U-verse did include FTTP at one point: I had fiber to my router in an apartment I lived in 3 years ago. However, U-verse is now nothing in particular since AT&T have rolled all of their residential data offerings under the U-verse banner, including sub-1Mbps DSL that they will still sell as U-verse service.

Criminal punishment is not shared. If 10 people are convicted of a crime, they don't each get 1/10th the sentence that a single individual would. Just because some perpetrators go unpunished, doesn't meant that the convicted are doing their time. Likewise, the money is a fine, not recompensation, so the value isn't determined by distributing restitution across all of the convicted.

Yeah, that's cool. But some companies, once they are successful, like to create pleasant environments for their employees to work in. It helps to retain top staff. In fact, building a great environment is often more effective per dollar spent than giving out raises when it comes to staff retention. This goes beyond just architecture and decor, but it's part of a holistic approach to making a place that people want to work at.

Pixar, for one example, has always placed a lot of emphasis on environment and lifestyle over salary and have a workforce that has been very loyal because of it. They prioritize benefits, workspace conditions, and try hard to respect personal time, but if you want to earn more money there are many better-paying alternatives.

This is posed as as if it were questioning the safety of a regularly available car. The Carerra GT is a very limited production run vehicle (limited to 1,000 or so) that hasn't been made in 7 years. It's not even fair to compare it to any other street-legal Porsche every made because it was such a rare, expensive, and powerfully tuned vehicle. It was a 600hp car in its stock version, and a fairly light car at that. I believe that the car Paul Walker was in was more powerful than stock.

If this spreads, hockey will be a very different game in a few years.

In 10+ years, with over 60,000 employees, this has happened only one time. It doesn't seem as if TSA employees have a job that puts them in particular risk. I'm sure that it is much more dangerous to be a mail carrier than a TSA agent. I don't object to unions looking after their employee's welfare and safety. That is the point, after all. But demanding armed guards as a knee jerk reaction to a single incident seems like a laughable response without any real analysis behind it.

And it's pretty much a copy of the plan the AEI concocted for Massachusetts,the one they designed to be the most pro-business universal coverage system imaginable. If anything, the federal version has been made more friendly to the right than the Romney plan.

Exactly. Speaking of Google, how long was Gmail technically in beta?

Why would the DEA waste their time and money on this? HIPAA thoroughly establishes prescription records as being contained within the scope of medical privacy.

Every generation likes to judge the new by the standards of the old (which have already been discarded by anyone who cares). "However, as for tablets and smartphones, I think these devices will definitely make a kid dumber. There's nothing intellectual about them, nothing that expands the mind, and it's depressing to walk around the mall and see 50 percent of people staring at their phones or talking on them."

Horseshit. These devices have replaced newspapers and magazines. They've cut into the amount of TV that kids (and adults) watch. That, in turn has put pressure on networks to make purchasing changes that resulted in this being referred to as "the golden age of television" an awful lot these days. These devices have democratized music, taking the power of success away from radio and payola and putting it in the hands of the listener. There's plenty of arguments that, at worse, they are zero sum.

My daughter, now 8, has spent most of her life using smartphones and tablets. She reads more books and with far greater sophistication than her classmates. As a toddler, she had a digital coloring book accessible whenever she was with us, now she uses our devices as stop motion animation studios. Our fight, as parents, is to get her to stop reading and launching creative projects - yeah, you can have too much of anything.
Do I think the devices had an impact? Maybe. Constant access to ability-appropriate reading material might have accelerated literacy. It's hard to say, given that we're fairly bookish people anyway. But I certainly have never seen any evidence that she'd have benefited from having her access to modern technology restricted.

I don't know, maybe there were people who thought Isaac Newton should've been outside kicking a fucking ball around instead of being a nerdy kid with a book. Whatever. I'm inclined to say if your kid sucks, maybe it's not the phone's fault. It could be you just got a bum kid.

Gee, their tablets beat out kicking a ball around. What a surprise. Ball games made me pretty miserable as a kid too. And that was long before these parents were born in '86.

An amateur fiction site will probably have a readership nothing like a broader audience. For one thing, you have to assume that most of the readers are themselves amateur writers, so you have to assume upvotes would skew heavily toward those writing attributes that appeal to what they like to (or would like to) write. The members of a broader audience, however, are generally not interested in being writers themselves and place less value on "writerliness" than they do on simple enjoyment.

This is not at all surprising. We contracted a major premises security company to build out the entry-access systems in our company's new buildings a few years ago. Just to be clear, these control the locks to every door into all of the buildings as well as higher security areas within the buildings. The installers insisted that the control boxes for every building needed to have fixed public IP addresses and could not be behind a firewall in order to work. With little understanding of what they were actually asking, they would only enable service if we provided exactly that to them. Do I even need to mention that they left all of these control units running with default username and password?

Needless to say, once functioning service had been established, I immediately moved everything behind a firewall with no forwarding whatsoever to the NAT private address range. Of course, everything works just fine. I later double-checked the installation guide, which allowed for even wider flexibility in installation, with no real network restrictions of the sort that the installers demanded. I'm sure, however, that if they had ever consulted that document, they would not have understood anything about the network installation instructions.

A big part of the problem with things like this is that the systems are installed by people with next to no real network knowledge. They see their job as alarm, plumbing, cabling, construction, or whatever. So when they get to the networked component, they install it in the simplest, most straightforward manner that has been prescribed by someone only slightly more knowledgeable than they are. They are instructions designed to work in every situation for the dimmest of installers, making it possible to complete the contract as possible, even when the client has no one with network knowledge available. The installers, not understanding networks, see them as impenetrably cryptic and therefore secure from intrusion. In most situations there is no one whose job it is to assess security of these connected devices at the completion of the contract, much less tell the customer that they've left them with a risk.

Sadly, the only real advice for these situations is to make companies (the client companies, I mean, not the vendors) understand that they need to be responsible for their own security. If they don't have the necessary expertise on staff, then they absolutely *need* to hire someone - no, not the damn Geek Squad - to check that any network connected device is secure. If they don't then they own the resultant problems. I suppose, in the long run, that insurance companies will require some sort of compliance if potential risk is to be insured.

I'm a tug pilot, you insensitive clod!

So MS is forgoing revenue altogether over this cut? Seems unlikely. I think giving their own mobile offerings a market advantage and the existing competition on iOS probably have more to do with it. After all, the sell software retail and a lot more than 30% goes to retailer and distributor in that model.