Eh, no. Steps 1-2 happen, step 3 is when you note you've suddenly got 48 guys from seedy domains that sound vaguely like STD's slobbering all over over your keyboard and you slowly back away, disabling javascript from the first two again and hope you didn't catch something.

No site requires javascript from 48 other sites to show you something you want to see. That code is there to show someone else something about you, monetize you, violate your privacy, etc, and once you're past half a dozen sites it's far beyond too creepy to be worth it.

While these cards are a shitty setup, they are NOT company scrip in any way, shape, or form. They are denominated in US dollars and can be cashed out in that, or spent as that at stores that accept the reliant payment processor (Visa or Mastercard).

Company scrip was money that could only be spent at stores owned by the company, not anywhere else, and had no value in terms of government currency.

Don't make shit up. It weakens your argument. When something is bad, demonstrate its problems as they are. Don't try and invent new ones. When people find out you are lying they'll disregard your argument.

The cost to actually send the money to the employee direct deposit is $0.35 per transaction. That's what the payroll service pays, and what you'd pay if you did it directly. That is what ACH charges. It is a cheap system. That's why places are more than happy to have bills paid via ACH. When they do an ACH deduction, they pay the fee (the initiator pays), but it is so very cheap in terms of getting money. Much less than a CC.

In terms of an actual check, it varies but is generally in the range of $0.75-$1 when you count the cost of the check stock, printing, envelope, and postage fees. Perhaps a bit more if you factor in labour (depending on how automated the system is).

Neither system costs an employer much. Checks cost the bank somewhat more to deal with, though they have automated that to a large degree, but ACH costs them nothing (when they receive). The sender pays a small transaction fee and that's it. ACH is cheap on purpose because it can be, and is, used for massive volume and thus does well.

No matter how you look at it, it doesn't cost much. The costs are mostly in the other services, as you of course notice from the cost of your payroll service that does all the other work for you (my folks used a payroll service when they ran their business for the same reason).

Still a trivial cost as compared to all the others, as you point out. $15 is trivial shit compared to the other costs of having an employee, even a minimum wage one.

1) You can, indeed, get free checking from Credit Unions pretty easy. Some banks too. There really are places that'll do business with you for no money up front and they won't charge you fees so long as you don't do things like overdraw.

2) They say companies are trying to do this instead of direct deposit. DD costs companies next to nothing. The Automated Clearing House (which is how they all do it) charges $0.35/transaction. This is why companies like to pay people that way. It adds just a trivial cost, and it all automated, the money comes out of their account in to yours. Well the only reason to go prepaid cards instead would be because the bank is bribing them, not because it is cheaper because the ACH cost is just fucking trivial.

This is not a matter of being nice to poor employees, this is a matter of fucking people over.

I could certainly understand offering it as an option. Maybe some employees would find it convenient or financially advantageous. But trying to force people on it? That is just trying to screw them over for a very minor benefit. Like I said, ACH is $0.35/transaction (or 0.06% of a minimum wage paycheck, not counting payroll tax and all that jazz if you want to look at it that way) and it is good bookkeeping wise since the transaction hits right away so you know the status of your current accounts.

At the university there are only two kinds of budgets: capital and personnel. We have money for salaries, and money for equipment. Those are the categories. You may disagree with their method for doing it, but it is set by the regents and the state and it not something we control. Basically our personnel budget isn't being reduced, in fact there are small state mandated raises coming. However the equipment budget has only been 33% approved.

Personally I don't think toner should be an IT item, it should be in the same category as office supplies which is a department budget the business managers have. However, it is in the IT budget and that is that. We don't control it.

In terms of printers we have little control over that. We aren't like most IT shops where we can tell people what it is. We have to do what they want, by and large. Were it up to me, people wouldn't have personal printers, they'd use the large floor combo copier/printers which have much cheaper consumables on account of being so large. However they don't do that because:

1) They are lazy.

2) They use their printers for non-work related uses. We can audit the departmental stuff, not so for the personal stuff.

You have to remember that universities operate rather differently from companies.

Show what you'd lose at a 50% cut. Show him the things that they want to have, that would go away if they cut that much. Often people fail to appreciate what a budget is spent on and if it gets explained what they'll have to trade off they'll be more accommodating.

We may have to do just that where I work. The Dean has been fiddling with the budget again (he's really, really bad at budgeting) and has approved about 33% of our capital budget. He says he'll see if there's more money once the FY starts. Well if not, we are just going to have to make it clear what they don't get to have. Toner will be a big one, we spend almost a third of the budget on that because every professor just HAS to have their own personal printer (this isn't something we get to say no to). Well, those purchases will have to stop, departmental toner purchases only, and then only for academics and business needs. We'll identify the computer labs that are running Windows XP that cannot be upgraded to 7/8 that will need to be shut down next year when updates stop. There will be no new purchases of desktops for anyone unless their computer is just non-functional, no refresh. Etc, etc.

At that point, he'll likely decide that more budget is needed, and move money around (I haven't looked, but my suspicion is he's giving the advertising group more they are a black hole that always wants more). If not, we'll keep going on what we have, and services will be cut because there won't be the funds for it.

It can be very effective to not only show people what you give them, but what you won't be able to give them. A 50% cut is huge, that isn't the kind of thing where you "just make do with a little less" or "cut some minor things" that is where major services have to be cut out. Show him what those are. It is easy to say "I want a 50% cut," when you just look at the money side. When you see what you are going to lose, then it is not so easy.

The UK's SIS is one of the all-time legends of the intelligence community. Not surprising, given the importance that intelligence played in WWII and the threat that the UK faced. The SIS is one of the best of the best. Likewise France's DGSE is a pretty heavy hitter, with a number of publicly known operations (and likely many more not known) and a six hundred million Euro annual budget.

So ya, the EU itself has no central intelligence agency, but if you think its members don't, well then you haven't bothered to check.

In case you are wondering, they HAVE in fact killed people. One example that is publicly known? The DGSE sunk a Greenpeace ship in New Zealand, which killed one person. It was called Opération Satanique.

So sorry to burst your bubble about the EU and members being nothing but noble, but they are nations, with interests, just like all the others and they have intelligence agencies to that end.

Pick the nation, I can likely name the intelligence agency. How about Canada? Those nice Canadians surely don't have one. Oh wait, they have the CSIS, modeled after the British SIS. Ok well not the Norwegians, I mean they are such a wonderful country. Oh, no, wait, they have four of them, three mostly foreign (NIS, FOST, NSM), one mostly domestic (PST).

I really can go on for basically any nation. Nations have collected intelligence on each other for basically as long as we've had nations. This shouldn't surprise you if you've studied history at all. There are also some fairly recent (in historical terms) events that remind nations of the importance of intelligence, like the second world war.

That the US spies shouldn't surprise you. If you think it shouldn't, ok that is valid, but understand it would be essentially the only nation that doesn't. You also might want to learn up on problems that would cause, and then see if you are still ok with the tradeoff.

Many Wikileaks supporters seem to feel that it and its members should have near inviolable privacy, and nobody else should. It is sacred ground, that can be as secretive as it likes, while shedding light on anything else.

Now I suppose I could respect that if it were a more generalized "public/private" thing. In that they believed that government entities, being under the public's control, should have no secrets, but that private individuals and entities should be allowed secrets. However they don't do that, they've published things like sorority secrets which are for a private entity and have no public interest (meaning actual use to the public, people are interested in them with the same voyeuristic attitude as prying into celebrity lives).

It just seems to be how many Wikileaks members and supporters feel. It and its members are one of the few things that should be allowed as much privacy, including total privacy/anonymity, as they want. Everyone else? Fair game, publish whatever they can get their hands on that they decide is a juicy secret, regardless of utility or public good.

For that matter you can even see that with the governmental data they've leaked. There's various stuff that you can argue if it is in the public interest to release it but there is plenty you really can't. For example the private opinions of the diplomatic corps about the Russian leaders. There is NO REASON to release it to the public. It harms diplomatic relations, harms the individuals involved, and doesn't reveal anything, not even US policy, just the opinions of those involved. It isn't evidence of malfeasance or illegal action, it isn't useful to release. But they did, because they could.

Oo, two arms. But why can't I see them?

Ah, yes, they appear to both be stuck up th...

..... never mind. That's just not right.

....Aaand now I'm thinking of some new kids' TV show hero figure, the Mighty Morphin Gay Ranger. He's rainbow-colored, naturally, so he has all the powers of all the other Rangers.

Not really what I wanted to be thinking about, but there you go.

Frankly, I don't see why any type of union should have any bearing on benefits or tax. Get government out of it entirely. Provide a dozen or so template civil relationship contracts that people can use ranging from 'we intend to bear responsibility for raising a child together' to 'this is my best friend who I want to be able to make medical decisions and receive life insurance benefits'.

Harm to society? Either there is harm to specific individuals or there isn't; trying to define harm to society depends on having a strict definition of what society is and should be and that any deviation from that is considered harm. Totalitarianism lies that way.

For example, trying to argue that specific unions risk damaging the gene pool immediately opens up to eugenics; it's trivial today to do genetic screening that would identify entirely unrelated couples whose joined contribution would be much more harmful than various combinations of close relatives.

Their drivers aren't crap, but they aren't up to nVidia's standards. I've a 7970M in my laptop, which I got when it was a brand new chip, and it has been a trial. So there are two big issues it has had, only which could be relevant to the PS4:

1) Issues with Enduro, that's AMD's hybrid GPU switching. The laptop can use the integrated Intel 4000 graphics for easy stuff and fire up the 7970M for hard stuff. Well until fairly recently, that didn't work that well. The 7970M didn't operate at full capacity, something with the drivers was inefficient. You could see it on other laptops which has a mux to allow you to switch off the iGPU. With just the 7970M they ran much faster. AMD finally got it (mostly) fixed, but it took for damn well ever. Also when it first came out, the interface for choosing GPUs was really clunky.

2) OpenGL issues. AMD has sucked at the OpenGL for as long as I can remember, and it never seems to get better. They SUPPORT it, but it doesn't work well. On nVidia, GL and DX run equally fast. They are both first-class APIs and there really is no speed or capability difference between them. On AMD, not so much. Recently the issues I've seen were with Brink and HFSS. Brink was a shit (man it was a waste of money) game that used iD Tech 4. As such, OpenGL. On my AMD GPU, it never ran well despite being WAY passed the spec needed. Tried it on a lesser spec nVidia system, flawless. Said problems were all over the forums. With HFSS we set up a desktop at work with a cheap AMD chip, a 7570 or something like that, just for basic graphics (it was server class hardware, so no good iGPU). The user reported HFSS worked over RDP, but not local and sure enough, that was the case. So it occurred to me: HFSS will use OpenGL to accelerate its interface. Out came the AMD card, in went a cheap nVidia GT 210, and HFSS worked fine.

Now of those, the OpenGL problem could be problematic to the PS4, since that's what it uses. Maybe they won't have a problem since this is ONLY a GL driver and they've had time and all that, but I worry. The PS4 may lose its, on paper, graphics advantage due to driver issues. It would suck for Sony if their console which has more graphics units and more memory bandwidth had lesser GPU capabilities because AMD can't work out a good GL driver.

At any rate the overall situation is AMD still has problems nVidia drivers don't. I really like AMD's hardware, it is often faster and is nearly always a good price, but I get continually bit with driver issues. Not something huge like "The system blue screens and won't run," but things that are very real and very annoying. Hence I have nVidia in my desktop and I've seriously considered replacing the card in my laptop (it is a Clevo laptop and the card is field replaceable). They aren't perfect, but I find them WAY less problematic.

And don't even get me started on Linux drivers. There is NO comparison there. nVidia binary drivers is lightyears ahead of anyone else.

Sony actually intended for it to be the graphic chips. Early on they were doing graphics demos of things running on a number of Cell chips. However, it wasn't good at that either and as the PS3 went in to hardware development, it was clear that they'd need a real GPU.

Well rather than just admit that the Cell wasn't ready for a consumer device (I mean who the fuck tries to put first gen technology in a consumer device) they decided to make it the CPU instead, and had nVidia make them a GPU.

Ultimately Cell's long term problem has been GPUs themselves. As you say Cell sucks as a general purpose CPU. No problem, that wasn't really its design. However as a stream processor it can't keep up with the new GPUs. That wasn't an issue when it was designed (this was back in the pre nVidia 8800 days) but now it gets out stream processed by GPUs.

Hence it has kinda just languished. IBM has chattered about it a bit, but nothing has happened.

Because they can't do anything about you. The reason your own government is more of a concern than foreign governments is they have power over you whereas foreign governments do not. Now yes, technically foreign governments can go after someone, like North Korean kidnappings or the US drone program, however by and large they have little control over citizens of other nations.

In terms of looking at civilians, you think that is new? Most people in a country are civilians, as in not in the military. That doesn't mean they aren't involved in things a nation might take interest in. A simple example would be spies. You think they are military officers? No, they are regular civilians, or often diplomats.

Also in some countries, like China, the line is considerably less clear. The PLA outright owns many industries, and has their hands in many others, so even were you to take the line that spying is only for military things, well that would be rather unclear there.

That aside, I've seen little enough protesting period, and none that seems to be people mad about civilian spying. It is DOMESTIC spying that seems to bother them. They are mad that the NSA is (allegedly) spying on Americans which they are not supposed to do according to the law. I haven't seen any protests complaining about foreign spy agencies doing it, and they do it, make no mistake.