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Comment Re:Totally clueless (Score 2) 135

The problem there is they might try start forcing more people in such prisons in order to make money for the government, claim "we are fixing this country" and everyone will cheer.

Do you not have private prisons in the UK? If not, I suppose it's only a matter of time. We have them in the US, and some judges are already rotting in prison for exactly the sort of thing you were imagining. They were sentencing juveniles with petty offenses to long term detention, in exchange for multi-million dollar kickbacks from the private detention facility. When imprisoning people becomes a profitable enterprise, abuse is guaranteed to follow.

Comment Re:How did he ever hope to make all that money bac (Score 4, Interesting) 120

The real profit to be found are with the people selling these ASICs. The best analogy I've seen compares it to people selling shovels during the gold rush.

The fun part is that a lot of these miracle mining rig builders are suspected of using those new rigs themselves for awhile before finally delivering them. So it's kind of like people selling used outdated beat-up shovels during the gold rush. The scam seems to be:

  • Pre-sell insanely powerful mining rigs
  • Use pre-sale money to order hardware and build rigs
  • Mine for a month or two with awesome rigs while delaying delivery to buyers
  • !!!PROFIT!!!
  • Newer, faster hardware becomes available
  • Pre-sell rigs built with this month's even better hardware
  • Finally ship last month's batch to the buyers
  • Repeat

Just another pyramid scheme and there are still suckers falling for it.

Comment svn (Score 4, Insightful) 64

At a former job, we had a similar situation, no budget for graphics so we only used photos from places like morguefile. We handled it through version control. A subversion pre-commit hook was set up that would reject any commit containing an image file unless specific properties were set on the files (subversion allows custom "svnprops" which are essentially user-defined metadata tags). One of the required attributes was the source URL that the file came from.

I guess this may not have helped much if an image was later re-licensed. Perhaps taking a screenshot of the source site, with some visible indication of the license, would help.

Microsoft

Microsoft's Cloud Storage Service OneDrive Now Offers 15GB For Free 99

DroidJason1 writes Microsoft revealed today that they will be offering 15GB of free OneDrive storage, up from 7GB. Office 365 users will now get 1TB of storage, up from 20GB. This announcement comes after Amazon revealed unlimited photo storage for those who buy the new Fire phone. Dropbox, a competitor to OneDrive, currently has 2GB for free but offers more space if you refer people to the service. Google Drive offers 15GB of free storage, while Amazon Cloud Drive offers 5GB.

Comment Re:More common? (Score 4, Insightful) 195

At my last workplace, we officially got two 15-minute breaks per day, one before lunch and one after lunch. Now this was at a non-regulated, non-union, private company and we were salaried employees who routinely showed up early, occasionally stayed late, and many of us were still checking (and responding to) emails and tickets, fixing things, etc. from home at all hours of the day and night. This was not a scenario where we had time cards or where everyone worked exactly 480 minutes per day or where being away from your desk for a few minutes had any negative impact on productivity.

Over the course of some years, a group of smokers had aligned our patterns so that we'd break for a quick smoke at 9:30, 11, 2:30, and 4. We kept it legit, it doesn't take 7 1/2 minutes to walk outside, smoke a cigarette while chatting, and walk back in. No one was taking four 15-minute breaks. Eventually HR sent out a warning to everyone who was "abusing" the break policy by taking two quick breaks during every 4 work hours instead of one 15-minute break.

So we shifted to taking our allotted break once before lunch and once after. And we used every last second of those 15 minutes, every time. We'd wave at the cameras on the way into and out of the building and one of us would always keep track of our remaining time on their watch or their phone. Guess which folks stopped showing up at work 20 minutes early, staying late to finish things up, leaving our email clients open and monitoring work emails 24/7, and handling shit outside of business hours? Guess which folks stopped bringing their lunches and eating in 10 minutes at their desk, and started taking their full lunch hours offsite every day?

Somehow there are still plenty of employers who just don't understand that if you treat your employees like a bunch of kindergarteners, you're not going to get things like "loyalty" and "amazing work ethic" and "110%" in return. No, you're going to drive away good talent, and with that talent will go many years of your institutional memory. And you deserve to lose it.

By the time I was out of there, we had a running joke that they were probably keeping records of anyone who took more than 2 minutes to take a shit. I suppose it's a function of HR feeling a need to justify their own existence from time to time. That company is currently advertising for an HR director, a little bit of schadenfreude to end my night on a pleasant thought...

Comment Does this taint any verdicts? (Score 5, Insightful) 251

When (e.g.) a forensic examiner is discovered to have manipulated or faked various test results that were introduced by the prosecution, this often results in hundreds of prior cases being reviewed. Every case that person touched as an expert or as a witness is called into question. Verdicts are vacated, people get released from prison.

Shouldn't that scenario be playing out here? Any case in which a supposed "confidential informant" was used in these Florida jurisdictions is now potentially in question. Defense attorneys should be lining up over this.

Comment Yes, paper. (Score 1) 208

Forget doing it digital. Your beneficiaries may have no idea how to decrypt something, or how to access whatever's become of some dead man's switch. Really, if I got hit by a bus tomorrow, even if I had things stored in quadruplicate across various flash drives, I'm not so confident anyone would know what to do with them.

Type the important stuff up, and seal it in an envelope (or several, if you're dividing things up amongst likely heirs). Present those things to an attorney and have him draw up a will. The attorney will retain those envelopes and ensure that things are done properly once you're gone. If your very important passwords change, revise the documents and stop by the lawyer's office with new copies in new envelopes. They might not even charge you anything for that.

I know we generally hate lawyers here, but this is one really worthy function that many of them can perform, and the courts know full well how to deal with written and physically signed documents. In the event that you outlive your lawyer, his or her office will retain custody of your will and your envelopes, or you can find a different lawyer.

Businesses

Amaya Gaming Buys PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker For $4.9 Billion 52

Dave Knott (2917251) writes Montreal-based gaming company Amaya Gaming Group Inc. has agreed to purchase privately held Oldford Group, the owner of online poker websites PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker, for $4.9 billion. The deal marks the end of a remarkable story that began when Isai Scheinberg, an Israeli-Canadian former IBM computer programmer, founded PYR Software in Toronto and started building PokerStars, which eventually became the largest online poker site in the world. But in 2011, federal prosecutors in Manhattan launched a massive crackdown against online poker in the U.S., indicting Scheinbeg, suing PokerStars and shutting down the U.S. operations of the company for operating an illegal gambling business. In 2012, PokerStars struck a $731 million settlement with federal prosecutors that also saw the company acquire the assets of Full Tilt Poker. However, reentering the vital U.S. market has proved difficult, and in the end, it started to make sense for the Scheinbergs to sell. The Scheinbergs will not remain with PokerStars in any capacity after the current deal closes. In a statement announcing the deal, Amaya said it believes the "transaction will expedite the entry of PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker into regulated markets in which Amaya already holds a footprint, particularly the U.S.A."

Comment Re:$5k (Score 1) 875

The sheriff said he'd rather have a more police-oriented armored vehicle for his SWAT team, but they cost $300,000, and this only cost $5,000.

Shouldn't cost anything. We (the taxpayers) already paid for it once. I think it's ridiculous for police to be getting this sort of equipment at all, but for fuck's sake, how many times does the public need to be billed for it?

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