...govvies get a lifetime pension and healthcare for life after retirement at the expense of the taxpayer.
No. You obviously don't know how these things work. You're not distinguishing "govvies" by what level of government at which they worked, meaning any comment you make will be demonstrably wrong for a large percentage of the "govvies" at question.
Specifically, I'm a fed retiree. The screwed-up retirement setups are found at the state, county, and city level. The fed fixed their problems during the transition from the Civil Service Retirement System to the Federal Employees Retirement System, a transition that occurred over 25 years ago.
No. I'm a very old-timer, one of the few remaining covered under the old Civil Service Retirement System. 100% of my pension is funded by participant contributions.
Additionally, I will never receive Social Security retirement benefits nor will I get govt-subsidized medical care, though my private group insurance payouts will be limited to Medicare rates, thus making me a far less attractive customer to healthcare providers once I get old.
People who think U.S. govt retirees are a budget problem or parasites or being paid for by the poor, put-upon taxpayers of today simply don't understand how the system works.
If you want to find screwed up govt employee retirement setups, you need to look to state, county, and city governments. The fed got its act together and solved all those problems for its own people over 25 years ago.
Start with the "Re-Inventing Government" initiative under Gore during the Clinton administration, where some idiot decided that government should be run "more like a business." (Protip - Anytime someone says "Government should be run more like a business" you've just received perfect proof they're an idiot. Govt and business aren't the same and cannot/should not be run the same way.)
Add 8 years of "We hate government. We hate government workers. Government is incompetent at everything it does and, by the way, too-often prevents us from funneling contracts to the big-money corps that help us get elected." under the Bush administration.
Stir in the fact that IT is in the middle of everything nowadays.
Bake a while and what do you get? Everything being outsourced, even to people who have no idea what they're doing and don't give two shits about the concept of "public service."
A couple of months ago, I retired from a once-wonderful IT position with a major U.S. three-letter-agency. I just couldn't stand the whole "Do more with less. Don't worry about all the new, critical changes; they'll be admin'd by contractors, anyway. Bump the efficiency metrics; forget about actually keeping the field guys functioning."
For the first 20 years I was there, we were allowed to do good work, help officers and agents do their jobs, and serve the public. Over the last 10 years, that whole notion of public service got lost in an orgy of fiefdom creation and repayment of favors.
U.S. govt IT is going to hell. It's happening slowly but, I fear, inexorably.
A force no larger than 20 could take control of pretty much any US nuclear power plant.
I agree with most of your examples but not this one. The security forces assigned to nuclear plants are variable in their skills, of course, but they are generally capable of fending off an attack by well-equipped, well-trained bad guys. Think "trained as well as Blackwater" without all the ideological baggage. The folks who carry the assault rifles at our nuclear plants are a pretty sharp bunch.
My old plan was streaming plus one DVD. In my household, I have a disabled sister for whom streaming movies is a godsend, both via the Roku and over her iPad. However, we MUST keep the DVD option because we keep running into situations like happened a couple of weeks ago - I got her into Babylon 5 and we streamed the first 52 episodes. She was really looking forward to each new installment.
Then, all of a sudden, the streaming option for B5 dropped. It became DVD-only content.
This is not the first time this has happened. It's the reason I signed up for the supplemental DVDs in the first place.
So I kinda feel like I'm being taken for a ride, here, but I'll hang on. Even at the new price, Netflix-streamed-to-iPad is such an incredibly wonderful thing for a bedridden person that I won't give it up, nor will I give up the ability to finish out a series when Netflix decides to pull the rug out from under us.
I had the Cisco/Linksys and experienced endless frustration. I wound up replacing it with a Draytek Vigor 2930N. The 2930 works great and provides integrated wireless, to boot. Love it.
OK, I accept what you've said - that compression makes music listenable in sub-standard environments.
However, why in the bloody hell have music-makers decided that's it's OK to destroy the source material to achieve this?
Instead of compressing the songs, why didn't the industry get together with the hardware folks and implement compression in the playback devices? My car, for example, has radio settings that automatically turn the volume up when driving faster, then lower the volume when driving slower. (This is really only needed when driving with the windows down. I leave the feature disabled nearly all the time.) Players for motorcycles have had automatic volume adjustment dependent on speed for at least a couple of decades.
So why ruin the recordings themselves? Why not make good recordings with wide dynamic range and then rely on the playback devices to adapt to the environment?
I'd love to have a car CD player with a button to absolutely flatten dynamic range. I'd happily play high-quality recordings of classical music in the car if I had such a thing. Even high-quality recordings of popular music from a few decades ago would be well served by such a device. And I could still play those recordings in a good acoustic environment and enjoy them.
But no. Instead, the record companies have chosen to make recordings themselves utterly defective for use on quality equipment in good environments just because most customers won't care. Piss off the real fans to satisfy the ignorant masses.
Anyone have any ideas which of these packages is maintained, useful, and can reasonably be expected to be around for a while?
I used to use CityDesk from FogCreek and loved it but it's been moribund for years, even though there's still a zombie of a web site for it. I'd love to find something that won't break my heart again.
Special Agents with the IRS are expected to find some of their own cases. The thinking is that if a Special Agent understands how illegal tax avoidance works, he'll recognize it when he trips over it in daily life. SAs are allowed a bit of flexible time and access to (mostly, though not exclusively) public information sources to try to develop a case before it becomes an official case.
This isn't nearly as nefarious as it seems. Markers of illegal tax avoidance are sometimes so obvious that something really should be done.
Much of this sort of thing doesn't work out, of course. When I was an Officer (not an Agent and not a Special Agent) I helped do a background check on a prominent local businessman who had not paid taxes in the past. His tax liabilities had been written off as uncollectible. There's an automated check that happens yearly but if he had gone a few more years without paying the statute of limitations for collection would have run out.
Then he started appearing in local TV commercials in a quarter-million dollar car. When a local businessman starts prominently featuring such a bauble in his commercials, the obvious and by far most often correct assumption is that he's just putting it in the commercials to write it off. An "OI" (Other Investigation) form was filled out, dropped in a folder, and we were covered to do a compliance check on the local celebrity in question.
It turns out that his business had taken off quite well in the previous couple of years. He had paid off all his old debts, going back years, and was completely current in all ongoing obligations.
The OI form (which was literally a half-page, nearly blank form intended just to create a record of why we were looking at things we're not supposed to under normal circumstances) got a short sentence explaining that all was well. Then the folder went off to the federal records depository.
Does that really seem all that sinister?
I'm retired now but I occasionally run into situations that simply stink. From the retail establishment that doesn't close the cash drawer (to keep transactions off the books) to the apparently-no-job guy with the big family from Mexico who pays cash for a million-dollar home and idly tells the realtor that he's buying so he'll feel safe, to the employment agency that smurfs all their accounts offshore every night through banks on Indian reservations - there are lots of situations where it's obvious that there's no *normal* reason to do business that way.
If you're an IRS SA and one of those situations slaps you in the face you'd be crazy to not make a cursory check to see if there's an investigation to be made.
As for the "routine checks on fancy cars" - let's just say that one of the most obvious markers of funny business is too much car. Guys are just stupid like that.
To all the folks crying to cut government worker pay and pensions, there are a few things you should keep in mind.
First, which government? Most of you are making no distinction between federal, state, local, and any other other sort of government. You should. There's a great deal of difference.
In a nutshell, most people seem to think feds are the problem. They're not.
Federal government workers are paid, on the low end, slightly more than their private sector counterparts. Or, put another way, because we believe our government should be a little more fair in the way it treats people (as contrasted with, say, your typical mega-corp robber baron), that government pays clerical folks almost enough to get by, putting them a bit ahead of the normal private sector slave wage level. However, since there are far more low-end employees than high-level ones, their slightly more fair salary makes it look like average federal wages are high. That's not the case. If you have a decent education or special skills or you are a high-level manager, working for the fed means being woefully underpaid. There is, essentially, no federal equivalent of the private-sector executive who makes a million bucks a year.
So if you want to cut federal wages, what you're really asking is that the vast majority of federal workers on the low end of the wage scale be pushed down even further, often past the poverty line. That's not progress; that's volunteering the other guy to be exploited and, ultimately, it doesn't help.
When it comes to the folks demanding a reduction in federal pensions, I can only ask "Where have you been for the last 25 years?" The old Civil Service Retirement System, which is what you're thinking of when you think of some sort of traditional, gold-plated pension plan, ceased to take in new members over a quarter of a century ago. The last people in that plan are retiring now.
Everyone who's hired on since the mid 1980s is a part of the Federal Employees Retirement System, which is a perfectly reasonable, slightly-better-than-private-sector retirement plan with three components: a tiny pension, a Thrift Savings Plan (govt-worker version of a 401k), and Social Security.
CSRS retirees are dying off and FERS employees aren't causing a problem.
Is there anyone out there who actually thinks *federal* workers should have their pay or pensions cut? I'd love to hear why.
...real trouble with a forensics guy telling them that for 'this particular case', they need to not use the standard procedure to preserve the data unmodified, but instead to rip open the disk and muck about...
If such becomes accepted practice, I imagine the demand will go up for drives that are designed to frustrate exactly that sort of approach. I use
Flagstone drives that are designed to resist such attacks.
My point, really, is that all organizations need a mix. In my case, having the top guy from the outside was nothing new. Traditionally, though, the main operating division heads came from inside because they needed intimate knowledge of the way the business worked. Support divisions were a mix of outsiders and ladder-climbers. And there were always a few analysts and operational assistants from the outside. The dozen or so guys at the very top, collectively, knew the business intimately and loved it just the way it was...and also viewed the business as hidebound and in need of shaking up.
From that sort of mix comes arguments, compromises, relatively slow change, and solid overall performance. Once all the insiders got booted, there was no brake on the "let's import ideas from other industries, whether they work or not" mindset that took hold. The results are not pretty.
Despite the fact that I truly love the work I do, I'm now really looking forward to retirement in a few years. That's pretty sad.
The biggest gripe I have with IT support in my organization is that the HQ office has a special team of IT workers who just respond to executives. Yes, that means that expensive executives don't suffer from too much downtime. I see the justification. However, they are now totally insulated from the consequences of the poorer quality IT service that's delivered to the rank and file. They simply don't appreciate the problems that substandard IT service creates for the organization as a whole.
...in the old days, the leaders were the people who had worked in the factory floor and had showed their talent there. They understood the processes,...
I remember a time, about 10 years ago, when it dawned on me that for the first time in my very large, very old organization, the guy at the top was from the outside. And everyone that reported to him had been hired from the outside. And everyone that reported to them. For the first time in our history, the head guy and the next two levels of executives on the org chart had all come from outside the organization. Not one of them had worked their way up from the inside. Not one of them had lived the processes by which our mission is accomplished. Not one truly understood what we did.
At about that time, all sorts of plans started flowing from the top down about how the organization should be changed to make it more efficient. Those of us who had been around for 20 years saw potential problems in some of the proposals but, for the most part, we were willing to try to make the organization better.
A decade later, one of the best organizations to work for has become a hell-hole where flashy fast-talkers routinely make decisions that shock the hell out of those of us who understand the mission of the organization. Us oldsters look back on the time when working your way up through the ranks changed from a badge of honor to the mark of someone who didn't understand how to leverage an advanced degree and some strategic ass-kissing to get ahead.
Is there a top-level executive in the U.S. today, working for a sizable company (say, 100k or more employees), who worked their way up through the ranks of that organization?
I see complaints about the quality of stuff on usenet with some frequency. I agree that there's a lot of noise hiding the signal. But the complaints about unreliable transfers are something I don't understand. I've downloaded hundreds of things over the last few years and I no longer even have a program on my computer to handle PAR files. I'm able to successfully unRAR everything I download. I take a quick look at things and if there's obviously parts missing, I don't bother. But that's very, very rare.
I tend to wonder if the complaints come from folks who expect all the parts to show up at the same time? If you see a piece of something good, you sometimes have to wait for it to all appear. But once it's all there, it usually works for me.
Are there really crappy nntp servers out there trying to sell access to binaries and screwing it up? That might be another explanation. I've always used one of the big name providers so I haven't run across any problem in this quarter.
Where I work we have plenty of oldsters who know how things work and are incredibly valuable to the organization. Once they hit retirement age, they're in "KMA status", i.e. "kiss my ass status".
They and their bosses know that when the executives come up with something crazy enough, the grunt who actually must do the work can simply walk out the door. This provides a powerful incentive for first-line management to push back when middle management starts making noise about doing something particularly stupid.
Having high-value employees who can walk at any time actually makes for a better workplace; management knows they can walk and tries not to do too much to piss 'em off.
I work for a large, U.S. gov TLA. For us, Vegas conferences are banned. We made the newspapers once, a decade ago, with a conference of managers in Vegas enjoying themselves and were painted as a bunch of libertines sponging off the public. Now, for public relations reasons only, no function is allowed to fly anyone to Vegas for meetings, conferences, training, anything. It doesn't matter how much economic sense it makes. It wouldn't matter if a hotel comped every single thing to the agency. The rule is "No Vegas. Period."
I wonder how many other organizations operate under the same rule?
Slashdot Mirror
No. You obviously don't know how these things work. You're not distinguishing "govvies" by what level of government at which they worked, meaning any comment you make will be demonstrably wrong for a large percentage of the "govvies" at question.
Specifically, I'm a fed retiree. The screwed-up retirement setups are found at the state, county, and city level. The fed fixed their problems during the transition from the Civil Service Retirement System to the Federal Employees Retirement System, a transition that occurred over 25 years ago.
No. I'm a very old-timer, one of the few remaining covered under the old Civil Service Retirement System. 100% of my pension is funded by participant contributions.
Additionally, I will never receive Social Security retirement benefits nor will I get govt-subsidized medical care, though my private group insurance payouts will be limited to Medicare rates, thus making me a far less attractive customer to healthcare providers once I get old.
People who think U.S. govt retirees are a budget problem or parasites or being paid for by the poor, put-upon taxpayers of today simply don't understand how the system works.
If you want to find screwed up govt employee retirement setups, you need to look to state, county, and city governments. The fed got its act together and solved all those problems for its own people over 25 years ago.
Start with the "Re-Inventing Government" initiative under Gore during the Clinton administration, where some idiot decided that government should be run "more like a business." (Protip - Anytime someone says "Government should be run more like a business" you've just received perfect proof they're an idiot. Govt and business aren't the same and cannot/should not be run the same way.)
Add 8 years of "We hate government. We hate government workers. Government is incompetent at everything it does and, by the way, too-often prevents us from funneling contracts to the big-money corps that help us get elected." under the Bush administration.
Stir in the fact that IT is in the middle of everything nowadays.
Bake a while and what do you get? Everything being outsourced, even to people who have no idea what they're doing and don't give two shits about the concept of "public service."
A couple of months ago, I retired from a once-wonderful IT position with a major U.S. three-letter-agency. I just couldn't stand the whole "Do more with less. Don't worry about all the new, critical changes; they'll be admin'd by contractors, anyway. Bump the efficiency metrics; forget about actually keeping the field guys functioning."
For the first 20 years I was there, we were allowed to do good work, help officers and agents do their jobs, and serve the public. Over the last 10 years, that whole notion of public service got lost in an orgy of fiefdom creation and repayment of favors.
U.S. govt IT is going to hell. It's happening slowly but, I fear, inexorably.
Somebody will make a Grendel movie. Please. That's a comic franchise that naturally rebooted itself every few issues. God, I loved it.
I agree with most of your examples but not this one. The security forces assigned to nuclear plants are variable in their skills, of course, but they are generally capable of fending off an attack by well-equipped, well-trained bad guys. Think "trained as well as Blackwater" without all the ideological baggage. The folks who carry the assault rifles at our nuclear plants are a pretty sharp bunch.
My old plan was streaming plus one DVD. In my household, I have a disabled sister for whom streaming movies is a godsend, both via the Roku and over her iPad. However, we MUST keep the DVD option because we keep running into situations like happened a couple of weeks ago - I got her into Babylon 5 and we streamed the first 52 episodes. She was really looking forward to each new installment.
Then, all of a sudden, the streaming option for B5 dropped. It became DVD-only content.
This is not the first time this has happened. It's the reason I signed up for the supplemental DVDs in the first place.
So I kinda feel like I'm being taken for a ride, here, but I'll hang on. Even at the new price, Netflix-streamed-to-iPad is such an incredibly wonderful thing for a bedridden person that I won't give it up, nor will I give up the ability to finish out a series when Netflix decides to pull the rug out from under us.
Correction - The Cisco/Linksys model that was mentioned by another poster was the RV042. I owned and had less-than-good experiences with the RV082.
Correction - I had the RV082. It was still a bad experience.
I had the Cisco/Linksys and experienced endless frustration. I wound up replacing it with a Draytek Vigor 2930N. The 2930 works great and provides integrated wireless, to boot. Love it.
More info.
At home, I have both cable and DSL. I use a Vigor2930N from DrayTek.
Works like a charm.
There have been other mentions of a Cisco/Linksys product (the 104, I believe) but I went with the Draytek because I wanted integrated wireless, too.
OK, I accept what you've said - that compression makes music listenable in sub-standard environments.
However, why in the bloody hell have music-makers decided that's it's OK to destroy the source material to achieve this?
Instead of compressing the songs, why didn't the industry get together with the hardware folks and implement compression in the playback devices? My car, for example, has radio settings that automatically turn the volume up when driving faster, then lower the volume when driving slower. (This is really only needed when driving with the windows down. I leave the feature disabled nearly all the time.) Players for motorcycles have had automatic volume adjustment dependent on speed for at least a couple of decades.
So why ruin the recordings themselves? Why not make good recordings with wide dynamic range and then rely on the playback devices to adapt to the environment?
I'd love to have a car CD player with a button to absolutely flatten dynamic range. I'd happily play high-quality recordings of classical music in the car if I had such a thing. Even high-quality recordings of popular music from a few decades ago would be well served by such a device. And I could still play those recordings in a good acoustic environment and enjoy them.
But no. Instead, the record companies have chosen to make recordings themselves utterly defective for use on quality equipment in good environments just because most customers won't care. Piss off the real fans to satisfy the ignorant masses.
Destroy the music to sell the music.
Just seems wrong to me.
Thanks so much for the highly useful info.
Anyone have any ideas which of these packages is maintained, useful, and can reasonably be expected to be around for a while?
I used to use CityDesk from FogCreek and loved it but it's been moribund for years, even though there's still a zombie of a web site for it. I'd love to find something that won't break my heart again.
Special Agents with the IRS are expected to find some of their own cases. The thinking is that if a Special Agent understands how illegal tax avoidance works, he'll recognize it when he trips over it in daily life. SAs are allowed a bit of flexible time and access to (mostly, though not exclusively) public information sources to try to develop a case before it becomes an official case.
This isn't nearly as nefarious as it seems. Markers of illegal tax avoidance are sometimes so obvious that something really should be done.
Much of this sort of thing doesn't work out, of course. When I was an Officer (not an Agent and not a Special Agent) I helped do a background check on a prominent local businessman who had not paid taxes in the past. His tax liabilities had been written off as uncollectible. There's an automated check that happens yearly but if he had gone a few more years without paying the statute of limitations for collection would have run out.
Then he started appearing in local TV commercials in a quarter-million dollar car. When a local businessman starts prominently featuring such a bauble in his commercials, the obvious and by far most often correct assumption is that he's just putting it in the commercials to write it off. An "OI" (Other Investigation) form was filled out, dropped in a folder, and we were covered to do a compliance check on the local celebrity in question.
It turns out that his business had taken off quite well in the previous couple of years. He had paid off all his old debts, going back years, and was completely current in all ongoing obligations.
The OI form (which was literally a half-page, nearly blank form intended just to create a record of why we were looking at things we're not supposed to under normal circumstances) got a short sentence explaining that all was well. Then the folder went off to the federal records depository.
Does that really seem all that sinister?
I'm retired now but I occasionally run into situations that simply stink. From the retail establishment that doesn't close the cash drawer (to keep transactions off the books) to the apparently-no-job guy with the big family from Mexico who pays cash for a million-dollar home and idly tells the realtor that he's buying so he'll feel safe, to the employment agency that smurfs all their accounts offshore every night through banks on Indian reservations - there are lots of situations where it's obvious that there's no *normal* reason to do business that way.
If you're an IRS SA and one of those situations slaps you in the face you'd be crazy to not make a cursory check to see if there's an investigation to be made.
As for the "routine checks on fancy cars" - let's just say that one of the most obvious markers of funny business is too much car. Guys are just stupid like that.
Wow. Just...wow.
To all the folks crying to cut government worker pay and pensions, there are a few things you should keep in mind.
First, which government? Most of you are making no distinction between federal, state, local, and any other other sort of government. You should. There's a great deal of difference.
In a nutshell, most people seem to think feds are the problem. They're not.
Federal government workers are paid, on the low end, slightly more than their private sector counterparts. Or, put another way, because we believe our government should be a little more fair in the way it treats people (as contrasted with, say, your typical mega-corp robber baron), that government pays clerical folks almost enough to get by, putting them a bit ahead of the normal private sector slave wage level. However, since there are far more low-end employees than high-level ones, their slightly more fair salary makes it look like average federal wages are high. That's not the case. If you have a decent education or special skills or you are a high-level manager, working for the fed means being woefully underpaid. There is, essentially, no federal equivalent of the private-sector executive who makes a million bucks a year.
So if you want to cut federal wages, what you're really asking is that the vast majority of federal workers on the low end of the wage scale be pushed down even further, often past the poverty line. That's not progress; that's volunteering the other guy to be exploited and, ultimately, it doesn't help.
When it comes to the folks demanding a reduction in federal pensions, I can only ask "Where have you been for the last 25 years?" The old Civil Service Retirement System, which is what you're thinking of when you think of some sort of traditional, gold-plated pension plan, ceased to take in new members over a quarter of a century ago. The last people in that plan are retiring now.
Everyone who's hired on since the mid 1980s is a part of the Federal Employees Retirement System, which is a perfectly reasonable, slightly-better-than-private-sector retirement plan with three components: a tiny pension, a Thrift Savings Plan (govt-worker version of a 401k), and Social Security.
CSRS retirees are dying off and FERS employees aren't causing a problem.
Is there anyone out there who actually thinks *federal* workers should have their pay or pensions cut? I'd love to hear why.
If such becomes accepted practice, I imagine the demand will go up for drives that are designed to frustrate exactly that sort of approach. I use Flagstone drives that are designed to resist such attacks.
My point, really, is that all organizations need a mix. In my case, having the top guy from the outside was nothing new. Traditionally, though, the main operating division heads came from inside because they needed intimate knowledge of the way the business worked. Support divisions were a mix of outsiders and ladder-climbers. And there were always a few analysts and operational assistants from the outside. The dozen or so guys at the very top, collectively, knew the business intimately and loved it just the way it was...and also viewed the business as hidebound and in need of shaking up.
From that sort of mix comes arguments, compromises, relatively slow change, and solid overall performance. Once all the insiders got booted, there was no brake on the "let's import ideas from other industries, whether they work or not" mindset that took hold. The results are not pretty.
Despite the fact that I truly love the work I do, I'm now really looking forward to retirement in a few years. That's pretty sad.
Pretty much. Yeah. :-(
I use giganews. They tend rate pretty well.
There should be enough info at http://www.newsgroupreviews.com/ and http://www.newsgroupservers.net/ for you to make up your mind.
The biggest gripe I have with IT support in my organization is that the HQ office has a special team of IT workers who just respond to executives. Yes, that means that expensive executives don't suffer from too much downtime. I see the justification. However, they are now totally insulated from the consequences of the poorer quality IT service that's delivered to the rank and file. They simply don't appreciate the problems that substandard IT service creates for the organization as a whole.
I remember a time, about 10 years ago, when it dawned on me that for the first time in my very large, very old organization, the guy at the top was from the outside. And everyone that reported to him had been hired from the outside. And everyone that reported to them. For the first time in our history, the head guy and the next two levels of executives on the org chart had all come from outside the organization. Not one of them had worked their way up from the inside. Not one of them had lived the processes by which our mission is accomplished. Not one truly understood what we did.
At about that time, all sorts of plans started flowing from the top down about how the organization should be changed to make it more efficient. Those of us who had been around for 20 years saw potential problems in some of the proposals but, for the most part, we were willing to try to make the organization better.
A decade later, one of the best organizations to work for has become a hell-hole where flashy fast-talkers routinely make decisions that shock the hell out of those of us who understand the mission of the organization. Us oldsters look back on the time when working your way up through the ranks changed from a badge of honor to the mark of someone who didn't understand how to leverage an advanced degree and some strategic ass-kissing to get ahead.
Is there a top-level executive in the U.S. today, working for a sizable company (say, 100k or more employees), who worked their way up through the ranks of that organization?
I see complaints about the quality of stuff on usenet with some frequency. I agree that there's a lot of noise hiding the signal. But the complaints about unreliable transfers are something I don't understand. I've downloaded hundreds of things over the last few years and I no longer even have a program on my computer to handle PAR files. I'm able to successfully unRAR everything I download. I take a quick look at things and if there's obviously parts missing, I don't bother. But that's very, very rare.
I tend to wonder if the complaints come from folks who expect all the parts to show up at the same time? If you see a piece of something good, you sometimes have to wait for it to all appear. But once it's all there, it usually works for me.
Are there really crappy nntp servers out there trying to sell access to binaries and screwing it up? That might be another explanation. I've always used one of the big name providers so I haven't run across any problem in this quarter.
Too true. I remember first hearing that joke in middle school, 40 years ago.
Where I work we have plenty of oldsters who know how things work and are incredibly valuable to the organization. Once they hit retirement age, they're in "KMA status", i.e. "kiss my ass status".
They and their bosses know that when the executives come up with something crazy enough, the grunt who actually must do the work can simply walk out the door. This provides a powerful incentive for first-line management to push back when middle management starts making noise about doing something particularly stupid.
Having high-value employees who can walk at any time actually makes for a better workplace; management knows they can walk and tries not to do too much to piss 'em off.
I work for a large, U.S. gov TLA. For us, Vegas conferences are banned. We made the newspapers once, a decade ago, with a conference of managers in Vegas enjoying themselves and were painted as a bunch of libertines sponging off the public. Now, for public relations reasons only, no function is allowed to fly anyone to Vegas for meetings, conferences, training, anything. It doesn't matter how much economic sense it makes. It wouldn't matter if a hotel comped every single thing to the agency. The rule is "No Vegas. Period."
I wonder how many other organizations operate under the same rule?