These clipboard wielding morons are the reason that nobody has any initiative left to do anything. They get handed absolute power over you, dont wield it with any respect, and when you point out how unreasonable it is you get told its for your own good, which is utter bullshit. They are only overzealous because telling you what is for your own good is for their own good if they want their job to be secure. The faults above may well be worth noting, but they hardly sound like they represented immediate danger. He could very easily have just turned off the breaker and there is no longer a hazard.
Public property is something else altogether, but do you think it is common sense to be able to deny someone their own roof because of minor oversights that can be left for later?
What building code deficiencies do you think should homeowners should be allowed to address "later"? How do you define "minor"? If something is so "minor" that it doesn't need to be addressed immediately, maybe it's not that important after all and should be removed from the code?
Does your plan apply only when the homeowner does the work, or also when a contractor does the work? How do you ensure that the homeowner is making an informed decision about a particular risk that may involve areas of structural engineering, electrical design or plumbing, etc that the homeowner is not an expert in? Should home builders be able to specialize in building low-cost non-code-compliant housing that cover the "major" parts of code, but leave the "minor" parts for the homeowner to implement later?
For example, should a contractor or homeowner be allowed to install a non-AL rated outlet when the house has Aluminum wiring? After all, it's likely that it will last for quite some time before it causes a problem - it might last for years or even decades without a problem - plenty of time for the homeowner to fix it "later". Until that cold winter night when he decides to plug in a space heater in his bedroom, and the inadequate connection between the home wiring and the outlet heats up until it starts a fire. He ran out of outlet boxes when he was installing that outlet, so he built one out of scrap wood (not code compliant and he knew it, but hey, the hardware store is 60 miles away and he just wanted to get the work finished) -- and now that wood is smoldering.
But no worries, it's a slow smoldering fire. The inspector warned him that the foam insulation he installed in the bedroom walls was not properly fire-rated but he knew that was just a government plot to make him buy more expensive foam, so he left it there. And now as it's heated by the flaming outlet, it's filling his bedroom with toxic smoke.
Good thing he has smoke detectors. Oh wait, despite the building code requiring AC-wired smoke detectors, he decided that was a minor thing that was not important to him since a battery operated smoke detector worked just as well. But he forgot to change the smoke detector batteries this year since he was on vacation over daylight saving's time when he usually swapped out the batteries and though the detector chirped for a week while he was out on that business trip, he wasn't there to hear it and now his smoke detector is silent.
At least the sprinklers will save him as the smoldering fire breaks out into outright flames. Oh yeah, when he built the house he didn't want some government wonk telling him how to build his house, so he omitted the sprinkler system that was required by code. He said he'd add it later when he had more money.
Fortunately his daughter woke up from the smoke, but when she was blinded by the smoke and rushing down the stairs to safety she stumbled on that one step that was wider than the others (sure, it was a code violation, but it would have been expensive to fix since the inspector didn't point it out until the contractor already finished his work and left town), and she grasped at empty air trying to stop her fall with the non-existent handrail, she hit her head o
I'm all about anonymity when appropriate, but trust me, the NSA, CIA, FBI, etc. couldn't possibly care less about your latté habits
Of course they do - that's the whole point of the NSA's data mining efforts.
If they know that a group of interest meets at 8pm on the 1st, 17th and 23rd of each month, and you buy a Latte from the Starbucks next door to the meeting place only on those days at 7:45pm, then you become a person of interest.
Is there any building department in the country that will approve stairs with no railing? Your wife is disabled, so you should understand the need for hand railings on stairs.
Bullshit. Have you ever moved furniture up or down stairs? In every single place I have moved into or out of I have removed the banister/handrail (if possible) when moving: it's a necessity to ease moving. The handrail aids you in no way while carrying boxes or moving matress or sofa. If anything, they're a liability.
I'm not sure what you're calling bullshit on. Unless you've removed the handrails and *still* got signoff on the permit that covers the stairway construction, what you're describing is much different that getting a construction permit signed off when the work is not up to code.
Obviously you can get the permit signoff, then take the railing off yourself and no one will know but you. However, if you have the inspector out for some other reason and he sees the stairway with a missing handrail, he can still call it out as a a code violation and require that it be brought up to code if was built at a time when the building code required it.
In some places, city workers take their damn time. 6 weeks seems like the realm of somewhere like Chicago, NY, or California, but I suppose it's possible to happen in other places. It took 4 weeks to get a building permit to do a little fix-up on a patio for me a while back... at about week 3, I said "fuck it" and just fixed it. Nobody was the wiser.
Lots of people do unpermitted work without being found out. But sometimes a neighbor turns them in, or sometimes it's uncovered when they try to sell the house and suddenly the homeowner is faced with the prospect of tearing open walls so the inspector can look at plumbing and electrical -- and if the inspector doesn't like what he sees, he can require that all of the non-permitted renovations be removed. If the work was done by a licensed contractor, his license can be revoked for doing unpermitted work.
I thought the Galaxy Tab 10 and 7.7 were tablets, but Apple was quoted saying:
"Samsung's infringing sales have enabled Samsung to overtake Apple as the largest manufacturer of smartphones in the world. Samsung has reaped billions of dollars in profits and caused Apple to lose hundreds of millions of dollars through its violation of Apple's intellectual property."
Why does Samsung's status as a smartphone manufacturer have anything to do with tablets?
And why is Apple suing for $2.5B in damages when by their own admission, they lost only "hundreds of millions of dollars"?
I don't see why it took you 6 more weeks of sleeping outside to get the handrail installed and porch light fixed? A handrail is a couple hours of work, even in concrete. Couldn't you just fix them and schedule a followup inspection?
Now that I think about it, it was more like 3 weeks but to answer your question it was because the contractors who did the initial work had squeezed us in between larger jobs and moved on to their next job in another state as soon as they got their truck unloaded, and everybody else within a hundred miles (it's a rural area in Wyoming) was booked months in advance. Once the original contractor was able to send somebody back to do the handrail, we had to wait for the inspector to come back out for the followup inspection.
Then it sounds like your problem is with the contractor and not the building inspector -- the contractor should have known that railings were required on stairs so it was his fault for building a non-compliant structure.
Your wife is disabled, so you should understand the need for hand railings on stairs. Even if they are OUTSIDE the house, since presumably they may be used for emergency egress. If the porch light was installed as part of the permitted work, then I can understand why they rejected it -- a loose light can be a shock hazard. If it wasn't part of the permitted work, then the inspector was being petty and should have just pointed it out without writing it up. But if it was done under the permit and he gave his signoff and your wife electrocuted herself while changing the light bulb, it's his head on the line.
She will also never, ever be able to use those stairs under any circumstances. But that's beside the point. I'm saying it's intrusive and counterproductive to deny occupancy of our bedroom because of an outside handrail. Yes, all the things you cite are potential hazards and it's quite conceivable that some poorly placed item or loose fixture could someday hurt me.
But the building inspector has only one tool at his disposal - he can either sign off on the inspection or not. He can't add a note to your real estate records warning potential future buyers about non-compliant construction, nor can he post a sign at your door warning future visitors that there may be a safety hazard in your home. He can't have you sign a waiver saying that you understand and accept the risks. All he can do is tell you to build to code or refuse to sign off on the construction.
Where would you draw the line on compliant construction? Should a homeowner be able to do anything? Should he be able to use non-approved plastic piping for water, even if that piping is known to degrade with hot water and will likely fail in a few years? Should he be able to forgo GFCI outlets in his kitchen because he knows he's always careful to avoid electric shock? Should he be able to wire up 20 amp breakers and outlets with 14 gauge wire?
If I get hurt, or somebody decides to sue me because they got hurt, on my own property due to decisions I made; if a future buyer refuses to make an offer until I change the layout of the stairs, I bear the consequences of my actions.
It's only remains your problem until it becomes someone else's problem. Maybe a visitor will stumble down those stairs, maybe you'll end up having to move and rent out your house. Maybe you'll sell the house and the purchaser won't find (or repair) all of the non-compliant issues.
I don't need every minuscule aspect of my life safety inspected, protective helmeted, or compliance regulated. I shouldn't have to stop by my building office and speak to inspector to manage my property to my specifications. If they want to offer advice as to what they think is the best way to approach things, I think that's great and I'll seek out such advice and take it into considerations; making me legally bound to adhere
Whether all you say is true and just, you walked right by the core point of the post. They were prevented from living in their house on their property by some government bureaucrat. Whether those issues are 'serious' or not, they should be allowed to accept that risk without worrying that some one will show up and evict them from their own home.
I see what you're saying about building codes and I'd likely want a house I bought to be built to some good standards and certified as such by someone. That said, I would also not want some government wonk showing up and telling me I can't live the way I want as long as I'm not bringing harm on others.
Ahh, well that's the problem -- your house on your property ends up being someone else's house and property some day, and once the work is done and the walls are sealed up, no one knows if the work was done to code. If you want to know that the house was built to some good standards, then you're going to check the permit history and make sure that any significant renovations or improvements were done with permits. The previous owner might have been happy with doing his own work on the house in his own way, but without permits and building inspections, you don't know if it's done safely - the previous owner may have thought it was ok to forgo junction boxes and join wires behind the wall by wrapping them together with electrical tape. And the house may be fine for decades like that, but a building inspector will require properly sized wire nuts and sealed junction boxes for safety. But without the building inspector there at the time of construction, you may never know what's behind the walls.
A good pre-purchase home inspection will turn up a lot of non-code compliant issues, but that's no substitute for making sure the work was done right in the first place since not everything can be inspected without tearing open walls (which is what the building inspector will make you do if they discover that you did non-permitted work).
I don't see how you can have a house built to some good standards and certified as such without having some government wonk telling you how to build or renovate your house. How else would you ensure these good standards?
. Where I live (east coast US), windows also have to be hurricane rated by law. This basically means that they will not break when a 8ft 2x4 is shot at 150 mph directly at them. Good luck with that, if you just threw it together yourself.
I think you may be mixing up the wind load test with the missile impact test. I bet the wood siding on most houses would fail a 150mph 8ft 2x4 impact. The 150mph rating is for wind-load (which is substantial, especially for a large window).
Miami-Dade has 2 impact tests for windows, the speed of the large projectile 2x4 is only 34mph, which has much lower energy than a 150mph projectile... even the small projectile "ball bearing" test is only performed at 50mph:
The Miami-Dade Building Code requires that every exterior opening - residential or commercial - be provided with protection against wind-borne debris caused by hurricanes. Such protection could either be shutters or impact-resistant products. There are two types of impact-resistant products: large-missile resistant and small- missile resistant.
Large-missile resistant A product is declared large-missile resistant after it has been exposed to various impacts with a piece of lumber weighing approximately 9 pounds, measuring 2" x 4" x 6’ in size, traveling at a speed of 50 feet per second (34 mph). The product must pass positive and negative wind loads for 9,000 cycles, with impact creating no hole larger than 1/16 x 5" in the interlayer of the glass.
Small-missile resistant A product is declared small-missile resistant after it has been exposed to various impacts with 10 ball bearings traveling at a speed of 80 feet per second (50 mph). The product is then subjected to wind loads for 9,000 cycles.
We had a basement foundation put in for a modular house and jumped through all their hoops; when the inspector came out we failed the inspection because the front porch light was loose and there was no handrail on the concrete stairs leading to the basement OUTSIDE the house. Because of that -- and that alone -- we were not permitted to occupy our own house on our own property. Apparently he felt it was safer for my handicapped wife, my dog, and me to live for six weeks in a leaky motor home in our driveway with no running water in below-zero winter than to sleep in beds in our heated house because of that porch light and handrail.
Is there any building department in the country that will approve stairs with no railing? Your wife is disabled, so you should understand the need for hand railings on stairs. Even if they are OUTSIDE the house, since presumably they may be used for emergency egress. If the porch light was installed as part of the permitted work, then I can understand why they rejected it -- a loose light can be a shock hazard. If it wasn't part of the permitted work, then the inspector was being petty and should have just pointed it out without writing it up. But if it was done under the permit and he gave his signoff and your wife electrocuted herself while changing the light bulb, it's his head on the line.
I don't see why it took you 6 more weeks of sleeping outside to get the handrail installed and porch light fixed? A handrail is a couple hours of work, even in concrete. Couldn't you just fix them and schedule a followup inspection?
As annoying as they are, building department regulations are supposed to insure a minimal standard of construction - any licensed contractor should be able to build to code without a problem. If you're doing the work yourself, stop by your building office and speak to an inspector -- don't assume that if you just submit plans that the inspector is going to call out every little non-compliant item.
Does the whole world have to stop every time some crazy person snaps? If you knew the victims, I'm sorry for your loss. I didn't, so I'm more interested in the review.
When you know that a particular article is tied to a recent tragedy and is likely to attract many lame attempts at humor directed at the tragedy, maybe it wouldn't hurt to wait a day or two before publishing it so friends and relatives of the victims who are searching the news for articles pertaining to the tragedy don't have to read flippant comments like "I hear the special effects in Colorado were killer", "atleast 12 people were dying to see it...", or "Yeah, it sucked watching it made me want to go out and shoot people.". Leave the infantile comments to sites like 4chan where they are expected and appreciated. Would you want to see the "funny" comments about a tragedy where you may have lost a child or friend?
I'm sure everyone here has already heard the news about the shootings (I can't believe the Slashdot editors let this story go up today), but for posterity's sake when people stumble across this article and wonder what the inappropriate attempts of humor are with thinly veiled references to the attack, here's more background:
A gunman dressed head to foot in body armor and brandishing three weapons, including an assault rifle, opened fire in a theater crowded with families and children at a midnight showing of the Batman movie “The Dark Knight Rises” in a Denver suburb early Friday morning, killing at least 12 people and wounding 59 others, police and federal officials said.
The suspect, James Holmes, 24, told the police after his arrest that he had booby-trapped his Aurora apartment with explosive devices, leading the police to evacuate five buildings in the neighborhood as they sought to disable what they described as “incendiary devices” rigged to trip wires.
Mr. Holmes’s only criminal history was a traffic summons, said Aurora’s police chief, Dan Oates. Mr. Holmes earned a bachelor’s degree with honors in neuroscience in 2010 from the University of California, Riverside.
During the attack, witnesses said Mr. Holmes had entered through a side door of the packed theater and first set off at least two smoke devices before firing randomly at audience members, who had just settled into their seats. Within minutes, he was arrested in a parking lot behind the theater near his car, the police said.
Mr. Holmes had apparently planned the attack for some time: He wore a gas mask, body armor, a tactical helmet and was dressed completely in black. He entered the theater with an AR-15 assault rifle, a Remington 12-guage shotgun and a 40-caliber Glock handgun. A fourth gun, another Glock pistol, was found in his car. The authorities believe that Mr. Holmes acted alone, and that the death toll may increase because some of the injuries were serious.
The police and witnesses described a scene of utter chaos inside the darkened, smoke-filled theater as bullets resounded loudly around them, and people who had gone to see a PG-13-rated action movie were suddenly forced to scramble to safety as friends and loved ones were felled around them.
The screen on my Galaxy Nexus is the perfect size for me. Still fits in my pocket, and my thumb can reach the entire screen while the phone is held comfortably in my hand. It's a bit of a stretch to reach the pull-down notification bar, but it's still within reach. I think any larger screen would be too big to use one handed.
My girlfriend, on the other hand, can't use my Nexus one handed, her thumb is not long enough to reach the top of the screen, and it's even a bit of a stretch to reach over to the left-side of the screen. So she's much happier with the 3.1" screen on her phone.
My Nexus is still large enough for us to both comfortably watch a movie on an airplane. A bigger screen might be nice for that, but not if I need to carry it in my pocket or use it one handed while standing in the bus.
For statistical reasons woman boobs are bigger then mens.
No, women's breasts are (statistically) larger than mens for evolutionary reasons, not statistical ones. In fact, I doubt that statistics themselves have much effect on breast size at all!:-)
Statistically, some women obtain big boobs because they believe that statistically speaking, they will be able to attract a better mate with larger boobs.
So an argument could be made that, on average, women's boobs are statistically larger due to statistics.
You've never met such a person. You're projecting unwarranted assumptions onto people you'll never know.
I have met such a person. They have a boat that they keep in a local marina. They bought a heavy 4 wheel drive SUV so they can take the boat out of the water and tow it to other places.
In the 3 years since they bought the car, they've towed the boat out of the water Zero times, but the SUV gets daily use on a 40 mile commute (while the wife's Civic sits at home almost every day). They boat has been out of the water a few times for maintenance, but they just let the marina people take care of it rather than using their own trailer (which is rusting away in their side yard with at least one flat tire, I don't even know if it's still roadworthy).
How about "they incur no costs above what they've already charged to recover."
Unless you're claiming that users that tether use no more bandwidth than those that do, the provider *does* incur more costs due to tethering.
Even though they are selling you a plan that lets you use up to 1GB or 5GB (or whatever) of data, they don't actually expect everyone to use that much data, and their network couldn't handle it if everyone did.
Carriers have always oversold capacity, and there's really no way to efficiently run a network without overselling capacity. And few customers want to pay the price for dedicated bandwidth.
That's like saying they incur no cost for voice calls. Tethering increases data use, so increases carrier costs -- even if you stay under your "free" allowance. The carrier oversells bandwidth (and voice capacity) because they know not everyone is going to use their allotment of bundled data and minutes. But if everyone tethered and suddenly increased their data use, the carriers would have to spend money increasing their cellular network capacity.
25-50 miles on electric and starting at $40k is a long, long ways off from his spec.
For my part, they're going to have to be much closer to gas car prices, get more like 100 miles on electric, gas-extended so they have some utility beyond just work-and-back, and I need some way to charge one. Right now an electric vehicle wouldn't be an option for me if I had an unlimited car budget.
So maybe you have a 50 mile (or longer) one-way commute that's longer than 92% of USA commuters , but 68% of commuters have a one way distance of 15 miles or less, 78% have a commute of 20 miles or less.
So for most commuters, they can already buy a car that will get them to work and back on a single charge.
My commute is only 8 miles each way, I rarely travel more than 20 miles from home on weekends, and when I do, it's often more than 100 miles, so even a 200 mile range car wouldn't get me there and home again without recharging.
My commute isn't a good fit for an electric car (or even a hybrid) because it's too short -- I usually bike it. I drive too little to make it work buying a new car just to get a hybrid or electric car. My 10 year old car only gets 19/28 mpg, but it's hard to justify replacing it. But if I had a longer commute, I'd seriously consider the Chevy Volt since even a 200 mile range electric car means I can't take it everywhere I want to go. Even though the payback period for the Volt is 10 years or more, I expect gas prices to rise in the future, which will probably make the Volt pay itself back in under 10 years.
The first electric car with 200+ mile range and a less than $25,000 price will be the biggest seller in the market overnight.
Just those two items alone would probably cause Musk to be right. And that's what he's betting, that the battery range and price will come down to the point that everyone can afford an electric car and that it will have a range similar to that of a gasoline engine. If the market delivers those specs I think he'll be right, you can drive an electric car for about $0.10 cents a mile, the gas savings alone would so massive everyone and their dog would want one.
What could you do if you didn't have to buy gas anymore?
The Chevy Volt already has a longer all-electric range than the average USA commute distance (and hundreds of miles of gasoline powered range) and "only" costs $30K (after tax rebate). Why wait for a 200 mile electric car when a Volt will get you to work on electricity alone, yet you can still drive it 200 miles to grandma's house (and you don't need to plug it in at her house and let it charge overnight).
I'd be surprised if a $25K 200 mile range electric made a significant difference in sales - sales over the $25K Nissan Leaf (70 mile range, which covers about 85% of round trip commutes in the USA) have only numbered in the thousands.
Electric cars will continue to gain in sales, but not because of a $5K drop in price or even a doubling or tripling of range - they will just become more acceptable - and the operating cost savings will be more apparent when the global economy picks up and gas prices rise again. I doubt the USA will ever build a significant natural gas refueling station network to let it take advantage of cheaper natural gas for transportation, but natural gas works well at creating electricity that can be delivered to cars over existing wires.
Try clicking BOTH links to see where they go. HINT: Slashdot is only half of them.
Still a valid question about why a summary posted to Slashdot links to Slashdot. I think most people that are reading Slashdot already know the URL.
But my bigger pet peeve is when a summary contains fivedifferentlinks and you have to play "link roulette" to try to guess the one that takes you to the relevant article - hovering over them to look at the URL's doesn't always tell you which is the relevant one.
the thing I dont get about drupal is why is it necessary when websites are just html codes because i dont need any cms to write html codes and so i think its just a scam to try to get people to pay good money for things when they could just write their own html codes
If you think that's bad, wait until you find out how much money Microsoft makes from Excel, when a spreadsheet is really no different than a paper tabular worksheet. Anything you can do with spreadsheet software can easily be duplicated on paper (sometimes with a little cutting and pasting with scissors and glue).
I can't wait until this whole digital sham blows over and we can stop trying to force everything into some lame digital form.
I was involved in a phone system rollout where we rolled out high definition voice that gives noticeably better quality on calls within the office.
Many people hated it - said the voice quality of the new phone system was terrible and wondered how could we possibly put in a new system that sounded noticably worse than the old.
But a year later, we did a test with a few of the more vocal complainers and had them do side-by-side comparisions with the high def codec and the lower bandwidth codec used by the old system and now even they admit that the new system sounds better.
So even if 48fps is technically better than 24fps, many people will think it's worse because it's "different" but if it becomes a standard, at some point kids will wonder how their parents could ever stand watching 24fps movies.
"Using "waterfall" you could also get 1000 lines of code in a single day from a coder too..."
Repeat: the oft-quoted "average" in a large waterfall project has often been reported at 7 usable (i.e., non-comment) lines of code a day.
The average for Agile is commonly reported to be somewhere around 300 to 500 lines. That's a pretty significant difference.
I'm going to have to call bullshit on those numbers. Unless you're saying that an Agile project is bloated with unnecessary lines of code because a developer continuously rewrites code over and over. I'm sure you can find the stats to back up 7 LoC for a Waterfall project and several hundrend LoC/day for an Agile project, but I can't believe it's an apples-to-apples comparison for an equivalent project.
If those numbers were true a project that would have taken 60 months under the Waterfall methodology would take a month or two under Agile (assuming the same number of resources were assigned to the project). I haven't heard anyone claiming that a project could be completed 40 to 70 times faster under Agile.
"(but some managers overestime the agility of Agile development and think that a major change that requires rearchitecting major pieces of the project can be incorporated into the next iteration)"
I agree, but that's a problem with the manager, not with the process.
Well, sometimes the adaptability of Agile is oversold. It's not a weakness with the process, but it is sometimes presented as a magic bullet that will let a project adapt to changing requirements, and not everyone understands that a fundamental change in the requirements may require a major overhaul of the project. Whereas waterfall makes that assumption explicit - what you write down is what you're going to get.
Agile is a proven methodology. In the old "waterfall" software industry, the famous "standard" was 7 lines of code per day per programmer.
Thanks largely to Agile methodologies, you can get up to as many as 1000 lines of code per day (though that's a bit on the high side), with even fewer bugs than the old 7-lines-per-day methods thanks in part to thorough, continuing testing being built-in to the process.
Using "waterfall" you could also get 1000 lines of code in a single day from a coder too - but whether the project is done using Agile or Waterfall, if you take the total project time (including requirements analysis, documentation, unit and system tests), the average LoC/day is much lower. And of course, LoC is completely meaningless - when using a modern library or framework a single line of code can replace what would have taken a thousand lines or code 5 or 10 years ago.
In my experience, Agile projects tend to run longer than they would have under waterfall, but the end product is usually closer to what the customer needs - few customers are willing to put in the time to spec out an entire project at the beginning (and are unwilling to freeze their business process during the project) and it takes too long to work changes through the waterfall process, but small changes can easily be rolled into the next iteration of an Agile process. (but some managers overestime the agility of Agile development and think that a major change that requires rearchitecting major pieces of the project can be incorporated into the next iteration)
You're doing yourself a disservice if you make a TV purchase based on an in-store comparison. They're all set up in torch mode to out-compete each other on brightness. Similar to how WMA audio was rumored to increase the volume by a few decibels to "cheat" by exploiting people's audio perception.
That may be true if I were purely interested in display quality (though it's easy enough to take them out of eye-searing brightness mode), but my wife is more interested in aesthetics - before we spend $1000+ on a new TV for the living room she wants to be sure she likes it too. And you can't always tell from the online pictures how shiny the finish is or how big the speaker grills are.
At this moment your post is modded down '-1 overrated' to give your post a score of zero. IMO/. has had an increasing number of unjustified negative mods. Your post is on-topic and reasonable. You don't have a 6 digit ID (neither do I) but you're a million away from all of the 2.6 million ID trolls and shills and your comment history doesn't indicate you're a nuisance that needs to be modded down all of the time (the last zero score post I see by you is equally baffling). Hopefully someone will come along and at least mod you back to your natural score.
Perhaps/. shouldn't give more mods to people who spend (or waste) all of their mod points whenever they get them and shouldn't keep giving mods to people who have a history of voting negatively.
Sorry for the off-topic* post but it's really been bothering me lately and I needed to vent.
*If someone is going to mod my post down please at least use the correct mod of off-topic.
Yeah, I've noticed the same thing. Sometimes I do make flippant remark or make an attempt a humor that (rightfully) gets modded down (but seems like just as often, an inane comment gets moderated up!), and sometimes I'll take an unpopular viewpoint (without making it into a personal attack), which also gets modded down -- moderators seem to have trouble separating dissenting opinions from trolling or offtopic posts. But sometimes I'll have a post like this one that's completely on-topic and relevant (and this time I even did the math right!) and it still gets modded down.
I figure that I must have pissed someone(s) off in the past and they are retaliating, but I really don't know for sure. If that's what's going on, I assume meta-moderation will eventually catch up to them. But hey, I've still got my 2^6 Score:5 Comment achievement badge, and I wear it proudly!
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These clipboard wielding morons are the reason that nobody has any initiative left to do anything. They get handed absolute power over you, dont wield it with any respect, and when you point out how unreasonable it is you get told its for your own good, which is utter bullshit. They are only overzealous because telling you what is for your own good is for their own good if they want their job to be secure. The faults above may well be worth noting, but they hardly sound like they represented immediate danger. He could very easily have just turned off the breaker and there is no longer a hazard.
Public property is something else altogether, but do you think it is common sense to be able to deny someone their own roof because of minor oversights that can be left for later?
What building code deficiencies do you think should homeowners should be allowed to address "later"? How do you define "minor"? If something is so "minor" that it doesn't need to be addressed immediately, maybe it's not that important after all and should be removed from the code?
Does your plan apply only when the homeowner does the work, or also when a contractor does the work? How do you ensure that the homeowner is making an informed decision about a particular risk that may involve areas of structural engineering, electrical design or plumbing, etc that the homeowner is not an expert in? Should home builders be able to specialize in building low-cost non-code-compliant housing that cover the "major" parts of code, but leave the "minor" parts for the homeowner to implement later?
For example, should a contractor or homeowner be allowed to install a non-AL rated outlet when the house has Aluminum wiring? After all, it's likely that it will last for quite some time before it causes a problem - it might last for years or even decades without a problem - plenty of time for the homeowner to fix it "later". Until that cold winter night when he decides to plug in a space heater in his bedroom, and the inadequate connection between the home wiring and the outlet heats up until it starts a fire. He ran out of outlet boxes when he was installing that outlet, so he built one out of scrap wood (not code compliant and he knew it, but hey, the hardware store is 60 miles away and he just wanted to get the work finished) -- and now that wood is smoldering.
But no worries, it's a slow smoldering fire. The inspector warned him that the foam insulation he installed in the bedroom walls was not properly fire-rated but he knew that was just a government plot to make him buy more expensive foam, so he left it there. And now as it's heated by the flaming outlet, it's filling his bedroom with toxic smoke.
Good thing he has smoke detectors. Oh wait, despite the building code requiring AC-wired smoke detectors, he decided that was a minor thing that was not important to him since a battery operated smoke detector worked just as well. But he forgot to change the smoke detector batteries this year since he was on vacation over daylight saving's time when he usually swapped out the batteries and though the detector chirped for a week while he was out on that business trip, he wasn't there to hear it and now his smoke detector is silent.
At least the sprinklers will save him as the smoldering fire breaks out into outright flames. Oh yeah, when he built the house he didn't want some government wonk telling him how to build his house, so he omitted the sprinkler system that was required by code. He said he'd add it later when he had more money.
Fortunately his daughter woke up from the smoke, but when she was blinded by the smoke and rushing down the stairs to safety she stumbled on that one step that was wider than the others (sure, it was a code violation, but it would have been expensive to fix since the inspector didn't point it out until the contractor already finished his work and left town), and she grasped at empty air trying to stop her fall with the non-existent handrail, she hit her head o
I'm all about anonymity when appropriate, but trust me, the NSA, CIA, FBI, etc. couldn't possibly care less about your latté habits
Of course they do - that's the whole point of the NSA's data mining efforts.
If they know that a group of interest meets at 8pm on the 1st, 17th and 23rd of each month, and you buy a Latte from the Starbucks next door to the meeting place only on those days at 7:45pm, then you become a person of interest.
Is there any building department in the country that will approve stairs with no railing? Your wife is disabled, so you should understand the need for hand railings on stairs.
Bullshit. Have you ever moved furniture up or down stairs? In every single place I have moved into or out of I have removed the banister/handrail (if possible) when moving: it's a necessity to ease moving. The handrail aids you in no way while carrying boxes or moving matress or sofa. If anything, they're a liability.
I'm not sure what you're calling bullshit on. Unless you've removed the handrails and *still* got signoff on the permit that covers the stairway construction, what you're describing is much different that getting a construction permit signed off when the work is not up to code.
Obviously you can get the permit signoff, then take the railing off yourself and no one will know but you. However, if you have the inspector out for some other reason and he sees the stairway with a missing handrail, he can still call it out as a a code violation and require that it be brought up to code if was built at a time when the building code required it.
In some places, city workers take their damn time. 6 weeks seems like the realm of somewhere like Chicago, NY, or California, but I suppose it's possible to happen in other places. It took 4 weeks to get a building permit to do a little fix-up on a patio for me a while back... at about week 3, I said "fuck it" and just fixed it. Nobody was the wiser.
Lots of people do unpermitted work without being found out. But sometimes a neighbor turns them in, or sometimes it's uncovered when they try to sell the house and suddenly the homeowner is faced with the prospect of tearing open walls so the inspector can look at plumbing and electrical -- and if the inspector doesn't like what he sees, he can require that all of the non-permitted renovations be removed. If the work was done by a licensed contractor, his license can be revoked for doing unpermitted work.
I thought the Galaxy Tab 10 and 7.7 were tablets, but Apple was quoted saying:
"Samsung's infringing sales have enabled Samsung to overtake Apple as the largest manufacturer of smartphones in the world. Samsung has reaped billions of dollars in profits and caused Apple to lose hundreds of millions of dollars through its violation of Apple's intellectual property."
Why does Samsung's status as a smartphone manufacturer have anything to do with tablets?
And why is Apple suing for $2.5B in damages when by their own admission, they lost only "hundreds of millions of dollars"?
I don't see why it took you 6 more weeks of sleeping outside to get the handrail installed and porch light fixed? A handrail is a couple hours of work, even in concrete. Couldn't you just fix them and schedule a followup inspection?
Now that I think about it, it was more like 3 weeks but to answer your question it was because the contractors who did the initial work had squeezed us in between larger jobs and moved on to their next job in another state as soon as they got their truck unloaded, and everybody else within a hundred miles (it's a rural area in Wyoming) was booked months in advance. Once the original contractor was able to send somebody back to do the handrail, we had to wait for the inspector to come back out for the followup inspection.
Then it sounds like your problem is with the contractor and not the building inspector -- the contractor should have known that railings were required on stairs so it was his fault for building a non-compliant structure.
Your wife is disabled, so you should understand the need for hand railings on stairs. Even if they are OUTSIDE the house, since presumably they may be used for emergency egress. If the porch light was installed as part of the permitted work, then I can understand why they rejected it -- a loose light can be a shock hazard. If it wasn't part of the permitted work, then the inspector was being petty and should have just pointed it out without writing it up. But if it was done under the permit and he gave his signoff and your wife electrocuted herself while changing the light bulb, it's his head on the line.
She will also never, ever be able to use those stairs under any circumstances. But that's beside the point. I'm saying it's intrusive and counterproductive to deny occupancy of our bedroom because of an outside handrail. Yes, all the things you cite are potential hazards and it's quite conceivable that some poorly placed item or loose fixture could someday hurt me.
But the building inspector has only one tool at his disposal - he can either sign off on the inspection or not. He can't add a note to your real estate records warning potential future buyers about non-compliant construction, nor can he post a sign at your door warning future visitors that there may be a safety hazard in your home. He can't have you sign a waiver saying that you understand and accept the risks. All he can do is tell you to build to code or refuse to sign off on the construction.
Where would you draw the line on compliant construction? Should a homeowner be able to do anything? Should he be able to use non-approved plastic piping for water, even if that piping is known to degrade with hot water and will likely fail in a few years? Should he be able to forgo GFCI outlets in his kitchen because he knows he's always careful to avoid electric shock? Should he be able to wire up 20 amp breakers and outlets with 14 gauge wire?
If I get hurt, or somebody decides to sue me because they got hurt, on my own property due to decisions I made; if a future buyer refuses to make an offer until I change the layout of the stairs, I bear the consequences of my actions.
It's only remains your problem until it becomes someone else's problem. Maybe a visitor will stumble down those stairs, maybe you'll end up having to move and rent out your house. Maybe you'll sell the house and the purchaser won't find (or repair) all of the non-compliant issues.
I don't need every minuscule aspect of my life safety inspected, protective helmeted, or compliance regulated. I shouldn't have to stop by my building office and speak to inspector to manage my property to my specifications. If they want to offer advice as to what they think is the best way to approach things, I think that's great and I'll seek out such advice and take it into considerations; making me legally bound to adhere
Whether all you say is true and just, you walked right by the core point of the post. They were prevented from living in their house on their property by some government bureaucrat. Whether those issues are 'serious' or not, they should be allowed to accept that risk without worrying that some one will show up and evict them from their own home.
I see what you're saying about building codes and I'd likely want a house I bought to be built to some good standards and certified as such by someone. That said, I would also not want some government wonk showing up and telling me I can't live the way I want as long as I'm not bringing harm on others.
Ahh, well that's the problem -- your house on your property ends up being someone else's house and property some day, and once the work is done and the walls are sealed up, no one knows if the work was done to code. If you want to know that the house was built to some good standards, then you're going to check the permit history and make sure that any significant renovations or improvements were done with permits. The previous owner might have been happy with doing his own work on the house in his own way, but without permits and building inspections, you don't know if it's done safely - the previous owner may have thought it was ok to forgo junction boxes and join wires behind the wall by wrapping them together with electrical tape. And the house may be fine for decades like that, but a building inspector will require properly sized wire nuts and sealed junction boxes for safety. But without the building inspector there at the time of construction, you may never know what's behind the walls.
A good pre-purchase home inspection will turn up a lot of non-code compliant issues, but that's no substitute for making sure the work was done right in the first place since not everything can be inspected without tearing open walls (which is what the building inspector will make you do if they discover that you did non-permitted work).
I don't see how you can have a house built to some good standards and certified as such without having some government wonk telling you how to build or renovate your house. How else would you ensure these good standards?
. Where I live (east coast US), windows also have to be hurricane rated by law. This basically means that they will not break when a 8ft 2x4 is shot at 150 mph directly at them. Good luck with that, if you just threw it together yourself.
I think you may be mixing up the wind load test with the missile impact test. I bet the wood siding on most houses would fail a 150mph 8ft 2x4 impact. The 150mph rating is for wind-load (which is substantial, especially for a large window).
Miami-Dade has 2 impact tests for windows, the speed of the large projectile 2x4 is only 34mph, which has much lower energy than a 150mph projectile... even the small projectile "ball bearing" test is only performed at 50mph:
http://browardimpact.com/miamidadeimpacttesting.htm
The Miami-Dade Building Code requires that every exterior opening - residential or commercial - be provided with protection against wind-borne debris caused by hurricanes. Such protection could either be shutters or impact-resistant products. There are two types of impact-resistant products: large-missile resistant and small- missile resistant.
Large-missile resistant
A product is declared large-missile resistant after it has been exposed to various impacts with a piece of
lumber weighing approximately 9 pounds, measuring 2" x 4" x 6’ in size, traveling at a speed of 50 feet per
second (34 mph). The product must pass positive and negative wind loads for 9,000 cycles, with impact
creating no hole larger than 1/16 x 5" in the interlayer of the glass.
Small-missile resistant
A product is declared small-missile resistant after it has been exposed to various impacts with 10 ball bearings
traveling at a speed of 80 feet per second (50 mph). The product is then subjected to wind loads for 9,000 cycles.
We had a basement foundation put in for a modular house and jumped through all their hoops; when the inspector came out we failed the inspection because the front porch light was loose and there was no handrail on the concrete stairs leading to the basement OUTSIDE the house. Because of that -- and that alone -- we were not permitted to occupy our own house on our own property. Apparently he felt it was safer for my handicapped wife, my dog, and me to live for six weeks in a leaky motor home in our driveway with no running water in below-zero winter than to sleep in beds in our heated house because of that porch light and handrail.
Is there any building department in the country that will approve stairs with no railing? Your wife is disabled, so you should understand the need for hand railings on stairs. Even if they are OUTSIDE the house, since presumably they may be used for emergency egress. If the porch light was installed as part of the permitted work, then I can understand why they rejected it -- a loose light can be a shock hazard. If it wasn't part of the permitted work, then the inspector was being petty and should have just pointed it out without writing it up. But if it was done under the permit and he gave his signoff and your wife electrocuted herself while changing the light bulb, it's his head on the line.
I don't see why it took you 6 more weeks of sleeping outside to get the handrail installed and porch light fixed? A handrail is a couple hours of work, even in concrete. Couldn't you just fix them and schedule a followup inspection?
As annoying as they are, building department regulations are supposed to insure a minimal standard of construction - any licensed contractor should be able to build to code without a problem. If you're doing the work yourself, stop by your building office and speak to an inspector -- don't assume that if you just submit plans that the inspector is going to call out every little non-compliant item.
Does the whole world have to stop every time some crazy person snaps? If you knew the victims, I'm sorry for your loss. I didn't, so I'm more interested in the review.
When you know that a particular article is tied to a recent tragedy and is likely to attract many lame attempts at humor directed at the tragedy, maybe it wouldn't hurt to wait a day or two before publishing it so friends and relatives of the victims who are searching the news for articles pertaining to the tragedy don't have to read flippant comments like "I hear the special effects in Colorado were killer", "atleast 12 people were dying to see it...", or "Yeah, it sucked watching it made me want to go out and shoot people.". Leave the infantile comments to sites like 4chan where they are expected and appreciated. Would you want to see the "funny" comments about a tragedy where you may have lost a child or friend?
I'm sure everyone here has already heard the news about the shootings (I can't believe the Slashdot editors let this story go up today), but for posterity's sake when people stumble across this article and wonder what the inappropriate attempts of humor are with thinly veiled references to the attack, here's more background:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/21/us/colorado-mall-shooting.html?pagewanted=all
A gunman dressed head to foot in body armor and brandishing three weapons, including an assault rifle, opened fire in a theater crowded with families and children at a midnight showing of the Batman movie “The Dark Knight Rises” in a Denver suburb early Friday morning, killing at least 12 people and wounding 59 others, police and federal officials said.
The suspect, James Holmes, 24, told the police after his arrest that he had booby-trapped his Aurora apartment with explosive devices, leading the police to evacuate five buildings in the neighborhood as they sought to disable what they described as “incendiary devices” rigged to trip wires.
Mr. Holmes’s only criminal history was a traffic summons, said Aurora’s police chief, Dan Oates. Mr. Holmes earned a bachelor’s degree with honors in neuroscience in 2010 from the University of California, Riverside.
During the attack, witnesses said Mr. Holmes had entered through a side door of the packed theater and first set off at least two smoke devices before firing randomly at audience members, who had just settled into their seats. Within minutes, he was arrested in a parking lot behind the theater near his car, the police said.
Mr. Holmes had apparently planned the attack for some time: He wore a gas mask, body armor, a tactical helmet and was dressed completely in black. He entered the theater with an AR-15 assault rifle, a Remington 12-guage shotgun and a 40-caliber Glock handgun. A fourth gun, another Glock pistol, was found in his car. The authorities believe that Mr. Holmes acted alone, and that the death toll may increase because some of the injuries were serious.
The police and witnesses described a scene of utter chaos inside the darkened, smoke-filled theater as bullets resounded loudly around them, and people who had gone to see a PG-13-rated action movie were suddenly forced to scramble to safety as friends and loved ones were felled around them.
The screen on my Galaxy Nexus is the perfect size for me. Still fits in my pocket, and my thumb can reach the entire screen while the phone is held comfortably in my hand. It's a bit of a stretch to reach the pull-down notification bar, but it's still within reach. I think any larger screen would be too big to use one handed.
My girlfriend, on the other hand, can't use my Nexus one handed, her thumb is not long enough to reach the top of the screen, and it's even a bit of a stretch to reach over to the left-side of the screen. So she's much happier with the 3.1" screen on her phone.
My Nexus is still large enough for us to both comfortably watch a movie on an airplane. A bigger screen might be nice for that, but not if I need to carry it in my pocket or use it one handed while standing in the bus.
For statistical reasons woman boobs are bigger then mens.
No, women's breasts are (statistically) larger than mens for evolutionary reasons, not statistical ones. In fact, I doubt that statistics themselves have much effect on breast size at all!:-)
Statistically, some women obtain big boobs because they believe that statistically speaking, they will be able to attract a better mate with larger boobs.
So an argument could be made that, on average, women's boobs are statistically larger due to statistics.
You've never met such a person. You're projecting unwarranted assumptions onto people you'll never know.
I have met such a person. They have a boat that they keep in a local marina. They bought a heavy 4 wheel drive SUV so they can take the boat out of the water and tow it to other places.
In the 3 years since they bought the car, they've towed the boat out of the water Zero times, but the SUV gets daily use on a 40 mile commute (while the wife's Civic sits at home almost every day). They boat has been out of the water a few times for maintenance, but they just let the marina people take care of it rather than using their own trailer (which is rusting away in their side yard with at least one flat tire, I don't even know if it's still roadworthy).
How about "they incur no costs above what they've already charged to recover."
Unless you're claiming that users that tether use no more bandwidth than those that do, the provider *does* incur more costs due to tethering.
Even though they are selling you a plan that lets you use up to 1GB or 5GB (or whatever) of data, they don't actually expect everyone to use that much data, and their network couldn't handle it if everyone did.
Carriers have always oversold capacity, and there's really no way to efficiently run a network without overselling capacity. And few customers want to pay the price for dedicated bandwidth.
Carriers incur no cost for tethering
That's like saying they incur no cost for voice calls. Tethering increases data use, so increases carrier costs -- even if you stay under your "free" allowance. The carrier oversells bandwidth (and voice capacity) because they know not everyone is going to use their allotment of bundled data and minutes. But if everyone tethered and suddenly increased their data use, the carriers would have to spend money increasing their cellular network capacity.
25-50 miles on electric and starting at $40k is a long, long ways off from his spec.
For my part, they're going to have to be much closer to gas car prices, get more like 100 miles on electric, gas-extended so they have some utility beyond just work-and-back, and I need some way to charge one. Right now an electric vehicle wouldn't be an option for me if I had an unlimited car budget.
The Volt costs around $31k after the tax rebate.
So maybe you have a 50 mile (or longer) one-way commute that's longer than 92% of USA commuters , but 68% of commuters have a one way distance of 15 miles or less, 78% have a commute of 20 miles or less.
So for most commuters, they can already buy a car that will get them to work and back on a single charge.
My commute is only 8 miles each way, I rarely travel more than 20 miles from home on weekends, and when I do, it's often more than 100 miles, so even a 200 mile range car wouldn't get me there and home again without recharging.
My commute isn't a good fit for an electric car (or even a hybrid) because it's too short -- I usually bike it. I drive too little to make it work buying a new car just to get a hybrid or electric car. My 10 year old car only gets 19/28 mpg, but it's hard to justify replacing it. But if I had a longer commute, I'd seriously consider the Chevy Volt since even a 200 mile range electric car means I can't take it everywhere I want to go. Even though the payback period for the Volt is 10 years or more, I expect gas prices to rise in the future, which will probably make the Volt pay itself back in under 10 years.
The first electric car with 200+ mile range and a less than $25,000 price will be the biggest seller in the market overnight.
Just those two items alone would probably cause Musk to be right. And that's what he's betting, that the battery range and price will come down to the point that everyone can afford an electric car and that it will have a range similar to that of a gasoline engine. If the market delivers those specs I think he'll be right, you can drive an electric car for about $0.10 cents a mile, the gas savings alone would so massive everyone and their dog would want one.
What could you do if you didn't have to buy gas anymore?
The Chevy Volt already has a longer all-electric range than the average USA commute distance (and hundreds of miles of gasoline powered range) and "only" costs $30K (after tax rebate). Why wait for a 200 mile electric car when a Volt will get you to work on electricity alone, yet you can still drive it 200 miles to grandma's house (and you don't need to plug it in at her house and let it charge overnight).
I'd be surprised if a $25K 200 mile range electric made a significant difference in sales - sales over the $25K Nissan Leaf (70 mile range, which covers about 85% of round trip commutes in the USA) have only numbered in the thousands.
Electric cars will continue to gain in sales, but not because of a $5K drop in price or even a doubling or tripling of range - they will just become more acceptable - and the operating cost savings will be more apparent when the global economy picks up and gas prices rise again. I doubt the USA will ever build a significant natural gas refueling station network to let it take advantage of cheaper natural gas for transportation, but natural gas works well at creating electricity that can be delivered to cars over existing wires.
Try clicking BOTH links to see where they go. HINT: Slashdot is only half of them.
Still a valid question about why a summary posted to Slashdot links to Slashdot. I think most people that are reading Slashdot already know the URL.
But my bigger pet peeve is when a summary contains five different links and you have to play "link roulette" to try to guess the one that takes you to the relevant article - hovering over them to look at the URL's doesn't always tell you which is the relevant one.
the thing I dont get about drupal is why is it necessary when websites are just html codes because i dont need any cms to write html codes and so i think its just a scam to try to get people to pay good money for things when they could just write their own html codes
If you think that's bad, wait until you find out how much money Microsoft makes from Excel, when a spreadsheet is really no different than a paper tabular worksheet. Anything you can do with spreadsheet software can easily be duplicated on paper (sometimes with a little cutting and pasting with scissors and glue).
I can't wait until this whole digital sham blows over and we can stop trying to force everything into some lame digital form.
I was involved in a phone system rollout where we rolled out high definition voice that gives noticeably better quality on calls within the office.
Many people hated it - said the voice quality of the new phone system was terrible and wondered how could we possibly put in a new system that sounded noticably worse than the old.
But a year later, we did a test with a few of the more vocal complainers and had them do side-by-side comparisions with the high def codec and the lower bandwidth codec used by the old system and now even they admit that the new system sounds better.
So even if 48fps is technically better than 24fps, many people will think it's worse because it's "different" but if it becomes a standard, at some point kids will wonder how their parents could ever stand watching 24fps movies.
"Using "waterfall" you could also get 1000 lines of code in a single day from a coder too..."
Repeat: the oft-quoted "average" in a large waterfall project has often been reported at 7 usable (i.e., non-comment) lines of code a day.
The average for Agile is commonly reported to be somewhere around 300 to 500 lines. That's a pretty significant difference.
I'm going to have to call bullshit on those numbers. Unless you're saying that an Agile project is bloated with unnecessary lines of code because a developer continuously rewrites code over and over. I'm sure you can find the stats to back up 7 LoC for a Waterfall project and several hundrend LoC/day for an Agile project, but I can't believe it's an apples-to-apples comparison for an equivalent project.
If those numbers were true a project that would have taken 60 months under the Waterfall methodology would take a month or two under Agile (assuming the same number of resources were assigned to the project). I haven't heard anyone claiming that a project could be completed 40 to 70 times faster under Agile.
"(but some managers overestime the agility of Agile development and think that a major change that requires rearchitecting major pieces of the project can be incorporated into the next iteration)"
I agree, but that's a problem with the manager, not with the process.
Well, sometimes the adaptability of Agile is oversold. It's not a weakness with the process, but it is sometimes presented as a magic bullet that will let a project adapt to changing requirements, and not everyone understands that a fundamental change in the requirements may require a major overhaul of the project. Whereas waterfall makes that assumption explicit - what you write down is what you're going to get.
Agile is a proven methodology. In the old "waterfall" software industry, the famous "standard" was 7 lines of code per day per programmer.
Thanks largely to Agile methodologies, you can get up to as many as 1000 lines of code per day (though that's a bit on the high side), with even fewer bugs than the old 7-lines-per-day methods thanks in part to thorough, continuing testing being built-in to the process.
Using "waterfall" you could also get 1000 lines of code in a single day from a coder too - but whether the project is done using Agile or Waterfall, if you take the total project time (including requirements analysis, documentation, unit and system tests), the average LoC/day is much lower. And of course, LoC is completely meaningless - when using a modern library or framework a single line of code can replace what would have taken a thousand lines or code 5 or 10 years ago.
In my experience, Agile projects tend to run longer than they would have under waterfall, but the end product is usually closer to what the customer needs - few customers are willing to put in the time to spec out an entire project at the beginning (and are unwilling to freeze their business process during the project) and it takes too long to work changes through the waterfall process, but small changes can easily be rolled into the next iteration of an Agile process. (but some managers overestime the agility of Agile development and think that a major change that requires rearchitecting major pieces of the project can be incorporated into the next iteration)
You're doing yourself a disservice if you make a TV purchase based on an in-store comparison. They're all set up in torch mode to out-compete each other on brightness. Similar to how WMA audio was rumored to increase the volume by a few decibels to "cheat" by exploiting people's audio perception.
That may be true if I were purely interested in display quality (though it's easy enough to take them out of eye-searing brightness mode), but my wife is more interested in aesthetics - before we spend $1000+ on a new TV for the living room she wants to be sure she likes it too. And you can't always tell from the online pictures how shiny the finish is or how big the speaker grills are.
...if you try, why not go a year without DRM?
If you think that's hard, try to go a year without DRAM
At this moment your post is modded down '-1 overrated' to give your post a score of zero. IMO /. has had an increasing number of unjustified negative mods. Your post is on-topic and reasonable. You don't have a 6 digit ID (neither do I) but you're a million away from all of the 2.6 million ID trolls and shills and your comment history doesn't indicate you're a nuisance that needs to be modded down all of the time (the last zero score post I see by you is equally baffling). Hopefully someone will come along and at least mod you back to your natural score.
Perhaps /. shouldn't give more mods to people who spend (or waste) all of their mod points whenever they get them and shouldn't keep giving mods to people who have a history of voting negatively.
Sorry for the off-topic* post but it's really been bothering me lately and I needed to vent.
*If someone is going to mod my post down please at least use the correct mod of off-topic.
Yeah, I've noticed the same thing. Sometimes I do make flippant remark or make an attempt a humor that (rightfully) gets modded down (but seems like just as often, an inane comment gets moderated up!), and sometimes I'll take an unpopular viewpoint (without making it into a personal attack), which also gets modded down -- moderators seem to have trouble separating dissenting opinions from trolling or offtopic posts. But sometimes I'll have a post like this one that's completely on-topic and relevant (and this time I even did the math right!) and it still gets modded down.
I figure that I must have pissed someone(s) off in the past and they are retaliating, but I really don't know for sure. If that's what's going on, I assume meta-moderation will eventually catch up to them. But hey, I've still got my 2^6 Score:5 Comment achievement badge, and I wear it proudly!