But... how would the Comcast user notice the difference? :P

Your answers are fine, but your post demonstrates one of the key problems with many gun advocates.

There are responsible gun owners like you out there... but your answers completely fail to acknowledge the ample proof that there are large numbers of *irresponsible* gun owners as well (e.g., how many Americans died as a direct result of guns in the US last year?).

Your airliner analogy confuses me. America has had numerous shootings, and very few airliner accidents, and even less that would have required someone other than a pilot to land a plane. Doesn't this prove that the odds are extremely stacked towards gun violence?

Equally, the comparison to automobiles is a bit of red herring too. Though we don't ban them, we do MANY things to ensure improve the safety of automobiles. For example, relatively strict licensing, safety features in cars, breathlizer ignitions, etc. Obviously, we do the same for guns... so stalemate.

A rational person *should* fear danger from automobiles, and do their best to avoid automobiles. After all, you don't play on the freeways do you? In the same way, a rational person *should* understand that you can only suffer a gun-related incident if there are guns in your immediate vicinity.

The fundamental perspective that I find is often missing from pro-gun arguments is any discussion about how many times a DOMESTIC CITIZEN with a gun has done something positive for society, vs. how many times a domestic citizen with a gun has done something negative for society. A car is used by millions of people for many useful things. Yes, deaths result from ownership and operation, but it is clear that society has net gain in spite of the down sides. I haven't yet seen compelling evidence to suggest that large numbers of gun owners leads to a corresponding improvement in my own quality of life.

Which makes sense if the employees are goal-oriented rather than time-oriented. However, there are legal limits to how much overtime the employer can force their workers to do. Basically, this form of protest works if the employees don't let themselves get abused by their company.

If, on the other hand, the employees simply take up all the slack, then of course this type of protest is ineffective. But... why would you work for a company that treats you this way? That is the question the employee should be asking themselves as a direct result of the peanut-butter protest. In principle, either the employee is getting paid enough to continue to perform the work, or they aren't, and will leave to find a better job.

I'm still interested in a rebuttal as to why the employees should be insulated from the choices made by management though, as I think that is the more compelling argument on why the proposed protest is effective & even desirable.

Costco isn't the only job filling the niche of low-skilled employment though. Why work at Costco vs. other employers (e.g., Walmart, other major department store chains, fast food joints etc.)?

These people are paid by the company, and as such, directly benefit from the choices the company makes. I do grant the Costco employees don't have a lot of choice, but, limited options doesn't automatically grant these people immunity from backlash as a result of the company's actions.

Out of curiosity, why is it worse that I have to restock peanut butter jars vs. whatever other task the employee has to do? Does it affect their pay directly somehow?

It is less direct than just avoiding the store all together, but can still be effective form of protest. If you know you'll get abuse for working for Costco, you'll either demand more money, or not even apply in the first place. So Costco will either need to change their reputation, or offer more money. I sympathise that this is VERY stressful on a personal level for the individual workers, but would force Costco to change in the long run.

That is an intended effect of the boycott though.

The workers, by choosing to work for Costco, are effectively enabling the management to make the decisions they do. If enough staff complain, the problem *will* financially impact Costco, either through productivity dropping amongst their staff or staff leaving.

Of course, the question is how Costco staff will get blamed for being lazy before management realise it's not something the staff are in control of... but, working for a corrupt (! not my belief! Just paraphrasing other opinions :) ) company should have some downsides for the employees. Otherwise there is no incentive to ensure the company employing you is doing the right thing by society.

They key problem in this mess isn't Netflix using up so much bandwidth (they aren't pumping things out, consumers are pulling things down)... it's actually Cogent. Cogent is clearly not paying to keep up with the data Netflix is consuming. Cogent needs to pay Verizon more to ship the data around (according to their peering agreement)... and should probably pass that data cost back onto Netflix which will force Netflix to find ways to balance out the bandwidth they consume.

Netflix's proposed solution is a legitimate strategy that reduces congestion and helps both Netflix AND the ISP they place with. The ISP receives less inbound traffic (usually good for their peering agreements), the ISP's customers get access to a service they desire, and Netflix is able to place some cheap servers.

Netflix is not a victim, I agree... but neither are they some type of protection racket trying to force tier1s to place their server. Netflix would be no threat if people weren't subscribing to it, so your analogy is a little off there.

The funny thing is, this article is an example of the system working as intended. The packets are being dropped because Netflix data appears to be flowing upstream faster than Cogent is paying Verizon. This is not a net neutrality issue... quite simply, Cogent is trying to push more data into Verizon than they are paying Verizon to handle.

All anti-net neutrality demands are attempting to do is treat packets unequally (e.g., allow Netflix packets through but not other customers on the Cogent network). You know, we can already do that easily: If Netflix wants to improve their bandwidth to Verizon customers, they start negotiating directly with Verizon for an extra uplink. Alternatively, they can do what they are doing here, and wait for their ISP and upstream to battle it out and see who has bigger clout (e.g., will Verizon's customers change ISPs if Verizon doesn't get the bandwidth sorted out, or will Netflix simply be replaced with a faster alternative?).

Destroying net neutrality achieves nothing, and just makes it basically a given that you will one day have an "express email" delivery charge to ensure your email is delivered in under a week ;-)

Hehe. They do seem to keep missing the point that putting a "Trolling" option automatically gives the trolls something to avoid though (thereby skewing their data). I mean, all their study is proving is that there is a certain type of troll who is narcissistic enough to enjoy admitting this fact to others... right?

Not sure how version incompatibility weighs into this? Either way, your answer to this question is: all of them. See http://www.similartech.com/cat....

And so far, they have provided not one hint as to how jQuery is *bad* for their VIERA TVs. Again, your (subjective) opinion of the code quality in jQuery only makes sense if this is likely to have some impact. What is this impact? Are they worried about bugs? Performance? What is the danger to Panasonic from using this library?

Even if you don't like jQuery, and don't agree with the coding style, and have a host of other subjective opinions about it... the simple fact is Panasonic is supposed to be a professional business. Referring to something used on 70% of web as a "hack" stinks of either a completely unprofessional elitism (assuming the reviewer is technically competent), or more likely an uninformed reviewer ("never attribute to malice...").*

* I don't actually particularly love jQuery by the way... but I do recognise what they have attempted to create, and can readily see the advantages their API brings over most raw DOM manipulation code people write.

Except.... I'm not quite sure what Panasonic gains by rejecting the app. I mean, sure, lets pretend for a moment that your opinion is not just boring ol' developer elitism... why does Panasonic care that the developer here used jQuery? It isn't the same thing as depending on flash or other such stuff... this is a standard and widely used library that is an industry standard (regardless of what you perceive it's quality to be). I mean, Panasonic uses it on their own site...

How is Panasonic harmed by this person using jQuery?

In terms of coding, a "fork" of a project usually indicates and offshoot of an existing project. I.e., the rule tends to be the newest kid on the block is the fork.

In this case, the Nagios people are arguing that because they had the domain name all along, the monitoring-plugins project is a fork. In spite of the fact that Nagios branched their code from the existing monitoring-plugins project... in spite of the fact that Nagios's brand new development team has never contributed a single line of code to the existing code base they branched.

Basically, Nagios can claim whatever they want about the name (sure, it's their name, they have a right to use it). But from every definition of "fork", Nagios is actually the fork. Attempting to claim otherwise is extremely misguided at best (outright lying is more likely), as the *only* thing Nagios has from the original project is the domain name.

It would be like someone taking ownership of my slashdot username, and then try and claim they were the real lilrobbie the whole time. They are lilrobbie *now*... but they can never assert they have always been lilrobbie.

Wait... wait... wait... Are you saying that it DOESN'T cost a web service money to consume bandwidth? How on earth did their ISP give them that plan?

This is not the way connections work. As a consumer, I generally only pay for my downloads, because I have very little upload. But any *actual* site has their own upstream caps that they must pay for. The service pays THEIR ISP for the bandwidth they consume. So it does very directly cost them money.

Perhaps you're arguing that the chains in the middle don't get paid directly... but even that is either a lie or a misunderstanding by you. This is the whole point of peering agreements and exchange... because that is how the links in the middle get paid. Your ISP pays a bigger ISP (or a specialised backbone) to transport their data to other networks.

So no. Both sides of the internet are paying for their access and data. It's the greedy buggers in the middle that seem to be somehow not understanding this.

Isn't this one of those situations though where if you are likely to be rubber-hosed, you probably would have compiled the kernel yourself with this type of thing disabled?

I can't see someone downloading and installing a pre-compiled distro if they are that worried about security....

I do follow your point, I just don't agree with the assertion it is easy ;-). The ways to game a system like this are blindingly obvious.

I am honestly thrilled it works at your company :) (how big is your company out of interest?). I haven't disputed that it can work under certain conditions. But, it does require either a very carefully engineered reward system (i.e., accurate metrics that can be tracked to ensure there isn't deliberate under-spending being performed), or a group of honest people who genuinely care about the company's health and the customers they serve. Metrics work well for sales companies, but are difficult to enforce for a lot of tech-heavy or research heavy jobs. In the latter two, the metrics are not obvious for tracking expenditure.

I'm interested as to how your department is able to underspend four years in a row. Did they get any change to their budget after underspending the first year (i.e., up, down, stagnant)?

If you're interested in the results of driving towards savings, it's worth looking at a book called "The Wallmart Effect". The plot spoiler is that continually trying to save more money will inevitably lead to long-term sacrifices to allow short-term savings. If you make someone's salary dependent on how little they spend, they find intelligent ways to hide the accumulating debt from you (this isn't a hypothetical situation... this actually is happening with numerous large supermarket chains).