"If you think it's expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur." - Red Adair

Well, I don't really know about the US, but the prisoners up here in Canada are paid for their work. Not very well and the system of having them buy daily necessities isn't great now, but apparently they've gone on strike to protest that last year. If the US is forcing their prisoners to work for no pay then that might be something they need to change.

Although, I was thinking outright slavery since it reminded me of news reports in June talking about slaves being used in Thailand for the shrimp trade. In that case, the slavers there were also murdering their slaves, in addition to forcing them to work.

Yeah, I realized that a bit as soon as I hit submit. I tried. 8)

The article sparked my thoughts of what I heard about the shrimp slave trade from Thailand, for example, and not just necessarily factory workers in Malaysia. Possibly what is going on is this race to the bottom via slave labor, 'forced' labor as the article says, prison labor, dissident labor, etc. In order to compete countries are taking this tack. But I was thinking with the outrage of slavery, maybe it's enough justification going in there with guns and outright killing the slavers. i.e. one country trumping up some reason to invade, hiring mercenaries, etc., etc. Not that I would advocate it as I imagine the situation would only get messier, but this is very similar to how gangs work. I just suspect someone is thinking about 'solving' the problem that way.

For anyone interested, the slave labor trade was reported in June.
http://www.theguardian.com/glo...

Let's play devil's advocate here. Let's think about this assuming we don't care about the mass suffering, slavery and murder of humans, which is kinda bad enough already for us to try to end this practice any way we can. Say we are just bare naked capitalists, only interested in profit, past the point even Adam Smith would find horrific.

This is still bad enough for us to care.

We can't use slavery to produce our products because of laws and non-corruption in our countries, nor can we change our system to allow slavery. It would cost too much. So there is no way we can compete with Malaysia who is allow things, official or not. They are gaining an 'unfair' advantage by resorting to this practice that only they can use.

Therefore, even if you are an inhuman psychopathic capitalist (or at least a long-term high functioning one), you should care about abolishing slavery, since it grants those who do an unfair advantage.

I've seen a few employers do this for their workers. LIke 2 out of the 7 different places I've been at (but this is Canada we're talking about). You're right though. Most employers will probably not do this.

The other thing I've heard of for ergonomics is that we should have a chair that lets you lean back and forward spontaneously, rather than have to fiddle with any levers, etc. Supposedly you should relieve the pressure on your belly once in awhile when you sit too...

Anyways, I guess for us office workers this just shows us how important breaks are. i.e. These things are essentially work hazards that are as dangerous as fumes and particles in factories.

I don't have any evidence that standing will help as much as walking, but I was thinking this is why we should have more standing desks at the office. By standing desks, I mean the ones that convert from sitting to standing easily and encourage people to change their body positions often during the work day.

It's not just a good idea, but it's probably something to keep your work population alert and productive!

We have this requirement of corporations where they must keep records of all electronic communications. Missing communications during a court case is considered to be 100% condemning on the part of the corporation that lost their data. So, I'm not saying this is working 100%, but if we can do this for corporations, can't the police do it for cameras too?

How does Sarbanes-Oxley treat regular malfunctions vs. tampering?

We can at least point to this to start the conversation.

Finkler writes. "... My tolerance for learning curves grows smaller every day. New technologies, once exciting for the sake of newness, now seem like hassles. I'm less and less tolerant of hokey marketing filled with superlatives."

I feel much the same way, but I thought this was the result of me turning old, bitter and cynical...

Oh yes, definitely, very not new...

During the Industrial Revolution, factory owners were declaring that it was a waste of time for children to be going to school when they could better be spent making money mining for coal or scrubbing pots in factories. Why waste their time learning when clearly a child's life is better spent earning profits?

So...

> Would the series be better if they dressed these characters like professionals and grown-ups?

I thought some really good Troi episodes (like all 1 of them?) were the ones where she WAS put into a uniform and advanced her career, like where she took the Command exam and learned that sometimes you have to order your friends to their deaths to save the ship. She advanced to the rank of Lt. Commander after that if I remember correctly.

All other Troi episodes are meant to be avoided, of course.

Also, as others mentioned in his Graphics Programming Black Book (which I have), he led and popularized the use of Mode X in VGA adapter cards.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...

Having square pixels at 320x240 was significantly easier than having to deal with the odd 320x200 resolution. ... an' git off my lawn! 8)

The article only gives Simplified Chinese examples, but is this happening to Traditional Chinese searches too? The two are machine translatable (except probably for one or two characters) so I would not be surprised if search engines simplified things by converting to one or the other before doing a search. So I suspect both.

Which is kinda huge. It's not just Chinese searches from the US or any other country, what about searches from Hong Kong and Taiwan, which use Traditional? Censoring on behalf of the Communist Government in these places would seriously be looked down on.

And what about Singapore which uses Simplified Chinese? I don't imagine they will be pleased to suffer Mainland censorship either.

I sure hope it's just a glitch. Probably not Microsoft automatically kowtowing to China. Probably.

There was a joke about this I read from somewhere. In Silicon Valley, collaboration means working together to achieve. In Washington DC, collaboration means being shot for treason.

Make sure your company encourages the former.

> How can people be so ignorant of something that happened only a few years ago?

At some point it becomes: "Do not assume idiocy where maliciousness becomes the most logical explanation."

Then again, the people merely parroting incorrect talking points could be stupid. But it is most likely a conspiracy to rewrite the truth through excessive high volume. How else can you win if all your points were proven wrong anyways?

Sorry, forgot the link to the data, if anyone's actually even interested.
http://www.statista.com/statistics/221666/net-income-of-rim-since-2009/