Allthough, there are situations where giving up is the correct thing to do. Not because you -cant- do it. There are few things you couldn't do if you dedicated the rest of your life to it. But because ultimately, there's a few things where really, the payoff is not going to be there. (neither for you, nor the client).
For that matter, there are "customers" where the best response to some insane request is to say some variant of "I'm sorry we couldn't help you, may I recommend you talk with.... over in...., I hear they're experts on these kinds of issues."
I dunno if you count that as "giving up". But really, not *all* problems are worth solving.
When someone can't do something though, I expect them to discover that in the -start- of a project, in the exploratory phase, not 3 days before deadline. That's just insane. If you're in it for the first third and give no indication that you're in over your head, you better go all the way too, otherwise you're just chickening out.
Having a look at a new project, and then going "I'm sorry Boss, but I really don't think I'm the rigth guy for this particular assignement" is a perfectly sane thing to say, it's a waste for everyone to have me -try- to do something (likely poorly) in a month when someone better qualified could do it better in 10 days.
Knowing your own limits, strengths and weaknesses is a strength, not a weakness.
Yeah, I know that US workplaces typically don't place a premium on admitting weakness. Everyone has them though, trying to pretend that's not so is likely to cause losses.
I was just commenting that it's not really fair to complain that you take the entire risk, when you also expect the entire win. That's just the way life is, and as they say, if you don't like the heat, get out of the kitchen.
I'm sure you don't mean to, but you do sound quite undervaluing of your employees, that or they're bad. If employees generally -only- did what they where explicitly told to do, only used the tools provided to them by the employer, never checked anything of their own volition, then most companies would be bust.
Indeed most of the value I generate for the company I work for, I generate by doing stuff the boss would never ever explicitly -ask- me to do, how could he ? He doesn't have expertise in my field -- infact that's precisely why he hired me in the first place: because he recognized the company needed more expertise in my field. (cryptography, protocol-security)
Ok, I recognize that quite a few employees work the way you describe. However the really valuable ones don't.
As for only investing in your own business; there's many reasons you may want to spread out. The primary one is risk-reduction. If you've got all your eggs in one basket, this also means your entire savings are omelette in one go. If you spread out a bit more, you've got a better chance of surviving if your primary business explodes, something for which there's always a risk, even if it's well-run and healthy.
I've got 35% of my savings in the business I work for. The remaining 65% are split between my house and a diverse portofolio, primarily of companies wildly different from the one I work for. (different continents, differents industries, different sizes)
Yeah, *I* could take more risk. However I've got 3 kids to take care of, this tends to lead to higher risk-aversion. I'd probably have thougth differently 10 years ago, before the kids.
If the stuff that leads to the loss of job is just an example of the employee being "bad", then fine, I can agree. But what about the cases where it's not about good or bad, but simply about being of a different opinion ?
Is it reasonable for a gardener at the church to lose his job over publicly stating that he is in favor of homosexuals being allowed marriage ? (does this in any way affect his ability to do his job well ?)
That's all fine and good. But it's a problem for people who carry unpopular opinions.
We need those people though, those who challenge the commonly held ideas. Sure, most of the time they're wrong, but sometimes they're not, and we desperately -need- to be challenged on ethical, moral, political stances. That is, afterall, the only way to expose the weak points in our ideas.
Free speech is commonly (especially in the USA) assosiated ONLY with the absence of government-coersion. That is one important part. But it's not enough. We should also wish for a society in which you can say even unpopular things, without undue negative consequences.
That is true offcourse, but on the other hand, employees who have outside-work related interests tend to be more valuable than those who don't. Sure, I may be more -tired- because I stayed up all night hacking RoR or reading Applied Cryptography. But odds are, my employer will still benefit from me doing these (and other stuff) because it gives me new ideas for how to solve work-related problems.
So, it works both ways. Employees doing other things does carry a risk that they'll spend work-time thinking about other things than work, but on the other hand it also carries the possibility that they'll solve work-problems trough knowledge gained while doing other things.
Overall I don't think the couch-potato who does -nothing- but work is a winner.
So ? That also means if the business runs well, the entire win is yours. The employer gets his salary, no less even with a medicre job, true, but also no more even if the business ends up making gargantuan profits.
If you don't like this, play the game differently. For example, where I work, everyone who has worked there for a year or two and do a good job are offered partnerships. End-result is that the majority of workers are also co-owners. Which, again, they also tend to have an interest in the company performing well.
As for betting your house, depends, doesn't it ? The minimum capital for starting a limited liability company around here is $20K, that's not precisely a house, unless you're living in a trailer-camp. Yeah, in practice it's $20K and 3 years of around-the-clock work before you can even hope to have a steady business. But even that is -still- not a house.
You where cherrypicking though, somewhere there exist some train that at some point in its route hit 200mph, true. Your other points are also individually more or less true. They're not however overall a good description of the train-systems we have today.
To the contrary, travelling Bergen-Oslo, Berlin-Dresden or Chicago-NY by train today takes similar time to what it did 50 years ago, infact for the first 2 examples it takes a few minute -longer- than it did back then.
Cheap flight have made trains close to irrelevant for long-distance passenger-travel.
Except, offcourse, that landfills are nothing else than extremely high-grade ores. It's not as if the metals are -gone- or anything. The only reason we don't mine landfills today is that we've got other cheaper sources of metals.
This may be a shock to you, but not -all- kids grow up in homes with multiple computers and ipods. Many kids can count to 10 and do simple reading before they enroll in school too, which doesn't mean that schools should ignore teaching these things.
Among other things. Which was sorta my point: Not knowing how to use a "web browser" is much more of a practical problem in the current workplace than not knowing a single opera (of the singing-variety) by name.
You've got your nose so deep in computer-skills that you don't even notice they -are- skills.
True, a doctor needs only to be able to deal with a low number of programs. But you ignore the -BASIC- computer-skills. You know the ones that all the more *spesific* computer-skills depend upon. The ones you don't even notice knowing, because to you it's as natural as breathing.
To use the handful of programs a doctor needs to know, the doctor needs to know a lot of -basic- computer skills.
How to type text using a keyboard, preferably without using hunt-n-peck. (that works, but means a lot of wasted time)
How to use a mouse. Point. Click. Double-click. Right-click. Drag-and-drop. I know it seems incredible to a computernerd, but these things *really* aren't obvious to someone who -didn't- spend time infront of a computer.
Basic, general concepts: A *file*. A *program*. A *folder*. A *drive*.
If you don't know how to do these things well today, you are severly hampered in the large majority of available jobs out there.
None of these things are -hard-. Someone who is smart enough to be a doctor can learn all of them quickly. It'll take some time to get -good- at them, but learning and understanding the basics of it can be done in a couple of weeks, even starting from zero.
The *basics* of art and culture aren't hard to learn either, that can -also- be done in a few weeks, even starting from zero by someone who is smart. But there are two important differences.
First, unlike computers, it is actually very hard to start from zero. You are continually exposed to art and culture, in contrast there are millions of people in USA that have never themselves spent even 10 hours working on a computer.
Second, unlike computers, you are -not- seriously hampered in your ability to do most jobs by a near-zero knowledge of arts and culture. Not having heard of Mozart, George Orwell or Shakespear is completely irrelevant to 90% of all jobs.
Your wife is not an example of someone with zero or near zero computer-skills. To me she sounds like someone of -average- computer-skill. Indeed from your description it sounds as if she's spent hundreds of hours learning about and/or working on a computer.
If your wife was unable to send an email with an attachment, could not type a simple sentence correctly in less than 2 minutes, had yet to master the doubleclick and stared at you blankly if you asked her to delete a file from her desktop -- that most certainly would have had a negative influence on her ability to do her job efficiently.
I certainly do. (use the bookmarks in the browser I mean).
I am not inclined to store them at some random third-party site which I have no reason to trust.
I -do- use foxMarks to sync the bookmarks to a ftp-server, so in this sense they are "online", but the difference is, that ftp-account is on a machine under -my- control, not some random company.
The benefit is a) I get the same bookmarks at home, at work, on different machines. and b) I can access them over http when I'm not using a browser that is primarily mine. (i.e one without foxmarks configured to sync bookmarks from that place)
Actually, I'm pretty sure I understated it. And besides, if you read what I wrote, I *agree* that arts and culture is important -- for reasons almost completely disconnected from work. Having a functioning democracy is one of those reasons.
That it's possible to function as a doctor with no more than a few days worth of computer training and/or experience is no evidence that being comfortable with the basics of computers isn't a tremendous *benefit* to someone working as a doctor.
One can type on a keyboard with literally 5 minutes of training -- but it's going to take you a HELL of a lot more time than filling out the same form would take for someone who has a few hundred hours of practice typing on a keyboard.
Art is important for -other- reasons, but for purely job-related education, knowing computer-basics is an order of magnitude more important.
Today you need to know basics of computer use regardless of if you are a doctot, a nurse, a teacher, a office-worker of any sort, a car-mechanic, a oil-driller, a farmer or a bus-drivers.
Yes, you can -do- some of these jobs with no computer-skills, but you're seriously hampered in all of them.
In contrast, it's a rare job that can't be done without any problems by someone who doesn't know the storyline of Hamlet, has never watched a complete Opera in his life, and has never heard the name "Mozart". Infact, I'd guess 90-95% of all jobs fall into this category, the main exception being, ironically, teaching. (It's somewhat ironic to consider a skill important for the reason that you need to know it to teach it, if that is the only reason, then the skill as such is redundant)
Like I said: I consider art important -- but for -OTHER- reasons, almost completely separate from work.
True. A *raft* may indeed save your life if the plane lands on water, and you're still conscious after that, even if the water is cold.
My point was the flotation-thingies that each passenger has under the chair won't be of help. As you correctly point out, if you get wet in the north-atlantic you are essentially dead anyway. And a personal flotation-device is only designed to help in the case where you're already swimming in the water -- at which point its really too late.
Yes, you can survive falling in ice-cold water, if you're picked up and given the chance to re-heat inside of the first 15 minutes or something. But let's face it, the odds of that are slim to none.
As I said: I wouldn't be even sligthly surprised if it turns out the millions of floating-vests brougth along on planes all over the world has yet to save even a -single- life. They are very -VERY- close to completely pointless. Indeed the 30 seconds extra you may need for leaving the plane because everyone is messing with vests may harm more than the vests help.
That won't help, first you can't "break" surface-tension, even if a hammer entered the water 0.1 seconds ahead of you, it's still there just as ever, sligthly more rippled, but otherwise no difference.
Second, it's simply untrue. If it *was* true, then obviously, your foot will break the surface-tension when it enters the water, so by this logic, your foot may end up crushed, but the rest of you should be fine, which isn't even close to what happens in real life.
It *does* help to inject large amounts of air into the water, because that means you're essentially landing in air-water-mixture rather than in water, which helps. Some pools for dive-practive can blow lots of bubbles from the bottom, which -does- make quite a difference in the pain you feel when you make a mistake and enter the water awkwardly.
Actually, I use that pptp-connection as my default gateway for much more mundane reasons, laziness and convenience.
Using it means I end up surfing using a university-ip. The university has site-subscriptions for a large number of otherwise very expensive resources, ranging from technical journals to law and case-databases.
All of which are freely available to me when I surf trough the university ip, but wouldn't otherwise be.
Actually, it's even the other way around, the flotation-devices in comercial passenger-planes are almost completely pointless.
First, the majority of planes that crash or emergency-land do so in connection with take-off or landing, on land. Only a fraction of passenger-planes that come down outside of the airport come down on water.
Second, of the ones that -do- come down on water, quite a few come down violently enough that flotation-help makes no difference, it doesn't help you if you're dead or unconscious on impact.
Third, even when the plane *does* land on water and you *are* conscious after landing, it *still* makes no difference to your survival if you're in the north-atlantic and rescue arrives an hour later. You'll be frozen to death rather than drowned but that isn't really much of a benefit.
That's optimistic actually. We're talking survival here, not being unharmed.
The first part of the deceleration is all that matters, we know that jumping from 10 metres will give essentially 100% survival-rate, indeed odds are excellent that you won't just survive, but be -unharmed-. Jumping from 10 metres gives you an impact-speed of perhaps 20m/s, terminal velocity for a human is about 55m/s.
The trick is surviving the deceleration from 55m/s to 25m/s, if you can do that, declerating in water from 25m/s is comparatively undramatic. The thing is, water is "harder" the faster you push trough it, so the fact that you may penetrate to a depth of 5 metres is almost completely irrelevant, the trick is surviving the first single meter of water.
I do. My ISP sees a single, AES-encrypted stream to the PPTP-server at my university. That's it. And yes, I -do- truse the University more than the ISP.
And the support from many of them are higher level than MS is willing to offer.
Where do you sign to have a qualified technician from MS fix that particular bug or shortcoming in Office that you would -really- want to have fixed ? Only MS can do that, and they will point-blank refuse to make a custom addition just for a single customer -- even if the customer is willing to pay the cost.
They typically don't. But (atleash here) they typically ask the customer to check bolt-tigthness after 10-20 miles. Which nobody does. (or almost nobody anyways)
It's less likely to be critical though, because they -will- be aware of the importance of properly seating the wheel, and they will use the correct bolt-tension, both of which decrease the risk that the wheel will vibrate free considerably.
I've never heard of anyone loosing a wheel after having it attached professionally at a repair-shop, though I'm sure it has happened, somewhere, sometime. But some risks are low enough that it's not really worth your effort to care about them. If it -was- a common problem, then wheel-attachments would be redesigned, it's not as if locking-bolts or locking-nuts are uninvented.
Because of immunisation, few children die (or are seriously hurt by) polio, measles and the like. As a result, it's easy for parents to lull themselves into a false sense of security, thinking that these diseases aren't common or aren't that dangerous.
I am fairly certain, a parent that had grown up in a society with polio and -without- widespread immunisation would spend 0.01 second deciding to immunise their kid if given the chance.
But when you've never seen a kid sick from polio, and don't know anyone who's ever lost anyone to it, it's a lot easier to "forget" the risk.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, okay, to a point.
.... over in ...., I hear they're experts on these kinds of issues."
Allthough, there are situations where giving up is the correct thing to do. Not because you -cant- do it. There are few things you couldn't do if you dedicated the rest of your life to it. But because ultimately, there's a few things where really, the payoff is not going to be there. (neither for you, nor the client).
For that matter, there are "customers" where the best response to some insane request is to say some variant of "I'm sorry we couldn't help you, may I recommend you talk with
I dunno if you count that as "giving up". But really, not *all* problems are worth solving.
When someone can't do something though, I expect them to discover that in the -start- of a project, in the exploratory phase, not 3 days before deadline. That's just insane. If you're in it for the first third and give no indication that you're in over your head, you better go all the way too, otherwise you're just chickening out.
Having a look at a new project, and then going "I'm sorry Boss, but I really don't think I'm the rigth guy for this particular assignement" is a perfectly sane thing to say, it's a waste for everyone to have me -try- to do something (likely poorly) in a month when someone better qualified could do it better in 10 days.
Knowing your own limits, strengths and weaknesses is a strength, not a weakness.
Yeah, I know that US workplaces typically don't place a premium on admitting weakness. Everyone has them though, trying to pretend that's not so is likely to cause losses.
I was just commenting that it's not really fair to complain that you take the entire risk, when you also expect the entire win. That's just the way life is, and as they say, if you don't like the heat, get out of the kitchen.
I'm sure you don't mean to, but you do sound quite undervaluing of your employees, that or they're bad. If employees generally -only- did what they where explicitly told to do, only used the tools provided to them by the employer, never checked anything of their own volition, then most companies would be bust.
Indeed most of the value I generate for the company I work for, I generate by doing stuff the boss would never ever explicitly -ask- me to do, how could he ? He doesn't have expertise in my field -- infact that's precisely why he hired me in the first place: because he recognized the company needed more expertise in my field. (cryptography, protocol-security)
Ok, I recognize that quite a few employees work the way you describe. However the really valuable ones don't.
As for only investing in your own business; there's many reasons you may want to spread out. The primary one is risk-reduction. If you've got all your eggs in one basket, this also means your entire savings are omelette in one go. If you spread out a bit more, you've got a better chance of surviving if your primary business explodes, something for which there's always a risk, even if it's well-run and healthy.
I've got 35% of my savings in the business I work for. The remaining 65% are split between my house and a diverse portofolio, primarily of companies wildly different from the one I work for. (different continents, differents industries, different sizes)
Yeah, *I* could take more risk. However I've got 3 kids to take care of, this tends to lead to higher risk-aversion. I'd probably have thougth differently 10 years ago, before the kids.
If the stuff that leads to the loss of job is just an example of the employee being "bad", then fine, I can agree. But what about the cases where it's not about good or bad, but simply about being of a different opinion ?
Is it reasonable for a gardener at the church to lose his job over publicly stating that he is in favor of homosexuals being allowed marriage ? (does this in any way affect his ability to do his job well ?)
That's all fine and good. But it's a problem for people who carry unpopular opinions.
We need those people though, those who challenge the commonly held ideas. Sure, most of the time they're wrong, but sometimes they're not, and we desperately -need- to be challenged on ethical, moral, political stances. That is, afterall, the only way to expose the weak points in our ideas.
Free speech is commonly (especially in the USA) assosiated ONLY with the absence of government-coersion. That is one important part. But it's not enough. We should also wish for a society in which you can say even unpopular things, without undue negative consequences.
That is true offcourse, but on the other hand, employees who have outside-work related interests tend to be more valuable than those who don't. Sure, I may be more -tired- because I stayed up all night hacking RoR or reading Applied Cryptography. But odds are, my employer will still benefit from me doing these (and other stuff) because it gives me new ideas for how to solve work-related problems.
So, it works both ways. Employees doing other things does carry a risk that they'll spend work-time thinking about other things than work, but on the other hand it also carries the possibility that they'll solve work-problems trough knowledge gained while doing other things.
Overall I don't think the couch-potato who does -nothing- but work is a winner.
So ? That also means if the business runs well, the entire win is yours. The employer gets his salary, no less even with a medicre job, true, but also no more even if the business ends up making gargantuan profits.
If you don't like this, play the game differently. For example, where I work, everyone who has worked there for a year or two and do a good job are offered partnerships. End-result is that the majority of workers are also co-owners. Which, again, they also tend to have an interest in the company performing well.
As for betting your house, depends, doesn't it ? The minimum capital for starting a limited liability company around here is $20K, that's not precisely a house, unless you're living in a trailer-camp. Yeah, in practice it's $20K and 3 years of around-the-clock work before you can even hope to have a steady business. But even that is -still- not a house.
You where cherrypicking though, somewhere there exist some train that at some point in its route hit 200mph, true. Your other points are also individually more or less true. They're not however overall a good description of the train-systems we have today.
To the contrary, travelling Bergen-Oslo, Berlin-Dresden or Chicago-NY by train today takes similar time to what it did 50 years ago, infact for the first 2 examples it takes a few minute -longer- than it did back then.
Cheap flight have made trains close to irrelevant for long-distance passenger-travel.
Except, offcourse, that landfills are nothing else than extremely high-grade ores. It's not as if the metals are -gone- or anything. The only reason we don't mine landfills today is that we've got other cheaper sources of metals.
Sure they -could-. If they did, it'd be reasonably likely that someone would discover it, but sure, they could.
I prefer "could, and is easily discoverable" infront of "certainly does, infact thats the entire business-case for providing the service"
This may be a shock to you, but not -all- kids grow up in homes with multiple computers and ipods. Many kids can count to 10 and do simple reading before they enroll in school too, which doesn't mean that schools should ignore teaching these things.
Among other things. Which was sorta my point: Not knowing how to use a "web browser" is much more of a practical problem in the current workplace than not knowing a single opera (of the singing-variety) by name.
True, a doctor needs only to be able to deal with a low number of programs. But you ignore the -BASIC- computer-skills. You know the ones that all the more *spesific* computer-skills depend upon. The ones you don't even notice knowing, because to you it's as natural as breathing.
To use the handful of programs a doctor needs to know, the doctor needs to know a lot of -basic- computer skills.
If you don't know how to do these things well today, you are severly hampered in the large majority of available jobs out there.
None of these things are -hard-. Someone who is smart enough to be a doctor can learn all of them quickly. It'll take some time to get -good- at them, but learning and understanding the basics of it can be done in a couple of weeks, even starting from zero.
The *basics* of art and culture aren't hard to learn either, that can -also- be done in a few weeks, even starting from zero by someone who is smart. But there are two important differences.
First, unlike computers, it is actually very hard to start from zero. You are continually exposed to art and culture, in contrast there are millions of people in USA that have never themselves spent even 10 hours working on a computer.
Second, unlike computers, you are -not- seriously hampered in your ability to do most jobs by a near-zero knowledge of arts and culture. Not having heard of Mozart, George Orwell or Shakespear is completely irrelevant to 90% of all jobs.
Your wife is not an example of someone with zero or near zero computer-skills. To me she sounds like someone of -average- computer-skill. Indeed from your description it sounds as if she's spent hundreds of hours learning about and/or working on a computer.
If your wife was unable to send an email with an attachment, could not type a simple sentence correctly in less than 2 minutes, had yet to master the doubleclick and stared at you blankly if you asked her to delete a file from her desktop -- that most certainly would have had a negative influence on her ability to do her job efficiently.
I certainly do. (use the bookmarks in the browser I mean).
I am not inclined to store them at some random third-party site which I have no reason to trust.
I -do- use foxMarks to sync the bookmarks to a ftp-server, so in this sense they are "online", but the difference is, that ftp-account is on a machine under -my- control, not some random company.
The benefit is a) I get the same bookmarks at home, at work, on different machines. and b) I can access them over http when I'm not using a browser that is primarily mine. (i.e one without foxmarks configured to sync bookmarks from that place)
Actually, I'm pretty sure I understated it. And besides, if you read what I wrote, I *agree* that arts and culture is important -- for reasons almost completely disconnected from work. Having a functioning democracy is one of those reasons.
That it's possible to function as a doctor with no more than a few days worth of computer training and/or experience is no evidence that being comfortable with the basics of computers isn't a tremendous *benefit* to someone working as a doctor.
One can type on a keyboard with literally 5 minutes of training -- but it's going to take you a HELL of a lot more time than filling out the same form would take for someone who has a few hundred hours of practice typing on a keyboard.
Art is important for -other- reasons, but for purely job-related education, knowing computer-basics is an order of magnitude more important.
Today you need to know basics of computer use regardless of if you are a doctot, a nurse, a teacher, a office-worker of any sort, a car-mechanic, a oil-driller, a farmer or a bus-drivers.
Yes, you can -do- some of these jobs with no computer-skills, but you're seriously hampered in all of them.
In contrast, it's a rare job that can't be done without any problems by someone who doesn't know the storyline of Hamlet, has never watched a complete Opera in his life, and has never heard the name "Mozart". Infact, I'd guess 90-95% of all jobs fall into this category, the main exception being, ironically, teaching. (It's somewhat ironic to consider a skill important for the reason that you need to know it to teach it, if that is the only reason, then the skill as such is redundant)
Like I said: I consider art important -- but for -OTHER- reasons, almost completely separate from work.
"\n" is *defined* to be newline.
"\n" will be one thing on unix, another on Windows, just like endl.
Using the equivalent of \cr\lf would have the problems you mention and thus be worthy of a loss of points.
True. A *raft* may indeed save your life if the plane lands on water, and you're still conscious after that, even if the water is cold.
My point was the flotation-thingies that each passenger has under the chair won't be of help. As you correctly point out, if you get wet in the north-atlantic you are essentially dead anyway. And a personal flotation-device is only designed to help in the case where you're already swimming in the water -- at which point its really too late.
Yes, you can survive falling in ice-cold water, if you're picked up and given the chance to re-heat inside of the first 15 minutes or something. But let's face it, the odds of that are slim to none.
As I said: I wouldn't be even sligthly surprised if it turns out the millions of floating-vests brougth along on planes all over the world has yet to save even a -single- life. They are very -VERY- close to completely pointless. Indeed the 30 seconds extra you may need for leaving the plane because everyone is messing with vests may harm more than the vests help.
That won't help, first you can't "break" surface-tension, even if a hammer entered the water 0.1 seconds ahead of you, it's still there just as ever, sligthly more rippled, but otherwise no difference.
Second, it's simply untrue. If it *was* true, then obviously, your foot will break the surface-tension when it enters the water, so by this logic, your foot may end up crushed, but the rest of you should be fine, which isn't even close to what happens in real life.
It *does* help to inject large amounts of air into the water, because that means you're essentially landing in air-water-mixture rather than in water, which helps. Some pools for dive-practive can blow lots of bubbles from the bottom, which -does- make quite a difference in the pain you feel when you make a mistake and enter the water awkwardly.
Actually, I use that pptp-connection as my default gateway for much more mundane reasons, laziness and convenience.
Using it means I end up surfing using a university-ip. The university has site-subscriptions for a large number of otherwise very expensive resources, ranging from technical journals to law and case-databases.
All of which are freely available to me when I surf trough the university ip, but wouldn't otherwise be.
Sorry to disapoint you.
Actually, it's even the other way around, the flotation-devices in comercial passenger-planes are almost completely pointless.
First, the majority of planes that crash or emergency-land do so in connection with take-off or landing, on land. Only a fraction of passenger-planes that come down outside of the airport come down on water.
Second, of the ones that -do- come down on water, quite a few come down violently enough that flotation-help makes no difference, it doesn't help you if you're dead or unconscious on impact.
Third, even when the plane *does* land on water and you *are* conscious after landing, it *still* makes no difference to your survival if you're in the north-atlantic and rescue arrives an hour later. You'll be frozen to death rather than drowned but that isn't really much of a benefit.
That's optimistic actually. We're talking survival here, not being unharmed.
The first part of the deceleration is all that matters, we know that jumping from 10 metres will give essentially 100% survival-rate, indeed odds are excellent that you won't just survive, but be -unharmed-. Jumping from 10 metres gives you an impact-speed of perhaps 20m/s, terminal velocity for a human is about 55m/s.
The trick is surviving the deceleration from 55m/s to 25m/s, if you can do that, declerating in water from 25m/s is comparatively undramatic. The thing is, water is "harder" the faster you push trough it, so the fact that you may penetrate to a depth of 5 metres is almost completely irrelevant, the trick is surviving the first single meter of water.
I do. My ISP sees a single, AES-encrypted stream to the PPTP-server at my university. That's it. And yes, I -do- truse the University more than the ISP.
And the support from many of them are higher level than MS is willing to offer.
Where do you sign to have a qualified technician from MS fix that particular bug or shortcoming in Office that you would -really- want to have fixed ? Only MS can do that, and they will point-blank refuse to make a custom addition just for a single customer -- even if the customer is willing to pay the cost.
They typically don't. But (atleash here) they typically ask the customer to check bolt-tigthness after 10-20 miles. Which nobody does. (or almost nobody anyways)
It's less likely to be critical though, because they -will- be aware of the importance of properly seating the wheel, and they will use the correct bolt-tension, both of which decrease the risk that the wheel will vibrate free considerably.
I've never heard of anyone loosing a wheel after having it attached professionally at a repair-shop, though I'm sure it has happened, somewhere, sometime. But some risks are low enough that it's not really worth your effort to care about them. If it -was- a common problem, then wheel-attachments would be redesigned, it's not as if locking-bolts or locking-nuts are uninvented.
It's a negative network-effect.
Because of immunisation, few children die (or are seriously hurt by) polio, measles and the like. As a result, it's easy for parents to lull themselves into a false sense of security, thinking that these diseases aren't common or aren't that dangerous.
I am fairly certain, a parent that had grown up in a society with polio and -without- widespread immunisation would spend 0.01 second deciding to immunise their kid if given the chance.
But when you've never seen a kid sick from polio, and don't know anyone who's ever lost anyone to it, it's a lot easier to "forget" the risk.