What's illegal about protesting illegal government actions? Uber is ILLEGAL in France but they continue to operate! Do you understand the concept of "protest"? The idle rich like you are SUPPOSED to be inconvenienced, it is the INTENTION that you get annoyed.
Protesting is fine. Here in the USA, we have this crazy thing in our constitution called "free speech" that covers it. Most or all of Europe has no such law. Se we are Americans are totally cool with the whole protesting thing. What myself and others are not at all cool with is blocking access to train stations, beating up people who they don't agree with, and so on. You want to set up protests and carry signs outside of train stations and such? That's great. Some people may be interested and may ask what you are protesting about and may end up on your side as a result. You want to block everybody from using the train? Screw you and your cause. At that point, all those protesters are doing is making the people who can't get to the train sympathize with the other side. I've been to France and in the past I worked for a US office of a big French company. This kind of stuff is why I have really mixed feelings about the French. This kind of a-hole "I am going to screw you over because I have a problem that's not your problem so I'm going to make it your problem too until you get so angry you make my problem go away" stuff is a perfect example of what I really don't like about them.
If you want to help, if your dream is space and not some aggrandized ego stroke, then you fund nasa and make mars a reality for everyone.
I got curious so I looked. I know fact checking isn't cool, but really, you couldn't be bothered? Elon Musk's net worth is about $14 billion give or take. NASA's budget for just this year is $17 billion. Mind explaining how he's going to "fund nasa" as you put it when his entire net worth won't fully fund one year?
The problem is that the public doesn't want money spent on NASA "until we fix our problems here". That day will never, ever come. There will always be "problems here". To give you an example, a guy I know at work who likes SciFi and is pretty smart doesn't want to see NASA get even the $17 billion they get now per year because he thinks the money needs to be spent here on those problems that need to be solved. There are a lot more people like him than me who think that NASA needs even more money than $17 billion.
I actually still have a landline and I get calls every now and then for political polls. I used to participate. I don't anymore. Some of the polls are very slanted, sometimes simply in favor of one issue. I live in what is strongly a red state and most of the polls ask questions about Republican strategies I rarely agree with. I'm not really sure what the purpose is as my state is about as red as they come and it's not likely to ever be competitive for Democrats for decades. I'm not sure I feel comfortable telling strangers that no, I don't agree with whatever the Republican cause du jour is since I'm expressing what is most likely a minority opinion in a state where differences of opinion are not respected at all. The other problem I have is that the polls are too long. You can count on 5 minutes minimum, maybe 10 if you're unlucky. After a few questions I quickly get weary of the time consuming formats they insist on using and I refuse to do any of them anymore.
By the way, I've believed for years that a significant minority of people in the US deliberately lie on polls to throw them off. I've known since 2004 that you can't trust the polls at all.
I use normorobo (https://www.nomorobo.com/). It's free for non-business use. I have my home phone (yes I still have a home phone - my current home security system requires it) going through it and I think it's great. It only works with VOIP or wireless phone numbers though, not true land lines. It works by having you activate a feature to ring a 2nd number when a call comes in. The 2nd number is No Mo Robo's phone number. Let your phone ring once and their database will pick up the call before the 2nd ring if they feel it's fraudulent. I'd say it stops more than 95% of the robo calls I get, which to me is fantastic. Maybe once or twice a month a robo call will get through, but that's all.
Just as a point of interest, I work with a guy whose ability to judge scams is broken beyond anything I've ever seen in a non-elderly person. His ability to differentiate between the bogus and the legit is just about non-existent. Remember in the past decade when a lot of us US people were getting cold calls from some company telling us we could buy an extended warranty for our cars that would pay for any and every repair we needed for years to come? He bought one. I realized that it's guys like him who keep the robo callers in business.
Quitting allows you to leave on your own terms rather than being humiliated into training your low-pay replacements and then being fired. Are you really saying that workers should stick around at a company that was just days before trying to lay them off?
I don't think you understand something at play here. In my career of 28 years in IT, I have noticed that some people will just not leave - ever - under any circumstances until you turn out the lights and close the doors. What I mean is, no matter how bad the job is, some people will not ever leave it until they get thrown out the door or the company goes out of business. Not always, but usually it's the people who are just barely getting by. Some years ago we hired a guy who used to work for a local bank and his local bank got bought out by a much bigger bank out of state. They planned to shut down all their IT work in our city for this bank they bought, but they needed this guy and his co-workers to stay to help out with the transition. At first they were told 6 months and they'd be done. 6 months came and they got offered another 6 month extension. Then came another 6 month extension. The guy looked for another job and we hired him, but he left a co-worker behind who just didn't want to leave. Eventually after maybe 3 years, they finally closed down the IT work in our city and co-worker guy now for real has to find a job. The guy we hired asked us to hire his co-worker and we couldn't. No more openings. Even though this guy knew his job was going to end sooner rather than later, and the bank did not want to keep him on after it closed down all the local IT work they had, he refused to leave or even start looking for a job until they told him "Your job is over. Thanks. We'll send your final paycheck to you. Today is your last day." My previous employer, a European company, did some really reprehensible things to us before I left. They changed our terms of employment to favor them and enable them to cheat us out of severance pay they promised us and told us we had to either accept the new terms that let them do it or quit. Then they gave my small department 6 months notice that they were moving our jobs to another lower cost country (not India though). I was the only person in my office to find another job before the deadline. Nobody else would leave. One of the things you see at Disney is a lot of employees are big Disney fans, so they want to work there and they will put up with a lot of bs to do so. Even with these workers temporarily getting their jobs back, and yes we here all know this likely won't have a happy ending for them, more like a temporary reprieve, I guarantee you that many will still happily go back and refuse to look elsewhere for a job until they get this job taken away from them.
Given how many submitters will submit an article with a comment of "He said X! He said X! Definitely gonna be nothing but X!" and the article actually says "Not X at all! Definitely not X! Anything but X! Never gonna be X!", I'm impressed that nobody submitted the article and said one of the following:
1) Linus Torvald's death is imminent.
2) Linus says he's going to kill himself.
3) Linux says Linux is doomed once he dies.
There is no proof that he handed secrets to the Russians or Chinese. The whole article on that was made up by its authors.
There's also no proof he didn't. While I'd admit he probably didn't hand anything over to them, I'm pretty sure that both countries separated him from his laptops and imaged them so they could shunt decryption off to a series of networked computers. It's certainly possible that they've already cracked his encryption (maybe there is a bug in it that they know about and he doesn't). It's also possible that they haven't cracked it yet. But I think there is almost zero chance that they aren't even trying to crack it.
BTW: People criticising the USA normally criticise the politics and actions of the USA. To call them America-haters is totally wrong. In two ways. First, there is a lot more America then only the USA. Use google maps if you do not believe me. Second, its the actions abroad that cause you low reputation. And three, your tourists often help to foster such reputation. Even though the last thing is hardly something that can be changed. We all have parts of our population which go on vacation and ruin our reputation. Ask the Germans and the British or even better ask the Italian and Spanish on the reputation of Germans and the British.
Keep in mind that this is Slashdot and it's very common for European members to trash the US at every turn, including all of its citizens. I've seen people insist here many times that the US is a consistent threat to world peace and the world would be so much better off if we all died as soon as possible.
My grandmother said that you could bitch about the government, though you would not be allowed to do that on TV or radio. Well, at least after Stalin's death.
That's sort of true in that I think if the complaints were kept to a very small group of people, like bitching to your next door neighbor, it was mostly tolerated. But you still had to be careful what you said. Complaining about a lack of bread was one thing. Complaining that Brezhnev (for example) was terrible might be something else.
There's a great old joke in Russia from the Soviet days about how a Texan came to visit Moscow.
Muscovite: How do you like Moscow and the Soviet Union?
Texan: Well it's really nice, but you have no freedom here. In America, any time I want to, I can go to the White House and stand outside it and say that the president is terrible and he needs to go and nobody will do anything to me.
Muscovite: Oh it is the same here.
Texan: Really?
Muscovite: Yes. Anytime I want, I can go outside the Kremlin and say that the American president is terrible and he needs to go and nobody will do anything to me.
Some people I know who grew up in China really liked that joke.
If I have to choose I would prefer China spying on me than the US. China doesn't care wether I download movies and music, or if I want to smoke something else than tobacco. The US can have me extradicted and put me in jail for made up charges, China much, much less likely.
My last 2 girlfriends were born and raised in China and both would argue vehemently with you about this. Search sometime for photos on the internet of houses in the middle of roads in China. Do you know why those houses are there? It's because some Communist Party official wanted a road built and an owner refused to sell for literally pennies on the dollar (offers to buy may be at 10% of true value) so they built the road completely around the house to force the owner to leave for nothing. One of my ex-girlfriends still spoke angrily about how the police interrogated her and her school friends harshly over a decade ago because they happened to be dormmates with a girl who was secretly in Falun Gong. Do you know why the Chinese government persecutes Falun Gong? Nobody in the West does. There's speculation that it may be nothing more than a loyalty test of Communist Party members -it serves no purpose other than to see if Party members will go along with it and thus be loyal. Neither of my ex-girlfriends thought very much of the Chinese government and both thought that while the US and other Western democracies might not be perfect, they were a lot better choice than China.
My best friend for many years is a lawyer and he's taught me a lot about how the legal system really works. I can assure you that non-lawyers almost never understand the reality of the US legal system. Judges rarely like to sanction lawyers like has happened to Prenda. The general feeling in the legal industry is that making one side of lawyers pay the other side's costs is very bad because it might - no joke - lead to fewer lawsuits. You see, lawyers and judges feel that the system works perfectly fine as it is and that any time you've been wronged, they have no problem with the idea that you may have to pay tens of thousands of dollars or much more to defend yourself by hiring an attorney and running up costs. And what you might not know is that paying off attorney fees has a higher priority than anything else because the judges and attorneys have fixed the system to insure that they get paid first and they get paid all that you owe them. Believe me when I tell you that attorneys and judges are not even a little bit troubled by the massive costs that innocent parties expend trying to defend themselves from predatory attorneys and they truly do not care if it destroys financially to pay them off, but by God you will pay your attorney and court fees fully or they'll put you in jail or confiscate your stuff if they have to to get it done. If you win a financial judgement against another party, good luck getting a sheriff interested in enforcing the payment on your behalf but those same sheriffs will not hesitate at all to make you pay off legal fees you owe. My guess is that Prenda will simply file appeal after appeal on the judgement against them and it may be many years before they pay it, if ever.
1000 Mice killed with a 0 success rate and primates next.
1.6 Million funding so far - more to come, as it seems.
What is the actual benefit, how many humans would be able to take advantage of such a procedure at what success rate and which result?
Your questions are valid but please consider the following.
1) Despite the fact that Time reported this and Americans would assume them to be a reliable source, nobody does fact checking any more. So I can't discount the possibility that this is a bunch of lies. I've dated a couple of born and raised in China ladies in recent years and unlike Russians, neither of them believed stuff just because the media or government said it.
2) There may be some big money backing of this where basically whoever wants it done is paying off anybody who might object to it within China.
3) Senior Communist Party officials may be backing this knowing that it's not likely to ever work, but figuring if the guy can pull it off, it might be their ticket to immortality.
Just for reference, the much hailed CPR has a success rate of - depending where one looks - 6 or 10 % and of those, half have maybe a halfway liveable life, the other half will be tied to an artificial reparator working against their native breath rythm for the rest of their remaining life, not considering remaining mental capacities.
Keep in mind that 100% of those people would be dead without CPR and even a 3-5% success rate would look better than 0% if you need it done on you. I have no idea how accurate your numbers are or the source you got them from, but you sure seem to be downplaying this, acting almost nobody anywhere has ever lived a normal life after CPR and I can't accept that.
I'm not trying to excuse Disney as such, but we only have part of the story here. And yes, as pointed out by others, it's a dupe. Disney get rid of a lot less workers than a lot of other major employers (cough cough - Cisco, IBM) have done recently. My understanding is that these jobs were basically support type jobs like system admin stuff and they turned them over to an outsourcing company to save money as they opened newer, better paying jobs in IT to do more high tech things. At least that's what they claim. Might be interesting to find out just how many of those new jobs there are, what the average pay is, and whether they went to Americans or not.
I've heard of many other American companies that transferred IT jobs overseas and forced a small number of employees to train their replacements by either bringing the replacements here temporarily or sending the US staff over there to train the locals. Making people stay to train their replacements is rather mean spirited, but this is not the first time it's been done by a US company. However, some people actually don't want to leave and will willingly stay until the bitter end without too much complaint just to put off having to find a new job. My previous job was working in a US office of a subsidiary of a major European telco company. They gave us 6 months notice of an end to our jobs and the fact that they would be moved to a cheaper country in South America. I found a job about 3 months later with another company, but none of my co-workers would leave. In fact, one of them offered to move to the country where the jobs were being relocated at his own cost and to work for local wages and they turned him down. It sucks, but I've heard of other companies doing the same thing. The former employees may not like it, but the reality is that Disney jobs in Orlando have a higher degree of risk than Disney jobs elsewhere. Disney completely closed down the Orlando animation department more than a decade ago I think. They're always making major changes in Orlando that cost people jobs.
We should apply the same idea to Congress and the laws it passes: every law should have to be re-approved by every new Congress individually.
You seriously want this completely ineffectual Congress to have to do that? Not to mention the time this would take, but with the realities of today's Congress and the "my way or the highway" Tea Party supporters in it, no law would ever again pass if it had to do that. I guess if you're in favor of anarchy this is one way to do it. Keep in mind that the Patriot Act renewal was defeated by exactly one man, a junior senator in the majority party who was powerless to stop him despite many influential and senior members of that party being opposed to him. No law would ever be renewed again under this plan.
Profiling might be somewhat useful, but it's doubtful. Disallowing large/serious weapons on a plane is a good thing simply because, without some amplification of strength, the numbers are wildly against any single attacker. Simple security is sufficient.
From the Supreme Court on down, courts have consistently held that profiling is illegal and convictions have been thrown out for it. TSA does profile but the only way they can get away with it is that they have to screen small children and grandmothers and then everybody here screams "Security theater!" about it. At least in this thread we have people posting who actually do fly. That hasn't always been the case. I used to be friends with a guy and he last flew in the late 1990s and has never flown since and likely will not ever for any reason fly anywhere again before he dies. He has never been subjected to TSA. That didn't stop him from railing on about how evil and useless they were and just completely losing his mind anytime he talked about air travel. We get a lot of similar people here posting all the time on this subject.
1) Managers with some degree of technical knowledge are almost always better for tech workers than managers that don't really have any technical knowledge.
2) One of the very best managers I ever worked for was a woman. The two worst managers I ever had were women. Women tech managers will either be fantastic or horrible beyond belief. The bad ones were orders of magnitude worse than the worst male managers I've ever had.
3) When a bunch of co-workers start leaving a job or the very best ones in your department start to leave, it's probably time for you to consider leaving too.
4) I've had jobs that were really great that became bad or started bad and became really good. Conditions change. Be prepared for it to happen. And if they change for the worse, it may be your signal to find a new job.
5) Try to get along with co-workers because as you change jobs in your tech career, you'll often find yourself working again with people from a previous job and you don't want to have those people have a grudge against you when you start a new job.
6) Don't be a hothead. Stay cool. I had a pretty negative opinion of a manager in a sister office over some things some co-workers told me when they worked under him in the past. My attitude got so negative that I remember once almost blowing up at him over something trivial, but I kept my cool. That guy got promoted and became my manager's manager and he went to bat for me with his management to get me a promotion at a time when it was really difficult to get promoted. You can misjudge people and if I had blown up at the guy, he'd have never gotten me the promotion. I really learned a valuable lesson on that one.
7) My dad told me years ago not to ever kick people when they were down because circumstances change and people who are down today may wield great power in your organization later and they will definitely remember who was good to them when they were at the low point of their career.
Thanks for pointing out that Roberts and Scalia were the 2 dissenters, which means that Thomas didn't vote with Scalia. I ask in all seriousness - is the first time ever that they haven't voted the same on a case?
Maybe the only good film ever directed by some guy who worked on Star Wars and has a tie to Lucas. I guess it gets a weak "yea" but this guy is not a good director. I had an unusual chance a few years ago to have a personal conversation with an actor or actress (I'm unwilling to name who I talked to) who appeared in "Prisoner Of The Sun" which finally got released last year and was directed by Christian. I specifically asked about that film and the person who acted in it said that they had doubts that it would ever see the light of day and they didn't think it was probably going to be very good if it did. Based on the IMDB rating, it looks like that person was right. I can say that the person I talked to did not have any negative comments about Christian himself, they just didn't really have a good feeling about that movie. Not sure given the track record that I'm going to invest 30 minutes in watching this one.
I took a look at the actual indictment. Well, at least the first few pages. Remember how people still insist to this day that Bill Clinton wasn't impeached (he was - impeaching does not mean convicting) or that he was impeached for "cheating on his wife"? Years later, the lies spun by his spin doctors still hold fast in many minds. Clinton was impeached for committing perjury in a civil trial. Now the event he committed perjury about was cheating on Hilary, but he was impeached for lying about it while under oath, not for the actual act of cheating on her. Similarly, this indictment isn't really and truly about beating lie detector tests. The government's contention is that Williams had a business whose purpose was to enable people ineligible for certain government jobs to get those jobs through lying and deception. This is defrauding the US government because salaries would be paid to those ineligible people. The government also contends that he enriched himself (through fees he charged) by encouraging people to lie to and deceive the federal government into hiring ineligible people for jobs. The first 6 or so pages I looked at don't actually mention anything about lie detector tests.
After dialup disappeared, AOL had plenty of cash in the bank. So they became a type of venture capital. They bought Huffington Post, Tech Crunch and many others. Since they actually have a lot of web traffic, they started an advertising business.
Thank you for this explanation. I was really struggling to understand why Verizon would want to pay so much for the dial up business but clearly they want everything else and are just taking the dial up business as part of a complete package, not specifically trying to get that.
The elaborate charade is all about convincing Congress that the negotiation is so complex that the president NEEDS fast-track authority to get this whole deal done.
Well, Bush asked for this kind of authority too, so do note that this not particular to Obama. The real reason the president wants this is to prevent individuals from tagging on bill busting riders where the president would have to veto his the agreement to stop some unacceptable after the negotiation condition from taking place which is exactly what the person wants who tagged the rider onto the bill. I never hear about other countries having this kind of problem. Can you imagine if you agreed to buy a house at a certain price and then you show up for closing and the owner says "Surprise! I never told you this before, but you have to buy me a new BMW to get the house." Nobody would go for that. But doing similar things in legislation is completely OK apparently. If you don't understand why all presidents regardless of party affiliation can't trust Congress to just leave the agreements alone before voting on them, then you don't understand why this is necessary.
Do courts give grovelling apologies enough weight that this 'contrition' is a logical strategy to try to reduce any awards of damages? Are such apologies sometimes added as conditions of a settlement, presumably so that the victor can grind the vanquished further into the dirt? Is there some other advantage to issuing one?
I'm not a lawyer, but as an informed layman I can only point out that in some/many/most cases, juries and not judges determine damage awards. Based on the juries I've served on, I can tell you that a rather large amount of people on a jury don't know anything about technology and thus tend to see this kind of thing in real black and white terms where they overvalue the "damage" that the defendant does. I've never served on a jury where this strategy would have made any difference in the damage awards, but they may be gambling that just giving up may stop the lawsuit in that the music companies may find it cheaper to reach a quick settlement where the founders/owners agree never to do this again than to try to get blood from a stone and squeeze money out of the defendants. Given that it was likely going to be a slam dunk in court to prove that Grooveshark violated copyright law and failed to pay legally required licensing fees, giving up and apologizing is probably the best choice out of a bunch of not very good choices. I've seen people and companies fight in court when it's been ridiculously easy to prove that they were in the wrong and the results of that have often been financially disastrous to the defendants.
Other than the pixie dust and unicorn poop, what exactly keeps the government from charging you with nor reporting the money?
It's a valid question but I can speculate on reasons why they may not do that.
1) Incompetence.
2) Corruption. Specifically I mean that the people who investigate this can often be bribed in nations with major economic problems to look the other way.
3) The current president can always fall back on the old tried and try cry of "Britain stole the Islas Malvinas from us! We must get them back!" to distract citizens from paying attention to the economy.
4) Blaming the USA for everything is another always successful policy to distract the population.
But unfortunately, haters gonna hate, so many here are already spinning this as "POS Apple iPad crashed cause it suxors!" instead of the much more accurate "POS software update went bad and crashed the hardware".
Would you trust the guys that infected your system, removed your access to files, ransomed the decryption key from you etc. to correctly - and perfectly - restore your untouched data?
Because, I know I wouldn't.
I understand your point, but in the case of individuals, most non-techies are often too embarrassed to ask a technical person for help in such situations, so they just pay and hope for the best. In the case of businesses, I can tell you as someone who works in IT for a Fortune 500 company and has to deal with IT staff in much smaller companies on a regular basis, smaller companies often don't have the best IT people. A lot of times I see that small companies just hire whoever they can get for the bottom tier wages they pay because they don't respect the job and they would outsource it to India if they really could do so. The IT staff of such companies are just barely competent enough to deal with most ordinary situations that come up and anything out of the ordinary like this gets way out of their comfort and knowledge zone. Maybe they have backups, but to actually verify those backups? Keep hashes? Probably not on both of those.
I've been thinking about this for a long time, especially after the rash of hostages killed by ISIS. At this point, nobody can really claim to not know the danger. I know nothing about Lo Porto but Weinstein clearly knew the dangers. So we did he stay there? I think there are several reasons why westerners put themselves in deliberate danger in places like Pakistan, Syria, etc.
1) Some people are simply mentally ill. After the first Japanese hostage was killed by ISIS, it came out that he was mentally ill. Not mentally ill enough to need to be locked away, but clearly incapable of making rational decisions regarding his own safety. People like this are simply always going to gravitate towards dangerous places because the internet makes sure that they know where the really dangerous places are.
2) Some people believe that they are special and the bad guys won't go after them because they are "helping". Most of the hostages fall into this category. Weinstein was like this. Alan Henning fell into this category and possibly the first one as well. Reports are that Henning believed to the very end that the fact that he was there to help would save his life. Sometimes these people get away with being in a dangerous location once and they think that they are simply lucky and won't ever be harmed. Henning went into Syria several times and was left alone. The second Japanese hostage executed by ISIS went to help the first one and he went because he'd been to the area before and thought he was special and the bad guys would leave him alone.
3) Some people are so overcome with their desire to help others that they can't rationally assess the danger and while they know if they are captured it's going to end very badly for them, they believe that they will simply beat the odds. Remember many years ago when Americans and Europeans volunteered to be human shields for Saddam Hussein? They were like this. A few months ago it got announced that a young American female hostage was supposedly killed in a bombing raid against ISIS. She had operated in the area previously and had to know the danger, but she believed that because nobody had yet bothered her that she could work there at no risk. She died as a result of being wrong about that.
There's some overlap between those vague 3 reasons I gave for people ignoring the real danger to be in places like Pakistan and Syria and so on, but I don't know how we can ever stop people from willingly becoming victims of their own bad decisions about personal risk.
Slashdot Mirror
What's illegal about protesting illegal government actions? Uber is ILLEGAL in France but they continue to operate! Do you understand the concept of "protest"? The idle rich like you are SUPPOSED to be inconvenienced, it is the INTENTION that you get annoyed.
Protesting is fine. Here in the USA, we have this crazy thing in our constitution called "free speech" that covers it. Most or all of Europe has no such law. Se we are Americans are totally cool with the whole protesting thing. What myself and others are not at all cool with is blocking access to train stations, beating up people who they don't agree with, and so on. You want to set up protests and carry signs outside of train stations and such? That's great. Some people may be interested and may ask what you are protesting about and may end up on your side as a result. You want to block everybody from using the train? Screw you and your cause. At that point, all those protesters are doing is making the people who can't get to the train sympathize with the other side. I've been to France and in the past I worked for a US office of a big French company. This kind of stuff is why I have really mixed feelings about the French. This kind of a-hole "I am going to screw you over because I have a problem that's not your problem so I'm going to make it your problem too until you get so angry you make my problem go away" stuff is a perfect example of what I really don't like about them.
If you want to help, if your dream is space and not some aggrandized ego stroke, then you fund nasa and make mars a reality for everyone.
I got curious so I looked. I know fact checking isn't cool, but really, you couldn't be bothered? Elon Musk's net worth is about $14 billion give or take. NASA's budget for just this year is $17 billion. Mind explaining how he's going to "fund nasa" as you put it when his entire net worth won't fully fund one year?
The problem is that the public doesn't want money spent on NASA "until we fix our problems here". That day will never, ever come. There will always be "problems here". To give you an example, a guy I know at work who likes SciFi and is pretty smart doesn't want to see NASA get even the $17 billion they get now per year because he thinks the money needs to be spent here on those problems that need to be solved. There are a lot more people like him than me who think that NASA needs even more money than $17 billion.
I actually still have a landline and I get calls every now and then for political polls. I used to participate. I don't anymore. Some of the polls are very slanted, sometimes simply in favor of one issue. I live in what is strongly a red state and most of the polls ask questions about Republican strategies I rarely agree with. I'm not really sure what the purpose is as my state is about as red as they come and it's not likely to ever be competitive for Democrats for decades. I'm not sure I feel comfortable telling strangers that no, I don't agree with whatever the Republican cause du jour is since I'm expressing what is most likely a minority opinion in a state where differences of opinion are not respected at all. The other problem I have is that the polls are too long. You can count on 5 minutes minimum, maybe 10 if you're unlucky. After a few questions I quickly get weary of the time consuming formats they insist on using and I refuse to do any of them anymore.
By the way, I've believed for years that a significant minority of people in the US deliberately lie on polls to throw them off. I've known since 2004 that you can't trust the polls at all.
I use normorobo (https://www.nomorobo.com/). It's free for non-business use. I have my home phone (yes I still have a home phone - my current home security system requires it) going through it and I think it's great. It only works with VOIP or wireless phone numbers though, not true land lines. It works by having you activate a feature to ring a 2nd number when a call comes in. The 2nd number is No Mo Robo's phone number. Let your phone ring once and their database will pick up the call before the 2nd ring if they feel it's fraudulent. I'd say it stops more than 95% of the robo calls I get, which to me is fantastic. Maybe once or twice a month a robo call will get through, but that's all.
Just as a point of interest, I work with a guy whose ability to judge scams is broken beyond anything I've ever seen in a non-elderly person. His ability to differentiate between the bogus and the legit is just about non-existent. Remember in the past decade when a lot of us US people were getting cold calls from some company telling us we could buy an extended warranty for our cars that would pay for any and every repair we needed for years to come? He bought one. I realized that it's guys like him who keep the robo callers in business.
Quitting allows you to leave on your own terms rather than being humiliated into training your low-pay replacements and then being fired. Are you really saying that workers should stick around at a company that was just days before trying to lay them off?
I don't think you understand something at play here. In my career of 28 years in IT, I have noticed that some people will just not leave - ever - under any circumstances until you turn out the lights and close the doors. What I mean is, no matter how bad the job is, some people will not ever leave it until they get thrown out the door or the company goes out of business. Not always, but usually it's the people who are just barely getting by. Some years ago we hired a guy who used to work for a local bank and his local bank got bought out by a much bigger bank out of state. They planned to shut down all their IT work in our city for this bank they bought, but they needed this guy and his co-workers to stay to help out with the transition. At first they were told 6 months and they'd be done. 6 months came and they got offered another 6 month extension. Then came another 6 month extension. The guy looked for another job and we hired him, but he left a co-worker behind who just didn't want to leave. Eventually after maybe 3 years, they finally closed down the IT work in our city and co-worker guy now for real has to find a job. The guy we hired asked us to hire his co-worker and we couldn't. No more openings. Even though this guy knew his job was going to end sooner rather than later, and the bank did not want to keep him on after it closed down all the local IT work they had, he refused to leave or even start looking for a job until they told him "Your job is over. Thanks. We'll send your final paycheck to you. Today is your last day." My previous employer, a European company, did some really reprehensible things to us before I left. They changed our terms of employment to favor them and enable them to cheat us out of severance pay they promised us and told us we had to either accept the new terms that let them do it or quit. Then they gave my small department 6 months notice that they were moving our jobs to another lower cost country (not India though). I was the only person in my office to find another job before the deadline. Nobody else would leave. One of the things you see at Disney is a lot of employees are big Disney fans, so they want to work there and they will put up with a lot of bs to do so. Even with these workers temporarily getting their jobs back, and yes we here all know this likely won't have a happy ending for them, more like a temporary reprieve, I guarantee you that many will still happily go back and refuse to look elsewhere for a job until they get this job taken away from them.
Given how many submitters will submit an article with a comment of "He said X! He said X! Definitely gonna be nothing but X!" and the article actually says "Not X at all! Definitely not X! Anything but X! Never gonna be X!", I'm impressed that nobody submitted the article and said one of the following:
1) Linus Torvald's death is imminent.
2) Linus says he's going to kill himself.
3) Linux says Linux is doomed once he dies.
There is no proof that he handed secrets to the Russians or Chinese. The whole article on that was made up by its authors.
There's also no proof he didn't. While I'd admit he probably didn't hand anything over to them, I'm pretty sure that both countries separated him from his laptops and imaged them so they could shunt decryption off to a series of networked computers. It's certainly possible that they've already cracked his encryption (maybe there is a bug in it that they know about and he doesn't). It's also possible that they haven't cracked it yet. But I think there is almost zero chance that they aren't even trying to crack it.
BTW: People criticising the USA normally criticise the politics and actions of the USA. To call them America-haters is totally wrong. In two ways. First, there is a lot more America then only the USA. Use google maps if you do not believe me. Second, its the actions abroad that cause you low reputation. And three, your tourists often help to foster such reputation. Even though the last thing is hardly something that can be changed. We all have parts of our population which go on vacation and ruin our reputation. Ask the Germans and the British or even better ask the Italian and Spanish on the reputation of Germans and the British.
Keep in mind that this is Slashdot and it's very common for European members to trash the US at every turn, including all of its citizens. I've seen people insist here many times that the US is a consistent threat to world peace and the world would be so much better off if we all died as soon as possible.
My grandmother said that you could bitch about the government, though you would not be allowed to do that on TV or radio. Well, at least after Stalin's death.
That's sort of true in that I think if the complaints were kept to a very small group of people, like bitching to your next door neighbor, it was mostly tolerated. But you still had to be careful what you said. Complaining about a lack of bread was one thing. Complaining that Brezhnev (for example) was terrible might be something else.
There's a great old joke in Russia from the Soviet days about how a Texan came to visit Moscow.
Muscovite: How do you like Moscow and the Soviet Union?
Texan: Well it's really nice, but you have no freedom here. In America, any time I want to, I can go to the White House and stand outside it and say that the president is terrible and he needs to go and nobody will do anything to me.
Muscovite: Oh it is the same here.
Texan: Really?
Muscovite: Yes. Anytime I want, I can go outside the Kremlin and say that the American president is terrible and he needs to go and nobody will do anything to me.
Some people I know who grew up in China really liked that joke.
If I have to choose I would prefer China spying on me than the US. China doesn't care wether I download movies and music, or if I want to smoke something else than tobacco. The US can have me extradicted and put me in jail for made up charges, China much, much less likely.
My last 2 girlfriends were born and raised in China and both would argue vehemently with you about this. Search sometime for photos on the internet of houses in the middle of roads in China. Do you know why those houses are there? It's because some Communist Party official wanted a road built and an owner refused to sell for literally pennies on the dollar (offers to buy may be at 10% of true value) so they built the road completely around the house to force the owner to leave for nothing. One of my ex-girlfriends still spoke angrily about how the police interrogated her and her school friends harshly over a decade ago because they happened to be dormmates with a girl who was secretly in Falun Gong. Do you know why the Chinese government persecutes Falun Gong? Nobody in the West does. There's speculation that it may be nothing more than a loyalty test of Communist Party members -it serves no purpose other than to see if Party members will go along with it and thus be loyal. Neither of my ex-girlfriends thought very much of the Chinese government and both thought that while the US and other Western democracies might not be perfect, they were a lot better choice than China.
My best friend for many years is a lawyer and he's taught me a lot about how the legal system really works. I can assure you that non-lawyers almost never understand the reality of the US legal system. Judges rarely like to sanction lawyers like has happened to Prenda. The general feeling in the legal industry is that making one side of lawyers pay the other side's costs is very bad because it might - no joke - lead to fewer lawsuits. You see, lawyers and judges feel that the system works perfectly fine as it is and that any time you've been wronged, they have no problem with the idea that you may have to pay tens of thousands of dollars or much more to defend yourself by hiring an attorney and running up costs. And what you might not know is that paying off attorney fees has a higher priority than anything else because the judges and attorneys have fixed the system to insure that they get paid first and they get paid all that you owe them. Believe me when I tell you that attorneys and judges are not even a little bit troubled by the massive costs that innocent parties expend trying to defend themselves from predatory attorneys and they truly do not care if it destroys financially to pay them off, but by God you will pay your attorney and court fees fully or they'll put you in jail or confiscate your stuff if they have to to get it done. If you win a financial judgement against another party, good luck getting a sheriff interested in enforcing the payment on your behalf but those same sheriffs will not hesitate at all to make you pay off legal fees you owe. My guess is that Prenda will simply file appeal after appeal on the judgement against them and it may be many years before they pay it, if ever.
1000 Mice killed with a 0 success rate and primates next. 1.6 Million funding so far - more to come, as it seems. What is the actual benefit, how many humans would be able to take advantage of such a procedure at what success rate and which result?
Your questions are valid but please consider the following.
1) Despite the fact that Time reported this and Americans would assume them to be a reliable source, nobody does fact checking any more. So I can't discount the possibility that this is a bunch of lies. I've dated a couple of born and raised in China ladies in recent years and unlike Russians, neither of them believed stuff just because the media or government said it.
2) There may be some big money backing of this where basically whoever wants it done is paying off anybody who might object to it within China.
3) Senior Communist Party officials may be backing this knowing that it's not likely to ever work, but figuring if the guy can pull it off, it might be their ticket to immortality.
Just for reference, the much hailed CPR has a success rate of - depending where one looks - 6 or 10 % and of those, half have maybe a halfway liveable life, the other half will be tied to an artificial reparator working against their native breath rythm for the rest of their remaining life, not considering remaining mental capacities.
Keep in mind that 100% of those people would be dead without CPR and even a 3-5% success rate would look better than 0% if you need it done on you. I have no idea how accurate your numbers are or the source you got them from, but you sure seem to be downplaying this, acting almost nobody anywhere has ever lived a normal life after CPR and I can't accept that.
I'm not trying to excuse Disney as such, but we only have part of the story here. And yes, as pointed out by others, it's a dupe. Disney get rid of a lot less workers than a lot of other major employers (cough cough - Cisco, IBM) have done recently. My understanding is that these jobs were basically support type jobs like system admin stuff and they turned them over to an outsourcing company to save money as they opened newer, better paying jobs in IT to do more high tech things. At least that's what they claim. Might be interesting to find out just how many of those new jobs there are, what the average pay is, and whether they went to Americans or not.
I've heard of many other American companies that transferred IT jobs overseas and forced a small number of employees to train their replacements by either bringing the replacements here temporarily or sending the US staff over there to train the locals. Making people stay to train their replacements is rather mean spirited, but this is not the first time it's been done by a US company. However, some people actually don't want to leave and will willingly stay until the bitter end without too much complaint just to put off having to find a new job. My previous job was working in a US office of a subsidiary of a major European telco company. They gave us 6 months notice of an end to our jobs and the fact that they would be moved to a cheaper country in South America. I found a job about 3 months later with another company, but none of my co-workers would leave. In fact, one of them offered to move to the country where the jobs were being relocated at his own cost and to work for local wages and they turned him down. It sucks, but I've heard of other companies doing the same thing. The former employees may not like it, but the reality is that Disney jobs in Orlando have a higher degree of risk than Disney jobs elsewhere. Disney completely closed down the Orlando animation department more than a decade ago I think. They're always making major changes in Orlando that cost people jobs.
We should apply the same idea to Congress and the laws it passes: every law should have to be re-approved by every new Congress individually.
You seriously want this completely ineffectual Congress to have to do that? Not to mention the time this would take, but with the realities of today's Congress and the "my way or the highway" Tea Party supporters in it, no law would ever again pass if it had to do that. I guess if you're in favor of anarchy this is one way to do it. Keep in mind that the Patriot Act renewal was defeated by exactly one man, a junior senator in the majority party who was powerless to stop him despite many influential and senior members of that party being opposed to him. No law would ever be renewed again under this plan.
Profiling might be somewhat useful, but it's doubtful. Disallowing large/serious weapons on a plane is a good thing simply because, without some amplification of strength, the numbers are wildly against any single attacker. Simple security is sufficient.
From the Supreme Court on down, courts have consistently held that profiling is illegal and convictions have been thrown out for it. TSA does profile but the only way they can get away with it is that they have to screen small children and grandmothers and then everybody here screams "Security theater!" about it. At least in this thread we have people posting who actually do fly. That hasn't always been the case. I used to be friends with a guy and he last flew in the late 1990s and has never flown since and likely will not ever for any reason fly anywhere again before he dies. He has never been subjected to TSA. That didn't stop him from railing on about how evil and useless they were and just completely losing his mind anytime he talked about air travel. We get a lot of similar people here posting all the time on this subject.
1) Managers with some degree of technical knowledge are almost always better for tech workers than managers that don't really have any technical knowledge.
2) One of the very best managers I ever worked for was a woman. The two worst managers I ever had were women. Women tech managers will either be fantastic or horrible beyond belief. The bad ones were orders of magnitude worse than the worst male managers I've ever had.
3) When a bunch of co-workers start leaving a job or the very best ones in your department start to leave, it's probably time for you to consider leaving too.
4) I've had jobs that were really great that became bad or started bad and became really good. Conditions change. Be prepared for it to happen. And if they change for the worse, it may be your signal to find a new job.
5) Try to get along with co-workers because as you change jobs in your tech career, you'll often find yourself working again with people from a previous job and you don't want to have those people have a grudge against you when you start a new job.
6) Don't be a hothead. Stay cool. I had a pretty negative opinion of a manager in a sister office over some things some co-workers told me when they worked under him in the past. My attitude got so negative that I remember once almost blowing up at him over something trivial, but I kept my cool. That guy got promoted and became my manager's manager and he went to bat for me with his management to get me a promotion at a time when it was really difficult to get promoted. You can misjudge people and if I had blown up at the guy, he'd have never gotten me the promotion. I really learned a valuable lesson on that one.
7) My dad told me years ago not to ever kick people when they were down because circumstances change and people who are down today may wield great power in your organization later and they will definitely remember who was good to them when they were at the low point of their career.
Thanks for pointing out that Roberts and Scalia were the 2 dissenters, which means that Thomas didn't vote with Scalia. I ask in all seriousness - is the first time ever that they haven't voted the same on a case?
Maybe the only good film ever directed by some guy who worked on Star Wars and has a tie to Lucas. I guess it gets a weak "yea" but this guy is not a good director. I had an unusual chance a few years ago to have a personal conversation with an actor or actress (I'm unwilling to name who I talked to) who appeared in "Prisoner Of The Sun" which finally got released last year and was directed by Christian. I specifically asked about that film and the person who acted in it said that they had doubts that it would ever see the light of day and they didn't think it was probably going to be very good if it did. Based on the IMDB rating, it looks like that person was right. I can say that the person I talked to did not have any negative comments about Christian himself, they just didn't really have a good feeling about that movie. Not sure given the track record that I'm going to invest 30 minutes in watching this one.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer.
I took a look at the actual indictment. Well, at least the first few pages. Remember how people still insist to this day that Bill Clinton wasn't impeached (he was - impeaching does not mean convicting) or that he was impeached for "cheating on his wife"? Years later, the lies spun by his spin doctors still hold fast in many minds. Clinton was impeached for committing perjury in a civil trial. Now the event he committed perjury about was cheating on Hilary, but he was impeached for lying about it while under oath, not for the actual act of cheating on her. Similarly, this indictment isn't really and truly about beating lie detector tests. The government's contention is that Williams had a business whose purpose was to enable people ineligible for certain government jobs to get those jobs through lying and deception. This is defrauding the US government because salaries would be paid to those ineligible people. The government also contends that he enriched himself (through fees he charged) by encouraging people to lie to and deceive the federal government into hiring ineligible people for jobs. The first 6 or so pages I looked at don't actually mention anything about lie detector tests.
After dialup disappeared, AOL had plenty of cash in the bank. So they became a type of venture capital. They bought Huffington Post, Tech Crunch and many others. Since they actually have a lot of web traffic, they started an advertising business.
Thank you for this explanation. I was really struggling to understand why Verizon would want to pay so much for the dial up business but clearly they want everything else and are just taking the dial up business as part of a complete package, not specifically trying to get that.
The elaborate charade is all about convincing Congress that the negotiation is so complex that the president NEEDS fast-track authority to get this whole deal done.
Well, Bush asked for this kind of authority too, so do note that this not particular to Obama. The real reason the president wants this is to prevent individuals from tagging on bill busting riders where the president would have to veto his the agreement to stop some unacceptable after the negotiation condition from taking place which is exactly what the person wants who tagged the rider onto the bill. I never hear about other countries having this kind of problem. Can you imagine if you agreed to buy a house at a certain price and then you show up for closing and the owner says "Surprise! I never told you this before, but you have to buy me a new BMW to get the house." Nobody would go for that. But doing similar things in legislation is completely OK apparently. If you don't understand why all presidents regardless of party affiliation can't trust Congress to just leave the agreements alone before voting on them, then you don't understand why this is necessary.
Do courts give grovelling apologies enough weight that this 'contrition' is a logical strategy to try to reduce any awards of damages? Are such apologies sometimes added as conditions of a settlement, presumably so that the victor can grind the vanquished further into the dirt? Is there some other advantage to issuing one?
I'm not a lawyer, but as an informed layman I can only point out that in some/many/most cases, juries and not judges determine damage awards. Based on the juries I've served on, I can tell you that a rather large amount of people on a jury don't know anything about technology and thus tend to see this kind of thing in real black and white terms where they overvalue the "damage" that the defendant does. I've never served on a jury where this strategy would have made any difference in the damage awards, but they may be gambling that just giving up may stop the lawsuit in that the music companies may find it cheaper to reach a quick settlement where the founders/owners agree never to do this again than to try to get blood from a stone and squeeze money out of the defendants. Given that it was likely going to be a slam dunk in court to prove that Grooveshark violated copyright law and failed to pay legally required licensing fees, giving up and apologizing is probably the best choice out of a bunch of not very good choices. I've seen people and companies fight in court when it's been ridiculously easy to prove that they were in the wrong and the results of that have often been financially disastrous to the defendants.
Other than the pixie dust and unicorn poop, what exactly keeps the government from charging you with nor reporting the money?
It's a valid question but I can speculate on reasons why they may not do that.
1) Incompetence.
2) Corruption. Specifically I mean that the people who investigate this can often be bribed in nations with major economic problems to look the other way.
3) The current president can always fall back on the old tried and try cry of "Britain stole the Islas Malvinas from us! We must get them back!" to distract citizens from paying attention to the economy.
4) Blaming the USA for everything is another always successful policy to distract the population.
But unfortunately, haters gonna hate, so many here are already spinning this as "POS Apple iPad crashed cause it suxors!" instead of the much more accurate "POS software update went bad and crashed the hardware".
Anyone with a brain:
Would you trust the guys that infected your system, removed your access to files, ransomed the decryption key from you etc. to correctly - and perfectly - restore your untouched data?
Because, I know I wouldn't.
I understand your point, but in the case of individuals, most non-techies are often too embarrassed to ask a technical person for help in such situations, so they just pay and hope for the best. In the case of businesses, I can tell you as someone who works in IT for a Fortune 500 company and has to deal with IT staff in much smaller companies on a regular basis, smaller companies often don't have the best IT people. A lot of times I see that small companies just hire whoever they can get for the bottom tier wages they pay because they don't respect the job and they would outsource it to India if they really could do so. The IT staff of such companies are just barely competent enough to deal with most ordinary situations that come up and anything out of the ordinary like this gets way out of their comfort and knowledge zone. Maybe they have backups, but to actually verify those backups? Keep hashes? Probably not on both of those.
I've been thinking about this for a long time, especially after the rash of hostages killed by ISIS. At this point, nobody can really claim to not know the danger. I know nothing about Lo Porto but Weinstein clearly knew the dangers. So we did he stay there? I think there are several reasons why westerners put themselves in deliberate danger in places like Pakistan, Syria, etc.
1) Some people are simply mentally ill. After the first Japanese hostage was killed by ISIS, it came out that he was mentally ill. Not mentally ill enough to need to be locked away, but clearly incapable of making rational decisions regarding his own safety. People like this are simply always going to gravitate towards dangerous places because the internet makes sure that they know where the really dangerous places are.
2) Some people believe that they are special and the bad guys won't go after them because they are "helping". Most of the hostages fall into this category. Weinstein was like this. Alan Henning fell into this category and possibly the first one as well. Reports are that Henning believed to the very end that the fact that he was there to help would save his life. Sometimes these people get away with being in a dangerous location once and they think that they are simply lucky and won't ever be harmed. Henning went into Syria several times and was left alone. The second Japanese hostage executed by ISIS went to help the first one and he went because he'd been to the area before and thought he was special and the bad guys would leave him alone.
3) Some people are so overcome with their desire to help others that they can't rationally assess the danger and while they know if they are captured it's going to end very badly for them, they believe that they will simply beat the odds. Remember many years ago when Americans and Europeans volunteered to be human shields for Saddam Hussein? They were like this. A few months ago it got announced that a young American female hostage was supposedly killed in a bombing raid against ISIS. She had operated in the area previously and had to know the danger, but she believed that because nobody had yet bothered her that she could work there at no risk. She died as a result of being wrong about that.
There's some overlap between those vague 3 reasons I gave for people ignoring the real danger to be in places like Pakistan and Syria and so on, but I don't know how we can ever stop people from willingly becoming victims of their own bad decisions about personal risk.