I never pressed him for the details of the fight, but my personal experience was that he's one of the most laid-back and funniest people I've ever known, and I've never seen him even come close to losing his temper. I wasn't making any kind of judgment regarding his conviction, just saying that having a felony on one's record doesn't mean one doesn't have legitimately marketable skills.

We need someone in authority to step up, tell the American people what is going on, and take the heat for it.

So Wyden spills the beans, goes to jail, and then we're left with no one on the inside that will let us know that the intelligence community is still overstepping their bounds. As a bonus, after Wyden tells everyone what's going on, the executive branch refuses to take any action and continues to cow the legislature into letting them do what they want because the rest of the Intelligence Committee is largely a stunning exercise in uselessness.

As long as he remains in office and on the Committee, Wyden is doing more good being on the inside - certainly more good than those like Dianne Feinstein, Barbara Mikulski, or my own state's elected dickhead Marco Rubio. Only in the event Wyden loses his place on the Committee or fails to get re-elected would coming out and telling everything he knows be potentially useful.

Remember - by law, you can't discriminate against them.

True in some cases, but not as a blanket statement. The EEOC says an employer's policies regarding one's criminal history cannot be used as an employment criteria if:

They significantly disadvantage Title VII-protected individuals such as African Americans and Hispanics; AND
They do not help the employer accurately decide if the person is likely to be a responsible, reliable, or safe employee.

I had a former co-worker that was convicted of felony battery years prior to the current job. The employer would have been well within their rights to deny him a job based solely on the second criteria.

There is only one reason to hire a criminal, and that is planning to do something criminal.

Well, there's also the situation where the ex-con is actually good at what he does. Back in 2010 I did some contract work for a large and established company (big/old enough to have a pre-ARIN /16 netblock), and I shared a cubicle with a guy that had a third-degree felony battery conviction after putting a guy in the hospital during a bar fight years earlier, and happened to be a wicked sharp Java coder with great customer interaction skills. Even with the clearly disclosed felony on his record, he was eventually extended quite a nice offer to go onboard as a permanent employee.

Who knows. In any event, it's kind of silly for AT&T to complain about regulation cutting into their profits when they aren't offering the kinds of services that people might actually want. Especially when I've had two outages over the last 18 months that were the result of them accidentally cancelling the authorization for the MAC address of the outside DSL hardware and taking four days to figure that out the first time it happened.

Quoting almost 170 years' worth of service fees for an install? I think I might have laid into the sales guy with a variation of the "does Marsellus Wallace look like a bitch?" speech after that. That's just insane.

AT&T has been laying fiber for their U-Verse rollout. They dug up a whole bunch of land in town here a few years ago, and when they were done, the salesman came by to ask if we wanted to sign up for the newly available U-Verse.

The AT&T sales guy came around a couple of weeks ago to tout the new fiber rollout in my area. Here's how it went:

AT&T guy: "Did you know that AT&T is laying fiber in your area?"
Me: "No, that's great. How fast is the fastest speed you'll be offering when it's in?"
AT&T: "Let me look...[rifles through papers]...says here it will be 18 Mbps."
Me: "That's already available here now over your copper lines."
AT&T: "Really? What do you have now?"
Me: "I've got a 12 Mbps U-verse business account with five static IPs. The 18 Mbps service is already too expensive for such a small bump, and it doesn't sound like the fiber offering is otherwise going to make any difference at all for me. The *only* reason I'm with AT&T is that Comcast has a ridiculous installation fee for business accounts."

The guy hemmed and hawed a little bit more, and eventually left looking rather dejected. Seriously, only 18 Mbps over fiber?

Well the FCC cannot create a tax, sorry but that actually takes Congress.

That doesn't mean that AT&T won't hit all their customers with some bogus "net neutrality compliance fee" or other such nonsense.

I worked for one - never again. I don't particularly appreciate attempts to guilt me into working extra hours "because the company really needs to hit this ship date" when they're weeks behind on payroll. "Hey asshole, I need to eat more than you need to be able to charge a receivable to the current quarter."

More like train HR to not make unrealistic barriers to getting people interviewed who can do the job

At the last place I worked, we had the most awesome HR manager I've ever seen. She was smart as hell, listened to what the managers were saying, and got the hell out of the way when it came to technical evaluations - she hired people she personally didn't like on the basis of the team's recommendations, and they turned out to be good for the company. She knew enough about what we did to know when a resume was mostly BS, and when she wasn't sure she came to us to ask. She also was truly interested in the employees' needs, and often would go out of her way to do stuff for the employees to make them feel appreciated. *Everyone* loved her, and she had a real gift for interacting with people.

Until...

...the company was bought out and hired a "VP of HR" to be her boss that thought she (the new VP) knew everything there was to know because of all of her certifications, and was more interested in making the C-level execs happy than what was actually best for the company. She dressed up as an ice queen for her first Halloween party at the company, and the universal opinion was, "wow, totally appropriate costume".

The awesome HR manager left about 18 months later (after having been with the company for 8 years), and from what I hear, morale and productivity hasn't ever been lower. The new VP made it quite clear that the employees are looked upon as replaceable cogs, and that they should be happy that management deigns to let them keep their jobs. My former co-workers have lamented the quality of interviews of late, simply because Ms. VP thinks she has all of the answers in regards to hiring, and doesn't pay much attention to what the team thinks now.

"Well Mr. Smith, the good news is that your wife doesn't have cancer. The bad news is that the diagnostic equipment ate her."

Unless you own a pawn shop. Florida (and I'm guessing other states too) effectively makes them immune to action for trading in stolen property, and makes you jump through ridiculous legal hoops to get your stuff back even if you can prove it's yours.

Perhaps if Blue is smart, they will offer X a free license to use their 'technology' in exchange for dropping any attempt to squash the patent.

Wouldn't it kind of defeat the purpose of patenting the idea if the only company that would have the need to use the patented invention was given permission to use it for free? Granted, the patent still has 15 years to go before it runs out, but SpaceX is likely to be the only company using the technology in the near future.

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com... [nakedcapitalism.com]

Well, that might explain why it's practically impossible to get a Rickenbacker 4003 through Musician's Friend. They're almost never in stock, which I could understand if RIC is demanding cash up front for them now.

That wasn't spotted for ages, discovered only in 2013, when it was only 10 times the moon's distance away (nearly a Mars distance)

Math check - you missed a zero. The closest Earth and Mars can get is about 34 million miles, or about 140 times the Earth-Moon distance.