I'm really not understanding what the heck Chrysler is thinking these days. A few weeks ago I rented a car with Hertz and they gave me a Chrysler 200. It has a rotary shifter. Basically it's knob you turn to shift. I hated it. But I will say that it wasn't all that hard to get the car into the right gear. I just didn't like the shifter at all. Turning a knob to shift is weird.
Maybe a couple of years ago my step-mother found some crackpot pseudo-medical claim online that drinking cold beverages is also bad for you and causes cancer. She showed it to me to "help" me and if I remember, it claimed that any beverage not at a temperature close to the human body temperature was potentially very bad for you. It involved a bunch of ramblings about how your body has to use energy to warm up the cold beverage and using that energy is supposedly bad. So she stopped ordering any drinks in restaurants with ice and my poor late father started doing the same. I never asked him about it before he died, but I assume he decided that it wasn't a battle he wanted to fight and he'd just go along with her on it.
What if the company cut your salary before firing you?
"Hey Bill, you've had your salary reduced to minimum wage, but don't worry, we're firing you!"
Non-compete for 1 year price: ~$8,000
Or even better:
"Hey bill, we'll give you severance pay of $X, but you have to sign these papers..."
Included in that pile is an agreement to take a lower base salary for your last pay check, which is then used for non-compete salary calculations.
This. You totally nailed it. My previous employer was a company I don't wish to name because frankly, I don't want to give them any publicity. Few have heard of their North American office, who I worked for, and I'd like to keep it that way. During my final year or two there (not sure of the exact time) they forced us to sign a form that went to HR that said that if they laid us off, they agreed to pay us one month's severance pay for each 2 years we worked there but there was a huge catch. Until your severance period ran out (for example, if you worked there 8 years you'd get 4 months pay and your severance period was 4 months) they could hire you back at any time and they had to right to do so at a loss in pay to you, potentially as much as 20% less. If you refused the new job offer, you had to refund your remaining severance pay. If you accepted the new offer, you also had to refund the remaining severance pay. So with my example if you got 4 months of severance pay but 1 month into it they offered you a new job at 80% of your old pay, you had to return 3 months of severance to them whether you took the job or not. And you agreed that they could assign you to a work place as far as 45 miles from the previous work location. And if we didn't agree to those terms, we could quit on the spot with no severance. Yes, of course we could sue over it, but that costs money and time and there's no guarantee. We had a lawyer here some years ago tell people that he advised everybody not to sue an employer because the suits were so hard to win even when the employee was in the right. That company laid off a lot of people and then hired them back within 2-4 weeks for basically the same job. I don't know if they cut their salaries or not. The people who I knew that this happened to wouldn't talk about it. So it was a really sneaky way to get out of paying full severance. If you owe John Doe 6 months of severance, lay him off, hire him back after 2 weeks and then get 5 and a half months of the severance back, maybe hire him at reduced pay too, and bam! His employment clock now starts at zero and if you lay him off after one month, you owe him nothing in severance because he hasn't worked there 2 years since he was re-hired. Yeah, it was pretty bad. I was owed a pretty good chunk of change in severance when they announced layoffs in my department some months in advance of them happening and I quickly found a new job with another company. I gave up the severance (the deal was, if you left before you got laid off, you got nothing) but I figured that they were going to probably try to screw me out of it anyway by laying me off and offering me a new job after a month or so and I just wanted out and on the new job clear and free.
Because Walmart shoppers already get so much exercise and are in such great shape that any form of exercise is not needed. I am saddened by the fact that we are now to the point where we consider pushing a shopping cart around the store to be too much work.
That was my thought too, although I certainly do understand that some people might have a very legitimate need for such help. Like you, I'm having a hard time feeling sorry for people who's only disability is that they can't say "No" to a second or third piece of pie. Maybe Walmart should instead look into home delivery for the people for whom even walking from their front door to their car is just way too much effort.
I'm guessing from your comment that you're ignorant of the context here. Peter Thiel personally dislikes Gawker, and is now bankrolling third-party lawsuits against them. It's "news" because the very wealthy are openly perverting the United State's permissive litigation rules in order to quell disfavored speech.
I can only say that outside of Gawker's legal team, I think just about every lawyer in the USA would argue that the system is working perfectly and has no problem at all with what Thiel is doing and would not consider it perversion.
This is just Apple following the model of all platform developers: let individual developers take the risk and initial revenues of developing a hot new app, and then build your own version of the most popular ones to collect all future revenues from that type of application.
Developer dude's app doesn't run on Apple Watch OS. It only runs on iPhones and IPads. Also, his app is free. Apparently there is some kind of special version of it you can pay $1.99 extra a month for. So yes, I'm sure that Apple saw the tons of revenue that this free app was getting from all 20 crazy people who actually think it is useful and decided that they just had to have some of that sweet cash for themselves.
So...he's holding onto them so that she gets into office, and the expects that the congress (which will not change hands) will not impeach (house) and convict (senate) with the actual emails/facts on the table? But he's announcing them now rather than a surprise reveal on January 2x? And why does he not think that Trump will win the White House, and what will his course of action be if he does? I don't get his motives here, except as some play for himself in some twisted logic game?
On the subject of the actual indictment...
I'm American, so I can speak from experience here. Despite all the bitter complaints from the public over the years about how "Congress gets nothing done" the only thing American voters may like as much as sending back the same idiots to Congress every year is voting for a president of one party and at least one chamber of Congress for the other. I agree that Trump's chance of winning is badly underestimated by many and if he does win, it would not surprise me at all if he gets a Democratic Senate to deal with. But there's no realistic chance this year of the House being anything but under Republican control. If Hillary wins, the odds are that the Senate stays Republican because, as I said, voters love split government.
Oh please stop swallowing the propaganda. US culture did not change overnight with the war of secession.
LOL. You must be a Brit. Over here in the USA (that's "the colonies" to you) we use the term "Revolutionary War" exclusively to refer to this. My personal favorite though is when a guy claimed he heard a Brit call it the "War of Amicable Separation" but that may have been a joke and not something someone actually said.
It could be worse I guess. The Russians call WWII the "Great Patriotic War" which I guess is better than what they probably wanted to say, which would be something like "The War In Which The Soviet Union Alone Suffered Terribly But Did 100% Of The Work To Defeat Fascism With No Help At All From Western Imperial Capitalistic Powers".
Given MS owns it and has a one or two lawyers, patents, and a little available cash to defend itself that seems to be an odd target to pick. Given MS also has an app store I would think they will fight this to protect their interests; a win would be good for everyone. MS and good, two things you never thought you'd hear together on/.
My best friend is a lawyer and we've known each other since college, so I know way more about how the US legal system really works than most posters here. Anything and I do mean anything can happen in a court case, whether heard by a jury or a judge. You can ask RIM about that. They got a settlement offer over a patent suit from a troll and they thought the case was frivolous so the went to court and had to pay over a billion dollars in damages after losing. The settlement wanted half or less of that. So the troll here may be quite willing to gamble that Microsoft could lose and have to pay them a fortune or they'll just settle it to avoid the hassle and either way the troll wins big time. Worst case for them is some lost money for lawyers fees but if they have their own lawyer on staff, that's a sunk cost anyway.
One of the downsides of having a friend who is a lawyer is that you come to understand that all lawyers believe the current US legal system is working perfectly as is and they don't see any problem with people like Austin Meyer having to spend a fortune just to defend themselves. They don't see it as wasted money just to get back to square one because even is Austin "wins" in court, he'll be out big time lawyer fees to do so and he won't actually make any money himself from "winning". Lawyers have zero problems with this. To them, even if Austin is financially destroyed by legal fees and he wins, then it was all worthwhile.
Is simply that I won't pay for such apps. Ever. I already have enough reluctance to pay once for apps and it wasn't helped when an app that I used a lot turned into abandonware and stopped fully working after some iOS updates. Apple deliberately has no way to complain to them that old apps no longer work so the mostly broken app still is available for purchase on their store. So good luck with this change, Apple, but I'll opt out of buying apps with subscriptions. I'm not really into this whole "subscription thing".
that the Singapore Govt may have difficulty retaining skilled staff.
Unlikely. People who take government jobs aren't doing so for the paychecks. Very few of the people who would leave over this are working for the government anyway. It will be annoying, but the workers will adapt. Those who work for the government often do so because government jobs rarely get cut so it will take a lot more than this to get people to leave. Heck, I've known of people in private industry who were told bluntly "Your job WILL end. We're moving your job to another state and you won't be kept once that happens. The only problem is that we don't know when exactly that will happen. It could be 6 months from now. It could be 12 months. It could be longer. But when that day comes, you'll be lucky if you get even a few days notice that your employment is over. Most likely you'll just show up to work and be told to pack your things and leave." And even after all of that, some people still wouldn't leave the job until they actually got sent home and the doors were permanently locked.
I have posted on this before. People who care about the subject should read _The Impossible State: North Korea, Past and Future_ by Victor Cha. It would be fair to say that many in the west, particularly Republicans (and by the way, Cha worked for the George W. Bush administration) overestimate the amount of influence that China has, but it is fair to say that China rarely uses what influence it does have.
Basically China can't really make North Korea do anything. They can influence them, but that's about it. China really doesn't want instability in the region and it knows that the Kim family is crazy and China is telling the truth when they say that they want North Korea to be denuclearized. But North Korea learned from the experiences of Libya and Iraq in particular some lessons that the US wishes they hadn't. Namely that cooperating with the West is in no way a guarantee that they won't turn on you any way (Gaddafi in Libya) and that if you don't have nukes, the US may remove you from power any way (Saddam in Iraq). Survival of the Kim regime is paramount so the current Kim will never give up nukes. And North Korea has a Stalinist state where people are both brainwashed and unwilling to fight the big guy in charge because if they stand up they may be the only ones, so everybody cooperates in keeping him alive even though they fear him and know that doing so may be a really bad idea for their own livelihood.
Basically China views all post-North Korea scenarios as really really bad for them and unacceptable. They know it is inevitable that the regime will eventually fall, but they want that to be the problem of the next generation to deal with. China deeply fears a united pro-US Korea that will have US troops stationed on its borders and they will not do anything to enable that outcome. Plus, they are raping the North Korea countryside for rare earths (the only thing of any real value in North Korea - the land there is very poor for agricultural purposes when you know what you are doing, let alone under Communism) at cut rate prices and they have a big economic interest in keeping that business going. So China has basically zero incentive to do anything that will result in the Kim regime leaving. Note too that North Korea borders a part of China with a relatively large ethnic Korean population because China basically stole this part of Korea many hundreds of years ago from an old Korean kingdom and never kicked out the people who lived there. So China fears any regime change because the border is somewhat porous and they could be overwhelmed with North Korean refugees once the government falls. So you can see how from China's side they view all North Korean regime changes as a lose-lose scenario for them even though they are beyond being tired of the North Koreans being troublesome. You have to give old Boris Yeltsin some credit as he stopped all aid there over 20 years ago and left China holding the bag for 100% of North Korea's aid because China didn't want the regime to fall.
I'm not interested and not impressed unless it can help soldiers do that. That could enable our soldiers to use the ringtone and not miss a call while enemy prisoners wonder how they knew they got a call since they didn't hear it vibrate.
This is a stupid question, but I've always wondered why old (very old, unused for decades) antibacterials can't be resurrected with a restored effectiveness. I liken it to the idea of rotating crops so the field soils aren't totally stripped of nutrients by planting the same crop year after year.
It's not a stupid question at all. Frankly, people should be asking this question in case nobody thought of it. The problem is that this has actually been tried and in a lot of cases it hasn't helped. Some of the older drugs stopped being used because they were toxic or had some very undesirable possible side effects and they were replaced with drugs that were safer to the patient to use. It turns out that once bacteria start getting highly resistant that they are basically resistant to almost everything including the older drugs. We desperately need drug manufacturers to get interested in new lines of antibiotics, but due to research cost there hasn't been a lot of interest in developing new ones. And as others have pointed out given how the government seems completely and utterly disinterested in the USA (and other countries) in stopping people from giving antibiotics to livestock, we've created this mess ourselves and seem oddly uninterested in fixing it.
When are legitimate IP and patent holders going to band together and take out the courts in Texas?
The answer to this is, unfortunately, "never". Lawyers make up the majority of state and federal legislatures. Lawyers and judges don't think the system is broken. In fact, they think it's working quite well, thank you. My best friend is a lawyer and he's taught me a lot about the law. One of the things he has also taught me is that lawyers don't think anything in the legal system is broken or needs fixing anywhere. Their response to literally every issue is to just sue over it.
I guess you didn't read that story on Slashdot from a few years ago about an HP acquisition. One of the successors as CEO to Carly Fiorina insisted that HP buy out some smaller company that had some niche product they wanted to sell. HP rushed through their due diligence process as the CEO insisted that the buyout happen immediately. A little before they got bought out, some dude, some average joe guy who was an investor, took a look at the company's reports and wrote an article saying how there was simply no way that they could possibly be making the revenue they were reporting and it was very likely fraud. Nobody paid any attention This had to be a publicly traded company because this guy got access to more numbers than you'd get for a privately held company. Then after the acquisition it quickly went south because HP realized that nothing the company claimed in terms of sales was accurate and some stock market writer found a copy of the average joe's article questioning the company's finances and it went viral. There are a lot of companies out there and yes, nobody can probably go over each and every one of them, especially the smaller ones, with a fine tooth comb.
Sad to see that India hasn't fully thrown off the economic ignorance that stifled their growth from independence until the late 1980s. Protectionism is nearly as stupid as price controls.
-jcr
My personal favorite is the excuse above that currently pretty highly rated that claims that India was colonized and "sucked dry" - wah wah wah. Funny how Japan, South Korea and Taiwan have all prospered recently, to name but 3 countries all were industrialized in less time than India has been independent, but pity poor poor India and how it will suffer for apparently generations to come.
Back in the latter part of the 1990s I worked with a guy who was Libertarian and very vocal about it. So I asked him to explain exactly what Libertarianism was and what his beliefs were. Two things in particular came out of that conversation. One was that I realized that while a lot of what he supported sounded really good on the surface, the whole philosophy seemed like a house of cards to me where one bad actor could make out like a bandit after basically gaming the system to take advantage of it since Libertarianism working relies on people "doing the right thing" and it all collapses when one guy doesn't. The other thing I took out of it was that I asked him since the government under his Libertarian ideals was incredibly weak and small, what did you do when you had problems, like for example, some manufacturer sells you bad medicine? Simple - you sue. So instead of the government being your big stick the legal system is. So yes, I think it's very much in keeping with Libertarian principles to simply sue people you don't agree with.
Every time there's a TSA post, the same responses always come out. "They haven't caught anybody, therefore it's a waste." It's possible that they are effective in that they've discouraged people from trying to repeat the incidents of 9-11 as the terrorists have decided that the odds of being caught aren't worth the risk. Yes, even with tests showing the TSA keeps failing to catch what it should most of the time, it still may be enough of a risk that terrorists are skipping it.
i fly sometimes and I have no problem with the TSA. What really gets me is how people who never, ever fly sometimes have the most strident opinions about how bad the TSA is. I knew a guy who took his last flight around 1999 or 2000 and very likely he will die with never again going on a plane. He has no reason to do so - ever. Yet you couldn't even mention TSA without him giving you a rant and rave session about how bad they were and he never personally has experienced them. Many of you here are the same.
I've got 18 Mbps ATT DSL, and I don't think that I could hit that cap anyway given that their service is so unreliable. My connection goes down at least once almost every evening... (Granted, it usually comes back 5-10 minutes later, but still.)
I'm a Uverse customer who previously had DSL. I'm convinced that AT&T is doing this deliberately with DSL customers to drive them to Uverse. Uverse is significantly more reliable and for me at least it was cheaper and faster than my DSL service anyway. My DSL went down at least once a day and eventually it got so inconvenient that I moved to Uverse. I had to change TV providers though which is one of the reasons I delayed getting off DSL because I had TV from another company and I was OK with it. Of course now you'll post back that AT&T doesn't offer Uverse where you live and if that's the case, then it does suck to be you but your DSL is not ever going to get better. AT&T wants you off of it and if you insist on staying they're going to make it painful for you.
There is a reason why there is a legal process and this is exactly the reason.
If there is a dispute between people (in this case the posting) and one party feels wronged, they should take it up with the legal system, not with a third party.
The legal system wil then not only decide if something illegal went on, but also what the consequences will be.
This sounds like a perfectly American answer to me. You might not know this, but in the UK they have this little thing called "loser pays" in their legal system. That's why it's not going to court. BuildTeam knows that they'll probably lose. On the other side, the lady in the article simply may not have the money to pay should things not go her way in court. I can't speak for UK courts, but here in the USA every case is a toss up depending on a variety of factors such as the judge (particularly in cases without juries), the jury and how stupid or smart the people are who are on it, the competency of the lawyers involved, and so on.
To me the core issue is that EU countries don't have a freedom of speech law at all. While a case like this could certainly end up in the US legal system if it happened here, eventually at some level a court would likely find it to be a freedom of speech issue, rule in favor of the lady who made the review, and it would be done. I personally find it pretty bizarre that for a group of nations with an overly sympathetic bent towards making sure that criminals have more rights than their victims, they also find free speech simply a bridge too far and happily lock up people for saying stupid things that in reality harm nobody.
Because of the uncertainty, it will have a chilling effect to Egypt tourism (second airplane crash within 12 month), and, possibly, even longer TSA lines in USA. People will now need arrive to the airport not 2 but 3 hours.
Unlikely. People are both stupid and cheap in general. Malaysia Air should probably be out of business permanently after being too stupid to stay out of hostile air space in Ukraine and having a plane simply disappear with no explanation to date yet they remain in business. If the price is cheap enough, people will still want to go there. Based on this and your next comment, I assume you don't live in the USA. This is unlikely to have any impact on TSA lines. After all, it wasn't a USA bound or USA originating flight.
This tragedy may also add several percent points to Mr. Trump's popularity, and could possibly win him elections.
Unlikely too. Americans have very short memories. By the end of June, probably nobody will be talking much about this. Americans don't travel that much overseas so this will be considered "somebody else's problem".
In July 1944, a coup was launched and an attempt was made to assassinate Hitler. The plan was to kill Hitler, and then immediately negotiate a surrender. The assassination failed, but the coup did not collapse until it was clear that the Allies had refused to negotiate and were unwilling to accept any terms that included soldiers returning home, rather than going to labor camps (where, at least in Russia, most inmates died). From 1944 on, the Allies were fighting for the right to have death camps, and nothing more.
You've kind of gone off the deep end at the end of your post which is unfortunate given the well written parts before it. The Allies were obsessed with bringing the Nazi leadership to war crimes trials, no matter the cost. That, not a desire for their own "death camps", is why Nazi offers to surrender earlier failed. it's been known for a long time that both Goring and Himmler separately tried to negotiate complete surrenders to non-Soviet Allies roughly around January 1945, only to be rejected. I think both attempts were in Switzerland. Both offered immediate stops to the fighting in exchange for cutting out the Soviets from any say in post-war Germany (the Soviets had not yet reached Germany) and both wanted their own skin saved from a war crimes trial and them ending up the president of a pro-Western post-war Germany. The Soviet paranoia that the Western Allies, especially the USA, might take this offer was completely off the charts. In the 1970s a famous Soviet TV mini-series used this as a major subplot in a story about a long standing mole placed many years before deep in the Nazi hierarchy. The Soviets were going to fight until the reached Berlin no matter the cost to them, but among the Western Allies, how many soldiers and civilians died in the fighting from January 1945 until the German surrender? Was it really worth this cost just to send under 100 people to the hangman? I'm not sure that it was. But nobody is even asking the question, let alone trying to answer it.
Except that's not the standard, it never has been, government officials have used private emails for ages, John Kerry was the first Secretary of State to primarily use a state.gov address. The only way Clinton differed was she used her own server instead of a 3rd party server like AOL or Google, and I'm not sure a properly maintained private server (not that she had one) is a worse scenario.
And it's not clear that using the private server was an attempt to evade record keeping. Most indications are that Clinton really wanted to keep using a Blackberry and wanted access to her current email and the NSA and State Department weren't able to accommodate her so she just gave up and did her own thing.
You're right. I felt that if she had used a really secure server at the foundation, like a hardened BSD based server, she could make an argument that she was actually using better security. It would still technically be illegal, but that is a strong argument. Probably wouldn't be too tough to prove that the government email servers at the time didn't have great security. Then I found out she basically hired some "company" I will call Two Windoze Dudes And A PC to set everything up and that argument flew out the window. This wasn't about security at all but it was to keep her from having to use 2 different mobile devices at the same time. No more. No less.
It is crazy I know, but would you put it past Trump?
Yes. I would.
No chance for this. Sanders and Trump have some overlap in terms of voter attraction, but there's a fundamental disagreement over policy and what exactly the problem with Washington is between them. Essentially Sanders is arguing that people in politics are mostly decent, but it's the evil money that's made them corrupted and if we get rid of the influence of money, the good hearted politicians will do the right thing. Trump is arguing that the evil money and the corrupt politicians both encourage and feed off each other and only he can stand up to them because he's not a politician and he can't be bought. Trump has the stronger argument by far. Trump is embracing a lot of typical Republican concerns, like tax cuts, killing off the ACA (aka Obamacare) that are anathema to Sanders.
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I'm really not understanding what the heck Chrysler is thinking these days. A few weeks ago I rented a car with Hertz and they gave me a Chrysler 200. It has a rotary shifter. Basically it's knob you turn to shift. I hated it. But I will say that it wasn't all that hard to get the car into the right gear. I just didn't like the shifter at all. Turning a knob to shift is weird.
Maybe a couple of years ago my step-mother found some crackpot pseudo-medical claim online that drinking cold beverages is also bad for you and causes cancer. She showed it to me to "help" me and if I remember, it claimed that any beverage not at a temperature close to the human body temperature was potentially very bad for you. It involved a bunch of ramblings about how your body has to use energy to warm up the cold beverage and using that energy is supposedly bad. So she stopped ordering any drinks in restaurants with ice and my poor late father started doing the same. I never asked him about it before he died, but I assume he decided that it wasn't a battle he wanted to fight and he'd just go along with her on it.
What if the company cut your salary before firing you?
"Hey Bill, you've had your salary reduced to minimum wage, but don't worry, we're firing you!"
Non-compete for 1 year price: ~$8,000
Or even better:
"Hey bill, we'll give you severance pay of $X, but you have to sign these papers..."
Included in that pile is an agreement to take a lower base salary for your last pay check, which is then used for non-compete salary calculations.
This. You totally nailed it. My previous employer was a company I don't wish to name because frankly, I don't want to give them any publicity. Few have heard of their North American office, who I worked for, and I'd like to keep it that way. During my final year or two there (not sure of the exact time) they forced us to sign a form that went to HR that said that if they laid us off, they agreed to pay us one month's severance pay for each 2 years we worked there but there was a huge catch. Until your severance period ran out (for example, if you worked there 8 years you'd get 4 months pay and your severance period was 4 months) they could hire you back at any time and they had to right to do so at a loss in pay to you, potentially as much as 20% less. If you refused the new job offer, you had to refund your remaining severance pay. If you accepted the new offer, you also had to refund the remaining severance pay. So with my example if you got 4 months of severance pay but 1 month into it they offered you a new job at 80% of your old pay, you had to return 3 months of severance to them whether you took the job or not. And you agreed that they could assign you to a work place as far as 45 miles from the previous work location. And if we didn't agree to those terms, we could quit on the spot with no severance. Yes, of course we could sue over it, but that costs money and time and there's no guarantee. We had a lawyer here some years ago tell people that he advised everybody not to sue an employer because the suits were so hard to win even when the employee was in the right. That company laid off a lot of people and then hired them back within 2-4 weeks for basically the same job. I don't know if they cut their salaries or not. The people who I knew that this happened to wouldn't talk about it. So it was a really sneaky way to get out of paying full severance. If you owe John Doe 6 months of severance, lay him off, hire him back after 2 weeks and then get 5 and a half months of the severance back, maybe hire him at reduced pay too, and bam! His employment clock now starts at zero and if you lay him off after one month, you owe him nothing in severance because he hasn't worked there 2 years since he was re-hired. Yeah, it was pretty bad. I was owed a pretty good chunk of change in severance when they announced layoffs in my department some months in advance of them happening and I quickly found a new job with another company. I gave up the severance (the deal was, if you left before you got laid off, you got nothing) but I figured that they were going to probably try to screw me out of it anyway by laying me off and offering me a new job after a month or so and I just wanted out and on the new job clear and free.
Because Walmart shoppers already get so much exercise and are in such great shape that any form of exercise is not needed. I am saddened by the fact that we are now to the point where we consider pushing a shopping cart around the store to be too much work.
That was my thought too, although I certainly do understand that some people might have a very legitimate need for such help. Like you, I'm having a hard time feeling sorry for people who's only disability is that they can't say "No" to a second or third piece of pie. Maybe Walmart should instead look into home delivery for the people for whom even walking from their front door to their car is just way too much effort.
I'm guessing from your comment that you're ignorant of the context here. Peter Thiel personally dislikes Gawker, and is now bankrolling third-party lawsuits against them. It's "news" because the very wealthy are openly perverting the United State's permissive litigation rules in order to quell disfavored speech.
I can only say that outside of Gawker's legal team, I think just about every lawyer in the USA would argue that the system is working perfectly and has no problem at all with what Thiel is doing and would not consider it perversion.
This is just Apple following the model of all platform developers: let individual developers take the risk and initial revenues of developing a hot new app, and then build your own version of the most popular ones to collect all future revenues from that type of application.
Developer dude's app doesn't run on Apple Watch OS. It only runs on iPhones and IPads. Also, his app is free. Apparently there is some kind of special version of it you can pay $1.99 extra a month for. So yes, I'm sure that Apple saw the tons of revenue that this free app was getting from all 20 crazy people who actually think it is useful and decided that they just had to have some of that sweet cash for themselves.
So...he's holding onto them so that she gets into office, and the expects that the congress (which will not change hands) will not impeach (house) and convict (senate) with the actual emails/facts on the table? But he's announcing them now rather than a surprise reveal on January 2x? And why does he not think that Trump will win the White House, and what will his course of action be if he does? I don't get his motives here, except as some play for himself in some twisted logic game?
On the subject of the actual indictment...
I'm American, so I can speak from experience here. Despite all the bitter complaints from the public over the years about how "Congress gets nothing done" the only thing American voters may like as much as sending back the same idiots to Congress every year is voting for a president of one party and at least one chamber of Congress for the other. I agree that Trump's chance of winning is badly underestimated by many and if he does win, it would not surprise me at all if he gets a Democratic Senate to deal with. But there's no realistic chance this year of the House being anything but under Republican control. If Hillary wins, the odds are that the Senate stays Republican because, as I said, voters love split government.
Oh please stop swallowing the propaganda. US culture did not change overnight with the war of secession.
LOL. You must be a Brit. Over here in the USA (that's "the colonies" to you) we use the term "Revolutionary War" exclusively to refer to this. My personal favorite though is when a guy claimed he heard a Brit call it the "War of Amicable Separation" but that may have been a joke and not something someone actually said.
It could be worse I guess. The Russians call WWII the "Great Patriotic War" which I guess is better than what they probably wanted to say, which would be something like "The War In Which The Soviet Union Alone Suffered Terribly But Did 100% Of The Work To Defeat Fascism With No Help At All From Western Imperial Capitalistic Powers".
Given MS owns it and has a one or two lawyers, patents, and a little available cash to defend itself that seems to be an odd target to pick. Given MS also has an app store I would think they will fight this to protect their interests; a win would be good for everyone. MS and good, two things you never thought you'd hear together on /.
My best friend is a lawyer and we've known each other since college, so I know way more about how the US legal system really works than most posters here. Anything and I do mean anything can happen in a court case, whether heard by a jury or a judge. You can ask RIM about that. They got a settlement offer over a patent suit from a troll and they thought the case was frivolous so the went to court and had to pay over a billion dollars in damages after losing. The settlement wanted half or less of that. So the troll here may be quite willing to gamble that Microsoft could lose and have to pay them a fortune or they'll just settle it to avoid the hassle and either way the troll wins big time. Worst case for them is some lost money for lawyers fees but if they have their own lawyer on staff, that's a sunk cost anyway. One of the downsides of having a friend who is a lawyer is that you come to understand that all lawyers believe the current US legal system is working perfectly as is and they don't see any problem with people like Austin Meyer having to spend a fortune just to defend themselves. They don't see it as wasted money just to get back to square one because even is Austin "wins" in court, he'll be out big time lawyer fees to do so and he won't actually make any money himself from "winning". Lawyers have zero problems with this. To them, even if Austin is financially destroyed by legal fees and he wins, then it was all worthwhile.
Is simply that I won't pay for such apps. Ever. I already have enough reluctance to pay once for apps and it wasn't helped when an app that I used a lot turned into abandonware and stopped fully working after some iOS updates. Apple deliberately has no way to complain to them that old apps no longer work so the mostly broken app still is available for purchase on their store. So good luck with this change, Apple, but I'll opt out of buying apps with subscriptions. I'm not really into this whole "subscription thing".
that the Singapore Govt may have difficulty retaining skilled staff.
Unlikely. People who take government jobs aren't doing so for the paychecks. Very few of the people who would leave over this are working for the government anyway. It will be annoying, but the workers will adapt. Those who work for the government often do so because government jobs rarely get cut so it will take a lot more than this to get people to leave. Heck, I've known of people in private industry who were told bluntly "Your job WILL end. We're moving your job to another state and you won't be kept once that happens. The only problem is that we don't know when exactly that will happen. It could be 6 months from now. It could be 12 months. It could be longer. But when that day comes, you'll be lucky if you get even a few days notice that your employment is over. Most likely you'll just show up to work and be told to pack your things and leave." And even after all of that, some people still wouldn't leave the job until they actually got sent home and the doors were permanently locked.
And China has no real desire to stop them.
I have posted on this before. People who care about the subject should read _The Impossible State: North Korea, Past and Future_ by Victor Cha. It would be fair to say that many in the west, particularly Republicans (and by the way, Cha worked for the George W. Bush administration) overestimate the amount of influence that China has, but it is fair to say that China rarely uses what influence it does have.
Basically China can't really make North Korea do anything. They can influence them, but that's about it. China really doesn't want instability in the region and it knows that the Kim family is crazy and China is telling the truth when they say that they want North Korea to be denuclearized. But North Korea learned from the experiences of Libya and Iraq in particular some lessons that the US wishes they hadn't. Namely that cooperating with the West is in no way a guarantee that they won't turn on you any way (Gaddafi in Libya) and that if you don't have nukes, the US may remove you from power any way (Saddam in Iraq). Survival of the Kim regime is paramount so the current Kim will never give up nukes. And North Korea has a Stalinist state where people are both brainwashed and unwilling to fight the big guy in charge because if they stand up they may be the only ones, so everybody cooperates in keeping him alive even though they fear him and know that doing so may be a really bad idea for their own livelihood.
Basically China views all post-North Korea scenarios as really really bad for them and unacceptable. They know it is inevitable that the regime will eventually fall, but they want that to be the problem of the next generation to deal with. China deeply fears a united pro-US Korea that will have US troops stationed on its borders and they will not do anything to enable that outcome. Plus, they are raping the North Korea countryside for rare earths (the only thing of any real value in North Korea - the land there is very poor for agricultural purposes when you know what you are doing, let alone under Communism) at cut rate prices and they have a big economic interest in keeping that business going. So China has basically zero incentive to do anything that will result in the Kim regime leaving. Note too that North Korea borders a part of China with a relatively large ethnic Korean population because China basically stole this part of Korea many hundreds of years ago from an old Korean kingdom and never kicked out the people who lived there. So China fears any regime change because the border is somewhat porous and they could be overwhelmed with North Korean refugees once the government falls. So you can see how from China's side they view all North Korean regime changes as a lose-lose scenario for them even though they are beyond being tired of the North Koreans being troublesome. You have to give old Boris Yeltsin some credit as he stopped all aid there over 20 years ago and left China holding the bag for 100% of North Korea's aid because China didn't want the regime to fall.
I'm not interested and not impressed unless it can help soldiers do that. That could enable our soldiers to use the ringtone and not miss a call while enemy prisoners wonder how they knew they got a call since they didn't hear it vibrate.
This is a stupid question, but I've always wondered why old (very old, unused for decades) antibacterials can't be resurrected with a restored effectiveness. I liken it to the idea of rotating crops so the field soils aren't totally stripped of nutrients by planting the same crop year after year.
It's not a stupid question at all. Frankly, people should be asking this question in case nobody thought of it. The problem is that this has actually been tried and in a lot of cases it hasn't helped. Some of the older drugs stopped being used because they were toxic or had some very undesirable possible side effects and they were replaced with drugs that were safer to the patient to use. It turns out that once bacteria start getting highly resistant that they are basically resistant to almost everything including the older drugs. We desperately need drug manufacturers to get interested in new lines of antibiotics, but due to research cost there hasn't been a lot of interest in developing new ones. And as others have pointed out given how the government seems completely and utterly disinterested in the USA (and other countries) in stopping people from giving antibiotics to livestock, we've created this mess ourselves and seem oddly uninterested in fixing it.
When are legitimate IP and patent holders going to band together and take out the courts in Texas?
The answer to this is, unfortunately, "never". Lawyers make up the majority of state and federal legislatures. Lawyers and judges don't think the system is broken. In fact, they think it's working quite well, thank you. My best friend is a lawyer and he's taught me a lot about the law. One of the things he has also taught me is that lawyers don't think anything in the legal system is broken or needs fixing anywhere. Their response to literally every issue is to just sue over it.
I guess you didn't read that story on Slashdot from a few years ago about an HP acquisition. One of the successors as CEO to Carly Fiorina insisted that HP buy out some smaller company that had some niche product they wanted to sell. HP rushed through their due diligence process as the CEO insisted that the buyout happen immediately. A little before they got bought out, some dude, some average joe guy who was an investor, took a look at the company's reports and wrote an article saying how there was simply no way that they could possibly be making the revenue they were reporting and it was very likely fraud. Nobody paid any attention This had to be a publicly traded company because this guy got access to more numbers than you'd get for a privately held company. Then after the acquisition it quickly went south because HP realized that nothing the company claimed in terms of sales was accurate and some stock market writer found a copy of the average joe's article questioning the company's finances and it went viral. There are a lot of companies out there and yes, nobody can probably go over each and every one of them, especially the smaller ones, with a fine tooth comb.
Sad to see that India hasn't fully thrown off the economic ignorance that stifled their growth from independence until the late 1980s. Protectionism is nearly as stupid as price controls.
-jcr
My personal favorite is the excuse above that currently pretty highly rated that claims that India was colonized and "sucked dry" - wah wah wah. Funny how Japan, South Korea and Taiwan have all prospered recently, to name but 3 countries all were industrialized in less time than India has been independent, but pity poor poor India and how it will suffer for apparently generations to come.
Back in the latter part of the 1990s I worked with a guy who was Libertarian and very vocal about it. So I asked him to explain exactly what Libertarianism was and what his beliefs were. Two things in particular came out of that conversation. One was that I realized that while a lot of what he supported sounded really good on the surface, the whole philosophy seemed like a house of cards to me where one bad actor could make out like a bandit after basically gaming the system to take advantage of it since Libertarianism working relies on people "doing the right thing" and it all collapses when one guy doesn't. The other thing I took out of it was that I asked him since the government under his Libertarian ideals was incredibly weak and small, what did you do when you had problems, like for example, some manufacturer sells you bad medicine? Simple - you sue. So instead of the government being your big stick the legal system is. So yes, I think it's very much in keeping with Libertarian principles to simply sue people you don't agree with.
Every time there's a TSA post, the same responses always come out. "They haven't caught anybody, therefore it's a waste." It's possible that they are effective in that they've discouraged people from trying to repeat the incidents of 9-11 as the terrorists have decided that the odds of being caught aren't worth the risk. Yes, even with tests showing the TSA keeps failing to catch what it should most of the time, it still may be enough of a risk that terrorists are skipping it.
i fly sometimes and I have no problem with the TSA. What really gets me is how people who never, ever fly sometimes have the most strident opinions about how bad the TSA is. I knew a guy who took his last flight around 1999 or 2000 and very likely he will die with never again going on a plane. He has no reason to do so - ever. Yet you couldn't even mention TSA without him giving you a rant and rave session about how bad they were and he never personally has experienced them. Many of you here are the same.
I've got 18 Mbps ATT DSL, and I don't think that I could hit that cap anyway given that their service is so unreliable. My connection goes down at least once almost every evening... (Granted, it usually comes back 5-10 minutes later, but still.)
I'm a Uverse customer who previously had DSL. I'm convinced that AT&T is doing this deliberately with DSL customers to drive them to Uverse. Uverse is significantly more reliable and for me at least it was cheaper and faster than my DSL service anyway. My DSL went down at least once a day and eventually it got so inconvenient that I moved to Uverse. I had to change TV providers though which is one of the reasons I delayed getting off DSL because I had TV from another company and I was OK with it. Of course now you'll post back that AT&T doesn't offer Uverse where you live and if that's the case, then it does suck to be you but your DSL is not ever going to get better. AT&T wants you off of it and if you insist on staying they're going to make it painful for you.
There is a reason why there is a legal process and this is exactly the reason.
If there is a dispute between people (in this case the posting) and one party feels wronged, they should take it up with the legal system, not with a third party. The legal system wil then not only decide if something illegal went on, but also what the consequences will be.
This sounds like a perfectly American answer to me. You might not know this, but in the UK they have this little thing called "loser pays" in their legal system. That's why it's not going to court. BuildTeam knows that they'll probably lose. On the other side, the lady in the article simply may not have the money to pay should things not go her way in court. I can't speak for UK courts, but here in the USA every case is a toss up depending on a variety of factors such as the judge (particularly in cases without juries), the jury and how stupid or smart the people are who are on it, the competency of the lawyers involved, and so on.
To me the core issue is that EU countries don't have a freedom of speech law at all. While a case like this could certainly end up in the US legal system if it happened here, eventually at some level a court would likely find it to be a freedom of speech issue, rule in favor of the lady who made the review, and it would be done. I personally find it pretty bizarre that for a group of nations with an overly sympathetic bent towards making sure that criminals have more rights than their victims, they also find free speech simply a bridge too far and happily lock up people for saying stupid things that in reality harm nobody.
Because of the uncertainty, it will have a chilling effect to Egypt tourism (second airplane crash within 12 month), and, possibly, even longer TSA lines in USA. People will now need arrive to the airport not 2 but 3 hours.
Unlikely. People are both stupid and cheap in general. Malaysia Air should probably be out of business permanently after being too stupid to stay out of hostile air space in Ukraine and having a plane simply disappear with no explanation to date yet they remain in business. If the price is cheap enough, people will still want to go there. Based on this and your next comment, I assume you don't live in the USA. This is unlikely to have any impact on TSA lines. After all, it wasn't a USA bound or USA originating flight.
This tragedy may also add several percent points to Mr. Trump's popularity, and could possibly win him elections.
Unlikely too. Americans have very short memories. By the end of June, probably nobody will be talking much about this. Americans don't travel that much overseas so this will be considered "somebody else's problem".
In July 1944, a coup was launched and an attempt was made to assassinate Hitler. The plan was to kill Hitler, and then immediately negotiate a surrender. The assassination failed, but the coup did not collapse until it was clear that the Allies had refused to negotiate and were unwilling to accept any terms that included soldiers returning home, rather than going to labor camps (where, at least in Russia, most inmates died). From 1944 on, the Allies were fighting for the right to have death camps, and nothing more.
You've kind of gone off the deep end at the end of your post which is unfortunate given the well written parts before it. The Allies were obsessed with bringing the Nazi leadership to war crimes trials, no matter the cost. That, not a desire for their own "death camps", is why Nazi offers to surrender earlier failed. it's been known for a long time that both Goring and Himmler separately tried to negotiate complete surrenders to non-Soviet Allies roughly around January 1945, only to be rejected. I think both attempts were in Switzerland. Both offered immediate stops to the fighting in exchange for cutting out the Soviets from any say in post-war Germany (the Soviets had not yet reached Germany) and both wanted their own skin saved from a war crimes trial and them ending up the president of a pro-Western post-war Germany. The Soviet paranoia that the Western Allies, especially the USA, might take this offer was completely off the charts. In the 1970s a famous Soviet TV mini-series used this as a major subplot in a story about a long standing mole placed many years before deep in the Nazi hierarchy. The Soviets were going to fight until the reached Berlin no matter the cost to them, but among the Western Allies, how many soldiers and civilians died in the fighting from January 1945 until the German surrender? Was it really worth this cost just to send under 100 people to the hangman? I'm not sure that it was. But nobody is even asking the question, let alone trying to answer it.
Except that's not the standard, it never has been, government officials have used private emails for ages, John Kerry was the first Secretary of State to primarily use a state.gov address. The only way Clinton differed was she used her own server instead of a 3rd party server like AOL or Google, and I'm not sure a properly maintained private server (not that she had one) is a worse scenario.
And it's not clear that using the private server was an attempt to evade record keeping. Most indications are that Clinton really wanted to keep using a Blackberry and wanted access to her current email and the NSA and State Department weren't able to accommodate her so she just gave up and did her own thing.
You're right. I felt that if she had used a really secure server at the foundation, like a hardened BSD based server, she could make an argument that she was actually using better security. It would still technically be illegal, but that is a strong argument. Probably wouldn't be too tough to prove that the government email servers at the time didn't have great security. Then I found out she basically hired some "company" I will call Two Windoze Dudes And A PC to set everything up and that argument flew out the window. This wasn't about security at all but it was to keep her from having to use 2 different mobile devices at the same time. No more. No less.
It is crazy I know, but would you put it past Trump?
Yes. I would.
No chance for this. Sanders and Trump have some overlap in terms of voter attraction, but there's a fundamental disagreement over policy and what exactly the problem with Washington is between them. Essentially Sanders is arguing that people in politics are mostly decent, but it's the evil money that's made them corrupted and if we get rid of the influence of money, the good hearted politicians will do the right thing. Trump is arguing that the evil money and the corrupt politicians both encourage and feed off each other and only he can stand up to them because he's not a politician and he can't be bought. Trump has the stronger argument by far. Trump is embracing a lot of typical Republican concerns, like tax cuts, killing off the ACA (aka Obamacare) that are anathema to Sanders.