Why do you assume that their motives are altruistic?
I certainly won't assume their motives are altruistic. I'd be surprised if the main reason this passed ISN'T because some relatively large number of congress critters and/or their powerful friends have quite a few things to hide in their emails.
That doesn't, however, automatically mean this act is bad. To know for sure one way or the other, we'll have to wait until we see what changes get made and riders get added by the Senate and then in committee.
While true, pretty much anyone still using/happy with a 5-6 year old phone is probably using it as, you know, a phone. And maybe sending/reading an occasional text. Most likely NOT doing things like banking and accessing secure sites on it.
The truth is, not everyone needs or wants to have their entire life tied to a mobile device. Hell, my wife and I finally retired our old Moto Razr flip phones toward the end of last year. In the end, we didn't cheap out much on new devices because we plan to hold onto them for a long time. But most of what we use them for is phone calls, minimal numbers of text, and checking email.
No mod points today, or you'd get one. But I'm mostly commenting to point out that this isn't even specific to IT. I can certainly tell someone how to do most of what I do, but there are all sorts of tricks, optimizations, and background that are required to do it well.
Why should a business have to support any of this? But in any case, FMLA cover this for 3 months.
Well, for starters, as someone mentioned above, it's goodwill toward employees and may just make them a bit more loyal to the business, not that most businesses seem to care about that these days.
But it's also a bit of a big deal because while federal law requires that you still have a job after parental leave, it doesn't require you to be paid for that time off. Actually, IIRC, federal law only REQUIRES that for the mother, my understanding of FMLA is that your employer can't fire you for using existing sick leave/vacation for family issues, including childbirth, but it doesn't require your employer to give you additional time off beyond what you've accrued. I could be partially wrong about that last part, that was the explanation I got filtered through our HR department.
OK, so solar is way cheaper where you are. As for the "German property sizes", I simply took the number in your post above of 60 square meters, no idea how normal that is but it sounds reasonable for a 1 bedroom or smaller 2 bedroom flat.
or, there WAS NO HACK and they simply are lying to cover their damned asses.
I'm mainly inclined to believe this as well, especially given the reports I saw yesterday where the phone is now useless because the FBI managed to spill water on the phone, completely destroying it, mere moments after they broke in. Really?
For starters, figuring that 1 m^2 ~= 10 ft^2, that German property is "only" 600 ft^2. Without arguing good vs. bad, here in the US that's considered incredibly small, many 1 bedroom apartments are roughly that size, and depending on where you are it can be hard to find a house much less than 2000 ft^2. A lot of older homes (and some newer ones) aren't that well insulated.
On top of that, as a nation we're energy hogs. A LOT of Americans pay $200+ per month for their electric bills, if I assume $0.12/kWh which is on the high end and subtract a bit for "standard" fees, that comes to something like 1200-1500 kWh. In other words, your annual electric usage is on the order of what many people here use each month. My house probably averages more like $60/month varied by season, which puts me on the low end, but my annual use is still more than double yours.
On other thing, though, is to make sure you're comparing apples to apples. Does your $8k figure cover everything, or just the panels? Typically installed costs in the US also covers the wiring, inverter, some sort of batteries, and grid tie in. I've toyed with the idea, and have a nice stretch of south facing roof, but the payback is long and electricity here is cheap, so I haven't gotten serious about it.
I pretty much agree, but most of that list (except MAYBE algebra, and there was a story just a couple of weeks ago about how we should stop teaching that) won't help them get a high score on a standardized test, and therefore isn't considered at all "important" in the current climate *sigh*
They could, and someone could just as easily write some code that splits the larger file into however many 4k x 4k chunks are necessary to reconstruct that same larger file. I seem to recall downloading things from Usenet in the early 90s in parts and then combining them to recover the original file. The only real difference here is that instead of recombining with a simple *nix "cat" command and then decoding the resulting file, someone would need to write a script that stripped the 8 kb header off the various chunks when combining.
Also, in this particular case, if the mother is the parent with the defective mitochondria, there's no reason that the good mitochondria need to come from a third party, they could just as easily come from the father.
I'd like to see two additional changes to the mod system myself, I think at least the first has been proposed earlier.
We really need an "undo mod" and/or "change mod" option, I think we've all hit the wrong mod at some point in time, usually resulting in a "D'oh!" moment. Heck, it would only need to be active for 30 or 60 seconds. An alternative that I've also seen proposed is to have an "are you sure?" prompt for every mod, but I would find that quite annoying.
Second, while I can certainly see at least some of the reasoning against being able to both comment and mod in the same thread, the system defines an entire post/story as a single thread. I at least would like to see this change, it often forces one to choose between modding or posting in a story (or at least forces posting as an AC). It's particularly annoying in submissions with multiple hundreds of comments where I may mod near the top but then see something later that I want to correct, add to, or disagree with (and post why).
If I had mod points, you'd get them. Thanks for pointing out the real problem here. I do think though that the way populations of those "lowest classes" are distributed throughout the US contributes to the perception in that far more people see the ghetto culture, which is concentrated in and near larger cities, than see the white trash culture which tends to concentrate in the boonies.
Patients should not be able to import their own prescriptions. At all. There's a reason shit like daraprim and amoxacillin are behind the prescription counter instead of on the shelf.
Woah there, the key word is prescriptions. At this point, you're the first person in this thread who said anything about being able to get these drugs without a prescription. When prescribed, though, we should be able to obtain drugs from reputable foreign sources. While I'd certainly be suspect of drugs coming from India, Russia, China, Mexico, etc., I totally agree with the parent AC that there's no problem getting stuff from Canada or many European sources, their supplies are as safe if not safer than ours.
There are certainly any number of Slashdotters who lean libertarian enough to think we should be able to get what we want, when we want it, from anywhere we want to, but that wasn't really the context of the discussion
On the other hand, why would you increase the credit limit of someone who never gives you more than you gave them in the first place?
Why wouldn't the bank increase the credit limit of someone who always pays back on time and clearly has the assets to continue doing so? Sure, they bank doesn't get to make $BIGSUM at extortionate interest rates. But they do charge a fee to the merchant for every single transaction. IIRC, it averages somewhere around 2% of the purchase price. So if I buy a new laptop for $1000 and charge it on my Visa card, the issuing bank and Visa (via their processing network) split $20 of profit. Depending on how they do things, they can then float the $20 and collect interest on it for at least a few days.
Even if every single cardholder paid off in full every statement, you're looking at tens (or more) of millions of accounts.
When did Verizon ever promise not to increase the cost of plans?
The question (that the fine article doesn't address...) is whether or not they're waiting until the next contract cycle to add this increase.
The story I read earlier this morning quoted someone or other as saying that customers currently in a contract won't see a change until the contract is up. If they renew, it will be at the new price.
This seems to be a recurring theme on/. There's a HUGE difference between a liberal arts education and a liberal arts degree.
A liberal arts education is something you generally get from a liberal arts college, typically involves taking classes in a variety of subjects outside one's major to be more well rounded, and requires that you're able to think. A degree in liberal arts on the other hand is something that's usually obtained by those who have accumulated enough total credits to graduate but don't have enough in any one subject for a real major, often obtained by a certain subset of athletes at large universities who obviously didn't get in based on academics. This is usually those schools that have just enough pride to not give out a degree in "general studies".
A quick followup, but I largely observed the same thing in Paris in the late 80s. In the most "touristy" parts of the city, say along the Seine, near the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, Montmartre, the Louvre, etc., it was very clean. Off the beaten path, however, within 2-3 blocks things were just as dirty (if not more so) than anything I ever saw in New York City.
As best I can tell, many colleges and universities do indeed offer a free e-mail address to alumni. Most of the ones I'm aware of cost the institution nearly nothing and don't have much overhead. I'll note that very few of these actually host your email - they do indeed can your student account within a fairly short time of graduation. Instead, they'll provide you with a permanent address, usually of the form user@alumnus.college.edu, that is really just an alias/relay that forwards to your choice of email account. Of course, you have to figure out how to set your return address correctly, but this can be useful because if and when you change your "real" email provider for any reason you just need to log in to the alumni server, update your preferred email address, and don't need to ask all of your contacts to update your information themselves.
Which states don't do driver's training in high school?
In reality, many, possibly most schools in the US, don't do "behind the wheel" drivers ed any more. It's often one of the first things to go when budgets get tight (I suspect liability insurance gets expensive). I've heard of some schools that still offer the program charging for it, and the last 3 places I've lived there are multiple "for profit" drivers ed companies since at least some road hours are required to get a license.
The Agilent name is now used on their chemical/life sciences stuff (chromatographs, NMR, etc.)
You might not want to include NMR in that. Agilent shuttered that division last October with nearly zero warning. Lots of good people affected by that, many employees only had ~2 weeks from the announcement until they were out the door. Fortunately at this point many have found other jobs. Agilent is also effectively letting all of their NMR technology go into a black hole; the tax write off is apparently worth more to them than they could sell the IP for (welcome to screwed up US tax codes). I'm SO glad that Bruker now has a near monopoly on NMR - nothing against Bruker, but...
More likely, they either require a credit card upfront with the understanding that you won't be charged if you return the device within, say, 45 days, or given that a phone is kind of useless without service, you'll sign an agreement with your carrier that the full cost will be added to your bill if it's not returned.
Farther up the east coast, a lot of older rentals have radiators with a single boiler for multiple units. The landlord is required to heat for a certain part of the year (15 October to 15 April is fairly common). There may be rules for a minimum livable temperature, and at least in NYC there are plenty of examples of "slum lords" who don't maintain that.
But to support the parent post, few if any of these units have a thermostat in them. But I suppose you do have some control. You can always open/close the valve to a given radiator (and many really do effectively have those two settings with little in between) or open a window if it gets too hot.
I'll have to agree with this. I'm partial to Mac myself, but really any reasonable quality laptop should suffice. Since she wants to do at least some coding and simulation, I'd look for a quad core i5 or i7 with a decent amount of RAM.
The choice of desktop OS should be a combination of what she's comfortable with and what's truly required. If her subfield tends to write papers in Word and/or required lots of editing of figures in "real" graphics tools, that likely means Mac OS or Windows will be preferable for the day to day OS. A VirtualBox VM with whatever Linux distro is used on the clusters available to the lab (Scientific Linux?) should take care of the rest - it should run small jobs at near native speeds if there's not much else going on, provide a developer environment similar to other work computers, and any really heavy lifting is going to be offloaded to a cluster somewhere anyway.
tl;dr version: get her any laptop/OS combo she likes with decent specs and run an appropriate linux under a VM
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Why do you assume that their motives are altruistic?
I certainly won't assume their motives are altruistic. I'd be surprised if the main reason this passed ISN'T because some relatively large number of congress critters and/or their powerful friends have quite a few things to hide in their emails.
That doesn't, however, automatically mean this act is bad. To know for sure one way or the other, we'll have to wait until we see what changes get made and riders get added by the Senate and then in committee.
While true, pretty much anyone still using/happy with a 5-6 year old phone is probably using it as, you know, a phone. And maybe sending/reading an occasional text. Most likely NOT doing things like banking and accessing secure sites on it.
The truth is, not everyone needs or wants to have their entire life tied to a mobile device. Hell, my wife and I finally retired our old Moto Razr flip phones toward the end of last year. In the end, we didn't cheap out much on new devices because we plan to hold onto them for a long time. But most of what we use them for is phone calls, minimal numbers of text, and checking email.
No mod points today, or you'd get one. But I'm mostly commenting to point out that this isn't even specific to IT. I can certainly tell someone how to do most of what I do, but there are all sorts of tricks, optimizations, and background that are required to do it well.
Why should a business have to support any of this? But in any case, FMLA cover this for 3 months.
Well, for starters, as someone mentioned above, it's goodwill toward employees and may just make them a bit more loyal to the business, not that most businesses seem to care about that these days.
But it's also a bit of a big deal because while federal law requires that you still have a job after parental leave, it doesn't require you to be paid for that time off. Actually, IIRC, federal law only REQUIRES that for the mother, my understanding of FMLA is that your employer can't fire you for using existing sick leave/vacation for family issues, including childbirth, but it doesn't require your employer to give you additional time off beyond what you've accrued. I could be partially wrong about that last part, that was the explanation I got filtered through our HR department.
OK, so solar is way cheaper where you are. As for the "German property sizes", I simply took the number in your post above of 60 square meters, no idea how normal that is but it sounds reasonable for a 1 bedroom or smaller 2 bedroom flat.
or, there WAS NO HACK and they simply are lying to cover their damned asses.
I'm mainly inclined to believe this as well, especially given the reports I saw yesterday where the phone is now useless because the FBI managed to spill water on the phone, completely destroying it, mere moments after they broke in. Really?
For starters, figuring that 1 m^2 ~= 10 ft^2, that German property is "only" 600 ft^2. Without arguing good vs. bad, here in the US that's considered incredibly small, many 1 bedroom apartments are roughly that size, and depending on where you are it can be hard to find a house much less than 2000 ft^2. A lot of older homes (and some newer ones) aren't that well insulated.
On top of that, as a nation we're energy hogs. A LOT of Americans pay $200+ per month for their electric bills, if I assume $0.12/kWh which is on the high end and subtract a bit for "standard" fees, that comes to something like 1200-1500 kWh. In other words, your annual electric usage is on the order of what many people here use each month. My house probably averages more like $60/month varied by season, which puts me on the low end, but my annual use is still more than double yours.
On other thing, though, is to make sure you're comparing apples to apples. Does your $8k figure cover everything, or just the panels? Typically installed costs in the US also covers the wiring, inverter, some sort of batteries, and grid tie in. I've toyed with the idea, and have a nice stretch of south facing roof, but the payback is long and electricity here is cheap, so I haven't gotten serious about it.
I pretty much agree, but most of that list (except MAYBE algebra, and there was a story just a couple of weeks ago about how we should stop teaching that) won't help them get a high score on a standardized test, and therefore isn't considered at all "important" in the current climate *sigh*
They could, and someone could just as easily write some code that splits the larger file into however many 4k x 4k chunks are necessary to reconstruct that same larger file. I seem to recall downloading things from Usenet in the early 90s in parts and then combining them to recover the original file. The only real difference here is that instead of recombining with a simple *nix "cat" command and then decoding the resulting file, someone would need to write a script that stripped the 8 kb header off the various chunks when combining.
Also, in this particular case, if the mother is the parent with the defective mitochondria, there's no reason that the good mitochondria need to come from a third party, they could just as easily come from the father.
I'd like to see two additional changes to the mod system myself, I think at least the first has been proposed earlier.
We really need an "undo mod" and/or "change mod" option, I think we've all hit the wrong mod at some point in time, usually resulting in a "D'oh!" moment. Heck, it would only need to be active for 30 or 60 seconds. An alternative that I've also seen proposed is to have an "are you sure?" prompt for every mod, but I would find that quite annoying.
Second, while I can certainly see at least some of the reasoning against being able to both comment and mod in the same thread, the system defines an entire post/story as a single thread. I at least would like to see this change, it often forces one to choose between modding or posting in a story (or at least forces posting as an AC). It's particularly annoying in submissions with multiple hundreds of comments where I may mod near the top but then see something later that I want to correct, add to, or disagree with (and post why).
Ignoring the debate over whether or not Jackson should be the face of the $20 bill, but Jefferson is already on a bill, the $2 bill to be precise.
If I had mod points, you'd get them. Thanks for pointing out the real problem here. I do think though that the way populations of those "lowest classes" are distributed throughout the US contributes to the perception in that far more people see the ghetto culture, which is concentrated in and near larger cities, than see the white trash culture which tends to concentrate in the boonies.
Patients should not be able to import their own prescriptions. At all. There's a reason shit like daraprim and amoxacillin are behind the prescription counter instead of on the shelf.
Woah there, the key word is prescriptions. At this point, you're the first person in this thread who said anything about being able to get these drugs without a prescription. When prescribed, though, we should be able to obtain drugs from reputable foreign sources. While I'd certainly be suspect of drugs coming from India, Russia, China, Mexico, etc., I totally agree with the parent AC that there's no problem getting stuff from Canada or many European sources, their supplies are as safe if not safer than ours.
There are certainly any number of Slashdotters who lean libertarian enough to think we should be able to get what we want, when we want it, from anywhere we want to, but that wasn't really the context of the discussion
On the other hand, why would you increase the credit limit of someone who never gives you more than you gave them in the first place?
Why wouldn't the bank increase the credit limit of someone who always pays back on time and clearly has the assets to continue doing so? Sure, they bank doesn't get to make $BIGSUM at extortionate interest rates. But they do charge a fee to the merchant for every single transaction. IIRC, it averages somewhere around 2% of the purchase price. So if I buy a new laptop for $1000 and charge it on my Visa card, the issuing bank and Visa (via their processing network) split $20 of profit. Depending on how they do things, they can then float the $20 and collect interest on it for at least a few days.
Even if every single cardholder paid off in full every statement, you're looking at tens (or more) of millions of accounts.
When did Verizon ever promise not to increase the cost of plans?
The question (that the fine article doesn't address...) is whether or not they're waiting until the next contract cycle to add this increase.
The story I read earlier this morning quoted someone or other as saying that customers currently in a contract won't see a change until the contract is up. If they renew, it will be at the new price.
This seems to be a recurring theme on /. There's a HUGE difference between a liberal arts education and a liberal arts degree.
A liberal arts education is something you generally get from a liberal arts college, typically involves taking classes in a variety of subjects outside one's major to be more well rounded, and requires that you're able to think. A degree in liberal arts on the other hand is something that's usually obtained by those who have accumulated enough total credits to graduate but don't have enough in any one subject for a real major, often obtained by a certain subset of athletes at large universities who obviously didn't get in based on academics. This is usually those schools that have just enough pride to not give out a degree in "general studies".
Ironically enough, I just clicked that link and the "how to" video at the top right of the linked page autoplays...
A quick followup, but I largely observed the same thing in Paris in the late 80s. In the most "touristy" parts of the city, say along the Seine, near the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, Montmartre, the Louvre, etc., it was very clean. Off the beaten path, however, within 2-3 blocks things were just as dirty (if not more so) than anything I ever saw in New York City.
As best I can tell, many colleges and universities do indeed offer a free e-mail address to alumni. Most of the ones I'm aware of cost the institution nearly nothing and don't have much overhead. I'll note that very few of these actually host your email - they do indeed can your student account within a fairly short time of graduation. Instead, they'll provide you with a permanent address, usually of the form user@alumnus.college.edu, that is really just an alias/relay that forwards to your choice of email account. Of course, you have to figure out how to set your return address correctly, but this can be useful because if and when you change your "real" email provider for any reason you just need to log in to the alumni server, update your preferred email address, and don't need to ask all of your contacts to update your information themselves.
Which states don't do driver's training in high school?
In reality, many, possibly most schools in the US, don't do "behind the wheel" drivers ed any more. It's often one of the first things to go when budgets get tight (I suspect liability insurance gets expensive). I've heard of some schools that still offer the program charging for it, and the last 3 places I've lived there are multiple "for profit" drivers ed companies since at least some road hours are required to get a license.
The Agilent name is now used on their chemical/life sciences stuff (chromatographs, NMR, etc.)
You might not want to include NMR in that. Agilent shuttered that division last October with nearly zero warning. Lots of good people affected by that, many employees only had ~2 weeks from the announcement until they were out the door. Fortunately at this point many have found other jobs. Agilent is also effectively letting all of their NMR technology go into a black hole; the tax write off is apparently worth more to them than they could sell the IP for (welcome to screwed up US tax codes). I'm SO glad that Bruker now has a near monopoly on NMR - nothing against Bruker, but...
Not that I'm bitter about this or anything.
More likely, they either require a credit card upfront with the understanding that you won't be charged if you return the device within, say, 45 days, or given that a phone is kind of useless without service, you'll sign an agreement with your carrier that the full cost will be added to your bill if it's not returned.
Farther up the east coast, a lot of older rentals have radiators with a single boiler for multiple units. The landlord is required to heat for a certain part of the year (15 October to 15 April is fairly common). There may be rules for a minimum livable temperature, and at least in NYC there are plenty of examples of "slum lords" who don't maintain that.
But to support the parent post, few if any of these units have a thermostat in them. But I suppose you do have some control. You can always open/close the valve to a given radiator (and many really do effectively have those two settings with little in between) or open a window if it gets too hot.
I'll have to agree with this. I'm partial to Mac myself, but really any reasonable quality laptop should suffice. Since she wants to do at least some coding and simulation, I'd look for a quad core i5 or i7 with a decent amount of RAM.
The choice of desktop OS should be a combination of what she's comfortable with and what's truly required. If her subfield tends to write papers in Word and/or required lots of editing of figures in "real" graphics tools, that likely means Mac OS or Windows will be preferable for the day to day OS. A VirtualBox VM with whatever Linux distro is used on the clusters available to the lab (Scientific Linux?) should take care of the rest - it should run small jobs at near native speeds if there's not much else going on, provide a developer environment similar to other work computers, and any really heavy lifting is going to be offloaded to a cluster somewhere anyway.
tl;dr version: get her any laptop/OS combo she likes with decent specs and run an appropriate linux under a VM