Posts by Tom 13 7544 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
It seems to me the correct response to that is to sue the employer, not Google. And when the headlines hit about the company being sued for employment discrimination, not only it, but every other employer out there gets the message that they aren't to abuse the searches.
Mostly agree but there is a problem. We know Google are already fiddling with their search results to hide certain results which they find problematic. Mostly we've tended to agree with Google that the fiddling is both proper and necessary. But the earlier poster did make a decent case with the wife of the German poll. That is a case in which I think Google should consider tweaking their results.
The problems I have with the decision are:
1) For the most part if focuses on the wrong party. If there is defamatory information on the internet, the proper course of action is to seek removal of the defamatory information. Once the information has been removed, it will be removed from Google. If the information is hosted outside the jurisdiction of the courts to which the plaintiff has access, tough shit. Or at least that's been the usual retort from freetards and hacktivists when one country objects to information being made accessible outside their jurisdiction in the past.
2) As noted by an El Reg notable above, truth is no longer an absolute defense.
3) It is not clear how many of these tweaks Google will be required to implement or how it will affect the efficiency and/or effectiveness of their search engine.
Lastly I'll make the following note. Here in the US, once you've been convicted of a felony, if an employer asks about it on a work application you are required to report it. Failure to report it, even if 40 years ago is grounds for firing. Employers are required to not hold the conviction against you unless it directly impacts the position for which you are applying. Companies to hire convicted felons who have served their sentences. I worked with one such fellow who has reformed. I'd hire him for any job for which he is qualified. I'd particularly hire him as a consultant for physical security on buildings. Having done the auto theft and break-in thing previously in life, he spots things most people miss and will proudly point out how stupid they are.
Study our AC friend carefully. This is a tech site with people who love tech and are prone to like the idea of manned space flight simple for itself. While we can mostly agree the experiments being done are important, it skirts the specificity of his question: is it worth the money expended?
I'm not entirely certain I can answer that question affirmatively. Sure, looking at the benefits of the Apollo program the answer is yes. But for the money expended since then? I'd like it to be 'yes', but is it? If we roll Apollo's benefits into it, are we still in 'yes' territory? For how much longer? The Space Shuttle was mostly a dead end. It didn't really advance engine technology. It's not clear it advanced recovery or insulation technology. Musk went back to square one to start his program precisely because of how dead end the Space Shuttle was. And that's where most of NASA's money has been spent since Apollo. We have gotten more bang for the buck out of the unmanned stuff which has from time to time fired up people's imagination.
Also remember, amongst the non-technical, and even more so amongst the ideological left, there are a lot more people like AC than there are like us.
Actually right now the government money is their meat and potatoes. In fact for all the talk about commercial space flight, the truth of the matter is nobody does without the government. We may get there someday (it's certainly where I'd prefer us to be), but we're not there yet.
Why?
The only thing NASA ever liked about the Man to the Moon program was the good publicity they got. They didn't want to do manned missions, that was shoved down their throats. They would much have preferred a series of unmanned probes that would have cost far less money. ISS is a cobbled together program that runs only because of inertia. NASA complains about it constantly because it eats so much of their budget. This is just one more issue with manned space flight, and from NASA's point of view, another reason to end the waste.
Please don't read me incorrectly. My gut tells me you have the correct position and I'd like to see better support for manned exploration. But if you were sitting in the room with the NASA bean counters and/or Congress critters, what do you say from this incident that changes their position?
Wow! You really have no clue how real banks work.
In point of fact real banks DO effectively put their cash reserves online, and most of their onhand cash is frequently in the teller drawers. Have you ever tried to get even $15,000 in cash out of a bank on what they regard as short notice? I have. Somehow or another they misplaced our change order and therefore hadn't gotten extra cash reserves transferred in from the federal reserve. Ever deposited even more than that because the armored car didn't make the scheduled stop for a pickup? I've done that too. You should see the look on the branch chief's face when he realizes you're handing him a Rubbermaid bin with more cash than his branch has in reserves with the Fed.
Here in the US, reserves are generally held by the Federal Reserve. Every night the banks connect to the fed and settle up their account transfers. Since it's mostly all virtual money even though it is dollar denominated this is all very easy. Back in the day it was all done with modems and special encryption cards (which might cost even more than the PC) in a desktop PC somewhere in the bank. These days I expect they've done away with the modems and connect right over the internet just like Mt. Gox.
What protects your account isn't physical separation of assets, but a web of interconnected security measures. First up, being a real, regulated bank, they have proper backup, access, and encryption regimes. Next up, they have constant and ongoing audits to make sure everything checks and balances. Then they have the ability to reverse transactions. And the final security measure is FDIC insurance backed by the Federal government.
Over here we tend to pay for speed not quantity except with cells where you typically pay get reamed for both.
I don't actually have a problem with a multi-tiered internet of different speeds and capacity. I think it would lead to a more efficient internet. My only concern is that the pipes at a given speed are available without monopoly restriction. That is, if Comcast introduces a streaming only pipe with 20 times the speed of the text pipe, if it offers itself that pipe for $100/unit it can't charge Netflix $1000/unit for the same pipe, although I might see $150/unit.
I think Archimedes principle depends on the entire object being immersed.
In any event, they are claiming the ice flow from land continues until it is exhausted. And that's where the problem will be. Something will interrupt the continuous flow but they're too arrogant to admit they don't know.
I don't give a rat's ass how many letters are trailing behind the reviewer's names. This paper has a fundamental flaw. The same fundamental flaw all the hyperblow rhetoric from the warmists have: the data line is too frelling short compared to the baseline. They've got 40 years of data they're trying to project 1000+ years back. Then they predict 200-800 years into the future. Those so called predictions are as reliable as shaman throwing bones or an old crone reading tea leaves.
I think I've found the problem:
use and unnecessary run-time errors were deemed a finger-breaking offence for the programmer concerned.
Between the cheap price or disk and RAM and a new interpretation of the Geneva Convention, this penalty is no longer allowed. Now if you were to do away with the new interpretation of the Geneva Convention, we might be able to fix it.
No, no. You have to have the exact right sequences:
1) Order up the blame assessment project. Figure 6 months an 12 heads as the parameters for this one.
2) Order the mitigation for the current system. At 6 weeks and underfunded with still incomplete specs the patch will still fail. Leading to
3) Order the replacement of the current abomination. Kick off the first planning meeting. Meanwhile, kick #2 in the ass because until we get a replacement we need the other one doing the best it can.
4) After two years of planning the replacement, determine the estimated cost is not within budget. Cancel plan, do forensic accounting and find people to blame. Go back to step 3.
Thus arriving at intergalactic travel is common place, the abomination has been ordered replaced but is still operating and not accepting U2 flights, which are now being tracked on glass table with crayons and little model planes.
There is no such thing as a natural monopoly, no matter how many times you claim there is.
ALL these monopolies were created by greedy politicians making deals with their friends. No, not at the national level where everybody keeps focusing their attention, but at the local level where the zoning laws were written to allow one incumbent. At first it was a lot of little monopolies because "the last mile is a natural monopoly." Then one of the little monopolies found it had a bunch of extra cash. So it bought an adjacent monopoly to allow efficiencies of scale because "the last mile is a natural monopoly." And with two regions under its control, it was making even more cash, so it could annex its next monopoly quicker than it did the last. So now we've got an oligopoly of at most four players and everybody else being sound and fury signifying nothing.
No, I don't know how to fix it. You F'ed it up too badly with your "natural monopolies" BS. If you break them apart, they'll all reassemble again because they've tasted monopoly power and it is nearly impossible to police all the possible political graft at the local level across the country. The best shot we've got right now is somebody showing the Verizon/Comcast deal was the sort of illegal arrangement the Sherman Anti-Trust Act was meant of penalize. Not much chance of that happening though is there?
Doubtful. And that's the problem, somebody has to pay for it.
Seriously, how many articles have we had where posters have wailed about data caps for unlimited service because the ISP is oversubscribed? Too many for me to count. That means the ISPs aren't charging the full price of everything, probably because we aren't willing to pay for it. But somebody does, somehow. What we're seeing in the market now is as much a socialism problem as anything else. The ISPs promised too much for too little.
In the US, ask about DSL and the likely retort will be "No, we've moved past using phones to connect our computers." Not fair, but there it is.
For the most part, the phone companies quickly realized they weren't going to be able to build out the infrastructure using DSL. Population density is too small for too large an area. So they switched to fiber optics early on. But in rural regions a combination of real costs and political opportunism at the local level has pretty much left only 1 wired competitor in most areas. You may have a wireless option, or a satellite option, which the FCC has counted as competition. Which is why AC above is getting so many downvotes. Even those of us who believe the market CAN provide the competition, know it isn't because of the political angles.
Typical civil suits focus on restoring the injured party/ies to parity with where they would have been if the offense had not occurred.
So, if you assume
- 5000 affected workers
- an average salary of $50,000/yr
- 10 years of offense
- 5% interest year on year
You wind up with a settlement amount of $261,250,00 or $52,250 per person.
Which makes ballpark numbers look about right for the proposed settlement on the usual settlement basis. Whether or not the usual settlement basis is fair is the real question.
Discovered yesterday that I've been unwittingly helping keep them above water but no more. Back some years ago I think I renewed a copy of it that came on my mother's laptop and set it to renew automatically since I'm not usually around when it is renewal time. And forgot all about it. I've been in the process of reducing interest payments on my revolving credit and was looking at the monthly when I saw their name. Called them and asked them to cancel it and refund that charge. They processed both requests. So that $80/yr less they'll be making in the future.
I agree, the problem for Symantec is that all they've ever done is borged on more stuff (badly) other people developed initially. So they've got nothing with which to come out swinging. Given that, Don's pretty much nailed it: call the vulture capitalists and sell off what you've got left before you lose even more of it. You owe it to your stockholders.
No need for threats this time. The administration hasn't approved sanctions for their pal in Russia who happens to be invading Ukraine at the moment. All that sanctions hoopla is just so much crap to keep the rubes distracted.
I'll admit I was expecting that given the situation with the ISS they'd been issued a waiver, but it wasn't even that complicated. They just flat out haven't affirmed the company should be on the list.
So effectively very difficult.
Sounds like they should put a hold on the LCPD closures and either keep them running or at least mothballed for two or three years while they work out a better transition plan. Not that they will. I get that the money problem is real, not just greed. It just strikes me that you do what you have to to keep the power up and running, and coal is what you still have.
Thanks!
It is not generally know that John Michell was originally venting to a friend over a pint at the pub before he wrote his famous missive Henry Cavendish:
I tell you, it's all bullshit and it's completely impenetrable. In fact, anything you throw at it sticks to it and simply becomes more bullshit. It's just like a black hole from which nothing escapes.
Valid patents frequently depend on an arrangement of very specific angles that produce a superior product. An example of such a patent would be an angle on a camshaft that allows the optimal flow with minimal pulsing in closed high pressure pump for a single piston pump.
In this instance it isn't simply on a white background. It is for:
...when captured with an image capture device, as a near perfect white without the need for post-processing, retouching, or other image manipulation. In other words, images and video of items captured in the studio arrangement appear against a background that is equivalent to a white background when converted into a web color hexadecimal triplet corresponding to a true white.
Now you can make fun of this all you want, but I've edited enough crappy "white" images in my time to recognize the commercial value of something that eliminates the need for such editing. And yes, this is the sort of thing a company could invest a couple hundred thousand dollars determining.
Sure there is. They were already inside the system. They might not have used their account privileges to carry out the attack, but just because you're inside the system you know the attack surfaces and how to go after them. That is privileged information you are supposed to protect, not exploit.
You forgot the most important reason: The Apple under Jobs reason that Apple has now lost, aka scarcity of product.
When the Wii first came out you couldn't find one in the stores. I know I looked. In fact I looked for almost a full year. Then I got it home and most of the games were crap. So it sits in the basement collecting dust.
Just as is the case with MS, no matter how much you polish a turd, it is still a turd.
Maybe if it was confined to just the internet it would be tolerable. But it's not. I personally know people who have been physically injured because of the antics 4chan engages in. So no, it's not all in good fun.
Not sure anyone would notice if the lights were hacked in the middle of rush hours. Perhaps the middle of the day, but not rush parking lot hours. Not sure about NY and Seattle, but here on the beltway, parking lot hours are 6:00 am to 9:30 am and 3:00 pm to 6:30 pm, except Fridays when late hours are 2:30 to 7:30. Don't ask! It just is.
Treat bitcoin investing like a drug purchase. The risks are similar except since you aren't in close proximity there's a reduced chance of actual gunfire. The bigger the deal, the more the risk, and the more you need to know the players in your deal. Which sort of invalidates the whole anonymity thing. And like a drug deal gone bad, you don't really have decent legal recourse.
Fire every member of:
- the BBC finance committee
- the BBC executive
- the BBC Trust
Release the Accenture report to the public.
I'll note El Reg's and Marge's notations that Linwood may have been called in too late to be responsible for the fiasco and let others sort out the details on that. I expect that he needs to remain unemployed even if not at fault if for no other reason than there aren't projects there for him to manage.
I'll also note auburnman's comments about the Accenture report's worth. Be that as it may, the report should still be made public and open to criticism. If it's as bad as he said it is, BBC heads need to roll for commissioning the worthless report in the first place. If they already rolled in items 1 to 3, so much the better.
And these bits:
This is very different from what Netflix was getting from Cogent because Comcast is providing fully dedicated capacity, unlike sending it through someone like Cogent where those connections are potentially over-subscribed if a transit provider over-sells their capacity, which Cogent has a history of doing.
To date, Cogent has had peering disputes with AOL, Teleglobe, France Telecom, Level 3, TeliaSonera, Sprint-Nextel and Verizon. I find it interesting no one in the press mentioned how Cogent always seems to be the one major transit provider who continues to have disputes with so many other network providers, year after year.
I found this paragraph enlightening:
You will notice that when Netflix was using third party CDN providers Akamai, Level 3 and Limelight for 100% of their video delivery, there were no quality issues. Just look at their speed ratings from 2012. The reason for this is that those CDNs already have their servers connected to ISPs like Comcast and have put in place all the necessary links, both free and paid, to guarantee, via an SLA, that they can deliver Netflix’s video. So for all the people who say that Comcast forced Netflix into paying or is strong arming them, that is not true. Netflix has multiple options in the market for delivering good quality video, but Netflix chose to build their own CDN and change their delivery strategy because they want to have more control over it and save money.
The baby bells were more government interference. What we need is less.
THERE ARE NO NATURAL MONOPOLIES. NOT EVEN THE LAST MILE TO THE HOUSE.
The monopolies are imposed by politicians who grant them to certain people/companies who fund their campaigns. And then get foolish rubes to vote for them so they can democratize the internet through regulation.
It wouldn't be a problem if they were really the rat-bastages everyone accuses them of being. Right now the problem for the cable companies is exactly the sort of tripe the net-neutrality types spout: there are a lot of channels they carry that nobody gives a damn about. My subscription has 150 channels, of which I regularly watch maybe 12 and touch at most 30 in a month. That's 120 channels to whom the cable company doesn't need to pay royalties on my behalf. But because they've already built the last mile, they've been coerced into supporting those channels because there is no "incremental cost and it's good for diversity." Screw the 120 channels! They could probably halve my cable bill it they provided a more minimal selectable set and increase their profits by 50%.
The NSA came in from the cold more than 15 years ago. There was a time within my memory when you drove past the exit for their main campus and there was no sign. Today it is well marked, proudly proclaiming it is the headquarters. A friend of mine who worked at Hopkins use to have people who query about a good place to live that was equidistant from Baltimore and DC but wouldn't say much else about their job or why they were moving here. "Ah, you going to work for No Such Agency. That means you probably want a place in Columbia." So even when it was still technically secret, people knew about it and where it was. Granted it did help that my friend worked at a materials research lab that had classified contracts with the agency.
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