As long as you don't demand that one provide you with sex...

But then, that's a whole other ethical bucket of fish.

To be fair, two things:

1) Most of Apple's patents are on hardware, and design patents aren't uncommon at all among big corps that make and sell tangible stuff (see also the Auto industry).

2) Apple got this way because they were IP-raped pretty hard in their early years (with Microsoft being among the more notable thieves).

s'okay, I'm all stocked up for popcorn on that one.

Although, wouldn't it just save us some time if we just nuked East Texas from orbit?

Yeah! Take the latest federal judge in good ol' Marshall TX, Judge James Rodney Gilstrap - he was nominated by that great champion and bastion of the Republican party... err, Barack Obama. He was confirmed by the Senate in 2011, when the joint was run by that other massive bastion of conservative GOP morality, err, Sen. Harry Reid. :/

Here's an idea - how about you do some, I dunno, research, before you spout partisan politics.

True indeed.

On the one hand, they're paying for the employee's time, so as long as the tracking can be removed/ended as the employee leaves, it's within their legal bounds to do so. On the other hand, given that employees can get creative as hell when it comes to slacking off, I don't see how this is going to be very effective.

It's like when they moved to an open office (as in "you can see everyone's screens") plan at Intel as a pilot "How We Work" program a few years ago. They figured it would increase collegiality, increase productivity, etc etc. Turns out that the area of the building where they ran that pilot was a frigging ghost town, with the assigned occupants hiding somewhere quiet to get some work done. Other alternatives were to come up with sudden justifications for working remotely, and scheduling conference rooms just to go be somewhere quiet for awhile that didn't have as many eyeballs on you and what you were doing. Not even free soda fountains parked right next to the area could lure folks back to their desks.

I'd worked in a similar type of office later on, and honestly, it kind of sucked. Auditing file shares for pr0n/mp3s/illicit files with HR had to be done in a conference room, the noise levels otherwise were louder than usual (headphones were pretty much required if you wanted to work quietly), and it was kind of odd having my manager sitting 3' away from me all day long in between meetings (on the plus side, I only had to elbow him if I needed something.)

All that aside, they've been trying to come up with ways to monitor employees for years: timesheets, RFID badges, workstation monitoring (even down to keyloggers on certain sensitive employees' workstations), email/proxy logs, you-name-it. Most have failed to live up to expectations due to cost or ease of circumvention. Short of hiring a human monitor/proctor for each employee (or small group thereof) to watch and record what they do, you're simply not going to get much more productivity out of your employees than you get now - I daresay you'll end up with less because they'll be spending more time trying to circumvent or cheat all the bullshit you've put into place to track them.

His point was that you just proved it. :/

This, especially this. Pushing petroleum through pipelines instead of on his railroads would make him very sad, and nobody wants to make one of the biggest DNC contributors sad, now do they?

Meanwhile the partisans will clog up Facebook and similar with variations of 'yay our Lord and Savior saved teh environmentz!' versus 'teh imperialz president OMG!'... ...while the fat cats laugh at the little people a little before they plan their next chess move (and lobbyists) in Washington DC.

Meanwhile the world begins to do its best impression of Titanic-Meets-Iceberg ever.

Fucking politics, gotta love it (eyeroll).

Please. Once Verizon gets done lobbying for a redefinition of "5G", you'd be lucky to see a 10% increase in bandwidth from 4G.

He's not too far off; I remember in the bad old days when I worked for a large poultry corporation; most of the illegals (nearly all from South of the US) that they hired on did exactly that - shipped as much money home to the family as possible, stayed 5-10 years, then went back home and used that cash pile to start a business back home as their career/nest-egg generator.

Not sure how many H1-B's do the same thing, but I'm willing to wager that it's not an inconsequential percentage.

(...and to be honest, if I were not American, I'd do the same damned thing.)

I think it's even worse than that. The survey likely doesn't show what the individuals who got their H1-B's through Tata and Infosys actually get paid, instead showing what the tech corp paid agencies like Infosys or Tata instead for a given individual. Contractors are contractors, after all - the rate paid to the contracting agency for a guy is way more than the guy himself will ever see. A corp can pay a rate of $50/hr to the agency (be it US or foreign), but the guy in the seat is lucky to see $30/hr of that, before taxes. Tata and Infosys devour the majority of H1-B visas, so it stands to reason that maybe they should be more specific on who they're surveying.

TL;DR: I may be wrong, but I suspect that the survey is bullshit, and that the reality is that the individual more often than not gets paid slave wages, while the tech company can still happily report paying "industry standard", since they pay that "average" rate to the agency.

I could be wrong, but given greed...

Replace "smoker" with "diabetic", "downs syndrome parent", "thyroid issue" (obesity), etc etc...

Once that box is opened, all bets are off as to what can be denied. ;)

http://www.exploreutah.com/Get...

*mic drop*

Hell, there's a lot of exceptions...

Most towns in Utah are laid out on a strict grid wherever possible (and often even where it isn't), with any given address denoting it's position in yards relative to the nearest Mormon temple. My home address there always read like coordinates, no matter which home I lived in (e.g. 2240 E, 840 S ). Here in Portland, it's a semi-grid that quickly gets tangled once you get out of downtown (and in many cases, not even that far out).

Then again, TFA seems like they're just stating that people like grid patterns, which makes sense considering that it makes the best use of divvying up the land without the whole zig-zag travel that some n-Gon grid (e.g. hexagonal/honeycomb) layout would introduce.

Hell, forget specificity - it would be nice if it could even make a good/bad prediction, or at least *something* close enough and concrete enough. We've seen predictions of an ice-free Arctic by now (nope), sea levels that should have risen at least 5-12" by now (nope), swarms of killer hurricanes (nope)... and mostly we see a lot of authorities having to go out of their way to explain why their 10-year-old predictions have turned to crap. It doesn't help that some of them have resorted to long circuitous loops of semi-logic to try at an explanation.

Seriously - this isn't about quibbling over a fractions of a degree here, it's about getting the trend predictions workable, at least enough that later events come to within at least the same zip code of confirming them. Put this way: According to Dr. Hansen's infamous 'hockey stick', we should have seen something affirmative by now... and instead of revisiting his hypothesis to see why it didn't stack up against the facts on the ground (which would be the scientific way to deal with failure), we see Dr. Hansen actively litigating against any big-name critic that hurts his ego by pointing out that he was (*gasp*) wrong. And no - don't get me started on the IPCC; it's become little more than a propaganda organ these days.

So yeah - it is relevant to have a working model that can at least predict a trend, especially in light of what these scientists are demanding of society as a whole. As long as the science itself remains broken, no one should take stock in it.

Before anyone comes swooping in to express their hurt little feelings via downmods, note that I *want* these scientists to have a working model, and to have some sense of accuracy, no matter how it turns out otherwise. So far, not only is there a lack of one, but a religious and ideological fervor has swept the whole damn field, making it a mess that has lost credibility (partially in some cases, entirely in others).

May want to read what you quoted... the condition was caused by one massive-assed volcano going off. No anthropogenic cause for that one. ;)