That's sort of true in that I think if the complaints were kept to a very small group of people, like bitching to your next door neighbor, it was mostly tolerated. But you still had to be careful what you said. Complaining about a lack of bread was one thing. Complaining that Brezhnev (for example) was terrible might be something else.

There's a great old joke in Russia from the Soviet days about how a Texan came to visit Moscow.
Muscovite: How do you like Moscow and the Soviet Union?
Texan: Well it's really nice, but you have no freedom here. In America, any time I want to, I can go to the White House and stand outside it and say that the president is terrible and he needs to go and nobody will do anything to me.
Muscovite: Oh it is the same here.
Texan: Really?
Muscovite: Yes. Anytime I want, I can go outside the Kremlin and say that the American president is terrible and he needs to go and nobody will do anything to me.

Some people I know who grew up in China really liked that joke.

My last 2 girlfriends were born and raised in China and both would argue vehemently with you about this. Search sometime for photos on the internet of houses in the middle of roads in China. Do you know why those houses are there? It's because some Communist Party official wanted a road built and an owner refused to sell for literally pennies on the dollar (offers to buy may be at 10% of true value) so they built the road completely around the house to force the owner to leave for nothing. One of my ex-girlfriends still spoke angrily about how the police interrogated her and her school friends harshly over a decade ago because they happened to be dormmates with a girl who was secretly in Falun Gong. Do you know why the Chinese government persecutes Falun Gong? Nobody in the West does. There's speculation that it may be nothing more than a loyalty test of Communist Party members -it serves no purpose other than to see if Party members will go along with it and thus be loyal. Neither of my ex-girlfriends thought very much of the Chinese government and both thought that while the US and other Western democracies might not be perfect, they were a lot better choice than China.

My best friend for many years is a lawyer and he's taught me a lot about how the legal system really works. I can assure you that non-lawyers almost never understand the reality of the US legal system. Judges rarely like to sanction lawyers like has happened to Prenda. The general feeling in the legal industry is that making one side of lawyers pay the other side's costs is very bad because it might - no joke - lead to fewer lawsuits. You see, lawyers and judges feel that the system works perfectly fine as it is and that any time you've been wronged, they have no problem with the idea that you may have to pay tens of thousands of dollars or much more to defend yourself by hiring an attorney and running up costs. And what you might not know is that paying off attorney fees has a higher priority than anything else because the judges and attorneys have fixed the system to insure that they get paid first and they get paid all that you owe them. Believe me when I tell you that attorneys and judges are not even a little bit troubled by the massive costs that innocent parties expend trying to defend themselves from predatory attorneys and they truly do not care if it destroys financially to pay them off, but by God you will pay your attorney and court fees fully or they'll put you in jail or confiscate your stuff if they have to to get it done. If you win a financial judgement against another party, good luck getting a sheriff interested in enforcing the payment on your behalf but those same sheriffs will not hesitate at all to make you pay off legal fees you owe. My guess is that Prenda will simply file appeal after appeal on the judgement against them and it may be many years before they pay it, if ever.

Your questions are valid but please consider the following.
1) Despite the fact that Time reported this and Americans would assume them to be a reliable source, nobody does fact checking any more. So I can't discount the possibility that this is a bunch of lies. I've dated a couple of born and raised in China ladies in recent years and unlike Russians, neither of them believed stuff just because the media or government said it.
2) There may be some big money backing of this where basically whoever wants it done is paying off anybody who might object to it within China.
3) Senior Communist Party officials may be backing this knowing that it's not likely to ever work, but figuring if the guy can pull it off, it might be their ticket to immortality.

Keep in mind that 100% of those people would be dead without CPR and even a 3-5% success rate would look better than 0% if you need it done on you. I have no idea how accurate your numbers are or the source you got them from, but you sure seem to be downplaying this, acting almost nobody anywhere has ever lived a normal life after CPR and I can't accept that.

Yes, the original poster's specification should have read, "...it should do something subtly evil on purpose ."

I'm not trying to excuse Disney as such, but we only have part of the story here. And yes, as pointed out by others, it's a dupe. Disney get rid of a lot less workers than a lot of other major employers (cough cough - Cisco, IBM) have done recently. My understanding is that these jobs were basically support type jobs like system admin stuff and they turned them over to an outsourcing company to save money as they opened newer, better paying jobs in IT to do more high tech things. At least that's what they claim. Might be interesting to find out just how many of those new jobs there are, what the average pay is, and whether they went to Americans or not.

I've heard of many other American companies that transferred IT jobs overseas and forced a small number of employees to train their replacements by either bringing the replacements here temporarily or sending the US staff over there to train the locals. Making people stay to train their replacements is rather mean spirited, but this is not the first time it's been done by a US company. However, some people actually don't want to leave and will willingly stay until the bitter end without too much complaint just to put off having to find a new job. My previous job was working in a US office of a subsidiary of a major European telco company. They gave us 6 months notice of an end to our jobs and the fact that they would be moved to a cheaper country in South America. I found a job about 3 months later with another company, but none of my co-workers would leave. In fact, one of them offered to move to the country where the jobs were being relocated at his own cost and to work for local wages and they turned him down. It sucks, but I've heard of other companies doing the same thing. The former employees may not like it, but the reality is that Disney jobs in Orlando have a higher degree of risk than Disney jobs elsewhere. Disney completely closed down the Orlando animation department more than a decade ago I think. They're always making major changes in Orlando that cost people jobs.

You seriously want this completely ineffectual Congress to have to do that? Not to mention the time this would take, but with the realities of today's Congress and the "my way or the highway" Tea Party supporters in it, no law would ever again pass if it had to do that. I guess if you're in favor of anarchy this is one way to do it. Keep in mind that the Patriot Act renewal was defeated by exactly one man, a junior senator in the majority party who was powerless to stop him despite many influential and senior members of that party being opposed to him. No law would ever be renewed again under this plan.

From the Supreme Court on down, courts have consistently held that profiling is illegal and convictions have been thrown out for it. TSA does profile but the only way they can get away with it is that they have to screen small children and grandmothers and then everybody here screams "Security theater!" about it. At least in this thread we have people posting who actually do fly. That hasn't always been the case. I used to be friends with a guy and he last flew in the late 1990s and has never flown since and likely will not ever for any reason fly anywhere again before he dies. He has never been subjected to TSA. That didn't stop him from railing on about how evil and useless they were and just completely losing his mind anytime he talked about air travel. We get a lot of similar people here posting all the time on this subject.

1) Managers with some degree of technical knowledge are almost always better for tech workers than managers that don't really have any technical knowledge.
2) One of the very best managers I ever worked for was a woman. The two worst managers I ever had were women. Women tech managers will either be fantastic or horrible beyond belief. The bad ones were orders of magnitude worse than the worst male managers I've ever had.
3) When a bunch of co-workers start leaving a job or the very best ones in your department start to leave, it's probably time for you to consider leaving too.
4) I've had jobs that were really great that became bad or started bad and became really good. Conditions change. Be prepared for it to happen. And if they change for the worse, it may be your signal to find a new job.
5) Try to get along with co-workers because as you change jobs in your tech career, you'll often find yourself working again with people from a previous job and you don't want to have those people have a grudge against you when you start a new job.
6) Don't be a hothead. Stay cool. I had a pretty negative opinion of a manager in a sister office over some things some co-workers told me when they worked under him in the past. My attitude got so negative that I remember once almost blowing up at him over something trivial, but I kept my cool. That guy got promoted and became my manager's manager and he went to bat for me with his management to get me a promotion at a time when it was really difficult to get promoted. You can misjudge people and if I had blown up at the guy, he'd have never gotten me the promotion. I really learned a valuable lesson on that one.
7) My dad told me years ago not to ever kick people when they were down because circumstances change and people who are down today may wield great power in your organization later and they will definitely remember who was good to them when they were at the low point of their career.

Thanks for pointing out that Roberts and Scalia were the 2 dissenters, which means that Thomas didn't vote with Scalia. I ask in all seriousness - is the first time ever that they haven't voted the same on a case?

Okay, so we have a benchmark where the bog-standard human being scores 94.9%.

Then in February (that's three months ago), Microsoft reports hitting 95.06%; the first score to edge the humans.

Then in March, Google notches 95.18%.

Now it's May, and Baidu puts up a 95.42%.

Meh. Swinging dicks with big iron are twiddling with their algorithms to squeeze out incremental, marginal improvements on an arbitrary task.

I presume that next month it will be IBM boasting about "leading the race" and being "much greater than their competitors". The month after that it will be Microsoft's turn again. Google will be back on top in August or so...unless, of course, some other benchmark starts getting some press.

Maybe the only good film ever directed by some guy who worked on Star Wars and has a tie to Lucas. I guess it gets a weak "yea" but this guy is not a good director. I had an unusual chance a few years ago to have a personal conversation with an actor or actress (I'm unwilling to name who I talked to) who appeared in "Prisoner Of The Sun" which finally got released last year and was directed by Christian. I specifically asked about that film and the person who acted in it said that they had doubts that it would ever see the light of day and they didn't think it was probably going to be very good if it did. Based on the IMDB rating, it looks like that person was right. I can say that the person I talked to did not have any negative comments about Christian himself, they just didn't really have a good feeling about that movie. Not sure given the track record that I'm going to invest 30 minutes in watching this one.

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer.

I took a look at the actual indictment. Well, at least the first few pages. Remember how people still insist to this day that Bill Clinton wasn't impeached (he was - impeaching does not mean convicting) or that he was impeached for "cheating on his wife"? Years later, the lies spun by his spin doctors still hold fast in many minds. Clinton was impeached for committing perjury in a civil trial. Now the event he committed perjury about was cheating on Hilary, but he was impeached for lying about it while under oath, not for the actual act of cheating on her. Similarly, this indictment isn't really and truly about beating lie detector tests. The government's contention is that Williams had a business whose purpose was to enable people ineligible for certain government jobs to get those jobs through lying and deception. This is defrauding the US government because salaries would be paid to those ineligible people. The government also contends that he enriched himself (through fees he charged) by encouraging people to lie to and deceive the federal government into hiring ineligible people for jobs. The first 6 or so pages I looked at don't actually mention anything about lie detector tests.

One should be very wary of the distinction between "run without refueling" and "run without regular maintenance". Even assuming that the reactor's fuel would last, the ancillary equipment associated with the reactor's operation (coolant pumps and such) and electricity generation (steam turbines) certainly wouldn't be expected to operate unattended and unmaintained for months, let alone years.

That said, the fifty-year planned lifespan of the Nimitz-class includes, if I'm not mistaken, a mid-life refuelling and complex overhaul (RCOH). To be fair, the reactor's fuel would likely last longer than the planned 20-25 years if the carrier weren't actively steaming--but I wouldn't trust the other parts to last anywhere near so long.

Thank you for this explanation. I was really struggling to understand why Verizon would want to pay so much for the dial up business but clearly they want everything else and are just taking the dial up business as part of a complete package, not specifically trying to get that.