Your point? Rules are rules, school administrators follow the rules.
Not suspected of trafficing illegal drugs? Yes she was, the drugs were prohibited for her to have in the school, she was suspected of exactly that.
I roundly reject the idea that this should be treated as some special case. Either they have the authority to prohibit this sort of activity, or they don't. Period.
I love this case because it tests peoples feelings on the issue. Yes... this is what drug laws mean. Once you start, this is the conclusion. Enjoy the world this social experiment called prohibition has created.
Your main rule doesn't support your previous statement about monoculture.
You are right, but mainly by segmenting the systems. Now you have more chains, each with its own least secure element. The better rule is "Defense in depth". Don't just deploy a firewall. Harden the hosts, segment the network, replace hubs with switches, use internal firewalls and setup a DMZ for externally facing hosts...
Then good passwords, retire telnet for ssh, strict key checking, publish a list of your server ssh keys.....
the VAST majority of users are not savy. Lets say the 80/20 rule applies, you can do 20% of the work to get 80% of the benefit. Its probably even bigger than that. The point is, you can do a LOT of extra work to get to the small percentage of people who take basic precautions.... then its even more work to get the small percentage of them who take more than basic precautions...
But... your first cut hit a million nodes... is all that work worth it to bump it up to 1.1 million?
And then... the saavy people are more likely to notice you, and remove you quicker anyway. So its a short lived benefit, for a shit ton of extra effort.
Its like blackjack at the casino. Optimum play gives a slight edge if you count cards. However, the vast majority of players don't even try. Even less are any good at it, or disciplined enough to take advantage.
Its not to the casino's advantage to catch every person who tries to keep a count. Only to notice and kick out the ones who are really good at it, and try to make lots of money.
Funny you would mention drugs.... talk about a policy that missed its mark.
Lets persue policies that help increase ignorance about drugs, lead to increases in both price and potency.... yes thats a real recipe for harm reduction now. Instead of a bunch of addicts we can treat medically and in the mean time are low on the productivity scale... and see if we can't turn them all into criminals who steal to support their habbits.
Great plan. Once again a triumph for abstinence only education!
Hard to fault them, it worked so well for alcohol. Hard to believe it would fail for heroin, and sex.
> No, they're right about that. In my teenage years, I had a lot of romantic > ideals. I didn't really care about having sex until pressure from my peers and > the media convinced me that it was the best thing ever and my life was > worthless if I didn't have it.* > (*: This turned out to be false.)
Same here though, I didn't need any pressure from peers. I found sex all on my own, like any good primate, by jacking off. It wasn't years of peer pressure that did it... it was just watching my peers and seeing them with partners, and with "friends".
Its easy to latch on to sex, just as its easy to latch on to silly romantic ideas. Each fantasy has its place and its purpose, but in the end, fantasy is just fantasy.
I think the real flaw in the right wing argument is... that its a problem. The problem is not sex. People having promiscuous sex is NOT going to bring down society.
People will still get married and have kids for all the reasons that they always did. People may not respect some elder god who is handing down his pre-condom, pre-safe-abortion advice from long ago... and less people will listen to that nonsense.....
But I don't think any of that is really bad for society.
I happen be on both ends.... I am all for sex education. I can remember my sex ed instructor in middle school saying it should start in second grade on some level. I have to agree, its HEALTH. There is nothing wrong with teaching health, in fact, we should do more of it.
I think the entire concept of sex being "bad" and "dirty" needs to be done away with. I think the entirety of "lets not talk about sex", and "sex = loss of innocence" needs to be forgotten beyond our ability to recall that people ever felt that way.
Its a health issue. Pure and simple.
On the other hand... I think gun safety is too. Its unconscionable that we don't teach kids how to properly use guns the same way as hammers and saws.
I dunno.... havn't people been complaining the younger generation is worst than every in every way imaginable since the dawn of language?
I have personally read accounts over 200 years old of how "young people today just want to stay up all night, listen to loud music, and disrespect their elders"
Meh I agree and disagree. I don't think you can put a blanket over all behaviour like that.
The fact is, most of what we see as normal, is people doing prescribed things because its what everyone else does and whats expected of them. Anyone who has spent a few minutes questioning can see how superficial many of our daily activities are.
I have seen entirely effective and competent entire teams that don't wear suits or even particularly nice clothes. Tshirts and jeanes. That same group, dark offices, loud music.
Frankly i think most of what people lable as "eccentric" is just mundane difference. You don't really need people to conform in those ways. You don't need everyone to be a 9 to fiver with a collared shirt...
what you need is the work to get done, and right, and the docs to be written. You need to make the docs part of the task and not fall for the old "the code is the docs" BS.
What probably helps the most is integrating such people with others more. More positive social interactions, more work interactions where they can see that other people are important and they contribute.
Assholes are usually assholes because they don't understand the people they are being assholes too. It comes, often, from judging others by the standards of your own myopic world. "I am the sysadmin, you are an idiot by sysadmin standards, your request makes no sense for a sysadmin".... but you arn't a sysadmin, you are with the helpdesk.
I think to the studies of what happens in situations of authority (like the prison gaurd experiment), and think this is a lot of the issue... people judging and making decisions for others based on their own requirements. If my requirements and world works best when you are docile and do afraid of me and do as I say.... I treat you accordingly. Hence the "Instant asshole, just add badge" syndrome thats seems so common (at least among younger cops as far as I see)
Sure but like... thats the nature of your relationship with google (or whoever is providing the service). You pay per person who clicks through, meeting whatever technical requirements of a click through. You do this because you believe that people clicking through are most probably potential customers.
Whats left out of the picture, is that the page is presented to people, who may or may not click on anything on that page, on their own whim. If you setup a water cooler, and put up a "free cup of water" sign, are you going to complain when people come by and take a cup of water and don't drink it?
Its not like a person visiting a page has any expectation of being bound by any agreement between you and the page you are advertising on, which he is visiting. He can click on or ignore your link at his whim.
If this is a problem, then perhaps the real value of these advertising services is::shock:: overpriced! Perhaps its real value is already less than "advertised" (as you seem to have realized). Perhaps the advertisers should either demand a better deal so as to make dealing with this protest tolerable, or to demand that google pacify this crowd by changing its policies.
Of course, I would say that if this hurts advertisers enough that they make such demands, then its doing exactley what its intended to do.... drive advertising business away from google.
actually I disagree. That is one of the things a corperation does, and is, in my mind, a perversion to be considered the only reason.
The purpose of a corperation is to make money for its shareholders by providing benefit to community by fullfilling one or more of their needs in exchange for money.
The benefit to the community should be considered as much the purpose of the busisness as the making of the money, and whenever it isn't, is when you see these sorts of gross abuses.
Frankly, I think we should have regulation that forbids the formation of any company that doesn't state as part of its purpose that one of its core purposes is anything other than benefit to the community.
After all, thats why we give them the privilege of limited liability.
You know "whatever the market will bear" refers to a lot more than cash price.
Its like banks. We changed the federal reserve system around 8 years ago to do instant check clearing. As soon as the bank gets your check, they image it, send off the image...and bang... checks clear immediatly.
Of course... without any regulation to force the benefit to be shared with consumers, it wasn't. We got a trickle down... they just pissed on us. How long to checks take to clear 8 years later? Oh... 3 days instate, 10 days out of state.
They kept te entirely artifical distinction, and the clearance times... all the while they already have your money. Holding it for a clearance that already came.
Right nice of them to hold your money for you.
Which banks do it? As far as I can tell... all of them.
>The market will work it out, as they go out of business, replaced by employers with saner hiring policies.
I agree up until that. I don't have as much faith in the market. The market will work it out to the extent that it absolutely needs to. Most of its "punishments" go unrealized unless they are so large in magnitude as to be undeniable.
I wholeheartedly reject the notion that we should allow the whims of the market to determine the ways in which we interact with others. In fact, the unchecked market has even, at times, so rewarded wickedness that people had to start forming unions and fighting back collectively. Say what you want about unions, they would never have gained the popularity and power they did if people didn't feel a need for them.
Of course what goes along with that is "for better or for worst".
I can't tell you how many times I have heard pro-buisness people, or even managers directly talk about whats legal and perfectly right for an employer to do or require. They argue vehemently about how the company owners are king, and how employment is often "at will".
Well.. its one thing to know your rights, another to be a prick. Its legal to be a prick but... it means you bring many of your personal (or personelle) problems on yourself. Sure there is no expectation of privacy, sure you can have policies about workplace dating, can do drug testing, you can do all manner of things....
However, in the end, your employees are another customer. They give you work in exchange for your money. Just like being rude to a customer can make them a bad customer or even someone else's customer, the same goes for employees. They are customers, and if you want them to keep buying paychecks with their work, and not trying to screw you, then you had better treat them right.
Else they are just going to take their buisness elsewhere, or decreace the quality of work they are giving you....and in the end, right as you may be, its still your fault for being a prick. Sadly managers are far better at being pricks and getting away with it than employees because people don't generally stand up for themselves.
I don't do much research, but I do have my personal rules, and a company that breaks them doesn't get to hire me. Companies may have employee policies and handbooks, but my policies are just as important.
Every time I am negotiating a new job, I am quite prepared to inform them that only my doctor is allowed to ask for samples of my bodily fluids, and only for medical reasons. My policy is, my employer doesn't even get to ask for that. Its my personal being and an employer that wants urine gets treated the same as any random person asking for my urine.
People have to learn to stand up for themselves, this is about personal dignity. Are we free men or slaves? Pissing in a cup is just one of the degrading and what should be non-negotiable things that employers ask for and people blindly say yes to. You have a right to say no.
Snooping however... snooping is harder. Sure, I agree with some amount of "caveat emptor" but also.... theres alot about me that I don't think is any of an employers business and I do feel they should be prohibited from using against a person in decisions.
I think on the whole the line has to come down on whats publically available and what isn't. If its out there, public, and attributable to you, then its public. Maybe what we need is regulation on expectations of privacy. If I register on a site, and don't publicize my real name etc... it should be illegal for my information to be sold off and aggregated such that its attributable back to me.
So if you find a person on myspace under their name... thats one thing. If an aggregator with access to peoples emails uses that to connect a person to say... their fetlife.com account thats not publishing their full name, and makes that available to a third party.... that I can see making very illegal. (and the law should hold each step in that chain individually liable,,, the site that sold the info, the aggregator who put it together, and the company that used it)
I think they would go back to the paper copies...but first the backups. Really data corruption/erasure is best if you can do the corruption before the backup cycle and not have it noticed until afterwards... but even then its just a matter of using older backups.
Barring that, I imagine they would go back to the paper docs. Of course, that wouldn't have payment history, so they would probably have to just assume that all the loans were current unless they could find evidence they were otherwise, and of course, ask the customers for information they have about extra payments that they made.
I think the reality is more like, a bunch of people would get credited for whatever payment information was just lost and unrecoverable.
Oh yah... now think for a second... if a random sampling of nearly everything I look at comes out at price variances of up to 100%.... how much of your money do you think you can "reclaim" just by being a better shopper? How much of a pay raise does that equate to?
You know, money being tight recently got me to open my eyes...and what I have found has been really enlightening.
Take the Brother label maker that I got for xmass. I realized that I needed one about the same time my mother was hitting me up for gift ideas. So I looked around, and found both that it was a great idea...and I better tell her where to buy it!
Why? Simple... I found the price ranged from about $45 to $95 depending solely on where you bought it from, and I wasn't even looking at shipping! Seriously... you could pay more than DOUBLE just for shopping at the wrong place!
More and more, I am finding this is true of nearly everything that I look at. I ma not even comparing used vs new....this is new merchandise, same model.
It makes me really see the value of Amazon where they have many sources of some items and you can see the prices... making vendors actually compete on price, item for item, rather than just compete on getting your foot in the door.
I decided a while ago... its better to be a good consumer than a good customer, as the two are OFTEN at odds. Hell just look at OTC drugs. You can buy name brand or generic... but even among generics, the price from generic to generic for the same drug and dose can vary by 80%!
And of course, I should mention, I am a born again amazon user. I just this past year decided to stop boycotting them over the 1-click lawsuit (yes, it really had been that long since I used amazon, I had been one of their earlier customers)
Not that I want to give them too much kudos, they are a corperation and I do believe will fleece me as fast as anyone else if I give them a chance, but they do at least seem to be able to deliver reasonable prices.
Take my own town of Arlington MA (don't be fooled, its really a part of Boston, just not offically, its a full blown city here, we just don't have a mayor). They decided back in the 50s to ban overnight parking for more than an hour on the street. It comes up to the town every year, and every year they decide to keep it.
Never mind that this city is no longer a bedroom community. Never mind that there are many rentors. Never mind that all the other towns have streets the same size and don't need parking bans... but we have one.
Hell, they even raised the fine!
Frankly, when a $25 ticket can go to over $100 with late charges... how can you imagine this is ANYHING but a blatant and disgraceful attempt to come up with unjustified "infractions" for no other reason than to create a back door tax that doesn't need approval?
Its disgusting to see the government so badly musused and abused. Its is a corruption of the system to treat the laws as nothing more than a way to raise revenue.
Do the people installing these cameras know that studies have shown an increase in traffic accidents? I doubt they care. Just like here in Arlington, bringing in money is more important to these people than public safety.
No. Actually... I would go as far as to say that the way some parents would treat teenage sexual curiosity borders on abuse in and of itself.
Teenagers are curious and experiment. Its what they have been doing for millions of years, and anyone who thinks that this is going to change within even the next thousand is an absolute lune.
In fact, if teenagers didn't experiment sexually... then all we would have is sexually imature and experimentive 20 somethings. You can't "save innocence" all you can do is delay maturity.
That is my solemn belief, and I consider the attempts to delay maturity tantamount to abuse, because they harm the child for no reason but to help the parent deny for a little longer that their child is growing up.
If you want to know why people are saying "30 is the new 20", I suspect its that way for no other reason than these foolish attempts at doing the impossible.
Actually, while I know its k-12 here...still... young as they are: This is acedemia.
You should block nothing but known phishing sites.
Why? Because they are students... ANYTHING they look at could be in service of their studies or in some way related to them. Sex sites? Well how about as a sumplimenbt to sex ed? What if they are doing a report on something related to pornography?
I know it may seem silly to some, but again.... this is acedemia. All human knowledge is fair game. No matter how politically incorrect or inconvienient.
The fundamental flaw is that its looking at your response, physical indicators of stress. Thats great... if you are so worried about getting caught.
A police office by the door of a car is a great lie detector in many circumstances. People pick out lies and weird behavior all the time. However, a person who isn't worried about lieing, a person who can really put the truth right out of their head.... good luck.
Its funny, people always call me a bad liar. They don't realize I dislike lieing, I avoid it whenevr possible. Except when playing poker of course:)
However when i want to do it, I am quite good at it. I tell people the same advice when they ask. If you have to lie....don't. Just put the truth out of your mind and remember... you are doing what you are doing, and did what you did. Suspend disbelief in yourself, and you wont express it to anyone else.
Hell, my favorite trick at poker, when I put someone on a hard decision. Don't think "does he have anything that can beat me" Don't think "I have a good hand". Think "What does he think I might have". Hold the thought process of of figuring out what he thinks in your head, and you wont tell your own hand.
> and 0.005mg/day of Risperdal for it to have an effect on me
Really? If you can back that up then you may want to update wikipedia which currently says:
Most of these results have yet to be replicated in humans. In the only positive human trial, extremely high doses (3â"5 g) of resveratrol in a special proprietary formulation have been necessary to significantly lower blood sugar
3-5 g and.005 mg are very different claims. Though, the stuff sounds pretty good overall, I wonder how economical it would be to ingest 3 grams a day.
This is exactly why issues that involve the protection of minority groups shouldn't go to the people at large. I would wonder how many of the people in question have known a gay couple. How many of them have seen that homosexuals who desire marriage desire it for the same reasons, the same loves and same fears as everyone else.
I have thought how much easier it would be if my GF and I were married so she could get on my health insurance and so she would be taken care of if I die. I can't imagine supporting a society that denied these simple securities to anyone who loved someone enough to want them for their partner to the best that they could possibly provide.
So personally, I would ask those people to provide some evidence that we don't need it, or that its really so useless. Because from what I have seen, I can't support such a view.
Slashdot Mirror
Your point? Rules are rules, school administrators follow the rules.
Not suspected of trafficing illegal drugs? Yes she was, the drugs were prohibited for her to have in the school, she was suspected of exactly that.
I roundly reject the idea that this should be treated as some special case. Either they have the authority to prohibit this sort of activity, or they don't. Period.
I love this case because it tests peoples feelings on the issue. Yes... this is what drug laws mean. Once you start, this is the conclusion. Enjoy the world this social experiment called prohibition has created.
Thanks.
-Steve
Your main rule doesn't support your previous statement about monoculture.
You are right, but mainly by segmenting the systems. Now you have more chains, each with its own least secure element. The better rule is "Defense in depth". Don't just deploy a firewall. Harden the hosts, segment the network, replace hubs with switches, use internal firewalls and setup a DMZ for externally facing hosts...
Then good passwords, retire telnet for ssh, strict key checking, publish a list of your server ssh keys.....
-Steve
Well... if you are a malware author....
the VAST majority of users are not savy. Lets say the 80/20 rule applies, you can do 20% of the work to get 80% of the benefit. Its probably even bigger than that. The point is, you can do a LOT of extra work to get to the small percentage of people who take basic precautions.... then its even more work to get the small percentage of them who take more than basic precautions...
But... your first cut hit a million nodes... is all that work worth it to bump it up to 1.1 million?
And then... the saavy people are more likely to notice you, and remove you quicker anyway. So its a short lived benefit, for a shit ton of extra effort.
Its like blackjack at the casino. Optimum play gives a slight edge if you count cards. However, the vast majority of players don't even try. Even less are any good at it, or disciplined enough to take advantage.
Its not to the casino's advantage to catch every person who tries to keep a count. Only to notice and kick out the ones who are really good at it, and try to make lots of money.
-Steve
Funny you would mention drugs.... talk about a policy that missed its mark.
Lets persue policies that help increase ignorance about drugs, lead to increases in both price and potency.... yes thats a real recipe for harm reduction now. Instead of a bunch of addicts we can treat medically and in the mean time are low on the productivity scale... and see if we can't turn them all into criminals who steal to support their habbits.
Great plan. Once again a triumph for abstinence only education!
Hard to fault them, it worked so well for alcohol. Hard to believe it would fail for heroin, and sex.
-Steve
> No, they're right about that. In my teenage years, I had a lot of romantic
> ideals. I didn't really care about having sex until pressure from my peers and
> the media convinced me that it was the best thing ever and my life was
> worthless if I didn't have it.*
> (*: This turned out to be false.)
Same here though, I didn't need any pressure from peers. I found sex all on my own, like any good primate, by jacking off. It wasn't years of peer pressure that did it... it was just watching my peers and seeing them with partners, and with "friends".
Its easy to latch on to sex, just as its easy to latch on to silly romantic ideas. Each fantasy has its place and its purpose, but in the end, fantasy is just fantasy.
I think the real flaw in the right wing argument is... that its a problem. The problem is not sex. People having promiscuous sex is NOT going to bring down society.
People will still get married and have kids for all the reasons that they always did. People may not respect some elder god who is handing down his pre-condom, pre-safe-abortion advice from long ago... and less people will listen to that nonsense.....
But I don't think any of that is really bad for society.
-Steve
Sigh so sad.
I happen be on both ends.... I am all for sex education. I can remember my sex ed instructor in middle school saying it should start in second grade on some level. I have to agree, its HEALTH. There is nothing wrong with teaching health, in fact, we should do more of it.
I think the entire concept of sex being "bad" and "dirty" needs to be done away with. I think the entirety of "lets not talk about sex", and "sex = loss of innocence" needs to be forgotten beyond our ability to recall that people ever felt that way.
Its a health issue. Pure and simple.
On the other hand... I think gun safety is too. Its unconscionable that we don't teach kids how to properly use guns the same way as hammers and saws.
-Steve
I dunno.... havn't people been complaining the younger generation is worst than every in every way imaginable since the dawn of language?
I have personally read accounts over 200 years old of how "young people today just want to stay up all night, listen to loud music, and disrespect their elders"
-Steve
Meh I agree and disagree. I don't think you can put a blanket over all behaviour like that.
The fact is, most of what we see as normal, is people doing prescribed things because its what everyone else does and whats expected of them. Anyone who has spent a few minutes questioning can see how superficial many of our daily activities are.
I have seen entirely effective and competent entire teams that don't wear suits or even particularly nice clothes. Tshirts and jeanes. That same group, dark offices, loud music.
Frankly i think most of what people lable as "eccentric" is just mundane difference. You don't really need people to conform in those ways. You don't need everyone to be a 9 to fiver with a collared shirt...
what you need is the work to get done, and right, and the docs to be written. You need to make the docs part of the task and not fall for the old "the code is the docs" BS.
What probably helps the most is integrating such people with others more. More positive social interactions, more work interactions where they can see that other people are important and they contribute.
Assholes are usually assholes because they don't understand the people they are being assholes too. It comes, often, from judging others by the standards of your own myopic world. "I am the sysadmin, you are an idiot by sysadmin standards, your request makes no sense for a sysadmin".... but you arn't a sysadmin, you are with the helpdesk.
I think to the studies of what happens in situations of authority (like the prison gaurd experiment), and think this is a lot of the issue... people judging and making decisions for others based on their own requirements. If my requirements and world works best when you are docile and do afraid of me and do as I say.... I treat you accordingly. Hence the "Instant asshole, just add badge" syndrome thats seems so common (at least among younger cops as far as I see)
-Steve
Sure but like... thats the nature of your relationship with google (or whoever is providing the service). You pay per person who clicks through, meeting whatever technical requirements of a click through. You do this because you believe that people clicking through are most probably potential customers.
Whats left out of the picture, is that the page is presented to people, who may or may not click on anything on that page, on their own whim. If you setup a water cooler, and put up a "free cup of water" sign, are you going to complain when people come by and take a cup of water and don't drink it?
Its not like a person visiting a page has any expectation of being bound by any agreement between you and the page you are advertising on, which he is visiting. He can click on or ignore your link at his whim.
If this is a problem, then perhaps the real value of these advertising services is ::shock:: overpriced! Perhaps its real value is already less than "advertised" (as you seem to have realized). Perhaps the advertisers should either demand a better deal so as to make dealing with this protest tolerable, or to demand that google pacify this crowd by changing its policies.
Of course, I would say that if this hurts advertisers enough that they make such demands, then its doing exactley what its intended to do.... drive advertising business away from google.
-Steve
actually I disagree. That is one of the things a corperation does, and is, in my mind, a perversion to be considered the only reason.
The purpose of a corperation is to make money for its shareholders by providing benefit to community by fullfilling one or more of their needs in exchange for money.
The benefit to the community should be considered as much the purpose of the busisness as the making of the money, and whenever it isn't, is when you see these sorts of gross abuses.
Frankly, I think we should have regulation that forbids the formation of any company that doesn't state as part of its purpose that one of its core purposes is anything other than benefit to the community.
After all, thats why we give them the privilege of limited liability.
-Steve
You know "whatever the market will bear" refers to a lot more than cash price.
Its like banks. We changed the federal reserve system around 8 years ago to do instant check clearing. As soon as the bank gets your check, they image it, send off the image...and bang... checks clear immediatly.
Of course... without any regulation to force the benefit to be shared with consumers, it wasn't. We got a trickle down... they just pissed on us. How long to checks take to clear 8 years later? Oh... 3 days instate, 10 days out of state.
They kept te entirely artifical distinction, and the clearance times... all the while they already have your money. Holding it for a clearance that already came.
Right nice of them to hold your money for you.
Which banks do it? As far as I can tell... all of them.
-Steve
>The market will work it out, as they go out of business, replaced by employers with saner hiring policies.
I agree up until that. I don't have as much faith in the market. The market will work it out to the extent that it absolutely needs to. Most of its "punishments" go unrealized unless they are so large in magnitude as to be undeniable.
I wholeheartedly reject the notion that we should allow the whims of the market to determine the ways in which we interact with others. In fact, the unchecked market has even, at times, so rewarded wickedness that people had to start forming unions and fighting back collectively. Say what you want about unions, they would never have gained the popularity and power they did if people didn't feel a need for them.
-Steve
Of course what goes along with that is "for better or for worst".
I can't tell you how many times I have heard pro-buisness people, or even managers directly talk about whats legal and perfectly right for an employer to do or require. They argue vehemently about how the company owners are king, and how employment is often "at will".
Well.. its one thing to know your rights, another to be a prick. Its legal to be a prick but... it means you bring many of your personal (or personelle) problems on yourself. Sure there is no expectation of privacy, sure you can have policies about workplace dating, can do drug testing, you can do all manner of things....
However, in the end, your employees are another customer. They give you work in exchange for your money. Just like being rude to a customer can make them a bad customer or even someone else's customer, the same goes for employees. They are customers, and if you want them to keep buying paychecks with their work, and not trying to screw you, then you had better treat them right.
Else they are just going to take their buisness elsewhere, or decreace the quality of work they are giving you....and in the end, right as you may be, its still your fault for being a prick. Sadly managers are far better at being pricks and getting away with it than employees because people don't generally stand up for themselves.
-Steve
I agree...mostly.
I don't do much research, but I do have my personal rules, and a company that breaks them doesn't get to hire me. Companies may have employee policies and handbooks, but my policies are just as important.
Every time I am negotiating a new job, I am quite prepared to inform them that only my doctor is allowed to ask for samples of my bodily fluids, and only for medical reasons. My policy is, my employer doesn't even get to ask for that. Its my personal being and an employer that wants urine gets treated the same as any random person asking for my urine.
People have to learn to stand up for themselves, this is about personal dignity. Are we free men or slaves? Pissing in a cup is just one of the degrading and what should be non-negotiable things that employers ask for and people blindly say yes to. You have a right to say no.
Snooping however... snooping is harder. Sure, I agree with some amount of "caveat emptor" but also.... theres alot about me that I don't think is any of an employers business and I do feel they should be prohibited from using against a person in decisions.
I think on the whole the line has to come down on whats publically available and what isn't. If its out there, public, and attributable to you, then its public. Maybe what we need is regulation on expectations of privacy. If I register on a site, and don't publicize my real name etc... it should be illegal for my information to be sold off and aggregated such that its attributable back to me.
So if you find a person on myspace under their name... thats one thing. If an aggregator with access to peoples emails uses that to connect a person to say... their fetlife.com account thats not publishing their full name, and makes that available to a third party.... that I can see making very illegal. (and the law should hold each step in that chain individually liable,,, the site that sold the info, the aggregator who put it together, and the company that used it)
Thats mu $.02 on the way it should be,
-Steve
I think they would go back to the paper copies...but first the backups. Really data corruption/erasure is best if you can do the corruption before the backup cycle and not have it noticed until afterwards... but even then its just a matter of using older backups.
Barring that, I imagine they would go back to the paper docs. Of course, that wouldn't have payment history, so they would probably have to just assume that all the loans were current unless they could find evidence they were otherwise, and of course, ask the customers for information they have about extra payments that they made.
I think the reality is more like, a bunch of people would get credited for whatever payment information was just lost and unrecoverable.
-Steve
Well duh, why do you think he encrypted it with ROT-26 ? :)
-Steve
Oh yah... now think for a second... if a random sampling of nearly everything I look at comes out at price variances of up to 100%.... how much of your money do you think you can "reclaim" just by being a better shopper? How much of a pay raise does that equate to?
-Steve
You know, money being tight recently got me to open my eyes...and what I have found has been really enlightening.
Take the Brother label maker that I got for xmass. I realized that I needed one about the same time my mother was hitting me up for gift ideas. So I looked around, and found both that it was a great idea...and I better tell her where to buy it!
Why? Simple... I found the price ranged from about $45 to $95 depending solely on where you bought it from, and I wasn't even looking at shipping! Seriously... you could pay more than DOUBLE just for shopping at the wrong place!
More and more, I am finding this is true of nearly everything that I look at. I ma not even comparing used vs new....this is new merchandise, same model.
It makes me really see the value of Amazon where they have many sources of some items and you can see the prices... making vendors actually compete on price, item for item, rather than just compete on getting your foot in the door.
I decided a while ago... its better to be a good consumer than a good customer, as the two are OFTEN at odds. Hell just look at OTC drugs. You can buy name brand or generic... but even among generics, the price from generic to generic for the same drug and dose can vary by 80%!
And of course, I should mention, I am a born again amazon user. I just this past year decided to stop boycotting them over the 1-click lawsuit (yes, it really had been that long since I used amazon, I had been one of their earlier customers)
Not that I want to give them too much kudos, they are a corperation and I do believe will fleece me as fast as anyone else if I give them a chance, but they do at least seem to be able to deliver reasonable prices.
-Steve
This stuff is only going to get worst too.
Take my own town of Arlington MA (don't be fooled, its really a part of Boston, just not offically, its a full blown city here, we just don't have a mayor). They decided back in the 50s to ban overnight parking for more than an hour on the street. It comes up to the town every year, and every year they decide to keep it.
Never mind that this city is no longer a bedroom community. Never mind that there are many rentors. Never mind that all the other towns have streets the same size and don't need parking bans... but we have one.
Hell, they even raised the fine!
Frankly, when a $25 ticket can go to over $100 with late charges... how can you imagine this is ANYHING but a blatant and disgraceful attempt to come up with unjustified "infractions" for no other reason than to create a back door tax that doesn't need approval?
Its disgusting to see the government so badly musused and abused. Its is a corruption of the system to treat the laws as nothing more than a way to raise revenue.
Do the people installing these cameras know that studies have shown an increase in traffic accidents? I doubt they care. Just like here in Arlington, bringing in money is more important to these people than public safety.
-Steve
No. Actually... I would go as far as to say that the way some parents would treat teenage sexual curiosity borders on abuse in and of itself.
Teenagers are curious and experiment. Its what they have been doing for millions of years, and anyone who thinks that this is going to change within even the next thousand is an absolute lune.
In fact, if teenagers didn't experiment sexually... then all we would have is sexually imature and experimentive 20 somethings. You can't "save innocence" all you can do is delay maturity.
That is my solemn belief, and I consider the attempts to delay maturity tantamount to abuse, because they harm the child for no reason but to help the parent deny for a little longer that their child is growing up.
If you want to know why people are saying "30 is the new 20", I suspect its that way for no other reason than these foolish attempts at doing the impossible.
-Steve
No way!
I would totally pay $50 for a laptop that had 6 years worth of my work and data on it.
-Steve
Actually, while I know its k-12 here...still... young as they are: This is acedemia.
You should block nothing but known phishing sites.
Why? Because they are students... ANYTHING they look at could be in service of their studies or in some way related to them. Sex sites? Well how about as a sumplimenbt to sex ed? What if they are doing a report on something related to pornography?
I know it may seem silly to some, but again.... this is acedemia. All human knowledge is fair game. No matter how politically incorrect or inconvienient.
-Steve
The fundamental flaw is that its looking at your response, physical indicators of stress. Thats great... if you are so worried about getting caught.
A police office by the door of a car is a great lie detector in many circumstances. People pick out lies and weird behavior all the time. However, a person who isn't worried about lieing, a person who can really put the truth right out of their head.... good luck.
Its funny, people always call me a bad liar. They don't realize I dislike lieing, I avoid it whenevr possible. Except when playing poker of course :)
However when i want to do it, I am quite good at it. I tell people the same advice when they ask. If you have to lie....don't. Just put the truth out of your mind and remember... you are doing what you are doing, and did what you did. Suspend disbelief in yourself, and you wont express it to anyone else.
Hell, my favorite trick at poker, when I put someone on a hard decision. Don't think "does he have anything that can beat me" Don't think "I have a good hand". Think "What does he think I might have". Hold the thought process of of figuring out what he thinks in your head, and you wont tell your own hand.
-Steve
> and 0.005mg/day of Risperdal for it to have an effect on me
Really? If you can back that up then you may want to update wikipedia which currently says:
3-5 g and .005 mg are very different claims. Though, the stuff sounds pretty good overall, I wonder how economical it would be to ingest 3 grams a day.
-Steve
This is exactly why issues that involve the protection of minority groups shouldn't go to the people at large. I would wonder how many of the people in question have known a gay couple. How many of them have seen that homosexuals who desire marriage desire it for the same reasons, the same loves and same fears as everyone else.
I have thought how much easier it would be if my GF and I were married so she could get on my health insurance and so she would be taken care of if I die. I can't imagine supporting a society that denied these simple securities to anyone who loved someone enough to want them for their partner to the best that they could possibly provide.
So personally, I would ask those people to provide some evidence that we don't need it, or that its really so useless. Because from what I have seen, I can't support such a view.
-Steve