In national defense, we've been falling backward (in relation to Russia and China) for the last few decades. Our main battle tanks are two generations behind Russia's and their air defense systems are also greatly enhanced. Iran successfully took over one of our most sophisticated drones and captured in, a couple years ago, using electronic warfare... Although we have the F-22 and the F-35 jets, we are falling in most other areas and are even behind in some.
You really shouldn't believe everything you hear. Assuming Iran really did capture a US drone, what possible sense would it make to announce it? That's all propaganda. Or they are idiots beyond belief. If they really did capture the drone, announcing it would just make the US fix whatever problem they exploited so it can't be exploited again. I'd think if Iran really got the drone they would keep that highly classified so they could use it to get more drones in the future or exploit this captured knowledge is some special way down the road. Russia announces stuff all the time just like this that if it was true they really shouldn't announce it, but some folks always believe them anyway.
Also, the cost of war is very prohibitive for us as Congress requires subcontractors in virtually every state to fund any new project. Both potential enemies can easily outlast us in a protracted war, financially.
I can assure you that Russia cannot outlast the US financially - period. That is delusional. China could put up a stronger financial fight, but when US allies stop trading with them, they won't be doing so well. And about a billion people in India really do not want to live in a world where China runs the show, as but one example.
Given China lackluster record in "integrating" the hearts and minds of the Hong Kong residents, who were basically tossed to the wolves by the British after 99 years of dutifully generated revenues for the British Empire. Despite some last minute electoral reforms by the British prior to the 1997 hand over to China, Hong Kong was basically a colonial subject of the Crown without a tradition of electing its own executives.
This is quite right. Wish I could mod this up instead of having to comment. The UK wasn't interested at all in letting Hong Kong people have a big say in their own government and tried to get that snuck into the handover agreement where China rightly pointed out that it was kind of late in the game for the UK to want Hong Kongers to have a say in their local government because the UK sure wasn't interested in that at all prior to having to negotiate the handover.
Taiwan, on the other hand, thanks to continuous US intervention since WWII, has blossomed into a fractious democracy, along with the requisite shares of protests, counter-protesters, counter-counter-protests.... and etc. Streets protest is almost a national past time, enjoyed by all demographic, from the young to the old, regardless of sexual orientation, or ethnic origin. Not to mentioned that unlike Hong Kong, Taiwan has its own military.
This is quite right as well, not to mention that Ronald Reagan, patron saint of the Republican Party, stated during his presidency that the USA would not negotiate between China and Taiwan to settle the question of Taiwan. So frankly, Taiwan is not Trump's to bargain away. Taiwanese people are mostly not interested in joining China at any price and would rather live with their fractious democracy than enjoy the bliss of a one party state.
"The South China Morning Post called the event an "epic fail.""
And promptly had their social scores plummeting into the negatives....?
Well, SCMP is in Hong Kong so it's a little different because...
1) What happens or is said in Hong Kong (mostly) stays in Hong Kong.
2) Hong Kong still has some autonomy and I haven't yet read about the social scores idea being used there - yet.
3) SCMP is in English, so its target audience is actually mostly foreigners or locals with really good English skills.
So I thought it was just common knowledge that no flight ever departs with checked luggage unless the passenger is also on board the plane...
While you have a general truth here, that's not always true. Let's say that an airline named Awesome Airlines exists and passenger John Smith flew them from Heathrow to Warsaw with no problem, but due to some kind of mistake his checked luggage didn't get on the flight. It happens. It has happened to me. That's why I mention this. If we assume that Awesome Airlines figures out where the luggage is and that a mistake was made, they will put it on the next Heathrow to Warsaw flight without passenger John Smith being on that flight.
Which country is letting large numbers of immigrants illegally cross the border into Quebec and Manitoba the past few years? President Trump doesn't seem to concerned about stopping that from happening. Our current government is also part of the problem.
How is this even happening? Manitoba and Quebec share a border with one nation - the USA. Is this a bunch of hyperbole? Is your country letting questionable people in on tourist visas who aren't leaving and for some reason are finding Manitoba and Quebec to be extra welcoming?
While there are some interesting posts about various legal topics here, perhaps a summary of what actually happened would be helpful.
Lundgren restore discs were labeled in a way to make them look almost identical to similar restore discs sent out by Dell. Apparently they had Microsoft's Windows logo on them.
He was charging 25 cents each for the discs. This means that in effect he was making money from selling the discs.
Customs intercepted the shipment of his discs, possibly through a random inspection. Microsoft got upset because they deliberately want it to be very difficult to get old, but still legal version of Windows working this way because they want people to just give up a buy a new copy, which makes money for Microsoft.
He pleaded guilty to 2 of 21 charges he faced, which is the main reason he's going to jail. He pleaded guilty. And he may have had some questionable legal representation because some of the arguments he makes against the final verdict are really items that his attorney should have brought up in court, but apparently did not.
I do agree that there's no point trying to reclaim "hacker", the public has defined it their own way and we're not going to get them to redefine it. But we can certainly figure out something else to call the non-malicious hobbyists who are doing cool stuff.
The problem is that the public uses it in very inconsistent ways to mean basically "Something happened that I don't like", "Here's a new idea I thought of", "My computer got broken into", and other wildly differing meanings. Just last week I read a blog post from a guy complaining (with no real hard evidence) that a sports related post he made on his own blog was copied by a sports writer who gets paid to write about sports. The complaining guy wasn't hacked if the blog is publicly readable (I think it is) and the contents aren't copyrighted. But the complaining guy said "I got hacked". Doesn't sound like hacking to me. And then we have people who talk about "hacks" with regards to food, like dumping the ground beef from a Taco Bell taco onto a slice of pepperoni pizza. "Hack" as a term reminds me of a saying we have about email - when it's everybody's responsibility, in reality it's nobody's responsibility. When hack has turned into a word that means anything and everything, it has no real meaning any more. Yes, we need a new word.
You voted for a delegate to represent a candidate, not a candidate. They also had a big chunk of "superdelegates", appointed by the party itself, so that everything wouldn't be left in the hands of smelly, stupid individual voters like yourself.
Imagine if you dislike gun violence and have never owned a gun and you get robbed at home by a gun toting criminal who takes stuff you really don't want to lose. And then you buy a gun so this won't happen again and I call you an "ammosexual gun lover and supporter of gun violence who hates kids". I get that it's fun to claim that the Democrats did this so only the big cheese could pick the winner, but that's about as accurate as calling you an ammosexual in my example.
The superdelegate thing was a reaction, maybe an overreaction, to the 1972 and 1980 election disasters the Democrats suffered. The rules at the time forced them to nominate what were basically unwinnable candidates. Superdelegates were put in so that there wouldn't be any more brokered conventions (the 1968 one also ended in a White House loss) and if something weird happened in the vote where a fringe candidate with almost no chance of victory somehow ended up with a small majority of elected delegates (McGovern in 1972), the superdelegates could save the election by voting for a better candidate. Now it's fair to argue if maybe the intentions were OK but it gives the appearance (accurate or not) of the common citizen's vote not mattering or if maybe the voters want to run a bad candidate they should be allowed to do so, but it's not really an attempt to stifle the voters so special interests get their way. I know the Sanders supporters are going to claim until they die that Bernie won and Clinton stole the nomination, but the superdelegates did not put her over the top. People forget that in 2008 the superdelegates voted mostly for Obama and they didn't mostly vote for supposed vote stealing Hillary. There's yet to be a nomination in which the superdelegates clearly voted for a 2nd place candidate in the popular vote to deny the voters their will. But again, the fact that people think that is exactly what happens all the time is possibly a very good argument that the system should be eliminated.
Russia won't invade Estonia - the country is simply not important enough.
I speak Russian really well (not fluent, but really good nonetheless) and I spent a good deal of time in Ukraine in the previous decade. I definitely understand the region more than most here. While they may not invade Estonia, it will have nothing at all to do with how important it is or isn't. That's not a consideration. Putin simply wants to reacquire as much of the former USSR as he reasonably can or turn those nations into something like tributary states (ie. Belarus) or anti-Western allies (more or less all the so-called "Stan" countries). Trump is extremely unpredictable, mostly by design, and he's shown a willingness to kill Russians already in Syria. Early in the presidency Putin was feeling him out to see if he might really and truly leave the European NATO countries hanging in the wind like he threatened to do, but Putin has to know that there is a big chance now that any invasion of a Baltic NATO member would result in a war that isn't going to end with Putin winning, so it won't happen, but yes, Russians will continue to try to undermine the Baltic countries as much as possible.
This sounds to be in line with previous court judgements. Yes your coffee is hot. Put a sign on it.
You're alluding to the infamous McDonalds case. On the surface it seems nuts and it may still be a case of a stupid jury reaching a stupid verdict, but there are things about the case that are not known by the general public. I have a good friend who is a lawyer and we talked about this.
1) McDonalds kept serving coffee at a temperature very close to boiling and about 20 to 30 degrees higher than their competitors. The problem wasn't that some dumb person didn't know that hot coffee is hot but that McDonalds was deliberately serving it at an undrinkably high temperature.
2)McDonalds received a lot of complaints about the too high temperature of their coffee and refused to do anything about it. They received many hundreds of complaints.
3)The old lady who got burned did basically accidentally pour it on herself, but the case argument was that had the coffee been at a normal temperature of 20-30 degrees lower like McDonalds competitors served, she would not have suffered devastating burns that required hospitalization.
4)The lady's attorneys tried to settle the case out of court and McDonalds refused.
5)The original verdict was reduced by a judge as being excessive and she didn't end up with a million dollars, although she was awarded over $600,000.
It is actually possible for You Tube to get more paying subscribers and still not manage to pay artists or the RIAA any more, although I'll guess that maybe the RIAA will end up with slightly more money in that scenario. See Spotify, etc.
I deleted my Facebook account back in the beginning of November 2017. I am now 120 days free from the bullshit! There is no way I will ever go back. I hope more people join the movement to delete Facebook and lead richer, fuller lives.
Let me guess. You still have a Twitter account though. At worst Facebook is super annoying, but you can make a case that Twitter is actually doing real harm to human society, yet which of the two do you still probably have? Yeah.
Toys R Us went bankrupt, they had only $5B debt but plenty of stock and store property and we're still selling items. How does any radio corporation get to the point that they are $20B in debt, they basically own nothing of any real worth. Even the stations themselves are small and limited tech. iTunes has been out for years. Napster. Writing has been on the wall for years. Who was loaning or lending this company money? At $10B or $15B in debt people didn't stop to think, hmm, may even we should cut them off? $20B is what it takes. Insane.
I can answer these. My response is meant to be an example and the numbers I mention are not meant to be representative of actual amounts involved.
Imagine you owe $10,000 on a car and your neighbor, who makes a similar salary, owes $20,000 on his. But imagine he pays $400 a month and the interest rate is 3%. Imagine you have to pay $1000 a month but $900 is interest (you got a terrible loan which we will pretend is even legal) and $100 against the principle. By the time your car is paid off, you will have paid over $80,000 in interest payments. Toys R Us was having to pay a ton of their money towards debt servicing over their leveraged buyout which left their stores in pretty bad shape. One commenter in the Toys R Us thread on Slashdot said they were like being inside a KMart. Yikes.
One of the reasons you might loan a failing business money to keep failing is to gain control over that business. Back in the 90s when the music industry changed and sales of physical products began to decline, Sony loaned Michael Jackson something like a billion dollars against his future music sales. I thought it was insane because there was no way he was ever going to sell enough going forward to pay that back. I thought Sony was crazy. They weren't. To get the money they made Michael pledge his ownership of the Beatles' publishing (that's a whole other story about how he got that in the first place) against the loan and when Michael died and there was no way to pay back the loan, guess who got the publishing? Sony. And by now this particular catalog is now estimated to be worth more than a billion dollars, so Sony was just really looking far into the future knowing that by making a huge loan now that could never be repaid down the road they could get their hands on some publishing they wanted that they felt would be worth more than the loan. Perhaps whoever is pumping money into IHeartMedia wants to get their hands on their stations.
If the market is so good for developers, why do very good programmers in their 60s, who have current skills, have such a hard time finding work?
It's a good question. I can give you some answers.
1) Their experience, although good, is in older technology instead of the current flavor of the day that will itself be considered antiquated in a few more years.
2) Often they live in small towns and the only shop that needed them closed. They aren/t willing to move to larger cities where they might find work, so they stay where they are and there simply aren't any other local employers who need their skills.
3) As someone else said they tend to be white males and there may not be a desire to hire more of such people by companies who do want a more diverse workplace.
4) With their age and experience may come salary expectations that the market no longer wants to meet.
In collusion with intel or not, I'd bet these "researchers" have bought a bunch of intel stock over the last few months.
Or they've shorted AMD and really need to knock down the price. For what it's worth as I write this AMD's stock is actually slightly up today despite the news.
First 20 years free. Then an escalating payment is required for each 20 year renewal afterward. Simply requiring a payment will solve the orphan works problem. This solution also lets Disney keep Mickey under copyright forever if they keep paying the escalating renewal fees. This is a simple solution to keeping commercially profitable works under copyright and letting everything else revert to the public domain.
I have argued a variation on this here before, although 20 years will simply never work in the USA. My proposal is that we support the Bono Act, as bad as it is, and then make copyrights renewable for 10 year increments for massively increasing fees. Anybody who won't pay the fee sees their stuff go into public domain. You could start at $100,000 for the first renewal and then multiply each subsequent renewal by 10. The renewal after $100,000 is $1 million, then $10 million and so on. If somebody is actually willing to pay millions of dollars for something that has already been under copyright for over 75 years, let them, but make the price keep going up. Eventually they'll stop paying. Even Disney wouldn't pay $1 billion to renew Steamboat Willie - their shareholders would riot.
I got an annual report for an upcoming stockholders' meeting for a stock I own. I was really surprised that the whole thing was in Flash. Not PDF but ail in Flash. This is a company in the top 250 of the Fortune 500. While it's not an IT company, let's just say that you would think they have a good enough handle on technology to not make their annual report be only in Flash, but nope. I'm not going to name the company lest doing so hurt the stock value, but it just shows you how even people who you might have thought were way past using Flash are in fact still using it.
The divas because you'd rather have control than anything else. Did I guess right? By the way, as someone who has probably worked in IT longer than you, you'd be a lot better off getting rid of the borderline autistic guys because guys who aren't team players aren't worth the trouble. It far far better to deal with smart people who may be 'unmanagable" (and I bet another manager besides you could somehow reach them) than guys who aren't team players.
"You may find better elsewhere, but you'll never pay more."
They used to say that about IBM, but it applies to Apple too. To be fair, I've had iPhones for years and I have an iMac at home and I do like the iMac. I think Time Machine is a really nice, hugely user friendly backup program that has worked really well for me when I've needed it. It hasn't been too hard to get stuff to work on a Mac, unlike Windows where, well, you know. Macs are good computers for people who might be, uh, technically challenged because they tend to last and they're not too hard to setup and do what you need to do. They're good for people who know their techno stuff too. They have a really easy to use feature that lets me change keyboard languages and the rare times I need to type in Cyrillic, I change to a Cyriilic keyboard, type my stuff and switch back to the US mode. Really could not be easier.
Now, they can be found in the wild by the millions in Germany, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Croatia, the Ukraine, Japan, and Madagascar.
The country's name in English is Ukraine. There's no "the" anymore. Look at their website for any Ukrainian embassy in an English speaking country. It was OK, although a bit unusual, to call it "the Ukraine" when it was part of the USSR, but Ukrainians don't like the use of "the Ukraine" any more. It's now just Ukraine.
1) Ethnic Russians who disagree and cite ancient, Soviet era English grammar books to justify the use of "the" can suck it.
2) Rules can be different for non-English languages such as French. But just because French uses their equivalent of "the", doesn't mean English should. Again, look at any of the country's consular websites in an English speaking country. No "the".
3) There's no articles (the, a, an) at all in the Ukrainian language (or Russian either) so you can't go there to justify the use of "the" in the name.
I am just so relieved that this commercial browser extension that effects, by my rough count, approximately 1 out of every 500 people on earth (assuming Grammarly's user counts are accurate) and offers a feature that just about everybody has no use for at all has been fixed.
I work for a Fortune 500 company as a result of working for a successful startup that got bought out. The startup that eventually hired me started in the late 1990s I think. Employees who were there in those early years told me that the company thought seriously about selling stock, but for whatever reason decided not to. That decision probably saved the company. The internet bubble burst and they avoided being caught up in that. I was told that after the bubble burst they did have some layoffs, but they weren't too bad. The company just chugged along and grew and eventually was bought out by the company I now work for.
There actually are ways without going public to eventually enrich company executives. Someone else mentioned a plus of going public was giving stock bonuses because they don't tap company revenue. The start up I worked for gave some kind of restricted private stock in the company to execs and the rank and file employees got some kind of shares but those rank and file shares weren't as numerous or worth as much. I came on too late to get those so I don't know much about them. All I do know is that when the Fortune 500 company bought us, the rank and file employees did get paid for their private stock shares and the exces made a fortune. Pretty much every one of those execs became a millionaire. Some of them told us they were simply going to retire after the sale because they made so much money they didn't need to work again.
Yes. I'm a Starbucks shareholder and this week I got email telling me where to get my electronic copy of their annual report. I like to glance at the annual reports for any stocks I own and read shareholder proposals. I rarely vote to approve those but there have been a few really good ones that I voted for. Imagine my surprise to find that the Starbucks annual report was only available in Flash, not PDF.
Slashdot Mirror
In national defense, we've been falling backward (in relation to Russia and China) for the last few decades. Our main battle tanks are two generations behind Russia's and their air defense systems are also greatly enhanced. Iran successfully took over one of our most sophisticated drones and captured in, a couple years ago, using electronic warfare... Although we have the F-22 and the F-35 jets, we are falling in most other areas and are even behind in some.
You really shouldn't believe everything you hear. Assuming Iran really did capture a US drone, what possible sense would it make to announce it? That's all propaganda. Or they are idiots beyond belief. If they really did capture the drone, announcing it would just make the US fix whatever problem they exploited so it can't be exploited again. I'd think if Iran really got the drone they would keep that highly classified so they could use it to get more drones in the future or exploit this captured knowledge is some special way down the road. Russia announces stuff all the time just like this that if it was true they really shouldn't announce it, but some folks always believe them anyway.
Also, the cost of war is very prohibitive for us as Congress requires subcontractors in virtually every state to fund any new project. Both potential enemies can easily outlast us in a protracted war, financially.
I can assure you that Russia cannot outlast the US financially - period. That is delusional. China could put up a stronger financial fight, but when US allies stop trading with them, they won't be doing so well. And about a billion people in India really do not want to live in a world where China runs the show, as but one example.
Given China lackluster record in "integrating" the hearts and minds of the Hong Kong residents, who were basically tossed to the wolves by the British after 99 years of dutifully generated revenues for the British Empire. Despite some last minute electoral reforms by the British prior to the 1997 hand over to China, Hong Kong was basically a colonial subject of the Crown without a tradition of electing its own executives.
This is quite right. Wish I could mod this up instead of having to comment. The UK wasn't interested at all in letting Hong Kong people have a big say in their own government and tried to get that snuck into the handover agreement where China rightly pointed out that it was kind of late in the game for the UK to want Hong Kongers to have a say in their local government because the UK sure wasn't interested in that at all prior to having to negotiate the handover.
Taiwan, on the other hand, thanks to continuous US intervention since WWII, has blossomed into a fractious democracy, along with the requisite shares of protests, counter-protesters, counter-counter-protests.... and etc. Streets protest is almost a national past time, enjoyed by all demographic, from the young to the old, regardless of sexual orientation, or ethnic origin. Not to mentioned that unlike Hong Kong, Taiwan has its own military.
This is quite right as well, not to mention that Ronald Reagan, patron saint of the Republican Party, stated during his presidency that the USA would not negotiate between China and Taiwan to settle the question of Taiwan. So frankly, Taiwan is not Trump's to bargain away. Taiwanese people are mostly not interested in joining China at any price and would rather live with their fractious democracy than enjoy the bliss of a one party state.
"The South China Morning Post called the event an "epic fail."" And promptly had their social scores plummeting into the negatives....?
Well, SCMP is in Hong Kong so it's a little different because...
1) What happens or is said in Hong Kong (mostly) stays in Hong Kong.
2) Hong Kong still has some autonomy and I haven't yet read about the social scores idea being used there - yet.
3) SCMP is in English, so its target audience is actually mostly foreigners or locals with really good English skills.
So I thought it was just common knowledge that no flight ever departs with checked luggage unless the passenger is also on board the plane...
While you have a general truth here, that's not always true. Let's say that an airline named Awesome Airlines exists and passenger John Smith flew them from Heathrow to Warsaw with no problem, but due to some kind of mistake his checked luggage didn't get on the flight. It happens. It has happened to me. That's why I mention this. If we assume that Awesome Airlines figures out where the luggage is and that a mistake was made, they will put it on the next Heathrow to Warsaw flight without passenger John Smith being on that flight.
Which country is letting large numbers of immigrants illegally cross the border into Quebec and Manitoba the past few years? President Trump doesn't seem to concerned about stopping that from happening. Our current government is also part of the problem.
How is this even happening? Manitoba and Quebec share a border with one nation - the USA. Is this a bunch of hyperbole? Is your country letting questionable people in on tourist visas who aren't leaving and for some reason are finding Manitoba and Quebec to be extra welcoming?
While there are some interesting posts about various legal topics here, perhaps a summary of what actually happened would be helpful.
Lundgren restore discs were labeled in a way to make them look almost identical to similar restore discs sent out by Dell. Apparently they had Microsoft's Windows logo on them.
He was charging 25 cents each for the discs. This means that in effect he was making money from selling the discs.
Customs intercepted the shipment of his discs, possibly through a random inspection. Microsoft got upset because they deliberately want it to be very difficult to get old, but still legal version of Windows working this way because they want people to just give up a buy a new copy, which makes money for Microsoft.
He pleaded guilty to 2 of 21 charges he faced, which is the main reason he's going to jail. He pleaded guilty. And he may have had some questionable legal representation because some of the arguments he makes against the final verdict are really items that his attorney should have brought up in court, but apparently did not.
I do agree that there's no point trying to reclaim "hacker", the public has defined it their own way and we're not going to get them to redefine it. But we can certainly figure out something else to call the non-malicious hobbyists who are doing cool stuff.
The problem is that the public uses it in very inconsistent ways to mean basically "Something happened that I don't like", "Here's a new idea I thought of", "My computer got broken into", and other wildly differing meanings. Just last week I read a blog post from a guy complaining (with no real hard evidence) that a sports related post he made on his own blog was copied by a sports writer who gets paid to write about sports. The complaining guy wasn't hacked if the blog is publicly readable (I think it is) and the contents aren't copyrighted. But the complaining guy said "I got hacked". Doesn't sound like hacking to me. And then we have people who talk about "hacks" with regards to food, like dumping the ground beef from a Taco Bell taco onto a slice of pepperoni pizza. "Hack" as a term reminds me of a saying we have about email - when it's everybody's responsibility, in reality it's nobody's responsibility. When hack has turned into a word that means anything and everything, it has no real meaning any more. Yes, we need a new word.
You voted for a delegate to represent a candidate, not a candidate. They also had a big chunk of "superdelegates", appointed by the party itself, so that everything wouldn't be left in the hands of smelly, stupid individual voters like yourself.
Imagine if you dislike gun violence and have never owned a gun and you get robbed at home by a gun toting criminal who takes stuff you really don't want to lose. And then you buy a gun so this won't happen again and I call you an "ammosexual gun lover and supporter of gun violence who hates kids". I get that it's fun to claim that the Democrats did this so only the big cheese could pick the winner, but that's about as accurate as calling you an ammosexual in my example.
The superdelegate thing was a reaction, maybe an overreaction, to the 1972 and 1980 election disasters the Democrats suffered. The rules at the time forced them to nominate what were basically unwinnable candidates. Superdelegates were put in so that there wouldn't be any more brokered conventions (the 1968 one also ended in a White House loss) and if something weird happened in the vote where a fringe candidate with almost no chance of victory somehow ended up with a small majority of elected delegates (McGovern in 1972), the superdelegates could save the election by voting for a better candidate. Now it's fair to argue if maybe the intentions were OK but it gives the appearance (accurate or not) of the common citizen's vote not mattering or if maybe the voters want to run a bad candidate they should be allowed to do so, but it's not really an attempt to stifle the voters so special interests get their way. I know the Sanders supporters are going to claim until they die that Bernie won and Clinton stole the nomination, but the superdelegates did not put her over the top. People forget that in 2008 the superdelegates voted mostly for Obama and they didn't mostly vote for supposed vote stealing Hillary. There's yet to be a nomination in which the superdelegates clearly voted for a 2nd place candidate in the popular vote to deny the voters their will. But again, the fact that people think that is exactly what happens all the time is possibly a very good argument that the system should be eliminated.
Russia won't invade Estonia - the country is simply not important enough.
I speak Russian really well (not fluent, but really good nonetheless) and I spent a good deal of time in Ukraine in the previous decade. I definitely understand the region more than most here. While they may not invade Estonia, it will have nothing at all to do with how important it is or isn't. That's not a consideration. Putin simply wants to reacquire as much of the former USSR as he reasonably can or turn those nations into something like tributary states (ie. Belarus) or anti-Western allies (more or less all the so-called "Stan" countries). Trump is extremely unpredictable, mostly by design, and he's shown a willingness to kill Russians already in Syria. Early in the presidency Putin was feeling him out to see if he might really and truly leave the European NATO countries hanging in the wind like he threatened to do, but Putin has to know that there is a big chance now that any invasion of a Baltic NATO member would result in a war that isn't going to end with Putin winning, so it won't happen, but yes, Russians will continue to try to undermine the Baltic countries as much as possible.
This sounds to be in line with previous court judgements. Yes your coffee is hot. Put a sign on it.
You're alluding to the infamous McDonalds case. On the surface it seems nuts and it may still be a case of a stupid jury reaching a stupid verdict, but there are things about the case that are not known by the general public. I have a good friend who is a lawyer and we talked about this.
1) McDonalds kept serving coffee at a temperature very close to boiling and about 20 to 30 degrees higher than their competitors. The problem wasn't that some dumb person didn't know that hot coffee is hot but that McDonalds was deliberately serving it at an undrinkably high temperature.
2)McDonalds received a lot of complaints about the too high temperature of their coffee and refused to do anything about it. They received many hundreds of complaints.
3)The old lady who got burned did basically accidentally pour it on herself, but the case argument was that had the coffee been at a normal temperature of 20-30 degrees lower like McDonalds competitors served, she would not have suffered devastating burns that required hospitalization.
4)The lady's attorneys tried to settle the case out of court and McDonalds refused.
5)The original verdict was reduced by a judge as being excessive and she didn't end up with a million dollars, although she was awarded over $600,000.
For just one blindingly obvious example, you can trash Trump 24/7 and not go to jail. Try that in China.
I've been to China several times and I'm pretty sure you could trash Trump 24x7 over there and not go to jail.
It is actually possible for You Tube to get more paying subscribers and still not manage to pay artists or the RIAA any more, although I'll guess that maybe the RIAA will end up with slightly more money in that scenario. See Spotify, etc.
I deleted my Facebook account back in the beginning of November 2017. I am now 120 days free from the bullshit! There is no way I will ever go back. I hope more people join the movement to delete Facebook and lead richer, fuller lives.
Let me guess. You still have a Twitter account though. At worst Facebook is super annoying, but you can make a case that Twitter is actually doing real harm to human society, yet which of the two do you still probably have? Yeah.
Toys R Us went bankrupt, they had only $5B debt but plenty of stock and store property and we're still selling items. How does any radio corporation get to the point that they are $20B in debt, they basically own nothing of any real worth. Even the stations themselves are small and limited tech. iTunes has been out for years. Napster. Writing has been on the wall for years. Who was loaning or lending this company money? At $10B or $15B in debt people didn't stop to think, hmm, may even we should cut them off? $20B is what it takes. Insane.
I can answer these. My response is meant to be an example and the numbers I mention are not meant to be representative of actual amounts involved.
Imagine you owe $10,000 on a car and your neighbor, who makes a similar salary, owes $20,000 on his. But imagine he pays $400 a month and the interest rate is 3%. Imagine you have to pay $1000 a month but $900 is interest (you got a terrible loan which we will pretend is even legal) and $100 against the principle. By the time your car is paid off, you will have paid over $80,000 in interest payments. Toys R Us was having to pay a ton of their money towards debt servicing over their leveraged buyout which left their stores in pretty bad shape. One commenter in the Toys R Us thread on Slashdot said they were like being inside a KMart. Yikes.
One of the reasons you might loan a failing business money to keep failing is to gain control over that business. Back in the 90s when the music industry changed and sales of physical products began to decline, Sony loaned Michael Jackson something like a billion dollars against his future music sales. I thought it was insane because there was no way he was ever going to sell enough going forward to pay that back. I thought Sony was crazy. They weren't. To get the money they made Michael pledge his ownership of the Beatles' publishing (that's a whole other story about how he got that in the first place) against the loan and when Michael died and there was no way to pay back the loan, guess who got the publishing? Sony. And by now this particular catalog is now estimated to be worth more than a billion dollars, so Sony was just really looking far into the future knowing that by making a huge loan now that could never be repaid down the road they could get their hands on some publishing they wanted that they felt would be worth more than the loan. Perhaps whoever is pumping money into IHeartMedia wants to get their hands on their stations.
If the market is so good for developers, why do very good programmers in their 60s, who have current skills, have such a hard time finding work?
It's a good question. I can give you some answers.
1) Their experience, although good, is in older technology instead of the current flavor of the day that will itself be considered antiquated in a few more years.
2) Often they live in small towns and the only shop that needed them closed. They aren/t willing to move to larger cities where they might find work, so they stay where they are and there simply aren't any other local employers who need their skills.
3) As someone else said they tend to be white males and there may not be a desire to hire more of such people by companies who do want a more diverse workplace.
4) With their age and experience may come salary expectations that the market no longer wants to meet.
In collusion with intel or not, I'd bet these "researchers" have bought a bunch of intel stock over the last few months.
Or they've shorted AMD and really need to knock down the price. For what it's worth as I write this AMD's stock is actually slightly up today despite the news.
First 20 years free. Then an escalating payment is required for each 20 year renewal afterward. Simply requiring a payment will solve the orphan works problem. This solution also lets Disney keep Mickey under copyright forever if they keep paying the escalating renewal fees. This is a simple solution to keeping commercially profitable works under copyright and letting everything else revert to the public domain.
I have argued a variation on this here before, although 20 years will simply never work in the USA. My proposal is that we support the Bono Act, as bad as it is, and then make copyrights renewable for 10 year increments for massively increasing fees. Anybody who won't pay the fee sees their stuff go into public domain. You could start at $100,000 for the first renewal and then multiply each subsequent renewal by 10. The renewal after $100,000 is $1 million, then $10 million and so on. If somebody is actually willing to pay millions of dollars for something that has already been under copyright for over 75 years, let them, but make the price keep going up. Eventually they'll stop paying. Even Disney wouldn't pay $1 billion to renew Steamboat Willie - their shareholders would riot.
I got an annual report for an upcoming stockholders' meeting for a stock I own. I was really surprised that the whole thing was in Flash. Not PDF but ail in Flash. This is a company in the top 250 of the Fortune 500. While it's not an IT company, let's just say that you would think they have a good enough handle on technology to not make their annual report be only in Flash, but nope. I'm not going to name the company lest doing so hurt the stock value, but it just shows you how even people who you might have thought were way past using Flash are in fact still using it.
Guess which two I'm trying to get rid of?
The divas because you'd rather have control than anything else. Did I guess right? By the way, as someone who has probably worked in IT longer than you, you'd be a lot better off getting rid of the borderline autistic guys because guys who aren't team players aren't worth the trouble. It far far better to deal with smart people who may be 'unmanagable" (and I bet another manager besides you could somehow reach them) than guys who aren't team players.
"You may find better elsewhere, but you'll never pay more."
They used to say that about IBM, but it applies to Apple too. To be fair, I've had iPhones for years and I have an iMac at home and I do like the iMac. I think Time Machine is a really nice, hugely user friendly backup program that has worked really well for me when I've needed it. It hasn't been too hard to get stuff to work on a Mac, unlike Windows where, well, you know. Macs are good computers for people who might be, uh, technically challenged because they tend to last and they're not too hard to setup and do what you need to do. They're good for people who know their techno stuff too. They have a really easy to use feature that lets me change keyboard languages and the rare times I need to type in Cyrillic, I change to a Cyriilic keyboard, type my stuff and switch back to the US mode. Really could not be easier.
Just ask IBM - They reduce costs to prop up stock value.
Now, they can be found in the wild by the millions in Germany, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Croatia, the Ukraine, Japan, and Madagascar.
The country's name in English is Ukraine. There's no "the" anymore. Look at their website for any Ukrainian embassy in an English speaking country. It was OK, although a bit unusual, to call it "the Ukraine" when it was part of the USSR, but Ukrainians don't like the use of "the Ukraine" any more. It's now just Ukraine.
1) Ethnic Russians who disagree and cite ancient, Soviet era English grammar books to justify the use of "the" can suck it.
2) Rules can be different for non-English languages such as French. But just because French uses their equivalent of "the", doesn't mean English should. Again, look at any of the country's consular websites in an English speaking country. No "the".
3) There's no articles (the, a, an) at all in the Ukrainian language (or Russian either) so you can't go there to justify the use of "the" in the name.
I am just so relieved that this commercial browser extension that effects, by my rough count, approximately 1 out of every 500 people on earth (assuming Grammarly's user counts are accurate) and offers a feature that just about everybody has no use for at all has been fixed.
I work for a Fortune 500 company as a result of working for a successful startup that got bought out. The startup that eventually hired me started in the late 1990s I think. Employees who were there in those early years told me that the company thought seriously about selling stock, but for whatever reason decided not to. That decision probably saved the company. The internet bubble burst and they avoided being caught up in that. I was told that after the bubble burst they did have some layoffs, but they weren't too bad. The company just chugged along and grew and eventually was bought out by the company I now work for.
There actually are ways without going public to eventually enrich company executives. Someone else mentioned a plus of going public was giving stock bonuses because they don't tap company revenue. The start up I worked for gave some kind of restricted private stock in the company to execs and the rank and file employees got some kind of shares but those rank and file shares weren't as numerous or worth as much. I came on too late to get those so I don't know much about them. All I do know is that when the Fortune 500 company bought us, the rank and file employees did get paid for their private stock shares and the exces made a fortune. Pretty much every one of those execs became a millionaire. Some of them told us they were simply going to retire after the sale because they made so much money they didn't need to work again.
Yes. I'm a Starbucks shareholder and this week I got email telling me where to get my electronic copy of their annual report. I like to glance at the annual reports for any stocks I own and read shareholder proposals. I rarely vote to approve those but there have been a few really good ones that I voted for. Imagine my surprise to find that the Starbucks annual report was only available in Flash, not PDF.