Because it's one thing to pay public money to a private org to get work done; it's quite another to pay public money to public servants and have the resulting product not be available to the public.

No it's not. It's still public money. Just because one is a private organization should not mean they should be exempt from releasing their work such as you suggest the public servants should do.

This is the same twisted logic the banks and brokerage firms used in 2007-2008 to justify why they shouldn't be answerable to government oversight despite getting trillions of taxpayer dollars to prop up their failed businesses and giving themselves bonuses with that money. If you're getting taxpayer money, you should be subject to the same rules as the public employees.

As someone who recently had to put my cat to sleep because of cancer, the vet told me they were using an overdose of barbiturates, not gas.

I felt my best bud of 12 years go limp in my hands within a second or two of the injection and he was gone a second or two later.

Maybe my vet was different, but I've known other vets who do the same.

Perhaps they should do their jobs which would result in finding things like mice and cockroaches,

Nothing like a rant based on nonsense to start the day. You obviously have never looked at the NYC Health Inspections web site where they list the reasons for the restaurant grade, including if they find mice droppings (or mice themselves). Here, let me show you the way.

In fact, Per Se, a well known restaurant, recently received a 'C' grade because of their violations.

But go ahead and rant, it's your right. The nice thing about freedom of speech is it reveals to the world the true nature of an individual.

because there are no more speeding cars and reckless drivers

Except there won't be and most likely there is a good chance there will be more reckless drivers as they get frustrated at being caught behind cars driving the speed limit.

Years ago Virginia wanted to raise the cost of their speeding tickets to around $1,000 but only if the person was caught going 20 miles over the posted speed limit. People were howling about how awful it was, how it wasn't fair and couldn't the state just raise their taxes so they could continue to speed.

See this article for some comments, particularly this one:

"It's outrageous," says traffic court attorney Thaddeus Furlong of Springfield, Va. "When Mr. and Mrs. Middle Class find out what they have to pay, there's going to be a backlash like you've never seen."

something that makes the world better instead of being a necessary evil.

It's only a necessary evil because, to throw words back in people's faces, people refuse to live in a civilized society and not do things which endanger other people's lives such as speeding, talking on their cell phones while speeding, stiff-arming the steering wheel while speeding and talking on their cell phones, robbing, raping, and murdering people, to name just a few things.

I can only hope the mad rush to get everything to the cloud continues so as more and more of these incidents occur people will see the folly of letting someone else manage their data.

Further, if someone is able to get into a cloud service, it's not just your information that is compromised, it is the thousands of other people as well. Imagine a company having its internal documents about an upcoming product being made available to its competitors.*

* To those who might cheer this scenario, image if it's your company or the company you work for. Not so cheery when the product you were working on to get your paycheck won't get made because someone else has the same information, is it?

For Pennsylvania, texting 911 is about all the majority of people can handle. Attempting to communicate anything more complicated would really be stretching it.

You must stand and wait while it pops.

This is Slashdot where the majority of people are OCD and can't stand still for 2 minutes because they are so busy with everything else. They would literally explode before the popcorn does if they couldn't run away and chimp their phone or play a game or pretend their life was so important and announce it to the world.

You might as well ask a baby not to poop while you're holding it.

keeps falling further and further behind the rest of the industrialized world.

Pretty soon we'll be behind countries like Latvia and Romania.

Oh wait. . .!

This same article was written elsewhere which was much more direct in what was happening: we are all now beta testers.

The adage that the company will roll out improvements is typical double-speak. They're not improvements, they're what should have been in the game when it was released (levels, abilities, etc) and the obvious bugs and faults that should not have been in the game when released.

Game companies are doing exactly what I keep harping on: releasing bad software.

We shouldn't have to put up with this nonsense considering the cost involved, but like good Pavlovian dogs, we'll keep shelling out our money because we think, "This time it will be better."

I meant four total providers. For the entire country. Your experience is exactly what I have, and what most people have.

In my case the two ISPs offer the same slow speeds at the exact same high price.

Coincidence?

Consumers would face less choice,

How would that even be possible? We only have 4 main providers in the U.S. Are these folks saying that if they were reclassified they would start merging with one another?

One can only hope they go through with this threat because the government would be able to step in and regulate them as a monopoly, forcing them apart like they did with AT&T and for a few years we'd once again have multiple ISPs to choose from.

Unless you can find a written policy forbidding it, just do it.

This is why you never give people admin rights. They'll randomly install shit and when something breaks, go to someone else and let them spend (potentially) hours of their time trying to figure out what went wrong.

If you think randomly installing shit is fine, I think it's fine to just reimage your machine without bothering to see if your stuff is backed up.

When you're at work, it's not your equipment. It's the company's and yes, almost every company out there has a policy explicitly stating the installation, or attempted installation, of unapproved software can get you fired.

Try this one:

Jane felt there were too many cables under her desk so she took her scissors to several of them and cut them back to the floor opening.

Our team successfully ran new cables and got the network up and running in the space of half an hour as well proactively took steps to prevent such an occurrence in the future by tossing Jane out the window.

I work with people across the entire working-age spectrum who are blithering idiots so I don't think it's just age which reduces ones mental acuity.

Maybe this process can help them as well. Let's start with programmers followed by the executive staff for starters.

Regardless of the legality, it was ethically wrong.

But it's ethically okay for you (not necessarily you personally, but the big You) to take what you want from TPB, not paying the person who created the work for their efforts, right?