With how commonplace it is for Republicans fundraisers to embezzle, moralists to molest, and budget hawks to feather with pork, it's important that "Democratic party affiliation" be mentioned, because otherwise we'd assume it was just another Republican and "patriotic Americans" would just carry on and ignore the story.

I'm in favor of prosecuting crooks with power, no matter their affiliation. Bold type on Republicans? Really? People would think that was the average weight of a font if we did that.

that way myself. If you don't like it, I suggest that you not do it.

front page of Slashdot. Of course this is price discrimination. Charge what the market will bear. Segment your users accordingly. Maximize revenue through each avenue, carefully ensuring that you match value offered to segments to pricing, etc.

This is not a story, this is marketing 101—it's what every marketing-driven organization (basically everyone in the modern economy) does, and the bigger they are, the better they do it.

It's not that any of this is wrong, it's just not newsworthy. We could write the same piece about any number of consumer goods companies, SAAS platforms, etc.

I guess my response to this is: "Yes. And?"

If you want to securely control your HVAC systems in your data centre, don't connect it to the Internet: Hire a person to operate it.

Social engineering.

Seems to me you're talking about SOCIALISM, or even worse, COMMUNISM.

I didn't sign no contract, and there ain't no such thing as society. That's a lie told by Karl Marx.

— All of America

Because:

- The pay is 2-3x what I could get paid at established firms
- The relationship-starting practices actually make sense (an interview amongst humans, often with C-levels, rather than with an HR-drone, and forms of testing that involve work on-product, rather than abstract and unrelated HR games).
- They are thankful to have me and pleasant to work with (as opposed to confronting the HR bureaucracy and middle management)
- I get better titles and better status/authority within the firm

I do good work, I produce value, and the startups that I work with see that and can measure it quantitatively. Established firms could if they wanted to, but that's the point: they don't want to. They want to pay you as little as they can get away with, and have you as silent and head-hung as they can get you to be.

I stopped working for stodgy HR- and middle-management-heavy firms years ago. It basically sucked, and was soul-sucking.

Companies want to talk about making yourself competitive in the labor market, then bitch and moan when those that will pay get all the hot talent?

Oh noez! Whatever will we do!?

I'd say that if someone gets paid $big_bucks at $hot_startup, they're entitled to it. If you want them, pony up.

company now:

- Pays less
- Is less secure
- Is a shitty environment
- Offers dwindling benefits
- And little respect

You're cannon fodder, that's all.

At startups and companies with that "hot startup" attitude (there are a few established companies that do this), you're the core of the business, the brains of the operation, worthy of any perks or cash they can throw at you.

Who wants to work where they're completely undervalued when they can work where they're (if anything) overvalued?

Make the salary at least reasonable, the hiring practices sane, the benefits good, and the job security reliable, and you'll find that a lot of young people are willing to work at stodgy old firms, just like they used to.

Employees are just tired of being treated like shit. These days hot startup > freelance/consult > established firm when it comes to the deal you get as a worker.

Yes, conceptually sound. IN practical terms -- absolute Public Relations marketing material.

The stock market for the most part does not lead to capital investments. Venture Capitalists firms are as often involved in predatory capitalism. Futures contracts don't stabilize prices for farmers, they create profits and scarcity in grains and now in oil.

And it's incorrect to say that Housing defaults caused the crash in 2008 -- banks were over-leveraged so a slight default in highly profitable sub-prime loans created a situation where they owed more than they owned.

If you accept everything at face value the comment makes sense. If I just believed the brochures and the macro / micro economics I took in college --sure, sounds good. Just like that sage serious stuff you see on all the financial shows if you don't pay attention that the hot stock pick is being promoted by someone who gets money on trades.

Stocks and Hedge Funds are activity to generate profits for people who sell stocks and mega institutions who do more trade in a second than you have in your entire lifetime. The algorithms that select buy and sell opportunities are looking at volatility and vectors -- not the value of the company or what it will do with that brand new widget. If you had to start a company by selling shares of stock today, you've got more luck with Kickstarter than you do with a Venture Capital fund -- the benefit of the Stock Market is like saying that Meth has a month of high productivity and then there are a few downsides but we won't go into that. The Stock Market does not promote good companies over bad ones. Good companies can get ahead but it's totally despite whatever goes on with their stock.

The 2008 Market Crash was NOT CAUSE BY REAL ESATE -- any more than a horse running around a track causes people to lose money betting on the ponies. The Sub Prime loans were often "sub prime" because someone was taking advantage of a home-owner with a higher interest rate -- people with good credit have a hard time with that, and people at the margins have a much harder time with that. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, before they were sold the Republican idea of the free market, did a good job getting loans back by not charging a high fee -- the default rates were only slightly higher than the average for the nation.

At the peak of all this "default" it was about 8% -- so what happened? The repeal of Glass/Stegall is what happened. Banks were overleveraged betting on Credit Default Swaps. They were able to use these as deposits because they had "property" somewhere in the title, and then use factoring to act like this was an asset and issue more money to buy more credit default swaps (this is why banks USED TO BE prohibited from speculative investments).

The problem was entirely one of high finance and fiscal discipline with people who got all the benefits and none of the responsibility.

The problem with finance in America is too many yokels go around spouting this "free market / finance BS" -- because they made some money selling people Financial Services. Financial Services may make a lot of money for a few people -- but it does squat to produce anything of value or empower anyone who is actually working for a living.

You start making some sense again when you talk about the velocity of money; "circulation is reduced because people are using the money to pay down debt." The big problem is that the distance between the Fed and the people with Big Pockets is shorter. If you just handed everyone in the country the trillions going to prop up the banks, you would have many more transactions -- and thus, the "velocity of money" would go up. "Velocity" is a medical term so that people can charge you more for saying; "more buying and selling".

Don't feel like I'm just picking you out -- you aren't worse that most people I hear talk about Finance - Hell, almost everyone talking about finance is brainwashed by people in finance.

I'm sure the people who used to sell religious artifacts also had a lot of important information on the value of the virgin Mary's milk.

Hopefully this case will never meet the supreme court. It's either going to happen at the state -- or not at all.

God knows we don't need the mostly fascist SCOTUS to rule that the needs of the status quo outweighs the rights of the many -- again.

I don't think they had Assyrian judges court ordering the non-smashing of clay tablets. The establishment at that time was used to investigating itself. The guards could not read -- only the scribes could read. And in these cases, the accounting was to keep track of what they already owned -- nobody had accounts. If someone thought they were being cheated, they'd just go bash their head in. Investigations were probably not a part of the judicial process until well after the Magna Carta. Now Hammurabi's code was the first known introduction of laws -- but not on due process or "how not to get your head bashed in." Two guys would argue about who did what and another man with really fancy clothes would listen, then someone would get bashed. Case closed.

Throughout most of history, suspicion of a crime was met with head bashing and throwing in a dungeon -- if you were lucky. The Assyrians probably didn't have dungeons so either you were dead, or thrown in a deep pit.

The modern courts will hem and haw and find no malfeasance but they'll give a stern warning to not do anything bad again. We've fallen a long way since the days of Assyrian Head bashing.

We hold all the "evidence"? 15,000 exabytes at the least? Who's going to review all of it?
If it's wrong for 1 million records, is the court case going to be more judiciously correct with 20 trillion records?

And, without putting police on the scene where the data is stored -- how can you guarantee they don't just show you to a PC with a backup usb drive and say; "It's all there have at it." ???

If anyone were serious with oversight, they'd have a "cease and desist" on the way while black helicopters air-drop paratroopers and some forensic data specialists and then they block off all electronic access to the data storage facility while they trace any routes and private lines from the facility to where the real data might be if it isn't where we think it is. The other option is to sequester a sample of what is being stored -- take randomly with someone you send in to retrieve the data. You can use a good random sampling to represent what is going on, and then factor in the number of records -- this will change the case from a few billion to a few million to investigate.

Other than that; stop wasting everyone's time and taxpayer money with an order that cannot be complied with and serves no purpose. If they are ordered to just store the data for more than 5 years -- you just court ordered them to spend a few hundred billion dollars on something they probably intended to do. The reason they only stored 5 years is probably because they've only been storing it for 5 years so far or couldn't store any more data. The only reason the NSA didn't break any more laws - because they didn't have the technology and budget to do so, had they had a bigger budget and better tech, they'd be sucking up more data.

For instance, people with unrestrained eating shouldn't go into a buffet, and you shouldn't praise them for restraint after the kitchen runs out of food.

Pro tip; If you see a resume that says; "20 years of iPhone programming experience" -- that's also a sign that someone is fudging the numbers.

In order to save time and 30 replies, the answer is Yes and No to all of your questions. And at least three posts explaining why they were silly questions.

How do you listen to 20 terabytes of music? You won't repeat a song for at least a year, at a guess.