I wonder if we'll ever see a Corporate Mutiny. A situation wherein the employees want to do good work and make a good product/service, many can do decent work, but the CxOs and managers are hellbent are running it into the ground either through stupidity or expecting that golden parachute. Some combination of poor job market, location, and just being mad as hell causes the employees to essentially come to work and agree to completely disregard certain people/levels of management and continue about work in the way they see best, led by a small group who may or may not have been in leadership positions before.

It might not be smooth, and it probably wouldn't work, but it would make for a hell of a story.

If such a thing was attempted: Sure, the higher ups probably have the access to completely cut off their paychecks, but if all the non-managers left who would do the work? The company would quickly fold, turning it into an odd MAD situation.

I originally went to Netvibes, which tries to offer RSS as some sort of secondary service to some business analytics aggregation or something (I never fully understood.) But sometime around the beginning of the year they did a moderate layout change and then completely ignored the vast number of user complaints (a help thread, with almost 200 comments when most had 3, was marked "completed" with no change or solid comment from staff). It introduced a ton of useless whitespace and, most importantly for me, broke their Mosaic view, which was great for images and the primary reason I chose them after Reader's shut down.

Once they proved they didn't care about user interaction and had to have their vision, I jumped ship along with a ton of others (HINT HINT BETA). I now use NewsBlur and am fairly happy with it. Their free service is pretty limited, but I found it useful enough to be worth the $2/mo for a subscription once I changed the settings to get rid of all their Web 2.0 stuff. I miss having "pages" to allow for larger grouping and any kind of image-oriented feed option, but I have a lot more flexibility in how I view things (and I can sort by time descending, something NetVibes was never able to do!)

I don't think she's competitive, but one of the regulars on the TF2 server I usually go to is female and usually plays Medic; this doesn't sound too odd for TF2, until you go against her and find out that she is absolutely lethal with the Ubersaw (melee weapon, for non-TF2 players). If she gets the jump on someone (usually when her heal target loses uber and about to die, she'll split off and dive into the enemy team) she can easily take out two or three people with just that, and I've seen her clear half the team by a combination of luck (they had already taken moderate damage and were regrouping) and surprise.

She also likes to mock people by hiding around the corner and using a death taunt (for non-TF2 players, that's a taunt that can OKO an opposing player if it connects properly) if she knows someone is chasing her. Pretty good success rate there, too.

There are a few other players known to be female on the server who are really good, but I have no idea if they're comp or not.

he wrote about child pornography

Glad you're already +5, because my mod points expired yesterday. The judge wouldn't have given him a second look if it was pedophilic(?) fiction, despite falling under the same kind of fantasy. (Of course, as others have mentioned, him being a cop probably landed him on the good side of the judge and a common citizen wouldn't have been freed.)

Disgusting though it is, disgust should not be used as the main criteria for laws.

If true, that leaves me a bit disappointed. I switched to their pay-as-you-go plan in October and have been happy enough with it: while their cell service is pretty crap compared to Verizon, they also didn't do anything super-evil like Verizon (that I was aware of)... until now. Even if true, I still prefer them over any of the other three major providers, so I don't plan on switching to anything else.

the pervasive pressure that's exerted against people who aren't like you [...] But we can get even better than that and be pretty good and inclusive.

So why must the pendulum swing the other way? Why can't Google offer free coding lessons to anyone and try their best to employ processes to make sure that they are advertising so as diverse a population as possible and nothing is in place that might favor one group over another? (Bonus points for transparency in that.) And if, despite their best efforts to be inclusive, the turnout is vastly white male it would be useful to find out why. Are the minorities/women threatened by the prospect of being around so many white males? Are they disinterested in coding in general? In how Google was presenting it?

Do Asians get to take part in this? Or are they not allowed because their quota has been met? At least here in America, they're still a minority (Wiki says 6% in 2010.)

I guarantee you if the headline read "Google is Offering Free Coding Lessons to White Males" the same "equal rights" people who view their current action as a Very Good Thing would rage with the power of a thousand suns. I'm not against equality, but I'm for equal equality. I wouldn't try to stop Google from doing this (I don't see it as a bad thing, I just think it's misguided, and it's a private initiative), but I await the day when elementary schools and nursing programs having hiring/teaching days targeting males.

What needs to happen is a permanent recording of all interactions with people so they can't just get together and decide what their story will be.

Agreed. At the same time, legal teams and individual citizens can tie up the courts with counter-claims, so not only would constant monitoring of the police keep the system from abusing the people, but it would decrease the potential for the people to abuse the system. So these systems save a lot of headache (at the very least) for a lot of people and should be mandatory for all standard police forces.

http://www.theguardian.com/wor...

I'm a long-time gamer, and I was astounded at the demo as well. It doesn't claim otherwise, so I assume the video is not from in-game footage, but just the design and suggestion really riled my inner geek. If their final product can reach even 70% of what the video suggests, it will be amazing... ...and that's the problem. As beautiful as the trailer is to me, there is a lot being promised and I doubt they can deliver on that, much like Fable. Fable (at least the first one) was still a good game, but it was far more limited than originally promised. And Molyneaux probably had a team of more than 10 people behind him when he made those promises.

Sadly, this is probably either vaporware or will be underwhelming when released.

I went to an interview for a tech company (can't remember what they did now, this was years ago) and one of the questions went something like "We're looking for people who will be dedicated to our small company; right now most everyone regularly works 10 hours a day. Would this be a problem for you?" I can't remember my exact answer, but I tried to be clear but soft that I had no interest in doing that on a constant basis. While there were more questions, the interview basically ended at that point for me and, I'm sure, for them.

Crunch time happens, but it should be rare and compensated. If it's not rare, then something is seriously wrong at the company in the way it manages people, it's business, or all of the above. Thankfully, at my current job when I hit 40 hours I'm out the door unless there is something seriously wrong or I'm way behind a massive deadline (and those are rare to begin with). No one makes a peep about this, and everyone else does the same. My income isn't high compared to averages for the area for my job, but so long as I can survive I'm okay with that if it means not being beat like a rented mule.

Seriously. Try getting by on $30-35K a year. Now try doing it WITH STUDENT LOANS.

Adjusted to my situations. Thanks to believing the lies/myth that if I go to college and get a degree I'll get out with, at worst, a moderately paying job and those loans will be no biggy.

So, being a white male that did almost no extracurricular activities in high school, I had almost no scholarships and just put in for massive loans each year to also help cover room & board. It didn't help that I chose to go to an expensive, out of state, private university. (In fact, Yahoo! Finance did a piece recently on university costs, using my alma matter as a central example. Apparently it's now about $37K/yr there; when I was a freshman a decade ago it was about $30K.) And so I graduated, right after the Great Recession started, with approx. $150,000 in student loan debt. Unable to get a job, I did a stint in the military and took part in their Loan Repayment Program; between that and regular, minimum payments of $900/mo I'm down to $111,000.

I'm able to pay it with my current job (roughly $38K take home), but I live paycheck to paycheck and with such a massive debt over my head as I near 30 I don't even consider things like relationships, hobbies, or getting a place of my own.

I never thought about it that way, but perhaps this is the result of the ideal in many schools/communities that everyone is completely equal no matter what they do. "Okay, you all played kick ball, so everyone gets a blue ribbon, yay!" "Oh, you won the championship kick ball game? Good job, here's your blue participation ribbon!"

The result being that when you grow up you think you're on the same level as everyone, regardless of actually being better or worse in any particular area, so you don't see the point in unions because "everyone is the same, they can just go to management and talk it out!" because they think management is also the same. And then management, who grew up in a different generation and/or knows better, takes full advantage of this.

Don't forget all the dancing!

That being said, it's remarkable they're still in business.

Aye, but I'm thankful they are. I think it's because general trust in them is so deep that they keep a steady readership. They also lock most of their stuff online behind a paywall (especially auto reviews, which I'm sure gets them most of their attention; after all, if you're looking to buy an $XXK car, dropping $5-10 for a short subscription to their site makes sense.)

It also wouldn't surprise me if they were extremely zealous in keeping sites from reposting their material, though I've not actually heard of actions on their part.

Or they can what Consumer Reports does: Buy the models themselves. I didn't see mention of it while skimming TFA, but many review sites/publications use samples/loaners from companies, making this kind of bait-and-switch easy.

Sure, this means they might not get the review out before it's released, but that also makes this kind of thing far harder to do. (They could still release a first batch of high-quality items, and then successive batches use lower-quality parts, but that still costs more money and will mean less people swindled.)

You're making a big assumption, in that our metaphorical bread winner has a car. This isn't always the case, and in poor areas the lack of a car not only makes getting a job harder, but it also makes getting proper food harder due to the lack of local markets. And, even if that person somehow had unlimited funds for food, they are still at a disadvantage because they can't buy in bulk, being limited to whatever they can carry in that trip.

Sprawling suburbs have the same problem, but we don't notice it because we're used to driving multiple miles, sometimes out of our way, to go grocery shopping. This is thanks to many of our zoning laws, because having a small shopping center in the middle of suburban areas is somehow a travesty to many people (NIMBYs?)

Because most grocers don't like losing shedloads of money due to food-stamp/EBT fraud, shoplifting, robberies, etc.

It's not just due to those, but the added cost of getting food (especially fresh food) into dense cities, and that's just on the financial side. You can't regularly drive huge 18 wheelers down the streets of an urban population, to my knowledge. Food deserts are a relatively new problem.