Given that at least half of the crap I have plugged into my AC outlets in my home end up converting it to DC power, why haven't we seen a DC power standard for home use?
Power-over-Ethernet seems like it could be expanded to do so much more.
Seriously, wouldn't that be nice? Have the "speaker" be an ethernet digital audio receiver. You could flip a switch on each speaker telling it what speaker it was (left/rear, whatever), and it would simply listen for (or request) the audio stream it was interested in.
The actual receiver device could auto-detect the speaker configuration and adapt what it was sending accordingly.
If I understand you correctly, that was exactly my point. X.500, for example, is hierarchical, typically along geopolitical boundaries. Therefore, you can set up whatever naming scheme you want specific to your local customs, laws and regulations.
I COMPLETELY agree. First, the rant: DNS names are designed to give an administrator-friendly label for an IP address (or other network-related record). Domains are there to define an administrative scope within DNS. The top-level domains are there to define, very broadly, some different types of administrative scopes within DNS. The original designations seemed very logical.
DNS DOMAINS ARE NOT FUCKING CONTENT LABELS. DNS IS NOT A FUCKING INTERNET KEYWORD.
Now, with the rant portion of my post concluded, here's the reality:
There is no unique, persistent "keyword-style" web site lookup mechanism on the Internet. All attempts to create one have been plagued with litigation, jurisidicational, and cross-industry trademark ambiguity problems. The best we have is DNS, and something needs to fill that role. ICANN seems to think that continuing to warp DNS is the best way to do that.
A proper solution might entail a "proper" directory mapping real-world names to DNS domains (and letting SRV records do the rest). Then we can throw all of the intellectual property issues and the full weight of America's mighty litigation tendencies onto this directory service and keep it out of DNS. The directory service itself could be architected across geopolitical boundaries and thus tailor its regional scope/namespace to whatever country's laws happen to be in effect there (much like others' suggestions of eliminating the generic TLDs entirely in favor of ccTLDs). A directory like X.500 or LDAP, in conjunction with a country's trademark/service mark scheme, could offer users a guaranteed way to persistently and uniquely identify a mark's owner or an organization by name on the Internet. It would even allow for multiple organizations with the same name (as is allowed in the US for companies of different industries), which is impossible with DNS (and another whopping reason why DNS is unsuitable for this role). There remain some usability issues with an approach like this, though, so maybe that's why no one's figured out a way to make it work and take off.
But once DNS is taken out of the picture here, it can revert to being a simple host label and none of these stupid TLDs will matter. But that isn't going to happen any time soon. DNS will continue to be (ab)used as a content label and an Internet keyword, so long as there are companies willing to pay to keep/make it that way and so long as there are organizations out there willing to put those interests ahead of others.
I think that he's trying to say that if a radioactive isotope has an exceptionally long half-life, that means it will be emitting dangerous radiation at a small percentage of the rate that other isotopes will. Generally speaking, this makes the isotope less of a threat. The same amount of an isotope with a shorter half-life (15k years versus 1.5M years) will expose you to 100 times the radiation over the same period of time. A radioactive isotope with a long enough half-life might even be considered safe.
Unfortunately, 129I has another problem: the body likes to stockpile it in your thyroid (it can't tell the difference between it and regular iodine). A sufficient exposure will cause fatal thyroid cancer.
So it may not be as radioactive, but its chemical properties make it just as dangerous. This would certainly suggest it would need to be kept out of the environment for the typical 10* half-life (160M years).
Or, even more practical/useful (also taking advantage of transmitting hardware):
- GSM so I can make phone calls - broadcast TV so I can watch TV (and ATSC/HDTV while we're at it) - WiFi so I can get online - X10 so I can control my lights and appliances - Keyless entry system so I can warm up my car - Garage door opener - Bluetooth and/or wireless USB so I can interact with peripherals
Give it another decade or two and we can have all of this on one mega-PDA.
I see this point brought up a lot. It basically amounts to a lack of trust of your law enforcement, right? I'm not suggesting that there haven't been abuses, but why don't we have better oversight here?
If the police have additional powers that could potentially be misused, why don't we have measures in place to hold them accountable for the use of those powers? For example:
1. Wiretaps could be regulated by a 3rd-party, or at the very least, any request for a wiretap must be linked to a valid judicial order (independently) before being executed. (It goes without saying that the Patriot Act's provisions allowing for taps without a judicial order need to go.)
2. Police should be required to document the reasons for a search before the search (for probable cause). Search warrants obviously still need to go through the judicial branch.
There's probably not going to be a perfect solution, since problems can go all the way up in someone's chain of command (small-time law enforcement agencies such as those in the late New Rome), but in many places where there is widespread mistrust, there remains measures we can implement to add oversight to increase that level of trust. And that's important if you're expecting these people to protect you. Don't live somewhere where you don't trust your public servants. Replace them or find a way for them to earn your trust.
I guess you could just run it 100 times if you wanted 100 chunks...
That would be an easy solution for someone that didn't want to "fill in the blanks."
If you were more interested in brevity than readability, you could replace
[ rand(64800), 30 ]
with
map {[rand(64800),30]} 1..10
to get 10 of them. There's probably a more elegant solution though. I'm in a meeting and am somewhat lazy.
And, btw, 64800 is an 18-hour day. Maybe you intended that
I did. The requirements indicated 18 hours of audio would be recorded per day. I suspect they don't really care about the sound of the participant sleeping.
It's not just coercion, it's the ability to sell your vote willingly. What's being advocated is the introduction of ballot policy to make that easy to do. There's no reason to allow that printed confirmation to leave the polling station.
Plus, how many of these receipts would get lost, or washed, or simply thrown away? If a recount is needed, can you see certain demographics that might be more likely to lose their receipt, or less likely to present it when a recount is demanded? How would that affect the recount?
There will always be an absentee ballot "problem", but I don't really see why we need to introduce additional integrity issues when it's not really necessary. Absolutely, something should be printed for an audit trail, but deposit these in a locked box, not the voter's hand.
Receipts offer no benefit over a printed, but left behind, audit trail. One you take out (and possibly lose, possibly forge, or possibly offer as proof to keep your kneecaps or get a reward), and the other you leave behind (which makes it less likely to be lost, forged, and makes it difficult to violate the integrity of the system).
Why are we looking at this as a "receipts" versus "no receipts" argument when we can effectively have the audit trail that a receipt provides without actually giving it to the user? There is a middle ground.
What I find even more amusing is the lengths they've gone to identify and ban people who request the RSS version of the home page too frequently (once every half hour is the cap).
Now, the RSS version is extremely lean, and the alternative is hitting the home page, which is not. Why don't they ban people who hit the home page too frequently? I can hit it a hundred times in 10 minutes and they won't care, but the RSS page twice in 30 minutes? Banned for 72 hours.
Clearly Slashdot is not concerned whatsoever (not even a tiny bit) about their bandwidth consumption, unless it's not earning them ad impressions.
My tinfoil hat side says the RIAA knew that truly cipppled/DRM'd discs are not technically CDs anymore
I might go further than this.. If the RIAA is being told that they're not allowed to use the CD logo on discsthat depart from specifications, it seems to be in their best interests to stop using the CD logo on all of their music discs, whether or not they adhere to specifications. This way, they dilute the value of the logo to the point where it doesn't matter that copy protected discs don't have it.
there's no way to really verify that what you have just purchased is actually a CD until its too late.
You could ask the clerk. If he says it's a CD and will play in any CD player, and you find out that it doesn't, you should have sufficient grounds to get them to take it back even though it's opened: they misled you when they sold it to you.
IMO, Philips and/or some other pro-consumer organizations need to start taking out ad campaigns advising consumers to look for that logo to ensure their music will play correctly, and warn them that if there's no logo, then the disc may not be "CD-compatible" and may carry additional (harmful?) restrictions or software, and may not play on all of their players (now or in the future).
I think some of the other suggestions (pending legislation?) requiring some labeling in the other direction (pointing out that the disc is not a proper CD) would be even better.
I don't think the original poster is trying to make such a polarization. Lots of smart kids appear to themselves to be geniuses compared to their high school peers. Take any pool of a few hundred kids and you're going to find a lot that excel (perhaps singularly) at certain things.
In the real world, you end up working with other people who enjoy and/or are educated in the same thing you thought you were really good at. In comparison, you suddenly aren't as good as you thought you were.
The original poster is suggesting that the self-described genius humble himself before someone else does it for him, which I think is reasonable advice for all self-appointed geniuses, even if it turns out your peers in the field really aren't up to your level in that one specific thing. Let your accomplishments speak for you. Nobody likes an egotistical ass.
Your arguments don't really hold much water, I'm afraid.
However, from another purely legal standpoint, the Executive Branch can imprison anyone for an arbitrary length of time... provided that they classify the prisoner as an "enemy combatant".
If you are honestly suggesting that someone walking around and taking pictures of the front of everyone's houses will get him classified as an "enemy combatant", then you have completely missed the boat.
The problem is that someone taking pictures looks suspicious to the police. And being suspected of terrorist plotting isn't something you want to have happen to you.
I'm not going to go so far as to suggest that the police may not be oversensitive to things that they find suspicious. I had an aquaintenace here in St. Louis that was detained and questioned after he was wandering through St. Louis's large Forest Park and came across a site involved in some "Homeland Security" preparations. It's a public park, and being inquisitive, he asked a few questions. He had some small amount of Middle Eastern blood and was questioned rather seriously and asked to leave in forceful terms. So sure, the police don't take too kindly to people doing suspicious things.
I still don't see how photographing the front of someone's house is very suspicious, though. At most, someone could suggest that he was scouting places to burglarize. It'd be difficult to convince anyone that he was photographing landmarks for his back-yard cruise missile.
It would be much easier for an up-and-coming prosecuting attorney to convince a jury that you are a terrorist than for you to convince them that you are an amateur cartographer
I think perhaps you are attempting to make commentary on the state of affairs in the US with hyperbole, but it sorta looks like you actually believe this. If so, please elaborate and substantiate.
And then there's the whole other matter of police who simply disregard what the law says.
You'll always have people in power abusing that power. The best you can do is oversight. Checks and balances, all that.
If you really live somewhere where you could walk around and photograph the front of someone's house and be:
a) labeled an "enemy combatant"; b) prosecuted as a terrorist; and c) falsely imprisoned by dirty cops
I might suggest you find a new place to live!
The US is bad, but I think perhaps you are taking things a little too far. If this is the extent of your argument, I'm siding with the other poster here: the average private citizen has nothing to worry about. If someone ends up getting worried, questions will be asked. Only if the answers indicate something sinister will it be looked into any further.
I've always wondered why unions can't just be treated like any other outsourcing firm. Turn them into a company that directly pays their employees and have businesses contract out to one or more "unions" to do a large chunk (or a small chunk) of their work.
If the company continues paying him while they bitch about his numbers, he must be doing something right.
He doesn't have to be doing anything right. The company just has to be slightly better off with him than without him (or with an unknown replacement).
He can either modify his behavior, or stick with it and continue to risk low wage increases, disciplinary action, or even be the first on the chopping block the next time layoffs come around.
While it should be every company and every employee's goal to provide good, quality customer service, you still have to look at the bigger picture. If you're doing 10 jobs in a day while making customers 98% satisfied, versus a co-worker who does 20 jobs in a day with a 96% satisfaction rate, perhaps that 2% isn't really worth it? Sure, it's a judgement call, but it helps to work with management in finding a good balance fitting your skills. If you can't achieve the same completion rate/satisfaction level that a co-worker can, perhaps you simply aren't as valuable an employee, and there's no reason that shouldn't be reflected on reviews.
So in other words, it's a lose-lose situation, right? Either drive up prices and let foreign companies move in to put you out of business, or move the jobs overseas and lose income to the point where it puts you out of business...
Did I miss something that points out how anyone but union members profits from any of this?
What are you talking about? The discussion is on unions and their wages, not on services and prices. Union wages have little to do with prices, though it isn't out of the realm of imagination that a major union wage increase might translate to increased prices to make up for it. I don't see how this has anything to do with people buying local service and having some of that go to SBC.
Higher union density means better wages, benefits, and conditions for everyone.
Assuming by "everyone" you mean "union members", you're absolutely right. Right up to the point where the company gives up and ships those jobs overseas. Yay, unions!
Re:put it under the hood
on
Freecache
·
· Score: 1
the compound URL is so user-unfriendly
At the risk of pulling us off-topic, I might argue that all URLs need to be "under the hood". A URI (thus URL) only needs to uniquely (and arguably persistently) identify a resource. It doesn't have to be user-friendly. That's what search engines and links are for.
But in that regard, I think I agree with what you're trying to say. The URL they're proposing is ugly, and it's not going to be practical for users to manually enter without messing it up. Some form of translation or redirection would be beneficial here.
It would be nice to see some statistics regarding the amount of pollutants put into the atmosphere for a) burning gasoline; b) burning coal to produce hydrogen; and c) burning coal to produce electricity for a battery.
Sure, coal is far dirtier than gasoline, but if you're burning X times as much gasoline as you are coal for the same amount of work (distance travelled), which is actually better?
Re:What we really need....
on
Freecache
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Now the www.squidserver.com server would have to bear the entirety of the bandwidth usage. That's not at all scalable.
What makes you think that www.squidserver.com always resolves to the same single squid server? Intelligent DNS resolution in conjunction with things like IP multicast and multi-homing could be used to achieve something approaching what Akamai does.
Plus, the advantage of a proper caching HTTP proxy as the "meat" of this solution means that HTTP caching rules are respected. If a site has an advertising graphic that they really need to have loaded for each user and not cached, they can express that through HTTP caching headers and "www.squidproxy.com" would be "required" to pass the request through. This way you neatly side-step the perceived legal problems Slashdot says they face when considering a similar Slashdot cache for linked-to articles. (See the FAQ.)
Re:put it under the hood
on
Freecache
·
· Score: 1
including their repetitive "http://"?
What if FreeCache wished to cache non-HTTP information and make it available via HTTP? It might be useful to allow for http://freecache.org/ftp://example.com/big-file.gz wouldn't it? It makes sense to require the "http://".
Slashdot Mirror
Given that at least half of the crap I have plugged into my AC outlets in my home end up converting it to DC power, why haven't we seen a DC power standard for home use?
Power-over-Ethernet seems like it could be expanded to do so much more.
Seriously, wouldn't that be nice? Have the "speaker" be an ethernet digital audio receiver. You could flip a switch on each speaker telling it what speaker it was (left/rear, whatever), and it would simply listen for (or request) the audio stream it was interested in.
The actual receiver device could auto-detect the speaker configuration and adapt what it was sending accordingly.
If I understand you correctly, that was exactly my point. X.500, for example, is hierarchical, typically along geopolitical boundaries. Therefore, you can set up whatever naming scheme you want specific to your local customs, laws and regulations.
I COMPLETELY agree. First, the rant: DNS names are designed to give an administrator-friendly label for an IP address (or other network-related record). Domains are there to define an administrative scope within DNS. The top-level domains are there to define, very broadly, some different types of administrative scopes within DNS. The original designations seemed very logical.
DNS DOMAINS ARE NOT FUCKING CONTENT LABELS. DNS IS NOT A FUCKING INTERNET KEYWORD.
Now, with the rant portion of my post concluded, here's the reality:
There is no unique, persistent "keyword-style" web site lookup mechanism on the Internet. All attempts to create one have been plagued with litigation, jurisidicational, and cross-industry trademark ambiguity problems. The best we have is DNS, and something needs to fill that role. ICANN seems to think that continuing to warp DNS is the best way to do that.
A proper solution might entail a "proper" directory mapping real-world names to DNS domains (and letting SRV records do the rest). Then we can throw all of the intellectual property issues and the full weight of America's mighty litigation tendencies onto this directory service and keep it out of DNS. The directory service itself could be architected across geopolitical boundaries and thus tailor its regional scope/namespace to whatever country's laws happen to be in effect there (much like others' suggestions of eliminating the generic TLDs entirely in favor of ccTLDs). A directory like X.500 or LDAP, in conjunction with a country's trademark/service mark scheme, could offer users a guaranteed way to persistently and uniquely identify a mark's owner or an organization by name on the Internet. It would even allow for multiple organizations with the same name (as is allowed in the US for companies of different industries), which is impossible with DNS (and another whopping reason why DNS is unsuitable for this role). There remain some usability issues with an approach like this, though, so maybe that's why no one's figured out a way to make it work and take off.
But once DNS is taken out of the picture here, it can revert to being a simple host label and none of these stupid TLDs will matter. But that isn't going to happen any time soon. DNS will continue to be (ab)used as a content label and an Internet keyword, so long as there are companies willing to pay to keep/make it that way and so long as there are organizations out there willing to put those interests ahead of others.
I think that he's trying to say that if a radioactive isotope has an exceptionally long half-life, that means it will be emitting dangerous radiation at a small percentage of the rate that other isotopes will. Generally speaking, this makes the isotope less of a threat. The same amount of an isotope with a shorter half-life (15k years versus 1.5M years) will expose you to 100 times the radiation over the same period of time. A radioactive isotope with a long enough half-life might even be considered safe.
Unfortunately, 129I has another problem: the body likes to stockpile it in your thyroid (it can't tell the difference between it and regular iodine). A sufficient exposure will cause fatal thyroid cancer.
So it may not be as radioactive, but its chemical properties make it just as dangerous. This would certainly suggest it would need to be kept out of the environment for the typical 10* half-life (160M years).
Or, even more practical/useful (also taking advantage of transmitting hardware):
- GSM so I can make phone calls
- broadcast TV so I can watch TV (and ATSC/HDTV while we're at it)
- WiFi so I can get online
- X10 so I can control my lights and appliances
- Keyless entry system so I can warm up my car
- Garage door opener
- Bluetooth and/or wireless USB so I can interact with peripherals
Give it another decade or two and we can have all of this on one mega-PDA.
I see this point brought up a lot. It basically amounts to a lack of trust of your law enforcement, right? I'm not suggesting that there haven't been abuses, but why don't we have better oversight here?
If the police have additional powers that could potentially be misused, why don't we have measures in place to hold them accountable for the use of those powers? For example:
1. Wiretaps could be regulated by a 3rd-party, or at the very least, any request for a wiretap must be linked to a valid judicial order (independently) before being executed. (It goes without saying that the Patriot Act's provisions allowing for taps without a judicial order need to go.)
2. Police should be required to document the reasons for a search before the search (for probable cause). Search warrants obviously still need to go through the judicial branch.
There's probably not going to be a perfect solution, since problems can go all the way up in someone's chain of command (small-time law enforcement agencies such as those in the late New Rome), but in many places where there is widespread mistrust, there remains measures we can implement to add oversight to increase that level of trust. And that's important if you're expecting these people to protect you. Don't live somewhere where you don't trust your public servants. Replace them or find a way for them to earn your trust.
Yes.
I guess you could just run it 100 times if you wanted 100 chunks...
That would be an easy solution for someone that didn't want to "fill in the blanks."
If you were more interested in brevity than readability, you could replace with to get 10 of them. There's probably a more elegant solution though. I'm in a meeting and am somewhat lazy.
And, btw, 64800 is an 18-hour day. Maybe you intended that
I did. The requirements indicated 18 hours of audio would be recorded per day. I suspect they don't really care about the sound of the participant sleeping.
Agreed..
In any case I couldn't imagine that it'd take more than half a day or so to do this in Java or Python.
Or five minutes in Perl with MP3::Splitter:
It's not just coercion, it's the ability to sell your vote willingly. What's being advocated is the introduction of ballot policy to make that easy to do. There's no reason to allow that printed confirmation to leave the polling station.
Plus, how many of these receipts would get lost, or washed, or simply thrown away? If a recount is needed, can you see certain demographics that might be more likely to lose their receipt, or less likely to present it when a recount is demanded? How would that affect the recount?
There will always be an absentee ballot "problem", but I don't really see why we need to introduce additional integrity issues when it's not really necessary. Absolutely, something should be printed for an audit trail, but deposit these in a locked box, not the voter's hand.
Receipts offer no benefit over a printed, but left behind, audit trail. One you take out (and possibly lose, possibly forge, or possibly offer as proof to keep your kneecaps or get a reward), and the other you leave behind (which makes it less likely to be lost, forged, and makes it difficult to violate the integrity of the system).
Why are we looking at this as a "receipts" versus "no receipts" argument when we can effectively have the audit trail that a receipt provides without actually giving it to the user? There is a middle ground.
What I find even more amusing is the lengths they've gone to identify and ban people who request the RSS version of the home page too frequently (once every half hour is the cap).
Now, the RSS version is extremely lean, and the alternative is hitting the home page, which is not. Why don't they ban people who hit the home page too frequently? I can hit it a hundred times in 10 minutes and they won't care, but the RSS page twice in 30 minutes? Banned for 72 hours.
Clearly Slashdot is not concerned whatsoever (not even a tiny bit) about their bandwidth consumption, unless it's not earning them ad impressions.
My tinfoil hat side says the RIAA knew that truly cipppled/DRM'd discs are not technically CDs anymore
I might go further than this.. If the RIAA is being told that they're not allowed to use the CD logo on discsthat depart from specifications, it seems to be in their best interests to stop using the CD logo on all of their music discs, whether or not they adhere to specifications. This way, they dilute the value of the logo to the point where it doesn't matter that copy protected discs don't have it.
there's no way to really verify that what you have just purchased is actually a CD until its too late.
You could ask the clerk. If he says it's a CD and will play in any CD player, and you find out that it doesn't, you should have sufficient grounds to get them to take it back even though it's opened: they misled you when they sold it to you.
IMO, Philips and/or some other pro-consumer organizations need to start taking out ad campaigns advising consumers to look for that logo to ensure their music will play correctly, and warn them that if there's no logo, then the disc may not be "CD-compatible" and may carry additional (harmful?) restrictions or software, and may not play on all of their players (now or in the future).
I think some of the other suggestions (pending legislation?) requiring some labeling in the other direction (pointing out that the disc is not a proper CD) would be even better.
I don't think the original poster is trying to make such a polarization. Lots of smart kids appear to themselves to be geniuses compared to their high school peers. Take any pool of a few hundred kids and you're going to find a lot that excel (perhaps singularly) at certain things.
In the real world, you end up working with other people who enjoy and/or are educated in the same thing you thought you were really good at. In comparison, you suddenly aren't as good as you thought you were.
The original poster is suggesting that the self-described genius humble himself before someone else does it for him, which I think is reasonable advice for all self-appointed geniuses, even if it turns out your peers in the field really aren't up to your level in that one specific thing. Let your accomplishments speak for you. Nobody likes an egotistical ass.
It's too bad they didn't think of this before he started travelling...
Your arguments don't really hold much water, I'm afraid.
However, from another purely legal standpoint, the Executive Branch can imprison anyone for an arbitrary length of time... provided that they classify the prisoner as an "enemy combatant".
If you are honestly suggesting that someone walking around and taking pictures of the front of everyone's houses will get him classified as an "enemy combatant", then you have completely missed the boat.
The problem is that someone taking pictures looks suspicious to the police. And being suspected of terrorist plotting isn't something you want to have happen to you.
I'm not going to go so far as to suggest that the police may not be oversensitive to things that they find suspicious. I had an aquaintenace here in St. Louis that was detained and questioned after he was wandering through St. Louis's large Forest Park and came across a site involved in some "Homeland Security" preparations. It's a public park, and being inquisitive, he asked a few questions. He had some small amount of Middle Eastern blood and was questioned rather seriously and asked to leave in forceful terms. So sure, the police don't take too kindly to people doing suspicious things.
I still don't see how photographing the front of someone's house is very suspicious, though. At most, someone could suggest that he was scouting places to burglarize. It'd be difficult to convince anyone that he was photographing landmarks for his back-yard cruise missile.
It would be much easier for an up-and-coming prosecuting attorney to convince a jury that you are a terrorist than for you to convince them that you are an amateur cartographer
I think perhaps you are attempting to make commentary on the state of affairs in the US with hyperbole, but it sorta looks like you actually believe this. If so, please elaborate and substantiate.
And then there's the whole other matter of police who simply disregard what the law says.
You'll always have people in power abusing that power. The best you can do is oversight. Checks and balances, all that.
If you really live somewhere where you could walk around and photograph the front of someone's house and be:
a) labeled an "enemy combatant";
b) prosecuted as a terrorist; and
c) falsely imprisoned by dirty cops
I might suggest you find a new place to live!
The US is bad, but I think perhaps you are taking things a little too far. If this is the extent of your argument, I'm siding with the other poster here: the average private citizen has nothing to worry about. If someone ends up getting worried, questions will be asked. Only if the answers indicate something sinister will it be looked into any further.
I've always wondered why unions can't just be treated like any other outsourcing firm. Turn them into a company that directly pays their employees and have businesses contract out to one or more "unions" to do a large chunk (or a small chunk) of their work.
That way, unions have to actually compete.
If the company continues paying him while they bitch about his numbers, he must be doing something right.
He doesn't have to be doing anything right. The company just has to be slightly better off with him than without him (or with an unknown replacement).
He can either modify his behavior, or stick with it and continue to risk low wage increases, disciplinary action, or even be the first on the chopping block the next time layoffs come around.
While it should be every company and every employee's goal to provide good, quality customer service, you still have to look at the bigger picture. If you're doing 10 jobs in a day while making customers 98% satisfied, versus a co-worker who does 20 jobs in a day with a 96% satisfaction rate, perhaps that 2% isn't really worth it? Sure, it's a judgement call, but it helps to work with management in finding a good balance fitting your skills. If you can't achieve the same completion rate/satisfaction level that a co-worker can, perhaps you simply aren't as valuable an employee, and there's no reason that shouldn't be reflected on reviews.
So in other words, it's a lose-lose situation, right? Either drive up prices and let foreign companies move in to put you out of business, or move the jobs overseas and lose income to the point where it puts you out of business...
Did I miss something that points out how anyone but union members profits from any of this?
What are you talking about? The discussion is on unions and their wages, not on services and prices. Union wages have little to do with prices, though it isn't out of the realm of imagination that a major union wage increase might translate to increased prices to make up for it. I don't see how this has anything to do with people buying local service and having some of that go to SBC.
Higher union density means better wages, benefits, and conditions for everyone.
Assuming by "everyone" you mean "union members", you're absolutely right. Right up to the point where the company gives up and ships those jobs overseas. Yay, unions!
the compound URL is so user-unfriendly
At the risk of pulling us off-topic, I might argue that all URLs need to be "under the hood". A URI (thus URL) only needs to uniquely (and arguably persistently) identify a resource. It doesn't have to be user-friendly. That's what search engines and links are for.
But in that regard, I think I agree with what you're trying to say. The URL they're proposing is ugly, and it's not going to be practical for users to manually enter without messing it up. Some form of translation or redirection would be beneficial here.
It would be nice to see some statistics regarding the amount of pollutants put into the atmosphere for a) burning gasoline; b) burning coal to produce hydrogen; and c) burning coal to produce electricity for a battery.
Sure, coal is far dirtier than gasoline, but if you're burning X times as much gasoline as you are coal for the same amount of work (distance travelled), which is actually better?
Now the www.squidserver.com server would have to bear the entirety of the bandwidth usage. That's not at all scalable.
What makes you think that www.squidserver.com always resolves to the same single squid server? Intelligent DNS resolution in conjunction with things like IP multicast and multi-homing could be used to achieve something approaching what Akamai does.
Plus, the advantage of a proper caching HTTP proxy as the "meat" of this solution means that HTTP caching rules are respected. If a site has an advertising graphic that they really need to have loaded for each user and not cached, they can express that through HTTP caching headers and "www.squidproxy.com" would be "required" to pass the request through. This way you neatly side-step the perceived legal problems Slashdot says they face when considering a similar Slashdot cache for linked-to articles. (See the FAQ.)
including their repetitive "http://"?
z wouldn't it? It makes sense to require the "http://".
What if FreeCache wished to cache non-HTTP information and make it available via HTTP? It might be useful to allow for http://freecache.org/ftp://example.com/big-file.g