The switch is probably much more expensive than a relay and computer programming. Electromechanical components are expensive, especially switches. Transistors are cheap. And programming a computer is free (it's only done once, not once per vehicle, so it's NRE).
You really think some manager is going to allot time for developers to read tons of documentation up-front? That's insane. You may be right about getting something right at the design stage taking less time than reimplementing and retesting, but that's irrelevant, because that's not how management thinks. They want something out the door fast, even if it's full of bugs, because customers will happily accept that and their lame promises of "it'll be fixed in the next release".
Society needs replacements for expiring members, and while it's possible to support it through immigration
No, it doesn't, and immigration should not be used as a replacement method either. If a society can't make itself sustainable, then it deserves to die out. We should stop immigration and let the chips fall where they may over the next few decades.
I disagree. I believe that most of her district's population agree with the practice, and with doing anything necessary to prop up the commercial music industry. How well this correlates to those people's actual welfare and prosperity is irrelevant; the only thing important is the voter's opinions. The voters are adults; they're responsible for themselves and voting in their own interests. If they vote against their own interests, that's their own stupid fault.
Now Google sends ads to your Gmail inbox, and claims you opted into that. You can go to settings and turn it off, but then it displays ads at the top of the screen.
That's the price you pay for having a free service where they house gigabytes of your email for you and give you instant access to it from any device, with 5-9s reliability.
The catch is, whenever you access it with a web browser using the standard web interface, there's nothing stopping you from blocking the ads with AdBlock Plus. So no, it's not going to get "worse and worse", as long as they have a web interface. They'd have to disable the web interface and force everyone to switch to a closed-source proprietary client application, and that's never going to happen.
Complaining about ads on Gmail makes about as much sense as complaining about pop-up ads. I can't remember the last time I saw one of those, thanks to pop-up blockers.
I agree with everything you said here. Labels are far better than folders, since it effectively means you can put one email in several "folders" at once, such as if it pertains to both subjects. And the message threading is indispensable to me; it's too confusing having hundreds or thousands of disparate emails when most of them are part of long email chains between various people.
The "killer feature" for me on Gmail is conversation view, where it groups messages together in conversations, so instead of a ton of disparate emails, they're grouped together in a single line and can be seen in sequential order. Back when I switched over to Gmail, it was the only thing that had this feature, and now I find it indispensable, though it does sometimes screw up (since email was never designed to actually have this in the first place).
Do other clients have this yet? At my last job I had to use Outlook Web Access, and the job before that I had to use regular Outlook (can't remember the version), and neither one had this, and as a result, it was a complete PITA to manage work email, with all the email chains going on between other coworkers, customers, etc. I ended up having pages and pages of emails that I'd never look at, and missed a lot of emails unless someone told me about them; the volume was so large I pretty much gave up even trying to read them all, and only looked at ones that had subject lines that looked important to what I was doing. As useful as I find Gmail's conversation-grouping for my own personal email, it would have been 10x more useful for my work email, with all the CCing going on in email chains there.
I think Congresscritters (BTW, Senators are a subset of "Congressmen") should be on the VA health care system, exactly like our soldiers. If they need any surgeries or other procedures or doctors' visits, they should have to visit VA hospitals, and get the same care there that all our soldiers (including enlisted) get. They shouldn't be allowed to seek out private options either, even if they want to pay out-of-pocket. If the VA system is good enough for our soldiers that we ask to die for political aims, then it's good enough for the people who send them off to war.
I see it as a dilemma, and I honestly don't see a good solution at all.
On one hand, if you have separate sick days, you're going to have people abusing them, and it's not fair to people who are healthy and honest. I imagine this is why separate sick days seem to have gone the way of the do-do (the fact that it's widely "abused", not that it's not fair, since employers don't give a shit about that).
On the other hand, if you have combined PTO, that's more fair to the healthy and honest people, and makes abuse much harder so the employer doesn't have to deal with so many unplanned absences. However, it results in exactly the problem in TFA: people are loathe to call in sick because they don't want to burn up their vacation days.
I live in NJ now, but I work for myself here so I don't know the laws. My experience was in Arizona and Virginia, and in 12 years of employment in AZ I only had combined PTO.
The problem with sick time being use-it-or-lose-it is that people are going to call in "sick" so they can use up that time, so you might as well just give them that time off as PTO so they're more likely to give the employer advance notice. Why should someone who gets sick more often get free vacation days while healthy people have to come to work?
What have you personally done to stand up for your rights?
Did you not see what happened to the "Occupy" movement? They were all rounded up and arrested (and pepper-sprayed in the process). They didn't accomplish anything at all.
Have you taken your concerns to management or talked with your union (if part of one)?
Is this a joke or something? If he takes his concerns to management, he can be fired; there's nothing preventing employers from firing workers here for anything at all, except outright discrimination (racial, sexual, disabled, etc.). Union? You've got to be kidding; this is Slashdot, so he's probably an IT employee. IT people and engineers do not have unions in this country, only hourly-paid laborers, and only in some states.
As an Australian I cannot begin to fathom what it must be like to live in that shit hole over there
As an American, I cannot begin to fathom what it must be like to live in that place over there where your leaders are all corrupt lapdogs for our country's leaders, and you Australians, for some odd reason, keep electing them! Then you have the gall to bitch and complain about our people making poor choices in our elections! AND IT'S PEOPLE LIKE YOU WHO ARE TO BLAME FOR NOT DOING ANYTHING.
Why do you have to wait for your kids to graduate to get out of the Bible Belt? Just find a new job and move. I had to move lots of times when I was a kid; it's a good learning experience. They'll deal with it.
The reason they don't do sick days any more is because people were always cheating, and for very good reason: they weren't fair. The people who were always sick were constantly calling in sick, and in effect getting free vacation days, whereas the people who were healthy were getting screwed and having to go to work all the time. So the healthy people would call in "sick" even though they were fine, so they could have some free vacation time like the sickly people.
It's a lot like the stupid smoke breaks some companies had (or may still have): they'd give extra break time to hourly workers who smoked, so they could go outside and smoke. But non-smokers didn't get the same breaks, and had to keep working. What kind of bullshit is that?
Employees have a very good reason for showing up to work sick: vacation days and pay. At all the jobs I've ever worked since college, there was only one kind of paid time off (PTO), and you could use that either for vacation or sick days. Well, what moron would want to burn up all his vacation days on sitting at home sick? We Americans already get pathetically little vacation time (my first job was only 2 weeks/year!), so we jealously guard it so we can take a decent vacation somewhere, since if you want to vacation somewhere far away, like Hawaii, you'll burn up some time just traveling to and from the place.
So it's absolutely in the employee's interest to not waste PTO days on being sick, so if they just have the sniffles or something, it makes more sense to come to work, even if that means spreading the disease to everyone else. And of course, for employees who are paid hourly, staying home means losing a day's pay, and people at that end of the ladder are frequently living paycheck-to-paycheck anyway, so they can't afford to call out sick.
Of course, companies could go back to the old way of having separate vacation and sick days, but that never worked either, since someone who's healthy and never gets sick gets screwed, so they'll call out "sick" anyway, and unplanned absences are always much worse for the company than planned ones, which is why they went to all-in-one PTO in the first place.
Lots of people in cubicles spend much of their time goofing off too, such as by reading Slashdot. You can dissuade that by having an "open work area" so anyone walking by can see what employees are doing, however this usually has some big downsides: you'll have a much harder time finding good employees (they'll see the crappy office conditions and turn down the job), and you'll probably have higher turnover as people who did take the job for whatever reason will get sick of the total lack of privacy and go find a job with proper cubicles.
Yep, ever since becoming a telecommuter, this is one of my favorite things about working at home: always being very close to a bathroom. I've worked in some offices where it was quite a hike to get to the bathroom, and then the bathroom was crowded, and I really hate crowded bathrooms. Even if I'm not sick, it sucks needing to take a long hike to get to a bathroom several times a day.
At my last company before taking the telecommuting job, there was only one bathroom for all ~200 people at that location (well, one set of bathrooms, but most employees were male), and I had to actually walk the entire length of the company's offices and leave the company's office suite to get to it. Total PITA.
For every person like the OP's sister, there's probably at least one other buyer who ponies up the additional $1200 for the crappy overpriced built-in option, which is almost pure profit. So it's probably worth it to them to fuck over buyers this way, because there's plenty of people who will buy the overpriced built-in options, especially since those can be financed.
As with most things in life, one simple phrase will explain it all to you: "Follow the Money".
Heated seat buttons are not on the side of the seat because that costs more. On the OP's Edge, putting it on the touch-screen makes it far cheaper. Switches and buttons are rather expensive items, and add a lot to the BOM (bill of materials) for any electronic device. Touchscreens, however, are free (once you've already decided to put it in there): adding some new control to the touchscreen doesn't cost anything except for a bit of engineering time for someone to program it in.
Moving seat controls, likewise, saves money, if they're putting them on touchscreens.
Someone needs to come up with a docking module on the dash, to which you can dock a standard device that can be upgraded over the years. Kind of like the old "DIN" standard for car stereos, but more flat, intended for touch screen devices. Then when your in-dash system gets outdated you can upgrade it.
And why on earth would automakers want to adopt such a standard? It's more profitable for them to only install proprietary stuff into their cars which becomes obsolete in 2 years, requiring you to buy an all-new car if you don't want your interior to look hacked-up if you try upgrading anything.
Maybe they're banking on that psychological trick where making something more expensive makes people think it's better somehow. Of course, there's a big limit to how far you can take that, otherwise Rolls-Royce would be the most successful car company.
Because, unfortunately, they're not really "hemorrhaging" money at all, they're just not making as much as in their golden days. They still have a near-monopoly in OSes with Windows (even though lots of people and businesses are sticking with Win7), and they make boatloads of money with MS Office, Sharepoint, Exchange, Outlook, etc. If you look at their actual revenues, they're still profitable, unfortunately. They can easily blame reduced profits on the bad economy instead of Ballmer's idiocy.
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The switch is probably much more expensive than a relay and computer programming. Electromechanical components are expensive, especially switches. Transistors are cheap. And programming a computer is free (it's only done once, not once per vehicle, so it's NRE).
You really think some manager is going to allot time for developers to read tons of documentation up-front? That's insane. You may be right about getting something right at the design stage taking less time than reimplementing and retesting, but that's irrelevant, because that's not how management thinks. They want something out the door fast, even if it's full of bugs, because customers will happily accept that and their lame promises of "it'll be fixed in the next release".
Oh please. Sure, the broader public benefits from trickle-down economics, in comparison to no economics at all, but that's not saying much.
Society needs replacements for expiring members, and while it's possible to support it through immigration
No, it doesn't, and immigration should not be used as a replacement method either. If a society can't make itself sustainable, then it deserves to die out. We should stop immigration and let the chips fall where they may over the next few decades.
I disagree. I believe that most of her district's population agree with the practice, and with doing anything necessary to prop up the commercial music industry. How well this correlates to those people's actual welfare and prosperity is irrelevant; the only thing important is the voter's opinions. The voters are adults; they're responsible for themselves and voting in their own interests. If they vote against their own interests, that's their own stupid fault.
Now Google sends ads to your Gmail inbox, and claims you opted into that. You can go to settings and turn it off, but then it displays ads at the top of the screen.
That's the price you pay for having a free service where they house gigabytes of your email for you and give you instant access to it from any device, with 5-9s reliability.
The catch is, whenever you access it with a web browser using the standard web interface, there's nothing stopping you from blocking the ads with AdBlock Plus. So no, it's not going to get "worse and worse", as long as they have a web interface. They'd have to disable the web interface and force everyone to switch to a closed-source proprietary client application, and that's never going to happen.
Complaining about ads on Gmail makes about as much sense as complaining about pop-up ads. I can't remember the last time I saw one of those, thanks to pop-up blockers.
I agree with everything you said here. Labels are far better than folders, since it effectively means you can put one email in several "folders" at once, such as if it pertains to both subjects. And the message threading is indispensable to me; it's too confusing having hundreds or thousands of disparate emails when most of them are part of long email chains between various people.
The "killer feature" for me on Gmail is conversation view, where it groups messages together in conversations, so instead of a ton of disparate emails, they're grouped together in a single line and can be seen in sequential order. Back when I switched over to Gmail, it was the only thing that had this feature, and now I find it indispensable, though it does sometimes screw up (since email was never designed to actually have this in the first place).
Do other clients have this yet? At my last job I had to use Outlook Web Access, and the job before that I had to use regular Outlook (can't remember the version), and neither one had this, and as a result, it was a complete PITA to manage work email, with all the email chains going on between other coworkers, customers, etc. I ended up having pages and pages of emails that I'd never look at, and missed a lot of emails unless someone told me about them; the volume was so large I pretty much gave up even trying to read them all, and only looked at ones that had subject lines that looked important to what I was doing. As useful as I find Gmail's conversation-grouping for my own personal email, it would have been 10x more useful for my work email, with all the CCing going on in email chains there.
I think Congresscritters (BTW, Senators are a subset of "Congressmen") should be on the VA health care system, exactly like our soldiers. If they need any surgeries or other procedures or doctors' visits, they should have to visit VA hospitals, and get the same care there that all our soldiers (including enlisted) get. They shouldn't be allowed to seek out private options either, even if they want to pay out-of-pocket. If the VA system is good enough for our soldiers that we ask to die for political aims, then it's good enough for the people who send them off to war.
Sorry, I didn't even think of that play on words when I wrote that.
I see it as a dilemma, and I honestly don't see a good solution at all.
On one hand, if you have separate sick days, you're going to have people abusing them, and it's not fair to people who are healthy and honest. I imagine this is why separate sick days seem to have gone the way of the do-do (the fact that it's widely "abused", not that it's not fair, since employers don't give a shit about that).
On the other hand, if you have combined PTO, that's more fair to the healthy and honest people, and makes abuse much harder so the employer doesn't have to deal with so many unplanned absences. However, it results in exactly the problem in TFA: people are loathe to call in sick because they don't want to burn up their vacation days.
I live in NJ now, but I work for myself here so I don't know the laws. My experience was in Arizona and Virginia, and in 12 years of employment in AZ I only had combined PTO.
The problem with sick time being use-it-or-lose-it is that people are going to call in "sick" so they can use up that time, so you might as well just give them that time off as PTO so they're more likely to give the employer advance notice. Why should someone who gets sick more often get free vacation days while healthy people have to come to work?
I do, however. And I don't want your supervisor to be allowed to wash his hands after being in contact with you in the bathroom, either.
The only way we'll get change is for the people in power to be personally affected by their decisions.
What have you personally done to stand up for your rights?
Did you not see what happened to the "Occupy" movement? They were all rounded up and arrested (and pepper-sprayed in the process). They didn't accomplish anything at all.
Have you taken your concerns to management or talked with your union (if part of one)?
Is this a joke or something? If he takes his concerns to management, he can be fired; there's nothing preventing employers from firing workers here for anything at all, except outright discrimination (racial, sexual, disabled, etc.). Union? You've got to be kidding; this is Slashdot, so he's probably an IT employee. IT people and engineers do not have unions in this country, only hourly-paid laborers, and only in some states.
As an Australian I cannot begin to fathom what it must be like to live in that shit hole over there
As an American, I cannot begin to fathom what it must be like to live in that place over there where your leaders are all corrupt lapdogs for our country's leaders, and you Australians, for some odd reason, keep electing them! Then you have the gall to bitch and complain about our people making poor choices in our elections! AND IT'S PEOPLE LIKE YOU WHO ARE TO BLAME FOR NOT DOING ANYTHING.
Why do you have to wait for your kids to graduate to get out of the Bible Belt? Just find a new job and move. I had to move lots of times when I was a kid; it's a good learning experience. They'll deal with it.
The reason they don't do sick days any more is because people were always cheating, and for very good reason: they weren't fair. The people who were always sick were constantly calling in sick, and in effect getting free vacation days, whereas the people who were healthy were getting screwed and having to go to work all the time. So the healthy people would call in "sick" even though they were fine, so they could have some free vacation time like the sickly people.
It's a lot like the stupid smoke breaks some companies had (or may still have): they'd give extra break time to hourly workers who smoked, so they could go outside and smoke. But non-smokers didn't get the same breaks, and had to keep working. What kind of bullshit is that?
Employees have a very good reason for showing up to work sick: vacation days and pay. At all the jobs I've ever worked since college, there was only one kind of paid time off (PTO), and you could use that either for vacation or sick days. Well, what moron would want to burn up all his vacation days on sitting at home sick? We Americans already get pathetically little vacation time (my first job was only 2 weeks/year!), so we jealously guard it so we can take a decent vacation somewhere, since if you want to vacation somewhere far away, like Hawaii, you'll burn up some time just traveling to and from the place.
So it's absolutely in the employee's interest to not waste PTO days on being sick, so if they just have the sniffles or something, it makes more sense to come to work, even if that means spreading the disease to everyone else. And of course, for employees who are paid hourly, staying home means losing a day's pay, and people at that end of the ladder are frequently living paycheck-to-paycheck anyway, so they can't afford to call out sick.
Of course, companies could go back to the old way of having separate vacation and sick days, but that never worked either, since someone who's healthy and never gets sick gets screwed, so they'll call out "sick" anyway, and unplanned absences are always much worse for the company than planned ones, which is why they went to all-in-one PTO in the first place.
Lots of people in cubicles spend much of their time goofing off too, such as by reading Slashdot. You can dissuade that by having an "open work area" so anyone walking by can see what employees are doing, however this usually has some big downsides: you'll have a much harder time finding good employees (they'll see the crappy office conditions and turn down the job), and you'll probably have higher turnover as people who did take the job for whatever reason will get sick of the total lack of privacy and go find a job with proper cubicles.
Yep, ever since becoming a telecommuter, this is one of my favorite things about working at home: always being very close to a bathroom. I've worked in some offices where it was quite a hike to get to the bathroom, and then the bathroom was crowded, and I really hate crowded bathrooms. Even if I'm not sick, it sucks needing to take a long hike to get to a bathroom several times a day.
At my last company before taking the telecommuting job, there was only one bathroom for all ~200 people at that location (well, one set of bathrooms, but most employees were male), and I had to actually walk the entire length of the company's offices and leave the company's office suite to get to it. Total PITA.
In fact, the very Star Wars itself draws a major source of inspiration from there,
You forgot to mention that Star Wars even borrowed the term "stormtroopers" from the Nazi regime.
For every person like the OP's sister, there's probably at least one other buyer who ponies up the additional $1200 for the crappy overpriced built-in option, which is almost pure profit. So it's probably worth it to them to fuck over buyers this way, because there's plenty of people who will buy the overpriced built-in options, especially since those can be financed.
As with most things in life, one simple phrase will explain it all to you: "Follow the Money".
Heated seat buttons are not on the side of the seat because that costs more. On the OP's Edge, putting it on the touch-screen makes it far cheaper. Switches and buttons are rather expensive items, and add a lot to the BOM (bill of materials) for any electronic device. Touchscreens, however, are free (once you've already decided to put it in there): adding some new control to the touchscreen doesn't cost anything except for a bit of engineering time for someone to program it in.
Moving seat controls, likewise, saves money, if they're putting them on touchscreens.
Someone needs to come up with a docking module on the dash, to which you can dock a standard device that can be upgraded over the years. Kind of like the old "DIN" standard for car stereos, but more flat, intended for touch screen devices. Then when your in-dash system gets outdated you can upgrade it.
And why on earth would automakers want to adopt such a standard? It's more profitable for them to only install proprietary stuff into their cars which becomes obsolete in 2 years, requiring you to buy an all-new car if you don't want your interior to look hacked-up if you try upgrading anything.
Maybe they're banking on that psychological trick where making something more expensive makes people think it's better somehow. Of course, there's a big limit to how far you can take that, otherwise Rolls-Royce would be the most successful car company.
Because, unfortunately, they're not really "hemorrhaging" money at all, they're just not making as much as in their golden days. They still have a near-monopoly in OSes with Windows (even though lots of people and businesses are sticking with Win7), and they make boatloads of money with MS Office, Sharepoint, Exchange, Outlook, etc. If you look at their actual revenues, they're still profitable, unfortunately. They can easily blame reduced profits on the bad economy instead of Ballmer's idiocy.