[Quote:]

Barry also made similar complaints about the “decentives” to doing a good job. “The metrics are too complex,” he said. “We were evaluated also on a client’s satisfaction with our work.” The client could range from a reporter for Microsofties working in PR to developers for employees doing product development or for anyone to other groups within Microsoft.

Several current and former employees wanting to do better or escape from stifling management situations would request transfers. However, many managers wanted to keep their staff in part “because it would reflect badly on them,” Barry said.

Most of the things are pretty standard for big companies, Microsoft really isn’t the any worse than most of them I heard about…

[Quote:]

ABC obtains long awaited 9/11 photos after ABC filed and won a Freedom of Information Act back in 2009. The National Institute of Standards and Technology gathered the 9/11 images of the falling World Trade Center back on September 11, 2001 as part of the NIST investigation of terrorist attacks. ABC exclusively obtained 2,779 pictures all contained on 9 CD’s.

get back here!

[Quote:]

We sat for over an hour waiting for Google in the hot and dense diving suits, he recalls.

[Quote:]

After years of complaints, last year the music labels finally got what they wanted from Apple–the ability to raise prices on their songs. Last April, iTunes introduced a “variable pricing” scheme, which gave the labels the ability to move prices from 99 cents a song to $1.29 (and for some tracks, down to 69 cents).

The result? Music sales are slowing.

[Quote:]

Divisions emerged within the group of 10 Americans jailed in Haiti on child abduction charges, with eight of them signing a note over the weekend saying that they had been misled by Laura Silsby, the leader of the group.

“Laura wants to control,” said the scribbled note handed to a producer for NBC News. “We believe lying. We’re afraid.”

The infighting came amid a shakeup in the legal representation of the Americans, who have been charged with trying to remove 33 Haitian children from the country without government permission.

[Quote:]

Laura Silsby is, unless the news has been uncharacteristically skewed against a white American Christian lady, a human trafficker. Another word for that is “slave trader”.

[..]

I don’t have a lot of sympathy for her cohorts. I understand how they might have been sucked in… there are actually numerous scams going on in the United States at any given time that are based on taking advantage of the belief that one’s congregation is full of people who are Right With God and who will never lie or deceive you. It’s a dangerous belief, and one that’s not particularly well-supported by the Bible (I don’t recall what number of people the Bible says are righteous, but I think it’s smaller than the number it takes to fill a church), and even that speaks to an arrogance, a sort of imperialism: we are the good people and everybody else is bad. Anything WE do is right. Anything they do is suspect.

And of course that leads right into any child is better off with one of US than with one of THEM… the kind of thinking that leads to stolen generations. So, yes, perhaps some of the people involved really wanted nothing more than to improve the lives of some children. They didn’t approach that goal from a very pure place, though… and see also: what several thousand dollars a year can really do to improve the lives of children.

Also, whatever they believed about Silsby’s plan and the legality of what they were doing, they were evidently lying to the parents, lying to the children… if your plan requires you to lie to children, Jesus may not approve of it as strongly as you think.

[Quote:]

America has slid back again into its own special brand of terrorism-derangement syndrome. Each time this condition recurs, it presents with more acute and puzzling symptoms. It’s almost impossible to identify the cause, and it’s doubtful there’s a cure. The entire forensic team from House would need a full season to unravel the mystery of what it is about the American brain that renders us more terrified of terrorists today than we were five years ago and less trusting of government policies to protect us.

The real problem is that too many people tend to follow GOP cues about how hopelessly unsafe America is, and they’ve yet again convinced themselves that we are mere seconds away from an attack. Moreover, each time Republicans go to their terrorism crazy-place, they go just a little bit farther than they did the last time, so that things that made us feel safe last year make us feel vulnerable today.

[Quote:]

It’s going to be okay. I was raised by a single mom, and I turned out just fine.

“I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.” — Thomas Jefferson

“They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

— Benjamin Franklin

“But a Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored. Liberty, once lost, is lost forever.”

— John Adams

“It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once.”

— David Hume

“Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and success of liberty.”

— John F. Kennedy

“The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.”

– Albert Einstein