Subscribers get a debit card from them and they have access to smartphone location data. They're getting their RoI on the info they gather from their subscribers. While the average slashdotter is smart enough to work around this (burner phone with data plan, or various phone configuration settings, etc) most users will blissfully turn that over without a second thought.
The only places at the local mall open past 10PM are bars and the movie theater. The mall itself is in a different town than most of the surrounding roads, so the (very bored) town cops will wait at the town line and nab DUIs all night - it would be hilarious if one of those caught had come out of a movie rather than a bar. There's no excuse to drive drunk: the city buses run past midnight, the mall has a taxi stand, and overnight parking is allowed (so they can leave their car without fear of ticketing). Yet every night without fail there's at least one driver caught.
For this one you're giving this company a lot of personal info in exchange for the "free" movie ticket.
On the very rare occasion I actually want to see a movie (which has never been more than once in a month), I'll buy the tickets through the union for $6 each. Since I can buy more than one at that rate, I'm not stuck convincing my buddies to pay 2-3x more than I am to go out to a movie. College students and employees can get similar deals through student associations and the like. People just have to actually look for these deals, they won't be advertised on Slashdot.
Unless that renewable plant was built specifically to generate power for you (i.e. it wouldn't have been built otherwise), all you're doing is depriving someone else of renewable energy that they would've gotten if you hadn't built your company there.
Interesting example of this. The Safe Harbor Dam in PA was built with several turbines dedicated to powering the Pennsylvania Railroad (now Amtrak)'s 25 Hz overhead lines. Without the railroad as a customer there would have been less turbines installed in the initial construction, so the PRR was partially a "green" company in that sense.
Over the years many more turbines were added (all 60 Hz), so it stands to reason that there would be the same number today regardless of the original customers. So at what point did/will it cease to be "green" for Amtrak to use that power station?
Perhaps more importantly is why would you seek to circumvent this one... Maduro's government is even more stupid and evil [elpais.com] than Chavez' was
One valid reason to want to put your hat in the ring is if it actually goes somewhere, getting in on the ground floor can make you a lot of money. Evil can be profitable, and for those that do not believe in some form of karma, afterlife, or divine punishment, there's no logical reason to not take advantage provided any potential punishment is outweighed by the profit. See: the premise of Breaking Bad.
Just as you are supposed NOT to spend your money on goods sold by ISIS, you are not supposed to buy Venezuelan bonds, including the petro.
In that case I wonder why Citgo is still allowed to operate in the US. Oh yeah, because entrenched interests like it that way. Funny how calls of "national security" don't apply when influential people with large amounts of money stand to lose it...
Why is AC being downmodded - Trump can't even get the courts to allow things he *is* allowed to regulate, like immigration. Nothing about this is an emergency - Venezuela isn't going to take the pennies Americans might throw at their new currency and build WMDs with it. If there's fear that the new currency will somehow take away our stranglehold on the price of oil, banning it from America will do fuck all to stop the global markets from using it anyway.
The executive branch enforces the laws. Unless there exists a law that violating this ban would also infringe, someone with enough money to see this through court can get it blocked or overturned.
Of course Joe Blow in his basement buying some crypto-bolivars (or whatever) would have no ability to stop the SS* from dragging him from his home, shooting his dog, and destroying his computers...
As in Secret Service, who deals with currency related issues, but pun partially intended.
The problem is the hack for enforcing speed limits - timer signals. Basically, train passes spot "a", a hidden timer starts counting, signal at spot "b" turns green if the timer runs out before the train gets there, otherwise it stays red. If you ride up front (on one of the few trains where you can see the same as the operator), you can see how the timer signals work and see the speed the train is going (either with a GPS app on your phone, or by peeking through the gap in the door to the cab). Here's a typical interaction:
A sign says "GT 35" meaning 35 MPH enforced speed limit. Great. Except, even in a perfect world, if they actually go 35, they will not see the signal clear - the timer would hit zero the second the train reaches it. So they have to go 34. But, the speedometers aren't perfectly calibrated and may be off by up to 3MPH, so now down to 31. But wait, the signals aren't calibrated right either; some of them say 35 but are actually counting down too fast (not like there's a quartz crystal in there), it could be off by as much as 5MPH. The end result is, in an enforced 35, the operator can only "safely" (as in his keeping his/her job safe) go 26. Experienced operators will instinctively know the fastest they can get away with, but anyone new will follow the rule of 9MPH under the limit. Since throughput during rush hours is only as fast as the slowest train, one overly cautious operator can tank the schedule for all the trains behind him.
Now one solution to this justified over-caution was "two shot" timers - there are two signals. The first one is yellow with an S under it, the second red. If the first one clears to green before the train passes it, the second one also turns green. If the first one does not clear to green, the operator has to slow down so that his average speed since the start of the first timer is slower than the enforced limit, or the second one remains red. So if he enters a 25 going 35, in order to make that second shot he has to drop down to somewhere around 15 (but likely that won't be enough, so they will instead come to a complete stop). In the case of two shot timers, to deal with a 25MPH enforced speed limit, trains operators who make a mistake on the first shot are reducing their speed to 0 for several seconds. All this has to do is happen once to cause a ripple effect on all trains behind.
At a lot of the locations these timer signals do not make any sense. Some of them are on uphill grades. Some are on banked curves designed for 60MPH running - if it were simply a signal system limitation that had them slow down the trains, there would be no reason to treat curves any differently from straightaways. The speed restrictions designed for human limitations on reaction time were also copied over to the modern signal system the L train uses without being re-evaluated (in other words, they fixed the original problem from 1995 but left in the hack). Thus why it is an expose - reducing speeds is now a kneejerk reaction to any perceived danger, bordering on superstition.
The subway runs an operating profit, I think it came out to something like 20 cents a passenger. However that money is "shared" with the New York City Transit side of the bus system, which runs at a loss.
If they were to eliminate the bus-subway transfers and separate the revenue pools, the subway would probably be shown to operate at even more of a profit (since a lot of people take an unofficial round trip discount by taking the subway one way and the bus back).
There's a time to give fucks, and a time to withhold them. The USA gives too many, China gives too few. Europe and Japan seem to have struck the right balance; we need to see where we went wrong.
Texas Central is confident they will transport the first true high speed passengers in the country, despite not having yet turned a shovel. If they can manage to reach construction, I think they will win because the route is easier (mostly flat open land), 100% new build (versus sharing with existing passenger/freight RoW), and less encumbered by regulations (e.g. FRA crash safety standards can be relaxed as it does not connect to the national freight network).
And by not taking government subsidy, they were able to come up with the route of "least resistance" versus routes that involve deviating to serve every local politician's one horse town. Stations are pretty expensive, and by only having one intermediate one they save on cost, time, and legal wrangling.
While the Interstate system is a great success story, it spawned the very hurdles that CAHSR is trying to overcome. Highways were built by: 1. Siezing and demolishing everything they *might* need to use for a RoW 2. Completely ignoring anything resembling environmental impact
The only reason we have our successful system now is that by the time the legal system caught up and mechanisms to stop the "destruction" were put in place, most of it was already built.
Engineering, labor and materials costs have mostly kept up with inflation. At this point that's maybe 20% of the total cost of this project; the rest is in fighting lawsuits.
Light in the morning is completely useless except to help people wake up. A 150 watt equivalent daylight bulb on a timer will do the same thing. Even with DST "turned off", during the winter months if I see sunshine and am still in bed, I'm already late for work.
Conversely, light in the evening makes, at a bare minimum, going home safer against crime. This also has a financial impact: for example due to incidents of robbery, rape, and carjacking the local university is required to provide any employee who requests an escort to their car after dark. During DST when the sun sets before the standard departure time of 5PM, this results in a need to hire more escorts. Similarly, the local state offices begrudgingly allow people to move their cars from farther lots to the closer higher seniority / visitor lots after 3PM. The productivity loss of government employees and contractors casing parking lots for closer spaces every afternoon is surely incurred somewhere.
And then there's the Jewish reason. Since they can't do any work (which includes driving) after sundown Friday, early sundown causes staffing issues.
I fail to see any legitimate reason for light in the morning hours that isn't overshadowed by a correspondingly better reason for light in the evening hours.
If Vermont asks really nicely, maybe someone can let them join the Atlantic club. Elsewhere an AC mentioned PA. I completely forgot those poor bastards have NJ's fat arse blocking them from the ocean. They can join out of pity. Plus western NY would get lonely being surrounded on all sides by eastern time.
I have to drive East in the morning and West in the evening so the sun is in everyone's eyes the entire time.
Me too, but I'll throw in a further annoyance. Not only do I have that unpleasantness on the highway, but after exiting I drive west on local roads in the morning (/east in the afternoon), which means the sun is shining on the traffic lights at just the perfect angle that I have no idea what they read, unless I'm 3 cars back. The pedestrian lights only change if someone pushes the button, so whoever the first car is has to deduce whether the light has changed based on how long the cross traffic has stopped and if no one is confidently turning left in the opposite direction.
You're in the western edge of the time zone, so it's fine for you. Your earliest sunset each year is 4:41 PM, and the sun sets before 5PM From November 8th to January 10th. In Boston for example, the earliest sunset is 4:11 PM, a full half hour earlier, and the sun sets before 5PM from November 5th (instantly when DST ends) to Feburary 3rd. In other words, this translates to an entire extra month of not seeing the sun after work for a typical office worker, a problem that would disappear if us east coasters were in Atlantic time (year round) instead of Standard time for those few months DST is not in effect.
Puerto Rico is in Atlantic time, which matches Eastern Daylight time. So with this change, Florida and Puerto Rico would always be in the same time zone. MA also wants to join Atlantic time. NYers when asked also want to stay in EDT permanently (aka join Atlantic time).
Let's make this real easy. Move all states that touch the Atlantic ocean to year-round Atlantic time. Sorted.
Problems with remote work: 1. If a company goes 100% work from home, they could outsource to India. 2. When a company decides remote work is not working, they make everyone come in full time, massively disrupting everyone's lives.
These issues can both be avoided with a combination of the two - where I am allows for up to 5 days work from home every 2 weeks. This is quite flexible, since you can do 1 week on-1 week off, or alternate days, or any other pattern employee and supervisor agree on. The above problems are solved because: 1. Management seeing and interacting with the employees goes a long way to stave off offshoring ideas. It places a concrete value on locally available employees. 2. They're more likely to tweak individual work plans if there's a problem, rather than blanket rescinding permissions for everyone (i.e. Yahoo). It's less disruptive for both sides if management asks an arbitrary handful of employees to change their days to facilitate a project than if those same employees suddenly have to come in when they may not have even seen the office in years.
Brilliant law, just like getting people for DUI in a parked car. It encourages people do the illegal behavior while moving, as they are less likely to get caught.
Not arguing for less control at all (especially if you read my first point). The difference is it's easier for a novice to royally screw something up. The Windows equivalent of my chmod command can also be done, but it requires clicking through a large number of hurdles before it will allow it to happen, any one of which will help the user realize "shit I thought I was just changing permissions on my documents, not all the system shit, lemme cancel out of this...".
In Windows (hell even the Server variants) it's a lot harder to click yourself into a hole you can't get out of without simply reversing course. In Linux it is easy to click into a hole that requires command line to get out of. A good example is the simple Nvidia utility that will rewrite your xorg.conf. Sometimes whatever it spits out can result in a system where GUI will not start. Or the GUI starts but the mouse doesn't work right. For a Linux novice this is game over, time to reinstall. Nowadays simply deleting xorg.conf results in somewhat of a safe mode for X, but this temporary remedy isn't nearly as obvious as the basic, plain as day "safe mode" prompt which appears after you frustratingly hard power cycle your PC.
As for security, the biggest mistake a Linux admin can make is thinking they can't get hacked. I've seen it happen, because Middleware folk never update their part of the stack because the process is more complicated on Linux than their brains can handle. Our Windows servers get hacked *less*, because the userland software on it actually gets updated, because the process is easier and less likely to break a working application. Part of that is the fault of companies like...BM and...racle. 0patch sucks on Windows but is a downright nightmare on Linux.
Slashdot Mirror
Subscribers get a debit card from them and they have access to smartphone location data. They're getting their RoI on the info they gather from their subscribers. While the average slashdotter is smart enough to work around this (burner phone with data plan, or various phone configuration settings, etc) most users will blissfully turn that over without a second thought.
The only places at the local mall open past 10PM are bars and the movie theater. The mall itself is in a different town than most of the surrounding roads, so the (very bored) town cops will wait at the town line and nab DUIs all night - it would be hilarious if one of those caught had come out of a movie rather than a bar. There's no excuse to drive drunk: the city buses run past midnight, the mall has a taxi stand, and overnight parking is allowed (so they can leave their car without fear of ticketing). Yet every night without fail there's at least one driver caught.
For this one you're giving this company a lot of personal info in exchange for the "free" movie ticket.
On the very rare occasion I actually want to see a movie (which has never been more than once in a month), I'll buy the tickets through the union for $6 each. Since I can buy more than one at that rate, I'm not stuck convincing my buddies to pay 2-3x more than I am to go out to a movie. College students and employees can get similar deals through student associations and the like. People just have to actually look for these deals, they won't be advertised on Slashdot.
Unless that renewable plant was built specifically to generate power for you (i.e. it wouldn't have been built otherwise), all you're doing is depriving someone else of renewable energy that they would've gotten if you hadn't built your company there.
Interesting example of this. The Safe Harbor Dam in PA was built with several turbines dedicated to powering the Pennsylvania Railroad (now Amtrak)'s 25 Hz overhead lines. Without the railroad as a customer there would have been less turbines installed in the initial construction, so the PRR was partially a "green" company in that sense.
Over the years many more turbines were added (all 60 Hz), so it stands to reason that there would be the same number today regardless of the original customers. So at what point did/will it cease to be "green" for Amtrak to use that power station?
Perhaps more importantly is why would you seek to circumvent this one... Maduro's government is even more stupid and evil [elpais.com] than Chavez' was
One valid reason to want to put your hat in the ring is if it actually goes somewhere, getting in on the ground floor can make you a lot of money. Evil can be profitable, and for those that do not believe in some form of karma, afterlife, or divine punishment, there's no logical reason to not take advantage provided any potential punishment is outweighed by the profit. See: the premise of Breaking Bad.
Just as you are supposed NOT to spend your money on goods sold by ISIS, you are not supposed to buy Venezuelan bonds, including the petro.
In that case I wonder why Citgo is still allowed to operate in the US. Oh yeah, because entrenched interests like it that way. Funny how calls of "national security" don't apply when influential people with large amounts of money stand to lose it...
Why is AC being downmodded - Trump can't even get the courts to allow things he *is* allowed to regulate, like immigration. Nothing about this is an emergency - Venezuela isn't going to take the pennies Americans might throw at their new currency and build WMDs with it. If there's fear that the new currency will somehow take away our stranglehold on the price of oil, banning it from America will do fuck all to stop the global markets from using it anyway.
The executive branch enforces the laws. Unless there exists a law that violating this ban would also infringe, someone with enough money to see this through court can get it blocked or overturned.
Of course Joe Blow in his basement buying some crypto-bolivars (or whatever) would have no ability to stop the SS* from dragging him from his home, shooting his dog, and destroying his computers...
As in Secret Service, who deals with currency related issues, but pun partially intended.
The problem is the hack for enforcing speed limits - timer signals. Basically, train passes spot "a", a hidden timer starts counting, signal at spot "b" turns green if the timer runs out before the train gets there, otherwise it stays red. If you ride up front (on one of the few trains where you can see the same as the operator), you can see how the timer signals work and see the speed the train is going (either with a GPS app on your phone, or by peeking through the gap in the door to the cab). Here's a typical interaction:
A sign says "GT 35" meaning 35 MPH enforced speed limit. Great. Except, even in a perfect world, if they actually go 35, they will not see the signal clear - the timer would hit zero the second the train reaches it. So they have to go 34. But, the speedometers aren't perfectly calibrated and may be off by up to 3MPH, so now down to 31. But wait, the signals aren't calibrated right either; some of them say 35 but are actually counting down too fast (not like there's a quartz crystal in there), it could be off by as much as 5MPH. The end result is, in an enforced 35, the operator can only "safely" (as in his keeping his/her job safe) go 26. Experienced operators will instinctively know the fastest they can get away with, but anyone new will follow the rule of 9MPH under the limit. Since throughput during rush hours is only as fast as the slowest train, one overly cautious operator can tank the schedule for all the trains behind him.
Now one solution to this justified over-caution was "two shot" timers - there are two signals. The first one is yellow with an S under it, the second red. If the first one clears to green before the train passes it, the second one also turns green. If the first one does not clear to green, the operator has to slow down so that his average speed since the start of the first timer is slower than the enforced limit, or the second one remains red. So if he enters a 25 going 35, in order to make that second shot he has to drop down to somewhere around 15 (but likely that won't be enough, so they will instead come to a complete stop). In the case of two shot timers, to deal with a 25MPH enforced speed limit, trains operators who make a mistake on the first shot are reducing their speed to 0 for several seconds. All this has to do is happen once to cause a ripple effect on all trains behind.
At a lot of the locations these timer signals do not make any sense. Some of them are on uphill grades. Some are on banked curves designed for 60MPH running - if it were simply a signal system limitation that had them slow down the trains, there would be no reason to treat curves any differently from straightaways. The speed restrictions designed for human limitations on reaction time were also copied over to the modern signal system the L train uses without being re-evaluated (in other words, they fixed the original problem from 1995 but left in the hack). Thus why it is an expose - reducing speeds is now a kneejerk reaction to any perceived danger, bordering on superstition.
The subway runs an operating profit, I think it came out to something like 20 cents a passenger. However that money is "shared" with the New York City Transit side of the bus system, which runs at a loss.
If they were to eliminate the bus-subway transfers and separate the revenue pools, the subway would probably be shown to operate at even more of a profit (since a lot of people take an unofficial round trip discount by taking the subway one way and the bus back).
There's a time to give fucks, and a time to withhold them. The USA gives too many, China gives too few. Europe and Japan seem to have struck the right balance; we need to see where we went wrong.
Texas Central is confident they will transport the first true high speed passengers in the country, despite not having yet turned a shovel. If they can manage to reach construction, I think they will win because the route is easier (mostly flat open land), 100% new build (versus sharing with existing passenger/freight RoW), and less encumbered by regulations (e.g. FRA crash safety standards can be relaxed as it does not connect to the national freight network).
And by not taking government subsidy, they were able to come up with the route of "least resistance" versus routes that involve deviating to serve every local politician's one horse town. Stations are pretty expensive, and by only having one intermediate one they save on cost, time, and legal wrangling.
While the Interstate system is a great success story, it spawned the very hurdles that CAHSR is trying to overcome. Highways were built by:
1. Siezing and demolishing everything they *might* need to use for a RoW
2. Completely ignoring anything resembling environmental impact
The only reason we have our successful system now is that by the time the legal system caught up and mechanisms to stop the "destruction" were put in place, most of it was already built.
Engineering, labor and materials costs have mostly kept up with inflation. At this point that's maybe 20% of the total cost of this project; the rest is in fighting lawsuits.
Light in the morning is completely useless except to help people wake up. A 150 watt equivalent daylight bulb on a timer will do the same thing.
Even with DST "turned off", during the winter months if I see sunshine and am still in bed, I'm already late for work.
Conversely, light in the evening makes, at a bare minimum, going home safer against crime. This also has a financial impact: for example due to incidents of robbery, rape, and carjacking the local university is required to provide any employee who requests an escort to their car after dark. During DST when the sun sets before the standard departure time of 5PM, this results in a need to hire more escorts. Similarly, the local state offices begrudgingly allow people to move their cars from farther lots to the closer higher seniority / visitor lots after 3PM. The productivity loss of government employees and contractors casing parking lots for closer spaces every afternoon is surely incurred somewhere.
And then there's the Jewish reason. Since they can't do any work (which includes driving) after sundown Friday, early sundown causes staffing issues.
I fail to see any legitimate reason for light in the morning hours that isn't overshadowed by a correspondingly better reason for light in the evening hours.
... so that part would now be in the Eastern time zone and is essentially what Indiana was until a decade or so ago.
And don't worry too much about the DST discrepancy. Florida might be starting a trend which will hopefully sweep the entire country.
If Vermont asks really nicely, maybe someone can let them join the Atlantic club.
Elsewhere an AC mentioned PA. I completely forgot those poor bastards have NJ's fat arse blocking them from the ocean. They can join out of pity. Plus western NY would get lonely being surrounded on all sides by eastern time.
Correct, actually. This is moving the state of Florida into Atlantic time.
I have to drive East in the morning and West in the evening so the sun is in everyone's eyes the entire time.
Me too, but I'll throw in a further annoyance. Not only do I have that unpleasantness on the highway, but after exiting I drive west on local roads in the morning (/east in the afternoon), which means the sun is shining on the traffic lights at just the perfect angle that I have no idea what they read, unless I'm 3 cars back. The pedestrian lights only change if someone pushes the button, so whoever the first car is has to deduce whether the light has changed based on how long the cross traffic has stopped and if no one is confidently turning left in the opposite direction.
You're in the western edge of the time zone, so it's fine for you. Your earliest sunset each year is 4:41 PM, and the sun sets before 5PM From November 8th to January 10th. In Boston for example, the earliest sunset is 4:11 PM, a full half hour earlier, and the sun sets before 5PM from November 5th (instantly when DST ends) to Feburary 3rd.
In other words, this translates to an entire extra month of not seeing the sun after work for a typical office worker, a problem that would disappear if us east coasters were in Atlantic time (year round) instead of Standard time for those few months DST is not in effect.
The alt-text on that one is brilliant.
Puerto Rico is in Atlantic time, which matches Eastern Daylight time. So with this change, Florida and Puerto Rico would always be in the same time zone.
MA also wants to join Atlantic time. NYers when asked also want to stay in EDT permanently (aka join Atlantic time).
Let's make this real easy. Move all states that touch the Atlantic ocean to year-round Atlantic time. Sorted.
Problems with remote work:
1. If a company goes 100% work from home, they could outsource to India.
2. When a company decides remote work is not working, they make everyone come in full time, massively disrupting everyone's lives.
These issues can both be avoided with a combination of the two - where I am allows for up to 5 days work from home every 2 weeks. This is quite flexible, since you can do 1 week on-1 week off, or alternate days, or any other pattern employee and supervisor agree on. The above problems are solved because:
1. Management seeing and interacting with the employees goes a long way to stave off offshoring ideas. It places a concrete value on locally available employees.
2. They're more likely to tweak individual work plans if there's a problem, rather than blanket rescinding permissions for everyone (i.e. Yahoo). It's less disruptive for both sides if management asks an arbitrary handful of employees to change their days to facilitate a project than if those same employees suddenly have to come in when they may not have even seen the office in years.
Brilliant law, just like getting people for DUI in a parked car. It encourages people do the illegal behavior while moving, as they are less likely to get caught.
Because someone is paying for the damage and getting a rate hike, might as well make damn sure it's the asshat who caused it.
Not arguing for less control at all (especially if you read my first point). The difference is it's easier for a novice to royally screw something up. The Windows equivalent of my chmod command can also be done, but it requires clicking through a large number of hurdles before it will allow it to happen, any one of which will help the user realize "shit I thought I was just changing permissions on my documents, not all the system shit, lemme cancel out of this...".
In Windows (hell even the Server variants) it's a lot harder to click yourself into a hole you can't get out of without simply reversing course. In Linux it is easy to click into a hole that requires command line to get out of. A good example is the simple Nvidia utility that will rewrite your xorg.conf. Sometimes whatever it spits out can result in a system where GUI will not start. Or the GUI starts but the mouse doesn't work right. For a Linux novice this is game over, time to reinstall. Nowadays simply deleting xorg.conf results in somewhat of a safe mode for X, but this temporary remedy isn't nearly as obvious as the basic, plain as day "safe mode" prompt which appears after you frustratingly hard power cycle your PC.
As for security, the biggest mistake a Linux admin can make is thinking they can't get hacked. I've seen it happen, because Middleware folk never update their part of the stack because the process is more complicated on Linux than their brains can handle. Our Windows servers get hacked *less*, because the userland software on it actually gets updated, because the process is easier and less likely to break a working application. Part of that is the fault of companies like ...BM and ...racle. 0patch sucks on Windows but is a downright nightmare on Linux.