Let's say you live in a large city and you tell your boss "I will check with you when I get to a public phone".
Will your boss tell you "OK, check with me when you get to a public phone", or "Get a cell phone" ?
You couldn't get away with that in the USA. Public phones, or pay phones, are dead. Almost none exist any more. They are so rare that I've been known to take photos of them in amazement just to show people that a few of them actually do still exist.
After Ellen Pao, UNLV, Duke LaCrosse, and countless false police reports (resulting in legal action) about discrimination I'm waiting for evidence.
I am familiar with the case, maybe even more than you are, and I can't draw any conclusions from it as to who was right here. I'm American and I've actually served on juries twice and I can tell you that in a case like this when juries have no idea who is telling the truth, they'll opt for the least harm verdict, which means that ruling against Ellen Pao is the safest course of action because it avoids ruling against defendants who may actually be innocent. People get found innocent of murder because there's nothing more than circumstantial evidence in the case and juries won't always convict just on that. Both Ellen and the defendants provided reasonable, believable versions of what happened. The only conclusion I can come to is that Ellen didn't prove her case sufficiently for whatever reason and it shows just how difficult it is to win workplace lawsuits. Some years ago we had a lawyer who actually did this kind of work post about them and he told us that his first advice to all prospective clients was to drop the matter and get on with their lives if they possibly could because most workplace discrimination cases are losses for the plaintiffs.
Get rid of work visas outright. If a company can't find talent here in the US, they should feel free to sponsor a foreign national for citizenship - and take away the ability to summarily deport the foreign worker when they're through with them..
That would require a change to US law. And it would potentially be a thorny legal issue in that it would potentially create a protected class (foreign workers) who might potentially have an easier path to US citizenship than people who marry US citizens. Also, you're assuming that US companies won't find a way to game your new system and I bet they can. My guess is they'd agree to your plan but still be allowed to pay low wages to such employees so that if those people leave, they don't care because they can bring in the next group of low paid future "citizens".
I look forward to the inevitable security problem that gets found with this app when bored researchers find some unintended way that this new app has a security hole big enough to drive a truck through.
Companies are under no obligation to profit. They are completely free to fail and go bankrupt. They would like to profit and not fail, but they are under no legal obligation to do so.
In the USA you can sue publicly traded companies if you feel that management has been derelict and hope for the best in the court system, but in general you are quite right. My previous job was working for a US subsidiary of a European telco. I don't like to name who I worked for because I don't want to give them free publicity as I still, years later, have some grudges against them and how they treated their US based employees. Anyway, we competed in a market segment as a minnow against much bigger fish like AT&T. Our bigger competitors could offer pretty much the same stuff we did but cheaper because they had economies of scale in North America that we couldn't match that enabled them to have a lower price structure. Desperate to get business, our European bosses somehow got a major American company with offices all around the world as a customer. I don't want to name the company or what we did for them, but you would be absolutely appalled to know what we did for them, the fact that they needed it done at all, and the fact that they were too stupid to just do it themselves. I'll just vaguely say that we fixed a major email issue for them. We sold this service at a huge loss just to be able to get their business because management decided that if we could tell prospective clients that we had company X as a customer, we could get more business. It didn't work. In fact, it not only didn't work, our crazy North American sales team took it as a green light to literally sell everything they could at any price, even if at a loss, just to get business. Our CEO had to send out a company wide email around the world to every employee saying that we could no longer sell services to customers at a loss. That's how bad it got. Another point is that Amazon lost truckloads of money for years after it started and I remember investment writers seriously asking in the 1990s if the company would ever turn a profit. Sometimes you have to run at a loss to get established and hopefully you have the money available to do that.
Manufacturing jobs are returning to the US because labor is getting too expensive in China, as Chinese workers want a middle class lifestyle.
While that is not wrong that Chinese workers want a middle class lifestyle, there is more to manufacturing jobs leaving China than that. To get manufacturing started there, the Chinese government offered huge tax incentives to foreign companies willing to set up shop. China has now acquired enough internal expertise to make a lot of those things themselves, such as TVs for example, so the tax incentives and other things done to bring in the foreigners are going away so that they can shift more and more production to Chinese owned companies. I read an article today that said that foreign companies can still get good deals on manufacturing in China but only if they are willing to go to what were called third tier cities.
....why are electric cars still ridiculously expensive? For most of the models on the market I can get two or even three gas powered cars. Sure, there probably is a difference in the cost of operation, but the biggest hurdle is the initial cost....which is why I drive a 15 year old car, although it only has 61000 miles on it. I rarely drive more than about 15 miles a day, I'd be the perfect candidate for an EV, but an EV costs as much as a house in this region.
Well, you can get a Nissan Leaf for about $37,000 before the $7500 tax credit the US government gives you for buying a fully electric vehicle. That brings the price down to about $30,000. That's not cheap, but you can't even get the really cheap subcompacts any more for less than $18,000 so you can't really get 2 or 3 cars for the price of the Leaf. Now if you're only comparing Tesla or Porsche or BMW prices, then yes, you are quite right. The Leaf could work well for you. I leased one for 3 years and I loved it. Unfortunately I have distant relatives who live beyond its range that I still need to visit at times and when I had the Leaf I also had an old vehicle I was using mostly for long trips and eventually it needed really expensive repairs. In the end I turned in the Leaf when the lease ended and the old car and got a recent year gasoline powered used car that I like. But the whole electric vehicle experience was really positive for me and I might go back to one in the future once higher range vehicles become available at Leaf like prices like the upcoming Bolt or that cheaper Tesla model (forgot what they call it).
Speaking as someone who has spent thousands of dollars in legal assistance getting the appropriate visa in place allowing me to work in the US (but luckily am not from one of the countries in the executive order)... go fuck yourself. This isn't about American jobs, its about screwing over people you don't like and trying to win political points with morons.
People have spent years getting those visas. People may have even been living the in US for decades. This is not a moratorium on new visas, this is retroactively screwing people who have followed the process to get into the US legally.
It could actually both be about American jobs and screwing over people you don't like to win political points. There's nothing about one that prevents the other.
You might want to ramp your hysterical reaction down a notch or two. No legal residents are being kicked out. Some who left the country are having trouble getting back in, but nobody here is being kicked out. I read recently about a guy who has lived in the US for over 20 years and his children are young adults and naturalized citizens. For some reason Dad doesn't want to get US citizenship, so he's now in trouble because he travels outside the USA all the time on work and he's an Iranian passport holder. I admit to not really seeing the point in targeting people like him, but I have to ask why he hasn't applied for American citizenship yet. Maybe if he needs an Iranian passport to work in countries hostile towards the USA, he needs to consider getting a new job. I personally know immigrants who the first chance they could they applied for US citizenship and got tested and they are proud to be Americans. Maybe it's inconvenient for him but the truth is that having US citizenship provides protections that don't exist otherwise. As long as you are a long time legal resident without citizenship, you're always going to be at some level of risk that Uncle Sam might not want to extend your stay.
Can they solve the problem of the record skipping in my car?
I know you're joking, but for those who don't know, they actually did try record players in cars many years ago. They were very expensive and had lots of drawbacks. http://gajitz.com/road-tunes-w...
You probably don't know this, but IBM is also protecting US based management jobs while they are letting US based employees hit the bricks. Were you aware of that? I have a sort of relative by marriage (related to someone related to me through marriage) and he's been in middle management at IBM for probably at least 20 years now. IBM will keep him around forever even as they lay off other US based employees where he works. I'm guessing that maybe they make these people remotely manage foreign employees, but he hasn't given a lot of details and I rarely see him. I only know that he's said he has zero worries about ever losing his job there. A lot of what IBM is doing doesn't actually make a lot of sense. It's just designed to prop up the stock value.
You can possibly add Air France 447 to that list. Air France chose not to replace the air speed indicators until the plane returned to France on what would be its last flight. The passengers and crew lost that gamble. I have no inside knowledge as to whether that was for cost reasons, lack of training in Rio where they simply didn't know how to do the job there, or control freak reasons (I worked for a French company and until you actually work for them you really have no idea how much of a control freak the French are about everything) but failure to replace the air speed indicators prior to that flight started the chain of events that led to the crash.
I am not mad at people like you because Clinton lost. I am unconcerned that we have different politics. And I don’t think less of people like you because you vote one way and I vote another. I think less of people like you because you watched an adult mock a disabled person in front of a crowd and still supported him. I think less of you because you saw a man spouting clear racism and backed him. I think less of you because you listened to him advocate for war crimes, and still thought he should run this country. I think less of people like you because you watched him equate a woman’s worth to her appearance and got on board. It isn’t your politics that I find repulsive. It is your personal willingness to support racism, sexism, and cruelty. You sided with a bully when it mattered and that is something I will never forget. So, no people like you and I won’t be “coming together” to move forward or whatever. Trump disgusts me, but it is the fact that he doesn’t disgust people like you that will stick with me long after this election.
I'm surprised that you still get don't get this, but the election proved one thing that myself and others have suspected or claimed for years and people like you don't want to admit. The only "issue" that matters for the vast majority of Americans, and I'd put it at about 80% of the electorate, is whether there is a D or an R next to their name. Some of my old friends who are women could not possibly have cared less about anything bad that Trump did on the campaign trail but completely flipped out over both and real and imaginary things related to Hillary. Trump bragged about grabbing women in the crotch? No problem. But Hillary was tied, barely, to Benghazi where a grand total of 4 Americans died and this was the single biggest American foreign policy disaster ever. People really don't care much about anything except whether a candidate has a D or an R next to their name. Pretty much everything else is negotiable. Congressional races prove this every election. Most Congressional districts regardless of who holds them are no longer competitive for members of the other party. Most of the people who aren't party tied voted for Trump in this election because he told people what they wanted to hear - namely that they were victims of powers and forces beyond their control and only he could stand up to those powers. Given the monopoly the Democrats have had on victimhood it's kind of funny that Trump outflanked them on this.
The study basically concluded that the name of the university on your diploma matters a lot and an argument can be made that if desperately poor people can get into expensive top schools and run up mountains of debt, the odds are in their favor that they'll earn more than people who went to cheaper universities. This whole debate about the disadvantages poor applicants have is beside the point.
Dumb that cars that should be targeting a 15-20 year life span are larded up with the current flavor of the month that will be obsolete in a fraction of that. Wish it had WIFI so I could maintain the remote pre-heat functionality at home at least.
I agree. I had a Nissan Leaf on a lease and I liked the car, but life changes made me need to get to one car and with distant relatives I need to visit I couldn't really make the Leaf work for me as an only vehicle. My lease ended with 2G still working, but a co-worker recently had his modem replaced. I think there was some charge for labor for doing the work. The problem is that AT&T has done this kind of thing before and businesses go with it because it's cheap with no long term thought that AT&T might dump the service down the road. In the first half of the previous decade I had a job that for a while made me use a work provided cell phone ("mobile phone" for you non-Americans) and it was on some crappy non-GSM network. My company got a really good bargain on the phone service because AT&T was trying to drive business into this crappy network, but eventually AT&T gave up and closed it down. Only then did my company start letting us use our own phones and expense them. I'm sure Nissan simply saw the 2G as a cheap network that big ol' AT&T would probably support forever and nobody considered the problems that would be caused if they stopped supporting this old technology.
He's been in custody for over 6 months and is not a minor so why keep his name a secret?
This is the EU. He was arrested 6 months ago, but he may not actually be being held. I have no idea. Remember, in the EU (OK, the UK and maybe France are exceptions) the emphasis will be on figuring out why society failed him so that he turned to crime, not about making the point that what he did was a bad thing. I'll predict he'll at most get 2 years in the cushiest jail they can find and I wouldn't be surprised at all if he pays no fine and they don't even take his ill gotten gains from him. After all, he might feel bad if he was actually punished for his crime. Once he gets out of jail he can apply for the crime to be legally "forgotten" so he can work in the IT industry again and maybe do the same thing all over again. Publishing his name might make him feel bad. Can't do that.
Keep in mind that in most or all of the EU criminals have the right for nobody to ever find out that they were criminals but you can be jailed for years for saying certain things. No for doing things. Merely for saying things. Things that don't threaten anybody's safety or well being. Yep, those guys really have a good sense of justice and what's important over there.
I'm genuinely curious as to how it damages / inconveniences / hurts you to just call her a her?
That's not the reason. Some people object to calling humans with penises "she". That's the reason. But if you want play by a different rule, you can do so, madam.
Go to your card provider (Visa/MC/Discover/Amex) and tell them to remove the charge because the service was not rendered and/or the charge was improper.
They will.
Actually that was how things work. But I'm not so sure that this is how things are any more with credit card companies. And I speak from personal experience.
Things definitely did work that way in the past, but they changed after the "Great Recession". I never lost a dispute until the Great Recession happened. Short version - I bought 2 airline tickets on a small foreign carrier and through various circumstances could not make the trip. I called the carrier and asked for a credit against a future flight or a refund. They refused both. I protested the charge with my credit card company. I provided evidence that the tickets were never sold to me as non-refundable and non-changeable and I mean I had real evidence to back this up. I had an attorney friend check out my submission and he expected me to win. The airline never provided any evidence that the tickets they sold me, were in fact, non-refundable or non-changeable. At every step the airline simply refused to refund my money or allow any changes. After months of disputing this with the airline never, ever disproving my contentions my credit card company gave up and refused to eat the charge and refused to demand that the airline give them the money back. They just told me to work it out with the airline, which was impossible because the airline's position was that the tickets were non-refundable and non-changeable and if I and my (at the time) girlfriend couldn't make it, we were simply out of luck and out of money. So I can tell you that if AT&T fights back, your credit card company may just give in and refuse to help you, their customer. It's possible that this is a small enough amount of money that they may just do you a favor here, but the days of credit card companies having the backs of their customers are gone for sure for charges that are more than a mere pittance.
There's definitely more to this story than the main article talks about. I have some questions I'd love to know the answers to.
1) Why did they ask for a judge to rule rather than a jury? That may have been a tactical error on the part of Ivey's legal team.
2) Is Cheng Yin Sun a US citizen? If not, why was she still allowed in the USA after going to jail? Is this more favoritism to the rich? Typically you're deported from the US if you're not a citizen and you do something that gets you thrown in jail.
3) Why did it apparently take years for the casino to figure out what happened? And how did they find out? Did someone connected to Ivey rat them out? Was that person or those people paid for finking on him?
There is no reason to use tape aside from "retro hipsterism". (isn't that redundant?) Tape sucks on SO many levels. Anyone who thinks it doesn't isn't old enough to have had to live with tapes. I can see it being kind of novel to someone once or twice but the charm will wear off fast. Seriously, tape has some use cases but playing music shouldn't be one of them. We used it back in the day because there wasn't anything better available.
Yep. Back in the days before CDs, I only bought tapes if I had no choice - something went out of print on vinyl and was only available on tape. I've got a small number of old commercial cassettes sold by various music companies. These are real legitimate releases, not bootlegs. Some have long been completely unplayable. I've got a somewhat larger number of cassette tapes I made myself in that era. They all still work, although I rarely do anything with them. Commercial cassette quality was known to be awful. Maybe if you were lucky they used Dolby B noise reduction which helped the sound suck less, but on home cassette recorders you could use the superior Dolby C. And worse, manufacturers didn't always tell if they used Dolby B when they did, so all you could do was play the tape and try to figure out if it sounded better with it on or off. Vinyl had a lot of problems, mostly because the US industry used really cheap and low quality vinyl at the time, but cassettes were pretty much always crap. I have no idea why anybody would want to buy these by choice nor how a young person could even find a player. I've got a player I almost never use, but I bought it more than 20 years ago.
I just don't know if it's realistic to want "satisfying and rewarding work". This is something I see a lot of millennials say and believe me we all get this, but I just don't know if it's realistic. To me this is kind of like people saying that if you don't love your job you should quit it and find one you do love. The sad reality is that there just aren't enough "jobs you love" to go around for everybody to have one. If you go home at the end of the day and you're not stressed out from work and you're not screaming about your job and it's not taking a toll on your health, that is a realistic best case scenario for most people. I had a job I loved once. I'm not in it any more. You know why? I chased money. That job spun off a new company during the internet boom and I was given the option of remaining in the job I loved or joining the new company. The old job I loved was laying off a few people and it froze salaries for what would end up being 2 or 3 years so I went with the spin off. For the time of the job freezes at my old company the spin off looked great and I got pay increases. But we got bought out by a European company who forced out our CEO and the new CEO was pretty hostile towards US workers in general. The job got a lot worse and in the end I and others got layoff notices. I found a new job and my new company is pretty good compared to most out there, but I wish I was still with the job I loved. Those I know who rode out the pay freezes are still there. The vast majority of my co-workers who went with me to the spun off company are long gone from it, having been laid off at various times. So leaving a job you do actually love to chase more money isn't something I'd ever do again and I wish I hadn't done it. I wish I could go back to the old company I loved, but I can't. They don't have much turnover there because it's a pretty good place to work.
As a new CS grad you do need to full grasp that management in US companies usually doesn't respect your job or what you do and they'll always be looking to replace you with cheaper workers, probably from India. Those cheaper workers won't do as good a job as you will, but management doesn't care. They don't respect your work nor do they want to pay US wages for it. They'll take "sort of works" if it's cheap enough. This is just going to get worse as you age. My current employer does value its US employees but there are limits. We also hire plenty of cheap H-1B workers or simply add spots on our India team. The race to the bottom for wages is a race you'll never win. Maybe if you're lucky you'll be able to finish your career without any major disruptions, but likely you'll change jobs a lot as the number of US employers who actually value US IT staff continues to shrink. Today there's another article on Slashdot about a major California university replacing its IT staff with foreign workers. This is going to be the norm for you in your career. If you find at some point you're tired of this crap, get into US federal government work as quickly as you can. The Feds don't do too many layoffs and security concerns make it very difficult to impossible to outsource the work. There are pros and cons to this kind of work, which I did for some years after I graduated. The pay is better now than when I started and you get a lot of vacation time, which I really liked. On the downside a lot of government IT jobs, even programming ones, are very specific to the government and you'll get skills that will be of little use on the outside world in the unlikely event you are ever laid off. Pay won't match outside companies though. You'll always have friends who are getting more than you and working for the Feds may require you to live in small towns that just suck your soul and fill you with despair.
If you're really really good at what you do, you may be able to work for one of the top employers like Google, etc. who may give you great work with great benefits. But again, there are only so many of those jobs. You may be in
I'm not a lawyer, but my best friend since college is. We're both Americans. I probably know more about how the US legal system really works as a result of this friendship than how almost all non-lawyers do. The truth is that judges don't like to award court costs nor do lawyers really like it when they do this because it discourages lawsuits and lawyers and judges both think that the system is fine just like it is and having fewer lawsuits is actually bad. Some judges won't ever award costs to the winner. Some will only do so to send a message to people they think really abuse the system. It seems to me that this is considered to be an unusual situation rather than something that will set a precedent. Also, judges often ignore anything they feel like, so the fact that court costs got awarded in case A doesn't at all mean that they will be in case B in front of a different judge even if the circumstances that led to the awarded are essentially identically.
Here's an example. Suppose you have neighbor who doesn't like you and the neighbor sues you for something really stupid and asks for a huge monetary award. Suppose that you win, but the case is extraordinarily difficult and time consuming and you end up ruined financially from having to pay the costs to defend yourself against this frivolous lawsuit. You can probably count on one hand the number of judges and lawyers who actually feel sorry for you. From their perspective the system worked perfectly. You got sued for something bogus and you won. The fact that it destroyed you financially to defend yourself is not their concern. Not at all.
I've got a 3D TV. Had it for about 3 years now I think. I'm a video enthusiast, so I can speak with personal insight into this topic. I'm seeing a lot of posts that contain half-truths and outright falsehoods from people who have no experience at all with the technology.
First of all. 3D TVs were not necessarily all that expensive. I've got a 41 inch VIzio that cost me a little over $500. It uses the passive glasses system, which I think is great. You know those glasses you get at the movie theater when you see 3D films? It uses those. They are cheap. I can buy as many as I want on Amazon for a few dollars a piece. Unfortunately Vizio was disappointed in sales and has permanently dropped 3D from their current TVs, which limits us fans to only a very small number of manufacturers - Sony, LG and Samsung. If I remember correctly Samsung uses the active system of bulky glasses that need batteries. I love my TV. It's great for normal 2D stuff and I can watch 3D Blu Rays on it too.
One of the problems with 3D is that a small percentage of the public, I think I saw a number of around 10%, has some kind of quirk in their physiology that makes them have a bad reaction to 3D video. I suspect these people will also have problems with 3D VR. Another issue is that people with serious vision problems can't see 3D either very well or at all and they invariably make a lot of noise about how much 3D sucks and how they don't understand how anybody likes it because it sucks all the time. I have a friend and a relative in this category and frankly it gets old listening to them complain about 3D. People with vision or physical reaction problems to 3D don't understand that they are in the minority and most people have no problems with it. You can see from some of the comments complaints like if you don't look directly at the TV it sucks to see things outside with the glasses. With the passive ones it doesn't, but there's a lot of variability among humans and some people are just not going to react positively to the technology no matter what you do.
3D is here to stay. Most films won't be in 3D, but there will always be 3D films going forward. Animated films will always be in 3D. Now that they use computers to do animated films, there's no compelling cost reason not to make them available in 3D for those who want to see them that way. The cost of producing an additional 3D master to go with a 2D mater is negligible for animation. BIg blockbuster films will also continue to be in 3D. The vast majority of Disney's movies are in 3D. In fact, if Disney puts out a live action film that's not in 3D, that's a clear sign that they don't expect it to be a hit. This was the case with "The Lone Ranger" for example. In Asia 3D is a winning format and consumers have shown a marked preference for 3D films. Even if the US stopped making 3D films today, and they won't, films in China and Japan in particular would continue to be made in 3D. Cheaper films and films without many special effects will be in 2D, but any big budget film is getting the 3D treatment. A few directors are pretty anti-3D right now. Chris Nolan is a big example. I wouldn't expect anything he does to be in 3D. But even big names like Spielberg and Scorsese have released 3D films in recent years. Spielberg's "The BFG" was in 3D.
ransomware purporting to be a FBI message a notice that suspicious files were found and the user has been fined.
That people believe such "warnings" in large enough numbers to make it worthwhile for the crooks to make them, is a sign, that FBI has an image problem.
I disagree. It's really a people problem, such as people not understanding technology very well. I know a guy who is a blue collar worker and he can barely use a PC enough to read and send email and surf the web. He has admitted to me that he's clicked on one of those "We've found a virus on your PC. Click here to pay for our scanning program to save your PC!" popups and sent money to those people. People often don't understand the technology well enough to know what's real and what isn't and they're often too embarrassed to ask for help from people who do understand. This same guy if he ever has a PC problem, it's a bad, time consuming one to fix. I've had to tell him he's got to go to Geek Squad for this kind of thing. I have a better friend who is a middle school teacher and he's not much better with PCs. He doesn't know how to save any file to a location other than the default location that comes up. There are lots of people who just don't get technology very well.
You won't need it. This is a classic nuisance suit. I watched a lawsuit much like this in court once. A driver of a bobcat wasnt wearing his seatbelt when he lifted a load too high digging out a house foundation, and it fell into the foundation and he was crushed. He got absolutely nowhere.
This is probably true. But there is some chance you'll be wrong, even if a small one. I'm not a lawyer, but my best friend is and over the years he's taught me a lot about how the US legal system really works. Literally anything can happen in court. I agree that probably this case will go nowhere, but it depends on the judge and their personal biases and how stupid the jury is that gets the case. Believe me, the people suing are going to want a jury to hear this one. For example, a judge may think this is stupid but also feel that a jury, not him, needs to make that determination. Or you could have a crackpot judge who completely buys the argument that Apple is at fault here and it also goes to a jury. If you've ever served on a jury, you'll know that juries are not made up of the best and brightest of us. I've served twice and the last time I served, one day while we were waiting in the jury room for court to start, 3 guys on the jury got into an argument where they tried to top each other by each one of them offering proof that he was far stupider in dealing with new technology than the other 2 were. These are exactly the kind of people who serve on juries. And people who try to "win" an argument that they are stupider than everybody else are the kind of people who might be swayed by the arguments of the people suing.
By the way, you mentioned (but I didn't quote it) fear of the litigants having to pay Apple's court costs. That's almost impossible. Judges and lawyers both think that the US legal system is perfect as it is and doesn't need fixing and as a result judges are extremely hesitant to award legal costs even for frivolous lawsuits. Judges and lawyers believe that awarding such costs will lessen the number of lawsuits, which they universally feel is very bad indeed for them. Fewer lawsuits means fewer lawyers, which means fewer judges. Legal costs are awarded only in very egregious cases to send a message and most likely this case won't be one of them.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's say you live in a large city and you tell your boss "I will check with you when I get to a public phone". Will your boss tell you "OK, check with me when you get to a public phone", or "Get a cell phone" ?
You couldn't get away with that in the USA. Public phones, or pay phones, are dead. Almost none exist any more. They are so rare that I've been known to take photos of them in amazement just to show people that a few of them actually do still exist.
After Ellen Pao, UNLV, Duke LaCrosse, and countless false police reports (resulting in legal action) about discrimination I'm waiting for evidence.
I am familiar with the case, maybe even more than you are, and I can't draw any conclusions from it as to who was right here. I'm American and I've actually served on juries twice and I can tell you that in a case like this when juries have no idea who is telling the truth, they'll opt for the least harm verdict, which means that ruling against Ellen Pao is the safest course of action because it avoids ruling against defendants who may actually be innocent. People get found innocent of murder because there's nothing more than circumstantial evidence in the case and juries won't always convict just on that. Both Ellen and the defendants provided reasonable, believable versions of what happened. The only conclusion I can come to is that Ellen didn't prove her case sufficiently for whatever reason and it shows just how difficult it is to win workplace lawsuits. Some years ago we had a lawyer who actually did this kind of work post about them and he told us that his first advice to all prospective clients was to drop the matter and get on with their lives if they possibly could because most workplace discrimination cases are losses for the plaintiffs.
Get rid of work visas outright. If a company can't find talent here in the US, they should feel free to sponsor a foreign national for citizenship - and take away the ability to summarily deport the foreign worker when they're through with them. .
That would require a change to US law. And it would potentially be a thorny legal issue in that it would potentially create a protected class (foreign workers) who might potentially have an easier path to US citizenship than people who marry US citizens. Also, you're assuming that US companies won't find a way to game your new system and I bet they can. My guess is they'd agree to your plan but still be allowed to pay low wages to such employees so that if those people leave, they don't care because they can bring in the next group of low paid future "citizens".
I look forward to the inevitable security problem that gets found with this app when bored researchers find some unintended way that this new app has a security hole big enough to drive a truck through.
Companies are under no obligation to profit. They are completely free to fail and go bankrupt. They would like to profit and not fail, but they are under no legal obligation to do so.
In the USA you can sue publicly traded companies if you feel that management has been derelict and hope for the best in the court system, but in general you are quite right. My previous job was working for a US subsidiary of a European telco. I don't like to name who I worked for because I don't want to give them free publicity as I still, years later, have some grudges against them and how they treated their US based employees. Anyway, we competed in a market segment as a minnow against much bigger fish like AT&T. Our bigger competitors could offer pretty much the same stuff we did but cheaper because they had economies of scale in North America that we couldn't match that enabled them to have a lower price structure. Desperate to get business, our European bosses somehow got a major American company with offices all around the world as a customer. I don't want to name the company or what we did for them, but you would be absolutely appalled to know what we did for them, the fact that they needed it done at all, and the fact that they were too stupid to just do it themselves. I'll just vaguely say that we fixed a major email issue for them. We sold this service at a huge loss just to be able to get their business because management decided that if we could tell prospective clients that we had company X as a customer, we could get more business. It didn't work. In fact, it not only didn't work, our crazy North American sales team took it as a green light to literally sell everything they could at any price, even if at a loss, just to get business. Our CEO had to send out a company wide email around the world to every employee saying that we could no longer sell services to customers at a loss. That's how bad it got. Another point is that Amazon lost truckloads of money for years after it started and I remember investment writers seriously asking in the 1990s if the company would ever turn a profit. Sometimes you have to run at a loss to get established and hopefully you have the money available to do that.
Manufacturing jobs are returning to the US because labor is getting too expensive in China, as Chinese workers want a middle class lifestyle.
While that is not wrong that Chinese workers want a middle class lifestyle, there is more to manufacturing jobs leaving China than that. To get manufacturing started there, the Chinese government offered huge tax incentives to foreign companies willing to set up shop. China has now acquired enough internal expertise to make a lot of those things themselves, such as TVs for example, so the tax incentives and other things done to bring in the foreigners are going away so that they can shift more and more production to Chinese owned companies. I read an article today that said that foreign companies can still get good deals on manufacturing in China but only if they are willing to go to what were called third tier cities.
....why are electric cars still ridiculously expensive? For most of the models on the market I can get two or even three gas powered cars. Sure, there probably is a difference in the cost of operation, but the biggest hurdle is the initial cost....which is why I drive a 15 year old car, although it only has 61000 miles on it. I rarely drive more than about 15 miles a day, I'd be the perfect candidate for an EV, but an EV costs as much as a house in this region.
Well, you can get a Nissan Leaf for about $37,000 before the $7500 tax credit the US government gives you for buying a fully electric vehicle. That brings the price down to about $30,000. That's not cheap, but you can't even get the really cheap subcompacts any more for less than $18,000 so you can't really get 2 or 3 cars for the price of the Leaf. Now if you're only comparing Tesla or Porsche or BMW prices, then yes, you are quite right. The Leaf could work well for you. I leased one for 3 years and I loved it. Unfortunately I have distant relatives who live beyond its range that I still need to visit at times and when I had the Leaf I also had an old vehicle I was using mostly for long trips and eventually it needed really expensive repairs. In the end I turned in the Leaf when the lease ended and the old car and got a recent year gasoline powered used car that I like. But the whole electric vehicle experience was really positive for me and I might go back to one in the future once higher range vehicles become available at Leaf like prices like the upcoming Bolt or that cheaper Tesla model (forgot what they call it).
Speaking as someone who has spent thousands of dollars in legal assistance getting the appropriate visa in place allowing me to work in the US (but luckily am not from one of the countries in the executive order)... go fuck yourself. This isn't about American jobs, its about screwing over people you don't like and trying to win political points with morons.
People have spent years getting those visas. People may have even been living the in US for decades. This is not a moratorium on new visas, this is retroactively screwing people who have followed the process to get into the US legally.
It could actually both be about American jobs and screwing over people you don't like to win political points. There's nothing about one that prevents the other.
You might want to ramp your hysterical reaction down a notch or two. No legal residents are being kicked out. Some who left the country are having trouble getting back in, but nobody here is being kicked out. I read recently about a guy who has lived in the US for over 20 years and his children are young adults and naturalized citizens. For some reason Dad doesn't want to get US citizenship, so he's now in trouble because he travels outside the USA all the time on work and he's an Iranian passport holder. I admit to not really seeing the point in targeting people like him, but I have to ask why he hasn't applied for American citizenship yet. Maybe if he needs an Iranian passport to work in countries hostile towards the USA, he needs to consider getting a new job. I personally know immigrants who the first chance they could they applied for US citizenship and got tested and they are proud to be Americans. Maybe it's inconvenient for him but the truth is that having US citizenship provides protections that don't exist otherwise. As long as you are a long time legal resident without citizenship, you're always going to be at some level of risk that Uncle Sam might not want to extend your stay.
Can they solve the problem of the record skipping in my car?
I know you're joking, but for those who don't know, they actually did try record players in cars many years ago. They were very expensive and had lots of drawbacks.
http://gajitz.com/road-tunes-w...
You probably don't know this, but IBM is also protecting US based management jobs while they are letting US based employees hit the bricks. Were you aware of that? I have a sort of relative by marriage (related to someone related to me through marriage) and he's been in middle management at IBM for probably at least 20 years now. IBM will keep him around forever even as they lay off other US based employees where he works. I'm guessing that maybe they make these people remotely manage foreign employees, but he hasn't given a lot of details and I rarely see him. I only know that he's said he has zero worries about ever losing his job there. A lot of what IBM is doing doesn't actually make a lot of sense. It's just designed to prop up the stock value.
You can possibly add Air France 447 to that list. Air France chose not to replace the air speed indicators until the plane returned to France on what would be its last flight. The passengers and crew lost that gamble. I have no inside knowledge as to whether that was for cost reasons, lack of training in Rio where they simply didn't know how to do the job there, or control freak reasons (I worked for a French company and until you actually work for them you really have no idea how much of a control freak the French are about everything) but failure to replace the air speed indicators prior to that flight started the chain of events that led to the crash.
I am not mad at people like you because Clinton lost. I am unconcerned that we have different politics. And I don’t think less of people like you because you vote one way and I vote another. I think less of people like you because you watched an adult mock a disabled person in front of a crowd and still supported him. I think less of you because you saw a man spouting clear racism and backed him. I think less of you because you listened to him advocate for war crimes, and still thought he should run this country. I think less of people like you because you watched him equate a woman’s worth to her appearance and got on board. It isn’t your politics that I find repulsive. It is your personal willingness to support racism, sexism, and cruelty. You sided with a bully when it mattered and that is something I will never forget. So, no people like you and I won’t be “coming together” to move forward or whatever. Trump disgusts me, but it is the fact that he doesn’t disgust people like you that will stick with me long after this election.
I'm surprised that you still get don't get this, but the election proved one thing that myself and others have suspected or claimed for years and people like you don't want to admit. The only "issue" that matters for the vast majority of Americans, and I'd put it at about 80% of the electorate, is whether there is a D or an R next to their name. Some of my old friends who are women could not possibly have cared less about anything bad that Trump did on the campaign trail but completely flipped out over both and real and imaginary things related to Hillary. Trump bragged about grabbing women in the crotch? No problem. But Hillary was tied, barely, to Benghazi where a grand total of 4 Americans died and this was the single biggest American foreign policy disaster ever. People really don't care much about anything except whether a candidate has a D or an R next to their name. Pretty much everything else is negotiable. Congressional races prove this every election. Most Congressional districts regardless of who holds them are no longer competitive for members of the other party. Most of the people who aren't party tied voted for Trump in this election because he told people what they wanted to hear - namely that they were victims of powers and forces beyond their control and only he could stand up to those powers. Given the monopoly the Democrats have had on victimhood it's kind of funny that Trump outflanked them on this.
Every VP back to Quayle has been an assassination preventor.
You meant to say:
Every Republican VP back to Quayle has been an assassination preventor.
The study basically concluded that the name of the university on your diploma matters a lot and an argument can be made that if desperately poor people can get into expensive top schools and run up mountains of debt, the odds are in their favor that they'll earn more than people who went to cheaper universities. This whole debate about the disadvantages poor applicants have is beside the point.
Dumb that cars that should be targeting a 15-20 year life span are larded up with the current flavor of the month that will be obsolete in a fraction of that. Wish it had WIFI so I could maintain the remote pre-heat functionality at home at least.
I agree. I had a Nissan Leaf on a lease and I liked the car, but life changes made me need to get to one car and with distant relatives I need to visit I couldn't really make the Leaf work for me as an only vehicle. My lease ended with 2G still working, but a co-worker recently had his modem replaced. I think there was some charge for labor for doing the work. The problem is that AT&T has done this kind of thing before and businesses go with it because it's cheap with no long term thought that AT&T might dump the service down the road. In the first half of the previous decade I had a job that for a while made me use a work provided cell phone ("mobile phone" for you non-Americans) and it was on some crappy non-GSM network. My company got a really good bargain on the phone service because AT&T was trying to drive business into this crappy network, but eventually AT&T gave up and closed it down. Only then did my company start letting us use our own phones and expense them. I'm sure Nissan simply saw the 2G as a cheap network that big ol' AT&T would probably support forever and nobody considered the problems that would be caused if they stopped supporting this old technology.
He's been in custody for over 6 months and is not a minor so why keep his name a secret?
This is the EU. He was arrested 6 months ago, but he may not actually be being held. I have no idea. Remember, in the EU (OK, the UK and maybe France are exceptions) the emphasis will be on figuring out why society failed him so that he turned to crime, not about making the point that what he did was a bad thing. I'll predict he'll at most get 2 years in the cushiest jail they can find and I wouldn't be surprised at all if he pays no fine and they don't even take his ill gotten gains from him. After all, he might feel bad if he was actually punished for his crime. Once he gets out of jail he can apply for the crime to be legally "forgotten" so he can work in the IT industry again and maybe do the same thing all over again. Publishing his name might make him feel bad. Can't do that.
Keep in mind that in most or all of the EU criminals have the right for nobody to ever find out that they were criminals but you can be jailed for years for saying certain things. No for doing things. Merely for saying things. Things that don't threaten anybody's safety or well being. Yep, those guys really have a good sense of justice and what's important over there.
I'm genuinely curious as to how it damages / inconveniences / hurts you to just call her a her?
That's not the reason. Some people object to calling humans with penises "she". That's the reason. But if you want play by a different rule, you can do so, madam.
Go to your card provider (Visa/MC/Discover/Amex) and tell them to remove the charge because the service was not rendered and/or the charge was improper.
They will.
Actually that was how things work. But I'm not so sure that this is how things are any more with credit card companies. And I speak from personal experience.
Things definitely did work that way in the past, but they changed after the "Great Recession". I never lost a dispute until the Great Recession happened. Short version - I bought 2 airline tickets on a small foreign carrier and through various circumstances could not make the trip. I called the carrier and asked for a credit against a future flight or a refund. They refused both. I protested the charge with my credit card company. I provided evidence that the tickets were never sold to me as non-refundable and non-changeable and I mean I had real evidence to back this up. I had an attorney friend check out my submission and he expected me to win. The airline never provided any evidence that the tickets they sold me, were in fact, non-refundable or non-changeable. At every step the airline simply refused to refund my money or allow any changes. After months of disputing this with the airline never, ever disproving my contentions my credit card company gave up and refused to eat the charge and refused to demand that the airline give them the money back. They just told me to work it out with the airline, which was impossible because the airline's position was that the tickets were non-refundable and non-changeable and if I and my (at the time) girlfriend couldn't make it, we were simply out of luck and out of money. So I can tell you that if AT&T fights back, your credit card company may just give in and refuse to help you, their customer. It's possible that this is a small enough amount of money that they may just do you a favor here, but the days of credit card companies having the backs of their customers are gone for sure for charges that are more than a mere pittance.
There's definitely more to this story than the main article talks about. I have some questions I'd love to know the answers to.
1) Why did they ask for a judge to rule rather than a jury? That may have been a tactical error on the part of Ivey's legal team.
2) Is Cheng Yin Sun a US citizen? If not, why was she still allowed in the USA after going to jail? Is this more favoritism to the rich? Typically you're deported from the US if you're not a citizen and you do something that gets you thrown in jail.
3) Why did it apparently take years for the casino to figure out what happened? And how did they find out? Did someone connected to Ivey rat them out? Was that person or those people paid for finking on him?
There is no reason to use tape aside from "retro hipsterism". (isn't that redundant?) Tape sucks on SO many levels. Anyone who thinks it doesn't isn't old enough to have had to live with tapes. I can see it being kind of novel to someone once or twice but the charm will wear off fast. Seriously, tape has some use cases but playing music shouldn't be one of them. We used it back in the day because there wasn't anything better available.
Yep. Back in the days before CDs, I only bought tapes if I had no choice - something went out of print on vinyl and was only available on tape. I've got a small number of old commercial cassettes sold by various music companies. These are real legitimate releases, not bootlegs. Some have long been completely unplayable. I've got a somewhat larger number of cassette tapes I made myself in that era. They all still work, although I rarely do anything with them. Commercial cassette quality was known to be awful. Maybe if you were lucky they used Dolby B noise reduction which helped the sound suck less, but on home cassette recorders you could use the superior Dolby C. And worse, manufacturers didn't always tell if they used Dolby B when they did, so all you could do was play the tape and try to figure out if it sounded better with it on or off. Vinyl had a lot of problems, mostly because the US industry used really cheap and low quality vinyl at the time, but cassettes were pretty much always crap. I have no idea why anybody would want to buy these by choice nor how a young person could even find a player. I've got a player I almost never use, but I bought it more than 20 years ago.
I just don't know if it's realistic to want "satisfying and rewarding work". This is something I see a lot of millennials say and believe me we all get this, but I just don't know if it's realistic. To me this is kind of like people saying that if you don't love your job you should quit it and find one you do love. The sad reality is that there just aren't enough "jobs you love" to go around for everybody to have one. If you go home at the end of the day and you're not stressed out from work and you're not screaming about your job and it's not taking a toll on your health, that is a realistic best case scenario for most people. I had a job I loved once. I'm not in it any more. You know why? I chased money. That job spun off a new company during the internet boom and I was given the option of remaining in the job I loved or joining the new company. The old job I loved was laying off a few people and it froze salaries for what would end up being 2 or 3 years so I went with the spin off. For the time of the job freezes at my old company the spin off looked great and I got pay increases. But we got bought out by a European company who forced out our CEO and the new CEO was pretty hostile towards US workers in general. The job got a lot worse and in the end I and others got layoff notices. I found a new job and my new company is pretty good compared to most out there, but I wish I was still with the job I loved. Those I know who rode out the pay freezes are still there. The vast majority of my co-workers who went with me to the spun off company are long gone from it, having been laid off at various times. So leaving a job you do actually love to chase more money isn't something I'd ever do again and I wish I hadn't done it. I wish I could go back to the old company I loved, but I can't. They don't have much turnover there because it's a pretty good place to work.
As a new CS grad you do need to full grasp that management in US companies usually doesn't respect your job or what you do and they'll always be looking to replace you with cheaper workers, probably from India. Those cheaper workers won't do as good a job as you will, but management doesn't care. They don't respect your work nor do they want to pay US wages for it. They'll take "sort of works" if it's cheap enough. This is just going to get worse as you age. My current employer does value its US employees but there are limits. We also hire plenty of cheap H-1B workers or simply add spots on our India team. The race to the bottom for wages is a race you'll never win. Maybe if you're lucky you'll be able to finish your career without any major disruptions, but likely you'll change jobs a lot as the number of US employers who actually value US IT staff continues to shrink. Today there's another article on Slashdot about a major California university replacing its IT staff with foreign workers. This is going to be the norm for you in your career. If you find at some point you're tired of this crap, get into US federal government work as quickly as you can. The Feds don't do too many layoffs and security concerns make it very difficult to impossible to outsource the work. There are pros and cons to this kind of work, which I did for some years after I graduated. The pay is better now than when I started and you get a lot of vacation time, which I really liked. On the downside a lot of government IT jobs, even programming ones, are very specific to the government and you'll get skills that will be of little use on the outside world in the unlikely event you are ever laid off. Pay won't match outside companies though. You'll always have friends who are getting more than you and working for the Feds may require you to live in small towns that just suck your soul and fill you with despair.
If you're really really good at what you do, you may be able to work for one of the top employers like Google, etc. who may give you great work with great benefits. But again, there are only so many of those jobs. You may be in
I'm not a lawyer, but my best friend since college is. We're both Americans. I probably know more about how the US legal system really works as a result of this friendship than how almost all non-lawyers do. The truth is that judges don't like to award court costs nor do lawyers really like it when they do this because it discourages lawsuits and lawyers and judges both think that the system is fine just like it is and having fewer lawsuits is actually bad. Some judges won't ever award costs to the winner. Some will only do so to send a message to people they think really abuse the system. It seems to me that this is considered to be an unusual situation rather than something that will set a precedent. Also, judges often ignore anything they feel like, so the fact that court costs got awarded in case A doesn't at all mean that they will be in case B in front of a different judge even if the circumstances that led to the awarded are essentially identically.
Here's an example. Suppose you have neighbor who doesn't like you and the neighbor sues you for something really stupid and asks for a huge monetary award. Suppose that you win, but the case is extraordinarily difficult and time consuming and you end up ruined financially from having to pay the costs to defend yourself against this frivolous lawsuit. You can probably count on one hand the number of judges and lawyers who actually feel sorry for you. From their perspective the system worked perfectly. You got sued for something bogus and you won. The fact that it destroyed you financially to defend yourself is not their concern. Not at all.
I've got a 3D TV. Had it for about 3 years now I think. I'm a video enthusiast, so I can speak with personal insight into this topic. I'm seeing a lot of posts that contain half-truths and outright falsehoods from people who have no experience at all with the technology.
First of all. 3D TVs were not necessarily all that expensive. I've got a 41 inch VIzio that cost me a little over $500. It uses the passive glasses system, which I think is great. You know those glasses you get at the movie theater when you see 3D films? It uses those. They are cheap. I can buy as many as I want on Amazon for a few dollars a piece. Unfortunately Vizio was disappointed in sales and has permanently dropped 3D from their current TVs, which limits us fans to only a very small number of manufacturers - Sony, LG and Samsung. If I remember correctly Samsung uses the active system of bulky glasses that need batteries. I love my TV. It's great for normal 2D stuff and I can watch 3D Blu Rays on it too.
One of the problems with 3D is that a small percentage of the public, I think I saw a number of around 10%, has some kind of quirk in their physiology that makes them have a bad reaction to 3D video. I suspect these people will also have problems with 3D VR. Another issue is that people with serious vision problems can't see 3D either very well or at all and they invariably make a lot of noise about how much 3D sucks and how they don't understand how anybody likes it because it sucks all the time. I have a friend and a relative in this category and frankly it gets old listening to them complain about 3D. People with vision or physical reaction problems to 3D don't understand that they are in the minority and most people have no problems with it. You can see from some of the comments complaints like if you don't look directly at the TV it sucks to see things outside with the glasses. With the passive ones it doesn't, but there's a lot of variability among humans and some people are just not going to react positively to the technology no matter what you do.
3D is here to stay. Most films won't be in 3D, but there will always be 3D films going forward. Animated films will always be in 3D. Now that they use computers to do animated films, there's no compelling cost reason not to make them available in 3D for those who want to see them that way. The cost of producing an additional 3D master to go with a 2D mater is negligible for animation. BIg blockbuster films will also continue to be in 3D. The vast majority of Disney's movies are in 3D. In fact, if Disney puts out a live action film that's not in 3D, that's a clear sign that they don't expect it to be a hit. This was the case with "The Lone Ranger" for example. In Asia 3D is a winning format and consumers have shown a marked preference for 3D films. Even if the US stopped making 3D films today, and they won't, films in China and Japan in particular would continue to be made in 3D. Cheaper films and films without many special effects will be in 2D, but any big budget film is getting the 3D treatment. A few directors are pretty anti-3D right now. Chris Nolan is a big example. I wouldn't expect anything he does to be in 3D. But even big names like Spielberg and Scorsese have released 3D films in recent years. Spielberg's "The BFG" was in 3D.
That people believe such "warnings" in large enough numbers to make it worthwhile for the crooks to make them, is a sign, that FBI has an image problem.
I disagree. It's really a people problem, such as people not understanding technology very well. I know a guy who is a blue collar worker and he can barely use a PC enough to read and send email and surf the web. He has admitted to me that he's clicked on one of those "We've found a virus on your PC. Click here to pay for our scanning program to save your PC!" popups and sent money to those people. People often don't understand the technology well enough to know what's real and what isn't and they're often too embarrassed to ask for help from people who do understand. This same guy if he ever has a PC problem, it's a bad, time consuming one to fix. I've had to tell him he's got to go to Geek Squad for this kind of thing. I have a better friend who is a middle school teacher and he's not much better with PCs. He doesn't know how to save any file to a location other than the default location that comes up. There are lots of people who just don't get technology very well.
You won't need it. This is a classic nuisance suit. I watched a lawsuit much like this in court once. A driver of a bobcat wasnt wearing his seatbelt when he lifted a load too high digging out a house foundation, and it fell into the foundation and he was crushed. He got absolutely nowhere.
This is probably true. But there is some chance you'll be wrong, even if a small one. I'm not a lawyer, but my best friend is and over the years he's taught me a lot about how the US legal system really works. Literally anything can happen in court. I agree that probably this case will go nowhere, but it depends on the judge and their personal biases and how stupid the jury is that gets the case. Believe me, the people suing are going to want a jury to hear this one. For example, a judge may think this is stupid but also feel that a jury, not him, needs to make that determination. Or you could have a crackpot judge who completely buys the argument that Apple is at fault here and it also goes to a jury. If you've ever served on a jury, you'll know that juries are not made up of the best and brightest of us. I've served twice and the last time I served, one day while we were waiting in the jury room for court to start, 3 guys on the jury got into an argument where they tried to top each other by each one of them offering proof that he was far stupider in dealing with new technology than the other 2 were. These are exactly the kind of people who serve on juries. And people who try to "win" an argument that they are stupider than everybody else are the kind of people who might be swayed by the arguments of the people suing.
By the way, you mentioned (but I didn't quote it) fear of the litigants having to pay Apple's court costs. That's almost impossible. Judges and lawyers both think that the US legal system is perfect as it is and doesn't need fixing and as a result judges are extremely hesitant to award legal costs even for frivolous lawsuits. Judges and lawyers believe that awarding such costs will lessen the number of lawsuits, which they universally feel is very bad indeed for them. Fewer lawsuits means fewer lawyers, which means fewer judges. Legal costs are awarded only in very egregious cases to send a message and most likely this case won't be one of them.