Pretty much every credit, debit or charge card in the UK now has a chip as well as the mag strip (for those places that haven't moved to chip and pin authentication). Even some of the store loyalty cards use a chip instead of a mag strip.
Maybe if search engines didn't weight page title so heavily people wouldn't keyword stuff it. Surely it would be better to base results on the content of the page that users actually look at. How often do you actually look at the page title? I don't look often, I look at the page body. If the page body text were used as the primary source of keywords, and the text <Hx> tags given appropriate weightings (H1 more heavily than H2 &c) then that might be more useful as it would use keywords that the reader actually sees and weights them according to prominance.
Sometimes it is valid to have a long title for a page, I think it would be useful if you could set a full title and short title with full title used in search results and the short title in bookmarks, history, window title bars &c.
On Linux you can run 10 year old apps provided you have the source code which is true for most Open Source apps.
And a compatible compiler and libraries. Also a lot of older business apps aren't open source. Plus you need someone who is comfortable compiling apps and can deal with the inevitable errors due to library incompatibilities (not the case in a lot of smaller companies).
Personally I'd love it if we could get more Linux into businesses on the desktop and in the middleware layer (we already have a lot being used for network edge type things, DNS, LDAP, monitoring stations &c). Right now SUsE seem to be the best bet, in Europe at least. I know of a few companies doing packaged solutions based around Debian but they're quite specialised (to the extent that you buy the PC preinstalled with Debian and the apps then they remotely manage the boxes, you cannot install software or manage the boxes yourself and don't even have the root password).
So you put that your three team mates did nothing or next to nothing. They put that they each did about 30% each and you did about 10%. The teacher investigates, the upshot of which is that you lose your teeth or some other body part(s) you need and probably get sent down or put on academic probation for lying (well, it was 3 against one).
Sometimes people seem to get so caught up on the details of an example or analogy that they lose whatever it was about in the first place. I was trying to present a variation of the original example where their objections would be void.
Here in the UK criminal records checks tend to be limited to roles where employing someone who has been convicted of a specific crime or group of crimes would put someone in danger, so jobs if you were recruting someone to look after children you'd check that they didn't have a record of child abuse &c. Unfortunately checks aren't always done properly, hence the case with Ian Huntley.
Here in the UK most employment contracts (certainly all the ones I've had so that's 5 in the last 11 years, both public and private sector) have a clause whereby doing anything that is or causes negative publicity for the employer is an instant dismissal offense. Mentioning your employer by name in your blog negatively falls under this. It's also been used to sack employees convicted of minor criminal offenses that have been reported in the local newspaper and even one case (a friend of mine) where they were getting a divorce, the justification being that they worked for a dating service and it was contrary to the image of the company to employ divorced people.
OK, you find that he was jailed for child molestation but a few years later it was found that he was innocent (it happens, we've had a recent rash here in the UK of women who had been jailed for killing their children now being released because of new evidence), perhaps he just fitted the profile and couldn't afford a good enough lawyer. He was released and the official record expunged but you found newspaper stories from time about the trial and mention of his release and the circumstances behind it. You, however, decide "There's no smoke without fire." and so refuse to employ him on the basis of an wrongful accusation.
Only if the information is false. The truth is an absolute defense against all defamation and libel suits. Even so, I doubt the prospective employer can be held accountable in most cases. However, a person (or former employer) saying something bad that is false (or not provably true) about someone, which causes them to not get hired is definately actionable.
Not in Europe it's not, I've been told it's not in the US either. If you reveal information about some one and are sued for defamation there are only four defenses available to you.
It wasn't you. Obviously if you can prove that then you're in the clear.
That the information was already public knowledge. You'd probably have to produce newspaper articles or similar material pre-dating your publication.
The release was in the public interest and there is a reasonable belief that the information is true. If you published an article about how your neighbour was having an affir with his pool boy then you could be sued for defamation, if you published the same about George W. Bush Jnr then you'd be found not guilty.
You can show that the publication was not intended to be defamatory and there was no reasonable expectation that it would be. This basically covers misunderstandings.
One of my teachers at school tried that. Unfortunately what happened is that in each group the rest of the members (the groups were arranged so each group was mixed ability) ganged up on the 'smart but weak/shy' one to do all the work then goofed off.
Actually, now I come to think about it, that's exactly what happens in the workplace.
30 students each writing 2 pages? wow, the US colleges must be very different from the UK was when I was getting my degree. I mainly studied sciences (although my university did have a cross boards requirement so I also studied some social science and humanities courses) and typical class size was 60+. Each week (until final year) we'd have to submit an essay or lab report, essays were typically 8-12 pages and lab reports often 20+ pages (although they'd be mostly graphs and tables of data) of typewritten text. Most of the marking was done by grad students, the lecturers would just produce a marking scheme and check a sample of each grad students marking to make sure they were marking appropriately.
I remember one time submitting an 80 page essay (about 60 pages of which was text and the rest diagrams), the bibliography alone was 5 pages. It was a subject area I was particularly interested in at the time and the title we'd been given was very loose and I found myself going into great depth. I got a B and instructions to put in the corrections/edits the lecturer and his grad student had annotated to it then have 5 copies printed and bound to be put into the university library if I wanted an A. Apparently it appeared on the reccomended reading list for that course the folowing year. Unfortunately the university had a policy that any material a student produced as part of a course was copyrighted to the university so I couldn't get any cash for it.
The first mass market for lithography was porn. The first mass market for photography was porn. The first mass market for movie films was porn. The first mass market for VCRs was porn. The highest selling genre in writing (both electronic and traditional printed media) is porn. I think I'm seeing a pattern here.
Definately. I've run Oracle 9i and 8i on SLES and it's sweet. Faster than running the Windows version on exactly the same kit. I've noticed that when I attend user group meetings and presentations where the presenters are demonstrating something using Oracle installed on their laptop virtually all are running it on SLES. 3 years ago they'd have been running on Windows.
That mirrors my experience. We were looking at replacing a lot of our 300 Windows servers (mainly hosting small Oracle databases and services like HTTP, DNS, File+Print, some apps &c) with Linux boxes so were looking to test SLES and RHAS with the apps and see which worked out best for us. Most of the apps would only run on the enterprise versions of Linux (i.e. SLES or RHAS, this was a couple of years ago so it was before the Novell deal went through), some would run on the free version with some fudging but we wanted to make sure that our testing reflected what we'd actually do in the live roll out. We were also looking at replacing most of our 24,000 Windows desktops with Linux ones.
I contacted SuSE and RedHat to see if we could get trial copies of SLES and RHAS (I'd been told there was no budget to buy trial copies, this is pretty much standard in the public sector, vendors tend to be aware of this), explaining what we wanted to do.
SuSE said they'd put a copy of the latest SLES in the post to us that day (they actually sent a partner media pack which had the SLES disks, a full set of manuals, the desktop and a bunch of supporting software and documentation), phone support for the testing period and would give us 5 days onsite consultancy. All for free. They even offered to send one of their technical guys to talk to the local Linux User Group (of which we're a member).
RedHat...well first time I called (just before lunch on a Friday) the entire sales department were out of the office at a leaving party. When I got through on Monday and eventually spoke to someone they said that they don't send out trial copies and I would have to use the free version. I explained the situation, that we couldn't use the free version because the software we wanted to test it with wasn't certified for the free version and I knew from experience that most of it wouldn't run on the free version due to library incompatibilities. I pointed out that by refusing to let us have a trial copy they were effectively taking themselves out of the running and potentially losing out on selling 300 RHAS licenses and 18-20,000 desktop licenses. They said they didn't care and it was their policy to not send out trial copies.I gave up.
We've started to roll out SuSE (or Novell as it is now) Linux, again it's the nature of the public sector that things happen slowly.
An interesting situation has arisen a number of times where I work (we've got 50,000 employees in a restricted geographical area so things that happen once in a bluemoon at other employers happen quite often for us) which you just reminded me of. Under British law you only have to inform your employer that you are pregnant if you plan to take maternity leave. Even then it's only something like one month before you plan to go on maternity leave (there are exceptions but they tend to relate jobs where you're exposed to conditions (chemicals, radiation &c) that may harm the sprog in which case you have to tell the employer that you may be pregnant or are planning on becoming pregnant as soon as you know/suspect). Until you formally tell the employer they cannot officially make preparations for your maternity leave, they cannot even ask you if you are planning to take maternity leave. This has lead to situations where an obviously pregnant woman is sitting at her desk discussing with her collegues how she's painted the nursery and how she's planning to take 12 months maternity leave but if her manager started looking for a temp to cover for her or plans to distribute her workload during her absence she could take the employer to industrial tribunal.
Whilst I think that pregnant women should be protected from discrimination for being pregnant, but I also think that a manager who has heard unofficially/informally should be permitted to formally confirm it and enquire as to the woman's plans as to how long she expects to be on maternity leave. Plans do change but it's better to have a plan that you can revise than not to have one at all.
I also feel that it is incumbant on the woman's partner to tell his/her employer about the pregnancy so that plans can be made to give him/her time off to assist the woman, but then I feel (as I indicated previously) that it is incumbant on employers to ensure that their employees can have time to participate in child rearing. Some employers do seem to be giving paternity leave and adoptive parent leave.
There is still an assumption inherant in society that if one parent stays home to look after the kids then that parent will be the mother. Consider infants schools here in the UK (I guess that would be K through 2nd grade in the US, although we do start school earlier herem at age 4, by law, no hanging around till 6 years old). I have two neices, the eldest one just turned 14. When they were in infants school if my sister, our mother if a female friend showed up to pick them up they'd be allowed to take them with no questions. However if their father or I showed up to pick them up the school would check on us (ask the kid who we were and sometimes they'd call my sister to check, despite the fact that their father picked them up more often than my sister as he wasn't working but she was). the assumption was that a woman was safe but a man picking up a child was suspect. Indeed whilst the parents were waiting for the kids to come out the women would cluster together and exclude any men to the point of ignoring them. On two occasions when I was waiting to pick up one or both of my neices a police car pulled up and an officer got out to question me because they'd had reports of 'a strange man lurking outside the school'. Lurking? I was standing there reading a news paper in full view of everyone! Both times I had to tell them that I was waiting for my neice, give them the kid's name and they'd go into the school to get my neice, point me out and ask who I was.
Personally I think that both parents, if they choose to have kids, should have the opportunity to take time out from work and/or reduce their hours to participate in their kids upbringing. Obviously mother needs time off for the birth and to recover but beyond that it should be equal. Hah. I can dream.:-) I also think that if someone chooses not to have kids they should not be denigrated for that, maybe even have the opportunity to participate in the raising of children of their relatives or even friends? If one of your relatives or close friends was having a hard time with their new kid wouldn't you like to be able to take some time to help them out?
Maybe it's just the environments I've worked in and had female managers but, I've found that women in managerial positions have tended to have gotten there by consciously being more masculine than the males. If anything they've been more authoritarian and less democratic.
I do agree that not all women want a gaggle of sprogs. I did, however, see on the news this morning that now a greater number of women than in the last 10-20 years are choosing to have children and either quit work entirely whilst raising them or only working part time. I suspect that this might be, at least partly, behind the drop in the number of women in IT. Not only would it cause an overall drop in numbers but IT managers tend to be less amenable to part time working IME.
There is still a lot of sexism around, I've seen a lot of managers pay lip service to sexual equality but still target women for redundancy over men in the belief that a woman has a man to support her. Certainly salaries for women still seem to lag that of men for equivalent work (I'm a union rep and a lot of what I have to do is get equality for members who are subject to discrimination).
Personally, most of my old mail is either short stories (in some cases series that have been ongoing for years) people have sent me that I like to periodically reread (especially if someone who hasn't published in a while sends out a new part) or old tech stuff that I still need to refer to occaisionally (I still have to maintain some pretty old kit). It's eaiser to store that stuff in my mailbase.
Why involve the government at all? Oh right, because you want to force other people to pay for it...
Local governments are funded through taxes so each year they have a certain amount of money to spend that has been raised from the local people and businesses. A certain amount of that will be already ear marked for things that they have to provide for legal/statutory reasons but some will be available for projects that the elected representatives feel are in the interests of their electorate. If they believe that what is int he best interest of the majority of their electorate is a broadband service then they can choose to spend the money on that, if they think that something else would be a better use of the money then they can spend it on that. Why should you, living in one town, be able to tell a different town how they should be spending their money.
Municipalities frequently spend money on things that not all of their electorate use, not everyone wants or needs the same things (for example I haven't used a municipal swimming pool in years and have never used a municipal gymnasium) but so long as enough of their electorate vote for it then that's fine. I don't begrudge spending on the faccilities like swimmiong pools that I don't use as I'm sure that there are faccilities that I use, have used or will use at some time that are similarly not of interest to everyone. I'm also sure that there will be municipal services and faccilities that you use that not everyone needs or wants.
Yep, I've done that. I've also spent a weekend recovering an Oracle database from multiple backups. Because of idiocy in management and stupidity amongst the ops we didn't have a single backup in nearly a month that had all files backed up correctly, fortunately by combining backups I could get all the files back but at different timestamps and a complete transaction log from before the earliest datafile up to the time of the failure (the failure being a sysadmin who thought he knew what he was doing going in and dropping the wrong database (a database with a different name, different password and on a different machine) then removing the filesystems the datafiles were in, all 'accidentally'). This meant that I could roll the files forward to just before the 'failure'.
Slashdot Mirror
Pretty much every credit, debit or charge card in the UK now has a chip as well as the mag strip (for those places that haven't moved to chip and pin authentication). Even some of the store loyalty cards use a chip instead of a mag strip.
Stephen
Maybe if search engines didn't weight page title so heavily people wouldn't keyword stuff it. Surely it would be better to base results on the content of the page that users actually look at. How often do you actually look at the page title? I don't look often, I look at the page body. If the page body text were used as the primary source of keywords, and the text <Hx> tags given appropriate weightings (H1 more heavily than H2 &c) then that might be more useful as it would use keywords that the reader actually sees and weights them according to prominance.
Sometimes it is valid to have a long title for a page, I think it would be useful if you could set a full title and short title with full title used in search results and the short title in bookmarks, history, window title bars &c.
Stephen
And a compatible compiler and libraries. Also a lot of older business apps aren't open source. Plus you need someone who is comfortable compiling apps and can deal with the inevitable errors due to library incompatibilities (not the case in a lot of smaller companies).
Personally I'd love it if we could get more Linux into businesses on the desktop and in the middleware layer (we already have a lot being used for network edge type things, DNS, LDAP, monitoring stations &c). Right now SUsE seem to be the best bet, in Europe at least. I know of a few companies doing packaged solutions based around Debian but they're quite specialised (to the extent that you buy the PC preinstalled with Debian and the apps then they remotely manage the boxes, you cannot install software or manage the boxes yourself and don't even have the root password).
Stephen
So you put that your three team mates did nothing or next to nothing. They put that they each did about 30% each and you did about 10%. The teacher investigates, the upshot of which is that you lose your teeth or some other body part(s) you need and probably get sent down or put on academic probation for lying (well, it was 3 against one).
Stephen
That's kinda the point I was trying to make.
Sometimes people seem to get so caught up on the details of an example or analogy that they lose whatever it was about in the first place. I was trying to present a variation of the original example where their objections would be void.
Here in the UK criminal records checks tend to be limited to roles where employing someone who has been convicted of a specific crime or group of crimes would put someone in danger, so jobs if you were recruting someone to look after children you'd check that they didn't have a record of child abuse &c. Unfortunately checks aren't always done properly, hence the case with Ian Huntley.
Stephen
Here in the UK most employment contracts (certainly all the ones I've had so that's 5 in the last 11 years, both public and private sector) have a clause whereby doing anything that is or causes negative publicity for the employer is an instant dismissal offense. Mentioning your employer by name in your blog negatively falls under this. It's also been used to sack employees convicted of minor criminal offenses that have been reported in the local newspaper and even one case (a friend of mine) where they were getting a divorce, the justification being that they worked for a dating service and it was contrary to the image of the company to employ divorced people.
Stephen
OK, you find that he was jailed for child molestation but a few years later it was found that he was innocent (it happens, we've had a recent rash here in the UK of women who had been jailed for killing their children now being released because of new evidence), perhaps he just fitted the profile and couldn't afford a good enough lawyer. He was released and the official record expunged but you found newspaper stories from time about the trial and mention of his release and the circumstances behind it. You, however, decide "There's no smoke without fire." and so refuse to employ him on the basis of an wrongful accusation.
Stephen
Not in Europe it's not, I've been told it's not in the US either. If you reveal information about some one and are sued for defamation there are only four defenses available to you.
Stephen
One of my teachers at school tried that. Unfortunately what happened is that in each group the rest of the members (the groups were arranged so each group was mixed ability) ganged up on the 'smart but weak/shy' one to do all the work then goofed off.
Actually, now I come to think about it, that's exactly what happens in the workplace.
Stephen
30 students each writing 2 pages? wow, the US colleges must be very different from the UK was when I was getting my degree. I mainly studied sciences (although my university did have a cross boards requirement so I also studied some social science and humanities courses) and typical class size was 60+. Each week (until final year) we'd have to submit an essay or lab report, essays were typically 8-12 pages and lab reports often 20+ pages (although they'd be mostly graphs and tables of data) of typewritten text. Most of the marking was done by grad students, the lecturers would just produce a marking scheme and check a sample of each grad students marking to make sure they were marking appropriately.
I remember one time submitting an 80 page essay (about 60 pages of which was text and the rest diagrams), the bibliography alone was 5 pages. It was a subject area I was particularly interested in at the time and the title we'd been given was very loose and I found myself going into great depth. I got a B and instructions to put in the corrections/edits the lecturer and his grad student had annotated to it then have 5 copies printed and bound to be put into the university library if I wanted an A. Apparently it appeared on the reccomended reading list for that course the folowing year. Unfortunately the university had a policy that any material a student produced as part of a course was copyrighted to the university so I couldn't get any cash for it.
Stephen
The first mass market for lithography was porn. The first mass market for photography was porn. The first mass market for movie films was porn. The first mass market for VCRs was porn. The highest selling genre in writing (both electronic and traditional printed media) is porn. I think I'm seeing a pattern here.
Stephen
s/earned/inherited/
April Fool pranks, by tradition, can only be played up until midday. After that it's bad luck to play pranks.
Stephen
Definately. I've run Oracle 9i and 8i on SLES and it's sweet. Faster than running the Windows version on exactly the same kit. I've noticed that when I attend user group meetings and presentations where the presenters are demonstrating something using Oracle installed on their laptop virtually all are running it on SLES. 3 years ago they'd have been running on Windows.
Stephen
That mirrors my experience. We were looking at replacing a lot of our 300 Windows servers (mainly hosting small Oracle databases and services like HTTP, DNS, File+Print, some apps &c) with Linux boxes so were looking to test SLES and RHAS with the apps and see which worked out best for us. Most of the apps would only run on the enterprise versions of Linux (i.e. SLES or RHAS, this was a couple of years ago so it was before the Novell deal went through), some would run on the free version with some fudging but we wanted to make sure that our testing reflected what we'd actually do in the live roll out. We were also looking at replacing most of our 24,000 Windows desktops with Linux ones.
I contacted SuSE and RedHat to see if we could get trial copies of SLES and RHAS (I'd been told there was no budget to buy trial copies, this is pretty much standard in the public sector, vendors tend to be aware of this), explaining what we wanted to do.
SuSE said they'd put a copy of the latest SLES in the post to us that day (they actually sent a partner media pack which had the SLES disks, a full set of manuals, the desktop and a bunch of supporting software and documentation), phone support for the testing period and would give us 5 days onsite consultancy. All for free. They even offered to send one of their technical guys to talk to the local Linux User Group (of which we're a member).
RedHat...well first time I called (just before lunch on a Friday) the entire sales department were out of the office at a leaving party. When I got through on Monday and eventually spoke to someone they said that they don't send out trial copies and I would have to use the free version. I explained the situation, that we couldn't use the free version because the software we wanted to test it with wasn't certified for the free version and I knew from experience that most of it wouldn't run on the free version due to library incompatibilities. I pointed out that by refusing to let us have a trial copy they were effectively taking themselves out of the running and potentially losing out on selling 300 RHAS licenses and 18-20,000 desktop licenses. They said they didn't care and it was their policy to not send out trial copies.I gave up.
We've started to roll out SuSE (or Novell as it is now) Linux, again it's the nature of the public sector that things happen slowly.
Stephen
That aspect of the episode was nicked pretty much straight out of the Pertwee era story "Terror of the Autons".
Stephen
An interesting situation has arisen a number of times where I work (we've got 50,000 employees in a restricted geographical area so things that happen once in a bluemoon at other employers happen quite often for us) which you just reminded me of. Under British law you only have to inform your employer that you are pregnant if you plan to take maternity leave. Even then it's only something like one month before you plan to go on maternity leave (there are exceptions but they tend to relate jobs where you're exposed to conditions (chemicals, radiation &c) that may harm the sprog in which case you have to tell the employer that you may be pregnant or are planning on becoming pregnant as soon as you know/suspect). Until you formally tell the employer they cannot officially make preparations for your maternity leave, they cannot even ask you if you are planning to take maternity leave. This has lead to situations where an obviously pregnant woman is sitting at her desk discussing with her collegues how she's painted the nursery and how she's planning to take 12 months maternity leave but if her manager started looking for a temp to cover for her or plans to distribute her workload during her absence she could take the employer to industrial tribunal.
Whilst I think that pregnant women should be protected from discrimination for being pregnant, but I also think that a manager who has heard unofficially/informally should be permitted to formally confirm it and enquire as to the woman's plans as to how long she expects to be on maternity leave. Plans do change but it's better to have a plan that you can revise than not to have one at all.
I also feel that it is incumbant on the woman's partner to tell his/her employer about the pregnancy so that plans can be made to give him/her time off to assist the woman, but then I feel (as I indicated previously) that it is incumbant on employers to ensure that their employees can have time to participate in child rearing. Some employers do seem to be giving paternity leave and adoptive parent leave.
Stephen
There is still an assumption inherant in society that if one parent stays home to look after the kids then that parent will be the mother. Consider infants schools here in the UK (I guess that would be K through 2nd grade in the US, although we do start school earlier herem at age 4, by law, no hanging around till 6 years old). I have two neices, the eldest one just turned 14. When they were in infants school if my sister, our mother if a female friend showed up to pick them up they'd be allowed to take them with no questions. However if their father or I showed up to pick them up the school would check on us (ask the kid who we were and sometimes they'd call my sister to check, despite the fact that their father picked them up more often than my sister as he wasn't working but she was). the assumption was that a woman was safe but a man picking up a child was suspect. Indeed whilst the parents were waiting for the kids to come out the women would cluster together and exclude any men to the point of ignoring them. On two occasions when I was waiting to pick up one or both of my neices a police car pulled up and an officer got out to question me because they'd had reports of 'a strange man lurking outside the school'. Lurking? I was standing there reading a news paper in full view of everyone! Both times I had to tell them that I was waiting for my neice, give them the kid's name and they'd go into the school to get my neice, point me out and ask who I was.
Personally I think that both parents, if they choose to have kids, should have the opportunity to take time out from work and/or reduce their hours to participate in their kids upbringing. Obviously mother needs time off for the birth and to recover but beyond that it should be equal. Hah. I can dream. :-) I also think that if someone chooses not to have kids they should not be denigrated for that, maybe even have the opportunity to participate in the raising of children of their relatives or even friends? If one of your relatives or close friends was having a hard time with their new kid wouldn't you like to be able to take some time to help them out?
Stephen
Maybe it's just the environments I've worked in and had female managers but, I've found that women in managerial positions have tended to have gotten there by consciously being more masculine than the males. If anything they've been more authoritarian and less democratic.
Stephen
I do agree that not all women want a gaggle of sprogs. I did, however, see on the news this morning that now a greater number of women than in the last 10-20 years are choosing to have children and either quit work entirely whilst raising them or only working part time. I suspect that this might be, at least partly, behind the drop in the number of women in IT. Not only would it cause an overall drop in numbers but IT managers tend to be less amenable to part time working IME.
There is still a lot of sexism around, I've seen a lot of managers pay lip service to sexual equality but still target women for redundancy over men in the belief that a woman has a man to support her. Certainly salaries for women still seem to lag that of men for equivalent work (I'm a union rep and a lot of what I have to do is get equality for members who are subject to discrimination).
Stephen
Personally, most of my old mail is either short stories (in some cases series that have been ongoing for years) people have sent me that I like to periodically reread (especially if someone who hasn't published in a while sends out a new part) or old tech stuff that I still need to refer to occaisionally (I still have to maintain some pretty old kit). It's eaiser to store that stuff in my mailbase.
Stephen
Since when? I tried it a couple of weeks ago and it said that it had but it failed miserably. It copied over the folders but not the contents.
Stephen
No. Irony would be if it was never edited.
Stephen
Local governments are funded through taxes so each year they have a certain amount of money to spend that has been raised from the local people and businesses. A certain amount of that will be already ear marked for things that they have to provide for legal/statutory reasons but some will be available for projects that the elected representatives feel are in the interests of their electorate. If they believe that what is int he best interest of the majority of their electorate is a broadband service then they can choose to spend the money on that, if they think that something else would be a better use of the money then they can spend it on that. Why should you, living in one town, be able to tell a different town how they should be spending their money.
Municipalities frequently spend money on things that not all of their electorate use, not everyone wants or needs the same things (for example I haven't used a municipal swimming pool in years and have never used a municipal gymnasium) but so long as enough of their electorate vote for it then that's fine. I don't begrudge spending on the faccilities like swimmiong pools that I don't use as I'm sure that there are faccilities that I use, have used or will use at some time that are similarly not of interest to everyone. I'm also sure that there will be municipal services and faccilities that you use that not everyone needs or wants.
Stephen
Yep, I've done that. I've also spent a weekend recovering an Oracle database from multiple backups. Because of idiocy in management and stupidity amongst the ops we didn't have a single backup in nearly a month that had all files backed up correctly, fortunately by combining backups I could get all the files back but at different timestamps and a complete transaction log from before the earliest datafile up to the time of the failure (the failure being a sysadmin who thought he knew what he was doing going in and dropping the wrong database (a database with a different name, different password and on a different machine) then removing the filesystems the datafiles were in, all 'accidentally'). This meant that I could roll the files forward to just before the 'failure'.
Stephen