We throw money at the highways, they are not profitable. We throw money at Congress, they are the opposite of profitable. We stuff gazillions into the military just to lose one war after another. I rather see a few millions more go to Amtrak, at least trains are cool.
Giving just three years of Interstate funding to Amtrak would allow them to complete all projects pegged for the next 30 years! And spending even just a wee bit more would allow for cross-country and regional high speed rail which effectively declutters airspace. Instead, Amtrak is asked to generate revenue on infrastructure that for the most part has not changed since the late 60s when Congress stood idle when the big passenger rail companies went belly up, instead billions were wasted on building an entirely unsustainable Eisenhower Interstate System. But yes, it's all Obama's fault.
Or Verizon...they quote 115$ for services and then charge 180$ claiming that their quote was wrong "due to a computer glitch". Such customer abuse is much better than any emotionally unstable robot to generate irate calls. Needless to say, Verizon needed three days to understand their own billing and after that still could not make sense of it. Luckily for them, their competition is even worse.
....can be avoided by providing great product and service instead of screwing over your customers at any opportunity possible. And call center employees deserve the abuse, they should have stayed in school and got a real job or should have applied to a less craptastic company. What comes around goes around.
Best doc is for Apache web server...worst docs are for OpenOffice. That said, tech writing is an art form and writing good manuals takes a lot of work and a lot of time spent with developers and designers. In true FOSS fashion most of the developers get really rude and abusive when questions come up from the tech writing folks. I attempted to contribute that way because I am a lousy programmer, but a decent tech writer. The hatred towards the tech writers from the developers was just too much and I quit. Here someone wants to spend their spare time to contribute and all I got was personal attacks and no answers. So no wonder that the FM is really a FM because those who put the FM together are people who either like to be mistreated or are the developers who give a F about documenting anything that doesn't boost their ego.
No idea why Apache web server is so well documented, even the config file is extremely well documented so that one barely needs any other documentation.
That is why we went to three month sprints that fit neatly between our quarterly releases. We also ditched Scrum for a lose Kanban approach, no longer do retrospectives where we were asked to tell how we felt the sprint went (and if you speak your mind your boss tears you a new one), and stopped estimating. We never have enough info to even give a good estimate and there is no value in estimating 2 weeks when it takes 4 weeks in the end. Plus, being in QA, Agile is nothing else than mini waterfalls with the difference that I now have no clue what the business wants until stuff is coded and changed a dozen times. Without acceptance criteria all that is left to do is craft test cases that pass based on what was coded....ass backwards! Oh, and we do standup twice a week tops.
Scrum is the worst of all Agile methods anyway, it was invented by the office supply industry because the consumption of post its and Sharpie pens is mindboggling. With Scrum we spent endless hours trying to split tasks into mini tasks, just to find out that some stuff takes longer than the arbitrary time box of 3 weeks. But then we were reprimanded for having nothing to demo when sprint was over and all that was done was database design. Folks don't dig ERDs and they are not impressed when all that changed was a check box.
Agile is the hardest on QA. Agile is the free for all to not commit to anything and constantly change your mind. If you cannot tell me what you want I cannot tell you if it was implemented correctly. And since devs consider a story done as soon as code compiles it is especially tricky to get bugs fixed or testing done before equally arbitrarily set release dates. Agile is the death to quality. Ever wondered why software quality is in the toilet? Shipping features is more important than doing things right the first time...because it all has to get done in 3 weeks.
I cannot speak to a desired ticket price, but I am convinced that building the high speed rail link is several magnitudes cheaper than maintaining the CA highway system. Folks get bent out of shape when talk comes to spending once a few billions on sustainable rail projects, but find it quite OK to spend billions each year on keeping the highway system from falling apart. So what if that rail link needs subsidies? The Interstate system needs subsidies as well because tolls alone (if they are charged) cover only a fraction of the direct and indirect cost.
Improving regional and even cross-country high speed rail will put the US into a good position for the future. It is also _the_ tool to reduce airspace congestion. A while back I read an article that only three years of Interstate maintenance spending would fund all planned and thought about projects for passenger rail in the US, that includes big projects like closing the Boston gap. Instead politicians decide to keep wasting money on an unsustainable and pollution fostering car/truck focused infrastructure.
How about closing all the left lanes on Interstates and putting rails down to run trains? Right of way is not an issue and the rail links will be able to handle tremendously more transport of goods and people than cars/trucks can at a fraction of the energy needed. Sounds like too much of a great plan, right? Is that why nobody wants do it?
While I agree you are lacking the answer on how to power NYC at night and when there are clouds. Would need a huge batch of those Tesla batteries or pumped water storage power plants or thermal storage. Of course, cutting power consumption in NYC in general would be an equally big help.
I pull backups from my SSD every night to a network share. Using the free version of Macrium Reflect....excellent tool by the way. The file server runs a script that drops any backup older than a week.
I have a 3TB drive for quick access archiving, some of the more important files get backed up to an enterprise grade SCSI drive and then I use 'abandoned' hard drives (anything that is too small to occupy a slot in a live system) for additional backup/archiving offsite.
What good does it do when US schools crank out IT experts when the outlook is being not hired / replaced by cheap labor from overseas? I also don't think that high schools should focus on coding skills or such. Rather have students master writing and science skills, then drop tuition for all STEM degrees nationwide. Any shortage of talent will be gone within a matter of years.
At the same time tech companies should not all focus on just a few areas in the US like Silicon Valley, Seattle, or San Diego. There are gazillion other places where talent is available and competition for that talent is tremendously lower making skilled workers less expensive to hire and easier to retain.
It is much better to connect the large airports JFK and Newark to the many smaller airports in the region with high(er) speed rail links that go straight to the terminals (rather than the insanely expensive AirTrain from the subway station....used to be free bus shuttle!). Linking to airports in the region such as Bradley, Stewart, and even Albany with fast rail links will make not much difference for travelers in the end. Any investment in LGA will only benefit LGA. Closing LGA and investing into regional high speed rail will benefit the entire NJ/NY/CT region. Rail connection should be considered part of airport services, so if one flies to e.g. Stewart to then connect to a flight from JFK the rail transit should be seamless including baggage transport. There are even other smaller airfields in the region that might take on a few more flights. It will spread the investments, benefit more places, and spread the wealth.
As soon as someone invents a robot that can sort the lights from the darks and not overload the machine I buy into the hype. Once they have an affordable dish washing robot I'll buy.
The Pinto had plenty of modern safety devices planned by engineers: ABS, air bags, double-lined gas tank, etc. It was that clueless managers cut all that out forcing a car that was cheaper to manufacture, but that really cost Ford more money in the end. Without the cuts the Pinto would have been the safest car made at the time.
I do agree that a lot comes down to how people drive. The biggest problem is the ridiculously low requirements for obtaining a driver's license in the US. No professional training is required, only mildly phased approaches, and a way too low eligibility age. A 16 year old is considered mature enough to drive a Porsche or Hummer, but not mature enough to drink a light beer?
Look at the requirements for getting a driver's license in Germany....noticeably less whackos on the road and noticeably less accidents and vehicle accident deaths.
....for something that was common knowledge? Laws come to be based on which special interest group pays the most and which position will secure reelection. If you do not like this then advocate for term limits and only public lobbying. Anyone getting caught taking kickbacks gets fired from Congress. I know...won't happen.
....would potentially be the better choice here. Haven't heard anything that those were breached.
They read unclassified emails, not great, but unclassified means that the messages contained info that could have been obtained otherwise as well.
The FDA was about to not approve Aspartame. Rumsfeld then played every trick possible to delay a decision as the installation of Reagan (worst US president ever) was imminent. As soon as Reagan was in office the FDA was forced to reverse course and Aspartame was suddenly deemed safe making Rumsfeld a lot of money. Ye think they care about long term effects? As long as the Dollar rolls into the right pockets we get to eat whatever.
If it has to be fake sugar I lean towards Splenda, which isn't great either, but it does not taste as nasty as Stevia. My prime choice is no sweetener / sugar.
Germany constantly has to sell electric power for cheap to neighboring countries because they produce so much electricity from renewables. Last year they even had a day where at least on paper all energy consumed that day in Germany came from renewables. Yes, there will always be a need to have a base amount generated at any time and any weather. Energy storage is also not that easy because there are not as many sites as needed to build pumped hydro power plants. In any case, more renewables is the way to go, better than soft coal plants or nuclear or gas / oil plants.
They also package the shopping channels and Fox News in...nobody in their right mind watches that either. Fact is that many like sports on TV or the web. There is no other outlet to watch some European soccer than ESPN3.
Anyhow, I loathe Verizon's TV packages for other reasons. Recently upgrade to a higher priced package and did get more channels, but also lost some. In which universe does that make sense? In order to get those channels back I have to go to the next higher package that is 50$ more per month...I don't miss those channels that much.
I'm fine with commercials, a few are entertaining and the rest is providing the needed break to go to the loo and not miss anything. Overall, TV service is rather expensive. What is sorely needed is more competition on the same last mile technology. I would have signed up with a satellite provider, but they do not allow me to use my own equipment...and their flimsy garbage that is constantly mounted wrong looks like more trouble than it is worth.
California's problem is that too much water is exported. Farmers grow very thirsty plants and then export the crop and the water out of state. Less thirsty plans will make a huge difference...and yes, that also means less Californian wine.
Another huge water waster are golf courses...there are 1140 golf courses in California...a few hundred less will make a big difference.
One of the biggest annoyances of searching in English is that the results are coming from gazillion places. Sometimes that great, but when I look for lumber yards I really don't care about the ones in England, Australia, or New Zealand. They all might be fine businesses and a pleasure to deal with, but I doubt they deliver to the northeastern US.
What also would help bilinguals as myself is to set two (or more) preferred languages. I speak and read two languages fluently and I don't mind and often want search results in both languages.
Lastly, making it easier to search within results will be great. I know it is already possible with some search engines, but it is not easily achieved.
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We throw money at the highways, they are not profitable. We throw money at Congress, they are the opposite of profitable. We stuff gazillions into the military just to lose one war after another. I rather see a few millions more go to Amtrak, at least trains are cool.
Giving just three years of Interstate funding to Amtrak would allow them to complete all projects pegged for the next 30 years! And spending even just a wee bit more would allow for cross-country and regional high speed rail which effectively declutters airspace. Instead, Amtrak is asked to generate revenue on infrastructure that for the most part has not changed since the late 60s when Congress stood idle when the big passenger rail companies went belly up, instead billions were wasted on building an entirely unsustainable Eisenhower Interstate System. But yes, it's all Obama's fault.
Or Verizon...they quote 115$ for services and then charge 180$ claiming that their quote was wrong "due to a computer glitch". Such customer abuse is much better than any emotionally unstable robot to generate irate calls. Needless to say, Verizon needed three days to understand their own billing and after that still could not make sense of it. Luckily for them, their competition is even worse.
....can be avoided by providing great product and service instead of screwing over your customers at any opportunity possible. And call center employees deserve the abuse, they should have stayed in school and got a real job or should have applied to a less craptastic company. What comes around goes around.
Best doc is for Apache web server...worst docs are for OpenOffice. That said, tech writing is an art form and writing good manuals takes a lot of work and a lot of time spent with developers and designers. In true FOSS fashion most of the developers get really rude and abusive when questions come up from the tech writing folks. I attempted to contribute that way because I am a lousy programmer, but a decent tech writer. The hatred towards the tech writers from the developers was just too much and I quit. Here someone wants to spend their spare time to contribute and all I got was personal attacks and no answers. So no wonder that the FM is really a FM because those who put the FM together are people who either like to be mistreated or are the developers who give a F about documenting anything that doesn't boost their ego. No idea why Apache web server is so well documented, even the config file is extremely well documented so that one barely needs any other documentation.
That is why we went to three month sprints that fit neatly between our quarterly releases. We also ditched Scrum for a lose Kanban approach, no longer do retrospectives where we were asked to tell how we felt the sprint went (and if you speak your mind your boss tears you a new one), and stopped estimating. We never have enough info to even give a good estimate and there is no value in estimating 2 weeks when it takes 4 weeks in the end. Plus, being in QA, Agile is nothing else than mini waterfalls with the difference that I now have no clue what the business wants until stuff is coded and changed a dozen times. Without acceptance criteria all that is left to do is craft test cases that pass based on what was coded....ass backwards! Oh, and we do standup twice a week tops. Scrum is the worst of all Agile methods anyway, it was invented by the office supply industry because the consumption of post its and Sharpie pens is mindboggling. With Scrum we spent endless hours trying to split tasks into mini tasks, just to find out that some stuff takes longer than the arbitrary time box of 3 weeks. But then we were reprimanded for having nothing to demo when sprint was over and all that was done was database design. Folks don't dig ERDs and they are not impressed when all that changed was a check box. Agile is the hardest on QA. Agile is the free for all to not commit to anything and constantly change your mind. If you cannot tell me what you want I cannot tell you if it was implemented correctly. And since devs consider a story done as soon as code compiles it is especially tricky to get bugs fixed or testing done before equally arbitrarily set release dates. Agile is the death to quality. Ever wondered why software quality is in the toilet? Shipping features is more important than doing things right the first time...because it all has to get done in 3 weeks.
I cannot speak to a desired ticket price, but I am convinced that building the high speed rail link is several magnitudes cheaper than maintaining the CA highway system. Folks get bent out of shape when talk comes to spending once a few billions on sustainable rail projects, but find it quite OK to spend billions each year on keeping the highway system from falling apart. So what if that rail link needs subsidies? The Interstate system needs subsidies as well because tolls alone (if they are charged) cover only a fraction of the direct and indirect cost. Improving regional and even cross-country high speed rail will put the US into a good position for the future. It is also _the_ tool to reduce airspace congestion. A while back I read an article that only three years of Interstate maintenance spending would fund all planned and thought about projects for passenger rail in the US, that includes big projects like closing the Boston gap. Instead politicians decide to keep wasting money on an unsustainable and pollution fostering car/truck focused infrastructure. How about closing all the left lanes on Interstates and putting rails down to run trains? Right of way is not an issue and the rail links will be able to handle tremendously more transport of goods and people than cars/trucks can at a fraction of the energy needed. Sounds like too much of a great plan, right? Is that why nobody wants do it?
While I agree you are lacking the answer on how to power NYC at night and when there are clouds. Would need a huge batch of those Tesla batteries or pumped water storage power plants or thermal storage. Of course, cutting power consumption in NYC in general would be an equally big help.
I pull backups from my SSD every night to a network share. Using the free version of Macrium Reflect....excellent tool by the way. The file server runs a script that drops any backup older than a week. I have a 3TB drive for quick access archiving, some of the more important files get backed up to an enterprise grade SCSI drive and then I use 'abandoned' hard drives (anything that is too small to occupy a slot in a live system) for additional backup/archiving offsite.
What good does it do when US schools crank out IT experts when the outlook is being not hired / replaced by cheap labor from overseas? I also don't think that high schools should focus on coding skills or such. Rather have students master writing and science skills, then drop tuition for all STEM degrees nationwide. Any shortage of talent will be gone within a matter of years. At the same time tech companies should not all focus on just a few areas in the US like Silicon Valley, Seattle, or San Diego. There are gazillion other places where talent is available and competition for that talent is tremendously lower making skilled workers less expensive to hire and easier to retain.
It is much better to connect the large airports JFK and Newark to the many smaller airports in the region with high(er) speed rail links that go straight to the terminals (rather than the insanely expensive AirTrain from the subway station....used to be free bus shuttle!). Linking to airports in the region such as Bradley, Stewart, and even Albany with fast rail links will make not much difference for travelers in the end. Any investment in LGA will only benefit LGA. Closing LGA and investing into regional high speed rail will benefit the entire NJ/NY/CT region. Rail connection should be considered part of airport services, so if one flies to e.g. Stewart to then connect to a flight from JFK the rail transit should be seamless including baggage transport. There are even other smaller airfields in the region that might take on a few more flights. It will spread the investments, benefit more places, and spread the wealth.
....that there is no plane going from by car port to my workplace.
Postal services are also capable of delivering pirated content...so when are all those shut down?
....and you get zero job offers....or jokes like 3 month contracts at the other end of the continent.
As soon as someone invents a robot that can sort the lights from the darks and not overload the machine I buy into the hype. Once they have an affordable dish washing robot I'll buy.
The Pinto had plenty of modern safety devices planned by engineers: ABS, air bags, double-lined gas tank, etc. It was that clueless managers cut all that out forcing a car that was cheaper to manufacture, but that really cost Ford more money in the end. Without the cuts the Pinto would have been the safest car made at the time. I do agree that a lot comes down to how people drive. The biggest problem is the ridiculously low requirements for obtaining a driver's license in the US. No professional training is required, only mildly phased approaches, and a way too low eligibility age. A 16 year old is considered mature enough to drive a Porsche or Hummer, but not mature enough to drink a light beer? Look at the requirements for getting a driver's license in Germany....noticeably less whackos on the road and noticeably less accidents and vehicle accident deaths.
....for something that was common knowledge? Laws come to be based on which special interest group pays the most and which position will secure reelection. If you do not like this then advocate for term limits and only public lobbying. Anyone getting caught taking kickbacks gets fired from Congress. I know...won't happen.
....would potentially be the better choice here. Haven't heard anything that those were breached. They read unclassified emails, not great, but unclassified means that the messages contained info that could have been obtained otherwise as well.
The FDA was about to not approve Aspartame. Rumsfeld then played every trick possible to delay a decision as the installation of Reagan (worst US president ever) was imminent. As soon as Reagan was in office the FDA was forced to reverse course and Aspartame was suddenly deemed safe making Rumsfeld a lot of money. Ye think they care about long term effects? As long as the Dollar rolls into the right pockets we get to eat whatever. If it has to be fake sugar I lean towards Splenda, which isn't great either, but it does not taste as nasty as Stevia. My prime choice is no sweetener / sugar.
Germany constantly has to sell electric power for cheap to neighboring countries because they produce so much electricity from renewables. Last year they even had a day where at least on paper all energy consumed that day in Germany came from renewables. Yes, there will always be a need to have a base amount generated at any time and any weather. Energy storage is also not that easy because there are not as many sites as needed to build pumped hydro power plants. In any case, more renewables is the way to go, better than soft coal plants or nuclear or gas / oil plants.
They also package the shopping channels and Fox News in...nobody in their right mind watches that either. Fact is that many like sports on TV or the web. There is no other outlet to watch some European soccer than ESPN3. Anyhow, I loathe Verizon's TV packages for other reasons. Recently upgrade to a higher priced package and did get more channels, but also lost some. In which universe does that make sense? In order to get those channels back I have to go to the next higher package that is 50$ more per month...I don't miss those channels that much. I'm fine with commercials, a few are entertaining and the rest is providing the needed break to go to the loo and not miss anything. Overall, TV service is rather expensive. What is sorely needed is more competition on the same last mile technology. I would have signed up with a satellite provider, but they do not allow me to use my own equipment...and their flimsy garbage that is constantly mounted wrong looks like more trouble than it is worth.
Otherwise going to the loo during commercial breaks could be deemed illegal as well!
California's problem is that too much water is exported. Farmers grow very thirsty plants and then export the crop and the water out of state. Less thirsty plans will make a huge difference...and yes, that also means less Californian wine. Another huge water waster are golf courses...there are 1140 golf courses in California...a few hundred less will make a big difference.
The Nazis found that to be very effective. State sponsored murder is about the same.
One of the biggest annoyances of searching in English is that the results are coming from gazillion places. Sometimes that great, but when I look for lumber yards I really don't care about the ones in England, Australia, or New Zealand. They all might be fine businesses and a pleasure to deal with, but I doubt they deliver to the northeastern US. What also would help bilinguals as myself is to set two (or more) preferred languages. I speak and read two languages fluently and I don't mind and often want search results in both languages. Lastly, making it easier to search within results will be great. I know it is already possible with some search engines, but it is not easily achieved.