get that they are looking for a certain type of employee and trying this as a way to find them.
However, the kind of people who are totally geeky enough to pass these types of tests do not always make for great colleagues. I know a guy at work who is now in a different department who would ace this kind of thing and he is smart but he is also super challenging to deal with in person. He's been given permission to work from home pretty much all the time because he's so challenging to deal with in person. I remember another really good programmer who one time disappeared for like a week with no word to his office. His manager had a couple of guys from work go to his apartment and they expected to find him dead. They knocked on the door and the dude answers. Told them that he hurt his ribs. He didn't bother to call work or his manager about it. Just didn't show up to work. So yeah, these are the kind of guys who pass that kind of test.
I read linked article, and nothing in the transcript there stands out as wrong. You buy a $100K car to run Uber?! Take responsibility for your actions if it doesn't work out. Yes, Uber shits on everyone. Yes, Uber isn't socially responsible company. No, in this case CEO wasn't wrong in pointing out that it was driver, and not Uber that f-up.
You and I seem to be the only ones who picked up on this. If you as one person are dumb enough to invest $100,000 in one car and hope to make it up driving for Uber, well, you just may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer.
. . . .running against an established Congressman (Stephen Lynch) who has been in Congress for 16 years, who has routinely been winning elections by 70%+ for years.
Wu's only real "in" here, is that Lynch is considered moderate. No idea on how that particular congressional district trends. . .
Given that she's trying to knock off a popular incumbent in the primary who's done nothing to hurt his chances for re-election over the years, this was a long shot under the best of circumstances. Her only possible means of attack is to argue that Lynch is not liberal enough, which seems like a low percentage move to me. Lynch once said that being "least liberal" member of the House from Massachusetts is a bit like being the slowest Kenyan in the marathon. You're still a lot more liberal/fast than most of the others. Are there really all that many voters who rank transgender issues as their number 1 above all else concern? Probably not.
Geez. Newt Gingrich got savagely and unfairly criticized in 2012 for suggesting that putting a permanent base on the moon was a good idea and that was a pretty rational idea that I'm sure a decent number of Slashdotters would support. I really have question Wu's fitness for office for simply lacking the self-awareness to know that what she said makes her sound like a crackpot. "Vote for me. I'm crazy and I only care about edge issues that don't effect the vast majority of the district." Yes, that sounds like a good plan - not.
You can always find cases of unfair sentencing where small crime X is punished at level Y in one place but at level 2 times Y or 3 times Y at another place. I have a relative who got caught for DUI on a two lane (one lane in each direction - no median) surface road within 2 miles of his house while driving home when he came upon a police roadblock he could not avoid. First offense. He had a lawyer. Still went to jail for a week over it. No wreck. No injuries. Barely crossed the DUI threshold. My best friend is a lawyer and I've learned from him that all of the following can play a role in sentencing.
1) Judge might be a hard liner.
2) Judge wants to send a message that the incident in question is not acceptable and deter others from doing the same (ie. DUI incident I referenced).
3) Defendant might have used a public defender and this almost always leads to a bad outcome for the defendant. My lawyer friend sometimes does criminal defense work and he's told me that the DA will often completely back down and offer greatly reduced penalties if he simply shows up in court to fight for his client. Defendants with PDs don't get these sweet deals.
4) Defendant could be a combative jerk in court and that played a role in the sentence.
I checked and their stock is trading in the over the counter market. It's currently at 6/10 of one cent per share. That's right. A share costs less than one penny. At some point in the past year it was worth something like 38 cents a share. Given how even by OTC standards their stock is practically worthless, I would imagine that they don't have the funds on hand to pay the ransom and they probably can't fix the problems either, if they even cared to (not sure that they do). What people are saying about how this worked, when it did actually do what it was supposed to, doesn't suggest that security was given much thought. They probably thought nobody would care enough to hack a children's toy.
If you were to sit and watch a billion hours of YouTube, it would take you over 100,000 years.
Eh, I bet I can do that in 60,000 years, tops.
Now techies, many of whom are among the highest 1 percent of earners, are complaining that they, too, are being priced out. The Twitter employee said he hit a low point in early 2014 when the company changed its payroll schedule, leaving him with a hole in his budget. "I had to borrow money to make it through the month." He was one of several tech workers, earning between $100,000 and $700,000 a year, who vented to the Guardian about their financial situation.
In 2013 to be in the top 1% of US earners you had to earn over $1.15 million per year. That's quite a bit more than $100,000 and even $700,000 a year. See here:
http://www.mlive.com/news/inde...
I'd guess the top 1% is even higher now.
It's an objective, publicly available piece of information. Birth records aren't secret, or in any way protected from public view.
I'm not sure that if you knew my name and the approximate year I was born that you could find my birth record. Probably depends on whether there was a birth announcement in the local paper when I was born and it is currently searchable on the internet. I can tell you that I can probably count on one or two hands the number of people who know me who know the city and state I was born in. I have very good friends who know my birthday but have no idea where I was born. I took a look and my state of birth would not allow you to get a copy of my birth certificate, so if you knew the place but not the date, you'd be out of luck there too. So birth records aren't really as open as you might think. Try looking up your own via an internet search. You might find it's harder to find than you think. This is a good thing as one of the ways identity theft gets done is via knowing a person's birth date and year, but that's in part a factor of greed in businesses being willing to give credit cards, loans, etc. on insufficient proof that you really are who you claim to be.
Somebody here has probably done the math. Does it really make sense economically for Uber to get 100% of the cost of a ride this way but having to spend money to buy main, maintain and insure cars? Or is this another sign of a company that doesn't know what it is doing, perhaps most recently suggested by the recent charges of sexism and sexual harassment?