The thing is cost prohibitive: Wide turning radius, maintaining a vacuum in a tube, built to withstand earthquakes, and the often overlooked but required inertial dampeners.
I know of this issue first hand being a IT contractor and working for the state. Where Im at they have approximately 125 IT contractors. So far they have laid off 15 IT contractors, are trying to convert 15 or so more to government service. Next in Oct all IT companies will have to bid through a Managed Service Provider. Basically an appointed IT contractor that all the agencies will go through to source contractors. I don't believe they plan on eliminating all contractors since I don't think they can do to the fact the most people would rather be a contractor than work for the state. Also a lot of the IT contractors are from overseas and cannot become state employees without a green card. Most of us are just taking a wait and see approach to what our future actually is with the state come Oct. Who knows how many contract slots will be available at that time.
For some people taking the state job is actually good deal. Some prefer the stability that the state has offered in the past. What I can add is the converted contractors will receive a tier 5 pensions not tier 4. The state legislature enacted the tier 5 pension in Jan 2010 in coincidence with the plan to convert the 500 contractors. Here are some of the reduced benefits that they will receive.
Require most public employees to work 10 full years before vesting in the system, rather than the current five, and limit the amount of overtime that can be used in the calculation of a final average salary to 15 percent of regular annual wages.
Raises the minimum full-benefit retirement age for members of the State and Local Retirement System to 62 years from the current 55.
Certain exemptions were granted to firefighters, teachers, and police officers.
They figure they will save $48 billion over 30 years.
I can remember walking into the punch card room at Ohio State University around 1980. There were many of these rooms about the campus. Punch cards were on there way out then, and big (10 inch) floppy disks were the new thing. I still have my original 10 inch floppy - the new technology of the time. I can remember typing punch cards over and over as I made typing mistakes. There is no white out or a delete key with punch cards or a punch card machine. Mistyped punch cards commonly littered the floor of every punch card room. Maybe this is where the saying "dumped on the floor" came from. One of the worst fears was that someone might bump you or you might trip while going down the steps and your cards get scattered everywhere. I can also remember standing in line waiting to feed my cards into the card hopper. I can also remember living in the "Ross Tower" on or about the 20th floor and dumping the cards out the window and watching them flutter out the window during the end of quarter celebrations.:)
http://www.circlemud.org
I had fun intalling this on freebsd and getting it to run. You can open the code and make mods to the mud and enjoy playing your mods. Apply the patches from the ftp site. Others can come in and enjoy your mods. I learned alot about C programming from modifying this software and had fun playing with the mods I created.
For instance, mod the software to have Puff roam around town instead of hanging out in Limbo. RO mud did this. Is it still around?
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The thing is cost prohibitive: Wide turning radius, maintaining a vacuum in a tube, built to withstand earthquakes, and the often overlooked but required inertial dampeners.
I know of this issue first hand being a IT contractor and working for the state. Where Im at they have approximately 125 IT contractors. So far they have laid off 15 IT contractors, are trying to convert 15 or so more to government service. Next in Oct all IT companies will have to bid through a Managed Service Provider. Basically an appointed IT contractor that all the agencies will go through to source contractors. I don't believe they plan on eliminating all contractors since I don't think they can do to the fact the most people would rather be a contractor than work for the state. Also a lot of the IT contractors are from overseas and cannot become state employees without a green card. Most of us are just taking a wait and see approach to what our future actually is with the state come Oct. Who knows how many contract slots will be available at that time.
For some people taking the state job is actually good deal. Some prefer the stability that the state has offered in the past. What I can add is the converted contractors will receive a tier 5 pensions not tier 4. The state legislature enacted the tier 5 pension in Jan 2010 in coincidence with the plan to convert the 500 contractors. Here are some of the reduced benefits that they will receive.
Require most public employees to work 10 full years before vesting in the system, rather than the current five, and limit the amount of overtime that can be used in the calculation of a final average salary to 15 percent of regular annual wages.
Raises the minimum full-benefit retirement age for members of the State and Local Retirement System to 62 years from the current 55.
Certain exemptions were granted to firefighters, teachers, and police officers.
They figure they will save $48 billion over 30 years.
Here is the full article. http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/statehouse_oks_deal_to_fix_hyper_p72NcP2a2IegZcBJFKuf0J
Is this how we eventually get back to a singularity or will it be after all due to shrinkage... :)
What happened to Matt Damon?
I can remember walking into the punch card room at Ohio State University around 1980. There were many of these rooms about the campus. Punch cards were on there way out then, and big (10 inch) floppy disks were the new thing. I still have my original 10 inch floppy - the new technology of the time. I can remember typing punch cards over and over as I made typing mistakes. There is no white out or a delete key with punch cards or a punch card machine. Mistyped punch cards commonly littered the floor of every punch card room. Maybe this is where the saying "dumped on the floor" came from. One of the worst fears was that someone might bump you or you might trip while going down the steps and your cards get scattered everywhere. I can also remember standing in line waiting to feed my cards into the card hopper. I can also remember living in the "Ross Tower" on or about the 20th floor and dumping the cards out the window and watching them flutter out the window during the end of quarter celebrations. :)
http://www.circlemud.org I had fun intalling this on freebsd and getting it to run. You can open the code and make mods to the mud and enjoy playing your mods. Apply the patches from the ftp site. Others can come in and enjoy your mods. I learned alot about C programming from modifying this software and had fun playing with the mods I created. For instance, mod the software to have Puff roam around town instead of hanging out in Limbo. RO mud did this. Is it still around?