It's a nice idea that fraud can be prevented by out of office time, but anyone who's smart enough to commit ongoing fraud is smart enough to script the tasks so they go on without apparent input....
Without question. They're not overdedicated. They're scared, they're afraid that you'll terminate them for daring to take time for themselves. Didn't you read the article?
I just sold off my Rainbow 100 last year, to a collector who marveled at the fact that it was still working.....and it had both MS-DOS 1.0 and CPM disks.
Learned to program on Ultrix, which of course ran on VAX hardware....it was good for its time, and as much as VMS was good, I think a real focus on *nix would have catapulted DEC into the stratosphere.
I did mean inexpensive travel, though I also raised the specter of governments banding together to disallow civilian space tourism on security grounds. The two are separate factors, both of which vitiate the idea of space tourism.....and I still want to float around weightless in space and see the world through a porthole or observation deck. Oh, well.
You're right; thank you for clarifying. Southwest is an interesting model - fast, cheap, relatively good. I don't think we'll get that combination in the form of a space bus in the next 40 years or so. Would love it, though....
What is the purpose of re-using them? Is it purely as a space tug, or a space cargo shuttle that has self-guided re-entry, or is it something else? It seems to me that a lot of the stuff we do in orbit doesn't have to be staffed with humans for everything,....I mean, why else keep making software do new stuff?
(Yes, I want space tourism. But I kinda doubt it'll happen in my lifetime; the logistics and geopolitical issues conspire to make it bloody unlikely that governments will allow civilian space tourism....)
Except that stellar alignment and the effects of local climate are not causally linked - because winter in Australia is summer in the Northern Hemisphere and so forth. Unless astrology is insanely geographically localized, which is the same as taking it out of the equation altogether, because it would require a 1:1 correspondence with location....oi.
Astrology is bunk. Homeopathy is bunk. Pseudoscience is, IMHO, the most dangerous set of memes floating around, because they have a deleterious effect on every decision made subsequent to a decision made based on pseudoscientific soi-distant data or principles.
Pretty much. We (as a society) need to quit braying about gov't-being-the-problem and socialism and actually do something done in a coordinated fashion.
We know gov't led programs can work - witness the US space program, or the seed development of Internet technology, or any number of other coordinated efforts.
Oh, and actually finding a way to deal with companies performing labor arbitrage and undermining our economy would be useful, too....
Pretty much, a company that treats people poorly will eventually pay for it.
I know for certain that if the economy improves in the US, employers are going to be in for a very rough ride, especially with tech employees. Companies have thoroughly maltreated most of their tech staff for years - assuming that they're interchangeable, flattening pay scales and not giving raises, bonuses, whatever, while management and sales get raises & bonuses - and the net of it is that no company employing tech staff should assume any employee loyalty.
The same free-market, no-union, every-man-for-himself knuckleheads who run companies and run roughshod over staff will perhaps not like it when the employees use those policies to their advantage....
There are days I agree with you - I'm currently in a situation where the social games and infighting are becoming intolerable, and I'm just a consultant, mostly on the outside of this stuff. Troubling, really.
Another one who actually uses it. My parents, who are old and infirm, live far away, and I have had to travel quite a bit, making communications difficult....with this, we can communicate far more often and with far more gestures than previously available. Ekiga is nice but they're not technical, and they don't have iPhone 4 devices with which to use FaceTime.
It's a start. Eventually, open standards, better tech, etc, will come - but the perfect is the enemy of the good enough, and for now this is good enough, at least for my needs.
Also had a Saturn - 99 SL2 - which routinely got 35+ MPG until a nitwit shortened it using poorly directed F=MA. It was the best commuting car ever - never got dings, got good mileage, the 5-speed was fun to drive....
I still haven't replaced it (I'm riding a bicycle now until I figure out what I want). Debating between a fun car like a Volks CC and maybe a hybrid something....who knows.
With all due respect, the only reason terminal/copy/paste is a fail is that the vast majority of the computer-using public has spent the last twenty-plus years operating in GUI environments without them....
I agree that it's simple. But then again this is what I do for a living. For someone who doesn't do it for a living, the grammar of a lot of statements showing up in a CLI isn't intuitive....and whether or not 'intuitive' is a good measure (IMHO it isn't), the meme of "it should be easy" is sufficiently pervasive to cause new users to prejudge the difficulty of a task.....and it's not just dumb people who decide that CLIs are too difficult to use. I use various flavors of Linux and such at work, but a co-worker who is in no way mentally deficient absolutely refuses to even try...he's not mentally deficient, but he's been unduly affected by the memes about the difficulty of the CLI, and that colors his outlook sufficient to prevent CLI-OSes from making inroads.
I'm curious to hear evidence for this claim. Intelligence (whether genetic or cultural) is in general a highly adaptive trait which confers significant advantage on the organisms in which it's expressed. I suspect that the comment conflates pedantic behavior, which our society incorrectly associates with intelligence, rather than intelligence itself.
I use Ubuntu everyday, it's free and works well. They've done a great job and I for one couldn't imagine going back to the hell that is Windows.\
Yes, this.
I switched to Ubuntu on a Dell D610 - it's an old computer, and it runs just fine. It's also got WIndows on it (because there are times that Windows is necessary, as with certain VPN clients which aren't ported to Linux). But on the whole, I spend 99% or more of my time in Ubuntu, and it does quite well.
the wild kids are quite different from what we remember.
With all due respect, NSM. I got out of HS in the early eighties, and without question I was a wild kid. What kids are doing now is nothing that hasn't happened before. Every generation of adults has considered every generation of kids to be 'wild and uncontrollable' - even the ancient Greeks wrote about it.
Shopping for doctors is, nominally, a rational business activity.
Note the *noiminally* - in reality, it's not rational. In a lot of situations, people seeing doctors are under significant stress, and shopping for price is less important provision of care and easing of symptoms. It's a lot like desktop users calling for support - they really don't care where the support comes from. They just want their problem dealt with.
WIth desktop users? Let 'em shop around. Fine - it's not (usually) life and death. Healthcare IS life and death.
Forcing sick people to shop around also adds an expenditure of energy which may, in some cases, drain someone who may not have the energy....and it's not malingering.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a nice idea that fraud can be prevented by out of office time, but anyone who's smart enough to commit ongoing fraud is smart enough to script the tasks so they go on without apparent input....
Without question. They're not overdedicated. They're scared, they're afraid that you'll terminate them for daring to take time for themselves.
Didn't you read the article?
+1
Rest in peace.
I just sold off my Rainbow 100 last year, to a collector who marveled at the fact that it was still working.....and it had both MS-DOS 1.0 and CPM disks.
Learned to program on Ultrix, which of course ran on VAX hardware....it was good for its time, and as much as VMS was good, I think a real focus on *nix would have catapulted DEC into the stratosphere.
I did mean inexpensive travel, though I also raised the specter of governments banding together to disallow civilian space tourism on security grounds. The two are separate factors, both of which vitiate the idea of space tourism. ....and I still want to float around weightless in space and see the world through a porthole or observation deck. Oh, well.
You're right; thank you for clarifying. Southwest is an interesting model - fast, cheap, relatively good. I don't think we'll get that combination in the form of a space bus in the next 40 years or so. Would love it, though....
What is the purpose of re-using them? Is it purely as a space tug, or a space cargo shuttle that has self-guided re-entry, or is it something else? It seems to me that a lot of the stuff we do in orbit doesn't have to be staffed with humans for everything,....I mean, why else keep making software do new stuff?
(Yes, I want space tourism. But I kinda doubt it'll happen in my lifetime; the logistics and geopolitical issues conspire to make it bloody unlikely that governments will allow civilian space tourism....)
psi is easy to measure......use a tire gauge, pull the cap off the valve, and depress the gauge.
The other kind of psi? I use that psi to steal passwords from the admins so I can psuedo commands.....funny how they never seem to work. ;-)
Mod Up!
Except that stellar alignment and the effects of local climate are not causally linked - because winter in Australia is summer in the Northern Hemisphere and so forth. Unless astrology is insanely geographically localized, which is the same as taking it out of the equation altogether, because it would require a 1:1 correspondence with location....oi.
Astrology is bunk.
Homeopathy is bunk.
Pseudoscience is, IMHO, the most dangerous set of memes floating around, because they have a deleterious effect on every decision made subsequent to a decision made based on pseudoscientific soi-distant data or principles.
I am laughing hard enough to hurt myself. I have a memory of the baby in the bathwater, too.....maybe that'll heal me. Heh...
If she weighs more than a duck, she must be.... .....A witch! burn her, burn her!
Pretty much. We (as a society) need to quit braying about gov't-being-the-problem and socialism and actually do something done in a coordinated fashion.
We know gov't led programs can work - witness the US space program, or the seed development of Internet technology, or any number of other coordinated efforts.
Oh, and actually finding a way to deal with companies performing labor arbitrage and undermining our economy would be useful, too....
Pretty much, a company that treats people poorly will eventually pay for it.
I know for certain that if the economy improves in the US, employers are going to be in for a very rough ride, especially with tech employees. Companies have thoroughly maltreated most of their tech staff for years - assuming that they're interchangeable, flattening pay scales and not giving raises, bonuses, whatever, while management and sales get raises & bonuses - and the net of it is that no company employing tech staff should assume any employee loyalty.
The same free-market, no-union, every-man-for-himself knuckleheads who run companies and run roughshod over staff will perhaps not like it when the employees use those policies to their advantage....
There are days I agree with you - I'm currently in a situation where the social games and infighting are becoming intolerable, and I'm just a consultant, mostly on the outside of this stuff. Troubling, really.
Another one who actually uses it. My parents, who are old and infirm, live far away, and I have had to travel quite a bit, making communications difficult....with this, we can communicate far more often and with far more gestures than previously available. Ekiga is nice but they're not technical, and they don't have iPhone 4 devices with which to use FaceTime.
It's a start. Eventually, open standards, better tech, etc, will come - but the perfect is the enemy of the good enough, and for now this is good enough, at least for my needs.
Also had a Saturn - 99 SL2 - which routinely got 35+ MPG until a nitwit shortened it using poorly directed F=MA. It was the best commuting car ever - never got dings, got good mileage, the 5-speed was fun to drive....
I still haven't replaced it (I'm riding a bicycle now until I figure out what I want). Debating between a fun car like a Volks CC and maybe a hybrid something....who knows.
Tinfoil hats as a Faraday cage are so 1960s.....what we need are stylish Faraday Fedoras lined with metal mesh!
(yeah, I knew I'd get a Linux reference in there somehow)
With all due respect, the only reason terminal/copy/paste is a fail is that the vast majority of the computer-using public has spent the last twenty-plus years operating in GUI environments without them....
I agree that it's simple. But then again this is what I do for a living. For someone who doesn't do it for a living, the grammar of a lot of statements showing up in a CLI isn't intuitive....and whether or not 'intuitive' is a good measure (IMHO it isn't), the meme of "it should be easy" is sufficiently pervasive to cause new users to prejudge the difficulty of a task. ....and it's not just dumb people who decide that CLIs are too difficult to use. I use various flavors of Linux and such at work, but a co-worker who is in no way mentally deficient absolutely refuses to even try...he's not mentally deficient, but he's been unduly affected by the memes about the difficulty of the CLI, and that colors his outlook sufficient to prevent CLI-OSes from making inroads.
There is no such the as 'de-evolving' only evolving.
Bingo - evolution = change, and, like (certain values of) time, it moves forward only - there is no back.
Net-net, organisms which undergo mutations reflected in morphological changes which confer reproductive advantage will tend to increase in number.
If culture plays a role in the selection of a mate, then yes, it can have an effect - that's sexual selection.
I'm curious to hear evidence for this claim. Intelligence (whether genetic or cultural) is in general a highly adaptive trait which confers significant advantage on the organisms in which it's expressed. I suspect that the comment conflates pedantic behavior, which our society incorrectly associates with intelligence, rather than intelligence itself.
I use Ubuntu everyday, it's free and works well. They've done a great job and I for one couldn't imagine going back to the hell that is Windows.\
Yes, this.
I switched to Ubuntu on a Dell D610 - it's an old computer, and it runs just fine. It's also got WIndows on it (because there are times that Windows is necessary, as with certain VPN clients which aren't ported to Linux). But on the whole, I spend 99% or more of my time in Ubuntu, and it does quite well.
the wild kids are quite different from what we remember.
With all due respect, NSM. I got out of HS in the early eighties, and without question I was a wild kid. What kids are doing now is nothing that hasn't happened before. Every generation of adults has considered every generation of kids to be 'wild and uncontrollable' - even the ancient Greeks wrote about it.
Shopping for doctors is, nominally, a rational business activity.
Note the *noiminally* - in reality, it's not rational. In a lot of situations, people seeing doctors are under significant stress, and shopping for price is less important provision of care and easing of symptoms. It's a lot like desktop users calling for support - they really don't care where the support comes from. They just want their problem dealt with.
WIth desktop users? Let 'em shop around. Fine - it's not (usually) life and death. Healthcare IS life and death.
Forcing sick people to shop around also adds an expenditure of energy which may, in some cases, drain someone who may not have the energy....and it's not malingering.