I work in a unionized environment. All wages are in contractual 'bands', every job is evaluated and placed in an appropriate band based on required skill, risk, shift, education, etc.

This means that, within the band, we all know each other's pay if we bother to look up a job classification and leaf through to the most recent contract's appendix.

We all seem to continue working without being at each other's throats.

Indeed. Snowden should release a letter of regret to the NSA, thanking them for their interest but indicating he can neither confirm nor deny possession of any NSA files as a matter of personal security.

I read all I needed to with Howard Taylor's review - weak sci-fi could have been saved by pretty visuals, ruined by shakey-cam.

They can't advertise it enough to convince me, now. I wouldn't even pirate a shakey-cam movie.

Actually, I think your analysis is off. Their real problem, in my opinion, is that they never got their systems working smoothly.

Configuring a BB server is a bitch, and it all depends on connectivity to RIM, which is a dumbass move. Then they put out several generations of handset that failed during normal use due to design flaws, and then they rolled out BB10 which doesn't sync as well as the older system, and crippled their companion tablets in the process instead of providing the software upgrade they'd promised.

If they'd have run their corporate and consumer sides as seperate platforms, done some decent usability and QA testing, made sure their systems required only connectivity to their home server with a phone-home to RIM only to register a BBM address... they'd probably still own the corporate world. Instead, they screwed up each time they made a change - improving some things, but damaging others.

When all the employees (and, more importantly, the management) want Android/iOS, it's very, very important to keep the techies happy so we can articulate why BlackBerry is a much better choice for security, control, and TCO. We can't do that anymore, at least not strongly enough to justify sticking with the BlackBerry platform.

If you try to strike this woman down, every woman with a militant feminist agenda will stand up and scream 'patriarchy!'.

The best you can hope for is that ignoring her leads to the problem going away - because keeping her in the limelight is almost certainly going to result in people creating policies to 'protect' everyone, and the reasonable voices will be drowned out, partially because they don't make as good news copy and partially because the reasonable people generally have something other than 'advocacy' to engage in, and are busy with it.

Pycon put out a statement that it was regrettable somebody was oversensitive and overreacted to something mildly offensive.

That under these particular circumstances it might have been best if the offended party had expressed the fact that she was offended directly to those offending her (as they were not the least bit threatening) or perhaps escalated it to Pycon security.

That Adria Richards was banned from all future events for violating Pycon privacy policies and making a hostile environment for all attendees, and the developers banned for a year for their part.

Imagine a world where Pycon did that, and stated that there would be no changes in policy as a result of the 'donglegate' effect, because no Pycon policy was an issue in the events as they unfolded.

I need an AI to watch the video for me, erase the boring stuff and duplicate things, and flag and tag everything else based on date & time & categories and people involved, transcribe all conversations, do OCR on everything in front of me, plus make a nice searchable index.

Otherwise I'll never be able to find anything interesting out of the giant heap of boring in my life if I'm ever so lucky as to have something worth reliving actually happen to me.

China benefits from a functional United States. So long as the benefits outweigh any prize that would remove them in the taking, Americans are fairly safe from Chinese attack.

Institutions of higher learning across country should issue a joint statement banning that publisher's books from being sold in on-campus bookstores (new or used) or being required material in any course.

They're against academic freedom, they can kiss academic support goodbye, right?

It's not like there aren't other publishers.

My Playbook does VOIP and video calling. The app was free, too.

BBM is through a tethered connection to my phone, though my Playbook has an option for its own cellular data connection. I've no idea if that would make it BBM capable, I'm not going to pay for a second connection to find out when the Bluetooth link reaches throughout my home and my office.

You can load Android apps on it if you wish, though you do need a bit of knowledge or just some Google-Fu to find the instructions on how to do it.

Procrastinator. :P

Also, still 800 million years before the Earth becomes too hot to be inhabitable. We're probably fine not even putting up some kind of shielding for a few million years yet, so long as nothing happens to radically change the atmosphere's heat retention or albedo.

>If we're worried about Earth not being in the habitable zone it's far easier to do something to change the amount of sunlight hitting the Earth* than to move the planet.

Except that the Sun is heating up and expanding. The day will come when the Earth will be inside the Sun... probably not for very long, though.

I expect that for a longer term solution, moving the Earth further from the Sun is both more practical and more effective that attempting to shield it.

Boy, are you presenting a logical, reasoned argument backed up by history to the wrong crowd.

Slashdot's really gone downhill since I last was hanging around. It's getting more like Fark every day.

This isn't the problem. The real problem is, 'How are we going to allocate resources without work as a measurement of worth?'

This astroturfing paid for by Microsoft.