Watch the space shuttle program make a dramatic re-appearance. This is a massive national security issue that I bet no one brought up when they decided, "Gee, lets go and outsource our rockets and launches to a foreign power we've had cold relations with since the early 20th century."
Good post, but you're wrong about the shuttle. It's gone - forever. It's been proven to be a non-starter. I doubt that anybody anywhere will ever try it again and here is why. The shuttle requires massive booster rockets to be strapped to it to get it into orbit. This is its truly fatal flaw. The shuttle Columbia disaster was caused when part of the foam that attached the boosters to the shuttle fell off and fatally damaged the shuttle so that it burned up on re-entry. There is no way to prevent this from happening again with a shuttle. The risk may be low, but it's not zero, as the Columbia proved. The current Orion technology that is NASA's future has nothing to do with the shuttle and is what I would call a "back to the future" design that's inspired by the old Apollo modules. Orion and the old school Russian rockets may not be sexy, but the astronauts don't have to worry about burning up on re-entry because foam fell away and struck the vehicle.
Surely this is scaremongering right? Or does anyone actually worry about such scenarios on a daily basis?
I'm an American. That's important to this reply. Some people here actually do worry about such scenarios all the time. Roughly a couple of months ago a guy I used to work with in another city on another job posted on Facebook about how he brought his gun to WalMart. While he and his wife were in the parking lot, a bum came up to them. The wife freaked out, the guy showed his gun, and the bum quickly walked away. I wasn't there so I can't really judge, but the account as posted hardly seemed like the guy's life was in danger, yet it's not hard to imagine this going horribly wrong and a guy being shot just for panhandling. I worked with another guy on a different job and he used to take his gun with him everywhere he went, including places like McDonald's, because he never felt safe anywhere. One of my friends who works for a defense contractor told me about how he and a another guy got sent to a US military base in a different state then where they were employed. "Other guy" refused to travel anywhere without his guns, so he checked them into his baggage and put them in his rental car. Only problem was that somehow his rental car got examined by base security. Outsiders aren't allowed to bring guns onto the base without permission and he didn't have it. He got fired from the job as a result of the problem it caused. So yes. Some people here really do feel that they can't go anywhere without their guns.
Facebook and Microsoft want cheaper workers, they lobby the gov't (i.e. grease palms with money) for more H1B. Disney wants to milk more money out of Mickey Mouse, it lobbies the gov't until copyright laws extend for centuries. And please explain how this benefits the public (as opposed to benefitting Microsoft/Disney).
The copyright problem is actually easy to fix. The president needs to tell Congress that if copyrights are so valuable they need to be extended, then why is this being done for free? Pitch it to the Republicans as a way for the government to avoid raising taxes by having copyright owners start to pay their fair share and call it something like having the government give a guy a free barn because he paid for a horse. Let copyrights at first go for whatever they cost now. Change the law so that after 25 years they can be renewed to go to the current limits (roughly 75 years) by paying, say, $100000 per copyright. After that, allow 15 year renewals, but each renewal goes up by orders of magnitude. The first renewal is $1 million. The next one is $100 million. The one after that is $1 billion. After that, set it to $100 billion and no more renewals after that.
The H1B problem is something that can't easily be fixed. Businesses use these to hire workers at rates under what US workers would get. I learned a long time ago that rich people, including companies, are really good at protecting their money. H1B will only grow.
First, any public poll with close to 90% outcome should be suspect.
There are 10% Crimean Tatar and 25% Ukrainian nationals in the Crimea, that makes Putin's figures unbelievable.
And even people who identify with Russia do not necessarily all want to actually join it under Putin's regime.
This is quite right. I'm an American and I've spent a grand total of several months in Ukraine in the first half of the decade of the 2000s. I can speak Russian well. I was by pure luck, not by plan, on the ground in Ukraine while the Orange Revolution of 2004 was happening and I saw if first hand. What was just amazing at the time is how insanely bad the Russians and their Ukrainian lackeys are at cheating in elections. In 2004 some of the oblasts (this is something like a state or region) reported vote totals approaching 100% for the entire state for Yanukovich. I had no doubt that Yanukovich easily won his home oblast, but the 98% in favor of him reported in the first (later thrown out) voting was just absurd. Other regions came out with equally absurd totals, such as Odessa with something like 90%. I believe that Yanukovich truly won every oblast he was said to have won in the original 2004 elections, but none of them were won with the vote totals reported. The Russians and their Ukrainian lackeys like to report huge super majorities in their favor and no sane person believes the vote totals reported.
Some years ago I worked for a company almost nobody here would have ever heard of. We struggled quite a bit in North America, but sales in other parts of the world were fairly good. Microsoft was one of our customers. In fact, I used to have to go to our data center from time to time and we had equipment for them in a special rack. We put out a paper exactly like the one discussed here, where my company "proved" that open source software had all these "secret" costs that made Microsoft a better deal. It was quite amusing because actually a rather significant chunk of our business depended on Linux and the services we actually ran under Windows were unreliable. To those of us who worked there, it was a pretty transparent attempt to keep the small business Microsoft sent our way and to maybe try to get them to send us more. The industry completely ignored our paper and I left the company some months later. I have no idea what the end result was, but I would be really surprised if Microsoft still uses my former employer for anything.
This is a pretty reliable method of creating new terrorists.
Don't know if you're an ignorant American or an EU pacifist, but we tried doing nothing before (see Jimmy Carter presidency). Didn't work so well. In fact it made the terrorists even more emboldened because they knew that nobody would ever come to get them. At least this way people know that they may have to pay for fighting America.
Also, if the company does well, you may get $20-$50K out of it. If the company does really well, you may get $100K. Don't even think about being in the next Google or Facebook, It. Will. Not. Happen. Even if you're in a superbly great company that's going to be making billions, you need to have an employee number less than 10 to become fabulously wealthy from it.
So what this means is, do NOT bypass the salary. Getting a decent salary can more than make up for the lack of equity. That equity may not pay for for 10 years, and all the while it's being diluted.
I would suggest that the word may in those first 2 sentences needs to be boldfaced. I was hired to work for a startup right at the end of their startup days as they got bought out by a Fortune 500 company. I still work for that Fortune 500 company. My co-workers who were there at the very beginning of the startup were given stock in the company and they were all convinced that that they were going to get a sweet paycheck out of it. They got, at most, $10000 (US dollars) out of the stock sale. Many didn't get that. Sure, that's better than nothing, but I got the impression that they were figuring $20000 would be the absolute low end of their stock sale and they were wrong. The people who founded the company all left as millionaires. The employees they hired, even those at the very beginning, didn't even get enough to pay for a new subcompact car.
You hire someone and hand over a COPY of the keys. Rule #1 is that you ALWAYS know admin passwords and whatnot. That's not only for your comfort, it's part of due dilligence as your new guy might be hit by a bus on the way home after his first day. Then you step out of the way and do the important job of running the company. If you're not comfortable with this, reexamine your career path. It's time to let it go.
This is very good advice, but I'd like to elaborate a bit on this. First of all, somebody, but not necessarily you (I have no idea how things work in your company) does need to know those passwords besides the new guy. I'd also like to suggest that you make that requirement an up front part of your interview process to find your replacement. Find out if the guy has a problem with it and explain bluntly that it's not negotiable and he will be expected on his first day as one of his very first duties to turn those over and you need to know right now if he is going to have a problem with that. The last thing you want is to hire some guy who won't give you the information because he is some kind of misguided whacko (like the infamous San Francisco network admin who was the subject of a very contentious Slashdot debate over his actions a few years ago) or some kind of prima donna who fears he might lose his job at a moment's notice if he doesn't retain secret knowledge that nobody else knows. I'd advise you to ask some probing technical questions to make sure he/she knows his/her stuff as the IT world is full of bs artists. I feel pretty strongly that asking those bizarre Microsoft, etc. questions like "How many quarters would it take to build a stack from the earth to the moon?" and so on accomplishes nothing. Asking someone "Describe briefly in general terms how you would write a script to do task X" where X is something real world that could occur on your job is useful. If you use, say, Perl a lot and the new person is going to have to understand and maintain/change existing Perl scripts, you really should find out if they know enough to do that or not. Maybe the applicant is some kind of Ruby genius, but if you have an existing use of Perl and he doesn't know it at all, you may not want him reinventing the wheel and re-writing everything in Ruby so he (and maybe nobody else) can maintain it.
Netflix and Amazon, as streaming content providers, have apps on various devices such as some smart TVs, Roku, etc. At present I'm not aware of any Yahoo video app like that. Sure, the kids will just watch on their laptops - if they care enough to watch such shows and assuming they hear about them - but the older crowd that buys Roku, Amazon Fire, and similar devices won't watch without a dedicated app. We'll see what happens, but this sounds like a foolish thing for Yahoo to do unless they are able to get viewers that somehow (ads) translates into revenue.
I suppose anything could happen, but making a TV show doesn't seem to fit with Apple and Microsoft's business model. Google may do it or may not care about it at all and view it as a distraction - 50-50 on that. This is the first big decision Yahoo has made under Marissa Mayer that makes me wonder if they know what they are doing. I haven't necessarily agreed with everything she's done, but none of the other decisions seemed to be grasping at straws in desperation like this one does. It makes me wonder if things at Yahoo are actually pretty bad if this seems like a good idea to them. Well, if I'm wrong and Yahoo is right, they'll make some money and if I'm right that this idea won't work, I guess they won't be any worse off unless it spooks investors that they really are out of good ideas to raise revenue.
Rich guys attempt to influence industry dear to their hip pockets.
In other news, the damage from these abuses of democracy could be mitigated with some sane campaign contribution reform legislation.
Yes, wealth will always have more than its proportionate share of say, but it gets worse if you leave it alone to fix itself.
Please tell me that you are not a US citizen or if you are, you simply don't keep up with the news. The US Supreme Court has ruled consistently in recent cases that any campaign finance restrictions are infringing on free speech. At this point I'm not sure that any law could be written that the 5 members who have voted against campaign contribution restrictions would accept. It's going to take a Constitutional amendment and the odds of that happening are so low, we might as well just wait for the court to reach a liberal majority sometime in the future as that would probably take less time. Republicans like no campaign limits right now and they control the majority of state legislatures.
Depends on how you define "win". You sound suspiciously Canadian to me.
Yes, basically the War of 1812 was a failed attempt by the US to do a land grab on Canada and annex it by force, but there were some legitimate gripes by the US, notably the British practice of kidnapping American citizens and forcing them to serve in the British Navy, but that was not the only legitimate complaint on which to base the war. I cannot personally say how much or little "Canadian" forces played in the war. I'm pretty sure that it wasn't a bunch of Canucks who burned down Washington DC or got their rears handed to them at New Orleans (yes, after the war officially ended). I also am of the opinion that Canadians have very greatly exaggerated the role their militias played and while it isn't fair to say they did nothing, it's also not accurate at all to act, like you do, that they did almost all of the heavy lifting of the war in the US itself and the British were little more than interested spectators as you seem to imply.
I think just about anybody would happy to "lose" a war with this outcome. Canada "won" in so far as they did successfully repel US attempts to annex them by force. The US lost no territory, as you admit, US points were made about impressment, which stopped, A lasting peace treaty followed and set the stage for US-UK friendship which exists to this day. US naval commanders won some impressive victories and the US Navy emerged from the war with a new found respect within the US and the Navy began to get a bigger share of the US military budget as it became obvious that the young nation needed a strong navy for national defense. You act like the US won no victories at all or almost none before the war ended, which is not true at all. Yes, British/Canadian forces did a lot of winning in the war, maybe most of it, but there were some huge US victories at various times. Most historians consider this a stalemate, but your take on this is really simplistic and hard to justify.
Reading between the lines though, I wonder what Putin is up to. Why bother with this?
It's likely for domestic consumption and it's just a useful coincidence that it gives him a chance to have a proxy take a shot at the USA. Putin's current line of reasoning is that Russia and its people are under constant attack by Western powers who wish to oppress them. This is part of his justification for taking Crimea back and if he has his eye on Eastern Ukraine it will be part of that as well - ethnic Russians are under duress by evil, anti-Semitic, fascist Ukrainians and Putin is the white knight who can save them. Whether he actually believes this line of reasoning or not is a question I am unsure of, but it is the public justification for what he is doing. I have to admit that I am a bit amused about his rationale because it seems to me that Russia is actually getting closer and closer to being a fascist state, but beating the old fascist boogeyman is always good to get Ivan Q. Publik riled up and on the side of the tsar, cough cough, I mean President Putin.
That's what's great about the legal system. Procedural rules trump right and wrong.
My best friend is an attorney and he has explained a lot about the US legal system to me. Basically judges don't like ambiguity. If people don't do things according to procedure and they get away with it, it opens the door for others to try it. For example, suppose someone is facing the death penalty in a US state that has it. A defendant could represent himself and if he loses the case (he probably will) then he can appeal that he had "incompetent legal representation" and try to get a new trial and role the dice again on the outcome. In fact, every time you lose you could just argue that no matter who the lawyer is and try to get a new trial until you win. There actually were a few cases more or less like this years ago and courts quickly realized that this was going to get out of hand so when defendants try to represent themselves, they are advised against it and warned that trying to argue on appeal that they didn't have proper legal representation won't work. So Lavabit blew it and tried a Hail Mary by gambling that the judge might feel sorry for them and overlook the procedural mistakes. It wasn't likely to work, but the US is a large country with a lot of judges and there probably is a judge somewhere who would have bought it, it's just that most won't because they don't like the potential outcome of allowing this, namely that other cases could have lawyers deliberately make procedural mistakes so if they lose the case, they can make that the basis of an appeal. Lots of people have incompetent lawyers work for them. It's not just death penalty cases. I have a friend who got cleaned out financially in a divorce case because he hired a bottom dollar lawyer and he got bottom dollar representation in court. The few cases where they have been punishingly large judgements in favor of the RIAA for "music sharing" have all involved shockingly inept legal representation for the defendant.
In Sydney we just arrested the State Premier for corruption over a bottle of wine. The system works. The Prime minister is not above the law in Australia. Something that the USA has never managed to sort out with their corrupt system. Nixon should have been jailed, but really the rot had started to set in long before then. The Greens in Australia are a credible threat to the Liberal and Labor parties. Unlike America, where there is no alternative political movement that can ever get into office. The minor parties in Australia actually get to set policy and ensure that the average person retains a speaking voice in our government.
That's not fair. The office of president is a completely different thing altogether and Nixon did ultimately resign when he realized that the alternative was to possibly be removed from office and maybe go to jail. Very important Congressmen have been jailed over corruption. The US legal system is incompetent at times and that's a fair charge, but it's not really corrupt. Bill Clinton was actually impeached ("impeach" does not mean "removed from office") while President over lying under oath in a court case, but when tried before the Senate he was not removed from office. The court case just happened to involve him cheating on his wife and Clinton's handlers were geniuses in that they were able to spin it as him being on trial for infidelity to Hillary when in fact he was on trial for lying under oath about cheating on Hillary. Vice-President Spiro Agnew was probably facing imprisonment (it had nothing to do with Nixon's issues as it was a tax avoidance case) when he got a plea bargain to resign from the vice-presidency and face some lesser charges. If you want to argue that US presidents get a free pass for misconduct, you probably have a point, but as I don't know enough about Australian Prime Ministers to be able to comment on their lives, I can't say whether an Aussie PM would get special treatment or not if caught breaking the law.
You are being naive in your definition of wealth and are in fact completely very wrong in this. But don't feel ashamed, many other middle/upper class around the world have this wrong also and that is why they vote republican (in the US) or for other neo-con parties that do not actually represent their interests in practice - despite their rhetoric. (studies showing that many in the middle classes believing they will be wealthy soon and thus voting as if they were)
This has been going on for a long time. Percentage wise very few Americans actually owned slaves yet it's estimated that somewhere between half a million and 1.5 million men served in the Confederate Army. That's a large number of people willing to die to protect the rights of the rich to own another human being. I have little doubt that if there were some kind of mythical Civil War today in the US that millions would willingly lay down their lives to protect the money of the rich and receive absolutely nothing in return for their willingness to fight and possibly die for somebody else's money.
My feelings on the matter:
"If you knew how much money I was supposed to send in, WHY DIDN'T YOU TELL ME IN THE &@#$ING FIRST PLACE! It could have saved everyone time, money and trouble."
They don't really know for a lot of people. Almost every year I have stuff to report that they don't know about at all. I'm pretty sure that they don't know about most if not all of my charitable contributions. I own shares in an investment club and I'll spare you what we have to do to report sales in that. I can assure you that Uncle Sam has no idea about what I'm doing in the club so it's a good thing I am honest and report it. Congratulations on having such a simple tax situation that Uncle Sam apparently knows exactly how much you owe, but I have to ask this - if your taxes are so simple, are you an idiot for hiring an accountant when you could do them yourself if they are that simple?
Some people get away with it for years by simply not turning in their forms or paying anything. Yes, eventually they will probably get caught, but we've had some recent celebrities who thought that they could get away with not paying at all like Lauryn Hill and Wesley Snipes. Snipes in particular tried to justify what he did with a bunch of crackpot excuses that the judge shot down. The fact that people do get away with this for a while shows that the IRS doesn't really know what everybody owes. They probably do have ball park figures for everybody, but not exact amounts for a lot of people.
People can always try to sue Google over this kind of discrimination, but they may not win. First of all, unless you are a person who was personally affected by this, what would likely happen is that the lawsuit would get thrown out, especially on appeal where higher courts often rule that you can't sue just because you don't like something if you're not personally affected by it. So it would require a male student to sue to get the ball rolling. Second there would have to be some kind of proof like a verifiable situation where a male student was refused assistance because the teacher only wanted to help females to get the reward. Third, and this may be most important of all, literally anything can happen in court. Nobody knows what juries or judges will do. The case might go before someone who isn't interested in this issue at all and feels that women have traditionally been discriminated against so this is OK or you might get a very conservative judge/jury who is just adamantly against this kind of "help" for anybody at all who would rule in favor of the boy. Then the losing party can appeal and the exact opposite verdict can happen on appeal and so on. Could take years to resolve it, maybe ultimately ending in a Supreme Court ruling. By the time it finally gets resolved, it may be too late (depending on the age of the student) for anything to be accomplished even if the boy wins. He may already be in college and have learned programming or moved on to some other area of study.
.. that the Cuban government still think the US gives a damn about their 3rd world Island apart from Guantanamo Bay. Since the USSR collapsed its been pretty irrelevant in the scheme of things other than a source of refugees and comedy revolutionaries in green slacks with silly beards.
Well, the problem is that there are some people who do care and their influence is way out of whack with regards to their actual numbers. There are a small number of members of the US House and Senate who are offspring of Cuban refugees and they have a lot of influence. The younger generation of people who immigrated many years ago has little interest in continuing the embargo, but there are still enough of the old hardcore anti-Castro people in Florida that no president is willing to undo the embargo for fear of the next presidential election going against his party. Florida is a hotly contested state that gives a very thin majority to whoever wins it in the presidential elections. Florida has a lot of electoral votes. So if you piss off, say, 40 or 50 thousand voters who care a lot (maybe too much) about the Castro brothers and Cuba, you could lose the next presidential election. So the president never has the courage to drop the embargo as either he or his party's next candidate will face angry voters in the next presidential election and it could be enough to decide the race in favor of the other party. It's rather remarkable to see an entire country held hostage to the whims of a really small group of people over one issue, but that's exactly how it is here.
Basically, if you can't get the people it's because you're not prepared to pay (that includes money, benefits and training).
I agree with the post (just quoted the last part to save space), but I'd also point out that banks are going to have to overpay to get young people interested in learning this. You're trying to get new workers interested in what actually is dying technology. If one day your bank has an epiphany and decides to port everything to Linux, those trained young workers are likely to be out of a job and finding that the number of people who use that old technology is shrinking, not growing. Your bank could get bought out by a larger bank who uses more modern computers and the same problem occurs for the displaced younger workers who have skills that nobody wants.
It's a good guess. I'd also say that the Red Sox and A's make the short list of teams that have people in the front office who might see some value in this, although the A's are run on the cheap so it is a little hard to think they'd pay for this.
Not in my last 6 flights they haven't, at least not without trying to be incredibly covert about it which I seriously doubt. All these flights were within Europe or SE Asia, I don't know if head counts are more common in other regions.
Within the US they definitely count the passengers. I flew between Canada and Asia last year and I don't remember if they counted or not, but on flights within the USA they definitely do count. There was a rather embarrassing incident where a minor without a ticket of any kind got on a plane in the US and nobody ever did anything to make sure he was in the right place or even had a ticket for the flight. I think now all the airlines want to make sure that kind of thing never happens again, because if a kid can do it, an adult with bad intentions may be able to do ti too.
The problem is not religion. Yes, there are some religion people who hate science, but they are on the fringe. There are some fundamentalist Christians who are very anti-evolution, but they do not reject science. I have a friend who works as a chemical engineer and he rejects evolution, but he certainly doesn't disbelieve the general principles of chemistry. In fact, his company is desperate to keep him that they basically let him take however much vacation he wants every year just to keep him happy and his company is one of the largest in its industry. Arguments against evolution denying are a whole other subject and not really the issue here.
There is a saying that "all politics in local" and in America that's really true. For my whole life Congress has had members, usually in the House of Representatives which is voted on in a district level in the individual states, who are just wildly out of step with the rest of the country. People who hold crazy beliefs sometimes get elected because they just happen to live in a part of the country that accepts those beliefs. Sometimes people get elected simply because of party affiliation. It may be that they are a stupid and horrible candidate, but at least they aren't a member of the other political party. I'd guess that maybe 70-80% of voters vote simply on party affiliation and for no other reason. Climate change denial plays big in the Republican Party right now as does religious belief, but the two things are not sets with 100% the same members in each. For example, Newt Gingrich is religious and has bona fide conservative credentials yet he certainly believes in climate change. Various members of Congress, particularly in the House, are just huge embarrassments but they keep going back because very few voters will ever consider voting for a member of what they consider to be "the other party", so if an idiot wins the nomination of his/her party in the primary, the regular election victory is almost assured. For most of my life I have lived in wildly uncompetitive districts for both parties where the winner of the primary never had to worry about his/her general election opponent because the voters would simply never vote in large numbers for the "other party" candidate.
I see a different possible reason for this than "bad totalitarian government gets scared of loss of control", but my sample size is small so I may be very wrong here. I know some Chinese citizens and they are unusually interested in the stock market and money making schemes. They don't really understand even a little bit how the stock market works, yet they remain convinced that it's easy to invest a pittance and come out rich. It may be simply that the government is tired of dealing with citizens who don't have even the faintest understanding of how markets work and they don't want to see a bunch of dummies investing their life savings into bitcoin and maybe going bust because I guarantee you that if that happens, the same people who lost their money would demand that the government make them whole.
"hit there targets". Their, their, their, THEIR! Basic kingergarten-level knowledge. Damn idiocracy. 10 years from now, everyone will spell "right" as "rite" and posts complaining about it will get downvoted. Mark my words. (after all, most people already think "definitely" is spelled "definately", and can't tell the difference between "doing good" and "doing well")
It's even worse than that. There/their/they're confusion has been around a long time, but what just baffles me is that younger people today actually think that "prolly" is a real word. I talked to a relative who is in college right now and pointed out to him that "prolly" wasn't a real word and it was "probably" and he looked just shocked as he replied to me that he did not ever recall seeing the word "probably" in his life.
The other theory is that Amazon believes users will prefer it as a premium branded product, again like Apple. The product does not need to compete with Roku on price, in that case, but does need to compete on features.
My guess is it's this and right now Amazon seems to be betting that people want what is basically a Roku with a whole lot less video options and a whole lot more game options. Seems like a strange bet to me and not what I would think as the people I know who have Roku (including me) aren't interested in the game part of it, which isn't much.
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Watch the space shuttle program make a dramatic re-appearance. This is a massive national security issue that I bet no one brought up when they decided, "Gee, lets go and outsource our rockets and launches to a foreign power we've had cold relations with since the early 20th century."
Good post, but you're wrong about the shuttle. It's gone - forever. It's been proven to be a non-starter. I doubt that anybody anywhere will ever try it again and here is why. The shuttle requires massive booster rockets to be strapped to it to get it into orbit. This is its truly fatal flaw. The shuttle Columbia disaster was caused when part of the foam that attached the boosters to the shuttle fell off and fatally damaged the shuttle so that it burned up on re-entry. There is no way to prevent this from happening again with a shuttle. The risk may be low, but it's not zero, as the Columbia proved. The current Orion technology that is NASA's future has nothing to do with the shuttle and is what I would call a "back to the future" design that's inspired by the old Apollo modules. Orion and the old school Russian rockets may not be sexy, but the astronauts don't have to worry about burning up on re-entry because foam fell away and struck the vehicle.
Surely this is scaremongering right? Or does anyone actually worry about such scenarios on a daily basis?
I'm an American. That's important to this reply. Some people here actually do worry about such scenarios all the time. Roughly a couple of months ago a guy I used to work with in another city on another job posted on Facebook about how he brought his gun to WalMart. While he and his wife were in the parking lot, a bum came up to them. The wife freaked out, the guy showed his gun, and the bum quickly walked away. I wasn't there so I can't really judge, but the account as posted hardly seemed like the guy's life was in danger, yet it's not hard to imagine this going horribly wrong and a guy being shot just for panhandling. I worked with another guy on a different job and he used to take his gun with him everywhere he went, including places like McDonald's, because he never felt safe anywhere. One of my friends who works for a defense contractor told me about how he and a another guy got sent to a US military base in a different state then where they were employed. "Other guy" refused to travel anywhere without his guns, so he checked them into his baggage and put them in his rental car. Only problem was that somehow his rental car got examined by base security. Outsiders aren't allowed to bring guns onto the base without permission and he didn't have it. He got fired from the job as a result of the problem it caused. So yes. Some people here really do feel that they can't go anywhere without their guns.
Facebook and Microsoft want cheaper workers, they lobby the gov't (i.e. grease palms with money) for more H1B. Disney wants to milk more money out of Mickey Mouse, it lobbies the gov't until copyright laws extend for centuries. And please explain how this benefits the public (as opposed to benefitting Microsoft/Disney).
The copyright problem is actually easy to fix. The president needs to tell Congress that if copyrights are so valuable they need to be extended, then why is this being done for free? Pitch it to the Republicans as a way for the government to avoid raising taxes by having copyright owners start to pay their fair share and call it something like having the government give a guy a free barn because he paid for a horse. Let copyrights at first go for whatever they cost now. Change the law so that after 25 years they can be renewed to go to the current limits (roughly 75 years) by paying, say, $100000 per copyright. After that, allow 15 year renewals, but each renewal goes up by orders of magnitude. The first renewal is $1 million. The next one is $100 million. The one after that is $1 billion. After that, set it to $100 billion and no more renewals after that.
The H1B problem is something that can't easily be fixed. Businesses use these to hire workers at rates under what US workers would get. I learned a long time ago that rich people, including companies, are really good at protecting their money. H1B will only grow.
First, any public poll with close to 90% outcome should be suspect.
There are 10% Crimean Tatar and 25% Ukrainian nationals in the Crimea, that makes Putin's figures unbelievable.
And even people who identify with Russia do not necessarily all want to actually join it under Putin's regime.
This is quite right. I'm an American and I've spent a grand total of several months in Ukraine in the first half of the decade of the 2000s. I can speak Russian well. I was by pure luck, not by plan, on the ground in Ukraine while the Orange Revolution of 2004 was happening and I saw if first hand. What was just amazing at the time is how insanely bad the Russians and their Ukrainian lackeys are at cheating in elections. In 2004 some of the oblasts (this is something like a state or region) reported vote totals approaching 100% for the entire state for Yanukovich. I had no doubt that Yanukovich easily won his home oblast, but the 98% in favor of him reported in the first (later thrown out) voting was just absurd. Other regions came out with equally absurd totals, such as Odessa with something like 90%. I believe that Yanukovich truly won every oblast he was said to have won in the original 2004 elections, but none of them were won with the vote totals reported. The Russians and their Ukrainian lackeys like to report huge super majorities in their favor and no sane person believes the vote totals reported.
Some years ago I worked for a company almost nobody here would have ever heard of. We struggled quite a bit in North America, but sales in other parts of the world were fairly good. Microsoft was one of our customers. In fact, I used to have to go to our data center from time to time and we had equipment for them in a special rack. We put out a paper exactly like the one discussed here, where my company "proved" that open source software had all these "secret" costs that made Microsoft a better deal. It was quite amusing because actually a rather significant chunk of our business depended on Linux and the services we actually ran under Windows were unreliable. To those of us who worked there, it was a pretty transparent attempt to keep the small business Microsoft sent our way and to maybe try to get them to send us more. The industry completely ignored our paper and I left the company some months later. I have no idea what the end result was, but I would be really surprised if Microsoft still uses my former employer for anything.
This is a pretty reliable method of creating new terrorists.
Don't know if you're an ignorant American or an EU pacifist, but we tried doing nothing before (see Jimmy Carter presidency). Didn't work so well. In fact it made the terrorists even more emboldened because they knew that nobody would ever come to get them. At least this way people know that they may have to pay for fighting America.
Also, if the company does well, you may get $20-$50K out of it. If the company does really well, you may get $100K. Don't even think about being in the next Google or Facebook, It. Will. Not. Happen. Even if you're in a superbly great company that's going to be making billions, you need to have an employee number less than 10 to become fabulously wealthy from it.
So what this means is, do NOT bypass the salary. Getting a decent salary can more than make up for the lack of equity. That equity may not pay for for 10 years, and all the while it's being diluted.
I would suggest that the word may in those first 2 sentences needs to be boldfaced. I was hired to work for a startup right at the end of their startup days as they got bought out by a Fortune 500 company. I still work for that Fortune 500 company. My co-workers who were there at the very beginning of the startup were given stock in the company and they were all convinced that that they were going to get a sweet paycheck out of it. They got, at most, $10000 (US dollars) out of the stock sale. Many didn't get that. Sure, that's better than nothing, but I got the impression that they were figuring $20000 would be the absolute low end of their stock sale and they were wrong. The people who founded the company all left as millionaires. The employees they hired, even those at the very beginning, didn't even get enough to pay for a new subcompact car.
You hire someone and hand over a COPY of the keys. Rule #1 is that you ALWAYS know admin passwords and whatnot. That's not only for your comfort, it's part of due dilligence as your new guy might be hit by a bus on the way home after his first day. Then you step out of the way and do the important job of running the company. If you're not comfortable with this, reexamine your career path. It's time to let it go.
This is very good advice, but I'd like to elaborate a bit on this. First of all, somebody, but not necessarily you (I have no idea how things work in your company) does need to know those passwords besides the new guy. I'd also like to suggest that you make that requirement an up front part of your interview process to find your replacement. Find out if the guy has a problem with it and explain bluntly that it's not negotiable and he will be expected on his first day as one of his very first duties to turn those over and you need to know right now if he is going to have a problem with that. The last thing you want is to hire some guy who won't give you the information because he is some kind of misguided whacko (like the infamous San Francisco network admin who was the subject of a very contentious Slashdot debate over his actions a few years ago) or some kind of prima donna who fears he might lose his job at a moment's notice if he doesn't retain secret knowledge that nobody else knows. I'd advise you to ask some probing technical questions to make sure he/she knows his/her stuff as the IT world is full of bs artists. I feel pretty strongly that asking those bizarre Microsoft, etc. questions like "How many quarters would it take to build a stack from the earth to the moon?" and so on accomplishes nothing. Asking someone "Describe briefly in general terms how you would write a script to do task X" where X is something real world that could occur on your job is useful. If you use, say, Perl a lot and the new person is going to have to understand and maintain/change existing Perl scripts, you really should find out if they know enough to do that or not. Maybe the applicant is some kind of Ruby genius, but if you have an existing use of Perl and he doesn't know it at all, you may not want him reinventing the wheel and re-writing everything in Ruby so he (and maybe nobody else) can maintain it.
Netflix and Amazon, as streaming content providers, have apps on various devices such as some smart TVs, Roku, etc. At present I'm not aware of any Yahoo video app like that. Sure, the kids will just watch on their laptops - if they care enough to watch such shows and assuming they hear about them - but the older crowd that buys Roku, Amazon Fire, and similar devices won't watch without a dedicated app. We'll see what happens, but this sounds like a foolish thing for Yahoo to do unless they are able to get viewers that somehow (ads) translates into revenue.
I suppose anything could happen, but making a TV show doesn't seem to fit with Apple and Microsoft's business model. Google may do it or may not care about it at all and view it as a distraction - 50-50 on that. This is the first big decision Yahoo has made under Marissa Mayer that makes me wonder if they know what they are doing. I haven't necessarily agreed with everything she's done, but none of the other decisions seemed to be grasping at straws in desperation like this one does. It makes me wonder if things at Yahoo are actually pretty bad if this seems like a good idea to them. Well, if I'm wrong and Yahoo is right, they'll make some money and if I'm right that this idea won't work, I guess they won't be any worse off unless it spooks investors that they really are out of good ideas to raise revenue.
Rich guys attempt to influence industry dear to their hip pockets.
In other news, the damage from these abuses of democracy could be mitigated with some sane campaign contribution reform legislation.
Yes, wealth will always have more than its proportionate share of say, but it gets worse if you leave it alone to fix itself.
Please tell me that you are not a US citizen or if you are, you simply don't keep up with the news. The US Supreme Court has ruled consistently in recent cases that any campaign finance restrictions are infringing on free speech. At this point I'm not sure that any law could be written that the 5 members who have voted against campaign contribution restrictions would accept. It's going to take a Constitutional amendment and the odds of that happening are so low, we might as well just wait for the court to reach a liberal majority sometime in the future as that would probably take less time. Republicans like no campaign limits right now and they control the majority of state legislatures.
Depends on how you define "win". You sound suspiciously Canadian to me.
Yes, basically the War of 1812 was a failed attempt by the US to do a land grab on Canada and annex it by force, but there were some legitimate gripes by the US, notably the British practice of kidnapping American citizens and forcing them to serve in the British Navy, but that was not the only legitimate complaint on which to base the war. I cannot personally say how much or little "Canadian" forces played in the war. I'm pretty sure that it wasn't a bunch of Canucks who burned down Washington DC or got their rears handed to them at New Orleans (yes, after the war officially ended). I also am of the opinion that Canadians have very greatly exaggerated the role their militias played and while it isn't fair to say they did nothing, it's also not accurate at all to act, like you do, that they did almost all of the heavy lifting of the war in the US itself and the British were little more than interested spectators as you seem to imply.
I think just about anybody would happy to "lose" a war with this outcome. Canada "won" in so far as they did successfully repel US attempts to annex them by force. The US lost no territory, as you admit, US points were made about impressment, which stopped, A lasting peace treaty followed and set the stage for US-UK friendship which exists to this day. US naval commanders won some impressive victories and the US Navy emerged from the war with a new found respect within the US and the Navy began to get a bigger share of the US military budget as it became obvious that the young nation needed a strong navy for national defense. You act like the US won no victories at all or almost none before the war ended, which is not true at all. Yes, British/Canadian forces did a lot of winning in the war, maybe most of it, but there were some huge US victories at various times. Most historians consider this a stalemate, but your take on this is really simplistic and hard to justify.
Reading between the lines though, I wonder what Putin is up to. Why bother with this?
It's likely for domestic consumption and it's just a useful coincidence that it gives him a chance to have a proxy take a shot at the USA. Putin's current line of reasoning is that Russia and its people are under constant attack by Western powers who wish to oppress them. This is part of his justification for taking Crimea back and if he has his eye on Eastern Ukraine it will be part of that as well - ethnic Russians are under duress by evil, anti-Semitic, fascist Ukrainians and Putin is the white knight who can save them. Whether he actually believes this line of reasoning or not is a question I am unsure of, but it is the public justification for what he is doing. I have to admit that I am a bit amused about his rationale because it seems to me that Russia is actually getting closer and closer to being a fascist state, but beating the old fascist boogeyman is always good to get Ivan Q. Publik riled up and on the side of the tsar, cough cough, I mean President Putin.
That's what's great about the legal system. Procedural rules trump right and wrong.
My best friend is an attorney and he has explained a lot about the US legal system to me. Basically judges don't like ambiguity. If people don't do things according to procedure and they get away with it, it opens the door for others to try it. For example, suppose someone is facing the death penalty in a US state that has it. A defendant could represent himself and if he loses the case (he probably will) then he can appeal that he had "incompetent legal representation" and try to get a new trial and role the dice again on the outcome. In fact, every time you lose you could just argue that no matter who the lawyer is and try to get a new trial until you win. There actually were a few cases more or less like this years ago and courts quickly realized that this was going to get out of hand so when defendants try to represent themselves, they are advised against it and warned that trying to argue on appeal that they didn't have proper legal representation won't work. So Lavabit blew it and tried a Hail Mary by gambling that the judge might feel sorry for them and overlook the procedural mistakes. It wasn't likely to work, but the US is a large country with a lot of judges and there probably is a judge somewhere who would have bought it, it's just that most won't because they don't like the potential outcome of allowing this, namely that other cases could have lawyers deliberately make procedural mistakes so if they lose the case, they can make that the basis of an appeal. Lots of people have incompetent lawyers work for them. It's not just death penalty cases. I have a friend who got cleaned out financially in a divorce case because he hired a bottom dollar lawyer and he got bottom dollar representation in court. The few cases where they have been punishingly large judgements in favor of the RIAA for "music sharing" have all involved shockingly inept legal representation for the defendant.
In Sydney we just arrested the State Premier for corruption over a bottle of wine. The system works. The Prime minister is not above the law in Australia. Something that the USA has never managed to sort out with their corrupt system. Nixon should have been jailed, but really the rot had started to set in long before then. The Greens in Australia are a credible threat to the Liberal and Labor parties. Unlike America, where there is no alternative political movement that can ever get into office. The minor parties in Australia actually get to set policy and ensure that the average person retains a speaking voice in our government.
That's not fair. The office of president is a completely different thing altogether and Nixon did ultimately resign when he realized that the alternative was to possibly be removed from office and maybe go to jail. Very important Congressmen have been jailed over corruption. The US legal system is incompetent at times and that's a fair charge, but it's not really corrupt. Bill Clinton was actually impeached ("impeach" does not mean "removed from office") while President over lying under oath in a court case, but when tried before the Senate he was not removed from office. The court case just happened to involve him cheating on his wife and Clinton's handlers were geniuses in that they were able to spin it as him being on trial for infidelity to Hillary when in fact he was on trial for lying under oath about cheating on Hillary. Vice-President Spiro Agnew was probably facing imprisonment (it had nothing to do with Nixon's issues as it was a tax avoidance case) when he got a plea bargain to resign from the vice-presidency and face some lesser charges. If you want to argue that US presidents get a free pass for misconduct, you probably have a point, but as I don't know enough about Australian Prime Ministers to be able to comment on their lives, I can't say whether an Aussie PM would get special treatment or not if caught breaking the law.
You are being naive in your definition of wealth and are in fact completely very wrong in this. But don't feel ashamed, many other middle/upper class around the world have this wrong also and that is why they vote republican (in the US) or for other neo-con parties that do not actually represent their interests in practice - despite their rhetoric. (studies showing that many in the middle classes believing they will be wealthy soon and thus voting as if they were)
This has been going on for a long time. Percentage wise very few Americans actually owned slaves yet it's estimated that somewhere between half a million and 1.5 million men served in the Confederate Army. That's a large number of people willing to die to protect the rights of the rich to own another human being. I have little doubt that if there were some kind of mythical Civil War today in the US that millions would willingly lay down their lives to protect the money of the rich and receive absolutely nothing in return for their willingness to fight and possibly die for somebody else's money.
My feelings on the matter: "If you knew how much money I was supposed to send in, WHY DIDN'T YOU TELL ME IN THE &@#$ING FIRST PLACE! It could have saved everyone time, money and trouble."
They don't really know for a lot of people. Almost every year I have stuff to report that they don't know about at all. I'm pretty sure that they don't know about most if not all of my charitable contributions. I own shares in an investment club and I'll spare you what we have to do to report sales in that. I can assure you that Uncle Sam has no idea about what I'm doing in the club so it's a good thing I am honest and report it. Congratulations on having such a simple tax situation that Uncle Sam apparently knows exactly how much you owe, but I have to ask this - if your taxes are so simple, are you an idiot for hiring an accountant when you could do them yourself if they are that simple?
Some people get away with it for years by simply not turning in their forms or paying anything. Yes, eventually they will probably get caught, but we've had some recent celebrities who thought that they could get away with not paying at all like Lauryn Hill and Wesley Snipes. Snipes in particular tried to justify what he did with a bunch of crackpot excuses that the judge shot down. The fact that people do get away with this for a while shows that the IRS doesn't really know what everybody owes. They probably do have ball park figures for everybody, but not exact amounts for a lot of people.
People can always try to sue Google over this kind of discrimination, but they may not win. First of all, unless you are a person who was personally affected by this, what would likely happen is that the lawsuit would get thrown out, especially on appeal where higher courts often rule that you can't sue just because you don't like something if you're not personally affected by it. So it would require a male student to sue to get the ball rolling. Second there would have to be some kind of proof like a verifiable situation where a male student was refused assistance because the teacher only wanted to help females to get the reward. Third, and this may be most important of all, literally anything can happen in court. Nobody knows what juries or judges will do. The case might go before someone who isn't interested in this issue at all and feels that women have traditionally been discriminated against so this is OK or you might get a very conservative judge/jury who is just adamantly against this kind of "help" for anybody at all who would rule in favor of the boy. Then the losing party can appeal and the exact opposite verdict can happen on appeal and so on. Could take years to resolve it, maybe ultimately ending in a Supreme Court ruling. By the time it finally gets resolved, it may be too late (depending on the age of the student) for anything to be accomplished even if the boy wins. He may already be in college and have learned programming or moved on to some other area of study.
.. that the Cuban government still think the US gives a damn about their 3rd world Island apart from Guantanamo Bay. Since the USSR collapsed its been pretty irrelevant in the scheme of things other than a source of refugees and comedy revolutionaries in green slacks with silly beards.
Well, the problem is that there are some people who do care and their influence is way out of whack with regards to their actual numbers. There are a small number of members of the US House and Senate who are offspring of Cuban refugees and they have a lot of influence. The younger generation of people who immigrated many years ago has little interest in continuing the embargo, but there are still enough of the old hardcore anti-Castro people in Florida that no president is willing to undo the embargo for fear of the next presidential election going against his party. Florida is a hotly contested state that gives a very thin majority to whoever wins it in the presidential elections. Florida has a lot of electoral votes. So if you piss off, say, 40 or 50 thousand voters who care a lot (maybe too much) about the Castro brothers and Cuba, you could lose the next presidential election. So the president never has the courage to drop the embargo as either he or his party's next candidate will face angry voters in the next presidential election and it could be enough to decide the race in favor of the other party. It's rather remarkable to see an entire country held hostage to the whims of a really small group of people over one issue, but that's exactly how it is here.
Basically, if you can't get the people it's because you're not prepared to pay (that includes money, benefits and training).
I agree with the post (just quoted the last part to save space), but I'd also point out that banks are going to have to overpay to get young people interested in learning this. You're trying to get new workers interested in what actually is dying technology. If one day your bank has an epiphany and decides to port everything to Linux, those trained young workers are likely to be out of a job and finding that the number of people who use that old technology is shrinking, not growing. Your bank could get bought out by a larger bank who uses more modern computers and the same problem occurs for the displaced younger workers who have skills that nobody wants.
My best guess is it's the Cubs.
It's a good guess. I'd also say that the Red Sox and A's make the short list of teams that have people in the front office who might see some value in this, although the A's are run on the cheap so it is a little hard to think they'd pay for this.
Not in my last 6 flights they haven't, at least not without trying to be incredibly covert about it which I seriously doubt. All these flights were within Europe or SE Asia, I don't know if head counts are more common in other regions.
Within the US they definitely count the passengers. I flew between Canada and Asia last year and I don't remember if they counted or not, but on flights within the USA they definitely do count. There was a rather embarrassing incident where a minor without a ticket of any kind got on a plane in the US and nobody ever did anything to make sure he was in the right place or even had a ticket for the flight. I think now all the airlines want to make sure that kind of thing never happens again, because if a kid can do it, an adult with bad intentions may be able to do ti too.
The problem is not religion. Yes, there are some religion people who hate science, but they are on the fringe. There are some fundamentalist Christians who are very anti-evolution, but they do not reject science. I have a friend who works as a chemical engineer and he rejects evolution, but he certainly doesn't disbelieve the general principles of chemistry. In fact, his company is desperate to keep him that they basically let him take however much vacation he wants every year just to keep him happy and his company is one of the largest in its industry. Arguments against evolution denying are a whole other subject and not really the issue here.
There is a saying that "all politics in local" and in America that's really true. For my whole life Congress has had members, usually in the House of Representatives which is voted on in a district level in the individual states, who are just wildly out of step with the rest of the country. People who hold crazy beliefs sometimes get elected because they just happen to live in a part of the country that accepts those beliefs. Sometimes people get elected simply because of party affiliation. It may be that they are a stupid and horrible candidate, but at least they aren't a member of the other political party. I'd guess that maybe 70-80% of voters vote simply on party affiliation and for no other reason. Climate change denial plays big in the Republican Party right now as does religious belief, but the two things are not sets with 100% the same members in each. For example, Newt Gingrich is religious and has bona fide conservative credentials yet he certainly believes in climate change. Various members of Congress, particularly in the House, are just huge embarrassments but they keep going back because very few voters will ever consider voting for a member of what they consider to be "the other party", so if an idiot wins the nomination of his/her party in the primary, the regular election victory is almost assured. For most of my life I have lived in wildly uncompetitive districts for both parties where the winner of the primary never had to worry about his/her general election opponent because the voters would simply never vote in large numbers for the "other party" candidate.
I see a different possible reason for this than "bad totalitarian government gets scared of loss of control", but my sample size is small so I may be very wrong here. I know some Chinese citizens and they are unusually interested in the stock market and money making schemes. They don't really understand even a little bit how the stock market works, yet they remain convinced that it's easy to invest a pittance and come out rich. It may be simply that the government is tired of dealing with citizens who don't have even the faintest understanding of how markets work and they don't want to see a bunch of dummies investing their life savings into bitcoin and maybe going bust because I guarantee you that if that happens, the same people who lost their money would demand that the government make them whole.
"hit there targets". Their, their, their, THEIR! Basic kingergarten-level knowledge. Damn idiocracy. 10 years from now, everyone will spell "right" as "rite" and posts complaining about it will get downvoted. Mark my words. (after all, most people already think "definitely" is spelled "definately", and can't tell the difference between "doing good" and "doing well")
It's even worse than that. There/their/they're confusion has been around a long time, but what just baffles me is that younger people today actually think that "prolly" is a real word. I talked to a relative who is in college right now and pointed out to him that "prolly" wasn't a real word and it was "probably" and he looked just shocked as he replied to me that he did not ever recall seeing the word "probably" in his life.
The other theory is that Amazon believes users will prefer it as a premium branded product, again like Apple. The product does not need to compete with Roku on price, in that case, but does need to compete on features.
My guess is it's this and right now Amazon seems to be betting that people want what is basically a Roku with a whole lot less video options and a whole lot more game options. Seems like a strange bet to me and not what I would think as the people I know who have Roku (including me) aren't interested in the game part of it, which isn't much.