My recent calls log indicates I have only received 8 phone calls since 1 July.
I hope that does not count against me.
Wouldn't it be ironic if you got a lower score by actually using your iPhone as you know.... a phone?
Apple Bot 1: "This person made 30 calls yesterday from their iPhone" Apple Bot 2: "Who the hell does that with a phone? Better knock a few points off. Clearly they're a scammer in the making."
For the record my father in law is a property manager for a senior living community. He averages 40-50 incoming and outgoing calls on a given workday. I, on the other hand, might make one call a day (and ignore five spam callers). Given this wide range how does one apply any meaningful analysis to it? Maybe I'm wrong but I really don't think robocallers use mobile phones and sanctioned apps to do their dirty work.
I've had a 20 year career without a degree. Most employers don't really care, and the ones that do aren't much worth working for. It's a bit of a red flag if you care about a check mark (in what could be a completely unrelated field) over actual experience.
There's the issue of critical mass. My company doesn't require a college degree for most positions and will instead accept so many years of prior experience. But how does one get that prior experience if years ago the only way to get a job with that experience was to have a degree? Lots of volunteering and working crappy jobs that at least get you in the door is how.
At the risk of sounding like the bitter old man, I'm worried about the current generation. A lot millennials come in expecting to be treated as someone who earned their chops on the front line for 5 or 10 years. They don't want to hear garbage about getting in, taking lumps, building your network and personal brand, acquiring those years of experience. No, they come in mostly wanting to know how much we will pay them to not work (what do you mean I'm not eligible for eight weeks' vacation and you won't guarantee to promote me to the "senior" role in six months?)
I had one young lady tell me it was outright discrimination that our company doesn't start giving more vacation until five years of service. Pro tip - never, ever, EVER, mention your concerns about discrimination in a job interview.
Would I refuse if someone offered me a two-digit million salary for the job? Of course not. But half of that salary would be paying me for doing something I'd rather prefer not to do, and a good part of it would go to coaches and other support to enable me to do it at all.
Ah, but then you'd be doing it wrong. Once you land the two-digit million salary the goal is you don't spend a penny of it. Muddle through it, make it a year and then walk away or get let go. Either way you'll never have to work for pay again. You can spend your time volunteering for something you're truly passionate about!:)
Until recently I worked in the financial services industry where this topic was being hotly debated. Set Facebook aside for a minute. Third party aggregation services like Mint.com have been around for a while. What they offer is a way for customers to access their own data from their platforms of choice.
A lot of it is accomplished by screen scraping - you give them your online banking credentials and a bot logs in to download your data and do something with it. Naturally there's risks and downsides to this.
As a group, customers are demanding access to their financial data outside of what FIs provide. Functionally this means some kind of an API where consumers can request that their bank share their information with specific third parties. Believe it or not, banks are not eager to open the floodgates. They're very reluctant to allow this to occur because there are big unanswered questions about who is responsible when things go wrong. Banks have obligations under GLBA to protect customer data. But when JoeBlow startup loses financial data given to them by a bank at a customer's request? Very much an open question. Same with fraud liability. On the other hand, regulatory bodies such as the CFPB are pushing for consumer ease of access.
Back to FB, no surprise that they'd want in on this. So long as they only get access to customers who have properly consented and so long as they have controls to properly protect the data entrusted to them, more power to 'em. Let the customer decide if they trust them. Personally I wouldn't, but who am I to decide for my neighbor?
There is a difference between an asylum seeker and an immigrant and a migrant and an illegal immigrant.
Yes and no. No sovereign nation is obligated to allow anybody but its own citizens in. When you are any of the above people asking a country to admit you, regardless of the reason, you're standing at the gate, hat in hand, hoping that by their grace they let you in. If they tell you to jump, you ask how high.
If you don't want to follow their procedures and allow an invasive search of your property, then that's fine, ask another country to take you instead, or go back to your home country.
The first sentence, "I want out of the system and saw a way through good ole Unk," was decoded to, "I want out of the system and saw a way by skyjacking a jet plane."
And the second sentence, "And please tell the lackey cops D.B. Cooper is not my real name" was decoded to "I am 1st Lt. Robert Rackstraw, D.B. Cooper is not my real name"
Well. That settles it I guess. Fine work, fellas. Roll commercial!
Good old Rolling Stone, always light on specifics and heavy on unverified claims made by interview subjects.
I am in New York. They are phasing out the white plates back to the yellow ones. However you can keep the white ones, as long as you can transfer them to an other car. The yellow ones which cost more, are also of a cheaper build quality and I am seeing many of them starting to flake off.
In Ohio yellow license plates, colloquially known as party plates, are often issued by judges to DUI offenders as a visible indication that the registered owner has limited driving privileges.
Cops can and do single out yellow plated cars for more scrutiny. I had a rental car from NY for three weeks once while mine was in the shop. Twice I had cops flip on me after dark, something that never happens when I drive my regular vehicle. They presumably lost interest after realizing it was a NY plate and not seeing me commit any traffic violations. All's well that ends well but I try to avoid attracting unwanted attention in the first place.
You would think that NY being close to Ohio and leaning politically as it does would have considered that when deciding on what color to brand all of its citizens' vehicles with.
At least in this instance society derives some benefit from the scientific work. Increased costs due to the actions of others with no societal benefit already occur every day and we tolerate it, just like we'll tolerate road delays due to construction (which does actually have societal benefit).
When somebody causes an accident on the freeway and thousands of cars creep along for an hour they might each burn an extra half gallon or gallon of fuel, not to mention trucks that only get eight miles to the gallon under the best circumstances. I read an article once that a good fender-bender in the middle of rush hour may cost society $5,000 or more in increased gasoline consumption alone. Then you start looking at opportunity costs and the figures quickly skyrocket.
That's what you get when you buy something subject to wild price swings.:)
Oops, sorry, but in the 6ms it took to process your initial request the price of the currency doubled so we just need to sort that out. 6ms later, agh, drats, the price changed again. Just one more correction, that should do the trick, honest. 6ms later, dammit...
My favorite reference seeking question is "would you hire them back?" When the answer is "no", how it is said does speak volumes.
No need for any more details than that. Although I will say that while many companies do take the tight lipped approach there are also many that will talk your ear off for an hour if you let them.
It's funny how just now people are starting to care about bogus comments to NPMs. It's not new and both sides do it. The thing of it is though it doesn't really matter. While the APA requires public comment to be solicited it does not require the agency to weigh it.
It's not like voting for American Idol where the agency has to count how many people are for and against something and proceed accordingly. So long as the agency summarizes the distinct arguments (of which there might only be 10 or 12 among 100,000 comments) and somehow considers them it has more or less fulfilled its obligation under the APA. Assuming the APA is otherwise complied with one must prove abuse of discretion which is a pretty high bar.
If it were a popularity contest the ATF never would have gotten rule 41 put in place a few years ago. The comments were significantly weighed against the proposal and the final rule only gave scant consideration to the points raised in the comments.
But hey, give the current administration credit. At least they're seeking public comment on rulemakings rather than simply issuing "guidance" that more or less acts like a rule without going through the rulemaking process.
The latter. I don't really follow MMA that much but I guess around here McGregor is known to have a rough following. In some ways it became a self-perpetuating problem. As small bars decided against showing it due to cost that meant bars that were showing it were faced with the possibility of more people, many unknown.
So then your medium sized bars said wait, with nobody else showing it we will be overrun with people, some unsavory, the fire marshal will no doubt be counting heads so we'll need serious security to turn pissed off people away when we are at capacity and to deal with any drunken louts that inside.
I'm not sure why anyone pays for this shit anyway. Go to your local bar and spend the $hundred on beer and snacks support your local business and watch the show for free.
Oddly enough for this particular event this was not an option in my relatively urban area. My usual watering holes were not showing it (though they will often do other PPVs). Reasons varied between the cost to them and security concerns. The only two options in my area were $40 to watch it at a movie theater, which will be well over $100 if you and the wife go and each have one of their overpriced beers and some snacks. The other option was a Dave and Busters and they were charging a cover as well ($20) with no guarantee of a seat or even any wait service unless you bought the $50 VIP package.
A buddy went to Dave and Busters and he said it sucked. Literally wall to wall people, it took 20 minutes just to get to the bar to buy a single beer, and the place was crawling with cops.
Luckily a neighbor was "streaming" his PPV against his garage door using a projector. As long as you came with your own beer it was completely free, though most chipped in $10 or left the remains of a beer case. From a social perspective that's the way to go.
There is no one switch that would take out the entire facility
Then your facility may not be code compliant. Data centers are often required to have an emergency power off (EPO) button that does exactly this - kill power to the entire facility, or at the very least the room, across all sources and phases of power.
I believe the NEC was updated to remove this requirement in some situations but data centers built to the earlier standards still have them. The NEC is technically voluntary; it has no force of law until it is adopted by a local authority having jurisdiction (AHJ), and that AHJ is free to only adopt portions of the code or modify the requirements.
As an example a place I used to work has a small data center. When the NEC was updated it took three years before the city adopted that version of the NEC, and when they did they stated that the only way to remove the EPO button was to bring the entire facility up to the latest code, a very expensive undertaking.
while they could simply give me a red light controlled by a switch. Red=do not disturb...
A few years ago we used to have these little do not disturb flags to put on top of our cube when we were really busy. Naturally the top performers tended to be very busy and were often showing DND. Those with less things to do, or less productive almost never used it.
Management noticed, of course. But they didn't notice the right things. Instead of wondering why their average performers always had time to BS and their top performers didn't, they started letting it be known that having your DND flag up too much was kind of anti-social. Using it "too much" (not defined) was discouraged. Within three months the whole idea went kaput. Most of the top performers eventually moved on to other opportunities.
I'm not a programmer anymore but the best thing I ever did was start working remotely full time. If you're not physically there people tend to only bother you via IM/email when it's real work-related stuff. I think that's because it takes effort and it is logged (the joys of working in litigation), whereas plopping yourself in someone else's cube when you're out roaming the halls anyway does not. Thankfully no millennial knows how to use a telephone so I happily answer that when it rings.
The Dish FlexPacks are slowly heading that way. The base package does not include kids channels, RSNs, locals, or ESPN.
When I switched to it I was adamant that we did not want ESPN, nor would we pay for it. We'd cut the cord before we paid the ESPN tax again. The lady said you wouldn't believe how often they hear that.
We get locals OTA (plus many that Dish didn't carry) and with an OTA card for our Dish receiver you hardly know the difference from how they used to be. I did get the RSN to watch baseball but the lady helpfully pointed out that I'm free to add or remove packs anytime so she suggested that as soon as the season is over I should drop the RSN and not pay for it until the next season starts.
As usual! -- "the legal definition of boarding is not the common sense definition"
I know, and that's what worries me. Since the Contract of Carriage is just that, a contract, it's only natural that companies will interpret everything as favorable to them as possible and applying legal definitions where it suits them is right up that alley.
As a consumer there's no choice short of not buying the product, but it would behoove all of us to understand exactly what the rules are. And by the way, this is not a problem unique to United. Every airline has a CoC, and every one has provisions for being involuntarily denied boarding.
Also, denied boarding is a whole different ball game than being physically removed from the plane after already boarding.
Any aviation law experts here? I was talking to a pilot buddy of mine - he does charters, not air transport, but he said that the legal definition of boarding is not the common sense definition. In essence you have not boarded the plane until everyone is on and the door has been closed. At that point, everybody has boarded and the plane is legally "in flight" even though it hasn't left the gate. Thus, one can be denied boarding even though they're sitting in their seat.
If true that complicates the idea that once you set foot on the plane the rules about being denied boarding no longer apply (physically removing someone from a plane is an entirely separate matter).
At long last, we can figure out which jerk is using all the toilet paper and clogging the plumbing. As a bonus we can improve employee health!
Dear employee: We have noticed that you are using an average of 9.8 squares of toilet paper per wipe, and wiping an average of 19 times, 3.2 seconds per wipe, four times per day, and yet only spend an average of 6.4 seconds at the sink. And by the way, using your right hand for that is just nasty. Please report to the Employee Wellness center for voluntary tips on how to wash your hands and increase your fiber intake.
That's one thing MLB.TV does a good job at. Under normal circumstances you get to choose from the home or away television feed. And then you get to choose your audio and there's usually five choices: home/away TV audio, home/away radio audio, AND ambient stadium mic.
When I'm watching but not watching (i.e. multitasking) I usually select the radio announcers for my city. Overall their commentary is better than the TV guys and since they're describing the game for a radio audience I can follow along without having to watch the screen every time. But if I'm just sitting watching the game it's ambient stadium the whole way baby.
Incidentally we just got off the ESPN bandwagon. With the Dish FlexPack we get basic cable stations plus our regional sports network for $40 a month for two years. No ESPN and no local channels (those cost $10 each). Local channels are handled through an OTA antenna that hooks up to our Dish receiver and integrates with the program guide.
Sling was a strong possibility but it was only marginally cheaper and the reliability wasn't great. Even with a 60 meg internet connection it falls down on live sports with fast action like hockey and baseball, if the channel is even working that day. Yet MLB.tv has no issues showing ballgames. Plus it's a lot of dicking around to go back and forth between Sling and OTA.
It's no longer about where the jobs are. For a lot of people the office is wherever the worker happens to be. I work for major corporation but do so from home full time. I only have to physically visit a company facility a few times a year.
We just got back from three weeks in Arizona to catch spring ball, but it only cost me about a week of vacation, mostly taken an hour at a time. By staying on Eastern time and taking my laptop and Skype headset I could start my day at 4:30 AM and be done by noon. That left the whole afternoon to catch a game and do whatever. As long as I got to bed by 9:30 or so it was very sustainable. Most of my co-workers had no idea where I was because it didn't matter.
And don't forget having to put up with snazzy (read: slow) animations as it transitions from one screen to another and no ability to speed things up by rapidly pressing the needed buttons before the screen catches up.
It's not about convenience. It's about security. The apps are far superior from a security perspective. Leave your card locked up at home so no one gets it when they steal your wallet.
Whose security exactly? Certainly not mine. If my wallet is stolen and I make timely reports my liability for any fraud on my credit cards is exactly zero. I have three credit cards but only ever carry two. Even if those two get shut down for a week while I await replacements I've got my third one at home.
One of my cards was tied up in the Target breach and even though I'd never had a balance higher than $1,000 on a $10,000 limit Bank of America let some fraudsters exceed my limit by over $15,000 making multiple purchases of $2,000 worth of gift cards within minutes of each other at a Sams Club before calling me to verify the activity. About a week later I got new cards in the mail along with an affidavit to sign which I gladly did. I was surprised to see that in the end when they reversed the $25,000 in charges they didn't bother to reverse the 2% cash back I earned on those purchases. I called three times asking them to adjust that as well. Finally after letting the credits sit on my account for six months with no reversal I said fuck it and spent the $500. I'm still a customer and never heard another word.
I don't care if my phone would be more secure because at the micro level it doesn't affect me one bit. One might say that we all pay higher costs because of fraud and while that's true if all fraud went away tomorrow the consumers would never see a dime. When the big bad banks had their debit card interchange fees significantly curtailed we were all told how great it was for the consumer. I didn't see a single price drop anywhere. I did, however, see CEOs of big retailers celebrating their increased profitability to shareholders specifically citing reduced expenses in the transaction processing category. So basically instead of one asshole group of companies exploiting consumers we just shifted it to another while patting ourselves on the back for doing something good for the little guy.
Seems to me that the DOJ is going about this the wrong way. As the Affordable Care act has shown the government can't compel a private actor to do something. But it can tax the hell out of their refusal to do so.
I'm rather surprised they haven't schemed to let Apple continue to refuse but impose a tax of a billion dollars a day for doing so.
Slashdot Mirror
My recent calls log indicates I have only received 8 phone calls since 1 July.
I hope that does not count against me.
Wouldn't it be ironic if you got a lower score by actually using your iPhone as you know.... a phone?
Apple Bot 1: "This person made 30 calls yesterday from their iPhone"
Apple Bot 2: "Who the hell does that with a phone? Better knock a few points off. Clearly they're a scammer in the making."
For the record my father in law is a property manager for a senior living community. He averages 40-50 incoming and outgoing calls on a given workday. I, on the other hand, might make one call a day (and ignore five spam callers). Given this wide range how does one apply any meaningful analysis to it? Maybe I'm wrong but I really don't think robocallers use mobile phones and sanctioned apps to do their dirty work.
I've had a 20 year career without a degree. Most employers don't really care, and the ones that do aren't much worth working for. It's a bit of a red flag if you care about a check mark (in what could be a completely unrelated field) over actual experience.
There's the issue of critical mass. My company doesn't require a college degree for most positions and will instead accept so many years of prior experience. But how does one get that prior experience if years ago the only way to get a job with that experience was to have a degree? Lots of volunteering and working crappy jobs that at least get you in the door is how.
At the risk of sounding like the bitter old man, I'm worried about the current generation. A lot millennials come in expecting to be treated as someone who earned their chops on the front line for 5 or 10 years. They don't want to hear garbage about getting in, taking lumps, building your network and personal brand, acquiring those years of experience. No, they come in mostly wanting to know how much we will pay them to not work (what do you mean I'm not eligible for eight weeks' vacation and you won't guarantee to promote me to the "senior" role in six months?)
I had one young lady tell me it was outright discrimination that our company doesn't start giving more vacation until five years of service. Pro tip - never, ever, EVER, mention your concerns about discrimination in a job interview.
Would I refuse if someone offered me a two-digit million salary for the job? Of course not. But half of that salary would be paying me for doing something I'd rather prefer not to do, and a good part of it would go to coaches and other support to enable me to do it at all.
Ah, but then you'd be doing it wrong. Once you land the two-digit million salary the goal is you don't spend a penny of it. Muddle through it, make it a year and then walk away or get let go. Either way you'll never have to work for pay again. You can spend your time volunteering for something you're truly passionate about! :)
Until recently I worked in the financial services industry where this topic was being hotly debated. Set Facebook aside for a minute. Third party aggregation services like Mint.com have been around for a while. What they offer is a way for customers to access their own data from their platforms of choice.
A lot of it is accomplished by screen scraping - you give them your online banking credentials and a bot logs in to download your data and do something with it. Naturally there's risks and downsides to this.
As a group, customers are demanding access to their financial data outside of what FIs provide. Functionally this means some kind of an API where consumers can request that their bank share their information with specific third parties. Believe it or not, banks are not eager to open the floodgates. They're very reluctant to allow this to occur because there are big unanswered questions about who is responsible when things go wrong. Banks have obligations under GLBA to protect customer data. But when JoeBlow startup loses financial data given to them by a bank at a customer's request? Very much an open question. Same with fraud liability. On the other hand, regulatory bodies such as the CFPB are pushing for consumer ease of access.
Back to FB, no surprise that they'd want in on this. So long as they only get access to customers who have properly consented and so long as they have controls to properly protect the data entrusted to them, more power to 'em. Let the customer decide if they trust them. Personally I wouldn't, but who am I to decide for my neighbor?
There is a difference between an asylum seeker and an immigrant and a migrant and an illegal immigrant.
Yes and no. No sovereign nation is obligated to allow anybody but its own citizens in. When you are any of the above people asking a country to admit you, regardless of the reason, you're standing at the gate, hat in hand, hoping that by their grace they let you in. If they tell you to jump, you ask how high.
If you don't want to follow their procedures and allow an invasive search of your property, then that's fine, ask another country to take you instead, or go back to your home country.
The first sentence, "I want out of the system and saw a way through good ole Unk," was decoded to, "I want out of the system and saw a way by skyjacking a jet plane."
And the second sentence, "And please tell the lackey cops D.B. Cooper is not my real name" was decoded to "I am 1st Lt. Robert Rackstraw, D.B. Cooper is not my real name"
Well. That settles it I guess. Fine work, fellas. Roll commercial!
Good old Rolling Stone, always light on specifics and heavy on unverified claims made by interview subjects.
I am in New York. They are phasing out the white plates back to the yellow ones. However you can keep the white ones, as long as you can transfer them to an other car.
The yellow ones which cost more, are also of a cheaper build quality and I am seeing many of them starting to flake off.
In Ohio yellow license plates, colloquially known as party plates, are often issued by judges to DUI offenders as a visible indication that the registered owner has limited driving privileges.
Cops can and do single out yellow plated cars for more scrutiny. I had a rental car from NY for three weeks once while mine was in the shop. Twice I had cops flip on me after dark, something that never happens when I drive my regular vehicle. They presumably lost interest after realizing it was a NY plate and not seeing me commit any traffic violations. All's well that ends well but I try to avoid attracting unwanted attention in the first place.
You would think that NY being close to Ohio and leaning politically as it does would have considered that when deciding on what color to brand all of its citizens' vehicles with.
At least in this instance society derives some benefit from the scientific work. Increased costs due to the actions of others with no societal benefit already occur every day and we tolerate it, just like we'll tolerate road delays due to construction (which does actually have societal benefit).
When somebody causes an accident on the freeway and thousands of cars creep along for an hour they might each burn an extra half gallon or gallon of fuel, not to mention trucks that only get eight miles to the gallon under the best circumstances. I read an article once that a good fender-bender in the middle of rush hour may cost society $5,000 or more in increased gasoline consumption alone. Then you start looking at opportunity costs and the figures quickly skyrocket.
That's just the way the world works.
That's what you get when you buy something subject to wild price swings. :)
Oops, sorry, but in the 6ms it took to process your initial request the price of the currency doubled so we just need to sort that out. 6ms later, agh, drats, the price changed again. Just one more correction, that should do the trick, honest. 6ms later, dammit...
My favorite reference seeking question is "would you hire them back?" When the answer is "no", how it is said does speak volumes.
No need for any more details than that. Although I will say that while many companies do take the tight lipped approach there are also many that will talk your ear off for an hour if you let them.
It's funny how just now people are starting to care about bogus comments to NPMs. It's not new and both sides do it. The thing of it is though it doesn't really matter. While the APA requires public comment to be solicited it does not require the agency to weigh it.
It's not like voting for American Idol where the agency has to count how many people are for and against something and proceed accordingly. So long as the agency summarizes the distinct arguments (of which there might only be 10 or 12 among 100,000 comments) and somehow considers them it has more or less fulfilled its obligation under the APA. Assuming the APA is otherwise complied with one must prove abuse of discretion which is a pretty high bar.
If it were a popularity contest the ATF never would have gotten rule 41 put in place a few years ago. The comments were significantly weighed against the proposal and the final rule only gave scant consideration to the points raised in the comments.
But hey, give the current administration credit. At least they're seeking public comment on rulemakings rather than simply issuing "guidance" that more or less acts like a rule without going through the rulemaking process.
Terrusts? Getting hacked? Or drunk paddies?
The latter. I don't really follow MMA that much but I guess around here McGregor is known to have a rough following. In some ways it became a self-perpetuating problem. As small bars decided against showing it due to cost that meant bars that were showing it were faced with the possibility of more people, many unknown.
So then your medium sized bars said wait, with nobody else showing it we will be overrun with people, some unsavory, the fire marshal will no doubt be counting heads so we'll need serious security to turn pissed off people away when we are at capacity and to deal with any drunken louts that inside.
I'm not sure why anyone pays for this shit anyway. Go to your local bar and spend the $hundred on beer and snacks support your local business and watch the show for free.
Oddly enough for this particular event this was not an option in my relatively urban area. My usual watering holes were not showing it (though they will often do other PPVs). Reasons varied between the cost to them and security concerns. The only two options in my area were $40 to watch it at a movie theater, which will be well over $100 if you and the wife go and each have one of their overpriced beers and some snacks. The other option was a Dave and Busters and they were charging a cover as well ($20) with no guarantee of a seat or even any wait service unless you bought the $50 VIP package.
A buddy went to Dave and Busters and he said it sucked. Literally wall to wall people, it took 20 minutes just to get to the bar to buy a single beer, and the place was crawling with cops.
Luckily a neighbor was "streaming" his PPV against his garage door using a projector. As long as you came with your own beer it was completely free, though most chipped in $10 or left the remains of a beer case. From a social perspective that's the way to go.
There is no one switch that would take out the entire facility
Then your facility may not be code compliant. Data centers are often required to have an emergency power off (EPO) button that does exactly this - kill power to the entire facility, or at the very least the room, across all sources and phases of power.
I believe the NEC was updated to remove this requirement in some situations but data centers built to the earlier standards still have them. The NEC is technically voluntary; it has no force of law until it is adopted by a local authority having jurisdiction (AHJ), and that AHJ is free to only adopt portions of the code or modify the requirements.
As an example a place I used to work has a small data center. When the NEC was updated it took three years before the city adopted that version of the NEC, and when they did they stated that the only way to remove the EPO button was to bring the entire facility up to the latest code, a very expensive undertaking.
while they could simply give me a red light controlled by a switch. Red=do not disturb...
A few years ago we used to have these little do not disturb flags to put on top of our cube when we were really busy. Naturally the top performers tended to be very busy and were often showing DND. Those with less things to do, or less productive almost never used it.
Management noticed, of course. But they didn't notice the right things. Instead of wondering why their average performers always had time to BS and their top performers didn't, they started letting it be known that having your DND flag up too much was kind of anti-social. Using it "too much" (not defined) was discouraged. Within three months the whole idea went kaput. Most of the top performers eventually moved on to other opportunities.
I'm not a programmer anymore but the best thing I ever did was start working remotely full time. If you're not physically there people tend to only bother you via IM/email when it's real work-related stuff. I think that's because it takes effort and it is logged (the joys of working in litigation), whereas plopping yourself in someone else's cube when you're out roaming the halls anyway does not. Thankfully no millennial knows how to use a telephone so I happily answer that when it rings.
The Dish FlexPacks are slowly heading that way. The base package does not include kids channels, RSNs, locals, or ESPN.
When I switched to it I was adamant that we did not want ESPN, nor would we pay for it. We'd cut the cord before we paid the ESPN tax again. The lady said you wouldn't believe how often they hear that.
We get locals OTA (plus many that Dish didn't carry) and with an OTA card for our Dish receiver you hardly know the difference from how they used to be. I did get the RSN to watch baseball but the lady helpfully pointed out that I'm free to add or remove packs anytime so she suggested that as soon as the season is over I should drop the RSN and not pay for it until the next season starts.
As usual! -- "the legal definition of boarding is not the common sense definition"
I know, and that's what worries me. Since the Contract of Carriage is just that, a contract, it's only natural that companies will interpret everything as favorable to them as possible and applying legal definitions where it suits them is right up that alley.
As a consumer there's no choice short of not buying the product, but it would behoove all of us to understand exactly what the rules are. And by the way, this is not a problem unique to United. Every airline has a CoC, and every one has provisions for being involuntarily denied boarding.
Also, denied boarding is a whole different ball game than being physically removed from the plane after already boarding.
Any aviation law experts here? I was talking to a pilot buddy of mine - he does charters, not air transport, but he said that the legal definition of boarding is not the common sense definition. In essence you have not boarded the plane until everyone is on and the door has been closed. At that point, everybody has boarded and the plane is legally "in flight" even though it hasn't left the gate. Thus, one can be denied boarding even though they're sitting in their seat.
If true that complicates the idea that once you set foot on the plane the rules about being denied boarding no longer apply (physically removing someone from a plane is an entirely separate matter).
At long last, we can figure out which jerk is using all the toilet paper and clogging the plumbing. As a bonus we can improve employee health!
Dear employee: We have noticed that you are using an average of 9.8 squares of toilet paper per wipe, and wiping an average of 19 times, 3.2 seconds per wipe, four times per day, and yet only spend an average of 6.4 seconds at the sink. And by the way, using your right hand for that is just nasty. Please report to the Employee Wellness center for voluntary tips on how to wash your hands and increase your fiber intake.
That's one thing MLB.TV does a good job at. Under normal circumstances you get to choose from the home or away television feed. And then you get to choose your audio and there's usually five choices: home/away TV audio, home/away radio audio, AND ambient stadium mic.
When I'm watching but not watching (i.e. multitasking) I usually select the radio announcers for my city. Overall their commentary is better than the TV guys and since they're describing the game for a radio audience I can follow along without having to watch the screen every time. But if I'm just sitting watching the game it's ambient stadium the whole way baby.
Incidentally we just got off the ESPN bandwagon. With the Dish FlexPack we get basic cable stations plus our regional sports network for $40 a month for two years. No ESPN and no local channels (those cost $10 each). Local channels are handled through an OTA antenna that hooks up to our Dish receiver and integrates with the program guide.
Sling was a strong possibility but it was only marginally cheaper and the reliability wasn't great. Even with a 60 meg internet connection it falls down on live sports with fast action like hockey and baseball, if the channel is even working that day. Yet MLB.tv has no issues showing ballgames. Plus it's a lot of dicking around to go back and forth between Sling and OTA.
It's no longer about where the jobs are. For a lot of people the office is wherever the worker happens to be. I work for major corporation but do so from home full time. I only have to physically visit a company facility a few times a year.
We just got back from three weeks in Arizona to catch spring ball, but it only cost me about a week of vacation, mostly taken an hour at a time. By staying on Eastern time and taking my laptop and Skype headset I could start my day at 4:30 AM and be done by noon. That left the whole afternoon to catch a game and do whatever. As long as I got to bed by 9:30 or so it was very sustainable. Most of my co-workers had no idea where I was because it didn't matter.
And don't forget having to put up with snazzy (read: slow) animations as it transitions from one screen to another and no ability to speed things up by rapidly pressing the needed buttons before the screen catches up.
It's not about convenience. It's about security. The apps are far superior from a security perspective. Leave your card locked up at home so no one gets it when they steal your wallet.
Whose security exactly? Certainly not mine. If my wallet is stolen and I make timely reports my liability for any fraud on my credit cards is exactly zero. I have three credit cards but only ever carry two. Even if those two get shut down for a week while I await replacements I've got my third one at home.
One of my cards was tied up in the Target breach and even though I'd never had a balance higher than $1,000 on a $10,000 limit Bank of America let some fraudsters exceed my limit by over $15,000 making multiple purchases of $2,000 worth of gift cards within minutes of each other at a Sams Club before calling me to verify the activity. About a week later I got new cards in the mail along with an affidavit to sign which I gladly did. I was surprised to see that in the end when they reversed the $25,000 in charges they didn't bother to reverse the 2% cash back I earned on those purchases. I called three times asking them to adjust that as well. Finally after letting the credits sit on my account for six months with no reversal I said fuck it and spent the $500. I'm still a customer and never heard another word.
I don't care if my phone would be more secure because at the micro level it doesn't affect me one bit. One might say that we all pay higher costs because of fraud and while that's true if all fraud went away tomorrow the consumers would never see a dime. When the big bad banks had their debit card interchange fees significantly curtailed we were all told how great it was for the consumer. I didn't see a single price drop anywhere. I did, however, see CEOs of big retailers celebrating their increased profitability to shareholders specifically citing reduced expenses in the transaction processing category. So basically instead of one asshole group of companies exploiting consumers we just shifted it to another while patting ourselves on the back for doing something good for the little guy.
Installing it on my brand new AT&T iPhone SE right now...
Seems to me that the DOJ is going about this the wrong way. As the Affordable Care act has shown the government can't compel a private actor to do something. But it can tax the hell out of their refusal to do so.
I'm rather surprised they haven't schemed to let Apple continue to refuse but impose a tax of a billion dollars a day for doing so.