I actually still have a landline and I get calls every now and then for political polls. I used to participate. I don't anymore. Some of the polls are very slanted, sometimes simply in favor of one issue. I live in what is strongly a red state and most of the polls ask questions about Republican strategies I rarely agree with. I'm not really sure what the purpose is as my state is about as red as they come and it's not likely to ever be competitive for Democrats for decades. I'm not sure I feel comfortable telling strangers that no, I don't agree with whatever the Republican cause du jour is since I'm expressing what is most likely a minority opinion in a state where differences of opinion are not respected at all. The other problem I have is that the polls are too long. You can count on 5 minutes minimum, maybe 10 if you're unlucky. After a few questions I quickly get weary of the time consuming formats they insist on using and I refuse to do any of them anymore.

By the way, I've believed for years that a significant minority of people in the US deliberately lie on polls to throw them off. I've known since 2004 that you can't trust the polls at all.

I use normorobo (https://www.nomorobo.com/). It's free for non-business use. I have my home phone (yes I still have a home phone - my current home security system requires it) going through it and I think it's great. It only works with VOIP or wireless phone numbers though, not true land lines. It works by having you activate a feature to ring a 2nd number when a call comes in. The 2nd number is No Mo Robo's phone number. Let your phone ring once and their database will pick up the call before the 2nd ring if they feel it's fraudulent. I'd say it stops more than 95% of the robo calls I get, which to me is fantastic. Maybe once or twice a month a robo call will get through, but that's all.

Just as a point of interest, I work with a guy whose ability to judge scams is broken beyond anything I've ever seen in a non-elderly person. His ability to differentiate between the bogus and the legit is just about non-existent. Remember in the past decade when a lot of us US people were getting cold calls from some company telling us we could buy an extended warranty for our cars that would pay for any and every repair we needed for years to come? He bought one. I realized that it's guys like him who keep the robo callers in business.

I don't think you understand something at play here. In my career of 28 years in IT, I have noticed that some people will just not leave - ever - under any circumstances until you turn out the lights and close the doors. What I mean is, no matter how bad the job is, some people will not ever leave it until they get thrown out the door or the company goes out of business. Not always, but usually it's the people who are just barely getting by. Some years ago we hired a guy who used to work for a local bank and his local bank got bought out by a much bigger bank out of state. They planned to shut down all their IT work in our city for this bank they bought, but they needed this guy and his co-workers to stay to help out with the transition. At first they were told 6 months and they'd be done. 6 months came and they got offered another 6 month extension. Then came another 6 month extension. The guy looked for another job and we hired him, but he left a co-worker behind who just didn't want to leave. Eventually after maybe 3 years, they finally closed down the IT work in our city and co-worker guy now for real has to find a job. The guy we hired asked us to hire his co-worker and we couldn't. No more openings. Even though this guy knew his job was going to end sooner rather than later, and the bank did not want to keep him on after it closed down all the local IT work they had, he refused to leave or even start looking for a job until they told him "Your job is over. Thanks. We'll send your final paycheck to you. Today is your last day." My previous employer, a European company, did some really reprehensible things to us before I left. They changed our terms of employment to favor them and enable them to cheat us out of severance pay they promised us and told us we had to either accept the new terms that let them do it or quit. Then they gave my small department 6 months notice that they were moving our jobs to another lower cost country (not India though). I was the only person in my office to find another job before the deadline. Nobody else would leave. One of the things you see at Disney is a lot of employees are big Disney fans, so they want to work there and they will put up with a lot of bs to do so. Even with these workers temporarily getting their jobs back, and yes we here all know this likely won't have a happy ending for them, more like a temporary reprieve, I guarantee you that many will still happily go back and refuse to look elsewhere for a job until they get this job taken away from them.

Given how many submitters will submit an article with a comment of "He said X! He said X! Definitely gonna be nothing but X!" and the article actually says "Not X at all! Definitely not X! Anything but X! Never gonna be X!", I'm impressed that nobody submitted the article and said one of the following:

1) Linus Torvald's death is imminent.
2) Linus says he's going to kill himself.
3) Linux says Linux is doomed once he dies.

There's also no proof he didn't. While I'd admit he probably didn't hand anything over to them, I'm pretty sure that both countries separated him from his laptops and imaged them so they could shunt decryption off to a series of networked computers. It's certainly possible that they've already cracked his encryption (maybe there is a bug in it that they know about and he doesn't). It's also possible that they haven't cracked it yet. But I think there is almost zero chance that they aren't even trying to crack it.

Keep in mind that this is Slashdot and it's very common for European members to trash the US at every turn, including all of its citizens. I've seen people insist here many times that the US is a consistent threat to world peace and the world would be so much better off if we all died as soon as possible.

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?