Even if they are 100% authentic, most places will give you a seriously suspicious look if you show up with a brick of hundreds.
Until they get to know you.
I am a creature of routine. Except for the exceptions, of course, I tend to go to the same places and deal with the same people. The Chinese buffet at which I eat lunch expects me to pay my $8.40 tab with a $100 bill. The Walmart where I drop in to pay my Discover credit card expects me to pull out a $2K, bank-sleeved pile of hundreds, plus a few more that I fish out of my pocket.
Big exception: the dancers at the strip club. I love dropping $2 bills on the stage. They pick 'em up and look at 'em funny, sometimes for a long time.
I always carry $2 bills. I call 'em my "stripper-confusers".
Note: In my experience, Starbucks clerks will be nearly as perplexed nearly as often.
...people who have the pleasure of working with China have such similar experiences of being treated royally and being ripped off.
If you listen to some of the stories that fly around the Consumer Electronics Show, doing business in China is like waltzing in a minefield. You'd better step carefully.
Lots of high-end audio companies care about quality and specify very particular parts to go into their electronics. I've never run into such a company that moved production to China without having to deal with "As soon as we turned out backs, they started tossing in whatever cheap-shit capacitors they could find!" problems.
I'm a yahoo customer. I like being able to access old emails from anywhere.
Of course, those old emails contain letters to and from girlfriends. I wouldn't want anyone reading those.
There are emails to and from the porn site that ripped me off. However secretly proud I am of the fact that I talked them into giving me a refund, I'd rather the feds not know about it.
There are emails negotiating gun purchases from private individuals across the country. I followed all applicable laws, but you can't tell that from the content of the emails and I'd sure prefer that the BATFE not feel the need to interview me.
There are multiple letters to the editor of local papers. I asked for those to be published anonymously because I expected to paper to protect me (at least a little) but I certainly don't trust federal authorities in the same way.
I could go on and on and on. My yahoo account doesn't contain proof of anything illegal in my life but if you are a prude, an authoritarian, my employer, etc., you would almost surely find an email or two that would strain our relationship if you were able to read them.
I guess I'll have to start relying on local storage and doing a better job of backing up.
That whole "convenience of the cloud" thing sure is a lot less attractive than it once was.
"Stranger-danger" is incredibly overrated. The people who hurt kids are their family or trusted, known others. Other sources of abuse are statistical outliers. Being completely trusting of strangers exposes your daughter to a risk of kidnapping and horrible abuse/death that's significantly less than the risk of being struck by lightning while simply walking around outside.
People are terrible at risk assessment and parents are typically the worst and most paranoid. Yes, something horrible could happen to your kid. Get over it. The likelihood is so small that you can't do anything about it, anyway. You expose her to FAR more risk every time you put her in a car and drive her anywhere. Any protective strategy that could save her from the infinitesimal chance of abuse by a stranger would require you to helicopter over her and keep her socially isolated. Some parents adopt such strategies and, frankly, I feel that those strategies, themselves, are tantamount to abuse.
Don't fall prey to unreasonable fears.
Instead of worrying, be joyful. You've been given a gift of inestimable value.
Around the turn of the previous century, heroin was considered a reasonable treatment for alcoholism.
Alcohol gets you addicted, wrecks your health even if you don't OD on it, and ultimately makes you unable to function (keep a job, etc.) which produces costs to society (not to mention your family).
Doctors looked at this situation and many decided to substitute heroin for alcohol. Yes, heroin left their addiction patients still addicted. However, it didn't wreck their health unless they OD'd on it. With some care, users could get high and still function, keep a job, etc.
The problem of addiction was not cured this way but the ultimate costs to society were much lessened.
All of this sounds reasonable to me but I'm certainly open to the notion that I could be ignorant of important considerations that I haven't mentioned.
So - Could someone clue me in on how the notion of using heroin to treat alcoholism got discredited?
About a year ago, I found my mother's body. I'll spare you the details, but the experience was traumatic and I've been rather severely depressed since then. I was no singing nightengale before but the last year has been excruciating.
One small thing I've done to make me feel better is that I now carry around a substantial roll of cash. I'm far from well-to-do but, nevertheless, I've started carrying much more cash than ever before. It's more than just for convenience. I think everyone knows that there are plenty of aggravations in life that can be cured by throwing a few $100 bills at the problem. More than that, though, I seem to derive some needed comfort from the sure knowledge that there are few of life's little problems that can cause me much pain in the short term. Car/water heater/front lawn gas light/air conditioning breaks down? Tree suddenly dies in the front yard? No problem. Each of those things has happened in the last year and I haven't had to stress over it for more than a few minutes until I could put a few bills in the hands of the workman who would solve the problem. Can't park in time to get to an appointment? No problem, just valet it. Feel like treating myself to a nice meal when I'm driving by and see the sign for Ruth's Chris? No problem, just swing on in.
I could go on and on.
Yes, I know that a credit card or check could do most of these tasks. But there's a sense of immediacy with the cash. I don't have to show ID. I don't have to enter something in my check register. Just peel off a couple of pieces of paper and forget about the problem.
Thus, from my personal experience, the notion of having some money in hand as a stress/pain reliever is valid. YMMV.
Minor correction: the IRS didn't really wind up with "...an airplane in their offices."
I haven't been in the building but I have received a report from one of the members of the disaster recovery team onsite. Per that report, Stack came within 10 feet of killing 20 to 50 people, perhaps many more.
His plane center-punched a main support column on the exterior of the building, taking it out and causing most of his plane and fuel to spew out at about 90 degrees from the impact. That's why there was such a wide area (there was fuel and fire almost the entire width of the building on the side he struck) that immediately showed damage and fire. The plane and extra fuel aboard, for the most part, didn't penetrate the building.
If he had been 10 feet to the left or right, nearly the entire plane would have plowed into the interior office space. The death toll would have been huge.
Then came the day when I was driving a big, old Lincoln down the freeway. I was in the left lane. (I normally don't sit in the left when traffic is light, but my left-side exit was coming up in about a mile.) Traffic was light and there was no one near me except for one car a bit ahead, three lanes to the right.
Two cars racing topped the rise behind us at a high rate of speed. They split and went on either side of the car to my right, one of them clipping its bumper. The two racers sped off but the driver of the other car over-corrected to the left, then the right, then bounced off the right guard rail and shot across 5 lines directly into me. The front passenger door wound up halfway into the front passenger seat. My car, incredibly, was still drivable but it looked like it had been folded in the middle. As I rolled past the site of the impact, the car that had struck me was bouncing back and forth on the road, taking out other cars. Eventually, 7 or 8 cars got crunched as the traffic knot behind us rolled into the mayhem.
My point? I was maintaining safe speed, a safe cushion around me, and full situational awareness. I saw it coming. But even if I had been on my bike (a Suzuki 650 twin was what I had home in the garage at the time) with its superior braking and acceleration, there's simply no way I could have avoided the impact. If I had been on my bike, I would have been dead.
I never rode after that. I had learned that there are, indeed, such things as completely unavoidable crashes. Play with the terminology all you want, but riding a bike means accepting that if the stars align against you, you die. And no amount of situational awareness, rider skill, and superb vehicle performance can save you.
They claim that Regenexx is solely used as a part of their medical practice, only within the state of Colorado(emphasis added), and as such is no more regulated by the FDA than it would be by the FAA or the Department of Motor Vehicles.
So at least part of their legal claim that the FDA can go jump in the lake is based on the notion that their work is limited to one state. Others are saying the same thing. Gun-rights activists are pushing
legislation, some of which has been passed into law to make firearms made and sold in a single state exempt from federal regulation. (That's an odd link, but it was one of the first I found. Google a bit and you'll see lots of pages devoted to this stuff.)
How many other issues are being pushed in this way? There's medical marijuana, of course, (I didn't figure I needed to find a cite for that one) but are there any others?
Oddly enough, I have exactly the sort of experience you assume I don't have. A decade ago, I was a sysadmin in an all-Unix (SCO OSR) environment. The servers all ran unix. The desktops all ran unix. The laptops used by the field officers all ran unix. End user applications ran in multiple terminals, mapped to function keys. When a field employee needed to do word processing, they hit a particular function key. Same for email, their primary custom work app, and everything else. Life was good. We had about 150-160 "computer people" of all stripes, from developers to deskside support. They managed, without working too hard, to keep about 20,000 users happy as clams. Everything just worked. Everything worked so well that when we transitioned all our old, crusty, famously irritable field officers from paper files to computers, a not-inconsequential number of them actually delayed their retirements since the work was made so much easier and smoother.
However, we were 20,000 people in an organization of 140,000. Everyone else used Windows, from the desktops to the servers.
Upper management looked at the situation carefully. They felt like they were maintaining two separate information systems divisions, each with mostly-incompatible skill sets, and they didn't like it.
Everything transitioned to Windows. At first, the end users ran the old software under Cygwin. Eventually everything got rewritten. The servers were virtualized and consolidated until there are now just a few in a single data center. We've inherited all the problems that come with running Windows on the desktop. It well and truly sucks, from my perspective.
From the perspective of the end users, though, there are distinct advantages. Files can go back and forth between divisions without labourious, format-destroying conversions from WP to Word. An enterprise-wide encrypted email system has been set up that works well. The customer base and the organization are now on the same software and can read each others files. People can stay in touch with their ubiquitous Blackberries, something that would be pretty darn difficult if any of us were still on SCO OSR machines. And the same help desk, the same deskside support people can help anyone who needs help without having to learn an entirely duplicated set of skills.
These advantages are mostly customer-facing and may seem trivial to me (and maybe you). Lord knows, I screamed and hollered at the time of the transition that "Our stuff works and theirs doesn't! We should be converting to all-Unix, not all-Windows!" But that was just my viewpoint. The customer-facing advantages were bigger. That's the way the executives went.
I'm still not sure if they made the right decsion. I am sure, however, that it's better to have one standard in a large organization than as many configurations as we have employees.
One last thing - We are not consistent to the point of insanity. We have a very, very small number of people (a few graphic artists, some odd security-related functions, some developers, etc.) who simply can't make do with our standard image. They get to do what they want. They are isolated from the network and they are entirely responsible for their own support. If someone can make a real business case, they get accomodated. But business cases are never made by individual employees, only for classes of tasks, and the approval process is extensive.
SLRN? I'm not *that* old-school. I'm simply spoiled by the graphical newsreaders that have been available for Windows for so many years. I want easy, automatic handling of binaries, rar files (including repairs), yenc, and everything else. I want to point, click, and have my ISO. Or my set of jpgs. Or my discussion thread.
Under Linux, I've used Pan but it has some problems and lacks all the features I can get from Windows newsreaders. I've tried various Windows newsreaders under Wine but they've all failed, nearly all of them crashing during install. I've tried using various binary-specific nntp programs and tried to handle reading separate from binary handling; that doesn't work since so many newsgroups now freely mix text and binary postings.
Typing a few commands at a prompt isn't the problem. Finding a reader I'd actually like to use that functions under a *nix OS is the problem.
I've tried PC-BSD a couple of times and liked it but I've never stuck with it. The lack of a PBI to install a proper usenet newsreader has always been the deal-killer for me.
Thanks. I had my heart set on going to Haverford when I graduated high school in 1978. I couldn't get in and wound up going to Rice in Houston. That's not a bad second choice but I've always wondered what I missed at Haverford.
Why is it IT people in general feel that they are somehow different than everyone else in the world?
Good question.
Prior to 1706, some software folks abused the crap out of their status as "independent contractors."
They liked to say they were ICs. They liked having their own little sham corporation through which they could write off all sorts of expenses that mere "employees" (Make sure you snort derisively when you spit out that foul word) couldn't. They even signed contracts with big companies that called them ICs and repeatedly pointed to those contracts to say "See!? I'm an IC! Both me and the only people I work for agree!"
Of course, that was all crap. They were employees. They worked for just one entity for long periods, didn't seek other revenue streams, changed the focus of their work for that entity whenever that entity needed them to, etc. Some of them even wore the corporate polo shirt. They were employees. Period.
The law was changed to put pressure on the employers to bring those people on board officially. The whole point was to make it more difficult for a single person to claim to be a corp when they're actually an employee.
The whining over this thing has been going on for a couple of decades, now. Well, if so many people hadn't abused their status, no, make that *lied about* their status for so long, it wouldn't have happened.
Normal people don't freely redefine the terms "independent contractor" and "employee" to whatever they want, whenever they want, whenever it profits them. Why so many people who spend their days writing code feel they should be free to get away with it is beyond me.
I was heavy into collecting at one time. I still have my #1s of "The Nam" and whatever reboot cycle Supes was going through at the time.
Here's what put me off the whole business: At that time, the business model of collectible comics dealers was based on ripping off little boys. They'd come into shops with their few bucks and dealers would sell them crap by always hinting that "This is gonna be the next TMNT #1! Buy it now! Only a buck over cover!" I've never known any business that bought stock, put it out, stored it away when everyone realized it was crap and didn't sell, then dragged the same crap out of storage a year or two later, slapped on a higher price, and called it a "collectible". That shit is just ridiculous.
What broke the camel's back was when I managed, some time after the fact, to piece together what had happened with the Dark Knight hardcovers. When they were announced, you could prepay something like $75 and reserve a signed copy. There were delays and by the time all the signed copies had shipped, the book had totally blown up. The demand for the signed collectible hard cover was huge, with new stock selling for $300.
Every lousy fucking dealer in Houston that I was able to get info on (except one, A Few Books and Records on the SW side), told every kid who had prepaid for their book that their book never arrived and the order needed to be canceled. They refunded the $75. Some of them didn't wait a week before they stuck that kid's book in the display case with a huge price tag on it.
With just one exception, every comics dealer I've ever known has been a scumbag.
I wasn't planning on "dropping by for the freebies." I have excellent health and long-term disability care insurance, neither of which can be cancelled. Thus, I can pay for my health care pretty much anywhere.
However, like all financially-prepared people approaching retirement age, I occasionally daydream about living someplace within walking distance of a beach. I can't afford that in the U.S. I might be able to do so elsewhere. Wherever that "elsewhere" turns out to be, I'd like to know that if I had a heart attack, there'll be a decent healthcare facility within an hour's travel.
That's the scenario that was on my mind when I asked the question.
However, by leaving the question a bit more open-ended, I've managed to garner some really interesting answers. Thanks to everyone who responded in this thread.
If you're a U.S. federal government employee, if you're willing to go through the embarrassment of the process, if you have the medical certs from doctors, you can get your condition of being morbidly obese declared a "disability" subject to "reasonable accommodation." Under normal circumstances, that means you get a uprated, wider office chair. (Actually, you can usually get that by just asking. Reasonable accommodations are generally intended for people with more obvious problems. To wit: If your vision is bad, you can get a big monitor. If you're blind, you can get a braille monitor. If you use a wheelchair, you can get an automatic door opener installed on the door you use the most. Etc., etc., etc.)
While I've never seen this done with any normal line-level grunt, I have seen a morbidly obese executive who traveled a great deal get the "reasonable accommodation" of a first class seat for every flight.
I guess there's always a solution if you're willing to pay for it.
A bullying victim can't have a cop or a teacher or a parent standing over them, protecting them all the time. The only people who are always present when bullying occurs are the perp and the victim. The only person who is always available and able to convince the perp that bullying is a bad idea is the victim.
Refuse to be a victim.
Specific instructions as to how to do that would only open this post to criticism based on unimportant details, so I'm not going there. Let the principle stand: You, the victim, can break the cycle of abuse. It's absolutely heartbreaking that so many kids don't figure this out before they're 40 years old.
...the market for volley guns would take off. New manufacturers would come online nearly overnite.
I can just imagine a stereotypical U.S. liberal (who definitely hates guns but should also hate police surveillance, even though they often don't) contemplating the situation. How long before their head would explode?
Slashdot Mirror
Not quite. Before barcodes, it was the Social Security Number.
Until they get to know you.
I am a creature of routine. Except for the exceptions, of course, I tend to go to the same places and deal with the same people. The Chinese buffet at which I eat lunch expects me to pay my $8.40 tab with a $100 bill. The Walmart where I drop in to pay my Discover credit card expects me to pull out a $2K, bank-sleeved pile of hundreds, plus a few more that I fish out of my pocket.
Big exception: the dancers at the strip club. I love dropping $2 bills on the stage. They pick 'em up and look at 'em funny, sometimes for a long time.
I always carry $2 bills. I call 'em my "stripper-confusers".
Note: In my experience, Starbucks clerks will be nearly as perplexed nearly as often.
If you listen to some of the stories that fly around the Consumer Electronics Show, doing business in China is like waltzing in a minefield. You'd better step carefully.
Lots of high-end audio companies care about quality and specify very particular parts to go into their electronics. I've never run into such a company that moved production to China without having to deal with "As soon as we turned out backs, they started tossing in whatever cheap-shit capacitors they could find!" problems.
I'm a yahoo customer. I like being able to access old emails from anywhere.
Of course, those old emails contain letters to and from girlfriends. I wouldn't want anyone reading those.
There are emails to and from the porn site that ripped me off. However secretly proud I am of the fact that I talked them into giving me a refund, I'd rather the feds not know about it.
There are emails negotiating gun purchases from private individuals across the country. I followed all applicable laws, but you can't tell that from the content of the emails and I'd sure prefer that the BATFE not feel the need to interview me.
There are multiple letters to the editor of local papers. I asked for those to be published anonymously because I expected to paper to protect me (at least a little) but I certainly don't trust federal authorities in the same way.
I could go on and on and on. My yahoo account doesn't contain proof of anything illegal in my life but if you are a prude, an authoritarian, my employer, etc., you would almost surely find an email or two that would strain our relationship if you were able to read them.
I guess I'll have to start relying on local storage and doing a better job of backing up.
That whole "convenience of the cloud" thing sure is a lot less attractive than it once was.
Phooey!
So what?
"Stranger-danger" is incredibly overrated. The people who hurt kids are their family or trusted, known others. Other sources of abuse are statistical outliers. Being completely trusting of strangers exposes your daughter to a risk of kidnapping and horrible abuse/death that's significantly less than the risk of being struck by lightning while simply walking around outside.
People are terrible at risk assessment and parents are typically the worst and most paranoid. Yes, something horrible could happen to your kid. Get over it. The likelihood is so small that you can't do anything about it, anyway. You expose her to FAR more risk every time you put her in a car and drive her anywhere. Any protective strategy that could save her from the infinitesimal chance of abuse by a stranger would require you to helicopter over her and keep her socially isolated. Some parents adopt such strategies and, frankly, I feel that those strategies, themselves, are tantamount to abuse.
Don't fall prey to unreasonable fears.
Instead of worrying, be joyful. You've been given a gift of inestimable value.
Around the turn of the previous century, heroin was considered a reasonable treatment for alcoholism.
Alcohol gets you addicted, wrecks your health even if you don't OD on it, and ultimately makes you unable to function (keep a job, etc.) which produces costs to society (not to mention your family).
Doctors looked at this situation and many decided to substitute heroin for alcohol. Yes, heroin left their addiction patients still addicted. However, it didn't wreck their health unless they OD'd on it. With some care, users could get high and still function, keep a job, etc.
The problem of addiction was not cured this way but the ultimate costs to society were much lessened.
All of this sounds reasonable to me but I'm certainly open to the notion that I could be ignorant of important considerations that I haven't mentioned.
So - Could someone clue me in on how the notion of using heroin to treat alcoholism got discredited?
In fact, I thought you could make *lots* of money being a "dumb pipe" provider.
What's wrong with being a profitable provider of infrastructure?
About a year ago, I found my mother's body. I'll spare you the details, but the experience was traumatic and I've been rather severely depressed since then. I was no singing nightengale before but the last year has been excruciating.
One small thing I've done to make me feel better is that I now carry around a substantial roll of cash. I'm far from well-to-do but, nevertheless, I've started carrying much more cash than ever before. It's more than just for convenience. I think everyone knows that there are plenty of aggravations in life that can be cured by throwing a few $100 bills at the problem. More than that, though, I seem to derive some needed comfort from the sure knowledge that there are few of life's little problems that can cause me much pain in the short term. Car/water heater/front lawn gas light/air conditioning breaks down? Tree suddenly dies in the front yard? No problem. Each of those things has happened in the last year and I haven't had to stress over it for more than a few minutes until I could put a few bills in the hands of the workman who would solve the problem. Can't park in time to get to an appointment? No problem, just valet it. Feel like treating myself to a nice meal when I'm driving by and see the sign for Ruth's Chris? No problem, just swing on in.
I could go on and on.
Yes, I know that a credit card or check could do most of these tasks. But there's a sense of immediacy with the cash. I don't have to show ID. I don't have to enter something in my check register. Just peel off a couple of pieces of paper and forget about the problem.
Thus, from my personal experience, the notion of having some money in hand as a stress/pain reliever is valid. YMMV.
Minor correction: the IRS didn't really wind up with "...an airplane in their offices."
I haven't been in the building but I have received a report from one of the members of the disaster recovery team onsite. Per that report, Stack came within 10 feet of killing 20 to 50 people, perhaps many more.
His plane center-punched a main support column on the exterior of the building, taking it out and causing most of his plane and fuel to spew out at about 90 degrees from the impact. That's why there was such a wide area (there was fuel and fire almost the entire width of the building on the side he struck) that immediately showed damage and fire. The plane and extra fuel aboard, for the most part, didn't penetrate the building.
If he had been 10 feet to the left or right, nearly the entire plane would have plowed into the interior office space. The death toll would have been huge.
Bad conclusion, that. I used to think that way.
Then came the day when I was driving a big, old Lincoln down the freeway. I was in the left lane. (I normally don't sit in the left when traffic is light, but my left-side exit was coming up in about a mile.) Traffic was light and there was no one near me except for one car a bit ahead, three lanes to the right.
Two cars racing topped the rise behind us at a high rate of speed. They split and went on either side of the car to my right, one of them clipping its bumper. The two racers sped off but the driver of the other car over-corrected to the left, then the right, then bounced off the right guard rail and shot across 5 lines directly into me. The front passenger door wound up halfway into the front passenger seat. My car, incredibly, was still drivable but it looked like it had been folded in the middle. As I rolled past the site of the impact, the car that had struck me was bouncing back and forth on the road, taking out other cars. Eventually, 7 or 8 cars got crunched as the traffic knot behind us rolled into the mayhem.
My point? I was maintaining safe speed, a safe cushion around me, and full situational awareness. I saw it coming. But even if I had been on my bike (a Suzuki 650 twin was what I had home in the garage at the time) with its superior braking and acceleration, there's simply no way I could have avoided the impact. If I had been on my bike, I would have been dead.
I never rode after that. I had learned that there are, indeed, such things as completely unavoidable crashes. Play with the terminology all you want, but riding a bike means accepting that if the stars align against you, you die. And no amount of situational awareness, rider skill, and superb vehicle performance can save you.
Per the article:
So at least part of their legal claim that the FDA can go jump in the lake is based on the notion that their work is limited to one state. Others are saying the same thing. Gun-rights activists are pushing legislation, some of which has been passed into law to make firearms made and sold in a single state exempt from federal regulation. (That's an odd link, but it was one of the first I found. Google a bit and you'll see lots of pages devoted to this stuff.)
How many other issues are being pushed in this way? There's medical marijuana, of course, (I didn't figure I needed to find a cite for that one) but are there any others?
I'm curious about how widespread this trend is.
Oddly enough, I have exactly the sort of experience you assume I don't have. A decade ago, I was a sysadmin in an all-Unix (SCO OSR) environment. The servers all ran unix. The desktops all ran unix. The laptops used by the field officers all ran unix. End user applications ran in multiple terminals, mapped to function keys. When a field employee needed to do word processing, they hit a particular function key. Same for email, their primary custom work app, and everything else. Life was good. We had about 150-160 "computer people" of all stripes, from developers to deskside support. They managed, without working too hard, to keep about 20,000 users happy as clams. Everything just worked. Everything worked so well that when we transitioned all our old, crusty, famously irritable field officers from paper files to computers, a not-inconsequential number of them actually delayed their retirements since the work was made so much easier and smoother.
However, we were 20,000 people in an organization of 140,000. Everyone else used Windows, from the desktops to the servers.
Upper management looked at the situation carefully. They felt like they were maintaining two separate information systems divisions, each with mostly-incompatible skill sets, and they didn't like it.
Everything transitioned to Windows. At first, the end users ran the old software under Cygwin. Eventually everything got rewritten. The servers were virtualized and consolidated until there are now just a few in a single data center. We've inherited all the problems that come with running Windows on the desktop. It well and truly sucks, from my perspective.
From the perspective of the end users, though, there are distinct advantages. Files can go back and forth between divisions without labourious, format-destroying conversions from WP to Word. An enterprise-wide encrypted email system has been set up that works well. The customer base and the organization are now on the same software and can read each others files. People can stay in touch with their ubiquitous Blackberries, something that would be pretty darn difficult if any of us were still on SCO OSR machines. And the same help desk, the same deskside support people can help anyone who needs help without having to learn an entirely duplicated set of skills.
These advantages are mostly customer-facing and may seem trivial to me (and maybe you). Lord knows, I screamed and hollered at the time of the transition that "Our stuff works and theirs doesn't! We should be converting to all-Unix, not all-Windows!" But that was just my viewpoint. The customer-facing advantages were bigger. That's the way the executives went.
I'm still not sure if they made the right decsion. I am sure, however, that it's better to have one standard in a large organization than as many configurations as we have employees.
One last thing - We are not consistent to the point of insanity. We have a very, very small number of people (a few graphic artists, some odd security-related functions, some developers, etc.) who simply can't make do with our standard image. They get to do what they want. They are isolated from the network and they are entirely responsible for their own support. If someone can make a real business case, they get accomodated. But business cases are never made by individual employees, only for classes of tasks, and the approval process is extensive.
Truer words and all that...
SLRN? I'm not *that* old-school. I'm simply spoiled by the graphical newsreaders that have been available for Windows for so many years. I want easy, automatic handling of binaries, rar files (including repairs), yenc, and everything else. I want to point, click, and have my ISO. Or my set of jpgs. Or my discussion thread.
Under Linux, I've used Pan but it has some problems and lacks all the features I can get from Windows newsreaders. I've tried various Windows newsreaders under Wine but they've all failed, nearly all of them crashing during install. I've tried using various binary-specific nntp programs and tried to handle reading separate from binary handling; that doesn't work since so many newsgroups now freely mix text and binary postings.
Typing a few commands at a prompt isn't the problem. Finding a reader I'd actually like to use that functions under a *nix OS is the problem.
I've tried PC-BSD a couple of times and liked it but I've never stuck with it. The lack of a PBI to install a proper usenet newsreader has always been the deal-killer for me.
Thanks. I had my heart set on going to Haverford when I graduated high school in 1978. I couldn't get in and wound up going to Rice in Houston. That's not a bad second choice but I've always wondered what I missed at Haverford.
The letter was found at Haverford. Just out of curiosity, what's that school like? Any grads or current students out there who would like to share?
Good question.
Prior to 1706, some software folks abused the crap out of their status as "independent contractors."
They liked to say they were ICs. They liked having their own little sham corporation through which they could write off all sorts of expenses that mere "employees" (Make sure you snort derisively when you spit out that foul word) couldn't. They even signed contracts with big companies that called them ICs and repeatedly pointed to those contracts to say "See!? I'm an IC! Both me and the only people I work for agree!"
Of course, that was all crap. They were employees. They worked for just one entity for long periods, didn't seek other revenue streams, changed the focus of their work for that entity whenever that entity needed them to, etc. Some of them even wore the corporate polo shirt. They were employees. Period.
The law was changed to put pressure on the employers to bring those people on board officially. The whole point was to make it more difficult for a single person to claim to be a corp when they're actually an employee.
The whining over this thing has been going on for a couple of decades, now. Well, if so many people hadn't abused their status, no, make that *lied about* their status for so long, it wouldn't have happened.
Normal people don't freely redefine the terms "independent contractor" and "employee" to whatever they want, whenever they want, whenever it profits them. Why so many people who spend their days writing code feel they should be free to get away with it is beyond me.
That's the original graphics, displayed in a non-original format (not covering the whole page).
But is that the original music? I don't think so. Then again, I'm just relying on my memory.
Collectible comics, that is.
I was heavy into collecting at one time. I still have my #1s of "The Nam" and whatever reboot cycle Supes was going through at the time.
Here's what put me off the whole business: At that time, the business model of collectible comics dealers was based on ripping off little boys. They'd come into shops with their few bucks and dealers would sell them crap by always hinting that "This is gonna be the next TMNT #1! Buy it now! Only a buck over cover!" I've never known any business that bought stock, put it out, stored it away when everyone realized it was crap and didn't sell, then dragged the same crap out of storage a year or two later, slapped on a higher price, and called it a "collectible". That shit is just ridiculous.
What broke the camel's back was when I managed, some time after the fact, to piece together what had happened with the Dark Knight hardcovers. When they were announced, you could prepay something like $75 and reserve a signed copy. There were delays and by the time all the signed copies had shipped, the book had totally blown up. The demand for the signed collectible hard cover was huge, with new stock selling for $300.
Every lousy fucking dealer in Houston that I was able to get info on (except one, A Few Books and Records on the SW side), told every kid who had prepaid for their book that their book never arrived and the order needed to be canceled. They refunded the $75. Some of them didn't wait a week before they stuck that kid's book in the display case with a huge price tag on it.
With just one exception, every comics dealer I've ever known has been a scumbag.
I wasn't planning on "dropping by for the freebies." I have excellent health and long-term disability care insurance, neither of which can be cancelled. Thus, I can pay for my health care pretty much anywhere.
However, like all financially-prepared people approaching retirement age, I occasionally daydream about living someplace within walking distance of a beach. I can't afford that in the U.S. I might be able to do so elsewhere. Wherever that "elsewhere" turns out to be, I'd like to know that if I had a heart attack, there'll be a decent healthcare facility within an hour's travel.
That's the scenario that was on my mind when I asked the question.
However, by leaving the question a bit more open-ended, I've managed to garner some really interesting answers. Thanks to everyone who responded in this thread.
3 of the first 4 responses are simply "Move out of the U.S." One suggests Canada.
Seriously - If I was willing to move out of the U.S. and good health care was on my list of needs, where should I go?
A good net connection and a government that doesn't care to monitor what I do on that connection would be a major plus.
I'm no more than 5 years from retirement and find this question oddly applicable to my situation.
If you're a U.S. federal government employee, if you're willing to go through the embarrassment of the process, if you have the medical certs from doctors, you can get your condition of being morbidly obese declared a "disability" subject to "reasonable accommodation." Under normal circumstances, that means you get a uprated, wider office chair. (Actually, you can usually get that by just asking. Reasonable accommodations are generally intended for people with more obvious problems. To wit: If your vision is bad, you can get a big monitor. If you're blind, you can get a braille monitor. If you use a wheelchair, you can get an automatic door opener installed on the door you use the most. Etc., etc., etc.)
While I've never seen this done with any normal line-level grunt, I have seen a morbidly obese executive who traveled a great deal get the "reasonable accommodation" of a first class seat for every flight.
I guess there's always a solution if you're willing to pay for it.
A bullying victim can't have a cop or a teacher or a parent standing over them, protecting them all the time. The only people who are always present when bullying occurs are the perp and the victim. The only person who is always available and able to convince the perp that bullying is a bad idea is the victim.
Refuse to be a victim.
Specific instructions as to how to do that would only open this post to criticism based on unimportant details, so I'm not going there. Let the principle stand: You, the victim, can break the cycle of abuse. It's absolutely heartbreaking that so many kids don't figure this out before they're 40 years old.
...the market for volley guns would take off. New manufacturers would come online nearly overnite.
I can just imagine a stereotypical U.S. liberal (who definitely hates guns but should also hate police surveillance, even though they often don't) contemplating the situation. How long before their head would explode?