those worst case scenarios when they are abducted or drift off somewhere at the beach (yes, bad parenting but it happens to the best, most cautios parents)
This sentiment has been expressed several times, but I'm picking on this one.
If a child gets abducted it isn't the parents' fault. You don't blame the rape victim. Don't blame the parents (barring etreme negligence). Allowing yourself to take your eyes off of your child is NOT bad parenting. It is, in fact, good parenting to give your child some freedom. Sometimes that backfires, and sometimes that results in a horrific tragedy, but that tragedy is not the parents' fault.
All accidents are preventable in hindsight, the reality is that none of them were prevented.
Yes, in a thousand years or so current texts are likely to be more difficult to read for contemporary speakers than text of the day, that is no surprise.
I suspect that, with modern printing and the standardization of spelling that occurred with the development of the dictionary, language will change less quickly than in the past. While slang and neologisms will still occur, writing will remain much less changed. The examples of Beowulf vs. Chaucer (~500 years?) vs. Shakespeare vs. modern writers (~400 years) seems to bear this out. Even grammatical constructs seem to have settled down sometime around 1700 (compare John Bunyan and Jonathon Swift) -- JimFive
Additionally, it's not like the money is going to go directly from the customer to the charity. The money is going to sit in Google's bank account(s) for some amount of time (30 days to a year) before it gets donated. So Google is still going to have an income on the deal. Also, the money still counts as revenue on the balance sheet making Google look better to investors and keeping the stock price up. And, unless there is somehow a contract provision requiring the donation, they can just drop the donation aspect if cash ever becomes an issue. -- JimFive
if you are somehow suggesting that by taking government out of economic decisions you will lesson corporate influence over those decisions
That is exactly what he is suggesting, and it is patently obvious.
My point is simply that all a business can (legally) do is offer things. You can walk away any time.
And my point is that the only reason that is all a business can legally do is because of goverment interference in economic decisions. In the absence of government regulations you (could, and have in the past) end up with company towns that limit one's ability to leave. -- JimFive
Apparently I was too subtle. Your statement: "All a company can do is offer you a product. They cannot force you to buy it." is historically untrue. Companies have set up systems that coerced people into being customers and prevented them from leaving. If you don't think companies would attempt to create a similar system in the absence of regulation then you are much less cynical than I.
For a modern example of people being tied to jobs they dislike and being forced to give money to companies they loathe I refer you to the current system of employer paid health insurance.
When I think of public transportation I am thinking of intracity/regional transport, not point to point bus/train service. That is, the ability to get to and from work, shopping, and recreation on a daily basis. Once a week, or even once a day, bus service doesn't meet this need. Taking the train from Detroit to Ann Arbor for the day is doable, but it doesn't get you to where you need to be in Ann Arbor.
The problem with public transit in small cities is that it either has too many busses for the ridership or not enough busses to maintain a reasonable schedule.
I have thought recently that an on-demand style van service with automatic dispatching to pre-defined pick up points might be able to resolve the dilemma, but only if it were able to combine enough riders so that it wasn't just a taxi service. -- JimFive
Simply put; the solution is to charge the outsourcer with security of the network and the data as part of the contract negotiations. If you do this then they are beholden to you and if a breach occurs they are legally and financially liable. If the outsourcer will not accept those terms, find one who does.
I would never accept blanket liability for data breaches. As the network admin I can only control so much of what the users do. I would make that contract much more detailed about responsibilities regarding patching and external facing security, but there's not a lot that I can do about the internal threat. -- JimFive
I just wanted to mention that Salaried is not the same as Exempt.
Positions are exempt from overtime and assorted other parts of labor law based on the requirements of the position, not based on how they are paid. Paying your janitors on salary does not make them exempt and paying your managers hourly doesn't make them non-exempt.
Roughly speaking, if your position is >50% managing (as opposed to working), or your position is Commissioned Sales, or your position is Professional (requiring either licensing, certification, or a technical degree) then you are exempt and your employer is not required by law to pay you Time and a half for more than 40 hours in a week. Your employer may still pay you extra by contract, but it isn't required.
There are also benefits to being Exempt. For example, if your salary period is weekly, then if you work at any time during that week then you get paid for the whole week. Most companies have a salary period of a day or even half-day to counter that. But that also means that if you work an extra day then you might be entitled to get paid for that day as it is an extra salary period (check with your lawyer). -- JimFive
am curious about one thing, however. If electric cars become the norm, will kids run through garages and unplug them for fun? How would you prevent that?
Off the top of my head, assuming you mean parking garages. When you plug it in and turn on the current the outlet will lock on to your plug. It won't let go until you have inserted enough money to pay for the juice. -- JimFive
No one can ever come in and force you to turn it off.
Sure they can. They can come in and take your radio away. They can forbid you from owning a stereo capable of producing more than X decibels. Does this mean that you don't have the "right" to listen to a radio at the volume you prefer. Yes. Yes it does. You don't have that right. And if you persist they will lock you in a cage and take away a whole bunch of other "rights" you thought you had.
We don't cut out people's tongues anymore, but that is a pretty effective way to remove someone's "right" of speech.
There is no such thing as an inalienable right (hence the scare quotes). -- JimFive
You may be right, as I remember the eye doc telling me a few years back that I had better than 20/20 out of the left (IIRC he said either 20/30 or 20/40) and normal 20/20 out of the right.
20/30 or 20/40 are worse than 20/20, not better./pedant -- JimFive
Really? I don't see anything in there that solves the problem. Ok, there's an [Accessed On] tag, but that still doesn't stop the page from being irrecoverably modified on Date+1. So, if I wanted to fake references I would just need to look at the date the page was updated and pick some date prior to that to claim to have looked at it.
I didn't say there was no possible way to format a web citation, I said there was no good way to cite the web.
Citing arbitrary web pages is just asking for problems. Web versions of print publications are probably the safest to cite, followed by something like arxiv.org that has an interest in being citable then something with a change history like wikipedia, and finally, the rest of the web. -- JimFive
Allow me to rephrase. It isn't ludicrous to say that there is no good way to cite web pages. It is ludicrous to not try and then use the lack of a good method as an excuse. -- JimFive
I don't think it's ludicrous. How are you supposed to cite a Wikipedia article (or really, any web article) in such a way that when someone goes to research your sources the article hasn't been altered to remove the bit you cited? With Wikipedia you at least have the history of changes to look at, but it's still a problem.
-- JimFive
So putting a drag on one part of the athmosphere will have zero effects on other parts of it ? Wind flows. Putting a drag in one location will cause eddy currents elsewhere (where that wind would normally have ended up), impeding air movement higher up.
Turbulence sinks. You probably want a reference to this so I think it's in the FAR/AIM, or possibly in the Private Pilot's Training Manual. But it shouldn't be that hard to verify that slow moving air has a higher density than fast moving air (Bernoulli effect) and therefore is heavier and will sink.
I guess you don't believe in thermodynamics. After all taking energy away from a system in no way affects all the other things that system normally does with that energy, right ?
This isn't a closed system, there is energy being constantly added to the system from the Sun and the spinning of the Earth (cf. Coriolus Effect).
It would be interesting to know the size of the area affected by a wind turbine, my guess is that it would extend 2-3x the height of the turbine and probably vaguely cone shaped angled toward the ground with the point somewhere in front of the turbine. This WAG is based on my recollection that a stand of trees disrupts the wind for about 2x it's height. It would be fairly easy to test this by putting wind gauges in a pattern before and after a turbine and finding the distance before the wind is back to normal.
Now, I agree that there may be unknown effects of using that many wind turbines, but those effects are just that, unknown. -- JimFive
What's being proposed is actually "destroying" 2.5% of all global wind (or 20% if oil is to be replaced too).
No, when wind hits the windmill it doesn't stop, it slows down. So we're talking about reducing by some small amount the wind energy in 20% of the wind in a narrow band near the surface of the planet. How high do you think windmills are?
Birds will not be able to fly as high, or as fast.
What?!?!? We're not destroying the air we're reducing the wind. Altitude is limited by air density not wind speed. If a migratory bird is flying high enough to take advantage of wind speeds they are probably above the height of the windmills.
This isn't to say that there wouldn't be unforeseen effects, I suspect there would be. But, I think the extremism in your rhetoric overshadows that point with absurdity. -- JimFive
Slashdot Mirror
This sentiment has been expressed several times, but I'm picking on this one.
If a child gets abducted it isn't the parents' fault. You don't blame the rape victim. Don't blame the parents (barring etreme negligence). Allowing yourself to take your eyes off of your child is NOT bad parenting. It is, in fact, good parenting to give your child some freedom. Sometimes that backfires, and sometimes that results in a horrific tragedy, but that tragedy is not the parents' fault.
All accidents are preventable in hindsight, the reality is that none of them were prevented.
--
JimFive
I suspect that, with modern printing and the standardization of spelling that occurred with the development of the dictionary, language will change less quickly than in the past. While slang and neologisms will still occur, writing will remain much less changed. The examples of Beowulf vs. Chaucer (~500 years?) vs. Shakespeare vs. modern writers (~400 years) seems to bear this out. Even grammatical constructs seem to have settled down sometime around 1700 (compare John Bunyan and Jonathon Swift)
--
JimFive
No, evolution only implies progressive change. Progressive as in building on previous changes, not progressive as in getting better.
Additionally, it's not like the money is going to go directly from the customer to the charity. The money is going to sit in Google's bank account(s) for some amount of time (30 days to a year) before it gets donated. So Google is still going to have an income on the deal. Also, the money still counts as revenue on the balance sheet making Google look better to investors and keeping the stock price up. And, unless there is somehow a contract provision requiring the donation, they can just drop the donation aspect if cash ever becomes an issue.
--
JimFive
And my point is that the only reason that is all a business can legally do is because of goverment interference in economic decisions. In the absence of government regulations you (could, and have in the past) end up with company towns that limit one's ability to leave.
--
JimFive
Apparently I was too subtle. Your statement: "All a company can do is offer you a product. They cannot force you to buy it." is historically untrue. Companies have set up systems that coerced people into being customers and prevented them from leaving. If you don't think companies would attempt to create a similar system in the absence of regulation then you are much less cynical than I.
For a modern example of people being tied to jobs they dislike and being forced to give money to companies they loathe I refer you to the current system of employer paid health insurance.
--
JimFive
Read up on the history of company towns.
--
JimFive
When I think of public transportation I am thinking of intracity/regional transport, not point to point bus/train service. That is, the ability to get to and from work, shopping, and recreation on a daily basis. Once a week, or even once a day, bus service doesn't meet this need. Taking the train from Detroit to Ann Arbor for the day is doable, but it doesn't get you to where you need to be in Ann Arbor.
The problem with public transit in small cities is that it either has too many busses for the ridership or not enough busses to maintain a reasonable schedule.
I have thought recently that an on-demand style van service with automatic dispatching to pre-defined pick up points might be able to resolve the dilemma, but only if it were able to combine enough riders so that it wasn't just a taxi service.
--
JimFive
No. We lack public transportation because the population isn't dense enough to make it feasable.
--
JimFive
I would never accept blanket liability for data breaches. As the network admin I can only control so much of what the users do. I would make that contract much more detailed about responsibilities regarding patching and external facing security, but there's not a lot that I can do about the internal threat.
--
JimFive
I just wanted to mention that Salaried is not the same as Exempt.
Positions are exempt from overtime and assorted other parts of labor law based on the requirements of the position, not based on how they are paid. Paying your janitors on salary does not make them exempt and paying your managers hourly doesn't make them non-exempt.
Roughly speaking, if your position is >50% managing (as opposed to working), or your position is Commissioned Sales, or your position is Professional (requiring either licensing, certification, or a technical degree) then you are exempt and your employer is not required by law to pay you Time and a half for more than 40 hours in a week. Your employer may still pay you extra by contract, but it isn't required.
There are also benefits to being Exempt. For example, if your salary period is weekly, then if you work at any time during that week then you get paid for the whole week. Most companies have a salary period of a day or even half-day to counter that. But that also means that if you work an extra day then you might be entitled to get paid for that day as it is an extra salary period (check with your lawyer).
--
JimFive
Off the top of my head, assuming you mean parking garages. When you plug it in and turn on the current the outlet will lock on to your plug. It won't let go until you have inserted enough money to pay for the juice.
--
JimFive
You clearly don't have young children.
--
JimFive
See, the one that bugs me is "an historic" It's "a historic" The rule is vowel sound, not vowel or h.
--
JimFive
The law is not a logical syllogism.
--
JimFive
Sure they can. They can come in and take your radio away. They can forbid you from owning a stereo capable of producing more than X decibels. Does this mean that you don't have the "right" to listen to a radio at the volume you prefer. Yes. Yes it does. You don't have that right. And if you persist they will lock you in a cage and take away a whole bunch of other "rights" you thought you had.
We don't cut out people's tongues anymore, but that is a pretty effective way to remove someone's "right" of speech.
There is no such thing as an inalienable right (hence the scare quotes).
--
JimFive
They're called Telephones.
--
JimFive
20/30 or 20/40 are worse than 20/20, not better. /pedant
--
JimFive
Really? I don't see anything in there that solves the problem. Ok, there's an [Accessed On] tag, but that still doesn't stop the page from being irrecoverably modified on Date+1. So, if I wanted to fake references I would just need to look at the date the page was updated and pick some date prior to that to claim to have looked at it.
I didn't say there was no possible way to format a web citation, I said there was no good way to cite the web.
Citing arbitrary web pages is just asking for problems. Web versions of print publications are probably the safest to cite, followed by something like arxiv.org that has an interest in being citable then something with a change history like wikipedia, and finally, the rest of the web.
--
JimFive
Allow me to rephrase. It isn't ludicrous to say that there is no good way to cite web pages. It is ludicrous to not try and then use the lack of a good method as an excuse.
--
JimFive
I don't think it's ludicrous. How are you supposed to cite a Wikipedia article (or really, any web article) in such a way that when someone goes to research your sources the article hasn't been altered to remove the bit you cited? With Wikipedia you at least have the history of changes to look at, but it's still a problem.
--
JimFive
Turbulence sinks. You probably want a reference to this so I think it's in the FAR/AIM, or possibly in the Private Pilot's Training Manual. But it shouldn't be that hard to verify that slow moving air has a higher density than fast moving air (Bernoulli effect) and therefore is heavier and will sink.
This isn't a closed system, there is energy being constantly added to the system from the Sun and the spinning of the Earth (cf. Coriolus Effect).
It would be interesting to know the size of the area affected by a wind turbine, my guess is that it would extend 2-3x the height of the turbine and probably vaguely cone shaped angled toward the ground with the point somewhere in front of the turbine. This WAG is based on my recollection that a stand of trees disrupts the wind for about 2x it's height. It would be fairly easy to test this by putting wind gauges in a pattern before and after a turbine and finding the distance before the wind is back to normal.
Now, I agree that there may be unknown effects of using that many wind turbines, but those effects are just that, unknown.
--
JimFive
What's a closed system?
--
JimFive
Mount Rozinante, summon Sancho, and charge.
--
JimFive
Sorry, I've been reading Don Quixote.
Yes, they do.
No, when wind hits the windmill it doesn't stop, it slows down. So we're talking about reducing by some small amount the wind energy in 20% of the wind in a narrow band near the surface of the planet. How high do you think windmills are?
What?!?!? We're not destroying the air we're reducing the wind. Altitude is limited by air density not wind speed. If a migratory bird is flying high enough to take advantage of wind speeds they are probably above the height of the windmills.
This isn't to say that there wouldn't be unforeseen effects, I suspect there would be. But, I think the extremism in your rhetoric overshadows that point with absurdity.
--
JimFive