Comment Re:Useless (Score 1) 71
Adding new rules to the Meta pages doesn't count.
Adding new rules to the Meta pages doesn't count.
Wonder what he's getting under the table for his "selfless sacrifice"?
Well, he's had his passport revoked, is being hunted around the world, and is being vilified in almost all public media.
Oh, wait....
Whether you agree with what Snowden did or not (I for one do not), dude is a serious drama queen. This is somewhat typical of his generation. Everything is just so much more bigger and more important because it happens to them
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Being from Snowden's generation -- I'm the same age -- I have to say that I for one am personally shocked by the entire NSA spying incident and the subsequent witch-hunt of Snowden himself. Not surprised, but still despite myself, shocked.
Despite having grown a warty hide of cynicism over the last decade, despite having watched western society fail again and again over the last 10 years, despite having suspected the truth for many years already, the sheer scale and nakedness of the NSA's programs has pierced right down to the soft kernel of hope for the world instilled in me during the 1990s. The brazen outrage of the NSA and US military, the absurdly exaggerated charges against Snowden, and the relentless and petty retaliation by the US government have cast present reality back into a past which I was raised to believe would never reoccur.
Snowden is a hero. He's a straight up hero. He gave up reward, riches, happiness, and his own future for the sake of his principles and his fellow countrymen. People in the US should build a statue in his honour. Instead, they're howling like fascists for satisfaction.
If Snowden returns to the United States, I don't think he will get a day in open court. I doubt he will see a military tribunal. After everything that has happened, after just how wrong the world has become, it would not surprise me if Snowden was simply disappeared. It would shock me yes, but not surprise me.
What happened to paying in cash?
This is what you get when you believe that ever freer markets will do anything and everything more efficiently than ever before -- Chaos.
Any company that cannot handle its own payroll should not be licensed to trade. It's that simple.
The GPL is all about preserving access to code. If you use GPL code, you have to publish that code. If you make changes to it, you need to publish those changes as well. This is to stop people "proprieterizing" GPLed code by making a few incompatible changes and releasing it.
Well then the GPL has failed because that is exactly what these people are doing. They're altering the GPL code, offloading code to proprietary files, then releasing the whole thing as a finished product. I presume this can be done with split
Against what? The NSA spying on US citizens?
The Laffer curve is on record as having been dreamed up on the back of a napkin by Donald Rumsfeld during lunch hour. I am not making this up.
Upper management allowed equity investors it jack up the debt load.
Yeah... part of the plan to to return money to the shareholders. That's why companies do things: to make money for the shareholders. (The debtors, rather than getting totally screwed, are first in line for the bankruptcy proceeds.) Not necessarily a nice thing but, when the financial incentive put the two sides in conflict over millions (nearly billions!) of dollars, guess what happens?
Based on the debt load, the bakers union did not think a percentage of the company had enough value.
Yeah, because the company's worthless when they've got work rules saying that you can't put Twinkies and Wonder-bread on the same truck. Word on the street has it that normal distribution channels would have easily freed up $80-$120 million a year to go straight to the bottom line; maybe the bakers' percentage would have been worth something under those circumstances.
And now that they're out of union-contract-land, they're actually thinking about making new snacky-things. Because they might actually be able to make money off of them. Perish the thought.
Not quite.
The Teamsters union always had a variety of rules, e.g. "the guy who unloads the truck has to drive in a separate car from the guy who drives the truck" and other stuff like that. Hostess, realizing the costs that this imposed on them, didn't really invest in the brand very much over the next several decades, because they realized that they couldn't turn the investment into a big profit and they're not in the business of giving away money if they can help it - instead, they returned such money as there was to shareholders. (And to themselves as management. The shareholders and bankruptcy courts are free to look into that, certainly.) Hostess slowly declined into marginal profitability, then unprofitability, and limped around in bankruptcy for 11 years, until at a critical juncture the baker's union went on strike because they felt that they could do better for their members in any takeover than if Hostess were otherwise restructured with a Teamsters contract.
Not if the NSA's intent in doing so is to spy, directly or indirectly on US citizens. As I said, they can spy on me or random Russian/Saudi/Chinese guy no problem. But they're not meant to be snooping on US citizens any more than the US airforce is meant to be dropping bombs on Atlanta suburbs.
Meanwhile geeks, who do understand how computers work, instead of developing technologies supporting encryption and pricacy by default, have instead hopped into bed with big data and the NSA. There are more geeks helping the NSA builds a Stasi apperatus than there are geeks working on building a truely anonymous and untappable internet.
The more I think back to the likes of the whole Firefox self signed certs debacle, the more I see the NSA survellance apperatus collectively roaring with laughter at geekdom's heedless self-destruction of itself and the internet.
Reading history, you frequently come across periods where you wonder "How could people put up with this?" or "Why didnâ(TM)t they just do X" where X is the solution which was eventually reached 20 years later.
Looking at the modern world, I realise I'm living in just such a period. A pity I'm not longer "smart" enough to figure out what the current X should be. I guess I may have been a little too hard on all those "stupid" societies in the past.
Then again, maybe it's not wrong to think that they and we are just, actually stupid.
You want to know why the meltdown happened? Your first thought will be "greed". I'd be more abstract and call it "pursuit of money", but tomato/tomahto. Anyway. GREED! Right, but! It's not enough. Greed happens all the time in the corporate world without causing meltdowns. All businesses are out to pursue money all the time, doubly so in the financial sector, and it doesn't cause meltdowns all the time. The difference here? The reason that the meltdown happened? The system was giving them money for doing the wrong thing. And it started when the Washington, DC establishment combined negative real interest rates (subsidizing the housing bubble) with federal homeownership programs that paid the banks top dollar to make shaky mortgages -- and when federal rules gave ratings from a few firms with clear conflict-of-interest problems special preference in the regulatory system, and thus encouraged all banks to buy AAA-rated mortgage junk to maintain their regulatory capital requirements.
Of course banks caused the crisis. They were paid to do so, and paid handsomely, and chased into doing so by regulators when they weren't overtly paid. But don't worry!!! We've solved the failures with Dodd-Frank and it'll never happen again!!!11 *coughcoughcough asif cough*
FORTRAN is not a flower but a weed -- it is hardy, occasionally blooms, and grows in every computer. -- A.J. Perlis
