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Comment Re:So sue 'em. (Score 4, Insightful) 569

He can't sue.

Florida is a "At Will Employment" state. The only thing you can sue for here is Discrimination. In Florida, you can be fired for anything, with or without reason, and you can quit, with or without reason.

Emphasis mine. What you said is not strictly true. You can be fired without reason, but if you provide a reason then it can't violate the numerous federal laws on the matter. For example, you can't fire someone for race, religion, sex, etc.

In this case they appear to have given a reason, and the reasons would seem to violate federal whistle blower laws, so he can sue.

Comment Re:Hmmm (Score 1) 325

Then look at the graph (the one in the article with blue and red dots). That is a TERRIBLE correlation. It might be significant from a purely statistical argument, but the correlation is so weak that it would be difficult to eliminate other factors.

I think you might be looking at the graph the wrong way. The correlation isn't how long it takes to spot the direction. The correlation is the difference in time that it takes to see the small vs large. They certainly need a lot more data points, but it looks like they could nail down an IQ score to about 20 points within a couple of minutes with a high degree of confidence. That's pretty impressive. It might give a better starting point for tests to give a more accurate measurement.

Of course, then you have the question as to if an IQ score correlates to anything useful in life, or provides any useful information.

Comment Re:Blackberry Enterprise (Score 1) 125

Blackberry Enterprise is one of those products that I really just have to scratch my head at. It has always seemed to me that encouraging users to treat as secure something which is easily lost, stolen, or damaged is a fundamentally flawed concept for a business model.

Are you insane? Or you just have no idea what a blackberry enterprise server (BES) does?

The BES manages strong encryption (AES by default) on the devices. The encryption keys are found only in two places: one the BES, and on the blackberry itself.

The mobile carrier doesn't have the keys, and RIM doesn't have the keys. So if a government comes calling with a warrant, RIM doesn't have anything to give them. It's a very elegant design.

The BES can force mandatory policies onto the blackberries, such as strong full-disk encryption, strong passwords, remote tracking, remote wiping, remote locking, wiping if the phone doesn't check in regularly, restricting what apps can access, and many, many other things.

All of the encryption stuff is exactly like ActiveSync, which comes on every device worth it's salt, and every organization that has Exchange (is there an enterprise that doesn't?). All of the policies are included in ActiveSync, except for "remote tracking, remote locking, wiping if the phone doesn't check in regularly, restricting what apps can access", and most of those are easily implemented with a mobile management program. That said, most enterprises I've seen really only care about the features ActiveSync comes with.

We have a BES that we are actively trying to get the last few stragglers off of so we can decommission it. Really, once the first iPhone supported ActiveSync (2008?) BES stopped being relevant to any sysadmin I've interacted with.

Comment Re:Cost Per Lumen? BS! (Score 1) 308

The only things I see holding back LED bulbs are misinformation and lack of availability

Not true. You only give lifetime values for current prices. If the price of an LED bulb will be a quarter of the current cost in five years (a likely scenario), you could keep using incandescents for the next five years and then switch to LED. Your total cost will still be half of what it would have been if you had purchased LED bulbs now.

For me, it makes far more sense to replace heavily used bulbs with CFL now, and then switch to LED once they drop to a reasonable price.

Comment Re:How can they compete with other data centers th (Score 1) 60

None of this post makes sense.

1. We're not talking about halfway around the world. They could put the datacenter 20 miles away and pay a small fraction of the property and maintenance costs.
2. Our primary datacenters are ~270 miles apart, and the latency is less than 10ms round trip. 20 miles is going to have negligible latency.
3. Datacenters have a tiny staff on site for a large number of servers. You don't need a huge talent pool to get someone to rack servers and run cables.
4. In the rare event that you want to touch a server physically (why?) driving 20 miles just isn't a big deal.
5. Wall Street stopped putting its servers in Manhattan after 9/11, so you wouldn't put servers there for high frequency trading.
6. Most major telecom nexus points to the rest of the world aren't in the middle of large cities. There's no reason to have them there. In a large city you have a nexus for the city, which then has a connection to a nexus point off someplace sensible.

Comment Re:If you want updates, buy Nexus (Score 3, Informative) 505

How are people so lacking in foresight that they can't do the *very* simple math of calculating the significant price difference over time between a "free" phone with an ass-raping contract and buying a phone outright with only the plan and features they need?

From what I've seen from most carriers in the US, there is no difference between a plan that is paying for a phone under contract, and one that has no phone under contract. So unless one plans to change carriers before a contract ends, it would cost significantly more to purchase a phone outright and then pay for service. (Note that I'm speaking of major carriers, and this could be different if one were willing to accept a very minor carrier.)

Comment Re:Er, that likely means they'll be on WP9 (Score 3, Informative) 505

But on a related-note, the first jump Microsoft made from Windows Phone 7.5/7.8 to Windows Phone 8 broke compatibility for all existing third party applications.

This is not correct. The framework used on 7.5/7.8 still works on 8, and so applications released for 7.5/7.8 still worked, that framework has just been deprecated for new applications. MS released an additional framework for 8 that was not compatible with 7.5/7.8, so new applications developed with the new framework will not work on older phones. This is not particularly surprising given that I have encountered numerous applications for both iOS and Android that do not work with older versions of the OS.

Comment Re:I'm not even a fan, but (Score 1) 1174

Your statement is heavily dependent on the assumption that government endorsement of a particular marital arrangement significantly affects whether or not people will choose it. I posit that other social institutions are hugely more important than government in influencing such choices.

It's been my personal experience that a significant number of people are getting married for legal reasons rather than societal ones. But let's face it, I really have no actual numbers, selection bias, etc, so I have no idea how representative my experience is.

Much better for government to butt out and leave family structure to institutions better suited to maintain it -- and meanwhile leave people who really want to go their own way the right to do so.

The statistics I've seen impacting the success of children is in regards to legally recognized marriages. Parents who stay together without a legally recognized marriage suffer a statistically significant drop in the likelihood of success of their children. While you couldn't be certain without trying, I think that setting marriage up with the same legal significance as a promise ring might cause a global drop in success. Who knows for sure, but it's a big enough risk that I wouldn't even think about trying it without a significant amount of data saying that there wouldn't be an impact.

Comment Re:I'm not even a fan, but (Score 1) 1174

I think the best solution is to simply get government out of the business of marriage entirely. Let people make whatever sort of property, child care and permissions-sharing arrangements they like via contracts (perhaps with some "standard", default contracts for those who don't wish to define their own) and let groups (e.g. religions) and individuals define "marriage" however they like.

You want to marry your cat? Go for it, dude. Just don't take any amorous liberties without the cat's consent.

Unfortunately, that is probably a rather short sighted plan, much like communism sounds like a great way in theory to bring everyone up to the same level but practical problems with human nature prevent that end goal from ever being a reality. Whatever the reasons, children raised in families with married parents (in the government endorsed sense) have a significantly higher chance of success, and changes that are likely to decrease the likelihood of that situation should probably be avoided due to the long term negative economic and social impacts to a country. It's not that it wouldn't be better, it's that statistics and experience seem to indicate that it would be an extremely risky move.

Comment Re:Wrong site (Score 1) 605

The trend will reverse as high schools narrow the university track and expand vocational options (already happening here in Austin, TX).

I haven't had much cause to watch the changes in school policies in AISD, but I'm curious what is happening here. What sorts of new vocational training are being offered to middle and high school students?

Comment Re:Why? (Score 1) 180

The patents/licensing issue is the reason that the BBC developed the Dirac codec. They have a few hardware boxes that they've developed that take uncompressed or analog audio/video in one end and spit it onto Ethernet on the other end. If you use those everywhere, then there are no compatibility issues. The BBC uses it right now, so it is certainly a possibility on current equipment.

I don't buy the "produced live" as an issue as you're not likely to see a full second delay at any point. Outside the studio, no one cares about a fraction of a second because everything else adds seconds of delay. Just turn on a "live" sports game on TV and the radio and you'll notice how the radio announcer is always a few seconds ahead of what you see on the TV. You would have to be filming a delayed stream in the same view as the live stream to know, and even then the delay is unlikely to be noticeable.

I could see a case where you have multiple timing planes with edits being made using circular dependencies that would wreak havoc. That sounds like more of a process issue though.

It still sounds to me like you're making the process difficult by holding onto ideas of how certain pieces have to be done, and that maybe the whole process needs to be rethought. That said, I know there are things going on that I just don't have the background to foresee or understand, so it may very well be impossible without moving around insane amounts of uncompressed data. It'll certainly be interesting to see what the next decade brings for this field.

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