SO you are saying that you took CS when you should have taken Software Engineering?
Most universities don't offer a Software Engineering degree. They funnel you into a CS or CIS/MIS degree. CS, as has been pointed out, is a poor degree for someone who wants to be a software developer. CIS/MIS programs are better, they throw business courses into the mix in place of the higher math. But many of them still have a problem that they are being taught by morons. I had a C programming course at a state university in the mid 90s where the PHD professor taught C as it related to Cobol. And every main started with 'while 1=1'. Advanced Cobol in this program was the 'washout' course. A SENIOR level course. A hell of a time to tell a student that they have wasted the last two years on a program they can't complete. Oh, and that Advanced Cobol class started with JCL disk sort to physical locations on the disk. The class was so tough because you had to guess at all the assignment requirements because the instructor felt 'that's the way user requirements are in the real world'. In actuality, the way you passed his course was to talk to someone who already took it and get the 'real' requirements for each programming assignment. Maybe he was just promoting teamwork..... A decade later at another state university the advanced database class consisted of configuring a web portal in Oracle. The systems design course was building a simple web site that was never completed. My team spent the semester building 8-10 tables in MySQL and importing a couple dozen records. (We got A's, btw)
I have evaluated a dozen degree programs in my local area, and I'm not sure I'd trust any of them for a career developing software in the real world, which is predominately business software. But you need that 4 year degree to get past the HR drones.
I was doing programming projects for years before I ever took any sort of computer class. If a potential programmer can't show any work they've done outside of the classroom, they're almost certainly not ready to code for a living.
I've been developing software for a living for over 15 years. And yet I couldn't provide any significant amount of my code to a prospective employer to evaluate. I have moved to non-IT related hobbies, coding is my job and my employer owns the source. And as far as that goes, how do you know the code provided isn't pilfered from an obscure OS project?
I don't want to know if they can churn out code, I want to know if they can develop a solution to a business problem. I'd rather hand a prospective employee a list of requirements and ask them to draw up a quick and dirty flow chart and DFD. From there, if they can produce an application in ANY language, they will likely have enough skill to learn our tool chain.
I'm a practicing cardiologist and see my fair share of comments on topics like this, and my responses range from sadness to amusement. ...
Assuming that the results of the JUPITER trial are accurate, and by giving Crestor to 100 people with normal LDL but high CRP, I could eliminate 1 "outcome" (stroke, heart attack, or death - a composite outcome often used in trials like this), the question isn't "am I harming 99 to save 1" - the question is "am I helping this population overall." The harm was minimal, the benefit was impressive. The real harm comes in the form of monetary cost (as well as the rare risk of "adverse events," including muscle injury or liver injury).
The real harm comes in the unknowns of introducing new drugs into a patients system when the outcomes are minimal. To say it's advantageous to one patient and had no consequences to the other 99 is naive. As a cardiologist, what is your opinion of doctors prescribing Avandia to diabetics who experience huge weight gains on Actos? Are Avandia's heart risks higher or lower than the risks of diabetic obesity? I know people who have taken Avandia, Vioxx, or Propulsid. All three were prescribed for specific problems (blood sugar, arthritis, acid reflux), and quite likely were presented as being 'minimally harmful'. Yet all three have been later linked to heart problems and withdrawn in a number of countries.
It's problematic when drug manufacturers run non-comprehensive drug trials and then launch media campaigns focused on doctors and patients. Doctors need to be informed, and not by a drug company's rep. When your patients ask for specific medications that you don't think they need, you should require them to be informed as well before caving to their "I want xxx because I saw a commercial on TV". Over prescription is a big problem; there are side effects that may not show up for years, unnecessary prescriptions are raising insurance costs, flushed and excreted drugs are showing up in our water and food supplies. Look at 'reasonably safe' antibiotics, and the result of over prescription in patients and animals, because the harm was minimal.
I'm sure you can find plenty of examples in diagnostic medicine as well.
With that perspective, it makes sense that they'd try hard to foster employee loyalty, as they already try to treat employees well.
I don't see how expecting everyone to eat lunch together fosters any kind of loyalty. Even if it isn't 'required', the expectation puts pressure on employees to donate time to the company.
I look at it this way; the company doesn't pay for my lunch or my lunch time. I work 40 hours a week, plus some overtime as an exempt (no OT pay) employee. I am on call for production issues when I am not in the office (24x7). Aside from lunch, I work straight through my day with my only breaks being meetings and an occasional trip to the bathroom or water fountain. Lunch is my chance to get away from the stresses of my job and 'center' myself for the rest of the day. I use that time to eat lunch and read. It is the only time of my day that isn't allocated to some task related to responsibilities. And now an employer wants to co-op that time for team building? Occasional team lunches are fine, but anything more and the only thing you'll foster is resentment.
My impression of Joel is that he is a legend in his own mind.
SS isn't a ponzi scheme, as you say. But politicians aren't "regularly stealing money from the program". They regularly borrow from the program, and pay about +50% interest every 30 years. Which is the same investment banks make in housing, except the SS investment in the rest of the Federal government is far more safe. The only actual threat of killing Social Security is rightwing politicians trying to actually steal ("privatize") it.
In the past the federal government was a safe borrower. With the current deficits, will it continue to be in the future? There are a number of hazards to SS. As generations keep getting smaller than their previous generation, there are fewer taxpayers to fund the system. This is a real danger if there isn't a large number of surplus dollars in the system. The Federal government is siphoning off that surplus in loans to offset deficit spending, the SS system's stability is now linked to the health of the national economy. Another factor is jobs. Once upon a time you could support a family on a single retail income. Now retail jobs are the domain of students and working poor. Manufacturing jobs have moved off shore. Many tech computer jobs have moved off shore. And we are moving to a service economy, that IMO is parasitic. The norm is now two working adults to support a family. While a lot of that can be blamed on how we have redefined essentials; Large LCD HD TVs, SUVs, multi-car families, McMansions in the suburbs, and electronic gadgets, even without that it would be difficult to support a family on a single income today. Certainly not at the standard of 60 years ago when single incomes were the norm. And don't forget that longer lifespans are a burden to the system. That may change, thanks to our unhealthy lifestyle and rampant obesity. But that simply transfers the cost to the healthcare system and other federal spending, and then indirectly affects SS by more deficit spending. Vicious cycle.
Privatizing has it's problems. We don't even have the willpower to demand that everyone carry health insurance to balance our health care system, how would we handle people who don't save for retirement or lose their money in risky adventures? So the biggest argument against privatizing is; if someone doesn't save enough to support them-self, are you willing to support them or have the fortitude to let them starve? I'd like to think there are still enough rational voters to make privatizing SS a small threat.
Again, IMO, the biggest threat to SS is the biggest threat to our economy, energy costs. Every time our economy starts to rebound, fuel prices rise and slow it back down. Gas at the pumps, dairy products, and fresh foods are all considerably higher than they were before the recession. And then you factor in all the military costs spent trying to maintain stability in energy producing regions of the world. SS needs both future generations having good paying jobs and a Federal government capable of paying it's debts. Both are in doubt today due to the amount of debt being added by the Federal gov't. That drain on resources means there are three choices; cheaper energy, fewer services, or more taxes. And until that is addressed, I don't think we can rely on SS being available when we retire.
Virgin Mobile and Boost are both on Sprint's network. They should be able to reprogram your Verizon phone. I'm pretty sure Cricket Wireless is also CDMA. The day my contract expires (if I don't choose to pay the ETF just to get away from Verizon Wireless early), I'll be taking my Droid to one of them.
Another thought: I don't know if these plant have boric acid for emergencies. For water-cooled reactors (e.g. PWR) it is a requirement to have a load of boric acid that can be dumped into the primary coolant to ensure permanent shutdown in the case of an emergency. Boric acid dissolves in the water and the boron absorbs all the neutrons. shutting down the nuclear reactions. It's a permanent shutdown though:-)
They have already announced that they are pumping sea water and boric acid into reactor #1. I think they are still trying to save #2 and #3, but they obviously have the ability to permanently kill them too if necessary.
This disaster is serious, but there will be no Chernobyl or Three Mile Island level event, despite an EXTREME earthquake (8.9) and a tsunami.
With the explosion, I think they have already exceeded TMI. But in the end, the TMI event turned out to be pretty much inconsequential as far as ecological disasters are concerned. BP far exceeded TMI last summer with their little oil spill. Regardless of what happens in Japan, I don't think, due to reactor design, that we'll see an event as bad as Chernobyl even if they loose all three reactors at Fukushima 1.
The truth is that the cost of energy is an enormous part of the cost of virtually all goods and services, and further that the average person is tied rather directly into the cost of energy through their visits to the fuel pump and their receipt of a light bill.
You're right, the cost of energy is part of virtually all goods. But as a consumer I don't have to give a crap what is part of what I am buying. I don't care how much energy was used to create the aluminum in the cans of the products I buy, although making aluminum is an extremely energy intensive process. I'm not buying the energy or the can, I'm buying what is inside it. I mentioned milk, or dairy products, specifically to make this point. But you were too focused on the price of gasoline to notice. The largest component of dairy products is energy. Time sensitive goods. Fuel to transport, fuel to pasteurize, energy to keep it cold until it is used. Again, when I go to the store I'm not calculating the energy component of milk, I'm buying milk.
As a consumer I managed to successfully not care, for decades, what the price of a barrel of oil is. And the point you fail to grasp is I don't care what the cost of natural gas is, I care what it costs to heat my house. It's not the same thing.
His point is that people care about things other than cost of energy. Most wouldn't care if fuel cost $40 a gallon if it took 1 gallon to commute, compared to $4 fuel that required 10 gallons for the same commute. Or to put it another way, you have the choice of a $20k car that gets 30mpg vs a $60k car that gets 90mpg. (all other factors being equal) The concern is how much they have to pay to get to work everyday.
Along the same line; I don't buy natural gas based on price, I buy based on what it takes to keep my house warm.
I care that the price of milk went up 25 cents a gallon this week, I don't care whether it's because diesel has gone up 30 cents a gallon in the last month or because dairy farmers are paying more for grain.
In addition, trucks cause quicker roadway deterioration.
On the other side of the coin, passenger traffic tends to be clustered on limited routes during short periods of the day. So passenger traffic causes cities to build over capacity to support traffic flow for 4-5 hours of the day. For example, a local loop interstate has 4-6 lanes (each direction) to handle rush hour in the morning and evenings. Even so, it is quite common for a 6 mile stretch to be bumper to bumper for close to 2 hours in the evening. Outside of the morning and evening commutes, 2 lanes in each direction would be sufficient. That carries over to ramps and interchanges as well. Most of the interchanges around town are being rebuilt to increase rush hour capacity, not because of wear.
No they don't. People watch ABC, NBC, CBS, BBC, MSNBC, CNN, and Fox for news. I know many people who are well versed on current events that have no idea about Wikileaks or who Julian Assange is. They've heard about the controversy, but couldn't tell you who the players are. My (retired) mother can tell you daily where the stock market closed, what the price of crude oil is, what is being reported about the economy, and what congress has done to affect the stock market. We regularly discuss things like TARP and ARRA, the housing market (for instance, what will the dissolution of Fanny and Freddy do to house prices), and whether we're going to see a spike in gas prices because crude prices are up. Last night we were discussing North American oil reserves because she read an article that stated the US had more oil reserves than Saudi Arabia. But if I mention a story about Wikileaks, I have to explain who everyone is and what is happening. She'll never look at Wikileaks websites, although she'll probably see the story when it hits cable news.
And as far as that goes, I've never been to Wikileaks. I get my news through aggregators like Slashdot and Google News. Wikileaks can post documents all day long, but if none of the wire services write an article about it, the majority of the world will never know.
Getting broadband at their homes won't make them a resource for on-shoring tech support jobs. It's already being done, and how it is accomplished is by setting up a call center in a small town. So the only network build-out needed is from the phone company CO to their office. It's not like some call center is going to have these people working from their homes, they couldn't manage hourly staff without having them corralled in a cube farm.
As far as them having IT training, they don't care if a level 1 script reader can do anything more than read the script, recite it to the customer and breathe.
OTOH, when all these hicks finally get broadband, maybe local farmers will have better access to urbanites and more food will be purchased locally. That would give the city dwellers better quality food, cut out some corporate middlemen, and reduce unnecessary fuel costs transporting food.
Oh and the healthcare requirement is illegal. The Union government can not mandate what products you must buy - it was never given that power by the Member states.
That's why we need to expand Medicare and go with a single payer system. Libertarian heads are exploding all over Slashdot.:-)
Really off topic, but the opposition to the healthcare mandate from the "I don't want to pay for someone else's....." group baffles me. The mandate has no effect if you are already being responsible and have your own insurance. It only effects the freeloaders that assume they won't ever get sick and end up getting free (to them) healthcare in the emergency room.
Satisfied customers who think you're better than your competition would be a good start.
Cell phone company (and ISP) executives don't talk about customer satisfaction (they leave that to marketing), they talk about churn. Churn rate only considers customer satisfaction as an abstract factor. They expect customers to move from provider to provider. Rather than worrying about keeping their own customers happy, they talk about ways they can poach their competition's customers. They'll call for more 'can you hear me now' commercials, say they have the fastest network, and offer the new, hot wireless device. Every year there are millions of new customers, and all those disgruntled customers were probably over consuming support time anyway. Or to put it more bluntly, all those new towers and network upgrades show up on the balance sheet in black and white. Lost customers are amorphous and churn is seen as a fact of life.
Tethering on Verizon is a different and additional plan,
Tethering plans are a money grab by cell service providers. They want to isolate a specific type of user and charge them extra, regardless of whether they actually add any load to the network. We saw this a couple decades ago when the phone company wanted to bill every modem and fax line at business rates. If it was simply about users tethering and overloading their network, they would implement usage based billing and QOS. I don't have a problem paying for the resources I use, I even pay for considerably more minutes on my cell so that I don't have to worry about overages. (avg usage 150 mins on a 450 min plan) But I'm not going to pay an extra $15-30 a month simply because I want to view a web page on my laptop rather than my cell phone.
Another big push is to sell you a data service contract for every device you want to use with mobile broadband. 3g Cell phones, netbooks, tablets, book readers. Even though most users would be happy with wifi devices and a MiFi style broadband access point.
My comment about babies and invalids was aimed very specifically at the implication that a person's value as a human is tied to their use to society.
No, what you have done is focused on a simple sentence that you either couldn't comprehend, or intentionally twisted, so that you start a debate of your own choosing.
I said:
Their last act may be the only positive contribution to society, amusement.
Now, we are discussing a suicide bomber that died by their own hand. Regardless of what you may think of value of their life, when they died without taking their victims with them, it was an extraordinarily good thing for society. It's not just that we should shed no tears for this person, we should celebrate their passing. And the fact that they were undone by a spam text is certainly a humorous irony.
If you want to mourn this persons passing and look for the good in their life that's fine. You sit there and think happy thoughts about someone whose intent was to take the life of as many innocent victims as possible. But I could read stories of suicide bombers accidentally blowing themselves up in their workshops daily and be quite happy about it. The world will be a better place without them.
Recently a local young man was drunk and driving his car at 150 mph and rear-ended another car on the interstate and killed one of the passengers in that car. Had he killed himself instead, I would not have shed a tear. He didn't care what effect his actions would have on others, why should I care about him?
Should the members of Westboro Baptist church cause their own demise, it would be a positive result for society. Religion has been responsible for massacres throughout history. If you need religion to get you through the day, fine, but when you place your beliefs over other people's lives, you have no place in civilized society.
And absolutely, if I should happen to cause my own death, I do not expect strangers to mourn my death.
And really, before you get all self righteous and claim that I want to commit genocide and kill babies, elderly, and invalids, you really ought to understand the term 'hoisted by their own petard'. It has a very specific meaning.
For all those claiming that it is funny because of the atrocities he tried to commit, do you also chuckle at the "darwin awards"?
I find it sad that I am more compassionate than our (US) "don't spend MY money" national political party. And yes, I have NO sympathy for people who die while trying to commit acts of terrorism or from extreme stupidity. I also have no sympathy for people who die due to their own greed. And I would shed no tears for a religious fundamentalist, of any flavor, who causes their own demise. These people put their own desires over society's and I see no reason to respect them when they are 'hoisted by their own petard'. Their last act may be the only positive contribution to society, amusement.
I'm sure the only place records of text messages are kept are on the recipient's phone.
Doubtful, many government agencies receive the full contents of any text message sent or received by a phone with service paid for with public money. And according to CBS News, it depends on your carrier.
But even if that was the case, billing info would have been collected with the time/date and source of any text messages.
These people grew up here and are generally fully Americanized, have family here, friends, work, etc, but don't have citizenship. I know one family who came to the US legally on a work Visa with their young children, but it eventually expired. The family they had everything up here (a house, a job, friends, etc) and nothing to go back to.
I was just reading a local story like that. A man was brought to the US by his parents at age six, and has lived here for 20 years. He is married, has three kids, a steady job and owns his home. And is now scheduled to be deported to a country he has never known. He's not a legal citizen, but seems to be a better example than some prominent Americans. I say we keep him and his family and deport the entire Westboro clan.
Browser vendors were already adding draft features into their product before the specification was finalized.
Browsers adding draft features isn't a problem. Nobody cares that a browser supports a feature that nobody uses. Developers adding draft features to web sites is the problem.
They ran the cable straight across the vacant lot in the grass and into one of our ventilation conduits to get under the house. Then, one day the cable stopped working. I could see that they were starting to develop the lot next door and a tractor had run across the cable laying on the ground. I called the provider, they came out and strung another cable across the lot, on the ground.
Interesting story, I have been battling something similar with Comcast. My neighbor had trouble with his cable and they installed a new drop, running it across my yard. I asked him to call and have them hang it properly because it was a hazard, but nothing happened. For months I called and mowed around it, and it is still laying on the ground. I don't have any leverage because I'm not a Comcast customer.
Their outsourced tech support tried to tell me it was not their problem because the local government was responsible for installing the drops. (?) Supervisors told me several times that the problem was it needed to be scheduled to be buried. I explained that it's an AERIAL drop, and if they think I'm mad now, just try to trench across my property. Which lead to promises to get it properly hung the following week. And the next. Etc.
In the spring it will have been a year. The old drop still runs from the pole to the house, 20' above the ground. The new drop still lies on the ground, taunting the lawnmower.
Slashdot Mirror
SO you are saying that you took CS when you should have taken Software Engineering?
Most universities don't offer a Software Engineering degree. They funnel you into a CS or CIS/MIS degree. CS, as has been pointed out, is a poor degree for someone who wants to be a software developer. CIS/MIS programs are better, they throw business courses into the mix in place of the higher math. But many of them still have a problem that they are being taught by morons. I had a C programming course at a state university in the mid 90s where the PHD professor taught C as it related to Cobol. And every main started with 'while 1=1'. Advanced Cobol in this program was the 'washout' course. A SENIOR level course. A hell of a time to tell a student that they have wasted the last two years on a program they can't complete. Oh, and that Advanced Cobol class started with JCL disk sort to physical locations on the disk. The class was so tough because you had to guess at all the assignment requirements because the instructor felt 'that's the way user requirements are in the real world'. In actuality, the way you passed his course was to talk to someone who already took it and get the 'real' requirements for each programming assignment. Maybe he was just promoting teamwork..... A decade later at another state university the advanced database class consisted of configuring a web portal in Oracle. The systems design course was building a simple web site that was never completed. My team spent the semester building 8-10 tables in MySQL and importing a couple dozen records. (We got A's, btw)
I have evaluated a dozen degree programs in my local area, and I'm not sure I'd trust any of them for a career developing software in the real world, which is predominately business software. But you need that 4 year degree to get past the HR drones.
I was doing programming projects for years before I ever took any sort of computer class. If a potential programmer can't show any work they've done outside of the classroom, they're almost certainly not ready to code for a living.
I've been developing software for a living for over 15 years. And yet I couldn't provide any significant amount of my code to a prospective employer to evaluate. I have moved to non-IT related hobbies, coding is my job and my employer owns the source. And as far as that goes, how do you know the code provided isn't pilfered from an obscure OS project?
I don't want to know if they can churn out code, I want to know if they can develop a solution to a business problem. I'd rather hand a prospective employee a list of requirements and ask them to draw up a quick and dirty flow chart and DFD. From there, if they can produce an application in ANY language, they will likely have enough skill to learn our tool chain.
I'm a practicing cardiologist and see my fair share of comments on topics like this, and my responses range from sadness to amusement.
...
Assuming that the results of the JUPITER trial are accurate, and by giving Crestor to 100 people with normal LDL but high CRP, I could eliminate 1 "outcome" (stroke, heart attack, or death - a composite outcome often used in trials like this), the question isn't "am I harming 99 to save 1" - the question is "am I helping this population overall." The harm was minimal, the benefit was impressive. The real harm comes in the form of monetary cost (as well as the rare risk of "adverse events," including muscle injury or liver injury).
The real harm comes in the unknowns of introducing new drugs into a patients system when the outcomes are minimal. To say it's advantageous to one patient and had no consequences to the other 99 is naive. As a cardiologist, what is your opinion of doctors prescribing Avandia to diabetics who experience huge weight gains on Actos? Are Avandia's heart risks higher or lower than the risks of diabetic obesity? I know people who have taken Avandia, Vioxx, or Propulsid. All three were prescribed for specific problems (blood sugar, arthritis, acid reflux), and quite likely were presented as being 'minimally harmful'. Yet all three have been later linked to heart problems and withdrawn in a number of countries.
It's problematic when drug manufacturers run non-comprehensive drug trials and then launch media campaigns focused on doctors and patients. Doctors need to be informed, and not by a drug company's rep. When your patients ask for specific medications that you don't think they need, you should require them to be informed as well before caving to their "I want xxx because I saw a commercial on TV". Over prescription is a big problem; there are side effects that may not show up for years, unnecessary prescriptions are raising insurance costs, flushed and excreted drugs are showing up in our water and food supplies. Look at 'reasonably safe' antibiotics, and the result of over prescription in patients and animals, because the harm was minimal.
I'm sure you can find plenty of examples in diagnostic medicine as well.
With that perspective, it makes sense that they'd try hard to foster employee loyalty, as they already try to treat employees well.
I don't see how expecting everyone to eat lunch together fosters any kind of loyalty. Even if it isn't 'required', the expectation puts pressure on employees to donate time to the company.
I look at it this way; the company doesn't pay for my lunch or my lunch time. I work 40 hours a week, plus some overtime as an exempt (no OT pay) employee. I am on call for production issues when I am not in the office (24x7). Aside from lunch, I work straight through my day with my only breaks being meetings and an occasional trip to the bathroom or water fountain. Lunch is my chance to get away from the stresses of my job and 'center' myself for the rest of the day. I use that time to eat lunch and read. It is the only time of my day that isn't allocated to some task related to responsibilities. And now an employer wants to co-op that time for team building? Occasional team lunches are fine, but anything more and the only thing you'll foster is resentment.
My impression of Joel is that he is a legend in his own mind.
SS isn't a ponzi scheme, as you say. But politicians aren't "regularly stealing money from the program". They regularly borrow from the program, and pay about +50% interest every 30 years. Which is the same investment banks make in housing, except the SS investment in the rest of the Federal government is far more safe. The only actual threat of killing Social Security is rightwing politicians trying to actually steal ("privatize") it.
In the past the federal government was a safe borrower. With the current deficits, will it continue to be in the future? There are a number of hazards to SS. As generations keep getting smaller than their previous generation, there are fewer taxpayers to fund the system. This is a real danger if there isn't a large number of surplus dollars in the system. The Federal government is siphoning off that surplus in loans to offset deficit spending, the SS system's stability is now linked to the health of the national economy. Another factor is jobs. Once upon a time you could support a family on a single retail income. Now retail jobs are the domain of students and working poor. Manufacturing jobs have moved off shore. Many tech computer jobs have moved off shore. And we are moving to a service economy, that IMO is parasitic. The norm is now two working adults to support a family. While a lot of that can be blamed on how we have redefined essentials; Large LCD HD TVs, SUVs, multi-car families, McMansions in the suburbs, and electronic gadgets, even without that it would be difficult to support a family on a single income today. Certainly not at the standard of 60 years ago when single incomes were the norm. And don't forget that longer lifespans are a burden to the system. That may change, thanks to our unhealthy lifestyle and rampant obesity. But that simply transfers the cost to the healthcare system and other federal spending, and then indirectly affects SS by more deficit spending. Vicious cycle.
Privatizing has it's problems. We don't even have the willpower to demand that everyone carry health insurance to balance our health care system, how would we handle people who don't save for retirement or lose their money in risky adventures? So the biggest argument against privatizing is; if someone doesn't save enough to support them-self, are you willing to support them or have the fortitude to let them starve? I'd like to think there are still enough rational voters to make privatizing SS a small threat.
Again, IMO, the biggest threat to SS is the biggest threat to our economy, energy costs. Every time our economy starts to rebound, fuel prices rise and slow it back down. Gas at the pumps, dairy products, and fresh foods are all considerably higher than they were before the recession. And then you factor in all the military costs spent trying to maintain stability in energy producing regions of the world. SS needs both future generations having good paying jobs and a Federal government capable of paying it's debts. Both are in doubt today due to the amount of debt being added by the Federal gov't. That drain on resources means there are three choices; cheaper energy, fewer services, or more taxes. And until that is addressed, I don't think we can rely on SS being available when we retire.
Virgin Mobile and Boost are both on Sprint's network. They should be able to reprogram your Verizon phone. I'm pretty sure Cricket Wireless is also CDMA. The day my contract expires (if I don't choose to pay the ETF just to get away from Verizon Wireless early), I'll be taking my Droid to one of them.
Another thought: I don't know if these plant have boric acid for emergencies. For water-cooled reactors (e.g. PWR) it is a requirement to have a load of boric acid that can be dumped into the primary coolant to ensure permanent shutdown in the case of an emergency. Boric acid dissolves in the water and the boron absorbs all the neutrons. shutting down the nuclear reactions. It's a permanent shutdown though :-)
They have already announced that they are pumping sea water and boric acid into reactor #1. I think they are still trying to save #2 and #3, but they obviously have the ability to permanently kill them too if necessary.
http://gulfnews.com/news/world/other-world/japan-tries-sea-water-boric-acid-to-cool-down-nuclear-reactors-1.775701
This disaster is serious, but there will be no Chernobyl or Three Mile Island level event, despite an EXTREME earthquake (8.9) and a tsunami.
With the explosion, I think they have already exceeded TMI. But in the end, the TMI event turned out to be pretty much inconsequential as far as ecological disasters are concerned. BP far exceeded TMI last summer with their little oil spill. Regardless of what happens in Japan, I don't think, due to reactor design, that we'll see an event as bad as Chernobyl even if they loose all three reactors at Fukushima 1.
The truth is that the cost of energy is an enormous part of the cost of virtually all goods and services, and further that the average person is tied rather directly into the cost of energy through their visits to the fuel pump and their receipt of a light bill.
You're right, the cost of energy is part of virtually all goods. But as a consumer I don't have to give a crap what is part of what I am buying. I don't care how much energy was used to create the aluminum in the cans of the products I buy, although making aluminum is an extremely energy intensive process. I'm not buying the energy or the can, I'm buying what is inside it. I mentioned milk, or dairy products, specifically to make this point. But you were too focused on the price of gasoline to notice. The largest component of dairy products is energy. Time sensitive goods. Fuel to transport, fuel to pasteurize, energy to keep it cold until it is used. Again, when I go to the store I'm not calculating the energy component of milk, I'm buying milk.
As a consumer I managed to successfully not care, for decades, what the price of a barrel of oil is. And the point you fail to grasp is I don't care what the cost of natural gas is, I care what it costs to heat my house. It's not the same thing.
His point is that people care about things other than cost of energy. Most wouldn't care if fuel cost $40 a gallon if it took 1 gallon to commute, compared to $4 fuel that required 10 gallons for the same commute. Or to put it another way, you have the choice of a $20k car that gets 30mpg vs a $60k car that gets 90mpg. (all other factors being equal) The concern is how much they have to pay to get to work everyday.
Along the same line; I don't buy natural gas based on price, I buy based on what it takes to keep my house warm.
I care that the price of milk went up 25 cents a gallon this week, I don't care whether it's because diesel has gone up 30 cents a gallon in the last month or because dairy farmers are paying more for grain.
In addition, trucks cause quicker roadway deterioration.
On the other side of the coin, passenger traffic tends to be clustered on limited routes during short periods of the day. So passenger traffic causes cities to build over capacity to support traffic flow for 4-5 hours of the day. For example, a local loop interstate has 4-6 lanes (each direction) to handle rush hour in the morning and evenings. Even so, it is quite common for a 6 mile stretch to be bumper to bumper for close to 2 hours in the evening. Outside of the morning and evening commutes, 2 lanes in each direction would be sufficient. That carries over to ramps and interchanges as well. Most of the interchanges around town are being rebuilt to increase rush hour capacity, not because of wear.
Pleople know wikileaks, people watch it,
No they don't. People watch ABC, NBC, CBS, BBC, MSNBC, CNN, and Fox for news. I know many people who are well versed on current events that have no idea about Wikileaks or who Julian Assange is. They've heard about the controversy, but couldn't tell you who the players are. My (retired) mother can tell you daily where the stock market closed, what the price of crude oil is, what is being reported about the economy, and what congress has done to affect the stock market. We regularly discuss things like TARP and ARRA, the housing market (for instance, what will the dissolution of Fanny and Freddy do to house prices), and whether we're going to see a spike in gas prices because crude prices are up. Last night we were discussing North American oil reserves because she read an article that stated the US had more oil reserves than Saudi Arabia. But if I mention a story about Wikileaks, I have to explain who everyone is and what is happening. She'll never look at Wikileaks websites, although she'll probably see the story when it hits cable news.
And as far as that goes, I've never been to Wikileaks. I get my news through aggregators like Slashdot and Google News. Wikileaks can post documents all day long, but if none of the wire services write an article about it, the majority of the world will never know.
Getting broadband at their homes won't make them a resource for on-shoring tech support jobs. It's already being done, and how it is accomplished is by setting up a call center in a small town. So the only network build-out needed is from the phone company CO to their office. It's not like some call center is going to have these people working from their homes, they couldn't manage hourly staff without having them corralled in a cube farm.
As far as them having IT training, they don't care if a level 1 script reader can do anything more than read the script, recite it to the customer and breathe.
OTOH, when all these hicks finally get broadband, maybe local farmers will have better access to urbanites and more food will be purchased locally. That would give the city dwellers better quality food, cut out some corporate middlemen, and reduce unnecessary fuel costs transporting food.
Oh and the healthcare requirement is illegal. The Union government can not mandate what products you must buy - it was never given that power by the Member states.
That's why we need to expand Medicare and go with a single payer system. Libertarian heads are exploding all over Slashdot. :-)
Really off topic, but the opposition to the healthcare mandate from the "I don't want to pay for someone else's ....." group baffles me. The mandate has no effect if you are already being responsible and have your own insurance. It only effects the freeloaders that assume they won't ever get sick and end up getting free (to them) healthcare in the emergency room.
I doubt the guy intentionally let his SSN go public
Maybe he idolizes the founder of LifeLock.
Satisfied customers who think you're better than your competition would be a good start.
Cell phone company (and ISP) executives don't talk about customer satisfaction (they leave that to marketing), they talk about churn. Churn rate only considers customer satisfaction as an abstract factor. They expect customers to move from provider to provider. Rather than worrying about keeping their own customers happy, they talk about ways they can poach their competition's customers. They'll call for more 'can you hear me now' commercials, say they have the fastest network, and offer the new, hot wireless device. Every year there are millions of new customers, and all those disgruntled customers were probably over consuming support time anyway. Or to put it more bluntly, all those new towers and network upgrades show up on the balance sheet in black and white. Lost customers are amorphous and churn is seen as a fact of life.
Tethering on Verizon is a different and additional plan,
Tethering plans are a money grab by cell service providers. They want to isolate a specific type of user and charge them extra, regardless of whether they actually add any load to the network. We saw this a couple decades ago when the phone company wanted to bill every modem and fax line at business rates. If it was simply about users tethering and overloading their network, they would implement usage based billing and QOS. I don't have a problem paying for the resources I use, I even pay for considerably more minutes on my cell so that I don't have to worry about overages. (avg usage 150 mins on a 450 min plan) But I'm not going to pay an extra $15-30 a month simply because I want to view a web page on my laptop rather than my cell phone.
Another big push is to sell you a data service contract for every device you want to use with mobile broadband. 3g Cell phones, netbooks, tablets, book readers. Even though most users would be happy with wifi devices and a MiFi style broadband access point.
My comment about babies and invalids was aimed very specifically at the implication that a person's value as a human is tied to their use to society.
No, what you have done is focused on a simple sentence that you either couldn't comprehend, or intentionally twisted, so that you start a debate of your own choosing.
I said:
Now, we are discussing a suicide bomber that died by their own hand. Regardless of what you may think of value of their life, when they died without taking their victims with them, it was an extraordinarily good thing for society. It's not just that we should shed no tears for this person, we should celebrate their passing. And the fact that they were undone by a spam text is certainly a humorous irony.
If you want to mourn this persons passing and look for the good in their life that's fine. You sit there and think happy thoughts about someone whose intent was to take the life of as many innocent victims as possible. But I could read stories of suicide bombers accidentally blowing themselves up in their workshops daily and be quite happy about it. The world will be a better place without them.
Recently a local young man was drunk and driving his car at 150 mph and rear-ended another car on the interstate and killed one of the passengers in that car. Had he killed himself instead, I would not have shed a tear. He didn't care what effect his actions would have on others, why should I care about him?
Should the members of Westboro Baptist church cause their own demise, it would be a positive result for society. Religion has been responsible for massacres throughout history. If you need religion to get you through the day, fine, but when you place your beliefs over other people's lives, you have no place in civilized society.
And absolutely, if I should happen to cause my own death, I do not expect strangers to mourn my death.
And really, before you get all self righteous and claim that I want to commit genocide and kill babies, elderly, and invalids, you really ought to understand the term 'hoisted by their own petard'. It has a very specific meaning.
For all those claiming that it is funny because of the atrocities he tried to commit, do you also chuckle at the "darwin awards"?
I find it sad that I am more compassionate than our (US) "don't spend MY money" national political party. And yes, I have NO sympathy for people who die while trying to commit acts of terrorism or from extreme stupidity. I also have no sympathy for people who die due to their own greed. And I would shed no tears for a religious fundamentalist, of any flavor, who causes their own demise. These people put their own desires over society's and I see no reason to respect them when they are 'hoisted by their own petard'. Their last act may be the only positive contribution to society, amusement.
I'm sure the only place records of text messages are kept are on the recipient's phone.
Doubtful, many government agencies receive the full contents of any text message sent or received by a phone with service paid for with public money. And according to CBS News, it depends on your carrier.
But even if that was the case, billing info would have been collected with the time/date and source of any text messages.
These people grew up here and are generally fully Americanized, have family here, friends, work, etc, but don't have citizenship. I know one family who came to the US legally on a work Visa with their young children, but it eventually expired. The family they had everything up here (a house, a job, friends, etc) and nothing to go back to.
I was just reading a local story like that. A man was brought to the US by his parents at age six, and has lived here for 20 years. He is married, has three kids, a steady job and owns his home. And is now scheduled to be deported to a country he has never known. He's not a legal citizen, but seems to be a better example than some prominent Americans. I say we keep him and his family and deport the entire Westboro clan.
Saudi Arabia can still pump for under $20 per barrel.
Saudi Arabia can still pump for under $20 per barrel as long as the World Policeman is around to keep anyone from kicking sand in their face.
Browser vendors were already adding draft features into their product before the specification was finalized.
Browsers adding draft features isn't a problem. Nobody cares that a browser supports a feature that nobody uses. Developers adding draft features to web sites is the problem.
They ran the cable straight across the vacant lot in the grass and into one of our ventilation conduits to get under the house. Then, one day the cable stopped working. I could see that they were starting to develop the lot next door and a tractor had run across the cable laying on the ground. I called the provider, they came out and strung another cable across the lot, on the ground.
Interesting story, I have been battling something similar with Comcast. My neighbor had trouble with his cable and they installed a new drop, running it across my yard. I asked him to call and have them hang it properly because it was a hazard, but nothing happened. For months I called and mowed around it, and it is still laying on the ground. I don't have any leverage because I'm not a Comcast customer.
Their outsourced tech support tried to tell me it was not their problem because the local government was responsible for installing the drops. (?) Supervisors told me several times that the problem was it needed to be scheduled to be buried. I explained that it's an AERIAL drop, and if they think I'm mad now, just try to trench across my property. Which lead to promises to get it properly hung the following week. And the next. Etc.
In the spring it will have been a year. The old drop still runs from the pole to the house, 20' above the ground. The new drop still lies on the ground, taunting the lawnmower.