Former John Birch Society Republican turned AFL-CIO labor activist who evolved into a progressive netizen which I'm now beginning to regret due to all the fucking emails I keep finding on my lawn!
I understand and respect that many in the tech community love being independent contracts, and financially flourish under those rules. They are the exception. In virtually every other field I worked with, independent contractors were little more than abused and underpaid employees.
Nearly ALL workers benefit from the legal protections afforded employees, but not independent contractors. From newspaper carriers to pizza delivery folks, indie contractors get the short end of the stick while being held to the same standards as employees without the benefits.
It's deeply offensive they have not withdrawn their allegation and publicly apologized. Nakamoto may not have the law on his side, but with crowdfunding he could embarrass Newsweek and I suspect that's his intent.
The less the American media bothers to investigate and report real scandals, the harder they should be slapped for sloppy work that serves no point other than to serve up some mild titillation to their geekier readers.
Salaries are kept confidential for the worst of reasons, and almost always hide unequal pay and disproportionate bonuses. I've written over 7,000 resumes for clients. Never has one told me of a good job review that helped them improve their work, but countless clients told me of being unfairly set up for being fired after getting a bad review that came out of nowhere.
Nothing beats transparency, and no workplace ever suffered from hands-on management and supervisors who worked with their employees to assure top quality. You should never need a performance review to know what your boss thinks of your work.
still blacks out local games, making it impossible for fans to watch the local team except by paying for cable TV.
League Pass is a horrible run service, something the NBA did solely to take the heat off them for their unholy alliance with cable. Very few NBA games are shown on broadcast TV, and their playoffs are all locked up by cable channels. It's a pay-per-view league, and only fans in a handful of cities get to watch the home games and playoffs without paying at least $600 a year.
Everything must be owned. If a reader is influenced by your words, then that reader becomes your property or at least their brain does because you can prove your words are in their head. That's where you're going, isn't it?
You're trying to lock ideas up. Once expressed, no one else can have them. They cannot be debated or revised, only attributed and paid for. Over and over again forever, amen. It's not homage, it's theft. If Pizzolatto had been a serious writer, he would have never read anything by anyone else ever. Once you fill your brain with other people's words, how can you ever claim to be original?
That's exactly right. Perlstein's documentation attacks the right's myth building. Anything that detracts from Reagan as Buddy Jesus offends the right, and the right still believes that it should be illegal to offend them.
It is important to fight back when the media confuses the right with conservatism, a label the modern right and Republican party do not deserve. This is the party of Nixon's Southern Democrats. They are ideological pissants who would rather tear down than build, prefer libel to fact finding, and favor oppression over liberation.
Go to Craigslist. It's a rare day when there are no ads for product reviewers. The pay is so dreadful the people writing them really don't have time to go to the website to see the product, let alone use it.
Sports fans have endured this for years now. Want to watch the MN Timberwolves? You must have a cable package that includes Fox Sports, ESPN, TNT/TBS and access to NBA TV. If you do it right, you may be able to watch your team play in their taxpayer-subsidized arena for a little less than $7 a game (x 82 games).
Welcome to our brave new rentier society. And once you're used to paying these rents, you'll be ready for a world in which you never get to own anything. Your car will be leased, your home rented, major appliances leased, and, of course, any entertainment you purchase can be deleted remotely at the behest of just about anyone who's not you.
I couldn't watch my team over the internet (legally) when I lived in Minnesota, and now that I'm in Wisconsin I find myself in a no cable address with a worse than nothing Frontier phone system that doesn't support DSL. Literally my only broadband solution was to pay Verizon $120 a month for 30GB of insanely fast and incredibly expensive broadband.
I can watch my team on NBA League Pass now (TNT and ESPN games excepted) but I can't afford the broadband (those game streams suck up a lot of bandwidth.
We are the most corrupt country on earth, Russia included. Worse, we don't even know the only standing that count, namely which billionaire has/is the biggest dick.
I moved to a remote rural location with no cable or dish options available. I had to set up a Verizon Home Fusion device. It is amazing. It can download the Library of Congress in about half an hour. OK, 30mbps isn't that fast, but at $5 a GB I had to dump my Netflix account because I couldn't afford the bandwidth it used.
That and even at 30 mbps, Netflix was choppy and unwatchable. All other streaming video was better, including illegal NBA feeds.
State of the art wireless technology, but it couldn't stream Netflix worth a crap.
i SERIOUSLY doubt 90-99% of the people who were protesting against the illegal invasion of iraq, know SHIT about pincus, but i bet most of them had heard of -and been influenced by- greenwald and moulitsas ( as much of a demo-shill as he has become)...
But unlike Greenwald and (Markos) Moulitsas, members of Congress and people in the Pentagon did read Pincus.
I'm not nominating him for the Nobel Peace Prize, just saying that he was an establishment voice for reason at a time when the establishment had gone batshit insane. Also, he's 83 years old and entitled to his opinions.
He was more critical of the BS leading up to and during the Iraq War than almost any other columnist I can think of.
He's very old, very pro-defense establishment, but he's not half the hack his boss, Fred Hiatt is.
Agree with you that this is a bad column, but I think it lacks context. Pincus did a better job of trying to slow the rush to war than Glenn Greenwald, Marcos Moulitsas and all the other bloggers combined (myself included).
For those who don't know Bryson, his breakout novel, "A Walk in the Woods," was based on his hiking the Appalachian Trail with a high school buddy. Yes, Stephen Katz was a real person. It's not clear if Bryson has any documentation from "Katz" allowing him to freely recount their trip.
All you really need to know about Bryson is that he was born and raised in Des Moines, Iowa, but now speaks with a British accent.
A friend recently published a book on Amazon. I bought a copy and then found out I could not read it on my Kindle due to DRM protection.
The problem was that I broke my Kindle and bought a used replacement but did not register it with Amazon. That's what DRM is now about: you cannot read DRM content on an unregistered device.
Why does that not scare the hell out of civil libertarians.
CenturyLink (formerly Qwest) is not a part of this, and every tech/repair person I've ever talked to joked with me about piracy. They simply don't care.
Sadly, they're regional so you can't switch to their DSL product, but Qwest/CenturyLink has always been a great ISP.
I accidentally bought Word 6 before it went on sale (clerical error) and because of that and my very busy resume writing service I got to be a primary troubleshooter for MS on that horrible release. Apparently not one single beta tester typed over 50 wpm, and they didn't realize how buggy the Typeahead buffer was. Word was literally dropping words and letters at random out of what I was inputting and suddenly my workload doubled due to the need for very close proofreading. Resulted in involuntary eye twitches and then my heart went out of rhythm, something that's never happened before or since.
in this country. When Microsoft's super-buggy Word 6.0 resulted in my hospitalization (cardiac arrhythia), the MN AG's office refused to even consider suing Microsoft. They flat out told me that Microsoft was bigger than Minnesota, and there was no point to litigation.
Clinton's DOJ gave MS a free pass on monopolistic abuses. I don't think that horse is ever getting put back into the barn.
Having written thousands of resumes
I understand and respect that many in the tech community love being independent contracts, and financially flourish under those rules. They are the exception. In virtually every other field I worked with, independent contractors were little more than abused and underpaid employees.
Nearly ALL workers benefit from the legal protections afforded employees, but not independent contractors. From newspaper carriers to pizza delivery folks, indie contractors get the short end of the stick while being held to the same standards as employees without the benefits.
Newsweek should be held up to ridicule on this
It's deeply offensive they have not withdrawn their allegation and publicly apologized. Nakamoto may not have the law on his side, but with crowdfunding he could embarrass Newsweek and I suspect that's his intent.
The less the American media bothers to investigate and report real scandals, the harder they should be slapped for sloppy work that serves no point other than to serve up some mild titillation to their geekier readers.
Bad employment practices
Salaries are kept confidential for the worst of reasons, and almost always hide unequal pay and disproportionate bonuses. I've written over 7,000 resumes for clients. Never has one told me of a good job review that helped them improve their work, but countless clients told me of being unfairly set up for being fired after getting a bad review that came out of nowhere.
Nothing beats transparency, and no workplace ever suffered from hands-on management and supervisors who worked with their employees to assure top quality. You should never need a performance review to know what your boss thinks of your work.
The NBA's League Pass
still blacks out local games, making it impossible for fans to watch the local team except by paying for cable TV.
League Pass is a horrible run service, something the NBA did solely to take the heat off them for their unholy alliance with cable. Very few NBA games are shown on broadcast TV, and their playoffs are all locked up by cable channels. It's a pay-per-view league, and only fans in a handful of cities get to watch the home games and playoffs without paying at least $600 a year.
Re: No, you're wrong, Tim. This is a clear-cut case of plagiarism.
Everything must be owned. If a reader is influenced by your words, then that reader becomes your property or at least their brain does because you can prove your words are in their head. That's where you're going, isn't it?
You're trying to lock ideas up. Once expressed, no one else can have them. They cannot be debated or revised, only attributed and paid for. Over and over again forever, amen. It's not homage, it's theft. If Pizzolatto had been a serious writer, he would have never read anything by anyone else ever. Once you fill your brain with other people's words, how can you ever claim to be original?
Re: ideology war
That's exactly right. Perlstein's documentation attacks the right's myth building. Anything that detracts from Reagan as Buddy Jesus offends the right, and the right still believes that it should be illegal to offend them.
It is important to fight back when the media confuses the right with conservatism, a label the modern right and Republican party do not deserve. This is the party of Nixon's Southern Democrats. They are ideological pissants who would rather tear down than build, prefer libel to fact finding, and favor oppression over liberation.
(untitled comment)
Go to Craigslist. It's a rare day when there are no ads for product reviewers. The pay is so dreadful the people writing them really don't have time to go to the website to see the product, let alone use it.
This is nothing new
Sports fans have endured this for years now. Want to watch the MN Timberwolves? You must have a cable package that includes Fox Sports, ESPN, TNT/TBS and access to NBA TV. If you do it right, you may be able to watch your team play in their taxpayer-subsidized arena for a little less than $7 a game (x 82 games).
Welcome to our brave new rentier society. And once you're used to paying these rents, you'll be ready for a world in which you never get to own anything. Your car will be leased, your home rented, major appliances leased, and, of course, any entertainment you purchase can be deleted remotely at the behest of just about anyone who's not you.
Amen
I couldn't watch my team over the internet (legally) when I lived in Minnesota, and now that I'm in Wisconsin I find myself in a no cable address with a worse than nothing Frontier phone system that doesn't support DSL. Literally my only broadband solution was to pay Verizon $120 a month for 30GB of insanely fast and incredibly expensive broadband.
I can watch my team on NBA League Pass now (TNT and ESPN games excepted) but I can't afford the broadband (those game streams suck up a lot of bandwidth.
We are the most corrupt country on earth, Russia included. Worse, we don't even know the only standing that count, namely which billionaire has/is the biggest dick.
More anecdotal evidence
I moved to a remote rural location with no cable or dish options available. I had to set up a Verizon Home Fusion device. It is amazing. It can download the Library of Congress in about half an hour. OK, 30mbps isn't that fast, but at $5 a GB I had to dump my Netflix account because I couldn't afford the bandwidth it used.
That and even at 30 mbps, Netflix was choppy and unwatchable. All other streaming video was better, including illegal NBA feeds.
State of the art wireless technology, but it couldn't stream Netflix worth a crap.
There's something else going on here.
This sounds like a job for Anonymous
Those who use the internet to abuse others should experience how that feels first hand.
Re: Re: To Pincus's credit
i SERIOUSLY doubt 90-99% of the people who were protesting against the illegal invasion of iraq, know SHIT about pincus, but i bet most of them had heard of -and been influenced by- greenwald and moulitsas ( as much of a demo-shill as he has become)...
But unlike Greenwald and (Markos) Moulitsas, members of Congress and people in the Pentagon did read Pincus.
I'm not nominating him for the Nobel Peace Prize, just saying that he was an establishment voice for reason at a time when the establishment had gone batshit insane. Also, he's 83 years old and entitled to his opinions.
To Pincus's credit
He was more critical of the BS leading up to and during the Iraq War than almost any other columnist I can think of.
He's very old, very pro-defense establishment, but he's not half the hack his boss, Fred Hiatt is.
Agree with you that this is a bad column, but I think it lacks context. Pincus did a better job of trying to slow the rush to war than Glenn Greenwald, Marcos Moulitsas and all the other bloggers combined (myself included).
A good writer but too full of himself
For those who don't know Bryson, his breakout novel, "A Walk in the Woods," was based on his hiking the Appalachian Trail with a high school buddy. Yes, Stephen Katz was a real person. It's not clear if Bryson has any documentation from "Katz" allowing him to freely recount their trip.
All you really need to know about Bryson is that he was born and raised in Des Moines, Iowa, but now speaks with a British accent.
DRM
A friend recently published a book on Amazon. I bought a copy and then found out I could not read it on my Kindle due to DRM protection.
The problem was that I broke my Kindle and bought a used replacement but did not register it with Amazon. That's what DRM is now about: you cannot read DRM content on an unregistered device.
Why does that not scare the hell out of civil libertarians.
(untitled comment)
CenturyLink (formerly Qwest) is not a part of this, and every tech/repair person I've ever talked to joked with me about piracy. They simply don't care.
Sadly, they're regional so you can't switch to their DSL product, but Qwest/CenturyLink has always been a great ISP.
Re: Re: There is no consumer protection
Here's a very old archive of a newspaper column about what happened to me, and sorry for misspelling Arrhythmia.
http://mfinley.com/articles/cardiac.htm
I accidentally bought Word 6 before it went on sale (clerical error) and because of that and my very busy resume writing service I got to be a primary troubleshooter for MS on that horrible release. Apparently not one single beta tester typed over 50 wpm, and they didn't realize how buggy the Typeahead buffer was. Word was literally dropping words and letters at random out of what I was inputting and suddenly my workload doubled due to the need for very close proofreading. Resulted in involuntary eye twitches and then my heart went out of rhythm, something that's never happened before or since.
There is no consumer protection
in this country. When Microsoft's super-buggy Word 6.0 resulted in my hospitalization (cardiac arrhythia), the MN AG's office refused to even consider suing Microsoft. They flat out told me that Microsoft was bigger than Minnesota, and there was no point to litigation.
Clinton's DOJ gave MS a free pass on monopolistic abuses. I don't think that horse is ever getting put back into the barn.
How can I contribute to that reward?
She's called me literally hundreds of times over the last ten years ON MY RESIDENTIAL LINE.
It's gotten to where I'm beginning to involuntarily hate everyone named Rachel.
Outrageous
The right of corporations to litter our doorsteps shall not be abridged.
Corporate litterers now have more rights than human beings engaged in political protest.